Harvey and Mandel played a few more times and then Mandel bought a racquet of his own and a pair of Jack Purcell tennis shoes. He would wander down to Indian Boundary on weekends and watch the better adult players. He concentrated on picking up technique: their serving motion, the way they positioned their bodies before striking the ball, the short blocking stroke of the volley. He began to acquire a sense of the angles of the game. He absorbed the chatter—“Let, take two,” “Add out,” “Too good”—the hand movements, the various ways to pick up a loose ball from the ground with one’s racquet without having to bend down for it.

  One day early in the summer of his fourteenth year, Mandel took the El to play with a friend on the clay courts of Northwestern University The clay was a café au lait color, freshly rolled and relined every morning by a man who looked as if, in another life, he might have been a hard-drinking naval chief petty officer. In the small clubhouse, where they assigned courts, collected rental fees, strung racquets, and sold equipment, a sign read PRO’S HELPER NEEDED. Mandel inquired about the job. What it entailed was going out with the pro, who was also Northwestern’s tennis coach, and collecting the balls he used when he gave lessons to children and housewives. The pay was $1 an hour, and you could use the courts for free, and you got a 10 percent discount on tennis clothes and equipment. Mandel applied for and got the job.

  The pro was a heavyset man who in the late 1920s had had a national ranking. He had a gruff voice and a kind heart. Mandel went out with him four or five times a day as he gave his half-hour lessons, collecting the loose balls, picking up what he could from the fairly fundamental instruction: forehand, backhand, volley, half volley, three kinds of serve: American twist, flat drive, slice. After a few weeks, the pro used Jerry to demonstrate the strokes he taught.

  When Mandel wasn’t shagging balls and demonstrating strokes, he played with people whose partners were late or failed to show up. Sometimes he hit balls with older guys who played on the Evanston Township High School team. He saved his small earnings and used them to buy a new Jack Kramer model Wilson racquet, a few white Lacoste shirts, tan Fred Perry shorts.

  Mandel began to expand his repertoire of shots, hit a harder second serve without too often double-faulting, developed a stronger backhand. Each night he took the El back to Chicago, a fine brown clay dust on his Jack Purcells. Daydreaming, he imagined himself brilliantly winning the fifth and deciding match of the Davis Cup for the United States or playing on Centre Court at Wimbledon. He must also have been undergoing a sexual awakening at this time, but now, in his memory at least, thoughts of tennis crowded out all others.

  That same summer Mandel began to play in local tournaments, in the public parks as well as at tennis clubs in Oak Park and River Forest. He didn’t have much success. He might win a round or two, but even players of lesser skill than he—who had less stylish strokes, less of a feel for the game—often defeated him. Mandel was too enraptured by his own fantasy of style. He wanted above all to be an elegant player; his opponents were content merely to win.

  That summer, too, Jerry Mandel first saw Danny Montoya, of whom of course he had heard; with fewer sports on offer in those days, the Chicago papers covered prep and other junior sports more thoroughly than now. When he saw Danny—in a tournament from which he, Mandel, had been eliminated in the first round at the River Forest Tennis Club—he recognized the game he himself longed to have. Danny had the style Mandel dreamed of, though in Danny’s case style didn’t keep him from winning. Danny won that tournament, beating a kid named Esteban Reyes, who had come all the way up from Mexico, 8–6 in the third set. Danny met Reyes at the net, shook his hand cordially, flashed his brilliant smile, and walked over to his father, a small pudgy man, who looked a lot like the Danny Montoya that Mandel had met fifteen or so minutes before at the Home Depot.

  Mandel played on his high school tennis team, which was no big deal, for tennis in the Chicago public schools in those years was strictly a minor sport, like fencing or speed skating. The good junior tennis players were at New Trier or Evanston Township or from the western suburb of Hinsdale, where Claire Riessen, the father of Marty Riessen, who was later nationally ranked and would play Davis Cup, was the coach. Mandel played number-four singles in his sophomore year, and most of the kids he played from other schools—Roosevelt, Sullivan, Fenger on the far South Side—wore black sneakers and white gym shorts with their boxer underwear sticking out at the bottom; black socks under Keds were not uncommon. All this was a long way from Centre Court at Wimbledon.

