Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  I looked to the window, recalled pulling a black shade down during an air raid drill. I imagined my father groping his way toward the cellar to get his helmet and gas mask from the bin. Would he stumble and fall? Gail reached for the bowl of chicken salad, but my grandfather grabbed her wrist. He drew a black silk cap from his pocket and placed it upon his head. First, he said, we should say a prayer. We should never begin a meal without saying a prayer. We were still Jews, weren’t we?

  I carried the shopping bag, filled with baby clothes, down the stairs. The cellar smelled of chalk dust. I stared in through the slats of our bin but I couldn’t make out much except for lamps and chairs, the dark shapes of cartons. Beau Jack’s door opened. He tipped his baseball cap to Gail. We entered. He asked if we wanted tea. Tea was the best thing for you in hot weather, he said. Gail was surprised at how cool his apartment was. Was it air-conditioned? Beau Jack smiled, said that it couldn’t be air-conditioned because he had no windows, but he explained to her about the vents in the ceiling, the ducts that carried warm air all the way up and out through the roof, five stories above, that sucked coolness from the earth below ground. He asked her if she had ever heard of the Nubians, and of how, in Egypt, they cooled their desert homes. Even modern engineers could not imitate with electricity what the Nubians did without it. He showed Gail pictures of Nubian homes, in a book I had looked at often—white mud-brick windowless buildings, some with barrel-vaulted roofs, others connected to one another the way Pueblo dwellings were, beams jutting out near the tops where the air-slits were. The inner chambers were high-ceilinged and dark, the floors made of earth, the walls white, decorated above the doors with dinner plates.

  If things got as bad as I figured they might, could I hide Gail and our child out here? Did Beau Jack have some secret chamber, behind or below his rooms? Would he be willing to help Abe, if only for my sake?

  Beau Jack poured tea for us, took milk and lemon from the refrigerator. He set a plate of Loma Doones and Oreo cookies on the table, and while we sat there for a while, sipping tea and eating, I surprised myself by beginning to talk, telling Gail about all the hours Beau Jack and I had sat in the room together and listened to baseball games. I remembered making scorecards—drawing lines on blank paper with pencil and ruler, writing in the names of the players, putting in the play-by-play, inning by inning. I remembered listening to Red Barber’s voice, to the teletype machine that clicked away behind him. Beau Jack and I had agreed that that would be a hard job: to sit in a room by yourself somewhere in Brooklyn, a microphone in front of you, and try to make a game real and exciting when all you had to work with was a long, thin strip of paper that typed words out in front of you, giving you only the bare essentials—balls and strikes, runs and hits and errors—of a game that was taking place in a city thousands of miles away. I remembered how much I loved to lean back, to rest my feet on Kate’s silky fur.

  I looked around. “Is Kate in the bedroom?”

  Beau Jack leaned toward me. “Didn’t your Momma tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Kate’s gone, honey. She died the beginning of June. I thought you knew.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I felt my heart catch. “I’m so sorry—”

  “Oh me too, Davey. Me too.” He ran his finger around the rim of his cup. “But she died nice and easy, so I’m glad for that. She just went to sleep one morning and didn’t wake up.” “How old was she?” Gail asked.

  “Sixteen. That means she would have been more than a hundred in human years.”

  I kept my eyes on Beau Jack’s face, tried to imagine what he was feeling, what he’d felt when he touched Kate for the last time. I wished that I’d spent more time with him during the past few years. I wondered: what I felt toward him now, and what I thought I’d felt for him through all the years—did those feelings come, really, only from me, from my own needs and desires and not from who he was, from what he thought and felt? In what ways did we know one another, and what did it mean, after all, to truly know another human being. Had I merely used him somehow, stuck my feelings onto him the way I’d stuck pictures of my sports heroes on my bedroom wall? I wondered how often Tony thought about Regina and if, when she was in from college, he tried to see her. How could he not think about her all the time? If you truly loved somebody else—if you were in the middle of being in love when the other person suddenly stopped loving you, how could you ever stop hoping? How could you ever stop wanting to get the other person’s love back?

