Before My Life Began (58 page)

Aaron finds himself wishing that he could tell Lucius what his childhood was like—that he could take Lucius back with him, into his apartment on Martense Street and along Flatbush Avenue and into the Erasmus gym. If he had fewer secrets to keep from Lucius, would Lucius be less likely to listen to Paul? Aaron lifts a pencil, rubs the point against his index finger, gently. Why is it, he wonders, that his first life often seems to him a continuous line while his life in the years since seems to be made of fragments? Do most other people see their childhoods in this way—as consecutive, continuous, whole? He floats, as if in warm haze, as if it is summer. He thinks of long days spent in the Holy Cross schoolyard, his ass on concrete, his back against the chain-link fence, Tony or Morty or Julie beside him. He sees himself sipping a Coke, slipping the bottle through the fence to a kid even younger than himself—the kid running off to get the deposit money—waiting for his nexts, talking about the Dodgers or the Knicks, watching the older guys play—Al Roth, Johnny “Red” Lee, Heshy Weiss—wondering if he will ever be as good as them. He recalls his mother asking if she ever wanted more than that they should be a real family together, the three of them, with no secrets.

He can hear Paul laughing at him, asking him why he thinks nonviolence and love will change the world, and when he does he finds that he is clenching his fists, that this time he is seeing his mother's smile—not Abe's. He is seeing her laughing at his father, mocking him.

I
mean, is he helpless or is he helpless?

Is Lucius right? Lucius believes that the F.B.I, has something on Paul, knows about his operations, may even be paying him to hide fugitives so that they can keep tabs on them, pick and choose when they want to hang somebody in the wind. Lucius knew enough men like Paul in prison—men who would do anything to save their own skins, who would simply work for whoever bought the bread. Aaron remembers Paul saying that his father used to say something in Yiddish about love being sweet but tasting best with bread—does Aaron know the expression?—but that for the places where Paul has to travel he has invented a variation: revolution is sweet but tastes best with tacos.

Aaron imagines that it is night and that Lucius is waiting inside Paul's house, guns and ammunition at his side. Paul is on the highway, heading for safety. Full moons of yellow light float waist-high across Paul's lawn, police cars closing in. The problem, Aaron decides, is that once you set your imagination free—once you begin to let it imagine
possible
futures—there seems no way to stop your imagination from
being
free.

He remembers Susan's hands, on his eyes, in the woods. He thinks of how cold the plate glass of his sliding doors would be against his back. He looks at the lawn, the patches of snow, and he imagines Martin Luther King and Malcolm X leading one another through the rubble of a bombed-out city—one of them is blind and one of them is deaf and they walk one behind the other, the blind man's hand on the deaf man's shoulder. They are dressed, as always, in dark business suits. He recalls watching boys play baseball in the field behind the Elkton Fancy Diner. He hears a car, imagines Susan opening the door, stepping outside, greeting Lucius. The trouble with blacks like Lucius, Paul claims, is that they are too religious when they need to be more political. The trouble with their Movement is that it is essentially
spiritual
at its core. They dream of salvation in
this
world when their history and religion should teach them to act and believe and hope otherwise. Aaron sees Malcolm and Martin move from the edge of the city, out into the desert. Then the image fades, bit by bit. Which one is blind? Which deaf? Aaron turns, goes to his desk.

14

P
URPLE CROCUS
tipped with snow. The first week in May, and in the hills of Leverett there has been a light snowfall during the night. The previous week the weather was unseasonably warm and muggy, as if, Aaron thinks, August were lost, wandering through winter. He crouches down but does not touch the flower; under the snow its veined petals curl inward at the top. In the early morning light—in his memory—the flower seems to be made of thick glass stained a wonderful deep purple that is more blue than red, the little cap of snow perched upon it like a drop of liquid porcelain that has spread, thinned, begun to harden. When the sun rises, though, above the line of birch and maple and pine to the east, the white will dissolve and disappear, the flower will open, will reveal the deeper violet within, the soft vertical yellow streaks, the little upright threads that tell its sex. The glass will—in his mind, to his touch—thin to satin. With both hands he grasps the smooth plank on which he sits, feels its grain. He closes his eyes, listens to the pleasant sound of feet pounding on hardwood. He is, he realizes, happy, and it surprises him—pleases—that at his age this can be so. In less than half a year he will be thirty-four years old.

