Before My Life Began (19 page)

“You think you're such a big shot, don't you?” Feinberg said. “All that double-talk about helping the man, while you let the child here watch—all that nonsense about being good to him when you're nothing but…but a monster with a brain. Did you know that? I don't care how intelligent or rich or powerful you are, or how many lackeys you have around you to bow down to you and do your dirty work.”

“Abe?” Benny asked.

“Let him talk,” Abe said.

The muscles in Feinberg's long neck were stretched tight. He looked like a bird in its nest, opening its beak, straining upwards to get food from its mother.

“You're Jewish too, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

“Then you bring shame on us all.”

“Do I?”

“Oh, you cover it up with a veneer of respectability. I know more than you think. More than I said before, when my life was threatened. I've heard all about you, Mr. Litvinov. In this neighborhood your reputation precedes you, as they say, and it visits shame upon us all.”

“Hey Abe,” Louie said. “Do we really gotta listen to this crap? Why don't we see if we can get this bird a job working for the BMT, yeah?”

“The men who shipped us into the camps in boxcars and shoved us into the ovens—my own aunts and uncles, do you hear me?—and tore out our fillings and shoveled our ashes out the other end—many of them were kind to their families too. Did you know that, Mr. Litvinov? They were good to their own children, to their wives and parents and nieces and nephews. They—”

“I think you've said enough.”

Abe touched his ring with one finger. Silence. It was almost, I thought, as if Feinberg had been there in the street with us, listening. Feinberg looked around the room, his eyes wild, as if he suddenly realized where he was, as if he suddenly realized that my uncle's men could cripple him as easily as he had sliced Avie's scrotum.

“You didn't have to do it,” Abe said, and I was surprised that what Feinberg accused him of did not seem to bother him. When Abe spoke now, he spoke calmly and precisely, as if to a child: “You had a choice, you see, Mr. Feinberg. You didn't have to do it. Life always presents us with choices, big ones and little ones, and there are always consequences and many of them are unpleasant. But you did have a choice, you see, and you chose. Take the money, please.”

Abe nodded to Turkish Sammy. Turkish Sammy picked up the money, stuck it into the hip pocket of Feinberg's white coat. Abe glanced at Benny. Benny took Feinberg by the elbow, guided him to the door.

5

M
Y FATHER WAS WAITING
for me in the lobby, hiding behind the staircase. I was dead tired, drenched from walking home in the rain, and when he came toward me, smiling—he'd been squatting in the small alcove where the mailman left his shoulder bags each morning—I felt nothing, not even irritation.

“Hey—you were terrific tonight, Davey. Really terrific. Twenty-three points and you hardly played most of the last quarter.”

“Thanks.”

I started up the stairs. My arms and legs felt waterlogged. All I wanted to do was sleep.

“Stevey Komisarik said you were shooting the eyes out of the basket.” He laughed. “I thought it was a terrific way of putting it to a man like me, to shoot the eyes out of the basket.”

“Sure, Dad.”

“Davey?”

I stopped.

“I waited for you. I wanted to talk with you.”

“Sure.”

I shivered. I was sixteen years old, in the middle of my junior year at Erasmus, the leading scorer and rebounder on the team. During practices and games the guys would sometimes talk to me as if I were someone ordinary, just another player. I'd even gone to Garfield's with them after the first home game. We sat in the back room, and as each player walked in, some with their girlfriends, everybody cheered. They'd cheered for me too, but when I said I had to get home early, I sensed that they were relieved. The instant I was gone I heard them laugh in a way they didn't while I was with them. Some of Abe's men were at a table near the back room and they called out to me, raised their coffee cups, said they'd heard what a star I was.

My father held on to my sleeve. He talked to me about how, if I kept up my scoring average and my good grades, I was certain to get a scholarship to any college I wanted, Harvard or Princeton or Yale or Columbia. I should make sure not to get injured and I should stay out of trouble. The Ivy League liked clean-cut types. He seemed to be losing his balance, to be falling sideways on the wet staircase.

