Sam's Legacy Read online

  “Think of it this way,” Ben had said, when Sam was a boy—it was a game they’d played. “We’re both Sams, but I’m Samson.”

  “No,” Sam would reply. “I’m Sam’s son.”

  “Then you’re my son, if you’re Sam’s son.”

  “But you’re Samson. That makes you my son.” And around and around they’d go, he recalled, like Abbott and Costello. At the Linden Theater, on Nostrand Avenue, when Ben had taken him to see Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Sam had been petrified, he’d tried to hide his face in his father’s shoulder. Ben had laughed, stroked his son’s head. “Some Samson,” he had heard Ben whispering. “Who sheared your locks that you can’t look at the screen? It’s just an actor, my little Sam—like your father sometimes, on the radio—just an actor, a man with make-up on.…”

  “A penny for your thoughts,” Flo said to him.

  “What odds?” Sam asked, and the others laughed. The store was quiet, without shoppers. Sam saw that Tidewater was staring at him, smiling. Now that he knew about the guy, he had no reason to doubt it. It had always interested him, in fact, about athletes: the difference between what they were as players, and what they were in their private lives. Some of them—like Namath or Stallworth—were the same on and off the field, but there was no rule that said it had to be that way. Some of the greatest players could be the biggest deadbeats; and some of the quietest guys, guys who didn’t even look like athletes, had been the greatest players, the born leaders. In truth, the only thing that bothered him about Tidewater’s story, now that he had it, was that he felt—especially with the guy’s eyes fixed on him—that it had been written somehow for him. Sam sipped his coffee and kept his mouth shut. He could see, from the wrinkles at the corners of his father’s eyes, that Ben was flying, enjoying himself.

  “You will come with us,” Ben said. “Won’t you, sonny boy? You’ll join our excursion?” Ben showed his left palm to the others. “I can still feel the sting, Mason—that one time I let you pitch to me.” He sat back. “But I said nothing at the time. That was always my trouble, you see. I could take it, but I couldn’t dish it out. That’s why, with my wife, with the school, with…”

  “Poor Ben,” Flo said, and, with the others, Sam found himself laughing.

  “All right, all right,” Ben said. “But notice my son’s silence. Has he answered my question?”

  “Sure,” Sam said, and he saw Tidewater smile. “I’ll come.”

  “Tell Sam,” Ben continued, as if his son had not spoken, “what you were telling us before—about your speed. Then he’ll understand. Or”—Ben paused—“has Sam already read that story?”

  “No,” Tidewater said, and he seemed, suddenly, embarrassed. “But it’s a story he might have heard before, assigned to another.”

  “Please,” Flo said.

  Sure, Sam thought, hearing the man begin to speak: Negro players had had it rough. Sam had seen Satchel Paige on television, talking about his barnstorming days, and he remembered what they’d done to Jackie Robinson when he’d been the first Negro player in the Major Leagues—siccing black cats after him, making him room by himself, making him promise that he’d never talk back to anybody, even when they called him nigger. But Tidewater, Sam thought, and laughed at the idea, had had two strikes against him before he’d started: the first, his being white, and the second, his being black.

  “When it was said of me that my fast ball moved so fast that you could not see it,” Tidewater was saying, “the figurative expression became literal. Sometimes, in the late innings of a game, with darkness descending, I would call my catcher to the mound, prolonging the game as visibility decreased; I would slip the ball to him, return to the mound without it, then go through the motions of firing an invisible ball—my catcher would crack the pocket of his glove with his fist, the batter would swing at nothing, and the catcher would return the ball, which he had hidden, all the while, under his chest protector.”

  “Ah,” Ben sighed, leaning back, his small eyes closed. Then his finger pointed at his son and his voice rose. “Do you see now, Sam, why I…” But he seemed, all at once, to lose energy. He sighed again. “It’s a parable,” he said. “I’ve always considered it a parable.”

  Flo nodded. The bell above the front door jingled, and a Negro woman, one of the regulars, carrying a bundle in her arms—a small baby, Sam saw—entered. “Sometimes,” Flo said, “life can go by so fast that—”

  “But as a story—as a story first,” Ben said, interrupting Flo. He shifted, and his eyes twinkled. “What I mean to say is, it’s incom-parable.”

