Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  “And all for this,” says the coltish girl, giggling a little as she holds up the slender curve of fruit. “A very expensive proposition. But watch!”

  If my closed eyes could close their eyes I could close them now. Here is what they’re too shy to gaze upon: the general’s daughter peels back the skin and holds up the wand of nourishment, and with a heavenly smile on her face crosses the small space between them and then sitting next to Sadie motions for her to spread herself somewhat, and with a gentle motion touches the tip to her bud and slips it further in, in, and then guides it out again, out, and Sadie, who has closed her eyes, opens them, and yes her newfound friend breaks the creamy fruit in two and with a slow and certain opening of the mouth and taking in of breath and touching of the tongue and working of the jaw they eat of this. Communion.

  THERE IS SOME way of telling time which even those of us who cannot see the hands on a clock can say. You feel the slight change of pressure on your face. There is a certain wind. It has a flavor all its own, a special weight and tone, a sound. Weather is the breath of seasons, the lingering reminder that some voice in the clouds has spoken. Time’s teeth mark the rocks with ridges and gashes. A blind god could feel its presence by fingering the layers of soil and stone, sand, the dried-up seas. What? Did I say that? Or just think it, or remember it, or maybe dream it? Have I slept maybe for a few minutes? Taken a grandmother’s catnap, made some grandmother’s poetry, so never mind.

  SO GOOD MORNING, though I know it’s still not light.

  Sarah, is that you?

  Is it you and I’m not dreaming, Sarah come back from your evenings out—and where did you go? With friends? With enemies?—and back from hiding where you disappeared after the big trouble? Back back back from California? Too late—too late for the life but just in time for the story, and as the sun tries to rise, your grandmother salutes you.

  And Florette, you’re still here? Good. So Sarah, join the party, hand me a pill, a cup, braid my long white hair, make my bed—for all of such I am grateful—and in exchange I will tell you this, what you may have been wondering about, what you may have heard in newspaper and fable, what terrible information you do not have ears for to know.

  On that last awful morning, back in the city, my Manny stuffed into his briefcase books he had not touched in twenty years—a volume of Graetz’s History of the Jews—and where his history fits in we’ll leave to the historians, yes? it’s not for his mother to say, but it was a book that brought him together with Maby years before when they studied together—the Encyclopedia Judaica, a book that always came in handy when he was making his sermons—and the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, the same use—all of which had the effect of turning his usually slender leather case into a battering ram of knowledge. He could not, as hard as he tried, close the clasps. Neither could he fight off the anguish he was feeling, a sensation of the nerves that leaked from his heart like water from a broken tap. This day he was, you could say, hemorrhaging from pain, and the suffering seeped everywhere around his bones. The many questions he had had in his life, the whys, the whos, the hows, the whens, for these he had found a few answers. But, like always, nothing was good for him, finally. Nothing let him rest.

  How did he get this way? From his father, a man he hardly knew—if you added up all the years he knew him and all the years he was alive? From me, his mother? From both of us together? Sure, Mike, we had our questions—our lives were questions. If you could follow us with your eyes through time what would we look like, people running away from something, or people running toward something? Or both?

  Now my Manny was running.

  “RABBI GUATEMALA” PAYS LATIN GENERAL MILLIONS

  So here it was, the news of the day, in the big black words in the newspaper—also it was on the radio, the early morning news. Can words make anything happen? If they can, then these were some of the words. Manny felt the shame, the disgrace like heat in an oven, and he was the dough, rising. Worse yet, he was the baker, he was the bread.

  “Mama?” he said, stealing into my room earlier that morning. I had the extra good hearing as my eyes got worse and worse, as well as the seeing from the inside, the imagining from what they told me, and so I pushed off the switch on the radio as he got to the door.

  “Yes, Manny?” I said. My Manny, I added in my mind.

  “I’m tired, Mama,” he said.

  “Sit here.” I motioned with my hand to the place next to me on the bed. “It’s morning. You shouldn’t be tired.”

  “It’s early,” he said. “I’m tired.”

  “But also late?” I patted him on the hand, trying to think strong thoughts right into his heart and brain, supply him with strength so that he could go on with his day. “You been up all night?”

  “I haven’t slept much,” he said.

  “You been on the telephone. I heard you.”

  “You heard me talking?”

  “I heard you talking, not what you were saying, just the way you said it. You got trouble, Manny?” I was asking, but I knew already, I knew.

  “I’ve got trouble, Mama.”

  “And this tires you out?”

  “I’ve been working for too many years, Mama. I’m suddenly very tired.”

  “Like Maby got tired? So maybe you should try and take a rest like she did. Maybe you should call Sally Stellberg’s Doctor Mickey, you could use a few words from him, a long time you haven’t talked. Maybe you should stay home a little more.”

  “I’d like to rest, Mama. But I have to go in to the office. There’s going to be a big mess, there’s going to be a lot of trouble. With the stockholders, with the reporters, the press.”

  “Press, schmess. You’re tired, you stay home. Let the brother-in-law clean up the mess.”

  My Manny shook his head and made a little laugh, unusual for him to laugh at all.

