Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  Aaron opens the sliding doors. Just outside his studio crocuses and daffodils are in bloom, as is the forsythia that grows wild down by the stone wall. He studies the crocus, sees that it is not veined inside, as he imagined. Siberian iris, around the base of the Russian olive, have risen, formed their small slender buds. Soon the redbud and weeping crab apple and flowering dogwood will release wild reds and purples and whites. He thinks he hears Jennifer’s voice, mildly raspy, so similar to Susan’s that he cannot be sure. Or perhaps the boys have turned on the television set. Jennifer. Not yet eighteen and leaving home. God knows how many boys and men have had their pleasures with her already, yet this does not bother Aaron the way it used to. Maybe Susan is right: when Jennifer has to make the choices that will mark the rest of her life she will not, at least, be confused by sex itself the way so many are. The way Susan was with Paul.

  Paul. That should be in the epilogue, too, shouldn’t it—that Paul and Debbie and their child have gone away, have left them in peace. Paul is somewhere in New York City, making money and bombs, Aaron supposes. Out of sight, out of mind. Would he, he wonders, feel differently about Jennifer were she his own daughter? He thinks not. Amazing. All he really cares about is that she be happy. The past is the past and we need to understand it, not to dwell in it. Perhaps if Paul and Debbie had not come along, Jennifer would have been led down the same path—full of drugs and sex and rebellion—that many of her friends have traveled. Who can tell?

  Aaron walks along the north side of the building. Jennifer has made the honor roll her last three semesters of high school, has scored within the top 2 percent of the nation in her college board exams, is headed for Tufts in the fall. And Benjamin, to everybody’s surprise, has become an excellent student. Susan had good instincts there: his surliness, especially during the months he was going back and forth from Susan to Paul, became almost pathological. Susan insisted that Benjamin go into psychotherapy, where he stayed twice a week for three years. He continues now once a week, and that, along with the passing of time, seems to have helped to straighten him out. The intense irritability that could have turned inwards now deploys itself in a determined will to succeed—in his studies, in sports, with his friends, with girls.

  Sports. That has been a bonus for Aaron—that Benjamin has turned into a gifted athlete, star pitcher on the Northampton High baseball team, high-scoring forward on their basketball team. They work out together, and it hardly ever occurs to Aaron that the boy is not his own son.

  Aaron feels himself float through the window and into the air of Delft. Flat land with low horizons, endless vistas. Windmills. Canals like blue veins. The wide curving sea. Boats at rest in the harbor, masts bare of sails. He descends slowly, riding warm currents of air, and finds that he is drifting into the courtyard of their apartment building on Martense Street, where he is hurling a pink Spaldeen against the wall again and again, bouncing it off ridges, making spectacular one-hand grabs, imagining himself as different players: Pee Wee Reese, Eddie Stanky, Spider Jorgensen, Goody Rosen, Augie Galan. His father appears and they throw the ball back and forth. Aaron is frightened—afraid to throw the ball too fast, afraid he will hurt his father. He is surprised that his father can gauge distances, can catch and throw as if he has two normal eyes. For days afterwards he brags to his friends about what a great player his father would have been had he had normal vision. Has there ever been a one-eyed major league baseball player? One-armed Pete Gray, one-legged Monty Stratton, Three-Finger Mordecai Brown. But no blind men.

  Aaron is walking across a green lawn with his father at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. They have just come from Ebbets Field, two blocks away, where the Dodgers lost to the Cubs in both ends of a Sunday double-header. The Cubs will go on to win the pennant. It is 1945, then, and Aaron is nine-and-a-half years old. The war will soon be over, first in Europe, then in Asia. Phil Cavaretta, the Cubs’ first baseman, who gets five hits that day, will go on to lead the National League in batting with a .355 average. The Dodgers’ Dixie Walker—the bastard who will later lead the rebellion against Jackie’s being on the team—led the league the year before, with a .357 average, and Walker is Aaron’s hero. Claude Passeau and Hank Borowy, the Cubs’ ace pitching duo will, in the World Series against the Detroit Tigers, be no match for Hal New-houser and Virgil Trucks. Newhouser’s face, in a full-page portrait in Sport magazine, by Jack Sher, which Aaron copies on a long Sunday afternoon, transferring Sher’s colors to blacks and whites and grays, is lean and scarred. A gangster’s face, were not the eyes so gentle and unhappy, as if in mourning.

