Before My Life Began (3 page)

I nodded. “Sure.”

“Sure.”

I went into his bedroom with him while he changed. When he lifted his hands up over his head, to pull his undershirt off—he wore the sleeveless kind with straps that hung loosely across his shoulders—I stared at the hair in his armpits and at the way the muscles rippled on his upper arms. Even though he was a small, thin man, I was always amazed at how powerful his arms were from tying packages all day at Gordon's, where he worked on the Lower East Side. Gordon's was a men's clothing store that sold merchandise on the installment plan. Sometimes on school vacation I'd go to work with my father and watch him at the counter next to the cash register and be proud of the way he could snap the twine off with his bare hands, without using a scissor or a knife.

“Should you take your air raid warden's stuff?” I asked.

“What for? The war's over.”

“I don't know,” I said. “But I saw some of the men wearing their old Army hats and parts of their uniforms, so I thought maybe you should.”

We walked downstairs. When we got to the lobby he put his cigarette out in the standing ashtray and lifted my face up toward his, his hand under my chin.

“You like it when I get dressed up in my air raid warden's stuff?”

I nodded. I figured he knew that I sometimes took the stuff out of his closet when my friends and I played war—the helmet and arm band and silver whistle and flashlight and gas mask.

“So listen,” he said, smiling. “Maybe if I don't have to turn the stuff back in, I'll let you have it. Okay? Would you like that?”

“Would I!” I exclaimed, and I couldn't keep from lunging toward him, from hugging him around the waist as tightly as I could. “Oh Poppa!”

“Well, I ain't promising,” he said. “It depends on if they make you pay or not—that gas mask must of cost a few good bucks. But if I don't gotta pay, maybe I can let you have it.”

He patted the top of my head and I let go of him.

“Okay? It's a deal?”

“It's a deal.”

We went outside and started toward the corner. “I'll tell you something else. Listen. Sure I'm happy the war's over, but you know the one thing I'm sorry about?”

I thought of saying something about Uncle Abe coming home, but I didn't.

“What?”

He looked at me in a very serious way, shaking his head up and down. His good eye was moist.

“I'm only sorry F.D.R. didn't live to see this day. He was a wonderful man, President Roosevelt. He…” He stopped. “Come. Momma's waiting.”

At the corner, we found my mother right away. Her lipstick was on straight and she gave my father a big hug and kiss.

“So look who's here finally!”

Before my father could say anything about what I'd said to him to get him there, I tugged on her dress and showed her the bag with the confetti.

“Where'd you get it?”

“I made it,” I said. “I cut it all up myself. It took me a long time.”

“Ain't he something?” she said to my father. “Ain't this little one something?”

“You want some?” I asked.

“And why not?”

She reached in and took a big handful. Then I pushed the bag toward my father and he took a big handful too. Between them they'd taken more than half.

“Hey Sol—” she yelled at my father. “Guess what?”

“What?”

“The war's over!” she yelled, and she threw her confetti into his face.

My father tried to laugh, but when some of the pieces of paper got stuck in his mouth, he gagged. He coughed and spat and my mother turned him around and pounded him on the back with the flat of her hand.

“Raise up your hands over your head—”

My father looked at me, his hands in the air as if he were being robbed, and I saw that his eye was tearing badly. He stopped gagging.

“So what are you waiting for?” he asked me. “Throw already.”

I wanted to get a really good effect, so I tore my bag down from the top on two sides to expose the rest of the confetti, balanced the bag on my hands from underneath and gave as hard a toss as I could, upwards. All the confetti went up in a kind of clump, though, and as the clump fell only a few pieces detached themselves and fluttered. My mother was leaning on my father's shoulder, laughing at him, picking pieces of paper from his face and hair. I looked at the empty paper bag and I felt embarrassed.

