by Kluge, P. F.
I was distracted, all the introducing and teasing, trying to remember names. I shook hands with the men and nodded to a tableful of German nannies, a kind of ladies auxiliary to Heinz’ stammtisch. The woman I married was there that day, it turned out. She saw me then, the first time. She saw me and noticed me. I knew nothing. I noticed nothing, except this. I thought she … that’s Maria … was with him, with my brother. It was just a little flicker, a glimpse of something that came and went, that’s all. But it was there. He was so popular. Everybody liked him, even the ones who regretted it. Maybe she’d heard about me, on the nannies’ network. The latest of Hofer greenhorns is arriving, another one sleeping in the basement. He’s not so tall, not so dark, not so handsome. Smaller than Heinz. A soccer player, not a boxer. Also—not like Heinz—he’s shy. He blushes when they talk about women. He looks like a worker, not like that Heinz. He’s not a gypsy, not a gambler. Anyway, Mom knew about me before I knew about her. But that afternoon, she was in the future. That’s how college material would put it. Just as now, in 1984, she’s in my past. He’d say that too, I guess. A lot, he knows.
“Post aus Deutschland!” Heinz was waving an envelope, standing in the middle of the room, between the two green horn tables.
“So,” someone asked in German. “Is it a boy or a girl?” I heard snickers but, by the time I turned, I couldn’t tell who had made the joke.
“Nothing like that,” Heinz said, embarrassed I was there to hear this.
“Is it money from home, Heinz?”
“The money goes one way,” he answered. “From here to there.” That was true, I learned. We never lost sight of the people on the other side. The time we spent in America, even if it stretched into years, was nothing against the time we’d spent in Germany. We’d left a lot behind there. If we had to choose, we knew what the choice would be. Or thought we did. And then, when the question finally arose, the contest was over and America had won.
“My friend is coming to America,” Heinz said. “My special friend. Leaving next week from Bremerhaven.”
“Schmeling?”
“Der Max.”
“This time he wins standing up?”
“This time,” Heinz said, glaring, “he makes it official.”
Max Schmeling had won the title from Jack Sharkey the year before. But it wasn’t much of a victory. Sharkey had fouled Schmeling, hit him below the belt. Max had gone to the canvas. The foul was real, Heinz insisted—he’d been there—but some newspapers said Schmeling was acting. Anyway, he was the first boxer to win the title on the floor of the ring, clutching his groin and looking up at the referee. So this second fight had a lot riding on it. It would shut up the people who said that Max was the best German actor since Emil Jannings.
“You’ll be at the fight?” I asked Heinz.
“Yes,” Heinz said. “And before that. At training.” Already he was in his glory. “We’ll all go. I’ll set it up.” Then he included me. “You come too.”
Well, Max Schmeling’s upcoming fight against Jack Sharkey took over my life. Remember, I was new in America and America was new to me, in the time of oranges. I was open to whatever came my way, those long walks up and down Manhattan, sticking my nose into all kinds of neighborhoods, taking the ferry to Staten Island and over to Jersey City. And then there were the blacks. I’d seen maybe six in all my life, all sailors, always from a distance. In New York, they were all around. I still would have been shy about meeting them except that there were two who worked for Otto Hofer. Cleveland and Billy.
The first time I saw them they were standing outside my room, down in the basement, one man coal-black and big, the other brown and thin. If Otto hadn’t been standing behind them, I’d have jumped and run.
“What’s this?” the big man—who was Billy—asked. He wore blue overalls and his hair was turning white. I stared at his skin, black as could be but polished, it seemed, almost shining. “Another kin of yours, Mr. Otto?”
“He’s the brother from Heinz,” Otto said. He wore dark pants with suspenders, a white shirt. In his hand, he held a morning cigar, short and stubby. “You’re remembering Heinz?”
The two men traded a glance, Billy and the thin one, Cleveland. “We remember him alright,” Billy said. “There’s people all up and down this street remembering Heinz.”
“Well,” Otto said with a nod. “Maybe this one is different. He looks like a worker. We’ll see.” Then he turned to me. “You do what they say.”
