“Never mind.”
He walked her anyway, relieving her of the laundry bag while she carried the baby astride her hip. They passed the mailman. He was bent so low to the ground that he didn’t even notice them.
Out by the car, Ezra said, “I’ve got this lump.”
“Oh?” said Jenny. “Where?”
He touched his groin. “In the morning it starts out small,” he said, “but by evening it’s so big, it’s like a rock or something in my trouser pocket. I’m wondering if it’s, you know. Cancer.”
“It’s not cancer. More likely a hernia, from the sound of it,” she said. “Go see a doctor.” She got in the car and buckled the baby into her carrier. Then she leaned out the open window. “Do I have all the children?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She waved and drove off.
Back in the house, his mother was hovering at the window exactly as if she could see. “That girl has too big a family,” she said. “I suppose her looks must be ruined by now.”
“No, I haven’t noticed it.”
“And her hair. Honestly. Ezra, tell me the truth,” she said. “How does Jenny seem to you?”
“Oh, the same as always.”
“I mean, don’t you think she’s let herself go? What about what she was wearing, for instance?”
He tried to remember. It was something faded, but perfectly acceptable, he guessed. Was it blue? Gray? He tried to picture her hairdo, the style of her shoes, but only came up with the chiseled lines that had always, even in her girlhood, encircled her neck—rings of lines that gave her a lush look. For some reason, those lines made him sad now, and so did Jenny’s olive hands with the ragged, oval fingernails, and the crinkles at the corners of her eyes, and the news that his life would, after all, go on and on and on.
“February sixth, nineteen-ten,” Ezra read aloud. “I baked a few Scottish Fancies but they wouldn’t do to take to a tea.”
His mother, listening intently, thought that over a while. Then she made her gesture of dismissal and started rocking again in her rocker.
“I hitched up Prince and rode downtown for brown silk gloves and an ice bag. Then got out my hat frames and washed my straw hat. For supper fixed a batch of—”
“Move on,” his mother said.
He riffled through the pages, glimpsing buttonhole stitch and watermelon social and set of fine furs for $22.50. “Early this morning,” he read to his mother, “I went out behind the house to weed. Was kneeling in the dirt by the stable with my pinafore a mess and the perspiration rolling down my back, wiped my face on my sleeve, reached for the trowel, and all at once thought, Why I believe that at just this moment I am absolutely happy.”
His mother stopped rocking and grew very still.
“The Bedloe girl’s piano scales were floating out her window,” he read, “and a bottle fly was buzzing in the grass, and I saw that I was kneeling on such a beautiful green little planet. I don’t care what else might come about, I have had this moment. It belongs to me.”
That was the end of the entry. He fell silent.
“Thank you, Ezra,” his mother said. “There’s no need to read any more.”
Then she fumbled up from her chair, and let him lead her to the kitchen for lunch. He guided her gently, inch by inch. It seemed to him that he had to be very careful with her. They were traversing the curve of the earth, small and steadfast, surrounded by companions: Jenny flying past with her children, the drunks at the stadium sobering the instant their help was needed, the baseball players obediently springing upward in the sunlight, and Josiah connected to his unknown gift giver as deeply, and as mysteriously, as Ezra himself was connected to this woman beside him.
10
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
When Pearl Tull died, Cody was off on a goose hunt and couldn’t be reached for two days. He and Luke were staying in a cabin owned by his business partner. It didn’t have a telephone, and the roads were little more than logging trails.
Late Sunday, when they returned, Ruth came out to the driveway. The night was chilly, and she wore no sweater but hugged herself as she walked toward the car, her white, freckled face oddly set and her faded red hair standing up in the wind. That was how Cody guessed something was wrong. Ruth hated cold weather, and ordinarily would have waited inside the house.
“It’s bad news,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“What happened?”
“Your mother’s passed away.”
“Grandma died?” asked Luke, as if correcting her.
