Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  Because ever since for the boy it was not such a beautiful place, ever since for the boy it was not a place which he would remember with fondness, it was not a place the boy would think back on fondly while sailing the seas—and isn’t it amazing how from the place of water where he had the trouble with his father he went out over the water again, sailing from one country to the next, from continent even to continent, and here he was, another one of us, passing over water, sleeping at night to the rocking of the waves, listening to the music of the engines, feeling the vibrations in the bones of the ship in his own bones, and when he later returned to land for a long time after he longed for the roll and slope of the deck beneath his feet? The boy, the girl, brother and sister, brought here by the father who wanted for them only the best—and wasn’t it tough enough for our futures when our parents who wanted for us only the best began to work their way with us? And you can imagine when these children go into the world who have parents who give them only the worst—because if you think about Sarah, Sadie now as she calls herself, who didn’t want the best for her? and how she is becoming so sad, and her father wants, and her mother if she could figure out what she wants, if she could come up for air out of the ocean of her depression—boy and girl on a boat, and it’s a lovely day, and it’s like a picnic up on top, the food for them set out, the fishing lines, because then you could fish in these clean waters, and now you could catch only bodies and garbage and dreck, the wreckage and the trash, but then there was fishing, oh, there was the fishing and the water you could even drink, and the sun, and the light wind, and the father went off on some errands, telling them that he would be back in a while, and they were alone, which nowadays you wouldn’t do, but in those days, days of trust with people, days of doors unlocked, and at night the peaceful sleep of dreamers who fear no strangers, evenings filled with walking and talking, and children playing without bother, horses standing about waiting for travelers, the wind tickling the tops of the growing wheat, deer trotting down to the edge of the forest, nibbling at the stalks of grass, the bark, no dogs to fear, no hunters—but this is another time even further back still I started talking about, the time I knew, the places I knew, the fields I played in while I was that age, and the sun and wind and wheat and earth, the furrows, the watering streams, birds in air, frogs in chorus, and down to the edge of the wood trot the tiny deer, fragile, easily frightened, and no hunter raises his gun, and I sigh, loving the feel of the wind in my hair, the way it caresses my skirt, lifts my apron as if with the exploring fingers of a mother studying me for neatness, and if this was a time back further still, then it’s a time to think about when you picture the children in the cabin in the barge on the American river, the Ohio, the name from the Indians, because for them it was like for me, and for you, for all of us, my Jacob, my Manny, and as it was for Sarah, as we know, before the party where her mother made her weep, a time for all of us, before the time stoppage, before the stop motion, before the end of the circling back to the beginning when the conclusion seems too much like the start, and we all sigh, and say, oh, not again, and then, oh, yes, I wish, again, and again, and again.

  The little girl felt something of this. What did she know? She played in childish simplicity, unaware of the ball of spite that grew hard, and, at the same time, larger, in her brother’s chest. He knew no innocence. Not since his father had tossed him across the void between the land and the deck. He’d had a hint of these feelings once before, when his sister was first born and he felt cast aside, when he got elbowed away from the center of his mother’s attention, a normal emotion under the circumstances, though in this case with some kernel of truth since Mrs. Sporen, with all her problems, particularly the drink, she could barely take care of one child in some way resembling normal, let alone two. So she cared for one and ignored one, and that one, the older brother, grew resentful. But then resentment alone doesn’t make you harm someone, it only makes you hate. He, Mordecai, the older brother, might have merely ignored his little sister if his father hadn’t tested him above the waters and found him wanting. But when his father tossed him into the air he landed with something that he hadn’t possessed when he took off, a desire burning in his chest like a field fire for revenge against the man who humbled him—and against the sister whom that man held up as an example.

  Isn’t that something, the way a few seconds changes a person’s life? One minute the older brother, the next the hateful enemy. The father might have forgotten altogether, the sister might have forgotten altogether—to them it was only a moment’s annoyance, a joke, a misbegotten minute of comedy. But to the brother it was something never to forget, and like a banker he compounded his hurt until he struck at Maby.

  In the barge, the boat, at the bottom of the boat, in the cabin, at the waterline. They were playing, moving dolls and toy soldiers in and out among the pillows on one of the bunks while their father was out on the pier. Without warning, Mordecai leaped on his sister and held her down on the bunk while he pressed a pillow over her face. She struggled, kicked and scratched, and he pressed down harder, harder. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t scream, all she could do was pummel him on the arms with her tough little fists, and this annoyed him, and he let the pillow go in order to grab her hands, and then he started hitting her in the face, on the chest, and then he grabbed her by the hair and yanked hard, yanked ferociously, so that she screamed, and he made her scream again, which shows that what happened next was something that just happened, because just who would want someone to scream and make everybody on deck come running—although at this time no one was on deck, not the father, not any of the crew? He yanked, and she screamed, and if anyone had been up on the deck they would have come running because the scream was loud, her scream slit the air like a razor, and the next thing to happen he was pulling up her skirt and pulling down her pants and poking his needle into her little eyelet, poking and poking, because you see he got stiff like he had to make a pee and then he did what he did because it brought all of his hatred and resentment to a point, and he poked and poked, and she kicked and kicked, and finally she pushed him with both hands hard on his chest, and she rolled away from under him, falling from the bunk onto the floor and turning over on her stomach, weeping, shrieking, punching at the floor. She threw a royal fit, is what happened, kicking, kicking, pummeling the floor, the wall, and when her father came back she was still lying there, her mouth covered with spit, her hands red and raw from the punching.

