Sam's Legacy

by Jay Neugeboren

  It was probably true about how many people bet the Knicks. The streak helped, of course—everybody loved a winner—but Sam figured the betting had been heavy even before the string began to develop. Guys in the city were that way: about the Knicks, the Mets, the Giants. When the Dodgers had gone to Los Angeles, Brooklyn had been like a funeral parlor.

  On the subway, coming home from the game two nights before, he’d tried to remember as many other guys, like Stallworth, as he could. It picked him up, thinking of guys like Ben Hogan and Pete Reiser and Ray Berry—guys who’d had the deck stacked against them and had come back anyway. Hogan from a near-fatal auto crash, Reiser from running into the centerfield wall in Ebbets Field, Berry from polio as a kid. And what, he thought, about Ed Head, who’d been a top Dodger prospect before the war, had gone into the service, had had his right arm ruined by the Nazis, and then had come back, in 1945, to pitch a no-hitter with his left hand! A sportswriter in the Post had suggested that Stallworth hadn’t had an actual heart attack in the first place, that, given the perfect reading of his EKG now, it might have been something else—some kind of clot—but Sam laughed at that. What difference did it make? The point was, any way you looked at it, that the guy had come back: he’d had to live with the thought that he was washed up at twenty-five, he’d had to fight with the doctors and the coaches to prove that he had a right to get out on the hardwood again. And even if it had been a mild heart attack, so what? A heart attack was a heart attack. Sure. You couldn’t be a little bit pregnant.

  Sam slipped into his trousers, put a shirt on over the T-shirt he’d slept in, buckled his belt. He’d call Sabatini later, put something down on the Milwaukee Bucks—the kid Alcindor, all seven-foot-three-and-a-quarter inches of him, was showing a lot of class, and you could still get a good point spread there. There were others: Monty Stratton—Jimmy Stewart played him in the movie—who’d shot his leg off in a hunting accident and had returned to pitch for the Indians, and Lou Brissie, who’d pitched hand grenades into Jap bunkers and had come back to pitch for the Red Sox with a leg made out of steel plate, and a guy named Bert Shepard, with a wooden leg, who’d pitched in one game for the Senators in 1945. And others: Herb Score, hit in the eye by a line drive; Eddie Waitkus, shot by a love-crazed girl in his hotel room; and the immortal Lou Gehrig, the Iron Man, playing his heart out, building the longest consecutive game-playing string in history, and knowing he had a fatal sickness all the time. His disease had been like muscular dystrophy, only different—Flo had given Sam the technical term several times. Ezzard Charles, the former heavyweight champion, had the same thing; Sam had seen him in a wheelchair, during last year’s telethon.

  “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” That was what Gehrig had said when they’d given him a farewell at Yankee Stadium—Sam had heard it on a recording—and he would have given anything to have been alive then, to have been there, to have seen Lou and Babe Ruth hugging each other. There wasn’t a dry eye in the stadium, since every fan had known just what Lou knew when he had said what he did. Sure. That was what it was all about.

  Sam left the apartment. Down the corridor, on the other side of the banister, the door was cracked open and the little girl—Muriel—was staring at Sam with her large brown eyes. That was a bitch, being brought up by your grandmother. When he’d first moved in, before Muriel was born, Sam had said hello a few times to the grandmother, Mrs. Reardon, but she’d only grunted. Thin as a rail, bent over, one hand on her back, the other always hiding something, as if… Sam started down the stairs. He’d seen Muriel’s mother coming in at two or three in the morning: a first-class floozy, with thick make-up, high heels four inches from the floor, a huge pair of knockers, orange-red hair. The word was that she was working steady now, living with a small-time gangster in the Pigtown section. Sure. Things were rough all over—even the subways were in a hole.

  Okay, too: Ben had had it rough—he granted that—working his guts out for over thirty years, wearing out the seat of his pants driving a hack around Brooklyn and Queens. The guy had been made for better things, that was what Sam believed: with his voice, and his intelligence…and then, at the end, selling his medallion and sinking all his money into that stupid school…. Well, maybe it hadn’t been stupid—Sam had honestly thought it might work out, a fifty-fifty chance. Ben had been able to get bit parts now and then on radio programs, and during the war he’d given his time free, announcing. As far as Sam could tell—he tried to be honest with himself about it—he never, even now, resented the money he’d put into the school: Ace Broadcasting School, Ben Berman, Executive Director. Even with the way things had worked out—Ben falling sick, and the hospital, and having to move out of the Linden Boulevard place, and the bankruptcy—his father had had a right—that was the word—he’d had a right to that school.

