Prayers for the Living (15 page)

“I
T
'
S A NICE
letter. But enough of the letter, Minnie. Here's the fish.”

“It smells good.”

“It looks good. It looks nice here even if it's the mall.”

“The mall. The mall. Today everything is at the mall. I remember before the mall. Everything was in the neighborhood, you didn't have to drive nowhere else. Because how could you drive if you didn't have a car?”

“Today we drive. We fly. To the moon.”

“Tomorrow the moon. Fish on the moon. The mall on the moon. Oi, I should be so lucky to eat on the mall on the moon. What we would eat there I don't know. Fish? Moon fish? What do you think? Are there fish on the moon? In the mall on the moon? And this same dark woman will be serving us? Moon women? Moon men? Grandmothers, grandmothers on the moon? There'll always be grandmothers. On the sun. Moon. Stars. We'll always be here, talking, making nice for the children, for the grandchildren. Here. Look. The fish is getting cold, Rose. Eat the fish. Enjoy. Is it moon fish?”

“It's fish fish. Not a fishy fish but a meaty fish. A fleshy fish. Sole.”

“Sole. Moon sole. Soul. Soul moon. Eat. I'll eat.”

“And talk?”

“And talk. You want to finish that letter. Read more letters. But I didn't bring more. More I have at home. Sometime I'll show. Letters. Diaries also I have. And papers. Plenty of papers. These he gives to me for safekeeping. He trusts me. Don't you like a boy who trusts his mother? What more could you want? The moon?”

“Why not the moon?”

“So I'll give you the moon. And you know what that is?”

“What?”

“The truth. The moon is the truth. Everybody wants it, but it's always hanging up there in the sky just out of reach.”

“And this you can give to me?”

“On this subject I'm trying.”

“So tell me more.”

“I'm telling. First a bite of fish. And then more moon.”

I
T WAS THE
woman who decided it. You know, it's always the woman.

He was teaching her Hebrew, and she asked him if they could read poetry in Hebrew. So at night he came over to teach her, and one night, this was in his last year, after his classes, after his dinner in
the dormitory, where, I assure you, he ate well but not as well as he ate at home—he had stopped, you see, eating so much at the Sporens' because of the atmosphere, Meyer Sporen becoming louder at the dinner table, the son still absent, Mrs. Sporen constantly sneaking off into the other room to take a drink, and Maby the daughter living in another world from which now and then she would visit, in the form of saying nasty things to both her parents, and teasing Manny.

So one night she tells him, after a year of reading together in the downstairs parlor, “Come up with me, I want to show you something.”

And like a fool he climbs the stairs. Like a fool—like a boy so much in love he couldn't pee or eat a potato without thinking of her. It had been that way with him ever since that time he saw her at the station and he looked up and saw her beautiful white-ruffled chest—this is how the world is decided, by either seeing such things or not seeing and that changes everything—and in Manny's case he saw, and so when she invited him up after all this time—because she had other things on her mind all those other years, crazy things, they all show up later, sometime I'll show you, you'll see, you'll see—anyway she invites him up, and he can't climb the stairs fast enough—oh, if he could hear me tell you this he'd turn red, he'd say, Mama, Mama, please, do you think you could read my mind? How do you know how I felt then? And I'd have to remind him that he was a good son, that he wrote all this to me, that he told me everything, even though now he would like to forget it, now that he's on his second honeymoon in Bitch Heaven, Beach Haven some normal people call it—the bitch herself leading him up the stairs . . .

“Come and see this,” she says to him, and takes his hand.

His fingers felt like hot sticks! Her cool touch, almost clammy, it didn't matter, it set his hands on fire! She leads him, by the hand, the heat rising to his wrist and climbing to his arm, the fire, burning, along the hall and up to the window at the end, the alcove overlooking the river. There's the moon hanging over all, turning the river to a silvery sliver that looks like water that spilled and then froze between the southern hills. Whenever he studies water, gazes at it, into it, he thinks of his father, tries to remember the ocean
passage, recalls his father's stories about Atlantis this, Atlantis that, the city in the sea, and before he knows what he's doing he's telling her all about it, and she's laughing out loud, telling him how crazy it all sounds, and he draws back from her, a little hurt, a little insulted.

“And I suppose all your talk about changelings isn't a bunch of bull?” he says to her.

She gave him a funny look, a deep look that in a way scared him a little, for reasons we all found out later on, but also a look where he could see a bit of playacting on her part too, a look that wanted to say, so, who can know what we really are after all? and perhaps I really am a changeling, whatever that is. Remember now that he's been studying Talmud, reading philosophy, history, and doing his accounting, his business practices, his little classes in managing things, all of it very practical each in its own way from the Torah to the economics, and maybe some rabbis they've got their eyes on the mysterious, on what God means when He says this or that in one place in the Books of Moses or another, but Manny was never interested in that part of it—in a way he had decided to study it because he wanted something hard but something he could hold on to—he could have the rules from the Ten Commandments, he could have maybe a little fuzziness in some of the arguments from the old rabbis, but there was always the
hard and fast
rule that you could always figure out one way or another and
pretend
at least that you knew what was going on in the Bible or in your life or somebody else's life or all of this at once.

