Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  “NO!”

  In the middle of the street in the bright sunlight,

  “NO!”

  And people turned, even in the Village they turned, and she remembered that she had been drinking and tried to quiet herself down, and she looked behind her and saw that the door had opened down below the stoop and the writer, Bair, was sticking his head out the door, and he was waving to her with the glass.

  “Come back down, come back!”

  And she, the daughter-in-law, my daughter, her beautiful short hair, feeling the heat in her chest, the taut pull of her pink waist, the pinch of her sandals at her ankles, feeling the sand cave in around the trap where she stood, blinking at the sun, listening to come back down, come back down! She started walking straight up the street.

  This was her life. In a minute she put the little basement cave with its shrine, its temptations, its mistakes, its delusions, all this she put behind her. Now she had to find her car.

  “Wait a minute!” The writer came loping up the street and touched her from behind on the arm.

  “What do you want?”

  No, the way it came out was, what do you want? As if she had better things to do. As if standing in the middle of the street looking for a car she couldn’t find, she couldn’t remember parking, as though this was her idea of a good time.

  “I want to apologize. I want . . .”

  “You’re sorry. So you’re sorry. I’m sorry. I can’t find my car. That makes me sorry. It even makes me sad.”

  He made a loud vulgar noise with his mouth.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Mode of registering regret and loss. Where did you park? Come on, I’ll help.”

  “You’re too drunk.”

  “I’m not at all drunk. Maybe just a little. Come on.”

  “No, no, I have to get home.”

  “I’m helping you get there. I’m helping you find your car.”

  “It’s not helping. It’s making it worse.”

  “Come on.”

  “No, I can’t. You go.” She made a noise in her throat.

  “Well.”

  “Well. Go.”

  “I tried.”

  “You tried.”

  “I’ll see you in class.”

  “You’ll see me.”

  He made one final lunge for her hand.

  “Come on.”

  “Please let me be. Go to Alaska.”

  “I’ll do that. I look forward to it. All that cold. Like the bottom of Dante’s Hell.”

  “Good.”

  “Not good, just cold.”

  “Yeah.”

  My life on the street, she was thinking. These things in my life all seem to take place on the street, in driveways, in cars. Car. It took her what seemed like a long time to find the car and when she finally did she discovered that the windshield held a ticket. This she tore in a lot of pieces and sprinkled onto the roadway.

  “Kinnahurra,” she says, like me. She’s heard me a thousand times. To ward off the evil eye. A saying, that’s all. “Kinnahurra,” she says over and over as she’s tearing up the ticket and then climbing into the car and starting it up. In a moment she’s off and away, driving uptown to the bridge, and then across the bridge, the old way home. Looking upriver, she sees nothing familiar, rock ledges, the water, trees, trees. Downriver, there’s the city, something she knows a little better than the natural part, towers, spires, glass, and steel. And she’s thinking, he’s up there now, behind one of those windows, looking out, but not north, probably south, south because of Mord’s holdings—she’s overheard a number of conversations, just as I have overheard, but never had any information, the way I have gotten it, directly, from Manny, from the brother—south because they’re buying there, building there. North is the company she hears they want to buy in order to invest further in the south. North is also the school where Sarah wants to study. Study? Fool around is more like it. The girl wants to become an artist, a potter, that’s the latest. I should understand, trying to write as I am. I should, but I don’t. Should she? Why should she? Can the family stand more than one? Can Manny? He’s paying. Him and his stupid star. And isn’t he lucky? That I didn’t. She pictures what could have happened if she had. Stayed. If I sat down again. He would have. With a hand. Kissed his lips. Whiskey he smelled of. Me, too. And how can I drive? Cars coming fast. And steer. And steer around. He would have lifted up my arms and helped me with. He would have helped. If he could have stood. If he could have stood it up. Nice man. Not a bad man. Why didn’t I? A nice man. I like his. Not a bad man. Steer. Steer, girl, steer. Onto the highway. And forward. Not a bad man. He would have lifted. Light ahead, Jersey horizon. Light spreading up and lifted behind the horizon toward the . . . he’s lying drunk now in his bed. How can he work? How does he, how do they say, get it up. And Manny, how does he? Terrible this information here, I know, but what can I say? He doesn’t. Not with me. And terrible that she doesn’t know about the other her, Florette. I know. Does he with others? I doubt it. But the teacher, the writer, does he? In class he seems sober. Maybe after next class. Maby. Baby. Will you or won’t you? Maybe, maybe light my fire. She thinks about it some more. She thinks about taking off the sweater, taking off the slacks. She’s thinking about drinking more with him. Thinking, if I could, I’d ask, can I go to Alaska? I’d say, I’ll work and you’ll work and you’ll understand. Not like with Manny. He gives me money, and he’s cold. Alaska. She’s on Route 80 now, heading west, traveling at a terrific speed, and her eyes blink open, and she slows down and takes the next exit and pulls over and sits a minute on the side of the highway, cars whizzing past, chewing on a finger, tugging at the waistband of her slacks, and then after peeking at herself in the mirror she gets back on the road in the other direction, and in a few minutes she’s traveling toward the city again, paying a toll, rolling over the river, this time the north to her left, the south to her right, the light in the south much brighter, as though near sunset the brightness increases as if at dawn, thinking, am I really doing this? And answering, yes, I am, he will hand me a glass and I will take one more, and then I will help him, and he will ask me, another glass? and I will, and he will raise my arms, and I will lift up my arms unto him . . .