  Only a madman could drive a hack in New York. His father had said something about mystery—that, in Sam’s opinion, was the true mystery: how Ben had rung up fares for over thirty years without winding up in the funny house. Sure. Even though he’d had only eight months at the school before the ceiling fell in, Sam knew the eight months had meant a lot to his father.

  When he’d gotten sick, he’d tried not to involve Sam. They hadn’t been living together then—Ben was, so Sam had thought, still on Linden Boulevard, and Sam had had his own apartment on West 76th Street, off Amsterdam Avenue. They’d admitted Ben to Mount Sinai Hospital—Ben had called from his office at the school—and Ben had told them he had Blue Cross, Blue Shield, a Major Medical policy. Sam had received a call from the administrator two days later….

  Ben had offered again—that morning—to give him something before he left for California, and Sam had of course refused. The last thing he needed, when he was in a hole, was to have Ben looking down at him. He didn’t blame the guy: if anything ever happened to him, he’d have done what he could not to have them cart him off to a city hospital. Kings County—a few blocks away—Sam knew what it was like there. He didn’t need Ben’s description: the lines in the lobbies, the smells, the foreign doctors, the drunks and deadbeats and addicts crawling all over the place. Ben had been scared they’d take the wrong thing out, the left lung instead of the right, and Sam had agreed with him. The brown-skinned doctors—students is what they were—how could they cure you if they couldn’t even understand your language? If it had been a lung, Ben had joked, he would have applied for disability insurance; but it had been a kidney. His voice box stayed where it was. The guy in the hospital office had said he wanted to be of service to the family, he’d tried to reassure Sam about the competence of the doctors in city hospitals. Did Sam know that his father had been living in his office, on West 48th Street, at the time of his illness? The hospital, the man explained, even with its high rates, still worked at a deficit, relying on private contributions…how, he was obliged to ask, did Sam expect to pay for his father’s fees?

  “With money,” Sam had replied. He liked that, remembering the sound of his own voice. Ben had appreciated the line, when he’d heard it. Sam opened the door, smiling—it picked him up to remember that, when his father had needed him, he’d come through.

  Outside, it was colder than it had been the day before. Sam inhaled. He heard a tapping, on glass—Flo was smiling at him through the rummage shop window, motioning to him with her finger to come inside. He bet Flo would have adopted Muriel if it were possible. That was the kind of woman she was.

  “How’s tricks?” he asked, entering the store.

  “Fine, dear—a cup of coffee?”

  “I had already.” The store was quiet—just one woman, toward the back of the front room, going through dresses.

  “You haven’t been stopping by as much as you used to,” Flo said. “We miss you.”

  “I got things on my mind,” Sam said.

  “I’m sure you do.” Flo sipped from her paper coffee cup, then spoke: “You must be upset about Ben’s leaving.”

  Sam liked the fa
ct that Flo came right out with things. “I don’t blame the guy,” he said. “I mean, at his age, and—well, why live here if you can live there?” Sam knew that Flo was sad about Ben’s decision, maybe more than sad. When he and Ben had first moved in and Ben had begun helping in the store, Sam had often thought that Ben and Flo might get together, though in the end he’d figured it was best that they hadn’t. Sometimes—he didn’t push the theory—he’d thought that Flo would have done it because she worried about him. “Anyway, he said it was just for a visit—nothing’s definite.”

  Flo looked at him. “You expect him to return, then?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t either.” She paused. “We’ll miss him.”

  “Sure,” Sam said, and had an idea; he tried not to smile. “It’ll be just like—like losing a member of the family.”

  Flo put her hand on his, then looked away, through the window, to the street. “It’s quiet today,” she said.

