Prayers for the Living (43 page)

H
E TOLD ME
, while I fed him. He told me some things, a lot of what I knew, some of what I didn't, a lot of what I've told you already in the past, and some of what I've said since you came into my room today. A long story, a sad story. You know the part about what he was saying to you, about the burden he was feeling, the working day in day out, and many nights getting the proposal together for the big takeover. You spent one late evening with him, in the hotel room he kept for the two of you just a few blocks downtown, and he held you in his arms as always, closer to you than any woman besides his mother, me—perhaps because you are
not
a mother, because either from choice or chance and circumstance you are as much like his lover and sister than mother and wife—but this time not with the steadiness you felt in him ever since the first time you embraced. This time you felt him tremble, you drew back, and watched him blink and blink, as though he were trying to shake off a fever or a nightmare, and you said, my darling, what's wrong? You're shaking so.

And I want you to notice I'm not jealous when I say all this, not this mother, I am not, certainly not, not if it makes him feel good about what he is doing, because I want—I wanted him to feel so good that he would love life, like his father, like me.

“I can't tell you,” he said, drawing loose from your embrace.

“Of course you can. It's me, Manny,” you said, “your Florette.”

“I know.”

“Then tell me. You'll feel better. Haven't I talked to you about things when they bother me? My nightmares, my dreams.”

“I too have dreams. But mine don't sound as good as yours.”

“Not even as bad as my nightmares?”

“What do you mean?”

He's up now, walking to the window, peering between the slats of the blinds as though he might be able to spot some messenger or watchman on the street twelve, fourteen stories below.

“I'm just talking. I'm just alive. I want to help you.”

“I don't need any help except to keep calm. And you can't poke around inside me and make me calm.”

“No, but I can squeeze you and pet you on the outside.” You get up and join him at the window. “There, there.”

“Ah, Florette.” He turns, embraces you. “I don't mean to make a mystery. It's easy to explain, just difficult to live through.”

“Your company?”

“My company. We're about to commit ourselves to the biggest outlay of money and stock that I've ever heard of, let alone participated in. So my mind's not here. It's in little pieces of paper in brokers' offices all around the country. It's counting, counting. I'm buying so much of another company that I'm not going to have enough cash left to take a taxi home when I'm through. So I'm borrowing, borrowing—look, you don't want to hear this. I've got it under control—except the man at the controls, he feels his hand shaking on the wheel as the vehicle approaches maximum safe speed.

“You know, I left the temple so I could run the business, and now I'm wondering if I did the right thing. And I'm wondering what would happen next if the business failed? Would I go back to the temple. Some temple, someplace. Wherever they would take me. But who would take me? Who would want a rabbi with such a failure in his past?

“My father, voices at my ear, someone trying to feed me with a teaspoon. I've told you about these visions. It's just static, the mind's static from a day of rough and tumble. When I had the temple, people would come to me with questions about their dreams, as though I were the psychiatrist they feared to visit, and that's what I told them. In those days I had a kind of theory, you know. The Torah was God's broadcast, and we were the static. Some modern thing to say like that. What did I know? I was fooling myself into thinking I knew
what I wanted or even a little about what I could say about anything serious. The best thing that ever happened to me was an accident—when I fell off the dais. Or was that God's hand pushing me from behind? Who knows? Do you think I want to know? I knew nothing about my life then and I know little enough about it now. And how much am I going to learn between now and the end? This much? The space between thumb and forefinger? Look in the Bible and in novels and you find lives that have meanings either from without or within, do you know what I mean? God pushes in one meaning, and the vital living force of the character is the other. But in real life”—and imagine now he's standing naked at the window, you, woman with the numbers on your arm, clutching his waist, leaning your head against his shoulder—“you feel more forces from without that come from the world, not from God, you feel like a stick pushed along by the current of . . . of time, say, of the flow of the hours in the day and the force of the days gathering together one after the other behind you. I want things, I'm aware of these things—peace for my family—which I'm not sure I'll ever obtain, health for my family, my mother's eyes”—and isn't he a good boy, worrying like that?—“and I want to play a little more with this company. Play, that's what it is to me, you know. So why am I shaking when it's only a game? Because games are serious sometimes, too. Any businessman knows that. So I'll shake a little, and I'll worry a little about whether or not we're going to make this takeover work.

“Now Mord, take Mord, he's a fanatic. He's like boys I saw at the seminary years ago—they had God, and he eats, drinks, breathes, sleeps the company. I put in sixteen hours, he puts in twenty. I put in twenty, he stays up for three days running and then catnaps and works a fourth. To him it's not a game. He has bad memories of his childhood, anything reminding him of his youth he runs from. Me, I'm the other way around. Me, I wish I had it to do all over again. I wish . . .”—he pauses, thinks a moment about something long lost, stares out the window again, watches clouds pass behind a tall tower, waits for birds to swoop from cornices, sees none, breathes—“I wish . . .”

“What do you wish, Manny?”

