Corky’s Brother

THE FIRST TIME I ever cried about anybody dying was at Corky Williams’ older brother’s funeral. I was fourteen then—it happened after the summer, just before my first year in high school. I was surprised that it upset me so much because I didn’t even know Corky’s brother well. I wished I did, of course—every guy in our neighborhood did—but the only way I really knew him was through Corky and through the newspapers.

Corky’s brother—Mel was his name—died from the same kind of leukemia that got Ernie Davis, and he was probably the most famous guy in our neighborhood. He had been All-City in baseball and football at Erasmus and had gotten a bonus of about $10,000 from the Dodgers when he’d finished high school. At the time he got sick—he wasn’t twenty years old yet—he was playing double-A ball in their farm system, and Corky would always come down to the schoolyard with clippings from the Fort Worth newspapers. The night Mel fainted the first time and was taken to the hospital, he was hitting over .300, and in the New York Post it said that he might be brought up to the Dodgers the next year to fill the left-field spot. The Dodgers hadn’t had a steady left-fielder since they’d traded Andy Pafko to the Braves in 1953.

All of us worshipped Mel, especially Corky. Whenever any of us got to do anything with him we’d talk about it for weeks afterwards. Once, I remember, he came down to the schoolyard and we got him into a game of stickball with us. Somehow I managed to strike him out once—he didn’t do it to make me feel good either, you could tell that—and when I did, he turned to Corky and said, “Hey, who’s that out there—Carl Erskine?” I felt so great, I struck out the next two batters on six straight pitches. The guys kidded me about how red my face got and about the stupid grin I had on, but I didn’t care. For the next few months they all called me Carl and no matter how many times they did, each time it made me feel as if Mel were saying it for the first time.

Even though Corky always talked about what a great ballplayer his brother was, he talked even more about the things Mel did with girls. Almost every Saturday and Sunday morning when our baseball team got together at the Parade Grounds, the first thing out of his mouth was—“Boy, you should of seen the piece my brother took out last night!” He said it so many times that after the “Boy” we would all repeat the rest of the sentence with him. He didn’t mind. “I mean it,” he’d say. “This one was the best yet. You should of seen her!” He’d make a motion with his hand and suck on his lower lip. “Moron! What a pair of knockers she had!” Then we’d usually crowd around him and he’d tell us about how he’d been up when Mel had come home and how they’d stayed up and talked till early morning, with Mel filling him in on all the luscious details. “My brother can plug any broad he wants!” Corky would say. That was his favorite word. I don’t think any of us ever spent a day or even an hour with Corky when he didn’t speak at least once about who Mel was plugging.

Corky and I were good friends at that time, and my parents weren’t happy with the idea. They thought he was too wild—and, of course, this only made me feel better about being his friend. He’d do crazy things that nobody else would—and when he wasn’t with our group of guys, he’d spend his time with the tough guys from the other side of Nostrand Avenue. They took part in gang wars, and some of them had already been arrested for stealing radios, but Corky never had any part in those things. What he was after were the girls.

The summer Mel was sick, when I’d come home from camp, I used to go with Corky almost every night to the P.S. 181 schoolyard. We’d play stickball for a while, and then, as it began to get dark, the girls would come in and Corky would go to work. The tough guys didn’t bother me because I was Corky’s friend—so I just used to sit on a bench, fooling with a stickball bat, watching the way Corky would treat the girls. He’d neck with them and chase them around and twist their arms—and no matter what he did or said they seemed to love it. In fact, the more he’d curse a girl or punch her in the arm, the more she’d be willing to make out with him. I knew most of the girls from school—they were the tough ones, the ones who wore tight sweaters and black kerchiefs on their heads and usually had bite marks on their necks and ink tattoos on their arms from whatever guys they were going with.

Sometimes Corky would say to me, “Hey, Howie, you dare me to soul-kiss every one of these girls?” and when I’d say “Yeah,” he’d say “Darers go first,” and the girls would laugh at me. I didn’t mind, though. After spending a couple of weeks with Corky and the girls at night, I got to like them. They may not have been the brightest girls in the world, but at least they didn’t talk all the time. “You know why Howie don’t make out with any of you broads?” Corky said one night. “Because he got a girlfriend nobody knows about. He gotta be true to her.” Then Corky showed them a picture from his wallet and all the guys and girls crowded around. The girl in the picture looked something like Corky—she had light wavy blond hair and a kind of square face with a dimple in her chin. In the picture she was standing next to a well pump with her mouth half open and her eyes half closed. The guys all agreed that she was a piece, and every night after that when I came down the girls would ask me if I’d heard from Sarah Jean. That was her name. Sarah Jean Stilman, and she was Corky’s cousin who lived in Pennsylvania. Corky got a big charge out of how I blushed and fidgeted every time her name was mentioned, and I guess I was glad to be thought of as a guy who had a girlfriend.

Sometimes at night, if the guys got bored fooling around with the girls, they’d crowd around one of the concrete checker tables and play poker or blackjack. Corky would keep up a running commentary, announcing the hands as if he were on television. What I liked most, though—and I think this was true for all the guys—were the things he’d say to the girls. “Hey, Gloria,” he might say suddenly, calling to one of them. “Do me a favor, huh?” “Sure, Corky,” the girl would usually say. Then when she got near the table Corky would say to her, in this very serious tone, “Take a walk to the corner and see if it’s raining, okay?”—or something like that, and we’d all laugh.

He was great at ranking out girls—I think this was one of the reasons the tough guys looked up to him so much. There was one exception, of course. About a year and a half before he died, Mel had eloped and gotten married to a girl named Rhoda Miller who worked behind the soda fountain at Ellman’s on Flatbush Avenue. When Mel had first started dating her, Corky had been in his glory because Rhoda was generally acknowledged to be the most beautiful girl in our neighborhood. When she waited on tables in Ellman’s and we watched her wiggle between the tables and chairs or bend over to scoop out ice cream, Corky would just lean back and smile. “I told you,” he’d say to us, and then he’d give us the details about what Mel was doing to her. A few times he told us that Mel had plugged her right on the rug in Corky’s living room. “My brother’s really something,” he’d say.

When they got married, though, Corky was stunned. He couldn’t seem to understand why a guy who could be getting it all over the country would want to settle for getting it from one girl—even if she was the most beautiful girl around. “Why’d he do it?” he kept asking. “Why’d he do it?” After a while, of course, he came to like the idea of having a big sister like Rhoda, and when Mel was away during the baseball season in 1955 he spent almost all his time at her house. She made special foods and pies for him, and according to Corky she could do everything better than any girl in the world.

Corky never did get along well with his parents, and after Mel was taken to the hospital, I remember, they fought more than ever. Any time I’d go over to his house with him, within two minutes they’d be screaming at each other, and when Corky’s father would threaten to hit him—usually for the way Corky was treating his mother—Corky would clench his fist and dare him. “I’m ready whenever you are,” he’d say. “Just remember one thing. I’m bigger than you are now, you hear that? You better remember that.” It was the only time I’d ever heard anybody our age talk to a parent that way. “I hope you both croak,” he’d say when we left. Then he’d go to Rhoda’s and she would feed him and they’d talk. Or rather, Corky would talk and Rhoda would listen, usually about how lousy his parents were. When Corky visited Mel at the hospital—he didn’t do it often because he said it upset Mel to have to entertain visitors—he always went with Rhoda.

The night the news came we were at a party, I remember, and being at a party always made Corky feel uncomfortable. That was the strange thing. He’d be as wild as could be with girls in the schoolyard or at school—but when he had a tie and jacket on at a party you couldn’t get him to go near them. If we’d play kissing games, he’d say it was sissy stuff and would sit in a corner reading a sports magazine—and if the girls’ parents were gone and we’d play “lights out” or “flashlight” he’d say that the girls didn’t know how to do anything, and he’d leave early.

The night it happened we were at Paula Ornstein’s house on Linden Boulevard, and her mother came into the living room—after coughing a lot to warn us—and said that Corky’s mother had called and told him to come home, there was bad news. The whole neighborhood knew about Mel, of course—I can remember listening to my parents and their friends agreeing with each other that it was “a tragedy, a genuine tragedy”—and when Mrs. Ornstein bit on her lip, some of the girls started sniffling. If the other guys and I hadn’t kept busy telling them to shut up, I think a lot of us would have done the same thing. Corky didn’t budge.

“Aren’t you gonna go home?” Louie asked.

