Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

5 The Country Cook

Cody Tull always had a girlfriend, one girl after another, and all the girls were wild about him till they met his brother, Ezra. Something about Ezra just hooked their attention, it seemed. In his presence they took on a bright, sharp, arrested look, as if listening to a sound that others hadn’t caught yet. Ezra didn’t even notice this. Cody did, of course. He would give an exaggerated sigh, pretending to be amused. Then the girl would collect herself. It was already too late, though; Cody never allowed second chances. He had a talent for mentally withdrawing. An Indian-faced man with smooth black hair, with level, balanced features, he could manage, when he tried, to seem perfectly blank, like a plaster clothing model. Meanwhile, his ragged, dirty, unloved younger self, with failing grades, with a U in deportment, clenched his fists and howled, “Why? Why always Ezra? Why that sissy pale goody-goody Ezra?”

But Ezra just gazed into space from behind his clear gray eyes, from under his shock of soft, fair hair, and went on thinking his private thoughts. You could say this for Ezra: he seemed honestly unaware of the effect he had on women. No one could accuse him of stealing them deliberately. But that made it all the worse, in a way.

Cody half believed that Ezra had some lack — a lack that worked in his favor, that made him immune, that set him apart from ordinary men. There was something almost monkish about him. Women never really managed to penetrate his meditations, although he was unfailingly courteous to them, and considerate. He was likely to contemplate them in silence for an inappropriate length of time, and then ask something completely out of the blue. For instance: “How did you get those little gold circles through your ears?” It was ridiculous — a man reaches the age of twenty-seven without having heard of pierced earrings. However, it must not have seemed ridiculous to the woman he was addressing. She raised a finger to an earlobe in a startled, mesmerized way. She was spellbound. Was it Ezra’s unexpectedness? The narrowness of his focus? (He’d passed up her low-cut dress, powdered cleavage, long silky legs.) Or his innocence, perhaps. He was a tourist on a female planet, was what he was saying. But he didn’t realize he was saying it, and failed to understand the look she gave him. Or didn’t care, if he did understand.

Only one of Cody’s girlfriends had not been attracted to his brother. This was a social worker named Carol, or maybe Karen. Upon meeting Ezra, she had fixed him with a cool stare. Later, she had remarked to Cody that she disliked motherly men. “Always feeding, hovering,” she said (for she’d met him at his restaurant), “but acting so clumsy and shy, in the end it’s you that takes care of them. Ever notice that?” However, she hardly counted; Cody had so soon afterward lost interest in her.

You might wonder why he went on making these introductions, considering his unfortunate experiences — the earliest dating from the year he turned fourteen, the latest as recent as a month ago. After all, he lived in New York City and his family lived in Baltimore; he didn’t really have to bring these women home on weekends. In fact, he often swore that he would stop it. He would meet somebody, marry her, and not mention her even to his mother. But that would mean a lifetime of suspense. He’d keep watching his wife uncomfortably, suspiciously. He’d keep waiting for the inevitable — like Sleeping Beauty’s parents, waiting for the needle that was bound to prick her finger in spite of their precautions.

He was thirty years old by now, successful in his business, certainly ready to marry. He considered his New York apartment temporary, a matter of minor convenience; he had recently purchased a farmhouse in Baltimore County with forty acres of land. Weekends, he traded his slim gray suit for corduroys and he roamed his property, making plans. There was a sunny backyard where his wife could have her kitchen garden. There were bedrooms waiting to be stocked with children. He imagined them tumbling out to meet him every Friday afternoon when he came home. He felt rich and lordly. Poor Ezra: all he had was that disorganized restaurant, in the cramped, stunted center of the city.

Once, Cody invited Ezra to hunt rabbits with him in the woods behind the farm. It wasn’t a success. First Ezra fell into a yellowjackets’ nest. Then he got his rifle wet in the stream. And when they paused on a hilltop for lunch, he whipped out his battered recorder and commenced to tootling “Greensleeves,” scaring off all living creatures within a five-mile radius — which may have been his intention. Cody wasn’t even talking to him, at the end; Ezra had to chatter on by himself. Cody stalked well ahead of him in total silence, trying to remember why this outing had seemed such a good idea. Ezra sang “Mister Rabbit.” “Every little soul,” he sang, blissfully off-key, “must shine, shine …”

No wonder Cody was a cuticle chewer, a floor pacer, a hair rummager. No wonder, when he slept at night, he ground his teeth so hard that his jaws ached every morning.

Early in the spring of 1960, his sister, Jenny, wrote him a letter. Her divorce was coming through in June, she said — two more months, and then she’d be free to marry Sam Wiley. Cody didn’t think much of Wiley, and he flicked this news aside like a gnat and read on. Though it looks, she said, as if Ezra might beat me down the aisle. Her name is Ruth but I don’t know any more than that. Then she said she was seriously considering dropping out of medical school. The complications of her personal life, she said, were using up so much energy that she had none left over for anything else. Also, she had gained three pounds in the last six weeks and was perfectly obese, a whale, living now on lettuce leaves and lemon water. Cody was accustomed to Jenny’s crazy diets (she was painfully thin), so he skimmed that part. He finished the letter and folded it.

Ruth?

He opened it again.

… as if Ezra might beat me down the aisle, he read. He tried to think of some other kind of aisle — airplane, supermarket, movie house — but in the end, he had to believe it: Ezra was getting married. Well, at least now Cody could keep his own girls. (This gave him, for some reason, a little twinge of uneasiness.) But Ezra! Married? That walking accident? Imagine him in a formal wedding — forgetting license, ring, and responses, losing track of the service while smiling out the window at a hummingbird. Imagine him in bed with a woman. (Cody snorted.) He pictured the woman as dark and Biblical, because of her name: Ruth. Shadowed eyes and creamy skin. Torrents of loose black hair. Cody had a weakness for black-haired women; he didn’t like blondes at all. He pictured her bare shouldered, in a red satin nightgown, and he crumpled Jenny’s letter roughly and dropped it in the wastebasket.

The next day at work, Ruth’s image hung over him. He was doing a time-and-motion study of a power-drill factory in New Jersey, a dinosaur of a place. It would take him weeks to sort it out. Joining object K to object L: right-hand transport unloaded, search, grasp, transport loaded … He passed down the assembly line with his clipboard, attracting hostile glances. Ruth’s black hair billowed in the rafters. Unavoidable delays: 3. Avoidable delays: 9. No doubt her eyes were plum shaped, slightly tilted. No doubt her hands were heavily ringed, with long, oval fingernails painted scarlet.

When he returned to his apartment that evening, there was a letter from Ezra. It was an invitation to his restaurant this coming Saturday night. You are cordially invited was centered on the page like something engraved — Ezra’s idea of a joke. (Or maybe not; maybe he meant it in earnest.) Oh, Lord, not another one of Ezra’s dinners. There would be toasts and a fumbling, sentimental speech leading up to some weighty announcement — in this case, his engagement. Cody thought of declining, but what good would that do? Ezra would be desolate if a single person was missing. He’d cancel the whole affair and reschedule it for later, and keep on rescheduling till Cody accepted. Cody might as well go and be done with it.

Besides, he wouldn’t at all mind meeting this Ruth.

Ezra was listening to a customer — or a one-time customer, from the sound of it. “Used to be,” the man was saying, “this place had class. You follow me?”