  Senn High School had a tennis coach who worked summers as the pro at the River Forest Tennis Club, a tall, white-haired, pink-faced, taciturn man named Major Singleton, known to everyone as Maj. Rumor had it that he had been a young flying ace in World War I. (Mandel’s friend Barry Grolnik, in later years trying to describe him to a group of people who hadn’t gone to Senn, said, “You have to imagine a Gentile John Wayne.”) The coach’s own tennis past was a bit unclear, though everyone who played tennis in the Midwest seemed to know Maj Singleton. One afternoon decades later, Mandel heard Tony Trabert, on television, remarking that Stephen Singleton, in the umpire’s chair, was the son of Major Singleton, “one of the great gentlemen in the game.”

  Maj Singleton must have been the reason behind Danny Montoya’s transferring from Crane Tech, in the middle of the city, to Senn High School, on the Far North Side, his junior year. The Montoyas lived a few blocks south of Madison near Western Avenue, a tough neighborhood even then, and it may have been that Danny’s parents were worried about their son’s going to a school where gangs had begun to form and violence was more and more part of daily life for adolescents. Crane had no tennis team but was noted for its black basketball players, one of whom, Leon Hillard, had recently replaced Marques Haynes as the dribbling wizard of the Harlem Globetrotters.

  “Jerome,” the Maj said to Mandel one day in his office, “Danny Montoya is transferring to Senn. When he arrives, I want you to keep an eye out for him.”

  “I’ll do everything I can, sir,” Mandel said. He played tennis for three years for Maj Singleton, and this may have been Maj’s longest speech to him, though once, in a doubles match against two kids from Roosevelt wearing brown Keds, he gave Mandel and his partner, a boy named Mickey Hoffner, some advice having to do with the wind; neither of them heard what Maj said, and both were too daunted by him to ask him to repeat it.

  Senn High School was roughly 60 percent Jewish, 40 percent working-class Irish, Germans, and Swedes, with six or seven black kids and no Hispanics at all. Mandel didn’t think of Danny Montoya as particularly ethnic—the word was not then in use—but chiefly as an amazing athlete. But that morning, even as Maj Singleton introduced them—“Jerome Mandel, Danny Montoya. Jerome here’s going to show you around”—Mandel sensed that Danny wasn’t going to be happy at Senn.

  Danny was wearing rust-colored pants with outer stitching and severely pegged at the cuffs, a shocking-pink shirt with a Mr. B collar (Mr. B being the singer Billy Eckstine, “That Old Black Magic” man), and square-toed blue-suede loafers. His hair was heavily pomaded, and swooped into a duck’s ass at the back. The clothes had been bought at Smokey Joe’s, a zoot-suitery on Halsted, off Maxwell Street. If Maj Singleton bothered to notice Danny’s clothes, he gave no sign. This getup may have worked among the black kids at Crane Tech, but for Senn every item was wrong.

  Mandel used to eat lunch outside, at Harry’s, where the more with-it Jewish kids hung out. He didn’t fancy taking Danny out there with him, at least not in those duds. He walked him to his first class and told him that he’d meet him for lunch fifth period at the entrance to the school’s cafeteria.

  In the cafeteria, Mandel asked Danny how things were going.

  “OK,” he said. “Not bad.”

  “Anything I can do to smooth the way, let me know. I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Thanks,” Danny said. “But do you think I can get something better to eat than this gunk?” He pointed at his lunch tray, which had the sandwich called a sloppy joe on it and some gloppy macaroni and cheese.

  “Tomorrow I’ll take you to a better place,” Mandel said. “Don’t be offended, but maybe you aren’t wearing exactly the right clothes. We dress a lot more casual here.”

  “Yeah,” Danny said, smiling, “I noticed. I feel as if I’m dressed for maybe the wrong play.”

  “Where did you get your backhand?” Mandel asked, changing the subject. “I’d kill a guy for your backhand.”

