Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  He went looking, first for his good soft-soled shoes because this was another day of standing all morning and afternoon and he wanted to be as comfortable as he could make himself, and these it appeared he had misplaced. He went up to the top of the house, and down to the study, his library, even to the basement, and he couldn’t find the shoes. It got so he was cursing, because who wants to stand all day in uncomfortable shoes on top of everything else—the fasting, the hard work of leading the service, the looking down into the faces of the congregation and feeling his fatigue rise in him like water crawling up to the brim of a glass—and then of course he felt terrible because he was cursing over nothing but a stupid pair of shoes. When he had so many other more important things to worry about, I don’t have to tell you, he was worrying about her, about both hers, the mother with the problem in the store—you didn’t hear? I can tell by your look you never heard, well, so later I’ll tell you, but not now because I don’t want to be distracted—and the other her, the daughter with the problem with the boy—both hers, her and her. To think, women give him such trouble when all his life while growing he didn’t have no problem with me . . . don’t laugh, don’t laugh or I’ll close my mouth!

  So . . . down the stairs, up—he can’t find the shoes, and then he feels a headache coming on, from the fasting probably, he figures, an ache so big it’s like one of those dark summer thunderstorm clouds you see blowing in over the water at Bradley Beach, and he shudders when he thinks what he’s doing with his life, with his congregation, with his business, because after all what is he? Can he stand every weekend in front of the temple crowd and make his sermons and still go in twice a week to the city to work with his brother-in-law in the holding company? He’s wandering around the house, thinking to himself, I’ve lost more than my shoes . . . and if I find them how do I find what else I’ve lost?

  He’s in the kitchen, he’s looking behind the desk in his study, he’s on his hands and knees snooping behind the couch and you know what he finds there? He finds a pair of panties the size the same as both hers wear because the daughter has now reached the point where she has the same hips as the mother, and the same hair, as you know, but God forbid the same disposition, there it’s maybe too early to tell, and so anyway, he says to himself, on top of everything else, what’s this? what’s this? and he stuffs the panties in his pocket and keeps on looking, the panties in the pocket along with a piece of glass he carries with him all the time, a souvenir, a piece of glass shaped like a Jewish star, and about this don’t ask a question, because I’ll explain in a while if you want me to, or maybe even if you don’t, because it’s a story from the beginning, and this I’m telling you now comes from the middle—and God forbid we should see the end.

  So he’s on his hands and knees and feeling the first drummings of the headache and the first winds of the dizziness, and then he’s up again, shouting for Maby, and where is she? Who knows, taking a bath? She takes so many baths you’d think she got herself dirty like a baby when the truth is ever since the business in the store—and I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you—she doesn’t go out at all except when he says you absolutely have to, only to services, not even to temple affairs—so she doesn’t answer, and he calls for Sarah. Sarah! he calls, and where is she? Outside on the back porch playing, would you believe this? Playing her guitar! And singing, on the holidays! He can’t believe this either!

  Sometimes I feel

  Like a motherless child.

  Not a bad voice, and on other days he might have stopped and thought to himself, My daughter, with such a good voice, but the song, oi, the song it gives me heartache.

  Sometimes I feel

  Like a motherless child.

  A nice song, an American song, because in the old country we had our mamas, we knew our mamas, and if we sang we sang to celebrate our mamas, not to tell the world we got lost, except, of course, for later, for the ones that got lost in the Holocaust, but that’s another story. Here she is, singing the song of the lost child, she’s strumming good, she’s singing strong and loud, and he goes charging off after her, not knowing exactly where she is, following the music, the song.

  Sometimes I feel

  Like I’m almost gone.

  “How can you do it to me on a day like this?” he growls at her when he bursts out onto the back porch.

  “I’m playing my guitar,” she says. “I’m not out in public. I’m on the porch. Am I embarrassing you?”

  “The porch is public,” he says, trying his best to keep his voice down. “The porch is outside. The porch is the world. Go inside, young lady, and get ready for temple.”

  “I am ready,” she says, poking a finger at one of the guitar strings.

  “Are you?” And he yanks out of his pocket the panties he found under the sofa and says, “Put these on if you’re so ready!” And throws them in her face.

  “That’s . . . disgusting!” she says to him, her face covered over as if with a veil. And she snatches them up and flings them over her shoulder into the garden.

  “Pick those up,” her father says.

  “Pick them up yourself, Rabbi,” she says. And she plucks a loud thirrum with two fingers on the guitar.

  Maybe if she had only been insolent, just mean, nothing else would have happened. But she added that title, Rabbi, and it did something to his temper, to his mind. Fathers and daughters! What a story, an old story, ach, and a bitter one, bitter, bitter, bitter. So. She called him what he was, and that changed it all. Why? Even now I’m still finding out, after he’s telling me all, after she’s talking to me, this poor old grandma with the bad eyes, and they’re talking to her, but to each other do you think they’re talking? You can imagine. Look! He reaches over, and she cringes, like a dog fearing a smack, but he doesn’t want her, no, he grabs the guitar and even as she’s screaming, “No! No!” up he hurls it, and it sails end over end, making a strange shape in the air as it spins, and it comes down, like a filmy piece of silk or nylon but also like the thing of wood it is and smash! onto the walk beyond the porch steps, and it splinters, breaks into pieces.