People were cheering and pointing towards Rogers Avenue, where I saw a silver-gray DeSoto come along, men on both running boards—five of them—and they had guns in their hands and were shooting them into the air as if they were cowboys riding a stagecoach. Little Benny was in the front seat, wearing a brown felt hat pulled down on one side, shading his eyes. He was grinning from ear to ear, as if he'd just won the war himself. When my father saw who they were, he spit on the ground, three times.

“They should rot in hell,” he said.

“Shh,” my mother said. “C'mon, Sol. Someone will hear.”

I looked at the ground where my father's spit had gone, and it seemed to me that the mounds of paper that had risen almost to my knees by now were ocean waves. I imagined myself standing at Coney Island, knee-deep in the water, holding my father's eyeglasses in my hands while he swam out, arm over arm, to get cooled off, and I saw how frightened I was, that if he went too far he might disappear under the waves and never come back.

A few feet away from me Marvin Ellenbogen, who lived downstairs from us in our building, was going around picking up bunches of confetti and streamers with his hands and stuffing it all into an A & S shopping bag. I stared at him for a while—things seemed quieter somehow—and then I hunted around until I found a bag and I did the same. I pushed over to Marvin and raised my bag up over my shoulder and tossed the whole thing at his face and this time the stuff sprayed out beautifully. For a second I found myself wishing that Tony Cremona could be there to see, and when I thought of him, my heart bumped. Then I threw the bag away and just started scooping up as much paper as I could hold in my hands and arms and heaving the stuff at Marvin while he did the same back to me. I lost sight of my mother and father, but that was just as well, I figured, because I knew my father would probably have had that sour look on his face again by this time. I knew that he was probably beginning to think that when Abe came home from the Army he would have to quit his job at Gordon's and go to work for him again, no matter how much he didn't want to.

2

O
N THE MORNING
that Lillian called to tell us Abe's troopship had arrived and that she was going to have a big welcome home party for him that night at her house, my mother and father were near the end of one of their fights. I'd heard some of it between dreams—it was about money again, and how my father didn't earn enough but still kept forbidding my mother to get a job—and when I went to the bathroom in the morning my father's small blue canvas satchel was at the door. Whenever I saw it waiting there by itself I knew he wouldn't be coming home after work. He did that sometimes, and stayed in a hotel for a few nights or with one of his two brothers. Usually, he'd explain to me afterwards, he left home not to punish my mother for anything she'd done to him but because he felt her life would be happier without him in it.

He was still home when the call came. My mother and I were eating breakfast and listening to “Rambling with Gambling.” Through the window at the end of the kitchen I could see bands of snow about an inch high on the railings and stairs of the fire escape, white on orange, and I narrowed my eyes and stared, to see if the snow was perfectly level or if it had begun to melt in places.

My mother turned the radio down, and as soon as she got the news about Abe—the phone was on the wall between the table and the icebox and she put one hand over the mouthpiece and whispered to me that Abe was home but that we couldn't say hello to him because Lillian said he was asleep—tears started down from her eyes, sliding along the crease lines around her mouth.

She asked a lot of questions about how Abe looked and how he was feeling—it was January 1946, five months since the war ended—and if he'd asked about her. She apologized to Lillian for crying like an idiot, and while she carried on I thought of all the drawings I'd saved up for Abe and of which ones I would take, even though I knew that taking them would mean showing them to him in front of other people.

“Is it really true this time?” I asked when she hung up.

“It's really true.”

She switched the radio off and stuffed the antenna wires that came out of the back—the copper showed through in spots, smooth orange between the thin twisting lines of red and white—into the wooden console. She turned in a circle like a little girl, looking around the room as if she didn't know what to do next, then she leaned over the sink, knocked on the wall, called into the bathroom to my father that Abe was home, that Lillian was making a party, that he should come home early from work. He didn't answer. He was coughing again, the way he did every morning, and I imagined him bent over the toilet bowl, hands on thighs. My mother went into the foyer, came back with her pocketbook. She sat next to me, took out the compact that had her initials, E.V., engraved on the gold cover—“E.V.—get it?” she liked to say to people. “My initials and name are just the same!”—and inspected her face, twisting her mouth this way and that, running her tongue around between her gums and her lips. She rubbed rouge into her cheeks, and then, while she smiled at me over the mirror in her compact, she put on fresh lipstick from a brass-colored tube that looked like a machine gun bullet, and blotted her lips with a tissue.