  “Press, schmess? That’s what you say, Mama? In the middle of all this you’re making jokes?”

  “Did I make a joke?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I made a joke. I’m the mother. The mother can do what she wants.”

  “I have to go now,” he said, getting up from my bed.

  “You said you were tired, so stay a little bit. Go back to bed, take a nap.”

  “I have to,” he said. “And . . .”

  “And?”

  “You know the and.”

  “I know the and.”

  “So if she calls.”

  “Yes?”

  “Ask where she is. Ask where I can see her.”

  “You still want to see her?”

  “You’re a mother. Can’t a father have the same feelings as a mother? She did a terrible thing but she didn’t know how terrible. I forgive her. I don’t know why but I do forgive her.”

  “I’ll ask her.”

  “Tell her if she calls here that I forgive her and that I want to see her.” He sighed and took a deep breath before speaking again. “Do you think I’m crazy, Mama?”

  “You forgive her. That’s not so crazy.”

  “I forgive her.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  “Or maybe don’t tell her anything. Just say I want to talk to her. Say I have some questions for her.”

  “She’s here in the city? And she’s got answers for you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know where she is. And I don’t know what she can say to me. But I want to ask.”

  “Maybe she went to see her mother?”

  “I called there yesterday. She hadn’t been there.”

  “Maybe she’s hiding with her friend the painter?”

  “How do you know about her?”

  “How do I know? I know.”

  “So you know. No. She found another friend. On our trip. It could be she’s back down there. Though how she got there, with what money I don’t know. And how she could show her face there, either, I couldn’t say.”

  “Now you don’t sound so tired, darling, now that you’re gettin
g angry.”

  “I’m not angry, Mama. I’m hurt.”

  “She hurt you?”

  “Maybe. She hurt me, and I also hurt her. And myself.”

  “She did. But did you?”

  “I have to go now, Mama.”

  “You’re tired. Stay home.”

  “I have to go.”

  “You’re just like your father. Always up and on the go. He never rested until the end.”

  “Mama?”

  I was watching him with his hand in his pocket, the fingers working around the edges of the little star.

  “Yes, Manny?”

  “Are you . . .”

  “What, darling?”

  Then, like a little boy coming home from school, his trousers torn, his socks sagging, his book bag open, papers swirled about in his bag and his pockets, he asks,

  “Are you . . . disappointed in me?”

  “No, no, no, darling. Never. Never. But—your eyes. Is there something else?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Never mind? Like when you were a little boy you’d want to say something and you’d say then never mind? Tell me, tell your mother.”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “One thing.”

  “What, Mama?”

  “Go take care of your hand.”

  “What?”

  “Your fingers. I can feel them like they were my own.”

  He took his hand from his pocket and I could see the blood on his fingers.

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “You shouldn’t do that, Manny.”

  “I know I shouldn’t, Mama.”

  “Pour alcohol on it. Put a bandage on.”

  “I will. Mama?”

  “Yes, Manny?”

  “Were you watching the TV when I came in?”

  “How can I watch? With these eyes I could watch? No, I was listening to the radio—better than the TV, it makes more sense to the ear. And what are you so worried about, anyway? You’re worried about what other people say? Worry only about what you think is right. I’m only your mother, but I want you to know that I’ve always been proud of you, and I’m still proud of you.”

  He nodded, but said nothing, and then he left the room. I could hear, very faintly far away on the other side of the hall in the long bedroom, the sound of the water in the bathroom basin where he must have been cleaning his bloody fingers.

  “Mama, you take care,” he said, as he passed my door.

  “Manny!”

  “What is it?”

  “You come in here and give me a good-bye kiss.”

  In he came, leaned down, and kissed me.

  “Good-bye, Mama.”

  “Manny,” I said, “you took a drink of whiskey?”

  “To help calm me, Mama.”

  “It’s early in the morning.”

  “I had a drink late last night, Mama.”

  I squeezed his good fingers in mine.

  “If it helps you, take another. Now. Before you go.”

  He kissed me again, and said no words. I could smell toothpaste pasted over the whiskey drink. I could smell another scent, an odd and unfamiliar odor, not a product of human labor, like toothpaste, like whiskey, but maybe something created in his own body because of what was going on. But what was going on? Mothers are smart, mothers are stupid. I could not, could not tell, let alone predict.

  In a minute he had picked up his heavy satchel and gone out the door. Our driver waited in the lobby, the nice Spanish boy, Daniel. He tried to take the satchel from my Manny but Manny said that he wanted to carry it himself.

  I pictured all this as only I can do. And all other mothers, if they give themselves over to the power. The ride through the streets, nearly as smooth as the elevator ride down to the lobby—it was early, early, new light spreading across and bending across the fronts of tall buildings, very few cars, only some taxis speeding away toward the lower end of the park as though they might be punished if they got caught with the sun full up over the buildings in the east. In his mind he had decided, my Manny, that if he was going to do what he was going to do he had to do it before too many people got out on the street. He didn’t want to put people in danger—and I think, if I know him well enough, knew him, that he didn’t want to become at the end a spectacle. He thought that he had become a spectacle enough in the day since the news had come out.