“I’ll go when I feel like it,” Corky said. We all looked at each other and nobody seemed to know what to do. I jammed my mouth full of potato chips so I wouldn’t have to say anything, and after a minute or so Corky broke the silence by doing something he’d never done before at a party. He suggested we play “post office”—and he nominated himself to be first postmaster. Then he whispered to me to be sure to get Ellen Dienstag to deliver the first letter, and he went into the hallway to the bedroom. I couldn’t figure what he was up to, because Ellen Dienstag was the biggest snob in the school. She was intelligent and good-looking—we all had to admit that—and she was the only girl in our class whose father was a doctor. She was always taking lessons in ice-skating and elocution and things like that. At a party the week before when we’d taken a break and crowded together in the bathroom to compare notes on who was the smoothest kisser, I’d admitted to the guys that I’d never gotten anything from her—that when I’d go into the hall or bedroom with her for “post office,” or if we were on the couch together during “sneak attack,” she’d always whisper to me to pretend that we were going to town. “Let’s just make believe—all right, Howie?” she’d say, and give my hand a squeeze. Then when it was over she always acted as if I’d really been loving her up. It turned out that she did pretty much the same thing with all the guys. If you were lucky she’d give you a quick peck on the lips so that some lipstick would show. “I know her kind,” Corky had said. “She thinks hers is lined with mink—”

A minute after I got her to deliver a special delivery to Corky, we heard her yelp for him to stop. Then they were quiet for a while—but until she came running back into the living room, covering her blouse where Corky’d ripped it open, I think we all figured she was making believe again. Corky followed her into the room and while the tears streamed down her face and the girls crowded around her, he sauntered over to them and started ranking Ellen out. She pushed the girls away from her—her blouse was pinned up by then—and screamed at him that she didn’t care if his brother did die, he was still an idiot and a punk.

Corky just laughed. “You know what you are?” he said. “You’re nothing but a two-bit C.T.—” Then he went up to her and shoved her on the breasts. “And I’ll tell you something else, Lana Turner, you ate it up when I soul-kissed you—you’re the one who wanted to keep going. You know why I stopped?” He turned to us. “Cause she’s the sloppiest kisser I ever met. I’ve gotten smoother kisses from a wet sponge.” He turned to me. “You wanna bug out with me, Howie? I had enough of this place. Let’s get us some real stuff.”

When we got outside, though, he said he wanted to visit Rhoda. “I ought to be with her at a time like this,” he said. “Mel always told me to keep an eye on her, to take care of her—” His voice broke then, and I didn’t look at him. Then he started talking about Ellen. “I really showed her, huh? I showed her, didn’t I, Howie?” he said, and even after I’d agreed with him, he kept repeating it. “I showed her, didn’t I? I really showed her, huh?”

When we got to Rhoda’s place on East 21st Street, there was nobody home. “Damn it,” he said. “She must of gone to my folks’ place. What’d she wanna do that for?” So we walked back to Corky’s house, which was on Martense Street, off Rogers Avenue. I felt funny going in with Corky, but at the door, when I told him I thought I’d better leave him alone, he insisted that I come in with him. Even from outside the door I could hear Corky’s mother crying—I’d never heard a woman cry so loud—she just kept wailing and screaming and shouting Mel’s name. Corky took a deep breath and opened the door. Inside, it was dark and the apartment smelled as if somebody had been boiling cabbage. Corky’s mother was stretched out on the living-room couch with a washcloth over her forehead, and Corky’s father was next to her, talking low. Rhoda was sitting in the easy chair, next to the TV, and there were some neighbors walking around the room trying to make themselves helpful.

Corky’s mother reached out with her hand. “Is that you, Corky baby?” she said. Corky mumbled something. “Corky, Corky, my love, come to your mother—oh, Corky, why? why—?”

“Easy does it now, Margaret,” Corky’s father said.

Corky stood there for a second, at the entrance to the living room, and I stood behind him. The neighbors disappeared into the kitchen, and when Corky’s mother started crying again for him to come to her, Corky went to Rhoda instead. He seemed very tall and sure of himself as he strode across the room to her—but the minute Rhoda raised her arms to him and he lifted her from the chair and let her cry on his shoulder, something inside him seemed to break. He didn’t cry, at least not that I could tell—and he talked to Rhoda about how he understood how much they’d loved each other—but something seemed to break in his body, to sag, so that even though he was taller than her and she was leaning against him, he still looked like a little boy. He brushed his pompadour out of his eyes a few times, and when Rhoda had finished crying, he straightened himself up a little bit.

“Your brother’s dead, Corky—” his father began.

“Godamnit!” Corky said, turning on his father. “You think you’re telling me something I don’t know?” Then he walked out of the living room, to his own bedroom. He motioned to me. “Come on in here, Howie,” he said.

I went into his room with him and sat down in a chair next to his desk. “Jesus!” he said a few times, and pounded his fist into his palm. Then he paced the room and when he came by me he patted me on the shoulder, as if he were trying to cheer me up, to make me feel good. “You’re okay, Howie,” he said. After a while he sat down and took some deep breaths. “Jesus,” he said. “It’s hard to believe, you know what I mean?” I said I did, and I meant it. I could still picture Mel—the way he looked in the newspapers, but more the way he looked when I’d seen him play stickball, the way he’d smile when he whipped the bat around. He was a lefty and swung on a line like Ted Williams, with a really graceful swing. Corky started to unwind then, talking about things he and Mel had done together and about how it seemed impossible that they wouldn’t do them again, but the fact that Mel was gone just didn’t seem real to him. Not until he went to the closet to show me some stuff. He took out picture albums of Mel he’d collected and some baseball caps from teams Mel had been on, an old baseball glove that he’d given to Corky, a pair of spikes. “See these?” he said, showing me the spikes. The black leather was crusted and cracked from dirt and the shoelaces had been broken and retied in five or six places. “They didn’t belong to Mel,” he said. “They were mine. Do you understand? Remember last year when we changed the name of our team to The Zodiacs and started getting more games and things? I got these then. Mel bought ’em for me. When he was back from the Dodgers’ training camp in Florida just after spring training—before he got sent to Fort Worth—he bought ’em for me and when he gave them to me he said—he said it was about time I stopped using his hand-me-down’s, that I was on my own and he—” And then Corky just started blubbering. The tears came rolling down his face. He stood there holding the shoes next to his face, dirty smudge marks running on his cheeks from the tears, asking if I understood. “He said it was about time I stopped using hand-me-down’s…do you understand…do you?” When he breathed in, he made deep raspy noises and I wished more than anything in the world I could have done something for him. But there was nothing I could do except listen to him repeat what Mel had said. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as helpless as I did then.

Just as he was beginning to get himself under control, the door opened and his mother came in. Corky’s father was with her, holding her steady by the elbow, and I could see the neighbors behind them in the living room, looking in at us.

“I’m feeling better now, Corky,” his mother said. “I didn’t like for you to see me the way I was before—”

“That’s okay,” Corky said, and he turned his back to her and leaned on the windowsill. He put his spikes on the dresser.

“I heard you from the living room,” she said, and took a few steps toward him. “I know what you must be feeling now—you—you lost your best friend, didn’t you?” She had to fight to keep her tears back, I could see. Then she took another step toward Corky and reached out with her hands, to rest them on his shoulders, but the minute her fingertips touched him he whirled on her, screaming like a maniac. “Leave me alone! Leave me alone—/” She moved backwards as if somebody had punched her, and Corky’s father got to her quickly and held her up. Corky couldn’t stop screaming. “Goddamnit, just leave me alone! Leave me alone already!”

“Look at him—” Corky’s father said then. Corky’s face was beet-red and the bottom of his mouth was spread wide, quivering. “You ain’t no good, Corky. I always said it, and I say it again.”

“Stop, Frank—” Corky’s mother said. “He’s upset. Poor baby.” Then she was crying again, her chest heaving in and out. “He’s lost his best friend—he’s—”

“This is my room—so get out! Out!” Corky screamed. “Just get out and leave me alone—!”

“Sure,” his father said. “We’ll leave you alone—should of done it a few years back, all the good’s gonna come of you.” He stopped and hitched up his suspenders. “Maybe I never would of said this, not for what’s happened—but you’re a bum, Corky. Don’t know where it come from. Maybe it’s my seed—but you’re gonna wind up a bum, living all over the country, never settling down. Maybe it’s my fault. Like I say, I don’t know—”

“Frank, please, I beg of you, stop—” his mother said. She clung to his arm, but Corky’s father wouldn’t stop now. I just stood there, wishing I could vanish. Corky’s father had always seemed a little strange to me and the other guys—to our parents too—but we knew from Corky that before they’d come to Brooklyn his father had run the family farm in Pennsylvania, and I guess we figured that all farmers dressed and talked the way he did. He was the most tight-mouthed man I ever met. In fact, in all the years Corky and I had been friends—he had come into our class in the second grade—this was the first time I think I’d ever heard his father speak more than one sentence at a time.

“You let me speak my piece, and then I’ll be done for good, Margaret,” he said. “At least your brother, God bless his poor soul, at least he had an excuse with that baseball stuff of his—but you ain’t even gonna have that—you ain’t—”

Corky leapt at his father as if he were going to kill him and then—it happened so fast I didn’t even have a chance to move—Mr. Williams had laid him out with one stroke of his hand. I’d never seen anyone react so quickly. One minute Corky’s hands were making for his throat, and the next minute Corky’s father had whipped his arm across and hit Corky square on the side of the face with the back of his hand and Corky was on the floor, stunned. His mother bent down, but Corky screamed at her to get away. “I’ll kill you some day,” he said to his father. “I swear to God I will—”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” his father said.

“Frank, why? Why must you?” his mother was saying. “Why now—?”

