A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The Blue Ribbon

I’ll never forget the day I first met him. He made quite an impression on me. Especially on my right eye, which he changed to a dun-colored sworl. Also on my upper left pivot, which he detached. It was a first tooth, it would have come out eventually anyhow, but he undeniably hastened the process.

He was maybe seven, I was maybe eight.

I’d strayed incautiously out of my own neighborhood. They still had the El up in those days, and I’d ventured across to the lee side of it, riverward.

He was lounging up against the wall, alongside one of the tenement doorways. He had his arms pinioned behind his back, in an attitude suggestive of keeping them leashed, holding them in reserve for eventual use. I should have been forewarned by that, but I wasn’t.

I eyed him with the detached objectivity of one boy for another, a strange boy, as I came along, no more. Everything about him — the slanted peaked cap, the maroon jersey, the knee britches, the black stockings — was strictly de rigueur, befitting his age and surroundings. Everything but one thing. And that was so glaring, so incredible, so horrific a stigma, I had to look twice, to make sure I had actually seen it there the first time. That was where I made my mistake.

It was a bow of ribbon; a pert, four-leafed bow of blue ribbon, such as the little girls contemporaneous to us wore on their pigtails. And it was on his head. On, or in, or clinging to, his hair. Since he had no pigtail, someone (inconceivable that it could have been he himself) had taken a strand of his carrot-colored hair, just over the ear, brought it downward, and affixed this unspeakable token to it. At that, his cap could have been made to conceal it; it could have been thrust upward out of sight, or the cap brought down over it. Instead, the cap had been deliberately and acutely slanted far over the other way, so that the whole side of his skull was left unprotected. And there it was, in full view, in broad daylight, on 22nd Street east of Second Avenue.

The rest was automatic. A stomach-deep guffaw churned up from me.

His head had been lowered slightly, his eyes had been watchfully on me, following me across his radius of vision. Now he nodded to himself, as if to say, “That’ll do nicely. That’s just what I’ve been waiting for.”

His arms came out from behind his back. He stepped forward away from the wall.

To me he was monosyllabic. “Okay” was all he said.

He made various fistic preparations. Shucked back his cuffs so that they wouldn’t hamper him; took off his cap and stowed it up under his jersey for temporary safekeeping, directly over his stomach. He also tested out the knuckles of one hand by grinding them, so to speak, against the palm of the other.

There was no anger or any other emotion apparent, he was quite professional about it.

I didn’t like any of this. There was too much formality, and I was used to only impromptu little scuffles that were over with almost before you even knew you were engaged in them. I saw that I’d let myself in for something. I had an inkling of my own limitations. Also the average amount of prudence. Or caution, if you want to call it that.

“All right, I apollugize,” I said grudgingly, but fairly hurriedly.

I was laboring under a misapprehension. I had thought there was a point of honor involved: I had ridiculed him by chortling as I was going by. It seemed that wasn’t it at all.

“What’re you trying to do, spoil everything?” he said accusingly. “I don’t want no apollugies. I want some training. What do you think I’ve been standing here like this for, for over an hour? Come on, put ’em up.”

“But I–I take it back,” I faltered.

“What’re you trying to do, do me out of a workout? Come on, put ’em up. How’re we going to start, until you put ’em up?”

I had to put them up then, what could I do?

I could have saved myself the trouble. They went right down again. So did all the rest of my person with them, to a sprawling position on the sidewalk. That was when my eye got it.

A certain amount of heated emotion entered into it on my part now. None whatever on his, “Wide open,” I heard him mutter judiciously.

I got up again, and I put ’em up again.

I, and they, both went down again. That was when my tooth got it.

He was beginning to veer over into advice, although I was in too rabid a state at the moment to take much note of it. “No guard at all,” he said critically. “Y’ just put ’em up, and then you don’t do anything with them.” He spat off to one side, although I imagine this was a restorative reflex and not a commentary on my prowess. “And y’get sore when you fight,” he added. “Never get sore when you fight; dintcha ever learn that?”

I was up again; then I was down again just as promptly. This time there was no particular damage, except to my equilibrium.

“I pulled that one,” he told me. He stood a moment, then he swung his hand at me disgustedly. “Aw, what’s the use?” he said. “That ain’t no practice. I could get that from a punching bag.”

He let me cool off a minute in a recumbent position. Then abruptly he held out his hand, helped me to swing myself to my feet.

“Where you from?” he said.

“The other side of the El.”

“Oh, no wonder!” he exclaimed, as though that explained everything. “They don’t know how to fight. Why’n’t you say so before? I wouldn’t have matched up with you.”

I felt like pointing out I’d done about as much as I could to avoid having it happen myself, but I refrained.

“Know who my father was?” he said pridefully. “Chuck O’Reilly.”

“Who was that?” I asked incautiously.

His voice rose almost to the third-floor windows over us. “Chuck O’Reilly?” he shrieked. “He was only the world’s champiun! Don’t you know anything?”

I felt rather humble now intellectually, just as humble as I’d felt physically before.

“He’s dead now,” he said more quietly. “That’s what I’m training for. He made my mother swear before he died that she’d train me to be champiun some day, like he was.”

I was looking at his eye. “Did I do that to you?” I asked incredulously. I couldn’t remember having been anywhere near there, or any of the rest of him.

“Naw,” he said reluctantly, “I got that yesterday. I forgot, and dropped my guard.” That seemed to remind him of something. He seized me by the arm suddenly, pulled me in toward the doorway. “Come on up a minute, I want to find out.”

He didn’t say what he wanted to find out. I was vaguely uneasy; I tried to hang back. I didn’t like the gloomy interior of the hallway, or the even gloomier stairs he started to tow me up, flight after flight. After all I was legitimate spoils of war, in a manner of speaking, and I didn’t know what might be awaiting me. “Come on,” he urged, “nobody’s gonna hurt you.”

He partly urged and partly dragged me up four long flights, and then threw open a flat-door without the formality of knocking. It appeared we had had an audience the whole time, without my being aware of it. She was sitting by a window, overlooking the street. She was on some kind of a rocker; she must have been, because I could see her sway a little every now and then; but outside of that you couldn’t tell. You couldn’t see hide nor hair of it, not even the runners. She was wide of girth, she must have weighed about one-eighty. With the smooth, pink cheeks of a young girl. His mother.

