Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  What can I say to him sometimes to make him see that he should be doing something soothing instead of the business all the time, on the telephone all the time, in New York every spare minute of his time ever since the father-in-law passed away and the brother came back from South America? Can I say to him, Manny, darling, you want to get prematurely gray from worry? I cannot. Can I say to him, darling, Manny, you want to make people think you care only about making a dollar? That I can’t do, because he also puts in so much time at the temple that to everyone in the world it’s clear that he loves the work, loves the people in the congregation, wants to help them, especially the families that are broken up because of a death, because of a divorce, because he remembers what it was like when he was growing up without a father.

  So here comes the hardworking man doing a double-time life but not a double life, not then, he didn’t see it that way at that time, at that time it was still how can he be rich and blessed at the same time. Well, let me tell you, he was trying, and he was succeeding. So here he comes in through the front door at the end of the day, the end of part of one day since he will work in his study after supper for hours, and so the day doesn’t really end for him yet, and he comes through the door and if he’s not smiling, and he’s not whistling, and he’s not behaving like the happiest man in the world, he’s not slumping in over the threshold either, he’s not beaten down like a dog the way you sometimes see men look after working all day in the business, whatever they do, men who come in and the first thing you know they’re a little tipsy already, and that’s the evening, the sun has set.

  But not my Manny, on him the sun is still shining. You can tell by his face that he’s got something on his mind—that night it was the sermon—but not something that he can’t accomplish by applying himself. Which is how he works, steady, steady, at one thing at a time, and I think, Sally, this is something he learned from my Jacob, the steadiness, the plodding along like a horse before a cart, but of course I’m not calling him an animal, don’t be silly, but it reminds me of my Jacob and the way they set out that morning, for the cart, loading the cart with the fruit, and then towing and pushing the cart up toward Union Square, and the taxi heading for them, and the milk truck, and the swerving taxi with the fire engine at its back, and the rearing horse, and the falling truck, the crash of the glass, the broken bottles, the crush, the weight, the crumpled body of my Jacob, the lake of milk, the blood, the half-orphaned boy.

  So Jacob comes home—oi, did I say Jacob? I meant to say Manny. So my Manny comes home in a state which is for him almost close to whistling and walks into a wall. I don’t mean this actually, darling, I mean it’s like he walks into a wall. Because I am in the kitchen and Sarah is upstairs listening to her music, and Manny walks in and the telephone starts to ring. Like in a play or a movie.

  Ring ring ring.

  “I’ll get it,” Manny calls.

  “Oh, your daddy’s home,” I call to Sarah from the kitchen. She of course is upstairs listening to her music but through the noise she can hear the telephone—she has a magical ability to hear the telephone through any kind of sound. And she’s already on the receiver when he picks it up.

  “What, Mama?” she’s saying.

  “Hello, Maby?” Manny is saying.

  Maby’s voice comes through very well.

  “What?”

  “Where?”

  Both father and daughter sound surprised.

  “Please come now!” Maby’s crying, screaming.

  “Hello? Rabbi Bloch?” It’s a man on the other end now, gruff-voiced, but not trying to be rough. “Can you please come down here?”

  The police never tell you everything. It’s not that they want to make you guess, I think, but you have to ask to hear it all. So Manny asked. So they told him.

  “At the supermarket?” Sarah said to him as he went out the door. “They caught her at the supermarket? How disgusting!”

  “Don’t speak about your mother in that voice,” Manny said. I was listening, I could tell that he didn’t really mean it—I mean, I could tell that he felt some of that same disgust as soon as he had heard the news.

  It had been coming to this over the years—I didn’t know about the Purim party until just now when we heard Sarah’s—pardon me, Sadie’s—story. But I knew she had a problem. How could I not know she had a problem? Ever since her mother’s death, and her father’s. And it was as if with her mother gone the world called on her to pick up the glass that her mother had set down, or dropped, actually, and Maby picked it up and took her mother’s place without spilling a sip. Except that she spilled quite a bit from that point on, she knocked things over, fell down, splattered food over her clothing, and I should know this because by that time I was running the house, not just cooking but cleaning and managing—everything. Did the rabbi’s wife have time for such things? She would have had little time even if she did nothing but go to meetings at the temple, and on top of this Maby had plenty to do with her problem. It takes time to drink all day. Time slows down for you. Oi, if I had only known what it could do for you with time I maybe would have done some drinking myself—whiskey clips the wing of the bird of time, the bird flies slower, slower all the day, until it finally may not even get off the ground . . .

  Well, she’d done it this time, climbed into her car and driven over to the market, left the car running while she went inside, packed her basket with groceries, and rolled it right past the checker and out into the parking lot.

  In the parking lot she got abusive, as they say, when a basket boy came running up to her.

  “What do you mean?” she said, hands on hips, stopping for a moment as she loaded the groceries into the back seat.

  “Please, lady,” the boy said.

