Corky's Brother (18 page)

Mr. Goldstein didn't show up for school the next day, but Izzie's notices did. This time he'd printed up a list of Mr. Goldstein's property and expenses—his house, his car, Mrs. Goldstein's mink coat, the trips to Miami, etc.—with the estimated cost of each. Then he'd listed Mr. Goldstein's salaries from school and camp. Across the bottom of the sheet he'd printed: “Something is rotten in the borough of Brooklyn.”

Two days passed and there were no more messages from “The Shadow.” The weekend came and we won an important game against Madison, insuring us of a spot in the playoffs. I hoped Izzie would have stopped his campaign by the time we got back to school Monday, but he hadn't. This time he'd printed leaflets which seemed to prove that Sears-Roebuck had sent a color television set to Mr. Goldstein's house and had sent the bill to Levy's Sporting Goods Store. At the bottom of this sheet was a quotation from Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.” The
New York Post
carried an item about Izzie's leaflets in their evening edition that day—I figured Izzie must have mailed them the material—and on Tuesday night Mrs. Goldstein called me again. She pleaded with me to do something.

I called Izzie right after she hung up, and he was obviously excited by the fact that Mrs. Goldstein had been telephoning me. There was no talking with him, though. When I mentioned Mr. Goldstein's bad heart, he only carried on more than ever. “Our names are all written in the Book of Life, Howard. I am not moved by your plea for pity…“I hung up on him.

A day or two later, our coach told us that Mr. Goldstein was going to send in a letter of resignation to the Board of Education. The guys all looked at me when he said it, as if it were my responsibility to do something, but I just shrugged and ignored them. Izzie hadn't been seen in school for the previous two days. I went home for supper and took a walk along Flatbush Avenue. A little after nine I found myself knocking at Mr. Goldstein's door. I don't know what I would have said to him if he'd been there, but he wasn't. Some neighbors saw me and told me that he'd been taken to the hospital a few hours before.

If Izzie had been there right then, I think I might have killed him. I headed straight for his house. By the time I reached it, though, I'd calmed down and decided to call the hospital to see how Mr. Goldstein was.

“Greetings, greetings, my basketball-hero comrade.” It was Izzie. He was leaning against a lamppost, in the shadows, puffing on a cigar. His beret was tilted to one side, so that it nearly covered his right eye.

“How long have you been watching me?” I asked.

“Forever, forever, Howie—since we were boys together, since we came in trailing those wings of glory…or were they clouds?”

“Mr. Goldstein's in the hospital.” I said it matter-of-factly.

Izzie nodded, as if he knew already. “Cowards—cowards die many times before their—”

“Oh, shut your trap already, huh? Just can it!” I took a step toward him and drew back my fist.

“Come, come,” he said calmly. “Get it over with. Hit me. Use your physical power. What else do you have, after all?”

“Forget it,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets. “There's no use talking with you—”

“Have you seen our friends down the street?” Izzie asked. I turned and looked. It was dark and I couldn't make out much. At the end of the block, though, I could see the shapes of a group of guys. “I await them in the light of the lamppost. They called a while ago and told me they were coming to
get me…”

I saw them coming toward us now. There were about a dozen guys, and I could make out faces.

“Are you totally nuts?” I said. “Get inside your damned house. Those guys'U beat shit out of you.”

“If that will satisfy their animal desires, then perhaps—”

“Don't be an ass—get inside, Izzie. They'll
kill
youl”

He didn't move. I whirled around. The guys were almost to us now—some of them were on the basketball team with me, and the rest were jocks from the football team. I looked back at Izzie. His eyes weren't shifting. Instead, he had this weird smile on his face, and he just kept puffing away on his cigar, blowing smoke rings.

“You're the first one here,” Hank Ebel said to me. “That means you got rights to go at him first, Howie.”

“Ah, lay off, huh?” I said. “You'll just get in trouble if you do anything to him—”

“I need no defenders!” Izzie shouted. His voice was strong. “Let them have their way with me. We are in the arena, Howie!”

