Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  14

  PURPLE CROCUS tipped with snow. The first week in May, and in the hills of Leverett there has been a light snowfall during the night. The previous week the weather was unseasonably warm and muggy, as if, Aaron thinks, August were lost, wandering through winter. He crouches down but does not touch the flower; under the snow its veined petals curl inward at the top. In the early morning light—in his memory—the flower seems to be made of thick glass stained a wonderful deep purple that is more blue than red, the little cap of snow perched upon it like a drop of liquid porcelain that has spread, thinned, begun to harden. When the sun rises, though, above the line of birch and maple and pine to the east, the white will dissolve and disappear, the flower will open, will reveal the deeper violet within, the soft vertical yellow streaks, the little upright threads that tell its sex. The glass will—in his mind, to his touch—thin to satin. With both hands he grasps the smooth plank on which he sits, feels its grain. He closes his eyes, listens to the pleasant sound of feet pounding on hardwood. He is, he realizes, happy, and it surprises him—pleases—that at his age this can be so. In less than half a year he will be thirty-four years old.

  Susan’s house. Why, though he designed it and built it and owns it, does he continue to think of it as Susan’s house? Is it because he likes adding to it little by little, year by year—because he likes having her think of it, still, as his gift to her? Is it because he is reluctant to admit that he loves it as much as she does—loves especially, he knows, the idea of its being, after three years, unfinished—so that, as with their life together, he can continue to make it, to change it?

  Or is the reason simpler: does he continue to think of it as Susan’s house because he does not like to admit what she admits—that time is passing, that they are getting older. In three months Susan will be thirty-seven years old. A hand moves through his mind, palming the meadow as if it is velvet, transforming its green from lime to emerald. He thinks of the meadow in winter—as it was this morning: a white field fringed by forest, with here and there a spot of color—evergreens and birch and mountain laurel; tan cedar shakes on the house’s roof; Delft-blue curtains in the kitchen window; copper lantern beside the door; a flash of color—brown, red, yellow—as a bird careens across the meadow.

  He watches Lucius, who fakes to the left, slips under the backboard, takes a pass, gives it right back and pivots, in place for the rebound. He thinks of Lucius in the van, beside him, and of the snow that surrounded them as they drove home four years before, down from the hills of Conway and Ashfield, across the flat plain of Hatfield, on the day Paul came back into Susan’s life, into Benjamin and Jennifer’s life. He sees the dome of snow, hazy and infinite. Are the years like that too—his years—lost in white? The meadow in front of Susan’s house stretches away, but not forever. The trees form a dark border to it, on three sides. The sky above is pale, washed out, ice-blue. Cerulean. He recalls seeing the word on a tube of paint once, in the art store on Church Avenue. How magical the words were! Cerulean blue. Vermilion red. Burnt sienna. Yellow ochre. Cadmium orange.

  He does think of the years as being like that, doesn’t he—like spots of color in an endless white landscape. Yet when he thinks of his childhood, as he does with greater and greater ease lately, he never thinks of white unless he is thinking of blank paper, of his old bedroom, his drawings. He sees, instead, paint squeezed from tubes, bright-colored oil flowing in glossy streams, converging to thick masses of dull brown and gray-black and muddy green. Olive drab. He sees the soiled Army jacket Abe liked to wear on weekends when the two of them would go to the Parade Grounds together to play ball. The jacket fades, threads floating in wind, fraying to air. Curious. If he thinks of these years—before he reached high school—he finds that he has to search for whiteness, for those times when, if ever, emptiness and space existed, for the times when there were expanses of no color: of calm, of peace. To mark the passing of time during those years—to date things—he has to concentrate, and even when he does he finds that it is not always easy to reconstruct sequences, to determine how old he was when particular events occurred.

