Corky's Brother

by Jay Neugeboren

  He changed a lot too. We still saw each other every day and we had no trouble talking about sports and school, but he didn’t come down to the schoolyard as much. He spent more time at home, taking care of his kid sister while his mother was away working. I’d stop by his house sometimes on my way home from the schoolyard for supper, and he’d be sitting on the couch, with his sister next to him, leaning on his shoulder. Her name was Miriam, and even though she was a year or so younger than we were, she was already bigger than Izzie. She wore a lot of Izzie’s clothes—his shirts and his old baseball hats—and she reminded me of those refugee kids you saw in all the movies that came out after the war. I used to picture myself riding on the front of a Patton tank through a European village, with her looking up at me with big eyes, one hand in her mouth, while I’d reach into my pocket for a Hershey bar to give her. Izzie would read stories to her, and I’d stay with them for a while, drinking a Coke Izzie gave me, and listen also. Miriam hardly ever smiled, except when he read poems to her that he’d written himself. Then she’d giggle and snuggle up to him.

  Their mother worked as a saleswoman at A & S’s in downtown Brooklyn, near the Loew’s Metropolitan and the Fox, and I’d sit in the kitchen with Izzie, talking about what the games had been like that afternoon—who was improving and which guys were going to try out for the Erasmus team that year and things like that—while he started getting supper ready for the three of them.

  His poems were pretty good, I thought—they had a lot of strange words in them that he’d invented himself—and when we were sophomores he had some published in the school literary magazine, The Erasmian. From then on, he stopped talking with me so much about basketball and spent most of his time working on his poems and being with his sister. I played on the school team and he didn’t, but we were still close friends. Not as close as we’d been, but pretty close, and even though I began spending most of my time after that with guys from the school team, I think I still thought of Izzie as my best friend. We’d meet each other at the comer every morning at 8:15 to walk to school together, and I was becoming too busy with practice sessions and games and dating girls to realize that I hardly ever stopped by his house any more and that he never came by mine to see me. Once in a while he’d come down to the schoolyard on a Sunday morning—he’d always have The New York Times tucked under his arm—and he’d get in a game or two of basketball, but he never stayed long.

  We drifted apart during the last two years of high school. Because of his height, I guess, he didn’t go out with girls too much, and most people I knew at school, especially the guys on the team, thought he was weird. He’d do crazy things—like mimeographing his own poems and handing them out in the cafeteria during lunch period—and even though I always defended him when people said how screwy he was becoming, by the time we were seniors I had to agree with them, though I never said so.

  He was editor-in-chief of The Erasmian by then, and he had his own set of friends and hung out in Greenwich Village with them. He dressed strangely, too. He was never sloppy, but he’d wear crazy combinations—a bright-red polka-dot bow tie with a blue flannel shirt, or a vest over a T-shirt—things like that. When the yearbook ran the popularity contests that year—most likely to succeed, best-looking, class athlete—he ran for Joe Erasmus. He had big glossy pictures made of himself dressed in nothing but a bathing suit, with a beret on his head and a cigar in his mouth. He was staring at a skull he held in his right hand and under the picture he’d printed: YORICK SAYS —VOTE FOR IZZIE COHEN.

  The second set of basketball scandals broke during our senior year of high school, near the end of the basketball season. By then I’d grown to about six four and was a starter on the Erasmus team. Mr. Goldstein had had a heart attack the previous spring, so he wasn’t the coach any more. Instead, we had a young guy who’d been a big star at Erasmus and C.C.N.Y.—Al Newman. He was a good coach, but no Goldstein, and we were fighting just to get into the city playoffs. Mr. Goldstein had been made head of the Physical Education Department, but everybody knew that that didn’t take much work. He’d sit in his office all day and talk with anyone who came by. He still came to practices and games, and he said he’d be back coaching by the following year, but his wife had told me at camp that the doctor would never allow it.

  “I’m happy where he is now,” she said. “And I’m grateful he has something to do with his days. You know he could stay home and live well—we have enough saved, Howie—and there’s always the teachers’ retirement plan waiting. But he wouldn’t be happy away from Erasmus. It’s part of him.”

