Corky's Brother

by Jay Neugeboren

  She looked at him. “You’re too old,” she said; then she turned and ran off, holding the ice cream high in her right hand, as if it were a torch.

  Billy stood up. The counter man was staring at him. Billy walked away, toward the card tables. He saw the girl’s mother and stopped. He turned a corner of the clubhouse and peered out. The woman was talking to his own mother. His father was being called over and the three of them walked away and talked for a while. His mother gesticulated a lot, his father shrugged, and the woman seemed to be shouting. Once she even pointed a forefinger at his mother. When she left he saw his mothers head sag, then lift, searching for him. He stepped out from behind the building so that she could see him. She waved to him and he walked to her. His father wouldn’t look straight at him.

  “I’ve been thinking, dear,” his mother said, putting her hand to his cheek, “that maybe this isn’t very exciting for you, and here your father and I—selfish parents that we are—sit around and have a good time. Maybe you’d really like to get back to the hospital early—it’s Saturday and I’m sure there must be some very special activities planned for you.”

  He nodded.

  “You don’t mind?”

  He said he didn’t mind and then he and his father went into the locker room and changed from their bathing trunks into their regular clothes. His stomach was bothering him; but he vowed that he wouldn’t throw up—not in front of them—not, at least, until he was back at the hospital. On the way home his mother talked a lot, and his skin was very itchy. He kept his hands in his lap, pressing the left one down.

  “You know,” his mother said when they were almost at the hospital, “I’m really glad we came to get you today, Billy. Someday soon you’ll be able to go to the beach as much as you want. You’ll see. Until then, I want you to know that we’re always available—as many passes as your doctors give you, that many times we’ll be here to take you places. I even told the social worker, Mrs. Schwartz, on the phone last week—we certainly are glad to give up this little bit, this part of our time for our son. What else do we have to live for? What…”

  Her voice trailed off. Billy’s father shot a look her way, and Billy felt his stomach convulse, turn, and then he tasted some bile in his mouth. He forced it down. He prayed for one thing now: that his stomach would hold out until he got back in his unit. Nothing else mattered. Everything else, everything that had happened at the beach, seemed unimportant in comparison. His mother was talking again, telling him that she didn’t really mean the “giving up” part—she wanted to spend time with him. She had loved having him at the club with her, she had enjoyed seeing him look so nice…but Billy hardly heard her words. He set his eyes on the horizon and concentrated on keeping his stomach inside him. Her voice came at him from a distance; even when she kissed him goodbye at the gate, he hardly knew she was there, and when he got to the cottage and could relax and let the day’s meals splatter the floor, he felt good. He had done it. He had kept it in.

  Corky’s Brother

  THE FIRST TIME I ever cried about anybody dying was at Corky Williams’ older brother’s funeral. I was fourteen then—it happened after the summer, just before my first year in high school. I was surprised that it upset me so much because I didn’t even know Corky’s brother well. I wished I did, of course—every guy in our neighborhood did—but the only way I really knew him was through Corky and through the newspapers.

  Corky’s brother—Mel was his name—died from the same kind of leukemia that got Ernie Davis, and he was probably the most famous guy in our neighborhood. He had been All-City in baseball and football at Erasmus and had gotten a bonus of about $10,000 from the Dodgers when he’d finished high school. At the time he got sick—he wasn’t twenty years old yet—he was playing double-A ball in their farm system, and Corky would always come down to the schoolyard with clippings from the Fort Worth newspapers. The night Mel fainted the first time and was taken to the hospital, he was hitting over .300, and in the New York Post it said that he might be brought up to the Dodgers the next year to fill the left-field spot. The Dodgers hadn’t had a steady left-fielder since they’d traded Andy Pafko to the Braves in 1953.

