Prayers for the Living (29 page)

“Fever?”

This word he reacted to. Because he had a fever then, he had the Florette Glass fever, and it made him sensitive, sensitive, because here he is the rabbi, the leader, the father, the husband, the son even, and he's having an affair with the woman in his congregation while his wife is out in the hospital in the woods, so who wouldn't be sensitive to that? The fever of his life made his hands shake, for the first time, and it was worrying him because he didn't want to lose control, he believed that he couldn't afford to lose control, he was sure that everything he had accomplished in his life up until this point was the result of never having lost control. He believed this, but if it was true or not is another question.

So it was a good thing he took the train. On the way to the station he appeared to have so little power over the automobile that it wobbled and wavered, like a boat on water. His palms were sweating like it was summer and he'd just come out of the water. His underarms, all water too, what we call, you know, here and in the old country,
schvitz
. And in his pants, too, he almost wet, this later he explained to me, as he thought about what would happen
if he talked to Mordecai the way he thought he ought to—call him
rapist, pervert, destroyer of innocence,
trying to think of his wife as a girl, a child really, and of his own daughter, and how he would respond if it had been Sarah to whom Mord had done this terrible thing. But his heart sank when he understood what would follow such a confrontation—the entire train ride in he mourned over the loss of the company, the collapse of the partnership, the end of everything he had worked for. Green hills, white houses, churches, vast parking lots, towers, then factories, train yards, power lines, walls, walls, walls—and in the station the crowd of thousands, not usually a force that my Manny did anything but yield to when he had to as he walked, threatened, it felt like, to close in on him and crush him between their hips and shoulders, so that when they stepped away the police would find him, a white-haired man pressed flat to the floor in his fresh dark suit. Shaken, my son walked on to find his stairway to the street, weary already of the thought which had come to him only a little while before, that he had become utterly without care for anything but the company and that to his brother-in-law he was not going to say a word.

A mother understands what's right. And for him this was what he needed in his life, that he shouldn't feel ashamed, although at first he did. If I had been with him, I would have said,
never,
don't be ashamed. In that crowd, in that station, he wanted to disappear and change his life for yet another although he had by that time already changed his life one time more than most, or was nearly ready to, in any case, nearly ready. This was the spring before his fall from the dais—and so many things were building, building up inside. Like the storms in the systems on the weather maps you watch on TV? Oh, and if I could see them again clear I'd be a happier woman. Because my eyes. And yours,
kinnahurra?
They're still good? Then bless them, because that is a gift that came to me I didn't know was so precious until it started to fade. To see. To see, it would be wonderful to look out the window and see the lights of the buildings across the dark space of the park—how do I know what I'm missing? When we first moved here, darling, I could still make it out.

More coffee? My Manny is drinking some in his office after his trip on the train. Amazing that you can take the same ride you've made so many times before and this one time it all seems different. To my Manny, it was as if he had not passed under a river but crossed over a border. Several lights on his telephone were blinking and he was staring at them but not responding. He was thinking about Florette, about removing her and then his clothes and climbing into bed with her, and about the paper box company he and Mordecai were going to swallow, like a long thick South American snake swallows a baby kid or goat. Except my Manny knew that they could digest it in shorter time. The last things on his mind were his wife, his daughter, and, I have to admit it, because I'm in this too, his mother. Why not? We faded away to nothing more than a faint reminder of another life, the way your stomach sometimes growls to tell you that it's working. That's how faint we were in his day at this point, natural to him, but not present. How far he had come to reach this moment, when he could forget everyone he had been working for all these years! But I don't blame him, you understand. He had arrived at an important time in his life, when he had to say to himself, what is it all for, what am I doing this all for? To keep a girl in clothes and schoolbooks? To keep a mother warm against the winter weather? To keep a wife in and out of a hospital and shot full of medicines? No, it's more than that, more than that, and if the bird that visited him from time to time didn't swoop down out of the sky and give him the advice he needed, that was because right now he didn't have to go outside himself for news, for weather reports, for wisdom, for inspiration, for advice on how to proceed. All he needed was his brother-in-law Mordecai to show him where he was supposed to stand and like a good actor he played his part. Options rolled in, companies stumbled before him, the money added up, and my Manny, in less than half a lifetime, went from peddler's boy to king—or what we call in this country the same thing as king. He was a president, executive officer, board member, he might as well be a moon man except that he goes to the office in the city and he and Mordecai look at reports, they talk it over, they telephone
money men, bankers, they talk it over, and they draw up plans, and then they make more telephone calls, and the next thing you know they own something else, and Manny, my Manny, the nice little boy who used to help his father push the cart on the Sabbath, who made up for all that by serving so many years as a rabbi, and a fine one you'll admit, yes? He's sitting on yet another board in his dark suit and white hair, and he's got the respect of the others, and more important, he's got control of yet one more company. In less than five years, four of them, the bottling, the paper, the box, the ships, and the one they started out with, barges. But now they've got more than barges, they've got ocean ships. And shipping routes south, and warehouses where they need them. And my Manny is getting upset because he has to divide himself between the temple and the companies, and the other thing of course that's upsetting him now is the two women, between Maby and Florette, and you're smiling but don't ever think that except for what you're about to hear me tell him on the telephone just now, in a minute, when I tell you what I told him, I never asked him to do nothing for me.

