Prayers for the Living (28 page)

He didn't rest even then, as a matter of fact, not in his mind. For years he had been climbing into bed with Maby, and nothing like this had ever happened, the trip through a fairy tale, the voyage through trees. Wait, it was like that, he described it. He had seen things, sure, and he had heard things, because this is the boy who heard the voice of the white pigeon and grew up to be the man who heard
more
voices, and he had heard a voice just a few nights before, remember, when he was wrestling with the talk about the camps, but of all the things he had heard, it was not like this, because this was something that drew him in
all over,
not just sound or sight but smell too, and touch, but also this time with a sensation like electrical in his heart, and in his nose up where it meets the face, behind his tongue, at the roots of his teeth, at the sockets of elbow and knee and in my Manny's toes and ankle joints, something that he had never imagined before let alone believed happened to other people. So it was, this feeling, yes, in his marrow bones, and he did not know what to do about it or what to call it but only to live through it or with it or whatever else he was going to have to do.

“Do you mind,” she said, after a while, “if I smoke a cigarette?”

And he began to laugh wildly, the way he imagined Maby would be laughing if she were not sitting in a clean room in the rest home looking out at the trees enshrouded by fog, the clouds that drifted close to the ground in western Jersey where the forests flourished, where the state was not the state where the rest of us still lived, Maby sitting in her room with a river of drugs running through her veins keeping her calm and cool and collected, the way she would be laughing if she knew that after all these years, after the studies and the struggle in the early days to take care of the congregations, and the early days in the business after her father died, the business that was growing now so large that he was worrying almost all the
time about living a double life, and which to choose, which to give up, that after telling his mother all because his mother was the only woman in his life for so long, and after thinking that he would live forever, because that was the custom, with his red-haired bride from the Middle West, and after discovering that he could not go on much longer because of what she had told him about her and her brother,
that
burden added on to the
other
burden of the congregation and the business, the choice between living a life that might be blessed and a life in which he was rich and growing richer, that after all this he had finally, finally, found a way to let go. Very funny.

A Daughter's Prayer

W
HERE WERE
Y
OU IN THE DARK
? W
HERE
? W
HERE DID
Y
OU
disappear? You walked with me as a child. I remember hearing Your voice in the closet behind my toy chest. God, I said to You, where did You put my Mickey coloring book? Where did You put my Mouse? And You answered, You said, girl, it lies in the bottom of the chest. And I went there and looked and, lo and behold, there it was. In the old days—I hear this in the class, I hear it in sermons—You spoke to us in a burning bush, You spoke to us in a cloud and pillar of fire. Why not use Your plain voice now? If You're not a man, even better to speak. What if You are a She? Or an It, something between the two usual sexes? What if You have both the one thing and the other? What if You are a dual sex? What if You are a woman, though, what if? Do You have periods? Do You feel the cramps come on as the egg sets out on its journey? Do You mourn for the death of the egg? Do You care for the egg? Or do You hate the egg? Do You think about the egg as a life? Or is our world the egg from Your ovary? Are we the life on the evolving egg? Are we the children of Your universe? Or if so, how did we get fertilized? If You are a woman, did You have intercourse with a male God? And how did that happen? Did He force you, as I know how force can be, or did You go into a trance, as I know how a trance can take over, or did You decide that it was time and that You had to find out what it was like, which I did? And did You like it? Or did You find that it was something not for You? And if it was something not for You, God, did You find that You kept to Yourself for a long time? And then did You find that You looked for someone like Yourself so that
You could find pleasure? And is our good weather on this planet Your pleasure, perhaps? And is our hate and fear and killing and war and anxiety, is it Your cramping? Your periods?

Oh, I know I don't know—oh, I know I care but I don't know how to find out. I don't know how to find it. But dear, dearest God or Goddess, if You are a female, then I want to tell You that I need You now. I need to know. I need You most. I need You swiftly. I need You now in the dark, and in the light. I want to touch Your body, Goddess, I want to hold Your hand.

BOOK THREE

EVENING

N
ow you've finished your meal, the latest of your grandmothers' suppers.

And you've walked a little around this place where my son has put me in the style that I never knew I'd see. And while you walked maybe you looked out the window at the lights of the city—thinking, could I? Did I ever imagine that I could climb so high and look down upon these places? Look down upon these people? But Rose, look, by accident and by design we climb higher and we get older and we look down and back along the way we came.

And we'll have some coffee, because it is that time in the meal. Here, the girl is bringing it. See? Her? Black? The granddaughter maybe of our old friend the waitress in the mall? Could be? But I don't ask, I never ask questions like that unless I can feel that someone has the answer in her mouth and wants to spit it out. They're all related anyway, from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, it goes back, black, white, red, brown, maybe someday a miracle we'll hear about blue, green, and who knows what else could go on? Because even I know—I know—that there's a mixing sometimes at the beginning of things, like when you make soup there's a mixing and a thickening and all the bones and juices, spices and seasonings simmer
together, so who am I to say that no matter what I think or what I want things have happened and things will happen?

