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That Old Cape Magic


That Old Cape Magic Cover





A Finer Place

Though the digital clock on the bedside table in his hotel room read 5:17, Jack Griffin, suddenly wide awake, knew he wouldnt be able to get back to sleep. Hed allowed himself to drift off too early the night before. On the heels of wakefulness came an unpleasant realization, that what he hadnt wanted to admit yesterday, even to himself, was now all too clear in the solitary, predawn dark. He should have swallowed his petulance and waited the extra day for Joy.

It had been their long- established habit to flee the campus as soon as Griffin taught his last class. Usually, they hopped on the Freedom Trail (his term for I- 95), drove to New York and treated themselves by checking into a good hotel. During the day he would evaluate his small mountain of student portfolios while Joy shopped or otherwise amused herself, and then, evenings, theyd catch up on movies and go to good restaurants. The whole thing reminded him of the early years of their marriage back in L.A. It cost a small fortune, but there was something about spending money they didnt really have that made him optimistic about more coming in&#8212;which was how it had worked in L.A.&#8212;and it got him through the portfolios.

This year Kelseys Cape Cod wedding had royally screwed up their plans, making New York impractical, though hed been willing to substitute Boston. But Joy, assuming that thanks to the wedding all the usual bets were off, had messed things up further by scheduling

meetings on the day after his last class. “Just go,” she said when he expressed his annoyance at the way things were working out. “Have a boys night out in Boston and Ill meet you on the Cape.” Hed squinted at this proposal. Didnt you need more than one to have a boys night out? Or had Joy meant it to be singular, one boy celebrating his boyness? Was that how shed understood

the phrase all her life, as singular? Joys relationship to the English language was not without glitches. She was forever mixing metaphors, claiming that something was “a tough line to hoe.” Row to hoe? Line to walk? Her sisters, Jane and June, were even worse,

and when corrected all three would narrow their eyes dangerously and identically. If theyd had a family motto, it would have been You Know Perfectly Well What I Mean.

In any event his wifes suggestion that he go on without her had seemed less than sincere, which was why he decided to call her bluff. “All right,” he said, “thats what Ill do,” expecting her to say, Fine, if it means that much to you, Ill reschedule the meetings. But she hadnt said that, even when she saw him packing his bag, and so hed discovered a truth that other men probably knew already&#8212; that once youd packed a bag in front of a woman there was no possibility of unpacking, or of not going and taking the damn bag with you.

Worse, Joy, who preferred to watch movies on DVD rather than in a theater, as they were meant to be seen, had given him a list of films he was forbidden to see without her, and of course these were the only ones worth seeing. Hed spent an hour looking through the restaurant guides provided by the hotel, but couldnt decide on one, or even on what kind of food he wanted. Griffin had no trouble making these sorts of decisions when she was around, but for some reason, when he had only himself to please, he often couldnt make up his mind. He told himself this was just the result of being married for thirty years, that part of the decision- making process was imagining what his wife would enjoy. Okay, but more and more he found himself stalled, in the middle of whatever room he happened to be standing in, and he realized that this had been, of course, his fathers classic pose. In the end Griffin had ordered room service and watched a crappy made- for- TV movie, the kind he and Tommy, his old partner, had been reduced to writing that last year or two in L.A. before hed gotten his teaching gig and moved back East with Joy and their daughter, Laura. Hed fallen asleep before the first commercial, confident he could predict not only the movies outcome but also half its dialogue.

In order not to dwell on yesterdays mistakes, he decided to put today in motion by calling down to the bell captain for his car. Twenty minutes later, dressed and showered, hed checked out of his Back Bay hotel. The whole of Boston fit neatly into the rectangle of his rearview mirror, and by the time the Sagamore Bridge, one of two that spanned the Cape Cod Canal, hove into view, the sky was silver in the east, and he felt the last remnants of yesterdays prevarications begin to lift like the patchy fog hed been in and out of since leaving the city. The Sagamore arched dramatically upward in the middle, helping to pull the sun over the horizon, and though the air was far too cool, Griffin pulled off onto the shoulder of the road and put the convertibles top down, feeling truly off the reservation for the first time since leaving home in Connecticut. There was something vaguely thrilling about not being where his wife thought he was. She liked to know what people were up to, and not just him. She called Laura most mornings, her brain still lazy with sleep, to ask “So . . . whats on the agenda for you today?” She also phoned both of her sisters several times a week and knew that June was having her hair done tomorrow morning and that Jane had put on five new pounds and was starting a diet. She even knew what new folly her idiot twin brothers, Jared and Jason, were engaged in. To Griffin, an only child, such behavior was well over the line that separated the merely inexplicable from the truly perverse.

