Prayers for the Living Read online

  “Help!” Maby yelled, and ran right into her husband’s arms.

  He tried to help her, to help her home, but she struggled, and twisted free.

  “No!” she screamed. “No!”

  Lights flashed on in the front of the house where they struggled, and poor Manny, my Manny, blinked against the sudden brightness as Maby, a captive in his grip, kicked him in the shins and again raced away.

  How long can this go on, you ask? How long. How long? Rivers are long, nights are long, space is wide, the air is deep, my memory and the minds of my children are long and deep and wide if they say to themselves what the truth is. And to tell you the truth it went on for another few minutes, running back and forth across the street, and some people by now had come out on their doorsteps, attracted by the noise, and my Manny was begging her, saying,

  “Please, Maby, it’s enough now, enough is enough.”

  But enough wasn’t enough. She ran, tripped, fell face-first onto the roadway. Manny leaned over and yanked her up by the hand, as though she were a child or a rag doll, a child’s rag doll, a rag doll’s child, and she swung her other hand around as she rose to her feet and clawed his face and the sting of it matched the smart of his fingers, and the blood ran down his cheek.

  By the time he got her upstairs and undressed and into bed, your Doctor Mickey had arrived. Manny feared a lot more kicking and screaming once she understood what was happening, but he was wrong. When your lovely boy gave her a shot she just lay there, not smiling, not frowning, staring up at the ceiling as though some picture show was going to begin there, a movie on the ceiling. Who knows what she thought she was looking at that night? I, the mama, stood in the doorway, ready as always to help. My dinner was dried up, ruined. I had no patience left for anyone or anything. But what did that matter? We were all upset. Even Sarah had recognized that something out of the ordinary was going on, had turned off her Victrola and come down the hall with her most serious expression on her face, the one she usually saved for discussions of friends and music.

  “Is she all right?” she asked. “What happened to her, Grandma? Was she . . . you know?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her, and took her by the hand. She allowed me to press her fingers to my bosoms, like she was little again and I wanted to see her nails.

  “But, sure,” I said, “she’ll be all right. Doctor Mickey can fix anything, except if you fall and go smash. So he’ll give her something to help her sleep and in the morning your mother will feel fine.”

  It was the father I was worrying about, because Maby went right out but my Manny and your Mickey had a conference in the study, and the expression on Manny’s face after that was also his most serious face, the one he reserved for accidents and funerals, and with those claw marks he had the appearance of a man to whom an accident has just happened. I noticed his fingers when he took out his handkerchief to dab at his nose—raw and red and sliced from the shard. Here was a man already marked out by the color of his hair, so distinguished that you couldn’t help but notice him in a crowd, and now up close I could see these smaller but just-as-distinctive marks on him, the stripes and slits made by nails and glass, stripings for a day or a life filled with a turmoil and hullabaloo like nobody, or maybe everybody’s seen. You see, on top of everything else, remember—but you don’t, because even I didn’t—was the fact that he had to write his sermon on the concentrating camps so that he could deliver it at the service the next evening.

  So here’s the house now quieting down, a night like this, seeming normal, the music off, the creaks and shifts of the wood and stone, resting of the bones of the residence, sleep on the horizon, undress and lay your weary body in the welcome crib of dark, babies, grandmothers, it’s all the same what we need at this time, some because we have so much to look forward to, some because we have so much to see over our shoulders, we look behind. I wash, I sigh, I smear my face with cream, throwing good money after bad for years, the cream on this wrinkled property, but this is America, and we have hope forever, and the same person, me, once a girl who sailed the seas in search of a new life with her husband in a new country, she uses even at an age when she should—kinnahurra, I shouldn’t say this but I’m saying it nevertheless—when I should be thinking about what the undertaker will do for my face at the funeral home. I’m using the cream and oil that promises all of the crevices and streaks and lines and bumps and spots and gouges and veins and ridges and hollows will fade away and I will appear as if young again—and I’m squinting into the mirror and the face before me looks like someone I know, if only because the dark is closing in and I can see it only in the barest outline, the faintest form. Sit, flush, wash, a night like any night. And into the welcoming bedclothes, and into the welcoming bed.

