Max Baer and the Star of David (6 page)

“Perhaps,” I said. “But you are only a kike if you choose to call yourself one. Your people possess a long and rich history, and it behooves you not to make of this history a joke, but to cherish it even as Joleen and I, who are not of your Mosaic persuasion, have learned to do.”

“Hey,” he said, and he wrapped his arms around me and gave me a big, sloppy kiss on the cheek. “Don’t you know how to tell it, Horace, and with words to burn. And ain’t you the smartest nigger anyone ever knew—this Jewboy first of all!”

I pressed the palm of my hand against his chest and pushed him away—we were in the corridor outside the dressing room, and could hear the riotous chanting of fans who waited on the other side of the exit door—and when I did, he grabbed my hand in his own so that for a moment I thought he would try to crush it. Instead, he took it to his chest and pressed it there.

“Shit, Horace,” he said, his eyes moist. “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean nothing—you know that, don’t you? I got nothing for you and your wife but all the love and respect I ever had for anyone. Just ask June here, about how I been talking about you two, and how smart you are and what I been learning from you.”

“He really loves you like he says,” June said, and gave me a smile such as the one that must have won the heart of Mister Ziegfeld. “So come on out and play with us tonight. Our Mister Max knows how to have a good time better than anyone. Come on out and play with us tonight, pretty please?”

Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion, and behold king Solomon with the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladness of his heart. (3:11)

In the year that followed on Max’s victory over Schmeling—until he fought and defeated Primo Carnera for the heavyweight championship of the world—Max continued to excel at what he loved most: having a good time. It was a year during which we spent most of our time in New York and Los Angeles (where Max purchased a home overlooking the Pacific Ocean), and during which he divorced Dorothy, had highly publicized romances with several movie stars, and starred in his first movie, playing opposite Myrna Loy in
The Prizefighter and the Lady.

Max delighted in the praise he received from critics for his role in
The Prizefighter and the Lady
, in the women who pursued him because of it (Jean Harlow, relentlessly aggressive, would show up at our home uninvited on evenings when she knew Max was entertaining other women), and, especially, in the news that Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and Entertainment, had banned it in Germany. That, he declared, was the kind of fame you couldn’t buy.

It was also a year during which Joleen went through an unexpected and alarming transformation. This was apparent at once when, five months after the premiere of
The Prizefighter and the Lady
, Max and I returned to Livermore and, entering the cottage Joleen and I shared (this was our first visit home since Max’s triumph over Schmeling), we found Joleen sitting cross-legged on the floor, playing with two cloth dolls. The dolls, which Joleen and I had taken with us when we left Texas, had belonged to our mother, and to her mother before that. Known as pickaninny dolls—a locution that had no derogatory association at that time, being merely a literal reference to Negro children, and deriving from a mixture of Portuguese (
pequenino
), and Creole (
pinkin ningre
)—they had lost their original button eyes, most of their looped yarn hair, and the stitchings of their embroidered mouths, so that they were by now of indecipherable age or gender.

Joleen showed neither surprise nor happiness—no reaction at all, in fact—at our unannounced arrival. She continued to play with the dolls as if we were not there—talking to them, placing them in a wooden vegetable crate, covering them with a piece of frayed red-checkered fabric, kissing them, and wishing them pleasant dreams.

“My ghosts,” she said to Max. And then: “Has my husband told you about my dead brother?”

My heart stopped briefly, and returned with such a strong thump-thump that I thought Max would hear it. His eyes fixed on Joleen, however, he paid me no attention.

“Hey—” he said to her, his arms spread wide, “ain’t you got some welcome-home hugs and kisses for us long-lost guys?”

Joleen took her Bible from the top of a bookcase that was set at right angles, in an L-shape, against the footboard of our bed and an adjacent wall. “You have not answered my question,” she said. She sat, and opened her Bible. “When you have replied to my question, I will reply to yours.”

“Okay,” Max said. “Sure. So the answer’s no—he never said nothing about any brother.”

“That is a shameful but correctable omission,” Joleen said.

“Glad to hear it,” Max said. “So now that I answered your question like you asked, how about those hugs and kisses?”

“Of course,” Joleen said, and she rose and, as if she herself had become a cloth doll, embraced each of us in a limp, perfunctory manner.

“Since my husband has been dilatory in telling you of this chapter in our lives—nor, I confess, have I been as forthcoming as I might have been—I will tell it to you,” she said. “But be forewarned: it is not a tale that will inspire joy or hope, and it is one that will surely bring me down with gray hairs to the grave.”

Max turned to me. “Do you know what the hell’s going on here, Horace?” he asked. “I can understand your wife being pissed at us for being away so long, and maybe it was bad manners to bust in here first thing, but that was just my way of showing how
much
I missed you, see, and—”

“You are a child, Max Baer,” Joleen said. “And a fool, which is doubtless why so many adore you, though I do not, for such reasons, count myself among them.”

“Ah come on,” Max said. “You know how you feel about me, so why don’t you sweeten up and we’ll make amends, okay? Amends—that’s the right word, ain’t it? I mean, you can punish me later any way you want for being gone so long—only don’t be getting sore at Horace. He ain’t to blame for nothing, and hey—to show how much I been thinking about you, I brought you some stuff from New York you’re gonna love.”

“Do you want to hear about my brother?” Joleen asked.

“You know it,” Max said. “Only I ain’t spent time with my own family yet, and
my
brother Buddy’s hungry for getting me in the ring so we can bang each other around. But I’ll be back after, and with the surprises I brought for you, okay?”

