Carnovsky's Retreat

by Larry Duberstein

  Not at the dinner table or waving bye bye in the early morning. Tanya naked, rising from her bath. My new sex symbol is my wife—true more than once.

  Once or twice I sharpened my pencil and sat here with the book open. It’s the second week of April and I only wrote once since the Ides of March. I’m not shirking on my homework, it’s just that nothing much is new. I am doing more cookery than last year at this time, that’s a change. I like cooking for myself, as you save money, eat better food, and the place smells nice. But why list recipes? I don’t even have any, I’m a junk pitcher, mix it up and keep them guessing.

  I could enter Jimmy’s latest. He has become a freeholder in the Yukon Territory, putting together a parcel of land inch by inch, but literally. They are putting deeds in the cereal now—a piece of gold paper worth one square inch of land comes in each box, so that he has got five square inches of his land already. Maybe it’s a phony, or in a rotten swamp, or maybe there is three hundred miles of ice between each inch and you can’t get a right-of-way. But he feels good about owning this turf and assures me I am in for a share if gold is discovered under his plot.

  What else? I shared a chess board twice with the new man, Hansen. I enjoyed myself—a good man. But not a good chess player. I need Morris for that.

  That’s it, all the news that’s fit to scribble. If I come up with more, I’ll be back, but just now I have no interesting thoughts. (Maybe I never had any, and now I don’t even try.) I’m finished thinking. It’s all worked out, my philosophy of life: life is a fountain, no more no less.

  Rejoined the working classes today. My favorite time of the year, the early spring races at Jamaica. The first day in January is not a New Year—it’s the start of nothing, the deep freeze. It’s April when the world re-opens, that’s the new beginning, as designated by God and the Devil alike.

  We had a roster change, as Mickey Klutz will not be reporting for duty. He went on from Hialeah to Kentucky and will stay put there for the present. Wiley had a note inviting us down for Derby Day, with mint juleps on the house. Something to do with a lady, I’m sure.

  It’s a different atmosphere in the clubhouse without Mickey Klutz. We are all unique, of course, but some are more unique than others. And the new man is not a man at all—the beardless youth, Wiley tags him, and daringly so, as the kid’s old man is a big stockholder. (That’s how he comes by the job, sent down to dip his toe in the waters of experience.) He parts his hair in the middle like McSorley’s bartender, and knows it all.

  Wiley thinks he don’t know a thing, including how to comb his hair, and so presents the kid with a gift-wrapped ten cent comb for a joke. Lucky for the kid he came up with a smile. If not, he would never survive a week in the room, stockholder or no stockholder.

  May 2. Watched the fight on television, the rematch from Chicago with Robinson and Fullmer. Hansen and I sat downstairs with Timothy Myers and Jimmy—men’s night.

  Started out a carbon copy of the first bout. Sugar Ray in better shape and doing more (make Fullmer look as clumsy as he is) and yet you could not envision Robinson holding on to the fort over fifteen gruelling rounds.

  No need. To all the world this Fullmer looks carved from stone, a butte from Utah, a plateau of solid granite. No one has ever had him down—pushed him, knocked him, or tripped him to the canvas. He doesn’t go down, no more than a cornerstone. But in Round Five of this one, Sugar Ray put a left hook on his chin that must be the single greatest punch in prizefight history. Had to be.

  An ordinary fighter fielding this blow (perfectly timed and placed, full leverage from way down) would sift away like sand, and wake up two three minutes later. A punch like that makes you miss out on a little American History. This Fullmer nearly made it back to his feet. He was wobbling sideways like a Russian dancer when they tolled the number ten. So a clean knockout, Robinson is once more the champion, and the world is set right until further notice.

  Hansen can’t see the fights, can’t see caring too much who wins. First time he watched a fight. And I’m sure I surprised him with my ringside personality, as contrasted with my chess face. Timothy Myers likes the fights, likes his beer. He pulls for Gene Fullmer because Fullmer is white and that’s that. Not a bad fellow but simple. He keeps it simple, black and white.

