Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  “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?

  I started near the top of the paper, sketching in my uncle’s hairline. It always felt easier for me to start at the top, with the forehead and hair and eyes, because that way I could be sure not to run out of space. When I first started doing portraits I sometimes began with the person’s shoulders and neck and lower part of the face but got so lost in the details that by the time I was ready to do the hair I found I’d run out of room on the paper. I didn’t like to do what they told you to do in books—to sketch in an outline of the entire head in an oval shape first, and then to section off the bottom, lengthwise, with three light parallel lines where the mouth and eye and nose lines were. I worked best when I worked feature by feature, making each one as real as I could before going on to the next. What I loved most, the way I did now when I saw that I was getting the line of Abe’s hair and his forehead right—the gentle way it sloped down toward the little rise above his eyebrows—was the feeling that I was making something where there had been nothing.

  I loved seeing the different parts of a person’s face come into being slowly, one at a time—the hair and then the forehead and then the right eye and then the left eye and then the nose and then the mouth—each appearing by itself on the white space and making the parts already done seem even more real than they’d been by themselves. To see a single eye staring out from a white space, all shaded in under the eyebrow so that you could feel the way the bone went in backwards, made me happy. When I’d stop and look at the person and then back at my drawing it seemed like a miracle to me that my own hands had been able to imitate reality while at the same time—though I never told this to anyone—it was as if my drawing was somehow more real than the person himself. I would get excited too, not just because I was able to draw things so they looked real, but because I’d be a little bit frightened all the time that I was going to mess up—that once I got the left eye I wouldn’t get the right eye to look as if it belonged with the left. Still, I liked the way being frightened got me worked up inside, into a kind of trance, yet let me concentrate on doing my best, on getting the reality of the face I could see inside my head, the face that stared up at me from the depth of the white paper.

  That seemed magical to me too—how deep the white of a plain piece of paper could be. Before I started drawing, the paper would be flat and blank and ordinary, but the minute I put a single line on it, the way I was doing now—starting to sketch the curls of my uncle’s hair lightly with a number 3 pencil—the flat white
space would suddenly seem to me to be the deepest thing in the world. It would seem to go down forever and ever, so that to sketch in lines first the way the books said, crisscrossing them across an egg shape like tick-tack-toe boxes, wiped away the depth the paper could hold and made it flat and ordinary again.

  It also seemed like cheating—as if anyone could draw faces correctly if only they could learn to follow rules—and I liked it when people admired my drawings at school, or at work with my father, and remarked on how incredible it was that a boy my age could draw the way I did, without sketching in an outline of the whole head first. Drawing portraits was something I could do that nobody else my age could do as well.

  Abe’s hairline was starting to recede at either side of his forehead, and I noticed the faint indentations there, where I imagined hair had been when he was younger. The hairline curved down gracefully from both sides of his head in what my mother said was a perfect widow’s peak—though I couldn’t figure out then why they used the word “widow” to describe a man’s hair. Abe’s hair was a deep brown, almost black, with a few wisps of gray at the temples, moving backwards over his head in thick curly waves, a little bit the way you’d see the waves in oceans drawn sometimes, one following the other in a nice easy way, and I left white spaces here and there near the tops of the curls to show the reflections. It made me feel good to see the effect you could get by leaving a bit of white just below the top of the gently rolling crests. Without the white it would look as if you’d traced a two-dimensional outline, like those in coloring books, but with the white highlights, which I added in a few places by blackening the hair first with a number 2B pencil and then erasing, you could feel the hair actually curving, one layer into the other, so that when I looked down at the paper I wanted to dip my fingers right in and press the curls flat and then feel them spring back up at me.

  I sketched in the worry lines on his forehead, three of them, lightly, and on the sides of his head I brushed in a few strokes, then rubbed the pencil marks with my index finger so that they blended into gray shadows that showed the shape of the skull curving beneath his skin. Abe had a nice high forehead, with flat planes along the sides. His sideburns ended near the bottoms of his ears, and his hair curled back there, hiding most of his ears so that from the front you saw only the outer rims. I began doing his eyes next—they were always my favorite parts of portraits, and if I got them right the rest usually went well—and as I outlined the left one, and got the folds above and below, and the light smile lines that radiated from the outer corner, like the fine lines you’d see in school books, in drawings of the way a flower’s roots spread out under the soil, I got upset for an instant because I knew I’d seen eyes exactly like Abe’s somewhere before. At first, because of the smile lines, I thought they reminded me of the way Ted Williams’s eyes looked. I’d copied a picture of Williams from Sport magazine, in which he was smiling at you, not from his Boston Red Sox uniform, but from the cockpit of a Marine fighter plane in the South Pacific. But there was something else too, and when I shaded in the space along the inner edge of Abe’s eye, where the eyebrow began sloping down along the bones of the nose and cheek, I realized that Abe’s eyes were steady and penetrating the way Williams’s eyes were—Williams had the best eyesight of any player who ever lived, and there was a photo in the article showing him reading the title of a song on a 78 rpm record while the record was still spinning—but that they were also like someone else’s eyes: like the eyes Abe’s father had, and that Abe was staring at me in the same way his father had stared at my mother the day before, when she mentioned Abe’s name.

