by Alan Cheuse
“I don’t know what you’re supposed to be.”
“So come to New Orleans and I’ll show you some things you might enjoy.”
“What are you doing there anyway?”
“I have some business to do. But we can have plenty of time for fun.”
“I’ll believe it when it happens.”
“So come and see and believe.”
“Is she going?”
“How does she know? Manny knows she knew?”
“Florette?”
She. Her.
“You don’t want her to come, she doesn’t come.”
“Some loyalty. And true love.”
“You want me to take her so you can say I was keeping you from going? Sarah, don’t try to have it both ways. You want to come, Florette stays here. You don’t come, she might come along with me.”
“While my mother turns into a mushroom at Owl Valley? No thanks.”
“So that was the whole point of this conversation.”
“I didn’t know it had a point. I was just talking to my father. And he turned everything to shit again.”
“You led me into this, you know.”
“Listen to the rabbi. The devil made him do it. The devil in his daughter.”
“Please don’t talk like that. Now let’s calm down and try to talk about . . .”
“Owl Valley.”
“You cannot keep throwing that in my face.”
“Owl Valley.”
“Please stop it, Sarah.”
“Owl Valley.”
“I can’t . . .”
“Owl Valley.”
“If you . . .”
“Owl . . .”
Hit her he did. And sorry he was, too, like the time he hit her mother. But it was too late. By the time the stinging stopped in his palm she was already out the door and gone.
She’s walking across Houston Street, classes haven’t even begun and she’s off to see her new teacher.
“I’m awfully glad you came,” this Peale woman says, her legs folded beneath her on a bunch of large floppy pillows. This is how they sit in such places, like Arabs in tents. Above her head the high ceiling of a factory loft, the kind of place I worked in for years after the death of my Jacob. And today, artists live and play in these buildings. And the granddaughter of a former seamstress plays here too, watching the funny little cigarette in the pinched fingers of her hostess, watching the trail of white smoke pour from her pinched red lips.
“I like your work a lot,” she says to the Peale woman, meaning the canvases piled all around against the walls. They show giant breasts, nipples as large as the heads of children—in fact, some of the nipples take the shape of children’s faces. Other paintings: they show parts of the woman’s body which fifty years ago a girl didn’t even know she had, let alone would show in a picture. The colors all stand out very bright, because of the veins, the skin, the tender flesh. If you didn’t know it was art you would think it belonged on the wall of a butcher shop or a doctor’s office, the work of a very angry person, the red, the red makes me think that. And so it’s no accident that Sadie found it pleasing, so angry she was with her father. If she had a gun who knows what she would have done. But she didn’t have any weapon to use against him except her life, and this, like a terrorist’s bomb, is dangerous both to the one who carries it as well as to the one who is the target.
“I’d like to paint like you,” Sadie said.
The Peale woman laughed.
“I don’t think you’d like it, my dear, I don’t think you would.”
Pushing herself off from her nest of pillows, the older woman fetched a little dark metal tin. From this she took out the special tobacco to make more of the cigarettes that make you dream. My Sadie, who never drank a drop in her life except the wine at holidays, and of course that unfortunate beer at Rutgers, and who never smoked nothing at all, she watched her heroine roll a little pencil of it and when it was time she learned to inhale and puff, inhale and puff.
Some time went by—the way clouds roll past your window when you’re looking out at a big Jersey storm. It actually passed by her eyes. Next thing she knew she was rolling on the puffy pillows, her chest bare to the air, and the painter woman is playing tickle-tickle with her long fingernails on Sadie’s back.
I never had so much fun, my granddaughter is saying to herself, I never had a pal like this before.
So by the time Sadie’s school started they were great friends, eating lunch together all the time, and spending a number of evenings together, and even whole nights. It was a bit of a shock for my granddaughter when going back up to Vermont she had to live in a dreary little wooden-walled dormitory instead of the loft with the pillows and paintings.
“I felt like I was being separated from a twin sister,” she told me. “Gram, I’d never had a friend before like this, not anyone. Mother never held me the way she does. Can I say these things to you?”
Sure, Mike, I told her, sure you can say these things to your grandmother. Who else could love you so much to listen and not grit her teeth? You think your mother? You think your father? I know, I know, my Manny, he has his problems. And you should understand them—remember, his own father he saw crushed to death by the wagon, his own father’s blood he saw spill out into the lake of milk. I told her long ago, I told her the story.
“HE SAW HIS own father crushed to death by a milk wagon,” she told her friend the painter. “He saw his own father’s blood spill out into the lake of milk.”
“I like the action, I like the color,” the painter said.
“How can you say that?”
Sadie was shocked—for maybe the last time.
“He’s not my father,” she said. “And from what you’ve told me about how he’s treated you, you probably feel a lot more anger than sympathy if you’d admit to the truth.”
Let’s say that this conversation is taking place in the little apartment the painter uses when she comes up to the school during the week to teach. Let’s say that they’re sitting on the bed together, smoking that stuff. Let’s say that the Peale woman calls this their advising session, and that they both laugh whenever she calls it that.
