“I want to know things,” I said. “Sometimes I want to know everything, Uncle Abe! I want to know why things happened, why you’re the way you are, how you got to have the life you have. Sometimes I think you don’t want anyone to know what you feel, though. That you want to shut everybody out.”
“Sometimes I do.”
“But it matters to me—what you feel. When you were overseas I used to wonder a lot about what you were thinking and feeling. Were you scared?”
“Sometimes.”
“Are you ever afraid now—since the war ended, I mean?”
“Not much, though I don’t like pain. I’ve always been frightened of physical pain if you want the truth, and yet when it’s come it hasn’t bothered me much. Strange. It’s always been as if I could simply close a valve to the part of my brain the pain was in. Then I’d be there, as alert as I could be, and it would be as if what was happening was happening to somebody else. Does that make any sense?”
“My mother says that your father used to beat you a lot. Did he?”
“Probably.”
“Probably?”
“It wasn’t the pain that hurt, Davey. It was being humiliated. Degraded. All I ask for, see, is a little notice, a mild amount of respect. I thought about that a lot when I was overseas and I decided that my one wish, really, was simply to know ahead of time. I didn’t want to die in my sleep or in a coma or on my knees, and I didn’t want to die with a bullet in the back of my head either.”
“Did you ever want to die?”
“No.”
“I’m glad. Do you ever want to now?”
“There’s not much that gives pleasure in life, Davey. Still, I figure I’ll stick around. To see how you turn out, right?” He touched my shoulder. “The truth is, I was pretty happy when I was over there and could kill a few Krauts. I felt good when I was able to save some of my boys. I was sorry the war didn’t last longer. I still write to some of them.”
“To the guys in your platoon?”
“No. Why would I do a thing like that? I write to the women who lost sons or husbands or brothers.”
“But why? Why does that mean so much to you, when nothing else—”
“Because I couldn’t save them all.”
“But how could you? I mean, why would you think you were supposed to? I don’t understand.”
“Sometimes I don’t either.”
“Do you think of me that way too sometimes? As if you’re responsible for my life, as if you don’t know whether or not you’ll be able to save me?”
“They were going to throw acid in Momma’s face. That’s the answer to your question. They were going to throw acid in Momma’s face. They were going to teach our father a lesson, but a guy warned me and I went to see Mr. Rothenberg and asked for help and he told me that he would take care of things and he kept his word and it never happened. All right?”
“That’s the whole story? That’s all I get?”
“You are persistent, aren’t you?”
“Sure.” I thought of Gail. “I want to know, Uncle Abe. I want to know everything I don’t know.”
To my surprise, Abe was smiling at me as if he was pleased to see this side of me—how much I could talk, how much I cared about his life. I tried to look at him as easily and lovingly as I could, so that he wouldn’t change his mind, so that he wouldn’t become frightened. I waited. I wished we weren’t so close to Mr. Rothenberg’s house because I felt that if only we could keep on driving—just the two of us, away from the city, away from our apartment and families and our other lives—he would have felt free to tell me everything.
He touched his jacket pocket again, nervously. When I’d asked him once about why he didn’t carry a gun, I remembered, he had answered by saying that there were many stupid people in the world who thought that if they killed him, they could sit in his seat and have his power and live his life. I’m the only one who can lead my life, he said.
“Your mother was a very beautiful woman, wasn’t she,” I offered.
“My mother was a very beautiful woman,” he said. “Sure, Davey. Sure she was.” He touched my hair again, as if to reassure himself that I was actually in the car with him. “She was so beautiful that men and women used to come to our house from all over the city—rich men and women—just to see her face. Can you imagine?” He smiled at me in a way that told me he was happy to be answering my question, to be talking about her. “When your mother and I were kids growing up on the Lower East Side, our father had a small fur store on Howard Street where people would come to buy their coats. We lived in back of the store, in two small rooms—plus there was the room our father worked in, where he did all his work—the sewing and cleaning and tipping and dyeing and pointing and repairs—and we had half the cellar downstairs too, which the landlord rented to my father for storage.
