There’s these weird times, Christ! It’s like I could bless everybody I see. Like I’m a priest or something, and God gave me the power to bless. My heart is so full, feels like it’s going to burst.
Know what I mean? Oram I some kind of dope or something?
It’s like I got to go through what I do, hitting, and being hit, hurting a guy, and being hurt, before I can bless those people? Before I can feel that kind of, whatever it is, happiness.
Next day, anyway, it’s gone. Next day I’m feeling like shit, can’t hardly get out of bed and my eye swollen shut and I’m pissing blood and the fucking phone better be off the hook, fuck it I don’t want any interference in the household.
“That poor woman. I don’t envy her.”
So the Yewville women spoke of Colum Donaghy’s wife Carlotta. She was a brunette Susan Hayward look-alike from Niagara Falls. She hadn’t any family in Yewville, and few women friends. A glamorous woman when you saw her ringside, and photographed in the papers beside her husband, but at other times she looked what you’d have to call almost ordinary, shopping at Loblaw’s, pushing a baby in a stroller and trying to hang on to a toddler’s hand to prevent him from rushing into the street.
“When he brought her here to live, she looked so young."
When Colum wasn’t in training, it’s true Colum did drink. Coming off a fight, whether he’d won the fight or lost, he’d start to drink pretty seriously. Because now it was normal life, it was the life of normal, average men, men who worked at daily jobs, in garages, in lumberyards, driving trucks, taking orders from others, trying to make money like you’d try to suck moisture out of some enormous unnameable thing pressing sucker-lips against it filled with revulsion for what you did, what you must do, if you wanted to survive. These times, it’s like I saw into the heart of things. The mystery. And there’s no mystery. Just trying to survive. It was known that Colum and Carlotta had married within a few weeks of meeting, crazy for each other but prone to quarrels, misunderstandings. Each was an individual accustomed to attention from the opposite sex. It was known that Colum loved his wife very much, and their children. If he lost his temper sometimes, if he frightened them, still he loved Carlotta very much, and their children.
Yet sometimes, specific reasons unknown, Colum would disappear from Yewville to live in Buffalo. He had many friends there, men and women both. Sometimes he’d only just move out of his house and live across town. Friends took him in, eager to make room for Colum Donaghy. Rarely did he pay rent. He’d stay in a furnished apartment in downtown Yewville near the railroad yard, which was also in a neighborhood of Irish bars where Colum “The Kid” was very popular, his boxing photos and posters taped to the walls. For a few weeks, or maybe just a few days, he’d live apart from his family; then Carlotta would ask him to return, and Colum would promise that things would be different, he loved her and the kids, he’d die for them he vowed, and he meant it. Colum Donaghy was a man who always meant the words he uttered, when he uttered them.
Sometimes it was Carlotta who left Yewville, took the children to stay with their grandparents in Niagara Falls. And it was Colum who went to bring them back.
“She’s taking a chance. Him with that temper. And his drinking—
“What kind of woman would stay with him? You can’t trust that kind of Irish.”
Always there seemed to be women in Colum’s life, so naturally there were misunderstandings. There were complications, crises. There were threats of violence against Colum and occasional acts of violence. Scuffles in the parking lots of taverns, aggrieved husbands and boyfriends accosting Colum so he had no choice but to “defend himself,” once breaking his fist on a stranger’s jaw, so an upcoming fight had to be postponed. Another time, in a woman’s house in Albany, police were called to break up a fight involving Colum and several others. “What can I do? These things happen.” A man who’s a boxer is attractive to both men and women, they want to be loved by him or hit and hurt by him, possibly there’s little difference, they only know they yearn for something.
