Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  “Better of course.”

  “Of course better. You can even suggest that it wasn’t better? Here we lived, there we died. And if we didn’t die, we came here. So what is better? Living or dying?”

  “Living, living, of course. But I got to laugh, Minnie, because a few minutes ago you were telling me it was better to die in a stream than live with a boy who smelled like a dog.”

  “You got to laugh? So laugh.”

  “I’m laughing, darling, I’m laughing.”

  “With your face straight you laugh?”

  “I’m laughing inside.”

  “Who could tell? Darling, who could tell?”

  “More coffee, ladies?”

  “Saved by the bell.”

  “Saved from what, I’ll ask.”

  “Ladies?”

  MY POOR JACOB, strong-backed son of a country hostler, he felt weighed down by the city at first, like the whole of New York was a wagon tipped over in a ditch and he had to crawl under it and lift it on his back. He worked days, he worked nights. And he worked Saturday, on the Sabbath, and this changed everything.

  This, you cannot do, the hump-shouldered little rabbi from our street came all the way up to our floor to say. It must have been important to him—he never climbed stairs, except down and up into his study in the basement of the little shul down the block.

  “And what is that?” Jacob asked, a man who was not used to taking guff from either oxen or horses or men.

  “You must not work on the Sabbath.”

  “I am a poor Jew . . . and the Irishmen work Union Square on Saturdays and the working girls eat apples and oranges and bananas, and if I am not there they buy from the Irishmen.”

  “The goyim don’t work on Sunday. From you they’ll buy on Sunday. Theirs Saturday. Yours Sunday. And it all works out. It works.”

  “Except that all the gentile working girls are not working on Sunday, Rabbi. I’m there and there’s no one to buy.”

  “So sell to the Jews around here. You need Union Square only like a hole in the head.”

  “There are too many peddlers already on Rivington Street, Rabbi. And I’m the only one who works the square Saturday and Sunday.”

  “You work too much. Even the One Most High rested one day a week.”

  “He maybe had another income, Rabbi. I’ve only got what I make with my hands.”

  “You mock?” the little humpbacked rabbi said, waggling a finger at Jacob. Me, Minnie, I was over in the corner, pretending to fold clothes, but I was so upset by what I was hearing I couldn’t even find a seam. Little Manny stood at the window watching the birds. But he was listening. I could tell by the way he held his head that he was listening.

  “You mock the Most High?”

  Jacob turned his head aside, not wanting to quarrel. He was a good man, understood fruits and vegetables much better than the Torah, and knew what he had to do. “We were punished for living modern,” said the rabbi. “We destroyed the Tablets of the Commandments and wandered across the face of the earth. Break the Commandments, Jacob, and you, too, will wander. And your sons will wander.”

  “Rabbi,” Jacob said, as close to pleading as I ever heard him. “Don’t say such things to a working man. I’m going to wander up to Union Square, that’s where I’ll wander, so I can sell enough bananas to buy this boy a winter coat.”

  “Blasphemy,” the humped-over rabbi said with a snort like an old horse in freezing weather.

  Well, that autumn Jacob went to work on the Sabbath, and the rabbi was wrong. He didn’t wander. He didn’t have time left enough to wander. He went out that next Sabbath, Manny trailing behind, and never came back—not the same way. But whether because of God or a taxicab, I can’t figure.

  It was a cold day. They were both snorting and huffing like horses, and the horses they noticed here and there among the motorcars and trucks, these animals stood like statues with steam rising from them after a sun-melting morning. Except that the sun did not shine so strong. It rose over the tenements on the east side of the avenue like a little light bulb from which some clumsy woman in cleaning had torn off the shade. It glowed, but it didn’t give heat.

  And it was a windy day. Winds splashed back and forth across the street, snatching sounds from here and there along with newspapers and box tops, bloody scraps of butcher paper, old tin cans, pieces of clothing, cloth. It was our, his, first autumn in the city—all of us, even little Manny who didn’t remember nothing except the sea voyage, we missed the way the earth smelled in the various seasons, the turning leaves, the pleasures that come after a harvest, the rest before the bitter winter, the way the clods frozen after the first frost crumble underfoot, and the color of the sky itself, a thin layer of white fleecy undercoating that it appeared to have slipped on overnight to guard against the cold. Here was the city, bloody butcher paper curling around their ankle tops.