Ruth kissed Luke’s cheek but kept her eyes on Cody, maybe trying to gauge the damage. Cody himself, wearily closing the car door behind him, was uncertain of the damage. His mother had been a difficult woman, of course. But even so …
“She died in her sleep, early yesterday,” Ruth said. She took Cody’s hand in both of hers and gripped it, tightly, so that the pain he felt right then was purely physical. He stood for a while, allowing her; then he gently pulled away and went to open the car trunk.
They had not bagged any geese—the hunt had been a lame excuse, really, to spend some time with Luke, who was now a senior in high school and would not be around for much longer. All Cody had to unload was the rifles in their canvas cases and a duffel bag. Luke brought the ice chest. They walked toward the house in silence. Cody had still not responded.
“The funeral’s tomorrow at eleven,” said Ruth. “I told Ezra we’d be there in the morning.”
“How is he taking it?” Cody asked.
“He sounded all right.”
Inside the front door, Cody set down the duffel bag and propped the rifles against the wall. He decided that he felt not so much sad as heavy. Although he was lean bodied, still in good shape, he imagined that he had suddenly sunk in on himself and grown denser. His eyes were weighty and dry, and his step seemed too solid for the narrow, polished floorboards in the hall.
“Well, Luke,” he said.
Luke seemed dazed, or perhaps just sleepy. He squinted palely under the bright light.
“Do you want to go to the funeral?” Cody asked him.
“Sure, I guess,” said Luke.
“You wouldn’t have to.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Of course he’s going,” said Ruth. “He’s her grandson.”
“That doesn’t obligate him,” Cody told her.
“Of course it obligates him.”
This was where they differed. They could have argued about it all night, except that Cody was so tired.
For their journey south, Cody drove Ruth’s car because his own was still spattered with mud from the goose hunt. He supposed they would have to ride in some shiny, formal funeral procession. But when he happened to mention this to Ruth, halfway down the turnpike, she told him that Ezra had said their mother had requested cremation. (“Golly,” Luke breathed!) There would only be the service, therefore—no cemetery trip and no burial. “Very sensible,” Cody said. He thought of the tidy framework of his mother’s bones, the crinkly bun on the back of her head. Did that fierce little figure exist any more? Was it already ashes? “Ah, God, it’s barbaric, however you look at it,” he told Ruth.
“What, cremation?” she asked.
“Death.”
They sped along—Cody in his finest gray suit, Ruth in stiff black beside him. Luke sat in the rear, gazing out the side window. They were traveling the Beltway now, approaching Baltimore. They passed trees ablaze with red and yellow leaves and shopping malls full of ordinary, Monday morning traffic. “When I was a boy, this was country,” Cody said to Luke.
“You told me.”
“Baltimore was nothing but a little harbor town.”
There was no answer. Cody searched for Luke in the rear-view mirror. “Hey,” he said. “You want to drive the rest of the way?”
“No, that’s all right.”
“Really. You want to?”
“Let him be,” Ruth whispered.
&nb
sp; “What?”
“He’s upset.”
“What about?”
“Your mother, Cody. You know he always felt close to her.”
Cody couldn’t figure how anyone could feel close to his mother—not counting Ezra, who was thought by some to be a saint. He checked Luke’s face in the mirror again, but what could you tell from that impassive stare? “Hell,” he said to Ruth, “all I asked was did he want to drive.”
The city seemed even more ruined than usual, tumbling under a wan, blue sky. “Look at there,” Cody said. “Linsey’s Candy and Tobacco. They sold cigarettes to minors. Bobbie Jo’s Barbecue. And there’s my old school.”
On Calvert Street, the row houses stood in two endless lines. “I don’t see how you knew which one was home,” Luke had told him once, and Cody had been amazed. Oh, if you lived here you knew. They weren’t alike at all, not really. One had dozens of roses struggling in its tiny front yard, another an illuminated madonna glowing night and day in the parlor window. Some had their trim painted in astonishing colors, assertively, like people with their chins thrust out. The fact that they were attached didn’t mean a thing.
He parked in front of his mother’s house. He slid from the car and stretched, waiting for Ruth and Luke.
