Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

6 Beaches on the Moon

Twice or maybe three times a year, she goes out to the farm to make sure things are in order. She has her son Ezra drive her there, and she takes along a broom, a dustpan, rags, a grocery bag for trash and a bucket and a box of cleanser. Ezra asks why she can’t just keep these supplies in the farmhouse, but she knows they wouldn’t be safe. The trespassers would get them. Oh, the trespassers — the small boys and courting couples and the teen-aged gangs. It makes her mad to think of them. As the car turns off the main road, rattling up the rutted driveway, she already sees their litter — the beer cans tossed among the scrubby weeds, the scraps of toilet paper dangling from the bushes. This land has been let go and the vegetation is matted and wild, bristly, scratchy, no shade at all from the blazing sun. There are little spangles of bottle tops embedded in the dirt of the road. And the yard (which is not truly mown but sickled by Jared Peers, once or twice a summer) is flocked with white paper plates and Dixie cups, napkins, sandwich bags, red-striped straws, and those peculiarly long-lived, accordioned worms of paper that the straws were wrapped in.

Ezra parks the car beneath an oak tree. “It’s a shame. A disgrace and a shame,” Pearl says, stepping out. She wears a seersucker dress that will wash, and her oldest shoes. On her head is a broad-brimmed straw hat. It will keep the dust from her hair — from all but one faded, blondish frizz bordering each temple. “It’s a national crime,” she says, and she stands looking around her while Ezra unloads her cleaning supplies. The house has two stories. It is a ghostly, rubbed-out gray. The ridgepole sags and the front porch has buckled and many of the windowpanes are broken — more every time she comes.

She remembers when Cody first showed her this place. “Imagine what can be done with it, Mother. Picture the possibilities,” he said. He was planning to marry and raise a family here — provide her with lots of grandchildren. He even kept the livestock on, paying Jared Peers to tend it till Cody moved in.

That was years ago, though, and all that remains of those animals now is a couple of ragged hens gone wild, clucking in the mulberry tree out behind the barn.

She has a key to the warped rear door but it isn’t needed. The padlock’s missing and the rusted hasp hangs open. “Not again,” she says. She turns the knob and enters, warily. (One of these days, she’ll surprise someone and get her head blown off for her trouble.) The kitchen smells stale and cold, even in the heat of the day. There’s a fly buzzing over the table, a rust spot smearing the back of the sink, a single tatter of cloudy plastic curtain trailing next to the window. The linoleum’s worn patternless near the counters.

Ezra follows, burdened with household supplies. He sets them down and stands wiping his face on the sleeve of his work shirt. More than once he’s told her he fails to see the use of this: cleaning up only to clean again, the next time they come out. What’s the purpose, he wants to know. Why go to all this trouble, what does she have in mind? But he’s an obliging man, and when she insists, he says no more. He runs his fingers through his hair, which the sweat has turned a dark, streaked yellow. He tests the kitchen faucet. First it explodes and then it yields a coppery trickle of water.

There are half a dozen empty bottles lying on the floor — Wild Turkey, Old Crow, Southern Comfort. “Look! And look,” says Pearl. She nudges a Marlboro pack with her toe. She scrapes at a scorch on the table. She discreetly looks away while Ezra hooks an unmentionable rubber something with the broom handle and drops it into the trash bag.

“Cody,” she used to say, “you could hire a man to come and haul this furniture off to the dump. Surely you don’t want it for yourself. Cody, there’s a Sunday suit in the bedroom closet. There are shoes at the top of the cellar stairs — chunky, muddy old garden shoes. You ought to hire a man to come haul them for you.” But Cody paid no attention — he was hardly ever there. He was mostly in New York; and privately, Pearl had expected that that was where he would stay. Which of those girlfriends of his would agree to a life in the country? “You’d just better watch out who you marry,” she had told him. “None of your dates that I’ve met would do — those black-haired, flashy, beauty-queen types.”

But if only he’d married one of them! If only he’d been satisfied with that! Instead, one afternoon Ezra had come into the kitchen, had stood there looking sick. “What’s wrong?” she’d asked. She knew it was something. “Ezra? Why aren’t you at work?”

“It’s Cody,” he said.

“Cody?”

She clutched at her chest, picturing him dead — her most difficult, most distant child, and now she would never have the answer to him.

But Ezra said, “He’s gone off to get married.”

“Oh, married,” she said, and she dropped her hand. “Well? Who to?”

