Presence: Stories

  He found himself standing still, facing the ocean. As if it were a very old thought that never went away, he saw that he could walk into the water and drown. For the moment there was no fear in it, and no hope, but only the pleasure of not longing. And now he recalled the time earlier in the summer when he and his brother had gone in before breakfast when no one was on the beach. And they had played around in the water for a while, and then it came time to go back, and he could not. The undertow pushed him out as hard as he tried to swim against it. And then he had turned himself around in the water, already vomiting, and started to swim with the current. How easy it was, how fast! And soon he would have got to Europe. Then he was lying in his bed all bundled up, with the doctor there, and everybody saying he would have drowned except that the milkman happened to notice him.

  He had never openly denied it to them. But, standing there now, he knew he had not nearly drowned at all. He would have made it to Europe, because he had a secret strength nobody knew he had. And suddenly he remembered: “I don’t need you any more!” His own words came back, shrill and red with fury. Why was that so terrible? He didn’t need her. He could tie his laces now, he could walk forever without getting tired. . . . She didn’t want him, why did he have to pretend he wanted her? The horror in it escaped him. Still, it probably was horrible anyway, only he didn’t understand why. If only he could know what was horrible and what was only terrible! How fine it would be to sink into the ocean now, he thought. How she would plead with his dead, shut-eyed face to say something. Ben would be frantic too, and Papa . . . Papa would probably be waiting in the background not wanting to interfere with the doctor, waiting to be told what had happened. And then his lips would move a little, and they would all gasp. “He’s going to speak!” she would cry. And he would open up his eyes and say, “I was by the ocean, walking. I saw a wave, and in the wave I saw the beard. It was a whole block long. All gray. And then I saw the face. It had blue eyes, like Grandpa, only much bigger. And it has a very, very deep voice, like whales hooting in the bottom of the ocean. It’s God.”

  “It’s God,” his mother gasps, clapping her hands together the way she used to.

  “How can it be God?” Ben asks, disgusted with his lies.

  “Because He kissed me.”

  “Prove it!” Ben says, laughing warmly.

  And he opens his mouth, and they look in, the way they all did when he had a toothache New Year’s Eve and had to call up so many dentists. And in his mouth they see the whole ocean, and just beneath the surface they see the blue eyes and the floating beard, and then from his mouth comes a deep, gigantic roar, just like the ocean. In the corners of his eyes he saw a movement. A man was there, dressed in black.

  He did not dare to turn fully, but even in that first instant he saw that the man had on black shined shoes, a white satin prayer shawl over his shoulders, and a black skullcap on top of his head.

  Now he forced himself to face the man; a terror sucked his tongue an inch back into his throat, but quickly he was relieved—the man was really there, because there were other men standing behind him in a little crowd. They were as far away as he could throw a ball. The wind was whipping the white fringes of their prayer shawls. They were facing the sea, praying aloud from the black prayer books they held, and they were swaying backward and forward a little more urgently, he thought, than he had ever seen them do in the synagogue, and he saw his father and brother among them. Did they know he was standing here? Nobody even glanced at him; they kept addressing the air over the sea.

  He had never seen so many men with shined black shoes on the beach. He had never seen prayer shawls in open sunlight. It was out of order to him, pulsing in a vague alarm. He feared for them, doing this, as though the roof had been lifted off the synagogue and God might really appear and not just the Scrolls of the Ark. They were facing Him, and He must be very near, and it was terrible. Seeing their inward stares, he wondered if they maybe did not realize they were out on the beach only a yard from the rough ocean. Maybe he should sneak quietly over to Papa and tell him, and then Papa would look up from his book, see where he was, and yell, “What did we do! How did we get out of shul!” And they would all turn around and run back, with prayer shawls flying, to the synagogue and then thank him for saving them from having looked into God’s naked face.

  Or maybe he wasn’t even supposed to watch this, like the time last year in the synagogue when his grandfather had said, “You mustn’t look now,” and had made him cover his eyes. But for one second he had peeked through his fingers, and there up front on the raised platform he had seen a terrible sight. The cantor, or the rabbi, or somebody with a long beard, with three or four other old men, was covering his face with his silk prayer shawl. He had no shoes on, only white socks. All of them had white socks, and they started singing crazily and then they were dancing! And not a beautiful dance but an old man’s dance, mainly up and down and rocking stiffly from foot to foot like a group of moving tents, and from under the shawls came squawking and crying and sudden shouts. Then they all faced the closet where the Scrolls of the Ark were kept and got down on one knee, then on the other knee, and, like buildings bending over, they lay down right on their faces, all stretched out. Right up there on the altar, where usually the rabbi or the cantor or whoever he was always stood so stiff and didn’t even look directly down at anybody. He was embarrassed at the thought of grave old men dancing.

