Sam's Legacy

by Jay Neugeboren

  He could, as he had once put it to Dutch, be in an entire apartment all at once: living room, bedroom, kitchen, dining room, TV room, study, office—even the bathroom. Since the bathroom he shared with Ben was connected to Ben’s bedroom, on the far side, Sam kept a stainless steel hospital pan with him in the living room, resting on its side behind the convertible bed; he used it at night, if Ben were already asleep when he got in.

  There was a time when he and Dutch had laughed about the bedpan, but that time had passed. Poor Dutch. You and me, Sam had said to him one time when they’d been talking about their old buddies, we’re the only ones who haven’t flown off, and we’re supposed to be the birds. But Dutch hadn’t laughed. What do you think, Ace? he’d replied. Are we different because we stay, or do we stay because we’re different? Sam had shrugged the question off; when it came to riddles, his father was the expert. Sure. When Ben left for California—which wasn’t too far off, he knew, with the phone calls he’d been getting from his brother lately—Sam figured he’d stay on in the apartment, though he didn’t really know what he’d do with the second room. He’d offered it to Dutch, but Dutch had, as expected, said no, and that was just as well. There was something in the idea, not just of living completely in one room, but of living completely in one small room, that appealed to Sam. He didn’t owe anything to anybody.

  Sam’s Uncle Andy—Ben’s younger brother—was, no secret, fatally ill, and when he died Ben would inherit his apartment in California. That was the only thing Ben was waiting for, Sam knew. The brochure which Andy had sent to Ben over a year before would, if Sam wanted to look, be on Ben’s desk: Pioneer Estates—California’s Finest Resort-Retirement Community. Peripheral Privacy Guaranteed. There, among the full-color pictures of the retirement city’s golf courses and swimming pools, Andy had marked with an “x” his window on the seventeenth floor of one of the village’s two twenty-story high-rise condominiums.

  Sam watched Ben unwind his tephillin. What kind of privacy, he wondered, was peripheral. Ben liked to turn that phrase over in his mouth, blowing the “p”s through his lips, but Sam would never ask him to explain. He knew what peripheral meant, of course: Bill Bradley of the Knicks, for example, had more peripheral vision than the normal guy—it was what enabled him to see far to the sides, even behind him, and to get a pass off to somebody you wouldn’t think was in his range. Okay. Somehow you saw more than one hundred and eighty degrees, but where did that get you? It didn’t, Sam concluded, make sense.

  “So,” Ben said. “Tell me about the day’s doings in the world of sports.”

  Sam forced a laugh, opened the refrigerator. “You eat yet?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I’ll fix some eggs for us, okay?” Sam looked at his father. “Sure. You can’t eat till you pray first, right?” Ben nodded. “See,” Sam said. “I know a few things.”

  Ben smiled. “I’ve never denied it.” He put his tephillin in his tephillin bag, folded his talis carefully, and put that in also. Then he busied himself, setting the table. Sam prepared the toast, poured their coffee, turned on the radio—on top of the refrigerator. The two men sat down at the table.

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” Ben said. “After all this time—living together here the way we have these past five years—you’re still a mystery to me, sonny boy.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “I’m one for the books.”

  Ben smiled, cut into the yolk of his fried egg. “Why wait till some other time to say it: it’s something I’ve often wondered about.” He watched his son’s eyes, open, clear, fixed on his own mouth. “Your—how shall I put it?—not your silence, but your simplicity. If that’s the right word.” Sam continued to eat, to show interest in what Ben was saying to him. “I’ve never been sure, though, whether your simplicity comes from the top or the bottom, if you see what I mean. Whether you’re simple because you know life so well that you’ve reduced it to essentials, or the opposite—”

  “Meaning?”

  Ben laughed. “Ah—there it is. What I mean.”

  Sam wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, then, touched by his father’s confession, he lowered his eyes. “I see things for what they are, that’s all.” He looked up. “Anyway, what’d you want to talk about—it must be something, you standing watch over my bed.” He stirred his coffee. “Don’t do that anymore, either, okay? I like to wake up by myself. That’s why we have two rooms.”

  “I’m thinking of visiting Andy,” Ben said. “You probably—”

  “Fine,” Sam said, without hesitating.