  Along the mall near the Brooklyn Museum the cherry trees are in bloom, two long alleys of pink and white, the color of strawberries and cream. Double-flowering kwanzans. Aaron has planted three kwanzans in front of the house in Northampton, has given the children stories about the trees in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, about outings he made there from the orphanage. Aaron hears his father declare unequivocally that the trees they are looking at in Brooklyn are more magnificent than the more famous cherry trees of Washington, D.C., and Aaron repeats this information for his fourth grade class, insists upon it. His father, of course, has never been to Washington.

  His poor father, so ineffectual, yet so sweet and gentle! His father, he realizes, would be happy for him in the life he now has. But would Abe? He is not sure. He is not sure that Abe would want to believe it possible that he could have a second chance. He is not sure that Abe would be as interested in his architectural renderings as he was in his portraits of athletes. If he brought Abe with him, to Susan’s house, he thinks, Abe would be restless, distracted. He would not wander through the rooms as Ellen might—happy, intense, curious. Abe would have a hard time accepting anything he had not imagined.

  Aaron has sometimes said to Susan that he values his privacy and that of his children so dearly because in the orphanage he had so little of it. But surely it was in the four small rooms of that Brooklyn apartment that he had so little privacy, as little as any orphan in any dormitory ever had.

  Lately he has been able to think back to those rooms more, to dwell within them, without either annoyance or fear. They seem more ordinary, less terrible: cluttered, low-ceilinged, dimly lit, drab, but not totally without light. He can live in them if he wants to. He can recall any moment of any day, summon up any conversation, any argument, any sensation. Still, he knows that he would never choose to live in those rooms again. Not while his parents were there with him. Not for a single minute. Why, then, does he cherish, more than ever, each physical detail of those rooms? If he could be there by himself—without people, without sound, without being seen—he would.

  What, he finds himself wondering, is the story of his life? He drives north along Route 5, through Hatfield, turns east onto Route 116, crosses the Connecticut River over the Sunderland Bridge, then heads north again on Route 47. He has left a note in the kitchen—the boys were downstairs, in the workshop—telling Susan that he has gone to the property in Leverett and will be home shortly after sundown. If they are hungry, they should eat supper without him.

  What is the story of anyone’s life? Do lives, as such, have stories? Apart from birth and death, do they have true beginnings and ends? Like pictures, he thinks, stories are illusions, and that is why he loves them so: they are single moments in which time seems to stop, narratives in which events only appear—momentarily, magically—to be connected, one to the other. If he thinks of others—Beau Jack or Lucius or Abe or Jackie Robinson or his father or Susan or Nicky—he can find beginnings, middles, ends. But if, in fact, you trace a person’s life from start to finish, there is no real story, he decides—no single picture, or series of pictures, that will be equal to the life, or to its essence.

  When he recalls how moved he was by the story of Jackie’s life—My Own Story, by Jackie Robinson, as told to Wendell Smith—he realizes that this book that so utterly enchanted him was made up, even if there were any of Jackie’s own words or thoughts in it, of a series
of moments, incidents, facts, and that these items, along with all those that have come since, do not really lead one to the other in any necessary way. Jackie’s birth, the death of Jackie’s brother, the displacement from Georgia to California, Jackie meeting Rachel, Jackie in the Army, Jackie joining the Dodgers, Jackie stealing bases, Jackie having children, Jackie running Chock Full O’Nuts, Jackie worrying about Jack Junior’s drug problem—what was inevitable about such things? Where in such a brief catalogue is there cause-and-effect? Lives do not have plots the way stories do, though in following lives, he likes to impose story, doesn’t he? The events of Jackie’s life are random, joined only by the fact of the man who has lived through them. Is this why, when Aaron thinks of his own life, he can never find its center, its story—but why, he senses, looking at him from the outside, as he has looked at Jackie through the years, other people can?

