When he and Susan married there were fewer than six thousand students at the University. Now there are almost twenty thousand and new poured-concrete structures rise everywhere on campus. Everywhere there are girders and cement mixers, earth movers and construction trailers. In the center of the campus, overlooking the small pond where he and Susan and the children ice skate in winter and feed the swans in spring, workers are building a twenty-six-story structure that will soon be the world’s tallest library, the design by Edward Durell Stone.
With the vast numbers of new faculty and staff and students, and the young lawyers and doctors and teachers and social workers who follow after, it will be a long time, Aaron knows, before he will have to worry about not having enough work. In the past six months he has had to refer over a dozen potential clients to other builders. He likes being able to pick and choose among clients—to do only those houses that please him, to work only with those people he senses will give him the least trouble, will appreciate him most. Susan has urged him, now and then, to expand, to hire more men—aren’t you an American? she teases; aren’t you ambitious?—but he prefers to keep things the same, to scale: to work with one or two helpers and to let Lucius work whenever he has free time—which has been, the past year, almost never.
He drives through Hadley, past the Farm Museum, the town’s center. The steeple of the Congregational Church—an imitation of one by Christopher Wren—rises at a slant from behind the Town Hall. More fields. Long, low tobacco barns. Boulders. Black earth, recently plowed—old river bottom, the richest land in New England. A field dusted with lime. He approaches Coolidge Bridge. His body feels wonderful, as relaxed as it has been for months, and he thinks of the shower he took with Lucius and the other players afterwards, recalls their glances, their questions about what college he had played for. He hears Lucius bragging on him: This man never went to college. Too smart for that…
He will ache tomorrow, he knows, but right now his body sings to him, the muscles stretched, the blood coursing through them, through veins that he thinks of as being wide open, like tunnels, as having been vacuumed clean. He feels light-headed, ready for anything. He shoots baskets with Benjamin and the younger boys sometimes, plays full court in pick-up games now and then, but it has been a long time since he moved with such fury. Lucius guarded him, talked to him, teased. He felt at first as if he were, despite the bodies and sounds around him, lost, wandering, abandoned. But as soon as the ball came to him, he was all right. He faked, went straight up, watched the ball curl off his fingers, saw it rise and fall, spin straight through—swish!—heard Lucius groan, felt somebody slap his ass as he began to backpedal toward the other end.
In some strange way he had never, despite playing with guys a dozen years younger than he is, felt more on top of his form. When he swiped the ball from Lucius—slapped it ahead, broke, headed downcourt—it was as if the others were moving in slow motion. He would not have been surprised had he, from the foul circle, been able to rise up, as in dreams when a boy, and float through the air, legs pumping as if on a bicycle going uphill so that he would be cruising through the air for twenty feet, then descending slowly, dropping the ball through the orange hoop, his body dropping past the ball as it slipped through the netting.
Oh man, take this little boy to heaven now, Lord. Take him right now! Lucius said when Aaron had put yet another move on him, faking right, gliding left, changing the ball back from right to left hand in midair, slamming it home backwards over Lucius’s outstretched arm and body. Oh yeah. Take this boy to heaven now.
Aaron smiles. Mercifully, the scrimmage lasted for only seven or eight minutes. Then the players relaxed, shot their fouls. He wonders what would have happened to him had they played for ten or fifteen minutes. He sees Susan smiling into her dressing room mirror, jars of cold cream and makeup in front of her on the table, while Lucius describes the game. Well, well, she says, and her eyes glow, happy for him. Well. Susan is playing Beatrice in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge— when she was an undergraduate at Smith she had played Beatrice’s daughter, Catherine—and Aaron watches her remove the black wig, shake her golden hair free, brush it. She moves her mouth in slow circles, stretching the skin so that she can cream the blacked-in wrinkle lines from around her lips and eyes, from her forehead. He and Lucius arrived in time for the final scene of the dress rehearsal—Eddie being killed by Marco, but by his own knife, his hand held by Marco’s turned against himself, Beatrice crying Yes, yes! and covering his body with her own; Alfieri the lawyer coming forward, the bodies behind him frozen in a tableau. Susan does not know it, but Aaron knows Alfieri’s words by heart. Most of the time now we settle for half and I like it better….