  I have to admit I’m no better. Black versus white, I will always root black, automatic. In the old days, when the white guy was Jewish, I might make an exception.

  May 4. Visited Elaine.

  May 10. I found a way to get rich on Hartack again. When General Duke scratched out just before the serious betting began, the race opened up, with a number of good possibilities. Yet no one was looking to Iron Liege, Calumet’s number two or three, who was not at all up to it the Derby Trials. Even Kramer never suspected.

  Shoemaker made his mistake—stood up in the irons at the sixteenth pole and that cost him—but I was already past sweating it. Neck and neck with two hundred yards to go, I am comfy with the formula. Hartack. This kid asks 110% from his mount but he knows just how to ask, and so he gets it.

  And Kramer crying where can he get a thousand bucks, but I know where. “In your pocket, you crumb. You took the action, now take the heat.” Because I already planned on sharing the wealth. New mitt for Jimmy, so he will throw something besides a rock at the kittycat, and a lovely saddle blanket I had my eye on for Caddy. Why not five hundred in an envelope for Tanya, she could need it by now, and I know Walter can always use a single.

  But see what life will turn on. I’m sure it’s no different with a world war or the general election. A pebble on the ground, General Duke steps on it, and the shape of history is altered. Take it at the flood.

  A number of years since I did any business with Coney Island. Goes back to before the War, excepting a few times with Walter, and I can’t say I missed it. Coney Island is for the young. You must be young, or crazy, to brave the masses, although I can well recall the argument we would make—“There’s plenty of room in the water.” And we would go, and never be sorry. There was water, and food, softshell crabs at Feltman’s while the mob thinned out, then head home on the train around dark. Nice.

  This week I felt the urge. The whole world is ready for Coney Island suddenly, because we are on a hot streak—two straight days of humidity. I’m sure the Culver Line will be loaded for bear tomorrow morning, with all the palefaces, and they have boats leaving from here, Battery Park, that loop the loop too. It’s a procession, and I can’t make it, my hands are tied.

  I would gladly put my face in the sun and float on my back with a cigar high and dry, like early times. Eat a plate of softshells and who knows, maybe ride the steeplechase. I would love to take Caddy there, and stroll down Surf Avenue with the hoi polloi. Of course it is not an option, as she likes to say. Though she will be here soon, and I will be seeing her.

  Instead of Merry Old England she has latched on with a professor of hers, who will be spending his summer in Italy, digging up old bones.

  It is very significant work, Oscar, to find an old bone in the ground. Some people think that even a dog can do it, but a dog can’t say which bone it is, or how old. And if it’s old enough and hasn’t much flavor, the dog will leave it in the bushes. And imagine, it could be Julius Caesar’s kneecap!

  I’m really going, as you know, to build up my biceps for the return match with Jimmy (tell him: September, to the death) and to get tan and gorgeous in case you claim your two minutes in bed with me, and to master Italian and see the world and to bring you Julius Caesar’s kneecap as a souvenir.

  She will do it, of course she will. She’ll show up in the fall and meet me for chicken soup and tuna, with her Roman sun-tan and a few dozen suitors in her wake. She will come down here and sit with me and chat about the summer’s racing. And she will guaranteed arrive with some old hunk of Genoa butcher-shop bone and tell me with her pokerface, here, for you Oscar, Julius Caesar’s right knee.

  Caddy off to Europe. She was looking very mature in h
er “digging togs”—a blue skirt and a red silk scarf around her neck. And she should look mature because by the time she comes back to America she will be a voter.

  They age very quickly between 19 and 21. At 19 they can still live home where at 21 they inherit the earth.

  July 2. Seeing Jimmy today made me aware I have been seeing him less. No problem, however, we are still pals and I am still in line for a full share of the gold up north. He’s growing up, that’s all, and like a young animal a growing boy will get what he needs. So if he needs me he’ll come round, and otherwise not.

