Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  But a man needs, he said to himself as he reached the top of the hidden staircase built into the wall behind the dais and pushed open the door that allowed him to step out onto the raised platform just to the left of the Ark of the Covenant. He needs. Not more than that, needs not x, y, z, wine, women, song, although of course he had on his mind women, mainly Florette, at this point, and me and Maby and Sarah. But he needs. He needs.

  This was how he described it to me, about his mental state, physical state—we were very close, of course, mother and child—as he walked out into the bright lights. He had, all the time, one hand in his pocket fingering his famous star-shaped souvenir and the other adjusting the fringes on his heavy prayer shawl. One time, when he had a sense of humor, he said to me, “You know, Mama, when I do the high holiday service, I feel like a floor,” and I asked, “Why?” and he said, “Because the robes hang as heavy on me as a rug.” And he looks the cantor in the eye, and gives a nod, and Manny moves to the front of the dais, and suddenly looks down and sees me—no longer upstairs, of course, for years no longer upstairs, not since the old days, the old old days, and now I’m down below in the front row, where there is mixed seating, men and women, boys and girls—and I smile at him a good smile, my best smile, and this, he told me later, released something in him—some latch unlatched, some hook unhooked, lock unlocked, lid pried open, trap sprung free—do you see what I’m getting at? And he smiled back, and all at once this feeling rose in his chest like steam from a hole in the ground, like a volcano erupting, a pressure out of the middle of the earth, although it was a lightness, a tugging, and even as he felt his body carry him forward, he looked next to me and saw Maby, and she turned quickly away, as though suddenly ashamed to stare her own husband in the eye, and he noticed his daughter, the third of the redheads in a row, and you know what Sarah does? Does she turn away? No, no, she wets her lips with her tongue, and with her hands in front of her—the demon!—strums for him an invisible guitar. This was at least what he thought he saw, like a drowning man whose seemingly endless days suddenly come to an end with a running backward of the life like on a movie projector in reverse—and at the last second, he caught a flurry of motion toward the rear of the auditorium, and he saw the doors open and in walked Mordecai, the brother-in-law, the partner, bald man, thin, with a beak like a hunting bird, and this may be—if you want to explain things in some way—why he says he saw the birds at the top of the ceiling. Two birds, the pigeon and the parrot.

  Mrs. Pinsker, look up next time you’re in temple. Look for birds. Will you see birds? You’ll see beautiful designs, stars, rectangles, flowers, lines, columns, but birds? No. Not a pigeon, let alone a parrot. A pigeon he could imagine, a window open, in flies a bird. But a parrot? A jungle bird in Jersey? And in the temple of all places? First thing he thought was, Sarah, that little wretch! Ah, his own daughter, at this high holy time, and he thinks such a thing, but on this morning his anger etched the word in for the breaking of the guitar.

  Maybe he thought other things. He thought he thought other things. But how much time did he have to think? He had no time. Florette! He caught a glimpse of her standing up. Standing out wasn’t enough? He might have thought—if he were thinking—she’s got now to stand up? And if he were thinking he might have been thinking about—if the seconds he had up there, like a kite on a string about to take off in a gust of thunderstorm, could have been stopped and cut into slices thin enough to give him time to think—thinking about her numbers. No? Why not? Now and then he thought about her numbers, because he is a man who loves, among other things, his numbers, whether in his business or in his Torah . . .

  But if one hand held a kite string and was tugging, pulling him forward, the other hand held a scissors and quick like that cut the tie, and my Manny pitches forward off the dais, landing at our feet like the kite crumpling, except there was a thud, a skid and a thud, like a crate of vegetables or fruit that some dockworker with muscles thick as rope drops on the ground.

  “WHAT’S ALL THIS?” Mrs. Pinsker asked. “Birds? Kites? Workers? Boxes of fruit? He fell. I was there. I saw. He walked up to the edge of the what-do-you-call-it and he tipped over. He wasn’t drunk. He didn’t trip. But I didn’t see no birds either, darling. No birds.”

