Max Baer and the Star of David

by Jay Neugeboren

  Thus, on the second Saturday morning in June, Miss Hémon and I, along with David and Anna, drove to the camp, located on Mount Veeder, ten miles west of Napa. The weather was balmy, the views along the way lovely, and while we drove we sang songs Anna could not hear, and saw sights David could not see, and in marveling at their skills, I began to learn ways of translating the worlds of silence and darkness into those of seeming sound and light, so that by the time we arrived at the camp I felt exhilarated in much the way I had when I was with Max, following on one of his victories, and I could, though at a remove, revel in his untamed expressions of joy.

  After we had settled into our separate cabins, and washed up—Miss Hémon and I sharing a cabin with separate rooms and a common bathroom, Anna and David rooming in bunkhouses with boys and girls their own ages, several of whom were not only visually or hearing impaired, but doubly disabled—unable either to see or to hear—Miss Hémon took me on a tour of the camp’s grounds.

  Wherever we wandered we met others: men and women who walked with canes or with guide dogs, or arm in arm with one another; children who, loosely roped together at the waist, were learning to navigate trails on their own; and staff members who were giving lectures (with other staff members translating the lectures into sign language for those who could not hear) to individuals, who, like me, seemed to be first-time visitors to the camp.

  When I asked Miss Hémon about attending some of these talks, she informed me that she had taken the liberty of obtaining VIP status for me, and would be my personal guide for the weekend. Did I approve?

  “Perhaps,” I said.

  “Perhaps?!” she laughed, and talked about how—her hope—as I lost the ability to see the world, I might also lose some of the naiveté that seemed my devoted accomplice.

  “I do not understand,” I said.

  “Come,” she said as she started on a marked trail, green arrows painted on small leather pouches that were nailed to tree trunks every ten or twenty yards. “Please. Come with me, Mister Littlejohn, and let me show you some of the rather exceptional amenities provided for our amusement and education.”

  While we walked along the trail, I found myself recalling training camps where Max and I had stayed, and how wonderful it had been for the two of us to be away from the rest of the world, with time to do nothing but eat, sleep, and work out. Enchanted Hills Camp put me in mind, in fact, of Max’s favorite training camp, in Lakewood, New Jersey, where he had prepared for his fights against Schmeling, Carnera, Braddock, and Louis, and I laughed, recalling how he would drive Cantwell crazy by his refusal to follow the workout regimens Cantwell had prescribed for him. Max did love the early morning roadwork, however, and enjoyed, at the end of these five- to ten-mile runs, sprinting the last two or three hundred yards and challenging anyone, including his young sparring partners, to catch him if they could.

  As Miss Hémon and I walked on a path of wood chips that made sweet, crunching sounds beneath our shoes, and then several hundred feet along a narrow trail that rose gradually to a lookout point above the lake, during which walk we passed others who were already heading back toward the camp (a bell had rung, signaling the noon hour, which was also the hour for a communal lunch), Miss Hémon talked of the hikes Anna and David would be taking, and of the self-confidence people with deficits of hearing and sight gained from traveling the camp’s many trails.

  By and by, she said, they would come to forget they lacked one or more of the five senses, because what was more important than senses that might take their leave of us were those that remained. This, she explained, was the gist of a talk she often gave to new members of the Lighthouse—a talk in which she emphasized that if we trained the senses that were still ours, we could learn to take as much pleasure—perhaps more—from the world around us as we could were we blessed with a seemingly “normal” set of five senses.

  She led me away from the lookout point and along a footpath that descended into a forest thick with evergreens—pine, fir, redwood—and large swaths of flowering rhododendron. There had been a sun-shower earlier in the day—the cool spray of rain welcome on a day that was more humid than usual—and the fragrance of pine needles and rhododendron blossoms, intensified by the moisture-laden air, was intoxicating. We walked, without talking, for perhaps ten or twelve minutes, until we came to a small clearing that was home to a gazebo that was in a state of considerable disrepair, some of the crossing limbs that supported a fragile roof looking as if they, along with the roof, could be blown away by the next strong wind. There were two benches in the gazebo, facing one another. I sat on one, and Miss Hémon sat next to me.

  “This is where Anna first learned to read lips, which has proven an enormous aid not only to her understanding others,” she said, “but also to her ability to speak like a hearing person.”

  “Oh.”

  “Would you like me to show you how it is done?”

  “Please,” I said.

  “Then close your eyes and put a finger to my lips, and when I speak—I will mouth words without sound—tell me what you think I have said.”

  I closed my eyes and put a finger to her lips. Her lips moved.

  “‘Hello?’” I asked.

  “Very good. Now put two fingers against my lips.”

  Her lips were soft, and my head filled with a confusing bouquet of scents and memories. I began to feel strangely light-headed. Without sound, she again talked to my fingers.

  “‘Mister Littlejohn?” I asked.

  “Ah,” she said. “You are an excellent pupil—a fast read, as we say, yes? I am not surprised. I have, from our first moments together, sensed you were a man of great potential whose loss of vision would be of manageable consequence, especially if…”

  “If what?”

