by Alan Cheuse
“Your mother?” Mordecai said, sitting on the desktop. His big bald head caught the light from the ceiling lamp and appeared to be as beautifully polished as the surfaces of the furniture. To Manny at this time the brother-in-law’s skull seemed about to burst out of its skin. Mord had picked up some weight in the few years since he had come back to this country and taken up the business with Manny. As Manny remembered him he had been tall, bony, thin. But this man could easily have lifted up the father who had tossed him from dock to barge and heaved the big man who tortured him across that same empty space over the water. At fifty-plus, he had strength the boy he had been never dreamed of. In a funny way he owed this all to Sporen.
I’m starting to tell you this, and I said it would take all night. You want to hear? Listen. What happened between him and Manny didn’t last all that long. Manny finished our telephone conversation—he was feeling better, I was feeling better because he was feeling better—and, hello, hello, isn’t it amazing, how a mother’s call can have that effect?—and he didn’t take the rest of his calls but sat down with Mord and he talked, they talked, he explained about Maby, where she was, how long the doctors thought she would rest there, he wanted Mord to know, he explained, after all, she was his sister, and then they had a lot of arrangements for the business to discuss, they hadn’t talked face to face in weeks, but it was true, they had a meeting here, a meeting there, and they needed to talk strategy, that’s what they called it, Mord the mastermind, Manny the soothing presence—and during this time, while Mord is looking so concerned about his sister, and so serious about the preparations for the week, Manny is saying to himself, say something, say something, but how do you say something to a man some years your elder about something he did, if he did it, as a boy? When Manny couldn’t, as it turned out, connect the little boy he himself had been to the man he had become, and couldn’t connect the man he had become first, the student, the rabbi, to the man he had become now, the corporation man in the dark suit whose presence soothed gentile—which doesn’t mean gentle—boards into submission, so what was he going to do, crucify his partner for something his hysterical wife remembered like a bad dream? And did it happen at all, he asked himself as he sat there, what if it was only the fantasy of a woman lost in drink? It could be the truth but it could be many other things, some of which Manny had heard over the years from members of the congregation. If there was one thing he learned in that job, it was that there was no such thing as an adult, so why couldn’t he include his hysterical wife in that number? And why shouldn’t he sympathize with his brother-in-law, particularly when, if they quarreled, they would get into a mess that could bring down all their holdings on their heads? They had met by chance—the deathly accident that took my Jacob, and again by chance yet another time after the untimely deaths of the pair of Sporens—and worked well together only by chance, an act of chemistry, Manny had originally decided, not unlike the kind that brought him and Maby together and now clasped him and Florette in its fist like two pieces of clay to be joined and molded—and what chance had wrought did someone want by design to bring down?
You hear stories these days about the coloreds and how they felt when they were slaves, and I listen carefully because—and I want to talk a little quietly here because she’s still in the kitchen cleaning up and I don’t want to hurt her feelings, and it was terrible, sometimes even the masters would sell a father and mother here, a child elsewhere—and like I say, I listen, because, you know, how it’s been that way in the Bible with the Jews, and I can tell you, my Manny knows his history inside out, he was a student, and then a rabbi, and so I want to tell you that even though it could sound bad what he’s done with the brother-in-law it is not at all like that, like that with the slaves, the coloreds, the Jews, it is not like he is selling his wife down the river because he doesn’t bring up the subject with the brother, with the brother-in-law. I believe this. I have thought about it. Believe me. A son of mine I wouldn’t have behave that way, and he didn’t. I’m telling you.
SO.
You know, I’m wondering where she is. She should be getting back by now from wherever she is. Sarah, I mean. Sadie, as she calls herself. Sarah, Sadie, whatever she calls herself, she’s still my little granddaughter. Except now, not so little. Maybe she went to her mother’s? It could be, it could be. But so late? On the highway after dark? I worry about her. I always worry, I know, so who doesn’t? You worry, and you worry. But the worst thing you can’t do anything about. The worst things—I told you the Sporen story—you do yourself.
