Mother's Wrath
“How’s your son?”
She drew back her head as if recalling to mind the climax of a great tragedy from which she would never recover. “Ah,” she said. “I am afraid that he has fallen into dissipation.”
I said that I was sorry to hear it.
“It is not,” she said stiffly, “entirely his own doing.”
I expressed my view that she must be correct.
“He was, at least in part, driven to it.”
“Driven eh? By whom? Or should I say, by what?”
“You should. He was driven to it by women.” This last word escaped her lips as if she spoke of some class of person hateful to her. It was in very much the same way that Hannibal used to go on about Romans.
I made no effort to conceal my surprise. “Women?” I said.
“Yes!” she assured me gravely. She fondled the head of her cane and scoured the room with a dark gaze. I was rather grateful that there were no women about or I should not have liked their chances. “And now what do you think he’s gotten himself into?”
I said I had no idea, nor did I.
“Booze! Gambling!” she leaned in close and looked me in the eyes until I shuddered. “Drugs,” she said. It took her longer to say that five-letter words than it took Abraham Lincoln to say ‘Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’. In fact, while she was still on the letter “u”, four score and seven occurred to me as the exact number of minutes she proposed to take.
“Dreadful!” I intoned when at last it was my turn to speak.
She nodded. “And there’s more,” she said, “but we don’t need to talk about that.”
Which made me want to talk about nothing but that. I let it go, returning to the main. “And you say that it’s women that have been driving him to all these things?”
“In large part.”
“To alcohol? Gambling?” I lowered my voice. “To drugs?”
She looked at me with the eye of an inquisitor daring me to question the faith. “That is what I said.”
“But why would these women want him embroiled in such…such…”
“Dissipation.”
“Why would these women want him embroiled in such dissipation?”
“They want his money.” She pointed at me to let me know that she was about to say something that mattered. “They want my money.”
I shook my head. “So they’re driving him to gamble? To buy drugs? Seems an odd way to go about getting his money. Or your money, for that matter.”
She waved a dismissive hand and I felt quite dismissed. I crossed my legs defensively.
“They have been the ruin of him,” she said.
“Well I’m sorry to hear it,” I said with feeling. I had my reservations, but I wasn’t about to argue with this cane-fondling woman-hater. Then a question occurred to me. “How many of them are there?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The women who do the driving. We’ve been discussing them in the plural form this entire time. The mind is agog with pictures of them herding him into ruin like a pack of sheepdogs.”
She drew her head back again, considering me through narrowed eyes. She looked a bit like a cobra when she did this, and I felt sure that I was within striking range if she really uncoiled herself. It occurred to me, as I endured her gaze, that perhaps she suspected me of trying to be funny. I would have to be more careful of that tendency. The subject of her son’s descent into dissipation was clearly a delicate one.
“I do not know,” she said at last. “I have not been introduced to any of them.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Rest assured that there are several.”
“Ah,” I said.
“At least.”
“Oh.”
“Each and every one of them doing her part to destroy my son.”
I said that I thought this was shameful.
She agreed, and the cobra stance was relaxed.
The food arrived and I made a great show of listening intently to a conversation that was taking place further down the table. I glanced across at her occasionally, and every time she was eating furtively and raking her venomous gaze up and down the length of the table. I felt sure that she would challenge one of the women there to a duel before the end of the night and, for the second time that sitting, I shuddered.