  “Can he hurt you?” Manny told me later he had asked his father as they trudged up the avenue. Uptown a taxi was taking on passengers, a mother, a father, a hawk-nosed boy, a red-haired girl, at a fancy hotel.

  “Who, boychick?” Jacob wondered. “Who could hurt me?” Big-boned, black-bearded Papa, a man invulnerable. That was how Manny saw him, so why should he ask such a question? Because the rabbi had scared him. That’s how the little humpbacked man worked, with fear.

  “He said I’ll wander. I don’t want to wander, Papa. What’s wander, Papa?”

  “Wandering is walking,” Jacob explained, “walking without no place to get to. But you and I don’t wander. We’re walking to pick up the cart, then the produce, and then up to the square.”

  “We’re not going to shul, Papa?”

  “When did you figure it out, boychick? No, not today. Tomorrow, in the morning, we can go if you miss it. Me, I don’t miss it. I’m glad I have a reason not to go. All those men humped together like cattle in a barn. Maybe in the cold weather it feels good. But I remember it mostly for the heat. What for? What for, boy? In the old country it went well for those who believed it, but here it’s a new world, a free country. And I’m free to walk in the other direction from the rest of them.”

  “Why was Mama crying, Papa?”

  “Crying? From the joy of it. From slicing onions for the eggs. Because she once had a dead dog and she remembered today was its birthday. She remembered her dead dog.”

  “Can I have a dog, Papa?”

  “In the house? No, no, darling, but sometime like your little friend Arnie you’ll have pigeons.”

  “Really, Papa?”

  “Really.”

  Here was the store yard where Jacob kept his cart. If he had had a horse he would have hitched the animal to the front. As it was, he stood in front of it and pulled while he directed Manny to push from the rear. In a moment they had it rolling up the alley and out onto the street. Jacob sweated despite the cold, and was thinking to himself—and how do I know? Here I’m guessing, because I know him so well I can figure it—thinking to himself, I’m working, and with every foot forward toward the square I’m stepping on the remains of a Commandment—and this was even before they stopped at the wholesale place to pick up the day’s fruit.

  “Reading changed my life,” Jacob was saying to Manny as they hauled their full load. “It was an accident, but it changed everything. Who would say that a hostler’s son would ever learn to read Hebrew, let alone German and now English?” And how he told him an old story, one I’d heard from him a million times but still a charming story.

  “One spring,” he said, “we hauled a load of hay into the city and the wagon broke down and we had to wait for the repairs and for two days I had nothing to do but talk to the students drinking tea in the café where my father made me sit while he watched the carpenter work on our cart. It was a game. They showed me letters, taught me a few words, and I listened while they discussed such matters as the origins of creation and the movement of the stars. That was the first time I heard about the lost continent. I love to talk a
bout it because it reminds me of that wonderful stay in the café where for once in my life I could pretend that I was a student and not a wagon man’s boy. But you, Manny, you will become a fine student, and perhaps make a living at it too. After all, this place is better than Atlantis, because it’s a found continent, not lost. Here’s a curb now, come around to the side there, watch your step, don’t spill no apples, don’t catch your foot. So. Now it didn’t take you no two days to learn to read, did it, boychick? No, it took one. You’re a little genius. And this new world will open up for you. One day I’ll have a store. And we’ll work together, Bloch and Son. Or sons, maybe. Who knows but what sometime a brother and even a sister might come into the world? Would you like a brother? Uh-huh. But not a sister? Oh, pupkin, the things you’ve got to learn! Watch it now! There, up, hup, there! Pretend we’re back on board that ship—remember how the sailors!—there!”

  And Manny looks up toward his father over the orbs of oranges, apples, lemons, over the half-moon clasps of bananas, touching a place here, a piece there as if for luck, thinking of seabirds, of the roll and swell of the waves, confusing them with the fields of waving wheat he’s heard so much about.

  The two of them walking, father and son. Approaching the square.

