Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  You’re shaking your head. You’re speechless.

  But he told me what the pigeon said to him. And he felt faint, everything went black, and the next thing he knows he’s back out on the street, walking toward our building. He was, at this time, let me see . . . fourteen. And he didn’t tell me, not then. Later. Usually I’ve been telling you what I didn’t know until later. But here I wanted you to see that for years I lived in ignorance of my son’s thoughts and needs. Only later did he begin to tell me everything. When he started writing letters from the school in Cincinnati, that’s when it started, the telling of the truth. This first time with the vision he kept it secret, to me at least. The old rabbi he told. But not his mother. No. This was before the news came from Cincinnati. Years before. And then came the offer.

  “Oh, you’re going too fast. You’re making time fly. Like the pigeons you’re making it, Minnie.”

  “So can you tell me where did the years go, anyway? I wish only they had nested up on the roof like the pigeons. Then we could visit them. Then we could see.”

  “It moves so fast.”

  “It moves fast all right. It moves like those movies you see sometimes on the television, the ones about growing flowers, all speeded up, and clouds sometimes, clouds moving so fast it looks like the world is spinning away.”

  “Time stopper they call it. I remember from Rick my grandson’s school.”

  “Not time stopper, Mrs. Pinsker. Time stoppage. The world spins, the clouds rush along, the flower grows, one two three four five.”

  “Stopper, stoppage. It moves, don’t it? It spins so fast. And now you got to wait a minute for me. It’s my turn for the bathroom.”

  “Some things you can’t stop, nu?”

  SO, MORE ABOUT the birds?

  More about the bird: another bird. The second time this happened he had just fought his battle with the rabbi about the offer to attend school in Cincinnati. “You want to go to the Union of All Hebrews?” The old man had raised his voice full of taunt and disparagement. “This is a school for goyim. Classes they have in English. You want to study Talmud in English? Go read a comic book, boychick.”

  He reached over to pinch Manny’s cheek, but the boy ducked. “You want to read a comic book? Go ’head, go ’head.”

  “I’m sure they read in Hebrew,” Manny said.

  “Goyim can learn Hebrew, too. Does that make them good Jews?”

  “I’m not a good Jew. I’m a good student.”

  The humped-up little man clapped his hands to his face and slid back in his chair. Here in this greenish light of the basement office my Manny always felt as though he were sitting in a fishbowl. And here was the big fish squirming at the antics of the little.

  “You’re a good student. But you’re stubborn like your father.”

  “Please don’t talk about my father. What’s this got to do with my father?”

  “What’s it got? It’s got plenty.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with my father,” Manny said.

  “It doesn’t?” the old man said. “It most certainly does. It has to do with saving your father. Your father died like a goy and you’re helping to make him a Jew. Who knows where he is now, his soul, spinning around and around in the smoke, burning in Gehenna, because he died like a goy on the Sabbath, and praying, he is praying, you will help to make him leave his pain. Do you understand? And you go to Cincinnati, go to study with the goyish Jews, the Jews who aren’t Jews, and he’ll spin around another thousand years, because what’s time to him when he died the way he died? So you’ll go, and he’ll spin, and he’ll burn, and he’ll . . .”

  “You’re crazy,” Manny told him, enjoying the full breath of their argument. “You don’t talk like a rabbi, you talk like a priest.”

  “A what?”

  “You heard me.” Manny stood up.

  “A what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Get out, you forsaken little bastard,” the old man said. “Out!” He stood up and waved a hand at the boy. “Out!”

  “I’m not a bastard,” Manny said, moving toward the door.

  “Your father died like a goy!” the old man said. “And you’re a stinking little bastard not worth my time.” And this man hurled his miserable little body at Manny and struck him on the shoulder. “Out!”

  “Don’t do that to me!” Manny said. And he without thinking slapped the little old man on the side of the head and knocked him against his desk. Books flew everywhere, pencils, pads, pens, ink bottles went flying.

