“When the show finally went off,” Frank Sann said, “Dream Street pretty much faded from public life, as they say.”
“Me too,” Vinny said. “I just didn’t go anywheres.”
They got off at Exit 70, took the connector road at Manorville, got on Route 27 East, which finally became a two-lane road in Southampton. They went past Southampton, and then through this little town with a huge windmill on the right, and then past a shopping center and were on their way into the town of Bridgehampton when Sann took a left. “Shortcut,” he said, “guy at the paper who comes out here summers told me when I gave him the address.”
Now they were on a road called Butter Lane, taking that to the end, taking a right when Sann said, “Okay, this is Scuttlehole,” talking to himself more than Vinny, who could’ve been in fucking Iowa. All Vinny wanted to know is which way the ocean was. Sann said they would’ve had to go right off 27, they were heading north now, toward a town Vinny’d never heard of called Noyack.
“You see any of those beautiful people, you tell me,” Vinny said.
Sann said he was on the lookout.
It took about forty more minutes and two wrong turns that took him into Sag Harbor both times, but now they were on a long road that went back into some woods, and coming up on a nice two-story house, what Sann said was built “saltbox” style, whatever that meant. He stopped about a hundred yards from the house, where the dirt-road driveway began.
“You’re just going to go up, ring the doorbell?” Sann said.
Vinny shrugged. “You know what they always said about me. I got no couth.”
May Stone, looking young still to Vinny, looking young and pretty, made it easy for him, smiling when she opened the door, as if she’d been expecting him. No shock, no surprise, just a smile as she came out on the porch and gave him a hug.
“Vincenzo,” she said, the way Dream Street used to, “please come in.”
It was an elegant-looking room, Vinny thought, not that he knew what any of the furniture was, or the paintings on the wall. There was one big table with a fancy lamp on it, surrounded by photographs of Dream Street and May, none from boxing, just them looking young and happy and made for each other.
She asked if she could get him something and Vinny said no, no thanks, he knew he was intruding, but that’s what old people did, right?
“You never did stand on ceremony,” she said. “In or out of the ring.”
“I didn’t know any better.”
May Stone said, “I’ve got a million questions, but I guess the only one that matters is, to what do we owe this surprise?”
Vinny said, “I came to ask him a question.” He looked around, aware now of how quiet the house was. “Is he here?”
Vinny saw something in her eyes now, something he couldn’t read, he’d never been any good at reading women especially. Jesus, look at the record.
“He’s not...he’s not himself,” she said finally.
She started to say something else and Vinny put up his hand, trying to keep things light, saying, “None of us are, except you, May, from the looks of you.”
Vinny saw May Stone looking toward the back and before she could say anything he said, “Is he out there? Let me surprise him, I promise I won’t be long.”
May said “Surprise” now, trying to make it sound happy, the way you would at a party. Vinny thought it came out sad-sounding instead. Then she walked him through the kitchen to the back door and pointed to where Dream Street Stone was, out there at the other end of the backyard, which finally ended at a small duck pond. He was sitting by himself, in a big wooden chair, wearing a leather jacket with the collar pulled up.
“Vinny...” May said.
“Don’t worry,” Vinny said, “it’s my turn to talk.”
He walked across the lawn, rehearsing what he wanted to say, knowing he was only going to get one shot to get it right. When he was about twenty feet away from where Dream Street sat, he said quietly, “Hey, you want to go a few?”
Dream Street Stone turned around, the smile that the whole world loved once still on his face, a lot heavier than Vinny remembered, his hair snow white, but still a handsome bastard, no signs on that face that he’d ever been in any kind of fight in his life.
“Hey,” Dream Street said, still smiling. “Hey you,” and came over and shocked Vinny by hugging him.
“Hey,” Dream Street Stone said again, and sat back down in the chair, turning it so it would face Vinny, still smiling.
