Morningside Heights

by Joshua Henkin

  Arlo hesitated, then launched right in. The bakery was underperforming.

  “How’s it underperforming?” Nancy said. On weekend mornings, the lines were out the door.

  But most people bought just a coffee and a scone, then sat at a table, reading. And as the day wore on the crowds dwindled, and on weekdays they were thinner to start. “The bread’s overpriced,” Arlo said. He pointed at a shelf, where a loaf of einkorn bread sat behind a window like a museum jewel.

  “How can you know if my bread’s overpriced?”

  “Quite simply. No one’s buying it.” Arlo drew a graph on a napkin. “Do you know about supply and demand?” As the price went down, demand went up. Nancy could still make a profit if she sold her bread for less.

  Nancy closed early one day and squeegeed the windows. With Arlo’s encouragement, she hired someone to make a new sign for the store. The old sign had faded, and the new letters were blockier and bolder, like a set of straightened teeth.

  * * *

  —

  A week passed, and the bakery was more crowded; revenue had gone up 10 percent. Maybe it was the squeegeed windows and the new sign. Or maybe it was the sunflowers Nancy had placed on the tables. Or maybe it was the law of supply and demand, because now that she’d cut the price of bread, more loaves were selling.

  “We’ve turned this place around,” Arlo’s mother said.

  What did his mother mean, we? She was spending her days by the ovens, making a nuisance of herself. And she’d gone back to stealing from the tip jar, doing so with an impunity that unnerved him.

  One night, she removed a couple of croissants and a frittole from her bag.

  “Did you pay for those?”

  She just smiled at him.

  “Mom, you can’t go stealing tips, and you can’t go stealing bread.”

  “With everything we’ve been doing for the bakery, we need to ask for a raise.”

  “Would you stop it with the we already? I’m the one who needs to ask for a raise.”

  “Yes,” his mother said. “You do.”

  * * *

  —

  But when Arlo asked Nancy for a raise, she said, “If you get a raise, all the workers will want one.”

  “I helped bring in more revenue.”

  “Let me think about it,” Nancy said.

  But a week passed, and Nancy didn’t get back to him.

  One day, a worker showed up wearing a T-shirt with a half-eaten doughnut silkscreened across the front and the words doughs before bros printed above it. Nancy liked the T-shirt; she thought it could be the bakery’s new uniform. She ordered ten of the T-shirts and handed them out. Soon everyone was wearing the T-shirt—everyone, that is, except for Arlo, who hated clothes with words written on them. He certainly wasn’t going to show up to work with the words doughs before bros printed across his chest.

  And when Nancy insisted, he quit.

  “Do you have another job?” his mother asked him.

  “Don’t worry about me.” He was too big for the bakery. He was too big for Ames. If he was going to succeed, he would succeed spectacularly, and if he was going to fail, he would fail spectacularly, too.

  * * *

  —

  One day, he found a pile of mail in his mother’s drawer, with the envelopes sliced open. The return address said New York, NY. It was in his father’s handwriting. He found another envelope, in his stepmother’s hand. And a postcard from Sarah.

  He stood in the doorway when his mother got home, holding the pile of letters. “What are these?”

  His mother looked startled.

  “Answer my question.”

  “Is that how you greet me at the end of a long workday while you’ve been loafing around?”

  “Tell me what they are.”

  “They’re letters, Arlo. The question is, what were you doing going through my drawers?” She grabbed the letters from him.

  “You took my mail. You probably read it.”

  “And if I did?”

  “What else are you hiding?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Search me.”

  He thought he might do that; he was tempted to strip her bare.

  “Listen, darling.”

  “No, you listen.”

  “What if he wanted you back?”

  “Did he?”

  “A person only gets one chance in life.”

  Arlo disagreed. His mother had gotten many chances with him. Maybe his father deserved another chance, too.

  * * *

  —

  When he picked up the phone the next day a voice said, “Arlo?”

  “Dad?”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Iowa, Dad.”

  “Why haven’t you answered my letters?”

  “Mom confiscated them.”

  “What about my phone calls? I’ve been trying you day and night.”

  In the day Arlo had been at work, and at night his mother had told him not to answer the phone because she didn’t want him talking to solicitors. Now he understood what she’d been doing.

  “Put your mother on right now.”

  Arlo handed her the phone.

  “You have no business—”

  “Don’t lecture me, Spence.”

  “I have a right to talk to him.”

  “Arlo and I are on our own now. Stop meddling in our lives.”

  22

  Spence tried to catch the first plane to Des Moines, but the flight was overbooked, so he flew to Cedar Rapids, with a stopover at O’Hare, then took a car service to Ames.

  “The things you’ll do for Arlo,” Sarah said.

  “I’d do it for you too,” he said. “Thank God I don’t have to.”

  * * *

  —

  When Spence got to the house, Arlo was waiting, but Linda was still at the bakery.

  “She bakes?”

  “Mostly she steals from the tip jar.”

  “At least we’ll have a few hours before she tries to send me back.”

  “She won’t bother,” Arlo said. “She’s met a new man.”