  Out the door, up the steps to the street, running back toward our building, Manny kept going. If at that hour I had been home already, and not still working my fingers to the bone at the shirt factory, I would have heard the downstairs door fly open and slam shut behind him, and I would have heard him pump his legs, pump, pump, pump his way up the stairs, all the way up to the fourth floor, fifth, past our door, and up again, higher, to the sixth. And he’s climbing, not only climbing stairs, he’s climbing years, he’s going back in time and he’s going ahead in years, pump, pump, pump, pump go his legs, his heart, and he’s thinking, Papa! and he’s thinking, you worked! You worked so hard! And he’s thinking, how could he say that? that rotten old bastard, that slump! And he’s thinking, he’s helped me, helped me so much, but how could he say that? How? How? And he’s reached the top floor, and he’s wrenching open the door to the roof, and he’s thinking, what for? What for? Oh, Papa, Papa, and he’s feeling as though his heart has been drained of blood, now an empty shell, now an empty bottle, a cracked, shattered glass bottle of a heart, and he reaches into his pocket, and he feels the shard, and he stops short of the edge, looks down, breathing, breathing, and looks up, looks around at a sound, sees Arnie’s pigeon coop, hears the cooing and gurgling of the nesting birds, and he steps back from the edge, catches his breath, the brat, I would have said if I could have seen him then, the little brat, daring the air beyond the edge to lift him somewhere without pain, daring it, saying, I dare you, lift me, I’ll leap into your arms, you air! and finally, stepping back again, back again, and lifting his head to the horizon, seeing the spires of the greater city beyond the flat roofs of our neighborhood, looking east toward the river where our boat first docked, southeast toward that island, that pier in the bay, and west toward Cincinnati from where the call had come, and north again to the greater city, the towers, the spires. Hands in his pockets, fingers of one hand curled around the shard, breathing hard, still breathing hard, and the stink of the street rising up to his nostrils, the stink of the pigeons in his nose. A wind coming up from the river. Heat of the roof in the late afternoon sun. Sun sloping toward the west. The street below, throbbing beneath his eye, the street beating like a heart—thunka-tunk, thunka-tunk, calling up to him, saying, want me? Want me?

  It happened then. Again. It happened first as a speck in the sky, first a speck, then a bird swooping up and then swerving around, and stooping down toward the neighborhood, past the higher roofs, toward our roof, the pigeon from on high, swerving in toward him, fixing its eye on him as it floated past, and opening its beak to say, You want to be both rich and blessed? as it sailed past on its broad, white wings untouched by city soot.

  “I d-do,” stuttered Manny to himself aloud.

  Follow me then, the bird said, turning around and swinging by the western side of the roof again, then swooping up over his head and swinging past the sun, making a shadow as it swerved past the sun, and then down again, toward the south side, and around again, where it feathered its wings and landed atop the coop.

  You want? it asked him.

  He knew the voice. He fell to his knees.

  “I want.”

  Then, I say, follow me, it told him, cocking its head first to one side, then the other.

  “Where?” Manny asked.

  Where? the voice said. Where? Watch!

  And now the other birds inside the coop fluttered their wings all at once, all together, like a chorus line waving a
rms, legs, and then like an orchestra behind a solo singer the birds commenced to coo and gurgle and bleat and bleep and blutter-bluster, birdlike, birdlike, but loud, louder than he had ever heard, and the pure white bird, who spoke with his father’s voice, gave a flutter, gave a shudder, and pushed itself off into the air from the roof of the coop, soaring higher, higher toward the west. And soon it was no more than a moving object as large as his hand, and then as small as his thumbnail, and then as tiny as a dot on a clean white piece of paper, and then it was gone.

  My Manny lingered awhile on the roof before he realized that he was still on his knees, kneeling. So then he arose and walked slowly toward the door, and he descended slowly the height of the entire building, down the flight after flight of steps to the street, and he met his friend Arnie on his way out of the building, and Arnie took one look at him and bumped up against the side of the hall.

