Prayers for the Living (31 page)

And then a resting, a lying down alone, a washing of the waves against the hull, a thudding of the engines in the quiet of the resting, of the lying down,

and then,

and then again,

the engines,

the waves . . .

So you see, this is how the battered boy found some affection, and so what if it's that kind, the kind we don't usually talk about, the kind—what would my Manny say, he's said it to me—the kind in the tent in the desert in the dark, the Bible says, but does the Bible bring affection to the battered boy? Even a dog needs affection, and this boy, long-limbed and with a hawky nose, and already starting to lose on top the hair, this poor boy needed someone, we all need someone, and don't get me wrong, I'm not defending. I'm not defending what happened with the sister, I'm not defending what he does with his life after that, with the sailor, with other sailors, with men, with boys like he himself used to be, I'm not defending, I'm merely describing, but who is this grandmother, let alone a mother, or an uncle, or a sister, or a brother-in-law, who are they—who am I?—to say what's right, what's wrong, darling, short of murder, short of torturing somebody with a knife, a gun, who am I to say?

The Bible. The Bible, I told you I know what the Bible—I told you my Manny and I discussed it, the Bible, what the Bible says about the things in the dark in the tent in the desert, but there are deserts and there are deserts, and tents and tents, and dark and dark, and these are modern times, you know, and I'm not saying that you bend the rules until they break, but I'm saying that the rules they change and twist and bend and that's life—the rules live, too, and the rules change, like people change, and if I don't understand it I can at least understand that I don't understand it, the grandmother speaks—she says the words—the language comes to her.

B
LOOD
.

If blood could talk, if nerves could, in the two minutes they spent together in the room just after my telephone call, all of what I just told you they might have said right then and there. If blood could talk, if nerves. Let's imagine that they said this, with their nerves, with their veins. And then they sat down, and they made a deal. It didn't take longer than that. It had to do with a partnership they had already concluded just after Meyer Sporen's death, an agreement they had made between the two of them to run the company the boat man had left. They extended it now—it included not only operating the company, and building it up, certainly that they had done, it now included, from my Manny's side at least, a new small unspoken agreement. It included the fact that he put the company ahead of his love, his family, anything he cared about or believed in that might stand in the way of making things work.

It can only help Maby, he told me, a long time afterward, when the heat of her revelation to him had cooled, and she, too, had calmed down considerably, with the help of pills, doctors, and the nice trees and grass and air out in the country at Owl Valley. She brought some of it with her when she returned home, the calm, the pills, the desire for doctors. The first, she kept with her, deciding, with the help of the doctors, that she ought to do something with her life. And what she decided was, as I said before, taking courses. Manny would have preferred that she work in the temple organizations, but that was something she never did with much enthusiasm and he wasn't about to force her, seeing her delicate state, to do it now. Instead, he listened patiently while she explained that she was going to enroll in a creative writing seminar at Rutgers Newark. He nodded, agreed. And he bought her a new car. Touching, no? Well, look, he was behind her a hundred percent. He made a point from that time on never to lose his temper with her, never to criticize. And if you don't think my Manny could make a decision like that, you don't know what he did—by decisions like that—to make his company, the brother's company, the brother-in-law's company, grow. I mean, little companies they picked up like kids' toys from
the playroom floor—and stock options, whatever that is, I hear him talk, these he gets from all of them, and from the companies they buy they milk money and buy others. My Manny. In his white hair streaked dark and dark suit—he walks into a boardroom and no one, let me tell you, is bored, my dear. They sit up, they watch him, they listen for what he says, because he has learning, he's read in the Torah, in history, and this is a twist for them, all of them like lawyers and businesspeople only, or maybe a few studied history at college, but this was all for the ancient history. I'm trying to explain to you how he does it, trying, too, to understand it myself. But he does it—maybe it's magic. Maybe he's got some formula he uses, hypnosis, halitosis, outrageous how he does it, Manny, my little boy turned wizard of the Walled Street. Look, he learned a lot from the brother-in-law, I don't want to take away from Mordecai, Mord, but he has something in himself, the part that talks to birds.