Susan's house. Why, though he designed it and built it and owns it, does he continue to think of it as Susan's house? Is it because he likes adding to it little by little, year by year—because he likes having her think of it, still, as his gift to her? Is it because he is reluctant to admit that he loves it as much as she does—loves especially, he knows, the idea of its being, after three years, unfinished—so that, as with their life together, he can continue to make it, to change it?

Or is the reason simpler: does he continue to think of it as Susan's house because he does not like to admit what she admits—that time is passing, that they are getting older. In three months Susan will be thirty-seven years old. A hand moves through his mind, palming the meadow as if it is velvet, transforming its green from lime to emerald. He thinks of the meadow in winter—as it was this morning: a white field fringed by forest, with here and there a spot of color—evergreens and birch and mountain laurel; tan cedar shakes on the house's roof; Delft-blue curtains in the kitchen window; copper lantern beside the door; a flash of color—brown, red, yellow—as a bird careens across the meadow.

He watches Lucius, who fakes to the left, slips under the backboard, takes a pass, gives it right back and pivots, in place for the rebound. He thinks of Lucius in the van, beside him, and of the snow that surrounded them as they drove home four years before, down from the hills of Conway and Ashfield, across the flat plain of Hatfield, on the day Paul came back into Susan's life, into Benjamin and Jennifer's life. He sees the dome of snow, hazy and infinite. Are the years like that too—his years—lost in white? The meadow in front of Susan's house stretches away, but not forever. The trees form a dark border to it, on three sides. The sky above is pale, washed out, ice-blue. Cerulean. He recalls seeing the word on a tube of paint once, in the art store on Church Avenue. How magical the words were! Cerulean blue. Vermilion red. Burnt sienna. Yellow ochre. Cadmium orange.

He does think of the years as being like that, doesn't he—like spots of color in an endless white landscape. Yet when he thinks of his childhood, as he does with greater and greater ease lately, he never thinks of white unless he is thinking of blank paper, of his old bedroom, his drawings. He sees, instead, paint squeezed from tubes, bright-colored oil flowing in glossy streams, converging to thick masses of dull brown and gray-black and muddy green. Olive drab. He sees the soiled Army jacket Abe liked to wear on weekends when the two of them would go to the Parade Grounds together to play ball. The jacket fades, threads floating in wind, fraying to air. Curious. If he thinks of these years—before he reached high school—he finds that he has to search for whiteness, for those times when, if ever, emptiness and space existed, for the times when there were expanses of no color: of calm, of peace. To mark the passing of time during those years—to date things—he has to concentrate, and even when he does he finds that it is not always easy to reconstruct sequences, to determine how old he was when particular events occurred.

The easy way to fix things in time is to link events in his life to events in sports. The dates of particular baseball games, the years the Knicks or the Dodgers won championships, the times favorite players performed spectacular feats—these allow him, with some certainty, to figure out when things happened. He was ten when George “Snuffy” Stirnweiss of the Yankees won the American League batting championship with the lowest average ever: .309. He was eleven when Jackie Robinson signed to play with the Montreal Royals and twelve when Jackie came to the Dodgers. He was a month past his thirteenth birthday when Cookie Lavagetto ruined Bill Bevens's no-hitter in the bottom of the ninth with a line drive off the right-center-field wall at Ebbets Field….

Now he finds that he often marks the passing of time—measures his life—by each change in Susan's house. He was at the house this morning, awake before sunrise, before Susan and the children began their day, to haul beams there for the greenhouse he plans to build. He wants to go back later today, while there is still light and the ground has thawed, to begin staking out the plot, clearing some trees and shrubs, figuring exactly where, on the southeast side of the kitchen, he will cut into the wall. He loves being out in the woods by himself, cutting trees with his chain saw, letting his mind drift. It drifts, he realizes, the way it would when, as a boy, he would be riding the subways, nodding off to sleep, his head bobbing to the irregular lurchings, the rumblings. Susan worries about him when he is in the woods alone. He doesn't, she warns, have many fingers to spare.