  For Sarah the same, except for her no cream. All the world lies before her, and she knows no sin, no pain. Not even has she crossed a river, not even has she had to work, not this child, fruit of a garden her parents and grandparents planted, blessed with the riches of the New World without ever having had to dream or wrestle or sail over waters, fly over empty space, here she is, sitting, gushing, flushing, washing, brushing the beautiful straight teeth, the lovely hair. No wrinkles on her face, and no sense of ever having done wrong either, this American child, who, even if she dreams of horrible beasts and fears great falling walls of brick and mortar, as she did, long afterwards I learned this, will wake up refreshed, as if she’s returned to the womb overnight, beginning again as she did on the day of her birth, all peach flesh and willpower, bouncing up and down in her sneakers to the music of I want to hold your hand, another day to live as if the others did not exist, present, past, and future in the jittering finger-snapping of the instant after instant she calls her life. She was a little tired, she slept. I was weary, I collapsed. Her mother, my daughter-in-law with the funny name, she was drowned in medication, veins churning with drugs, ropes to bind her in the hospital of sleep.

  Only Manny, my Manny, remains awake. He’s sitting in his study, walled in by books, magazines, notes, photographs of old teachers, Maby, Sarah, me, and he’s staring down at a blank sheet of paper on which he must soon begin to write the sermon he must deliver the next late afternoon. But what to write? what to say about this awful time in the life of our people, in the life of Europe, in the life of the planet? Better to have been born on the moon than to have been a Jew in Hitler Germany he could say. Or, better to have lived in Hitler Germany than to have been married to the woman who nearly drove him this evening into a crazy state of violent distress? He’s thinking that—frightening thoughts, and his thoughts drift, wander, stray. Maby. She has turned into a monster, and now she needs the kind of care only an institution can offer. That’s what Doctor Mickey suggests. Why let her suffer and slide into a worse state of detachment and distraction and, to be frank, a kind of lunacy, when she can go into a place for a few weeks of intensive treatment and come out with a program that will keep her on an even keel?

  “I know just the place,” your wonder-making Doctor Mickey said. “Owl Valley. It’s not far, it’s modern, a warm place, good care, not cheap by any means, but the best in the state.”

  “I’ll do it,” Manny said. “For her sake, I’ll do it.”

  “Do it for your own sake, too, for God’s sake,” Doctor Mickey said.

  “Near, good, warm, the best. I’ll suggest it,” Manny said.

  “Don’t suggest, Manny,” Doctor Mickey said. “Not suggest—take her there. We’ll take her there together.”

  Her face drifted in and out of his view, like a raft in the temple swimming pool butted here and there by the wind. He saw her, he saw her not—he saw her, he saw her not. This woman, the only woman he had ever known, the only woman in his life except his mother, me—Sarah didn’t count as a woman, then, being just a little more than little girl, at least as far as Manny was concerned. He had without ever thinking much about it attached himself to her, for what he supposed—when he thought about it—was life.
There was too much else to think about, work, work, the two kinds of work, to consider ever finding another way to live. Accept, is what he told himself, you must accept. Accept. Good advice to give to others, and advice he ought to take himself. But how can you advise yourself? He’d listen to your Doctor Mickey, and he would help her heal herself, help her to rest, take stock. And then she would get back to the odd but ebullient and appealing personality that she was when they had first thought of marriage. When they had first . . . kissed, was how he put it in his mind . . . which shows you how much he hid from himself in the realm of private matters as opposed to the way he did business, where he considered everything that had to be considered, no matter what the cost.

  The paper. Still blank, and he was drifting.

  Death camps.

  Jews going up in smoke.

  Bones.

  Blank white ash.

