Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

3 Destroyed by Love

Supposedly, Jenny Tull was going to be a beauty someday, but the people who told her that were so old they might easily be dead by the time that day arrived, and no one her own age saw much promise in her. At seventeen, she was skinny and severe and studious-looking. Her bones were so sharp, they seemed likely to puncture her skin. She had coarse dark hair that she was always hacking at, much to her mother’s disapproval — one week chopping it to a blunt, square shape; the next week cutting bangs that accidentally slanted toward the left; and then, to correct her error, shortening the bangs so drastically that they appeared damaged and painful. While her classmates were wearing (in 1952) bouffant skirts and perky blouses with the collars turned up in back, Jenny’s clothes were hand-me-downs from her mother: limp, skimpy dresses fashionable in the forties, with too much shoulder and not enough skirt. And since her mother despised the sloppiness of loafers, Jenny’s shoes were the same kind of sturdy brown oxfords that her brothers wore. Every morning she clomped off to school looking uncomfortable and cross. No wonder hardly anyone bothered to speak to her.

She was about to be, for the very first time, the only child at home. Her brother Cody was away at college. Her brother Ezra had refused to go to college and started instead what his mother openly hoped was a temporary job in Scarlatti’s Restaurant, chopping vegetables for salads; but just as he was advancing to sauces, notice came that he’d been drafted. None of his family could envision it: placid Ezra slogging through Korea, tripping over his bayonet at every opportunity. Surely something would be wrong with him, some weakness of spine or eyesight that would save him. But no, he was found to be in perfect health, and in February was ordered off to a training camp down south. Jenny sat on his bed while he packed. She was touched by the fact that he was taking along his little pearwood recorder, the one he’d bought with his first week’s wages. It didn’t seem to her that he had a very clear idea of what he was getting into. He moved in his cautious, deliberate way, sorting out what he would send to the basement for storage. Since their mother had plans for renting his room, he couldn’t just leave things as they were. Already his brother Cody’s bed was freshly made up for a boarder, the blankets tight as drumskins on the narrow mattress, and Cody’s sports equipment was packed away in cartons.

She watched Ezra empty a drawer of undershirts, most of them full of holes. (Somehow, he always managed to look like an orphan.) He had grown to be a large-boned man, but his face was still childishly rounded, with the wide eyes, the downy cheeks, the delicate lips of a schoolboy. His hair seemed formed of layers of silk in various shades of yellow and beige. Girls were always after him, Jenny knew, but he was too shy to take advantage of it — or maybe even to be aware of it. He proceeded through life absentmindedly, meditatively, as if considering some complex mathematical puzzle from which he was bound to look up, you would think, as soon as he found the solution. But he never did.

“After I leave,” he told Jenny, “will you stop in at Scarlatti’s Restaurant from time to time?”

“Stop in and do what?”

“Well, talk with Mrs. Scarlatti, I mean. Just make sure she’s all right.”

Mrs. Scarlatti had been without a husband for years, if she’d ever had one, and her only son had recently been killed in action. Jenny knew she must be lonely. But she was a bleak and striking woman, so fashionably dressed that it seemed an insult to her particular section of Baltimore. Jenny couldn’t imagine holding a conversation with her. Still, anything for Ezra. She nodded.

“And Josiah too,” Ezra said.

“Josiah!”

Josiah was even more difficult — downright terrifying, in fact: Ezra’s friend Josiah Payson, close to seven feet tall, excitable, and incoherent. It was generally understood that he wasn’t quite right in the head. Back in grade school, the other children had teased him, and they had teased Ezra too and asked Jenny why her brother hung out with dummies. “Everybody knows Josiah should be sent away,” they told her. “He ought to go to the crazy house; everybody says so.”

She said, “Ezra, I can’t talk to Josiah. I wouldn’t understand him.”

“Of course you’d understand,” said Ezra. “He speaks English, doesn’t he?”

“He jibbers, he jabbers, he stutters!”

“You must have only seen him when they’re picking on him. The rest of the time he’s fine. Oh, if Mother’d let me have him to the house once, you would know. He’s fine! He’s as bright as you or me, and maybe brighter.”

“Well, if you say so,” Jenny told him.

But she wasn’t convinced.

After Ezra was gone, it occurred to her that he’d only mentioned outsiders. He hadn’t said anything about taking care of their mother. Maybe he assumed that Pearl could manage on her own. She could manage very well, it was true, but Ezra’s leaving seemed to take something out of her. She delayed the renting of his room. “I know we need the money,” she told Jenny, “but I really can’t face it right now. It still has his smell. Maybe if I aired it a while … It still has his shape in it, know what I mean? I look in and the air feels full of something warm. I think we ought to wait a bit.”

So they lived in the house alone. Jenny felt even slighter than usual, overwhelmed by so much empty space. In the afternoons when she came home from school, her mother would still be at work, and Jenny would open the door and hesitantly step inside. Sometimes it seemed there was a startled motion, or a stopping of motion, somewhere deep in the house just as she crossed the threshold. She’d pause then, heart thumping, alert as a deer, but it never turned out to be anything real. She’d close the door behind her and go upstairs to her room, turn on her study lamp, change out of her school clothes. She was an orderly, conscientious girl who always hung things up and took good care of her belongings. She would set her books out neatly on her desk, align her pencils, and adjust the lamp so it shone at the proper angle. Then she’d work her way systematically through her assignments. Her greatest dream was to be a doctor, which meant she’d have to win a scholarship. In three years of high school, she had never received a grade below an A.

At five o’clock she would go downstairs to scrub the potatoes or start the chicken frying — whatever was instructed in her mother’s note on the kitchen table. Soon afterward her mother would arrive. “Well! I tell you that old Pendle woman is a trial and a nuisance, just a nuisance, lets me ring up all her groceries and then says, ‘Wait now, let me see, why, I don’t have near enough money for such a bill as this.’ Goes fumbling through her ratty cloth change purse while everyone behind her shifts from foot to foot …” She would tie an apron over her dress and take Jenny’s place at the stove. “Honey, hand me the salt, will you? I see there’s no mail from the boys. They’ve forgotten all about us, it seems. It’s only you and me now.”

It was only the two of them, yes, but there were echoes of the others all around — wicked, funny Cody, peaceful Ezra, setting up a loaded silence as Jenny and her mother seated themselves at the table. “Pour the milk, will you, dear? Help yourself to some beans.” Sometimes Jenny imagined that even her father made his absence felt, though she couldn’t picture his face and had little recollection of the time before he’d left them. Of course she never mentioned this to her mother. Their talk was small talk, little dibs and dabs of things, safely skating over whatever might lie beneath. “How is that poor Carroll girl, Jenny? Has she lost any weight that you’ve noticed?”

Jenny knew that, in reality, her mother was a dangerous person — hot breathed and full of rage and unpredictable. The dry, straw texture of her lashes could seem the result of some conflagration, and her pale hair could crackle electrically from its bun and her eyes could get small as hatpins. Which of her children had not felt her stinging slap, with the claw-encased pearl in her engagement ring that could bloody a lip at one flick? Jenny had seen her hurl Cody down a flight of stairs. She’d seen Ezra ducking, elbows raised, warding off an attack. She herself, more than once, had been slammed against a wall, been called “serpent,” “cockroach,” “hideous little sniveling guttersnipe.” But here Pearl sat, decorously inquiring about Julia Carroll’s weight problem. Jenny had a faint, tremulous hope that times had changed. Perhaps it was the boys’ fault. Maybe she and her mother — intelligent women, after all — could live without such scenes forever. But she never felt entirely secure, and at night, when Pearl had placed a kiss on the center of Jenny’s forehead, Jenny went off to bed and dreamed what she had always dreamed: her mother laughed a witch’s shrieking laugh; dragged Jenny out of hiding as the Nazis tramped up the stairs; accused her of sins and crimes that had never crossed Jenny’s mind. Her mother told her, in an informative and considerate tone of voice, that she was raising Jenny to eat her.

Cody wrote almost never, and what letters he did write were curt and factual. I won’t be coming home for spring vacation. All my grades are fine except French. This new job pays better than the old one did. Ezra sent a postcard the moment he arrived in camp, and followed that three days later with a letter describing his surroundings. It was longer than several of Cody’s put together, but still it didn’t tell Jenny what she wanted to know. There’s somebody two blocks down who’s from Maryland too I hear but I haven’t had a chance to talk to him and I don’t think he’s from Baltimore anyway but some other place I wouldn’t know about so I doubt we’d have much to … What was he saying, exactly? Had he, or had he not, made any friends? If people lived so close together, you’d think they would have talked. Jenny pictured the others ignoring him, or worse: tormenting him and making fun of his incompetence. He simply was not a soldier. But I have learned right much about my rifle, he wrote. Cody would be surprised. She tried to imagine his long, sensitive fingers cleaning and oiling a gun. She understood that he must be surviving, more or less, but she couldn’t figure out how. She thought of him on his belly, in the dust of the rifle range, squeezing a trigger. His gaze was so reflective, how would he hit a target? They say the whole bunch of us will be joining the Korean Conflict as soon as we are … Why, they’d pick him off like a fly! He’d never do more to defend himself than dodge and shield his head.

I think a lot about Scarlatti’s Restaurant and how nice the lettuce smelled when I tore it into the bowl, he wrote — his only mention of homesickness, if that was what it was. Pearl gave a jealous sniff. “As if lettuce had a smell!” Jenny was jealous too; he could have remembered, instead, how he and she used to lie on the floor in front of the Philco on Monday nights, listening to the Cities Service Band of America. What did he see in that restaurant, anyhow? Then a little knob of discomfort started nudging inside her chest. There was something she hadn’t done, something unpleasant that she didn’t want to do … Check on Mrs. Scarlatti. She wondered if Ezra had really meant for her to keep her promise. He couldn’t actually expect that of her, could he? But she supposed he could. He was a literal-minded kind of person.