“To Ruth,” he said.

“Your Ruth?”

“My Ruth.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said.

Not that she hadn’t had some inkling. She had seen it coming for weeks, she believed, though she hadn’t exactly seen marriage — more likely a fling, a flirtation, another of Cody’s teases. Should she have hinted to Ezra? He wouldn’t have listened. He was so gullible, and so much in love. Ruth was the center of his world, for some reason. And anyway, who would have thought that Cody would let it get so serious? “He’s just doing it to be mean, sweetheart,” she told Ezra. She was right, too, as she’d been right the other times she’d said it — oh, those other times! Those inconsequential spats, those childhood quarrels, arguments, practical jokes! “Cody, stop it this instant,” she used to tell him. “You think I don’t see what you’re up to? Let your poor brother alone. Ezra, pay no mind. He’s only being mean.” Back then, Ezra had listened and nodded, hoping to believe her; he had doted on his older brother. But now he said, “What does it matter why he did it? He did it, that’s all. He stole her away.”

“If she could be stolen, honey, why, you don’t want her anyhow.”

Ezra just looked at her — bleak faced, grim, a walking ache of a man. She knew how he felt. Hadn’t she been through it? She remembered from when her husband left — a wound, she’d been, a deep, hollow hole, surrounded by shreds of her former self.

She sweeps all the trash to the center of the floor, collects the bottles and the cigarette packs. Meanwhile, Ezra tapes squares of cardboard to the broken windowpanes. He works steadily, doggedly. She looks up once and sees how the sweat has made an eagle-shaped stain across his back. There are other cardboard squares on other panes, broken earlier. In a few more seasons, it occurs to her, they’ll be working in the dark. It’s as if they’re sealing themselves in, windowpane by windowpane.

When Cody came back with Ruth, after the honeymoon, he was better-looking than ever, sleek and dark and well dressed, but Ruth was her same homely self: a little muskrat of a girl with wickety red hair and freckles, her skin that tissue-thin kind subject to lip sores and pink splotches, her twiggish body awkward in a matronly brown suit that must have been bought especially for this occasion. (Though Pearl was to find, in later years, that all Ruth’s clothes struck her that way; nothing ever seemed as natural as those little-boy dungarees she used to wear with Ezra.) Pearl watched the two of them sharply, closely, anxious to come to some conclusion about their marriage, but they gave away no secrets. Ruth sat pressing her palms together; Cody kept his arm across the back of the couch, not touching her but claiming her, at least. He talked at length about the farm. They were heading out there directly, settling in that night. It was too late for sowing a garden but at least they could clean the place up, begin to make plans for next spring. Ruth was going to get started on that while Cody went back to New York. Ruth nodded at this, and cleared her throat and fumbled with the pocket of her suit jacket. Pearl thought she was reaching for one of her little cigars, but after a moment she stopped fumbling and placed her palms together again. And in fact, Pearl never saw her smoke another one of those cigars.

Then Ezra arrived — not whistling, oddly quiet, as he’d been since Ruth had left. He stopped inside the door and looked at them. “Ezra,” Cody said easily, and Ruth stood up and held out her hand. She seemed frightened. This made Pearl like her, a little. (Ruth, at least, recognized the magnitude of what they’d done.) “How you doing, Ezra,” Ruth said, quavering. And Ezra had said … oh, something or other, he’d managed something; and stood around a while shifting from foot to foot and answering their small talk. So it looked, on the surface, as if they might eventually smooth things over. Yes, after all, this choosing of mates was such a small, brief stage in a family’s history.

