Before My Life Began (20 page)

My mother's voice, shouting at my father to stop bothering her, sounded as if it had sand in it. Couldn't my father tell she was getting another migraine? Didn't he have
any
sense? I unzipped my gym bag, put my sneakers on the windowsill, unlaced them to the bottom so they would air out. I took my sweat socks and T-shirt and underpants, picked up my mother's coffee mug. The mug was on top of the old drawing I'd done of the apartment building across the way—I'd take the drawing out now and then to look at it, to make myself wonder how long it would be before I'd either give up the dream of someday being an artist or do something in a sustained way that might make the dream possible—and the mug had stained the drawing, had left a dark circle in the lower right-hand corner.

I sucked an enormous amount of air into my lungs, then left my room. My father rushed by me, a glass of water in one hand and a bottle of aspirins in the other. The pink ice bag, with its round silver cap, hung from his mouth. Through clenched teeth he explained that he didn't have three hands.

“Davey, is that you? Are you home? Are you all right?”

My mother came into the kitchen. She rested her head on my back for a few seconds. I put the coffee mug into the kitchen sink, but I didn't turn around. If I turned and looked at her she might ask if I thought she looked older. She might whisper to me about her secret bank account—she kept the passbook in Mr. Lipsky's freezer—and how she thought that in five years, by saving from what she got every Friday from my father, she would have enough money for her to take me with her to California.

“I had a little headache, so I went to sleep,” she said. “You must be hungry. You never eat before your games, so let Momma make you something, all right? Would you like a nice grilled cheese sandwich?”

“I wish you wouldn't go into my room while I'm gone.”

“But I like to sit there, Davey. What else do I have, with both my men working for my brother? Listen. You don't think I go in there to spy on you, do you?”

“You ruined one of my drawings. You left your coffee mug standing on it and it left a ring.”

“But you don't draw anymore,” she said.

“It's a shame,” my father said, coming into the kitchen. “A real waste.”

“I mean, I could understand you being upset if you still showed that you cared about drawing.” She sighed. “Your father's right about that—God gave you such a gift and you never use it anymore. I'm really sorry, darling, but this is what happened: the phone rang and it was Lillian asking me to come over and watch TV with her—the hearings, with Mr. Rothenberg getting ready to go on—and by the time I was off the phone I forgot all about my coffee. That woman turns my head sometimes! But you bring me the drawing, sweetheart, and I'll see if I can get rid of the ring, all right?”

“He could still draw if he wanted to,” my father said. “A gift like that just don't disappear overnight. If he started again he could pick up where he left off.”

I went into the bathroom. My jaw ached on the right side and I peered into the mirror to see if my gums were bleeding. In my head I saw my mother laughing with Mr. Lipsky, telling him that he was going to make her wet her pants from all his jokes. When I was a boy she would leave me alone in his shop sometimes while he took her into the freezer to show her special cuts of beef. In the summer, if he saw me on the street he would ask if I wanted to sit in his freezer to cool off. I should watch out that no sides of beef fell on me, he said. I should always sit with my hands on my lap. That way, he laughed, I wouldn't get cold-cocked.

My mother called and said my snack was ready. I put on a clean sweatshirt, walked into the kitchen, looked at the bowl and spoon.

“I asked for a grilled cheese sandwich.”

“No darling,” my mother corrected. “I asked you if you'd like a grilled cheese sandwich, only I needed to use up some nice cold borscht first. You don't mind, do you?”

I heard knocking, went to the front door, opened it. Tony and Regina stood there, grinning.

“Hey—where was the fire?” Tony asked.

“How'd you get into my building without ringing from downstairs?”

“I got my ways,” Tony said. “But how come the big rush home?”

“Would you like to do something with us?” Regina asked. “That's what we came by to say. When we didn't find you in Garfield's, Tony thought you might like to go out and celebrate with us.”

“Yeah. We were thinking of taking the train down to Coney Island—hit the boardwalk and Nathan's and some of the games. Fun by the ocean with Davey Voloshin, right?”

