Before My Life Began (7 page)

My Aunt Lillian reached me first. She bent down, grabbed me behind the ears, pulled me up to her. She wore her long fur coat with the fox heads around the collar, a coat Abe had bought her before he went overseas—not a coat my grandfather had made.

“So come on and give your Aunt Lillian a big kiss,” she said, “and tell me where your mother's hiding.”

“In the bedroom.”

“Oh yeah?” She laughed and moved past me, into the apartment, calling out my mother's name. “And give your cousin Sheila a kiss too,” she called back. “You're not too old for that yet, are you?”

“Oh come on, Ma,” Sheila said. “He's just a baby.”

I pressed my back to the wall and didn't look into Sheila's face. Sheila was fifteen years old and until about two years ago she baby-sat for me whenever my parents went out. At night sometimes now, if I was allowed out after supper, I'd see her hanging around in the doorways of the stores on Rogers Avenue with her girlfriends, or with some of the older guys from the neighborhood.

“Wanna kiss me?” she asked.

She smelled like soap and when I peeked upwards I could see that she was wearing bright orange-red lipstick. I kept quiet. She laughed at me the way her mother did and walked off. I didn't feel well. I'd forgotten that Abe wasn't coming by himself.

“Hello Davey.”

I looked up into Abe's face then. He was looking down at me with a smile that seemed half happy and half sad. He touched my hair gently and when he did I felt that he knew exactly what I was feeling.

“Hi,” I said, and I looked down again.

“It's okay to give me a kiss—or we can just shake. Whatever you want.”

I put my hand into his and shook it, trying to give him my best grip, and then he was carrying me into the apartment and lifting me up toward the ceiling so that my head nearly scraped the light fixture. I looked down into his face and laughed with him. His eyes were shining.

“Are you still my boy?” he asked. “Answer me that—are you still my favorite little guy?”

“I hope so.”

“Sure you are.” He let me down a little so that my face was level with his. He held me in front of him for a second, staring at me—his eyes didn't blink or move sideways—and then he pressed me to him so that our cheeks touched. His skin was smooth and warm.

“Come on, you two guys,” my mother said, pulling us apart. She put her arms around Abe's neck but warned him not to kiss her on the mouth. They walked to the living room, their arms around each other's waists. My mother looked back at me. “So come on already. What are you waiting for—a royal invitation?”

After supper we sat in the living room and I was scared Abe might leave without asking to see my drawings. My father stayed close to Abe, patting him on the back a lot and telling him how terrific he looked, and I just stared at my uncle and tried to imagine what he was thinking. I wondered about what he'd thought of on all those dark nights when he was out on patrol and his life could have ended in the next instant. I wondered how he felt to have to be living with Lillian and Sheila again. I wondered if he was worried about Fasalino's men crossing over borders and ambushing Avie or Benny or Spanish Louie or my father, forcing them to betray him.

Abe hardly said a word, and this made me feel that he could tell how two-faced my father was—how quickly my father would change his opinion just so he could get Abe or my mother to like him. I stood with my back against the door to my bedroom, feeling very small, and what I wanted to do was to tear my father's fingers from Abe's shoulder—to shove him up against a wall and force him to tell Abe the truth of how he felt.

But there was nothing I could do, I knew, except to wait and hope. I was almost happy when Sheila interrupted to say she needed to leave to do her homework. Lillian told her that her homework could wait—since when was she such a perfect student?—and then she said that if we were boring her so much she should go into my room with me and we should play something together.

“Oh Ma, he's just a baby,” she said, but even while she said it she walked past me, opened the door to my room, and went in. “Come on,” she said. “As long as we got to.”

I followed her, and Lillian laughed while my mother said what she always did whenever Sheila visited me—about how when I was a baby she used to put Sheila into the bathtub with me, and about how Sheila had liked to help bathe my ducky-wucky.

“Do you wanna play Monopoly?” I asked.

Sheila looked at the magazines on my bed.

“Is all you guys ever think about sports?”

“I don't know.”

“You'll be the same as all the rest. Sports, sports, sports—it's the only thing that ever fills up your head.” Then she giggled. “Except for one other thing.”

“What's that?”

“You're too young.”

