Max Baer and the Star of David (19 page)

“To repeat,” she said when we had again separated. “You
are
a love, Mister Horace Littlejohn. And you
are
a gentle soul, and how surprising it is, given your devotion to a sport that is itself savage in the extreme.”

“
Not at all!
” I protested. “Oh not at all! You speak from ignorance, and—”

Her hand firm on the back of my neck, she drew me to her, her eyes demanding my full attention, and she spoke each word as if it were a sentence. “
I – do – not – mean – to – offend
,” she said. “Do you
not
understand me? I intended my words as a compliment to
who – you – are
—to how gentle you are despite having spent so much of your life in battle with others, despite—”

“Not at all,” I said again, and found myself drawing upon talks I sometimes gave to the young men I worked with at the YMCA. “Not at all, Miss Hémon, for boxing is a sport—and an art—with an ancient and honorable history that has, with reason, been known as the ‘sweet science.’ Although its participants may suffer injury, such injury usually results from ignorance in the same manner that those who are injured in other athletic contests, or in automobile or airplane accidents are injured—because they are not well-trained, or take liberties that are unwise, or—”

“Or what?” she said. “How can you compare driving an automobile with attacking someone so as to render that person unconscious? How can you believe that if … ?”

“Please,” I said. “Consider this: Do men who fight according to rules that encourage them to protect themselves at all times, and with hands swathed in tape and leather—do they die with greater frequency at their vocation than men who work in coal mines, or who build bridges and tunnels? Do they die with greater frequency than men who choose to defend our nation, or patrol our cities’ streets, or plunge into burning buildings? Do they die with greater frequency than men who go out to sea in fishing boats, or—”

She stopped my mouth with a kiss so fierce—her fingernails digging into the skin of my neck and shoulders, her teeth tearing at my lips and tongue—that even while lost in a desire to respond to her with a ferocity—and a rage—of my own, I found myself wondering how, when she and I returned to the camp, we would explain wounds I feared would be visible to others … and I then wondered what she might think were I to reveal this thought to her—were she to learn that in a moment of near feral abandon—a moment when I was tasting the salty sweetness of blood and could not know if it were hers, mine, or ours—I remained a slave to thoughts that seemed terribly rational.

“In addition to which,” I stated when we were again sitting side by side, “it is a way of defending ourselves from those who would do us harm. Thus, at the YMCA, my young men will have the benefit for the rest of their lives of knowing how to protect themselves and those they love, and they will also know the pleasure one knows, as in any athletic enterprise, or in any of the arts, for that matter—in music, or painting, or dance—when we work in a diligent and disciplined way to perfect a craft.”

“My goodness,” Miss Hémon said. “Given the fervor with which you put forth your views, and given, too, what I know of your son’s love of the Bible, and what you have told me of the Bible’s importance to you and Joleen—I must wonder: Have you ever considered the ministry? For you clearly have a gift—a zeal—for preaching that, if devoted exclusively to the world of boxing, might go unrealized for more worthy matters, especially if—”

“Do not belittle me,” I said, and I stood and walked away.

At the edge of the clearing, I turned and glared at her. She took in a long breath, after which she gestured to me to return to her.

“Please,” she said. “Please, Horace…”

It was the first time she had not called me “Mister Littlejohn,” and noticing—this too was a surprise—that her eyes were moist with tears, I returned, and stood in front of her.

“It is not my habit to humble myself before others,” she said. “I admire the passion you have for what you do, and I am embarrassed by my ignorance of matters of which you speak, as well as by ways I have misjudged you. So: Will you forgive me?”

When she reached toward me, I took her hand in mine, and when she touched the space on the bench next to her, I sat. A minute or so later, she spoke: “May I return, then, to what I was saying about you before … before I rudely…”

“If it pleases you to do so.”

“It does—oh it does,” she said, “for you
are
a love and a truly gentle soul, and so I am wondering what we shall do to fulfill the needs and desires of your love and of your soul, which needs and desires, I assure you, have their counterparts in who
I
am and who
I
wish to be.”

We sat side by side for a while without talking, and I was relieved to find that, though the scene in front of me remained clouded, it had begun to regain its recognizable shapes and colors.

O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother! When I should find thee without, I would kiss thee; yea, I should not be despised. (8:1)

On a Tuesday afternoon, the last week of June 1958, while I was having lunch in the staff lounge of the YMCA, Miss Patricia Fontaine, a secretary in our office, entered the room, as she usually did at this hour, and distributed the day’s mail. In addition to correspondence having to do with our teams—schedules for upcoming tournaments, equipment we had ordered—there was a small, square envelope of a kind that often contained a greeting card or an announcement. I opened it, and read:

Monday 23 June 1958

Miss Hémon went on to write in ways as elegant as they were candid about new responsibilities she had chosen to bear, and about pleasures she hoped we would continue to enjoy until they became so sublime as to seem almost (but not quite)
un
-bearable. To this end, she was most cordially inviting me to visit her in her home for several hours on Wednesday, June 25, at half past noon, at a time when I might otherwise be engaged in tutoring my young charges or studying Braille at the Lighthouse, and when she might otherwise be teaching a class or pushing papers from one side of her desk to the other, so that, with the very same hands we would otherwise have been using for such tasks, we might be kind to one another in ways yet to be determined.

And so began the happiest days and hours of my life, their pleasures doubtless enhanced by the fact that we were, Miss Hémon and I, obliged out of consideration for others to hide the fact of the unexpected course our friendship had taken. “Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret most pleasant,” Proverbs tells us. True enough, although I do not believe our love was sweeter
because
it was secret, for were this so, my love for Max and Joleen—loves that compelled concealment—would have remained the supreme and transcendent loves of my life. And despite my romantic proclivities, I would sometimes admit to Miss Hémon that she and I were probably not all that different from others—that our situation was comprised of the kinds of ordinary complications and secrecies—the obstacles
to
love—that accompanied what many individuals in love experienced.

The obstacles to our being able to be together whenever we wished and in whatever way we wished were clear enough, of course—my devotion to Joleen, Miss Hémon’s devotion to her children, and our desire not to impose upon them complications and confusions that would arise from knowledge of who she and I had become to one another. Unlike the love she had for Anna and David, and the love I had for Joleen, Max, and Horace Jr., however—loves that would pass from this world only when we passed from this world—our expectations, from the beginning, were realistic, for we seemed, separately, to have come to the same conclusion: that free as we were in our love
for
one another, yet was our love destined to be ever a moment away from perishing as swiftly as it had come into being. We were free in our love, that is, because we loved without either expectations
or
hope—because we were acutely aware that, as Virgil wrote, in a line Horace Jr. loved to quote, “
Optima dies … prima fugit
,” which he translated as “The best days are the first to flee.”

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.”