Cinderella Man Page 7

  His boxing shoes.

  Mae wasn’t surprised. Jim had been boxing too long to let a couple of big suits keep him from the ring.

  “Are you training today?” she asked.

  “I was thinking of selling them.”

  Jim word’s hung between them. Mae didn’t know what to feel, what to say.

  “Oh,” she finally replied.

  “I figure the three shifts and what I get for these, by the end of the week, we can pay off the grocer.”

  Mae looked at the shoes: long laces to support the ankles, leather soles still sturdy. They’d carried her husband across countless rings, buoyed him against every kind of opponent. They’d taken him up the ladder and down again, but always en route to a dream.

  Mae swallowed with difficulty. She wanted to say a dozen things to her husband, but all that came out was, “Don’t take less than a dollar, Jim.”

  Jim Braddock saw the tears pooling in his wife’s gaze. He gave her a weak smile. “You go home now. I’ll stand.”

  Mae gestured to Jay and Howard in their soggy clothes, her fingers brushing Rosy’s damp hair. “I got to turn on the heat, Jimmy,” she whispered. “They’re chilled through.”

  He nodded.

  “Got ya!”

  Howard had jumped in another puddle, launching a giant splash at his older brother. As Mae sighed, Jim put Rosy down then spun and grabbed Howard, lifting the eight-year-old high in the air.

  “You know what happens to little monkeys who don’t listen to their mother?”

  Howard squealed.

  “They get…the boot!”

  As Jim dangled one of his boxing shoes into Howard’s face, Jay pointed and shrieked with laughter. Howard stuck his tongue out at his older brother, then Jim set the little boy down.

  “Go on, now,” Jim told his family.

  Mae handed her husband the empty soup pot. She gathered the children together and towed them along, heading toward home.

  Jim’s gaze followed his wife and children, and then he turned forward again. The back end of the truck seemed as far away as anything in his life, but since the Crash, Jim had mastered the frustrating art of waiting.

  Snapping up his collar against the biting wind, he watched the endless line, impossible in number, move forward. Silently, slowly, by half steps and half inches.

  Hours later, Jim entered the building on Summit Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street, an area once called West Hoboken but now part of Union City. He walked past the garage and through the narrow hallway. As he ascended the creaking wooden steps, the sounds from above flowed over him: the slip-slap of rope against wood, the smack of bag gloves against punch mitts, the grunting exhales that accompanied right-left-rights as taped-up fists dented heavy bags.

  Alone on the staircase, Jim stopped for a minute to lean on the banister and compose himself. He was tired and frozen, and his back was sore as hell from the torturous dock work and the long soup line. Still, the exhaustion couldn’t stop the old adrenaline from rising, or the inveterate craving to pull out the boxing shoes tucked in his coat, slip between the ropes, and begin to throw.

  It was the perfect moment for Jim to feel sorry for himself. But he didn’t have that luxury, not with his family depending on him, and not with his trainer, Joe Jeannette, just a stone’s throw away. After all, Braddock lectured himself, what do I have to complain about? I got my day at the stadium, didn’t I? I got my shot at a title. More than Jeannette ever got.

  Joe Jeannette had never been a champion, but he’d always been a hero to Jim. The former coal truck driver and son of a blacksmith had started boxing before Jim had even been born. In his day, Jeanette had displayed extraordinary endurance in the ring. His forty-nine-round fight against Sam McVey in 1909 was the stuff of legends. Jeanette had overcome twenty-two knockdowns in three hours and twelve minutes to win on technical knockout when McVey simply went to his corner and collapsed, exhausted, on his stool.

  On offense, Jeanette had displayed quicksilver hand speed and dangerous inside punches. On defense, he’d been slippery and elusive. Nobody could catch him. Within two years of turning pro, back in 1904, the sculpted, strikingly handsome Jeanette had become one of the best heavyweights in the nation.

