Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Page 3

  Then Cody graduated from high school, and Ezra was a sophomore, and Jenny was a tall young lady in eighth grade. Beck would not have known them. And they, perhaps, would not have known Beck. They never asked about him. Didn’t that show how little importance a father has? The invisible man. The absent presence. Pearl felt a twinge of angry joy. Apparently she had carried this off—made the transition so smoothly that not a single person guessed. It was the greatest triumph of her life. My one true accomplishment, she thought. (What a pity there was no one to whom she could boast of it.) Without noticing, even, she had gradually stopped attending the Baptist church. She stopped referring to Beck in conversation—although still, writing her Christmas cards to relatives in Raleigh, she remarked that Beck was doing well and sent them his regards.

  One night, she threw away his letters. It wasn’t a planned decision. She was just cleaning her bureau, was all, and couldn’t think of any good reason to save them. She sat by her bedroom wastebasket and dropped in looks like I will be moving up the ladder and litle place convenient to the railway station and told me I was doing mighty well. There weren’t very many—three or so in the past year. When had she quit ripping open the envelopes with shaking hands and rapidly, greedily scanning the lines? It occurred to her that the man she still mourned, late on sleepless nights, bore no relation whatsoever to the pan who sent these tiresome messages. Ed Ball is retiring in June, she read with infinite boredom, and I step into his territory which has the highest per capitta income in Delaware. It was a great satisfaction to her that he had misspelled capita.

  Her children grew up and embarked on lives of their own. Her sons started helping out financially, and Pearl was glad to accept. (She had never been ashamed about taking money—from Uncle Seward in the olden days, or from Beck, or now from the boys. Where she came from, a woman expected the men to provide.) And when Cody became so successful, he bought the row house she’d been renting all these years and presented her with the deed one Christmas morning. She could have retired from the grocery store right then, but she put it off till her sight began failing. What else would she do with her time? “Empty nest,” they called it. Nowadays, that was the term they used. It was funny, in her old age, to look back and see for how short a period her nest had not been empty. Relatively speaking, it was nothing—empty far longer than full. So much of herself had been invested in those children; who could believe how briefly they’d been with her?

  When she thought of them in their various stages—first clinging to her, then separating and drifting off—she thought of the hall lamp she used to leave on so they wouldn’t be scared in the dark. Then later she’d left just the bathroom light on, further down the hall of whatever house they’d been living in; and later still just the downstairs light if one of them was out for the evening. Their growing up amounted, therefore, to a gradual dimming of the light at her bedroom door, as if they took some radiance with them as they moved away from her. She should have planned for it better, she sometimes thought. She should have made a few friends or joined a club. But she wasn’t the type. It wouldn’t have consoled her.

  Last summer, she’d been half-awakened by a hymn on her clock radio—“In the Sweet Bye and Bye,” mournfully sung by some popular singer just before Norman Vincent Peale’s sermonette. We shall meet on that beautiful shore … She’d slipped into a dream in which a stranger told her that the beautiful shore was Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, where she and Beck and the children had once spent a summer vacation. They were meeting on the shore after changing into swimsuits, for the very first swim of their very first day. Beck was handsome and Pearl felt graceful and the children were still very small; they had round, excited, joyous faces and chubby little bodies. She was astounded by their innocence—by her own and Beck’s as well. She stretched her arms toward the children, but woke. Later, speaking to Cody on the phone, she happened to mention the dream. Wouldn’t it be nice, she said, if heaven were Wrightsville Beach? If, after dying, they’d open their eyes and find themselves back on that warm, sunny sand, everyone young and happy again, those long-ago waves rolling in to shore? But Cody hadn’t entered into the spirit of the thing. Nice? he had asked. He asked, was that all she thought of heaven? Wrightsville Beach, where as he recalled she had fretted for two solid weeks that she might have left the oven on at home? And had she taken into account, he asked, his own wishes in the matter? Did she suppose that he wanted to spend eternity as a child? “Why, Cody, all I meant was—” she said.

  Something was wrong with him. Something was wrong with all of her children. They were so frustrating—attractive, likable people, the three of them, but closed off from her in some perverse way that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. And she sensed a kind of trademark flaw in each of their lives. Cody was prone to unreasonable rages; Jenny was so flippant; Ezra hadn’t really lived up to his potential. (He ran a restaurant on St. Paul Street—not at all what she had planned for him.) She wondered if her children blamed her for something. Sitting close at family gatherings (with the spouses and offspring slightly apart, nonmembers forever), they tended to recall only poverty and loneliness—toys she couldn’t afford for them, parties where they weren’t invited. Cody, in particular, referred continually to Pearl’s short temper, displaying it against a background of stunned, childish faces so sad and bewildered that Pearl herself hardly recognized them. Honestly, she thought, wasn’t there some statute of limitations here? When was he going to absolve her? He was middle-aged. He had no business holding her responsible any more.

  And Beck: well, he was still alive, if it mattered. By now he’d be old. She would bet he’d aged poorly. She would bet he wore a toupee, or false teeth too white and regular, or some flowing, youthful hairdo that made him look ridiculous. His ties would be too colorful and his suits too bold a plaid. What had she ever seen in him? She chewed the insides of her lips. Her one mistake: a simple error in judgment. It should not have had such far-reaching effects. You would think that life could be a little more forgiving.