  “Get away from me or I’ll call the police.”

  He didn’t know what to do. He was standing there, this pimply-faced high school student, probably one of the boys who used to stare at Sarah from a distance because she’s so pretty, he stands there almost in tears. And he looks around, waves toward the store, and a manager or a manager’s assistant who had been watching from the window picks up the telephone and calls the police. From his point of view he wasn’t going to wonder about what was going through her mind, he was just going to do his job the way the rules said he must. You stop a shoplifter? Call the cops. So he called. And Maby meanwhile was loading the groceries into the car because she believed that she had paid for them. Or at least she could not remember not paying, so here she is, loading her groceries into the car when this boy tries to stop her. What does she do? She does what a lot of women do. He grabs her arm, what does he know? She picks up a can of asparagus and dents his head with it.

  “He molested me!” is the first thing she says when the police car pulls up alongside her in the parking lot. What a temper she’s got! Her hair, her flaming eyes!

  “He molested me, officer, I’m so glad that you got here when you did.”

  The boy was more than glad. He was standing next to the car trying to hold back his tears, the blood dripping from between his fingers, such a slice Maby’s cut with the edge of the can.

  Now what did the policemen know? They had a call about a shoplifter and they drive up and see this beautifully dressed woman, a beauty herself, and this boy in his apron, cowering, crying, bleeding, standing against a car, and for a moment they believe her, and turn him around and push him against the car and run their hands up and down his body, as if they are looking for things he has lifted, not she. He was wearing an apron, they should have known, but such is the power of Maby’s appearance that they got confused, and it wasn’t until the assistant manager came walking out to meet them that they got things straightened out, let the boy stand aside, and began to ask Maby some questions.

  “Of course I paid for them,” she said, her voice rising high in indignation.

  This is a little cop she’s got talking to her, and another one a little bigger only talking to the manager. They don’t kno
w what to do. They would like to say, bring the groceries back and we’ll check them out for you and forget about it. Except that they’ve got the boy bleeding from the cut in his head—and now there’s blood on his hand, on his apron, and a few customers watching this scene in the parking lot.

  Still they could have gone back inside. The cops had even begun helping her repack the groceries in the sacks in the cart when Maby grabbed the little one’s hand.

  “You can’t do this to me,” she said. “Do you know who I am?”

  “Please, lady,” the cop said, holding a bag of onions, looking quite silly, probably feeling even worse.

  “Do you know?” Maby said again, taking the onions from him. He felt even sillier now.

  “Please lady, give that back or put it in the cart.”

  “I will not stand for this,” she said. “Do you know who I am?”

  The little policeman stopped trying to pack the groceries and in that voice policemen can put on, or maybe it comes natural, says,

  “All right, lady, who are you?”

  He might have said another time, I don’t care who you are, and just taken her in. But maybe she piqued his curiosity, so he said,

  “All right, who?”

  She was clutching the bag of onions, and her face turned pale, and her eyes, those greenish-gray eyes, turned watery, and she said,

  “I don’t know. I don’t really know.”

  “All right lady,” the cop said, “we’ll help you get these things out of your car.”

  “Fine,” she said, as if that was what she was after, someone to unload these groceries from her car and carry them back into the supermarket, as if that was what you did, brought groceries from home to the supermarket and then looked around for some gallant policeman to come and help you take them in.

  “She hurt my boy,” the assistant manager said.

  “I see that,” the big cop said. “So what do you want to do about it?”

  “He molested me,” Maby said, her hands suddenly tearing at her hair. She had worn it coiled up in braids that morning, it gives her such a little-girl look, makes her appear younger than Sarah sometimes when the light is right, and now she was pulling at the braids. Pulling, pulling.

  “Just take it easy, lady. Now son,” the cop says to the boy, “did you touch this woman?”

  “I didn’t touch her, I didn’t do anything except try to get the groceries back.”

  “He grabbed me,” Maby says.

  “I tried to get the groceries,” the boy says.

  “Look,” the cop says, “I think we’d all better get out of this parking lot and go down to the station and straighten this out. Mrs.?” He turns to Maby.

  “Not me, buster,” she says to the cop, and slides into the front seat of her car which all this time has been standing open.

  “Please?” says the cop. And whoever heard of a cop saying please?

  Even at this point the cop believes he still has things under control. But he hasn’t figured on my daughter-in-law, Maby, because she turns the key in the ignition and without even pulling closed the door throws the car into reverse, knocking aside the little cop and scaring the feathers out of the other one and the grocery boy and the people who have stopped to watch. But the little cop—quick thinker—jumps for the car, reaches inside, and yanks out the keys, and she gets knocked back by his elbow against the seat and when the car stops she is crying. Maby cried all the way to the station house, and by that time they definitely knew she was a little drunk. You see, when they asked for the registration, as they have to do, I suppose, out of the glove compartment rolled a bottle she’d been carrying around, whiskey, whiskey, yes.

