Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Page 14

  “Fine,” she said, eyes scanning the print.

  “Harley all right?”

  There was a deep, studious silence.

  “It doesn’t seem we ever get to see him any more,” Ezra said.

  “He’s okay,” Jenny said.

  She turned a page.

  Ezra waited a while longer, and then he straightened up from the doorway and went downstairs. He found his mother in the kitchen, unpacking groceries. “Well?” she asked him.

  “Well, what?”

  “Did you talk to Jenny?”

  “Ah …”

  She still had her coat on; she thrust her hands in her pockets and faced him squarely, with her bun slipping down the back of her head. “You promised me,” she told him. “You swore you’d talk to her.”

  “I didn’t swear to, Mother.”

  “You took a solemn oath,” she told him.

  “I notice she still wears a ring,” he said hopefully.

  “So what,” said his mother. She went back to her groceries.

  “She wouldn’t wear a ring if she and Harley were separated, would she?”

  “She would if she wanted to fool us.”

  “Well, I don’t know, if she wants to fool us maybe we ought to act fooled. I don’t know.”

  “All my life,” his mother said, “people have been trying to shut me out. Even my children. Especially my children. If I so much as ask that girl how she’s been, she shies away like I’d inquired into the deepest, darkest part of her. Now, why should she be so standoffish?”

  Ezra said, “Maybe she cares more about what you think than what outsiders think.”

  “Ha,” said his mother. She lifted a carton of eggs from the grocery bag.

  “I’m worried I don’t know how to get in touch with people,” Ezra said.

  “Hmm?”

  “I’m worried if I come too close, they’ll say I’m overstepping. They’ll say I’m pushy, or … emotional, you know. But if I back off, they might think I don’t care. I really, honestly believe I missed some rule that everyone else takes for granted; I must have been absent from school that day. There’s this narrow little dividing line I somehow never located.”

  “Nonsense; I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said his mother, and then she held up an egg. “Will you look at this? Out of one dozen eggs, four are cracked. Two are smushed. I can’t imagine what Sweeney Brothers is coming to, these days.”

  Ezra waited a while, but she didn’t say any more. Finally, he left.

  He tore down the wall between the restaurant kitchen and the dining room, doing most of the work in a single night. He slung a sledgehammer in a steady rhythm, then ripped away at hunks of plaster till a thick white dust had settled over everything. Then he came upon a mass of pipes and electrical wires and he had to call in professionals to finish off the job. The damage was so extensive that he was forced to stay closed for four straight weekdays, losing a good deal of money.

  He figured that while he was at it, he might as well redecorate the dining room. He raced around the windows and dragged down the stiff brocade draperies; he peeled up the carpeting and persuaded a brigade of workmen to sand and polish the floorboards.

  By the evening of the fourth day, he was so tired that he could feel the hinging of every muscle. Even so, he washed the white from his hair and changed out of his speckled jeans and went to pay a visit to Mrs. Scarlatti. She lay in her usual position, slightly propped, but her expression was alert and she even managed a smile when he entered. “Guess what, angel,” she whispered. “Tomorrow they’re letting me leave.”

  “Leave?”

  “I asked the doctor, and he’s letting me go home.”

  “Home?”

  “As long as I hire a nurse, he says … Well, don’t just stand there, Ezra. I need for you to see about a nurse. If you’ll look in that nightstand …”

  It was more talking than she’d done in weeks. Ezra felt almost buoyant with new hope; underneath, it seemed, he must have given up on her. But of course, he was also worried about the restaurant. What would she think when she saw it? What would she say to him? “Everything must go back again, just the way it was,” he could imagine. “Really, Ezra. Put up that wall this instant, and fetch my carpets and my curtains.” He suspected that he had very poor taste, much inferior to Mrs. Scarlatti’s. She would say, “Dear heart, how could you be so chintzy?”—a favorite word of hers. He wondered if he could keep her from finding out, if he could convince her to stay in her apartment till he had returned things to normal.

  He thanked his stars that he hadn’t changed the sign that hung outside.

  * * *

  It was Ezra who settled the bill at the business office, the following morning. Then he spoke briefly with her doctor, whom he chanced to meet in the corridor. “This is wonderful about Mrs. Scarlatti,” Ezra said. “I really didn’t expect it.”

