Prayers for the Living (5 page)

He didn't say: “You're not sick, are you? Poor dear.”

He said: “You're sick again and today of all days?”

“It's the heat,” she said, in that voice like a sound trying to shrink back into itself, the voice that came out to shrink only when she was in one of her states. “I was taking a bath and the heat got to me, Manny. It made me ill.” And this was a big difference between them, my son and my daughter-in-law, him saying
sick
and her saying
ill,
a difference in upbringing, her from the fancy Cincinnati school, him from where we came from, from Second Street, from the old rabbi's school, some finishing school that was! When I first saw her, with
her red hair, the pale pink face, I asked myself, this is one of us? But then I learned . . . too much I learned, if you ask me.

“You know what just got to me?” he said to her. And he launches into a tirade against the daughter, telling about the guitar, about her curse—he took it that way—upon him.

“I don't want to hear!” Maby says, spitting up more into the bowl. “Just leave me out of it, do you hear? Leave me out.”

“She's your daughter as much as mine,” he says, “and she's insolent and cruel and . . .”

She spits up more into the bowl.

And with his bleeding finger, he grabs from the medicine chest a little bandage, and he walks out into his own room.

This was how he started that day. If you think it got any better, guess again, darling, guess again. You were there. You saw the moment. And there were other moments behind the big moment, I'll tell you. Here is what it was. First he's dressed quicker than you can say Jack Ribicoff and then he's standing at the front door calling back to me.

“Ma,” he's calling, “Mama, tell Maby to get after Sarah to get ready because I'm on my way.”

I had been standing at the sink, feeling a little bit lost since on a fast day I couldn't cook, I couldn't eat, I couldn't help nobody else do neither.

“Don't put it all on the mama,” I called to him. “The mama has her troubles, too, you know.”

He walked back up to the entrance to the kitchen and stuck in his head, just for a change like he was my little boy again.

“I wasn't yelling at you, Mama, just calling.”

“And at the others you were yelling, not calling?”

“You heard what she said, you heard the way that she said it.”

“Which one?”

“Sarah.”

“Oh,” I said to him, “you think this is a special event? You should hear how she talks to her grandmother.”

“She's sarcastic with you, too?” he says. “Oh, Mama.” And he throws up his hands, a man with three women who he understands as much as
he understands about cars. Business he understands, the accounting, deals, what he calls them, that he understands, and it goes without saying he understands the business of being a rabbi. Who else could have led the temple through all these years since he arrived in a time when congregations—look, I know, I have ears, I have eyes—where they change rabbis the way countries down south of the border change presidents? My Manny, that's who! So what if he don't understand the women he lives with? I'm helping him, I'm trying. He knows that. He comes to me, he always has. Like this. Poking his head in through the entrance to the kitchen when already he's almost late for the start of services on the biggest holiday of the year.

“Look,” I say, “don't worry, I'll talk to her. I'll help.”

“You always do, Ma,” he says, and the good boy comes and gives me a hug, and a kiss on my cheek, and even a wink he manages, and off he goes to the temple, walking by himself, and I stand at the door watching him walk away, looking at the rabbi, walking, thinking, getting himself ready for the big morning and the bigger afternoon. To see him people would say, there he goes, our faithful rabbi, pondering the day.

And he was. Pondering. Later he told me. Worrying about his life. His future. What it would do for him. For the family. Past cars he walked, past street corners, streetlamps, red lights, green lights. And before he even got to the temple he had decided that he was no good for them anymore, that he had to get out—isn't that terrible? Such a good rabbi, such a good leader, such a fine advisor to men, women, children, even on the building committee he's wonderful I hear from reports—and either that or he has to give up the business arrangements with
her
brother in the city because not that the time is too demanding, because no, he goes in there only once, twice a week, just like if he was going to school there as some rabbis do, or to teach, but no, it's not the time, but the feeling he has of living like two people when he is only one man, living mostly for others, living for me, living for
her,
for the wife, the daughter, living—this he told me and you see how much he sees—living for my poor, dear, all-these-years-departed Jacob.

You know, you have one of those situations, your late husband, years it's been, yes? Or if not him, someone? Living for the dead, I told him. How can you live for the dead? And he said to me, “Mama, this is what I told myself, because I have always tried to be the best advisor to myself, to counsel myself”—notice how dignified he talks even to his own mother?—“even as I would have myself counsel others.” And he said this to himself as he was walking to temple, he said, “Manny, you fool, you stupid holy fool, for whom are you living? For whom do you put in these long hours, this double life? If not for yourself, then for whom?” Did he want to live a life dedicated to study? Or did he want to live a life in which he could use the talents he inherited from his father? Which did he want? One? Or the other? He heard a voice in his head telling him, both! Choose both! Take both! You can have both! You've been living now for the last few years with both! And why should one cancel out the other? Is there a law saying somewhere a rabbi can't know the world and the world can't know a rabbi?

