Prayers for the Living Page 18

  But so now they are driving west across Jersey, watching the shopping malls and bald spots where gas stations and houses used to stand, and the grease and the dead trees turned into greener hillsides, the road becoming hilly, the earth curving, and soon the horizon becomes beautiful, with only here and there a billboard, here and there a house, an abandoned filling station, and it is like another state, and you can imagine streams and rivers and farms and all of those things that used to be here throughout the East when the Indians ruled, where now only the rich gentiles to the west commute to the city on their neat little train lines. And there are birds here, and deer, and perhaps now and then someone sees the droppings of a bear. And are there wolves? I don’t know. And what do they call them? mountain lions? There are perhaps almost mountain lions, call them hill lions, because there are not real mountains but only the beautiful tree-filled hills, I can close my eyes now and see them as clearly as if I am driving with him in that car. The dozing Maby, the clear-eyed doctor sitting next to her, ready at any moment to give her comfort. She was going in for observation, for tests and relaxation, to get her away from the booze, to get her away from the stress that pushed her close to the booze.

  “It must be a relief to finally come to terms with this, Manny,” Doctor Mickey says.

  “A relief, yes,” says my Manny, steering carefully at a speed just within the limits of the law. He didn’t tell you all this, your boy, the doctor? Well, he keeps good secrets. But my boy, Manny, he tells me everything and that’s how I’m telling you things, even secrets about your own son.

  His head—tumbling through it are pictures of Mord and Maby, the survivor woman Florette Glass, Mord, the company offices, the barge, wondering about Florette Glass, thinking, what are you thinking, Manny? Get off it! Get off it! Wondering about how long Maby would stay, this would free his time, slightly, if Mama, if Sarah, oh, what was he thinking? Nothing that you wouldn’t imagine a man in his situation wouldn’t be thinking, but to think about it, when you were he, it hurt, it hurt, and to tell it to you now, it stings a little too, let me tell you, it stings, it bites, like the cuts in the fingers made by him with his little shard of star. They sting, they sting.

  “. . . the facilities,” Doctor Mickey was explaining to him.

  “It sounds fine,” my Manny says, coming back to the discussion.

  “And of course the insurance covers it, from . . .”

  “I don’t worry about such things anymore,” Manny said. What did he know in fact about money worries since old Meyer Sporen had died? Not much, except his worries about making the company, his and Mord’s company, grow faster and faster. Oh, what a thing is a man’s mind, listen in on his thoughts the way he told me he was thinking, and you add in the wondering about the company, and you get a pretty picture, I’m telling you.

  Maby, Florette, Sarah, me, the company, the takeover of the bottling plant they wanted to begin next week, and Mord, what to say to him, the boy with the needle in the eyelet, the mess at the barge, the old man tossing him across the abyss, over the water, over time, Maby, her drinking, the story hitting him, my Manny, like a ton of bricks, the money from the deal, the cash to come, the board, new board control, the suit he’d wear to the meeting, the same plain black suit he’d worn to all of those meetings because it seemed to work like a charm, they see me and they think confidence, they have confidence in me the studious rabbi, what doesn’t he know about these things? What couldn’t he tell us about both the business and the ethics of it all? And Mord telling me this and explaining, and me not listening, and me explaining, Mord, you are the genius and I only look like the genius, and I know precious little but what I learned in my econ classes a long time ago and what I feel I can do by way of doing right. And what my voices tell me, of course, I mustn’t leave that out of any consideration since as of this weekend I do declare it appears to be true that after a long absence the voice seems to have returned.

  “. . . observation . . .”

  “Observation?”

  My Manny thinks, they ought to put me under observation along with Maby, because all of this boiling beneath the surface, the distinguished man with the white hair and the dark suit, put him under observation and study him, a man who hears voices and believes in luck beyond all limits set upon the world by his religion, and now add to this a man who can’t wait to lock up his wife so that he can visit another woman.