Zipping along Route 6, Griffin realized he was humming “That Old Black Magic,” the song his parents had sung ironically&#8212;both university English professors, thats how they did most things&#8212; every time they crossed the Sagamore, substituting Cape for black. When he was growing up, theyd spent part of every summer on the Cape. He could always tell what kind of year it had been, moneywise, by when and where they stayed. One particularly prosperous year theyd rented a small house in Chatham for the month of August. Another year, when faculty salaries were frozen, all they could afford was Sandwich in June. His parents had been less wed to each other than to a shared sense of grievance over being exiled eleven months of every year to the “Mid- fucking- west,” a phrase they didnt say so much as spit. They had good academic careers, though perhaps not the stellar ones that might have been predicted, given their Ivy League pedigree. Both had grown up in the Rust Belt of western New York State, his mother in suburban Rochester, his father in Buffalo, the children of lower- middle- class, white- collar parents. At Cornell, where theyd both gone on scholarship, theyd met not only each other but also the kind of friends whod invited them home for holidays in Wellesley and Westchester and for summer vacations in the Hamptons or on the Cape. They told their parents they could earn more money there, which was true, but in fact theyd have done anything to avoid returning to their parents depressing upstate homes. At Yale, where they did their graduate work, they came to believe they were destined for research positions at one of the other Ivys, at least until the market for academics headed south and they had to take what they could get&#8212;the pickings even slimmer for a couple&#8212;and that turned out to be a huge state university in Indiana.

Betrayed. That was how they felt. Why go to Cornell, to Yale, if Indiana was your reward? But theyd had little choice but to hunker down and make the best of their wretched timing, so they dove into teaching and research and committee work, hoping to bolster their vitae so that when the academic winds changed theyd be ready. They feared the Princeton and Dartmouth ships had probably sailed for good, but that still left the Swarthmores and Vassars of the world as safe if not terribly exciting havens. This much, at least, was surely their due. And before going up for promotion and tenure (or “promotion and tether,” in their parlance) in the Midfucking-west, theyd each had opportunities&#8212;she at Amherst, he at Bowdoin&#8212;but never together. So they stayed put in their jobs and their marriage, each terrified, Griffin now suspected, that the other, unshackled, would succeed and escape to the kind of academic post (an endowed chair!) that would complete the misery of the one left behind. To make their unhappy circumstances more tolerable, they had affairs and pretended to be deeply wounded when these came to light. His father had been a genuine serial adulterer, whereas his mother simply refused to lag behind in this or anything else.

Of course all of this was adult understanding. As a boy, the reluctant witness to his parents myriad quarrels and recriminations, Griffin had imagined that he must be the one keeping them together. It was his mother who eventually disabused him of this bizarre notion. At his and Joys wedding reception, actually. But by then they had finally divorced&#8212;even spite, apparently, was not eternal&#8212;and shed narrowly won the race to remarry. In an ecumenical mood, she ventured outside the English department for her second husband, a philosopher named Bart, whom shed quickly dubbed “Bartleby.” At the reception, half in her cups, shed assured Griffin, “Good heavens, no, it wasnt you. What kept us together was ‘That Old Cape Magic. Remember how we used to sing it every year on the Sagamore?” She then turned to Bartleby. “One glorious month, each summer,” she explained. “Sun. Sand. Water. Gin. Followed by eleven months of misery.” Then back to Griffin. “But thats about par for most marriages, I think youll find.” The I think youll find, he understood, was of course meant to suggest that in her view, his own marital arithmetic was likely to be much the same. For a moment it seemed as if Bartleby might offer an observation of his own, but he apparently preferred not to, though he did sigh meaningfully.

Griffin was about to respond when his father reappeared with Claudia, his former graduate student and new wife. Theyd disappeared

briefly after the ceremony, to quarrel or make love, he had no idea. “I swear to God,” his mother said, “if he buys that child a house on the Cape&#8212;and I do mean anywhere on the Cape&#8212;I may have to murder him.” Her face brightened at a pleasant thought. “You might actually prove useful,” she told Bartleby, then turned back to Griffin. “Your stepfather collects locked- room murder mysteries. Death by curare, that sort of thing. You can figure something out, cant you? Just make sure Im in full view of everyone in the drawing room when the fat cow hits the deck, writhing in excruciating pain.” She knew perfectly well, of course, that Griffins father didnt have the money to buy Claudia (who was more zaftig than fat) or anyone else a house on the Cape, of course. Shed made sure of that by beggaring him in the divorce settlement, but the possibility&#8212; what of, that he might purchase a winning Lotto ticket?&#8212;still clearly worried her.

To Griffin, now fifty- five, roughly the same age his parents had been when he and Joy married, the Cape place- names were still

magical: Falmouth, Woods Hole, Barnstable, Dennis, Orleans, Harwich. They made a boy of him again and put him in the backseat of

his parents car, where hed spent much of his boyhood, unbelted, resting his arms on the front seat, trying to hear what they, who never made any attempt to include him in their conversations, were talking about. It wasnt so much that he was interested in their front- seat conversations as aware that decisions that impacted him were being made up there, and if privy to these hatching plans he might offer an opinion. Unfortunately, the fact that his chin was resting on the seat back seemed to preclude this. Most of what he overheard wasnt really worth the effort anyway. “Wellfleet,” his mother might say, studying the road atlas. “Why havent we ever tried Wellfleet?” By the time Griffin was a high school freshman, which marked the last of their Cape vacations, theyd rented just about everywhere. Each summer, when they handed over the keys at the end of their stay, the rental agent always asked if they wanted to book it for next year, but they always said no, which made Griffin wonder if the perfect spot they were searching for really existed. Perhaps, he concluded, just looking was sufficient in and of itself.