  If Joe had been white, he would have been given a shot at the heavyweight title. But Jeanette was a black boxer. Few white fighters would consent to enter the ring with him. Even Jack Johnson, a white opponent whom Joe had fought seven times before, drew the color line after he’d won the heavyweight title.

  Jeannette never got over Jack Johnson’s denying him a shot at the championship, but he sure as hell didn’t quit. Instead, Jeannette took on the other great black heavyweights of his time, and in his long career fought, officially and unofficially, more than four hundred bouts—from Paris, London, and Montreal to Baltimore, Philly, and New York.

  By 1919, at the age of forty, Joe Jeannette had made the decision to retire without ever getting his shot at being the heavyweight champion of the world, but even now, fourteen years later, Joe was far from out of the fight game. A respected New Jersey referee, Jeannette had made his Summit Avenue boxing gym one of the most popular around. The man was never too busy to give pointers to a young boxer, and Jim had relished the hours he’d spent here. It was a place where he’d always felt a genuine camaraderie. It was the gym where’d he’d first met Joe Gould.

  As Jim crested the narrow staircase, the familiar smell of leather and sweat hit him, along with that slight whiff of motor oil from the garage below. Jim stood unmoving at the gym’s entrance, his eyes skimming the main floor, taking in the shadowboxers and sparring partners, the slick shoulders working heavy bags. At the far end of the room, a scrawny rookie was dancing around a muscled veteran. The rookie’s moves were lightning quick, and the kid landed more than a few jabs on his heavier, more experienced opponent. The scene looked so familiar, Jim could almost hear his old friend asking…

  “You got a manager, kid?”

  “No. My brother does my business. He’s a plumber. Hey, aren’t you Joe Gould?”

  “Yeah, and if your brother agrees, maybe I can take over the job…”

  “Jimmy Braddock, what’s going on? You come to spar?”

  Across the room, Joe Jeannette tossed a friendly wave. Jim tried to return the man’s smile, but he couldn’t quite manage it. Woodenly, he walked toward the practice ring. He set his soup pot on the floor, set the wet bread on the soup pot, then reached into his coat with his casted hand. It took a moment’s struggling to pull his boxing shoes free.

  Joe Gould stepped out of the bathroom and into the corridor. Checking his watch, he headed toward the gym floor. Jeannette had promised him a look at a young comer, and Gould didn’t have all night. But when he reached the main doorway, he suddenly stopped.

  Jim Braddock was here. He was standing beside Jeannette. Next to them stood a young, leanly muscled black boxer. As Gould watched, Jim handed his boxing shoes to the younger man, who paid Jim two bits.

  Few words were exchanged, and whatever they’d said, Gould couldn’t hear. He simply watched Jim stiffly bend down, pick up his soup pot and bread, then turn toward the front entrance.

  That’s when Joe Jeannette’s gaze lifted and he spotted Gould standing in the rear doorway. Jeannette’s eyes met Gould’s expectantly, but Gould shook his head and stepped back, behind the door.

  Better for us both if Jim doesn’t see me, Gould decided. Better for us both if I just let him go.

  ROUND SIX

  If either man falls through weakness or otherwise, he must get up unassisted,…

  —The Queensbury Rules,

  Number 4

  So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

  Values have shrunken to fantastic levels: taxes have risen, our ability to pay has fallen, government of all kinds is faced by serious curtai
lment of income.

  The means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade, the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side, farmers find no market for their produce, the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of un employed citizens face the grim problem of existence and an equal number toil with little return.

  These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and our fellow men…

  The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. In this dedication of a nation, we humbly ask the blessing of God. May he protect each and every one of us.

  Jim sat at the rickety kitchen table in his basement apartment, reading President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech aloud from the paper, trying hard to find inspiration from the words. Beside him, Mae counted coins from the rainy-day mason jar, trying equally hard to keep the gas and electric going.

  By late fall, Jim’s weeks had become an unending string of dismal gray mornings and sweaty afternoons of manual labor. At the dock, Jim and Mike were paired for strenuous unloading jobs day after day: barrels of molasses, bags of rice or sugar or coffee, boxes of bananas. Jim had learned to ignore the ache beneath his plaster-encased right, forced his left to do the work of two hands.