So she folded Ezra’s letter and put it in her pocket. Then she slipped her coat on and walked to St. Paul Street, to a narrow brick building set in a strip of shops and businesses.

Scarlatti’s was the neighborhood’s one formal elegant eating place. It served only supper, mostly to people from better parts of the city. At this hour — five-thirty or so — it wouldn’t even be open. She went to the rear, where she’d been a couple of times with Ezra. She circled two garbage cans overflowing with wilted greens, and she climbed the steps and knocked on the door. Then she cupped a hand to the windowpane and peered in.

Men in dirty aprons were rushing around the kitchen, which was a mass of steam and stainless steel, pot lids clattering, bowls as big as birdbaths heaped with sliced vegetables. No wonder they hadn’t heard her. She turned the knob, but the door was locked. And before she could knock any harder, she caught sight of Mrs. Scarlatti. She was slouched in the dining room entranceway, holding a lit cigarette — a white-faced woman in a stark black knife of a dress. Whatever she was saying, Jenny couldn’t catch it, but she heard the gravelly, careless sound of her voice. And she saw how Mrs. Scarlatti’s black hair was swept completely to the right, like one of those extreme Vogue magazine model’s, and how she leaned her head to the right as well so that she seemed to be burdened, cruelly misused, bearing up under an exhausting weight that had something to do with men and experience. Imagine Ezra knowing such a person! Imagine him at ease with her, close enough to worry about her. Jenny backed away. She understood, all at once, that her brothers had grown up and gone. Her mental pictures of them were outdated — Ezra playing the bamboo whistle he used to have in grade school, Cody triumphantly rattling his dice over their old Monopoly board. She thought of a faded flannel shirt that Ezra had worn so often, it was like a second skin. She thought of how he would rock back and forth with his hands in his rear pockets when he was lost for something to say, or dig a hole in the ground with his sneaker. And how when Jenny was shattered by one of their mother’s rages, he would slip downstairs to the kitchen and fix her a mug of hot milk laced with honey, sprinkled over with cinnamon. He was always so quick to catch his family’s moods, and to offer food and drink and unspoken support.

She traveled down the alley and, instead of heading home, took Bushnell Street and then Putnam. It was getting colder; she had to button her coat. Three blocks down Putnam stood a building so weathered and dismal, you’d think it was an abandoned warehouse till you saw the sign: TOM ’N’ EDDIE’S BODY SHOP. She had often come here to fetch Ezra home, but she’d only called his name at the drive-in doorway; she had never been inside. Now she stepped into the gloom and looked around her. Tom and Eddie (she assumed) were talking to a man in a business suit; one of them held a clipboard. In the background, Josiah Payson swung a gigantic rubber mallet against the fender of a pickup. Jenny was hit by a piece of memory, a mystifying fragment: Josiah in the school yard, long ago, violently flailing a pipe or a metal bar of some sort, cutting a desperate, whizzing circle in the air and shouting something unintelligible while Ezra stood guard between him and a mob of children. “Everything will be fine; just go away,” Ezra was telling the others. But what had happened next? How had it ended? How had it started? She felt confused. Meanwhile Josiah swung his mallet. He was grotesquely tall, as gaunt as the armature for some statue never completed. His cropped black hair bristled all over his head, his skull of a face glistened, and he clenched a set of teeth so ragged and white and crowded, so jumbled together and overlapping, that it seemed he had chewed them up and was preparing to spit them out.

“Josiah,” she called timidly.

He stopped to look at her. Or was he looking someplace else? His eyes were dead black — lidless and almost Oriental. It was impossible to tell where they were directed. He heaved the hammer onto a stack of burlap bags and lunged toward her, his face alight with happiness. “Ezra’s sister!” he said. “Ezra!”

She smiled and hugged her elbows.

Directly in front of her, he came to a halt and smoothed his stubble of hair. His arms seemed longer than they should have been. “Is Ezra okay?” he asked her.

“He’s fine.”

“Not wounded or—”

“No.”

Ezra was right: Josiah spoke as distinctly as anyone, in a grown man’s rumbling voice. But he had trouble finding something to do with his hands, and ended up scraping them together as if trying to rid his palms of dirt or grease, or even of a layer of skin. She was aware of Tom and Eddie glancing over at her curiously, losing track of their conversation. “Come outside,” she told Josiah. “I’ll let you see his letter.”

Outside it was twilight, almost too dark to read, but Josiah took the letter anyway and scanned the lines. There was a crease between his eyebrows as deep as if someone had pressed an ax blade there. She noticed that his coveralls, pathetically well washed, were so short for him that his fallen white socks and hairy shinbones showed. His lips could barely close over that chaos of teeth; his mouth had a bunchy look and his chin was elongated from the effort.

He handed the letter back to her. She had no way of knowing what he had got out of it. “If they’d let me,” he said, “I’d have gone with him. Oh, I wouldn’t mind going. But they claimed I was too tall.”

“Too tall?”

She’d never heard of such a thing.

“So I had to stay behind,” he said, “but I didn’t want to. I don’t want to work in a body shop all my life; I plan to do something different.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Find something with Ezra, I guess, once he gets out of the army. Ezra, he would always come to visit me here and look around and say, ‘How can you stand it? All the noise,’ he’d say. ‘We got to find you something different.’ But I didn’t know where to start hunting, and now Ezra’s gone away. It’s not the noise that’s so bad, but it’s hot in summer and cold in winter. My feet get bothered by the cold, get these itchy things all over the toes.”

“Chilblains, maybe,” Jenny suggested. She felt pleasantly bored; it seemed she had known Josiah forever. She ran a thumbnail down the crease of Ezra’s letter. Josiah gazed either at her or straight through her (it was hard to tell which) and cracked his knuckles.

“Probably what I’ll do is work for Ezra,” he said, “once Ezra opens his restaurant.”

“What are you talking about? Ezra’s not opening a restaurant.”

“Sure he is.”

“Why would he want to do that? As soon as he pulls himself together he’s going off to college, studying to be a teacher.”

“Who says so?” Josiah asked.

“Well, my mother does. He’s got the patience for it, she says. Maybe he’ll be a professor, even,” Jenny told him. But she wasn’t so certain now. “I mean, it’s not a lifework, restaurants.”

“Why isn’t it?”

She couldn’t answer.

“Ezra’s going to have him a place where people come just like to a family dinner,” Josiah said. “He’ll cook them one thing special each day and dish it out on their plates and everything will be solid and wholesome, really homelike.”

“Ezra told you that?”

“Really just like home.”

“Well, I don’t know, maybe people go to restaurants to get away from home.”

“It’s going to be famous,” Josiah said.

“You have the wrong idea entirely,” Jenny told him. “How did you come up with such a crazy notion?”

Then without warning, Josiah went back to being his old self — or her old picture of him. He dropped his head, like a marionette whose strings had snapped. “I got to go,” he told her.

“Josiah?”

“Don’t want those people yelling at me.”

He loped away without saying goodbye. Jenny watched after him as regretfully as if he were Ezra himself. He didn’t look back.

Cody wrote that he was being interviewed by several corporations. He wanted a job in business after he finished school. Ezra wrote that he could march twenty miles at a go now without much tiring. It began to seem less incongruous, even perfectly natural, that Ezra should be a soldier. After all, wasn’t he an enduring sort, uncomplaining, cheerful in performing his duties? Jenny had worried needlessly. Her mother too seemed to relax somewhat. “Really it’s for the best, when you think about it,” she said. “A stint in the service is often just the ticket; gives a boy time to get hold of himself. I bet when he comes back, he’ll want to go to college. I bet he’ll want to teach someplace.”

Jenny didn’t tell her about his restaurant.

Twice, after her first visit to Josiah, she looked in on him again. She would stop by the body shop after school, and Josiah would come outside a moment to swing his arms and gaze beyond her and speak of Ezra. “Got a letter from him myself, over at the house. Claimed he was marching a lot.”

“Twenty miles,” Jenny said.

“Some of it uphill.”

“He must be in pretty good shape by now.”

“He always did like to walk.”

The third time she came, it was almost dark. She’d stayed late for chorus. Josiah was just leaving work. He was getting into his jacket, which was made of a large, shaggy plaid in muted shades of navy and maroon. She thought of the jackets that little boys wore in the lower grades of school. “That Tom,” Josiah said, jabbing his fists in his pockets. “That Eddie.” He strode rapidly down the sidewalk. Jenny had trouble keeping up. “They don’t care how they talk to a fellow,” he said. “Don’t give a thought to what he might feel; feelings just like anyone else …”

She dropped back, deciding that he’d rather be alone, but partway down the block he stopped and turned and waited. “Aren’t I a human being?” he asked when she arrived at his side. “Don’t I feel bad if someone shouts at me? I wish I were out in the woods someplace, none of these people to bother me. Camping out in a dead, dead quiet with a little private tent from L. L. Bean and a L. L. Bean sleeping bag.” He turned and rushed on; Jenny had to run. “I’ve half a mind to give notice,” he said.

“Why don’t you, then?”

“My mama needs the money.”

“You could find something else.”

“Oh, no, it isn’t easy.”

“Why not?”

He didn’t answer. They raced past a discount jewelry store, a bakery, a bank of private apartments with inviting yellow windows. Then he said, “Come and have supper at our house.”

“What? Oh, I can’t.”

“Ezra used to come,” he said, “back before he worked in the restaurant and couldn’t get away. My mama was always glad to set an extra plate out, always, anytime. But your mother didn’t often let him; your mother doesn’t like me.”