“I'm past eleven,” I said. “I'll be twelve next September.”

She went to the window, turned around, leaned backwards and arched her back so that her breasts stood out inside her sweater. Her sweater was a pale yellow-pink, the color of peaches.

“Do you think I'm pretty?”

“I guess so,” I said. “I don't know.”

“People say I'm gonna look like my mother when I grow up, but I think I got my father's eyes and smile more.” She came closer so that her breasts almost touched my chest. She wore the kind of brassiere that made me think of the nose cones on dive-bombers. “My mother was real pretty when my father married her. Not all fat the way she is now, with too much makeup.”

I looked into her face quickly and saw that she was right, that she had Abe's soft brown eyes.

“You wanna play something else?” she asked. “I got a new game.”

“Okay.”

“You ever play ‘Radio'?”

“No.”

“You wanna learn?”

“I guess so.”

“You sit down on the bed,” she said, “and I sit next to you.”

I sat on the bed and she sat next to me. Then she smiled—her gums showed above her teeth the way Abe's did—and twisted herself around so that she was almost on top of me and I could smell her again, the way I could in the foyer. She closed her eyes. I waited. I heard my mother and Lillian laughing. Sheila opened her eyes and pushed her chest toward me.

“How you play radio is that you turn my knobs and your antenna goes up.”

“I don't get it,” I said. “What knobs?”

But as soon as I said it, she jiggled herself from side to side so that her breasts rubbed against me, and then she started laughing, forcing herself at first, then lying back on the bed and covering her mouth and getting hysterical and pointing at me and making fun of how red my face was getting.

“You're an idiot,” I said, standing. “I don't gotta play with you. You're crazy.”

“Oh yeah?” she said, and she clapped her hand over her mouth again, to keep from laughing too loud. “Wanna hear another game?”

I stood by the window, looking out into the courtyard, wondering if Kate and Beau Jack were nice and warm together in their apartment. I heard Sheila come up behind me and when she touched my back I twisted away and shoved past her to the door.

“You leave off me, do you hear? Do you
hear?”

“What're you scared of? Don't you like girls?”

“I don't like you and your stupid games.”

She came closer but she didn't touch me.

“So here's the other game,” she said. “It's called ‘Crazy,' and in this game I get to put my hands in your pockets, see, and then you ask me if I'm feeling crazy and when I say yes, you say, ‘Well, you put your hands in a little bit further and you'll feel nuts!'”

She lay down on my bed again, laughing and rolling from side to side and pointing at me. I wanted to smash her face in, but instead I just went back into the living room.

“Hey,” my mother said. “You two sound like you're having one swell time in there.”

“My Sheila knows how to have a good time,” Lillian said. “She's just like I was. Didn't I always like a good time, Abie? Didn't we have fun?”

“Can we go home
now?”
Sheila asked, coming into the room and smoothing down her hair.

“You stop pouting,” Lillian said. She turned to my mother. “Don't she look gorgeous when she's mad?”

“Sheila's a pretty girl,” my mother said. “I always said so. She'll hook a guy before you know it.”

“Be a good girl, I keep telling her,” Lillian said. “And if you can't be good, be careful, right?”

“Stop,” Abe said. His voice was hard.

“Yeah, Ma,” Sheila said, smiling at her father. “You make me embarrassed.”

“Since he's back it's like instead of a sergeant in the Army he's Holy Joe from Holy Cross or something. All he does all day is tell us to stop talking the way we talk.” She stopped. Her eyes flickered. “I was good enough for you before the war, so what's the matter with me now? You get used to them high-class French broads or something?”

“You won't talk this way,” Abe said.

“Why? You're gonna stop me the way you used to stop everyone, huh? You're gonna have your goons do a job on me too, like—”

Abe slapped her face so quickly that I wasn't sure I saw him do it. Then he sat. We waited. In the silence I could still hear the crack of his palm against Lillian's cheek. I saw the red marks rise on her face. Her eyes and mouth opened wide, but it was my mother who started crying.

“Oh Abe, my baby!” she cried. “What did they do to you over there? Tell me, darling. I was so worried all the time. I was so worried. What did they
do
to you. What did you have to see?”

“We should go,” Abe said. “Get your coats.”

