Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

4 Heart Rumors

The first few times that Mrs. Scarlatti stayed in the hospital, Ezra had no trouble getting in to visit her. But the last time was harder. “Relative?” the nurse would ask.

“No, ah, I’m her business partner.”

“Sorry, relatives only.”

“But she doesn’t have any relatives. I’m all she’s got. See, she and I own this restaurant together.”

“And what’s that in the jar?”

“Her soup.”

“Soup,” said the nurse.

“I make this soup she likes.”

“Mrs. Scarlatti isn’t keeping things down.”

“I know that, but I wanted to give her something.”

This would earn him a slantwise glance, before he was led brusquely into Mrs. Scarlatti’s room.

In the past, she had chosen to stay in a ward. (She was an extremely social woman.) She’d sit up straight in her dramatic black robe, a batik scarf hiding her hair, and “Sweetie!” she’d say as he entered. For a moment the other women would grow all sly and alert, till they realized how young he was — way too young for Mrs. Scarlatti. But now she had a private room, and the most she could do when he arrived was open her eyes and then wearily close them. He wasn’t even sure that he was welcome any more.

He knew that after he left, someone would discard his soup. But this was his special gizzard soup that she had always loved. There were twenty cloves of garlic in it. Mrs. Scarlatti used to claim it settled her stomach, soothed her nerves — changed her whole perception of the day, she said. (However, it wasn’t on the restaurant’s menu because it was a bit “hearty”—her word — and Scarlatti’s Restaurant was very fine and formal. This hurt Ezra’s feelings, a little.) When she was well enough to be home, he had often brewed single portions in the restaurant kitchen and carried them upstairs to her apartment. Even in the hospital, those first few times, she could manage a small-sized bowl of it. But now she was beyond that. He only brought the soup out of helplessness; he would have preferred to kneel by her bed and rest his head on her sheets, to take her hands in his and tell her, “Mrs. Scarlatti, come back.” But she was such a no-nonsense woman; she would have looked shocked. All he could do was offer this soup.

He sat in a corner of the room in a green vinyl chair with steel arms. It was October and the steam heat had come on; the air felt sharp and dry. Mrs. Scarlatti’s bed was cranked upward slightly to help her breathe. From time to time, without opening her eyes, she said, “Oh, God.” Then Ezra would ask, “What? What is it?” and she would sigh. (Or maybe that was the radiator.) Ezra never brought anything to read, and he never made conversation with the nurses who squeaked in and out on their rubber soles. He only sat, looking down at his pale, oversized hands, which lay loosely on his knees.

Previously, he had put on weight. He’d been nowhere near fat, but he’d softened and spread in that mild way that fair-haired men often do. Now the weight fell off. Like Mrs. Scarlatti, he was having trouble keeping things down. His large, floppy clothes covered a large, floppy frame that seemed oddly two-dimensional. Wide in front and wide behind, he was flat as paper when viewed from the side. His hair fell forward in a sheaf, like wheat. He didn’t bother pushing it back.

He and Mrs. Scarlatti had been through a lot together, he would have said, if asked — but what, exactly? She had had a bad husband (a matter of luck, she made it seem, like a bad bottle of wine) and ditched him; she had lost her only son, Ezra’s age, during the Korean War. But both these events she had suffered alone, before her partnership with Ezra began. And Ezra himself: well, he had not actually been through anything yet. He was twenty-five years old and still without wife or children, still living at home with his mother. What he and Mrs. Scarlatti had survived, it appeared, was year after year of standing still. Her life that had slid off somewhere in the past, his that kept delaying its arrival — they’d combined, they held each other up in empty space. Ezra was grateful to Mrs. Scarlatti for rescuing him from an aimless, careerless existence and teaching him all she knew; but more than that, for the fact that she depended on him. If not for her, whom would he have? His brother and sister were out in the world; he loved his mother dearly but there was something overemotional about her that kept him eternally wary. By other people’s standards, even he and Mrs. Scarlatti would not have seemed particularly close. He always called her “Mrs. Scarlatti.” She called Ezra her boy, her angel, but was otherwise remarkably distant, and asked no questions at all about his life outside the restaurant.

