Max Baer and the Star of David (11 page)

Horace Littlejohn Jr. was born at eight minutes before six on the morning of May 30, 1938. I count this the happiest moment of my life, for I sensed on that morning that our son’s birth would redeem for Joleen, even more than Max Jr.’s birth had, those hours and days of her life that had been lost to the dusky vapors of her depressive humors. Max and his wife, Mary Ellen, along with Buddy Baer and Max and Buddy’s mother, Dora, were there with us, as was a local midwife, Miss JoAnna Butler, whom Max had fetched shortly before midnight the evening before, when, upon visiting us after he put Max Jr. to sleep, as was his habit most evenings, he saw that Joleen had gone into labor, and that she was, though valiantly denying it, in considerable pain.

Horace Jr. weighed six pounds two ounces at birth—nearly three pounds less than Max Baer Jr. had weighed at his birth—and he was, miracle of miracles, born with fingers and toes noticeably longer than seemed natural for a child of his size. His skin was a ruddy, somewhat splotched mocha brown, and he arrived with a full and impressive head of black curls, the curls made slick by the liquids that had accompanied him on his journey from the womb. Although Joleen, exhausted from her labors, showed nothing but a childlike contentment in holding her son close to her and having him, within minutes of his birth, suckle at her breasts, I expect she may have been as relieved as I was that Horace had not come into our world with the fair skin or facial features that would have suggested to attentive observers the true nature of his parentage.

And just as Abraham regarded Ishmael, son of his concubine Hagar, as his true son, so did Max Baer regard Horace Jr. as his son (though without acknowledging this to others). But whereas Abraham’s wife, Sarah, childless until Ishmael was a young man, was jealous in the extreme of Hagar and Ishmael, and had Abraham banish them into the wilderness of Beersheba, an act intended by Sarah to cause their deaths (which deaths would, without God’s merciful intervention, have surely occurred), neither Max nor Mary Ellen showed anything but love and kindness toward Horace.

And Max Baer Jr. loved our son Horace Jr., and our son Horace Jr. loved Max Baer Jr., and they grew up together on the Baer ranch and, later on, in the home Max and Mary Ellen made for themselves in Sacramento, where Joleen and I also came to reside in order that we might continue to serve in their employ. Not knowing they were true brothers, and without those envies and resentments that in families too often transform natural affections into less generous feelings, Max Baer Jr. and Horace Littlejohn Jr. became great, good friends to each other even as brothers sometimes are.

The years that followed, during which the boys grew from childhood to young manhood, and, when each was eighteen years old, left home—Max Jr. for Santa Clara University, and Horace Jr. for the University of California at Berkeley—were, in the large, good and fruitful years, and I feel confident in stating that we all would have agreed, without the need to express the thought in words, that these were years informed by that rarest of entities: family happiness. And this was due, above all, to
who they were
—to the fact that Max Baer Jr. and Horace Littlejohn Jr. were living incarnations of a truth to which many are blind: that who we are in our time on earth is not determined merely by the biological vector produced by the coupling of a man and woman, but by something else—by that essence within each of us that, independent of our parenting and/or our up-bringing, is an irreducible and eternal self that is
I-and-no-other.

Both boys were, in my estimation, possessed of intelligence beyond that of their parents, and both boys, early on, though as gifted as their coevals in matters athletic and academic, distinguished themselves at different activities. Max Jr., for example, considerably taller, more sturdy, and more outgoing than Horace, was highly proficient at football and baseball, and later on as an actor in theatrical productions, whereas Horace, possessed of remarkably quick hands and feet, and a nimble facility with words, excelled at basketball and track, and was the leading orator on his high school debate team. It was in their finely tuned sensibilities, however, that they were most alike. They were, each of them, fair-minded concerning others, including those against whom they competed, infinitely curious about the world, and—always, always—innately kind, taking to heart a saying from Philo of Alexandria (known also as Philo the Jew), taught to them by Joleen, which Horace Jr. translated as follows (and which he has on occasion recited for me in the original Greek): “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”

Both boys learned to read before they entered school, and grew up loving to talk
about
what they read. And they both took delight in telling stories, whether the stories were recountings of tales read, accounts of actual adventures, or invented. And in their storytelling they were ever observant of, and attentive to, those around them—to Max, Joleen, and Mary Ellen; to aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents; to schoolmates; to visitors and guests from the worlds of boxing and entertainment—just as they were to the wonders of the natural world—to the animals, gardens, fields, lakes, streams, and forests that, due to Max’s ongoing financial success, surrounded them throughout their growing up and their coming of age.

In setting down my memories, it has been my primary purpose to tell the story of Max Baer’s life, and, in particular, of the love my sister Joleen and I had for him, and knew with him. Although tempted to indulge a desire to reminisce about events from the lives of Horace Jr. and Max Jr., especially their early years, I will leave the telling of such tales to them, knowing that my son, Horace Jr., for one, is more gifted than I in the making of stories, and in making sense
of
stories. I will, however, tell of an event in Horace Jr.’s childhood that proved significant to his lifelong passion for the study of Scripture.

During the years we lived in Livermore, Mary Ellen took Max Jr. with her every Sunday morning to nearby St. Peter’s Holy Roman Catholic Church, where he had been baptized, and, when we lived in Sacramento, to All Souls Church of the Sacred Heart, where, at seven years of age, he received first Holy Communion, accepting Jesus Christ in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. And during these years, Joleen and I took Horace Jr. with us several times a month to the Church of Our Holy Saviour, a house of worship attended by people of color.