  The easy way to fix things in time is to link events in his life to events in sports. The dates of particular baseball games, the years the Knicks or the Dodgers won championships, the times favorite players performed spectacular feats—these allow him, with some certainty, to figure out when things happened. He was ten when George “Snuffy” Stirnweiss of the Yankees won the American League batting championship with the lowest average ever: .309. He was eleven when Jackie Robinson signed to play with the Montreal Royals and twelve when Jackie came to the Dodgers. He was a month past his thirteenth birthday when Cookie Lavagetto ruined Bill Bevens’s no-hitter in the bottom of the ninth with a line drive off the right-center-field wall at Ebbets Field….

  Now he finds that he often marks the passing of time—measures his life—by each change in Susan’s house. He was at the house this morning, awake before sunrise, before Susan and the children began their day, to haul beams there for the greenhouse he plans to build. He wants to go back later today, while there is still light and the ground has thawed, to begin staking out the plot, clearing some trees and shrubs, figuring exactly where, on the southeast side of the kitchen, he will cut into the wall. He loves being out in the woods by himself, cutting trees with his chain saw, letting his mind drift. It drifts, he realizes, the way it would when, as a boy, he would be riding the subways, nodding off to sleep, his head bobbing to the irregular lurchings, the rumblings. Susan worries about him when he is in the woods alone. He doesn’t, she warns, have many fingers to spare.

  If possible, he wants to have the greenhouse finished in time for Jennifer’s graduation from high school. That gives him seven weeks. He would like her party to be at Susan’s house. He imagines the greenhouse filled with flowers, bursting with color. He sees himself at the breakfast table with Susan—the children are all gone—and they are happy because while they eat and gaze out through the greenhouse at the white meadow beyond, they are gazing through layers of color: through glossy green leaves, frilly hanging ferns, baskets of fuchsia, flats and containers of violets and spices, tea roses and lilies and chrysanthemums. Seven weeks. In seven weeks Jennifer will graduate from high school, Benjamin will complete his junior year. In seven weeks Carl and Larry will be preparing to go off to a sleep-away camp in Vermont.

  To have the textures and colors of flowers there, between him and the world, pleases Aaron, mutes the passing of time somehow. But why? To be able to go from his kitchen directly to the greenhouse, to feel the sun’s distant heat in midwinter, to put his hands into warm earth when the earth beyond home and glass is frozen, when the world behind him—his life with Susan—is whole: this comforts him. She was right, he thinks, to insist on building the house so that they could have a place to go to whenever one of them wanted to be alone. In the meantime, she argued, they could rent the house, he could use it to show prospective clients the quality of his work, they could camp there with the children in the summer, they could use it as a guest house….

  Jennifer has a summer job in West Yarmouth, on the Cape, as a waitress. Benjamin has a job at a camp near Pittsfield as a counselor. For the first time in their eleven years of married life, Aaron and Susan will be together without children for four entire weeks—until Carl and Larry return—and she has been teasing him: is he frightened of being alone with her? And just before the first of those four weeks, Aaron thinks, Lucius and Louise will be married.

  He nudges Louise, lifts her hand. “Some rock,” he says.

  “Sometimes Lucius knows how to do the appropriate thing,” Louise says. She speaks, as always, with excessive clarity, articulating each word. Aaron touches the engagement ring, turns it, diamond to palm, so that it looks like a silver band. Louise turns it back so that the diamond catches the light, sparkles. Aaron imagines what it looks like within, through a jeweler’s glass: the endless refracting boxes and triangles. They are sittin
g on wooden benches, eight rows up, inside the Curry Hicks gymnasium. On the court Lucius works out with the other players from the All-Star team that will tour for two weeks against a visiting Yugoslavian team. Aaron’s fingers itch. He wants the ball in his own hands. He wants to sky high over Lucius, to jam the ball home, to see the surprise in Lucius’s eyes. Louise talks about the wedding, about the honeymoon she and Lucius will take—they’ve rented a cabin on Penobscot Bay, in Maine—about their plans, their future. For all her airs—if she weren’t so goddamned proud she’s black, you’d think she thought she was white, Lucius always says—Aaron likes her, admires her.

