The Professional

by W. c. Heinz

  He led us through the other office and into the small room. There was a scale there and a desk and a couple of chairs, and Eddie sat down and the doctor, using the pocket flashlight, looked into his eyes and then down Eddie’s throat and into his ears. Then Eddie stripped to the waist and the doctor put the stethoscope on the chest and then on the back. When he finished that he wrapped the blood pressure cuff around Eddie’s left upper arm and squeezed on the bulb and read the dial.

  “Okay,” he said. “Strip down to your shorts and I’ll weigh you.”

  “As you were, Edward,” Doc said. “Nix on that.”

  “What?” Martin said. “What’s the matter?”

  “He’s not going to weigh. He makes the weight a week from Friday.”

  “He’s got to weigh. It’s a title fight.”

  “Not today it isn’t. The fight’s a week from Friday. What difference does it make what he weighs today? Are you afraid he won’t make the weight?”

  “Of course not.”

  “He’ll make sixty, a week from Friday. In fact, I’ll tell you exactly. He’ll come in at 159.”

  “The law says that for a title fight both contestants must weigh at the preliminary examination. He doesn’t have to weigh 160 today. I just have to have a record of his weight.”

  “Now the lawyers are writing laws to make work for doctors, too,” Doc said to me, and then to Martin: “They used to just write laws to make work for themselves, so how come they’re cutting the doctors in, too?”

  “The commission has to protect the public. The public is buying tickets for a title fight. The commission has to have some proof that both contestants, on this date of examination, are within reach of 160 pounds.”

  “Ah, don’t give me that about the commission and the public. As soon as you try for a title the commission wants to manage your fighter. Why do you think I never let one of my guys go for a title before? I’ve been bringing fighters in at their best weight for over forty years. When I bring a fighter in on the day of a fight all he has to do is spit once and step on that scale and he makes exactly what I wanted him to make the day we signed for the fight. You don’t think I’m going to blow this one, do you?”

  “I know you’re not. I just have to have the weight in my report. What have you got against that?”

  “Plenty. I manage my own fighter. The commission doesn’t manage him, and the newspapermen don’t manage him. I don’t want it in the papers what Eddie Brown weighs.”

  “It’s not going to be in the papers. This is for our own records.”

  “You might just as well publish it in Parker’s column or on the front page of the Daily News. There are more leaks in this office than there were in the Andrea Doria after she came off second best with that other boat. The Pro doesn’t weigh.”

  “Then what do you expect me to put down?”

  “Put down 161½.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “How long do you know me?”

  “I don’t know. Thirty years.”

  “Did I ever lie to you?”

  “No.”

  “Eddie Brown weighed 161½ pounds yesterday afternoon. Put it down.”

  “You’re a tough man, Doc,” Martin said, looking Eddie over and then feeling him around the stomach and then the hips. “I’ll do it for you, but don’t say anything.”

  “You’re all right, doctor,” Doc said, and then to Eddie: “Put your shirt and things on.”

  “Gentlemen! Gentlemen! Gentlemen!”

  It was the champion. He came through the door with three others from his camp and Mel Nathan. There was a big smile on his face and a day’s growth of beard, and he was wearing road clothes—heavy shoes and khaki trousers, a gray woolen shirt and an Army khaki zipper jacket. He was perhaps an inch taller than Eddie, with a good slim build that showed in spite of the clothes, and on his head was a red woolen toque.

  “There’s my man,” he said, walking over to Eddie with that big smile still on and his hand out. “How are you, Eddie?”

  “I’m fine. You?”

  “Man, you look good.”

  “You’re late,” Martin said to him.

  “Hello, doctor,” he said, shaking Martin’s hand. “Man, I got things to do. You can’t expect a man to always be on time.”

  “You’re never on time.”

  “C’mon,” Doc said, motioning with his head to Eddie.

  “Hello, Mr. Carroll.”

  “Hello.”

