Before My Life Began (16 page)

“I saw the sentence in the newspaper once. Sure. Moe Berg said it, I think, from the time when he was playing catcher for the Yankees.”

My mother twirled around, left the kitchen, yelled to us from the living room to come in and join her. I followed my father through the foyer. My mother was pouring two glasses of whiskey. She handed one to my father, then drank the whiskey from her glass in one swallow. She switched on the phonograph and began moving around the room, dancing to the music but singing a song different from the one playing. She took my father's hands and tried to make him dance with her, singing words about being close together dancing cheek-to-cheek. I backed up against the door to my bedroom.

“It's too hot for funny business,” my father said, shoving her away. “What's the matter with you, anyway? Are you crazy or something?”

“What's the matter with
you
—ain't you in love with me no more? You don't want to dance with a beautiful lady?” She pushed him aside and came towards me, arms out, eyes half-closed. “Then maybe my handsome son will give his mother a dance. I mean, we may all be dead anyway in a day or two, so why not dance, right, fellas? Why not have a good time? Let's break out the booze! Let's be happy! Strike up the music! Let's live a little!”

My father moved in front of me, to block her. She turned away, drank from the bottle the way I remembered her drinking on the night the war ended, her head way back, her throat stretched to its full length.

“Am I the only one wants to have a good time?”

“I think the heat's getting to you,” my father said. “You heard what Abie told the boy, about finishing his business by the end of the week, didn't you? Only I'll tell you the truth, on a day like this, it's the heat that'll kill me before any of their dumb bolagulas do.”

“From your lips to God's ears,” my mother said, and then she drank some more, laughing and sputtering so that she spat some of the whiskey right back out.

“What's a bolagula?” I asked.

My mother clicked off the phonograph, swayed from side to side to silent music. She licked whiskey from her wrist.

“Oh Solly,” she said. “I ain't heard that word since I was a kid. Bolagula! What a memory you got for a blind man! What a brain you got that's melting there in your tiny head. Only you know what—?”

She stopped, set the bottle down on the arm of my father's easy chair, steadied it so that it wouldn't topple over. Then, without finishing her sentence, she walked into her bedroom.

The next morning my mother and father slept late. I dressed, made my own breakfast, knocked on their bedroom door so I could tell them I was going to Stevey Komisarik's apartment to play Monopoly. They didn't answer, and for a second I was frightened, thinking they might have been murdered during the night. I pressed my ear to the door—the keyhole was stuffed with cotton—and I heard my mother giggling, telling my father to stop, asking him if he was crazy or if he was crazy. I yelled in that I'd eaten breakfast and about where I was probably going and before they could shout back anything to stop me, I was gone.

Stevey's mother looked through the peephole in the middle of their door, and when she saw it was me she put the latch on. She told me to go away, that she didn't want trouble.

Beau Jack let me into his apartment, handed me the morning paper. Kate nuzzled my hand. I sat and looked at the photograph on the front page of a beat-up old Ford, from behind, its trunk wide open. A policeman stood at each side of the car, at attention, looking straight into the camera, and on the ground—you almost didn't notice them at first—were two bodies, the heads facing down into the gutter, over the curbstone. According to the caption, the bodies had been found in the car's trunk, the car discovered next to an open lot in Canarsie. The dead men were rumored to be thugs who worked for Mr. Fasalino.

“Jesus!” I exclaimed.

“He ain't gonna be no help now.”

I turned to the story on page three, searching for Abe's name. It wasn't there. I told Beau Jack about what Abe had said to me on the phone the night before.

“That man dotes on you. I don't deny it, only if you want to stay down here, Beau Jack do what he can.”

“What do you mean?”

“I killed men before, I guess I can do it again, they try to hurt you.”

“It's not my uncle's fault, what's happening.”

“Didn't say it was.”

“Do you believe me?”

“Sure I do. You a boy a man can trust.”

“But you don't believe my uncle, do you? You never say his name. I noticed that.”

He pointed to the newspaper.

