Charlie strained his eyes. For one moment, through the rain that herringboned the windowpanes, he thought
he glimpsed somebody standing just to the left of the shed, veiled like a bride with old man's beard.
Somebody dark, somebody stooped, with a face that was disturbingly pale.
There was a third flash of lightning, even more intense than the first; and for one split second every shadow
in the garden was blanched white . . .
'Optical illusion,' said Charlie.
Martin didn't answer, but kept on staring outside.
'Ghost?' Charlie suggested.
'I don't know,' said Martin. 'It gave me a weird kind of a feeling, that's all.'

Outside the restaurant window, behind the trees, a huge thundercloud ballooned up, luridly orange in the
afternoon sunshine, anvil-headed, apocalyptic, the kind of thundercloud from which Valkyries should have
been tumbling.
'Well, then,' said Charlie, his face half hidden in the shadows. 'How long do you think this baby has been
dead?'
Martin peered across the table. 'Hard to say, under all that glop.'
'This glop, as you call it, is Colonial-style Sauce,' Charlie corrected him.
'It's glop,' Martin insisted. 'Look at it. It's so gloppy.'
Charlie bowed his head so close to the lumpy scarlet sauce spread out over his plate that Martin thought for
one moment that he was going to press his face into it. Charlie was sniffing it, to determine what it was
made of. He was also trying to decide whether the veal schnitzel underneath had been defrosted recently
enough to justify the menu's confident claim that it was 'Homestead Fresh'.
Without raising his face, Charlie said, 'This is a mixture of Chef Boy-ar-Dee canned tomatoes, undercooked
onions, and Spice Islands Mixed Herbs straight out of the jar. Its primary purpose would appear to be to
conceal the midlife crisis being suffered by the schnitzel beneath it.'
'Is that what you're going to write about it?' asked Martin. Charlie could hear the challenge in his voice. He
sat up straight and looked Martin directly in the eye.
'I have to be practical, as well as critical. Where else is your
ravenous fertilizer salesman going to eat, halfway up the Housa-tonic Valley on a wet fall afternoon?'
He picked up his fork, wiped it carefully on his napkin, and added, 'What I shall probably write is, "The
Colonial-style Sauce was somewhat short on true Colonial character."'
'Isn't that called copping out?' said Martin. All the same, he watched with amusement as Charlie lifted up
his entire veal schnitzel on the end of his fork and scrutinized first one side and then the other, as if he were
trying to sex it.
'Sometimes, you have to be forgiving to be accurate,' said Charlie. 'The truth is, this veal is disastrous and
this sauce is worse, but we'd be wasting our time if we went driving around looking for anything better.
Besides, I've eaten far less appetizing meals than this. I was served up with steak tartare once, in the
Imperial Hotel in Philadelphia, and there was half a cow's lip in it, complete with hair. The maitre d' tried to
persuade me that it was something called Steak Tartare Napoleone. I said, "This is more like Steak Tartare
Vidal Sassoon.'"
Martin smiled, one of those odd sly smiles which fifteen-year-old boys put on to convince their forty-one-
year-old fathers that they are still interested in hearing all the hoary, unfunny anecdotes that their fathers
have been telling them ever since they were old enough to listen. He poked at his Traditional Connecticut
Potpie.
'I haven't put you off your food?' asked Charlie.
Martin shook his head. 'I don't think you've done anything for their appetites, though.' And he nodded

towards two white-haired New England matrons who were sitting at the next table, staring at Charlie with
their spectacles as blind as four polished pennies.
Charlie turned in his seat and smiled at the matrons benignly, like a priest. Flustered, they attended to their
fried fish. 'The food is okay here,' he told Martin. 'The vegetables are all home-grown, the breadrolls are
fresh, and when they
accidentally drop someone's lunch on the floor, they usually throw it in the trash. Did I ever tell you about
the time they dropped a whole lobster stew in the service elevator at the Royalty Inn in Seattle? Yes - and
scraped it up between two wine-lists. Yes \u2014 and served it up to a legionnaires' reunion party. No wonder
legionnaires are always having diseases named after them.'
