Before My Life Began (37 page)

“He's been here since last weekend. Nobody knows except Beau Jack, who helped me get Poppa here from New York.” She stopped, as if she wanted to cry. “Tell me I did the right thing, Davey, please? I mean, he's my own flesh and blood just like you and Abe—”

Her father looked up. “What?” he asked. “What did you say?”

She kissed the top of his head, cupped his narrow chin in her hand and lifted his face, pointed him toward me. “I said that Davey is here, Poppa. He came to visit you. You remember Davey, don't you?”

He spoke, but I couldn't understand him. The words gurgled from him as if from a hole in his throat.

“He thinks I understand Russian.” My mother laughed, nervously. “Sometimes he even thinks I'm Momma. But who knows what we'll be like when we get to his age, yeah? I mean, think of where he started, of all he's seen, of the whole life he had that we don't know nothing about.”

Her father looked at me and his eyes cleared, his neck straightened. “Davey's a good boy. I always said so.” He took my hand, pressed a quarter into it. His fingers were cold and bony. “Here. This is from me to you. Now show me your wife.”

“She's sleeping, Poppa,” my mother said. “Remember how I told you she's going to have a baby—her and Davey—so she needs to sleep.”

“I want to see your wife. Why is she hiding from me? What did I do to her?”

His eyelids dropped and his chin fell to his chest. Mouth open, he began wheezing.

“Sometimes he does that. In the middle of anything, he just falls asleep.”

“Can we eat soon? We promised Gail's parents we would stop by later.”

“Listen. I got some nice cold chicken salad I made before you got here, but I wanted you to know that Sam already agreed it's okay by him if Poppa comes to live with us. Are you surprised? Did I do the right thing? I mean, like you see, he ain't no trouble really, and I got the extra room now….” She pressed my arm, at the elbow. “You won't tell Abe? He'll never come visit me if he finds out, but I got this crazy dream, see—you know me—that maybe if I arrange things right—if I hope enough!—that maybe they can still forgive one another, that maybe they can still remember that they're a father and a son.”

“Where are all my things?”

“Your things?”

In the mirror I saw the door open. Gail stepped into the room. She closed her eyes, drew the cold air in through her nostrils. “Wonderful!” she said. “Oh my God, but that feels wonderful!”

“I would have let you in here before, to lie down,” my mother said, “but I felt it was only right to show Davey first.” Gail looked at me, puzzled. “It's my father. I brought him here to live with me now that you and Davey got your own place.”

My grandfather lifted his head, put out his hand. “Hello,” he said. “You must be Davey's wife.
Da
. Come closer so I can look at you. My eyes aren't so good anymore.”

Gail moved to him, let him take her hands.

“Good,” he said. “Listen. I'm glad you married our Davey. He's a good boy. You should be happy together for many years. I give you my blessing.”

“Oh Poppa—!”

“She's a beautiful woman. I know a beautiful woman when I see one. You're a lucky boy. Would you give me a kiss?”

Gail kissed him on the forehead.

“No.” He took her hand, pointed to his mouth. “The right way. Here.”

Gail kissed him on the mouth.

“I'm not sick,” he said. “I'm just old, but I know what's happening. You'll come visit me, you and Davey? Good. Don't be strangers. Family is family.” He took my mother's hand, kissed it. “This is my best daughter.”

“You have another daughter?” Gail asked.

“No.” He smiled. “But she's my best.”

His head sagged, his mouth fell open.

We left. In the kitchen, my mother said that she had taken my things to the bin in the cellar, that I could pick them up when I wanted. I heard footsteps. The bathroom door opened and closed. My mother was telling Gail that if she ever needed to take a water stain out of wood—if somebody left a wet glass on furniture—she should mix ashes with mayonnaise and rub it in, but not in hot weather. She asked if Gail's friends or family were going to make her a baby shower. Had Gail's parents mentioned providing her with a layette? She said she had picked up some beautiful hand-knit sweaters at the Muscular Dystrophy Rummage Shop on Nostrand Avenue.

