Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  “What I do is I use newspapers on the windows. It has chemicals in it that makes them shine.” He smiled. “That’s what I like to best of all, you see—to get a place ready before somebody starts to live in it. But you know who’s moving in, Davey?”

  I shook my head.

  “Gone to be a boy your age in the family, somebody you’ll have to play with.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Don’t know.” He led me back along the corridor and out the door. Under the surface of his skin—along the flat planes of his cheeks and under the brown pores that were pitted like the perforations between postage stamps—it seemed to me that there were shades of purple. Without the purple, I thought, the brown would not have seemed so deep and beautiful.

  “Stanley maybe. Or Steven. That be the boy’s name. Steven. His father’s a dentist.”

  When we got back downstairs my mother was next to the fence with Kate, waiting, and Beau Jack told her about the apartment and the family that was moving in, so that she wouldn’t get angry with me.

  “We’re going to see my father,” she said. “I’m hoping that maybe this time we’ll be able to talk him into coming home to live with us.”

  “You’re a good woman, Mrs. Voloshin,” Beau Jack said. “You’re a good daughter to that man.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice, Davey—if your grandpa came and lived with us?”

  I looked down. Kate licked at my right hand and I slipped it into her mouth so she could nibble on it. My mother laughed. She leaned on Beau Jack’s arm.

  “I think he’s afraid we’ll make him sleep out on the fire escape, this one is, but we wouldn’t do a thing like that, would we?”

  “Oh no,” he said. “We don’t put the boy out there. What we do if you got no more room is you send him down to live with me.”

  “My brother’s home, you know—Abe—so maybe he’ll figure out something for us.” She paused. “You remember my brother?”

  “Everybody knows Abe,” Beau Jack said.

  “Things’ll be different again now that he’s home. Sure. Maybe we’ll move down to Mrs. Farber’s apartment when she moves out and that way we’ll get an extra bedroom.” She pressed Beau Jack’s arm with her gloved hand. “We got first call on that, don’t we?”

  “I told Mr. Fogel you first in line.”

  “Or else Poppa can share Davey’s room with him for a while. We’ll get one of those nice hi-risers, so the room will still be just as big in the daytime. Sol don’t like the whole idea, and my father ain’t coming home with us right away, only you gotta start planning these things ahead.”

  “Oh yeah,” Beau Jack said. He took his shovel from against the fence and the metal scraped along the sidewalk, giving me chills. “You got to plan things.”

  My grandfather’s old age home was on the Lower East Side, a few blocks from where my father worked, and we had to change trains twice to get there. We walked up the six flights of stairs to his floor—the elevator was broken—and when we came into his room he was sitting up on the side of his bed with his feet on the floor, his head to his chest.

  “Shh,” my mother said. We took off our coats—my mother was wearing a Persian lamb coat with a mink collar that her father had given to her before he sold his fur store—and she tiptoed toward him, going around his bed to the far side, laying our coats across his blanket first. The room was about half the size of our gym at school and there was nothing in it except beds, wooden chairs, and, along the wall opposite the windows, a row of old metal lockers, one for each of the twenty men who lived in the room. The lockers were different colors—gray, brown and green mostly—but none of them had been painted for a long time and the rust showed through where the paint had chipped away.

  Five other men were in the room, two of them taking naps under their blankets, three sitting on chairs next to their beds. The man in the chair next to my grandfather’s bed was reading a book with Hebrew words in it. He had a lump on his neck that ran from just under his ear into his collar in an oval shape that made me imagine for a second that there was a hand grenade under the skin.

  My mother sat on the bed alongside my grandfather, reached into his lap and stroked one of his hands.

  “What?” My grandfather’s head jerked upwards. “What do you want from me? What?”

  “I’m sorry, Poppa. I didn’t mean to wake you. You must have been sleeping lightly—like a feather, yeah?”

  “Is Davey here?”

  I came around in front so he could see me.

  “Hello, Grandpa,” I said, and I leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. He took my shoulders in his hands and pressed me to his chest.

  “You’re a good boy, Davey.” He turned to my mother. “Why didn’t you call me first?”

  “I wanted to surprise you.”

  My grandfather slipped his feet into orange carpet-slippers, walked to where the lockers were. He took a key from his sweater pocket, opened the lock, fumbled around inside until he found what he wanted. On the inside of the locker door there was a mirror and a calendar. He looked into the mirror and opened his mouth wide, as if inspecting the fillings in his teeth.

  He handed me a Clark bar. Half the wrapper, at a diagonal, was faded to pale orange, as if it had been lying in the sun for a long time.

  “This is for you. I was saving it.”

  “Oh Poppa!” my mother exclaimed. She hugged him, but he just sat there stiffly. “Didn’t I tell you how much your grandpa loves you?”

  “Thank you, Grandpa.”

  “You’re a good boy, Davey.” He looked at my mother. “I always said he was a good boy, didn’t I?”

  My mother chewed on the corner of her lower lip, and I hoped she would give him the news about Abe right away so we could get it over with. My grandfather and Abe hadn’t seen each other since before I was born. My grandfather had not even come to my parents’ wedding, he hated Abe so much.

  Two old men limped into the room, leaning on one another. My mother waved to them, but they didn’t come to say hello. My grandfather wasn’t friendly with the men in his home. Most of them were observant Jews who spent a lot of time downstairs in the sanctuary and library, praying or studying. My grandfather didn’t believe in religion and he sometimes made fun of the other men for their beliefs.

  “Why don’t you eat your candy bar?” he asked me.

  I looked toward my mother, for permission.

  “Sure. Why not? That’s what he gave it to you for—to eat.”

  “He’s a good boy,” my grandfather said. “He’s a nice quiet boy. I like that. He doesn’t say much.”