Has Aaron settled for half? He is on the other side of the Coolidge Bridge, in Northampton. LaFleur Airport and the Three County Fairgrounds are to his left, the river behind him. He turns right onto Damon Road to avoid the town’s center. Most of the time now we settle for half. Not me, Aaron thinks. Not yet. Not by a long shot. Aaron has told neither Louise nor Lucius nor Susan his real reason for being on campus. He was there in order to pick up registration forms so that, during the summer, he can attend the university. He has decided to go there, to major in art.
There was a moment, standing at the rear of the small theater, looking through darkness at the brightly lit stage, when he had the impulse to tell Lucius everything. Everything! He felt, too, as if Susan’s body were lying across his own. They were, perhaps, ninety feet apart, yet he believed that he could actually feel the warmth of his wife’s body as it lay across Eddie’s, could feel it press against his own. Will he tell her later? What Alfieri says about Eddie—would Susan say this about him —for he allowed himself to be wholly known and for that I think I will love him more than all my sensible clients.
For he allowed himself to be wholly known. Is it possible—the question has never been inside his head before in words, and as soon as it is, his heart cramps, lurches—but is it possible, he wonders, that he may someday be able to tell Susan about David Voloshin?
To his surprise he does not have to pull to the side of the road, or to stop driving. To the right, down a steep embankment, a single yellow-and-blue tent is perched on a narrow sandbar. Two boys sit on the old railroad bridge, their feet dangling twenty feet or so above the Connecticut River. He thinks of David as if thinking of one of his own children. David! Sweet David! The pressure in his chest eases as quickly as it came: the fist that gripped his heart opens, the sharp pain dissipates, sends heat along the length of his arms, his legs. Is it possible that he may someday be able to tell his children the story of David Voloshin’s life?
He looks at his fingers, swallows. New fingers cannot grow from the old. He recalls Carl asking him about that, having read about certain crabs and sea animals that regenerate severed tentacles. His half-fingers live on, can do work he never expected them to do. It has not occurred to him for a long time that he has no trouble shooting baskets with three fingers, no trouble drawing. But how, he wonders—this question is new—can the second half of his life ever be whole, ever have its story, if cut off from the first life, from its true beginnings?
Going to the University and getting the forms is a start, he tells himself. Doubtless, if he wanted to, he could figure out ways to fake things—to fill out the forms so that he could fool whoever had to be fooled. He can take one or two courses a semester as a special student forever, but to apply for regular admission so that he might someday obtain a degree, for that he will need to produce transcripts and a high school diploma.
Did the first Aaron Levin graduate from high school, and if so, from which one? He could find out, he supposes, by going back and spending a few days in the city, but the easier way is to drive to Boston, to ask around, to purchase whatever papers he needs. For a price, you can buy anything. He could, he considers, make up a story about the orphanage closing, the records being burned—he has the name and address of the one he knew: the Maimonides Home
for Jewish Boys, whose history he has given Susan and the children. He could inquire about taking high school equivalency exams. Better, though, to pay for what he needs.
Who, he wonders, would care now that he was Abe Litvinov’s nephew, or that once, in self-defense, he killed a small-time thug named Vincent D’Agostino? Aaron has read stories in the papers of people confessing to crimes decades after they were committed, of murderers being let off with light or suspended sentences. But if he reveals himself—his true life—what of Gail and Emilie? What if his mother is still alive? What of Susan and Carl and Larry…
When he arrives home and finds that the children are gone and the house empty, he is happy. He walks from room to room, touching objects in each room—the boy’s model cars and planes, Jennifer’s collection of shells and dolls, Susan’s hairbrush, Benjamin’s geodes—and all the while he is imagining himself in studio classes at the university, an easel in front of him or a sketch pad on his lap, and he is learning from teachers, some younger than himself, how, through specific techniques and exercises, to draw and to paint. What he realizes is that his willingness—his desire—to tell Susan about David Voloshin could be born not merely because he wants to open the doors to his past so that he can be free of it, but because he has decided to free himself for the years to come. This seems so obvious and simple—wasn’t it always there, waiting?—that he is astonished it has dawned upon him so slowly.
