Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  Why is it, Aaron wonders, even as he lets the tears flow, that he is so moved by the death of a man he has never known, yet has been unable to weep for the two men he has been closest to in his life: his father and Abe. Why has he seemed to feel—to show—so little for the loss of the others who were dear to him: Gail, Emilie, Lucius, Susan.

  He wipes his eyes with the backs of his wrists. To his right a construction crew is building a new shopping mall. He watches a giant crane slowly lower a long orange girder. Workers in yellow hard hats move deliberately, almost eagerly in the cool morning air. A year before, the land that is now laid over with tons of flat black asphalt was covered with acres of high straw-yellow cornstalks. The Holyoke Range, rising behind the skeleton of the new mall, seems chiseled into the pale early morning sky. The spectacular blaze of autumn color has come somewhat early this year, and now, most trees bare, the landscape stretches away on all sides in browns and lavenders and russets and pale greens. Should he try to paint the picture, not of the half-built mall, but of the mountains and fields behind it—of the Holyoke notch—Aaron would, he decides, do so in watercolors, in washes that might suggest the enormous mass of snow-white air that seems to lie behind the cold blue sky, cushioning it.

  This is, as ever, Aaron’s favorite time of the year. The crops are, for the most part, already harvested or plowed under, and snow has not yet covered the earth. The landscape opens gradually to wide horizons, endless vistas. Mornings, heading north towards Montague, where he is building a house for a young couple—the wife a social worker, the husband a dentist—he loves seeing the Connecticut River, hidden by trees all through the spring and summer and early autumn, become slowly visible: he likes seeing the full expanse of the river; he likes looking across the river to the rich, flat farmland of Deerfield. It is as if, at this time of year, between the end of autumn and the beginning of winter, his heart opens—as if his mind sheds its dry leaves, sucksin cold air, expands, begins to reveal itself, to fill with bright white light.

  He considers going on, as he has planned—to his drawing class, and after his class to the house in Montague. His two coworkers, George and Norm, will be finishing up the framing. Next week, ahead of schedule and in plenty of time for first snow, they can begin to put the roof on. It will be good, he thinks, to lose himself in the steady rhythm of hammering twelve- and sixteen-pound nails into posts and beams and studs and trimmers. But he wonders what the right thing to do is: to stop and to try to recall as much of Jackie’s life as he can and thereby to feel the loss—to grieve, to mourn—or, by going on with the ordinary tasks of his own life, to give honor to Jackie’s.

  Jackie was only fifty-three years old, yet Aaron finds that he is not surprised by the fact of the man’s death. Jackie was suffering from hypertension, arthritis, diabetes. He had previously recovered from a near-fatal septicemia and from two earlier heart attacks. He was blind in one eye and, as a result of retinal bleeding caused by diabetes, rapidly going blind in the other. All efforts to stop the deterioration by cauterizing the ruptured vessels with laser beams failed. He had lost his firstborn son.

  In an adult education course that Aaron is taking at the synagogue in Northampton—he joined two and a half years before, in the month immediately following his divorce from Susan—the rabbi has explained that the Mourner’s Kaddish is not, in fact, a prayer for the dead, but a prayer for the living in which we declare our faith in the fact that life goes on, that the generations renew one another. Jews do not believe in an afterlife. The only immortality we have, the rabbi says—the only way in which we can live on beyond our time on earth—is in our children, or in our works, or in the memories others have of us.

  But who, Aaron wonders, is still alive who can remember what he was like before he reached the age of twenty? Who is still alive who ever thinks about the boy named Davey Voloshin, about the young man who married Gail, who loved Emilie, who disappeared…?

  The rabbi has explained that there are three levels of mourning. The first level is that of tears. The second and higher level is that of silence. And the third and highest level is that of song. Aaron recalls walking with Lucius and Nicky through downtown Meridien, holding hands while they approached the church in which James Chaney’s body waited, but he cannot hear the sound of their voices. He cannot summon up the sound of the hymns they sang in the church. He cannot hear Nicky’s voice as she sang by the lakeside, though he can recall the dark oval of her open mouth, the blood along her cheek and jaw. We shall overcome? Not a chance, he thinks. Not in this life. He starts the car, pulls out into traffic.

  Just past the Zayre’s Shopping Center, at the Hadley-Amherst town line, he makes a U-turn, drives east, back towards home. He knows what it is he wants to do, knew it really in the first instant in which he heard the news on the radio: he wants to be there. He lets his rage subside and admits to himself that he wants to go to New York—to the funeral and to the cemetery—so that he can be with others who mourn and honor a man Aaron once loved with all his heart. He wishes Carl and Larry had not already left for school. He wishes he could sit with them now in his living room, or on the hard ground outside his studio window, and tell them the story of Jackie Robinson’s life.

  That story is now complete, isn’t it?

  He recalls sitting in Beau Jack’s apartment when he was a boy no older than his own sons, listening to a Dodger game on the radio, Red Barber calling the play-by-play as if he were there in the ballpark, as if he were not in a radio studio looking at words curling across his desk on a narrow strip of ticker tape. Aaron reminds himself to tell the boys about that, about how the announcers would have to invent the action, about how boys like himself would have to imagine the games on the screens inside their heads.