  “What are you doing?” her father shouted when he came down from the deck.

  Not, are you all right? Not, who did this? Not, no, no, poor baby, poor thing. But: What are you doing?

  “What are you doing?”

  And here is what all the men in this family have done, with the exception of my Jacob, and he passed away so early that, who knows, but God forbid, he too might have done the same if he had lived.

  “What are you doing?”

  Sympathy? A healing touch? None, none of this. Not like your boy, your son Doctor Mickey. Not this man. Not them. And here is where the men go wrong, don’t you think? Because they can’t get over the need to pin the blame on someone, the blame for the mess of life, the blame for the spills and the accidents and the things people drop and leave behind. They want a reason, they want a mama to clean up after them, they want to hear anything about why something happened except that it just happened and now there’s a need to do something about it, even when as in this time on the barge on the river that flowed clearly and carried barges south and west, on the spring day on which this happened, in the state with the Indian name, on the river with the Indian name, it was a man who was at fault.

  Am I contradicting myself? So what? So I am? So if you were a man listening, as Manny was listening, my Manny, in the driveway on that night when he was supposed to have written his sermon about the death camps, and was interrupted by the mess that Maby had made, and was listening to the story of how the mess began, if you were my Manny, that man, you m
ight have done what he did then, said what he said, and saying is doing when the words make things happen, don’t you think? Of course, of course. And what he did was make a truth out of the old saying, men are all alike, because he stood there and listened to what she said, and then he responded as her father did—he might have been a mouthpiece for the ghost of her father—standing there in the dark, his mama passing back and forth in front of the lighted window, upstairs the daughter beating her hands together to the tunes of the beatle bugs who want to hold her hand, saying, him standing there saying,

  “But what? but what did you do?”

  Let’s admit it wasn’t easy for him. He could listen to such stories coming from people from his congregation, he could read about such things in the newspapers, but hearing his own wife tell of such a thing, listening to her confess to this, he could not, I’m afraid to say of my Manny, even my wonderful Manny, he could not take it. This, he admitted later, much later, was on his mind, images, pictures of the scene, the girl with her skirt over her tummy, the panties down, the slit like the eyelet of a needle winking up at her brother, and the boy forcing himself into her—may you forgive me for telling you such things so clearly but when you need to know you need to know—in and out, in and out, as if he, my Manny, were jabbing himself with a needle, except it wasn’t a point of steel but the tips of the starry shard that he was fingering then, as always when nervous, anxious, in pain, and the pain came in waves, in his hands, and it complemented the pain in his mind, in the images that stuck again and again, needles, sharp needles, in his brain, in his eyes.

  This headache stayed with him long after that. A man cannot just get rid of such visions, in and out, in and out, the needles pricking him behind the eyes.

  “You know very well what I did,” she answered.

  “Dis-gust-ing,” he said, my Manny. “Dis-gust-ing.”

  And Maby, the wife who was the girl in the story, she turned on her heel and started away across the lawn.

  “Where are you going?” Manny called after her.

  She didn’t say a word, she didn’t even look over her shoulder, let alone turn around.

  “I meant Mord,” he called after her. Because he realized now why she was running—she was running now. “Mord, that’s who I meant,” he said, because by this time he had even convinced himself that he had meant Mordecai, the brother, the brother-in-law, the revengeful boy who had harmed his little sister and then run away—and stayed away because he knew that he was not welcome—Mord, his business partner, Mord, the man older than he, gaunt, always looking famished, as though he needed a mother to feed him, Mord, whose life had been mysterious to Manny up until then, until it was the hateful saga it suddenly became for him, as the headache deepened in his skull and the darkness thickened in the driveway, yes, by now he did mostly mean Mordecai, was mostly convinced.

  But what if she had made up this story? What if she had made up a tale of vengeance to cover for some dreadful act or acts of her own? What if she had led the boy on herself to the terrible time on the bunk in the barge? What if, worse, she had made it up to slander him, to thicken the slander and thus hide some of her own wildest fears? Because Mord the man was not the boy, Mord the man was his knowledgeable partner, the man who made all the business possible, who showed him how to join one board, then another—showed him the paths to take, who played Aaron to his Moses, general to his minions, using him in strategies of which he never knew the completed arc until it came to pass, which meant when the holdings showed up on the books.

