Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  “Thanks but no thanks. I’ll take the bus. I’m not used to such a style.”

  “It’s not a style, it’s a luxury. But don’t knock it. From my Jacob’s cart to this car with the driver, it’s a long way, and when you’ve traveled as far as I have you don’t turn down a ride.”

  “Me, I haven’t traveled so far. Just over the bridge.”

  “And a long way besides, for you, too, you’ll admit it if I push you, and for all of us, the girls turned into grandmothers, a far trip.”

  “All right, all right, Minnie, you’re convincing me. I deserve the car to drive me home, I’ll take the ride.”

  “I’m glad, darling. If it was afternoon maybe I could listen to you talk about the bus. But it’s dark now, and the air’s turning cold, the night is coming, it’s almost here.”

  “You’re here alone?”

  “I’m here alone.”

  MY MANNY, AND Maby, they’re on a trip to Israel, the middle of the East. And I’m the one in charge of Sarah who’s at school now, you know, up in the Green Mountains, at the Vermont college called something-ton or other, very small, very fancy, and very—you know—free, she tells me, or at least that’s the way she wants it to be. As to how free, we’ll see, we’ll see. You just missed her, actually. She drove down for the weekend in the little car, very small, very fancy, and not so free, that her father bought for her when she promised if she would go to this place that she would work hard and not forget about us. So the only time she’s here on a trip since school began it’s the middle of the week and her parents are away on a trip. She couldn’t have planned it better if she had planned it. She needed some things, she said, and goes into her room and starts packing jeans and sweaters and shoes and a load of bedding, and I’m saying, you need these things for school? You have these things for school, darling. And I’m trying to figure out what she’s doing, I can’t see so good now with the problem, like I told you on the telephone, so I have to lean over real close so I can see the packing, and she chases me away, she says, “Grandma, please leave me some privacy.”

  “Privacy, I should leave you?” I told her, “Darling, privacy you’ll get from me when I’m in my grave, God forbid, and for now I want to know what you’re doing. Your parents are away on their trip—they’re in Europe and Israel now, on a trip her doctor said would be good for her. So I’m in charge.”

  “Mama, you think you want to do this?” Manny asked me for about the tenth time before they left.

  “She’s in school, darling, and I’m down here. So if she has a problem up there she talks to people up there, and if I have a problem down here—because that’s what you’re asking, really, isn’t it?—I pick up the telephone and I call the doorman, and he calls for me whatever I need.”

  “So you’ll be all right?”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “I think that I must do this, Mama. The doctor thought that a change of pace would be good for her. And . . .”

  “Don’t explain no more,” I told him. “It will be good for her, it will be good for you. Take pictures. You’ll show me when you come back.”

  “And you promise,” he says, “you’ll keep up with your eye medicine so that you can see them?”

  “I promise, I promise.” I don’t tell him that I think it don’t matter no more the medicine. Because the specialists Doctor Mickey sent me to they’re already talking deteriorating nerves, and they want to try a beam, a this, a that, and we’ll see, I say, when my son comes back from his trip, we’ll see about putting a beam in my eye, see, and we’ll all be happy together. They like my spirit, they tell me, they laugh, they joke, they treat me royally, like I’m their own mother. I am your mother, I tell these doctors. I am all your mothers so you’d better be careful. And they laugh and laugh again, sweet boys, like your boy the lovely Doctor Mickey, Mrs. Stellberg, I’m sure.

  So Sarah picked through her things and packed up her things, and I said, “You’re taking all this up to school?”

  And she gives me a funny look, and a silence, and then she says, “Sure, Grandma.”

  You think I believe her? It’s warming up there, she needs more sweaters? In Vermont it’s spring almost and she needs sweaters? “So where are you going?” I ask her.

  “Back to school, Grandma,” she says. “I told you.”

