Corky's Brother

by Jay Neugeboren

  When he’d finished, everybody started walking up to the casket for the final look at Mel. Some of them did it quickly and some of them stayed a minute or so, and not too many of them could look over at Corky and his family. When the rows in front of us had all emptied out and it was our turn, we all kind of stumbled forward on each other’s heels—I was right behind Izzie—and it was then that I cried. It wasn’t because it was the last time I was going to see MeL or because I suddenly realized that Mel simply wasn’t going to be in the world any more. What happened was that as the guys all stood around the coffin looking in, most of them with their eyes popping out of their sockets, I suddenly looked at all of them—Louie and Izzie and Kenny and Eddie and Marty, and then quickly back at Corky—and I realized that some day I would be standing in front of a box looking in at one of them, at one of the guys I’d spent a lifetime knowing—and that some day some of them, the ones who were left, would be looking in at me, feeling the same ache. That was what made the tears start. They didn’t last long, and I wiped my eyes quickly and followed the other guys out of the room.

  One of the men from the funeral parlor asked us to be seated while the family had “the final viewing,” and a few minutes later they came filing through. Corky’s mother was in bad shape, and he and his father were holding her up. I looked at the other guys and none of us knew what to do. Some of the neighbors had come over to us and asked us questions about ourselves and our families—a few of the guys went and stood with their mothers—but even though I think we all felt grown up to be participating in such an event, when Corky had helped his mother sit down and came toward us, most of us were terrified.

  “You guys coming to the cemetery?” he asked. “There’s lots of room in some of the cars—just go outside. All my relatives got cars.”

  We nodded and hurried outside, telling people we were Corky’s friends and asking if they had room for us. I got into a car with a man who worked at the bakery with Corky’s father, and Izzie and Louie came in with me. The man was as stone-faced as Corky’s father, and all the way to the cemetery—it was on Long Island—there was total silence.

  It was raining slightly when we got there and we had to huddle inside a tent they’d set up. It was over pretty quickly after that, and while they were saying the final prayers I remembered a funeral I’d been to once of an uncle of mine and of how quiet this one was compared to it. At the other funeral, I remember, my aunt had carried on like a maniac, trying to follow my uncle into the grave—and I remembered also how all the men had gone up, one at a time, and shoveled dirt on top of the box after it had been lowered. They didn’t do this for Mel.

  As soon as they’d gotten him into the ground, Corky slipped away from his family and came over to me. “Come on,” he said. “We got room in the car for you. Sarah Jean too.”

  All the way into Brooklyn I sat in the back of the car between Corky and Sarah Jean. In front of us Corky’s parents and Rhoda stayed pretty quiet—they all looked exhausted, even Corky’s father. Corky talked the whole way in, mostly about a guy who had come to the funeral—a fat Irish-looking old man I’d seen him talking with—who Corky said had come to represent the Brooklyn Dodger organization. Corky said that the guy had promised to send him Mel’s old uniform, and a lot of glossy pictures that had been taken in spring training. And he’d said that any time Corky wanted to get into a game he should ask for him.

  At Corky’s house, everybody went inside and had coffee and then all the relatives went right back out and piled into their cars for the trip home. It happened so fast I didn’t have a chance to be alone with Sarah Jean. I walked with her to the car, though, and scribbled her address down on the back of a card from my wallet.

  “Anyway,” Corky said, “at least you two got together.”

  Sarah Jean kissed Corky goodbye. “I had a real good time last night,” she said to him. She turned to me. “Corky and I spent the whole night working on his new peep show,” she said. “It’s gonna be real good, Corky. Real good.”

  I didn’t know if I should kiss her goodbye or not, but when I noticed the look her mother was giving me from inside the car, I took a step backwards. Sarah Jean smiled and stepped forward, touching me on the back of the neck with one hand and kissing me half on my mouth and half on the side of my face. I kept my eyes open. “When I’m sixteen,” she whispered.

