Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  But listen to the story Maby told my Manny while they are standing there in the dark driveway while I moved back and forth inside the house and upstairs the music plays, the pretty voices sing about homesick blues. She told it so he would know, and let me know if you understand because I’m not so sure even after I heard it if I did. If I do now.

  So listen carefully, Mrs. Stellberg.

  “You think that I started drinking after my mother died, don’t you?” she said, leaning against the side of the car, pulling at a long thick strand of her hair. “You think so, I know you do.”

  “I do,” my Manny said. He’s looking at her, looking at the lights and shadows in the house, his mouth moving back and forth before the light, and upstairs the shadow of his daughter moving back and forth across her lighted room, and the house engraving itself into the sky as the last light fades, the house sinking into the shadows like one of those ships you hear about that runs into rocks and the thing sinks out of sight—the house, which had not been such a bad place to live, nice big rooms downstairs, snug bedrooms upstairs, a good kitchen, a pleasant place, the nicest of the houses we lived in after Manny was ordained and went out into the world of rabbis and houses and work—this house appeared to him to be fading quickly from his vision, and he grew fearful, as if he already understood by the tone of her voice that she was going to tell him something terrible that would change everything. How could he know that everything had already been changed? He could sense something, but what did he know of the truth? A nice house, he was thinking, and I’m sorry that I’ve made her feel bad, he was thinking, and I shouldn’t have lost my temper, he was thinking, I should have tried to help her. I should have tried to help you, he wanted to say. But she was already caught up in her story.

  “My brother and I were very close when we were younger. Despite the large difference in age we found ourselves together all the time because my mother discovered quite early in Mordecai’s life that he didn’t enjoy the usual rough play that boys are supposed to like, but preferred staying indoors with her, doing the things that she did around the house, do you know what I’m saying? He was a bit shy, I suppose, is the way people would put it. It’s not the way it really was at first. I think at first that he was just a little fearful of my father who was a big boisterous man stomping around the docks, a man always slapping people on the arm, the back, with his big fat cigar clenched between his teeth, shouting, cursing, shoving people around, hey, you, do this, do that, shut up, come on over, put that down, pick that up, launch that barge, shove that load, tie that line, I remember his voice, I’ve got it impressed on me from the times that I spent down at his pier and on board the barges. You’ve seen him at home, and once on the barges, the trip we once took down the river, do you remember? I’m sure you do. Well, picture me as a young girl, a little older than when you and I first met at the scene of the accident that took your father’s life—now I know you don’t like to think of it, you’re fidgeting, you’re suddenly upset—but then jump ahead from there about five years and picture me then, still thin but tall for my age, my hair as red as a freshly painted barge in my father’s fleet, and Mord, my brother, about twice as tall and with hair just as red, at that time he hadn’t started to lose it, the two of us playing together at home, playing house, and you can’t blame me, can you? because he was there for me to play with, and you can’t blame him, really, can you? because he just couldn’t bear to go out with my father because of the roughness of the way he treated him, it was just something in his nature, like his hair, or being left-handed, some people just are that way, and because of it my father picked on him terribly almost from the beginning, from the first time my brother refused to jump from the pier onto the boat or from the boat onto the pier, I can’t remember just which way, I guess it was trying to get him to jump from the pier to the boat, and Mord wouldn’t do it, he wouldn’t jump, he looked down into the gap between the pier and the deck and saw the water swirling up and around and he wouldn’t do it—and so my father picked him up and threw him across onto the boat and Mord hit his head and cut his hand and began to wail, and our father leaped after him and yanked him up by his shirt collar and said in a hard whisper in his ear, ‘Don’t you cry on my boat or else you’re going over the side.’”

