Before My Life Began (31 page)

“The next day there was a big story in the papers, with photos of the guy dead and of the guy when he was alive. His name was Harold Bernstein and he was a lawyer. He had a wife and two kids living in Newark, but the papers said he hadn't lived with them for five years and they couldn't get much more information from anyone, except that he had worked for Mr. Rothenberg briefly and for others with worse reputations—Lepke and Schultz—and that he was rumored to be a stool pigeon, to have been one of Dewey's key informers, when Dewey was a special D.A.

“Dewey was hot shit back then, see, and had all the boys scared, even Lansky and Luciano and Costello. He put Waxey Gordon behind bars and got Schultz knocked off and sent Lepke to the electric chair. ‘Well,' Mr. Rothenberg said when we read that headline, ‘Abbadabba would be pleased. He would have said that Mr. Dewey had Lepke's number, yes?'

“I went to work for Mr. Rothenberg after that. Momma never knew anything about it all, the acid or O'Shea or what happened to Dennis. She got sick about a year later and died within a few months. She was only forty-one, the same age your mother is now. But the word did get back to Poppa and Evie somehow. Who knows? Maybe it was Mr. Rothenberg himself who made sure they knew so he could keep his hold on me. We liked each other, but in our line of work that didn't mean there was trust. We never made an association without making sure we had something we could hold over the other guy. Just in case. Mostly what you learned was that you couldn't trust anybody in this life—ever—though there were a few you could trust more than others.”

Abe touched his ring. He seemed angry suddenly. Was he sorry he'd answered my questions? Did he resent having told me why all the years had been the way they were?

“So now that you know, kid,” he said, “are you happy?”

8

M
Y MOTHER
was telling me about Sam Lipsky and Harry Kanoff and the other men who'd been pursuing her, but I thought only of Gail and of the first moment in which we would see one another again. I imagined her next to the information booth in Penn Station, wearing her navy-blue pea coat, her yellow-and-blue plaid scarf. Suitcase in one hand, she was turning slowly in circles, as if lost. How was it possible, I wondered, that merely by existing I could make another human being so happy? I saw her racing toward me. I imagined the softness of her lips against mine. I touched the backs of my first two fingers to my mouth, pressed light against the soft folds of the skin at the knuckles. I let my fingers trail cross my lips to my cheek, and I stared at my mother as if I were paying attention to her.

What did I think? Sam Lipsky said he couldn't wait much longer for an answer. He had taken her into the vault with him at the Lincoln Savings Bank. There he had opened his safe deposit box, shown her his dead wife's jewelry, and promised that if she married him the jewels would be hers. If she didn't say yes soon, though, he would have to divide the jewelry among his four daughters. My mother wanted me to be truthful with her. Would I feel, a little more than a year since my father died, that she was somehow betraying his memory, that she was letting me down? She talked about which men were liars and which were only out for a good time, and I said little except, as usual, to tell her that she was free to do what she wanted. In a few weeks I would be graduating from high school, she said. By the fall I might be gone and what would she do then? She offered me the money she'd been saving for her trip to California—she had decided she was too old to start out there all over again, on her own—because if I went to college at least I would get away from working for Abe. If I went to college I would get my student deferment so that I wouldn't be shipped off to Korea to be killed. She would be grateful for little things.

“But I do get lonesome. Do you know what? I get lonesome for you before you're even gone. Is that crazy? I mean, do you have a crazy mother or do you have a crazy mother?”

I put my dishes in the sink. “I don't know,” I said. “One or the other, I guess.”

“What?”
She was startled. Then she began to laugh. “You got your father's sense of humor, yeah? The way you like to tease me. Only I was always that way, Davey—from as far back as I can remember. Even when I first brought you home from the hospital I remember thinking that someday you'd be all grown up and gone away to have your own family, and what would I do then?” She reached toward me. “Come and sit, yeah? So you'll be late for school for once in your life. Come and sit and talk with your mother for a few minutes.”

