That Old Cape Magic

enigmatic smile playing on her lips. “You aren’t the only one with a story to tell, you know,” she said one afternoon.
    “I’m sure that’s true,” he replied. He had exactly no desire to be the beneficiary of any morphine-fueled revelations, and the nurses had warned him to try to steer clear of upsetting topics. He hoped she’d let the subject drop, but a few minutes later, she said, “I bet you didn’t know your father and I were lovers right to the end.”
    That
, as it turned out, was the opening salvo, a warning shot across his bow, the beginning of what over the next few days he’d come to think of as his mother’s Morphine Narrative. Chronically short of breath now, she delivered it the only way she could, in short installments, like an old Saturday matinee serial. After each segment she closed her eyes and slept, or pretended to, leaving him to digest and puzzle over what she’d told him.
    The real reason Claudia had abandoned his father, his mother now explained, was that she’d discovered they were still sexually involved. She’d visited him off and on that whole period, telling Bartleby—who was easy to lie to, since he preferred not knowing anyway—that she was attending conferences. She claimed Griffin himself had nearly found them out when he visited his father in Amherst. She’d meant to leave well before he arrived, but her car, parked in plain sight in the driveway, wouldn’t start. The engine had turned over just in the nick of time. They’d actually driven past each other on his father’s street, but he’d been off in his own world and hadn’t noticed her. The first installment had ended here, and when Griffin asked why she was telling him these things at such great cost, she said, “So you’ll know. You think you know all about your father and me, but you don’t.”
    “Why is that so important?” he asked, but she just smiled, her eyes drooping toward sleep. Did she mean to imply that he was wasting his time writing about the Brownings when instead he could’ve been writing about them? That a writer with real imagination wouldn’t have been “off in his own world” when he could have been off in theirs?
    The sex, she told him with a sly smile (of invention or memory?),was better than it had ever been when they were married. Cheating
with
rather than
on
each other had added another whole layer of excitement. Later, after his father and Claudia returned to the university, they’d just kept on. In the end the fat cow had given his father an ultimatum—herself or his ex-wife—never dreaming what his choice would be (that sly smile broadening now).
    Each time she dozed, Griffin was certain she’d either forget the story she was telling him or, upon awakening, not have the strength to continue, but he was wrong. The tale seemed to satisfy some need as fundamental as breathing. “Let her tell it,” the nurse advised.
    “But it’s not even true. She’s exhausting herself spinning a ridiculous yarn that neither one of us believes. It’s complete bullshit.”
    Which got him a stern look. “Not to her. Your mother was a professor, right? She’s professing. She’ll stop when she’s ready, or when she can’t go on.”
    Whenever she resumed the story, he felt his heart plunge, thinking,
Here we go again
, but gradually, as the snow outside drifted higher and higher up the hospital window, he became intrigued and eventually fascinated by the tale that struggled to be born even as its teller slipped away.
    At some point one of Bartleby’s grown children had tumbled to what was going on between them, which explained why, when their father died, the siblings were united in their determination that she not inherit a farthing, the little shits. Not that she really cared. Bartleby never had anything she really wanted (yet another sly smile here, to let Griffin know she wasn’t just talking about worldly goods). She even claimed she’d continued to visit his father, though less frequently, at his subsequent academic postings. Indeed, they’d remained lovers for as long as he was physically able, and they hadn’t entirely broken off the relationship even then.
    Could
any
of this be true? Griffin couldn’t decide. The story didn’t really track, or rather it tracked for a while, then jumped the tracks, then somehow climbed back on again. In an attempt to reconcile them, he made a mental point-by-point comparison of the Morphine Narrative and the earlier one. At