Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Read online

  “If you like.”

  “Just to gab, I’ll say, chew the fat …”

  Jenny could see that it would never work out.

  She walked him to the door, strolling with her hands deep in her skirt pockets. “I hope,” she said, “you haven’t got the wrong idea about us. I mean, Joe’s an excellent father, honestly he is; he’s always been good with Slevin.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Oh, when I compare him with some others I could name!” Jenny said. She had a habit, with disapproving people, of talking a little too much, and she knew it. As they crossed the hall, she said, “Sam Wiley, for instance—my second husband. Becky’s father. You’d die if you ever saw Sam. He was a painter, one of those graceful compact small types I’ve never trusted since. Totally shiftless. Totally unreliable. He left me before Becky was born, moved in with a model named Adar Bagned.”

  She opened the front door. A fine, fresh mist blew in and she took a deep breath. “Oh, lovely,” she said. “But isn’t that a hilarious name? For the longest time I kept trying to turn it around, thinking it must make more sense if I read it off backward. Goodbye, then, Father. Thanks for dropping in.”

  She closed the door on him and went off to fix the children’s supper.

  This would be a very nice house, Jenny was fond of saying, if only the third-floor bathtub didn’t drain through the dining room ceiling. It was a tall, trim Bolton Hill row house; she’d bought it back in ’64, when prices weren’t yet sky-high. In those days, it had seemed enormous; but seven years later, with six extra children, it didn’t feel so big any more. It was inconvenient, warrenlike, poorly arranged. There were so many doors and radiators, it was hard to find space for the furniture.

  She cooked at a sticky, stilt-legged stove, rinsed greens at a yellowed sink skirted with chintz, set plates on a table that was carved with another family’s initials. “Here, children, everyone get his own silver, now—”

  “You gave Jacob more peas than me.”

  “She did not.”

  “Did too.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did too.”

  “Take them! I don’t even like them.”

  “Where’s Slevin?” Jenny asked.

  “Who needs Slevin anyhow, the old grouch.”

  The telephone rang and Joe came in with the baby. “That’s your answering service, they want to know—”

  “I’m not on; it’s Dan’s night on. What are they calling me for?”

  “That’s what I thought, but they said—”

  He wandered off again, and returned a minute later to settle at the table with the baby in his lap. “Here’s her meat,” Jenny said, flying past. “Her spoon is on the …”

  She left the kitchen, climbed the stairs to the second floor and called up to the third. “Slevin?” No answer. She climbed the rest of the way, quickly growing breathless. How out of shape she was! It was true, as her mother was forever telling her, that she had let herself go—a crime, her mother said, for anyone with Jenny’s good looks. It was true that she’d become a bit haggard, slackened somewhat, her skin turning sallow and her eyebrows shaggy and her wide, amused mouth a dry brownish color now that she wore no lipstick. “Your hair!” her mother mourned. “Your lovely hair!”—which wasn’t lovely at all: a thick, blunt, gray-threaded clump with boxy bangs. “You used to be such a beauty,” Pearl would say, and Jenny would laugh. A fat lot of good it had done her! She liked to think that she was wearing her beauty out—using it up, she liked to think. She took some satisfaction in it, like a housewife industriously making her way through a jar of something she did not enjoy, would not buy again, but couldn’t just discard, of course.

  Panting, clutching a handful of denim skirt, she arrived on the third floor. It was the older children’s floor, not her territory, and it had a musty, atticky smell. “Slevin?” she called. She knocked at his door. “Supper, Slevin!”

  She opened the door a crack and peered in. Slevin lay on his unmade bed with his forearm over his eyes. A wide strip of blubbery belly showed, as it nearly always did, between jeans and T-shirt. He had his earphones on; that was why he hadn’t heard. She crossed the room and lifted the earphones from his head. A miniature Janis Joplin song rang out tinnily: “Me and Bobby McGee.” He blinked and gave her a puzzled look, like someone just waking. “Suppertime,” she told him.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Not hungry! What kind of talk is that?”

  “Jenny, honest, I just don’t want to get up.”

