Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  The Bible. The Bible, I told you I know what the Bible—I told you my Manny and I discussed it, the Bible, what the Bible says about the things in the dark in the tent in the desert, but there are deserts and there are deserts, and tents and tents, and dark and dark, and these are modern times, you know, and I’m not saying that you bend the rules until they break, but I’m saying that the rules they change and twist and bend and that’s life—the rules live, too, and the rules change, like people change, and if I don’t understand it I can at least understand that I don’t understand it, the grandmother speaks—she says the words—the language comes to her.

  BLOOD.

  If blood could talk, if nerves could, in the two minutes they spent together in the room just after my telephone call, all of what I just told you they might have said right then and there. If blood could talk, if nerves. Let’s imagine that they said this, with their nerves, with their veins. And then they sat down, and they made a deal. It didn’t take longer than that. It had to do with a partnership they had already concluded just after Meyer Sporen’s death, an agreement they had made between the two of them to run the company the boat man had left. They extended it now—it included not only operating the company, and building it up, certainly that they had done, it now included, from my Manny’s side at least, a new small unspoken agreement. It included the fact that he put the company ahead of his love, his family, anything he cared about or believed in that might stand in the way of making things work.

  It can only help Maby, he told me, a long time afterward, when the heat of her revelation to him had cooled, and she, too, had calmed down considerably, with the help of pills, doctors, and the nice trees and grass and air out in the country at Owl Valley. She brought some of it with her when she returned home, the calm, the pills, the desire for doctors. The first, she kept with her, deciding, with the help of the doctors, that she ought to do something with her life. And what she decided was, as I said before, taking courses. Manny would have preferred that she work in the temple organizations, but that was something she never did with much enthusiasm and he wasn’t about to force her, seeing her delicate state, to do it now. Instead, he listened patiently while she explained that she was going to enroll in a creative writing seminar at Rutgers Newark. He nodded, agreed. And he bought her a new car. Touching, no? Well, look, he was behind her a hundred percent. He made a point from that time on never to lose his temper with her, never to criticize. And if you don’t think my Manny could make a decision like that, you don’t know what he did—by decisions like that—to make his company, the brother’s company, the brother-in-law’s company, grow. I mean, little companies they picked up like kids’ toys from the playroom floor—and stock options, whatever that is, I hear him talk, these he gets from all of them, and from the companies they buy they milk money and buy others. My Manny. In his white hair streaked dark and dark suit—he walks into a boardroom and no one, let me tell you, is bored, my dear. They sit up, they watch him, they listen for what he says, because he has learning, he’s read in the Torah, in history, and this is a twist for them, all of them like lawyers and businesspeople only, or maybe a few studied history at college, but this was all for the ancient history. I’m trying to explain to you how he does it, trying, too, to understand it myself. But he does it—maybe it’s magic. Maybe he’s got some formula he uses, hypnosis, halitosis, outrageous how he does it, Manny, my little boy turned wizard of the Walled Street. Look, he learned a lot from the brother-in-law, I don’t want to take away from Mordecai, Mord, but he has something in himself, the part that talks to birds.

