Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant Part 5

"You're getting a cap with turn-down earflaps and a pair of corduroy pants."

"Cody!" said Jenny. "You weren't supposed to tell."

"It doesn't matter," Ezra said.

They separated for a woman who had stopped to fit her child's mittens on. "It used to be," Jenny said, "that we got toys for Christmas, and candy. Remember how nice last Christmas was?"

"This one's going to be nice too," Ezra told her.

"Remember down in Virginia, when Daddy bought us a sled, and Mother said it was silly because it hardly ever snowed but December twenty-sixth we woke up and there was snow all over everything?"

"That was fun," Ezra said.

"We had the only sled in town," Jenny said. "Cody started charging for rides. Daddy showed us how to wax the runners and we pulled it to the top of that hill...What was the name of that hill? It had such a funny-"

Then she stopped short on the sidewalk. Pedestrians jostled all around her. "Why," she said.

Cody and Ezra looked at her.

"He's really not ever coming home again. Is he," she said.

No one answered. After a minute they resumed walking, three abreast, and Cody took a pinch of Ezra's sleeve, too, so they wouldn't drift apart in the crowd.

Cody sorted the mail, setting aside for his mother a couple of envelopes that looked like Christmas cards. He threw away a department store flyer and a letter from his school. He pocketed an envelope with a Cleveland postmark.

He went upstairs to his room and switched on the goose-necked lamp beside his bed. While the lightbulb warmed, he whistled and stared out the window. Then he tested the bulb with his fingers and, finding it hot enough, wrapped the envelope around it and counted slowly to thirty. After that he pried open the flap with ease and pulled out a single sheet of paper and a check.

...says they should be producing to capacity by June of '45...his father wrote. Sorry the enclosed is a little smaller than expected as I have incurred some Sorry the enclosed is a little smaller than expected as I have incurred some...It was his usual letter, nothing different. Cody folded it again and slid it back in the envelope, though it hardly seemed worth the effort. Then he heard the front door slam. "Ezra Tull?" Pearl called. Her cloppy high heels started rapidly up the stairs. Cody tucked the envelope into his bureau and shut the drawer. "Ezra!"

"He's not here," Cody said.

She came to stand in the doorway. "Where is he?" she asked. She was out of breath, untidy-looking. Her hat was on crooked and she still wore her coat.

"He went to get the laundry, like you told him to."

"What do you know about this?"

She bore down on him, holding out a stack of snapshots. The one on top was so blurred and gray that Cody had trouble deciphering it. He took the whole collection from her hand. Ah, yes: Ezra lay in a stupor, surrounded by liquor bottles. Cody grinned. He'd forgotten that picture completely.

"What could it mean?" his mother asked. "I take a roll of film to the drugstore and I come back with the shock of my life. I just wanted to get the camera ready for Christmas. I was expecting maybe some scenes from last summer, or Jenny's birthday cake...and here I find Ezra like a derelict! A common drunk! Could this be what it looks like? Answer me!"

"He's not as perfect as you think he is," Cody told her.

"But he's never given me a moment's worry."

"He's done a lot that might surprise you."

Pearl sat down on his bed. She was shaking her head, looking stunned. "Oh, Cody, it's such a battle, raising children," she said. "I know you must think I'm difficult. I lose my temper, I carry on like a shrew sometimes, but if you could just realize how...helpless I feel! How scary it is to know that everyone I love depends on me! I'm afraid I'll do something wrong."

She reached up-for the photos, he thought, and he held them out to her; but no, what she wanted was his hand. She took it and pulled him down beside her. Her skin felt hot and dry. "I've probably been too hard on you," she said. "But I look to you for support now, Cody. You're the only person I can turn to; it may be you and I are more alike than you think. Cody, what am I going to do?"

She leaned closer, and Cody drew back. Even her eyes seemed to give off heat. "Uh, well..." he said.

"Who took that picture, anyhow? Was it you?"

"Look," he said. "It was a joke."

"Joke?"

"Ezra didn't drink that stuff. I just set some bottles around him."

Her gaze flicked back and forth across his face.

"He's never touched a drop," Cody told her.

"I see," she said. She freed his hand. She said, "Well, all I can say is, that's some joke, young man." Then she stood up and took several steps away from him. "That's some sense of humor you've got," she said.

Cody shrugged.

"Oh, I suppose it must seem very funny, scaring your mother half out of her wits. Letting her babble on like a fool. Slandering your little brother. It must seem hilarious, to someone like you."