“I take no pleasure from material gifts,” Joleen said. “Be assured, however, that despite my subdued manner, I do retain considerable affection for you, as I do for my husband. Before the enormity of my brother’s death, however, and my memory of it, the memories of our times together—you and me, sir—do, necessarily, grow small.”

“I get what you’re telling me,” Max said. “Sure. So how about I give you two lovebirds some private time together and come back after dinner, and you tell me your story then. I’d be glad to hear it. Really.”

“You say that you will be glad to hear it—true in prospect, yes, though in the hearing of it, I expect, no,” she said, and then, more softly: “‘By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.’”

“But we’re
here
now!” Max said. “So you don’t got to worry no more. Like they say—lost and found, and found is better than lost, right?”

“Perhaps,” Joleen said. “But you must also distinguish between ‘lost’ and ‘loss,’ and it is the latter that troubles my days of late, though it need not trouble yours. So take your leave of me to be with those others you love, and whether your word proves true or not—whether you return or wander away again—know this: I will have vengeance, Max Baer.”

“Oh sure,” Max said. “I can understand that.”

Joleen smiled for the first time since our arrival. “You can understand what?”

“About me coming and going so much—more going than coming, that’s for sure.”

“I do not think you heard my words,” Joleen said, and she repeated them in the same toneless manner as before: “I will have vengeance, Max Baer.”

“Against who?” Max asked.

“Against
whom
,” Joleen said, correcting him.

“Whom—sure,” Max said. “And I don’t envy whoever—whomever?—it is you got a grudge against, because I know you, Joleen, and I can tell just how royally pissed off you are from how goddamned calm you’re being. But you know what? Inside you, sweetheart, you seethe with rage the way I do, and the same goes for Silent Sam here—it’s why we click so good, the three of us. I figured that out a long time back—only the difference, see, is that when I’m pissed off, I don’t know how to hide it because I don’t
want
to hide it.”

“Hide and seek?” Joleen asked.

“Oh yeah,” Max said. “Hide and seek. Sure. I see what you mean. So like I said—I’ll be back after supper.”

It was dark when he returned to our cottage, and he came bearing gifts that he laid out upon our bed: silk scarves, small flasks of perfumes and ointments, a lacquered jewelry box containing a bracelet made of baroque pearls, a barrette delicately inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a pale pink diaphanous scarf embroidered with seed pearls, and a necklace of round, natural pearls, which were, Max said proudly, the most valuable pearls in the world. It was called a
princess
-length necklace, which, since she was his one and only princess, he declared, was the reason he’d bought it for her.

“And are you then my prince, Max Baer?” Joleen said as she removed the gifts from our bed and placed them in the crate with her dolls. “If so, you might consider that the prince of princes himself declared the kingdom of heaven—a place, I expect, none of
us
will ever know—to be itself a pearl of great worth.”

“Sure, sure,” Max said, grinning. “The prince of princes—I get it—but do you
like
what I got for you?”

“I am grateful for your kindness,” Joleen said. “You are and ever have been a thoughtful man.”

“Well yeah,” Max said. “Only I don’t want you to think I chose what I did because of what they cost. Like I always say: money’s just money, and the easiest way to pay for things in this life is with money.”

“How true,” Joleen said. “Especially for those who
have
money.”

“But I bet you’re wondering why all the pearls, right?” Max said.

“No,” Joleen said.

“Okay then,” Max said. “So I’ll tell you. It’s because they come from the deep.”

“And so—?”

“And so? And so they’re like
you
, see—they come from a place that’s so deep you can’t figure out what’s going on there. They grow at the bottom of the ocean—sure—we know
that
, but what I mean is they’re deep because nobody understands how things so beautiful can grow in the dark from almost nothing, and get to be what they are.”

“There is no mystery as to how pearls come into being,” Joleen said.

“
That ain’t what I mean!
” Max shouted. “That ain’t what I mean at all and you know it!” And then: “You’re giving me a hard time just so you can rile me up, right? I say black and you say white, and I say hot and you say cold, and—sure—now that I’m back home there ain’t
nothing
I can say or do that’s gonna get you to agree with me on
anything
, is there?”

“I do not understand why you are upset with me,” Joleen said. “I appreciate your gifts, and have shown my gratitude by making a home for them in a place that is dear to me, and where—”

“It’s because
you’re
such a goddamned mystery, don’t you get it?” Max said. “
That’s
why I got them for you. If I wanted to bring you baubles like I do for a lot of dames, I could’ve done that, but I
thought
about what to bring that would
mean something
, and here you go and crap all over them.”

“Not at all, my friend,” Joleen said. “I and my children will cherish them.”

“Your
children
?!” Max asked, and he turned to me. “What the hell is she talking about?
What
children?”

“Her dolls,” I said.

Max looked bewildered. “I also thought of how beautiful they would look against your skin,” he said. “Because they’re
like
you but they’re
not
like you, see? They’re beautiful, and there’s nothing fake about them, and they come from a grain of sand the way you, me, and Horace come from something invisible you can’t see with your naked eye.”

“But it is not true that—” Joleen began.

“Don’t you go cutting me off with your highfaluting crap,” Max snapped. “I’m not some dunce the way you and everyone tries to make out, because sure I know about how things are born—pearls
or
people—but
knowing
how it happens don’t take away from the
mystery
of it. It’s still a mystery no matter how much we know. It’s like … it’s like…”

“It’s like what, Max?” Joleen asked.

“I don’t know,” Max said. “It’s like love, I guess—like falling in love.”