  Nobody in the little crowd was looking at him, not even Ben for a second, and not Papa either. “They know that I peeked that time at the cantor dancing,” Martin thought, and they knew that he could not be saved any more; it did not matter whether he watched this now because he was not good. In fact, they might all have come here to mourn him, that he was such a bandit. If a good boy like one of his cousins with regular ears were here now, they would probably rush over and make him close his eyes and not watch. He turned his face from the men to concentrate on the roar of the sea, trying not even to hear them praying. But there was no reward, and still no reward, and suddenly the voice of the cantor, the man he had seen first, rose high and then higher in the wind, until it was like a girl’s voice, and Martin had to look.

  They all were praying louder now and crying out frighteningly toward the waves, the cantor and then the other men with him hitting themselves on the chest with their fists. The blows sounded like separate drums in the ground, making them grunt or cry out across the water again and again, and Martin saw some sparkling thing fly out of the cantor’s hand and arch into a wave. A dead sardine? Or was it a speck of spray glistening? Now there was silence. No one moved. All their lips opened and closed, but there was only a deep humming that merged into the roaring of the waves.

  Martin waited, and suddenly he felt fright at the thought that the cantor, as he had done in the synagogue last week, would draw out the curved ram’s horn and blow on it. “Ahoooo-yah!” Martin’s flesh moved at the memory of the raw, animal cry, which he prayed would not happen now, not now when God was so close that the noise would go right into His ear and drive Him up out of the ocean to burn them all in His blue-eyed gaze. Oh, what a clashing pillar of foam would break the surface of the sea, rivers of green water pouring down the great fall of beard!

  Without warning, everybody started shaking hands. Now they were talking, so relieved and familiarly, and laughing, nodding, folding up their satin prayer shawls, closing their books, sounding like neighbors. Martin felt a singing in him that God had stayed where He belonged. Thank God He hadn’t come out! He hurried over and squeezed through the crowd toward his father, forgetting all about whether he was supposed to have watched. He saw Ben first and called him excitedly as he tried to get through to him. Ben, seeing him, pulled his father’s sleeve, and Papa turned and saw him, and both of them smiled down at him proudly, he felt. And before he could think he cried out, “Ben! I saw it! I saw him throw it in the water!” How fine it was to have seen a wonder, and not al
one! “I saw it fly into the waves!” He felt as clear and fine as Ben, with nothing at all hidden inside him.

  “What, in the water?” Ben asked, puzzled.

  Terror snapped its nail lightly on Martin’s eye. He blushed at the rebuff, but his desire would not be stopped. “The cantor—what he threw just before.” He looked up quickly for corroboration at his father, who laughed down at him warmly and surprised, not understanding, but only loving him.

  Ben shook his head to their father. “Boy,” he said, “what he can make up!”

  Papa laughed, but kind of crediting him, Martin thought, and he lived on the credit for a few moments as he walked with them across the beach toward the bungalow. At least he had made Papa laugh. But he had seen something arching into the sea—why wouldn’t they admit it? A sallowness was creeping into him. He could feel his ears sticking out farther and farther, and he could not bear his loneliness, being thrown back into the arms of his secrets. “I saw it, Ben,” he insisted, trying to stop Ben with his hand. “Pa? I saw him throw, I swear!” he yelled suddenly.

  His father, alarmed, it seemed, looked down at him with his kind incomprehension and his wish for happy behavior. “He just throws out his hand, Marty. When he hits himself.”

  That was something anyway. “But what’s in his hand, though? He threw, I saw him.”

  “He throws his sins, dopey,” Ben said.

  “Sure,” Papa said, “the sins get thrown in the ocean.”

  Martin sensed a shy humor in his father’s tone. He wondered if it was because this was not supposed to be talked about. And then he wondered if it was that Papa did not absolutely believe they were sins in the cantor’s hand.

  “And they shine, don’t they, Pa?” he asked avidly. More than anything, he wanted Papa to say yes, so that they could have seen something together, and he would no longer be alone with what he knew.

  “Well—” Papa broke off. He sighed. He did not laugh but he wasn’t serious enough.

  “Don’t they shine?” Martin repeated anxiously.

  Papa seemed about to answer but he didn’t, and Martin could not bear for it to end in silence. “I saw like”—his inner warnings rattled but he could not stop—“like a sardine fly out and go in.”

  “A sardine!” His father burst out laughing.

  “Oh, God!” Ben groaned, knocking himself on the head with his fist.

  “Well, it wasn’t live! I mean dead!” Martin amended desperately.

  “Dead yet!” Ben laughed. “You know what he said last week, Pa?”

  “Shut up!” Martin yelled, knowing well what was coming.

  “The milkman’s horse—”

  Martin grabbed his brother’s sleeve and started to pull him down to the sand, but Ben went on.

  “—kills flies with his foot!”

  With all his strength Martin beat his brother’s back, pummeling him with his fists.

  “Hey, hey!” Papa called in his reedy voice that was just like Ben’s.

  “I saw him!” Martin tore at his brother’s arms, kicked at his legs, while their father tried to separate them.

  “All right, you saw him, you saw him!” Ben yelled.

