“Unfair,” Stupenagel laughed. “It was only the offensive line. Besides, I don’t think Murrow needs any help. Once he loosens up the bow tie and the sock garters, I’ll bet he’s the Energizer Bunny. Takes a lickin’ and keeps on ticking.”
“That’s a Timex, Stupe,” Karp laughed. “You’re mixing your advertising metaphors. I just hope you’ll give him back to me in one piece.”
“Would you two quit discussing my impending deflowerment in front of my face,” Murrow protested. “I am quite satisfied with my current love life, thank you very much.”
Karp and Stupenagel laughed. But the journalist reverted back to her professional demeanor and resumed her questions.
“Why put up with it?” Stupenagel asked.
“Put up with what?” Karp replied.
Stupenagel rolled her eyes. “All the crap. All the baby-kissing and pleasant exchanges of meaningless platitudes, which I know you hate. And all the cynicism, diatribes, and criticism. The guys like Bernard Little who can’t separate you from Bloom,” she said. “The accusations about you being a racist. The spotlight that will fall on your family, especially Marlene. And what if, after all that, the voters turn you out? Or worse, say you win and then four years down the line you are spent and broken and nothing has changed? What if the inertia of the system is impervious to the will of Roger ‘Butch’ Karp? That’s what I meant when I asked you a simple question: Why put up with it?”
Good question, he thought. Same things that Marlene worried about before she left. But again, he heard the voice of his mother. “Let me tell you a story,” he said.
“Oooh, I love stories,” Stupenagel said. “Is there a sex scene?”
Karp fixed her with the stare. “You going to shut up for a moment or would you rather ask and answer your own questions?” Stupenagel took another sip of the brandy, gave it to Murrow, and made a motion as though she was zipping her lips.
“The summer before I entered high school, I went away to this basketball camp run by Claire Bee, who you may not remember, but he was legend as the coach of Long Island University when LIU was a real power in the forties and fifties. Adolph Rupp, the coach at Kentucky, was there, and Frank McGuire, whose North Carolina team had just beat Kansas and Wilt Chamberlain in triple overtime to win the NCAA championship.
“Anyway, I was a star in the junior high league. The newspapers wrote up my games, and my head grew as big as a basketball. Granted, I worked at it. I was a real preparation freak and competitive—actually at everything I did, including school. My attitude at school was there was no reason not to get an A. I was the same way when I played ball; it wasn’t enough for me just to go out there and have fun, I wanted to win every game.
“So I was going to go to this camp and show everyone—all these big names—what I was made of…and they were going to be in awe…probably offer me a dozen college scholarships and maybe a pro contract on the spot. But for the first two weeks, I couldn’t get a shot off. I had the ball slapped back into my face so many times, Spaulding was imprinted on my forehead. I was down and unhappy…ready to give up.
“So I called my parents and said I wanted to come home. They asked why and I told them a bunch of kids’ excuses. ‘The food’s no good…I’m bored…I miss my friends…I’m not learning anything.’ So they said, ‘Well, okay, we’ll come up and get you.’ ”
Karp paused as he thought back. The foot traffic on the sidewalks was light, a Sunday, which made it actually easier to see the individuals and wonder what their childhoods had been like. His had been wonderful.
• • •
Ruth and Jules Karp were first-generation Americans whose parents had come from Poland and Russia and spoke mostly Yiddish. The new immigrants had established the Karp tradition of success through hard work, respect for others, a love for their adopted country, and the importance of family.
His paternal grandparents had arranged to send all four of their children to college, two of them to law school. Every Friday night, Butch and his family would go over to his maternal grandmother’s Brooklyn home for Sabbath dinner, which his grandmother always made from scratch—rolling the noodles by hand, turning the fresh pike into gefilte fish, and baking fresh bread to go with the boiled chicken and sponge cake. The next night, the family would take the subway into Manhattan to have dinner with his father’s parents. However, that grandmother was ill so they always went out to eat.