“I think maybe you should put some ice on your cheek,” my father said. “I really think so. Do you want me to get you some ice, Lillian?”

“A lot of good that one is,” my mother said. “What are you asking for—don't you see how fast she's swelling up? Don't you got eyes?”

“Here we go again,” Sheila said.

“She's right,” my father said, forcing a smile. “It seems like old times again already, doesn't it?”

“He didn't get enough fighting over there,” Lillian said, “so he gotta come home and start in.”

My mother put out her arms and Lillian went to her. The two of them kissed and hugged and sniffled. Sheila laughed. My father shrugged. Abe was looking at me, puzzled, a new crease line between his eyes. I imagined one of Tony's brothers machine-gunning him to death in an alleyway. My mother pressed the cold washcloth against Lillian's cheek and talked about the kind of job she wanted to get. My father told her to be quiet, that he didn't like talking business when we were with family for a happy occasion. My mother sat next to Abe and took his hands in hers. I remembered that Little Benny had come to the party late the night before and had gone into the bedroom with Abe. After that, two of Abe's men had taken turns guarding the building downstairs, with Louie Newman on the roof for lookout. If I knew where Abe was hiding out and Fasalino's men caught me and tortured me—upside-down with a hose in my mouth, or with pliers to tear my nails off, or by making me watch them do cruel things to my mother—would I be strong enough not to rat on him?

“Listen,” she said. “I'm not complaining about Sol's job, only I just wanted to say that if you should run across something—a good opportunity, if you know what I mean—you should keep Sol in mind.”

Abe went to the foyer, took their coats from the closet. I stared at him hard so that he'd notice me. He looked my way for a few seconds, nodded his head once.

“Yes,” he said. He came back into the living room, set the coats down on the couch. “Yes.” He smiled. “Can I see your drawings, Davey?”

“But I thought we were
going!”
Sheila said.

“This one here is worse than his father sometimes, the way he won't speak up for himself,” my mother said. “If I'm not for myself, who then? That's what Poppa always used to say to us, didn't he, Abe?”

“Can I see your drawings?” Abe repeated, as if he hadn't heard my mother.

“So get your drawings already,” my mother said. “Didn't you hear your Uncle Abe? Why do you always gotta be asked twice?”

“If you want to wait until we can have more time, alone, that's all right too,” Abe said to me. “It's late and you must be very tired.”

“It's okay. I can show them to you now.”

“Look,” my father said, taking me by the arm and stopping me from going into my room. “We'll do even better than that. Listen. I got an idea. Everybody sit down.” He took Abe by the arm. “I mean, my son got a talent—a real gift like you won't believe, Abe. So you sit down here and watch something you'll remember for the rest of your life. Everybody sit.”

My father pulled his desk chair out from next to the breakfront—the top drawer of the breakfront opened down on hinges and my father worked there at night sometimes, paying bills and writing letters—and he made Abe sit.

“You go get your paper and pencils, Davey, and then you draw Abe's picture for him the way you know how, okay? I mean you won't believe it, Abe, the way this kid can copy people's faces so it looks just like them. It's a gift from God is what I think, a boy his age.”

“Don't go showing him off so much,” my mother said. “Maybe Davey don't feel like it. You shouldn't force the boy.”

“Who's forcing? The way he worships Abe, you think I gotta force him? He don't want to do it, all he's gotta do is say so.”

I took my drawing pad and a few different-number pencils from my room, and the old cutting board from the kitchen that I used for leaning on—I'd sandpapered it down so that the nicks and scratches were gone—and I brought a wooden chair in from my bedroom. I liked to sit on something hard when I drew. I set myself up about five feet from Abe so that I'd be able to see all the details in his face. Lillian and my mother and Sheila went to the kitchen to make more coffee. My father pulled a chair up behind me so he could watch, and he started talking about what a great drawer I was and how he figured that with a gift like mine I could be practically anything—I could go into advertising or commercial art or make comic books or do pictures for medical books or engineering companies. Or maybe I would be an architect, he said, and design new kinds of buildings for the future, like the ones at the World's Fair. Did I remember when he took me to the World's Fair before the war, he asked, and carried me around on his shoulders?