“There was a gorgeous silk curtain from China I loved to stare at—blues and reds and silver and gold threads, with birds and flowers and mountain peaks covered with snow—and it hung between our apartment and the storefront. Momma and Poppa slept in the kitchen near the stove, see, and Evie and I slept in the one bedroom, which had no windows, and downstairs Poppa had this enormous kind of icebox—bigger than our whole apartment—where he kept coats stored for customers in the summer. Cold storage. That’s what they called it. People would bring him their coats in the spring, or he’d go around and pick them up and he’d keep them there through the summer, then take them out in the fall and get them ready for the winter. He built the room himself out of sheets of tin and wooden slats, with chambers between the inner and outer walls for the slabs of ice and sawdust, and with drains to let the melted water run off. He could make a fur coat from scratch—scraping and soaking and fleshing and tanning and stretching and drumming and dressing and bleaching and the hundred other operations the skins had to go through before they became coats. When I was a kid he’d show me the whole process, his part of it, let me use his knives and emery wheels, let me try to get the thin membrane of flesh away from the pelt without cutting into the fur, let me pluck the top hairs of the beavers and seals so we could get at the soft underfur. Sure. In the summertime Evie and I would go down and stay inside the room, sucking on ice chips—I’d knock them off with a screwdriver—and we’d put the chips in paper cups and pour blackberry syrup on them, and speculate on how much money you had to have to be able to afford the sables and ermines and minks, the astrakhans and sealskins and the different kinds of foxes.
“Evie would model the coats for me the way Momma modeled them for customers—that was what she did, see—and I’d act as if I was some rich guy from Park Avenue, tapping on the floor with a cane, and I’d keep making her take off one coat and put on another, and sometimes she would sit next to me and act like one of the ladies who was buying the coats. A lot of rich German Jews bought their coats from our father, and I hated them most because they acted as if they thought their crap didn’t stink. Mostly we’d make fun of them. I’d mimic the way Poppa would whisper to us, as if revealing state secrets. ‘Now children, I want you to remember that these are very wealthy people.’ And when he’d come to the word ‘very,’ he’d always close his eyes, and suck in his cheeks.
“I liked being down below with the furs when it was real hot, so I could cool off, pet the coats, run my hands over the silk linings, run my fingers across the monograms on the inside labels. He worked hard on those because he said it was the mark of ownership that mattered most to his customers. Evie and I would talk about what it would be like to be able to buy whatever you wanted, to have servants, to be able to go wherever you wanted in the world if you suddenly just felt like it. The world exists for money. Sure. Wasn’t that what all of us believed then? Me and Evie and Momma and Poppa and everyone in our neighborhood? That the world existed to serve and protect the people with money? When there was trouble on the street, between a guy dressed fancy and a bum, who did the cop grab first?
“Upstairs, whenever the cus
tomers would come, Poppa would seat them next to the front window so that the neighbors could see, and he would get them something to drink, tea or wine or sherry or Turkish coffee. He had special engraved silver trays and little demitasse cups and saucers edged in gold, and sometimes if we were dressed right he’d let me and Evie serve them. He taught us to bow and curtsey and how to answer questions politely and how not to look goggle-eyed at their clothes and jewels. He would have long conversations with his customers before he showed them coats, see—making fun of how poor and stupid everyone in the neighborhood was, telling them about the other wealthy people who’d been in and what they were buying. He had these fancy leather-bound books with photographs of models in coats, and he’d open them and, while he showed them the photos, he’d ask about trips they’d taken and about their houses and then—”
Abe stopped and blinked, as if surprised to find that he’d come to this part of his story. His eyes seemed to frost over, to go dead.
