That Old Cape Magic

were born renters, his parents. And the houses of senior faculty were gracious and the rents cheap, at least until word got around how careless Griffin’s parents were with other people’s possessions. One professor returning from a European sabbatical would find that her china service for ten had become a service for seven, another that his favorite Queen Anne chair, now missing a leg, had been relocated to the damp basement. “When we left for Paris,” they’d say, “there was a blender on the kitchen counter.” To which Griffin’s mother would reply, “Oh,
that
piece of crap,” as if to suggest that its owner owed them a debt of gratitude for putting the offending appliance out of its misery. One year they’d nearly burned down a colleague’s house by starting a grease fire in a cast-iron skillet and trying to put it out with cold water. The worst had been the year they’d gotten a beautiful old Victorian rent free. The only thing the elderly professor who owned it had asked of them was to make sure the pipes didn’t burst during a cold snap. If it got below zero, she reminded them, they should leave the kitchen faucet running when they went to bed. She seemed fixated on that scenario, actually, calling twice from Italy to make sure the pipes were okay, because she’d heard the winter was brutally cold. “She doesn’t even realize she’s projecting, the frigid bitch,” Griffin’s mother remarked after hanging up. “Pipes my ass,” his father added. “What she wanted to impress on us was that she’s in Tuscany while we’re stuck in fucking Indiana.” But that very night an arctic clipper had blown in, the pipes burst, and by morning the whole first floor was underwater.
    Eventually, people either refused to rent to the Griffins or required huge deposits and locked away anything of value in a closet. That last tactic didn’t work, though, because a locked closet was both an affront and a challenge, and his father’s one physical skill was as a picker of cheap padlocks. By the time Griffin was in junior high, his parents were reduced to renting damp, drafty, decrepit dumps on fraternity row, and even these they managed to leave the worse for wear. “Houses are nothing but trouble,” they told him over and over, every time something went wrong, though even as a boy he understood the more commonly held view was that houses were fine, it was the
Griffins
that meant trouble.
    The way his parents saw it, renting allowed them to remain flexible, so if a job came along at Swarthmore or Sarah Lawrence they wouldn’t be saddled with an unsellable house in the Mid-fucking-west. And, of course, the money they saved by renting would then be available for a down payment when the right property on the Cape finally came along. Except they never managed to actually save. Indeed, they exhibited the professional humanist’s utter cluelessness where money was concerned. They bought on impulse, often things that required assembly, saying,
how hard could it be
, then finding out. Bookshelves invariably had at least one shelf where the unfinished side faced up, its rough edge facing out. When you pulled open the upper-right-hand drawer of a desk, its lower-left-hand one opened in noisy sympathy. They gravitated to failed technologies like eight-track tapes and Beta recorders.
    This carelessness was amplified in automobiles. His father specialized in rear-end collisions in the parking lots of grocery stores and shopping malls. The crashes all occurred without warning. The first sign that anything was amiss came with the impact itself, followed by the shriek of metal twisting, the shattering of glass and a moment of deep silence before his father, studying the rearview mirror, would say, “Where the hell did
he
come from?” Griffin, as akid, had actually been in the car for most of these accidents, never seatbelted that he could remember, and in childhood often had a stiff neck. “Do you realize that sixteen-year-old boys on learner’s permits get better rates than we do?” his mother complained to their insurance agent. “Sixteen-year-old boys have fewer collisions,” the man told her. The cop who’d talked to him at the turnpike rest stop had noted that his father’s dented trunk was secured by a bungee cord, testimony to a recent accident, and Griffin had to explain that it would’ve been far more unusual if the trunk had
not
been mangled, and also that the accident in question probably hadn’t