Prayers for the Living Read online

  “THE POOR CHILD.”

  “Poor.”

  “And this is how he lost his father?”

  “This is how.”

  “And this is how you lost your Jacob?”

  “This is how.”

  “I’m telling you . . .”

  “You’re telling me? I’m telling you!”

  “But it has a good side, no?”

  “It has a good side? Sure, it has a good side. I’m sitting here drinking coffee with you. That’s a good side. I’m still here. And Manny is still here.”

  “No, I meant, this is how they met, wasn’t it?”

  “How did you figure it out?”

  “The hair. You described the hair. So it’s her, isn’t it?”

  “It’s her. The first her. The mother of the other her. The opposite of the third her.”

  “It was her family in the taxi.”

  “It was her family. Her father, her mother, her mixed-up brother.”

  “The brother-in-law? He’s mixed up?”

  “You should meet him now that he’s a grown man.”

  “I saw him at temple.”

  “Up close you should see.”

  “I’ll take a look next time.”

  “Take a good look. It’s all part of the family show. After years away he shows up, and he’s part of the family again.”

  “Here.”

  “I don’t take sugar, so why are you passing me the sugar?”

  “Darling, don’t talk bitter.”

  “Bitter? All of a sudden I’m talking bitter? Mrs. Pinsker, Rose, I am sweet. Very sweet.”

  “It was only a joke, Mrs. Bloch. Minnie.”

  “Some joke.”

  “Don’t get miffed.”

  “All right, I won’t get miffed.”

  “And you’ll tell me more?”

  “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you things. I’ll tell you that when they brought my Manny home to me without his father . . .”

  “Don’t tell me if it makes you remember.”

  “Remember? I don’t remember, darling. And I don’t forget. I’ll tell you this. Manny said to me, the poor little boy, he says, ‘Mama, you know, if they used paper bottles instead of the glass the weight of the wagon wouldn’t have been so much on Papa.’”

  “He said this to you?”

  “He said it. Of course, he said it. Would I make something up like that? He didn’t know what he was saying. He was in shock still.”

  “Shock? Shock? Who wouldn’t be in shock? But they brought him to you? Or the police brought him?”

  “They did. The Sporens. This was their name. It still is their name. The brother, of course, he’s alive. The mother, the father, they died some years ago. Terrible. They had their accident. He was in his house, a very beautiful home in Cincinnati, let me tell you, and he was going to go to the basement to look for a bottle of wine—it was a Sunday, they were at home together—and she says, ‘Meyer, let me go for you.’ She was a cold woman in a way, the little I knew her I could tell that, but she also had a good side, a nice side. When she had a glass of wine, it came out.”

  “She sounds nice.”

  “She was nice this time. Already she’d had one glass. And look where it got her? She goes over and opens the door to their downstairs, to their cellar. The house was on a steep hill, they have many steep hills in Cincinnati . . .”

  “I’ve never been there.”

  “Someday you’ll go.”

  “At my age? I want to see Paris first.”

  “You never saw Paris? We stopped there on our trip to Israel a few years ago.”

  “Rome. When we went to Israel we stopped in Rome.”

  “Rome we stopped too. But so you’ll never see Cincinnati, it’s a lot like Rome, they say, because of the hills—so she opens the door and reaches for the light, and in the reaching, loses her balance, and she falls down the stairs. Terrible.”

  “Terrible.”

  “She hits her head. Without a sound she lies there. And he comes to the head of the stairs, the old boat captain, that’s how he started out, and he bought more and more barges, I told you already, and pretty soon he’s got a fleet, he’s got docks, he’s got bigger and bigger ships, and you think a man like this could live a long time to enjoy it. But . . .”

  “So what happened?”

  “What happened? He comes to the top of the stairs, squints down into the dark. And he calls to her.”

  “And she answered?”

  “She couldn’t talk. She was paralyzed. Her neck, you know? Her spine . . . the cord . . .”

  “So? Don’t keep me in the dark.”

  “Very funny. He pulls on the light and he looks down and he sees her, and he starts down the steps. And by the time he gets to the bottom he’s already dead himself.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Would I kid about such a terrible thing. It was his heart. He had an attack. From the scare. From the sight. And that was that. He falls over on top of her. And who knows how long she was lying there with the weight of her dead husband on her body before they found her.”

  “Who came? Who found?”

  “Who came? Who found? Guess who?”

  “Her?”

  “Her.”

  “Oi.”

  “Oi, is right. It was quite a sight, quite a sight. For a girl her age. Something to see.”

  “How old was she?”

  “She was old enough, old enough to feel the hurt and know the pain.”

  “So it wasn’t like when your Manny saw his father, your Jacob, under the truck. She was older. He was younger.”

  “Thank God for small favors. No, when he saw Jacob, he went into shock. And he came home, I told you, and he says this about the paper containers being better than the glass. And he’s holding in his pocket the piece of glass.”

  “The famous piece of glass.”

  “To this day, that’s right, he carries it with him everywhere.”

  “And his hand was bleeding?”

  “His hand? His heart! His hand was nothing. So we bandaged it. Or Mrs. Sporen did. They took over for a little until the rabbi came, and the neighbors.”