Walking, thinking. Stomach growling, churning. A fast day. And a day for thinking, walking. All too quickly the time passes. He looks up out of his trance, sees a familiar house, a familiar arrangement of tree and bush. And up there in our New Jersey sky, a cloud, and way high up, a bird, swooping. And he knows he will become again a public person, talking and thinking out loud, doing a job, making a performance. Was that how he saw it? Was that what he wanted? Playacting? Making a public display, a mockery even of his inner thoughts? Unable to say all that he felt about what he was doing, what he read about, thought about? Walking, thinking, stomach growling. Feeling a little tingling on the soles of his feet. A big day ahead, standing, standing all day.

And what about his other life? Across the river. The company. A holding corporation, he called it to me. The father-in-law died, left it to the brother, who was absent and then appeared as if by magic, and asked Manny to come in with him, advise him. The brother was a sailor, a shipper-outer, not a man of the city. He had left home early, run away, never really knew the little sister, feuded with the
father—and when you know why, you'll know a good reason, and of course I'll tell you, but wait, later, first this—the brother worked on the ships because the father had been a boat man, a man who first owned boats on a river and then bought containers for shipping—and then what? Oceans!

You're smiling, you're smiling, because you think the old grandmother can't know from the business? So I don't know much. But you think a grandmother can't know, what do you think of a rabbi? He can't know either? Old dogs, new tricks, you're thinking? New dogs, old tricks, is more like it, but listen—so—walking, thinking, remembering, past hedge, car, tree, driveway, corner, and now the cloud has gone and up above it is a beautiful high holy day blue sky, as if God in heaven had blessed New Jersey with something, the gift of never having had a rainy Yom Kippur ever in a lifetime as far as I remember, and he's thinking, Sporen—this was her father, the man who, well, later I'll explain because first let's concentrate on the walking, thinking—Sporen dying, the prodigal son working on one of his ships hearing the news, returning to the country, feeling helpless, hopeless, calling the sister, the brother-in-law after not having seen them in a long, long time, that too, you'll hear about, just wait, so thinking Sporen, and the business, and what it meant to the sister, wife, to the daughter, then a little little girl, and what it meant to him working in both professions, but could he handle both?

He's thinking the kind of thinking that is right for the holiday, a holiday of thinking, of pondering, of wondering about the writing of God, which book, which book? And wondering if one way, rabbi or holding company man, was life, was death, or could he have both? Past hedge, path, bush, tree, stone—thinking one was good for the other, the deep inner life, the thought, the pondering, the study, the wondering also good for the business life, because who else in business could look at things from such a point of view as his? And the sharp, keen, razor-edge practice helped him at the head of the congregation, because he did not lead them astray, he led them straight to where they needed to go, no nonsense, they wanted a building fund, he showed them how, they wanted fund-raising, an
aging program, that too he showed them, showed them the other side of things, the way he showed the box and bag people, the bottle cap people in the city how they should feel better about decisions about workers, about selling, and while he's walking, thinking, he's thinking how he's been living two lives at once, and not living for himself, and the quarrel with the daughter, the wife sick again—and not just in body, he's worrying; because he knows her face, the look, the special glow like cinders from a bonfire in the eyes, knows that it's not just in body. This at home makes him worry to the point where he feels his heart beating like a garbage can lid some child in the alley is smacking with a stick, and his legs get cold, and now he stops, takes out his handkerchief and dabbles at his brow, runs a hand through his beautiful white hair and the one dark streak that flows through it, and he looks up and he sees a car passing and inside he sees
her,
and he knows in his bones that his life is not his own.

“Which her?
She?
”

“Yes, the
other
her. Florette.”

B
UT DOES HE
think, she's riding to the temple on the holiest of days? Breaking the most serious of rules for worship? And, worse, flaunting it in front of the eyes of all who will see her pass by in her car? Yes, he thinks this and then in a flash he forgives her, as he is sure anyone from the congregation who sees her will forgive her, because of all she has been through. Oh, yes, many men have forgiven women many things because they are who they are, and in this case he had only to think of her early life, in the camps, the number he sees on her upper wrist each time they meet. A27300. The number, the number, her souvenir of her childhood. Like the star was his remembrance, the number was hers. And so he will defend her should anyone dare to raise an eyebrow, let alone say a word. And so he will say to them as he has said before, each of us has a mark put upon us as an individual, and as a people we have had a mark put upon us together, and let him or her without a mark
cast the first stone.
Her
. It was
her
.
She
. It made him stumble—like he had caught his toe in a crack in the sidewalk and went pitching over, forward.

“Whoa, Rabbi!” Doctor Mickey, hurrying up, catches him by the arm. “You tripped?”

“I tripped,” Manny said, shaking off his surprise. “I was looking at a car, Florette Glass was driving and I lost all of my balance. A funny thing. Looking up, I wasn't looking down. But now I'm okay.”

“One person in the congregation rides to services on Yom Kippur, and the rabbi is so sensitive he nearly loses control?”

The doctor smiled at Manny from behind his large owl-eye glasses. A few years older than his rabbi, he gave the impression that he was always willing to hear advice from the younger man.

“She's the sensitive one,” Manny said. “Her nightmares—has she ever told you about her nightmares?”

“No, but I can imagine,” Doctor Mickey said. They started to walk again in the direction of the temple. “Or,” Doctor Mickey said, “maybe I don't want to imagine.”

“She comes in to talk now and then,” said Manny, realizing he had said too much already about her. But he could not help himself, explaining more and more as they continued on their way.