Cinderella Man Read online

  The cast on Jim’s right hand had been off for months now, but he’d spent so much time and effort training his left hand to do this job, he now used it as often as his right, if not more. When the right got tired, he went to the left. When the left got tired, he went with the right. Alternating made the work easier.

  Hook, haul, drop…hook, haul, drop.

  Jim considered his silent partner. The two hadn’t spoken since the churchyard celebration, that loud scene with Sara. Mike’s handsome, young face appeared aged today. He was usually clean shaven, but this morning his cheeks and chin were covered with rough stubble, his bright eyes were downcast, cradled in dark half circles. His tall, lanky form was stooped, his narrow shoulders weighted.

  Jim wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what.

  Finally, Mike spoke up, although his bloodshot eyes remained on the ground. “I wouldn’t have hit her.”

  Jim nodded. “I know, Mike.”

  “I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d hit her.”

  Jim didn’t know what to say.

  “You get so angry with all of it,” Mike went on. “You got to push somewhere. I’m getting things under control.”

  Hook, haul, drop…hook, haul, drop.

  “So thanks for that,” Mike added.

  Jim glanced up to see Mike was looking at him now, his nod apologetic and grateful at the same time. Then he said, “You were going to win again, you could have told me.”

  “I knew? I could have bet on me too.”

  Mike smiled, but it was different. Strained. That old infectious grin had disappeared. Jim was sorry to see it go.

  Hook, haul, drop…

  “C’mon, Jimmy,” Mike said at last, “how about you talk me through that last round?”

  A tiny flame ignited in Jim’s eyes. He cleared his throat. “Griffin comes out of his corner like a freight train, I swear…” Jim kept working. He’d been using his right till now. Without thinking, he switched to his left with smoothness, power, and flexible ease.

  A week later, Mae was strolling down the street. In her hands was a thick package wrapped in white butcher’s paper. She glanced down at her daughter.

  “No more,” Mae firmly scolded. “Now, say it, Rosy.”

  Rosy pouted.

  “Say it,” Mae repeated.

  Rosy stalled by gazing down at the cracks in the sidewalk, where a variety of tall, green weeds were tickling her small legs as she walked along.

  “Rosy!”

  The little girl sighed. “Don’t trade Daddy’s autograph for free meat.”

  Mae bit her cheek to keep from laughing. “Why can’t you ever listen to me?”

  Rosy thought hard about this question, then answered with great seriousness. “I don’t know.”

  This time, Mae couldn’t stop the smile. Then she glanced up. A shiny roadster was pulling away from their dingy apartment house. Mae recognized the vehicle. It was Joe Gould’s. Her smile vanished.

  “Go play with the boys,” Mae told her daughter.

  Rosy ran off to join her brothers, who were playing pink ball in the shade of the tenement alley. With quick, worried steps, Mae headed inside.

  The afternoon was beautiful. Sunny and warm but not hot, and the humidity that usually plagues this erstwhile swamp was lower than usual. Mae wasn’t surprised to find their stuffy apartment empty. After throwing the fresh cuts of meat into the icebox, she headed outside in search of her husband.

  She found him behind the tenement building in what passed for a backyard. More weeds than grass, a few damaged chairs scattered about. A pile of rusted pipes heaped at the yard’s edge.

  Jim stood strong and tanned in the middle of the scraggly outdoor space. Mae’s breath caught a moment, seeing him so happy, so handsome in the sun. His broad shoulders tapered down to a lean waist, the thick muscles of his thighs evident through his slacks. His square chin was tipped up, his bright eyes peering confidently at the cloudless blue sky. He looked like a majestic bronze statue, still standing steady and unbroken, among the ruins of some devastated civilization.

  Mae crossed the yard. “You daughter is now a celebrity in Sam’s butcher shop.”

  Jim turned and Mae felt her heart stop. She saw it in his eyes—the old excitement. The reason he was so happy.

  “Joe came by. He thinks the commission might be willing to reverse their ruling. He thinks he can get me another fight.”

  Mae said nothing.

