Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

7 Dr. Tull 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. All he did was shift uncomfortably in his chair. Meanwhile the children milled 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 Tull 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. “Well,” he said. “Mrs., um — or Dr.—”

“Tull.”

“Dr. Tull, 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 well he ought, Jenny felt; for slow, plump Slevin with his ashy hair was obviously Joe’s. Jenny was small 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. All 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 cheerfully. “Cleared clean out of Baltimore. Parked the kids with a neighbor one day, while I was off at work. Hired an Allied van and departed with all 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 really couldn’t imagine; really 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. Well, he was lost, of course. Utterly lost. The way we met: he called 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 calls. But I came, I don’t know why. Well, he lived only two blocks away. And he was so desperate — answered the door in striped pajamas, jiggling the baby—”

“I fell 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.

“Well, 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 filling in when she could or my brother or a neighbor, or Becky sometimes just camping in my waiting room with her math assignment—”

“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 all over me. He said his wife had found them irritating, the last few years. Well, 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 tell she still remembered. Anyway,” she said, and she smiled at the priest, who really was shockingly young — a wide-eyed boy, was all. “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 all, 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, naturally 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—”

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

“But my point is—”

“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? Hell, I’m not even Catholic.”

“Or I don’t suppose you, Dr. Tull …”

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 really wouldn’t have the faintest—” She laughed, covering her mouth — a gesture she had. “Besides,” she said, “it was Greta who was the Catholic. Slevin’s mother.”

“I see. Well, the important thing—”

“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. “Well, 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 really 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.”

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

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

“If you like.”

“Just to gab, I’ll say, chew the fat …”

Jenny could see that it would never work out.

She walked him to the door, strolling 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 excellent 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 hall, 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 small types I’ve never trusted since. Totally shiftless. Totally 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 tall, trim Bolton Hill 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, warrenlike, 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 yellowed 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—”

“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—”

“I’m not on; it’s Dan’s night on. What are they calling me for?”

“That’s what I thought, but they said—”

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 called 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 telling 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 sallow 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 all: 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, atticky smell. “Slevin?” she called. 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 belly 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 pulling him to his feet — a burly boy nearly Jenny’s height and considerably heavier but still babyish, creamy skinned. She propelled him to the door, pushing from behind with both palms flat on the small 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:

“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 well, she decided — even the older ones, who’d acted so wary and hostile 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 smells like school,” Jenny told Slevin’s teacher. “You can add all the modern conveniences you like — audiovisual things and computers — it still smells like book glue and that cheap gray paper they used to have for arithmetic and also … what’s that other smell? There’s another smell besides. I know it but I can’t quite name it.”

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

“Radiator dust,” said Jenny.

“Pardon?”

“That’s the other smell.”

“I called you in for a purpose,” said the teacher, opening the file that lay before her. She was a tiny thing, surely not out of her twenties, perky and freckled with horn-rimmed glasses dwarfing her pointed nose. Jenny wondered how she’d learned to be so intimidating so quickly. “I know you’re a busy woman, Dr. Tull, but I’m genuinely anxious about Slevin’s school performance and I thought you ought to be informed.”

“Oh, really?” Jenny said. She decided she would feel better if she too wore glasses, though hers were only needed for reading. She dug through her purse and a pink plastic pacifier fell out. She pretended it hadn’t happened.

“Slevin is very, very intelligent,” the teacher said. She glared at Jenny accusingly. “He goes straight off the top of the charts.”

“Yes, I figured that.”

“But his English average …” the teacher said, flipping through papers. “It’s F. Well, maybe D minus.”

Jenny clicked her tongue.

“Math: C. History: D. And science … and gym … He’s had so many absences, I finally asked if he’d been cutting school. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said — came right out with it. ‘What did you cut?’ I asked him. ‘February,’ he said.”

Jenny laughed. The teacher looked at her.

Jenny straightened her glasses and said, “Do you think it might be puberty?”

“All these children are going through puberty,” the teacher told her.

“Or … I don’t know; boredom. You said yourself he’s intelligent. Why, you ought to see him at home! Monkeying around with machinery, wiring stereos … He’s got a tape recorder of his own, he worked for it and bought it himself, some superduper model, offhand I can’t think of the name. I’m such a dunce about these things, when he talked about head cleaners I thought he meant shampoo; but Slevin knows all about it and—”

“Mr. Davies suggests,” said the teacher, “—that’s our assistant principal — he suggests that Slevin may be experiencing emotional problems due to the adjustments at home.”

“What adjustments?”

“He says Slevin’s mother abandoned him and Slevin was moved to your household almost immediately thereafter and had to get used to a brand-new mother and sister.”

“Oh, that,” said Jenny, waving her hand.