So the painter says, “If I were you . . .”
“Yes?”
“I’d be completely unforgiving.”
Sadie—she’s torn now, like a piece of butcher paper, right down the middle. “He can’t help it,” she says.
“He’s a free agent,” Peale the painter says. “He’s free to act.”
“He’s weighed down,” Sadie says, feeling herself floating higher and higher.
“A typical man,” the painter says.
“He’s unusual,” Sadie says, wondering at herself even as she defends him. This lightness she feels, is it good or bad? This strangeness in her life, the bittersweet taste of Peale’s oily mouth in her mouth, the sharp earthy odor of the dreamy cigarettes, is it here to stay? Will life be like this from here on in? All that she knew from the past seems out of reach and even if within her grasp unusable. All that she has heard about life from her father—since her mother spoke to her very little, very little—appears weak and foolish and even sick.
“Have you told me everything about him now?” Peale the painter asks.
“I think so. Everything I know.”
“He was a rabbi but he no longer even goes to the synagogue?”
“That’s right.”
“Hypocrite,” Peale says.
“He changed his mind, he changed his life,” Sadie says, amazed at herself that she’s still defending my Manny.
“Look,” Peale says.
“Look what?”
“You can’t go on talking about him from his point of view. It’s your life that he’s eating up. You’re nothing but a slave to yet another male monster if you keep on seeing things from his perspective. Do you think I make my art by sticking to the male perspective? Do you think I could get my forms if I showed the female body the way men see it? D
o you?”
“No.”
“You want to paint?”
She thinks of you, another painter. All these painters? Why? And says, “I do.”
“You want to be an artist.”
“Yes. I want to paint. And I want to make pots.”
“If you’re going to be any good, and I don’t know how good you can be, sweetheart, though I do know you’ve got something to start with—God knows you’ve got the pain in your life a woman begins with when she makes her art—but if you’re going to go on with it, push on with it, you’ve got to make your own vision. You’ve got to give over the vision of the fathers. The vision of your father.”
“I . . . guess you’re right.”
“You guess I’m right. You only guess? You don’t feel it in your guts, you don’t feel it in your womb?”
“I . . . know you’re right.”
“Yes, you know it. You know I’m right.”
And she leans over and kisses Sadie on the mouth. “There. That’s the seal of our pact. Sealed with a kiss.”
“SWAK. Like a letter in grade school to a boyfriend?”
“Yes, love. Except it’s to me, not a boyfriend.”
“Yes,” Sadie says, and rolls over to where she can rest her head on her painter-teacher-friend’s chest.
“And now we have our pact.”
“And what’s our pact?”
“We’re going to get rid of the father who haunts your mind.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“Here.” Painter Peale leans over and kisses Sadie tenderly on the neck. “This.”
“Um. How?”
Sadie closes around her friend her arms in a desperate embrace.
“Don’t you worry. We’re going to find a way to destroy him.”
DESTROY! CAN YOU imagine! This is what it had come to!
Excuse, I got to wipe my eyes. Even the blind weep, darling, when in their minds they witness sadness. Hate. Destruction. Of their children hating, and being hated.
My Manny’s building, and she wants to destroy.
In this building he’s building. He’s sitting in his office in his building, with the brother-in-law in a meeting. These are new offices, twice removed from the original where the company they first formed had its home. On a wall map, with pins stuck onto the colored shapes where they own buildings, piers, here a small shipyard, there a complex of warehouses, you could count fifteen little pinheads of blue, and another seven, eight of black. Glancing away from the wall, Manny stares out the window, and he can see down from this height all the way to the same pier where our ship first docked. And he can remember just how far in time and how high in the world he has climbed.
“In legend,” he says, “in mythology, there is a plot to describe a passage such as this. A man wants, and the devil appears to him and offers him his desires in exchange for his soul. Devil! This is a metaphor, is it not?”
“If you say so, Son,” I reply to him.
Now we’re talking together over supper on a night when he has come home late from another meeting in the series of meetings coming upon the big takeover. I’ve made a little salad, it’s early spring, there’s not such good tomatoes yet, but he’s been asking for avocado, something I never even saw let alone served before we moved to this new apartment in the city, high up where we moved from Jersey, so I had the Gristedes man send some over, and some steak I cooked for him, too, and to tell you the truth it was also from the Gristedes, because the butcher shop was closed and—what?—no, this was a good thick bloody piece of sirloin, we hadn’t eaten kosher for years, not since the move definitely.
“I say so? I know so.”
Oh, and a baked potato, of course, with a little butter—that’s right, since he was eating this way it included dairy in the meat meal, and was it going to kill him?
“The devil is for the goyim, isn’t it? Jews don’t have the devil.”
“The gentiles, Mama, don’t have him either. He doesn’t exist.”
“So what’s with all their stories?”
“Just stories.”
“Just stories? I’ve heard some of their stories from Sarah when she was studying them at school. They’re scary stories. And sometimes she said we, the Jews, we’re supposed to be the devil. But so I told her, darling, we’re not angels, but we’re not the devil either. But Manny, darling, you don’t believe in angels then either? What about your . . . ?”