Ezra nodded, watching him with such a sympathetic, kindly expression that Cody wondered if his mind weren’t somewhere else altogether. “Used to be there was fine French cuisine, flamed at the tables and all,” said the man. “And chandeliers. And a hat-check girl. And waiters in black tie. What happened to your waiters?”

“They put people off,” Ezra said. “They seemed to think the customers were taking an exam of some kind, not just ordering a meal. They were uppish.”

“I liked your waiters.”

“Nowadays our staff is homier,” Ezra said, and he gestured toward a passing waitress — a tall, stooped, colorless girl, open mouthed with concentration, fiercely intent upon the coffee mug that she carried in both hands. She inched across the floor, breathing adenoidally. She proceeded directly between Ezra and the customer. Ezra stepped back to give her room.

The customer said, “ ‘Nettie,’ I said, ‘you’ve just got to see Scarlatti’s. Don’t knock Baltimore,’ I tell her, ‘till you see Scarlatti’s.’ Then we come upon it and even the sign’s gone. Homesick Restaurant, you call it now. What kind of a name is that? And the decor! Why, it looks like … why, a gigantic roadside diner!”

He was right. Cody agreed with him. Dining room walls lined with home preserves, kitchen laid open to the public, unkempt cooks milling around compiling their favorite dishes (health food, street food, foreign food, whatever popped into their heads) … Ever since Ezra had inherited this place — from a woman, wouldn’t you know — he’d been systematically wrecking it. He was fully capable of serving a single entrée all one evening, bringing it to your table himself as soon as you were seated. Other nights he’d offer more choice, four or five selections chalked up on the blackboard. But still you might not get what you asked for. “The Smithfield ham,” you’d say, and up would come the okra stew. “With that cough of yours, I know this will suit you better,” Ezra would explain. But even if he’d judged correctly, was that any way to run a restaurant? You order ham, ham is what you get. Otherwise, you might as well eat at home. “You’ll go bankrupt in a year,” Cody had promised, and Ezra almost did go bankrupt; most of the regular patrons disappeared. Some hung on, though; and others discovered it. There were several older people who ate here every night, sitting alone at their regular tables in the barnlike, plank-floored dining room. They could afford it because the prices weren’t written but recited instead by the staff, evidently according to whim, altering with the customer. (Wasn’t that illegal?) Ezra worried about what these older people did on Sundays, when he closed. Cody, on the other hand, worried about Ezra’s account books, but didn’t offer to go over them. He would find a disaster, he was sure — errors and bad debts, if not outright, naive crookery. Better not to know; better not to get involved.

“It’s true there’ve been some changes,” Ezra was telling his ex-customer, “but if you’ll just try our food, you’ll see that we’re still a fine restaurant. Tonight it’s all one dish — pot roast.”

“Pot roast!”

“A really special kind — consoling.”

“Pot roast I can get at home,” said the man. He clamped a felt hat on his head and walked out.

“Oh, well,” Ezra told Cody. “You can’t please everybody, I guess.”

They made their way to the far corner, where a RESERVED sign sat upon the table that Ezra always chose for family dinners. Jenny and their mother weren’t there yet. Jenny, who’d arrived on the afternoon train, had asked her mother’s help in shopping for a dress to be married in. Now Ezra worried they’d be late. “Everything’s planned for six-thirty,” he said. “What’s keeping them?”

“Well, no problem if it’s only pot roast.”

“It’s not only pot roast,” Ezra said. He sat in a chair. His suit had a way of waffling around him, as if purchased for a much larger man. “This is something more. I mean, pot roast is really not the right name; it’s more like … what you long for when you’re sad and everyone’s been wearing you down. See, there’s this cook, this real country cook, and pot roast is the least of what she does. There’s also pan-fried potatoes, black-eyed peas, beaten biscuits genuinely beat on a stump with the back of an ax—”

“Here they come,” Cody said.

Jenny and her mother were just walking across the dining room. They carried no parcels, but something made it clear they’d been shopping — perhaps the frazzled, cross look they shared. Jenny’s lipstick was chewed off. Pearl’s hat was knocked crooked and her hair was frizzier than ever. “What took you so long?” Ezra asked, jumping up. “We were starting to worry.”

“Oh, this Jenny and her notions,” said Pearl. “Her size eight figure and no bright colors, no pastels, no gathers or puckers or trim, nothing to make her look fat, so-called … Why are there five places set?”

The question took them all off guard. It was true, Cody saw. There were five plates and five crystal wineglasses. “How come?” Pearl asked Ezra.

“Oh … I’ll get to that in a minute. Have a seat, Mother, over there.”

But she kept standing. “Then at last we find just the right thing,” she said. “A nice soft gray with a crocheted collar, Jenny all the way. ‘It’s you,’ I tell her. And guess what she does. She has a tantrum in the middle of Hutzler’s department store.”

“Not a tantrum, Mother,” Jenny told her. “I merely said—”

“Said, ‘It isn’t a funeral, Mother; I’m not going into mourning.’ You’d think I’d chosen widow’s weeds. This was a nice pale gray, very ladylike, very suitable for a second marriage.”

“Anthracite,” Jenny told Cody.

“Pardon?”

“Anthracite was what the saleslady called it. In other words: coal. Our mother thinks it suitable to marry me off in a coal-black wedding dress.”

“Uh,” said Ezra, looking around at the other diners, “maybe we should be seated now.”

But Pearl just stood straighter. “And then,” she told her sons, “then, without the slightest bit of thought, doing it only to spite me, she goes rushing over to the nearest rack and pulls out something white as snow.”

“It was cream colored,” Jenny said.

“Cream, white — what’s the difference? Both are inappropriate, if you’re marrying for the second time and the divorce hasn’t yet been granted and the man has no steady employment. ‘I’ll take this one,’ she says, and it’s not even the proper size, miles too big, had to be left at the store for alterations.”

“I happened to like it,” Jenny said.

“You were lost in it.”

“It made me look thin.”

“Maybe you could wear a shawl or something, brown,” said her mother. “That might tone it down some.”

“I can’t wear a shawl in a wedding.”

“Why not? Or a little jacket, say a brown linen jacket.”

“I look fat in jackets.”

“Not in a short one, Chanel-type.”

“I hate Chanel.”

“Well,” said Pearl, “I can see that nothing will satisfy you.”

“Mother,” Jenny said, “I’m already satisfied. I’m satisfied with my cream-colored dress, just the way it is. I love it. Will you please just get off my back?”

“Did you hear that?” Pearl asked her sons. “Well, I don’t have to stand here and take it.” And she turned and marched back across the dining room, erect as a little wind-up doll.

Ezra said, “Huh?”

Jenny opened a plastic compact, looked into it, and then snapped it shut, as if merely making certain that she was still there.

“Please, Jenny, won’t you go after her?” Ezra asked.

“Not on your life.”

“You’re the one she fought with. I can’t persuade her.”

“Oh, Ezra, let’s for once just drop it,” Cody said. “I don’t think I’m up to all this.”

“What are you saying? Not have dinner at all?”

“I could only eat lettuce leaves anyhow,” Jenny told him.

“But this is important! It was going to be an occasion. Oh, just … wait. Wait here a minute, will you?”

