Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (37 page)

Her vitality hummed in the room around him. She was forever doing something to her “waists,” which Ezra assumed to be blouses. Embroidering waists or mending waists or buying goods for a waist or sewing fresh braid on a waist, putting insertion on a waist, ripping insertion
off
a waist, tucking her red
plaid waist until the tucker got out of fix, attaching new sleeves to a waist—even, for one entire week, attending a course called “Fashioning the Shirtwaist.” She pressed a bodice, sewed a corset cover, darned her stockings, altered a girdle, stitched a comforter, monogrammed a handkerchief, cut outing flannel for skirts. (Yet in all the time he’d known her, Ezra had never seen her so much as hem a dish towel.) She went to hear a lecture entitled “Thunder Tones from the Guillotine.” She pestered the vet about Prince’s ailment—an injured stifle, whatever that was. She sold tickets to socials, amateur theatricals, and Mission Society picnics. She paid a call on her uncle but found his door double-locked and only a parlor window open.

In Ezra’s slumbering, motionless household, the loudest sound came from fifteen-year-old Pearl, hitching up her underskirts to clamber through that long-ago window.

Daily, in various bookstores, he proceeded from the Merck Manual to other books, simpler to use, intended for laymen. Several were indexed by symptoms, including
lump
. He found that his lump could indeed be a lymph node—a temporary swelling in reaction to some minor infection. Or it could also be a hernia. Or it could be something worse.
Consult your doctor
, he read. But he didn’t. Every morning, still in his pajamas, he tested the lump with his fingers and resolved to call Dr. Vincent, but later he would change his mind. Suppose it did turn out to be cancer: why would he want to endure those treatments—the radiation and the toxic drugs? Better just to die.

He noticed that he thought of dying as a kind of adventure, something new that he hadn’t yet experienced. Like an unusual vacation trip.

His sister, Jenny, stopped by with her children. It was a Wednesday, her morning off. She took over the house with no trouble at all. “Where’s your ironing? Give me your ironing,” she said, and “What do you need in the way of shopping?” and “Quinn,
get down from there.” She had so much energy; she spent herself with such recklessness. In her worn-looking clothes, run-down shoes, with her dark hair lifting behind her, she flew around the living room. “I think you should buy an air-conditioner, Mother. Have you heard the latest pollution count? For someone in your state of health …”

Her mother, bleakly speechless, withstood this storm of words and then lifted one white hand. “Come closer so I can see your hair,” she said.

Jenny came closer and submitted to her touch. Her mother stroked her hair with a dissatisfied expression on her face. “I don’t know why you can’t take better care of your looks,” she said. “How long since you’ve been to a beauty parlor?”

“I’m a busy woman, Mother.”

“How much time would you need for a haircut? And you’re not wearing makeup, are you. Are you? In this light, it’s hard to tell. Oh, Jenny. What must your husband think? He’ll think you’re not trying. You’ve let yourself go. I expect I could pass you on the street and not know you.”

Her favorite expression, it seemed to Ezra: I wouldn’t know you if I saw you on the street. She used it when referring to Jenny’s poor grooming, to Cody’s sparse visits, to Ezra’s tendency to put on weight. Ezra caught a sudden glimpse of a wide, vacant sidewalk and his various family members strolling down it, their faces averted from one another.

Jenny’s children ambled through the house, looking bored and disgusted. The baby chewed on a curtain pull. Jane, the nine-year-old, perched on Ezra’s knee as casually as if he were a piece of furniture. She smelled of crayons and peanut butter—homely smells that warmed his heart. “What are you fixing in your restaurant tonight?” she asked.

“Cold things. Salads. Soups.”

“Soups are hot,” she said.

“Not necessarily.”

“Oh.”

She paused, perhaps to store this information in some tidy filing cabinet inside her head. Ezra was touched by her willingness
to adjust—by her amiable adaptability. Was it possible, he sometimes wondered, that children
humored
grown-ups? If grown-ups insisted on toilet training, on
please
and
thank you
—well, all right, since it seemed to mean so much to them. It wasn’t important enough to argue about. This is a transitive verb, some grown-up would say, and the children would go along with it; though to them it was immaterial, frankly. Transitive, intransitive, who cared? What difference did it make? It was all a foreign language anyhow.