“I could call one of my friends if you want a date,” Regina said.

“Hey,” Tony whispered. “I think Roberta Pegorara got the hots for you. Only—”

“Oh Tony, just be quiet will you?” Regina looked past me. “Hello, Mrs. Voloshin,” she said.

“Listen, Davey, if you really want a grilled cheese sandwich, I'll make you a grilled cheese sandwich. What I think is, you're overtired.”

“Now you hold on a minute, Evie,” my father said. “Here you are fighting a migraine and you get out of bed—” He stopped, cocked his head to the side. “What's
he
doing here?”

“I'm going out.” I took my jacket from the foyer closet.

“It's the Cremona kid,” my father said.

“You think I'm blind too?” My mother laughed, caressed my father's chin with the back of her hand. “Listen, Sol. Do you remember those straw-tipped Melachrinos I used to smoke before the war?”

“If Abe asks, you weren't here—is that clear?” my father said to Tony.

“Take it easy, Sol. It just happens all over again sometimes, see? Like with Momma and Abe, the way they used to argue. All over again, Sol, is the way the world works. Can you see the temper he still got, that he's saving up inside him? It's why he acts so cold to us.”

“It was only an idea,” Regina said, backing away. “We were just passing by—”

“Listen, Mrs. Voloshin,” Tony said. “Between me and your son ain't like it is between the others. You don't gotta believe me, but I want you to know, from my heart, that it's true. It's just that Davey did so good tonight me and Regina figured he was entitled to somebody giving him a celebration. I mean, you know your son better than anyone, but don't you think he needs to get out more and have a good time so he can get rid of all the energy he keeps bottled up? Ain't he entitled too?”

“Ah Tony,” my mother said, and to my surprise she actually reached over and touched his forehead, brushed his hair to the side. “You really understand my little Davey, don't you? Sure. You take him down to the beach. You fix him up with one of your friends.” Her head dipped to one side. She seemed happy. “Remember when we were on the boardwalk in Sea Gate, Sol, the summer after our honeymoon and that handsome man with the little stringy dog stopped me and said I looked just like Claudette Colbert?”

“Davey looks a lot like you,” Regina said.

I told my parents not to wait up for me and I left.

Roberta was standing in the entranceway downstairs, outside the front door, and when I saw her and Tony put a hand over his mouth and said what a coincidence it was that she just happened to be there, we all laughed. Then we walked along Church Avenue to the BMT, to get the Brighton line, and headed for Coney Island, with Tony talking a lot about the play-offs and about what a great team the two of us made and teasing me and Roberta when we held hands. It stopped raining by the time we got to the end of the subway line. We walked around, playing games and riding the Go-Karts and eating hot dogs and french fries, and walking on the boardwalk.

We got back to our section of Brooklyn past midnight, took the girls home, and then Tony put his arm around me and teased me about the way Roberta and I had been necking on the bench next to him and Regina. When we got to my block he began talking more seriously, though, about how much he liked Regina and how he was scared because her parents didn't like the idea of her going with him on account of his uncle and his father and his brothers.

He talked more quickly then—almost pleading with me—about how much he wanted to have a family of his own someday, and about how he was scared because of the family he came from, that he never would. He said that he and Regina talked about running away together when they got to the right age, but he was worried that she might not wait for him that long, that the pressure from her parents was too great. We sat down on the steps in front of my building—the air had warmed up and the sidewalk smelled good, the way it always did after a rain—and I found myself telling Tony about how I sometimes dreamt of having a family of my own too. I didn't tell him about the girl on the beach, but we talked about how many kids we each wanted to have and if we'd feel differently about having boys or girls and about where it would be better to bring your kids up—in the city or the country—and about what the best way to treat a wife would be: how we'd want to be in charge of a family the way our fathers weren't—wasn't this the reason our mothers were always so unhappy and trying to make us do things for them that our fathers didn't?—but about how we would also know how to be very gentle and thoughtful, so that our wives would never doubt our love.

