Before My Life Began (22 page)

Manny nodded. “You're Sol's boy,” he said.

“Yes.”

“He's Sol's boy,” Harry said, and he sucked in on his lower lip, as if to keep from crying. Eyes closed, he rocked back and forth, heel to toe. Was he praying? Sometimes, I knew, when my father had taken his satchel and stayed away for a few nights, he stayed with them and they tried to talk him into divorcing my mother.

Manny tugged at my jacket, asked me how old I was.

“Sixteen. Sixteen-and-a-half, actually. I'll be seventeen next fall.”

“Were you Bar Mitzvah?”

“No.”

Harry pushed his book into my face, held it open.

“Can you read Hebrew?”

“No.”

“So tell me how do you expect to say Kaddish for your father? Can you answer me that, sonny boy?”

“I don't know.”

“Are you a Jew or are you a Jew?” Manny asked.

“He's a bright boy,” Harry stated. “Sol always said so. We can teach him the words, from memory. We can write them out with English spelling.”

“Will you say it for him? He wanted you to say Kaddish for him. Believe me when I tell you this. To us he always called you his little
Kaddishel
. My little
Kaddishel
Davey, he called you. That means you were the one who would live after him and remember him by saying Kaddish. You say it every day for one year. We'll come get you every morning before school and take you with us. It's no trouble. We can teach you to put on
tephillin.”

“Where we pray nobody will make fun of you for not knowing.”

“Your father said Kaddish for his father, yes? And his father said it for his father,
olev hashalom
, for our grandfather. You should say Kaddish for your father.”

They moved away from me, eyes downcast.

“Hello Davey.”

Abe's eyes were as dry as mine. Did he feel anything? He smiled slowly, almost as if he were happy. He opened his arms to me. We embraced.

“Are you all right?”

“I suppose.”

We stepped back from one another. He looked well tanned, rested. He wore a soft gray pinstriped suit, a white shirt, a beautiful blue silk paisley tie. Manny and Harry whispered to one another in the corner, next to my room, and I imagined them in the kitchen, washing down my father's body with soapy hands, snipping hairs inside his nose.

“We'll do whatever you want, whatever you choose,” Abe said. “Okay? But not now. When everyone's gone—later—you and your mother talk things over and then you decide.”

I pressed my eyes closed, but when I opened them everyone was still there, Abe was still smiling at me. I wondered if it occurred to him to think of his own father at a time like this, and if my mother would call him or visit him at the home, to give him the news, to have him come to the funeral. And why, I wondered, if I was taller than everyone else in the room, did I feel so small?

My mother had my hand in hers and was taking me around the room, introducing me to cousins and aunts. Neighbors kissed me. Avie and Benny sat on the couch together, under the window, Avie's mother between them. I couldn't recall the last time I'd seen her outside their apartment. Avie introduced me to his mother. She said she knew who I was, that she was honored to meet me. She set her wool and knitting needles in her lap.

“You know what I can't get over?” she said. She pointed to Abe's men. “That once upon a time they were little boys and we changed their diapers, and now they're all grown up and they kill people.”

Avie told her to be quiet, but she laughed at him. My mother said we had private business to talk over and took me with her to the bedroom. She told me to stand by the door, to guard it. She got down on her hands and knees, and from under the bed she took out my father's gray metal box, the one he'd kept his important papers in. She cursed my father for not having given her the combination to the lock. She took a hammer and screwdriver from under her pillow, then got on her knees again and started beating on the lock with the hammer. She'd warned my father, hadn't she? She'd told him something like this might happen someday.

If you lived and then died, there should be a difference in the world, I thought. There should be a reason for your life. I wondered if Abe thought the same way, if he ever compared his life now, in Brooklyn, to his life during the war, and if, like me, he felt somehow ashamed of the difference. My mother took one of my father's slippers from under the bed, put it on top of the lock to muffle the sound, and smashed down. The lock stayed closed. She talked about my father's life insurance policies, how she'd made him take out a special policy from the Jewish Guild for the Blind that would have paid a hundred dollars a month for the rest of their lives had he gone blind before he died. She tried to pry the lid of the box open with the screwdriver. I told her to stop, that what she was doing was crazy.