“Y’don’t cahll that a bout, now do ye?” she blurted out before we were fairly in the doorway. “It was over before it begun. ’Twas what your father used to cahll a set up.”

“It was all I could get. I stood there an hour. Nobody around here will laugh at me any more. The kids stand right in front of me and pretend they don’t see it,” he exculpated himself.

“Then why don’t you go over on the next block?”

“They’re foreigners over there, they jump you three at a time. An’ that’s Officer McGinty’s beat, he’s getting to be a sorehead lately, he says he’ll run me in the next time I—” He took a deep, crucial breath. “Can I take it off now. Mom? Can I?”

“Well now, I don’t know. Look at that eye. Y’left yourself wide open yesterday, and your footwork was a crying shame, it was. And now today, you take on this— this—” Words seemed to fail her. “Come here, creature,” she said to me with kindly contempt.

She reached out and felt my spindly arms. She shook her head with professional gravity. “He hasn’t the makings, he’ll never be any good for it, I can tell ye that now. He’s stunted. He’s a dwharf. Don’t they feed you anything at ahll at your house, poor limb? It’s here with us you’d better be staying for a few meals.”

“He’s from the other side of the El,” he explained, the way you would explain some helpless maimed thing you have brought home with you out of sheer humanitarianism.

She threw up her hands in pious horror. “The poor soul,” was all she said.

I felt like a useless encumbrance on the face of the earth.

And yet I had taken to her instantly, even though I was getting the short end of her criticism. She was the kind of mother my age dreamed about — and never got. She was interested in the right sort of things to be interested in. Not whether one of your knee pants was dragging down your leg or how your marks were in history. The things she taught you stayed with you all through life. You stopped wearing knee pants after a while. And history went right on making itself up without any help from you. When I grew older I learned to call what she was taking, the long view. She was a maker of men.

“Can I take it off, Mom?” he kept pestering her. “Can I now? I don’t like it. I don’t even like him to see it on me.”

“I know ye don’t,” she said judiciously. “And that’s why I put it on ye.” She considered. “Very well, that’ll do for this time,” she assented finally. “Fetch me my box, ye know where it is.”

He brought out a trinket box of sorts. Of polished rosewood, with brass hinges. The sort of box that women use to hold their treasured keepsakes and mementos.

“Bend your head down,” she ordered.

Her fingers worked deftly, separating the hideous appendage from his virile thatch, while I stared in frozen fascination.

Then she wound it about her finger, in a tight-packed coil. It was the sort of ribbon they weren’t making even then. A rich, full-bodied silk; it must have come over from the old country with her, maybe on one of her dresses. It had a thin line of satin traced along each edge, the way a mirror is beveled. And an invisible pattern of flowers sprinkled all over it. When you held it flat, you couldn’t see them; when you held it up, they came out.

She prodded it down into the box, wedged it in, into a special little cranny, a crevice, just big enough to hold it. She closed the lid.

“And the next time ye break any of me rules, forget the things I’ve told ye, like ye did yesterday,” she warned him, “out it comes again. Mark me word now!”

And then, as he turned his back in unutterable relief, she caught my eye, and solemnly dropped one eyelid at me. I glowed all over. She was soaring moment by moment in my young esteem. I was already well into the opening stages of heroine-worship. It was more than that; if there’s such a thing as acquiring a second mother, contemporary with the first, I was in process of doing just that. She was a mother the old Spartans would have understood. A mother who reared warriors.

“I’m going to be champiun of the world some day,” he told me matter-of-factly, as we went flying down the tenement stairs together, his penance at an end.

I was carrying his coat. I knew then that was what I wanted to do, more than anything else. Carry his coat, figuratively speaking. I knew then that I had my life’s work cut out ahead of me.

“And I’m going to be your manager,” I said.

He came up the hard way. Fighting for a turkey or a smoked ham, fighting almost for the love of it alone; fighting at church benefits and social club smokers, fighting in basements and on amusement piers and at the back of recreation halls, once even on the roof of a disused car-barn. And no matter where it was, I was always there. Every step of the way. Little Barney Carpenter, undersized as ever and still wearing those same horn-rimmed glasses, who had to wear a topcoat right up to the end of May and couldn’t have paced him even once around the Reservoir in the Park without being carried off on a stretcher. I was his manager, as I’d always said I’d be. I had to be a civil engineer on the side, my family’d had something to say about that. But that was on the side, that was a pale substitute for living. This was my real life, the truncated hours of the day and night I snitched to spend with him. This was the main event, and nothing could make it otherwise.

He was a grand specimen by now. He could have held up the El on one shoulder while they shifted supports under it. When you saw him in a pair of trunks, you only realized then what the Creator’s blueprints must have originally called for. And when you watched him inside the ropes, you knew what they meant by the expression “poetry of motion.” The carrot thatch of his kid days had darkened to bronze, and there was a sort of honest, open look about his face that’s all any man requires in the way of good looks.

He was a comer. But then everyone is, I guess, until — well, until he’s a goner.

It was a foregone conclusion that someone would see him sooner or later. Someone did, at one of those peanut-bouts one night. The door blew open in the dressing room right afterward and a big black cigar walked in, followed by a man.

“Shackley’s the name,” he said, and shoved out his hand to O’Reilly, who couldn’t take it because he was unlacing his gym shoes. So he changed it to a clout on the back instead.

“I’m your new manager,” he announced. “I seen you out there just now. Now don’t argue. I gotta make a train back to the Hudson Terminal. I’m a busy man. Ben Hogan on the entertainment committee tipped me off I should come out here, and anything that’ll get me all the way to Hackensack— This is your trainer. Here’s a notary public. Where’s that contract. Freeman; you got that contract, Freeman? Here, get your unnawear off this bench, this’ll do. Just sign here.”

“Well, gimme time to get my pants on at least, will you?” O’Reilly glowered.

Meanwhile the dynamic one had become aware of me, as if by postscript. “Who’s this guy?” he asked.

“He’s my manager,” O’Reilly said. “Past, present and future.” He gave him a level look. “And he suits me just fine.”

The cigar notched upward an inch in his mouth. He looked me up and down as though he didn’t think much of the dates I was able to get for him. “How much you want for his contract?” he blurted out.

“Even if there was one between us,” I let him know, “I wouldn’t peddle it like a side of bacon over a counter.”

