Cinderella Man Read Free Page A

mouth. The next thing out of it was no joke. “You’re in line now, Jimmy. You’re gonna get your shot.”
    Braddock nodded, couldn’t help but feel the shiver. He glanced away a moment, saw his reflection in the dark window, confident, prepared. Everything was falling into place.
    Outside, crowded sidewalks rolled by, the city’s dazzling lights bathing raucous revelers in a golden glow.Theater marquees shined with a glory that dispelled the night, as if the Strand, the Embassy, and the Globe’s Ziegfeld Follies were all bragging, “So who needs the sun anyway?”
    Beside the limo, an expensive roadster pulled up. Inside, two well-dressed young men laughed and clinked glasses. They looked more like kids really, playing at drinking scotch and holding fat cigars. Top of the world, they were—and why not? Braddock thought. It was the fifth straight year of the boom. Everything was going up, skyscrapers and stocks alike. The market had been driving upward, punching through records month after month, and everyone seemed to be getting rich. Braddock and Joe had wanted a piece of it, too, so they’d sunk their winnings in deep. Together they’d invested in another venture as well, a taxicab company, and Jim was certain they could only get richer.
    That’s right, thought Jim, he was a winner in the market and in the ring. More than that, he was going straight to the top of the highest skyscraper in the fight game. With Gould talking up the right promoters, setting up the right opponents, Jim was going to get his shot at knocking them all down, and becoming the Heavyweight Champion of the World—
    â€œWe need to get you out, being seen,” said Gould. “Flash-flash, bing-bing. Satchmo’s playing the Savoy. And there’s this new jinny uptown.”
    So that’s why the driver had turned north, thought Braddock. Gould was trying to hijack his hide, throw him in with the up-all-night crowd again. Jim had been holding out hope he might be the first passenger to cross the George Washington Bridge. But that crossing was still under construction—and this was one husband and father who wasn’t going to any celebration that didn’t include his wife.
    Braddock shot Gould the usual look. “Home, Joe.”
    Gould had a comeback. He always did. But Braddock beat him to the punch—
    â€œ Home. ”
    With familiar resignation, Gould shook his head. Leaning forward, he called to his driver. “Jersey, Frank. For Mr. Adventure.”
    They reversed direction and headed downtown to the Holland Tunnel, a feat of engineering that had opened just the year before to become the world’s first underwater vehicular roadway. Newspapers said the ventilation system was a model for similar tunnels planned around the world. That’s what Jim loved about this city. Like a fighter, it never stood still, even punching under rivers through rocky earth to come out the other side.
    Jim’s parents had done that, too. Started on one side of an ocean and come out another, emigrating across the Atlantic to make a better life. The year Jim was born, Joseph Braddock and Elizabeth O’Toole Braddock had moved across water again for the same reason. With their six boys and two girls in tow, they traveled over the Hudson to relocate in West New York, New Jersey, once known as Bergen Hills. The peaceful residential township of churches, stores, and small houses, with the occasional outcroppings of the underlying Palisades’ prehistoric rock, reminded Jim’s parents of the old country—more so than the crowded concrete at 551 West Forty-eighth Street anyway.
    In Jersey, Jim had grown up a typical American boy, playing marbles and baseball and hanging around anold swimming hole on the edge of the Hudson or under the Hackensack River Bridge. He’d endured Saint Joseph’s Parochial School, where a classroom of thirty-five boys engaged him in