Max Baer and the Star of David Page 15

  Miss Hémon and I met whenever and wherever we could—in her home and mine (when Joleen and our children were away); on walks in parts of San Francisco where we felt reasonably certain we would meet no one we knew (or who, if they knew us, would not see us); on weekends at Enchanted Hills Camp; for wild and quick assignations in her office (the door locked); and, like randy adolescents whose lustful longings put the fulfillment of desire above patent dangers, in unlikely settings I will not here name. Nor will I particularize the pleasures we knew, or their astonishing variations, or recount with any further specificity when, where, how often, or for what lengths of time we met. I do not shy away from telling of such matters because to do so would demean or diminish our love, but because I wish, simply, to let what was ours remain ours. I will, however, note this: that I never loved Miss Hémon more than when I watched her tending to her children. This, in addition to her beauty, her sensuality, her wit, her intelligence, and her kindness, was for me ever the great aphrodisiac.

  There was this too: that I felt she would protect me with the same fierce determination with which she would her own children. Being with her and her children put me in mind—curious realization—of Max’s desire to protect me. In particular, I found myself recalling a time in Chicago, on a scorching August evening in 1932, the temperature and humidity approaching one hundred degrees, when I was accompanying him on his rounds of several jazz clubs he liked to visit. The following evening he would fight a second time against Ernie Schaaf, a man who had defeated him badly during their first match two years earlier in New York City’s Madison Square Garden. It was in this second fight, in Chicago, that he would knock Schaaf unconscious. Several months later, when Schaaf died after a bout with Carnera, it would be Max, and the savage beating he had rendered Schaaf, and not Carnera, who would be seen as the cause of Schaaf’s death.

  But on the night before he rendered Schaaf unconscious, Max did not know this would happen, and he was enjoying, among other things, the pleasure it gave him to know that Cantwell was back in our hotel, having one of his famous fits because Max was, yet again, out on the town and breaking all training rules.

  Max had as his other companion that evening a young, beautiful jazz singer named Leslie Pearl, and the three of us were standing at the bar while a jazz trio was on break, Max holding forth with one of his tall tales, when a man approached him, tapped him on the shoulder, and asked if he had read the sign.

  “I’m not into astronomy,” Max laughed, “but they tell me I’m an Aquarius, which means I got a serious and sunny nature. How about you?”

  The man, shorter than Max by three or four inches but weighing a good twenty or thirty pounds more, pointed to a sign above the bar that read “We Serve Whites Only.”

  “So you’re okay then,” Max said. “They can serve you here.”

  “But not this nigra next to you,” the man said.

  The room became suddenly quiet. Max smiled broadly, put an arm around Leslie.

  “Get lost, Mister, okay?” Max said, and he put his other arm around me. “We’re here to have a good time and we don’t want some Sad Sack Sam messing up our party, okay? And this man here, he’s my right-hand man, see—my best friend.”

  “And who the hell are you?” the man said.

  “Why I’m his friend!” Max said.

  I saw the bartender take a baseball bat out from under the counter, slap the heft of it against his palm several times.

  “Look,” Max said to the man. “Like the blind man said when he pissed into the wind, ‘It’s all coming back to me now!’ Get it?”

  “Get out,” the man said, and he took the baseball bat from the bartender. “We don’t like nigras much around here, but we hate nigra lovers even worse.”

  “Too bad for you,” Max said, “because, like I said, you’re pissing into the wind, Mister, and if you don’t want to wind up blind in both eyes, which operation I’d be pleased to perform free of charge, I suggest you put that toothpick down and vamoose. ’Cause if you’re blind, see—in your eyes, not in what passes for the slop you got between your ears—in a minute or two you won’t be able to see that sign—or my friend either.”

  Someone whispered in the man’s ear.

  The man took a step back. “You’re Max Baer?”