"I'm just naturally mean, I guess," Cody said.

"You've been mean since the day you were born," she told him.

After she had walked out, he went to work resealing his father's letter.

Ezra landed on Park Place and Cody said, "Aha! Park Place with one hotel. Fifteen hundred dollars."

"Poor, poor Ezra," Jenny said.

"How'd you do that?" Ezra asked Cody.

"How'd I do what?"

"How'd you get a hotel on Park Place? A minute ago it was mortgaged."

"Oh, I scrimped and saved," Cody said.

"There's something peculiar going on here."

"Mother!" Jenny called. "Cody's cheating again!"

Their mother was stringing the Christmas tree lights. She looked over and said, "Cody."

"What did I do?" Cody asked.

"What did he do, children?"

"He's the banker," Jenny said. "He made us let him keep the bank and the deeds and the houses. Now he's got a hotel on Park Place and all this extra money. It's not fair!"

Pearl set down the box of lights and came over to where they were sitting. She said, "All right, Cody, put it back. Jenny keeps the deeds from now on; Ezra keeps the bank. Is that clear?"

Jenny reached for the deeds. Ezra began collecting the money.

"And I tell you this," Pearl said. "If I hear one more word, Cody Tull, you're out of the game. Forever! Understood?" She bent to help Ezra. "Always cheating, tormenting, causing trouble..." She laid the fives beside the ones, the tens beside the fives. "Cody? You hear what I say?"

He heard, but he didn't bother answering. He sat back and smiled, safe and removed, watching her stack the money.

3.

Destroyed by Love.

I Supposedly, Jenny Tull was going to be a beauty someday, but the people who told her that were so old they might easily be dead by the time that day arrived, and no one her own age saw much promise in her. At seventeen, she was skinny and severe and studious-looking. Her bones were so sharp, they seemed likely to puncture her skin. She had coa.r.s.e dark hair that she was always hacking at, much to her mother's disapproval-one week chopping it to a blunt, square shape; the next week cutting bangs that accidentally slanted toward the left; and then, to correct her error, shortening the bangs so drastically that they appeared damaged and painful. While her cla.s.smates were wearing (in 1952) bouffant skirts and perky blouses with the collars turned up in back, Jenny's clothes were hand-me-downs from her mother: limp, skimpy dresses fas.h.i.+onable in the forties, with too much shoulder and not enough skirt. And since her mother despised the sloppiness of loafers, Jenny's shoes were the same kind of st.u.r.dy brown oxfords that her brothers wore. Every morning she clomped off to school looking uncomfortable and cross. No wonder hardly anyone bothered to speak to her.

She was about to be, for the very first time, the only child at home. Her brother Cody was away at college. Her brother Ezra had refused to go to college and started instead what his mother openly hoped was a temporary job in Scarlatti's Restaurant, chopping vegetables for salads; but just as he was advancing to sauces, notice came that he'd been drafted. None of his family could envision it: placid Ezra slogging through Korea, tripping over his bayonet at every opportunity. Surely something would be wrong with him, some weakness of spine or eyesight that would save him. But no, he was found to be in perfect health, and in February was ordered off to a training camp down south. Jenny sat on his bed while he packed. She was touched by the fact that he was taking along his little pearwood recorder, the one he'd bought with his first week's wages. It didn't seem to her that he had a very clear idea of what he was getting into. He moved in his cautious, deliberate way, sorting out what he would send to the bas.e.m.e.nt for storage. Since their mother had plans for renting his room, he couldn't just leave things as they were. Already his brother Cody's bed was freshly made up for a boarder, the blankets tight as drumskins on the narrow mattress, and Cody's sports equipment was packed away in cartons.

She watched Ezra empty a drawer of unders.h.i.+rts, most of them full of holes. (Somehow, he always managed to look like an orphan.) He had grown to be a large-boned man, but his face was still childishly rounded, with the wide eyes, the downy cheeks, the delicate lips of a schoolboy. His hair seemed formed of layers of silk in various shades of yellow and beige. Girls were always after him, Jenny knew, but he was too shy to take advantage of it-or maybe even to be aware of it. He proceeded through life absentmindedly, meditatively, as if considering some complex mathematical puzzle from which he was bound to look up, you would think, as soon as he found the solution. But he never did.

"After I leave," he told Jenny, "will you stop in at Scarlatti's Restaurant from time to time?"

