By Caitlin Horrocks
One of my all-time, hands-down, desert-island favorite short stories begins like this: “We lived then in Cleveland, in the middle of everything.” The narrator does not mean the middle of the action. “One of the beauties of living in Cleveland,” he later explains, “is that any direction feels like progress.” We’re in the middle of the country and also the middle of the Twentieth century, just after Woodstock but “before the city of Cleveland went broke, before its river caught fire.” We’re four sentences in and Cleveland’s not looking too good. It’s looking like a placeholder for either midwestern boredom or rustbelt squalor.
But nothing in this story is a placeholder. A hallmark of Cincinnati-born author Michael Cunningham’s work is the inimitable, graceful precision of his language, the sense of details accumulating in ways that feel simultaneously careful and organic, surprising and inevitable. Published ten years before his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours, Cunningham’s oft-anthologized story “White Angel,” with its evocation of Ohio, is an excellent example of this style. Narrator Bobby Morrow lives with his parents and beloved older brother Carlton in Woodlawn, a tract of “neat one- and two-story houses painted optimistic colors.” But the image of suburban sameness is quickly complicated by the brush-filled gully that borders the family backyard, and behind that a cemetery which serves as a site of both great beauty and sibling lawlessness.
Bobby describes airplanes overhead as carrying people “toward New York or California, to take up lives of risk and invention,” qualities presumably unavailable to Clevelanders, but both Bobby’s retrospective narration and Carlton’s behavior are suffused with risk and invention. Bobby’s diction is also often elevated, alternately self-deprecating and sincere, funny and elegant. In a scene in the cemetery, our narrator tells us that “miniature mosques and Parthenons spoke silently to Cleveland of man’s enduring accomplishments.” He continues, “Carlton and I played in the cemetery as children and, with a little more age, smoked joints and drank Southern Comfort there. I was, thanks to Carlton, the most criminally advanced nine-year-old in my fourth-grade class.” Whatever Cleveland’s limitations, it has been sufficiently fertile soil to sprout this hard-drinking fourth grader and his erudite, retrospective, older self.
The image of a nine-year-old smoking joints with his sixteen-year-old brother is startling, maybe alarming, but there is no regret or judgement in Bobby’s recollection. What he felt, what he still feels, is pride and devotion. Which makes the next sentence, the first of the third paragraph, startling and alarming in its own way: “Here is Carlton several months before his death, in an hour so alive with snow that earth and sky are identically white.”
The northern Ohio setting is often beautiful in this story, but the local weather still requires sheltering from, both in the family home and under the veranda of a particular tomb where the brothers drop acid. We feel the tumultuousness when Bobby tells us, “I lean into the wind, trying to decide whether everything around me seems strange because of the drug, or just because everything truly is strange.” In the same moment, we find out, “Three weeks earlier, a family across town had been sitting at home, watching television, when a single-engine plane fell on them.” Bobby’s suspicion of his hometown’s fundamental strangeness, whether drug-induced or naturally occurring, lingers into evening, when Carlton promises his little brother that they’re headed not just to Woodstock but “other planets.” Bobby can’t wait to get there.
Here is where I confess that I myself have only been to Cleveland a handful of times, that anything I say about any author’s use of Cleveland is not the voice of a local expert. I am from southeastern Michigan, though, close kin geographically, environmentally, economically, and demographically to northern Ohio, and the inbetweenness of “White Angel”’s setting is achingly familiar to me. It’s a story that depicts an event, Carlton’s death, that cleaves Bobby’s life into a Before and After, but it’s also a story of liminality. It’s about the fluid boundary between suburban Woodlawn and the not-quite-tamed cemetery; between desolate winter and the promise of spring; between people dully watching television and suddenly getting squashed by an airplane.
In his story “Westland,” fellow Midwestern writer Charles Baxter writes, “Most landscapes, no matter where you are, manage to keep something wild about them, but the land in southern Michigan along the Ohio border has always looked to me as if it had lost its self-respect some time ago. This goes beyond being tamed. This land has been beaten up . . . The plant life looks scared and defeated, but all the other earthly powers are busily at work.” I grew up thinking that the place I was from was a place I was supposed to leave, or at least want to, that the act of growing up entailed a getaway. Bobby has similar plans—he’s noted that his house’s floorplan runs west to east, so that he’s making incremental progress toward New York every time he walks through it—but he has a deeper appreciation than I managed for what’s already around him.
