Prayers for the Living (4 page)

“His fall.”

“It was an accident.”

“But it comes first, not later.”

“First I'm telling, but in his life it comes later.”

“Don't confuse me, just tell me.”

“I'm telling you. Just the way he told me.”

“His
concudante
? Like the confessor?”

“You mean like the Catholics? God forbid.”

“If He forbid we wouldn't have the Catholics.”

“Don't joke when I'm thinking about this.”

“Thinking to you is like praying? I shouldn't disturb you?”

“I'm just trying to get it right.”

“Look, darling, sip a coffee, calm a little, and tell me what happened.”

“When he fell? It was awful. Remember, it was the high holidays, Yom Kippur, the very last day of the ten days of penitence, when it comes time for God to decide which book He wants to write our
names in for the coming year—the
Book of Life
or the
Book of Death
.”

“Stop with the Sunday school lecture already and tell me what happened.”

“So I'll tell. So Manny woke up that morning, he told me later in the hospital . . .”

“He tells you everything? Ah, I should be so lucky. My boys, they never talk. And you know why?”

“Why?”

“Because they are terrible talkers. They are like . . . like Moses's brother Aaron, he talks with pebbles in his mouth. They have stories, believe me they have stories just as good as your Manny's, but they can't say them because they can't talk so good.
Book of Life, Book of Death
? They could write books themselves, believe me, if they could only write.”

“Now your turn to stop.”

“So I'll stop. You want me to stop? I'm not offended. So. I stopped.”

“You better keep stopping or I can't tell you.”

“All right, all right, so go on.”

“I'll go on. Please. Let me clear my throat. Aherm. Aherm.”

S
O HE WOKE
up that morning feeling, he said, very very strange, not in the usual way as though something is going to happen—because you know when you feel that way it never does—but strange because he had the idea that something already had taken place, that something in his life had been decided for him. Do you know? As though God had written in the book already, and he didn't know which one. Except he didn't think of it that way except to explain it to himself, the feeling that something had already gone past him. Or something had been lost.

He went looking, first for his good soft-soled shoes because this was another day of standing all morning and afternoon and he wanted to be as comfortable as he could make himself, and these
it appeared he had misplaced. He went up to the top of the house, and down to the study, his library, even to the basement, and he couldn't find the shoes. It got so he was cursing, because who wants to stand all day in uncomfortable shoes on top of everything else—the fasting, the hard work of leading the service, the looking down into the faces of the congregation and feeling his fatigue rise in him like water crawling up to the brim of a glass—and then of course he felt terrible because he was cursing over nothing but a stupid pair of shoes. When he had so many other more important things to worry about, I don't have to tell you, he was worrying about
her,
about both
her
s, the mother with the problem in the store—you didn't hear? I can tell by your look you never heard, well, so later I'll tell you, but not now because I don't want to be distracted—and the other
her,
the daughter with the problem with the boy—both
her
s,
her
and
her
. To think, women give him such trouble when all his life while growing he didn't have no problem with me . . . don't laugh, don't laugh or I'll close my mouth!

So . . . down the stairs, up—he can't find the shoes, and then he feels a headache coming on, from the fasting probably, he figures, an ache so big it's like one of those dark summer thunderstorm clouds you see blowing in over the water at Bradley Beach, and he shudders when he thinks what he's doing with his life, with his congregation, with his business, because after all what is he? Can he stand every weekend in front of the temple crowd and make his sermons and still go in twice a week to the city to work with his brother-in-law in the holding company? He's wandering around the house, thinking to himself, I've lost more than my shoes . . . and if I find them how do I find what else I've lost?

He's in the kitchen, he's looking behind the desk in his study, he's on his hands and knees snooping behind the couch and you know what he finds there? He finds a pair of panties the size the same as
both
hers wear because the daughter has now reached the point where she has the same hips as the mother,
and
the same hair, as you know, but God forbid the same disposition, there it's maybe too early to tell, and so anyway, he says to himself, on top of everything else, what's
this? what's this? and he stuffs the panties in his pocket and keeps on looking, the panties in the pocket along with a piece of glass he carries with him all the time, a souvenir, a piece of glass shaped like a Jewish star, and about this don't ask a question, because I'll explain in a while if you want me to, or maybe even if you don't, because it's a story from the beginning, and this I'm telling you now comes from the middle—and God forbid we should see the end.

So he's on his hands and knees and feeling the first drummings of the headache and the first winds of the dizziness, and then he's up again, shouting for Maby, and where is she? Who knows, taking a bath? She takes so many baths you'd think she got herself dirty like a baby when the truth is ever since the business in the store—and I'll tell you, I'll tell you—she doesn't go out at all except when he says you absolutely have to, only to services, not even to temple affairs—so she doesn't answer, and he calls for Sarah.
Sarah!
he calls, and where is she? Outside on the back porch playing, would you believe this? Playing her guitar! And singing, on the holidays! He can't believe this either!

            
Sometimes I feel

            
Like a motherless child.

Not a bad voice, and on other days he might have stopped and thought to himself, My daughter, with such a good voice, but the song,
oi,
the song it gives me heartache.