“Crazy? Listen. At a time like this you gotta be thinking overtime or people will steal you blind. The police brought me home but I was having fits because I didn't know if they were police who were Abe's friends or police who were Abe's enemies, but they didn't try any funny stuff, so the minute they were gone, before I even called you or Abe, I ran to the bank and took all our money out of the accounts and got my diamonds and jewels out of the safe-deposit box. You call that crazy? And if I left it here for the courts to seal over for a few years?”

She moved to the wardrobe closet, reached in and took out a shoe box. She showed me the cash and jewelry.

“What do you think, that I'm doing this for myself? Is that what you think?”

“No.”

“Good.” She held the handle of the screwdriver with her left hand, the blade against the lock, then banged down on the screwdriver's handle with the hammer. “Do I even know what kind of report I'm gonna get from the doctor? Sure. I'm the sick one but your father goes and dies. The operation was a success but we lost the patient. Oh Sol. Sol. That was just like you, wasn't it—to have your heart attack
after
we left the doctor's office.”

“I think I can open the lock,” I said. “I think I know the combination.”

She dropped the tools.

“So why didn't you say so before?”

Sweat dripped along her forehead and cheeks. She unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse, blew downwards to cool herself. She put the box on the bed, and when I went to it she backed up and stood by the door.

“Just hurry, yeah? We gotta see what else he left in there, in case he had another policy for me—for a surprise—only if you think I dragged you in here so I could find out how rich I'm gonna be, you're wrong. It's for you, Davey. For you. You were the real light of his life. That's what this is all about.”

I turned the lock, listened to the tumblers click. I'd watched my father open and close the lock a thousand times.

“Oh Davey, Davey,” she said. “Things were just so awful between us sometimes. Do you forgive me? Do you think you'll ever be able to forgive me for what we did to you, all those years, watching the way we were with each other, night and day and day and night?”

“Yes.”

“I mean really. You shouldn't answer so quickly. I want you to think about it, that the last thing we wanted was to make you unhappy. But it was terrible between us sometimes. Didn't I know it? Abe said that—”

She backed away. The lock opened. I stood. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

“What did Abe say?” I asked.

“Not now.” She pointed to the box. “There's a surprise for you in there and I want to make sure you get it before the courts take charge. The surprise is that your father once said that when he died there would be something special in here for you that he put away.”

She took out account books, business envelopes, booklets of check stubs. She held up a large manila envelope, read the writing on the outside. Her right hand moved to her chest. On the outside of the envelope, I recognized my father's handwriting:

He had not signed his name.

My mother's hand rested on my wrist with such gentle pressure that it was as if she didn't even know she was touching me. “Your father was a sweet man. Before we were married he used to write poems to me, did you know that? He had beautiful penmanship, like on the envelope here. He won prizes in grade school when he was a boy. Who could believe?”

She touched the envelope as if she were touching him. She seemed puzzled.

“It's so thin,” she said.

“Can I open it?”

I pressed the metal tabs together, straightening them. I slipped my index finger under the flap, at the corner, and slid it along slowly, so that the flap gave way where it was glued, where he had licked it closed. We said nothing. I reached inside and felt a single sheet of glossy paper. I slid it out. It was a reproduction of President Roosevelt's portrait, the unfinished portrait that he was sitting for in Warm Springs, Georgia, when he had a brain hemorrhage. The picture seemed pale, the green, brown and pink watercolor washes, under the ink sketch, faded. My mother grabbed the envelope and looked inside.

“Is that
all?”
she asked. “This is the big deal?”

Later, when everybody had gone, she came into my room and sat on my bed. I opened my eyes so she would know I was awake. She touched my forehead, thanked me for being there, for having been polite to all the visitors. She said she didn't know what she would have done had I not been there, had she not had me to lean on, to live for. We agreed that the easiest thing would be to let my father's brothers bury my father in their cemetery the next day. A Jew was supposed to be buried within twenty-four hours of his death and she figured that was a good thing. Why prolong the suffering for the living? There would be enough hard times to come. Whatever his brothers wanted was fine with her. Sol was dead. Now we were two. What else mattered?

