Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

Then she met Beck Tull. She was thirty years old. He was twenty-four — a salesman with the Tanner Corporation, which sold its farm and garden equipment all over the eastern seaboard and where he would surely, surely rise, a smart young fellow like him. In those days, he was lean and rangy. His black hair waved extravagantly, and his eyes were a brilliant shade of blue that seemed not quite real. Some might say he was … well, a little extreme. Flamboyant. Not quite of Pearl’s class. And certainly too young for her. She knew there were some thoughts to that effect. But what did she care? She felt reckless and dashing, bursting with possibilities.

She met him at a church — at the Charity Baptist Church, which Pearl was only visiting because her girlfriend Emmaline was a member. Pearl was not a Baptist herself. She was Episcopalian, but truthfully not even that; she thought of herself as a nonbeliever. Still, when she went to the Baptist church and saw Beck Tull standing there, a stranger, glossily shaved and wearing a shiny blue suit, and he asked within two minutes if he might be allowed to call, she related it in some superstitious way to the church itself — as if Beck were her reward for attending with the Baptists. She did not dare stop attending. She became a member, to her family’s horror, and was married at Charity Baptist and went to one Baptist church or another, in one town or another, her entire married life, just so her reward would not be snatched away. (Didn’t that maybe, it occurred to her, imply some kind of faith after all?)

Courting her, he brought chocolates and flowers and then — more serious — pamphlets describing the products of the Tanner Corporation. He started telling her in detail about his work and his plans for advancement. He paid her compliments that made her uncomfortable till she could get off alone in her room and savor them. She was the most cultured and refined little lady that he had ever known, he said, and the best mannered, and the daintiest. He liked to place her hand to his, palm to palm, and marvel at its tiny size. Despite the reputation of salesmen, he was respectful to a fault and never grabbed at her the way some other men might.

Then he received his transfer, and after that things sped up so; for he wouldn’t hear of leaving her behind but must marry her immediately and take her with him. So they had their Baptist wedding — both of them out of breath, Pearl always pictured later — and spent their honeymoon moving to Newport News. She never even got to enjoy her new status among her girlfriends. She didn’t have time to show off a single one of her trousseau dresses, or to flash her two gold rings — the narrow wedding band and the engagement ring, set with a pearl, inscribed To a Pearl among Women. Everything seemed so unsatisfying.

They moved, and they moved again. For the first six years they had no children and the moves were fairly easy. She’d gaze at each new town with hopeful eyes and think: This may be where I’ll have my son. (For pregnancy, now, took on the luster that marriage had once had — it was the treasure that came so easily to everyone but her.) Then Cody was born, and moving seemed much harder. Children had a way of complicating things, she noticed. There were the doctors and the school transcripts and this, that, and the other. Meanwhile she looked around and saw that somehow, without her noticing, she’d been cut off from most of her relatives. Aunts and uncles had died while she’d been too far away to do more than send a sympathy note. The house where she was born was sold to a man from Michigan; cousins married strangers with last names she’d never heard of; even the street names were changed so she’d be lost if she ever went back. And it struck her once, in her forties, that she really had no notion what had become of that grandpa with the mothball breath. He couldn’t still be living, could he? Had he died and no one thought to inform her? Or maybe they’d sent the news to an out-of-date address, three or four years behind times. Or she might have heard but simply forgotten, in the rush of some transfer or other. Anything was possible.

Oh, those transfers. Always there was some incentive — a chance of promotion, or richer territory. But it seldom amounted to much. Was it Beck’s fault? He claimed it wasn’t, but she didn’t know; she really didn’t know. He claimed that he was haunted by ill-wishers. There were so many petty people in this world, he said. She pursed her lips and studied him. “Why do you look at me that way?” he asked. “What are you thinking? At least,” he said, “I provide for you. I’ve never let my family go hungry.” She admitted that, but still she felt a constant itch of anxiety. It seemed her forehead was always tight and puckered. This was not a person she could lean on, she felt — this slangy, loud-voiced salesman peering at his reflection with too much interest when he tied his tie in the mornings, combing his pompadour tall and damp and frilly and then replacing the comb in a shirt pocket full of pencils, pens, ruler, appointment book, and tire gauge, all bearing catchy printed slogans for various firms.