If possible, he wants to have the greenhouse finished in time for Jennifer's graduation from high school. That gives him seven weeks. He would like her party to be at Susan's house. He imagines the greenhouse filled with flowers, bursting with color. He sees himself at the breakfast table with Susan—the children are all gone—and they are happy because while they eat and gaze out through the greenhouse at the white meadow beyond, they are gazing through layers of color: through glossy green leaves, frilly hanging ferns, baskets of fuchsia, flats and containers of violets and spices, tea roses and lilies and chrysanthemums. Seven weeks. In seven weeks Jennifer will graduate from high school, Benjamin will complete his junior year. In seven weeks Carl and Larry will be preparing to go off to a sleep-away camp in Vermont.

To have the textures and colors of flowers there, between him and the world, pleases Aaron, mutes the passing of time somehow. But why? To be able to go from his kitchen directly to the greenhouse, to feel the sun's distant heat in midwinter, to put his hands into warm earth when the earth beyond home and glass is frozen, when the world behind him—his life with Susan—is whole: this comforts him. She was right, he thinks, to insist on building the house so that they could have a place to go to whenever one of them wanted to be alone. In the meantime, she argued, they could rent the house, he could use it to show prospective clients the quality of his work, they could camp there with the children in the summer, they could use it as a guest house….

Jennifer has a summer job in West Yarmouth, on the Cape, as a waitress. Benjamin has a job at a camp near Pittsfield as a counselor. For the first time in their eleven years of married life, Aaron and Susan will be together without children for four entire weeks—until Carl and Larry return—and she has been teasing him: is he frightened of being alone with her? And just before the first of those four weeks, Aaron thinks, Lucius and Louise will be married.

He nudges Louise, lifts her hand. “Some rock,” he says.

“Sometimes Lucius knows how to do the appropriate thing,” Louise says. She speaks, as always, with excessive clarity, articulating each word. Aaron touches the engagement ring, turns it, diamond to palm, so that it looks like a silver band. Louise turns it back so that the diamond catches the light, sparkles. Aaron imagines what it looks like within, through a jeweler's glass: the endless refracting boxes and triangles. They are sitting on wooden benches, eight rows up, inside the Curry Hicks gymnasium. On the court Lucius works out with the other players from the All-Star team that will tour for two weeks against a visiting Yugoslavian team. Aaron's fingers itch. He wants the ball in his own hands. He wants to sky high over Lucius, to jam the ball home, to see the surprise in Lucius's eyes. Louise talks about the wedding, about the honeymoon she and Lucius will take—they've rented a cabin on Penobscot Bay, in Maine—about their plans, their future. For all her airs—if she weren't so goddamned proud she's black, you'd think she thought she was white, Lucius always says—Aaron likes her, admires her.

Lucius has one more year of college—he is on full scholarship, for basketball—and while he is finishing his bachelor's degree, Louise will get a master's degree in counseling. She wants Lucius to apply for fellowships abroad, she says, but he is resisting. He is afraid, she reasons, not of failing, but of succeeding. Good old survival guilt. Louise believes in Lucius in the same way, Aaron realizes, that Susan believes in him. Why shouldn't Lucius be able to be a Rhodes Scholar or a Marshall Fellow? His grades are excellent, he is a superb athlete, he has risen from adversity. Did Aaron see the article she clipped and gave to Lucius about Bill Bradley, the All-American from Princeton, in Oxford for two years on a Rhodes Fellowship while playing, in his spare time, for one of the professional Italian teams? Lucius could do the same and that way they would have extra income, he would stay in shape, have some friends—most of the players on the European teams are American blacks not quite good enough for the N.B.A.—and the two of them could travel and see the world.

Aaron suggests that Louise go easy on Lucius. He reminds her that Lucius has come a long way in a short time, that less than four years before the very idea of going to
any
college seemed absurd to him. Until Susan began working with him, encouraging him to enroll for courses, Aaron admits that it had not even occurred to
him
to suggest that Lucius go to the university.