A home at the end of the world (2 page)

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.

I glanced at my mother. She was not crying. Her face was drained not only of color but of expression as well. She might have been a vacant body, waiting dumbfounded to be infused with a human soul. But when she felt my eyes on her she managed, in a strong-limbed, somnambulistic fashion, to draw me to her breast. Her embrace caught me off guard, and I lost my hold on my father’s forearm. As my mother crushed my face into the folds of her coat I lost track of my father entirely. I felt myself being pulled down into the depths of my mother’s coat. It filled my nose and ears. The sound of my father’s laments grew muffled and remote as I was impelled deeper into my mother’s clothes, through the outer layer of cold toward the scented, familiar-smelling core. I resisted a moment, tried to return to my father, but she was too strong. I disappeared. I left my father, and gave myself over to my mother’s more ravenous sorrow.

Afterward she was more reluctant than ever to go outdoors. Sometimes in the mornings she took me into bed with her and kept me there, reading or watching television, until mid-afternoon. We played games, told stories. I believed I knew what we were doing together during those long, housebound days. We were practicing for a time when my father would no longer be with us; when it would be just we two.

To make my mother laugh I did imitations, although I no longer felt inclined to imitate Miss Heidegger. I settled into doing my mother herself, which sometimes made her screech with laughter. I would put on her scarves and hats, speak in my own version of her New Orleans accent, which I made half Southern and half Bronx. “What are you thinking?” I’d drawl. “Honey, tell me a story.”

She always laughed until her eyes shone with tears. “Sweetheart,” she would say, “you’re a natural. What do you say we put you on the stage, you can support your old mama in her dotage?”

When finally we got up she dressed hurriedly, and set about cooking and cleaning with the relentlessness of an artist.

My father no longer massaged her shoulders when he came home at night. He did not plant exaggerated, smacking kisses on her forehead or the tip of her nose. He couldn’t. A force field had grown up around her, transparent and solid as glass. I could see it go up when he came home, with the rampant smells of the outside world clinging to his coat. When the field was up my mother looked no different—her face remained clever and slightly feverish, her movements exact as a surgeon’s as she laid out the perfect dinner she had made—but she could not be touched. We knew it, both my father and I, with a visceral certainty that was all the more real for its inexplicability. My mother had powers. We ate our dinner (her cooking got better and better, she hit ever more elaborate heights), talked of usual things, and my father kissed the air in our vicinity as he readied himself to return to the outside.

One night in late spring, I was awakened by the sound of a proper fight. My parents were downstairs. Even in rage they kept their voices down, so that only an occasional word or phrase worked its way up to my room. The effect was like that of two people screaming inside a heavy sack. I heard my father say, “
pun
ishment,” and, nearly a full minute later, my mother answer, “what
you
want…something…
sel
fish.”

I lay in the dark, listening. Presently I heard footsteps—my father’s—mounting the stairs. I believed he would come into my room, and I feigned elaborate, angelic sleep, my head centered on the pillow and my lips slightly parted. But my father did not come to me. He went instead to the room he shared with my mother. I heard him go in, and heard nothing more.

Minutes passed. My mother did not follow him. The house was silent, filled with a gelid, wintery hush even as lilac and dogwood leaves brushed darkly against the windowpanes. I lay carefully in my own bed, uncertain of what was expected and what allowed on a night like this. I thought I would just go back to sleep, but that refused to happen.

Finally, I got out of bed and walked down the hall to my parents’ room. The door stood ajar. Light from their bedside lamp—a pink-gold light tinted by the parchment shade—hung with a certain weight in the semidarkness of the hall. From the kitchen my mother could be heard shelling pecans, a series of sharp, musical cracks.

My father lay diagonally across the double bed, in an attitude of refined, almost demure, abandon. His face was turned toward the wall on which a blue-and-green Paris street, unpeopled, hung in a silver frame. One of his arms was draped over the edge of the mattress, the large fingers dangling extravagantly. His rib cage rose and fell with the steady rhythm of sleep.

I stood in the doorway for a while, contemplating my position. I had expected him to hear me, to look up and commence worrying over the fact that I had been disturbed. When he maintained his posture on the bed I stepped quietly into the room. It was time for me to speak but I could not think of what to say. I had thought my simple presence would cause a next thing to happen. I looked around the room. There were the twin bureaus, with my mother’s makeup and perfumes arranged on a mother-of-pearl tray. There was the oak-framed mirror, displaying a rectangle of flowered wallpaper from the opposite wall. Empty-handed, without an offering, I crept to the bed and cautiously touched my father’s elbow.

He lifted his head and looked at me as if he didn’t recognize me; as if we had met once, long ago, and now he was trying to summon up my name. His face nearly stopped my heart. For a moment it seemed he had left us after all; his fatherly aspect had withdrawn and in its place was only a man, big as a car but blank and unscrupled as an infant, capable of anything. I stood in the sudden glare of his new strangeness, shyly smiling in yellow pajamas.

Then he brought himself back. He reoccupied his face and laid a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Hey,” he whispered. “What are you doing up?”

I shrugged. Even today, as an adult, I can’t remember a time when I did not pause and consider before telling the truth.

He could have picked me up and taken me onto the bed with him. That gesture might have rescued us both, at least for the time being. I ached for it. I’d have given everything I imagined owning, in my greediest fantasies, to have been pulled into bed with him and held, as he’d held me while the sky exploded over our heads on the Fourth of July. But he must have been embarrassed at having been caught fighting. Now he was a man who had awakened his child by yelling at his wife, and had then flung himself across the bed like a heartbroken teenage girl. He could become other things, but he would always be that as well.

“Go back to sleep,” he said, in a voice gruffer than he may have intended it to be. I believe he hoped the situation could still be undone. If he acted forcefully enough, we could jump back in time and restitch the fabric of my sleep. I would wake in the morning with nothing more than dimly recollected dreams.

I refused. I would settle for nothing less than consoling him. My father ordered me back to bed and I grew balky and petulant. I hovered at the edge of tears, which strained his patience. I wanted him to require my presence. I needed to know that by my kindness and perseverance I was victorious in the long contest for his love.

“Jonathan,” he said. “Jonathan, come on.”

I let myself be taken back to my room. I had no options. He picked me up and for the first time I did not exult in his touch or his spicy smell, the broad curving shine of his forehead. At that moment I came to know my mother’s reticence, her delicate-boned sense of remove. I had practiced imitating her and now, in a rush, I could do nothing else. If my father rubbed my weary shoulders I would tense up; if he stomped in from the snow I would think nervously of the collapse of my spinach soufflé.

He put me into bed tenderly enough. He pulled the covers over me, told me to get some shut-eye. He did not act badly. Still, in a fury, I slipped out of bed and ran across the room to my toy chest. Unfamiliar feelings racketed in my ears, made me light-headed. “Jonathan,” my father said sharply. He started after me, but I was too quick for him. I dug to the bottom of the chest, knowing just where to reach. I pulled the doll out by her slick rubber leg and held her roughly in my arms.

He hesitated, half standing over my miniature bed. On my headboard, a cartoon rabbit danced ecstatically on a field of four-petaled pink flowers.

“This is mine,” I said, in a nearly hysterical tone of insistence. The floor of my bedroom felt unsteady beneath my feet, and I clung to the doll as if it alone could keep me from losing my balance and slipping away.

My father shook his head. For the single time in my recollection, his kindness failed. He had wanted so much, and the world was shrinking. His wife shunned him, his business was not a success, and his only son—there would be no others—loved dolls and quiet indoor games.

“Jesus Christ, Jonathan,” he hollered. “Jesus H. Christ. What in the hell is the matter with you?
What
?”