Cinderella Man Page 3

  “Jimmy,” Mae whispered, “my sister.”

  Jim looked at the door to find his sister-in-law Alice, a slightly older version of Mae, walking into the hall. Racing past her were two jackrabbits with bright eyes and light brown hair. They circled Jim’s legs, hopping and squealing.

  “Daddy, did you win?” cried four-year-old Jay.

  Jay understood about Daddy’s job. Three-year-old Howard was still too young to comprehend what all the excitement was about, other than Daddy being home. Jim smiled down at his boys. He took hold of the younger one’s belt, hoisted him up for a kiss, then bent down to plant another on the older one. My little men, thought Jim. His eyes met Mae’s. My little family.

  The Braddocks moved inside after that. Jim gave them a dramatic accounting of his pugilistic performance under the Garden’s broiling lights, and then Alice helped Mae settle the boys in to bed—not easy after Jim’s big boxing tale. Mae checked on her sleeping baby girl, Rose Marie, said good-bye to her departing sister, then sat down with Jimmy for some food.

  Mae didn’t eat much, just opened a bottle of wine.

  “Was he a real slugger?” Mae’s lively eyes were playful. Her face flushed.

  Jim’s eyebrows rose. His wife had gotten tipsy. “You could come watch,” he suggested.

  Having Mae see him win as a headliner in the Garden, that would be grand, thought Jim. He considered the nearly empty bottle beside the burned-down candle. Maybe if she had a little wine first, he thought, maybe then she’d come.

  But the suggestion didn’t go over. Mae’s eyes looked away, the playfulness gone. “You get punched. Every time, it feels like I’m getting punched too. And I ain’t half as tough as you…and anyway…” she added, forcing her smile to come back, her fears to recede, “who wants those articles about me running out on a fight again?”

  Jim caught her waving hand, brought it to his lips. He knew how much it bothered Mae to see him get hurt. He could still recall the terror-stricken look on her face at ringside during his first ten-round bout.

  Jack Stone had sent him sprawling to the canvas at the West New York Playground. Braddock had never been knocked out in his career, but that day had been one of the few times he’d been knocked down. Mae had been there to witness it, and she’d been scared senseless.

  Jimmy had gotten up again, had even won the fight, but the knockdowns had shaken Mae something awful. After that, she kept trying to put on a brave face. She even came to a few other fights. Jim never knew how hard it was for her, until the night he stepped in the ring with the “Harlem Harlequin.” The fighter was nothing special, but Jim was having a bad night. So pathetic did he look against his opponent—dreadfully awkward and appallingly slow, being forced to eat haymakers round after round—that Mae fled long before the final bell.

  Jim had lost on points in ten rounds that night, and he’d lost Mae at ringside forever because some smart aleck sportswriters had seen fit to inform the public about Mae’s heartbroken flight from the building.

  Jim understood her reluctance to sit at ringside now. But that stuff she claimed about her not being tough? Malarkey. He’d seen Mae take on the barking Joe Gould without a moment’s pause, seen her corral his wildcat boys into quiet little saints for Father Rorick’s Masses. She’d even bossed Jim about their wedding date.

  Jim would never forget it. At the last minute, Gould had scheduled an important match in Chicago on January 17, the night before Jim and Mae’s wedding. The money was too good to pass up.

  “I’ll take a plane right back after the fight on Friday night,” Braddock had pleaded with Mae, “and I’ll be back here in plenty of time for the wedding Saturday.”

  “Nothing doing,” Mae had told him in that firm, pert tone she now used on their two little boys. “Suppose you get a black eye. Do you think I want to walk up the aisle with a bridegroom who has a black eye? I do not. No, Jim. We’ll postpone the wedding for a week.”

  The memory made Jim smile. Yeah, he knew what tough stuff his wife was made of—even if she didn’t. It was one of the reasons he’d married her.

  “Tell me about the girls,” Mae said suddenly, her eyes narrowing suspiciously at his faraway smile.

  “Were there girls?” Jim asked innocently.

  “Come on. There was one.”

  “Yeah. Maybe there was one.”

  A familiar game was starting.

  “Blond?” asked Mae.

  “A brunette,” answered Jim.

  “Tall?”

  “Like a gazelle. Don’t know how she breathed up there.”