  “I’m going to stop working, get back into shape.” Jim dug into his pocket, pulled out a wad of green. “Joe fronted us one hundred and seventy-five. So I can train.”

  Mae swallowed, had trouble finding her voice. “You said it was just the one fight.”

  “It’s our second chance, is what it is. It’s a chance to make you and the kids proud.”

  Mae’s fingers clenched, her nails digging groves into her palms. She tried to keep her voice steady, her fear and anger under control. “Jim, we got off easy when you broke that hand. It’s not that I’m not proud or grateful. I am. But what if something worse happened? And you can’t work?”

  Mae couldn’t bring herself to paint the sign any clearer. She expected her husband could read it in her eyes. What if you become a cripple, Jim Braddock? You’ve seen it happen to other men. What if you go and get yourself killed!?

  “What happens to us?” challenged Mae. “To the kids again? We’re barely managing now.”

  Jim shook his head, disappointed at his wife’s reaction. He gestured to their pitiful, rundown surroundings. Couldn’t she see? Didn’t she know? He was already killing himself—and for what?

  “Yeah, Mae,” he replied. “If I can’t do better than I’m doing, we’re not going to make it. Kill myself every day for a couple coins, and every week we slip behind a little.”

  Mae stepped closer. “We got out of it. We’re back to even now.” Her tone turned desperate. “Please, baby. I’m begging you. We don’t have anything left to risk.”

  Jim wanted to reach out, take her in his arms, but he stopped himself. He couldn’t give her what she wanted. There was so much at stake for their kids, their future, he didn’t dare give in to her fears.

  He touched her cheek with gentleness, but when he spoke again, his tone was unbendable iron. “I can still take a few punches, Mae. And I’d rather take them in the ring. At least you know who’s hitting you.”

  He turned from her then, and Mae’s hopeful expression crumbled. She stood there, feeling helpless as she watched him stride away from her, across the yard and into the dark doorway. But Mae Theresa Fox Braddock was far from helpless, and she knew it.

  This isn’t done, James Braddock, she promised. No, it is not. Not by a long shot.

  The next morning, Jim rose at dawn and left the apartment house, not for the docks but for the gym. Mae left the apartment house too. She took a bus to her sister’s, dropped off the kids, and rode a ferry across the mighty Hudson, toward the silver spires of Manhattan island, determined to storm one of its castles.

  Mae’s destination was a section of New York City known as the Upper East Side, a relatively small piece of property that displayed the grandest, most majestic apartment buildings and houses ever constructed in the United States. Elegant bluebloods, tycoons, and solid citizens resided together in these blocks amid exclusive clubs, luxurious penthouses, grand hotels, and stately museums. Millionaires Row was here, a Gilded Age playground along the east side of Central Park, where Carnegie, Astor, and Vanderbilt spent fortunes mixing periods and tastes in a line of sumptuous Fifth Avenue mansions resembling English castles, Italian villas, and French chateaux.

  Two avenues over, on Park, the ostentation was less pronounced—“filthy rich” descending to merely “terribly moneyed.” But it was still one of the broadest thoroughfares and most beautiful streets in New York. Two lanes of traffic were divided by a wide swath of well-tended grass, flower beds, and shrubbery. Trucks were banned from this gracious artery, but buses, cars, a
nd drays constantly rolled up and down its lanes.

  At one time, seven-and nine-story elevator buildings had lined Park Avenue, but after the World War, skyscraper apartments were constructed in their place. Mae had read somewhere that they’d been built on stilts to keep them free from the vibration of the New York Central railroad yards hidden below.

  Walking north, Mae gaped at Villard House, a group of brown sandstone mansions surrounding a court and first owned by Henry Villard, a German-American railroad magnate. The ornate cornices, windows, and details had been fashioned to resemble an Italian Renaissance palace. Next came the opulent athletic facilities of the Racquet and Tennis Club, one of the most fashionable sports associations in the city. Mae remembered reading in one of the gossip columns that the two tennis courts inside with slate foundations had cost more than $250,000 to construct.

  A pair of gentlemen in tennis whites, speaking earnestly about financing and real estate, burst out of a hired car and nearly ran her over in their haste to cross the sidewalk and enter the building.

