You Are My Heart and Other Stories Read online

  Herschel took me aside, coached me on some basics—jab, jab, slip, slip—how, after I jabbed, to move my head quickly to the side to avoid a return blow—and said that the main thing was not the hands, but the legs. “Balance, Marty,” he said. “Make sure you got good balance, especially when you move from side to side—and when you see an opening and swing, maintain your balance—don’t let your back leg drag, got it?”

  I said I did, but when the bell rang and I stepped into the ring, my legs turned to jelly, and as Mancuso danced around and threw jabs—I was able to catch most of them with my gloves—and then laughed at me for being a pretty boy whose nose he’d try not to break, my stomach gurgled so loud I thought everyone would hear it.

  Between rounds, Herschel told me I’d done a good job of keeping away from Mancuso’s right hand, which he said was wicked. “He’s just playing with you,” Herschel said, “and he got no clue that you’re gonna surprise him.”

  “I am?” I said.

  “Oh yeah,” Herschel said, “because he’s got the same problem Louis had with Schmeling in their first fight. When he goes for the knockout punch—a roundhouse right—he drops his left hand, which leaves him wide open. That’s when you’re in the money.”

  My legs were better in the second round, and I enjoyed moving around the ring, and listening to Joey, Herschel, and some of the others cheering for me, and once in a while jabbing at Mancuso and connecting, then getting him in a clinch so I could catch my breath. What surprised me, though, was how tired my arms got just from keeping them up all the time to protect myself.

  “This is it, Marty,” Joey called when the bell rang for the third round. “So don’t forget—my money’s on you, and that there’s nothing I hate more than losing.”

  About a minute into the round I heard Mancuso’s trainer yelling at him to stop fooling around and put me on my ass or they’d lose whatever bucks they’d put down against Joey. Mancuso came after me then, and I got up on the balls of my feet more, my knees slightly bent—as if I were guarding a guy who was trying to fake me out and make his move to the basket—and when he came at me with a couple of sharp jabs to soften me up, and I could tell he was going to unleash his right, I was ready, and just before he threw his right, he dropped his left the way Herschel said he would, and I laid into his stomach as hard as I could—as close to where Herschel had shown me the liver was, the most vulnerable spot on the body—and when Mancuso gagged and doubled over, I smashed him with a wild punch to the side of his head with all my might, then stepped away and, to my amazement, watched him fall flat onto the canvas.

  Joey and Herschel howled with delight—roared out my name—and Mancuso stumbled to his feet, came at me again, but was too wobbly to land any good punches, and at the end of the round, Joey climbed into the ring, held my right hand high in triumph, and then walked around, his hand moving in and out between the ropes, to collect the money he’d won. “Come on, come on, guys,” he kept saying. “Pay up! Pay up!”

  That night, after Joey passed out and two guys helped him back to our cabin, Herschel told me he was worried about Joey. “He saw a lot of shit when he was overseas,” Herschel said, “and he won’t talk to nobody about it—just sucks it all in, and then drowns it in booze. So you keep an eye on him too, okay?”

  I said I would, but what could I do, really? The more money he made, the more he drank, and having a loving wife and two gorgeous kids and everything money could buy didn’t seem to make a difference. Sometimes, when I was home from college (I went to Union, a small upstate New York college where I was able to start on the basketball team by my junior year), and I stopped by his office, he’d take a bottle of Scotch and some paper cups from the bottom drawer in his desk and offer me a drink, and when I’d say no thanks, he’d tell me how smart I was, smarter than he’d ever be, and ask me what I thought he should do because he knew if he kept drinking the way he was, he’d wind up losing everything.

  I said ordinary stuff—that he should talk to his doctor, or maybe go to one of the places movie stars and athletes went when they had to chill out—and he’d say that what I said made sense, and that he was going to think it over, and then he’d pour himself another drink.

