Read That Old Cape Magic for Free Online

The usual end-of-semester pressure, no doubt. He’d already had his standard academic-anxiety dream, the one where he arrived at his classroom only to find a note on the door saying his class was now meeting in another building across campus. When he arrived there, same deal. And no matter how he hurried to catch up, his students were always receding at the end of an impossibly long corridor. All of it would probably disappear when he turned in his grades.
    “Guess who I’m having breakfast with?” he said, anxious to change the subject.
    “Who?”
    “Al Fresco,” he said. It was an old joke, no doubt summoned to the front of his brain by being on the Cape and eating outdoors. His parents always made sure their summer rental had either a patio or porch so they could have breakfast outside and read the paper “with Al,” ignoring Griffin’s pleas to finish so they could go to the beach. He and Joy had used Al Fresco back in their L.A. days, but it wasn’t that great a joke and had naturally fallen into disuse.
    Still, he was a little hurt when Joy said, “Al who?”
    “I don’t know about yours,” he told her, “but my day’s begun poorly.”
    “I know,” Joy said, sounding exhausted now. “She called here, too. The semester’s officially over, I guess.”
    Griffin had put off introducing Joy to his parents for as long as possible, explaining that they were involved in a particularly acrimonious divorce. “But I
am
going to meet them, right?” she’d inquired, already suspicious. “I mean, they
are
your parents.” He suggested, “How about at the wedding?” and she’d laughed, thinking he was joking. Down the years she’d gotten on well enough with his father, though he could never quite seem to place her, even when she was standing next to his son. Living two thousand miles apart, they saw each other infrequently, of course, but each time they met, his father acted more delighted and charmed than seemed natural. “Is it my imagination,” Joy said after their second meeting, “or had he forgotten me entirely?” Griffin told her not to take it personally. At the end of each semester his father still didn’t know his students’ names, except the two or three prettiest girls.
    His mother was a different story. Though polite, she’d never made a secret of her low opinion of Griffin’s choice of a mate. “Where did she do her graduate work?” was the first thing she’d wanted to know when Griffin called to say he was engaged. For her there was no greater barometer of personal worth. Moreover, when she asked people this question, they generally asked her back, and she got to say her doctorate was from Yale; if they didn’t ask, she told them anyway. In Joy’s case, she’d been expecting UCLA or Southern Cal. Griffin had anticipated this question, of course, and reminded himself there was no reason to be embarrassed to answer it, though naturally he was. He’d taken a deep breath and explained that Joy had gone directly to work after getting her undergraduate degree and that she had a good job, one she enjoyed. “Yes, but what sort of person doesn’t do graduate work?” His mother inflected theword
person
ever so slightly, as if to suggest that anyone who didn’t go to graduate school might belong to neither gender, or perhaps to both. Poor Joy had spent the first decade of their marriage trying to get her mother-in-law to think better of her, the next trying to fathom why that wasn’t happening and the one after that pretending it didn’t matter. Of late she seemed to favor getting an unlisted phone number.
    On their honeymoon, she’d paid him an unintentional compliment by asking if there was any chance he’d been adopted. Back then he bore little physical resemblance to either parent, though over the last two decades that had changed. His hair had thinned in the exact same pattern as his father’s, and his nose, delicate when he was a younger man, had started to dominate his