“Oh, well …”

“I wish you’d just have supper with us.”

She paused. Then she said, “I’d be happy to.”

He didn’t seem surprised. (Jenny was astonished, herself.) He grunted and continued to tear along. His whisks of black hair stood out around his head. He led her down a side street, then through an alley that Jenny wasn’t familiar with.

From the front, his house must have been very much like hers — a brick row house set in a tiny yard. But they approached it from the rear, where a tacked-on, gray frame addition gave it a ramshackle look. The addition turned out to be an unheated pantry with a cracked linoleum floor. Josiah stopped there to work himself free of his jacket, and then he reached for Jenny’s coat and hung them both on hooks beside the door. “Mama?” he called. He showed Jenny into the kitchen. “Got company for supper, Mama.”

Mrs. Payson stood at the stove — a small, chubby woman dressed in earth tones. She reminded Jenny of some modest brown bird. Her face was round and smooth and shining. She looked up and smiled, and since Josiah failed to make the introduction Jenny said, “I’m Jenny Tull.”

“Oh, any kin to Ezra?”

“I’m his sister.”

“My, I’m just so fond of that boy,” Mrs. Payson said. She lifted the pot from the stove and set it on the table. “When he was called up I cried, did Josiah tell you? I sat right down and cried. Why, he has been like a son to me, always in and out of the house …” She laid three place settings while Josiah poured the milk. “I’ll never forget,” she said, “back when Josiah’s daddy died, Ezra came and sat with us, and fixed us meals, and made us cocoa. I said, ‘Ezra, I feel selfish, taking you from your family,’ but he said, ‘Don’t you worry about it, Mrs. Payson.’ ”

Jenny wondered when that could have been. Ezra had never mentioned Mr. Payson’s dying.

Supper was spaghetti and a salad, with chocolate cake for dessert. Jenny ate sparingly, planning to eat again when she got home so her mother wouldn’t guess; but Josiah had several helpings of everything. Mrs. Payson kept refilling his plate. “To look at him,” she said, “you’d never know he eats so much, would you? Skinny as a fence post. I reckon he’s still a growing boy.” She laughed, and Josiah grinned bashfully with his eyes cast down — a skeletal, stooped, hunkering man. Jenny had never thought about the fact that Josiah was somebody’s son, some woman’s greatest treasure. His stubby black lashes were lowered; his prickly head was bent over his plate. He was so certain of being loved, here if no place else. She looked away.

After supper she helped with the dishes, placing each clean plate and glass on open wooden shelves whose edges had grown soft from too many coats of paint. Her mother would be frantic by now, but Jenny lingered over the wiping of each fork. Then Josiah walked her home. “Come back and see us!” Mrs. Payson called from the doorway. “Make sure you’re buttoned up!” Jenny thought of … was it “Jack and the Beanstalk”? … or perhaps some other fairy tale, where the humble widow, honest and warmhearted, lives in a cottage with her son. Everything else — the cold dark of the streets, the picture of her own bustling mother — seemed brittle by comparison, lacking the smoothly rounded completeness of Josiah’s life.

They walked up Calvert Street without talking, puffing clouds of steam. They crossed to Jenny’s house and climbed the porch steps. “Well,” said Jenny, “thank you for inviting me, Josiah.”

Josiah made some awkward, jerky motion that she assumed was an effort toward speech. He stumbled closer, enveloped her in a circle of rough plaid, and kissed her on the lips. She had trouble, at first, understanding what was happening. Then she felt a terrible dismay, not so much for herself as for Josiah. Oh, it was sad, he had misread everything; he would be so embarrassed! But how could he have made such an error? Thinking it over (pressed willy-nilly against his whiskery chin, against the knobbiness of his mouth), she saw things suddenly from his viewpoint: their gentle little “romance” (was what he must call it), as seamless as the Widow Payson’s fairy tale existence. She longed for it; she wished it were true. She ached, with something like nostalgia, for a contented life with his mother in her snug house, for an innocent, protective marriage. She kissed him back, feeling even through all those layers of wool how he tensed and trembled.

Then light burst out, the front door slammed open, and her mother’s voice broke over them. “What? What! What is the meaning of this?”

They leapt apart.

“You piece of trash,” Pearl said to Jenny. “You tramp. You trashy thing. So this is what you’ve been up to! Not so much as notifying me where you are, supper not started, I’m losing my mind with worry — then here I find you! Necking! Necking with a, with a—”

For lack of a word, it seemed, she struck out. She slapped Jenny hard across the cheek. Jenny’s eyes filled with tears. Josiah, as if it were he who’d been struck, averted his face sharply and stared away at some distant point. His mouth was working but no sound came forth.

“With a crazy! A dummy! A retarded person. You did it to spite me, didn’t you,” Pearl told Jenny. “It’s your way of making mock of me. All these afternoons that I’ve been slaving in the grocery store, you were off in some alleyway, weren’t you, off with this animal, this gorilla, letting him take his pleasure, just to shame me.”

Josiah said, “But-but-but—”

“Just to show me up when I had such great plans for you. Cutting school, no doubt, lying with him in bushes and back seats of cars and maybe this very house, for all I know, while I’m off slaving at Sweeney Brothers—”

“But! But! Aagh!” Josiah shouted, and he sputtered so that Jenny saw white flecks flying in the lamplight. Then he flung out his scarecrow arms and plunged down the steps and disappeared.

She didn’t see him again, of course. She chose her routes carefully and never again came near him, never approached any place that he was likely to be found; and she assumed he did the same. It was as if, by mutual agreement, they had split the city between them.

And besides, she had no reason to see him: Ezra’s letters stopped. Ezra appeared in person. One Sunday morning, there he was, sitting in the kitchen when Jenny came down to breakfast. He wore his old civilian clothes that had been packed away in mothballs — jeans and a scruffy blue sweater. They hung on him like something borrowed. It was alarming how much weight he had lost. His hair was unbecomingly short and his face was paler, older, shadowed beneath the eyes. He sat slumped, clamping his hands between his knees, while Pearl scraped a piece of scorched toast into the sink. “Jam or honey, which?” she was asking. “Jenny, look who’s here! It’s Ezra, safe and sound! Let me pour you more coffee, Ezra.” Ezra didn’t speak, but he gave Jenny a tired smile.

He’d been discharged, as it turned out. For sleepwalking. He had no memory of sleepwalking, but every night he dreamed the same dream: he was marching through an unchanging terrain of cracked mud flats without a tree or a sprig of grass, with a blank blue bowl of sky overhead. He would set one foot in front of the other and march and march and march. In the morning, his muscles would ache. He’d thought it was from his waking marches, till they told him differently. All night, they told him, he roamed the camp, plodding between the rows of cots. Soldiers would stir and sit up and say, “Tull? That you?” and he would leave. He wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t wake, but simply went someplace else. To some of the soldiers, the youngest ones, his silence was frightening. There were complaints. He was sent to a doctor, who gave him a box of yellow pills. With the pills he still walked, but he would fall down from time to time and just lie where he fell until morning. Once he must have landed on his face; when they roused him, his nose was bloody and they thought it might be broken. It wasn’t, but for several days he had purple circles under his eyes. Then they sent him to a chaplain, who asked if Ezra had anything particular on his mind. Was there some trouble back home, perhaps? Woman trouble? Illness in his family? Ezra said no. He told the chaplain things were fine; he couldn’t for the life of him think what this was all about. The chaplain asked if he liked the army and Ezra said, well, it wasn’t something you would like or dislike; it was something you had to get through, was more to the point. He said the army wasn’t his style, exactly — what with the shouting, the noise — but still, he was coming along. He guessed he was doing all right. The chaplain said just to try not to sleepwalk again, in that case; but the very next night Ezra walked directly into town, four and a half miles in his olive-drab underwear with his eyes wide open but flat as windows, and a waitress in a diner had to wake him up and get her brother-in-law to drive him back to camp. The next day they called another doctor in, and the doctor asked him a series of questions and signed some papers and sent him home. “So here I am,” Ezra said in a toneless voice. “Discharged.”

“But honorably,” said his mother.

“Oh, yes.”

“The thought! All the while this was going on, you never said a word.”

“Well, how could you have helped?” he asked.

The question seemed to age her. She sagged.

After breakfast he went upstairs and fell on his bed and slept through the day, and Jenny had to wake him for supper. Even then he could barely keep his eyes open. He sat groggily swaying, eating almost nothing, nodding off in the middle of a mouthful. Then he went back to bed. Jenny wandered through the house and fidgeted with the cords of window shades. Was this how he was going to be, now? Had he changed forever?

But Monday morning, he was Ezra again. She heard his little pearwood recorder playing “Greensleeves” before she was even dressed. When she came downstairs he was scrambling eggs the way she liked, with cheese and bits of green pepper, while Pearl read the paper. And at breakfast he said, “I guess I’ll go get my old job back.” Pearl glanced over at him but said nothing. “How come you didn’t call on Mrs. Scarlatti?” Ezra asked Jenny. “She wrote and said you never came.”

Jenny said, “Oh, well, I meant to …”

She lowered her eyes and held her breath, waiting. Now was when he would mention Josiah. But he didn’t. She looked up and found him buttering a piece of toast, and she let out her breath. She was never going to be certain of what Ezra knew, or didn’t know.

By the time Jenny reached college, she’d grown to be the beauty that everyone predicted. Or was it only that she’d come into fashion? Her mirror showed the same face, so far as she could tell, but most of her dormitory’s phone calls seemed to be for her, and if she hadn’t been working her way through school (waiting tables, folding laundry, shelving books in the library stacks), she could have gone out every night. Away from Baltimore, her looks lost a little of their primness. She let her hair grow and she developed a breathless, flyaway air. But she never forgot about medical school. Her future was always clear to her: a straightforward path to a pediatric practice in a medium-sized city, preferably not too far from a coast. (She liked knowing she could get out anytime. Wouldn’t mid-westerners feel claustrophobic?) Friends teased her about her single-mindedness. Her roommate objected to Jenny’s study light, was exasperated by the finicky way she aligned her materials on her desk. In this respect, at least, Jenny hadn’t changed.