  “He saw the birds, Mrs. Pinsker.”

  “Now I believe you that he needs a vacation.”

  “Please don’t joke. This is serious.”

  “So who’s joking? I’m telling you, I believe you. And I hope he comes back refreshed. Doctor Mickey said he had no tumor? No problem like that?”

  “You think to see birds you have to have a tumor? He saw birds when he was a boy and he didn’t have a tumor then and he doesn’t have one now. In any case, he didn’t tell Doctor Mickey about the birds. He told me. His mother.”

  “I’m glad he told somebody.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic. You think people don’t have visions? They have visions, let me tell you. His father had visions, and so I’m not so surprised the son has them too.”

  “A vision? He saw things? Or just he believed in them? Which?”

  “Both, maybe.”

  “So tell me.”

  “I’ll tell you but in order to hear about Manny’s first time seeing things . . .”

  “Oh, so now it’s not a vision but just seeing things?”

  “You know what I’m talking about, darling? My Jacob . . .”

  “All right. So go ’head, talk . . . I’m all ears.”

  “And all earrings, too. Where did you get those?”

  “Oi, don’t change the subject. Begin at the beginning. Your Jacob, you were going to tell me.”

  “I’ll tell you only because it’s important for understanding where the birds came from.”

  “That’s not all. Look at your face. Such a smile. Such memories it gives you, no?”

  “It’s true. That I can’t deny. It makes me feel warm . . . it makes me remember.”

  “Remembering makes you remember?”

  “And forgetting.”

  “Forgetting could make you remember. It could make you want to remember.”

  “But it can’t bring these things back. Remembering brings them back.”

  “So remember.”

  “I’m remembering . . . I’m remembering . . .”

  THE WAVING WANDS of wheat, the sun baking my mama’s babushka blacker than burnt toast, wavy lines of heat rising from her head, the fields, the sun. Holding Mama’s hand walking through the wheat. I feel the smooth and gnarled stalks, the pricking of the stalks, the rough husks. And I am about to tell my mama all about what I feel when along comes the large dark-bearded person of my papa. He takes me up in rough hands dried from the sun and around his mouth, like winds from a cave, come odors of bread, grass, beer, tobacco, fire, fish.

  “FISH?”

  “Fish! Don’t ask me how in the middle of the fields there’s fish for us to eat but sometimes we ate it. Sea of wheat they swim in? Who knows? Papa he grew things, he traded them, so sometimes he must have traded wheat for fish. Or maybe we lived closer to the sea than I remember? Or is the fish part of the dreaming? I don’t know. But the odor of it, and the taste, stay with me. Except now that I remember it I can’t say whether it was Mama was fish and Papa was bread or Mama was bread and Papa was fish, and tobacco, and the smell of wind on his clothes, and the smell of horse on his rough hands. It all floats together in my nostrils. I remember my papa leaning down—he was a tall man, to me as tall as a tree—and Mama raising her cheek for him to kiss it.”

  “Your Jacob, you were going to tell me.”

  “I’m getting to that. Hold your horses, it’s coming.”

  I HAD BEGUN to bleed. And they had me pledged to a chubby, pimply-faced rabbinical student who had come out to our settlement as part of a group of Torah-crazy boys who wanted to save all of us in the countryside from the forces of the Other Side. It made me sick just to think of him. His smell, it was like dead things we threw away behind
our barn. But did that stop Mama? It wasn’t her nose, or her life. She explained to me that it was because she felt so close to me that she wanted for me nothing but the best.

  “Mama,” I said to her, “I want someone who smells like Papa, not a dead dog.”

  Look, in those days, I was direct. I said what I thought. Who knows why? The wheat? The country makes you more direct. You feel things firsthand, you yank on the cow teat in the way you’re taught and out comes the milk. No moping about, no big talk. That was what the city boy didn’t like. To consider a subject was what he wanted to do. Consider the cow teat? I asked him the one and only time he ever got me alone. He raised a hand to slap me and I pushed him up against the side of a wagon. He went to Mama and complained and that was when she came to me and told me that she wanted for me nothing but the best.