“You okay?” Vinny said, and then shook his head, thinking. There was a great fucking icebreaker. “Of course you’re okay,” Vinny said, “you’ve still got May, look at you, sitting out here like the lord of the manor.”
“You,” Dream Street said again, looking happy as a kid.
And then it just came right out of Vinny, the way it had with Frank Sann that day at the apartment, not like he rehearsed exactly but right from his gut.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m an old man. We’re both old men.” He looked at the water, not wanting to stare into Dream Street’s smile just then, watching the ducks float lazy-like on the water instead, barely making a ripple on it. “Somebody once told me that late at night was the hour when guys told each other the truth. You know? Well, maybe it’s the same way when you get late into your goddamn life, no matter how much you bullshitted yourself when you were younger, you want the truth now, you don’t have the energy to lie. Now I know you’re gonna think I’m crazy”—Vinny laughed, feeling like he was talking to himself, maybe just for himself—“hell, you probably always thought I was a little crazy, the way 1 kept coming, but there’s something been bothering me all these years about the second fight in Boston. I forget things sometimes, it scares the shit out of me the way I forget things, maybe someday I won’t even be able to remember this conversation, but I got to know something, once and for all. If I’m insulting you by asking the question, well, I apologize.”
Vinny took a deep breath, the April morning too cold for his old bones, making him feel like it was still winter out. “I got to know why you didn’t come out for the fifteenth round basically,” Vinny said.
He turned now, looking right at Dream Street, who wasn’t smiling the way he had been, a frown on his face now, as if Vinny had confused him somehow.
“You want to get up and pop me a good one for asking, go ahead, I probably deserve it for even asking the question. Maybe it’s not even a question at all, now that I think about it. Maybe I’m begging you to please tell me that nobody got to you, that you just didn’t have nothing left.”
Dream Street Stone didn’t say a word. All you could hear was the sound of one of the ducks behind them. But then the frown melted away, and he was smiling again.
“Hey,” he said, getting up out of the chair again, giving Vinny another hug. “Hey you.”
Vinny Tavernese had always thought of himself as a dim bulb, at least without boxing gloves on. His last year of school had been the seventh grade, their choice. But now he knew.
“You know who I am, Dream?” he said.
“Hey!” Dream Street said, brighter and louder than before. “Hey you!”
This time it was Vinny’s turn. He hugged Dream Street Stone as hard as he could. When he finally pulled back, he saw May standing there.
“How long—?” Vinny began.
“Too long.”
Vinny said, “He doesn’t know—?”
“Not even me.”
There were two chairs like the one Dream Street Stone was sitting in. May pulled them closer to him, and gestured for Vinny to sit down. He thought briefly about Frank Sann sitting there in the car, wondering what was happening. He’d go get him soon enough. He stared at Dream Street Stone, the smile frozen on his face as he watched one of the ducks go airborne, his eyes as empty as the house behind them, as still as the trees all around them.
“Talk to him,” May said. “He doesn’t know what you’re talking about, but it seems to make him happy
. Talk to us both, Vincenzo, about the old days,” she said, taking his hand.
Now Vinny smiled.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I remember everything.”
THE MAN WHO FOUGHT
ROLAND LASTARZA
by Joyce Carol Oates
And in that instant the Armory is silent. Every uplifted face still, frozen. Overhead lights are reeling like drunken birds. Where my eye is bleeding there’s a halo of red light. No pain! Never pain again! Only this strange, wonderful silence. A giant black bubble swelling to burst. It was the moment I died, and / was happy.
This is not a very pretty story, and not just because it’s about boxing. In a way, it’s only incidentally about boxing. Its true subject is betrayal.
A story about the only person I’ve known, close to me, lodged deep in my memory like a beating heart, who took his own life.
Took his own life. These clumsy words. But words are what we say. We try our best, and words fail us.
Took his own life. This was said about Colum Donaghy, my father’s friend after he died at the age of thirty-one in September 1958. Colum would be spoken of in two ways depending upon who the speaker was, how close to Colum and how respectful of his memory. To some, he would always be the man who fought Roland LaStarza. To others, he would be the man who took his own life.
