The Harder They Fall Page 3

  CHAPTER TWO

  When I am in a pub and the phone is for me I am never too happy about it. It means the natural rhythm of my day is about to be interrupted by the unexpected. Shirley had gone back to the place, ‘to make a new girl feel at home’, as she put it, and Beth had dropped in to pick me up. She was annoyed because I was slightly swizzled when she came in. Beth wasn’t WCTU or anything, but she liked me to do my drinking with her. She thought I wasted too much time shooting the breeze with Charles and Shirley and the other characters. If my job didn’t take up all my time, she said, I should plant myself in the room at the hotel and try to finish that play.

  The big mistake I made with Beth was that once when I had her up to my room – in the days when I still had to impress her – I showed her that unfinished first act. Beth didn’t have too much to say about it, except for wanting me to get it done. That was the trouble with Beth: she always wanted me to finish things. I proposed to her once in a drunken moment and I think secretly she always held it against me for not mentioning the proposal again when I sobered up. I guess she just wanted me to finish whatever I started.

  When I first met her, Beth was fresh out of Smith College, where her Phi Bete key had been good for a $25-a-week job with Life, in their training squad for researchers. Everything she knew came out of books. Her old man taught Economics at Amherst and her old lady was the daughter of a Dartmouth dean. So when I first began to tell her about the boxing business, she thought it was fascinating. That’s the word she used for this business – fascinating. This fight talk was a new kind of talk for Beth, and all the time she was professing to despise it, I could tell it was getting to her. Even if only as a novelty, it was getting to her and I was the ideal interpreter of this new world that repelled and attracted her. That’s how I got to Beth myself. I was just enough of a citizen of this strange new world to excite her and yet – since Beth could never completely recover from her snobberies, intellectual and otherwise – there was just enough Ivy still clinging to me, just enough Cottage Club, just enough ability to relate the phenomenon of prizefighting to her academic vocabulary to make me acceptable.

  I think my talking about trying to write a play on boxing gave her a justification for being interested in me, just as it seemed to justify my staying in the game.

  But this is taking us back a year and a half. It’s almost another story. In the story I am telling here, Beth is miffed again – her impatience with me had been increasing lately – and somebody wants me on the telephone.

  It was Killer Menegheni. Killer was a combined bodyguard, companion, masseur and private secretary to Nick. I don’t really think the Killer had ever been responsible for anybody’s funeral, but the legend had sprung up that the Killer would have been a featherweight champ if he hadn’t killed a man in the ring his third time out. I had looked it up, but no Menegheni, and the Ring Record Book almost always gives the boys’ right names in parentheses under their professional names. Nat Fleischer, that eminent historian, had never heard of him either. So you could take heavy odds that the Killer’s alleged mayhem had no resemblance to any character living or dead, as they always say.

  ‘Hey, Eddie, d’ boss wants ya.’

  ‘Now, goddamit, Killer,’ I said. ‘I’m with a lady. Can’t a man settle down to a little companionate drinking without Nick putting his hounds on me?’

  ‘The boss wants ya to get your ass up here,’ Killer answered. Take away those three- and four-letter essential Anglo-Saxon words and Mr Menegheni would have to talk with his fingers.

  ‘But this lady and I have plans for the evening,’ I said. ‘I don’t have to come running every time Nick lifts a finger. Who does he think he is?’

  ‘He thinks he’s Nick Latka,’ said the Killer. ‘And I never seen d’ day he wasn’t right.’

  For the Killer, that was considerable repartee. ‘Say, you’re pretty sharp today,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’ the Killer said. ‘I scored with that redhead from the Chez Paris last night. Just seventeen years old. Beauteeful.’

  The Killer, only five-six in his built-up shoes, was always flashing us the latest news of his daily conquests.

  ‘You would make a good leg-man for Krafft-Ebing,’ I said.

  ‘I ain’t changing places with nobody. I do all right with Nick.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you’re happy,’ I said. ‘Pleasant weekend, Killer.’

  ‘Hey-hey-hey, wait a minnut,’ the Killer said quickly. ‘This deal what the boss wants to see you about. It must be very hot. I’ll tellum yer on yer way up.’

