by John Florio
Dorothy Albright trailed her father down the aisle of the Third Regiment Armory, joining the crowd of businessmen surrounding the boxing ring at the front of the arena. Dorothy had pinned her hair up on the crown of her head and refrained from dabbing rouge onto her cheeks, but she was still a rose in a butcher shop.
She had been to the armory a year earlier to see one of her father’s prizefighters take his lumps from Marvin Hart, the heavyweight champion at the time. The place hadn’t changed—it reeked of sweat, tobacco, liniment, and greed. Beer stands were set up alongside the cheap bench seats in the back, and vendors worked the ringside aisles, hawking Cracker Jack and pretzels. Clusters of older men in sweat-stained work shirts gathered by the rear fire exit. They puffed on cigarettes as they talked in clipped sentences about the odds of the fight—and what they’d do with their winnings.
It had taken three hours to get to Camden from Hartford, and there were hundreds of more acceptable ways Dorothy could have spent her day, let alone her evening. There was no Bible passage that addressed it directly, but she knew two brutes fighting for public entertainment went against the Lord’s word, somehow.
To say that she saw the world differently than her father did was an understatement. He’d been talking up this fight ever since the Newark Evening-Star had agreed to back the statewide tournament four months ago. He could barely contain himself when speaking of how his latest investment, Barry Higgins, would soon have the championship belt of New Jersey wrapped around his flat Irish midsection.
Back in grade school, Dorothy had admired her father, particularly when he spoke of respecting all people, regardless of their skin color. According to him, he’d always fought for the downtrodden. He even told her a story of how, when he was a young boy, he’d taken a few beatings at the hands of neighborhood teenagers for befriending the Negro, Tom Jeffries, who worked at his father’s general store. But now, Dorothy realized that her father’s tolerance wasn’t enough to make him an upstanding citizen. He simply wasn’t the straight arrow he presented himself to be. That’s why she railed against him, hoping a run of bad luck would convince him that his gambling businesses weren’t only illegal but built on temptation and moral weakness. His enterprise was the devil on Earth.
But Dorothy did have a reason for being at the armory, and she didn’t dare mention it to her father. This would surely test his tolerance: she’d developed a fondness for a doughy knot of muscle named Ernie Leo, who was not only a Negro, but also Higgins’s opponent. She’d been praying for weeks that Ernie would buck the odds and walk away with the prize money—and force the Higgins syndicate, particularly its prime operator, to rue the day it ensnared itself in professional prizefighting.
The overhead lights snapped off as Dorothy and her father found their seats. The only bulbs that now shone were the black torpedo lamps trained on the ring. Inside the ropes, Ernie shadowboxed in his corner. His skin was as dark as his leather boots, his legs muscular and sturdy. His feet looked heavy, as if they’d grown roots below the canvas. Above his beefy shoulders, sweat shone on his round face. Beads trickled down his pulpy ears, his short, fleshy neck, his puffy bottom lip, and the cleft in his chin.
Dorothy had met Ernie during one of her father’s scouting expeditions at that dreadful gym in Hoboken, the place he’d take her when trying to prove that boxing was the result of discipline and endurance. The athletes did work hard, but that didn’t prove anything. Most were lummoxes—their brains were as dense as their physiques—and every one of them was a pawn in her father’s operation. Ernie was no exception, but he was sweet and decent. And she knew he was smitten because she’d caught him stealing glances at her in between rounds on the brown leather dummy bag. She’d imagined feeling him inside of her, smothering her with muscle, sweat, and pleasure. It was her greatest sin, her weakness of the flesh, and she’d struggled for all of her twenty years to keep it under control. Father Jennings, the pastor at Saint Anthony’s of Padua, had told her months ago that he smelled this weakness on her, and she couldn’t deny it. It oozed out of her every pore. Still, when Ernie hit that dummy bag, walloping it with his gloved fists and peering around the side of it, she felt a tingle stirring beneath her corseted waist as her sin grew deep within her loins and clamored to be set free.