  “That’s what they tell me, and let me tell you that I don’t mind being him one bit,” Max said, and he took the bat out of the man’s hand, and tossed it to the bartender, to whom he now spoke. “Hey—I’d get rid of that sign, if I were you, okay? It’s making your customers uncomfortable.”

  The bartender froze where he was.

  “Now!” Max commanded.

  The bartender did what Max asked. The man who had confronted Max backed away, told Max he didn’t mess with killers or kikes, and hurried out the door.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Max announced, holding up my right hand and Leslie’s left. “A TKO, two minutes of the first round! And to celebrate the victory, drinks are on the house—right, bartender?—so everybody drink up and don’t forget to have a good time!”

  On the fourth Friday after we had returned from our first visit to the Enchanted Hills Camp, I arrived at Miss Hémon’s home an hour or so earlier than usual. My Golden and Silver Gloves teams had a competition in Northridge the next morning, and I had cut our training session short, and urged my young men to have an early dinner and a long night’s sleep. My hope was that Anna and David might be off playing, and that Miss Hémon and I might enjoy some private time before Joleen and Horace Jr. arrived. But as I was turning the corner on Alabama Street, I saw a man walking across her backyard, then leaving the yard through a loose slat in the fence that enclosed the yard. The shuffling walk and bandana were familiar, and I told myself that my eyesight was not as reliable as it had once been, and that Hawkins Johnson was hardly the only man of color in San Francisco who wore a bandana or walked with a limp.

  Before I could reflect on what I had seen, though, I became aware of cries coming from Miss Hémon’s home. I hurried up her steps and, without knocking, entered. Miss Hémon and Anna were in the living room, Miss Hémon straitjacketing Anna from behind the way I might have held a fighter determined to attack his opponent after a bout was over. Anna was thrashing about wildly while David stood a few feet away, staring at his mother and sister as if he could actually see them.

  Miss Hémon was talking softly into her daughter’s ear. “I love you, sweetheart, and everything will be all right,” she was saying. “I love you and I love you, and everything will be all right, so just let me hold you a while longer. Don’t fight me, sweetheart. Please. I love you, and everything will be all right. You’ll see. I love you and everything will be all right…”

  The only time I had ever seen a child in such a frenzied agony had been when I was younger than David was now, and my father had had my older brother Simon tie Joleen to a chair so he could whip her across her chest and legs with a willow switch, and while this memory blazed through my mind, and while I listened to Miss Hémon’s voice as if I, too, like David, might draw consolation from it, it did not occur to me that Anna could not hear the words her mother was speaking.

  Why then was Miss Hémon whispering to her … ? And why was she gazing at me with such a fierce expression? She seemed not at all startled to see me there, while for my part I felt disoriented—like a child about to do what as a child I did not dare do—to stride forward and snatch the willow switch from my father’s hand while crying out that he was never ever again to touch or come near to my sister!

  “Get out, Mister Littlejohn,” Miss Hémon said. “Get out at once. This is not your business. This is not your family. Leave us be. Please.”

  I kneeled in front of Anna, who continued to wail away, her thin body heaving in and out. I set two fingers against her mouth—ready to pull them back if she moved to bite—and tapped upon her upper lip.

  “Listen to your mother,” I said. “She loves you as I do, and everything is going to be all right.
Can you understand?”

  At my words, her screaming abated slightly, and I wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of my shirt.

  “I’m sorry,” she said a minute later.

  Miss Hémon was now attending to David, and it was only when she did that I became aware of a large lump on his forehead.

  I went into the kitchen, wrapped ice in a dishcloth, returned, and placed the ice pack against David’s forehead, telling him to hold it there for as long as he could bear doing so.

  Miss Hémon and Anna sat on the couch, Anna’s head resting against her mother’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Mama,” Anna said. “But it hurt so much. You don’t know. You can’t know what it’s like…”

  “That’s true,” Miss Hémon said.

  “I get scared,” Anna said. “That’s all. I just get scared. It hurts so much that I get scared.”

