Ruffly Speaking

deferentially, and took off.
    The café was already quite crowded with what looked to me like a principally Harvardian clientele— alumni, alumnae, and faculty, women with intelligent faces, no makeup, and simple clothes, men who spoke in educated tenor voices and would have been outraged at the accusation that they adored women who were good listeners. I heard scraps of French, Spanish, and a couple languages I didn’t recognize. A man with African blue-black skin and ritual scars on his cheeks spoke British English to an elderly Caucasian woman dressed in a pale blue sari. At the table next to ours, a couple nibbled cucumber sandwiches and discussed feminism in relation to the next presidential election. She had a blotchy-looking scarf messily draped around her neck. He wore a neatly folded ascot. He argued that it was meaningless to speak of the women’s vote. She agreed with him.
    “This is what Rita calls a ‘civilized occasion,’ ” I told Leah.
    Doug Winer, who’d been drifting from table to table, overheard and happily repeated the phrase. “Civilized occasion! I may borrow that sometime,” he said playfully. “Sunday tea at Winer and Lamb. The ultimate civilized occasion.” As usual, Doug’s face showed his apparently ineradicable black whiskers. He wore a boxy white suit that somehow narrowed and elongated his low, muscular build. Murmuring a perfunctory apology to the three people at a nearby table for four, Doug removed the empty chair, and, before seating himself with us, asked, “May I join you ladies? The preparation for this has been simply indescribable. I cannot stay on my feet another second.” As Leah and I nodded and made room for him, he exclaimed, “Where is your tea? Where is Fyodor!”
    “We’ve ordered. We haven’t been here long,” I said.
    With an audible sigh of exasperation or exhaustion, Doug settled himself at our table. “Pink,” he said, fingering the heavy tablecloth. “This pink has got to go.”
    “It’s pretty,” I said.
    He tsked. “Tacky, tacky. Pink! Morris wanted lamp shades. He wanted little lamps on the tables with pink shades. Pink! Well, I managed to talk him out of that) thank God. Can you imagine? Pink lamp shades? ‘Morris it’ll look like a boudoir,’ I said, and that convinced him, finally, but when it came to the linens, he would not gi vt -in, and here we are. Pink! But I haven’t even welcomed you! This whole thing has been exhausting. Where is your tea?”
    As if in response to Doug’s rhetorical question, Fyodor appeared. He rapidly covered the tiny table with pink-rimmed crockery, my pot of tea, and a dainty little triple-tiered glass contraption, each layer of which was piled with miniature pastries, crustless sandwiches, and squares of frosted cake interspersed here and there with whole strawberries, clusters of green and purple grapes, and slices of orange and melon. Food makes me feel mothered.
    “This is just like a birthday party,” I said to Doug, who flushed with pleasure, but then interrupted Leah’s praise by seizing her spoon, examining it closely, grimacing, and summoning Fyodor to replace it.
    “It looked fine to me,” Leah said. “Everything does. Everything is perfect.” Before serving herself, she tried to cajole Doug into sharing the cakes and sandwiches with us, but Doug insisted that he couldn’t possibly touch a thing.
    Leah and I helped ourselves. Partly to divert Doug from his scrutiny of the food, china, silver, and linen for any minute deviations from perfection, I said that I’d been happy to meet his father. How was Mr. Winer? I asked. And the Bedlingtons?
    Nelson and Jennie, Doug said, were a godsend. The family had been futilely trying to persuade Mr. Winer to wear an identification bracelet on his long daily walks, or else to limit himself to repetitive perambulations of the block in front of his own house. The dogs had solved the ID tag problem without hurting Mr. Winer’s pride: Their tags bore his address.
    I swallowed a tiny cream puff and said, “I thought your parents might be here today. Because of...” I caught myself. I’d been about to say something about celebrating the launch of the Sunday teas, but the word celebrating stuck to my vocal cords. I coughed lightly. Today was the twenty-eighth of June. Morris had been dead less than two months. Wasn’t it a little soon for Doug to celebrate anything? “Or Stephanie,” I added to cover my embarrassment.
    “Holly,