Prayers for the Living (25 page)

Running running running.

As I'm telling you this he's resting on vacation in a hotel somewhere in the Holy Land. But as I'm telling you, in my mind, in your mind, if you're listening the way you should—if I'm telling the way I should—he's running running running.

And in a way he will always be running.

And falling like the fall he took just before the time I began to tell you the family story.

“Get over here!” he called out to her as he saw her leaning against the hood of a neighbor's car. Her chest was heaving like a bird's in flight, and her eyes, even in the dark he could tell, her eyes were wild.

“You wait for me!” he called after her. And this time she did look back, looked over her shoulder, as she cut across the lawn and ran behind the house.

A dog leaped out of the yard and barked at her. Way down the street inside the lighted house the mother, this mother, stood silently in front of the table now set for a meal of which no one seemed about to partake and heard the faint yip-howling of that same beast.

“Help!” Maby yelled, and ran right into her husband's arms.

He tried to help her, to help her home, but she struggled, and twisted free.

“No!” she screamed. “No!”

Lights flashed on in the front of the house where they struggled, and poor Manny, my Manny, blinked against the sudden brightness
as Maby, a captive in his grip, kicked him in the shins and again raced away.

How long can this go on, you ask? How long. How long? Rivers are long, nights are long, space is wide, the air is deep, my memory and the minds of my children are long and deep and wide if they say to themselves what the truth is. And to tell you the truth it went on for another few minutes, running back and forth across the street, and some people by now had come out on their doorsteps, attracted by the noise, and my Manny was begging her, saying,

“Please, Maby, it's enough now, enough is enough.”

But enough wasn't enough. She ran, tripped, fell face-first onto the roadway. Manny leaned over and yanked her up by the hand, as though she were a child or a rag doll, a child's rag doll, a rag doll's child, and she swung her other hand around as she rose to her feet and clawed his face and the sting of it matched the smart of his fingers, and the blood ran down his cheek.

By the time he got her upstairs and undressed and into bed, your Doctor Mickey had arrived. Manny feared a lot more kicking and screaming once she understood what was happening, but he was wrong. When your lovely boy gave her a shot she just lay there, not smiling, not frowning, staring up at the ceiling as though some picture show was going to begin there, a movie on the ceiling. Who knows what she thought she was looking at that night? I, the mama, stood in the doorway, ready as always to help. My dinner was dried up, ruined. I had no patience left for anyone or anything. But what did that matter? We were all upset. Even Sarah had recognized that something out of the ordinary was going on, had turned off her Victrola and come down the hall with her most serious expression on her face, the one she usually saved for discussions of friends and music.

“Is she all right?” she asked. “What happened to her, Grandma? Was she . . . you know?”

“I don't know,” I told her, and took her by the hand. She allowed me to press her fingers to my bosoms, like she was little again and I wanted to see her nails.

“But, sure,” I said, “she'll be all right. Doctor Mickey can fix anything, except if you fall and go smash. So he'll give her something to help her sleep and in the morning your mother will feel fine.”

It was the father I was worrying about, because Maby went right out but my Manny and your Mickey had a conference in the study, and the expression on Manny's face after that was also his most serious face, the one he reserved for accidents and funerals, and with those claw marks he had the appearance of a man to whom an accident has just happened. I noticed his fingers when he took out his handkerchief to dab at his nose—raw and red and sliced from the shard. Here was a man already marked out by the color of his hair, so distinguished that you couldn't help but notice him in a crowd, and now up close I could see these smaller but just-as-distinctive marks on him, the stripes and slits made by nails and glass, stripings for a day or a life filled with a turmoil and hullabaloo like nobody, or maybe everybody's seen. You see, on top of everything else, remember—but you don't, because even I didn't—was the fact that he had to write his sermon on the concentrating camps so that he could deliver it at the service the next evening.

So here's the house now quieting down, a night like this, seeming normal, the music off, the creaks and shifts of the wood and stone, resting of the bones of the residence, sleep on the horizon, undress and lay your weary body in the welcome crib of dark, babies, grandmothers, it's all the same what we need at this time, some because we have so much to look forward to, some because we have so much to see over our shoulders, we look behind. I wash, I sigh, I smear my face with cream, throwing good money after bad for years, the cream on this wrinkled property, but this is America, and we have hope forever, and the same person, me, once a girl who sailed the seas in search of a new life with her husband in a new country, she uses even at an age when she should—
kinnahurra,
I shouldn't say this but I'm saying it nevertheless—when I should be thinking about what the undertaker will do for my face at the funeral home. I'm using the cream and oil that promises all of the crevices and streaks and lines and bumps and spots and gouges and veins and ridges and hollows will fade away and
I will appear as if young again—and I'm squinting into the mirror and the face before me looks like someone I know, if only because the dark is closing in and I can see it only in the barest outline, the faintest form. Sit, flush, wash, a night like any night. And into the welcoming bedclothes, and into the welcoming bed.

