Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  BOOK THREE

  EVENING

  Now you’ve finished your meal, the latest of your grandmothers’ suppers.

  And you’ve walked a little around this place where my son has put me in the style that I never knew I’d see. And while you walked maybe you looked out the window at the lights of the city—thinking, could I? Did I ever imagine that I could climb so high and look down upon these places? Look down upon these people? But Rose, look, by accident and by design we climb higher and we get older and we look down and back along the way we came.

  And we’ll have some coffee, because it is that time in the meal. Here, the girl is bringing it. See? Her? Black? The granddaughter maybe of our old friend the waitress in the mall? Could be? But I don’t ask, I never ask questions like that unless I can feel that someone has the answer in her mouth and wants to spit it out. They’re all related anyway, from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, it goes back, black, white, red, brown, maybe someday a miracle we’ll hear about blue, green, and who knows what else could go on? Because even I know—I know—that there’s a mixing sometimes at the beginning of things, like when you make soup there’s a mixing and a thickening and all the bones and juices, spices and seasonings simmer together, so who am I to say that no matter what I think or what I want things have happened and things will happen?

  And how are you now, darling? You’ve been in the kitchen all this time? And you’ve finished cleaning up almost already? And thank you, darling, well have some coffee. Rose? Mrs. Pinsker? It’s the decaffeinated. It won’t keep you awake only just a little while. Me, some nights I drink it and lie in the dark, lay in the dark, whatever, and it’s like being awake in a small closed box or hole in the ground, and in this cave, the hole, on the walls I see pictures, things from my life gone by, because, you know, it’s restful for me when I’m having so much trouble with my eyes, that I have a little perfect dark, dark like old velvet, like satin, dark smooth to my eyes the way the material is smooth. And what does it remind me of? It reminds me, this dark, of the feeling of Manny’s tallis, his prayer shawl, the same material, and the yarmulke I made for him when he went to Cincinnati so long ago. I feel, and I feel the time, I feel old time, and if I could have my fingers in my head or my eyes in my fingers, that is what it would feel like, and I could see it like it was yesterday, no, like today, now. No. Not right now. You can’t be in two places at once. But at night, at times almost like these, when I close my eyes to see and try to contemplate the many sad mysteries of Jersey and New York, the stories I need to tell you, the stories you didn’t know you needed until you heard them, then I call on the powers of my eyes and fingers, the strength of my old memory and deep heart feelings, whatever I have, whatever I give, to show you in your eyes inside the way things moved in this world where I once lived.

  So.

  This is how it began, on the one side, this new stage of his life, on the one side, the side we don’t see, like the way the moon has the side we see and the side we don’t, and this is the side we don’t. The moon, that’s right, where even shopping malls may exist on the side we don’t see. Moon malls. Moon men in moon malls. My Manny, in this time of his life, he could live there and be happy, the first rabbi on the moon.

  Because this was how he felt, with the arrangement with Florette Glass on the one hand and the tending needed by Maby, who from then on was in and out of Owl Valley, on the other. One side of the moon, and the other. But you only see one side, and the other you have to guess about. He lived on both sides, but he only saw one, was how he felt. And which was the light side, which the dark? Sometimes it would change for him, some things would change, and he would be happy one way, sometimes the other. He couldn’t figure it, he couldn’t predict. But it’s true that after her first stay at the hospital, Maby appeared to get a lot better. And the house got a lot better. And to me, his mama, before I knew, it seemed to me that he was happier, too. But I didn’t know about the arrangement with Florette. What did I know? I knew only that she was painting his portrait, and I trusted my son to sit still for a picture because that was what he said he went over to her place for. But did he sit? Not still. They loved each other, they rolled around.

  And what about Maby? Was she sitting still? Not her, I’m telling you. With the permission of a new doctor she started to see in Montclair on recommendation again from Sally Stellberg’s Doctor Mickey, she enrolled in writing classes at Rutgers Newark. Which meant she had to drive a lot, to the doctor, to the classes. So she wasn’t sitting still neither.

  So who was? Why should anybody? Sarah also wasn’t. She was back and forth to Rutgers all the time now, because the youth leader, Rick, your grandson, he was finishing up the law school there and she liked to talk with him. That’s right, you didn’t know? So now you hear it. Much older he was than she was, but that didn’t matter to her because when she wanted her way, let me tell you, she got her way. And who do you think she takes after? Her father? Her mother? Her grandmother? All of us, that’s who!

  But Manny, too, he was going back and forth in a number of ways, from Florette to Maby, Maby to Florette, and also from the temple to the office in the city, from the city to the temple. And this meant something that if you didn’t think of it before you had to think of it now. The brother-in-law. Mordecai. Mord. How was he going to work with him now that he knew something of the circumstances that surrounded his early exit from the Sporen house in those days when the old boat owner was still alive? He ran away from home. And it was a good thing he was running, wasn’t it? Because you can imagine his father would have killed him if he had caught him.

