Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (26 page)

“Thirteen,” said Joe, after thinking it over.

“Thirteen years old, naturally a difficult … I wouldn’t even mention it, except that when I suggested we have a talk he just wrenched away and ran out, and never returned. Now we notice that you, Mr. St. Ambrose, that you drop him off for mass every Sunday, but in fact he’s stopped coming inside and simply sits out front on the steps and watches the traffic. He’s, you might say, playing hooky, but—”

“Shoot,” said Joe. “I get up specially on a Sunday morning to drive him there and he plays
hooky?
”

“But my point is—”

“I don’t know why he wants to go anyhow. He’s the only one of them that does.”

“But it’s his withdrawn behavior that worries me,” the priest said, “more than his church attendance. Though it might not be a bad idea if, perhaps, you accompanied him to mass sometime.”

“Me? Hell, I’m not even Catholic.”

“Or I don’t suppose
you
, Dr. Tull …”

Both men seemed to be waiting for her. Jenny was wondering about the baby’s diaper, which bulged suspiciously, but she gathered her thoughts and said, “Oh, no, goodness, I really wouldn’t have the faintest—” She laughed, covering her mouth—a gesture she had. “Besides,” she said, “it was Greta who was the Catholic. Slevin’s mother.”

“I see. Well, the important thing—”

“
I
don’t know why Slevin goes to church. And to Greta’s church, her old one, clear across town.”

“Does he communicate with his mother now?”

“Oh, no, she’s never been back. Got a quickie divorce in Idaho and that’s the last we heard.”

“Are there any, ah, step-family problems?”

“Step-family?” Jenny said. “Well, no. Or yes. I don’t know. There
would
be, probably; of course these things are never easy … only life is so rushed around here, there really isn’t time.”

“Slevin is very fond of Jenny,” Joe told the priest.

“Why, thank you, honey,” Jenny said.

“She won him right over; she’s got him trailing after her anyplace she goes. She’s so cool and jokey with kids, you know.”

“Well, I try,” Jenny said. “I do make an effort. But you never can be sure. That age is very secretive.”

“Perhaps I’ll suggest that he stop by and visit me,” the priest said.

“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:

“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 worked 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.”