  Blank white paper.

  What could he say that hadn’t already been said? Here was a speech he wanted to use to greet the survivors who had come to the congregation, and to celebrate and commemorate. But what did he know? He knew nothing. Blank. White paper.

  SILENCE.

  THE HOUSE CREAKED and yawned, like a ship in which he took passage across a great dark sea, in time, in space.

  Blank.

  The paper.

  He had read everything, and understood nothing, knew only by rote, could spew out lines from the Talmud, from histories, and it was all, he felt in his blood, make-work. The ignorant congregants, they were impressed with the smallest bit of knowledge, but what could he say that was interesting to himself? Nothing.

  What could he say that was new to himself?

  BLANK.

  THE PAPER.

  HE SIGHED, AND the house squeaked, settled in response. Outside the study window he heard a noise, a fluttering of wings? He lighted a pipe, unusual for him. He had the sense that he was waiting, and not just for the dawn. Tomorrow he would have other work to perform, other duties, and there would be no time for the writing. And so he must accomplish it now. And a chill passed over him, and he hugged his coat tighter around his shoulders and arms. The pipe smoke curled up toward the study ceiling, and the wings beat at the window, and he knew that he was yet again to be visited.

  Manny?

  “Yes, Father?” he heard himself say, in spite of his fear.

  Manny, I have a suggestion. A solution for this nothingness on your page there.

  “What is it, Father?” he said, hearing his own voice tinny and shrill, a boy’s voice in a man’s throat.

  Silence.

  “Father?”

  Silence.

  Perhaps I ought to move in to Owl Valley along with Maby, he said to himself.

  And then the voice returned.

  Manny, that was the answer. Silence is the answer. Nothing is the answer.

  “Nothing?”

  Nothing.

  I could get Doctor Mickey to prescribe something for me, he told himself. I could get something that would help me sleep, something that would at least help me relax. Hearing voices, for a man who has two jobs, nearly a double life, in fact, it wouldn’t be such an admission of weakness if now and then he took a pill to help him relax, would it?

  It wouldn’t, said a voice.

  Manny jumped to his feet.

  “What the hell?” he cursed. His eyes rolled up in his head and he swung his arm as if striking out at something visible to him but no one else, and then he keeled over onto the rug.

  It was light when he awoke, to the sound of me asking him if he was all right. I had found him there on the rug in his study, his knees curled up to his chin, his hands clasped around his knees, like the baby he had been in my womb.

  “I was working late,” he explained. “I had to get my sermon done, and I was upset, I suppose . . .”

  He supposed, can you imagine?

  “. . . because of Maby’s upset, and I had just figured out how to do the sermon when I fell asleep.”

  “On the floor, darling?”

  “It looked comfortable.”

  “Darling, I can look at your face and in an instant know you’re not telling the truth.”

  “Can you, Mama?” And he made the little laugh he laughs sometimes with me, when I catch him like this, and with nobody else. So he learned some things that night, and most important he made his sermon, and let me tell you it was a big hit. You were there to hear it, no? So you heard it, but you didn’t hear it. I don’t want to make a joke about something so serious. Remember? Twenty minutes of silence in honor of the dead of the camps. Before an audience that included, as it turned out—and oh, did it turn—some of the living who had survived. Twice as many words and twice as much time couldn’t have done it better.

  THAT’S WHAT she told him when she met him on his way out of his office door at the end of the service. He was exhausted, my Manny. Standing there for twenty minutes. In silence. But thinking. Thinking of the dead. The torture. Murder. Mangled bodies. Murdered babies. And all of the things he had done as a young man while these things were going on. Most Jews here didn’t know, he decided. And they could never truly know, unless they went through it themselves, which, God forbid, should never happen. And so a paradox. And so the silence. Silence. Now to see Maby, to see if the drugs prescribed by Doctor Mickey had calmed her. To Owl Valley. On Monday. With the doctor. And he wanted to remember, also, to have the good doctor prescribe something for his own sleep as well. It had been a long night for him, long awake in his study and then the voice of his father, he had heard it, clearly as if from the beak of the visiting white bird of his youth. And if he hadn’t been a grown man by this time, with all that he knew, he might have been frightened.

