Prayers for the Living (13 page)

“We should eat together here.”

“Why don't we do that? The car is going to wait for me no matter what. It can wait a little longer. You think it's good here? Here I never thought of eating.”

“It's the mall. It couldn't be good, it couldn't be bad.”

“You're right. The mall is the mall. But we could try it.”

“Sure we could try it. I have nobody at the house now neither.”

“So when she comes with the coffee we'll ask her for a menu.”

“Sure, sure, we'll splurge, we'll tell her. We're having dinner. She'll like it. It will give her something to do.”

“You don't think she has a family of her own to think about? She's going to be happy because we're staying around to eat? Don't kid yourself. I bet she's a grandmother, just like the rest of us.”

“You want to ask her to sit down and tell us her story?”

“Don't be so sarcastic. I'll bet she has a story just like I do.”

“About her son the minister?”

“Or her son the doctor.”

“Or the janitor.”

“Don't be so cruel. There's enough cruelty in this world. We all got grandchildren.”

“Excuse me. I was making a joke. It's true. All grandmothers got children.”

“I'm glad she didn't hear you. Some joke.”

“You're miffed because I make a joke, Minnie? You would prefer that we don't eat together?”

“Sit, sit. I prefer that we eat. I don't want to eat alone. I'm enough alone. I was enough alone ever since Manny went to Cincinnati. I was alone. Mrs. Tabatchnick was alone. Mine only went to Cincinnati. Hers went to Europe already. To the war.”

“To the war?”

“To the war.”

B
UT THERE WAS
a war on in Cincinnati, too, let me tell you. Manny took the train west, and it was a dark ride, at night, through the cities with the lights browned out, through the dark fields, the woods, over the eastern mountains. He felt so strange. Never had he been west of Sixth Avenue, and here he was on the other side of the mountains. For him it could have been at that time almost California, nearly Japan. But of course as it turned out he didn't have to travel very far at all to begin his education into foreign ways. No, sir. No, sirree. It began on the train—he saw young boys his own age in uniform. Soldiers home from war or on their way to war. And for the first time in his life he paid attention to what was going on in the world outside. Before that, it had been his studies and Mama, Mama and his studies. So if in Europe they had been killing the Jews, that was in Europe, and he lived on Second Street, New York City, America. He had been born in the old country, of course, and the old rabbi had taught him in the style of the old country. And from studies to Mama, and Mama to studies, that you could say was
living like he had never left the old country. But there was a part of my boy that was—still is—so American I can hardly tell you. Even if he lived the old country life he was living it on Second Street, in New York—and when he opened his eyes and saw what was going on around him, when he saw the soldiers, and talked to them about the war, and picked up—at long last, he put it in a letter to me soon after he got to Cincinnati—a newspaper it was like a curtain falling away between his eyes and the world. He saw, he saw. For the first time he saw. He saw his own little world, and what a little puddle, as he put it, it was alongside the big sea. And by crossing the sea he could learn to see. Living in this country made it possible for him to throw off the old ways, the old cloak, he called it, and to make a way for himself that was more suited, more American, and also for him more comfortable, and, I think he always thought about others when he talked about this part of it, more useful. More useful to himself, more useful to others.

Of course this doesn't happen overnight. On a train ride. In the dark. But he sat up the whole night talking with the soldiers, and thinking. And he remembered how far he had come, the boat trip across the ocean he remembered, working with his father he remembered, the accident he remembered, his studies he remembered, even his mama he remembered. But now came the time in his life when he met new things, new ideas, new people, and he noticed the difference between what he remembered on the one hand and what he knew firsthand on the other in the present.

Hitler? They talked about Hitler in the train in the dark.

And the war, what war meant. These young soldiers talked—and some of them drank. They passed around a bottle. And my Manny drank with them. Before he never drank a drop, but on the train, in the dark, with the boys almost as young as he was, he drank. And they talked about the contribution, the effort they were making. And he kept quiet about what he was doing, but he thought to himself, he was going to make a contribution, every sip from the bottle he thought more about it, a contribution not just with his body but with his mind. He was going to study even harder, and he was going
to change the lives of other people not by war but by peace. Not by deeds of battle but by deeds of peace.

You know years later, many many years later, I mean last month, just last month, when he was in the hospital, I was in the hall outside his room, he was sleeping, and
she
was off somewhere, and Sarah was in school, and I was talking to Sally Stellberg's Doctor Mickey, you know, he's so wonderful, he was always there, always ready to help, and what a relief it was to me to see him always there, let me tell you, so I was talking, and I said, Doctor Mickey, tell me, here is a man who has so much, he's a scholar, a teacher and rabbi, he's a businessman on the side, he's got a beautiful wife—well, she is beautiful, with her face, with her hair, you've got to admit that—and a lovely daughter, and yet he always seemed lately so troubled, do you know what I mean? Isn't it possible for a man to be happy? Isn't it possible for a man to say to himself, look, I have a lot of wonderful things—and of course I didn't even mention his mother, his dear mama who fed him and clothed him and cared for him all these years—why isn't it possible for a man to be satisfied when he has so much?

“If you could tell me, Mrs. Bloch, what makes a man satisfied,” he says to me, “then I could help many more people than I do with my prescriptions.”