  Of course he didn’t know. Do you think that a little girl tells something like that to her parents? She takes the blame on herself, and she eats herself up alive inside. She’s a victim, and she comes to be as much a victim of her own self, her feeling-guilty self, as she was of the one who made her a victim in the first place. But of the man, the boy that he was, and the man that he is now, who made her feel this way in the first place—well, old man Sporen, the father, helped her to feel this way, too, and in that way, he should share some of the responsibility—but it’s the brother, the boy he was, the man he is, who is the main person—oh, it’s so confusing sometimes, boy, man, girl, woman, father, mother, daughter, son, one behaving like the other should behave, the other pretending to be what he is not, or she—but the boy, I was saying before my confusion started weighing on me like a load of groceries in both arms, and I can feel it in my feet, too, let me tell you. I was telling you about the boy, who, like my Manny, became a man the hard way. If he ever did become a man. The boy, I mean. Mordecai. Mord. Not my Manny, because with my Manny there was no doubt that he was what he was. Why else was the Glass woman painting his portrait? But Mordecai. Mord. That could be another story.

  Time for coffee now. Sip coffee, and while in the kitchen that young girl, somebody’s grandchild, cleans up the dishes, or maybe she’s done them already and she’s thinking about going home, home to see her young children, she has some children, and a husband, hardworking, a hostler maybe like my Jacob, I’ll tell you what happened when Manny for the first time after he heard the news about the past from his Maby went to see the brother, the brother-in-law, who was responsible for the past.

  As usual, he went in on the train. Well, I shouldn’t say as usual because only in the last few years it was usual. Before that, he drove. But then when he worked more in the business than he did, say, at the seminary in the city, he took the train in. Because he had to go to midtown instead of uptown and to midtown it’s easier to take the tubes and walk to where you want or take a taxi than it is to drive. And come to think of it you could mark the beginning of the big change in my Manny’s life from the time he stopped driving the cars and started taking the train. So . . . that morning he got up and got dressed—Maby was, of course, still out in the country—just like on any other day when he had made the trip into the city, and I met him at the table where he was already reading the pape
r, the Wall Street, and I ask,

  “You want some eggs, darling?”

  He shakes his head. “No thanks.”

  “A big day in the city, you could eat some eggs,” I said.

  “I don’t think it’s going to be a big day,” he said. Just to make talk, he was talking. But I could see something unusual, the newspaper in his hand, it was shaking, he was trembling.

  “You’re all right?” I asked him. “You don’t have no fever?”

  “Fever?”

  This word he reacted to. Because he had a fever then, he had the Florette Glass fever, and it made him sensitive, sensitive, because here he is the rabbi, the leader, the father, the husband, the son even, and he’s having an affair with the woman in his congregation while his wife is out in the hospital in the woods, so who wouldn’t be sensitive to that? The fever of his life made his hands shake, for the first time, and it was worrying him because he didn’t want to lose control, he believed that he couldn’t afford to lose control, he was sure that everything he had accomplished in his life up until this point was the result of never having lost control. He believed this, but if it was true or not is another question.

  So it was a good thing he took the train. On the way to the station he appeared to have so little power over the automobile that it wobbled and wavered, like a boat on water. His palms were sweating like it was summer and he’d just come out of the water. His underarms, all water too, what we call, you know, here and in the old country, schvitz. And in his pants, too, he almost wet, this later he explained to me, as he thought about what would happen if he talked to Mordecai the way he thought he ought to—call him rapist, pervert, destroyer of innocence, trying to think of his wife as a girl, a child really, and of his own daughter, and how he would respond if it had been Sarah to whom Mord had done this terrible thing. But his heart sank when he understood what would follow such a confrontation—the entire train ride in he mourned over the loss of the company, the collapse of the partnership, the end of everything he had worked for. Green hills, white houses, churches, vast parking lots, towers, then factories, train yards, power lines, walls, walls, walls—and in the station the crowd of thousands, not usually a force that my Manny did anything but yield to when he had to as he walked, threatened, it felt like, to close in on him and crush him between their hips and shoulders, so that when they stepped away the police would find him, a white-haired man pressed flat to the floor in his fresh dark suit. Shaken, my son walked on to find his stairway to the street, weary already of the thought which had come to him only a little while before, that he had become utterly without care for anything but the company and that to his brother-in-law he was not going to say a word.

  A mother understands what’s right. And for him this was what he needed in his life, that he shouldn’t feel ashamed, although at first he did. If I had been with him, I would have said, never, don’t be ashamed. In that crowd, in that station, he wanted to disappear and change his life for yet another although he had by that time already changed his life one time more than most, or was nearly ready to, in any case, nearly ready. This was the spring before his fall from the dais—and so many things were building, building up inside. Like the storms in the systems on the weather maps you watch on TV? Oh, and if I could see them again clear I’d be a happier woman. Because my eyes. And yours, kinnahurra? They’re still good? Then bless them, because that is a gift that came to me I didn’t know was so precious until it started to fade. To see. To see, it would be wonderful to look out the window and see the lights of the buildings across the dark space of the park—how do I know what I’m missing? When we first moved here, darling, I could still make it out.

