Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  My father held on to my sleeve. He talked to me about how, if I kept up my scoring average and my good grades, I was certain to get a scholarship to any college I wanted, Harvard or Princeton or Yale or Columbia. I should make sure not to get injured and I should stay out of trouble. The Ivy League liked clean-cut types. He seemed to be losing his balance, to be falling sideways on the wet staircase.

  “I’m tired,” I said. “Thanks for coming to the game, okay? I meant to say that before.”

  He laughed. “Did you hear that or did you hear that? I got a boy with a terrific gift like he got and he thanks me for coming to his games!” He clucked inside his mouth. “You’re really a terrific kid, Davey, did you know that? I mean, I never known anybody like you. Only I want you to promise me one thing, yeah?”

  “Look, Dad. I said I’m tired. What did you want to talk to me about?”

  “What did I want to talk to you about.” He let go of my arm. “Sure. It’s why I was waiting for you, right?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Not too loud,” he whispered. “But listen. All right. This is why I waited for you. I mean, you’re a smart boy, Davey, so maybe you can tell me what you think I can do to make Momma happy. I want to make her happy, only I don’t know how, see?” I moved away from him, up the staircase. In the dim light of the stairwell, his face seemed very pasty, a flat dull-orange. When he touched me I wanted to pull back, to strike him across the cheek so that he’d tumble down the stairs. I thought of the guys in the back room at Garfield’s. I thought of their girlfriends holding their hands and stroking their fingers, one at a time. I thought of the girls’ sweaters, the soft pastel colors: powder-blue and powder-pink, beige and peach and lavender and yellow. “I figured a smart boy like you, maybe you could give your old man a good suggestion so that every time I come home I don’t gotta feel like poison.”

  I looked away and tried to remember the game, to fix my mind upon some moment—upon the faces of my teammates, the sound of the crowd, the flight of the ball as it settled into the net and swished through. Had I really been running back and forth and soaring through the air only an hour before, playing my heart out? I tried to see Tony, feeding me a pass under the basket, slapping my ass as we ran back upcourt. I tried to think of something—anything—that would get my father’s voice out of my head, and what I began to see was a photo of Jackie, the way he looked two months before, smiling down at Rachel from the back page of the New York Post. Rachel was in the hospital with their new child, Sharon. In another month Jackie would head South for spring training, to begin his fifth season with the Dodgers, and if Rachel and their two children went with him they would stay in the team’s camp with the wives and families of the other players. They wouldn’t board with a black family the way they had during Jackie’s first season. There were dozens of black players in the league now, and as I stared at Jackie’s face he looked so happy that I wondered if, in that moment, he had any room inside him for memories of the hard times that had come before. Could one moment of pure happiness wash away years of pain and bitterness? Jackie—who’d led the Dodgers to two World Series; who was voted Rookie of the Year; who was an All-Star second baseman, the league’s Most Valuable Player—could fight back now. When pitchers or infielders got in his way on the base paths, he aimed his spikes for their shins, he rolled over them.

  “With you gone so much now at school, and then with Abe the rest of the time—it’s only that your Momma don’t feel needed the way she used to, do you see what I mean?” He tried to laugh. I thought of Tony’s girlfriend Regina, waiting for him after games in the darkness under the Bedford Avenue arch. I remembered the starched white blouses the Catholic girls would wear on the days they got out of school early for Religious Instruction, and how I’d always felt less shy with them, less frightened—how I’d felt they wouldn’t want to own me the way Jewish girls did. The lips of Catholic girls felt less sticky to me when we necked—firmer, cooler.

  “Sure, sure. All that running up and down the court, and the way those big shvartzes were banging you around under the basket….” He tapped on the side of his head with his knuckles. “I should have my head examined, to try having a conversation like this tonight. Only”—he laughed—“only I guess I was just afraid to go home by myself.” He shrugged. “I didn’t want Momma to yell at me no more.”