  “That was a help.”

  “A help? What could help? Nothing could help! The dead at least lie still. I was rolling on the bed tearing out my hair.”

  “Make some tea, make some tea!” Meyer Sporen is shouting at his wife.

  “All right, don’t holler at me, Meyer!” she’s hollering back at him.

  “Mother, for Christ’s sake!” the boy is shouting.

  And the girl is watching her mother help Manny undress.

  “Where’s your clean clothes, darling?” she’s asking him, and he’s standing there like a dressmaker’s dummy, his arms and legs moving when she makes them move, otherwise not moving. In his pocket, the piece of glass, this, the one I drew you, in his fingers the bandage, and now he’s rubbing the fingers again through the bandage.

  “Let me,” Mrs. Sporen says, trying to take it from him, but quick he whips it back and she stands dumb, looks around for the toilet, leads him to that little closet where the bulb goes on when you pull the string. In the light she sees her dress. And for a minute she forgets about him. She sees the smear on her dress from what he has done in his pants when she was helping him out of the clothes, and she grunts in disgust, and there’s the girl looking at her, looking at him, and she lets out a shriek, and he, Meyer Sporen, comes rushing up to the door and he says, “What do you think you are doing? We’re here to help, not hinder, and so stop complaining, and so what is it? We’ve got trouble with the lady here, so what? What?”

  And the little girl points, and her mother says nothing, and the father says, “On you even dreck looks good. Now take over, make some tea.”

  “I’ll make tea, Papa,” the little girl says.

  “You’ll make, you’ll make. You’ll make what the boy made, a mess, so don’t worry. Thank you, sweetheart, but here we need your mother to
take over.”

  “I’m changing his clothes, can’t you see?” she says to him, with a voice like a knife.

  Why they’re hollering, I don’t know, I don’t care, but I can hear them from the bed where I’m tearing my hair, and I’m thinking, why are they hollering? Soon enough they’ll be dead too. They had years then, of course, but to me at the time years were nothing. Time had dried like laundry on the roof on a warm afternoon. Years like moisture all gone and only the wind was left, blowing my hair, my face, burning me in the chest, the arms, and I had no days, but a lot of time left, both at once, you know? I had time like a big tall glass and nothing to fill it with. And if it wasn’t for Manny I would have died. But I heard them shouting, and I got up, and he was standing there while they were hollering, and he was covered with his own mess, and I took him, and they grabbed for him but I pushed them away, and I took him to the sink, and I washed my boy, and I cleaned him. It was good practice for the years to come.

  “You took good care of him, these years.”

  “Is that a question? I have an answer. I took, I cared. I took good care.”

  “And he’s grateful. You can see, he respects his mother, he gives to her.”

  “You can tell. Yes, he gives. And this gets him in trouble with you-know-who.”

  “With her? Which her?”

  “The first her. And maybe the second.”

  “The second Maby?”

  “Sarah, yes. The second redhead. Or third, if you count me, the mother.”

  “Of course I count you. You don’t count you?”

  “I count, I count on my fingers. I count the years since all this happened, since my Jacob passed away.

  “You know when I started counting? I started counting when, after I finished cleaning him up, I saw Manny standing at the window by the fire escape watching the birds. The famous birds. His little friend Arnie kept the pigeons and they would all day long fly up, fly down, and here he was my Manny standing there, watching, newly washed, not saying a word. Behind him of course there’s a lot of words people are saying.”

  “How do they live?” Mrs. Sporen is saying.

  “Sha,” her husband says. “I grew up in this neighborhood. They live, that’s how.”

  “This is living?” she says.

  They’re talking, while I’m back to my oi-yoi-yoiing.

  “Maby,” he says.

  “Maybe what?” I’m thinking.

  “Maby,” he says again. “Darling.”

  “What, Papa?”

  That’s when I discover that Maby is the little redhead’s name.

  “Maby, someone’s knocking, please answer the door.”

  “Maybe I will,” she says.

  “Not maybe. Answer it. Your mother’s at the stove.”

  “I’ll get it,” Mrs. Sporen says. She was standing in the toilet, the closet, actually, taking a drink from a bottle that she kept in her pocketbook.

  “I’ll get it,” the older boy says, and goes to the door. He had been sitting next to me, trying to comfort me. It didn’t help much.

  But here came the neighbors, Mrs. Tabatchnick, little Arnie’s mother, the whole bunch, and that helped a little. Behind them in time came the police, the undertaker, the rabbi, other neighbors. I went on with my oi-yoi-yoiing. Eventually the Sporens left, returning to their home in Cincinnati from where they were visiting the city, Meyer Sporen’s old neighborhood, traveling downtown in that famous taxi, the taxi that swerved and frightened the horse that pulled the wagon that tipped over on my Jacob and left him crushed flat in a lake of milk. Oi-yoi-yoi-yoi-yoi . . .

  Before this I did not think much about believing. I believed, or I didn’t believe, it didn’t matter. But that day I learned that the Lord giveth and He taketh away, in strange portions, strange ways. Here, now, wait a minute. Take an intermission. I’ve got to go to the bathroom. The coffee, all of it I drank, I got to go so bad I can taste it.

