Prayers for the Living (24 page)

The little girl felt something of this. What did she know? She played in childish simplicity, unaware of the ball of spite that grew hard, and, at the same time, larger, in her brother's chest. He knew no innocence. Not since his father had tossed him across the void between the land and the deck. He'd had a hint of these feelings once before, when his sister was first born and he felt cast aside, when he got elbowed away from the center of his mother's attention, a normal emotion under the circumstances, though in this case with some kernel of truth since Mrs. Sporen, with all her problems, particularly the drink, she could barely take care of one child in some way resembling normal, let alone two. So she cared for one
and ignored one, and that one, the older brother, grew resentful. But then resentment alone doesn't make you harm someone, it only makes you hate. He, Mordecai, the older brother, might have merely ignored his little sister if his father hadn't tested him above the waters and found him wanting. But when his father tossed him into the air he landed with something that he hadn't possessed when he took off, a desire burning in his chest like a field fire for revenge against the man who humbled him—and against the sister whom that man held up as an example.

Isn't that something, the way a few seconds changes a person's life? One minute the older brother, the next the hateful enemy. The father might have forgotten altogether, the sister might have forgotten altogether—to them it was only a moment's annoyance, a joke, a misbegotten minute of comedy. But to the brother it was something never to forget, and like a banker he compounded his hurt until he struck at Maby.

In the barge, the boat, at the bottom of the boat, in the cabin, at the waterline. They were playing, moving dolls and toy soldiers in and out among the pillows on one of the bunks while their father was out on the pier. Without warning, Mordecai leaped on his sister and held her down on the bunk while he pressed a pillow over her face. She struggled, kicked and scratched, and he pressed down harder, harder. She couldn't breathe, she couldn't scream, all she could do was pummel him on the arms with her tough little fists, and this annoyed him, and he let the pillow go in order to grab her hands, and then he started hitting her in the face, on the chest, and then he grabbed her by the hair and yanked hard, yanked ferociously, so that she screamed, and he made her scream again, which shows that what happened next was something that just happened, because just who would want someone to scream and make everybody on deck come running—although at this time no one was on deck, not the father, not any of the crew? He yanked, and she screamed, and if anyone had been up on the deck they would have come running because the scream was loud, her scream slit the air like a razor, and the next thing to happen he was pulling up her skirt
and pulling down her pants and poking his needle into her little eyelet, poking and poking, because you see he got stiff like he had to make a pee and then he did what he did because it brought all of his hatred and resentment to a point, and he poked and poked, and she kicked and kicked, and finally she pushed him with both hands hard on his chest, and she rolled away from under him, falling from the bunk onto the floor and turning over on her stomach, weeping, shrieking, punching at the floor. She threw a royal fit, is what happened, kicking, kicking, pummeling the floor, the wall, and when her father came back she was still lying there, her mouth covered with spit, her hands red and raw from the punching.

“What are you doing?” her father shouted when he came down from the deck.

Not, are you all right? Not, who did this? Not, no, no, poor baby, poor thing. But: What are you doing?

“What are you doing?”

And here is what all the men in this family have done, with the exception of my Jacob, and he passed away so early that, who knows, but God forbid, he too might have done the same if he had lived.

“What are you doing?”

Sympathy? A healing touch? None, none of this. Not like your boy, your son Doctor Mickey. Not this man. Not them. And here is where the men go wrong, don't you think? Because they can't get over the need to pin the blame on someone, the blame for the mess of life, the blame for the spills and the accidents and the things people drop and leave behind. They want a reason, they want a mama to clean up after them, they want to hear anything about why something happened except that it just happened and now there's a need to do something about it, even when as in this time on the barge on the river that flowed clearly and carried barges south and west, on the spring day on which this happened, in the state with the Indian name, on the river with the Indian name, it was a man who was at fault.

Am I contradicting myself? So what? So I am? So if you were a man listening, as Manny was listening, my Manny, in the driveway
on that night when he was supposed to have written his sermon about the death camps, and was interrupted by the mess that Maby had made, and was listening to the story of how the mess began, if you were my Manny, that man, you might have done what he did then, said what he said, and saying is doing when the words make things happen, don't you think? Of course, of course. And what he did was make a truth out of the old saying, men are all alike, because he stood there and listened to what she said, and then he responded as her father did—he might have been a mouthpiece for the ghost of her father—standing there in the dark, his mama passing back and forth in front of the lighted window, upstairs the daughter beating her hands together to the tunes of the beatle bugs who want to hold her hand, saying, him standing there saying,

“But what? but what did you do?”

Let's admit it wasn't easy for him. He could listen to such stories coming from people from his congregation, he could read about such things in the newspapers, but hearing his own wife tell of such a thing, listening to her confess to this, he could not, I'm afraid to say of my Manny, even my wonderful Manny, he could not take it. This, he admitted later, much later, was on his mind, images, pictures of the scene, the girl with her skirt over her tummy, the panties down, the slit like the eyelet of a needle winking up at her brother, and the boy forcing himself into her—may you forgive me for telling you such things so clearly but when you need to know you need to know—in and out, in and out, as if he, my Manny, were jabbing himself with a needle, except it wasn't a point of steel but the tips of the starry shard that he was fingering then, as always when nervous, anxious, in pain, and the pain came in waves, in his hands, and it complemented the pain in his mind, in the images that stuck again and again, needles, sharp needles, in his brain, in his eyes.

This headache stayed with him long after that. A man cannot just get rid of such visions, in and out, in and out, the needles pricking him behind the eyes.