  One afternoon, at the close of a morning shift, Jim was just clearing the dock’s gate when somebody’s daughter ran up to the group.

  “They’re hiring extra at the coal yards!”

  Jim took off with the others in a sprint.

  Now, after his dock shift had ended, Jim shoveled coal—with his left arm, of course. It was another new exercise, another new struggle, but eventually he found a rhythm and a balance to make the one-handed shoveling work.

  Every night, Mae waited up for Jim on the lumpy cushions of the family’s worn sofa. She was usually dozing by the time he crept through the door, past midnight. Tonight was no different.

  The sound of two quarters clinking into the mason jar stirred Mae from her sleepy state. She glimpsed her husband, black with coal dust, stumbling through the hanging blanket and toward their bed.

  Jim wanted nothing more than to fall into the crisp sheets that Mae had turned back for the two of them. The kids were asleep on their own small mattress, and Jim blinked at the sheets on his and Mae’s bed. The flat expanse looked so very white, so very clean, a cloud from heaven. He glanced down at his filthy self, covered with coal dust and dried sweat from head to toe.

  He sunk down and lay on the floor.

  “Jimmy,” whispered Mae, pushing through the hanging blanket. “We can wash the sheets.”

  But Jim was out, already snoring. Mae sighed and pulled the covers off their bed to lay beside her husband on the bare floorboards.

  The winter of 1933–34 was one of the coldest in recent memory, with an average temperature hovering around eleven degrees Fahrenheit in the Northeast. The Braddocks hung on to their meager apartment, but just barely.

  As the world turned white one morning with a fine dusting of snow, Mae emerged from the basement of their old tenement building. Tramping past closed storefronts and abandoned lots, she traveled to the next neighborhood and dropped off her boys at school.

  “Why can’t I go to school yet?” asked Rosy, walking home with Mae. “Is it because I’m a girl?”

  “Maybe,” said Mae, struggling to hold her footing on the icy cracks in the broken sidewalk. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  They plodded in silence for a time, through the wet, snowy lots, when Mae was distracted by a brand-new car blasting its radio. It was a rare sight, seeing such a shiny new luxury. Nobody she knew had one.

  “Mama, who’s the man at our house?”

  Mae followed Rosy’s pointing finger. A man in a public utilities uniform stood at the side of their building, near their electric meter. With her daughter in tow, Mae doubled her strides until she reached the gas and electric man. “Can I help you, sir?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. You’re past due.”

  The man was probably in his mid thirties, but his eyes looked much older. They were sad and tired, and Mae looked into them with naked panic as his words sunk in.

  “You can’t,” she said. Maybe if she begged? “There’s kids. Please.”

  “I don’t, they’ll let me go. They let two guys go for it already.”

  He tried to turn away, but Mae wouldn’t let him. She forced him to stand there and look at her, stand there and hear her. “This apartment, it’s what we got left that keeps us hanging on.”

  “Lady. Lady, I got kids too.”

  Jim and Mike had been let go early from their Newark dockwork, fifteen cents in their pockets for the six hours of backbreaking labor. As they often did with half days or less, they walked and hitched to nearby towns, trying to find other work—cleaning out lots, shoveling coal, loading and unloading ties at the railroad yards of Weehawken—but there was nothing today. Exhausted, chilled to the bone, they headed home.

  “Hey…we got until tomorrow!” cried a loud voice.

  Jim’s heavy steps slowed. Across the street, a young man was arguing with two city marshals. The man wore a double-breasted pinstriped suit, tastefully tailored for the 1920s, its sheen dulled by excessive wear, the buttons mismatched, one sleeve slightly unraveling at the shoulder. His wife stood beside him, fighting back tears in a frayed black coat, its thick wool patched with strips of red and blue cloth, its once elegant fur collar in tatters. On the sidewalk around the couple, their furniture was scattered—a mahogany table, matching chairs, a dresser spilling clothes, night table, bed board, mattress turned on its side, lamps standing erect in the slushy snow next to the end tables meant to hold them.