  Mae leaped back. “Goodness.”

  She continued her walk, aware no other street in the world came close to the amount of wealth concentrated among these buildings. Her sister had told her that apartment rentals here averaged as much as $1,500 per room annually—an obscene sum. She also knew farther uptown was the Frick Collection, a museum that housed important old paintings. And two avenues away was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the greatest and most important museums in the world.

  She vowed to take Jay, Howard, and Rosy to those museums for a visit someday—but not today. Today, she had business on Park, and she continued her trek between the double row of tall apartment buildings with all the intense determination that her husband displayed in the ring.

  On the scrubbed sidewalk, she passed dignified men in white smocks—house servants—exercising pedigreed dogs or carrying armloads of parcels. Under each canvas-awning-framed entryway, she passed uniformed men, some simply standing guard, others hurrying to aid impeccably tailored gentlemen and ladies in their journeys from foyer to car, car to foyer.

  On the small, dog-eared map of the city that she’d borrowed from her sister, Park was shown to stretch all the way to the uncovered railroad tracks at Ninety-sixth, where it transformed itself into a slum tenement street in an area known as Spanish Harlem. But Mae wasn’t going nearly that far.

  When she arrived at the limestone building she sought, she tilted her head back, holding her little straw hat to keep it from tumbling. She tried to guess how many floors high the skyscraper went, but she couldn’t even see the top.

  Girding herself for what came next, Mae approached the door. Beneath the awning, the uniformed doorman, his brass buttons shining, tipped his visored cap and with a white gloved hand pulled open the beveled glass. Mae walked through, into an elegant lobby of rare marbles and dark wood. Framed oils hung on the walls and bronzed sculptures and potted plants sprung up from the waxed and gleaming floor.

  Aware her shoes were broken down, her dress threadbare, her straw hat a sorry beaten-up thing, she nevertheless lifted her chin and walked toward the elevator door. The operator was dressed like the doorman. She told him the floor she wanted as she moved inside and ogled the large, walnut-paneled car, deciding it was only slightly smaller than the entire basement apartment where all five Braddocks now made their home.

  “Good day, Mrs. Reynolds.”

  “Good day, Johnny.”

  A matron stepped into the elevator behind her wearing a smartly tailored green summer suit, highly polished T-strap shoes, and an ostrich-feathered toque over perfectly styled curls. She seemed startled to see someone like Mae in her building, and, as the operator closed the door and the car ascended, the woman looked her up and down.

  Mae felt her cheeks growing warm. Self-consciously she straightened her tattered clothes and nodded nervously. The matron nodded back with politeness, but Mae didn’t miss the horrified expression in her gaze. It was the sort of look usually reserved for car accidents. Bad ones.

  A few minutes later, Mae was standing on the fifteenth floor, digging inside her purse for a scrap of paper. She moved down the line of apartment doors until the number on the door matched the one she’d scribbled down.

  Straightening her threadbare dress one more time, she raised her hand and knocked. Hard. She heard movement inside, saw motion at the keyhole. Then nothing. Just stillness beyond the portal.

  Mae frowned and knocked again.

  Still nothing.

  “Open the door, Joe,” she called politely. She waited ten more seconds, and when no one answered, she cocked back and let go—

  “Joe, open the damn door! You’re not going to hide in your fancy apartment and make my husband your punching bag all over again. We’re starving and you’re taking him from his work like some short little blood-sucking leech and I won’t let you get him hurt like that again, do you hear me? I will not let you!”

  The door opened a few inches. Joe Gould stood staring at her. “I guess you better come in.”

  Mae pushed past him and entered, as she moved inside, however, her steps slowed and the righteous anger drained out of her. She’d expected a space like the lobby or even the elevator—tasteful wallpaper, old English furniture, marble statues, framed oils, potted plants. But there was none of that. There was none of anything.

  The apartment was completely empty. Just a wide expanse of polished wood floor and high bright windows. In the middle of the empty apartment stood Joe’s wife, Lucille.

  “Hello, Mae…We…we weren’t expecting you.”

  “How is it?” asked Joe.

