by Irwin Shaw
What am I doing in a place like this, Gretchen thought. How did I get here?
“There we are,” the doctor said, stepping back, his head cocked to one side, admiring his work. He put on a pad of gauze and a strip of adhesive tape over the wound. “You’ll be able to fight again in ten days.”
“Thanks, Doc,” Thomas said and opened his eyes. He saw Rudolph and Gretchen. “Good Christ,” he said. He smiled crookedly. “What the hell are you two doing here?”
“I have a message for you,” Rudolph said. “A man called Al phoned me this afternoon and told me he’d put five hundred at seven to five for tonight.”
“Good old Al,” Thomas said. But he looked worriedly over at the curvy young woman with the black hair, as though he had wanted to keep this information from her.
“Congratulations on the fight,” Rudolph said. He took a step forward and put out his hand. Thomas hesitated for a fraction of a second, then smiled again, and put out his swollen, reddened hand.
Gretchen couldn’t get herself to congratulate her brother. “I’m glad you won, Tom,” she said.
“Yeah. Thanks.” He looked at her amusedly. “Let me introduce everybody to everybody,” he said. “My brother, Rudolph; my sister, Gretchen. My wife, Teresa, my manager, Mr. Schultz, my trainer, Paddy, everybody …” He waved his hand vaguely at the men he hadn’t bothered to introduce.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Teresa said. It was the suspicious voice of the telephone that afternoon.
“I didn’t know you had family,” Mr. Schultz said. He, too, seemed suspicious, as though having family was somehow perilous or actionable at law.
“I wasn’t sure myself,” Thomas said. “We have gone our separate ways, like they say. Hey, Schultzy, I must be getting to be one helluva draw at the gate if I even get my brother and sister to buy tickets.”
“After tonight,” Mr. Schultz said, “I can get you the Garden. It was a nice win.” He was a small man with a basketball pouch under a greenish sweater. “Well, you people must have a lot to talk about, catch up with the news, as it were, we’ll leave you alone. I’ll drop in tomorrow sometime, Tommy, see how the eye’s doing.” He put on a jacket, just barely managing to button it over his paunch. The trainer gathered up the gear from the floor and put it into a bag. “Nice going, Tommy,” he said, as he left with the doctor, the manager, and the others.
“Well, here we are,” Thomas said. “A nice family reunion. I guess we ought to celebrate, huh, Teresa?”
“You never told me anything about a brother and sister,” Teresa said aggrievedly, in her high voice.
“They slipped my mind for a few years,” Thomas said. He jumped down off the rubbing table. “Now, if the ladies will retire, I’ll put on some clothes.”
Gretchen went out into the hall with her brother’s wife. The hall was empty now and she was relieved to get away from the stink and heat of the dressing room. Teresa was putting on a shaggy red fox coat with angry little movements of her shoulders and arms. “If the ladies will retire,” she said. “As though I never saw him naked before.” She looked at Gretchen with open hostility, taking in the black-wool dress, the low-heeled shoes, the plain, belted polo coat, considering it, Gretchen could see, an affront to her style of living, her dyed hair, her tight dress, her over-voluptuous legs, her marriage. “I didn’t know Tommy came from such a high-toned family,” she said.
“We’re not so high-toned,” Gretchen said. “Never fear.”
“You never bothered to see him fight before tonight,” Teresa said aggressively, “did you?”
“I didn’t know he was a fighter before today,” said Gretchen. “Do you mind if I sit down? I’m feeling very tired.” There was a chair across the hall and she moved away from the woman and sat down, hoping to put an end to conversation. Teresa ruffled her shoulders irritably under the red fox, then began to walk peckishly up and down, her high stiletto heels making a brittle, impatient sound on the concrete floor of the hallway.
Inside the dressing room Thomas was dressing slowly, turning away modestly when he put on his shorts, occasionally wiping at his face with a towel, because the shower had not completely broken the sweat. From time to time he looked across at Rudolph and smiled and shook his head and said, “Goddamn.”
“How do you feel, Tommy?” Rudolph asked.
