Prayers for the Living (53 page)

“Sarah?” He was, in any case, more interested in conversing with the daughter than with the wife.

“This car drives neat,” she said. “I like the overdrive.”

“Don't speed, please,” he said. “I don't need any more bad publicity than we already received today.”

“Oh, they're just crazies, Dad,” she said.

“Is that all they are?”

“Just crazies. Nobody pays attention to crazies.”

“And
you
think they're crazy?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“But do you believe that they are correct? Or that they're crazy?”

“Uh-oh,” she said.

“Answer me, please.”

“How can I answer you? There's always a little bit of truth in what people like that say. And a lot of fantasy.”

“So mature of you,” my Manny said. “Is that what the college has done for you? Then I'm glad, after all, that you went there.”

“After all?”

“I don't want to argue with you, darling. I was just asking your opinion.”

My Manny was remembering the sight of her lips moving, remembering her mouthing the chant. For him all the rest of it—the escapade with the art teacher, stealing Maby away, the police, the agents—all of that was a closed book. He wanted only to know whether or not she was part of it, part of the demonstration, part of the outside world, part of all of that against which he had to work in order to make his way, make his mark. For him, my Manny—I suddenly understand it now that I'm telling you—it was him and
the cart and his father, and the rest was rushing car and rearing horse and yowling siren, the crash of the truck and the smash of glass. Can you imagine? Can you imagine what it was like to live this way? With the past creeping up on you always no matter how far you move into the present, let alone the future? Always the past leaning over his shoulder, the sound of the car, the cab, the rearing horse, the siren? I've been trying to show you, and I hope that I have shown you, I've been trying to make you feel what he felt, and I hope that I've made you feel what he felt—this endless sliding back, no matter where he stood, no matter what, back and back and back and back to the crossroads of the crash and glass. It was like a scar he wore with the rough ridges of the wound turned inside rather than out. Except for his beautiful hair that everybody noticed, he showed no outward sign of his difference. But different, as you long ago knew, he was, and would be, while he lived. This difference, of course, the children never know. But if you could look into the hearts of others, if you could see a field, or a forest of hearts, my Manny's you would notice for its rough and strangely overbearing growth.

“What do you want me to say?” Sadie asked.

“I want to know.”

“You care about my opinion? You really care?”

“Of course I do, darling. Of course I do.”

“Bull. Shit.”

“Don't use—no, not bullshit. What I said wasn't bullshit.”

He could feel the car picking up speed, as though she drove a team of horses and not this long sleek vehicle of steel and rubber and glass, horses that she whipped and whipped until they roared forward, slobbering froth, with thundering hooves. He wanted to say, slow down, slow down. But he bit his lip, fingered the shard, waited for her to say something, anything. Could he tell that this was his last chance to hold on to her? He must have understood, he must have known somehow that it was now—on this turnpike, rolling past the lights of oil refineries, factories, moon cities of gridwork,
tanks, wires, even within the car the air flavored with the stench of chemicals unholy and disgusting—or never.

“I want to know,” he asked her, “what do you think of my latest venture?”

“Your latest venture?”

“Am I speaking too quietly? My new holdings. The big company. General Banana.”

She laughed, and said that it was such a silly name. And the label, the long yellow fruit with the officer's cap and epaulets, that was sillier still. It was a comic book, she said, her father was turning her life into part of a comic book.

“Should I change it then?” he asked. “Should I call it Middle American Bananas? Republic Bananas? United Bananas? What about maybe Bananas United? Bananas Away? Bananas Awave? or People's Bananas? Major Bananas? Bananas Ahoy?”

“Why do you ask me? You're not going to change it if I say you should. You'll change if you think you want to. Why fool around and ask me?”

“I'm asking you. Because I'm asking you. I want to know your opinion.”

“Bull. Shit.”

“Please, Sarah. We said we weren't going to do that, say that.”

This is how close they came. He came. How close!
Oi!

“You don't want my opinion. You're just buttering me up because you're afraid I'm going to do something terrible again.”

“I don't think I'm buttering you up, as you say. I want to hear what you think.”

This is how close!

Silence, nothing but the hum of the tires, the purr of the engine.

“Sarah?”

“Are we going to take her back to Owl Valley? Or is she coming back to the city?”

She turned and tilted her head toward the rear where her mother sat silently, eyes wide open, staring at the lights ahead.

“Sarah, you didn't answer my question.”

“What question?”

“Should I change the name, the label? Should I make them get a new brand name?”

“Oh! Is that what you wanted to know? Sure, let them do it.”

“Get a new one?”

“Keep the old one. It's funny, it's a gas.”

“So you like it?”

“Sure, I like it.”

“So I'll keep it. Because you want me to.”

“I'm flattered.”

“I respect your opinion,” he said.

“Is this the exit?”

“Can't you see? If you can't see you shouldn't drive.”

“I can see. I'm just asking.”

“Yes, this is it coming up. And Sarah?”

“What?”

“I want to ask you something else.”

“Ask.”

