Cinderella Man (7 page)

“You think about it, you gotta go to a swanky joint to eat with candles,” said Mae. She lit the single candle on the table, blew out the match, then grabbed the mason jar they used for a bank and sat down, waiting for her husband.

Jim crossed the room to toss a broken scrap of wooden sign—some piece of an advertisement from a failed local business—into the fire in the stove, then warmed his hands for a moment. Mae emptied the contents of the jar onto the table. Nickels and dimes jangled. Jim joined her, added the meager contents of his pockets. They slid the money around for a moment.

“Six bucks seventy,” grunted Jim. “How much to turn it back on?”

“Three months. Thirty-three ten,” whispered Mae, careful not to wake the children.

“If I work twenty-six out of every twenty-four, it still won't add up. And we got nothing left to sell.” Jim's body seemed to weaken, his posture waver. He rested his elbows on the table, rubbed his eyes. “All my busted bones, then a piece of paper changes hands and that's it. It's all for nothing.”

Mae reached for his hand. Her flesh was cold, but the sentiment was warm, and Jim smiled despite his weariness.

“All the guys you could have married,” he said.

“Yeah,” Mae teased. “What happened to those guys?” Jim looked at her and she laughed, squeezed his hand. “I married the man I love.”

A wet cough across the room interrupted them. Jim glanced at Mae, the question in his eyes.

“Howard,” she told him. “Since this afternoon.”

Mae took back her hand, folded both of them over
her heart and began to pray. When she realized she was alone, she paused. “Jim…?”

“I'm all prayed out,” he replied.

It only took a stern glance from his wife to set Jim backpeddling. “Anyway, God's too busy for me right now. He already gave me you and the kids. He's answered all my prayers.”

Jim rose and crossed the room, face hidden in the shadows. Mae watched his back, trying to read his thoughts.

“He…He doesn't owe me anything,” Jim added softly.

Next morning, as the first rays of dawn streamed through the streaked basement windows, Mae woke shivering under piles of clothing to find her husband had already ventured out, into the relentless cold.

 

The giant face on the billboard—a well-groomed gentleman in evening clothes displaying a Gillette razor—grinned down at the grimy winter street. Mae glanced around her to find empty sidewalks, save for two children even more filthy than her own, gamely washing clothes in the cold runoff beside the curb.

With no one to see her, Mae began snapping off pieces of wooden latticework from around the billboard frame, breaking a fingernail in the process. She handed the first pieces off to her sleepy children, then broke off more. Suddenly, shouting voices echoed down the street.

“Where are you going?” A woman hung out the second-story window of one of the faceless brownstones, her features flushed with rage, her words a desperate cross between accusation and heartbreak. On
the ground below, a man walked down the street, his back to the ranting woman. His clothes were shabby and he carried a small suitcase double-wrapped with twine.

“Go ahead, you piece of shit,” the woman wailed. The man walked on without turning, his spine bowed by shame. “Go on then.” She sobbed. “We don't need you.”

One of the children in the gutter, a small boy, stared after his father. Then the boy locked eyes with Mae, and she saw a tear cutting a canal through the dirt on his cheek.

Mae swept Jay and Rosy in front of her. “Come on, now, let's go.”

She knew this ugly scene was typical. No longer able to earn a living, thousands of husbands and fathers had simply given up trying. Some of them vanished into the homeless hordes of Central Park or rode the rails to oblivion. Mae shuddered at the thought of losing her husband this way. She tried not to imagine a day when Jim Braddock would give up on his family. And though she told herself that he was not like those other men, Mae knew that her husband was only human, and there was only so much a man could do in the face of such overwhelming odds against him.

Back home again, Mae shook away her gloomy thoughts as she fed latticework chips to the stove's fire, its warmth failing to reach beyond the corner. Snow caked the windows, frost glazing both sides of the pane. One window was cracked, and the rag stuffed into the hole did little to stop the chill air that poured through the gap.

Mae turned to her youngest boy, still huddled where she'd left him, under a blanket mere inches from the
stove. His face was flushed with fever, moist with perspiration that caused him to shiver uncontrollably when the blanket was removed, even for a moment.

“Baby, look at Mommy.”