It wasn’t much of a trade for a trained metal worker and I wasn’t at it for long but I learned about New York buildings from Cleve and Billy, from tarring the roof to feeding the furnace to washing windows, waxing floors, vacuuming carpets, polishing woodwork, hauling garbage. They’d broken in a bunch of greenhorns already, so they mixed jokes with lessons, which meant letting me do things my own way, then showing me how to do it, just as well, in half the time.
A lot of people in Otto’s building were German Jews. Harlem wasn’t always a black neighborhood. The blocks just north of the park stayed white into the 1930’s. Look at the names on New York hospitals and music halls, department stores and newspapers and those were the names whose garbage came down the dumbwaiter: Lewisohn, Frankfurter, Bamberger, Bloomingdale, Klingenstein, Ochs, Damrosch. These people knew I was German the minute they saw me and I was the one they’d talk to first, in German. I noticed that. When they wanted something done, they’d talk to me. They weren’t all like that. Some made a point of knowing Cleve and Billy. These were good people, good for a slice of cake when we worked in their apartment and some apples and peaches, when they came in from their country places: Teitelbaum 10-G, Elmann 7-A, Rudofsky 5-B. But it bothered me a lot, when people who spoke to me ignored them. I tried to tell them as much. Sometimes, in good weather, we took lunch together at a bench by the lake in Central Park. The way we talked! Cleve and Billy had been working around Germans so long that German expressions showed up in what they spoke. So when they came into the basement at dawn to wake me up, it was “zeit for aufgettin.” At the end of the day it was, “Hans, wir heading knock house.” We got along fine. But I wanted them to know what was bothering me.
“Hans, what you complaining for?” Cleve asked. “You’re doin’ alright, nick war?”
“But you are my seniors!”
“Maybe so … but your seniors aren’t complaining either.”
“Was dis?” Billy said, digging around the basket Hilde Hofer had given us. “We got three kinds of sandwiches.” He lifted the bread to see what was in between. “Knock worse, liver worse, blood worse.” He offered me first choice. I waved him off, I was giving them the respect they deserved. Cleve and Billy made their choices. I got the knockwurst.
“This liver worse,” Cleve said. “Not the stuff you see in the stores. Hey, Hans, what you call this kind?”
Coarse liverwurst, it was, with diced skin, pimentos, onions, flecks of fat. “Grobe,” I said. And that was all I said. My thoughtfulness was wasted on people who did so little on their own behalf.
“Listen here,” Cleve said. “What you say is you wish folks would respect Billy and me more because we been working for years around here.” He gestured across the lake. Seen from inside the park, beyond a line of sycamore trees, it looked like something from Hamburg. “Well,” Cleve continued. “How come you don’t respect us?”
“I don’t?”
“Me and Billy been around a long time. You just came. You’re telling us you don’t like the way they treat us. We’re asking—we’re telling—you to leave it alone. And you ain’t listening.”
“We’re staying,” Billy said. “Not you. You move on out. And up. We ain’t going no place. Your uncle don’t mess us around. Your tante’s nice people. As for the other, it don’t matter. You complain, it’ll come back on us. Just leave it alone, Hans. You just got here. Takes time to figure a country out.”
“Gones be stimmed,” Cleve added. Ganz bestimmt. Damn straight.
Smelling,
they both pronounced it, the way Joe Louis said it a few years later. You wondered whether he meant an insult. Louis seemed to like saying it that way. But black people do have a problem with S-C-H. I leave it at that. Cleve and Billy knew of Heinz and his connection with Schmeling. Smelling. They saw me reading the papers, the sports pages, as if it were homework for an examination I was going to take. I lived and breathed that fight. I talked like an expert, the fine points of Max’s style, compared with Sharkey’s. They knew I didn’t know a thing. And one day they decided to do me a favor.
They didn’t speak to me directly. Instead they talked to each other, while I sat alongside. They talked about black boxers who’d spent whole careers and never had a chance at the title—Sam Langford and Harry Wills—or were made to wait until they were over the hill. About what it was like to spend your whole career on the road, in front of crowds who wanted you beaten and officials who went out of their way to assure a loss and if you happened to win—usually it took a knockout— you fled like a thief. They guessed that being white was worth three rounds, any day.
“Smelling is white,” Billy said. “You’ve got to give him that.”
“White for sure,” Cleve granted. “But he’s not an American. Makes him … off-white.”
“I wouldn’t bet my money on Smelling. Not if it was money I needed.”