  And for a change he uses some of his magic when he listens to his wife. He doesn’t shout, he doesn’t say put your time into the temple, he listens, he nods, he agrees, he buys a car. After all, by this time he wasn’t tied so closely to the temple himself, he only thought he was—after all, another year and he would take a fall, and rest, and then resign so that we would move here and he would put all of his time into the company—the companies. So it doesn’t upset him that she won’t be helping with the auxiliary and the rest of it because it was all by this time auxiliary to him. In a way, I hate to say this, it always was, all of it. He did it, he did it well, but it was all a stepping-stone, rungs on a ladder. Don’t get me wrong—he did it because he was a good boy and a good man, but when he saw that he could do it, it was in a way for him over and done. And he was ready for a change—in a way he was ready for a change whenever he was doing anything. From the first time he went out with his father, may he rest in peace, the first time they walked together to the square, he was ready for a change. And didn’t he get one? He got a big change. We all got a big change. And sometimes I wish we didn’t have any changes big or small. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been so particular that I didn’t like the smell of a student from the city. If I had held my nose and lived my life, things would have been different, wouldn’t they? Jacob, my Jacob, he might have been—but no, because whenever I think this, I remember about Florette, and I remember the numbers on her pale white skin, and I remember that if I hadn’t been so particular I would have stayed, and I would have been put in one of those camps, and my Jacob, even if he hadn’t become my Jacob, he too would have been caught, and we both would have gone up in big puffs of smoke, and there would have been no Manny, and no nothing, not this apartment, and the cars and the trips and the food and the gifts and the everything, no Maby, not for us, and no little Sarah, little Sarah-Sadie, and so where do you think she is at this hour, it’s time she should be getting home, don’t you think? But as I was saying, there would have been none of this if I hadn’t been so particular. So who wants no change? So who wants to stand still? You stand still you might as well be dead—you stand still you are dead. And that’s that.

  So where do I think she is? At a friend’s apartment, or someplace waiting to go back, waiting to pick up a friend she promised to drive, where else? She packed warm clothes to take back with her, is all. She came, she packed, so what? She’s like her mother, you know, she won’t talk about where she’s going, where she’s been. But her mother, I’m telling you, she paid. Oi, did she pay. She was in the hospital, the home, whatever you call it, and then she came out looking like she had paid. And she took her classes and then . . .

  It gave her something to do.

  She wrote about things she did. She made up a little but a lot she put down just the way it was. I know. I was there for most of the time. There was a teacher, a Professor Bair, a writer of books, novels he wrote, and he came in from the city one night a week and taught the class, and Maby, she drove over from here in her new car, and she wrote stories. Look, here, wait a minute. You see . . . I know where she keeps them. I know where they are. And I’d love to hear . . . so you could read it to me? Like we’ve done before. We could listen together? I know she made one about a trip they took to Israel after she came home from Owl Valley. I forgot, I should have told you, the one thing she wanted was the classes, and Manny said, certainly you should do that, and then he asked her if she wanted to take the trip, a vacation to Israel, and she said, sure, she would do that, it would take her to places she had never seen before. And so they went, and the doctor, the one she was seeing at Owl Valley, he said, “Maby, you should do more traveling, it agrees with you.”

  And she wrote this, and other things, I heard her talking on the telephone to someone from the class, or maybe it was the teacher, the writer, about the trip.

  So.

  We’ll look.

  Here. In the room. The study she uses when she’s home.

  Here it is. The filing. Here. The folder. Here. The writing.

  What do you mean you don’t want to snoop? This is not snooping, snooping is something else. This is learning. Here. Now. You got it? And so let’s see what it says.

  But there’s more than one? I want to hear more. She got out of the hospital and went to this class for months and months. I at least ought to hear what she did—think of all the suppers I cooked f
or nobody, Sarah away at some school activity, Maby at the Rutgers Newark, Manny—well, I’ll tell you where he was, though I think you can guess. Later, I’ll tell you. Why not? If I know all this the world should know. At least you should know it—frankly I wouldn’t tell the world before I told my friends. And I wouldn’t tell my friends before I told myself, so I could understand it. And I wouldn’t tell myself before admitting the whole thing was weighing me down like a ton of water. So I admit it, it’s weighing on me. So I’m talking. You think I didn’t tell you before now because I wanted to keep it a secret what I feel? I didn’t know—so who can know what they feel before they tell somebody else? Only my Manny thinks it’s possible to live that way—and only lately, since he stopped talking to his mother did he start to feel that way. And he’ll talk again to me, I know he will. All his life he talked, and he’ll talk again.

  So. You’re holding on to these pages? You want to look at the top page at least? You’re ready to snoop along with the grandmother? What’s it called? “Notes of a Rabbi’s Wife after Shock, Drugs, Chaos, Night”? What kind of a title is that? And it starts in the middle of nowhere?

