Max Baer and the Star of David

by Jay Neugeboren

  “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.”

  “Yes,” Joleen said.

  “I said it,” Max said. “I said the magic word. So now are you happy?”

  “Does it matter?” Joleen asked.

  “Sure it matters,” Max said. “It’s the most important thing there is, being happy and in love. What else is there?”

  “Loss,” Joleen said. “And there is also mystery, as you have suggested. Loss and mystery. There is the great unknown from which we come and to which we go, and there is all that we lose when we are between these worlds.”

  Max turned to me. “Do you understand her when she talks like this, Horace?” he asked.

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “Not me,” Max said. “Seems like hide-and-seek to me, but without rules, if you get what I mean.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

 
“Good,” Max said, and he whacked me on the shoulder. “So I guess that means I’m a mystery too, right?”

  “You have always been a mystery to me, Max Baer,” Joleen said.

  “Ah,” Max said, smiling. “And here I been thinking I had you fooled about me being the fool you been saying I am.”

  “You have always been a mystery to me, Max Baer,” Joleen said again. “A sweet mystery despite your vocation—your penchant for inflicting violence upon others—though about that, as you will soon learn, I am no stranger, so please sit. Please sit, and I will tell you about my brother.”

  “Sure thing,” Max said. “Only first—”

  And before either Joleen or I could stay his hand, he had reached into the dolls’ bed, taken out the necklace, and held it against Joleen’s throat.

  “Will you look at that!” he exclaimed. “Just look at that! I been thinking about how wonderful amazing it would look against your skin ever since I saw it in New York, and—”

  Joleen seized Max’s hand, wrested the necklace from it and, holding its clasp at one end, began whipping it against a wall—as if killing a snake—until the pearls sprung loose, sprayed into the air, and clattered to the floor.

  “Holy shit,” Max said.

  “You did not ask my permission,” Joleen said, and though her voice remained calm, in her eyes I saw a look that reminded me of nothing else but the look in Max’s eyes when, without mercy, he would be pummeling an opponent to the canvas. “They were my pearls once they were given to me, were they not?”

  Max stared at the back of his hand, now red with blood. Quickly, I wet a cloth and gave it to him, and he wiped the blood away, wrapped his hand in the cloth.

  “Holy shit,” he said again. “But they sure looked beautiful next to your skin—more beautiful than I imagined. And that’s worth the world to me … but holy shit, Joleen…”

  On my hands and knees, I began to gather the pearls.

  Joleen went to our cupboard, took out a candle, lit it, and knelt at my side. “When we lose the most valuable objects in the world, we search for them with a candle that costs but a penny,” she said. “My mother taught me that.”

  “You’re nuts,” Max said. “You’re also a bitch, but that don’t matter. I’ve known plenty of bitches in my time. You’re mean too—but mostly you’re a nut job. Totally bonkers, and maybe that’s all there is to it, to what I could never figure out till now.”

  Joleen blew out the candle, stood, and, without acknowledging what Max said, she took his hand—the one she had scratched—in her own. He did not resist. She unwrapped the cloth, wiped away the blood, and then rewrapped his hand.

  “I am a woman whose habits are such that you need not fear the loss of your much vaunted power,” she said. “I will gather the pearls later on—they have no means of escape, after all—and I will restring them so that they will be as before. I trust that will make you happy. But now, my friend, please sit beside my husband and I will tell you about my brother.”

  Max sat on the bed next to me. Although I took comfort from the fact that Joleen had, several times, referred to me as her husband, I remained wary, and to comfort myself I reached for Max’s hand, the one Joleen had scraped raw, and held it in mine, and when I did he gave me a smile so innocent it made me want to comfort him.

  “I never was a child, really,” Joleen began. “As I have told you before, I grew up on small farms owned by white people, mostly in southeast Louisiana, where my parents and older siblings worked as sharecroppers and domestics. I am not going to talk this evening of what our life was like back then, however, except to say it was not unlike that of other poor Negroes, nor was it unlike the lives of poor white families who lived nearby, though we had little commerce with them. In point of fact, I never talked with a white person until I had passed my ninth birthday.

  “I will talk tonight of my brother James, whom I loved dearly, and of his death, and of how this led to my taking leave of my family, to my marriage to Horace, and to the honor that has become mine: of knowing you as my friend, Max Baer, of benefiting from the generosity of your heart, and of the honor of bearing my husband’s good name, Littlejohn, so that living here as I do, under the protective love of two good men, no one who knew me, or of me, and of what occurred before and after my brother’s death, will ever, should my good fortune hold, find me and punish me.”