And for a change he uses some of his magic when he listens to his wife. He doesn't shout, he doesn't say put your time into the temple, he listens, he nods, he agrees, he buys a car. After all, by this time he wasn't tied so closely to the temple himself, he only thought he was—after all, another year and he would take a fall, and rest, and then resign so that we would move here and he would put all of his time into the company—the companies. So it doesn't upset him that she won't be helping with the auxiliary and the rest of it because it was all by this time auxiliary to him. In a way, I hate to say this, it always was, all of it. He did it, he did it well, but it was all a stepping-stone, rungs on a ladder. Don't get me wrong—he did it because he was a good boy and a good man, but when he saw that he could do it, it was in a way for him over and done. And he was ready for a change—in a way he was ready for a change whenever he was doing anything. From the first time he went out with his father, may he rest in peace, the first time they walked together to the square, he was ready for a change. And didn't he get one? He got a big change. We all got a big change. And sometimes I wish we didn't have any changes big or small. Sometimes I wish I hadn't been so particular that I didn't like the smell of a student
from the city. If I had held my nose and lived my life, things would have been different, wouldn't they? Jacob, my Jacob, he might have been—but no, because whenever I think this, I remember about Florette, and I remember the numbers on her pale white skin, and I remember that if I hadn't been so particular I would have stayed, and I would have been put in one of those camps, and my Jacob, even if he hadn't become my Jacob, he too would have been caught, and we both would have gone up in big puffs of smoke, and there would have been no Manny, and no nothing, not this apartment, and the cars and the trips and the food and the gifts and the everything, no Maby, not for us, and no little Sarah, little Sarah-Sadie, and so where do you think she is at this hour, it's time she should be getting home, don't you think? But as I was saying, there would have been none of this if I hadn't been so particular. So who wants no change? So who wants to stand still? You stand still you might as well be dead—you stand still you
are
dead. And that's that.

So where do I think she is? At a friend's apartment, or someplace waiting to go back, waiting to pick up a friend she promised to drive, where else? She packed warm clothes to take back with her, is all. She came, she packed, so what? She's like her mother, you know, she won't talk about where she's going, where she's been. But her mother, I'm telling you, she paid.
Oi,
did she pay. She was in the hospital, the home, whatever you call it, and then she came out looking like she had paid. And she took her classes and then . . .

It gave her something to do.

She wrote about things she did. She made up a little but a lot she put down just the way it was. I know. I was there for most of the time. There was a teacher, a Professor Bair, a writer of books, novels he wrote, and he came in from the city one night a week and taught the class, and Maby, she drove over from here in her new car, and she wrote stories. Look, here, wait a minute. You see . . . I know where she keeps them. I know where they are. And I'd love to hear . . . so you could read it to me? Like we've done before. We could listen together? I know she made one about a trip they took to Israel after she came home from Owl Valley. I forgot, I should have told you,
the one thing she wanted was the classes, and Manny said, certainly you should do that, and then he asked her if she wanted to take the trip, a vacation to Israel, and she said, sure, she would do that, it would take her to places she had never seen before. And so they went, and the doctor, the one she was seeing at Owl Valley, he said, “Maby, you should do more traveling, it agrees with you.”

And she wrote this, and other things, I heard her talking on the telephone to someone from the class, or maybe it was the teacher, the writer, about the trip.

So.

We'll look.

Here. In the room. The study she uses when she's home.

Here it is. The filing. Here. The folder. Here. The writing.

What do you mean you don't want to snoop? This is not snooping, snooping is something else. This is learning. Here. Now. You got it? And so let's see what it says.

But there's more than one? I want to hear more. She got out of the hospital and went to this class for months and months. I at least ought to hear what she did—think of all the suppers I cooked for nobody, Sarah away at some school activity, Maby at the Rutgers Newark, Manny—well, I'll tell you where he was, though I think you can guess. Later, I'll tell you. Why not? If I know all this the world should know. At least you should know it—frankly I wouldn't tell the world before I told my friends. And I wouldn't tell my friends before I told myself, so I could understand it. And I wouldn't tell myself before admitting the whole thing was weighing me down like a ton of water. So I admit it, it's weighing on me. So I'm talking. You think I didn't tell you before now because I wanted to keep it a secret what I feel? I didn't know—so who can know what they feel before they tell somebody else? Only my Manny thinks it's possible to live that way—and only lately, since he stopped talking to his mother did he start to feel that way. And he'll talk again to me, I know he will. All his life he talked, and he'll talk again.

So. You're holding on to these pages? You want to look at the top page at least? You're ready to snoop along with the grandmother?
What's it called? “Notes of a Rabbi's Wife after Shock, Drugs, Chaos, Night”? What kind of a title is that? And it starts in the middle of nowhere?

. . . I have come to love the work of my hands, spinning and weaving. Three days a week I am awake long before light and lie in bed contemplating the class to come. Breakfasts never thrilled me, but even the moist eggs and dry toast lure me on, and I chew, and I chew, and I swallow, building my strength.

“Good morning, Maby.”

I open my eyes to see her white-lined eyes, her curling lip.

“I know you.”

“Of course you do.”

“And you know me.”

“I do.”

“A vow,” I said.

“What's that?”

“A wedding vow. I do. You do. We do. We two.”

“You're so poetic. Maby, would you like to try and write some poetry?”

“Try and? Why not? It's all done, isn't it? I went to school, you know.”

“I think we know that. In . . .”

“Shhh! Not the names of real places. We don't say the names of real places.”