He makes himself a cup of coffee, then goes to his studio, locks the door behind him. He likes the fact that he does not know where his children are, that they have lives and worlds of their own that exist apart from him, from anything he has given them, from any knowledge he has of them. He plans ahead: should Susan or one of the children return before he is ready to leave for her house, he will slip through the sliding doors, walk around to the front, get away without speaking to anyone. He wants to be at her place while there is still light. The sun will not set until after seven. He wants to sit for a while in his studio, to let his feelings float, to let the world seep into them.
In the upper right-hand corner of his drafting table, under clear plastic tape, is the painting he loves: Vermeer’s portrait of a woman pouring milk. The print, eight-by-ten-inches, is in black and white. Two floors above, on their bedroom wall, beside the window that overlooks the back lawn, is a framed print of the same painting, but in color. It was on the wall when he married Susan, and he has never grown tired of it. Susan bought it almost twenty years ago, during her junior year abroad, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
When his mind wanders during work, when he rests from his drawing, he likes to stare at the black-and-white print and to imagine colors, as if from below, bleeding through, suffusing the blacks and whites and grays with life. He loves the pale yellow light that comes from the window, from its small square panes, the light that touches, with tenderness, the woman’s head and bosom and arms and hands. The woman is neither beautiful nor young, and he cannot tell if she is a mother.
The contrasting textures never cease to fascinate: the wicker basket and the metal one; the bread and the milk; the whole loaf and the broken loaf; the full basket and the empty one; the blue overskirt that is drawn up and the blue tablecloth that hangs down; the earthenware pitcher in hand and the glazed jug on the table…. All things seem to be partially hidden: what do the baskets on the wall contain? What is inside the wooden box on the floor? Why is the skirt slightly lifted, the extra blue cloth gathered and laid across the tablecloth? And how can there be so many different textures, so many contrasting shapes—ovals and circles and squares and rectangles and triangles—within such calm?
So little movement, yet so much life! The rough wood of the window casing and the smooth cloth of the woman’s head-kerchief; the fresh white milk pouring down near the grainy pieces of the half-cut loaf of bread; the soft curves of pitcher, bowl and bosom, and the hard angles of table, of box, of copper basket. So much light, yet so much darkness; so much that is hidden, so much that is only partially revealed; and beyond the window—into that world from which the woman has come and to which he senses she will soon return—what life out there?
The picture begins to shimmer, to take on color and depth, to glow with golds and blues and browns, and the intensity of the color—its clarity—serves, miraculously, only to soften the effect, to make the moment seem yet more peaceful, more calm. How can it be? Aaron touches the print, runs his index finger along the rim of the pitcher, then traces the oval of the ceramic bowl into which the thin line of milk descends. How easily the woman holds the bowl of the pitcher. Aaron touches the strong muscles in the woman’s bare left forearm. He feels as if his entire being is suffused with the same pale yellow light that suffused this woman’s world. Did she exist? What is the difference between who she actually was and the woman Vermeer painted? The wall behind her—the great expanse of wall that has nothing on it but a few nails—seems to surround the woman with radiant light, and staring into it Aaron feels sleepy, dreamy, happy. Oh how wonderful it would be to be able to have the knowledge—in craft, in experience—to be able to paint like this! Can he do it? Is it too late? His drafting technique, he knows from the admiration of other architects, is excellent. The sketches he does from time to time are fine. But is there still the time—and will—for him to learn how to paint like this? As far as art historians know, Vermeer painted only thirty-seven paintings. If there were a thirty-eighth, Aaron wonders, what would it be like?