But Ezra no longer played tunes on his recorder, and he continued to look limp and beaten, and he went to bed every night with no more than a “Good night, Mother.” She grieved for him. She longed to say, “Ezra, believe me, she’s nothing! You’re worth a dozen Ruth Spiveys! A dozen of both of them, to be frank, even if Cody is my son …” Though of course she loved Cody dearly. But from infancy, he had batted her away; and his sister had been so evasive, somehow; so whom did that leave but Ezra? Ezra was all she had. He was the only one who would let her in. Sometimes, in his childhood, she had worried that he would die young — one of life’s ironic twists, to take what you valued most. She had watched him trudging down the street to school, his duck-yellow head bowed in thought, and she would have a sudden presentiment that this was the last she would see of him. Then when he returned, full of news about friends and ball games, how solid, how commonplace — even how irritating — he seemed! And sometimes, long ago when he was small, he might climb up into her lap and place his thin little arms around her neck, and she would drink in his smell of warm biscuits and think, “Really, this is what it’s all about. This is what I’m alive for.” Then, reluctantly, she allowed him to slip away again. (They claimed she was possessive, pushy. Little did they know.) As a child, he’d had a chirpy style of talking that was so cheerful, ringing through the house like a trill of water … when had that begun to change? As an older boy he grew shy and withdrawn, gazing out of shining gray eyes and saying next to nothing. She’d worried when he didn’t date. “Wouldn’t you like to bring someone home? Ask someone to Sunday dinner?” He shook his head, tongue-tied. He blushed and lowered his long lashes. Pearl wondered, seeing the blush, whether he thought much about girls and such as that. His father had left by then and Cody was no help, three years older, off tomcatting someplace or other. Then as a man, Ezra was … well, to be honest, he was not much different from when he was a boy. In a way, he was an eternal boy, never got boastful and brash like most men but stayed gentle, somber, contentedly running that restaurant of his and coming home peaceful and tired.

It was a shock when he introduced her to Ruth. What an urchin she was! But plainly, Ezra adored her. “Mother, I’d like you to meet my — meet Ruth.” Pearl had stalled a little, at first. Maybe she had failed to act properly welcoming. Well, who could blame her? And now, seeing how things had turned out, who could say she’d been wrong? But she can’t help wondering, anyhow … If she’d been a little more encouraging, they might have married sooner. They might have married before Cody could work his mischief. Or if she had let herself realize … Yes, she wonders over and over again: if she’d mentioned Cody’s plot to Ezra, stopped that situation that was not so much a courtship as a landslide, a kind of gathering and falling of events …

Ridiculous, of course, to imagine that anything she did could have mattered. What happens, happens. It’s no one’s fault. (Or it’s only Cody’s fault, for he has always been striving and competitive, a natural-born player of games, has had to win absolutely everything, even something he doesn’t want like a runty little redhead far below his usual standards.)

She opens the farmhouse parlor to air it. It smells like skunk. She leaves the front door ajar, taking care not to step onto the porch, which could very well give way beneath her. She remembers how, toward the end of that first week after the honeymoon, she asked Ezra to bring out to Ruth a few odds and ends for the farm — some extra pans, some linens, a carpet sweeper she had no use for. Was there an ulterior motive in her suggestion? If not, why didn’t she accompany him, visit the bride like any good mother-in-law? “Please, I don’t want to,” Ezra said, but she said, “Honey. Go.” She hadn’t had any conscious design — truly, none at all — but it was a fact that later that morning, dawdling over the dishes, she’d allowed herself a little daydream: Ezra coming up behind Ruth, setting his arms around her, Ruth protesting only briefly before collapsing against him … Oh, shouldn’t it be possible to undo what was done? What all of them had done?

But Ezra when he returned was as subdued as ever, and only said that Ruth thanked Pearl for the pans and linens but was sending back the carpet sweeper as the farmhouse had no carpets.

Then Saturday, Cody came storming in with everything Ezra had taken to Ruth. “What’s all this?” he asked Pearl.

“Why, Cody, pots and sheets, as you can surely see.”

“How come Ezra brought them out?”

“I asked him to,” she said.

“I won’t have it! Won’t have him hanging around the farm.”

“Cody. It was at my request. Believe me,” she told him.

“I do,” he said.

She tried to get Ezra to go again the following week — taking the rug from the dining room and the carpet sweeper, once more — but he wouldn’t. “I’m not comfortable there,” he said. “There’s no point. What’s the point?” She supposed he was right. Yes, she thought, let Ruth wonder where he’d got to! People who leave us will be sorry in the end. She imagined Ruth alone in the farmhouse, roaming from room to room and peering sadly through the bare windows.

The next weekend, Pearl asked Ezra to drive her out. He couldn’t very well refuse; he was her only means of transportation. They both, without discussing it, wore Sunday clothing — formal, guestlike clothing. They found the house looking sealed and abandoned. A lone hound nudged at a bone in the yard, but he surely didn’t belong there.

Back home, Pearl placed a call to Cody in New York. “Aren’t you coming to the farm any more?”

“Things are kind of busy.”

“Won’t Ruth be there during the week?”

“I want her here with me,” he said. “After all, we just did get married.”

“Well, when will we see you?”