“Okay. But I’ll piss blood tomorrow,” Thomas said calmly. “He got in a couple of good licks to the kidney, the sonofabitch. It was a pretty good fight, though, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Rudolph said. He didn’t have the heart to say that in his eyes it had been a routine, ungraceful, second-rate brawl.
“I knew I could take him,” Thomas said. “Even though I was the underdog in the betting. Seven to five. That’s a hot one. I made seven hundred bucks on that bet.” He sounded like a small boy boasting. “Though it’s too bad you had to say anything about it in front of Teresa. Now she knows I have the dough and she’ll be after it like a hound dog.”
“How long have you been married?” Rudolph asked.
“Two years. Legally. I knocked her up and I thought what the hell.” Thomas shrugged. “She’s okay, Teresa, a little dumb, but okay. The kid’s worth it, though. A boy.” He glanced maliciously over at Rudolph. “Maybe I’ll send him to his Uncle Rudy, to teach him how to be a gentleman and not grow up to be a poor stupid pug, like his old man.”
“I’d like to see him some day,” Rudolph said stiffly.
“Any time. Come up to the house.” Thomas put on a black turtle-neck sweater and his voice was muffled for a moment as he stuck his head into the wool. “You married yet?”
“No.”
“Still the smart one of the family,” Thomas said. “How about Gretchen?”
“A long time. She’s got a son aged nine.”
Thomas nodded. “She was bound not to hang around long. God, what a hot-looking dame. She looks better than ever, doesn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Is she still as much of a shit as she used to be?”
“Don’t talk like that, Tom,” Rudolph said. “She was an awfully nice girl and she’s grown into a very good woman.”
“I guess I’ll have to take your word for it, Rudy,” Thomas said cheerfully. He was combing his hair carefully before a cracked mirror on the wall. “I wouldn’t know, being on the outside the way I was.”
“You weren’t on the outside.”
“Who you kidding, brother?” Thomas said flatly. He put the comb in his pocket, took a last critical look at his scarred, puffed face, with the diagonal white slash of adhesive tape above his eye. “I sure am a beauty tonight,” he said. “If I’d known you were coming, I’d’ve shaved.” He turned and put a bright-tweed jacket over the turtle-neck sweater. “You look as though you’re doing all right, Rudy,” he said. “You look like a goddamn vice-president of a bank.”
“I’m not complaining,” Rudolph said, not pleased with the vice-president.
“You know,” Thomas said, “I went up to Port Philip a few years ago. For Auld Lang Syne. I heard Pop is dead.”
“He killed himself,” Rudolph said.
“Yeah, that’s what the fruit-lady said.” Thomas patted his breast pocket to make sure his wallet was in place. “The old house was gone. No light in the cellar window for the prodigal son,” he said mockingly. “Only a supermarket. I still remember they had a special that day. Lamb shoulders. Mom alive?”
“Yes. She lives with me.”
“Lucky you.” Thomas grinned. “Still in Port Philip?”
“Whitby.”
“You don’t travel much, do you?”
“There’s plenty of time.” Rudolph had the uncomfortable feeling that his brother was using the conversation to tease him, undermine him, make him feel guilty. He was accustomed to controlling conversations himself by now and it took an effort not to let his irritation show. As he had watched his brother dress, watched him move that magnificent and fearsome body slowly and bruisedly,
he had felt a huge sense of pity, love, a confused desire some-how to save that lumbering, brave, vengeful almost-boy from other evenings like the one he had just been through; from the impossible wife, from the bawling crowd, from the cheerful, stitching doctors, from the casual men who attended him and lived off him. He didn’t want that feeling to be eroded by Thomas’s mockery, by that hangover of ancient jealousy and hostility which by now should have long since subsided.
“Myself,” Thomas was saying, “I been in quite a few places. Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Hollywood, Tia Juana. Name it and I’ve been there. I’m a man broadened by travel.”
The door burst open and Teresa charged in, scowling under her pancake makeup. “You fellows going to talk in here all night?” she demanded.
“Okay, okay, honey,” Thomas said. “We were just coming out. Do you want to come and have something to eat with us, you and Gretchen?” he asked Rudolph.
