Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  By the time Tony got up to leave, it was past two in the morning. We laughed about how the time had flown by, and Tony confided in me that Regina wasn’t like the other girls he’d gone with—she wasn’t one of those Hail-Mary-and-let’s-neck types—and that what had surprised him most of all was that when he was with her he didn’t feel the need to talk a lot or to show off. That showed, he said as he walked off, what the love of a good woman could do, even for a guy like him.

  My father died two weeks after that, on Tuesday afternoon, March 13, 1951, while taking my mother home from a doctor’s appointment. Our team was working out in the gym, getting ready for our play-off game against Jefferson for the Brooklyn-Queens championship, the first game we would play in Madison Square Garden, when our coach, Mr. Goldstein, returned from taking a phone call in his office, stopped the practice, asked me to come with him.

  The gym was quiet, and I felt myself tense because I knew the guys were figuring the same thing I was: that Mr. Goldstein was going to speak to me again about my uncle and the basketball fixes, that he was going to ask me again if I didn’t want to just sit out the rest of the season, until the D.A.’s office and the F.B.I. finished their investigation.

  But when, in his office, he put his hand on my shoulder and told me that he had bad news for me, that my father had had a heart attack, that they’d rushed him from the subway to Kings County Hospital but that he had died before they got him there, all the rage I was feeling washed out of me. I said nothing. I did what he told me to do: I went to the locker room, I got out of my uniform, I showered and I dressed and I packed up my books and gym bag.

  Mr. Goldstein walked with me from the school, along Bedford Avenue. He talked about how he had felt when his father died, three years before. He talked on and on, telling me the story of his father’s life. His father had been born in a small village in Russia, had come to America in 1888 and had worked fifteen hours a day in the dark, candling eggs, in order to save up enough money to bring his wife and his younger sisters and brothers here. Mr. Goldstein talked about how happy his father was on his eighty-third birthday, his children and grandchildren and brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces around him, and of how his father called it a miracle, that he had lived to see such a day. A second Bar Mitzvah. Seventy plus thirteen. In the synagogue Mr. Goldstein’s father was called to the Torah to recite the same prayers he had recited in Russia seventy years before. Everything after seventy was a gift, Mr. Goldstein said. That was what his father believed.

  I tried not to hear his words. I tried instead to fix my mind upon some picture of my father that might make me feel close to him, that might cause tears to come into my eyes. Mr. Goldstein asked me if I wanted him to walk home with me. I told him I would walk home alone.

  “Look Davey,” he said. “Jefferson’s the class team in the city this year. Even with you in there, and you’re as good a player as there is, it would take a miracle for us to win. What I’m trying to say is that you should go and be with your mother and take care of her at a time like this. Nobody will hold it against you that you couldn’t be there for the play-off. These things happen.”

  He probably believed that he was being straight with me, I realized. I could play or not play. The choice was mine. That was what he’d been saying all along. There were others—league officials, alumni, school administrators—who’d been urging him to suspend me, to ask me to sit out the season, but since nobody could prove I’d done wrong, he refused to listen to them. Sure, I thought. And won’t it be convenient for him that my father died two days before the game in the Garden?

  I said nothing. I crossed Church Avenue, and as words began to fill up inside my head again—the words I wanted to hold there, ready to fire at Goldstein and all the others who hoped my father’s death would do their dirty work for them—I realized that I was feeling less weary, less drained. Anger did that for me. It was as if I could look down inside my chest and see flames there, bright and steady, warming me, giving me energy, keeping me alive. I’d show the bastards. I’d show them all.

  In the Holy Cross schoolyard, children were lined up in double rows, holding hands, and the nuns, their black capes and gowns swirling close to the ground, pulled them here and there. Know who your real enemies are, Abe had taught me, because your true friends will take care of themselves. But Abe’s words were flat and unconvincing. I wanted to hear my father’s voice, to see his face. Was he really gone? I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them and gazed ahead until I could see him walking toward me.

  I was eleven years old and I was leading him by the hand. He had a white patch over his good eye. They had called me to the principal’s office at school and told me that I was to take the subway to the Lower East Side, where he was waiting for me at Gordon’s. While he was tying packages, a piece of twine had whipped up and scratched his good eye. My mother telephoned to say she was too ill to travel. The principal gave me a nickel for the subway, asked if I felt brave enough to make the journey myself.

  My father sat on a stool in a corner of the store, near racks of dark winter coats. When I spoke to him he beamed. He touched my face with his fingertips so that, in front of the other men, I felt embarrassed. I wrapped his eyeglasses in tissue, then in brown wrapping paper. On the subway platform I was terrified that he would fall over the edge in front of an oncoming train. In the train I was terrified that I would get through the doors and that they would snap closed behind me with him still in the subway car, grinning, feeling the door with blind fingers. On the street I kept urging him to stay close to me, to hold my hand, and I was afraid he would trip and fall, that I would fall with him and smash his glasses. Yet all the while I led him home he was quiet and obedient. With a son like mine, he said to the men at Gordon’s, who needs eyes?