Meanwhile, her brother Cody had become a success — shot ahead through several different firms, mainly because of his ideas for using the workers’ time better; and then branched out on his own to become an efficiency expert. And Ezra still worked for Mrs. Scarlatti, but he had advanced as well. He really ran the kitchen now, while Mrs. Scarlatti played hostess out front. Jenny’s mother wrote to say it was a shame, a crime and a shame. I tell him the longer he piddles about in that woman’s restaurant the harder he’ll find it to get back on track, you know he always intended to go to college …

Pearl still clerked at the grocery store but was better dressed, looking less careworn, since Jenny’s scholarship and part-time jobs had relieved the last financial strain. Jenny saw her twice a year — at Christmas and just before the start of school each September. She made excuses for the other holidays, and during the summers she worked at a clothing shop in a small town near her college. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see her mother. She often thought of her wiry energy, the strength she had shown in raising her children single-handed, and her unfailing interest in their progress. But whenever Jenny returned, she was dampened almost instantly by the atmosphere of the house — by its lack of light, the cramped feeling of its papered rooms, a certain grim spareness. She almost wondered if she had some kind of allergy. It was like a respiratory ailment; on occasion, she believed she might be smothering. Her head grew stuffy, as it did when she had studied too long without a break. She snapped at people. Even Ezra irritated her, with his calm and his docility.

So she kept her distance, and after missing her family a while began to discard the very thought of them. She grew brisker, busier, more hurried. Ezra’s letters — as ponderous as his conversation, just this side of dull — would turn up on the edge of the bathroom sink or crumpled among the bedclothes, where Jenny had laid them aside in midsentence. Her mind just drifted, that was all. And twice, during her first two years in college, Cody stopped to see her while traveling through Pennsylvania on business, and both times she was happy at the prospect (he was so dashing and good-looking, she was proud to show him off), but she felt muffled, gradually, once he’d arrived. It wasn’t her fault; it was his. It seemed that everything she said carried, for him, the echo of their mother. She saw him stiffen. She knew exactly what he was thinking. “How are you fixed for money?” he would ask her. “You need a few new dresses?” She would say, “No, thanks, Cody, I’m fine”—really meaning it, needing nothing; but she saw, from his expression, what he had understood her to say: “No, no,” in Pearl’s thin voice, “never mind me …” She could not straighten his tie, or compliment his suit, or inquire about his present life without setting up that guarded look in his face. It made her feel unjustly accused. Did he really imagine she would be so domineering, or reproachful, or meddlesome? “Look,” she tried once. “Let’s start over. I didn’t intend what you think I intended.” But his wary, sidelong glance told her that he suspected even this. There was no way to cut themselves out of the tangle. She let him leave. Back in her dorm room she studied her reflection, her swing of dark hair and her narrow-waisted figure. Then she acted gayer than usual, for a while, and had a sense of having clapped her hands to free them of some thick and clinging dust.

Late in her senior year, she fell in love. She had been in love before, of course — once with an English major who’d grown too possessive, bit by bit; and once with a barrel-necked football star who seemed now, when she looked back, to be a symptom of some temporary insanity. But this was different. This was Harley Baines, a genius, a boy of such intelligence that even his smudged tortoiseshell glasses, pure white skin, and adenoidal voice struck awe in his classmates. He was not outside Jenny’s group so much as above it, beyond it — a group in himself. It was rumored that he could have had a Ph.D. at twelve but was kept from it by his parents, who wanted him to enjoy a normal childhood. Next year he’d be at Paulham University, outside Philadelphia, doing advanced research in the field of genetics. Jenny was going to Paulham too; she had just been accepted by its medical school. That was what made her notice Harley Baines. Secure in the center of her own noisy group (which would not be hers much longer, which would soon be scattered by graduation, leaving her defenseless), she looked across the campus and saw Harley Baines passing with his stork-like gait, wearing unstylish, pleated flannel trousers and a bulky pullover obviously knitted by his mother. His hair, which could have used a shampoo, was a particularly dense shade of black. She wondered if he knew she was entering Paulham. She wondered if he would care, if he found girls beneath his notice. Was he impervious? Unobtainable? Her friends had to call her name several times, laughing at her bemused expression.

It was the spring of 1957—an unusually late and gradual spring. Professors opened the classroom windows with long, hooked poles, and the smell of lilacs floated in. Jenny wore sleeveless blouses and full skirts and ballerina flats. Harley Baines laid aside his home-knit sweater. Bared, his arms were muscular, thick with black hair. Around his neck he wore a gold or brass disk of some kind. She was dying to know what it was. One day in German class, she asked. He said it was a medal he’d won in a high school science fair, for setting up an experiment on the metabolic rate of white rats. She thought it was a funny thing to go on wearing all this time, but she didn’t say so. Instead, she touched the medal lightly with her fingertips. It hung just inside his shirt, and it was almost hot.

She asked him at other times (catching up with him in a corridor, arranging to stand behind him in the cafeteria line) whether he was looking forward to Paulham University, and what sort of housing he would have there, and what he’d heard about Paulham’s public transportation system. Offering these questions in an even, noncommittal voice, she felt like one of those circus trainers who take care to present to an animal only the curled-in backs of their hands, showing they pose no threat. She didn’t want to alarm him. But Harley didn’t act alarmed at all, and answered her courteously, matter-of-factly. (Was that good or bad?) When exams began, she came to him with her genetics notes and asked if he could help her study. They sat outdoors in the grass, in front of the Student Union, on a blue chenille bedspread she’d brought from her room. Their classmates lounged on other bedspreads all around them — including some of Jenny’s friends, who cast her startled, doubtful looks and then glanced quickly past her. She’d been hoping they would stroll over, make Harley a part of the group. But on second thought, she could see that would never happen.

While she framed her queries (acting not so slow-witted as to put him off, but still in need of his assistance), Harley listened and stripped a grass blade. He wore heavy, dressy shoes that seemed out of place on the bedspread. In his probing hands, the grass blade took on the look of a scientific experiment. He answered her levelly, with no question marks after his sentences; he took it for granted that she would understand him. Which she did, in fact, and would have even if she hadn’t known her subject ahead of time. His logic proceeded steadily from A to B to C. In his slowness and his thoroughness, he reminded her of Ezra — though otherwise, how different they were! When he finished, he asked if everything was clear now. “Yes, thank you,” she said, and he nodded and rose to go. Was that it? She rose too, and felt suddenly dizzy — not from standing, she believed, but from love. He had actually managed to bowl her over. She wondered what he would do if she threw her arms around him and collapsed against him, laid her face on his white, white chest, burned her cheek on his scientific medal. Instead she asked, “Will you help me fold the bedspread, please?” He bent to lift one end, and she lifted the other. They advanced. He gave his end to her and then soberly brushed off every wisp of grass, every flower petal and grain of pollen, from his side of the spread. After that he took the spread back again, evidently assuming that she would brush off her side. She looked up into his face. He stepped forward, flipped the spread around him like a hooded cloak, and wrapped her inside its darkness and kissed her. His glasses knocked against her nose. It was an unskillful kiss anyhow, too abrupt, and she couldn’t help imagining the picture they made — a blue chenille pillar in the middle of the campus, a twin-sized mummy. She laughed. He dropped the spread and turned on his heel and walked off very fast. A plume of hair bobbed on the back of his head like a rooster’s tail.

Jenny returned to her room and took a bath and changed to a ruffled dress. She leaned out her open window, humming. Harley didn’t come. Eventually she went to supper, but he wasn’t in the cafeteria, either. The next day, after her last exam, she phoned his dormitory. Some sleepy-sounding, gruff boy answered. “Baines has left for home,” he said.

“Home? But we haven’t had graduation yet.”

“He’s not planning to go through with that.”

“Oh,” said Jenny. She hadn’t thought of graduation as “going through” with anything, although it was true you could simply have your diploma mailed out. To people like Harley Baines, she supposed, a degree was unimportant. (While Jenny’s family was coming all the way to Summerfield for this event.) She said, “Well, thank you anyhow,” and hung up, hoping her voice didn’t sound as forlorn to Harley’s roommate as it did to her.

That summer, after graduation, she worked again at Molly’s Togs in the little town near the college. It had always seemed a pleasant job, but this year she was depressed by the studied casualness of married women’s clothes — their Bermuda shorts for golfing and their wide-hipped khaki skirts. She gazed away unhelpfully when her customers asked, “Does it suit me? Do you think it’s too youthful?” Next year at this time, she would be at Paulham. She wondered how soon she could start wearing a starched white coat.

In July, a letter arrived from Harley Baines, forwarded from home by her mother. When Jenny returned to her boardinghouse after work, she found it on the hall table. She stood looking at it a moment. Then she slipped it into her straw purse and climbed the stairs. She let herself into her room, threw her purse on the bed, and opened the window. She took a square tin from a drawer and fed the two goldfish in the bowl on the bureau. All before opening Harley’s letter.

Did she guess, ahead of time, what it would say?

Later, she imagined that she must have.

His handwriting was as small and separate as typing. She would have imagined something more headlong from a genius. He used a colon after the greeting, as if it were a business letter.

