Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Page 19

  It was a shock when he introduced her to Ruth. What an urchin she was! But plainly, Ezra adored her. “Mother, I’d like you to meet my—meet Ruth.” Pearl had stalled a little, at first. Maybe she had failed to act properly welcoming. Well, who could blame her? And now, seeing how things had turned out, who could say she’d been wrong? But she can’t help wondering, anyhow … If she’d been a little more encouraging, they might have married sooner. They might have married before Cody could work his mischief. Or if she had let herself realize … Yes, she wonders over and over again: if she’d mentioned Cody’s plot to Ezra, stopped that situation that was not so much a courtship as a landslide, a kind of gathering and falling of events …

  Ridiculous, of course, to imagine that anything she did could have mattered. What happens, happens. It’s no one’s fault. (Or it’s only Cody’s fault, for he has always been striving and competitive, a natural-born player of games, has had to win absolutely everything, even something he doesn’t want like a runty little redhead far below his usual standards.)

  She opens the farmhouse parlor to air it. It smells like skunk. She leaves the front door ajar, taking care not to step onto the porch, which could very well give way beneath her. She remembers how, toward the end of that first week after the honeymoon, she asked Ezra to bring out to Ruth a few odds and ends for the farm—some extra pans, some linens, a carpet sweeper she had no use for. Was there an ulterior motive in her suggestion? If not, why didn’t she accompany him, visit the bride like any good mother-in-law? “Please, I don’t want to,” Ezra said, but she said, “Honey. Go.” She hadn’t had any conscious design—truly, none at all—but it was a fact that later that morning, dawdling over the dishes, she’d allowed herself a little daydream: Ezra coming up behind Ruth, setting his arms around her, Ruth protesting only briefly before collapsing against him … Oh, shouldn’t it be possible to undo what was done? What all of them had done?

  But Ezra when he returned was as subdued as ever, and only said that Ruth thanked Pearl for the pans and linens but was sending back the carpet sweeper as the farmhouse had no carpets.

  Then Saturday, Cody came storming in with everything Ezra had taken to Ruth. “What’s all this?” he asked Pearl.

  “Why, Cody, pots and sheets, as you can surely see.”

  “How come Ezra brought them out?”

  “I asked him to,” she said.

  “I won’t have it! Won’t have him hanging around the farm.”

  “Cody. It was at my request. Believe me,” she told him.

  “I do,” he said.

  She tried to get Ezra to go again the following week—taking the rug from the dining room and the carpet sweeper, once more—but he wouldn’t. “I’m not comfortable there,” he said. “There’s no point. What’s the point?” She supposed he was right. Yes, she thought, let Ruth wonder where he’d got to! People who leave us will be sorry in the end. She imagined Ruth alone in the farmhouse, roaming from room to room and peering sadly through the bare windows.

  The next weekend, Pearl asked Ezra to drive her out. He couldn’t very well refuse; he was her only means of transportation. They both, without discussing it, wore Sunday clothing—formal, guestlike clothing. They found the house looking sealed and abandoned. A lone hound nudged at a bone in the yard, but he surely didn’t belong there.

  Back home, Pearl placed a call to Cody in New York. “Aren’t you coming to the farm any more?”

  “Things are kind of busy.”

  “Won’t Ruth be there during the week?”

  “I want her here with me,” he said. “After all, we just did get married.”

  “Well, when will we see you?”

  “Pretty soon, not too long, I’m sure we’ll be down in a while …”

  But they weren’t; or if they were, they didn’t tell Pearl, and she was too proud to ask again. The summer ended and the leaves turned all colors, but Ezra dragged himself along with no change. “Sweetheart,” Pearl told him, as in his boyhood, “isn’t there someone you’d like to have home? Some friend to dinner? Anyone,” she said. Ezra said no.