  Are you wondering what my Manny’s thinking through all this speech? He’s thinking about the past, about his father, rubbing, rubbing his souvenir glass until his fingers are getting raw again, something that he hasn’t done in a long, long while, remembering the accident, the sounds, the smells, the curling wispy smokelike trail of blood in milk—and then what she’s saying catches his ear and he’s recalling his Cincinnati days again—why don’t people really listen, maybe you’re asking, why isn’t he listening? This is an important thing she’s telling him, this is his wife, she’s telling him news about herself that he ought to pay careful attention to, he ought to listen hard, he ought to make notes, why does he drift off into dreamy recollections of his own story? Why doesn’t he bear down hard with his mind on the story she’s telling him the way he’s pressing his fingers into that glass, that glass, oi, the bloody star that he carries around.

  “Are you listening to me?” she says, catching his face in the reflection of the light from the house and noticing that he’s staring into the darkness like he’s watching a movie or a slide show from his past. “I’ll bet if I were one of your beloved problems from the congregation you wouldn’t be thinking about something else.”

  “Please,” he says, “continue.”

  “I’ll bet,” she says, “if I were one of these famous companies you want to take over you especially wouldn’t get distracted, would you?”

  “Please,” he says. “I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. I’m listening quite intently.”

  “Or are you thinking about someone else? Do you have someone else who’s . . .”

  “Please, Maby,” he says, “don’t make trouble. Tell me what you want to say.”

  “I don’t want to say it, Manny. I never would have said it, Manny, if all of this stupid business hadn’t happened, if you hadn’t walked into the station house when I needed your sympathy and slapped me in the face, no, I never would have told you this, but I’m going to tell you this because I want you to know what you’re up against, and it’s nothing I would have told you ever if I didn’t think you were so dumb, so blockheaded . . .”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because you are so dumb, so thick-skulled . . .”

  “Maby, so what is this all about? Why are you speaking to me like this?”

  “Can’t I speak to the rabbi in a truthful way? Doesn’t the famous . . .”

  “Maby, please.”

  “But you’ve never understood and in a way I never wanted you to understand because who wants to live with this out in the open, who . . .”

  “Who wants to live what, with what? Will you kindly tell me?”

  “Kindly? You don’t sound so kindly. You sound like the opposite of kindly. When you have that tone in your voice I won’t tell you,” she says. “Not when it’s in your voice that same violence, the smack in my face, the . . .”

  “And you didn’t hit me?”

  “You hit me first. And my father threw my brother across the space between the pier and the boat.”

  “So he was a crude man, I knew him, I know all that, but he had a good side to him, he helped me over the years, helped Mama . . .”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “I heard, I heard.”

  “He threw me across that space.”

  “He took you down there?”

  “He deliberately took me along the next time he went down to the pier with Mordecai, and he asked me to make that jump and I refused, and he picked me up and threw me and I landed on the deck. Except I didn’t cry. I wish I had cried. But I was angry at him and I decided that I would get my revenge against him by pretending that he hadn’t touched me, and so I clenched myself up li
ke a fist and I didn’t cry, I was aching, hurting, but I didn’t make a sound. Oh, I wish, I wish that I had let myself go then, I wish I had known then what it was inside me that kept me all balled up like a fist, so that I could have screamed, wept, wailed, shouted, shrieked like the baby that I was—because if I had let out even a whimper, Mord wouldn’t have hated me, and he wouldn’t have plotted his revenge.”

  “Revenge?” Manny says.

  Standing there in the driveway of his house, the handsome white frame house the congregation gives him, standing there with his lovely wife, her beautiful face, her red hair, her pale-like-cream complexion, and inside the house his mama, me, passing back and forth across the light, and upstairs the daughter, little Sarah grown now so big, snapping her fingers, humming, dancing lightly by herself, a happy girl, singing about how I want to hold your hand—and how many scenes like this do we see? such happy things? And how much pain lies behind the curtain? How many fingers digging into the glass, bleeding fingers, and how many minds concentrating now on the scene from the past where the pain shoots out, slashes out whenever the mind turns to it, like a bullet? like a knife? like a hurtling rock? My Manny, standing there in the driveway, a normal man for his age with a few extra large talents that separate him maybe from the others who can do only one thing well, so he can do several things well, a man frowning, his face lined with questions, his hair catching the light, looking slightly silver now instead of the pure white of snow it seems usually, my Manny asking for revenge?