The postscript, she thought, was the most affecting part of the letter. It was written in a looser hand, as if impulsively, while the rest seemed copied and perhaps recopied from a rough draft. She read the letter again, and then folded it and set it on her bed. She went over to study her goldfish, who had left too much food floating on the surface of the water. She would have to cut down on their rations. Dear Harley, she practiced. It was such a surprise to … No. He wouldn’t care for gushiness. Dear Harley: I have considered your terms and … What she was trying to say was “Yes.” She was pulled only very slightly by the feelings she’d had for him earlier (which now seemed faded and shallow, a schoolgirl crush brought on by senior panic). What appealed to her more was the angularity of the situation — the mighty leap into space with someone she hardly knew. Wasn’t that what a marriage ought to be? Like one of those movie-style disasters — shipwrecks or earthquakes or enemy prisons — where strangers, trapped in close quarters by circumstance, show their real strengths and weaknesses.

Lately, her life had seemed to be narrowing. She could predict so easily the successive stages of medical school, internship, and residency. She had looked in a mirror, not so long ago, and realized all at once that the clear, fragile skin around her eyes would someday develop lines. She was going to grow old like anyone else.

She took paper from a bureau drawer, sat down on her bed, and uncapped her fountain pen. Dear Harley: she wrote. She plucked a microscopic hair from the pen point. She thought a while. Then she wrote, All right, and signed her name — the ultimate in no-nonsense communication. Even Harley couldn’t find it excessive.

The following evening, just before supper, Jenny arrived in Baltimore. She had burned all her bridges: quit her job, given away her goldfish, and packed everything in her room. It was the most reckless behavior she had ever shown. On the Greyhound bus she sat grandly upright, periodically shrugging off the snoring soldier who drooped against her. When she reached the terminal she hailed a cab, instead of waiting for a city bus, and rode home in style.

No one had been told she was coming, so she was puzzled by the fact that while she was paying off the driver, the front door of her house opened wide and her mother proceeded across the porch and down the steps in a flowing, flowered dress, high-heeled pumps, and a hat whose black net veil was dotted with what looked like beauty spots. Behind her came Ezra in un-pressed clothes that were a little too full cut, and last was Cody, dark and handsome and New Yorkish in a fine-textured, fitted gray suit and striped silk tie. For a second, Jenny fancied they were headed for her funeral. This was how they would look — formally dressed and refraining from battle — if Jenny were no longer among them. Then she shook the thought away, and smiled and climbed out of the taxi.

Her mother halted on the sidewalk. “My stars!” she said. “Ezra, when you say family dinner, you mean family dinner!” She raised her veil to kiss Jenny’s cheek. “Why didn’t you tell us you were coming? Ezra, did you plan it this way?”

“I didn’t know a thing about it,” Ezra said. “I thought of writing you, Jenny, but I didn’t think you’d come all this distance just for supper.”

“Supper?” Jenny asked.

“It’s some idea of Ezra’s,” Pearl told her. “He found out Cody was passing through, maybe spending the night, and he said, ‘I want both of you to get all dressed up—’ ”

“I am not spending the night,” Cody said. “I’m running on a schedule here, when will you see that? I shouldn’t even be staying for supper. I ought to be in Delaware.”

“Ezra’s got something he wants to say,” Pearl said, picking a thread off Jenny’s sundress, “some announcement he wants to make, and is taking us to Scarlatti’s Restaurant. Though hot as it is, I believe a leaf of lettuce is just about all I could manage. Jenny, honey, you’re thin as a stick! And what’s in this big suitcase? How long are you planning to stay?”

“Oh, well … not long,” Jenny said. She felt shy about telling her news. “Maybe I ought to change clothes. I’m not as dressed up as the rest of you.”

“No, no, you’re fine,” Ezra told her. He was rubbing his hands together, the way he always did when he was pleased. “Oh, it’s working out so well!” he said. “A real family dinner! It’s just like fate.”

Cody took Jenny’s suitcase inside the house. Meanwhile, her mother fussed: smoothing Jenny’s hair, clucking at her bare legs. “No stockings! On a public conveyance.” Cody came back and opened the door of a shiny blue car at the curb. He helped Pearl in, cupping her elbow. “What do you think of my car?” he said to Jenny.

“It’s very nice. Did you buy it new?”

“How else? A Pontiac. Smell that new-car smell,” he said. He walked around to the driver’s seat. Jenny and Ezra settled in the rear; Ezra’s knobby wrists dangled between his knees.

“Of course, it’s not yet paid for,” Cody said, pulling into traffic, “but it will be very soon.”

“Cody Tull!” his mother said. “You didn’t go in debt for this.”

“Why not? I’m getting rich, I tell you. Five years from now I can walk into an auto dealer, any dealer — Cadillac — and slap cold cash on the counter and say, ‘I’ll take three. Or on second thought, make that four.’ ”

“But not now,” said Pearl. “Not yet. You know how I feel about buying on time.”

“Time is what I deal with,” Cody said. He laughed, and shot through an amber light. “What could be more fitting? Ten years more, you’ll be riding in a limousine.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“And Ezra can go to Princeton, if he likes. And I can buy Jenny a clinic all her own. I can pay for her to specialize in every field, one by one.”

Now was the moment for Jenny to mention Harley, but she watched the scenery and said nothing.

At Scarlatti’s, they were shown to a table in the corner, at the end of the long, brocade-draped dining room. It was early evening, not yet dark. The restaurant was almost empty. Jenny wondered where Mrs. Scarlatti was. She started to ask about her, but Ezra was too busy overseeing their meal. He had ordered ahead, evidently, and now wanted it known that four would be eating instead of three. “We have my sister with us too. It’s going to be a real family dinner.” The waiter, who seemed fond of Ezra, nodded and went to the kitchen.

Ezra sat back and smiled at the others. Pearl was polishing a fork with her napkin. Cody was still talking about money. “I plan to buy a place in Baltimore County,” he said, “in the not-too-distant future. There’s no particular reason that I should be based in New York. I always did want land, that rolling Maryland farmland. I might raise horses.”

“Horses! Oh, Cody, really, that’s just not our style,” Pearl said. “What would you want with horses?”

“Mother,” Cody said, “anything’s our style. Don’t you see? There’s no limit. Mother, do you know who called for my services last week? The Tanner Corporation.”

Pearl set her fork down. Jenny tried to remember where she had heard that name before. It rang just the dimmest bell; it was like some lowly household object that you never look at, and only notice when you return after years of absence. “Tanner?” she asked Cody. “What’s that?”

“It’s where our father worked.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Where he still may, for all I know. But, Jenny, you should have seen it. Such a nickel-and-dime operation … I mean, not small, good Lord, with that mess of branch offices overlapping and conflicting, but so … tacky. Really so easily encompassed. And I was thinking: imagine, just like that, I have them in my power. The Tanner Corporation! The great, almighty Tanner Corporation. That afternoon, I went out and ordered my Pontiac.”

“There was never,” Pearl said, “the slightest thing tacky about the Tanner Corporation.”

Their appetizers arrived on chilled plates, along with a slender, pale green bottle of wine. The waiter poured a sip for Ezra, who tasted it as if it were important. “Good,” he said. (It was strange to see him in a position of command.) “Cody? Try this wine.”

“Never,” said Pearl, “was there anything nickel-and-dime, in the smallest, tiniest way, ever in this world, about the Tanner Corporation.”

“Oh, Mother, face it,” Cody told her. “It’s a trash heap. I’m going to strip it to the bones.”

You would think he was speaking of something alive — an animal, some creature that would suffer. Pearl must have thought so, too. She said, “Cody, why must you act toward me in this manner?”

“I’m not acting in any manner.”

“Have I ever wronged you, knowingly? Ever done you harm?”

“Please,” Ezra said. “Mother? Cody? It’s a family dinner! Jenny? Let’s have a toast.”

Jenny hastily raised her glass. “A toast,” she said.

“Mother? A toast.”

Pearl’s eyes went reluctantly to Ezra’s face. “Oh,” she said, after a pause. “Thank you, dear, but wine in all this heat would settle on my stomach like a rock.”

“It’s a toast to me, Mother. To my future. A toast,” said Ezra, “to the new full partner of Scarlatti’s Restaurant.”

“Partner? Who would that be?”

“Me, Mother.”

Then the double doors to the kitchen opened and in came Mrs. Scarlatti, glamorous as ever, striding on rangy, loose-strung legs and tossing back her asymmetrical hairdo. She must have been waiting for her cue — eavesdropping, in fact. “So!” she said, setting a hand on Ezra’s shoulder. “What do you think of my boy here?”

“I don’t understand,” said Pearl.

“Well, you know he’s been my right hand for so long, ever since my son died, really better than my son, if the truth be told; poor Billy never cared all that much for the restaurant business …”

Ezra was rising, as if something momentous were about to happen. While Mrs. Scarlatti went on speaking in her rasping, used-up voice — telling his own mother what an angel Ezra was, a sweetie, so gifted, such a respect for food, for decent food served decently, such a “divine” (she said) instinct for seasonings — he pulled his leather billfold from his pocket. He peered into it, looked anxious for a moment, and then said, “Ah!” and held up a ragged dollar bill. “Mrs. Scarlatti,” he said, “with this dollar I hereby purchase a partnership in Scarlatti’s Restaurant.”

“It’s yours, dear heart,” said Mrs. Scarlatti, taking the money.

“What’s going on here?” Pearl asked.

“We signed the papers in my lawyer’s office yesterday afternoon,” Mrs. Scarlatti said. “Well, it makes good sense, doesn’t it? Who would I leave this damn place to when I kick off — my chihuahua? Ezra knows it inside out by now. Ezra, pour me a glass of wine.”

“But I thought you were going to college,” Pearl told Ezra.

“I was?”

