Prayers for the Living (56 page)

“Hello,
Sarah
,” her uncle said to her, running a hand across his hairless sweat-beaded skull. “Did you have a nice lunch?”

“Hello, Uncle Mord. Yes, we did. Very good.” And, oddly, she embraced him, as if she had only just now suddenly recognized their kinship.

“Good, I'm glad,” Mord said as they rolled off toward the gate.

“You know where we're going,” Mord said to my Manny in a quieter voice.

“Of course.”

“Well, it's going to be one big happy family.” He handed a sealed oversize envelope to my Manny and sat back to watch the green flow past. In a few minutes they reached the dockside, the place where workers loaded the fruit from the jungle into crates and loaded the crates onto the ships. A large white yacht lay at anchor in the deep harbor. From its mast flew, among other flags, one that showed the insignia of the curled and sleeping anaconda, a snake that grew more and more sharply defined as they roared closer and closer to the ship in a motor launch.

“The national emblem,” Mord said to his companions.

“Should we trust somebody who flies a snake? Can we?” my Manny inquired, half in jest.

“It's out in the open at least,” Mord said, wiping sea spray from his broad bald forehead.

My Manny had one hand on, not so surprising, the shard in his pocket, with the other holding on to the rail.

“You're all right?” he asked Sarah.

“Just fine,” she said, licking salty lips with a dry tongue. She couldn't keep her legs still—they quivered as though her kneecaps were made of rubber. It had to be the sea, she decided, but here in the harbor there was no pitch and roll, only the steady thrumming as the prow of the launch split the water in a direct lunge toward the yacht. A girl shouldn't feel like wetting her pants over that, should she?
Oi,
she was nervous, and well she should have been. She knew only one thing that was about to happen—she didn't know it would be more than one.

Could I have stopped all this if I had been there? Could I have asked for a wave from the east to roll the ship on its side? Could I have called up from the sleeping depths where it lay for a long time, thousands of years, coiled and waiting, the green-scaled, red-eyed anaconda? Could I have forced it to wind itself around the yacht and crush the hull with its tangles? And if I could have done that, and I would have, would that have stopped the progress of this tragedy, my Manny's story, my Manny's end of life? There are some things the mamas cannot do—and one of them is stop a stone that's been rolling downhill when it's picked up the force of a subway train.

“
Bienvenidos
. . . welcome,” a tall man with a crinkled brow and dark thin mustache says to father and daughter as they climb over the side of the yacht. Behind him on a chaise lounge a raven-haired girl with long thin legs lies stretched out sipping a drink through a straw. She blinks at the new arrivals. The sun behind her etches her into the deck.

Mord makes some introductions. A boyish waiter appears with glasses on a tray.

“Orange juice, please,” says my Manny while Sarah agrees to something fixed with rum. Minutes go by. Sarah's wondering who they're all waiting for to appear before she realizes that this is the meeting that everything has pointed toward, and it is already almost over, a flurry of polite exchanges on the hot deck in fierce sunlight.

“Swim?” says the girl approaching her on coltish legs. The sun wings in and out of focus, like a photograph from positive to negative to positive. Sarah feels the light spinning out from her insides, singeing her thighs. Who says these things can't happen the way they do? a shift of the ocean surface, the spinning sun like a pinwheel whirling, some strong chemical eating through thick cloth, seething, powdery smoke rising, acrid to the nostrils, thick as stone. Meeting the painter had showed her how to recognize such heart rumblings and squirts of gall, gush of sex-syrup into the main arteries, you know, you know, what you felt when my Manny first appeared before you, high on his dais, yes? a feeling in the veins, not an idea in the head—the news tingling at every joint and pore, saying, here it is, this is what you need. You might ask how a grandma knows this feeling, but don't inquire. Think instead to when you're old and nearly sightless, and how what you'll have left will be nothing but the ghosts of encounters you make for yourself each day when young. You'll wish that you'd done more when you have nothing but less. My darling, my daughter, granddaughter, she felt this power of the other standing before her, as though the general's daughter—this is who she is, isn't it? this is her father on the deck, isn't it?—had drawn the marrow from her bones. She follows the girl below. In a forward cabin, she undresses. The other girl undresses.

Collapse a year or more into a minute or ten—close the door to the state room—find the key to your sister's strengths and desires, the fusing of alternate organs, heart to heart becoming twin appendages of a single chest, breast to breast, double image of a passion now one, and deeper and deeper it goes, so that kidney and bladder and womb and liver, labia and eyebrow, toe and lip, nose and knee and tip of pelvis, apertures and roundings, breath and secretion, celebrate the occasion of the quest.

If I had been there would I have said what is this that you're doing? where are you putting your hands? your lips? your tongue? Ahoy, above on decks it passes between hands, the soon-to-be famous envelope, and later she'll learn of this, but now, smoking a doper, about to become the object in the arms of another, one sandal on, one sandal off, swimming in the perfumes of her own lust and the new friend's, she knows no father, mother, grandma, or even the children she might yet conceive if ever a man could educe in her the swinging wild wind of yes-I-want-it, that this dark and coltish sister inspires.