  As I drew in the lines under his eyes, and then went back up and began darkening the middle of the eye, pressing down lightly, yet with enough force so that you could tell that the deep brown of the iris was lighter-colored than his hair, I knew I was nervous. My hand trembled slightly, so I put my left hand on the paper, at the bottom edge, palm down, and leaned my right hand on it for steadiness. Abe’s eyes seemed gentle because of the wrinkle lines around them and the soft way they were set into their hollows, but there was something in them that terrified me—something hard and unforgiving that told me there wasn’t anything in life, no cruelty that he had not seen.

  I kept drawing, though, and by the time my mother and Lillian and Sheila returned to the living room, I was almost done. They came up behind me and made a big fuss about how my picture looked exactly like Abe, and my father kept saying he’d told them so, hadn’t he? He’d told them what a terrific gift I had.

  The welts on Lillian’s cheek were red, as if she had fingers stuffed under her skin. Sheila had put on fresh lipstick. She bent down close to the paper.

  “Hey, that’s good, Davey,” she said. “You really draw good. How’d you do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He don’t know,” my mother laughed. “With a gift like that, he don’t know. Oh my Davey!” She started to give me a kiss, to show how proud she was of me, but my father grabbed her hands and warned her about not touching me while I was drawing. “You know what I think the secret is?” she said. “I think the secret comes from how quiet he is all the time. It leaves him lots of time for staring, you know what I mean? I never seen a kid who could stare so much.”

  I was working on Abe’s lips, the final part of the picture, and my mother, seeing where I was, warned Abe not to talk. She said that when he was a kid, Abe was like me. She remembered how he could look at a single page in a magazine for hours. When he wasn’t even two years old, people were amazed at him, the way he could stare at records or newspapers or playing cards or the voice from a radio, without moving. Some people thought he was a genius, the way he could concentrate, and before he was a year old he was able to pick out any song from a stack of records, or give you any card you wanted from a deck of cards.

  Abe looked at me with affection and I could tell that it pleased him for my mother to remember him this way. His mouth opened slightly and that helped—it was what I’d been waiting for because I was able to draw him with his lips parted and turned up a bit at the ends, and that softened his expression. He had a large lower lip, very full, with a nice deep shadow under it in a crescent. I darkened in his long upper lip with a plain number 2 pencil and put in a highlight along the top edge with my eraser, then shaded the lower lip with a number 3H pencil so it would be lighter. I shaded in the points at either end of his mouth—they were like dimples—and did the same for the cheek lines that came down from beside his nose and curved around his mouth, and then I softened those lines by smudging them sideways slightly with my finger, to give the effect of roundness.

  I stopped to see if I needed to touch up anything else. My father was talking about how a man like Abe didn’t need to use words in this world, and Lillian was saying back to him about how, in his own quiet way, Abe was going to get things reorganized now that he was back, about how things were going to be different, more high-class.

  “Personally, my Abe has no use for rough stuff,” she said. “I mean, rough stuff is out of date, right? Behind the times, if you know what I mean.”

  She looked at Abe, and his mouth set itself in a hard line again.

  My father tried to change the subject by talking about Roosevelt and how sad it was that he hadn’t lived to see the end of the war, but his words didn’t change the expression on Abe’s face.

  I left the paper behind Abe’s head blank, not shading it in with the little crisscross lines I often used—the kind professional artists put behind heads for a background. It seemed right for Abe to have a lot of open space around him, without the background calling attention to the fact that what you were seeing was a drawing made with pencils, and in that open space I imagined Abe’s henchmen spinning in long loops, like planets circling the sun, all of them grinning like idiots and waving their hands and telling Abe how great he was.

  “I think it’s done,” I said, and before my mother or father could get to it, I picked it up and turned it around s
o that Abe could see first.

  He looked at the drawing, nodded a few times, and then he swallowed. I watched his Adam’s apple slide up and down in his throat, and his eyes, I saw, became moist. He stood and set the picture back down on my drawing board, then bent over and kissed me on the forehead. He let his lips stay there for a few seconds.

  “Didn’t I tell you the kid was terrific?” my father said. “Didn’t I? I mean, is he terrific or is he terrific?”

  “So come on, Abe—say something already,” Lillian said. “Do you like it or not?”

  “Shh,” my mother said to both of them, and the soft quality of her voice surprised me. “Shh. Can’t you tell how much he likes it?”

  I didn’t know what time it was or if I’d been sleeping for a few minutes or a few hours, when I realized that my mother was in my room, sitting on the bed.

  She caressed my cheek with her hand. “Don’t be scared,” she said. “It’s just me.”

  Light slipped in through the slats in my Venetian blinds. I rubbed my eyes and tried to get used to the dark. She moved closer to me. Through my covers I could feel the warmth of her body. All her makeup was off and the swelling on her lips was pretty much gone. Under her robe she wore a silk nightgown. Her face looked gray and peaceful.

  “That was nice of you to give Abe the picture. It meant a lot to him.”

  She moved her fingers across her face as if she might have been wiping tears away. I took my hand out from under the cover so I could touch her nightgown, and I wondered how long she’d been sitting there, watching me.

  “You’re a good boy, Davey, did you know that?”

  “I suppose.”

  She didn’t laugh at me this time, and I had the feeling, in the silence, that there was something else she wanted to say to me, something about Abe’s life, something about what he’d been like before I was born, when they were brother and sister growing up together.