Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  It took a while for Manny to notice. Young love, darling, it’s all alike, like one of those big races where everybody starts off from the starting post all bunched up together. It looks like everyone is going to finish—and then, after a half a mile, after a mile and three quarters, some of the runners begin to drop out, or limp at least, and you can see that not everyone is as well equipped as everyone else in this race. That’s when to the person looking on things get interesting. To think that our amusement comes from such pain from other people!

  “Bitch!” he spit at her through tightly closed teeth, and he swung his hand and clipped her on the side of the face.

  She made a little noise, like a balloon might when the air phishes out through a puncture, and she grabbed her face. Why is it? Her he hit, and a year later he smashed a guitar?

  The matron meanwhile stood up and like a professional backed my Manny away from her. She’d seen a lot of couples go through this—mainly the negroes are hitting each other all the time is what a lot of Jewish people think, until they find themselves like my Manny, with a stinging palm and a crying wife, and a police matron and a desk sergeant standing next to him, a few seconds away from a personal riot.

  “Take it easy,” she says to Manny, and he calms down quickly, mainly because he understands how close he stands to getting the sergeant in a situation where he’ll have to do something official. In most police stations, darling, more people use their fists than pull guns and believe me the police are quick to respond. And if you wonder how this grandmother knows such things you haven’t been listening to what I’ve been telling you. But sometimes it gets away from him. It scares him when he loses control. And then, because he’s frightened, he loses more.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Manny says, running his hands nervously along the front of his dark suit. And see what happens? This is the effect he has on people. In a second, they’re back to where they were before, as if the man had not slapped his wife in front of them, as though the wife isn’t still on the bench, holding her face to her hands, sobbing so loud that you could hear it outside in the disappearing light. This distinguished man, not so old but not so young either, this man in the dark suit with the striking thatch of brilliant white hair, my Manny, he’s got the power.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her on the way home. “But you should be sorrier than I am. This to me shows that you’ve crossed over the line and that you are going to have to see that doctor in New York.”

  Until then what had she done? She had tried talking to your lovely Doctor Mickey about her problem, pardon my saying, because I believe he is a very fine doctor, but all that he prescribed for her was a good diet, lots of sleep, and some pills that did nothing for her. Everything had been all right until Sarah was born, and then she had bad dreams, but even the dreams were something she could handle until her mother and father started dying in them again, and then everything came crashing at once and the days turned into times as bad as the dreams at night. But my Manny didn’t know this then. For all of his experts working at his company with the brother-in-law in the city he didn’t know much, as it turns out, about what was going on at home. Without me, I think, he would have found out sooner.

  But I think that in a funny way, Sally, it was the presence of the mama in the house, my life, that gave him the impression that things were going all right. I mean, after all, who cooked and who cleaned and who was there to dress Sarah in the morning when her mother couldn’t get out of bed, and who was there for a long time to pick her up after school, and to plan her school outings with her, and to help her with her homework, and to help with the decisions about what to wear to the club meetings, and what to do on a Saturday when she had three, four equally desirable things she wanted to do? Who was there? You know who was there—the grandmother, that’s who. But there is a certain limit to my powers, do you know what I mean? I could be there in the day, I could be there in the night, but I couldn’t wake in the dark and go down into my daughter-in-law’s dreams and turn her fears around into something that would make her laugh instead of shout out in the middle of the night.

  You’re laughing. Why? Because I admit that there’s something in life more powerful than the powers of the grandmother? Sure, there is, and you know about it, from raising your own children. There are the waters of life, rising, rising like the river or the ocean during a storm, and there’s the grandmother standing between the rising waters and her family, like a wall, a dike, a dam. But you can only do so much, you’re only human, even though sometimes the demands they make on you are more than that, and there’s only so much holding back you can do, and only so much suffering you can take into yourself and turn into comforting. Nu? Isn’t that right? Isn’t that the grandmothers’ way?

  That Purim party, that’s when Manny first saw how she was fooling herself about the way she could conduct herself in public. Can you imagine how he felt when he saw her, and his daughter, with the punch dripping from her turban? The look in Sarah’s eyes? Jewish Halloween? I’m telling you, it all comes in costume, darling, nobody knows who he is, or she is, what they want, what they are, until almost always it’s too late.

  Did Manny know he was going to slap her? Did he ever think that he had it within him to slap his wife in public? To slap her even in private? Slap? He never even touched her hard with a finger let alone slapped! He never used with her a harsh word. Now this is not to say he didn’t feel frustrated with her, because the older she got the more like a child she became. And it seemed to him, it worried him, that the oldest she ever was for him was when they first met as adults and that year after year she was getting younger, until now, in the car, or back there in the police station when he slapped her he had been filled with the frustration of a father with a misbehaving child, the frustration of a husband who wants his wife to act like a grown-up and she behaves instead younger than their own young daughter. When her mother and father died he expected that she would have a reaction—he wasn’t the rabbi of a hundred-person-plus congregation for years and years not to expect that her grief was going to take terrible shape in one way or another. But Maby’s way of responding was not to grow older at last, to turn into the adult that people always wanted to become and, after their parents die, understand they finally have the chance to be. No. Her way was to collapse the years into herself and turn once again into the little girl he met the first time they met ever, the first time, in the car, after the accident, when he was in shock, holding on to his piece of glass, digging with it the blood from his fingers, soiling his trousers.