The cigar hitched up another notch. “Oh, one of them idlelists! Fine,” he went on briskly, “then I’m not taking anything away from you. If you think that much of him, then you ought to be glad to see him get what he’s worth. Whaddye want to waste him on things like this for? He’s material, I tell you, material.” He turned to O’Reilly. “Whaddye say, fighter?”

O’Reilly finished tucking his shirt in, went over to get his coat. “Like I told you, I’m doing all right. Carp suits me, and I’m the guy that’s to be suited.” He put on his hat. “Coming, Carp?”

I incautiously handed him the ten dollars he’d just earned, at this point, so he could take it home to her.

Shackley calmly intercepted it, looked it over on both sides as if he’d never seen one that small before. “Hunh!” he said expressively. Then before either one of us could stop him he’d put a match to it and used it to relight his extinguished cigar. After which he dropped it on the floor and stepped all over the blazing remnants.

“Hey, what the!” O’Reilly gasped. I had to hold him back for a minute or he would have swung at the guy.

Meanwhile Shackley calmly proceeded to peel off a pair of fifties and held them out toward him in exchange. “Here,” he said loftily. “Quit thinking in five and tens. Guys that fight under me don’t have to bother with small change like that.” And at the door, for coup de grâce, he turned and suggested casually: “How would you like a crack at Donner — oh, say within the next two, three years?”

“D-D-Donner, the world’s heavy?” O’Reilly sputtered. He sat down on the bench, pointed to his shirt front. “M-me?”

He was smart, this Shackley. He was a shrewd psychologist, although he probably wouldn’t have known how to pronounce the word. His parting shot was directed at me, not O’Reilly.

“Don’t hold him back,” he pleaded ruefully as he pulled the door closed after him. “If you love him, don’t hold him back.”

So I didn’t hold him back. We went down to Shackley’s office the next day, the two of us, and I went halves with Shackley on him. I was to be the silent voice, Shackley was to be in active control, attend to the business angles. I think this was the first time that was ever done, although since then there have been many such arrangements.

I didn’t think Shackley’d accept on those terms, but to my surprise he did. He sure must have seen something in that Hackensack ring the night before. I guess he decided he’d rather have a half-share in O’Reilly than none at all. It was all drawn up in black and white and the three of us signed. “And now,” he said to O’Reilly, lighting up another of those big black cigars, “get ready to get famous.”

I was there the night he won the title from Donner. Three years from that night in Hackensack, maybe four. Not three years. A lifetime. The short, swift lifetime of a prizefighter, from the bottom to the top. In no other profession is there such an absolute, measurable, mathematically exact top. In no other profession are you so alone on it; nobody else can be up there with you, it’s one at a time. In no other profession is your stay up there so short, so strictly limited. You stand up on the pinnacle, in rays of glory, you look around, then down you come, clawing and crumbling.

But sometimes I think it’s the closest you can get to the stars. Higher than all the arts and sciences, all the gentler things. Man alone, in the glow of his youth, with the body that God gave him.

Was I there? Every blow that landed on him, landed on me too. Every fall he took, I went down with him. Every drop of blood he lost, was drawn from me as well. Every drop of sweat he sweated, I paid out with him. Every time he hurt, and every time his heart broke, I hurt for him and my heart broke right in time with his.

What love for a woman can match up with that: what you feel when your man’s in the ring?

Until the bell was way up in the early teens. Until their savings were gone, and they were dead broke. Both down to one last good punch apiece.

He looked down at me blurredly one time, dangling there half-over the ropes. I didn’t know whether he could see me or not, or even knew who I was any more.

I stood up on my seat and put my hands gently on the sides of his face. “Have you got one punch left?” I whispered.

“The tailings,” he heaved.

“Save it until after his. Make him come across first. Be the last one out with it.”

The referee came over, and he swung around, with that grace they still have even when they’re dying on their feet.

I saw Donner’s come and go, and I knew it was his last, the way his whole guts nearly came up with it to send it off, the way his belly swelled, and then dropped flat again, empty.

It turned my boy completely around, he breasted the ropes, as though the whole ring were a boat heaving under him and throwing him against the gunwale.

Then I stood up and I screamed, until my lungs smouldered and sent out wisps of smoke: “Now yours! Now! Use it! Oh, for the love of God, use it now!”

He had to scrape it up from his toes, practically. But he collected it, and he packaged it, and he delivered it. And that did it, that told the story. The last punch. The one that always counts. The last punch after the other guy’s last punch.

I couldn’t see very well, the next few seconds right after that. I guess my glasses were too steamy or something. Funny, but when I took them off, my eyes still were steamy anyway.

But I heard the thud when Donner went down. And I saw the blur of something going up: two arms together, O’Reilly’s and the referee’s. And I heard the words that went with it. “The winner!” And he was the heavyweight champion of the world. Like his father had been before him. Like his mother had sworn she’d live to see him be some day too.

And after that. I guess, there was no place else for him to go but down.

Then the girl comes into it. There’s always a girl comes into it sooner or later, in every man’s life, and you can tell by the time she picks for coming into it, whether she’s going to be good for him or bad. If she comes into it while he’s still at the bottom, before he starts up, then it’s only he himself she wants, and she’ll probably be good for him, all right. If she comes into it after he’s already at the top, watch out for her.

There’d been a girl in his life before this, but he’d kept her off-center, around the edges. Maggy Connors. Plain like her name. He’d brought her home to her door now and then, and that was two doors down from his own. It never seemed to get anywhere much, though. Maybe it was her fault, maybe it was his. Then after he’d copped the title, she couldn’t get through the crowd to where he was. She wasn’t much of a one for using her elbows to push her way forward, I guess.

This one I mean was different. Lolly Dean. She hailed from Park Avenue. I’m giving you her generic address now, not the actual house number. Her voice had been injected with novocain, but she had cayenne in her eyes. I think they called her a deb. I used to call her something else, but it was an equally short word.

She probably didn’t mean him any harm, that was the worst of it. If she’d been after his money, it would have been a lot easier for somebody to save him. She had more money than he did, from first to last. I don’t know what she was after, myself. Maybe she didn’t either. The world’s heavyweight championship, you might say. I guess she enjoyed wearing it slung over her arm, like whatever the fashionable fur was that year.

