Prayers for the Living (41 page)

B
UT LISTEN
,
DO
you hear a noise? I think I hear it, I think I do, a door opening, the sound of keys? Has she come back? My Sadie, after all this talk, has she come back? I can't wait to see her, to feel her hair, her face, her hands. But has she come or is it only my misery making sounds to me in the night?

If you see her, touch her for me, ask her for me, ask her for her own living grandmother because she talks to me sometimes but she don't listen . . . and I touch her but she don't touch back, ask her, where are you going? Say to her, like in the song from Baby Dylan, where are you going? Where have you been?

A Former Virgin's Prayer

D
EAR
L
ORD
. L
ORD OF THE WORLD
. T
HE WORD
. G
LOBE
. S
AND
, sea, land, wind, fire. Watch over me. Protect me as I set out on this voyage. Over land, over sea. I know nothing. I fear all. And yet I could be something, could I not? When I am trembling with fear, hold me fast, Lord, by the shoulders and keep me straight and strong. When I am turning my back on those I need most blow upon me and turn me around with Thy sweet strong breath, sustain me, nourish me in my needy hour, cast not a gloom upon me even in the dark but give me the will to move forward, yea, even through the thorniest thickets, through the deepest, roughest waters.

Lord, succor to youth, guide to the unaware, I cast myself into the oceans of the world and know that Thou will buoy me up. Wind in my sails. Gravity of my world. Brain, belly, and loins I offer up to Thee on the altar of time. May my gift be not found lacking. For if it were, I would sink rapidly beneath the spume and buffeting, sink down, down, so low as never again to find the air.

BOOK FOUR

NIGHT

P
ut on the light. You'll feel more comfortable.

There.

Eyes can see better now? Good. As for mine, bad.

But what's to see now? Now that the light of my life has gone out? My light and your light also.

Here, let me touch your hand. The fingers. Such nice nails, such nice fingers. And your face? Let me feel your face. Since the lights went out, I like to feel the skin, the hair. Ashamed I'm not, am I? I never was ashamed. I was always proud, very proud. My Manny made me proud . . .

See how the eyes run? Dark but they still run tears. My Manny. Your Manny. Where is he now? Somewhere in the dark? Or flying on the back of that great broad-winged bird? The one that carried him off. But what, you're asking what? The bird that carried him off? Sure, I told you.

Here, you sit. Let me. Your hands. How smooth, darling, smooth. What are you doing for them? You're using a cream? You're using a lotion? Me, I bathe now and then, with the help of the little girls who work here, in a large tub of milk. How many cows must give to fill the tub in which I float I cannot tell you, but it must be a
number, yes, because I am not a little girl no more. But imagine me floating in the lake of milk, the creamy stuff bubbling up at my old shoulders, laving my chest, the nubs called nipples, aureoles, where first he sucked, my little man, and now he is taken away.

Put on more light. I want you to see. See? Here? I found it. I feel it. In his pocket we found it. After. Feel?

All the years. They've worn it down a bit. But still the points remain sharp. It's a wonder it didn't shatter. And now we remain behind. In the dark. Put on more light. For me, there's no more left. I hear, though. I sniff the air, the way, you know, you see a dog sniffing? I can tell many things from the patterns of the breeze in the halls, in the room, which nurse wanders here and where, which doctor, by the scent of them, by the odors. One for example, I know, is fooling around with a woman not his wife—because I've asked him if the perfume on his shoulders one morning was his wife's and he said yes, and then came a day when he smelled of another. And the nurses I like, I like by their smell. And there is one I don't and she doesn't bathe. I bathe in milk, but she does not bathe at all.

Kinnahurra
. I would like for the rest of my last few days to breathe in only good odors, the trees outside, the smell of the leaves, dirt. It's autumn now, and the year is traveling toward the end, not on the wings of some bird but on the rear end of a donkey, bumping along toward the end of the rocky dirt track that leads to nowhere. That reminds me of the old country. Here it's not so much country—in summer you can hear the mower powered by gas. But sometimes at night I believe my ears and listen to the snorts and fidgeting of a horse in the barn, thick-boned old dray. Back in the old country. But, I know, I shouldn't talk, because for me the old is good and for you it's bad. And for me it exists because it no longer exists, and for you it no longer exists because it existed.

Do I make sense? Do I cost dollars? I start talking and I can feel my tongue starting off like a bird that just heard a gunshot—
snap! pap!
—and my tongue is on the wing, swooping, turning, saying words I never heard, crash! it says, kill! it says, blood and milk and
scum and stones and bullets, it says,
oi,
the medicine they give me, the medicine they give me, it makes my head swim and gives my tongue flight!

But thank God for the medicine! I take it for my eyes, for my nerve. Here on this part of my face I have a nerve that burns through to my bone. Sometimes I sit here and wait for it to erupt, like the way you hear people in Hawaii wait for volcanoes? If they wait—or do I hear wrong? Do they go about their business on those islands and get caught unaware? Or do they worship the fires within the mountains? Or do they believe in nothing but ocean and wind and sky and cloud and the heat from beneath the ground? Lava flows—pace of a dray horse it makes. New country, Hawaii. I would have liked one day for my Manny to have taken me there, except he was business busy at the end, busy, oh, I meant to say
at the end down there
. In the Americas, they call it. Where the brother-in-law lurked for many a year. Building connections. Making deals.

He was ready . . .

Eye . . . shit . . .

