Prayers for the Living (34 page)

I didn't mention that? Well, darling, I'll get around to that. You can stay and have one cup more, can't you? The driver, he'll wait all night if we want him.

So what was I saying? Oh. The staying out, their staying out, their playing like children. Of course, he was on the leave he took after the fall in the temple. Am I getting this story straight? And she? She had a little money from her late husband, some investments here, investments there, and she owned her house, and so she had plenty of time. Who did she cook for and clean for and shop for and worry about? Nobody but herself. So she had time. She painted, and they played, and that was her life. Not bad, you say. Not bad, I say it, too. And she's not a bad artist either. If you can see the painting better than I can, you can say it's good, it's good. The lines, big, bold, modern, the shapes, modern, the plain colors more old-fashioned but attractive. You could even call her gifted, no? That was how she survived, you know. Drawings she made for herself. While all of the terrible things were going on around her at the camps, and sometimes, even terrible things were happening to her, she was making little sketches with stolen pens and ink, or at
least thinking about sketches she would make. It took her mind off her hunger. A whole notebook she has from that time. She showed it to Manny. He cried, he told me, when he saw it.

We each have our own trials, he said, hers was the presence of pain and suffering made palpable—oh, how he talks sometimes—when it comes to others he can talk, talk—and ours, mine, specifically, was the absence of palpable suffering and thus a suffering more inexplicable but no less painful in its own way. Did he say that? He wrote it down and maybe he gave it in a sermon, I don't remember. Or maybe he just wrote it down and I saw it somewhere in his papers when I was cleaning. I don't snoop, of course, but if something is out there, like Maby's writings, I might pick it up and take a look. Just in case I wouldn't throw out something that was valuable to somebody. Just looking—the mother, the grandmother was just looking.

While everybody else in the world, it seemed to me, was playing like a child. Maybe it happens only in this country, but all of them, and I don't leave out my Manny, they got to a certain point in life, adults, with a life, and they decided they were getting so old they better try to play one more time like children or else they might not have the chance again. I say it happens only maybe in this country, even though I never saw in Europe, I came here so young I never saw over there how it was, but they had a war and so it was hard to live like children after that, and here they didn't have no war, they had only their own troubles, but instead of making them older it made them want to be more like children again, which means, probably, that they felt how old they got but didn't want to face it, don't you think?

I know he wrote that down, but I'm sure he didn't say it. It sounds too big for him to say. His best sermon was the one where he used silence—and that, after all, was the one that brought them, him and
her,
Florette, together. The silence.

But in his heart he wasn't silent. After his fall, after his time in Bitch Heaven, he wasn't so silent to himself. Because he talked to Florette while they played, he played with her, too, of course,
I'm not kidding myself, I'm not kidding you, he played, the two grown-ups like children, my son the grandchild, I could joke with myself, but while he played he was making plans, he was talking with the brother-in-law, they were planning together, because once my Manny decided to go into the business full time there was no stopping him. And just like with the woman, with
her
, Florette, he could hold her in his arms and say to himself, this is where I was always supposed to be, because this was what he said to himself, and sometimes even he said it out loud to her—he began going into the city on a Monday morning instead of a Wednesday afternoon the way he did when he was still at the temple and only piddling around with the business, and he could say it as he rode in, say it as he took the taxi to the building, the tall glass and steel building, on Park Avenue, no less, he took a taxi at first and then he got the driver and the car, but that comes later, he could ride the elevator up the twenty, thirty stories to the office—the office they started in, because later they would take a higher floor in a taller building—he could say to himself, this is where I was always supposed to be.

So he's riding up in the elevator and he's remembering the last conversation with her, Florette, trying to remember it as it happened, and what he recalls is how they fit together, like pieces of glass from the time he tells her about, the time of the broken bottles.

“From the accident,” he explains to her while they're lying in bed, him with his chin resting on his palm, her sitting up smoking a cigarette—the only bad habit she has as far as my Manny is concerned.

By this time she has told him about the animals, about the fingers of the dead—and once or twice not the fingers but the organs, do you understand?—she has told him about the men in the camps who traded food and pens and ink and paper for her favors, because that mattered little to her, the life after the encounters with the dead, and she had to draw to survive.

And he has told her about life with Maby, and how distant he feels, and how untouched and unloved he feels because of the distance.

And she tells him about coming to this country, about meeting her late husband, a successful man, relatively, and old, sick, and he
died within the period of time that he himself predicted, and left her with enough to live on without worrying.

“Enough except love,” she says.

“And who ever has enough?” my Manny says. A smart boy. Of course he had his mother's love, he still has it, but we know not to be insulted, we know what he means.

“Tell me about that time again,” she says.

“You're the counselor and I'm the person with the problem, eh?”

“We both have problems. It's just your turn to talk.”

He glanced up at her, fingered the place on her arm just below the faint dark row of figures.

“Turns? We need turns?”

“Turns,” she said. “Now talk.”

“It's the accident, when my father died. For years I hadn't thought about it, and now it's come back in a dream. He's standing in the middle of the road, and the fire engine comes flying one way, the milk truck from the other direction, the taxi cuts off the truck, the horse rears up, the truck overturns and down comes crate after crate of milk bottles, crashing around us, crushing my father's chest. It's not an imaginative dream because it's so close to what happened. There's only one difference.”