To yourself, I mean.
Excuse me. Why I should be crying all of a sudden, I don’t know. To yourself, I was saying. To your own.
For example, what Meyer Sporen did to that boy, I could sympathize why he was so rough to the sister. A mother can understand, though, I’ll tell you, I don’t think his mother did. She didn’t, because she couldn’t. From her you could figure some terrible thing had happened in her own life when she was little, and to her parents, either the mother or father or both when they were children, and on and on, back further and further, until you get to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and you have to think, maybe the story in the Bible should tell the truth about what happened, because maybe what happened was, instead of eating the apple and getting God angry, maybe they hit Cain who hit Abel—or, worse, darling, imagine, maybe even it was God who hit Adam, and Adam hit Eve, or at least made him feel worthless, and this feeling he passed along, and along, and down all the generations—I’m telling you, one mother, even this one, can’t hardly make up for all of the abuse the human race has given to itself, and gotten, all the years.
But I was saying. What Sporen did to that boy Mordecai you already know. But what it did to him, that only came out later in his life. When Mord ran away to sea. How do I know this? I see it, just the way I heard it from my Manny, and if you don’t think he, the man who used to be the boy, the brother, the brother-in-law, didn’t tell it to my Manny, then you got another thing coming, because to my Manny he talked, they talked and they talked, like the Catholics with their confessions, his story, the brother’s, the brother-in-law’s, it fits in not because it makes you laugh but because it could make you weep. So here he is, standing there talking to my Manny, and on his shoulders, in his brain, he’s carrying a lot around with him. You have this table-oh, you call it? My white-haired Manny, and the older man, the hawk nose, the balding head, the slightly hunched shoulders, and he’s carrying with him despite the man he looks to be the boy inside who went to sail the ocean where islands dotted the horizon.
So the brother-in-law, he saw the seas, from his father’s barge that sailed the river down to the gulf, and then out to the sea, warm waters there, and warmer still, unlike the spitting ice from the whitecaps where we watched the waves, yes, for him, warmer, warmer, warmer still, and through the canal, the one named after the hat, and on to the China part, his first big trip, and he was not so young that he couldn’t appreciate the enormity of what he had done—put Cincinnati, his sister, his mother, father, behind him—and not so old that he didn’t feel, along with the guilt, a little bit of playful pleasure, and not so old that he didn’t feel some homesick too along with the pleasure, and not so old that he couldn’t appreciate the beautiful first sight, the flying fish, the sunsets, the sound of the engines churn-churn-churn-churn-churning him to sleep on nights when he didn’t watch the stars fade to nothing and the sun come up over waters higher than he had ever dreamed, the waves, sometimes splashing across the sky—or so it appeared to him—and sometimes the sky spilling down into the trough of the waves, after a storm a sky so multicolored it might have been the original roll of material that God supplied for Joseph’s many-colored coat. Oh, he loved the ocean, and he hated it, too—and oh, we are an oceangoing people, a water-crossing people, ever since our ancestors rushed between the Red Sea waves the Lord pulled back to let them pass, and we crossed over Jordan, after a while, and even their Jesus, who used to be, as th
ey tell it, one of us, didn’t he supposedly walk on the lake at Galilee? a nice Jewish boy, standing on the waves? the son, the brother-in-law, like me and my Manny, and my Jacob, and his father before him, too, he’s crossing the water, and walking on the deck if not on the waves, walking, walking all the way to China.