Eyes glazed, pupils like pinpricks, he looked up. Her voice hardly seemed to penetrate the sickness. She knelt at his side, tucked the blanket tighter around him, and held a glass of water to his trembling lips.

“Drink up now,” she coaxed.

Howard's cracked lips touched the rim and he managed to take in a few small sips, dribbling some. Again Mae tugged at the blankets, unaware of the tears spilling from her eyes.

“Mommy?”

It was Jay, standing behind her, his fear of his mother's distress a palpable thing.

“It's all right, sweetheart,” she said, pushing the hair away from his wide eyes. Suddenly Mae stood. “Mommy'll be right back,” she said. Eyes blurred by tears, unwilling to let her children see her break, Mae hurried out the door and into the dirty, snow-dusted courtyard, where she stood crying bitterly.

All that mattered in the world was keeping this family together. Jim was killing himself trying to do it, taking as many jobs as he could find. But it wasn't working. Every week, no matter how many hours Jim toiled, they fell further behind. They had lost their heat and electricity. How long would it be before they were living in the street?

Mae squared her shoulders, deciding for both of them what had to be done. Despite all of her husband's efforts, Howard was getting sicker from the scarcity of food, the lack of heat. Mae turned and went back inside
to dress her children snugly for the trip across town, then across the river to New York City.

 

The afternoon sun was bright, but provided no warmth as Jim returned home, squinting against the glare while shivering in the wind. He opened the front door. As usual, no electric power meant the basement apartment was veiled in shadow. No gas meant the temperature inside was almost as cold as the sidewalk. Then it struck him, the wall of silence. No childish voice called out to greet him. No tiny body charged forward with open arms.

By the stove, Mae sat alone in her coat, her limbs drawn tightly against herself, her eyes staring into the fading glow of the dying flames. She would not look up as he walked closer. Wouldn't even meet his eyes.

“Howard's fever was getting worse. And then Rosy started to sneeze,” she explained before he could ask.

“Where are they, Mae?”

His eyes frantically scanned the tiny space, as if he refused to hear her, as if he could find them hiding among the meager sticks of furniture or inside the spidery cracks in the dingy walls. Mae finally looked up at him, her expression defiant. “We can't keep them warm, Jim.”

“Where are they, Mae?”

“The boys will sleep on the sofa at my father's in Brooklyn. Rosy's going to stay at my sister's. We can't keep them, Jim.”

Jim's emotions were almost too overpowering to express—fear, disappointment, rage. He stabbed his finger. “You don't decide what happens to our children without me.”

Mae stood, seized his arm with icy hands. “Jimmy,
if they get real sick, we don't have the money for a doctor.”

“You send them away, this has all been for nothing.”

“It's…It's only until we can make enough to get back to even, then we can—”

“If it was that easy, why didn't I just go on relief, get a book and put my feet up?” He was simmering now. His own wife had given up, given in. Hadn't he been out on the street seven days, looking for work? Hadn't he been acting like a man? Doing anything and everything he could to support his family? “Every day, out there, it was so we could stay together. What else was it for? If we can't stay together, it means we lost.”

“Baby, no one has any good choices anymore, we'll get them—” Mae had tried to embrace him but he shook her off.

“Mae, I promised him, see? I got on my knees, looked him in his eyes and I promised him I would never send him away.” Without another word, Jim turned and strode across the freezing room.

“What are you doing? Where are you going?” Mae demanded, tears falling. But he was already gone, out the door, onto the street. Mae ran after him, suddenly remembering the woman she'd seen earlier, hanging out that brownstone window, sobbing, angry, heartbroken.

“Jimmy, come back!”

But he didn't stop. He didn't even turn for one last look. Mae's steps slowed as her husband continued to walk away, silently, resolutely, down the cold concrete of the broken sidewalk.

 

At the scarred and battered wooden counter of the Newark relief office, a stern-faced woman counted out
twelve dollars and eighty cents, then placed the money in a white envelope with a state seal. Hands shaking, Jim signed the receipt book, trying not to berate himself for what he'd once been, what he'd once believed about himself as a man. He snatched up the cash and thrust it into his coat pocket.