  Once or twice a year, even now, his letters arrived. (Though the money had stopped when Jenny turned eighteen—or two months after she turned eighteen, which meant he’d lost track of her birthday, Pearl supposed.) It was typical of him that he lacked the taste to make a final exit. He spent too long at his farewells, chatting in the doorway, letting in the cold. He had retired from the Tanner Corporation, he wrote. He remained at his last place of transfer, Richmond, like something washed up from a flood; but evidently he still traveled some. In 1967 he sent her a postcard from the World’s Fair in Montreal, and another in ’72 from Atlantic City, New Jersey. He seemed spurred into action by various overblown occasions—when man first walked on the moon, for instance (an event of no concern to Pearl, or to any other serious person). Well! he wrote. Looks like we made it. His enthusiasm seemed flushed, perhaps alcohol induced. She winced and tore the letter into squares.

  Later, when her eyes went, she saved her mail for Ezra. She’d hold up an envelope. “Where’s this from? I can’t quite make it out.”

  “National Rifle Association.”

  “Throw it away. What’s this?”

  “Republican Party.”

  “Throw it away. And this?”

  “Something in longhand, from Richmond.”

  “Throw it away.”

  He didn’t ask why. None of her children possessed a shred of curiosity.

  She dreamed her uncle hitched up Prince and took her to a medal contest, but she had failed to memorize a piece and stood onstage like a dumb thing with everybody whispering. When she woke, she was cross with herself. She should have done “Dat Boy Fritz”; she’d always been good at dialect. And she knew it off by heart still, too. Her memory had not faded in the slightest. She rearranged her pillow, irritably. Her edges felt uneven, was how she put it to herself. She slept again and dreamed the house was on fire. Her skin dried out from the heat and her hair seemed to sizzle in her ears. Jenny rushed upstairs to sav
e her costume jewelry and her footsteps died away all at once, as if she’d fallen into space. “Stop!” Pearl shouted. She opened her eyes. Someone was sitting next to her, in that leather armchair that creaked. “Jenny?” she said.

  “It’s Ezra, Mother.”

  Poor Ezra, he must be exhausted. Wasn’t it supposed to be the daughter who came and nursed you? She knew she should send him away but she couldn’t make herself do it. “I guess you want to get back to that restaurant,” she told him.

  “No, no.”

  “You’re like a mother hen about that place,” she said. She sniffed. Then she said, “Ezra, do you smell smoke?”

  “Why do you ask?” he said (cautious as ever).

  “I dreamed the house burned down.”

  “It didn’t really.”

  “Ah.”

  She waited, holding herself in. Her muscles were so tense, she ached all over. Finally she said, “Ezra?”

  “Yes, Mother?”

  “Maybe you could just check.”

  “Check what?”

  “The house, of course. Check if it’s on fire.”

  She could tell he didn’t want to.

  “For my sake,” she told him.

  “Well, all right.”

  She heard him rise and shamble out. He must be in his stocking feet; she recognized that shushing sound. He was gone so long that she began to fear the worst. She strained for the roar of the flames but heard only the horns of passing cars, the clock radio’s electric murmur, a bicycle bell tinkling beneath the window. Then here he came, heavy and slow on the stairs. Evidently there was no emergency. He settled into his chair again. “Everything’s fine,” he told her.

  “Thank you, Ezra,” she said humbly.

  “You’re welcome.”

  She heard him pick up his magazine.

  “Ezra,” she said, “I’ve had a thought. Did you happen to check the basement?”

  “Yes.”

  “You went clear to the bottom of the steps.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “I don’t much care for how that furnace sounds.”

  “It’s fine,” he told her.

  It was fine. She resolved to believe him. She soothed herself by wandering, mentally, from one end of the house to the other, cataloguing how well she’d managed. The fireplace flue was shut against the cold. The drains were clear and the faucets were tight and she’d bled the radiators herself—sightless, turning her key back sharply the instant she heard the hiss of water. The gutters were swept and the roof did not leak and the refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. Everything was proceeding according to instructions.

  “Ezra,” she said.

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “You know that address book in my desk.”

  “What address book?”

  “Pay attention, Ezra. I only have the one. Not the little red book for telephone numbers but the black one, in my stationery drawer.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I want everybody in it invited to my funeral.”

  There was a thrumming silence, as if she had said a bad word. Then Ezra said, “Funeral, Mother? You’re not dying?”

  “No, of course not,” she assured him. “But someday,” she said craftily. “Just in the eventuality, you see …”

  “Let’s not talk about it,” he said.

  She paused, assembling patience. What did he expect—that she’d go on forever? It was so tiring. But that was Ezra for you. “All I’m saying,” she said, “is I’d like those people invited. Are you listening? The people in my address book.”

  Ezra didn’t answer.

  “The address book in my stationery drawer.”

  “Stationery drawer,” Ezra echoed.

  Good; he’d got it. He flicked a magazine page, said nothing further, but she knew he’d got it.

