by Alan Cheuse
Some picnic they had, eh? If I had been there I might have done something to save them, I might have pointed out to them the lovely wildflowers blooming in little shapes of stars, spades, clubs, all purple and blue and yellow at the edge of the picnic ground, the pine trees standing nearby dripping with the sap of springtime, the bees newly present since the disappearance of the snow and cold. If I had been there I might have clapped my hand over my granddaughter’s mouth before she spoke.
“You can’t buy me, you know, Father. You can give me everything I want, and I’ll take it, but that’s no guarantee that I’m ever going to love you again.”
There—in the middle of the wildflowers, bees, the trees, the beautiful season—there, she said this. And it ate into his heart, my Manny’s heart, like acid spilled onto cloth. It burned, it burned!
So what could he be thinking through all this? That he should have done something different? Sure, he should have done something different. He should have never lived! Because what else could he have done? Could he have saved his father on that cold Saturday morning when my Jacob pulled the cart out onto the street? Could he have said, Papa, let’s go to shul instead because if we work today you’re going to die? He’s supposed to know that? God he’s not. That I guarantee. Because he was my child, and while I was a Jewish mother I was not the Virgin Mary or whatever her name was. No, I was not! I met my Jacob long ago at the stream, and that was that, as far as my virgin condition was concerned. And so he was nothing but a man, but a man has his rights, does he not? A man has his dignity. And my Jacob had his. And he wanted the right to earn his living the way he wanted to earn it. And so he went to work on the Sabbath, and that was that.
He looked away from Sarah, not speaking back to her, staring up into the perfect pale white cloth of sky.
“We’d better get going,” were his words after a little while. “The admissions person will be waiting.”
Now if I had had the powers of a god or goddess, if I could have made weather, I would have called up storm clouds, great crashing thunder and lightning, like the noise of many gods gnashing their teeth in heaven—I would have called up winds, huge rushing torrential floods of winds, and I would have turned this car from its course. Oi, if I had been the goddess or the god, hoo! I would have shouted, hoo, hoo! go back, you ridiculous mortals, go back to the city you came from, because up here your daughter’s going to meet real trouble, and this will in turn bring the trouble home to you!
But nobody would have listened, I think, even if I had had the power. Do children listen to their mothers? Do daughters listen? Do sons? I would have warned them if I could and they would have done it anyway. It’s the law of life, on earth as it is in heaven, that what they want to do they will do, and doing it they will think they could not have done otherwise. Oi, I sit here with my eyes closed to what’s around me, feeling the world to life with my fingertips, and I think, oi, if I could have done it perhaps I might have simply struck them down right then and there at the roadside rest stop among the wildflowers and the neatly tended grass.
Beautiful cloudless blue sky as they drove north. And it was warming up, and it was a promising day, and oi, what bad things can come into the world at two o’clock in the afternoon, on a lovely spring afternoon in the country! Those people who put you in the camps, who tortured your childhood, did they get their ideas on cold cloudy days in winter? I don’t think so—I think they could have thought up their monster thoughts at a picnic on a sunny day in spring. They loved music. They loved certain poetry, all this I heard from my Manny. And if they thought up murder in big figures on a sunlit day, why isn’t it possible that the God we pray to decided in creation that evil would be there in a pure white cloud? that a good man like my Manny could try to do good for his family and himself and still make the worst things happen?
Oi, I would have rolled rocks down from the mountain to block their path! I would have made earthquakes to tear up the road out from under them! I would have hurled God’s dinner dishes out of heaven, and His pots and pans, if I could have stopped them from reaching their destination!
The college. The quiet little art studies college in the hills of Vermont. My Manny thought something was funny with it from the first time he took a look—it was an old farm turned into a college, with the faded red barn and the chicken houses and farmhouse and other small buildings making up half of the campus. For this he was going to pay the highest tuition in the United States of America? He was a man on the verge of buying a shipping line and not so far away from beginning to ponder the value of buying half an isthmus—is that the word?—down there in the south of America. And so, because he liked to match what he knew in his mind with what he saw with his eye, he had a deep deep question about this school even before they walked in the door. But he bit his lip, my Manny did, and oh, I wish I could have been the muscles in his jaw and pressed his teeth through the skin of his mouth! Because then he might have had some idea of the pain that would come of this, and he might have said, wait, no, this is wrong! I don’t want you to do this! I won’t pay a penny for this, not one!
But he felt so guilty about her, because of Sadie’s trouble that time at Rutgers, the memory of it, it hurt him as well as her, and he tried to do the right thing, and the thing he tried to do was buy her these things that she wanted. And if she wanted to attend this place whose appearance suggested to him that they should be the ones paying the students to attend just in order to give the convincing air of a college, then he would send her. Of course, she had an interview, they had to read her records, they had to accept her—but even though she had one of the worst high school careers in the history of her school he was not in doubt of her getting in. All they would do was read the name of his business on the application—that would do it as sure as they would have had a different, if still positive, response if he had put the temple on the application as his place of business. Corporations or churches, it was all the same to people like this—they waited and wanted to be impressed, and so they were by money whether gained by deeds or misdeeds. It was all such a game to my Manny by this time—and he wanted nothing greater than to make all of the pieces fall into place.
