Before My Life Began (59 page)

The players move silently—Aaron chooses not to hear the pounding of the ball, of feet—and in his mind's eye he is lying in the meadow in front of Susan's house. A local farmer, who hayed it before they bought the land, continues to hay it each year, and Aaron stares ahead at the expanse of white, through which, as if through the softest cotton sheet, he can discern the pale green below. Can he blow the snow away? The snow rests lightly on the new spring shoots of winter rye as if protecting them. He thinks of being inside the house, looking out at snow. He is sawing through sheet rock, the fine spray of plaster dust coating his neck and arms. He thinks of the sun, rising now above the trees, a squat ball of yellow suffused with clouds of white, like dry ice, that make the yellow unbearably harsh. The sun warms the meadow, turns the snow to vapor, lets the blades of bent grass straighten, rise. If you stared long enough, would you see them move and grow—could you see the color change?

He tells Louise about the greenhouse, about his plans, about how it will be a surprise for Susan. He talks about the new kind of thermal glass he has ordered, which will concentrate and hold the sun's rays, spreading warmth to the kitchen in winter. He imagines the greenhouse filled with daisies. He tells Louise that he will coax Lucius into coming out with him one weekend so they can work together. Louise gives him Lucius's schedule—when he leaves with the team, where he will be playing, when he will return. She has been preparing work sheets for him, charting the homework he will have to do each day. She has spoken with the coach, with each of his professors.

“Lucius going to let your dad work on his mouth?”

“Or I don't marry him.” Louise smiles. “Who'd want to marry a man with teeth like his?” She touches her ring. “Oh, I'll marry him. I'd do anything for him, I love him so. But he is one stubborn man sometimes. We had a big fight this morning before he left for classes. Did he tell you?”

“I haven't seen him. It's why I'm here. I mean, I was on campus anyway, to see Susan in rehearsal—her play opens Friday night—so I thought I'd stop by. Lucius and I don't get to see each other much anymore.”

“He says that he won't attend graduation—my graduation. He says that he intends to boycott it.”

“I figured.”

“I've told him that I'm not against him or the others, but for the life of me I can't see what having a separate graduation ceremony for blacks is going to
prove
to anybody. Damn it, Aaron—I worked hard for four years to earn my degree, earn it without favors, and without majoring in black studies either—and I'm proud of what I did. I thought what we wanted was to be equal and
not
separate.”

“What did Lucius say?”

“That they're his brothers and sisters by skin and history, and that he won't go against them.”

“And what did you say?”

“What did I say? I asked him why he was choosing them over me—that's what I said. I asked him if this was what the rest of our life was going to be like—him choosing race over reason, him choosing to hurt me just so he won't be called an Uncle Tom.” She openes and closes her fists. “Why
should
he choose to be with them instead of me?
Why
, Aaron?”

Aaron says that he can't answer for Lucius, that Louise knows his life better than he does. Louise sighs, says that Lucius is afraid that, if he appeared at her ceremony, he would be betraying the others, and that she argued with him and said that he would be betraying himself if he let himself be manipulated, if he let the others lay a guilt trip on him.

How strange, it occurs to Aaron, that somebody who has lived through all that Lucius has lived through—lynchings and beatings and chains, sadism and Carrie and jail—can still seem such a child, can still need to be taken care of by a woman like Louise, who has tasted little of the world's cruelty. Carrie. Carrie and the boy moved from Greenwood over three years before, not telling Rose they were leaving. Rose does not know their whereabouts, has never heard from them again. Lucius is free then. And if Carrie had not left, Aaron wonders, would Lucius have felt free to fall in love with Louise, to marry her? Has he told Louise about Carrie and the boy? Louise talks more evenly, tells Aaron that she has given in and agreed to be married in the First Baptist Church of Amherst—a concession to Lucius. Louise does not believe in God, but she believes in Lucius's belief in God. Does that make sense to Aaron? Will she regret it later if she defers to him now?