Ezra turned and rushed off to the kitchen. From the swarm of assorted cooks at the counter, he plucked a small person in overalls. It was a girl, Cody guessed — a weasel-faced little redhead. She followed Ezra jauntily, almost stiff-legged, wiping her palms on her backside. “I’d like you to meet Ruth,” Ezra said.

Cody said, “Ruth?”

“We’re getting married in September.”

“Oh,” said Cody.

Then Jenny said, “Well, congratulations,” and kissed Ruth’s bony, freckled cheek, and Cody said, “Uh, yes,” and shook her hand. There were calluses like pebbles on her palm. “How do,” she told him. He thought of the phrase banty hen, although he had never seen a banty hen. Or maybe she was more of a rooster. Her brisk, carroty hair was cut so short that it seemed too scant for her skull. Her blue eyes were round as marbles, and her skin was so thin and tight (as if, like her hair, it had been skimped on) that he could see the white cartilage across the bridge of her nose. “So,” he said. “Ruth.”

“Are you surprised?” Ezra asked him.

“Yes, very surprised.”

“I wanted to do it right; I was going to announce it over drinks and then call her in to join the family dinner. But, honey,” Ezra said, turning to Ruth, “I guess Mother was overtired. It didn’t work out the way I’d planned.”

“Shit, that’s okay,” Ruth told him.

Cody said, “Surely. Certainly. We can always do it later.”

Then Jenny started asking about the wedding, and Cody excused himself and said he thought he’d go see how their mother was. Outside in the dark, walking up the street toward home, he had the strangest feeling of loss. It was as if someone had died, or had left him forever — the beautiful, black-haired Ruth of his dreams.

“I knew what that dinner was going to be, tonight,” Pearl told Cody. “I’m not so dumb. I knew. He’s got himself engaged; he’s going to marry the country cook. I knew that anyway but it all came home to me when I walked in the restaurant and saw those five plates and glasses. Well, I acted badly. Very badly. You don’t have to tell me, Cody. It was just that I saw those plates and something broke inside of me. I thought, ‘Well, all right, if that’s how it’s got to be, but not tonight, just not tonight, Lord, right on top of buying wedding dress number two for my only daughter.’ So then, why, I went and made a scene that caused the dinner to be canceled, exactly as if I’d planned it all ahead of time, which of course I hadn’t. You believe me, don’t you? I’m not blind. I know when I’m being unreasonable. Sometimes I stand outside my body and just watch it all, totally separate. ‘Now, stop,’ I say to myself, but it’s like I’m … elated; I’ve got to rush on, got to keep going. ‘Yes, yes, I’ll stop,’ I think, ‘only let me say this one more thing, just this one more thing …’

“Cody, don’t you believe I want you three to be happy? Of course I do. Naturally. Why, I wouldn’t hold Ezra back for the world, if he’s so set on marrying that girl — though I don’t know what he sees in her, she’s so scrappy and hoydenish; I think she’s from Garrett County or some such place and hardly wears shoes — you ought to see the soles of her feet sometime — but what I want to say is, I’ve never been one of those mothers who try to keep their sons for themselves. I honestly hope Ezra marries. I truly mean that. I want somebody taking care of him, especially him. You can manage on your own but Ezra is so, I don’t know, defenseless … Of course I love you all the same amount, every bit the same, but … well, Ezra is so good. You know? Anyway, now he has this Ruth person and it’s changed his whole outlook; watch him sometime when she walks into a room, or swaggers, or whatever you want to call it. He adores her. They get all playful together, like two puppies. Yes, often they remind me of puppies, snuggling down and giggling, or bounding about the kitchen or listening to that hillbilly music that Ruth seems to be so crazy about. But, Cody. Promise not to tell this to anyone. Promise? Cody, sometimes I stand there watching them and I see they believe they’re completely special, the first, the only people ever to feel the way they’re feeling. They believe they’ll live happily ever after, that all the other marriages going on around them — those ordinary, worn-down, flattened-in arrangements — why, those are nothing like what they’ll have. They’ll never settle for so little. And it makes me mad. I can’t help it, Cody. I know it’s selfish, but I can’t help it. I want to ask them, Who do you think you are, anyhow? Do you imagine you’re unique? Do you really suppose I was always this difficult old woman?’

“Cody, listen. I was special too, once, to someone. I could just reach out and lay a fingertip on his arm while he was talking and he would instantly fall silent and get all confused. I had hopes; I was courted; I had the most beautiful wedding. I had three lovely pregnancies, where every morning I woke up knowing something perfect would happen in nine months, eight months, seven … so it seemed I was full of light; it was light and plans that filled me. And then while you children were little, why, I was the center of your worlds! I was everything to you! It was Mother this and Mother that, and ‘Where’s Mother? Where’s she gone to?’ and the moment you came in from school, ‘Mother? Are you home?’ It’s not fair, Cody. It’s really not fair; now I’m old and I walk along unnoticed, just like anyone else. It strikes me as unjust, Cody. But don’t tell the others I said so.”

At work that next week, charting the steps by which power drills were fitted into their housings, Cody watched the old, dark Ruth fade from the rafters and hallways, until at last she was completely gone and he forgot why she had moved him so. Now a new Ruth appeared. Skinny and boyish, overalls flapping around her shinbones, she raced giggling down the assembly line with Ezra hot on her heels. Ezra’s hair was tousled. (He was not immune at all, it appeared, but had only been waiting in his stubbornly trustful way for the proper person to arrive.) He caught her in the supervisor’s office and they scuffled like … yes, like two puppies. A cowlick bounced on the crown of Ruth’s head. Her lips were chapped and cracked. Her nails were bitten into tiny pink cushions and there were scrapes and burns across her knuckles, scars from her country cooking.

Cody called his mother and said he’d be down for the weekend. And would Ruth be around, did she think? After all, he said, it was time he got to know his future sister-in-law.

He arrived on Saturday morning bringing flowers, copper-colored roses. He found Ruth and Ezra playing gin on the living room floor. Ruth’s reality, after his week of dreaming, struck him like a blow. She seemed clearer, plainer, harder edged than anybody he’d known. She wore jeans and a shirt of some ugly brown plaid. She was so absorbed in her game that she hardly glanced up when Cody walked in. “Ruth,” he said, and he held out the flowers. “These are for you.”

She looked at them, and then drew a card. “What are they?” she asked.

“Well, roses.”

“Roses? This early in the year?”

“Greenhouse roses. I especially ordered copper, to go with your hair.”

“You leave my hair out of this,” she said.

“Honey, he meant it as a compliment,” Ezra told her.

“Oh.”

“Certainly,” said Cody. “See, it’s my way of saying welcome. Welcome to our family, Ruth.”

“Oh. Well, thanks.”

“Cody, that was awfully nice of you,” Ezra said.

“Gin,” said Ruth.

Late that afternoon, when it was time to go to the restaurant, Cody walked over with Ruth and Ezra. He’d had a long, immobile day — standing outside other people’s lives, mostly — and he needed the exercise.

It had been raining, off and on, and there were puddles on the sidewalk. Ruth strode straight through every one of them, which was fine since her shoes were brown leather combat boots. Cody wondered if her style were deliberate. What would she do, for instance, if he gave her a pair of high-heeled evening sandals? The question began to fascinate him. He became obsessed; he developed an almost physical thirst for the sight of her blunt little feet in silver straps.

There was no explaining his craving for the gigantic watch — black faced and intricately calibrated, capable of withstanding a deep-sea dive — whose stainless steel expansion band hung loose on her wiry wrist.