“Mr. Davies suggests that Slevin might need professional counseling.”

“Nonsense,” Jenny said. “What’s a little adjustment? And anyhow, that happened a good six months ago. It’s not as if … why, look at my daughter! She’s had to get used to seven new people and she’s never said a word of complaint. Oh, we’re all coping! In fact my husband was saying, just the other day, we should think about having more children now. We ought to have at least one joint child, he says, but I’m not so sure myself. After all, I’m thirty-six years old. It probably wouldn’t be wise.”

“Mr. Davies suggests—”

“Though I suppose if it means so much to him, it’s all the same to me.”

“The same!” said the teacher. “What about the population explosion?”

“The what? You’re getting me off the subject, here … My point is,” Jenny said, “I don’t see the need to blame adjustment, broken homes, bad parents, that sort of thing. We make our own luck, right? You have to overcome your setbacks. You can’t take them too much to heart. I’ll explain all that to Slevin. I’ll tell him this evening. I’m certain his grades will improve.”

Then she bent to pick up the pacifier, and shook hands with the teacher and left.

On the wall in Jenny’s office was a varnished wooden plaque: DR. TULL IS NOT A TOY. Joe had made it for her in his workshop. He was incensed by the scrapes and bruises that Jenny gathered daily in her raucous games with her patients. “Make them show some respect,” he told her. “Maintain a little dignity.” But the sign was all but lost among her patients’ snapshots (on beaches, on seesaws, on photographers’ blanketed tables, or behind lit birthday cakes) and the crayoned self-portraits they’d brought her. Anyhow, most of them were too young to read. She scooped up Billy Burnham and carried him, squawking and giggling, to the nurse for his tetanus shot. “Now, it’s possible,” she called back to Mrs. Burnham, “that tonight he’ll experience a little soreness in his left—” Billy squirmed, and a button popped off Jenny’s white coat.

The Albright baby was due for a DPT shot. The Carroll baby had to have her formula switched. Lucy Brandon’s constant sniffle looked like an allergy; Jenny told Mrs. Brandon where she could take her for testing. Both the Morris twins’ tonsils were swollen.

She asked the receptionist to order her a sandwich, but the receptionist said, “Aren’t you eating out? Your brother’s here; he’s been waiting half an hour, at least.”

“Oh, my Lord, I forgot all about him,” Jenny said. She went into the waiting room. Ezra was seated on the vinyl couch, surrounded by pull toys and building blocks and oilcloth picture books. A family of Spanish-speaking children, probably patients of Dr. Ramirez, played at his feet, but you’d never mistake Ezra for a parent. His shaggy yellow hair was soft as a child’s; he wore faded work clothes, and his face was wide and expectant.

“Ezra, honey,” Jenny told him, “I clean forgot. My next appointment’s in twenty minutes; do you suppose we could just grab a hamburger?”

“Oh, surely,” Ezra said.

He waited while she took off her white coat and put on a raincoat. Then they rode the elevator down to the marble-paved lobby, and pushed through the revolving door onto a spattery, overcast street. There was a smell like wet coal. Huddled people hurried by and buses wheezed and cathedral bells rang far away.

“I feel dumb,” Jenny said, “taking you of all people to a humburger joint.”

She was thinking of his restaurant, which always intimidated her a little. Recently, Ezra had remodeled the living quarters above it into a series of tiny, elegant private dining rooms like those in old movies — the velvet-hung compartments where the villain attempts to seduce the heroine. They’d be perfect for anniversary couples, Ezra said. (Like most unmarried men, he was comically, annoyingly sentimental about marriage.) But so far, only business groups and heavily jeweled Baltimore politicians had asked to use the rooms.

Now he said, “A hamburger’s fine; I’m crazy about hamburgers.” And when they walked through the plate glass doorway, into a slick, tiled area lined with glaring photos of onion rings and milkshakes, he looked around him happily. Secretaries clustered at some tables, construction workers at others. “It’s getting like a collective farm,” Ezra said. “All these chain places that everyone comes to for breakfast, lunch, sometimes supper … like a commune or a kibbutz or something. Pretty soon we won’t have private kitchens at all; you just drop by your local Gino’s or McDonald’s. I kind of like it.”

Jenny wondered if there were any eating place he wouldn’t like. At a soup kitchen, no doubt, he’d be pleased by the obvious hunger of the customers. At a urine-smelling tavern he’d discover some wonderful pickled eggs that he’d never seen anywhere else. Oh, if it had to do with food, he was endlessly appreciative.

While he ordered for them, she settled herself at a table. She took off her raincoat, smoothed her hair, and scraped at a Pablum spot on her blouse. It felt strange to be sitting alone. Always there was someone — children, patients, colleagues. The empty space on either side of her gave her an echoing, weightless feeling, as if she lacked ballast and might at any moment float upward.