“You're not gonna take up for him, are ya, Howie?” Stan Reiss asked. I looked at the others—Harvey Rosen, Jerry Charyn, Vic Fontani. “No,” I said. “No—but I'm not—I'm not gonna let you guys get yourselves in trouble. Just leave him be.”

“Bullshit.”

One of the guys made a move toward Izzie and I backed up, spreading my arms out to protect him. He screamed. “Let me alone, Howie—I can fight my own battles. Let me alone! Let these boors tear me apart for telling them the truth. Let me alone. Let me alone…”

One of the football players grabbed at me to shove me aside, but I didn't move.

“Look, Howie,” he said. “We got nothin' against you—but if you don't let us get him, we're gonna have to get you too.”

“Okay,” I said. I meant it—but I knew already that it didn't matter. I wasn't going to be able to help Izzie. Still, I stood my ground, more tired than defiant. Somebody grabbed at my shoulder and I shook him off. Someone came at me from the other side and I swung. Then they were on me. They didn't hit me much. Just grabbed me by the legs and arms. I fought and swung but there were too many of them. They dragged me away and a few of them sat on me while the rest took care of Izzie.

It didn't take them long. I heard him laughing, shouting something—poetry, I guess—and then I heard him scream. He really howled! You could hear windows shding open in all the apartment houses on the block.

The guys let me up a second later and they took off down the street. Izzie was lying next to the lamppost. His lips were moving, producing a strange sound—I couldn't tell if it was whimpering or laughing. I got him under one arm and helped him into his building and up the stairs. When we got into the apartment and his mother saw him, she nearly fainted. I told her to call a doctor, but she was too paralyzed to do anything. Miriam came out of her room then, and while she got Izzie to a couch in the living room, I telephoned. Izzie'd been pretty well mashed up around his face—and his left arm hung limply. While I held a compress on his eye, Miriam coaxed her mother into the bedroom and got her to lie down. Then she came back in. I looked at her, shrugging to indicate that I was sorry—hoping she'd know I didn't have any part of it. “When it snows it pours,” she said. “Where's it all gonna end, is what I want to know. You ever see anything like us?” She seemed in command and I just did what she told me to, getting Mercuro-chrome and Band-Aids from the bathroom. She had a ballpoint pen stuck in her hair right over her ear, and her sweater was loose. “I'm glad we weren't working tonight, is all. I just don't know sometimes, Howie, you know what I mean?” Izzie blinked and smiled at us. “You jerk,” Miriam said to him, and he smiled bigger. She talked to me like my own sister. “Like, where's it all gonna end, Howie?” I shrugged again, and she seemed to take this for a good enough response. Her mother started crying from the other room, chanting in Yiddish about Izzie and Izzie's father. “See what I mean?” Miriam said, and she left me. It was crazy, in the middle of everything, but I realized that for the last few minutes my eyes had been fastened right on her chest, as if I'd noticed for the first time what an enormous pair of knockers she had.

“Well, well, Howie my friend,” Izzie began. His voice cracked. “I—I suppose I cannot say
Et tu, Brute—”

In the other room I could hear Miriam. “Shush, shush—you worked hard today, Momma—you take it easy. It's okay, Momma. I'll take care of everything. It's okay…”

I kept thinking that Izzie's mother was really his grandmother. His bottom hp was already swollen to twice its size and both his eyes were starting to close. I got more ice from the kitchen. When I came back, the door to Mrs. Cohen's room was closed and Miriam was washing up some blood from the couch. She shook her head, and drew in deeply on a cigarette. I kept my eyes off her chest. “There are real idiots in this world, aren't there, Howie? I mean—”

The doctor came in a little while and I was glad. He examined all of Izzie's cuts and swellings, put his arm in a sling, and told him to come to the office the next day for X-rays. When he left, Izzie and I went into his room together and Miriam left us alone. The whole time the doctor had been there, Izzie had seemed cocky. As soon as he got into his room, though, he collapsed, just sort of folding and dropping to the floor. I lifted him to his chair and he opened his eyes halfway. He was shivering and I threw a blanket over his shoulders.

“Should I call the doctor again?” I asked. “Or get Miriam?”