Ezra had his pearwood recorder. He played it as he walked, serious and absorbed, with his lashes lowered on his cheeks. “Le Godiveau de Poisson,” he played. Passersby looked at him and smiled. Ruth hummed along with some notes, fell into her own thoughts at others. Then Ezra put his recorder in the pocket of his shabby lumber jacket, and he and Ruth began discussing the menu. It was good they were serving the rice dish, Ruth said; that always made the Arab family happy. She ran her fingers through her sprouty red hair. Cody, walking on the other side of her, felt her shift of weight when Ezra circled her with one arm and pulled her close.

In the restaurant, she was a whirlwind. Ezra cooked in a dream, tasting and reflecting; the others (losers, all of them, in Cody’s opinion) floated around the kitchen vaguely, but Ruth spun and pounced and jabbed at food as if doing battle. She was in charge of a chicken casserole and something that looked like potato cakes. Cody watched her from a corner well out of the way, but still people seemed to keep tripping over him.

“Where did you learn to cook?” he asked Ruth.

“No place,” she said.

“Is this chicken some regional thing?”

“Taste,” she snapped, and she speared a piece and held it out to him.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I feel too full.”

In fact, he felt full of her. He’d taken her in all day, consumed her. Every spiky movement — slamming of pot lids, toss of head — nourished him. It came to him like a gift, while he was studying her narrow back, that she actually wore an undershirt, one of those knitted singlets he remembered from his childhood. He could make out the seams of it beneath the brown plaid. He filed the information with care, to be treasured once he was alone.

The restaurant opened and customers began to trickle in. The large, beaming hostess seated them all in one area, as if tucking them under her wing.

“Find a table,” Ezra told Cody. “I’ll bring you some of Ruth’s cooking.”

“I’m honestly not hungry,” Cody said.

“He’s full,” said Ruth, spitting it out.

“Well, what’ll you do, then? Isn’t this boring for you?”

“No, no, I’m interested,” Cody said.

He could look across the counter and into the dining room, where people sat chewing and swallowing and drinking, patting their mouths with napkins, breaking off chunks of bread. He wondered how Ezra could stand to spend his life at this.

When the first real flurry was over, Ruth and Ezra settled at the scrubbed wooden table in the center of the kitchen, and Cody joined them. Ezra ate some of Ruth’s chicken casserole. Ruth lit a small brown cigarette and tipped back in her chair to watch him. The cigarette smelled as if it were burning only by accident — like something spilled on the floor of an oven, or stuck to the underside of a saucepan. Cody, seated across from her, drank it in. “Eat, Cody, eat,” Ezra urged him. Cody just shook his head, not wanting to lose his chestful of Ruth’s smoke.

Meanwhile, the other cooks came and went, some of them sitting also to wolf various odd assortments of food while their kettles simmered untended. Ezra’s boyhood friend Josiah appeared, metamorphosed into an efficient grown man in starchy white, and he and Ruth had a talk about peeling the apples for her pie. Cody could not have cared less about her pie, but he was riveted by her offhand, slangy style of speech. She held her cigarette between thumb and index finger, with her elbow propped against her rib cage. She hunkered forward to consider some decision, and beneath her knotted brows her eyes were so pale a blue that he was startled.

They left the restaurant before it closed. Josiah would lock up, Ezra said. They took a roundabout route home, down a quiet, one-way street, to drop Ruth off at the house where she rented a room. When Ezra accompanied her up the front steps, Cody waited on the curb. He watched Ezra kiss her good night — a bumbling, inadequate kiss, Cody judged it; and he felt some satisfaction. Then Ezra rejoined him and galumphed along beside him, big footed and blithe. “Isn’t she something?” he asked Cody. “Don’t you just love her?”

“Mm.”

“But there’s so much I need to find out from you! I want to take good care of her, but I don’t know how. What about life insurance? Things like that! So much is expected of husbands, Cody. Will you help me figure it out?”

“I’ll be glad to,” Cody said. He meant it, too. Anything: any little crack that would provide him with an entrance.

Eventually, Ezra subsided, although he continued to give the impression of inwardly bubbling and chortling. From time to time, he hummed a few bars of something underneath his breath. And then when they were almost home — passing houses totally dark, where everyone had long since gone to sleep — what should he do but pull out that damned recorder of his and start piping away. It was embarrassing. It was infuriating: “Le Godiveau de Poisson,” once again. Depend on Ezra, Cody thought, to have as his theme song a recipe for a seafood dish. He walked along in silence, hoping someone would call the police. Or at least, that they’d open a window. “You there! Quiet!” But no one did. It was so typical: Ezra the golden boy, everybody’s favorite, tootling down the streets scot-free.

On Sunday morning, Cody presented himself at Ruth’s door — or rather, at the door of the faded, doughy lady who owned the house Ruth stayed in. This lady toyed so fearfully with the locket at her throat that Cody felt compelled to take a step backward, proving he was not a knock-and-rob man. He gave her his most gentlemanly smile. “Good morning,” he said. “Is Ruth home?”

“Ruth?”

He realized he didn’t know Ruth’s last name. “I’m Ezra Tull’s brother,” he said.

“Oh, Ezra,” she said, and she stood back to let him enter.

He followed her deep into the interior, past a tumult of overstuffed furniture and dusty wax fruit and heaps of magazines. In the kitchen, Ruth slouched at the table spooning up cornflakes and reading a newspaper propped against a cereal box. A pale, pudgy man stood gazing into an open refrigerator. Cody had an impression of inertia and frittered lives. He felt charged with energy. It ought to be so easy to win her away from all this!

“Good morning,” he said. Ruth looked up. The pudgy man retreated behind the refrigerator door.

“I hope you’re not too far into that cereal,” Cody said. “I came to invite you to breakfast.”

“What for?” Ruth asked, frowning.

“Well … not for any purpose. I’m just out walking and I thought you might want to walk with me, stop off for doughnuts and coffee someplace.”

“Now?”

“Of course.”

“Isn’t it raining?”

“Only a little bit.”

“No, thanks,” she said.

Her eyes dropped back to her newspaper. The landlady slid her locket along its chain with a miniature zipping sound.

“What’s going on in the world?” Cody asked.

“What world?” said Ruth.

“The news. What does the newspaper say?”

Ruth raised her eyes, and Cody saw the page she had turned to. “Oh,” he said. “The comics.”

“No, my horoscope.”

“Your horoscope.” He looked to the landlady for help. The landlady gazed off toward a cabinet full of jelly glasses. “Well, what … um, symbol are you?” Cody asked Ruth.

“Hmm?”

“What astrological symbol?”

“Sign,” she corrected him. She sighed and stood up, finally forced to recognize his presence. Snatching her paper from the table, she stalked off toward the parlor. Cody made way for her and then trailed after. Her jeans, he guessed, had been bought at a little boys’ clothing store. She had no hips whatsoever. Her sweater was transparent at the elbows.

“I’m Taurus,” she said over her shoulder, “but all that’s rubbish, anyhow. Total garbage.”

“Oh, I agree,” Cody said, relieved.

She stopped in the center of the parlor and turned to him. “Look at here,” she said, and she jabbed her finger at a line of newsprint. “Powerful ally will come to your rescue. Accent today on high finance.” She lowered the paper. “I mean, who do they reckon they’re dealing with? What kind of business am I supposed to be involved in?”

