Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  We each have our own trials, he said, hers was the presence of pain and suffering made palpable—oh, how he talks sometimes—when it comes to others he can talk, talk—and ours, mine, specifically, was the absence of palpable suffering and thus a suffering more inexplicable but no less painful in its own way. Did he say that? He wrote it down and maybe he gave it in a sermon, I don’t remember. Or maybe he just wrote it down and I saw it somewhere in his papers when I was cleaning. I don’t snoop, of course, but if something is out there, like Maby’s writings, I might pick it up and take a look. Just in case I wouldn’t throw out something that was valuable to somebody. Just looking—the mother, the grandmother was just looking.

  While everybody else in the world, it seemed to me, was playing like a child. Maybe it happens only in this country, but all of them, and I don’t leave out my Manny, they got to a certain point in life, adults, with a life, and they decided they were getting so old they better try to play one more time like children or else they might not have the chance again. I say it happens only maybe in this country, even though I never saw in Europe, I came here so young I never saw over there how it was, but they had a war and so it was hard to live like children after that, and here they didn’t have no war, they had only their own troubles, but instead of making them older it made them want to be more like children again, which means, probably, that they felt how old they got but didn’t want to face it, don’t you think?

  I know he wrote that down, but I’m sure he didn’t say it. It sounds too big for him to say. His best sermon was the one where he used silence—and that, after all, was the one that brought them, him and her, Florette, together. The silence.

  But in his heart he wasn’t silent. After his fall, after his time in Bitch Heaven, he wasn’t so silent to himself. Because he talked to Florette while they played, he played with her, too, of course, I’m not kidding myself, I’m not kidding you, he played, the two grown-ups like children, my son the grandchild, I could joke with myself, but while he played he was making plans, he was talking with the brother-in-law, they were planning together, because once my Manny decided to go into the business full time there was no stopping him. And just like with the woman, with her, Florette, he could hold her in his arms and say to himself, this is where I was always supposed to be, because this was what he said to himself, and sometimes even he said it out loud to her—he began going into the city on a Monday morning instead of a Wednesday afternoon the way he did when he was still at the temple and only piddling around with the business, and he could say it as he rode in, say it as he took the taxi to the building, the tall glass and steel building, on Park Avenue, no less, he took a taxi at first and then he got the driver and the car, but that comes later, he could ride the elevator up the twenty, thirty stories to the office—the office they started in, because later they would take a higher floor in a taller building—he could say to himself, this is where I was always supposed to be.

  So he’s riding up in the elevator and he’s remembering the last conversation with her, Florette, trying to remember it as it happened, and what he recalls is how they fit together, like pieces of glass from the time he tells her about, the time of the broken bottles.

  “From the accident,” he explains to her while they’re lying in bed, him with his chin resting on his palm, her sitting up smoking a cigarette—the only bad habit she has as far as my Manny is concerned.

  By this time she has told him about the animals, about the fingers of the dead—and once or twice not the fingers but the organs, do you understand?—she has told him about the men in the camps who traded food and pens and ink and paper for her favors, because that mattered little to her, the life after the encounters with the dead, and she had to draw to survive.

  And he has told her about life with Maby, and how distant he feels, and how untouched and unloved he feels because of the distance.

  And she tells him about coming to this country, about meeting her late husband, a successful man, relatively, and old, sick, and he died within the period of time that he himself predicted, and left her with enough to live on without worrying.

  “Enough except love,” she says.

  “And who ever has enough?” my Manny says. A smart boy. Of course he had his mother’s love, he still has it, but we know not to be insulted, we know what he means.

  “Tell me about that time again,” she says.

  “You’re the counselor and I’m the person with the problem, eh?”

  “We both have problems. It’s just your turn to talk.”

  He glanced up at her, fingered the place on her arm just below the faint dark row of figures.

  “Turns? We need turns?”

  “Turns,” she said. “Now talk.”

  “It’s the accident, when my father died. For years I hadn’t thought about it, and now it’s come back in a dream. He’s standing in the middle of the road, and the fire engine comes flying one way, the milk truck from the other direction, the taxi cuts off the truck, the horse rears up, the truck overturns and down comes crate after crate of milk bottles, crashing around us, crushing my father’s chest. It’s not an imaginative dream because it’s so close to what happened. There’s only one difference.”

  “And that’s what?”

  “I’m not standing in the road, I’m driving the horse that pulls the milk wagon.”

  “Very interesting.”

  “Can you figure it?”

  Florette shook her head slightly, and she puffed, puffed on her cigarette. Afternoon light—the smell of some flowers in the vase on her dresser. A Sunday this was. He was trying to get the temple out of his mind at that point but he couldn’t. Even when he had given up his duties he thought of them for a long while. Not strange, it isn’t strange. He had a memory. Has. He remembered the accident, so he could remember what happened every weekend for years and years, like the way you’re supposed to feel a limb that gets amputated long after it’s gone. No, he had to remind himself, he had only a visit to Maby at the Owl Valley home, and that was his only duty. Sarah, she was off with friends. About them I’ll tell you in a minute. But so here he is, in the bed with the mistress. He’s watching the smoke float up to the ceiling. Asking his question. Ah, what a life he has come to, he thinks. He has made several successes already and he’s not yet fifty. But he wonders, am I crazy? He’s thinking about the dream, he’s thinking about the birds he’s seen in his life, about the voices.

