Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  “I suppose. I don’t know. It’s hard to think that far back.”

  “You don’t talk much about the home anymore, the way you did when we first met. The children say you still tell them stories from time to time, but they wonder why you don’t have any friends from back then, why—”

  “I’m worried about Lucius,” Aaron says. “He seems different lately. Have you noticed?”

  “No. What I notice is that you’ve just changed the subject.”

  “I was thinking about friends—about Lucius, about friends I lost.” He shrugs, begins to dress. He says that the only thing he can figure is that something in Lucius seemed to shift a month or so ago, at about the time Malcolm X was killed. Does that sound crazy? Lucius was never a fan of Malcolm or the Muslims, yet he seemed very upset about it—about the idea of yet another killing, this time up North, this time with blacks killing blacks.

  Susan asks if he has tried asking Lucius what’s bothering him. She says that Lucius loves and admires Aaron very much. She suggests that Lucius may be withdrawn precisely because he wants Aaron to ask him the questions Aaron is asking Susan.

  She kisses him, goes to the door. She nods to herself. She should do the same, she says. About Jennifer. She had been about to ask Aaron’s advice but realizes that what she will do is ask Jennifer the questions she was going to ask Aaron. She has been finding notes on Jennifer’s desk that are addressed to boys. They are wildly pornographic and Susan cannot tell if Jennifer is actually doing the things she writes about, or fantasizing about them. She wonders if Debbie has been filling Jennifer’s ears with stories of her wild life in New York when she was Jen’s age, of all the dope and sex she and her friends were into at their fancy private schools. Is Jennifer leaving the notes so that Susan will find them, will ask about them? Is Paul getting Debbie to talk to Jennifer…?

  When Aaron turns, to answer her, to suggest that she talk to Jennifer—draw her out the way Susan suggested he draw Lucius out—she is gone.

  He closes his eyes, thinks of going to the window with Susan and the children. Aaron never agreed with Malcolm’s politics, but he liked the man—he liked to watch the fire in Malcolm’s eyes, the quick light that showed forth the mind within. Now that mind is gone. Aaron opens his eyes. He will talk with Lucius about Malcolm the next time he sees him. He thinks of their last talk, five days before, at Paul’s house.

  When they arrived there was only an hour of daylight left. They carried two forty-foot ladders from the van, extended them, raised them to roof level, steadied them. They took the old wood rain gutter Aaron bought the week before, from the owner of a house being torn down in South Hadley, and attached metal hangers while the gutter was on the ground. The gutter was beautifully channeled, still thick enough in the channel to serve for many years. They called instructions to each other across the length of the house. When Aaron laid a dab of roofing cement onto the tin roof, then banged nails through the hanger and covered the nails with another dab of cement, Lucius did the same at his end. The gutter sagged in the middle, swayed. Aaron moved a step down, tested the gutter, looked up at the cornice—the eaves, fascia, soffit—called across and asked Lucius if, given their mutual dislike of Paul, they might call the work they were doing for him sheer soffitsry. Lucius groaned. They descended, moved each ladder in ten feet, mounted again, nailed in the next set of hangers.

  There was no car in the driveway. Paul and Debbie were supposedly in London, but according to Benjamin they had gone there so that Paul could get a flight to Havana. Paul had confided in Benjamin, but Aaron figured that he did so knowing that Benjamin would not keep his secret. It was all the same to Aaron. Mostly he was pleased that the renovations were near an end, that the house was deserted. The less he had to do with the man, the better. The day was mild, the roofing cement soft. Aaron made sure the gutter sloped slightly toward Lucius’s end. Perhaps, he thought, what Paul claimed—that he wanted a new and good family life like the kind Aaron and Susan had—was true. Who could tell? Aaron had stopped trying to figure the man out. He only hoped Paul would become as tired of his new life—in which he seemed to be half-revolutionary, half gentleman-farmer—as he had of those lives that preceded it.

