Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

“It’s okay,” Bobby said. “I mean, I think I get it. I think I understand.”

Jonathan linked his arm in Bobby’s. They walked along stolid and pleased with themselves as two burghers strolling through the village they controlled. Jonathan offered his other elbow to me, but I declined. I walked alone, at a distance. I figured I’d get through the funeral, get back on a plane, and never see either of them again.

Ned’s funeral took place the next day at four o’clock. His brother, a furniture salesman named Eddie, flew in from Indiana that morning. Eddie’s cigarette smoke crept out of his nose and into his watery eyes the same way my father’s had. I knew I could never like him. I didn’t seem to like anybody at this funeral. Also present were a big, white-haired woman named Mrs. Cohen, and a small white-haired one named Mrs. Black. I felt nothing particular about them but my observations edged over to the unfavorable (a handbag full of wadded Kleenex, pink powder caught flaking in the folds around a mouth) because that was the drift of things.

We all drove out to the crematorium in a short string of cars: the Oldsmobile, a Honda, and a Plymouth. We duplicated the car order when we walked from the parking lot toward the chapel: Jonathan, Alice, and Eddie first, followed by Bobby and me, followed by the two women. On the way I whispered to Bobby, “Why do you think Alice wanted to keep the funeral so small?”

“I think this is just all the people who came,” he whispered back. We were moving along a blinding concrete walk bordered by flowering hedges. Pink trumpet-shaped flowers protruded from among waxy green leaves. Bobby sweated in a dark jacket. I had forgotten to bring any sunglasses but the triangular ones with the scarlet frames, which I couldn’t very well wear to a funeral.

“He must have known other people,” I said. I slipped my hand into the crook of his elbow, so I wouldn’t step off the path in the dizzying light. I found I liked holding on to his arm. It had nothing to do with affection for Bobby. Holding somebody’s arm made me feel more like a real mourner, less like a funeral-crasher.

“He just ran a theater in Cleveland,” Bobby said. “I mean, who’s going to come, ushers from ten years ago?”

“Well, some one,” I said. We had nearly reached the chapel. It was a gabled building that seemed to be made of stained glass and mirrors. The crematorium was in back. When we first pulled up I had checked for chimneys, but all that was visible behind the church was a flat-roofed cement building with grooves running along its sides, as if it had been combed with a giant comb while the cement was still wet. Of course, it would be too technologically advanced to have chimneys sticking up.

We seated ourselves in the front pews, in the air-conditioned hush. Ned’s casket, dark wood with a dry sheen, was displayed under a hanging Lucite cross. On the casket was a single wreath of hollyhocks. It reminded me of the lei Donna Reed threw overboard at the end of From Here to Eternity. I thought Ned, a former theater-owner, would probably have liked that.

I sat at the far end of the pew, with Bobby on my right and nothing on my left. Jonathan sat on Bobby’s other side, and Alice sat next to Jonathan. Jonathan was crying, quietly but without reserve. Today he had quit being dryly courageous. The cut on his cheek bore a brown hairline scab. A single tear, stained by the light from the colored glass, trembled on his chin. I touched my own chin, and tears started to leak out of my eyes as if I’d pushed a button. I thought about my own father. Once, during a drunken argument with my mother, he had dropped me in a snowbank. I believe that was my first memory. My mother had reached for me, and in their jostling I’d fallen into the snow. My father had had a sure grip, even drunk. He wouldn’t have dropped me if my mother hadn’t grabbed. The snow had been white and cold and silent as death itself. I had sunk down deep. The two of them dug me out, cursing one another. If Ned had been my father, I’d have made sure he didn’t end up with a sparse little funeral in the middle of the desert. The tears flowed. Bobby pressed my hand. For a moment I felt as if Jonathan and I were brother and sister, being comforted by a mutual friend. Then I remembered I was crying for myself and my little sorrows, not the big sorrow of someone actually dead. That reminder only seemed to make me cry harder.

After the funeral the casket was wheeled out to be cremated. We mourners got back in our cars and went home. The ashes would be ready the following day. They worked fast. I wondered if they used some new vaporizing process. Once we were out of the chapel I put my sunglasses on, which helped hide my red eyes.

Everyone started back to Alice’s house, what was now Alice’s house, what had been Alice and Ned’s. I thought of how much Alice must hate that house, with the muddy sprayed-on cement walls and air conditioners humming under the little raw poles that stuck out over the windows. I suspected Ned had probably learned to like it. In a humorous sort of way. People who went to a lot of movies were usually able to see the irony in a wider variety of situations.

Bobby didn’t speak the whole way back. He is respecting my grief, I thought with surprise. My grief over a stranger, over my own memories, while he himself had known the living person. My face burned. I had lost track of things. I reached over and stroked his hair, then let my hand drop down to his chest, the soft squarish mounds of muscle and fat. I suddenly desired him fiercely. I desired his kindliness and self-sacrifice as if they comprised a different person, a handsome capable stranger I’d just met. It wasn’t lust for the Bobby I knew. I’d have liked this compassionate stranger to pull out of line and onto a side street where we could make screaming, axle-rocking love. I made up for that ghoulishness by kissing Bobby on the ear and whispering, “It’s all right, sweetheart.”

He smiled. His own eyes were unreadable as mine behind the smoky oval mirrors of his glasses. He didn’t say anything.

Bobby and I and Jonathan and I—our mingled love and friendship, the lopsided family we’d tried to form—had come to seem like just another foolish episode. Another sprayed-concrete house with twigs over the windows. Now, unexpectedly, the weight of the moment filled that rented Honda. Bobby and I were driving on a desert highway, second in a makeshift funeral procession. I was pregnant. He was the baby’s father. Jonathan, who’d broken both our hearts in some obscure way I couldn’t quite name, sat in the car ahead of us, beside his unflinching mother. The radio, playing an old Fleetwood Mac song, glowed orange in the relentless white light of mid-afternoon.

Back at the house, the two old women went straight to the kitchen to do things to the casseroles and desserts they had brought. That human preoccupation with food in the face of death. I felt a little better about my urge for a wild, hot fuck at about the same time Ned’s casket must have been sliding into the oven.

Ned’s brother Eddie sat smoking in a wing chair. He smelled of flowery cologne and everything the cologne was intended to cover up. I wondered where his wife was, and if he had children. How could he help but have a wife and children? I was always astonished at how simple and inevitable those facts were for most people.

“It was a nice service,” he said.

“I suppose,” Alice said. The old women had banished her from her own kitchen. She paced around the room, making minor adjustments. She straightened a picture that had not been crooked. She was wearing a black cocktail dress that must have dated back to Cleveland. She would certainly have had no use for a dress like that in the desert. Years ago, when she packed up and moved, she had probably decided to keep the dress for today.