  “Do you mind being alone now?”

  He touched the spot on the side of his head where the bud of his missing ear was, and when he looked at me, his eyes moist, I knew I’d said the right thing.

  “Oh sure, honey. Who wouldn’t mind being alone? It’s always good to have someone near you, Davey, don’t I know that much? The hard thing is to not have someone to be taking care of.”

  “Yes,” Gail said. “But what happens to them? The dead animals, I mean. I used to wonder about that all the time. Where are all the dead squirrels and rabbits and pigeons and sparrows and chipmunks? I used to walk the streets and sneak into my neighbors’ gardens, but I almost never found a dead one.”

  “I buried Kate out in the courtyard. I sit there sometimes now, where you and I used to have catches together, Davey, and I think about her, about how much we loved each other. Does that make old Beau Jack sound like a fool?”

  “No.”

  “I mean, it’s not so much not to be loved. The bad thing, it’s when you got nobody to love. Your Momma, she been coming down to visit me lots since Kate’s gone. She got a good heart. I guess you know now how I helped out with her father. I’m glad she done that, only I’m scared for what your uncle Abe do when he finds out. That’s what Beau Jack worries about. That man still scares me.”

  “Me too,” Gail said.

  Silence.

  Beau Jack reached across and touched my hand, told me not to worry about him, that he was taking good care of himself. He had his radio so he could listen to the games, and he was thinking of getting a small television set so he could watch Jackie. Weren’t we right about that man, about how great he was going to be? Beau Jack said he was in a television store last week, on Flatbush Avenue, watching a Dodger game, and he liked the way they used a split-screen to show how Jackie worried the pitchers when he got to first base.

  “Roy, though, he’s in a bad slump this year,” Beau Jack said. “I worry about him, the way he never stops smiling but always goes up and down and up and down. Not behind the plate. He’s the best man there I ever saw, but he gets in awful slumps at the plate, and our Dodgers, without him blasting away and with big Newk still off in the service, I don’t think they’re gonna make it this year.” He winked at Gail. “I guess by getting married you saved our boy from going over to Korea like big Newk. I’m glad for that.”

  “Who’s big Newk?” Gail asked.

  “Don Newcombe,” I said. “He won twenty games year before last, before he got called up. He led the league in strikeouts.”

  I stood, as if to go.

  “Were you ever married?” Gail asked. I glared at her. Hadn’t I told her that I needed to be home soon, in case there was a message from Abe?

  “Oh no,” Beau Jack said. “I was never married. Ain’t that too bad?”

  “Yes,” Gail said.

  “Wasn’t because I didn’t want to. I was in love, for sure. It was the woman I loved who gave me my name, over in France. She called me Beau Jack—that meant Handsome Jack in French, like the boxer’s name, only my Christian name, it was John. Oh sure.”

  He closed his eyes, let his head bob up and down a few times. When Gail broke the silence a minute later her voice was so soft and low that I hardly recognized it.

  “What was her name?”

  “Marcelle. She had hair a lot like yours, didn’t you know that? Everybody loved her hair, you always be wanting to touch it.” Beau Jack touched Gail’s hair in the exact way I’d seen him touch
Kate a thousand times. “Oh how that girl loved her hair. It was so soft and silk-like after she washed it, and in the summer, she’d pin it up the way you do.”

  “David’s mother pinned mine up for me.”

  “Marcelle, she had a mother too, which was where we got our first troubles, only you children don’t want to hear the whole story. You got to be getting on home, so—”

  “We’d love to hear the story,” Gail said.

