Prayers for the Living (26 page)

B
LANK
.

T
HE PAPER
.

H
E SIGHED
,
AND
the house squeaked, settled in response. Outside the study window he heard a noise, a fluttering of wings? He lighted a pipe, unusual for him. He had the sense that he was waiting, and not just for the dawn. Tomorrow he would have other work to perform, other duties, and there would be no time for the writing. And so he must accomplish it now. And a chill passed over him, and he hugged his coat tighter around his shoulders and arms. The pipe smoke curled up toward the study ceiling, and the wings beat at the window, and he knew that he was yet again to be visited.

Manny?

“Yes, Father?” he heard himself say, in spite of his fear.

Manny, I have a suggestion. A solution for this nothingness on your page there
.

“What is it, Father?” he said, hearing his own voice tinny and shrill, a boy's voice in a man's throat.

Silence.

“Father?”

Silence.

Perhaps I ought to move in to Owl Valley along with Maby, he said to himself.

And then the voice returned.

Manny, that was the answer. Silence is the answer. Nothing is the answer
.

“Nothing?”

Nothing
.

I could get Doctor Mickey to prescribe something for me, he told himself. I could get something that would help me sleep, something that would at least help me relax. Hearing voices, for a man who has two jobs, nearly a double life, in fact, it wouldn't be such an admission of weakness if now and then he took a pill to help him relax, would it?

It wouldn't,
said a voice.

Manny jumped to his feet.

“What the hell?” he cursed. His eyes rolled up in his head and he
swung his arm as if striking out at something visible to him but no one else, and then he keeled over onto the rug.

It was light when he awoke, to the sound of me asking him if he was all right. I had found him there on the rug in his study, his knees curled up to his chin, his hands clasped around his knees, like the baby he had been in my womb.

“I was working late,” he explained. “I had to get my sermon done, and I was upset, I suppose . . .”

He supposed, can you imagine?

“. . . because of Maby's upset, and I had just figured out how to do the sermon when I fell asleep.”

“On the floor, darling?”

“It looked comfortable.”

“Darling, I can look at your face and in an instant know you're not telling the truth.”

“Can you, Mama?” And he made the little laugh he laughs sometimes with me, when I catch him like this, and with nobody else. So he learned some things that night, and most important he made his sermon, and let me tell you it was a big hit. You were there to hear it, no? So you heard it, but you didn't hear it. I don't want to make a joke about something so serious. Remember? Twenty minutes of silence in honor of the dead of the camps. Before an audience that included, as it turned out—and oh, did it turn—some of the living who had survived. Twice as many words and twice as much time couldn't have done it better.

T
HAT
'
S WHAT
she
told him when she met him on his way out of his office door at the end of the service. He was exhausted, my Manny. Standing there for twenty minutes. In silence. But thinking. Thinking of the dead. The torture. Murder. Mangled bodies. Murdered babies. And all of the things he had done as a young man while these things were going on. Most Jews here didn't know, he decided. And they could never truly know, unless they went through
it themselves, which, God forbid, should never happen. And so a paradox. And so the silence. Silence. Now to see Maby, to see if the drugs prescribed by Doctor Mickey had calmed her. To Owl Valley. On Monday. With the doctor. And he wanted to remember, also, to have the good doctor prescribe something for his own sleep as well. It had been a long night for him, long awake in his study and then the voice of his father, he had heard it, clearly as if from the beak of the visiting white bird of his youth. And if he hadn't been a grown man by this time, with all that he knew, he might have been frightened.

“I couldn't believe it was so right,” Florette said to him as he came out of his office.

“Oh,” he said, “thank you, I wanted to do the right thing.”

“You did, Rabbi, you did,” she said, pressing her hand against his.

“I'm glad,” he said. “Although it makes me sorrowful to have to think let alone talk about such a subject.”

“Such a subject, yes,” she said, staring into his eyes.

Do you think he needed more than that to think what he thought at that point? With Maby being what she was? For all that time? He did not, he did not need more. And if you understand, then you understand.

“I didn't realize,” he said. “You are Mrs. . . . Glass?” His voice trembled a little with fatigue.

She reminded him of her name.

“You moved here when?” he asked.

She reminded him.

“Not that long ago,” he said, looking down now at her hand in his.

She nodded, a presence of flesh and perfume, past and present.

“Would you like to come in for a moment?” he asked, stepping back into the office as she nodded her head.