  “Everything I know about tennis I know from my father,” Danny said. “He worked as a locker room valet at a ritzy tennis club in Manila—that’s in the Philippines—and picked up the game on his own. He spent a lot of time teaching me, beginning when I was three or four. I’ve got a brother, Bobby, he’s only five now, you should see him. He figures to be a lot better than me.”

  The next afternoon, Maj Singleton called a practice at Indian Boundary to introduce the team to Danny. Everyone paired up afterward to hit some balls, and Danny and Mandel hit together. Rallying balls back and forth, Mandel felt himself getting into Danny’s rhythm. And how satisfying that rhythm felt! Whap went the balls Mandel hit, pock came Danny’s returns, all right at Mandel, so he scarcely had to move to return the ball to him. Whap, pock, whap, pock, Mandel could have stood on that court all night, so fine did he feel rallying with Danny.

  When Mandel came to the net, Danny provided him precisely placed lobs so that he could hit practice overheads. He fed him volleys to his forehand and backhand sides. Mandel felt the level of his own game rise just by being on the court with Danny. They played a set, which Danny won, 6–2. Mandel wasn’t quite sure how he got the two games, but was very pleased he did. At the end, meeting at the net, Mandel was breathing like someone who had just completed a marathon. Danny was cool and smiling.

  On another afternoon, Mandel and Danny played doubles together against two other boys on the team, Tim Ritholz and Dicky Simpson. Danny was the perfect partner, unselfish, backing up Mandel whenever necessary, cheerfully congratulatory whenever he scored a winner. Danny made difficult half volleys look easy. His sense of the angles of the doubles court—and doubles, he taught Mandel without having to say a word about it, was essentially a game of angles, geometry in motion—was unerring. Like all really good athletes, Danny had mastered form and yet was ready to abandon good form when winning the point required it. In the few autumn practices the team had, Mandel, warming up with Danny, playing doubles with him as his partner, felt he was playing well over his head; and it occurred to him that exactly there, over his head, was the best of all places to play.

  Mandel and Danny had no classes together, but they met every day for lunch. Mandel never took him to Harry’s but instead to other places a little farther from school. Sometimes, when he had the use of his mother’s car—a 1953 Chevy Bel Air, cream-colored with green trim—Mandel would drive to Morse Avenue and they would have lunch at Ashkenaz Deli. Danny had long since changed his Smokey Joe’s wardrobe and now came to school, like everyone else, wearing Levi’s and a V-neck sweater over a white T-shirt. If Danny made any other friends at Senn, he never mentioned them to Mandel; whenever he saw Danny in the halls between classes, he walked alone. The darkness of his skin, made even darker by his long summers on the tennis court, made him a fairly exotic figure. Mandel once asked him if he wanted to meet any girls, and Danny told him thanks, but he already had a steady girlfriend in his neighborhood.

  Danny’s happiness at Senn wasn’t a question Mandel felt he ought to ask about. He wasn’t sure Danny had been all that happy at Crane Tech, either; at least he never spoke fondly about missing it. With a Filipino father and a white mother, Danny would always, Mandel supposed, be without any definable group he could easily slip into. What went on in the classroom was of less than minimal interest to him. At their lunches together, Danny and Mandel talked chiefly about sports, girls, offbeat places in the great city in which they had both grown up. Danny never rationed his marvelous smile; his walk had a natural spring to it; he had enormous cordiality. If Danny was unhappy, he kept it to himself.

  When the tennis team held one of its autumn practices, Mandel usually drove Danny to the Loyola El station afterward. One night Danny had dinner at the Mandels’ apartment, and afterward he drove him home. Dropping Danny in front of his building on South Hoyne, he was reminded of the toughness of the neighborhood in which the Montoyas lived. Mandel had begun reading the popular novels of the day, many of them set in slums: The Amboy Dukes, A Stone for Danny Fisher, The Hoods, Knock on Any Door, books that, as he would later understand, eroticized the lives of the poor.

  One Saturday afternoon in November, Mandel picked up Danny at his apartment. In the entryway, two mailboxes, sprung from their hinges, hung open. Unappetizing food smells—cabbage maybe—clung to the air. When he rang the bell, Danny came down, wearing a dark brown leather jacket, in which he looked great. He told Mandel that his parents were out back, and they walked around to the rear of the building, where Danny introduced him to his mother and father.

