Prayers for the Living (35 page)

            
Come on baby,

            
Light my fire!

With her hair cut short—she did it in Montclair the day before—the rabbi's wife looks ten years younger, almost like her own daughter, banging the heel of her hand on the steering wheel, in her mind she's getting ready to turn over the stories, and she feels good—of course when I learned about how she felt I didn't yet know the stories themselves . . .

            
Come on baby,

            
Light my fire!

This is music? They call this music? Give me the big noisy bands, first, give me Paul Whiteman, Tommy Dorsey, I love Guy Lombardo so much at New Year's, but this is their music they listen to now and you can't tell them anything, anyway, so you have to listen to it if you want to listen to their stories.

And she's got thoughts on her mind that are about as young—I don't say immature, because that would not show respect to the youth, and I think that if we want the youth to show respect to the older, these days, we got to give them the respect right back, or even first, maybe—as young as her daughter. She's thinking that she wants to be a writer, and she wants to impress the teacher and the class, she wants to show them how good she is. Because she's been through things, she's lived through certain things that might make good stories and she believes that she's done good work from them, out of them, because of them, whatever you say, and this is the only thing in her life she's ever felt good about thinking, the only time, believe it or not, that she's ever believed in herself. She's suffered her childhood in Cincinnati the way that you know, and she married my Manny young, and they went through the early years together, and she was not happy, but she didn't know just how unhappy she was until it all came to a head with Manny that evening in the driveway, not the slap in the face in the police station was what did it to her but the slap to her feelings in the driveway—and oh, I was inside, and I wish I had been outside, I could have helped, I could have done something, if I had been the air, if I had been the dark night coming on, I would have wrapped myself around them, closed their mouths with my fingers of darkness, told them both to stop for a minute, told them to think, to feel deeply about each other instead of just themselves, people today they're so selfish—and from that time on, it was in and out of Owl Valley, and here and there with different fads, clothes, shoes, in the stores, out of the stores, the hair long, the hair short, the stones, rocks, bugs, beetles.

            
Come on baby,

            
Light my fire!

And I'm telling you, she was flying, driving very fast, but with her eyes on the road, so she was safe, this time, and I think—because I was once a daughter, and still am a mother, even if now, as a grandmother, I'm a mother over too many years of time—I understand how she was hoping, how she was wanting, how she was feeling. Didn't she yearn for things the same way my Manny did? Didn't she wish for the good instead of the bad? the happy instead of the miserable? the light instead of the dark? But what did she get? That I'm not so sure. She had bad luck, you could say, being born to those miserable parents, and bad luck to find herself alone with the brother who the parents had hurt miserably, too. And this made her into someone not exactly right, not exactly wrong. It was like—like she had a mechanical problem. It was like there was something minor wrong, but it made with the major. Like . . . you have, say, a flashlight, and one battery, is that what you call it? A battery, a connection is loose. There's a wire worn down, a nut, a screw, whatever. And it goes. You smell a little smoke, the lights flash on and off, and it's not working right. I had a washing machine this happened to, and a stove. So once she was all right, and the parents they made a dent in her, and the brother made a big slash, and that was it. We had only to wait for the day when it showed. How could my Manny know this? He couldn't know. I couldn't know. And could Maby herself know? Could she, I don't think so. If I had been that way, I wouldn't have wanted to know myself. I would have wanted help, but I would have prayed for help from God and never asked for nobody on this earth to help. And if God didn't answer, if he didn't send the Mr. Fixit, then I would have burned the way she did. And you would have. We all would have.

            
Come on baby,

            
Light my fire!

You bet. Come on baby, light my fire, she's thinking to herself as she drives. Sure, Mike. Come on, baby . . . The road ahead. Lampposts winking on as the sun falls back far to the west, twilight night. Before me down the long incline of the Jersey shelf, Newark lies. Dark city. Blacks live there, mostly. And Italians. They're dark, too. Like most Jews. Except me. Redhead. Flame hair. Fiery things. The road bends. The road tends. Freedom. My fiery legs in these slacks—the color of the earth. Grounded. A pun. Sarah's grounded. Means under house arrest. Means also in touch with the ground. Solid. Two feet on it. Not like me. One foot. Other in air. My other? Two feet above the ground. Always high. My mother, I meant. Not other—but mother. Mother. Light up ahead. And then turn. And turn again. And turn again. And park. Walk. These dangerous streets without good light. And in the center, the building. Classrooms. Guards. Against myself. Should I read? What if? Should I? Now class is here. And the others. Not the mothers. No one here a mother but me. Children. I am old enough. To read or not to read. And if I don't? He will think. And if I do? He will think. What? I have a feeling. Here they are. Here he is. Others. Mothers? Me only. Hello, I will say. Good evening, he will say. And so I do. And he does. And we do. And he suggests. I will read. And I do. And after. He says. And I hand it to him. And he suggests. And I say, why not? So a few days later I drive in.