“The boy says he wants to be left alone, so we’ll leave him—” Corky’s father pushed his mother out the door and then turned back. Corky was still on the floor, feeling his jaw as if something were broken in it. “One other thing—all my kin’s coming up from Pennsylvania for the funeral and I ask you not to shame your mother or your brother’s memory the way I know you’d like to. They’ll be here by morning. You get this room cleaned up before that, you hear?”

“Like hell I will,” Corky said as his father left the room. He got up from the floor and rubbed his jaw.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Sure. He caught me off guard, that’s all.”

Corky picked up the pair of spikes from his dresser and put them back in the closet with the other stuff from Mel. “If I don’t put these away, my old man’II probably throw them out,” he explained to me.

“What about your peep shows?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Corky. “You wanna give me a hand—I’ll stand on the chair and you hand ’em to me—”

“You got any new ones?”

“Nah,” he said. “I’m still working on the Ebbets Field one.” He got down on his hands and knees and pulled a big carton out from under his bed. “I’m gonna attach some flashlight batteries here, and some bulbs—” The short end of the carton, like the ends of all the shoeboxes around Corky’s room, had a little square cut out of it which was covered with cellophane, and inside, when Corky let light into the top of the box through special slats, you could see a baseball field laid out, with the stands painted on the sides of the carton. “I used green felt from an old pool table—the guy at Ryan’s on Church Avenue saved it for me—” I told Corky how great I thought it looked, and he said it would look better when he got the lights fixed on it. At school Corky was famous for his peep shows. They were always putting them on exhibit, and the teachers would say that if he applied the same imagination and skill to his work as he did to his hobby, he “could be somebody.” What amazed them, I guess, was the same thing that got us all: how a guy as restless and nervous as Corky was most of the time, could have so much patience when it came to making things on such a small scale for the peep shows. The top of his closet was stacked with them, and I helped him put away the ones that were around the room—winter scenes made with cotton, scenes from foreign countries with trees made from twigs, and scenes with animals that Corky had copied from the exhibits at the Museum of Natural History. I looked into each one before I handed it to him, and it seemed to make him feel better to spend some time talking about them.

“Mel really liked ’em,” he said when we were finished. “It was the first thing I ever did, I guess, that he hadn’t done—he used to brag to all of his friends about what a great artist I was.” He looked up at me. “Boy,” he said, shaking his head. “How long you think this is gonna go on, me remembering everything Mel ever said or did?” I shrugged and he patted me on the shoulder again. “You don’t gotta say anything, Howie. Come on, let’s get out of here before I start getting upset again.”

“You ought to get some sleep,” his mother said when Corky announced that we were going for a walk. “You’ll need it.”

“I’ll be okay,” Corky said.

“Pa’s relatives will be here before morning,” she said.

“So?”

“I’m just telling you,” she said. Corky’s father didn’t add anything, or even look at Corky. He just sat back in his rocking chair as if he were in another world. He looked very old to me.

“You okay?” Corky asked, kneeling next to Rhoda’s chair. She nodded and ran her hand over Corky’s blond hair. Then he whispered so the others wouldn’t hear: “If you need me to stay here, you just say the word, Rhoda—”

“You go with Howie,” she said. “It’ll do you good to get some fresh air.” Then she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek softly. Her eyes were bloodshot from crying, I remember, but she looked more beautiful sitting in that dark room with her hair messed than I’d ever seen her. When I tried to imagine what she must have been thinking and feeling, I had to swallow hard to keep the tears back. Still, I knew I wanted to say something to her, and I guess I did because in the next instant I was standing next to her chair and she had touched me on the cheek and kissed me too. “Thanks, Howie,” she said. “You keep an eye on Corky now—”

“You wanna come with me to see Mel?” Corky asked when we were outside.

“Mel?”

“Come on—” he said. “You don’t got to look at me like that—I didn’t bust my wig. I mean at the funeral parlor. I wanna see him by myself once—before the others.”

“You know which place he’s at?”

Corky nodded and turned up Rogers Avenue. I stayed next to him. At the corner of Rogers and Church, in the London Hut, the bus drivers were sitting, drinking coffee. “Sure I know where he is,” Corky said. “My old man ain’t been talking about anything but the funeral since last spring. He said he had to get my old lady ready for it. Bastard—” We walked up Church Avenue, toward Flatbush, past Holy Cross Church. “The way he kept talking, you could tell he was glad Mel was gonna die.”

“Come on, Corky,” I said. “Your dad may be a louse, but I’m sure he didn’t want Mel to die—”

“No?” Corky sneered. “You don’t know my old man. He’s got something twisted in him—ever since he had to leave the farm. Something happened then.”

“What?”

Corky shrugged. “I don’t remember. I was too young. But something happened with him and my uncle—that was Sarah Jean’s father—they ran the place together. There was fighting going on all the time, about money. That Sarah Jean’s mother—she’s a real bitch. My old man almost killed her once, went after her with an ax—I swear to God! I remember that. Me and Sarah Jean, we were playing in the barn when he took after her—we hid back of the bin of horseshoes. Sarah Jean’s old man hadn’t come, he would of chopped her head off. You should of seen him swinging that ax over his head—the horses, they were stamping like mad—I still remember that. I expected one of them to rear up and kill ’em both.”

“Why’d he do it?” I asked.

Corky shrugged, “I don’t know—she was a bitch, that’s all. I told you. She was always bugging him.” He laughed real loud. He seemed happy again. “He could of chopped her head off in one swipe too! You seen the power he has before, when he slugged me. On the farm he could beat any of the hands at tests of strength—he was always arm-wrestling somebody. The only guy who ever stood up to him was Mel.” Corky shook his head emphatically. “Mel never took any shit from that bastard.”

We were almost at the funeral parlor, and Corky pointed it out to me. He hitched up his pants, set his jaw, and a minute later we’d walked through the door. The man there looked at us strangely. “What do you boys want?” he asked. The room was lit with a pale amber light. In the next room I could see a coffin, the top open. There were flowers all around it, and the inside was lined with fancy silk.

‘Is my brother ready?” Corky asked.

The guy looked at Corky. “Your brother?”

“Mel—Mel Williams.”

“Melvin Williams,” the man repeated. His hair looked as if it had been drenched in oil. “Yes,” he said to himself. “Now I have it. The young man who…”

“Cut the jazz,” Corky said. “I wanna see my brother. Is he ready?”

The guy started apologizing to Corky in a Holy Joe tone about not having greeted us in a nicer way. “But we do have some young toughs who sometimes come in here at night and—”

“Come on, come on,” Corky said. He was rubbing his palms furiously with his fingertips and for a second I could see him losing his temper and slugging the funeral guy.

“Let me check,” the man said. He left us and Corky cursed. “Greasy bastard. He better not touch my brother—” The man returned after a minute and said that the “final preparations” would not be completed until the morning. “You sure?” Corky said.

“Yes,” the man said. He started to offer his condolences, but Corky didn’t want them. The way his eyes were darting, and the way he kept shifting his feet and playing with his hands I think I must have been scared that Corky was not only going to slug him but was going to drag me down to the basement with him to look for Mel. I had this mad picture in my head of us pulling corpses out of these huge refrigerators, and the thought of the naked bodies, all fleshy and pink, made my stomach turn. I tasted some of the stuff from the party in my mouth, but I forced it back down.

“What time?” Corky asked.

“The family viewing is scheduled for ten o’clock,” the man said.

“Will he be ready before that?”

The man thought for a second. “Well, I imagine the preparations will be completed by our staff sometime before that, but, as I said—”

“I’ll be here at nine,” Corky said. “You better be open. Come on, Howie.”

We walked around a lot after that, and at about two or three in the morning we wound up at my house. My father was a restless sleeper and he got up when he heard us come in. I think he was going to give me hell for coming in so late, but when he saw Corky he changed his mind. He told him how sorry he was to hear about Mel, and Corky mumbled back a reply.

“Can he stay here for the night?” I asked.

My father hesitated. “Do your folks know?” he asked.

Corky started to say something but I interrupted him and I surprised myself at how I could raise my voice to my father. “Jesus,” I said. “You’re not gonna be like that, are you? What’s the difference? If you don’t want him to stay here, just say so. Yes or no—”

My father looked at Corky, then at me, then back at Corky. “Don’t wake your brother and sister,” he said. “You want me to get you up in the morning?”

“I got to be at the funeral parlor at nine,” Corky said.

My father promised he would wake us at eight and then he said good night and told us not to stay up too late talking. I was proud of him. “He doesn’t even need an alarm clock,” I explained to Corky later. “It’s like he’s got one built into his head—he can wake up any time he wants—on the dot.”

I loaned Corky a pair of my pajamas and we got undressed. When I’d opened my hi-riser, Corky lay on his back in the bed next to me, smoking. He cursed a few times and he seemed to be thinking about a lot of things. He thanked me for sticking with him and letting him sleep over, but I told him to shut up. Then he turned on his side and smiled at me.

“Bet I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

“What?”

“Bet you’re wondering if your girlfriend’s coming up from Pennsylvania. I’ll bet you can’t wait.”