  I knew that what she said was true. Even the money part. Aside from the camp job, there was a stock-brokers firm on Flatbush Avenue, about a block away from school, and Mr. Goldstein would spend his lunch hour there with some other teachers. He’d bought a brand-new Dodge after the summer, and he was still the sharpest dresser around.

  A few days after two big stars from N.Y.U. and Columbia confessed to fixing games, Izzie telephoned me. He told me he had big news about the latest basketball scandal and that if I came to his house right away he’d give me the lowdown. He sounded mysterious about it all, and I told him I’d be there in a few minutes.

  We sat in his bedroom and he offered me a cigar. I told him the basketball season was still on, so I wasn’t smoking. He shrugged, leaned back in his swivel chair and inhaled. It was probably a year since I’d last been in his room, I realized. The room seemed smaller than it had a few years before, and it was cluttered—books and magazines stacked everywhere. On the walls he had pasted postcards of famous paintings you get from museums, and over his desk he’d painted a big hammer and sickle in red, white, and blue. There were shelves built into all the walls now, and half hidden by one over his bed, with clothes hanging over the edge across one side of it, I could see the picture of Bob Cousy. The edges were cracked and had been mended with scotch tape.

  “What’s the scoop?” I asked.

  “This isn’t easy to talk about, Howie,” he began. He sipped from a glass. “Care for a drink?”

  I shook my head. He leaned forward then and, even though we were just a few feet apart, he spoke in a whisper. “I have discovered, it seems, the newest of the basketball fixes.” He paused and closed his eyes knowingly. “Your revered Mr. Goldstein—’Uncle Abe,’ I believe you used to call him—is deeply implicated in them, I fear.”

  I stood up. “What—?” He smiled up at me. “Oh, come off it, huh, Izzie,” I said. “He doesn’t coach college—he doesn’t even coach high school any more. And even if he did—”

  “But Mr. Goldstein has quite an interest in the stock market, doesn’t he? And you and I, Howie, we know what teachers’ salaries are like…”

  “Sure, sure—but his wife used to teach too—and he’s head counselor at Wanatoo—”

  “Ah yes, yes,” he said. “All right. So add another thousand dollars. Two thousand dollars for the position of head counselor at Camp Wanatoo. Let’s even add a bit more for the bonus he gets for each camper he signs up. Could all that account for his new car? His trip to Miami every Christmas? His own home on Bedford Avenue?” He knocked some ash from the end of his cigar onto the floor. “And have you ever noticed the coat that Mrs. Goldstein wears at our school’s basketball games? I’ve been told that on chilly evenings during the summer she could be seen wearing her mink to the canteen of Camp Wanatoo. A marvelous image, I might note: mink at a canteen in a Catskill camp. I should use it. It’s difficult to believe, Howie, I know, but our beloved coach—”

  “Look, Izzie,” I said, walking to the door. “You’re really going off the deep end. You better sober up and I’ll talk to you on the way to school one day this week, okay? Or—”

  “I will assuage your fears, Howard,” Izzie said, rising and coming to me, his hand on my arm. “Mr. Goldstein has never conspired to prearrange the scores of high school basketball games—his dealings are far more nefarious.” He returned to his desk and pulled a manila envelope from a d
rawer. He started to hand it to me and just as I reached for it he pulled it back. “I have in this envelope proof of the—what shall we call it?—the finagling Mr. Goldstein has been engaged in. In my wildest imagination I could never have invented anything more absurd—or more tragic for those of us who look to our teachers, to our boyhood heroes, for guidance, for example, for—”

  “Come on,” I said. “What’s in the envelope—?”

  “When the scandals broke last week, I found them rather ludicrous,” he continued, sitting down again. “And it goes without saying that I do not at all condemn any of the players who have fixed games. For that philosophy I am still indebted to our one-time friend, Mack—if you remember him.”

  “I remember.”

  “This time I thought to myself: Izzie, I said, there is something cockeyed in all this fixing business—all this moralizing from teachers and rabbis and newspapers. Rigged quiz shows, point-shaving, payola—what’s the big deal, eh?”