  “I wanted to tell you first, to—”

  “You don’t have to make excuses.” Sam mopped up some egg with a piece of toast. “He’s your brother. You’re a free man.”

  “You wouldn’t mind then?”

  “Why should I mind?” Sam replied. Then: “What else?”

  Ben smiled, slowly. “Yes,” he said. “There is something else. I’d like to be able to pay you back, for what you did. You know that.”

  Sam rolled his eyes. “Here we go round the mulberry bush,” he said, standing and taking his dishes and silverware—all but the coffee cup—to the sink. “Look, I told you before: I made my own choices. I live with the results, like always.”

  “Of course, of course,” Ben said. “It’s just that, leaving—if I leave, that is—it’s not definite—I was reminded: I wish it could be resolved, that you could be paid back.”

  “I’ll get my reward in heaven,” Sam said. He thought of guys like Stallworth and he told himself that he had no reason to kick, that—especially with Ben gone—he’d work his way out of things. He’d been in jams before. He shrugged, came back to the table and picked up his coffee cup. “Look at it this way,” he said. “How many guys get the chance to put a bet on their own old man in this life?”

  “It wasn’t a bet.”

  “What was it then?—an investment?” He drank. “That’s even better.” He broke off, laughing. “We had some good times, Ben. It’s okay.”

  “No, no,” Ben said, as if he were brushing aside the last few things Sam had said. “What’s this about heaven?” His voice was stern, forceful. “Come.”

  “Nothing. Just an expression.”

  Ben pushed his dishes forward, indicating he had finished eating. “But if you feel that way, then why—”

  “Who said I felt any way?” Sam said. “Look, stop confusing me. Your old tricks won’t work.” He took Ben’s dishes from the table and brought them to the sink. “You—that mumbo-jumbo every morning and you don’t even believe in—”

  Sam stopped; he was turned sideways to the sink, aware of his father’s eyes, of the way they gazed at him. Although Ben said nothing, Sam could hear his father’s voice, and he defended himself. He set the dishes down, and pointed. “I know all about it. You do it because your father did it and his father did it all the way back to fucking Moses and Aaron—but what’s that to me? You don’t even believe in God!”

  Ben waited, watching his son’s face. “What’s there to get excited about?” he asked, very quietly. “I don’t ask that anybody else believe what I believe. Have I ever urged you to put on tephillin?” “You’re too smart.”

  The light entered Ben’s eyes. “You—” His mouth hung open, incredulously. “You mean—all this time, with your—you believe there is a God, a Maker of the Universe?”

  Sam expected a laugh, but there was none. He shrugged. “Somebody had to start it all.”

  “Why?”

  “Because—things just don’t happen. It had to start somewhere, that’s all.” He turned away again. “Look—I don’t care if you fly to California on an angel’s back, just lay off. I got things to think about.”

  “But it’s so simple, Sam,” Ben went on, calmly. “All right. Granted. Somebody had to start it all—but then—who started the starter?”

  “Come on,” Sam said, turning the hot and cold water faucets on, sprinkling soap powder into the sink. He remembered the words which
had been in his head the night before: that somebody had to deal the first hand, right?—but he knew what Ben would have done with that kind of line. “It all had to start somewhere,” he said again. “That’s all.” Soap bubbles collected between his fingers. “I mean, it couldn’t just keep going on forever. It had to stop somewhere.”

  Sam faced his father and waited, the water splashing into the sink. He hated the way Ben would drag out the silences. “But why,” Ben said again, more as a statement than a question.

  Sam waved him off, began washing the dishes. “Like I said, you’re out of your mind. Things just don’t—” He made a sound with his lips, like that of a motor, but didn’t bother to finish the sentence. He’d been stupid to let himself get trapped this way. Seeing the guy all rigged up in his holy shawl first thing in the day, with the straps shining on his arm, those two boxes, one against the heart, one against the head, to show—Sam knew all about it—that one put one’s mind and heart into prayer: that was what had done it, had put him off stride.

  He heard Ben behind him, clearing the table. “Anyway,” he offered, “I still say it was a good idea—putting up my money. Win some, lose some—that’s the way it goes, you know? If you hadn’t gotten sick, we would have done okay together. I stick by that.”