“I thought you were planning to be a teacher! Maybe a professor. I don’t understand what’s happened. Oh, I know it’s none of my affair. I’ve never been the type to meddle. Only let me tell you this: it’s going to look very, very peculiar to people who don’t have all the facts. Accepting such a gift! And from a woman, to boot! It’s a favor; partnerships don’t cost a dollar; you’ll be beholden all your life. Ezra, we Tulls depend on ourselves, only on each other. We don’t look to the rest of the world for any help whatsoever. How could you lend yourself to this?”

“Mother, I like making meals for people,” Ezra said.

“He’s a marvel,” said Mrs. Scarlatti.

“But the obligation!”

Cody said, “Let him be, Mother.”

She swung on him so quickly, it was more like pouncing. “I know you’re enjoying this,” she said.

“It’s his life.”

“What do you care about his life? You only want to see us break up, dissolve in the outside world.”

“Please,” said Ezra.

But Pearl rose and marched toward the door. “You haven’t eaten!” Ezra cried. She didn’t stop. In her straight-backed posture, Jenny saw the first signs of her mother’s old age — her stringy tendons and breakable bones. “Oh, dear,” Ezra said, “I wanted this to be such a good meal.” He tore off after Pearl. Scattered diners raised their heads, thought a moment, and went back to eating.

That left Cody, Jenny, and Mrs. Scarlatti. Mrs. Scarlatti didn’t seem particularly distressed. “Mothers,” she said mildly. She tucked the dollar bill inside her black linen bosom.

Cody said, “Well? Does that wrap it up? Because I should have been in Delaware an hour ago. Can I give you a lift, Jenny?”

“I guess I’ll walk,” Jenny said.

The last she saw of Mrs. Scarlatti, she was standing there all alone, surveying the untouched appetizers with an amused expression on her face.

After Cody had driven off, Jenny walked slowly toward home. She didn’t see Pearl or Ezra anywhere ahead of her. It was twilight — a sticky evening, smelling of hot tires. As she floated past shops in her sundress, she began to feel like someone’s romantic vision of a young girl. She tried out a daydream of Harley Baines, but it didn’t work. What did Jenny know about marriage? Why would she even want to get married? She was only a child; she would always be a child. Her wedding plans seemed makeshift and contrived — a charade. She felt foolish. She tried to remember Harley’s kiss but it had vanished altogether, and Harley himself was no more real to her than a little paper man in a mail-order catalogue.

In the candy store, two children argued while their mother pressed a hand to her forehead. Next came the pharmacy and then the fortune-teller’s — a smudged plate glass window with MRS. EMMA PARKINS — READINGS AND ADVICE arched in curly gold letters that were flaking around the edges. Handmade signs sat propped on the sill like afterthoughts: STRICTEST CONFIDENCE and NO PAYMENT IF NOT FULLY SATISFIED. In the light from a dusty globe lamp, Mrs. Parkins herself paced the room — a fat, drab old woman with a cardboard fan on a Popsicle stick.

Jenny reached the corner, paused, and then turned. She went back to the fortune-teller’s door. Should she knock, or just walk on in? She tried the handle. The door swung open and a little bell above it tinkled. Mrs. Parkins lowered her fan and said, “Do tell! A customer.”

Jenny hugged her purse to her chest.

“Keeping warm?” Mrs. Parkins asked her.

“Yes,” said Jenny. She thought she smelled cough syrup, the bitter, dark, cherry-flavored kind.

“Why don’t you have a seat,” Mrs. Parkins said.

There were two armchairs, puffy, facing each other across the little round table that held the lamp. Jenny sat in the chair nearest the door. Mrs. Parkins plucked her dress from the backs of her thighs and settled down with a groan, still gripping her fan. “Radio says the weather ought to break tomorrow,” she said, “but I don’t know if I can last that long. Seems like every year, the heat just hits me harder.”

Yet her hand, when she reached for Jenny’s, was cool and dry, with tough little pads at the fingertips. She fanned herself while she studied Jenny’s palm. It made her work look commonplace. “Long life, good career line …” she murmured, as if riffling through a file. Jenny relaxed.

“I suppose there’s something special you want to know about,” Mrs. Parkins said.

“Oh, well …”

“No sense beating around the bush.”

Jenny said, “Should I get … well … married?”

“Married,” said Mrs. Parkins.

“I mean, I could. I have this chance. I’ve been asked.”

Mrs. Parkins went on scrutinizing Jenny’s hand. Then she beckoned for the other one, which she barely glanced at. Then she sat back and fanned herself some more, gazing at the ceiling.

“Married,” she said finally. “Well, I tell you. You could, or you could not. If you don’t, you will get other offers. Surely. But here is my advice: you go ahead and do it.”

“What, get married?”

“If you don’t, see,” Mrs. Parkins said, “you’ll run into a lot of heartbreak. Lot of trouble in your romantic life. From various different people. What I mean to say,” she said, “if you don’t go on and get married, you’ll be destroyed by love.”

“Oh,” Jenny said.

“That’ll be two dollars, please.”

Searching through her purse, Jenny had an interesting thought. By Ezra’s rate of exchange, she could have bought a couple of restaurants for the same amount of money.

She married Harley late in August, in the little Baptist church that the Tulls had attended off and on. Cody gave Jenny away and Ezra was the usher. The guests he ushered in were: Pearl, Mr. and Mrs. Baines, and an aunt on Harley’s mother’s side. Jenny wore a white eyelet dress and sandals. Harley wore a black suit, white button-down shirt, and snub-nosed, dull black shoes. Jenny looked down at those shoes all during the ceremony. They reminded her of licorice jellybeans.

Pearl did not shed a tear, because, she said, she was so glad things had worked out this way, even though certain people might have informed her sooner. It was a relief to see your daughter handed over safely, she said — a burden off. Mrs. Baines cried steadily, but that was the kind of woman she was. She told Jenny after the wedding that it certainly didn’t mean she had anything against the marriage.

Then Harley and Jenny took a train to Paulham University, where they’d rented a small apartment. They had no furniture yet and spent their wedding night on the floor. Jenny was worried about Harley’s inexperience. She was certain he’d always been above such things as sex; he wouldn’t know what to do, and neither would she, and they would end up failing at something the rest of the world managed without a thought. But actually, Harley knew very well what to do. She suspected he’d researched it. She had an image of Harley at a library desk, comparing the theories of experts, industriously making notes in the proper outline form.

“On old Olympus’s torrid top,” Jenny told the scenery rushing past her window, “a Finn and German picked some hops.”

This was supposed to remind her of the cranial nerves: olfactory, optic, oculomotor … She frowned and checked her textbook. It was 1958—the start of the first weekend in May, but not a weekend she could spare. She was paying a visit to Baltimore when she should have been holed up in Paulham, studying. She had telephoned her mother long-distance. “Could you ask Ezra to meet my train?”

“I thought you had so much work to do.”

“I can work down there just as well.”

“Are you bringing Harley?”

“No.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“Of course not.”

“I don’t like the sound of this, young lady.”

On the telephone, Pearl’s voice was dim and staticky, easily dealt with. Jenny had said, “Oh, Mother, really.” But now the train was drawing into Baltimore, and the sight of factory smokestacks, soot-blackened bricks, and billboards peeling in the rain — a landscape she associated with home — made her feel less sure of herself. She hoped that Ezra would meet her alone. She rubbed a clean spot on the window and stared out at acres of railroad track, then at the first metal posts flying by, then at slower posts, better defined, and a dark flight of stairs. The train shrieked and jerked to a stop. Jenny closed her book. She stood up, edged past a sleeping woman, and took a small suitcase from the rack overhead.

This station always seemed to be under some kind of construction, she thought. When she arrived at the top of the stairs, she heard the whine of a power tool — an electric drill or saw. The sound was almost lost beneath the high ceiling. Ezra stood waiting, smiling at her, with his hands in his windbreaker pockets. “How was your trip?” he asked.

“Fine.”

He took her suitcase. “Harley all right?”

“Oh, yes.”

They threaded through a sparse crowd of people in raincoats. “Mother’s still at work,” Ezra said, “but she ought to be home by the time we get there. And I’ve put in a call to Cody. I thought we might all have dinner at the restaurant tomorrow night; he’s supposed to be passing through.”

“How is the restaurant?”

Ezra looked unhappy. He guided Jenny through the door, into a dripping mist that felt cool on her skin. “She’s not at all well,” he said.

Jenny wondered why he called the restaurant “she,” as if it were a ship. But then he said, “The treatments are making her worse. She can’t keep anything down,” and she understood that he must mean Mrs. Scarlatti. Last fall, Mrs. Scarlatti had been hospitalized for a cancer operation — her second, though up until then no one had known of the first. Ezra had taken it very hard. Mournfully trudging down a row of taxis, he said, “She hardly ever complains, but I know she’s suffering.”

“Are you running the restaurant alone, then?”

“Oh, yes, I’ve been doing that since November. Everything: the hiring and the firing, bringing in new help as people quit. A restaurant is not all food, you know. Sometimes it seems that food is the least of it. I feel the place is falling apart on me, but Mrs. Scarlatti says not to worry. It always looks like that, she says. Life is a continual shoring up, she says, against one thing and another just eroding and crumbling away. I’m beginning to think she’s right.”

They had reached his car, a dented gray Chevy. He opened the door for her and heaved her suitcase into the rear, which was already a chaos of Restaurateur’s Weeklys, soiled clothing, and some kind of tongs or skewers in a Kitchen Korner shopping bag. “Sorry about the mess,” he said when he’d slid behind the wheel. He started the engine and backed out of his parking slot. “Have you learned to drive yet?”

“Yes, Harley taught me. Now I drive him everywhere; he likes to be free to think.”

They were on Charles Street. The rain was so fine that Ezra hadn’t bothered to turn on his windshield wipers, and the glass began to film over. Jenny peered ahead. “Can you see?” she asked Ezra.