  Papa pulled Martin gently clear of his brother. “All right, cut it out now. Be a man,” he said and let him go. And Martin struck his father’s arm as he was released, but his father said nothing.

  They walked on across the beach. Martin tried to quell his throat, which kept squeezing upward to cry out. Before he knew he would speak he said with a sob, “There’s a lot of flies on a horse.”

  “Okay,” Ben said, disgusted with him but saying no more.

  Martin walked on beside him, and his anger pumped in him. A woman in an apron was at the end of their street, looking off toward the dispersing crowd of men, probably for her husband. Seeing her there, Martin moved closer to his father so that maybe she would think he too had been fasting all day in the synagogue and praying on the beach with the others. She glanced at them as they approached the macadam and respectfully said, “Gut Yontef.”

  “Gut Yontef,” Papa and Ben said together, weightily. Then Martin started to say it, but it was too late; it would sound naked, his voice all by itself, and maybe laughable since he had eaten so many times all day. They mounted the steps of their bungalow, and suddenly he was weak with uneasiness at not being one of them.

  The door spring meowed, and his innocent father held the door open for Ben to go in and then pressed his great hand on Martin’s back, warming it with pride. It was only when the door banged shut behind him that he remembered his mother’s bared teeth and scandalized eyes.

  “Ma?” Ben called.

  There was no answer.

  The stove was steaming, unattended. Martin’s father went into the kitchen, calling her name in a questioning voice, and came back into the living room, and Martin saw the perplexity, the beginning of alarm in his face. Martin blushed, afraid of being aware of what his father did not know. And he envisioned that she had gone away forever, disappeared, so that they, the three men, could sit down quietly and eat in peace. And then Ben would go away and only he and Papa would be left, and how he would obey! How perfectly grave he would always be with his father, who would discuss with him seriously the way he did with Ben, making him get a shine the way Ben had to every Saturday, and conversing with him about holidays so he would always know way in advance, and not just suddenly the day before, that it was Rosh Hashonoh or Tishebuf or whatever it was, and sharing together the knowledge of what was or was not against the Law at all times.

  The bathroom door opened and Mama came out. He saw at once that she had not forgotten. Her eyes were red, like after Uncle Karl had died from bending over to pick up a telephone book. Martin’s neck prickled at the relentlessness of her present grief. It was no joke, he saw—Papa was really frightened and Ben’s eyes were big.

  “What happened?” they asked her, already astounded.

  She looked from them down to Martin, powerless incomprehension, dried grief, glazing her eyes. “I shouldn’t have lived to hear it,” she said and turned back to Martin’s father.

  Even now Martin could not believe she was going to tell on him to Papa. Again he could not remember exactly what there was to tell, but for her to reveal anything that passed between them was obscurely horrifying and would leave him all alone to face his father’s and Ben’s awakening eyes and a crashing and screaming that would crush him out of sight.

  “You know what he said to me?”

  “What?”

  “‘I don’t need you any more.’ That’s what he says to me!”

  It seemed that no one could breathe. Ben’s face looked so hurt and astonished he seemed about to faint. And Martin waited for her to go on, to set forth some final fact about him that would fall like a stone or a small animal from her mouth; and, looking at it, they would all know, and he would know, what he was.

  But she was not going on. That was all! Martin had no clear idea what more she might say, but the final, sea-roaring evil was not brought into the room, and his heart lifted. She was talking again, but only about how he had hit her. And although Papa was standing there shaking his head, Martin saw that he was abstracted already.

  “You shouldn’t say a thing like that, Marty,” he said and went into the bedroom, taking off his jacket. “Let’s eat,” he said from in there.

  He wanted to run and kiss his father, but something kept him: a certain disappointment, a yearning for and a fear of a final showdown.

  And suddenly his mother yelled, “Didn’t you hear what I told you? He’s driving me crazy every day!”

  Papa’s footsteps approached from the bedroom. Now, now maybe it would come, his thunderstruck roar of down-looking disgust. He appeared in the doorway in his shirt sleeves, enormous, immovable. “I’ll take my strap to you, young fella,” he said and touched his belt b
uckle.

  Martin thrilled and got set to run around the table. Papa sometimes took his belt off—and Martin would have to dodge out of his way, keeping the dining-room table between them for a minute or two. But Papa never actually hit him, and one time his pants had started to fall down and everybody had laughed, including Mama and Papa himself.

  But now he was unbuckling his belt, and a surge of pity for his father brought tears to Martin’s eyes. He pitied his father for having so unworthy a son, and he knew why he was going to be beaten and felt it was right, for it was disgusting that a boy should know what he knew. He backed away from his father, not because he feared being hurt but to save him the pain of having to be cruel.

  “I didn’t mean it, Mama!” he pleaded. Maybe she would let Papa go, he hoped.

  “You’ll kill me!” she cried.

  But instantly Martin knew it was his release. Papa’s having unbuckled his belt was enough for her, and she went into the kitchen with her hand on her belly to stop a pot cover from rattling.