Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  WHEW. I HAD to take a breath. But here you are, Manny, and your own breathing has become shallow, as if you are saving yourself for the big run, the speech. It has been weeks in coming, because you had so much to do, meetings, conferences, and more meetings, more conferences, and as the news of the takeover reached the ears of the reporters more interviews and more, and finally you decided that you would answer all of the questions that came up by giving the speech at the university, a speech in which you could state the policy of your company and your position as a man—my Manny. And you would use the occasion to give Maby the chance to try and come back into your life—and, oh, darling, my listener, I know how this hurts you to hear, but still it’s the truth and I had to say it! And you would use the occasion of the speech to show your daughter, the wayward and—you hoped not permanently—estranged little—I call her little but she’s not little no more—Sarah-Sadie that you could do good as well as the other of which she thought you were capable only. And you would use the occasion of the speech to speak to your brother-in-law, Mord, and give him some guidance for how you wanted the company to grow.

  You walked into the hall to see that about two hundred people had already taken their seats and dozens more stood at the back of the room, waiting for your appearance. You smiled, and touched a hand to your blizzard-white hair. The first thought that came into your mind was this: this is a long way from Second Street—you thought of the street, the old apartment, the bloodstained butcher paper and horse dung and dead birds in the gutters. And in your pocket you fingered the star-shaped shard, old partner, souvenir of lost times. Would but that you could listen now to a bird speech, the guiding voice of your papa, but no, the noise drowned out all sense of recollection, and after turning to smile at Maby, you led her by the arm toward your host at the front of the hall.

  “Rabbi,” said the boy turned man who once had worked for you, now with a slight thickening of flesh under his chin.

  “Mister, if you please,” you said, Manny. But you smiled as you said it, making him feel at ease. That smile, that smile that won so many votes in recent days, won over shareholders by the hundreds, picked up shares by the millions! What a smile, the dawn breaking over the horizon on a summer day in the mouth of my only son!

  And here is Sadie, in the company of her old pal, the boy turned dean. Brave girl to have ventured back here, the scene of the crime. But that was a few years past now, you assured yourself, and the memory of it had faded. Look how she stands tall, shows her own heady ways, tosses a brief hello to her father, and then scans the crowd, as if there might be someone here she knows.

  And the dean introduces you to the head of the political science, or whatever, foreign relations, something, who has actually invited you, and you come forward to the podium and take a seat behind it. The professor, or whatever he is, steps up to the microphone to introduce you. You settle yourself in your chair, looking at your wife and daughter who have taken seats in the row reserved for them at the front of the hall.

  You don’t love yourself that much that you listen to the remarks the professor makes in his introduction. Instead you’re trying to concentrate your energy on your delivery, something you’ve prided yourself on ever since you took over your first congregation. No, not Rabbi any longer, but Mister, but still you can’t leave behind all that you learned, not the technique. And you’re remembering the discussion you had with the brother-in-law just at the time that you decided to go ahead and accept the invitation to speak. He leaped to his feet, an older man suddenly rejuvenated, and grabbed you—quite uncharacteristically—by the shoulders.

  “That’s it,” he said.

  “What’s it?” you asked.

  “Give the talk, state our new policy. The press will pick it up, what a boost for the reorganized stock. You’ve got to do it.”

  You didn’t tell him about your sudden awareness of what you could do even beyond the business, how you could work with these foreign governments, and show your growing expertise as a man of diplomacy, and use the reformed company’s role down there as an opening toward an eventual diplomatic appointment. These were what we used to call pipe dreams, or daydreams, but then, my Manny, you seemed to be one of those people with the power and the luck—your father watching over you—to turn your daydreams into real things. You didn’t say a word about your new idea about going into diplomacy. And if you had, why he might have laughed, the brother-in-law, and that might have changed how you felt about it, it might somehow—but would it?—have prevented you from going through with this—but I doubt it—and that would—might—somehow?—have saved you? but for what? another way of going as quickly as you did? Oh, my Manny, this two-minute conversation with Mord, it started everything tumbling faster, faster, deciding then and there to use your talk as—what?—see the light in Mord’s eyes—as—a—what? as a send-off for A TRIP DOWN TO THE HOLDINGS!

  That was it, my Manny. You would take a business trip, a what-do-you-call-it? a fact-finding trip, like a congressman, like a senator, and you who headed the new company would see firsthand for yourself what the old managers did wrong, and see how the operation functioned now, and make recommendations for changes that would show the stockholders and the new board and the press and the public that this was a company for the future and show you, yourself, as a man—my Manny—for the future!

  It’s dark here? Darker? Put on another light!

  “Mr. Emmanuel Bloch, president and chairman, chief executive”—all that is said.

  And there is applause.