  Then we were standing there waving goodbye as the line of cars started to move toward Rogers Avenue. “You better get on home,” Corky said to me. “Maybe I’ll see you tonight at the schoolyard. It depends on how Rhoda feels.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “I’ll tell you the truth, Howie, if not for her I wouldn’t stay myself. But I think she could use me now, you know what I mean? She got no real home to go to, and no parents or anything.” He patted me on the back. “You’re okay, Howie.”

  Then he went over to Rhoda and walked inside his building with her, and I turned and walked home by myself.

  After that day Corky spent almost all his free time with Rhoda. During the second week after school had started, she went back to work at Ellman’s and every day when school was out he would stop by to see her. We didn’t have any classes together at Erasmus, but we’d walk to school together and at night if I didn’t have too much homework I’d usually find him with the other guys at the corner of Linden Boulevard and Rogers Avenue. Sometimes we’d go over to the schoolyard together and he’d mess around with the girls, but he never seemed to do it with the same spirit any more.

  The other thing that changed about him was the way he started studying for school. None of the guys could figure it out. Sometimes he’d even call me up at home just to find out how to do an algebra problem, or to read a composition to me, and sometimes he’d invite me over and I’d eat supper with him and his family and Rhoda—she ate there almost every night—and we’d do our homework together. Rhoda was very proud of the way he was applying himself and this made Corky happy.

  For a month or so after Sarah Jean went back we wrote each other almost every day, and I’d show the letters to Corky. I’d tell her about what I was doing in school and about our baseball team and about Corky and Rhoda and about how we were still planning to hitch down to see her, and she would tell me about how much she hated the farm and about her mother and about books she was reading and she’d make up stories that she’d include about a family of mules. Sometimes, when I was most lonesome, I’d remember the things we’d done the weekend we’d been together and I’d try to tell her all the things I was feeling.

  It didn’t last, of course. There weren’t any fights or anything like that—it was just that after a while we seemed to run out of things to say to each other. By Thanksgiving our letters were only going back and forth about once a week, and even though the guys in our neighborhood were still speaking of her as my girlfriend, by Christmas time we’d stopped writing almost completely. The last letter I remember getting from her was one that came right after Christmas with a tin box full of cookies. Corky got one too. He’d sent her a peep show he’d made—it was a model farm with a barn and silo—and when she wrote back to him and thanked him for it, she said to send me her regards. That was all.

  Not too long after that—just before our first term in high school ended—the big news came: Corky’s father announced that they were going to move back to the farm in Pennsylvania. Corky said he should have suspected it, with all the mail that had been flying back and forth since Mel’s death about bygones being bygones and family being family—and he didn’t seem to like the idea too much. He kept saying that he wouldn’t have as much chance to develop as a ballplayer on the farm—that he wouldn’t get the coaching and the competition he could get at Erasmus. All of us reminded him of guys like Walter Johnson and Bob Feller, but it didn’t matter. What seemed to bother him most, though, was leaving Rhoda alone in the city.

  From the time Mel died until Corky’s father made the decision about moving, Rhoda had practically lived with Corky’s family. She ate with t
hem, she went to church with them, and she slept over their house five or six nights a week. I remember when I’d tell my parents I’d been studying with Corky and that Rhoda had been helping Corky’s mother around the house, that they’d sigh and shake their heads, though I didn’t see anything wrong with what was happening.

  At any rate, the day after Corky broke the news to us, Rhoda stopped sleeping over his house. Corky spoke against his parents a lot, about how it wasn’t easy for Rhoda to live by herself every night and how they should have taken her into consideration, and he even started doing what he’d done when Mel had been on the Fort Worth team—eating his meals at her house and spending his evenings with her.