  She’s always been an independent girl, Mrs. Stellberg. Very tough on her parents, a little tomboy sometimes, especially now she cut her hair so short when she came back from the first year at school, but I like to think she got it from all of us, from Jacob, me, the explorers who came from the Old World to the New, and from her father who went from here in the city to Cincinnati, and got his education, and came back and made a very good head of the congregation and then set up with the brother-in-law the new business, the holding company, and then the package factory, the boxes they make, the crates, the bottle tops, and then they bought the machines that make the bottles, and then they turned their barges around and sent them back to the ports and added to their fleet bigger boats for the ocean trips, I’m telling you, it’s growing and growing, whenever I turn around he’s buying something else, because they’re quite a team as it turns out, Mrs. Stellberg, the brother-in-law who doesn’t like the public so much but knows everything about business, and my Manny, who has such a good public presence, and people trust him, the ethics man, I’m so proud, the man in the plain black suit, he is up in the front, and even the fancy old men with their gray suits they never even sat with a Jewish person, let alone did business with them, they trust him too maybe because of his hair, and the quiet way he has, I don’t know, to me he’s my little Manny, and she, I was telling you about the granddaughter, she’s my little Sarah, except I hear her on the telephone she’s talking to a friend and can you imagine she says, “Hi, this is Sadie.”

  Sadie! “So who’s Sadie,” I say to her when she gets off the phone, and she jumps at me again, she shouts at me, “Grandma,” she shouts, “why don’t you let me live my life. You’re just like the rest of them!”

  “Just like the rest?” I said to her. “Of course I’m just like the rest, I’m your grandmother and I love you, and your father loves you”—oh, she made a face when I said that—“and your mother loves you”—and youch, another face—and I said, “So that’s the way I’m just like the rest of them. Me and the rest of them, we’re your family, we’re your own, and if we love you that’s not such a big crime, is it?”

  She looked at me with that funny squint, one I noticed early in her life would be her way of looking at things, and the way she’s standing, holding her head to one side, squinting, it’s not only her but somebody else in the family, not her mother, although she has her mother’s coloring and my coloring, and not her father, although she’s a little heavy in the hips and shoulders, a little stocky like him, but it’s the brother-in-law I see, the one I hardly know, the one who came back from the sea after the death of the Sporens together, that awful mess I told you about? Yes, I remember telling you, at another session of our grandmothers’ club, and she’s looking, looking, like a judge, or maybe like a wild animal who has just come out of the woods and sees a human being standing there and is wondering, is this person dangerous or does she want to play, and then she steps up to me and takes me around the waist and lays her head on my shoulder and says, “It’s not such a big crime, Grandma, no.”

  And the next thing, this tough cookie is shaking, quaking like a leaf!

  “What is it, darling,” I ask her, putting my hands on her head and pressing her even closer to my bosom. “Grandma hurt your feelings?”

  She just shakes and quakes, she can’t force herself to speak. Never as a little girl did she cry like this. Her mother never cried, and I think she learned from her mother somehow that crying was wrong. So she always bit her lip or pounded her hands together but she never cried.

  “Gr-randma!” she says, quaking, shaking, trembling.

  “There, there, darling,” I say, “tell m
e what’s wrong. Some boy?”

  But she says nothing more, just quakes, trembles, like a leaf.

  “Darling, you can tell Grandma, you can tell your bubba. You can tell.”

  She’s stuttering now, “N-no, I c-can’t, I c-can’t, Grandma,” and the next thing you know she’s pulling away from me, and she’s out the door.

  You didn’t see her on the elevator? or in the lobby? She left just a little while before you arrived. With the keys to her car still lying there on her unmade bed. And half the things she packed still sitting there on the floor. So she’ll be back sooner or later, if she really wants these things for school. Or whatever. Frankly, I don’t think that she knows what she wants. For a girl who’s had everything, toys, clothes, boys, friends, school, books, records, a car now, trips everywhere to Europe, she doesn’t know what she wants. She wanted a car, he gave her a car. Three cars the family has! And Jacob and I had nothing except the cart that he pulled like a horse all by himself! With little Manny, that last time, pushing from behind, of course. With little Manny, pushing—and he’s still pushing, pushing his way to the business he wants to make into something bigger than just in one country, because of the boats, he tells me when I inquire, because of the boats.