  “Who?”

  “Some guy from the bakery. I haven’t seen her in days.” He ushered his father into the house. “How long are you here for?”

  “Just a couple of nights. I can cancel only so many classes before the dean gets suspicious.”

  “You canceled class for me?”

  “I couldn’t very well ask my students to fly out here, could I?”

  Arlo thought he was going to cry. He doubted his father had ever canceled class in his life. One time, his father had shown up to class with a 103 fever. Another time, he’d hobbled on a broken ankle through a foot of snow, only to discover that classes had been canceled. “How about we go camping?” Arlo said.

  “You camp?”

  Arlo didn’t camp. In fact, until he’d said those words, he hadn’t realized he wanted to go camping.

  * * *

  —

  They found a camping store, and Arlo’s father bought a tent, a tarp, and two canteens. “Will your mother let me borrow the car?”

  “I doubt it,” Arlo said, “but she’ll let me.”

  “Since when do you drive?”

  “I’m seventeen, Dad. I got my driver’s license.” It was the first thing he’d done when he’d gotten to Iowa. He took out his phone to call his mother.

  “You have a cell phone too?”

  That was the second thing he’d done. “It’s nineteen ninety-four, Dad. Everyone has a cell phone now.”

  “Not anyone I know.”

  Not many people Arlo knew either. But he had one, and that was all that mattered.

  * * *

  —

 
At the campsite, Arlo strung a hammock between two trees. He lay down in the hammock and closed his eyes. In his half-sleep, he could feel his father gently pushing him.

  They walked through the park along the Des Moines River. Maybe they could swim there, or at least dip their feet in.

  “I didn’t bring a bathing suit,” his father said. At the camping store, he’d bought a pair of breathable pants. He was wearing them now as they hiked along the path.

  The river was filled with canoers, kayakers, and tubers, and Arlo, in his bathing suit, said, “Come on, Dad, jump in!”

  But his father just stood in the shallows. He rolled up his pants cuffs almost to his knees, then stepped in deeper.

  “Be careful, Dad. You’ll capsize!” One time, the family had spent the weekend at the beach, and Arlo’s father had gotten stung by a jellyfish. He’d cried out in pain—how exhilarating that had been, how terrifying—and afterward, Arlo sat with his father back at the hotel, saying, “Here, Dad, I’ll get you a washcloth,” placing his father’s foot in a bucket of ice. Was that why he’d taken his father camping? To cast him out into the elements once more, at the mercy of the rattlesnakes and bears?

  * * *

  —

  Back at the campsite, they got the fire going. Arlo was wearing an oven mitt on one hand, and with his other hand he was opening and closing an enormous pair of tongs, ready to have a go at the vegetables. On the picnic bench the mushrooms, onions, and peppers were laid out in rows, like beads on an abacus. He dropped the hot dogs and hamburgers onto the grill.

  It was hot out, and he removed from his bag a little battery-operated fan and let it blow air across his forehead. “Let’s sit back-to-back,” he said. “I could use some support. You probably could, too.”

  They ate dinner that way, back-to-back, sitting on the ground, hamburger juice dripping on them.

  “I got you something,” his father said, and he went to the car and returned with a package. “It’s a little housewarming gift.”

  Arlo opened it. “It’s your Cornell bowl.” He recognized it from his father’s study. It held his father’s pens and pencils, his erasers, staples, and paper clips: the tools of his trade.

  “My parents gave me that bowl when I got into Cornell.”

  “And now you’re giving it to me?”

  “It’s had a long life. May it have an even longer one.”

  Arlo held the bowl in front of him.

  “This way, you can think of me back home in New York.”

  Arlo spun the bowl around on his lap. It was strange to have it at this campground, like an animal removed from its natural habitat. “Were your parents proud when you got into Cornell?”

  “Probably. Parents are engineered to be proud.”

  “You graduated number one from your high school, and also number one from Cornell.”

  “Who told you that?”

  Arlo shrugged. It was just something he knew.

  “Well, don’t go being my publicist,” his father said. “It’s bad enough when Pru does it.”

  Arlo placed a blade of grass between his two front teeth and let it bob up and down like a compass needle. “I won’t be applying to Cornell.”

  “You don’t have to,” his father said. “There are lots of good colleges out there.”

  “What if I don’t want to go to college at all?”

  His father was quiet. A man walked by with his Saint Bernard. The dog days of summer, Arlo thought, though there was still another month of spring.

  “What about next year?” his father said. “Will you be finishing up high school in Ames?”

  “If we even stay here.”

  “Where else would you go?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Maybe Mom’s new man will keep her in town.”

  “Just as likely, they’ll break up and it’ll be on to the next place.”

  Behind them, a man carried his toddler into the bathroom. “I got you something else,” his father said, and he went to the car and returned with another package.

  “It’s your book,” Arlo said. Who Really Wrote Shakespeare? His father had inscribed it to him: To Arlo, from your loving father, thinking of you back home in New York. In the smoky half-light, Arlo stared down at the pages.

  “I hope you’ll forgive me,” his father said. “It’s hubris to give someone your own book.”

