Tell Me a Riddle (12 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
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Page 48
Sure she's unreasonable, Dadbut you have to stay with her; if there's to be any happiness in what's left of her life, it depends on you.
Prop me up, children, think of me, too. Shuffled, chained with her, bitter woman. No Haven, and the little money going. . . . How happy she looks, poor creature.
The look of excitement. The straining to hear everything (the new hearing aid turned full). Why are you so happy, dying woman?
How the petals are, fold on fold, and the gladioli color. The autumn air.
Stranger grandsons, tall above the little gnome grandmother, the little spry grandfather. Paul in a frenzy of picture-taking before going.
She, wandering the great house. Feeling the books; laughing at the maple shoemaker's bench of a hundred years ago used as a table. The ear turned to music.
''Let us go home. See how good I walk now." "One step from the hospital," he answers, "and she wants to fly. Wait till Doctor Phil says."
"Lookthe birds too are flying home. Very good Phil is and will not show it, but he is sick of sickness by the time he comes home."
"Mrs. Telepathy, to read minds," he answers; "read mine what it says: when the trunks of medicines become a suitcase, then we will go."
The grandboys, they do not know what to say to us. . . . Hannah, she runs around here, there, when is there time for herself?
Let us go home. Let us go home.
 
Page 49
Musing; gentleness
but for the incidents of the rabbi in the hospital, and of the candles of benediction.
Of the rabbi in the hospital:
Now tell me what happened, Mother.
From the sleep I awoke, Hannah's Phil, and he stands there like a devil in a dream and calls me by name. I cannot hear. I think he prays. Go away, please, I tell him, I am not a believer. Still he stands, while my heart knocks with fright.
You scared
him,
Mother. He thought you were delirious.
Who sent him? Why did he come to
me?
It is a custom. The men of God come to visit those of their religion they might help. The hospital makes up the list for themrace, religionand you are on the Jewish list.
Not for rabbis. At once go and make them change. Tell them to write: Race, human; Religion, none.
And of the candles of benediction:
Look how you have upset yourself, Mrs. Excited Over Nothing. Pleasant memories you should leave.
Go in, go back to Hannah and the lights. Two weeks I saw candles and said nothing. But she asked me.
So what was so terrible? She forgets you never did, she asks you to light the Friday candles and say the benediction like Phil's mother when she visits. If the candles give her pleasure, why shouldn't she have the pleasure?
Not for pleasure she does it. For emptiness. Because his family does. Because all around her do.
 
Page 50
That is not a good reason too? But you did not hear her. For heritage, she told you. For the boys, from the past they should have tradition.
Superstition! From our ancestors, savages, afraid of the dark, of themselves: mumbo words and magic lights to scare away ghosts.
She told you: how it started does not take away the goodness. For centuries, peace in the house it means.
Swindler! does she look back on the dark centuries? Candles bought instead of bread and stuck into a potato for a candlestick? Religion that stifled and said: in Paradise, woman, you will be the footstool of your husband, and in lifepoor chosen Jewground under, despised, trembling in cellars. And cremated. And cremated.
*
This is religion's fault? You think you are still an orator of the 1905 revolution?
**
Where are the pills for quieting? Which are they?
Heritage. How have we come from our savage past, how no longer to be savagesthis to teach. To look back and learn what humanizesthis to teach. To smash all ghettos that divide usnot to go back, not to go backthis to teach. Learned books in the house, will humankind live or die, and she gives to her boyssuperstition.
Hannah that is so good to you. Take your pill, Mrs. Excited For Nothing, swallow.
* Alludes to Yiddish folk saying, the basis of Peretz's story. ''A Good Marriage." and to the cremations in Nazi concentration camps.
** Broad uprising against the regime of Tsar Nicholas II that temporarily initiated a series of democratizing concessions.
 
Page 51
Heritage! But when did I have time to teach? Of Hannah I asked only hands to help.
Swallow.
Otherwisemusing; gentleness.
Not to travel. To go home.
The children want to see you. We have to show them you are as thorny a flower as ever.
Not to travel.
Vivi wants you should see her new baby. She sent the ticketsairplane ticketsa Mrs. Roosevelt she wants to make of you. To Vivi's we have to go. A new baby. How many warm, seductive babies. She holds him stiffly,
away
from her, so that he wails. And a long shudder begins, and the sweat beads on her forehead.
''Hush, shush," croons the grandfather, lifting him back. "You should forgive your grandmamma, little prince, she has never held a baby before, only seen them in glass cases. Hush, shush."
"You're tired, Ma," says Vivi. "The travel and the noisy dinner. I'll take you to lie down."
(A long travel from, to, what the feel of a baby evokes.)
In the airplane, cunningly designed to encase from motion (no wind, no feel of flight), she had sat severely and still, her face turned to the sky through which they cleaved and left no scar.
So this was how it looked, the determining, the crucial sky, and this was how man moved through it, remote above the dwindled earth, the concealed human life. Vulnerable life, that could scar.

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