Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  Up the steps of the lovely wide veranda to the large oak door. Once inside, Sadie went directly to the receptionist at the desk.

  She introduced herself and said, “We’ve come for my mother.”

  Peale the painter meanwhile was studying the portraits on the wall—gray-faced, gray-haired men, doctors they appeared to be, the founding psychiatric fathers of this place.

  “She’d probably like to take a walk,” the nurse said as she led them down the long hallway toward the rear of the large converted Victorian house.

  “That’s what we had in mind,” Peale said, suppressing laughter.

  “My sister,” Sadie said.

  “Older sister,” Peale said.

  The nurse looked from Sadie to Peale and back again.

  “Here we are,” she said, leaving them at the door to Maby’s room. She took a last look at Peale, and walked away.

  “Bitch,” Peale said.

  “Why?” Sadie asked.

  “Just bitch, that’s all.”

  Sadie pursed her lips, gave a shrug, and knocked on the door.

  No reply.

  Sadie knocked again.

  Again silence.

  “Just go on in,” Peale said. “It’s our mother.”

  Sadie looked up and down the hall, and then opened the door.

  “Who?” Maby said in a feeble whisper, as if from beneath a heap of blankets.

  “It’s me, Mother.”

  Sadie crossed to where her mother sat at the window. Her slacks were an ugly green—Sadie had never seen them before.

  “Who?”

  “And my friend.” Sadie gestured toward Peale who had come in and shut the door behind her. But Maby didn’t turn.

  “We’ve come to take you for a walk, Mother.”

  “Who?”

  “Mother, we’ve come to take you for a walk.”

  Maby stirred in her chair.

  “A walk? I’ve had a walk. I’m tired now. Later I shall arise.”

  “You’ll what?”

  “I’m reading this poem,” Maby said. But there was no book nearby, only a few novels on the shelf near the bed. Sadie stared at them while wondering how to move her mother off the spot—there was a title by the man named Bair, the one who taught her. The man she turned back once to see before he left for Alaska. Once. Maybe twice.

  “Come along, sweetheart,” Peale said, taking Maby’s hand and urging her to stand.

  “Who are you?” Maby blinked at the painter, as if coming out of a dream.

  “She’s my friend, Mother,” Sadie said. “A dear friend.”

  “Come along now,” Peale said. “We’ve got a ride to take.”

  “We do? Not a walk?”

  “We do, and not a walk.”

  “Not back to the city. I don’t want to go back to the city. Not just yet.”

  “Up to the country is where we’re going, Mother. Up to Vermont.”

  “I would like that,” Maby said. “Where we took our picnic. I remember that. I enjoyed myself.”

  “We’ll enjoy ourselves a lot, Mother. We’re going to spend a lot of time together. The three of us. And maybe more. We’ll invite more women to live with us if we can find the right ones.”

  “All of them are okay,” Peale said. “Some are just a little closer to a sense of themselves than others.”

  “That’s right,” Sadie said. “We want you to come with us now, Mother.”

  “I’ll need to pack.”

  “We have some of your things in the car, Mother.”

  “You do?”

  “We do.”

  “And your father? Was he glad to hear the news?”

  “The news?”

  “About my trip.”

  “Oh, yes, Mother. He was very glad. He is glad.”

  “Very glad,” Peale said.

  “We’re going on a picnic,” Maby said as they passed the nurses’ station.

  “Today’s the day . . .” Peale was singing.

  “The sisters going on a picnic,” Sadie said.

  “. . . the teddy bears have . . .”

  Maby laughed as they went out the door.

  “. . . their pic-nic.”

  But when Sadie opened the car door and motioned for her mother to climb in? Maby pressed her face against the side of the vehicle and began to cry. “I have no things,” she said.

  “We packed for you, Mother, I told you,” Sadie said. “Your bag is in the trunk.”

  “I have nothing to read,” Maby said, her voice choked with tears, high-pitched, like a worried child’s.

  “We’re going to stay near the college, Mother. You can use the library.”

