That Old Cape Magic

shivering andcurled up in a ball on the bathroom floor with no memory of how he’d gotten there, though the commode testified eloquently as to why he’d needed to. Was he hallucinating or had Claudia called the day before, wondering how the dissertation was coming along? Had she laughed at him when he reported it was almost done?
    Eventually the flu ran its course, but he never fully recovered his strength or the weight he’d lost as a result of vomiting and skipping meals, but guess what? He’d finished, and
wasn’t he proud
? Only when Claudia actually returned in late August, just when he’d concluded she was gone for good, did the enormity of what he’d done come down on him like an anvil. Not so much the dishonesty of it, but rather that this could have been
his book
. It was quite possibly the best thing he’d ever written. Any good university press would be happy to have it, maybe even a mainstream trade publisher. It was possible that real money, as opposed to the bogus scrip universities routinely printed, redeemable only in the academic commissary, might change hands. But there was an obvious problem. How could he claim the work as his own when it was supposed to be Claudia’s? He could argue she hadn’t written any of it, and everyone who’d ever taught her would believe him, but that would mean he’d stolen her idea. He’d already signed off on the fact that it was
her
idea when he and two other colleagues approved the proposal.
    “Mom,” Griffin had protested at this point, “you can’t know all this. And don’t tell me Dad confided it, either. They aren’t the kind of things he’d admit to anybody, especially not you.” After all, he’d just spent the last twenty-four hours with his father, who hadn’t dropped a single hint, even an oblique one, about any of this.
    Another woman might have taken umbrage at his
especially not you
, but his mother didn’t even slow down. “Pipe down,” she said gleefully. “I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet. Claudia was
blackmailing
him.
    “Well, not in the conventional sense,” she conceded. “It’s more like emotional blackmail.” Since they’d returned from Amherst,Claudia had taken to wondering out loud what his colleagues would think if they knew what he’d done. Had he always been so dishonest, she wanted to know, or was this something new? Was what he’d done a firing offense? Would the scandal make the front page of the
Chronicle of Higher Education
?
    “But that’s an absurd threat,” Griffin felt compelled to inject. “She couldn’t expose him without exposing herself.”
    “True,” she said, “but he’s terrified anyway.”
    “He didn’t look scared to me.”
    “Trust me.”
    “But Mom, the story doesn’t track. Any undergraduate fiction workshop would tear it apart.” Well, okay, maybe not completely. It was more disjointed and inconsistent than unbelievable, and Griffin suspected he knew why. The academy was a small world, and his mother had friends, and friends of friends, everywhere. She’d no doubt been following her ex-husband’s year at UMass, or trying to, through half a dozen spies. She’d glean small bits of information from a wide variety of sources and stitch these into a single narrative as best she could, drawing inferences, pretending, as she always did, to be privy to everything.
    Nor did she appreciate him suggesting she wasn’t. “Undergraduate workshop,” she snorted. “Right. Now
there’s
a test.”
    “Okay,” Griffin conceded. “I’m not saying there’s no truth to what you’re saying. I’m just—”
    But she waved him off. “Do you want to hear the best part or not?”
    “The blackmail wasn’t the best part? There’s more?”
    She arched a sculpted eyebrow. “Get this. The whole time he was in Amherst?”
    He waited until it was clear she had no intention of going on without a specific invitation. He had to go on record as wanting to know what she had to tell him, which, unfortunately, he did.
    “What, Mom? The whole time in Amherst what?”
    “The
whole time
your father was in Amherst,” she said triumphantly, “he never even made it to the Cape. Not once.”
    In retrospect, his mother had been right about at least one thing. She’d given his father’s marriage another year. Not a full year, either, she insisted, an academic year. And that’s exactly how long it had lasted. The following May, Claudia had departed for good, and shortly after that his