  . . . I have come to love the work of my hands, spinning and weaving. Three days a week I am awake long before light and lie in bed contemplating the class to come. Breakfasts never thrilled me, but even the moist eggs and dry toast lure me on, and I chew, and I chew, and I swallow, building my strength.

  “Good morning, Maby.”

  I open my eyes to see her white-lined eyes, her curling lip.

  “I know you.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “And you know me.”

  “I do.”

  “A vow,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “A wedding vow. I do. You do. We do. We two.”

  “You’re so poetic. Maby, would you like to try and write some poetry?”

  “Try and? Why not? It’s all done, isn’t it? I went to school, you know.”

  “I think we know that. In . . .”

  “Shhh! Not the names of real places. We don’t say the names of real places.”

  “That still bothers you?”

  “Always. Since communion.”

  “The weaving’s going well, isn’t it, Maby?”

  “Um-hum.”

  “Did you copy that from a pattern? Something out of a National Geographic?”

  “No.”

  “From some design?”

  “No design.”

  “Looks pretty lifelike to me.”

  “Life has no design.”

  “Think so?”

  “Know so.”

  “Well, so what?”

  “My mother used to say, sew buttons.”

  “Did she sew?”

  “She sewed seems.”

  “Seams?”

  “Seems. She knew seems.”

  “Would you like to talk a little more about her?”

  “She lived in sin.”

  “Your mother lived in sin?”

  “In Cincinnati.”

  “A fine pun. Shall we talk about her?”

  “She knew not seams.”

  “What?”

  “When I was a girl we went to Coney Island and rode on the bumper cars. They . . .”

  “Excuse me, did you say Coney Island? On one of those trips to New York with your father?”

  “Coney Island in Sin-sin-ati. We had one of our own. We had many things of our own. We had sin-sin. We had original Sin-sin-ati.”

  “So tell me about the bumper cars.”

  “I don’t remember what I was going to say.”

  “Maby, you ought to keep a notebook. Keep it at your bedside. When you have a thought, just write it down. And then we can talk about things that come to you. Would you like that?”

  “I . . . would.”

  Eye. Wood.

  Eye. Sigh.

  Eye sigh for you. Eye die for you.

  Four yew trees in a row. Four Jew trees in a row.

  THIS IS WRITING? This is craziness is what it is. And I can’t tell you how much it hurts me to hear it, for the sake of the poor girl who all these years had such craziness inside her and it took a college writing class and the breakdown to come out, and for the sake of my Manny who lived with her, who made his life depend on her, and for the sake of my granddaughter in whose heart runs the same blood as this same poor girl, red, deep red, I’m sure, because they are both so strong-headed, and strong-headed means strong-hearted, but also it means wild and seeing things the rest of the world doesn’t see—except for people like me who see sometimes, and this I got to learn for the future, without their eyes.

  You know, Rose, sometimes you recognize these feelings inside you. Intimations of the future, invitations to the future, whatever you call them, and about the little red-haired girl at the scene of the accident I wish I could tell you that I knew better, because some things I can tune in on, like I tune on a radio, but other times, the signals from the future fade, because maybe the moon in the present or the near past or early future, who knows when, passes between my mind and the news I’m trying to get, like the way the radio crackles with the sunspots? You tell me how. Because if I knew then—if I knew when I first saw her—oh, if only I could have been a better grandmother even though at the time I was only the mother of the boy still far too young even to think about girls, let alone make a marriage with one, and making a child that would make me a grandmother—if only I could have known then, if I would have known the minute she entered the apartment, dragged along there by her parents when they brought my poor milk-truck-struck half-orphaned Manny in the door, I would have grabbed my little boy by the arm and dragged him inside and shut the door forever in the face of this crazy bunch with their crazy little girl who was not only about to make remarks about the smell in his pants but who would grow up to give him a life that would nearly drive him mad. And if my Manny could have avoided the trouble from her, and if their daughter, my little Sarah, could have been spared some of the trouble that has already come to her in life because she is the daughter of you-know-who, I would give up what time I have left ahead of me and go back to that awful Saturday in that cold year, the Sabbath of milk and blood and bells, and lay my own body down in the path of that taxi to make it stop before arriving to kill my Jacob. I would make a jump to stop that horse . . .

