Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

“Okay,” I said. Water leaked out of its joints. Its sulfur-colored hair, which sprouted from a grid of holes punched into its scalp, had taken on the smell of a wet sweater.

“Good baby,” my father said, and patted its firm rubber cheek with one big finger. I was thrilled. He loved the baby so.

“Yes,” I said, holding the lifeless thing in a thick white towel.

My father hunkered down on his huge hams, expelling a breeze spiced with his scent. “Jonathan?” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

“You know boys don’t usually play with dolls, don’t you?”

“Well. Yes.”

“This is your baby,” he said, “and that’s fine for here at home. But if you show it to other boys they may not understand. So you’d better just play with it here. All right?”

“Okay.”

“Good.” He patted my arm. “Okay? Only play with it in the house, right?”

“Okay,” I answered. Standing small before him, holding the swaddled doll, I felt my first true humiliation. I recognized a deep inadequacy in myself, a foolishness. Of course I knew the baby was just a toy, and a slightly embarrassing one. A wrongful toy. How had I let myself drift into believing otherwise?

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Good. Listen, I’ve got to go. You take care of the house.”

“Daddy?”

“Yeah?”

“Mommy doesn’t want to have a baby,” I said.

“Sure she does.”

“No. She told me.”

“Jonathan, honey, Mommy and Daddy are both very happy about the baby. Aren’t you happy, too?”

“Mommy hates having this baby,” I said. “She told me. She said you want to have it, but she doesn’t want to.”

I looked into his gigantic face, and could see that I had made some sort of contact. His eyes brightened, and the delta of capillaries that spread over his nose and cheeks stood out in sharper, redder relief against his pale skin.

“It’s not true, sport,” he said. “Mommy sometimes says things she doesn’t mean. Believe me, she’s as happy about having the baby as you and I are.”

I said nothing.

“Hey, I’m late,” he said. “Trust me. You’ll have a little sister or brother, and we’re all going to be crazy about her. Or him. You’ll be a big brother. Everything’ll be great.”

After a moment he added, “Take care of things while I’m gone, okay?” He stroked my cheek with one spatulate thumb, and left.

That night I awoke to the sound of a whispered fight being conducted behind the door of their bedroom at the end of the hall. Their voices hissed. I lay waiting for—what? Soon I had fallen asleep again, and do not know to this day whether or not I dreamed the sound of the fight. It is still sometimes difficult to distinguish what happened from what might have happened.

When my mother delivered one evening in December I was left behind with Miss Heidegger, the neighbor woman. She was a milky-eyed, suspicious old soul who had worried her hair to a sparse gray frazzle through which the pink curve of her skull could be seen.

As I watched my parents drive away together Miss Heidegger stood behind me, smelling mildly of wilted rose perfume. When the car was out of sight I told her, “Mommy’s not really going to have the baby.”

“No?” she said pleasantly, having no idea how to talk to children when they began speaking strangely.

“She doesn’t want to,” I said.

“Oh, now, you’ll love the baby, dear,” Miss Heidegger said. “Just you wait. When Momma and Poppa bring it home, you’ll see. It’ll be the sweetest little thing you can imagine.”

“She doesn’t like having a baby,” I said. “We don’t want it.”

At this poor Miss Heidegger’s remaining blood rushed to her face, and she went with a sound like rustling tissue to the kitchen to see about dinner. She put together something limp and boiled, which I with my child’s devotion to bland food liked enormously.

My father telephoned from the hospital after midnight. Miss Heidegger and I reached the phone at the same moment. She answered and stood erect in her blue bathrobe, nodding her withered head. I could tell something was wrong from her eyes, which took on a thinness and brilliance like that of river ice just before it melts, when it is no more than the memory of ice lingering another moment or two over bright brown water.

The baby would be described to me as a canceled ticket, a cake taken too soon from the oven. Only as an adult would I piece together the true story of the snarled cord and ripped flesh. My mother had died for nearly a minute, and miraculously come back. Most of her womb had had to be scooped out. The baby, a girl, had lived long enough to bleat once at the fluorescent ceiling of the delivery room.

I suppose my father was in no condition to talk to me. He left that to Miss Heidegger, who put the telephone down and stood before me with an expression of terrified confusion like that with which I imagine we must greet death itself. I knew something dreadful had happened.

She said in a whisper, “Oh, those poor, poor people. Oh, you poor little boy.”

Although I did not know exactly what had happened, I knew this to be an occasion for grief. I tried feeling inconsolable, but in fact I was enlivened and rather pleased by the chance to act well in a bad situation.

“Now, don’t you worry, dear,” Miss Heidegger said. There was true horror in her voice, a moist gargling undertone. I tried leading her to a chair, and found to my astonishment that she obeyed me. I ran to the kitchen and got her a glass of water, which was what I believed one offered somebody in a state of emotional agitation.

“Don’t you worry, I’ll stay with you,” she said as I got a coaster for the glass and set it on the end table. She tried pulling me onto her lap but I had no interest in sitting there. I remained standing at her feet. She petted my hair and I stroked the thin, complicated bones of her flannel-covered knee.

She said helplessly, almost questioningly, “Oh, she was so healthy. She just looked perfectly fine.”

Emboldened, I took one of her brittle, powdery old hands in mine.

“Oh, you poor thing,” she said. “Don’t you worry now, I’m here.”

I continued standing at her feet, holding the bones of her hand. She smiled at me. Was there some aspect of pleasure in her smile? Probably not; I suspect I imagined it. I gently kneaded her hand. We stayed that way for quite a while, bowed and steadfast and vaguely satisfied, like a pair of spinsters who have learned to find solace in the world’s unfathomable grief.

My mother came back over a week later, reserved and rather shy. Both she and my father looked around the house as if it were new to them, as if they had been promised something grander. In my mother’s absence Miss Heidegger had instituted a smell of her own, compounded of that watery rose perfume and the odor of unfamiliar cooking. She squeezed my parents’ hands and left discreetly, hurriedly. She might have been told privately that at any moment the house would catch fire.

After she had gone my mother and father both kneeled down and held me. They surrounded me, all but buried me, with their flesh and their brisk, known smells.

My father wept. He had never before shed a single tear in my presence and now he cried extravagantly, great phlegmy sobs that caught in his throat with the clotted sound of a stopped pipe. Experimentally, I placed my hand on his forearm. He did not brush it off, or reprimand me. His pale hairs sprouted up raucously between my fingers.

“It’s okay,” I whispered, though I don’t believe he heard me over his keening. “It’s okay,” I said again, in full voice. He did not derive any visible comfort from my reassurances.