  “… if you would allow yourself to trust me.”

  “I believe that has happened,” I said. “But if…”

  “Anna and I would practice hour after hour,” she said, “and I often think of those hours as having been our happiest times together. As she grew up and had less need for my assistance, however, I sometimes found myself wishing we could return to those early times together.”

  “I can understand that,” I said.

  “But you, my friend,” she said, “who can hear my voice, and who often shies away from its more aggressive probings—you will never have need of what my daughter has had need, will you?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Still, because it pleases me, will you indulge me a while longer and allow me the pleasure of showing you how she learned to hear and to speak?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good,” she said. “So now please close your eyes again, and press all five of your fingers against my mouth.”

  What I saw before I did what she asked—the bench across from us, the crossing limbs that held up the gazebo’s roof, the trees, flowers, and forest beyond turned suddenly gray and blurred as if the world were veiled behind a low-lying cloud and I was unmoored from earth as from time itself—alarmed me: could my vision experience so precipitous a decline that what I had seen but a few minutes before could suddenly have no recognizable shape or color?

  I pressed my eyes closed, and when I did, she mouthed words I hoped—and feared—she would speak, after which, very slowly, she took the tip of my index finger onto her lower lip, and kissed it.

  I did not move. Nor did I state the obvious: that although I might eventually lose my vision, there were, as she had said, no indications I was in danger of losing my hearing. Why, then, was it so important that I learn to read lips the way Anna had? Why was it so important that I understand what their experience had been like? She bent over and kissed my hand in much the way she had, in her office, kissed Hawkins Johnson’s hand—more with her breath than with her mouth—and after that it was her eyes that told me what her lips and tongue had told my fingers, and they asked for a reply.

  As if she could infer my answer, she nodded once, and so I kissed her han
d in the way she had kissed mine, after which she gestured to me to again close my eyes and to again touch her mouth with my fingers. I did what she asked, and my answer, to the question she asked of my fingers, was that yes, I would very much like to kiss her.

  Her lips were warm, and everything that was me—my mouth, heart, hands, skin, and what was left of my mind—was aroused, although the kiss itself was without overt force or passion.

  “You have never kissed any woman other than your wife, have you?” she said when we had separated.

  “I have not.”

  “Yet you are remarkably good at it,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Still, I wonder: Am I worthy of—am I prepared for such a responsibility?”

  “Possibly,” I said.

  “Ah yes,” she said. “The land of possibility—far preferable to the land of probability, don’t you think?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But there’s also this—can you trust me to continue as your guide? Will you believe that if you fall—I speak metaphorically, Mister Littlejohn—I will be here to catch you?”

  We kissed again, and then again, and when some time later I withdrew my mouth from hers, she touched my cheek with her hand, and spoke: “You are a gentle soul,” she said.

  “Probably,” I said.

  She tapped on my lips with her fingertips. “You are a love,” she said.

  “Possibly,” I said, and we both laughed, and I kissed her again—would I ever want to not be kissing her?—and her mouth opened to me this time, and I was lost in feelings and sensations of which, in truth, I had had no intimations.

  “To repeat,” she said when we had again separated. “You are a love, Mister Horace Littlejohn. And you are a gentle soul, and how surprising it is, given your devotion to a sport that is itself savage in the extreme.”

  “Not at all!” I protested. “Oh not at all! You speak from ignorance, and—”

  Her hand firm on the back of my neck, she drew me to her, her eyes demanding my full attention, and she spoke each word as if it were a sentence. “I – do – not – mean – to – offend,” she said. “Do you not understand me? I intended my words as a compliment to who – you – are—to how gentle you are despite having spent so much of your life in battle with others, despite—”

  “Not at all,” I said again, and found myself drawing upon talks I sometimes gave to the young men I worked with at the YMCA. “Not at all, Miss Hémon, for boxing is a sport—and an art—with an ancient and honorable history that has, with reason, been known as the ‘sweet science.’ Although its participants may suffer injury, such injury usually results from ignorance in the same manner that those who are injured in other athletic contests, or in automobile or airplane accidents are injured—because they are not well-trained, or take liberties that are unwise, or—”

  “Or what?” she said. “How can you compare driving an automobile with attacking someone so as to render that person unconscious? How can you believe that if … ?”

  “Please,” I said. “Consider this: Do men who fight according to rules that encourage them to protect themselves at all times, and with hands swathed in tape and leather—do they die with greater frequency at their vocation than men who work in coal mines, or who build bridges and tunnels? Do they die with greater frequency than men who choose to defend our nation, or patrol our cities’ streets, or plunge into burning buildings? Do they die with greater frequency than men who go out to sea in fishing boats, or—”

  She stopped my mouth with a kiss so fierce—her fingernails digging into the skin of my neck and shoulders, her teeth tearing at my lips and tongue—that even while lost in a desire to respond to her with a ferocity—and a rage—of my own, I found myself wondering how, when she and I returned to the camp, we would explain wounds I feared would be visible to others … and I then wondered what she might think were I to reveal this thought to her—were she to learn that in a moment of near feral abandon—a moment when I was tasting the salty sweetness of blood and could not know if it were hers, mine, or ours—I remained a slave to thoughts that seemed terribly rational.