“Ah, come on, Corky—I never even met the girl. I mean—”

He laughed and punched me in the arm. “Wait till you closed I could feel his eyeballs staring through the lids, each one pointing in a different direction. Corky walked fast when we left and I had to skip once in a while to keep up with him. “Bastards,” he kept muttering. “Goddamn bastards.” He seemed so mean and angry I was scared that when he got home he would really kill somebody. I’d never seen him as angry as he was then, and when he kept repeating the word “bastards” I couldn’t tell who he was referring to.

As soon as he walked through the door of his home, though, and saw all his relatives sitting around the table eating breakfast, the anger left. He got the way he did at parties—self-conscious and unsure of himself. He went around the room shaking hands with everybody and being kissed by all the women, and he hardly said anything. He just kept jerking his head forward the way a very shy guy does when he’s introduced to somebody, and mumbling hello’s. He shoved his hands in and out of his pockets and he didn’t seem to be able to look anybody in the eye. He made the rounds of the room, staring at the floor most of the time, and then came back and stood by me.

When Corky’s mother introduced me, saying I was Corky’s best friend and that I’d stayed with him since the news had come, I felt uncomfortable, like an intruder. Everybody said hello, but when they stared at me I felt they were looking at me as if I was the one who’d been responsible for Mel’s death. There must have been twenty to thirty of them in that small living room—about half of them sitting at the table drinking coffee, and the rest sitting in chairs, as quiet as Corky’s father. Some of the women dabbed at their eyes with handkerchiefs once in a while, and Rhoda and a few of the neighbors walked around in the silence asking if people had enough coffee.

“They got here about an hour ago,” Corky’s mother said to us. “They drove all night to be here—” She started to say something else, but began crying instead. A big woman—one of Corky’s aunts—went to her and put her arm around her shoulder. Everybody else ate in silence. That got me, I remember—the idea of twenty or thirty people driving in a caravan of cars through the night on empty highways from these farms I’d never seen. I was certain they hadn’t spoken, either. Just stayed awake looking at the road and waiting for the sun to come up.

When Corky’s mother had gotten control of herself she asked some of the people about how other relatives and friends were—and then things settled down with everybody talking about who’d married and who’d had children and who’d been hit by disaster or by good fortune. They weren’t quiet after that. Even Corky’s father talked a lot—asking questions about the farm—and it really impressed me, how much all the men knew about animals and farming and machines. I suppose it was because they came from a world I didn’t know anything about, but there was something about them—not just the way they clipped their sentences short or the old-fashioned way they dressed, with double-breasted suits and wide ties, but something else that made me envy them, that made me think that they were wiser than men like my uncles, who were all in businesses.

In the middle of all the talk a girl came out of Corky’s room and I knew right away it was Sarah Jean. She was dressed in a plain wine-colored shirtwaist dress—and her blond hair was cut short, in bangs straight across her forehead. She was much prettier than her picture—it was almost as if she were the only person in the room who had any light coming from her face—yet she hardly seemed to be there. When she walked around the table and came to us, nobody even turned to look at her. She did it so silently it was as if she had air cushions under her feet. She just seemed to glide across the room, her whole body moving together, not emphasizing any one part, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her or stop my heart from pounding. She drifted in between me and Corky and reached up on her toes slightly and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m sorry, Corky,” she said. “I liked Mel real well.”

She stayed next to us while the conversation went on around the room, and the whole time she held Corky’s hand. I kept glancing at her and I couldn’t figure out how old she was. Even though her hair was cut short and she didn’t have any make-up on, there was something in the way her body relaxed, in the way she was able to stand there without fidgeting, that made her seem much older than the girls her age I went to school with. Her arm touched mine above the elbow—her skin was cool and soft—but she didn’t seem to be aware of it, and I didn’t move away. I kept glancing at her and getting more and more nervous.

Finally, Corky remembered that I was there. “This is Howie,” he said. “I stayed over his house last night.”

Sarah Jean nodded to me. “You meet my mother yet?” she asked.

“Your who—?” I replied—or something like that. I was so flustered by the way she looked straight at me that I didn’t know what to say. Corky’s face seemed to relax when he saw what was happening to me.

“That’s her over there,” Sarah Jean said, motioning to a tall woman who was collecting dishes from the table.

“Hey,” Corky said, leaning his head in front of us and pushing his hair out of his eyes. “Did Howie tell you about how he’s been telling everybody you’re his girlfriend—?”

“Come on,” I objected. “You’re the one—”

Then Corky laughed and explained to Sarah Jean about showing her picture. She smiled, and looked at me without blinking. Her eyes were a kind of olive-green color and I couldn’t get over how pretty they were, at how they seemed to go with the rest of her face. Her hair was almost white in spots from having been bleached by the sun, yet her skin, even though it was smooth and brown, had a kind of deep red flush to it, mostly in her cheeks and around her eyes. “You’re real nice-looking,” she said to me, her eyes fixed on mine. She said it as if it were a fact. Corky laughed and kidded me about blushing. “I got thin skin,” I said.

“My Ma’s looking at us,” Sarah Jean said. I looked at Sarah Jean’s mother standing across the room, and the look she gave me made me gulp. “Hold my hand, Howie,” Sarah Jean said, and she slipped her hand into mine. “I know what she’s thinking,” she whispered to us, and I looked at her mother. She gave me such a stern look, I recall—as if holy fire were going to erupt from her eyes—that I started to take my hand from Sarah Jean’s. With the gentlest pressure on my palm from her fingertips she made me keep it there. “I know what she’s thinking,” Sarah Jean said again, and her cheeks glowed more than ever. “I don’t care, though. You just hold on to my hand, Howie, and don’t be scared. She can’t do nothing to us.”

So I stood there holding Sarah Jean’s hand. Her eyes were shining now, and while we stood there and everybody talked, she hummed along in this pretty voice, thin and pale. Then Corky’s father said that it was time, that the funeral car was outside.

Downstairs, we got into the back of a Cadillac limousine along with Corky’s parents and Rhoda, and on the way to the funeral parlor I looked out the windows, wondering if anybody I knew was going to see me riding with Corky’s family.

“I saw him already,” Corky whispered, low enough so that only Sarah Jean and I could hear. “It don’t look like him at all. Howie and I went to the place this morning. The bastards got him all fixed up like a square—you may not recognize him in this suit and tie and stuff.”

“I liked Mel real well,” Sarah Jean said.

‘It don’t look like him at all—” Corky repeated.

Sarah Jean ran her thumb along the back of my hand and goose pimples started up my right arm. Corky’s father was sitting between Corky’s mother and Rhoda, talking low to both of them, about how it was going to be a great shock to see Mel this way, about how they should prepare themselves.

His words didn’t help. When we got there and walked inside, the moment the two women saw Mel it was as if they hadn’t understood until that second that he was actually dead. They both started wailing—totally out of control—and one of Corky’s uncles went to them quickly to hold them steady. I don’t remember what they said or how long they stood there looking at Mel, but I do remember the sounds they both made—not just whimpering and crying and rasping when they tried to stop the tears, but this high-pitched sound, almost like the kind you hear dogs make sometimes. Everybody left them alone with Mel, and when they sat down on chairs away from the coffin, the other relatives began coming forward.

“Once is enough for me,” Corky said to Sarah Jean.

She looked at him, then took my hand. “Come on, Howie,” she said. “You come with me.”

So I went up to the box and got a longer look this time. I still couldn’t cry. Everybody around me was, though they all did it softly, but it still didn’t seem real to me that Mel was gone. It was as if somebody else was in the box. Sarah Jean cried some and I asked her if she was okay. “I liked him real well,” she said. “Here—help me touch his hand.” As soon as she said that, I said we should leave to make room for some others to come up and see Mel. “Don’t be scared,” she said. “Once you touch a dead person, then you feel better—it don’t seem so scary after that.” And with my hand on top of hers she reached over the side of the coffin and touched Mel where his hands were clasped on his stomach. “Come on,” she whispered. “You do it, too, Howie. You’ll feel better if you do.”

I let my hand slip off hers and I touched Mel’s hand but it was so cold and stiff it made me think of the way your own hand feels when it falls asleep—you can touch it, and you know you’re touching it, but it seems to belong to somebody else.

A few of the other relatives were standing alongside us now, and from the corner of my eye I saw Sarah Jean’s mother approaching us. “He looks right nice, I think,” she said when she got to us. Sarah Jean looked at her in this absent way and didn’t reply. A woman behind us said something about all the flowers that were around the room and how nice they looked.

“Poor Mel,” another aunt said—the big one who’d comforted Corky’s mother. “We all have to travel the same road, I suppose, but why so soon, why so soon—?”

“Well,” Sarah Jean’s mother said—she said it stiffly, too, even though there were tears in her eyes. “We know where he is now, though, don’t we? We can at least be thankful for that.”