  When Mord came back from over the sea, Manny had been nothing but an overtalented religious leader—and I say this, remember, as his most fervent admirer, his mother—with a calling for one kind of life and a yen for another kind of life and no awareness of just what that other life might be. Oh, he’d ridden the barges his father-in-law owned, and he’d seen on paper the steamships he had purchased, and some of the loading docks, some of the warehouses, but he had never turned his mind to the thought of making them his, not until Meyer Sporen died and left most of it to his daughter and son-in-law, with a small portion set aside for the prodigal Mord as an afterthought, the kind of codicil, my Manny called it, set down by a man who didn’t want to take a chance on being denied entrance to a heaven if it existed. Mord the man had nothing to do with Mord the boy, as far as Manny was concerned, not the man who returned from overseas, from the tropics where he had been living for many years, not now and not then, because Manny hadn’t before needed to make the association between the lanky young fellow a number of years his senior whom he had met at the scene of Jacob’s accident and death and the man who returned, because it hadn’t before mattered, but now, no, now there was a painful association for him between the boy on the barge and the man in their New York suite, the man behind Manny’s growing successes as the head of several small companies they had acquired just that year, the man who projected another round of takeovers for the coming year, the boy on the barge and this man were now the same person, and how it mattered, it mattered too much. How could he work with the man who had defiled the sister who had become his wife? He couldn’t—couldn’t work with him, couldn’t talk with him, couldn’t stand to breathe the air in the same room with him, and so my Manny turned his rage around, turned it in two ways, one more visible than the other, the first being the way in which he turned it against himself, and the second being the way he turned it against his wife. And on that evening, in the dark laid on like paint from a housepainter’s brush, he turned it first against his wife.

  “You come back,” he shouted as he had never done before, him, my Manny, solid, stolid, quiet, steady, rational—that’s the right word?—always with the hand in the pocket clenched around the star, but never showing that side of himself to the world, and he’s running across the lawn shouting at his wife who by now has disappeared in the shadows beyond the next house.

  “Where are you?” he calls.

  There is no answer in the dark.

  “Maby, where have you gone?”

  No answer.

  So husband and wife play hide-and-seek, on a spring night in the New Jersey dark.

  “Where?” Now a feeble call, like a wounded animal.

  No answer.

  “Come the hell out!” he calls, stronger than ever before, and using language like never before.

  And this draws a laugh from her, where she’s hiding, in the bushes, in the dark.

  “Come out!”

  “Come find me, Manny,” she says, “come find me, Rabbi.”

  “Bitch!” he yells, again with the language.

  And as though this is her true name she steps up to him from behind and gives him a big push. And down he goes, and she’s running past him, onto the sidewalk, onto the road, and down the street toward the corner, to the road that leads to town.

  “You come back!” he shouts after her, picking himself up and limping—he’s hurt his foot—in the direction she’s running.

  Such games! You’d have thought she was a little girl again, leading him along in such games. But despite her laugh, and her agile running, this is not a child, not even a young girl, but a woman filled to bursting with great sorrow. How do I know this? I know, I know, I have lived with her, heard her sobbing in the night, and I know from some of her writings, of which I could show examples, of the pain that never ended in her, that flowed always, sometimes with the force of a stream in springtime, sometimes only seeping, like water in wet moss on a mountainside—and where do I imagine these things if not from her own voice, from her world, the words she writes, I’ve known, I’ve known—because sympathy, that is the word, sympathy is what makes the world go around, isn’t that what they say?—so I know this, and you’ll know this, and the sad, deep truth, the news that hurts the most, particularly to a mother, to the mother, is that he, my Manny, the man who needed most to find out, never knew about sympathy, or he didn’t know he knew. His head was aching, this was a sign, but he didn’t know. His foot was
aching now that he had fallen forward in the dark, shoved down by his seemingly playful wife, but he didn’t know. He didn’t know and he didn’t know and he didn’t know, and he ran off after her along the street, well, not ran, but limped, his imitation of a run because now he felt the urgency that he hadn’t known before, now he felt the same despair and humiliation that would descend on him, if she were to rush for the second time in the day into the arms of the police, and so he hurried as fast as he could.

  Running running running.

  As I’m telling you this he’s resting on vacation in a hotel somewhere in the Holy Land. But as I’m telling you, in my mind, in your mind, if you’re listening the way you should—if I’m telling the way I should—he’s running running running.

  And in a way he will always be running.

  And falling like the fall he took just before the time I began to tell you the family story.

  “Get over here!” he called out to her as he saw her leaning against the hood of a neighbor’s car. Her chest was heaving like a bird’s in flight, and her eyes, even in the dark he could tell, her eyes were wild.

  “You wait for me!” he called after her. And this time she did look back, looked over her shoulder, as she cut across the lawn and ran behind the house.

  A dog leaped out of the yard and barked at her. Way down the street inside the lighted house the mother, this mother, stood silently in front of the table now set for a meal of which no one seemed about to partake and heard the faint yip-howling of that same beast.