Corky's Brother

by Jay Neugeboren

  “They got here about an hour ago,” Corky’s mother said to us. “They drove all night to be here—” She started to say something else, but began crying instead. A big woman—one of Corky’s aunts—went to her and put her arm around her shoulder. Everybody else ate in silence. That got me, I remember—the idea of twenty or thirty people driving in a caravan of cars through the night on empty highways from these farms I’d never seen. I was certain they hadn’t spoken, either. Just stayed awake looking at the road and waiting for the sun to come up.

  When Corky’s mother had gotten control of herself she asked some of the people about how other relatives and friends were—and then things settled down with everybody talking about who’d married and who’d had children and who’d been hit by disaster or by good fortune. They weren’t quiet after that. Even Corky’s father talked a lot—asking questions about the farm—and it really impressed me, how much all the men knew about animals and farming and machines. I suppose it was because they came from a world I didn’t know anything about, but there was something about them—not just the way they clipped their sentences short or the old-fashioned way they dressed, with double-breasted suits and wide ties, but something else that made me envy them, that made me think that they were wiser than men like my uncles, who were all in businesses.

  In the middle of all the talk a girl came out of Corky’s room and I knew right away it was Sarah Jean. She was dressed in a plain wine-colored shirtwaist dress—and her blond hair was cut short, in bangs straight across her forehead. She was much prettier than her picture—it was almost as if she were the only person in the room who had any light coming from her face—yet she hardly seemed to be there. When she walked around the table and came to us, nobody even turned to look at her. She did it so silently it was as if she had air cushions under her feet. She just seemed to glide across the room, her whole body moving together, not emphasizing any one part, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her or stop my heart from pounding. She drifted in between me and Corky and reached up on her toes slightly and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m sorry, Corky,” she said. “I liked Mel real well.”

  She stayed next to us while the conversation went on around the room, and the whole time she held Corky’s hand. I kept glancing at her and I couldn’t figure out how old she was. Even though her hair was cut short and she didn’t have any make-up on, there was something in the way her body relaxed, in the way she was able to stand there without fidgeting, that made her seem much older than the girls her age I went to school with. Her arm touched mine above the elbow—her skin was cool and soft—but she didn’t seem to be aware of it, and I didn’t move away. I kept glancing at her and getting more and more nervous.

  Finally, Corky remembered that I was there. “This is Howie,” he said. “I stayed over his house last night.”

  Sarah Jean nodded to me. “You meet my mother yet?” she asked.

  “Your who—?” I replied—or something like that. I was so flustered by the way she looked straight at me that I didn’t know what to say. Corky’s face seemed to relax when he saw what was happening to me.

  “That’s her over there,” Sarah Jean said, motioning to a tall woman who was collecting dishes from the table.

  “Hey,” Corky said, leaning his head in front of us and pushing his hair out of his eyes. “Did Howie tell you about how he’s been telling everybody you’re his girlfriend—?”

  “Come on,” I objected. “You’re the one—”

  Then Corky laughed and explained to Sarah Jean about showing her picture. She smiled, and looked at me without blinking. Her eyes were a kind of olive-green color and I couldn’t get over how pretty they were, at how they seemed to go with the rest of her face. Her hair was almost white in spots from having been bleached by the sun, yet her skin, even though it was smooth and brown, had a kind of deep red flush to it, mostly in her cheeks and around her eyes. “You’re real nice-looking,” she said to me, her eyes fixed on mine. She said it as if it were a fact. Corky laughed and kidded me about blushing. “I got thin skin,” I said.

  “My Ma’s looking at us,” Sarah Jean said. I looked at Sarah Jean’s mother standing across the room, and the look she gave me made me gulp. “Hold my hand, Howie,” Sarah Jean said, and she slipped her hand into mine. “I know what she’s thinking,” she whispered to us, and I looked at her mother. She gave me such a stern look, I recall—as if holy fire were going to erupt from her eyes—that I started to take my hand from Sarah Jean’s. With the gentlest pressure on my palm from her fingertips she made me keep it there. “I know what she’s thinking,” Sarah Jean said again, and her cheeks glowed more than ever. “I don’t care, though. You just hold on to my hand, Howie, and don’t be scared. She can’t do nothing to us.”