Yes, my call was one of those winking lights on his desk board, because I was upset at breakfast when he didn't eat, when I saw how much he was sweating, when I could feel his nervousness crackling in the air like Jersey summer lightning, and when his secretary told him that among the others on the line I was waiting to speak to him fortunately for him he took my call first. Because just when he said,

Hello, into the office walked Mordecai. Where he was returning from I couldn't say, but he was always just back from some place or other, South America, Texas, California, Detroit, even Israel is a place that he goes to and comes from. He himself, let me tell you, darling, is quite a story, a match for my Manny, no doubt about that, and to think that they all met—except for Florette who at the time was not born yet, and lucky for her not yet born because she had a future in the camps still to suffer through, and little Sarah who, of course, was also away in the future—they all met at the accident where my Jacob passed away, in the Union Square, and ever since in
one way or another we've all been together. He has quite a past, and if I told you all of it you'd be sitting here until tomorrow morning and your own children would be wondering why you weren't at home to answer the telephone. Not that my driver wouldn't wait, he's a very nice boy, a South American, his name is Daniel, which is a French name, I understand, but somehow with the French and the South American he still speaks English, and he takes good care of me, like a grandson I never had.

And isn't Manny a good son, too? Because when from the switchboard comes the word that I'm on the line and it's an emergency—this voice comes to him through the speaker on his desk because, remember, he hasn't touched the telephone—he says, “Put her on the line.”

“Hello, Mama?” he says.

“Darling,” I say. I'm breathing hard. “I'm worried, frankly, that's what it is. You're all right?” I ask him.

“Yes,” he says, “is that why you called?”

He's staring up from his desk at Mordecai, remember, who has just walked in, without knocking, without buzzing, of course, that's his way, and he's talking to me across the river.

“I was worried that you didn't eat your breakfast.”

“Mama,” he says with a laugh, “you're always worried.”

“Your hands were shaking when you held the newspaper. That's something I shouldn't worry about?”

“Mama.”

“Tell me I shouldn't worry.”

“You shouldn't.”

He looks up at his partner, wonders what, just what he's going to say first, there's the news about Maby in the hospital, there's the news about . . . but then he catches himself. Because Mord doesn't need to learn about Florette. Why in hell should he hear about Florette? But Manny is thinking a mile a minute, and the borders between his thoughts—or do I mean the boundaries?—they're falling away in his mind, and like on the train he's working his fingers raw on the glass shard, rubbing, rubbing so when he finishes talking to me he's
got to excuse himself and go into the bathroom and run water over the wounds and put on Band-Aids in two places.

“Your mother?” Mordecai said, sitting on the desktop. His big bald head caught the light from the ceiling lamp and appeared to be as beautifully polished as the surfaces of the furniture. To Manny at this time the brother-in-law's skull seemed about to burst out of its skin. Mord had picked up some weight in the few years since he had come back to this country and taken up the business with Manny. As Manny remembered him he had been tall, bony, thin. But this man could easily have lifted up the father who had tossed him from dock to barge and heaved the big man who tortured him across that same empty space over the water. At fifty-plus, he had strength the boy he had been never dreamed of. In a funny way he owed this all to Sporen.

I'm starting to tell you this, and I said it would take all night. You want to hear? Listen. What happened between him and Manny didn't last all that long. Manny finished our telephone conversation—he was feeling better, I was feeling better because he was feeling better—and, hello, hello, isn't it amazing, how a mother's call can have that effect?—and he didn't take the rest of his calls but sat down with Mord and he talked, they talked, he explained about Maby, where she was, how long the doctors thought she would rest there, he wanted Mord to know, he explained, after all, she was his sister, and then they had a lot of arrangements for the business to discuss, they hadn't talked face to face in weeks, but it was true, they had a meeting here, a meeting there, and they needed to talk strategy, that's what they called it, Mord the mastermind, Manny the soothing presence—and during this time, while Mord is looking so concerned about his sister, and so serious about the preparations for the week, Manny is saying to himself, say something, say something, but how do you say something to a man some years your elder about something he did, if he did it, as a boy? When Manny couldn't, as it turned out, connect the little boy he himself had been to the man he had become, and couldn't connect the man he had become first, the student, the rabbi, to the man he had become now, the corporation
man in the dark suit whose presence soothed gentile—which doesn't mean gentle—boards into submission, so what was he going to do, crucify his partner for something his hysterical wife remembered like a bad dream? And did it happen at all, he asked himself as he sat there, what if it was only the fantasy of a woman lost in drink? It could be the truth but it could be many other things, some of which Manny had heard over the years from members of the congregation. If there was one thing he learned in that job, it was that there was no such thing as an adult, so why couldn't he include his hysterical wife in that number? And why shouldn't he sympathize with his brother-in-law, particularly when, if they quarreled, they would get into a mess that could bring down all their holdings on their heads? They had met by chance—the deathly accident that took my Jacob, and again by chance yet another time after the untimely deaths of the pair of Sporens—and worked well together only by chance, an act of chemistry, Manny had originally decided, not unlike the kind that brought him and Maby together and now clasped him and Florette in its fist like two pieces of clay to be joined and molded—and what chance had wrought did someone want by design to bring down?

You hear stories these days about the coloreds and how they felt when they were slaves, and I listen carefully because—and I want to talk a little quietly here because she's still in the kitchen cleaning up and I don't want to hurt her feelings, and it was terrible, sometimes even the masters would sell a father and mother here, a child elsewhere—and like I say, I listen, because, you know, how it's been that way in the Bible with the Jews, and I can tell you, my Manny knows his history inside out, he was a student, and then a rabbi, and so I want to tell you that even though it could sound bad what he's done with the brother-in-law
it is not at all like that,
like that with the slaves, the coloreds, the Jews, it is not like he is selling his wife down the river because he doesn't bring up the subject with the brother, with the brother-in-law. I believe this. I have thought about it. Believe me. A son of mine I wouldn't have behave that way, and he didn't. I'm telling you.