“I wish . . . many things. I wish . . . I wish . . . I wish I could figure out why it is I
can't
figure out my life, why I feel sometimes as though I'm plunging headlong off the dais in a fall that goes on for years, through the end of my days at the temple, and on to this life in the city, in the company, in my new rooms, my new thoughts, and why I still dream about the old days, about my father, about his accident, and I see birds, and I hear, sometimes, voices, I hear voices in my head, in my ear, and all of those dreams and visions, if that's what to call them, all those things haul me back, back, back toward the first part of my life—and sometimes I feel the tension of the torque, is that how to say it? the twisting and untwisting, winding and unwinding, screwing and unscrewing along the thread—until it feels as though one day I just may split apart—what?”

You're kneeling before him now, touching the outspread palm of one hand to his turned-out kneecap, the other hand clasped behind his knee joint, the other leg.

“And along with that comes another sense of splitness—I can call it, yes, good, splitness—comes the feeling of getting pushed along like a mouse at the claw's end of a great paw, God's paw? I don't know anymore about the things I felt so confident about in my younger days. So—I feel like the mouse at the mercy of the God's cat paw. And other days, days such as this—look out through the blinds, no, no, later, don't get up, that's good, that feels good—other days I know in my bones that I'm in control of it all, of my life, of my time, of my head and heart and lungs and eyes, and that I'm making things happen for myself and for those around me. I'm making . . . ah . . . ah . . . ah . . . ah!”

C
AN YOU BEAR
to hear this now that you can't touch him no more? Can you bear to think about the connection you made between your flesh and his? between your heart and his heart, the beating, the pulsing? And think how it was for the mother, for me, the one who
first felt the kick and tickle of his life within her womb—did I know it would come to what it came to? Did I know when I felt my own heart winking at the sight of the bearded young hostler behind the team of oxen? Did I? Could I? Did I have a choice? It was my own mother and father who made me—and then I made myself—and made my life with Jacob, and we made my Manny—and he unto him begat Sarah, known now in her early adulthood as Sadie, and she, she,
oi,
what was she at this same time begetting that could help her erase the errors of the attack upon her childlike flesh?

It has to do with America, America the south, South America. I have to tell you, but I don't know just yet when to put it in. Telling you these stories, it's like cooking. When does the baking powder go in? when the sugar? when the salt? And at what temperature do we bake it? and how long does it bake? I never was much good at it—baking, not cooking. At cooking I was all right. But you know now I remember something about Manny that never came to mind all the time before when I was thinking about him, that for a time when he was a young rabbi, when a congregation was giving him trouble for one thing or another, as congregations sometimes do, he came home every night and he baked bread. That's right, my Manny the baker. And I had completely forgotten about that. And if I was telling you the whole story and I left that out, would it have been important? To leave it out or put it in? Who knows how much I'm telling you is too much—or too little? Sure, it could be that, but I don't think so. I think I'm telling you just enough, and not much more, just enough for you to know him as I did, but not enough to die with him. To feel the grief but not to die. You wouldn't want to be in the story that much, would you? To want something so real it takes you along with the people in it, making the good things, that's one thing, but if there's hurting, criminals, killing, and if at the end, like in this sad story, there's dying, do you really want to go ahead and become so much a part of the telling that you never come out alive? I don't think so. Just like with a meal you're invited to, you don't want to have to slice the potatoes and chop the onions beforehand, you don't want to do the dishes and take the garbage out after.
Only the enjoyment is what you want, the pleasure, and sometimes suffering is part of pleasure if you know that when it's over you don't have to clean up the mess.

But I was saying about the American part before I interrupted myself with my thoughts about the baking, after years and years of living his life in what seemed to be a straight line my Manny's days began to take on a different shape, a shape I see at least from where I tell you about it, a shape that you don't need light to make out but like me can figure out with the fingers you have in your mind alone in your room in the dark. You could say, if you still want to think about the matter of making bread, that his life was rising. All the years before it was baking but it hadn't yet started to rise—it needed salt, it needed yeast—none of the unleavened variety for my Manny because he wanted heft and depth and flavor, taste, texture—and so the years leading up to the time when he fell and rose up again to take a new interest in the company in the city, these were the years when the heat had not yet accumulated, the years when it was building but not yet hot enough to make the dough rise, and then came the time of real fire, of fierce heat, the baking years, and, oh, his life changed so differently, he changed so differently and sometimes you would think if you didn't see him—with his hair and his dark suits—that he might be a different person, but he was the same person only changed, changed by the heat of his life, darkening, no doubt, darkening, darkening, but the same person nonetheless.

But I was saying about the story before I interrupted myself—and thanks, my darling, here, let me feel your hands, your face—thank you for not interrupting when I'm doing such a good job of interrupting myself—I was saying about the American part, I wanted to say about it, of course, it was always present, it was there from the beginning, from the time I woke up to discover what I wanted, that I wanted freedom and escape and a life with a man I wanted and who wanted me, and that was the American part beginning right there in the old country, and it was there when we sailed here, and it was present, of course, when we arrived here—get up in the apartment and look out the window in the bedroom at the far end of the long
hall and you can see the lights of the very place where we arrived, the same pier itself and the buildings nearby, little pinpoints of light now down below in the city dark, like stars in a sky turned upside down and become the ground we walk on—that was our destination, and this, right now, this was what we sailed toward, and here we have arrived, after lightness, this dark, after young days, this age, a New World? a country of the old.