  “Oh, my God!” he said and nearly dropped his clarinet case.

  That night, I was stirring the soup, and in the door comes Manny, his hair turned almost completely white.

  “THAT’S HOW HE got his white?”

  “That’s how. White as snow from that day on. Except for the little dark streak down one side. They missed that part.”

  “They?”

  “You know. Whatever. The way it turned. It turned all over except for that little streak.”

  “It looks very becoming. I always thought that.”

  “It makes him look distinguished now. But at sixteen it didn’t seem that way. I worried he might be upset.”

  “You took him to a doctor?”

  “Why should I have done that? He wasn’t sick. He was scared. His hair changed. This doesn’t happen every day, but it doesn’t mean he’s a sick person. In fact, after this happened he seemed to me a lot happier. ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘I have made up my mind. I’m going to the Union of All Hebrews. I’m going to get myself a good education and I don’t care what name anybody puts on it.’”

  “A smart boy.”

  “He was always a smart boy. He was always smart. But I worried, you know, I always worried about just how smart he was.”

  “Ladies?”

  “Oh, you surprised me. You sneaked up so quiet I didn’t even suspect.”

  “More coffee, ladies?”

  “More coffee, of course. Mrs. Pinsker?”

  “For me, sure, I’ll have coffee, thank you, yes.”

  The waitress stepped back from the table.

  “I don’t need it. Already I’ve got a coffee lake inside me. But I don’t want to hurt her feelings.”

  “That’s why you drink more coffee?”

  “That’s why I’m drinking this cup. She’s very nice. She caters to us.”

  “She has nothing better to do with her time. It’s not so busy now just before dinner.”

  “It’s that late?”

  “It’s that late.”

  “After this cup I should go home and make dinner. But tonight I could be a little late. I eat with nobody but myself.”

  “We should eat together here.”

  “Why don’t we do that? The car is going to wait for me no matter what. It can wait a little longer. You think it’s good here? Here I never thought of eating.”

  “It’s the mall. It couldn’t be good, it couldn’t be bad.”

  “You’re right. The mall is the mall. But we could try it.”

  “Sure we could try it. I have nobody at the house now neither.”

  “So when she comes with the coffee we’ll ask her for a menu.”

  “Sure, sure, we’ll splurge, we’ll tell her. We’re having dinner. She’ll like it. It will give her something to do.”

  “You don’t think she has a family of her own to think about? She’s going to be happy because we’re staying around to eat? Don’t kid yourself. I bet she’s a grandmother, just like the rest of us.”

  “You want to ask her to sit down and tell us her story?”

  “Don’t be so sarcastic. I’ll bet she has a story just like I do.”

  “About her son the minister?”

  “Or her son the doctor.”

  “Or the janitor.”

  “Don’t be so cruel. There’s enough cruelty in this world. We all got grandchildren.”

  “Excuse me. I was making a joke. It’s true. All grandmothers got children.”

  “I’m glad she didn’t hear you. Some joke.”

  “You’re miffed because I make a joke, Minnie? You would prefer that we don’t eat together?”

  “Sit, sit. I prefer that we eat. I don’t want to eat alone. I’m enough alone. I was enough alone ever since Manny went to Cincinnati. I was alone. Mrs. Tabatchnick was alone. Mine only went to Cincinnati. Hers went to Europe already. To the war.”

  “To the war?”

  “To the war.”