“How do you do?” he said when the head of the admissions department, a slender, pale woman, pearls at her throat, offered him her cold and bony-fingered hand. He could see written all over her face the desire for his company’s name and cash in the files and bank accounts of the college. This ship was sinking, he could smell it about the place. My Manny, he had some of that same instinct as his brother-in-law, you know. But if his daughter wanted it for a while, for as long as it lasted or as long as it made her happy, then that was fine with him. Nothing it seemed was too far out of reach for him anymore, and so nothing that any one of his family wanted was out of their reach. Except maybe some kind of peace? I don’t know. Here he was riding high, talking quietly to the admissions woman while Sarah was taking her interview with a member of the art department.
Oh, if I could have started a fire and cleared the building and ended that interview—and broken the link in the chain that weighed my Manny down! If I could have hurled lightning at this crumbling old former barn and crackled fire through its timbers! Oi, if I could have eaten giant onions so bad that I could have breathed and cleared the halls that way! If I could have smelled them out, stunk them out! Maybe, maybe then the rest of it would not have fallen into place!
But she was in there, stayed in there, and came out beaming.
“So?” her father, my Manny, asked her.
“She’s wonderful,” Sarah said, already becoming though we didn’t know it yet the person she called Sadie.
“She?”
She was Lana Peale, an overweight painter from New York who had come up that year to teach on the college faculty. She had a face like a knife, eyes like a small animal from the woods, and no sense of humor, hardly. Only later did we learn that she stood on very bad ground with the dean and that she was volunteering her time i
n admissions interviews in the hope that she could make up for some damage she had done earlier in the year. The damage, as it turned out, my dear, was a freshman girl from her design class who sliced her own wrists with a linoleum cutter because Lana Peale told her that she would be an artist only if she lived to be four hundred years old.
“I love students,” Peale told the dean, “and I love art, and you can see that from my work and if you don’t think that I love students I’ll show you. I’ll help with the admissions committee, how’s that?”
And they took her up on it. And so there she was, giving an interview to my granddaughter.
It was love at first blink. It didn’t even take a blink, maybe only half a squinched look when Sadie came into the room. Both of them felt it like a piece of jagged glass in the palm of the hand—suh-lash!—and the pain was there, and the beautiful feeling, was how Sadie described it to me—only for the first time last night when she finally came back from her wanderings—but, oh, for how long I never knew where she was and didn’t want to imagine!—here in the dark of this room, holding my hand, touching now and then a cool finger to my forehead, saying, oh, Gram, oh, Grammy, Gram—she had never felt anything like it before except maybe for the time when she was dancing with Rose Pinsker’s grandson, Rick Sommer, the youth advisor turned dean, at the Purim dance, that was, she told me, the last time—and the first time—she ever felt like that with a boy or a man.
“It was like lightning striking me, Grammy,” she said—which was why, maybe, when I was telling you how much I wanted to stop things from rolling toward the end I thought of becoming like lightning, like a big summer storm—and then she made a little noise in her throat, like she was thinking of something she desired. Since from the time she was a little girl I never heard her talk in that voice, with the dreamy part, with the little purr like a kitten’s when it sleeps. What was this that happened to her? What do you call it? When my Manny fell in love with his Maby, it was so different, full of old-fashioned talk, from the Song of Songs they were reading, and if Maby behaved like a Delilah, like a Jezebel, then that was old-fashioned too. But this business between the women, you don’t hear too much about it. There’s nothing in the old books to explain it, at least nothing I ever heard. But it’s there, here, in the world, a fact of life, like red hair and people who write with the left hand. But then I never heard everything—who lives long enough to hear everything? to know everything? The Jews thought they knew, you know. They thought they knew it all. They had the Torah, and they made commentaries, saying what they knew, and then commentaries upon the commentaries—see how much I learned over the years from my Manny?—but the years go by and soon you’re arguing about the meaning of the commentaries on the commentaries and you forget about the first things you said, or they seem different, and what used to seem like such a simple truth has become so complicated that in the end all you know is that you don’t know. And the gentiles, the goyim, they’re no better, because they overlap with what the Jews know and add their own complications on top of our complications and it’s even more mixed up—the truth—than it was when it first started—back then, in the Garden, where the first man and first woman came to life, and they looked at each other—like the way I looked at my Jacob the first time, it had to be—and so maybe that’s the only thing we can know, that the lightning strikes whatever kind of tree is standing there, male, female, boy and girl, girl and girl, boy and boy, the lightning, the fire it makes burns the same.