By the time Tony got up to leave, it was past two in the morning. We laughed about how the time had flown by, and Tony confided in me that Regina wasn't like the other girls he'd gone with—she wasn't one of those Hail-Mary-and-let's-neck types—and that what had surprised him most of all was that when he was with her he didn't feel the need to talk a lot or to show off. That showed, he said as he walked off, what the love of a good woman could do, even for a guy like him.

My father died two weeks after that, on Tuesday afternoon, March 13, 1951, while taking my mother home from a doctor's appointment. Our team was working out in the gym, getting ready for our play-off game against Jefferson for the Brooklyn-Queens championship, the first game we would play in Madison Square Garden, when our coach, Mr. Goldstein, returned from taking a phone call in his office, stopped the practice, asked me to come with him.

The gym was quiet, and I felt myself tense because I knew the guys were figuring the same thing I was: that Mr. Goldstein was going to speak to me again about my uncle and the basketball fixes, that he was going to ask me again if I didn't want to just sit out the rest of the season, until the D.A.'s office and the F.B.I. finished their investigation.

But when, in his office, he put his hand on my shoulder and told me that he had bad news for me, that my father had had a heart attack, that they'd rushed him from the subway to Kings County Hospital but that he had died before they got him there, all the rage I was feeling washed out of me. I said nothing. I did what he told me to do: I went to the locker room, I got out of my uniform, I showered and I dressed and I packed up my books and gym bag.

Mr. Goldstein walked with me from the school, along Bedford Avenue. He talked about how he had felt when his father died, three years before. He talked on and on, telling me the story of his father's life. His father had been born in a small village in Russia, had come to America in 1888 and had worked fifteen hours a day in the dark, candling eggs, in order to save up enough money to bring his wife and his younger sisters and brothers here. Mr. Goldstein talked about how happy his father was on his eighty-third birthday, his children and grandchildren and brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces around him, and of how his father called it a miracle, that he had lived to see such a day. A second Bar Mitzvah. Seventy plus thirteen. In the synagogue Mr. Goldstein's father was called to the Torah to recite the same prayers he had recited in Russia seventy years before. Everything after seventy was a gift, Mr. Goldstein said. That was what his father believed.

I tried not to hear his words. I tried instead to fix my mind upon some picture of my father that might make me feel close to him, that might cause tears to come into my eyes. Mr. Goldstein asked me if I wanted him to walk home with me. I told him I would walk home alone.

“Look Davey,” he said. “Jefferson's the class team in the city this year. Even with you in there, and you're as good a player as there is, it would take a miracle for us to win. What I'm trying to say is that you should go and be with your mother and take care of her at a time like this. Nobody will hold it against you that you couldn't be there for the play-off. These things happen.”

He probably believed that he was being straight with me, I realized. I could play or not play. The choice was mine. That was what he'd been saying all along. There were others—league officials, alumni, school administrators—who'd been urging him to suspend me, to ask me to sit out the season, but since nobody could prove I'd done wrong, he refused to listen to them. Sure, I thought. And won't it be convenient for him that my father died two days before the game in the Garden?

I said nothing. I crossed Church Avenue, and as words began to fill up inside my head again—the words I wanted to hold there, ready to fire at Goldstein and all the others who hoped my father's death would do their dirty work for them—I realized that I was feeling less weary, less drained. Anger did that for me. It was as if I could look down inside my chest and see flames there, bright and steady, warming me, giving me energy, keeping me alive. I'd show the bastards. I'd show them all.

In the Holy Cross schoolyard, children were lined up in double rows, holding hands, and the nuns, their black capes and gowns swirling close to the ground, pulled them here and there. Know who your real enemies are, Abe had taught me, because your true friends will take care of themselves. But Abe's words were flat and unconvincing. I wanted to hear my father's voice, to see his face. Was he really gone? I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them and gazed ahead until I could see him walking toward me.