“Any money you don’t need?”
“Not if it was money I worked for.”
“Don’t you work for all your money?”
“You know anybody got money they don’t work for?”
“Used to,” Cleve said. “But I ain’t seen that fellow lately. He don’t come around. I been looking for him. But I don’t reckon he’s looking for me.”
That was Heinz they were talking about, I was sure.
Back in the 1930’s, you didn’t have suburbs like you do today, all the way from Boston to Washington. Half an hour out of New York, in any direction, you were in the sticks. That’s where fighters had their training camps, up in Greenwood Lake, in the mountains, the Poconos, the Catskills. A few years later, Joe Louis went to Lakewood to get ready for Schmeling. To prepare for Sharkey, Max went to Summit, New Jersey, to a place called Madame Bey’s. That first time, I took the train out from the city, hitched a ride, hiked up a driveway into a collection of sheds, barn, boxing ring and heavy bags, bunk houses and kitchens and cabins, a kind of mess hall where they served ham and eggs in the morning, which is why bum fighters are called ham-and-eggers. I walked right in on a sparring session my brother was watching, so intent he hardly said hello. I got more of a greeting from Max, who nodded my way, even as he hooked a right at the belly of a much smaller man. The punch missed.
“He looks big,” I said to Heinz.
“The other man is a light-heavyweight,” Heinz answered, all his attention on the ring. “Paulie Costello. We want someone fast. Hard to hit.”
Well, I watched Max work three rounds and I’ve got to say he proved my brother’s point. Paulie Costello was very hard— for Max—to hit. He connected three or four times a round, not more, not enough to slow Costello down. Meanwhile, Costello threw jabs by the dozen, meaningless little punches, but he looked good, flurrying, dancing out of danger, posing. If Costello gave him this kind of problem, what would Sharkey do? I felt my wallet settling deeper in my pocket.
After it was over, people at ringside applauded politely, but they weren’t impressed. Even I could tell. And Max stayed in the ring a moment, chatting with Costello. It was hard to believe, but it seemed he was coaching Costello, trying to show him something that would make him even harder to hit and when his English failed him, he waved my brother through the ropes so he could continue the lesson.
“You believe that?” someone asked. I turned around and it was a newspaperman, talking to another gentleman. Maybe another newspaperman, or a gambler, or a spy from Sharkey’s camp. Training camps were open in those days and just far enough out of New York to make pleasant drives for sporting types, politicians, bootleggers, gamblers and their women.
“Believe?” said the second man. “Believe in what?”
“Taking the sparring partner to school. It looked the other way around, to me.”
“Next time, little Paulie only gets hit two times, not four.”
They walked off, deep in conference, adjusting the odds, and headed down the hill to where the cars were parked across the street, in an apple orchard no one looked after, though the trees were blossoming. The smoke from their cigars mixed with the smell of grass and flowers. I saw women with lipstick and perfume and good legs and no wedding rings, shoes that were meant for nightclubs and sidewalks, so they took their time going down the hill. When Heinz got back to me—Max had gone for a rubdown—I asked who those people were. Heinz shrugged, he couldn’t keep track.
“Mayor Hague was here last week,” he said. “And Gene Fowler. And Bugs Baer, the columnist.”
“Mayor of …”
“Jersey City. That’s nothing. Last week comes Gentleman Jimmy Walker.”
“Who is he?”
“New York City. Former mayor.” He gave me a look that said I was a little thick. “You meet a lot of people here. You make connections. They know me. Walker, he said I should run for Mayor of Yorkville. Of course he was only joking …”
His voice trailed off into a silence I didn’t interrupt. I heard a last car pulling out of the orchard, onto the road that led out of the valley where the training camp was located, already falling into darkness, while the sun just caught the top of the trees, beech and oak and maple. This was the first I’d seen of the country outside New York. It was different from Germany, where every inch of ground, field, forest was spoken for. America was untended. Uncared for. The woods were full of fallen trees and branches that no one collected, all that firewood going to waste. I liked it in New Jersey. But not Heinz. He reminded me of how someone sits next to a car that’s broken down, waiting for the mechanic to come.
