The Professional Page 3

  “I’m sure he’ll be all right,” I said, trying to think of how to say it. “You can live a pretty normal life with that.”

  “That’s what the doctor said.”

  “Do you remember Tony Lazzeri, the old Yankee second baseman?”

  “Sure. The Italians in my neighborhood were all crazy about him. Poosh-em up, Tony!”

  “He was an epileptic.”

  “He was?”

  “Sure.”

  “He really was?”

  “Certainly. I don’t think many people knew it, but when Paul Krichell, the Yankee scout, was scouting Lazzeri out west he called Ed Barrow, the general manager of the Yankees, one night. I think Lazzeri was Cubs’ property, and they wanted $50,000 for him. Krichell told Barrow on the phone what a terrific ballplayer Lazzeri was, and Barrow said: ‘What else?’ Krichell said: ‘Well, he’s got epilepsy.’ Barrow screamed: ‘What? You want me to pay $50,000 for an epileptic?’ And Krichell said: ‘He’s an epileptic, but he never throws fits between one and four o’clock in the afternoon, and that’s when you play ball.’ So they bought him.”

  “He was a great ballplayer.”

  “Sure, and he never had an attack during a game. Once he had one down in Florida during spring training, and I think he might have had one in the clubhouse at Yankee Stadium once, but that’s all. He played great ball for years.”

  “And the people never knew there was anything wrong with him.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “No, he died a few years ago.”

  “That’s right. I think I remember now.”

  I can never figure out how the mind works. I was thinking of Lazzeri and the stories in the papers at the time, telling how they found him in his house on the West Coast, dead at the foot of the stairs. Then, I don’t know why, I got to thinking back to that traffic circle, and that Army-Fordham game.

  Eddie was not saying anything now, and I was seeing that mist falling on that raw November day and hearing the noise that hung over the stadium from the start to the end and the players in the middle of it. Fordham was undefeated and Army was, too, and had maybe the best team in the country. They were both so high for this, and with the crowd never letting up, that at first they couldn’t do anything but rock one another, and then, finally, Army broke it up with passes at the end of the first half. Army went on to win it, 35 to 0, but the second half was the roughest football you ever saw because one Army player came off the field with the lower half of his face all blood and another staggered to the bench like a fighter at the end of a bad round and some from both sides were thrown off for fighting and there were Fordhams mud-caked and lying on their backs with the wind knocked out of them.

  After the game there were colonels walking around behind the press box trying to get somebody’s ear and complaining about Fordham, and there were old Fordhams cussing the Army, and finally we all went down to the Bear Mountain Inn and we stood around that bar there in that pine-paneled room and we had a wonderful time.

  “After that first half, Fordham couldn’t have won except by a knockout,” somebody, maybe Tom Meany, said.

  “If Tim Cohane made this match, he’s the new Mike Jacobs,” I said.

  “If you didn’t see the first Dempsey-Firpo fight it’s all right, because you just saw the second one,” perhaps Tom said.

  “They should have swapped the electric clock operator for a knockdown timekeeper,” Jimmy Cannon said. “How about that?”

  “I don’t care for outdoor fights this late in the season,” Wilbur Wood said, and that stopped it.

  Then we went into the dining room and had another round of drinks and ate some of Jack Martin’s steaks and told stories and finally we broke up and went out and got our cars and drove back through the mist to New York. The next day I was probably depressed again, writing the column for Monday and trying to place myself in the middle of what had happened down there on the field. It is always that way. It was that way in the war. Only the ones who did what they did could understand it, and the rest of us who wrote about it never really belonged.

  “So Tony Lazzeri had that, too,” Eddie said.

  “Yes,” I said. “He did.”

  3

  Eddie felt better as soon as we got to camp. The camp is on the west shore of the lake, where you miss the sunsets, but the railroad did that when it took the east shore. There are a few summer cottages on the east shore, in the places where the railroad is back a hundred yards or so, but they always have those two trains a day shoo-wooing and sooting at them, and it spoils it for them.