  All of us worshipped Mel, especially Corky. Whenever any of us got to do anything with him we’d talk about it for weeks afterwards. Once, I remember, he came down to the schoolyard and we got him into a game of stickball with us. Somehow I managed to strike him out once—he didn’t do it to make me feel good either, you could tell that—and when I did, he turned to Corky and said, “Hey, who’s that out there—Carl Erskine?” I felt so great, I struck out the next two batters on six straight pitches. The guys kidded me about how red my face got and about the stupid grin I had on, but I didn’t care. For the next few months they all called me Carl and no matter how many times they did, each time it made me feel as if Mel were saying it for the first time.

  Even though Corky always talked about what a great ballplayer his brother was, he talked even more about the things Mel did with girls. Almost every Saturday and Sunday morning when our baseball team got together at the Parade Grounds, the first thing out of his mouth was—“Boy, you should of seen the piece my brother took out last night!” He said it so many times that after the “Boy” we would all repeat the rest of the sentence with him. He didn’t mind. “I mean it,” he’d say. “This one was the best yet. You should of seen her!” He’d make a motion with his hand and suck on his lower lip. “Moron! What a pair of knockers she had!” Then we’d usually crowd around him and he’d tell us about how he’d been up when Mel had come home and how they’d stayed up and talked till early morning, with Mel filling him in on all the luscious details. “My brother can plug any broad he wants!” Corky would say. That was his favorite word. I don’t think any of us ever spent a day or even an hour with Corky when he didn’t speak at least once about who Mel was plugging.

  Corky and I were good friends at that time, and my parents weren’t happy with the idea. They thought he was too wild—and, of course, this only made me feel better about being his friend. He’d do crazy things that nobody else would—and when he wasn’t with our group of guys, he’d spend his time with the tough guys from the other side of Nostrand Avenue. They took part in gang wars, and some of them had already been arrested for stealing radios, but Corky never had any part in those things. What he was after were the girls.

  The summer Mel was sick, when I’d come home from camp, I used to go with Corky almost every night to the P.S. 181 schoolyard. We’d play stickball for a while, and then, as it began to get dark, the girls would come in and Corky would go to work. The tough guys didn’t bother me because I was Corky’s friend—so I just used to sit on a bench, fooling with a stickball bat, watching the way Corky would treat the girls. He’d neck with them and chase them around and twist their arms—and no matter what he did or said they seemed to love it. In fact, the more he’d curse a girl or punch her in the arm, the more she’d be willing to make out with him. I knew most of the girls from school—they were the tough ones, the ones who wore tight sweaters and black kerchiefs on their heads and usually had bite marks on their necks and ink tattoos on their arms from whatever guys they were going with.

  Sometimes Corky would say to me, “Hey, Howie, you dare me to soul-kiss every one of these girls?” and when I’d say “Yeah,” he’d say “Darers go first,” and the girls would laugh at me. I didn’t mind, though. After spending a couple of weeks with Corky and the girls at night, I got to like them. They may not have been the brightest girls in the world, but at least they didn’t talk all the time. “You know why Howie don’t make out with any of you broads?” Corky said one night. “Because he got a girlfriend nobody knows about. He gotta be true to her.” Then Corky showed them a picture from his wallet and all the guys and girls crowded around. The girl in the picture looked something like Corky—she had light wavy blond hair and a kind of square face with a dimple in her chin. In the picture she was standing next to a well pump with her mouth
half open and her eyes half closed. The guys all agreed that she was a piece, and every night after that when I came down the girls would ask me if I’d heard from Sarah Jean. That was her name. Sarah Jean Stilman, and she was Corky’s cousin who lived in Pennsylvania. Corky got a big charge out of how I blushed and fidgeted every time her name was mentioned, and I guess I was glad to be thought of as a guy who had a girlfriend.

  Sometimes at night, if the guys got bored fooling around with the girls, they’d crowd around one of the concrete checker tables and play poker or blackjack. Corky would keep up a running commentary, announcing the hands as if he were on television. What I liked most, though—and I think this was true for all the guys—were the things he’d say to the girls. “Hey, Gloria,” he might say suddenly, calling to one of them. “Do me a favor, huh?” “Sure, Corky,” the girl would usually say. Then when she got near the table Corky would say to her, in this very serious tone, “Take a walk to the corner and see if it’s raining, okay?”—or something like that, and we’d all laugh.