“Maybe you could invite me to your restaurant for supper,” Jane told Ezra.

“I’d be delighted to invite you for supper.”

“Maybe I could bring a friend.”

“Certainly.”

“I’ll bring Barbie.”

“That would be wonderful,” Ezra said.

“You bring a friend, too.”

“All my friends work in the restaurant.”

“Don’t you ever date?”

“Of course I date.”

“I don’t mean just some one of those lady cooks you pal around with.”

“Oh, I’ve dated in my time.”

She filed that away also.

Jenny was criticizing their mother’s doctor. She said he was too old, too old-fashioned—too general, she said. “You need a good internist. I happen to know a man on—”

“I’ve been going to Dr. Vincent as long as I’ve lived in Baltimore,” her mother said.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“We don’t all just change for change’s sake.”

Jenny rolled her eyes at Ezra.

Ezra said, “Maybe
you
could be her doctor.”

“I’m her relative, Ezra.”

“So much the better,” Ezra said.

“Besides, my field is pediatrics.”

“Jenny,” said Ezra. “What would you say—”

He stopped. Jenny raised her eyebrows.

“What would you say is your patients’ most common disease?”

“Mother-itis,” she told him.

“Oh.”

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s not, um, cancer or anything.”

“Why do you ask?” she said again.

He only shrugged.

After she’d collected the ironing, and made a shopping list, and rounded up the children, she said that she had to be off. She brushed her cheek against her mother’s and patted Ezra’s arm. “I’ll walk you to the car,” he said.

“Never mind.”

He walked her anyway, relieving her of the laundry bag while she carried the baby astride her hip. They passed the mailman. He was bent so low to the ground that he didn’t even notice them.

Out by the car, Ezra said, “I’ve got this lump.”

“Oh?” said Jenny. “Where?”

He touched his groin. “In the morning it starts out small,” he said, “but by evening it’s so big, it’s like a rock or something in my trouser pocket. I’m wondering if it’s, you know. Cancer.”

“It’s not cancer. More likely a hernia, from the sound of it,” she said. “Go see a doctor.” She got in the car and buckled the baby into her carrier. Then she leaned out the open window. “Do I have all the children?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She waved and drove off.

Back in the house, his mother was hovering at the window exactly as if she could see. “That girl has too big a family,” she said. “I suppose her looks must be ruined by now.”

“No, I haven’t noticed it.”

“And her hair. Honestly. Ezra, tell me the truth,” she said. “How does Jenny seem to you?”

“Oh, the same as always.”

“I mean, don’t you think she’s let herself go? What about what she was wearing, for instance?”

He tried to remember. It was something faded, but perfectly acceptable, he guessed. Was it blue? Gray? He tried to picture her hairdo, the style of her shoes, but only came up with the chiseled lines that had always, even in her girlhood, encircled her neck—rings of lines that gave her a lush look. For some reason, those lines made him sad now, and so did Jenny’s olive hands with the ragged, oval fingernails, and the crinkles at the corners of her eyes, and the news that his life would, after all, go on and on and on.

“
February sixth, nineteen-ten,
” Ezra read aloud. “
I baked a few Scottish Fancies but they wouldn’t do to take to a tea.
”

His mother, listening intently, thought that over a while. Then she made her gesture of dismissal and started rocking again in her rocker.

“
I hitched up Prince and rode downtown for brown silk gloves and an ice bag. Then got out my hat frames and washed my straw hat. For supper fixed a batch of—
”

“Move on,” his mother said.

He riffled through the pages, glimpsing
buttonhole stitch
and
watermelon social
and
set of fine furs for $22.50. “Early this morning,
” he read to his mother, “
I went out behind the house to weed. Was kneeling in the dirt by the stable with my pinafore a mess and the perspiration rolling down my back, wiped my face on my sleeve, reached for the trowel, and all at once thought, Why I believe that at just this moment I am absolutely happy.
”

His mother stopped rocking and grew very still.

“
The Bedloe girl’s piano scales were floating out her window,
” he read, “
and a bottle fly was buzzing in the grass, and I saw that I was kneeling on such a beautiful green little planet. I don’t care what else might come about, I have had this moment. It belongs to me.
”

That was the end of the entry. He fell silent.