“The birds? Mama, I don’t know how to explain that. The voices came to me from the birds. What can I say? Perhaps it was my mind’s way of telling me something I couldn’t bear to recognize, or wouldn’t understand as my own thought. I don’t know.”
“If you don’t know, I don’t know either.”
“Such a good mother.”
“Such a good cook is what I want to hear.”
“Such a good cook.”
“Really? You like it? It’s hard to hurt a steak. But is it rare enough for you, darling?”
“It’s rare.”
“So eat a little more.”
“To tell you the truth, Mama, my stomach is in turmoil. I’ve got a lot of things on my mind.”
And then I said it. I take the blame. Were my words pulled out of me by some invisible devil? You don’t believe in them, not even you? Then it was God who did it? And did God do all those things to you when you were a child? And if not God and if the devil didn’t, then who? who? I said it. It was an innocent remark. What could I say? It was one of those things a mother says, and isn’t that as innocent as it comes?
I said, “You got your wife on your mind?”
What did I know? I was thinking of her. I was thinking that in spite of everything else she was his wife, and she was alone and probably very lonely out there in that place. Owl Valley. With the green lawns, the shaped shrubs, the stately, stately trees—I been there to visit, I saw it. But he hadn’t been there to visit in a while. And so I said it. Sarah had gone. She went there when she came down from school. But he hadn’t. You marry a girl, you try to make a life, and then when she gets sick do you leave her there in the home? No matter how good it is—and he tells me, and I believe him, that it’s the best place on the East Coast—no matter how good, do you leave a person there? Do you leave there a person you married?
He didn’t say a word, just looked at me, deeply, deeply. In his eyes I saw—I was watching when I said, With your mother you get a meal and for dessert you get a lecture—I saw in his eyes there was this empty space, a darkness and a nothingness, a large field of black like on it I could have picked up a lipstick or a crayon my granddaughter wrote with when she was a child and I could have inscribed my name, made pictures, drawn this star-shaped shard around which that very moment he was curling his fingers in his trousers pocket. It frightened me to see this—into this—because he was my son, who I tried to raise practically by myself, and I knew what he had lived through, and I knew the things he felt and saw, because he told me so much, the mother, his friend, and to sit across from him and look into that place it was very scary, let me tell you, because I had no idea how much he had changed, right before my very own eyes. In another man, an average man without the kinds of talents possessed by my Manny, in a man who would never climb so high, you could look and you could see, like vegetables and meat floating in a stew, bits and pieces of guilty thoughts and happy thoughts, hopes, prospects, fears. But I told you just now how it was with my Manny. Why I kept after him on the subject, I can only say, I must have been a little bit crazy at that time.
“After all she’s still your wife,” I said.
And he nodded. What had I said that he could argue with?
“Florette tells me the same.” He said this. He said.
“So what do you do about it?” I asked him.
Him holding a bit of meat up on his fork.
“I’ll see her more often.”
“Often? It doesn’t have to be often,” I said. “It just has to be sometimes. Sometimes is bet
ter than nothing, Manny.”
“It hasn’t been nothing,” he said. Still holding the meat on the fork. He had stopped eating, stopped chewing. He reached out for a glass of wine without looking and nearly knocked over the bottle. Wine, which I had brought out from his new collection in the study wall. Dry red wine—not the white sweet he used to like. It’s all changed for him, see, even the wine.
Now maybe he would have gone to see her again sooner rather than later anyway. Maybe he would have. But when I remember it I worry that it was my remark that started him back there. The way he did. What he did. And this in turn. You don’t know that part because he told me he couldn’t bear to tell you. But I’ll tell you even though it hurts me, like tearing the scab from a sore. Why shouldn’t it? The son hurts, the mother hurts. That is a law of life. But as far as laws go, what happened in the next months, it showed me an answer to the questions he had on his mind about the devil or not the devil. If you could say anything on that question that made sense after what happened next, the answer was there to see. It always has been. It always will be. Life is the devil.
THEY WERE PULLING up the long tree-lined driveway to Owl Valley when Sadie got cold feet.
“What if she doesn’t believe me?” she asked.
“She’ll believe you, sweetheart,” her painter friend and teacher said. “You’re her daughter, her only child. She’ll want to believe just about anything you tell her.”
“But if she doesn’t want to come?”
“She will, sweetheart, she will. How could she refuse the offer we’re going to make to her? I wouldn’t, would you?”
“I didn’t,” Sadie said. “I’m living up there with you, right?”
“You shouldn’t put it that way, Sadie. You shouldn’t make it sound as though you’re my subordinate. Here, park here.”
“I wasn’t trying to. It just came out that way.”
“Think about the way you frame those statements, sweetheart. Your whole sense of framing is subordinate. We’re equals, remember? Under the sign of the gyn?”
“Under the sign. Here we go.” Sadie’s voice trembled a little with anticipation, and a little fear.