  Mae rose from her seat, moved around the table.

  “Oh, Mr. Braddock,” she cooed, her head bowed in mock coyness. “You’re so strong. Your hands are so big.” She looked up, batted her eyes. “So powerful.”

  Mae moved in close, her voice suddenly sincere. “I am so proud of you, Jimmy.”

  Her small hands reached for her husband’s solid shoulders and she climbed onto his muscled thighs.

  “Introducing two-time state golden gloves title holder…”

  She rose up, onto her knees.

  “In both the light heavyweight and heavyweight divisions…”

  Now she was standing on his thighs, looking into his eyes.

  “Twenty-seven and two with eighteen wins coming by way of knockout…the Bulldog of Bergen, the pride of New Jersey, and the hope of the Irish as the future champion of the world…James J. Braddock!”

  Jimmy rose, catching his wife by her tiny waist. Her hands moved under his shirt. She was kissing him now. He picked her up, carried her to the stairs and up to the second floor, then softly kicked open the door at the end of the hall. Their colonial was beautiful to start, but Mae had made it a real home. The solid oak four-poster dominated the master bedroom’s space. Dressers, night tables, a huge oval mirror, everything matched. Mae had picked it all out, arranged it with care. He laid her down on the soft white quilt, kissed her. She whispered some delightful words, then came a little boy’s call. Mae smiled, touched her husband’s cheek, left for a moment.

  Jim began to undress. Listening to his wife’s tender whispers in the next room, he unbuttoned his shirt, took off his gold watch, laid it on the richly polished bureau. He gazed a moment at their wedding picture, framed in thick silver. As he took off his gold cross, he glimpsed himself in the mirror—the face of a man who’d been blessed and knew it. Jim kissed the gold. A lucky man, a winner.

  ROUND THREE

  If you get the breaks, you’re in there, you’re up on top, but if you don’t, you’re on the bottom.

  —James J. Braddock,

  as quoted by Peter Heller in In This Corner

  Newark, New Jersey

  September 25, 1933

  Jim Braddock stood at the same oak bureau where he’d once felt so lucky. Opening one drawer after another, he shifted through the meager pickings of tattered clothes, mended repeatedly by patient fingers. The top of his dresser was scarred now and barren. No watch. No cross. Not even the silver frame to hold his and Mae’s wedding picture.

  Outside the sooty window, something scampered through the dingy alley. A rat was Jim’s guess, part of the wildlife that came with the view from a basement apartment in a rundown tenement near the Newark docks.

  Dressing was a quick affair these days. Whatever clothes Mae had patched the night before and dunked in the washtub, he pulled on. No need to spend time winding his expensive watch or kissing his solid gold cross for luck since both had been pawned years before. Besides, by now, everyone’s luck had run out—even Jim Braddock’s.

  Behind him, three hungry kids shared the same mattress in the chilly family bedroom. Steps away hung a worn blanket, Mae’s idea of turning one cramped room into two. On the other side of the thin wool, his wife cooked breakfast by the light of a single bare bulb. Jim heard the meat frying, felt his empty stomach clutch at the smell.

  A drawer stuck and Jim pushed hard to close it. The once richly polished bureau was part of
a set that had been sold off piece by piece: the four-poster bed, the framed oval mirror, the night tables, even the silver lining around their wedding picture—but not the picture inside. Propped for Jim to look at every day, his wedding photo was the last possession left sitting on his chest of drawers.

  Jim gazed at the image of Mae in her wedding dress, radiant and rosy cheeked, himself next to her, wearing a suit of clothes he no longer owned. To another man, this blissful couple might appear ridiculous, grinning fools from another time and place, completely oblivious to a future like this one. Another man might have shoved the photo into the deepest recess he could find. But Jim liked seeing the picture every day. It was the singular reminder of what had gone right in his life. The one thing that still made him a lucky man.

  Tugging back the hanging blanket, Jim stepped into the kitchen—an old gas stove, a table, and four chairs. A few feet away sat a single shabby sofa. The Braddock parlor. Mae stood at the stove, frying two thin slices of bologna. Since their meals had become spartan, her curves seemed less pronounced, her face more careworn. Shadowy circles now lived beneath her eyes, and her plump, pink cheeks had become sunken and pallid. To Jim, however, she was still a raving beauty.