Sarah Jean jerked her head sideways and her eyes flared up in anger. Her mother saw the look and repeated what she’d said. “We know where he is now, don’t we, Sarah Jean?” Sarah Jean just glared. “I was just repeating to Frank and Margaret about the time when Mel accepted the Lord as his personal savior. It was while he was riding home from town one day when he was a boy on the farm. Reverend Millet had given him a lift—”

Then Sarah Jean did the strangest thing. She started humming. The more her mother went on about the religious stuff, the louder Sarah Jean hummed. It was the same tune she’d been humming when we’d been at Corky’s place. It sounded like a hymn and while Sarah Jean hummed it she looked straight at Mel’s face, as if she were singing it just for him. The other relatives all grew quiet and Sarah Jean’s mother stopped what she was saying. “Don’t you be singing that,” she said between her teeth, low, but Sarah Jean kept singing. It wasn’t humming any more, because she’d let her mouth come open so that it was more like singing without words, with a sweet “ah” sound coming from her. Her mother kept glaring at her and whispering for her to stop, saying she had no right, but Sarah Jean didn’t seem to hear her. She hummed through the song twice, softly, and when she stopped, one of her aunts came to her and kissed her on the cheek, saying that God must have given her such a voice just to put Mel at peace. Sarah Jean’s mother got more upset then—you could see it in the way she clicked her jaw, as if she were grinding on her teeth—and Sarah Jean only smiled and tugged at my hand. I couldn’t move. Her mother’s stare had me transfixed. Sarah Jean tugged again. “Come on, Howie,” she said, and this time I followed her to where Corky was standing in back of all the chairs.

“I got an idea,” Corky whispered to us. “How about us three cutting out of here and doing something together?” I shrugged and looked at Sarah Jean. She was smiling, her cheeks glowing. “It’s okay,” Corky said. “Mel wouldn’t wanna make me hang around all day looking at him and saying a bunch of crap to all these jerks coming to say how sorry they are. Bastards. Half the people who’re gonna be here never even knew him—they’ll just be doing it for my old man and my mother. Anyway, the funeral’s not till Monday—we can come back tonight or tomorrow if you want. I’m just too damned restless today—”

“I like Rhoda,” Sarah Jean said. “She’s real pretty—”

“Come on,” Corky said. “Am I gonna go alone, or are you two coming with me—?”

Sarah Jean didn’t seem to be listening to Corky. She left us and went to Rhoda. She knelt down next to her and took Rhoda’s hand in hers, then said something. Rhoda stopped crying and tried to smile and they talked to each other for a minute. Then Sarah Jean came back. “I told Rhoda,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“Sarah Jean—” we heard from behind as we started out. “Sarah Jean Stilman!” Sarah Jean turned and looked at her mother coming through the rooms after us. “I want to speak with you—” Sarah Jean smiled, and she had this real wild look in her eye. “Come on!” she said, excited. “Don’t let her scare you. She ain’t God.”

Her mother kept calling to us to come back, but the minute we got outside, Corky shouted, “This way!” and we ran down the street together, Sarah Jean between us, the three of us holding hands, zooming in and out of people. When we finally stopped running, way down Flatbush Avenue near the Parkside Theater, we were laughing and out of breath.

“Let’s go rowing,” Corky said, and we turned up Parkside Avenue into Prospect Park and walked to where you rented the boats. Corky paid. He did the rowing too, and Sarah Jean and I sat in the back of the boat holding hands. It was still early and the lake was almost empty. None of us said anything for a while, but you could tell how happy Corky was now, not only to be away from the funeral parlor but to be getting rid of some energy. When we were away from the islands, in the big open part of the lake, Sarah Jean took her shoes off and let her feet slip over the side. She started humming again, but she kept laughing to herself while she did.

“You been baptized?” she asked me.

“I’m Jewish,” I said.

“You don’t know then,” she said, and laughed again. Then she hummed the tune, and there was something about the melody and the way she did it that made me think it could go on forever. It was beginning to haunt me. “They sing this when you get baptized,” she said to me. “It’s a hymn.” Then she started singing, soft and thin, with this calm look in her eyes: “Just as I am without one plea…But that Thy blood was shed for me…” She didn’t seem to breathe between sentences. I took my shoes and socks off and let my feet trail in the water so that the boat balanced better. “And that Thou hid’st me come to Thee…O Lamb of God, I come, I come…” She sang another verse and this time I hummed along with her. What I liked most was the way her voice glided over the words like “am” and “plea” and “Thee”—the ones that carried across more than one note.

“When they baptize you, the preacher, he holds your head under water backwards—that’s immersion,” she said. “Corky knows.” Corky nodded and pulled at the oars. I could see his muscles, and sweat dripping along his neck. “Only thing was,” Sarah Jean said, “when they did it to me, this damned preacher, he kept my head under water so long when I come up I bit his hand.” Corky caught his oar in the water and splashed us. Sarah Jean clapped her hands, delighted at his surprise. “My mother got so mad she about died.” Then she leaned forward and spoke lower, smiling the whole time. “That’s why she got so mad before, me singing a hymn for Mel and all—she keeps on at me all the time, how I’m gonna be damned eternally, cause I weren’t baptized right. She says the devil must of been inhabiting me, me to do that.—But I don’t care. I got even with that preacher. You should of heard him howl, everybody come splashing through the water to us. But I got a real good hold on account of I knew I would only get that chance but once—” She stopped smiling. “He held me under for spite, cause he knew I didn’t like him.”

“Reverend Millet?” Corky asked. Sarah Jean nodded and Corky smiled. “Mel hated him too,” he said, and then—just like that—Corky started singing too, real loud. “Just as I a-am withou-out one plea—” He could hardly carry a tune, but it didn’t matter. Sarah Jean and I joined in with him and as we glided across the waters we sang the song again and again.

We stayed on the lake for an hour or two, singing and talking and kidding around—Sarah Jean and Corky had fun roaring out a lot of the hymns they both knew—and then we came in and sat at the boathouse and had some French fries and Cokes. Corky wouldn’t let me pay for a thing.

“You wanna see where our team plays its games?” he asked Sarah Jean, and she said she did, so we walked through the park to the Parade Grounds. Corky got sentimental then, remembering how he used to be batboy for a team Mel had been the star on, and he couldn’t stop talking about him and about what a great ballplayer he would have been. “Yeah,” he said. “I’d give anything to be able to make the Majors someday—the way Mel would of—” He kicked at the dirt. “Ah, shit!” he said.

“You’ll be as good as Mel if you want to,” Sarah Jean said.

He lifted his head. “You think so?”

“Sure,” I offered. “Everybody’s always saying how you got the same swing he has—”

“Ah, what’s the difference now?” Corky said, staring across the fields.

“You’ll be as good as Mel if you want to,” Sarah Jean said again, and the way she said it had a calming effect on Corky.

“What time is it, Howie?” he asked. I told him it was after one o’clock and he punched his fist into his palm. “Hey, I know what—let’s show Sarah Jean what the Kenmore’s like on a Saturday afternoon—” He put his arm over both our shoulders and started talking about how the RKO Kenmore balcony was famous all over Brooklyn. “They got a maternity ward built right in!” he said, and Sarah Jean giggled. Then Corky explained how all the girls went there together on Saturday afternoons and sat in the balcony, and how the matron never asked your ages, so you could smoke and neck and do anything you wanted. We walked up Caton Avenue, then turned right on Ocean. “Howie’s never been here on Saturday afternoon,” Corky said to Sarah Jean when we were at the booth buying tickets, “so you gotta take good care of him—you know what I mean?”

“Howie can take care of himself,” Sarah Jean said, and when she said it she tickled the inside of my palm with her fingertip. I shoved my other hand in my side pocket to keep what was happening from showing, and as we passed into the lobby and started up the steps I was really nervous. It was supposed to be mostly the tough guys and girls who would be there in the dark and I didn’t know what to expect. Of our group of guys, Corky was the only one who’d ever been there more than once, and he’d always brought back stories about how girls you didn’t even know would let you sit next to them and do wild things.

“I almost forgot,” Corky said when we got to the landing of the balcony. “Wait for me a minute—I gotta get ammunition!” He ran down the stairs, two at a time, and a minute later he was back with a couple of bars of candy. “Come on,” he said, and we went inside. I don’t know what I expected, but I was surprised that the seats were only about half taken. There was a lot of smoke and some of the guys had their feet on the backs of the chairs in front of them. There was an old woman in a white uniform standing in one corner, with a flashlight, but she didn’t seem to care about anything. “Let me scout the place first,” Corky said, and he walked along the back row, looking down the aisles. Every once in a while you’d hear somebody curse, or make a remark back to the movie screen, but most of the time it was pretty quiet. You could hear girls giggling, and sometimes some arguing. “Okay,” Corky said. “I see one. Follow me—”

Sarah Jean and I followed Corky down a side aisle until we came to two girls who were sitting together. They looked at Corky, then back at the screen. We sat down, and Corky turned to the girl at his left. “You want some candy?” he asked. The girl gave him a dirty look, but this didn’t bother Corky. “Ah, come on,” he said. “I ain’t trying to be fresh. Honest. This is my cousin Sarah Jean from Pennsylvania and her boyfriend. Come on,” he whispered. “We’re sitting next to each other anyway and I got more than I can eat, so we might as well share. Here—your friend can have some too.”

