Max Baer and the Star of David

by Jay Neugeboren

  Although, like many others, I might have been able to register for the draft without a valid birth certificate (or with one Max offered to have created for me), rather than risk the possible scrutiny such a ruse, if uncovered, might arouse (and thereby lead to revelations concerning my true relation to Joleen), I chose to take a civilian job as a stevedore, which job, given the dangers attached to the moving of large stores of ammunition, paid slightly more than a kitchen detail paid. In point of fact, several incidents would occur during the war wherein Negro soldiers, under pressure from their white officers to work with dispatch, were killed when ammunition they were loading onto ships exploded. One explosion, occurring less than an hour’s drive from Oakland, at the Port Chicago facility near Martinez, resulted in the deaths of three hundred and twenty workers, virtually all of them Negro, and led to a mutiny by surviving Negro sailors who refused to continue loading ammunition under dangerous conditions. The result in this instance—the only case of a full military trial for mutiny in the history of the navy—was that these fifty Negro sailors were convicted, jailed, and given dishonorable discharges.

  My own career at the Oakland base, though not without dangers—in my fourth month of work, I was put in charge of a unit of two dozen men specializing in the loading of ammunition on destroyers and aircraft carriers—proved less dramatic. I put in my time (often working sixty or more hours a week), received commendations, and was even—this in late 1943—encouraged by my commanding officer to join one of the few all-Negro units that were being granted permission to engage in combat operations. (Although more than two and a half million colored men registered for the draft during the war, only fifty thousand were permitted to serve in combat, this permission not granted until 1944.)

  I chose to remain a stevedore. It was good, honorable work, and necessary to what proved, blessedly, a victorious cause. It also allowed me to help Joleen and Max’s brother Augie keep the properties in Livermore and Sacramento in reasonably good repair. The only serious injury to any of us during the war years—and it was far from lethal—was to Max, who, while entertaining a group of soldiers, had an eighty-five pound punching bag fall on him, and do to him what no fighter had ever done: put him out of action. This happened late in 1944, a half year after Maudie Marion’s birth, and resulted in disabling neck and shoulder injuries so that, with Italy having already surrendered (a substantial group of Italian prisoners of war worked at the Oakland Army Base, three of them assigned to my unit), and the wars in Europe and the Far East winding down, Max was given an honorable discharge and a special commendation for his exemplary service from both the commander in chief of the armed forces and the president of the United States.

  During the years Max and Buddy were doing their part to help the United States and its allies prevail, and to bring about a peaceful accommodation between nations, however tainted and fraught with sorrow that peace may have been, Joleen and I also reached what I came to think of as a peaceful accommodation of our own, becoming to one another much like the married couple others believed we were. If at the time I had been able to put my sense of how Joleen and I got on with one another into words, I might have said that we had a loving understanding of the kind that informs those much-admired long-lasting marriages that persist in states of calm, contented companionship. We had, that is, friendship without rivalry, and intimacy without desire.

  What made this possible, I believe, were not only habits we had acquired during our friendship with Max Baer, habits that had freed us in large degree from the desire to be physically intimate with one another, but—more—the happiness we found in being parents to Horace Jr., whose presence brought with it those sweet and ordinary responsibilities that, during years when we had seen no future for us other than the childless life we had with one another (and with Max Baer), we had come to believe would never be ours.

  But just as the Lord gave a child to Abraham’s wife, Sarah, when she had lived well past her childbearing years (so unexpected was the news that she was with child, the Bible tells us, that it made Sarah laugh), and did this not long after Abraham had informed King Abimelech that Sarah was his sister—just so had we been blessed with a child of our own when we had given up hope that, together or apart, this would ever be. And although we continued to sleep in the same bed (as we had begun doing when we were children), and sometimes to lie in one another’s arms (and to do so with Horace Jr., when he was an infant, nestled between us), yet did we seem rarely if ever to have been tempted to renew with one another the act that had led to the life that was ours together.

  Yet how curious, it occurs to me now, that we seemed so old when we were so young—more like an elderly aunt and uncle to Horace Jr. than his parents—and how curious, too, that more than three score years after Horace Jr.’s birth, and nearly a half century after Max Baer’s passing from this world, it often seems that we had never, with each other, done what we had done.

  If I so choose, however, I can conjure up in detail not only the first time Joleen and I made love, but many other times after that. I have indulged this ability on occasion through the years (and somewhat more often in the period when I became aware I was losing my sight), and I have done so, in part, in order that, in the darkness in which I have increasingly come to live, I might confirm for myself that the life I believed I had was in fact the life I did have. And when I revisit these times, it is as if I am a ghost-like intruder watching someone else do what I did once upon a time.

  Whereas ordinary sensory experiences—the scent of a rose, the sound of waves crashing on rocks, the taste of ripe raspberries, the sight (when sight was mine) of a storm-tossed sky, the feel of sandpaper or smooth stones upon my fingertips—can set in motion an unending sequence of feelings and desires—of associations, memories, and fantasies that seem as real as the world I inhabit, when it comes to Joleen—to feeling her hand on mine, or inhaling the almond-scented fragrance of her skin, or listening to her voice read to me from Scripture—all of which fill me, as ever, with pleasure, and send my mind tumbling through tunnels of memory—I can never recall our intimacy in any corporeal way. I can see us doing what we did, but I neither feel it happening again, nor does the memory of what happened lead to other feelings or memories.

