The town car was pulling to the curb on Larchmont. “I’m going to stop in here right now and get you some boxing gloves,” James was saying. “We’ll start the first lesson this afternoon.”
They squared off on the back lawn near the garage, James with a pair of huge, greasy, worn gloves and Chris with a little pair in shiny red leather. Chris was stiff with fear at the strangeness of it and James did his best to show him how to relax and how to place his feet so he’d be in balance and able to move back and forth like a dancer. He told Chris to hit him in the belly as hard as he could and Chris enjoyed hitting with all his might. James told him to turn his left toe in a little and to pivot on the right foot—“now with your body behind it”—smack!—“that’s better!” Chris was enjoying the sensation of sweat oiling his body. If he kept this up he was going to have a big chest and a hard, tight stomach like James. Wham-bang, wham-bang. “Hey, that’s pretty good! I could really feel that one.”
In his going-on-eleven years, Chris could not remember hearing anything that made him feel so alive. He listened devoutly, desperately anxious to please, as James drew him into a new world where belligerence was fascinatingly linked to skill. Chris found, under James’s tutelage, that he could pull his head back a few inches to avoid a punch, or deflect it with his glove. “The first thing to learn is how not to get hit.” James dramatized his lesson with stirring accounts of his Navy bouts: like the time he forgot to duck and the Navy middleweight champ Jocko Kennedy knocked him cold with a haymaking right. “I was out for ten minutes. They thought I was dead. They say you hear birdies but it’s a funny thing—I heard telephone wires. You know how you hear them buzzing sometimes in the country?”
James had just told him he had had enough for a while and Chris was stretched out on the grass, listening. He had never heard anyone tell such wonderful stories. He was looking up into James’s face as the chauffeur told him of his determination to fight Kennedy again. James’s shipmates had lost their month’s pay on him and he felt he owed it to them to turn the tables on Kennedy. On shipboard, all the way from San Diego to the Philippines, James practiced how to duck under that haymaker right, and then to bob up quickly with a left hook of his own. Day after day in the hot sun of the Oriental seas James fought his imaginary battle with the fearsome Jocko Kennedy. It was like fighting Iggy Gonzalez, Chris was thinking. Was there anything more exciting in the whole world than to choose the one person you are most afraid of and then to devote yourself to a long-range careful plan for licking him? Chris lived through the days when James was preparing himself for his ordeal. The plan was to challenge Jocko formally to a rematch when the Pacific Fleet assembled in Manila Bay.
Chris was sitting up now with his arms clasped around his bony knees. His gentle face was set in an unusually serious and manly expression, as if his vicarious sharing of the chauffeur’s experiences had already cut him off from his sheltered child’s world.
“We better not get too cooled off,” James interrupted himself. “Let’s go one more round and I’ll finish the story.”
“Oh please, please finish it,” Chris begged. He was sailing into Manila Bay, ready for Jocko Kennedy. On Sundays his father had read him Dickens and James Fenimore Cooper and it had been rather pleasant. But this wasn’t listening to a story, it was being inside a story. He and James on one side and Jocko and Iggy on the other. Chris was in training to duck Gonzalez’s fiercest blows. Oh, he had to beat him, he had to, in this grudge match in Manila Bay!
“James, please, finish about you and Jocko.” Wham-bang—inexplicably Chris pistoned his small fists into the air. With his newfound feeling of power came a new kind of laugh.
“Well, the night we hit Manila we all got shore leave. And you know how the sailors are, a lot of young punks who don’t know any better, they hit the bars pretty hard. Around one o’clock in the morning I was in some dive called the Yellow Dragon feeling pretty good. There was an argument in the other corner, some loudmouth getting fresh with one of the Filipino barmaids and I look over and see my old friend Jocko Kennedy. I say, ‘Pipe down, Jocko, ye’re rockin’ the boat,” something like that. This Jocko, he bellows like a bull. Twenty Shore Police can’t hold him when he’s boozed up. I see him coming at me with a bottle. My shipmates, they say to me, ‘Let’s powder out of here, Jimmy, that Jocko’s the toughest rough-and-tumble fighter in the Navy.’ All those months I been practicing to meet him in the ring where I c’n use my footwork and science, not in a dim-lit bar with a bottle. But I tell my pals, ‘You clear out if you want to. I ain’t afraid of no man, bottle or no bottle.’ The boys back away to give me fighting room. Jocko comes at me swinging the bottle at my head. I do just what I been practicing on shipboard. I duck and then bob up quick and put everything I have into a left hook to the jaw. I follow it up with a right cross as he’s going down. Jocko Kennedy is through for the night. His jaw is broken and he’s still in sick bay when his ship pulls out.”