On the day Ernie signed to fight Higgins, she’d sat with the fighter on a bench outside the trainer’s room, intoxicated by the spicy smell of his liniment. Had her father seen them, he’d surely have lit into Ernie. He didn’t abuse Negroes the way his cronies did, but that didn’t mean he had any use for Ernie other than as a stepping-stone for Higgins. And he certainly didn’t want Dorothy gumming up the works. She knew him well enough to know he’d have probably yelled about miscegenation, as if he didn’t create his own laws whenever he needed them. He’d have been so busy barking at her, she might have missed hearing Ernie say that he considered himself more than a rented dunderhead.
“I’m not going to lose for nobody, not if I can help it,” Ernie said. “I won’t sell my pride. And I’m not gonna give up the prize money, neither.”
It made sense that the twenty dollars meant more to Ernie than the title did; he couldn’t be making more than ten cents an hour sweeping streets in Hoboken.
Now he stood in the ring, lumbering in a small circle, punching the fetid air in front of him.
“Higgins will be out soon,” Dorothy’s father said, his blue eyes contrasting a mane of white hair that was combed back off his forehead, each strand plastered into place. His face was so clean-shaven it looked as if it were made of clay.
“Wait’ll you see him, honey. He’s a born winner.”
Her father owned 40 percent of Higgins. He’d bought his way into the fighter’s syndicate with a thousand dollars—more than twice what Aunt Ellen made teaching third grade all year in Baltimore.
“Let’s hope this leads to the big paydays,” her father said. He squeezed her hand and she fought the urge to yank it back.
He couldn’t possibly be nervous, could he? Dorothy knew little of what her father was up to, but the round-robin must have been weighted in Higgins’s favor. The only reason Ernie was given a chance to take on a white fighter was that he had the finesse of a wild boar.
The last time Dorothy had seen Ernie he was standing on the scale at the weigh-in. She’d looked him in the eye and wished him luck. He’d nodded back while inflating his muscles and lifting both arms over his head as his trainer, Willie Brooks, wrapped a cloth tape measure around his chest. Now she prayed that all his hard work would give him a fighting chance.
Her father leaned toward her ear. “Once our boy plows through Leo, he’ll take on Tommy Burns,” he said, smiling.
He and his cronies had been coveting the world heavyweight title ever since Burns had taken it from Marvin Hart in February. Burns, they felt, was beatable. Even Dorothy had to admit that her father’s timing was impeccable. He’d bought into Higgins on a Monday, and by Friday, Burns was champ.
Ernie windmilled his arms in looping circles from his shoulders. A group of five men sitting ringside—two rows in front of Dorothy—hurled insults at him. They all wore grubby pants and yellowed white shirts; they couldn’t have been more than a year older than Dorothy.
“Here comes the whupping,” the youngest one yelled, his hands cupped around his hairless lips like a ten-fingered megaphone.
“Kiss the canvas, boy!” another shouted, his dark brown eyes bulging with every syllable. Then he turned to his friend and laughed as if he had come up with a line worthy of Vaudeville.
Ernie’s brown shoulders gleamed like wet stones under the glare of the torpedo lamps. Dorothy had never been attracted to a dark-skinned man before Ernie, but she couldn’t help fantasizing about running into the ring and sucking him on the mouth under the glaring lights. Her corset, already biting into her bust, seemed to squeeze her lungs even more tightly whenever she looked at him.
Her father nudged his elbow into Dorothy’s arm and motioned wit
h his chin to the back of the aisle. There strutted Higgins, a tall, sinewy specimen with long arms and sweaty blond hair that dangled like string onto his forehead. He didn’t have Ernie’s muscles; he was lean and towered over most everybody in the crowd. He swaggered down the steps of the aisle, twisting his lanky body to avoid the outstretched arms of boxing fans hoping to shake the hand of their favorite thoroughbred.
“There’s our future, honey,” her father said. “I can feel it.”
Dorothy excused herself, quickly making her way back up the aisle to get some air. She knew that Ernie had refused a bribe from her father’s friends to fall in the seventh round. Now she wished he had taken the money, at least he would have walked away with something in his pocket.
When the bell rang, the two fighters left the safety of their corners and approached the center of the mat with their gloves raised. Dorothy watched from the cheap seats, barely able to see over the standing crowd. Every so often, between the padded shoulders of the cheering fans, she glimpsed Higgins pelting Ernie’s right eye with lightning-quick left jabs. Ernie shook them off, but she’d been tagging along with her father long enough to know how quickly those kinds of punches could wear on a fighter.
