“You see then,” Ben went on, his voice cool, “why Poppa admired Sam so much. He knew something—he knew that Sam would maintain family tradition, that—”
“You are a fool sometimes,” Flo said. She stood. “I’ll bring the presents. May I put the lights on?”
“It’s Friday night,” Ben said. “No work, no lights. On Howard Street, on Friday nights, there were no lights. On Howard Street…”
“Then you should not,” Tidewater declared angrily, “mock what is happening here, where things have happened—before you were born—which command respect.” Tidewater looked at Sam. “When you are gone, I will share that story with your son. You, Ben Berman, have forfeited your chance and when, from your son, you—”
Ben waved a hand at Tidewater. “This side of you I can do without,” he said. “I’ve told you before. If you want your secrets, fine—but if you want them, why advertise them?”
“You should not mock what is happening here. You’re a fool to leave us. When you’re there, you’ll see, you’ll regret having gone away. What we have here is rare, what you will have there is nothing. Think: you mock it before you even know it—your resort-retirement community—doesn’t that tell you enough?” Sam watched the man’s narrow body, the long neck stretched forward toward his father. “Where you are going to is a place people pass through, from one death to another, as it were—the graveyard before the graveyard; where we are staying is a place that has substance. You do not kill great cities. In transition? There is more truth than irony in what you say.”
“All right,” Ben said. His eyes twinkled. “I’m sorry, yes? Let’s say it was—well, just a phrase I was going through.”
Tidewater’s body relaxed at once, seemed to dance, sitting there. “Ah Ben,” he said, smiling so happily that Sam felt his own stomach tighten.
Flo handed Ben a small package and he unwrapped it. “So that you’ll write to us,” she said, as Ben showed the silver pen and pencil set to the others.
“Thank you,” Ben said. “From the gift wrapping I assume the proceeds did not go for muscular dystrophy.”
“No,” Flo said.
“Well,” Ben said. “I appreciate it.”
Flo kissed him on the forehead. Ben accepted a small package from Marion and untied the paper ribbon. Inside the wrapping paper was a box and inside the box was a leather travel kit: comb, brush, mirror, razor, toothbrush. Ben nodded a thank you to Marion.
“I hope you like it,” she said.
“No kiss?” Ben asked.
Marion’s chair scraped the floor. Flo stepped away, took her seat again, and Marion went to Ben, kissed him on the cheek. He reached up, held her hand, seemed emotional suddenly. “You do forgive me, don’t you? For—”
“Things happen,” Marion said, and sat down again.
Ben looked at Tidewater. “You go before me,” Tidewater said to Sam, and Sam obeyed; he stood, went to the closet, next to the kitchenette, and took out the valise, brought it to his father. He’d returned four hundred of the five hundred to Willie the Lump, and had spent three-quarters of the hundred he’d kept on the valise, but it was the kind of thing he wanted to give his father: a genuine leather valise, with Ben’s initials embossed in gold, next to the handle. It was the kind of valise he’d wanted to have himself, when he’d been traveling. He’d always bought quality stuff, but never anything as expensive as this, and it was, he realized, something he now regretted. “Here,” he said.
“It’s very—” Ben hesitated, wrinkled his forehead. “It’s very handsome, Sam. Very appropriate.”
Sam sat down. “It has your initials on it—on the top,” he said.
Ben nodded. “‘S’ is for Samson. I’m Samson,” Ben said dreamily, but before there could even have been time for Sam to pick up his cue, Ben went on: “But—with your situation—where did you get such money? This must have—”
“Don’t,” Flo commanded. “Please don’t, Ben.”
Ben looked at the others. “What my son did for me—I’d like to make it up to him. I’ve told you all the story.”
“That’s right,” Tidewater said. “We don’t need it.”
“All right,” Ben said, caressing the coffee-colored leather. He rubbed a hand across his forehead, then brushed his hair. “I’ll be like the man who lamented the coming of baldness—hair today and gone tomorrow—”
The others groaned, then smiled, but Sam saw nothing to laugh about. He was glad that he’d done the right thing—he hadn’t wanted to get Ben something the others would have looked down upon—but the money it cost did hurt, it did put him that much deeper into Sabatini’s—the word made him laugh out loud—grip. Sure. Sam knew how far playing with words could get you.