  What a way to start the holiest of holy days! Everyone already feeling tired and irritated, because of the fasting, because of the heat—always in Jersey it’s hot like summer in India when the high holidays come around—and his breath stinks in his own nose, and now he’s got this to contend with! As if everything else weren’t enough, as if the life he’s made hasn’t been enough, as if he doesn’t want to pick it up like that guitar and throw it into the air without caring where it comes down in pieces! He can barely stand up to it, and he says, holding down his voice as best he can, but you can hear it trembling—I heard it trembling because this was when I opened the door and came onto the back porch . . . “Little girl,” he is saying, “little girl . . .”

  And you can imagine what this did to her, this girl growing up so quick, her life like a merry-go-round, going around in circles at the moment but moving, quickly, quickly—don’t I know what it was like? But she had stung him with that word, the piercing word, Rabbi, though how could she know? Maybe her instincts told her? Was that how she stabbed right through? He was thinking about his life, on this holy day, on the day when God’s moving finger or pen or whatever He writes with, maybe even now a typewriter or a computer, when He—or She or whatever God is these days—marks in the Book of Life or the Book of Death, he’s been thinking, wondering, pondering, sweating in his brain, milking his thoughts, should I go on with this farce—wait, all this will come to you—should I go on with it? or should I get out? All week long, all day long the day before, and all night lying there in a sweat, alongside his sleeping beauty, the woman dead to the world from all the pills she takes so she can sleep, should I? shouldn’t I? What could the daughter know of the father? She couldn’t know, the children never know until it’s too late. Even now do you think he knows about me? his own mother? and did I know mine?

  I’m telling you, the whole world works backward in reverse, t
hat the parents should know of the children all the time and be unable to do anything and the children know only when it’s too late! And even more than the parents of the children it is the grandmother who knows triple trouble, because she knows her troubles and the children’s and the children’s children’s, and thinking about it, talking about it, gives me such a headache I’m telling you that if there is a God in heaven—and don’t be shocked that I say something like this, because today you hear a lot worse from smarter people than me—but if there is, He must have the biggest headache of all from knowing everything backward, forward, past and future, but then if He’s so great I suppose He can make for Himself the biggest headache powder, no? Poor little girl turning big girl who I rocked in my arms when she was a newborn, how could she know what she had said?

  “You are going to pay for this,” my Manny shouts, “you are going to pay! You little . . . little . . . !”

  Please don’t say something terrible! I call out to him in my mind. And maybe he hears, because he turns and goes back inside, walking around me to do it, like I’m a stranger, “Excuse me,” he says, and goes upstairs to his dressing room—because by this time it’s separate bedrooms for them, which, Sarah told me, is very troubling to her for not-so-obvious reasons, and he reaches into his pocket and takes out his favorite piece of glass and sees his finger all slashed from it, and he goes into the bathroom to wash off the blood and put on a little bandage, and there he finds her, Maby, throwing up into the bowl. I’m telling you, it’s early morning and this man has already had quite a day.

  He didn’t say: “You’re not sick, are you? Poor dear.”

  He said: “You’re sick again and today of all days?”

  “It’s the heat,” she said, in that voice like a sound trying to shrink back into itself, the voice that came out to shrink only when she was in one of her states. “I was taking a bath and the heat got to me, Manny. It made me ill.” And this was a big difference between them, my son and my daughter-in-law, him saying sick and her saying ill, a difference in upbringing, her from the fancy Cincinnati school, him from where we came from, from Second Street, from the old rabbi’s school, some finishing school that was! When I first saw her, with her red hair, the pale pink face, I asked myself, this is one of us? But then I learned . . . too much I learned, if you ask me.

  “You know what just got to me?” he said to her. And he launches into a tirade against the daughter, telling about the guitar, about her curse—he took it that way—upon him.

  “I don’t want to hear!” Maby says, spitting up more into the bowl. “Just leave me out of it, do you hear? Leave me out.”

  “She’s your daughter as much as mine,” he says, “and she’s insolent and cruel and . . .”

  She spits up more into the bowl.

  And with his bleeding finger, he grabs from the medicine chest a little bandage, and he walks out into his own room.

  This was how he started that day. If you think it got any better, guess again, darling, guess again. You were there. You saw the moment. And there were other moments behind the big moment, I’ll tell you. Here is what it was. First he’s dressed quicker than you can say Jack Ribicoff and then he’s standing at the front door calling back to me.

  “Ma,” he’s calling, “Mama, tell Maby to get after Sarah to get ready because I’m on my way.”

  I had been standing at the sink, feeling a little bit lost since on a fast day I couldn’t cook, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t help nobody else do neither.

  “Don’t put it all on the mama,” I called to him. “The mama has her troubles, too, you know.”

  He walked back up to the entrance to the kitchen and stuck in his head, just for a change like he was my little boy again.

  “I wasn’t yelling at you, Mama, just calling.”

  “And at the others you were yelling, not calling?”

  “You heard what she said, you heard the way that she said it.”