  NOW I’M REALLY getting upset and worried about where the other one is. Not Florette. Not her. Sarah, I mean. She’s been out for hours now and she said she was coming back. So where did she go? And where is she now? And who is she with? The questions a grandmother asks, they should be answered without fail because otherwise she only worries on into the night. I know where she’s been lately. That I could tell you. But where is she now? Is she now where she’s been?

  She went down to Rutgers, some years ago, I told you, you read it, it was in her story—and this was not good. All the way to New Brunswick by herself—well, not exactly alone, which is why it was not good.

  All the time, oh, all my children always in motion, in cars, going up and down in elevators, and in airplanes, too, of course, my Manny, flying back and forth between here and New Orleans, New Orleans! where they just bought a company, some boats, and a warehouse or two, and a pier, in motion, in motion.

  This was after the move here, to Manhattan. So it was after he bought the company down there with the pier and the warehouse and the boats. Because soon after that—it was like opening a door into a bank, he said—a lot of money suddenly appeared. Don’t ask me how you spend millions to buy a company and suddenly, right away, you have more to spend than you know what to do with, but that’s what happened. And now listen, this isn’t bragging, do you understand? This is explaining. This is recounting. Counting the blessings. If they are to be counted and recounted, if they are blessings is what I mean. Suddenly it was there. Just the way I say this word: suddenly. And it was there. Maybe it was creeping up on him, on us. Maybe it was in the bank, growing, increasing. I know. I turned around and—boom—it was there. A new car for me and the driver. The handsome Latin boy, Daniel. And the driver
, for them too he drove, of course. But Sarah wanted her own car and she got. And she wanted the fancy college and she was going to get it—but that comes in a minute, in a few minutes, and Maby the wife? what did she get that she wanted? If she could have told him, he would have gotten it for her. If she could have figured it out for herself she would have said it to him and he would have gotten it for her. Trips, he took her on when he had a spare week. Things he bought her. A new typewriter, my God, it looks like what you see on the astronaut’s spaceship, such a machine he bought for her to write on. Everything he got. And nothing for her but the best, still this Owl Valley which was from the first the best for her, that, too, when she needed it, because by then she was in and out, from season to season like the changing of the leaves.

