Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (9 page)

“Your cat is
retarded
,” Cody told him.

“Huh?”

“I can’t get her to yawn.”

Ezra reached over, matter-of-factly, and circled the cat with his arm. She gave a luxurious yawn and nestled down against him, and Ezra went back to sleep. Cody didn’t try for another picture, though. He’d never seen anyone take the fun out of things the way Ezra could.

Cody and Ezra and Jenny went shopping for a Christmas present for their mother. Each of them had saved four weeks’ allowance, which meant forty cents apiece, and Cody had a dollar
extra that he’d taken from Miss Saunders’s center desk drawer. That made two dollars and twenty cents—enough for some winter gloves, Cody suggested. Jenny said gloves were boring and she wanted to buy a diamond ring. “That’s really stupid,” Cody told her. “Even you ought to know you can’t buy a diamond ring for two-twenty.”

“I don’t mean a real one, I mean glass. Or anything, just so it’s pretty and not useful.”

They were forced to shop in the stores near home, since they didn’t want to spend money on carfare. It was mid-December and crowds of other people were shopping too—plowing past with their arms full of packages, breathing white clouds in the frosty air. Further downtown the department store windows would be as rich and bright as the insides of jewel boxes, and there’d be carols and clanging brass bells and festoons of tinsel on the traffic lights, but in this neighborhood the shops were smaller, darker, decorated with a single wreath on the door or a cardboard Santa Claus carrying a carton of Chesterfield cigarettes. Soldiers on leave straggled by in clumps, looking lost. The shoppers had something grim and determined about them—even those with the gaudiest packages. They seemed likely to mow down anyone in their path. Cody took a pinch of Jenny’s coat sleeve so as not to lose her.

“I’m serious,” she was saying. “I don’t want to get her anything warm. Anything necessary. Anything—”

“Serviceable,” Ezra said.

They all grimaced.

“If we bought her a ring, though,” Ezra said, “she might feel bad about the wastefulness. She might not really enjoy it.”

Cody hated the radiant, grave expression that Ezra wore sometimes; it showed that he realized full well how considerate he was being. “What do
you
want for Christmas?” Cody asked him roughly. “World peace?”

“World what? I’d like a recorder,” Ezra said.

They crossed an intersection with a swarm of sailors. “Well,” said Cody, “you’re not getting one.”

“I know that.”

“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
 … 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.

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 coarse 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 classmates 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 fashionable 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 sturdy 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 basement 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 undershirts, 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 fashionably 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 assumed 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.”