Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  The lobby of our building was quiet. We lived on the third floor, in apartment 3B, and I walked up the stairs, took the key out from under the doormat—my father wasn’t home from work yet—and let myself in. What would happen to Tony? If his brothers found out that he’d let himself get caught by my uncle’s men, how rough would they be on him? In the kitchen, I looked up the Davidoff number, put a dish towel over the mouthpiece of the telephone. I told Rosie’s mother where she was, but hung up when she started screaming questions at me. I went to my room, got my ruler and pencil and scissors from my desk, then took a copy of the New York Post from the newspaper rack in the living room and brought it with me to the kitchen table. Starting with the sports pages, I drew lines with a pencil, up and down and back and forth, across the photos of all the Dodger and Giant and Yankee players. There was an article from the day before about the Dodgers who’d be coming back as soon as the war ended, guys I’d never seen but had read about—Pee Wee Reese and Pistol Pete Reiser and Cookie Lavagetto and Billy Herman and Ed Head and Kirby Higbe and Hugh Casey—and I cut their faces into little squares, first sideways and then up and down. I cut through five pages at a time. I brushed the squares of newsprint with the side of my hand to the edge of the oilcloth and into a paper bag I took out from under the sink. I nicked the oilcloth a few times—it was an old green-checkered one we’d been using ever since I could remember—and smoothed the nicks down with saliva.

  When I finished with the New York Post I went into the hallway where the incinerator was, found the comics section from the previous Saturday and brought it inside. Scorchy Smith was on the front page, frying Japs with his flamethrower. I smiled and ruled lines across Scorchy and the Japs and the palm trees and the B-24 Super-Fortresses and cut the comics into squares. I’d sent my Uncle Abe a few sets of drawings I’d made of Scorchy Smith and the pictures seemed so good to him he thought I’d traced them. So I sent him more, and I also sent him some of the actual comic strips so that he could compare the sizes—mine were a little smaller—and see that I’d done the drawings myself, freehand.

  When I was done pouring the pieces of paper into the bag I twisted the top closed and shook it up and down so that the colored pieces would mix with the black-and-white. Then I looked out the window and I felt even better because—as if my finishing just when I did made it happen—there was my father walking along the street from the No-strand Avenue end, coming home from work.

  There were still big crowds at both ends of the street—our block was one of the longest in the neighborhood—but in the middle, where my father was, he was all alone, and I watched him walking under the lampposts and felt happier than I had all night because I knew I’d be by myself waiting for him, to give him the good news.

  I cleaned up the kitchen table, put my ruler and pencil and scissors back into the desk drawer, then turned out all the lights in the apartment, locked the door and got into the front hall closet. That was where my father always went first when he got home, to hang up his coat or jacket. I set the paper bag down at my feet, but away from me so it wouldn’t rustle, next to where the carpet sweeper was, and I waited. It was broiling hot in the closet, but the soft wool of my father’s black winter coat against my cheek soothed me. I wondered how hot the subway had been for him. I breathed in through my nose, the odors of wool and camphor and stale cigarettes—my father smoked over three packs of Chesterfields a day—making my eyes tear.

  I imagined listening to his footsteps coming up from the second floor landing—he always stopped there, to get his breath back—and then I imagined myself running down the street with him toward the corner where my mother was, and of how we’d throw my confetti into the air, and of how some of the pieces of the comics would stick in his hair. I saw him smiling proudly, one arm around my shoulder, his other arm around my mother’s waist. I saw him pulling us to him from either side, to give us kisses.

  His key was turning the lock and then, through the slit at the bottom of the closet door, I saw that he’d put the foyer light on. I held my breath and while I did it occurred to me for the first time that because it had been such a hot day he might have gone to work without his jacket, but I was afraid to move my hands and feel around to find out. My eyes pressed closed as tightly as I could get them, I tried to see him when I was looking down on him from the window, and when the picture came into my head I breathed out: his thin summer jacket was folded over his right arm, the newspaper rolled up just above it, chest high.