His left hand strokes the seat of his stool, idly. He is glad he stopped in at the gym, spoke with Lucius. He realizes now that the dim memory he had, sitting there, was of sitting in the balcony of the Erasmus gym when he was a thirteen-year-old freshman watching the varsity practice. Afterwards Mr. Goldstein came upstairs, put a hand on his shoulder. So you’re the Voloshin kid. Davey, right? Well. I hear you’re pretty good…. He sees the photos of former Erasmus stars hanging from the walls of Mr. Goldstein’s office. He sees Leo Durocher, the Dodger manager, talking to men in business suits. The men are reputed to be gangsters. Durocher has been banned from baseball for a year, for consorting with underworld figures. Durocher is in his uniform, the men are in the grandstands, just above the dugout. The photograph is in the New York Post. Abe laughs. Abe quotes Mr. Rothenberg: the self-righteousness of weak and envious men is without end.
The woman’s face is suddenly less round. The print begins to lose color, and as it does, the darker hues—the inside of the bowl, the edge of the tablecloth, the folds of the skirt, the shadows of basket and bread, the lines of the woman’s eyes and mouth—become black, a color that does not exist in the painting itself. The wall becomes almost as white as her kerchief. The absence of color does not displease Aaron. Someday too, he promises himself, he will draw the picture of Beau Jack that he was once too frightened to draw.
Aaron is for the moment content, he realizes, and in this contentment he is aware that he feels as if he is somehow living within the epilogue to one of those nineteenth-century novels that Susan loves so much, wherein all the couples marry, all evil is dispersed, all good people are reunited, all the children and grandchildren are seated happily about the family hearth. How strange to feel that he is living within the ending to such a story when he is barely beginning the middle of his own life.
He looks at the woman again and her color has returned, as if he is looking at the print on the bedroom wall, and he feels that he is somehow alive within the yellow-white light that surrounds her. It is as if he can thin to air and rise like the light itself—the almost invisible motes of pale yellow and white dust—and float back and forth, passing in and out through the panes of the window in the woman’s kitchen. Has her life been hard? Has she suffered loss? Is she a mother, daughter, or servant? Is she happy?
Aaron looks out at the lawn, the trees, the blossoms. He is, he knows, living a life he never expected to live, and he can catalogue its riches: he is married to a good and beautiful woman who loves him as much as he loves her; they li
ve in a lovely home in a gorgeous part of the world; they have four bright, healthy children; they do not want for money or for time to enjoy their life; he has work he loves, and can grow in; his wife, having raised the children, now has a life of her own too—with friends, with the theater—that rewards her; he has good friends, and the lives of these friends go well. Nicky is living in a small town in Pennsylvania, married to a man who was her history professor at Dickinson College—they are expecting their first child in the fall. And in his friendship with Lucius, Aaron has something he never expected to have: a close adult male friend with whom, on a regular basis, he shares his work, his life, his family, his feelings. He has a rich family life, work he loves, close friends to share his life with. What more does a man need?
Somewhere behind him, a door opens. Aaron stands, goes to the window. He imagines Martin Luther King going to the balcony of his motel. Now Martin Luther King is dead too, slain in Memphis, where he had come to help striking garbage collectors. The world beyond Aaron’s home—beyond his thoughts—rolls on. Outside his house, beyond his safe New England world, wars and famine blaze across the swamps and deserts and jungles of the world. Young Americans and Asians die by the thousands in the heat and mud of Vietnam. Jackie Robinson Junior, home from Southeast Asia, has been arrested for possession of drugs, for carrying a concealed weapon; he is an addict and has said so publicly; he is now living in a rehabilitation center called Daytop House. Jackie himself, silver-haired and paunchy, has been inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame—the first black there—but what pleasure in this public victory when the private grief must be so great?
Before My Life Began Page 46