  “You will learn to like it there,” she said.

  “But I like it here,” I said in reply.

  “You’re going,” she said. “He’s a scholar. He’ll have a living from a shul his uncle helps pay for.”

  “Let him marry his uncle,” I said.

  She slapped me.

  I don’t like this life with all this hitting, all these threats, I told myself, told in my feelings, of course, because back then I didn’t know how to talk to myself in my mind.

  And my father came to me with his rough hands and his wonderful smell, lifted me by the hips and sat me down on top of a hay bale. Like I was a slave and he was my owner, he explained how I’m going to do what they tell me. My wonderful father! “If he smelled like you, Papa,” I said, “I wouldn’t mind. But he’s got the stink of a dying animal.”

  “You’ve got a smart lip,” my father says to me. “For a girl, too smart.”

  And for a father, I wanted to say to him, you’re very quick to give away your daughter. But I didn’t. Daughters didn’t say much. I already said enough with my talk about the boy smelling like a dying dog.

  “You’ll keep quiet,” he says to me, smiling through his thick black beard. “You’ll go to the city. You’ll marry a scholar, a rich scholar. And you’ll invite us to your house in the city. And we’ll bring bread and milk and cheese and you’ll put us up in a room of our own overlooking the street. And it will be so noisy, the city—I was there, once, so I know—we won’t be able to sleep, your mother and I, and we’ll leave the next day, return to our farm, and think to ourselves the whole way home, she’s got such a life as we never imagined in a million years one of our own could live.”

  I nodded, nodded, and when he was through with me and went back out to the barn, I hurried off into the fields ready to throw myself into a ditch. But then the ditch didn’t look deep enough and so I ran further, toward a stream that ran on the western edge of the big wheat field. This was the end of me, and the end for me, my father giving me away! Like I was a cow or a cart or a jar of honey! Or less! A length of cloth, a milking stool! A handrag, a handful of grain! Oi, oi, oi! For a young girl, I had a lot to moan about! And I rushed to the stream where I hoped to lay myself down and drown . . .

  Here, at this point, if you were standing, Mrs. Pinsker, I would say sit. Because if until then my life was just the story of a country girl, here it becomes poetry. A miracle takes place! At least to me it was a miracle. Imagine—this is how the world changed for me. A wooden pin worked loose in an oxcart axle. This pin had been carved by a husky, handsome ox handler from a good strong oak limb, whittled down and down further, until it fit snugly into the hole he had punched with the crosspiece of the axle. The oak was not so strong—it had flaws in the grain, whatever it is that holds the oak together or makes the wood wood. The pin from the strain split into splinters—and the axle rubbed itself against it until it sheared off. Shup! Like a wart sliced from the wrist, it went spinning off into the air! And the wheel fell, and the axle dropped and splintered itself. Oi, these accidents that made my life so infirm and yet so steady! And here was the carter’s son, a bulky-bodied, hairy-chested, strong-armed man with a wide grin and most of his teeth to show off, sitting with his bare feet in the streambed whittling a new pin.

  “Did you ever imagine,” he said to me when I stepped up to the edge of the water, “that this little stream flows to the river that flows to the sea? And we could sail along from here over the lost city of Atlantis until we reached America?”

  You could say, who was this crazy boy talking like this?

  I knew right away it wasn’t just a boy but some greater chance talking—the oak that grew the branch that lent itself to the splintered pin that stopped the cart that brought the boy to rest here at the side of the stream where I had decided I would end my life.

  Instead, my life began . . . cockeyed—you’re looking at me cockeyed. But don’t deny it, behind every old lady with her hair dyed my color there’s a story like this. Maybe not exactly as much an adventure as this, but some story, a real story. Somewhere a chance comes along—and she either takes it or she doesn’t. In my story, I took. Because what else did I have to hold on to? It was a choice between nothing and something. So what do you choose? Nothing? Don’t kid yourself—you reach out for what saves your life if you have a feeling that you have a life to save.