“Pretty soon, not too long, I’m sure we’ll be down in a while …”

But they weren’t; or if they were, they didn’t tell Pearl, and she was too proud to ask again. The summer ended and the leaves turned all colors, but Ezra dragged himself along with no change. “Sweetheart,” Pearl told him, as in his boyhood, “isn’t there someone you’d like to have home? Some friend to dinner? Anyone,” she said. Ezra said no.

From time to time, Pearl called Cody in New York again. He was courteous and noncommittal. Ruth, if she spoke, gave flustered replies and didn’t seem to have her wits about her. Then in October, two full weeks went by when no one answered the phone at all. Pearl wondered if they’d gone to the farm, and she begged Ezra to investigate. But when he finally agreed to, he found nobody there. “Someone’s shattered four windowpanes,” he reported. “Threw rocks at them, or shot them out.” This made Pearl feel frightened. The world was closing in on them; even here on her own familiar streets, she no longer felt safe. And who knew what might have become of Ruth and Cody? They could be lying dead in their apartment, victims of a burglary or some bizarre, New York-type accident, their bodies undiscovered for weeks. Oh, this was what happened when you broke off all ties with your family! It wasn’t right; with your family, if with no one else, you have to keep on trying.

She called frantically, day after day, often letting the phone ring thirty or forty times. There was something calming about that faraway purling sound. She was, at least, connected — though only to an object in Cody’s apartment.

Then he answered. It was late in October. She was so taken aback that she didn’t know what to say. It seemed the monotonous ring of the phone had grown to be enough for her. “Um, Cody …” she said.

“Oh. Mother.”

“Cody, where have you been?”

“I had a job to see to in Ohio. I took Ruth along.”

“You didn’t answer the phone for weeks, and we looked for you out at the farm and some of the windows were broken.”

“Damn! I thought I was paying Jared to keep that kind of thing from happening.”

“You can’t imagine how I felt, Cody. When I heard about the windows I felt … You’re letting that place go to rack and ruin and we never get to see you any more.”

“I do have a job to do, Mother.”

“I thought that once you married, you were moving down to Baltimore. You were doing over the farmhouse and planting a garden and all.”

“Yes, definitely. That’s a definite possibility,” said Cody. “Get Ezra to tape those windows, will you? And tell him to speak to Jared. I can’t have the place depreciating.”

“All right, Cody,” she said.

Then she asked about Thanksgiving. “Will you be coming down? You know how Ezra likes to have us at the restaurant.”

“Oh, Ezra and his restaurant …”

“Please. We’ve hardly seen you,” she said.

“Well, maybe.”

So in November they returned — Cody looking elegant and casual, Ruth incongruous in a large, ornate blue dress. Her hair was so stubby, her head so Small, that the dress appeared to be drowning her. She staggered in her high-heeled shoes. She still would not meet Ezra’s gaze.

“What have you two been up to?” Pearl asked Ruth, as they rode in Cody’s Cadillac to the restaurant.

“Oh, nothing so much.”

“Are you decorating Cody’s apartment?”

“Decorating? No.”

“We’ve hardly seen it,” Cody said. “I’m taking on longer-term jobs. In December I start reorganizing a textile plant in Georgia, a big thing, five or six months. I thought maybe Ruth could come with me; we could rent us a little house of some kind. There’s not much point in commuting.”

“December? But then you’d miss Christmas,” said Pearl.

Cody looked surprised. He said, “Why would we miss it?”

“I mean, would you still make the trip to Baltimore?”

“Oh. Well, no, I guess not,” he said. “But we’re here for Thanksgiving, aren’t we?”

She resolved to say no more. She had her dignity.

They sat at their regular family table, surrounded by a fair-sized crowd. (In those days — the start of the sixties — shaggy young people had just discovered Ezra’s restaurant, with its stripped wood and pure, fresh food, and they thronged there every evening.) It was sad that Jenny couldn’t come; she was spending the holiday with her in-laws. But Ruth, at least, rounded out their number. Pearl smiled across the table at her. Ruth said, “It feels right funny to be eating where I used to be cooking.”

“Would you like to visit the kitchen?” Ezra asked. “The staff would enjoy seeing you.”

“I don’t mind if I do,” she said. It was the first time since her marriage that she’d looked at him directly — or the first that Pearl knew about.

So Ezra scraped back his chair and rose, and guided Ruth into the kitchen. Pearl could tell that Cody wasn’t pleased. He stopped in the act of unfolding his napkin and gazed after them, even taking a breath as if preparing to object. Then he must have thought better of it. He shook out the napkin angrily, saying nothing.

