Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  “Your father was real proud of you too. He was worried before we went to sleep that maybe he shouldn’t have pushed you so much to do Abe’s picture and that maybe you felt forced to give it to him, but I told him I could tell you wanted to, that keeping things like that for yourself don’t matter much to a boy like you. One thing you’re not is selfish.” She touched my cheek again. “You mean a lot to your father, did you know that?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Oh Davey, Davey,” she said. “What are we gonna do with a boy like you?”

  “Keep me, I guess.”

  “Sure. You got a sense of humor too. But listen, I didn’t want to wake you up. It was just that I couldn’t sleep and it relaxes me if I can sit here and watch you when vou’re sleeping. Do you mind?”

  “No.”

  “You love your uncle a lot, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. You’re just like I was, I guess.” In the faint light from the window her face looked very beautiful to me. “I wish you’d known what he was like when he was young. I mean, who didn’t worship him? He was always good to me. He brought me presents all the time. We used to snuggle in bed when we were kids and then, even when we got older and could go out on double dates together, we’d hold hands with each other sometimes. He was very affectionate, Davey. I mean, he was always a big shot wherever he was—in school and in the neighborhood, with sports or with the guys or with women—but most people never knew how much affection he could give you when he was alone. Do you see what I’m saying—what I’m trying to tell you?”

  “He’s said he’s gonna take me to a Dodger game,” I offered. “Maybe to a doubleheader on Memorial Day.”

  She brushed back my curls. “Sure,” she said. “If Abe makes a promise he always keeps it. But who can tell what the future’s gonna bring—that’s what I’m trying to say to you, Davey. Who can tell? Who can ever know?” She put her hands on the sides of my face to make me look straight up into her eyes. “You won’t tell your father about me being here, okay? I mean, this is just between you and me, like a private conversation, all right?”

  “Sure.”

  “No matter what you hear or what people say I want you always to remember that your uncle Abe is a good man.” Her fingernails suddenly tightened into my cheeks, but I didn’t dare let her know she was hurting me. “He’s a good man, do you hear? Do you hear? No matter what people say I want you always to remember what I’m telling you right now. He did the best he could. He had no choice. If my father—”

  She pulled away from me and stuck her fist into her mouth and bit down so hard I got scared she was going to make herself bleed.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. “Do you want me to get you a glass of water?”

  We heard noises from the other side of the wall that separated my bedroom from my parents’ and we both froze. I imagined my father stumbling through the house without his eyeglasses. I wondered again about what he actually saw when he looked at the world, because I knew from what I’d read in a drawing book about perspective that with only one good eye he couldn’t see in three dimensions. What then, when he looked at my drawings, did he see? I’d close one eye lots of times and try to judge distance, but distance wasn’t the same as depth, and I knew that I couldn’t ever really see the world in the exact way he did.

  The noise stopped. My mother breathed out, withdrew her fist from her mouth. I wanted to tell her that I wished she would be like this all the time—I wanted to tell her that in some crazy way I wished that the middle of the night could last forever so she could be the way she was now—for if it would last I felt that maybe after a while I’d have the courage to ask her all the questions I wanted to, that maybe I could find out what she and Abe and their father had been like before I was born. I wanted to tell her that it didn’t make sense—the way Abe was, and the way people said he was.

  “I’ll always be your best friend, Davey,” my mother said then, as if she’d prepared the words beforehand. “I want you to know that. No matter who you make friends with in life—no matter what people give you, no matter who you love and who loves you, I want you to remember that you’ll never have a friend like me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Not really,” I said. “You’re my mother. I mean, friends are my own age, from school.”

  She put a finger on my lips.

  “No, no. You’re not listening to what I’m trying to tell you. You listen and Momma will explain. It’s something I learned—Abe and I both learned—from our mother, and I think you’re at the right age for me to tell it to you.” She shifted so that her body wasn’t touching mine anymore. “Lots of people will want to be your friend in this life, lots of them will tell you they’re your best friend. And why not, a boy like you. But when it comes down to it you’d be surprised at the way people can turn against you. What I mean is, most people are out for themselves in this life. Sure. They’ll be your friend so long as you can do something for them, but a mother will always be her own boy’s best friend no matter what, do you see?”

  I didn’t speak.

  “No matter what you do, Davey—even if, God forbid, you should kill somebody and be waiting for the electric chair—I’d still love you as much as always. That’s what I mean. If the whole world should turn against you and abandon you, a true mother would never stop loving you. That’s how deep my love for you goes and I wanted you to hear it from my own lips, so you’ll never forget. Nobody can ever be a best friend to you the way a mother can.”

  “Not even Uncle Abe?”

  “Not even Abe.”

  3

  A WEEK AFTER SCHOOL was out the next summer, my mother began spending her afternoons going from doctor to doctor. When she wasn’t making rounds of their offices, she’d lie on the living room couch, a cold washcloth over her eyes. When I’d ask if I could do anything for her, she’d turn her head away from me, into the cushions, and repeat my name over and over again.