  “Ah Ben,” Tidewater said, pleased. “I should have seen it coming. You’re too quick for me.”

  Ben stood, placed a hand on Sam’s shoulder. He spoke softly, his head lowered. Sam watched Flo, looking at the woman’s baby. “I’d like to pay you back,” Ben said. “You know that, Sam. It meant—it still means—a good deal to me. Especially now.”

  “Forget it,” Sam said. Flo was holding the baby in front of Sam. Was she, he wondered, thinking of what she had once told him? If it had been him, he knew that every time he saw a baby—any baby—he would have thought of the children he hadn’t had—or rather, of those he’d had and then had had taken away.

  “Isn’t he beautiful?” Flo asked.

  “Sure,” Sam said. “He’s an ace.”

  “Don’t put me on, son,” the woman said. “But put a kiss on his cheek, for good luck.”

  Flo nodded and Sam did what she wanted; he bent over, felt the blood rush to his head, and touched his lips to the baby’s skin, on the forehead. “You have a good boy there,” the woman said to Ben. “Like my oldest. Most of them now, they run off and leave you first chance.”

  “He’s a good boy,” Ben said.

  Flo carried the baby to Ben, and then to Tidewater, and they each kissed it. Mrs. Scofield—Sam remembered her name, she was one of Flo’s favorites—sat on a chair, and Flo returned the baby to her. She laughed at something Ben said, and talked about what had happened in the hospital. Was the new baby her seventh? eighth? her ninth? Sam couldn’t keep count. She would bring the entire family in with her sometimes, to outfit them, as she put it. Her oldest son played basketball for Erasmus and would be going somewhere in the Midwest on a scholarship the following year. She did okay—he didn’t know the exact figure—but the checks she got from the city for all the kids, from the government for her first husband (killed in Korea)… Even with the money rolling in, though, having an armful of kids was no picnic. Sam thought of all the diapers, filled with mush—and if the kid hurt somewhere and started bawling and you couldn’t figure out where he hurt…

  Mrs. Scofield laughed and, without interrupting her story, she slipped the baby’s head under her blouse and put his mouth onto her breast. Sam watched the baby’s mouth, swallowing the nipple. It seemed impossible that he could take so much in. The breast was enormous. “So then, seeing how this young doctor knew I’d been through this eight times before, I reached over and took his hand in mine and I said to him, ‘Honey, don’t you worry none, don’t you be nervous—why you just open your two little hands and I’ll drop it right down in!’”

  She leaned back then, laughing, and the baby went with her, lifted across her chest, sucking away. “I got to get going,” Sam said, and he looked at Tidewater, as if, he realized, he were asking for permission.

  “I’m glad you’ll come with us on our little trip,” Ben said. “To see where your father grew up, where he and Mason…”

  “I got the picture,” Sam said, and walked out. He felt Tidewater’s eyes on his back, and it bothered him, not the way the guy looked at him, but that, there was no reason to deny it, he felt something for the guy now. To have been an ace, to have had it all in your hands, and then to have had it taken away: Sam could understand that that was something in life that could hurt. He walked along Linden Boulevard, his head down, against the cold.

  That was why, when he thought about it, he himself
had never gone after the big kill. If you did, the way Sam saw things work out in this life, you always lost. Sam had never had any dreams, night or day. He figured that dreams were the things that wore people down. Sometimes he wondered, as he did now, where dreams came from in the people who had them. Maybe, he thought, if you had a bundle of talent, you could consider yourself chosen, the way Tidewater had—you could make yourself think you’d had some kind of calling—but the only time Sam figured he would believe he’d been called was when he was holding three of a kind, or more.

  At the corner of Linden and Rogers Avenue, he stopped in the grocery store. The cold air, all the words in his head—they were making his stomach talk to him. A black man and his wife owned the store now and there were crates on the floor: beans and vegetables. Behind the counter, in the glass case, were strange-looking meats. Sam picked up a package of Drake’s Devil’s Food Cakes, and thought of the white cream center, then sucked away the small pool of saliva from under his tongue. A black girl, in pigtails, was ahead of him: “My mother wants two quarts of milk, a loaf of Silvercup white bread, a pound of rice, and fifty cents on number three eighty-eight.”