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you can tell him for me’ – O Lord, the fear that eats into a man for a hundred bucks a week – ‘I’ll be up in fifteen minutes.’

  I started back to the booth to break it to Beth. She was always turning down good things to keep Saturday night for me. Saturday nights we’d usually hit our favourite spots together, Bleeck’s and Tim’s and when we wanted music, Nick’s for Spanier and Russell and Brunis, and Downtown Café Society, when Red Allen was there, and J.C. Higginbotham. Sunday morning we’d wake up around ten, send down for coffee and lie around with the papers until it was time to go out for lunch. Beth would kick about the News, the Mirror and the Journal because she was a pretty hot liberal as well as a snob, but some of my best plants were picked up by the tabs and I liked to read the Journal for Graham, one of the town’s oldest and hardest-working sports writers.

  I don’t know if it was love with me or not, but I’ll put it this way: I never slept with anybody I was so glad to see in the morning as Beth Reynolds. I’ve known other girls who were more beautiful, more passionate or more experimental, but who turned out to be a drag in the morning. With Beth, having a drink, seeing a fight, listening to Spanier, going to bed, nursing each other’s hangovers, arguing about Wolfe and getting sore at some new stupidity of some old senator’s – it was all one, all good, all close, and when you are pushing into your middle-thirties and beginning to need a slow count to get up in the morning, that outweighs the dime-a-dozen ecstasies.

  Not that Beth wasn’t exciting enough, in her own way. She met you with a small, intense passion that seemed surprisingly wanton for a girl with a pretty-plain schoolteacher face, who couldn’t see very well without her glasses. I hadn’t been her ‘first man’ (Beth’s words, naturally, not mine), for that honour had been reserved for an Amherst boy from a distinguished Boston family who had been madly and incompetently in love with her. He had made such a mess of things, apparently, that she had shied away from further intimacies until I came along. I don’t quite know yet how I got her to try again. She just decided it for herself one evening. It was the night we had gone back to her apartment after I had taken her to see her first fight. I think she always distrusted me a little for helping make it so successful. That academic, puritanical background didn’t stop her from enjoying herself. It just prevented her from respecting herself for what she had allowed herself to do. That’s why when she took off her glasses and the other encumbrances, she was wanton. For only the true Puritan can know that delicious sense of falling from grace that we call wantonness.

  More than once, in my cups, I had proposed that we make an honourable girl of Beth. She didn’t approve of the way we were living, but she always preferred to wait and see if a similar offer would be forthcoming under the influence of sobriety. But somehow I could never quite muster up enough marital determination to make a legitimate proposal without the nudge of friendly spirits. The closest I could ever come was to say, with what was meant for levity, ‘Beth, if I ever marry anyone, it’s got to be you.’

  ‘If you insist on prefacing all your proposals with the conditional conjunctive,’ she had answered, ‘you will end up a lecherous old bachelor and I will end up married to Herbert Ageton.’

  Herbert Ageton was a playwright who had written militant proletarian dramas for the Theatre Union back in the early thirties, when he was just out of college and hardly knew how to keep his pipe lit. Much to
his horror and indignation, MGM had bought one of his radical plays, and brought him out to adapt it. When he got up to two thousand dollars a week he was analysed at one hundred dollars an hour by a highly successful female practitioner who made him realise that his proletarian protest against capitalism was only a substitute for his hatred of his father. Somehow the signals got crossed and he came out still hating his father but feeling somewhat more kindly toward capitalism. Since that time he had only been on Broadway twice, with symbolic plays about sex relations which all the critics had panned and all the studios had scrambled for. They turned out to make very good pictures for Lana Turner. Or maybe I was just jealous. Herbert used to call Beth from Hollywood all the time. And every time he came to town he took her to 21 and the Stork and the other meeting places of good-time counter-revolutionists and their opposite numbers.

  ‘Baby,’ I said, when I got back to the booth, ‘this is lousy, but I’ve got to go up and see Nick a minute.’

  ‘A minute. Nick and his minutes! You will probably end up out in Jersey at his country place.’