She didn't say anything else for a long time. She had brushed her hair so that in the dim half-light the gray wisps looked like silver threads. I felt peaceful. I was drifting off to sleep—seeing myself on the beach, telling the girl with the long hair about my father's death—when I felt my mother's lips on my forehead.

“You get a good night's sleep. Tomorrow won't be easy. Tomorrow we say goodbye to him, yeah?”

“I suppose.”

“I love you, Davey.”

“Mother?”

“Yes?”

“Why wouldn't you let me kiss you when I first came home?”

“Sure,” she said, but I could tell she wasn't listening to me. “You're a good boy, Davey. I always said so. So listen—I wanted you to know something else I been thinking about. I wanted you to know that no matter what impression he gave, that your father was always able to satisfy me.”

“What?”

“Shh. You rest now. You don't gotta say anything, but I wanted you to know. Oh it was crazy sometimes, believe me, life with your father—but he did satisfy me and I wanted you to know.” She kissed me. “You get some sleep now. You're a good boy. Like Lillian said and I have to agree, you got your father's sweetness sometimes, so I never worry about you really, did you know that?” I didn't reply and she kept talking. “Oh I worry the way a mother worries sometimes, and I know you still got a temper that scares me. For example, if you should find a girl you like someday I worry what you might do to her if she ever got you angry. Because this is what I've been thinking—that maybe God will be good to us from now on. Maybe He took your father early so that He'll take you late. Who can tell about things like that?” She laughed. “Abe,” she said. “I love him like a brother, don't I?” She kissed me on the forehead, went to the door. Was there something else she wanted to say?

6

M
R. GOLDSTEIN
was telling us what he'd been telling us all game long: to take our time, to move slowly, to get the ball to me every time we could. We were ahead 57 to 56 and I had 29 of our points and most of our rebounds. There were two minutes left in the game and I didn't sit down during our time-out because I was afraid that if I did I might never get up again. My arms were sore and heavy, my feet felt as if they were being pumped full of warm water—and all I wanted was for the game to be over. I wanted to die, to float weightlessly above the court the way I did in dreams.

The guys patted me on the back and rear end, told me that I was playing like a madman. I felt hammers banging against my skull, from inside. Everything went black. I pressed my eyes shut, opened them, saw my teammates' hands in the circle, and I bent over, put my hands there too. The buzzer sounded. I looked at the stack of hands and I couldn't tell, at first, which fingers belonged to me.

The noise from the stands broke over me like waves. The guys were staring at me, and for an instant I felt that they were trying to understand why it was I was playing so hard, why it meant so much for me to win. Three of them, to my surprise—Tony Cremona, Julie Bender, Jerry Friedland—had even shown up at the funeral. Tony had come with Regina, and I figured he'd caught hell after. The guys started out onto the court, but Mr. Goldstein held onto my wrist. Did he want to apologize to me again? The referee blew the whistle, pointed to me. I pulled away. It was our ball, in back court.

I thought of how angry Manny and Harry were that I wouldn't sit and mourn with them for seven days. I'd let them bury him the way they wanted, hadn't I? I'd let their rabbi slit the collar of my good suit with a razor blade. I'd made a fool of myself at the cemetery, trying to recite the Kaddish with them, unable to pronounce the words correctly. What more did they want?

I heard voices again, calling to me, and I did what I should not have done. I looked up, past Mr. Goldstein—past our bench, past the scorer's table, past rows of wooden benches, up to the first tier of box seats. I glared, believing for an instant that if I stared at them hard enough they would leave me be. But they only smiled and waved. Louie Newman cupped his hands around his mouth and called to me, so everybody could hear: “Hey Davey baby—you go sink a hoop for me and all the boys back on Flatbush Avenue!” Avie Gornik and Big Jap Willer laughed like idiots, swiveled their heads from side to side to show all the dead-beats that they knew me.