"Stop in and do what?"

"Well, talk with Mrs. Scarlatti, I mean. Just make sure she's all right."

Mrs. Scarlatti had been without a husband for years, if she'd ever had one, and her only son had recently been killed in action. Jenny knew she must be lonely. But she was a bleak and striking woman, so fas.h.i.+onably dressed that it seemed an insult to her particular section of Baltimore. Jenny couldn't imagine holding a conversation with her. Still, anything for Ezra. She nodded.

"And Josiah too," Ezra said.

"Josiah!"

Josiah was even more difficult-downright terrifying, in fact: Ezra's friend Josiah Payson, close to seven feet tall, excitable, and incoherent. It was generally understood that he wasn't quite right in the head. Back in grade school, the other children had teased him, and they had teased Ezra too and asked Jenny why her brother hung out with dummies. "Everybody knows Josiah should be sent away," they told her. "He ought to go to the crazy house; everybody says so."

She said, "Ezra, I can't talk to Josiah. I wouldn't understand him."

"Of course you'd understand," said Ezra. "He speaks English, doesn't he?"

"He jibbers, he jabbers, he stutters!"

"You must have only seen him when they're picking on him. The rest of the time he's fine. Oh, if Mother'd let me have him to the house once, you would know. He's fine! He's as bright as you or me, and maybe brighter."

"Well, if you say so," Jenny told him.

But she wasn't convinced.

After Ezra was gone, it occurred to her that he'd only mentioned outsiders. He hadn't said anything about taking care of their mother. Maybe he a.s.sumed that Pearl could manage on her own. She could manage very well, it was true, but Ezra's leaving seemed to take something out of her. She delayed the renting of his room. "I know we need the money," she told Jenny, "but I really can't face it right now. It still has his smell. Maybe if I aired it a while...It still has his shape in it, know what I mean? I look in and the air feels full of something warm. I think we ought to wait a bit."

So they lived in the house alone. Jenny felt even slighter than usual, overwhelmed by so much empty s.p.a.ce. In the afternoons when she came home from school, her mother would still be at work, and Jenny would open the door and hesitantly step inside. Sometimes it seemed there was a startled motion, or a stopping of motion, somewhere deep in the house just as she crossed the threshold. She'd pause then, heart thumping, alert as a deer, but it never turned out to be anything real. She'd close the door behind her and go upstairs to her room, turn on her study lamp, change out of her school clothes. She was an orderly, conscientious girl who always hung things up and took good care of her belongings. She would set her books out neatly on her desk, align her pencils, and adjust the lamp so it shone at the proper angle. Then she'd work her way systematically through her a.s.signments. Her greatest dream was to be a doctor, which meant she'd have to win a scholars.h.i.+p. In three years of high school, she had never received a grade below an A.

At five o'clock she would go downstairs to scrub the potatoes or start the chicken frying-whatever was instructed in her mother's note on the kitchen table. Soon afterward her mother would arrive. "Well! I tell you that old Pendle woman is a trial and a nuisance, just a nuisance, lets me ring up all her groceries and then says, 'Wait now, let me see, why, I don't have near enough money for such a bill as this.' Goes fumbling through her ratty cloth change purse while everyone behind her s.h.i.+fts from foot to foot..." She would tie an ap.r.o.n over her dress and take Jenny's place at the stove. "Honey, hand me the salt, will you? I see there's no mail from the boys. They've forgotten all about us, it seems. It's only you and me now."

It was only the two of them, yes, but there were echoes of the others all around-wicked, funny Cody, peaceful Ezra, setting up a loaded silence as Jenny and her mother seated themselves at the table. "Pour the milk, will you, dear? Help yourself to some beans." Sometimes Jenny imagined that even her father made his absence felt, though she couldn't picture his face and had little recollection of the time before he'd left them. Of course she never mentioned this to her mother. Their talk was small talk, little dibs and dabs of things, safely skating over whatever might lie beneath. "How is that poor Carroll girl, Jenny? Has she lost any weight that you've noticed?"