Jules Karp was a lawyer who never practiced law. He’d graduated and passed the bar during the Depression at a time when lawyers were making about five dollars a week. But he had a family to support, starting with his wife and Butch’s older brother, so he’d gone into business selling women’s beauty care products. However, his father’s friends were lawyers and the Karp family home was a meeting place where the great legal questions of the time were debated over scotch and cigars. It was where as a child sitting next to his father’s chair, listening quietly to the conversation, he learned to love the law. And when he first heard the name Francis P. Garrahy spoken with respect, even by the famous defense attorneys who dropped by the Karp home.
Ruth Karp had paid her own way through Hunter College by working at Macy’s, where the attractive brunette had been named Miss Macy’s. Even working full-time and taking as many hours at a time as the administration would allow at the school, she’d graduated Phi Beta Kappa. She’d become a schoolteacher, though that was because teaching was one of the few occupations open to women at the time. She never said it in so many words, but he always knew that she would have preferred to be something more…a doctor, maybe even a lawyer.
In her own quiet way, Ruth Karp was ahead of her time. She spoke eloquently about equality for women and Negroes, and involved herself in politics. He remembered how he canvassed the blocks with her as she stumped for Adlai Stevenson; theirs was one of the few precincts nationwide he carried. She had such empathy for other people’s troubles, once pointing out the gold stars in the windows of homes in the neighborhood. “Oh,” she cried, her hand to her mouth. “Those are for the neighborhood boys who died in the war.” He, of course, knew that—those older kids, the ones Karp and his pals had looked up to, wanted to be like when they grew up, had gone away and not come back. They were just heroic memories, but not to his mom, who had sons and understood those other moms’ unbearable sorrow.
• • •
“Ahem,” Stupenagel cleared her throat, bringing him back to the present. “Anyway,” he said, “my parents drove up, and I got in the backseat of the station wagon, but they didn’t leave right away.” He could see the scene clearly: his tall, handsome father in the driver’s seat, his beautiful mother on the passenger side. They’d asked him why he was so unhappy and he’d repeated the lame excuses. “Okay,” his father had said. “If it’s that bad, we’ll take you home.”
All the time he was talking to his dad, his mother sat quietly listening. She wasn’t much of a sports fan, not until high school did she attend his games, and couldn’t have cared less if he kept playing basketball. In fact, it was their inside joke that his schoolteacher mother, who worked the New York Times crossword puzzles with a pen, at least pretended not to know a damn thing about the very essence of life for a boy growing up in Brooklyn during the fifties and sixties.
“Who’s the Mick?” she’d asked innocently.
“Geez, Mom, everyone knows that’s Mickey Mantle.”
“Well, then who’s the Big Dipper?”
“Ma, are you kiddin’ me or what! It’s Wilt ‘the Stilt’ Chamberlain.”
She would smile and say, “Oh, of course, I forgot.” And he would understand that it was her way of telling him that sports were for fun and not really important in the grand scheme of things, notwithstanding the NYT crossword puzzle. The only thing she ever said about his athletic endeavors was that she expected him to approach them as he did all the challenges of his life: that he prepare himself as completely as possible, and that he do the best he could. But now as
his father got ready to drive her son back home to Brooklyn, she spoke.
“Let me ask you a question.”
Forty years later, he remembered how silent the moments were between when she said that and when he asked what was on her mind. He saw the headlights of the truth coming at him in those moments and knew he would not be able to avoid the collision.
“Is the reason you don’t like it here because you’re not the star? Is that what’s going on?”
More silence, but he knew he’d been caught like a cockroach in the middle of the kitchen floor when the light goes on. There was nowhere to hide. She had always been able to see right through him.
“Yes,” he said quietly.
Ruth Karp nodded and spoke again. There was no anger in her voice, no remonstration, just the quietly stated truth. “You’re only fourteen. I know you thought you were ready for Madison Square Garden. But you’re just a boy and still learning. I think you should stay and watch the guys who are better than you, see what they do, compete with them. If you do, I think you’ll learn and you’ll have fun.
