Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (36 page)

“I was very young then,” Ezra said.

Although it was odd how clenched he felt, even now —not so much angry as defenseless; and he’d felt defenseless as a child, too, he believed. He had trusted his mother to be everything for him. When she cut a ringer with a paring knife, he had felt defeated by her incompetence. How could he depend on such a person? Why had she let him down so?

He took her by the upper arm and led her back to the living room. (he was conscious, suddenly, of his height and his solid, comfortable weight.) He seated her on the couch and went over to the desk to remove the bottom drawer.

This was something he had done many times before. It wasn’t, certainly, that the drawer needed cleaning, although to an outsider it might appear disorganized.

Cascades of unmounted photos slid about as he walked; others poked from the moldy, crumbling albums stacked to one side. There was a shoe box ful of his mother’s girlhood diaries; an incomplete baby book for Cody; and a Schrafft’s candy box containing old letters, al with the stamps snipped off the envelopes. There was a dim, lavender-colored corsage squashed as stiff and hard as a dried-up mouse carcass; a single kid glove hardened with age; and a musty-smel ing report card for Pearl E. Cody, fourth year, 1903, with the grades entered in a script so elegant that someone might have laid A-shaped tendrils of fine brown hair next to every subject. Ezra was fond of these belongings. He wil ingly went over them again and again, describing them for his mother. “There’s that picture of your Aunt Melinda on her wedding day.”

“Ah?”

“You are standing next to her with a fan made out of feathers.”

“We’l save it,” said his mother. She was stil pretending they were merely sorting.

But soon enough, she forgot about that and settled back, musing, while he recited what he’d found.

“Here is a picture of someone’s porch.”

“Porch? Whose porch?”

“I can’t tel .”

“What does it look like?”

“Two pil ars and a dark floor, clay pot ful of geraniums…”

“Am I in it?”

“No.”

“Oh, wel ,” she said, waving a hand, “maybe that was Luna’s porch.”

He had never heard of Luna.

To tel the truth, he didn’t believe that relatives were what his mother was after. Ladies and gentlemen drifted by in a blur; he did his best to learn their names, but his mother dismissed them airily.

It was herself she was hunting, he sensed. “Do you see me, at al ? Is that the dinner where I wore the pale blue?” Her single-mindedness sometimes amused him, sometimes annoyed him. There was greed in the forward jutting of her chin as she waited to hear of her whereabouts.

“Am I in that group? Was I on that picnic?” He opened a maroon velvet album, each of its pulpy gray pages grown bright yel ow as urine around the edges. None of the photos here was properly glued down. A sepia portrait of a bearded man was jammed into the binding alongside a Kodachrome of a pink baby in a flashy vinyl wading pool, with sept ‘63 stamped on the border.

His mother poked her face out, expectant. He said,

“Here’s a man with a beard. I think it’s your father.”

“Possibly,” she said, without interest.

He turned the page. “Here’s a group of ladies underneath a tree.”

“Ladies?”

“None of them look familiar.”

“What are they wearing?”

“Long, baggy dresses,” he told her.

“Everything seems to be sagging at the waist.”

“That would be nineteen-ten or so. Maybe Iola’s engagement party.”

“Who was Lola?”

“Look for me in a navy stripe,” she told him.

“There’s no stripes here.”

“Pass on.”

She had never been the type to gaze backward, had not fil ed his childhood with “When I was your age,” as so many mothers did. And even now, she didn’t use these photos as an excuse for reminiscing. She hardly discussed them at al , in fact—even those in which she appeared. Instead, she listened, alert, to any details he could give her about her past self. Was it that she wanted an outsider’s view of her?

Or did she hope to solve some mystery? “Am I smiling, or am I frowning? Would you say that I seemed happy?” When Ezra tried to ask her any questions, she grew bored. “What was your mother like?” he would ask.

“Oh, that was a long time ago,” she told him.

She hadn’t had much of a life, it seemed to him.

He wondered what, in al her history, she would enjoy returning to. Her courtship, even knowing how it would end?

Childbirth? Young motherhood? She did speak often and wistful y of the years when her children were little. But most of the photos in this drawer dated from long before then, from back in the early part of the century, and it was those she searched most diligently. “The Baker family reunion, that would be.

Nineteen-o-eight. Beulah’s sweet sixteen party. Lucy and Harold’s silver anniversary.”

