Happiness

The White Hope of Cleveland

The White Hope of Cleveland The summer before I started high school, the summer of 1962, was the hottest Philadelphia had ever seen. My mother would send me out before breakfast with a basket of wash while the dew steamed off the grass. By ten o'clock the wash would be dry. I could feel it drying as I hung it up, prying open the stiff folds locked in by the washer, snapping on the wooden elothespins. My bare feet were cold and wet, the sun burned the top of my head. As I reached and hung, reached and hung, I thought dark thoughts about manual labor, which I surely wasn't meant for; though what I was meant for eluded me. That year my face and body were changing faster than I could take in. Looking in the mirror, which I did frequently to take soundings, what I saw was never what I wanted: 99 hair like ginger ale, pale and fizzy; glasses; eyes behind them too large and dark. I wanted to look like my friend Roberta, who had pale-red hair and pale, freckled skin fitted neatly over narrow bones and blue eyes that slanted like a fox's. As far back as fifth grade, boys had liked her. At midsummer my grandfather came up from El Paso, his first visit without my grandmother, who'd died in March. After he retired and they moved south, he and my grandmother had spent a couple of weeks every summer in our big house on the Main Line, going on to my uncles and cousins in develand and St. Louis, then looping back to Texas. Each year the visit lasted longer. For the first time in his life, my grandfather (according to my mother) had discovered his family. Too late for his children, who had embedded themselves in lives of their own; but we grandchildren adored him. That year my grandfather drove up alone, despite my mother's arguments with him on the telephone, her insistence that he was getting too old. He drove the big navy-blue Buick he had had ever since I could remember. It was air-conditioned, which I thought was very exotic. A Saint Christopher medal hung from the rearview mirror ; a small sticker in the fly window on the passenger side entitled the driver, in English and Spanish, to use the town dump. The high spot of my grandparents' visits had always been the trip my grandfather and I made, just the two of us, to the book department of Wanamaker's. I was his favorite grandchild. He didn't like either of my sisters, and my cousins on my mother's side were all boys whose fathers were a disappointment, one a cabdriver, the other working in the steel mills. I knew without being told that my mother was jealous of my grandfather's affection for me. There were no book-buying sprees when she was growing up: instead, an often absent father who lived for his work. That summer, instead of driving, we took the train into Center Gty. It was a relief to get out of the house, out of the silence and the chill which at the time I associated with my grandmother's death; away from Rhoda and aggravating Althea. I sat across from my grandfather in the seats at the front of the car, the only ones facing each other, and we read our books. That summer I was reading william James's Principles of Psychology. It was too old for me; but my mother never noticed things like that, and my father seemed to be away on business a lot of the time now. My grandfather read Mickey ~ The White Hope of Cleveland Spillane, holding the book out in front of him; it looked small in his big, large-knuckled hands. I could see his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. Our family albums held yellowed newspaper clippings with photographs of my grandfather in the ring before a fight, towering over his coach. His skinny chest looked stark above the dark boxing shorts, and his hands, larger in boxing gloves, bloomed unexpectedly out of long thin limbs. The headlines called him the White Hope of develand . He must have been pretty good, because he put himself through college and law school by boxing, and he was already married with children then. Before that...