  Let me, he heard my Jacob say as he climbed out of the car in front of his building and the books tumbled out onto the street. He started around and saw that it was the driver speaking, and he quickly went down on his knees in the gutter to retrieve the heavy tomes.

  “You’re all right, sir?” Daniel looked up from his task.

  “Give it to me,” Manny said brusquely, out of character for this kind and gentle and thoughtful and generous person.

  Daniel, averting his eyes, handed over the satchel.

  “Morning,” the guard at the door said in greeting, and I knew my Manny well enough to know he was thinking, morning? Mourning? Or both?

  The guard opened the way for my son’s entrance into the building he had just purchased a few months before. Gargoyles guarded its parapets—and the insignia you thought so funny, the slender half-moon fruit wearing the general’s cap, it now crowned the entrance to the lobby. But what sign should he have endorsed? Any mark would by now have seemed as comical as it did serious—what should he have shown on his flag now, the star-shaped shard, perhaps? or the general’s anaconda, or, maybe, the star in the center of the coiled and dreaming snake?

  My child, conceived in a wheat field, borne across the ocean on a sturdy ship, nourished by adoring parents, only to lose one in an accident where cart and horse and wagon and truck and engine collided, student of the wisdom of his people, modern man ultimately rejecting this, pushing off from his past like a runner gaining added momentum in a race toward what? toward his own finished story, to the end he could not see because he closed his eyes before he saw it. This, all this, I know. But did I ever know him? He was an old man but a new man too, wanting a father from an early age and wanting to become one. Pointed star and anaconda became his new sign, a covenant with a future not even a blind seer like his mama could picture and, if picture, understand. Even now his mother talks, talks, trying to define him finally and has to give up and say only what happened next, because life remains undefinable up until the very end when it becomes death and to know a definition is to know death, not the vital being that inspired it. So in a few minutes his personal chaos—his deep sense of fatigue after having tried for years to make love with his Maby and for years to make father love with you, his Sarah-Sadie, and for years to make more than love with you, his numbered mistress, and for years taking that power he never could find the way to exercise in his private life and creating the business he made in public—this man’s, my Manny’s maelstrom of a life, would become a pattern.

  But Sarah—are you there? I want to feel your hand, darling! hand!—you were not so comical, and yet he wanted to see you.

  Could he say at this moment, rising up and up in the smoothly geared elevator the doorman had commandeered for him at his approach, that he wanted nothing now but to see again, and speak with, the disapproving daughter who had betrayed him to the press? But who knows if that was what he really wanted? He could say, if I could get her back then I would have reason not to go any further with this, and we could become reconciled. She would no longer be such a fatherless child, and we could visit Maby in the green Jersey woods. He could say that, but who knows if that was his fondest wish? He told me, his own mother, how tired he was—and it could be as he ascended to his office that this was what he told himself to keep himself moving.

  This picture, I imagined it while sitting at home, gave me a bad feeling—if they had been reading my blood pressure while I was thinking it you would have noticed on the doctor’s face a frown of concern—as Manny was rising. Manny, I was thinking, go to the telephone and give your mother a call. You s
aid tired, you were tired, what does this mean? Oh, give me the power, Lord of the Universe, if You can give it, give me the power. You underwater people from Atlantis, if you exist, give me the words to say to Manny what he was doing on that morning. Step out of the elevator, say good morning to the security guard, smile a big smile, unusual for you, and the guard, he’s no dummy, he knows this, but what else does he know, and enter the office, the reception part, and catch a whiff of expensive perfume and think, wait a minute, who’s here? who’s followed me here, or beat me here? and then you laugh, the last laugh, because you realize that it’s the cleaning woman who’s worked all night and splashed a little pleasure on her face and neck for home or wherever—or was it the brother-in-law wearing a ball gown and playing queen for the evening? that was the last laugh—and then you walk down the corridor and through the door to your own secretary’s office—you use keys, of course, I forgot—and into your own place, and there, from the window, you catch the first glimpse of morning, the bright spear of light shooting up from behind the buildings far to the east in Queens, and you think, as the early light catches the airplane passing across the middle sky like a finger skimming along a page still blank but where some writing may one day appear, you think, I should fly, I should take the elevator right back down and take the car to the airport and leave at once.

  Or at least call your mother. Call her! Call!

  But the satchel weighs you down, like some idea you must work out completely before dismissing it—before it dismisses you—and so you lean against the wall of a window, take a deep breath, and your eyes light upon the telephone. I should call her, you think, meaning me, your mother, I think, but it could be Maby who’s still, of course, in Owl Valley, asleep and dreaming, of what? sailboats on a river or pond, and stately swans, one black, a few white, soaring, then skimming across the top of the water and landing with a splash, or is she dreaming of wheat fields she’s never seen, and men in masks, robbers who took her middle life from her, beasts who grew from seeds sown so early, Maby, Maby, you call out to her in his thoughts, and toys with the notion of calling her right now this second to say that he is sorry for all but it got away from him.