My heart beat in fury when I heard them speak of my father’s friend in that smug, pitying way. As if they had the right. As if they knew. “Where’d he take his life to, if he took it!” I wanted to shout at them. “You have no right. You don’t know.”
In fact, no one knew. Not with certainty.
My own father, who’d been Colum’s closest friend, hadn’t known. The shock to him was so great, he never truly recovered. He would remember Colum Donaghy’s suicide his whole life. But it was rare for him to speak of it. My mother warned us children: Don’t ask your father about it, you hear? Not a word about Colum Donaghy. As if we required warning. You could see the hurt of it in my father’s face, and the rage. Don’t ask. Don’t ask. Don’t!
Colum’s parents and relatives, especially the older Donaghys, could never accept it that he’d shot himself deliberately, at the base of his skull. They were Roman Catholics, to them taking your own life was a mortal sin. No matter the evidence of the county coroner’s report, the police investigation, no matter how circumstances pointed to suicide, they had to believe it was an accident, but they refused to talk about that, too. My father said it’s necessary for the Donaghys, let them think what they need to think. Like all of us.
Forty years ago. But vivid in my memory as a dream unfolding before my eyes.
And now my father has died, just five days ago. Which is to say New Year’s Day of this new era 2000. “Outlived Colum by forty years so far,” my father said last time I visited him. Shaking his head at the strangeness of it. “Christ, if Colum could see me now! Older than his father was then. Old people made him nervous. But maybe we’d have a laugh together, once he saw it was me.”
“Know what? I’m betting on myself.”
Colum Donaghy was a man who liked to laugh, and he laughed, telling my father this. Seeing the look in my father’s face.
It was his Irish temperament, was it? Colum’s first instinct was to laugh, as another man might steel himself against surprise. His eyes were pale blue like washed glass, and didn’t always reflect laughter. There was a part of him held in reserve, calculated, wary. But when Colum entered a room it was like a flame rising, you couldn’t turn your eyes away. He had a deceptively childlike face to which something had happened. Something with a story to it. A misshapen nose and scar tissue above his left eye like an icicle, that seemed to wink at you. There was a pattern of tiny scars like lacework in his forehead. A scattering of freckles like splashes of rain on his pale, coarse skin, and reddish blond hair, ribbed and rippled and worn a little long in the style of the day. And sideburns that offended the elder Donaghy men and older boxing fans (except if you kept Billy Conn in mind, flashy Billy as a model for Colum Donaghy). Colum had a rougher, wilder ring style than Conn, for sure. There were some observers who praised Colum for his natural gifts and for his “heart” but worried the boy had never learned to seriously box, he was all offense and not enough defense; whatever strategy his trainer had drilled into him before a fight he’d lose as soon as he got hit, and started throwing punches by instinct. Colum was a natural counter-puncher, that look of elation in his face like flame. Now you hit me, now I can hit you. And hit, and hit you!
At the time of his fight with Roland LaStarza in May 1958 in the Buffalo Armory, Colum was thirty years old, weighed one hundred eighty-seven compact, muscled pounds, and stood five feet ten and a half inches tall. Colum was such a forceful presence in and out of the ring, you were inclined to forget that he was a “small” heavyweight, like Floyd Patterson, like Marciano and LaStarza, and had shortish legs and a short reach, built powerfully, in the torso with the muscular stubby arms and smallish hands, that in a later era of Sonny Liston, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, giant black heavyweights who have dominated the heavyweight division since, would have handicapped him from the start. And like most Caucasian boxers, he bled, and scarred easily, like his boxer friend in Syracuse he so admired, Carmen Basilio with his wreck of a face, Colum wore his scars proudly as badges of honor. I wanted to stay pretty, I’d have been a ballet dancer. Colum Donaghy was a natural light heavy, but there was no money in that division. And in the fifties, fighting in arenas and armories and clubs in Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Rochester, Syracuse and Albany, a few times in Cleveland, once as far west as Minneapolis, and St. Catharines, Ontario, Colum Donaghy looked good. Even when he lost on points, he looked good. And in Yewville, where he’d lived all his life, where he was known and liked by everyone, or almost everyone, he looked good. That quick, easy, boyish smile, the slightly crooked front teeth. His nose had been broken in an early Golden Gloves fight, rebroken in the Navy, where he’d made a name for himself as a light heavyweight, but it was a break that softened his hard-boned face and made you think, if you were a girl or woman and inclined to romance, that here was a “tough” man who wished for tenderness.
