Prayers for the Living (32 page)

“That still bothers you?”

“Always. Since communion.”

“The weaving's going well, isn't it, Maby?”

“Um-hum.”

“Did you copy that from a pattern? Something out of a
National Geographic
?”

“No.”

“From some design?”

“No design.”

“Looks pretty lifelike to me.”

“Life has no design.”

“Think so?”

“Know so.”

“Well, so what?”

“My mother used to say, sew buttons.”

“Did she sew?”

“She sewed seems.”

“Seams?”

“Seems. She knew seems.”

“Would you like to talk a little more about her?”

“She lived in sin.”

“Your mother lived in sin?”

“In Cincinnati.”

“A fine pun. Shall we talk about her?”

“She knew not seams.”

“What?”

“When I was a girl we went to Coney Island and rode on the bumper cars. They . . .”

“Excuse me, did you say Coney Island? On one of those trips to New York with your father?”

“Coney Island in Sin-sin-ati. We had one of our own. We had many things of our own. We had sin-sin. We had original Sin-sin-ati.”

“So tell me about the bumper cars.”

“I don't remember what I was going to say.”

“Maby, you ought to keep a notebook. Keep it at your bedside. When you have a thought, just write it down. And then we can talk about things that come to you. Would you like that?”

“I . . . would.”

Eye. Wood.

Eye. Sigh.

Eye sigh for you. Eye die for you.

Four yew trees in a row. Four Jew trees in a row.

T
HIS IS WRITING
? This is craziness is what it is. And I can't tell you how much it hurts me to hear it, for the sake of the poor girl who all these years had such craziness inside her and it took a college writing class and the breakdown to come out, and for the sake of my Manny who lived with her, who made his life depend on her, and for the sake of my granddaughter in whose heart runs the same blood as this same poor girl, red, deep red, I'm sure, because they are both so strong-headed, and strong-headed means strong-hearted, but also it means wild and seeing things the rest of the world doesn't see—except for people like me who see sometimes, and this I got to learn for the future, without their eyes.

You know, Rose, sometimes you recognize these feelings inside you. Intimations of the future, invitations to the future, whatever you call them, and about the little red-haired girl at the scene of the accident I wish I could tell you that I knew better, because some things I can tune in on, like I tune on a radio, but other times, the signals from the future fade, because maybe the moon in the present or the near past or early future, who knows when, passes between my mind and the news I'm trying to get, like the way the radio crackles with the sunspots? You tell me how. Because if I knew then—if I knew when I first saw her—oh, if only I could have been a better grandmother even though at the time I was only the mother of the boy still far too young even to think about girls, let alone make a marriage with one, and making a child that would make me a grandmother—if only I could have known then, if I would have known the minute she entered the apartment, dragged along there by her parents when they brought my poor milk-truck-struck half-orphaned Manny in the door, I would have grabbed my little boy by the arm and dragged him inside and shut the door forever in the face of this crazy bunch with their crazy little girl who was not only about to make remarks about the smell in his pants but who would grow up to give him a life that would nearly drive him mad. And if my Manny could have avoided the trouble from her, and if their daughter, my little Sarah, could have been spared some of the trouble that has already come to her in life because she is the
daughter of you-know-who, I would give up what time I have left ahead of me and go back to that awful Saturday in that cold year, the Sabbath of milk and blood and bells, and lay my own body down in the path of that taxi to make it stop before arriving to kill my Jacob. I would make a jump to stop that horse . . .

Now, I know what you're thinking, what you could be thinking anyway. I know that she had her own troubles that led to this craziness, I know she had her troubles piling up in her. And you had your troubles, too, I bet, Rose. And me mine, me too, but at least you survived without getting too crazy because—I don't know why. You're tough. And I'm tough? And she wasn't tough? I don't think so. It doesn't look that way. And why not? That I can't tell you. This grandmother doesn't know every single thing, not the creation of the earth except what I hear in stories as a child and not the taxes that's always bothering my Manny, and not the reasons for war and the reasons for peace, except maybe I do know something about the last thing, at least a way to stop it because mothers and grandmothers they get tired. So? What? You want to hear my plan for world peace? Later. First you want to hear the rest of this story.

So, she's suffering a lot in the hospital, and do I have to tell you that it's not a picnic for my Manny either? After he fell she couldn't be his proper helper, and in fact I think that her own craziness was creeping up on her even then. They went on the vacation—to Bitch Heaven they call it, not Beach, not Haven, that's right—and who do you think was the bitch? Guess. They went to the shore and he didn't want to go back to the temple. He had made up his mind. Or his mind had made up his body, maybe I should say. He fell because he tripped, but not with his feet. Not with his feet first. First his mind tripped, and then his feet. And he went hurtling head forward like a diver or one of those men shot from the cannons at the circus. A bullet, like. A shell, you call it? But not a seashell? I see. I can see him now, in the hospital bed, back at home, on the trip running along the seashore. Exercise, the famous Doctor Mickey said. Take it easy and exercise—so how can you do both? One high holy day Manny was walking to temple, thinking, what am I doing here,
where am I going, walking, thinking. And then he climbs the dais, and then he sees a bird—a bird!—and falls. And now he's running along the beach, trotting maybe and she's tagging along after. And he stops, and he looks out at the water, the waves, white-capped waves, and he says to himself,

From that way, from over there, I came, and I've done things here, and what do they mean to me now?

