Before My Life Began (28 page)

“But you don't love Lillian, do you?”

“No.”

“Did you ever love her. I mean the way—”

“—the way your father loved your mother, for example? I doubt it. It's too far back to remember. Lillian is good for me, though. She protects me. By sticking with her and getting to know her well, life is safer. She enabled me to develop a distaste for other women. She cured me.”

“But that's terrible.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. It just seems a waste—somebody like you not to have somebody to love, to love you back your whole life.”

“Love isn't everything. I had enough to last me a few more years.” He reached over, touched my hair. “You're a sweet kid, Davey. A real romantic. Your mother would be happy if she could hear you talking like this.” He nodded. “But I'm glad you have a girlfriend. It's good to have somebody at your age, somebody you can stick it into when you get the urge.”

“It's not like that.”

“It never is at first.”

We were quiet. Was he being this way on purpose, trying to protect me by making me hate him?

“You said that just to hurt me, didn't you?” I moved closer to him. He turned his Army ring so that sunlight bounced off the red stone. “Why is it you have to get so cold and mean sometimes? My mother says it's not your fault, that you weren't always this way, that you had no choice.”

“Not true,” he said quickly. “We always have choices.” He licked his lips, waited, and when he spoke again it was as if he'd said the same words to himself, over and over, a thousand times: “The rich have more choices than the poor, and the strong have more choices than the weak, and the powerful have more choices than those without power. But we all have choices. Always.”

“That's not true,” I said. “I didn't choose to have you for an uncle.”

To my surprise Abe showed no anger. Instead he smiled, reached across, ruffled my hair. We turned off the highway onto a two-lane road.

“You're a smart boy, Davey. Sure. They'll try to visit the sins of the uncles on the nephews, right? For a while—a year maybe—the scouts won't come sniffing at your door, but don't worry about it. One way or the other, you'll have your chance.”

“How?”

“When things blow over. When the investigations end without them pinning anything on me or Mr. Rothenberg. We're clean, Davey. We have better things to do with our time than hang around locker rooms.”

Could I believe him? Did I
want
to believe him? He tipped his hat back, touched his left jacket pocket with his right hand, as if to feel for a gun. But there was no gun there, I knew. He seemed very happy, and I wondered for an instant if this wasn't so because he was already thinking about the strings he could pull in order to get me into college—because he was already imagining talking with Mr. Rothenberg about me and what deals they could make to fix things.

“We'll be at Mr. Rothenberg's in about twenty-five minutes. You'll like his house.”

“Do you mind my asking questions?”

“You have more?”

“Lots.”

“Such as—?”

“What things were like when you and my mother were kids. What you feel about the colleges not talking to me because of you—because of the scandals. Why you always turn your ring around on your finger when you get upset. Why you won't speak to your father. Why he hates you the way you hate him. What Mr. Rothenberg did for you and Mom. What he stopped people from doing to your mother…”

In my head, Gail was smiling at me, encouraging me to go on, telling me that life was too short
not
to say the things we wanted to the people we cared about. I gazed out the window. In front of a small run-down gas station a young boy, sitting in a wheelbarrow, waved to me.

“I want to know things,” I said. “Sometimes I want to know everything, Uncle Abe! I want to know why things happened, why you're the way you are, how you got to have the life you have. Sometimes I think you don't want anyone to know what you feel, though. That you want to shut everybody out.”

“Sometimes I do.”

“But it matters to me—what you feel. When you were overseas I used to wonder a lot about what you were thinking and feeling. Were you scared?”

“Sometimes.”

“Are you ever afraid now—since the war ended, I mean?”

“Not much, though I don't like pain. I've always been frightened of physical pain if you want the truth, and yet when it's come it hasn't bothered me much. Strange. It's always been as if I could simply close a valve to the part of my brain the pain was in. Then I'd be there, as alert as I could be, and it would be as if what was happening was happening to somebody else. Does that make any sense?”