  Sam watched the grocer write something down. What he could do, he thought, was to give Ben back some of his own—the word fitted—medicine: tell him he didn’t want the money back, just what he would have lost during the five years from inflation. The grocer handed the girl her food, then took Sam’s dollar bill. “And how are you today?” he asked, with enthusiasm. He spoke very clearly, very politely. His smile revealed a set of perfectly even teeth.

  “Fine,” Sam said.

  “Yes,” the man said. “It’s been a lovely fall season this year.”

  “Sure,” Sam said, pocketing his change.

  “Thank you, and come back again, young man.”

  The guy was too much, Sam thought; he preferred, in his memory, old Mr. Bender—a bastard if ever there was one, always on the lookout to make sure you weren’t tucking away candy bars under your jacket.

  When he got to Garfield’s, his payoff man was waiting for him at a table in the back. Sam took a large glass of milk and two cinnamon buns, then joined the man at the table, under the stairwell which led to the toilets. The guy was called Willie the Lump and Sam didn’t have the foggiest idea why, since he was, like the grocer, the kind of black man who, in Ivy League clothes, could have walked down Madison Avenue without making you look at him twice. But when you had looked closely, you saw that Willie the Lump had one eye that never moved, made of glass, Sam imagined, and when he spoke at all, he lisped. Sam looked at him, drank some milk, measured his words.

  “I guess,” he offered, “you don’t have an envelope for me this week.”

  Willie the Lump nodded. He lifted his coffee cup, his small finger sticking out. He had rings on six of his ten fingers. Willie the Lump moved mechanically, following prescribed procedures: he pushed a copy of the Daily News across the table, for Sam to use for his envelope. “Did you see this item in today’s paper?” he asked, the “th” reminding Sam—he cursed the connection—of Tidewater’s precise manner of pronunciation.

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “Well, look, Willie—I’ve been good to you, right? I mean, I always treat you good when I’m on, right?”

  Willie nodded. “Did you see this item in today’s paper?” he asked again. His brown finger pointed to a photo of Lew Alcindor stuffing an opponent’s shot, Alcindor’s huge hand appearing to be larger than the ball.

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “Well, you tell Mr. Sabatini that I’d like to speak to him, he should put this on my account.”

  Willie the Lump drank from his coffee cup, focused on Sam’s face with his good eye. “This is the third time,” Willie said.

  “Yeah, well I got something in the works—I’ll speak to Sabatini about it. Say shalom to him for me, okay?” Sam paused, saw that Willie was going to leave. “I wish I could give you your usual—tell me: did I ever stiff you when I was going good? Tell me that, Willie. Didn’t I always give you your cut? So how come”—Sam tried to surprise the guy with his question—“how come nobody will touch the Knicks? What’s up, Willie? Come on—”

  “You always treated me fine, Mr. Benjamin,” Willie the Lump said. He reached across and—for the first time in Sam’s memory—shook Sam’s hand. “I hope you have better luck, Mr. Benjamin. I truly do. You always treated me fine.”

  “But the Knicks?” Sam asked, as Willie started to move away. “What’s up, Willie?” Sam let his cinnamon bun drop to his plate, and held onto Willie’s jacket, but lightly. Willie stopped. “What’s up?”

  Willie shrugged, lowered his good eye to the floor. “He was the one said to tell you this is the third time if you didn’t. It weren’t my idea.”

  Then he walked away, leaving Sam alone. You too, Sam Berman Junior, he thought: put your money where your mouth is. Words were for the birds. Sure. Sam the Lamb, that’s who he was. He left his second cinnamon bun on his plate, uneaten, and walked to the cashier’s desk: an elderly white woman in platinum-colored hair, red lipstick that was caking off, took his check, punched his change into the tin cup. There were a lot of high school kids in Garfield’s at this hour, but Sam didn’t look them over. Even if he saw a girl, where could he take her? That would be one good thing when Ben was gone—he could get something going for himself again; according to the old saying, his luck should be running at an all-time high in that department, although, with his brain, he’d probably wind up with jailbait.

