Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  “Do you want to talk?”

  “I want to eat your cooking. Mama, I eat at the most expensive tables in the city, in the country, but your food is still the best.”

  I leaned over and kissed him as I served up some latkes for his pleasure.

  “What a good boy.”

  “Thank you, Mama. As old as I am, I guess I needed to hear that.”

  “You’re old? Then what am I? One of those mummies from the caves of Egypt? I don’t need to hear talk about age. What about cooking? Talk about cooking, I could listen. Maybe it will get me started again, because I don’t cook much these days, do I?”

  “Why should you? And the smoke it doesn’t bother your eyes?”

  “What smoke?”

  “Oh, Mama. Here, let me serve myself.”

  “Stop it, stop it. You think I’m some kind of invalid? Here.” And onto his plate I placed a few tomatoes, a piece of lettuce. A slice fell onto the floor but he quickly scooped it up.

  “Mama, please tell me. You couldn’t see where you were putting that, could you?”

  “What are you talking about? I see perfectly fine.”

  “Ma-ma?”

  “So I missed your plate. You want everything in life?”

  “I want you to see the doctor this week. I want you to see the specialist we talked about.”

  “So I’ll see him.”

  “Promise?”

  “If I can see him.”

  “Mama, don’t joke about your eyesight. It’s precious.”

  “I’ll see him. I’ll see him. And if I don’t see him when I see him, what’s he going to do? Give me new glasses? He can give me new glasses, but he can’t give me new eyes. Anyway, new eyes I don’t need because I see everything I need to see.”

  “You’ll see him?”

  “I’ll see him.”

  “Good. Because I don’t need to have this worry on my mind on top of everything else.”

  “So tell me about everything else.”

  HE TOLD ME, while I fed him. He told me some things, a lot of what I knew, some of what I didn’t, a lot of what I’ve told you already in the past, and some of what I’ve said since you came into my room today. A long story, a sad story. You know the part about what he was saying to you, about the burden he was feeling, the working day in day out, and many nights getting the proposal together for the big takeover. You spent one late evening with him, in the hotel room he kept for the two of you just a few blocks downtown, and he held you in his arms as always, closer to you than any woman besides his mother, me—perhaps because you are not a mother, because either from choice or chance and circumstance you are as much like his lover and sister than mother and wife—but this time not with the steadiness you felt in him ever since the first time you embraced. This time you felt him tremble, you drew back, and watched him blink and blink, as though he were trying to shake off a fever or a nightmare, and you said, my darling, what’s wrong? You’re shaking so.

  And I want you to notice I’m not jealous when I say all this, not this mother, I am not, certainly not, not if it makes him feel good about what he is doing, because I want—I wanted him to feel so good that he would love life, like his father, like me.

  “I can’t tell you,” he said, drawing loose from your embrace.

  “Of course you can. It’s me, Manny,” you said, “your Florette.”

  “I know.”

  “Then tell me. You’ll feel better. Haven’t I talked to you about things when they bother me? My nightmares, my dreams.”

  “I too have dreams. But mine don’t sound as good as yours.”

  “Not even as bad as my nightmares?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He’s up now, walking to the window, peering between the slats of the blinds as though he might be able to spot some messenger or watchman on the street twelve, fourteen stories below.

  “I’m just talking. I’m just alive. I want to help you.”

  “I don’t need any help except to keep calm. And you can’t poke around inside me and make me calm.”

  “No, but I can squeeze you and pet you on the outside.” You get up and join him at the window. “There, there.”

  “Ah, Florette.” He turns, embraces you. “I don’t mean to make a mystery. It’s easy to explain, just difficult to live through.”

  “Your company?”

  “My company. We’re about to commit ourselves to the biggest outlay of money and stock that I’ve ever heard of, let alone participated in. So my mind’s not here. It’s in little pieces of paper in brokers’ offices all around the country. It’s counting, counting. I’m buying so much of another company that I’m not going to have enough cash left to take a taxi home when I’m through. So I’m borrowing, borrowing—look, you don’t want to hear this. I’ve got it under control—except the man at the controls, he feels his hand shaking on the wheel as the vehicle approaches maximum safe speed.