  Wouldn’t that kind of thinking make you want to draw back in fear if it was in your own life? Like the kind of thing you see when you’re out in the yard in springtime and you turn over a rock? If it weren’t my Manny I would think so too. But as his mother I know him better than anyone else, and as his mother I can tell you that he never wanted to hurt anyone—that he wanted love, he wanted to be held, he wanted the kinds of things grown people need but can’t get from their mothers. So? If I tell you now things that might sound wrong, who’s finally to say what’s right, what’s good, and what a grown man shouldn’t do no matter what?

  Because, as they say in bedtime stories I used to tell to my darling Sarah—when she was still Sarah, and not the Sadie person she has become—no sooner has he taken care of settling his wife in at the rest home at Owl Valley—a place, I have to admit to you, I haven’t seen, because, to tell you the truth, there are few things in the world I mind thinking about but staying, or worse, ending up in a place like that I don’t want to discuss, I don’t want to know, I don’t want to look—than he and Doctor Mickey drive back to the town, and then Manny says good-bye, and races right over to the house of the painter.

  He had arranged it. So don’t think it was an accident that she was home. She was expecting him. They had tea. Tea, of course, what did you expect, liquor? My Manny hardly ever touches liquor. Now and then, at a party, he’ll sip a glass, but never a lot.

  And they’re talking.

  And he says, and she says, you know that kind of thing.

  But through the talk he’s staring at her, she’s staring at him, the looks behind the talk, they’re saying a lot they can’t use words for, not when they hardly know each other, not so soon.

  “How long have you been painting?”

  “A long time, Rabbi Bloch. Ever since I was a small child. Drawing, I was drawing first.”

  “Please call me Manny, will you, please?”

  “I’d be happy to. Manny.”

  “Thank you. So this was before the camps? or after?”

  “Before. And I drew when I was inside. With whatever materials I could find. Sometimes a guard would take pity on me and give me things, sometimes guards would find my things and tear them up and throw them away.”

  “Would you say it kept you going?”

  “It did keep me going.”

  “And after, you kept on painting?”

  “It was the only good thing I knew. My parents were dead, I had no friends. Drawing, painting, was all I had. Rabbi . . .”

  “Manny, please. Manny.”

  “Manny.”

  She’s lighting a cigarette now. Putting down the pencil she was using to make a sketch of him and lighting a cigarette. This was her only vice as far as my Manny could tell—she smoked and smoked and smoked. She was wearing a peach sweater dress and stockings in her own house as though she had been expecting him to arrive on her way out to some function at the temple or in the city, and when she crossed her legs the stockings made a swishing sound to which my Manny listened intently, listened to her inhale and blow out the smoke, swish, and the insuck and outrush of air. In the space between the sounds he could hear the noise of his own future, a faint, faint whirring like the echo of a voice shouted far off in some hills. Does this make sense? It’s what he told me he heard, what he imagined, do you think? But then this is the boy who heard what the white pigeon told him, and did it, and he’s not crazy, he’s a big success, he’s got the temple, and he’s got the business in the city, and if he hears things and he keeps it to himself does the rest of the world have to decide whethe
r or not he’s a little odd or if he’s a success but crazy, who knows? He was listening to his own future, he told me later, and whatever that meant to him it had to do with the woman, the woman smoking, the escaped-from-the-camps woman smoking who in a few minutes would show him her sketch and he would say, “That’s me, I suppose, but a me I never can catch when I look in the mirror.”

  “I want to paint you soon,” she told him then, “because there’s no way I can get your hair and your eyes in a drawing. I need color.”

  “Color.”

  AND NOW WE finished our dinner, we’ll have some coffee, but first I got to . . .

  Ah, never mind the spill, Sally, the girl will clean it. I’m so clumsy, from the eye problem I get clumsy because I reach and it’s not there, and I touch and it’s over to the side.

  But while they’re talking about the painting, and they’re both trying to figure out, as people in this kind of situation do, how they can say to each other what they really want to say, I’m going to continue on my way to the bathroom, and then I’ll be right back.