  “In addition to which,” I stated when we were again sitting side by side, “it is a way of defending ourselves from those who would do us harm. Thus, at the YMCA, my young men will have the benefit for the rest of their lives of knowing how to protect themselves and those they love, and they will also know the pleasure one knows, as in any athletic enterprise, or in any of the arts, for that matter—in music, or painting, or dance—when we work in a diligent and disciplined way to perfect a craft.”

  “My goodness,” Miss Hémon said. “Given the fervor with which you put forth your views, and given, too, what I know of your son’s love of the Bible, and what you have told me of the Bible’s importance to you and Joleen—I must wonder: Have you ever considered the ministry? For you clearly have a gift—a zeal—for preaching that, if devoted exclusively to the world of boxing, might go unrealized for more worthy matters, especially if—”

  “Do not belittle me,” I said, and I stood and walked away.

  At the edge of the clearing, I turned and glared at her. She took in a long breath, after which she gestured to me to return to her.

  “Please,” she said. “Please, Horace…”

  It was the first time she had not called me “Mister Littlejohn,” and noticing—this too was a surprise—that her eyes were moist with tears, I returned, and stood in front of her.

  “It is not my habit to humble myself before others,” she said. “I admire the passion you have for what you do, and I am embarrassed by my ignorance of matters of which you speak, as well as by ways I have misjudged you. So: Will you forgive me?”

  When she reached toward me, I took her hand in mine, and when she touched the space on the bench next to her, I sat. A minute or so later, she spoke: “May I return, then, to what I was saying about you before … before I rudely…”

  “If it pleases you to do so.”

  “It does—oh it does,” she said, “for you are a love and a truly gentle soul, and so I am wondering what we shall do to fulfill the needs and desires of your love and of your soul, which needs and desires, I assure you, have their counterparts in who I am and who I wish to be.”

  We sat side by side for a while without talking, and I was relieved to find that, though the scene in front of me remained clouded, it had begun to regain its recognizable shapes and colors.

  6 Brothers

  O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother! When I should find thee without, I would kiss thee; yea, I should not be despised. (8:1)

  On a Tuesday afternoon, the last week of June 1958, while I was having lunch in the staff lounge of the YMCA, Miss Patricia Fontaine, a secretary in our office, entered the room, as she usually did at this hour, and distributed the day’s mail. In addition to correspondence having to do with our teams—schedules for upcoming tournaments, equipment we had ordered—there was a small, square envelope of a kind that often contained a greeting card or an announcement. I opened it, and read:

  Monday 23 June 1958

  Dear Horace … and becoming dearer …

  Is it—perhaps? probably? possibly?—an entire day since we were together? Impossible! It seems like years and, at the same time, but a few minutes ago. I miss you. And yet I am comforted by the thought that …

  Miss Hémon went on to write in ways as elegant as they were candid about new responsibilities she had chosen to bear, and about pleasures she hoped we would continue to enjoy until they became so sublime as to seem almost (but not quite) un-bearable. To this end, she was most cordially inviting me to visit her in her home for several hours on Wednesday, June 25, at half past noon, at a time when I might otherwise be engaged in tutoring my young charges or studying Braille at the Lighthouse, and when she might otherwise be teaching a class or pushing papers from one side of her desk to the other, so that, with the very same hands we would otherwise h
ave been using for such tasks, we might be kind to one another in ways yet to be determined.

  And so began the happiest days and hours of my life, their pleasures doubtless enhanced by the fact that we were, Miss Hémon and I, obliged out of consideration for others to hide the fact of the unexpected course our friendship had taken. “Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret most pleasant,” Proverbs tells us. True enough, although I do not believe our love was sweeter because it was secret, for were this so, my love for Max and Joleen—loves that compelled concealment—would have remained the supreme and transcendent loves of my life. And despite my romantic proclivities, I would sometimes admit to Miss Hémon that she and I were probably not all that different from others—that our situation was comprised of the kinds of ordinary complications and secrecies—the obstacles to love—that accompanied what many individuals in love experienced.

  The obstacles to our being able to be together whenever we wished and in whatever way we wished were clear enough, of course—my devotion to Joleen, Miss Hémon’s devotion to her children, and our desire not to impose upon them complications and confusions that would arise from knowledge of who she and I had become to one another. Unlike the love she had for Anna and David, and the love I had for Joleen, Max, and Horace Jr., however—loves that would pass from this world only when we passed from this world—our expectations, from the beginning, were realistic, for we seemed, separately, to have come to the same conclusion: that free as we were in our love for one another, yet was our love destined to be ever a moment away from perishing as swiftly as it had come into being. We were free in our love, that is, because we loved without either expectations or hope—because we were acutely aware that, as Virgil wrote, in a line Horace Jr. loved to quote, “Optima dies … prima fugit,” which he translated as “The best days are the first to flee.”