  Now, I know what you’re thinking, what you could be thinking anyway. I know that she had her own troubles that led to this craziness, I know she had her troubles piling up in her. And you had your troubles, too, I bet, Rose. And me mine, me too, but at least you survived without getting too crazy because—I don’t know why. You’re tough. And I’m tough? And she wasn’t tough? I don’t think so. It doesn’t look that way. And why not? That I can’t tell you. This grandmother doesn’t know every single thing, not the creation of the earth except what I hear in stories as a child and not the taxes that’s always bothering my Manny, and not the reasons for war and the reasons for peace, except maybe I do know something about the last thing, at least a way to stop it because mothers and grandmothers they get tired. So? What? You want to hear my plan for world peace? Later. First you want to hear the rest of this story.

  So, she’s suffering a lot in the hospital, and do I have to tell you that it’s not a picnic for my Manny either? After he fell she couldn’t be his proper helper, and in fact I think that her own craziness was creeping up on her even then. They went on the vacation—to Bitch Heaven they call it, not Beach, not Haven, that’s right—and who do you think was the bitch? Guess. They went to the shore and he didn’t want to go back to the temple. He had made up his mind. Or his mind had made up his body, maybe I should say. He fell because he tripped, but not with his feet. Not with his feet first. First his mind tripped, and then his feet. And he went hurtling head forward like a diver or one of those men shot from the cannons at the circus. A bullet, like. A shell, you call it? But not a seashell? I see. I can see him now, in the hospital bed, back
at home, on the trip running along the seashore. Exercise, the famous Doctor Mickey said. Take it easy and exercise—so how can you do both? One high holy day Manny was walking to temple, thinking, what am I doing here, where am I going, walking, thinking. And then he climbs the dais, and then he sees a bird—a bird!—and falls. And now he’s running along the beach, trotting maybe and she’s tagging along after. And he stops, and he looks out at the water, the waves, white-capped waves, and he says to himself,

  From that way, from over there, I came, and I’ve done things here, and what do they mean to me now?

  He was about to answer his own question with nothing when a cloud passed across the face of the sun, and he felt as though nature had answered it for him with a big chill, and the covering of the face of the sun with a shadow, with cold wind on his bare skin. Up he looks and there’s a dark-backed waterbird skimming high above the waves, and he hails it, standing there in his black bathing trunks, skin prickled, goose bumps, his stomach hanging over the waist of the suit maybe a finger’s thickness, his hair sucking in the light it’s so bright itself in the sun, head like a whirlpool so, the way water sucks down into the drain—swoo-uuck!—and even though he had asked only what do you call?—a remarkable question? the kind you want or don’t need no answer for?—everything of a sudden goes dark for him, and he hears nothing but the scree-scree, scree-scree of the bird swooping down on him, and the next thing you know he hears a voice again.

  Manny, it says, and if sound can have a light, it’s a bright light in the middle of the darkness that surrounds him, like a burning bush in a dark meadow, or a star against a black field of velvet, like that, all of the sunlight that was present a moment before condensed into the sound, and to my son, it’s as if he is falling again, falling through the sand, falling through into whatever it is—some kind of rock, a shelf, a ledge I once heard the word?—and to someone watching him, such as Maby, the wife, who stops for a moment as she sees him, not sure that what she is seeing is real—he falls to his knees and spreads out his arms toward the waves, face turned upward into the sun—what’s real to her anyway, after what she’s been through? the woman who carried the hurt from the brother? the woman who married my Manny, who knows why? the woman who wrote the crazy mishmash about the hospital? She should be the one down on her knees in the sand looking like she’s going mad! She should be the one who’s hearing the voice of a bird!