A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  Perhaps tonight had been a start. Perhaps, the following night, I would manage a little more.

  I didn’t want to be the monster of the house—the fretting mother, the ungenerous wife. I made the promises to myself once again, and hardly slept until the windows were blue with the first light.

  Jonathan persisted in his fascination with Bobby, who became a fixture at our table. Ned tolerated him, because it was Ned’s nature to go along. He kept a layer of neutral air between his person and the world, so that whatever reached him had been filtered and rarefied.

  It was I who kept the accounts.

  Bobby seemed to have no other plans. He was perennially available. He never invited Jonathan to his house, which sat all right with me, but still I began to wonder. One night I asked him, “Bobby, what does your father do?”

  We were eating dinner, he sopping up the last of his beurre blanc with his third piece of homemade bread seemingly before Jonathan or Ned or I had started to eat.

  “He’s a teacher” was the answer. “Not our school. Over at Roosevelt.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She died. About a year ago.”

  He stuffed the bread into his mouth and reached for another piece.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t be sorry,” he told me. “You didn’t even know her.”

  “I meant it in a more general way. I meant I’m sorry about your loss.”

  Gorging, he looked at me as if I had just spoken in Sanskrit. After a moment he said, “How do you make this sauce?”

  “Butter and vinegar,” I said. “Lemon, a little vermouth. Nothing to it, really.”

  “I never had sauce like this,” he said. “You made this bread?”

  “Bread’s a hobby of mine,” I said. “I just about do it in my sleep.”

  “Yow,” he said. Shaking his head in astonishment, he reached for his fourth slice.

  After dinner the boys went up to Jonathan’s room. In a moment we heard the stereo, an unfamiliar drumbeat that thumped through the floorboards. Bobby had brought some of his records over.

  Ned said, “My God, the kid’s an orphan.”

  “He’s not an orphan,” I said. “His father is alive.”

  “You know what I mean. That kid’s in a bad way.”

  I got up to clear the dishes. When I was a girl there had been parts of town we never went near. They were dark spots, blank areas on the map. I said, “Yes, and that’s why Jonathan is so taken with him. If he were lame on top of it, we’d have him here every night instead of every other.”

  “Whoa there,” Ned said. “This doesn’t sound like you.”

  I stacked Bobby’s empty plate on top of Jonathan’s. Jonathan had artfully distributed his food around the edges of his plate, so it would appear to have been consumed. He was so thin you could just about see through him in a strong light. Bobby’s plate was spotless, as if he had scoured it with his tongue. Nary a crumb was left on the cloth where he’d sat.

  “I know it doesn’t,” I said. “I’m sorry about all that’s happened to him, I really am. But something about that boy frightens me.”

  “He’s wild, is what he is. He’s a boy with no one but a father, growing up half wild. We have resources enough to give some shelter to a wild boy, don’t you think?”

  “Of course we do.”

  I carried the plates into the kitchen. I was sullen, bone-hard Alice, married to Ned the Good.

  He followed, bringing dishes. “Don’t worry,” he said from behind me. “Every kid brings home a few wild friends. Jonathan will grow up fine, regardless.”

  “But I do worry about him,” I said, running water. “He’s thirteen. This is like—oh, I don’t know. It’s almost like seeing some hidden quality of Jonathan’s come suddenly to light. Something he’s been harboring all along that we never knew about.”

  “You’re overplaying the scene.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes. If I had the time I’d tell you all about Robby Cole. He was my best friend in grade school. I was devoted to him because he could set off caps with his teeth. Among other things.”

  “And look how you turned out.”

  “Well, I married you,” he said.

  “A laudable accomplishment. Perhaps less than a life’s purpose, though.”

  “I married you and I run the best movie theater in Greater Cleveland. And I’ve got to go.”

  “Goodbye.”

  He put his hands around my waist, kissed me loudly on the neck. I was visited briefly by his smell, the particular odor of his skin mingled with citrus after-shave. It was like entering his sphere of inhabited air, and as long as I stood within that sphere I could share his belief that bad things passed away of their own accord, that the world conspired toward good outcomes. I turned and lightly kissed his rough cheek.

  “Worry less,” he said.

  I promised to try. While he was in the house, it seemed possible. But as soon as he left, the possibility receded like light from a lantern he carried. I watched him through the kitchen window. Perhaps Ned’s most remarkable feature was his ability to walk serenely in this city of gray stone and yellow brick, where the wind off the lake could shrink people’s hearts to pins.

  I took down the new cookbook I had just bought, full of recipes from the French countryside, and began planning tomorrow’s meal.