  A second later the closet door opened and in the yellow foyer light I saw the pale skin on the back of his hand—he was reaching for a hanger—and I pushed out toward him and began shouting that the war was over.

  “What are you—crazy or something!?”

  He dropped the hanger and it bumped me over my right eye. He reached in, snatched me hard on my right arm, above the elbow where my muscle was, and dragged me the rest of the way from the closet.

  “What are you trying to do—give me a heart attack? Are you crazy or are you crazy?”

  He shook me hard—he had tremendous power in his hands—and then shoved me away from him.

  “I just wanted to surprise you,” I said.

  “I don’t need surprises.”

  “But the war’s over, Poppa—and Uncle Abe will be coming home now! Momma said so.”

  “Wonderful.”

  He pushed by me but there was no anger on his face now. He looked tired, the way he usually did at night after work. His right eyelid was drooping down behind his thick glasses—he was blind in his left eye, from having lost all sight there when he was six years old—and when he hung up his jacket he slipped his hand into its side pocket and came out with a crumpled pack of Chesterfields. The cellophane crackled like the sound of fire.

  He walked away from me, to the kitchen.

  “You’re all sweaty,” he said, over his shoulder. “You should dry off so you don’t get a chill.”

  I followed him into the kitchen.

  “Aren’t you happy that the war is over?”

  He was at the sink, running cold water over his wrists to cool himself off. His glasses off, he looked at me sideways with his good eye, then splashed water on his face.

  “I’m happy the war’s over,” he said, but his voice was flat.

  I showed him my bag. “I made confetti.”

  He was reading his newspaper. He held it in one hand while he opened the door to the icebox with the other.

  “What?”

  “I made confetti.”

  “I thought you said spaghetti. Did Momma leave me supper?”

  “We never ate,” I said. “I think we forgot—I mean, I don’t think she ever got to make supper—we were too busy being excited because of the war being over.” I heard the sentence in my head that I could use to get him to do what I wanted: “Momma’s down at the corner with everybody, but she sent me back to get you so we could all celebrate together, like a family.”

  “So?”

  He was at the kitchen counter again, slicing a piece of American cheese for himself. His cigarette stuck to the corner of his lower lip.

  “So I waited for you so we could go to the corner together. Don’t you want to come? I got enough confetti for both of us. I made it all myself.”

  He exhaled, smoke curling toward the ceiling, and when he looked at me and nodded his head up and down a few times it was as if he were really listening to me for the first time.

  “Sure, Davey,” he said. “Sure.”

  He washed the stub of his cigarette under the faucet, forced it down the drain.

  “Momma’s expecting us, you said? She’s really waiting for me?”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  “Sure.”

  I went into his bedroom with him while he changed. When he lifted his hands up over his head, to pull his undershirt off—he wore the sleeveless kind with straps that hung loosely across his shoulders—I stared at the hair in his armpits and at the way the muscles rippled on his u
pper arms. Even though he was a small, thin man, I was always amazed at how powerful his arms were from tying packages all day at Gordon’s, where he worked on the Lower East Side. Gordon’s was a men’s clothing store that sold merchandise on the installment plan. Sometimes on school vacation I’d go to work with my father and watch him at the counter next to the cash register and be proud of the way he could snap the twine off with his bare hands, without using a scissor or a knife.

  “Should you take your air raid warden’s stuff?” I asked.

  “What for? The war’s over.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I saw some of the men wearing their old Army hats and parts of their uniforms, so I thought maybe you should.”

  We walked downstairs. When we got to the lobby he put his cigarette out in the standing ashtray and lifted my face up toward his, his hand under my chin.

  “You like it when I get dressed up in my air raid warden’s stuff?”

  I nodded. I figured he knew that I sometimes took the stuff out of his closet when my friends and I played war—the helmet and arm band and silver whistle and flashlight and gas mask.

