Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  He’s thinking the kind of thinking that is right for the holiday, a holiday of thinking, of pondering, of wondering about the writing of God, which book, which book? And wondering if one way, rabbi or holding company man, was life, was death, or could he have both? Past hedge, path, bush, tree, stone—thinking one was good for the other, the deep inner life, the thought, the pondering, the study, the wondering also good for the business life, because who else in business could look at things from such a point of view as his? And the sharp, keen, razor-edge practice helped him at the head of the congregation, because he did not lead them astray, he led them straight to where they needed to go, no nonsense, they wanted a building fund, he showed them how, they wanted fund-raising, an aging program, that too he showed them, showed them the other side of things, the way he showed the box and bag people, the bottle cap people in the city how they should feel better about decisions about workers, about selling, and while he’s walking, thinking, he’s thinking how he’s been living two lives at once, and not living for himself, and the quarrel with the daughter, the wife sick again—and not just in body, he’s worrying; because he knows her face, the look, the special glow like cinders from a bonfire in the eyes, knows that it’s not just in body. This at home makes him worry to the point where he feels his heart beating like a garbage can lid some child in the alley is smacking with a stick, and his legs get cold, and now he stops, takes out his handkerchief and dabbles at his brow, runs a hand through his beautiful white hair and the one dark streak that flows through it, and he looks up and he sees a car passing and inside he sees her, and he knows in his bones that his life is not his own.

  “Which her? She?”

  “Yes, the other her. Florette.”

  BUT DOES HE think, she’s riding to the temple on the holiest of days? Breaking the most serious of rules for worship? And, worse, flaunting it in front of the eyes of all who will see her pass by in her car? Yes, he thinks this and then in a flash he forgives her, as he is sure anyone from the congregation who sees her will forgive her, because of all she has been through. Oh, yes, many men have forgiven women many things because they are who they are, and in this case he had only to think of her early life, in the camps, the number he sees on her upper wrist each time they meet. A27300. The number, the number, her souvenir of her childhood. Like the star was his remembrance, the number was hers. And so he will defend her should anyone dare to raise an eyebrow, let alone say a word. And so he will say to them as he has said before, each of us has a mark put upon us as an individual, and as a people we have had a mark put upon us together, and let him or her without a mark cast the first stone. Her. It was her. She. It made him stumble—like he had caught his toe in a crack in the sidewalk and went pitching over, forward.

  “Whoa, Rabbi!” Doctor Mickey, hurrying up, catches him by the arm. “You tripped?”

  “I tripped,” Manny said, shaking off his surprise. “I was looking at a car, Florette Glass was driving and I lost all of my balance. A funny thing. Looking up, I wasn’t looking down. But now I’m okay.”

  “One person in the congregation rides to services on Yom Kippur, and the rabbi is so sensitive he nearly loses control?”

  The doctor smiled at Manny from behind his large owl-eye glasses. A few years older than his rabbi, he gave the impression that he was always willing to hear advice from the younger man.

  “She’s the sensitive one,” Manny said. “Her nightmares—has she ever told you about her nightmares?”

  “No, but I can imagine,” Doctor Mickey said. They started to walk again in the direction of the temple. “Or,” Doctor Mickey said, “maybe I don’t want to imagine.”

  “She comes in to talk now and then,” said Manny, realizing he had said too much already about her. But he could not help himself, explaining more and more as they continued on their way.

  “Sam, her husband,” Manny said, “he always helped her, but now she’s alone.”

  And you and Florette? No, the doctor didn’t ask that. Manny was already hearing him ask that, but Doctor Mickey didn’t say a word. He made noises, ahem, ahum, the kind of sounds he makes when you’re in his office telling him about this pain, that. He’s a good listener, that Mickey, like his mother, Mrs. Stellberg. You have to be a good listener to be a good doctor—and to be a good grandmother, too, I think. Because how else could I be telling you all this if I didn’t listen?