  Horace Jr. has often expressed gratitude to me for bequeathing to him the gift of memory that has been mine from my earliest years, which gift he has always claimed, no matter the truth of his lineage, to be his inheritance from me. Horace’s memory is most acute when it comes to words on a page; once he has seen a phrase or a page he chooses to remember, he is capable of being able to retrieve that phrase or page at will. My own memory—like Horace’s, lodged primarily in things visual—is more adept at recalling people, places, and objects, and, from the seemingly endless multitude of rooms housed in my many-chambered mind, to bring them forward into the light of day, as it were, and see them again in the fullness of who and what they once were.

  It is possible, of course, that this is merely a way I have found to protect myself from feelings I feared might destroy me as they nearly destroyed Joleen, and it is also possible that my forthrightness in here recounting what happened is a way of denying its power over me, as in: it happened to me, yes, but so distant am I from what happened—so clearly do I see it—that it is as if I was not truly there. Whatever the explanation for the singular quality of my memory in this instance, I find that I cherish what did happen in a way not unlike the way I cherish Joleen and our love for one another. Not for us the more predictable and ordinary lives we, and Max, might have had had we never known one another.

  What also remains curious is that when I recall our youthful love, and the extended moment in which it came into being, I find that I am increasingly put in mind of Joleen’s tale of her brother James, and of her vengeance on his behalf. And when I imagine again what, in her tale, happened to James and to our father, I begin to think of James as if he, and not I, were brother to Joleen: as if his life were real in a way my own nev
er was.

  When I do—when I imagine James defending Joleen against our father, and imagine her lifting the jar of lye from under the pecan tree, I see something that actually did happen: I see Joleen lying under that same pecan tree, and I see myself coming upon her on the day when everything in our lives changed forever.

  The sun was gone from the sky on what had been a brutally hot day in late August, and returning home from the fields, I saw that Joleen was by herself, her back against the pecan tree, and that she seemed to be in the midst of the kind of frightened, dream-tossed sleep that, in the bed we shared with our brother Paul, frequently plagued her. As I drew closer, I saw that her skirt, the deep black-brown of river-bottom, was raised above her waist. Her eyes were closed, and she had one hand between her legs while her other hand was pressed against her mouth in order, it seemed, to stifle growling sounds much like those our dogs would make when a person unknown to us came near.

  I stopped and watched for a while, then approached as quietly as I could. As soon as I sat on the ground some eight to ten feet from her, however, she opened her eyes and smiled at me in a way that showed me she was not, as I feared, in pain. When she looked downwards as if, with her eyes, urging me to do the same, I saw that she wore no undergarment, and that her fingers were appearing and disappearing from view, then moving more and more quickly until, hunched over in what seemed a sudden seizure—her feet rising from the ground, her toes straightening—she let out a long, high-pitched sound that made me rush to her.

  She collapsed against me, and held me close while strange whimpering sounds came from her throat. She touched my lips with her hand, and when she forced her fingers into my mouth and I tried to pull away, she took her hand from my mouth, dug her fingernails into my neck and, her mouth at my ear, whispered that I need not be frightened—“I’m all right, so don’t be frightened, brother,” she said. “I’m all right, so don’t be frightened”—and that I should please, please hold her as tightly as I could.

  I did what she asked. The back of her thin shirt was wet through, while her skin was slick with sweat. When, several minutes later, she let out a long exhalation of air, leaned back, and shook her head up and down several times to indicate that she was all right, I asked her what she had been doing that had brought on such spasms.

  “Oh my dear brother,” she said, “I have just been to the moon.”

  “I do not understand,” I said.

  She placed two fingers against my mouth, and this time, though their scent and taste were, as before, rank, they possessed a sweetness that made me want to take them into my mouth. Before I could, however, she pushed me away, and let her hand rest again between her thighs.

  “This is what happened,” she said. “When I delivered laundry to the Cogswell family this afternoon, the young woman with whom I converse from time to time—Margaret Jane—met me at the door, showed me where to put the laundry, paid me, and asked if I would care to join her and her brother for tea.

  “I said that it was not possible for me to accept such an invitation, but she told me she and her brother were alone in the house. Her brother appeared then, and he was to her as you are to me, two years younger, while Margaret Jane—I knew this from previous conversations—was but eight or nine months older than I am. Fearful she would take my refusal as insolence, and hearing no sounds indicating there were other people about, when she again insisted I join them—‘I expect you to do what I ask,’ were her words—I let her lead me to a veranda at the rear of the house that was screened in, its shades let down, and I sat where she told me to sit.

  “Then she lay down on a divan, and after a while she lifted her skirt, and when I saw that she wore nothing below the skirt, I covered my eyes and stood, but her brother pried my hand from my eyes, pushed me back into my chair, and sat beside me. He did not touch me again. Instead, while his sister began to move her fingers in and out of herself, he put his own hand inside his trousers.