  We walked upstairs together. All the lights were out in the apartment. I thought of Stevey Komisarik, next to my father, clapping like mad when the coach took me out of the game. Once, when I was thirteen and Abe asked why I didn’t play more with the boys from the neighborhood, my mother said that it was Stevey’s mother who kept him from playing with me. Two days later all of Mr. Komisarik’s dental equipment was destroyed. Everybody in the building went to the office on Bedford Avenue—Mr. Komisarik was renting it while they saved up enough money to buy their own house, where he could have his office and laboratory in the front part and they could live in the rest—to stare at the damage: the piles of twisted wiring and drills and springs, the ripped out fixtures, the broken glass and porcelain, the smashed sets of false teeth. The next day Stevey knocked on my door, his mother behind him, and asked if I wanted to come to his apartment to play with him.

  In my bedroom, my mother’s old tan coffee mug was on my desk. My mother spent a lot of her time sitting in my room while I was away. She sat there and she worried, she said. Or she sat there and tried to remember what a sweet child I’d once been. She said she liked sitting in my room because it was neat and uncluttered. She said she felt peaceful when she was in my room because it wasn’t like her room, or like the room she and Abe shared when they were children.

  Senator Kefauver’s hearings were on television every day now, investigating organized crime—they’d started four weeks before at the beginning of February, and they were making all the big shots like Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky and Joey Adonis and Mickey Cohen testify—but we had no television set, and my mother never asked me if I talked with Abe about things like that. The most she would do would be to look out a window and go through her old routines about how someday she would get a call from the hospital and they would ask her if she was David Voloshin’s mother. They would tell her that my arm was crushed or my head was split or my neck was snapped in two. That was all the good Abe or sports would ever do for me.

  From behind the wall, I heard my father and mother whispering. Maybe, I thought, it had relaxed him to talk with me about her. Maybe, when I was out of school in another year and a half, they could actually move to California. I’d visit them during college vacations and I’d take early morning walks by myself along deserted beaches. I’d be there before the sun rose, and the beaches would be quiet and clean, and one morning I’d see a girl coming toward me. She would have long honey-colored hair and large pearl-gray eyes and she would be carrying her sandals in one hand. I’d smile at her and she’d smile back shyly, but her eyes wouldn’t waver. We’d stop and stare into one another’s eyes, and then, without saying anything, I’d put out my hand and she would take it and we would walk together. When she kissed me she would hold my face between her hands so gently and sweetly that I’d want the kiss to never end. We wouldn’t tell one another our names, or where we were from, and we’d never meet anywhere except on the beach, and each time we parted we would say nothing about meeting again. And when vacation was over and I was back at my college, working out with the team or walking across campus, I’d think of her, searching for me, hoping I would return. She would be there every day, waiting, watching the ocean, and it would give me a wonderfully painful kind of pleasure to see tears slide down her cheeks, to know how much she missed me.

  I took off my sweat shirt and my T-shirt, looked at myself in the mirror. I was six-foot-three now—two inches taller than Abe—and I had what our coach called a perfect swimmer’s body: long waist, high broad chest, wide shoulders, strong neck, long muscular arms. It always surprised me, in a mirror, to see the face that was so familiar
to me sitting on top of a body I hardly recognized. I put my hands on my chest, palms flat, fingertips almost touching, and I rubbed slowly. During the school year, from the time football practice started in the fall until the baseball season was over in the spring, I worked out in my bedroom, using weights, skipping rope, doing sit-ups and push-ups. Sometimes, early in the morning, when Beau Jack was putting out the garbage pails and sweeping the walks and mopping the corridors, to build up my wind I’d go up and down the four flights of our building as fast as I could, five or six times in a row, until my lungs felt as if they would burst. Afterwards I’d sit out in front of the building with Beau Jack and drink water from the nozzle of his hose.

  I loved playing ball. I loved the feeling of slipping and crashing through other bodies and then of being free—suspended in air, the ball in my hands, nobody touching me, everybody straining to reach me. And I loved to win. When I didn’t win I’d be furious, enraged—I’d go over every second of the game, every move I’d made, vowing to do better next time, vowing to make up for my teammates’ deficiencies. I played end on the football team, first base on the baseball team, forward in basketball. I was good in all sports, but I was best at basketball. Like Tony, I was never the favorite of the coaches—they were especially wary now because of the fixes, because gangsters like Abe and Fasalino were allegedly behind the bribing of college players—but they would use me as an example in practice, to show the others how, even with my immense natural abilities I never gave up, I never stopped trying.