Ezra returned with their hamburgers. “How’s Joe?” he asked, sitting down.

“Oh, fine. How’s Mother?”

“Doing well, sends her love … I brought you something,” he said. He set aside his burger to rummage through his windbreaker pockets. Eventually, he came up with a worn white envelope. “Pictures,” he said.

“Pictures?”

“Photos. Mother’s got all these photos; I just discovered them. I thought maybe you’d be interested in having a few.”

Jenny sighed. Poor Ezra: he was turning into the family custodian, tending their mother and guarding their past and faithfully phoning his sister for lunch. “Why don’t you keep them,” she said. “You know I’d just lose them.”

“But a lot of these are of you,” he said. He spilled the envelope onto the table. “I figured the children might like them. For instance, somewhere here …” He shuffled various versions of a younger, sterner Jenny. “Here,” he said. “Don’t you see Becky in this?”

It was Jenny in a plaid tam-o’-shanter, unsmiling. “Ugh,” she said, stirring her coffee.

“You were a really nice little girl,” said Ezra. He returned to his burger but kept the photo before him. On the back of it, Jenny saw, something had been written in pencil. She tried to make it out. Ezra noticed and said, “Fall, 1947. I got Mother to write the dates down. And I’m going to send Cody some, too.”

Jenny could just imagine Cody’s face when he got them. “Ezra,” she said, “to tell the truth, I wouldn’t waste the postage.”

“Don’t you think he’d like to compare these with how Luke looks, growing up?”

“Believe me,” she said, “he’d burn them. You know Cody.”

“Maybe he’s changed,” Ezra said.

“He hasn’t,” said Jenny, “and I doubt he ever will. Just mention something — one little harmless memory from our childhood — and his mouth turns down. You know how his mouth does. I said to him once, I said, ‘Cody, you’re no better than the Lawsons.’ Remember the Lawsons? They moved into our neighborhood from Nashville, Tennessee, and the very first week all four childlren got mumps. Mrs. Lawson said, ‘This city is unlucky, I believe.’ The next week a pipe in their basement burst and she said, ‘Well, that’s Baltimore.’ Then their daughter broke her wrist … When they moved back to Tennessee, I went over to say goodbye. They were loading up their car trunk and they happened to slam the lid down smack on the fingers of their youngest boy. When they drove off he was screaming, and Mrs. Lawson called out, ‘Isn’t this a fitting way to leave? I always did say Baltimore was unlucky.’ ”

“Well, now, I’m trying to follow you, here,” Ezra said.

“It’s whether you add up the list or not,” Jenny said. “I mean, if you catalogue grudges, anything looks bad. And Cody certainly catalogues; he’s ruining his life with his catalogues. But after all, I told him, we made it, didn’t we? We did grow up. Why, the three of us turned out fine, just fine!”

“It’s true,” said Ezra, his forehead smoothing. “You especially, Jenny. Look at you: a doctor.”

“Oh, shoo, I’m nothing but a baby weigher,” Jenny said. But she was pleased, and when they rose to go she took along the photographs to make him happy.

Joe said if they did have a baby, he’d like it to be a girl. He’d looked around and noticed they were a little short on girls. “How can you say that?” Jenny asked. She ticked the girls off on her fingers: “Phoebe, Becky, Jane …”

When her voice trailed away, he stood watching her. She was expecting him to speak, but he didn’t. “Well?” she asked.

“That’s only three.”

She felt a little rush of confusion. “Have I left one out?”

“No, you haven’t left one out. Has she left one out,” he told the wall. He snorted. “Has she left one out, she asks. What a question! No, you haven’t left one out. Three is all we have. Three girls.”

“Well, there’s no need to act so cross about it.”

“I’m not cross, I’m frustrated,” he said. “I’m trying to have a conversation here.”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

“Yes, yes …”

“Then where’s the problem?”

He wouldn’t say. He stood in the kitchen doorway with his arms folded tight across his chest. He gazed off to one side, scowling. Jenny was puzzled. Were they quarreling, or what? When the silence stretched on, she gradually, imperceptibly returned to slicing the cucumbers for supper. She brought the knife down as quietly as possible, and without a sound scooped the disks of cucumber into a bowl. (When she and Joe had first met, he’d said, “Do you put cucumber on your skin?” “Cucumbers?” she’d asked, astonished. “You look so cool,” he told her, “I thought of this bottle of cucumber milk my aunt used to keep on her vanity table.”)

Two of the children, Jacob and Peter, were playing with the Ouija board in front of the refrigerator. Jenny had to step over them when she went to get the tomatoes. “Excuse me,” she told them. “You’re in my way.” But they ignored her; they were intent on the board. “What will I be when I grow up?” Jacob asked, and he set his fingertips delicately upon the pointer. “Upper middle class, middle middle class, or lower middle class: which?”

