Prayers for the Living (51 page)

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 remember 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?