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“He’s sleeping,” the woman said angrily. “He’s got to fight tonight. He hasn’t got time to talk to anybody.”
There was the sound of the receiver slamming down.
Rudolph had been holding the receiver away from his ear and the woman had talked loudly, so both Gretchen and Joh
“Fighting tonight on the old camp grounds,” Gretchen said. “Sounds like our Tommy.”
Rudolph picked up the copy of the New York Times that was lying on a chair beside the desk and turned to the sports section. “Here it is,” he said. “Main bout. Tommy Jordache versus Virgil Walters, middleweights, ten rounds. At the Su
“It sounds bucolic,” Gretchen said.
“I’m going,” Rudolph said.
“Why?” Gretchen asked.
“He’s my brother, after all.”
“I’ve gotten along for ten years without him,” Gretchen said. “I’m going to try for twenty.”
“Joh
“Sorry,” Joh
The telephone rang again. Rudolph picked it up eagerly, but it was only Willie. “Hi, Rudy,” Willie said. There were barroom noises behind him. “No, I don’t have to speak to her,” Willie said. “Just tell her I’m sorry, but I’ve got a business di
Gretchen smiled, lying on the couch. “Don’t tell me what he said.”
“He’s not coming home to di
“And I’m not to wait up.”
“Something along those lines.”
“Joh
By the time they had finished the second bottle, Gretchen had called for a baby sitter and they had found out where Su
When the baby sitter came, Gretchen gave her instructions and left the apartment with Rudolph and Joh
Joh
“Thanks.” Rudolph put the bills carelessly in his pocket. He laughed again.
“What’s so fu
“I never thought I’d like to see the day,” Rudolph said, “when I didn’t know exactly how much money I had in my pocket.”
“You have taken on the wholesome and mind-freeing habits of the rich,” Joh
“I hope he gets his head knocked off,” Gretchen said.
A preliminary bout was under way as an usher led them to their seats three rows from ringside. Gretchen noted that there were few women present and that none of them was wearing a black-wool dress. She had never been to a prizefight before and she tuned out the television set whenever one was being shown. The idea of men beating each other senseless for pay seemed brutish to her and the faces of the men around her were just the sort of faces that one would expect at such an entertainment. She was sure she had never seen so many ugly people collected in one place.
The men in the ring did not appear to be doing much harm to each other and she watched with passive disgust as they clinched, wrestled, and ducked away from blows. The crowd, in its fog of tobacco smoke, was apathetic and only once in awhile, when there was the thud of a heavy punch, a sort of sharp, grunting, animal noise filled the arena.
Rudolph, she knew, went to prizefights from time to time and she had heard him discussing particular boxers like Ray Robinson enthusiastically with Willie. She looked surreptitiously over at her brother. He seemed interested by the spectacle in the ring. Now that she was actually seeing a fight, with the smell of sweat in her nostrils and the red blotches on pale skin where blows had landed, Rudolph’s whole character, the subtle, deprecating air of educated superiority, the well-ma
In the next fight, one man was cut over the eye and the wound spurted blood all over him and his opponent. The roar of the crowd when they saw the blood sickened her and she wondered if she could sit there and wait for a brother to climb through the ropes to face similar butchery.
By the time the main bout came on, she was pale and sick and it was through a haze of tears and smoke that she saw a large man in a red bathrobe climb agilely through the ropes and recognized Thomas.
When Thomas’s handlers took off his robe and threw it over his shoulders to put the gloves on over the bandaged hands, the first thing Rudolph noticed, with a touch of jealousy, was that Thomas had almost no hair on his body. Rudolph was getting quite hairy, with thick, tight, black curls on his chest and sprouting on his shoulders. His legs, too, were covered with dark hair, and it did not fit with the image he had of himself. When he went swimming in the summer, his hairiness embarrassed him and he felt that people were snickering at him. For that reason he rarely sunbathed and put on a shirt as soon as he got out of the water.
Thomas, except for the ferocious, muscular, overtrained body, looked surprisingly the same. His face was unmarked and the expression was still boyish and ingratiating. Thomas kept smiling during the formalities before the begi
His opponent was a rangy Negro, considerably taller than Tommy, and with much longer arms, shuffling dangerously in his corner in a little dance, nodding as he listened to the advice being whispered into his ear by his handler.
Gretchen watched with a rigid, painful grimace on her face, squinting through the smoke at her brother’s powerful, destructive, bare figure. She did not like the hairless male body—Willie was covered with a comfortable reddish fuzz—and the ridged professional muscles made her shudder in primitive distaste. Siblings, out of the same womb. The thought dismayed her. Behind Thomas’s boyish smile she recognized the sly malevolence, the desire to hurt, the pleasure in dealing pain, that had alienated her when they lived in the same house. The thought that it was her own flesh and blood exposed there under the bright lights in this dreadful ceremony was almost unbearable to her. Of course, she thought, I should have known; this is where he had to end. Fighting for his life.
The men were evenly matched, equally fast, the Negro less aggressive, but better able to defend himself with his long arms. Thomas kept burrowing in, taking two punches to get in one, slugging away at the Negro’s body, making the Negro give ground and occasionally punishing him terribly when he got him in a corner against the ropes.
“Kill the nigger,” a voice from the back of the arena cried out each time Thomas threw a volley of punches. Gretchen winced, ashamed to be there, ashamed for every man and woman in the place. Oh, Arnold Simms, limping, in the maroon bathrobe, saying, “You got pretty feet, Miss Jordache,” dreaming of Cornwall, oh, Arnold Simms, forgive me for tonight.