Lucius does have his faith in God, Aaron knows—his belief that Christ reached inside him in an almost physical way, and redeemed him. Lucius claims that whatever he does—whether it be to play ball, or study, or cook, or marry, or make somebody laugh—is part of God, or rather is his way of returning, in part, the gift of life that God has given to him. Aaron has seen Lucius in church, praying and singing. He has seen the peacefulness in Lucius's eyes—the faith. Aaron wonders what
he
has—besides his love for Susan and his family—that is comparable. What does he believe in that goes beyond his own history, beyond things tangible? Had he believed in God—had he known anything about the history of the Jewish people—would he have felt differently at his father's funeral? Would he have been able to weep?

Louise asks Aaron if he will do her a favor and urge Lucius to take a course next year in the speech department. If the suggestion comes from Aaron, perhaps Lucius will be less threatened than if it came from her. How will they understand Lucius in England if he slurs his words so, if he talks as if he is on a porch in Mississippi? Louise is speaking softly, whispering, yet she articulates her words with such precision that Aaron asks her how Lucius ever stands a chance against her in arguments.

“He glowers,” she says. “Lucius is very good at glowering.”

“Hey, sweet one—you all angry again?”

Lucius is standing over them, dripping sweat.

“Get away, black man.”

“You don't love me in my natural state?”

One of the players calls up to Lucius, razzes him about his love life, tells him to get on down and play. Lucius sits next to Aaron.

“You ready?” he asks.

“For what?”

Lucius taps at Aaron's right sneaker. “I see you got your running shoes on, figure you be ready to step down there with the big boys.”

“Come on—”

“That ain't why you here? You ain't here to show me up?”

“I promised Susan I'd stop by,” Aaron says, glancing at his watch. “Her rehearsal will be over soon and—”

“Your boys been telling me how good you are, shooting baskets all the time lately. Ben tells me you're better than me—or would be, if you were still a young man.” The players call to Lucius from the court. Lucius waves them off, tells them he is recruiting. “Come on, hey—you against me, man—let's us old men show these boys how it's done, okay? Let's show these boys some quality.”

Aaron drives home alone in the van, along Route 9. Susan has her car. She asked him to stay, to go into town to have drinks with her and the other members of the cast, but he pleaded work, told her he had to have some preliminary sketches ready for a client within two days. He lied, and he is pleased that he did—that he is less absolute with himself than he used to be. Dump trucks carrying fill pass him going in the opposite direction, toward the university. Cows graze in the lush meadows to the north, and past them, across low fields of rye that are tufted in a miraculous haze of lavender and copper, he sees the new high-rise dormitories jutting twenty stories into the air, red brick laced with wide vertical ribbons of white concrete. So much open space, he thinks, such a lovely valley, and they build these oblong cartons of stone. He recalls photographs he has seen, in
National Geographic
, of buildings rising from the plains of Brasilia.

When he and Susan married there were fewer than six thousand students at the University. Now there are almost twenty thousand and new poured-concrete structures rise everywhere on campus. Everywhere there are girders and cement mixers, earth movers and construction trailers. In the center of the campus, overlooking the small pond where he and Susan and the children ice skate in winter and feed the swans in spring, workers are building a twenty-six-story structure that will soon be the world's tallest library, the design by Edward Durell Stone.

With the vast numbers of new faculty and staff and students, and the young lawyers and doctors and teachers and social workers who follow after, it will be a long time, Aaron knows, before he will have to worry about not having enough work. In the past six months he has had to refer over a dozen potential clients to other builders. He likes being able to pick and choose among clients—to do only those houses that please him, to work only with those people he senses will give him the least trouble, will appreciate him most. Susan has urged him, now and then, to expand, to hire more men—aren't you an American? she teases; aren't you ambitious?—but he prefers to keep things the same, to scale: to work with one or two helpers and to let Lucius work whenever he has free time—which has been, the past year, almost never.

