Prayers for the Living (52 page)

“The company's most important crop, of course, is bananas—of which it now owns and operates two hundred and fifty thousand acres in Middle America. The banana is one of mankind's oldest crops, and it is not native to the Americas.”

You heard that? The fruit he's talking about it, it too was an immigrant, like our family, and like the rest of us, except for maybe the Indians, and them, too, we all come here from someplace else. But from where? From the old country, or from the moon? When I tell you about this speech of my Manny's, or what happened on this afternoon, I got to ask you that.

“Chinese literature of three thousand years ago mentions bananas. They are called
the fruit of the wise
. But imagine if, instead of the apple that tradition had as the fruit with which Eve tempted Adam, it was in fact the banana—
the fruit of the wise
that grew on the Tree of Knowledge. In 327 BC Alexander the Great discovered bananas growing in the valley of the Indus in India. Later, history records the crop's further journey westward. In 1492, a famous year for us in
America, the Portuguese found the fruit growing along the African West Coast where the people there gave it the name
banana
. At the time Columbus launched his voyage, the banana, some historians tell us, was growing abundantly in the Canary Islands. In 1516 Father Thomas de Berlanga . . .”

Because it's turning now, I got to tell you what's happening, in his head he's no longer walking in a fantasy. He's concentrating on the crowd—on the fixed, firm, attentive faces, mostly young, with here and there a professor wearing a dark beard—like the old neighborhood he's thinking when he allows himself a glimpse of the beards—and he's losing attention from his dream in his mind and beginning to focus on the audience because somehow or other—you know my Manny's magical senses—he's already got a feeling of what's about to take place even before there is any way of telling from the look of the crowd or the sound of the crowd or the smell of the crowd—because they're college students, mostly, and they smell of sweat and cigarettes and here and there a little perfume, and here and there a little dope cigarette—it's turning.

“. . . a Spanish Dominican, carried the roots of the banana plant with him when he sailed to Santo Domingo as a missionary. From there the culture of this ancient fruit fanned out to various points on the mainland of Central America and to one Caribbean island after another.

“The fruit is old. But the banana trade as we know it is definitely new. The first bananas to arrive in New York were brought here from Cuba in 1804. By 1830 occasional clipper ships were bringing small cargoes from Cuba and the Bahamas. This trickle gradually increased, though as recently as the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876 red bananas wrapped in tinfoil were sold as an exotic curiosity.

“It was not until the introduction of the modern refrigerated steamship at the turn of the century that the real banana industry was born.”

And he has one strange thought before it all begins to break apart, my Manny does, up there on the podium looking down upon those faces, listening for a moment to his own words—he's thinking, what
do we know? what do we know? and the design suddenly came clear, it fell into place, all the pieces shifted into the pattern—and he saw that he was standing in for Adam, the first man, to whose lips Eve had raised the forbidden fruit, the delectable produce of the Garden, long, slender golden offshoot of the Tree, and together they had eaten, first him taking a bite, then her, then him, then her, until all the nourishing shaft was gone, and so they ate another, and another, and to the animals in the trees, the monkeys, and to the dogs in the bushes, the cats in the furrows, they passed along the food, and down even until the next generation, and the next, and the next, and now he stood, carrying forward the first tradition, assuming the leadership of this company whose power lay in its ability to clear spaces in the wet lowland jungles and plant with the thousands of hands they owned the so-called bits or rhizomes from which the first lusty young shoots would rise—and he stood as one with the first human shoot, the male Adam, and Maby with Eve, the first woman, but isn't it strange what my Manny's idea would do to me, his mother. It would make me, you see, into the mama of Adam, Creator, or, how do you say? Creatrix? The Mama God, not the Virgin but the Goddess, Maker Mother of all that lived, and lives, on earth!

But from this crazy thought his mind immediately fell away, as if it had climbed too high—and as he delivered the rest of his speech, as he outlined the company's holdings and its policies and its future projects, though he spoke with more conviction, now that he had convinced himself that there had been, working through it all, a reason why a former rabbi had taken over a company that grew and shipped and sold this exotic fruit, as he hypnotized himself and he hoped the audience with his explanations and projections, a boy with dark hair and tortoiseshell glasses took some steps that changed everything.

This boy: now he might have been the one, like I said, who gave Sadie directions on that terrible afternoon as she was walking across the campus, or he might have been a stranger, another child, but he was not, finally, an unknown—he became, even in his awful doings, in a way like a member of the family—as I see it now, because,
like some man who fires a gun that kills a president or king, out of his action grows something so intimate as to be so personal that it belongs more to you than most of your own actions, because it changes your life and the lives of others close around you—this boy: say that his name was Alan Kaplan or Mitchel Markovitz or James Bloom or Norman Fruchtman, and say that he was raised, like many good boys my Manny had known—and like the good boy he was himself—in some congregation, synagogue or temple, Orthodox, Conservative, Reformed, whatever the direction it doesn't matter, and say that after a time he cleaved from the laws, and he discovered another way of living, say a way like my Manny's, a way of living in the world without religion, but say that this boy, he belonged to a time when his soul ached from the lack of the laws, and he wanted something to set him on the straight and narrow, and he found friends with the same soul-ache, and they became boys who wanted some different kind of political situation, a change of government, but at the same time they fell back into the line of the laws that raised them, and they talked and they read and they met and they wrote, on campus that's easy, and they formed a group called Jews for Justice, a catchy name, don't you think? some catch for my Manny I'll say, and they followed the progress of my son's rise in the business world, my Manny was only one among many they followed, but he was the one on whom they took their aim, because he had risen so high, and lived so near, and when they heard that he was coming to speak at the university they organized a plan, and the plan was to make a demonstration that would point up the truth of what they believed he was doing—carrying out the work of imperialism, as they put it, instead of following the laws of the Torah—some cartoon world they lived in, and where are they now? all in business themselves I wouldn't be surprised, or becoming dentists or shoe manufacturers, nice boys following their own fathers' businesses, or going to law school, or teaching college, Jews for Justice!

