Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (25 page)

He was someone entirely different, beefy jawed, nowhere near as handsome. Ezra sped up again. Pearl said, “How sil y of me, I know ful wel 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 real y 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 fal 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 al 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, real y.

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:

“Natural y, you wouldn’t see it. Natural y, he can do no wrong, can he, Mother. Your precious boy.

Can he.”

She had given up, final y, on ever being asked to visit.

When Cody cal ed and told her Ruth was pregnant, some two or three years into the marriage, Pearl said, “Oh, Cody, if she’d like it at al , 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 cal ed 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 fel . Now that photos were arriving, letters came too, general y written by Ruth. Her grammar was shocking and she couldn’t spel . 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 al right? Then Cody wrote that they were moving to Il inois in June, but if she real y wanted then maybe she could come in July.

So she went to Il inois 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 wel , and he had an unchild-like way of walking. There was a bit of slump in his posture, a little droop to his shoulders, nothing physical y wrong but an air of resignation that was almost comical in someone so smal .

Pearl sat on the floor with him for hours, playing with his trucks and cars. “Vroom. Vroom. Rol it back to Granny, now.” She was touched by his stil ness. 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?

She saw that Cody had a sprinkling of gray in his sideburns, a more leathery look to his cheeks; but that Ruth was stil a scrappy little thing in too-short hair and unbecoming dresses. She had not grown ful er or softer with age. She was like certain supermarket vegetables that turn from green to withered without ever ripening. In the evenings, when Cody came home from work, Ruth clattered around the kitchen cooking great quantities of country food that Cody would hardly touch; and Cody had a gin and tonic and watched the news. The two of them asked each other,

“How was your day?” and “Everything fine?” but they didn’t seem to listen to the answers. Pearl could believe that in the morning, waking in their king-sized bed, they asked politely, “Did you sleep al right?” She felt oppressed and uncomfortable, but instead of averting her gaze she was for some reason compel ed to delve deeper into their lives; she sent them out one night to a movie, promising to watch Luke, and then ransacked al the desk drawers but found only tax receipts, and bank statements, and a photo album belonging to the people who real y lived here. Anyway, she couldn’t have said what it was she was looking for.

Coming home, jouncing on the train amid another group of soldiers, she felt weary and hopeless.

She arrived in Baltimore seven hours late, with a racking headache. Then as she entered the station, she saw Ezra walking toward her in his plodding way and she felt such a stab of… wel , recognition.

It was Luke’s walk, solemn little Luke.

Life was so sad, she thought, that she almost couldn’t bear it. But kissing Ezra, she felt her sorrow overtaken by something very like annoyance. She wondered why he put up with this, why he let things go on this way.

Could it be that he took some satisfaction in his grief? (as if he were paying for something, she thought.

But what would he be paying for?) In the car, he asked,

“How’d you like Luke?” and she said, “Don’t you ever think of just going there and trying to get her back?”

“I couldn’t,” he said, unsurprised, and he maneuvered the car laboriously from its parking slot.

“Wel , I don’t see why not,” she told him.

“It’s not right. It’s wrong.”

She wasn’t given to philosophy, but during the drive home she stared at the grimy Baltimore scenery and considered the question of right and wrong: of theoretical virtue, existing in a vacuum; of whether there was any point to it at al . When they reached home, she got out of the car and entered the house without a word, and climbed the stairs to her room.

Ezra scoops the dead bird onto a piece of cardboard and slides it into the trash bag. Then he tapes the cardboard to the broken windowpane where the bird must have entered.

Pearl, meanwhile, sweeps up the shards of glass. She leaves them in a pyramid and goes downstairs for the dustpan. Already, she sees, the house has a bit more life to it—the sunny pattern of leaves shimmering on the parlor floor in front of the open door, the smel of hot grass wafting through the rooms. “It was never al that practical,” Cody said on the phone just recently, referring to the farm. “It was only a half-baked idea that I had when I was young.” But if he real y meant that, why doesn’t he go on and sel ? No, he couldn’t possibly; she has spent so much time sweeping this place, preparing it for him, opening and shutting bureau drawers as if she’d find his secrets there. She can imagine Ruth in this kitchen, Cody out surveying fence lines or whatever it is men do on farms. She can picture Luke running through the yard in denim overal s. He is old enough to go fishing now, to swim in the creek beyond the pasture, maybe even to tend the animals. In August, he’l be eight. Is it eight? Or nine. She’s lost track. She hardly ever sees him, and must conquer his shyness al over again whenever he and his parents pass through Baltimore. Each visit, his interests have changed: from popguns to marbles to stamp col ecting. Last time he was here, some two or three years back, she got out her husband’s stamp album—its maroon, fake-leather cover gone gray with mildew—only to find that Luke had switched to model airplanes. He was assembling a balsa wood jet, he told her, that would actual y fly. And he was planning to be an astronaut. “By the time I’m grown,” he said, “astronauts wil be ordinary. People wil be taking rockets like you would take a bus. They’l spend their summers on Venus. They won’t go to Ocean City; they’l go to beaches on the moon.”

“Ah,” she said, “isn’t that wonderful!” But she was too old for such things.

