Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  Manny, you must do what you must do. It’s his father’s voice, again, he’s sure, the voice of my Jacob. Go where you must go. Midway in this life, a point I never reached, you must take a new road.

  Now this is pretty crazy talk, I have to admit, and I’m the boy’s mother. But this is what he heard, he reported this to me, and I’ve got to tell you that if I heard it I wouldn’t believe it, because you know, it sounds like, what? poetry? something out of the television special on the Bible with Charlton Heston or somebody? But this is what he heard, he swears, down on his knees, in the sand, though, of course, he says he felt as though he was falling through the ground, through the floor of the world, that’s the way he put it, through the floor of the world.

  Take a new road, he repeats to himself, and he knows what this means. This means put all of himself into the business—throw himself into the business. But as much as he understands, he wants to know more. Even though in part of his mind he’s thinking, I must be crazier than she is, I must be, because things like this don’t happen, not to educated people, to rational people, to an educated man like myself, kneeling on the beach. He couldn’t get up, he felt, until he knew more. He tried, but he couldn’t rise. He kept on falling, sinking, and couldn’t reverse it. He wanted to ask, but can I still feel blessed in that work? Because wasn’t that why he was hanging back from it? This much he told me, told me the truth of it, that he was hanging back not so much out of confusion as clarity, because that much he saw, he saw how much he was not confused but afraid, afraid that he would lose his special sense of himself in the world, his sense of himself as getting double goodness, the purity of his job as a rabbi, the money from the business, how much? How much? How much? And what he wanted to know, he wanted to know if he could do this and still keep the high right sense of life that he maintained when at the temple . . .

  And he might have gotten an answer from the bird, but just then up to him came Maby, running running she was, because she got scared, and she grabbed him by the shoulder and shouted,

  “Manny, are you okay?”

  Which pulled him up from the fall through the ground, yanked him right back her voice did, like he was tied to a rope that had just stretched taut to full length, and it yanked, and he felt the rope burn into his waist, like a tightening belt, and he turned with a scowl on his face, blinking into the sun that returned with her voice, and he stood up, and he snarled at her, showed his incisors, I’m sad to say, like an angry dog, and he said,

  “Don’t you touch me like that, ever again!”

  How things change! They change, but they don’t change that much, not that you can see. Look at this beach they’re standing on, how it washes away and swells with the coming and going of the tide. Now it comes, builds, grows, then it goes, shrinks, sinks, washes far off toward where the breakers roll, the undertow carves it, the moon calls it, in and out, far and near, and here is my son, a scene I could have described to you earlier, much earlier, but who wanted to remember this, the way he spoke to her, after he had promised himself, but the tide, the tide, and there she goes, running again, running off along the sand?

  Oh, if I could have been that beach I would have held him there on his knees. I would, if I had been those waves, washed over him to shut his mouth and stay his hand! I would have kept him from doing such harm to himself by speaking this way to her! But there she is, on the run again, and there he is, up and running after.

  They had a lovely room in the hotel, a room facing the ocean. And they had had a lovely meal the night before. And in bed—don’t blush, because with me it’s no use, you’ll be blushing all the time—he had tried to be kind, he had tried to be gentle, and he thought he had succeeded. But what kind of a love is this where he has to try all the time, to think all the time, now I must be kind, now I must be gentle? Because if it comes, it comes, right? And if there’s no gentle, can you make it gentle? I mean, all the time? Can you think about it all the time? It’s like a person with crutches, look I see these people, they have to think, now where can I get down to the next floor? or where is the way down the curb that won’t trip me? Where? Where? There’s always a way, and there’s never a way that could have been. So he was gentle for one night, and then he has the trance on the beach, and it’s all gone, blown away in the wind off the ocean.

  Which is where she runs to—the ocean.