The events she catalogued were other people’s; she just hung around the fringes, watching. “Katherine Rose, the summer she looked so beautiful and met her future husband.”

He peered at Katherine Rose. “She doesn’t look so beautiful to me” he said.

“It faded soon enough.”

Katherine Rose, whoever she was, wore a severe and complicated dress of a type not seen in sixty years or more.

He was judging her rabbity face as if she were a contemporary, some girl he’d glimpsed in a bar, but she had probably been dead for decades. He felt he was being tugged back through layers of generations.

He flipped open tiny diaries, several no bigger than a lady’s compact, and read his mother’s cramped entries aloud. “December eighth, nineteen-twelve. Paid cal on Edwina Barrett. Spil ed half-pint of top cream in the buggy coming home and had a nice job cleaning it off the cushions I can assure you…”

“April fourth, nineteen-o-eight. Went into town with Alice and weighed on the new weighing machine in Mr. Salter’s store. Alice is one hundred thirteen pounds, I am one hundred ten and a half.” His mother listened, tensed and stil , as if expecting something momentous, but al he found was purchased ten yards heliotrope bril iantine, and made chocolate blanc-mange for the Girls‘1 Culture Circle, and weighed again at Mr.

Salter’s store. During the summer of 1908— her fourteenth summer, as near as he could figure —she had weighed herself about every two days, hitching up her pony Prince and riding clear downtown to do so. “August seventh,” he read. “Had my measurements taken at the dressmaker’s and she gave me a copy to keep. I have developed in every possible sense.” He laughed, but his mother made an impatient little movement with one hand.

“September ninth,” he read, and then al at once had the feeling that the ground had rushed away beneath his feet.

Why, that perky young girl was this old woman! This blind old woman sitting next to him! She had once been a whole different person, had a whole different life separate from his, had spent her time swinging clubs with the Junior Amazons and cutting up with the Neal boys something dreadful and taking first prize at the Autumn Recital Contest. (1 hoped that poor Nadine would win, she wrote in a chubby, innocent script, but of course it was nice to get it myself.) His mother sat silent, absently stroking the dead corsage. “Never mind,” she told him.

“Shal I stop?”

“It wasn’t what I wanted after al .”

On his way to the restaurant, Ezra ducked into a bookstore and located a Merck Manual in the Family Health section. He checked the index for lump, but al he found was lumpy jaw (actinomycosis). Evidently you had to know the name of your disease first—in which case, why bother looking it up? He thought through what he remembered of his high school biology course, and decided to check under lymph gland. The very phrase was reassuring; lymph glands swel ed al the time. He had a couple in his neck that grew pecan sized anytime he developed a sniffle. But there were no lymph glands listed in the index, and it stopped him cold to see lymphatic leukemia and lymphohematogenous tuberculosis.

He shut the book quickly and replaced it on the shelf.

Josiah had already opened the restaurant, and two helpers were busy chopping vegetables in the kitchen.

A salesman in a plaid suit was trying to interest Josiah in some new product. “But,” Josiah kept saying. “But I don’t think—was Josiah was so gawky and confused-looking—

an emaciated giant in white, with his black and gray hair sticking out in frenzied tufts as if he’d grabbed handfuls in desperation—that Ezra felt a rush of love for him. He said,

“Josiah, what’s the problem?” and Josiah turned to him grateful y.

“Uh, see, this gentleman here—his “Murphy’s the name. J.

R. Murphy,” said the salesman. “I sel soy sauce, private brand. I sel it by the case.”

“We could never manage a case,” said Ezra.

“We hardly ever use it.”

“You wil , though,” the salesman told him. “Soy sauce is the coming thing; better get it while you can.

This here is the antidote for radiation.”

“For what?”

“Nuclear accidents! Atom bums! Just take a look at the facts: those folks in Hiroshima didn’t get near as many side effects as expected. Want to know why? It was al that Japanese food with soy sauce. Plain old soy sauce. Keep a case of this around and you’l have no more worries over Three Mile Island.”

“But I don’t even like soy sauce.”

“Who says you’ve got to like it?”

“Wel , maybe just a few bottles…”

Ezra said.

He wondered if there were some cryptic, cultish mark on his door that told al the crazy people he’d have trouble saying no.