Jenny laughed, and Joe glared at her and wheeled and stamped out of the kitchen.

On the evening news, a helicopter crewman who’d been killed in Laos was buried with full military honors. An American flag, folded into a cushiony triangle, was handed to the parents — a gray-haired, square-chinned gentleman and his fragile wife. The wife wore a trim beige raincoat and little white gloves. It was she who accepted the flag. The husband had turned away and was weeping, would not even say a few words to the microphone somebody offered him. “Sir? Sir?” a reporter asked.

One white glove reached out and took the microphone. “What my husband means to say, I believe,” the wife declared in a feathery, Southern voice, “is we thank all those who’ve gathered here, and we know we’re just going to be fine. We’re strong, and we’re going to be fine.”

“Hogwash,” Slevin said.

“Why, Slevin,” said Jenny. “I didn’t know you were political.”

“I’m not; it’s just a bunch of hogwash,” he told her. “She ought to say, ‘Take your old flag! I object! I give up!’ ”

“My goodness,” Jenny said mildly. She was sorting Ezra’s photos; she held one out to distract him. “Look,” she said. “Your Uncle Cody, at age fifteen.”

“He’s not my uncle.”

“Of course he is.”

“He’s not my real uncle.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew him. You’d like him,” Jenny said. “I wish he’d come for a visit. He’s so … un-brotherly or something; I don’t know. And look!” she said, alighting on another photo. “Isn’t my mother pretty?”

“I think she looks like a lizard,” Slevin said.

“Oh, but when she was a girl, I mean … isn’t it sad how carefree she was.”

“Half the time, she forgets my name,” Slevin said.

“Well, she’s old,” Jenny told him.

“Not that old. What she’s saying is, I’m not worth her bother. Old biddy. Sits at the head of the table with a piece of bread on her plate and sets both hands down flat and just stares around at us, stares around, face like one of those rotating fans, waiting for the butter but never asking, never saying a word. Till finally you or Dad says, ‘Mother? Could we pass you the butter?’ and she says, ‘Why, thank you,’ like she was wondering when you’d realize.”

“She hasn’t had an easy life,” Jenny said.

“I wish just once we’d get all through the meal and nobody offer her the butter.”

“She raised us on her own, you know,” Jenny told him. “Don’t you think it must have been hard? My father walked out and left her when I was nine years old.”

“He did?” Slevin asked. He stared at her.

“He left her, absolutely. We never set eyes on him again.”

“Bastard,” Slevin said.

“Oh, well,” said Jenny. She leafed through some more photos.

“Jesus! These people! They try to do you in.”

“You’re overreacting,” Jenny told him. “I can’t even remember the man, if you want to know the truth. Wouldn’t know him if I saw him. And my mother managed fine. It all worked out. Look at this, Slevin: see Ezra’s old-fashioned haircut?”

Slevin shrugged and switched the TV channel.

“And see what I was like at your age?” She handed him the picture with the tam-o’-shanter.

He glanced over. He frowned. He said, “Who did you say that was?”

“Me.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is. Me at thirteen. Mother wrote the date on the back.”

“It’s not!” he said. His voice was unusually high; he sounded like a much younger child. “It isn’t! Look at it! Why, it’s like a … concentration camp person, a victim, Anne Frank! It’s terrible! It’s so sad!”

Surprised, she turned the photo around and looked again. True, the picture wasn’t particularly happy — it showed a dark little girl with a thin, watchful face — but it wasn’t as bad as all that. “So what?” she asked, and she held it out to him once more. He drew back sharply.

“It’s somebody else,” he told her. “Not you; you’re always laughing and having fun. It’s not you.”

“Oh, fine, it’s not me, then,” she said, and she returned to the rest of the photos.

“I want to talk to you about that oldest boy,” her mother said on the phone. “What’s his name? Kevin?”

“Slevin, Mother. Honestly.”

“Well, he stole my vacuum cleaner.”

“He did what?”

“Sunday afternoon, when you all came to visit, he slipped into my pantry and made off with my Hoover upright.”

Jenny sat down on her bed. She said, “Let me get this straight.”

“It’s been missing all week,” her mother said, “and I couldn’t understand it. I knew we hadn’t been burglarized, and even if we had, what would anyone want with my old Hoover?”

“But why accuse Slevin?”

“My neighbor told me, just this afternoon. Mrs. Arthur. Said, Was that your grandson I saw Sunday? Kind of hefty boy? Loading your Hoover upright into your daughter’s car trunk?’ ”

“That’s impossible,” Jenny said.