  I will nonetheless record that he has added six pounds or so of new “pure muscle” and that his mama is not as quick to scream in his face these days. Commands a little more respect with so much pure muscle, and with something else he’s got going for him, a presence. If he does go off to war they will have to make him an officer, and maybe he will survive it after all.

  July 26. Commiserated this a.m. with Bulkitis over a cup of coffee. All month long we have been hearing the rumors about the teams moving west. Unbelievable that they could do this, least of all Brooklyn. The Dodgers in sunny California is a fish out of water. Not only that they have been such a great team but also a team that stands for something, and as far as I am concerned they can only stand for it at home in Brooklyn.

  So now we read the Giants will probably be going too. As much as I love to hate the Giants I can’t see them shifting either, from the Polo Grounds. They belong here too. It’s all relative—you cannot have the Dodgers without the Giants the same way you cannot have Marshall Dillon without a few black hats down at the saloon.

  But nothing is sacred and what’s more nobody cares, except the nobodies. Bulkitis and I must hang together, conjoined by fate as friendly rivals and now as teammates in defeat. And the worst of it is Tanya, because no one would believe a grown woman can mind a development inside the world of sports but they don’t know my wife. This is the Brooklyn Dodgers and she can mind. Her heart’s blood—and the whole damn team walks away.

  Money is absolutely no excuse. They talk about the gold in California, the packed houses and so forth. Would Ben Franklin polish off the Declaration of Independence and then sign on with the Russkies for a higher percent of the take? High and mighty pronouncements, for sale to the highest bidder? Forget it.

  And then some people are saying, Wait till next year and they will be back. I say not a chance, my poor dear friends. The past becomes past fast in this world, and that’s one worthy of Wiley himself. A real spouter.

  August 1. Packed for the Spa. My last ferry trip until the fall, and to break a habit I spent my morning walk on Staten Island—poked around a few hours. The ferry men, who consider me every kind of lunatic already, were astonished to see me disembark and walk away. Like the sun not setting—it made them sit up and take notice. What can be the meaning! I saw them pondering all the little mysteries of the universe.

  Across the Narrows from Brooklyn, facing Fort Hamilton, is another fort on Staten Island that looks like a cross between a Roman temple and a shooting gallery. As a matter of fact it is a shooting gallery and you can see the guns poking out at the water, in case the Russian fleet should happen to float up in the Bay. Battery Weed they call it, and no visitors welcome inside, as it is the genuine article and all the guns are loaded.

  But they tell a story that the last boats out of here in 1783 (bound home for Great Britain after they lost the war) got a nice Bronx cheer from the peanut gallery onshore. The British guys had signed a treaty of course, and the war was officially over with, but they decided to let one go just the same for the pure hell of it, and because they didn’t care for the raspberry.

  And the cannonball fell in the drink with a tiny splash and that was it, just another hole in the water. The last shot fired in the war for our independence and it’s not such a long time ago. After all, we are still a young country, compared to almost anyone else.

  *The Miss Rheingold Contest was a promotion run by the brewery, in which the public selected from six contestants whose smiling faces decorated the subway cars and corner stores in a six-panel black-and-white display ballot. Children did most of the voting and stuffed the ballot-box freely, but it didn’t matter as the six contestants were more or less interchangeable.

  —Waiter Ford, Jr.

  *Carroll Shilling, once a great race-rider at Belmont Park, was found dead at the entrance gate to the racetrack many years later, a derelict apparently, come home to die. O Henry might have written such a script, but this one comes from “the annals of life.”

  —Walter Ford, Jr.

  *Sheila WiIlcox had stunned the British equestrian world earlier in 1956 by running second at the august Badminton Horse Trials. She was to win at Badminton the next three years in succession.

  —Walter Ford, Jr.

  *Hear, Hear.

  —Walter Ford

  Afterword

  This odd, flat enigmatic note on the subject of Battery Weed, or the Revolutionary War, comprised the final entry in Oscar’s journal. I suppose if he had known they were also to be the closing words of a book, he would have labored over them a bit or perhaps tacked something on that was more like an ending per se, something to round off or polish up the sentiment.