When he wasn’t actively in training, and in the rocky after-math of a fight, never mind if he won or lost, Colum was restless and edgy as a wild creature in captivity; drank and ate too much, to the point of making himself sick; couldn’t sleep for more than an hour or two at a time, walking the nighttime streets of Yewville, or driving in his car aimlessly; waking at dawn not knowing where he was, on a country road miles from home, having fallen asleep at last. He was happiest drinking with his friends, watching the Friday night fights on TV, at a local bar. At such times carried out of himself in a bliss of excitement, subjugation. For he understood he was in thrall to boxing: to that deep rush of happiness, that blaze of life, that only boxing could give him. And he wanted even the yearning that swelled up in him as he watched the televised fights, broadcast from fabled Madison Square Garden, the very center of the professional boxing world, where he’d been waiting, waiting, waiting to be called to fight, waiting so badly he could taste it. Colum Donaghy waiting for his turn, his chance, his payday. Though money had little to do with it, except as a public sign of grace. A specially ordered canary-yellow Buick convertible, he’d buy. A new house in a better part of town. Something for his parents, who deserved better than they’d got from life so far? A week in Miami Beach? Colum “The Kid” Donaghy, who wasn’t getting any younger. Some of the kids in the gym, eyeing him. Maybe he’s slowing down. Waiting for five years, waiting for eight years, ten years. But his manager Gus Smith was just a local Buffalo guy, in his sixties, near obese, cigar smoker with a goiter for a nose, good-hearted and decent but second-rate, unconnected, whom nobody in the boxing business owed favors, and the truth was Colum’s record was not that impressive, he’d thrown away fights he should have won, thrown away opportunities because he had other things on his mind, like women, or Carlotta giving him grief, or he owed money, or somebody owed him, too many distractions, he’d become one of those wild Mick brawlers the crowds cheer even when they lose, so losing was too often confused with winning. Like gold coins falling through his fingers, those years. There was the hot exhilarating rush seeing the coins fall, and no way of guessing one day they’d all be gone.
So he was waiting, he was a hungry Irish kid waiting all his life. If there’s some other world, fuck it I expect I’ll be waiting there too.
His record going into the fight with LaStarza in May 1958 was forty-nine wins, eleven losses and one draw. LaStarza’s record was fifty-eight wins, five losses. But two of LaStarza’s losses, in 1950 and 1953, were to Rocky Marciano, who would be the single heavyweight boxer in history to retire undefeated, and the second match with Marciano was for the heavyweight title. And LaStarza had mixed it up for Marciano for ten rounds before he was TKO’d in the eleventh.
Colum said excitedly, “That fight?—LaStarza came close. If it’d been a decision, he’d won. Shows it can be done, the Rock ain’t invincible.”
True, LaStarza may have been ahead on points through ten rounds of the fight, but only because, and this is a big only, he’d boxed a cautious fight, determined to keep the stronger Marciano at bay as you’d keep a coiled-up cobra at bay, if you were lucky, with a pole. But Marciano was relentless, always pushing forward, always aggressive, maintaining a steady pace, not fast, deliberate, dogged, knowing what he was going to do when he was in a position to do it. With Marciano as with Louis, the cagiest opponent could run but he couldn’t hide. It was only a matter of time. “Like that story we read in school,” my dad said, “a guy is caught between a pit and a pendulum, and it’s only a matter of time.”
Now Colum knew this, or should have known, but didn’t want to admit it. He was eccentric like many boxers, he took contrary views that in oblique ways were satisfying to him if mystifying to others. Watching the Marciano-LaStarza fight on TV, in a bar with my dad and their friends, he was too restless to remain still, moving about excited, panting, calling out instructions to LaStarza as if he were ringside. “C’mon! Nail �
��im! Use that right!” Each time the bell rang signaling the end of a round Colum would snap his fingers: “LaStarza.” Meaning LaStarza won the round. When, in Round Nine, Marciano slipped to the canvas, Colum protested the referee should have ruled it a knockdown; and when, in Round Eleven, Marciano knocked LaStarza through the ropes and out onto the ring apron, Colum protested it was a push, a foul. Sure, Marciano threw a few low blows. His ring style lacked finesse. But the knockdown was a clean one and everybody knew it, just as everybody including LaStarza understood that LaStarza had lost that fight. If he’d kept on his feet for fifteen rounds with Marciano hammering away at him to the body, to the head, to the arms, practically breaking the man’s arms and leaving them weltered in bruises like battered meat, LaStarza might have been permanently injured.
