Prayers for the Living (22 page)

Oh, I can almost taste the meal the girl is cooking. I wish Sarah would come back and eat with us. Are you getting hungry? Here I invited you for a meal and all I'm giving you so far is the appetizer. But wait, wait.

Inside the house life goes on, the grandmother setting the table, the granddaughter upstairs listening to music. I said this already, I know. And the grandmother is worrying, wondering, where are they already? Where are they? The granddaughter of course, their daughter, is thinking about nothing. She's happy as she can be—though there's a question of how happy this is compared to the pleasures of other girls her own age—snapping her fingers, swinging her hips to the music, imagining a dance without costumes, without shame, the bump and push and bustle and the fancy steps of children at play, grown-ups to be, who have no cares, no worries like the grandmother down the stairs. So inside the house life goes on without much of a thought or an idea of what is going on outside in the driveway that could change, will change, does change everything for everyone.

Outside the house in the car in the driveway my Manny and Maby are still talking.

“And this writing will help me, you think?”

“It would give you a way to focus your thoughts.”

“So it appears that's all I need. Just a class or two?”

“Are you still taking a mocking tone with me now, Maby?”

“Manny, would I do that? It's perfectly normal. Your wife gets arrested in a supermarket parking . . .”

“Pardon me, but you weren't arrested. They didn't press charges.”

“So what was I? You have the words. Was I detained?”

“That was more like what happened. Yes, detained.”

“Does that make a difference?”

“A single word can sometimes make a great difference, yes.”

“Then why don't you use a word with me? Why don't you use a single word?”

“You're raising your voice. Please don't raise your voice. I'm sitting right here next to you.”

“Right here next to me? Right here? You're not here. You're in your study writing a sermon. You're talking to committees. You're in the city at a board meeting. Let me tell you about a bored meeting. You want to know about a bored meeting? Meeting with you is a bored meeting. Right now you bore me. Life with you is a terribly boring meeting, do you know that?”

“Is that why you drink?”

“Why I drink is none of your business.”

“Maby, please.” He touched her arm, but she squirmed away.

“No,” he said, “I want to know. Do you drink because life with me is so boring or is life with me boring because you drink?”

“If it isn't Mr. Paradox! Well, well. Why don't we apply some of our feeble psychological training to the question of our wife's unhappiness? Who knows where it could lead?”

“Enough with the irony, please.”

“You should have thought, enough with the slapping, please, when you slapped me in front of those people.”

“I'm sorry. But think of the times that you have made things difficult for me.”

“But you're the spiritual leader of the community. Certainly you can overcome a little personal adversity. I mean, where would you be if you didn't have a little suffering of your own when you have to deal every day with the suffering of others? You could end up sounding like a real prig when you give out all your advice if people didn't think that you had problems of your own.”

“So you drink for my benefit? I didn't know that, I wasn't aware. Thank you very much. I should be more appreciative.”

This is when she slapped
him
—a real openhanded smack right across the mouth. He could taste blood dripping from his lip as he spoke.

“This makes you feel better?”

“Did you feel better after you hit me?”

“I felt terrible then, I feel terrible now.”

“If it's any consolation, I feel nothing now.”

“Is that why you drink? To feel nothing.”

“I asked you not to mention that.”

“It hurts me to talk about it. But we have to talk.”

“Talk to the wall.”

“What?”

“Your mother says it's like talking to the wall. So talk awhile. Talk to the wall. I'm the wall.”

“Maby, wait a minute.”

“Yes, Rabbi?”

“Oh, don't do that, please.”

“All right, Rabbi. What shall I do?”

“You're impossible.”

“I'm going in.”

“You need a drink? I'll get you one, and we'll talk.”

“None of your business.”

“Why, Maby? Is it because of your mother?”

The mother, Mrs. S., always the poor mother takes it on her head, and where would they be without her? Where would they be
without us? Without, for instance, his mother, me, who would be telling his story?

“None of your beeswax,” she said. “I'm going.” She opened the door on her side and got out of the car. It was cooler now than when she had staggered across the parking lot behind the weight of her loaded cart, and quiet too. Some nights she could in warm weather walk out onto the porch, in the middle of evening, and listen, a glass in her hand, until the traffic from the highway miles away died down to a low thin line of noise and only the crickets chirped and the ground around the house gave up, or so it seemed to her, a little steady whisper that she pretended was the growth in the dark of the next morning's grass and flowers. A nice girl she could have been if it hadn't been for that woman she called her mother? Whose mother isn't some of the reason for whoever they become? It's the mother, it's the father, a mix of both, and in her case the father had little to do with it. It was chemistry, mother chemistry, the mother drank, and her mother drank, and all her grandmothers and great-grandmothers and great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers drank all the way back to a cousin of Eve. Paradise, to this kind of woman, you can see only through a little whiskey haze. Eve, now she was Jewish too. Like the Mary the Virgin, a married woman, if you think of it, and so not a virgin probably after all but then Mary wasn't either except for the time she was supposed to have had the baby from God or the angel or the bird that was God, whatever that cock-and-bull story is the goyim tell about it. Imagine, a married woman and they call her a virgin? Like a young girl, like my Sarah, they make her out to be when she's as much a woman as Maby or me, even, or you, except for you and me, darling, we went out of business when our husbands passed away. Of course I don't want to put words in your mouth—please, don't make a face, I'll tell the rest of my story. Isn't life something? Here I'm in the middle of a tragedy and I'm thinking about the tale they tell about God turning into a bird and swooping down and making a woman pregnant. Can you imagine a woman today coming home and telling her husband a story like that?