And he was thinking about what he had done to his sister, and what his father had done to him, before and after, and he discovered that he didn’t like thinking so much about this, and thinking about anything else much he didn’t do, and so he took up the hobby of the older sailors, he took up drinking, and he liked it because he didn’t have to think about what his father had done to him and what he had done to his sister, and he remembered now and then that what he was doing was his mother’s hobby, and that he probably took after her rather than his father, and if he had done something awful to his sister, it was probably because he was jealous that she was like their mother, that she was made like their mother, and one night while standing on the deck, with nothing between him and the dark ocean except a thin railing, the air as dark as the water except at the top of the ocean of sky the stars poked through, winkling, twinkling, as the ship’s deck rolled and heaved, and he felt such a longing for the water and sky and stars, felt such an urge to fling himself into the ocean, forgetting that he would not fall but rise into the stars, forgetting that he could not breathe the air but would instead inhale and cease to be, and remembering everything that had happened even as he thought about forgetting, that he left behind his hopes for merging into the starry watery dark and sank into himself, and up out of himself, like the way the mountains rose out of this same sea bottom in places around the world—according to my Sarah’s geography books where I used to look at the pictures with her—a mountain range of despair rose up, and he wanted to take himself by the hand, take himself—do you know what I mean?—in hand, and tear himself apart.
If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, they used to say. And he wanted to get rid of the offending part, maybe he was drunk out here already, and if so, he was lucky, I’m telling you, he didn’t feel so loose and lonely that he climbed over the rail and slipped over the side into the deepest part of the ocean sky, the dark deep where the stars go out from the blackness of it all, but no, he didn’t, even if he was drunk at that moment, he didn’t, but he did descend, descend he did, into the bowels of the ship, into the sleeping part where his little bunk lay, a niche in the inner part of the rear, the stern of the ship, and there he drank from a bottle he had bought in some port, rum it was, and he wept quietly to himself, and the bottle slipped from his hand in the night, and he wept on with an urgency matched only by the ship’s engines churn-churn-churn-churn-churn-churning, already you’re sorry for him, aren’t you? the bad boy, the boy who hurt his sister and you’re sorry for him? Well, he was a boy then, he was a mother’s son, and a father’s son, and you already know how they hurt him to begin with, and how he passed the hurt along, and here he is in his bunk, his bed, and he should be sleeping, a boy asleep in the niche in the ship, sleeping to the heaving of the sea and the churning music of the engines, a peaceful picture it could have been, but it wasn’t, because he was weeping and then he was moaning, and he was choking, and he was cursing himself as best he knew how to curse. Now if I could have been there I would have known what to do, I would have taken him in my arms and rocked him like a baby—ah-uh-ah-uh, bay-bee, Ma-ma is a lay-dee—and I would have comforted him, taken away his drink, given back to him the peace he threw aside when he learned how roughly his father treated him, when he discovered in himself his urge to hurt his sister—because if you turned it inside out it wasn’t the desire to hurt but the need to show her his affection that drove him to it, except that the affection got turned inside out and he hurt her beyond any limit he could have imagined. If he had torn loose one of her limbs he couldn’t have hurt her more—or hurt himself. If he had killed her and then himself that might have been the only way he could have hurt both of them more. And oh the pain that it caused him as well as her, and I would have taken him in my arms, taken the place of that mother the drunkard, whose own parents hurt her, gouged out of her a well that she had to fill with drink, and so I mustn’t sound so harsh, and I apologize, but I would have taken him, and helped him, and soothed him to sleep, me and the sea, the sea and the engines and me.
But I wasn’t there, and his own mother wasn’t there, not that she, the drinker, could have done any good, and he had no father as far as he was concerned, not the father who had grabbed and thrown him, which, when he didn’t think about what he did to his sister, was a large part of what made him weep, the father throwing him, the casting out of the son by the father is how he felt it though he didn’t at this point in his life have the words, no, there was nobody from the family, there was only an old sailor, from the family of the crew, and this man, gray-bearded, smelling of rum, and tobacco, and the sweat of his labor, this man, awakened by Mord’s weeping, crept alongside him in the night, and he comforted him, took him in his arms and comforted him.