  Lucius has one more year of college—he is on full scholarship, for basketball—and while he is finishing his bachelor’s degree, Louise will get a master’s degree in counseling. She wants Lucius to apply for fellowships abroad, she says, but he is resisting. He is afraid, she reasons, not of failing, but of succeeding. Good old survival guilt. Louise believes in Lucius in the same way, Aaron realizes, that Susan believes in him. Why shouldn’t Lucius be able to be a Rhodes Scholar or a Marshall Fellow? His grades are excellent, he is a superb athlete, he has risen from adversity. Did Aaron see the article she clipped and gave to Lucius about Bill Bradley, the All-American from Princeton, in Oxford for two years on a Rhodes Fellowship while playing, in his spare time, for one of the professional Italian teams? Lucius could do the same and that way they would have extra income, he would stay in shape, have some friends—most of the players on the European teams are American blacks not quite good enough for the N.B.A.—and the two of them could travel and see the world.

  Aaron suggests that Louise go easy on Lucius. He reminds her that Lucius has come a long way in a short time, that less than four years before the very idea of going to any college seemed absurd to him. Until Susan began working with him, encouraging him to enroll for courses, Aaron admits that it had not even occurred to him to suggest that Lucius go to the university.

  The players move silently—Aaron chooses not to hear the pounding of the ball, of feet—and in his mind’s eye he is lying in the meadow in front of Susan’s house. A local farmer, who hayed it before they bought the land, continues to hay it each year, and Aaron stares ahead at the expanse of white, through which, as if through the softest cotton sheet, he can discern the pale green below. Can he blow the snow away? The snow rests lightly on the new spring shoots of winter rye as if protecting them. He thinks of being inside the house, looking out at snow. He is sawing through sheet rock, the fine spray of plaster dust coating his neck and arms. He thinks of the sun, rising now above the trees, a squat ball of yellow suffused with clouds of white, like dry ice, that make the yellow unbearably harsh. The sun warms the meadow, turns the snow to vapor, lets the blades of bent grass straighten, rise. If you stared long enough, would you see them move and grow—could you see the color change?

  He tells Louise about the greenhouse, about his plans, about how it will be a surprise for Susan. He talks about the new kind of thermal glass he has ordered, which will concentrate and hold the sun’s rays, spreading warmth to the kitchen in winter. He imagines the greenhouse filled with daisies. He tells Louise that he will coax Lucius into coming out with him one weekend so they can work together. Louise gives him Lucius’s schedule—when he leaves with the team, where he will be playing, when he will return. She has been preparing work sheets for him, charting the homework he will have to do each day. She has spoken with the coach, with each of his professors.

  “Lucius going to let your dad work on his mouth?”

  “Or I don’t marry him.” Louise smiles. “Who’d want to marry a man with teeth like his?” She touches her ring. “Oh, I’ll marry him. I’d do anything for him, I love him so. But he is one stubborn man sometimes. We had a big fight this morning before he left for classes. Did he tell you?”

  “I haven’t seen him. It’s why I’m here. I mean, I was on campus anyway, to see Susan in rehearsal—her play opens Friday night—so I thought I’d stop by. Lucius and I don’t get to see each other much anymore.”

  “He says that he won’t attend graduation—my graduation. He says that he intends to boycott it.”

  “I figured.”

  “I’ve told him that I’m not against him or the others, but for the life of me I can’t see what having a separate graduation ceremony for blacks is going to prove to anybody. Damn it, Aaron—I worked hard for four years to earn my degree, earn it without favors, and without majoring in black studies either—and I’m proud of what I did. I thought what we wanted was to be equal and not separate.”

  “What did Lucius say?”

  “That they’re his brothers and sisters by skin and history, and that he won’t go against them.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “What did I say? I asked him why he was choosing them over me—that’s what I said. I asked him if this was what the rest of our life was going to be like—him choosing race over reason, him choosing to hurt me just so he won’t be called an Uncle Tom.” She openes and closes her fists. “Why should he choose to be with them instead of me? Why, Aaron?”