  “Can’t find my good socks,” he called, buttoning his frayed shirt.

  Mae turned from the stove, her voice a scolding whisper. “Jim!”

  He winced, lowered his voice. “Sorry. God. Sorry.”

  “Mama.” The sleepy whimper came from the other side of the blanket. Rose Marie, their youngest.

  Mae closed her eyes. “Great.” The damage had been done. She leaned down, reached into the oven, pulled out his socks—the ones that hadn’t gone threadbare yet in the heels and toes.

  “Sorry,” said Jim again, taking the precious strips of wool like an archeologist handling a rare find.

  His wife sighed and turned away. Now that Rosy was awake, the girl would want breakfast too. With resignation, Mae picked up the knife and sawed a third sliver of meat from the meager stump.

  “I washed them last night,” she said. “I took them right off your feet, remember? You were dead to the world.”

  Jim shook his head, sat at the table, pulled on his socks. The fabric smelled clean and felt warm—toasty heaven on his freezing toes. He smiled at his wife. “How can I keep ’em this warm?”

  Mae might have replied with a quip, or even a smile, but a tiny figure pushed forcefully through the blanket, reminding her of yet another reason she just couldn’t.

  “Mama, I want to eat too.”

  Mae hated that her six-year-old was too young to remember what it had been like to live in a spacious, well-heated house with a stocked pantry, to take a drive downtown and blithely purchase a brand-new pair of shoes and a pretty hat at Bamberger’s Department Store, to have a sumptuous picnic on a sunny day in Weequahic Park, throwing extra bread to the birds, or spending hours window-shopping on Market Street then refreshing yourself with an ice cream soda at the drug store on the corner.

  As Rosy climbed onto her father’s lap, Jim smoothed her hair and kissed her head. To him, she was as pretty as her mother, with big, curious eyes and silky, chestnut-colored hair. Yet her face appeared gaunt, and her fingers and toes felt far too cold. Jim hugged her close. Seeing his children grow up like this was harder to take than any beating he’d endured in the ring.

  “We got a notice yesterday,” Mae told him. “On the gas and electric.”

  Jim’s shoulders sagged a fraction. He didn’t know which was worse about the Depression—fighting so hard for so little, or having no real opponent to target, nothing and no one to haul off and punch.

  He looked toward a mason jar on the shelf, where they kept their big “rainy day” savings—a better bet for holding his money than his stocks and bonds had proved to be. He reached for the jar, shook it. The few remaining coins jangled against the glass. He set it on the kitchen table, raised an eyebrow.

  “It must have been raining lately, more than I noticed.”

  Mae didn’t laugh at the joke. She didn’t even smile. She stared at Jim, considering her once golden husband. His eyes appeared hollow now, the circles of fatigue like sooty smudges. His broken nose had healed slightly broader, one ear had gone cauliflower, and his clothes hung off his thinning frame. Even his teasing, boyish sense of humor had faded into recurrent stretches of weary sullenness. Yet Mae knew that beneath his rough morning stubble, his visible exhaustion, James Braddock’s square jaw was still firm, his quiet strength still evident. Mae counted on that strength like a tent counted on its center pole in a storm. She could keep herself steady, she told herself, keep the children protected—as long as he held her up, as long as he stayed firm and strong for all of them.

  Jim ignored Mae’s stony silence and placed Rosy on an empty chair. “I’ll get the milk.”

  At four in the morning, the sun had a few hours left to sleep. Jim didn’t have that luxury. The loading dock foreman would be choosing men soon and he had to get down there or he’d miss his chance. Quickly climbing the basement steps, Jim emerged into the predawn gloom of the tenement courtyard.

  His charming white colonial with the manicured lawn and two-hundred-year-old tamarack trees felt like the remnants of a dream. The heart of a slum was where he lived now. Filthy bricks stretched eight floors up. Clotheslines crisscrossed the quad, the hanging laundry fluttering above him like raggedy signal flags. Below, rats scavenged through spilled garbage cans, consuming whatever paltry crumbs were left to pilfer.

  Jim moved to the spot where the milkman always left his early morning deliveries. Two fat bottles stood empty. A few final drops of white clung to their insides. Pink past-due slips circled their necks like collars of shame.