  “What revenge?”

  “Revenge. Revenge the kind you’ve never heard of short of the stories that victims of the Nazis can tell.”

  “Florette Glass?”

  “Florette, that one, the stories she’s told at discussions. Over there Jews, other people . . .”

  “But mainly Jews.”

  “Jews and Poles, and Gypsies I read about too, Manny. But do you want me to go on?”

  You sound so sober, he wanted to say, I do want you to go on. He didn’t say that, but he kept quiet, and she continued her story.

  “Over there they attack special groups, but over here who gets it but the people we call normal? They practice atrocities, revenge. Over there in Europe they single out religions, beliefs. Here it’s psychology.”

  “What an odd thing to say. What do you mean?”

  My Manny leaned against the car, and if there had been enough light from the house to display his face you would have seen a puzzled look pass across it.

  “Here people whip people, beat people, attack people, rape people for the cause of their own revenge. Here atrocities begin in the mind and live on the bodies of other people.”

  “Maby, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Your father mistreated you? It sounds more like he wanted to show off to your brother, he wanted to encourage your brother. And what did your brother do in revenge that was so awful?”

  “You smug fart-mouth.”

  “What?”

  “You say that. You stand there and say that?”

  “Maby, please calm down, one minute you’re talking sanely, and the next you’re cursing me. Please, please. Such words, what language!”

  “The language of revenge,” she said. “The language of American psychology. I’ve been reading psychology, trying to figure out my case.”

  “Your case? What case?”

  “Oh, Manny, come along, come along, what case do you think? My suitcase? A case of soda pop? Come along, dear Manny, come along.”

  “Please explain to me.”

  “What planet did you come from, Manny? Where in the universe? I’ve been explaining. Don’t interrupt. Or interrupt. As you like it. As you like. The case. My case. My father, brother. And mother. Mustn’t forget dear mother. Her case. Not a hard case. A soft case. Her head snapped open like a suitcase that fell down the stairs. Open to the world.”

  “Maby, I want you to come inside with me.”

  “I like it out here, Manny. Why don’t you like it out here? Does everything of merit have to take place in a room? in a book? in a ledger? in . . . ?”

  “We don’t have to do this to each other, Maby. Please . . .”

  “Take your hands off me!”

  “The night air, it’s cold . . .”

  “No colder than what I feel inside.”

  “So don’t come inside, so we’ll stand here, so you’ll tell me about you and Mordecai, the sibling rivalry, the battles. Maby?” He speaks too softly in the dark.

  “Don’t Maby me. Give me an answer. The answer I never gave.”

  “Here . . .”

  “I—said—don’t—touch!”

  Again she pushes him away toward the other side of the drive, and he stumbles, regains his balance, and comes toward her, dark in the drive, in his dark suit, his hair in the light.

  But lucky for him, for his conscience, he raised his hand but he didn’t strike her down. Once that night had been enough. That slap in the face in the station. He never needed to lose his temper with her again. With Sarah, he still had his temper to lose—that time to come in the back porch, with the guitar, her song, with her remark, it was still ahead in the future, but here, now, in the driveway, in the darkness that folded around them like a winter blanket, the slap in the face was in the past, and there was nothing he could do to bring it back. Sooner bring back his mother-in-law, bring her back and help our friend, the mentor, the generous Sporen, not to bully her into drink, sooner catch her hand at the wrist and keep her from raising a glass to her lips that day she died, the day she went tipsy tripping down the stairs and snapped her neck, sooner hold her lips tight by pinching with your fingers her lips, sooner that, this, any other thing, before you could take back the slap the husband, Manny, my Manny, gave to Maby, yes, my Maby, the daughter-in-law, almost the daughter, that afternoon before a small crowd of uninterested police.