  What he said was: “How’s Maby doing?” Not feeling. He said doing. If he had said feeling, then Manny wouldn’t have had to worry about the question. Feeling—just politeness. Doing—this meant that Doctor Mickey was aware of things, noticing things. But he had sent Maby to the doctor in New York precisely because he didn’t want anyone in the congregation to talk. Was he worrying too much about what they would say? The rabbi’s crazy wife? Why should he worry? So he had a fantasy about giving it up, the congregation, so why should he care if they talked of his ailing wife? No, here is where the truth comes out. He could do that, and it might be what he wanted, but he would not have anyone else drive him to do it. Stubborn from the day he was born. Look at that star-shaped piece of glass, for instance. You know he’s carried it around with him ever since the morning his father died? He never lets it out of his pocket, never for a minute! Stubborn!

  “Did I mention her to you?” he asked Doctor Mickey. Wondering to himself, did I say things that I don’t remember saying? Am I losing control? I stumbled—I looked up and stumbled—and what if I gave up the whole thing with my brother-in-law Mordecai Sporen? What if I say, buy me out, and leave me out? A rabbi with a box factory? A rabbi with a bag factory? A rabbi who owns boats, barges, docks? Whoever heard? Sporen, he was thinking—the old man, his late father-in-law. What a legacy he had left him. His own father, my Jacob, left him nothing, if you don’t count a piece of broken milk bottle shaped like a star. The man who had something to do with Jacob’s accident, Sporen, he gives Manny everything, in life and after life.

  So, Doctor Mickey says, “You look confused, Manny. Do you feel all right yourself? Fasting doesn’t agree with everybody, and sometimes even the rabbi can be affected, you know.”

  “Doctor Mickey,” Manny says, catching the man’s arm as they cross the next street. “I can fast and it’s not a problem. My problem is, if you want to hear it, I need to slow down.”

  Doctor Mickey laughs. They can’t talk anymore now because other people from the congregation are coming up to them, saying good Yom Tov, good morning and comparing their hungers. One feels like he could eat a horse, another a cow. Manny doesn’t like to hear all this joking about something they’re supposed to take seriously, if not respect, remembering his own daughter on the back porch playing her guitar. Respect—that’s the problem. But the problem is doubled and tripled because he wonders, given his other life, if he can respect himself. What should I do? he wonders, ponders, walking, nodding, listening, talking a little as he makes his way up to the temple, walks to the side entrance, his office entrance. What am I going to do? he’s asking himself. I am a man with a problem, noticing almost without seeing the cars in the parking lot, one belonging to the janitor, another that’s been there for days, and the Sunday school van, and behind them, Florette’s, and this suddenly annoys him, that she should flaunt her special relationship with him, it annoys him as he walks inside—and then at the sound of another engine, he turns and sees Maby, Sarah, and me also driving up.

  I told her it was crazy, that he would get not just annoyed but angry. But she wouldn’t listen.

  “If you’d like to walk, Mama, then you can. But we’re driving, aren’t we, Sarah?” And the little one, now not so little, pinched her lips up the way she does in imitation—unconscious, I think—of her mother, and nodded her head.

  “I’m certainly not getting left behind,” I told them, “because I want to be there when Manny sees you pull up in the car.”

  “He won’t see,” my daughter-in-law says.

  “I hope he does,” says the granddau
ghter.

  “Sarah,” her mother says, “you needn’t be mean.”

  “I wasn’t being mean, just truthful,” she says. “I think we all ought to say that for the New Year we should tell the truth.”

  “And you know the truth, sweetheart?” I ask her.

  “Mama,” Maby says to me, “I can’t go otherwise.”

  “All right, darling,” I say to soothe her, “we’ll do what we have to do. Better you should be there than not.”

  “The truth is,” Sarah says, “I ate breakfast and I think the holiday is dumb, and I don’t want to go.”

  “Sarah,” her mother says. Just her name, nothing else.