  “Well, I’ll tell you this, that we met each other when they sent me down to rest up after they fixed my ear, down to a place they called Savoy, which was the same as the name of the famous dance place up in Harlem then. We all liked that. They sent soldiers there from all over France, you see, away from where the fighting was to where they had beautiful mountains and lakes and these special places to take baths, all stone and marble, where the Romans once did the same. You even saw giant mountains with snow on them that they drove us out to see, where Hannibal crossed over the Alps, only those mountains look like nobody ever walked on them, they so high and clean.”

  I thought of Tony and me, talking about how nice it would be to live out in the country someday, each of us in our own private homes, with our families, surrounded by beautiful green mountains. Without a wife, could Tony just take off one afternoon and never see his father or his brothers again? And if Abe was right about the trouble that was coming, even though Tony and I weren’t friends anymore, would we somehow be able to avoid being enemies? I looked at Beau Jack, as if to give him permission to continue. He smiled. Gail had said that according to the laws of quantum physics, disorganization always increased within a closed system. Salt and pepper, in layers in a shaker, became gray when mixed and, no matter how much you kept shaking, would never again return to separate layers of black and white. I’d given her theory to Abe and he had said that men like Rothenberg and Fasalino didn’t need to go to college to discover such things, to believe that the moment you stopped expanding you were already dead.

  “I was stationed up in Saint Nazaire till then mostly, unloading ships—we had more than fifty thousand colored soldiers there working as stevedores, and they tried to make things nice for us too. We had canteens and women come over on ships from the States to set up Y.M.C.A. buildings and Hostess Houses and Honey Bee Clubs for us to spend our free time in. To give us the gentle and civilizing influence of women, is the words they used. And they brought in colored French women too, from their colonies in Africa, for our dances. But you don’t want to hear all about Beau Jack in the Army, do you?”

  “But I do,” Gail said.

  “Well, you just like Davey then, didn’t you know that? When he was a boy, he couldn’t get enough of Beau Jack’s stories. Oh I seen terrible things, Gail—Davey can tell you—I seen such terrible things when I was young then. I seen men when they be clutching their stomachs from being shot and then they got their fingers blowed off their hands. I seen men with their eyes wide open and their whole jaws hanging half off. I seen brains spill out the backs of heads and I seen them string up poor colored boys in their pretty uniforms—they made us come out and watch, all in lines—’cause they say they raped the French girls. War was more personal then, like they say, and Davey, he had a way to make me tell him about all that bad stuff. He loved to hear about all the fighting I seen, only you know how I knew he still had a good heart?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Because one day when I was telling him about what the trenches were like and what mustard gas did to you, how you got to look right at the people you were killing and they got to look at you, and how they trucked us out afterwards in gangs for burying all those poor white boys, and when I say to Davey that he just like all these smart kids who think war is fine till they get over there themselves, when I ask if he wants to be a soldier when he grows up, like me and his uncle Abe, he answers me no. Just like that. Oh no, he says. Oh no, Beau Jack. I like to play soldier, but I wouldn’t want to ever have to really kill somebody. I wouldn’t ever want to hurt anybody. So that I see he knows the difference.”

  “I hope so,” Gail said. She took my hand. I settled back in my chair, knowing there was no way we would leave without hearing the rest of Beau Jack’s story. That was fine with me. Gail said her father wanted to talk with me privately and I wasn’t looking forward to that. As for reporting to Abe about Vincent, I figured that could wait until we got home. If anything urgent was up, Abe would get a message to me, probably by hand, since he was convinced that Fasalino had had a drop on our telephone lines for the past few weeks. I listened to Beau Jack’s voice and wondered the way I’d always wondered when I was with him, about how the world beyond his voice and his room could be as real as I knew it was. Who could tell? Maybe Vincent was on the level and loved Sheila and was going to pay Abe back. Maybe Fasalino really wanted peace. Maybe I could telephone Tony—in my mind I saw him smiling and brushing his hair back, happy to hear me talk to him the way he had always talked to me—and suggest that he get back together with Regina, knock her up good and then marry her so that the two of us could go down to the schoolyard together and, while we played one-on-one, talk about solving the problems we had in common.