  So. I made it. You thought maybe I got lost? I’m the woman who gave birth to a financial genius, to a man who figures out he should give silence instead of words on the subject of the camps of the Nazis. You think I couldn’t find my way to the toilet and back?

  COLOR, I WAS saying. His hair. She wanted the right color.

  “That is what attracted me to you,” she said.

  Because now they’re sitting next to each other, I forgot to say, I guess, ha-ha, it happened while I was in the toilet, they’re next to each other, and he’s kissing her, and she’s kissing him, her mouth tasting of many cigarettes, and he’s so uncomfortable in his suit coat, he stands up, and strips his coat off, and that’s when she says, “That is what attracted me to you, your hair,” she said, “the color of your hair, it’s extraordinary . . .”

  “Like me,” he said, and sat down next to her and threw himself on top of her, and she didn’t do anything but throw herself back.

  You’re shocked, I can tell, because of what I’m saying, about my own son, your rabbi, but why should it be a secret? If it’s something I want to tell, it shouldn’t be a secret, should it? Because I’m telling you, because I’m trying to figure how it all came to be the way it came to be, one woman in the rest home, a girl on the street, look, hours now and she hasn’t come back. How did it happen? Was it me? Or my Jacob? Or my own mother and father, something they did or said? Or was it Adam and Eve, the things they did? Or was it God Himself, or Herself, my Sarah-Sadie jokes about it these days now that she’s a big-shot student in college, was it God? Did He or She just decide that it was all going to be this way? the rabbi of the congregation and the woman who survived the camps taking their clothes off in her living room? Look, he’s pulling off his undershirt, and she’s turning her back so he can help her unhook her brassiere, and then she takes him suddenly by the hands and she says,

  “Don’t you want to get comfortable?”

  And my Manny nods his head, yes, of course, and she leads him, both of them half undressed, and he’s staring at her breasts, cones in shape they are, her nipples dark coins, and there’s that small line of numbers on her arm above her wrist, breasts, numbers, breasts, numbers, this is what he stares at on their way up to the second floor.

  She is a hairy woman all over, he discovers when they get upstairs. No, no listen, look at the look on your face, if you could see it, but listen look, they get upstairs, what’s the big deal a man getting undressed, we’ve all seen it, but to him, my Manny, he’s only seen one woman, and I don’t mean me, because he never saw me without no clothes except when we lived in the apartment on Second Street and it was very small and no place for privacy, but Manny was small then, and for him as a man he had only the redhead, and she is like a little girl, look, her I’ve seen plenty of times, flat-chested, not a lot of hair and what hair she has is reddish-blonde and so it looks like when she is naked you can see beneath her skin into the pinkish tissue of her under-self. This was a sight he was used to, and what you’re used to seems natural and everything else strange, a freak almost.

  So when they’re in the upstairs room, her bedroom, with her paintings hanging all around—dark colors, shapes he never saw before in paintings but things he could easily imagine in dreams—she’s slipping out of her underclothes, and, oh, let me tell you, for him it’s very strange, because in the dark light of the room in midafternoon, the curtains closed, the paintings hanging all about, he imagines things, he sees her all hairy and he imagines for a second that she has a snout—wait, and then he recovers and sees her climbing into bed, and it’s like a forest from her navel nearly down to her thighs, and—wait, look—then he imagines, listen, in the heat of it he’s like a little boy again, in the dark at night in our old place, and he’s seeing these frightening sights, that she’s got a snout like a wolf, so hairy she is, and then he climbs in alongside her and he’s over the fear, and they’re embracing, and for Manny, my Manny, it’s like he’s the one been taking drugs all weekend instead of the wife now in the rest home, because he has the sensation as soon as he’s holding her and she’s holding him, he swears this, that lying there horizontal he is falling, falling, down into the opening of the forest grove where the underbrush lay thick and overgrown, hiding the passage but showing the way all the same, and for the rest of the afternoon he got lost there, a little boy, a grown man, and for the rest of the afternoon he did not rest until it was over.