“My mother says that your father used to beat you a lot. Did he?”

“Probably.”

“Probably?”

“It wasn't the pain that hurt, Davey. It was being humiliated. Degraded. All I ask for, see, is a little notice, a mild amount of respect. I thought about that a lot when I was overseas and I decided that my one wish, really, was simply to know ahead of time. I didn't want to die in my sleep or in a coma or on my knees, and I didn't want to die with a bullet in the back of my head either.”

“Did you ever
want
to die?”

“No.”

“I'm glad. Do you ever want to now?”

“There's not much that gives pleasure in life, Davey. Still, I figure I'll stick around. To see how you turn out, right?” He touched my shoulder. “The truth is, I was pretty happy when I was over there and could kill a few Krauts. I felt good when I was able to save some of my boys. I was sorry the war didn't last longer. I still write to some of them.”

“To the guys in your platoon?”

“No. Why would I do a thing like that? I write to the women who lost sons or husbands or brothers.”

“But why? Why does that mean so much to you, when nothing else—”

“Because I couldn't save them all.”

“But how could you? I mean, why would you think you were supposed to? I don't understand.”

“Sometimes I don't either.”

“Do you think of me that way too sometimes? As if you're responsible for my life, as if you don't know whether or not you'll be able to save me?”

“They were going to throw acid in Momma's face. That's the answer to your question. They were going to throw acid in Momma's face. They were going to teach our father a lesson, but a guy warned me and I went to see Mr. Rothenberg and asked for help and he told me that he would take care of things and he kept his word and it never happened. All right?”

“That's the whole story? That's all I get?”

“You are persistent, aren't you?”

“Sure.” I thought of Gail. “I want to know, Uncle Abe. I want to know everything I don't know.”

To my surprise, Abe was smiling at me as if he was pleased to see this side of me—how much I could talk, how much I cared about his life. I tried to look at him as easily and lovingly as I could, so that he wouldn't change his mind, so that he wouldn't become frightened. I waited. I wished we weren't so close to Mr. Rothenberg's house because I felt that if only we could keep on driving—just the two of us, away from the city, away from our apartment and families and our other lives—he would have felt free to tell me everything.

He touched his jacket pocket again, nervously. When I'd asked him once about why he didn't carry a gun, I remembered, he had answered by saying that there were many stupid people in the world who thought that if they killed him, they could sit in his seat and have his power and live his life. I'm the only one who can lead my life, he said.

“Your mother was a very beautiful woman, wasn't she,” I offered.

“My mother was a very beautiful woman,” he said. “Sure, Davey. Sure she was.” He touched my hair again, as if to reassure himself that I was actually in the car with him. “She was so beautiful that men and women used to come to our house from all over the city—rich men and women—just to see her face. Can you imagine?” He smiled at me in a way that told me he was happy to be answering my question, to be talking about her. “When your mother and I were kids growing up on the Lower East Side, our father had a small fur store on Howard Street where people would come to buy their coats. We lived in back of the store, in two small rooms—plus there was the room our father worked in, where he did all his work—the sewing and cleaning and tipping and dyeing and pointing and repairs—and we had half the cellar downstairs too, which the landlord rented to my father for storage.

