Anne Tyler - Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“I often wondered about you, Cody,” Beck said, leaning toward him. “I often thought about you after I went away.”

“Oh?” said Cody, politely. “Have you been away?”

His father sat back.

“ Any how,” Ezra said. He cleared his throat. “Well. Dad. Are you still working for the Tanner Corporation?”

“No, no, I’m retired. Retired in sixty-five. They gave me a wonderful banquet and a sterling silver pen-and-pencil set. Forty-two years of service I put in.”

Ruth murmured — an admiring, womanly sound. He turned to her and said, “To tell you the truth, I kind of miss it. Miss the contacts, miss the life … A salesman’s life has a lot of action, know what I mean? Lot of activity. Oftentimes now it doesn’t seem there’s quite enough to keep me busy. But I do a bit of socializing, cardplaying. Got a few buddies at my hotel. Got a lady friend I see.” He peeked around at the others from under his tufted eyebrows. “I bet you think I’m too old for such things,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking! But this is a really fine lady; she puts a lot of stock in me. And you understand I mean no disrespect to your mother, but now that she’s gone and I’m free to remarry …”

Somehow, it had never occurred to Cody that his parents were still married. Jenny and Ezra, too, blinked and drew back slightly.

“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 still residing at home. Eustacia Lee. No good whatsoever. Lost two fingers in a drill 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-smelling air, carrying the baby and towing a whole raft of children. Really 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’ll 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 Tull.”

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

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

“Really?” 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. “Will 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 college,” Jenny said.

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

“What we’ve got,” said Beck, “is a … well, 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, well, 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 tell 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.”

“Tell 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?”

“Well,” 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, jolly, noisy, rambling … why, families! ”

The grown-ups 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—”

“It’s not really that way at all,” 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, well, I haven’t been with these people in years — couldn’t tell 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—”

“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 jolly, situation-comedy family when we’re in particles, torn apart, torn all 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 wall and called us scum and vipers, said she wished us dead, shook us till our teeth rattled, screamed in our faces. We never knew from one day to the next, was she all right? Was she not? The tiniest thing could set her off. ‘I’m going to throw you through that window,’ she used to tell me. ‘I’ll look out that window and laugh at your brains splashed all over the pavement.’ ”

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 grown-ups seemed to be thinking of something else. They kept their eyes lowered. Even Beck did.

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

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

“No, but she wasn’t always angry. Really 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 Allen 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.”