The bell clanged and Ernie trudged back to his stool. Dorothy returned to her seat, knowing the fight would soon be over.
“Dorothy, get over here,” her father said, smiling. “You’re missing the action.”
She sat down just in time to see the fighters start up again. Higgins stalked Ernie, pummeling his forehead. After a stiff right from Higgins, Ernie leaned back on the ropes and took a barrage of blows to his meaty trunk. But instead of crumbling to the floor, he pushed Higgins back, surged forward off the ropes, and lit into Higgins with a left hook that seemed to start at his knees. The blow bashed Higgins’s ribcage and sent the tall man’s right leg into a spasm. Higgins pinned his elbow to his midsection and took a couple of shaky sidesteps. Dorothy leaned forward, her heart racing at the thought of Ernie knocking Higgins out. But any hope she had of Higgins’s demise was yanked away when the Irishman fired three rapid blows to the bridge of Ernie’s flat, broad nose. Ernie’s head snapped back, spraying sweat with each shot. Dorothy prayed he would fall without enduring any more punishment, but he bounced off the ropes, banged his gloves together, and went back for more. When Higgins threw a jab, Ernie ducked and unleashed another whistling left. This one landed squarely on Higgins’s right temple and the lanky Irishman crumpled to the canvas, his head coming to rest on the bottom turnbuckle.
The referee shoved Ernie toward a neutral corner and started counting over Higgins. Dorothy eyed her father, who was squeezing the brim of his once perfectly formed charcoal gray homburg hat in his fists as his thousand-dollar investment lay helplessly on the mat.
Ernie was still standing, wobbly but on his feet, as the ringsiders showered him in a hail of insults, popcorn, and half-eaten frankfurters.
The referee, stooped over Higgins, kept counting but it was clear that Higgins had swung his last punch. “Seven! Eight!”
When the count reached ten, the ref walked across the ring and hoisted Ernie’s gloved fist into the air. A white man in a fitted gray suit, pencil-thin mustache, and shiny black shoes climbed through the ropes and tied the Evening-Star’s championship belt around Ernie’s waist. Crunched programs and balled-up napkins rained into the ring as Ernie held his head high, a gob of mustard on his neck and specks of popcorn in his hair. He nodded at the smattering of Negro vendors who stood ringside staring up at him, spellbound. Once he had faced all four sides of the arena, Ernie climbed through the ropes and headed to his dressing room, his round face now puffed up and bloated, the swollen bridge of his nose the color of an eggplant.
Halfway up the side aisle, as Ernie turned to shake the hand of a Negro popcorn vendor, a wooden folding chair flew out of the crowd and smacked against his forehead. He dropped to the cement floor, wincing and pressing his gloved hands over his right eye.
Dorothy shot out of her seat.
“Where do you think you’re going?” her father said.
“I’ll just be a minute.”
She knew she wouldn’t get near Ernie—the crowd around him was as impenetrable as granite. But she got close enough to watch in horror.
Her father caught up with her, grabbed her hand, and glared at her the way he did crooked employees.
“We’re going,” he said. “Now.”
He pulled Dorothy away from the scene and led her toward the lobby. Trudging behind him as he yanked on her arm, Dorothy cursed herself for needing his money. Once she graduated from Wellesley, she would start teaching and slam the door on her father—and his crooked associates—for good.
When they reached the main aisle, Dorothy peeked back at Ernie. He was sitting up; blood was smeared across his forehead and trickled down his right eye. He shook his head as if he’d just come out of a cold shower, and then stared straight ahead, blinking. He was no doubt trying to clear his vision, but Dorothy told herself he was looking her way.
Dorothy stood alongside her father and his two cronies as the ring doctor examined Higgins, methodically poking his fingers into the fighter’s shoulder blades, then his stomach, and finally, his rib cage. It didn’t take a physician to see that Higgins was in bad shape. He was doubled over, clutching the right side of his midsection, and moaning every time he took a breath. Worse than his physical condition was his mental state. The almighty Higgins didn’t even remember getting hit.