  She thought of how that address book must have aged by now—smelling mousy, turning brittle. It dated back to long before her sight had started dimming. Emmaline was in it, and Emmaline had been dead for twenty years or more. So was Mrs. Simmons dead, down in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Uncle Seward’s widow and perhaps his daughter too. Why, everybody in that book was six feet under, she supposed, except for Beck.

  She remembered that he took a whole page—one town after another crossed out. She’d kept it up to date because she’d imagined needing to call him in an emergency. What emergency had she had in mind? She couldn’t think of any that would be eased in the slightest by his presence. She’d like to see his face when he received an invitation to her funeral. An “invite,” he would call it. “Imagine that!” he would say, shocked. “She left me first, after all. Here’s this invite to her funeral.” She could hear him now.

  She laughed.

  The doctor came, stamping his feet. “Is it snowing out?” she asked him.

  “Snowing? No.”

  “You were stamping your feet.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s just cold.” He settled on the edge of her bed. “Feels like my toes are falling off,” he told her. “My knee bones say we’re going to have a frost tonight.”

  She waved away the small talk. “Listen here,” she said. “Ezra called you over by mistake.”

  “Is that so.”

  “I’m really feeling fine. Maybe earlier I was under the weather, but now I’m much improved.”

  “I see,” he said. He took her wrist in his icy, wrinkled fingers. (He was nearly as old as she was, and had all but given up his practice.) He held it for what seemed to be several minutes. Then he said, “How long has this been going on?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Where’s the phone?” he asked Ezra.

  “Wait! Dr. Vincent! Wait!” Pearl cried.

  He had laid down her wrist, but now he set his hand on hers and she felt him leaning over her, breathing pipe tobacco. “Yes?” he said.

  “I’m not going to any hospital.”

  “Of course you’re going.”

  She spoke clearly, maybe a little too loudly, directing her voice toward the ceiling. “Now, I’ve thought this through,” she told him. “I don’t want those crank-up beds and professional smells. It would kill me.”

  “Dear lady—”

  “And you know they wouldn’t be able to give me penicillin.”

  “Penicillin, no …”

  “That’s what I took in forty-three.”

  “Don’t tire yourself,” the doctor said. “I remember all about it.”

  Or maybe it was ’44. But Beck had not yet left. He’d been away on a business trip, and brought back an archery set for the children. The things he spent his money on! When they were never well off, in the best of times. He took the set on their Sunday drive to a field outside the city—nailed the canvas target to a tree trunk. Oh, he never gave a thought to danger. He was not the type to lie awake nights listing all that could go wrong. Well, anyway. She couldn’t say just how it had happened (she was arranging a bouquet of winter grasses at the time, as she no longer partook in sports), but somehow, she got hit. It was Cody who drew the bowstring, but that was incidental; Cody was not the one she had blamed, after the first little flurry. She blamed Beck, who through sheer thoughtlessness if not intention had shot her through the heart; or not the heart exactly but the fleshy part above it, between breast and shoulder. It was the queerest sensation, like being slapped—no sting whatsoever, but a jarring and then a disk of bright blood on her favorite blouse. “Oh!” she said, and she looked down, and went on holding her weeds. Then the pain began. Beck, white faced, pulled the arrow out. Jenny started crying. They drove straight home, forgetting to untack the target from the tree, but by the time they arrived the bleeding had stopped and it appeared there was no real danger. Pearl dressed the wound herself—iodine and gauze. Two days later, she noticed something amiss. The wound was not better but worse, inflamed, and she had a fever. Beck was on another trip, and she had to go to the doctor alone, rushing off breathless and hastily
hatted because she wanted to get home again before the children returned from school. In those days, Dr. Vincent was just building up his practice after a tour of duty in the army. She remembered he still had a full head of hair, and he wasn’t yet wearing glasses. He gave her a shot of penicillin—a miracle drug he’d first used overseas, he said. Walking home, she felt a tremendous sense of well-being, the way you always do when a doctor has taken upon himself the burden of your illness; but that night, she collapsed. First there was a rash, then chills, then a hazy and swarming landscape. It was Cody who called the ambulance. In the hospital, once the crisis was past, everyone acted stern and reproachful, as if it had been her fault. “You almost died,” a nurse told her. But that was nonsense. Of course she wouldn’t have died; she had children. When you have children, you’re obligated to live. She closed her eyes against the nurse’s words. Then two doctors came in and pulled up chairs beside her bed and solemnly, portentously explained about penicillin. She must never, never take it again, and must keep instructions to that effect in her pocketbook at all times. Pearl wasn’t paying much heed (she was framing a request to be released, so she could get on home to her children), but she did remember they said, “Once is your limit. Twice will kill you.” That impressed her. It was like something in a fairy tale—like a magic potion you could use only once and never again. And here she’d wasted it on such a paltry occurrence: a bow-and-arrow wound. No more miracles! In later years, when penicillin was a household word and her grandchildren took it for every little thing, she would go on and on about it. “Lucky you. Poor me. I’d just better not get an infection, is all I can say, or come down with strep throat or pneumonia.”