Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“It faded soon enough.”

Katherine Rose, whoever she was, wore a severe and complicated dress of a type not seen in sixty years or more. He was judging her rabbity face as if she were a contemporary, some girl he’d glimpsed in a bar, but she had probably been dead for decades. He felt he was being tugged back through layers of generations.

He flipped open tiny diaries, several no bigger than a lady’s compact, and read his mother’s cramped entries aloud. “December eighth, nineteen-twelve. Paid call on Edwina Barrett. Spilled half-pint of top cream in the buggy coming home and had a nice job cleaning it off the cushions I can assure you …”

“April fourth, nineteen-o-eight. Went into town with Alice and weighed on the new weighing machine in Mr. Salter’s store. Alice is one hundred thirteen pounds, I am one hundred ten and a half.” His mother listened, tensed and still, as if expecting something momentous, but all he found was purchased ten yards heliotrope brilliantine, and made chocolate blanc-mange for the Girls’ Culture Circle, and weighed again at Mr. Salter’s store. During the summer of 1908—her fourteenth summer, as near as he could figure — she had weighed herself about every two days, hitching up her pony Prince and riding clear downtown to do so. “August seventh,” he read. “Had my measurements taken at the dressmaker’s and she gave me a copy to keep. I have developed in every possible sense.” He laughed, but his mother made an impatient little movement with one hand. “September ninth,” he read, and then all at once had the feeling that the ground had rushed away beneath his feet. Why, that perky young girl was this old woman! This blind old woman sitting next to him! She had once been a whole different person, had a whole different life separate from his, had spent her time swinging clubs with the Junior Amazons and cutting up with the Neal boys something dreadful and taking first prize at the Autumn Recital Contest. (I hoped that poor Nadine would win, she wrote in a chubby, innocent script, but of course it was nice to get it myself.) His mother sat silent, absently stroking the dead corsage. “Never mind,” she told him.

“Shall I stop?”

“It wasn’t what I wanted after all.”

On his way to the restaurant, Ezra ducked into a bookstore and located a Merck Manual in the Family Health section. He checked the index for lump, but all he found was lumpy jaw (actinomy cosis). Evidently you had to know the name of your disease first — in which case, why bother looking it up? He thought through what he remembered of his high school biology course, and decided to check under lymph gland. The very phrase was reassuring; lymph glands swelled all the time. He had a couple in his neck that grew pecan sized anytime he developed a sniffle. But there were no lymph glands listed in the index, and it stopped him cold to see lymphatic leukemia and lymphohematogenous tuberculosis. He shut the book quickly and replaced it on the shelf.

Josiah had already opened the restaurant, and two helpers were busy chopping vegetables in the kitchen. A salesman in a plaid suit was trying to interest Josiah in some new product. “But,” Josiah kept saying. “But I don’t think—” Josiah was so gawky and confused-looking — an emaciated giant in white, with his black and gray hair sticking out in frenzied tufts as if he’d grabbed handfuls in desperation — that Ezra felt a rush of love for him. He said, “Josiah, what’s the problem?” and Josiah turned to him gratefully. “Uh, see, this gentleman here—”

“Murphy’s the name. J. R. Murphy,” said the salesman. “I sell soy sauce, private brand. I sell it by the case.”

“We could never manage a case,” said Ezra. “We hardly ever use it.”

“You will, though,” the salesman told him. “Soy sauce is the coming thing; better get it while you can. This here is the antidote for radiation.”

“For what?”

“Nucular accidents! Atom bums! Just take a look at the facts: those folks in Hiroshima didn’t get near as many side effects as expected. Want to know why? It was all that Japanese food with soy sauce. Plain old soy sauce. Keep a case of this around and you’ll have no more worries over Three Mile Island.”

“But I don’t even like soy sauce.”

“Who says you’ve got to like it?”

“Well, maybe just a few bottles …” Ezra said.

He wondered if there were some cryptic, cultish mark on his door that told all the crazy people he’d have trouble saying no.

He went to check on the dining room. Two waitresses were shaking out tablecloths and spreading them with a crisp, ripping sound. Josiah was lugging in bales of laundered napkins. There was always a moment, this early in the day, when Ezra found his restaurant disheartening. He was chilled by the empty tables, the looming, uncurtained windows, the bitter smell of last night’s cigarettes. What kind of occupation was this? People gulped down his food without a thought, too busy courting or arguing or negotiating to notice what they ate; then they went home and forgot it. Nothing amounted to anything. And Ezra was a middle-aged man with his hair growing transparent at the back of his head; but here he was, where he’d been at twenty, living with his mother in a Calvert Street row house and reading himself to sleep with cookbooks. He had never married, never fathered children, and lost the one girl he had loved out of sheer fatalism, lack of force, a willing assumption of defeat. (Let it be was the theme that ran through his life. He was ruled by a dreamy mood of acceptance that was partly the source of all his happiness and partly his undoing.)

Josiah came to stand before him. “See my boots?” he asked.

Ezra surfaced and looked down at Josiah’s boots. They poked from beneath the white uniform — gigantic, rubber-coated canvas boots that could weather a flood, a snowstorm, an avalanche.

“L. L. Bean,” Josiah said.

“Ah.”

L. L. Bean was where Josiah got his mystery gifts. Once or twice a year they arrived: a one-man tent; a goose-down sleeping bag; hunting shoes in his unwieldy, hard-to-find size; an olive-drab poncho that could see him through a monsoon; a pocket survival kit containing compass, flint, signal mirror, and metallic blanket. All this for a man who’d been born and reared in the city and seemed inclined to stay there. There was never any card or note of explanation. Josiah had written the company, but L. L. Bean replied that the donor preferred to stay anonymous. Ezra had spent hours helping Josiah think of possibilities. “Remember that old lady whose walk you used to shovel? Maybe it’s her.”

“She’d be dead by now, Ezra.”

“Remember Molly Kane, with her wheelchair? You used to wheel her to Algebra One.”

“But she said, ‘Let go my chair, you big ree-tard!’ ”

“Maybe now she regrets it.”

“Oh, no. Not her. Not Molly Kane.”

“Maybe just someone you changed a tire for and never gave it another thought. Someone you opened a door for. Maybe … I don’t know …”

Ordinarily he enjoyed these speculations, but now, looking down at Josiah’s mammoth boots, he was struck by the fact that even Josiah — lanky, buck-toothed, stammering Josiah — had a human being all his own that he was linked to, whether or not he knew that person’s name, and lived in a nest of gifts and secrets and special care that Ezra was excluded from.

“New Year’s Day, nineteen-fourteen,” Ezra read aloud. “I hope this little diary will not get lost as last year’s did. I hope I will not put anything foolish in it as I have been known to do before.”

His mother hid a smile, unsuccessfully. What foolishness could she have been up to so long ago? Ezra’s eyes slipped down the page to a line that had been crossed out. “There’s something here I can’t read,” he said.

“I never was known for my penmanship.”

“No, I mean you scribbled over it with so many loops and things—”

“Apple apple,” his mother said.

“Excuse me?”