  And in the distance, the wind whirls away with the sound of

  bells bells bells bells bells

  I can hear them clanging still, and the father, sweating, stops in mid-step, looking down at the cobblestones. Cars chug around them. Father panting. “Hard work, eh, pup?” he says to the boy.

  The boy nods, pressing up against the cart out of fear of the passing machines.

  And closer now the clanging—wavering in air, fading in, out, out, in, out

  BELLS BELLS bells bells bells BELLS BELLS

  as father and son halt in their passage. In the middle of Fourteenth Street. And from the east comes a clopping, clopping, clopping, a truck hauled by a horse of

  GRUENBERG’S DAIRY

  and from the west, now they can hear it, the

  BELLS BELLS BELLS

  of the fire truck.

  Fire somewhere in the city! Man and boy glance about, and the man looks down, as if peering beneath the cobblestones. “This land once belonged to the Indians,” he says.

  The boy is scared by the noise, by the rushing passage of vehicles. Hugging closer to the cart, his nose pierced by the cold odors rising up from the fruit, he fixes his eyes on his father. And thinks: Why isn’t he moving?

  And who knows why not? Who will ever know why not? Was it his heart? Had something torn loose in his chest? So he was resting there in the middle of the rushing chaos? Or was he lost in a dream of the Atlantis he always talked about, stopped there in the middle of traffic—dreamer and hardworking peddler all in one, poised in his crossing to the other side where he would take up his stand, would have taken up his stand, in competition with the hustling Irishmen?

  “Beneath these stones,” he was saying.

  “Papa.”

  “Beneath these stones . . .”

  BELLS

  BELLS

  BELLS BELLS BELLS

  and the forceful forward clop-clop-clop of the rushing onward wagon of

  GRUENBERG’S DAIRY

  and from the east and from the west the

  BELLS BELLS BELLS BELLS BELLS

  and ahead of the fire truck the taxicab pushed almost on the sound, the way a leaf gets pushed ahead of a wave of wind.

  Was it Jacob’s heart? We never knew. He never had had no trouble, but it could have been trouble then, from the hauling, the lifting. He could have been standing there to rest until he felt he could get moving again. Or it could have just as easily been his mouth. May he rest in peace, he had a mouth, he had an imagination, and he was talking to the boy, talking to him about Atlantis this, Atlantis that, and then it was too late to move, because here came from the east end of the street the dairy truck, and he didn’t dare try to rush with the cart and the fruit and the boy to the other side, and from the west-end direction comes the taxi and the fire truck behind it, and the taxi driver flies into a panic, and he hears the big bells and the machine behind him, what does he do? He swerves to the left—here, I have a lipstick, somewhere in my bag, here, give me a napkin.

  So you see what happens? The fire truck nudges the taxi and the taxi swings to the left just ahead of my Jacob and Manny and the cart, and the truck coming from the east, the horse from the truck goes into a fit, jumps, what do you call it?—rears up, and the entire wagon tilts over on top of my Jacob. Oi, can you just see it? Such a thing, such a mess! The wagon spills over him like a wall of falling bricks! And, I’m telling you, what do we see now? We see a crash of truck and splintered wood and moans we hear, and shouts, and the horse, it’s screaming like a man, and there’s bottles all over, smashed, broken milk bottles, and a big lake of milk spreading out underneath everything, fruit and fruit, like little stepping-stones in a lake of milk, and my little Manny picks himself up where he got knocked halfway across the street and he’s cut and he’s bleeding, not major just minor, but he’s lucky to be alive because the fire truck kept on rushing right past, bells clanging, to the fire in the east—BELLS BELLS BELLS bells bells bells—it trails away in Manny’s ears, and then he hears the screaming.

  “Papa!” he yells in a rush across the lake of milk that’s spread out from beneath the wreck of truck and cart. Stepping-stones of fruit trip him and he stumbles.

  And picks himself up.

  There is screaming.

  And he sees the gathering crowd, the mob.

  And he hears the screams rise higher and higher in pitch until

  Pap!

  a snap, a crack of a pistol. Birds scatter up all around and the horse sinks into a heap of itself.

  Oi, and then what he sees next!

