Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  “Hey, perfect,” I said and tried it on. It was heavy, and I had to practice to keep my head from wobbling when I wore it. And while I gawked at myself he found a large pair of harem pants that could have been either for a man or a woman, and some wooden shoes.

  “All just right,” I said. “I’ll try this on.”

  “You better change in here,” he said. “The brothers will be coming up to use the bathrooms.”

  So he left the room and I pushed the door shut and went over to the mirror and took off my sweater and blouse and skirt.

  “This is for a school assignment? It’s funny talk for a school assignment. But then that place is a funny school. I don’t know, Mrs. Stellberg. It’s got markings on it? Her professor gave her a grade? You tell me. Here, let me see. Oi, I can’t hardly see the writing. So what does it say?”

  Everything would have been all right with Rick except that he came back in too soon. Or maybe he did it on purpose, it’s difficult to say. He came back in and saw me there in my panties and bra and he came up to me and put his arms around me and I could feel him next to me . . .

  “This is enough?”

  “No, it’s not, it’s not over. Keep reading. She’s upset and I want to find out everything why. If I can, which I can’t because you can’t know everything. But go ’head.”

  . . . and I felt cold all over and moved away from him and told him to please leave the room. Asked him, anyway. “Sorry,” he said. And he left.

  “Ah, so you see. He is a very nice boy after all. Nice to my Sarah. His grandmother would be proud. Excuse me. Read.”

  And I changed into the costume and saw that it would be fine, and changed back into my sweater and blouse. Rick was embarrassed when I told him that I was ready to go. He had made a pass at the rabbi’s daughter and he was sweating. But I told him not to worry and I chattered away on the ride home, as if I were the one who should have been nervous because I had made the misstep and not him. That incident made me wonder. About a lot of things. But this essay is supposed to center around the Purim party, Jewish Halloween, and so I’d better get to the night of the party.

  A springlike night, warm air, clear skies. I’m feeling wonderful as I step into my baggy trouser costume and fit the turban on my head. And then I hear Mother on the stairs and I remember that she is supposed to chaperone the party, and my heart sinks. There’s a noise in the hall as she bumps against a door. And she’s got to drive me there as well as take over the party? She’s knocking at my door, and then steps in before I invite her.

  “Hey, Mom,” I say. “Don’t I rate a little privacy?”

  “What’s the matter?” she says. “Are you a boy or something? I come in when I come in. So excuse me,” and she turns around and staggers back out . . .

  “Dad?” I’m calling through the house. He doesn’t answer but I find him in his study.

  “Dad? There’s going to be trouble.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Mom,” I tell him. “She’s supposed to be chaperoning this Purim party? And she’s . . .”

  “She’s what?”

  “You know.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do.”

  “Don’t tell me, darling, what I know and what I don’t. Now inform your mother that you’re ready and I’ll drive you to the party.”

  “You’ll drive?” I asked.

  “I’ll drive.”

  “And you’ll pick us up?”

  “If you can’t find another ride home, yes.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your costume looks good,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Maybe you’ll win a prize?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “They couldn’t give me one because I’m your daughter.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Poor girl. Always penalized.”

  He smiled, and I had to smile too. His eyes sometimes nearly hypnotize me that way, they are so powerful. And his hair. Even me, his daughter, can’t help but notice his beautiful white hair.

  “We’ll make it up to you,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “No, no,” he said. “I was just sitting here going over some travel brochures. All these years as a rabbi, I said to myself, and I’ve never been to Israel. What if we were all to go?”

  “That would be all right, I guess.”

  “You guess? You don’t know?”

  “I know it would be all right. I’d like that.”

  “Because who knows how long I’ll be a rabbi, yes? So I had better take a look around.”

  “What does that mean, Dad?”

  “What does what mean?”

  “About how long you’ll be a rabbi?”

  “Oh, darling, every year I think I want to quit. I’m just talking.”

  “But what would you do if you quit?”

  “Your uncle Mordecai wants me to come into the business full time,” he said. “And it’s a very tempting offer.”

  “Well, I think that you should do what feels right,” I told him.