“You like that?” Ben was saying to him, he realized. “Hair today…”
“Sure,” Sam laughed. “It’s terrific, Ben,” and, using the word—thinking at once of his buddies in their houses on Long Island, of Herbie’s carpeted wastebaskets and Japanese lanterns—Sam found that he couldn’t stop laughing. He felt tears rolling down his cheeks, he heard the others laughing with him, enjoying themselves.
“I see what you mean,” Tidewater said to Sam.
“I’ll say one thing for him,” Sam said, feeling giddy now. He wiped his eyes. “Sure. He’s been a terrific father. Terrific!”
Sam howled at this, and to his surprise found that the others, Ben included, were laughing with him. Marion, her hand against his shoulder, was telling Sam to stop.
“See?” Ben said, calming down. “Do you see what I mean, Mason?”
“Ah Ben,” Tidewater said.
Ben stood. “‘Call me a cab,’ the man said.” Ben flicked his fingers into Marion’s face. “‘Poof,’ I said. ‘You’re a cab.’”
Sam’s laughing stopped abruptly. “That’s an old one,” he said, aloud.
“Like your father,” Ben said, and continued to laugh. “Tell him,” he said to Flo. “Tell him—”
“When you’re old,” Flo said, reaching across for Sam’s hand. “Ah, when you’re old, Sam, the whole world is Jewish.”
“Good,” Tidewater said, his hand on Flo’s arm. “That’s very good,” he said.
Sam looked away, did not take Flo’s hand. “It’s all the same to me,” he said. “I’ll put the valise away if you want—”
“No, no,” Ben said, still chuckling. “Leave it beside me. It comforts me. You couldn’t have given me anything more—appropriate.”
“You said that before,” Sam said.
“I remember things,” Ben said. “I found a valise in my cab once, and the girl who called it to my attention—she was very beautiful. Do you know what was in the valise?” Ben waited, looked around. “I am certain, to this day, that the girl wanted me to know that the valise had been hers, though we both pretended it had not been hers. This was before your mother, Sam.” Ben waited, then shook his head. “No. I won’t tell.”
“Please,” Flo said.
“No,” Ben said. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I could have given other stories. My life as a taxi driver by Benjamin Berman—one would think, here in New York, that it was the king of professions—yet it was, in truth, dull and boring. Oh so boring. There were no interesting passengers, no back-seat births, no horde of people telling you just to drive around please. I watched the road, they watched the meter. The high point, in truth, was picking up by chance somebody you already knew—a relative, an old friend…. Famous people? They told you who they were before you’d recognized them.” Ben sighed, swayed slightly from side to side, but his eyes twinkled. “It was, in short, the kind of life a man had to be driven to—”
Sam didn’t mind hearing the others laugh. He remembered Stella talking about wheeling and dealing. He could add something to that, with Ben: sure, they were a regular team, with their professions—one wheeled, the other dealed.
“Except for Sam,” Tidewater was saying, “we’ve passed the halfway point, and do you know what? I prefer it tha
t way. Until a certain point, one lives with one’s friends, one does things together—as we do every day, downstairs. And yet, one doesn’t, after all. When one is with friends, I discover, one begins to spend much of the time reminiscing about the things one has done together previously—the way we might share tonight in time to come. The talking becomes the doing, don’t you see? At a given moment in time, the reminiscing becomes more than half and the doing less than half. Things move in opposite directions until, near the end, we become almost all memory. Thus, you see, Ben, my gift to you tonight is the story I have already begun giving to Sam.”
Ben sighed. “Didn’t I tell you?” he said. “My son will take my place.”
Tidewater’s hand was resting on the handle of the leather valise. Sam nodded to himself: they could say what they wanted, about friendship or memories or dying or anything else, but they would never be able to deny that the valise was there.
“People worry about mugging,” Ben said, performing. “How best to deal with muggers? It’s simple: hypnotism.” He looked around, smiled, but saw that nobody was smiling with him. “Schools of hypnotism. The world’s finest hypnotists will train you to—” He lifted his glass of wine. “We couldn’t have evening classes, though, could we, Samela?—people are so afraid to go out at night these days….”