  AS WE DROVE up, Manny averted his eyes. He ducked in the door and went downstairs to his office where he would change into his robes for the beginning of the last day of the ten days of penitence. He felt the headache from the fasting, from his empty stomach—that could do it, it had done it in the past. It stuck with him, his dilemma, boiling in his mind. What, what should he do? or, even, could he do about his life? Nearly two decades he had been here, it felt comfortable, like home, and he had the congregation loving him and admiring him and—better yet—needing him. But he couldn’t squash the feeling that he wanted to break away—or else he might die. Unheard of—two decades in this place. The very hall he walked along wasn’t even built when he first arrived . . . and there was no Sarah then, and no big congregation. He had helped them build and build it up, the building and the crowds. These he could hear, by the way, faintly, like from another room, where they were gathering in the auditorium above him, like the same storm clouds over the beach at Asbury Park he felt building in his skull.

  Into the office he walks to change his clothes. She’s sitting there on his sofa, her face in her hands.

  “Florette,” he says, “what are you doing?”

  “You mean what am I doing here?”

  “Are you all right?” he says.

  “No, I am not all right,” she says. “But I am never all right, as you know, so that doesn’t matter.” Her voice, with that slight Old World accent, the Austrian frosting on her American cake, always intrigued him because it reminded him, he confessed to me once, of mine, but it wasn’t mine—not my thick country-flavored way of speaking, not at all, but just a foreignness, do you know? Something out of the ordinary. “I need to speak with you, Manny,” she says.

  A27300. Mindlessly touching her wrist.

  “This morning?” he says. “On this day of all days? I have to go up . . .” In his pocket, the glass shard. He touches it, touches it again, leaves it alone, touches it.

  “Precisely because it is this particular morning I must speak to you,” she says.

  “Speak then,” he says, going to his closet to fetch his special robes for the service.

  “To your face, please, not your back,” she says, and he turns to see her sitting up on the sofa, her face all splotchy with the crying she has done.

  “Florette, I must get dressed. The cantor is waiting, the congregation is waiting.”

  “They’ll wait, they have patience. I, however, lost my patience last night, Manny. I had my dreams again.” She runs her hand nervously across her tear-smeared face, a pale face, but her hair dark like no one else’s in his life, so that she always appears to him more fragile than the rest of us, because our red complexions make us seem healthy, like survivors, when the joke is that she is the only actual survivor he knows. Another glimpse of A27300.

  “I’m sorry, so sorry,” he says, laying his robes aside on the sofa and sitting down next to her, rubbing her hands.

  “I can’t go on,” she says.

  “You must take the medication, Florette. Doctor Mickey knows what he’s doing. You said it helped you before, so you must have stopped.”

  “I did,” she says. “Oh, you’re so smart, aren’t you?”

  But just how smart—he hears my voice in his head—we’ll find out, won’t we? Then he says out loud, “It’s not a matter of smart or dumb. It’s what’s necessary.”

  “And you know that, of course.”

  In his head, running beneath the gathering storm clouds, words and sentences rush around like picnickers about to be scattered by the crash of thunder, the threat of the lightning bolts. Words, sentences—she’s saying things Maby has also said over and over. Why doesn’t she say something different? Why aren’t any of them ever different? And with his mouth he says, “I have never tried to put anything over on you, I have never pretended to know more than you, I have only tried to use the little I know and feel is right to help you through your troubles. And I would ask, isn’t that the truth? Except you might take it as my way of trying to make you bend too much and admit that I know more than you. You, Florette, know more in your bones than anyone here”—and he jerked his head up to the ceiling—“more than I’ll ever know in my life, no, let me change that, more than I hope ever to learn the way you learned it. I have some skills, I have managerial skills, but you have knowledge, which is a lot more than skill ever will be. I stand in awe of your knowledge, my darling, but you could pick up a few skills to manage what you know.”