  But she was already pulling him to his feet—a burly boy nearly Jenny’s height and considerably heavier but still babyish, creamy skinned. She propelled him to the door, pushing from behind with both palms flat on the small of his back. “You’re the only one of them that I have to carry bodily to meals,” she said. She sang him down the stairs:

  “Oh, they had to carry Harry to the ferry,

  And they had to carry Harry to the shore …”

  “Seriously, Jenny,” Slevin said.

  They entered the kitchen. Joe made a trumpet of his hands above the baby’s head and said, “Ta-ra! Ta-ra! He approaches!” Slevin groaned. The others didn’t look up from their meal.

  Sitting in her place next to Joe, gazing around at the tableful of children, Jenny felt pleased. They were doing well, she decided—even the older ones, who’d acted so wary and hostile when she had first met them.

  Then she had an unsettling thought: it occurred to her that this would have to be her permanent situation. Having taken on these children, straightened their upturned lives and slowly, steadily won their trust, she could not in good conscience let them down. Here she was, forever. “It’s lucky we get along,” she said to Joe.

  “It’s extremely lucky,” he said, and he patted her hand and asked for the mustard.

  “Isn’t it amazing how school always smells like school,” Jenny told Slevin’s teacher. “You can add all the modern conveniences you like—audiovisual things and computers—it still smells like book glue and that cheap gray paper they used to have for arithmetic and also … what’s that other smell? There’s another smell besides. I know it but I can’t quite name it.”

  “Have a seat, Dr. Tull,” the teacher said.

  “Radiator dust,” said Jenny.

  “Pardon?”

  “That’s the other smell.”

  “I called you in for a purpose,” said the teacher, opening the file that lay before her. She was a tiny thing, surely not out of her twenties, perky and freckled with horn-rimmed glasses dwarfing her pointed nose. Jenny wondered how she’d learned to be so intimidating so quickly. “I know you’re a busy woman, Dr. Tull, but I’m genuinely anxious about Slevin’s school performance and I thought you ought to be informed.”

  “Oh, really?” Jenny said. She decided she would feel better if she too wore glasses, though hers were only needed for reading. She dug through her purse and a pink plastic pacifier fell out. She pretended it hadn’t happened.

  “Slevin is very, very intelligent,” the teacher said. She glared at Jenny accusingly. “He goes straight off the top of the charts.”

  “Yes, I figured that.”

  “But his English average …” the teacher said, flipping through papers. “It’s F. Well, maybe D minus.”

  Jenny clicked her tongue.

  “Math: C. History: D. And science … and gym … He’s had so many absences, I finally asked if he’d been cutting school. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said—came right out with it. ‘What did you cut?’ I asked him. ‘February,’ he said.”

  Jenny laughed. The teacher looked at her.

  Jenny straightened her glasses and said, “Do you think it might be puberty?”

  “All these children are going through puberty,” the teacher told her.

  “Or … I don’t know; boredom. You said yourself he’s intelligent. Why, you ought to see him at home! Monkeying around with machinery, wiring stereos … He’s got a tape recorder of his own, he w
orked for it and bought it himself, some superduper model, offhand I can’t think of the name. I’m such a dunce about these things, when he talked about head cleaners I thought he meant shampoo; but Slevin knows all about it and—”

  “Mr. Davies suggests,” said the teacher, “—that’s our assistant principal—he suggests that Slevin may be experiencing emotional problems due to the adjustments at home.”

  “What adjustments?”

  “He says Slevin’s mother abandoned him and Slevin was moved to your household almost immediately thereafter and had to get used to a brand-new mother and sister.”

  “Oh, that,” said Jenny, waving her hand.

  “Mr. Davies suggests that Slevin might need professional counseling.”

  “Nonsense,” Jenny said. “What’s a little adjustment? And anyhow, that happened a good six months ago. It’s not as if … why, look at my daughter! She’s had to get used to seven new people and she’s never said a word of complaint. Oh, we’re all coping! In fact my husband was saying, just the other day, we should think about having more children now. We ought to have at least one joint child, he says, but I’m not so sure myself. After all, I’m thirty-six years old. It probably wouldn’t be wise.”

