Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (40 page)

“Only trouble is this lady’s daughter,” Beck told them.

“She’s got this daughter, no-good daughter, thirty-five years old if she’s a day but stil residing at home. Eustacia Lee.

old if she’s a day but stil residing at home. Eustacia Lee.

No good whatsoever. Lost two fingers in a dril press years ago and never worked since, spent her compensation money on a snowmobile. I’m not too sure I want to live with her.”

No one seemed able to think of any comment.

Then Joe arrived. He burst through the door, traveling in an envelope of fresh-smel ing air, carrying the baby and towing a whole raft of children.

Real y there were only three, but it seemed like more; they were so chattery and jumbled. “Mrs. Nesbitt almost didn’t let me out of school,” and “You’l never guess what the baby ate,” and “Phoebe had to stay in for being prejudiced in math.”

“Who’s this?” a child asked, facing Beck.

“Your Grandpa Tul .”

“Oh,” she said, taking a seat. “Do us kids get wine?”

“Joe, I’d like you to meet my father,” Jenny said.

“Real y?” said Joe. “Gosh.” But then he had to figure out the high-chair strap.

The last two children slipped into the empty chairs on either side of Beck. They twined their feet through the rungs, set pointy elbows on the table.

Surrounded, Beck gazed first to his left and then to his right. “Wil you look at this!” he said.

“Pardon?” Jenny asked.

“This group. This gathering. This… assemblage!”

“Oh,” said Jenny, taking a bib from her purse. “Yes, it’s quite a crowd.”

“Eleven, twelve… thirteen… counting the baby, it’s fourteen people!”

“There would have been fifteen, but Slevin’s off at col ege,” Jenny said.

Beck shook his head. Jenny tied the bib around the baby’s neck.

“What we’ve got,” said Beck, “is a… wel , a crew. A whole crew.”

Phoebe, who was religious, started loudly reciting a blessing. Mrs. Potter set a steaming bowl of soup before Beck. He sniffed it, looking doubtful.

“It’s eggplant soup,” Ezra told him.

“Ah, wel , I don’t believe…”

“Eggplant Soup Ursula. A recipe left behind by one of my very best cooks.”

“On this day of death,” Phoebe said, “the least some people could do is let a person pray in silence.”

“She cooked by astrology,” Ezra said. “I’d tel her, “Let’s have the endive salad tonight,” and she’d say, “Nothing vinegary, the stars are wrong,” and up would come some dish I’d never thought of, something I would assume was a clear mistake, but it worked; it always worked. There might be something to this horoscope business, you know? But last summer the stars advised her to leave, and she left, and this place has never been the same.”

“Tel us the secret ingredient,” Jenny teased him.

“Who says there’s a secret ingredient?”

“Isn’t there always a secret ingredient? Some special, surprising trick that you’d only share with blood kin?”

“Wel ,” said Ezra. “It’s bananas.”

“Aha.”

“Without bananas, this soup is nothing.”

“On this day of death,” Phoebe said, “do we have to talk about food?”

“It is not a day of death,” Jenny told her.

“Use your napkin.”

“The thing is,” Beck said. He stopped. “What I mean to say,” he said, “it looks like this is one of those great big, jol y, noisy, rambling… why, families!” The grownups looked around the table. The children went on slurping soup. Beck, who so far hadn’t even dipped his spoon in, sat forward earnestly. “A clan, I’m talking about,” he said. “Like something on TV. Lots of cousins and uncles, jokes, reunions—his “It’s not real y that way at al ,” Cody told him.

“How’s that?”

“Don’t let them mislead you. It’s not the way it appears.

Why, not more than two or three of these kids are even related to you. The rest are Joe’s, by a previous wife. As for me, wel , I haven’t been with these people in years—

couldn’t tel you what that baby’s name is. Is it a boy or a girl, by the way? Was I even informed of its birth?

So don’t count me in your clan. And Becky down there, at the end of the table—his “Becky?” said Beck. “Does she happen to be named for me, by any chance?” Cody stopped, with his mouth open. He turned to Jenny.

