Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (40 page)

“Not at all,” Cody told him.

“You’d think she’d at least have—”

“What she was saying was, the man had nothing to do with them. He wasn’t ever there, you see, so he didn’t count. He wasn’t part of the family.”

Beck drew back sharply. His eyes no longer seemed so blue; they had darkened to a color nearer navy.

Then Joe said, “The baby!”

The baby was struggling soundlessly, convulsively, mouth open and face going purple. “She’s strangling,” Jenny said. Several people leapt up and a wineglass overturned. Joe was trying to pull the baby from the high chair, but Jenny stopped him. “Never mind that! Let me at her!” It seemed the tray was strapped in place and they couldn’t get the baby out from under it. An older child started crying. Something crashed to the floor. Jenny punched the baby in the midriff and a mushroom button shot onto the table. The baby wailed and turned pink. Hiccuping, she was dragged from the high chair and placed on her
mother’s lap, where she settled down cheerfully and started pursuing a pea around the rim of Jenny’s plate.

“Will I live to see them grown?” Jenny asked the others.

“He’s gone,” said Ezra.

They knew instantly whom he meant. Everyone looked toward Beck’s chair. It was empty. His napkin was tossed aside, one corner dipping into his plate and soaking up gravy.

“Wait here,” Ezra said.

They not only waited; they suspended talk, suspended movement, while Ezra rushed across the dining room and out the front door. There was a pause, during which even the baby said nothing. Then Ezra came back, running his fingers distractedly through his hair. “He’s nowhere in sight,” he said. “But it’s only been a minute. We can catch him! Come on, all of you.”

Still, no one moved.

“Please!” said Ezra. “Please. For once, I want this family to finish a meal together. Why, every dinner we’ve ever had, something has gone wrong. Someone has left in a huff, or in tears, everything’s fallen apart … Come on! Everybody out, cover the area, track him down! We could gather back here when we find him and take up where we left off.”

“Or,” Cody pointed out, “we could finish the meal
without
him. That’s always a possibility.”

But it wasn’t; even he could see that. One empty place at the table ruined everything. The chair itself, with its harp-shaped wooden back, had a desolate, reproachful look. Slowly, people rose. The children grouped around Ezra, who was issuing directives like a military strategist. “You and the little ones try Bushnell Street … rendezvous with Joe on Prima …” Then Ruth stood up too, to take the baby while Jenny put her coat on. They headed for the door. “Good hunting!” Cody called, and he tipped his chair back expansively and asked Mrs. Potter for another glass of wine.

Inwardly, though, he felt chastened. He thought of times in grade school when he’d teased some classmate to tears, taken things a little too far, and then looked around to find that all of his friends had stopped laughing. Wasn’t there the same hollow
silence in this dining room, among these sheeted tables? Mrs. Potter replaced the wine bottle upon a silver-rimmed coaster. She stepped back and folded her hands across her stomach.

“I believe I’ll just go check on how they’re doing,” Cody told her.

Outside, the sky had deepened to a blue that was almost gaudy. A weak sun lit the tops of the buildings, and it didn’t seem so cold. Cody stood with his hands at his hips, his feet spread wide—unperturbed, to all appearances—and looked up and down the street. One section of the search party was just disappearing around a corner: Joe and the teen-agers. A stately black woman with her head wrapped in bandannas had stopped to redistribute the contents of two grocery bags.

Cody took the alley to the right of the doorway, a narrow strip of concrete lined with old packing crates and garbage cans battered shapeless. He passed the restaurant’s kitchen window, where an exhaust fan blew him a memory of Ezra’s lamb. He skirted a spindly, starved cat with a tail as matted as a worn-out bottlebrush. The back of his neck took on that special alertness required on Baltimore streets, but he walked at an easy, sauntering pace with his hands in his trouser pockets.

“Always have a purpose,” his father used to tell him. “Act like you’re heading someplace purposeful, and none of the low-life will mess with you.” He had also said, “Never trust a man who starts his sentences with ‘Frankly,’ ” and “Nine tenths of a good sidearm pitch is in the flick of the wrist,” and, “If you want to sell a person something, look off elsewhere as you’re speaking, not straight into his eyes.”