“So,” said Pearl. “When do you move to the farm?”

“Farm? Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Everything’s so changed; the whole character of my work has changed.” He looked again toward the kitchen.

“But you’d planned on raising a family there. It was all you ever talked about.”

“Yes, well, and these long-term contracts,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her.

Pearl said, “You had your heart just set on it.”

But he continued watching the other two. He was not the least bit interested in what she might be saying. The kitchen was fully exposed, and could not have concealed the smallest secret. So why was Cody nervous? Ezra and Ruth stood talking with one of the cooks, their backs to the dining room. Ezra gestured as he spoke. He lifted both arms wide, one arm behind Ruth but not touching her, not brushing her shoulder, surely not encircling her or anything like that. Even so, Cody rose abruptly from his chair. “Cody!” Pearl said. He strode toward the kitchen, with his napkin crumpled in one fist. Pearl stood up and hurried after him, and arrived in time to hear him say, “Let’s go, Ruth.”

“Go?”

“I didn’t come here to watch you and Ezra chumming it up in the kitchen.”

Ruth looked scared. Her face seemed to grow more pointed.

“Come on,” said Cody, and he took her elbow. “Goodbye,” he told Pearl and Ezra.

“Oh!” said Pearl, running after them. “Oh, Cody, what can you be thinking of? How can you act so foolish?”

Cody yanked Ruth’s coat from a brass hook in passing. He opened the front door and pulled Ruth into the street and shut the door behind them.

Ezra said, “I don’t understand.”

Pearl said, “Why does it always turn out this way? How come we end up quarreling? Don’t we all love each other? Everything else aside,” she said, “don’t we all want the best for one another?”

“Certainly we do,” Ezra said.

His answer was so level and firm that she felt comforted. She knew things were bound to work out someday. She let him lead her back to the table, and the two of them had a forlorn turkey dinner on the wide expanse of white linen.

Upstairs there are four bedrooms, sparsely furnished, musty. The beds are so sunken-looking, evidently even the courting couples have not been tempted by them. They’re untouched, the drab, dirty quilts still smooth. But a dead bird lies beneath one window. Pearl calls down the stairwell. “Ezra? Ezra, come here this instant. Bring the broom and trash bag.”

He mounts the stairs obediently. She looks down and sees, with a pang, that his lovely fair hair is thinning on the back of his head. He is thirty-seven years old, will be thirty-eight in December. He will probably never marry. He will never do anything but run that peculiar restaurant of his, with its hodgepodge of food, its unskilled waitresses, its foreign cooks with questionable papers. You could say, in a way, that Ezra has suffered a tragedy, although it’s a very small tragedy in the eyes of the world. You could say that he and Ruth, together, have suffered a tragedy. Something has been done to them; something has been taken away from them. They have lost it. They are lost. It doesn’t help at all that Cody in fact is a very nice man — that he’s bright and funny and genuinely kind, to everyone but Ezra.

You could almost say that Cody, too, has suffered a tragedy.

In 1964, when she went out to Illinois to visit them, she felt in their house the thin, tight atmosphere of an unhappy marriage. Not a really terrible marriage — no sign of hatred, spitefulness, violence. Just a sense of something missing. A certain failure to connect, between the two of them. Everything seemed so tenuous. Or was it her imagination? Maybe she was wrong. Maybe it was the house itself — a ranch house in a development, rented for the four months or so that Cody would need to reorganize a plastics plant in Chicago. Plainly the place was expensive, with wall-to-wall carpeting and long, low, modern furniture; but there were no trees anywhere nearby, not even a bush or a shrub — just that raw brick cube rising starkly from the flatness. And outside it was so white-hot, so insufferably hot, that they were confined to the house with its artificial, refrigerated air. They were imprisoned by the house, dependent upon it like spacemen in a spaceship, and when they went out it was only to dash through a crushing weight of heat to Cody’s air-conditioned Mercedes. Ruth, going about her chores every day, had the clenched expression of someone determined to survive no matter what. Cody came home in the evening gasping for oxygen — barely crawling over the doorsill, Pearl fantasized — but did not seem all that relieved to have arrived. When he greeted Ruth, they touched cheeks and moved apart again.