“Now, how do you know that? How do you know what is or is not possible? He’s hardly more than a stranger, Jenny. I mean, you got those children the way other people get weekend guests.”

“You’re exaggerating,” Jenny told her.

“Well, all I ask is for you to go check Slevin’s bedroom. Just check.”

“What, this minute?”

“There’s lint specks all over my carpet.”

“Oh, all right,” Jenny said.

She laid the receiver on her pillow and climbed from the second floor to the third. Slevin’s door was open and he wasn’t in his room, although his radio rocked with the Jefferson Airplane. She stepped stealthily over Slevin’s knapsack, avoided a teetering pile of Popular Science magazines, opened his closet door, and found herself staring at her mother’s vacuum cleaner. She would know it anywhere: an elderly machine with a gray cloth dust bag. Its cord was coiled neatly and it seemed unharmed. If he’d taken it apart to learn how it worked, she might have understood. Or if he’d smashed it, out of some rage toward her mother. But there it sat, entire. She stood puzzling over it for several seconds. Then she wheeled it out of the closet and lugged it down the stairs, to where her mother’s voice was twanging impatiently from the receiver. “Jenny? Jenny?”

“Well, you’re right,” Jenny said. “I found it in his room.”

There was a pause in which Pearl could have said, “I told you so,” but kindly did not. Then she said, “I wonder if he might be calling for help in some way.”

“By stealing a vacuum cleaner?”

“He’s really a very sweet boy,” Pearl said. “I can see that. Maybe he’s asking for a psychologist or some such.”

“More likely he’s asking for a neater house,” Jenny said. “The dust balls on his closet floor have started raising a family.”

She pictured Slevin, in desperation, stealing an arsenal of cleaning supplies — this neighbor’s broom, that neighbor’s Ajax, gathered with the same feverish zeal he showed in collecting Indian head pennies. She was attacked by a sudden sputter of laughter.

“Oh, Jenny,” her mother said sadly. “Do you have to see everything as a joke?”

“It’s not my fault if funny things happen,” Jenny said.

“It most certainly is,” said her mother, but instead of explaining herself, she all at once grew brisk and requested the return of her vacuum cleaner by tomorrow morning.

Jenny and Joe and every child except the baby were watching television. It was long past bedtime for most of them, but this was a special occasion: the Late, Late Show was A Taste of Honey. Everyone in the house had heard of A Taste of Honey. It was Jenny’s all-time favorite movie. She had seen it once, back in 1963, and never forgotten it. Nothing else had ever measured up to it, she was fond of saying, and after returning from some other movie she was sure to announce, “Well, it was all right, I guess, but it wasn’t A Taste of Honey.” By now, any one of the children could finish that sentence before she got it halfway out. They’d ask as soon as she walked in the door, “Was it A Taste of Honey, Jenny? Was it?” and Phoebe was once heard telling Peter, “I like the new teacher okay, I guess, but she isn’t A Taste of Honey.”

When they learned it was coming to television, they had all begged to stay up and watch. The older ones made cocoa and the younger ones set out potato chips. Becky and Slevin arranged a ring of chairs around the TV set in the living room.

“You know what’s going to happen,” Joe told Jenny. “After all this time, even A Taste of Honey won’t be A Taste of Honey.”

In a way, he was right. Not that she didn’t still love it — yes, yes, she assured the children, it was just as she’d remembered — but after all, she was a different person watching it. The movie wrenched her with pity, now, when before it had made her feel hopeful. And wasn’t it odd, wasn’t it downright queer, that she’d never identified the story with her own? In 1963, she was a resident in pediatrics, struggling to care for a two-year-old born six weeks after her marriage dissolved. Yet she’d watched a movie about an unwed, unsupported pregnant girl with the most detached enjoyment, dreamily making her way through a box of pretzels. (And what had she been doing in a movie theater, anyway? How had she found the time, during such a frantic schedule?)

When it was over, she switched off the TV and shooed the children up the stairs. Quinn, the youngest, who had not been all that impressed with A Taste of Honey, was sound asleep and had to be carried by Joe. Even the older ones were groggy and blinking. “Wake up,” she told them. “Come on, now,” and she tugged at Jacob, who had dropped in a bundle on the topmost step. One by one she guided them to their beds and kissed them good night. How noisy their rooms seemed, even in silence! — that riotous clamor of toys and flung-off clothes, their vibrant, clashing rock star posters and antiwar bumper stickers and Orioles banners. Three of the children wouldn’t use sheets but slept in sleeping bags instead — garishly patterned, zippered cocoons sprawled on top of the blankets; and Phoebe didn’t like beds at all but curled in a quilt on the floor, most often out in the hall in front of her parents’ room. She lay across the doorway like a bodyguard, and you had to watch your step in the dark so as not to trip on her.

