Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

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