Jenny knew that, in reality, her mother was a dangerous person-hot breathed and full of rage and unpredictable. The dry, straw texture of her lashes could seem the result of some conflagration, and her pale hair could crackle electrically from its bun and her eyes could get small as hatpins. Which of her children had not felt her stinging slap, with the claw-encased pearl in her engagement ring that could b.l.o.o.d.y a lip at one flick? Jenny had seen her hurl Cody down a flight of stairs. She'd seen Ezra ducking, elbows raised, warding off an attack. She herself, more than once, had been slammed against a wall, been called "serpent," "c.o.c.kroach," "hideous little sniveling guttersnipe." But here Pearl sat, decorously inquiring about Julia Carroll's weight problem. Jenny had a faint, tremulous hope that times had changed. Perhaps it was the boys' fault. Maybe she and her mother-intelligent women, after all-could live without such scenes forever. But she never felt entirely secure, and at night, when Pearl had placed a kiss on the center of Jenny's forehead, Jenny went off to bed and dreamed what she had always dreamed: her mother laughed a witch's shrieking laugh; dragged Jenny out of hiding as the n.a.z.is tramped up the stairs; accused her of sins and crimes that had never crossed Jenny's mind. Her mother told her, in an informative and considerate tone of voice, that she was raising Jenny to eat her.

Cody wrote almost never, and what letters he did write were curt and factual. I won't be coming home for spring vacation. All my grades are fine except French. This new job pays better than the old one did I won't be coming home for spring vacation. All my grades are fine except French. This new job pays better than the old one did. Ezra sent a postcard the moment he arrived in camp, and followed that three days later with a letter describing his surroundings. It was longer than several of Cody's put together, but still it didn't tell Jenny what she wanted to know. There's somebody two blocks down who's from Maryland too I hear but I haven't had a chance to talk to him and I don't think There's somebody two blocks down who's from Maryland too I hear but I haven't had a chance to talk to him and I don't think he's from Baltimore anyway but some other place I wouldn't know about so I doubt we'd have much to... he's from Baltimore anyway but some other place I wouldn't know about so I doubt we'd have much to... What was he saying, exactly? Had he, or had he not, made any friends? If people lived so close together, you'd think they would have talked. Jenny pictured the others ignoring him, or worse: tormenting him and making fun of his incompetence. He simply was not a soldier. But What was he saying, exactly? Had he, or had he not, made any friends? If people lived so close together, you'd think they would have talked. Jenny pictured the others ignoring him, or worse: tormenting him and making fun of his incompetence. He simply was not a soldier. But I have learned right much about my rifle I have learned right much about my rifle, he wrote. Cody would be surprised Cody would be surprised. She tried to imagine his long, sensitive fingers cleaning and oiling a gun. She understood that he must be surviving, more or less, but she couldn't figure out how. She thought of him on his belly, in the dust of the rifle range, squeezing a trigger. His gaze was so reflective, how would he hit a target? They say the whole bunch of us will be joining the Korean Conflict as soon as we are They say the whole bunch of us will be joining the Korean Conflict as soon as we are...Why, they'd pick him off like a fly! He'd never do more to defend himself than dodge and s.h.i.+eld his head.

I think a lot about Scarlatti's Restaurant and how nice the lettuce smelled when I tore it into the bowl, he wrote-his only mention of homesickness, if that was what it was. Pearl gave a jealous sniff. "As if lettuce had a smell!" Jenny was jealous too; he could have remembered, instead, how he and she used to lie on the floor in front of the Philco on Monday nights, listening to the Cities Service Band of America. What did he see in that restaurant, anyhow? Then a little k.n.o.b of discomfort started nudging inside her chest. There was something she hadn't done, something unpleasant that she didn't want to do...Check on Mrs. Scarlatti. She wondered if Ezra had really meant for her to keep her promise. He couldn't actually expect that of her, could he? But she supposed he could. He was a literal-minded kind of person.

So she folded Ezra's letter and put it in her pocket. Then she slipped her coat on and walked to St. Paul Street, to a narrow brick building set in a strip of shops and businesses.

Scarlatti's was the neighborhood's one formal elegant eating place. It served only supper, mostly to people from better parts of the city. At this hour-five-thirty or so-it wouldn't even be open. She went to the rear, where she'd been a couple of times with Ezra. She circled two garbage cans overflowing with wilted greens, and she climbed the steps and knocked on the door. Then she cupped a hand to the windowpane and peered in.

