Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

9 Apple Apple

One morning Ezra Tull got up and shaved, brushed his teeth, stepped into his trousers, and encountered a lump in the bend of his right thigh. His fingers glanced over it accidentally and faltered and returned. In the bedroom mirror, his broad, fair face had a frozen look. The word cancer came on its own, as if someone had whispered it into his ear, but what caused his shocked expression was the thought that flew in after it: All right. Let it happen. I’ll go ahead and die.

He shook that away, of course. He was forty-six years old, a calm and sensible man, and later he would make an appointment with Dr. Vincent. Meanwhile he put on a shirt, and buttoned it, and unrolled a pair of socks. Twice, without planning to, he tested the lump again with his fingertips. It was nearly the size of an acorn, sensitive but not painful. It rolled beneath his skin as smoothly as an eyeball.

It wasn’t that he really wanted to die. Naturally not. He was only giving in to a passing mood, he decided as he went downstairs; this summer hadn’t been going well. His mother, whose vision had been failing since 1975, was now (in 1979) almost totally blind, but still did not fully admit it, which made it all the harder to care for her; and his brother was too far away and his sister too busy to offer him much help. His restaurant was floundering even more than usual; his finest cook had quit because her horoscope advised it; and a heat wave seemed to be stupefying the entire city of Baltimore. Things were so bad that the most inconsequential sights served to confirm his despair — the neighbor’s dog panting on the sidewalk, or his mother’s one puny hydrangea bush wilting and sagging by two o’clock every afternoon. Even the postman signified catastrophe; his wife had been murdered in a burglary last spring, and now he lugged his leather pouch through the neighborhood as if it were heavy beyond endurance, as if it would eventually drag him to a halt. His feet went slower and slower; his shoulders bent closer to the ground. Every day the mail arrived later.

Ezra stood with his coffee at the window and watched the postman moping past and wondered if there were any point to life.

Then his mother came downstairs, planting her feet just so. “Oh, look,” she said, “what a sunny morning!” She could feel it, he supposed — warming her skin in squares when she stood next to him at the window. Or perhaps she could even see it, since evidently she still distinguished light from dark. But her dress was done up wrong. She had drawn her wispy gray-blond hair into its customary bun, and deftly applied a single spark of pink to the center of her dry, pursed lips, but one side of her collar stuck up at an angle and the flowered material pouched outward, showing her slip in the gap between two buttons.

“It’s going to be another scorcher,” Ezra told her.

“Oh, poor Ezra, I hate to see you go to work in this.”

All she said carried references to sight. He couldn’t tell if she planned it that way.

She let him bring her a cup of coffee but she turned down breakfast, and instead sat beside him in the living room while he read the paper. This was their only time together — morning and noon, after which he left for the restaurant and did not return till very late at night, long past her bedtime. He had trouble imagining what she did in his absence. Sometimes he telephoned from work and she always sounded so brisk—“Just fixing myself some iced tea,” she would say, or “Sorting through my stockings.” But in the background he would hear the ominous, syrupy strains of organ music from some television soap opera, and he suspected that she simply sat before the TV much of the day, with a cardigan draped graciously over her shoulders even in this heat and her chilled hands folded in her lap. Certainly she saw no friends; she had none. As near as he could recall, she had never had friends. She had lived through her children; the gossip they brought was all she knew of the outside world, and their activities provided her only sense of motion. Even back when she worked at the grocery store, she had not consorted with the customers or the other cashiers. And now that she had retired, none of her fellow workers came to visit her.

No, this was the high point of her day, no doubt: these slow midmorning hours, the rustling of Ezra’s paper, his spotty news reports. “Another taxi driver mugged, it says here.”

“Oh, my goodness.”

“Another shoot-out down on the Block.”

“Where will it all end?” his mother wondered.

“Terrorist bomb in Madrid.”

Newspapers, letters, photos, magazines — those he could help her with. With those she let herself gaze straight ahead, blank eyed, while he acted as interpreter. But in all other situations, she was fiercely independent. What, exactly, was the nature of their understanding? She admitted only that her sight was not what it had once been — that it was impaired enough to make reading a nuisance. “She’s blind,” her doctor said, and she reported, “He thinks I’m blind,” not arguing but managing to imply, somehow, that this was a matter of opinion — or of will, of what you’re willing to allow and what you’re not. Ezra had learned to offer clues in the casual, slantwise style that she would accept. If he were to say, for instance, “It’s raining, Mother,” when they were setting out for somewhere, she would bridle and tell him, “Well, I know that.” He learned to say, “Weatherman claims this will keep up. Better bring your umbrella.” Then her face would alter and smooth, adjusting to the information. “Frankly, I don’t believe him,” she would say, although it was one of those misty rains that falls without a sound, and he knew she hadn’t detected it. She concealed her surprise so well that only her children, accustomed to her stubborn denial of anything that might weaken her, could have seen what lay behind that challenging gray stare.