But Colum, stubborn and contentious, seemed to have been watching a different fight. This was years before the deal with LaStarza was even being dreamt of by Colum’s manager, yet Colum seemed to foresee that one day he might fight Roland LaStarza, forget Marciano for now, it was his unconscious wish to build up LaStarza, the man who’d been a serious heavyweight title contender for years, and would be taking home a pretty decent purse from the night’s fight, and Colum Donaghy three hundred fifty miles away in upstate western New York is hungry for some of this, it’s his turn, his time, how badly he wants to be fighting in Madison Square Garden in these televised Friday night fights, broadcast throughout the entire United States, and people in Yewville and Buffalo crowded around their sets and cheering him on. “See? LaStarza came pretty close. It can be done.”
My dad said when he heard this, he just looked at Colum, didn’t say a word. Because already in his imagination Colum was beyond LaStarza, he’d fought and beaten LaStarza and was ready to fight the legendary Marciano himself. That was the meaning of It can be done.
“Oh, Colum! Come on.”
I’m remembering the time I came home from school, I was in sixth grade at the time, and my mom and Colum Donaghy were talking earnestly together in the kitchen. They were drinking beer (Molson’s, out of bottles) and talking in rapid lowered voices, Colum in a freshly laundered white T-shirt, khaki pants, gym shoes seated at the Formica-topped kitchen table, my mom leaning back against the rim of the sink, and in my memory she’s wearing a cotton dress with a vivid strawberry print, short sleeves and a flared skirt, and her slender legs are pale and bare, and her feet in open sandals because it’s a warm day in late May. And her hair that’s chestnut brown is soft and curly around her face as if she recently washed it. And she’s laughing, in her tentative nervous way. “Oh, Colum! Come on.”
I wondered what they’d been talking about, my mother breathless and girlish. Where usually she’s preoccupied, and two sharp vertical lines run between her eyebrows, even when her face is in repose.
It was vaguely known to me that my dad and mom had been engaged to be married twice; that something had gone wrong, some misunderstanding, in that murky region of time before my birth that both fascinated and repelled, and my mom had been “in love with” Colum Donaghy; and this “love” had lasted for six months, and had then ended; and again my dad and mom were together, and engaged, and married quickly. They were both so young, in their early twenties. They’d gone away from Yewville with no warning to be married by a justice of the peace in Niagara Falls, surprising and outraging their families. Like it was something to be ashamed of, and not proud. Marrying that girl after she’d left him for Donaghy. Taking her back, after Donaghy.
How I knew these facts, which could not have been told to me directly, I have no idea. I would no more have asked any relative about such things than 1 would have asked my proud, touchy father how much he made a year, repairing cars and trucks and selling gas out on the highway. I would no more have asked my mother a personal question them I would have confided in her the early-adolescent anxieties of my own life.
Had she left Donaghy, or had Donaghy left her.
This was not a question. This was a proposition.
My mother’s name was Lucille, “Lucy.” When I was a little girl and saw this name spelled out, I thought it was a way of spelling “lucky.” And when I told my mom this she laughed sadly and ran her fingers through my hair. “Me? ‘Lucky’? No. I’m Lucy.”
But later she hugged me, she said, “Hey, I am lucky. I’m the luckiest girl in the world to have you.”
I was the oldest of Lucy and Patrick Hassler’s three children, and the only girl. A daughter born within a year of their runaway wedding. If there were whispers and rumors in Yewville about who my father truly was, I did not know of them. And if I knew of them by way of my malicious girl cousins, I did not acknowledge them. I never did, and I never will.
Now my mother Lucy has been dead for nine years, and my father Patrick for five days.
That May afternoon was a delirium of wind! The air was filled with tiny flying maple seeds, some of them caught in my hair. I’d been running, I pushed through the screen door into the kitchen and there were Colum Donaghy and my mom talking earnestly together, and my mom was laughing, her nervous, sad laugh, unless it was a hopeful laugh, which my brothers and I rarely heard, and my mom was wearing lipstick which rarely she wore, and seeing me she quickly straightened her back, her startled eyes appeared dilated as if looking at me, her daughter, she saw no one, nothing. As if in that instant she’d forgotten who I was.