  So I stood there holding Sarah Jean’s hand. Her eyes were shining now, and while we stood there and everybody talked, she hummed along in this pretty voice, thin and pale. Then Corky’s father said that it was time, that the funeral car was outside.

  Downstairs, we got into the back of a Cadillac limousine along with Corky’s parents and Rhoda, and on the way to the funeral parlor I looked out the windows, wondering if anybody I knew was going to see me riding with Corky’s family.

  “I saw him already,” Corky whispered, low enough so that only Sarah Jean and I could hear. “It don’t look like him at all. Howie and I went to the place this morning. The bastards got him all fixed up like a square—you may not recognize him in this suit and tie and stuff.”

  “I liked Mel real well,” Sarah Jean said.

  ‘It don’t look like him at all—” Corky repeated.

  Sarah Jean ran her thumb along the back of my hand and goose pimples started up my right arm. Corky’s father was sitting between Corky’s mother and Rhoda, talking low to both of them, about how it was going to be a great shock to see Mel this way, about how they should prepare themselves.

  His words didn’t help. When we got there and walked inside, the moment the two women saw Mel it was as if they hadn’t understood until that second that he was actually dead. They both started wailing—totally out of control—and one of Corky’s uncles went to them quickly to hold them steady. I don’t remember what they said or how long they stood there looking at Mel, but I do remember the sounds they both made—not just whimpering and crying and rasping when they tried to stop the tears, but this high-pitched sound, almost like the kind you hear dogs make sometimes. Everybody left them alone with Mel, and when they sat down on chairs away from the coffin, the other relatives began coming forward.

  “Once is enough for me,” Corky said to Sarah Jean.

  She looked at him, then took my hand. “Come on, Howie,” she said. “You come with me.”

  So I went up to the box and got a longer look this time. I still couldn’t cry. Everybody around me was, though they all did it softly, but it still didn’t seem real to me that Mel was gone. It was as if somebody else was in the box. Sarah Jean cried some and I asked her if she was okay. “I liked him real well,” she said. “Here—help me touch his hand.” As soon as she said that, I said we should leave to make room for some others to come up and see Mel. “Don’t be scared,” she said. “Once you touch a dead person, then you feel better—it don’t seem so scary after that.” And with my hand on top of hers she reached over the side of the coffin and touched Mel where his hands were clasped on his stomach. “Come on,” she whispered. “You do it, too, Howie. You’ll feel better if you do.”

  I let my hand slip off hers and I touched Mel’s hand but it was so cold and stiff it made me think of the way your own hand feels when it falls asleep—you can touch it, and you know you’re touching it, but it seems to belong to somebody else.

  A few of the other relatives were standing alongside us now, and from the corner of my eye I saw Sarah Jean’s mother approaching us. “He looks right nice, I think,” she said when she got to us. Sarah Jean looked at her in this absent way and didn’t reply. A woman behind us said something abou
t all the flowers that were around the room and how nice they looked.

  “Poor Mel,” another aunt said—the big one who’d comforted Corky’s mother. “We all have to travel the same road, I suppose, but why so soon, why so soon—?”

  “Well,” Sarah Jean’s mother said—she said it stiffly, too, even though there were tears in her eyes. “We know where he is now, though, don’t we? We can at least be thankful for that.”

  Sarah Jean jerked her head sideways and her eyes flared up in anger. Her mother saw the look and repeated what she’d said. “We know where he is now, don’t we, Sarah Jean?” Sarah Jean just glared. “I was just repeating to Frank and Margaret about the time when Mel accepted the Lord as his personal savior. It was while he was riding home from town one day when he was a boy on the farm. Reverend Millet had given him a lift—”