  Character is fate, Susan often says, repeating Aristotle’s words, words she heard first from Paul when he was directing her in Euripides’ Alcestis. But the word “fate,” for Aaron, always signifies the place toward which one is inevitably heading; it does not account for the life led, for all the years, for the texture of individual days, for things pervasive. And even if one’s character is one’s fate, how does this, from within, become story? Will he ever see his own life so that it takes on contours the way Jackie’s, or even Susan’s life does?

  He pulls off the main road, eases the van into second gear. The road to Susan’s house is bumpy, the gravel washed out in low spots by spring rains. He drives past the thick woods that shield the property from the road, sees the setting sun, only inches above the far line of trees. The meadow, shaded by trees, the sun at low-angle, is a deep forest-green. He will have good light for at least an hour.

  Two cars are parked outside Susan’s house: her green 1966 Chevrolet and Lucius’s old 1958 Mercury. Aaron pulls up beside the cars, hears loud music. The Beatles. He gets out of his van, enters the kitchen. He is disappointed. She will have seen the timbers, will ask questions.

  Lucius and Susan sit at the round oak table, Susan’s back to the door; when she catches the look in Lucius’s eye, she turns, breaks into a broad grin, rises, shakes out her hair—which is wild and uncombed—comes to him, kisses him on the neck, begins to stroke the small of his back with her thumb and first two fingers. She leans back, body limp, pecks him on the nose, the mouth, each cheek. She is stoned, the pupils of her eyes dilated, the irises a pale, watery blue.

  On the table is a gallon jug of cheap Burgundy. Lucius, without rising from his chair, offers Aaron a glass, but as he begins to pour, the wine misses, splashes on the table. Lucius laughs.

  “You’re drunk,” Aaron says, then realizes that lost in the noise of the record, in clanging guitars and shimmering voices, Lucius cannot hear him. Susan is wearing a low-cut cream-colored summer dress, not the one she had on after rehearsal. He watches her bosom rise, sees that Lucius watches it too, bleary-eyed. Her cheeks are flushed and she looks especially young, the way she might have looked, Aaron imagines, when she played Beatrice’s daughter Catherine. He thinks of the beautiful young woman in the Elkton diner, the one Gail was jealous of. He goes to the sideboard, turns off the stereo.

  “Party pooper,” Susan says. “We were playing our song—”

  “My song,” Lucius says.

  “Lucius in the Sky with Diamonds,” Susan says. She lifts a halfsmoked cigarette from an ashtray, inhales, offers it to Aaron. “Want some?”

  “No.”

  “Drags don’t take drugs, I guess,” she states, then quickly puts a finger to her lips. “Shh. Be careful, Lucius. Aaron’s getting angry.”

  “Hey man, put the music back on!” Lucius commands.

  “I think you’d better get going,” Aaron says. He hears a high-pitched sound in his ear, the sound spiraling to a single note, higher and higher, as if going backwards through a cone of vision.

  Lucius pushes his knuckles against the table, braces himself and stands, goes to Aaron’s side, touches Aaron’s shoulder. “Hey—we just having some fun is all. Got to have me some fun before I’m a married man, don’t we?”

  “The longest journey,” Susan says. “Forsaking all others. Love, honor and obey. Obey. Oh boy.”

  “You can have fun after you’re married,” Aaron says.

  Susan bursts into laughter, slaps a hand over her mouth.

  “What’s so funny?” Aaron asks.

  “You,” Susan says. “Your eyes are in the sky, like diamonds. You have wonderful eyes. Still. Sometimes I’d like to swim into them, go all the way to the bottom.”

  “That’s Lucy,” Lucius says. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

  “Lucius,” Susan states.

  Lucius takes Aaron’s hand, touches the stubs. “You sure shoot good for a three-fingered man. But look now. Been wanting to ask you since we met, a long time gone. Look now. How you lose these things really?”

  “I told you once. At the orphanage, they—”

  “Oh come on, man—come off it already—what kind of dumb nigger you think I be? You think I believe all that bullshit about you being a poor orphan boy? Hey! Paul, he straighten me out on that a long time back.”

  “Oh God,” Susan says. “I am really stoned. I think I am fucking stoned out of my mind.” She blows lightly in his left ear. “C’mon Aaron—don’t be so damned high and mighty and pure. Try some, please? Don’t you want to have fun with me anymore? Don’t you want to play games with pretty Susan?”