She left us, came back a few minutes later with a stack of clothing, soft layers of pink and blue and white. She showed us each item, asked what we thought. Did we realize how much these things would cost if she'd bought them new? She banged an ice tray on the kitchen counter. She told us she wasn't looking for thanks. Abe was right about that. Did I remember what he used to tell people? That if what you wanted in life was gratitude, you should get a dog.

My grandfather came into the kitchen dressed in a double-breasted blue jacket, a clean white shirt, a maroon tie. He had shaved and there were small pieces of toilet paper stuck to his neck and cheeks. My mother told him how handsome he looked. He sat and told Gail that she looked beautiful. Women always did when they were pregnant, he said. The eyes looked inward, drew men toward them. He spoke in Russian, then translated: If a woman had something in the oven—he patted his stomach—you could know it by the radiant fire in her cheeks, by the silver smoke in her eyes.

I looked to the window, recalled pulling a black shade down during an air raid drill. I imagined my father groping his way toward the cellar to get his helmet and gas mask from the bin. Would he stumble and fall? Gail reached for the bowl of chicken salad, but my grandfather grabbed her wrist. He drew a black silk cap from his pocket and placed it upon his head. First, he said, we should say a prayer. We should never begin a meal without saying a prayer. We were still Jews, weren't we?

I carried the shopping bag, filled with baby clothes, down the stairs. The cellar smelled of chalk dust. I stared in through the slats of our bin but I couldn't make out much except for lamps and chairs, the dark shapes of cartons. Beau Jack's door opened. He tipped his baseball cap to Gail. We entered. He asked if we wanted tea. Tea was the best thing for you in hot weather, he said. Gail was surprised at how cool his apartment was. Was it air-conditioned? Beau Jack smiled, said that it couldn't be air-conditioned because he had no windows, but he explained to her about the vents in the ceiling, the ducts that carried warm air all the way up and out through the roof, five stories above, that sucked coolness from the earth below ground. He asked her if she had ever heard of the Nubians, and of how, in Egypt, they cooled their desert homes. Even modern engineers could not imitate with electricity what the Nubians did without it. He showed Gail pictures of Nubian homes, in a book I had looked at often—white mud-brick windowless buildings, some with barrel-vaulted roofs, others connected to one another the way Pueblo dwellings were, beams jutting out near the tops where the air-slits were. The inner chambers were high-ceilinged and dark, the floors made of earth, the walls white, decorated above the doors with dinner plates.

If things got as bad as I figured they might, could I hide Gail and our child out here? Did Beau Jack have some secret chamber, behind or below his rooms? Would he be willing to help Abe, if only for my sake?

Beau Jack poured tea for us, took milk and lemon from the refrigerator. He set a plate of Loma Doones and Oreo cookies on the table, and while we sat there for a while, sipping tea and eating, I surprised myself by beginning to talk, telling Gail about all the hours Beau Jack and I had sat in the room together and listened to baseball games. I remembered making scorecards—drawing lines on blank paper with pencil and ruler, writing in the names of the players, putting in the play-by-play, inning by inning. I remembered listening to Red Barber's voice, to the teletype machine that clicked away behind him. Beau Jack and I had agreed that that would be a hard job: to sit in a room by yourself somewhere in Brooklyn, a microphone in front of you, and try to make a game real and exciting when all you had to work with was a long, thin strip of paper that typed words out in front of you, giving you only the bare essentials—balls and strikes, runs and hits and errors—of a game that was taking place in a city thousands of miles away. I remembered how much I loved to lean back, to rest my feet on Kate's silky fur.

I looked around. “Is Kate in the bedroom?”

Beau Jack leaned toward me. “Didn't your Momma tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Kate's gone, honey. She died the beginning of June. I thought you knew.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. I felt my heart catch. “I'm so sorry—”

“Oh me too, Davey. Me too.” He ran his finger around the rim of his cup. “But she died nice and easy, so I'm glad for that. She just went to sleep one morning and didn't wake up.” “How old was she?” Gail asked.

“Sixteen. That means she would have been more than a hundred in human years.”

