Prayers for the Living (19 page)

Rick and I run over with everybody else. And we find my mother stretched out on the long table, having fallen and knocked the bowl over onto the floor. We're walking through a pool of punch, a pink pool, and at first I'm thinking, oh no, it's blood, but it's only punch, and Rick reaches over and helps Mother to her feet, and she sags against him just like a little kid who's really tired and I'm trying to straighten her dress, and my turban falls over into the pool of punch, and I'm crying suddenly, and she perks up when she hears me, just like some puppet on a string, jerks straight up, pushes herself off from Rick, and points a long bony-fingered hand at me.

“You look like a fairy!” she says.

“Mother!” I could only whisper.

“You look like a fairy from a fairy tale,” she says again.

“Please,” I said. “Rick?”

But he didn't know what to do—it was one thing to try to get close to your boss's daughter, but to get tough with the
boss's wife? It was awful, all the kids gathering around, and her standing there pointing that finger at me.

“Take it off,” she says to me next. “Take it off and we'll see what you have on underneath that junk!”

“Mother,” I pleaded with her.

“Mother!” she threw back at me, mocking.

“Mrs. Bloch, please,” Rick put in, finally realizing that he was going to have to step in. And he took her by one arm and I took her by the other and we walked her out of the hall, while behind us the quartet was playing again, playing “Rock around the Clock,” and we went up to the pay telephone in the hall and called my father, because Rick couldn't leave the dance, and my father arrived and drove Mother home, leaving me at the dance with a dripping turban, a heart made of lead, and Rick expecting me out of gratitude to kiss him on the mouth. Later on in the evening, I did.

“Minnie, there's a note from her teacher here at the end. I suppose it's from her teacher.
Sarah,
it says,
this was supposed to be a personal essay, not a creative essay about your personal life. And there is no conclusion. Please see me
.”

“Please see him?”

“That's what it says.
See me
.
Please
.”

“She's a polite girl, Sally. So I'm sure she saw him. And since I heard nothing about it I'm sure it all went well. And in case it didn't I'll ask her. And Manny too I'll ask when he comes back from his Israel.”

“You don't know what happened? You usually know everything.”

I
USUALLY KNOW
everything? Only God knows everything. Do I look like God to you? I'm only a grandmother, like you, just another grandmother worrying. In the worrying state. Not no longer Jersey but New York and still worrying. I'm worrying now even that it
could be my Sarah is packing because she's got boy trouble like she used to have with Rose Pinsker's Rick. And where does she think she's going? Not running away with some boy like this I hope not, because here is the poor grandma and I can hardly use my eyes no more, and I'm holding down the fort, the babysitter for the big daughter while the parents are away, and I don't want to lose the daughter to some wolf. Let's hope not. But what a comment from the teacher. He didn't say about what a good writer she was, only complaining about what she didn't do.

Oh, but doesn't the time stoppage fly by, I can remember when Maby gave birth to the pride of her grandmother's eye. While we're eating I can show you pictures I have of the little thing, and now she's out running around, suffering from the boys, in college, and did we used to say time flies, Mrs. Stellberg? Time is like smoke, like wind, like water, it's there, it's not there, you're in it, you're not. Here I am one minute holding little Sarah in my arms, cuddling her, singing to her songs to help her sleep, like this, like
Ah, ah-a, ba-bee, Mama is a lad-y, and her name is may-be, and you're a lit-tle bay-bee,
like this, like this, and the next thing you know my little baby is a lady,
Sadie
she calls herself on the phone with her friends, and I'm sitting here with you, with nothing in my arms but smoke, wind, water. I wish only it were water, then at least I would have something left over. I could wash with it, drink it, feel it on my skin.

After she was born we lived, all of us, in Jersey, just across the bridge, a lovely place close to the country, close to the city, like I was saying, just perfect for nearly everything we needed.

You like it, it was your hometown, Mrs. Stellberg, I know. You raised a family there, two families you could have raised and still not done better, isn't that right? And we settled in, trying our best to make the best of all the good things that were coming to us. And come they did, they came and came. The congregation was good people, and Manny's father-in-law, he died, that horrible way, like I told you at the mall, and the company goes to Manny and the long-lost son who comes back from a South American somewhere, that all came to us. And so while maybe to some people it looked
like my Manny was trying to lead a double life, I could see in those days in my mind just as clearly as I can today that he's instead got twice as many blessings as the normal man, as the average. And if these things come to you, don't knock them. Hold out your arms. It's a duty, a blessing is a duty, and you have to accept it as it comes because if you turn your head away it's going to knock you in the block. This, darling, Sally, is my philosophy, and maybe I should put it in a sermon myself.

Did I mention the sermon, the one that started all the trouble, the talk about the camps? I didn't say what it was about? With the other
her,
what else could it be? She came from the camps, she was a little girl there, her parents got arrested, and she got arrested, and they died so she could live. And that's it. A horror story, her story, and forever after you have to respect a person who has had to suffer such torture. That, too, is part of my philosophy, if you want to know. But I've told you anyway. Even if you didn't want to know now. There. Here. Look, the girl is getting ready to serve. But then I was telling you about the sermon, and I think that's one that you missed. It was a bad time for Manny, in those days. Because along with getting a good blessing there are other things you have to put up with. For example, Maby was having a lot of trouble with her problem, the kind like in the little personal essay Sarah's teacher complained about. Sarah. Or excuse me,
Sadie
. I should remember that that's how she likes people to call her now or else I'll get my head snapped off. And why shouldn't I call her that if it makes her happy? It doesn't hurt anybody, does it? But there are things that hurt, and let me tell about one of them. And don't get ants in your pants, darling, about the sermon because I'm going to get to that. But first, a little appetizer.

