Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (16 page)

Previously, he had put on weight. He’d been nowhere near fat, but he’d softened and spread in that mild way that fair-haired men often do. Now the weight fell off. Like Mrs. Scarlatti, he was having trouble keeping things down. His large, floppy clothes covered a large, floppy frame that seemed oddly two-dimensional. Wide in front and wide behind, he was flat as paper when viewed from the side. His hair fell forward in a sheaf, like wheat. He didn’t bother pushing it back.

He and Mrs. Scarlatti had been through a lot together, he would have said, if asked—but what, exactly? She had had a bad husband (a matter of luck, she made it seem, like a bad bottle of wine) and ditched him; she had lost her only son, Ezra’s age, during the Korean War. But both these events she had suffered alone, before her partnership with Ezra began. And Ezra himself: well, he had not actually been through anything yet. He was twenty-five years old and still without wife or children, still living at home with his mother. What he and Mrs. Scarlatti had survived, it appeared, was year after year of standing still. Her life that had slid off somewhere in the past, his that kept delaying its arrival—they’d combined, they held each other up in empty space. Ezra was grateful to Mrs. Scarlatti for rescuing him from an aimless, careerless existence and teaching him all she knew; but more than that, for the fact that she depended on him. If not for her, whom would he have? His brother and sister were out in the world; he loved his mother dearly but there was something overemotional about her that kept him eternally wary. By other people’s standards, even he and Mrs. Scarlatti would not have seemed particularly close. He always called her “Mrs. Scarlatti.” She called Ezra her boy, her angel, but was otherwise remarkably distant, and asked no questions at all about his life outside the restaurant.

He knew the restaurant would be fully his when she died. She had told him so, just before this last hospital stay. “I don’t want it,” he had said. She was silent. She must have understood that it was only his manner of speaking. Of course he didn’t
want
it, in the sense of coveting it (he never thought much about money), but what would he do otherwise? Anyway, she had no one else to leave it to. She lifted a hand and let it drop. They didn’t mention the subject again.

Once, Ezra persuaded his mother to come and visit too. He liked for the various people in his life to get along, although he knew that would be difficult in his mother’s case. She spoke
of Mrs. Scarlatti distrustfully, even jealously. “What you see in such a person I can’t imagine. She’s downright … tough, is what she is, in spite of her high-fashion clothes. It looks like her face is not trying. Know what I mean? Like she can’t be bothered putting out the effort. Not a bit of lipstick, and those crayony black lines around her eyes … and she hardly ever smiles at people.”

But now that Mrs. Scarlatti was so sick, his mother kept her thoughts to herself. She dressed carefully for her visit and wore her netted hat, which made Ezra happy. He associated that hat with important family occasions. He was pleased that she’d chosen her Sunday black coat, even though it wasn’t as warm as her everyday maroon.

In the hospital, she told Mrs. Scarlatti, “Why, you look the picture of health! No one would ever guess.”

This was not true. But it was nice of her to say it.

“After I die,” Mrs. Scarlatti said in her grainy voice, “Ezra must move to my apartment.”

His mother said, “Now, let’s have none of that silly talk.”

“Which is silly?” Mrs. Scarlatti asked, but then she was overtaken by exhaustion, and she closed her eyes. Ezra’s mother misunderstood. She must have thought she’d asked
what
was silly, a rhetorical question, and she blithely smoothed her skirt around her and said, “Total foolishness, I never heard such rot.” Only Ezra grasped Mrs. Scarlatti’s meaning. Which was silly, she was asking—her dying, or Ezra’s moving? But he didn’t bother explaining that to his mother.

Another time, he got special permission from the nurses’ office to bring a few men from the restaurant—Todd Duckett, Josiah Payson, and Raymond the sauce maker. He could tell that Mrs. Scarlatti was glad to see them, although it was an awkward visit. The men stood around the outer edges of the room and cleared their throats repeatedly and would not take seats. “Well?” said Mrs. Scarlatti. “Are you still buying everything fresh?” From the inappropriateness of the question (none of them was remotely involved with the purchasing), Ezra
realized how out of touch she had grown. But these people, too, were tactful. Todd Duckett gave a mumbled cough and then said, “Yes, ma’am, just how you would’ve liked it.”

“I’m tired now,” Mrs. Scarlatti said.