  “Oh,” said the doctor. “Well.”

  “I was getting sort of discouraged, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Well,” the doctor said again, and he held out his hand so suddenly that it took Ezra a second to respond. After that, the doctor walked off. Ezra felt there was a lot more the man could have said, as a matter of fact.

  Mrs. Scarlatti went home by ambulance. Ezra drove behind, catching glimpses of her through the tinted window. She lay on a stretcher, and next to her was another stretcher holding a man in two full leg casts. His wife perched beside him, evidently talking nonstop. Ezra could see the feathers on her hat bob up and down with her words.

  Mrs. Scarlatti was let off first. The ambulance men unloaded her while Ezra stood around feeling useless. “Oh, smell that air,” said Mrs. Scarlatti. “Isn’t it fresh and beautiful.” Actually, it was terrible air—wintry and rainy and harsh with soot. “I never told you this, Ezra,” she said, as they wheeled her through the building’s front entrance, “but I really didn’t believe I would see this place again. My little apartment, my restaurant …” Then she raised a palm—her old, peremptory gesture, directed toward the ambulance men. They were preparing to guide her stretcher through the right-hand door and up the stairs. “Dear fellow,” she said to the nearest one, “could you just open that door on the left and let me take a peek?”

  It happened so fast, Ezra didn’t have time to protest. The man reached back in a preoccupied way and opened the door to the restaurant. Then he resumed his study of the stairs; there was an angle at the top that was going to pose a problem. Mrs. Scarlatti, meanwhile, turned her face with some effort and gazed through the door.

  There was a moment, just a flicker of a second, when Ezra dared to hope that she might approve after all. But looking past her, he realized that was impossible. The restaurant was a warehouse, a barn, a gymnasium—a total catastrophe. Tables and upended chairs huddled in one corner, underneath bald, barren windows. Buckling plank footbridges led across the varnished floor, which had somehow picked up a film of white dust, and the missing kitchen wall was as horrifying as a toothless smile. Only two broad, plaster pillars separated the kitchen from the dining room. Everything was exposed—sinks and garbage cans, the blackened stove, the hanging pots with their tarnished bottoms, a calendar showing a girl in a sheer black nightgown, and a windowsill bearing two dead plants and a Brillo pad and Todd Duckett’s asthma inhalant.

  “Oh, my God,” said Mrs. Scarlatti.

  She looked up into his eyes. Her face seemed stripped. “You might at least have waited till I died,” she said.

  “Oh!” said Ezra. “No, you don’t understand; you don’t know. It wasn’t what you think. It was just … I can’t explain, I went wild somehow!”

  But she raised that palm of hers and sailed up the stairs to her apartment. Even lying flat, she had an air of speed and power.

  She didn’t refuse to see him again—nothing like that. Every morning he paid her a visit, and was admitted by her day nurse. He sat on the edge of the ladylike chair in the bedroom and reported on bill
s and health inspections and linen deliveries. Mrs. Scarlatti was unfailingly polite, nodding in all the right places, but she never said much in return. Eventually, she would close her eyes as a sign that the visit was finished. Then Ezra would leave, often jostling her bed by accident or overturning his chair. He had always been a clumsy man, but now was more so than usual. It seemed to him his hands were too big, forever getting in the way. If only he could have done something with them! He would have liked to fix her a meal—a sustaining meal, with a depth of flavors, a complicated meal that would require a whole day of chopping things small, and grinding, and blending. In the kitchen, as nowhere else, Ezra came into his own, like someone crippled on dry land but effortlessly graceful once he takes to water. However, Mrs. Scarlatti still wasn’t eating. There was nothing he could offer her.

  Or he would have liked to seize her by the shoulders and shout, “Listen! Listen!” But something closed-off about her face kept stopping him. Almost in plain words, she was telling him that she preferred he not do such a thing. So he didn’t.

