Before My Life Began (6 page)

“Catch it quick!” my mother yelled.
“Quick
, Davey.”

By the time I crawled out from under the iron bed, the hallway outside my grandfather's room was empty.

At the Hoyt Street stop in Brooklyn my mother pulled me to the train door just before it closed. She was yelling at me, but I couldn't hear what she was saying because of the roaring inside the subway station. I'd been playing a game I invented—staring at people's shoes and trying to imagine, just from the shoes, what the face of the person would be like. You could tell a lot from shoes—from the color and style and creases in the leather and from how dull or shiny or scuffed they were, or from the position they were in—and I usually came pretty close to knowing the face I'd see when I looked up.

“What's the matter, you can't hear when I tell you something? What's the matter with you anyway?”

I kept my eyes on the sidewalk, brown and slushy now from people having walked on the snow all morning. We were outside, across the street from the Brooklyn Paramount.

“Is this the way you treat me after I give you a day off so you can be with me? Is this the way you say thanks to your mother?”

She took my chin in her gloved hand and forced me to look up at her.

“See what happens? Do you
see?”

“Leave me alone,” I said. “I didn't do anything.”

“Oh shit,” she said then, and she cupped her palm over her mouth. “It serves me right for trying to be the good one, don't it? Just in time i for the party. Am I a genius or what? Listen. We gotta find a drugstore! so I can get something for this or by tonight it'll be spread all over my mouth.”

She started walking fast while she talked to herself.

“Just in honor of my kid brother, right? Well. It serves you right, Evie—you try to make peace and look what happens. Sol is right. If people want to eat each other up alive, you shouldn't deny them the pleasure. Did God give Lillian fever blisters? Did he put a plague on her like he did on me?”

We crossed another street and I could make out the letters on the arcade of the Brooklyn Fox now.
The Story of G.I. Joe
was playing, a new war picture that some of the guys at school said was better than
Objective Burma
.

What would you be ready to die for?

I wondered if my uncle would ask me the question at the party. I hoped not, because I still didn't know how to answer it. If I gave him the wrong answer, would he still love me?

We passed the IRT Nevins Street stop and entered a Rexall's pharmacy. The prescription counter was in the back, near the crutches and wheelchairs, and when the pharmacist came out my mother showed him her lip. The pharmacist was a short, chubby man with a trim black mustache like Governor Dewey's. He wore a light blue smock. He furrowed his brow while he examined my mother's lip. Then he nodded and said that it was herpes simplex and my mother began to give him the whole story, about how Abe was coming home and we were having the party for him and how she'd tried to get their father to come, how it had made her nervous stomach act up.

“You got a mirror?” she asked.

The pharmacist went back to the booth where he mixed the drugs and returned a few seconds later with a small mirror. I concentrated on how things had looked from six flights up in my grandfather's house, and I imagined myself letting dart-bombs loose from my Bombs Away game. Bombs Away was my favorite game. There was a map on a board of different Nazi bunkers and airfields and aircraft carriers and roads and bridges and mountains with hidden mortar positions and a box you held up at eye level that had two holes in it, like those on binoculars. When you looked into the holes there was a mirror at the other end, set at an angle that let you see the map below. As soon as you had your target in sight you pressed a small lever that let two steel-pointed bombs drop out.

“Well, Lillian will sure be happy to see me like this, won't she?”

My mother put the mirror down and touched the back of the pharmacist's hand.

“You got something to make this go away, right?”

“Not exactly, ma'am, but—”

“Listen. You look like the kind of man who don't just give people the routine. I can tell. I mean, you look like the kind of man who cares, if you know what I mean.” She touched her lip. “Oh yeah—it's not a terrible disease like cancer or polio, but the trouble is it takes place right in the middle of your face, yeah?”

