Prayers for the Living (33 page)

Which is where she runs to—the ocean.

And my Manny, can he swim? You might as well ask if he can fly. He called after her, come back here, come back, but she's pushing out into the waves like she owned them, like they were nasty children she's knocking aside or stalks of corn she's wading through, except these children, this field, it keeps coming on toward you no matter what you do, and pretty soon she's up to her neck, and stroking, swimming toward deeper water.

“Maby!” my Manny's yelling from the shore. “You come back here!”

But does she even turn around? She keeps on swimming, stroking, until she's so far out you can see her head bobbing up and down with the incoming rollers. By this time, he's frantic, he's lost all of his ability to keep calm, and he's swearing at her, something he hardly ever does, and cursing himself for doing what he did, and meanwhile she's swimming along the horizon, nothing more than a little bump of hair and head, bobbing up, dropping down, bobbing up, dropping down.

“Come back!” he shrieks at her, and the cry sounds as though it echoes over the waves because of the
scree-screeing
of the birds. And like a crazy man, he's scanning the waters one minute, as if he might lose her, and then searching the sky for a bird who might help.

“Please, Maby!” he calls out to her, and all of his restraint, it falls away like the robe he tossed aside when he came down to the water's edge. Tears have filled his eyes—salt there, salt at his knees as he wades as far as he dares, poor unlearned swimmer, no talent for that, poor boy, and he's losing his voice, and a few other people in swim clothes have wandered over, attracted by the spectacle of a grown man with pure white hair shrieking like a seabird at a woman beyond the breakers.

“My wife,” he says, helplessly, staring out into the waters, wishing that he had the courage to walk into the waves and never come back. Wishing that he had never been born to sail across this ocean.
Wishing that I had never been so proud as to turn away the offer of that awful-smelling student from the city, so that he, my Manny, poor unswimmer, never would have been born.

She returned to shore a few minutes later, her chest heaving from the effort of her swim. In her eyes there was something he had never seen before, a look, a certain way of telling him what she wanted to say even though she didn't have exactly the words for it. I can escape from you, maybe it was. I can go beyond where you can pursue me. Something like that.

And in his heart he felt a new emotion, too, forgetting as he did about why she had run out into the water to humiliate him, and he decided that this was a hurt that ranked above all pains, and that he had reason now to turn his back on her.

Some vacation,
nu
?

So he turned his back. He took his mind off her. Lucky for him, or unlucky? Florette wanted to paint his picture.

H
E WAS SITTING
for the portrait, see. If the one time he and Florette got together was an accident, sitting for the portrait was part of a plan. Hers. And, I have to admit, since he admitted it to me, his plan too.

As if he didn't have enough women in his life.

As if she didn't have enough men.

Oh, I can see by the look on your face you didn't hear that one before. But I've been telling you a lot of things you never heard before, mixed of course, like always, with things you knew but didn't want to think about or say. Sure, Mike, she had men. She was married? Sure, she had been married. But that was only one man. This woman, she had a history, and it was a crime to hear it when I finally did. A crime. She was in the camps. As a child, mind you. And they did things to her a grown woman should never know. What things? Let me tell you only what I heard, from her, of course, I heard from her, things she never even told my Manny, because she
was too shocked and embarrassed to remember the things that gave her the bad dreams—the reason she came to him in the first place, or so she said—bad dreams? Listen, the things she told me, they make nightmares into a musical comedy. Rats, they used on her, rats! Rats in the you-know-where, they'd let the animal poke its nose up. And the fingers of dead men, these too they'd poke around with. Disgusting? Darling, there's no word for it—this world, the Old World, that's where it happened, to a little girl and to older women, and if it should happen here, God forbid, somewhere in the New World, then we'd know that this world, this part of the world, was getting just as old as the other side.

So you see I have sympathy for her—her I don't hate. And I have sympathy for the other, too, for the daughter-in-law. She didn't have a bad childhood herself? She didn't have her own American version of the camps? She didn't have the Nazis, she had her family. And you can't get away from them, either, can you? Not if you believe her story. And of course I believe it. Not when she writes it down in stories she wrote for the class. Those I didn't believe. I know the truth so I know what she changes. Anyway—you call that writing? What's there but a host of
mishagahs,
mix-ups, confusions.

But look for a minute in your mind at the women in my Manny's life. One with the childhood of rats and the fingers of dead men, not to mention her parents going to the gas, and the other with her family around her but making the day into the time of nightmares. Two women—why does he attract them like this? Why not some plain ordinary girl, a nice mother, a nice wife, someone not too smart but not too dumb either who would help, and he would help, and she would feel grateful and she wouldn't want to do anything more than stay at home with me, the mother, and help with the house and the cooking? She wouldn't have to do too much because I like doing most of it. So it's three women out of the ordinary, if you count me. Four, if you count Sarah, and of course you have to count Sarah. But where is she? I can't see a clock. What's the—where has she gone, she should have been back hours ago!