  After a visit, he would go downstairs and look in on the restaurant, which at this hour was vacant and echoing. He might check the freezer, or erase the blackboard, and then perhaps just wander a while, touching this and that. The wallpaper in the back hall was too cluttered and he ripped it off the wall. He tore away the ornate gilt sconces beside the telephone. He yanked the old-fashioned silhouettes from the restroom doors. Sometimes he did so much damage that there was barely time to cover it up before opening, but everybody pitched in and it always got done somehow or other. By six o’clock, when the first customers arrived, the food was cooked and the tables were laid and the waitresses were calm and smiling. Everything was smoothed over.

  Mrs. Scarlatti died in March, on a bitter, icy afternoon. When the nurse phoned Ezra, he felt a crushing sense of shock. You would think this death was unexpected. He said, “Oh, no,” and hung up, and had to call back to ask the proper questions. Had the end been peaceful? Had Mrs. Scarlatti been awake? Had she said any words in particular? Nothing, said the nurse. Really, nothing at all; just slipped away, like. “But she mentioned you this morning,” she added. “I almost wondered, you know? It was almost like she sensed it. She said, ‘Tell Ezra to change the sign.’ ”

  “Sign?”

  “ ‘It’s not Scarlatti’s Restaurant any more,’ she said. Or something like that. ‘It isn’t Scarlatti’s.’ I think that’s what she said.”

  From the pain he felt, Mrs. Scarlatti might as well have reached out from death and slapped him across the face. It made things easier, in a way. He was almost angry; he was almost relieved that she was gone. He noticed how the trees outside sparkled like something newly minted.

  He was the one who made the arrangements, working from a list that Mrs. Scarlatti had given him months before. He knew which funeral home to call and which pastor, and which acquaintances she had wanted at the service. A peculiar thing: he thought of phoning the hospital and inviting that foreign family. Of course he didn’t, but it was true they would have made wonderful mourners. Certainly they’d have done better than those who did come, and who later stood stiffly around her frozen grave. Ezra, too, was stiff—a sad, tired man in a flapping coat, holding his mother’s arm. Something ached behind his eyes. If he had cried, Mrs. Scarlatti would have said, “Jesus, Ezra. For God’s sake, sweetie.”

  Afterward, he was glad to go to the restaurant. It helped to keep busy—stirring and seasoning and tasting, stumbling over the patch in the floor where the center counter had once stood. Later, he circulated among the diners as Mrs. Scarlatti herself used to do. He urged upon them his oyster stew, his artichoke salad, his spinach bisque and his chili-bean soup and his gizzard soup that was made with love.

  5

  The Country Cook

  Cody Tull always had a girlfriend, one girl after another, and all the girls were wild about him till they met his brother, Ezra. Something about Ezra just hooked their attention, it seemed. In his presence they took on a bright, sharp, arrested look, as if listening to a sound that others hadn’t caught yet. Ezra didn’t even notice this. Cody did, of course. He would give an exaggerated sigh, pretending to be amused. Then the girl would collect herself. It was already too late, though; Cody never allowed second chances. He had a talent for mentally withdrawing. An Indian-faced man with smooth black hair, with level, balanced features, he could manage, when he tried, to seem perfectly blank, like a plaster clothing model. Meanwhile, his ragged, dirty, unloved younger self, with failing grades, with a U in deportment, clenched his fists and howled, “Why? Why always Ezra? Why that sissy pale goody-goody Ezra?”

  But Ezra just gazed into space from behind his clear gray eyes, from under his shock of soft, fair hair, and went on thinking his private thoughts. You could say this for Ezra: he seemed honestly unaware of the effect he had on women. No one could accuse him of stealing them deliberately. But that made it all the worse, in a way.

  Cody half believed that Ezra had some lack—a lack that worked in his favor, that made him immune, that set him apart from ordinary men. There was something almost monkish about him. Women never really managed to penetrate his meditations, although he was unfailingly courteous to them, and considerate. He was likely to contemplate them in silence for an inappropriate length of time, and then ask something completely out of the blue. For instance: “How did you get those little gold circles through your ears?” It was ridiculous—a man reaches the age of twenty-seven without having heard of pierced earrings. However, it must not have seemed ridiculous to the woman he was addressing. She raised a finger to an earlobe in a startled, mesmerized way. She was spellbound. Was it Ezra’s unexpectedness? The narrowness of his focus? (He’d passed up her low-cut dress, powdered cleavage, long silky legs.) Or his innocence, perhaps. He was a tourist on a female planet, was what he was saying. But he didn’t realize he was saying it, and failed to understand the look she gave him. Or didn’t care, if he did understand.