  My mother’s voice, shouting at my father to stop bothering her, sounded as if it had sand in it. Couldn’t my father tell she was getting another migraine? Didn’t he have any sense? I unzipped my gym bag, put my sneakers on the windowsill, unlaced them to the bottom so they would air out. I took my sweat socks and T-shirt and underpants, picked up my mother’s coffee mug. The mug was on top of the old drawing I’d done of the apartment building across the way—I’d take the drawing out now and then to look at it, to make myself wonder how long it would be before I’d either give up the dream of someday being an artist or do something in a sustained way that might make the dream possible—and the mug had stained the drawing, had left a dark circle in the lower right-hand corner.

  I sucked an enormous amount of air into my lungs, then left my room. My father rushed by me, a glass of water in one hand and a bottle of aspirins in the other. The pink ice bag, with its round silver cap, hung from his mouth. Through clenched teeth he explained that he didn’t have three hands.

  “Davey, is that you? Are you home? Are you all right?”

  My mother came into the kitchen. She rested her head on my back for a few seconds. I put the coffee mug into the kitchen sink, but I didn’t turn around. If I turned and looked at her she might ask if I thought she looked older. She might whisper to me about her secret bank account—she kept the passbook in Mr. Lipsky’s freezer—and how she thought that in five years, by saving from what she got every Friday from my father, she would have enough money for her to take me with her to California.

  “I had a little headache, so I went to sleep,” she said. “You must be hungry. You never eat before your games, so let Momma make you something, all right? Would you like a nice grilled cheese sandwich?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t go into my room while I’m gone.”

  “But I like to sit there, Davey. What else do I have, with both my men working for my brother? Listen. You don’t think I go in there to spy on you, do you?”

  “You ruined one of my drawings. You left your coffee mug standing on it and it left a ring.”

  “But you don’t draw anymore,” she said.

  “It’s a shame,” my father said, coming into the kitchen. “A real waste.”

  “I mean, I could understand you being upset if you still showed that you cared about drawing.” She sighed. “Your father’s right about that—God gave you such a gift and you never use it anymore. I’m really sorry, darling, but this is what happened: the phone rang and it was Lillian asking me to come over and watch TV with her—the hearings, with Mr. Rothenberg getting ready to go on—and by the time I was off the phone I forgot all about my coffee. That woman turns my head sometimes! But you bring me the drawing, sweetheart, and I’ll see if I can get rid of the ring, all right?”

  “He could still draw if he wanted to,” my father said. “A gift like that just don’t disappear overnight. If he started again he could pick up where he left off.”

  I went into the bathroom. My jaw ached on the right side and I peered into the mirror to see if my gums were bleeding. In my head I saw my mother laughing with Mr. Lipsky, telling him that he was going to make her wet her pants from all his jokes. When I was a boy she would leave me alone in his shop sometimes while he took her into the freezer to show her special cuts of beef. In the summer, if he saw me on the street he would ask if I wanted to sit in his freezer to cool off. I should watch out that no sides of beef fell on me, he said. I should always sit with my hands on my lap. That way, he laughed, I wouldn’t get cold-cocked.

  My mother called and said my snack was ready. I put on a clean sweatshirt, walked into the kitchen, looked at the bowl and spoon.

  “I asked for a grilled cheese sandwich.”

  “No darling,” my mother corrected. “I asked you if you’d like a grilled cheese sandwich, only I needed to use up some nice cold borscht first. You don’t mind, do you?”

  I heard knocking, went to the front door, opened it. Tony and Regina stood there, grinning.

  “Hey—where was the fire?” Tony asked.

  “How’d you get into my building without ringing from downstairs?”

  “I got my ways,” Tony said. “But how come the big rush home?”

  “Would you like to do something with us?” Regina asked. “That’s what we came by to say. When we didn’t find you in Garfield’s, Tony thought you might like to go out and celebrate with us.”

  “Yeah. We were thinking of taking the train down to Coney Island—hit the boardwalk and Nathan’s and some of the games. Fun by the ocean with Davey Voloshin, right?”