“We’re going to eat Chinese,” Teresa said. “I’m dying to eat Chinese.”
“I’m afraid not tonight, Tom,” Rudolph said. “Gretchen has to get home. She has to relieve the baby sitter.” He caught the quick flicker of Thomas’s eyes from him to his wife and then back again and he was sure Thomas was thinking, he doesn’t want to be seen in public with my wife.
But Thomas shrugged and said amiably, “Well, some other time. Now we know we’re all alive.” He stopped abruptly in the doorway, as though he had suddenly thought of something. “Say,” he said, “you going to be in town tomorrow around five?”
“Tommy,” his wife said loudly, “are we going to eat or ain’t we going to eat?”
“Shut up,” Thomas said to her. “Rudy?”
“Yes.” He had to spend the whole day in town, with architects and lawyers.
“Where can I see you?” Thomas asked.
“I’ll be at my hotel. The Hotel Warwick on …”
“I know where it is,” Thomas said. “I’ll be there.”
Gretchen joined them in the hallway. Her face was strained and pale, and for a moment Rudolph was sorry he had brought her along. But only for a moment. She’s a big girl now, he thought, she can’t duck everything. It’s enough that she has so gracefully managed to duck her mother for ten years.
As they passed the door to another dressing room, Thomas stopped again. “I just have to look in here for a minute,” he said, “say hello to Virgil. Come on in with me, Rudy, tell him you’re my brother, tell him what a good fight he put up, it’ll make him feel better.”
“We’ll never get out of this goddamn place tonight,” Teresa said.
Thomas ignored her and pushed open the door and motioned for Rudolph to go first. The Negro fighter was still undressed. He was sitting, droop-shouldered, on the rubbing table, his hands hanging listlessly between his legs. A pretty young colored girl, probably his wife or sister, was sitting quietly on a camp chair at the foot of the table and a white handler was gently applying an icebag to a huge swelling on the fighter’s forehead. Under the swelling the eye was shut tight. In a corner of the room an older, light-colored Negro with gray hair, who might have been the fighter’s father, was carefully packing away a silk robe and trunks and shoes. The fighter looked up slowly with his one good eye as Thomas and Rudolph came into the room.
Thomas put his arm gently around his opponent’s shoulders. “How you feeling, Virgil?” he asked.
“I felt better,” the fighter said. Now Rudolph could see that he couldn’t have been more than twenty years old.
“Meet my brother, Rudy, Virgil,” Thomas said. “He wants to tell you what a good fight you put up.”
Rudolph shook hands with the fighter, who said, “Glad to meet you, sir.”
“It was an awfully good fight,” Rudolph said, although what he would have liked to say was, Poor young man, please never put on another pair of gloves again.
“Yeah,” the fighter said. “He awful strong, your brother.”
“I was lucky,” Thomas said. “Real lucky. I got five stitches over my eye.”
“It wasn’t a butt, Tommy,” Virgil said. “I swear it wasn’t a butt.”
“Of course not, Virgil,” Thomas said. “Nobody said it was. Well, I just wanted to say hello, make sure you’re all right.” He hugged the boy’s shoulders again.
“Thanks for comin’ by,” Virgil said. “It’s nice of you.”
“Good luck, kid,” Thomas said. Then he and Rudolph shook hands gravely with all the other people in the room and left.
“It’s about time,” Teresa said as they appeared in the hall.
I give the marriage six months, Rudolph thought as they went toward the exit.
“They rushed that boy,” Thomas said to Rudolph as they walked side by side. “He had a string of easy wins and they gave him a main bout. I watched him a couple of times and I knew I could take him downstairs. Lousy managers. You notice, the bastard wasn’t even there. He didn’t even wait to see if Virgil ought to go home or to the hospital. It’s a shitty profession.” He glanced back to see if Gretchen objected to the word, but Gretchen seemed to be moving in a private trance of her own, unseeing and unhearing.
Outside, they hailed a taxi and Gretchen insisted upon sitting up front with the driver. Teresa sat in the middle on the back seat, between Thomas and Rudolph. She was overpoweringly perfumed, but when Rudolph put the window down she said, “For God’s sake, the wind is ruining my hair,” and he said, “I’m sorry,” and wound the window up again.