I kept my eyes on Beau Jack's face, tried to imagine what he was feeling, what he'd felt when he touched Kate for the last time. I wished that I'd spent more time with him during the past few years. I wondered: what I felt toward him now, and what I thought I'd felt for him through all the years—did those feelings come, really, only from me, from my own needs and desires and not from who he was, from what
he
thought and felt? In what ways did we
know
one another, and what did it mean, after all, to truly know another human being. Had I merely used him somehow, stuck my feelings onto him the way I'd stuck pictures of my sports heroes on my bedroom wall? I wondered how often Tony thought about Regina and if, when she was in from college, he tried to see her. How could he
not
think about her all the time? If you truly loved somebody else—if you were in the middle of
being
in love when the other person suddenly stopped loving you, how could you ever stop hoping? How could you ever stop wanting to get the other person's love back?

“Do you mind being alone now?”

He touched the spot on the side of his head where the bud of his missing ear was, and when he looked at me, his eyes moist, I knew I'd said the right thing.

“Oh sure, honey. Who wouldn't mind being alone? It's always good to have someone near you, Davey, don't I know that much? The hard thing is to not have someone to be taking care of.”

“Yes,” Gail said. “But what happens to them? The dead animals, I mean. I used to wonder about that all the time. Where are all the dead squirrels and rabbits and pigeons and sparrows and chipmunks? I used to walk the streets and sneak into my neighbors' gardens, but I almost never found a dead one.”

“I buried Kate out in the courtyard. I sit there sometimes now, where you and I used to have catches together, Davey, and I think about her, about how much we loved each other. Does that make old Beau Jack sound like a fool?”

“No.”

“I mean, it's not so much not to be loved. The bad thing, it's when you got nobody
to
love. Your Momma, she been coming down to visit me lots since Kate's gone. She got a good heart. I guess you know now how I helped out with her father. I'm glad she done that, only I'm scared for what your uncle Abe do when
he
finds out. That's what Beau Jack worries about. That man still scares me.”

“Me too,” Gail said.

Silence.

Beau Jack reached across and touched my hand, told me not to worry about him, that he was taking good care of himself. He had his radio so he could listen to the games, and he was thinking of getting a small television set so he could watch Jackie. Weren't we right about that man, about how great he was going to be? Beau Jack said he was in a television store last week, on Flatbush Avenue, watching a Dodger game, and he liked the way they used a split-screen to show how Jackie worried the pitchers when he got to first base.

“Roy, though, he's in a bad slump this year,” Beau Jack said. “I worry about him, the way he never stops smiling but always goes up and down and up and down. Not behind the plate. He's the best man there I ever saw, but he gets in awful slumps
at
the plate, and our Dodgers, without him blasting away and with big Newk still off in the service, I don't think they're gonna make it this year.” He winked at Gail. “I guess by getting married you saved our boy from going over to Korea like big Newk. I'm glad for that.”

“Who's big Newk?” Gail asked.

“Don Newcombe,” I said. “He won twenty games year before last, before he got called up. He led the league in strikeouts.”

I stood, as if to go.

“Were
you
ever married?” Gail asked. I glared at her. Hadn't I told her that I needed to be home soon, in case there was a message from Abe?

“Oh no,” Beau Jack said. “I was never married. Ain't that too bad?”

“Yes,” Gail said.

“Wasn't because I didn't want to. I was in love, for sure. It was the woman I loved who gave me my name, over in France. She called me Beau Jack—that meant Handsome Jack in French, like the boxer's name, only my Christian name, it was John. Oh sure.”

He closed his eyes, let his head bob up and down a few times. When Gail broke the silence a minute later her voice was so soft and low that I hardly recognized it.

“What was her name?”

“Marcelle. She had hair a lot like yours, didn't you know that? Everybody loved her hair, you always be wanting to touch it.” Beau Jack touched Gail's hair in the exact way I'd seen him touch Kate a thousand times. “Oh how that girl loved her hair. It was so soft and silk-like after she washed it, and in the summer, she'd pin it up the way you do.”

“David's mother pinned mine up for me.”

“Marcelle, she had a mother too, which was where we got our first troubles, only you children don't want to hear the whole story. You got to be getting on home, so—”