But listen to the story Maby told my Manny while they are standing there in the dark driveway while I moved back and forth inside the house and upstairs the music plays, the pretty voices sing about homesick blues. She told it so he would know, and let me know if you understand because I'm not so sure even after I heard it if I did. If I do now.

So listen carefully, Mrs. Stellberg.

“You think that I started drinking after my mother died, don't you?” she said, leaning against the side of the car, pulling at a long thick strand of her hair. “You think so, I know you do.”

“I do,” my Manny said. He's looking at her, looking at the lights and shadows in the house, his mouth moving back and forth before the light, and upstairs the shadow of his daughter moving back and forth across her lighted room, and the house engraving itself into the sky as the last light fades, the house sinking into the shadows like one of those ships you hear about that runs into rocks and the thing sinks out of sight—the house, which had not been such a bad place to live, nice big rooms downstairs, snug bedrooms upstairs, a good kitchen, a pleasant place, the nicest of the houses we lived in after Manny was ordained and went out into the world of rabbis and houses and work—this house appeared to him to be fading quickly from his vision, and he grew fearful, as if he already understood by the tone of her voice that she was going to tell him something terrible that would change everything. How could he know that everything had already been changed? He could sense something, but what did he know of the truth? A nice house, he was thinking, and I'm sorry that I've made her feel bad, he was thinking, and I shouldn't have lost my temper, he was thinking, I should have tried to help her. I should have tried to help you, he wanted to say. But she was already caught up in her story.

“My brother and I were very close when we were younger. Despite the large difference in age we found ourselves together all the time because my mother discovered quite early in Mordecai's life that he didn't enjoy the usual rough play that boys are supposed to like, but preferred staying indoors with her, doing
the things that she did around the house, do you know what I'm saying? He was a bit shy, I suppose, is the way people would put it. It's not the way it really was at first. I think at first that he was just a little fearful of my father who was a big boisterous man stomping around the docks, a man always slapping people on the arm, the back, with his big fat cigar clenched between his teeth, shouting, cursing, shoving people around, hey, you, do this, do that, shut up, come on over, put that down, pick that up, launch that barge, shove that load, tie that line, I remember his voice, I've got it impressed on me from the times that I spent down at his pier and on board the barges. You've seen him at home, and once on the barges, the trip we once took down the river, do you remember? I'm sure you do. Well, picture me as a young girl, a little older than when you and I first met at the scene of the accident that took your father's life—now I know you don't like to think of it, you're fidgeting, you're suddenly upset—but then jump ahead from there about five years and picture me then, still thin but tall for my age, my hair as red as a freshly painted barge in my father's fleet, and Mord, my brother, about twice as tall and with hair just as red, at that time he hadn't started to lose it, the two of us playing together at home, playing house, and you can't blame me, can you? because he was there for me to play with, and you can't blame him, really, can you? because he just couldn't bear to go out with my father because of the roughness of the way he treated him, it was just something in his nature, like his hair, or being left-handed, some people just are that way, and because of it my father picked on him terribly almost from the beginning, from the first time my brother refused to jump from the pier onto the boat or from the boat onto the pier, I can't remember just which way, I guess it was trying to get him to jump from the pier to the boat, and Mord wouldn't do it, he wouldn't jump, he looked down into the gap between the pier and the deck and saw the water swirling up and around and he wouldn't do it—and so my father picked him up and threw him across onto the boat and Mord hit his head and cut his hand and began to wail, and our father leaped
after him and yanked him up by his shirt collar and said in a hard whisper in his ear, ‘Don't you cry on my boat or else you're going over the side.'”

Are you wondering what my Manny's thinking through all this speech? He's thinking about the past, about his father, rubbing, rubbing his souvenir glass until his fingers are getting raw again, something that he hasn't done in a long, long while, remembering the accident, the sounds, the smells, the curling wispy smokelike trail of blood in milk—and then what she's saying catches his ear and he's recalling his Cincinnati days again—why don't people really listen, maybe you're asking, why isn't he listening? This is an important thing she's telling him, this is his wife, she's telling him news about herself that he ought to pay careful attention to, he ought to listen hard, he ought to make notes, why does he drift off into dreamy recollections of his own story? Why doesn't he bear down hard with his mind on the story she's telling him the way he's pressing his fingers into that glass, that glass,
oi,
the bloody star that he carries around.

“Are you listening to me?” she says, catching his face in the reflection of the light from the house and noticing that he's staring into the darkness like he's watching a movie or a slide show from his past. “I'll bet if I were one of your beloved problems from the congregation you wouldn't be thinking about something else.”

“Please,” he says, “continue.”

“I'll bet,” she says, “if I were one of these famous companies you want to take over you especially wouldn't get distracted, would you?”

“Please,” he says. “I'm sorry if I gave you that impression. I'm listening quite intently.”

“Or are you thinking about someone else? Do you have someone else who's . . .”

“Please, Maby,” he says, “don't make trouble. Tell me what you want to say.”

“I don't want to say it, Manny. I never would have said it, Manny, if all of this stupid business hadn't happened, if you hadn't walked into the station house when I needed your sympathy and slapped me
in the face, no, I never would have told you this, but I'm going to tell you this because I want you to know what you're up against, and it's nothing I would have told you ever if I didn't think you were so dumb, so blockheaded . . .”