  “Oh, he still does,” Beau Jack said to Gail. “Which is why tonight I’ll just skip the war story and give you the love story. The love story, though, it got the same bad ending the war stories have, except it only happened to two people and nobody died from it.

  “The French, they had their colored soldiers in separate units like we did, and the French people, they the same as people all over and they have funny ideas about us, that all we ever think about is gambling and making love with their daughters and stealing from them. Some of them think we got tails like monkeys too, and they get nasty with us. So we keep to our own pretty much, except in this place they send us to rest, where they liked us better because of a legend they have there.

  “In this little town, see, near where they have the baths, they would take us in groups to see a church—I showed Davey the photo from the newspaper—and up front in the church they have a statue on the altar of a little black child in Mary’s arms, and that child wearing robes of gold and diamonds, and the people in the towns all around, they come there to get themselves healed. They call it the Church of the Black Madonna, and there be crutches and canes and eyepatches and the like around, from people who come there to be blessed. Lots of our boys done the same with their prayers, and didn’t it work sometimes too?

  “Now the story they tell to us was that the town this church was in, Aix-les-Bains, it got destroyed by a mountain-slide hundreds of years before, with only the church left standing and all the families from the village inside the church, praying to God to be saved. This pretty girl be our guide, and she was telling us the story in English and some of our boys were starting in to pray, and I see something in that girl’s eyes that draw me right down inside her—you know how I mean?—and I say to her, I say, does she think that if I pray hard enough I’ll get my ear grown back? Now I didn’t say that with the other boys around but when she all finished with her speech and we were left alone to wander around and light candles if we wanted, and you know what she do when I ask my question?”

  “What?” Gail asked.

  “She just start in laughing and laughing, and she reaches right up and lifts my bandage and peeks under and then she laughs some more. Her laugh kind of gurgles from down low, and when she looks at me all I want is to be nearer and nearer to her. You know how that feels? She had hazel-brown eyes with these flecks in them like gold slivers, and even though I was scared, I can’t help but want to be nearer to her and look in those eyes and make her laugh some more. So when she was done laughing we got to talking. She asked me questions about myself and how I lost my ear, and then she says, ‘Come on, brown soldier boy,’ just like that, and she takes me for a walk, holding my hand, and before you know it I was getting out of the hospital every chance I could and I was telling her that the real miracle, it was the two of us mee
ting one another. How you explain that, I ask her, that out of all the world to wander in, we happen to be in the same place on the same day? How you explain it, that if I don’t lose my ear and she don’t be so good in English at school that they make her a guide, that we might never know each other existed? I lost my ear, but I found you, I say to her. You hear that? That’s the way I talk to her, to make her laugh and to cry, and oh sure, how I got my name is one day out at the lake she just start in calling me her Beau Jack so that my name be half-French and half-American. She liked to take my bandage off and touch my ear and make me promise not to take no more chances, especially not to gamble no more, ‘cause if somebody take my other ear off, then how I gone to hear her laugh?”

  “You lost your ear gambling?” Gail asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Oh child, we got to leave some mysteries for you, didn’t you know that? If you and Davey know everything about Beau Jack, what gone to make you come back for more stories? Marcelle and me, we talk about that, how it was the same being in love, that you know you’re in love when you still always wanting to know more about the other person even when you think you never been closer to anyone.

  “But we were awful scared, from the first. Her mother be warning her all the time about colored soldiers, and our officers warning us about staying away from white women, and maybe being scared made our love a little more special too—we admit that to each other—and what happened finally is that we made up to meet at this band concert they have every Sunday afternoon in these gardens in town, to show we not hiding, and when she gets there to meet me, her Momma’s there too—her father be dead from the time she was eleven—Marcelle, she’s wearing a yellow kerchief on her head. I can see it now, ‘cause it wasn’t gold like that child’s robe and it wasn’t bright like the sun. It was just flat yellow like grass without rain.