There was a long, delicious silence as Chris saw himself in the smoky haze of the Yellow Dragon looking on in nonchalant curiosity as Iggy Gonzalez was being carried out with a slack and bloody jaw.
“OK, now let’s work one more round,” James said and Chris jumped up and assumed the stance his mentor had taught him. “That’s it, now tuck your chin in a little more, now move around and jab, snap it out, snap, snap!” Chris was feeling light on his feet and formidable. Someday he would have colored pictures on his arms and know how to do as many things as James.
Mrs. Samuels came out to find the new chauffeur and was surprised to find him sparring with her little boy. “Why, Chris, where did you get the gloves?”
Chris stopped, panting and sweating proudly. “Jimmy got them for me, Mom.”
“Who?”
“Jimmy.” He nodded toward his friend.
“Oh. James?” Mrs. Samuels looked at the chauffeur. “I’ll have Mr. Samuels reimburse you for that.”
“It’s my pleasure, Mrs. Samuels,” James said. “It’s my present to him.”
“But—you hardly know him,” Mrs. Samuels said.
“I wouldn’t say that. We’re pretty good pals already, aren’t we, Chris?”
“He used to be a real fighter, Mom. He’s been teaching me a lot of keen stuff. Look—watch me, watch me, Mom!”
Chris began swarming all over James, fearlessly, as James let the small punches through his guard.
“You’ve got a wonderful little boy here, Mrs. Samuels.”
“Yes. Thank you,” Mrs. Samuels said. She didn’t know why the sight of them sporting like this should disturb her even mildly. Was it because it pointed up some failure on Sol’s part? Or because there was a certain roughneck quality in James, under the careful chauffeur manners, that could coarsen Chris if their relationship grew too close?
“James, I’d like you to have the car out in front in fifteen minutes,” Mrs. Samuels said.
“Very good, madam,” James said.
“Chris, you look terribly overheated. Don’t you think you should go in and take a nice cool shower?”
His mother was forever telling him things in the form of questions.
“I want to stay out here with James,” Chris said.
His mother stared at him. She had never heard her son speak so positively, almost rudely, before.
As Mrs. Samuels returned to the house, James looked over at Chris and winked. Chris grinned. Their wink. The beginning of an entirely new experience, of an intimacy outside of and even opposed to his mother and father.
All through his school days Chris looked forward to his boxing lesson with James. In two weeks it had become a ritual, the sparring punctuated by talks on the grass between rounds, the valorous accounts of James’s fistic jousts that had begun to crowd out of Chris’s mind the gallant battles of Sir Lancelot and Sir Galahad. And then there were the glorious stories of the sea, when James had hung on to the wheel of a sinking destroyer, or had to dive into the shark-infested waters of the South Pacific to sa
ve an exhausted shipmate.
When Chris’s father did break away from the studio (“I’ll try to break away in time,” was the phrase he always used) his description of the more harrowing events of the day was frequently interrupted now by Chris’s boastful reference to some singular deed of James’s. “James was the best fighter in the whole Pacific Fleet, Dad,” Chris would say suddenly, interrupting his parents’ familiar conversation to speak his mind on a subject that seemed to him of far greater importance than all this talk-talk about making pictures.
One evening after dinner Chris’s father apologized for his delinquencies as a parent and offered to make atonement by taking up Melville’s Typee where they had left off nearly four weeks before. To his surprise, Chris said he had promised to meet “Jimmy” after dinner—Jimmy had something in his room he had promised to show Chris. Chris hurried off from the dinner table as soon as he was excused.