What am I saying? I’m saying, I’m saying. I’m saying that this poor boy had to travel many miles over land and sea before he found a little bit of . . . don’t you know what I’m saying? Worry more about how I know what I’m about to tell you instead of why I want to tell it. But I won’t tell you that. You’ll have to guess how I know it. But what happened? The old sailor, the young boy, what do you think? What do you imagine? You think it could be worse than what the father did to the boy and what the boy did to the sister? I don’t know, I don’t think so. To make a pattern you need cloth. To make a pattern you need scissors. To cut, to sew. To sew you need a needle, you need thread. To thread the needle, you need a good eye and a steady hand. To hold, to thread. Do you see? I’m not sure I see. But the thread, the needle, the eye of the needle, the point of the thread, the point of the pin. To make a pattern, cut the cloth, sew. Do you see? Different from what happened with the sister, but the same, in a way the same. The boy, he was trembling, weeping in the arms of the older sailor—probably not so old as I’m saying, probably only old to the eye of the boy, the eye he saw with, not the eye to thread, that eye, no, to that eye was he old? I don’t know—but the older sailor, the man, the boy, whatever he was, because maybe even he didn’t know what he was, how could he be sure when he was doing what he was doing, the mixing, mixing of young and old, boy and man, and boy and girl, too, that too—he, the sailor, he was trying to help, not to get pleasure and comfort for himself only, I don’t think, although isn’t that always part of it?
What am I saying? I’m trying to say it, but it’s not easy, you know. After all, a grandmother—a grandmother speaks—a grandmother speaks a certain language—a grandmother speaks a grandmother’s tongue all her life, all her life as a mother and as a grandmother—a grandmother speaks and the words, the words sometimes they don’t say—because they can’t say—all that she sees, all that she hears, all that she knows—because the words don’t, the words don’t do it, do they?—see, hear, eat, drink, live?—do they say it? Do they make you see? eat? drink? rest? fear? love? hold?—or hide? The sailor, he held the boy awhile, and as he held him, he played with him, do you know what I mean? I don’t mean games like cards, I mean he played, and the next thing you know they’re off in a shadowy bunk, a hammock, it’s not clear, all of it isn’t clear, but it’s like I’m seeing things, I can picture it from the words I heard about it, the sailor, the boy, and the sailor helps the boy undress, and they caress, and that’s a rhyme that tells you what they did, are doing, have done, the dress, undress, caress, caress, a rhyme for that time, because it’s like out of a fairy tale not for children. The sailor petting the boy, the boy weeping, mewing like a lost little kitten, long, skinny, hairy boy, bearded sailor, the little boy looking for a father who won’t throw him across the abyss, the older sailor looking for a boy to care for, each of them lost, each has lost something, lost themselves, who knows why? But each a mother’s boy, and wouldn’t their
mothers, if their mothers knew, know why?
And then the bending, and all the time the touching, and the touching and the stretching, in the dark, in the half-light, casting shadows, rolling with the waves, and then again the needle, the threading of the needle, the making of the thread, the cutting of the cloth, the pattern, the pattern, a long hup and a hush and a straining whine and a cry and a sigh.
And then a resting, a lying down alone, a washing of the waves against the hull, a thudding of the engines in the quiet of the resting, of the lying down,
and then,
and then again,
the engines,
the waves . . .
So you see, this is how the battered boy found some affection, and so what if it’s that kind, the kind we don’t usually talk about, the kind—what would my Manny say, he’s said it to me—the kind in the tent in the desert in the dark, the Bible says, but does the Bible bring affection to the battered boy? Even a dog needs affection, and this boy, long-limbed and with a hawky nose, and already starting to lose on top the hair, this poor boy needed someone, we all need someone, and don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending. I’m not defending what happened with the sister, I’m not defending what he does with his life after that, with the sailor, with other sailors, with men, with boys like he himself used to be, I’m not defending, I’m merely describing, but who is this grandmother, let alone a mother, or an uncle, or a sister, or a brother-in-law, who are they—who am I?—to say what’s right, what’s wrong, darling, short of murder, short of torturing somebody with a knife, a gun, who am I to say?