I was with him the night he first met her. She was death, on high heels. I knew that the minute I saw her start across the room toward him as we came in, holding a Martini in her hand, saying in that muscle-bound accent she had: “I want to meet a world’s champion. Just let me stand here close to a world’s heavyweight champion and breathe in the same air he does.”

She was the kind of a high-class dame that’s bad for a fighter. In fact, she was the kind of a high-class dame that’s bad for anyone except a high-class man just like her. And the reason she’s not bad for a high-class man just like her, is that he’s just as bad for her as she is for him. They neutralize one another.

Oh, it took a while. It was slow but it was sure. She hit him like a slow-burning fever, and you know what a fever does to you. But what she did to him, there was no quinine for.

I don’t know what there was between them; it wasn’t any of my business. I’m inclined to think, nothing. It might have been better if there had been; in that case the man usually gets the upper hand.

The first thing you know he’d moved into a bachelor penthouse and had some slant-eyed little runt for a valet. He had paintings on the walls, the kind you couldn’t tell if they were hanging upside-down or right-side-up, because they didn’t make any sense either way. Not even side-wise; I even tried them that way. He even had books around the place.

The first I heard about it was when I dropped in at the old flat one day, expecting to meet him there. “His lordship don’t live here any more,” she said, rocking away on the rocker that couldn’t be seen. You had to look real close at her to detect the genuine hurt. She upped a palm and swung it around her in innocent perplexity. “What’s wrong with this place. Carp? Can you tell me what’s wrong with it? Sure ’tis pleasanter than ever now, the way the neighbors look up to me since he’s holder of the title. It’s like a queen I’m treated on all sides. I can’t for the life of me see what’s wrong with it. Can you?”

“Nothing, Mom,” I said. “Not a thing.” To me it was a shrine, almost.

We both looked down at the floor and felt kind of lonely.

I was the one kept on climbing the four flights of stairs from then on. He didn’t have the time; he just sent her checks instead. But can you cook Irish stew for a check? Can it grin and call you “Mom”?

I didn’t see so much of him any more. Oh, he wanted me to, it wasn’t that. It used to do something to me to go over there and have to give my name to a laundry man at the door before I could get in. And then when you did get in, you had to wade through broken-down pugs knee-deep before you could get over to him. When you did get over to him, he was always putting on a stiff shirt to go out somewhere with her.

I visited him once at his training quarters. That was when he was priming for the Jack Day bout. Once was enough. His headquarters was down at one of the Jersey beaches, and it was one long Mardi gras. She was down there, with her whole crowd. There was one large and two small yachts anchored off the place the whole time he was there; I counted them, not to mention several motor cruisers. And just to make the record complete, I can vouch for the fact that there was actually a woman fashion expert in attendance, to write back on what Lolly and the rest of her set were wearing for sportswear. The only thing they left out was to sprinkle rose leaves along the ground when he did his roadwork. And that popping sound you heard after dark regularly, that wasn’t a punching bag, that was champagne corks. Just before he left, his trainer busted a toe kicking at a telegraph pole. “I was just pretending,” he explained to me, “that it was O’Reilly’s can.” I knew how he felt. I got on the train and went home.

You know the history of his world championship; short, but not very sweet. Donner, then Jack Day, then out.

She didn’t have to live to see him lose the championship — I’ve always been glad of that.

It wasn’t anything in particular. It was just her time. She was dying without any fuss or fancy airs, just as she’d always lived. A little tired, and a whole lot disappointed, that was all.

I was with her at the end. I was, but he wasn’t. I kept praying he’d come; not even for her sake, as much as for his own. But he didn’t. He wasn’t where he could be reached in time. Or else they delayed giving him my messages, I don’t know. He was on some party somewhere with Lolly and her bunch, amusing them, playing the trained seal, clapping his flippers and catching the fish she threw him.

So I sat there with her alone, beside her bed in the dim tenement room. Well, that was all right, I was her son too. She’d strain her ears and try to lift her head, each time there was a step outside on the stairs, thinking this time maybe it was he. Then when it wasn’t, when it went on past, she’d sort of fall back again, to wait some more, the little time she had left.

We spoke of him. It had always been him with us, with her and me both, and it still was him, right up to the very end. I saw that she wanted to say something, and I held her head a little higher, and put my face down close to listen.

“Tell him to keep punching, Carp. To always keep punching, never quit.”

Her voice got lower.

“Tell him to mind that left of his, it always was a little ragged—”

I could hardly hear her any more, I had to put my ear down close.

“Tell him — Carp, tell him for me — when they’ve got him backed to the ropes, or he’s down for the count of nine, to look around — he’ll see me there somewhere around — I’ll be there. I’ll be there.”

Her eyes closed and I laid her head gently back to rest. I couldn’t see the door very clearly any more, but I managed to find where it was and tiptoe outside. I waited on the other side of it for him to come.

He came late, and straight from the party. His dancing shoes twinkled hurrying up those tenement stairs, but they couldn’t save him, he was late. He still had the remnants of a flower left in his buttonhole, and there was a piece of paper streamer still snagged across his shoulder. Straight from the party, and late.

He tried to say something when he saw me standing there, but it wouldn’t come. Then as he made to go ahead on in, I reached out suddenly and barred him for a minute with the back of my arm. I jerked the withered flower out of his coat and the streamer off his shoulder; I pulled the dress-handkerchief out of his breast pocket and kicked it away on the floor. “She wants her son,” I said under my breath, “not a society clown.”

He came out again after a while and closed the door behind him. I could tell by the lingering way his hand left the knob she was gone. He couldn’t look at me. He came up and tried to stand alongside me, and I started to move away.

“You broke her heart,” I said bitterly. “You threw the fight. The long fight. Go on back to your fine friends now. They can have you. There’s your handkerchief, there’s your flower.”

His hand started out to stop me, but I wasn’t there any more. “Carp, not you and me—”

I went on down the stairs.

The Dean girl’s familiar black limousine was outside the door, with her sitting in it waiting for him, powdering her nose, when I came out of the door.

She looked at me and I looked at her. I raised my hands over my head and I gave her the double handshake coming to the winner. I guess she didn’t know what I meant.

It went awfully fast after that. He hit the skids. The skids are high compared to what he hit. He hit the bottom. He went down until he got to where he couldn’t go any lower than where he was.