“Ridiculous,” said Cody. He was hypnotized by her eyebrows. They were the color of orange sherbet, and whenever she spoke with any heat the skin around them grew pink, darker than the eyebrows themselves.

“Ignore innuendos from long-time foe,” she read, running a finger down the column. “Or listen to this other one: Clandestine meeting could solve mystery. Almighty God!” she said, and she tossed the paper into an armchair. “You got to lead quite a life, to get anything out of your horoscope.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Cody said. “Maybe it’s truer than you realize.”

“Come again?”

“Maybe it’s saying you ought to lead such a life. Ought to be more adventurous, not just slave away in some restaurant, mope around a gloomy old boardinghouse …”

“It’s not so gloomy,” Ruth said, lifting her chin.

“Well, but—”

“And anyhow, I won’t always be here. Me and Ezra, after we marry, we’re moving in above the Homesick. Then once we get us some money we plan on a house.”

“But still,” said Cody, “you won’t have anywhere near what those horoscopes are calling for. Why, there’s all the outside world! New York, for instance. Ever been to New York?”

She shook her head, watching him narrowly.

“You ought to come; it’s springtime there.”

“It’s springtime here,” she said.

“But a different kind.”

“I don’t see what you’re getting at,” she told him.

“Well, all I want to say is, Ruth: why settle down so soon, when there’s so much you haven’t seen yet?”

“Soon?” she said. “I’m pretty near twenty years old. Been rattling around on my own since my sixteenth birthday. Only thing I want is to settle down, sooner the better.”

“Oh,” said Cody.

“Well, have a good walk.”

“Oh, yes, walk …”

“Don’t drown,” she told him, callously.

At the door, he turned. He said, “Ruth?”

“What.”

“I don’t know your last name.”

“Spivey,” she said.

He thought it was the loveliest sound he had ever heard in his life.

The following weekend, he drove her out to see his farm. “I have seen all the farms I care to,” she said, but Ezra said, “Oh, you ought to go, Ruth. It’s pretty this time of year.” Ezra himself had to stay behind; he was supervising the installation of a new meat locker for the restaurant. Cody had known that before he invited her.

This time he brought her jonquils. She said, “I don’t know what I want with these; there’s a whole mess in back by the walkway.”

Cody smiled at her.

He settled her in his Cadillac, which smelled of new leather. She looked unimpressed. Perversely, she was wearing a skirt, on the one occasion when jeans would have been more suitable. Her legs were very white, almost chalky. He had not seen short socks like hers since his schooldays, and her tattered sneakers were as small and stubby as a child’s.

On the drive out, he talked about his plans for the farm. “It’s where I’d like to live,” he said. “Where I want to raise my family. It’s a perfect place for children.”

“What makes you think so?” she asked. “When I was a kid, all I cared about was getting to the city.”

“Yes, but fresh air and home-grown vegetables, and the animals … Right now, the man down the road is tending my livestock, but once I move in full-time I’m going to do it all myself.”

“That I’d like to see,” said Ruth. “You ever slopped a hog? Shoveled out a stable?”

“I can learn,” he told her.

She shrugged and said no more.

When they reached the farm he showed her around the grounds, where she stared a cow down and gave a clump of hens the evil eye. Then he led her into the house. He’d bought it lock, stock, and barrel — complete with bald plush sofa and kerosene stove in the parlor, rickety kitchen table with its drawerful of rusted flatware, 1958 calendar on the wall advertising Mallardy’s oystershell mixture for layers, extra rich in calcium. The man who’d lived here — a widower — had died upstairs in the four-poster bed. Cody had replaced the bedclothes with new ones, sheets and a quilt and down pillows, but that was his only change. “I do plan to fix things up,” he told Ruth, “but I’m waiting till I marry. I know my wife might like to have a say in it.”

Ruth removed a window lock easily from its crumbling wooden sash. She turned it over and peered at the underside.

“I want a wife very much,” said Cody.

She put back the lock. “I hate to be the one to tell you,” she said, “but smell that smell? Kind of sweetish smell? You got dry rot here.”

“Ruth,” he said, “do you dislike me for any reason?”

“Huh?”

“Your attitude. The way you put me off. You don’t think much of me, do you?” he said.

She gave him an edgy, skewed look, evasive, and moved over to the stairway. “Oh,” she said, “I like you a fair amount.”

“You do?”

“But I know your type,” she said.

“What type?”

“There were plenty like you in my school,” she said. “Oh, sure! Some in every class, on every team — tall and real good-looking, stylish, athletic, witty. Smooth-mannered boys that everything always came easy to, that always knew the proper way of doing things, and never dated any but the cheerleader girls, or the homecoming queen, or her maids of honor at the lowest. Passing me in the halls not even knowing who I was, nor guessing I existed. Or making fun of me sometimes, I’m almost certain — laughing at how poor I dressed and mocking my freckly face and my old red hair—”

“Laughing! When have I ever done such a thing?”

“I’m not naming you in particular,” she said, “but you sure do put me in mind of a type.”

“Ruth. I wouldn’t mock you. I think you’re perfect,” he said. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

“See there?” she asked, and she raised her chin, spun about, and marched down the stairs. She wouldn’t answer anything else he said to her, all during the long drive home.

It was a campaign, was what it was — a long and arduous battle campaign, extending through April and all of May. There were moments when he despaired. He’d had too late a start, was out of the running; he’d wasted his time with those unoriginal, obvious brunettes whom he’d thought he was so clever to snare while Ezra, not even trying, had somehow divined the real jewel. Lucky Ezra! His whole life rested on luck, and Cody would probably never manage to figure out how he did it.

Often, after leaving Ruth, Cody would be muttering to himself as he strode away. He would slam a fist in his palm or kick his own car. But at the same time, he had an underlying sense of exhilaration. Yes, he would have to say that he’d never felt more alive, never more eager for each new day. Now he understood why he’d lost interest in Carol or Karen, what’s-her-name, the social worker who hadn’t found Ezra appealing. She’d made it too easy. What he liked was the competition, the hope of emerging triumphant from a neck-and-neck struggle with Ezra, his oldest enemy. He even liked biding his time, holding himself in check, hiding his feelings from Ruth till the most advantageous moment. (Was patience Ezra’s secret?) For, of course, this wasn’t an open competition. One of the contestants didn’t even know he was a contestant. “Gosh, Cody,” Ezra said, “it’s been nice to have you around so much lately.” And to Ruth, “Go, go; you’ll enjoy it,” when Cody invited her anywhere.

Once, baiting Ezra, Cody stole one of Ruth’s brown cigarettes and smoked it in the farmhouse. (The scent of burning tar filled his bedroom. If he’d had a telephone, he would have forgotten all his strategies and called her that instant to confess he loved her.) He stubbed out the butt in a plastic ashtray beside his bed. Then later he invited Ezra to look at his new calves, took him upstairs to discuss a leak in the roof, and led him to the nightstand where the ashtray sat. But Ezra just said, “Oh, was Ruth here?” and launched into praise for an herb garden she was planting on top of the restaurant. Cody couldn’t believe that anyone would be so blind, so credulous. Also, he would have died for the privilege of having Ruth plant herbs for him. He thought of the yard out back, where he’d always envisioned his wife’s kitchen garden. Rosemary! Basil! Lemon balm!

