Prayers for the Living (46 page)

“I like your work a lot,” she says to the Peale woman, meaning the canvases piled all around against the walls. They show giant breasts, nipples as large as the heads of children—in fact, some of the nipples take the shape of children's faces. Other paintings: they show parts of the woman's body which fifty years ago a girl didn't even know she
had,
let alone would show in a picture. The colors all stand out very bright, because of the veins, the skin, the tender flesh. If you didn't know it was art you would think it belonged on the wall of a butcher shop or a doctor's office, the work of a very angry person, the red, the red makes me think that. And so it's no accident that Sadie found it pleasing, so angry she was with her father. If she had a gun who knows what she would have done. But she didn't have any weapon to use against him except her life, and this, like a terrorist's bomb, is dangerous both to the one who carries it as well as to the one who is the target.

“I'd like to paint like you,” Sadie said.

The Peale woman laughed.

“I don't think you'd like it, my dear, I don't think you would.”

Pushing herself off from her nest of pillows, the older woman
fetched a little dark metal tin. From this she took out the special tobacco to make more of the cigarettes that make you dream. My Sadie, who never drank a drop in her life except the wine at holidays, and of course that unfortunate beer at Rutgers, and who never smoked nothing at all, she watched her heroine roll a little pencil of it and when it was time she learned to inhale and puff, inhale and puff.

Some time went by—the way clouds roll past your window when you're looking out at a big Jersey storm. It actually passed by her eyes. Next thing she knew she was rolling on the puffy pillows, her chest bare to the air, and the painter woman is playing tickle-tickle with her long fingernails on Sadie's back.

I never had so much fun, my granddaughter is saying to herself, I never had a pal like this before.

So by the time Sadie's school started they were great friends, eating lunch together all the time, and spending a number of evenings together, and even whole nights. It was a bit of a shock for my granddaughter when going back up to Vermont she had to live in a dreary little wooden-walled dormitory instead of the loft with the pillows and paintings.

“I felt like I was being separated from a twin sister,” she told me. “Gram, I'd never had a friend before like this, not anyone. Mother never held me the way she does. Can I say these things to you?”

Sure, Mike, I told her, sure you can say these things to your grandmother. Who else could love you so much to listen and not grit her teeth? You think your mother? You think your father? I know, I know, my Manny, he has his problems. And you should understand them—remember, his own father he saw crushed to death by the wagon, his own father's blood he saw spill out into the lake of milk. I told her long ago, I told her the story.

“H
E SAW HIS
own father crushed to death by a milk wagon,” she told her friend the painter. “He saw his own father's blood spill out into the lake of milk.”

“I like the action, I like the color,” the painter said.

“How can you say that?”

Sadie was shocked—for maybe the last time.

“He's not my father,” she said. “And from what you've told me about how he's treated you, you probably feel a lot more anger than sympathy if you'd admit to the truth.”

Let's say that this conversation is taking place in the little apartment the painter uses when she comes up to the school during the week to teach. Let's say that they're sitting on the bed together, smoking that stuff. Let's say that the Peale woman calls this their advising session, and that they both laugh whenever she calls it that.

So the painter says, “If I were you . . .”

“Yes?”

“I'd be completely unforgiving.”

Sadie—she's torn now, like a piece of butcher paper, right down the middle. “He can't help it,” she says.

“He's a free agent,” Peale the painter says. “He's free to act.”

“He's weighed down,” Sadie says, feeling herself floating higher and higher.

“A typical man,” the painter says.

“He's unusual,” Sadie says, wondering at herself even as she defends him. This lightness she feels, is it good or bad? This strangeness in her life, the bittersweet taste of Peale's oily mouth in her mouth, the sharp earthy odor of the dreamy cigarettes, is it here to stay? Will life be like this from here on in? All that she knew from the past seems out of reach and even if within her grasp unusable. All that she has heard about life from her father—since her mother spoke to her very little, very little—appears weak and foolish and even sick.

“Have you told me everything about him now?” Peale the painter asks.

“I think so. Everything I know.”

“He was a rabbi but he no longer even goes to the synagogue?”

“That's right.”

“Hypocrite,” Peale says.

“He changed his mind, he changed his life,” Sadie says, amazed at herself that she's still defending my Manny.

“Look,” Peale says.

“Look what?”

“You can't go on talking about him from his point of view. It's your life that he's eating up. You're nothing but a slave to yet another male monster if you keep on seeing things from his perspective. Do you think I make my art by sticking to the male perspective? Do you think I could get my forms if I showed the female body the way men see it? Do you?”