  I sat down on the edge of his bed, leaned back, and listened as he talked on and on. I’d never felt so far away from him. The picture of Cousy was behind me and I wondered if Izzie had seen me glance at it. It was hard to remember any of the conversations we’d had when we’d been in grade school together, and it was harder to realize that the guy who was sitting across from me and talking had been the same guy I’d spent almost my whole life knowing. What I couldn’t understand, I suppose, was how any guy who’d loved sports so much could have turned out this way. All of us—Corky, Louie, Eddie, Marty, Kenny, Stan—we’d all had our different ways, our own strange ideas once in a while. If I’d wanted to think about it, I guess I could have found something weird in everybody’s home, including my own—you could never know everything that went on inside somebody’s house, behind his doors when you weren’t there. Still, if Corky had lived through all the stuff with his brother and his old man, and if Eddie could keep going, not having been able to play ball…

  I shrugged, but Izzie didn’t seem to notice. “I thought to myself,” he was saying. “Izzie, I said, there must be some analogue, some microcosm in our own small Brooklyn-Jewish-Flatbush-Erasmus-world that would point up the inherent absurdity in these scandals. And so I said to myself: what honest good man in Erasmus could be tempted by the Almighty Dollar? Who could be our own Topaze? The answer came at once—Abraham Goldstein. In my mind’s eyes I saw it all: the parallel to the national scandals.” He spread his hand outward in an arc, as if the words he spoke were hanging in front of him. “Famous coach receives bribes from local Sporting Goods Store in return for letting them sell Erasmus boys and girls their gym suits—”

  “What—?” I got up, then sat down again and started to laugh. I shouldn’t take him so seriously, I thought to myself.

  “Yes, it’s funny, isn’t it, Howie? Goldstein grows rich while Levy’s Sporting Goods Store gets sole rights to sell us T-shirts, gym shorts, and jockstraps. Most men who are possessed by visions—Blake and Coleridge come to mind at once—rarely see them manifested in their own lives. But I have, Howie. While Levy’s has been supplying five thousand boy and girls with their gym apparel, Mr. Goldstein has been getting what is known along Flatbush Avenue as a good old-fashioned kickback.”

  He leaned back, somewhat breathless, obviously pleased with himself. “If you’re lying,” I said, “I swear to God I’ll ram my fist straight through your face.”

  “Tomorrow New York City shall know the truth,” Izzie went on. “My campaign will begin.” He took a sheet of paper from his envelope and handed it to me. It was handwritten in capital letters:

  WHILE MR. GOLDSTEIN GROWS RICH WE WEAR

  LEVY’S JOCKSTRAPS.

  HAS ANYONE COMPARED PRICES???

  WHAT IS BEHIND THE LATEST EVENT IN

  THE GROWING SERIES OF ATHLETIC FIXES???

  It was signed, “The Shadow.”

  “You’re out of it,” I said, throwing the paper back at him. “I swear to God you are—”

  “Ah, but like another famous madman, there is reason in my madness, eh? Tomorrow five hundred mimeographed copies of the sheet you have just seen will appear mysteriously in the classrooms and corridors of our school—”

  I didn’t bother arguing with him. I just told him again that I thought he was nuts, and I left. On the staircase going out of his house, I met his sister. She smiled at me the way she always did when I saw her in the halls at Erasmus—not able to keep her eyes straight on me—and I felt uncomfortable this time. Her arms were full of packages from the store and I fumbled a little, offering to take them upstairs for her, but she wouldn’t let me and I was just as glad. She said something about my not coming by their house for a long time and I nodded. She was leaning back against the banister and I was a step below her. I could tell she wanted to talk with me, but I didn’t have anything to say. She asked me about my family, and said she’d seen how well I was doing on the basketball team, and I nodded again. Her hair was long—kind of dark brown—and it wasn’t combed too well. She shuffled her packages into the crook of one of her arms and brushed it back. “How’s Izzie?” she asked.

  I shrugged, “Okay, I guess.”

