Prayers for the Living (21 page)

So for months now he's been walking around like he's got a hole in his heart, at the temple, in New York, with Sarah, even with me, his mother who never asks him for nothing and always gives more than he thinks to ask, more than he wants. But could I give him this what he wanted then? That lies beyond the limits of the powers even of the mother.

But she had retreated, and he felt her absence. In the years when he was just building his talents, when he was the young rabbi and she was the young wife of the young rabbi, it was easy for him to ignore some of the things that bothered him now, at this time we're talking about, and it was easy for her to believe that what she was feeling inside—wait, I'll show you later, the emptiness of a hole in the heart you should never know and your children should never know—that the awful cold wind that blew right through her chest sometimes not just when she was asleep and had nightmares but also, worse, when she was awake and smiling in the middle of a tea at the house of some member of the temple, at the club meetings, at the supermarket, like this moment now, and from her side it was so painful all she could do was try to kill the pain the way she learned from her own mother.

It took a while for Manny to notice. Young love, darling, it's all alike, like one of those big races where everybody starts off from the starting post all bunched up together. It looks like everyone is going to finish—and then, after a half a mile, after a mile and three
quarters, some of the runners begin to drop out, or limp at least, and you can see that not everyone is as well equipped as everyone else in this race. That's when to the person looking on things get interesting. To think that our amusement comes from such pain from other people!

“Bitch!” he spit at her through tightly closed teeth, and he swung his hand and clipped her on the side of the face.

She made a little noise, like a balloon might when the air phishes out through a puncture, and she grabbed her face. Why is it? Her he hit, and a year later he smashed a guitar?

The matron meanwhile stood up and like a professional backed my Manny away from her. She'd seen a lot of couples go through this—mainly the negroes are hitting each other all the time is what a lot of Jewish people think, until they find themselves like my Manny, with a stinging palm and a crying wife, and a police matron and a desk sergeant standing next to him, a few seconds away from a personal riot.

“Take it easy,” she says to Manny, and he calms down quickly, mainly because he understands how close he stands to getting the sergeant in a situation where he'll have to do something official. In most police stations, darling, more people use their fists than pull guns and believe me the police are quick to respond. And if you wonder how this grandmother knows such things you haven't been listening to what I've been telling you. But sometimes it gets away from him. It scares him when he loses control. And then, because he's frightened, he loses more.

“I'm fine, I'm fine,” Manny says, running his hands nervously along the front of his dark suit. And see what happens? This is the effect he has on people. In a second, they're back to where they were before, as if the man had not slapped his wife in front of them, as though the wife isn't still on the bench, holding her face to her hands, sobbing so loud that you could hear it outside in the disappearing light. This distinguished man, not so old but not so young either, this man in the dark suit with the striking thatch of brilliant white hair, my Manny, he's got the power.

“I'm sorry,” he told her on the way home. “But you should be sorrier than I am. This to me shows that you've crossed over the line and that you are going to have to see that doctor in New York.”

Until then what had she done? She had tried talking to your lovely Doctor Mickey about her problem, pardon my saying, because I believe he is a very fine doctor, but all that he prescribed for her was a good diet, lots of sleep, and some pills that did nothing for her. Everything had been all right until Sarah was born, and then she had bad dreams, but even the dreams were something she could handle until her mother and father started dying in them again, and then everything came crashing at once and the days turned into times as bad as the dreams at night. But my Manny didn't know this then. For all of his experts working at his company with the brother-in-law in the city he didn't know much, as it turns out, about what was going on at home. Without me, I think, he would have found out sooner.

But I think that in a funny way, Sally, it was the presence of the mama in the house, my life, that gave him the impression that things were going all right. I mean, after all, who cooked and who cleaned and who was there to dress Sarah in the morning when her mother couldn't get out of bed, and who was there for a long time to pick her up after school, and to plan her school outings with her, and to help her with her homework, and to help with the decisions about what to wear to the club meetings, and what to do on a Saturday when she had three, four equally desirable things she wanted to do? Who was there? You know who was there—the grandmother, that's who. But there is a certain limit to my powers, do you know what I mean? I could be there in the day, I could be there in the night, but I couldn't wake in the dark and go down into my daughter-in-law's dreams and turn her fears around into something that would make her laugh instead of shout out in the middle of the night.

You're laughing. Why? Because I admit that there's something in life more powerful than the powers of the grandmother? Sure, there is, and you know about it, from raising your own children. There are the waters of life, rising, rising like the river or the ocean
during a storm, and there's the grandmother standing between the rising waters and her family, like a wall, a dike, a dam. But you can only do so much, you're only human, even though sometimes the demands they make on you are more than that, and there's only so much holding back you can do, and only so much suffering you can take into yourself and turn into comforting.
Nu?
Isn't that right? Isn't that the grandmothers' way?