“Here in America,” he said, Manny seated alongside her on the sofa, a rule he had never broken before even with the children who came to speak to him, always sit behind the desk and the other on the sofa was the rule, and here he had broken it, sitting next to her, still holding her hand. “Here in America we just don't know . . .”

“But you don't
want
to know,” she said. “You . . .”

“That's what I was coming to,” he said. “That's why the silence. Because to know is to suffer, and why should anyone suffer unnecessarily what those, you, knew? Could it stop it from happening again if more people knew? No, I don't think so, because to
truly
know is only to suffer it. The paradox lives.”

“I am painting about it,” she said.

“Are you? I'd love to see your paintings,” he said. Still holding her hand, and wondering to himself if she wore a number up on her wrist or above. But it was not that that fascinated him, no, it was not anything he could put into words, it was a certain electrical charge that he could feel, he explained later to me, a certain electrical field, he tried to say what it was. This had never happened to him before, except for the time that he met Maby, and he could only tell himself that he was mistaken even though he was sure that he was
not
mistaken.

“You'll have to come to my studio and see them,” she said. “They're in my studio, in my house.”

“Your house,” he said, “I should know where you live.”

And she explained to him, and he remembered from a list that he had seen, because he usually remembered everything that he saw on a page, and he told her that he would come and see the paintings, and perhaps they could allow others to see them, too, perhaps a show?

“No show,” she said. “Just you, Rabbi.”

“Just me,” he said, and that was an agreement.

“And perhaps you'll let me paint you?” she said.

“Me? Why me?”

“Because of your face,” she said, “and your hair.”

“I'm not a model,” he said, trying to make a joke.

“But I've been watching you,” she said, “and that makes you an object.”

“Not a subject?” he said. Thinking, I feel this tremendous pressure and I'm talking to her in joking language from philosophy?

The pressure didn't let up the rest of the weekend. In fact, as
the next week began, it got worse, and worse. On the drive west to Owl Valley, a lovely old Victorian building with a number of modern cottages—like the extra additions on a motel, was what they looked like, what they still do look like—he was thinking about this encounter with the woman in the temple, the survivor of the camps who painted pictures and wanted to paint him, all the while driving with your own Doctor Mickey, and Maby, the poor daughter-in-law, my poor girl, so drugged that she behaved like a sleepy child. He should have been thinking about what had driven her to this point in her life, and I don't mean a car, I mean the childhood event that she carried around with her—because as you know it upset him plenty just to have heard it, and he still didn't know what he was going to do later in the week when he had a meeting in the city scheduled with the brother-in-law, the famous brother Mordecai, otherwise known as Mord.

But so now they are driving west across Jersey, watching the shopping malls and bald spots where gas stations and houses used to stand, and the grease and the dead trees turned into greener hillsides, the road becoming hilly, the earth curving, and soon the horizon becomes beautiful, with only here and there a billboard, here and there a house, an abandoned filling station, and it is like another state, and you can imagine streams and rivers and farms and all of those things that used to be here throughout the East when the Indians ruled, where now only the rich gentiles to the west commute to the city on their neat little train lines. And there are birds here, and deer, and perhaps now and then someone sees the droppings of a bear. And are there wolves? I don't know. And what do they call them? mountain lions? There are perhaps
almost
mountain lions, call them hill lions, because there are not real mountains but only the beautiful tree-filled hills, I can close my eyes now and see them as clearly as if I am driving with him in that car. The dozing Maby, the clear-eyed doctor sitting next to her, ready at any moment to give her comfort. She was going in for observation, for tests and relaxation, to get her away from the booze, to get her away from the stress that pushed her close to the booze.

“It must be a relief to finally come to terms with this, Manny,” Doctor Mickey says.

“A relief, yes,” says my Manny, steering carefully at a speed just within the limits of the law. He didn't tell you all this, your boy, the doctor? Well, he keeps good secrets. But my boy, Manny, he tells me everything and that's how I'm telling
you
things, even secrets about your own son.

His head—tumbling through it are pictures of Mord and Maby, the survivor woman Florette Glass, Mord, the company offices, the barge, wondering about Florette Glass, thinking, what are you thinking, Manny? Get off it! Get off it! Wondering about how long Maby would stay, this would free his time, slightly, if Mama, if Sarah, oh, what was he thinking? Nothing that you wouldn't imagine a man in his situation wouldn't be thinking, but to think about it, when you were he, it hurt, it hurt, and to tell it to you now, it stings a little too, let me tell you, it stings, it bites, like the cuts in the fingers made by him with his little shard of star. They sting, they sting.