Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  Or will.

  And then in one last call, or the call he thought would be his last, the call in his mind, he tries you, Florette, because you of all the others besides myself, the mother, gave him solace, perhaps because you were the person least real to him, the one he could imagine had a life apart from his own, nurturing and mysterious, you with your childhood in the death places, you with your numbers on the wrist, you with your art and your cigarettes and your desire for a friendship with the rabbi, the one man you thought might know something about what happened to you in your life, who turned out to be the last person. And he knew that, and he didn’t call, and I can tell from the trembling hand you touch me with now, the way you touch my arm, that if he had called you you would have tried to talk to him as I tried to talk to him, and that alone makes you an honorary grandmother, because you think like a grandmother, like this grandmother. So what if nothing ever came forth from your womb, because you held my good son in your arms and loved him hard, though you might have said to him that a mother can’t be a lover and a lover can’t be a mother, not in the flesh, but we can try to give that kind of tenderness that the other gives and that kind of instruction and that kind of heat and warmth, and a daughter can’t either be a lover or a mother, but a woman who was once a daughter can show a lover how good a father he could become, and a mother once a daughter can do the same, as can a wife, if sane, and a lover, if you can call her, can try that too, but if you can make that call is a big if. He didn’t call to say that he might be going. He was already almost gone. And he didn’t call.

  I have left you all, he is thinking.

  And then he is thinking of Maby, and saying in his mind to her, if I never gave enough, and if I never gave, then, oh, well, I am sorry, sorrier than if I could see you now and say, because in the driveway that night, because in the street, I chased you, and if I held you too tight, it was love that impelled me, and if I turned to you and turned away, if I could never say, and if we never did, and if the verses I read, the Song of Songs, if it only in the words could be, and if I was not, and if your father, mother, brother, if they, if I, the feeling of it, my studies, my life, the family at home, I wanted you.

  My darling.

  That call to Maby he never made either. Because who would answer but a nurse?

  And the other call, the last and final he thought about, he couldn’t make because he didn’t know the number. Where was she, the daughter, you, Sarah, Sadie, now Sarah again? As far as he knew you had skipped to the edge of the universe. Only later I found where you were—dancing, dancing in saffron robes, with a head shaved as close as a woman’s cleft when first she’s about to give birth. Could he have asked God for directory assistance? Lord, I would like my daughter’s number, please?

  Now you step forward and tell me that that is the truth, and you take my hand and touch it to the back of your neck under your new thick length of hair, like a sheep’s back it feels, curly and coiled, springy, full of health, and you tell me that all this is true, that you at the same time were with your own Indian lord and that he your own father would have had to have gotten through to God Himself in order to have gotten your number, because that was how far you had traveled after betraying him so that you could hide yourself from him—and I am glad that you have come to me here in this room in this country place late in the night, just before morning, I can smell it because the earth is turning, the light will soon arrive, and though I can’t see it anymore I can feel it on my skin and taste it on my tongue and sniff it in my nostrils, oh, little girl, I could taste and smell you coming from the minute you said finally to yourself you wanted to leave that place of robes and dancing and come east again to see me, your grandmother, before the end, and here you are, standing in this room with her, she the childless one putting all her love and strength and caring into her paintings, like they were children, and grandchildren, making her a grandmother too, and you the girl who has been through so much but still can’t imagine—can you?—one day reaching down into yourself and coming up through the stoppage of time with a child, but you will probably become a mother one day—oh, if I could live to see it—and then, like unseeing I, you will become a grandmother, one distant day from now, in another city, or country, perhaps, maybe even on another world, on the moon or undersea in the new discovered old city of Atlantis. Listen, girl, here, come into the circle, take my hand, take her hand! too, and listen, listen to the sorrows of men and women standing on the edge of time. Take it! take it! I want to hold your hands!