  The second set of hangers nailed in, Aaron moved down two rungs, glanced into the upstairs window. Paul was there, grinning, pointing a rifle at him. Aaron lurched backwards, grabbed onto the rails, felt his heart thump wildly against his chest. Paul lowered the rifle, gave a half-wave, left the room. Lucius called across, asked him what was up, cursed when Aaron caught his breath, told him. They descended, moved the ladders again, mounted, nailed in the last set of hangers, and then, at the north end, installed an aluminum elbow, a downspout, metal straps to hold the downspout to the building. Lucius tried to get Aaron to talk about Paul—about what they should do—but Aaron said that the only thing he wanted to do was finish the job and leave.

  “Hey,” Lucius said as they jerked on the ropes that let the ladders collapse to half their lengths. “You’d best calm down or you gonna make that man too happy.”

  “Happy?”

  “To see how he can get to you, slide under your skin—”

  Lucius set his hand on Aaron’s shoulder, firmly, and when he did, Aaron felt his heart ease.

  “Let’s move,” Aaron said.

  Daylight was almost gone, the sky a lovely blend of pink and blue and lavender, the Berkshires themselves a soft, deep purple, the breeze transforming clouds into crisscrossing streaks, like jet streams. Aaron and Lucius carried the ladders to the van. Paul was waiting there for them, and he began talking at once about Malcolm’s death, telling Lucius that if he were black he would have agreed with Malcolm.

  “I wouldn’t want coffee at any white man’s lunch counter,” Paul said, then corrected himself. “Well. I might want the coffee, but if I drank it, I’d want the pot and the counter and the chairs and the whole goddamned store too. How about you?”

  “I want to get home,” Lucius said. “Want to get somewhere where the air smells right.”

  “Ah Lucius,” Paul said. “I wish you could learn to trust me more. I want to be your friend, don’t you see?”

  “Got enough friends,” Lucius said.

  “What a friend you have in Jesus, is that it?”

  “Lay off,” Aaron said, and he moved toward Paul. “I’m warning you.”

  “You and what army?” Paul asked, and the rifle was suddenly in his hands, aimed for Aaron’s chest.

  “Take it easy,” Lucius said to Aaron. He turned to Paul. “You leave off, you hear? You don’t start what you can’t finish.”

  “Why are you here?” Aaron asked. “Why did you come back?”

  “Do I have to report”—he gestured to Lucius—“the way he does?”

  “You talking bullshit,” Lucius said. “You making the flowers grow.”

  “Sure,” Paul said. “Planting them row by row, Lucius. But if I were Malcolm—may I tell you this?—I’d be watering them with lots of white man’s blood, in my dreams. Did I ever tell you the story my father told me, about how in this one camp during the war the Germans went crazy because blood started seeping upwards from the soil, bursting through like swamp water? They were forced to dig up the land all over again. My father told me the story when I was seven or eight and I’ve always thought that would have been marvelous—to see the land bleed, to have to plant death deeper.” He let the rifle drop so that the barrel grazed the ground. “You are aware of the camps they’ve set up for you—?”

  “I don’t know nothing,” Lucius said, “except that your fool tongue don’t know when to stop moving.”

  Aaron and Lucius secured the ladders to the van’s roof.

  “Where’s Debbie?” Aaron asked.

  “In London. I had to return early, on business. She’s four months pregnant, you know.” He lifted the rifle, patted the butt end, then smiled. “I’m sorry if I scared you before, but given the dark road and how isolated the house is—given the strangers
passing through, the family I’m responsible for—Jen and Ben, the new child to come—I can’t afford to take chances. I need to be ready at all times. I—”

  “Who’s paying you?” Lucius asked. “Come on, man. Tell the truth—who’s paying you?”

  Paul raised the rifle, the barrel pointed to the sky. A door opened behind them. The three men turned, watched a stocky black man walk from the house to the barn, a rifle in each hand. Aaron tensed—afraid the man might change direction, come toward them—and he realized that in Paul’s presence he was, as always, tight, wary, frightened. It was not only, he sensed, because he was reminded that somebody somewhere might connect him to his former life—might unexpectedly emerge from it—but because, quite simply, more and more with the years, he preferred life when it was predictable. As much as he was rarely able, as a boy, to imagine scenes before they took place, so now, as an adult, he disliked finding himself inside situations which he had not previously imagined.