  Lucille, an attractive woman with a genuine smile, nodded at her husband and took another sip from her bone-china cup. “Too sweet per usual.”

  Joe smiled back at his wife. The two of them and Mae were sitting on folding chairs in the middle of the empty living room, sipping hot tea that Joe had prepared. He glanced at Mae. “Yours?”

  Mae nodded without speaking, still feeling off balance. She’d come here expecting a knock-down-drag-out, but Joe and his wife had been warm and civil. And their circumstances had left her in a mild state of shock.

  “Sorry,” said Joe, gesturing to the door. Clearly, he felt badly about not answering the door right away. “But you just don’t want folks to see you down is all.”

  “I didn’t know,” said Mae, her voice not quite there. “I thought…”

  “Yeah,” said Joe fingering the lapel of his dapper, fawn-colored suit. “That’s the idea. Always keep your hands up.”

  Mae’s eyebrows arched. She realized that had been Joe Gould’s philosophy all along. Keep up appearances. And never let the opponent get to you.

  Joe shrugged. “Sold the last of it two days ago. So Jimmy could train.”

  Mae took a moment to absorb this. She’d always figured Joe Gould for a cagey opportunist. Not a man who’d risk his last few possessions on her husband’s second chance.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Sometimes you see something in a fighter. You don’t even know if it’s real, you’re looking for it so bad.” Joe glanced beyond the tall glass of the high window. “You can’t have no hope at all. I guess Jimmy’s what I hope for.”

  Mae’s eyes widened. It stunned her to hear Gould express exactly what she felt for her own husband.

  “He’s really something, Mae.”

  She shook her head. “This is crazy. You don’t even know if you can get him a fight, do you?”

  “I’ll get him a fight,” Joe promised. “Last thing I do, I’ll get him a fight.”

  Lucille reached over, lightly touched her husband’s arm. “Honey, get us some more tea, would you?”

  Joe rose, smiled at Mae. “I know who wears the pants.” Then he winked and headed into the kitchen.

  For a moment, the two women sat in silence. Finally, Lucille sighed, gestured to the empty room and said, “It’s not the way I imagined it either.”

/>   Mae nodded, frowned at the floor. She knew Lucille was in as deep as Joe now, but she felt compelled to explain why she’d made the trip here.

  “It’s just that…I hated it. Every day he walked out that door for a fight. I even hated eating the food it bought,’ cause it was like it came right out of him.”

  Lucille said nothing, just listened.

  “We lost something when he stopped fighting,” Mae admitted. “But I guess we got something too.”

  Lucille smiled but her eyes were sad. “Can you ever stop yours?” she asked. “When he sets his mind to do a thing.”

  “No. I wish I could. No.”

  “I never know who it’s harder on, them or us. We have to wait for them to fix everything. They have to do it. And every day it seems like they’re failing us. But really it’s just the world that’s failed, you know?”

  “It’s…” Mae’s voice trailed off as she realized they could say more to each other, and probably would, but there really was nothing more to say. Outside, a passing cloud dappled the sunlight across the gleaming floorboards. Mae smiled. “This is a lovely apartment.”

  “Thank you,” Lucille replied.

  Then they continued sipping their tea.

  ROUND TEN

  American fighters train in establishments you are not likely to confuse with a Knightsbridge health club.

  —Hugh McIlvanney, The Hardest Game

  On Braddock’s first day back in training, Joe Jeannette met him at the top of the creaky wooden steps of his Union City gym. The smell was the same—a combination of motor oil and gasoline from the garage below, mustiness from the gallons of sweat dumped daily into the air, and the distressed leather of punching bags and boxing gloves. The sound, however, was different. Absent was the usual noise of gloves smacking against bags, the slap of ropes on hardwood, and the grunting of fighters warily circling each other. At this early hour, the gym was empty, save for Joe and a corner man hanging a bag on a stout hook.

  Braddock felt his adrenaline begin to pump the moment he set his foot on that first creaky step. When he saw Joe Jeannette’s grin and the heavy leather bag just waiting to be smacked, his muscles actually twitched beneath his skin.