  My senior year in college, his business went into the tank. What happened was that after a big Davy Crockett craze, with pretty much every kid in the country wearing a coonskin hat, he’d bet on there being a big Robin Hood craze next, but wound up with two warehouses full of Robin Hood stuff nobody wanted. He went bankrupt, drank more, and—no surprise to anyone, including my parents and Herschel—Carol divorced him. But within eighteen months or so, with money Herschel put together from people he knew, Joey was back in business, and, specializing in sportswear for golf and tennis—shirts, shorts, pants, caps—his business boomed again, and when I saw him the summer after I graduated from Union, he told me he was on top of the world, and—he whispered this—he thanked me for the advice I’d given him, and said that when he told everybody he was voting himself a Carribean cruise so he could put his feet up and meet some elegant ladies, he’d been in a detox center in Arizona.

  When his business failed a second time, though, he went back on the bottle big-time, and this happened during a year when I was teaching at a prep school in New Jersey, which was also the year I fell in love, really in love, for the first time. Until then, in college and during my first year after college, I’d had some girlfriends, but nothing serious, and had mostly been doing what Joey believed I should be doing: trying to become a writer. I’d received encouragement from some of my professors, and had passed the substitute license test for New York City teachers, so that I could earn enough to pay my keep, and, on the days I didn’t get a call to sub, have my time free for writing.

  I rented a one-room walk-up apartment on the top floor of a brownstone in the West Eighties—this was in 1963—and I paid my landlord, a mannerly Hungarian man named Mordecai Wenger, fifteen dollars a week for the room. I shared two bathrooms with three other residents of the floor, and once a week Mister Wenger would come by, clean the room, and change my linens. And whenever I saw Joey, which was about once every other week, no matter how broke or drunk he was, when we parted, he’d always put a fifty dollar bill in my hand, chuck me on the shoulder, tell me how terrific he thought it was that I was going to be a writer, and to remember what Jack Dempsey said—that he’d been a pretty good fighter, but that it was the writers who’d made him great.

  I finished a draft of a novel that year—a story about an upand-coming young boxer who interrupts his boxing career to enlist in the army, and who winds up—where else?—in the Far East, nearly dies fighting the Japanese on Guadalcanal, and who comes home, gets married, has two kids, and has to give up his dream—to become World Middleweight Champion—partly because of responsibilities to his family, but more because there are lots of new, fit, young fighters against whom, with his war wounds and his age, he’s now easy prey. I did most of my research for the book by reading every writer I could find who’d written a war novel—Mailer, Jones, Shaw, Cozzens, Wouk, Michener, Uris, Hersey—and I had purposely not given my hero a drinking problem in case the book was published and Joey and people who knew him read it.

  Although a few editors found the book “promising,” and asked to see my next novel, I was easily discouraged by rejection, stopped writing, and took the first job I applied for: teaching English at a fancy prep school in New Jersey, near Saddle River.

  Doctor Margaret Whitmore—Margaret Connolly Whitmore—she’d emphasize, as a way of showing that although she might appear to have come from an old-line WASP family, she had good Irish blood in her too—was head of the school’s English Department. She was going on forty, about fifteen years older than I was, was drop-dead beautiful in the cool way movie stars like Grace Kelly and Dina Merrill were, and had a reputation for being so no-nonsense with faculty and students that she was known, behind her back, as ‘Doctor Iceberg.’ When I asked other teachers about her, they all said th
e same thing—that she was brilliant, ran a tight ship, did not suffer fools gladly, and that her private life was a total mystery.

  I kept my distance, did a serviceable job with my classes—I found that I enjoyed reading and talking about novels and stories much more than I enjoyed writing them—and so I was surprised one day in the teacher’s lunchroom, when she sat down next to me.

  “I’ve noticed that you’ve grown thinner since the start of the semester, and that you provide yourself with quite meagre provisions,” she said, setting a plate of food in front of me. “I cook most evenings, and it’s just as easy to cook for two as for one. I hope you’ll like what I made.”