First the title. He lost that, flat and final; Jack Day took it away from him. His chin dug into the resin like a tomahawk. They’d turned him into a cream puff that any man’s fist could go through. I wasn’t there, but they told me of an incident that happened there, that night. She was sitting there right under him, ringside, and a drop of blood from his split lip got on her new white dress (she was the kind went to the fights in ball-gowns), when he slopped over the ropes nearly into her lap one time. Anyway, she flinched, and edged away, and spent the next couple of minutes rubbing and scratching at it. It was more important to her than what was happening to him up above her in the ring. Finally she and her whole crowd of jackanapes got up and walked out on him during the ninth. They dropped him like a hot potato, then and there. “Come on, my dears,” she was heard to say during a lull in the booing, “This is really too slow for words, let’s go somewhere else.” That was the way I heard it.

He was no longer amusing. It had been too, too quaint when the world’s champion drank his coffee with the spoon left in the cup, but it was just plain bad manners when the world’s ex-champion did it, I suppose.

Anyway, I give her credit she’s done a thorough job. In about six months after that, he was through. Just another has-been. Which is awfully fast time, even in the fight game. Nothing left. His bones picked clean.

Then finally, I heard, even Shackley dropped him. I didn’t blame Shackley. He was a businessman. He didn’t love him like I had: O’Reilly wasn’t any good to him any more.

One night two or three years later I was standing waiting for a trolley on Sixth Avenue, one of those old green-line cars, when one of these walking sandwich-boards came drifting along behind me. You know the kind of thing. It had a patch of sample material pasted to it, and said something about having your old suits rewoven as good as new.

I would never even have raised my eyes any higher than the message on it, except for the peculiar way it suddenly changed pace. It had been moving along slowly, the way they’re supposed to, to give the passers-by ample time to read it. Then all at once, for no reason, it picked up speed, started to move away from me down the street almost at a run. As though the bearer couldn’t get away from that immediate vicinity fast enough. In fact he all but collided head-on with several people in the attempt. My eyes went up above the top of the board, naturally, and I thought there was something familiar about the back of that neck.

I made a beeline after him, and caught up with him just after he got around the corner. He couldn’t make very good time with that thing dangling on him, front and back. I stepped around in front of him and blocked his way, so he couldn’t pass me by. I looked him up and down.

“So it ended up the way it always does.”

He looked down at the ground. “Rub it in,” he answered. “I’ve got it coming to me. I didn’t even get one last break. Out of seven million people, I had to run into someone I used to know!”

“No,” I said. “Not ‘used to.’ I’m your manager, remember? Your first one, before you got fancy in the pants. What’s this, some new way of training? What’re you doing with this chest-protector on?” I hauled the sandwich-board off him so violently it nearly scalped him. Then I gave it a ride with my foot that sent it out across the curb.

I took him back to my place with me. I did what I could for the outside of him. I lent him my razor, and I lent him my towel, and I lent him my shirt. I couldn’t do anything for the inside of him, only feed it; I did that too. Then he sat there, looking enough like O’Reilly had, to fool you into thinking it was he again.

“It’s no use,” he kept telling me over and over. “What do you think you can do for me?”

“Nothing,” I agreed. “The point is, what do you think you can do for yourself?”

It was going to take time to answer that. A long, long time, I could see. Weeks and months.

I don’t think I was ever happier than the night he gave me the answer. He gave it as though I’d just finished asking it, instead of months before.

“Carp,” he said, “I’d like to fight again. Do you think I could, do you think I’ve got anything left?”

“When did you lose your right arm?” I asked. “I didn’t notice. And whatever became of the left?”

He looked down and nodded humbly.

I pulled wires like a spider spinning a web. I ran around all over town.

“It’s no use,” he said. “You never come back. It’s a game with a one-way door.”

“Braddock did,” I said, “and you’ve got him licked by ten years. But then he was no quitter.”

He just looked down again, like he was always doing. That’s where they look, when they’re down themselves. It makes where they are already look higher to them by comparison. I guess.

I got McKane, his old trainer, back for him. He nearly fell over the first time McKane walked in with me. “Where’d you dig him up?” he asked me on the side.

“Bumped into him in Stillman’s, where else?” I said casually. I’d had to put an ad in the personal columns, run it for ten days straight, to locate him.

“What’s the score?” I asked McKane a couple weeks later.

“Look, Mr. Carpenter,” he said, “he’ll be all right on the outside when I get through, but he’s no good inside. He’s out of something I can’t put into him. I can condition his mind but I can’t put that spark back into him. It ain’t his mitts, it’s his mind. He thinks he’s licked, so he is.”

“He’ll be all right if I can get him a fight,” I said. “That’s the main hurdle. Once he’s over that, it’ll be clear sailing.”

I looked up Shackley and I brought him around to take a look at him, without telling him who it was, ahead of time. He made the look a short one. “Nothing doing,” he said, “I ain’t interested in rummage sales,” and turned around and walked out of the gym.

I brought him around again two weeks later. I had to hold the door of the taxi closed with both hands all the way over to keep him in it. “All right. I’ll look, but I won’t buy,” he said. He stayed longer this time. “A very good job,” he admitted “But the Salvation Army does it every day, and I don’t have to go and watch.”

The third time was the hardest of all to get him there. He was wise now. I had to lace his coffee with slivovitz first, when he wasn’t looking, after spending the whole previous night in a Turkish bath with him. He liked to have someone to talk to, he said, when he was on the steam table.

We had a sparring partner for O’Reilly now. I turned it into a fix, the partner took a back dive.

Shackley turned around and walked out again. “All right, I like him,” he said. “But my money’s hard to convince, it’s smarter than I am. You keep him.”

I followed him back to his office, and I wouldn’t get out. “He bought you that diamond you’ve got on your little finger,” I told him, leaning across the desk at him.

“Not this exact one,” he admitted phlegmatically. “But I do have a smaller one back at the house, my weekday ring, that came out of his winnings.”

“Just one fight, that’s all I’m asking.” I think I wrung my hands at him, or shook him by the shoulders, I don’t remember any more. “With anyone at all, a football-tackle dummy, I don’t care. Just one fight. That’s all he needs. That’s all I’m begging you for.”

“What’ve you got, religion?” he said drily.

I turned around and slouched over to the door, beat. Then I stopped and looked around at him. He was holding the phone to his ear. “I may as well do this as contribute to the Red Cross,” he said matter-of-factly.