  “You know, I left the temple so I could run the business, and now I’m wondering if I did the right thing. And I’m wondering what would happen next if the business failed? Would I go back to the temple. Some temple, someplace. Wherever they would take me. But who would take me? Who would want a rabbi with such a failure in his past?

  “My father, voices at my ear, someone trying to feed me with a teaspoon. I’ve told you about these visions. It’s just static, the mind’s static from a day of rough and tumble. When I had the temple, people would come to me with questions about their dreams, as though I were the psychiatrist they feared to visit, and that’s what I told them. In those days I had a kind of theory, you know. The Torah was God’s broadcast, and we were the static. Some modern thing to say like that. What did I know? I was fooling myself into thinking I knew what I wanted or even a little about what I could say about anything serious. The best thing that ever happened to me was an accident—when I fell off the dais. Or was that God’s hand pushing me from behind? Who knows? Do you think I want to know? I knew nothing about my life then and I know little enough about it now. And how much am I going to learn between now and the end? This much? The space between thumb and forefinger? Look in the Bible and in novels and you find lives that have meanings either from without or within, do you know what I mean? God pushes in one meaning, and the vital living force of the character is the other. But in real life”—and imagine now he’s standing naked at the window, you, woman with the numbers on your arm, clutching his waist, leaning your head against his shoulder—“you feel more forces from without that come from the world, not from God, you feel like a stick pushed along by the current of . . . of time, say, of the flow of the hours in the day and the force of the days gathering together one after the other behind you. I want things, I’m aware of these things—peace for my family—which I’m not sure I’ll ever obtain, health for my family, my mother’s eyes”—and isn’t he a good boy, worrying like that?—“and I want to play a little more with this company. Play, that’s what it is to me, you know. So why am I shaking when it’s only a game? Because games are serious sometimes, too. Any businessman knows that. So I’ll shake a little, and I’ll worry a little about whether or not we’re going to make this takeover work.

  “Now Mord, take Mord, he’s a fanatic. He’s like boys I saw at the seminary years ago—they had God, and he eats, drinks, breathes, sleeps the company. I put in sixteen hours, he puts in twenty. I put in twenty, he stays up for three days running and then catnaps and works a fourth. To him it’s not a game. He has bad memories of his childhood, anything reminding him of his youth he runs from. Me, I’m the other way around. Me, I wish I had it to do all over again. I wish . . .”—he pauses, thinks a moment about something long lost, stares out the window again, watches clouds pass behind a tall tower, waits for birds to swoop from cornices, sees none, breathes—“I wish . . .”

  “What do you wish, Manny?”

  “I wish . . . many things. I wish . . . I wish . . . I wish I could figure out why it is I can’t figure out my l
ife, why I feel sometimes as though I’m plunging headlong off the dais in a fall that goes on for years, through the end of my days at the temple, and on to this life in the city, in the company, in my new rooms, my new thoughts, and why I still dream about the old days, about my father, about his accident, and I see birds, and I hear, sometimes, voices, I hear voices in my head, in my ear, and all of those dreams and visions, if that’s what to call them, all those things haul me back, back, back toward the first part of my life—and sometimes I feel the tension of the torque, is that how to say it? the twisting and untwisting, winding and unwinding, screwing and unscrewing along the thread—until it feels as though one day I just may split apart—what?”

  You’re kneeling before him now, touching the outspread palm of one hand to his turned-out kneecap, the other hand clasped behind his knee joint, the other leg.

  “And along with that comes another sense of splitness—I can call it, yes, good, splitness—comes the feeling of getting pushed along like a mouse at the claw’s end of a great paw, God’s paw? I don’t know anymore about the things I felt so confident about in my younger days. So—I feel like the mouse at the mercy of the God’s cat paw. And other days, days such as this—look out through the blinds, no, no, later, don’t get up, that’s good, that feels good—other days I know in my bones that I’m in control of it all, of my life, of my time, of my head and heart and lungs and eyes, and that I’m making things happen for myself and for those around me. I’m making . . . ah . . . ah . . . ah . . . ah!”