  Aaron is thirty-seven years old, the same age Jackie was when Jackie retired from baseball. Aaron is thirty-seven years old and he is living his second life and for the first time in a long while it occurs to him, with force, that he can never cross back over to that first life. The pain is sudden, as if fists have entered an enormous wound in his side and are now opening and closing inside his stomach. Stone seems to grind against stone. His body is rigid, as if poised for a blow that may never come. Yet the pain is bearable. Why? Has the other life and self died then? And if so—if they are gone at last, if he can never go back—why does the pain still come so sharply from time to time, and why can there never be an end to memory, to the sense he has that, as now, he will never be done with mourning?

  Because you loved that boy as much as you loved ]ackie.

  He feels his body relax. Whose voice is he hearing? Is it true—does he love the boy he himself was in the same way that he once loved Jackie, in the same way that he loves each of his own sons? He wonders: is the love more intense because he has lost that boy forever?

  Aaron crosses over the Coolidge Bridge. The fall has been dry and the sandbars in the river below are wide. No boys sit on the railroad bridge that spans the river thirty yards or so to the north. The river’s surface is calm and flat, unmoving, as if it is a lake. Aaron hears no music inside his head. Still, he can summon up the sound of Jackie’s falsetto voice. Had Jackie come to recognize the sound of that voice as his own? Aaron recalls how surprised he was in Ohio when he listened to himself on tape. Why is it, he wonders, that we always sound so different to ourselves than we do to others?

  Aaron can see Jackie, stone-cold in a pine coffin, his snow-white hair like lamb’s wool, his skin like hard black leather, and the picture gives neither peace nor comfort. Aaron thinks of how conservative Jackie had become—of how he had, in his newspaper columns, attacked Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and James Baldwin; of how he had become a Republican and supported Nixon and Rockefeller; of how he had shilled for Chock Full O’Nuts—and what he wishes he could have done to this white-haired pigeon-toed half-blind old man, he realizes, was to have kidnapped him and blindfolded him and carried him south again. He wishes he could have stripped him from his business suit an
d handed him a bat and a ball and a glove and put him on a scrabbly field with a bunch of black kids in the hope that his being there might remind Jackie of the boy he had once been, and of what it was he did so well.

  When Aaron arrives home, he telephones Nicky, asks if she can come to his house.

  “I’ll be right there. But listen—did you hear about Jackie?”

  “Yes. It’s why I’m calling.”

  “I’m sorry, Aaron.”

  “Me too.”

  “Remember the night you told Rose Morgan’s kids all about him, about seeing him with the Dodgers that first year?”

  “Yes.”

  “I love you, Aaron.”

  Aaron walks through the rooms of his house, down to his studio, sits at his drawing table, gazes out the window at the lawn, the stone wall, the trees. Past the wall, some maples still hold a few scarlet leaves, and the beech trees, at the east end of his property, are filled with brittle silver leaves, as they will be through most of the winter. Aaron tries to hear his own voice talking to Rose Morgan’s children and the other civil rights workers about what it was like to watch Jackie take the field, and scuff the dirt with his spikes, and pound his glove. When Jackie took the field, Aaron said to them, there was something about his bearing that reminded us all that it was our birthright to be free. Here I am, Jackie seemed to say by the way he stood and moved and gazed at others. Here I am. I’m a man—are you?

  Yes sir, that’s right, Rose Morgan said.

  Aaron looks at the woman in the upper right-hand corner of his table. Her downward glance has not changed. Her kitchen is still filled with pale yellow light, with soft blue and green cloths, with loaves of warm bread, with the glazed bowl that receives fresh milk. Her forearms and wrists and cheeks and forehead are still bright with the same gentle light that will, from the window to her left, shine upon her forever. And the life outside that window?

  Aaron is glad that Nicky is coming to visit—pleased that he called her, that he didn’t resist the impulse. Aaron likes Nicky’s husband Mark, a small bear of a man, blinded in one eye during a civil rights march in Selma, Alabama. Mark, on sabbatical leave from Dickinson College, is working at the University of Massachusetts library, where W. E. B. DuBois’s papers are stored, on a book about DuBois’s African years. Nicky is using the year to work on a master’s degree in special education. Afternoons, she works in Northampton at a home for delinquent teenage boys, mostly Puerto Ricans. In less than eight months, when she and Mark return to Pennsylvania, Aaron will graduate from the university.

  Aaron tries to imagine what it is he will feel when Nicky is gone. His mind drifts. He tries to remember August weather in Mississippi. Does time, he wonders, move more slowly through heat and darkness? He sees his father on the roof of their apartment house, sitting on the edge, feet dangling above the street. His father wears a green bathing suit and a sleeveless undershirt that is too large for him. His father calls down to neighbors who sit in front of the house. His mother shouts at his father to get off the edge, to stop showing off. She turns to a neighbor, Mrs. Ellenbogen. How the hell can he smoke his crappy Chesterfields in this weather is what she wants to know. Aaron wants to go to his father, to take his father’s hand before his father leans over too far and loses his balance. Aaron sees steam, like morning mist, rising from the sidewalk, giving off the heat that the concrete has absorbed all day. He wonders what he sounded like to others then, when he was a boy. If there is a difference—a distance—between the self we struggle to make and the self that others claim to know, is it possible to enter that space—to lie down in it, to dwell there?