Last month, Ezra’s sister had reported that their mother had called to ask a strange question. “She wanted to know if it were true,” she said, “that lying on her back a long time would give her pneumonia. ‘What for?’ I asked her. ‘Why do you care?’ ‘I was only curious,’ she said.”

Ezra lowered his paper, and he cautiously placed two fingertips at the bend of his thigh.

After they’d finished their coffee, he washed out the cups and straightened the kitchen, which nowadays had an unclean look no matter what he did to it. There were problems he didn’t know how to handle — the curtains graying beside the stove, and the lace doily growing stiff with dust beneath the condiment set on the table. Did you actually launder such things? Just throw them in the machine? He could have asked his mother, but didn’t. It would only upset her. She would wonder, then, what else she’d missed.

She came out to him, testing her way so carefully that her small black pumps seemed like quivering, delicate, ultrasensitive organs. “Ezra,” she said, “what are your plans for this morning?”

“No plans, Mother.”

“You’re certain, now.”

“What is it you want to do?”

“I was thinking we could sort through my desk drawers, but if you’re busy—”

“I’m not busy.”

“You just say so if you are.”

“I’ll be glad to help.”

“When you were little,” she said, “it made you angry to see me sick or in need of aid.”

“Well, that was when I was little.”

“Isn’t it funny? It was you that was the kindest, the closest, the sweetest child; the others were always up to something, off with their own affairs. But when I fell sick, you would turn so coldhearted! ‘Does this mean we don’t get to go to the movies?’ you’d ask. It was your brother who’d take over then — the one I’d least expect it of. I would say, ‘Ezra, could you just fetch me an afghan, please?’ and you would turn stony and pretend not to hear. You seemed to think I’d done something to you — got a headache out of malice.”

“I was very young then,” Ezra said.

Although it was odd how clenched he felt, even now — not so much angry as defenseless; and he’d felt defenseless as a child, too, he believed. He had trusted his mother to be everything for him. When she cut a finger with a paring knife, he had felt defeated by her incompetence. How could he depend on such a person? Why had she let him down so?

He took her by the upper arm and led her back to the living room. (He was conscious, suddenly, of his height and his solid, comfortable weight.) He seated her on the couch and went over to the desk to remove the bottom drawer.

This was something he had done many times before. It wasn’t, certainly, that the drawer needed cleaning, although to an outsider it might appear disorganized. Cascades of unmounted photos slid about as he walked; others poked from the moldy, crumbling albums stacked to one side. There was a shoe box full of his mother’s girlhood diaries; an incomplete baby book for Cody; and a Schrafft’s candy box containing old letters, all with the stamps snipped off the envelopes. There was a dim, lavender-colored corsage squashed as stiff and hard as a dried-up mouse carcass; a single kid glove hardened with age; and a musty-smelling report card for Pearl E. Cody, fourth year, 1903, with the grades entered in a script so elegant that someone might have laid A-shaped tendrils of fine brown hair next to every subject. Ezra was fond of these belongings. He willingly went over them again and again, describing them for his mother. “There’s that picture of your Aunt Melinda on her wedding day.”

“Ah?”

“You are standing next to her with a fan made out of feathers.”

“We’ll save it,” said his mother. She was still pretending they were merely sorting.

But soon enough, she forgot about that and settled back, musing, while he recited what he’d found. “Here is a picture of someone’s porch.”

“Porch? Whose porch?”

“I can’t tell.”

“What does it look like?”

“Two pillars and a dark floor, clay pot full of geraniums …”

“Am I in it?”

“No.”

“Oh, well,” she said, waving a hand, “maybe that was Luna’s porch.”

He had never heard of Luna.

To tell the truth, he didn’t believe that relatives were what his mother was after. Ladies and gentlemen drifted by in a blur; he did his best to learn their names, but his mother dismissed them airily. It was herself she was hunting, he sensed. “Do you see me, at all? Is that the dinner where I wore the pale blue?” Her single-mindedness sometimes amused him, sometimes annoyed him. There was greed in the forward jutting of her chin as she waited to hear of her whereabouts. “Am I in that group? Was I on that picnic?”