“If you still want to go home, we’ll take you. And you can be the big fish in a small pond. But I don’t think you’ll be happy. You may never be the big fish in the big pond, but you’ll never know if you don’t try.”
• • •
Of course, he’d stayed, and he had blossomed. The coaches changed his shot and soon he was all but unstoppable. When he returned to Brooklyn and entered high school, he was years beyond where he would have been and one of only three players to ever start for the varsity as a freshman. He’d gone on to have a stellar high school career, and the scholarship offers had poured in…thanks to a woman who insisted on the truth.
“There are many valuable lessons I learned from my parents,” Karp said, finishing his story. “But I think the greatest gift I ever got from my mother was that lesson sitting in the backseat of their car: Always be honest with yourself. If you’re going to give up, give up, but don’t make excuses. She detested phoniness and that’s a trait I inherited from her.”
Karp was silent for a moment, his eyes still on the sidewalks. Then he smiled, recalling how some lessons bore repeating. When he was still a young assistant district attorney, he’d tried several men for the murder of two NYPD cops. After a long, grueling court battle, the jury hung. Despondent, he’d gone back to his office where he sat making all sorts of excuses to himself why he shouldn’t try the case again. The next time he might lose, and he hated to lose. But he’d thought then, too, of that afternoon at the basketball camp and started to laugh. You’re just making the same excuses, he’d told himself, only on a different type of court. He then thought about the victims’ families who’d attended every day of the trial and were counting on him to bring justice. Back in the game, he got busy, prepared better, tried the case again, and won it. A slam dunk.
“There’d been one other thing I got from that afternoon in the car,” he told Stupenagel. “As I was getting out, my mom slipped me an envelope and told me to read what was in it when I had a moment alone.” He would never forget her eyes and the smile on her face.
“Why would I put up with it?” he repeated Stupenagel’s question.
“Believe me, I’ve asked myself that a thousand times, and until just now I didn’t remember that the answer has always been contained in the words someone else wrote that my mother passed on to me in that envelope.” He closed his eyes and saw the words again written in his mother’s strong, flowing cursive.
“It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out where the strong man stumbled, nor where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
“On the contrary, the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena—whose vision is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes up again and again; who knows the great devotions, the great enthusiasms; who at best knows in the end the triumph of his achievement.
“However, if he fails, if he falls, at least he fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
The car stopped at a light, and Karp paused to take in the scene, a snapshot of a New York sidewalk on a Sunday afternoon. A young man in an expensive suit, probably putting in the extra hours to climb to the top of his chosen profession—one hand holding a cell phone to an ear, the other waving an umbrella before him like a sword. Past a tiny elderly woman, her face like a sun-dried prune, her body swaddled in a colorful floral dress and scarf of some Slavic origin, shuffling along with her thin brown hand outstretched, hoping for one of those tourist dollars the mayors were always talking about bringing in…and ignored by the pretty blond woman, her young breasts bouncing like rubber balls beneath a tight T-shirt, who could have never imagined that she would ever be as aged or destitute as she moved around. Two Hispanic kids—boyfriend and girlfriend—strolling slowly with their arms around each other, oblivious to anything but young love…including the Hasidic Jew in the wide-brimmed black hat and sideburn curls who patted the young black bike messenger on the back and sent him pedaling like a fury into traffic. Karp knew that if he rolled down the window and listened closely, he would hear accents and languages to rival the Tower of Babel. But they were all his people, and they were counting on him to show up for the game.
“Why put up with it? For them,” he said, gesturing toward the sidewalk. “But most of all, for her.” He looked at Stupenagel. “Does that answer your question?”