He knew the restaurant would be fully his when she died. She had told him so, just before this last hospital stay. “I don’t want it,” he had said. She was silent. She must have understood that it was only his manner of speaking. Of course he didn’t want it, in the sense of coveting it (he never thought much about money), but what would he do otherwise? Anyway, she had no one else to leave it to. She lifted a hand and let it drop. They didn’t mention the subject again.

Once, Ezra persuaded his mother to come and visit too. He liked for the various people in his life to get along, although he knew that would be difficult in his mother’s case. She spoke of Mrs. Scarlatti distrustfully, even jealously. “What you see in such a person I can’t imagine. She’s downright … tough, is what she is, in spite of her high-fashion clothes. It looks like her face is not trying. Know what I mean? Like she can’t be bothered putting out the effort. Not a bit of lipstick, and those crayony black lines around her eyes … and she hardly ever smiles at people.”

But now that Mrs. Scarlatti was so sick, his mother kept her thoughts to herself. She dressed carefully for her visit and wore her netted hat, which made Ezra happy. He associated that hat with important family occasions. He was pleased that she’d chosen her Sunday black coat, even though it wasn’t as warm as her everyday maroon.

In the hospital, she told Mrs. Scarlatti, “Why, you look the picture of health! No one would ever guess.”

This was not true. But it was nice of her to say it.

“After I die,” Mrs. Scarlatti said in her grainy voice, “Ezra must move to my apartment.”

His mother said, “Now, let’s have none of that silly talk.”

“Which is silly?” Mrs. Scarlatti asked, but then she was overtaken by exhaustion, and she closed her eyes. Ezra’s mother misunderstood. She must have thought she’d asked what was silly, a rhetorical question, and she blithely smoothed her skirt around her and said, “Total foolishness, I never heard such rot.” Only Ezra grasped Mrs. Scarlatti’s meaning. Which was silly, she was asking — her dying, or Ezra’s moving? But he didn’t bother explaining that to his mother.

Another time, he got special permission from the nurses’ office to bring a few men from the restaurant — Todd Duckett, Josiah Payson, and Raymond the sauce maker. He could tell that Mrs. Scarlatti was glad to see them, although it was an awkward visit. The men stood around the outer edges of the room and cleared their throats repeatedly and would not take seats. “Well?” said Mrs. Scarlatti. “Are you still buying everything fresh?” From the inappropriateness of the question (none of them was remotely involved with the purchasing), Ezra realized how out of touch she had grown. But these people, too, were tactful. Todd Duckett gave a mumbled cough and then said, “Yes, ma’am, just how you would’ve liked it.”

“I’m tired now,” Mrs. Scarlatti said.

Down the hall lay an emaciated woman in a coma, and an old, old man with a tiny wife who was allowed to sleep on a cot in his room, and a dark-skinned foreigner whose masses of visiting relatives gave the place the look of a gypsy circus. Ezra knew that the comatose woman had cancer, the old man a rare type of blood disease, and the foreigner some cardiac problem — it wasn’t clear what. “Heart rumor,” he was told by a dusky, exotic child who was surely too young to be visiting hospitals. She was standing outside the foreigner’s door, delicately reeling in a yo-yo.

“Heart murmur, maybe?”

“No, rumor.”

Ezra was starting to feel lonely here and would have liked to make a friend. The nurses were always sending him away while they did something mysterious to Mrs. Scarlatti, and much of any visit he spent leaning dejectedly against the wall outside her room or gazing from the windows of the conservatory at the end of the corridor. But no one seemed approachable. This wing was different from the others — more hushed — and all the people he encountered wore a withdrawn, forbidding look. Only the foreign child spoke to him. “I think he’s going to die,” she said. But then she went back to her yo-yo. Ezra hung around a while longer, but it was obvious she didn’t find him very interesting.