He opened a maroon velvet album, each of its pulpy gray pages grown bright yellow as urine around the edges. None of the photos here was properly glued down. A sepia portrait of a bearded man was jammed into the binding alongside a Kodachrome of a pink baby in a flashy vinyl wading pool, with SEPT ’63 stamped on the border. His mother poked her face out, expectant. He said, “Here’s a man with a beard. I think it’s your father.”

“Possibly,” she said, without interest.

He turned the page. “Here’s a group of ladies underneath a tree.”

“Ladies?”

“None of them look familiar.”

“What are they wearing?”

“Long, baggy dresses,” he told her. “Everything seems to be sagging at the waist.”

“That would be nineteen-ten or so. Maybe Iola’s engagement party.”

“Who was Iola?”

“Look for me in a navy stripe,” she told him.

“There’s no stripes here.”

“Pass on.”

She had never been the type to gaze backward, had not filled his childhood with “When I was your age,” as so many mothers did. And even now, she didn’t use these photos as an excuse for reminiscing. She hardly discussed them at all, in fact — even those in which she appeared. Instead, she listened, alert, to any details he could give her about her past self. Was it that she wanted an outsider’s view of her? Or did she hope to solve some mystery? “Am I smiling, or am I frowning? Would you say that I seemed happy?”

When Ezra tried to ask her any questions, she grew bored. “What was your mother like?” he would ask.

“Oh, that was a long time ago,” she told him.

She hadn’t had much of a life, it seemed to him. He wondered what, in all her history, she would enjoy returning to. Her courtship, even knowing how it would end? Childbirth? Young motherhood? She did speak often and wistfully of the years when her children were little. But most of the photos in this drawer dated from long before then, from back in the early part of the century, and it was those she searched most diligently. “The Baker family reunion, that would be. Nineteen-o-eight. Beulah’s sweet sixteen party. Lucy and Harold’s silver anniversary.” The events she catalogued were other people’s; she just hung around the fringes, watching. “Katherine Rose, the summer she looked so beautiful and met her future husband.”

He peered at Katherine Rose. “She doesn’t look so beautiful to me,” he said.

“It faded soon enough.”

Katherine Rose, whoever she was, wore a severe and complicated dress of a type not seen in sixty years or more. He was judging her rabbity face as if she were a contemporary, some girl he’d glimpsed in a bar, but she had probably been dead for decades. He felt he was being tugged back through layers of generations.

He flipped open tiny diaries, several no bigger than a lady’s compact, and read his mother’s cramped entries aloud. “December eighth, nineteen-twelve. Paid call on Edwina Barrett. Spilled half-pint of top cream in the buggy coming home and had a nice job cleaning it off the cushions I can assure you …”

“April fourth, nineteen-o-eight. Went into town with Alice and weighed on the new weighing machine in Mr. Salter’s store. Alice is one hundred thirteen pounds, I am one hundred ten and a half.” His mother listened, tensed and still, as if expecting something momentous, but all he found was purchased ten yards heliotrope brilliantine, and made chocolate blanc-mange for the Girls’ Culture Circle, and weighed again at Mr. Salter’s store. During the summer of 1908—her fourteenth summer, as near as he could figure — she had weighed herself about every two days, hitching up her pony Prince and riding clear downtown to do so. “August seventh,” he read. “Had my measurements taken at the dressmaker’s and she gave me a copy to keep. I have developed in every possible sense.” He laughed, but his mother made an impatient little movement with one hand. “September ninth,” he read, and then all at once had the feeling that the ground had rushed away beneath his feet. Why, that perky young girl was this old woman! This blind old woman sitting next to him! She had once been a whole different person, had a whole different life separate from his, had spent her time swinging clubs with the Junior Amazons and cutting up with the Neal boys something dreadful and taking first prize at the Autumn Recital Contest. (I hoped that poor Nadine would win, she wrote in a chubby, innocent script, but of course it was nice to get it myself.) His mother sat silent, absently stroking the dead corsage. “Never mind,” she told him.

“Shall I stop?”

“It wasn’t what I wanted after all.”

On his way to the restaurant, Ezra ducked into a bookstore and located a Merck Manual in the Family Health section. He checked the index for lump, but all he found was lumpy jaw (actinomy cosis). Evidently you had to know the name of your disease first — in which case, why bother looking it up? He thought through what he remembered of his high school biology course, and decided to check under lymph gland. The very phrase was reassuring; lymph glands swelled all the time. He had a couple in his neck that grew pecan sized anytime he developed a sniffle. But there were no lymph glands listed in the index, and it stopped him cold to see lymphatic leukemia and lymphohematogenous tuberculosis. He shut the book quickly and replaced it on the shelf.

