Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [121]
“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