Like my father Patrick Hassler, whom nobody called “Pat,” Colum was a man of moods. Gaiety, and sobriety, and melancholy, and anger smoldering like an underground fire. Maybe the moods were precipitated by drinking, or maybe the drinking was a way of tempering the moods. These were men you couldn’t hope to know intimately, unless you already knew them; their friendships were forged in boyhood. If you hadn’t grown up with Colum, you’d never truly be a friend of his, he’d never trust you and, as Colum had many times demonstrated, you couldn’t trust him.
He confided in my father, though. Close as brothers they were and protective of each other. My father was the only person Colum told about betting on himself in the LaStarza fight, so far as my father knew, though after Colum’s death rumors would circulate that he’d owed money to a number of people, including his manager, who’d been advancing him loans for years. Colum surprised my father with the revelation that he wasn’t just going to win the fight with LaStarza, he was going to knock LaStarza out. His trainer was preparing him to box, box, box the opponent but Colum sure as hell wasn’t going to box a guy who’d managed to keep Marciano at arm’s length for ten rounds in their title fight, made Marciano look like an asshole, for sure Colum wasn’t going to pussyfoot with the guy but go after him at the bell, first round, surprise the hell out of him, get him into a corner. “Believe me, I know how,” Colum told my father seriously. “You can bet on me. This time. No fucking up this time. Maybe a TKO, a KO. See, I can’t risk going the distance and lose on points. So I’m going to win the smartest way.” Colum paused, breathing quickly. He had a way of watching you sidelong, narrow-eyed, cagey and alert as a wild creature. “Shortest distance between two points, see? I’m going to bet on myself.”
My father was troubled by these revelations. He tried to dissuade his friend, not from
winning the fight but from trying for a KO that might be disastrous; and from betting on himself if he was betting serious money. “You could lose double, man.”
Said Colum with his easy smile, “No. I’m gonna win double.”
They were our fathers, we did not judge them.
The bond between them was they’d been born in the same neighborhood in Yewville, New York, in the same year, 1928. Their families were neighbors. Their fathers worked in the same machine shop. They belonged to the same parish, St. Timothy’s. Colum Donaghy and Patrick Hassler, high school friends who’d enlisted together in the U.S. Navy in 1949 and were sent to active duty in Korea the following year, there was that bond between them of which they had no need to speak.
These were not men who were sentimental about the past: they survived it.
Of Colum’s Yewville children (the mysterious rumor was he had others, outside his marriage) it was Agnes I knew. Or wished to know. She was a year behind me in school. With her father’s fair, whitish skin that never darkened in summer, only burnt. With her father’s cold blue eyes that could laugh, or drill through you as if you didn’t exist. For a long time Agnes was the girl whose dad is
Colum Donaghy the boxer, and she basked in that renown, then so suddenly she became the girl whose dad took his own life, and her eyes shrank from us, all of the Donaghys were like kicked dogs. I was drawn always to Agnes, Agnes who was so pretty, but Agnes shunned me, hatred for me shone in her eyes and I never knew why.
Nothing so disturbs us as another’s hatred of us. Our own secret hatreds, how natural they seem. How inevitable.
Colum Donaghy would say zestfully, “Before a fight, I hate a guy’s guts. I just want to wipe him out. After a fight, I could love ’im to death.”
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