By now, Pearl would have been out the door and halfway down the steps, reaching for the three of them with those eager, itchy fingers of hers.
“Is that your sister’s car?” Ruth asked him.
“I don’t know what kind of car she drives.”
They climbed the steps. Ruth had her hand hooked in the back of Luke’s belt. He was too tall for her to cup the nape of his neck, as she used to do.
When Cody first left home, he would knock when he returned for a visit. It was a deliberate, planned act; it was an insult to his mother. She had known that and objected. “Can’t you walk straight in? Do you have to act like company?”
“But company is what I am,” he’d said. She had started outwitting him; she had lain in wait, rushing to meet him at the very first sound of his shoes on the sidewalk. (So it was, perhaps, not solely love that had sent her plunging down the steps.) Now, crossing the porch, Cody didn’t know whether to knock or just open the door. Well, he supposed this house belonged to Ezra now. He knocked.
Ezra looked sad and exhausted, loosely filling a lightweight khaki suit that only he would have thought appropriate. As always, he seemed whiskerless, boy faced. There was a space between his collar and the knot of his tie. A handkerchief bunched messily out of his jacket pocket. “Cody. Come in,” he said. He touched Cody’s arm in that tentative way he had—something more than a handshake, less than a hug. “Ruth? Luke? We were starting to worry about you.”
From the gloomy depths of the house, Jenny stepped forward to kiss everyone. She smelled of some complicated perfume but had her usual hastily assembled look—her tailored coat unbuttoned, her dark hair rough and tossed. Her husband ambled behind her, fat and bearded, good-natured. He clapped Cody on the shoulder. “Nice to see you. Too bad about your mother.”
“Thank you, Joe.”
“We’re supposed to be starting for the church this very minute,” Jenny said. “We have to leave early because we’re picking up some of the children on the way.”
“I’m all set,” Cody said.
Ezra asked, “But don’t you want coffee first?”
“No, no, let’s get going.”
“See,” Ezra said, “I had planned on coffee and pastries before we started out. I’d assumed you’d be coming earlier.”
“We’ve already had breakfast,” Cody told him.
“But everything’s on the table.”
Cody felt his old, familiar irritation beginning. “Ezra—” he said.
“That was thoughtful of you,” Ruth told Ezra, “but really, we’re fine, and we wouldn’t want to hold people up.”
Ezra checked his watch. He glanced behind him, toward the dining room. “It’s only ten-fifteen,” he said. He walked over to a front window and lifted the curtain.
Now that it was apparent he had something on his mind, the others stood waiting. (He could be maddeningly slow, and all the slower if pushed.)
“It’s like this,” he said finally.
He coughed.
“I was kind of expecting Dad,” he said.
There was a blank, flat pause.
“Who?” Cody asked.
“Our father.”
“But how would he know?”
“Well, ah, I invited him.”
“Ezra, for God’s sake,” Cody said.
“It wasn’t my idea,” Ezra said. “It was Mother’s. She talked about it when she got so sick. She said, ‘Look in my address book. Ask everybody in it to my funeral.’ I wondered who she meant, at first. You know she never wrote anyone, and most of her relatives are dead. But as soon as I opened the address book I saw it: Beck Tull. I didn’t even realize she knew where he had run off to.”
“He wrote her; that’s how she knew,” Cody said.
“He did?”
“From time to time he sent these letters, boasting, bragging. Doing fine … expecting a raise … I peeked inside when Mother wasn’t looking.”
“I never even guessed,” said Ezra.
“What difference would it have made?”
“Oh, I don’t know …”
“He ditched us,” Cody said, “when we were kids. What do you care about him now?”
“Well, I don’t,” said Ezra. And Cody, who had so often been exasperated by Ezra’s soft heart, saw that in this case, it was true: he really didn’t care. He looked directly at Cody with his peculiarly clear, light-filled eyes, and he said, “It was Mother who asked; not me. All I did was call him up and say, ‘This is Ezra. Mother has died and we’re holding her funeral Monday at eleven.’ ”
“That was all?” Cody said.
