Mama's Boys

We never talked about it, the boys and I. Not when it happened. Not afterward. I can't believe I'm talking about it now.

Milton didn't want to make a fuss. Finally he told me to call the doctor—doctors made house calls in those days—but the doctor had a birthday party to go to, so he didn't come until the next day. When he finally did, he said Milton should go to the hospital, but the hospital said there were no beds. So we waited another day. I took him at about seven that evening. I didn't tell the boys. They were at a movie. Milton didn't even want me to come up and see him in his room. I left after he got checked in, went home and got a call. He was dead. Imagine the shock. An aneurysm. By then the boys were in bed. When they woke up, the minors were covered with cloth. That's a Jewish tradition. My brother Joe and sister Edith had driven in from New York during the night. Herb knew something was wrong. But I couldn't tell him. Finally Joe told him his father had died, and Herb started punching him and crying. How could I tell Larry? He was six. He asked where his father was. We said he was on the road.

We sent him to a relative's house. You couldn't have a child that age at a funeral. We didn't tell him for a month that his father had died. We kept telling him he was off on business. He's still hurt that he wasn't told and didn't go to the funeral.

You know when I saw how much he still missed his father? I went to visit him once after he was married, and he had a cigar in his mouth. I said, "Larry, you don't smoke!" He said, "I just keep them in my mouth, I don't light them." Then he said, "Dad used to have cigars—didn't he?"

Two days after the benching in Detroit, they sat across from each other in a room. Allen with his arms wrapped around himself, smoldering. Larry with his head tucked into his shoulders, loathing confrontation, furious that team president Pat Croce was forcing them to spill everything on die table. The table, that's what Larry crawled under at restaurants when his wife asked the waiter to take her blood-red steak back and do it medium, the way she'd asked.

Croce was scared. Larry had demanded that Allen be traded or he himself would quit. Allen had demanded that Larry be fired or that he be traded. Croce felt the whole franchise quaking under his feet. " Allen," said Croce, "I don't think Coach likes you."

Allen erupted at Larry. "You say this team's a family when it's convenient, but then you go talk about me in the newspapers," he said. "If it's really family, then you keep it in the family! You don't disrespect me like that. There are times when you're coaching me and I'm looking at you, trying to learn, and I can tell you're thinking I don't give a f—-what you have to say. You think I'm not listening because of an expression on my face. Well, I hear you. I hear everything!"

"Are you finished?" Larry said.

"Do I ask you if you're finished when you talk to me?"

"Coach," said Croce, "I get the feeling that the way you act toward Allen feels to him like what the police and the judicial system did in Virginia after he came out of that bowling alley."