While he roamed the beach unattended, full of youthful energy and freedom, his parents spent sunny afternoons lying on the sand with their “guilty pleasures,” books theyd have been embarrassed to admit to their colleagues theyd ever heard of. They were on vacation, they claimed, not just from the Mid- fucking- west but also from the literary canon theyd sworn to uphold. His mothers taste ran to dark, disturbing thrillers and cynical spy novels. “That,” she would say, turning the books last page with evident satisfaction, “was truly twisted.” His father alternated between literary pornography and P. G. Wodehouse, enjoying both thoroughly, as if Naked Lunch and Bertie Wooster Sees It Through were intended as companion pieces.

The only thing they both read&#8212;indeed, studied as intently as each years Modern Language Association job listings&#8212;was the real- estate guide. Unwilling to give the other a first look, they always picked up two copies as soon as they arrived and wrote their names on the covers so theyd know which was which and whose fault it was if one got lost. A house here was part of their longrange, two- part plan to escape the Mid- fucking- west. First they would find real jobs back East, where theyd locate a suitable apartment to rent. This would allow them to save money for a house on the Cape, where theyd spend summers and holidays and the occasional long weekend, until of course they retired&#8212;early if they could swing it&#8212;and lived on there full- time, reading and writing op- eds and, who knew, maybe even trying their hand at a novel.

A single day was usually all it took for each of them to plow through the hundreds of listings in the fat real- estate guide and place each into one of two categories&#8212;Cant Afford It or Wouldnt Have It As a Gift&#8212;before tossing the booklet aside in disgust, because everything was more expensive this year than last. But the very next day his father would set Jeeves aside and take another look. “Page twenty- seven,” hed say, and Griffins mother would set down her Ripley and rummage for her copy in the beach bag. “Bear with me, now,” hed continue. Or, “Some things would have to go right”&#8212;meaning a big merit raise or a new university- press book contract&#8212;“but . . .” And then hed explain why a couple of the listings theyd quickly dismissed the day before just maybe could be made to work. Later in the month, on a rainy day, theyd go so far as to look at a house or two at the low end of the Cant Afford It category, but the realtors always intuited at a glance that Griffins parents were just tire kickers. The house they wanted was located in a future only they could see. For people who dealt largely in dreams, his father was fond of observing, realtors were a surprisingly unromantic bunch, like card counters in a Vegas casino.

The drive back to the Mid- fucking- west was always brutal, his parents barely speaking to each other, as if suddenly recalling last years infidelities, or maybe contemplating whom theyd settle for this year. Sex, if you went by Griffins parents, definitely took a

backseat to real estate on the passion gauge.

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jdthird, January 1, 2010 (view all comments by jdthird)
Russo is the modern day Steinbeck. The man does not know how to write a poor sentence. I recommend reading every book he has written.
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Product Details

Russo, Richard
Domestic fiction
College teachers
Publication Date:
Grade Level:
9.58x6.52x1.19 in. 1.15 lbs.

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Fiction and Poetry » Literature » A to Z

That Old Cape Magic Used Hardcover
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Product details 272 pages Knopf Publishing Group - English 9780375414961 Reviews:
"Staff Pick" by ,

Fans of Richard Russo's hilarious novel Straight Man will rejoice upon learning that the Pulitzer winner has once again trained his sights on academia. Most of That Old Cape Magic takes place off-campus, however, as Jack Griffin reckons with his parents' failed marriage and the rapidly deteriorating state of his own. No matter, Russo still draws plenty of laughs in this reliably sharp and introspective domestic drama.

"Review" by , "The Griffins may not find magic on old Cape Cod, but readers will. Those who savored Russo's long, languid novels...may be surprised by this one's rapid pace, but Russo's familiar compassion for the vicissitudes of the human condition shines through."
"Review" by , "[A]n impressively expansive analysis of familial dynamics...and his many fans are sure to savor the journey."
"Review" by , "The author's slapstick satire of academia (Straight Man, 1997) previously seemed like an anomaly. Now it has a companion of sorts....Readable, as always with this agreeable and gifted author."
"Review" by , "[Russo] has again worked his magic, rolling up his sleeves for an autumn years study disguised as a breezy summer read....The tone here may be lighter, but...Russo works this behavioral beat better than most literary heavyweights who foolishly believe that they get people."
"Synopsis" by , In this follow-up to Bridge of Sighs, Russo delivers a novel of deep introspection and every family feeling imaginable, with a middle-aged man confronting his parents and their failed marriage, his own troubled one, his daughter's new life and, finally, what it is he thought he wanted and what in fact he has.
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