Prayers for the Living (44 page)

But I was saying about that part—the part I'm calling the American part, even though it's all American—it was building, building, rising, rising. Because while my Manny was working on the takeover, Sarah, now called Sadie by her friends at college, she was working on her own little bit of business.

You remember when Manny and Maby drove her up to New England to visit the school? Nobody thought of asking the grandmother if she wanted to take the trip. Who knows? I might have liked it. But of course I was busy with other things, with the furniture for the new apartment—it was taking me months to get settled in here, let me tell you, here, I mean in the new apartment, not here, this room, the window that throws light on my face I can only feel but not see, not here, the gardens, the walks, I'll never feel settled here. But there, there I was setting up. Go to New England? Nah, I said, not for me, darling. But wasn't it sweet of him to ask? I can't go on.

Wait. Here. The tissue.

Now I'll go on.

So I stayed home and they went on their trip, and this trip, I'd like to think, was just as important in their lives—and what happened—as the trip in the taxi the daughter, Maby, and her parents took all those years ago, and the trip up to the Union Square my Jacob and my Manny undertook, and the smoke from the fire that called out the fire department wagon, and add in the daily trip by the milk wagon, and what do you have? You add in a trip like the college trip and you've got a life, and you've got deaths.

It was a cool, clear, cloudless day when they set out north from the city, Manny behind the wheel of the big car. Maby was in one of her friendly states and she had packed a picnic lunch for them which
they ate at a roadside rest area about an hour south of the Vermont state line.

“Do you want this? an art school?” she asked Sarah as she passed her a half sandwich of liver pâté—what we used to call on Second Street
chopped liver
!—and a napkin.

“Why shouldn't she want it?” Manny broke in before the daughter could answer for herself. “She wants something, she gets it. When I was young I learned that lesson—you want something, you work for it, you get it. If you're lucky. If I could”—here he waved through the air the half sandwich that he had picked up from the tray held out toward him by his wife—“I would give her the sun and the moon.” He smiled at her as lovingly as he did at anything in his life. Even me, his mother, he never often gave a smile like this.

But Sarah—soon to become Sadie—did not smile back.

“I don't want the moon or the sun,” she said. “I'd like to go to this school, though. It has a good art program.”

“Art you want, art you get,” my Manny said.

Can you hear how after all these years he still speaks in the same rhythms as he used when we all lived together in the tiny hole-in-the-wall on Second Street? This is—was—
oi!
was—one of the things I loved so much about my son, that though he accomplished things, and he changed, and,
oi,
didn't his hair change color overnight, he never put on airs! So he left the temple, and people would say he left his religious days behind him because, you know I have to admit, he never went inside a temple again after that, never went to another service, but he didn't pretend he was anything that he wasn't. He was a former rabbi in a black suit and almost glowing white hair. Nothing more, but nothing less. A former rabbi with a knack for business. Or for calming the fears of people in the business, to be exact.

“Art I want,” Sarah said, staring her father directly in the eye.

He stared back, thinking to himself, how far will she go when I do everything to make it up to her? Thinking, if once we cross over the line neither of us will ever come back. What could I do? he had been asking himself for a long time now. Could I invent a feeling
for her mother that was like love but wasn't love itself? Could I mend her spirit, hers, Sadie's, Sarah's, when I couldn't even thread a needle and start to work on her mother's? Look, if it's the feeling of regret you're wondering about, the moaning tone he takes in his mind right there in the middle of a sunny roadside stop near noon on a lovely day, think about the darkness you carry with you into the middle of the happiest occasions. You of all people shouldn't blink an eye at me as though I'm only telling you a story! You who have lived in the dark at midday and drunk the black milk of morning at midnight, you! You who have embraced my Manny and held his shaking, quivering spirit in your hand!

Some picnic they had, eh? If I had been there I might have done something to save them, I might have pointed out to them the lovely wildflowers blooming in little shapes of stars, spades, clubs, all purple and blue and yellow at the edge of the picnic ground, the pine trees standing nearby dripping with the sap of springtime, the bees newly present since the disappearance of the snow and cold. If I had been there I might have clapped my hand over my granddaughter's mouth before she spoke.

“You can't buy me, you know, Father. You can give me everything I want, and I'll take it, but that's no guarantee that I'm ever going to love you again.”

There—in the middle of the wildflowers, bees, the trees, the beautiful season—there, she said this. And it ate into his heart, my Manny's heart, like acid spilled onto cloth. It burned, it burned!

So what could he be thinking through all this? That he should have done something different? Sure, he should have done something different. He should have never lived! Because what else could he have done? Could he have saved his father on that cold Saturday morning when my Jacob pulled the cart out onto the street? Could he have said, Papa, let's go to shul instead because if we work today you're going to die? He's supposed to know that? God he's not. That I guarantee. Because he was my child, and while I was a Jewish mother I was not the Virgin Mary or whatever her name was. No, I was not! I met my Jacob long ago at the stream, and that was that,
as far as my virgin condition was concerned. And so he was nothing but a man, but a man has his rights, does he not? A man has his dignity. And my Jacob had his. And he wanted the right to earn his living the way he wanted to earn it. And so he went to work on the Sabbath, and that was that.

He looked away from Sarah, not speaking back to her, staring up into the perfect pale white cloth of sky.

“We'd better get going,” were his words after a little while. “The admissions person will be waiting.”