Let me tell you, these things don't happen every day. Such a locking, a joining, a what-do-the-goyim-call-it? this girl and her Catholic family? communion? Slip off the other sandal and settle on the cushions upon the bed. She's undoing the—that's right—and now—see—put your—ahh, the way she . . .

And they talk, say many things important to each of them, say things that will change everything for their fathers—but only in passing, two girls of a particular persuasion, like two redheads or two left-handed girls, swimming in a sea of burning weed, disposing of empires . . .

“A million is what he's giving him right now up on deck,” the coltish girl says. Her voice has the most delicate Latin shading, something that her studies at Wellesley rubbed at but never rubbed off.

“A million?” Sadie sits up.

“That's the agreement. So my father won't raise the tariff.”

“I see,” Sadie says, and sinks down again into the sea of pillows.

“And all for this,” says the coltish girl, giggling a little as she holds up the slender curve of fruit. “A very expensive proposition. But watch!”

If my closed eyes could close their eyes I could close them now. Here is what they're too shy to gaze upon: the general's daughter peels back the skin and holds up the wand of nourishment, and with a heavenly smile on her face crosses the small space between them and then sitting next to Sadie motions for her to spread herself somewhat, and with a gentle motion touches the tip to her bud and
slips it further in, in, and then guides it out again, out, and Sadie, who has closed her eyes, opens them, and yes her newfound friend breaks the creamy fruit in two and with a slow and certain opening of the mouth and taking in of breath and touching of the tongue and working of the jaw they eat of this. Communion.

T
HERE IS SOME
way of telling time which even those of us who cannot see the hands on a clock can say. You feel the slight change of pressure on your face. There is a certain wind. It has a flavor all its own, a special weight and tone, a sound. Weather is the breath of seasons, the lingering reminder that some voice in the clouds has spoken. Time's teeth mark the rocks with ridges and gashes. A blind god could feel its presence by fingering the layers of soil and stone, sand, the dried-up seas. What? Did I say that? Or just think it, or remember it, or maybe dream it? Have I slept maybe for a few minutes? Taken a grandmother's catnap, made some grandmother's poetry, so never mind
.

S
O GOOD MORNING
, though I know it's still not light.

Sarah, is that you?

Is it you and I'm not dreaming, Sarah come back from your evenings out—and where did you go? With friends? With enemies?—and back from hiding where you disappeared after the big trouble? Back back back from California? Too late—too late for the life but just in time for the story, and as the sun tries to rise, your grandmother salutes you.

And Florette, you're still here? Good. So Sarah, join the party, hand me a pill, a cup, braid my long white hair, make my bed—for all of such I am grateful—and in exchange I will tell you this, what you may have been wondering about, what you may have heard in newspaper and fable, what terrible information you do not have ears for to know.

On that last awful morning, back in the city, my Manny stuffed into his briefcase books he had not touched in twenty years—a volume of Graetz's
History of the Jews
—and where his history fits in we'll leave to the historians, yes? it's not for his mother to say, but it was a book that brought him together with Maby years before when they studied together—the
Encyclopedia Judaica,
a book that always came in handy when he was making his sermons—and the
Universal Jewish Encyclopedia,
the same use—all of which had the effect of turning his usually slender leather case into a battering ram of knowledge. He could not, as hard as he tried, close the clasps. Neither could he fight off the anguish he was feeling, a sensation of the nerves that leaked from his heart like water from a broken tap. This day he was, you could say, hemorrhaging from pain, and the suffering seeped everywhere around his bones. The many questions he had had in his life, the whys, the whos, the hows, the whens, for these he had found a few answers. But, like always, nothing was good for him, finally. Nothing let him rest.

How did he get this way? From his father, a man he hardly knew—if you added up all the years he knew him and all the years he was alive? From me, his mother? From both of us together? Sure, Mike, we had our questions—our lives
were
questions. If you could follow us with your eyes through time what would we look like, people running away from something, or people running toward something? Or both?

Now my Manny was running.

“RABBI GUATEMALA” PAYS LATIN GENERAL MILLIONS

So here it was, the news of the day, in the big black words in the newspaper—also it was on the radio, the early morning news. Can words make anything happen? If they can, then these were some of the words. Manny felt the shame, the disgrace like heat in an oven, and he was the dough, rising. Worse yet, he was the baker, he was the bread.

“Mama?” he said, stealing into my room earlier that morning. I had the extra good hearing as my eyes got worse and worse, as well
as the seeing from the inside, the imagining from what they told me, and so I pushed off the switch on the radio as he got to the door.

“Yes, Manny?” I said. My Manny, I added in my mind.

“I'm
tired,
Mama,” he said.

“Sit here.” I motioned with my hand to the place next to me on the bed. “It's morning. You shouldn't be tired.”