  “We all get scared sometimes,” Miss Hémon said. “I’ll wager that even Mister Littlejohn gets scared sometimes.”

  “I do,” I said. “I surely do.”

  “What seems to happen at times—” Miss Hémon explained when Anna and David had gone off on their own, and I watched her prepare dinner “—what Anna tells me happens—is that a series of small explosions take place inside her head. They arrive without warning, become louder and louder, and she becomes frightened they have no way out and are going to blow her head wide open—that her brains will scatter everywhere, and that she will disappear.”

  I expressed my sympathy, and my admiration for the way she had been with Anna, then asked about the man I had seen leaving through her backyard, and told her he reminded me of Hawkins Johnson.

  “That was Hawkins,” she said. “He often comes by to help me with chores, and with the children.”

  “Did he do anything to cause Anna’s fright?” I asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “And the lump on David’s head?”

  “David ran into a wall—in the upstairs hallway,” she said. “When he is very upset he does that—he will turn in circles to make himself dizzy, then charge ahead until something stops him.”

  “But how can you … ?”

  “It is my life, Mister Littlejohn,” she said. “Do you have any other questions?”

  “Do you feel safe when Hawkins is here?”

  “Safe?!” Miss Hémon said. “What kind of question is that? Like you, Hawkins is a dear friend.” She bent toward me as if to confide a secret. “I certainly feel safer with him than I do with you, given the things you have tried to do with me.”

  “But I thought you enjoyed—”

  She stopped my words with a quick kiss. “Oh Horace, you are a wonder,” she said, “Taking advantage of your innocence has become one of my great pleasures.” Then: “Hawkins thought you might arrive early today,” she said. “That was why he left when he did, and—”

  “But how would he know, unless … ?”

  “—and he had come here to tell me that your friend Max Baer will be visiting the YMCA next week.”

  “And so—”

  “And so he was hoping I might put in a word with you on his behalf so that he might meet the man.”

  “I don’t think that will be possible.”

  “It would mean a lot to him.”

  “Hawkins has said things to me that suggest he would use the occasion to malign Max’s character,” I said.

  “I would think Mister Baer is capable of defending himself,” she said.

  “I see no reason to arrange a situation in which Hawkins would confront Max in a way that would be disruptive,” I said. “But now that he has chosen to come to you—to involve you—I will talk with him, and after that—”

  “You will tell all, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  She took my hands in hers. “We should have no secrets from one another,” she said. “We should not hold back ever, not even for fear of hurting the other. We have agreed to that—agreed that it is at the heart of what we have found in and with one another. So rare, Horace. So rare, don’t you agree?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She let go of my hands. “Oh, we can dissemble a bit about things that are without consequence—” she said “—if I like your haircut, if you like my new dress—and we don’t have to say everything that comes to mind simply because, well, it comes to mind. Privacy yes, secrecy no, is the way I see it. Our thoughts and musings—our fantasies—they can remain ours, don’t you agree?”

  “I will talk with Hawkins at the next opportunity,” I said. “But for now I prefer to talk about Anna and David’s mother. I have never known a mother as loving and calm—as patient—as you.”

  “And strong,” she said, smiling. “You forgot ‘strong.’ I am very strong. Care to feel my biceps?”

  I felt her biceps. “Impressive,” I said.

  “May I feel yours?” she asked, and then, of a sudden, as if feeling the weight of what had happened with Anna and David for the first time, her body sagged and, eyes closed, she leaned against the kitchen sink to keep from collapsing.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, and rested my hands on her back.

  “No,” she said. “But I will be. What I worry about, you see, is what they will do—how they will cope—should anything happen to me. I worry and I wonder, Mister Littlejohn, because they have no father, no family—no aunts, uncles, grandparents. What, then, will they do if something happens to me? Do you have the answer to that? Tell me, please. What will they do? Who will care for them? Who will know how to care for them?”