“It’s okay,” Sarah Jean said to the girls. “He’s my cousin.”

For some reason, this seemed to do the trick. The girls took some candy from Corky and the next thing I knew he had his arm along the back of the seat of the one next to him, and her friend was saying she had to go to the bathroom and she got up and left, and then Corky and this girl were at it. I tried to keep my eyes on the movie—Yvonne De Carlo in a Technicolor Western—but I kept glancing at Corky to see how he was doing and then looking around at the other couples. Sarah Jean hardly moved. She just sat up straight and looked at the movie. My hand began to get sweaty in hers and I took it away and put my arm around the back of her seat. Next to me, Corky was starting to use his hands and I had to fight hard not to keep all my attention on him.

I don’t know how much time passed before I finally let my arm rest on Sarah Jean’s shoulder, but she seemed patient about it, and when I’d finally gotten it there she leaned toward me and let her head rest close to my face. Then she reached up with her right hand and touched my fingers, one at a time. She said something and I shifted in my chair and turned to her. “I—I didn’t hear you,” I said, and when Sarah Jean saw how nervous I was—I squeaked on the first word and had to clear my throat—she laughed and moved closer to me, so that I could feel her breast against my side. The way she laughed didn’t make me feel embarrassed at all, and I relaxed a little and let my cheek rest against her forehead. I could tell that she knew I was nervous and that I was working up my courage to make the final move—and what I liked about her, what I still remember most—was that the way she rested against me, so patiendy—that’s the word that comes to mind—made me feel good inside, confident, grown up. It was as if she were saying, “It’s okay, Howie—you just take your time, and when you’re ready I’m here.”

She was leaning deep into my shoulder by then, and when I looked down at her I saw that her eyes were closed and that she wasn’t looking at the movie. I reached over with my left hand to touch her cheek and she gave my finger a quick nibble. We both laughed, and then I leaned down and she leaned up and we met without any fuss or awkwardness.

Time passed pretty quickly after that, even though all we did was neck and fool around, teasing each other—and no matter how much we kissed, it never got boring or sloppy. That was the thing I remember most—no matter how long we’d stay in a clinch, her lips seemed to stay smooth and cool. She was so gentle, the way she touched my face and arms and played with me with her tongue—no girl had ever done that before with me—that I could hardly believe it. And when we’d separate and lean back, she’d snuggle close and smile at me. “I’m real glad I came up to New York,” she said to me after a while, and I said I was glad too, though I wished it didn’t have to be because of Mel. “You’re a good friend to Corky,” she said. “He looks up to you—” I was surprised to hear that, because I’d thought it was the opposite, and when I tried to tell her it wasn’t true, that I didn’t know what she meant, she said that that made her like me even more. “You don’t tell him what to do,” she said. “I like that.” We talked about other things too, and off and on we watched the movie—I think the other picture was a rerun of Randolph Scott in Gung Ho—and then, much later, I suddenly felt an elbow in my ribs and I nearly jumped out of my seat.

“Come on, lover,” Corky said. “Time to come up for air. It’s getting late—”

“Where—where’s the girl?” I asked, seeing the seat next to his empty.

“I sent her home,” he said. “Come on, it’s time to go to the schoolyard for our game of stickball. You’ll probably beat me tonight—I’m so stiff from wrestling in these seats—” We stood up and I tucked my shirt in where it had come loose and followed Corky out, holding Sarah Jean’s hand. When we were in front of the theater, Corky leaned close to me and winked. “You’re okay, Howie,” he whispered. “I knew you had it in you—” Then he spoke louder, for both of us. “Someday, what I’m gonna do,” he began, “is own a movie theater where they got a section of seats in pairs, without armrests…”

On the way to the schoolyard we stopped and had some pizza—Sarah Jean had never had any before and she loved it—and then we walked up Snyder Avenue, to avoid going by the funeral parlor, and when we got to the schoolyard most of the guys were already there, playing stickball or pitching pennies. They came over to us slowly and they were shy about saying things to Corky about Mel. They didn’t say much, and when Corky told them to forget about it, that after the initial shock you got used to the idea and that, as everybody knew, it’d always been a question of time—when he’d made them feel better about it by talking like that, they all went back to what they were doing. Still, I had the feeling they understood what Corky was going through better than most guys would have. None of them asked him why he wasn’t with his family or at the funeral parlor.

Corky introduced Sarah Jean to all the guys and I was kidded a lot and felt pretty good. We got chosen into a game on opposite sides, and while we played, Sarah Jean sat next to where we had the strike zone chalked on the handball court, and I could tell that the guys thought she was okay. An inning or two after we got there, Corky and I took over the pitching for our teams and as it got darker my fast ball began mystifying the batters. I struck them out so often that they started calling me Carl again. Corky did pretty well too, but after two innings he suddenly hit one of his wild streaks—he walked about six batters in a row before he switched to the outfield—and I wondered if I should begin pitching bad also, to kind of even things up, but I didn’t.

“Why do you think it is?” Corky asked when we were finished playing and were sitting against the handball court, relaxing. “It’s the same when I pitch for our team—I’ll be going along fine for an inning or two and then bam!—the minute I get a man on base and got to pitch with a stop motion I can’t find the plate.” He shrugged, and laughed. “Ah, who cares—P” he said.

Sarah Jean touched his hand and she said again what she’d said before: “You’ll be as good as Mel some day if you want to—”

Corky bummed a cigarette from one of the guys and smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess so. They say that after you develop to your full height and weight your body settles down inside and you get steadier. Maybe my control will improve then. Anyway, I don’t have to be a pitcher—you see me blast that ball over the fence off McGowan?—bam!” Corky said, imitating his own swing. “I showed him where I lived, huh, Howie?”

The girls were starting to come down now—it was almost pitch black out—and Corky picked up his jacket and went over to fool with them, telling us not to do anything he wouldn’t do. Sarah Jean and I stayed where we were. I asked her if she was getting cold. She said no, but I put my jacket around her shoulders anyway. Some of the girls came over to us to see what Sarah Jean was like, and they were all so polite I hardly recognized them. They didn’t seem to like Corky’s horsing around as much as usual—I guess some of them felt strange about doing anything with him on the weekend his brother died. But by nine o’clock I saw him standing by the fence with a girl we’d nicknamed the Splinter because she was so flat-chested, and he was really giving it to her. Then for a long time Sarah Jean and I kissed, leaning on each other and on the handball court and on the concrete and on our elbows all at the same time—we shifted a lot—and I kept my hands around her inside the jacket. Straightening up once, one of them touched against her breast accidentally and I started to say I’m sorry, but she said, “That’s okay, Howie,” and let me keep it there. Unless you count the sessions we used to have at the corner of Linden Boulevard and Rogers Avenue ganging up on fat Louise, who let you do anything to her, it was the first rime I’d ever done that too.

When we finally got up from the ground the schoolyard was empty, and both of us laughed at how sore our rear ends were. I told Corky it was past eleven o’clock, thinking he might want to get back home, but he said that the night was only beginning. He was right. The next thing I knew, we were on the IRT heading for Manhattan. At Chambers Street we changed for the downtown South Ferry local.

Sarah Jean had never been on a ferry boat before and she liked it. The four of us stayed on the outside the whole time, even though the wind ripped through you, and when we got to Staten Island we hiked around until we found a diner that was open. By this time Corky’s girl had started getting angry with him, saying he’d promised to get her home earlier. Sarah Jean tried to calm her down, but she whined so much that Corky threatened to leave her stranded. She cursed him and then he began ranking her out about how flat she was, but Sarah Jean got him to stop right away.

On the ferry back to Manhattan Corky and the Splinter made out inside on one of the benches, but Sarah Jean and I stayed outside again. We kept kissing and nuzzling and promising each other that we’d write every day after she went back to Pennsylvania. What I remember most was the way sometimes, after we’d come up from a long kiss, she’d say in a surprised way, as if she were discovering some new fact: “I like you, Howie—”

When we’d gotten back to Brooklyn and dropped the Splinter off where she lived—it was almost five o’clock by then—we walked around together, and every once in a while, whenever I got the urge, I’d just stop and we’d kiss in the middle of the street and Corky would laugh at us and tease me. We walked around the neighborhood, showing Sarah Jean where all the guys lived and the places we hung out, and when we got tired we’d sit down on the curbstone and rest. At about seven o’clock we wound up at the corner of Flatbush and Church in front of Garfield’s Cafeteria, and Corky announced that it was time for breakfast.

So we went inside and loaded our trays with pancakes and bacon and French toast and Danish and juice and milk and then sat down at a table by the window. We talked a lot about what a great thing it was to stay up all night and then have breakfast together, and I felt pretty good seeing people look over at us, wondering what three kids our age were doing in there at such an hour. After a while—we sat around the table for a long time and I’d finished a second plate of French toast, it tasted so good—we could see people going by all dressed up.

“You gonna go to church?” Corky asked Sarah Jean.

“We’ll get back too late,” she said, and smiled slowly at him. “Are you?”