“Those bodies real enough, Davey. I'm scared for you, is the truth. I'm just scared.”

“But Abe
loves
me,” I said. “I'm his
nephew
. Don't you understand?”

“Oh sure. I understand that. Lots of people gonna love a boy like you. That part's easy.”

“Do you have a gun here?”

“Yes.”

“From when you were a soldier?”

“Yes.”

“And you've already killed with it?”

“That's right.”

“Do you think I look like my uncle?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you
really?
We have the same color eyes. The same kind of dark curly hair….”

“You know who Beau Jack thinks you look like most?”

“Who?”

“Jackie Robinson.”

“Come on,” I said. “Be serious. How can I look like Jackie? I'm
white.”

“You sure are,” he said, and he brought me a glass full of ice cubes, poured a bottle of Coke over the cubes, let the copper foam rise to the top of the glass, then settle. He poured again. “You drink this and then I give you something to eat, so we bring some color back to that handsome face of yours.”

“Do you really think I look like him?”

Beau Jack started making us ham and Swiss cheese sandwiches.

“When I look in your face, Davey, all I see is young Jackie, don't ask me why. You got a look in your eyes like he must of had, he was your age, is what I think.”

The next morning there was another front-page photo, this time of two bodies lying on a waterfront pier on Red Hook. “G
ANGLAND
R
EVENGE
,” the headline said. The bodies had been fished out of the river and I recognized the names of two of my uncle's men, Mel Weiss and Skinny Epstein. An hour after the men's bodies were recovered, the article said, the District Attorney announced that a key member of one of the gangs had been arrested and was turning state's evidence. The man was known, the newspaper said, as Spanish Louie.

“Jesus!” I said.

Beau Jack smiled.

I went upstairs right away, but my father was already gone and my mother was walking from room to room in a bathing suit, cleaning the furniture with a feather duster, singing songs, asking me if I wanted to learn the words, if I wanted her to teach me how to dance.

I stayed in the kitchen so I could be there with her in case she turned on the radio and heard the news. I tried to draw, but I couldn't concentrate and decided to work on my baseball card collection instead. Sometimes my mother and father bragged about my drawing so much to other people—arguing with each other to prove which one of them believed in my talent more—that I felt as if their praise made what I did more theirs than mine. And sometimes, listening to my mother go on and on about how I would wind up running Abe's business someday, I had to agree with her that I could never do that and be an artist at the same time.

Abe came to our apartment that evening with my father, and after she heard the news my mother screamed and begged Abe to do something—to take us all to California, to give us new lives—but Abe stayed calm, even when she started bringing up things about their life from when they were children, from when he'd begun living the life he was leading now.

“If I had a different life, I'd have had a different life,” he said to her. “I didn't. Here I am.”

“Sure,” my father added. “Like we used to say—if my aunt had balls we would of called her uncle.”

Abe told us not to worry, that Spanish Louie was a very weak man. He told us that he had posted extra guards around our building and that if trouble increased, he would send us out of the city, to be with Lillian and Sheila.

The next day, before the sun was up, when the apartment house across the way was all in shadow so that the bricks were dusty white as if covered with old chalk dust, I went down to Beau Jack's. He nodded once, handed me the newspaper. He wasn't smiling.

Spanish Louie's photo was on the front page—a police photo from when he was younger that made his dark, milky eyes seem even sadder than they were in real life—and next to his photo there was a picture of the Hotel Mirapol in Coney Island, a circle drawn around a window on the eleventh floor. The article said that Spanish Louie had either jumped or was pushed from the window. It said that the District Attorney had been hoping to use Spanish Louie as his star witness in cleaning up the borough. At the time of his death, Spanish Louie's whereabouts were supposedly top secret. He was being guarded by six New York City detectives. At 1:23
A.M
., when he fell, there were two detectives in the room with him, two detectives in the hallway outside his room, and two more in the hotel's lobby. They all claimed to be either in the bathroom or taking naps. The District Attorney was furious. He suspended the six detectives and declared that his investigation would now expand to include possible police corruption.