Down the hall lay an emaciated woman in a coma, and an old, old man with a tiny wife who was allowed to sleep on a cot in his room, and a dark-skinned foreigner whose masses of visiting relatives gave the place the look of a gypsy circus. Ezra knew that the comatose woman had cancer, the old man a rare type of blood disease, and the foreigner some cardiac problem—it wasn’t clear what. “Heart rumor,” he was told by a dusky, exotic child who was surely too young to be visiting hospitals. She was standing outside the foreigner’s door, delicately reeling in a yo-yo.

“Heart
murmur
, maybe?”

“No, rumor.”

Ezra was starting to feel lonely here and would have liked to make a friend. The nurses were always sending him away while they did something mysterious to Mrs. Scarlatti, and much of any visit he spent leaning dejectedly against the wall outside her room or gazing from the windows of the conservatory at the end of the corridor. But no one seemed approachable. This wing was different from the others—more hushed—and all the people he encountered wore a withdrawn, forbidding look. Only the foreign child spoke to him. “I think he’s going to die,” she said. But then she went back to her yo-yo. Ezra hung around a while longer, but it was obvious she didn’t find him very interesting.

Bibb lettuce, Boston lettuce, chicory, escarole, dripping on the counter in the center of the kitchen. While other restaurants’ vegetables were delivered by anonymous, dank, garbage-smelling trucks, Scarlatti’s had a man named Mr. Purdy, who shopped personally for them each morning before the sun came up. He
brought everything to the kitchen in splintery bushel baskets, along about eight a.m., and Ezra made a point of being there so that he would know what foods he had to deal with that day. Sometimes there were no eggplants, sometimes twice as many as planned. In periods like this—dead November, now—nothing grew locally, and Mr. Purdy had to resort to vegetables raised elsewhere, limp carrots and waxy cucumbers shipped in from out of state. And the tomatoes! They were a crime. “Just look,” said Mr. Purdy, picking one up. “Vine-grown, the fellow tells me. Vine-
grown
, yes. I’d like to see them grown on anything else. ‘But ripened?’ I say. ‘However was they ripened?’ ‘Vine-ripened, too,’ fellow assures me. Well, maybe so. But nowadays, I don’t know, all them taste anyhow like they spent six weeks on a windowsill. Like they was
made
of windowsill, or celluloid, or pencil erasers. Well, I tell you, Ezra: I apologize. It breaks my heart to bring you such rubbage as this here; I’d sooner not show up at all.”

Mr. Purdy was a pinched and prunish man in overalls, a white shirt, and a shiny black suit coat. He had a narrow face that seemed eternally disapproving, even during the growing season. Only Ezra knew that inwardly, there was something nourishing and generous about him. Mr. Purdy rejoiced in food as much as Ezra did, and for the same reasons—less for eating himself than for serving to others. He had once invited Ezra to his home, a silver-colored trailer out on Ritchie Highway, and given him a meal consisting solely of new asparagus, which both he and Ezra agreed had the haunting taste of oysters. Mrs. Purdy, a smiling, round-faced woman in a wheelchair, had claimed they talked like lunatics, but she finished two large helpings while both men tenderly watched. It was a satisfaction to see how she polished her buttery plate.

“If this restaurant was just mine,” Ezra said now, “I wouldn’t serve tomatoes in the winter. People would ask for tomatoes and I’d say, ‘What can you be thinking of, this is not the season.’ I’d give them something better.”

“They’d stomp out directly,” Mr. Purdy said.

“No, they might surprise you. And I’d put up a blackboard,
write on it every day just two or three good dishes. Of course! In France, they do that all the time. Or I’d offer no choice at all; examine people and say, ‘You look a little tired. I’ll bring you an oxtail stew.’ ”

“Mrs. Scarlatti would just die,” said Mr. Purdy.

There was a silence. He rubbed his bristly chin, and then corrected himself: “She’d rotate in her grave.”

They stood around a while.

“I don’t really want a restaurant anyhow,” Ezra said.

“Sure,” Mr. Purdy said. “I know that.”

Then he put his black felt hat on, and thought a moment, and left.

The foreign child slept in the conservatory, her head resting on the stainless steel arm of a chair like the one in Mrs. Scarlatti’s room. It made Ezra wince. He wanted to fold his coat and slide it beneath her cheek, but he worried that would wake her. He kept his distance, therefore, and stood at one of the windows gazing down on pedestrians far below. How small and determined their feet looked, emerging from their foreshortened figures! The perseverance of human beings suddenly amazed him.