  By this time my father had been working as a collection man for Abe for more than a year. His route took him along Flatbush Avenue, from Empire Boulevard—across the street from the entrance to the Botanic Gardens, near Ebbets Field—all the way to the Albemarle Theatre, past where the new Macy’s was being built. He seemed happier than he’d been during the war, and it helped that my mother was ill, I sensed, because he could do things for her. He cleaned and cooked and shopped and took clothes to the wetwash man and picked them up and hung them out on the line we had on the roof.

  On the Friday before July Fourth weekend my mother went into Beth Israel Hospital for tests. She came home two days later and the first thing she told me was that Abe was going to California on business and that he’d invited her to go with him. Would I mind if she went?

  My father got excited and talked about how the two of us could cook and clean together, and about us going to ball games and restaurants, and then he made the three of us hold hands and dance around while he sang “California, Here I Come!” the way Al Jolson did, in a raspy voice. When he got down on one knee for the last part, his hands clasped upwards towards my mother as if he were praying, she told him to stop making her laugh, that her stomach hurt where the doctors had tested her. I could see that her eyes were shining, though, and when he put his arms around her she let him kiss her on the lips for a long time.

  My mother and Abe left from Grand Central Station eight days later on the Twentieth Century Limited. We went there early in the morning to see them off—Lillian, Sheila, my father and me. Little Benny and Turkish Sammy came too. Turkish Sammy, an enormous man with dusty, potato-colored skin and an oblong-shaped head that seemed too big for his body, was Abe’s new bodyguard, and he and Benny shared a compartment next to the one Abe and my mother were in. My mother had on her favorite dress—the chiffon one with the purple irises—and a beautiful wide-brimmed lavender hat she’d bought for the trip, with two long white silk streamers that flowed down along the back of her neck. My father t
eased her about how she looked like a movie star, asking if she was going to be interviewed on the Twentieth Century Limited radio show, where they spoke with famous people who were taking the train from New York to Chicago.

  Abe was dressed in a beautiful cream-colored summer suit, a Panama hat tipped down at a slight angle over his right eye. He looked handsomer than ever, and all the porters and guards along the platform smiled and tipped their hats to him. When one of the policemen said “Good morning, Mr. Litvinov—taking a long trip?” my uncle nodded to the policeman, touched the brim of his hat with two fingers, then winked down at me.

  He had champagne and oysters waiting for us inside their compartment, and a big orchid corsage for my mother. Benny and Turkish Sammy stayed in the room with us, eating and drinking and making jokes, and my mother kept asking us, over and over, if it was really true that she was there instead of in the hospital.

  I was twelve years old. For the first time in my life my father and I were alone in our apartment together for more than a few days, just the two of us, and I was surprised, not just at how peaceful things seemed with my mother gone, but at how different my father was. He didn’t put on any acts or pester me to do things the way he did when my mother was around, and he spent more time with me, playing boxball or hit-the-penny in front of the house, or talking with me about sports, or taking me with him on his route, or just sitting with me in my bedroom and smoking cigarettes while I read or drew or we listened to a Dodger game together on the radio.

  I loved going with him on his route. I was big for my age, taller than most of my friends—five-foot-five, only an inch shorter than he was—and he liked to have me walk beside him, on his good side, and to tease me about it only being a matter of months before he’d be looking up to me. He kept seven or eight different composition books in a black briefcase, and at each stop he wrote things down in one of the books. In the afternoons or evenings he worked at the breakfront in the living room, transforming his notes from pencil to ink. He showed me how he had the name of each one of Abe’s clients printed out at the top of a different page, along with the person’s address and phone number. Below, in neat columns, he wrote in the date of each transaction, how much money the person bet, and if the person won or lost. For cross-reference he kept separate books for each kind of bet people made: one book each for baseball, basketball, football, boxing, horse racing, and the numbers.

  He explained to me how the numbers worked—that for a nickel or a dime or a dollar you could bet on any number from 0 to 999. He opened the sports pages in the Journal-American and showed me how the number of the day was taken from the pari-mutuel bets at the racetracks. If the winning horses of the first three races paid a total of $347.67, and those of the first five races paid $462.78, and of the first seven $981.64, you’d take the third digit from each total and you’d have your lucky number. My father was very patient while he explained things to me. If you won, you got paid at a 600-to-1 rate—600 dollars for every dollar, 30 dollars for a nickel. When I asked if he’d let me bet some of my own money, instead of answering he replied that a lot of the Negroes and Puerto Ricans and some of the Irish and Italians bet the numbers a lot, and he taught me about odds—how they were 999 to I against picking the right number, while the payoff itself was only 600 to 1. In addition, he said, there was no control—no way to use your experience and your knowledge, no way to lower the odds in your favor. Jewish men didn’t bet on the numbers much, he stated when he was done explaining, and that ended the discussion.

  He also worked with a set of buff-yellow legal-size pads that had crisscrossing brown and green lines, like those on graph paper. He kept the pads in a gray metal box behind the hats in the foyer closet on a shelf above the coats, and once a month, at night, he would put the pads into his briefcase and take them to Abe’s apartment.