And how are
you
now, darling? You've been in the kitchen all this time? And you've finished cleaning up almost already? And thank you, darling, well have some coffee. Rose? Mrs. Pinsker? It's the decaffeinated. It won't keep you awake only just a little while. Me, some nights I drink it and lie in the dark, lay in the dark, whatever, and it's like being awake in a small closed box or hole in the ground, and in this cave, the hole, on the walls I see pictures, things from my life gone by, because, you know, it's restful for me when I'm having so much trouble with my eyes, that I have a little perfect dark, dark like old velvet, like satin, dark smooth to my eyes the way the material is smooth. And what does it remind me of? It reminds me, this dark, of the feeling of Manny's
tallis,
his prayer shawl, the same material, and the yarmulke I made for him when he went to Cincinnati so long ago. I feel, and I feel the time, I feel old time, and if I could have my fingers in my head or my eyes in my fingers, that is what it would feel like, and I could see it like it was yesterday, no, like today, now. No. Not right now. You can't be in two places at once. But at night, at times almost like these, when I close my eyes to see and try to contemplate the many sad mysteries of Jersey and New York, the stories I need to tell you, the stories you didn't know you needed until you heard them, then I call on the powers of my eyes and fingers, the strength of my old memory and deep heart feelings, whatever I have, whatever I give, to show you in your eyes inside the way things moved in this world where I once lived.

So.

This is how it began, on the one side, this new stage of his life, on the one side, the side we don't see, like the way the moon has the side we see and the side we don't, and this is the side we don't. The moon, that's right, where even shopping malls may exist on the side we don't see. Moon malls. Moon men in moon malls. My Manny, in this time of his life, he could live there and be happy, the first rabbi on the moon.

Because this was how he felt, with the arrangement with Florette Glass on the one hand and the tending needed by Maby, who from
then on was in and out of Owl Valley, on the other. One side of the moon, and the other. But you only see one side, and the other you have to guess about. He lived on both sides, but he only saw one, was how he felt. And which was the light side, which the dark? Sometimes it would change for him, some things would change, and he would be happy one way, sometimes the other. He couldn't figure it, he couldn't predict. But it's true that after her first stay at the hospital, Maby appeared to get a lot better. And the house got a lot better. And to me, his mama, before I knew, it seemed to me that he was happier, too. But I didn't know about the arrangement with Florette. What did I know? I knew only that she was painting his portrait, and I trusted my son to sit still for a picture because that was what he said he went over to her place for. But did he sit? Not still. They loved each other, they rolled around.

And what about Maby? Was she sitting still? Not her, I'm telling you. With the permission of a new doctor she started to see in Montclair on recommendation again from Sally Stellberg's Doctor Mickey, she enrolled in writing classes at Rutgers Newark. Which meant she had to drive a lot, to the doctor, to the classes. So she wasn't sitting still neither.

So who was? Why should anybody? Sarah also wasn't. She was back and forth to Rutgers all the time now, because the youth leader, Rick, your grandson, he was finishing up the law school there and she liked to talk with him. That's right, you didn't know? So now you hear it. Much older he was than she was, but that didn't matter to her because when she wanted her way, let me tell you, she got her way. And who do you think she takes after? Her father? Her mother? Her grandmother? All of us, that's who!

But Manny, too, he was going back and forth in a number of ways, from Florette to Maby, Maby to Florette, and also from the temple to the office in the city, from the city to the temple. And this meant something that if you didn't think of it before you had to think of it now. The brother-in-law. Mordecai. Mord. How was he going to work with him now that he knew something of the circumstances that surrounded his early exit from the Sporen house in those days
when the old boat owner was still alive? He ran away from home. And it was a good thing he was running, wasn't it? Because you can imagine his father would have killed him if he had caught him.

Of course he didn't know. Do you think that a little girl tells something like that to her parents? She takes the blame on herself, and she eats herself up alive inside. She's a victim, and she comes to be as much a victim of her own self, her feeling-guilty self, as she was of the one who made her a victim in the first place. But of the man, the boy that he was, and the man that he is now, who made her feel this way in the first place—well, old man Sporen, the father, helped her to feel this way, too, and in that way, he should share some of the responsibility—but it's the brother, the boy he was, the man he is, who is the main person—oh, it's so confusing sometimes, boy, man, girl, woman, father, mother, daughter, son, one behaving like the other should behave, the other pretending to be what he is not, or she—but the boy, I was saying before my confusion started weighing on me like a load of groceries in both arms, and I can feel it in my feet, too, let me tell you. I was telling you about the boy, who, like my Manny, became a man the hard way. If he ever did become a man. The boy, I mean. Mordecai. Mord. Not my Manny, because with my Manny there was no doubt that he was what he was. Why else was the Glass woman painting his portrait? But Mordecai. Mord. That could be another story.

Time for coffee now. Sip coffee, and while in the kitchen that young girl, somebody's grandchild, cleans up the dishes, or maybe she's done them already and she's thinking about going home, home to see her young children, she has some children, and a husband, hardworking, a hostler maybe like my Jacob, I'll tell you what happened when Manny for the first time after he heard the news about the past from his Maby went to see the brother, the brother-in-law, who was responsible for the past.

As usual, he went in on the train. Well, I shouldn't say as usual because only in the last few years it was usual. Before that, he drove. But then when he worked more in the business than he did, say, at the seminary in the city, he took the train in. Because he had to go
to midtown instead of uptown and to midtown it's easier to take the tubes and walk to where you want or take a taxi than it is to drive. And come to think of it you could mark the beginning of the big change in my Manny's life from the time he stopped driving the cars and started taking the train. So . . . that morning he got up and got dressed—Maby was, of course, still out in the country—just like on any other day when he had made the trip into the city, and I met him at the table where he was already reading the paper, the
Wall Street,
and I ask,

“You want some eggs, darling?”

He shakes his head. “No thanks.”

“A big day in the city, you could eat some eggs,” I said.

“I don't think it's going to be a big day,” he said. Just to make talk, he was talking. But I could see something unusual, the newspaper in his hand, it was shaking, he was trembling.

“You're all right?” I asked him. “You don't have no fever?”