Before My Life Began (2 page)

Little Benny leaned back and laughed, then buttoned his jacket at the waist—it was the kind of jacket that musicians wore, with only one button and wide lapels—but I didn't smile at him or look at the money or try to give it back. He grabbed my chin between his thumb and his index finger and pressed so hard I felt my teeth cutting through my lips.

“But you ain't never gonna tell your uncle what you seen, right?”

I didn't say anything and he squeezed harder.

“This never happened, right?”

“You want me to see that the other kid here don't talk?” Spanish Louie asked. “I could clip his ear off.”

“It's Angelo Cremona's kid,” the third man said. I squinted. Avie Gornik was standing against the wall, picking at his teeth with a foldedup dollar bill. Avie lived with his mother over Mr. Berg's drugstore. He was an old man, fat and bald, who spent his free time during the day in the stores, shopping for her. She never went outside their apartment. “Should I fix him good so Angelo knows we don't wanna make a second visit?”

“He your friend, Davey?” Little Benny asked.

I nodded.

“Any friend of Davey Voloshin is okay by me,” he said.

“They shouldn't go in alleys at night,” Spanish Louie said.

“Yeah,” Little Benny laughed. “It can be very dangerous to go in alleys at night.”

“What about the piece?” Avie asked.

“Turn her over and leave her a glass of water for when she wakes up.” Benny laughed in a tense, high-pitched way that made me hate him even more. He sounded like a woman. He bent down and kicked the girl. She flopped onto her side and I heard her head crack against the cement.

They didn't look at Tony or me again. They walked out side by side, taking up the entire width of the alley. I saw the bulge in Spanish Louie's back pocket, where he kept his blackjack, and as soon as I was sure the three of them were gone I went to Tony. I tried to lift him.

“You're a fucking dirty Jew,” he screamed, shoving me away. “Goddamn dirty Jew! Dirty Jew! Dirty Jew!”

“Don't say that.”

“I hope the Nazis had time to cut off your uncle's cock—!”

“Shut up,” I said, and I grabbed his wrist. He was wheezing in and out so hard when he spoke that I had to concentrate to make out his words.

“Who's gonna make me?”

He jerked his arm away, looked up at me. When I saw how swollen the left side of his face was I tried not to show anything. His lip was bleeding badly. I offered him my handkerchief.

“I don't need anything from you, you crummy kike.”

“Your face looks real bad,” I said. “Does it hurt?”

He sniffed in, wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

“A lot you care.”

“You should get home right away and do something for your face.”

“My old man got guys can take care of them real good. They ain't such big shots.”

“It's all swollen and purple.”

He stood up, shrugged me off when I moved toward him to help.

“I ain't a dumb sissy,” he said.

“I didn't say you were. Just that your face is swollen and cut and you gotta get some first aid for it.”

“We ain't soldiers.”

“So?”

“So what?”

I shrugged. “It's your face,” I said. I pointed to the girl. “Do you know who she is?”

He walked over and stared down at her.

“It's Mrs. Davidoff's dumb daughter Rosie,” he said. Nobody knew Rosie's age. She lived in a special home for people like her during the winter. The rest of the year she sat in front of Mr. Davidoff's grocery store on Rogers Avenue, knitting long scarves. “Who cares anyway? We ain't playing soldiers I said before. Didn't you hear me?”

“Is she alive?”

He bent over. “Yeah. She's breathing.”

He moved away then, but he walked crookedly and there was no time for me to get to him before he scraped his cheek against the brick wall.

“Jesus Christ!” he screamed. “Jesus fucking Christ! My old man's gonna be so angry with me I don't know what to do. Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!”

He kept veering from side to side, his left hand out in front of him to keep from knocking against the walls of the alleyway. I went back, picked up his bag of firecrackers and ran after him. Could I help Tony and Rosie at the same time? If I called her apartment and her mother and father were there I'd have to disguise my voice so they wouldn't think I'd been in on things. Outside, Linden Boulevard was even more crowded and noisy than my street had been. Cars were stuck out in the middle of the road, honking their horns, crowds of people waving flags and dancing in circles with each other.