  You don’t think, Mrs. Pinsker, maybe, a man and a woman talk in such a way, sitting there on the couch, he holding her hands, she’s touching her cheek to his shoulder, resting it there a minute, then looking up, around, and then back again goes the cheek? You don’t think this is the way it happened? But so how can we know anything except either what we’re there to see for ourselves or what somebody tells us? You think I’d make something like this up about my own son? No, he told me all, as I told you, and so maybe he changes a little bit here, a little there, but then who doesn’t? We all change things even as they’re happening to us, and the changes get changed, and here we are, and somebody is telling somebody else about us sitting here—the colored waitress, maybe, my Spanish driver—they could change things too, you know, and would we still be ourselves? I don’t know, darling, and I don’t want to know, because all I am doing is telling you and that’s enough for me.

  So I’m telling you more, and they’re sitting on the couch. “I wish,” Florette is saying, “I wish I could manage.” And her eyes explode into tears, like water from the desert stone, wetting his cheek, his shoulder, his shirtfront—and he reaches over and dabs at the water with his robes.

  “You will handle it,” he says. “You will. You are a . . .”

  “Call me a survivor and I’ll scream, Manny,” she says.

  “Don’t scream, please,” he says. “I’m getting a headache.”

  And he gives her a little pinch on her side.

  “Very funny,” she says. “Even on a day like this, with a person like me, you can still make a joke?”

  “That’s how I get by sometimes,” he says. “But I want you to know I’m sorry the dreams came back, that you couldn’t sleep. Me, you know, I sleep only on special occasions myself. Soundly, that is.”

  “I do know,” she says. And she’s calmed down all of a sudden, thinking, of course, of what he’s referring to.

  “We should meet again soon,” he says. “After the holidays.”

  “I want to if you do,” she says.

  “Of course I do,” he says. “It’s a . . . special thing for me, Florette. No matter what anyone else would say, it’s something I must do. For myself, and, I hope, for you.”

  “For me, of course.” She’s sitting up now, touching her cheek to his, quick once like a bird, and then she’s holding out his robes for him, helping him to dress for the service.

  “Rabbi? Manny?”

  A knock at the door and a voice calling from the other side.

  “It’s the cantor,” he says to Florette. “He’s been wondering.” He clears his throat.

  “I’m coming now,” Manny calls through the door. “Go on up.”

  He waits a good minute or two, his eyes fixed on Florette, and he reaches for her hand, and plants a kiss on her wrist just beside the numbers tattooed there so l
ong ago, and then he opens the door and urges her to go up ahead of him.

  “Happy New Year,” he says.

  Turning back she asks, “You’re joking again?”

  “I’m not joking. I want us to have a good new year.”

  “Then we’ll have one,” she says.

  “It’s not always in our power,” he says.

  She blows him a little kiss. “Save your wisdom for the people upstairs,” she says. “Save your kisses for me.”

  And she dashes up the hall toward the stairs.

  Picture now the rabbi and what do you see? He’s as helpless as a little boy who’s just gotten his first kiss and the little girl has run off into the park, and the glow of it is spreading, spreading across his face, down his neck, his chest, down below, and he’s glowing all over and amazed, amazed, that anything could ever make him feel such a way. And he, this rabbi you’re looking at, he’s also a man of experience, a husband, a father, the counselor of I don’t count anymore how many troubled people from the congregation—and if you don’t think I hear sometimes about those, then how did I find out about Florette in the first place?—and as he walks slowly toward the other end of the hall from where Florette has now vanished, up the stairs, walking toward the door that will lead him up to the dais where he will conduct the holy day service, he is counseling himself, saying, get a hold, Manny, take it easy, you may be feeling for a moment like a young boy, but young you are not, and if you make a fool of yourself what will that do to your power?

  This, finally, was the thing lying most heavy on his mind: the power, the people he could move and the money he could make and the feelings he could drape over himself like the robe he wore as heavily as the thought of losing control. If that went, what could he do for me, the grandmother, the wife, the daughter, himself? Not to mention all the people upstairs who depended on him to remain nothing but what he was supposed to be. To them he was “the rabbi,” not a man finally but a function. Did he breathe? laugh? eat? drink? sleep? Like a doctor or a lawyer he had to be there when they had certain kinds of trouble, certain varieties of happiness. But because they expected more from him, they allowed him—as a man—less.