• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 497 0

named Dave, who is not under Weill's management but lives in the neighborhood, was sitting on one of them talking in French to a Weill featherweight named Spider. Goldman introduced me, and then Spider said, raptly, “Go on, Dave, talk more French.” “Spider don't understand him,” Goldman said seriously, “but he thinks it sounds pretty.” When Mrs. Braune came in a couple of minutes later, Dave stopped talking, because Mrs. Braune, a German Swiss, understands French and would not have liked what he was calling Spider. “It's better than double talk,” Dave said to me with a grin. The two boys went out, and as they were leaving, Goldman said, “Don't get into no crap games.” The house stands in a treeshaded block of almost identical brownstones, all with high stoops, and usually there is a crap game in progress on at least one of them. Goldman disapproves of crap games because they take a fighter's mind off business. Whenever one of the boys is arrested and fined two dollars for shooting crap, Goldman gloats over his misfortune.

Mrs. Braune is about sixty years old and built like a large, soft cylinder with a diameter not greatly inferior to its axis. She has a pink face, sparse gray hair parted in the middle, and calm blue eyes. She is so much like the conventional idea of American motherhood that no fighter in his right mind would think of talking back to her. Mrs. Braune once ran a rooming house at 19 West Fiftysecond Street—an address which disappeared some years ago when the nextdoor neighbors, Jack and Charlie, bought the building and added it to their restaurant at No. 21. Her clients in that house included a Fifth Avenue jeweler who had a lot of girl friends and suffered from a complaint that Mrs. Braune calls “the gouch,” theatrical people, who were noisy and kept late hours, and a number of White Russian countesses, whom she calls in retrospect “the Countesses of HavingNothing.” The countesses were much the worst pay. Mrs. Braune prefers her present lodgers, who are in bed by ten o'clock except when they are professionally engaged. She is sure of getting the room rent from Weill's fighters, at least, because Al pays it and takes the money out of their earnings. He is always urging his boys to live frugally and put their money in the bank. They have a hard time obtaining a couple of dollars a week from him for spending money. He telephones at ten every evening to ask Mrs. Braune if the boys are all in their rooms. Sometimes she covers up for a fighter she thinks must be staying on at the movies for the end of a double feature, but she doesn't condone any really serious slip. Weill has fiveyear contracts with his boys, and if one of them won't behave, even for Mrs. Braune, Weill simply declines to make any matches for him. This means that the fighter must get some other kind of work, a prospect so displeasing that discipline at Mrs. Braune's is usually perfect.

The one detail of Mrs. Braune's appearance that sets her apart from other landladies is a pair of miniature leather boxing gloves pinned high on her vast bosom. She likes to show them to visitors, for they have been autographed by Lou Ambers, twice lightweight champion of the world. Ambers, she explains, was her star lodger for years and was responsible for her entrance into the prizefight business. In 1935, before he became illustrious, Ambers asked her for a room. He was training for a fight and had no money in the meanwhile. Mrs. Braune let him run up a bill of seventy or eighty dollars, a proceeding so extraordinary that after the fight Ambers induced his manager, Weill, to put all his fighters in her house. Ambers knew it was a lucky house, because he had won the fight. The boys living at Mrs. Braune's won a long series of bouts, and Weill began to call it, grandiloquently, the House of Destiny. It is impossible to tell how much Mrs. Braune's motherly discipline contributed to the winning streak, but the manager was sure it had some effect. Besides, the house is clean, and Mrs. Braune's rentals have always been reasonable. Now, after six years of it, she says,