“Here,” I said. I grabbed his arm and turned him around, shoving his bag at him.
“Here!”

He took it without looking at me and I wanted to do something—anything!—to change things, I was just so scared that he wouldn't ever want to be my friend again.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

I wanted to say more, but he disappeared into the crowd.

I walked back toward my own street. A few people said hello to me and one old woman pinched my cheek and tried to hand me a Hershey bar from a shopping bag. At the corner of Martense Street and Rogers Avenue, I couldn't find my mother. I crossed over to where Mr. Weiss's tailor shop was, but she wasn't there either, so I crossed back and walked up our street and climbed the black iron fence in front of our apartment house. I got my sneakers wedged in good between two of the sharp points that stuck up—we would climb up there when we needed to see what time it was on the Holy Cross tower on Church Avenue, a block and a half away—and I looked all around until I spotted my mother on the other side of Rogers Avenue. Her mouth was open wide, her teeth bright, her head tipped to the side, and she was laughing in a way that made her look more beautiful than ever. She gave her head a shake and confetti swirled down from her hair onto the people around her. I'd never seen so much paper. I watched her smile and thought of how she smiled the same way when I drew pictures for her, landscapes of trees and mountains and barns and lakes.

The lobby of our building was quiet. We lived on the third floor, in apartment 3B, and I walked up the stairs, took the key out from under the doormat—my father wasn't home from work yet—and let myself in. What would happen to Tony? If his brothers found out that he'd let himself get caught by my uncle's men, how rough would they be on him? In the kitchen, I looked up the Davidoff number, put a dish towel over the mouthpiece of the telephone. I told Rosie's mother where she was, but hung up when she started screaming questions at me. I went to my room, got my ruler and pencil and scissors from my desk, then took a copy of the
New York Post
from the newspaper rack in the living room and brought it with me to the kitchen table. Starting with the sports pages, I drew lines with a pencil, up and down and back and forth, across the photos of all the Dodger and Giant and Yankee players. There was an article from the day before about the Dodgers who'd be coming back as soon as the war ended, guys I'd never seen but had read about—Pee Wee Reese and Pistol Pete Reiser and Cookie Lavagetto and Billy Herman and Ed Head and Kirby Higbe and Hugh Casey—and I cut their faces into little squares, first sideways and then up and down. I cut through five pages at a time. I brushed the squares of newsprint with the side of my hand to the edge of the oilcloth and into a paper bag I took out from under the sink. I nicked the oilcloth a few times—it was an old green-checkered one we'd been using ever since I could remember—and smoothed the nicks down with saliva.

When I finished with the
New York Post
I went into the hallway where the incinerator was, found the comics section from the previous Saturday and brought it inside. Scorchy Smith was on the front page, frying Japs with his flamethrower. I smiled and ruled lines across Scorchy and the Japs and the palm trees and the B-24 Super-Fortresses and cut the comics into squares. I'd sent my Uncle Abe a few sets of drawings I'd made of Scorchy Smith and the pictures seemed so good to him he thought I'd traced them. So I sent him more, and I also sent him some of the actual comic strips so that he could compare the sizes—mine were a little smaller—and see that I'd done the drawings myself, freehand.

When I was done pouring the pieces of paper into the bag I twisted the top closed and shook it up and down so that the colored pieces would mix with the black-and-white. Then I looked out the window and I felt even better because—as if my finishing just when I did
made
it happen—there was my father walking along the street from the No-strand Avenue end, coming home from work.

There were still big crowds at both ends of the street—our block was one of the longest in the neighborhood—but in the middle, where my father was, he was all alone, and I watched him walking under the lampposts and felt happier than I had all night because I knew I'd be by myself waiting for him, to give him the good news.