  We walked through to the outer office where the photographers were still waiting. Eddie put his tie back on and got into his jacket again. Jay was talking with the photographers.

  “What did he really weigh yesterday?” I said to Doc.

  “Sixty-one and a half. Martin’s all right. I level with him.”

  “I just wondered.”

  “I’ll bet that champion has to weigh in there,” Doc said, nodding back toward the other room. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “How about that big greeting I got?” Eddie said.

  “The phony SOB,” Doc said. “Dreadful.”

  “Who does he think he’s impressing, showing up in those clothes, like he just came off the road.”

  “Dreadful.”

  In about ten minutes Mel Nathan came out, leading the others.

  “Now, what have you got in mind?” one of the photographers said, as the three of them stood up. “What do you want us to do?”

  “Just relax,” Nathan said. “You know I get paid for thinking, too.”

  “We’re here to do a job,” the same photographer said. “Get it up.”

  Nathan went back into the other office and came out carrying a gilt-painted cardboard crown, on the front of which was painted, in black letters: CHAMP. He took the red toque off the champion’s head and put the crown on.

  “Man, dig that crazy hat,” one of them with the champion said.

  “Man, how about this?” the champion said, grinning.

  “So you two guys get over here,” the same photographer said.

  “No. Get them over here,” another said. “We don’t want the windows in the back.”

  “So have it your way,” the first said.

  They posed the two of them, Eddie with the left hand cocked and reaching for the crown on the champion’s head with his right hand, the champion blocking the right with his left and about to throw his own right.

  “Isn’t that dreadful?” Doc said to me, as we stood there, the flash bulbs going and the photographers working.

  “Go on, you’ve done worse than that.”

  “Thirty years ago. Don’t they ever come up with anything new?”

  “What’s the matter?” Nathan said.

  “Nothing,” Doc said. “It’s great.”

  “It’ll get in the papers.”

  “Now what do you want?” the first photographer said to him.

  “Doc Martin!”

  “Hello?”

  “Lend us that stethoscope a minute, will you?”

  The photographers had the champion discard the crown and take off his jacket and open his shirt and they posed the two of them with Eddie, neat in his light gray sports jacket, dark slacks, blue shirt and gray tie, using the stethoscope on the champion’s chest. Then they posed the doctor using the stethoscope on the champion, with Eddie looking over the doctor’s shoulder.

  “Now what?” the first photographer said.

  “Now go back to your offices,” Nathan said.

  “That’s all?”

  “What did you expect, Marilyn Monroe?”

  “It’s up to you.”

  “So I’ll be seein’ you,” the champion said to Eddie, smiling and shaking his hand.

  “That’s right,” Eddie said.

  When we got outside the rain had stopped, so we walked the half block to Broadway and up the two and a half blocks to Dempsey’s, the traffic slurring on the wet pavement and the dampness hanging over it and over the people on the sidewalks. We took the firs
t booth on the right and Doc and I ordered a drink and a sandwich apiece and Eddie had a cup of tea and dry toast and Jay had corned beef hash with a poached egg on it.

  “What time is it?” Doc said, as we were finishing.

  “One-twenty,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Eddie said. “We better get to that studio.”

  “You know why I’m doing this, don’t you?” Doc said to me.

  “No.”

  “I’m a kindly old man. I felt sorry for that dame.”

  “Ethel Morse?”

  “Whatever her name is.”

  We took a cab the seven blocks to the studio. It was on the West Side, and when we got out and I looked at the place I made it out to be a remodeled loft building, a flat-roofed three stories, like the rest of the block, but the front redone in new red brick with plate-glass doors and aluminum trim. There was a small, semicircular lobby with the walls painted light green and with a cork-tiled floor, and we walked up to a kid in his teens who was sitting at the reception desk, talking into the phone.

  “Can I help you?” he said, taking the phone away from his face, but ready to go back to it.

  “What’s that dame’s name?” Doc said to me.

  “Ethel Morse.”

  “Will you have a seat?” the kid said.