  Sam’s eyes followed hers. In the window, leaning against one wall, was a sign: BUY HERE! YOU SAVE MONEY—YOUR MONEY SAVES LIVES! He wondered if, after five years, Flo saw that there was no need to worry, if she understood that he’d get by, with or without Ben. He had a heart, sure, but good times or bad, he looked out for number one. He watched a bus go by, heard the noise its motor made, pumping away, and realized that he was comforted by the lack of talk between himself and Flo. Pete Gray! The name flashed across his mind—how could he have forgotten him? The one-armed outfielder who’d played for the St. Louis Browns during the war. Sam had read his life story in a comic book, how he’d lost his arm when he’d fallen off the back of a trolley car, hitching a ride as a kid, and had been run over by a truck. Or maybe he’d hitched on the truck. When he caught a fly ball in his glove, he’d toss the ball in the air, and, before the ball would fall, he’d pull his glove off under his bad arm—between the stump and the armpit—and then catch the ball and fire it to the infield with his bare hand. Sam had practiced doing it—there’d been no great trick; it was the speed that counted, though, and Gray had given away nothing. You didn’t get to the major leagues on charity.

  “You’ll stay, though, won’t you?”

  “Oh sure,” Sam said, quickly. “Where else would I go?” He laughed: “I mean, you ever see pictures of where his brother lives?”

  “We’ll miss him,” Flo said again. She held his hand. “You keep promising to take me with you—to work.”

  “Sure,” Sam said. He liked the way she used the word work. “One of these first days.” He looked down, shook his head. “You want to hear a good one: a few weeks ago—me and Ben were having what you’d call a”—he forced a laugh—“a father to son talk, and, get this, he said my grandfather would have thought I’d discovered the ideal profession.” Sam rubbed his fingertips against the chair, between his legs. “That’s a laugh, isn’t it.”

  “Tell me about your grandfather.” Her voice was insistent.

  “He died when I was—before I was ten,” Sam said. She was a queen all right, he thought, in charge of everything, but the truth was that she was the one people should worry about. He could feel what it must have taken for her to have kept going. Maybe, when it came to fading in and fading out, she was the one Ben had passed his gift on to. “I don’t remember him much, except that he was always there—praying or reading a Jewish newspaper. Ask Ben if you’re interested.”

  “I asked you,” Flo said. “I don’t think your father likes to talk about him. I think he’s never gotten over—people are like that sometimes.”

  “You got it all wrong,” Sam said. “He worshiped his old man. He’s always quoting from him.” He leaned forward, looking over his shoulder first, as if he were worried that somebody was listening. “Hey listen. I’ll tell you what I remember most about my grandfather.” He felt heat rising from his collar. “Ben wouldn’t tell you this, because he used to make me take him downstairs. He’d say, ‘Sammy, be a good boy and take Grandpa to the subway,’ or to the bus. He was always going places. He was a little guy, maybe five-foot-one, and he always wore a vest under his jacket, and a tie, and he carried a cane, and a mesh-type shopping bag. He wore a hat—I remember that—and when he’d come in from outside, he’d take it off and put his yamulka on right away, so that his head was never uncovered. He wore one of those square ones, the old-fashioned kind. He still had most of his hair.”

  Sam could sense the eagerness in his voice, the response his story was registering on Flo’s face. “I’d walk down the stairs with him—he never let me help him—and then—”

  The door opened. A tall black guy, glassy-eyed, wearing a T-shirt, the fading orange and blue emblem of the New York Mets on it, swayed forward. He wore a gold earring in his left ear, a violet handkerchief wrapped tightly around his skull. He kept his palm to his mouth. “Help a guy out,” he said, to Flo. Sam stood, slipped his right hand into his pocket. He could hear his heart pumping; the guy was out of it, though—if he tried anything he wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Flo stood, walked to the table by the opposite wall, and returned with two cans of food. “Oh baby, that ain’t what I mean—that ain’t the kind of bread I need, don’t you know that?”

  From the back of the store, the woman who had been going through the dresses came forward and snatched the guy—a head taller than she was—by the arm, pushing him to the door. A boy—Sam hadn’t seen him—peeked out from the back room, a comic book in his hand. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Calvin—” the woman said. “You’ll be the death of your mother, bless her soul, and of your own poor self too. You used to be such a good boy.”

  Calvin looked down, his head circling slowly. “Can’t put a guy down for trying,” he said. “I didn’t mean nothing. I asked polite.”

  “You get on home. Here—” The woman took the two cans (corned beef hash, Sam saw) from Flo, gave them to him, and pushed him out the door. Through the window, Calvin seemed to be trying to doff an invisible hat to Flo, but he couldn’t get coordinated. The woman came back in, reached into her purse.