  Aaron says that he can’t answer for Lucius, that Louise knows his life better than he does. Louise sighs, says that Lucius is afraid that, if he appeared at her ceremony, he would be betraying the others, and that she argued with him and said that he would be betraying himself if he let himself be manipulated, if he let the others lay a guilt trip on him.

  How strange, it occurs to Aaron, that somebody who has lived through all that Lucius has lived through—lynchings and beatings and chains, sadism and Carrie and jail—can still seem such a child, can still need to be taken care of by a woman like Louise, who has tasted little of the world’s cruelty. Carrie. Carrie and the boy moved from Greenwood over three years before, not telling Rose they were leaving. Rose does not know their whereabouts, has never heard from them again. Lucius is free then. And if Carrie had not left, Aaron wonders, would Lucius have felt free to fall in love with Louise, to marry her? Has he told Louise about Carrie and the boy? Louise talks more evenly, tells Aaron that she has given in and agreed to be married in the First Baptist Church of Amherst—a concession to Lucius. Louise does not believe in God, but she believes in Lucius’s belief in God. Does that make sense to Aaron? Will she regret it later if she defers to him now?

  Lucius does have his faith in God, Aaron knows—his belief that Christ reached inside him in an almost physical way, and redeemed him. Lucius claims that whatever he does—whether it be to play ball, or study, or cook, or marry, or make somebody laugh—is part of God, or rather is his way of returning, in part, the gift of life that God has given to him. Aaron has seen Lucius in church, praying and singing. He has seen the peacefulness in Lucius’s eyes—the faith. Aaron wonders what he has—besides his love for Susan and his family—that is comparable. What does he believe in that goes beyond his own history, beyond things tangible? Had he believed in God—had he known anything about the history of the Jewish people—would he have felt differently at his father’s funeral? Would he have been able to weep?

  Louise asks Aaron if he will do her a favor and urge Lucius to take a course next year in the speech department. If the suggestion comes from Aaron, perhaps Lucius will be less threatened than if it came from her. How will they understand Lucius in England if he slurs his words so, if he talks as if he is on a porch in Mississippi? Louise is speaking softly, whispering, yet she articulates her words with such precision that Aaron asks her how Lucius ever stands a chance against her in arguments.

  “He glowers,” she says. “Lucius is very good at glowering.”

  “Hey, sweet one—you all angry again?”

  Lucius is standing over them, dripping sweat.

  “Get away, black man.”

  “You don’t love me in my natural state?”

  One of the players calls up to Lucius, razzes him about his love life, tells him to get on down and play. Lucius sits next to Aaron.

  “You
ready?” he asks.

  “For what?”

  Lucius taps at Aaron’s right sneaker. “I see you got your running shoes on, figure you be ready to step down there with the big boys.”

  “Come on—”

  “That ain’t why you here? You ain’t here to show me up?”

  “I promised Susan I’d stop by,” Aaron says, glancing at his watch. “Her rehearsal will be over soon and—”

  “Your boys been telling me how good you are, shooting baskets all the time lately. Ben tells me you’re better than me—or would be, if you were still a young man.” The players call to Lucius from the court. Lucius waves them off, tells them he is recruiting. “Come on, hey—you against me, man—let’s us old men show these boys how it’s done, okay? Let’s show these boys some quality.”

  Aaron drives home alone in the van, along Route 9. Susan has her car. She asked him to stay, to go into town to have drinks with her and the other members of the cast, but he pleaded work, told her he had to have some preliminary sketches ready for a client within two days. He lied, and he is pleased that he did—that he is less absolute with himself than he used to be. Dump trucks carrying fill pass him going in the opposite direction, toward the university. Cows graze in the lush meadows to the north, and past them, across low fields of rye that are tufted in a miraculous haze of lavender and copper, he sees the new high-rise dormitories jutting twenty stories into the air, red brick laced with wide vertical ribbons of white concrete. So much open space, he thinks, such a lovely valley, and they build these oblong cartons of stone. He recalls photographs he has seen, in National Geographic, of buildings rising from the plains of Brasilia.