Bibb lettuce, Boston lettuce, chicory, escarole, dripping on the counter in the center of the kitchen. While other restaurants’ vegetables were delivered by anonymous, dank, garbage-smelling trucks, Scarlatti’s had a man named Mr. Purdy, who shopped personally for them each morning before the sun came up. He brought everything to the kitchen in splintery bushel baskets, along about eight a.m., and Ezra made a point of being there so that he would know what foods he had to deal with that day. Sometimes there were no eggplants, sometimes twice as many as planned. In periods like this — dead November, now — nothing grew locally, and Mr. Purdy had to resort to vegetables raised elsewhere, limp carrots and waxy cucumbers shipped in from out of state. And the tomatoes! They were a crime. “Just look,” said Mr. Purdy, picking one up. “Vine-grown, the fellow tells me. Vine-grown, yes. I’d like to see them grown on anything else. ‘But ripened?’ I say. ‘However was they ripened?’ ‘Vine-ripened, too,’ fellow assures me. Well, maybe so. But nowadays, I don’t know, all them taste anyhow like they spent six weeks on a windowsill. Like they was made of windowsill, or celluloid, or pencil erasers. Well, I tell you, Ezra: I apologize. It breaks my heart to bring you such rubbage as this here; I’d sooner not show up at all.”

Mr. Purdy was a pinched and prunish man in overalls, a white shirt, and a shiny black suit coat. He had a narrow face that seemed eternally disapproving, even during the growing season. Only Ezra knew that inwardly, there was something nourishing and generous about him. Mr. Purdy rejoiced in food as much as Ezra did, and for the same reasons — less for eating himself than for serving to others. He had once invited Ezra to his home, a silver-colored trailer out on Ritchie Highway, and given him a meal consisting solely of new asparagus, which both he and Ezra agreed had the haunting taste of oysters. Mrs. Purdy, a smiling, round-faced woman in a wheelchair, had claimed they talked like lunatics, but she finished two large helpings while both men tenderly watched. It was a satisfaction to see how she polished her buttery plate.

“If this restaurant was just mine,” Ezra said now, “I wouldn’t serve tomatoes in the winter. People would ask for tomatoes and I’d say, ‘What can you be thinking of, this is not the season.’ I’d give them something better.”

“They’d stomp out directly,” Mr. Purdy said.

“No, they might surprise you. And I’d put up a blackboard, write on it every day just two or three good dishes. Of course! In France, they do that all the time. Or I’d offer no choice at all; examine people and say, ‘You look a little tired. I’ll bring you an oxtail stew.’ ”

“Mrs. Scarlatti would just die,” said Mr. Purdy.

There was a silence. He rubbed his bristly chin, and then corrected himself: “She’d rotate in her grave.”

They stood around a while.

“I don’t really want a restaurant anyhow,” Ezra said.

“Sure,” Mr. Purdy said. “I know that.”

Then he put his black felt hat on, and thought a moment, and left.

The foreign child slept in the conservatory, her head resting on the stainless steel arm of a chair like the one in Mrs. Scarlatti’s room. It made Ezra wince. He wanted to fold his coat and slide it beneath her cheek, but he worried that would wake her. He kept his distance, therefore, and stood at one of the windows gazing down on pedestrians far below. How small and determined their feet looked, emerging from their foreshortened figures! The perseverance of human beings suddenly amazed him.

A woman entered the room — one of the foreigners. She was lighter skinned than the others, but he knew she was foreign because of her slippers, which contrasted with her expensive wool dress. The whole family, he had noticed, changed into slippers as soon as they arrived each morning. They made themselves at home in every possible way — setting out bags of seeds and nuts and spicy-smelling foods, once even brewing a quart of yogurt on the conservatory radiator. The men smoked cigarettes in the hall, and the women murmured together while knitting brightly colored sweaters.