Now if I had had the powers of a god or goddess, if I could have made weather, I would have called up storm clouds, great crashing thunder and lightning, like the noise of many gods gnashing their teeth in heaven—I would have called up winds, huge rushing torrential floods of winds, and I would have turned this car from its course.
Oi,
if I had been the goddess or the god,
hoo!
I would have shouted, hoo,
hoo!
go back, you ridiculous mortals, go back to the city you came from, because up here your daughter's going to meet real trouble, and this will in turn bring the trouble home to you!

But nobody would have listened, I think, even if I had had the power. Do children listen to their mothers? Do daughters listen? Do sons? I would have warned them if I could and they would have done it anyway. It's the law of life, on earth as it is in heaven, that what they want to do they will do, and doing it they will think they could not have done otherwise.
Oi,
I sit here with my eyes closed to what's around me, feeling the world to life with my fingertips, and I think,
oi,
if I could have done it perhaps I might have simply struck them down right then and there at the roadside rest stop among the wildflowers and the neatly tended grass.

Beautiful cloudless blue sky as they drove north. And it was warming up, and it was a promising day, and
oi,
what bad things can come into the world at two o'clock in the afternoon, on a lovely spring afternoon in the country! Those people who put you in the camps, who tortured your childhood, did they get their ideas on cold cloudy days in winter? I don't think so—I think they could have thought up their monster thoughts at a picnic on a sunny day
in spring. They loved music. They loved certain poetry, all this I heard from my Manny. And if they thought up murder in big figures on a sunlit day, why isn't it possible that the God we pray to decided in creation that evil would be there in a pure white cloud? that a good man like my Manny could try to do good for his family and himself and still make the worst things happen?

Oi,
I would have rolled rocks down from the mountain to block their path! I would have made earthquakes to tear up the road out from under them! I would have hurled God's dinner dishes out of heaven, and His pots and pans, if I could have stopped them from reaching their destination!

The college. The quiet little art studies college in the hills of Vermont. My Manny thought something was funny with it from the first time he took a look—it was an old farm turned into a college, with the faded red barn and the chicken houses and farmhouse and other small buildings making up half of the campus. For this he was going to pay the highest tuition in the United States of America? He was a man on the verge of buying a shipping line and not so far away from beginning to ponder the value of buying half an isthmus—is that the word?—
down there
in the south of America. And so, because he liked to match what he knew in his mind with what he saw with his eye, he had a deep deep question about this school even before they walked in the door. But he bit his lip, my Manny did, and oh, I wish I could have been the muscles in his jaw and pressed his teeth through the skin of his mouth! Because then he might have had some idea of the pain that would come of this, and he might have said, wait, no, this is wrong! I don't want you to do this! I won't pay a penny for this, not one!

But he felt so guilty about her, because of Sadie's trouble that time at Rutgers, the memory of it, it hurt him as well as her, and he tried to do the right thing, and the thing he tried to do was buy her these things that she wanted. And if she wanted to attend this place whose appearance suggested to him that
they
should be the ones paying the students to attend just in order to give the convincing air of a college, then he would send her. Of course, she had
an interview, they had to read her records, they had to accept her—but even though she had one of the worst high school careers in the history of her school he was not in doubt of her getting in. All they would do was read the name of his business on the application—that would do it as sure as they would have had a different, if still positive, response if he had put the temple on the application as his place of business. Corporations or churches, it was all the same to people like this—they waited and wanted to be impressed, and so they were by money whether gained by deeds or misdeeds. It was all such a game to my Manny by this time—and he wanted nothing greater than to make all of the pieces fall into place.

“How do you do?” he said when the head of the admissions department, a slender, pale woman, pearls at her throat, offered him her cold and bony-fingered hand. He could see written all over her face the desire for his company's name and cash in the files and bank accounts of the college. This ship was sinking, he could smell it about the place. My Manny, he had some of that same instinct as his brother-in-law, you know. But if his daughter wanted it for a while, for as long as it lasted or as long as it made her happy, then that was fine with him. Nothing it seemed was too far out of reach for him anymore, and so nothing that any one of his family wanted was out of their reach. Except maybe some kind of peace? I don't know. Here he was riding high, talking quietly to the admissions woman while Sarah was taking her interview with a member of the art department.

Oh, if I could have started a fire and cleared the building and ended that interview—and broken the link in the chain that weighed my Manny down! If I could have hurled lightning at this crumbling old former barn and crackled fire through its timbers! Oi, if I could have eaten giant onions so bad that I could have breathed and cleared the halls that way! If I could have smelled them out, stunk them out!
Maybe, maybe
then the rest of it would not have fallen into place!

But she was in there, stayed in there, and came out beaming.

“So?” her father, my Manny, asked her.

“She's wonderful,” Sarah said, already becoming though we didn't know it yet the person she called Sadie.

“She?”

She
was Lana Peale, an overweight painter from New York who had come up that year to teach on the college faculty. She had a face like a knife, eyes like a small animal from the woods, and no sense of humor, hardly. Only later did we learn that she stood on very bad ground with the dean and that she was volunteering her time in admissions interviews in the hope that she could make up for some damage she had done earlier in the year. The damage, as it turned out, my dear, was a freshman girl from her design class who sliced her own wrists with a linoleum cutter because Lana Peale told her that she would be an artist only if she lived to be four hundred years old.

“I love students,” Peale told the dean, “and I love art, and you can see that from my work and if you don't think that I love students I'll show you. I'll help with the admissions committee, how's that?”

And they took her up on it. And so there she was, giving an interview to my granddaughter.