  Aaron pushes her away, feels the blood surge in his ears, surf spraying against rocks, boulders tumbling into the sea. “I think we’d better get going,” he says. “The children need supper. It will be dark soon and neither of you are in fit shape to drive.”

  Susan leans back against the sideboard, sucks on her cigarette. Her right hand moves down, splays open, rises slowly, makes circles across the plane of her stomach. Aaron sees a single drop of sweat glide down the right side of Lucius’s neck. Pearl on ebony. Aaron is dizzy for an instant, steadies himself against the table, then moves forward, to take Susan by the arm. He wants to be gentle but is not certain that, if she taunts him, he will be able to control himself.

  “I said it’s time to go.”

  “Her master’s voice,” Susan says, and she turns on the stereo. Aaron switches it off. Susan pouts. “See? He is just such a goddamned stick-in-the-mud sometimes, Lucius, didn’t I tell you? Can’t you see? Couldn’t you just fucking die from it?”

  “Hey,” Lucius says. “C’mon now. Aaron’s a good old boy. You see that jump shot today? You see the power under the boards? You see the moves? This man, he fall back in time, he be the best man out there. The coach, his face dragging the floor when he find out how old Aaron is, and never played for no college.”

  “I’ll pick you up and carry you if I have to,” Aaron says.

  “Really?” Susan’s eyes are suddenly bright, azure. “Would you?”

  “I mean, Aaron be okay for a white man. How much life a guy have left anyway, a man has to wonder, all the years he been married and stuff? Why you getting married anyway, Lucius? Don’t you never learn? Freedom now, boy. Freedom now!”

  Susan sips wine, tries to sit, nearly misses the chair. Aaron puts an arm round her waist and the instant he touches her, his palm falling on the curve of her hip, he is astonished to find that he begins to harden. Chin uptilted, Susan lets her head rest against his shoulder, swings her arm outward and back, so that her forearm drops across her closed eyes.

  “In a swoon,” she intones. “But listen. If Jen gets knocked up I’ll be a grandmother. Can you imagine? Here I am, in the prime of my life—the books say a woman’s peak is between thirty-five and forty—and if I’m a grandmother, then what will that make you?”

  “Come on,” Aaron says, and feels his erection ease even as his anger grows. “Enough. I’m losing patience.”

  “Carry me then.”

  “I said I’m losing patience. Don’t force me
to—”

  “Force me then, all right?” Her voice is husky. “Come on, big boy. Force me. Come on. We’re among friends—”

  “Same book say a man’s peak at nineteen, Aaron. Bad news. We way past our prime, I guess.”

  “Problems,” Susan says. “Problems and then more problems.” She slips out of Aaron’s grasp, slumps down in a chair, smiles up at him. “Hi!” she says. “Glad you could make it to our party. Haven’t we met somewhere before? Mmmmm.” She reaches up with her left hand. “Remember the first time we met? Oh God, when I saw your eyes I just melted. All those crinkles around them, and you so young I couldn’t tell you were so old. Take my hand, please?”

  He takes her hand, feels the cold metal of her gold wedding band.

  “Hey, you two lovers, tell Lucius about it, we have us some story time. No shit, Aaron—remember all the stuff we be telling each other, coming up from Mississippi? He tell me about how you two meet, him cleaning out the stables at the fairgrounds, you wiping them horses’ flanks, wondering how a guy so smart be caught shoveling out hot turds. Only what he don’t tell me is how come a smart good-looking guy with all his talent, he be moving from town to town, working the county fairs, taking this job and that. Being a poor orphan boy don’t explain that now, does it?”

  Susan’s head is on her arms, on the table. “God, he was so lovely then. You were just so lovely, Aaron. After all I’d been through, with Paul running out on me, all his crazy games. The second I saw your eyes, I knew I was safe. Home free.”

  “Come on,” Lucius says. “Come on now, Aaron. I tell you true all about Carrie, so now you gotta tell me about what you doing there, and about them fingers. You don’t, then I got nothing left but to believe in Paul’s tales and I don’t think you be wanting that. Oh yeah. Never could figure that either, when we were working for him, fixing that old house up all fancy, how it don’t bug you none that he, you know, had her all them years.”