  So now here, look, she left papers, folders, notebooks scattered all over the place. Just before you got here I started to pick up. And this I picked up, this folder with the papers. So what is it? A school assignment? Let me see. Oi, I can’t hardly make out the letters at all. Last year I could see letters. Now to me they’re all blurry. I’m going to have to have the cataract operation he says. He, your Doctor Mickey. So until then you’ll have to tell me because I’m not blind yet, I don’t have to read by running fingers across the page. But what does it say? Read a little darling, be my eyes a while, and the cook will bring the food.

  “I’LL BE YOUR eyes for a while,” Mrs. Stellberg said. “And then I’ll be my own mouth and we’ll eat?”

  “You’re hungry? So we’ll eat.”

  “But first I’ll read. You don’t mind?”

  “You’ll read.”

  “I’ll read. But first I got to adjust my glasses here. Here. Now. Mr. Eskin, it says at the top, and then Language and Lit., and Personal Essay. Jewish Halloween, it says, by Sarah Bloch.”

  “So what’s a personal essay?”

  “You’re asking me, Minnie? I don’t have the daughter who goes to the funny school up in the country. You tell me.”

  “So don’t ask, Sally. Just read, why don’t you.”

  “I’ll read. Again. Jewish Halloween. Personal Essay. By Sarah Bloch.”

  “Sarah Bloch.”

  “Sarah Bloch. Here, can you at least see her name?”

  “It’s dim.”

  “It’s dim? It’s in big letters, practically in crayon.”

  “She writes her personal assignment in crayon?”

  “I didn’t say in, I said practically in.”

  “Practically in. Practically out. Read now darling before the food comes.”

  Putting on costumes has never been fun for me. Ever since I was a small child I always found that I had problems just getting dressed in my everyday clothes for school. As the daughter of our town’s rabbi, I was the object of a lot of close observation, or so I felt. Each morning I wanted things to be perfect, to dress perfectly, to know my lessons well, to talk without a stammer. Now I see that rather than call attention to myself as someone without a fault what I really wanted to do was to become invisible.

  “What? Invisible? This is about wanting to be invisible? Oi, the poor girl! The poor girl!”

  “I don’t think she’s so poor.”

  “Don’t be funny. So, go ’head. Read me the rest.”

  I learned this lesson well the evening of the annual temple Purim party my freshman year in high school. Rick Sommer, the temple activities director, liked a good party.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Stellberg, but just a little explanation. This is Rick, Rose Pinsker’s grandson, by the way, and a very nice boy, she tells me. So go on. Read.”

  He called Purim—which is a minor festival in which Jews celebrate their rescue from a murderous Middle Eastern tyrant by means of the loyalty of his wife, Esther, to them—Jewish Halloween. Because everybody gets dressed up in costumes based on the story from the Book of Esther.

  It’s a name I never liked. And I never liked the holiday for the reasons which I’ve already said. But Rick kept after me, as he often did for sometimes very little obvious reason. I think that he suspected something about the fears public events like these produced in me, and he had some strange thing of his own which made him want to tease me about it. Teasing, I suppose, if you want to take Freud as your expert, is sexual in nature. It’s a friendly accepted way of saying, I like you a lot and would like to make you feel the same. Except that it makes you feel uncomfortable. Because it’s dishonest. Because it covers over the sexual feeling with humor. Well, not that sex isn’t humorous—oh, is it ever! It’s a real joke, except . . .

  “This doesn’t bother you, Mrs. Stellberg, Sally, does it? The talk about sex, I mean?”

  “Sex never bothered me. Talk bothers me less.”

  “Good, I didn’t think so, but I wanted to check. After all, these are modern times. And this is what they write in college these days especially, you know, at that kind of place, an experimental college. A personal essay.”

  . . . somebody forgot the punchline. It just keeps going on and on.

