Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [122]
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