  Then Sarah Jean did the strangest thing. She started humming. The more her mother went on about the religious stuff, the louder Sarah Jean hummed. It was the same tune she’d been humming when we’d been at Corky’s place. It sounded like a hymn and while Sarah Jean hummed it she looked straight at Mel’s face, as if she were singing it just for him. The other relatives all grew quiet and Sarah Jean’s mother stopped what she was saying. “Don’t you be singing that,” she said between her teeth, low, but Sarah Jean kept singing. It wasn’t humming any more, because she’d let her mouth come open so that it was more like singing without words, with a sweet “ah” sound coming from her. Her mother kept glaring at her and whispering for her to stop, saying she had no right, but Sarah Jean didn’t seem to hear her. She hummed through the song twice, softly, and when she stopped, one of her aunts came to her and kissed her on the cheek, saying that God must have given her such a voice just to put Mel at peace. Sarah Jean’s mother got more upset then—you could see it in the way she clicked her jaw, as if she were grinding on her teeth—and Sarah Jean only smiled and tugged at my hand. I couldn’t move. Her mother’s stare had me transfixed. Sarah Jean tugged again. “Come on, Howie,” she said, and this time I followed her to where Corky was standing in back of all the chairs.

  “I got an idea,” Corky whispered to us. “How about us three cutting out of here and doing something together?” I shrugged and looked at Sarah Jean. She was smiling, her cheeks glowing. “It’s okay,” Corky said. “Mel wouldn’t wanna make me hang around all day looking at him and saying a bunch of crap to all these jerks coming to say how sorry they are. Bastards. Half the people who’re gonna be here never even knew him—they’ll just be doing it for my old man and my mother. Anyway, the funeral’s not till Monday—we can come back tonight or tomorrow if you want. I’m just too damned restless today—”

  “I like Rhoda,” Sarah Jean said. “She’s real pretty—”

  “Come on,” Corky said. “Am I gonna go alone, or are you two coming with me—?”

  Sarah Jean didn’t seem to be listening to Corky. She left us and went to Rhoda. She knelt down next to her and took Rhoda’s hand in hers, then said something. Rhoda stopped crying and tried to smile and they talked to each other for a minute. Then Sarah Jean came back. “I told Rhoda,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “Sarah Jean—” we heard from behind as we started out. “Sarah Jean Stilman!” Sarah Jean turned and looked at her mother coming through the rooms after us. “I want to speak with you—” Sarah Jean smiled, and she had this real wild look in her eye. “Come on!” she said, excited. “Don’t let her scare you. She ain’t God.”

  Her mother kept calling to us to come back, but the minute we got outside, Corky shouted, “This way!” and we ran down the street together, Sarah Jean between us, the three of us holding hands, zooming in and out of people. When we finally stopped running, way down Flatbush Avenue near the Parkside Theater, we were laughing and out of breath.

  “Let’s go rowing,” Corky said, and we turned up Parkside Avenue into Prospect Park and walked to where you rented the boats. Corky paid. He did the rowing too, and Sarah Jean and I sat in the back of the boat holding hands. It was still early and the lake was almost empty. None of us said anything for a while, but you could tell how happy Corky was now, not only to be away from the funeral parlor but to be getting rid of some energy. When we were away from the islands, in the big open part of the lake, Sarah Jean took her shoes off and let her feet slip over the side. She started humming again, but she kept laughing to herself while she did.

  “You been baptized?” she asked me.

  “I’m Jewish,” I said.

  “You don’t know then,” she said, and laughed again. Then she hummed the tune, and there was something about the melody and the way she did it that made me think it could go on forever. It was beginning to haunt me. “They sing this when you get baptized,” she said to me. “It’s a hymn.” Then she started singing, soft and thin, with this calm look in her eyes: “Just as I am without one plea…But that Thy blood was shed for me…” She didn’t seem to breathe between sentences. I took my shoes and socks off and let my feet trail in the water so that the boat balanced better. “And that Thou hid’st me come to Thee…O Lamb of God, I come, I come…” She sang another verse and this time I hummed along with her. What I liked most was the way her voice glided over the words like “am” and “plea” and “Thee”—the ones that carried across more than one note.