'I think you did tell me that, yes sir,' said Martin, and slowly began to eat. Outside, the thundercloud was
already dredging the upper atmosphere with rain. There was a strange, threatening hush in the air,
interrupted only by the sound of knives and forks squeaking on plates.
'This place has charm,' Charlie added. 'These days, you don't get to see too much in the way of charm. And,
you know, for most people, charm is just as important as food. More important, sometimes. You're taking a
girl out, hoping to screw her, what do you care if they only half cook the onions in your Colonial-style
Sauce?'
Martin was quite aware that Charlie was trying to talk to him man-to-man. But anybody who had been
sitting next to them, father and son, both silhouetted against the pewterish light of an October afternoon -
anybody would have realized quite quickly that they were strangers to one another. There were too many
empty pauses; too many moments of un-familiarity and too many questions that no father should ever have
needed to ask his own son.
'How's the potpie?' Charlie wanted to know. 'I never knew you liked potpie.'
'I don't,' said Martin. 'But look at the alternatives. That fish looks like it died of old age.'
'Don't knock old age,' said Charlie. 'Old age has a dignity all its own.'
'If that's true, your veal must be just about the most dignified piece of meat I ever saw.'
Charlie was cutting up his schnitzel with professional
neatness. 'It's acceptable, given the location, the net cost and the time of year.'
'You always say that. You've been saying that since I was five years old. You said that about the very first
catcher's mitt you bought me.'
Charlie laid down his fork. 'I told you. I have to be practical as well as critical. I have to remember that
most people aren't picky.'
Martin said, more venomously than he had ever dared to speak to his father before, 'You'd eat anything,
wouldn't you?'
Charlie looked at his son with care. At last, he said, 'It's my job,' as if that explained everything.
For a few minutes, the two of them were silent. Charlie always felt tense when they were silent. There was
so much to ask, so much to say, and yet he found it almost impossible to express what he felt. How can you
explain to your son that you regret every minute you missed of his growing up, when there had never been
anything to prevent you from being there but your own misguided sense of destiny?
He carried a plastic wallet that was fat with dog-eared photographs, and for him they were as progressively
agonizing as the Stations of the Cross. Here was Martin playing in the yard at the age of three with a bright
red firetruck, his eyes squin-ched up tight against the summer sun. Here he was again, dressed as Paul
Revere at the grade-school concert, unsmiling, unsure of himself. That picture had been taken in 1978,
when Charlie hadn't been home for over four months. Here was Martin after his team had won the Little
League baseball tournament, his hand raised up in triumph by some ginger-haired gorilla of a man whom
Charlie had never even met.
Charlie had missed almost all of it. Instead, he had been dining in strange hotels all across America, Charlie
McLean, the restaurant inspector, an unremembered ghost at countless unremembered banquets. But how
could he explain to Martin why he had been compelled to do it, and what it had been
like? Those solitary hotel rooms, with television sets quarrelling through every wall; those fifteenth-floor
windows with soulless views of ventilation shafts and wet city streets, into which the taillights of passing
automobiles had run like blood.
Every meal taken alone, like a penance.
Watching his father's face, Martin said, 'Sounds like that storm's headed this way.'
'Yes,' said Charlie. 'There's a legend up here in the Litch-field Hills that electric storms are caused by
ancient Indian demons; the Great Old Ones, they call them. The Narragansett medicine men fought them
and beat them, and then chained them up to the clouds so that they couldn't escape. But, you know, every

now and then they wake up and get angry and shake their chains and gnash their teeth together, and that's
what causes electric storms.'
Martin put down his fork. 'Dad? Is it okay if I have another 7-Up?'
Charlie said, 'You know - you can call me Charlie. I mean, you don't have to. But you can if you want to.'
Martin didn't say anything to that. Charlie beckoned the waitress. 'You want to bring me another 7-Up, no
cherry, and another glass of the chardonnay?'