  She was so direct in the way she talked that I hesitated even to say thank you. But I did, and for the next ten days or so, she’d sit next to me at lunch each day, and put a plate of food in front of me: lamb and beef stews, exotic chicken dishes, sandwiches with sautéed vegetables, cheeses, and herbs. If there were raised eyebrows among the faculty, I was unaware of them, and that was probably because she set my plate down in the same matterof-fact way she did everything else, after which she’d turn to others and engage them in conversation, or simply stare ahead in the confident way she had, so that no one dared to even try to open a conversation with her.

  Then one afternoon, in the parking lot after school, she stopped me and said that since I seemed fond of her cooking, perhaps, if I was not otherwise engaged, I would enjoy having dinner with her at her home the following evening.

  I said yes.

  My first thought, given her age, was that I might find a way to introduce her to Joey, and that maybe she’d turn out to be the kind of woman who, when it came to men, was into rescue work, and would see Joey as a reclamation project. And maybe, too, their outer differences—her elegance, his street-savvy roughness—masked inner similarities: an elegant sensitivity in him, a rough, raw passion in her—that would prove a winning combination.

  At dinner the next evening, when she asked me to tell her about myself—things beyond what she knew from my application and interview—I found myself talking about growing up in Brooklyn, and about Joey: about the ups and downs of his life—how he’d been a war hero, a great ballplayer, and had been adopted as a black market baby. I couldn’t stop talking about him, and, helped along by a smooth red wine she kept refilling my glass with, in an easy way I’d never talked with anyone other than Joey.

  Margaret lived in a two-story Victorian house that had gleaming parquet floors, stained glass windows, and pocket doors separating the downstairs rooms—living room, dining room, kitchen—from one another. It was furnished with antiques of a kind I remembered seeing in the lounges of fancy women’s colleges I’d been to, and after we finished eating and were sitting across from each other in her living room, drinking more wine—she’d closed the pocket doors—she said she was intrigued by my mention of black market babies—that our conversation made her recall that she had heard the term several times when she was growing up in Philadelphia, and she wondered if I would be willing to tell her a bit more about them. She would understand, of course, if I’d rather not, but when she smiled at me warmly—a different smile from any I’d ever seen from her before—I began talking not only about Joey, and what I knew about how Herschel and Rose got him, but about Lakewood, and about my mother and Doctor Margolies.

  I kept talking and drinking, drinking and talking, and at one point I must have fallen asleep because when I looked up, she was standing above me, as serenely calm as ever, and saying, as if she were responding to something I’d just said, that yes, my mother must have been an exceptional woman, though doubtless difficult at times, and she wondered how she was doing.

  I said my mother had died of breast cancer four months before the start of the school year, and that my father had died ten months before that—they were only in their early fifties, both of them—which events, I suggested, made me an orphan, didn’t they?

  “In which case,” she said, “although you did not murder them, you may still throw yourself on the mercy of the court, yes?”

  “That’s an old one,” I said. “The definition of chutzpah, right? And I’m an English teacher, so I should know my definitions, right?”

  I tried to stand, started to fall, but instead of catching me, she touched my shoulder lightly with a single finger so that I fell straight back into the armchair I’d been asleep in.

  “Clearly, you cannot drive home tonight,” she said, “so I will prepare the guest room for you.”

  She did, and the next thing I knew I heard a knock on the door, and she was looking in and telling me I should shower and shave, and then come downstairs for breakfast.

  When I had dinner at Margaret’s house the following evening, she said that one reason among many that allowed her to be quite optimistic about the future of our friendship was that I had not apologized for what had happened the previous night.

  “What happened last night?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  We had dinner together every school night for the next two weeks, and we talked about all kinds of things—not so much about our childhoods (she’d grown up one of three daughters of a wealthy high-line Philadelphia family that had made its fortune in coal by-products, coke especially, had gone to Bryn Mawr, and then to the University of Pennsylvania for her doctorate in English), but more about our daily lives: students in the school we especially liked or were worried about; other teachers and their quirks; and, most of all, about books. She had done her dissertation on the novels of Thomas Hardy, and we found particular delight in the discovery that we both considered the first hundred pages or so of The Mayor of Casterbridge to be the most perfect opening of any novel either of us had ever read.

