He shook that away, of course. He was forty-six years old, a calm and sensible man, and later he would make an appointment with Dr. Vincent. Meanwhile he put on a shirt, and buttoned it, and unrolled a pair of socks. Twice, without planning to, he tested the lump again with his fingertips. It was nearly the size of an acorn, sensitive but not painful. It rolled beneath his skin as smoothly as an eyeball.
It wasn’t that he really wanted to die. Naturally not. He was only giving in to a passing mood, he decided as he went downstairs; this summer hadn’t been going well. His mother, whose vision had been failing since 1975, was now (in 1979) almost totally blind, but still did not fully admit it, which made it all the harder to care for her; and his brother was too far away and his sister too busy to offer him much help. His restaurant was floundering even more than usual; his finest cook had quit because her horoscope advised it; and a heat wave seemed to be stupefying the entire city of Baltimore. Things were so bad that the most inconsequential sights served to confirm his despair—the neighbor’s dog panting on the sidewalk, or his mother’s one puny hydrangea bush wilting and sagging by two o’clock every afternoon. Even the postman signified catastrophe; his wife had been murdered in a burglary last spring, and now he lugged his leather pouch through the neighborhood as if it were heavy beyond endurance, as if it would eventually drag him to a halt. His feet went slower and slower; his shoulders bent closer to the ground. Every day the mail arrived later.
Ezra stood with his coffee at the window and watched the postman moping past and wondered if there were any point to life.
Then his mother came downstairs, planting her feet just so. “Oh, look,” she said, “what a sunny morning!” She could feel it, he supposed—warming her skin in squares when she stood next to him at the window. Or perhaps she could even see it, since evidently she still distinguished light from dark. But her dress was done up wrong. She had drawn her wispy gray-blond hair into its customary bun, and deftly applied a single spark of pink to the center of her dry, pursed lips, but one side of her collar stuck up at an angle and the flowered material pouched outward, showing her slip in the gap between two buttons.
“It’s going to be another scorcher,” Ezra told her.
“Oh, poor Ezra, I hate to see you go to work in this.”
All she said carried references to sight. He couldn’t tell if she planned it that way.
She let him bring her a cup of coffee but she turned down breakfast, and instead sat beside him in the living room while he read the paper. This was their only time together—morning and noon, after which he left for the restaurant and did not return till very late at night, long past her bedtime. He had trouble imagining what she did in his absence. Sometimes he telephoned from work and she always sounded so brisk—“Just fixing myself some iced tea,” she would say, or “Sorting through my stockings.” But in the background he would hear the ominous, syrupy strains of organ music from some television soap opera, and he suspected that she simply sat before the TV much of the day, with a cardigan draped graciously over her shoulders even in this heat and her chilled hands folded in her lap. Certainly she saw no friends; she had none. As near as he could recall, she had never had friends. She had lived through her children; the gossip they brought was all she knew of the outside world, and their activities provided her only sense of motion. Even back when she worked at the grocery store, she had not consorted with the customers or the other cashiers. And now that she had retired, none of her fellow workers came to visit her.
No, this was the high point of her day, no doubt: these slow midmorning hours, the rustling of Ezra’s paper, his spotty news reports. “Another taxi driver mugged, it says here.”
“Oh, my goodness.”
“Another shoot-out down on the Block.”
“Where will it all end?” his mother wondered.
“Terrorist bomb in Madrid.”
Newspapers, letters, photos, magazines—those he could help her with. With those she let herself gaze straight ahead, blank eyed, while he acted as interpreter. But in all other situations, she was fiercely independent. What, exactly, was the nature of their understanding? She admitted only that her sight was not what it had once been—that it was impaired enough to make reading a nuisance. “She’s blind,” her doctor said, and she reported, “He thinks I’m blind,” not arguing but managing to imply, somehow, that this was a matter of opinion—or of will, of what you’re willing to allow and what you’re not. Ezra had learned to offer clues in the casual, slantwise style that she would accept. If he were to say, for instance, “It’s raining, Mother,” when they were setting out for 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; oth
ers 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.
“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.