Over his beer in the evening (but he was not a drinking man; don’t get her wrong), Beck liked to sing and pull at his face. She didn’t know why beer made him tug his skin that way — work it around like a rubber mask, so by bedtime his cheeks had a stretched-out, slackened look. He sang “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”—his favorite song. Nobody knows but Jesus. She supposed it must be true. What were his private thoughts, inside his spreading face, under the crest of black hair? She didn’t have the faintest idea.

One Sunday night in 1944, he said he didn’t want to stay married. They were sending him to Norfolk, he said; but he thought it best if he went alone. Pearl felt she was sinking in at the center, like someone given a stomach punch. Yet part of her experienced an alert form of interest, as if this were happening in a story. “Why?” she asked him, calmly enough. He didn’t answer. “Beck? Why?” All he did was study his fists. He looked like a young and belligerent schoolboy waiting out a scolding. She made her voice even quieter. It was important to learn the reason. Wouldn’t he just tell her what it was? He’d told her, he said. She lowered herself, shaking, into the chair across from him. She looked at his left temple, in which a pulse ticked. He was just passing through some mood, was all. He would change his mind in the morning. “We’ll sleep on it,” she told him.

But he said, “It’s tonight I’m going.”

He went to the bedroom for his suitcase, and he took his other suit from the wardrobe. Meanwhile Pearl, desperate for time, asked couldn’t they talk this over? Think it through? No need to be hasty, was there? He crossed from bureau to bed, from wardrobe to bed, packing his belongings. There weren’t that many. He was done in twenty minutes. He drew in his breath and she thought, Now he’ll tell me. But all he said was, “I’m not an irresponsible person. I do plan to send you money.”

“And the children,” she said, clutching new hope. “You’ll want to visit the children.”

(He would come with presents for them and she’d be the one to open the door — perfumed, in her Sunday dress, maybe wearing a bit of rouge. She’d always thought false color looked cheap, but she could have been wrong.)

Beck said, “No.”

“What?”

“I won’t be visiting the children.”

She sat down on the bed.

“I don’t understand you,” she said.

There ought to be a whole separate language, she thought, for words that are truer than other words — for perfect, absolute truth. It was the purest fact of her life: she did not understand him, and she never would.

At the time, they were living in Baltimore, in a row house on Calvert Street. The children were fourteen, eleven, and nine. They were old enough to suspect something wrong, if she didn’t take care. She took infinite care. The morning after Beck left she rose and dressed, piled her hair on her head the same as always, and cooked oatmeal for the children’s breakfast. Cody and Jenny ate without speaking; Ezra told a long, rambling dream. (He was the only one cheerful in the mornings.) There was some disappointment that the oatmeal lacked raisins. Nobody asked where Beck was. After all, he often left before they woke on a Monday. And there’d been times — many times — when he’d stayed away the whole week. It wasn’t so unusual.

When Friday night rolled around, she said he’d been delayed. He’d promised to take them to the Midget Circus, and she told them she would do it instead. Another week passed. She had no close friends, but if she met a chance acquaintance in the grocery store, she remarked that luckily, she wouldn’t have to use any meat points today. Her husband was away on business, she said. People nodded, showing no interest. He was almost always away on business. Few had ever met him.

Nights, especially Friday nights, she lay in bed in the dark and listened to the gritty click of heels on the sidewalk. Footsteps would come close and then pass. She would let out her breath. A new set of footsteps approached. Surely this was Beck. She knew how hesitantly he would let himself in, expecting the worst — his children’s tears, his wife’s reproaches. But instead, he’d find everything unchanged. The children would greet him offhandedly. Pearl would peck his cheek and ask if he’d had a good trip. Later, he would thank her for keeping his secret. He would be so easily readmitted, since only the two of them knew he’d left; outsiders would go on believing the Tulls were a happy family. Which they were, in fact. Oh, they’d always been so