“There!” she said. “What do you think?”

I shrugged and tried to keep eating. But it was hard to get the hot cereal to go down smoothly. The grains of Ralston stuck at the back of my throat and all I could think of was what it was going to be like to actually see Abe again. I'd only been in the second grade when he left for training camp four years before. He'd had a furlough once after that and had met my Aunt Lillian in Atlantic City while their daughter Sheila came and stayed with us, but I never saw him again before he was shipped overseas. Abe had been a hero and had killed a lot of Germans. Once, on a postcard, he said that he'd killed two Nazis just for me, and what I wondered—what scared me—was if killing somebody up close would change you in ways that you couldn't ever change back, even if you didn't know the person and even if you knew the other person would have killed you first if he could have. I wondered if he would still like me.

“Listen,” my mother said. “We'll go to Poppa.”

“But I have school.”

“That's what we'll do, okay? Just the two of us. We'll go to Poppa and give him the news that Abe is coming home and I'll talk him into coming to the party. Forgive and forget, right?” She reached toward me. “You'll come with Momma, darling?”

“I have school,” I said. “I told you.”

“So I give you permission—how often in one lifetime does your uncle Abe get home from the war?”

“Will you write me a note?”

She smiled. “I'll write you a note.”

My father came into the kitchen, lit a cigarette, blew a puff of smoke toward the ceiling. Three tiny pieces of toilet paper were stuck to his cheek and chin where he'd nicked himself shaving. My mother put her arms around his neck, from behind, but he twisted away and pointed a finger at me.

“You take good care of your mother while I'm gone, do you hear me?”

“Oh Sol!” my mother exclaimed. “Sol darling—not now, all right? Didn't you hear who was on the phone?”

“I thought you weren't talking to a good-for-nothing like me anymore.”

“Life is so short, Sol. Why should we use it up fighting?”

“So your brother is coming home and that makes everything jake, huh?” My father sniffed in. “Wonderful. Last night you told me I didn't have a pot to piss in and this morning—”

“Sol! Please—!”

“—and this morning, now that your big shot brother is coming home you start in with all the hugging and kissing. Sure. Wonderful. Everything is hunky-dory as long as Abe is around.”

I thought of how cold the radio said it was outside. I imagined the snow on the fire escape as being made up of millions of tiny white grains, like sand, and I felt sad that Abe was coming home now instead of in the spring or the summer. If he came home in the spring or summer, I knew, he would take me to a Dodger game at Ebbets Field. I thought of me and Tony and Marvin and the other guys sneaking into the bleachers and of how proud Abe would be of me for the way we did it. My mother was gone. My father was searching around on top of the table as if he'd lost something—he was too proud ever to ask me to help him look for anything—and what I saw inside my head was the lush green of the grass of Ebbets Field before a game began. I saw the men walking around the base paths, dragging the enormous pieces of weighted-down cloth they used to smooth the dirt paths. I saw Abe laughing his beautiful big smile and waving to people he knew in the stands and I saw how happy I was to be next to him. Now that he was back, though, I wondered if I could still stay friends with Tony. Tony's father worked for Mr. Fasalino the way my father worked for Abe, and Mr. Fasalino and Abe controlled different territories. According to my father, Mr. Fasalino's organization had been scared to go too far while the war was on and we were fighting against Italy, but now that the Italians weren't our enemies anymore he figured Mr. Fasalino would try to move into our territory as soon as Abe got back.

My mother set my father's satchel down on the chair next to me, took out his set of clean underwear, laid the tops and bottoms on the kitchen counter, and folded them down with her hands.

“For me this once, all right? Just meet us at Lillian's tonight. Is that asking too much of a man I've been married to for fourteen years?”