  “Is that so?” he said.

  I nodded, feeling the turban wobble on my head.

  “That’s what you advise the rabbi to do?”

  I shrugged, holding the turban steady.

  “You look like a vizier,” he said. “Giving me advice from inside your crystal ball.”

  “What’s a vizier?” I asked.

  “An advisor to an Eastern monarch. Like Haman. So how come you didn’t dress like Haman?”

  “I didn’t want to be a bad guy,” I said.

  “You want to come as a good guy?”

  I nodded.

  “You give me good advice.”

  “Can I give you a little more?”

  “Sure, Mike,” he said, using an old expression I’ve heard Grandma say before.

  “Let Mom stay home and you come and chaperone.”

  He moved his beautiful white-haired head a little, as though some insect or tiny electrical shock had given him a jolt.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s got to do it.”

  “She’s got to? But what if she can’t?”

  “I’m not her father,” he said.

  “Neither am I,” I said.

  “Don’t be a wise guy,” he said, and looked down at the papers on his desk.

  “Please listen,” I said.

  “Get ready, I’ll drive you.”

  “That’s all?” I said.

  I went to get my coat and he fetched my mother. In the car on the way to the temple he smoked a cigar and Mother said nothing but I could smell her breath. Oh, the perfume of my parents it was lovely in that time. Zillions of kids had gathered in the hall by the time we got there. My father dropped us off. I had to help my mother to the door and I nearly lost my turban several times since I was using both hands to help her. It was like we were dancing.

  Inside, the real dancing had begun and I left Mother at the coatroom and went over to listen to the band. It was Barry Katz and his rinky-dink quartet, but I didn’t care because all I wanted was a lot of loud music to cover over the noise in my head. I don’t know what I was waiting for but I didn’t dance with anyone, I just stood there rocking until Rick came over and said hello.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I told him, “just fine.” But it wasn’t fine because out of the corner of my eye, I could see my mother standing at an angle over alongside the punch bowl, and I thought, you are really stupid, Sadie, that’s my nickname for myself that I invented, why didn’t you just suggest that your mother stay home and that Rick chaperone the whole thing? Isn’t that what he gets paid for? Except that he’s not an adult, my father would have said, and we need an adult there. And Mother is an adult? I would have said. And he would have gotten really angry. So here we are, me in my turban, and a lot of princesses around, and a lot of other Mordecais beside me, and a few mil
lion Hamans with dark thin mustaches and evil paint around their eyes, and our rinky-dink band was playing an old song, “Blue Suede Shoes,” and some people are rocking back and forth. And then it’s “Blue Moon” and Rick comes up to me and asks me to dance, and I can feel him against me and I can feel the metal-like coldness taking over in me again, but now there’s no place to run to since we’re here at the dance for a while and I feel sick because I want to say something to him but I don’t know the words.

  “Rick,” I say to him, just to say something, “don’t you think it’s funny that Purim really is like a Jewish Halloween?”

  And he sort of pulls his face back from mine, and his eyes do a funny thing—later I understood, or learned, that that was his way of thinking seriously about something—and he says, “Hey, you know, that’s cool, I never thought of that!” And he pulls me closer to him, because I guess by this time he had gotten over his fears of scaring me off, and gotten over his worries about trying something with the boss’s daughter, or maybe he even thought it would get him somewhere, trying something with the boss’s daughter. I don’t know. I might have found out a lot more about him, and about me, except that just then the music came to an end. “A break, guys and gals,” Barry Katz said into the microphone, in a phony style that he must have picked up listening to band music on the radio or television. Hamans are drifting by, and many many princesses. I’m beginning to have half a good time, despite everything. “Want some punch?” says Rick. I’ve even forgotten about my mother. When all of a sudden—just like in a ghost story or a fairy tale, that’s right—when all of a sudden, there’s a screech from across the room by the table with the punch bowl, I see a long white arm flash up over the heads of the costumed crew of kids, and then there’s a loud crash!