  Oh, so the move? Yes, sure, I’ll tell you. We moved. It was no big deal to me at the time. So we left one house and moved into another. It was only after I lived here a little with the heights, with the view, that I came to love it, and I remembered—all too much sometimes I remembered—how it was when we lived six flights up that we had to walk, and now we were thirty flights up and fly there in an elevator that rides like silk. You felt it? You felt that you didn’t feel it, right? And the car downstairs waiting—waiting for you now, darling, to take you home across the bridge whenever you’re ready. But just a little more coffee first, or a glass of water or schnapps or whatever, because the last thing tonight I have the energy to tell you doesn’t take long.

  MABY TOOK THE move in stride. Manny, of course, he made the move for all of us and wanted it, as it turned out, quite badly. The brother, the brother-in-law, he liked the move because it showed to him that Manny was finally making a decision about putting his life into the company. I took the move, I told you I took it. The only one who didn’t seem to take it well at first was Sarah. Little Sarah. Except by that time she wasn’t so little. She’s already part of this because you and Mrs. Stellberg read her little story about Purim. Jewish Halloween, she calls it. What a smart little cookie, don’t you think? If I knew now where she was I’d feel like the smart one. When she was little we knew everything about her. But the bigger she got the more mysterious. She was the kind of child that everyone loved, chubby, roly-poly, playful, always smiling, never any trouble. Her mother took care of her and even with being one of the most sour people I’ve ever met in my life she the mother even laughed sometimes because of the child that Sarah was. She could make you smile. She could make you chuckle. She could make you giggle. And she’d smile and laugh and giggle and chuckle right back at you—such a mimic she was on top of everything else. Her father was busy, he didn’t see a lot of her. But her mother and I, we saw her, we played with her, we dressed her, we watched her play with other children, although this she didn’t like so much it became clear after a while. She was used to us, and she didn’t like strangers or strange children. She was always with her mother or her grandmother, with her mother in the dressing room, putting on the clothes, putting on the makeup, and with me she was always watching me cook—oh, you should have seen her eyes open wide when I would say, here, darling, you crack the eggs, you put in the milk, you mix the batter, when we would make a cake and put it in the oven and she would feel part of it, part of the magical rising of the batter.

  But then they grow, and she grew, and little by little, like water eating away at the beach, she changed the way her mother felt, because she didn’t accept her mother’s problems, and her mother knew that, and an ocean rolled between them, and also between her and my Manny, because he felt that he was taking care of the problems, and he didn’t need to hear any more about them than he already knew—I know that was what he thought, but to her it seemed like coldness. If he could go back and explain, she might today understand, but it made a rift, a wedge between them too, and so you have something like the moment I described to you once before, the last time you and I talked, the time when on the holiday she quarreled and he lost his temper and picked up the guitar and smashed it on the ground.

  Physically she changed too, from the Little Miss Roly-Poly to the thin girl, almost tall, still always though with her mother’s coloring, the pale red hair, the freckles—oh, and does she hate these freckles! When they first came out she once asked me if she could use tarnish remover like from the silverware to get rid of her freckles.

  “Tarnish?” I say to her. “What’s with the tarnish? You got no tarnish to remove, darling.”

  “I do,” she chirps up like a little bird. “I do, I do.” And she rubs her knuckles into her freckles, and she starts to cry.

  “You’re a beautiful girl and you don’t need to remove nothing,” was the way I comforted her. And I wasn’t lying. I was saying the truth. She’s got her mother’s height, just as tall as her father who is a man of medium height, wouldn’t you say? But the men tend to be taller than the women, and here she is getting almost to be a woman and nearly as tall as her father, which is all right, don’t you think? And no more Miss Roly-Poly, though. In fact, I wish she would eat a lot more than she does. Thin is the god these girls worship today—not like in the old days when a man wanted to feel a pinch of fat between his fingers when he gave your waist a good squeeze. But nowadays, modern days, you never can tell one minute from the next what’s going to be in fashion and what’s not. So that for example my Manny’s dark suits, the kind he’s always worn ever since he got out of the seminary, these too may be in fashion for the men in the big companies when they see year after year how he wears only these and how it brings him success.