  “When they baptize you, the preacher, he holds your head under water backwards—that’s immersion,” she said. “Corky knows.” Corky nodded and pulled at the oars. I could see his muscles, and sweat dripping along his neck. “Only thing was,” Sarah Jean said, “when they did it to me, this damned preacher, he kept my head under water so long when I come up I bit his hand.” Corky caught his oar in the water and splashed us. Sarah Jean clapped her hands, delighted at his surprise. “My mother got so mad she about died.” Then she leaned forward and spoke lower, smiling the whole time. “That’s why she got so mad before, me singing a hymn for Mel and all—she keeps on at me all the time, how I’m gonna be damned eternally, cause I weren’t baptized right. She says the devil must of been inhabiting me, me to do that.—But I don’t care. I got even with that preacher. You should of heard him howl, everybody come splashing through the water to us. But I got a real good hold on account of I knew I would only get that chance but once—” She stopped smiling. “He held me under for spite, cause he knew I didn’t like him.”

  “Reverend Millet?” Corky asked. Sarah Jean nodded and Corky smiled. “Mel hated him too,” he said, and then—just like that—Corky started singing too, real loud. “Just as I a-am withou-out one plea—” He could hardly carry a tune, but it didn’t matter. Sarah Jean and I joined in with him and as we glided across the waters we sang the song again and again.

  We stayed on the lake for an hour or two, singing and talking and kidding around—Sarah Jean and Corky had fun roaring out a lot of the hymns they both knew—and then we came in and sat at the boathouse and had some French fries and Cokes. Corky wouldn’t let me pay for a thing.

  “You wanna see where our team plays its games?” he asked Sarah Jean, and she said she did, so we walked through the park to the Parade Grounds. Corky got sentimental then, remembering how he used to be batboy for a team Mel had been the star on, and he couldn’t stop talking about him and about what a great ballplayer he would have been. “Yeah,” he said. “I’d give anything to be able to make the Majors someday—the way Mel would of—” He kicked at the dirt. “Ah, shit!” he said.

  “You’ll be as good as Mel if you want to,” Sarah Jean said.

  He lifted his head. “You think so?”

  “Sure,” I offered. “Everybody’s always saying how you got the same swing he has—”

  “Ah, what’s the difference now?” Corky said, staring across the fields.

  “You’ll be as good as Mel if you want to,” Sarah Jean said again, and the way she said it had a calming effect on Corky.

  “What time is it, Howie?” he asked. I told him it was after one o’clock and he punched hi
s fist into his palm. “Hey, I know what—let’s show Sarah Jean what the Kenmore’s like on a Saturday afternoon—” He put his arm over both our shoulders and started talking about how the RKO Kenmore balcony was famous all over Brooklyn. “They got a maternity ward built right in!” he said, and Sarah Jean giggled. Then Corky explained how all the girls went there together on Saturday afternoons and sat in the balcony, and how the matron never asked your ages, so you could smoke and neck and do anything you wanted. We walked up Caton Avenue, then turned right on Ocean. “Howie’s never been here on Saturday afternoon,” Corky said to Sarah Jean when we were at the booth buying tickets, “so you gotta take good care of him—you know what I mean?”

  “Howie can take care of himself,” Sarah Jean said, and when she said it she tickled the inside of my palm with her fingertip. I shoved my other hand in my side pocket to keep what was happening from showing, and as we passed into the lobby and started up the steps I was really nervous. It was supposed to be mostly the tough guys and girls who would be there in the dark and I didn’t know what to expect. Of our group of guys, Corky was the only one who’d ever been there more than once, and he’d always brought back stories about how girls you didn’t even know would let you sit next to them and do wild things.

  “I almost forgot,” Corky said when we got to the landing of the balcony. “Wait for me a minute—I gotta get ammunition!” He ran down the stairs, two at a time, and a minute later he was back with a couple of bars of candy. “Come on,” he said, and we went inside. I don’t know what I expected, but I was surprised that the seats were only about half taken. There was a lot of smoke and some of the guys had their feet on the backs of the chairs in front of them. There was an old woman in a white uniform standing in one corner, with a flashlight, but she didn’t seem to care about anything. “Let me scout the place first,” Corky said, and he walked along the back row, looking down the aisles. Every once in a while you’d hear somebody curse, or make a remark back to the movie screen, but most of the time it was pretty quiet. You could hear girls giggling, and sometimes some arguing. “Okay,” Corky said. “I see one. Follow me—”