  In our apartment my mother kissed me and laughed at my father, at the way he groped and stumbled from room to room. Was there a difference, she wanted to know? Was there a difference between when he was blind and when he could see?

  He kept the patch on his eye for twelve days. He learned to dress himself and to wash himself and to make himself sandwiches. He learned to shave himself while I told him where he had missed spots, where he had nicked himself.

  “Hey Davey—wait up.”

  It was Tony. He put his arm around my shoulder and I didn’t shrug it off.

  I’m sorry.

  “Thanks.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Goldstein was a real asshole, giving us all that Holy Joe shit about you and your father. You know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “I think he’s glad. I think he’s glad he got an excuse to bump you off the team.”

  “He can’t.”

  “I know. You’re gonna play, right?”

  “Right.”

  He pounded me on the back and we walked together without saying anything to each other for a while.

  “What are you going to do about college?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “I heard you got an offer.”

  “Oh yeah, they been sucking around my ass—these small Catholic places in Upstate New York, and one in Pennsylvania—but I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know.”

  “You should go to college.”

  “Tell you what—you help me see that my old man follows yours, so we’ll be even, and then you and me, we make a deal, right? We tell these colleges we’re a team—Mr. Outside and Mr. Inside, like Davis and Blanchard were for Army, remember?—and that they got to give us a package deal. The Kids from Brooklyn, right? The Gold-Dust Twins, like Reese and Reiser. Shit, they’ll pack in the fans and please all the Wops and Hebes and get two aces for the price of one.”

  I smiled.

  “There you go, hey! I was waiting for that, to make sure you were still alive inside that ice chest you got on your shoulders.”

  “I’m alive.”

  “I’m glad you’re gonna play in the game. Life
goes on. I mean, that’s what I think, don’t you? That life goes on, no matter what.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Does it hurt, though, that he’s gone?”

  “Some.”

  “Where does it hurt most, can you tell?”

  “No.”

  “You really think I should go to college? That I got the brains?”

  “Yes.”

  We were at the corner of Rogers and Church, where the trolley conductors and switchmen and supervisors were huddled together in front of Dominick’s Barber Shop, going over their bets.

  “I’ve been trying to imagine what it would be like to lose my old man,” Tony said, “and I came to the conclusion that the difference is I don’t really give a shit about mine, and I think you loved yours. Your old man ain’t mean the way mine is. That makes a difference, even with drips. About college, though, I don’t know. If I went off somewhere instead of following in my famous brothers’ footsteps, he wouldn’t think twice about getting out a small contract on me.”

  “You should go to college.”

  “Are you angry with me for following you, for talking so much?”

  “Not really.”

  “Your uncle say anything to you about us going down to Coney?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Yeah. They gave me a hard time too. But don’t you think if things were different with our old men—our families—that I’d want to hang out with you more the way we did in the old days? Don’t you know I’d do it if I thought it wouldn’t get us into worse trouble than we’re in already?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I suppose. Yeah. Only it takes two to be enemies the same way it takes two for friends is the way I look at it. You’ve always been free to be my friend too.”

  “Why don’t you just get lost for a while, okay?”

  “Nah. I figure you need somebody like me to get mad at now. It’ll do you good. Death should piss you off. Hey listen—you want Regina to fix you up with somebody else tonight? Hey Davey, the broad’ll ask—how’d the day go? Get it? How’d the Da-go?”

  “Get lost, Tony. I mean it. I’m not in the mood.”

  “Ah, if you’re so pissed at me, how come I see you starting to smile?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Listen, though: what I wanted to say was that I figured the only hope for me, if I do what you say and go to college someday, is to take on some new name like all the college players do for the summer up in the Catskills, playing for hotels. Grow a mustache maybe. Put on some weight. Tell people I’m a Jew, that you and me are cousins or that I ain’t got no mother and father, that I grew up in an orphanage, raised by rabbis. I mean, I got the nose, right? I got—”

  “I think I want to be alone. Really.”

  “Sure thing,” he said, and he was moving away even as he said it, past the London Hut, up Church Avenue toward Nostrand. He called back to me: “You stick to it, Davey. You stick to it and play if you want and don’t let anybody tell you different, you hear? And you know what else?”

  “What?”

  “I’ll see you in the Garden on Thursday. We’ll cream those guys, you and me, Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside. Impress the hell out of all the scouts too.”

  He waved and moved off. I walked along Rogers Avenue, realized that pictures were coming more swiftly, easily. I saw my father going down the staircase by himself. I saw him walking along the street, tapping a cane to the left and right in a semicircle. He said hello to people, guessed their names from their voices. The patch was gone. The sun was bright. We were in the courtyard together having a catch. I was eleven years old. He held my hand and showed me how to throw a curve ball, how to snap my wrist down and out at the last instant.