  One Friday night, though, after Corky, Eddie, and I had gone to an Erasmus basketball game together and were walking along Flatbush Avenue talking about the players and speculating on which of them would make good college ballplayers, Corky suddenly stopped and went white. Eddie and I looked where Corky was looking and saw what it was. Coming out of the Loew’s Kings Theater, Rhoda had her arm in the arm of some guy and she was laughing. I don’t remember what the guy looked like, but except for the day Corky and I raced over to Ellman’s to show her Corky’s first-term report card—he’d gotten an 83 average, which was something nobody could believe—it was the first time since before the funeral that I’d seen her looking like her old self. She didn’t see us.

  “Boy,” Corky said. “He ain’t even dead a year yet.”

  Eddie and I tried to cheer Corky up after that, but no matter what we said, he got more and more depressed—then angry. You couldn’t reason with him.

  When Corky first got down to the farm that spring—his family left during Easter vacation—we kept in pretty close touch, and during the next few years we’d write one another now and then. By that time he was doing pretty well pitching in American Legion ball, and I was playing varsity on the Erasmus basketball team—we’d always save our newspaper clippings and exchange them. The summer of my third year in high school he came up to New York for a weekend and we went to a Yankee ball game and spent most of our time with the guys down at the schoolyard playing three-man basketball and stickball. Corky’s control was still a little bit off, but being on the farm had made him husky and his fast ball was as good as any guy’s on the Erasmus team. He slept over my house for the two nights he was in town and he told me a lot about the things he and Sarah Jean did together.

  I suppose I should have suspected something then, but I didn’t, so that on that crazy cold night the following December when he suddenly showed up after a basketball game against Madison I was so stunned I didn’t know what to say. He caught me right outside Erasmus, under the arch on the Bedford Avenue side, and when I saw him carrying a suitcase I got scared. But then this pair of hands was around my eyes from the back, saying “Guess who?” and when she’d laughed and given me a hug and a kiss and the two of them started explaining what was going on, I think I was almost as happy as they were. I didn’t feel uncomfortable at all.

  I called my folks from Grand Central station and told them I was staying over a friend’s house, and then we were on the train heading for Maryland and they were explaining to me how Elkton was the closest place where they weren’t under age and where they didn’t have to have consent. They kept laughing at me because of the way I would shake my head in disbelief, and Sarah Jean kept saying to me didn’t I remember what she’d said about when she was sixteen, and about how her mother and Corky’s father would have heart attacks when they found out.

  “If they find out—” Corky said, and he started telling me how they were going to get a place somewhere in New York and how Sarah Jean would work while Corky finished high school and then he’d either go to college on a baseball scholarship or play in the Minors. Sarah Jean laughed a lot, and she seemed very beautiful and happy. “You think my mother’ll think this is worse than biting a preacher’s hand?” she asked Corky once, and her eyes were shining when she said it. “I guess we’re just gonna roast in hell, huh, Howie?” she said to me, cuddling up to Corky and beginning to hum. We kidded around like that until the train got to the town early in the morning and then we ate breakfast together in a diner and reminisced about the other time we’d stayed up all night.

  That night I telephoned my parents and told them the truth—it didn’t matter by then—and by the time I got back to New York the next day—we all kissed goodbye at Grand Central and said we’d be seeing each other—I was half dead. When I arrived home it all seemed like a dream and my parents thought the whole thing was silly and immature—if I’d had the strength I would have argued with them, but it didn’t seem to matter. I felt tired and happy.

  When I got back to school on Monday and told the story to the guys, I felt even better. The part they liked best was about where the clerk had read their application and had made a sour face and said “I see you’re cousins,”—and how Corky had put him in his place by saying “So were Franklin and Eleanor—ain’t you got patriotism?” I’ll never forget the way he winked at Sarah Jean and me then, and the other thing I remember most was the story he and Sarah Jean told me on the train back to New York, about how, the year before, Rhoda had driven down to the farm with her new husband and the lousy way Corky’s father and mother had treated her. Sarah Jean was very proud of the way Corky had told everybody off afterwards—and of what he’d said to Rhoda to make her feel better. The whole thing seemed weird to me, though, especially when Corky was leaning forward across from me in the train, describing all of them sitting around this farmhouse living room together, not saying anything.