Prayers for the Living (7 page)

“Happy New Year,” he says.

Turning back she asks, “You're joking again?”

“I'm not joking. I want us to have a good new year.”

“Then we'll have one,” she says.

“It's not always in our power,” he says.

She blows him a little kiss. “Save your wisdom for the people upstairs,” she says. “Save your kisses for me.”

And she dashes up the hall toward the stairs.

Picture now the rabbi and what do you see? He's as helpless as a little boy who's just gotten his first kiss and the little girl has run off into the park, and the glow of it is spreading, spreading across his face, down his neck, his chest, down below, and he's glowing all over and amazed, amazed, that anything could ever make him feel such
a way. And he, this rabbi you're looking at, he's also a man of experience, a husband, a father, the counselor of I don't count anymore how many troubled people from the congregation—and if you don't think I hear sometimes about those, then how did I find out about Florette in the first place?—and as he walks slowly toward the other end of the hall from where Florette has now vanished, up the stairs, walking toward the door that will lead him up to the dais where he will conduct the holy day service, he is counseling himself, saying, get a hold, Manny, take it easy, you may be feeling for a moment like a young boy, but young you are not, and if you make a fool of yourself what will that do to your power?

This, finally, was the thing lying most heavy on his mind: the power, the people he could move and the money he could make and the feelings he could drape over himself like the robe he wore as heavily as the thought of losing control. If that went, what could he do for me, the grandmother, the wife, the daughter, himself? Not to mention all the people upstairs who depended on him to remain nothing but what he was supposed to be. To them he was “the rabbi,” not a man finally but a function. Did he breathe? laugh? eat? drink? sleep? Like a doctor or a lawyer he had to be there when they had certain kinds of trouble, certain varieties of happiness. But because they expected more from him, they allowed him—as a man—less.

But a man
needs,
he said to himself as he reached the top of the hidden staircase built into the wall behind the dais and pushed open the door that allowed him to step out onto the raised platform just to the left of the Ark of the Covenant.
He needs
. Not more than that, needs not
x, y, z,
wine, women, song, although of course he had on his mind women, mainly Florette, at this point, and me and Maby and Sarah. But he needs. He needs.

This was how he described it to me, about his mental state, physical state—we were very close, of course, mother and child—as he walked out into the bright lights. He had, all the time, one hand in his pocket fingering his famous star-shaped souvenir and the other adjusting the fringes on his heavy prayer shawl. One time, when he had a sense of humor, he said to me, “You know, Mama, when I do the high holiday
service, I feel like a floor,” and I asked, “Why?” and he said, “Because the robes hang as heavy on me as a rug.” And he looks the cantor in the eye, and gives a nod, and Manny moves to the front of the dais, and suddenly looks down and sees me—no longer upstairs, of course, for years no longer upstairs, not since the old days, the old old days, and now I'm down below in the front row, where there is mixed seating, men and women, boys and girls—and I smile at him a good smile, my best smile, and this, he told me later, released something in him—some latch unlatched, some hook unhooked, lock unlocked, lid pried open, trap sprung free—do you see what I'm getting at? And he smiled back, and all at once this feeling rose in his chest like steam from a hole in the ground, like a volcano erupting, a pressure out of the middle of the earth, although it was a lightness, a tugging, and even as he felt his body carry him forward, he looked next to me and saw Maby, and she turned quickly away, as though suddenly ashamed to stare her own husband in the eye, and he noticed his daughter, the third of the redheads in a row, and you know what Sarah does? Does she turn away? No, no, she wets her lips with her tongue, and with her hands in front of her—the demon!—strums for him an invisible guitar. This was at least what he
thought
he saw, like a drowning man whose seemingly endless days suddenly come to an end with a running backward of the life like on a movie projector in reverse—and at the last second, he caught a flurry of motion toward the rear of the auditorium, and he saw the doors open and in walked Mordecai, the brother-in-law, the partner, bald man, thin, with a beak like a hunting bird, and this may be—if you want to explain things in some way—why he says he saw the birds at the top of the ceiling. Two birds, the pigeon and the parrot.

Mrs. Pinsker, look up next time you're in temple. Look for birds. Will you see birds? You'll see beautiful designs, stars, rectangles, flowers, lines, columns, but birds? No. Not a pigeon, let alone a parrot. A pigeon he could imagine, a window open, in flies a bird. But a parrot? A jungle bird in Jersey? And in the temple of all places? First thing he thought was, Sarah, that little wretch! Ah, his own daughter, at this high holy time, and he thinks such a thing, but on this morning his anger etched the word in for the breaking of the guitar.