Josiah had already opened the restaurant, and two helpers were busy chopping vegetables in the kitchen. A salesman in a plaid suit was trying to interest Josiah in some new product. “But,” Josiah kept saying. “But I don’t think—” Josiah was so gawky and confused-looking — an emaciated giant in white, with his black and gray hair sticking out in frenzied tufts as if he’d grabbed handfuls in desperation — that Ezra felt a rush of love for him. He said, “Josiah, what’s the problem?” and Josiah turned to him gratefully. “Uh, see, this gentleman here—”

“Murphy’s the name. J. R. Murphy,” said the salesman. “I sell soy sauce, private brand. I sell it by the case.”

“We could never manage a case,” said Ezra. “We hardly ever use it.”

“You will, though,” the salesman told him. “Soy sauce is the coming thing; better get it while you can. This here is the antidote for radiation.”

“For what?”

“Nucular accidents! Atom bums! Just take a look at the facts: those folks in Hiroshima didn’t get near as many side effects as expected. Want to know why? It was all that Japanese food with soy sauce. Plain old soy sauce. Keep a case of this around and you’ll have no more worries over Three Mile Island.”

“But I don’t even like soy sauce.”

“Who says you’ve got to like it?”

“Well, maybe just a few bottles …” Ezra said.

He wondered if there were some cryptic, cultish mark on his door that told all the crazy people he’d have trouble saying no.

He went to check on the dining room. Two waitresses were shaking out tablecloths and spreading them with a crisp, ripping sound. Josiah was lugging in bales of laundered napkins. There was always a moment, this early in the day, when Ezra found his restaurant disheartening. He was chilled by the empty tables, the looming, uncurtained windows, the bitter smell of last night’s cigarettes. What kind of occupation was this? People gulped down his food without a thought, too busy courting or arguing or negotiating to notice what they ate; then they went home and forgot it. Nothing amounted to anything. And Ezra was a middle-aged man with his hair growing transparent at the back of his head; but here he was, where he’d been at twenty, living with his mother in a Calvert Street row house and reading himself to sleep with cookbooks. He had never married, never fathered children, and lost the one girl he had loved out of sheer fatalism, lack of force, a willing assumption of defeat. (Let it be was the theme that ran through his life. He was ruled by a dreamy mood of acceptance that was partly the source of all his happiness and partly his undoing.)

Josiah came to stand before him. “See my boots?” he asked.

Ezra surfaced and looked down at Josiah’s boots. They poked from beneath the white uniform — gigantic, rubber-coated canvas boots that could weather a flood, a snowstorm, an avalanche.

“L. L. Bean,” Josiah said.

“Ah.”

L. L. Bean was where Josiah got his mystery gifts. Once or twice a year they arrived: a one-man tent; a goose-down sleeping bag; hunting shoes in his unwieldy, hard-to-find size; an olive-drab poncho that could see him through a monsoon; a pocket survival kit containing compass, flint, signal mirror, and metallic blanket. All this for a man who’d been born and reared in the city and seemed inclined to stay there. There was never any card or note of explanation. Josiah had written the company, but L. L. Bean replied that the donor preferred to stay anonymous. Ezra had spent hours helping Josiah think of possibilities. “Remember that old lady whose walk you used to shovel? Maybe it’s her.”

“She’d be dead by now, Ezra.”

“Remember Molly Kane, with her wheelchair? You used to wheel her to Algebra One.”

“But she said, ‘Let go my chair, you big ree-tard!’ ”

“Maybe now she regrets it.”

“Oh, no. Not her. Not Molly Kane.”

“Maybe just someone you changed a tire for and never gave it another thought. Someone you opened a door for. Maybe … I don’t know …”

Ordinarily he enjoyed these speculations, but now, looking down at Josiah’s mammoth boots, he was struck by the fact that even Josiah — lanky, buck-toothed, stammering Josiah — had a human being all his own that he was linked to, whether or not he knew that person’s name, and lived in a nest of gifts and secrets and special care that Ezra was excluded from.

“New Year’s Day, nineteen-fourteen,” Ezra read aloud. “I hope this little diary will not get lost as last year’s did. I hope I will not put anything foolish in it as I have been known to do before.”

