Prayers for the Living by Alan Cheuse

Author:Alan Cheuse [Cheuse, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781941493014
Publisher: Fig Tree Books

BLOOD.

If blood could talk, if nerves could, in the two minutes they spent together in the room just after my telephone call, all of what I just told you they might have said right then and there. If blood could talk, if nerves. Let’s imagine that they said this, with their nerves, with their veins. And then they sat down, and they made a deal. It didn’t take longer than that. It had to do with a partnership they had already concluded just after Meyer Sporen’s death, an agreement they had made between the two of them to run the company the boat man had left. They extended it now—it included not only operating the company, and building it up, certainly that they had done, it now included, from my Manny’s side at least, a new small unspoken agreement. It included the fact that he put the company ahead of his love, his family, anything he cared about or believed in that might stand in the way of making things work.

It can only help Maby, he told me, a long time afterward, when the heat of her revelation to him had cooled, and she, too, had calmed down considerably, with the help of pills, doctors, and the nice trees and grass and air out in the country at Owl Valley. She brought some of it with her when she returned home, the calm, the pills, the desire for doctors. The first, she kept with her, deciding, with the help of the doctors, that she ought to do something with her life. And what she decided was, as I said before, taking courses. Manny would have preferred that she work in the temple organizations, but that was something she never did with much enthusiasm and he wasn’t about to force her, seeing her delicate state, to do it now. Instead, he listened patiently while she explained that she was going to enroll in a creative writing seminar at Rutgers Newark. He nodded, agreed. And he bought her a new car. Touching, no? Well, look, he was behind her a hundred percent. He made a point from that time on never to lose his temper with her, never to criticize. And if you don’t think my Manny could make a decision like that, you don’t know what he did—by decisions like that—to make his company, the brother’s company, the brother-in-law’s company, grow. I mean, little companies they picked up like kids’ toys from the playroom floor—and stock options, whatever that is, I hear him talk, these he gets from all of them, and from the companies they buy they milk money and buy others. My Manny. In his white hair streaked dark and dark suit—he walks into a boardroom and no one, let me tell you, is bored, my dear. They sit up, they watch him, they listen for what he says, because he has learning, he’s read in the Torah, in history, and this is a twist for them, all of

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