I sat and I tried not to hear what she was saying about how much she loved me. I imagined Abe, later in the day, waiting for me at the office on Flatbush Avenue. Would he be angry? He had telephoned the night before to say that he would be leaving for Florida, that I should come to the office after school. There was no crisis, he said—simply the opportunity for me to be in charge of things on a daily basis, for his men to get used to taking orders from me.

My mother was saying that she had never expected her life to be like this, without my father, without me, without Abe. The gray in her hair softened her features. Smile lines radiated from the corners of her eyes, the skin webbed with tiny tracings, like the fine lines in cracked ice. Did I think she was capable of living alone? I imagined myself in Penn Station, staring up at the vaulted ceiling, the great steel-ribbed spaces through which the light poured down on polished marble. If you spent your whole life hoping to have a family, how could you ever be happy living by yourself? Through the grilled roof, through the domes and arches of glass and steel, I imagined that I could see a million stars sprinkled across the night sky like silver shavings. In the waiting room soldiers and sailors were sitting on duffel bags, smoking cigarettes.

“Still my silent one, huh?” Her voice was gentle again. “I don't mind, really. You're a good boy, Davey. I don't mind your not saying to me what you think about if I should say yes or no to Sam. At least I got you for a sounding board. I mean, I'm a big girl now, right?”

“When I was a kid Sam used to let me sit inside his freezer with him, in the summertime.”

“So?”

“That's all. It was something I remembered. We'd sit inside there eating Eskimo Pies and he'd tell me jokes.”

“Sam's got a terrific sense of humor, like your father did. He don't got Harry's money, but when he kisses me things happen inside that don't happen with Harry.” She pointed to her forehead. “You give your mother a kiss, yeah? And then you go to school. Kiss me up here because with all that's been going on I got a nervous stomach and you shouldn't be kissing me near the mouth.”

I kissed her on the forehead, went to the foyer, took my jacket from the closet.

“Abe used to call them lie blisters. He could be mean sometimes. When we were kids and I'd get one of my herpes he'd run around the school yard yelling to everybody that his sister got a lie blister. Ain't it too warm for a jacket?” She laughed. “I mean, it's May already.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. The picture I'd had in my head, of Gail, was of how she had looked the last time she'd come in from college. “And listen. I might be home late. Some of the guys are thinking of cutting out early and going to Ebbets Field. The Dodgers are playing the Phillies. Maybe after we'll go out for pizza and bowling and stuff, so don't expect me early.”

“You're telling me the truth?”

My heart stopped. “Sure.”

“You ain't really going to be with Abe, to get sucked in more?”

“I'm not going to be with Abe today,” I said. “Only if he calls, don't tell him I said so.”

“And you won't forget the signal?”

“I won't forget the signal.”

I expected her to joke about the signal—when I rang the downstairs buzzer, if she buzzed back once it meant the coast was clear; if she buzzed back twice it meant she had a visitor—but instead I saw that she was looking at me in such a sad, forlorn way that for an instant it made me think she knew exactly where I was going and why.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “You'll be all right here by yourself?”

“Oh Davey,” she cried, throwing her arms around me. “I get so scared about what's gonna be. I just get so scared sometimes—”

“Sure,” I said, and I stroked her hair. “Sure, Mom. But things will be all right. You'll see. They'll work out fine.”

“I just get so scared about all the years ahead—about you and Abe and what will happen if I lose you. It's been so nice this morning, talking to you like this, did you know? I mean, Sam or Harry—big deal. What do I give a shit about them, if you want the truth. But I smile and get dolled up and put on an act and I figure I better get set up with somebody before too many years go by and the men stop looking at me. But what's it all about, Davey? I mean, can you tell me that? What's it all about? And what about poor Sol? I mean, I think about him more than anyone thinks, how the last years I should of been kinder to him.”

“He loved you the way you were.”

“That's true enough,” she said, rubbing her nose against my shirt front. “Go on now. You get going before the waterworks start in.”