  He was great at ranking out girls—I think this was one of the reasons the tough guys looked up to him so much. There was one exception, of course. About a year and a half before he died, Mel had eloped and gotten married to a girl named Rhoda Miller who worked behind the soda fountain at Ellman’s on Flatbush Avenue. When Mel had first started dating her, Corky had been in his glory because Rhoda was generally acknowledged to be the most beautiful girl in our neighborhood. When she waited on tables in Ellman’s and we watched her wiggle between the tables and chairs or bend over to scoop out ice cream, Corky would just lean back and smile. “I told you,” he’d say to us, and then he’d give us the details about what Mel was doing to her. A few times he told us that Mel had plugged her right on the rug in Corky’s living room. “My brother’s really something,” he’d say.

  When they got married, though, Corky was stunned. He couldn’t seem to understand why a guy who could be getting it all over the country would want to settle for getting it from one girl—even if she was the most beautiful girl around. “Why’d he do it?” he kept asking. “Why’d he do it?” After a while, of course, he came to like the idea of having a big sister like Rhoda, and when Mel was away during the baseball season in 1955 he spent almost all his time at her house. She made special foods and pies for him, and according to Corky she could do everything better than any girl in the world.

  Corky never did get along well with his parents, and after Mel was taken to the hospital, I remember, they fought more than ever. Any time I’d go over to his house with him, within two minutes they’d be screaming at each other, and when Corky’s father would threaten to hit him—usually for the way Corky was treating his mother—Corky would clench his fist and dare him. “I’m ready whenever you are,” he’d say. “Just remember one thing. I’m bigger than you are now, you hear that? You better remember that.” It was the only time I’d ever heard anybody our age talk to a parent that way. “I hope you both croak,” he’d say when we left. Then he’d go to Rhoda’s and she would feed him and they’d talk. Or rather, Corky would talk and Rhoda would listen, usually about how lousy his parents were. When Corky visited Mel at the hospital—he didn’t do it often because he said it upset Mel to have to entertain visitors—he always went with Rhoda.

  The night the news came we were at a party, I remember, and being at a party always made Corky feel uncomfortable. That was the strange thing. He’d be as wild as could be with girls in the schoolyard or at school—but when he had a tie and jacket on at a party you couldn’t get him to go near them. If we’d play kissing games, he’d say it was sissy stuff and would sit in a corner reading a sports magazine—and if the girls’ parents were gone and we’d play “lights out” or “flashlight” he’d say that the girls didn’t know how to do anything, and he’d leave early.

  The night it happened we were at Paula Ornstein’s house on Linden Boulevard, and her mother came into the living room—after coughing a lot to warn us—and said that Corky’s mother had called and told him to come home, there was bad news. The whole neighborhood knew about Mel, of course—I can remember listening to my parents and their friends agreeing with each other that it was “a tragedy, a genuine tragedy”—and when Mrs. Ornstein bit on her lip, some of the girls started sniffling. If the other guys and I hadn’t kept busy telling them to shut up, I think a lot of us would have done the same thing. Corky didn’t budge.

  “Aren’t you gonna go home?” Louie asked.

  “I’ll go when I feel like it,” Corky said. We all looked at each other and nobody seemed to know what to do. I jammed my mouth full of potato chips so I wouldn’t have to say anything, and after a minute or so Corky broke the silence by doing something he’d never done before at a party. He suggested we play “post office”—and he nominated himself to be first postmaster. Then he whispered to me to be sure to get Ellen Dienstag to deliver the first letter, and he went into the hallway to the bedroom. I couldn’t figure what he was up to, because Ellen Dienstag was the biggest snob in the school. She was intelligent and good-looking—we all had to admit that—and she was the only girl in our class whose father was a doctor. She was always taking lessons in ice-skating and elocution and things like that. At a party the week before when we’d taken a break and crowded together in the bathroom to compare notes on who was the smoothest kisser, I’d admitted to the guys that I’d never gotten anything from her—that when I’d go into the hall or bedroom with her for “post office,” or if we were on the couch together during “sneak attack,” she’d always whisper to me to pretend that we were going to town. “Let’s just make believe—all right, Howie?” she’d say, and give my hand a squeeze. Then when it was over she always acted as if I’d really been loving her up. It turned out that she did pretty much the same thing with all the guys. If you were lucky she’d give you a quick peck on the lips so that some lipstick would show. “I know her kind,” Corky had said. “She thinks hers is lined with mink—”

