Free Before My Life Began by Jay Neugeboren Page B

pencil and then erasing, you could feel the hair actually curving, one layer into the other, so that when I looked down at the paper I wanted to dip my fingers right in and press the curls flat and then feel them spring back up at me.
    I sketched in the worry lines on his forehead, three of them, lightly, and on the sides of his head I brushed in a few strokes, then rubbed the pencil marks with my index finger so that they blended into gray shadows that showed the shape of the skull curving beneath his skin. Abe had a nice high forehead, with flat planes along the sides. His sideburns ended near the bottoms of his ears, and his hair curled back there, hiding most of his ears so that from the front you saw only the outer rims. I began doing his eyes next—they were always my favorite parts of portraits, and if I got them right the rest usually went well—and as I outlined the left one, and got the folds above and below, and the light smile lines that radiated from the outer corner, like the fine lines you’d see in school books, in drawings of the way a flower’s roots spread out under the soil, I got upset for an instant because I knew I’d seen eyes exactly like Abe’s somewhere before. At first, because of the smile lines, I thought they reminded me of the way Ted Williams’s eyes looked. I’d copied a picture of Williams from Sport magazine, in which he was smiling at you, not from his Boston Red Sox uniform, but from the cockpit of a Marine fighter plane in the South Pacific. But there was something else too, and when I shaded in the space along the inner edge of Abe’s eye, where the eyebrow began sloping down along the bones of the nose and cheek, I realized that Abe’s eyes were steady and penetrating the way Williams’s eyes were—Williams had the best eyesight of any player who ever lived, and there was a photo in the article showing him reading the title of a song on a 78 rpm record while the record was still spinning—but that they were also like someone else’s eyes: like the eyes Abe’s father had, and that Abe was staring at me in the same way his father had stared at my mother the day before, when she mentioned Abe’s name.
    As I drew in the lines under his eyes, and then went back up and began darkening the middle of the eye, pressing down lightly, yet with enough force so that you could tell that the deep brown of the iris was lighter-colored than his hair, I knew I was nervous. My hand trembled slightly, so I put my left hand on the paper, at the bottom edge, palm down, and leaned my right hand on it for steadiness. Abe’s eyes seemed gentle because of the wrinkle lines around them and the soft way they were set into their hollows, but there was something in them that terrified me—something hard and unforgiving that told me there wasn’t anything in life, no cruelty that he had not seen.
    I kept drawing, though, and by the time my mother and Lillian and Sheila returned to the living room, I was almost done. They came up behind me and made a big fuss about how my picture looked exactly like Abe, and my father kept saying he’d told them so, hadn’t he? He’d told them what a terrific gift I had.
    The welts on Lillian’s cheek were red, as if she had fingers stuffed under her skin. Sheila had put on fresh lipstick. She bent down close to the paper.
    â€œHey, that’s good, Davey,” she said. “You really draw good. How’d you do it?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œHe don’t know,” my mother laughed. “With a gift like that, he don’t know. Oh my Davey!” She started to give me a kiss, to show how proud she was of me, but my father grabbed her hands and warned her about not touching me while I was drawing. “You know what I think the secret is?” she said. “I think the secret comes from how quiet he is all the time. It leaves him lots of time for staring,