I cleaned up the kitchen table, put my ruler and pencil and scissors back into the desk drawer, then turned out all the lights in the apartment, locked the door and got into the front hall closet. That was where my father always went first when he got home, to hang up his coat or jacket. I set the paper bag down at my feet, but away from me so it wouldn't rustle, next to where the carpet sweeper was, and I waited. It was broiling hot in the closet, but the soft wool of my father's black winter coat against my cheek soothed me. I wondered how hot the subway had been for him. I breathed in through my nose, the odors of wool and camphor and stale cigarettes—my father smoked over three packs of Chesterfields a day—making my eyes tear.

I imagined listening to his footsteps coming up from the second floor landing—he always stopped there, to get his breath back—and then I imagined myself running down the street with him toward the corner where my mother was, and of how we'd throw my confetti into the air, and of how some of the pieces of the comics would stick in his hair. I saw him smiling proudly, one arm around my shoulder, his other arm around my mother's waist. I saw him pulling us to him from either side, to give us kisses.

His key was turning the lock and then, through the slit at the bottom of the closet door, I saw that he'd put the foyer light on. I held my breath and while I did it occurred to me for the first time that because it had been such a hot day he might have gone to work without his jacket, but I was afraid to move my hands and feel around to find out. My eyes pressed closed as tightly as I could get them, I tried to see him when I was looking down on him from the window, and when the picture came into my head I breathed out: his thin summer jacket was folded over his right arm, the newspaper rolled up just above it, chest high.

A second later the closet door opened and in the yellow foyer light I saw the pale skin on the back of his hand—he was reaching for a hanger—and I pushed out toward him and began shouting that the war was over.

“What are you—crazy or something!?”

He dropped the hanger and it bumped me over my right eye. He reached in, snatched me hard on my right arm, above the elbow where my muscle was, and dragged me the rest of the way from the closet.

“What are you trying to do—give me a heart attack? Are you crazy or are you crazy?”

He shook me hard—he had tremendous power in his hands—and then shoved me away from him.

“I just wanted to surprise you,” I said.

“I don't need surprises.”

“But the war's over, Poppa—and Uncle Abe will be coming home now! Momma said so.”

“Wonderful.”

He pushed by me but there was no anger on his face now. He looked tired, the way he usually did at night after work. His right eyelid was drooping down behind his thick glasses—he was blind in his left eye, from having lost all sight there when he was six years old—and when he hung up his jacket he slipped his hand into its side pocket and came out with a crumpled pack of Chesterfields. The cellophane crackled like the sound of fire.

He walked away from me, to the kitchen.

“You're all sweaty,” he said, over his shoulder. “You should dry off so you don't get a chill.”

I followed him into the kitchen.

“Aren't you happy that the war is over?”

He was at the sink, running cold water over his wrists to cool himself off. His glasses off, he looked at me sideways with his good eye, then splashed water on his face.

“I'm happy the war's over,” he said, but his voice was flat.

I showed him my bag. “I made confetti.”

He was reading his newspaper. He held it in one hand while he opened the door to the icebox with the other.

“What?”

“I made confetti.”

“I thought you said spaghetti. Did Momma leave me supper?”

“We never ate,” I said. “I think we forgot—I mean, I don't think she ever got to make supper—we were too busy being excited because of the war being over.” I heard the sentence in my head that I could use to get him to do what I wanted: “Momma's down at the corner with everybody, but she sent me back to get you so we could all celebrate together, like a family.”

“So?”

He was at the kitchen counter again, slicing a piece of American cheese for himself. His cigarette stuck to the corner of his lower lip.

“So I waited for you so we could go to the corner together. Don't you want to come? I got enough confetti for both of us. I made it all myself.”

He exhaled, smoke curling toward the ceiling, and when he looked at me and nodded his head up and down a few times it was as if he were really listening to me for the first time.

“Sure, Davey,” he said. “Sure.”

He washed the stub of his cigarette under the faucet, forced it down the drain.

“Momma's expecting us, you said? She's really waiting for me?”