  And my Manny, can he swim? You might as well ask if he can fly. He called after her, come back here, come back, but she’s pushing out into the waves like she owned them, like they were nasty children she’s knocking aside or stalks of corn she’s wading through, except these children, this field, it keeps coming on toward you no matter what you do, and pretty soon she’s up to her neck, and stroking, swimming toward deeper water.

  “Maby!” my Manny’s yelling from the shore. “You come back here!”

  But does she even turn around? She keeps on swimming, stroking, until she’s so far out you can see her head bobbing up and down with the incoming rollers. By this time, he’s frantic, he’s lost all of his ability to keep calm, and he’s swearing at her, something he hardly ever does, and cursing himself for doing what he did, and meanwhile she’s swimming along the horizon, nothing more than a little bump of hair and head, bobbing up, dropping down, bobbing up, dropping down.

  “Come back!” he shrieks at her, and the cry sounds as though it echoes over the waves because of the scree-screeing of the birds. And like a crazy man, he’s scanning the waters one minute, as if he might lose her, and then searching the sky for a bird who might help.

  “Please, Maby!” he calls out to her, and all of his restraint, it falls away like the robe he tossed aside when he came down to the water’s edge. Tears have filled his eyes—salt there, salt at his knees as he wades as far as he dares, poor unlearned swimmer, no talent for that, poor boy, and he’s losing his voice, and a few other people in swim clothes have wandered over, attracted by the spectacle of a grown man with pure white hair shrieking like a seabird at a woman beyond the breakers.

  “My wife,” he says, helplessly, staring out into the waters, wishing that he had the courage to walk into the waves and never come back. Wishing that he had never been born to sail across this ocean. Wishing that I had never been so proud as to turn away the offer of that awful-smelling student from the city, so that he, my Manny, poor unswimmer, never would have been born.

  She returned to shore a few minutes later, her chest heaving from the effort of her swim. In her eyes there was something he had never seen before, a look, a certain way of telling him what she wanted to say even though she didn’t have exactly the words for it. I can escape from you, maybe it was. I can go beyond where you can pursue me. Something like that.

  And in his heart he felt a new emotion, too, forgetting as he did about why she had run out into the water to humiliate him, and he decided that this was a hurt that ranked above all pains, and that he had reason now to turn his back on her.

  Some vacation, nu?

  So he turned his back. He took his mind off her. Lucky for him, or unlucky? Florette wanted to paint his picture.

  HE WAS SITTING for the portrait, see. If the one time he and Florette got together was an accident, sitting for the portrait was part of a plan. Hers. And, I have to admit, since he admitted it to me, his plan too.

  As if he didn’t have enough women in his life.

  As if she didn’t have enough men.

  Oh, I can see by the look on your face you didn’t hear that one before. But I’ve been telling you a lot of things you never heard before, mixed of course, like always, with things you knew but didn’t want to think about or say. Sure, Mike, she had men. She was married? Sure, she had been married. But that was only one man. This woman, she had a history, and it was a crime to hear it when I finally did. A crime. She was in the camps. As a child, mind you. And they did things to her a grown woman should never know. What things? Let me tell you only what I heard, from her, of course, I heard from her, things she
never even told my Manny, because she was too shocked and embarrassed to remember the things that gave her the bad dreams—the reason she came to him in the first place, or so she said—bad dreams? Listen, the things she told me, they make nightmares into a musical comedy. Rats, they used on her, rats! Rats in the you-know-where, they’d let the animal poke its nose up. And the fingers of dead men, these too they’d poke around with. Disgusting? Darling, there’s no word for it—this world, the Old World, that’s where it happened, to a little girl and to older women, and if it should happen here, God forbid, somewhere in the New World, then we’d know that this world, this part of the world, was getting just as old as the other side.