  The marshals were hard to miss on the rundown brick streets of Weehawken. Their uniforms were crisp and neatly pressed—the first really clean clothes Jim had seen in weeks—and their thick, warm coats were hardly patched. One officer was young and polite. The other was a gruff old veteran who had heard it all, and was tired of listening. While Jim watched, the young husband caught the edge of an official-looking document the older officer was clutching, tried to yank it out of the marshal’s hand.

  “This notice says we got another day,” the young husband insisted.

  The older marshal stepped back, stumbling against a small couch on the curb, spilling embroidered pillows onto the stained snow.

  “Sons-a-bitches,” the young man cried. “Sons-a-goddamned bitches.” He glanced across the street and exchanged a brief look with Jim.

  “Come on,” said Mike, tugging on Jim’s sleeve, steering him toward home. But Jim was already moving across the street, a strange light in his eyes. Mike shrugged, caught up with his partner, then took the lead.

  “You can’t do this.” The young woman’s voice was edged with hysteria. “Once we’re out, we’ll never get back in. We’ll never get back on our feet, you see?”

  Her husband jumped in front of the marshals as they moved to fit a padlock to the brownstone’s front door. “Please, I got a factory spot I can get next week…”

  The officers thrust the young man aside and snapped the padlock in place. The woman winced at the harsh sound. “The notice said we got another day,” she whispered, her tone defeated despite her words. “We’re gonna talk to the landlord tonight. He’ll be okay with us when he finds out we got something coming up. Please, if we make it until next week, we’ll be okay…”

  “Excuse me,” Mike said politely. He stood at the curb, tattered hat in hand, Jim Braddock at his shoulder. When nobody paid attention, he spoke again, much louder. “Excuse me!”

  The marshals turned to face him, the young officer reaching for the nightstick on his belt. Mike smiled deferentially. “City marshals, right? How are you boys doing?”

  Neither officer spoke. The older man just glared.

  “Would you mind, Marsha
l, if I had a quick look at that eviction notice?” Mike asked, stepping closer. “See, eviction notices are public record. Tabulae communium, as it were. And though each is specifically dated, city marshals have been known to try and complete a week’s worth of evictions on a Monday, so they don’t have to keep coming back and forth to shit little towns like Weehawken.”

  The older officer’s attention strayed from Mike to Jim Braddock with a mixture of recognition and wariness. The former boxer’s physical presence was hard to ignore, even though his clothes hung from a frame hollowed from too much work and not enough nourishment.

  “So,” said Mike. “How about I take a look at the date on that paperwork? The order’s legit, we’ll just walk on.”

  Now the younger officer rested one hand on his nightstick. “Or else what?”

  Mike just grinned, then turned to his partner. “Hey, Jim, I bet you’d like to see it too, wouldn’t you?” Now both marshals were looking past Mike to the man at his side. “You guys know Jim Braddock, don’t you?”

  “Jeez,” said the older officer, suddenly respectful. “I thought it was him. I seen you fight, Jim.”

  Mike eased a little closer, glancing at the crinkled document in the older man’s hand. “So what do you say, fellas? Honest mistakes happen all the time.”

  The older marshal lowered his eyes. “Maybe we got our days mixed up.”

  Mike nodded, his smile forced. “Sure glad we could work this one out. You want to help us move their furniture back in?”

  The young officer’s expression hardened. “Don’t push your luck, pal.”

  The older man unlatched the padlock and hooked it to his belt. With a respectful nod to Jim, he led his partner away. The young man and woman stood in awe of their rescuers. Mike grabbed a corner of the dresser, then gestured to Jim to grab the other side.

  As they lifted the heavy piece, Mike’s grin was sincere. “You know, Braddock, a fellow like you could come in handy.”