            
Sometimes I feel

            
Like a motherless child.

A nice song, an American song, because in the old country we had our mamas, we knew our mamas, and if we sang we sang to celebrate our mamas, not to tell the world we got lost, except, of course, for later, for the ones that got lost in the Holocaust, but that's another story. Here she is, singing the song of the lost child, she's strumming good, she's singing strong and loud, and he goes
charging off after her, not knowing exactly where she is, following the music, the song.

            
Sometimes I feel

            
Like I'm almost gone.

“How can you do it to me on a day like this?” he growls at her when he bursts out onto the back porch.

“I'm playing my guitar,” she says. “I'm not out in public. I'm on the porch. Am I embarrassing you?”

“The porch is public,” he says, trying his best to keep his voice down. “The porch is outside. The porch is the world. Go inside, young lady, and get ready for temple.”

“I
am
ready,” she says, poking a finger at one of the guitar strings.

“Are you?” And he yanks out of his pocket the panties he found under the sofa and says, “Put these on if you're so ready!” And throws them in her face.

“That's . . . disgusting!” she says to him, her face covered over as if with a veil. And she snatches them up and flings them over her shoulder into the garden.

“Pick those up,” her father says.

“Pick them up yourself,
Rabbi
,” she says. And she plucks a loud
thirrum
with two fingers on the guitar.

Maybe if she had only been insolent, just mean, nothing else would have happened. But she added that title,
Rabbi,
and it did something to his temper, to his mind. Fathers and daughters! What a story, an old story,
ach,
and a bitter one, bitter, bitter, bitter. So. She called him what he was, and that changed it all. Why? Even now I'm still finding out, after he's telling me all, after
she's
talking to me, this poor old grandma with the bad eyes, and they're talking to her, but to each other do you think they're talking? You can imagine. Look! He reaches over, and she cringes, like a dog fearing a smack, but he doesn't want her, no, he grabs the guitar and even as she's screaming, “
No! No!
” up he hurls it, and it sails end over end, making a strange shape in the air as it spins, and it comes down,
like a filmy piece of silk or nylon but also like the thing of wood it is and
smash!
onto the walk beyond the porch steps, and it splinters, breaks into pieces.

What a way to start the holiest of holy days! Everyone already feeling tired and irritated, because of the fasting, because of the heat—always in Jersey it's hot like summer in India when the high holidays come around—and his breath stinks in his own nose, and now he's got this to contend with! As if everything else weren't enough, as if the life he's made hasn't been enough, as if he doesn't want to pick it up like that guitar and throw it into the air without caring where it comes down in pieces! He can barely stand up to it, and he says, holding down his voice as best he can, but you can hear it trembling—I heard it trembling because this was when I opened the door and came onto the back porch . . . “Little girl,” he is saying, “little girl . . .”

And you can imagine what this did to
her,
this girl growing up so quick, her life like a merry-go-round, going around in circles at the moment but moving, quickly, quickly—don't I know what it was like? But she had stung him with that word, the piercing word,
Rabbi,
though how could she know? Maybe her instincts told her? Was that how she stabbed right through? He was thinking about his life, on this holy day, on the day when God's moving finger or pen or whatever He writes with, maybe even now a typewriter or a computer, when He—or She or whatever God is these days—marks in the
Book of Life
or the
Book of Death,
he's been thinking, wondering, pondering, sweating in his brain, milking his thoughts, should I go on with this farce—wait, all this will come to you—should I go on with it? or should I get out? All week long, all day long the day before, and all night lying there in a sweat, alongside his sleeping beauty, the woman dead to the world from all the pills she takes so she can sleep, should I? shouldn't I? What could the daughter know of the father? She couldn't know, the children never know until it's too late. Even now do you think he knows about me? his own mother? and did I know mine?

I'm telling you, the whole world works backward in reverse, that the parents should know of the children all the time and be unable
to do anything and the children know only when it's too late! And even more than the parents of the children it is the grandmother who knows triple trouble, because she knows her troubles and the children's and the children's children's, and thinking about it, talking about it, gives me such a headache I'm telling you that if there is a God in heaven—and don't be shocked that I say something like this, because today you hear a lot worse from smarter people than me—but if there is, He must have the biggest headache of all from knowing everything backward, forward, past and future, but then if He's so great I suppose He can make for Himself the biggest headache powder, no? Poor little girl turning big girl who I rocked in my arms when she was a newborn, how could she know what she had said?

“You are going to pay for this,” my Manny shouts, “you are going to
pay! You little . . . little . . . !
”

Please don't say something
terrible!
I call out to him in my mind. And maybe he hears, because he turns and goes back inside, walking around me to do it, like I'm a stranger, “Excuse me,” he says, and goes upstairs to his dressing room—because by this time it's separate bedrooms for them, which, Sarah told me, is very troubling to her for not-so-obvious reasons, and he reaches into his pocket and takes out his favorite piece of glass and sees his finger all slashed from it, and he goes into the bathroom to wash off the blood and put on a little bandage, and there he finds
her
, Maby, throwing up into the bowl. I'm telling you, it's early morning and this man has already had quite a day.