A woman entered the room—one of the foreigners. She was lighter skinned than the others, but he knew she was foreign because of her slippers, which contrasted with her expensive wool dress. The whole family, he had noticed, changed into slippers as soon as they arrived each morning. They made themselves at home in every possible way—setting out bags of seeds and nuts and spicy-smelling foods, once even brewing a quart of yogurt on the conservatory radiator. The men smoked cigarettes in the hall, and the women murmured together while knitting brightly colored sweaters.

Now the woman approached the child, bent over her, and tucked her hair back. Then she lifted her in her arms and settled in the chair. The child didn’t wake. She only nestled closer and
sighed. So after all, Ezra could have put his coat beneath her head. He had missed an opportunity. It was like missing a train—or something more important, something that would never come again. There was no explanation for the grief that suddenly filled him.

He decided to start serving his gizzard soup in the restaurant. He had the waiters announce it to patrons when they handed over the menu. “In addition to the soups you see here, we are pleased to offer tonight …” One of the waiters had failed to show up and Ezra hired a woman to replace him—strictly against Mrs. Scarlatti’s policy. (Waitresses, she said, belonged in truck stops.) The woman did much better than the men with Ezra’s soup. “Try our gizzard soup,” she would say. “It’s really hot and garlicky and it’s made with love.” Outside it was bitter cold, and the woman was so warm and helpful, more and more people followed her suggestion. Ezra thought that the next time a waiter left, he would hire a second woman, and maybe another after that, and so on.

He experimented the following week with a spiced crab casserole of his own invention, and then with a spinach bisque, and when the waiters complained about all they had to memorize he finally went ahead and bought a blackboard,
SPECIALS
, he wrote at the top. But in the hospital, when Mrs. Scarlatti asked how things were going, he didn’t mention any of this. Instead, he sat forward and clasped his hands tight and said, “Fine. Um … fine.” If she noticed anything strange in his voice, she didn’t comment on it.

Mrs. Scarlatti had always been a lean, dark, slouching woman, with a faintly scornful manner. It was true, as Ezra’s mother said, that she gave the impression of not caring what people thought of her. But that had been part of her charm—her sleepy eyes, hardly troubling to stay open, and her indifferent tone of
voice. Now, she went too far. Her skin took on the pallid look of stone, and her face began to seem sphinxlike, all flat planes and straight lines. Even her hair was sphinxlike—a short, black wedge, a
clump
of hair, dulled and rough. Sometimes Ezra believed that she was not dying but petrifying. He had trouble remembering her low laugh, her casual arrogance. (“Sweetie,” she used to say, ordering him off to some task, trilling languid fingers. “Angel boy …”) He had never felt more than twelve years old around her, but now he was ancient, her parent or grandparent. He soothed and humored her. Not all she said was quite clear these days. “At least,” she whispered once, “I never made myself ridiculous, Ezra, did I?”

“Ridiculous?” he asked.

“With you.”

“With me? Of course not.”

He was puzzled, and must have shown it; she smiled and rocked her head on the pillow. “Oh, you always were a much-loved child,” she told him. It must have been a momentary wandering of the brain. (She hadn’t known him as a child.) “You take it all for granted,” she said. Maybe she was confusing him with Billy, her son. She turned her face away from him and closed her eyes. He felt suddenly anxious. He was reminded of that time his mother had nearly died, wounded by a misfired arrow—entirely Ezra’s fault; Ezra, the family stumbler. “I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he had cried, but the apology had never been accepted because his brother had been blamed instead, and his father, who had purchased the archery set. Ezra, his mother’s favorite, had got off scot-free. He’d been left unforgiven—not relieved, as you might expect, but forever burdened. “You’re mistaken,” he said now, and Mrs. Scarlatti’s eyelids fluttered into crepe but failed to open. “I wish you’d get me straight. See who I
am
, I’m Ezra,” he said, and then (for no logical reason) he bent close and said, “Mrs. Scarlatti. Remember when I left the army? Discharged for sleepwalking? Sent home? Mrs. Scarlatti, I wasn’t really all the way asleep. I mean, I knew what I was doing. I didn’t
plan
to sleepwalk, but part
of me was conscious, and observed what was going on, and could have wakened the rest of me if I’d tried. I had this feeling like watching a dream, where you know you can break it off at any moment. But I didn’t; I wanted to go home. I just wanted to leave that army, Mrs. Scarlatti. So I didn’t stop myself.”