The reporter nodded without looking up from her notepad. He was surprised to see a tear fall and create a blue puddle where it contacted the ink. She glanced sideways at Murrow, who was sitting with his mouth agape looking at his boss, and said in a husky voice, “Murry, honey, you better close your mouth before I stick my tongue in there.”
Murrow ignored the innuendo. “What was that?” he asked quietly as the car pulled up to the curb at Grand and Crosby. “Did your mother write that? Oh my God, the voters will eat it up.”
Karp said nothing. He was lost again in memories as he got out of the car. But Stupenagel shook her head. “They might eat it up, but that was Teddy Roosevelt.”
• • •
Later that evening, Karp took the twins to the synagogue, where he was scheduled to teach another bar mitzvah class. “We all know the story of David, right? Remember, he killed Goliath with a rock,” he began once the class got settled, figuring that a little bloodshed right off the bat would get their attention.
“Yeah, he used a slingshot,” Zak said admiringly.
“A sling, Zak,” Giancarlo corrected him. “You put a rock in it and swing it around and at the right moment you let it go and the rock flies out.”
“I hardly think that is the point of this story,” Rachel said imperiously.
“Whatever,” Zak replied to both.
“As I was saying, young ladies and young gentlemen,” Karp said. “This is a story about David, only now he’s the king of Israel. He’s got everything he could want…palaces, gold, jewels, and people to do all his work for him…a couple dozen wives.”
“Cool,” the boys intoned.
“Chauvinists,” Rachel sniffed.
“But there came a time when he sent his army out to conquer some other folks, but he didn’t go with them—which was unusual in those days because kings usually went to battle with their troops. Instead, David stayed home and one night he saw this real hottie named Bathsheba bathing.”
“A Peeping Tom,” Zak piped up to the general amusement of his classmates.
“Yeah, maybe.” Karp laughed, too. “In violation of Penal Law Section Blah Blah. Anyway, his servants told him she was the wife of one of his captains, a guy named Uriah, who by the way was an Arab though they called them Hittites in those days. But Uriah was away at the war, so David sent for Bathsheba and when she arrived, he made love to her.”
“Sexed her up,” Zak whispered, to giggles all around.
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“What was that, Zak?” his father asked.
“Nothin’.”
“He said, ‘Sexed her up,’ Mr. Karp,” Rachel said helpfully despite Zak’s murderous glare.
“Thank you, Rachel, I thought that might have been what he said. Now, Bathsheba got pregnant and when she told David, he worried that people would talk, so he sent for Uriah and told him to go have sex with his wife.” Karp shot a look at Zak that preempted the crude comment that was on its way from his brain to his tongue. “But Uriah said he wouldn’t while other men were fighting and dying, so David sent him back to the battle. Only he also sent a letter to his general, Joab, and told him to put Uriah in the front of the fight so that he’d get killed. Sure enough, Uriah got waxed.”
“That stinks,” Zak said. “I thought David was supposed to be a good guy.”
“Yes, yes it did stink,” Karp acknowledged. “And I guess it goes to show you that no one is all good, but that’s not my point…. With Uriah out of the way, David married Bathsheba and she gave birth to their son.
“Now, David figured he got away with one. But one day, the prophet Nathan showed up and told David a story about a rich man who had all sorts of sheep and a poor man who only had one. A visitor came to see the rich man, Nathan said, who directed his servants to go kill the poor man’s only lamb for a feast.”
“That stinks, too,” Zak muttered.
“Would you please be quiet,” Rachel said, “or you’ll miss the point.”
“David was pretty upset himself, Zak,” Karp said. “He said that the rich man should be killed for such a thing. But Nathan told him, ‘You are the rich man. God gave you everything, including many wives, but you just had to have Uriah’s too. And to top it off, you are guilty of conspiracy to commit murder.” Well, maybe that’s not exactly how it went down, he thought, but doesn’t hurt to toss in something they’ve heard on the television cop shows.
“Well, David knew that he had done wrong and he apologized to God. But God decided to punish him anyway and caused the baby to get sick and die.”
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