His mother hid a smile, unsuccessfully. What foolishness could she have been up to so long ago? Ezra’s eyes slipped down the page to a line that had been crossed out. “There’s something here I can’t read,” he said.

“I never was known for my penmanship.”

“No, I mean you scribbled over it with so many loops and things—”

“Apple apple,” his mother said.

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what we wrote over words that we wanted kept secret. Appleappleapple all joined together, so no one could guess what was written underneath.”

“Well, it certainly worked,” Ezra said.

“Move on,” his mother told him.

“Oh. Um … put a flaxseed poultice on my finger … started some gartlets of pale pink ribbon … popped some popcorn and buttered half, made cracker-jack of the rest …”

His mother sighed. Ezra skimmed several pages in silence.

How plotless real life was! In novels, events led up to something. In his mother’s diaries, they flitted past with no apparent direction. Frank brought her perfumed blotters and a box of “cocoa-nut” candy; Roy paid quite a call and couldn’t seem to tear himself away; Burt Tansy took her to the comic opera and afterward presented her with a folio of the songs; but none of these people was ever mentioned again. Someone named Arthur wrote her a letter that was the softest thing, she said. I didn’t know he could be so silly. It was all in form though and I am not very mad. A certain Clark Allensby promised to visit and did not; I suppose it is all for the best, she said, but I can’t understand his actions as to-morrow he is leaving. And while she was stretching the curtains, she said, the darkie announced a young man come to visit. I looked like a freak but went in anyhow and there sat Hugh McKinley. He was heading for the seed store so just HAPPENED to stop by, and staid some while …

Ezra began to see that for his mother (or for the young girl she had been), there was a plot, after all. She had imagined a perfectly wonderful plot — a significance to every chance meeting, the possibility of whirlwind courtships, grand white weddings, flawless bliss forever after. James Wrayson came to call most shockingly late, she wrote. Stole my picture off the piano and put it in his pocket. Acted too comical for words. I’m sure I don’t know what will come of this.

Well, nothing had come of it. Nothing came of anything. She married a salesman for the Tanner Corporation and he left her and never came back. “Ezra? Why aren’t you reading to me?” his mother asked.

“I’m tired,” he said.

He took her to an afternoon ball game. In her old age, she had become a great Orioles fan. She would listen on the radio if she couldn’t attend in person, even staying up past her bedtime if the game went into extra innings. Baseball was the only sport that made sense, she said: clear as Parcheesi, clever as chess. She looked pleased with herself for thinking of this, but Ezra suspected that it had something in common too with those soap operas she enjoyed. Certainly she viewed each game as a drama, and fretted over the gossip that Ezra culled for her from the sports pages — players’ injuries, rivalries, slumps, mournful tales of young rookies so nervous they flubbed their only chances. She liked to think of the Orioles as poverty-stricken and virtuous, unable to simply buy their talent as richer teams did. Players’ looks mattered to her as deeply as if they were movie stars: Ken Singleton’s high, shining cheekbones, as described by one of her granddaughters, sent her into a little trance of admiration. She liked to hear how Al Bumbry wiggled his bat so jauntily before a hit; how Stanhouse drove people crazy delaying on the mound. She wished Doug DeCinces would shave off his mustache and Kiko Garcia would get himself a haircut. She thought Earl Weaver was not fatherly enough to be a proper manager and often, when he replaced some poor sad pitcher who’d barely had a chance, she would speak severely into the radio, calling him “Merle Beaver” for spite and spitting out her words. “Just because he grows his own tomatoes,” she said, “doesn’t necessarily mean a person has a heart.”

Sometimes Ezra would quote her to his friends at the restaurant, and halfway through a sentence he would think, Why, I’m making her out to be a … character; and all he’d said would feel like a lie, although of course it had happened. The fact was that she was a very strong woman (even a frightening one, in his childhood), and she may have shrunk and aged but her true, interior self was still enormous, larger than life, powerful. Overwhelming.

They got to the stadium early so his mother could walk at her own pace, which was so slow and halting that by the time they were settled, the lineup was already being announced. Their seats were good ones, close to home plate. His mother sank down gratefully but then had to stand, almost at once, for the national anthem. For two national anthems; the other team was Toronto. Halfway through the second song, Ezra noticed that his mother’s knees were trembling. “Do you want to sit down?” he asked her. She shook her head. It was a very hot day but her arm, when he took hold of it, was cool and almost unnaturally dry, as if filmed with powder.