  That had happened once and Beth would never let me forget it. I had left a message for her at Walker’s, but by the time it got through she had taken an angry powder.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘this is strictly business. If I’m not back in one hour …’

  ‘Don’t make it too drastic,’ she said. ‘If you’re back in one hour it will be the first time. You know I could have gone out with Herbert tonight.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus, that again.’

  ‘How many times have I told you not to say “Jesus”? It offends people.’

  ‘Oh Je—I don’t mean Jesus Christ. I just mean Jesus Ageton.’

  ‘He’s an interesting guy. He wanted me to have dinner at 21 and then come back to his hotel and hear his new play.’

  ‘What hotel? Don’t tell me. The Waldorf?’

  ‘Hampshire House.’

  ‘The poor kid. Have you ever slept with anybody in the Hampshire House?’

  ‘Edwin, when I get you home tonight, I’m going to wash your mouth out with soap.’

  ‘Okay, okay, be evasive. Sit tight, honey. I’ll go up and see what the Big Brain has on his larcenous mind.’

  The office of Nick Latka wasn’t the tawdry fight manager’s office you may have seen on the stage or that can actually be found along 49th Street. It was the office of a highly successful businessman who happened to have an interest in the boxing business, but who might have been identified with show business, shirts, insurance or the FBI. The walls of brown cork were covered with pictures of famous fighters, ball players, golfers, jockeys and motion-picture stars inscribed ‘to my pal Nick’, ‘to a great guy’, ‘to the best pal I had in Miami’. On the desk was a box of cigars, Nick’s brand, Belindas, and pictures in gold-plated frames of his wife when she was a lovely brunette in a Broadway chorus, and their two children, a handsome, conceited-looking boy of twelve in a military-school uniform, who took after his mother, and a dark-complexioned girl of ten who bore an unfortunate resemblance to her father. Nick would give those kids anything he had. The boy was away at New York Military Academy. The girl went to Miss Brindley’s, one of the most expensive schools in the city.

  No matter how he talked in the gym, Nick never used a vulgar word in the presence of those kids. Nick had come up from the streets, rising in ordinary succession from the kid gangs to the adolescent gangs that jimmied the gum and candy machines to the real thing. But his kids were being brought up in a nice clean money-insulated world.

  ‘I don’t want for Junior to be a mug like me,’ Nick would say. ‘I had to quit school in the third grade and go out and hustle papers to help my old man. I want Junior to go to West Point and be an Air Corps officer or maybe Yale and make a connection with high-class people.’

  Class! That was the highest praise in Nick’s vocabulary. In the mouth of a forty-year-old East-Side hood, who had been raised in a cold-water flat and wore patched hand-me-downs of his older brother, class became an appraisal of inverted snobbery, indicating a quality of excellence the East Side could neither afford nor understand. A fighter could run up a string of six knockouts and still Nick’s judgement might be, ‘He wins, but he’s got no class.’ A girl we’d see in a restaurant might not be pretty enough to get into the row at the Copacabana, but Nick would nudge me and say, ‘There’s a tomato with class.’ Nick’s suits, tailored by Bernard Weatherill, had class. The office had class. And I remember, of all the Christmas cards I received, picking out one that was light brown with the name tastefully engraved in the lower right-hand corner in conservative ten-point. That was Nick’s. I don’t know how he happened to choose it or who designed it for him, but it obviously had class.

  If Nick thought you had it, he could be a very respectful fellow. I remember once he was chairman of a benefit fight card for the infantile-paralysis fund and had himself photographed turning over the take to Mrs Roosevelt. This picture, autographed by Eleanor, hung in a position of honour over his head, right next to Count Fleet. The boys used to get a laugh out of that. You can imagine the gags, especially if you are a Republican and/or have a nasty mind. But Nick wouldn’t have any of it. Anybody throwing them low and inside at Mrs R. was sure to get the back of his hand. And it wasn’t just because Nick’s partner was Honest Jimmy Quinn who had the Tammany connections. Mrs Roosevelt and Count Fleet belonged up there together, the way Nick saw it, because they both had class.

