Searching for Caleb

Then the twins were born, in the fall of 1964. Well, of course life is hard with twins; you can't expect a woman to be as easy-going as ever.

Plus there was the financial angle. Certainly people require more money once they start having children. Luray was just frazzled with money worries, you could see it. She wanted so many things for her babies. She was always after Roy to take a second job, maybe driving a cab. "How we going to even eat?" she would ask him, standing there scared and fierce in her seersucker duster. (Once she had ordered her clothes off the back pages of movie magazines, all these sequined low-necked dresses and push-up bras.) So Roy took a job with the Prompt Taxi Company from six to twelve every night and Caleb ran the cafe alone. Not that he minded.

There wasn't much business anyway and he had just about given up his evening fiddling now that the park was gone and his hands were so stubborn and contrary. (Besides, sometimes lately when he played he had the feeling that people thought of him as a-character, really. Someone colorful. He had never meant to be that, he only wanted to make a little music.) So he would putter around the cafe fixing special dishes and talking to the customers, most of whom were friends, and after the plates were rinsed he might pull out his harmonica and settle himself on a stool at the counter and give them a tune or two. "Pig Meat Papa" he played, and "Broke and Hungry Blues" and "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out." The old men listened and nodded heavily and, "Now that is so," they said when he was done-a much finer audience than any courting couple.

Till Luray came down from upstairs with her hair in curlers and her duster clutched around her. "What all is going on here? Caleb, you have woken both babies when I had just slaved my butt off putting them down. What is everybody sitting here for? Shoo now! Shoo!" As if they were taking up seats that someone else wanted, when it was clear no more customers were coming; and anyway, they were having fun. There was no point to hurrying off when you were having fun.

Then Luray got back in her transparent white uniform and said she saw that she would have to start waiting tables again; men customers 'would leave her tips that they wouldn't leave Caleb. "Well, naturally," Caleb said. "They're personal friends, they wouldn't want to embarrass me." "It don't embarrass me," said Luray, tossing her head. She would open the stair door, listening for the babies. Caleb worried about her leaving them alone but she said they would be fine. She was saving up to buy them an electric bottle sterilizer. Caleb didn't think a sterilizer was all that necessary but he could see that, to Luray, there was always the chance that some single magic object might be the one to guarantee that her babies would live happily forever; and maybe the sterilizer was that object. So he was not surprised when after the sterilizer was bought she started saving up for a double stroller, and after that a pair of collapsible canvas carbeds although they didn't own a car. And he didn't hold it against her when she started criticizing his work, although certainly there were times when she got him down. "What do I see you doing here? How come you to be using pure cream? What you got in mind for all them eggs?"

The fact was that Caleb was pretty much a custom chef by now. He had known his few patrons a very long time, and since he was not a man who easily showed his liking for people he chose to cook them their favorite foods instead-the comfort foods that every man turns to when he is feeling low. For Jim Bolt it was hot milk and whisky; for old Emmett Gray, fried garden-fresh tomatoes with just a sprinkle of sugar; and Mr.

Ebsen the freight agent liked home-baked bread. The narrow aluminum shelves behind the counter, meant to hold only dry cereals, potato chips, and Hostess cream-filled cupcakes, were a jumble of condiments in Mason jars and Twinings tea from England, Scotch oatmeal tins, Old Bay crab spice, and Major Grey chutney. The cafe appeared, in fact, to be a kitchen in the home of a very large family. It had looked that way for years, but this was the first time Luray noticed. "What kind of a business is this?" she asked. "Do you want to send us all to the poorhouse? Here am I with these two growing babies and lying awake at night just wondering will we manage and there you are cooking up French omelettes and rice pudding, things not even on the menu and I don't even want to know how much you're charging for them . . ."

Luray took over his job, whipping an apron around her little tiny waist.