  “Are you coming as Esther?” Rick said to me at a meeting of the Temple Youth, our group that was sponsoring the event. “No,” I told him, “I’m coming as her husband.” I didn’t know what I had said at first, but after a while with some help from a kid at school I figured it out. The night of the party was going to be bad enough because of the fact that I had decided I wasn’t going—coming—through the hassle of trying to look like a queen. I know I am an attractive girl and look a lot like my mother, and I have her coloring and her build. But I don’t feel inside what I appear to be because somewhere along the line I never learned how to act pretty. I could easily blame my mother for never transmitting this bit of knowledge along to me, but she had—has—her own troubles. My father wouldn’t know. He understands zero about girls, and I wonder how much he knows about anything outside of the Bible and his business. But that’s another story. Or is it? I don’t know yet where I fit in. But I was explaining, before I allowed myself to get sidetracked, about Jewish Halloween. Or maybe this is what the holiday is all about—confusing identities and the inability to heal anybody who has that problem including yourself.

  So here I was, trying to figure out what to wear to the costume party, when all of a sudden it occurred to me that I was telling Rick the truth. I didn’t want to go as the queen, I wanted to go as her husband, the king, or maybe her brother if she had one. But where was I going to get boys’ clothes? I knew boys from class, of course, but never very well. All they could do is look at me and see how pretty I was but they never let the me beneath my skin come out. They thought they were my friends but they were friends with the skin and bones of me only. I couldn’t go to them anyway because it wouldn’t be a surprise if I did. Word would get out quickly that the rabbi’s daughter was coming as a boy. I couldn’t use my father’s clothes either because he is broad enough but not tall enough, and anyway all he ever wears are those deadly black suits and white shirts. I wanted something a little flashy—something that would call attention to my new costume in a sharp way.

  So I had to go to Rick. And that was what got me into trouble. He was a college student who worked weekends at the temple and it worked out well for him most of the time because even though he was older and more responsible he was still young enough to know what kids are like and what they really want. Except in my case. I guess he never ran into anyone like me before. And I was after all the daughter of the rabbi, his boss. Well, foolishly, then, I went to him to ask for help.

  “Come on down to New Br
unswick,” he told me. “I have all my clothes there in my room. Take the bus down and I’ll drive you back.” So, foolish maiden that I was, I took the bus one Thursday after school, thinking that he meant to drive me right back. I went to his fraternity house, the Zebes, an old white house with pillars painted black and white so that it looked like a striped zebra. And I met him in the living room and he invited me upstairs to his room. It was just before the dinner hour by the time I got there, and the upper floor was deserted because most of the boys were down in the dining room. Upstairs it was quiet, dimly lighted, and smelled of aftershave and gym clothes, a funny mix.

  “Should I keep reading?”

  “What do you mean, should you keep reading? Of course you should keep reading. I want you should hide things from me? I knew maybe she was having trouble with a boy. I could hear something. I’m the grandmother. The mother can’t hear it. She’s too nervous, but how nervous we don’t yet know. But I am always here listening, like a rock is near the sea, and what washes over me washes over. I’m still here . . . So read . . .”

  As an only child I never lived with the mess of other people my age. Because I was so pretty I never had a lot of female friends. Girls not as good-looking didn’t like to have me around. Boys I knew a little better but still at a distance. Being the rabbi’s daughter didn’t help. I read a lot. I took guitar lessons. It helped to soothe me when I was alone, which I was a lot of the time, though my guitar caused me a lot of trouble on Yom Kippur one time! Being my mother’s daughter didn’t help either since she was usually alone in her own little world, and then she started talking about trying to write to keep herself happy in the same way that I tried to use the guitar. And maybe I learned that from her? From Maby? That’s her nickname, because as a child she always used to reply with a “maybe” whenever her parents asked her if she would do something. Maybe? Maybe.

  “What do you think of this?” Rick said after a few minutes of rummaging around in his closet. He was holding up a large turban that someone had worn once during a fraternity carnival.