I'm calm, I'm calm. I have to be, to think about these things, let
alone talk about them. The portrait—he was getting the portrait. After he came back from the beach, after Maby went to the doctor again—this time she volunteered, to get out of the house, I think, because, poor dear—I do sympathize with her, see—that was the only way she could get away. Until she thought about taking the classes. But that was a little later. But for now she goes back for a rest, she calls it, and he's sitting for the portrait, the famous portrait, that's right, the one you can see when you come into the foyer. With the wild brushstrokes on the forehead, and the hair not white but the absence of color, just the raw canvas—she's got a style,
nu
? But is it the style you want our son to appear in? that's the question. The black suit, black as crows' hair, I like that—a magic suit, I call it, because when my Manny wears a light-colored jacket and trousers to his board meetings, he doesn't have such good luck with the things he wants to do. He told me. It's superstition, but he now wears only the black suit. Superstition. That should be the only thing he's superstitious about, huh? What with carrying around that piece of glass all his life, you'd think either it or his fingers would wear away. But he's still got it, and while he's sitting there for the portrait you can bet he's got his fingers around it, rubbing it, rubbing.

“Why so nervous?” Florette asks him. “Are you afraid I'll catch your soul on the canvas?”

She's worrying, actually, that he's thinking that she's just another widow looking for a companion and will do anything and everything to get one. Even if he's her rabbi. Maybe
because
he is her rabbi? Her rabbi. Her wild and sexy rabbi is how she thinks of him. Her heart leaped in her chest like a fish the first time she saw him, when she came from the city, moved there to escape the loneliness of life without her husband—and don't I know what that's like?—and she bought a little house in town, and joined the temple, and there he was. My Manny. With his hair, his suit. And his living fingers, fingering, fingering the star in his pocket—because didn't he? doesn't he? have his own souvenirs of death and dying?

But I'm telling you too much. You should listen.

“Manny?” she says.

“I'm glad you finally brought yourself to call me by my name,” he says in reply.

“Don't move,” she says. “But listen to me.”

“I'm listening. But I have to move my lips to tell you that I'm not going to move, only listen.”

“That's good.
Don't
move. I want to . . .”

“What? You're talking to me like you're cutting my hair, not painting me.”

“You don't like my method?”

“I like your method.”

“Good. Then please, how do you say? button your lip.”

“I'm buttoned.”

“Stay buttoned.”

“I didn't make a sound.”

“You moved.”

“I didn't. I was only thinking about it. But we have such rapport . . .”

“Don't talk about our rapport, Manny. I'll get so heated up the paints will boil when I touch them with my fingers.”

“Now you're the culprit.”

“What?”

“You're making me move. Involuntarily.”

“Oh, you bad rabbi. You bad man.”

“Which one? Choice of one only. Bad man or bad rabbi.”

“Good, both.”

“Good.”

“Now stay.”

“I . . .”

“Hush!”

“I . . .”

“There!”

“So let . . .”

“Stay put!”

“No,” he says, coming around, “I want to see.”

“Have some respect,” she says, holding him off at arm's length.
“Look at it this way, you wouldn't peek at a cake rising in the oven. So stand back. You'll see it when I tell you that it's ready.”

“No,” he says, trying to push aside her arm, “I'm the kind of person who would peek.”

“And you'd make it fall.”

“Is this an allegory? Or an artist's sitting? Let me see.”

“No.”

“All right, I won't take a look. I'll trust you.”

“Trust me. I trust you.”

“Now you're getting serious. And I was feeling playful, for the first time in forty years.”

Florette, my Manny's mistress, I thank you. Because he was not just talking the talk lovers talk. He was having genuine fun. For the first time, like he said, in a long, long time. But I'd better not interrupt.

“That's a long time to go without feeling that way,” she says, stepping up to him and curling around his neck the arm she was holding him at bay with.

“You know.”

“I do. And that's why we get along, don't you think?”

“It could be. Or maybe it's just chemistry.
Maybe
. I hate to say that word. I try always to say
perhaps
. Because when I say it, I think of her.”

“And you think of her a lot.”

“How can I help it?”

“Is it chemistry?”

“Physics.”

“What do you mean?” She touched a finger to his chest. And he could feel it drilling into him, burning into him, like a finger of fire.

“Nothing. I was just joking.”

“Well,” she says, “is this chemistry?” She meant the way he was squirming a little under the touch of her finger.

He nodded.

“You can move now,” she told him.

And he put his arms around her, and when she realized that he was trying to move forward to catch a glimpse of the canvas she pulled him away, out of the room, up the stairs, to you-know-where.
And there in that room, as they did in many rooms, in other rooms, in days to come, and some nights, and an occasional morning, they did things that they told me not of, not because they could not describe them, or because they thought that they would offend me, but because they themselves, they claim, did not understand them. Chemistry. Physics. People experiment, and it doesn't always work. But I believe in it, no matter what you call it if you don't call it love. They were like children playing, like two new grandchildren I had. Sometimes they'd get undressed—this much I know, in case you're wondering if the grandmother had a total blackout in the news like they say sometimes from the government on the television—sometimes they'd get dressed up. Sometimes they'd stay at home, at her house, or sometimes they'd go out to the city. Sometimes they'd stay at a hotel in the city. Sometimes overnight. Business made him stay, he'd tell me at first. But later, much later, he confessed. After she, Maby, went back in again. After her trouble in the city.