“All we have is each other,” Ezra would say, justifying one of his everlasting dinners. “We’ve got to stick together; nobody else has the same past that we have.” But in that meager handful of advice offered by Beck Tull—truly the sole advice Cody could remember from him—there didn’t seem much of a past to build on. From the sound of it, you would imagine that the three of them shared only a purposeful appearance, a mistrust of frankness, a deft wrist, and an evasive gaze.

Cody suddenly longed for his son—for Luke’s fair head and
hunched shoulders. (He would rather die than desert a child of his. He had promised himself when he was a boy: anything but that.) He thought back to their goose hunt, where they hadn’t had much to say to each other; they had been shy and standoffish together. He wondered whether Sloan would lend him the cabin again next weekend, so they could give it another try.

He came out on Bushnell—sunnier than the alley and almost empty. He shaded his eyes with his hand and looked around him and—why! There was Luke, as if conjured up, sitting for some reason on the stoop of a boarded-over building. Cody started toward him, walking fast. Luke heard his footsteps and raised his head as Cody arrived. But it wasn’t Luke. It was Beck. His silver hair appeared yellow in the sunlight, and he had taken off his suit coat to expose his white shirt and his sharp, cocked shoulders so oddly like Luke’s. Cody came to a halt.

“I was just looking for the Trailways station,” Beck told him. “I thought I could make it walking, but now I’m not so sure.”

Cody took out his handkerchief to wipe his forehead.

“See, Claudette will be expecting me,” said Beck. “That’s the lady friend I mentioned. I figured I better go on and find a bus. Sorry to eat and run, but you know how it is with women. I told her I’d be home before supper. She’s depending on me.”

Cody replaced the handkerchief.

“I guess she’ll want to get married, after this,” said Beck. “She knows about Pearl’s passing. She’s sure to be making plans.”

He held up his jacket, as if inspecting it for flaws. He folded it carefully, inside out, and laid it over his arm. The lining was something silky, faintly rainbow hued, like the sheen on aging meat.

“To tell the truth,” Beck said, “I don’t much want to marry her. It’s not only that daughter; it’s me. It’s really me. You think I haven’t had girlfriends before? Oh, sure, and could have married almost any one of them. Lots have begged me, ‘Write your wife. Get a divorce. Let’s tie the knot.’ ‘Well, maybe in a while,’ I’d tell them, but I never did. I don’t know, I just never did.”

“You left us in her clutches,” Cody said.

Beck looked up. He said, “Huh?”

“How could you do that?” Cody asked him. “How could you just dump us on our mother’s mercy?” He bent closer, close enough to smell the camphorish scent of Beck’s suit. “We were kids, we were only kids, we had no way of protecting ourselves. We looked to you for help. We listened for your step at the door so we’d be safe, but you just turned your back on us. You didn’t lift a finger to defend us.”

Beck stared past Cody at the traffic.

“She wore me out,” he told Cody finally.

“Wore you out?”

“Used up my good points. Used up all my good points.”

Cody straightened.

“Oh, at the start,” Beck said, “she thought I was wonderful. You ought to have seen her face when I walked into a room. When I met her, she was an old maid already. She’d given up. No one had courted her for years; her girlfriends were asking her to baby-sit; their children called her Aunt Pearl. Then I came along. I made her so happy! There’s my downfall, son. I mean with anyone, any one of these lady friends, I just can’t resist a person I make happy. Why, she might be gap-toothed, or homely, or heavyset—all the better! I expect that if I’d got that divorce from your mother I’d have married six times over, just moving on to each new woman that cheered up some when she saw me, moving on again when she got close to me and didn’t act so pleased any more. Oh, it’s closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son—did I tell you that when you were young? When your mother and I were first married, everything was perfect. It seemed I could do no wrong. Then bit by bit I guess she saw my faults. I’d never hid them, but now it seemed they mattered after all. I made mistakes and she saw them. She saw that I was away from home too much and not enough support to her, didn’t get ahead in my work, put on weight, drank too much, talked wrong, ate wrong, dressed wrong, drove a car wrong. No matter how hard I tried, seemed like everything I did got muddled. Spoiled. Turned into an accident. I’d bring home a simple toy, say, to cheer you all up when I came, and it would somehow start a fight—your mother saying
it was too expensive or too dangerous or too difficult, and the three of you kids bickering over who got to play with it first. Do you recall the archery set? I thought it would be such fun, bring us all together—a family drive to the country, where we’d set up a target on a tree trunk and shoot our bows and arrows. But it didn’t work out like I’d planned. First Pearl claims she’s not athletic, then Jenny says it’s too cold, then you and Ezra get in some kind of, I don’t know, argument or quarrel, end up scuffling, shoot off an arrow, and wing your mother.”

