Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (11 page)

Jenny didn’t tell her about his restaurant.

Twice, after her first visit to Josiah, she looked in on him again. She would stop by the body shop after school, and Josiah would come outside a moment to swing his arms and gaze beyond her and speak of Ezra. “Got a letter from him myself, over at the house. Claimed he was marching a lot.”

“Twenty miles,” Jenny said.

“Some of it uphill.”

“He must be in pretty good shape by now.”

“He always did like to walk.”

The third time she came, it was almost dark. She’d stayed late for chorus. Josiah was just leaving work. He was getting into his jacket, which was made of a large, shaggy plaid in muted shades of navy and maroon. She thought of the jackets that little boys wore in the lower grades of school. “That Tom,” Josiah said, jabbing his fists in his pockets. “That Eddie.” He strode rapidly down the sidewalk. Jenny had trouble keeping up. “They don’t care how they talk to a fellow,” he said. “Don’t give a thought to what he might feel; feelings just like anyone else …”

She dropped back, deciding that he’d rather be alone, but partway down the block he stopped and turned and waited. “Aren’t I a human being?” he asked when she arrived at his side. “Don’t I feel bad if someone shouts at me? I wish I were out in the woods someplace, none of these people to bother me. Camping out in a dead, dead quiet with a little private tent from L. L. Bean and a L. L. Bean sleeping bag.” He turned and rushed on; Jenny had to run. “I’ve half a mind to give notice,” he said.

“Why don’t you, then?”

“My mama needs the money.”

“You could find something else.”

“Oh, no, it isn’t easy.”

“Why not?”

He didn’t answer. They raced past a discount jewelry store, a bakery, a bank of private apartments with inviting yellow windows. Then he said, “Come and have supper at our house.”

“What? Oh, I can’t.”

“Ezra used to come,” he said, “back before he worked in the restaurant and couldn’t get away. My mama was always glad to set an extra plate out, always, anytime. But
your
mother didn’t often let him; your mother doesn’t like me.”

“Oh, well …”

“I wish you’d just have supper with us.”

She paused. Then she said, “I’d be happy to.”

He didn’t seem surprised. (Jenny was astonished, herself.) He grunted and continued to tear along. His whisks of black hair stood out around his head. He led her down a side street, then through an alley that Jenny wasn’t familiar with.

From the front, his house must have been very much like hers—a brick row house set in a tiny yard. But they approached it from the rear, where a tacked-on, gray frame addition gave it a ramshackle look. The addition turned out to be an unheated pantry with a cracked linoleum floor. Josiah stopped there to work himself free of his jacket, and then he reached for Jenny’s coat and hung them both on hooks beside the door. “Mama?” he called. He showed Jenny into the kitchen. “Got company for supper, Mama.”

Mrs. Payson stood at the stove—a small, chubby woman dressed in earth tones. She reminded Jenny of some modest brown bird. Her face was round and smooth and shining. She looked up and smiled, and since Josiah failed to make the introduction Jenny said, “I’m Jenny Tull.”

“Oh, any kin to Ezra?”

“I’m his sister.”

“My, I’m just so fond of that boy,” Mrs. Payson said. She lifted the pot from the stove and set it on the table. “When he was called up I cried, did Josiah tell you? I sat right down and cried. Why, he has been like a son to me, always in and out of the house …” She laid three place settings while Josiah
poured the milk. “I’ll never forget,” she said, “back when Josiah’s daddy died, Ezra came and sat with us, and fixed us meals, and made us cocoa. I said, ‘Ezra, I feel selfish, taking you from your family,’ but he said, ‘Don’t you worry about it, Mrs. Payson.’ ”

Jenny wondered when that could have been. Ezra had never mentioned Mr. Payson’s dying.

Supper was spaghetti and a salad, with chocolate cake for dessert. Jenny ate sparingly, planning to eat again when she got home so her mother wouldn’t guess; but Josiah had several helpings of everything. Mrs. Payson kept refilling his plate. “To look at him,” she said, “you’d never know he eats so much, would you? Skinny as a fence post. I reckon he’s still a growing boy.” She laughed, and Josiah grinned bashfully with his eyes cast down—a skeletal, stooped, hunkering man. Jenny had never thought about the fact that Josiah was somebody’s son, some woman’s greatest treasure. His stubby black lashes were lowered; his prickly head was bent over his plate. He was so certain of being loved, here if no place else. She looked away.