  And you rise. And walk forward to the lectern, your speech in a folder in one hand, the other in your pocket for one more quick touch of fingers to the shard. RG’S DAI. And you take your place behind the stand, and you look down into the audience, into the first row, and you see your redheaded women, the mother, the wife in brown, the daughter in dark sweater and jeans, though the mistress—that word, ugly word, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—she is missing because of all the reasons you went through, the awkwardness, the shame, but you are here with him now, because I am putting you here, are you not? with him in the aftermath, in the afterfact, which is as good as any way we got of being anywhere other than where we are ourselves, as good as any way of living any life other than our own.

  And you are with him as he blinks at the vision of the women sitting below him, and he sees me, his mother, sitting alongside them, and he blinks again, and I’m gone, and he remembers that Yom Kippur afternoon when he looked down and saw us and fell—flew?—from the dais, and he blinks again, and his mind soars up to some crazy perch where it waits for the voice of the dove, and then back again to inhabit the brain cage in the body where he stands, thinking, I have done this before, and I will not fall this time. No, I will not! I will not!

  But he might have right then and there if he had not begun his speech.

  “I AM A businessman . . . representing a business that is sound because of two established policies.

  “One, that its business dealings with others are mutually beneficial to both parties, and two, that its employee-employer relationship is animated by a sound social and economic consciousness.”

  It started beautifully, don’t you think? Such an opening! I am a businessman. Because it was true, and he knew that, and he finally found it out, and for a man, my Manny, my sonny boy, to know who he was, this was a blessing for the mother. So many boys, they never know, they never know.

  “The essence of good trade is that all parties shall derive important or desirable advantages from each transaction. Mutual advantages are the essence of inter-American relations today and tomorrow. Our Western Hemisphere has become a community of nearly half a billion people, Americans, all interdependent in trade, prosperity, culture, and progress. The enduring good of one American nation, in this case the United States or each of the three smaller nations where we have much of our holdings, is inevitably the good of others.

  “The socioeconomic philosophy . . .”

  Why I r
emember this speech better than I remember all the sermons he gave—except the sermon of silence—it beats me. But it could be because this was something that I understood so little of, and that because it was so foreign to me it stuck in my mind. All of these words, those phrases! Oh, for years he studied! And to think it all began at that stream when I looked at my Jacob, and he looked at me! And further back and further back, I know, I know . . .

  “The socioeconomic philosophy which motivates our thirty-five-hundred-mile trade-and-work front is this: good trade requires healthy, solvent peoples. You cannot do business with peoples or nations who have neither the money nor the credit with which to buy the goods you have to sell or to produce the goods you wish to buy. And a people we cannot do business with is a people who may be ripe to do business with the other side. With the communist nations of Eastern Europe and their satellite island of Cuba.

  “The agricultural sphere of our operations is largely concerned with the sovereign American nations of the Caribbean area included in the phrase Middle America, and also Colombia and Ecuador in South America, with a small metal-mining interest in Peru.

  “Middle America. The phrase may remind you of a part of our own country. Consider this. Mexico and the republics of Central America . . .”

  Consider this, if you had been there, he would have had you hypnotized, my Manny would. He was that good a speaker. Not just the words, but the voice, the deep commanding voice, with just the slightest bit of hesitation, the part left over from his days as the rabbi who had more questions than he had answers, just the slightest bit, so that if you had questions you felt as though he was already making them for you. And besides his voice, his hair—how could you not stare at that blinding white shock, the brilliant hair that drew in your soul, almost, through your eyes until sometimes it felt as though you had passed along the line of your vision like a tightrope walker between one pole and the next and you were sucked into the blank space of the whiteness of the color so that you lived within another place inside some dimension inside his head.

  “Consider this. Mexico and the republics of Central America—Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, with their dozens of millions of inhabitants who consider themselves, as we do, Americans, and who sell us four-fifths and sometimes more of their total exports, and buy from us more than three-quarters of all their imports—these countries, most of them, are actually closer to us here in New Jersey than is San Francisco or Portland, Oregon. Middle America is close to us, and destined to become closer. These nations, our partners in trade, and with their millions yearning to come out from under the yoke of petty dictatorships and the threat of Communist takeovers, need us. And we need them. We want the essential crops that flourish in the tropical climate of Middle America which we cannot grow ourselves.”

  Words! but in here, in his head, there is light. Words give off flame and heat, they point like fingers at a map, at a block of land, at time like the hands of a clock! This space where he has nursed his vision, it is vast and without ceiling, a hall without a roof, planet without cloud or atmosphere, nothing stretching between surface of rock and the farthest blinking star, oh six-pointed shard of flight! And here live gentle creatures, so different from the human beings we know as to make the feeling between words like Portland and Salvador and the noise given off by this white-hot light appear to be as unalike as space is from sound. Without eyes even I see father, mother, daughter, brother, and the father and mother of the father and mother and the brother, their bodies giving off light like shocking white, calm color, absent darkness, band of peace, a tribe wandering across a windless plain, grassy sward where picnics go well, while above them heaves a moon so large it nearly deserves another story.

  “Bananas.”

  “Pineapples.”

  “Sugar.”

  “Palm oil.”

  “Coffee.”