“Well, and then I told him he could stop by the house first, if he got here early.”
“But you didn’t ask, ‘How are you?’ or ‘Where’ve you been?’ or ‘Why’d you go?’ ”
“I just said, ‘This is Ezra. Mother has died and—’ ”
Cody laughed.
“At any rate,” Jenny said, “it doesn’t seem he’s coming.”
“No,” said Cody, “but think about it. I mean, don’t you get it? First he leaves and Mother pretends he hasn’t. Out of pride, or spite, or something, she never says a word about it, makes believe to all of us that he’s only on a business trip. A thirty-five-year business trip. Then Ezra calls him on the phone and does the very same thing. ‘This is Ezra,’ he says, as if he’d seen Dad just yesterday—”
Jenny said, “Can we get started now? My children will be freezing to death.”
“Oh, surely,” Ruth told her. “Cody, honey, her children are waiting on us.”
“Mother would have done that, just exactly,” Cody said. “If Dad had walked in she would have said, ‘Ah, yes, there you are. Can you tell me if my slip is showing?’ ”
Joe gave a little bark of laughter. Ezra smiled, but his eyes filmed over with tears. “That’s true,” he said. “She would have. You know? She really would have.”
“Fine, then, she would have,” Jenny said. “Shall we go?”
She had been so young when their father left, anyhow. She claimed to have forgotten all about him.
At the funeral, the minister, who had never met their mother, delivered a eulogy so vague, so general, so universally applicable that Cody thought of that parlor game where people fill in words at random and then giggle hysterically at the story that results. Pearl Tull, the minister said, was a devoted wife and a loving mother and a pillar of the community. She had lived a long, full life and died in the bosom of her family, who grieved for her but took comfort in knowing that she’d gone to a far finer place.
It slipped the minister’s mind, or perhaps he hadn’t heard, that she hadn’t been anyone’s wife for over a third of a century; that she’d been a frantic, angry, so
metimes terrifying mother; and that she’d never shown the faintest interest in her community but dwelt in it like a visitor from a superior neighborhood, always wearing her hat when out walking, keeping her doors tightly shut when at home. That her life had been very long indeed but never full; stunted was more like it. Or crabbed. Or … what was the word Cody wanted? Espaliered. Twisted and flattened to the wall—all the more so as she’d aged and wizened, lost her sight, and grown to lean too heavily on Ezra. That she was not at all religious, hadn’t set foot in this church for decades; and though in certain wistful moods she might have mentioned the possibility of paradise, Cody didn’t take much comfort in the notion of her residing there, fidgeting and finding fault and stirring up dissatisfactions.
Cody sat in the right front pew, the picture of a bereaved and dutiful son. But skeptical thoughts flowed through his head so loudly that he almost believed they might be heard by the congregation. He was back to his boyhood, it seemed, fearing that his mother could read his mind as unhesitatingly as she read the inner temperature of a roasting hen by giving its thigh a single, contemptuous pinch. He glanced sideways at Ruth, but she was listening to the minister.
The minister announced the closing hymn, which Pearl had requested in her funeral instructions: “We’ll Understand It All By and By.” Raising his long, boneless face to lead the singing, Reverend Thurman did appear bewildered—perhaps less by the Lord’s mysterious ways than by the unresponsive nature of this group of mourners. Most were just staring into open hymn-books, following each stanza silently. And there were so few of them: a couple of Ezra’s co-workers, some surly teen-aged grandchildren sulking in scattered pews, and five or six anonymous old people, who were probably there as church members but gave the impression of having wandered in off the streets for shelter, dragging their string-handled shopping bags.
When the service was finished, the minister descended from the pulpit and stopped to offer Cody, as firstborn, a handshake and condolences. “All my sympathy … know what a loss …”
“Thank you,” said Cody, and he and Ruth and the minister proceeded down the aisle. Jenny and Joe followed, and last came Ezra, blowing his nose. By rights the grandchildren should have risen too, but if they had there would have been hardly any guests remaining.