Now the woman approached the child, bent over her, and tucked her hair back. Then she lifted her in her arms and settled in the chair. The child didn’t wake. She only nestled closer and sighed. So after all, Ezra could have put his coat beneath her head. He had missed an opportunity. It was like missing a train — or something more important, something that would never come again. There was no explanation for the grief that suddenly filled him.

He decided to start serving his gizzard soup in the restaurant. He had the waiters announce it to patrons when they handed over the menu. “In addition to the soups you see here, we are pleased to offer tonight …” One of the waiters had failed to show up and Ezra hired a woman to replace him — strictly against Mrs. Scarlatti’s policy. (Waitresses, she said, belonged in truck stops.) The woman did much better than the men with Ezra’s soup. “Try our gizzard soup,” she would say. “It’s really hot and garlicky and it’s made with love.” Outside it was bitter cold, and the woman was so warm and helpful, more and more people followed her suggestion. Ezra thought that the next time a waiter left, he would hire a second woman, and maybe another after that, and so on.

He experimented the following week with a spiced crab casserole of his own invention, and then with a spinach bisque, and when the waiters complained about all they had to memorize he finally went ahead and bought a blackboard, SPECIALS, he wrote at the top. But in the hospital, when Mrs. Scarlatti asked how things were going, he didn’t mention any of this. Instead, he sat forward and clasped his hands tight and said, “Fine. Um … fine.” If she noticed anything strange in his voice, she didn’t comment on it.

Mrs. Scarlatti had always been a lean, dark, slouching woman, with a faintly scornful manner. It was true, as Ezra’s mother said, that she gave the impression of not caring what people thought of her. But that had been part of her charm — her sleepy eyes, hardly troubling to stay open, and her indifferent tone of voice. Now, she went too far. Her skin took on the pallid look of stone, and her face began to seem sphinxlike, all flat planes and straight lines. Even her hair was sphinxlike — a short, black wedge, a clump of hair, dulled and rough. Sometimes Ezra believed that she was not dying but petrifying. He had trouble remembering her low laugh, her casual arrogance. (“Sweetie,” she used to say, ordering him off to some task, trilling languid fingers. “Angel boy …”) He had never felt more than twelve years old around her, but now he was ancient, her parent or grandparent. He soothed and humored her. Not all she said was quite clear these days. “At least,” she whispered once, “I never made myself ridiculous, Ezra, did I?”

“Ridiculous?” he asked.

“With you.”

“With me? Of course not.”

He was puzzled, and must have shown it; she smiled and rocked her head on the pillow. “Oh, you always were a much-loved child,” she told him. It must have been a momentary wandering of the brain. (She hadn’t known him as a child.) “You take it all for granted,” she said. Maybe she was confusing him with Billy, her son. She turned her face away from him and closed her eyes. He felt suddenly anxious. He was reminded of that time his mother had nearly died, wounded by a misfired arrow — entirely Ezra’s fault; Ezra, the family stumbler. “I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he had cried, but the apology had never been accepted because his brother had been blamed instead, and his father, who had purchased the archery set. Ezra, his mother’s favorite, had got off scot-free. He’d been left unforgiven — not relieved, as you might expect, but forever burdened. “You’re mistaken,” he said now, and Mrs. Scarlatti’s eyelids fluttered into crepe but failed to open. “I wish you’d get me straight. See who I am, I’m Ezra,” he said, and then (for no logical reason) he bent close and said, “Mrs. Scarlatti. Remember when I left the army? Discharged for sleepwalking? Sent home? Mrs. Scarlatti, I wasn’t really all the way asleep. I mean, I knew what I was doing. I didn’t plan to sleepwalk, but part of me was conscious, and observed what was going on, and could have wakened the rest of me if I’d tried. I had this feeling like watching a dream, where you know you can break it off at any moment. But I didn’t; I wanted to go home. I just wanted to leave that army, Mrs. Scarlatti. So I didn’t stop myself.”