Witnessing his shame, the woman's hardened expression softened a moment. “I would never have expected to see you here, Jim.”

The words rang like the closing bell of a fifteen-round defeat. With a red-faced nod, Jim pushed through the miserable crowd, eyes downcast, unable to forget the phrase some newspaper columnist had used to describe these unending relief lines: “Worms that walk like men.”

They were professionals and laborers. Teachers and dockworkers, lawyers and janitors, bankers and master builders. Some stood in nothing better than rags, while others were clad in finely tailored suits and overcoats frayed and patched after years of wear. And while some, like Jim, kept their eyes averted in disgrace, others displayed only vacant stares, their faces hollowed by loss and privation. One of the latter had quietly fallen forward the week before, dying on the steps of the very institution set up to provide aid for him. Jim had heard about it on the street. The man either hadn't known where to go, or hadn't been willing to go there until hunger and fatigue had done their work.

Jim hurried out of the office and into the street, taking great swallows of fresh air, steadying himself for what had to come next.

On the ferry to Manhattan, he stood at the rail and
gazed at the skyline as the chill winds whipped his hair, cut through his threadbare clothing. The ferry terminal was nearly deserted, and in the lengthening shadows of the fading day, Jim walked wearily along Eighth Avenue, passing homeless men lurking in alleyways, shopworn prostitutes with desperate eyes.

Jim continued his endless walk, passing a man in a dusty suit, standing tall while selling bruised apples from a rickety wooden cart. As he trudged by a brightly lit theater, a limousine rolled up beside him on the sidewalk. Two children, about the same ages as his sons, burst from the car, laughing excitedly, their well-heeled parents in tow. Jim paused to watch them, wondering how such carefree joy could exist in the middle of so much degrading misery.

During his walk, Jim had seen one employment office after another, the blocks around each wrapped with unending lines of men.
No work to be had. No other way to pay off his debts and reunite his family.
He told himself this, over and over, steeling himself for what he was about to do.

When he reached the streets around Madison Square Garden, he recalled the vibrant, glittering scenes of the past. The dazzling lights were gone now, dim as the gloomy winter twilight. No more fashionable fans, tipsy flappers, or Diamond Jim limousines. In their place, vagrants loomed, a sad collection of shabby humanity scavenging old billboards for scrap. A smoky garbage can burned in the alley. The starving panhandlers huddled around it in moth-eaten coats, stretching filthy hands toward meager flames.

Jim went to the familiar side door, below the fire es
cape. The once clean brick wall was dingy now, no extra pay for a man with a bucket and a brush. He glanced at the billboard above the door. An upcoming fight was advertised, two brawny bodies, stiffly posed, gloves up. He remembered himself up there, sharing one end of the “vs.” with Tuffy Griffiths, remembered the dream of that night, the cheering crowds, the astonished sportswriters, the gleaming bliss of a long-held ambition shimmering within reach.

Then, like a vicious uppercut, a different memory assailed him, shattering the fragile mirage. Yankee Stadium, in the heat of summer. Another fight on another day. It was the bout that had tarnished his golden future, branding him a boxer of “failed promise.” It was the match that, once over, he'd only wanted to forget…

 

July 1929, four months before the October crash, life was good. Jim Braddock was about to challenge Philadelphia's Tommy Loughran for the light heavyweight championship of the world.

Although neither boxer was a hometown darling in New York City, where the fight was to take place, Jersey Jim Braddock was the sentimental favorite among local sportswriters, and heavily favored to win.

“Does Braddock not have the kick of the mule with his right hand?” Joe Gould barked at Lud, a sportswriter for Union City's
Hudson Dispatch
, before the fight. “Did he not shatter Pete Latzo's jaw to fragments? Take down Tuffy Griffiths in two rounds and Jimmy Slattery in nine?”

But in the weeks before the opening bell, difficulties plagued both fighters. Loughran and Braddock each had a hard time staying within the weight class—Jim
because he couldn't gain pounds fast enough, Loughran because he couldn't shed them. Before the fight, the champ from Philly had tortured his body down to 175 pounds while Jersey Jim's nervous sleeplessness had given him an official weigh-in of 170 pounds, barely enough to qualify.