For Sarah the same, except for her no cream. All the world lies before her, and she knows no sin, no pain. Not even has she crossed a river, not even has she had to work, not this child, fruit of a garden her parents and grandparents planted, blessed with the riches of the New World without ever having had to dream or wrestle or sail over waters, fly over empty space, here she is, sitting, gushing, flushing, washing, brushing the beautiful straight teeth, the lovely hair. No wrinkles on her face, and no sense of ever having done wrong either, this American child, who, even if she dreams of horrible beasts and fears great falling walls of brick and mortar, as she did, long afterwards I learned this, will wake up refreshed, as if she's returned to the womb overnight, beginning again as she did on the day of her birth, all peach flesh and willpower, bouncing up and down in her sneakers to the music of I want to hold your hand, another day to live as if the others did not exist, present, past, and future in the jittering finger-snapping of the instant after instant she calls her life. She was a little tired, she slept. I was weary, I collapsed. Her mother, my daughter-in-law with the funny name, she was drowned in medication, veins churning with drugs, ropes to bind her in the hospital of sleep.

Only Manny, my Manny, remains awake. He's sitting in his study, walled in by books, magazines, notes, photographs of old teachers, Maby, Sarah, me, and he's staring down at a blank sheet of paper on which he must soon begin to write the sermon he must deliver the next late afternoon. But what to write? what to say about this awful time in the life of our people, in the life of Europe, in the life of the planet? Better to have been born on the moon than to have been a Jew in Hitler Germany he could say. Or, better to have lived in Hitler Germany than to have been married to the woman who nearly drove him this evening into a crazy state of violent distress? He's thinking
that—frightening thoughts, and his thoughts drift, wander, stray. Maby. She has turned into a monster, and now she needs the kind of care only an institution can offer. That's what Doctor Mickey suggests. Why let her suffer and slide into a worse state of detachment and distraction and, to be frank, a kind of lunacy, when she can go into a place for a few weeks of intensive treatment and come out with a program that will keep her on an even keel?

“I know just the place,” your wonder-making Doctor Mickey said. “Owl Valley. It's not far, it's modern, a warm place, good care, not cheap by any means, but the best in the state.”

“I'll do it,” Manny said. “For her sake, I'll do it.”

“Do it for your own sake, too, for God's sake,” Doctor Mickey said.

“Near, good, warm, the best. I'll suggest it,” Manny said.

“Don't suggest, Manny,” Doctor Mickey said. “Not suggest—take her there. We'll take her there together.”

Her face drifted in and out of his view, like a raft in the temple swimming pool butted here and there by the wind. He saw her, he saw her not—he saw her, he saw her not. This woman, the only woman he had ever known, the only woman in his life except his mother, me—Sarah didn't count as a woman, then, being just a little more than little girl, at least as far as Manny was concerned. He had without ever thinking much about it attached himself to her, for what he supposed—when he thought about it—was life. There was too much else to think about, work, work, the two kinds of work, to consider ever finding another way to live. Accept, is what he told himself, you must accept. Accept. Good advice to give to others, and advice he ought to take himself. But how can you advise yourself? He'd listen to your Doctor Mickey, and he would help her heal herself, help her to rest, take stock. And then she would get back to the odd but ebullient and appealing personality that she was when they had first thought of marriage. When they had first . . . kissed, was how he put it in his mind . . . which shows you how much he hid from himself in the realm of private matters as opposed to the way he did business, where he considered everything that had to be considered, no matter what the cost.

The paper. Still blank, and he was drifting.

Death camps.

Jews going up in smoke.

Bones.

Blank white ash.

Blank white paper.

What could he say that hadn't already been said? Here was a speech he wanted to use to greet the survivors who had come to the congregation, and to celebrate and commemorate. But what did he know? He knew nothing. Blank. White paper.

S
ILENCE
.

T
HE HOUSE CREAKED
and yawned, like a ship in which he took passage across a great dark sea, in time, in space.

Blank.

The paper.

He had read everything, and understood nothing, knew only by rote, could spew out lines from the Talmud, from histories, and it was all, he felt in his blood, make-work. The ignorant congregants, they were impressed with the smallest bit of knowledge, but what could he say that was interesting to himself? Nothing.

What could he say that was new to himself?