  Little did the father know at the time when he wanted to make this call that his daughter was dancing, dancing, and this only a week after she had gone to the Jews for Justice boy with copies of the documents showing the million, and a number where reporters could reach her, because, oh, this she needed to do, punish her father because he had and also had not punished her. He had, by keeping his distance over the years, by showing her the strictness when he never believed in it himself. He had not by not recognizing her pain, the mistakes she made, the wounds inflicted on her by others, and it was like mother, like daughter, and if you didn’t know their stories separately you might think that it was one story, and you throw in my story and you’ve got all the tales you need and it’s him against us, the universe—his life the counterpoint against our melodious and not so melodious music.

  Hello? he said in his mind, leaning there against the window, that wall-high window, thick glass through which the brightening morning light now streamed, gushers of light, a torrent of light rushing down from the only slightly higher height, it seemed, of the eastern wall, the world’s wall, the sky above the east.

  Hello? I want to speak with you, I want to tell you how sorry I am, I want you to come home and I will take your hands and we will look into each other’s eyes, and I will tell you, I am starting over, after all, this is America, the country of new lives, and haven’t I started twice already? can’t I start over again? and who can say I am finished before I begin?

  Hello? The eastern wall is glowing with new-minted light.

  And in his mind are you dancing? swirling, whirling in your saffron robes? your bald head like that of a newborn babe, glassy star in your look, your eye on the future, or past, whenever, all a swirling and a whirl, whorl, the eastern gate glowing with new whirl, and you cannot make the connection. Hello, he says, and you cannot make the connection. Hello? Hello? and where did you break the connection? Was it in the guitar? Was it in the trip to New Brunswick? Was it on the night you watched from your window the antics in the driveway? Or did God Himself say before you came, sorry, no connection.

  Hello?

  The last is never the last. He still doesn’t give up. He’s trying Maby again, hello? hello? and she’s sleeping, dreaming of a smooth sail on a glassy river, a human being, a nesting animal, all in one, and stirring now, a little before dawn, and turning now, in the last long step of a journey she’s been dreaming through the night—or in the minutes before dawn—or who knows how long? the mother, the father, they stand holding hands at the water’s edge, they drop hands, and then wave to her from the water’s edge, and in her dream her heart leaps from her chest like a fish, and she weeps freely, wholesomely, tears of forgiveness and tears of conciliation, tears of homecoming, tears of remorse, tears of pleasure, tears of pain, and in the dream she steps out after her heart and she chases it as though it’s a butterfly and her life is the net. Good morning.

  Hello? Hello? Is he calling—who?—the brother-in-law? Why does he need to call him? Long ago he decided how he would work with him—hello?—and he doesn’t need to say anything more, let alone good-bye. And where is this man now? Waking in the arms of a slender young boy who inexplicably finds his baldness attractive, rubbing the boy’s behind, a backside bald as the new-shaven head of his disappearing niece? But where else? and how else? and why else? And so we leave him. Almost where he began.

  My Manny, and it’s only early morning, drips sweat—his brow, just below the line of sta
rtling white hair, the sweat beads there, ready to roll down his creased and narrow forehead. Take off your jacket, I would have said to him if I had been there. Relax, you’re in your own office, like a bear in his den, so take your coat off, why don’t you?

  Mama, he’d have said, let me tell you something. I’ll always be your boy, but I am a big man now.

  A big Manny, I’d say.

  And he’d laugh a little—I am the only one in the world I know who can make my Manny laugh.

  Listen, I’d say, you’re getting ready, you’re a big man, you had many people very proud to work with you when you had the congregation and then you started buying up the companies, a carton place here, a bottle factory there, and pretty soon you had what you had. You had the power, you had the respect, so you had a little trouble with the family, so look down where you can see a few people, like ants, but smaller, just beginning to come out now, crossing here, there, on the way to work, early, and if you took any one of them up here, if you had the magical power, if you could play like a god, like God Himself, and if you could take off the wrapping on their lives and see what’s in the package underneath, do you think you would find many people who had done better with their families than you? I don’t think so, darling.