  “OKAY, SO HERE I am again. So. Where was I? Oh yes. He started the next week sending me money, and he never stopped.”

  “Sporen?”

  “Of course, who else?”

  It wasn’t enough, so I went to work in the shirt factory, but the money helped, believe me, it helped. He had the boat business in Cincinnati, you see. On the river. The Ohio. And this runs into the Mississippi, and then into the Gulf of Mexico. The boy, his older child, took a job on one of his boats and went out into the gulf, and further south. The girl stayed at home. She went to a fancy school. She learned French. All this while I was working in the shirt factory and Manny is studying with the rabbi. That’s right—the little humpbacked rabbi took him over. On Saturday mornings he started accompanying me to shul.

  “Your father would never believe it,” I told him the first time.

  “My father made a mistake,” Manny said, “may he rest in peace. He worked on the Sabbath, and that was a big mistake.”

  “So what do you want to do?” A friend of his, Arnie, standing there with us asked this of him. “You want to become a rabbi yourself?

  Come along, Ma.” He tugs at my hand. “Arnie? You coming?”

  “I got to feed my pigeons and then I got to practice,” Arnie says.

  He was a skinny boy, Arnie, but when he picked up that clarinet, I’m telling you, he made beautiful music. Manny, on the other hand, was stocky, he was always stocky, like his father, and when he got on his high horse you couldn’t knock him off with a stick. He wanted me to go to shul with him. I went. His friend Arnie stayed home.

  “He’ll be sorry, Ma,” Manny said to me on our way down the street.

  “Like your father was sorry?” I asked him.

  This was a time when Manny and I grew apart, the only time. When he was under the wing of the old rabbi. He did nothing but study, study, study. It was like he went from childhood to old age without having a life in between. And he was a stranger to me. I got up in the morning, made breakfast, went to work, he went to study with the old man. And he became like the old man, even walking a little hunched over, his head hanging to one side as if from the weight of his studies.

  “What’s the matter, you don’t smile no more?” I used to say to him. But could he take a joke? Like his ugly teacher, he looked at me in a different way then than he had before. His own mother, he looked at her like she was a foreigner. And treated her like she was nothing but his servant. And he told me nothing. Ten, eleven, he got older in body and in mind, twelve, thirteen, he had a bar mitzvah, and it was like an old man’s bar mitzvah, Manny stooped over the Torah looking even older than his teacher except for the hair, because then he still had his original hair color of the wing of a crow, tar-roof-black hair, and the old man had his white hair. Fourteen, fifteen, he kept on studying, and I kept on working, and the money came in from Cincinnati, regular like clockwork, sixteen, seventeen, those years flew away, let me tell you. And then comes the invitation to study in Cincinnati, and this brings down the house.

  Because until then he had not told me his secret. For years he had kept it hidden to himself and his old teacher. And so because it was hidden from me I kept it hidden from you until now, because I wanted you to know what it felt like to be in the dark. You go along, day to day, working, cooking, cleaning, trying to give the boy everything both a mother and a father could give, and you live in the dark. You know? You’re sitting there every day eating the toast, drinking tea, passing the sugar, and you know nothing of what’s going on inside the boy you’re sitting with. You wash his clothes, you mend his clothes, you make his bed, dust his dresser, comb, when he’s little, his hair, make him wash his face, make sure he has a little sweet here and there, make sure he has his friends to play with, that he does his studies—though in this department I didn’t have to worry, did I?—and what do you know? You know nothing. Dark. Darkness. Like in the middle of the night. In the middle of the day. In the bright early morning. Dark, dark, dark.

  And then something happens, and it’s like lightning in the storm. It
lights up, darling. You see everything, but only for a second.

  The offer came from Cincinnati. And he told me. Well, he told me first what happened the first time. He told me and for a little while I came out of the dark. He had to tell me something because of his hair.

  “It was still black then?”

  “Patience, Mrs. Pinsker, patience.”

  The first story he told was about a bird: he had been walking home from the store one late afternoon, a dark winter city afternoon, dark enough but now snow coming down on top of it, and he had been thinking, returning from this errand, that there must be a way that he could help me with the expenses without giving up his studies, thinking he could get a job after school for an hour or two, if he could find the right man who would understand his situation and hire him for only a short period each day, and he was thinking, deeper than the thoughts about work, as he often did throughout his life after the accident, thinking, if the milk bottles had been cartons, the weight would not have turned over the truck, and his father would have lived, and how to make paper containers for liquid, for milk; and he walked right into an alley. You know how you walk when you’re thinking of things but not about the world in front of you? Right into this alley. And he looked up and he saw a wall in front of him and he turned and saw another. How could that be? And a flock of pigeons descended from the small patch of sky above the alley, a dark curtain already thick with snow, the evening the color of window shades no one for ages has cleaned, and Manny backed against the wall feeling a sudden deep fear, and unto him spoke a pigeon, the leader of the flock, saying, Manny, you have strayed from the path but do not falter—listen, Mrs. Pinsker, I’m telling you this is what he told me it said—do not falter because your father sees your works and hath no questions!