  Bobby stayed until well after ten, until I’d called out, “Boys, it’s a school night.” Even then, after thirteen years of it, I was surprised at how much like somebody’s mother I could sound.

  I was reading the paper when Bobby came downstairs. “Good night,” he said.

  His way of speaking, his whole manner, was like that of a foreigner learning the customs of the country. He resembled more than anything a refugee from some distant place, underfed and desperate to please. His delivery of the words “good night” had precisely matched my own.

  “Bobby?” I said. I had no next statement, really. It was just that he stood so expectantly.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “I truly am sorry about your mother,” I said. “I hope I didn’t sound just polite at the dinner table.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Do you and your father manage all right? Does dinner get cooked, and the house cleaned up every now and then?”

  “Uh-huh. A woman comes once a week.”

  I said, “Why don’t you bring your father for dinner one night? Maybe early next week?”

  He looked at me darkly and questioningly, as if I had violated some taboo from his country; as if he could not immediately know whether I had meant to insult him or whether the rules were just that different over here.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Well, maybe I’ll give him a call. You’d better get along now, it’s late.”

  “Okay.”

  I believe he’d have just continued standing in front of me until I told him to go.

  “Good night,” I said again, and had the sentiment returned to me in a young male version of my own voice.

  After he’d gone I went upstairs and knocked
on Jonathan’s door.

  “Uh-huh?” he said.

  “Only me. May I come in?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He lay on his bed. A nasal male voice, accompanied by acoustic guitar, rasped through the speakers. The window stood open though it was early November, and frosty. I believed I detected a smell, something sweet and smoky which the chill air had not quite dissipated.

  I said, “Did you have a good evening?”

  “Sure.”

  “Bobby’s had a hard time of it, hasn’t he?” I said.

  “You shouldn’t pity him.”

  “Did you know before that his mother was dead?”

  “Uh-huh,” Jonathan said.

  “Do you know how she died?”

  “Sort of. I mean, she took too many sleeping pills. But she had a prescription, she’d been taking them for years. I guess she’d started complaining they weren’t working anymore. So it could have been an accident.”

  “Bobby had a brother who died, too?”

  Jonathan nodded. “That was definitely an accident. It wasn’t a murder after all. That’s when the mother started in on sleeping pills.”

  He delivered these facts with a certain pride, as if they represented Bobby’s worldly accomplishments.

  “Lord. The things that happen to people.”

  I went and shut the window. It was almost cold enough to steam your breath in that room.

  “And nothing’s ever happened to us,” Jonathan said. “Nothing bad.”

  “We’re very lucky.”

  As I turned from the window I saw Bobby’s leather jacket, draped over the chair. The embroidered eye, cyclopean, iris big as a hockey puck, stared from the worn cowhide.

  “Bobby forgot his jacket,” I said.

  “He’s loaning it to me,” Jonathan said. “It used to be his brother’s. I loaned him mine at school today.”

  “Your good windbreaker? You traded it for that?”

  “Uh-huh. Bobby talks about his brother a lot. I mean, it sounds like he was pretty cool. When he died, it just about blew their whole family apart.”

  “Do you know what that windbreaker cost?” I asked.

  He looked at me in the new way, his jaw set challengingly and his eyes gone hard.

  I decided to let it go. I thought I’d give him the leeway to work it through his system.

  “What would you think about veal stew for dinner tomorrow night?” I said. “There’s a recipe I’d like to try, veal with mushrooms and pearl onions. How does that sound?”

  “I don’t care.” He shrugged.

  I held my arms close over my chest. It was freezing in that room.

  “How about a quick game of hearts before bed?” I asked. “I’m in disgrace, you know. I lost so badly the last couple of times, I can barely hold my head up.”

  “No. I’m beat.”

  “One short game?”

  “ No , Mom.”

  “All right.”

  I stood for a moment, though it was clearly time to leave him alone. The light from his bedside lamp, which I had bought ten years ago, shone on his pale hair and precise, sculpted features. He took after me, but in an idealized way. My own looks, which any mirror told me were rather too severe, had come up softened in him.

  “Good night,” he said.

  “Good night. Sleep well.”

  Still I lingered. I could not leave off looking at him, even if he resented me for it. If I’d had the courage I’d have said to him, “Don’t do it. Please don’t start hating me. You can have the world without shutting me out of your life.”

  I walked quietly from the room, as full of him as I had been when I was pregnant.

  I invited Bobby and his father for dinner the following Tuesday. They arrived half an hour late, with two bottles of wine. “Sorry,” the father said. “We had to drive all over town looking for a decent Chardonnay. I hope you like Chardonnay.”

  I told him we loved it.