  From time to time, Pearl called Cody in New York again. He was courteous and noncommittal. Ruth, if she spoke, gave flustered replies and didn’t seem to have her wits about her. Then in October, two full weeks went by when no one answered the phone at all. Pearl wondered if they’d gone to the farm, and she begged Ezra to investigate. But when he finally agreed to, he found nobody there. “Someone’s shattered four windowpanes,” he reported. “Threw rocks at them, or shot them out.” This made Pearl feel frightened. The world was closing in on them; even here on her own familiar streets, she no longer felt safe. And who knew what might have become of Ruth and Cody? They could be lying dead in their apartment, victims of a burglary or some bizarre, New York-type accident, their bodies undiscovered for weeks. Oh, this was what happened when you broke off all ties with your family! It wasn’t right; with your family, if with no one else, you have to keep on trying.

  She called frantically, day after day, often letting the phone ring thirty or forty times. There was something calming about that faraway purling sound. She was, at least, connected—though only to an object in Cody’s apartment.

  Then he answered. It was late in October. She was so taken aback that she didn’t know what to say. It seemed the monotonous ring of the phone had grown to be enough for her. “Um, Cody …” she said.

  “Oh. Mother.”

  “Cody, where have you been?”

  “I had a job to see to in Ohio. I took Ruth along.”

  “You didn’t answer the phone for weeks, and we looked for you out at the farm and some of the windows were broken.”

  “Damn! I thought I was paying Jared to keep that kind of thing from happening.”

  “You can’t imagine how I felt, Cody. When I heard about the windows I felt … You’re letting that place go to rack and ruin and we never get to see you any more.”

  “I do have a job to do, Mother.”

  “I thought that once you married, you were moving down to Baltimore. You were doing over the farmhouse and planting a garden and all.”

  “Yes, definitely. That’s a definite possibility,” said Cody. “Get Ezra to tape those windows, will you? And tell him to speak to Jared. I can’t have the place depreciating.”

  “All right, Cody,” she said.

  Then she asked about Thanksgiving. “Will you be coming down? You know how Ezra likes to have us at the restaurant.”

  “Oh, Ezra and his restaurant …”

  “Please. We’ve hardly seen you,” she said.

  “Well, maybe.”

  So in November they returned—Cody looking elegant and casual, Ruth incongruous in a large, ornate blue dress. Her hair was so stubby, her head so Small, that the dress appeared to be drowning her. She staggered in her high-heeled shoes. She still would not meet Ezra’s gaze.

  “What have you two been up to?” Pearl asked Ruth, as they rode in Cody’s Cadillac to the restaurant.

  “Oh, nothing so much.”

  “Are you decorating Cody’s apartment?”

  “Decorating? No.”

  “We’ve hardly seen it,” Cody said. “I’m taking on longer-term jobs. In December I start reorganizing a textile plant in Georgia, a big thing, five or six months. I thought maybe Ruth could come with me; we could rent us a little house of some kind. There’s not much point in commuting.”

  “December? But then you’d miss Christmas,” said Pearl.

  Cody looked surprised. He said, “Why would we miss it?”

  “I mean, would you still make the trip to Baltimore?”

  “Oh. Well, no, I guess not,” he said. “But we’re here for Thanksgiving, aren’t we?”

  She resolved to say no more. She had her dignity.

  They sat at their regular family table, surrounded by a fair-sized crowd. (In those days—the start of the sixties—shaggy young people had just discovered Ezra’s restaurant, with its stripped wood and
pure, fresh food, and they thronged there every evening.) It was sad that Jenny couldn’t come; she was spending the holiday with her in-laws. But Ruth, at least, rounded out their number. Pearl smiled across the table at her. Ruth said, “It feels right funny to be eating where I used to be cooking.”

  “Would you like to visit the kitchen?” Ezra asked. “The staff would enjoy seeing you.”

  “I don’t mind if I do,” she said. It was the first time since her marriage that she’d looked at him directly—or the first that Pearl knew about.

  So Ezra scraped back his chair and rose, and guided Ruth into the kitchen. Pearl could tell that Cody wasn’t pleased. He stopped in the act of unfolding his napkin and gazed after them, even taking a breath as if preparing to object. Then he must have thought better of it. He shook out the napkin angrily, saying nothing.

  “So,” said Pearl. “When do you move to the farm?”

  “Farm? Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Everything’s so changed; the whole character of my work has changed.” He looked again toward the kitchen.

  “But you’d planned on raising a family there. It was all you ever talked about.”

  “Yes, well, and these long-term contracts,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her.