He nodded.

“First he wants me to drive,” she said, “and then he criticizes every last little thing about how I do it. He’s so clever; you don’t know how far his cleverness can extend. I mean, it’s not just math or genetics he knows all about but the most efficient temperature for cooking pot roast, the best way to organize my kitchen — everything, all charted out in his mind. When I’m driving he says, ‘Now, Jennifer, you know full well that three blocks from here is that transit stop where you have to veer left, so what are you doing in the right-hand lane? You ought to plan ahead more,’ he says. ‘Three blocks!’ I say. ‘Good grief! I’ll get to it when I get to it,’ and he says, ‘That’s exactly what your trouble is, Jenny.’ ‘Between here and that transit stop,’ I tell him, ‘anything might happen,’ and he says, ‘Not really. No, not really. In all three intersections there’s a left-turn lane, as you’ll recall, so you wouldn’t have to wait for …’ Nothing is unplanned, for Harley. You can see the numbered pages leafing over inside his head. There’s never a single mistake.”

“Well,” Ezra said, “I guess it’s like a whole different outlook, being a genius.”

“It’s not as if I hadn’t been warned,” said Jenny, “but I didn’t realize it was a warning. I was too young to read the signals. I thought he was only like me, you know — a careful person; I always was careful, but now compared to Harley I don’t seem careful at all. I should have guessed when I went to meet his parents before the wedding, and all the books in his room were arranged by height and blocks of color. Alphabetized I could have understood; or separated by subject matter. But this arbitrary, fixed pattern of things, a foot of red, a foot of black, no hardbacks mingling with the paperbacks … it’s worse than Mother’s bureau drawers. It’s out of the frying pan, into the fire! The first time Harley kissed me, he had to brush off this bedspread beforehand that we’d been sitting on. Wouldn’t you think that might have told me something? Every night now before he goes to sleep he perches on the edge of the bed and brushes off the soles of his feet. These bare white feet, untouched … what could have dirtied them? He wears shoes every waking moment and slippers if he takes one step in the night. But no, there he sits, so methodical, so exact, everything in its proper sequence, brush-brush … sometimes I think I’ll hit him. I’m fascinated, I stand there watching him brush his left foot first, his right foot second, not letting either touch the floor once he’s finished with it, and I think, ‘I’m going to bash your head in for you, Harley.’ ”

Ezra cleared his throat. “It’s the adjustment,” he said. “Yes, that’s it: adjustment. The first year of marriage. I’m sure that’s all it is.”

“Well, maybe so,” Jenny said.

She wished she hadn’t talked so much.

When they reached home, therefore — where their mother had just arrived herself — Jenny said nothing at all about Harley. (Pearl thought Harley was wonderful, admirable — maybe not so easy to hold a conversation with but the perfect person to marry her daughter.) “Now tell me,” Pearl said when she’d kissed her. “How come you didn’t bring that husband of yours? You haven’t had some silly kind of quarrel.”

“No, no. It’s only my work. The strain of work,” Jenny said. “I wanted to come and rest, and Harley couldn’t leave his lab.”

It was true that the house seemed restful, suddenly. After Ezra left for Scarlatti’s, her mother led Jenny to the kitchen and brewed her a cup of tea. One thing Pearl never skimped on was tea. She moved around the room, heating the speckled brown teapot, humming some old, wavery hymn. The damp weather had frizzed her hair into little corkscrews and the steam had turned her cheeks pink; she looked almost pretty. (What kind of a marriage had she had? Something must have gone terribly wrong with it, but Jenny couldn’t help imagining it as perfect, all of a piece, her parents permanently joined. That her father had left was only a fluke — some misunderstanding still not cleared up.)

“I thought we’d have a very light supper,” said her mother. “Maybe a salad or something.”

“That would be fine,” Jenny said.

“Something plain and simple.”

Plain and simple was just what Jenny needed. She loosened; she was safe at last, in the only place where people knew exactly who she was and loved her anyhow.

So it was all the odder that after supper, touring the house, she felt a flash of pity for Ezra when she looked in upon his room. Still here! she thought, seeing his boyish tartan blanket on the bed, his worn recorder on the windowsill, the stamped metal tray on his bureau heaped with ancient, green-tinged pennies. How can he bear it? she wondered, and she went back down the stairs, shaking her head and marveling.

This was what Jenny had brought with her: a change of clothes, her anatomy textbook, Harley’s letter proposing marriage, and his photo in a sterling silver frame. Unpacking, she set the photo firmly on her desk and examined it. She had brought it not for sentimental reasons but because she planned to think Harley over, to sum him up, and she didn’t want distance to alter her judgment. She foresaw that she might be so misguided as to miss him. This picture would remind her not to. He was a stiff and stodgy man; you could see it in the thickened line of his jaw and in the opaque, bespectacled gaze he directed at the camera. He disapproved of her reasoning methods — too rushed and haphazard, he said. He didn’t like her chattery friends. He thought her clothes lacked style. He criticized her table manners. “Twenty-five chews per bite,” he would tell her. “That’s my advice. Not only is it more healthful, but you’ll find yourself not eating so much.” He was obsessed by the fear that she might grow fat. Since Jenny could count every one of her ribs, she wondered if he had a kind of mad spot — if he were insane not through and through, but in one isolated area. It was the uncontrollability he feared, perhaps: he would not like to see Jenny ballooning, the pounds collecting unrestrained; he wouldn’t like to see her getting out of hand. That must be it. But she did begin to wonder if she might be gaining weight. She started stepping on the scales every morning. She stood in front of the full-length mirror, sucking in her stomach. Was it possible her hips were widening? Out in public, though, she noticed that the fleshy women were the ones who caught Harley’s eye — the burgeoning and dimpled ones, blondes, a little blowzy. It was a mystery, really.

Jenny’s grades were not very good. She wasn’t failing, or anything like that; but neither was she making A’s, and her lab work was often slipshod. Sometimes it seemed to her that she’d been hollow, all these years, and was finally caving in on herself. They’d found her out: at heart, there was nothing to her.

Packing for this trip (which Harley saw as a waste of time and money), she had strode across the bedroom to where his photo sat on the bureau. Harley was standing in front of it. “Move, please,” she told him. He looked offended and stepped aside. Then, when he saw what she wanted, his face had … well, flown open, you might say. His glare had softened, his lips had parted to speak. He was touched. And she was touched that he was touched. Nothing was ever simple; there were always these complications. But what he said was, “I don’t understand you. Your mother has frightened and mistreated you all your life, and now you want to visit her for no apparent reason.”

Probably what he was saying was “Please don’t go.”

You had to be a trained decoder to read the man.

She shook open his letter of proposal. See how he had dated it: 18 July, 1957—a form that struck her as pretentious, unless of course he happened to be English. She wondered how she could have overlooked the pompous language, the American courtship (as if his superior intelligence placed him on a whole separate continent), and most of all, the letter itself, the very fact that it was written, advancing the project of marriage like a corporation merger.

Well, she had overlooked it. She’d chosen not to see. She knew she had acted deviously in this whole business — making up her mind to win him, marrying him for practical reasons. She had calculated, was what it was. But she felt the punishment was greater than the crime. It wasn’t such a terrible crime. She’d had no idea (would any unmarried person?) what a serious business she was playing with, how long it lasts, how deep it goes. And now look: the joke was on her. Having got what she was after, she found it was she who’d been got. Talk about calculating! He was going to run her life, arrange it perfectly by height and color. He was going to sit in the passenger seat with that censorious expression on his face and dictate every turn she took, and every shift of gears.

Because she knew it would make Ezra happy, she went to visit the restaurant late in the evening. The rain had stopped, but there was still a mist. She felt she was walking underwater, in one of those dreams where a person can breathe as easily as on land. There were only a few other people out — all of them hurrying, locked in themselves, shrouded by raincoats and plastic scarves. Traffic swished by; reflections of the headlights wavered on the streets.

The restaurant’s kitchen seemed overcrowded; it was a miracle that an acceptable plate of food could emerge from it. Ezra stood at the stove, supervising the skimming of some broth or soup. A young girl lifted ladles full of steaming liquid and emptied them into a bowl. “When you’re done—” Ezra was saying, and then he said, “Why, hello, Jenny,” and came to the door where she waited. Over his jeans he wore a long white apron; he looked like one of the cooks. He took her around to meet the others; sweaty men chopping or straining or stirring. “This is my sister, Jenny,” he would say, but then he’d get sidetracked by some detail and stand there discussing food. “Can I offer you something to eat?” he asked finally.

“No, I had supper at home.”

“Or maybe a drink from the bar?”

“No, thanks.”

“This is our headwaiter, Oakes. And this is Josiah Payson; you remember him.”

She looked up and up, into Josiah’s face. He was all in white, spotless (how had they found a uniform to fit him?), but his hair still bristled wildly. And it was no easier than ever to see where he was directing his gaze. Not at her; that was certain. He was avoiding her. He seemed completely blind to the sight of her.

“When the Boyces come,” Ezra was saying to Oakes, “tell them we have the cream of mussel soup. There’s only enough for the two of them; it’s waiting on the back burner.”

“How are you, Josiah?” Jenny asked.

“Oh, not bad.”

“So you work here now.”

“I’m the salad chef. Mostly, I cut things up.”

His spidery hands twisted in front of him. The crease in his forehead seemed deeper than ever.

“I’ve thought of you often,” Jenny said.

She didn’t mean it, at first. But then she understood, with a rush to her head that was something like illness, that she spoke the truth: she had been thinking of him all these years without knowing it. It seemed he had never once left her mind. Even Harley, she saw, was just a reverse kind of Josiah, a Josiah turned inside out: equally alien, black-and-white, incomprehensible to anyone but Jenny.