  “Well, we’ll have to be careful for a while,” Peale said. “But we can get books for her from the library, sure. But Mrs. Bloch, Maby? Maby. Climb in. We’re going to have a picnic on the way, really.”

  “Really?” Maby peeked over at the painter from behind her hand. “It could be fun. I never had fun. I couldn’t, do you see?”

  “Mother?”

  “I couldn’t have much fun at all.”

  “Mother, please get in.”

  “I’ll get in,” Maby said.

  BY SIX O’CLOCK that night Manny was beginning to think about returning home from where he was—in Boston, at a meeting—and he called the house to tell me that he was going to take the shuttle. I had to tell him that the Owl Valley people, a nurse, had called to ask if Maby had shown up there at the apartment.

  “What?” I could hear the airport noise in the background, I could hear static on the telephone, noises both loud and soft. And in the middle, my Manny’s silence. What’s going on? his silence said.

  “They said that she left for a picnic with Sarah and a friend and she hadn’t come back.”

  “A boyfriend?”

  “A girl, they said. A woman.”

  Jet noise, static. Silence between.

  “Manny, you’re hearing me?”

  “I hear you. It’s the teacher, the one she’s been talking about.”

  “You think so?”

  “Who else? Look, if they show up, you keep them there, Mama. I’ll be there in . . . an hour and a half, two hours. I’m going to call Mord and have him come over.”

  “Please, no.”

  “I want someone there.”

  “Not him . . .”

  “Mama?”

  “I’ll call Daniel. I like him. He’ll come up.”

  “Okay, Mama. I’m going to board the plane now.”

  And I could imagine my Manny, his dark suit, his white hair, the slender little briefcase in his hand, taking big strides toward the entrance to the airplane, a distinguished man in an undistinguished hurry.

  HE HAD BEEN there for what turned out to be a final meeting with the board of the company next on the horizon—with the biggest shareholders from the board—and he was giving them assurances, assurances all afternoon long. There had been a faction of people owning stock, family members, younger people, who wanted him to acknowledge that he would turn around some of the company’s policies in that part of the world, America the south, where it owned most of its property, and these he gave assurances to also, and so—surprised as he was that these Boston people wanted something more than just the money for their shares—he gave his assurances to the ones who wanted only the money that their money would be there—and before you knew it he was the majority in this biggest company of all that he had ever owned. My Manny the majority!

  “She has gone far enough!”

  This was Mord—who came over at Manny’s call.

  “She has gone too far!”

  Mord claimed, he claimed that he had woken up that morning and known that something was going to go wrong.

  He was writhing in a dream, turning his body to the tune of a Bedouin flute while beasts of burden—camels, horses, asses—tested the lengths of their tethers, hawing, spitting, snorting, and the moon rose over an ocean of dunes. There was music in this dream, the splattering
of tambourines and the punching of drums, the jangling of wristlets and bracelets, a moaning chorus of camel drivers.

  Zum bah nim

  Sum akh

  Zum bah nim

  Sum akh

  Some strange singing in dreams! And some strange goings on! For a man who lived like a monk—from all reports, including his own, this was the way he lived—there was also some funny business with a boy all greased up and dancing.

  Some dark night, warm with cirrus clouds, flavored with citrus winds, he and the greased child had sipped mint tea together, and spoke in the language of the dream songs.

  Mustah markhim zum bah nim.

  Alia goh beem, go beem.

  Words like this, like that.

  And he had traced a map of the unknown country in which he lived while asleep on the sand, on the boy’s dried, bony chest, turning his flat nipples into oases, his head into a hairy mountain—and elsewhere? Well, on this subject he didn’t go into too much more detail.

  But he said that when he awoke his scalp bristled with an electricity only danger can generate, his skin prickled with it. In his nose, the smell of camels, elephants even, the prominent odors of his neighbor the Central Park Zoo.

  He was so furious when he arrived at the apartment I thought his bald head would turn so red-hot he could cook an egg on it.

  “I’ve called the police in Jersey and here, and I’ve called the FBI.”

  “You called the who?”

