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By Root 715 0

trucks, Scarlatti’s had a man named Mr. Purdy, who shopped personally for them each morning before the sun came up. He brought everything to the kitchen in splintery bushel baskets, along about eight a.m., and Ezra made a point of being there so that he would know what foods he had to deal with that day. Sometimes there were no eggplants, sometimes twice as many as planned. In periods like this—dead November, now—nothing grew locally, and Mr. Purdy had to resort to vegetables raised elsewhere, limp carrots and waxy cucumbers shipped in from out of state. And the tomatoes! They were a crime. “Just look,” said Mr. Purdy, picking one up. “Vine-grown, the fellow tells me. Vine-grown, yes. I’d like to see them grown on anything else. ‘But ripened?’ I say. ‘However was they ripened?’ ‘Vine-ripened, too,’ fellow assures me. Well, maybe so. But nowadays, I don’t know, all them taste anyhow like they spent six weeks on a windowsill. Like they was made of windowsill, or celluloid, or pencil erasers. Well, I tell you, Ezra: I apologize. It breaks my heart to bring you such rubbage as this here; I’d sooner not show up at all.”

Mr. Purdy was a pinched and prunish man in overalls, a white shirt, and a shiny black suit coat. He had a narrow face that seemed eternally disapproving, even during the growing season. Only Ezra knew that inwardly, there was something nourishing and generous about him. Mr. Purdy rejoiced in food as much as Ezra did, and for the same reasons—less for eating himself than for serving to others. He had once invited Ezra to his home, a silver-colored trailer out on Ritchie Highway, and given him a meal consisting solely of new asparagus, which both he and Ezra agreed had the haunting taste of oysters. Mrs. Purdy, a smiling, round-faced woman in a wheelchair, had claimed they talked like lunatics, but she finished two large helpings while both men tenderly watched. It was a satisfaction to see how she polished her buttery plate.

“If this restaurant was just mine,” Ezra said now, “I wouldn’t serve tomatoes in the winter. People would ask for tomatoes and I’d say, ‘What can you be thinking of, this is not the season.’ I’d give them something better.”

“They’d stomp out directly,” Mr. Purdy said.

“No, they might surprise you. And I’d put up a blackboard, write on it every day just two or three good dishes. Of course! In France, they do that all the time. Or I’d offer no choice at all; examine people and say, ‘You look a little tired. I’ll bring you an oxtail stew.’ ”

“Mrs. Scarlatti would just die,” said Mr. Purdy.

There was a silence. He rubbed his bristly chin, and then corrected himself: “She’d rotate in her grave.”

They stood around a while.

“I don’t really want a restaurant anyhow,” Ezra said.

“Sure,” Mr. Purdy said. “I know that.”

Then he put his black felt hat on, and thought a moment, and left.

The foreign child slept in the conservatory, her head resting on the stainless steel arm of a chair like the one in Mrs. Scarlatti’s room. It made Ezra wince. He wanted to fold his coat and slide it beneath her cheek, but he worried that would wake her. He kept his distance, therefore, and stood at one of the windows gazing down on pedestrians far below. How small and determined their feet looked, emerging from their foreshortened figures! The perseverance of human beings suddenly amazed him.

A woman entered the room—one of the foreigners. She was lighter skinned than the others, but he knew she was foreign because of her slippers, which contrasted with her expensive wool dress. The whole family, he had noticed, changed into slippers as soon as they arrived each morning. They made themselves at home in every possible way—setting out bags of seeds and nuts and spicy-smelling foods, once even brewing a quart of yogurt on the conservatory radiator. The men smoked cigarettes in the hall, and the women murmured together while knitting brightly colored sweaters.

Now the woman approached the child, bent over her, and tucked her hair back. Then she lifted her in her arms and settled in the chair. The child didn’t wake.