  CAN YOU BEAR to hear this now that you can’t touch him no more? Can you bear to think about the connection you made between your flesh and his? between your heart and his heart, the beating, the pulsing? And think how it was for the mother, for me, the one who first felt the kick and tickle of his life within her womb—did I know it would come to what it came to? Did I know when I felt my own heart winking at the sight of the bearded young hostler behind the team of oxen? Did I? Could I? Did I have a choice? It was my own mother and father who made me—and then I made myself—and made my life with Jacob, and we made my Manny—and he unto him begat Sarah, known now in her early adulthood as Sadie, and she, she, oi, what was she at this same time begetting that could help her erase the errors of the attack upon her childlike flesh?

  It has to do with America, America the south, South America. I have to tell you, but I don’t know just yet when to put it in. Telling you these stories, it’s like cooking. When does the baking powder go in? when the sugar? when the salt? And at what temperature do we bake it? and how long does it bake? I never was much good at it—baking, not cooking. At cooking I was all right. But you know now I remember something about Manny that never came to mind all the time before when I was thinking about him, that for a time when he was a young rabbi, when a congregation was giving him trouble for one thing or another, as congregations sometimes do, he came home every night and he baked bread. That’s right, my Manny the baker. And I had completely forgotten about that. And if I was telling you the whole story and I left that out, would it have been important? To leave it out or put it in? Who knows how much I’m telling you is too much—or too little? Sure, it could be that, but I don’t think so. I think I’m telling you just enough, and not much more, just enough for you to know him as I did, but not enough to die with him. To feel the grief but not to die. You wouldn’t want to be in the story that much, would you? To want something so real it takes you along with the people in it, making the good things, that’s one thing, but if there’s hurting, criminals, killing, and if at the end, like in this sad story, there’s dying, do you really want to go ahead and become so much a part of the telling that you never come out alive? I don’t think so. Just like with a meal you’re invited to, you don’t want to have to slice the potatoes and chop the onions beforehand, you don’t want to do the dishes and take the garbage out after. Only the enjoyment is what you want, the pleasure, and sometimes suffering is part of pleasure if you know that when it’s over you don’t have to clean up the mess.

  But I was saying about the American part before I interrupted myself with my thoughts about the baking, after years and years of living his life in what seemed to be a straight line my Manny’s days began to take on a different shape, a shape I see at least from where I tell you about it, a shape that you don’t need light to make out but like me can figure out with the fingers you have in your mind alone in your room in the dark. You could say, if you still want to think about the matter of making bread, that his life was rising. All the years before it was baking but it hadn’t yet started to rise—it needed salt, it needed yeast—none of the unleavened variety for my Manny because he wanted heft and depth and flavor, taste, texture—and so the years leading up to the time when he fell and rose up again to take a new interest in the company in the city, these were the years when the heat had not yet accumulated, the years when it was building but not yet hot enough to make the dough rise, and then came the time of real fire, of fierce heat, the baking years, and, oh, his life changed so differently, he changed so differently and sometimes you would think if you didn’t see him—with his hair and his dark suits—that he might be a different person, but he was the same person only changed, changed by the heat of his life, darkening, no doubt, darkening, darkening, but the same person nonetheless.

  But I was saying about the story before I interrupted myself—and thanks, my darling, here, let me feel your hands, your face—thank you for not interrupting when I’m doing such a good job of interrupting myself—I was saying about the American part, I wanted to say about it, of course, it was always present, it was there from the beginning, from the time I woke up to discover what I wanted, that I wanted freedom and escape and a life with a man I wanted and who wanted me, and that was the American part beginning right there in the old country, and it was there when we sailed here, and it was present, of course, when we arrived here—get up in the apartment and look out the window in the bedroom at the far end of the long hall and you can see the lights of the very place where we arrived, the same pier itself and the buildings nearby, little pinpoints of light now down below in the city dark, like stars in a sky turned upside down and become the ground we walk on—that was our destination, and this, right now, this was what we sailed toward, and here we have arrived, after lightness, this dark, after young days, this age, a New World? a country of the old.