“I want that radio down,” Jenny said, and she kissed the top of Becky’s head. Then she peeked into Slevin’s room, knocked on the frame of his open door, and entered. He wore his daytime clothes to bed, as always — even his wide tooled belt with the trucker’s buckle — and he lay on top of the covers. She had been kissing him good night every night since she’d married Joe, but still he acted bashful. All she really did was brush her cheek against his, allowing him his dignity. “Sleep well,” she told him.

He said, “I see you found the vacuum cleaner.”

“Vacuum cleaner,” she said, stalling for time.

“I’m sorry I took it,” he said. “I guess your mom is pretty mad, huh? But it wasn’t stealing; honest. I just needed to borrow it for a spell.”

She sat on the edge of the bed. “Needed to borrow it for what?” she asked.

He said, “Well, for … I don’t know. Just for … See, there it was in the pantry. It was exactly like my mother’s. Just exactly. You know how you never think about a thing, or realize you remember it, and then all at once something will bring it all back? I forgot how it had that rubber strip around the edge so it wouldn’t scuff the furniture, and that tall, puffy bag I used to be scared of when I was a kid. It even smelled the same. It had that same clothy smell, just like my mother’s. You know? So I wanted to take it home. But once I got it here, well, it didn’t work out. It’s like I had lost the connection. It wasn’t the same after all.”

“That’s all right, Slevin,” she said. “Heavens, honey, that’s all right.” Then she worried her voice had shown too much, would make him bashful again, so she laughed a little and said, “Shall we get you a Hoover of your own for your birthday?”

He turned over on his side.

“Or we could have it made up in calico,” she told him, giggling. “A tiny stuffed calico vacuum cleaner to take to bed with you.”

But Slevin just closed his eyes, so after a while she wished him good night and left.

She dreamed she was back with Sam Wiley, her second husband and the one she’d loved the best. She’d made a fool of herself over Sam. She dreamed he was twirling on that high wooden stool they used to have in their kitchen in Paulham. He was preening the scrolls of his handlebar mustache and singing “Let It Be.” Which hadn’t even existed, at the time.

She opened her eyes and heard “Let It Be” on one of the children’s radios, sailing out across the dark hall. How often had she told them? She got up and made her way to Peter’s room — barefoot, stepping over Phoebe. Radios late at night sounded so different, she thought — so far away and crackling with static, almost gritty, as if the music had had to travel above miles of railroad tracks and deserted superhighways, past coal yards and auto dumps, oil derricks and factory smokestacks and electrical transformers. She switched off the radio and pulled Peter’s sleeping bag up around his shoulders. She checked on the baby in her crib. Then she returned to bed, shivering slightly, and huddled against Joe’s hulking back for warmth.

“Mack the Knife,” Sam used to sing, and “Greenfields”—yes, that had been around. She remembered how operatic he’d get, rolling his eyes, pounding his chest, trying to make her laugh. (She’d been an earnest young medical student, in those days.) Then she remembered the tender, aching line that the examining table had pressed across the mound of the baby, when Jenny was an intern bending over a patient. Six months pregnant, seven months … By her eighth month the marriage was finished, and Jenny was walking around in a daze. She saw that she had always been doomed to fail, had been unlovable, had lacked some singular quality that would keep a husband. She had never known this consciously, before, but the pain she felt was eerily familiar — like a suspicion, long held, at last confirmed.

She wore uniforms designed for male physicians with forty-inch waists; there were no maternity lab coats. On rounds, professors would give her doubtful glances and ask if she were sure she was up to this. Sympathetic nurses brought her so many cups of coffee that she thought she would float away. One of those nurses stayed with her through most of her labor. Other women had their husbands, but Jenny had Rosa Perez, who let her squeeze her fingers as hard as needed and never said a word of complaint.