It was the first time Pearl had ever visited them, the first and only time, and this was after years of very little contact at all. They seldom came to Baltimore. They never returned to the farm. And Cody wrote almost no letters, though he would telephone on birthdays and holidays. He was more like an acquaintance, Pearl thought. A not very cordial acquaintance.

Once she and Ezra were driving down a road in West Virginia, on an outing to Harper’s Ferry, when they chanced to come up behind a man in jogging shorts. He was running along the edge of the highway, a tall man, dark, with a certain confident, easy swing to his shoulders … Cody! Out here in the middle of nowhere, by sheer coincidence, Cody Tull! Ezra slammed on his brakes, and Pearl said, “Well, did you ever.” But then the jogger, hearing their car, had turned his face and he wasn’t Cody after all. He was someone entirely different, beefy jawed, nowhere near as handsome. Ezra sped up again. Pearl said, “How silly of me, I know full well that Cody’s in, ah …”

“Indiana,” said Ezra.

“Indiana; I don’t know why I thought …”

They were both quiet for several minutes after that, and in those minutes Pearl imagined the scene if it really had been Cody — if he had turned, astonished, as they sailed past. Oddly enough, she didn’t envision stopping. She thought of how his mouth would fall open as he recognized their faces behind the glass; and how they would gaze out at him, and smile and wave, and skim on by.

Whenever he phoned he was cheerful and hearty. “How’ve you been, Mother?”

“Why, Cody!”

“Everything all right? How’s Ezra?”

Oh, on the phone he was so nice about Ezra, interested and affectionate like any other brother. And on the rare occasions when he and Ruth came through Baltimore — heading somewhere else, just briefly dropping in — he seemed so pleased to shake hands with Ezra and clap him on the back and ask what he’d been up to. At first.

Only at first.

Then: “Ruth! What are you and Ezra talking about, over there?” Or: “Ezra? Do you mind not standing so close to my wife?” When Ezra and Ruth were hardly speaking, really. They were so cautious with each other, it hurt to watch.

“Cody. Please. What are you imagining?” Pearl would ask him, and then he would turn on her: “Naturally, you wouldn’t see it. Naturally, he can do no wrong, can he, Mother. Your precious boy. Can he.”

She had given up, finally, on ever being asked to visit. When Cody called and told her Ruth was pregnant, some two or three years into the marriage, Pearl said, “Oh, Cody, if she’d like it at all, I mean when the baby arrives … if she’d like me to come take care of things …” But evidently, she wasn’t needed. And when he called to say that Luke was born — nine pounds, three ounces; everything fine — she said, “I can’t wait to see him. I honestly can’t wait.” But Cody let that pass.

They sent her photos: Luke in an infant seat, blond and stern. Luke creeping bear-style across the carpet, on hands and feet instead of knees. (Cody had crept that way too.) Luke uncertainly walking, with a clothespin in each fat fist. He had to have the clothespins, Ruth wrote, because then he thought he was holding on to something. Otherwise, he fell. Now that photos were arriving, letters came too, generally written by Ruth. Her grammar was shocking and she couldn’t spell. She said, Me and Cody wrecken Luke’s eyes are going to stay blue, but what did Pearl care about grammar? She saved every letter and put Luke’s pictures on her desk in little gilt frames she bought at Kresge’s.

I think I ought to come see Luke before he’s grown, she wrote. No one answered. She wrote again. Would June be all right? Then Cody wrote that they were moving to Illinois in June, but if she really wanted then maybe she could come in July.

So she went to Illinois in July, traveling with a trainload of fresh-faced boy soldiers on their way to Vietnam, and she spent a week in that treeless house barricaded against the elements. It was a shock, even to her, how instantly and how deeply she loved her grandson. He was not quite two years old by then, a beautiful baby with a head that seemed adult in its shape — sharply defined, the golden hair trimmed close and neat. His firm, straight lips seemed adult as well, and he had an unchildlike way of walking. There was a bit of slump in his posture, a little droop to his shoulders, nothing physically wrong but an air of resignation that was almost comical in someone so small. Pearl sat on the floor with him for hours, playing with his trucks and cars. “Vroom. Vroom. Roll it back to Granny, now.” She was touched by his stillness. He had a sizable vocabulary but he used it only when necessary; he was not a spendthrift. He was careful. He lacked gaiety. Was he happy? Was this a fit life for a child?