  We spread ourselves along a long, curved, tan, plastic-covered sectional sofa that fitted the curve of the wall. The kid put the phone back on the cradle, waited, picked it up again, listened and dialed.

  “So this is what these places are like,” Jay said.

  “No,” I said. “It’s just what this place is like.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “This business is still so new nothing is like anything else.”

  Ethel Morse came out of the hallway behind the desk. She had on a dark blue suit and a light blue mannish shirt with a round silver clip at the neck.

  “So you’re here!” she said, all smiles and shaking hands with Eddie and then Doc. “Good!”

  “Is it?” Doc said.

  “Let’s go back. Bunny will want to meet you.”

  “Bunny,” Doc said to me. “What’s our business coming to?”

  “You don’t want to go back to fighting on barges, do you?”

  “Yes.”

  It was a big room, undoubtedly an old warehouse, with a frightening air, now, of calculated disarray. Deep into the room, slightly to our left, a group of parochial-school girls, not yet in their teens and dressed in Navy blue skirts and white blouses, sat on a three-tiered bleacher flooded with lights. At either end of the top row of girls a nun sat, and in front of the group a guitar player in a black cowboy costume stood, his back to them and facing a TV camera. He was playing and singing and smiling at the camera, and to the right, off camera, a piano player and a bass-fiddle man, also in cowboy costumes, were accompanying him.

  “Just wait right here,” Ethel Morse said to Eddie. “I’ll find Bunny.”

  “Who’s that cowboy singing?” Jay said to me. “I bet I seen him somewhere.”

  “William S. Hart,” I said.

  “Go on,” Jay said. “I’ll bet I’ve heard of this guy.”

  Off into the vast room there was a kitchen set and, at another angle, an office, or study, set. To the right of that there was a corner of a living room, two brick-red upholstered love seats with a blond corner table with a modern, chartreuse lamp on it. Across the floor coursed the heavy black cables to the cameras and the stand-up flood lamps, and moving around, stepping over the cables, were a half-dozen people, male and female, all of them young, a couple of the men with headsets on, one or two of the women carrying clip boards and all of them studiously harassed.

  “This is a madhouse,” Doc said.

  “What’s Eddie’s mother doing here?” Jay said.

  “Where?”

  “Right there.”

  Eddie had moved about fifteen feet from us and was talking with a small, gray-haired woman wearing a black cloth coat and a small, black felt hat. She was fingering a black leather handbag and seemed worried, and Eddie was doing the talking, shrugging and explaining something.

  “Tell them to come over here,” Doc said to Jay. “What’s going on here, anyway?”

  Jay went over and shook hands with Eddie’s mother and then brought them over. Doc shook hands with her and then Eddie introduced her to me.

  “We didn’t know you were going to be here, Mrs. Braun,” Doc said.

  “She didn’t know, either,” Eddie said. “That gal—Morse—called her Saturday night. Then she called her this morning and told her to come up.”

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Braun said, shrugging. “She told me she saw Eddie, and I should come here.”

  “She didn’t tell me she was going to call my mother,” Eddie said to Doc. “You were there.”

  “Well, you’re here,” Doc said.

  “But I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  “There’s nothing to worry about, Mrs. Braun,” I said. “They’ll tell you what to do.”

  We stood in an awkward silence, watching the guitar player in the cowboy clothes finish his number.

  “And now,” he said, grinning into the camera, “we’re all going to join in a song that’s my favorite and probably one of your favorites, too. ‘Harvest Moon’!”

  He turned slightly and looked toward the parochial-school group on the bleacher.

  “Am I right about that?” he said. “Isn’t that one of your favorites?”

  “Yes,” several of them said, most of the others nodding.

  “Then you’ll all join in with me. Dick!”

  He signaled to the piano player and the piano player led into it with the bass man, and the guitar player picked it up and then started to sing.

  “‘Shine on, shine on harvest moon, up in the sky ...’”

