Before My Life Began (29 page)

“Momma would sit in the kitchen by the stove, not doing anything at all except getting the tea and stuff ready for him and chewing at her fingernails until she heard him clap for her. Then she'd light up.” He laughed. “I'd forgotten,” he said, turning toward me. “The way she'd hold her nails up to the lamp to see through them. She didn't really chew at them, just kind of nibbled at the air around them, clicking her teeth lightly while she did. Evie and I teased her about this way she had of biting her nails and not biting them. But she doted on him and did whatever he wanted, mostly. Except for his customers she rarely got dressed up fancy. He bought all her clothes for her—he'd bring them home in big boxes and take them out of the tissue paper very carefully and she would make a big fuss over how good he was to her. She only wore the clothes when she modeled for customers, though. It was crazy. You're like a diamond in the mud, he would say to her, and they'd both laugh. He had one extraordinary Russian Crown sable—it was the most expensive coat there was, a deep blue-black like you've never seen—that he would have her model only once in a while and that he never sold. It was hers, and he would promise each customer that if he ever found another like it, that customer would have first chance to purchase. Momma only wore the coat in the house.

“We weren't at all poor, see—he did well enough to move us out of the neighborhood into a snazzy place uptown if he'd wanted to, but he knew it was better for his business to stay where we were. He was shrewd, all right. He knew what kind of image gave the rich people their kicks. The thing that seemed crazy to me, though, was that he himself used to dress like the rich men who bought from him—in silk shirts and derbies and fancy underwear and gaiters and this incredible black broadcloth coat he had, fur-lined with nutria. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, see, all the fur coats had the fur on the inside, and even after they discovered a way to remove the coarse guard hairs so the furs would look beautiful on the outside, the men's coats kept the fur on the inside. Close to the vest, right? ‘My own Beau Brummell,' Momma used to call him, because he was the one, not Momma, who spent hours getting dressed, fixing himself in front of mirrors with tweezers and creams and lotions and pomades and colognes and all kinds of crap. And she'd smile and help him. Jesus, it made me sick, Davey, the way he carried on, the way he treated her—the way she worshipped him and did everything for him, and then he went and…” His voice trailed off, his knuckles tightened on the steering wheel. “All I'd dream about sometimes would be the day I'd be big enough to take him, okay? To bash his perfumed head against the stove, to knock his shiny teeth through the back of his throat, to break his manicured fingers one at a time, to—” He laughed suddenly, sharply. “But he wasn't the one, was he?”

“The one?”

“The one I got my chance on.” Abe licked his lips. “Okay. You asked me, right? So I'm telling you. He wasn't the one I had to do my first job on. Sure.” He shrugged slightly, seemed to relax. “Anyway, it all seemed very real back then—how small the rooms were and how much I hated him and how beautiful Momma was. She was a tiny woman. Even before she got sick at the end and went down to under sixty pounds, she was tiny—she never weighed more than ninety, ninety-five pounds. About Little Benny's size, if you think about it, only she had these giant brown eyes with long dark lashes, and a sweet set of lips—what we called a bow mouth in those days—and when she'd wrap herself up in one of those elegant minks or sables or silver foxes, or, best of all, in one of the beautiful black capes or long evening coats, she'd take your breath away. Like glowing coals, my father would say to his clients when they remarked on Momma's eyes. Like glowing coals.

“If Evie and I were around after school or on weekends, we'd wait with Momma in the kitchen, and then when Poppa came in and told her which coat to put on we'd take off down the cellar, out the back door, into the alley and back around to the front so we could be there at the window when Momma made her entrance. She was terrific, Davey. When she'd come out of the back, pushing the curtain aside like some timid schoolgirl wearing store-bought clothes for the first time, and turn and pose and look back over her shoulder shyly and smile for the clients, it was incredible. Magic. And when she'd glance over at Poppa and get a wink from him, to show her she was doing fine, her face would glow. I never saw anything like it. I—”

He looked at me, as if puzzled.

“Tell me Davey—is there anything else in the world like the smile of a beautiful woman? Is there anything else in the world like a smile that says just to you that you're the most important guy in the whole world, that you're the only thing that matters, that all the love and tenderness behind that smile is for you, that—”

I said nothing because I didn't really think he wanted an answer. I tried to see Gail's face, smiling at me, but instead I saw my mother, sitting on my bed while I slept, staring down at me. Do
you know what my trouble is, Davey? My trouble is that I love you too much. It's no good to love somebody too much….