How clear a green the grass was! He could see his mother’s point: precise and level and brightly colored, the playing field did have the look of a board game. Players stood about idly swinging their arms. Toronto’s batter hit a high fly ball and the center fielder plucked it from the sky with ease, almost absentmindedly. “Well!” said Ezra. “That was quick. First out in no time.”

There was a knack to his commentary. He informed her without appearing to, as if he were making small talk. “Gosh. Look at that change-up.” And “Call that a ball? Skimmed right past his knees. Call that a ball?” His mother listened, face uplifted and receptive, like someone at a concert.

What did she get out of this? She’d have followed more closely, he thought, if she had stayed at home beside her radio. (And she’d never bring a radio; she worried people might think it was a hearing aid.) He supposed she liked the atmosphere, the cheering and excitement and the smell of popcorn. She even let him buy her a Styrofoam cup of beer, which was allowed to grow warm after one sip; and when the bugle sounded she called, “Charge,” very softly, with an embarrassed little half-smile curling her lips. Three men were getting drunk behind her — booing and whistling and shouting insults to passing girls — but Ezra’s mother stayed untroubled, facing forward. “When you come in person,” she told Ezra, “you direct your own focus, you know? The TV or the radio men, they might focus on the pitcher when you want to see what first base is doing; and you don’t have any choice but to accept it.”

A batter swung at a low ball and connected, and Ezra (eyes in every direction) saw how the field came instantaneously alive, with each man following his appointed course. The shortstop, as if strung on rubber bands, sprang upward without a second’s preparation and caught the ball; the outfield closed in like a kaleidoscope; the second-base runner pivoted and the shortstop tagged him out. “Yo, Garcia!” a drunk yelled behind them, in that gravelly, raucous voice that some men adopt in ball parks; and he sloshed cold beer down the back of Ezra’s neck. “Well …” Ezra said to his mother. But he couldn’t think how to encompass all that had happened, so finally he said, “We’re up, it looks like.”

She didn’t answer. He turned to her and found her caving in on herself, her head falling forward, the Styrofoam cup slipping from her fingers. “Mother? Mother!” Everyone around him rose and milled and fussed. “Give her air,” they told him, and then somehow they had her stretched out on her back, lying where their feet had been. Her face was paper white, immobile, like a crumpled rock. One of the drunks stepped forward to smooth her skirt decorously over her knees, and another stroked her hair off her forehead. “She’ll be all right,” he told Ezra. “Don’t worry. It’s only the heat. Folks, make room! Let her breathe!”

Ezra’s mother opened her eyes. The air was bright as knife blades, shimmering with a brassy, hard light, but she didn’t even squint; and for the first time Ezra fully understood that she was blind. It seemed that before, he hadn’t taken it in. He reeled back, squatting at the feet of strangers, and imagined having to stay here forever: the two of them, helpless, flattened beneath the glaring summer sky.

That night he dreamed he was walking among the tables in his restaurant. A long-time customer, Mr. Rosen, was dithering over the menu. “What do you recommend?” he asked Ezra. “I see you’ve got your stroganoff, but I don’t know, that’s a little heavy. I mean I’m not so very hungry, just peckish, got a little weight on my stomach right here beneath my rib cage, know what I mean? What do you think might be good for that? What had I ought to eat?”

This was how Mr. Rosen behaved in real life, as well, and Ezra expected it and always responded kindly and solicitously. But in the dream, he was overtaken by a most untypical panic. “I have nothing! Nothing!” he cried. “I don’t know what you want! I don’t have anything! Stop asking!” And he wrung his hands at the thought of his empty, gleaming refrigerator and idle stove.

He woke sweating, tangled in damp sheets. There was a certain white quality to the darkness that made him believe it was close to dawn. He climbed out of bed, hitching up his pajama bottoms, and went downstairs and poured a glass of milk. Then he wandered into the living room for a magazine, but the only ones he found were months old. Finally he settled on the rug beside his mother’s desk and opened the bottom drawer.

A recipe for marmalade cake: From the kitchen of … with no name filled in. Someone’s diploma, rolled and secured with a draggled blue ribbon. A clipping from a newspaper: Bristle-cone pines, in times of stress, hoard all their life in a single streak and allow the rest to die. A photo of his sister in an evening dress with gardenias looped around her wrist. A diary for 1909, with a violet pressed between its pages. Washed my yellow gown, made salt-rising bread, played Basket Ball, he read. Bought a hat shape at Warner’s and trimmed it with green grosgrain. Preserved tomatoes. Went to Marching Drill. Learned progressive jackstraws.

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.