  After they looked at the registration, it was the police who got upset. Some of them like to arrest big shots, but these two fellows, they were not happy about having captured themselves the wife of the local rabbi. But I’ll tell you, with everything she was doing, the poor troubled girl she was at that time, it’s a wonder they hadn’t met her sooner.

  So here we are at the station house, and it’s not such a pretty picture. Fortunately there’s a matron on duty at this time—it’s late afternoon, remember?—and she’s sitting with Maby on a bench along the far wall covered with pictures of presidents. Listen. Maby presses against her, shaking, sobbing like a little girl. The woman comforts her like she’s her mother. So the world gives us all sometimes, the motherless, the barren alike, the chance to behave like mothers. The lights haven’t yet gone on. It’s almost twilight outside, and there’s still enough of an afterglow from the sun that just slipped down behind the western woods to give the inside a dark, cave-like unglowingness when first you step in the door.

  When he came in Manny blinked against that dark. He didn’t see Maby sitting there but walked right up to the desk and spoke to the sergeant. The sergeant waved him toward the place where Maby and the matron sat, mother and child, like one of those Christmas scenes, the kind the gentiles put up in front of city halls. Mother and child. Not a bad idea—and they got it from the Jews. After all, darling, wasn’t Mary the Virgin a Jewish mother? Comfort, darling, that’s what it’s all about. Everybody wants someone to comfort them, and who is the best comforter of all? We all know that. The father, he’s good, I’m not knocking the father but when push comes to shove it’s the mother’s arm the person in pain wants holding around them. From the first it has been that way and it will be that way to the last. And if I’m sounding like the Bible that’s because such things are in the Bible, and if they’re not they should be.

  So. Here is Manny’s chance to help his wife, to show her how much he cares. Because you know by now that she’s a drinker, and that she was the daughter of a drinker, and what do they know except that the person who should be comforting them cares more about the bottle than them. Her mother treated her that way—and who knows but her mother’s mother treated her mother that way, and so on back many generations. But here I am sounding like the Bible again when I’m only trying to tell a story. So. This, as I see it, was her problem—is, too, maybe, if the doctors don’t help any more than they already have—and what does Manny do to help her? I’m afraid to tell you, darling, because it only makes it worse.

  “Good evening, Rabbi,” says the desk sergeant.

  “Good evening, Sergeant,” says my Manny.

  “You’ve come for your wife?” the sergeant says. “She’s sitting right over there.” And he points toward the bench.

  Manny lets out a noise, surprised maybe? And he walks over to them. And Maby looks up, and Manny looks down, puts his hands on his hips, and says,

  “What have you done?”

  Not, you poor darling, not, can I help you? Comfort you? Not even just kneeling there and putting his arms around her. But,

  “What have you done?”

  Maby looks up and smiles. A minute before she was crying, now she’s all of a sudden throwing him a smile, as if he had in fact shown her how much he wanted to comfort her. As if it wasn’t the opposite of everything that she ever wanted and needed out of life—and it’s easy for me to say this now, of course, when I didn’t understand any of it while it was going on—but of course the smile is a weapon, a defense against the pain. The rabbi, my Manny, doesn’t see it that way, though. He sees it as a way of making him into a fool—he came home, picked up the telephone, heard the desk sergeant say she was in trouble, he jumps in the car and rushes over to rescue her, and what does she do but throw him the biggest smile he’s ever seen cross her face? And the smile says to him, boy oh boy, have I made a fool out of you!

  So what happened then, while it might seem strange and without any reason, happened in part because of this smile. What I didn’t know at the time was just how ready Manny was for the Florette business. Stop the time. Freeze the minutes. And you could take a walk back and forth like on the rocks across a stream down in the park, from the time Maby heard the news about her parents’ dying and her drinking and this arrest and Manny’s desire for someone in his a
rms he could talk to and feel close to. That’s it. That feeling. It’s what nobody talks about, darling, but it’s everything.

  So for months now he’s been walking around like he’s got a hole in his heart, at the temple, in New York, with Sarah, even with me, his mother who never asks him for nothing and always gives more than he thinks to ask, more than he wants. But could I give him this what he wanted then? That lies beyond the limits of the powers even of the mother.

  But she had retreated, and he felt her absence. In the years when he was just building his talents, when he was the young rabbi and she was the young wife of the young rabbi, it was easy for him to ignore some of the things that bothered him now, at this time we’re talking about, and it was easy for her to believe that what she was feeling inside—wait, I’ll show you later, the emptiness of a hole in the heart you should never know and your children should never know—that the awful cold wind that blew right through her chest sometimes not just when she was asleep and had nightmares but also, worse, when she was awake and smiling in the middle of a tea at the house of some member of the temple, at the club meetings, at the supermarket, like this moment now, and from her side it was so painful all she could do was try to kill the pain the way she learned from her own mother.