  “So listen,” he said, smiling. “Maybe if I don’t have to turn the stuff back in, I’ll let you have it. Okay? Would you like that?”

  “Would I!” I exclaimed, and I couldn’t keep from lunging toward him, from hugging him around the waist as tightly as I could. “Oh Poppa!”

  “Well, I ain’t promising,” he said. “It depends on if they make you pay or not—that gas mask must of cost a few good bucks. But if I don’t gotta pay, maybe I can let you have it.”

  He patted the top of my head and I let go of him.

  “Okay? It’s a deal?”

  “It’s a deal.”

  We went outside and started toward the corner. “I’ll tell you something else. Listen. Sure I’m happy the war’s over, but you know the one thing I’m sorry about?”

  I thought of saying something about Uncle Abe coming home, but I didn’t.

  “What?”

  He looked at me in a very serious way, shaking his head up and down. His good eye was moist.

  “I’m only sorry F.D.R. didn’t live to see this day. He was a wonderful man, President Roosevelt. He…” He stopped. “Come. Momma’s waiting.”

  At the corner, we found my mother right away. Her lipstick was on straight and she gave my father a big hug and kiss.

  “So look who’s here finally!”

  Before my father could say anything about what I’d said to him to get him there, I tugged on her dress and showed her the bag with the confetti.

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “I made it,” I said. “I cut it all up myself. It took me a long time.”

  “Ain’t he something?” she said to my father. “Ain’t this little one something?”

  “You want some?” I asked.

  “And why not?”

  She reached in and took a big handful. Then I pushed the bag toward my father and he took a big handful too. Between them they’d taken more than half.

  “Hey Sol—” she yelled at my father. “Guess what?”

  “What?”

  “The war’s over!” she yelled, and she threw her confetti into his face.

  My father tried to laugh, but when some of the pieces of paper got stuck in his mouth, he gagged. He coughed and spat and my mother turned him around and pounded him on the back with the flat of her hand.

  “Raise up your hands over your head—”

  My father looked at me, his hands in the air as if he were being robbed, and I saw that his eye was tearing badly. He stopped gagging.

  “So what are you waiting for?” he asked me. “Throw already.”

  I wanted to get a really good effect, so I tore my bag down from the top on two sides to expose the rest of the confetti, balanced the bag on my hands from underneath and gave as hard a toss as I could, upwards. All the confetti went up in a kind of clump, though, and as the clump fell only a few pieces detached themselves and fluttered. My mother was leaning on my father’s shoulder, laughing at him, picking pieces of paper from his face and hair. I looked at the empty paper bag and I felt embarrassed.

  People were cheering and pointing towards Rogers Avenue, where I saw a silver-gray DeSoto come along, men on both running boards—five of them—and they had guns in their hands and were shooting them into the air as if they were cowboys riding a stagecoach. Little Benny was in the front seat, wearing a brown felt hat pulled down on one side, shading his eyes. He was grinning from ear to ear, as if he’d just won the war himself. When my father saw who they were, he spit on the ground, three times.

  “They should rot in hell,” he said.

  “Shh,” my mother said. “C’mon, Sol. Someone will hear.”

  I looked at the ground where my father’s spit had gone, and it seemed to me that the mounds of paper that had risen almost to my knees by now were ocean waves. I imagined myself standing at Coney Island, knee-deep in the water, holding my father’s eyeglasses in my hands while he swam out, arm over arm, to get cooled off, and I saw how frightened I was, that if he went too far he might disappear under the waves and never come back.