  “Your husband’s a good man,” Max said, “and a fine boxer too. If he’d let me get him some bouts, he could clean up and rise almost as fast as me. But he’s more stubborn than smart most days.”

  Max punched me in the shoulder with his free hand, and I didn’t flinch.

  “See that?” he said. “He can take a punch good as anyone, and—”

  “Enough,” Joleen said.

  “Shh,” Max said, a finger at his lips, his mouth close to my ear. “You got one hell of a wife, you know, even if she’s bats some of the time, but let me tell you this too—when it comes to a wife who’s beautiful and bats, I been there, my friend.”

  He started laughing, but stopped as soon as he became aware of the severe look Joleen was giving him.

  “My brother James was older than I by two years,” Joleen said, “and we had two brothers and two sisters who were older than either of us. I was the last child born to my mother, who, in bearing me, suffered a stroke that took away sight from her left eye, and sensation from much of the right side of her body so that she was unable to work in the fields from that time on. Such an affliction was not uncommon among our people, of course, for women suffered this and numerous other ailments during and after childbearing, whether the children survived or did not. In point of fact, before my first surviving brother was born, my mother had three sons who died within their first year of life.

  “My father was, at my birth, doubly disappointed—first, because he had wanted another son, and, second, because his wife was no longer of utility to him and to our family. It is not surprising, then, that he took out his disappointments on me, beating me regularly, though not, in my early years, savagely. He beat me the way he did, it seems to me now, more out of obligation than anger—out of a sense of what his paternal duty was toward a child who had brought misfortune to his family. He seemed, most times, bored with the task, as he was with me, and he also withheld from me the affection that he bestowed, albeit irregularly, upon my older brothers and sisters. It was James, however, his youngest and last son, who became the favorite, much as Benjamin was to the patriarch Jacob.

  “That was the year we picked up our worldly belongings and traveled west, taking odd jobs along the way—field work and whatever day labor was available—until we landed on the outskirts of Kinnard, Texas, where my mother’s sister, Carrie, her husband, Charles, and their eleven children lived. They provided us with a one-room cabin behind their house, a cabin that had until our arrival been used for storage of farming tools and supplies. In addition to working some half-dozen acres of land, my aunt was employed as wet nurse to white families, and my uncle, in town, as helper to a blacksmith, while my older cousins worked my aunt and uncle’s farm, took care of the house and younger children, tended to the animals that were theirs—one cow, one mule, two hogs, and chickens—and did seasonal work for local farmers and store-owners. My siblings and I were employed at various tasks my aunt and uncle obtained for us, and these tasks, along with our farm work, enabled us to earn our keep.

  “Our quarters were close—James and I shared burlap-and-rag beds with our siblings—and our father, beholden to his brother-in-law, Charles, for work and sustenance, resented his dependency, of which my Uncle Charles reminded him daily. At the same time, my father’s love of alcohol, which had been restrained in Louisiana, now prospered, as did his habit, when drunk, of beating me and my mother with increasing frequency and fury. He beat me, as I have said, for not being the son he had longed for, and also, as I grew older, for being the image of my mother—we did look alike, especially in the reddish tint of our skin, and in our
high cheekbones—and he beat my mother, as before, for being a useless burden, and—more—for having brought him to a place where, ruled by the whims of his brother-in-law, he was subject to humiliation on a daily basis.

  “I will spare you additional details of our family life, much of which Horace has learned, so that I may tell you of James, and of how he died, and of what his death inspired in me. Perhaps because he was our father’s favorite, James possessed a sense of entitlement—and a will—at least equal to that of our father, and when he came of an age, this at fifteen years old, where his physical size was also equal to that of our father, he began standing up to him.

  “‘If you choose ever again to lift a hand against my mother or sister, you will have to lift it against me first,’” he declared on a Sunday morning when we had returned from a local church gathering.

  “Our father roared at James to get out of his way or he would kill him. My other brothers tried to intervene, but our father grabbed his whip and warned them that his wrath could fall upon them too. Still, when our father moved toward me and my mother—we were pleading with James to leave us be—James stood fast. Our father struck out at him with the whip, but drink had, mercifully, left him unbalanced, and the lash of the whip missed James entirely. When our father drew it back a second time, James simply stepped forward, removed the whip from our father’s hand, and told him that it was the Lord’s Day, and that we should honor it by doing what the Lord had done when, after six days, he had looked upon his work and seen that it was good: we should rest.

  “Such a scene repeated itself intermittently for several months until one Sunday, our father, having put aside his drinking, greeted us upon our return from church as if he were himself a minister of God—he could be a fiercely articulate man when sober—standing tall and quoting biblical scripture about the Lord declaring that a rebellious son should be brought before the elders of the village and, if declared rebellious, stoned to death.