  Between these words, the fruit, the sweetness, the coffee, the oil, and the great swarm of doves rising behind the gigantic moon, what connection? what tie? This is what my Manny is asking himself, this is what to himself he is saying even as he is speaking these words—because he stands before this crowd, saying his business sermon, and inside his own brain he is falling, or flying, how to tell the difference in a space where gravity doesn’t hold? faster and farther, up and up toward the moon, one of the birds, one of the beams of light that hovers like the rung of a ladder of light between the strange earth he imagines and the distant shard-shaped star.

  “To name the major crops that our company grows and cultivates in the soil of Middle America.”

  Did you know this? I didn’t know this. But I didn’t know as much about my Manny now, this became pretty clear to me after a while, all of what I knew about his modern life I had to hear from him in bits and snatches over meals, over coffee, in the last few months before this last flight of his life. His life! his life! If you had predicted it I wouldn’t have believed—to go from talking about boys’ things, work, his studies, Talmud, Torah, sermons on doing right and avoiding wrong, on family and friends, on fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, on grandparents and grandchildren, these things everybody like him except him would have talked about until the end of their days, to go from this to talk of packages and bottle tops and glass and steel and boats and piers, and now of ships and fruit, bananas, palm oil, who who who would have known?

  “The company’s most important crop, of course, is bananas—of which it now owns and operates two hundred and fifty thousand acres in Middle America. The banana is one of mankind’s oldest crops, and it is not native to the Americas.”

  You heard that? The fruit he’s talking about it, it too was an immigrant, like our family, and like the rest of us, except for maybe the Indians, and them, too, we all come here from someplace else. But from where? From the old country, or from the moon? When I tell you about this speech of my Manny’s, or what happened on this afternoon, I got to ask you that.

  “Chinese literature of three thousand years ago mentions bananas. They are called the fruit of the wise. But imagine if, instead of the apple that tradition had as the fruit with which Eve tempted Adam, it was in fact the banana—the fruit of the wise that grew on the Tree of Knowledge. In 327 BC Alexander the Great discovered bananas growing in the valley of the Indus in India. Later, history records the crop’s further journey westward. In 1492, a famous year for us in America, the Portuguese found the fruit growing along the African West Coast where the people there gave it the name banana. At the time Columbus launched his voyage, the banana, some historians tell us, was growing abundantly in the Canary Islands. In 1516 Father Thomas de Berlanga . . .”

  Because it’s turning now, I got to tell you what’s happening, in his head he’s no longer walking in a fantasy. He’s concentrating on the crowd—on the fixed, firm, attentive faces, mostly young, with here and there a professor wearing a dark beard—like the old neighborhood he’s thinking when he allows himself a glimpse of the beards—and he’s losing attention from his dream in his mind and beginning to focus on the audience because somehow or other—you know my Manny’s magical senses—he’s already got a feeling of what’s about to take place even before there is any way of telling from the look of the crowd or the sound of the crowd or the smell of the crowd—because they’re college students, mostly, and they smell of sweat and cigarettes and here and there a little perfume, and here and there a little dope cigarette—it’s turning.

  “. . . a Spanish Dominican, carried the roots of the banana plant with him when he sailed to Santo Domingo as a missionary. From there the culture of this ancient fruit fanned out to various points on the mainland of Central America and to one Caribbean island after another.

  “The fruit is old. But the banana trade as we know it is definitely new. The first bananas to arrive in New York were brought here from Cuba in 1804. By 1830 occasional clipper ships were bringing small cargoes from Cuba and the Bahamas. This trickle gradually increased, though
as recently as the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876 red bananas wrapped in tinfoil were sold as an exotic curiosity.

  “It was not until the introduction of the modern refrigerated steamship at the turn of the century that the real banana industry was born.”

  And he has one strange thought before it all begins to break apart, my Manny does, up there on the podium looking down upon those faces, listening for a moment to his own words—he’s thinking, what do we know? what do we know? and the design suddenly came clear, it fell into place, all the pieces shifted into the pattern—and he saw that he was standing in for Adam, the first man, to whose lips Eve had raised the forbidden fruit, the delectable produce of the Garden, long, slender golden offshoot of the Tree, and together they had eaten, first him taking a bite, then her, then him, then her, until all the nourishing shaft was gone, and so they ate another, and another, and to the animals in the trees, the monkeys, and to the dogs in the bushes, the cats in the furrows, they passed along the food, and down even until the next generation, and the next, and the next, and now he stood, carrying forward the first tradition, assuming the leadership of this company whose power lay in its ability to clear spaces in the wet lowland jungles and plant with the thousands of hands they owned the so-called bits or rhizomes from which the first lusty young shoots would rise—and he stood as one with the first human shoot, the male Adam, and Maby with Eve, the first woman, but isn’t it strange what my Manny’s idea would do to me, his mother. It would make me, you see, into the mama of Adam, Creator, or, how do you say? Creatrix? The Mama God, not the Virgin but the Goddess, Maker Mother of all that lived, and lives, on earth!