  “I could call one of my friends if you want a date,” Regina said.

  “Hey,” Tony whispered. “I think Roberta Pegorara got the hots for you. Only—”

  “Oh Tony, just be quiet will you?” Regina looked past me. “Hello, Mrs. Voloshin,” she said.

  “Listen, Davey, if you really want a grilled cheese sandwich, I’ll make you a grilled cheese sandwich. What I think is, you’re overtired.”

  “Now you hold on a minute, Evie,” my father said. “Here you are fighting a migraine and you get out of bed—” He stopped, cocked his head to the side. “What’s he doing here?”

  “I’m going out.” I took my jacket from the foyer closet.

  “It’s the Cremona kid,” my father said.

  “You think I’m blind too?” My mother laughed, caressed my father’s chin with the back of her hand. “Listen, Sol. Do you remember those straw-tipped Melachrinos I used to smoke before the war?”

  “If Abe asks, you weren’t here—is that clear?” my father said to Tony.

  “Take it easy, Sol. It just happens all over again sometimes, see? Like with Momma and Abe, the way they used to argue. All over again, Sol, is the way the world works. Can you see the temper he still got, that he’s saving up inside him? It’s why he acts so cold to us.”

  “It was only an idea,” Regina said, backing away. “We were just passing by—”

  “Listen, Mrs. Voloshin,” Tony said. “Between me and your son ain’t like it is between the others. You don’t gotta believe me, but I want you to know, from my heart, that it’s true. It’s just that Davey did so good tonight me and Regina figured he was entitled to somebody giving him a celebration. I mean, you know your son better than anyone, but don’t you think he needs to get out more and have a good time so he can get rid of all the energy he keeps bottled up? Ain’t he entitled too?”

  “Ah Tony,” my mot
her said, and to my surprise she actually reached over and touched his forehead, brushed his hair to the side. “You really understand my little Davey, don’t you? Sure. You take him down to the beach. You fix him up with one of your friends.” Her head dipped to one side. She seemed happy. “Remember when we were on the boardwalk in Sea Gate, Sol, the summer after our honeymoon and that handsome man with the little stringy dog stopped me and said I looked just like Claudette Colbert?”

  “Davey looks a lot like you,” Regina said.

  I told my parents not to wait up for me and I left.

  Roberta was standing in the entranceway downstairs, outside the front door, and when I saw her and Tony put a hand over his mouth and said what a coincidence it was that she just happened to be there, we all laughed. Then we walked along Church Avenue to the BMT, to get the Brighton line, and headed for Coney Island, with Tony talking a lot about the play-offs and about what a great team the two of us made and teasing me and Roberta when we held hands. It stopped raining by the time we got to the end of the subway line. We walked around, playing games and riding the Go-Karts and eating hot dogs and french fries, and walking on the boardwalk.

  We got back to our section of Brooklyn past midnight, took the girls home, and then Tony put his arm around me and teased me about the way Roberta and I had been necking on the bench next to him and Regina. When we got to my block he began talking more seriously, though, about how much he liked Regina and how he was scared because her parents didn’t like the idea of her going with him on account of his uncle and his father and his brothers.

  He talked more quickly then—almost pleading with me—about how much he wanted to have a family of his own someday, and about how he was scared because of the family he came from, that he never would. He said that he and Regina talked about running away together when they got to the right age, but he was worried that she might not wait for him that long, that the pressure from her parents was too great. We sat down on the steps in front of my building—the air had warmed up and the sidewalk smelled good, the way it always did after a rain—and I found myself telling Tony about how I sometimes dreamt of having a family of my own too. I didn’t tell him about the girl on the beach, but we talked about how many kids we each wanted to have and if we’d feel differently about having boys or girls and about where it would be better to bring your kids up—in the city or the country—and about what the best way to treat a wife would be: how we’d want to be in charge of a family the way our fathers weren’t—wasn’t this the reason our mothers were always so unhappy and trying to make us do things for them that our fathers didn’t?—but about how we would also know how to be very gentle and thoughtful, so that our wives would never doubt our love.