“I'm tired,” I said. “Thanks for coming to the game, okay? I meant to say that before.”

He laughed. “Did you hear that or did you hear that? I got a boy with a terrific gift like he got and he thanks
me
for coming to his games!” He clucked inside his mouth. “You're really a terrific kid, Davey, did you know that? I mean, I never known anybody like you. Only I want you to promise me one thing, yeah?”

“Look, Dad. I said I'm tired. What did you want to talk to me about?”

“What did I want to talk to you about.” He let go of my arm. “Sure. It's why I was waiting for you, right?”

“Tell me.”

“Not too loud,” he whispered. “But listen. All right. This is why I waited for you. I mean, you're a smart boy, Davey, so maybe you can tell me what you think I can do to make Momma happy. I want to make her happy, only I don't know how, see?” I moved away from him, up the staircase. In the dim light of the stairwell, his face seemed very pasty, a flat dull-orange. When he touched me I wanted to pull back, to strike him across the cheek so that he'd tumble down the stairs. I thought of the guys in the back room at Garfield's. I thought of their girlfriends holding their hands and stroking their fingers, one at a time. I thought of the girls' sweaters, the soft pastel colors: powder-blue and powder-pink, beige and peach and lavender and yellow. “I figured a smart boy like you, maybe you could give your old man a good suggestion so that every time I come home I don't gotta feel like poison.”

I looked away and tried to remember the game, to fix my mind upon some moment—upon the faces of my teammates, the sound of the crowd, the flight of the ball as it settled into the net and swished through. Had I really been running back and forth and soaring through the air only an hour before, playing my heart out? I tried to see Tony, feeding me a pass under the basket, slapping my ass as we ran back upcourt. I tried to think of something—
anything
—that would get my father's voice out of my head, and what I began to see was a photo of Jackie, the way he looked two months before, smiling down at Rachel from the back page of the
New York Post
. Rachel was in the hospital with their new child, Sharon. In another month Jackie would head South for spring training, to begin his fifth season with the Dodgers, and if Rachel and their two children went with him they would stay in the team's camp with the wives and families of the other players. They wouldn't board with a black family the way they had during Jackie's first season. There were dozens of black players in the league now, and as I stared at Jackie's face he looked so happy that I wondered if, in that moment, he had any room inside him for memories of the hard times that had come before. Could one moment of pure happiness wash away years of pain and bitterness? Jackie—who'd led the Dodgers to two World Series; who was voted Rookie of the Year; who was an All-Star second baseman, the league's Most Valuable Player—could fight back now. When pitchers or infielders got in his way on the base paths, he aimed his spikes for their shins, he rolled over them.

“With you gone so much now at school, and then with Abe the rest of the time—it's only that your Momma don't feel
needed
the way she used to, do you see what I mean?” He tried to laugh. I thought of Tony's girlfriend Regina, waiting for him after games in the darkness under the Bedford Avenue arch. I remembered the starched white blouses the Catholic girls would wear on the days they got out of school early for Religious Instruction, and how I'd always felt less shy with them, less frightened—how I'd felt they wouldn't want to own me the way Jewish girls did. The lips of Catholic girls felt less sticky to me when we necked—firmer, cooler.

“Sure, sure. All that running up and down the court, and the way those big
shvartzes
were banging you around under the basket….” He tapped on the side of his head with his knuckles. “I should have my head examined, to try having a conversation like this tonight. Only”—he laughed—“only I guess I was just afraid to go home by myself.” He shrugged. “I didn't want Momma to yell at me no more.”

We walked upstairs together. All the lights were out in the apartment. I thought of Stevey Komisarik, next to my father, clapping like mad when the coach took me out of the game. Once, when I was thirteen and Abe asked why I didn't play more with the boys from the neighborhood, my mother said that it was Stevey's mother who kept him from playing with me. Two days later all of Mr. Komisarik's dental equipment was destroyed. Everybody in the building went to the office on Bedford Avenue—Mr. Komisarik was renting it while they saved up enough money to buy their own house, where he could have his office and laboratory in the front part and they could live in the rest—to stare at the damage: the piles of twisted wiring and drills and springs, the ripped out fixtures, the broken glass and porcelain, the smashed sets of false teeth. The next day Stevey knocked on my door, his mother behind him, and asked if I wanted to come to his apartment to play with him.