  “How much was that, Flo honey?”

  “No, no,” Flo said, and again, “no.”

  The woman accepted Flo’s decision and walked to the back of the store. “Sure,” Sam offered. “She’s right—that takes real brains, getting strung out like that.”

  “You were telling me about your grandfather.”

  Her voice was cold again, like ice, yet there was something so direct in her coldness that Sam found he could respond to it. “When we’d get downstairs,” he continued, “and I’d start to try to get him to the subway, or the trolley—it ran right out here, in front of the store—what he used to do—you got to give him credit—he’d shush me away. ‘Gei, gei, Samela,’—that’s what he called me, Samela, and—the first time it happened my heart must of stopped, I got so scared—he walked right out into the traffic, and when a car stopped for a red light he’d tap on the window with his cane. Then, when whoever was inside would roll down the window, seeing this old guy, my grandfather would say: ‘Are you going to New York please?’—or wherever it was he wanted to go. If the guy said yes, my grandfather would say ‘Good’ and just like that he’d open the car door and get in.”

  Sam leaned back, watched the reaction on Flo’s face. From the way she laughed and said “No!” he knew she’d gotten the picture, but he also saw her eyes flick sideways, past him to the street. He was angry that the story had been interrupted, that his timing had been thrown off, that the words hadn’t come out in the exact way he’d hoped they would.

  “He was like that,” Sam continued, looking down. “Nothing stopped him. Sometimes he’d take the trolley, but even then, if there was a long line, he’d cut in front of everybody else when the trolley came. ‘I’m an old man,’ he’d say, and get on.” Sam looked up and saw that Flo was smiling at him. Her thoughts, though, he could tell, were elsewhere. “I used to think people stared at me because of what he did. Sure. Ben probably knew—why els
e would he have made me take the guy downstairs?”

  “He was a religious man, wasn’t he?” Flo said.

  “Yeah,” Sam replied. “I suppose. He prayed three times a day—mornings, afternoons, and at sundown.” Sam laughed. “If we were away from home when it started getting dark—he took me for walks after school—he’d go into a phone booth, lift the receiver to make believe, and shuckle back and forth. I stood guard.” Sam got up from the chair. “Look, I got things on my mind, so I’m gonna take off now, okay?” He knew he didn’t have to ask permission, and Flo, with her eyes, indicated as much. “When I told Ben once, he asked me if his going into phone booths made me imagine he was Superman, but that didn’t make sense to me then, I remember telling Ben: I mean, with the way the guy spoke and his beard and…” Sam moved to the door. “We’ll talk some more sometime soon, okay? I promise.” He considered, then spoke again: “One thing I meant to ask you before, though—did Tidewater say anything to you about having something for me—for after Ben goes?”

  “No,” Flo said. “Why?”

  “Nothing,” Sam said. “Ben said something screwy about—I was just curious is all.”

  He stopped. Flo stood, moved toward him. “I think he’ll miss Ben more than any of us.” She paused, as if pleased by what she had just said. “That’s why Ben asked you to look after him. He told me.” She held Sam’s hand again. “Your father likes to make mysteries of things, but there’s no need to be afraid of Mason. He—”

  “I’m not,” Sam said, quickly.

  Flo waved his answer away. “I didn’t mean afraid.” She smiled. “I liked your story,” she said then. “Try not to think about your father leaving. Take care of yourself.”

  “Sure,” Sam said. He was annoyed, but he didn’t want her to see his annoyance. She had enough to think about. How had she put it once?—the only time they’d had a long conversation about it: “I guess I’m what you’d call, in your line of work, a jinx.” He remembered that clearly. “I left a trail of casualties, Sam.” She’d offered it as a statement, but there had been a question in her voice. He’d tried to contradict her, but it had done no good—she’d apologized for bringing up the subject, and Sam had honored her wish: she didn’t want to talk about it again. But it must have been…heavy was the word which occurred to him, to outlive your husband and your two kids. He wondered: had she known her husband had muscular dystrophy when she’d married him? How old had she been then? What had the man looked like? And at the end, in which direction had he gone—ballooning up, or wasting away? They called that atrophy—but it was still dystrophy. His hand was on the doorknob. “You don’t worry, Flo. This boy is always looking out for number one.”