“He was just teasing them, though, because what they were there for, see, was for the moment when he’d stand, put his cup or glass down on the tray, and clap his hands sharply so that Momma would come out of the back room for the first time, wearing one of the fur coats. She’d push the curtain aside very tentatively, clutch the silk almost as if she needed it for balance, then let it slide between her fingers slowly so that the creases disappeared, and step forward toward the customers. And the crazy thing was that she loved it all. Why, Davey? Why did she love it so much? Can you tell me that?”
I didn’t try to answer his question, and I knew he didn’t expect me to. I imagined Abe letting me off in front of the house later and instead of going upstairs I was going to the corner candy store, calling Gail. I imagined us walking together along Bedford Avenue, near Brooklyn College, and I was telling her the story Abe was now telling me. I was feeling her press my hand when I came to the sad parts, and I was hearing her tell me that what we had to remember most of all was that it wasn’t just a story, that it was their lives, that these things had actually happened, that here was a difference between a person’s life and the story of that life.
“Momma would sit in the kitchen by the stove, not doing anything at all except getting the tea and stuff ready for him and chewing at her fingernails until she heard him clap for her. Then she’d light up.” He laughed. “I’d forgotten,” he said, turning toward me. “The way she’d hold her nails up to the lamp to see through them. She didn’t really chew at them, just kind of nibbled at the air around them, clicking her teeth lightly while she did. Evie and I teased her about this way she had of biting her nails and not biting them. But she doted on him and did whatever he wanted, mostly. Except for his customers she rarely got dressed up fancy. He bought all her clothes for her—he’d bring them home in big boxes and take them out of the tissue paper very carefully and she would make a big fuss over how good he was to her. She only wore the clothes when she modeled for customers, though. It was crazy. You’re like a diamond in the mud, he would say to her, and they’d both laugh. He had one extraordinary Russian Crown sable—it was the most expensive coat there was, a deep blue-black like you’ve never seen—that he would have her model only once in a while and that he never sold. It was hers, and he would promise each customer that if he ever found another like it, that customer would have first chance to purchase. Momma only wore the coat in the house.
“We weren’t at all poor, see—he did well enough to move us out of the neighborhood into a snazzy place uptown if he’d wanted to, but he knew it was better for his business to stay where we were. He was shrewd, all right. He knew what kind of image gave the rich people their kicks. The thing that seemed crazy to me, though, was that he himself used to dress like the rich men who bought from him—in silk shirts and derbies and fancy underwear and gaiters and this incredible black broadcloth coat he had, fur-lined with nutria. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, see, all the fur coats had the fur on the inside, and even after they discovered a way to remove the coarse guard hairs so the furs would look beautiful on the outside, the men’s coats kept the fur on the inside. Close to the vest, right? ‘My own Beau Brummell,’ Momma used to call him, because he was the one, not Momma, who spent hours getting dressed, fixing himself in front of mirrors with tweezers and creams and lotions and pomades and colognes and all kinds of crap. And she’d smile and help him. Jesus, it made me sick, Davey, the way he carried on, the way he treated her—the way she worshipped him and did everything for him, and then he went and…” His voice trailed off, his knuckles tightened on the steering wheel. “All I’d dream about sometimes would be the day I’d be big enough to take him, okay? To bash his perfumed head against the stove, to knock his shiny teeth through the back of his throat, to break his manicured fingers one at a time, to—” He laughed suddenly, sharply. “But he wasn’t the one, was he?”
“The one?”
“The one I got my chance on.” Abe licked his lips. “Okay. You asked me, right? So I’m telling you. He wasn’t the one I had to do my first job on. Sure.” He shrugged slightly, seemed to relax. “Anyway, it all seemed very real back then—how small the rooms were and how much I hated him and how beautiful Momma was. She was a tiny woman. Even before she got sick at the end and went down to under sixty pounds, she was tiny—she never weighed more than ninety, ninety-five pounds. About Little Benny’s size, if you think about it, only she had these giant brown eyes with long dark lashes, and a sweet set of lips—what we called a bow mouth in those days—and when she’d wrap herself up in one of those elegant minks or sables or silver foxes, or, best of all, in one of the beautiful black capes or long evening coats, she’d take your breath away. Like glowing coals, my father would say to his clients when they remarked on Momma’s eyes. Like glowing coals.