  “The FBI. This is interstate, Mama”—hardly his mother I was, but he called me this anyway, and I let him, because who doesn’t feel sorry for a man such as this, no matter what his successes? “They told me they have to wait a certain number of hours before they can start on a case.”

  “A case? This is a case? A girl took her mother on a picnic. How can that be called a case?”

  This man, he was the only person in the family I didn’t like, even if I had some sympathy for him. I wanted to wash my hands of him—he was driving my Manny so hard, showing him what he must do, one thing after another. And now he wants the FBI, kinnahurra, to come and chase my granddaughter?

  “It’s that school,” he said, pacing around the apartment. “Manny should never have let her go to that school.”

  “He’s a good father,” I defended him. “She went where she wanted to go. A little crazy, but it’s what she wanted. And what do I know about school, anyway?”

  “Well, look where it’s got her.”

  “Where has it got her? She took her mother on a picnic.”

  “She’s kidnapped her out of the hospital,” he said.

  “Don’t yell at me, mister, please.”

  “What’s all this?” Manny breathed hard as he came in the door.

  “He’s yelling at me and we’re not even related,” I said to my son.

  “Mord?”

  “Have you called the New England state troopers, Manny?”

  “They’ve already found them,” he said. “I talked to them from the airport.”

  “Where?”

  “In Vermont. At her teacher’s house. Out in the country.”

  “They were having a picnic?”

  “Yes, Mama, I suppose you could say that,” my Manny answered me.

  THEY HAD DRIVEN directly to Vermont from Owl Valley, a trip that took several hours. The sun was going down when they arrived. Maby was asleep in the back of the car, but she woke up abruptly when they stopped at the apartment on the campus where Peale the painter stayed when she was up from the city.

  “It’s too dark for a picnic now, isn’t it?” Maby said. “When will we do it?”

  “Tomorrow,” Peale said.

  “Tomorrow, that’s good,” Sadie said.

  “And what do we do tonight? Do we go back to Owl Valley? It’s a long ride, isn’t it?”

  “We’ll stay here tonight, Mom. We’ll eat dinner indoors. And you can come to class with me tomorrow. Would you like that?”

  “I would love it,” Maby said. And she climbed out of the car as enthusiastically as a child arriving at the house of a relative whom she loves dearly and desires to see.

  “Is this where you live?” she asked the painter woman after they stepped inside. The walls were cluttered with more of Peale’s giant woman paintings, breasts, ears, fluted noses, the Vs of thigh and crotch, tents of leg and hair, here and there an entire body or two clutching together as if falling through a terrible empty space.

  “Liberated territory of the super-gyn,” the painter said. “Right, Sadie?”

  “Right.”

  “It sounds like fun,” Maby said. “I never had fun when I was Sadie’s age.”

  “Things are different now,” the painter said with a smile, as she led her into the kitchen and began to look about for the makings of a meal.

  “I never was your age,” Maby said.

  The painter laughed. She lighted a funny cigarette and after sucking in smoke passed it to Sadie’s mama.

  “What’s this?”

  “Try it, you’ll like it,” the painter said, pursing her thin cruel mouth into a crooked smile.

  Maby took the little stick in her hand, studied it, took a puff, and coughed, choking. She kept trying. “Strange,” she said after a few minutes. She helped with the salad while the painter cooked something in a skillet and Sadie set the table, as if mother and daughter had become daughters and the stranger, the painter, was the mother.

  “They give you a lot of medication there, don’t they, Mama?” Sadie asked as they were sitting down.

  Maby nodded.

  “No more of that, though,” the painter said. “They drug us, it’s the tranquilization of an entire gender, and we’re not going to let that kind of shit go down anymore.”

  “Hell no,” Sadie said.

  “Strange,” her mother muttered, staring at her plate. “Are you thinking of driving me home now?”

  “No, no, Mama,” Sadie said. “It’s too far. We’re not taking you back. You’re going to stay with us here awhile. You’re going to get all that stuff out of your system. You’re going to enjoy the country air. We’re going to take walks, we’re going to swim when the water warms up a little.”

  “Does your father know about this?”