  Pearl said, “You had your heart just set on it.”

  But he continued watching the other two. He was not the least bit interested in what she might be saying. The kitchen was fully exposed, and could not have concealed the smallest secret. So why was Cody nervous? Ezra and Ruth stood talking with one of the cooks, their backs to the dining room. Ezra gestured as he spoke. He lifted both arms wide, one arm behind Ruth but not touching her, not brushing her shoulder, surely not encircling her or anything like that. Even so, Cody rose abruptly from his chair. “Cody!” Pearl said. He strode toward the kitchen, with his napkin crumpled in one fist. Pearl stood up and hurried after him, and arrived in time to hear him say, “Let’s go, Ruth.”

  “Go?”

  “I didn’t come here to watch you and Ezra chumming it up in the kitchen.”

  Ruth looked scared. Her face seemed to grow more pointed.

  “Come on,” said Cody, and he took her elbow. “Goodbye,” he told Pearl and Ezra.

  “Oh!” said Pearl, running after them. “Oh, Cody, what can you be thinking of? How can you act so foolish?”

  Cody yanked Ruth’s coat from a brass hook in passing. He opened the front door and pulled Ruth into the street and shut the door behind them.

  Ezra said, “I don’t understand.”

  Pearl said, “Why does it always turn out this way? How come we end up quarreling? Don’t we all love each other? Everything else aside,” she said, “don’t we all want the best for one another?”

  “Certainly we do,” Ezra said.

  His answer was so level and firm that she felt comforted. She knew things were bound to work out someday. She let him lead her back to the table, and the two of them had a forlorn turkey dinner on the wide expanse of white linen.

  Upstairs there are four bedrooms, sparsely furnished, musty. The beds are so sunken-looking, evidently even the courting couples have not been tempted by them. They’re untouched, the drab, dirty quilts still smooth. But a dead bird lies beneath one window. Pearl calls down the stairwell. “Ezra? Ezra, come here this instant. Bring the broom and trash bag.”

  He mounts the stairs obediently. She looks down and sees, with a pang, that his lovely fair hair is thinning on the back of his head. He is thirty-seven years old, will be thirty-eight in December. He will probably never marry. He will never do anything but run that peculiar restaurant of his, with its hodgepodge of food, its unskilled waitresses, its foreign cooks with questionable papers. You could say, in a way, that Ezra has suffered a tragedy, although it’s a very small tragedy in the eyes of the world. You could say that he and Ruth, together, have suffered a tragedy. Something has been done to them; something has been taken away from them. They have lost it. They are lost. It doesn’t help at all that Cody in fact is a very nice man—that he’s bright and funny and genuinely kind, to everyone but Ezra.

  You could almost say that Cody, too, has suffered a tragedy.

  In 1964, when she went out to Illinois to visit them, she felt in their house the thin, tight atmosphere of an unhappy marriage. Not a really terrible marriage—no sign of hatred, spitefulness, violence. Just a sense of something missing. A certain failure to connect, between the two of them. Everything seemed so tenuous. Or was it her imagination? Maybe she was wrong. Maybe it was the house itself—a ranch house in a development, rented for the four months or so that Cody would need to reorganize a plastics plant in Chicago. Plainly the place was expensive, with wall-to-wall carpeting and long, low, modern furniture; but there were no trees anywhere nearby, not even a bush or a shrub—just that raw brick cube rising starkly from the flatness. And outside it was so white-hot, so insufferably hot, that they were confined to the house with its artificial, refrigerated air. They were imprisoned by the house, dependent upon it like spacemen in a spaceship, and when they went out it was only to dash through a crushing weight of heat to Cody’s air-conditioned Mercedes. Ruth, going about her chores every day, had the clenched expression of someone determined to survive no matter what. Cody came home in the evening gasping for oxygen—barely crawling over the doorsill, Pearl fantasized—but did not seem all that relieved to have arrived. When he greeted Ruth, they touched cheeks and moved apart again.

  It was the first time Pearl had ever visited them, the first and only time, and this was after years of very little contact at all. They seldom came to Baltimore. They never returned to the farm. And Cody wrote almost no letters, though he would telephone on birthdays and holidays. He was more like an acquaintance, Pearl thought. A not very cordial acquaintance.