“It is your leaving, Ben,” Tidewater stated, calmly, “now a certainty, which has—the good coming from the bad? the honey in the dead lion’s carcass?—pushed me into putting my story into something resembling a narrative. Our talks, in my room, are over.”
“Of course,” Ben said. “But tell me one thing, what I asked you before: what do you want to do with your story, once it is on paper?”
“Do with it?” Tidewater asked. “Nothing, of course. It is enough to set it down.”
“Ah,” Ben said, seeing an opening. “But of what use will it be?”
Then Tidewater smiled, his eyes on Sam’s face. “What use? Don’t you know the answer to that, Ben?” Sam looked away and saw that Flo was sitting stiffly, her back straight, her hands at her sides, as if frozen in her chair. “To save your son’s soul.”
Then the two men were laughing together, and though their laughter was soft, even gentle, Sam didn’t like it. “My son, my son,” Ben hummed.
“You,” Tidewater said, when he had stopped laughing. “You, Ben, are the only friend—with one exception—I have ever seen again. Any person I knew before 1928 I was obliged never—” He turned to Sam: “Your son should not be so foolish as to regard my life, and the writing down of this part of it, as anything exotic or unusual. There were thousands of us who played baseball in the Negro Leagues, and there were thousands of us—some as light-skinned as myself—who, in the half-century following the Civil War, set down their life stories, often by themselves, with great literacy, often dictated to others. Then as now there was a great demand for the personal lives, for the details, the secret ways of black folks!” Tidewater spat the words out, laughed a wild laugh, almost maniacal. “I am not exotic, I am not even—the beginning of my tale—black. As you see, I am merely an old man saying good-bye to another old man, yes?”
He looked at Sam. “You’ll have more—of my story—soon. You may serve the coffee and cake now, Florence.” Flo brought a plate from the kitchenette—a chocolate cake on it—then put water on to boil, brought cups and saucers, spoons, plates, and forks.
“Well,” Ben said, cutting the silence. He touched Sam’s hand. “Mason’s gift—it’s not the kind I could have gotten on special—”
“Exactly,” Tidewater said, but he did not smile.
“Who,” Ben asked, “was the other friend?”
Tidewater stared ahead, at nothing, and made no move to reply.
“My girlfriend Irene,” Flo said, “despaired of a happy marriage because, when she was living with a young Jewish boy, who had come to New York from Chicago, and who later became a well-known novelist, she tried to fix up his apartment for him, in Greenwich Village, and, instead of saying that she needed to go to the store for a can of paint, she said she needed to leave for a pain of can’t…”
“So?” Ben said.
“Nothing,” Flo said. “The phrase has been in my head, before, and while Mason was speaking. That was all. She never got over it, she claimed, and she put much too much stock into it, into one slip of the tongue. Still…”
Flo was trembling. She reached between Ben and Marion, with a knife, and cut into the cake. “I hope you like it. I wasn’t used to your oven.” She served a piece of the cake to Ben. “I’m sorry I’m so distracted, so far away. Irene and I were classmates, closest friends in college—at Barnard—and I keep hearing her say it, seeing her eyes get rounder and rounder. I keep hearing her voice, so plaintive, so—what do you think, Ben?”
“It sounds like pure cant to me,” he said.
Flo started to reply, but changed her mind. She served a piece of cake to Tidewater, then to Sam, then to Marion.
“Very good,” Ben said. “Thank you. It’s very good.”
Sam took a piece in his hand and bit into it; he watched Tidewater’s mouth, obscure in the dark room, and thought of the soft chocolate—thick and sweet, the consistency somewhere between that of fudge and brownies—melting on his two-toned tongue. “And I’m sorry for being ugly,” Ben said to Flo. He caught a crumb, falling from his lip, then hummed, the way Sam remembered his grandfather humming, at the end of a meal. When he spoke again, Ben’s voice seemed very sweet: “You look at me and you see a small ugly man, cruel to friends and children, yes? But I was not always like this. Ah no!” Ben’s hands were clasped in front of him, his body rocking gently back and forth. “When I was young, in Galicia, I was a very beautiful child, but when I was young, I was put into the hands of a wicked nurse, who exchanged me for another…and that is why today, you see before you the man who—”
“All right,” Tidewater said. “All right.”