  BUT THERE WAS a war on in Cincinnati, too, let me tell you. Manny took the train west, and it was a dark ride, at night, through the cities with the lights browned out, through the dark fields, the woods, over the eastern mountains. He felt so strange. Never had he been west of Sixth Avenue, and here he was on the other side of the mountains. For him it could have been at that time almost California, nearly Japan. But of course as it turned out he didn’t have to travel very far at all to begin his education into foreign ways. No, sir. No, sirree. It began on the train—he saw young boys his own age in uniform. Soldiers home from war or on their way to war. And for the first time in his life he paid attention to what was going on in the world outside. Before that, it had been his studies and Mama, Mama and his studies. So if in Europe they had been killing the Jews, that was in Europe, and he lived on Second Street, New York City, America. He had been born in the old country, of course, and the old rabbi had taught him in the style of the old country. And from studies to Mama, and Mama to studies, that you could say was living like he had never left the old country. But there was a part of my boy that was—still is—so American I can hardly tell you. Even if he lived the old country life he was living it on Second Street, in New York—and when he opened his eyes and saw what was going on around him, when he saw the soldiers, and talked to them about the war, and picked up—at long last, he put it in a letter to me soon after he got to Cincinnati—a newspaper it was like a curtain falling away between his eyes and the world. He saw, he saw. For the first time he saw. He saw his own little world, and what a little puddle, as he put it, it was alongside the big sea. And by crossing the sea he could learn to see. Living in this country made it possible for him to throw off the old ways, the old cloak, he called it, and to make a way for himself that was more suited, more American, and also for him more comfortable, and, I think he always thought about others when he talked about this part of it, more useful. More useful to himself, more useful to others.

  Of course this doesn’t happen overnight. On a train ride. In the dark. But he sat up the whole night talking with the soldiers, and thinking. And he remembered how far he had come, the boat trip across the ocean he remembered, working with his father he remembered, the accident he remembered, his studies he remembered, even his mama he remembered. But now came the time in his life when he met new things, new ideas, new people, and he noticed the difference between what he remembered on the one hand and what he knew firsthand on the other in the present.

  Hitler? They talked about Hitler in the train in the dark.

  And the war, what war meant. These young soldiers talked—and some of them drank. They passed around a bottle. And my Manny drank with them. Before he never drank a drop, but on the train, in the dark, with the boys almost as young as he was, he drank. And they talked about the contribution, the effort they were making. And he kept quiet about what he was doing, but he thought to himself, he was going to make a contribution, every sip from the bottle he thought more about it, a contribution not just with his body but with his mind. He was going to study even harder, and he was going to change the lives of other people not by war but by peace. Not by deeds
of battle but by deeds of peace.

  You know years later, many many years later, I mean last month, just last month, when he was in the hospital, I was in the hall outside his room, he was sleeping, and she was off somewhere, and Sarah was in school, and I was talking to Sally Stellberg’s Doctor Mickey, you know, he’s so wonderful, he was always there, always ready to help, and what a relief it was to me to see him always there, let me tell you, so I was talking, and I said, Doctor Mickey, tell me, here is a man who has so much, he’s a scholar, a teacher and rabbi, he’s a businessman on the side, he’s got a beautiful wife—well, she is beautiful, with her face, with her hair, you’ve got to admit that—and a lovely daughter, and yet he always seemed lately so troubled, do you know what I mean? Isn’t it possible for a man to be happy? Isn’t it possible for a man to say to himself, look, I have a lot of wonderful things—and of course I didn’t even mention his mother, his dear mama who fed him and clothed him and cared for him all these years—why isn’t it possible for a man to be satisfied when he has so much?

  “If you could tell me, Mrs. Bloch, what makes a man satisfied,” he says to me, “then I could help many more people than I do with my prescriptions.”

  He’s such a wise man, Mrs. Pinsker. Our friend Mrs. Stellberg must be proud. Such a wise mind. Answers he doesn’t give. He makes questions.

  What satisfies a man? I was asking him. I was asking why my Manny never seems satisfied when he has all of the things a man could want. He wants, he wants. No matter what he’s got he wants more, more. And not in a selfish way. He’s never been selfish. He’s always given generously of what he has had, and he’s always gone out for more. In a way, the trip to Cincinnati, that was a way of getting more for me as well as for him. He wanted a better education. He wanted to open up the world for himself. And look where this ended for me. A lovely house where we all live together. A car and a driver of my own—this from the business, of course, and not from the temple. From the temple he has never taken, he has only given. You know that. Everybody knows that. You’re nodding, you understand. Good.