He drives through Hadley, past the Farm Museum, the town's center. The steeple of the Congregational Church—an imitation of one by Christopher Wren—rises at a slant from behind the Town Hall. More fields. Long, low tobacco barns. Boulders. Black earth, recently plowed—old river bottom, the richest land in New England. A field dusted with lime. He approaches Coolidge Bridge. His body feels wonderful, as relaxed as it has been for months, and he thinks of the shower he took with Lucius and the other players afterwards, recalls their glances, their questions about what college he had played for. He hears Lucius bragging on him: This
man never went to college. Too smart for that…

He will ache tomorrow, he knows, but right now his body sings to him, the muscles stretched, the blood coursing through them, through veins that he thinks of as being wide open, like tunnels, as having been vacuumed clean. He feels light-headed, ready for anything. He shoots baskets with Benjamin and the younger boys sometimes, plays full court in pick-up games now and then, but it has been a long time since he moved with such fury. Lucius guarded him, talked to him, teased. He felt at first as if he were, despite the bodies and sounds around him, lost, wandering, abandoned. But as soon as the ball came to him, he was all right. He faked, went straight up, watched the ball curl off his fingers, saw it rise and fall, spin straight through—swish!—heard Lucius groan, felt somebody slap his ass as he began to backpedal toward the other end.

In some strange way he had never, despite playing with guys a dozen years younger than he is, felt more on top of his form. When he swiped the ball from Lucius—slapped it ahead, broke, headed downcourt—it was as if the others were moving in slow motion. He would not have been surprised had he, from the foul circle, been able to rise up, as in dreams when a boy, and float through the air, legs pumping as if on a bicycle going uphill so that he would be cruising through the air for twenty feet, then descending slowly, dropping the ball through the orange hoop, his body dropping past the ball as it slipped through the netting.

Oh man, take this little boy to heaven now, Lord. Take him right now!
Lucius said when Aaron had put yet another move on him, faking right, gliding left, changing the ball back from right to left hand in midair, slamming it home backwards over Lucius's outstretched arm and body.
Oh yeah. Take this boy to heaven now
.

Aaron smiles. Mercifully, the scrimmage lasted for only seven or eight minutes. Then the players relaxed, shot their fouls. He wonders what would have happened to him had they played for ten or fifteen minutes. He sees Susan smiling into her dressing room mirror, jars of cold cream and makeup in front of her on the table, while Lucius describes the game. Well, well, she says, and her eyes glow, happy for him. Well. Susan is playing Beatrice in Arthur Miller's A
View from the Bridge—
when she was an undergraduate at Smith she had played Beatrice's daughter, Catherine—and Aaron watches her remove the black wig, shake her golden hair free, brush it. She moves her mouth in slow circles, stretching the skin so that she can cream the blacked-in wrinkle lines from around her lips and eyes, from her forehead. He and Lucius arrived in time for the final scene of the dress rehearsal—Eddie being killed by Marco, but by his own knife, his hand held by Marco's turned against himself, Beatrice crying Yes,
yes!
and covering his body with her own; Alfieri the lawyer coming forward, the bodies behind him frozen in a tableau. Susan does not know it, but Aaron knows Alfieri's words by heart.
Most of the time now we settle for half and I like it better….

Has Aaron settled for half? He is on the other side of the Coolidge Bridge, in Northampton. LaFleur Airport and the Three County Fairgrounds are to his left, the river behind him. He turns right onto Damon Road to avoid the town's center.
Most of the time now we settle for half
. Not me, Aaron thinks. Not yet. Not by a long shot. Aaron has told neither Louise nor Lucius nor Susan his real reason for being on campus. He was there in order to pick up registration forms so that, during the summer, he can attend the university. He has decided to go there, to major in art.

There was a moment, standing at the rear of the small theater, looking through darkness at the brightly lit stage, when he had the impulse to tell Lucius everything.
Everything!
He felt, too, as if Susan's body were lying across his own. They were, perhaps, ninety feet apart, yet he believed that he could actually feel the warmth of his wife's body as it lay across Eddie's, could feel it press against his own. Will he tell her later? What Alfieri says about Eddie—would Susan say this about him
—for he allowed himself to be wholly known and for that I think I will love him more than all my sensible clients
.