  A few feet away from me Marvin Ellenbogen, who lived downstairs from us in our building, was going around picking up bunches of confetti and streamers with his hands and stuffing it all into an A & S shopping bag. I stared at him for a while—things seemed quieter somehow—and then I hunted around until I found a bag and I did the same. I pushed over to Marvin and raised my bag up over my shoulder and tossed the whole thing at his face and this time the stuff sprayed out beautifully. For a second I found myself wishing that Tony Cremona could be there to see, and when I thought of him, my heart bumped. Then I threw the bag away and just started scooping up as much paper as I could hold in my hands and arms and heaving the stuff at Marvin while he did the same back to me. I lost sight of my mother and father, but that was just as well, I figured, because I knew my father would probably have had that sour look on his face again by this time. I knew that he was probably beginning to think that when Abe came home from the Army he would have to quit his job at Gordon’s and go to work for him again, no matter how much he didn’t want to.

  2

  ON THE MORNING that Lillian called to tell us Abe’s troopship had arrived and that she was going to have a big welcome home party for him that night at her house, my mother and father were near the end of one of their fights. I’d heard some of it between dreams—it was about money again, and how my father didn’t earn enough but still kept forbidding my mother to get a job—and when I went to the bathroom in the morning my father’s small blue canvas satchel was at the door. Whenever I saw it waiting there by itself I knew he wouldn’t be coming home after work. He did that sometimes, and stayed in a hotel for a few nights or with one of his two brothers. Usually, he’d explain to me afterwards, he left home not to punish my mother for anything she’d done to him but because he felt her life would be happier without him in it.

  He was still home when the call came. My mother and I were eating breakfast and listening to “Rambling with Gambling.” Through the window at the end of the kitchen I could see bands of snow about an inch high on the railings and stairs of the fire escape, white on orange, and I narrowed my eyes and stared, to see if the snow was perfectly level or if it had begun to melt in places.

  My mother turned the radio down, and as soon as she got the news about Abe—the phone was on the wall between the table and the icebox and she put one hand over the mouthpiece and whispered to me that Abe was home but that we couldn’t say hello to him because Lillian said he was asleep—tears started down from her eyes, sliding along the crease lines around her mouth.

  She asked a lot of questions about how Abe looked and how he was feeling—it was January 1946, five months since the war ended—and if he’d asked about her. She apologized to Lillian for crying like an idiot, and while she carried on I thought of all the drawings I’d saved up
for Abe and of which ones I would take, even though I knew that taking them would mean showing them to him in front of other people.

  “Is it really true this time?” I asked when she hung up.

  “It’s really true.”

  She switched the radio off and stuffed the antenna wires that came out of the back—the copper showed through in spots, smooth orange between the thin twisting lines of red and white—into the wooden console. She turned in a circle like a little girl, looking around the room as if she didn’t know what to do next, then she leaned over the sink, knocked on the wall, called into the bathroom to my father that Abe was home, that Lillian was making a party, that he should come home early from work. He didn’t answer. He was coughing again, the way he did every morning, and I imagined him bent over the toilet bowl, hands on thighs. My mother went into the foyer, came back with her pocketbook. She sat next to me, took out the compact that had her initials, E.V., engraved on the gold cover—“E.V.—get it?” she liked to say to people. “My initials and name are just the same!”—and inspected her face, twisting her mouth this way and that, running her tongue around between her gums and her lips. She rubbed rouge into her cheeks, and then, while she smiled at me over the mirror in her compact, she put on fresh lipstick from a brass-colored tube that looked like a machine gun bullet, and blotted her lips with a tissue.

  “There!” she said. “What do you think?”

  I shrugged and tried to keep eating. But it was hard to get the hot cereal to go down smoothly. The grains of Ralston stuck at the back of my throat and all I could think of was what it was going to be like to actually see Abe again. I’d only been in the second grade when he left for training camp four years before. He’d had a furlough once after that and had met my Aunt Lillian in Atlantic City while their daughter Sheila came and stayed with us, but I never saw him again before he was shipped overseas. Abe had been a hero and had killed a lot of Germans. Once, on a postcard, he said that he’d killed two Nazis just for me, and what I wondered—what scared me—was if killing somebody up close would change you in ways that you couldn’t ever change back, even if you didn’t know the person and even if you knew the other person would have killed you first if he could have. I wondered if he would still like me.