  There were four compartments inside his briefcase, and at every stop, in addition to writing things down in his notebooks, he would collect envelopes. None of the envelopes had money in them. My father said he never knew who collected the money and paid off the winners and that he was just as happy not to know, that he was safer that way. The envelopes were filled with slips of paper on which people wrote things, or sometimes my father wrote things for them, and before he left each place he would lick the flap of the envelope, seal it, glance at his wrist-watch, then write the place, date, and time on the outside, sign his initials, and put the envelope into his briefcase. “Now you’re all set,” he would say, rapping the side of his briefcase with his knuckles. And then—this surprised me the first time he did it—he would put his arm around me, draw me close to him, and add, “And all I can wish for you is that your luck should be as good as mine, right?”

  It made me happy to see how much people liked my father. He made stops at forty-three different places on his route—luncheonettes, barber shops, clothing stores, candy stores, service stations, beauty parlors, bowling alleys, hat stores, stationery stores—and in almost every one of them, even if the people had been losing money steadily, they always brightened up when he walked in. They never seemed to hold their bad luck against him and if they had a big win they would sometimes tip him a few dollars.

  Our last stop of the day was back at Church Avenue, next to Erasmus Hall High School, to a set of four rooms on the third floor of an office building. The front was the real estate office that Abe ran for Mr. Roth-enberg—Mr. Rothenberg owned a few apartment houses, a small construction company and three restaurants—and in the other three rooms there were lots of telephones and blackboards, with men calling out numbers to one another, and even though a few of them stopped their work and made a fuss over me because I was Abe’s nephew—they called me the Prince—my father didn’t like going there. He didn’t like going into the restaurants Mr. Rothenberg owned either. In the restaurants, I knew, after the last customer had gone and the shades were drawn, Abe’s men would just keep punching the cash register. This, and paying the construction company for renovations on the apartment houses that never got made, was how they made all the gambling income seem legitimate.

  After the first few times we went to Abe’s office, my father would have me wait downstairs in front of Bickford’s cafeteria. He’d go upstairs by himself, and when he returned, unless they had errands for him—sometimes he’d have to deliver large sealed envelopes to other offices, in Brooklyn or Manhattan—he’d be free for the rest of the day.

  Then we’d go out for lunch, and that was my favorite part of the day. Usually we’d eat either at Garfield’s—the big cafeteria at the corner of Church and Flatbush, which I always thought of as being the center of our neighborhood, where everybody met—or, more often, at one of the luncheonettes where he was the collection man. Until that time I’d hardly ever eaten in a restaurant, and it made me feel very grown up to sit at a table across from my father, the waitress standing there with a pad in her hand, my father saying to me, the way he always did, “Well, what’ll it be today, Davey? I want you to order anything you want, you understand? Anything at all.” He liked to tease the waitresses. Sometimes he’d take a waitress’s hand just as she was about to leave and ask her if she made home deliveries—he’d explain about my mother being in California—and the waitress would laugh and tell him not to be fresh.

  I liked eating in restaurants, yet no matter where we ate I almost always ordered the same thing: a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich with french fries, a vanilla-Coke, and either lemon meringue pie or a hot fudge sundae for dessert. I loved the way the grilled cheese sandwich tasted from being pressed down hard on the grill, the odors of hamburgers and sausage and bacon and onions cooked into the bread, the cheese and tomato melted into one another, and I loved the way my father would always say, “He’s some kid, my boy—you offer him the whole menu and he winds up choosing the same thing every time. He’s one steady kid, my boy—a guy you can count on, right?”

  After we were done eating, if he didn’t have any errands we would stay on in the lunche
onette for an hour or two and I would make sketches of some of the people—waitresses or cooks or owners or one of the regulars—and when everybody crowded around and patted my father on the back and told him how talented I was, he would glow.

  One afternoon when we’d finished lunch early and were walking back home along Church Avenue—my mother and Abe had been gone for more than two weeks and she had written that they might not start back until mid-August, that Abe had to take care of some business for Mr. Rothenberg in Las Vegas—some of my friends called me from inside the Holy Cross schoolyard to come in and play with them. Tony Cremona was there, and for a second, knowing that part of the reason Abe was staying away was because there’d been some threats from Fasalino’s organization, I wondered if it would seem disloyal to my uncle to play ball with Tony. But when Tony called to me, my father smiled.

  “You go enjoy yourself,” he said.

  I went in and started shooting with the guys—they were between games—and when we were lining up at the foul line to shoot for new sides, I noticed that my father had entered the schoolyard and was leaning against the fence. His jacket and tie were off, his shirt sleeves rolled up.

  “Can an old man get a few shots?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  He bounced the ball on the concrete a few times, using both hands the way the girls did at school. I cringed. He stood to the side of the basket, about twenty feet away, his cigarette stuck in the corner of his, mouth, cocked his head to one side, took a step and a half, and shot the ball with two hands, using an old fashioned set-shot with a lot of backspin, but letting the ball go more from his waist than from his chest. The ball smashed off the backboard without even touching the rim.

  “C’mon. C’mon,” he said, gesturing impatiently. “I gotta get the right angle.”