After supper she helped with the dishes, placing each clean plate and glass on open wooden shelves whose edges had grown soft from too many coats of paint. Her mother would be frantic by now, but Jenny lingered over the wiping of each fork. Then Josiah walked her home. “Come back and see us!” Mrs. Payson called from the doorway. “Make sure you’re buttoned up!” Jenny thought of … was it “Jack and the Beanstalk”? … or perhaps some other fairy tale, where the humble widow, honest and warmhearted, lives in a cottage with her son. Everything else—the cold dark of the streets, the picture of her own bustling mother—seemed brittle by comparison, lacking the smoothly rounded completeness of Josiah’s life.

They walked up Calvert Street without talking, puffing clouds of steam. They crossed to Jenny’s house and climbed the porch steps. “Well,” said Jenny, “thank you for inviting me, Josiah.”

Josiah made some awkward, jerky motion that she assumed was an effort toward speech. He stumbled closer, enveloped her
in a circle of rough plaid, and kissed her on the lips. She had trouble, at first, understanding what was happening. Then she felt a terrible dismay, not so much for herself as for Josiah. Oh, it was sad, he had misread everything; he would be so embarrassed! But how could he have made such an error? Thinking it over (pressed willy-nilly against his whiskery chin, against the knobbiness of his mouth), she saw things suddenly from his viewpoint: their gentle little “romance” (was what he must call it), as seamless as the Widow Payson’s fairy tale existence. She longed for it; she wished it were true. She ached, with something like nostalgia, for a contented life with his mother in her snug house, for an innocent, protective marriage. She kissed him back, feeling even through all those layers of wool how he tensed and trembled.

Then light burst out, the front door slammed open, and her mother’s voice broke over them. “What? What! What is the meaning of this?”

They leapt apart.

“You piece of trash,” Pearl said to Jenny. “You tramp. You trashy thing. So this is what you’ve been up to! Not so much as notifying me where you are, supper not started, I’m losing my mind with worry—then here I find you! Necking! Necking with a, with a—”

For lack of a word, it seemed, she struck out. She slapped Jenny hard across the cheek. Jenny’s eyes filled with tears. Josiah, as if it were he who’d been struck, averted his face sharply and stared away at some distant point. His mouth was working but no sound came forth.

“With a crazy! A dummy! A retarded person. You did it to spite me, didn’t you,” Pearl told Jenny. “It’s your way of making mock of me. All these afternoons that I’ve been slaving in the grocery store, you were off in some alleyway, weren’t you, off with this animal, this gorilla, letting him take his pleasure, just to shame me.”

Josiah said, “But-but-but—”

“Just to show me up when I had such great plans for you. Cutting school, no doubt, lying with him in bushes and back
seats of cars and maybe this very house, for all I know, while I’m off slaving at Sweeney Brothers—”

“But! But! Aagh!” Josiah shouted, and he sputtered so that Jenny saw white flecks flying in the lamplight. Then he flung out his scarecrow arms and plunged down the steps and disappeared.

She didn’t see him again, of course. She chose her routes carefully and never again came near him, never approached any place that he was likely to be found; and she assumed he did the same. It was as if, by mutual agreement, they had split the city between them.

And besides, she had no reason to see him: Ezra’s letters stopped. Ezra appeared in person. One Sunday morning, there he was, sitting in the kitchen when Jenny came down to breakfast. He wore his old civilian clothes that had been packed away in mothballs—jeans and a scruffy blue sweater. They hung on him like something borrowed. It was alarming how much weight he had lost. His hair was unbecomingly short and his face was paler, older, shadowed beneath the eyes. He sat slumped, clamping his hands between his knees, while Pearl scraped a piece of scorched toast into the sink. “Jam or honey, which?” she was asking. “Jenny, look who’s here! It’s Ezra, safe and sound! Let me pour you more coffee, Ezra.” Ezra didn’t speak, but he gave Jenny a tired smile.