“You stay here tonight,” he said. “It’s taken care of.” He said it in a grand way as if it were his treat, he was paying. I nodded my thanks. I could smell dinner, steaks grilling, and onions. A radio was playing and some of the hanger-ons were sitting out, end of the day for them, too. I liked being there, now that it had quieted down. The visitors were gone, Heinz had to go back to New York. No getting out of work behind the bar, when he was off, the place went flat. But now, in New Jersey, crickets were starting up. And I felt at home.
“I saw the sparring,” I said.
“Well? So?”
“He didn’t look so good.”
“Don’t worry,” Heinz said. “Max will find him. Max wins this fight. It’s money in the bank.” He laughed. This was at a time when banks were failing. “It’s better than money in the bank.” I felt him looking at me, appraising, deciding not to do something: to place money on the fight. Then he walked towards the car that was taking him back to Yorkville, riding with new friends.
Five minutes later, Max Schmeling emerged from a cabin. He stood and considered the evening coming on. Then he did something I never forgot. He walked by, giving me a little wave, but you sensed he wanted to be alone. He walked to the edge of the yard, where the land sloped steeply down to River Road. A tree was there with a swing hanging down, a child’s swing that he tested carefully, respecting property, and found it was sturdy enough to carry a heavyweight. He sat still, studying the ground. The greatest athlete Germany had produced, a few weeks away from a packed arena, he regarded that bare patch that children make, dragging their feet across the ground as they swing back and forth. Then he tilted back in the swing and looked up at a sky turned pink and purple, the sun long gone, he himself not much more than a silhouette. He started moving, pushing off with his feet. Then he put his weight into it, pushing forward, pulling back, and the swing was creaking, creaking, creaking like an animal in the woods. To this day, that’s how I picture him, swinging back and forth in the dark. That is how I picture all of us, up and
down, high and low, daylight turning dark. Anyway, I never forgot that moment.
“Who the hell are you?” someone asked. I turned around and saw an older man in a suit. He’d come up behind me, he’d watched me watching Max. The way he shouted scared me. This man was like the police.
“Well … who the hell are you?” he repeated. I saw a tall, thin man with slicked back hair, prominent nose, sharp eyes, a Jewish face, I guessed. He smelled of barbershop and gymnasium, of beer, liniment and tobacco. He piled smell on smell the same way, I soon learned, he piled one language onto another, English and American, Yiddish and German.
“Ich bin … I am … der brother … von Heinz,” I managed.
Now he let go and stepped back. “Well, tell me, der Bruder von Heinz. Anybody come for sparring this afternoon?”
“Yes. Quite many.”
“And your bozo brother, did he remember to charge them admission?”
“Charge?”
“Take money. Gelt nehmen.”
“No sir. I did not see that.”
“What I thought. Anybody drops by to see the champ work out, it’s fine with Heinz. It’s on the house. What’s your name, der brother von Heinz?”
“Hans Greifinger,” I said. After a minute, I stuck out my hand, which he took and shook.
“Joe Jacobs,” he said. I recognized the name. Schmeling’s manager. He pointed at some round metal cans he’d put on the grass when he arrested me. “Grab that stuff, will you Hansel.” I obeyed and followed him towards the cabin they used as a dining room. They were singing German songs in there. It felt like they were camping out in a strange land, singing to keep from feeling lonely.
“Alright, time for movies,” Jacobs announced.
Ten minutes later, two figures circled around a ring, as if they were copying each other. The first one crouched, bobbed, moved sideways, the second did the same. Anything you can do, I can do better. The first was the Basque heavy-weight Paulino Uzcudun. The second—he sat at the table watching himself— was Max Schmeling. The Uzcudun fight, three years before, was just before Schmeling’s first fight with Jack Sharkey. And it was a gamble. Uzcudun was an awkward fighter with a cast-iron chin. He could make anybody look bad—including, later, Joe Louis. He didn’t punch hard but he could embarrass you to death. At one point, when there was a problem with the projector, I wandered into the kitchen for coffee. It was that kind of fight, that went with coffee better than beer. And there was Madame Bey, who ran the place. A French-Armenian woman, the wife of a Turkish diplomat who became an American, she spoke half a dozen languages, cooked international food, sang opera. She’d sung the national anthem in Buffalo when President McKinley made a speech there and was standing next to the president when he was shot. Years later, I attended her funeral. She’s buried over in Chatham.