“If you get lonesome or scared, call down to Beau Jack. Have him come up here and stay with you.”

“Beau Jack.” She wiped her eyes with the backs of her wrists. “He'll miss you too. He doesn't say much, but I know he misses that you don't spend time with him the way you used to.”

“I'll try harder. With him and with you. You'll see.”

“When? When you're halfway across America playing basketball?”

“Maybe I won't be that far away.”

I reminded her that I hadn't played basketball the past season—my senior year—that because of the fixes, because of Abe, there were no scholarships coming my way. My words stopped her for a second, long enough for me to kiss her, for me to tell her that she shouldn't worry about what happened with Sam and Harry or any of the others.

I went out the door. I winked. “You're only young once, Mother,” I said, and when I laughed she laughed with me.

We changed trains at the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. The train out of Penn Station had been delayed in the tunnel for forty minutes and was so packed we'd hardly been able to speak to one another. The new train, only four cars long, was less than half full, and I found seats at the far end of the last car. I put Gail's two suitcases on the seat across from us and asked if she wanted to rest. I said that if she wanted to stretch out I could put the luggage on the overhead rack, but that I'd left them on the seats so that we could be alone. Was that all right?

She slumped down next to me, put her arm through mine, leaned her head against my shoulder. I asked if I could get her anything from the suitcases before the train left the station. If she wanted to sleep, I said, I wouldn't mind. I realized she'd been up half the night, sneaking out of her dormitory, taking the four o'clock milk train down from Northampton. I was sorry she was so exhausted. I was sorry about lots of things, I supposed. She smiled, squeezed my arm. Buy why did she need two suitcases when we were only going to be away for a day? I asked if she was comfortable. Was she hungry? Was she thirsty?

“I'm happy,” she said, burrowing closer. “But lordy, the guy I'm in love with is so nervous I hardly know him. Are you going to be all right, David?”

She reached up and cupped my chin in her hand. I jerked my head away, pressed my forehead against the window. I watched the platform begin to slide backwards, as if, I thought, it were moving into the past.

“Please don't pull away from me when I'm trying to be affectionate. It's the one time I hate you. I know this has been difficult for you, but let me touch you, all right?”

“Just give me a few minutes,” I said. “I need time to get over my nervousness, to get used to being with you again.”

The Philadelphia high-rise apartment buildings we were passing looked as run-down as those near the Brooklyn waterfront. Did Abe and Mr. Rothenberg have connections in Philadelphia? In every large city in America where Jews lived, were there men like Abe, in charge of things? Had Abe ever been to Shibe Park to see the Phillies play? In Jackie's first year the Phillies' manager, Sam Chapman, had tried to get his team to go on strike against the Dodgers. He'd razzed Jackie so much that the commissioner had called him in and threatened to suspend him.

“Don't forget,” she said. “If anybody asks, just say I'm going to visit a girlfriend at Goucher and that you're my cousin and you're going to Hopkins, all right?”

“Then why do we have tickets to Elkton instead of to Baltimore?”

“Because Elkton is where you have to go if you want to get married first, stupid. Everybody knows
that.”

She moved closer again, let her head rest on my shoulder. I looked through the window, at our images—flecked with dust, suspended in the air like ghosts. “I'm sorry about the way I was before,” I said. “I keep being afraid we're being followed.”

“Who would follow us?”

“Abe. He might have somebody follow me in order to protect me.”

“David?”

“What?”

“When I'm up there without you I get scared sometimes that you
have
been taken from me, but not by your uncle or his enemies.” She pointed to the window, to our reflection. “Sometimes, in my room, I try to see your face and all I get is your eyes or your mouth—like a half-drawn picture, and I get scared—panicked, really—that I won't be able to remember the rest of you. And then because I get worried that I can't see the person I love most in the world, things get all mixed up and crazy inside me. I get scared you'll stop loving me. I don't ever want to lose you. David?”

“What?”

“Are you sorry?”