“She smiled like that for Poppa, and when he wanted her to she did it for his customers, and afterwards when me and Evie would go back around and in again through the cellar and she'd come into the kitchen and ask us, ‘How was I?' and we'd tell her that she was wonderful, she'd hug us and kiss us and smile at us in the same way, and give us each a piece of her special chocolate, the ones with sweet, dark cherries inside that she kept hidden and would eat whenever she knew she'd helped Poppa sell a coat. She'd let us sit on her lap, and when she held me—this was when I was really little—I tried to touch her hair and curl it around my fingers and tug on it so that she'd make believe she wanted to bite my fingers. Her hair was dark and curly, like yours and mine—like the astrakhans, only softer. She liked to tell me about the softest and most fragile of the lamb pelts—the ones from a newborn or one-day old Caracul lamb or sometimes from those born prematurely, that came in a watered silk pattern—what we called
moiré
then—and it was nice to sit on her lap and let my hand go back and forth from the fur of a coat to the softness of her hair and then back again.

“She didn't always smile right away, of course. Sometimes she'd take on this cold, sophisticated I-don't-give-a-damn look—she and Poppa had a set of signals for how she performed—and once in a while she'd go through a whole showing without smiling at all. Evie and I tried to figure out their signals and what he made her save the special smiles for, but who knows? She looked like some of those gorgeous movie stars from the silent films, like Janet Gaynor if you could have seen her then, only darker and more fragile, I guess. She wanted to be an actress too, did you know that? Did Evie ever tell you that?”

“No. But my father used to say that she should have been one—
my
mother, I mean. Like this morning, with the tape over her mouth—”

“Sure. Because if she had—” He stopped. “Anyway, that was what she wanted. To be an actress up on the stage, with a bouquet of flowers in her arms and hundreds of people clapping for her, and sometimes if she got too upset about how my father wouldn't let her—he'd pull the shades on the store window and give her a coat and gesture to the showroom as if he was Jacob Astor himself, and say, ‘Here, my darling—here is the only theater you will ever need! Here is where your star will shine!' But even in the old country, see—in Odessa, where they came from—she wanted to be an actress. She'd recite lots of poems and parts to us in Russian. Who knows why? Who knows where these things get started, Davey? Sometimes I used to think that if I could have known her when
she
was a girl, the way I knew Evie—the way I knew you—if I could have spent a day or two with her when she was growing up—if I could have been there invisibly—that I could have understood everything. Do you ever think that way? That all you need is a few minutes or hours in somebody's home—to see how things were when they were growing up—and you'd understand them forever after?”

He didn't wait for my answer. “I still think that way sometimes,” he said. “Whenever I need to figure out some guy I'm dealing with, what I do is imagine the way he was when he was five years old, say, or eight or nine. I imagine that—I send the guy back in time to what he was like hanging around some small apartment, and what his face looked like when he watched his mother and father speaking to him, what he felt, and when I do that it helps me to know how to act. I saw it all overseas too—saw it proved—when guys were dying, when they came back in on stretchers, when the shit was running down their legs. Because the two words that came out were always the same: ‘God' or ‘Momma.' Momma most of all. Please Momma, save me. Please Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Please.” He glanced at me. “It's a good thing to remember, Davey—no matter who somebody is, no matter how rich and powerful, that once upon a time they were just little boys who weighed maybe forty or fifty pounds and who wanted their mothers to smile at them and to hold them.” He shrugged. “Though I have to admit that in my business I've come across a few characters, through the years, who might be different.”