“The only real problem is the ribcage,” the doctor said to her father, as if he were delivering good news. “One rib is cracked. I suspect another is fractured. He’ll fight again, but he’ll need a couple of months.”
Dorothy knew better: Higgins was done, not because of his injuries, but because he’d lost to a no-name Negro oaf. Her father would finagle a way to get his money back, assuming Higgins hadn’t already spent it on equipment, meals, lodging, whiskey, and women.
Dorothy wagged a finger to catch her father’s eye. She wanted to tell him she’d meet him in the lobby, but it was useless. He was too wrapped up in the doctor’s medical gibberish, which seemed to be just getting started.
She eased out the door and walked to the mouth of the corridor, where three reporters stood laughing about the fight, taking turns imitating the way Higgins had fallen to the canvas. Each had a press card dangling from his neck. The shortest one—he had a square jaw and wore a brown derby—stepped in front of her to block her path. He must have seen her coming out of Higgins’s dressing room.
“Hey, Sister. How bad is he?”
His press card identified him as Walter Wilkins of the Newark Evening-Star. His eyes were darting down the hallway with a spark that could only come from a rookie. The fellow wanted a scoop, but he wasn’t going to get one from Dorothy.
“He’ll be out soon, ask him yourself,” she said.
“You can’t tell me anything?”
“I barely know the fighters’ names,” she said.
Wilkins smirked and walked toward Higgins’s room. The other two lingered, scanning Dorothy’s body with nearly the same level of scrutiny the doc had given Higgins.
Dorothy ignored them and made her way across the back aisle of the armory. A young guard with red hair and blue eyes policed the corridor leading to Ernie’s dressing room. Dorothy flashed him a smile and he let her pass. As she did, he straightened his back and puffed out his chest, apparently so eager to look like a competent guard that he forgot to actually be one.
With a few more steps Dorothy found herself in front of Ernie’s dressing room, where a wrinkled Negro man with a balding pate sat guard, his large round potbelly fitting snugly between the arms of his folding chair. Dorothy recognized him as Ernie’s trainer, Willie Brooks. She’d seen him at the weigh-in, and again tonight in Ernie’s corner, holding the boxer’s water bucket, nursing his cuts, and screaming into his ear between rounds. Apparently, Willie also worked Ernie’s door. He didn’t need any
help manning his post—there wasn’t a fan or reporter in sight.
“Excuse me, is this Ernie Leo’s dressing room?” Dorothy asked, knowing full well it was.
“Who’s asking, Miss?”
Dorothy figured she had a few minutes before the press arrived, if they came at all.
“I’m Dorothy Albright,” she said.
Willie raised his eyebrows. He was no stranger to the surname.
“Edward Albright’s daughter,” Dorothy said to close the deal.
Willie nodded and got up. Then he pulled a ring of keys from his pocket and opened the dressing room door.
Ernie Leo rested his battered body on a bench in the converted storage room. Dust covered the base of the floor moldings. Four chairs, taken from the auditorium and still assembled into a single row of seats, were stacked against the brick wall. A makeup table peeked out from behind a pyramid of torn cardboard boxes but Ernie didn’t go near the mirror—he couldn’t breathe through his right nostril and could only imagine how bad his face looked.
He should have gone after Higgins harder and lower. The lowlife had butted heads with him three times, punched him in the kidneys twice, and hit him squarely below the belt right after the bell rang to end the first round. Ernie had kept it clean—he knew the ref wouldn’t look away if a Negro broke the rules, regardless of how badly he’d been taunted. It didn’t matter now, though, because lying on the bench to his right was a green leather belt with a shiny gold placard and gleaming red jewels. Ernie couldn’t read the words, but he knew the fancy script on the belt proclaimed him the New Jersey boxing champion. And with that honor came twenty dollars.
Ernie’s hands throbbed, his neck ached, and he could barely lift his arms to his chest. He’d slumped under the showerhead for ten minutes, hoping the heat would loosen his battered muscles, but hot water and steam could only do so much. He leaned back and held an ice-filled rubber bag to the bridge of his nose, careful not to upset the cotton bandage covering the stitches Willie had put in his forehead.