  Behind him all the lips moved and the voices sounded small and far away. I looked at the two sisters, flanking the top row, and their lips were moving, too, and my mind moved ahead to the next line and my eyes stayed on them.

  “‘I ain’t had no lovin’ since January, February, June or July.’”

  “My God!” Doc said, nudging me. “Did you just see what I saw?”

  “The sisters singing it?”

  “Sure. Let’s get out of here. What is this?”

  “This is the brave new world.”

  “Dreadful.”

  “Bunny will be right here,” Ethel Morse said. “You people enjoying watching this show?”

  “This is Mrs. Braun,” Doc said.

  “Yes, I know. She got here before you did.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us she was coming?”

  “To tell you the truth, I didn’t know it myself, not until this morning. Oh, Charley!”

  A young man, wearing a white shirt and a black knitted tie and charcoal gray trousers, turned and walked toward us. He had a sheaf of papers in one hand and was making marks on them with a pencil.

  “This is Charley Adams, our A.D. This is Eddie Brown, and his mother, Mrs. Braun, and his manager, Mr. Carroll.”

  “Hello,” Charley Adams said, nodding a couple of times, and then he turned and walked away, studying his sheaf of papers again.

  “Who’s he?” Doc said to me.

  “Our A.D.,” Ethel Morse said. “Assistant Director.”

  “Isn’t that dreadful?” Doc said to me. “A.D.”

  “Here comes Bunny now.”

  She came, stepping over the cables, toward us, about five feet three inches at the most, a good-looking little blonde wearing a blue dress with a flared skirt.

  “Bunny,” Ethel Morse said. “Mrs. Braun, Eddie Brown, Mr. Carroll and—”

  “Johnny Jay,” Jay said. “Hello.”

  “Johnny Jay and Frank Hughes.”

  “How do you do?” Bunny said. “All of you.”

  She had on pancake make-up, which gave her that orange look, but she had a small, turned-up nose and big blue eyes and seemed to be
in her early thirties.

  “Now who’s going on, anyway?” she said, looking at Ethel Morse and then at some papers she was carrying. “Not all of them?”

  “Oh, no,” Ethel Morse said. “It’s right there. First Mrs. Braun, and then Eddie. The rest of them are just watching.”

  “Good,” Bunny said, and then to Eddie and his mother, “I’ll see you on, then.”

  “Wait a minute,” Doc said. “What are they going to do?”

  “Why I’m sure Ethel’s explained that. Haven’t you explained that?”

  “No, but I’m going to now.”

  “Good. Then it’s nice to have met the rest of you.”

  She turned and walked back across the floor to where the young man named Charley Adams and identified as the A.D. was waiting for her. In front of the camera the guitar player in the cowboy clothes was sitting on the bottom step of the bleachers, smiling and nodding and talking with two of the parochial-school girls.

  “What about this?” Doc said.

  “It’s very simple,” Ethel Morse said. “There’s nothing to worry about. Bunny’s very good at this, and she’ll lead them.”

  “Lead them where?”

  “Well, they’re on the second segment. Bunny has a piano player from the Embers on the first half. He’s over there, getting ready now. In the second half, Mrs. Braun, the announcer will take you in. Perhaps you’d better leave your coat and your handbag here. Here, let me take them.”

  “I don’t know,” Eddie’s mother said. “My dress?”

  “Oh, it’ll be fine. It’s just fine. Here.”

  It was a black dress, plain except for a small white-lace collar. With her coat off, Eddie’s mother was smoothing the dress, the front and the sleeves.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Then what?” Doc said. “This woman doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do.”

  “She’ll sit down with Bunny on that love seat over there. We’re using that for this bit. Bunny will just ask her some questions.”

  “About what?” Doc said.

  “About Eddie, naturally. About his boyhood. That’s why we wanted her on the show. After all, no one knows Eddie’s boyhood better than she does, and this is a home show. I mean it’s largely a woman audience, and they’ll appreciate this.”

  “I’ll bet,” Doc said.