  Only one of Cody’s girlfriends had not been attracted to his brother. This was a social worker named Carol, or maybe Karen. Upon meeting Ezra, she had fixed him with a cool stare. Later, she had remarked to Cody that she disliked motherly men. “Always feeding, hovering,” she said (for she’d met him at his restaurant), “but acting so clumsy and shy, in the end it’s you that takes care of them. Ever notice that?” However, she hardly counted; Cody had so soon afterward lost interest in her.

  You might wonder why he went on making these introductions, considering his unfortunate experiences—the earliest dating from the year he turned fourteen, the latest as recent as a month ago. After all, he lived in New York City and his family lived in Baltimore; he didn’t really have to bring these women home on weekends. In fact, he often swore that he would stop it. He would meet somebody, marry her, and not mention her even to his mother. But that would mean a lifetime of suspense. He’d keep watching his wife uncomfortably, suspiciously. He’d keep waiting for the inevitable—like Sleeping Beauty’s parents, waiting for the needle that was bound to prick her finger in spite of their precautions.

  He was thirty years old by now, successful in his business, certainly ready to marry. He considered his New York apartment temporary, a matter of minor convenience; he had recently purchased a farmhouse in Baltimore County with forty acres of land. Weekends, he traded his slim gray suit for corduroys and he roamed his property, making plans. There was a sunny backyard where his wife could have her kitchen garden. There were bedrooms waiting to be stocked with children. He imagined them tumbling out to meet him every Friday afternoon when he came home. He felt rich and lordly. Poor Ezra: all he had was that disorganized restaurant, in the cramped, stunted center of the city.

  Once, Cody invited Ezra to hunt rabbits with him in the woods behind the farm. It wasn’t a success. First Ezra fell into a yellowjackets’ nest. Then he got his rifle wet in the stream. And when they paused on a hilltop for lunch, he whipped out his battered recorder and comme
nced to tootling “Greensleeves,” scaring off all living creaures within a five-mile radius—which may have been his intention. Cody wasn’t even talking to him, at the end; Ezra had to chatter on by himself. Cody stalked well ahead of him in total silence, trying to remember why this outing had seemed such a good idea. Ezra sang “Mister Rabbit.” “Every little soul,” he sang, blissfully off-key, “must shine, shine …”

  No wonder Cody was a cuticle chewer, a floor pacer, a hair rummager. No wonder, when he slept at night, he ground his teeth so hard that his jaws ached every morning.

  Early in the spring of 1960, his sister, Jenny, wrote him a letter. Her divorce was coming through in June, she said—two more months, and then she’d be free to marry Sam Wiley. Cody didn’t think much of Wiley, and he flicked this news aside like a gnat and read on. Though it looks, she said, as if Ezra might beat me down the aisle. Her name is Ruth but I don’t know any more than that. Then she said she was seriously considering dropping out of medical school. The complications of her personal life, she said, were using up so much energy that she had none left over for anything else. Also, she had gained three pounds in the last six weeks and was perfectly obese, a whale, living now on lettuce leaves and lemon water. Cody was accustomed to Jenny’s crazy diets (she was painfully thin), so he skimmed that part. He finished the letter and folded it.

  Ruth?

  He opened it again.

  … as if Ezra might beat me down the aisle, he read. He tried to think of some other kind of aisle—airplane, supermarket, movie house—but in the end, he had to believe it: Ezra was getting married. Well, at least now Cody could keep his own girls. (This gave him, for some reason, a little twinge of uneasiness.) But Ezra! Married? That walking accident? Imagine him in a formal wedding—forgetting license, ring, and responses, losing track of the service while smiling out the window at a hummingbird. Imagine him in bed with a woman. (Cody snorted.) He pictured the woman as dark and Biblical, because of her name: Ruth. Shadowed eyes and creamy skin. Torrents of loose black hair. Cody had a weakness for black-haired women; he didn’t like blondes at all. He pictured her bare shouldered, in a red satin nightgown, and he crumpled Jenny’s letter roughly and dropped it in the wastebasket.