Like that piece of glass he carried around, something he could feel under his fingers and think, this came from the bottles from the truck that killed my father, and I will always remember that day, and it will never change for me, hard and fast. Maybe it was a little magic trick he used on himself, a little bit of pretending, but he used the glass star as a way of giving himself good luck, of protecting himself against the kind of trouble he could see coming in her eyes. And he had used it before, when he had stumbled into the alley and looked up and saw the pigeon that spoke to him in his father's voice! The pigeon! The vision! Am I seeing this? Am I hearing things? he asked himself
always, and touched his fingers to the sharp-edged souvenir as a way of bringing himself back to the reality of his pain, the loss of his father so young in his life and so early in his
father's
life, and the pain would always put him back on the right path, the trail he wanted to take toward making a success for himself in the world both as a good man and as a man who can buy for himself and his family and his mother the things of this world that everyone, unless they're lying, wants to buy and pile up and keep.

And through all this thinking and remembering he's still looking into her eyes and he sees in there some very strange things, first a park or a playground, a schoolyard, like that, with little demon children playing on the swings and push-go-round, and then a shift of light, like a big storm over the rooftops just at sunset when the colors swirl around and turn orange and purple and darker and finally dark, and he sees a garden, and a tree, an apple tree,
kinnahurra,
a tree from Eden he explained it to me, this is what he saw, which makes her, and makes him, well . . .

“Come,” she says to him, and takes him by the hand, down the hall, into her room, where her parents are I don't know. He doesn't know. If she knows, she's not telling. Always before this pair, they had done their studying together in the downstairs old-fashioned parlor, where the ship captain who built the house could tell his daughters to sit if they had male visitors, but now they are upstairs—and it's so quiet it's as if somebody has turned off the sound on a television or turned off a hearing aid—and they're going to study, she explains to him, because he looks and there in her hand is a Bible, and in a minute she's leading him into her room, and she points to the bed for him to sit and she sits on the floor and she tilts her head a little, you know the cute way my Sarah's got, obviously she got disinherited from her mother who to me has never shown such cuteness but must have had it in her when she was Sarah's age or just a little older, because this is the time that we are seeing her in right now.

“Read,” she says.

He knows just what she means. They've been studying together, studying Graetz's
History of the Jews,
studying the
Encyclopedia Judaica,
at whose suggestion his or hers it doesn't matter by now, does it? Big books, heavy books, but tonight, they're reading the Song of Songs.

He clears his throat, feels just the tiniest prickle of embarrassment, since how well does he know this girl though by now it's been a few years? Not so well. He's seen her at mealtimes when he's been invited, but she's always kept her distance from him, even after the time he watched her coming down the stairs. She's his twin, she says to him sometimes, twin lost in the woods. And now and then she'd talk to him after services on the holidays at the Union of All Hebrews, since Meyer Sporen liked to keep track of Manny. He had an investment in the boy, of course. His own son, at that time, he considered lost. He was off on the ocean somewhere. Did he write? No. Did he telephone? No. Did he send a telegram? Nothing. And the reasons, well, Manny learned all this soon enough, but not during his first few years there, and not even up until this moment, but soon, and then it was soon enough, and it was enough, too, I'm telling you.

And my Manny opens to the proper page, and he's feeling at the very instant that he begins to read the twinge in his you-know-what-and-where that turns his face red. But she pretends not to notice the way he shifts his leg on the bed, the way he leans closer into the pages even as he raises the book closer to his face. He was a boy who had known very little about life except hard work and what love his mother could bring to him, which is a love every boy needs but different of course from the love that comes to a man from a woman, and this he needed, too, without even knowing, and the reddening of his face, the feeling in his legs, his . . . It came from not understanding how much he needed, but she understood, and she was tempting him even with her eyes, with her . . .

Well, I'll just show you.

So he's opening his mouth to read, he's wet his lips for the Song of Songs . . .

I am a Rose of Sharon / a lily of the valleys . . .

Can you imagine him reading this to her at this moment, alone in the room, alone in the house?

Catch us the little foxes, / the little foxes, / that spoil the vineyards / for our vineyards are in blossom.

He looks up, she's standing, unbuttoning, can you believe this?

I come to my garden,
he's reading, digging his nose deeper and deeper into the page as though if he tries hard enough he can disappear face first right into the poem and never have to deal with the life that's going on in front of him.

I come to the garden, my sister, my bride, / I gather my myrrh with my spice, / I eat my honeycomb with my honey, / I drink my wine with my milk.

She's a bony girl, but pretty, the same prettiness you can see coming out in Sarah these days, the slightly knobby shoulders and elbows still available if a grandmother wants to rub them for luck, but also a thickening in the tush and the chest, a reddening of the skin, the knees looking good, the calves, and here she is, standing in front of him, sliding from her shoulders her ruffled blouse.

I went down to the nut orchard,
he reads,
to look at the blossoms of the valley / to see whether the vines had budded, whether the pomegranates were in bloom . . .

And that was that. In a few seconds she removed the book from his hand, pushed him down, undid his trousers, slid them right over his shoes. Sister, bride, myrrh, spices, eat the honeycomb with the honey. Before he could turn around my little boy was no longer a little boy, and the Bible study, the famous reading of the big poem from Solomon, it was over.