'You're not on vacation,' the waitress said. It wasn't a question. She wore a blue satin dress that stuck to all
the most unflattering parts of her hips and her buttocks with the tenacity of Saran-wrap. She could have
been quite pretty, except that one side of her face didn't quite seem to match the other, giving her a
peculiarly vixenish appearance. Her hair was the colour of egg-yolk, and stuck up stiffly in all directions.
'Just making the rounds,' said Charlie, winking at Martin. There was a distant grumble of thunder, and he
pointed with a smile towards the window. 'I was telling my son about the Indian demons, chained up in the
clouds.'
The waitress stopped writing on her pad for a moment and stared at him. 'Pardon me?'
'It's a legend,' said Martin, coming to his father's rescue.
'You're not kidding,' the waitress remarked. She peered down at Charlie's plate. 'You really hate that veal,
don't you?' she told him.
'It's acceptable,' said Charlie, without looking at her. Like each of his five fellow inspectors, he wasn't
permitted to discuss meals or services with the management of any of the restaurants he visited, and it was
a misdemeanour punishable by instant dismissal to tell them who he was. His publishers believed that if
their inspectors were allowed to reveal their identity, they would be liable to be offered bribes. Worse than
that, they would be liable to accept them. Charlie's colleague, Barry Hunsecker, paid most of his alimony
out of bribes, but lived in a constant cold sweat unless he was found out, and fired.
The waitress leaned over, and whispered to Charlie, 'You don't have to be embarrassed. It's awful. Listen,
don't eat it if you don't want to. Nobody's forcing you to eat it. I'll make sure they charge you for the
chowder, and leave it at that.'
Charlie said, 'You don't have to worry. This is fine.'
'If that's fine, I'm a Chinese person.' The waitress propped her hands on her hips and looked at him as if he
were deliberately being awkward.
'It's fine,' Charlie repeated. He could hardly tell her that he was obliged to eat it, that doggedly finishing his
entire portion was part of his professional duties.And he was supposed to order dessert, and cheese, and
coffee; and visit the restrooms, to scrutinize the towels.
'Well, I took you for a gourmand,' the waitress told him. She scribbled down '7~Up + Char' and tucked her
pad into the pocket of her dress.
'A gourmand?' asked Charlie. He lifted his head a little, and as he did so the last of the sunlight caught him,
and gave his age away, but that was all. A round-faced man of forty-one, his roundness redeemed by the
lines around his eyes, which
gave him a look of experience and culture, like a Meissen dish that had been chipped at the edges. His hair
was clipped short and neat as if he still believed in the values of 1959. His hands .were small, with a single
gold ring on the wedding finger. He wore a grey speckled sport coat and plain grey Evvaprest pants.
Perhaps the only distinctive thing about him was his wristwatch, an eighteen carat gold Corum Romulus.
That had been given to him under circumstances that still made him sad to think about, even today.
Nobody had ever guessed what he did for a living, nobody in twenty-one years. Most of the time, this
anonymity gave him a slightly bitter sense of satisfaction; but at other times it made him feel so lost and
isolated that he could scarcely breathe.
'Of course, this place has been going to the dogs ever since Mrs Foss took over,' the waitress said, as if they
ought to know exactly who Mrs Foss was, and why she should have such a degenerative influence. She
curled up her lip. 'Mrs Foss and all the other Fosses.'
'How many Fosses are there exactly?' asked Charlie. Martin covered his mouth with his hand to hide his
amusement. He enjoyed it when his father was being dry with people.
'Well, there's six, if you count Edna Foss Lawrence. There used to be seven, of course, but Ivy went
missing the week before Thanksgiving two years gone.'
Charlie nodded, as if he remembered Ivy Foss going missing just like it was yesterday. 'It sounds to me like
too many Fosses spoil the broth,' he remarked.
'She'd burn a can of beans, that woman,' said the waitress. 'Come on, now, why don't you let me get you the
snapper. I should of warned you not to have the veal.'