  “Margaret Jane kept smiling at me, but her smile was forced and the laughter that accompanied it shrill, as if she were on the verge of hysterics. At the same time, despite the fact that I remained mute, she kept asking if I had ever done what she was doing, and so astonished was I by what was happening that it was all I could do to shake my head sideways, and look about, frightened to death someone would find me with them, and that my punishment for being there would in fact become the death of me.

  “A moment later her brother, eyes closed, shuddered and let his head fall backwards. He was soon asleep, a doltish smile on his face, and while he slept, Margaret Jane ordered me to do what she was doing, and said that if I did her bidding there might be a reward, but that if I did not do what she said…”

  “Dear Joleen—how awful!” I exclaimed.

  “Not at all,” Joleen said. “Oh not at all, for when I did what she told me to do, I experienced sensations that, though familiar, opened this time into sensations I did not know I could have, and when these sensations led to an explosion within me, like a rush of brilliant stars crashing down with a great and mighty roar, I also found myself floating happily in the air above myself, and then Margaret Jane closed her eyes, and went into mild convulsions that, I am certain, she knew were not in their intensity anything like mine. And was that not the greatest pleasure of all, to have outdone her at her own beloved game? For I was on my way to the moon, and when I returned, I was able, while Margaret Jane, her mouth agape, watched in awe, to send myself there again, and again, and again.

  “And now,” she said, “the sun having set and the moon rising, you may accompany me while I travel there once more…”

  This was when she saw that I had, listening to her tale, become aroused, and she reached out to touch me—I backed away at once—and said that Margaret Jane had told her that sometimes her brother did for her what she had been doing for herself, and that Margaret Jane did not know how she could have survived the endless ennui of her life—“oh the boredom, the terrible boredom and ennui!” she cried—had they not played such games with one another.

  “I did not believe her,” Joleen said. “But I believe that if you really love me the way you say you do, you will do with me now what Margaret Jane claims she and her brother do with and for one another.”

  I scuttled backwards on the ground, but Joleen was upon me at once, tugging on the thin cloth of my trousers, and asking again, if I really, really loved her, why would I not do what she asked, for it was a simple thing no one would ever know about, and that—was this what vanquished the last, frail vestige of my resistance?—even the great patriarchs and matriarchs of the Bible, along with their children, had done with one another.

  5 Enchanted Hills

  Awake. O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits. (4:16)

  Although, when Max and I were on tour together after the war, just the two of us, and he was either performing vaudeville routines, or working as a celebrity referee, we resumed our intimacies, we did so with decreasing frequency, and without anything like the passion that had informed our earlier times together. Whether this was due to the hiatus in our liaisons necessitated by the war, or to Max’s taking his familial responsibilities more seriously now that he was a father of three, or to a certain calming effect on my emotions that came as a result of the accommodation Joleen and I had reached, or simply to the passage of time, I cannot say. But it soon became clear in these post-war years that Max and I had become to one another good friends and companions in much the way Joleen and I had, and though this transformation was unanticipated and, at first, disheartening, it was not unpleasant.

  During the telling of my story, as during the nearly four decades that have passed since Max Baer’s death, in November of 1959, I have frequently found myself wondering how it could be that so much sheer and abundant energy was gone from the world, and—more!—how it could be that Joleen and I had lived on together after
Max’s passing for more years than those in which we knew him. Having set out to tell the story of the Max Baer I knew, and of the life I knew with him, at a time when my own physical well-being was in decline, I am surprised to find, as I draw near to the end of the task, that I have gained strength from the journey. It has given me great and unexpected pleasure to be able to put my memories into words, to remember experiences as if they occurred no more than a few weeks ago, and to be able to conjure up, in addition, experiences I dimly recalled, or recalled not at all until the moment I began to recount what I did remember.

  Thus, while the strength I have gained from the task remains, I will set down one more story—a story with distinctly unpleasant elements, and a story I have kept to myself for nearly half a century. It may be that Joleen will judge this a story that should go to the grave with me. It is my hope, however, that she will write down what I here reveal, and it is my wish that our son, Horace Jr., thereby learn of what happened, and that it be left to him to decide whether the events I describe, as with those ancient manuscripts he ponders, are worthy of being preserved.

  In the early summer of 1958, about a year before Max’s death, and Horace Jr.’s graduation from the University of California at Berkeley, I became aware that my eyesight was failing. At this time, Joleen and I were living in a house of our own in San Francisco, a house built into the side of a hill where, from our second-floor bedroom—our only room on the second floor—we could see, through the open spaces between homes that lay, on descending levels between our house and the Embarcadero, a vertical slice of San Francisco Bay and, rising up above it, the magnificent Golden Gate Bridge, a bridge that did not exist when we had first come to San Francisco. Our house was situated in a neighborhood that had, for most of this century, been largely Italian, but was now quite diverse. In addition to a scattering of black families and, still, a fair number of Italians, mostly elderly, there was a large population of Asians—Chinese, Japanese, and Korean—as well as substantial communities of Russians, Mexicans, and college-educated white families with young children.