  So you see I have sympathy for her—her I don’t hate. And I have sympathy for the other, too, for the daughter-in-law. She didn’t have a bad childhood herself? She didn’t have her own American version of the camps? She didn’t have the Nazis, she had her family. And you can’t get away from them, either, can you? Not if you believe her story. And of course I believe it. Not when she writes it down in stories she wrote for the class. Those I didn’t believe. I know the truth so I know what she changes. Anyway—you call that writing? What’s there but a host of mishagahs, mix-ups, confusions.

  But look for a minute in your mind at the women in my Manny’s life. One with the childhood of rats and the fingers of dead men, not to mention her parents going to the gas, and the other with her family around her but making the day into the time of nightmares. Two women—why does he attract them like this? Why not some plain ordinary girl, a nice mother, a nice wife, someone not too smart but not too dumb either who would help, and he would help, and she would feel grateful and she wouldn’t want to do anything more than stay at home with me, the mother, and help with the house and the cooking? She wouldn’t have to do too much because I like doing most of it. So it’s three women out of the ordinary, if you count me. Four, if you count Sarah, and of course you have to count Sarah. But where is she? I can’t see a clock. What’s the—where has she gone, she should have been back hours ago!

  I’m calm, I’m calm. I have to be, to think about these things, let alone talk about them. The portrait—he was getting the portrait. After he came back from the beach, after Maby went to the doctor again—this time she volunteered, to get out of the house, I think, because, poor dear—I do sympathize with her, see—that was the only way she could get away. Until she thought about taking the classes. But that was a little later. But for now she goes back for a rest, she calls it, and he’s sitting for the portrait, the famous portrait, that’s right, the one you can see when you come into the foyer. With the wild brushstrokes on the forehead, and the hair not white but the absence of color, just the raw canvas—she’s got a style, nu? But is it the style you want our son to appear in? that’s the question. The black suit, black as crows’ hair, I like that—a magic suit, I call it, because when my Manny wears a light-colored jacket and trousers to his board meetings, he doesn’t have such good luck with the things he wants to do. He told me. It’s superstition, but he now wears only the black suit. Superstition. That should be the only thing he’s superstitious about, huh? What with carrying around that piece of glass all his life, you’d think either it or his fingers would wear away. But he’s still got it, and while he’s sitting there for the portrait you can bet he’s got his fingers around it, rubbing it, rubbing.

  “Why so nervous?” Florette asks him. “Are you afraid I’ll catch your soul on the canvas?”

  She’s worrying, actually, that he’s thinking that she’s just another widow looking for a companion and will do anything and everything to get one. Even if he’s her rabbi. Maybe because he is her rabbi? Her rabbi. Her wild and sexy rabbi is how she thinks of him. Her heart leaped in her chest like a fish the first time she saw him, when she came from the city, moved there to escape the loneliness of life without her husband—and don’t I know what that’s like?—and she bought a little house in town, and joined the temple, and there he was. My Manny. With his hair, his suit. And his living fingers, fingering, fingering the star in his pocket—because didn’t he? doesn’t he? have his own souvenirs of death and dying?

  But I’m telling you too much. You should listen.

  “Manny?” she says.

  “I’m glad you finally brought yourself to call me by my name,” he says in reply.

  “Don’t move,” she says. “But listen to me.”

  “I’m listening. But I have to move my lips to tell you that I’m not going to move, only listen.”

  “That’s good. Don’t move. I want to . . .”

  “What? You’re talking to me like you’re cutting my hair, not painting me.”

  “You don’t like my method?”

  “I like your method.”

  “Good. Then please, how do you say? button your lip.”

  “I’m buttoned.”

  “Stay buttoned.”

  “I didn’t make a sound.”

  “You moved.”

  “I didn’t. I was only thinking about it. But we have such rapport . . .”

  “Don’t talk about our rapport, Manny. I’ll get so heated up the paints will boil when I touch them with my fingers.”

  “Now you’re the culprit.”

  “What?”

  “You’re making me move. Involuntarily.”

  “Oh, you bad rabbi. You bad man.”

  “Which one? Choice of one only. Bad man or bad rabbi.”