  “SO WHAT YOU’RE telling me, darling, is that you ran off with this oxcart driver?”

  “Yes, we eloped. It took a while, it was a slow elopement, but we eloped. Eventually, we eloped. We fought with my parents—they didn’t want no oxcarter, they wanted a rabbi. But we got married, we had our child, after that we eloped.”

  “How romantic! My own life is much less romantic. Sometime I’ll tell you.”

  “I’d love to hear, Mrs. Pinsker, but not now. Now I’m remembering my own. Oi, I remember so hard. How I left a whole world behind, how I saved my life. Because of an oak branch splitting. Because of an axle. Because of a crack in a wheel. God looked away at something when that particular oak was growing, and it made all the difference in my life, in Manny’s, and in the lives of three other women, the daughter-in-law’s, my grandchild’s, and hers.”

  “Pheeww . . .”

  “Don’t make a face. My heart weighs a ton. It feels like it’s going to lay a big sad egg. It hurts my eyes to talk about it. The sun is going down . . . it’s getting late. At times like this I wonder about my parents, about the old country, and, worst of all, or best, I can feel Jacob like they say you miss an arm you’ve lost, a missing limb you miss. I can feel him sitting at this table. His aura, the granddaughter calls such things. She tells me. We talk something about it sometimes. Why should he be gone? And I’m still here? Because, remember what the story was I was just telling you, if I had listened to my parents, obeyed them like a good girl and gone off to the city with the student who smelled like a dog, nobody would have been here. Darling, you would have been drinking coffee alone. We would have been caught by the Nazis and melted like wax for candles. They all went—Mama, Papa, the students of Torah, not so many escaped. So maybe all of that time is like Jacob’s Atlantis, what he talked about, a lost city, a lost continent, I’ve told you about that? Well, I’ll tell you later . . . and who knows what the world would have been if it had lasted? But it wasn’t supposed to, was it? Like that oak pin, it splintered. God looked the other way. But with what was He so busy that He could blink and lose so many of His chosen people? You think He was like me and was having trouble with His eyes?

  “Crazy, I suppose. You think I’m talking crazy. But it’s just talk, and I’m just talking.

  “I’m telling you, Mrs. Pinsker, I can still smell the woods, the stream where we met, the way the wood, that oak, lay on my nostrils. And the boat, the salty sea, the waves, spray, seabirds calling, the boat swaying under my feet—from the cart to here took so many years, a long ride. Oh, if we could only remember the good things and not the bad! The odor of water and horses and not the stink of boys who smell like dogs!”

  “I never imagined when I asked about all this that you’d remember so much with your nose.”


  “I remember with my nose, I remember with my feet. I remember the walking, walking, when we first arrived in the city.”

  “Just off the boat?”

  “Just off the boat and walking. And how we could have used the horse, then, I’m telling you. With our bags, a trunk, I nearly walked off my feet.”

  “They didn’t have taxis then, it was so far back in the past?”

  “They had taxis, but we didn’t have money. We had a little money, but we didn’t want to spend it all on taxis. First we needed a place to live. Once we got a place things went well. Well. As well as well could be when a man works every waking hour and sometimes on into his sleep.”

  “He worked in his sleep? That’s a new one.”

  “An old one, Mrs. Pinsker, if in your sleep you’re so tired you can’t sleep.”

  “He had no pleasures? I was poor, too, Minnie, and I had pleasures. A little piece of candy now and then, a trip to the market.”

  “Eventually we had those pleasures. More and more pleasures, sure. And we had the pleasures of our neighbors, the whole building was a little village, one family on top of another. We had friends, we had the Tabatchnicks, with a little boy Arnie my Manny used to play with, a wonderful clarinet he played, he was a music student, until the war . . .”

  “I didn’t live in a building? I didn’t know those pleasures as a girl and as an adult? Maybe it was the Bronx instead of Manhattan, but it was the same place, the same time.”

  “The same station. Sure. It could have been other towns, other cities. All of us lived the same. In the old country it was one way the same, over here another.”