  “Mr. Davies suggests—”

  “Though I suppose if it means so much to him, it’s all the same to me.”

  “The same!” said the teacher. “What about the population explosion?”

  “The what? You’re getting me off the subject, here … My point is,” Jenny said, “I don’t see the need to blame adjustment, broken homes, bad parents, that sort of thing. We make our own luck, right? You have to overcome your setbacks. You can’t take them too much to heart. I’ll explain all that to Slevin. I’ll tell him this evening. I’m certain his grades will improve.”

  Then she bent to pick up the pacifier, and shook hands with the teacher and left.

  On the wall in Jenny’s office was a varnished wooden plaque: DR. TULL IS NOT A TOY. Joe had made it for her in his workshop. He was incensed by the scrapes and bruises that Jenny gathered daily in her raucous games with her patients. “Make them show some respect,” he told her. “Maintain a little dignity.” But the sign was all but lost among her patients’ snapshots (on beaches, on seesaws, on photographers’ blanketed tables, or behind lit birthday cakes) and the crayoned self-portraits they’d brought her. Anyhow, most of them were too young to read. She scooped up Billy Burnham and carried him, squawking and giggling, to the nurse for his tetanus shot. “Now, it’s possible,” she called back to Mrs. Burnham, “that tonight he’ll experience a little soreness in his left—” Billy squirmed, and a button popped off Jenny’s white coat.

  The Albright baby was due for a DPT shot. The Carroll baby had to have her formula switched. Lucy Brandon’s constant sniffle looked like an allergy; Jenny told Mrs. Brandon where she could take her for testing. Both the Morris twins’ tonsils were swollen.

  She asked the receptionist to order her a sandwich, but the receptionist said, “Aren’t you eating out? Your brother’s here; he’s been waiting half an hour, at least.”

  “Oh, my Lord, I forgot all about him,” Jenny said. She went into the waiting room. Ezra was seated on the vinyl couch, surrounded by pull toys and building blocks and oilcloth picture books. A family of Spanish-speaking children, probably patients of Dr. Ramirez, played at his feet, but you’d never mistake Ezra for a parent. His shaggy yellow hair was soft as a child’s; he wore faded work clothes, and his face was wide and expectant.

  “Ezra, honey,” Jenny told him, “I clean forgot. My next appointment’s in twenty minutes; do you suppose we could just grab a hamburger?”

  “Oh, surely,” Ezra said.

  He waited while she took off her white coat and put on a raincoat. Then they rode the elevator down to the marble-paved lobby, and pushed through the revolving door onto a spattery, overcast street. There was a smell like wet coal. Huddled people hurried by and buses wheezed and cathedral bells rang far away.

  “I feel dumb,” Jenny said, “taking you of all people to a humburger joint.”

  She was thinking of his restaurant, which always intimidated her a little. Recently, Ezra had remodeled the living quarters above it into a series of tiny, elegant private dining rooms like those in old movies—the velvet-hung compartments where the villain attempts to seduce the heroine. They’d be perfect for anniversary couples, Ezra said. (Like most unmarried men, he was comically, annoyingly sentimental about marriage.) But so far, only business groups and heavily jeweled Baltimore politicians had asked to use the rooms.

  Now he said, “A hamburger’s fine; I’m crazy about hamburgers.” And when they walked through the plate glass doorway, into a slick, tiled area lined with glaring photos of onion rings and milkshakes, he looked around him happily. Secretaries clustered at some tables, construction workers at others. “It’s getting like a collective farm,” Ezra said. “All these chain places that everyone comes to for breakfast, lunch, sometimes supper … like a commune or a kibbutz or something. Pretty soon we won’t have private kitchens at all; you just drop by your local Gino’s or McDonald’s. I kind of like it.”

  Jenny wondered if there were any eating place he wouldn’t like. At a soup kitchen, no doubt, he’d be pleased by the obvious hunger of the customers. At a urine-smelling tavern he’d discover some wonderful pickled eggs that he’d never seen anywhere else. Oh, if it had to do with food, he was endlessly appreciative.