  Even without the sunsets, though, it is quite nice where the camp is. The lake is three miles long and about a mile across at its widest, and there is a lot of pine and hemlock in the hills. The hills appear to roll right down to the lake, so that from a distance you are quite unaware that the railroad runs along one side or that a narrow blacktop road winds between the hills and the lake on the other.

  Because of the railroad, almost all of the building has taken place on the west shore, and you can trace the eras in the architecture. First, around the turn of the century, there were only the two small summer hotels, the one at the foot of the lake and the other halfway up this west shore, steep-roofed, clapboarded, gingerbreaded and the progenitors of the line. Their issue, after the First World War, were the summer homes, heavy-set on a wooded acre or two, fieldstoned and brown-stained shingled with large open porches facing the lake and screened sleeping porches above them. After the Second World War the summer homes spawned the cottages and camps spotted among the trees and between the summer homes, some cement-blocked and square, some synthetic log cabins, some prefabricated Cape Cods with rose arbors and pottery gnomes. About ten years ago the fighters started using the hotel halfway up the lake, and now during the autumn and winter and spring they share it with the bar trade and occasional diners, and in July and August, when boxing slows down, it becomes again a summer hotel.

  “Well, it looks the same,” Eddie said as he drove down the incline of the driveway and turned to the right to put the car in the empty parking space by the lake. “I really like it here.”

  “Yes, it’s fine,” I said, but I was thinking that you had better like it here because you are going to have it for a whole solid month.

  “We can take our stuff in later,” he said.

  The hotel is painted white now, with the windows and door trim and those gingerbread cornices painted red. I suppose this is excusable, because the owner’s name is Jean Girot and he is from Lausanne and calls the place Chalet Swiss. He wanted to call it Chalet Suisse, but his wife, being Irish, wouldn’t stand for that, so it says Chalet Swiss on the neon sign at the head of the driveway and on the small, red rectangular sign with white letters that hangs by a chain over the two steps leading up to the porch.

  “Hey! What’s going on around here, my bon ami?” Eddie said.

  He pronounced it the way you pronounce the household cleanser, because it was a pleasantry he and Girot had between them. The last time I had been out to the camp Eddie had been there and Girot had been trying to get him to pronounce it correctly, and then, finally, he had shrugged his shoulders and quit on it.

  “Hello, Eddie,” Girot said. “And Mr. Hughes.”

  It is a small square lobby with speckled linoleum on the floor and three plastic-covered occasional chairs, a blond coffee table and an artificial palm tree. At the back there is the small hotel desk, with the key rack behind it, and against the wall on the left, near the door to the bar and dining room, are two phone booths. When we came in, Girot, wearing his butcher’s apron, was leaning against one of the booths and watching a telephone repairman, who was on his knees by the open door of the other booth, putting some tools into his metal tool box.

  “So what’s new, bon ami?” Eddie said.

  “He’s fixing the phone,” Girot said, nodding at the repairman.

  “It’s fixed,” the repairman said, looking up,
“but I’m telling you, Girot, the next time it happens, out it goes.”

  “What’s the matter with it?” Eddie said.

  “I’ll tell you what’s the matter with it,” the telephone man said, looking up at Eddie. “Some wise guy’s been trying to rig it again, banging on it.”

  He got up and turned to Girot.

  “I’m not kidding. I’m telling the office. This is the third time. These things ain’t made to be banged around. Out it comes.”

  “It’s the last time,” Girot said, nodding.

  “Who did it?” Eddie said, when the telephone man had gone out and shut the door behind him.

  “You know,” Girot said, shaking his head. He is short and thin and in his late fifties and, since he stopped drinking, he always seems to me to be in perpetual mourning.

  “I know?” Eddie said. “Who?”

  “Your friend,” Girot said. “Al Penna.”