“You know very well what I did,” she answered.

“Dis-gust-ing,” he said, my Manny. “Dis-gust-ing.”

And Maby, the wife who was the girl in the story, she turned on her heel and started away across the lawn.

“Where are you going?” Manny called after her.

She didn't say a word, she didn't even look over her shoulder, let alone turn around.

“I meant Mord,” he called after her. Because he realized now why she was running—she was running now. “Mord, that's who I meant,” he said, because by this time he had even convinced himself that he had meant Mordecai, the brother, the brother-in-law, the revengeful boy who had harmed his little sister and then run away—and stayed away because he knew that he was not welcome—Mord, his business partner, Mord, the man older than he, gaunt, always looking famished, as though he needed a mother to feed him, Mord, whose life had been mysterious to Manny up until then, until it was the hateful saga it suddenly became for him, as the headache deepened in his skull and the darkness thickened in the driveway, yes, by now he did mostly mean Mordecai, was mostly convinced.

But what if she had made up this story? What if she had made up a tale of vengeance to cover for some dreadful act or acts of her own? What if she had led the boy on herself to the terrible time on the bunk in the barge? What if, worse, she had made it up to slander him, to thicken the slander and thus hide some of her own wildest fears? Because Mord the man was not the boy, Mord the man was his knowledgeable partner, the man who made all the business possible, who showed him how to join one board, then another—showed him the paths to take, who played Aaron to his Moses, general to his minions, using him in strategies of which he never knew the completed arc until it came to pass, which meant when the holdings showed up on the books.

When Mord came back from over the sea, Manny had been nothing but an overtalented religious leader—and I say this, remember, as his most fervent admirer, his mother—with a calling for one kind of life and a yen for another kind of life and no awareness of just what that other life might be. Oh, he'd ridden the barges his father-in-law owned, and he'd seen on paper the steamships he had purchased, and
some of the loading docks, some of the warehouses, but he had never turned his mind to the thought of making them his, not until Meyer Sporen died and left most of it to his daughter and son-in-law, with a small portion set aside for the prodigal Mord as an afterthought, the kind of codicil, my Manny called it, set down by a man who didn't want to take a chance on being denied entrance to a heaven if it existed. Mord the man had nothing to do with Mord the boy, as far as Manny was concerned, not the man who returned from overseas, from the tropics where he had been living for many years, not now and not then, because Manny hadn't before needed to make the association between the lanky young fellow a number of years his senior whom he had met at the scene of Jacob's accident and death and the man who returned, because it hadn't before mattered, but now, no, now there was a painful association for him between the boy on the barge and the man in their New York suite, the man behind Manny's growing successes as the head of several small companies they had acquired just that year, the man who projected another round of takeovers for the coming year, the boy on the barge and this man were now the same person, and how it mattered, it mattered too much. How could he work with the man who had defiled the sister who had become his wife? He couldn't—couldn't work with him, couldn't talk with him, couldn't stand to breathe the air in the same room with him, and so my Manny turned his rage around, turned it in two ways, one more visible than the other, the first being the way in which he turned it against himself, and the second being the way he turned it against his wife. And on that evening, in the dark laid on like paint from a housepainter's brush, he turned it first against his wife.

“You come back,” he shouted as he had never done before, him, my Manny, solid, stolid, quiet, steady, rational—that's the right word?—always with the hand in the pocket clenched around the star, but never showing that side of himself to the world, and he's running across the lawn shouting at his wife who by now has disappeared in the shadows beyond the next house.

“Where are you?” he calls.

There is no answer in the dark.

“Maby, where have you gone?”

No answer.

So husband and wife play hide-and-seek, on a spring night in the New Jersey dark.

“Where?” Now a feeble call, like a wounded animal.

No answer.

“Come the hell out!” he calls, stronger than ever before, and using language like never before.

And this draws a laugh from her, where she's hiding, in the bushes, in the dark.

“Come out!”

“Come find me, Manny,” she says, “come find me, Rabbi.”

“Bitch!” he yells, again with the language.

And as though this is her true name she steps up to him from behind and gives him a big push. And down he goes, and she's running past him, onto the sidewalk, onto the road, and down the street toward the corner, to the road that leads to town.

“You come back!” he shouts after her, picking himself up and limping—he's hurt his foot—in the direction she's running.

Such games! You'd have thought she was a little girl again, leading him along in such games. But despite her laugh, and her agile running, this is not a child, not even a young girl, but a woman filled to bursting with great sorrow. How do I know this? I know, I know, I have lived with her, heard her sobbing in the night, and I know from some of her writings, of which I could show examples, of the pain that never ended in her, that flowed always, sometimes with the force of a stream in springtime, sometimes only seeping, like water in wet moss on a mountainside—and where do I imagine these things if not from her own voice, from her world, the words she writes, I've known, I've known—because sympathy, that is the word,
sympathy
is what makes the world go around, isn't that what they say?—so I know this, and you'll know this, and the sad, deep truth, the news that hurts the most, particularly to a mother, to
the
mother, is that he, my Manny, the man who needed most to find
out, never knew about sympathy, or he didn't know he knew. His head was aching, this was a sign, but he didn't know. His foot was aching now that he had fallen forward in the dark, shoved down by his seemingly playful wife, but he didn't know. He didn't know and he didn't know and he didn't know, and he ran off after her along the street, well, not ran, but limped, his imitation of a run because now he felt the urgency that he hadn't known before, now he felt the same despair and humiliation that would descend on him, if she were to rush for the second time in the day into the arms of the police, and so he hurried as fast as he could.