  I’m old. I’m blind, and I’m your mother—but I don’t think so.

  Here, darling, look, the sweat, it’s dripping, it’s running, if you’re not going to take off your jacket, at least, here, let me with a handkerchief wipe the brow.

  And now you should call her, don’t you think? Her, her. So many hers in your life. My Manny, such a ladies’ man, always with the ladies, with the hers. It makes you wonder what his life would have been like if there had been some hims, like his father, may he rest in peace, and a brother-in-law who was a better person.

  The brother-in-law! Feh! You know what he’s doing now even as my Manny has decided to take off his suit coat and set it on a chair? He’s turning over in his bed, dreaming of little Israeli boys, of an oasis in the desert where he has just ridden on his donkey, and there’s water, and the boys, almost children, and he’s smoking a pipe with one of them, running his eyes over a little fellow’s body.

  And this is the world! All this goes on, in dreams and out, while my Manny is wondering to himself, should I call her? what for? or should I not? People waking, dressing, going to work, smoking cigarettes, patting the children on the head, women making breakfasts all over the country, millions of breakfasts, millions of bunches of fruit of the wise, while others lie in bed with their husbands, some men, some women mounted upon each other like riders heading west with messages of great importance, while other women in hospitals groan in labor, open their legs—excuse me, but that’s how it’s done—and push children out into the world of food and school, and others just in the next ward over, the floor below or above, groan in the lesser labor of dying, and out in the streets of cities, business as usual, newspapers, the radio news, television views, buses, trains, airplanes, frying eggs, fruit stands, electrical hum and factory smoke, firehouse—ah, fire engine, milk truck, oi, yoi!—and teachers and bankers and sales clerks and do I have to name everyone? everything? The world is out there waking . . .

  His wife of all those years is waking, alone in her madhouse bed.

  His daughter turns in her sleep, you, Sarah, in saffron robe and saffron sheets, a cloud of incense descending upon you, still unconscious, in soon-to-be-sunny California.

  And you, the woman called Florette, he’s dialing your telephone number now, yes, he’s going to do it, but you’ve become a jogger now, of all things, and you’re out for a run, you’re in shorts and a T-shirt that says across the chest DRINK MILK and your skin is so tan you can scarcely see the line of faint blue numbers etched on your wrist, especially not when you jog past so swiftly. So good-bye Florette, no answer.

  And up in Alaska—Alaska? Alaska!—the mad wife’s teacher, the writer, one-time lover, he’s asleep too, everybody in the West is still asleep, as always, dreaming their way through the East’s bright morning, and in this artist’s head he’s running, too—he’s running off the edge of the icy continent, pursued by a bear.

  And in the mountains.

  And on the plains, and in the deserts which are the old beds of ancient oceans, and on the Great Lakes, and in ten thousand ponds, in the sultry southern kudzu forests, something like the rain jungle down below the line my Manny crossed.

  And here near the bare sidewalks of Jersey, and at the far rocky points where the country ends and oceans begin on both coasts, and the flat steps leading down into the blue-true gulf.

  And you say, this is his mother? This is what she’s thinking? This is how she pictures it as he’s about to—but it’s happened so many times before, I’ve seen it and said it to myself so many times before, I’ve watched him, off with the suit coat now, and picking up the satchel, going to the window wall, and out there, threading his vision like a needle between the buildings he remembers the pier where we all first arrived, and the ocean waves we rode upon, I’ve watched him, in my blindness, his story light upon my dark.

  And I have thought, sometimes, that it was his fault, all of it, his flaw, so what if the death of the father, so what of the confusion of choices, so what if the woman bewitched him, so what if, what if, so what!

  He wanted the power, he wanted the world, he got it, that’s what I think sometimes.