“Would you . . . ? Uh . . . I'm making a trip down to the new holdings. I'm setting up an inspection tour. I want to see for myself what's going on down there, what we've got. I mean, thousands of people work for us now, and I think that I should go and see for myself exactly what the story is, what the picture is. And . . . I would like you to come with me. I would like that very much.”

“Take that trip? All the way down there?”

“I would like that.”

Silence—hum of tires, whirring of engine. And then from the rear of the car, a faint-at-first wailing, like an infant lost, separated from its mother at feeding, the whimpering of a child. And then the louder noise, something like a scream or the outcry of an animal tortured by some larger child. Both daughter and father turned around to see, and passed the exit, missed the turn.

“Pull over,” my Manny ordered her.

“Here?”

“Right here,” he said. And Sadie slowed the car down, and they rolled to a stop on the shoulder, in the dark, swampy ground to their right, cars rushing past on the left.

“Ride with her,” he said. “I'll drive the rest of the way.”

“She needs you,” Sadie said.

“She needs, she needs,” he said. “You go on. Get back there.”

Something in his voice—his life erupted through it. She didn't understand that—all Sadie felt was the way it pierced her, like a splinter, a shard of glass.

“All right,” she said. And she said to herself, all right. And she got out of the car and felt the cold on her face and neck. It was snowing.

S
OMEBODY ONCE SAID
that hate stories go well in winter. Ice and dislike, they're alike. So here's snow, and Manny planning his trip. And the snow came down for a while, as it seems to do only in New York and Jersey, like a beautiful gift that breaks after just a little while, before you can really use it. For a few days, a week maybe, everything lay covered in white, and then everybody mixed in the dirt and the soot and dogs added their part—I was still walking on the street now and then at this time, and so I can remember what that was like—and so did the garbage men, who scattered as they collected, and pretty soon the snow was bordered in black, like a funeral notice for the lovely stuff it was when it first fell, and it melted a little and turned into dark lumpy chunks, a bad memory of its old self, and many citizens noticed that when it came to nature this part of Jersey left something to be desired.

Except for people like my Manny, who never notice anything around them because their eyes stare ahead into the future and down at the work on their desks. What do the seasons matter to a man whose life stopped and started again once when he was eight years old? He was like the rest of us, sure, he ate, slept, and suffered when his child spoke back to him, but he was also different, living in a
different kind of time. But if he spent all of these years living his life—he's my son, but I have to say this—indifferent, finally, to the business of being a rabbi, and indifferent, finally, to the pain and torture inside of his very own wife—if one day he looked up and saw clearly a few words of hatred rolling from his own daughter's lips,
Rab-eye Gwat-a-mal-a! Rab-eye Gwat-a-mal-a!,
he shouldn't have been all that surprised. But here is where he made his own trouble, I think, and if I could have been there, if I could have sneaked in like some ghost or thief in the night and lain next to his heart and alongside his brain and camped out in his nerves when the question came up of doing something about her, I would have urged him to leave well enough alone! Leave well enough alone! Or leave half-bad enough!

But here was his problem, his fault, if you can call it a fault, I don't know if I have even the right words for any of this, but call it now a fault, and here it is: that he couldn't be either completely indifferent to the feelings and desires of these other people in his life, mainly the daughter now, and before that, before her feelings went underground like a stream in a dry season, the wife, my daughter-in-law,
or
that he couldn't get enough of their love for him, because this was how they felt for a long time, before the feeling went sour, rotten, what's the word? I'm telling you so I should know but sometimes the sensations go beyond the way to say it, that he couldn't devote his life to those he supposedly loved himself! Here is where he lived a life divided, and if you live that way, eventually you discover that you have to give up something, because it takes two people to live two lives, or nine people nine, and my Manny was fast approaching the point where he was going to find this out.

“S
HE
'
S COMING WITH
us,” he said to Mord in the office the next morning.

“Why not bring your mother, too?”

Oh, I never liked this man, but when he talks like this, could anybody in the world have any love for him?

“I'm serious, Mord, I'm bringing Sarah.”

“You're aware of what we have to do down there?”

“We have to fly in a helicopter and look at some banana groves. We have to walk through some warehouses and hospitals. We have to look at workers' housing. This is what we're saying we're going to do in our press release. So I'm taking my daughter with me—it will be even better press than we'll get already. I
should
take my mother. That would be better still.”

“And my sister? Should we take my sister?”

“No joking.”

“No joking,” Mord said. “We'll take them all. We'll turn it into a family cavalcade. We'll get complete TV coverage. What if we dress in native garb—picture this, you in a sombrero holding a machete,
Rabbi Gwat
. . .”

“We're taking her,” Manny said. “She wants to go.”

And that was that.

And oh how I wish the rotten hateful brother had been more forceful—for all of a bastard, excuse me, for all of the
bastard
he was, for all the damage he did, what if he had been twice as bad, perhaps then he might have blocked my Manny in his plan, and everything, everything, would have been different! But if he had been more that way from the beginning, then that too might have changed everything. Oh the puzzle, how everything fits and falls into place!