  Danny’s mother was hanging wash on a line in the concrete backyard. She was shapeless and not wearing any makeup. Her hair was stringy. She wore a gold cross over a housedress. She seemed worn out, though she was probably not much older than forty. She said only that she was pleased to meet Mandel, and went back to hanging her laundry.

  Mr. Montoya, who was handing his wife clothespins, stopped to shake Mandel’s hand with enthusiasm.

  “Nice to meet,” he said in choppy English. “Danny tell all about you. How kind you are to him. His mother and I grateful for this.”

  The neighborhood, which seemed so menacing at night, in daylight turned out to be chiefly dilapidated. Windows on a number of buildings were boarded up. A six-flat on Danny’s block had had a fire, and no attempt was apparently being made to repair the damage; the charred ruin just stood there, like a blackened tooth in an already unattractive mouth. A few blocks to the west, across Western Avenue, skid row began, with red-faced drunks wandering the streets.

  Danny and Mandel drove two blocks over to Bell Avenue, where Danny’s girlfriend, Claire, was waiting for them outside the bungalow that she and her five brothers and sisters lived in with their widowed mother. Her father had been a Chicago cop, killed four years ago, as Danny had earlier explained, in the line of duty while chasing a drug dealer down an alley off Wilson Avenue on the North Side. Claire went to Immaculata High, was Irish, and Danny’s age. She was small, a dishwater blonde, and was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt; young as she was, there was already something a little tired-looking about her eyes, or so Mandel thought.

  The three of them drove to Maxwell Street. The day was crisp and sunny. Maxwell Street was humming. Older men grabbed their arms, telling them that terrific bargains were to be had inside their dark clothing shops. Carts in the middle of the street were loaded with fake Zippo lighters, neckers’ knobs for steering wheels, playing cards with blurrily photographed naked women on them, eight-battery flashlights, French ticklers. A butcher sold live chickens. An ancient-looking black woman was seated on a kitchen chair hovering over a blanket on which she displayed dishes, some of them chipped, that she offered for sale. A Gypsy family sat before its doorway, hawking fortunetelling and suggesting that more than mere fortunes could be obtained within. The smell of fried onions and Polish sausages on the open-air vendors’ grills suffused everything.

  Danny, as always, seemed completely at ease. He bopped along with his jaunty walk, very much with the show, laughing at the young black guy who stopped him in the hope of selling him a gaudy wristwatch. Claire, less confident, clung to Danny’s arm. Mandel didn’t say much to her after Danny introduced them. He felt she looked on him as a rich (by her standard, anyway) Jewish boy from the Far North Side, possibly slumming, which, though he preferred not to think so, he may well have been doing.

  Danny bought Claire a necklace with a St. Christopher medal. They walked to Roosevelt Road, where Mandel showed Danny that he could get Florsheim plain-toed cordovans, factory seconds, for $10 at a place called Wolinsky and Levy. They stopped for hot dogs at the Vienna Sausage outlet store on Halsted. They looked at the wild clothes on display in the windows at Smokey Joe’s. On the drive home, the three of them sitting in the front seat—this was before the age of bucket seats—Claire fell asleep on Danny’s shoulder, continuing to clutch his arm. “She’s not been feeling so good lately,” he told Mandel.

  Danny Montoya never actually played for Senn. A week or so after the Christmas vacation he didn’t show up at his and Mandel’s usual meeting place for lunch. The next week Mandel asked Maj Singleton if he knew anything about Danny’s absence. The Maj told him that Danny had decided not to return to Senn, but said nothing more. Mandel was disappointed but not completely surprised. Danny had no known social life at the school apart from him, which, for a naturally gregarious kid, must not have been easy. He got no real coaching from Maj Singleton, nor did he need any. Maybe he just became bored with the long bus and El rides up and back to school.

  Mandel felt he ought at least to call Danny to ask what was going on. His father’s name (Gustavo Montoya) was in the book. He twice left messages with Danny’s mother, and only a week or so later did Danny call back.

 

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