  A minute after I got her to deliver a special delivery to Corky, we heard her yelp for him to stop. Then they were quiet for a while—but until she came running back into the living room, covering her blouse where Corky’d ripped it open, I think we all figured she was making believe again. Corky followed her into the room and while the tears streamed down her face and the girls crowded around her, he sauntered over to them and started ranking Ellen out. She pushed the girls away from her—her blouse was pinned up by then—and screamed at him that she didn’t care if his brother did die, he was still an idiot and a punk.

  Corky just laughed. “You know what you are?” he said. “You’re nothing but a two-bit C.T.—” Then he went up to her and shoved her on the breasts. “And I’ll tell you something else, Lana Turner, you ate it up when I soul-kissed you—you’re the one who wanted to keep going. You know why I stopped?” He turned to us. “Cause she’s the sloppiest kisser I ever met. I’ve gotten smoother kisses from a wet sponge.” He turned to me. “You wanna bug out with me, Howie? I had enough of this place. Let’s get us some real stuff.”

  When we got outside, though, he said he wanted to visit Rhoda. “I ought to be with her at a time like this,” he said. “Mel always told me to keep an eye on her, to take care of her—” His voice broke then, and I didn’t look at him. Then he started talking about Ellen. “I really showed her, huh? I showed her, didn’t I, Howie?” he said, and even after I’d agreed with him, he kept repeating it. “I showed her, didn’t I? I really showed her, huh?”

  When we got to Rhoda’s place on East 21st Street, there was nobody home. “Damn it,” he said. “She must of gone to my folks’ place. What’d she wanna do that for?” So we walked back to Corky’s house, which was on Martense Street, off Rogers Avenue. I felt funny going in with Corky, but at the door, when I told him I thought I’d better leave him alone, he insisted that I come in with him. Even from outside the door I could hear Corky’s mother crying—I’d never heard a woman cry so loud—she just kept wa
iling and screaming and shouting Mel’s name. Corky took a deep breath and opened the door. Inside, it was dark and the apartment smelled as if somebody had been boiling cabbage. Corky’s mother was stretched out on the living-room couch with a washcloth over her forehead, and Corky’s father was next to her, talking low. Rhoda was sitting in the easy chair, next to the TV, and there were some neighbors walking around the room trying to make themselves helpful.

  Corky’s mother reached out with her hand. “Is that you, Corky baby?” she said. Corky mumbled something. “Corky, Corky, my love, come to your mother—oh, Corky, why? why—?”

  “Easy does it now, Margaret,” Corky’s father said.

  Corky stood there for a second, at the entrance to the living room, and I stood behind him. The neighbors disappeared into the kitchen, and when Corky’s mother started crying again for him to come to her, Corky went to Rhoda instead. He seemed very tall and sure of himself as he strode across the room to her—but the minute Rhoda raised her arms to him and he lifted her from the chair and let her cry on his shoulder, something inside him seemed to break. He didn’t cry, at least not that I could tell—and he talked to Rhoda about how he understood how much they’d loved each other—but something seemed to break in his body, to sag, so that even though he was taller than her and she was leaning against him, he still looked like a little boy. He brushed his pompadour out of his eyes a few times, and when Rhoda had finished crying, he straightened himself up a little bit.

  “Your brother’s dead, Corky—” his father began.

  “Godamnit!” Corky said, turning on his father. “You think you’re telling me something I don’t know?” Then he walked out of the living room, to his own bedroom. He motioned to me. “Come on in here, Howie,” he said.