  “H-how’s things, Sam?” Milt asked.

  “Slow, Milt. Slow,” Sam answered.

  “Did you say hello to your f-father for me?”

  “Oh sure,” Sam said. “He said he’d try to come by to say good-bye to you. He’s going to California, to live in an old people’s home….” Sam tried to see Milt’s eyes behind the thick lenses.

  “Is he s-sick?”

  “No, no,” Sam said. He sighed. “Not a home really—a kind of retirement city. A resort-retirement community is what it is.”

  Milt nodded. “I see,” he said. “Well, you tell him I wish him well and the b-best of success in his new v-venture.”

  “Sure,” Sam said. “I’ll do that. You got this week’s line from Jimmy the Greek?”

  “T-tomorrow,” Milt said. “I sincerely hope your luck changes, Sam, but you’re young and healthy, and that’s the important thing. I believe that. Tell your father that he should be well and that Milt said so.” Milt looked around, then whispered: “Zei gezunt, if you know what I mean.”

  Sam had never heard such a long speech from the man. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll tell him.”

  He crossed the street, went into the phone booth, watched the kids sitting on the steps of the Dutch Reformed Church, pigeons around their feet. He knew what some of them were smoking: they said it wasn’t habit-forming, that it relaxed you—but Sam wasn’t fooled: they’d start you there, and before you knew it, feeling relaxed all the time, you wouldn’t care about keeping in shape. He dropped a dime in the slot. Still, he knew that they said that Namath and most of the boys on the New York Jets were on stuff even more powerful—even when they’d been out there slogging it in the Super Bowl. It didn’t figure, from what he knew, but maybe when you were in their class, things changed.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Mr. Benjamin here.”

  “This is Mr. Sabatini, Mr. Benjamin, what can I do for you today?”

  “Look,” Sam said, rejecting the apologies that he had heard himself giving. “Can you trust me for another week or so?”

  “Trust you?” Mr. Sabatini said, and Sam thought he could see the man smiling at him with a mouthful of yellow teeth. “We love you, sweetheart.”

  “Sure,” Sam said. “I got something in the works.”

  “Of course,” Mr. Sabatini said. “All things can be arranged.”

  “But one thing else,” Sam said. “If you happen to hear of anybody looking for a game—poker—you keep me in mind, okay?”<
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  Sam listened to the silence. Then: “I don’t usually let myself get involved in something like that, of course….”

  “I just thought—if you heard, that’s all. It’s not serious.”

  “But for a good customer like you—a nice Jewish boy—!” Mr. Sabatini howled with laughter at that, and Sam jerked the receiver away from his ear. “I’ll see what I can arrange, all right? No promises, sweetheart, but the Kinesset will be thinking of you.” His voice descended again. “Still, there’s a terrible credit squeeze on, you know—everybody’s feeling the pinch. Don’t feel—if you understand me—isolated.”

  “Yeah. Well, thanks.”

  Sam heard the click at Mr. Sabatini’s end. He pulled the doors toward him, stepped out. A black guy, about Sam’s height, carrying a pile of schoolbooks under one arm, moved into Sam’s path. “How about a smoke, chief?”

  “Don’t smoke,” Sam said.

  The guy’s eyes were glazed, he looked away, his body swayed. “How ‘bout some bread, then, okay? I’ll pay you back—I seen you around.”

  “Sorry,” Sam said, and walked away. The guy held Sam’s jacket-sleeve. Sam whirled around. “Chuck off, Farley, you hear?” he said.

  The guy blinked, then smiled, his eyes suddenly clear. “Hey, that’s good, man. I like that. Chuck off, Farley—ain’t heard that one before.”

  “He bothering you, mister?” Sam turned. A cop—about Sam’s age, perhaps a few years older—was speaking to him. “You don’t have to be scared, mister—I know this kid.”

  “No,” Sam said. “It was nothing. He just asked for a smoke is all.”

  The cop kept his eyes on Sam, but talked to the kid. “Okay. Take off. You’re lucky. Know who your friends are from now on.”