Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

somewhere, she would bridle and tell him, “Well, I know that.” He learned to say, “Weatherman claims this will keep up. Better bring your umbrella.” Then her face would alter and smooth, adjusting to the information. “Frankly, I don’t believe him,” she would say, although it was one of those misty rains that falls without a sound, and he knew she hadn’t detected it. She concealed her surprise so well that only her children, accustomed to her stubborn denial of anything that might weaken her, could have seen what lay behind that challenging gray stare.

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

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

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

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

“No plans, Mother.”

“You’re certain, now.”

“What is it you want to do?”

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

“I’m not busy.”

“You just say so if you are.”

“I’ll be glad to help.”

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

“Well, that was when I was little.”

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

“I was very young then,” Ezra said.

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

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

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

“Ah?”

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

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

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

“Porch? Whose porch?”

“I can’t tell.”

“What does it look like?”

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

“Am I in it?”

“No.”

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

He had never heard of Luna.

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

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

“Possibly,” she said, without interest.

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

“Ladies?”

“None of them look familiar.”

“What are they wearing?”

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

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

“Who was Iola?”

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

“There’s no stripes here.”

“Pass on.”

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

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

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

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

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