“No.”

“You want to paint?”

She thinks of you, another painter. All these painters? Why? And says, “I do.”

“You want to be an artist.”

“Yes. I want to paint. And I want to make pots.”

“If you're going to be any good, and I don't know how good you can be, sweetheart, though I do know you've got something to start with—God knows you've got the pain in your life a woman begins with when she makes her art—but if you're going to go on with it, push on with it, you've got to make your own vision. You've got to give over the vision of the fathers. The vision of
your
father.”

“I . . . guess you're right.”

“You guess I'm right. You only guess? You don't feel it in your guts, you don't feel it in your womb?”

“I . . . know you're right.”

“Yes, you know it. You know I'm right.”

And she leans over and kisses Sadie on the mouth. “There. That's the seal of our pact. Sealed with a kiss.”

“SWAK. Like a letter in grade school to a boyfriend?”

“Yes, love. Except it's to me, not a boyfriend.”

“Yes,” Sadie says, and rolls over to where she can rest her head on her painter-teacher-friend's chest.

“And now we have our pact.”

“And what's our pact?”

“We're going to get rid of the father who haunts your mind.”

“How are we going to do that?”

“Here.” Painter Peale leans over and kisses Sadie tenderly on the neck. “This.”

“Um. How?”

Sadie closes around her friend her arms in a desperate embrace.

“Don't you worry. We're going to find a way to destroy him.”

D
ESTROY
! C
AN YOU
imagine! This is what it had come to!

Excuse, I got to wipe my eyes. Even the blind weep, darling, when in their minds they witness sadness. Hate. Destruction. Of their children hating, and being hated.

My Manny's building, and she wants to destroy.

In this building he's building. He's sitting in his office in his building, with the brother-in-law in a meeting. These are new offices, twice removed from the original where the company they first formed had its home. On a wall map, with pins stuck onto the colored shapes where they own buildings, piers, here a small shipyard, there a complex of warehouses, you could count fifteen little pinheads of blue, and another seven, eight of black. Glancing away from the wall, Manny stares out the window, and he can see down from this height all the way to the same pier where our ship first docked. And he can remember just how far in time and how high in the world he has climbed.

“In legend,” he says, “in mythology, there is a plot to describe a passage such as this. A man wants, and the devil appears to him and offers him his desires in exchange for his soul. Devil! This is a metaphor, is it not?”

“If you say so, Son,” I reply to him.

Now we're talking together over supper on a night when he has come home late from another meeting in the series of meetings coming upon the big takeover. I've made a little salad, it's early spring, there's not such good tomatoes yet, but he's been asking
for avocado, something I never even saw let alone served before we moved to this new apartment in the city, high up where we moved from Jersey, so I had the Gristedes man send some over, and some steak I cooked for him, too, and to tell you the truth it was also from the Gristedes, because the butcher shop was closed and—what?—no, this was a good thick bloody piece of sirloin, we hadn't eaten kosher for years, not since the move definitely.

“I say so? I know so.”

Oh, and a baked potato, of course, with a little butter—that's right, since he was eating this way it included dairy in the meat meal, and was it going to kill him?

“The devil is for the goyim, isn't it? Jews don't have the devil.”

“The
gentiles,
Mama, don't have him either. He doesn't exist.”

“So what's with all their stories?”

“Just stories.”

“Just stories? I've heard some of their stories from Sarah when she was studying them at school. They're scary stories. And sometimes she said we, the Jews, we're supposed to be the devil. But so I told her, darling, we're not angels, but we're not the devil either. But Manny, darling, you don't believe in angels then either? What about your . . . ?”

“The birds? Mama, I don't know how to explain that. The voices came to me from the birds. What can I say? Perhaps it was my mind's way of telling me something I couldn't bear to recognize, or wouldn't understand as my own thought. I don't know.”

“If you don't know, I don't know either.”

“Such a good mother.”

“Such a good cook is what I want to hear.”

“Such a good cook.”

“Really? You like it? It's hard to hurt a steak. But is it rare enough for you, darling?”

“It's rare.”

“So eat a little more.”

“To tell you the truth, Mama, my stomach is in turmoil. I've got a lot of things on my mind.”

And then I said it. I take the blame. Were my words pulled out of me by some invisible devil? You don't believe in them, not even you? Then it was God who did it? And did God do all those things to you when you were a child? And if not God and if the devil didn't, then who? who? I said it. It was an innocent remark. What could I say? It was one of those things a mother says, and isn't that as innocent as it comes?