“What is this Jimmy business?” Sol Samuels wanted to know.
“Chris is simply wild about James,” Mrs. Samuels explained. “I don’t remember ever seeing him like this before.”
Mr. Samuels frowned. “I wonder if it’s a good idea, letting him get this chummy with that fellow. After all, we don’t know very much about him.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much,” Mrs. Samuels said. “He seems to adore Chris. And he’s all the things a boy would idolize—a sailor and a fighter and—” She saw a suggestion of regret or jealousy come into her husband’s eyes for a moment and she quickly added, “I’m afraid he’s at an age when being an ex-fighter or even having a spectacular tattoo seems a little more important than merely being the head of a movie studio.”
Sol Samuels nodded, absently, and then he sighed with an exaggerated intake of breath. “God, I had a helluva day. That Gloria may bring in millions at the box office but she takes every dollar of it out of my hide.”
“Those stupid, temperamental girls,” Mrs. Samuels sympathized, shaking her head at a whole generation of glamorous ladies who fought each other tooth and nail for larger dressing rooms, more close-ups and better billing.
The chauffeur’s room above the garage was rather small and unprepossessing but Chris entered it with a sense of wonder. It supposed a new sense of intimacy with his big friend, of entering into an almost forbidden world of adults and their strange, secret ways. Over the chauffeur’s bed were three pictures of young women, two of them in bathing suits and one of them almost naked.
“That middle one is my sweetie,” James said. “She works in the movies once in a while. She’s an extra girl. Maybe one of these days your old man will give her a screen test.”
“I hate girls,” Chris said.
“Just wait about five more years,” James said.
“Oh boy, a gun,” Chris said, seeing a rifle set on pegs above the door.
“That’s my deer-hunting rifle,” James said. “One of these days I’ll take you up in the Sierras and we’ll get ourselves a twelve-point buck.”
“Can I hold it, Jimmy, please?” Chris begged.
“I don’t know if your mother ’n’ father’d like it.”
“I won’t tell them if you won’t.”
James grinned and roughed up Chris’s curly yellow-brown hair.
“You’re a rascal. OK. It’ll be our secret.”
He took the rifle down from the wall, checking it to make sure it was safe, and handed it to Chris. Chris held it up and made the expert ricochet sound that has replaced in young vocabularies the old fashioned bang-bang. Then James set it back on its pegs again. Chris’s mother and father hated guns and wouldn’t have one in the house.
“When I’m big will you teach me how to shoot it, Jimmy?”
“Sure, Chris, you just stick with me and I’ll teach you everything I know. And one of these days when you’re a big famous movie producer like your father I’ll be your assistant, how about that?”
Chris frowned slightly because everybody from the studio was always telling him he’d be a famous producer like his father one of these days. The people who told him that were his father’s friends and not his friends and it worried him that Jimmy, his own private grown-up friend, should mention the studio like the others.
“I don’t want to be a producer. I want to be an explorer and an archaeologist.”
“An archaeologist? Hey, what’s that?”
“You dig up old cities that are all covered over with grass and trees. Pyramids and stuff like that.”
“Like digging for buried treasure, huh? Well, you’re going to make a bundle, whatever you do. You’re a smart kid.”
“Have you got any more guns?”
James laughed at him and jabbed him lightly, playfully, on the jaw.
“What are you, the house dick around here? Come on, now, don’t be so nosy.”
“Chri-is, oh Chris-sy-boy,” his mother’s voice, plaintive but persistent, spanned the mysterious gulf between the main house and the chauffeur’s quarters.
“Now, remember, fella,” James said, “don’t tell your old lady I let you handle a gun.” He winked toward the bathing-suit pictures over his bed. “And I wouldn’t mention the cheesecake to her either. I don’t want her to think I’m leading you astray.”
Chris did not entirely understand the chauffeur’s meaning but he did appreciate the fact that they now shared certain rather delicious secrets together.
“I won’t tell, Jimmy,” he said solemnly, “I swear I won’t tell.”
“Attaboy. Hit the sack now. You got to get lots of sleep if you want to grow big and strong like your Uncle Jimmy.”