  “Which one?”

  “Sarah.”

  “Oh,” I said to him, “you think this is a special event? You should hear how she talks to her grandmother.”

  “She’s sarcastic with you, too?” he says. “Oh, Mama.” And he throws up his hands, a man with three women who he understands as much as he understands about cars. Business he understands, the accounting, deals, what he calls them, that he understands, and it goes without saying he understands the business of being a rabbi. Who else could have led the temple through all these years since he arrived in a time when congregations—look, I know, I have ears, I have eyes—where they change rabbis the way countries down south of the border change presidents? My Manny, that’s who! So what if he don’t understand the women he lives with? I’m helping him, I’m trying. He knows that. He comes to me, he always has. Like this. Poking his head in through the entrance to the kitchen when already he’s almost late for the start of services on the biggest holiday of the year.

  “Look,” I say, “don’t worry, I’ll talk to her. I’ll help.”

  “You always do, Ma,” he says, and the good boy comes and gives me a hug, and a kiss on my cheek, and even a wink he manages, and off he goes to the temple, walking by himself, and I stand at the door watching him walk away, looking at the rabbi, walking, thinking, getting himself ready for the big morning and the bigger afternoon. To see him people would say, there he goes, our faithful rabbi, pondering the day.

  And he was. Pondering. Later he told me. Worrying about his life. His future. What it would do for him. For the family. Past cars he walked, past street corners, streetlamps, red lights, green lights. And before he even got to the temple he had decided that he was no good for them anymore, that he had to get out—isn’t that terrible? Such a good rabbi, such a good leader, such a fine advisor to men, women, children, even on the building committee he’s wonderful I hear from reports—and either that or he has to give up the business arrangements with her brother in the city because not that the time is too demanding, because no, he goes in there only once, twice a week, just like if he was going to school there as some rabbis do, or to teach, but no, it’s not the time, but the feeling he has of living like two people when he is only one man, living mostly for others, living for me, living for her, for the wife, the daughter, living—this he told me and you see how much he sees—living for my poor, dear, all-these-years-departed Jacob.

  You know, you have one of those situations, your late husband, years it’s been, yes? Or if not him, someone? Living for the dead, I told him. How can you live for the dead? And he said to me, “Mama, this is what I told myself, because I have always tried to be the best advisor to myself, to counsel myself”—notice how dignified he talks even to his own mother?—“even as I would have myself counsel others.” And he said this to himself as he was walking to temple, he said, “Manny, you fool, you stupid holy fool, for whom are you living? For whom do you put in these long hours, this double life? If not for yourself, then for whom?” Did he want to live a life dedicated to study? Or did he want to live a life in which he could use the talents he inherited from his father? Which did he want? One? Or the other? He heard a voice in his head telling him, both! Choose both! Take both! You can have both! You’ve been living now for the last few years with both! And why should one cancel out the other? Is there a law saying somewhere a rabbi can’t know the world and the world can’t know a rabbi?

  Walking, thinking. Stomach growling, churning. A fast day. And a day for thinking, walking. All too quickly the time passes. He looks up out of his trance, sees a familiar house, a familiar arrangement of tree and bush. And up there in our New Jersey sky, a cloud, and way high up, a bird, swooping. And he knows he will become again a public person, talking and thinking out loud, doing a job, making a performance. Was that how he saw it? Was that what he wanted? Playacting? Making a public display, a mockery even of his inner thoughts? Unable to say all that he felt about what he was doing, what he read about, thought about? Walking, thinking, stomach growling. Feeling a l
ittle tingling on the soles of his feet. A big day ahead, standing, standing all day.

  And what about his other life? Across the river. The company. A holding corporation, he called it to me. The father-in-law died, left it to the brother, who was absent and then appeared as if by magic, and asked Manny to come in with him, advise him. The brother was a sailor, a shipper-outer, not a man of the city. He had left home early, run away, never really knew the little sister, feuded with the father—and when you know why, you’ll know a good reason, and of course I’ll tell you, but wait, later, first this—the brother worked on the ships because the father had been a boat man, a man who first owned boats on a river and then bought containers for shipping—and then what? Oceans!

  You’re smiling, you’re smiling, because you think the old grandmother can’t know from the business? So I don’t know much. But you think a grandmother can’t know, what do you think of a rabbi? He can’t know either? Old dogs, new tricks, you’re thinking? New dogs, old tricks, is more like it, but listen—so—walking, thinking, remembering, past hedge, car, tree, driveway, corner, and now the cloud has gone and up above it is a beautiful high holy day blue sky, as if God in heaven had blessed New Jersey with something, the gift of never having had a rainy Yom Kippur ever in a lifetime as far as I remember, and he’s thinking, Sporen—this was her father, the man who, well, later I’ll explain because first let’s concentrate on the walking, thinking—Sporen dying, the prodigal son working on one of his ships hearing the news, returning to the country, feeling helpless, hopeless, calling the sister, the brother-in-law after not having seen them in a long, long time, that too, you’ll hear about, just wait, so thinking Sporen, and the business, and what it meant to the sister, wife, to the daughter, then a little little girl, and what it meant to him working in both professions, but could he handle both?