  Once she and Ezra were driving down a road in West Virginia, on an outing to Harper’s Ferry, when they chanced to come up behind a man in jogging shorts. He was running along the edge of the highway, a tall man, dark, with a certain confident, easy swing to his shoulders … Cody! Out here in the middle of nowhere, by sheer coincidence, Cody Tull! Ezra slammed on his brakes, and Pearl said, “Well, did you ever.” But then the jogger, hearing their car, had turned his face and he wasn’t Cody after all. He was someone entirely different, beefy jawed, nowhere near as handsome. Ezra sped up again. Pearl said, “How silly of me, I know full well that Cody’s in, ah …”

  “Indiana,” said Ezra.

  “Indiana; I don’t know why I thought …”

  They were both quiet for several minutes after that, and in those minutes Pearl imagined the scene if it really had been Cody—if he had turned, astonished, as they sailed past. Oddly enough, she didn’t envision stopping. She thought of how his mouth would fall open as he recognized their faces behind the glass; and how they would gaze out at him, and smile and wave, and skim on by.

  Whenever he phoned he was cheerful and hearty. “How’ve you been, Mother?”

  “Why, Cody!”

  “Everything all right? How’s Ezra?”

  Oh, on the phone he was so nice about Ezra, interested and affectionate like any other brother. And on the rare occasions when he and Ruth came through Baltimore—heading somewhere else, just briefly dropping in—he seemed so pleased to shake hands with Ezra and clap him on the back and ask what he’d been up to. At first.

  Only at first.

  Then: “Ruth! What are you and Ezra talking about, over there?” Or: “Ezra? Do you mind not standing so close to my wife?” When Ezra and Ruth were hardly speaking, really. They were so cautious with each other, it hurt to watch.

  “Cody. Please. What are you imagining?” Pearl would ask him, and then he would turn on her: “Naturally, you wouldn’t see it. Naturally, he can do no wrong, can he, Mother. Your precious boy. Can he.”

  She had given up, finally, on ever being asked to visit. When Cody called and told her Ruth was pregnant, some two or three years into the marriage, Pearl said, “Oh, Cody, if
she’d like it at all, I mean when the baby arrives … if she’d like me to come take care of things …” But evidently, she wasn’t needed. And when he called to say that Luke was born—nine pounds, three ounces; everything fine—she said, “I can’t wait to see him. I honestly can’t wait.” But Cody let that pass.

  They sent her photos: Luke in an infant seat, blond and stern. Luke creeping bear-style across the carpet, on hands and feet instead of knees. (Cody had crept that way too.) Luke uncertainly walking, with a clothespin in each fat fist. He had to have the clothespins, Ruth wrote, because then he thought he was holding on to something. Otherwise, he fell. Now that photos were arriving, letters came too, generally written by Ruth. Her grammar was shocking and she couldn’t spell. She said, Me and Cody wrecken Luke’s eyes are going to stay blue, but what did Pearl care about grammar? She saved every letter and put Luke’s pictures on her desk in little gilt frames she bought at Kresge’s.

  I think I ought to come see Luke before he’s grown, she wrote. No one answered. She wrote again. Would June be all right? Then Cody wrote that they were moving to Illinois in June, but if she really wanted then maybe she could come in July.

  So she went to Illinois in July, traveling with a trainload of fresh-faced boy soldiers on their way to Vietnam, and she spent a week in that treeless house barricaded against the elements. It was a shock, even to her, how instantly and how deeply she loved her grandson. He was not quite two years old by then, a beautiful baby with a head that seemed adult in its shape—sharply defined, the golden hair trimmed close and neat. His firm, straight lips seemed adult as well, and he had an unchildlike way of walking. There was a bit of slump in his posture, a little droop to his shoulders, nothing physically wrong but an air of resignation that was almost comical in someone so small. Pearl sat on the floor with him for hours, playing with his trucks and cars. “Vroom. Vroom. Roll it back to Granny, now.” She was touched by his stillness. He had a sizable vocabulary but he used it only when necessary; he was not a spendthrift. He was careful. He lacked gaiety. Was he happy? Was this a fit life for a child?