  “Good, both.”

  “Good.”

  “Now stay.”

  “I . . .”

  “Hush!”

  “I . . .”

  “There!”

  “So let . . .”

  “Stay put!”

  “No,” he says, coming around, “I want to see.”

  “Have some respect,” she says, holding him off at arm’s length. “Look at it this way, you wouldn’t peek at a cake rising in the oven. So stand back. You’ll see it when I tell you that it’s ready.”

  “No,” he says, trying to push aside her arm, “I’m the kind of person who would peek.”

  “And you’d make it fall.”

  “Is this an allegory? Or an artist’s sitting? Let me see.”

  “No.”

  “All right, I won’t take a look. I’ll trust you.”

  “Trust me. I trust you.”

  “Now you’re getting serious. And I was feeling playful, for the first time in forty years.”

  Florette, my Manny’s mistress, I thank you. Because he was not just talking the talk lovers talk. He was having genuine fun. For the first time, like he said, in a long, long time. But I’d better not interrupt.

  “That’s a long time to go without feeling that way,” she says, stepping up to him and curling around his neck the arm she was holding him at bay with.

  “You know.”

  “I do. And that’s why we get along, don’t you think?”

  “It could be. Or maybe it’s just chemistry. Maybe. I hate to say that word. I try always to say perhaps. Because when I say it, I think of her.”

  “And you think of her a lot.”

  “How can I help it?”

  “Is it chemistry?”

  “Physics.”

  “What do you mean?” She touched a finger to his chest. And he could feel it drilling into him, burning into him, like a finger of fire.

  “Nothing. I was just joking.”

  “Well,” she says, “is this chemistry?” She meant the way he was squirming a little under the touch of her finger.

  He nodded.

  “You can move now,” she told him.

  And he put his arms around her, and when she realized that he was trying to move forward to catch a glimpse of the canvas she pulled him away, out of the room, up the stairs, to you-know-where. And there in that room, as they did in many rooms, in other rooms, in days to come, and some nights, and an occasional morning, they did things that they told me not of, not because they could not describe them, or b
ecause they thought that they would offend me, but because they themselves, they claim, did not understand them. Chemistry. Physics. People experiment, and it doesn’t always work. But I believe in it, no matter what you call it if you don’t call it love. They were like children playing, like two new grandchildren I had. Sometimes they’d get undressed—this much I know, in case you’re wondering if the grandmother had a total blackout in the news like they say sometimes from the government on the television—sometimes they’d get dressed up. Sometimes they’d stay at home, at her house, or sometimes they’d go out to the city. Sometimes they’d stay at a hotel in the city. Sometimes overnight. Business made him stay, he’d tell me at first. But later, much later, he confessed. After she, Maby, went back in again. After her trouble in the city.

  I didn’t mention that? Well, darling, I’ll get around to that. You can stay and have one cup more, can’t you? The driver, he’ll wait all night if we want him.

  So what was I saying? Oh. The staying out, their staying out, their playing like children. Of course, he was on the leave he took after the fall in the temple. Am I getting this story straight? And she? She had a little money from her late husband, some investments here, investments there, and she owned her house, and so she had plenty of time. Who did she cook for and clean for and shop for and worry about? Nobody but herself. So she had time. She painted, and they played, and that was her life. Not bad, you say. Not bad, I say it, too. And she’s not a bad artist either. If you can see the painting better than I can, you can say it’s good, it’s good. The lines, big, bold, modern, the shapes, modern, the plain colors more old-fashioned but attractive. You could even call her gifted, no? That was how she survived, you know. Drawings she made for herself. While all of the terrible things were going on around her at the camps, and sometimes, even terrible things were happening to her, she was making little sketches with stolen pens and ink, or at least thinking about sketches she would make. It took her mind off her hunger. A whole notebook she has from that time. She showed it to Manny. He cried, he told me, when he saw it.