  She nodded. “It’d be good if you could come by more often, but—” She stopped, then sighed. “Don’t mind me, Howie,” she said. “I don’t know sometimes—you know what I mean?” I felt a little dizzy. There was something in her face, the way she stood—kind of relaxed, yet unsure of herself—that made her seem younger and older at the same time. “Well,” she said when I didn’t answer—a kind of weak smile under her red cheeks. “I guess we can’t hold these packages all day, huh? I’ll get upstairs to Izzie—Momma’s still at the store—”

  I asked her if she worked there too now—at A & S’s—and she said yes, and then I said I’d see her at school sometime and I ducked down the stairs.

  The next day Izzie’s notices were all around the school and lots of guys came to me and asked about them, figuring that only Izzie would pull a stunt like that. I played dumb. When Mrs. Goldstein telephoned me that night and asked about the notices, I told her I couldn’t figure out what they meant.

  Two days later Izzie had mimeographed up a new batch of sheets. On these he’d placed two lists: on the left-hand side were the prices Erasmus students paid for their gym uniforms, and on the right-hand side were the prices Davega charged for the same things. In almost every case, the Davega prices were lower.

  Mr. Goldstein didn’t show up for school the next day, but Izzie’s notices did. This time he’d printed up a list of Mr. Goldstein’s property and expenses—his house, his car, Mrs. Goldstein’s mink coat, the trips to Miami, etc.—with the estimated cost of each. Then he’d listed Mr. Goldstein’s salaries from school and camp. Across the bottom of the sheet he’d printed: “Something is rotten in the borough of Brooklyn.”

  Two days passed and there were no more messages from “The Shadow.” The weekend came and we won an important game against Madison, insuring us of a spot in the playoffs. I hoped Izzie would have stopped his campaign by the time we got back to school Monday, but he hadn’t. This time he’d printed leaflets which seemed to prove that Sears-Roebuck had sent a color television set to Mr. Goldstein’s house and had sent the bill to Levy’s Sporting Goods Store. At the bottom of this sheet was a quotation from Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.” The New York Post carried an item about Izzie’s leaflets in their evening edition that day—I figured Izzie must have mailed them the material—and on Tuesday night Mrs. Goldstein called me again. She pleaded with me to do something.

  I called Izzie right after she hung up, and he was obviously excited by the fact that Mrs. Goldstein had been telephoning me. There was no talking with him, though. When I mentioned Mr. Goldstein’s bad heart, he only carried on more than ever. “Our names are all written in the Book of Life, Howard. I am not moved by your plea for pity…“I hung up on him.

  A day or two later
, our coach told us that Mr. Goldstein was going to send in a letter of resignation to the Board of Education. The guys all looked at me when he said it, as if it were my responsibility to do something, but I just shrugged and ignored them. Izzie hadn’t been seen in school for the previous two days. I went home for supper and took a walk along Flatbush Avenue. A little after nine I found myself knocking at Mr. Goldstein’s door. I don’t know what I would have said to him if he’d been there, but he wasn’t. Some neighbors saw me and told me that he’d been taken to the hospital a few hours before.

  If Izzie had been there right then, I think I might have killed him. I headed straight for his house. By the time I reached it, though, I’d calmed down and decided to call the hospital to see how Mr. Goldstein was.

  “Greetings, greetings, my basketball-hero comrade.” It was Izzie. He was leaning against a lamppost, in the shadows, puffing on a cigar. His beret was tilted to one side, so that it nearly covered his right eye.

  “How long have you been watching me?” I asked.

  “Forever, forever, Howie—since we were boys together, since we came in trailing those wings of glory…or were they clouds?”

  “Mr. Goldstein’s in the hospital.” I said it matter-of-factly.

  Izzie nodded, as if he knew already. “Cowards—cowards die many times before their—”

  “Oh, shut your trap already, huh? Just can it!” I took a step toward him and drew back my fist.

  “Come, come,” he said calmly. “Get it over with. Hit me. Use your physical power. What else do you have, after all?”

  “Forget it,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets. “There’s no use talking with you—”

  “Have you seen our friends down the street?” Izzie asked. I turned and looked. It was dark and I couldn’t make out much. At the end of the block, though, I could see the shapes of a group of guys. “I await them in the light of the lamppost. They called a while ago and told me they were coming to get me…”