  While he ordered for them, she settled herself at a table. She took off her raincoat, smoothed her hair, and scraped at a Pablum spot on her blouse. It felt strange to be sitting alone. Always there was someone—children, patients, colleagues. The empty space on either side of her gave her an echoing, weightless feeling, as if she lacked ballast and might at any moment float upward.

  Ezra returned with their hamburgers. “How’s Joe?” he asked, sitting down.

  “Oh, fine. How’s Mother?”

  “Doing well, sends her love … I brought you something,” he said. He set aside his burger to rummage through his windbreaker pockets. Eventually, he came up with a worn white envelope. “Pictures,” he said.

  “Pictures?”

  “Photos. Mother’s got all these photos; I just discovered them. I thought maybe you’d be interested in having a few.”

  Jenny sighed. Poor Ezra: he was turning into the family custodian, tending their mother and guarding their past and faithfully phoning his sister for lunch. “Why don’t you keep them,” she said. “You know I’d just lose them.”

  “But a lot of these are of you,” he said. He spilled the envelope onto the table. “I figured the children might like them. For instance, somewhere here …” He shuffled various versions of a younger, sterner Jenny. “Here,” he said. “Don’t you see Becky in this?”

  It was Jenny in a plaid tam-o’-shanter, unsmiling. “Ugh,” she said, stirring her coffee.

  “You were a really nice little girl,” said Ezra. He returned to his burger but kept the photo before him. On the back of it, Jenny saw, something had been written in pencil. She tried to make it out. Ezra noticed and said, “Fall, 1947. I got Mother to write the dates down. And I’m going to send Cody some, too.”

  Jenny could just imagine Cody’s face when he got them. “Ezra,” she said, “to tell the truth, I wouldn’t waste the postage.”

  “Don’t you think he’d like to compare these with how Luke looks, growing up?”

  “Believe me,” she said, “he’d burn them. You know Cody.”

  “Maybe he’s changed,” Ezra said.

  “He hasn’t,” said Jenny, “and I doubt he ever will. Just mention something—one little harmless memory from our childhood—and his mouth turns down. You know how his mouth does. I said to him once, I said, ‘Cody, you’re no better than the Lawsons.’ Remember the Lawsons? They moved into our neighborhood from Nashville, Tennessee, and the very first week all four childlren got mumps. Mrs. Lawson said, ‘This city is unlucky, I belie
ve.’ The next week a pipe in their basement burst and she said, ‘Well, that’s Baltimore.’ Then their daughter broke her wrist … When they moved back to Tennessee, I went over to say goodbye. They were loading up their car trunk and they happened to slam the lid down smack on the fingers of their youngest boy. When they drove off he was screaming, and Mrs. Lawson called out, ‘Isn’t this a fitting way to leave? I always did say Baltimore was unlucky.’ ”

  “Well, now, I’m trying to follow you, here,” Ezra said.

  “It’s whether you add up the list or not,” Jenny said. “I mean, if you catalogue grudges, anything looks bad. And Cody certainly catalogues; he’s ruining his life with his catalogues. But after all, I told him, we made it, didn’t we? We did grow up. Why, the three of us turned out fine, just fine!”

  “It’s true,” said Ezra, his forehead smoothing. “You especially, Jenny. Look at you: a doctor.”

  “Oh, shoo, I’m nothing but a baby weigher,” Jenny said. But she was pleased, and when they rose to go she took along the photographs to make him happy.

  Joe said if they did have a baby, he’d like it to be a girl. He’d looked around and noticed they were a little short on girls. “How can you say that?” Jenny asked. She ticked the girls off on her fingers: “Phoebe, Becky, Jane …”

  When her voice trailed away, he stood watching her. She was expecting him to speak, but he didn’t. “Well?” she asked.

  “That’s only three.”

  She felt a little rush of confusion. “Have I left one out?”

  “No, you haven’t left one out. Has she left one out,” he told the wall. He snorted. “Has she left one out, she asks. What a question! No, you haven’t left one out. Three is all we have. Three girls.”

  “Well, there’s no need to act so cross about it.”

  “I’m not cross, I’m frustrated,” he said. “I’m trying to have a conversation here.”

  “Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

  “Yes, yes …”

  “Then where’s the problem?”