The guy’s name he got for him was Behrens. I didn’t know anything about him. I didn’t want to. All I cared about was that he had two arms and was willing to step into the ring with O’Reilly.

Shackley looked me up for a heart-to-heart talk the night before the fight, after I’d put O’Reilly to bed. I could see he was plenty worried.

“I been watching him all week,” he said. “There’s something wrong with him. Listen, there’s two kinds of a sure thing, and it looks to me like I let myself in on the wrong one — a sure loss. His spine has a wave in it. Is it that society dame that—?”

“Naw, she went down the drain long ago. It’s just that he don’t believe in himself any more. His self-confidence is sapped.”

“And I’m a bigger sap than that, even,” he grunted.

“You can’t bring it back. I can’t bring it back. It’s got to come back by itself. I only know of one person who could bring it back, if she was still alive.”

He asked me who I meant. I told him about her, then. How she used to train him when he was a kid, with that scrap of blue ribbon. How it worked. What results it got.

He just took it in, didn’t say much. He was thinking about it for a while after, though, I could see. He looked at me kind of intently, one time. All of a sudden he bounced his hands against his knees, stood up to go.

The last thing he said when he left the room was, “I’ve got a certain amount of money tied up in this, after all. I’d like to protect it the best I can, that’s all.”

O’Reilly tipped at one hundred ninety and Behrens was way up in the two-twenties, but we weren’t worried about that; it was just that McKane had shaved him down pretty close to the bone, that was all.

Behrens’s manager gave our man a contemptuous pitch of the head at the weighing-in. “What sort of chance d’you think he stands?” he asked us insultingly. “What does he think he can do?”

“He’s not talking,” I answered for him. “He ends at the shoulders.”

“He sure will tonight,” he promised. “He’s going to get his block knocked off.”

O’Reilly just looked down at the floor. He believed that himself, and I could see it. That was the whole trouble.

He climbed in a welter of groaning and booing that night. It wasn’t so much that they were against him; they were showing they didn’t think he had a chance, didn’t think he was good enough, that was all. It got him, too, I could see that; started the dirty work of sapping the little confidence he’d had to begin with. He just sat down in his corner without taking a bow, and looked down between his legs at the canvas. Always looking down, always down.

The gong boomed and the agony dance began. Behrens came out like a young hurricane tearing a path across the ring. They met, and he kept plastering short ones all over O’Reilly, like a potter modeling wet clay. O’Reilly just staggered through the hailstorm like a guy caught far from shelter without his umbrella; he stayed up, but that was about all.

“Look at him,” Shackley commented bitterly, “blinding himself with his own bent arm like it was raining in his face. Cringing. Watch; see that? He’s scared of the blows before they even land on him!”

It looked truer than I would have cared to admit.

The bell, and then the bell again.

He went in again, plodding like a guy on his way to dig a ditch. And burdened down by dragging his own shovel and wheelbarrow along behind him.

Behrens’s arms blurred at times, like a pinwheel, they circled so fast.

“I thought you trained all that yellow out of him,” Shackley turned and scowled at the trainer.

“That ain’t yellow,” McKane snapped. “It’s orange!”

“You two talk a good fight, with your cans to the chair,” I said sourly. “At least he’s up there on his own two feet, no matter how lame a showing he’s making.”

“Oh, is he up there?” Shackley sneered sarcastically. “I’m glad you told me. You see, you’re the one wearing glasses. I’m not. I wasn’t sure until now. Behrens is hitting at something up there, that’s all I know, and it looks like a live figure. But it doesn’t do anything.”

“Why don’t you change seats?” I growled. “You seem to be in back of the wrong corner.”

“My money sure is,” he let me know.

The bell, and then the bell, and then the bell again.

“Throw him a hot-water bottle,” Shackley said savagely. “He must be cold, the way he’s afraid to take his arms away from his sides!” He was on his feet beside me, on tenterhooks, one hand in his pocket jingling some loose change. Showing where his thoughts were, now as always, I said to myself bitterly.

“I don’t have to throw my money away like this!” he seethed. “I can bet it on horses if I want to lose it that bad!”

When O’Reilly staggered back to his stool next time, I reached up through the ropes and squeezed him encouragingly on his moist calf. “You’re doing all right,” I said above the catcalls and the insults. “Good boy. You’re still up. Don’t let them get you down.” And I meant the spectators, as much as his opponent.

He turned around and looked at me blearily, and tried to smile a little. But he was ashamed even of me, I could see.

He got up and lumbered in again at the next bell, slower than slow, no flash at all, no fire, no fight. Just old habit (maybe) keeping one hundred and ninety pounds vertical, instead of the other way. All he did was spar, and spar, and spar, and backtrack all the while.

“We ain’t booked here through tomorrow night, you know,” Shackley shrilled. “We gotta clear out sometime between now and morning.”

“It’s no use,” McKane said disgustedly. “He needs a miracle.”

“He needs a Pulmotor,” I heard Shackley ejaculate. The next time I looked around he wasn’t there alongside me any more, he was ploughing his way up the aisle, on his way out. As if he couldn’t stand watching even another minute of it.

The noise the crowd was making was like surf spattering against the shore; but a surf of muddy water, not of clean. It would rise and dip, dip and rise. Sometimes the things they said would come through, sharp and clear for a minute, by themselves; individual remarks. The jeers, the insults, the cruel things that laugh at a man’s pain and misfortune. The things the crowd says are always the things the crowd says; they never change. Two thousand years ago the circus crowd must have howled out the same things to some dying gladiator. In a different language, but with the same stony hearts.

“Reach out, kid. He ain’t poison ivy, don’t be afraid to touch him.”

“Why don’t somebody introduce the two of them? What kind of manners yis got?”

“I want a rebate! There’s only one guy in the ring. I paid to see two!”

“Hey, how much longer does this keep up? We got homes and families to get back to.”

Behrens hit him like nobody’s ever hit anybody before. He hit him all around the ring, in a kind of a May dance; as if there were a pole in the middle of it, and they were both attached to it by equidistant streamers. From a neutral corner, past his own, past the second neutral corner, past O’Reilly’s corner, back to the first neutral corner again. All one-way blows, one-way; just give, give, and no take. It wasn’t a prize fight any more, it was like something out of the penal code.

And still he stayed up.