“I’m going to be in the Navy and have pictures all over my arm,” Chris said happily, as he ran to obey his mother’s now slightly more impatient call.
The next afternoon when James picked Chris up in front of the school in the hateful gold petit-point town car, the nemesis Iggy Gonzalez was watching disdainfully. James was resplendent in his dark maroon uniform.
“Jeez, get a load of the little prince,” Iggy said. He was a tough, young American with only the faintest echo of a Mexican accent.
Chris was hating the car and Iggy Gonzalez and all the moving-picture money that wasn’t his fault.
“Hey, stuck-up, what you got that guy in uniform for? So you don’t get your block knocked off?”
A few of Iggy’s admirers laughed. Iggy had wiry brown arms and a cocky way of walking, as if he was already a winning prizefighter like his big brother Chucho. Iggy came closer, charging the atmosphere with his schoolboy snarls. Chris was ready to duck into the safety of the coach when James said, “Go ahead. Stand up to him. Left hand in his face like I showed you.”
Chris was terribly afraid of Iggy Gonzalez but he was even more afraid to be a coward in the eyes of his benefactor Jimmy. Visibly trembling and embarrassingly close to tears, he did as the chauffeur told him. The two boys circled each other with intense concentration, Chris moving jerkily in his fear, Iggy feeling his man out coolly as befitted a veteran of these schoolyard bouts. Then he rushed at Chris, but Chris, to his own surprise, put into practice the cleverness James had been teaching him. He drew back quickly and stepped neatly to one side and Iggy went rushing foolishly by him like a little bull. Iggy cursed and came charging in again. Chris put out his left hand and Iggy ran into it. His nose began to bleed. Iggy’s rooters called out, “Come on, Ig, he can’t fight, knockum down. Hit ’im on his Jew nose!” They were vicious cries and made Chris panicky. But he kept pushing his left in the dark sweaty face coming at him, as James had tutored him. Iggy was breathing hard like a little bull through his soggy nose. He knocked Chris’s surprising left hand away and swung on him with his hard wild right. Chris cringed and ducked, both automatically and in fear, and they fell into each other, the clinch deteriorating into a stand-up wrestle. They teetered and fell to the ground, grabbing frantically at each other, Chris on the verge of hysterical sobbing and fighting with the survival strength of some small cornered animal. Iggy was working his hard,
bony knees into Chris’s neck when James decided this was the strategic moment to extricate his charge with honor.
“OK, kids, good fight, let’s call it a draw,” he said and he pulled them apart. Iggy had not expected any resistance from Chris. He stared at him with sullen respect. Chris was still trembling inside and giddy with relief at having the ordeal behind him, this thing he had dreaded from the time he was eight.
“Come on,” James said to Iggy. “Hop in. I’ll blow both you champs to a soda.”
It was a master stroke. Secretly, for a long time, Iggy Gonzalez had been wishing for a ride in the gold petit-point coach, and once he accepted he could hardly heckle Chris about it again.
Chris felt even closer to James after that. He’d be in James’s room almost every evening after dinner, and occasionally James would even be invited to Chris’s room, to examine the rock collection or to talk over some secret plans that Chris enjoyed being mysterious about in front of his parents.
Sol Samuels still had doubts about the wisdom of allowing so close a relationship but Mrs. Samuels said she had to admit that Chris was a good deal more manly than he had been before James came into his life. “Really, James has done wonders for him, Sol. I wouldn’t say he’s the best chauffeur we ever had, but he’s almost like a second father to Chris.”
A few weeks after school let out for the summer there was a company convention in Chicago and the Samuelses planned to be away for five or six days. They were going to take Chris along, and Winnie to care for him. But when Chris heard about it he said, Gee whiz what fun would that be, he’d rather stay home with James. “We thought this would be a good time to give James his week’s vacation,” Mrs. Samuels said. This conversation was held in the yard and James happened to overhear it. After lunch he came in and asked Mrs. Samuels if he could talk to her.
“Mrs. Samuels, I’ve been thinking what to do with my week. I thought I’d pack into the Sierras with a gun and some fishing tackle and sleep out of doors.”
Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales Page 20