  “If,” Ben said, and then mumbled something in Yiddish. Though Sam could not have repeated it, he’d heard the sounds often enough to know what they meant: And if my aunt had had balls we would have called her my uncle.

  “That’s true too,” Sam said.

  Ben was next to him, touching his son’s arm, above the elbow, firmly. “It’s just that—you’ll forgive my sentimentality—thinking of leaving here, of—” He paused. “There are things I’d like to say to you.”

  Sam moved away from the sink, wiping his hands on a dishtowel. “I can understand that,” he said, and he meant it. He began making up his bed, smoothing the sheets, tucking the blankets in. He carried his pillow to the closet, dropping it behind the shoes and galoshes. “I mean, okay, when you come down to it, what’s it all about, right?”

  Ben opened the cabinet above the sink. “My father always gave you credit,” he said. “He said you were special.”

  “Yeah, I’m a bird,” Sam laughed. He pulled the loop at the foot of the bed, then folded the three sections backward so that the mattress disappeared and the bed was, once again, a sofa. He lifted the cushions from beside the bed and put them in place.

  “You have the right idea,” Ben said. “You’re like your grandfather—it’s a pity the two of you—that he didn’t live longer, to know that you had found the—yes—the ideal profession.” Sam sat on his couch. “You never work, in the ordinary sense, and yet if you, if—what I mean is, you work for nobody but yourself, you’re beholden to nobody. That’s why—” Ben’s voice had become passionate, but Sam dismissed him with a wave of the hand.

  “A lot you know,” he said.

  Ben stepped back, hung a dishtowel on a hook in the alcove. He was, obviously, upset. Sam understood. Having to go out and be a nursemaid to Andy—Sam didn’t figure that Ben had had any real choice, since the guy was his brother—was nothing to look forward to. Especially with the way Andy would try to cover up, to act as if he were still the world’s last big spender. But Sam knew that he wouldn’t have sent for Ben unless he’d needed him, and probably for cash. Ben forced a smile, spoke in the voice which gave him confidence. “Remember—sunshine and hot competition! Lawn bowling on the lush greensward.”

  Sam pushed the picture of Andy from his head. “Any more questions?”

  “That look in your eyes,” Ben said. “I know you don’t daydream, sonny boy, but that look—” Ben smiled. “Perhaps from my radio days—the way you fade in and fade out—perhaps that is your inheritance from me. What do you think?”

  Sam sighed, as if bored. “Is that all?”

  Ben smiled. “You’re right again—there is something else you should know.” Sam said nothing. “I was worried about how Mason would react to my leaving, you see, and I was thinking of asking you to—well—to look after him.”

  Sam laughed. “Sure,” he said. “Me and my mother.”

  “I’m serious,” Ben said, sharply, and began to speak of his friendship with the man, of their childhood together, of the hours they had spent these past five years in Mason’s room below the rummage shop. Tidewater! There was something Sam could never figure—what his father found to talk about so much with a guy like that. The way he slid around so goddamned silently you never knew when he would be there, right next to you. The guy gave him the creeps, that was all. Sure, the two of them had known one another when they’d been kids, growing up in Brooklyn. That counted for something. They could ask one another about people they’d known and what had happened to them and how their lives had turned out, the way Sam and Dutch did with their old buddies. Ben could give Tidewater his life story, and Tidewater could do the same. But then what, Sam wondered. Ben claimed that there was more to Tidewater than met the eye, but Sam only bet what he knew.

  He watched his father pick up his tephillin bag and turn away, toward his bedroom. At the door, Ben held the bag toward Sam, and his voice shifted, so that Sam paid attention. “‘It’s true,’ the man said, returning from an illness,” Ben declared. “‘The Jews are smarter than we are. How do I know? In the hospital, every morning before the doctors came, each Jewish man would take his own blood pressure—!’” Sam didn’t laugh, and watched his father smile, weakly. “But you will do what I’ve asked you to, won’t you? You will let him give you whatever it is he wants you to have.”

  Sam blinked. “What?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Ben said. “It has something to do with things he would have told me, had I stayed on. But if I’m going, he says you will receive it—”

  “Look,” Sam said. “Enough riddles. Receive what?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben said, then opened the door to his bedroom. “I just told you. You should pay attention to your father, don’t you see? Mason has his secrets—the best your father can make of it is this: that it must be part of what we were talking about before—about your inheritance: you’ll receive what had been saved for me.”