“Why didn’t she come to me?” he asked Ezra. “She could always grow her herbs on my farm.”

“Oh, well, the closer to home the fresher,” said Ezra. “But you’re kind to offer, Cody.”

Oiling his rifles that night, Cody seriously considered shooting Ezra through the heart.

When he complimented Ruth, she bristled. When he brought her the gifts he’d so craftily chosen (gold chains and crystal flasks of perfume, music boxes, silk flowers, all intended to contrast with the ugly, mottled marble rolling pin that Ezra presented, clumsily wrapped, on her twentieth birthday), she generally lost them right away or left them wherever she happened to be. And when he invited her places, she only came along for the outing. He would take her arm and she’d say, “Jeepers, I’m not some old lady.” She would scramble over rocks and through forests in her combat boots, and Cody would follow, bemused and dazzled, literally sick with love. He had lost eight pounds, could not eat — a myth, he’d always thought that was — and hardly slept at night. When he did sleep, he willed himself to dream of Ruth but never did; she was impishly, defiantly absent, and daytimes when they next met he thought he saw something taunting in the look she gave him.

He often found it difficult to keep their conversations going. It struck him sometimes — in the middle of the week, when he was far from Baltimore — that this whole idea was deranged. They would never be anything but strangers. What single interest, even, did they have in common? But every weekend he was staggered, all over again, by her strutting walk, her belligerent chin and endearing scowl. He was moved by her musty, little-boyish smell; he imagined how her small body could nestle into his. Oh, it was Ruth herself they had in common. He would reach out to touch the spurs of her knuckles. She would ruffle and draw back. “What are you doing?” she would ask. He didn’t answer.

“I know what you’re up to,” his mother told him.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I see through you like a sheet of glass.”

“Well? What am I up to, then?” he asked. He really did hope to hear; he had reached the stage where he’d angle and connive just to get someone to utter Ruth’s name.

“You don’t fool me for an instant,” said his mother. “Why are you so contrary? You’ve got no earthly use for that girl. She’s not your type in the slightest; she belongs to your brother, Ezra, and she’s the only thing in this world he’s ever wanted. If you were to win her away, tell me what you’d do with her! You’d drop her flat. You’d say, ‘Oh, my goodness, what am I doing with this little person?’ ”

“You don’t understand,” said Cody.

“This may come as a shock,” his mother told him, “but I understand you perfectly. With the rest of the world I might not be so smart, but with my three children, why, not the least little thing escapes me. I know everything you’re after. I see everything in your heart, Cody Tull.”

“Just like God,” Cody said.

“Just like God,” she agreed.

Ezra arranged a celebration dinner for the evening before Jenny’s wedding — a Friday. But Thursday night, Jenny phoned Cody at his apartment. It was a local call; she said she wasn’t ten blocks away, staying at a hotel with Sam Wiley. “We got married yesterday morning,” she said, “and now we’re on our honeymoon. So there won’t be any dinner after all.”

“Well, how did all this come about?” Cody asked.

“Mother and Sam had a little disagreement.”

“I see.”

“Mother said … and Sam told her … and I said, ‘Oh, Sam, why not let’s just …’ Only I do feel bad about Ezra. I know how much trouble he’s gone to.”

“By now, he ought to be used to this,” Cody said.

“He was going to serve a suckling pig.”

Hadn’t Ezra noticed (Cody wondered) that the family as a whole had never yet finished one of his dinners? That they’d fight and stamp off halfway through, or sometimes not even manage to get seated in the first place? Well, of course he must have noticed, but was it clear to him as a pattern, a theme? No, perhaps he viewed each dinner as a unit in itself, unconnected to the others. Maybe he never linked them in his mind.

Assuming he was a total idiot.

It was true that once — to celebrate Cody’s new business — they had made it all the way to dessert; so if they hadn’t ordered dessert you could say they’d completed the meal. But the fact was, they did order dessert, which was left to sag on the plates when their mother accused Cody of deliberately setting up shop as far from home as possible. There was a stiff-backed little quarrel. Conversation fell apart. Cody walked out. So technically, even that meal could not be considered finished. Why did Ezra go on trying?

Why did the rest of them go on showing up, was more to the point.

In fact, they probably saw more of each other than happy families did. It was almost as if what they couldn’t get right, they had to keep returning to. (So if they ever did finish a dinner, would they rise and say goodbye forever after?)

Once Jenny had hung up, Cody sat on the couch and leafed through the morning’s mail. Something made him feel unsettled. He wondered how Jenny could have married Sam Wiley — a scrawny little artist type, shifty eyed and cocky. He wondered if Ezra would cancel his dinner altogether or merely postpone it till after the honeymoon. He pictured Ruth in the restaurant kitchen, her wrinkled little fingers patting flour on drumsticks. He scanned an ad for life insurance and wondered why no one depended on him — not even enough to require his insurance money if he should happen to die.

He ripped open an envelope marked AMAZING OFFER! and found three stationery samples and a glossy order blank. One sample was blue, with LMR embossed at the top. Another had a lacy PAULA, the P entwined with a morning-glory vine, and the third was one of those letters that form their own envelopes when folded. The flap was printed with butterflies and Mrs. Harold Alexander III, 219 Saint Beulah Boulevard, Dallas, Texas. He studied that for a moment. Then he took a pen from his shirt pocket, and started writing in an unaccustomed, backhand slant:

Cody felt he had just found the proper tone toward the end; he was sorry to run out of space. He signed the letter Luv, Sue (Mrs. Harold Alexander III), and sealed, stamped, and addressed it. Then he placed it in a business envelope, and wrote a note to his old college roommate in Dallas, asking if he would please drop the enclosed in the nearest mailbox.

That weekend he didn’t go home, and his reward was to dream about Ruth. She was waiting for a train that he was traveling on. He saw her on the platform, peering into the windows of each passenger car as it slid by. He was so eager to reach her, to watch her expression ease when she caught sight of him, that he called her name aloud and woke himself up. He heard it echoing in the dark — not her name, after all, but some meaningless sleep sound. For hours after that he tried to burrow back inside the dream, but he had lost it.

The next morning he began another letter, on the sheet headed PAULA. In a curlicued script, he wrote:

That letter he mailed from Pennsylvania, when he visited a packing-crate plant the following Tuesday. And on Wednesday, from New York, he sent the blue sheet with LMR at the top.

“You went too far with that last letter,” Ruth told him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He was sitting on a kitchen stool, watching her cube meat. He’d come directly to the restaurant this Saturday — bypassing home, bypassing the farm — hoping to find her altered somehow, mystified, perhaps tossing him a speculative glance from time to time. Instead, she seemed cross. She slammed her cleaver on the chopping board. “Do you realize,” she asked, “that I went ahead and answered that first note? Not wanting someone to worry, I sent it back and said it wasn’t mine, there must be some mistake; went out specially and bought a stamp to mail it with. And would’ve sent the second back, too, only it didn’t have a return address. Then the third comes; well, you went too far.”

“I tend to do that,” Cody said regretfully.

Ruth slung the cleaver with a thunking sound. Cody was afraid the others — only Todd Duckett and Josiah, this early — would wonder what was wrong, but they didn’t even look around. Ezra was out front, chalking up tonight’s menu.

“Just what is your problem?” Ruth asked him. “Do you have something against me? You think I’m some Garrett County hick that you don’t want marrying your brother?”