She couldn’t keep up, and the very thought of traveling to the moon made her feel desolate.

And nowadays—wel , who can guess? Luke must be involved in something entirely different. It’s so long since he was here, and she’s not sure he’l ever be back. During that last visit, Ezra got his old pearwood recorder from the closet and showed Luke how to play a tune. Pearl knows very little about recorders, but evidently something happens

—the wood dries up, or warps, or something—when they’re not played enough; and this one hadn’t been played in a decade, at least. Its voice had gone splintery and cracked.

How startled she’d been, hearing three ancient notes tumble forth after such a silence! Ezra and Luke walked south on Calvert Street to buy some linseed oil. Not two minutes after they left, Cody asked where they’d got to.

“Why, off to buy oil for Ezra’s recorder,” Pearl told him.

“Didn’t you see them go?” Cody excused himself and went outside to pace in front of the house. Ruth stayed in the living room, discussing schools. Pearl hardly listened. She could look through the window and see Cody pacing, turning, pacing, his suit coat whipping out behind him. She could tel when Ezra and Luke returned, even before she saw them, by the way that Cody stiffened. “Where have you been?” she heard him ask. “What have you two been doing?”

Luke never did learn how to play the recorder.

Cody said they had to go. “Oh, but Cody!” Pearl said. “I thought you were spending the night!”

“Wrong,” he told her. “Wrong again. I can’t stay here; this place is not safe. Don’t you see what Ezra’s up to?”

“What, Cody? What is he up to?”

“Don’t you see he’s out to steal my son?” he asked. “The same way he always stole everybody?

Don’t you see?”

In the end, they left. Ezra wanted to give Luke the recorder for keeps, but Cody told Luke to leave it; he’d get him a newer one, fancier, finer. One that wasn’t al dried up, he said.

Pearl believes now that her family has failed. Neither of her sons is happy, and her daughter can’t seem to stay married. There is no one to accept the blame for this but Pearl herself, who raised these children single-handed and did make mistakes, oh, a bushel of mistakes. Stil , she sometimes has the feeling that it’s simply fate, and not a matter for blame at al . She feels that everything has been assigned, has been preordained; everyone must play his role.

Certainly she never intended to foster one of those good sonstbad son arrangements, but what can you do when one son is consistently good and the other consistently bad?

What can the sons do, even? “Don’t you see?” Cody had cried, and she had imagined, for an instant, that he was inviting her to look at his whole existence—his years of hurt and bafflement.

Often, like a child peering over the fence at somebody else’s party, she gazes wistful y at other families and wonders what their secret is. They seem so close. Is it that they’re more religious?

Or stricter, or more lenient? Could it be the fact that they participate in sports? Read books together?

Have some common hobby? Recently, she overheard a neighbor woman discussing her plans for Independence Day: her family was having a picnic. Every member—child or grownup—was cooking his or her specialty. Those who were too little to cook were in charge of the paper plates.

Pearl felt such a wave of longing that her knees went weak.

Ezra has finished taping the glass. Pearl drifts through the other bedrooms, checking the other windows. In the smal est bedroom, a nursery, a little old lady in a hat approaches. It’s Pearl, in the speckled mirror above a bureau.

She leans closer and traces the lines around her eyes.

Her age does not surprise her. She’s grown used to it by now. You’re old for so much longer than you’re young, she thinks. Real y it hardly seems fair. And then she thinks, for no earthly reason, of a girl she went to school with, Linda Lou something-or-other—such a pretty, flighty girl, someone she’d always envied. In the middle of their senior year, Linda Lou disappeared. There were rumors, later confirmed—an affair with the school’s only male teacher, a married man; and a baby on the way. How horrified her classmates had been! It had thril ed them: that they actual y knew such a person, had borrowed her history notes, helped her retie a loose sash, perhaps even brushed her hand accidental y—that hand that may have touched… wel , who knew what.

It occurs to Pearl, peering into the glass, that the baby born of that scandal must be sixty years old by now. He would have gray hair and liver spots, perhaps false teeth, bifocals, a tedious burden of a life. Yet Linda Lou, wearing white, stil dances in Pearl’s mind, the prettiest girl at the senior social.

“Don’t you see?” Cody has asked, and Pearl had said,

“Honey, I just can’t understand you.” Then he shrugged, and his normal, amused expression returned to his face. “Ah, wel ,” he said, “I can’t either, I guess. After al , what do I care, now I’m grown? Why should it matter any more?”

She doesn’t recal if she managed any reply to that.

She steps away from the mirror. Ezra comes in, bearing the trash bag. “Al finished, Mother,” he says.

“It looks a lot better, doesn’t it?”

“It looks just fine,” he tel s her.

They descend the stairs, and close the door, and carry their supplies to the car. As they drive away Pearl glances back, like any good housewife checking what she’s cleaned, and it seems to her that even that buckling front porch is straighter and more solid. She has a feeling of accomplishment.

Others might have given up and let the trespassers take the place over, but never Pearl. Next season she wil come again, and the season after, and the season after that, and Ezra wil go on bringing her—the two of them bumping down the driveway, loyal and responsible, together forever.