“No, I had supper at home.”
“Or maybe a drink from the bar?”
“No, thanks.”
“This is our headwaiter, Oakes. And this is Josiah Payson; you remember him.”
She looked up and up, into Josiah’s face. He was all in white, spotless (how had they found a uniform to fit him?), but his hair still bristled wildly. And it was no easier than ever to see where he was directing his gaze. Not at her; that was certain. He was avoiding her. He seemed completely blind to the sight of her.
“When the Boyces come,” Ezra was saying to Oakes, “tell them we have the cream of mussel soup. There’s only enough for the two of them; it’s waiting on the back burner.”
“How are you, Josiah?” Jenny asked.
“Oh, not bad.”
“So you work here now.”
“I’m the salad chef. Mostly, I cut things up.”
His spidery hands twisted in front of him. The crease in his forehead seemed deeper than ever.
“I’ve thought of you often,” Jenny said.
She didn’t mean it, at first. But then she understood, with a rush to her head that was something like illness, that she spoke the truth: she had been thinking of him all these years without knowing it. It seemed he had never once left her mind. Even Harley, she saw, was just a reverse kind of Josiah, a Josiah turned inside out: equally alien, black-and-white, incomprehensible to anyone but Jenny.
“Is your mother well?” she asked him.
“She died.”
“Died!”
“A long time ago. She went out shopping and she died. I live in my house all alone now.”
“I’m sorry,” Jenny said.
But still he wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Ezra turned from Oakes and asked, “Are you sure I can’t get you a snack, Jenny?”
“I have to leave,” she told him.
Going home, she wondered why the walk seemed so long. Her feet felt unusually heavy, and there was some old, rusty pain deep inside her chest.
The ash grove, how graceful, Ezra’s recorder piped out, how sweetly his singing … Waking slowly, still webbed in bits of dreams, Jenny found it strange that a pearwood recorder should put forth plums—perfectly round, pure, plummy notes arriving in a spill on her bed. She sat up and thought for a moment. Then she pushed her blankets back and reached for her clothes.
Ezra was playing “Le Godiveau de Poisson” when she left the house.
Down this street, and then that one, and then another that turned out to be a mistake. She had to retrace her path. It was going to be a beautiful day. The sidewalks were still wet, but the sun was rising in a pearly pink sky above the chimneys. She dug her hands in her coat pockets. She met an old man walking a poodle, but no one else, and even he passed soundlessly and vanished.
When she reached the street she wanted, nothing looked familiar and she had to take the alley. She could only find the house from the rear. She recognized that makeshift gray addition behind the kitchen, and the buckling steps that gave beneath her feet, and the wooden door with most of its paint worn off. She looked for a bell to ring but there wasn’t one; she had to knock. There was the scraping of furniture somewhere inside the house—chair legs pushing back. Josiah, when he came, was so tall that he darkened the window she peered through.
He opened the door. “Jenny?” he said.
“Hello, Josiah.”
He looked around him, as if supposing she had come to see someone else. She noticed his breakfast on the kitchen table: a slice of white bread spread with peanut butter. In the scuffed linoleum and the sink full of dirty dishes, in his tattered jeans and raveling brown sweater, she read neglect and hopelessness. She pulled her coat tighter around her.
“What are you, what are you here for?” he asked.
“I did everything wrong,” she told him.
“What are you talking about?”
“You must feel I’m just like the others! Just like the ones you want to escape from, off in the woods with your sleeping bag.”
“Oh, no, Jenny,” he said. “I would never believe you’re like that.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“Nobody would; you’re too pretty.”
“But I mean—” she said.
She set a hand on his sleeve. He didn’t pull away. Then she stepped closer and slipped her arms around him. She could feel, even through her coat, how thin and bony his rib cage was, and how he warmed his skimpy sweater. She laid her ear against his chest, and he slowly, hesitantly raised his hands to her shoulders. “I should have gone on kissing you,” she said. “I should have told my mother, ‘Go away. Leave us alone.’ I should have stood up for you and not been such a coward.”
“No, no,” she heard him say. “I don’t think about it. I don’t think about it.”
She drew back and looked up at him.
“I don’t talk about it,” he said.
“Josiah,” she said, “won’t you at least tell me it’s all right now?”
“Sure,” he said. “It’s all right, Jenny.”
After that, there was really nothing else to discuss. She stood on tiptoe to kiss him goodbye, and she thought he looked directly at her when he smiled and let her go.
“To everybody’s good health,” Cody said, raising his glass. “To Ezra’s food. To Scarlatti’s Restaurant.”
“To a happy family dinner,” Ezra said.
“Oh, well, that too, if you like.”
They all drank, even Pearl—or maybe the little sip she took was only make-believe. She was wearing her netted hat and a beige tailored suit so new that it failed to sit back when she did. Jenny was in an ordinary skirt and blouse, but still she felt dressed up. She felt wonderful, in fact—perfectly untroubled. She kept beaming at the others, pleased to have them around her.
But really, were they all here? In Jenny’s new mood, her family seemed too small. These three young people and this shrunken mother, she thought, were not enough to sustain the occasion. They could have used several more members—a family clown, for instance; and a genuine black sheep, blacker than Cody; and maybe one of those managerial older sisters who holds a group together by force. As things were, it was Ezra who had to hold them together. He wasn’t doing a very good job. He was too absorbed in the food. Right now he was conferring with the waiter, gesturing toward the soup, which had arrived a touch too cool, he said—though to Jenny it seemed fine. And now Pearl was collecting her purse and sliding back her chair. “Powder room,” she mouthed to Jenny. Ezra would be all the more upset, once he noticed she’d gone. He liked the family in a group, a cluster, and he hated Pearl’s habit of constantly “freshening up” in a restaurant, just as he hated for Cody to smoke his slim cigars between courses. “I wish just once,” he was always saying, “we could get through a meal from start to finish,” and he would say it again as soon as he discovered Pearl was missing. But now he was telling the waiter, “If Andrew would keep the china hot—”
“He mostly does, I swear it, but the warming oven’s broke.”