“Of course I don’t want you marrying him,” Cody said. “I love you.”

“Huh?”

This wasn’t the moment he had planned, but he rushed on anyway, as if drunk. “I mean it,” he said, “I feel driven. I feel pulled. I have to have you. You’re all I ever think about.”

She was staring at him, astonished, with one hand cupped to scoop the meat cubes into a skillet.

“I guess I’m not saying it right,” he told her.

“Saying what? What are you talking about?”

“Ruth. I really, truly love you,” he said. “I’m sick over you. I can’t even eat. Look at me! I’ve lost eleven pounds.”

He held out his arms, demonstrating. His jacket hung loose at the sides. Lately he’d moved his belt in a notch; his suits no longer fit so smoothly but seemed rumpled, gathered, bunchy.

“It’s true you’re kind of skinny,” Ruth said slowly.

“Even my shoes feel too big.”

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

“You haven’t heard a word I said!”

“Over me, you said. You must be making fun.”

“Ruth, I swear—” he said.

“You’re used to New York City girls, models, actresses; you could have anyone.”

“It’s you I’ll have.”

She studied him a moment. It began to seem he’d finally broken through; they were having a conversation. Then she said, “We got to get that weight back on you.”

He groaned.

“See there?” she asked. “You never eat a thing I offer you.”

“I can’t,” he told her.

“I don’t believe you ever once tasted my cooking.”

She set the skillet aside and went over to the tall black kettle that was simmering on the stove. “Country vegetable,” she said, lifting the lid.

“Really, Ruth …”

She filled a small crockery bowl and set it on the table. “Sit down,” she said. “Eat. When you’ve tried it, I’ll tell you the secret ingredient.”

Steam rose from the bowl, with a smell so deep and spicy that already he felt overfed. He accepted the spoon that she held out. He dipped it in the soup reluctantly and took a sip.

“Well?” she asked.

“It’s very good,” he said.

In fact, it was delicious, if you cared about such things. He’d never tasted soup so good. There were chunks of fresh vegetables, and the broth was rich and heavy. He took another mouthful. Ruth stood over him, her thumbs hooked into her blue jeans pockets. “Chicken feet,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Chicken feet is the secret ingredient.”

He lowered the spoon and looked down into the bowl.

“Eat up,” she told him. “Put some meat on your bones.”

He dipped the spoon in again.

After that, she brought him a salad made with the herbs she’d grown on the roof and a basketful of rolls she’d baked that afternoon — a recipe from home, she said. Cody ate everything. As long as he ate, she watched him. When she brought him more butter for his rolls, she leaned close over him and he felt the warmth she gave off.

Now two more cooks had arrived and a Chinese boy was sautéing black mushrooms, and Ezra was running a mixer near the sink. Ruth sat down next to Cody, hooking her combat boots on the rung of his chair and hugging her ribs. Cody cut into a huge wedge of pie and gave some thought to food — to its inexplicable, loaded meaning in other people’s lives. Couldn’t you classify a person, he wondered, purely by examining his attitude toward food? Look at Cody’s mother — a nonfeeder, if ever there was one. Even back in his childhood, when they’d depended on her for nourishment … why, mention you were hungry and she’d suddenly act rushed and harassed, fretful, out of breath, distracted. He remembered her coming home from work in the evening and tearing irritably around the kitchen. Tins toppled out of the cupboards and fell all over her — pork ’n’ beans, Spam, oily tuna fish, peas canned olive-drab. She cooked in her hat, most of the time. She whimpered when she burned things. She burned things you would not imagine it possible to burn and served others half-raw, adding jarring extras of her own design such as crushed pineapple in the mashed potatoes. (Anything, as long as it was a leftover, might as well be dumped in the pan with anything else.) Her only seasonings were salt and pepper. Her only gravy was Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, undiluted. And till Cody was grown, he had assumed that roast beef had to be stringy — not something you sliced, but a leathery dry object which you separated with a fork, one strand from the other, and dropped with a clunk upon your plate.

Though during illness, he remembered, you could count on her to bring liquids. Hot tea: she was good at that. And canned consommé. Thin things, watery things. Then she’d stand in the door with her arms folded while you drank it. He remembered that her expression, when others ate or drank, conveyed a mild distaste. She ate little herself, often toyed with her food; and she implied some criticism of those who acted hungry or over-interested in what they were served. Neediness: she disapproved of neediness in people. Whenever there was a family argument, she most often chose to start it over dinner.

Biting into Ruth’s flaky, shattering crust, Cody considered his mother’s three children — Jenny, for instance, with her lemon-water and lettuce-leaf diets, never allowing herself a sweet, skipping meals altogether, as if continually bearing in mind that disapproving expression of her mother’s. And Cody himself was not much different, when you came right down to it. It seemed that food didn’t count, with him; food was something required by others, so that for their sakes — on dates, at business luncheons — he would obligingly order a meal for himself just to keep them company. But all you’d find in his refrigerator was cream for his coffee and limes for his gin and tonics. He never ate breakfast; he often forgot lunch. Sometimes a gnawing feeling hit his stomach in the afternoon and he sent his secretary out for food. “What kind of food?” she would ask. He would say, “Anything, I don’t care.” She’d bring a Danish or an eggroll or a liverwurst on rye; it was all the same to him. Half the time, he wouldn’t even notice what it was — would take a bite, go on dictating, leave the rest to be disposed of by the cleaning lady. A woman he’d once had dinner with had claimed that this was a sign of some flaw. Watching him dissect his fish but then fail to eat it, noticing how he refused dessert and then benignly, tolerantly waited for her to finish a giant chocolate mousse, she had accused him of … what had she called it? Lack of enjoyment. Lack of ability to enjoy himself. He hadn’t understood, back then, how she could draw so many implications from a single meal. And still he didn’t agree with her.

Yes, only Ezra, he would say, had managed to escape all this. Ezra was so impervious — so thickheaded, really; nothing ever touched him. He ate heartily, whether it was his mother’s cooking or his own. He liked anything that was offered him, especially bread — would have to watch his weight as he got older. But above all else, he was a feeder. He would set a dish before you and then stand there with his face expectant, his hands clasped tightly under his chin, his eyes following your fork. There was something tender, almost loving, about his attitude toward people who were eating what he’d cooked them.

Like Ruth, Cody thought.

He asked her for another slice of pie.

Mornings, now, he called her from New York, often getting her landlady out of bed; and Ruth when she answered was still creaky voiced from sleep — or was it from bewilderment, even now? Reluctantly, each time, she warmed to his questions, speaking shortly at first. Yes, she was fine. The restaurant was fine. Dinner last night had gone well. And then (letting her sentences stretch gradually longer, as if giving in to him all over again) she told him that this house was starting to wear her down — creepy boarders padding around in their slippers at all hours, no one ever going anywhere, landlady planted eternally in front of her TV. This landlady, a widow, believed that Perry Como’s eyebrows quirked upward as they did because he was by nature a bass, and singing such high notes gave him constant pain; she had heard that Arthur Godfrey, too, had been enduring constant pain for years, smiling a courageous smile and wheeling about on his stool because the slightest step would stab him like a knife. Yes, everything, to Mrs. Pauling, was a constant pain; life was a constant pain, and Ruth had started looking around her and wondering how she stood this place.