“A fool,” Ben went on, “can throw a stone into the water which ten wise men cannot recover.”
“Enough,” Tidewater said. “I will speak of my other friend, of—”
“Of course,” Ben said, easily. “But note my son’s continuing silence. If I think of how far I might have gone in radio—consider Sam’s potential, for the first thing I taught any student at the school—my famous opening lecture—was silence. The only actors and announcers who succeeded were those who mastered the uses of silence—when to pause, how long to pause, how to sustain the pause, how, coming into people’s homes, to let the silence work for you. The lack of sound…do you recall the lecture, my son? Will you use your silence, when I am gone, to look for a job?”
Sam laughed. Look for a job—that was the best one yet. The room was quiet again, and the quiet reminded Sam of how dark it was. Sam didn’t measure the time, but in a short while Flo came to the table, poured the coffee, gave out second pieces of cake to each of them. “I will speak of my friend,” Tidewater said, and looked, his eyes troubled, at Ben. Ben sipped coffee from his cup, his chin down at the table’s level. There were, Sam could tell, a lot of things Ben might have said to Tidewater, but in the end, following his own advice, he rejected them all, and merely nodded his assent.
“In the early summer of 1930,” Tidewater began, “posing as a newspaper reporter, I visited Rube Foster—the friend—who, in 1927, at the age of forty-eight, had been committed to the state mental institution at Kankakee, Illinois. He had been, from the time I decided to make my way as a ballplayer—from the time you last saw me, Ben, when we were in school together—the man I had respected most. Born in Calvert, Texas, he had begun earning his own living as a baseball player before he had finished grade school. A minister’s son, he never drank (though he did not, when a manager, require abstinence of his players), and he carried a loaded pistol with him always. He had been one of the great players during the first two decades of this century, a man with unlimited confidence in himself and his right arm, and he had become, when I f
irst knew him, a superb field manager, and the organizer and first president of the league in which I played.
“It was Foster, you see, and not John McGraw, who had invented the hit-and-run play, and the squeeze bunt, and it was Foster who was, in his time, the admitted master of psychological warfare. In fact, McGraw would hire him, between seasons, as a coach. I will never forget coming into his home park in Chicago, in 1923, and seeing the row of metal files, for sharpening spikes, which he kept hanging from the nails outside the visiting team’s dressing room. I laughed, of course, at the sheer transparency of such a ploy, and yet, coming to know the man’s glowering black face, I eventually came to feel a slight chill whenever I saw the files hanging there.
“Foster told me, at the end of my first full season, when, in Chicago, I had defeated his team for the World Series championship, that I could have been the greatest of them all. He had seen all the greats, from Moses Fleetwood Walker to John Henry Lloyd, and the best of the whites, too, from Willie Keeler to Cobb and Ruth and Johnson, and he declared that if I could last—for there were lots of young boys who could have one or two seasons as good as any other man’s—I could make them forget all the others, including himself.
“When we could, though I did not play for his team, we would travel together, and share a room. He would often recount for me the fact that the separation of the races into separate leagues had come about quite slowly, and he believed that the time before there had been separate leagues—a time just before he had begun playing—had been the Golden Age of Baseball. He did not believe that the races would ever mix again, in baseball or elsewhere, and, along with his Bible, he kept in his traveling bag a copy of Moses Walker’s Our Home Colony—A Treatise on the Past, Present, and Future of the Negro Race in America, not because he believed in the back-to-Africa movement, but because Walker had been the last (acknowledged) black man to play on a white team.”
“I’m sorry we couldn’t find the field,” Ben began. “My intentions—”
“When I visited Foster in 1930,” Tidewater continued, as if Ben had not spoken, “though he showed no sign of recognizing me, he did once—I spent but an hour with him, in a room he shared with five others—look out the barred window, and, pointing, said: ‘There’s McGraw, boy.’ For though he knew that McGraw had tried, as with me, to hire black players many times under many guises—most famously in the case of Charlie Grant, a fine second baseman whom he tried to pass off unsuccessfully as a full-blooded Indian named ‘Tokohoma,’ it was his knowledge of my encounter with McGraw, when I refused to pass, which, I believed, first drew Foster to me.”
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