Maybe he thought other things. He thought he thought other things. But how much time did he have to think? He had no time. Florette! He caught a glimpse of
her
standing up. Standing out wasn't enough? He might have thought—if he were thinking—she's got now to stand up? And if he were thinking he might have been thinking about—if the seconds he had up there, like a kite on a string about to take off in a gust of thunderstorm, could have been stopped and cut into slices thin enough to give him time to think—thinking about her numbers. No? Why not? Now and then he thought about her numbers, because he is a man who loves, among other things,
his
numbers, whether in his business or in his Torah . . .

But if one hand held a kite string and was tugging, pulling him forward, the other hand held a scissors and quick like that cut the tie, and my Manny pitches forward off the dais, landing at our feet like the kite crumpling, except there was a thud, a skid and a thud, like a crate of vegetables or fruit that some dockworker with muscles thick as rope drops on the ground.

“W
HAT
'
S ALL THIS
?” Mrs. Pinsker asked. “Birds? Kites? Workers? Boxes of fruit? He fell. I was there. I saw. He walked up to the edge of the what-do-you-call-it and he tipped over. He wasn't drunk. He didn't trip. But I didn't see no birds either, darling. No birds.”

“He saw the birds, Mrs. Pinsker.”

“Now I believe you that he needs a vacation.”

“Please don't joke. This is serious.”

“So who's joking? I'm telling you, I believe you. And I hope he comes back refreshed. Doctor Mickey said he had no tumor? No problem like that?”

“You think to see birds you have to have a tumor? He saw birds when he was a boy and he didn't have a tumor then and he doesn't have one now. In any case, he didn't tell Doctor Mickey about the birds. He told me. His mother.”

“I'm glad he told somebody.”

“Don't be sarcastic. You think people don't have visions? They have visions, let me tell you. His father had visions, and so I'm not so surprised the son has them too.”

“A vision? He saw things? Or just he believed in them? Which?”

“Both, maybe.”

“So tell me.”

“I'll tell you but in order to hear about Manny's first time seeing things . . .”

“Oh, so now it's not a
vision
but just
seeing things
?”

“You know what I'm talking about, darling? My Jacob . . .”

“All right. So go 'head, talk . . . I'm all ears.”

“And all earrings, too. Where did you get those?”

“Oi
, don't change the subject. Begin at the beginning. Your Jacob, you were going to tell me.”

“I'll tell you only because it's important for understanding where the birds came from.”

“That's not all. Look at your face. Such a smile. Such memories it gives you, no?”

“It's true. That I can't deny. It makes me feel warm . . . it makes me remember.”

“Remembering makes you remember?”

“And forgetting.”

“Forgetting could make you remember. It could make you want to remember.”

“But it can't bring these things back. Remembering brings them back.”

“So remember.”

“I'm remembering . . . I'm remembering . . .”

T
HE WAVING WANDS
of wheat, the sun baking my mama's babushka blacker than burnt toast, wavy lines of heat rising from her head, the fields, the sun. Holding Mama's hand walking through
the wheat. I feel the smooth and gnarled stalks, the pricking of the stalks, the rough husks. And I am about to tell my mama all about what I feel when along comes the large dark-bearded person of my papa. He takes me up in rough hands dried from the sun and around his mouth, like winds from a cave, come odors of bread, grass, beer, tobacco, fire, fish.

“F
ISH
?”

“Fish! Don't ask me how in the middle of the fields there's fish for us to eat but sometimes we ate it. Sea of wheat they swim in? Who knows? Papa he grew things, he traded them, so sometimes he must have traded wheat for fish. Or maybe we lived closer to the sea than I remember? Or is the fish part of the dreaming? I don't know. But the odor of it, and the taste, stay with me. Except now that I remember it I can't say whether it was Mama was fish and Papa was bread or Mama was bread and Papa was fish, and tobacco, and the smell of wind on his clothes, and the smell of horse on his rough hands. It all floats together in my nostrils. I remember my papa leaning down—he was a tall man, to me as tall as a tree—and Mama raising her cheek for him to kiss it.”

“Your Jacob, you were going to tell me.”

“I'm getting to that. Hold your horses, it's coming.”