Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Read online

  Jenny returned to her room and took a bath and changed to a ruffled dress. She leaned out her open window, humming. Harley didn’t come. Eventually she went to supper, but he wasn’t in the cafeteria, either. The next day, after her last exam, she phoned his dormitory. Some sleepy-sounding, gruff boy answered. “Baines has left for home,” he said.

  “Home? But we haven’t had graduation yet.”

  “He’s not planning to go through with that.”

  “Oh,” said Jenny. She hadn’t thought of graduation as “going through” with anything, although it was true you could simply have your diploma mailed out. To people like Harley Baines, she supposed, a degree was unimportant. (While Jenny’s family was coming all the way to Summerfield for this event.) She said, “Well, thank you anyhow,” and hung up, hoping her voice didn’t sound as forlorn to Harley’s roommate as it did to her.

  That summer, after graduation, she worked again at Molly’s Togs in the little town near the college. It had always seemed a pleasant job, but this year she was depressed by the studied casualness of married women’s clothes—their Bermuda shorts for golfing and their wide-hipped khaki skirts. She gazed away unhelpfully when her customers asked, “Does it suit me? Do you think it’s too youthful?” Next year at this time, she would be at Paulham. She wondered how soon she could start wearing a starched white coat.

  In July, a letter arrived from Harley Baines, forwarded from home by her mother. When Jenny returned to her boardinghouse after work, she found it on the hall table. She stood looking at it a moment. Then she slipped it into her straw purse and climbed the stairs. She let herself into her room, threw her purse on the bed, and opened the window. She took a square tin from a drawer and fed the two goldfish in the bowl on the bureau. All before opening Harley’s letter.

  Did she guess, ahead of time, what it would say?

  Later, she imagined that she must have.

  His handwriting was as small and separate as typing. She would have imagined something more headlong from a genius. He used a colon after the greeting, as if it were a business letter.

  18 July, 1957

  Dear Jenny:

  I unreasonably took offense at what was, in fact, a natural reaction on your part. I must have seemed ridiculous.

  What I had intended, before our misunderstanding, was that we might become better acquainted over the summer and then marry in the fall. I still find marriage a viable option. I know this must seem sudden—we haven’t exactly had a normal American courtship—but after all, we are neither of us frivolous people.

  Bear in mind that we will both be at Paulham next year and could share a single apartment, buy groceries in economy lots, etc. Also, I sense that your finances have been something of a problem, and I would be glad to assume that responsibility.

  The above sounds more pragmatic than I’d intended. Actually, I find I love you, and am awaiting your earliest reply.

  Sincerely, Harley Baines

  P.S. I know that you’re intelligent. You didn’t have to make up all those questions about genetics.

  The postscript, she thought, was the most affecting part of the letter. It was written in a looser hand, as if impulsively, while the rest seemed copied and perhaps recopied from a rough draft. She read the letter again, and then folded it and set it on her bed. She went over to study her goldfish, who had left too much food floating on the surface of the water. She would have to cut down on their rations. Dear Harley, she practiced. It was such a surprise to … No. He wouldn’t care for gushiness. Dear Harley: I have considered your terms and … What she was trying to say was “Yes.” She was pulled only very slightly by the feelings she’d had for him earlier (which now seemed faded and shallow, a schoolgirl crush brought on by senior panic). What appealed to her more was the angularity of the situation—the mighty leap into space with someone she hardly knew. Wasn’t that what a marriage ought to be? Like one of those movie-style disasters—shipwrecks or earthquakes or enemy prisons—where strangers, trapped in close quarters by circumstance, show their real strengths and weaknesses.

  Lately, her life had seemed to be narrowing. She could predict so easily the successive stages of medical school, internship, and residency. She had looked in a mirror, not so long ago, and realized all at once that the clear, fragile skin around her eyes would someday develop lines. She was going to grow old like anyone else.

  She took paper from a bureau drawer, sat down on her bed, and uncapped her fountain pen. Dear Harley: she wrote. She plucked a microscopic hair from the pen point. She thought a while. Then she wrote, All right, and signed her name—the ultimate in no-nonsense communication. Even Harley couldn’t find it excessive.

  The following evening, just before supper, Jenny arrived in Baltimore. She had burned all her bridges: quit her job, given away her goldfish, and packed everything in her room. It was the most reckless behavior she had ever shown. On the Greyhound bus she sat grandly upright, periodically shrugging off the snoring soldier who drooped against her. When she reached the terminal she hailed a cab, instead of waiting for a city bus, and rode home in style.

  No one had been told she was coming, so she was puzzled by the fact that while she was paying off the driver, the front door of her house opened wide and her mother proceeded across the porch and down the steps in a flowing, flowered dress, high-heeled pumps, and a hat whose black net veil was dotted with what looked like beauty spots. Behind her came Ezra in un-pressed clothes that were a little too full cut, and last was Cody, dark and handsome and New Yorkish in a fine-textured, fitted gray suit and striped silk tie. For a second, Jenny fancied they were headed for her funeral. This was how they would look—formally dressed and refraining from battle—if Jenny were no longer among them. Then she shook the thought away, and smiled and climbed out of the taxi.