  Thank God for Andy, Sam thought, when Ben was in his room. Maybe, when people got past a certain age they should send them out in the snow with a bag of food, the way the Eskimos did. Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse. That—a favorite line from high school days—was the way it should be, instead of all this moping around and trying to find—to find what?—words, he supposed. To find words all the time, the way Ben had just been doing.

  A few minutes later, Ben left the apartment to help out in the store below: it was Saturday morning, and from the living room window Sam could see that the line of shoppers reached almost to the corner. Sleepy-eyed black women, many with their children, stood quietly, waiting. One policeman was there, but usually, Sam knew, if trouble arose—a place in line, who had found a dress first, whether a woman had forgotten to pay for a coat that was on her back when she left the store—Ben’s voice would be enough to settle the matter. “I think the manager would like to have a word with you,” Flo would say, and a minute later Ben would be there, the richness—the depth—of his voice doing the job.

  And if—it happened rarely—there were some real trouble, Ben would bang on the pipes and Sam would come down, for whatever his presence was worth. The policeman was, in the end, useless: the store would not press charges for a twenty-five cent dress or a five dollar suit. In a while, Sam would go downstairs. He liked sitting there, watching the people come and go, and he liked listening to Flo. The people bought, they traded, they looked, they hung around sipping coffee (a nickel a cup, refills free to the regulars), they talked to Flo about their problems, the time passed. It passed more easily, in fact, than it did anywhere else, Sam had decided. Leave it to Flo, he’d heard the local people say, she runs the show. They were right. It told you a lot about the way things were
going, for example—Flo had pointed this out to him the first time he’d been in the store—to realize that it was cheaper to buy used clothing than to have old clothes washed and cleaned. Twenty-five cents for dresses, twenty-five cents for a pair of shoes, ten cents for blouses, twenty-five cents for shirts, ten cents for underwear, one dollar for coats, a nickel for a pair of torn nylons. Sheets were twenty cents each, pillows a quarter, pillow cases a dime. Dishes were two for a dime, and eyeglasses were fifteen cents a pair.

  Sam thought that Flo slipped Ben five or ten dollars a week—he wasn’t sure, and he never asked—but Ben earned the money; it was his voice that helped bring a lot of the merchandise in—telephoning factories, department stores, warehouses, and—the biggest source of gifts, as things turned out—the names he culled from obituary columns. Flo fixed up the tax deduction forms—the shop was, after all, a legitimate charity.

  Flo sold to dealers also: they exported the goods, mostly to South American countries. And she would—this got Sam—take orders from the women, according to color and size. Sure. So he could have breakfast and pass the time watching the people trying the stuff on while the kids pored through the comic books (five for a dime), and records (ten cents each), and maybe, toward noon, there’d be a touch football game on Martense Street—but then what? Despite his win the night before, his funds were low, and he hadn’t had a card game in six weeks. He felt—the word, as soon as he’d used it to name the feeling, gave him chills—rusty: as if, somewhere inside him, his bones were coated with orange flakes which he yearned to scrape away.

  He finished his coffee, rinsed his cup, then went to Ben’s room. The tephillin bag lay in the middle of Ben’s pillow. Sam laughed at his father’s theories. If he’d wanted, he knew, he could have said something to Ben about it being forbidden to wear tephillin on the Sabbath, but when he had, during their first year together in the apartment, discovered Ben putting tephillin on in his bedroom one Saturday morning and said something, Ben had only smiled. He knew the law, he said, but he was entitled in this life to some small transgressions, wasn’t he? Even in religion, every man had his own pleasure…. The brochure, Sam saw, was there, as always, in the middle of Ben’s desk. It unfolded, he knew, with a green map in the center, showing the location of each private home, of Andy’s building, of the synagogues, churches, banks, shopping center, and the rest, but what Sam liked most were the captions under the photos. Sometimes, when he was least expecting it, Ben would suddenly look at him and, in his best radio voice, declare: “Grandma Moses started painting at seventy!” or “If you think shuffkboard is an easy game, wait till you take on the pros at Pioneer Estates!”