“If Evie and I were around after school or on weekends, we’d wait with Momma in the kitchen, and then when Poppa came in and told her which coat to put on we’d take off down the cellar, out the back door, into the alley and back around to the front so we could be there at the window when Momma made her entrance. She was terrific, Davey. When she’d come out of the back, pushing the curtain aside like some timid schoolgirl wearing store-bought clothes for the first time, and turn and pose and look back over her shoulder shyly and smile for the clients, it was incredible. Magic. And when she’d glance over at Poppa and get a wink from him, to show her she was doing fine, her face would glow. I never saw anything like it. I—”
He looked at me, as if puzzled.
“Tell me Davey—is there anything else in the world like the smile of a beautiful woman? Is there anything else in the world like a smile that says just to you that you’re the most important guy in the whole world, that you’re the only thing that matters, that all the love and tenderness behind that smile is for you, that—”
I said nothing because I didn’t really think he wanted an answer. I tried to see Gail’s face, smiling at me, but instead I saw my mother, sitting on my bed while I slept, staring down at me. Do you know what my trouble is, Davey? My trouble is that I love you too much. It’s no good to love somebody too much….
“She smiled like that for Poppa, and when he wanted her to she did it for his customers, and afterwards when me and Evie would go back around and in again through the cellar and she’d come into the kitchen and ask us, ‘How was I?’ and we’d tell her that she was wonderful, she’d hug us and kiss us and smile at us in the same way, and give us each a piece of her special chocolate, the ones with sweet, dark cherries inside that she kept hidden and would eat whenever she knew she’d helped Poppa sell a coat. She’d let us sit on her lap, and when she held me—this was when I was really little—I tried to touch her hair and curl it around my fingers and tug on it so that she’d make believe she wanted to bite my fingers. Her hair was dark and curly, like yours and mine—like the astrakhans, only softer. She liked to tell me about the softest and most fragile of the lamb pelts—the ones from a newborn or one-day old Caracul lamb o
r sometimes from those born prematurely, that came in a watered silk pattern—what we called moiré then—and it was nice to sit on her lap and let my hand go back and forth from the fur of a coat to the softness of her hair and then back again.
“She didn’t always smile right away, of course. Sometimes she’d take on this cold, sophisticated I-don’t-give-a-damn look—she and Poppa had a set of signals for how she performed—and once in a while she’d go through a whole showing without smiling at all. Evie and I tried to figure out their signals and what he made her save the special smiles for, but who knows? She looked like some of those gorgeous movie stars from the silent films, like Janet Gaynor if you could have seen her then, only darker and more fragile, I guess. She wanted to be an actress too, did you know that? Did Evie ever tell you that?”
“No. But my father used to say that she should have been one—my mother, I mean. Like this morning, with the tape over her mouth—”
“Sure. Because if she had—” He stopped. “Anyway, that was what she wanted. To be an actress up on the stage, with a bouquet of flowers in her arms and hundreds of people clapping for her, and sometimes if she got too upset about how my father wouldn’t let her—he’d pull the shades on the store window and give her a coat and gesture to the showroom as if he was Jacob Astor himself, and say, ‘Here, my darling—here is the only theater you will ever need! Here is where your star will shine!’ But even in the old country, see—in Odessa, where they came from—she wanted to be an actress. She’d recite lots of poems and parts to us in Russian. Who knows why? Who knows where these things get started, Davey? Sometimes I used to think that if I could have known her when she was a girl, the way I knew Evie—the way I knew you—if I could have spent a day or two with her when she was growing up—if I could have been there invisibly—that I could have understood everything. Do you ever think that way? That all you need is a few minutes or hours in somebody’s home—to see how things were when they were growing up—and you’d understand them forever after?”
Before My Life Began Page 22