  He didn’t rest even then, as a matter of fact, not in his mind. For years he had been climbing into bed with Maby, and nothing like this had ever happened, the trip through a fairy tale, the voyage through trees. Wait, it was like that, he described it. He had seen things, sure, and he had heard things, because this is the boy who heard the voice of the white pigeon and grew up to be the man who heard more voices, and he had heard a voice just a few nights before, remember, when he was wrestling with the talk about the camps, but of all the things he had heard, it was not like this, because this was something that drew him in all over, not just sound or sight but smell too, and touch, but also this time with a sensation like electrical in his heart, and in his nose up where it meets the face, behind his tongue, at the roots of his teeth, at the sockets of elbow and knee and in my Manny’s toes and ankle joints, something that he had never imagined before let alone believed happened to other people. So it was, this feeling, yes, in his marrow bones, and he did not know what to do about it or what to call it but only to live through it or with it or whatever else he was going to have to do.

  “Do you mind,” she said, after a while, “if I smoke a cigarette?”

  And he began to laugh wildly, the way he imagined Maby would be laughing if she were not sitting in a clean room in the rest home looking out at the trees enshrouded by fog, the clouds that drifted close to the ground in western Jersey where the forests flourished, where the state was not the state where the rest of us still lived, Maby sitting in her room with a river of drugs running through her veins keeping her calm and cool and collected, the way she would be laughing if she knew that after all these years, after the studies and the struggle in the early days to take care of the congregations, and the early days in the business after her father died, the business that was growing now so large that he was worrying almost all the time about living a double life, and which to choose, which to give up, that after telling his mother all because his mother was the only woman in his life for so long, and after thinking that he would live forever, because that was the custom, with his red-haired bride from the Middle West, and after discovering that he could not go on much longer because of what she had told him about her and her brother, that burden added on to the other burden of the congregation and the business, the choice between living a life that might be blessed and a life in which he was rich and growing richer, that after all this he had finally, finally, found a way to let go. Very funny.

  A Daughter’s Prayer

  WHERE
WERE YOU IN THE DARK? WHERE? WHERE DID YOU disappear? You walked with me as a child. I remember hearing Your voice in the closet behind my toy chest. God, I said to You, where did You put my Mickey coloring book? Where did You put my Mouse? And You answered, You said, girl, it lies in the bottom of the chest. And I went there and looked and, lo and behold, there it was. In the old days—I hear this in the class, I hear it in sermons—You spoke to us in a burning bush, You spoke to us in a cloud and pillar of fire. Why not use Your plain voice now? If You’re not a man, even better to speak. What if You are a She? Or an It, something between the two usual sexes? What if You have both the one thing and the other? What if You are a dual sex? What if You are a woman, though, what if? Do You have periods? Do You feel the cramps come on as the egg sets out on its journey? Do You mourn for the death of the egg? Do You care for the egg? Or do You hate the egg? Do You think about the egg as a life? Or is our world the egg from Your ovary? Are we the life on the evolving egg? Are we the children of Your universe? Or if so, how did we get fertilized? If You are a woman, did You have intercourse with a male God? And how did that happen? Did He force you, as I know how force can be, or did You go into a trance, as I know how a trance can take over, or did You decide that it was time and that You had to find out what it was like, which I did? And did You like it? Or did You find that it was something not for You? And if it was something not for You, God, did You find that You kept to Yourself for a long time? And then did You find that You looked for someone like Yourself so that You could find pleasure? And is our good weather on this planet Your pleasure, perhaps? And is our hate and fear and killing and war and anxiety, is it Your cramping? Your periods?

  Oh, I know I don’t know—oh, I know I care but I don’t know how to find out. I don’t know how to find it. But dear, dearest God or Goddess, if You are a female, then I want to tell You that I need You now. I need to know. I need You most. I need You swiftly. I need You now in the dark, and in the light. I want to touch Your body, Goddess, I want to hold Your hand.