Colum Donaghy turned to me, smiling. If he was surprised at me bursting into the kitchen breathless, he didn’t give a sign. He smiled:
“H’lo there, honey.”
I muttered a greeting. I was very embarrassed.
They talked to me about nothing, my mother’s voice was eager and bright and false as a TV voice trying to sell you something you don’t want. I walked through the kitchen and into the hall and upstairs, my heart thudding. Out of a small oval mirror on my bedroom wall, a mirror my father had made for me framed in wood painted pink, there glared my ferocious eleven-year-old’s face.
“I hate you. All of you.”
A sensation of pure loathing rose in me, bitter as bile. At the same time I was hoping they’d call me back downstairs. I understood that I could not be a girl as beautiful as Colum Donaghy’s wife Carlotta or pretty as Lucy my mother; I understood, as surely as if my sixth-grade teacher had spelled it out in chalk on the blackboard of our classroom, that no man like Colum Donaghy would ever look at me as he’d been looking at my mother when I pushed through the screen door.
Still, the words echo in memory. So lightly tossed off, fleeting as breath. H’lo there, honey.
After thirty a boxer’s legs begin to go, and fast. If he’s a brawler who hasn’t taken care of himself, a crowd pleaser who trades blows confident the crowd will always adore him for holding nothing back, his legs will go faster. His punch he’ll keep till the end. Maybe. But the legs, the legs wear out. Breath wears out. By the age of thirty-five you’re an old man, by the age of forty you’re unspeakably old. Colum Donaghy was thirty years old by the time he fought Roland LaStarza in the Buffalo Armory. But LaStarza was thirty-one. Both boxers had been young for a long time. Still, Marciano had retired undefeated two years before at the age of thirty-three, in his prime. Or nearly. So it didn’t always mean that boxers beyond thirty were old. That their lives were speeding by like landscape glimpsed from a car window.
“It isn’t a matter of old, young,” Colum argued, “it’s got nothing to do with calendar age. Look at Willie Pep, Archie Moore. Look at Walcott, thirty-eight when he won the fucking title.”
My father said, “So you got plenty of time, you’re thinking, eh, Donaghy?” The men laughed, listening.
Colum said, “That’s right. If it happens soon.”
Then in the late winter of 1958, the deed was made.
How much negotiating had gone into it, how many calls between Gus Smith and Roland LaStarza’s manager, what the exact payment would be for each boxer and what sort of promises were made not in the contract, no one except a ve
ry few individuals would know. Certainly the boxers would not know. But a deal was made at last, and the media were notified: a match between LaStarza and Donaghy was set as the main card for a Saturday evening of boxing, May 20, 1958, in the Buffalo Armory.
The most exciting local sports news of the year! Colum Donaghy, the popular heavyweight who’d never moved away from his hometown, Yewville, was scheduled to fight a major heavyweight, an Italian glamor figure who’d “almost beaten” Marciano for the title and who was still a highly regarded contender and a TV favorite. (Or at least he’d been before his year of inactivity and losses to obscure fighters in places like Cleveland, Akron, Miami Beach.) How’d it happen, such a coup?
Gus Smith, interviewed locally, had a terse answer to this question: “It happened.”
Colum called my father to tell him the good news before it broke. My father said, “This is great news, Colum. Congratulations.” Trying to keep the dread out of his voice.
“Fucking fantastic, ain’t it?”
“Colum, it is.”
“Me and Carlotta, we’re going out to celebrate tonight. At the Top Hat.” The Top Hat was a well-known glitzy nightclub in Buffalo where individuals known in the media as sports figures, and their noisy entourages, often gathered on weekends. “You and Lucy want to join us? My treat.”
“That sounds good, Colum. Let me check with Lucy and get back to you.”
“Hey.” Colum caught the signal. “Aren’t you happy for me, Hassler?”
“Sure I’m happy for you.”
“You’re thinking—what? I can’t beat LaStarza?”
“No.”
“You’re thinking I can?
My father paused just a little too long. Colum said angrily: “I’m going to win, fuck it! I can beat LaStarza. ”
“Right. If anybody can, you can, Colum.”
Otto Penzler (ed) - Murder 06 - Murder on the Ropes raw Page 30