  And at other times I think that some great god of a bird or bird of a god, whichever, who knows, they never never let me pray, never gave me a place in the temple, so what do I know except what I imagine, this bird or godbird or birdgod sucks up into the path of its flight all such puny notions as human will and feeds on desire and sends it back, blows it back with the great powerful force of its wings as it flies past worlds and words.

  And this bird fixed its eye upon my son, my only son, my Manny, and he could have turned, he could have not turned, but no matter which way he turned it would have ended all the same.

  And lo the bird swoops back now into my vision. Lights, lights!

  Bursts of lights of suns!

  My blighted vision returning.

  And I can see Manny standing at the window of the great city, standing tall, powerful in his decision, looking out at the bird.

  And I am with the bird too, I am in the bird’s eye, thus the light, the returning after these years of loss of the light I once knew, and I am seeing with the eye of the bird.

  And here it comes soaring out of nowhere—the place where all things are born, to which all things go, an America of the ether, all poles no poles, equator noquator, city country mountain ocean desert plain all one, up and down the same, sideways eastwest north-south the same, I glance away and it becomes the bird.

  And I’m riding in its eye, and next to me my Jacob, and I clasp his hand and he touches the place where my shoulder meets my neck, and we each say with our eyes I am with you again my love, my lovely, in the eye, on the wings of this bird of day, of night, and the sound of its wings fluttering makes the air tremble, and we swoop past the window and see our Manny standing, staring out, and we know it is time, time made of the years gone by, and my Jacob says to me, Mama, Minnie, my love, how are you? how have you been? and I say, don’t you know? you haven’t been watching? and he says, of course, I’ve been watching but I wanted to hear from you in your own words, and he touches me again at the breast, and I say in my own words, I have been happy and I have been lonely, I have been happy, I have been sad, I have raised our boy for the world to take, though he took a little of the world from itself himself, and he says, do you think it would have been different if I had stayed here with you, with you and him? and I say to him, I say, Jacob, my darling Jacob, one way or another we weave a world, we make a pattern, and if it is not one design it is another, and in the end the light goes, and we ride here in the eye of this flying beast, and yes, he says, it’s all crazy, it’s all sane, it’s all up and down and the way to the past is the way to the future a
nd to the future we . . .

  No, I say, no, my darling, please don’t give me speeches, here we are, and we are soaring, and there he is, the boy we made, and see him staring out into the blank air where the sunlight streaks up now, spears of light slicing the early morning sky? I see him, Jacob says, he’s about to meet us, and I say, so who wants him? I want that he should live, but Jacob, he says, but we all want what we want, and what he wants this time he gets, because he has discovered how to get it, and I am about to ask him what this means when the bird soars into a steep turn and my throat locks up, and we’re skimming now past the windows so close that I can see deep into my Manny’s eyes, and what do I see? I see wheat fields, ocean, river, city, skullcap, velvet-covered Torahs, the inside of an office, handshake, daughter, jungle, Maby, forest, I see eyes, dishes, a closet full of dark suits, pieces of a guitar. I see purple and darkness and gold and metal, I smell onions and flowers, fruit, and feel the stone, the scrape of metal, the slick of blood on fingers as glass slits skin.

  Tell him no, Jacob, I say, as we swoop past in our perch within the skull of the soaring bird and see our Manny who lifts the satchel back past his shoulder and prepares to lay into the window as if with a frontier axe. Tell him no, I urge him, he is our only son, and he’s not only a son but a father and not only a father but a husband and a lover, and if he goes he’ll take these people with him, in their grief their lives will come undone, and in that moment that seems like ice it is so frozen my Jacob says, listen to you, you never were a liar, but listen, you don’t care about the others, all you care about is what you’ll feel if he does it? nu? and I shake my head, I’m shaking all over, it’s not easy to ride within this throbbing bird in flight even when it’s hovering quite still, and I say, no, if he dies, I’ll die with him, and my Jacob says, no, no, that’s not the worst part, the worst part is that you’ll live.

  Call him please.