Less than an hour later my father came banging at the door. He ordered me to come with him, and kept trying to slap my face all the way up the stairs, yelling at me for having snuck away, for being with Beau Jack again.

Abe sat in my father's easy chair. He spoke in the same calm way he had spoken the night before. He told us that we were now free to come and go from the building whenever we wanted. My father could resume his regular route, my mother could get out and do her shopping, I could play with my friends. Sheila and Lillian were on the way in from the country.

“See?” my father said to my mother. “Didn't I tell you they don't got no power against a guy like your brother? Ain't we gonna be one happy family again, eating supper together and things?”

“Sure,” my mother said. “Terrific. And what about Spanish Louie, huh? What about the promises in California? What about Davey? What about if they get Mr. Rothenberg and the cops don't fall asleep? What about the next time?”

“Spanish Louie thought he was a bird,” Abe said, very flatly, in a voice I'd never heard before, and when he spoke my mother's eyes seemed to shrink, to return to their normal size. All the questions in them—about how she had given up on her brother and her husband, but what about her son—were suddenly gone.

Abe spoke directly to us, yet it was as if he wasn't there—it was as if somebody else was talking for him.

“Spanish Louie thought he was a bird. Only he wasn't. He could sing, you see, but he couldn't fly!”

My father laughed.

“Mr. Fasalino and I are even. We both want peace. Things are arranged now, all right? Come, Davey,” he said, without pausing, “I'd like to spend some time with you, now that things are settled.” He looked at my mother. “You don't mind if I take the boy with me, Evie?”

My mother bit on her lip and waved her hand at Abe, to show him that he could do whatever he wanted, that it was all the same to her.

“Do you want to come with me, Davey?”

“I suppose.”

“Good.”

He stood and stared hard at my mother. She turned away. He twisted his Army ring around on his finger so that the top part was on the inside and it looked as if he were wearing a gold wedding band.

“There is one more small piece of business we need to take care of, and you can help us, Davey. Then we'll be all done with the rough stuff.”

“You got choices, Abe,” my mother said.

“That's right.”

“That's really terrific,” my father said, forcing a laugh. “I mean, I didn't know you had such a sense of humor. I used to think the war knocked it out of you. He can sing but he can't fly! Do you get it, Evie? See—they thought Spanish Louie would spill the beans and—”

“There's no need,” Abe said softly.

Downstairs, the women from our building were already outside sitting on folding chairs, knitting and talking. Next to the curb, in the little squares of dirt around the oak and maple trees, their children were playing with pails and shovels and dixie cups. When the women saw us, they stopped what they were doing and called their children to them. Abe said good morning, tipped his hat.

I said nothing. We walked along Rogers Avenue, then turned up Church Avenue, toward Holy Cross. Abe seemed very far away, even when he asked me what I'd done to pass the time during the previous two weeks. There was more gray in his hair, especially in the sideburns. He was still well tanned, so that the worry lines in his forehead and the smile lines around his eyes seemed deeper. He looked handsomer than ever, but inside, behind his eyes, something was dead. I kept looking at him—while I talked about reading sports books, and sketching, and listening to Dodger games—and thinking that he was really somebody else disguised as my uncle.

“I'm sorry,” I offered.

He ruffled my hair the way he liked to. “You have nothing to be sorry for. Everything's settled. I told you.”

“I mean, I'm sorry your men got killed. I'm sorry you lost your friends.”

“I have no friends.”

“Not even me?”

“You're my nephew.”

We crossed Bedford Avenue, near the entrance to Erasmus Hall High School—I'd be going there in another year—and Abe was silent again. I thought of him on night watch in a forest somewhere near France, peering out from under his G.I. helmet, looking through field glasses. All his men were sleeping in their foxholes. Abe never spoke about his war experiences to me. He'd given me some souvenirs—a compass in a leather case, a few ribbons and medals, old machine gun shells—but he never spoke about what it was like to be in charge of a platoon, of four squads of a dozen men each. What had he felt when some of them were killed? Had he written to their mothers and wives afterwards?