  Oi, and then what he sees!

  No boy should have to see.

  No man should have to see.

  No one in the world should have to see.

  But he sees it. Him. His father lying stretched out in the pond of milk, fingers curled around half-moons of yellowish-brown sheaths from which the fruity pith has been squashed as flat as his chest. His eyes are open—looking directly upon Atlantis.

  What does his son do next? What would anyone do? He doesn’t know what to do. And as the crowd follows the sound of the moaning—before the horse’s, now his—he kneels on his father’s awful chest, and then reaches out into the mess of milk and muck and—I’m telling you, and afraid I’m telling—the blood that spilled there, too, and up comes his hand with a piece of six-pointed glass.

  “Here, give me another napkin, I’ll show you what.”

  “And this is how he lost his father?”

  “Yes, so look.

  “With the lipstick, it’s messy. But I’m glad I use lipstick so I could show you. Today they don’t use it—Sarah wouldn’t be caught dead wearing lipstick, and your grandchildren, besides your one the youth leader, the girls? Well, whatever. Here. Look. The star. The six points. And if you can believe that glass shatters in a design—and who can say it can’t because it did—then listen to what happened next.”

  THE WAY A life breaks. The way life goes. The pieces. The pattern. What happens next.

  He’s now kneeling, my Manny, and now he’s crying, moaning, the shock has hit him, the shock is setting in. And around him he hears voices—oi, they will become so familiar!

  “Help him up, you idiot!” A man’s big booming order.

  “Pa, he won’t . . .”

  “Help him, damn it!”

  “It was the cabby’s fault, it was the cabby, the cabby,” he hears a woman jabbering alongside the raging of the men.

  “Help him. Oh, you schmuck, here!”

  And a strong arm lifts under his and Manny is up on his feet, as loose-limbed as a puppet from a puppet show in his misery, his shock.

  “Your father?” the man asks.

  Manny looks up to see this balding man in a
fine suit and overcoat, nose like a hawk, eyes like a fox, and the arm that holds Manny belongs to this man.

  “His father, all right,” a taller, younger man, also balding, says.

  “How are we doing here?” comes a cop along to say.

  And Manny, who has never stood so close to a policeman before, studies his uniform, such heavy blue cloth, shining gold buttons, and then becomes distracted by the approaching sound of

  bells bells BELLS BELLS BELLS

  as the ambulance roars in from the west.

  And the man takes him by the arm away from the crowd, the policeman accompanying them, and they ask where he lives and he gives them his address.

  And they open the door of the stalled taxi and help him into the back seat while they go on talking, talking outside.

  And he sits in the cab staring straight ahead at the back of the seat in front of him, and he loses himself in the smell and design of the upholstery, like a snail’s whorl of a shell, spinning around and around into a tighter and tighter knot, and he’s fingering the star-shaped shard until all the doors appear to open at once. A man climbs in, the smell of the street on his coat, the younger man in a suit, a big boy, with a high, nasal voice, and the woman, still jabbering—“Shut up already!” says the hawk-nosed man; “Shut up—don’t you dare!” the woman says back to him.

  And he sniffles in the woman’s perfume and the odor of a cigar as the hawk-nosed man lights up.

  And only then, his fingers responding to the sharp-pointed star, does he turn away from the pattern on the upholstery, lift himself up and out of the pattern—this was how he put it to me—and look to his right, on the seat to his right, and there he sees the little girl. When she got there he doesn’t know. She could have been there the whole time or she could have climbed in with her parents, her brother. But nonetheless there she is. Pale, pink, freckled face. Hair like wispy reddish cotton candy from a carnival, all done up in a knot. Like a doll’s hair. A little skirt she wears beneath her tiny fur wrap. White-stockinged feet that don’t reach to the floor of the cab. And as he stares at her something happens in her eyes—and she wiggles her nose in disgust—and that’s when he smells it too, and looks around for the source. An odor like the horse in its dying. Garbage. Manure. Filth of the gutter. And only when she opens her eyes wide—if a girl that small can feel horror, show horror—and points a finger at him, and cries out, only then, just as he lets another one go in his pants, does he understand what has been done to him, and what he has done.