Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

“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.

I ought to have let the insult pass. I ought simply to have ignored him and served the grapefruit. But instead I turned and asked pleasantly, “What did you say?”

He just smiled as if unutterably pleased with himself.

I asked again, “What did you say, darling? I’m not sure if I heard correctly.”

He stood up and left the house, saying, “Believe I’ll skip break-fuss this mornin’, dahling.” As he walked away that eye stared at me from the back of the jacket.

It happened again in the evening, while we were watching television. That night we did have Bobby. Ned was at the theater, and we were watching a Star Trek rerun, the boys and I. I said, “Mr. Spock might not be much fun at parties, but I love him best of all.”

Jonathan said, “He’s on a five-year mission in deep space. If you were married to him, you’d need a dozen sons to keep you company.”

I might have laughed along like a true sport but I was still too surprised by this new, outright meanness. “I rather thought we kept one another company,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said. “Boys like nothing better than to shop and cook.”

Bobby sat on the floor, as was his custom. He objected for some reason to furniture.

He said, “Quit, Jon.”

“All in fun,” Jonathan said.

“Yeah, but quit anyway.”

And so Jonathan quit. He watched the program without further comment. His feet looked huge and rather weapon-like in the black cowboy boots he had insisted on buying.

Bobby had pared his fingernails, and forced a comb through his hair. He appeared to have abandoned boots in favor of simple black sneakers.

He was always polite to me. More than polite, really: he was courtly, in his way. He inquired after the particulars of the dinners I made, and asked me how my day had gone. Answering wasn’t always easy, because I was never quite sure to whom I spoke. He stubbornly retained his foreign quality, although with time he did a better job of simulating the clean-minded normality of a television character. He polished his act. He took to trimming his hair, and even turned up in some new clothes that had not originally belonged to Jonathan.

One night in May I was passing by Jonathan’s room when I heard music less shrill and raucous than what the boys usually played. I had grown accustomed to the endless noise of their music, the way one does to a barking dog. Electric guitars and bass drums had become a new kind of silence for me, but this particular music—a single, sweet female voice accompanied by a piano—was distinctly audible.

I hesitated outside Jonathan’s door. Then I knocked, and was surprised by the timid little mouse-like sound my knuckles made against the wood. He was my son, living in my house. I was entitled to knock on his bedroom door. I knocked again, louder.

“Yeah?” he called from within.

“Only me,” I called back. “May I come in a minute?”

There was silence, filled with the tinkle of piano keys. After a moment, Bobby opened the door.

“Hey,” he said. He stood smiling, looking rather peculiar—miscast—in a pin-striped dress shirt and jeans. I could see Jonathan within, sitting sulkily in his black boots and T-shirt.

“I didn’t mean to bother you boys,” I said, and was annoyed at the craven sound of my own voice. I might have been a poor relation, come for her annual duty dinner.

“It’s okay,” Bobby said. “It’s fine.”

“I just, well, I wondered what that music was. It sounded so…different.”

“You like it?” Bobby asked.

It seemed a trick question. Would I open myself to ridicule? Then, brushing aside my own girlish fears, I answered like a woman of thirty-five. “It’s lovely,” I said. “Who is she?”

“Laura Nyro,” Bobby said. “Yeah, she’s good. It’s an old one, you want to come in and hear it for a minute?”

I glanced at Jonathan. I should of course have said no. I should have gone about my offstage business, folding the towels and sheets. But I said, “All right, just for a minute,” and stepped gratefully into the room to which I had previously enjoyed free access. During the past year, Jonathan had all but covered the walls with posters of scowling long-haired rock singers. The woman’s voice, soaring and melancholy, filled the room rather tenuously, surrounded by all those hard masculine eyes.