  “Am I?” he asks after telling her everything. “Am I? What do you think?” And suddenly he’s crying—for the first time in his life since his father passed away, he’s crying, and he can’t help it, the tears they come and come and come, and, oh, I wish I, the mother, could have been there to take him in my arms, to give him comfort. Because she tried, but she couldn’t help him as much as I could have done. But it’s true, she cradled him in her arms, and she tried to quiet him, she patted him, she soothed him, she did everything but croon in his ear—the way I would have done—ah-uh-ah-uh, bay-bee . . . but he can’t stop until finally she reaches her hand across him and crushes out the cigarette in the ashtray and uses both hands on him, massaging his neck and his chest, stripping away his sobbing like the old undershirt he was wearing, and soon she changes his weeping into groans of pleasure, the kind, you know, that come with a particular moment, and that’s the way she does it. Not a mother’s way—but a woman’s way—and that is good enough for my Manny.

  “Ever since my father died,” he’s saying to her later, “and this was such a long time ago that you’d think I would have gotten over . . .”

  “Just the opposite,” she interrupts.

  “Perhaps,” he says. “But ever since then I’ve felt as though I’ve lived on the run, constantly rushing toward some goal or other, rushing toward it and then past it, school, Maby, a job, another job, a child, the company, money, the expanding company. The only time—times—I’ve felt as though I’d stopped, have been when I felt the craziness come upon me, for just fle
eting seconds, when the visions came, messages from the birds, when I fell . . .”

  “I don’t know,” she says. Now she’s smoking again, the curling pillar drifting upward to the ceiling, the sun has shifted, beams spread out in the cloud and she exhales like rays through water.

  “And this time,” he says. “This is almost like standing still. Time. Now.”

  And you’re maybe wondering why in all this he never mentions me, Jacob’s wife, the mother? Because I’m so close to him, he told me once, it’s like I’m with him always, and if I’m with him, why talk about me.

  “This time?” she says, getting close to him again.

  “Like this, yes.”

  “Like this?”

  “Yes, like this.”

  “This?”

  “This.”

  “And this?”

  “This, too, yes. This.”

  And there’s a silence.

  MEANWHILE MABY? MEANWHILE Maby is in and out of the hospital, and when she’s out she’s taking the writing classes at Rutgers in Newark. You saw some of the papers. If you look up on the bookshelf just to the left, there, you’ll see some books by the teacher who signed comments on the paper she wrote, Bair what’s his name, there, see? Are they still there? I see the shelf but I don’t see each book too clearly. They’re missing? She must have taken them with her to the hospital, is all I can say. Well, so, she’s taking this class, this is just before the move, and driving back and forth to Newark by day and night. She was out at all hours. And my Manny, he was so caught up in his change of ways, with his idea that he was going to do the company full time—and not to mention, but I’ve already mentioned, his girlfriend Florette, who was not exactly a girl in age but who cheered him up, she was a friend, I have to grant her that—so I’ll give her—he was distracted, and he knew she was out, but he didn’t raise a fuss.

  And Sarah, she didn’t care, she was finishing her high school, and that means she was a little crazy, even a little boy crazy, and then she had her idea about going to Vermont—oi, what a year it was for ideas!—and she started dressing funny and playing with the paints and the clay, I’m telling you, the only one around here not doing something crazy was the mother, the grandmother. She went on with what she always did, the cooking, the cleaning, with maybe a little time out here and there for meetings with the other grandmothers, but the mother, the grandmother, she was the only one to keep things on an even keel while the rest of the house rocked and pitched, kinnahurra, like the boat most of us came over on, in a storm.

  Here is Maby, a mother herself, caught up in the rock and roll, of all things, singing, humming to herself—now I don’t mind if she is happy but could you call this happy?—in the car, on the way to her Newark class, and she’s got the radio on, and she’s heard the same music loved by the daughter, not the bugs, their music, some other boys, what do you call them? and she’s turning the dial to find a station so she can sing while she drives, she’s got one of those stories in her briefcase, she’s going to show it tonight to the teacher, the writer with the animal name, what is it? Bair, I said, that’s right, Bair, and have you ever heard of him, darling? He makes the best sellers? Myself, I never heard the name. So she’s heading along the road, and she’s singing:

  Come on baby,

  Light my fire!

  With her hair cut short—she did it in Montclair the day before—the rabbi’s wife looks ten years younger, almost like her own daughter, banging the heel of her hand on the steering wheel, in her mind she’s getting ready to turn over the stories, and she feels good—of course when I learned about how she felt I didn’t yet know the stories themselves . . .

  Come on baby,

  Light my fire!

  This is music? They call this music? Give me the big noisy bands, first, give me Paul Whiteman, Tommy Dorsey, I love Guy Lombardo so much at New Year’s, but this is their music they listen to now and you can’t tell them anything, anyway, so you have to listen to it if you want to listen to their stories.