He’d been discharged, as it turned out. For sleepwalking. He had no memory of sleepwalking, but every night he dreamed the same dream: he was marching through an unchanging terrain of cracked mud flats without a tree or a sprig of grass, with a blank blue bowl of sky overhead. He would set one foot in front of the other and march and march and march. In the morning, his muscles would ache. He’d thought it was from his
waking
marches, till they told him differently. All night, they told him, he roamed the camp, plodding between the rows of cots. Soldiers would stir and sit up and say, “Tull? That you?” and he would leave. He wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t wake, but simply
went someplace else. To some of the soldiers, the youngest ones, his silence was frightening. There were complaints. He was sent to a doctor, who gave him a box of yellow pills. With the pills he still walked, but he would fall down from time to time and just lie where he fell until morning. Once he must have landed on his face; when they roused him, his nose was bloody and they thought it might be broken. It wasn’t, but for several days he had purple circles under his eyes. Then they sent him to a chaplain, who asked if Ezra had anything particular on his mind. Was there some trouble back home, perhaps? Woman trouble? Illness in his family? Ezra said no. He told the chaplain things were fine; he couldn’t for the life of him think what this was all about. The chaplain asked if he liked the army and Ezra said, well, it wasn’t something you would like or dislike; it was something you had to get through, was more to the point. He said the army wasn’t his style, exactly—what with the shouting, the noise—but still, he was coming along. He guessed he was doing all right. The chaplain said just to try not to sleepwalk again, in that case; but the very next night Ezra walked directly into town, four and a half miles in his olive-drab underwear with his eyes wide open but flat as windows, and a waitress in a diner had to wake him up and get her brother-in-law to drive him back to camp. The next day they called another doctor in, and the doctor asked him a series of questions and signed some papers and sent him home. “So here I am,” Ezra said in a toneless voice. “Discharged.”

“But honorably,” said his mother.

“Oh, yes.”

“The thought! All the while this was going on, you never said a word.”

“Well, how could you have helped?” he asked.

The question seemed to age her. She sagged.

After breakfast he went upstairs and fell on his bed and slept through the day, and Jenny had to wake him for supper. Even then he could barely keep his eyes open. He sat groggily swaying, eating almost nothing, nodding off in the middle of a mouthful. Then he went back to bed. Jenny wandered through the
house and fidgeted with the cords of window shades. Was this how he was going to be, now? Had he changed forever?

But Monday morning, he was Ezra again. She heard his little pearwood recorder playing “Greensleeves” before she was even dressed. When she came downstairs he was scrambling eggs the way she liked, with cheese and bits of green pepper, while Pearl read the paper. And at breakfast he said, “I guess I’ll go get my old job back.” Pearl glanced over at him but said nothing. “How come you didn’t call on Mrs. Scarlatti?” Ezra asked Jenny. “She wrote and said you never came.”

Jenny said, “Oh, well, I meant to …”

She lowered her eyes and held her breath, waiting. Now was when he would mention Josiah. But he didn’t. She looked up and found him buttering a piece of toast, and she let out her breath. She was never going to be certain of what Ezra knew, or didn’t know.

By the time Jenny reached college, she’d grown to be the beauty that everyone predicted. Or was it only that she’d come into fashion? Her mirror showed the same face, so far as she could tell, but most of her dormitory’s phone calls seemed to be for her, and if she hadn’t been working her way through school (waiting tables, folding laundry, shelving books in the library stacks), she could have gone out every night. Away from Baltimore, her looks lost a little of their primness. She let her hair grow and she developed a breathless, flyaway air. But she never forgot about medical school. Her future was always clear to her: a straightforward path to a pediatric practice in a medium-sized city, preferably not too far from a coast. (She liked knowing she could get out anytime. Wouldn’t mid-westerners feel claustrophobic?) Friends teased her about her single-mindedness. Her roommate objected to Jenny’s study light, was exasperated by the finicky way she aligned her materials on her desk. In this respect, at least, Jenny hadn’t changed.

Meanwhile, her brother Cody had become a success—shot ahead through several different firms, mainly because of his ideas for using the workers’ time better; and then branched out on his own to become an efficiency expert. And Ezra still worked for Mrs. Scarlatti, but he had advanced as well. He really ran the kitchen now, while Mrs. Scarlatti played hostess out front. Jenny’s mother wrote to say it was a shame, a crime and a shame.
I tell him the longer he piddles about in that woman’s restaurant the harder he’ll find it to get back on track, you know he always intended to go to college …

Pearl still clerked at the grocery store but was better dressed, looking less careworn, since Jenny’s scholarship and part-time jobs had relieved the last financial strain. Jenny saw her twice a year—at Christmas and just before the start of school each September. She made excuses for the other holidays, and during the summers she worked at a clothing shop in a small town near her college. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see her mother. She often thought of her wiry energy, the strength she had shown in raising her children single-handed, and her unfailing interest in their progress. But whenever Jenny returned, she was dampened almost instantly by the atmosphere of the house—by its lack of light, the cramped feeling of its papered rooms, a certain grim spareness. She almost wondered if she had some kind of allergy. It was like a respiratory ailment; on occasion, she believed she might be smothering. Her head grew stuffy, as it did when she had studied too long without a break. She snapped at people. Even Ezra irritated her, with his calm and his docility.