  “My friend?” Eddie said, smiling. “He’s not my friend.”

  “That’s a fighter?” Girot said, shaking his head again. “He found some way, the last time he was here, to hit the box of the phone with something—I don’t know what it was—and it makes a sound like a quarter is dropped in. I heard him telling some of the other fighters one time, and I told him to stop it.”

  “He’s crazy,” Eddie said, smiling.

  “What kind of a fighter can he be?” Girot said, sadly. “All the time he is fooling around. Always he is kidding. How can that be a fighter?”

  At least when Girot drank he was a champ in his own league. For a little man he was astounding, and then nothing, not even fighters like Al Penna, bothered him. I was thinking how some doctor must have scared the life out of him and how it was too bad. Now he is just sad.

  “So you got the bridal suite for me?” Eddie was saying.

  “For a nice fellow like you, anything I have,” Girot said. “I mean that, Eddie.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And you, too, Mr. Hughes.”

  “Thank you, Girot.”

  “Who’s up here?” Eddie said. “I mean, besides Penna.”

  “That heavyweight from Buffalo who eats all the time. That Paul Schaeffer. All he does is eat.”

  “He’s building up his strength,” I said, smiling, because for some strange reason there is something amusing about the excessively doleful people like Girot. I often have the urge to egg them on.

  “Yes, strength,” Girot said. “Soon he will be so strong that when he gets knocked out it will take a team of horses to pull him back to his corner.”

  “Who else is here?” Eddie said.

  “Strength,” Girot said, still thinking about it and shaking his head.

  “Is Cardone here?”

  “Yes, he is here.”

  “That’s right. He fights the week before I do.”

  “And Booker Boyd. That is all.”

  “Let’s go out to the gym,” Eddie said to me.

  “You do not want to bring your things in now?” Girot said.

  “We’ll bring them in later.”

  “You have the corner room over there, on the lake,” Girot said, pointing up. “And you are across the hall, Mr. Hughes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “When Johnny Jay comes, he will use the other bed in your room, Eddie. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  Johnny Jay was Eddie’s trainer. That was his title, but actually Doc Carroll trained Eddie as well as managed him, and Johnny Jay was just the conditioner and rubber and the pail man in the corner.

  “That Girot isn’t a bad guy,” Eddie said, when we walked into the sitting room. “I like him.”

  “He has his troubles,” I said.

  At the back of the sitting room a stairway leads to the second floor. There was an old tan, rattan summer rug on the floor, and a mahogany console television set stood looking out from the far corner opposite the stairs. Most of the furniture in the room—an old maroon plush sofa and two or three overstuffed chairs with soiled slip covers on them and a couple of wooden folding chairs—was grouped in a sort of semicircle, facing the television. With the room deserted, I had the impression that the sofa and chairs had finally cornered the TV set and were about to spring upon it and crush it in repayment for all the indignities it had visited upon them in a long, long chain of nights past.

  The gym is beyond the sitting room. It was added to the original hotel about thirty years ago as a flat-roofed dance hall, and it is still a dance hall on Saturday nights during the summer. During the other seasons, however, it makes a quite excellent gym, even with the bar there and the tired and dusty but red, white and blue paper streamers still looped from the ceiling.

  As you come through the door, the bar is on the left, stripped now of bottles and glassware but used by the trainers to fill their water bottles. The ring sets toward the back of the room, with three rows of folding chairs in front of it, and there is a punching bag platform between two of the windows on the left and a heavy bag is chained about ten feet from that. In the far left corner two plywood partitions have been bolted to the ceiling and the floor to make a dressing room about fifteen feet long by about ten feet wide.

  “From Brooklyn, New York!” Eddie said, raising his voice as he walked past the rows of chairs to the ring. “Al Penna!”

  Penna was in the ring with Booker Boyd. They were moving around during a break between rounds, just circulating and shadowboxing, and when Penna heard Eddie he stopped and turned around and smiled, and with the thumb of his right glove he hooked his white rubber mouthpiece out.