  Rick and I run over with everybody else. And we find my mother stretched out on the long table, having fallen and knocked the bowl over onto the floor. We’re walking through a pool of punch, a pink pool, and at first I’m thinking, oh no, it’s blood, but it’s only punch, and Rick reaches over and helps Mother to her feet, and she sags against him just like a little kid who’s really tired and I’m trying to straighten her dress, and my turban falls over into the pool of punch, and I’m crying suddenly, and she perks up when she hears me, just like some puppet on a string, jerks straight up, pushes herself off from Rick, and points a long bony-fingered hand at me.

  “You look like a fairy!” she says.

  “Mother!” I could only whisper.

  “You look like a fairy from a fairy tale,” she says again.

  “Please,” I said. “Rick?”

  But he didn’t know what to do—it was one thing to try to get close to your boss’s daughter, but to get tough with the boss’s wife? It was awful, all the kids gathering around, and her standing there pointing that finger at me.

  “Take it off,” she says to me next. “Take it off and we’ll see what you have on underneath that junk!”

  “Mother,” I pleaded with her.

  “Mother!” she threw back at me, mocking.

  “Mrs. Bloch, please,” Rick put in, finally realizing that he was going to have to step in. And he took her by one arm and I took her by the other and we walked her out of the hall, while behind us the quartet was playing again, playing “Rock around the Clock,” and we went up to the pay telephone in the hall and called my father, because Rick couldn’t leave the dance, and my father arrived and drove Mother home, leaving me at the dance with a dripping turban, a heart made of lead, and Rick expecting me out of gratitude to kiss him on the mouth. Later on in the evening, I did.

  “Minnie, there’s a note from her teacher here at the end. I suppose it’s from her teacher. Sarah, it says, this was supposed to be a personal essay, not a creative essay about your personal life. And there is no conclusion. Please see me.”

  “Please see him?”

  “That’s what it says. See me. Please.”

  “She’s a polite girl, Sally. So I’m sure she saw him. And since I heard nothing about it I’m sure it all went well. And in case it didn’t I’ll ask her. And Manny too I’ll ask when he comes back from his Israel.”

  “You don’t know what happened? You usually know everything.”

  I USUALLY KNOW everything? Only God knows everything. Do I look like God to you? I’m only a grandmother, like you, just another grandmother worrying. In the worrying state. Not no longer Jersey but New York and still worrying. I’m worrying now even that it could be my Sarah is packing because she’s got boy trouble like she used to have with Rose Pinsker’s Rick. And where does she think she’s going? Not running away with some boy like this I hope not, because here is the poor grandma and I can hardly use my eyes no more, and I’m holding down the fort, the babysitter for the big daughter while the parents are away, and I don’t want to lose the daughter to some wolf. Let’s hope not. But what a comment from the teacher. He didn’t say about what a good writer she was, only complaining about what she didn’t do.

  Oh, but doesn’t the time stoppage fly by, I can remember when Maby gave birth to the pride of her grandmother’s eye. While we’re eating I can show you pictures I have of the little thing, and now she’s out running around, suffering from the boys, in college, and did we used to say time flies, Mrs. Stellberg? Time is like smoke, like wind, like water, it’s there, it’s not there, you’re in it, you’re not. Here I am one minute holding little Sarah in my arms, cuddling her, singing to her songs to help her sleep, like this, like Ah, ah-a, ba-bee, Mama is a lad-y, and her name is may-be, and you’re a lit-tle bay-bee, like this, like this, and the next thing you know my little baby is a lady, Sadie she calls herself on the phone with her friends, and I’m sitting here with you, with nothing in my arms but smoke, wind, water. I wish only it were water, then at least I would have something left over. I could wash with it, drink it, feel it on my skin.

  After she was born we lived, all of us, in Jersey, just across the bridge, a lovely place close to the country, close to the city, like I was saying, just perfect for nearly everything we needed.