  But oh yes, the move, the girl. I was telling, before I got caught up in the ride in the elevator, the heights up here, the view, did you see the view? I used to see it before more clear than now, it is so beautiful, at night especially, I don’t need my eyes, I got my memories. The girl? Yes, where’s the girl? She’s out now in the night, the dark, she should get back, she should come home. She’s not a child now, I know, she’s in the college. The college. That was what I was going to talk to you about. Not the college she attends but the college where the boy went. Or still goes. Him I never heard nothing more about after this, at least not from her. But from you I hear plenty.

  This was just after the move. The move back across the river and up, up onto these floors. High above. And you know, we should have known how children hate to move, they don’t want to leave their friends? they don’t want to leave their school? Well, we should have known because she was so happy to hear about the move. We saw that she was happy and we should have thought—the mother, the father, the grandmother—we should have put our heads together and figured it out, if she is so happy to move from Jersey to the city, it means only one thing, that she is miserable here, and if she is miserable here there must be reasons. But what if we had figured that out? and we discovered we were the reasons? What would we have done? Could we have changed ourselves, changed our lives so that we could make her life better? Who could have the power to do that? Who could find the strength? Who could say, I live this way but it is doing this and that to my child and so I will live another way? You could change? Could I? When the way we live is fixed in the time we live it that goes back to our own parents and their parents and all the way back to Adam and Eve, the first family that ever lived together. They had a nice place to live, they had a garden I understand was very lovely. And they made trouble for themselves. They wouldn’t listen to their Father, God. He spoke to them, told them what to eat, what not to eat, but they wouldn’t listen. And look at the mess they made for their children. But what if—what if it was God who made the mess for them because He had a mess made for Him by His own parents? If God had parents, I’m telling you, they must have made a mess. And if that’s not how the world got to be the way it is, then I have no way of explaining.

  So. We moved. Up high. Up here.

  And Sarah’s in her senior year at Dalton School—fancy, schmancy. A uniform even she’s got to wear. Like in the Brownies. Miss Schoolgirl.

  You can imagine how s
he looked when she left school that afternoon and took a bus across town and then a subway downtown and got out at Canal Street and stood at the entrance to the tunnel and stuck out her thumb. That’s right, stuck out her thumb. When she was little I used to say, stick out your finger, don’t let me linger, stick out your thumb, chew me some gum. And she would always say, jumping up and down, up and down so excited she was, stick out your thumb, gee, but you’re dumb! Oh, and I’d grab her and tickle her and she’d laugh she’d have so much fun, laugh and laugh and laugh. So. There she was, sticking out her thumb. And gee, was she dumb? Twenty minutes went by before anyone would stop. They drove by, they slowed down, they looked. You’d think a father would have stopped, some man who had a family and noticed that this girl in her uniform she was so young she couldn’t have driven through the tunnel if she had had a car.

  Finally a car stops and it’s a man in uniform.

  “Get in,” he says, opening the door.

  She wants to run, but she’s trying to get to Jersey, so in she gets and he tells her,

  “Close that door.”

  And they’re driving through the tunnel into Jersey.

  “What do you think you’re doing,” he’s scolding her. “Standing there with your thumb out. Where do you think you’re going?”

  She’s scared. She’s thinking, oh, no, he’s a Jersey cop and he’s taking me over to the other side of the river to arrest me and book me—she knows all the lingo, let me tell you, booked, she knows, and all of those things, from the books she gets it, from the TV, from living in the city—and what am I going to tell Papa?

  “Where you going?” the uniformed man behind the wheel asks her in a mean, mean voice.

  “To see my brother,” she says.

  “Where’s your folks?” he shouts again.

  “Back there,” she says, jerking her thumb in the direction of the tunnel entrance. Now they’re rolling under the river, and she’s looking forward at the long tube ahead, the pale yellowish lights on his face, the strange color of his complexion. Suddenly she takes a good look at the patch on the shoulder of his uniform coat.