Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (16 page)

But now she was beyond that. He only brought the soup out of helplessness; he would have preferred to kneel by her bed and rest his head on her sheets, to take her hands in his and tel her, “Mrs. Scarlatti, come back.” But she was such a no-nonsense woman; she would have looked shocked. Al he could do was offer this soup.

He sat in a corner of the room in a green vinyl chair with steel arms. It was October and the steam heat had come on; the air felt sharp and dry.

Mrs. Scarlatti’s bed was cranked upward slightly to help her breathe. From time to time, without opening her eyes, she said, “Oh, God.” Then Ezra would ask, “What? What is it?” and she would sigh. (or maybe that was the radiator.) Ezra never brought anything to read, and he never made conversation with the nurses who squeaked in and out on their rubber soles. He only sat, looking down at his pale, oversized hands, which lay loosely on his knees.

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 fel 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 fel 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: wel , he had not actual y been through anything yet. He was twenty-five years old and stil without wife or children, stil living at home with his mother. What he and Mrs.

Scarlatti had survived, it appeared, was year after year of standing stil . 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 al 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 eternal y wary. By other people’s standards, even he and Mrs.

Scarlatti would not have seemed particularly close. He always cal ed her “Mrs.

Scarlatti.” She cal ed Ezra her boy, her angel, but was otherwise remarkably distant, and asked no questions at al about his life outside the restaurant.

He knew the restaurant would be ful y 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 distrustful y, 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 careful y 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 sil y talk.”

“Which is sil y?” 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 sil y, 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 sil y, 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 tel 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. “Wel ?” said Mrs.

Scarlatti. “Are you stil 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 hal lay an emaciated woman in a coma, and an old, old man with a tiny wife who was al owed 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 wal 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 al 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-smel ing trucks, Scarlatti’s had a man named Mr.

Purdy, who shopped personal y 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 local y, 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 fel ow tel s 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,” fel ow assures me. Wel , maybe so.

But nowadays, I don’t know, al them taste anyhow like they spent six weeks on a windowsil .

Like they was Tnade of windowsil , or cel uloid, or pencil erasers. Wel , I tel you, Ezra: I apologize. It breaks my heart to bring you such rubbage as this here; I’d sooner not show up at al .”

Mr. Purdy was a pinched and prunish man in overal s, a white shirt, and a shiny black suit coat. He had a narrow face that seemed eternal y 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 al the time. Or I’d offer no choice at al ; examine people and say, “You look a little tired. I’l bring you an oxtail stew.” his “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 real y 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 smal 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-smel ing foods, once even brewing a quart of yogurt on the conservatory radiator. The men smoked cigarettes in the hal , 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 al , 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 fil ed 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 real y 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 fol owed 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 fol owing week with a spiced crab casserole of his own invention, and then with a spinach bisque, and when the waiters complained about al they bisque, and when the waiters complained about al they had to memorize he final y 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 pal id look of stone, and her face began to seem sphinx like, al flat planes and straight lines. Even her hair was sphinx like—a short, black wedge, a clump of hair, dul ed 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, tril ing 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 al 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 pil ow. “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 al for granted,” she said.