In my bedroom, my mother's old tan coffee mug was on my desk. My mother spent a lot of her time sitting in my room while I was away. She sat there and she worried, she said. Or she sat there and tried to remember what a sweet child I'd once been. She said she liked sitting in my room because it was neat and uncluttered. She said she felt peaceful when she was in my room because it wasn't like her room, or like the room she and Abe shared when they were children.

Senator Kefauver's hearings were on television every day now, investigating organized crime—they'd started four weeks before at the beginning of February, and they were making all the big shots like Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky and Joey Adonis and Mickey Cohen testify—but we had no television set, and my mother never asked me if I talked with Abe about things like that. The most she would do would be to look out a window and go through her old routines about how someday she would get a call from the hospital and they would ask her if she was David Voloshin's mother. They would tell her that my arm was crushed or my head was split or my neck was snapped in two. That was all the good Abe or sports would ever do for me.

From behind the wall, I heard my father and mother whispering. Maybe, I thought, it had relaxed him to talk with me about her. Maybe, when I was out of school in another year and a half, they could actually move to California. I'd visit them during college vacations and I'd take early morning walks by myself along deserted beaches. I'd be there before the sun rose, and the beaches would be quiet and clean, and one morning I'd see a girl coming toward me. She would have long honey-colored hair and large pearl-gray eyes and she would be carrying her sandals in one hand. I'd smile at her and she'd smile back shyly, but her eyes wouldn't waver. We'd stop and stare into one another's eyes, and then, without saying anything, I'd put out my hand and she would take it and we would walk together. When she kissed me she would hold my face between her hands so gently and sweetly that I'd want the kiss to never end. We wouldn't tell one another our names, or where we were from, and we'd never meet anywhere except on the beach, and each time we parted we would say nothing about meeting again. And when vacation was over and I was back at my college, working out with the team or walking across campus, I'd think of her, searching for me, hoping I would return. She would be there every day, waiting, watching the ocean, and it would give me a wonderfully painful kind of pleasure to see tears slide down her cheeks, to know how much she missed me.

I took off my sweat shirt and my T-shirt, looked at myself in the mirror. I was six-foot-three now—two inches taller than Abe—and I had what our coach called a perfect swimmer's body: long waist, high broad chest, wide shoulders, strong neck, long muscular arms. It always surprised me, in a mirror, to see the face that was so familiar to me sitting on top of a body I hardly recognized. I put my hands on my chest, palms flat, fingertips almost touching, and I rubbed slowly. During the school year, from the time football practice started in the fall until the baseball season was over in the spring, I worked out in my bedroom, using weights, skipping rope, doing sit-ups and push-ups. Sometimes, early in the morning, when Beau Jack was putting out the garbage pails and sweeping the walks and mopping the corridors, to build up my wind I'd go up and down the four flights of our building as fast as I could, five or six times in a row, until my lungs felt as if they would burst. Afterwards I'd sit out in front of the building with Beau Jack and drink water from the nozzle of his hose.

I loved playing ball. I loved the feeling of slipping and crashing through other bodies and then of being free—suspended in air, the ball in my hands, nobody touching me, everybody straining to reach me. And I loved to win. When I didn't win I'd be furious, enraged—I'd go over every second of the game, every move I'd made, vowing to do better next time, vowing to make up for my teammates' deficiencies. I played end on the football team, first base on the baseball team, forward in basketball. I was good in all sports, but I was best at basketball. Like Tony, I was never the favorite of the coaches—they were especially wary now because of the fixes, because gangsters like Abe and Fasalino were allegedly behind the bribing of college players—but they would use me as an example in practice, to show the others how, even with my immense natural abilities I never gave up, I never stopped trying.