“No,” said Jenny, wiping the baby’s chin.

“Her name’s Rebecca.”

“You think we’re a family,” Cody said, turning back. “You think we’re some jol y, situation-comedy family when we’re in particles, torn apart, torn al over the place, and our mother was a witch.”

“Oh, Cody,” Ezra said.

“A raving, shrieking, unpredictable witch,” Cody told Beck. “She slammed us against the wal and cal ed us scum and vipers, said she wished us dead, shook us til our teeth rattled, screamed in our faces. We never knew from one day to the next, was she al right? Was she not? The tiniest thing could set her off. “I’m going to throw you through that window,” she used to tel me. “I’l look out that window and laugh at your brains splashed al over the pavement.” his The main course was set before them, on tiptoe, by Mrs.

Potter and another woman who smiled steadily, as if determined not to hear. But nobody picked up his fork. The baby crooned softly to a mushroom button. The other children watched Cody with horrified, bleached faces, while the grownups seemed to be thinking of something else.

They kept their eyes lowered. Even Beck did.

“It wasn’t like that,” Ezra said final y.

“You’re going to deny it?” Cody asked him.

“No, but she wasn’t always angry. Real y she was angry very seldom, only a few times, widely spaced, that happened to stick in your mind.”

Cody felt drained. He looked at his dinner and found pink-centered lamb and bright vegetables—a perfect arrangement of colors and textures, one of Ezra’s masterpieces, but he couldn’t take a bite.

“Think of the other side,” Ezra told him.

“Think of how she used to play Monopoly with us.

Listened to Fred Al en with us. Sang that little song with you—what was the name of that song you two sang?

Ivy, sweet sweet Ivy… and you’d do a little soft-shoe. The two of you would link arms and soft-shoe into the kitchen.”

“Is that right!” said Beck. “I didn’t remember Pearl could soft-shoe.”

Mrs. Potter poured wine into Cody’s glass.

He set his fingers around the stem but then couldn’t lift it.

He was conscious of Ruth, to his right, watching him with concern.

Then Ezra said, “So! What do you think of this wine, Dad?”

“Oh, afraid I’m not much for wine, son,” said Beck.

“This is a real y good one.”

“Little shot of bourbon is more my style,” said Beck.

“And best of al ’s the dessert wine. They make it with these grapes that have suffered from a special kind of mold, you see—his “Wel , wait now,” Beck said. “Mold?”

“You’re going to love it.”

“And what is this here whitish stuff?”

“It’s kasha.”

“I don’t believe I’ve heard of that.”

“You’l love it,” Ezra said.

Beck shook his head, but he looked gratified, as if he liked to think that Ezra had traveled so far beyond him.

Then Cody pushed his plate away. “I’ve got this partner, Sloan,” he said. “A bachelor al his life. He never married.” Everyone took on an exaggerated attentiveness —even the children.

“Last year,” Cody said, “Sloan ran into some old girlfriend, a woman he’d known years ago, and she had her little daughter with her. They were celebrating the daughter’s birthday. Sloan asked which birthday it was, just making conversation, and when the woman told him, something rang a bel . He calculated the dates, and he said, “Why! My God! She must be mine!” The woman looked over at him, sort of vaguely, and then she col ected her thoughts and said, “Oh. Yes, she is, as a matter of fact.” They waited. Cody smiled and gave them a little salute, implying that they could go back to their food.

“Wel . What a strange lady,” Beck said final y.

“Not at al ,” Cody told him.

“You’d think she’d at least have—his “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 pul 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.

Hiccupping, she was dragged from the high chair and placed on her mother’s lap, where she settled down cheerful y and started pursuing a pea around the rim of Jenny’s plate.

“Wil 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, al of you.”

Stil , 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 fal en 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 Bushnel 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 cal ed, 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 al of his friends had stopped laughing. Wasn’t there the same hol ow 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’l 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 al 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 al ey 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 tel him.

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

“Al 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 Tul —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 Bushnel —sunnier than the al ey 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 yel ow 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.”