The business of Maby and the food.

You don't know none of this because nobody else ever heard about it. Except for Manny and us. We heard. Believe me, we heard. Like an alarm this went off in our ears. A burglar alarm. We were living in the old house, the new house that the congregation gives, you
know, the brick one over on Locust from where he walked the day of his fall, and my Manny is in his study, as a matter of fact working on the famous sermon on the Holocaust, and the daughter, Sarah, otherwise known as Sadie later in her life but now only still Sarah, she's in her room listening to records, Baby Dylan or some such person, I am in the kitchen fixing our supper, and since when was I ever anywhere else at this time of day, late afternoon, New Jersey afternoon, in what season? autumn, winter, spring, does it matter? I'm thinking, thinking chicken, chicken, what was I cooking? fricassee? and from the big market I had some fresh soup greens, so it had to be spring, yes? and I was in the kitchen, upstairs is the granddaughter and the music, and my white-haired boy is in his study, preparing his famous sermon, but where is the mother of the daughter, the wife of the rabbi? Good question.

No, no, wait a minute. It was soup greens and springtime, and this Baby Dylan on the Victrola, but my Manny wasn't home yet, he was on a condolence call, someone's father, mother, that I don't remember, had just passed away and he had stopped to see the family and so he comes in the door and says, “Hello, anybody home?”

So cheerful he could be in those days. And what happened all of a sudden that his cheerfulness went out like the tide at the beach and never, never came back? I'm asking you, because I don't know the answer. Well, I know and I don't know. I'm giving you answers but I'm giving you questions. Here is a man, coming through the door with a smile on his face, a little tired, but basically a man who knows what he wants to do in life and is doing it, making a living for his family, doing in the world what he does best, and he comes home and expects to relax a little—even a rabbi, a man everybody depends on, he has to relax a little too—and so he comes through the door and the music is playing, and that he tolerates, though he has never been a great fan of music, and in fact he never reads the books, not even books by rabbis everybody in the congregation is reading, and the funny thing with him I learned over the years, and this goes to show you that even someone's mother can sometimes be surprised
by what her child is up to, and believe you me don't think I haven't been surprised since, but what relaxes him I was going to tell you is something that would seem to everybody else like work, it is this business in the city, with the brother-in-law, this is his hobby, and he makes it grow and puts in the hours, just like he was building a toy house with blocks or matchsticks or making a garden, the way other people make a hobby in the yard.

What can I say to him sometimes to make him see that he should be doing something soothing instead of the business all the time, on the telephone all the time, in New York every spare minute of his time ever since the father-in-law passed away and the brother came back from South America? Can I say to him, Manny, darling, you want to get prematurely gray from worry? I cannot. Can I say to him, darling, Manny, you want to make people think you care only about making a dollar? That I can't do, because he also puts in so much time at the temple that to everyone in the world it's clear that he loves the work, loves the people in the congregation, wants to help them, especially the families that are broken up because of a death, because of a divorce, because he remembers what it was like when he was growing up without a father.

So here comes the hardworking man doing a double-time life but not a double life, not then, he didn't see it that way at that time, at that time it was still how can he be rich and blessed at the same time. Well, let me tell you, he was trying, and he was succeeding. So here he comes in through the front door at the end of the day, the end of part of one day since he will work in his study after supper for hours, and so the day doesn't really end for him yet, and he comes through the door and if he's not smiling, and he's not whistling, and he's not behaving like the happiest man in the world, he's not slumping in over the threshold either, he's not beaten down like a dog the way you sometimes see men look after working all day in the business, whatever they do, men who come in and the first thing you know they're a little tipsy already, and that's the evening, the sun has set.

But not my Manny, on him the sun is still shining. You can tell by his face that he's got something on his mind—that night it was the sermon—but not something that he can't accomplish by applying himself. Which is how he works, steady, steady, at one thing at a time, and I think, Sally, this is something he learned from my Jacob, the steadiness, the plodding along like a horse before a cart, but of course I'm not calling him an animal, don't be silly, but it reminds me of my Jacob and the way they set out that morning, for the cart, loading the cart with the fruit, and then towing and pushing the cart up toward Union Square, and the taxi heading for them, and the milk truck, and the swerving taxi with the fire engine at its back, and the rearing horse, and the falling truck, the crash of the glass, the broken bottles, the crush, the weight, the crumpled body of my Jacob, the lake of milk, the blood, the half-orphaned boy.

So Jacob comes home—
oi
, did I say Jacob? I meant to say Manny. So my Manny comes home in a state which is for him almost close to whistling and walks into a wall. I don't mean this actually, darling, I mean it's
like
he walks into a wall. Because I am in the kitchen and Sarah is upstairs listening to her music, and Manny walks in and the telephone starts to ring. Like in a play or a movie.