  “Mama, I want to eat too.”

  That moment Jim knew Rosy’s words would haunt him all day long. Every hour. Every minute. He picked up the bottles, went back inside, showed them to Mae. Her face went pale. She held his gaze. Jim looked away. Like a hard tenth round, he felt himself weakening.

  “Oh!” said Mae. Something in her voice surprised him. “Some left over, I think.”

  Jim watched her open the icebox, pull out the last cold milk bottle, barely an eighth full. At the sink, she began to top it off with water. She smiled at Rosy, winked at him. “Who needs a cow?”

  Jim didn’t laugh at her joke, just sat down heavily at the table. Mae’s smile was brittle. He could see the effort she was making, hear the forced brightness in her voice. She went to the stove, picked up three dishes, slid a slice of hot bologna onto each one. As she set down the pathetic plates of food in front of them, Jim found himself watching his wife’s hands. He remembered Mae’s hands from years before, when her brother routinely invited him to dinner at the Foxes’ house. He’d become entranced back then, watching such small, dainty hands offering him such large, heaping platters of buttered mashed potatoes, thickly sliced slabs of beef, steaming heads of cabbage, corned beef, and soda bread. He remembered how her looks, her eyes, had distinctly offered him more.

  “Rosy,” Jim said, turning to his daughter. “Your fork, please.”

  The meat may have been thin, but as he cut his little girl’s portion with the fork’s edge, the scent of sizzling fat made his mouth water. Maybe it was the idea of hot food that revived Jim, maybe the memory of that young, flirtatious Mae, or the sight of her now, trying so hard to appear happy for the sake of her husband and daughter. Whatever it was, when he spoke again, he did his best to sound more than cheerful—he sounded downright hopeful.

  “I got Feldman tonight.”

  Abe Feldman. Eighteen wins, one loss, no draws. A better record than his these days, but Jim wasn’t telling Mae that.

  “That’s half a C,” he said instead. And half a hundred was better pay than a week’s worth of sweat on the loading dock, which he seldom got anyway. Well worth a few rounds of physical punishment.

  “I beat him, maybe I can get back up to seventy-five.”

  Mae looked u
p from her plate. The old fear in her eyes was better hidden than the doubt in his, but the familiar dread shuddered through her anyway. It had been two months since her husband’s last fight, and well over a year since she’d started actively praying that he’d give up the gloves for good. In the past, for his sake, she’d tolerated the sport. But as the Depression began to take its toll on her family, Mae had grown to hate the ring, its punishments—and all its empty promises.

  “Mama, I want some more.”

  “I’m sorry, honey. We need to save some for the boys.”

  Jim looked at Mae and Rosy. Both their plates were empty now. His still held that mouth-watering slice of greasy meat.

  “Mae, you know what I dreamed about last night,” Jim said, rising from the table. “I dreamed I was having dinner at the Ritz…” He pulled on his old coat, his mended gloves, his frayed hat “…and I had a big, thick steak…” He spread his thumb and finger. “This thick, Rosy, and so much mashed potatoes and ice cream, I’m just not hungry anymore.”

  Rosy studied her father with lips pursed, eyebrows skeptically knitted together. Even at six, she was no pushover. Jim could see there was more scamming to be done—

  “Can you help me out?” he asked his daughter. “Mommy cooked and I don’t want it to go to waste.”

  When Rosy continued to hesitate, Jim picked up her fork again, this time to stab his own slice and deposit it on her plate. Eyes wide, stomach still hungry, the child immediately began to eat.

  “Jimmy—” Mae tried to object, but his mouth covered hers, halting the debate.

  When the kiss ended, Mae’s gaze found his. You can’t work on an empty stomach, her eyes protested. What are you thinking?

  Jim’s answer was simple. “You’re my girls.”

  When Jim thought he and his family had it bad, he just walked around the block. What he saw on the street made him count his blessings, few as they were. Near the tenement where he and Mae rented their one room, junker cars lay next to trashcan fires in an abandoned lot. Every day, Jim passed by the line of them on his way to the docks, rusted out and broken down, their cold glass windows steamed opaque with warm breath. Homes on wheels for the unemployed.