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

Just after Thanksgiving the woman who’d been in a coma died, and the tiny old man either died or went home, but the foreigner stayed on and his relatives continued to visit. Now that they knew Ezra by sight, they hailed him as he passed. “Come!” they would call, and he would step in, shy and pleased, and stand around for several minutes with his fists locked in his armpits. The sick man was yellow and sunken, hooked to a number of tubes, but he always tried to smile at Ezra’s entrance. Ezra had the impression that he knew no English. The others spoke English according to their ages — the child perfectly, the young adults with a strong, attractive accent, the old ones in ragged segments. Eventually, though, even the most fluent forgot themselves and drifted into their native language — a musical one, with rounded vowels that gave their lips a muscled, pouched, commiserative shape, as if they were perpetually tut-tutting. Ezra loved to listen. When you couldn’t understand what people said, he thought, how clearly the links and joints in their relationships stood out! A woman’s face lit and bloomed as she turned to a certain man; a barbed sound of pain leapt from the patient and his wife doubled over. The child, when upset, stroked her mother’s gold wristwatch band for solace.

Once a young girl in braids sang a song with almost no tune. It wandered from note to note as if by accident. Then a man with a heavy black mustache recited what must have been a poem. He spoke so grandly and unselfconsciously that passersby glanced in, and when he had finished he translated it for Ezra. “O dead one, why did you die in the springtime? You haven’t yet tasted the squash, or the cucumber salad.”

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

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

Now he grew feverish with new ideas, and woke in the night longing to share them with someone. Why not a restaurant full of refrigerators, where people came and chose the food they wanted? They could fix it themselves on a long, long stove lining one wall of the dining room. Or maybe he could install a giant fireplace, with a whole steer turning slowly on a spit. You’d slice what you liked onto your plate and sit around in armchairs eating and talking with the guests at large. Then again, maybe he would start serving only street food. Of course! He’d cook what people felt homesick for — tacos like those from vendor’s carts in California, which the Mexican was always pining after; and that wonderful vinegary North Carolina barbecue that Todd Duckett had to have brought by his mother several times a year in cardboard cups. He would call it the Homesick Restaurant. He’d take down the old black and gilt sign …

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

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

“Thank you,” said Ezra.

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

“The what?” said Ezra.

“The nightingales.”

“Nightingales? In New Jersey?”

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

The sick man moaned and tossed, nearly dislodging a tube that entered the back of his wrist. His wife, an ancient, papery lady, leaned toward him and stroked his hand. She murmured something, and then she turned to the younger woman. Ezra saw that she was crying. She didn’t attempt to hide it but wept openly, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Ah,” the younger woman said, and she left Ezra’s side and bent over the wife. She gathered her up in her arms as she’d gathered the child earlier. Ezra knew he should leave, but he didn’t. Instead he turned and gazed out the window, slightly tilting his head and looking nonchalant, as some men do when they have rung a doorbell and are standing on the porch, waiting to be noticed and invited in.

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

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

“It isn’t semester break yet, is it?”

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

“No, well,” he said.

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

But now when he lounged in the doorway, trying to find some way to sidle into a conversation, Jenny put her glasses back on and returned to her book. He felt dismissed. “Um,” he said. “How are things in Paulham?”

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

“Harley all right?”

There was a deep, studious silence.

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

“He’s okay,” Jenny said.

She turned a page.

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

“Well, what?”

“Did you talk to Jenny?”

“Ah …”

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

“I didn’t swear to, Mother.”

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

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

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

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

“She would if she wanted to fool us.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Hmm?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Leave?”

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

“Home?”

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

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

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

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

“Oh,” said the doctor. “Well.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, my God,” said Mrs. Scarlatti.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sign?”

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

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

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

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