  And she’s got thoughts on her mind that are about as young—I don’t say immature, because that would not show respect to the youth, and I think that if we want the youth to show respect to the older, these days, we got to give them the respect right back, or even first, maybe—as young as her daughter. She’s thinking that she wants to be a writer, and she wants to impress the teacher and the class, she wants to show them how good she is. Because she’s been through things, she’s lived through certain things that might make good stories and she believes that she’s done good work from them, out of them, because of them, whatever you say, and this is the only thing in her life she’s ever felt good about thinking, the only time, believe it or not, that she’s ever believed in herself. She’s suffered her childhood in Cincinnati the way that you know, and she married my Manny young, and they went through the early years together, and she was not happy, but she didn’t know just how unhappy she was until it all came to a head with Manny that evening in the driveway, not the slap in the face in the police station was what did it to her but the slap to her feelings in the driveway—and oh, I was inside, and I wish I had been outside, I could have helped, I could have done something, if I had been the air, if I had been the dark night coming on, I would have wrapped myself around them, closed their mouths with my fingers of darkness, told them both to stop for a minute, told them to think, to feel deeply about each other instead of just themselves, people today they’re so selfish—and from that time on, it was in and out of Owl Valley, and here and there with different fads, clothes, shoes, in the stores, out of the stores, the hair long, the hair short, the stones, rocks, bugs, beetles.

  Come on baby,

  Light my fire!

  And I’m telling you, she was flying, driving very fast, but with her eyes on the road, so she was safe, this time, and I think—because I was once a daughter, and still am a mother, even if now, as a grandmother, I’m a mother over too many years of time—I understand how she was hoping, how she was wanting, how she was feeling. Didn’t she yearn for things the same way my Manny did? Didn’t she wish for the good instead of the bad? the happy instead of the miserable? the light instead of the dark? But what did she get? That I’m not so sure. She had bad luck, you could say, being born to those miserable parents, and bad luck to find herself alone with the brother who the parents had hurt miserably, too. And this made her into someone not exactly right, not exactly wrong. It was like—like she had a mechanical problem. It was like there was something minor wrong, but it made with the major. Like . . . you have, say, a flashlight, and one battery, is that what you call it? A battery, a connection is loose. There’s a wire worn down, a nut, a screw, whatever. And it goes. You smell a little smoke, the lights flash on and off, and it’s not working right. I had a washing machine this happened to, and a stove. So once she was all right, and the parents they made a dent in her, and the brother made a big slash, and that was it. We had only to wait for the day when it showed. How could my Manny know this? He couldn’t know. I couldn’t know. And could Maby herself know? Could she, I don’t think so. If I had been that way, I wouldn’t have wanted to know myself. I would have wanted help, but I would have prayed for help from God and never asked for nobody on this earth to help. And if God didn’t answer, if he didn’t send the Mr. Fixit, then I would have burned the way she did. And you would have. We all would have.

  Come on baby,

  Light my fire!

  You bet. Come on baby, light my fire, she’s thinking to herself as she drives. Sure, Mike. Come on, baby . . . The road ahead. Lampposts winking on as the sun falls back far to the west, twilight night. Before me down the long incline of the Jersey shelf, Newark lies. Dark city. Blacks live there, mostly. And Italians. They’re dark, too. Like most Jews. Except me. Redhead. Flame hair. Fiery things. The road bends. The road tends. Freedom. My fiery legs in these slacks—the color of the earth. Grounded. A pun. Sarah’s grounded. Means under house arrest. Means also in touch with the ground.
Solid. Two feet on it. Not like me. One foot. Other in air. My other? Two feet above the ground. Always high. My mother, I meant. Not other—but mother. Mother. Light up ahead. And then turn. And turn again. And turn again. And park. Walk. These dangerous streets without good light. And in the center, the building. Classrooms. Guards. Against myself. Should I read? What if? Should I? Now class is here. And the others. Not the mothers. No one here a mother but me. Children. I am old enough. To read or not to read. And if I don’t? He will think. And if I do? He will think. What? I have a feeling. Here they are. Here he is. Others. Mothers? Me only. Hello, I will say. Good evening, he will say. And so I do. And he does. And we do. And he suggests. I will read. And I do. And after. He says. And I hand it to him. And he suggests. And I say, why not? So a few days later I drive in.

  She drives in. Easy. But the parking problem, it’s just awful. Bair lives in Greenwich Village where even during slow hours there’s not always a lot of parking places. She drives around and around, she must cross Bleecker Street four or five times, looking, looking. Once she nearly gets into a fight over a space with a man in a dark sedan. But she gives it up, and drives around the block again. Finally, something opens up, about half a legal space next to a fire hydrant on the west side of Fourth Street. She parks, gets out, walks. The Walk, she’s thinking, because now she’s been seeing French movies where the heroine always seems to take a Long Walk through the City, usually Paris. She pretends her eyes are a camera and watches stoops, storefronts, people on the street, signs, cars, birds, trees in the little park at Sheridan Square. I could make a film. Be in a film. Be a film, watching myself with my eyes, she’s thinking. And in the background she’s making the background music . . .