They drove back to Manhattan in silence, with Teresa holding Thomas’s hand and occasionally bringing it up to her lips and kissing it, marking out her possessions.
When they came off the bridge, Rudolph said, “We’ll get out here, Tom.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to come with us?” Thomas said.
“It’s the best Chinese food in town,” Teresa said. The ride had been neutral, she no longer felt in danger of being attacked, she could afford to be hospitable, perhaps in the future there was an advantage there for her. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
“I have to get home,” Gretchen said. Her voice was quivering, on the point of hysteria. “I just must get home.”
If it hadn’t been for Gretchen, Rudolph would have stayed with Thomas. After the noise of the evening, the public triumph, the battering, it seemed sad and lonely to leave Thomas merely to go off to supper with his twittering wife, anonymous in the night, unsaluted, uncheered. He would have to make it up to Thomas another time.
The driver stopped the car and Gretchen and Rudolph got out. “Good-bye for now, in-laws,” Teresa said, and laughed.
“Five o’clock tomorrow, Rudy,” Thomas said and Rudolph nodded.
“Good night,” Gretchen whispered. “Take care of yourself, please.”
The taxi moved off and Gretchen gripped Rudolph’s arm, as though to steady herself. Rudolph stopped a cruising cab and gave the driver Gretchen’s address. Once in the darkness of the cab, Gretchen broke down. She threw herself into Rudolph’s arms and wept uncontrollably, her body racked by great sobs. The tears came to Rudolph’s eyes, too, and he held his sister tightly, stroking her hair. In the back of the dark cab, with the lights of the city streaking past the windows, erratically illuminating, in bursts of colored neon, the contorted, lovely, tear-stained face, he felt closer to Gretchen, bound in stricter love, than ever before.
The tears finally stopped. Gretchen sat up, dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m such a hateful snob. That poor boy, that poor, poor boy …”
The baby sitter was asleep on the couch in the living room when they came into the apartment. Willie hadn’t come home yet. There had been no calls, the baby sitter said. Billy had read himself to sleep quietly and she had gone up and turned off his light without awakening him. She was a girl of about seventeen, a high-school student, bobby-soxed, pretty, in a snub-nosed, shy way, and embarrassed at being caught asleep. Gretchen p
oured two Scotches and soda. The baby sitter had straightened out the room and the newspapers, which had been strewn around, were now in a neat pile on the window sill and the cushions were plumped out.
There was only one lamp lit and they sat in shadow, Gretchen with her feet curled up under her on the couch, Rudolph in a large easy chair. They drank slowly, exhausted, blessing the silence. They finished their drinks and silently Rudolph rose from his chair and refilled the glasses, sat down again.
An ambulance siren wailed in the distance, somebody else’s accident.
“He enjoyed it,” Gretchen said finally. “When that boy was practically helpless and he hit him so many times. I always thought—when I thought anything about it—that it was just a man earning a living—in a peculiar way—but just that. It wasn’t like that at all tonight, was it?”
“It’s a curious profession,” Rudolph said. “It’s hard to know what really must be going on in a man’s head up there.”
“Weren’t you ashamed?”
“Put it this way,” Rudolph said. “I wasn’t happy. There must be at least ten thousand boxers in the United States. They have to come from somebody’s family.”
“I don’t think like you,” Gretchen said coldly.
“No, you don’t.”
“Those sleazy purple trunks,” she said, as though by finding an object on which she could fix her revulsion, she could exorcise the complex horror of the entire night. She shook her head against memory. “Somehow I feel it’s our fault, yours, mine, our parents’, that Tom was up there in that vile place.”
Rudolph sipped at his drink in silence. I wouldn’t know, Tom had said in the dressing room, being on the outside the way I was. Excluded, he had reacted as a boy in the most simple, brutal way, with his fists. Older, he had merely continued. They all had their father’s blood in them, and Axel Jordache had killed two men. As far as Rudolph knew, Tom at least hadn’t killed anybody. Perhaps the strain was ameliorating.