The landscapes in “White Angel” all count as “tamed,” but Bobby and Carlton find the wildness there, a sense of possibility, even expectation of possibility, a total faith in the potential of both earthly powers and unearthly. Just before his death, Carlton runs out to the cemetery chasing rumors of flying saucers overhead. The angel of the title refers to a particular statue that is not described as a transcendent work of art, but is beautiful and companionable in her way. These moments of beauty and potential heighten the tragedy of Carlton’s brutal and abrupt accident, which cuts Carlton off from all of this.
In the pages after, we’re warned of his impending death, but before the flying saucers, the story chronicles the Morrow family’s domestic drama, “the shifting lines of allegiance” between parents and children. Bobby is sympathetic to his mother’s growing exasperation with Carlton but unwilling to break ranks with his brother. The father hides out in the basement, making a grandfather clock from a kit. Their idiosyncratic dynamics and dialogue are drawn with affectionate, sometimes hilarious, realism. The family drama culminates in an early spring party the parents throw “to celebrate the sun’s return.” They invite their friends, all of them fellow schoolteachers who are “Ohio hip”—i.e., not very. But nor are they avatars of hopeless midwestern squareness. “Though they hold jobs and meet mortgages, they think of themselves as independent spirits on a spying mission,” Bobby observes, and when Carlton’s friends show up, the adults are happy to try on new kinds of music, new dances, new lives. A glorious alchemy occurs, the party alight with wild, genuine joy. When Bobby’s mom eventually orders him to bed, he is frantic to stay. He appeals to Carlton in desperation. The family allegiances shift this time against Bobby when Carlton declines to help. Bobby later lies in bed, furious at his exile and his brother’s betrayal: “I hope something awful happens to him. I say so to myself.”
Something very much does, and Carlton’s accidental death, despite the warn- ing early in the story that it’s coming, is as shocking as any I’ve read. It’s the kind of scene you can only read for the first time once, so instead of spoiling it any further, I’ll skip ahead to the aftermath, when “Years have passed—we are living in the future, and it’s turned out differently from what we’d planned.” Carlton’s death has created unbridgeable silences between the remaining family members, and between Bobby and Carlton’s girlfriend. This character, despite appearing only briefly in the story up to now, described as “from New York, and . . . more than just locally smart,” looms large at the end. Her family’s eventual departure for Denver is the only thing that gives Bobby any relief from the paralyzing guilt he feels over their differing actions in the moments right before Carlton’s death. “But as long as she was in Cleveland,” he says, in the very last lines of the story, “I could never look her straight in the face. I couldn’t talk about the wounds she suffered. I can’t even write her name.”
As an adult, Bobby still can’t write her name, but her physical distance from Cleveland allows him to look back at that night, to stare into the chasm between Past- and Future-Gone-Awry, a gully more treacherous than the one between backyard and cemetery.
I left Michigan when I was seventeen, not fleeing anything in particular, no death or destruction, and then came back as an adult. I like where I’ve ended up, but I still sometimes feel like I shouldn’t admit that. When we first moved here together, my Seattle-born husband referred to local iterations of certain dishes as “Michigan good.” He does it less often now, either because the food’s gotten better, or because he’s gotten acclimated, or both. When he says it, I think of Cunningham’s “locally smart,” “Ohio hip.” The qualifiers are mildly, cheerfully insulting, but they don’t totally negate the adjective.
Our childhoods are places we all inevitably leave, whether gradually or all at once. The physical setting in “White Angel,” with its strangeness and tameness, enhances the temporal in-betweenness of this moment in Bobby’s life, right before he’s exiled from childhood. Carlton’s death is a hinge between Before and After, but the setting provides a doorframe and door on which the whole story swings. To say, “Here is Carlton several months before his death . . .” is also to say: Here is Carlton in Cleveland, in the months between winter and spring, sneaking out of the house into a landscape that offers both stately shelter and wildness, inviting his “outlaw” friends to crash an “Ohio hip” party; these are months “in the middle of everything,” before Bobby’s life is transformed by grief, before the airplane crashes through the ordinary ceiling.
Caitlin Horrocks is author of the story collections Life Among the Terranauts and This is Not Your City, both New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice titles. Her novel The Vexations was named one of the 10 best books of the year by the Wall Street Journal. She teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives with her family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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