He's such a wise man, Mrs. Pinsker. Our friend Mrs. Stellberg must be proud. Such a wise mind. Answers he doesn't give. He makes questions.

What satisfies a man? I was asking him. I was asking why my Manny never seems satisfied when he has all of the things a man could want. He wants, he wants. No matter what he's got he wants more, more. And not in a selfish way. He's never been selfish. He's always given generously of what he has had, and he's always gone out for more. In a way, the trip to Cincinnati, that was a way of getting more for me as well as for him. He wanted a better education. He wanted to open up the world for himself. And look where this ended for me. A lovely house where we all live together. A car and a driver of my own—this from the business, of course, and not
from the temple. From the temple he has never taken, he has only given. You know that. Everybody knows that. You're nodding, you understand. Good.

So there he is, riding in the train through the dark country, and it comes to him how much he has lived under a cloak, behind a curtain. Not like his little friend Arnie, who could barely come up to his shoulder—he's already going off to volunteer for the war—and you can be sure Mrs. Tabatchnick still thinks about that, you can be very sure. No, but Manny's making plans to volunteer for other things—to volunteer for the world. To make his way in the world. It's near dawn. He's got whiskey on his breath, and in his mind a million ideas churn all around, mixed together, the past, the present, things he wants to do in the future, though the future is the darkest part, darker now than the forests outside the window of the train—and he's wondering at how far he has come in less than half a day, and he's wondering just how much farther life will carry him, because something has changed inside of him, something he cannot yet understand or explain, but the color of his hair seems to signal it to him, like a flag, like a new blossom on a bud sprouting out in time-stoppage photography. There's a war on in Europe, and there's a war on inside himself. And the Allies have Churchill, the Allies have FDR, and in his head he's got his father's voice, the bird that spoke in his father's tongue, and this helps him get through the ride, through the night. Now if this sounds crazy, let it be. Who knows what other boys keep in their minds to themselves? This is what he told me, long long after. And if he heard voices then at least the voices told him to do good things, not bad. Go west, young man. Go to the school that will do you good. And do good to others. Build a life. A way of life. A plan. A business that spreads out the good to other people.

So he arrives in the new city, and there's a war on inside and out, but to look at the outside you would never know it. Not in the morning. It's bright, sunny, a beautiful day, above the Union Station the birds soar, the clouds scatter past, and Manny is standing there
waiting for his host, his sponsor, his patron you can say, to arrive. He didn't know that they walked past him several times before finally stopping, staring, and Meyer Sporen pointing a finger at him, and saying, “You? It's you?”

At his side stands Maby. “Daddy,” she says, “who else is he supposed to be?” To my boy, she says, “I remember
you
. But your hair! What happened to your hair?”

And Manny retreats into himself, curling up inside like a little child, though he's still standing there, looking up at the girl on the platform, his hand on his suitcase, his coat open, shirt roughly wrinkled, one corner sticking out from beneath his belted waist. She's so pink, freckled, fresh, fair, young—he can hardly believe that voice comes out from that small pink birdlike mouth. It's music that slides up and then down, up and then down, an imitation of something she heard from the lips of people she greatly admires, the voice of an actress, the voice of some woman whom she might like to adopt as her mother. Oh, if I could have been standing there with him, I would have whispered in his ear, watch out! Watch out!

And now he's remembering.

And he's trying to disappear inside himself because he knows what she's remembering and what she's about to say.

You
, she is thinking.
You did it in your . . .

Oh, and now he wishes he had leaped from the deck of the ship, wishes he had died with his father crushed under the weight of a thousand breaking bottles of milk, drowned in the milk, in the blood pressed out of him! If he had only been the horse, the horse against whose head the policeman pressed the pistol!
Pap!
and he'd have gone, never to have had to live long enough to step into this moment! And he can tell, it's happened before, he's drawing blood from his fingers with the shard.

“Yes, it's me,” he muttered, and tried to smile. Tried to cover it over, overcome it, comb it smooth, oh, I wish I had been there to help! To brush his thick white hair, to make him feel neater, more handsome. He's so embarrassed, you know, because through all this
she's, how do you say? exciting him! That's right, he's looking at the pin, her hip, the way it pokes, the ruffles across her chest, the blouse, the face, the hair.

“Oh,” she says, “it's you all right,” and she laughs a kind of laugh that spreads across the air between him like those same ruffles, unfolding but never completely opening.

Here is where I really wish I could have been standing there, invisible—and why couldn't he imagine my voice? I didn't talk to him enough? I didn't help to raise him like both his mother and his father? And whose voice does he call up at a time like this, the temperamental dried-up old prune of a humpbacked rabbi who never told him outside of Talmud anything worthwhile? Manny, I would have said, Manny, Manny, boychick, stand up to her! Oh, if I could have been a pure white pigeon, the bird swooping down! I would have said to him, Manny, stand tall to her now or forever she will always keep the upper hand!

“You never liked her because she was mean to him? Or she was mean to him because you never liked her?”

“Who can say? A little of both. Look, I liked her at first. Why shouldn't I? Her father was so generous to us all the years. The accident made us like family. It brought us together and kept us together. So you think it was an accident that the girl and the boy should get together? Let me tell you, this was fate. This was what they were supposed to do. I'm only complaining about the way that they did it.”