“And that's what?”

“I'm not standing in the road, I'm driving the horse that pulls the milk wagon.”

“Very interesting.”

“Can you figure it?”

Florette shook her head slightly, and she puffed, puffed on her cigarette. Afternoon light—the smell of some flowers in the vase on her dresser. A Sunday this was. He was trying to get the temple out of his mind at that point but he couldn't. Even when he had given up his duties he thought of them for a long while. Not strange, it isn't strange. He had a memory. Has. He remembered the accident, so he could remember what happened every weekend for years and years, like the way you're supposed to feel a limb that gets amputated long after it's gone. No, he had to remind himself, he had only
a visit to Maby at the Owl Valley home, and that was his only duty. Sarah, she was off with friends. About them I'll tell you in a minute. But so here he is, in the bed with the mistress. He's watching the smoke float up to the ceiling. Asking his question. Ah, what a life he has come to, he thinks. He has made several successes already and he's not yet fifty. But he wonders, am I crazy? He's thinking about the dream, he's thinking about the birds he's seen in his life, about the voices.

“Am I?” he asks after telling her everything. “Am I? What do you think?” And suddenly he's crying—for the first time in his life since his father passed away, he's crying, and he can't help it, the tears they come and come and come, and, oh, I wish I, the mother, could have been there to take him in my arms, to give him comfort. Because she tried, but she couldn't help him as much as I could have done. But it's true, she cradled him in her arms, and she tried to quiet him, she patted him, she soothed him, she did everything but croon in his ear—the way I would have done—
ah-uh-ah-uh, bay-bee
. . . but he can't stop until finally she reaches her hand across him and crushes out the cigarette in the ashtray and uses both hands on him, massaging his neck and his chest, stripping away his sobbing like the old undershirt he was wearing, and soon she changes his weeping into groans of pleasure, the kind, you know, that come with a particular moment, and that's the way she does it. Not a mother's way—but a woman's way—and that is good enough for my Manny.

“Ever since my father died,” he's saying to her later, “and this was such a long time ago that you'd think I would have gotten over . . .”

“Just the opposite,” she interrupts.

“Perhaps,” he says. “But ever since then I've felt as though I've lived on the run, constantly rushing toward some goal or other, rushing toward it and then past it, school, Maby, a job, another job, a child, the company, money, the expanding company. The only time—times—I've felt as though I'd stopped, have been when I felt the craziness come upon me, for just fleeting seconds, when the visions came, messages from the birds, when I fell . . .”

“I don't know,” she says. Now she's smoking again, the curling pillar drifting upward to the ceiling, the sun has shifted, beams spread out in the cloud and she exhales like rays through water.

“And this time,” he says. “This is almost like standing still. Time. Now.”

And you're maybe wondering why in all this he never mentions me, Jacob's wife, the mother? Because I'm so close to him, he told me once, it's like I'm with him always, and if I'm with him, why talk about me.

“This time?” she says, getting close to him again.

“Like this, yes.”

“Like this?”

“Yes, like this.”

“This?”

“This.”

“And this?”

“This, too, yes. This.”

And there's a silence.

M
EANWHILE
M
ABY
? M
EANWHILE
Maby is in and out of the hospital, and when she's out she's taking the writing classes at Rutgers in Newark. You saw some of the papers. If you look up on the bookshelf just to the left, there, you'll see some books by the teacher who signed comments on the paper she wrote, Bair what's his name, there, see? Are they still there? I see the shelf but I don't see each book too clearly. They're missing? She must have taken them with her to the hospital, is all I can say. Well, so, she's taking this class, this is just before the move, and driving back and forth to Newark by day and night. She was out at all hours. And my Manny, he was so caught up in his change of ways, with his idea that he was going to do the company full time—and not to mention, but I've already mentioned, his girlfriend Florette, who was not exactly a girl in age but who cheered him up, she was a friend, I have to grant her
that—so I'll give her—he was distracted, and he knew she was out, but he didn't raise a fuss.

And Sarah, she didn't care, she was finishing her high school, and that means she was a little crazy, even a little boy crazy, and then she had her idea about going to Vermont—
oi,
what a year it was for ideas!—and she started dressing funny and playing with the paints and the clay, I'm telling you, the only one around here not doing something crazy was the mother, the grandmother. She went on with what she always did, the cooking, the cleaning, with maybe a little time out here and there for meetings with the other grandmothers, but the mother, the grandmother, she was the only one to keep things on an even keel while the rest of the house rocked and pitched,
kinnahurra,
like the boat most of us came over on, in a storm.

Here is Maby, a mother herself, caught up in the rock and roll, of all things, singing, humming to herself—now I don't mind if she is happy but could you call this happy?—in the car, on the way to her Newark class, and she's got the radio on, and she's heard the same music loved by the daughter, not the bugs, their music, some other boys, what do you call them? and she's turning the dial to find a station so she can sing while she drives, she's got one of those stories in her briefcase, she's going to show it tonight to the teacher, the writer with the animal name, what is it? Bair, I said, that's right, Bair, and have you ever heard of him, darling? He makes the best sellers? Myself, I never heard the name. So she's heading along the road, and she's singing: