You Are My Heart and Other Stories Read online

  Karen said he was being the same with her, but that what was making him this way didn’t have to do with her and me, but with what had happened between Olen and Mr. Ordover, and that what had happened was this: as soon as Olen learned about Johnny’s decision to go to Yale, he’d gone straight in to see Mr. Ordover and had demanded to know what was going to happen to him next year. Despite the fact that Olen had good grades—a solid B—and had made first team All-Brooklyn and third team All-City—Mr. Ordover told him that the only coaches who’d talked with him about scholarships for Olen were from two all-Negro colleges in the South.

  Olen had exploded, it seemed, and said he would rot in hell before he’d go to one of those places. That was all Karen knew. She didn’t know what else Olen said, or what his plans were, because, as had always been the case with her brother, the more enraged he was, the quieter he became.

  The next time I saw Olen, I tried to get him to talk about what had happened with him and Mr. Ordover, but all he did was to snap at me that if I was so interested in his future, why didn’t I go in and talk with Mr. Ordover.

  So I did. During my free period after lunch the next day, I found Mr. Ordover in his office and asked him if it was true—that Olen’s only choices were two Negro colleges.

  “It’s true,” Mr. Ordover said, “but what you have to realize is that when a college makes a commitment to a young athlete—the way Yale University has to Johnny—it has to be certain that the athlete will be capable, for his part, of honoring the commitment.”

  “So?” I said. “So why would that stop any college from wanting Olen to play for them? He’s a good student—a lot smarter than people think—and an incredible ballplayer…”

  Mr. Ordover praised me for being such a loyal friend, and then, switching subjects, started in about my prospects for the following year. He told me that unless some new player came along to beat me out, I would be his starting point guard, and also—excellent news he’d been saving for an appropriate time—that he’d already had inquiries about me from coaches with whom he had good working relationships. Not from places like Yale or Princeton, to be sure, but from some fine Division Two schools like Union, Muhlenberg, and Tufts, all of which were in the market for a smart point guard.

  “But what about Olen?” I persisted. “What’s he going to do next year?”

  Mr. Ordover had spoken with Olen’s guidance counselor, he replied, and learned that mistakenly counting on an offer of an athletic scholarship, Olen had, unfortunately, neglected to apply to any colleges in the traditional way. That was why Mr. Ordover had been speaking with coaches from several Negro schools where admissions standards were a bit more lax, and where arrangements for the coming fall could still be made.

  “But he was counting on you to get him in somewhere,” I protested. “The same as Johnny. Everybody knows that’s how it works. The colleges contact you and you set up the rest the way you always have.”

  Mr. Ordover responded by saying that Johnny, for one, had applied to colleges the way everyone else had, that he thought Olen would do well in one of the schools he’d found for him, and—he rose from his chair and looked at his watch—that he had an appointment. Our conversation, he declared, was over.

  “No it’s not,” I said. “You let him down, coach. He played his heart out for you for three years and you let him down.”

  Mr. Ordover said again that our conversation was over.

  “No it’s not,” I repeated. “Because do you know what? If you don’t get Olen into a regular college, then—” I searched for words “—then I won’t be your point guard next year because I won’t be on your team.”

  Mr. Ordover laughed. “You’re not being very intelligent,” he said. “Why forsake your chances because of your friend’s obstinacy? That’s just cutting off your nose to spite your face. The schools I can get Olen into, where he’ll be with his own people, are good choices, and for Olen to allow his pride to destroy his future would be foolish beyond words.”

  “But you can do it,” I said. “We all know it. If you want to, you can still get Olen into a place that isn’t all-Negro. Coach Fisher got Sihugo Green into Duquense, didn’t he? And Cal Ramsey’s going to play for N.Y.U. next year, and Tony Jackson’s going to St. John’s, so how can you say the only place for Olen is with other Negroes?”

  Mr. Ordover sighed. “Please,” he said. “As a ballplayer, Olen is not in Green or Ramsay or Jackson’s class—not by a long shot—and for you to think he is may indicate that you are less intelligent than I’ve been giving you credit for.”

  The bell went off for changing classes then and when it did, Mr. Ordover took me by the arm, led me to the door, opened it, and told me to get to my next class. What he wanted, he said, was to prevent me from saying anything I might regret later on. For his part, he was going to try to forget that our conversation had taken place because he didn’t want my passion and aggressiveness—qualities that served me well on the court—to endanger my opportunities. I was, he said, echoing my father, still a young man who was wet behind the ears.

  I knew I should have stopped myself then, but it was as if he was daring me to answer back, and when I was out of his office and in the large room where the secretaries worked and the other coaches hung out, I spoke the words that came to me.

  “Intelligence?” I said. “Intelligence?! Let me tell you something, Mr. Ordover—in my opinion Olen has more intelligence in his little finger than you have in that crap between your ears you call a brain.”

  Word got around the school pretty fast about what had happened between me and Mr. Ordover, but it made no difference to Olen—whenever I saw him, he either evaded me or rejected my overtures—and it surely didn’t help at home. As soon as my parents heard what happened, they demanded I give them a full and accurate accounting—which, in my righteous outrage at what had been done to Olen, I was happy to do—and then ordered me to send a letter of apology to Mr. Ordover. When I refused, they told me I was still the immature, selfish child I’d always been, and told me that since I was so free and independent, I could take my meals by myself from now on. And after that, they pretty much stopped talking to me.

  Things got worse for Karen too. Although her mother’s style may have been gentler than my mother’s, the results were basically the same. Karen wasn’t banished from the dinner table, but when she was there, everybody—including her brothers and sisters—ignored her. In addition, her mother and her Uncle Joshua took to blaming her for Olen’s situation. If she was so smart, and cared so much about her brother, why hadn’t she been more watchful—why hadn’t she seen to it that he applied to colleges in a proper way? She knew how busy Olen was with basketball, with his weekend job, and with keeping up with his classes. What kind of secretary was she going to be some day if she couldn’t even help her own brother with sending for applications, filling them out, and seeing that they were delivered on time? Worse still, they accused her of having neglected her own family in favor of—their words—an unhealthy infatuation.

  Karen kept trying to get Olen to talk with her, and even went to his guidance counselor to find out if anything could be done about getting him into college for the fall, but the guidance counselor said that the only choices left for him were to go to one of the schools Mr. Ordover had found, get a job and apply again for entrance a year from September, or make a late application to one of the city colleges. But Olen had no interest in attending a school where he couldn’t play ball, and because of the point-shaving scandals three years before, when star players at C.C.N.Y. had taken money to fix games (this after C.C.N.Y. had won both the N.C.A.A. and N.I.T. post-season tournaments), the city colleges had all dropped big-time intercollegiate basketball.

  From this point on, whenever Karen and I were together, we spent pretty much all our time trading stories of how lousy things were for us at home. We still made out—kind of desperately—when we could find a secluded place in the park or an unlocked car, but although we didn’t say it, i
t was as if we both began feeling doomed, and on walks or sitting next to each other in luncheonettes we’d go for long stretches without talking at all.

  When I went down to the Holy Cross schoolyard on weekends for games of pick-up ball, the guys told me how brave and crazy they thought I was to have talked to Mr. Ordover the way I had. But when I suggested they join me—that if we all stuck together and we all refused to play, Mr. Ordover would have no choice but to make some calls and get Olen into a good school—I didn’t get any takers.

  Then, one Saturday morning in early May, for the first time since our season ended, Olen showed up at the schoolyard. He sat along the chainlink fence with the other guys, not saying much and nobody saying much to him, and when he got on the court to play against a team I was on—we’d won four in a row—he was at his best, scoring at will and jibing the guys on my team about how bad he was making them look. But then, his team up nine to two in a ten-baskets-wins game, when I was going in for an easy layup, he suddenly left his own man and instead of trying to block my shot, clotheslined me with a forearm to the chest that sent me skidding on the concrete, after which he just stood over me, smiling.

  “What are you smiling about, you big ape?” I said when I got my wind back.

  “I’m smiling at a guy who just doesn’t have it,” he said.

  “Well it takes one to know one,” I said back, and then, pain suddenly shooting through my arm, elbow to wrist—it was skinned raw—I felt tears rush to my eyes. I pressed my eyes closed, bit down on my lower lip, and when I opened my eyes, Olen was still standing there smiling.

  “You’re an idiot,” I said. “Do you know that? You’re nothing but a big stupid black idiot. Correct that: You’re nothing a big stupid black fucking idiot.”

  The other guys crowded around, told us to go easy, and I saw a few of them get on either side of Olen, moving in to keep him from doing any more damage.

  “Shut your mouth,” Olen said. “You just shut your mouth.”

  “Who’s gonna make me? You ?” I stood up and stepped toward him so that the toes of my sneakers were right up against his. “Come on, big man—show us how smart and tough you are—how you always pick on guys your own size and your own intelligence, because you know what? The only thing smaller than your dick is your brain.”

  I saw fire flare briefly in his eyes, and then he just turned and walked out of the schoolyard. The guys came to me then, offering me their bandanas and handkerchiefs to wipe off the blood, and starting in praising me for how totally out of my mind I was to go at Olen the way I had.

  “Fuck all of you too,” I said, and left the schoolyard.

  I caught up with Olen and stayed by his side for a few blocks, neither of us saying anything. Before we turned the corner to his street, though, he stopped and looked down at me.

  “How’s the arm?” he asked.

  “Still attached,” I said.

  “But I mean it—I want you to just leave me be, okay?” he said. “I don’t need you holding my hand or sucking around to do stuff for me. It only makes it worse, do you understand?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then fuck you,” he said.

  “You and what army?” I shot back.

  “And don’t always be such a wise-ass,” he said, and he grabbed me by the arm, hard, opened his mouth—he seemed on the verge of saying more—but then let go and shook his head sideways, the anger suddenly washing out of him. “Forget it, okay? Just forget the whole thing and leave me be, you and my stupid sister, or next time—”

  “Next time what—?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe next time I drop you down the sewer if I get the chance. Then you’ll come out black as me, right? Black as the devil’s ass at midnight!”

  He laughed at what he’d said, but when I started to laugh with him, his face went hard again.