  “It’s not,” Arlo said. “I want it.”

  His father said, “Pru has this artist friend who gave us one of her paintings, and we’re forced to hang it up whenever she comes over, and we take it down as soon as she leaves. With a book, at least, you can hide it on a bookshelf. Or sell it for a few bucks at the Strand.”

  “I won’t sell it,” Arlo said. In the lamplight, a mosquito buzzed. “Wasn’t your book on the best-seller list?”

  “For a week or two.”

  “Mom says you don’t like that it was a best-seller. That you bite the hand that feeds you.”

  “Well, you know Mom.” Spence didn’t want to be fighting with Linda, especially when she wasn’t even here.

  They went to sleep that night in their matching sleeping bags. Outside the tent, the moon glowed ivory. They could hear the crickets susurrating.

  * * *

  —

  On the drive back to Ames Arlo said, “Pru told me you used to ride a moped. That you drove around on it with her.”

  “I drove around on it with Mom too.”

  “Where’s that moped now?”

  “It was turned into scrap metal years ago. I had kids at that point. It wasn’t worth the risk.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Every now and then, but there are other joys.”

  “You drove around the city on a moped, but you’re afraid to drive a car?” Even now, in the passenger seat, his father was holding on to the handle.

  “I’m a mass of contradictions.”

  “It’s because of Enid, right?”

  His father shrugged. “Cars are the one place I get claustrophobic. On a moped, at least, there’s nothing hemming me in.”

  “How’s Enid, anyway?”

  “She’s the same. She’ll be the same until the day she dies.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Five years? Ten years? Thirty years? Maybe more?”

  “And Stanley?”

  “I haven’t seen him since the party.”

  “Why not?”

  “I haven’t known Stanley since we were kids. We wouldn’t have anything to say to each other.”

  “But you’re blood relatives.”

  “That goes only so far.”

  * * *

  —

  On the day his father was supposed to leave, Arlo’s mother made them lunch. Tuna fish sandwiches. Sliced tomatoes and wedges of Gruyère. A loaf of einkorn bread, pilfered from the bakery. Without Arlo around to watch over the till, his mother was really going to put the store out of business.

  Arlo’s father didn’t like einkorn bread: it wasn’t bland enough for him. But Linda, his ex-wife, was cutting him a slice, and he didn’t want to seem ungrateful.

  They ate lunch on the porch while Arlo’s mother sat on the swing. Her new boyfriend had mellowed her. Two weeks ago, she’d been confiscating Arlo’s father’s mail; now she was making lunch for him.

  Arlo looked at his parents. He’d been an accident in deeper ways than that mistaken pregnancy, a product of this unlikely couple. Yet here they were, eating the bread his mother had stolen. He allowed himself to imagine that it had been this way all along, the three of them in their home in Iowa.

  On the street, a man was playing the bagpipes.

  “Reveille,” Arlo said, thinking of a story his father had told, summer camp at the Fresh Air Fund, his father waking up to t
he sounds of the bugle.

  They sat there for a while, eating their sandwiches and drinking lemonade. Arlo’s mother fell asleep on the swing. Arlo closed his eyes, too. Then his father stood up. He needed to get to the airport.

  * * *

  —

  That night, Arlo said to his mother, “Give me those letters you confiscated.”

  His mother handed him the letters.

  March 26, 1994

  Dear Arlo,

  We made a mistake. Come back home. Your bedroom is waiting.

  The letter went on, but Arlo stopped reading. What could it have told him that he didn’t already know?

  That night, he looked through his mother’s drawers for more letters, but he couldn’t find any. It was better that way, because the letters he already had were enough to break him, and he hadn’t been able to read through them anyway. His mother was right to have intercepted those letters. They would have only set him back.

  Meanwhile, his father had left: come and gone in two days.

  The next morning, garbage day, Arlo dumped the letters in the trash, then waited as they got carted off.

  He’d guessed correctly: his mother and her new boyfriend had broken up. So when August came and his mother said, “What do you say we move to San Francisco?” he packed his bags before she could change her mind.

  23

  Arlo’s mother’s friend Charlotte lived in San Francisco, and she told them they could stay with her until they got back on their feet. But Arlo wasn’t off his feet—that was his mother’s problem—and he resented Charlotte’s implication. He took an instant dislike to Charlotte, in part because she took an instant liking to him, so extravagant was she in her effusions and embraces he thought she might strangle him.

  The other thing he disliked about Charlotte was that she appeared trapped circa 1968, the same year in which his mother was trapped. Until they crossed the Bay Bridge in his mother’s Toyota, Arlo had never set foot in San Francisco, but he felt as if his whole life had been San Francisco, so he could have been forgiven for not wanting to dip in and out of the thrift shops on Haight Street, which his mother made clear was her idea of fun. He preferred to wander through Dolores Park, then head into the Mission and Potrero Hill. It reminded him of New York, when he made his roost in the East Village and the Lower East Side, and he would think of his father, whom he was barely in touch with, and he’d be filled with pleasure but also with an abiding regret.