  “But nothing will happen to you,” I said. “And should something happen, I…”

  She waved away my words, stood up tall, and returned to the stove. “Sometimes I think I shouldn’t love them as much as I do—that it’s truly wanton of me,” she said. “Wanton, Mister Littlejohn. Wanton and irresponsible and…”

  “And what?” I asked.

  “I’m glad you asked,” she said, “for in addition to being wanton and irresponsible, I am also melancholy at times. I am not always the cheerful mother, devoted employee, and magnificent lover of whom you are so inordinately fond. I thought you should know that. And sometimes I despair of a life in which I will be forever tending to Anna and David, never knowing with any certainty that they will be all right, or that there will ever be a life for me—or for them—beyond love and worry. Because as I’ve said before, it’s all love and worry, don’t you see? And why is that, do you suppose?”

  “I am certain you will tell me,” I said.

  “Of course,” she said, and she pulled me to her, took my left ear between her teeth, bit down hard. “Because,” she whispered, “when it comes to our children, there is no safety.”

  “There is no safety,” I repeated.

  “There is no safety,” she said. “I figured that out a long time ago, and once I did, I concluded that, if there is no safety, then the only thing worth having—worth taking—is pleasure. Do you understand that?”

  “Perhaps,” I said.

  “But since, with the children here, you cannot give me the pleasure I would most like to have—the pleasure that makes all else disappear—I will ask you to do something else for me. Do you have your kit with you?”

  “My kit?”

  “For the diabetes.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I keep it with me always. Doctor Levitzky said—”

  “Then let us give thanks to Doctor Levitzky,” she said, “and please go fetch your kit, and we will adjourn for a few minutes to the basement where I will take pleasure from watching you inject yourself. And after that, while I occupy myself with final preparations for dinner, I hope you will do me the additional favor of going upstairs and checking in on the children to make sure they are all right.”

  I looked into David’s room first, but the children were not there. Then I looked into Anna’s room and I was so taken aback by what I saw—David standing on a footstool, eyes closed, hands at his sides, kissing Anna, who wore a blindfold over her eye
s—that I nearly cried out. I could hear my heart pound inside my ears, and I backed away quickly so that they would not know I had seen them, and so that I could collect my thoughts.

  I also reproached myself, for I recalled that on the very first evening we had had dinner here, and I had seen how affectionate Anna and David were with one another, I had thought of how Joleen and I had been with one another as children, and I had wondered for an instant—foul thought of which I immediately chastised myself—whether they too might some day be to each other as Joleen and I had been.

  I tiptoed downstairs, where Miss Hémon, in the kitchen, wiped her hands on her apron, put her arms around my neck and gave me a long, lingering kiss.

  “That’s for being so kind to my children,” she said. “It’s the quick way to this woman’s heart.”

  “I see that,” I said.

  Then: “Is everything all right?” she asked, her brow furrowed. “The children?”

  I realized that Miss Hémon did not know, nor could she have any reason to suspect the true relationship between me and Joleen, and could not therefore suspect why seeing what I had seen had alarmed me. At the same time, I imagined telling Max what I had seen—telling him why seeing this brother and sister kissing had so upset me. “Holy mackerel,” I could hear him say. “I’ve seen and done lots of crazy stuff in my time, Horace, but to do it with your own sister—hey, that’s really sick, you ask me.”

  “They were kissing,” I said to Miss Hémon. “But not passionately. It was as if they were trying something out—experimenting perhaps. David was standing on a footstool, and they were not embracing.”

  Miss Hémon laughed.

  “Pecking,” I went on. “They seemed to be pecking at each other.”

  “And you were worried, weren’t you, that they were performing some dark, secret act—”

  “Well…” I began. “Not worried perhaps, but…”

  “Anna has a birthday party tomorrow night, girls and boys, and she told me her girlfriend Diane said there would be kissing games at the party,” Miss Hémon said.