She laughed then. The pharmacist looked worried for a second, as if he were trying to think of a remedy, but he didn't smile. He said that he thought her herpes was too advanced to be stopped—sometimes, if you sensed one coming, you could treat it before it blistered—but he asked if she had ever tried tincture of nicotine. She seemed happy while she was talking to the man about her lip, and when she paid she touched his hand again and then held onto his wrist to show him how much she appreciated what he was doing for her.

“So say something,” she said suddenly, turning to me, winking at the pharmacist.

“Is he your son?”

“Oh yeah. This here is my silent one, but I'll tell you one thing. I'm only thankful I never gave these things to him, you know what I mean? When he was a baby I was very careful. They say that's when they're most catching, when your baby is just born and nursing, so I was always careful not to kiss this one—”

She bent down and took me by the cheeks, squeezing so that my lips puffed forward.

“See?” she asked. “Is that a gorgeous mouth or is it a gorgeous mouth?”

“Come on,” I said. “It's too
hot
in here.”

“Listen—he got a voice too,” she said. “Didn't I tell you?” She took the brown jar out of the bag and with a Q-tip from her purse she began applying the tincture of nicotine to her lip. I imagined her embarrassing me at Abe's party by telling about what was happening now. And what if Abe asked me what we were doing downtown, I wondered, and why I hadn't been in school? Could I keep from telling him that we'd gone to visit his father? Could I lie to him if I had to, about how much his father hated him?

My mother was telling me to say goodbye to the pharmacist.

“He's a good boy,” she said, roughing up my hair. “I can take him anywhere with me and he's never any trouble. He was always this way. At home is another story, if you know what I mean. But look at that mouth and that little nose, would you? Take a good look,” she went on, and I knew what was coming next, the way it always did. “See those curls and those tiny little ears—wouldn't you say sometimes that it was a waste on a boy? Give me your honest opinion, mister. Wouldn't you agree about what a beautiful girl he would of made?”

I sat on the floor in front of the wardrobe closet, reading comics, while my father kept at me, demanding that I tell him why he knew he was the smartest man in the world. He had come to Abe's party the night before and now, a day later, Abe was coming to dinner at our house. I tried to see Abe's face, to remember how surprised he was when he said goodbye to me and noticed my folder for the first time. He'd gotten down next to me then, in a deep-knee bend position, and touched my folder very gently, telling me that he didn't want to look at my drawings while there were so many people around.

I saw a picture in my head of Little Benny and Spanish Louie clinking glasses with Tony Cremona's father after they'd frisked him and escorted him into the living room. I saw Tony's father, in his long black overcoat—a messenger—embracing Abe, giving him greetings from Mr. Fasalino, Abe and Tony's father patting each other on the back with both hands as if they were long-lost relatives.

Abe didn't trust any of them, though, and when I saw the others again, in my head—Louie Newman and Monk Solloway and Waxey Shreibman and Avie Gornik and Big Jap Willer and the rest—all the warmth and happiness I'd been feeling about Abe coming to dinner washed out of me. I looked down, almost as if I expected to see warm water come leaking out of my shoes, onto the carpet. I thought of my uncle's cronies walking around his apartment, eating and drinking and laughing, and of how I'd looked hard at each of them, trying to see through their jackets to tell if they had guns or blackjacks or knives underneath. I remembered how raucous they'd all been and how they'd spent so much of their time flattering Abe the way my father did.

“Come on,” my father insisted. “Answer the question—do you know how come I know I'm the smartest man in the world?”

He'd asked me the same question dozens of times before and I stayed quiet because I knew that he liked to be the one to give the answer.

“Because I married your mother!” he said. “That's how come!”

My mother waved a hand at him but I could tell that she was pleased. I wanted to get away from them so I could prepare my room for Abe's visit. If I tried to leave while my father was putting on one of his routines about how much he loved my mother, though, I knew he'd get angry with me. My mother was in her panties and brassiere. When she sat down at her vanity table, my father put his arms around her, from behind. I looked away. I didn't want to see my mother smiling at me as if she wished I would give her the kind of affection my father was trying to give her.