For Sadie—if I could see and had a lipstick I could draw you an arrow—it went from the woman Peale to this college to trying to paint to—the disaster she made for her father, my Manny, oi, my Manny! my Manny! Here near the end I think of his beginnings and I turn to ice inside, ice! to think that it all should come to this, the boy, the years, the work, the love I had for him! Ice! Ice! Ice!
I’M SORRY. I’LL be calmer. I’ll take it easy. Behind my eyes I see unfolding in time stoppage, like a flower, the year my Sadie went to college. It’s a movie, sometimes, sometimes a song, a dance, a poem, and sometimes the bad odor when you lift the lid on a can of garbage that’s stood too long in the sun.
“I like the work you showed me, Sarah,” the Peale woman said at the end of the interview and Sadie had put away her portfolio. “I’d like you to come to my studio in the city and show me more.”
If a man says a thing like this to a young girl he knows, she knows, everybody knows, what is meant behind the words. But what if a woman? if a girl, really, not that much older than the girl she speaks to, says such a thing? Who’s to know what she really means? Who’s to suggest that she’s not just being friendly? Oh, these modern times, I’m telling you, where sometimes, you hear of these things, even the mothers and fathers can’t be trusted with the children! And if it keeps up like this even the ground we walk on—or used to walk, because this particular grandmother, me, she don’t walk much anymore—even the ground you can’t trust. You hear about it, earthquakes, talk of planets going to collide, moons falling, the sun going out some day. And I say, what does it matter to me? What does it matter, if the child you bear and the children he fathered, they can’t get together and live even for a few years in peace? I say, if that don’t happen, then the rest could happen. I say, let the earth quake, let the stars crash, the sun spit and smolder out like a fire in a trash bin. What do I care? I have no hope. I have no prospects. I have no future that I see behind my closed-out eyes. Let it come, I say. Let it quake and shake and crash out and sputter—let it burn and burn and burn and burn, let the worlds collide, pieces of star shapes trailing through the airless spaces between the bones and tissues of void, a crash of a milk wagon of the heavens into the fire engines of hell. The only thing that comes of it is death.
SEE? THE SCENE changes, time stoppage unfolds faster. Her mother’s in the hospital scribbling star shapes in her notebook. Her father’s on a business trip to New Orleans with the brother-in-law. Grandma is as always at home, in the apartment, getting the meals ready despite eyes so bad she has to run her finger along the edge of a knife to figure if it’s the right one to cut with.
See?
She’s walking across Houston Street, though classes haven’t even begun yet, she’s going to see the art teacher. Her portfolio, with some new drawings, it’s banging against her leg. Her chest feels funny—like she wants to cough but can’t quite. Her mind is a million miles away from the traffic and the trash on the street. She’s thinking about how her father invited her to go to New Orleans, and she turned him down.
“You don’t want to?”
He couldn’t believe it.
“I have things to do, Papa,” she said, never, as usual, looking him in the eye.
“Things? What things? You don’t want to eat with me at those restaurants? It’s superb, my daughter, it’s wonderful. The seafood especially.”
“You eat the shellfish?”
“Of course I eat the shellfish.”
“You don’t keep any of the laws anymore.”
“Sarah, none of that means much to me anymore. Except that I try to stay true to the morality behind the laws. The spirit, not the letter.”
“You have changed,” she said.
“Of course I’ve changed. The world demands change and we demand that the world changes in turn, my dear.”
“When I was little you used to spank me if I broke one of the laws.”
“I never spanked you.”
“You did.”
“You have a faulty memory. Perhaps you recall the pain of humiliation as physical pain.”
“I remember physical pain.”
“You are imagining it. The memory plays tricks on us, darling. But will you think this through again? Are you sure?”
“Is it some kind of . . . ?”
“Some kind of what?”
“Never mind.”
“Will you think it over?”
“Um. I remember. I remember that you once broke my guitar. I was playing on the hi
gh holidays. And you smashed it.”
“I’m sorry. I was a fool. I apologize again. But didn’t I buy you another guitar? And many other things?”
“That was after . . .”
“Yes, you’re right. But are you . . . all right?”
“All right?”
“All right.”
“Yes, I’m all right. As all right as I’ll ever be. This year.”
My Manny shook his head.
“Sometimes I don’t know when I’m talking with you whether it’s you or your mother I’m hearing. She is always saying things like that.”
“Things like what?”
“Like, I’m all right. This year.”
“But it’s true. I’m all right this year. Next year I can’t say yet. Can you?”
“I don’t think like that anymore. And I wish you didn’t. Look, Sarah, why don’t you just get on the airplane with me and we’ll have a fine trip to New Orleans.”
“Watch the rabbi eat shellfish in New Orleans.”
“Will you stop that? Since when are you such a letter-of-the-law girl? Were you ever? Never! No! But me, I’m a former rabbi. But I’m also a human being, and I have my appetites and desires and that’s that. Am I supposed to be better than everybody else? Am I like the Catholic who’s supposed to be more Catholic than the pope?”