  MY NOSE IS still good, you know. And I can smell the dinner, it’s almost ready. And even though my eyes are bothering me so much I can still look you in the face and see you smiling, because you’re remembering that accident of Manny’s, not his father’s death, and it’s as if—no, no, I wasn’t criticizing you, because that’s the way it happened, all together, as if it is supposed to have that effect on me, you, whoever listens, so that we think not about death and the blood but the little boy who had an accident. And we smile a little, and that’s the living taking the place of dying.

  “You’re not sorry,” she said. Maby said. “You’re glad that you had the chance to punish me, and in public.”

  “Punish? Punish?” Manny, driving them home, turns from the wheel and says this twice. “And for what?” he says then.

  “Not for something, for nothing,” she says.

  “Punish you for nothing?”

  “Because I’m not the rabbi’s wife, because I’m not anybody’s wife. I’m not a wife. I’m too . . . too . . .”

  “Too what?”

  “Too . . . I don’t know. I don’t know the words for it.”

  “So find the words.”

  “So find the words,” she says, repeating after him. “Easy for . . .”

  “Please don’t make fun of me, Maby,” he interrupts.

  “I wasn’t making fun. I was making serious. I was saying seriously that I don’t know the words
. That you know the words. You know the words in English and Hebrew, even in Aramaic, isn’t that what you studied?”

  “I took a class.”

  “I never took a class. I never took a class in English, I took only French but I never took a class in Aramaic.”

  “You studied English.”

  “I never took a class in it.”

  “You had English in school. Everyone has English in school. Even I had English in school on the Lower East Side where hardly anyone speaks English, or hardly anyone did when I grew up there.”

  “So you have the words,” she said.

  “There are words,” Manny said. “You may have to look for them, but they’re there.”

  “If they are,” she said, “I don’t know how to find them.”

  “Take a class,” he said.

  “Now you’re making fun of me.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “You talk about writing and reading and finding the words. Take a class in these matters.”

  “In these matters,” she said.

  “So now after complaining that I was mocking you, you are methodically mocking me?”

  “Methodically,” she said. “If I could find a word like that I would be all right.”

  “You can find it. I found it. Look, Maby, I had no words in English. I had my mother’s voice, I had my father’s voice, I had the voices of the boys on the block, the rotten old rabbi’s voice, and it wasn’t until I got to Cincinnati, thanks to your father . . .”

  “Thanks, Father,” she broke in.

  “Will you let me finish? I would like you to hear this.”

  “Finish,” she said. “I would like to hear your words.”

  “And you’ll stop the mocking?”

  “I will stop the mocking.”

  “Good. I’ll go on.”

  “Go on.”

  “So I took the classes because I recognized that if I was going to speak before large groups I was going to need some discipline.”

  “I need discipline,” Maby said.

  “And I read and I wrote little papers for my classes and all of this helped enormously.”

  They now drive up to the house and Manny steers into the driveway, but they don’t go in. It’s an inky dark Jersey evening, blue-black clouds stretching over from the east to west blotting out whatever afterglow might have remained in the sky when they first came out of the station house, and here they are, man and wife, sitting in the parked car in front of their own house, talking, which they have done little of since they first read together, many years before, the poetry from the Bible, the Song of Songs, Solomon’s song and in the house, the house well lighted and comforting against the dark, the grandmother, me, passes back and forth from kitchen to dining room, setting the table, and upstairs is their only child listening now to the new group, called the Stones, like in the Bible where who shall cast the first one? because she was listening now to the things that made her stand up and dance and snap her fingers, which is good, don’t you think darling? that our children today can feel so good that they can do that? I wish today when I saw her she only looked so well.

  Oh, I can almost taste the meal the girl is cooking. I wish Sarah would come back and eat with us. Are you getting hungry? Here I invited you for a meal and all I’m giving you so far is the appetizer. But wait, wait.

  Inside the house life goes on, the grandmother setting the table, the granddaughter upstairs listening to music. I said this already, I know. And the grandmother is worrying, wondering, where are they already? Where are they? The granddaughter of course, their daughter, is thinking about nothing. She’s happy as she can be—though there’s a question of how happy this is compared to the pleasures of other girls her own age—snapping her fingers, swinging her hips to the music, imagining a dance without costumes, without shame, the bump and push and bustle and the fancy steps of children at play, grown-ups to be, who have no cares, no worries like the grandmother down the stairs. So inside the house life goes on without much of a thought or an idea of what is going on outside in the driveway that could change, will change, does change everything for everyone.