She drives in. Easy. But the parking problem, it's just awful. Bair lives in Greenwich Village where even during slow hours there's not always a lot of parking places. She drives around and around, she must cross Bleecker Street four or five times, looking, looking. Once she nearly gets into a fight over a space with a man in a dark sedan. But she gives it up, and drives around the block again. Finally, something opens up, about half a legal space next to a fire hydrant on the west side of Fourth Street. She parks, gets out, walks. The Walk, she's thinking, because now she's been seeing French movies where the heroine always seems to take a Long Walk through the City, usually Paris. She pretends her eyes are a camera and watches
stoops, storefronts, people on the street, signs, cars, birds, trees in the little park at Sheridan Square. I could make a film. Be in a film. Be a film, watching myself with my eyes, she's thinking. And in the background she's making the background music . . .

            
Come on baby,

            
Light my fire!

And the organ music, the doodle-doodly-dooodly-dooodly-doot-doo!

            
You know that I

            
Would be untrue

Stops at a street corner. Gets her bearings. Continues on down toward Bleecker and reaches it, this time, on foot. And sees a parking space! Oh! She's miffed for a few seconds. Then she shrugs. A husky man in blue gym shorts stops, stares at her.

“Hello,” he says.

She blinks at him. Does she know him? Does he know her?

“Where you headed, baby?”

She turns the corner, hunts for a number. He's following.

“Do you mind?!”

“Hey, baby, I know where . . .”

The number! It's nailed above the entrance to a basement stairwell. Two garbage cans guard either side of the descending steps. Down, down, knock.

“Hey, come on!” the man calls down to her. He's behind her, still talking.

Oh, please be home, she's worrying to herself. It's broad daylight, sunlight, no threat, not dark Newark, but still. He's got a glass in his hand.

“Hello.”

Bair in the doorway, rumpled hair, beard plastered to his face.

“Oh, I'm so glad.” She turns and the man has disappeared.

“Come in,” Bair says.

Oh, this is. What? Dark, small, not what she expected. The famous writer's . . .

“Sorry for the mess,” he says.

“You just woke up?”

He nods.

“I'll bet you worked all night.”

Nods again.

“What's that?”

There's a red shrine with a candle in the center nailed over the small bed in the rear of the one-room cave.

“Oh,” he laughs. “A friend of mine sells those. He gave me one.”

“A joke?”

“Yeah, a joke. Hey, would you like a drink?”

She shakes her head.

“Just one,” he says. “I can't talk to you unless you have a glass in your hand.”

“A joke?”

“No joke. No glass, that makes me nervous.”

“Just one then.”

“Just one.”

“You teach without a glass in your hand,” she says, looking around the cave. “Did this used to be . . .”

“A basement. A storage room for the restaurant upstairs. Then they blocked off the stairway—it's behind that little closet—and made it into an apartment. Nice, huh? There's a shower in there, and a . . . here.”

“Is this . . . ?”

“All I have? Unless you want some warm beer. I bought some beer last night but forgot to put it away.”

“No, this is all right. But it's awfully . . .”

“Just one.”

“Just one but a tall one? Coming right up. And I can teach without it because teaching doesn't make me nervous. Only life. And work.”

“Teaching isn't work?”

He drinks.

“Not when there's someone like you in the class.”

“Pardon?”

“Come, sit down.”

They sit, she on a straight-backed chair at the table where he both eats and works, he on the edge of his single bed that takes up almost a third of the room. Outside the sun shines but little light penetrates through the grillwork down into this cave. He's talking about her piece of writing, a story from her childhood she wrote for the class, she read it, he read it, it's moving, he says, and daring, for her to tell what she did, very daring, but daring isn't enough, you know, because you've got to have technique to convey it, and the daring part has to be there in the technique as well, to tell a daring story in a plain way makes the story plain, to tell a plain story in a daring way makes the technique stand out, to tell a daring story in a daring way gives the reader a real sense of the life, of the experience.

“Could I have another one of these, please?” she says.

“Sure,” he says. “See what I mean?”

“I think so,” she says.

Is it cold down here or just her imagination? It's a day in spring, bright sunlight through the bars, but here in the cave she expects moss, it's so damp, dank, musty. Does he sleep with heavy blankets into summer? And then it must become a steam bath, no real ventilation. She smells musk, whiskey, food, dampness from the shower. So close. She takes the glass from him.

“So when you do that scene on the barge, on the river, you don't want to muck it up with that stuff about the childhood. You want to make us feel her girlish self, her helplessness, and also her strengths because she's got strengths, no doubt about it, but the use of light, shadow, the water, the motion of the barge, all that can work to your advantage here, I'll get you a little more.”

Now there's no doubt in her mind that he is sincere, he's telling her the truth, and certainly she is sincere in wanting to hear the truth, because why else would he invite her to his apartment? He
could get anyone he wanted in the class and there are girls a lot younger, real girls, not mothers like herself with daughters almost in college, rabbis for husbands, drunks for dead mothers, dead fathers, someone with feelings who can feel and not just try to write about feelings that used to be.

“So do you think it's good?”

“Oh, hey, don't ask such an apocalyptic question.
Is it any good?
And will you be saved and go to heaven? We try, you try, and if we're lucky some good might come. Maybe you've got something, but you just have to keep on trying and see what it is.”

“Is that what you did?”

“Here, let me take care of that drink. Me, oh, sure, I wrote for a long time before anybody took any notice at all. I worked on newspapers, on magazines, I wrote about sports, I wrote about furs. I even wrote about robots once, what do you think about that? A magazine I was working for wanted a piece on robots and I had read all the science fiction stuff when I was a kid. So I did the piece.”

“Do I have to do things like that?”