Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (17 page)

Maybe she was confusing him with Bil y, 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 un-forgiven— 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 real y al 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.”

If she had heard (with her only son, Bil y, blown to bits in Korea), she would have risen up, sick as she was, and shouted, “Out! Out of my life!” So she must have missed it, for she only rocked her head again and smiled and went on sleeping.

Just after Thanksgiving the woman who’d been in a coma died, and the tiny old man either died or went home, but the foreigner stayed on and his relatives continued to visit. Now that they knew Ezra by sight, they hailed him as he passed.

“Come!” they would cal , and he would step in, shy and pleased, and stand around for several minutes with his fists locked in his armpits. The sick man was yel ow and sunken, hooked to a number of tubes, but he always tried to smile at Ezra’s entrance. Ezra had the impression that he knew no English. The others spoke English according to their ages

—the child perfectly, the young adults with a strong, attractive accent, the old ones in ragged segments.

Eventual y, though, even the most fluent forgot themselves and drifted into their native language —a musical one, with rounded vowels that gave their lips a muscled, pouched, commiserative shape, as if they were perpetual y. tut-tutting. Ezra loved to listen. When you couldn’t understand what people said, he thought, how clearly the links and joints in their relationships stood out! A woman’s face lit and bloomed as she turned to a certain man; a barbed sound of pain leapt from the patient and his wife doubled over. The child, when upset, stroked her mother’s gold wristwatch band for solace.

Once a young girl in braids sang a song with almost no tune. It wandered from note to note as if by accident. Then a man with a heavy black mustache recited what must have been a poem. He spoke so grandly and unselfconsciously that passersby glanced in, and when he had finished he translated it for Ezra. “O dead one, why did you die in the springtime? You havenh yet tasted the squash, or the cucumber salad.”

Why, even their poetry touched matters close to Ezra’s heart.

By December he had replaced three of the somber-suited waiters with cheery, motherly waitresses, and he’d scrapped the thick beige menus and started listing each day’s dishes on the blackboard. This meant, of course, that the cooks al left (none of the dishes were theirs, or even their type), so he did most of the cooking himself, with the help of a woman from New Orleans and a Mexican. These two had recipes of their own as wel , some of which Ezra had never tasted before; he was entranced. It was true that the customers seemed surprised, but they adjusted, Ezra thought. Or most of them did.

Now he grew feverish with new ideas, and woke in the night longing to share them with someone. Why not a restaurant ful of refrigerators, where people came and chose the food they wanted? They could fix it themselves on a long, long stove lining one wal of the dining room. Or maybe he could instal a giant fireplace, with a whole steer turning slowly on a spit. You’d slice what you liked onto your plate and sit around in armchairs eating and talking with the guests at large. Then again, maybe he would start serving only street food. Of course!

He’d cook what people felt homesick for— tacos like those from vendor’s carts in California, which the Mexican was always pining after; and that wonderful vinegary North Carolina barbecue that Todd Duckett had to have brought by his mother several times a year in cardboard cups. He would cal it the Homesick Restaurant. He’d take down the old black and gilt sign…

But then he saw the sign, SCARLATTI’S, and he groaned and pressed his fingers to his eyes and turned over in his bed.

“You have a beautiful country,” the light-skinned woman said. “Thank you,” said Ezra.

“Al that green! And so many birds. Last summer, before my father-in-law fel il , we were renting a house in New Jersey. The Garden State, they cal it. There were roses everywhere. We could sit on the lawn after supper and listen to the nightingales.”

“The what?” said Ezra.

“The nightingales.”

“Nightingales? In New Jersey?”

“Of course,” she said. “Also we liked the shopping. In particular, Corvette’s. My husband likes the… how do you say? Drip and dry suits.”

The sick man moaned and tossed, nearly dislodging a tube that entered the back of his wrist. His wife, an ancient, papery lady, leaned toward him and stroked his hand. She murmured something, and then she turned to the younger woman. Ezra saw that she was crying. She didn’t attempt to hide it but wept openly, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Ah,” the younger woman said, and she left Ezra’s side and bent over the wife. She gathered her up in her arms as she’d gathered the child earlier. Ezra knew he should leave, but he didn’t. Instead he turned and gazed out the window, slightly tilting his head and looking nonchalant, as some men do when they have rung a doorbel and are standing on the porch, waiting to be noticed and invited in.

Ezra’s sister, Jenny, sat at the desk in her old bedroom, reading a battered textbook.

She was strikingly pretty, even in reading glasses and the no-color quilted bathrobe she always left on a closet hook for her visits home. Ezra stopped at her doorway and peered in. “Jenny?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

“I thought I’d take a breather,” she said. She removed her glasses and gave him a blurry, unfocused look.

“It isn’t semester break yet, is it?”

“Semester break! Do you think medical students have time for such things?”

“No, wel ,” he said.

But lately she’d been home more often than not, it appeared to him. And she never mentioned Harley, her husband. She hadn’t referred to him once al fal , and maybe even al summer. “It’s my opinion she’s left him,” Ezra’s mother had said recently. “Oh, don’t act so surprised! It must have crossed your mind. Here she suddenly moves to a new address—closer to the school, she claims—and then can’t have us to visit, anytime I offer; always too busy or preparing for some quiz, and when I cal , you notice, it’s never Harley who answers, never once Harley who picks up the phone. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? But I’m unable to broach the subject. I mean, she deflects me, if you know what I mean. Somehow I just never… you could, though. She always did feel closer to you than to me or Cody. Won’t you just ask her what’s what?”

But now when he lounged in the doorway, trying to find some way to sidle into a conversation, Jenny put her glasses back on and returned to her book.

He felt dismissed. “Um,” he said. “How are things in Paulham?”

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

“Harley al 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.

“Wel ?” she asked him.

“Wel , what?”

“Did you talk to Jenny?”

“Ah…”

She stil 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 stil wears a ring,” he said hopeful y.

“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.”

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

“Al my life,” his mother said, “people have been trying to shut me out. Even my children. Especial y 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’l say I’m overstepping. They’l say I’m pushy, or… emotional, you know. But if I back off, they might think I don’t care. I real y, 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.

“Wil you look at this? Out of one dozen eggs, four are cracked. Two are smashed. I can’t imagine what Sweeney Brothers is coming to, these days.”

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

He tore down the wal 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 til a thick white dust had settled over everything. Then he came upon a mass of pipes and electrical wires and he had to cal 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 wel 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…

Wel , don’t just stand there, Ezra. I need for you to see about a nurse. If you’l 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.

“Real y, Ezra. Put up that wal 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 til 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 bil at the business office, the fol owing 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 real y didn’t expect it.”

“Oh,” said the doctor. “Wel .”

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

“Wel ,” 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 ful 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, smel that air,” said Mrs. Scarlatti. “Isn’t it fresh and beautiful.” Actual y, 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 real y 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 fel ow,” 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.