Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

Under Beechum’s guidance, Bobby leased space in a small shopping center in the suburbs, between a discount dress store and a bakery that displayed in its window an enormous, slightly dingy wedding cake. I expressed some doubts about the location, but Bobby had compiled a list of virtues that brooked no argument.

“It’s near some major retail outlets,” he recited gravely. “Penney’s is the flagship store, and Sears is practically around the corner. There are other food stores in the area. And it’s cheap. I mean, you’ve got to start somewhere, right?”

I needn’t offer much detail about the restaurant’s optimistic beginnings and its immediate decline. Suffice to say that Bobby named it Alice’s, and did what he could with a fluorescent-lit, acoustic-ceilinged room that had most recently failed as a pizza parlor. He hung framed posters of New Orleans—wrought-iron balconies in the French Quarter, a black man blowing a trumpet—and found old wooden tables and chairs at garage sales. I tested recipes with Bobby, debated over seasonings, though Beechum generally prevailed with admonitions about cost overruns or the timidity of Ohio tastes. The final menu turned out to be a Northerner’s version of Southern cooking: gumbo, hush puppies, frozen shrimp fixed every which way. The desserts were remarkable. I made it a point to stop by as often as I could.

Sometimes when I came for lunch I’d find one or two other parties—shoppers with bags from the discount store next door, lone salesclerks on their lunch hours—and sometimes I’d be the sole customer. On those occasions Bobby sat with me while the waitress either wiped the already clean pie case or gave in and read a movie magazine beside the refrigerator.

Through it all, Bobby never lost his Bible-salesman’s good cheer.

“Things are always slow at first,” he said. “You’ve got to let word of mouth get around. The people who leave here have all had great meals, they’ll tell ten other people. You’ve got to give it some time.”

“The food is fine, Bobby,” I said. “I’d like to think people will come to recognize a good thing.”

“Sure they will,” he said. “If you’ve got the product, people’ll find you. It’s a matter of time.”

We sat talking together in the empty room, under the fluorescent tubes. People passed by the spotless window and looked in with an expression I recognized: the humorous and rather frightened face one turns toward any ill-fated enterprise. I had looked in just that way through countless windows myself, into the depopulated interiors of fussy little gift shops, understocked delicatessens, boutiques in which every dress was five years out of style. As people rushed past with packages from Sears and Penney’s, I understood their feelings; I understood the particular sort of nervous disdain inspired by any singular evidence of mankind’s general failure to spin the straw into gold.

On an unseasonably warm night in November, six months after the restaurant’s opening, Burt Morrow burned himself and half his house to ashes by falling asleep with a cigarette. Ned and I were awakened by the sirens, though of course we could not know their destination.

Still, I had a feeling. I just had a nameless edgy feeling and so I stayed awake long after Ned had returned to his noisy, almost painful-sounding slumber. When the phone rang I knew. We drove straight over, with coats pulled on over our bathrobes.

Bobby saw us pull up. He did not move. He stood on the lawn beside a black-coated fireman. As Ned and I ran to him, Bobby watched us with his old numbed, uncomprehending expression; that foreigner’s look.

I put my arms around him. He was still as salt. He said in a high, clear voice, “My father died tonight at about twelve-thirty.”

Bobby’s shirtsleeves were singed, and his hair emitted an awful burnt smell. He must have tried to go into the burning house.

I stroked his ruined hair. He stood unmoving in my embrace. Half the house had burned to rubble; the other half was obscenely unscarred. The front door hung open, offering the blackened floral paper of an interior wall on which a mirror still hung in its ornate frame.

Presently Ned went off to see about Burt. I stayed with Bobby. He soon began to tremble, so I held him the harder, which seemed in turn to inspire more trembling. His spasms frightened me but I did not loosen my hold. I just dug in the way I had with Jonathan, when he was a baby given to mysterious crying fits and I, ignorant even for twenty-two, knew nothing but to hold him tight through my own terror and uncertainty.

Jonathan came home for the funeral. His blond hair still tumbled down past his shoulders, but he had taken to wearing loafers and a tweed jacket with his jeans. Bobby dressed in the style of the working young of Cleveland: sharply creased synthetic slacks, pastel shirts with epaulets.

They went for drives together, watched old movies on television. Bobby was pale and distracted, as if the interior of his own skull was putting out a noise only he could hear. Jonathan watched him carefully, sat close by, touched his shoulder or hand.

They might have been a convalescent and his nurse. There was compassion between them, but no hint of romance. For all their youth, they had taken on an elderly quality; sitting on the sofa together, they made you think of curio cabinets and Venetian blinds. Bobby always sat beside Jonathan, childishly close. At any given moment a stranger might not have been able to tell which was the comforter and which the consoled. After a week, Jonathan returned to his new life in New York City.

Bobby soon closed the restaurant, and finally declared bankruptcy as a way of clearing his debts. Now he works in a bakery. He seems to feel more secure amid the floured surfaces, the fresh eggs and pastry tubes.

Because he could no longer pay the rent on his apartment, he has moved in with us. He stays upstairs, in Jonathan’s room, sleeping on the narrow bed.

We don’t much mind having Bobby. To be honest, we can use even the small amount of rent he pays, what with Jonathan in college and Ned’s theater refusing to pull out of its slump. He has started booking foreign films, the kind that don’t play in the mall theaters. He mends the lobby carpet with duct tape.

Jonathan calls on Sundays, like a dutiful son. He’s moved out of the dormitory into an apartment in Greenwich Village. I try to imagine his life: movies and coffeehouses, music in basement clubs. I need to imagine those details because he relates none of them. What I hear from him is that his classes are going well, and that he requires no bedding, kitchen utensils, or new clothes.

Sometimes I think I’ll leave Ned. Sometimes I think I’ll just announce the fact and go, like a child of seventeen. But I can’t imagine doing it, not really. One of the revelations of my early middle age is the fact that I care for him, right down to the marrow of my bones. He inspires my tenderness, even my pity. If he were more successful, perhaps I could manage it.

Instead, I am making another effort to fit in here. I’ve rejoined the church guild. I’ve begun giving a baking class at the YMCA, for wives who want to surprise their families at the holidays. My class has attracted a surprising number of students. Many of them are humorous and good-hearted, and some can probably be coaxed away from their devotion to Jell-O and granulated-pudding mix. When the class ends at Christmastime, three or four of us will probably continue as baking friends.

This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand. I sit typing at a desk from Monday to Friday, and twice weekly instruct other women in the art of folding eggs into batter, of rolling dough so thin you could read newsprint through it. I have little time for housework, but Bobby keeps the whole place spotless in my absence. Save for the hours he puts in at the bakery, he is always home. Always. He makes dinner every night. After dinner, Ned returns to the theater and Bobby and I watch television or play cards. I sit with him until it’s time for bed. Sometimes I suggest he go out and see what the world is up to. I even offer to slip him some money, but he always says he’s exactly where he wants to be. So there we sit, passing the hours. To be perfectly frank, I sometimes wish he’d leave. He’s so dogged in his devotions, so endlessly agreeable.