She saw that Cody had a sprinkling of gray in his sideburns, a more leathery look to his cheeks; but that Ruth was still a scrappy little thing in too-short hair and unbecoming dresses. She had not grown fuller or softer with age. She was like certain supermarket vegetables that turn from green to withered without ever ripening. In the evenings, when Cody came home from work, Ruth clattered around the kitchen cooking great quantities of country food that Cody would hardly touch; and Cody had a gin and tonic and watched the news. The two of them asked each other, “How was your day?” and “Everything fine?” but they didn’t seem to listen to the answers. Pearl could believe that in the morning, waking in their king-sized bed, they asked politely, “Did you sleep all right?” She felt oppressed and uncomfortable, but instead of averting her gaze she was for some reason compelled to delve deeper into their lives; she sent them out one night to a movie, promising to watch Luke, and then ransacked all the desk drawers but found only tax receipts, and bank statements, and a photo album belonging to the people who really lived here. Anyway, she couldn’t have said what it was she was looking for.

Coming home, jouncing on the train amid another group of soldiers, she felt weary and hopeless. She arrived in Baltimore seven hours late, with a racking headache. Then as she entered the station, she saw Ezra walking toward her in his plodding way and she felt such a stab of … well, recognition. It was Luke’s walk, solemn little Luke. Life was so sad, she thought, that she almost couldn’t bear it. But kissing Ezra, she felt her sorrow overtaken by something very like annoyance. She wondered why he put up with this, why he let things go on this way. Could it be that he took some satisfaction in his grief? (As if he were paying for something, she thought. But what would he be paying for?) In the car, he asked, “How’d you like Luke?” and she said, “Don’t you ever think of just going there and trying to get her back?”

“I couldn’t,” he said, unsurprised, and he maneuvered the car laboriously from its parking slot.

“Well, I don’t see why not,” she told him.

“It’s not right. It’s wrong.”

She wasn’t given to philosophy, but during the drive home she stared at the grimy Baltimore scenery and considered the question of right and wrong: of theoretical virtue, existing in a vacuum; of whether there was any point to it at all. When they reached home, she got out of the car and entered the house without a word, and climbed the stairs to her room.

Ezra scoops the dead bird onto a piece of cardboard and slides it into the trash bag. Then he tapes the cardboard to the broken windowpane where the bird must have entered. Pearl, meanwhile, sweeps up the shards of glass. She leaves them in a pyramid and goes downstairs for the dustpan. Already, she sees, the house has a bit more life to it — the sunny pattern of leaves shimmering on the parlor floor in front of the open door, the smell of hot grass wafting through the rooms. “It was never all that practical,” Cody said on the phone just recently, referring to the farm. “It was only a half-baked idea that I had when I was young.” But if he really meant that, why doesn’t he go on and sell? No, he couldn’t possibly; she has spent so much time sweeping this place, preparing it for him, opening and shutting bureau drawers as if she’d find his secrets there. She can imagine Ruth in this kitchen, Cody out surveying fence lines or whatever it is men do on farms. She can picture Luke running through the yard in denim overalls. He is old enough to go fishing now, to swim in the creek beyond the pasture, maybe even to tend the animals. In August, he’ll be eight. Is it eight? Or nine. She’s lost track. She hardly ever sees him, and must conquer his shyness all over again whenever he and his parents pass through Baltimore. Each visit, his interests have changed: from popguns to marbles to stamp collecting. Last time he was here, some two or three years back, she got out her husband’s stamp album — its maroon, fake-leather cover gone gray with mildew — only to find that Luke had switched to model airplanes. He was assembling a balsa wood jet, he told her, that would actually fly. And he was planning to be an astronaut. “By the time I’m grown,” he said, “astronauts will be ordinary. People will be taking rockets like you would take a bus. They’ll spend their summers on Venus. They won’t go to Ocean City; they’ll go to beaches on the moon.” “Ah,” she said, “isn’t that wonderful!” But she was too old for such things. She couldn’t keep up, and the very thought of traveling to the moon made her feel desolate.

And nowadays — well, who can guess? Luke must be involved in something entirely different. It’s so long since he was here, and she’s not sure he’ll ever be back. During that last visit, Ezra got his old pearwood recorder from the closet and showed Luke how to play a tune. Pearl knows very little about recorders, but evidently something happens — the wood dries up, or warps, or something — when they’re not played enough; and this one hadn’t been played in a decade, at least. Its voice had gone splintery and cracked. How startled she’d been, hearing three ancient notes tumble forth after such a silence! Ezra and Luke walked south on Calvert Street to buy some linseed oil. Not two minutes after they left, Cody asked where they’d got to. “Why, off to buy oil for Ezra’s recorder,” Pearl told him. “Didn’t you see them go?” Cody excused himself and went outside to pace in front of the house. Ruth stayed in the living room, discussing schools. Pearl hardly listened. She could look through the window and see Cody pacing, turning, pacing, his suit coat whipping out behind him. She could tell when Ezra and Luke returned, even before she saw them, by the way that Cody stiffened. “Where have you been?” she heard him ask. “What have you two been doing?”