“Is your mother well?” she asked him.

“She died.”

“Died!”

“A long time ago. She went out shopping and she died. I live in my house all alone now.”

“I’m sorry,” Jenny said.

But still he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

Ezra turned from Oakes and asked, “Are you sure I can’t get you a snack, Jenny?”

“I have to leave,” she told him.

Going home, she wondered why the walk seemed so long. Her feet felt unusually heavy, and there was some old, rusty pain deep inside her chest.

The ash grove, how graceful, Ezra’s recorder piped out, how sweetly his singing … Waking slowly, still webbed in bits of dreams, Jenny found it strange that a pearwood recorder should put forth plums — perfectly round, pure, plummy notes arriving in a spill on her bed. She sat up and thought for a moment. Then she pushed her blankets back and reached for her clothes.

Ezra was playing “Le Godiveau de Poisson” when she left the house.

Down this street, and then that one, and then another that turned out to be a mistake. She had to retrace her path. It was going to be a beautiful day. The sidewalks were still wet, but the sun was rising in a pearly pink sky above the chimneys. She dug her hands in her coat pockets. She met an old man walking a poodle, but no one else, and even he passed soundlessly and vanished.

When she reached the street she wanted, nothing looked familiar and she had to take the alley. She could only find the house from the rear. She recognized that makeshift gray addition behind the kitchen, and the buckling steps that gave beneath her feet, and the wooden door with most of its paint worn off. She looked for a bell to ring but there wasn’t one; she had to knock. There was the scraping of furniture somewhere inside the house — chair legs pushing back. Josiah, when he came, was so tall that he darkened the window she peered through.

He opened the door. “Jenny?” he said.

“Hello, Josiah.”

He looked around him, as if supposing she had come to see someone else. She noticed his breakfast on the kitchen table: a slice of white bread spread with peanut butter. In the scuffed linoleum and the sink full of dirty dishes, in his tattered jeans and raveling brown sweater, she read neglect and hopelessness. She pulled her coat tighter around her.

“What are you, what are you here for?” he asked.

“I did everything wrong,” she told him.

“What are you talking about?”

“You must feel I’m just like the others! Just like the ones you want to escape from, off in the woods with your sleeping bag.”

“Oh, no, Jenny,” he said. “I would never believe you’re like that.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Nobody would; you’re too pretty.”

“But I mean—” she said.

She set a hand on his sleeve. He didn’t pull away. Then she stepped closer and slipped her arms around him. She could feel, even through her coat, how thin and bony his rib cage was, and how he warmed his skimpy sweater. She laid her ear against his chest, and he slowly, hesitantly raised his hands to her shoulders. “I should have gone on kissing you,” she said. “I should have told my mother, ‘Go away. Leave us alone.’ I should have stood up for you and not been such a coward.”

“No, no,” she heard him say. “I don’t think about it. I don’t think about it.”

She drew back and looked up at him.

“I don’t talk about it,” he said.

“Josiah,” she said, “won’t you at least tell me it’s all right now?”

“Sure,” he said. “It’s all right, Jenny.”

After that, there was really nothing else to discuss. She stood on tiptoe to kiss him goodbye, and she thought he looked directly at her when he smiled and let her go.

“To everybody’s good health,” Cody said, raising his glass. “To Ezra’s food. To Scarlatti’s Restaurant.”

“To a happy family dinner,” Ezra said.

“Oh, well, that too, if you like.”

They all drank, even Pearl — or maybe the little sip she took was only make-believe. She was wearing her netted hat and a beige tailored suit so new that it failed to sit back when she did. Jenny was in an ordinary skirt and blouse, but still she felt dressed up. She felt wonderful, in fact — perfectly untroubled. She kept beaming at the others, pleased to have them around her.

But really, were they all here? In Jenny’s new mood, her family seemed too small. These three young people and this shrunken mother, she thought, were not enough to sustain the occasion. They could have used several more members — a family clown, for instance; and a genuine black sheep, blacker than Cody; and maybe one of those managerial older sisters who holds a group together by force. As things were, it was Ezra who had to hold them together. He wasn’t doing a very good job. He was too absorbed in the food. Right now he was conferring with the waiter, gesturing toward the soup, which had arrived a touch too cool, he said — though to Jenny it seemed fine. And now Pearl was collecting her purse and sliding back her chair. “Powder room,” she mouthed to Jenny. Ezra would be all the more upset, once he noticed she’d gone. He liked the family in a group, a cluster, and he hated Pearl’s habit of constantly “freshening up” in a restaurant, just as he hated for Cody to smoke his slim cigars between courses. “I wish just once,” he was always saying, “we could get through a meal from start to finish,” and he would say it again as soon as he discovered Pearl was missing. But now he was telling the waiter, “If Andrew would keep the china hot—”

“He mostly does, I swear it, but the warming oven’s broke.”

“What’s your opinion?” Cody whispered, setting his face close to Jenny’s. “Has Ezra ever slept with Mrs. Scarlatti? Or has he not.”

Jenny’s mouth dropped open.

“Well?” he asked.

“Cody Tull!”

“Don’t tell me it hasn’t occurred to you. A lonely rich widow, or whatever she is; nice-looking boy with no prospects …”

“That’s disgusting,” Jenny told him.

“Not at all,” Cody said blandly, sitting back. He had a way of surveying people from under half-lowered lids which made him look tolerant and worldly. “There’s nothing wrong,” he said, “with taking advantage of your luck. And you have to admit Ezra’s lucky; born lucky. Have you ever noticed what happens when I bring around my girlfriends? They fall all over him. They have ever since we were kids. What do they see in him, anyway? How does he do it? Is it luck? You’re a woman; what’s his secret?”

“Honestly, Cody,” Jenny said, “I wish you’d grow out of this.”

Ezra finished his conversation with the waiter. “Where’s Mother?” he asked. “I turn my back one second and she disappears.”

“Powder room,” said Cody, lighting a cigar.

“Oh, why does she always do that? More soup is coming, fresh off the stove, piping hot this time.”

“Are you having it brought in by barefoot runners?” Cody asked.

Jenny said, “Don’t worry, Ezra. I’ll go call her.”

She made her way between the tables, toward a corridor with an EXIT sign over the archway. But just before the ladies’ room, in front of a swinging, leather-covered door, she caught sight of Josiah. He had his white uniform on and was carrying an aqua plastic dishpan full of chicory leaves. “Josiah,” she said.

He stopped short and his face lit up. “Hi, Jenny,” he said.

They stood smiling at each other, not speaking. She reached out to touch his wrist.

“Oh, no!” her mother cried.

Jenny snatched her hand back and spun around.

“Oh, Jenny. Oh, my God,” Pearl said. Her eyes were no longer gray; they were black, and she gripped her shiny black purse. “Well, I understand it all now,” she said.

“No, wait,” Jenny said. Her heart was beating so fast, it seemed she was vibrating where she stood.

“Visiting for no apparent reason,” said Pearl, “and slipping away this morning to meet him like a tramp, some cheap little tramp—”

“Mother, you’ve got it wrong!” Jenny told her. “It’s nothing, don’t you see?” She felt she had run out of breath. Gasping for air, she gestured toward Josiah, who merely stood there with his mouth agape. “He just … we just met in the hall and … it’s not that way at all, he’s nothing to me, don’t you see?”

But she had to say this to Pearl’s back, hurrying after her through the dining room. Pearl reached their table and said, “Ezra, I cannot stay here.”

Ezra stood up. “Mother?”

“I simply cannot,” she said. She gathered up her coat and walked away.

“But what happened?” Ezra asked, turning to Jenny. “What’s bothering her?”

Cody said, “That lukewarm soup, no doubt,” and he rocked back comfortably in his chair with a cigar between his teeth.

“I wish just once,” Ezra said, “we could eat a meal from start to finish.”

“I don’t feel well,” Jenny told him.

In fact, her lips were numb. It was a symptom she seemed to remember from before, from some long-forgotten moment, or maybe from a nightmare.

She left her coat behind, and she rushed through the dining room and out to the street. At first, she thought her mother had disappeared. Then she found her, half a block ahead — a militant figure walking briskly. Oh, what if she wouldn’t even turn around? Or worse, would turn and lash out, slap, snap, her clawed pearl ring, her knowing face … But Jenny ran to catch up with her, anyway. “Mother,” she said.

In the light from the liquor store window, she saw her mother reassemble her expression — take on a cool, unperturbed look.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” Jenny told her. “I’m not a tramp! I’m not cheap! Mother, listen to me.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Pearl said politely.

“Of course it matters!”

“You’re over twenty-one. If you don’t know good from bad by now, there’s nothing more I can do about it.”

“I felt sorry for him,” Jenny said.

They crossed a street and started up the next block.

“He told me his mother had died,” Jenny said.

They veered around a gang of teen-aged boys.

“She was all he had — his father’s dead too. She was the center of his life.”

“Well,” said Pearl, “I suppose it can’t have been easy for her.”

“I don’t know how he’s going to manage now she’s gone.”

“I believe I saw her in the grocery once,” said Pearl. “A brown-haired woman?”

“Plumpish, sort of.”

“Full in the face?”

“Like a wood thrush,” Jenny said.

“Oh, Jenny,” said her mother, and she gave a little laugh. “The things you come up with, sometimes!”

They passed the candy store, and then the pharmacy. Jenny and her mother fell into step. They passed the fortune-teller’s window. The same dusty lamp glowed on the table. Jenny, looking in, thought that Mrs. Parkins had not been much of a prophet. Why, she had even had to listen to the radio for tomorrow’s weather! And she should have guessed from the very first instant, from the briefest, most cursory glance, that Jenny was not capable of being destroyed by love.