He went to check on the dining room. Two waitresses were shaking out tablecloths and spreading them with a crisp, ripping sound. Josiah was lugging in bales of laundered napkins. There was always a moment, this early in the day, when Ezra found his restaurant disheartening.

He was chil ed by the empty tables, the looming, uncurtained windows, the bitter smel of last night’s cigarettes. What kind of occupation was this? People gulped down his food without a thought, too busy courting or arguing or negotiating to notice what they ate; then they went home and forgot it. Nothing amounted to anything.

And Ezra was a middle-aged man with his hair growing transparent at the back of his head; but here he was, where he’d been at twenty, living with his mother in a Calvert Street row house and reading himself to sleep with cookbooks.

He had never married, never fathered children, and lost the one girl he had loved out of sheer fatalism, lack of force, a wil ing assumption of defeat. (let it be was the theme that ran through his life. He was ruled by a dreamy mood of acceptance that was partly the source of al his happiness and partly his undoing.)

Josiah came to stand before him. “See my boots?” he asked.

Ezra surfaced and looked down at Josiah’s boots. They poked from beneath the white uniform— gigantic, rubber-coated canvas boots that could weather a flood, a snowstorm, an avalanche.

“L. L. Bean,” Josiah said.

“Ah.”

L. L. Bean was where Josiah got his mystery gifts. Once or twice a year they arrived: a one-man tent; a goose-down sleeping bag; hunting shoes in his unwieldy, hard-to-find size; an olive-drab poncho that could see him through a monsoon; a pocket survival kit containing compass, flint, signal mirror, and metal ic blanket. Al this for a man who’d been born and reared in the city and seemed inclined to stay there. There was never any card or note of explanation.

Josiah had written the company, but L. L. Bean replied that the donor preferred to stay anonymous. Ezra had spent hours helping Josiah think of possibilities. “Remember that old lady whose walk you used to shovel? Maybe it’s her.”

“She’d be dead by now, Ezra.”

“Remember Mol y Kane, with her wheelchair?

You used to wheel her to Algebra One.”

“But she said, “Let go my chair, you big reetard!” his

“Maybe now she regrets it.”

“Oh, no. Not her. Not Mol y Kane.”

“Maybe just someone you changed a tire for and never gave it another thought. Someone you opened a door for.

Maybe… I don’t know…”

Ordinarily he enjoyed these speculations, but now, looking down at Josiah’s mammoth boots, he was struck by the fact that even Josiah—lanky, buck-toothed, stammering Josiah—had a human being al his own that he was linked to, whether or not he knew that person’s name, and lived in a nest of gifts and secrets and special care that Ezra was excluded from.

“New Year’s Day, nineteen-fourteen,”

Ezra read aloud. “I hope this little diary wil not get lost as last year’s did. I hope I wil not put anything foolish in it as I have been known to do before.”

His mother hid a smile, unsuccessful y. What foolishness could she have been up to so long ago?

Ezra’s eyes slipped down the page to a line that had been crossed out. “There’s something here I can’t read,” he said.

“I never was known for my penmanship.”

“No, I mean you scribbled over it with so many loops and things—his “Apple apple,” his mother said.

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what we wrote over words that we wanted kept secret. Apple apple apple al joined together, so no one could guess what was written underneath.”

“Wel , it certainly worked,” Ezra said.

“Move on,” his mother told him.

“Oh. Um… put a flaxseed poultice on my finger… started some gartlets of pale pink ribbon… popped some popcorn and buttered half, made cracker-jack of the rest…” His mother sighed. Ezra skimmed several pages in silence.

How plotless real life was! In novels, events led up to something. In his mother’s diaries, they flitted past with no apparent direction. Frank brought her perfumed blotters and a box of “cocoa-nut” candy; Roy paid quite a cal and couldn’t seem to tear himself away; Burt Tansy took her to the comic opera and afterward presented her with a folio of the songs; but none of these people was ever mentioned again. Someone named Arthur wrote her a letter that was the softest thing, she said. I didn’t know he could be so sil y.

It was al in form though and I am not very mad. A certain Clark Al ensby promised to visit and did not; I suppose it is al for the best, she said, but I can’t understand his actions as tomorrow he is leaving. And while she was stretching the curtains, she said, the darkie announced a young man come to visit. I looked like a freak but went in anyhow and there sat Hugh McKinley. He was heading for the seed store so just HAPPENED to stop by, and staid some while…