  Nick had made a good living prying open the coin boxes of nickel machines when most of us were home reading the Bobbsey Twins and he had already escaped from the Boys Correction Farm when you and I were still struggling with first-year Latin. By dint of conscientious avoidance of physical work, a nose for easy money and constant application of the principle Do Unto Others As You Would Not Have Them Do Unto You he had worked himself up to the top of a syndicate that dealt anonymously but profitably with artichokes, horses, games of chance, women, meat, fighters and hotels, a series of commodities which in our free-for-all enterprise system could be parlayed into tidy fortunes for Nick and Quinn, with large enough chunks for the boys to keep everybody happy. But he was still a sucker for class, whether it was a horse, a human being or a Weatherill sports suit.

  The reason he kept me on the payroll, I think, was because he thought I had it too. He had the self-made man’s confusion of respect and contempt toward anybody who had read a couple of books and knew when to use me and when to say I. But whenever he was with me I noticed he cut the profanity down to those words he just didn’t have any respectable synonym for. Even Quinn, who had worked himself up through a logical sequence from ward boss to high-level rackets, didn’t always get the velvet-glove treatment. And when Nick was dealing with what he considered his inferiors, fighters, other managers, bookies, collectors, trainers, honest but intimidated merchants, the only way to describe his talk would be to compare it with the vicious way Fritzie Zivic used to fight, especially when he was sore, as in the return match with poor Bummy Davis after Bummy had got himself disqualified for conduct even less becoming a gentleman than Zivic’s.

  Probably the biggest mistake that Nick had ever made in picking class was very close to home. It was his wife Ruby. When Nick was in the liquor business back in Prohibition he had sat in the same seat for George White’s Scandals twenty-seven times because Ruby was in it. Where Ruby had it over the rest of the line was she was beautiful in an unusually quiet way, like a young matron who would look more at home in a Junior League musical than in a Broadway leg-show. On stage, so the boys tell me, even in the scantiest, she carried herself with an air of aloof respectability which had the actual effect of an intense aphrodisiac. The other girls could dance half naked in front of you and, if you thought about anything, you’d wonder how much it would cost. But seeing Ruby with her black lace stockings forming a sleek and silken path to her crotch was like opening the wrong bedroom door by mistake and catching your best friend’s sister.

  That’s the e
ffect Ruby had on Nick. And the physiological accident that gave Ruby Latka an austere beauty was accompanied by a personality adjustment that developed a quiet, superior manner to go along with the face. The combination drove all other women out of Nick’s life. Until then he had been giving the Killer competition, but from the first time he had Ruby he lined up with that small, select group who believe in monogamy and that even more select group who practise it. In fact, the first three years of his marriage Nick had it so bad he hardly ever bothered to look at another woman’s legs. Even now, in an environment which, to put it euphemistically, smiled on adultery, Nick never cheated on Ruby unless it was something very special and he was a long way from home. But the ordinary stuff that was always there, the showgirls and the wives who float around the bars when their husbands are out of town, Nick never bothered with. The ones who simply wouldn’t have minded never got a play, and the ones who had already made up their minds almost always got the brush. Most of it was the way he felt about Ruby. But what made it easier was the way he worked. He was all the time working, in the clinches, between rounds, always moving in, throwing punches, heeling, butting, elbowing, like Harry Miniff, only it was done on the top floor of a great office building and it wasn’t for nickels but for very fancy folding money.

  There was a glutton’s hunger for money in him. Maybe it was the pinched childhood, the gutter struggle, the fearful itch of insecurity that drove Nick on to his first hundred thousand and his second. And now, without even letting him sit down to catch his breath and enjoy himself a minute, he was pushing toward his third. If it hadn’t been for Ruby, Nick would never have had that place in Jersey with the riding horses and the swimming pool and the terraced barbecue pit. Ruby, who had been a working girl all her life, found no trouble at all in double-clutching into a life of leisurely hedonism. Nick would enjoy a swim when Ruby nagged him into it. He liked to get some of the boys out for the weekend and sit up until Sunday morning, playing pinochle. But it’s hard to relax when you’re possessed by a lean, sharp-faced kid from Henry Street who’s always got an eye out to pry the back off another coin machine.