  “You just leave me be, is all, do you hear?” he said again. “Do you? Do you? Because you don’t know, see. You don’t know anything. You just don’t know.”

  Don’t know what? I wanted to ask, but before I could say the words, he was gone.

  I didn’t see Karen that weekend—I telephoned her house a few times, but each time whoever answered told me she wasn’t in—and on Sunday night, when I was feeling like shit because I was missing her so badly, my mother came into my room, knocking on the door before she did, which was a first, and sat down on my bed. It was killing her for us to be like strangers to each other, she said, and it was hard on my father too. What did I want? she asked. Could I just tell her what I wanted from them.

  My answer was what it always was: for them to leave me alone.

  But they’d been doing that, she said, and it hadn’t made any difference. She said that my father believed that often you swallowed your pride and went against your own values, or you even lied—told white lies—to keep peace in the house. Shalom habayis, she said. That’s what your father believes, and I do too. Shalom habayis.

  I shrugged, and when my mother changed subjects, telling me she’d had a call from a Mrs. Merdinger, in Belle Harbor, I knew she was getting to her real reason for coming in to talk with me.

  Did I remember a young woman I’d met at Temple Beth El named Marcia Merdinger? she asked. I answered that I remembered Marcia, that I’d met her at a dance the year before, after a game we’d played against her synagogue’s team. My mother nodded and told me that Mrs. Merdinger had called without Marcia’s knowledge because there was a big dance at Marcia’s high school—a junior prom—and that Marcia was thinking of inviting me, but that since Marcia hadn’t heard from me in a long time, her mother was calling to say that it would be nice if I gave Marcia a call first.

  I rolled my eyes, and told my mother to forget the whole thing, but my mother, sensing my weakness somehow—the truth was that Marcia had been one of the hottest girls I’d ever made out with—said that I didn’t have to marry the girl, that all I had to do was call her and perhaps go to a dance with her. Where was the harm? My mother knew I was still seeing Karen, and if I didn’t call Marcia, she would of course understand. That was my decision. But she had promised Mrs. Merdinger she would talk with me, so if I could let her know what I intended to do…

  Meanwhile, I wasn’t seeing much of Karen. Whenever I asked her about going for a walk, she said she had “obligations at home,” and when, on Friday, I pointed out that a whole week had gone by without us spending any time alone together, and asked if she were avoiding me or if her mother and Uncle Joshua were putting pressure on her, she got angry.

  We were standing in an alcove under the arch at the Bedford Avenue entrance to Erasmus—the school was modeled after a British university, built around a quadrangle with Gothic style architecture—and she kept her books between us, pressed to her chest like a shield.

  “Am I avoiding you?” she asked, repeating my question. “Well, you might put it that way. But I’m not doing anything you’re not doing to Olen.”

  I told her I didn’t understand.

  “You call yourself Olen’s friend?” she said. “You call yourself his friend ?”

  “Sure,” I said. “He’s my best friend—”

  “Then why aren’t you spending time with him? This is when he needs you, and you’re nowhere. This is when—”

  “But he told me to leave him alone!” I protested. “He nearly chopped me in half last week at the schoolyard and then told me to go fuck myself and to never talk with him again—”

  “And you listened to him?” Karen shoved her books against my chest, pushing me against the wall. “You listened to him?”

  “But it’s what he said,” I said. “I tried—believe me—but he just kept telling me to leave him be, to—”

  “Talk about stupid,” Karen said. “I thought you were the big risk taker—the guy who never saw a dare he didn’t like—”

  “But this was different,” I began. “He really meant it, and I just didn’t know what else to do…”

  “You could have talked
with me,” Karen said, as if to herself. She took a deep breath, and continued, without anger: “Olen’s hurting bad—he’s hurting real bad—the worst I’ve ever seen him, and he’s been known to hunker down into some really foul moods. He won’t open up to anybody. Even when my mother was so worried, she got Pastor Kinnard to come by the house the other night, it didn’t do any good. So what’s he gonna do? I mean, what’s he gonna do? Answer me that if you’re so smart. You’re the only one could reach him, and now you just…”

  I tried to put my arms around her, but she pushed me away.

  “I counted on you,” she said, “and you let me down. You let me down big-time.”

  “But what was I supposed to do when he said to leave him be—?”

  “You were supposed to do something. You were supposed to use that famous daredevil imagination of yours. You were supposed to not take no for an answer.” She took a deep breath, put her face close to mine, and spoke in a whisper, enunciating each word very clearly. “You-were-supposed-to-be-his-friend.”

  Then she pushed by me, and walked away. I followed and stayed by her side all the way to her block, but no matter what I said—no matter how I pleaded for her to give me a chance to show her I could do better—she just kept telling me to leave her be, to stop following her, and to get on home. And when we got to her house, she told me we were finished and warned me not to telephone her or to dare to try to see her ever again.

  By this time I’d had it, and I let go of the frustration that was boiling up inside me and told her that she was being as stupid as her brother, and to hell with both of them—that it was fine with me if we never saw each other again and if she ever came crawling back asking me to forgive her, it would be too late for her and me the way it was going to be too late for Olen and college.