“Hey—cut it out. I gotta concentrate.”

“What I think,” my father said, “is that you're still ten times more beautiful when you got your little things than most women are the rest of the time. Tell your mother, Davey—isn't she as beautiful as a movie star? Couldn't she of been a movie star if she wanted to?”

My mother put her lipstick on, very carefully, and then, with her index finger, some cake makeup, but you could still tell that her upper lip was swollen to almost twice its size, and you could see the tiny rows of blisters through the makeup.

The church bells sounded, through the window, six times.

“Oh shit,” my mother said. “Just shit. Sure. They'll be here any minute and I ain't even ready yet. Look at this face, will you? Will you just look at it?”

My father took my mother by the chin and turned her around to make her face him.

“So I'm looking and you still look terrific. That's all I got to say. Do you think I care about a few little pimples? I'll show you how much I care.”

He tried to kiss her on the lips. I imagined Abe walking up the staircase, smiling, taking the steps two at a time. All afternoon I'd tried to be alone so I could sort out my drawings and baseball cards and comic books and sports magazines, but my mother kept interrupting me, saying she was too excited about Abe coming, that she needed me to keep her company.

“Jesus,” she said, looking at the smear of red on my father's mouth and chin. “I didn't even blot myself yet and look what he's doing. What are you, crazy or something?”

“Yeah. I'm still crazy in love with you. Wouldn't you be crazy in love, Davey, if you were lucky enough to have a wife like I got?”

“But he's gonna be here in a second,” I said. “Jesus Christ! What's the matter with you two—don't you got ears? Didn't you hear the bells?”

“Oooh—has that one got a temper,” my mother said. “Only don't you curse in my room, mister. You wanna curse, you go into the alleys with your friends.” She turned to my father. “Thanks for coming home early like I asked. And for last night. Did I remember to tell you how much that meant to me?”

“Family is still family,” he said. “And I'll tell you the truth, Evie. Abe seemed different. I honestly think Abe is gonna be okay. And if Fasalino starts up with him, Abe's the one who can handle things. I mean, did we beat the Germans over there so that the Italians could kill us here?”

My mother never reacted when my father talked about Abe's business. She reached up, as if to wipe the lipstick from his chin, but instead she took the cigarette out of his mouth and put it in her own. The makeup was already cracking, the skin above her lips looking the way dirt did after heavy rains, when the rains had all dried up. She drew in on my father's cigarette, leaning backwards so that her skin, between the top of her panties and her brassiere, stretched flat.

“You really think I'm still beautiful, even when I got these things all over my face?”

“I honestly do, Evie.”

“Ah,” my mother said, and she smiled now, the way my father liked. “You're really cockeyed, Sol, do you know that?”

“Sure,” he said. He took his glasses off, set them down on the night table and began walking around the room, his hands out in front of him, feeling his way like a blind man. “Yeah, me, I'm the original cockeyed wonder, right?”

My mother laughed. With his glasses off, my father could hardly see anything, not even the big lettering on signs in store windows.

The buzzer went off in the kitchen, from downstairs.

“It's him,” I said. “He's
here.”

My mother backed up to the dresser and my father kept walking toward her.

“He's here!” I said. “Didn't you
hear?”

The buzzer went off a second time.

“See
—?” I said.
“Now
do you see?”

“Now do I see what?” my father asked. “The trouble is that I
don't
see.

“If we don't let him in he'll go away! Come
on!
Please!”

“So go let him in,” my father said. “Who's stopping you?”

I ran to the kitchen and, just as the buzzer sounded a third time, pressed on the button that clicked open the downstairs door. Then I went to our front door and listened for the sound of Abe coming into the lobby. I heard Kate barking, and I heard Abe's voice, and then Kate was quiet. It made me feel warm inside to think of Abe petting her. I looked down the staircase, through the crisscrossing of the banisters, and when I saw the top of Abe's head I pulled back quickly so he wouldn't think I was spying on him.