  “Fuck the fathers,” Peale said. “Fuck and fuck and fuck them dead, with their dangly tissue of machinery looking like chicken guts and their great thoughts about themselves.”

  “Strange,” said Maby.

  “She doesn’t mean kill them, Mama. She just means that we have to throw off the yoke of oppression all those generations of patriarchs have put on us.”

  “And brothers?” Maby said.

  “Them, too,” Peale said, looking Maby hard in the eye. “Why? Did your brother oppress you as well as your father?”

  Maby lowered her head until her brow touched the edge of her plate and began to whimper like a hurt little beast.

  “I’d better go back,” she said after a minute. Sadie was touching her shoulder.

  “There, there,” she was saying. “There, there.”

  “I should want this, shouldn’t I?” Maby was saying. “I should, I should.”

  “Mama . . .”

  Sadie kept on stroking her shoulder.

  “We’re damaged women. We have to help ourselves repair ourselves. Do you see?”

  “I see you.”

  “What?”

  Maby picked up a knife from the table, sliced it across the tender underside of her right forefinger, and drew in quick bloody strokes on the tablecloth:

  “MOTHER, ARE YOU . . . ?”

  “I’ll get a . . .”—Peale was rising.

  But a knock at the door interrupted her.

  You want adventure? You want to see what happened next? I’m telling you, I’ll give you adventure, as if adventure is not my heart like it’s beating now, thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thump, thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thump! family life! that’s adventure! Go join a war, start a fire, build a city—the boredom sets in very soon
. But raise children, watch them grow, and you’ll know horror and love and fear and worry, you’ll learn real pain and your wounds may never heal. In an accident you only die once, but in a family you go on living. Didn’t I? Didn’t most of us?

  Peale went to the door, and the policemen, after muttering a few words, pushed their way in. Behind them came the two men in suits who immediately began reading to them from a little card. Maby burst into tears. Sadie started swearing. Peale, her eyes full of fire, made her big mistake. She picked up the knife.

  The next thing she knew she was falling back against the kitchen counter, the victim of a very big swing of a fist by one of the police. Later, when she sued, this was a big thing, the punch. But everyone in the room saw the knife in her hand, and that made all the difference. They had so much on her at that point it nearly didn’t matter about the attempt with the knife, if it was an attempt at all. They had Maby in the house and the dope on the table, if they wanted to use this against her. Later, sad woman, Peale probably wished that she had plunged the blade into her own chest.

  “Aw right, ladies.” The men said this a lot of times before emptying the room. Sadie and her mother they took to the office, where the campus police called Manny, who was waiting at the airport. The two men in suits escorted Peale into another room and talked to her for a while.

  “We took my mother on a picnic, that’s all,” Sadie told them over and over.

  “Some picnic, some picnic,” the men said over and over. That’s what I say too. It ended with the painter woman out of her job, back in New York and ready to kill, really. And Maby, very upset, back in Owl Valley. And Sadie, what was with her? She stayed in school, behaving as though she had made a silly error. As though wanting her teacher and girlfriend, Peale, and her mother, Maby, living together with her in a little house on the campus might have been all she was looking toward. As though she had not hoped that her action would in a brief terrific burst of emotion take her father’s heart and sear it like meat on a fire and shrivel it into dried leathery tissue. Now that my Manny—though it was Mord who called the New York police, he was acting for my Manny, and so it all turns out to be the same, doesn’t it?—now that Manny had blocked her game, not even knowing, of course, that it was a game, a dangerous kind of play but a game nevertheless, she turned quite serious, keeping her lips buttoned tight, but planning all the while when the time and place and scheme seemed right to take her revenge against her father not only for his inability to help her in her hour of need after the mess at Rutgers, and not only for forcing her mother out of the house and into the hospital—because she did place the blame squarely on him, and who wouldn’t, if she had no sense of how life was as much to blame as the people who lived it?—but now, on top of these old scores, she added the new grudge of vengeance, the charge of taking her friend’s life, the life of Peale the painter, spreading it across his knee, and breaking it in two.