  He wore a goat’s beard, and a mustard-colored jacket with bright brass buttons. His florid face was a riot of broken capillaries. He looked like an older, drunken Bobby.

  The father’s name was Burton. He scarcely touched his food when we sat down to eat. He drank wine, smoked Pall Malls, and paused occasionally in these activities to fork up a bit of my poached sole, hold it aloft for a moment or two, and insert it into his mouth with no more notice than a carpenter gives a tenpenny nail.

  Ned asked him, “How do you find the kids over at Roosevelt?”

  Burt Morrow looked at him uncomprehendingly. I recognized the expression.

  “They can be difficult,” he said in a measured voice. “They are not bad kids by and large but they can be difficult.”

  After a moment, Ned nodded. “I see.”

  “We try to get along,” Burt said. “I try to get along with them. I try not to offend them, and am mostly successful, I believe.” He turned to Bobby and asked, “Would you say that I’m mostly successful?”

  “Yeah, Dad,” Bobby said. He looked at his father with an expression neither loving nor disdainful. They shared a certain stunned quality, a way of responding to a question as if it had been posed by some disembodied voice whispering from the ether. They might have been the kindly, dim-witted older brothers in a fairy tale—the ones on whom the charms and enchantments are wasted. Jonathan sat between them, his blue eyes snapping with intelligence.

  “That’s all I try to do myself,” I said. “Just stay out of Jonathan’s way and let him experience life. Lord, I wouldn’t know how to discipline. I sometimes still feel like a child myself.”

  Both Bobby and his father looked at me with numbly astonished faces.

  “I married young, you know,” I said. “I wasn’t but a few years older than these boys are now, and I certainly hadn’t planned on falling in love with a Northerner named Ned Glover, nor on getting myself moved to Ohio, with that Canadian wind blowing sleet up off the lake. Brr. Not that I’d do things any differently.”

  Ned winked and said, “I call her Helen of Louisiana. I’m still waiting for a bunch of Southerners to leave a wooden horse on the front lawn.”

  Burt lit another cigarette. He let the smoke drift out of his open mouth, and watched it snake its way over the table. “I might do some things differently,” he said. “I think you’d have to say that I would. Yes.”

  I was not ignorant of psychology. I knew Jonathan needed to escape from his father and me, to sever the bonds: to murder us, in a sense, and then resurrect us later, when he was a grown man with a life of his own and we had faded into elderly inconsequentiality. I wasn’t blind, or foolish.

  Still, it seemed too soon, and Bobby seemed the wrong vehicle. At thirteen we have so many choices to make, with no idea about how consequences can rattle through the decades. When I was thirteen I had consciously decided to be talkative and a little wild, to ensure that my own parents’ silent dinners and their long, bookish evenings—marked only by the chimes of the clock—would have no lasting effect on me. I had been barely seventeen when I met Ned Glover, a handsome, humorous man in his twenties, owner of a Chrysler convertible, full of stories from the North.

 
That night in bed I said to him, “Well, at least now we know how Bobby comes by it.”

  “Comes by what?”

  “Everything. His whole personality. Or the mysterious lack thereof.”

  “You really can’t stand that kid, can you?” Ned said.

  “I don’t bear him any particular malice,” I said. “I just, well, this is an important time in Jonathan’s life. I’m not sure he should be hanging around with a character like that. Do you think Bobby might be a little retarded?”

  “Sweetie, the infatuation will wear off. Trust your own kid a little more. We’ve been raising him for thirteen years, we must’ve taught him a thing or two.”

  I didn’t speak. What I wanted to say was “I’ve taught him a thing or two; you’ve been holed up in that theater.” But I kept quiet. We lay waiting for sleep. There would be no sexual congress that night. I was miles from the possibility. Still, I thought we had time.

  Perhaps I struggled too hard to remain Jonathan’s friend. Perhaps I ought to have distanced myself more. I simply could not believe that the boy with whom I’d played and shared secrets—the achingly vulnerable child who told me every story that entered his head—needed suddenly to be treated with the polite firmness one might apply to a lodger.

  Our ongoing game of hearts came to an end, as did our Saturday shopping trips. Bobby continued wearing Jonathan’s blue windbreaker, and started turning up in Jonathan’s shirts as well. When he stayed overnight, he slept in Jonathan’s room on the folding cot. He was consistently cordial to me, in his rehearsed, immigrant’s fashion.

  One morning in March I was slicing a grapefruit for breakfast. Jonathan sat alone at the kitchen table, it being one of the mornings Bobby was not with us.

  I said, “Looks like a lovely day if you like ducks.”

  A moment passed. Jonathan said, “Yes, if yew lack ducks.”

  He was mocking my voice, my Southern accent.