And what was the name of that neighbor who used to watch the baby? Mary something — Mary Lee, Mary Lou — some fellow intern’s wife, as poor as Jenny and the mother of two children under two. She baby-sat for a pittance, but even that was more than Jenny could afford. And the schedule! Months of nights on duty, thirty-six hours on call and twelve off, emergency room, obstetrics, trauma surgery … and her residency was not much better. Meanwhile, Becky changed from an infant to a little girl, an outsider really, a lively child with Sam Wiley’s snapping black eyes, unrelated to Jenny. Though it was a shock, sometimes, to see her give that level, considering stare so typical of the Tulls. Was it possible, after all, that this small stranger might constitute a family? She learned to walk; she learned to talk. “No!” she would say, in her firm, spunky voice; and Jenny, trying to stay awake at three in the morning or three in the afternoon, whatever bit of time they had together, dropped her head in her hands. “No!” said Becky, and Jenny hauled off and slapped her hard across the mouth, then shook her till her head lolled, then flung her aside and ran out of the apartment to … where? (A movie, perhaps?) In those days, objects wobbled and grew extra edges. She was so exhausted that the sight of her patients’ white pillows could mesmerize her. Sounds were thick, as if underwater. Words on a chart were meaningless — so many k’s and g’s, such a choppy language English was, short syllables, clumps of consonants, she’d never noticed; like Icelandic, maybe, or Eskimo. She slammed Becky’s face into her Peter Rabbit dinner plate and gave her a bloody nose. She yanked a handful of her hair. All of her childhood returned to her: her mother’s blows and slaps and curses, her mother’s pointed fingernails digging into Jenny’s arm, her mother shrieking, “Guttersnipe! Ugly little rodent!” and some scrap of memory — she couldn’t quite place it — Cody catching hold of Pearl’s wrist and fending her off while Jenny shrank against the wall.

Was this what it came to — that you never could escape? That certain things were doomed to continue, generation after generation? She failed to see a curb and sprained her ankle, hobbled to work in agony. She misdiagnosed a case of viral pneumonia. She let a greenstick fracture slip right past her. She brought Becky a drink of water in the middle of the night and then suddenly, without the slightest intention, screamed, “Take it! Take it!” and threw the cup into Becky’s face. Becky shivered and caught her breath for hours afterward, even in her sleep, though Jenny held her tightly on her lap.

Then her mother called from Baltimore and said, “Jenny? Don’t you write your family any more?”

“Well, I’ve been so busy,” Jenny meant to say. Or: “Leave me alone, I remember all about you. It’s all come back. Write? Why should I write? You’ve damaged me; you’ve injured me. Why would I want to write?”

Instead, she started … not crying, exactly, but something worse. She was torn by dry, ragged sobs; she ran out of air; there was a grating sound in her chest. Her mother said, calmly, “Jenny, hang up. You know that couch in your living room? Go lie down on it. I’ll be there just as soon as Ezra can drive me.”

Pearl stayed two weeks, using all of her vacation time. The first thing she did was call Jenny’s hospital and arrange for sick leave. Then she set about putting the world in order again. She smoothed clean sheets on Jenny’s bed, brought her tea and bracing broths, shampooed her hair, placed flowers on her bureau. Becky, who had hardly seen her grandmother till now, fell in love with her. Pearl called Becky “Rebecca” and treated her formally, respectfully, as if she were not quite sure how much she was allowed. Every morning she walked Becky to the playground and swung her on the swings. In the afternoon they went shopping together. She bought Becky an old-fashioned dress that made her look solemn and reasonable. She bought picture books — nursery rhymes and fairy tales and The Little House. Jenny had forgotten about The Little House. Why, she had loved that book! She’d requested it every evening, she remembered now. She’d sat on that homely old sofa and listened while her mother, with endless patience, read it three times, four times, five … Now Becky said, “Read it again,” and Pearl returned to page one, and Jenny listened just as closely as Becky did.

Sundays, when his restaurant closed, Ezra drove up from Baltimore. He was not, in spite of his innocent face, an open sort of person, and rather than speak outright of Jenny’s new breakability he kept smiling serenely at some point just beyond her. She took comfort from this. There was already too much openness in the world, she felt — everyone raging and weeping and rejoicing. She imagined that Ezra was not subject to the ups and downs that jolted other people. She liked to have him read the papers to her (trouble in Honduras, trouble in Saigon, natural disasters in Haiti and Cuba and Italy) while she listened from a nest of deep blue blankets and a nightgown still warm from her mother’s iron.

On the second weekend, Cody blew in from wherever he’d vanished to most recently. He traveled on a breeze of energy and money; Jenny was impressed. He used her telephone for two hours like the wheeler-dealer he always was and arranged to pay for a full-time sitter, a slim young woman named Delilah Greening who turned out to be better help than Jenny would ever have again. Then he slung his suit coat over one shoulder, gave her a little salute, and was gone.

She slept, sometimes, for twelve and fourteen hours straight. She woke dislocated, frightened by the sunlit, tickling silence of the apartment. She mixed up dreams and real life. “How did it happen—?” she might ask her mother, before she remembered that it hadn’t happened (the Shriners’ parade through her bedroom, the elderly gentleman hanging by his heels from her curtain rod like a piece of fruit). Sometimes at night, voices came vividly out of the dark. “Dr. Tull. Dr. Tull,” they’d say, urgently, officially. Or, “Six hundred fifty milligrams of quinine sulfate …” Her own pulse thudded in her eardrums. She held her hand toward the light from the streetlamp and marveled at how white and bloodless she had become.

