Max Baer and the Star of David (20 page)

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 eyes—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.

“Oh yes,” I said. “I recall when Horace Jr. attended his first kissing games party. Yes.”

“They’re practicing,” Miss Hémon said. “That’s all. How sweet.”

“How sweet,” I repeated.

“Yet you
were
worried, weren’t you?”

“A bit,” I said. “Not very, but…”

“You are the dearest man I have ever known,” she said. “And the most innocent. How did I get to be so lucky?”

“Practice?” I asked, and when I did, she slugged me hard, on the arm.

“You can be mean too, can’t you?” she said.

“Perhaps.”

“I like that. Hmmm. Perhaps we can take our cue from my children,” she said. “I had no brothers
or
sisters, so incest was a possibility that was never available to me. But you, Horace?”