  We talked about authors we loved—Dickens, James, Cather, Dos Passos, Flaubert—and she introduced me to authors I’d known about but never read, and came to love: Robert Louis Stevenson, Arnold Bennett, George Eliot, and two modern writers especially dear to her: Colette and Jean Rhys. She assumed I wanted to be a writer—doesn’t every child who grows up loving to read dream of becoming a writer one day? she said—and when I told her I’d already written a novel, but, discouraged by the rejections it received, was reluctant to start another, she asked if she might read it. A week later, on the evening before I’d made a date for us to drive into New York City to have dinner with Joey, I gave her the manuscript.

  The three of us met at Da Nico, an Italian restaurant on Mulberry Street, where, Joey told us, his father had known the original owner, and where, when he was a kid, he and his father would go whenever they had something special to celebrate. And what were the usual occasions for celebration? Margaret asked.

  “Winning,” Joey said. “My father and I were big on winning.”

  “Winning what?” Margaret said.

  “You name it,” Joey said. “Ballgames, horse races, fights, wars…” He looked away for a split-second, and then put on his great smile—his winning smile, I thought to myself—and told Margaret the story of how he and his father had made seven hundred bucks betting on me when I’d knocked down a good young professional fighter in Lakewood.

  Joey looked trim and healthy, as if he’d been on the wagon for a while—and he was as charming as a guy could be, telling Margaret he’d heard a lot about her—about how brilliant she was, and how she’d taken me under her wing, and that for his money there was nobody who did better under a good wing than I did.

  He asked her lots of questions about herself, and she answered them without the clipped coldness I was used to from school, and seemed to be flirting with him from time to time with easy banter about the shirt business, and what the rules were about giving someone the shirt off your back. Early in the evening, she even suggested he might enjoy taking a drive out to the country some weekend, so he could see our school, which was built on what had once been an estate owned by heirs to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, and when she said this, I said that if he did, I bet we might persu
ade her to make one of her incredible gourmet meals for us, and told the story of how she’d begun bringing me lunch, and how we’d been having dinners together regularly.

  About midway through the meal, when she went to the ladies room, Joey whacked me on the shoulder, and congratulated me.

  “For what?”

  “For getting your ashes hauled regularly by one very classy lady,” he said.

  “But—” I began.

  “And she is one classy piece of prime ass, Marty, because in my experience, see, the ones who are cold bitches on the outside got the most heat going on the inside.” He lifted his glass of wine in a toast to me. “More power to your elbow, buddy—and to its southern neighbor.”

  Joey finished his wine, and ordered a Scotch-on-the-rocks. I thought of telling him that things weren’t like that—that Margaret and I weren’t sleeping together, that we were just friends—but I was afraid that if I did he would have looked down on me in the way my mother used to look down on my father.

  So I said nothing—just grinned back at him as if to corroborate what he thought was going on—and when Margaret returned, and asked him about his life, saying she’d heard he’d left the garment business for a new enterprise, Joey tossed down his Scotch, and ordered another. Given that the garment business was heading South and overseas at full speed, he explained, what he was doing while he figured out his next move was calling in favors from old friends for part-time jobs at resorts in the Lakewood area and the Catskills, usually as a maitre d’, but not, given his checkered history, as a bartender, which was a shame, because that was where the good money at those places was.

  By the time our coffee came, his voice slurred, Joey was going on and on about how much he missed his wife and kids (he only saw his son and daughter one afternoon a month), how nobody would ever know what his father had gone through to help him out when he’d gotten into bad trouble with some wise guys, and about his war buddies and how he missed them, the ones who were still living as much as the ones who weren’t.