“I remember that,” said Cody.

“Shot her through the shoulder. A disaster, a typical disaster. Then next week, while I’m away, something goes wrong with the wound. I come home from a sales trip and she tells me she nearly died. Something, I don’t know, some infection or other. For me, it was the very last straw. I was sitting over a beer in the kitchen that Sunday evening and all at once, not even knowing I’d do it, I said, ‘Pearl, I’m leaving.’ ”

Cody said, “You mean
that
was when you left?”

“I packed a bag and walked out,” said Beck.

Cody sat down on the stoop.

“See,” said Beck, “what it was, I guess: it was the grayness; grayness of things; half-right-and-half-wrongness of things. Everything tangled, mingled, not perfect any more. I couldn’t take that. Your mother could, but not me. Yes sir, I have to hand it to your mother.”

He sighed and stroked the lining of his jacket.

“I’ll be honest,” he said, “when I left I didn’t think I’d ever care to see you folks again. But later, I started having these thoughts. What do you suppose Cody’s doing now? What’s Ezra up to, and Jenny?’ ‘My family wasn’t so much,’ I thought, ‘but it’s all there really is, in the end.’ By then, it was maybe two, three years since I’d left. One night I was passing through Baltimore and I parked a block away, got out and walked to the house. Pretty near froze to death, standing across the street and waiting. I guess I was going to introduce myself or something, if anybody came out. It was you that came. First I didn’t even know you, wondered if someone else had moved in. Then
I realized it was just that you had grown so. You were almost a man. You came down the walk and you bent for the evening paper and as you straightened, you kind of flipped it in the air and caught it again, and I saw that you could live without me. You could do that carefree a thing, you see—flip a paper and catch it. You were going to turn out fine. And I was right, wasn’t I? Look! Haven’t you all turned out fine—leading good lives, the three of you? She did it; Pearl did it. I knew she would manage. I turned and walked back to my car.

“After that, I just stuck to my own routine. Had a few pals, a lady friend from time to time. Somebody’d start to think the world of me and I would tell myself, ‘I wish Pearl could see this.’ I’d even write her a note, now and then. I’d write and give her my latest address, anyplace I moved to, but what I was really writing to say was, ‘There’s this new important boss we’ve got who regards me very highly.’ Or, ‘There’s a lady here who acts extremely thrilled when I drop by.’ Crazy, isn’t it? I do believe that all these years, anytime I had any success, I’ve kind of, like, held it up in my imagination for your mother to admire. Just take a look at
this
, Pearl, I’d be thinking. Oh, what will I do now she’s gone?”

He shook his head.

Cody, searching for something to say, happened to look toward Prima Street and see his family rounding the corner, opening like a fan. The children came first, running, and the teen-agers loped behind, and the grown-ups—trying to keep pace—were very nearly running themselves, so that they all looked unexpectedly joyful. The drab colors of their funeral clothes turned their faces bright. The children’s arms and legs flew out and the baby bounced on Joe’s shoulders. Cody felt surprised and touched. He felt that they were pulling him toward them—that it wasn’t they who were traveling, but Cody himself.

“They’ve found us,” he told Beck. “Let’s go finish our dinner.”

“Oh, well, I’m not so sure,” Beck said. But he allowed himself to be helped to his feet. “Oh, well, maybe this one last
course,” he said, “but I warn you, I plan to leave before that dessert wine’s poured.”

Cody held on to his elbow and led him toward the others. Overhead, seagulls drifted through a sky so clear and blue that it brought back all the outings of his boyhood—the drives, the picnics, the autumn hikes, the wildflower walks in the spring. He remembered the archery trip, and it seemed to him now that he even remembered that arrow sailing in its graceful, fluttering path. He remembered his mother’s upright form along the grasses, her hair lit gold, her small hands smoothing her bouquet while the arrow journeyed on. And high above, he seemed to recall, there had been a little brown airplane, almost motionless, droning through the sunshine like a bumblebee.