  But I was saying about that part—the part I’m calling the American part, even though it’s all American—it was building, building, rising, rising. Because while my Manny was working on the takeover, Sarah, now called Sadie by her friends at college, she was working on her own little bit of business.

  You remember when Manny and Maby drove her up to New England to visit the school? Nobody thought of asking the grandmother if she wanted to take the trip. Who knows? I might have liked it. But of course I was busy with other things, with the furniture for the new apartment—it was taking me months to get settled in here, let me tell you, here, I mean in the new apartment, not here, this room, the window that throws light on my face I can only feel but not see, not here, the gardens, the walks, I’ll never feel settled here. But there, there I was setting up. Go to New England? Nah, I said, not for me, darling. But wasn’t it sweet of him to ask? I can’t go on.

  Wait. Here. The tissue.

  Now I’ll go on.

  So I stayed home and they went on their trip, and this trip, I’d like to think, was just as important in their lives—and what happened—as the trip in the taxi the daughter, Maby, and her parents took all those years ago, and the trip up to the Union Square my Jacob and my Manny undertook, and the smoke from the fire that called out the fire department wagon, and add in the daily trip by the milk wagon, and what do you have? You add in a trip like the college trip and you’ve got a life, and you’ve got deaths.

  It was a cool, clear, cloudless day when they set out north from the city, Manny behind the wheel of the big car. Maby was in one of her friendly states and s
he had packed a picnic lunch for them which they ate at a roadside rest area about an hour south of the Vermont state line.

  “Do you want this? an art school?” she asked Sarah as she passed her a half sandwich of liver pâté—what we used to call on Second Street chopped liver!—and a napkin.

  “Why shouldn’t she want it?” Manny broke in before the daughter could answer for herself. “She wants something, she gets it. When I was young I learned that lesson—you want something, you work for it, you get it. If you’re lucky. If I could”—here he waved through the air the half sandwich that he had picked up from the tray held out toward him by his wife—“I would give her the sun and the moon.” He smiled at her as lovingly as he did at anything in his life. Even me, his mother, he never often gave a smile like this.

  But Sarah—soon to become Sadie—did not smile back.

  “I don’t want the moon or the sun,” she said. “I’d like to go to this school, though. It has a good art program.”

  “Art you want, art you get,” my Manny said.

  Can you hear how after all these years he still speaks in the same rhythms as he used when we all lived together in the tiny hole-in-the-wall on Second Street? This is—was—oi! was—one of the things I loved so much about my son, that though he accomplished things, and he changed, and, oi, didn’t his hair change color overnight, he never put on airs! So he left the temple, and people would say he left his religious days behind him because, you know I have to admit, he never went inside a temple again after that, never went to another service, but he didn’t pretend he was anything that he wasn’t. He was a former rabbi in a black suit and almost glowing white hair. Nothing more, but nothing less. A former rabbi with a knack for business. Or for calming the fears of people in the business, to be exact.

  “Art I want,” Sarah said, staring her father directly in the eye.

  He stared back, thinking to himself, how far will she go when I do everything to make it up to her? Thinking, if once we cross over the line neither of us will ever come back. What could I do? he had been asking himself for a long time now. Could I invent a feeling for her mother that was like love but wasn’t love itself? Could I mend her spirit, hers, Sadie’s, Sarah’s, when I couldn’t even thread a needle and start to work on her mother’s? Look, if it’s the feeling of regret you’re wondering about, the moaning tone he takes in his mind right there in the middle of a sunny roadside stop near noon on a lovely day, think about the darkness you carry with you into the middle of the happiest occasions. You of all people shouldn’t blink an eye at me as though I’m only telling you a story! You who have lived in the dark at midday and drunk the black milk of morning at midnight, you! You who have embraced my Manny and held his shaking, quivering spirit in your hand!