Men in dirty ap.r.o.ns were rus.h.i.+ng around the kitchen, which was a ma.s.s of steam and stainless steel, pot lids clattering, bowls as big as birdbaths heaped with sliced vegetables. No wonder they hadn't heard her. She turned the k.n.o.b, but the door was locked. And before she could knock any harder, she caught sight of Mrs. Scarlatti. She was slouched in the dining room entranceway, holding a lit cigarette-a white-faced woman in a stark black knife of a dress. Whatever she was saying, Jenny couldn't catch it, but she heard the gravelly, careless sound of her voice. And she saw how Mrs. Scarlatti's black hair was swept completely to the right, like one of those extreme Vogue magazine model's, and how she leaned her head to the right as well so that she seemed to be burdened, cruelly misused, bearing up under an exhausting weight that had something to do with men and experience. Imagine Ezra knowing such a person! Imagine him at ease with her, close enough to worry about her. Jenny backed away. She understood, all at once, that her brothers had grown up and gone. Her mental pictures of them were outdated-Ezra playing the bamboo whistle he used to have in grade school, Cody triumphantly rattling his dice over their old Monopoly board. She thought of a faded flannel s.h.i.+rt that Ezra had worn so often, it was like a second skin. She thought of how he would rock back and forth with his hands in his rear pockets when he was lost for something to say, or dig a hole in the ground with his sneaker. And how when Jenny was shattered by one of their mother's rages, he would slip downstairs to the kitchen and fix her a mug of hot milk laced with honey, sprinkled over with cinnamon. He was always so quick to catch his family's moods, and to offer food and drink and unspoken support.

She traveled down the alley and, instead of heading home, took Bushnell Street and then Putnam. It was getting colder; she had to b.u.t.ton her coat. Three blocks down Putnam stood a building so weathered and dismal, you'd think it was an abandoned warehouse till you saw the sign: TOM 'N' EDDIE'S BODY SHOP TOM 'N' EDDIE'S BODY SHOP. She had often come here to fetch Ezra home, but she'd only called his name at the drive-in doorway; she had never been inside. Now she stepped into the gloom and looked around her. Tom and Eddie (she a.s.sumed) were talking to a man in a business suit; one of them held a clipboard. In the background, Josiah Payson swung a gigantic rubber mallet against the fender of a pickup. Jenny was. .h.i.t by a piece of memory, a mystifying fragment: Josiah in the school yard, long ago, violently flailing a pipe or a metal bar of some sort, cutting a desperate, whizzing circle in the air and shouting something unintelligible while Ezra stood guard between him and a mob of children. "Everything will be fine; just go away," Ezra was telling the others. But what had happened next? How had it ended? How had it started? She felt confused. Meanwhile Josiah swung his mallet. He was grotesquely tall, as gaunt as the armature for some statue never completed. His cropped black hair bristled all over his head, his skull of a face glistened, and he clenched a set of teeth so ragged and white and crowded, so jumbled together and overlapping, that it seemed he had chewed them up and was preparing to spit them out.

"Josiah," she called timidly.

He stopped to look at her. Or was he looking someplace else? His eyes were dead black-lidless and almost Oriental. It was impossible to tell where they were directed. He heaved the hammer onto a stack of burlap bags and lunged toward her, his face alight with happiness. "Ezra's sister!" he said. "Ezra!"

She smiled and hugged her elbows.

Directly in front of her, he came to a halt and smoothed his stubble of hair. His arms seemed longer than they should have been. "Is Ezra okay?" he asked her.

"He's fine."

"Not wounded or-"

"No."

Ezra was right: Josiah spoke as distinctly as anyone, in a grown man's rumbling voice. But he had trouble finding something to do with his hands, and ended up sc.r.a.ping them together as if trying to rid his palms of dirt or grease, or even of a layer of skin. She was aware of Tom and Eddie glancing over at her curiously, losing track of their conversation. "Come outside," she told Josiah. "I'll let you see his letter."

Outside it was twilight, almost too dark to read, but Josiah took the letter anyway and scanned the lines. There was a crease between his eyebrows as deep as if someone had pressed an ax blade there. She noticed that his coveralls, pathetically well washed, were so short for him that his fallen white socks and hairy s.h.i.+nbones showed. His lips could barely close over that chaos of teeth; his mouth had a bunchy look and his chin was elongated from the effort.

He handed the letter back to her. She had no way of knowing what he had got out of it. "If they'd let me," he said, "I'd have gone with him. Oh, I wouldn't mind going. But they claimed I was too tall."

"Too tall?"

She'd never heard of such a thing.

"So I had to stay behind," he said, "but I didn't want to. I don't want to work in a body shop all my life; I plan to do something different."