Straight Man

serves me is two slices of white bread into which she has massaged the thinnest possible layer of pimento cheese spread. “I do wish he’d get over his ridiculous crush,” she says, sitting down opposite me at the kitchen table. She’s made herself a sandwich identical to my own. “I mean, it’s absurd. What can he want from a seventy-three-year-old woman?”
    Despite this reasonable protest, there’s something about the way my mother registers it that suggests she doesn’t find it entirely absurd, as if she’s got a strong inkling what Mr. Purty has in mind and objects less to the principle of the thing than to the man in question. Perhaps she even wants me to weigh in on the matter, assure her I don’t think it’s ridiculous for Charles Purty to lust after a woman her age. But I know a son’s duties and I know this isn’t one of them. True, my mother is a remarkably well-preserved woman, who looks about Mr. Purty’s age, though he’s several years her junior. Still. I chew my bread and try to look thoughtful and abstractly sympathetic. My nostril begins to pulse with this complex effort.
    “He was impressed by your last column,” I say, to shift emphasis. A sound strategy. My mother is vain about her writing. Of my father’s numerous books of literary criticism, all of which created a stir, only one, his first, is now considered a classic. It’s my mother’s unwavering position that the reason for this is that the first was the only one she edited. It’s her opinion that by abandoning the true companion of his life (herself) for a series of academic bimbos, my father forsook histruest self. Whereas he used to be a powerful and original thinker, now he just jumps on bandwagons. My own take is that my father is simply a careerist, that this is what he would have been regardless.
    “It
was
one of my better efforts,” she admits. “I’m told the piece may be widely reprinted.” When I don’t immediately respond to this, she continues, “Speaking of journalistic efforts, may I suggest you avoid autobiography in the future?”
    This request is in reference to a recent column of mine, written shortly after I was informed that William Henry Devereaux, Sr., would be returning to the bosom of his family, an event that my mother told me to expect, any day, for nearly a year after he left us and that now, forty years later, has apparently earned her the right to say I told you so. In the essay I recounted the events leading up to the acquisition, naming, and burial of the Irish setter my father brought home when I was a boy.
    “Humor is a poor substitute for accuracy,” my mother reminds me. “And a poorer proxy for truth.”
    I’ve got a wad of pimento-flavored bread lodged in my throat, and I discover the impossibility of swallowing both it and my mother’s criticisms at the same time. I focus on the wad of bread first, and only when it is safely disposed of do I say, “What struck you as untrue?”
    My mother, who knows me as well as I know her, is prepared for this question. “Mind you, I don’t care how I myself am portrayed in your writings, but I do wish you wouldn’t give the impression that your father was a fool. I just pray no one sends it to him.”
    “
I
haven’t,” I assure her. “So if you don’t, I guess no one will.”
    “It could conceivably be reprinted,” she reminds me. “Has that occurred to you? The piece was well enough written. You have always been talented. I just wish you wouldn’t employ your talents in defense of falsehood. Often your subjects are trivial, and even then … you lack high seriousness, Henry. Weight, for want of a better word. There, I’ve said it. I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but the truth is that there’s nothing more shallow than cleverness. You’ve become a clever man.”
    “I do it for the money,” I respond cleverly. My mother knows well what the
Railton Mirror
pays its contributors. But as she gathers up my plate and coffee cup, I see that she is seriously annoyed with me. My mother has always been the sort of woman whose emotional state can beintuited from the volume at which she rattles kitchen utensils. I appreciate this. I would not, believe me, wish my wife to be more like my mother, except that there is something reassuring about dealing with a woman whose emotional barometer can be read so easily. Lily, I sometimes regret, lacks my mother’s sense of drama. In Lily’s opinion rattling the china not only