He shook his head from side to side. He seemed totally sober now and he gave me a long look, as if he were trying to tell me he couldn't figure out why it had turned out this way either. I got him to lay down on his bed, under the covers, and then I left. “You try to sleep,” I said. “Maybe I'll stop by in a few days.”

Mr. Goldstein was on critical for a week, and then he began to improve. He didn't come back to school, though. I got a Graduation card from him that June. Izzie returned to classes about a week and a half later and, to my surprise, nobody paid much attention to him. We were all too busy worrying about the playoffs and which colleges we would be going to—events passed pretty quickly in those days. Izzie got a state scholarship and was supposed to go to Columbia the next fall, but when I was home for Thanksgiving during my first year at college my mother told me that he'd dropped out of school and was living at home.

The next time I saw him was at the end of my first year of college. I'd driven home with some guys who were on the freshman team with me and I took them over to the P.S. 92 schoolyard to show them around. I'd improved during my first year of college and I didn't have much trouble with the Erasmus players. There were some other guys at the schoolyard who played college ball, and I could hold my own with them too. I'd developed a good outside shot and it surprised a lot of the guys who'd known me at Erasmus. My friends and I played a few games and then we started to leave.

“Hey, Howie—you see your friend Izzie lately?” one of the Erasmus players asked.

“No.”

“There he is. Didn't you notice? He's a real star now.”

The guy laughed and I looked where he'd pointed. On the other side of the wire fence, at the far end of the playground, I could see a bunch of grade-school kids playing basketball. I had to squint at first. Then I recognized him. He was playing with a group of little kids. Some of them were already taller than he was. I turned away quickly.

“One thing you gotta admit—he's got the best set-shot of all of 'em!”

Everybody laughed.

The Child

T
HE
CHILD
had not been wanted. He said they couldn't afford it yet; she said they hadn't done all the things they had planned to do. They thought, during the second month, of giving up the child, but decided against it. They agreed that she would continue to teach until the seventh month, and they told each other that they would love the child anyway, that somehow things would work out.

As the months went by and the child began to grow inside her, Helen changed; not only did she begin to forget about the many things they had hoped to do while still not “burdened” with children, but she found that she was beginning to look forward to becoming a mother. “Maybe it was best this way, honey,” Gary would say at night when they lay in bed together. “Maybe we were only kidding ourselves, maybe we would have just let the years slip by, inventing excuses, if this hadn't happened to us.” After spending an evening with their friends they would take pleasure, almost secretly, it seemed, from comparing themselves to those married couples who were still without children, from noting how the child was drawing them closer to one another.

She wrote to her family and to his, and they received long letters of congratulations and sizable checks from both sets of parents. They were amazed, they told each other, at how easily they could accept the gifts, without feelings of guilt, of obligation. Helen delighted in her third-grade children as she had never done before, and he became more optimistic about their financial situation. Several times a week he would sit down on the living-room couch with her and he would go over the figures—showing her, with pencil and paper, that even if she didn't return to teaching for three years, everything would be all right. She praised him for his ability to arrange things, to foresee possibilities she would never have thought of.

What pleased them most, though, was feeling the baby, listening to it. He would lie with his ear pressed gently to her stomach, and every time he heard a sound they would experience a thrill which seemed magical. “I think I'm falling in love with you all over again,” she said to him. “It's so strange.”

She had never seemed more beautiful to him, and he had never loved her more. They had never, he felt, been this close. Still, as the months went by, he became increasingly uneasy. In particular, he was afraid of what would happen to her were something to go wrong. He called her doctor and the doctor told him not to worry. He did, anyway. Helen didn't, he saw, and this worried him even more. While she was making supper one evening he leafed through a copy of
Life
magazine and found an article about Thalidomide babies who were being rehabilitated through the use of artificial limbs. Had Helen seen the article? If, as he hoped, she had not seen it, what was he to do? If he threw the magazine away without telling her, and if she found out, she would think that he was treating her like a child, overprotecting her. “Have you finished with all the magazines in the rack?” he called to her. “It's getting stuffed.” “I'm finished with them,” she called back.