  However, it is a story that to a certain extent I can finish for him, as the rest is largely known. The mystery was not exactly solved, yet simply ended on one level the day my uncle returned. I don’t have the exact date, although I could look it up easily enough, for it was in October of 1957, approximately two months after the “Battery Weed” entry, and it was the day the Russians launched their first Sputnik.

  My father’s best joke, in fact, was that the Sputnik went up into orbit on the same day Oscar Carnovsky touched down. And this one-liner created an escape-hatch for Oscar, for he could smile and answer quite simply the question that so many would ask, namely where had he been?

  “In orbit. I just touched down.”

  “How was the view from up there?” was inevitably the next line, establishing the joke, as opposed to the serious heartfelt inquiry.

  “Fine, you see a lot.”

  And so on. That he should have touched down on that particular day in history merely highlights for me the extraordinary distance between those years and these. We are always nostalgic for the days of our youth and those were mine (I was seventeen when my uncle re-entered the atmosphere at Linden Boulevard in Brooklyn) yet the changes really have been immense.

  Just as the automobile—a luxury in Oscar’s boyhood and an innovation then in American life—had become ubiquitous by 1955, as much is true for the computer today. When was it invented? Surely no one except I.B.M. and Uncle Sam could have had them thirty years ago, where now to lack one in the home is considered a malediction upon one’s offspring. It is moving quickly to the point where men will not go hunting or fishing in the woods without a micro-computer to plot their movements; to chart the previously arcane patterns of fish and game, factor in the sun and shadow, tell them when to stop and rest. They won’t trust their feet anymore.

  Certainly this office would be an empty, impotent husk if they carted our twelve terminals out to the elevator tomorrow, for we are all plugged in now. The eyes of America are on one sort of screen or another constantly, and the ears of America are clogged with transmitted sound. We are doing business while decanting untold decibels directly into the brain, and no one even seems to mind.

  But what of the brain itself in the midst of such electronic buffeting? These plugged-in persons we see—are they really in there? They man the cash-registers and the little tin cars and very likely they are manning the nuclear controls from sea to shining sea, but are they safe? Are we safe?

  It seems unlikely. We are not safe. And that is the biggest single change since Oscar’s time, or the time of his great escape. The Bomb existed then (albeit not in such gay profusion as now) but I am not referring to The Bomb, or to extinction in a literal sense. I mean that for Oscar
it was possible to be anonymous, private, to move through the world without quite being a part of it. Walking away was more feasible then, although I recognize that is an odd compliment to an age.

  Today the world impinges more. Our vacated souls are simply awash in media swill. We seem intent on lopping off all the rich corners of existence; a new electronic product is announced and twenty minutes later we are told that “half the homes in America” now own at least one. Of whatever it is. And our incomes, fingerprints, and parking histories can be summoned up on screens that flash from coast to coast in an instant. Today a computer would find my uncle an hour after he left home, a dot on a grid somehow, and stipulate his return.

  I have digressed. It was my intention to discuss the journal, and to add to it a few details and commentaries for the curious reader. As I have said, the journal comes to an end yet has no “ending.” I have also argued that there was an artistic thrust to it, or a catharsis in it, and I contend now that it was in this way completed after all. Clearly Oscar’s investment in it waned as his resolve to return, though always unmentioned, must have germinated and grown. Toward the close his entries are spaced in time, occasional, and they treat mostly of the sporting news, which to a lesser extent does appear throughout.

  But there is a loss of interest, or a loss of the need to crystallize his interest, or to celebrate his pleasures, or to belabor his thinking any further. Having finished with his journal, he was soon to finish his sabbatical as well, sixty-odd days later, as the two were firmly linked. Perhaps they were simply the same thing, one expressing the other in words, as Oscar intended. That is not very profound of me, I know, nor is the observation that the true conclusion to this record exists in history, in action: Oscar’s return to Tanya.