  “Thankew! Thankew!” he said, raising his two gloves above his head in the prize fighter’s salute. “How are you, Eddie?”

  “Time!” someone said, calling it.

  It was Barnum, standing on the ring apron. Barnum was an old Negro. I don’t know how old he was or his straight name, because everyone just called him Barnum, but he had been around forever. I know he was around Joe Gans, because in any argument about fighters and fighting he would go back to Gans. Gans was his big saver, the way Gans did this or did that or what Gans said, but no one resented it in the arguments, the way you get to resent old-timers, because he didn’t play it like a record, over and over, and because he knew as much about pure boxing as any man alive. He really did, and for years he had been bringing colored kids up out of the amateurs and then losing them. I could name a half-dozen good fighters he made, in the sense that he was the one who put the best that they had into them, but someone was always moving him out. Someone would always get to the kid, and the kid would listen to the white salesman and look at the white salesman’s clothes and then look at old Barnum and be gone. They would pay Barnum a thousand dollars maybe, and some of those kids made money after that, but they were never what they should have been because after they left Barnum they never got much better, and I often wondered how good they might have been.

  I used to get sore about this, and one night I watched one of those kids go for the featherweight title and get a good clobbering. Walking out of the Garden I saw Barnum standing in the crowd in the lobby, standing against the wall and wearing the dark blue beret that some of those old Negroes affected after Jack Johnson.

  “It’s too bad, Barnum,” I said.

  He just shook his head and I walked away and then, the first thing I knew, he had another one. Now he had Booker Boyd.

  Booker Boyd was a light welterweight and one of those deadpan Negroes, more like Ike Williams than Joe Louis. Joe was dead-pan, all right, especially in the ring, but outside the ring you could see, every once in a while, a quick, small smile playing behind it. With Ike Williams you could see nothing, and Booker Boyd was just like him.

  Boyd was stalking Penna now, always walking forward, feinting, jetting out that left, that face never changing, trying to corner Penna. Penna was moving, awkward, too tall and gangling for a lightweight, too loose and without purpose, except to protect himself and punch when he saw the chance. They both had u
p good sweats and Penna’s had spotted through his T-shirt and Boyd’s had soaked his tight against that mahogany torso, and we watched them for a couple of minutes, Boyd stalking and Penna skating and then stopping to try to punch Boyd off and then skating again.

  “I might as well bring my foot locker in,” Eddie said.

  “I’ll give you a hand,” I said.

  We walked out to the car and Eddie opened the trunk compartment. He hauled the heavy black foot locker out and put it down on the gravel and reached in and put his hand on the handle of my suitcase.

  “We can take our bags in now, or we can get them later.”

  “Why don’t we get rid of the foot locker first?” I said.

  “All right.”

  “What ever made that Al Penna want to be a fighter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He looks more like a basketball player.”

  “He’s a little better fighter than he looks.”

  “But he’s got no chance.”

  “I know.”

  He slammed the trunk compartment shut and turned the handle. We picked up the foot locker, he at one end and I holding the strap handle at the other, and we walked it that way across the driveway and jockeyed with the door and walked it through and across the gym and into that dressing room.

  Vic Cardone was in there alone, and he was just finishing dressing. He was a good-looking kid, handsome, dark-eyed and dark-haired and almost classic features, and the first time I saw him fight I knew that was going to be his trouble.

  “Hello, Vic,” Eddie said.

  “Hello,” Cardone said, looking at us.

  “You know Frank Hughes.”

  “I’ve seen him,” he said, nodding to me, and then he picked a towel up off one of the benches and put it around his neck and went out.

  “Some talker,” I said.

  “He never says much,” Eddie said, looking out of the window at the lake. “Penna calls him Silent. He used to call him Tyrone Cardone, but now he calls him Silent Cardone.”

  “His face is his problem.”