  More coffee? My Manny is drinking some in his office after his trip on the train. Amazing that you can take the same ride you’ve made so many times before and this one time it all seems different. To my Manny, it was as if he had not passed under a river but crossed over a border. Several lights on his telephone were blinking and he was staring at them but not responding. He was thinking about Florette, about removing her and then his clothes and climbing into bed with her, and about the paper box company he and Mordecai were going to swallow, like a long thick South American snake swallows a baby kid or goat. Except my Manny knew that they could digest it in shorter time. The last things on his mind were his wife, his daughter, and, I have to admit it, because I’m in this too, his mother. Why not? We faded away to nothing more than a faint reminder of another life, the way your stomach sometimes growls to tell you that it’s working. That’s how faint we were in his day at this point, natural to him, but not present. How far he had come to reach this moment, when he could forget everyone he had been working for all these years! But I don’t blame him, you understand. He had arrived at an important time in his life, when he had to say to himself, what is it all for, what am I doing this all for? To keep a girl in clothes and schoolbooks? To keep a mother warm against the winter weather? To keep a wife in and out of a hospital and shot full of medicines? No, it’s more than that, more than that, and if the bird that visited him from time to time didn’t swoop down out of the sky and give him the advice he needed, that was because right now he didn’t have to go outside himself for news, for weather reports, for wisdom, for inspiration, for advice on how to proceed. All he needed was his brother-in-law Mordecai to show him where he was supposed to stand and like a good actor he played his part. Options rolled in, companies stumbled before him, the money added up, and my Manny, in less than half a lifetime, went from peddler’s boy to king—or what we call in this country the same thing as king. He was a president, executive officer, board member, he might as well be a moon man except that he goes to the office in the city and he and Mordecai look at reports, they talk it over, they telephone money men, bankers, they talk it over, and they draw up plans, and then they make more telephone calls, and the next thing you know they own something else, and Manny, my Manny, the nice little boy who used to help his father push the cart on the Sabbath, who made up for all that by serving so many years as a rabbi, and a fine one you’ll admit, yes? He’s sitting on yet another board in his dark suit and white hair, and he’s got the respect of the others, and more important, he’s got control of yet one more company. In less than five years, four of them, the bottling, the paper, the box, the ships, and the one they started out with, barges. But now they’ve got more than barges, they’ve got ocean ships. And shipping routes south, and warehouses where they need them. And my Manny is getting upset because he has to divide himself between the temple and the companies, and the other thing of course that’s upsetting him now is the two women, between Maby and Florette, and you’re smiling but don’t ever think that except for what you’re about to hear me tell him on the telephone just now, in a minute, when I tell you what I told him, I never asked him to do nothing for me.

  Yes, my call was one of those winking lights on his desk board, because I was upset at breakfast when he didn’t eat, when I saw how much he was sweating, when I could feel his nervousness crackling in the air like Jersey summer lightning, and when his secretary told him that among the others on the line I was waiting to speak to him fortunately for him he took my call first. Because just when he said,

  Hello, into the office walked Mordecai. Where he was returning from I couldn’t say, but he was always just back from some place or other, South America, Texas, California, Detroit, even Israel is a place that he goes to and comes from. He himself, let me tell you, darling, is quite a story, a match for my Manny, no doubt about that, and to think that they all met—except for Florette who at the time was not born yet, and lucky for her not yet born because she had a future in the camps still to suffer through, and little Sarah who, of course, was also away in the future—they all met at the accident where my Jacob passed away, in the Union Square, and ever since in one way or another we’ve all been together. He has quite a past, and if I told you all of it you’d be sitting here until tomorrow morning and your own children would be wonde
ring why you weren’t at home to answer the telephone. Not that my driver wouldn’t wait, he’s a very nice boy, a South American, his name is Daniel, which is a French name, I understand, but somehow with the French and the South American he still speaks English, and he takes good care of me, like a grandson I never had.

  And isn’t Manny a good son, too? Because when from the switchboard comes the word that I’m on the line and it’s an emergency—this voice comes to him through the speaker on his desk because, remember, he hasn’t touched the telephone—he says, “Put her on the line.”

  “Hello, Mama?” he says.

  “Darling,” I say. I’m breathing hard. “I’m worried, frankly, that’s what it is. You’re all right?” I ask him.

  “Yes,” he says, “is that why you called?”

  He’s staring up from his desk at Mordecai, remember, who has just walked in, without knocking, without buzzing, of course, that’s his way, and he’s talking to me across the river.

  “I was worried that you didn’t eat your breakfast.”

  “Mama,” he says with a laugh, “you’re always worried.”

  “Your hands were shaking when you held the newspaper. That’s something I shouldn’t worry about?”

  “Mama.”

  “Tell me I shouldn’t worry.”

  “You shouldn’t.”

  He looks up at his partner, wonders what, just what he’s going to say first, there’s the news about Maby in the hospital, there’s the news about . . . but then he catches himself. Because Mord doesn’t need to learn about Florette. Why in hell should he hear about Florette? But Manny is thinking a mile a minute, and the borders between his thoughts—or do I mean the boundaries?—they’re falling away in his mind, and like on the train he’s working his fingers raw on the glass shard, rubbing, rubbing so when he finishes talking to me he’s got to excuse himself and go into the bathroom and run water over the wounds and put on Band-Aids in two places.