  My father was leaving the apartment, wearing his good black coat, his air-raid warden’s hat. I crouched beside the kitchen window, my ear to the wall. I lifted the black window shade and watched until I saw him walking by himself along our street three stories below. If German Messerschmitts and Stukas got through our radar and attacked New York, would he get back before we were hit?

  I saw us on my bed playing blackjack for pennies. I saw him sitting in my room, hour after hour, smoking and daydreaming while I worked on my drawings. I saw him waiting for me outside the gym, and how surprised I was, walking home with him, to realize that I often thought of myself as being older than him, of him being my younger brother.

  I felt less angry. Would Tony be angry with me, though, because I hadn’t wanted to talk with him, to let him be with me?

  With a son like mine who needs eyes.

  Abe’s black Buick Roadmaster was parked in front of my building, Turkish Sammy in the driver’s seat, working at his teeth with a silver toothpick. Waxey Shreibman and Lefty Kolatch huddled under the arcade. When they spotted me, they started pacing back and forth, flapping their arms against their sides to keep warm. Lefty held the door open for me.

  “Sorry, kid,” he said. “I liked your old man a lot.”

  “Yeah,” Waxey said. “He was a terrific little guy.”

  I waited in the lobby. I didn’t want to be angry when I entered the apartment. Could I know what my mother was feeling now? Could I ever know all that she and my father had been through, all that they had truly felt for one another? I walked up the stairs. I wondered if Beau Jack knew about my father. I opened the door and the warm air hit me as if it were a wall. The living room was already packed with people, but I tried not to see them. I stood just inside the door, closed it softly. My mother was moving across the living room, eyes red, cheeks flushed, and the instant I saw her she looked my way. I set down my gym bag and moved toward her.

  “Oh David!”

  She came to me and I felt almost happy suddenly, to feel warm air swell inside me, to feel tears beginning to well in my eyes.

  “Oh mother!” I said. “I’m so sorry. I’m just so sorry….”

  I wanted to take her to me, to comfort her and to be comforted, to kiss her and to feel her kisses and tears all over my face, to shut out the rest of the world and to talk for hours about him, about how we would miss him, about all the things we remembered! She smiled at me, her eyes shining, so happy to see me that it made my heart lurch. And then, as she came to me and as I put my arms out for her, she suddenly changed her mind. She shot out her right hand, toward my chest, and pushed me back.

  “Not now,” she said “I’ve already cried enough already today, believe me. Not now. But come. I want you to meet people. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  I stood there and stared at her hand—I imagined a policeman’s gloved hand holding up traffic for schoolchildren—and I could actually feel the tears recede, drain down the back of my throat. She led me to the kitchen. Lillian and Sheila were setting out fruit and nuts and crackers and pretzels in bowls. They kissed me. Sheila held to me for a long time. She said that my father was her favorite uncle, that on the day that Abe went overseas he came to their apartment and said to her that as long as Abe was gone he would try to be a second father to her. She said he was a man who never hurt anybody in his entire life. Lillian said that my father was always ready with a smile and a joke, that he had a good sense of humor and a sunny disposition.

  They left. My mother stood close to me, drew in on a cigarette.

  “Listen. What I wanted you to know before we go into the other room is that Sol’s brothers are here already, see? God bless Abe for taking care of things, but Sol’s brothers—listen—you don’t trust them for a second, do you hear? They’ll try to get you alone and work on your guilt and make you change all the plans. I know them.” She blew smoke toward the ceiling. “You know what they wanted me to do, first thing? They wanted me to call the hospital and have your father’s body shipped back here so they could wash it and clean it on the kitchen table. Can you believe it? And here”—she took a small brown box from the top of the refrigerator—“do you know what’s inside this? Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Dirt! That’s what
! The first thing they do when they get here is they hand me a box of dirt. No kiss, no hello, no I’m sorry, no nothing—just barge in and hand me a box of dirt. From the Holy Land, they say. From Israel! And I shouldn’t forget to bury the dirt with Sol.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “How should I know? I mean, do I know what I’m doing? Do I know what I’m feeling?”

  I tried again to put my arms around her, but she moved away, set the box back on the refrigerator, extinguished her cigarette under the faucet. She held up the wet stub.

  “So you tell me why I’m smoking these crappy Chesterfields. Because I want to smell like your father, so he won’t go away so fast?” She laughed and then, her mouth wide open—I thought of the car trunk, the bodies on the ground—she shoved the back of her hand in. “Oh Davey! I lost my best friend, did you know that? I lost my best friend!” She came close again. “But just you be smart and promise me not to get into any arguments with his brothers, yeah? I don’t want no trouble. You just agree with whatever they say and let Abe take care of the rest. Orthodox Jews are all nuts. Listen. Abe insisted I call. A brother’s a brother, he said. Death is death. Who can tell?”