Weekends — Friday and Saturday nights — Ruth tore through the restaurant kitchen slapping haunches of beef and whipping egg whites. Ezra worked more quietly. Cody sat at the wooden table. Now and then, Ruth would place some new dish in front of him and Cody would eat it dutifully. Every mouthful was a declaration of love. Ruth knew that. She was tense and watchful. She gave him sideways, piercing glances when he forked up one of her dumplings, and he was careful to leave nothing on his plate.

Then on Sunday mornings, yellow summer mornings at her boardinghouse, he rang her doorbell and pulled her close to him when she answered. Anytime he kissed her, he was visited by the curious impression that some other self of hers was still moving through the house behind her, spunky and lighthearted and uncatchable even yet, checking under pot lids, slamming cupboard doors, humming and tossing her head and wiping her hands on her blue jeans.

“I don’t understand,” Ezra told them.

“Let me start over,” said Cody.

Ezra said, “Is this some kind of a joke? Is that what it is? What is it?”

“Ruth and I—” Cody began.

But Ruth said, “Ezra, honey. Listen.” She stepped, forward. She was wearing the navy suit that Cody had bought her to go away in, and high-heeled shoes with slender straps. Although it was a glaring day in August, her skin had a chilled, dry, powdery look, and her freckles stood out sharply. She said, “Ezra, we surely never planned on this. We never had the least intention, not me or Cody neither one.”

Ezra waited, evidently still not comprehending. He was backed against the huge old restaurant stove, as if retreating from their news.

“It just happened, like,” said Ruth.

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” said Ezra.

“Ezra, honey—”

“You would never do this. It’s not true.”

“See, I don’t know how it came about but me and Cody … and I should’ve told you sooner but I kept thinking, oh, this is just some … I mean, this is silly; he’s so sophisticated, he isn’t someone for me; this is just some … daydream, see …”

“There’s bound to be an explanation,” Ezra said.

“I feel real bad about it, Ezra.”

“I’m sure I’ll understand in a minute,” he said. “Just give me time. Just wait a minute. Let me think it through.”

They waited, but he didn’t say anything more. He pressed two fingers against his forehead, as if working out some complicated puzzle. After a while, Cody touched Ruth’s arm. She said, “Well, Ezra, goodbye, I guess.” Then she and Cody left.

In the car, she cried a little — not making any fuss but sniffling quietly and keeping her face turned toward the side window. “Are you all right?” Cody asked.

She nodded.

“You’re sure you still want to go on with this.”

She nodded again.

They were planning to travel by train — Ruth’s idea; she had never set foot on a train — to New York City, where they would be married in a civil ceremony. Ruth’s people, she said, were mostly dead or wouldn’t much care; so there wasn’t any point having the wedding in her hometown. And it went without saying that Cody’s people … well. For the next little bit, they might as well stay in New York. By and by, things would simmer down.

Ruth took off one of her gloves, already gray at the seams, and crumpled it into a ball and blotted both her eyes.

Near Penn Station, Cody found a parking lot that offered weekly rates. It was a good deal of trouble, traveling by train, but worth it for Ruth’s sake. She was already perking up. She asked him if he thought there’d be a dining car — an “eating car,” she called it. Cody said he imagined so. He accepted the ticket the parking attendant gave him and slid out from behind the steering wheel, grunting a little; lately he’d put on a few pounds around the waist. He took Ruth’s suitcase from the trunk. Ruth wasn’t used to high heels and she hobbled along unsteadily, every now and then making a loud, scraping sound on the sidewalk. “I hope to get the knack of these things before long,” she told Cody.

“You don’t have to wear them, you know.”

“Oh, I surely do,” she said.

Cody guided her into the station. The sudden, echoing coolness seemed to stun her into silence. She stood looking around her while Cody went to the ticket window. A lady at the head of the line was arguing about the cost of her fare. A man in a crisp white suit rolled his eyes at Cody, implying exasperation at the wait. Cody pretended not to notice. He turned away as if checking the length of the line behind him, and a plump young woman with a child smiled instantly, fully prepared, and said, “Cody Tull!”

“Um—”

“I’m Jane Lowry. Remember me?”

“Oh, Jane! Jane Lowry! Well, good to see you, how nice to … and is this your little girl?”

“Yes; say hello to Mr. Tull, Betsy. Mr. Tull and Mommy used to go to school together.”

“So you’re married,” Cody said, moving forward in line. “Well, what a—”

“Remember the day I came to visit you, uninvited?” she asked. She laughed, and he saw, in the tilt of her head, a flash of the young girl he had known. She had lived on Bushnell Street, he remembered now; she had had the most beautiful hair, which still showed its chips of gold light, although she wore it short now. “I had such a crush on you,” she said. “Lord, I made a total fool of myself.”

“You played a game of checkers with Ezra,” he reminded her.

“Ezra?”

“My brother.”

“You had a brother?”

“I certainly did; do. You played checkers with him all afternoon.”

“How funny; I thought you only had a sister. What was her name? Jenny. She was so skinny, I envied her for years. Anything she wanted, she could eat and not have it show. What’s Jenny doing now?”

“Oh, she’s in medical school. And Ezra: he runs a restaurant.”

“In those days,” said Jane, “my fondest wish was to wake up one morning and find I’d turned into Jenny Tull. But I’d forgotten you had a brother.”

Cody opened his mouth to speak, but the man in white had moved away and it was Cody’s turn at the window. And by the time he’d bought his tickets, Jane had switched to the other line and was busy buying hers.

He didn’t see her again — though he looked for her on the train — but it was odd how she’d plunged him into the past. Swaying on the seat next to Ruth, holding her small, rough hand but finding very little to say to her, he was startled by fragments of buried memories. The scent of chalk in geometry class; the balmy, laden feeling of the last day of school every spring; the crack of a baseball bat on the playground. He found himself in a summer evening at a drive-in hamburger stand, with its blinding lights surrounded by darkness, its hot, salty, greasy smell of French fries, and all his friends horsing around at the curb. He could hear an old girlfriend from years ago, her droning, dissatisfied voice: “You ask me to the movies and I say yes and then you change your mind and ask me bowling instead and I say yes to that but you say wait, let’s make it another night, as if anything you can have is something it turns out you don’t want …” He heard his mother telling Jenny not to slouch, telling Cody not to swear, asking Ezra why he wouldn’t stand up to the neighborhood bully. “I’m trying to get through life as a liquid,” Ezra had said, and Cody (trying to get through life as a rock) had laughed; he could hear himself still. “Why aren’t cucumbers prickly any more?” he heard Ezra ask. And “Cody? Don’t you want to walk to school with me?” He saw Ezra aiming a red-feathered dart, his chapped, childish wrist awkwardly angled; he saw him running for the telephone—“I’ll get it! I’ll get it!”—hopeful and joyous, years and years younger. He remembered Carol, or was it Karen, reciting Ezra’s faults — a motherly man, she’d said; what had she said? — and it occurred to him that the reason he had dropped her was, she really hadn’t understood Ezra; she hadn’t appreciated what he was all about. Then Ruth squeezed his hand and said, “I intend to ride trains forever; it’s so much better than the bus. Isn’t it, Cody? Cody? Isn’t it?” The train rounded a curve with a high, thin, whistling sound that took him by surprise. He honestly believed, for an instant, that what he’d heard was music — a tune piped, a burble of notes, a little scrap of melody floating by on the wind and breaking his heart.