“What’s your opinion?” Cody whispered, setting his face close to Jenny’s. “Has Ezra ever slept with Mrs. Scarlatti? Or has he not.”
Jenny’s mouth dropped open.
“Well?” he asked.
“Cody Tull!”
“Don’t tell me it hasn’t occurred to you. A lonely rich widow, or whatever she is; nice-looking boy with no prospects …”
“That’s disgusting,” Jenny told him.
“Not at all,” Cody said blandly, sitting back. He had a way of surveying people from under half-lowered lids which made him look tolerant and worldly. “There’s nothing wrong,” he said, “with taking advantage of your luck. And you have to admit Ezra’s lucky; born lucky. Have you ever noticed what happens when I bring around my girlfriends? They fall all over him. They have ever since we were kids. What do they see in him, anyway? How does he do it? Is it luck? You’re a woman; what’s his secret?”
“Honestly, Cody,” Jenny said, “I wish you’d grow out of this.”
Ezra finished his conversation with the waiter. “Where’s Mother?” he asked. “I turn my back one second and she disappears.”
“Powder room,” said Cody, lighting a cigar.
“Oh, why does she always do that? More soup is coming, fresh off the stove, piping hot this time.”
“Are you having it brought in by barefoot runners?” Cody asked.
Jenny said, “Don’t worry, Ezra. I’ll go call her.”
She made her way between the tables, toward a corridor with an EXIT sign over the archway. But just before the ladies’ room, in front of a swinging, leather-covered door, she caught sight of Josiah. He had his white uniform on and was carrying an aqua plastic dishpan full of chicory leaves. “Josiah,” she said.
He stopped short and his face lit up. “Hi, Jenny,” he said.
They stood smiling at each other, not speaking. She reached out to touch his wrist.
“Oh, no!” her mother cried.
Jenny snatched her hand back and spun around.
“Oh, Jenny. Oh, my God,” Pearl said. Her eyes were no longer gray; they were black, and she gripped her shiny black purse. “Well, I understand it all now,” she said.
“No, wait,” Jenny said. Her heart was beating so fast, it seemed she was vibrating where she stood.
“Visiting for no apparent reason,” said Pearl, “and slipping away this morning to meet him like a tramp, some cheap little tramp—”
“Mother, you’ve got it wrong!” Jenny told her. “It’s nothing, don’t you see?” She felt she had run out of breath. Gasping for air, she gestured toward Josiah, who merely stood there with his mouth agape. “He just … we just met in the hall and … it’s not that way at all, he’s nothing to me, don’t you see?”
But she had to say this to Pearl’s back, hurrying after her through the dining room. Pearl reached their table and said, “Ezra, I cannot stay here.”
Ezra stood up. “Mother?”
“I simply cannot,” she said. She gathered up her coat and walked away.
“But what happened?” Ezra asked, turning to Jenny. “What’s bothering her?”
Cody said, “That lukewarm soup, no doubt,” and he rocked back comfortably in his chair with a cigar between his teeth.
“I wish just once,” Ezra said, “we could eat a meal from start to finish.”
“I don’t feel well,” Jenny told him.
In fact, her lips were numb. It was a symptom she seemed to remember from before, from some long-forgotten moment, or maybe from a nightmare.
She left her coat behind, and she rushed through the dining room and out to the street. At first, she thought her mother had disappeared. Then she found her, half a block ahead—a militant figure walking briskly. Oh, what if she wouldn’t even turn around? Or worse, would turn and lash out, slap, snap, her clawed pearl ring, her knowing face … But Jenny ran to catch up with her, anyway. “Mother,” she said.
In the light from the liquor store window, she saw her mother reassemble her expression—take on a cool, unperturbed look.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Jenny told her. “I’m not a tramp! I’m not cheap! Mother, listen to me.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Pearl said politely.
“Of course it matters!”
“You’re over twenty-one. If you don’t know good from bad by now, there’s nothing more I can do about it.”
“I felt sorry for him,” Jenny said.
They crossed a street and started up the next block.
“He told me his mother had died,” Jenny said.
They veered around a gang of teen-aged boys.
“She was all he had—his father’s dead too. She was the center of his life.”
“Well,” said Pearl, “I suppose it can’t have been easy for her.”
“I don’t know how he’s going to manage now she’s gone.”
“I believe I saw her in the grocery once,” said Pearl. “A brown-haired woman?”
“Plumpish, sort of.”
“Full in the face?”
“Like a wood thrush,” Jenny said.
“Oh, Jenny,” said her mother, and she gave a little laugh. “The things you come up with, sometimes!”
They passed the candy store, and then the pharmacy. Jenny and her mother fell into step. They passed the fortune-teller’s window. The same dusty lamp glowed on the table. Jenny, looking in, thought that Mrs. Parkins had not been much of a prophet. Why, she had even had to listen to the radio for tomorrow’s weather! And she should have guessed from the very first instant, from the briefest, most cursory glance, that Jenny was not capable of being destroyed by love.
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.”