  “The difference between you and me,” Paul offered, “is that I don’t fool myself about why I do what I do. Self-interest can be a very firm basis for trust, don’t you think?”

  “What I think is that it’s time to go.”

  “Yet you and me, we’re more alike than you think—than you like to think,” Paul continued. “Certainly more like one another than you and your black brother here. Why should a black man ever trust a white man in this country? If you were black, would you?” Paul grinned, the way he had earlier, through the upstairs window. “Then too, think of all we have in common, Aaron. Think of Ben and Jen. Think of the times you visited me when I was ill. Think of what we’ve survived. Think of our houses. Think of Susan—”

  Aaron did not react. He opened the door to the van, got into the driver’s seat. Paul talked to Lucius about the detention camps the government had set up for blacks in Arizona and Nevada—like those they had used for the Japanese during World War II. Had Lucius seen photos? Paul laughed, suggested that Lucius ask Susan to teach him about the camps during their tutorial sessions. For his part, he said, pointing to the house, he would continue to run his own Upward Bound program. Only his sessions, he imagined, were more practical, less personal. Lucius got in the van, slammed the door. He said that he used to think that Paul was crazy but that he had changed his mind. Paul wasn’t crazy. He was just plain stupid.

  Paul leaned in on Lucius’s open window, said that he hoped he hadn’t offended, but given what his daily life was like—the company he kept—he probably enjoyed talking with them more than he liked to acknowledge. Who else could he talk to in this way? He told them not to be strangers, to visit him again soon. He told Lucius that he was serious about Malcolm, about how, if he were black, he wouldn’t want ever to beg for what should rightfully be his. Malcolm was right. Why the hell should any black man want to be integrated into a burning house?

  What bothers Aaron most, he now realizes, is that in some crazy way, all the while they’d been standing there, outside his barn, Paul had been reminding him of Abe. Paul was about Abe’s height, had Abe’s build. He was about the same age Abe was when Abe had died.

  Your Uncle Abe is coming home, darling. He’s coming home now. Everything will be all right.

  Aaron imagines Lucius on Paul’s roof, looking at the chimney. He imagines one of the bricks falling away, an eye looking out from inside—a woman’s eye—and Lucius terrified, tumbling backwards into air. He wonders how many others there are in Paul’s house, and if they come out at night from their secret places—from the cellar, from the same narrow rooms beside the chimney where slaves hid a hundred years before. Could he talk with Susan about his feelings, about how Paul always seems able to get to him, to surprise him? The truth, he knows, is that he has sometimes found himself wishing he could be a bit more like Paul—a bit less absolute, a bit less moral—for as much as he despises the man, he can understand why, if he were a woman, he might be attracted to him. He can sense why it might seem exciting, in prospect, to think of being loved and protected by a man who believed that there was no such thing as morality—that you were allowed to do anything you wanted to, that you actually took on power by rejecting society’s rules and substituting your own.

  In the early years of his marriage to Susan, he recalls, he was afraid to admit to her that he was confused by the fact that he himself found Paul attractive—that he liked being near the man, liked hearing him dispense his theories—and that he often felt that women would find Paul more attractive than they would ever find him.

  He smiles. He sees himself standing by Abe’s front door, hoping that Abe will notice him—hoping that Abe will bend down, will take him in his arms, will hold him and comfort him and talk to him.

  Are you still my boy? Are you still my favorite little guy?

  He can recall, that first winter after the war, walking with Abe on Flatbush Avenue and meeting some of his friends, feeling their envy. He can recall how wonderful he felt whenever Abe tossed him in the air or ruffled his hair or played ball with him or admired his drawings. He can recall, when Abe touched him, believing that Abe’s strength could somehow pass out of Abe’s body and into his own.

  Aaron stares at the woods and feels that he is a blind man about to be led through a garden. He knows that he would like to believe that Paul is merely a sick and weak-willed version of Abe. But what if he is not? What if he is as shrewd and canny as he seems while also being sincere in his efforts to aid the Movement, to hide fugitives? What if Lucius is right about what he said to Aaron afterwards—about the need, still, for Aaron to loosen up, to be less pure? Lucius may have hated Paul as much as Aaron did—still, on the ride home he seemed surly, distant, disturbed by Paul’s words, by Paul’s reminding him of what Malcolm had taught, of what it meant to be black in America.