Then after a while one of those strange unaccountable hushes fell over the crowd. It got to them, the way he was hanging on up there. They quit the razzing and the hooting and the catcalling. They became compassionately silent, as in the presence of death. And to go down in the ring for the final count, well that is a form of death after all. The fight became a pantomime, almost completely without background sounds for a few minutes. Just the crunch of each blow. Each blow from Behrens, those were the only blows there were.

I could understand what had come over the crowd. I felt it myself a thousandfold more, for there was a personal love between him and me. That silence, that sudden respect, was a form of masculine mass-pity. I remember I’d lowered my head and I’d been holding my hands heeled to my eyes for a minute, for the lights over the canvas hurt them, and the blows hurt them, and the figures blurred a little with too much juice.

There was a plop like a big fat watermelon hitting a tin roof. And then I heard a great, deep, shuddering breath go up. As though the whole vast crowd had just one windpipe. What a strange sound it made, I remember. There was something of compunction in it, but even more of relief. It hadn’t been clean any more. It hadn’t been sport. It hadn’t been good any more to watch. There’s a cruel streak in everyone. But there’s no one that’s all cruelty and nothing else.

And I think they’d changed over without knowing it, changed sides. The guy they’d wanted to win, wasn’t the guy they wanted to win now. And the guy they wanted to win now, was the guy who couldn’t.

I knew he was down. And I was glad; yes, I was glad. I looked, and he was down, and it was finished. No one could take a beating like that and ever get up again. He was lying there flat as a paper cutout, and with his arms straight out from the shoulders in a ruler-even line.

The referee started to slice time thin over him. His arm chopped past the back of his neck like a guillotine blade. “One!” he intoned, in the embalmed hush that had fallen.

He wasn’t out even yet. He may have been dazed, but his eyes were wide open, I could see them from where I sat, under the querulous, corrugated ridges of his forehead. Staring, staring out along the resin; from way down low, as low as they could get. Just skimming the surface of it.

“Two!” shattered over his head.

A change came over him. I didn’t know what it was at first. It was so subtle, so gradual; it had nothing to do with moving his body. It was more like an awareness of something, a gathering to a head of attentiveness, all over him at once. Before there had been vacancy, now there was intentness; no line of his figure expressed it, yet every line expressed it.

His eyes seemed to be looking out across the edge of the ring floor he lay upon, out somewhere beyond, into the shadowy perspective. Then his head came up, slowly. Then his chest started to curve upward away from the resin, like something peeling off it. Then his shoulders backed, until he had propped himself up on one arm. He stayed like that for a short while.

His eyes were so fixed, they had so unmistakably the focus of steady though distant scrutiny, that half-unconsciously I turned my own head to follow their direction. It was just a reflex.

She was standing there down at the lower reaches of the aisle, not more than ten yards from the ring. Mom O’Reilly. In full glare of the ring. Just the way she used to look. That same coat-sweater that had always gapped open across her middle. That pair of funny little barrettes she wore, one on each side of her topknot, and never on quite straight. Round of figure, red of face, resolution and imprecation written all over her. Holding aloft in one fist, for him to see, a twining scrap of blue ribbon. Shaking the other at him while she did so, as if to say “This is what you’re going to get.”

It did something funny to me for a minute; it was like breathing in menthol and getting my pipes chilled all the way down. But only for a minute. I was scared for only a minute. There wasn’t anything to scare you about her.

I don’t know what she was, but she wasn’t any ghost. There wasn’t anything transparent or ethereal about her. And I had my glasses on. She blocked out everything and everyone she stood before, solid. I could see the shine on her high-blooded face, against the light. I could even see the black shadow she cast on the inclination of the aisle behind her. I even saw one of the ushers come down after her and tap her to get back, clear out of the aisle, and saw the impatient backhanded swat she gave him, like someone brushing off a mosquito. Then he even tried to take her by the arm, and she wrenched it away from him, and dug at him punitively with the point of her elbow.

I turned back to the ring.

He’d gotten up to his knees now. He was reared there on them, in an attitude curiously suggestive of penitence. There was some sort of sincere humility expressed by the posture, ungainly and trained-bear-like as it was. There was no fear on his face, no blatant stupefaction; only a sort of inscrutable contrition, very calm and sturdy. The sort of face one makes when one promises: “I’ll do better.”

Then he got all the way up. He went back to ring-center to fight some more. No. not some more, for he hadn’t fought at all until now. To begin to fight, unafraid, sure of himself. It’s funny what just a little thought inside your head can do; how much more it can do than all the might of your arms. “I’m good. I can win this. I’m good enough to win this.”

That thought won it for him. The referee hoisted his arm up in the air. He snatched it right down again, and came over to the side I was sitting on. He leaned over and looked straight down into my face. His eyes were wide and scared, but not scared in a bad way. Scared in the wondering way of a child that doesn’t understand something. That knows it must be all right, but can’t quite grasp it, and wants some wiser head to reassure him.

I knew what he was trying to say to me, even though he couldn’t say it. I nodded to show him I knew. “Don’t be scared, kid,” I told him. “It’s all right, don’t be scared.” Then we both looked around for her, sort of slow and gingerly, turning our heads little by little, instead of all at once.

She wasn’t there any more. Everyone had got to their feet, all at one time, all over the arena, and the aisles were clogged with slowly moving backs. She’d been swallowed up. You couldn’t see where she’d been, you couldn’t sec where she’d gone. She’d been drowned in the rising tide of departure, gone under.

It was just as well, I told myself bitterly. I had my doubts she could have borne a very much closer inspection. I was remembering how I’d told Shackley the story, only the night before, of that early training method of hers, when he was just a kid; complete down to the last detail, ribbon and all. I was remembering that hard, speculative look he’d given me at the time. I was remembering how he’d got up from his seat and stalked out, a round or two or three ago, and never come back.

I swore a little under my breath. He’d always been full of tricks, full of bright ideas, ever since I’d known him.

O’Reilly jumped down beside me on the arena floor, without waiting for his bathrobe even, and we forced our way back through the bedlam together. I went into the dressing room at his heels. I chased them all out, every last one of them down to McKane; squeezed the door closed on them, so there was just the two of us together, alone in there.

He still had his gloves on. He held both his mitts up against my shoulder, made a cushion of them, and put his head down on them, and cried into them. Cried like anything; I never saw a guy cry like that before.

“Did you see her?” he said after a while.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t answer, in a way that meant yes; I wanted it to.