But whatever they were, whether right or wrong, touched by the finger of God Himself—or Herself—or Itself—whatever—or crazy in their devotion to the Torah of Maimonides or Marx—you didn't
think I knew such things but from talking to my Manny over the years, from listening to him, I hear these names, I hear these ideas, a mother doesn't just teach, you know, sometimes, big miracle, she even learns!—here comes this Alan or Mitch or Norman or James, whatever his real name, and he's got his gang with him, the group or cadre or circle or cell or club, whatever they call themselves, here they come, shuffling in from the back of the hall, and they're wearing denim and scruffy beards and wearing yarmulkes—
yarmulkes!
—and they're carrying signs and they're chanting:

RABBI GUATEMALA!

OUT OF THE AMERICAS NOW!

and

JEWS FOR JUSTICE SAY

OUT OF THE AMERICAS!

So what is this? I should have stood up and shook a finger at them, so what is this that a Jewish person can't behave like any other person? a Jewish person can't make a business? can't take over a company and try to make it better? because that was what my Manny had in mind—he got the confidence and shares and votes of the majority of holders exactly because this was what he pledged to do, and they didn't want just anyone to take it over, they had a bad time with it for years, they knew how bad it was, they wanted someone to
make
it over by taking it over, they wanted someone with a vision, with a knowledge of the law, with a conscience, you see the business life isn't all bad, they wanted my Manny because of what he promised to them by the way that he presented himself both in his looks and in his plans—but in this world things don't move in straight lines, do they? Even a grandmother who can't see no more knows this—this world makes for motion by collision, and here was the collision and the crash making a noise, and having an effect, as loud and as great as the smash and destruction of taxi and fire engine
and milk truck and my poor Jacob's wagon—everybody in a hurry, nobody in the wrong, and out of it everything is changed.

Rab-eye Gwat-a-mal-a!
they're chanting.

Rab-eye Gwat-a-mal-a!
they're shouting at the top of their lungs.

And my Manny stops his speech—the air swells with the noise of those chants and the outcries from others in the audience, some of them shouting down, some shouting up—and he looks out upon the crowd like a man observing the rising waters of an ocean in a storm. He sees his wife clutching the arms of the chair, and he moves slightly forward toward the edge of the stage, around the lectern toward the edge, and some professors rush toward him, as if they expect him to fall forward right then and there—but he's careful, he's done this before, remember? It's Maby who worries him, sitting there clutching the seat as if she might take off and fly up to the ceiling and hit her head against the roof and break through, against all laws of gravity, and fly out of this world—and he motions for Sadie to turn around, her back is turned, she's observing the demonstrators who stand chanting at the back of the hall—and he calls to her, but who can hear amidst all this din?—but she does turn, she turns, and she doesn't know he's watching her, she doesn't know that he catches sight of her for a second with her lips moving with that phrase, he sees her lips moving, and his heart turns over in his chest, like a fish it turns, a fish diving up out into the light and then diving down again into darker waters, he sees on her pink lips, the mouth of his daughter, only child, the lips moving to the chant:

            
Rab-eye Gwat-a-mal-a!

            
Rab-eye Gwat-a-mal-a!

Or maybe he didn't see her chant it? There was suddenly chaos here, a lot of noise and motion and confusion. He could have been imagining things, my Manny. As you know he's good at that upon occasion, but not on an occasion like this. This was business. He was always very alert when it was business. But there she was, or so
he thought. And don't think he didn't say something to her right away after the rest of the speech, after the reporters came with their flashing bulbs, and the campus police arrived to carry off the boys with the yarmulkes and shouts and signs.

“You're coming with us?” he asked her as the police led them out to the car. “You'll come home with us?”

“Us?” she said, bearing down on him with a stare, something she hadn't done in years, for years it was always look off to the side, stare at the sun, moon, anything but look her father in the eye.

“Your mother will stay at the apartment tonight. And I'd like you to come back with us.”

“I have to drive back up to school.”

“Come in the car with us. I'll drive. And Daniel can drive your car back to the city.”

“I'll drive.”

“I said . . .”

“I'll drive the big car,” she said.

He felt unexpected heat in his chest, and he smiled, in the middle of all the noise, the police holding back some reporters, and some bulbs still flashing on and off.

“It's a deal.”

“Be careful,” her mother said as Sadie climbed in behind the wheel of the long black car.

“Mother, that's the first nice thing you've said to me in such a long time I can hardly believe it.” She was steering the long car away from the curb. Some students ran alongside it, waving, chanting, you could see their lips moving, though the words became a blur . . .

Rab-eye Gwat-a-mal-a!

“Don't speak to your mother that way,” my Manny said, sorry as soon as he said it.

“I'll shut up, sure,” Sadie said, pretending to concentrate on her driving. “Anyway, she couldn't hear me. But I'll shut up.”

“I didn't ask you to do that,” my Manny said. He sat in the front passenger seat—he had decided that he would sit there instead of with Maby so that he could speak to Sadie once they got rolling.
Now as he glanced back into the rear of the car, behind the glass partition, he noticed Maby looking so alone and forlorn, that he was sorry that he had isolated her—New Jersey rolling past her window, lights of the city and then highway, refineries, rest stops, the darkness of the turnpike on her face. She said not a word, not the entire trip. Or if she did the space between front and rear stopped the sound from reaching to his ears.