  Aaron recalls sitting in the garden with Ellen, on the stone bench. He can see Gail and her father coming from the house, moving toward him. He wonders what Benjamin and Jennifer will feel when Debbie’s child comes: happy? rejected? angry? confused? He thinks of riding in the car, the children asleep, Susan beside him, her head on his shoulder. He thinks of them with their four children, and then he thinks of them with three, with two, with one, with none. Susan loves the time they spend together as a family, but she misses having long stretches of time alone—she misses having time for just the two of them. They have never had that luxury. She often thinks of herself as having three distinct lives, she says: life before children, life with children, life after children. She thinks it will be interesting to see what they will be like, just the two of them, without the constant presence of others, without the intense family life they have shared for all their years together.

  Aaron finds himself wishing that he could tell Lucius what his childhood was like—that he could take Lucius back with him, into his apartment on Martense Street and along Flatbush Avenue and into the Erasmus gym. If he had fewer secrets to keep from Lucius, would Lucius be less likely to listen to Paul? Aaron lifts a pencil, rubs the point against his index finger, gently. Why is it, he wonders, that his first life often seems to him a continuous line while his life in the years since seems to be made of fragments? Do most other people see their childhoods in this way—as consecutive, continuous, whole? He floats, as if in warm haze, as if it is summer. He thinks of long days spent in the Holy Cross schoolyard, his ass on concrete, his back against the chain-link fence, Tony or Morty or Julie beside him. He sees himself sipping a Coke, slipping the bottle through the fence to a kid even younger than himself—the kid running off to get the deposit money—waiting for his nexts, talking about the Dodgers or the Knicks, watching the older guys play—Al Roth, Johnny “Red” Lee, Heshy Weiss—wondering if he will ever be as good as them. He recalls his mother asking if she ever wanted more than that they should be a real family together, the three of them, with no secrets.

  He can hear Paul laughing at him, asking him why he thinks nonviolence and love will change the world, and when he does he finds that h
e is clenching his fists, that this time he is seeing his mother’s smile—not Abe’s. He is seeing her laughing at his father, mocking him.

  I mean, is he helpless or is he helpless?

  Is Lucius right? Lucius believes that the F.B.I, has something on Paul, knows about his operations, may even be paying him to hide fugitives so that they can keep tabs on them, pick and choose when they want to hang somebody in the wind. Lucius knew enough men like Paul in prison—men who would do anything to save their own skins, who would simply work for whoever bought the bread. Aaron remembers Paul saying that his father used to say something in Yiddish about love being sweet but tasting best with bread—does Aaron know the expression?—but that for the places where Paul has to travel he has invented a variation: revolution is sweet but tastes best with tacos.

  Aaron imagines that it is night and that Lucius is waiting inside Paul’s house, guns and ammunition at his side. Paul is on the highway, heading for safety. Full moons of yellow light float waist-high across Paul’s lawn, police cars closing in. The problem, Aaron decides, is that once you set your imagination free—once you begin to let it imagine possible futures—there seems no way to stop your imagination from being free.

  He remembers Susan’s hands, on his eyes, in the woods. He thinks of how cold the plate glass of his sliding doors would be against his back. He looks at the lawn, the patches of snow, and he imagines Martin Luther King and Malcolm X leading one another through the rubble of a bombed-out city—one of them is blind and one of them is deaf and they walk one behind the other, the blind man’s hand on the deaf man’s shoulder. They are dressed, as always, in dark business suits. He recalls watching boys play baseball in the field behind the Elkton Fancy Diner. He hears a car, imagines Susan opening the door, stepping outside, greeting Lucius. The trouble with blacks like Lucius, Paul claims, is that they are too religious when they need to be more political. The trouble with their Movement is that it is essentially spiritual at its core. They dream of salvation in this world when their history and religion should teach them to act and believe and hope otherwise. Aaron sees Malcolm and Martin move from the edge of the city, out into the desert. Then the image fades, bit by bit. Which one is blind? Which deaf? Aaron turns, goes to his desk.