“It wasn’t really her, Carp, was it?” he kept saying over and over. “It wasn’t really her?”

“No,” I said, “it wasn’t really her.” I could feel an undercurrent of bitterness surging through me. “Don’t think about it any more,” I said.

He said, “But you saw her too. Carp.”

What could I say? “I loved her too, you see,” I explained. “I loved her as much as you. I was her second son, remember? The one she always said she would have had if the old champ hadn’t died.”

That satisfied him.

“Do you think anyone else?”

“Don’t talk about it any more, don’t you see what it does to it? It takes something away from it. You saw her, I saw her, that’s enough. We’re the only ones she — wanted to have see her.”

But I was remembering an usher who’d tapped her on the shoulder, to move back out of the way. And a man in an aisle scat who’d glanced momentarily aside at her, with indifferent curiosity, because the tail of his eye had caught her gesturing in some way; then looked back to the ring again.

And I was sore. I would have rather had him lose, than win by such a shabby trick.

“I’m going to be all right now,” he said. “I’ll take on two or three more, just so I’ll have a little money put aside. And then I’ll quit the fights. I’ll quit on my feet, though, and not on my back. That’s what she wanted, I guess. That’s what she wanted to do.”

He was going to be all right. Not up at the top any more, not down at the bottom either. Then leave it before it left him. Get into some longer-lived business, that would last him through the thirties and forties. We do what we can, the best of us, the worst of us, all of us.

I left him in the dressing room. I said, “I’ve got to see somebody about something.” The Connors girl was waiting around outside, when I jostled my way through. I saw her there, standing off by herself, away from the rest of them; like somebody who has a special arrangement, who knows she isn’t wasting her time. I went over to her. “He’ll be right out,” I said. “Been waiting long?”

“Yes, I guess I have,” she said thoughtfully. “A long, long time.” Then she smiled. “But that’s all right, I don’t mind.”

I knew what she meant.

He’d be all right now, that was all I cared about. She was for him; made to order for him. She’d see him through the rest of the way.

I went out into the arena again. I talked to the ushers until I’d found the one I wanted, the one who’d been posted on Aisle A. I said: “Did you see a little short, stout lady standing down there, about the third row, shaking her fists, toward the end?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I did. I hadda go down to her and tell her to move.”

“What’d — what’d it feel like, when you tapped her on the shoulder? You did feel — something, didn’t you?”

He looked at me like he thought I was crazy. “Sure I felt something. It felt good and firm and solid, that’s what. But I felt it even worse a minute later; she took and poked her elbow into my ribs.” And he rubbed himself there, where it must have been still a little sore.

I left him and went down that aisle to the ring again, and stood around. The ring looked so empty, so still and lonely now. Then on the way back, trudging up it, I found it. I stopped and picked it up.

It had been trampled half to death, nearly. I had to blow on it, and stroke it against my sleeve, to clear it off and get it back in shape. It was blue and it was silk, that was about all I could be sure of in the smoky, blurred light of the arena. I smiled grimly to myself as I looked at it. First I was going to throw it right away again, but instead I kept it. Put it in my billfold and put it away. Then I went on to do what I’d told him I was going to do: see Somebody about Something.

It didn’t take long. Shackley was standing waiting for me in the open doorway of his office, all the way at the back, where they were sitting ready to count out the receipts.

“Come on in,” he invited. “There’s something coming to you. We did all right tonight.”

“There’s something coming to you too,” was all I said.

The last time I’d struck a blow was that day outside the tenement, when I first met O’Reilly. I struck one now again, just one, and I put everything into it that I’d been saving up all those years. Even at that, it mayn’t have been much of a wallop, but it was enough to take care of him. He was shrimpy, and soft all over. He went down, loud-checked coat and all, and he put the hand wearing his Sunday diamond — or maybe it was his Saturday-night one — to his jaw and held it there; and it made the place the sock had landed sparkle pretty.

I never saw a guy like him. Money could do anything for him, even take the sting out of a knockdown. He didn’t even get sore about being floored like that, just acted stupefied for a minute or two. “What was that for, anyway?” he called out after me, as I turned and stalked away. “We won, didn’t we?”

I didn’t bother telling him. It wouldn’t have done any good. If he didn’t know already he’d never learn it now. It wasn’t that we’d won that made the difference, it was how we’d won.

It was like making fun of a guy’s mother. The one thing that no man should ever do to any other man, not the lowest, not the worst. That’s the closest we ever come to God, any one of us. Worse. It was like making fun of a guy’s mother after she was dead. Worse still, it was like making fun of a guy’s mother, after she was dead, in front of twenty thousand people, all at one time.

Hiring some fat old lady for ten or twenty dollars, rigging her up to look like Mom O’Reilly, putting a piece of blue ribbon in her hand, and sending her waddling down the aisle at the psychological moment, to give him the shot in the arm that he’d needed.

That was the only explanation then, and it still is now.

I took it out and looked at it again the next morning, in the daylight. It was the sort of ribbon they don’t make any more; a rich, full-bodied silk. With a thin line of satin traced along each edge, the way a mirror is beveled. And an invisible pattern of flowers sprinkled all over it. When you held it flat, you couldn’t see them; when you held it up, they came out. I wondered how he’d been able to match it so exactly. He’d never seen that first one, from long ago.

I went around to my safety-deposit box, in the bank vault, to compare the two. That was where I’d put the little trinket box she’d kept it in, that she’d turned over to me when she died.

They were very strict there. They are in all those places. You had to sign a little admission card first, and they checked your signature with the one on file. Then you had to turn over your duplicate key, and it had to match up with its mate, the original that they kept in their possession. They even had your physical description, and checked you against that. No one but the rightful owner can ever gain access to one of those boxes. Finally, they even kept a record of each visit you made. It showed the last time I’d been in there, as I knew already, was over a year before.

I took the trinket box out and opened it. It hadn’t been disturbed, it was just the way she’d left it when she’d turned it over to me. All her little treasures, all the odds and ends, all the keepsakes and mementos, were still in it, in their rightful places. All but one thing. All but the ribbon I’d come to look at.

There was still a little cranny, a niche, where it had been tucked, all rolled up tight; but it was empty, there was nothing in it now.

The only ribbon was the one I was holding in my hand, that I’d brought in with me, from the arena floor, last night.