  Outside the house in the car in the driveway my Manny and Maby are still talking.

  “And this writing will help me, you think?”

  “It would give you a way to focus your thoughts.”

  “So it appears that’s all I need. Just a class or two?”

  “Are you still taking a mocking tone with me now, Maby?”

  “Manny, would I do that? It’s perfectly normal. Your wife gets arrested in a supermarket parking . . .”

  “Pardon me, but you weren’t arrested. They didn’t press charges.”

  “So what was I? You have the words. Was I detained?”

  “That was more like what happened. Yes, detained.”

  “Does that make a difference?”

  “A single word can sometimes make a great difference, yes.”

  “Then why don’t you use a word with me? Why don’t you use a single word?”

  “You’re raising your voice. Please don’t raise your voice. I’m sitting right here next to you.”

  “Right here next to me? Right here? You’re not here. You’re in your study writing a sermon. You’re talking to committees. You’re in the city at a board meeting. Let me tell you about a bored meeting. You want to know about a bored meeting? Meeting with you is a bored meeting. Right now you bore me. Life with you is a terribly boring meeting, do you know that?”

  “Is that why you drink?”

  “Why I drink is none of your business.”

  “Maby, please.” He touched her arm, but she squirmed away.

  “No,” he said, “I want to know. Do you drink because life with me is so boring or is life with me boring because you drink?”

  “If it isn’t Mr. Paradox! Well, well. Why don’t we apply some of our feeble psychological training to the question of our wife’s unhappiness? Who knows where it could lead?”

  “Enough with the irony, please.”

  “You should have thought, enough with the slapping, please, when you slapped me in front of those people.”

  “I’m sorry. But think of the times that you have made things difficult for me.”

  “But you’re the spiritual leader of the community. Certainly you can overcome a little personal adversity. I mean, where would you be if you didn’t have a little suffering of your own when you have to deal every day with the suffering of others? You could end up sounding like a real prig when you give out all your advice if people didn’t think that you had problems of your own.”

  “So you drink for my benefit? I didn’t know that, I wasn’t aware. Thank you very much. I should be more appreciative.”

  This is when she slapped him—a real openhanded smack right across the mouth. He could taste blood dripping from his lip as he spoke.

  “This makes you feel better?”

  “Did you feel better after you hit me?”

  “I felt terrible then, I feel terrible now.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I feel nothing now.”

  “Is that why you drink? To feel nothing.”

  “I asked you not to mention that.”

  “It hurts me to talk about it. But we have to talk.”

  “Talk to the wall.”

  “What?”

  “Your mother says it’s like talking to the wall. So talk awhile. Talk to the wall. I’m the wall.”

  “Maby, wait a minute.”

  “Yes, Rabbi?”

  “Oh, don’t do that, please.”

  “All right, Rabbi. What shall I do?”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “I’m going in.”

  “You need a drink? I’ll get you one, and we’ll talk.”

  “None of your business.”

  “Why, Maby? Is it because of your mother?”

  The mother, Mrs. S., always the poor mother takes it on her head, and where would they be without her? Where would they be w
ithout us? Without, for instance, his mother, me, who would be telling his story?

  “None of your beeswax,” she said. “I’m going.” She opened the door on her side and got out of the car. It was cooler now than when she had staggered across the parking lot behind the weight of her loaded cart, and quiet too. Some nights she could in warm weather walk out onto the porch, in the middle of evening, and listen, a glass in her hand, until the traffic from the highway miles away died down to a low thin line of noise and only the crickets chirped and the ground around the house gave up, or so it seemed to her, a little steady whisper that she pretended was the growth in the dark of the next morning’s grass and flowers. A nice girl she could have been if it hadn’t been for that woman she called her mother? Whose mother isn’t some of the reason for whoever they become? It’s the mother, it’s the father, a mix of both, and in her case the father had little to do with it. It was chemistry, mother chemistry, the mother drank, and her mother drank, and all her grandmothers and great-grandmothers and great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers drank all the way back to a cousin of Eve. Paradise, to this kind of woman, you can see only through a little whiskey haze. Eve, now she was Jewish too. Like the Mary the Virgin, a married woman, if you think of it, and so not a virgin probably after all but then Mary wasn’t either except for the time she was supposed to have had the baby from God or the angel or the bird that was God, whatever that cock-and-bull story is the goyim tell about it. Imagine, a married woman and they call her a virgin? Like a young girl, like my Sarah, they make her out to be when she’s as much a woman as Maby or me, even, or you, except for you and me, darling, we went out of business when our husbands passed away. Of course I don’t want to put words in your mouth—please, don’t make a face, I’ll tell the rest of my story. Isn’t life something? Here I’m in the middle of a tragedy and I’m thinking about the tale they tell about God turning into a bird and swooping down and making a woman pregnant. Can you imagine a woman today coming home and telling her husband a story like that?