  You talk of time, you talk of time stoppage? We talk of passing minutes, hours, days curving around and back again in memory so that it seems only like yesterday, maybe even like tomorrow—do you know what I mean?—that I decided in my heart that I would not marry the bad-smelling rabbinical student from the city, kinnahurra, so long ago that it might be tomorrow, and what if I had caught my own wrist and stopped myself from traveling after Jacob? What if I had never pushed myself just the little that I needed so that I could have the comforts I have now? What if? What if? What’s done is done, me and my Jacob, Sporen and his wife, my Manny, and the slap in the face to the daughter-in-law, the passage of stoppage, the moving of time, and here we sit, sniffing the air and smelling our dinner, and it’s now, not then, now and now and now, and it’s also when I’m telling you then, now in the driveway, and he’s getting very nervous, my Manny, very nervous, but even if he’s caught himself by the wrist his own hand, he’s watching—in the dark, but with the eye in his mind—his own wife’s features fall apart like sand washed over by the waves that splash up at the beach. It was that quick that it happened, and he was standing right there. One minute her voice was calm and she was talking to him—even if maybe she was a little upset she wasn’t hysterical—and the next he could hear the strain in her throat, like a car going into another gear he explained it to me later, and she was driving across a border.

  “I want to know about Mordecai’s revenge,” he said, lowering his hand as though it were made of metal, lowering it as if it did not belong to his own body, carefully lowering his hand to his side and asking again, “What did he do that was so terrible?”

  He was thinking of Mordecai, bald, thin Mordecai, who as far as he knew never ate, who lived and drank and breathed, and ate only the business, the business, who had so little time for himself apart from the company—they have a new office on Park Avenue by the way, a nice suite of rooms, one secretary for them and another just for the telephone, I’m telling you, I don’t know how he does it but he does—but I’m telling you when he was standing there in the driveway listening to his wife tell him this story it was as if he h
ad no luck, no good looks, no talent for the congregation, no ability to talk about the religion, not a pinch of sense for the business, not even to know how to stand and talk to people, not nothing—he is a man listening to his wife tell him a story and he’s hearing it as if he’s hearing from a stranger.

  “You want to know what happened?” she said. “I’ll tell you what happened.”

  And this is the play in his brain that Manny watched, as a spectator filled with, I don’t mind telling you, very shocking feelings, with regret, with the feeling you call remorse.

  BUT HERE’S DINNER. And can we talk of such things while we eat? So why not? Why not? It’s a story more sad than disgusting although it gets disgusting, I’m telling you, something you might not want to hear with your soup. But by the time you get to our age don’t you think that we can eat and weep at the same time? We have to sometimes do both at once, and if we say it’s awful sometimes we’re saying only that it’s alive and we’ve seen it all before, and here in fact is the soup. Don’t it smell good? Me, I don’t cook anymore, but the girl, she’s got my recipes, I tell her and she writes it down, and this is the old-fashioned soup that I used to make for my Manny all the time—the same soup I had on the stove the night all this was taking place in the driveway, in fact . . .

  So of course I’ll tell the story, her story, she’s talking, she’s explaining, and like I said, he’s making a play, a movie even, in his head.

  On a barge on the river. Her father’s barge. One of the big boats in the fleet. He’s standing there in the driveway and he’s seeing this in the eyes of his mind, smelling the soup maybe, but not smelling it, feeling the air growing colder on his bare cheek but not feeling it, aware of the pressure of his soles in his shoes on the dark tarry surface of the driveway but not standing there, seeing as she talks, the barge, the river, smelling the river not the soup, the river he remembers from his stay in that city, fresh water slightly tainted with the odor of the gasoline from the boats, but at that time a fresh river, not the filthy waters today we have, the pollution, the stink, the smoke, dead fish, no fish, here was a pleasant broad stream where the children could come and play if only the father hadn’t first flung the boy across the space, above the water, between the dock and the deck.