  “I like the barns.”

  “The barns?”

  Nicky kisses him on the cheek. He turns to face her and she does not move back. Her lips, cool and soft, are light against his skin.

  “There!”

  She points to the drawing on the table, in pencil, of three Hadley tobacco barns, so much longer than they are high, set low on the horizon, their vertical slats, which run the full length of the barns, open to the autumn air.

  “Oh. The barns,” Aaron says. “Yes.”

  Nicky laughs. “Were you asleep? I kept knocking, but you didn’t come to the door.”

  “No. I was daydreaming, I guess.”

  “You don’t mind my coming down here.”

  “Why should I mind?”

  “Larry says it’s your sanctuary, that you get angry sometimes if—”

  “Maybe.” He takes her hand, kisses it. “But no. I don’t mind. Not today. No secrets here—not from you, Nicky. I do like to come here, though—to be by myself, to let my mind drift, to remember things, to imagine—”

  “Jackie?”

  “Sure.”

  “Jackie and what else?”

  “Jackie and me as a boy, idolizing him, rooting for him, wanting him to show the bastards just how good he was, how much of a man—”

  “Did the other guys at the orphanage feel the same?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I suppose. With the same intensity—with your intensity?

  “I doubt it.”

  “Me too.”

  Aaron laughs. “Listen, Larry came up with this during the summer when I took the kids camping in New Hampshire. ‘Do you know what I figured out, Dad,’ he said to me one day. ‘What?’ I asked, and he began to smile the way he does. ‘That camping is a very in-tents experience.’ Get it?”

  Nicky groans.

  “But how did Jackie do it, Nicky? How did he let that talent loose day after day when he knew thousands—millions—of people were waiting for him to fail? Every time he came to bat, every time a ball was hit toward him. What kept him going?”

  “His belief in himself.”

  “Maybe.” Aaron shakes his head. “He was a cold man, really. I’ve been remembering that. When he played, and after.”

  “Like you, right? All talent, no heart.”

  Nicky kisses him on the forehead. Aaron lets his left hand rest on her stomach.

  “The baby’s kicking. Can you tell?”

  Aaron presses lightly, searches for the baby’s shape, for the feet.

  “I think so. How many months now?”

  “Thirteen weeks to go, but the doctor says it might come early this time. Second children often do.”

  “Where’s Samuel?”

  “Upstairs. I parked him in front of the TV. I thought you might want to be alone with me first and I didn’t want him to be tempted to put his sweet little hands on your drawings. Those barns are wonderful! How do you get the details? The tobacco leaves peeking out of the openings with their curled edges—they—” Nicky stops. “You’re very upset, aren’t you?

  “Yes. I’m very upset.”

  “How would you feel about us just holding each other for a while?”

  Aaron stands, puts his arms around Nicky, holds her. He thinks of Gail, of the kitchen on Ocean Avenue, of a moment—perhaps ten days before Emilie was born—when he held to Gail this way. Well, he thinks. Did he love her or did he love her?

  He leaves the studio, walks upstairs, Nicky’s small fist tight around two of his good fingers. He should know more than most that life is never predictable. Why, then, is he always surprised—frightened—when the unexpected occurs? Is it ever possible to feel ready—to be ready—for whatever may happen, for any of life’s possibilities? He says hello to Samuel, lifts the boy in the air and tosses him toward the ceiling the way he remembers Abe doing with him, before the war.

  “More!” Samuel says. “More! More!”

  “You look very pale,” Nicky says. “I’ll fix you something. Did you have breakfast?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have a second then. On me.”

  Aaron sets Samuel down, nuzzles the skin between Samuel’s chin and shoulder. Samuel has Mark’s build, Nicky’s intense gray eyes. He tries to imagine Samuel at seventeen or eighteen, grinning, showing a chipped front tooth. What will news of Mississippi in the summer of 1964 mean
to him by then, in 1986 or 1987? How will he ever understand that a moment in history—Malcolm and Martin alive, moving closer to one another in belief and spirit—had been missed, and that an entire nation was, forever after, doomed? Despite his knowledge—the history his father and mother and others can give to him—how will he ever feel that things might, for so many, have been otherwise.

  In the kitchen, Nicky moves efficiently, gracefully—taking eggs from the refrigerator, putting bread in the toaster oven, pouring orange juice, fixing Samuel a snack, setting the table. She asks Aaron about his courses, about his work in Holyoke. Aaron travels there three times a week—two afternoons and Saturday mornings—helping out in Operation Renewal, teaching carpentry to blacks and Puerto Ricans. The project seems sensible: if poor people restore condemned and abandoned buildings according to conditions set down by the city’s housing commission, the buildings will become theirs. Nicky wonders how Aaron finds the time to do all he does—to take care of the boys and the house; to oversee the construction work; to be part of Operation Renewal….