No, no, sorry, darling, sorry. Excuse this crazy tongue. Excuse. I'm not losing control. Blame the drugs. It's just that in so many months I haven't wanted to talk about this, not since. The. You know. And so. It makes for pain, it alerts the nerve in my cheek, the volcano feelings.

New country feelings. You, who now know old country sorrow, it's difficult to understand. And if I had not come over in my youth, I would not be so easy to say this, that's for sure. Look, even the gentiles, they have this problem. Because they too are all immigrants. Their people came over the water. And trekked over the mountains, dray horses, oxen leading their carts, wagons. Here first only were the Indians, the red Indians, and even they walked over from the old country, from Siberia, the first ones some cold summer morning ten thousand years ago, packs on their backs, children at their hips, or was it the reverse? across the land bridge that no longer joins the Russians to our Alaska, and one day they walked over a hilltop and saw the mountains of the country where we live now.

Mama, says one of the little Siberian Indians to his mother, I want a drink of water—in whatever language, if they talked, they said these things to each other, and the mother smiled down at the little one, a babe naked as the day she gave birth to it, and pointed to a pool of water in the rocks past which they walked. Mothers in those days were as good as they are now. They loved their children, they tried to keep them from falling too far and feeling the hurt. These first Americans, what wonderful parents they were! Surviving such a trek with their children, these Indian mothers, or the same for the Jewish mothers—there are stories, you know, told by certain religions that these first ones belonged to the lost tribe of Israel. That they sailed over here on large reed boats, whole families, many families, the entire tribe.

My Sadie was studying these things, is how I know. When she got to college it was around the same time that her father bought the big boat company down there. The brother-in-law went down on trips all the time, but my Manny, he didn't seem to find the time. And he kept threatening her, you'll go, you'll go, and all the time she was studying about it—in fact, she got to the point where she was talking about it so much he even used her to do research for a speech he had to make when he took over the big fruit company down there. And for a long time when he was heckled by those roughnecks, the demonstrators, and even the ones that called themselves Jews for Justice, he thought at first, poor fool, that she was standing by him, giving him facts, facts. Almost to the end. But not all the way to the end. And so when you get to the end, when you see what she did, you could cry.

But the facts, the facts—these she kept on talking about and I, the grandmother, the mother, I couldn't help but learn a little about these matters myself.

The land bridge, or the reed boat, which is true? Not even the biggest scholars on either side want to make a final No to the other side. Maybe both sides are right? They both came. And why not? Look, here we got room for everybody. But I'll tell you one thing, my dear, my friend, my dear companion, the one thing I'll tell you is
that Columbus Day is a joke. Today this holiday is a joke. So maybe it was an Indian, so maybe it was a Jew, so maybe it was a Jewish Indian discovered America, but it wasn't the Italian who first came to these shores. He came so late that when me and my Jacob and my Manny, when we sailed across over the ocean that flowed all around, if it existed, my Jacob's famous Atlantis, the prow of our boat was nearly bumping the stern of his boat, our front his back, I know these words from Jacob.

See, so the Europeans didn't make a discovery but only found something they wanted to take over. And cover over, not
un
cover. And this was the problem with my Manny, wasn't it? That he behaved in the end like he didn't know this—that he hadn't yet found out the truth that even my schoolgirl, my college student, could figure out, the truth about discovery, about the discovery of this part of the world, that it had been here already before he got here, before any of us got here, and that it wasn't ours to do with what we would.

All the tribes that got here before us knew this, but the Europeans who broke away from their tribes never learned it well enough. All together we knew this, but when we break away from the group it's something we forget. All our waking hours we know this, but sometimes in our sleep, in wild dreams of uncovering, we forget. All the sleep time we know this, but waking sometimes we act as though the day is not part of the night, and the night the day, do you see? I don't see no more myself, but I think of it, I see in my thoughts, I see my thoughts, and my thoughts see me.

The Europeans came to New England and to the southern shores, and over the mountains to the great river valleys of the south of America. When they saw the tribes they conquered them and took their lands, and you know what, darling? we've been paying back with interest ever since. From the first garden these explorers took from the Indians, we've been owing, and we've been paying back. Take my Manny now, my poor Manny, he was taking out but he wasn't putting back, not fast enough. But was that what happened? I don't know, I don't really know, I only know what I see when my
eyes remain closed, what dreams may come to me in my state where I'm sitting awake and alert, the wind bringing the time of day and the season to my nostrils, to my skin, a blanket on my lap, my feet encased in slippers, the hands of the nurses upon me, and in my brain and blood this story I'm trying to tell you, my Manny's rise, my Manny's fall.

T
HE FIRST TIME
came with the board meeting when he was really flying high. The brother-in-law, the brother, Mordecai, Mord—I'll call him Mord, it's easier, darling, on the breath—Mord, he and several of the analysts they had brought in to decide about the future of the company, they had fixed their attention on a large old and famous firm in Boston that was going through hard times. Talking about ships, they had been in ships ever since the beginning of this country, hauling ice down from New England to the warmer regions, and bringing back up to the colder part of the world fruit from the tropics.

“It looks like the thing for us to do,” Mord is saying, “a perfect way to diversify and build at the same time. They've got ships, we've got piers. They haul produce, we've got the warehouses. The ships are large, seagoing, we've got the barges and tugs. This is the chance we've been waiting for, for years now, Manny. It's a big leap, but I think we've got the agility to make it.”