  You like it, it was your hometown, Mrs. Stellberg, I know. You raised a family there, two families you could have raised and still not done better, isn’t that right? And we settled in, trying our best to make the best of all the good things that were coming to us. And come they did, they came and came. The congregation was good people, and Manny’s father-in-law, he died, that horrible way, like I told you at the mall, and the company goes to Manny and the long-lost son who comes back from a South American somewhere, that all came to us. And so while maybe to some people it looked like my Manny was trying to lead a double life, I could see in those days in my mind just as clearly as I can today that he’s instead got twice as many blessings as the normal man, as the average. And if these things come to you, don’t knock them. Hold out your arms. It’s a duty, a blessing is a duty, and you have to accept it as it comes because if you turn your head away it’s going to knock you in the block. This, darling, Sally, is my philosophy, and maybe I should put it in a sermon myself.

  Did I mention the sermon, the one that started all the trouble, the talk about the camps? I didn’t say what it was about? With the other her, what else could it be? She came from the camps, she was a little girl there, her parents got arrested, and she got arrested, and they died so she could live. And that’s it. A horror story, her story, and forever after you have to respect a person who has had to suffer such torture. That, too, is part of my philosophy, if you want to know. But I’ve told you anyway. Even if you didn’t want to know now. There. Here. Look, the girl is getting ready to serve. But then I was telling you about the sermon, and I think that’s one that you missed. It was a bad time for Manny, in those days. Because along with getting a good blessing there are other things you have to put up with. For example, Maby was having a lot of trouble with her problem, the kind like in the little personal essay Sarah’s teacher complained about. Sarah. Or excuse me, Sadie. I should remember that that’s how
she likes people to call her now or else I’ll get my head snapped off. And why shouldn’t I call her that if it makes her happy? It doesn’t hurt anybody, does it? But there are things that hurt, and let me tell about one of them. And don’t get ants in your pants, darling, about the sermon because I’m going to get to that. But first, a little appetizer.

  The business of Maby and the food.

  You don’t know none of this because nobody else ever heard about it. Except for Manny and us. We heard. Believe me, we heard. Like an alarm this went off in our ears. A burglar alarm. We were living in the old house, the new house that the congregation gives, you know, the brick one over on Locust from where he walked the day of his fall, and my Manny is in his study, as a matter of fact working on the famous sermon on the Holocaust, and the daughter, Sarah, otherwise known as Sadie later in her life but now only still Sarah, she’s in her room listening to records, Baby Dylan or some such person, I am in the kitchen fixing our supper, and since when was I ever anywhere else at this time of day, late afternoon, New Jersey afternoon, in what season? autumn, winter, spring, does it matter? I’m thinking, thinking chicken, chicken, what was I cooking? fricassee? and from the big market I had some fresh soup greens, so it had to be spring, yes? and I was in the kitchen, upstairs is the granddaughter and the music, and my white-haired boy is in his study, preparing his famous sermon, but where is the mother of the daughter, the wife of the rabbi? Good question.

  No, no, wait a minute. It was soup greens and springtime, and this Baby Dylan on the Victrola, but my Manny wasn’t home yet, he was on a condolence call, someone’s father, mother, that I don’t remember, had just passed away and he had stopped to see the family and so he comes in the door and says, “Hello, anybody home?”

  So cheerful he could be in those days. And what happened all of a sudden that his cheerfulness went out like the tide at the beach and never, never came back? I’m asking you, because I don’t know the answer. Well, I know and I don’t know. I’m giving you answers but I’m giving you questions. Here is a man, coming through the door with a smile on his face, a little tired, but basically a man who knows what he wants to do in life and is doing it, making a living for his family, doing in the world what he does best, and he comes home and expects to relax a little—even a rabbi, a man everybody depends on, he has to relax a little too—and so he comes through the door and the music is playing, and that he tolerates, though he has never been a great fan of music, and in fact he never reads the books, not even books by rabbis everybody in the congregation is reading, and the funny thing with him I learned over the years, and this goes to show you that even someone’s mother can sometimes be surprised by what her child is up to, and believe you me don’t think I haven’t been surprised since, but what relaxes him I was going to tell you is something that would seem to everybody else like work, it is this business in the city, with the brother-in-law, this is his hobby, and he makes it grow and puts in the hours, just like he was building a toy house with blocks or matchsticks or making a garden, the way other people make a hobby in the yard.