The last time Joleen, Horace Jr., and I attended church as a family, however—or rather, the first of many Sundays upon which we would
no longer
attend church as a family—occurred two Sundays before Christmas of 1942 (and four and a half months after Max and Mary Ellen’s second child, James Manny Baer, was born).

Horace Jr. and I were already dressed in our Sunday best when Joleen announced that she had made a decision not to go to church on this morning, or ever again. Horace Jr. protested at once, but Joleen commanded him to hold his tongue, and to wait in the cabin while she talked with me—we were spending the weekend at the ranch in Livermore—and, taking me by the hand, she led me outside.

“Where the beast of darkness once made his home,” she announced in words she had clearly prepared earlier, “the true spirit of the Lord now lives.”

“And so?” I asked.

“And so I no longer feel a need for others, whether priests, ministers, or ministering angels, to intercede for me with our Lord,” she replied. “I have, on this day, ceased forever to be a churchgoing woman.”

“That may be,” I said, “and I know that when you have resolved to do something, there is little chance of my persuading you to change your mind. But what about Horace? You saw how upset he was by your decision. He
loves
going to church, and looks forward to it all week long. He loves the singing—he loves being with other children—and—”

“This afternoon I will tell him the story of the destruction of the Temple,” Joleen said, her voice an uninflected monotone, “and I will explain to him how the Hebrew people survived and sometimes flourished, as they do to this day, despite suffering and persecution, once they no longer
had
a holy temple, and once their caste of priests no longer had power over them.”

I felt lost—or, more exactly, that Joleen would soon be lost to
me
unless I could find a way to draw her back home, although I wondered if anything I said or did would make a difference, for I sensed that her precious beast of darkness, disguised this time as the spirit of the Lord, was once again luring her into a dusky isolation that could destroy all the good that, since the births of Max Baer Jr. and Horace Jr., had been ours.

I spoke the words that came to me. “I know how much pleasure and comfort your books give you—your reading of the Bible and of books
about
the Bible—and that these are matters that have intrigued you as, from time to time, they have intrigued me,” I said. “But I wonder what
use
such knowledge can be for Horace—what sense
any
child can make of such notions.”

“Ah, but today I will tell him the story celebrated at this season in temples and homes throughout the world—the story of the victorious rebellion of the Maccabees against the Romans,” Joleen said. “I will tell him of the restoration of the Temple—of the miracle of the lights—and I will teach him to trust in Our Lord by trusting to his own good heart.”

“Horace may be brilliant, but he is still a
child
, Joleen,” I said, my voice rising with my fear that Joleen had once again set out on a journey to places where her better angels dared not go. “Like Max Jr., he is still a boy like other boys, and if…”

“But he is not
like
other boys, Horace—can’t
you
see that?” she said. “He has a mind—and a vision—beyond the ordinary. Have you not noticed how he does not accept things merely because others do, or because others
claim
they are true? Have you not noticed, when we talk about Joseph and Mary, Jesus and Paul, or Abraham and Isaac, that no matter how enchanted he may be by the stories themselves, he always ends our talks by asking the same question?”

“Which is—?”

“How do we know this really happened?”

“But that’s a question
any
child would ask—a question you and I asked when we were his age,” I said. “And the answer we were given is the same all children are given: we know it happened—we
believe
it happened—because the Bible says it did, and because the Bible was written by the hand of God, and…”

“Oh Horace—was it
really
?” Joleen said. “And what is served by giving
any
child words that derive from ignorance and encourage ignorance? Tell me this, my brother: do you truly believe these stories
literally
took place in the way the Bible says they did, and were written down by that Being or Beings we have been worshipping?”

“Literally?” I said. “Perhaps not. But there is an essential truth in them that…” I stopped, then continued in a faltering manner: “If we believe … yes … and if we have faith, then the Bible can be our guide and our consolation, but…”

“Perhaps,” Joleen said. “But even men of God—men of great learning and discernment—have expressed doubts, and have taught us to hearken to the stories and parables as if they were
all
of them parables—metaphors for living from which we might take meaningful lessons for our lives.”

“True,” I said. “Yet have you not said that you believe God’s
greatest
gift to us has
been
metaphor? And if that is true, and if…”

Placing a finger upon my lips, Joleen gazed at me as if, once again, as in the years before we knew Max Baer, I was her pupil, and in that moment a wave of sadness washed through me, for I sensed that her decision not to attend church was irrevocably coupled to our love for one another. What I understood in this moment was something I had until now denied: the fact of her shame, and with it her belief in the eternal damnation that awaited her—a destiny that was a direct consequence of deeds she and I had committed once upon a time, and had persisted in committing.

Softly, I repeated words I had spoken a moment before: “If we believe and have faith, then the Bible can be our guide and our consolation. That is what I believe.”

“Then do I now have
two
children?” she laughed. “Or perhaps three, if we count the biggest child of all—our friend and the father of our son’s dearest friend, Maximilian Adelbert Baer. What do you think, my husband? Pray tell me, and please do so without your usual equivocations.”

“As you wish,” I said. “What I think is that you have, as
that
child said, lost your good sense. What I think—”

“Ah, but let us now put aside what
you
think, and pay attention to what our son thinks. It may be true, as our friend so delicately put it, that I am, now and again, bonkers—a true nut job, yes?—and that my mind does sometimes wander in realms to which, out of a spirit of loving-kindness, I do not invite my beloved companions to join me.”