When her mother left and Delilah arrived, Jenny got up and returned to work. For a while, she carried herself as gently as a cup of liquid. She kept level and steady, careful not to spill over. But she was fine, she saw; she really was fine. Weekends, her mother and Ezra paid brief visits, or Jenny took Becky down to Baltimore on the train. They both dressed up for these trips and sat very still so as not to muss their clothes. Jenny felt purified, like someone who had been drained by a dangerous fever.

And the following summer, when she could have accepted more lucrative offers in Philadelphia or Newark, she chose Baltimore instead. She joined two older pediatricians, entered Becky in nursery school, and shortly thereafter purchased her Bolton Hill row house. She continued to feel fragile, though. She went on guarding a trembly, fluid center. Sometimes, loud noises made her heart race — her mother speaking her name without warning, or the telephone jangling late at night. Then she would take herself in hand. She would remind herself to draw back, to loosen hold. It seemed to her that the people she admired (one of her partners, who was a wry, funny man named Dan Charles; and her brother Ezra; and her neighbor Leah Hume) had this in common: they gazed at the world from a distance. There was something sheeted about them — some obliqueness that made them difficult to grasp. Dan, for instance, kept up such a steady, easy banter that you never could ask him about his wife, who was forever in and out of mental institutions. And Leah: she could laugh off the repeated failures of her crazy business ventures like so many pratfalls. How untouched she looked, and how untouchable, chuckling to herself and covering her mouth with a shapely, badly kept hand! Jenny studied her; you could almost say she took notes. She was learning how to make it through life on a slant. She was trying to lose her intensity.

“You’ve changed,” her mother said (all intensity herself). “You’ve grown so different, Jenny. I can’t quite put my finger on what’s wrong, but something is.” She wanted Jenny to remarry; she hoped for a dozen grandchildren, at least; she was always after Jenny to get out and mingle, socialize, make herself more attractive, meet some nice young man. What Jenny didn’t tell her was, she simply couldn’t be bothered with all that. She felt textureless, so that events just slid right off her with no friction whatsoever; and the thought of the heartfelt conversations required by a courtship filled her with impatience.

Then she met Joe with his flanks of children — his padding, his moat, his barricade of children, all in urgent need of her brisk and competent attention. No conversation there—she and Joe had hardly found a moment to speak to each other seriously. They were always trying to be heard above the sound of toy trucks and xylophones. She didn’t even have time for thinking any more.

“Of course, the material object is nothing,” said the priest. He winced at a squeal from the waiting room. “That’s unimportant, the least of my concerns. Though it did have some historical value. It was donated, I believe, by the missionary brother of one of our parishioners.”

Jenny leaned back against the receptionist’s window and touched a hand to her forehead. “Well, I don’t …” she said. “What did you say this was?”

“A rhinoceros foot,” said the priest, “in the shape of an umbrella stand. Or an umbrella stand in the shape of a rhinoceros foot. It was an actual rhinoceros foot from … wherever rhinoceri come from.”

A naked toddler shot out a door like a stray piece of popcorn, pursued by a nurse with a hypodermic needle. The priest stood back to give them room. “We know it was there in the morning,” he said. “But at four o’clock, it was gone. And Slevin was in just previously; I’d asked him to come for a chat. Only I was on the phone when he arrived. By the time I’d hung up he was gone, and so was the rhinoceros foot.”

Jenny said, “I wonder if his mother had a rhinoceros foot.”

“Pardon?” said the priest.

She realized how this must have sounded, and she laughed. “No,” she said, “I don’t mean she had rhinoceros feet … oh, Lord …”

The priest said, “Dr. Tull, don’t you see this is serious? We have a child in trouble here, don’t you see that? Don’t you think something ought to be done? Where do you stand, Dr. Tull?”

Jenny’s smile faded and she looked into his face. “I don’t know,” she said, after a pause. She felt suddenly bereft, as if something were missing, as if she’d given something up. She hadn’t always been like this! she wanted to tell him. But aloud she said, “I only meant, you see … I believe he steals what reminds him of his mother. Hoovers and umbrella stands. Doesn’t that make sense?”

“Ah,” said the priest.

“What’s next, I wonder,” Jenny said. She mused for a moment. “Picture it! Grand pianos. Kitchen sinks. Why, we’ll have his mother’s whole household,” she said, “her photo albums and her grade-school yearbooks, her college roommate asleep on our bed and her high school boyfriends in our living room.” She pictured a row of dressed-up boys from the fifties, their hair slicked down wetly, their shirts ironed crisply, perched on her couch like mannequins with heart-shaped boxes of chocolates on their knees. She laughed. The priest groaned. A little blue plastic helicopter buzzed across the waiting room and landed in Jenny’s hair.