“There was a gorgeous silk curtain from China I loved to stare at—blues and reds and silver and gold threads, with birds and flowers and mountain peaks covered with snow—and it hung between our apartment and the storefront. Momma and Poppa slept in the kitchen near the stove, see, and Evie and I slept in the one bedroom, which had no windows, and downstairs Poppa had this enormous kind of icebox—bigger than our whole apartment—where he kept coats stored for customers in the summer. Cold storage. That's what they called it. People would bring him their coats in the spring, or he'd go around and pick them up and he'd keep them there through the summer, then take them out in the fall and get them ready for the winter. He built the room himself out of sheets of tin and wooden slats, with chambers between the inner and outer walls for the slabs of ice and sawdust, and with drains to let the melted water run off. He could make a fur coat from scratch—scraping and soaking and fleshing and tanning and stretching and drumming and dressing and bleaching and the hundred other operations
the skins
had to
go
through before they became
coats
. When I was a kid he'd show me the whole process, his part of it, let me use his knives and emery wheels, let me try to get the thin membrane of flesh away from the pelt without cutting into the fur, let me pluck the top hairs of the beavers and seals so we could get at the soft underfur. Sure. In the summertime Evie and I would go down and stay inside the room, sucking on ice chips—I'd knock them off with a screwdriver—and we'd put the chips in paper cups and pour blackberry syrup on them, and speculate on how much money you had to have to be able to afford the sables and ermines and minks, the astrakhans and sealskins and the different kinds of foxes.

“Evie would model the coats for me the way Momma modeled them for customers—that was what she did, see—and I'd act as if I was some rich guy from Park Avenue, tapping on the floor with a cane, and I'd keep making her take off one coat and put on another, and sometimes she would sit next to me and act like one of the ladies who was buying the coats. A lot of rich German Jews bought their coats from our father, and I hated them most because they acted as if they thought their crap didn't stink. Mostly we'd make fun of them. I'd mimic the way Poppa would whisper to us, as if revealing state secrets. ‘Now children, I want you to remember that these are
very
wealthy people.' And when he'd come to the word ‘very,' he'd always close his eyes, and suck in his cheeks.

“I liked being down below with the furs when it was real hot, so I could cool off, pet the coats, run my hands over the silk linings, run my fingers across the monograms on the inside labels. He worked hard on those because he said it was the mark of ownership that mattered most to his customers. Evie and I would talk about what it would be like to be able to buy whatever you wanted, to have servants, to be able to go wherever you wanted in the world if you suddenly just felt like it. The world exists for money. Sure. Wasn't that what all of us believed then? Me and Evie and Momma and Poppa and everyone in our neighborhood? That the world existed to serve and protect the people with money? When there was trouble on the street, between a guy dressed fancy and a bum, who did the cop grab first?

“Upstairs, whenever the customers would come, Poppa would seat them next to the front window so that the neighbors could see, and he would get them something to drink, tea or wine or sherry or Turkish coffee. He had special engraved silver trays and little demitasse cups and saucers edged in gold, and sometimes if we were dressed right he'd let me and Evie serve them. He taught us to bow and curtsey and how to answer questions politely and how not to look goggle-eyed at their clothes and jewels. He would have long conversations with his customers before he showed them coats, see—making fun of how poor and stupid everyone in the neighborhood was, telling them about the other wealthy people who'd been in and what they were buying. He had these fancy leather-bound books with photographs of models in coats, and he'd open them and, while he showed them the photos, he'd ask about trips they'd taken and about their houses and then—”

Abe stopped and blinked, as if surprised to find that he'd come to this part of his story. His eyes seemed to frost over, to go dead.

“He was just teasing them, though, because what they were there for, see, was for the moment when he'd stand, put his cup or glass down on the tray, and clap his hands sharply so that Momma would come out of the back room for the first time, wearing one of the fur coats. She'd push the curtain aside very tentatively, clutch the silk almost as if she needed it for balance, then let it slide between her fingers slowly so that the creases disappeared, and step forward toward the customers. And the crazy thing was that she loved it all. Why, Davey? Why did she love it so much? Can you tell me that?”

I didn't try to answer his question, and I knew he didn't expect me to. I imagined Abe letting me off in front of the house later and instead of going upstairs I was going to the corner candy store, calling Gail. I imagined us walking together along Bedford Avenue, near Brooklyn College, and I was telling her the story Abe was now telling me. I was feeling her press my hand when I came to the sad parts, and I was hearing her tell me that what we had to remember most of all was that it wasn't just a story, that it was their
lives
, that these things had actually happened, that here was a difference between a person's life and the story of that life.