  “I couldn’t believe it was so right,” Florette said to him as he came out of his office.

  “Oh,” he said, “thank you, I wanted to do the right thing.”

  “You did, Rabbi, you did,” she said, pressing her hand against his.

  “I’m glad,” he said. “Although it makes me sorrowful to have to think let alone talk about such a subject.”

  “Such a subject, yes,” she said, staring into his eyes.

  Do you think he needed more than that to think what he thought at that point? With Maby being what she was? For all that time? He did not, he did not need more. And if you understand, then you understand.

  “I didn’t realize,” he said. “You are Mrs. . . . Glass?” His voice trembled a little with fatigue.

  She reminded him of her name.

  “You moved here when?” he asked.

  She reminded him.

  “Not that long ago,” he said, looking down now at her hand in his.

  She nodded, a presence of flesh and perfume, past and present.

  “Would you like to come in for a moment?” he asked, stepping back into the office as she nodded her head.

  “Here in America,” he said, Manny seated alongside her on the sofa, a rule he had never broken before even with the children who came to speak to him, always sit behind the desk and the other on the sofa was the rule, and here he had broken it, sitting next to her, still holding her hand. “Here in America we just don’t know . . .”

  “But you don’t want to know,” she said. “You . . .”

  “That’s what I was coming to,” he said. “That’s why the silence. Because to know is to suffer, and why should anyone suffer unnecessarily what those, you, knew? Could it stop it from happening again if more people knew? No, I don’t think so, because to truly know is only to suffer it. The paradox lives.”

  “I am painting about it,” she said.

  “Are you? I’d love to see your paintings,” he said. Still holding her hand, and wondering to himself if she wore a number up on her wrist or above. But it was not that that fascinated him, no, it was not anything he could put into words, it was a certain electrical charge that he could feel, he explained later to me, a certain electrical field, he tried to say what it was. This had ne
ver happened to him before, except for the time that he met Maby, and he could only tell himself that he was mistaken even though he was sure that he was not mistaken.

  “You’ll have to come to my studio and see them,” she said. “They’re in my studio, in my house.”

  “Your house,” he said, “I should know where you live.”

  And she explained to him, and he remembered from a list that he had seen, because he usually remembered everything that he saw on a page, and he told her that he would come and see the paintings, and perhaps they could allow others to see them, too, perhaps a show?

  “No show,” she said. “Just you, Rabbi.”

  “Just me,” he said, and that was an agreement.

  “And perhaps you’ll let me paint you?” she said.

  “Me? Why me?”

  “Because of your face,” she said, “and your hair.”

  “I’m not a model,” he said, trying to make a joke.

  “But I’ve been watching you,” she said, “and that makes you an object.”

  “Not a subject?” he said. Thinking, I feel this tremendous pressure and I’m talking to her in joking language from philosophy?

  The pressure didn’t let up the rest of the weekend. In fact, as the next week began, it got worse, and worse. On the drive west to Owl Valley, a lovely old Victorian building with a number of modern cottages—like the extra additions on a motel, was what they looked like, what they still do look like—he was thinking about this encounter with the woman in the temple, the survivor of the camps who painted pictures and wanted to paint him, all the while driving with your own Doctor Mickey, and Maby, the poor daughter-in-law, my poor girl, so drugged that she behaved like a sleepy child. He should have been thinking about what had driven her to this point in her life, and I don’t mean a car, I mean the childhood event that she carried around with her—because as you know it upset him plenty just to have heard it, and he still didn’t know what he was going to do later in the week when he had a meeting in the city scheduled with the brother-in-law, the famous brother Mordecai, otherwise known as Mord.