He laughed, as if he'd told himself a joke. “Oh yeah, Davey, I have come across a few who might not be like the rest of us. Pretty scary. To look in a guy's eyes and feel he could just as easily never have had a mother or father. Turkish Sammy is that way. It makes him useful to me for the work he might be called on to perform one day soon.” Abe clicked his teeth together, lightly. Was Abe taking me to Mr. Rothenberg because they were expecting trouble from Fasalino? The word around the neighborhood was that the Italians had not had anything to do with the basketball fixes—Italians don't love sports the way you crazy Jews do, Tony said to me—but that men like Abe and Mr. Rothenberg and Harry Gross were trying to finger them for it with the D.A. Why? “Anyway,” Abe went on, “Momma dreamt of being an actress—that's the story I started out to tell you—but in those days for a Jewish girl to be an actress was like her wanting to be a prostitute. I never got the whole story straight, but the best I could figure was that in Odessa he made some kind of deal with her father to marry her so that she wouldn't run away and join a traveling show. Crazy, huh? To try to imagine all that. Her father managed forests for a rich Gentile, and she was his youngest daughter, his favorite—they had eleven altogether, and three more who died young—and from the time she was born, when her old man was in his sixties, everyone doted on her for her beauty. Her father made out okay for himself, managing the land, and he had a good business going on the side, selling liquor to the peasants who lived there. And sometimes he'd go around banging on trees with a hammer.

“Jesus! I hadn't remembered that for a long time! That was the story she'd tell us about going around with him when she was a girl, and do you know why he banged on trees? Because the violin-makers would come to the forests to pick out trees for their instruments, and he had the knack of knowing which ones would be best just from banging on them with hammers and putting his ear to the bark and listening to them vibrate. Sure. She told me and Evie lots of stories about her father, about all the things he could do—how he played the fiddle and sang like an opera star and rode a horse like a Cossack and danced like a prince and how all the women followed him around and left letters for him in tree trunks. Her own mother died when she was eight and he never married again, and she met Poppa when she was fourteen years old and married him two months later. So what chance did she ever have? Can you tell me that?

“All he really was, see, was a small-time gangster who supplied her father with some of the liquor he needed and who also went into the forests to get furs from the peasants. Which wasn't legal either. You ask your mother for details—she's closer to him than I ever used to be. She made her choice too, right? The two of them probably liked each other and went to the same whore houses together, for all I know. Sure. They were the kind of men I always classify as the ones who are born wanting to be big shots. That's the way it is, if you ask me—that some men are born wanting more than anything to grow up so that everybody else in the world thinks they're important. It's what drives them, right? So Momma tried to run off one last time, and when they dragged her back, the story is that she was shouting out words in the street—from
Uncle Vanya
, that she'd been secretly memorizing—and she didn't make it out of Odessa and Poppa offered to marry her to keep her from such a life and her father agreed and it happened. Okay?

“And then they came to America. He took a lot of money off the old man from what I can figure. The old man adored her—who wouldn't?—and he wanted most of all to protect her from harm. He figured Poppa was the guy for the job and in some ways he wasn't all wrong. Poppa spent his life protecting her from harm, and from everything else too, pretty much. There were a lot of gangsters in Odessa then, and Poppa came to the old man one day after they were married and said he was in bad trouble with a guy who was bigger than either of them, that they'd caught him in some kind of double-cross having to do with the liquor—the old man could pay them off and they wouldn't touch
him
, but that if Poppa didn't leave they would kill him and my mother. The old man believed him, and who knows, maybe he was even telling the truth. All I know is they got on a ship and came to America, and Poppa picked up right where he left off.

“Most of the coats he sold, see, were stolen goods. At night I'd watch him at work—he didn't seem to mind—removing labels from coats and putting his own labels in, or dyeing the skins, or bleaching them, or feathering in new colors with a turkey feather, or pointing the pelts by adding hairs, or changing the styles completely so the owners would never recognize them—making them longer or shorter, or putting more padding in the shoulders, or taking out padding, or changing the collars or the sleeves or the linings. On the mink and the sable and the marten and lynx and most of the stuff he dealt in, the pelts were so tiny, and you needed so many of them to make a coat, and the insides were hidden with silk and taffeta and satin, that nobody knew how to trace the stuff once he'd worked it over. He'd take mink coats and slash the pelts into narrow diagonal strips and resew them into longer shapes, into what they called let-out mink in those days. And sometimes, if he got worried, he'd just ship the stuff out of town—he took less money that way, but it was safer. An artist, Momma called him, and she'd sit next to him for hours, him passing her furs, her stitching or brushing or feathering, or putting the furs on horsehide cushions and tapping them with little canes to soften them up, and her telling us that no matter how long she lived or how many times he showed her what he did, she would never have his gift.