  Her mother halted on the sidewalk. “My stars!” she said. “Ezra, when you say family dinner, you mean family dinner!” She raised her veil to kiss Jenny’s cheek. “Why didn’t you tell us you were coming? Ezra, did you plan it this way?”

  “I didn’t know a thing about it,” Ezra said. “I thought of writing you, Jenny, but I didn’t think you’d come all this distance just for supper.”

  “Supper?” Jenny asked.

  “It’s some idea of Ezra’s,” Pearl told her. “He found out Cody was passing through, maybe spending the night, and he said, ‘I want both of you to get all dressed up—’ ”

  “I am not spending the night,” Cody said. “I’m running on a schedule here, when will you see that? I shouldn’t even be staying for supper. I ought to be in Delaware.”

  “Ezra’s got something he wants to say,” Pearl said, picking a thread off Jenny’s sundress, “some announcement he wants to make, and is taking us to Scarlatti’s Restaurant. Though hot as it is, I believe a leaf of lettuce is just about all I could manage. Jenny, honey, you’re thin as a stick! And what’s in this big suitcase? How long are you planning to stay?”

  “Oh, well … not long,” Jenny said. She felt shy about telling her news. “Maybe I ought to change clothes. I’m not as dressed up as the rest of you.”

  “No, no, you’re fine,” Ezra told her. He was rubbing his hands together, the way he always did when he was pleased. “Oh, it’s working out so well!” he said. “A real family dinner! It’s just like fate.”

  Cody took Jenny’s suitcase inside the house. Meanwhile, her mother fussed: smoothing Jenny’s hair, clucking at her bare legs. “No stockings! On a public conveyance.” Cody came back and opened the door of a shiny blue car at the curb. He helped Pearl in, cupping her elbow. “What do you think of my car?” he said to Jenny.

  “It’s very nice. Did you buy it new?”

  “How else? A Pontiac. Smell that new-car smell,” he said. He walked around to the driver’s seat. Jenny and Ezra settled in the rear; Ezra’s knobby wrists dangled between his knees.

  “Of course, it’s not yet paid for,” Cody said, pulling into traffic, “but it will be very soon.�
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  “Cody Tull!” his mother said. “You didn’t go in debt for this.”

  “Why not? I’m getting rich, I tell you. Five years from now I can walk into an auto dealer, any dealer—Cadillac—and slap cold cash on the counter and say, ‘I’ll take three. Or on second thought, make that four.’ ”

  “But not now,” said Pearl. “Not yet. You know how I feel about buying on time.”

  “Time is what I deal with,” Cody said. He laughed, and shot through an amber light. “What could be more fitting? Ten years more, you’ll be riding in a limousine.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “And Ezra can go to Princeton, if he likes. And I can buy Jenny a clinic all her own. I can pay for her to specialize in every field, one by one.”

  Now was the moment for Jenny to mention Harley, but she watched the scenery and said nothing.

  At Scarlatti’s, they were shown to a table in the corner, at the end of the long, brocade-draped dining room. It was early evening, not yet dark. The restaurant was almost empty. Jenny wondered where Mrs. Scarlatti was. She started to ask about her, but Ezra was too busy overseeing their meal. He had ordered ahead, evidently, and now wanted it known that four would be eating instead of three. “We have my sister with us too. It’s going to be a real family dinner.” The waiter, who seemed fond of Ezra, nodded and went to the kitchen.

  Ezra sat back and smiled at the others. Pearl was polishing a fork with her napkin. Cody was still talking about money. “I plan to buy a place in Baltimore County,” he said, “in the not-too-distant future. There’s no particular reason that I should be based in New York. I always did want land, that rolling Maryland farmland. I might raise horses.”

  “Horses! Oh, Cody, really, that’s just not our style,” Pearl said. “What would you want with horses?”

  “Mother,” Cody said, “anything’s our style. Don’t you see? There’s no limit. Mother, do you know who called for my services last week? The Tanner Corporation.”

  Pearl set her fork down. Jenny tried to remember where she had heard that name before. It rang just the dimmest bell; it was like some lowly household object that you never look at, and only notice when you return after years of absence. “Tanner?” she asked Cody. “What’s that?”

  “It’s where our father worked.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Where he still may, for all I know. But, Jenny, you should have seen it. Such a nickel-and-dime operation … I mean, not small, good Lord, with that mess of branch offices overlapping and conflicting, but so … tacky. Really so easily encompassed. And I was thinking: imagine, just like that, I have them in my power. The Tanner Corporation! The great, almighty Tanner Corporation. That afternoon, I went out and ordered my Pontiac.”

  “There was never,” Pearl said, “the slightest thing tacky about the Tanner Corporation.”

  Their appetizers arrived on chilled plates, along with a slender, pale green bottle of wine. The waiter poured a sip for Ezra, who tasted it as if it were important. “Good,” he said. (It was strange to see him in a position of command.) “Cody? Try this wine.”