Luke never did learn how to play the recorder. Cody said they had to go. “Oh, but Cody!” Pearl said. “I thought you were spending the night!”

“Wrong,” he told her. “Wrong again. I can’t stay here; this place is not safe. Don’t you see what Ezra’s up to?”

“What, Cody? What is he up to?”

“Don’t you see he’s out to steal my son?” he asked. “The same way he always stole everybody? Don’t you see?”

In the end, they left. Ezra wanted to give Luke the recorder for keeps, but Cody told Luke to leave it; he’d get him a newer one, fancier, finer. One that wasn’t all dried up, he said.

Pearl believes now that her family has failed. Neither of her sons is happy, and her daughter can’t seem to stay married. There is no one to accept the blame for this but Pearl herself, who raised these children single-handed and did make mistakes, oh, a bushel of mistakes. Still, she sometimes has the feeling that it’s simply fate, and not a matter for blame at all. She feels that everything has been assigned, has been preordained; everyone must play his role. Certainly she never intended to foster one of those good son/bad son arrangements, but what can you do when one son is consistently good and the other consistently bad? What can the sons do, even? “Don’t you see?” Cody had cried, and she had imagined, for an instant, that he was inviting her to look at his whole existence — his years of hurt and bafflement.

Often, like a child peering over the fence at somebody else’s party, she gazes wistfully at other families and wonders what their secret is. They seem so close. Is it that they’re more religious? Or stricter, or more lenient? Could it be the fact that they participate in sports? Read books together? Have some common hobby? Recently, she overheard a neighbor woman discussing her plans for Independence Day: her family was having a picnic. Every member — child or grownup — was cooking his or her specialty. Those who were too little to cook were in charge of the paper plates.

Pearl felt such a wave of longing that her knees went weak.

Ezra has finished taping the glass. Pearl drifts through the other bedrooms, checking the other windows. In the smallest bedroom, a nursery, a little old lady in a hat approaches. It’s Pearl, in the speckled mirror above a bureau. She leans closer and traces the lines around her eyes. Her age does not surprise her. She’s grown used to it by now. You’re old for so much longer than you’re young, she thinks. Really it hardly seems fair. And then she thinks, for no earthly reason, of a girl she went to school with, Linda Lou something-or-other — such a pretty, flighty girl, someone she’d always envied. In the middle of their senior year, Linda Lou disappeared. There were rumors, later confirmed — an affair with the school’s only male teacher, a married man; and a baby on the way. How horrified her classmates had been! It had thrilled them: that they actually knew such a person, had borrowed her history notes, helped her retie a loose sash, perhaps even brushed her hand accidentally — that hand that may have touched … well, who knew what. It occurs to Pearl, peering into the glass, that the baby born of that scandal must be sixty years old by now. He would have gray hair and liver spots, perhaps false teeth, bifocals, a tedious burden of a life. Yet Linda Lou, wearing white, still dances in Pearl’s mind, the prettiest girl at the senior social.

“Don’t you see?” Cody has asked, and Pearl had said, “Honey, I just can’t understand you.”

Then he shrugged, and his normal, amused expression returned to his face. “Ah, well,” he said, “I can’t either, I guess. After all, what do I care, now I’m grown? Why should it matter any more?”

She doesn’t recall if she managed any reply to that.

She steps away from the mirror. Ezra comes in, bearing the trash bag. “All finished, Mother,” he says.

“It looks a lot better, doesn’t it?”

“It looks just fine,” he tells her.

They descend the stairs, and close the door, and carry their supplies to the car. As they drive away Pearl glances back, like any good housewife checking what she’s cleaned, and it seems to her that even that buckling front porch is straighter and more solid. She has a feeling of accomplishment. Others might have given up and let the trespassers take the place over, but never Pearl. Next season she will come again, and the season after, and the season after that, and Ezra will go on bringing her — the two of them bumping down the driveway, loyal and responsible, together forever.