That Purim party, that's when Manny first saw how she was fooling herself about the way she could conduct herself in public. Can you imagine how he felt when he saw her, and his daughter, with the punch dripping from her turban? The look in Sarah's eyes? Jewish Halloween? I'm telling you, it all comes in costume, darling, nobody knows who he is, or she is, what they want, what they are, until almost always it's too late.

Did Manny know he was going to slap her? Did he ever think that he had it within him to slap his wife in public? To slap her even in private? Slap? He never even touched her hard with a finger let alone slapped! He never used with her a harsh word. Now this is not to say he didn't feel frustrated with her, because the older she got the more like a child she became. And it seemed to him, it worried him, that the oldest she ever was for him was when they first met as adults and that year after year she was getting younger, until now, in the car, or back there in the police station when he slapped her he had been filled with the frustration of a father with a misbehaving child, the frustration of a husband who wants his wife to act like a grown-up and she behaves instead younger than their own young daughter. When her mother and father died he expected that she would have a reaction—he wasn't the rabbi of a hundred-person-plus congregation for years and years not to expect that her grief was going to take terrible shape in one way or another. But Maby's way of responding was not to grow older at last, to turn into the adult that people always wanted to become and, after their parents die, understand they finally have the chance to be. No. Her way was to collapse the years into herself and turn once again into the little girl he met the first time they met ever, the first time, in the car, after the accident,
when he was in shock, holding on to his piece of glass, digging with it the blood from his fingers, soiling his trousers.

M
Y NOSE IS
still good, you know. And I can smell the dinner, it's almost ready. And even though my eyes are bothering me so much I can still look you in the face and see you smiling, because you're remembering that accident of Manny's, not his father's death, and it's as if—no, no, I wasn't criticizing you, because that's the way it happened, all together, as if it is supposed to have that effect on me, you, whoever listens, so that we think not about death and the blood but the little boy who had an accident. And we smile a little, and that's the living taking the place of dying.

“You're not sorry,” she said. Maby said. “You're glad that you had the chance to punish me, and in public.”

“Punish? Punish?” Manny, driving them home, turns from the wheel and says this twice. “And for what?” he says then.

“Not for something, for nothing,” she says.

“Punish you for nothing?”

“Because I'm not the rabbi's wife, because I'm not anybody's wife. I'm not a wife. I'm too . . . too . . .”

“Too what?”

“Too . . . I don't know. I don't know the words for it.”

“So find the words.”

“So find the words,” she says, repeating after him. “Easy for . . .”

“Please don't make fun of me, Maby,” he interrupts.

“I wasn't making fun. I was making serious. I was saying seriously that I don't know the words. That you know the words. You know the words in English and Hebrew, even in Aramaic, isn't that what you studied?”

“I took a class.”

“I never took a class. I never took a class in English, I took only French but I never took a class in Aramaic.”

“You studied English.”

“I never took a class in it.”

“You had English in school. Everyone has English in school. Even I had English in school on the Lower East Side where hardly anyone speaks English, or hardly anyone did when I grew up there.”

“So you have the words,” she said.

“There are words,” Manny said. “You may have to look for them, but they're there.”

“If they are,” she said, “I don't know how to find them.”

“Take a class,” he said.

“Now you're making fun of me.”

“I'm not,” he said. “You talk about writing and reading and finding the words. Take a class in these matters.”

“In these matters,” she said.

“So now after complaining that I was mocking you, you are methodically mocking me?”

“Methodically,” she said. “If I could find a word like that I would be all right.”

“You can find it. I found it. Look, Maby, I had no words in English. I had my mother's voice, I had my father's voice, I had the voices of the boys on the block, the rotten old rabbi's voice, and it wasn't until I got to Cincinnati, thanks to your father . . .”

“Thanks, Father,” she broke in.

“Will you let me finish? I would like you to hear this.”

“Finish,” she said. “I would like to hear your words.”

“And you'll stop the mocking?”

“I will stop the mocking.”

“Good. I'll go on.”

“Go on.”

“So I took the classes because I recognized that if I was going to speak before large groups I was going to need some discipline.”

“I need discipline,” Maby said.

“And I read and I wrote little papers for my classes and all of this helped enormously.”

They now drive up to the house and Manny steers into the driveway, but they don't go in. It's an inky dark Jersey evening, blue-black clouds stretching over from the east to west blotting out whatever afterglow might have remained in the sky when they first came out of the station house, and here they are, man and wife, sitting in the parked car in front of their own house, talking, which they have done little of since they first read together, many years before, the poetry from the Bible, the Song of Songs, Solomon's song and in the house, the house well lighted and comforting against the dark, the grandmother, me, passes back and forth from kitchen to dining room, setting the table, and upstairs is their only child listening now to the new group, called the Stones, like in the Bible where who shall cast the first one? because she was listening now to the things that made her stand up and dance and snap her fingers, which is good, don't you think darling? that our children today can feel so good that they can do that? I wish today when I saw her she only looked so well.