  “Oh yeah,” my mother said, ruffling my hair. “He’s a real quiet one, this one is. You never know what he’s got spinning inside that gorgeous head of his.”

  “All right,” my grandfather said. “You came for a reason, Evie. So talk to me.”

  The Clark bar was hard as a stone, and while I tried to bite a chunk out of it I wondered again—as I did each time we visited—why it was my mother kept looking with so much love into the face of a man who treated her so badly. I agreed with my father—that there was nothing she could ever do that would please her father, so why did she keep trying? Did she think that if she could figure out what to do to make him love her, he would get back together with Abe—that they would all be a family again the way they’d been once upon a time? After our visits to him she usually explained to me that her father hadn’t always been this way, that when she was in high school her girlfriends had envied her, to have a man like him for a father—that he’d been very handsome, a sharp dresser, a man who liked to tell jokes, a man who always had a good word for people. But no matter what she said I could never imagine a picture of what his face had been like when he was younger.

  Sometimes I tried to make the faces of the old men in his home younger by taking away their wrinkles and their beards and by moving the position of their eyes downwards in their faces, but most of the time it seemed impossible for me tha
t these old men had ever had other lives. I knew that some of them had once been wealthy, that some had fought in wars—a man on the floor below my grandfather’s wore a medal on his bathrobe given to him by the Emperor Franz Joseph—and often when my grandfather made me walk to his locker with him so he could give me candy, I would glance in the mirror and try to imagine how I would look when I was an old man, at the end of my own life.

  “Abe is coming home.” My mother let out a long breath of air. “I mean, he came home yesterday—last night, Lillian said.”

  “I don’t know any Abe.”

  “Oh Poppa,” my mother said, and as she took both his hands in her own I saw tears glisten in her eyes. “He’s alive—Abe is alive, Poppa! He could have been killed every day, but he’s alive, and he’s home, don’t you see? Your own flesh and blood. Forgive and forget, Poppa. Please?” She closed her eyes and tried to get control of herself, to stop herself from trembling. “Listen. Lillian’s having a party tonight and I asked permission for you to come and even she thought it would be wonderful. So don’t you see?”

  My grandfather pulled his hands away and spoke to me: “What are you staring at? Go. Go look out the window. You don’t have to listen to this kind of talk.”

  I went to the window and looked at the city, at rooftops with pigeon coops and clotheslines and chimneys and smokestacks and water towers, at iron ladders and brick ledges all edged with narrow layers of snow. My mother was begging her father not to make her choose, and he talked back to her in a hard, cold voice, telling her that he had warned her that he would never eat or sleep where Abe had eaten or slept and that she’d known what she was doing when she made her decision.

  The window was open a few inches at the bottom, to let fresh air in, and I slipped my hands under it and raised it up. I leaned out so I could see the entrance to the building down below. I concentrated on the five windowsills below mine and the way they jutted out from the wall and got narrower and narrower, but in an even way like an upside-down pyramid, until they reached the first floor. I wondered what would happen if you’d jump—if you would have time to twist around backwards in midair and catch onto one of the sills with your hands, on the fourth or third or second floor, or if you missed, what would be the best way to land on the sidewalk, and if you could survive. In Ripley’s Believe It or Not there was a drawing of a sixteen-month-old baby from Buffalo, New York, who had fallen eleven floors from a fire escape and had survived, with only a broken wrist and bruises.

  I let myself imagine that Abe was holding me upside-down from the roof above, by my ankles, to test how brave I was and how much I trusted him.

  “Davey!”

  My mother grabbed me from behind. She yanked on my right ear with one hand while she tried to turn me around with the other, but I twisted away.

  “Are you nuts?” she screamed. “How many times do I gotta tell you not to lean out windows with your feet off the floor? How many times?”

  I let her drag me to my grandfather’s bed. A few of the old men seemed to be moving toward me. One of them pointed at me and yelled something at my grandfather in Yiddish and he yelled back. Then I saw that the men were moving, not toward me but toward the door, and I realized that a bell had rung while my mother was grabbing me—or that it had rung a few moments before that, while I was looking down at the sidewalk. My grandfather stood.

  “It’s time to eat,” he said.

  He started toward the door without saying goodbye. My mother went after him and whispered to him, glanced at me, motioned to me to turn away. I did, but I looked back a second later and saw her hand him something from her purse. Then she called to me.

  “Grandpa wants to say goodbye to you. He wants to give you something.”

  “Here.”

  My grandfather handed me two quarters.

  I took the money and thanked him.

  “You can give me a kiss goodbye.”

  He bent over and I stretched up and kissed him. He moved away again, but my mother held onto his sleeve. She told me to tell him that he should come to the party, that everybody would be disappointed if he didn’t. I did what she said, but while I spoke I thought about Tony and I wondered if anybody from his family had come home on the same troopship with Abe—any of his cousins or uncles—and if there would be parties for them. One of Tony’s two older brothers was overseas, in the Philippines. Had the government sent him there on purpose, because it didn’t trust him? My father had told me that Italian gangsters helped the American Army when we invaded Sicily near the end of the war—Tony knew the story and was proud of it—but I wasn’t sure if I’d have the courage to ask Abe the question that still bothered me: How did Italian soldiers fighting for America feel about killing Italian soldiers fighting for Italy?

  “Enough already,” my grandfather said. “I’m late. The food will all be gone.”

  He shuffled into the hallway where the men were crowding together at the staircase, then pushed a few men aside so he could get in front of them. If Tony and I could get to be in charge someday, would we be able to make peace between everybody so that when we were old men our children and grandchildren would visit us and bring us gifts and thank us? My mother was calling to my grandfather, telling him she loved him and would visit him again soon. She lied and said that my father had sent his regards. I let one of the quarters slip out of my hand and watched it roll across the floor.

  “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 whe
n 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.