“Thank you, Ezra,” his mother said. “There’s no need to read any more.”

Then she fumbled up from her chair, and let him lead her to
the kitchen for lunch. He guided her gently, inch by inch. It seemed to him that he had to be very careful with her. They were traversing the curve of the earth, small and steadfast, surrounded by companions: Jenny flying past with her children, the drunks at the stadium sobering the instant their help was needed, the baseball players obediently springing upward in the sunlight, and Josiah connected to his unknown gift giver as deeply, and as mysteriously, as Ezra himself was connected to this woman beside him.

When Pearl Tull died, Cody was off on a goose hunt and couldn’t be reached for two days. He and Luke were staying in a cabin owned by his business partner. It didn’t have a telephone, and the roads were little more than logging trails.

Late Sunday, when they returned, Ruth came out to the driveway. The night was chilly, and she wore no sweater but hugged herself as she walked toward the car, her white, freckled face oddly set and her faded red hair standing up in the wind. That was how Cody guessed something was wrong. Ruth hated cold weather, and ordinarily would have waited inside the house.

“It’s bad news,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“What happened?”

“Your mother’s passed away.”

“Grandma
died?
” asked Luke, as if correcting her.

Ruth kissed Luke’s cheek but kept her eyes on Cody, maybe trying to gauge the damage. Cody himself, wearily closing the car door behind him, was uncertain of the damage. His mother had been a difficult woman, of course. But even so …

“She died in her sleep, early yesterday,” Ruth said. She took Cody’s hand in both of hers and gripped it, tightly, so that the pain he felt right then was purely physical. He stood for a while, allowing her; then he gently pulled away and went to open the car trunk.

They had not bagged any geese—the hunt had been a lame excuse, really, to spend some time with Luke, who was now a senior in high school and would not be around for much longer. All Cody had to unload was the rifles in their canvas cases and a duffel bag. Luke brought the ice chest. They walked toward the house in silence. Cody had still not responded.

“The funeral’s tomorrow at eleven,” said Ruth. “I told Ezra we’d be there in the morning.”

“How is he taking it?” Cody asked.

“He sounded all right.”

Inside the front door, Cody set down the duffel bag and propped the rifles against the wall. He decided that he felt not so much sad as heavy. Although he was lean bodied, still in good shape, he imagined that he had suddenly sunk in on himself and grown denser. His eyes were weighty and dry, and his step seemed too solid for the narrow, polished floorboards in the hall.

“Well, Luke,” he said.

Luke seemed dazed, or perhaps just sleepy. He squinted palely under the bright light.

“Do you want to go to the funeral?” Cody asked him.

“Sure, I guess,” said Luke.

“You wouldn’t have to.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Of course he’s going,” said Ruth. “He’s her grandson.”

“That doesn’t obligate him,” Cody told her.

“Of course it obligates him.”

This was where they differed. They could have argued about it all night, except that Cody was so tired.

For their journey south, Cody drove Ruth’s car because his own was still spattered with mud from the goose hunt. He supposed they would have to ride in some shiny, formal funeral procession. But when he happened to mention this to Ruth, halfway down the turnpike, she told him that Ezra had said their mother had requested cremation. (“Golly,” Luke breathed!) There would only be the service, therefore—no cemetery trip and no
burial. “Very sensible,” Cody said. He thought of the tidy framework of his mother’s bones, the crinkly bun on the back of her head. Did that fierce little figure exist any more? Was it already ashes? “Ah, God, it’s barbaric, however you look at it,” he told Ruth.

“What, cremation?” she asked.

“Death.”

They sped along—Cody in his finest gray suit, Ruth in stiff black beside him. Luke sat in the rear, gazing out the side window. They were traveling the Beltway now, approaching Baltimore. They passed trees ablaze with red and yellow leaves and shopping malls full of ordinary, Monday morning traffic. “When I was a boy, this was country,” Cody said to Luke.

“You told me.”

“Baltimore was nothing but a little harbor town.”

There was no answer. Cody searched for Luke in the rear-view mirror. “Hey,” he said. “You want to drive the rest of the way?”