  “Never,” said Pearl, “was there anything nickel-and-dime, in the smallest, tiniest way, ever in this world, about the Tanner Corporation.”

  “Oh, Mother, face it,” Cody told her. “It’s a trash heap. I’m going to strip it to the bones.”

  You would think he was speaking of something alive—an animal, some creature that would suffer. Pearl must have thought so, too. She said, “Cody, why must you act toward me in this manner?”

  “I’m not acting in any manner.”

  “Have I ever wronged you, knowingly? Ever done you harm?”

  “Please,” Ezra said. “Mother? Cody? It’s a family dinner! Jenny? Let’s have a toast.”

  Jenny hastily raised her glass. “A toast,” she said.

  “Mother? A toast.”

  Pearl’s eyes went reluctantly to Ezra’s face. “Oh,” she said, after a pause. “Thank you, dear, but wine in all this heat would settle on my stomach like a rock.”

  “It’s a toast to me, Mother. To my future. A toast,” said Ezra, “to the new full partner of Scarlatti’s Restaurant.”

  “Partner? Who would that be?”

  “Me, Mother.”

  Then the double doors to the kitchen opened and in came Mrs. Scarlatti, glamorous as ever, striding on rangy, loose-strung legs and tossing back her asymmetrical hairdo. She must have been waiting for her cue—eavesdropping, in fact. “So!” she said, setting a hand on Ezra’s shoulder. “What do you think of my boy here?”

  “I don’t understand,” said Pearl.

  “Well, you know he’s been my right hand for so long, ever since my son died, really better than my son, if the truth be told; poor Billy never cared all that much for the restaurant business …”

  Ezra was rising, as if something momentous were about to happen. While Mrs. Scarlatti went on speaking in her rasping, used-up voice—telling his own mother what an angel Ezra was, a sweetie, so gifted, such a respect for food, for decent food served decently, such a “divine” (she said) instinct for seasonings—he pulled his leather billfold from his pocket. He peered into it, looked anxious for a moment, and then said, “Ah!” and held up a ragged dollar bill. “Mrs. Scarlatti,” he said, “with this dollar I hereby purchase a partnership in Scarlatti’s Restaurant.”

  “It’s yours, dear heart,” said Mrs. Scarlatti, taking the money.

  “What’s going on here?” Pearl asked.

  “We signed the papers in my lawyer’s office yesterday afternoon,” Mrs. Scarlatti said. “Well, it makes good sense, doesn’t it? Who would I leave this damn place to when I kick off—my chihuahua? Ezra knows it inside out by now. Ezra, pour me a glass of wine.”

  “But I thought you were going to college,” Pearl told Ezra.

  “I was?”

  “I thought you were planning to be a teacher! Maybe a professor. I don’t understand what’s happened. Oh, I know it’s none of my affair. I’ve never been the type to meddle. Only let me tell you this: it’s going to look very, very peculiar to people who don’t have all the facts. Accepting such a gift! And from a woman, to boot! It’s a favor; partnerships don’t cost a dollar; you’ll be beholden all your life. Ezra, we Tulls depend on ourselves, only on each other. We don’t look to the rest of the world for any help whatsoever. How could you lend yourself to this?”

  “Mother, I like making meals for people,” Ezra said.

  “He’s a marvel,” said Mrs. Scarlatti.

  “But the obligation!”

  Cody said, “Let him be, Mother.”

  She swung on him so quickly, it was more like pouncing. “I know you’re enjoying this,” she said.

  “It’s his life.”

  “What do you care about his life? You only want to see us break up, dissolve in the outside world.”

  “Please,” said Ezra.

  But Pearl rose and marched toward the door. “You haven’t eaten!” Ezra cried. She didn’t stop. In her straight-backed posture, Jenny saw the first signs of her mother’s old age—her stringy tendons and breakable bones. “Oh, dear,” Ezra said, “I wanted this to be such a good meal.” He tore off after Pearl. Scattered diners raised their heads, thought a moment, and went back to eating.

  That left Cody, Jenny, and Mrs. Scarlatti. Mrs. Scarlatti didn’t seem particularly distressed. “Mothers,” she said mildly. She tucked the dollar bill inside her black linen bosom.

  Cody said, “Well? Does that wrap it up? Because I should have been in Delaware an hour ago. Can I give you a lift, Jenny?”

  “I guess I’ll walk,” Jenny said.

  The last she saw of Mrs. Scarlatti, she was standing there all alone, surveying the untouched appetizers with an amused expression on her face.

  After Cody had driven off, Jenny walked slowly toward home. She didn’t see Pearl or Ezra anywhere ahead of her. It was twilight—a sticky evening, smelling of hot tires. As she floate
d past shops in her sundress, she began to feel like someone’s romantic vision of a young girl. She tried out a daydream of Harley Baines, but it didn’t work. What did Jenny know about marriage? Why would she even want to get married? She was only a child; she would always be a child. Her wedding plans seemed makeshift and contrived—a charade. She felt foolish. She tried to remember Harley’s kiss but it had vanished altogether, and Harley himself was no more real to her than a little paper man in a mail-order catalogue.