Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (26 page)

Dr. Tul Is Not a Toy

“Whoever’s the first to mention divorce has to take the children,” Jenny said. “This has kept us together more times than I can count.”

She was joking, but the priest didn’t laugh. He may have been too young to catch it. Al he did was shift uncomfortably in his chair. Meanwhile the children mil ed around him like something bubbling, like something churning, and the baby dribbled on his shoes. He withdrew his feet imperceptibly, as if trying not to hurt the baby’s feelings.

“Yet I believe,” he said, appearing to choose his words,

“that you yourself have been divorced, have you not?”

“Twice,” said Jenny. She giggled, but he only looked worried. “And once for Joe here,” she added.

Her husband smiled at her from the sofa.

“If I hadn’t had the foresight to keep my maiden name,” Jenny said, “my medical diploma would read like one of those address books where people have moved a lot.

Names crossed out and added, crossed out and added—a mess! Dr. Jenny Marie Tul Baines Wiley St. Ambrose.” The priest was one of those very blond men with glasslike hair, and his color was so high that Jenny wondered about his blood pressure. Or maybe he was just embarrassed.

“Wel ,” he said.

“Mrs., um—or Dr.—his “Tul .”

“Dr. Tul , I only thought that the… instability, the lack of stability, might be causing Slevin’s problems. The turnover in fathers, you might say.”

“In fathers? What are you talking about?” Jenny asked.

“Slevin’s not my son. He’s Joe’s.”

“Ah?”

“Joe is his father and always has been.”

“Oh, excuse me,” said the priest.

He grew even pinker—as wel he ought, Jenny felt; for slow, plump Slevin with his ashy hair was obviously Joe’s.

Jenny was smal and dark; Joe a massive, blond, bearded bear of a man with Slevin’s slanted blue eyes. (she had often felt drawn to overweight men. They made her feel tidy.) “Slevin,” she told the priest, “is Joe’s by Greta, his previous wife, and so are most of the others you see here.

Al except for Becky; Becky’s mine. The other six are his.” She bent to take the dog’s bone from the baby. “Anyway…

but Joe’s wife, Greta: she left.”

“Left,” said the priest.

“Left me flat,” Joe said cheerful y.

“Cleared clean out of Baltimore. Parked the kids with a neighbor one day, while I was off at work. Hired an Al ied van and departed with al we owned, everything but the children’s clothes in neat little piles on the floor.”

“Oh, my stars,” said the priest.

“Even took their beds. Can you explain that?

Took the crib and the changing table. Only thing I can figure, she was so used to life with children that she real y couldn’t imagine; real y assumed she would need a crib no matter where she went. First thing I had to do when I got home that night was go out and buy a fleet of beds from Sears. They must’ve thought I was opening a motel.”

“Picture it,” Jenny said. “Joe in an apron. Joe mixing Similac. Wel , he was lost, of course. Utterly lost. The way we met: he cal ed me at home in the dead of night when his baby got roseola. That’s how out of touch he was; it’s been twenty years at least since pediatricians made house cal s.

But I came, I don’t know why. Wel , he lived only two blocks away. And he was so desperate—answered the door in striped pajamas, jiggling the baby—his “I fel in love with her the moment she walked in,” said Joe. He stroked his beard; golden frizz flew up around his stubby fingers.

“He thought I was Lady Bountiful,” Jenny said, “bearing a medical bag instead of a basket of food. It’s hard to resist a man who needs you.”

“Need had nothing to do with it,” Joe told her.

“Wel , who admires you, then. He asked if I had children of my own, and how I managed while I worked. And when I said I mostly played it by ear, with teen-aged sitters one minute and elderly ladies the next, my mother fil ing in when she could or my brother or a neighbor, or Becky sometimes just camping in my waiting room with her math assignment

—his “I could see she wasn’t a skimpy woman,” Joe told the priest. “Not rigid. Not constricted. Not that super-serious kind.”

“No,” said the priest, glancing around him. (it hadn’t been a day when Jenny could get to the housework.) Jenny said, “He said he liked the way I let his children crawl al over me. He said his wife had found them irritating, the last few years. Wel , you see how it began. I had promised myself I’d never remarry, Becky and I would rather manage on our own, that’s what I was best at; but I don’t know, there Joe was, and his children. And his baby was so little and so recently abandoned that she turned her head and opened her mouth when I held her horizontal; you could tel she stil remembered. Anyway,” she said, and she smiled at the priest, who real y was shockingly young—a wide-eyed boy, was al .

“How did we get on this subject?”

“Uh, Slevin,” said the priest. “We were discussing Slevin.”

“Oh, yes, Slevin.”

It was a rainy, blowy April afternoon, with the trees turning inside out and beating against the windowpanes, and the living room had reached just that shade of dusk where no one had realized, quite yet, that it was time to switch on the lights. The air seemed thick and grainy. The children were winding down like little clocks and fussing for their suppers; but the priest, lacking children of his own, failed to notice this.

He leaned forward, setting his fingertips together.

“I’ve been concerned,” he said, “by Slevin’s behavior at C.

y. O. meetings. He’s not sociable at al , has no friends, seems moody, withdrawn. Of course it could be his age, but… he’s fourteen, is he?”

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

“Thirteen years old, natural y 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—his

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

“But my point is—his “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? Hel , I’m not even Catholic.”

“Or I don’t suppose you, Dr.

Tul …”

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 real y wouldn’t have the faintest —was She laughed, covering her mouth—a gesture she had.

“Besides,” she said, “it was Greta who was the Catholic.

Slevin’s mother.”

“I see. Wel , the important thing—his “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. “Wel , 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 real y 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.”

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

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

“If you like.”

“Just to gab, I’l say, chew the fat…” Jenny could see that it would never work out.

She walked him to the door, strol ing 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 excel ent 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 hal , 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 smal types I’ve never trusted since. Total y shiftless. Total y 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 tal , trim Bolton Hil 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, warren like, 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 yel owed 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—his “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—his “I’m not on; it’s Dan’s night on. What are they cal ing me for?”

“That’s what I thought, but they said—his 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 cal ed 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 tel ing 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 sal ow 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 al : 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, attack smel . “Slevin?” she cal ed. 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 bel y 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 pul ing him to his feet—a burly boy nearly Jenny’s height and considerably heavier but stil babyish, creamy skinned.

She propel ed him to the door, pushing from behind with both palms flat on the smal 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: “Oh, they had to carry Harry to the jerry, And they had to carry Harry to the shore…”

“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 wel , she decided—even the older ones, who’d acted so wary and hostile tilde 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 smel s like school,” Jenny told Slevin’s teacher. “You can add al the modern conveniences you like— audiovisual things and computers

—it stil smel s like book glue and that cheap gray paper they used to have for arithmetic and also… what’s that other smel ?

There’s another smel besides. I know it but I can’t quite name it.”

“Have a seat, Dr. Tul ,” the teacher said.

“Radiator dust,” said Jenny.

“Pardon?”

“That’s the other smel .”