“It’s only eight-thirty,” I said.

“Nah, Sarah Jean’s right, Howie,” Corky said, catching the look in her eye. “We might as well go to the park again, huh?”

For some reason his suggestion sounded sour to me and I guess I showed it because he got mad, the way he did sometimes. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “You got to ask your mommy first?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just that they’ll be wondering what happened to me. I don’t stay out like this every night of the week, you know.”

“So go home,” he said. “The police must be looking for you.”

I didn’t say anything and Corky didn’t either. The thought of repeating what we’d done the day before suddenly made me feel tired. “You call home if you want, Howie,” Sarah Jean said, breaking the silence. “Then the three of us can stay together longer.”

I looked at Corky. “Sure,” he said. “It’s okay.”

“How about your mother?” I asked Sarah Jean.

She smiled. “She don’t worry about me,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, and left the table. I was afraid my father would yell at me, but when I said that I’d fallen asleep at Corky’s house and that nobody had woken me until just now, he said he’d figured the same thing. I guess he was sympathetic because of Mel. He reminded me that my grandparents were coming over and that he expected me home by four or five o’clock. When I got back to the table, I told them that everything was okay but that I had to be back for dinner.

“Yeah,” Corky said. “You better—you never know when they’re gonna die, old people. Who knows? This might be the last chance to see them together.”

I looked up at Corky and I think he knew from my look that I thought his remark was nutty. “My mother killed my father,” Sarah Jean said then, suddenly. I turned to her, wondering if I’d heard right. Corky looked at her sideways too. Sarah Jean nodded emphatically. “She took his drink away from him.”

Corky laughed.

“It ain’t funny,” Sarah Jean said, and Corky stopped smiling. “Everybody in the family knew about how he couldn’t stay away from the stuff. But he didn’t harm nobody with it.” She paused. “Him and your father were good friends, Corky—could of stayed that way, my mother didn’t—” She stopped and leaned forward. “The thing was, when I was young, at night my mother’d get him downstairs in the kitchen and badger the life out of him.” She talked low and we had our heads close together across the table. Her large eyes had narrowed by now in a way I’d never seen them. “I used to sneak right outside and listen. ‘Faith without works is death,’ she’d say. ‘You repeat it after me, Michael Stilman: Faith without works is death. Faith without works is death. Faith without works is death.’ She’d keep repeating it and she wouldn’t let up on him till she’d made him bawl. Then she’d feel satisfied.” She stopped. “I used to think of ways to kill her.”

“But—” Corky began.

“It don’t matter,” Sarah Jean said, as if she knew what Corky was going to say. “I know what I’m saying. If she’d let him be, he would of lived longer. But he didn’t have nothing to live for. Your Pa was gone by then and he was the only one my father ever felt real kin to—and they couldn’t have no more children after me on account of he had the mumps, so he had no son the way he would of liked. And then she wouldn’t even leave him have—” She broke off and started again, stronger. “She’d stand up there over him making him repeat it till he’d grab at her knees. ‘Faith without works is death. Faith without works is death.’”

“Hey, lower your voice,” Corky said.

Sarah Jean sat back in her chair and her face, which had gone all tight and tense, relaxed. Her eyes opened all the way. “I liked Mel real well,” she said to Corky. “He used to let me shoot his BB gun. He said I was a real good shot.”

“Maybe for Christmas vacation me and Corky’ll hitch down to where you live,” I offered impulsively.

Sarah Jean looked down. “You don’t got to,” she said. Then she looked up and she couldn’t keep from smiling. “But it’d be nice.” She licked her lips. “You know what else?—I didn’t tell nobody yet, but I’ve been thinking that as soon as I reach sixteen and don’t have to be in school no more I’m gonna leave home. I made up my mind.”

“Me too,” Corky said.

They both turned to me. I opened my mouth as if I was going to say “Me too” also—but I didn’t know if I should and I guess I had a crazy frozen expression on my face with my eyebrows up and my mouth wide open, because the two of them started laughing at me.

“Boy,” Corky kept saying when we were outside, walking along Flatbush Avenue again, looking in all the windows. “You should of seen your face!”

I laughed when they teased me, but by the time we were at the park and had rented a rowboat again, none of us was laughing too much. We tried singing and making jokes and tbings, but the longer the day went on, the quieter and more depressed the three of us got. Nothing helped. After we finished rowing, we walked around the park a lot and then took Sarah Jean through the zoo and the botanical gardens. Our money had pretty much run out, so we had to share a couple of hot dogs for lunch. We ate at the Brooklyn Museum and walked around there for a while, with Corky trying to make funny comments about all the naked statues, and then we walked all the way home. I got to my house at about four o’clock, feeling pretty low, and guilty somehow for not staying with Corky overnight again. I told this to Sarah Jean, and she smiled and said that she’d take good care of him and that they’d both see me tomorrow.

When I got to the funeral parlor the next morning most of the guys were already there, sitting in a row near the back of the room, and I sat down next to them. Corky and his family were in the front row and Sarah Jean was sitting next to her mother in the row behind them. There must have been a hundred or so folding chairs set up in the room and around the sides were baskets of flowers. I’d never seen so many in one place. The room filled up quickly and before I knew it they were playing soft organ music and a man was standing at a little lectern next to the coffin and reading from the Bible. When he finished and sat down, another man got up and began talking about Mel. Sarah Jean turned and smiled at me from in front of the room and I wished I could be with her. The guys who’d gotten to the parlor early whispered along our row that Corky had told them all about what we’d done the day before. “Boy,” Izzie whispered—he was sitting two seats away from me. “She’s some piece! They really grow ’em in the country!”

The rest of the service is still pretty much of a blur to me. There were lots of people from the neighborhood around the room—some of the guys’ mothers, a few of the store owners from Rogers Avenue like Mr. Fontani and Mr. Klein, people who lived in Corky’s building—and the man up front spoke a lot about going to live with the Lord Jesus and about Mel’s great gifts and how they would now be put into the highest service in exchange for the greatest of gifts. I didn’t pay too much attention to him, but whenever I did I’d think up arguments against what he was saying. Along our row the other guys all seemed as nervous and fidgety as I was—Eddie picked his nose a lot, Louie and Marty talked to each other the whole time, and Izzie kept trying to find out how far I’d gone with Sarah Jean. Whenever the preacher mentioned Mel’s age, though, they all got quiet. I don’t think that what he said about the Lord working in mysterious ways made much sense to any of them. Aside from Corky, though, Kenny Murphy was the only one of the guys who wasn’t Jewish and I thought that maybe if we’d been brought up differently what the man was saying might have sounded right to us.

When he’d finished, everybody started walking up to the casket for the final look at Mel. Some of them did it quickly and some of them stayed a minute or so, and not too many of them could look over at Corky and his family. When the rows in front of us had all emptied out and it was our turn, we all kind of stumbled forward on each other’s heels—I was right behind Izzie—and it was then that I cried. It wasn’t because it was the last time I was going to see MeL or because I suddenly realized that Mel simply wasn’t going to be in the world any more. What happened was that as the guys all stood around the coffin looking in, most of them with their eyes popping out of their sockets, I suddenly looked at all of them—Louie and Izzie and Kenny and Eddie and Marty, and then quickly back at Corky—and I realized that some day I would be standing in front of a box looking in at one of them, at one of the guys I’d spent a lifetime knowing—and that some day some of them, the ones who were left, would be looking in at me, feeling the same ache. That was what made the tears start. They didn’t last long, and I wiped my eyes quickly and followed the other guys out of the room.

One of the men from the funeral parlor asked us to be seated while the family had “the final viewing,” and a few minutes later they came filing through. Corky’s mother was in bad shape, and he and his father were holding her up. I looked at the other guys and none of us knew what to do. Some of the neighbors had come over to us and asked us questions about ourselves and our families—a few of the guys went and stood with their mothers—but even though I think we all felt grown up to be participating in such an event, when Corky had helped his mother sit down and came toward us, most of us were terrified.

“You guys coming to the cemetery?” he asked. “There’s lots of room in some of the cars—just go outside. All my relatives got cars.”

We nodded and hurried outside, telling people we were Corky’s friends and asking if they had room for us. I got into a car with a man who worked at the bakery with Corky’s father, and Izzie and Louie came in with me. The man was as stone-faced as Corky’s father, and all the way to the cemetery—it was on Long Island—there was total silence.

It was raining slightly when we got there and we had to huddle inside a tent they’d set up. It was over pretty quickly after that, and while they were saying the final prayers I remembered a funeral I’d been to once of an uncle of mine and of how quiet this one was compared to it. At the other funeral, I remember, my aunt had carried on like a maniac, trying to follow my uncle into the grave—and I remembered also how all the men had gone up, one at a time, and shoveled dirt on top of the box after it had been lowered. They didn’t do this for Mel.

As soon as they’d gotten him into the ground, Corky slipped away from his family and came over to me. “Come on,” he said. “We got room in the car for you. Sarah Jean too.”