He was about to answer his own question with
nothing
when a cloud passed across the face of the sun, and he felt as though nature had answered it for him with a big chill, and the covering of the face of the sun with a shadow, with cold wind on his bare skin. Up he looks and there's a dark-backed waterbird skimming high above the waves, and he hails it, standing there in his black bathing trunks, skin prickled, goose bumps, his stomach hanging over the waist of the suit maybe a finger's thickness, his hair sucking in the light it's so bright itself in the sun, head like a whirlpool so, the way water sucks down into the drain—
swoo-uuck!
—and even though he had asked only what do you call?—a remarkable question? the kind you want or don't need no answer for?—everything of a sudden goes dark for him, and he hears nothing but the
scree-scree, scree-scree
of the bird swooping down on him, and the next thing you know he hears a voice again.

Manny,
it says, and if sound can have a light, it's a bright light in the middle of the darkness that surrounds him, like a burning bush in a dark meadow, or a star against a black field of velvet, like that, all of the sunlight that was present a moment before condensed into the sound, and to my son, it's as if he is falling again, falling through the sand, falling through into whatever it is—some kind of rock, a shelf, a ledge I once heard the word?—and to someone watching him, such as Maby, the wife, who stops for a moment as she sees him, not sure that what she is seeing is real—he falls to his knees and spreads out his arms toward the waves, face turned upward into the sun—what's real to her anyway, after what she's been through? the woman who carried the hurt from the brother? the woman who married my Manny, who knows why? the woman who wrote the crazy mishmash about the hospital?
She
should be the one down on
her knees in the sand looking like she's going mad!
She
should be the one who's hearing the voice of a bird!

Manny, you must do what you must do
. It's his father's voice, again, he's sure, the voice of my Jacob.
Go where you must go. Midway in this life, a point I never reached, you must take a new road
.

Now this is pretty crazy talk, I have to admit, and I'm the boy's mother. But this is what he heard, he reported this to me, and I've got to tell you that if I heard it I wouldn't believe it, because you know, it sounds like, what? poetry? something out of the television special on the Bible with Charlton Heston or somebody? But this is what he heard, he swears, down on his knees, in the sand, though, of course, he says he felt as though he was falling through the ground, through the floor of the world, that's the way he put it, through the floor of the world.

Take a new road, he repeats to himself, and he knows what this means. This means put all of himself into the business—throw himself into the business. But as much as he understands, he wants to know more. Even though in part of his mind he's thinking, I must be crazier than she is, I must be, because things like this don't happen, not to educated people, to rational people, to an educated man like myself, kneeling on the beach. He couldn't get up, he felt, until he knew more. He tried, but he couldn't rise. He kept on falling, sinking, and couldn't reverse it. He wanted to ask, but can I still feel blessed in that work? Because wasn't that why he was hanging back from it? This much he told me, told me the truth of it, that he was hanging back not so much out of confusion as clarity, because that much he saw, he saw how much he was not confused but afraid, afraid that he would lose his special sense of himself in the world, his sense of himself as getting double goodness, the purity of his job as a rabbi, the money from the business, how much? How much? How much? And what he wanted to know, he wanted to know if he could do this and still keep the high right sense of life that he maintained when at the temple . . .

And he might have gotten an answer from the bird, but just then up to him came Maby, running running she was, because she got scared, and she grabbed him by the shoulder and shouted,

“Manny, are you okay?”

Which pulled him up from the fall through the ground, yanked him right back her voice did, like he was tied to a rope that had just stretched taut to full length, and it yanked, and he felt the rope burn into his waist, like a tightening belt, and he turned with a scowl on his face, blinking into the sun that returned with her voice, and he stood up, and he snarled at her, showed his incisors, I'm sad to say, like an angry dog, and he said,

“Don't you touch me like that, ever again!”

How things change! They change, but they don't change that much, not that you can see. Look at this beach they're standing on, how it washes away and swells with the coming and going of the tide. Now it comes, builds, grows, then it goes, shrinks, sinks, washes far off toward where the breakers roll, the undertow carves it, the moon calls it, in and out, far and near, and here is my son, a scene I could have described to you earlier, much earlier, but who wanted to remember this, the way he spoke to her, after he had promised himself, but the tide, the tide, and there she goes, running again, running off along the sand?

Oh, if I could have been that beach I would have held him there on his knees. I would, if I had been those waves, washed over him to shut his mouth and stay his hand! I would have kept him from doing such harm to himself by speaking this way to her! But there she is, on the run again, and there he is, up and running after.

They had a lovely room in the hotel, a room facing the ocean. And they had had a lovely meal the night before. And in bed—don't blush, because with me it's no use, you'll be blushing all the time—he had tried to be kind, he had tried to be gentle, and he thought he had succeeded. But what kind of a love is this where he has to try all the time, to think all the time, now I must be kind, now I must be gentle? Because if it comes, it comes, right? And if there's no gentle, can you make it gentle? I mean, all the time? Can you think about it all the time? It's like a person with crutches, look I see these people, they have to think, now where can I get down to the next floor? or where is the way down the curb that won't trip me? Where? Where?
There's always a way, and there's never a way that could have been. So he was gentle for one night, and then he has the trance on the beach, and it's all gone, blown away in the wind off the ocean.