All the way into Brooklyn I sat in the back of the car between Corky and Sarah Jean. In front of us Corky’s parents and Rhoda stayed pretty quiet—they all looked exhausted, even Corky’s father. Corky talked the whole way in, mostly about a guy who had come to the funeral—a fat Irish-looking old man I’d seen him talking with—who Corky said had come to represent the Brooklyn Dodger organization. Corky said that the guy had promised to send him Mel’s old uniform, and a lot of glossy pictures that had been taken in spring training. And he’d said that any time Corky wanted to get into a game he should ask for him.

At Corky’s house, everybody went inside and had coffee and then all the relatives went right back out and piled into their cars for the trip home. It happened so fast I didn’t have a chance to be alone with Sarah Jean. I walked with her to the car, though, and scribbled her address down on the back of a card from my wallet.

“Anyway,” Corky said, “at least you two got together.”

Sarah Jean kissed Corky goodbye. “I had a real good time last night,” she said to him. She turned to me. “Corky and I spent the whole night working on his new peep show,” she said. “It’s gonna be real good, Corky. Real good.”

I didn’t know if I should kiss her goodbye or not, but when I noticed the look her mother was giving me from inside the car, I took a step backwards. Sarah Jean smiled and stepped forward, touching me on the back of the neck with one hand and kissing me half on my mouth and half on the side of my face. I kept my eyes open. “When I’m sixteen,” she whispered.

Then we were standing there waving goodbye as the line of cars started to move toward Rogers Avenue. “You better get on home,” Corky said to me. “Maybe I’ll see you tonight at the schoolyard. It depends on how Rhoda feels.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “I’ll tell you the truth, Howie, if not for her I wouldn’t stay myself. But I think she could use me now, you know what I mean? She got no real home to go to, and no parents or anything.” He patted me on the back. “You’re okay, Howie.”

Then he went over to Rhoda and walked inside his building with her, and I turned and walked home by myself.

After that day Corky spent almost all his free time with Rhoda. During the second week after school had started, she went back to work at Ellman’s and every day when school was out he would stop by to see her. We didn’t have any classes together at Erasmus, but we’d walk to school together and at night if I didn’t have too much homework I’d usually find him with the other guys at the corner of Linden Boulevard and Rogers Avenue. Sometimes we’d go over to the schoolyard together and he’d mess around with the girls, but he never seemed to do it with the same spirit any more.

The other thing that changed about him was the way he started studying for school. None of the guys could figure it out. Sometimes he’d even call me up at home just to find out how to do an algebra problem, or to read a composition to me, and sometimes he’d invite me over and I’d eat supper with him and his family and Rhoda—she ate there almost every night—and we’d do our homework together. Rhoda was very proud of the way he was applying himself and this made Corky happy.

For a month or so after Sarah Jean went back we wrote each other almost every day, and I’d show the letters to Corky. I’d tell her about what I was doing in school and about our baseball team and about Corky and Rhoda and about how we were still planning to hitch down to see her, and she would tell me about how much she hated the farm and about her mother and about books she was reading and she’d make up stories that she’d include about a family of mules. Sometimes, when I was most lonesome, I’d remember the things we’d done the weekend we’d been together and I’d try to tell her all the things I was feeling.

It didn’t last, of course. There weren’t any fights or anything like that—it was just that after a while we seemed to run out of things to say to each other. By Thanksgiving our letters were only going back and forth about once a week, and even though the guys in our neighborhood were still speaking of her as my girlfriend, by Christmas time we’d stopped writing almost completely. The last letter I remember getting from her was one that came right after Christmas with a tin box full of cookies. Corky got one too. He’d sent her a peep show he’d made—it was a model farm with a barn and silo—and when she wrote back to him and thanked him for it, she said to send me her regards. That was all.

Not too long after that—just before our first term in high school ended—the big news came: Corky’s father announced that they were going to move back to the farm in Pennsylvania. Corky said he should have suspected it, with all the mail that had been flying back and forth since Mel’s death about bygones being bygones and family being family—and he didn’t seem to like the idea too much. He kept saying that he wouldn’t have as much chance to develop as a ballplayer on the farm—that he wouldn’t get the coaching and the competition he could get at Erasmus. All of us reminded him of guys like Walter Johnson and Bob Feller, but it didn’t matter. What seemed to bother him most, though, was leaving Rhoda alone in the city.

From the time Mel died until Corky’s father made the decision about moving, Rhoda had practically lived with Corky’s family. She ate with them, she went to church with them, and she slept over their house five or six nights a week. I remember when I’d tell my parents I’d been studying with Corky and that Rhoda had been helping Corky’s mother around the house, that they’d sigh and shake their heads, though I didn’t see anything wrong with what was happening.

At any rate, the day after Corky broke the news to us, Rhoda stopped sleeping over his house. Corky spoke against his parents a lot, about how it wasn’t easy for Rhoda to live by herself every night and how they should have taken her into consideration, and he even started doing what he’d done when Mel had been on the Fort Worth team—eating his meals at her house and spending his evenings with her.

One Friday night, though, after Corky, Eddie, and I had gone to an Erasmus basketball game together and were walking along Flatbush Avenue talking about the players and speculating on which of them would make good college ballplayers, Corky suddenly stopped and went white. Eddie and I looked where Corky was looking and saw what it was. Coming out of the Loew’s Kings Theater, Rhoda had her arm in the arm of some guy and she was laughing. I don’t remember what the guy looked like, but except for the day Corky and I raced over to Ellman’s to show her Corky’s first-term report card—he’d gotten an 83 average, which was something nobody could believe—it was the first time since before the funeral that I’d seen her looking like her old self. She didn’t see us.

“Boy,” Corky said. “He ain’t even dead a year yet.”

Eddie and I tried to cheer Corky up after that, but no matter what we said, he got more and more depressed—then angry. You couldn’t reason with him.

When Corky first got down to the farm that spring—his family left during Easter vacation—we kept in pretty close touch, and during the next few years we’d write one another now and then. By that time he was doing pretty well pitching in American Legion ball, and I was playing varsity on the Erasmus basketball team—we’d always save our newspaper clippings and exchange them. The summer of my third year in high school he came up to New York for a weekend and we went to a Yankee ball game and spent most of our time with the guys down at the schoolyard playing three-man basketball and stickball. Corky’s control was still a little bit off, but being on the farm had made him husky and his fast ball was as good as any guy’s on the Erasmus team. He slept over my house for the two nights he was in town and he told me a lot about the things he and Sarah Jean did together.

I suppose I should have suspected something then, but I didn’t, so that on that crazy cold night the following December when he suddenly showed up after a basketball game against Madison I was so stunned I didn’t know what to say. He caught me right outside Erasmus, under the arch on the Bedford Avenue side, and when I saw him carrying a suitcase I got scared. But then this pair of hands was around my eyes from the back, saying “Guess who?” and when she’d laughed and given me a hug and a kiss and the two of them started explaining what was going on, I think I was almost as happy as they were. I didn’t feel uncomfortable at all.

I called my folks from Grand Central station and told them I was staying over a friend’s house, and then we were on the train heading for Maryland and they were explaining to me how Elkton was the closest place where they weren’t under age and where they didn’t have to have consent. They kept laughing at me because of the way I would shake my head in disbelief, and Sarah Jean kept saying to me didn’t I remember what she’d said about when she was sixteen, and about how her mother and Corky’s father would have heart attacks when they found out.

“If they find out—” Corky said, and he started telling me how they were going to get a place somewhere in New York and how Sarah Jean would work while Corky finished high school and then he’d either go to college on a baseball scholarship or play in the Minors. Sarah Jean laughed a lot, and she seemed very beautiful and happy. “You think my mother’ll think this is worse than biting a preacher’s hand?” she asked Corky once, and her eyes were shining when she said it. “I guess we’re just gonna roast in hell, huh, Howie?” she said to me, cuddling up to Corky and beginning to hum. We kidded around like that until the train got to the town early in the morning and then we ate breakfast together in a diner and reminisced about the other time we’d stayed up all night.

That night I telephoned my parents and told them the truth—it didn’t matter by then—and by the time I got back to New York the next day—we all kissed goodbye at Grand Central and said we’d be seeing each other—I was half dead. When I arrived home it all seemed like a dream and my parents thought the whole thing was silly and immature—if I’d had the strength I would have argued with them, but it didn’t seem to matter. I felt tired and happy.

When I got back to school on Monday and told the story to the guys, I felt even better. The part they liked best was about where the clerk had read their application and had made a sour face and said “I see you’re cousins,”—and how Corky had put him in his place by saying “So were Franklin and Eleanor—ain’t you got patriotism?” I’ll never forget the way he winked at Sarah Jean and me then, and the other thing I remember most was the story he and Sarah Jean told me on the train back to New York, about how, the year before, Rhoda had driven down to the farm with her new husband and the lousy way Corky’s father and mother had treated her. Sarah Jean was very proud of the way Corky had told everybody off afterwards—and of what he’d said to Rhoda to make her feel better. The whole thing seemed weird to me, though, especially when Corky was leaning forward across from me in the train, describing all of them sitting around this farmhouse living room together, not saying anything.