Sam's Legacy

by Jay Neugeboren

  “I don’t think people buy plane insurance the way they used to,” Ben said. “I was out here before it was an airport, you know—just marshes—” He started to stand. “Come—I’ll get a quarter’s worth, or whatever it costs. I saw the machine before. You put the money in. Since you’re here with me, I won’t even need a postage stamp—”

  Sam dug his fingers into his father’s arm, forcing him down. “I said to cut it out. You and your sense of humor.”

  “If Mason asks you not to tell me about what he’s written, you won’t, yes?”

  “Whatever you say,” Sam said.

  “You’re restless, I can tell. Please—why don’t you go ahead. It’s less than fifteen minutes till I board—I can manage myself. I’ll write to you when I get out there—and—I’m sorry to say it again, but I will try to even our accounts, as soon as I can. I think I can work something out. So go ahead now—”

  “I’ll stay,” Sam said.

  “All right,” Ben said, and sighed again, sinking into the softness of the chair. His color, Sam saw, was terrible, and—if the plane had a rocky flight—would probably get much worse. Sam looked intently at his father’s face, hoping to see something new, to notice some physical detail—some sign of aging—that he could use, that he could fix his mind upon later, but the face seemed the same to him as it had always been. Inevitably, though, he saw himself—as he looked through the window at a man with earmuffs, flagging an arriving jet in—as a boy, as smaller than his father, but he was used to this feeling. If he had wanted to, he knew, he could have put himself inside Ben’s head—he could have tried to see what thoughts were occurring at such a time, but that too, he knew, would have proven nothing. He appreciated the absence of Ben’s voice. Words—and pictures too—where did they get you? There wasn’t enough time for anyone else ever to know what had passed between them, and to give things names didn’t help either. Sam understood now why Flo kept no photographs, and hearing her explain, as she once had (“if one has a photo of a time and a place, of yourself or a friend—then one tends to exclude those times, all those times, when somebody was not there with a camera…”), Sam felt that he suddenly understood her better than he ever had. He’d been fooled, hadn’t he, thinking she didn’t keep photos of her husband and two children because it was too painful; he’d forgotten until now, and realizing why she didn’t keep photos—the same reason he would not start trying to imagine the pictures Ben was seeing in his head at a time like this—he felt himself grow warm, he knew how much—more than he’d ever imagined—she must have loved her children.

  When Ben’s flight was announced, he rose, and Sam walked with him arm in arm through the long tubular walkway that led to the departure gate. Ben showed his ticket to the man at the counter, and then walked to the door. Sam bent down, kissed his father on the cheek, and held him, with his right arm, behind the shoulder. He felt Ben’s lips on his own cheek. “Yes,” Ben said, and turned away. Sam waited, watching Ben disappear into the collapsible tunnel that had been hooked up to the plane’s door, but Ben didn’t turn around.

  Sam left the terminal immediately and—he was low in cash—waited for a bus which took him to the East Side Terminal in Manhattan. He walked the few blocks to Grand Central Station, got the Lexington Avenue IRT to Brooklyn. At the Eastern Parkway-Brooklyn Museum stop, after he’d changed to the Seventh Avenue Line (at Franklin Avenue), two Puerto Rican kids came jitterbugging down the length of the car, dancing to the beat of a bongo drum that a third guy was playing. They kept dancing, moving wildly, keeping their balance even while the train was barreling along, and the smaller Puerto Rican boy, whose eyes were almost closed, as if he were drugged, finished by running halfway down the car and flipping over, holding onto the bars in the center, then resting on the floor, in a split. When the train stopped at President Street, the guy who’d been playing the drums—he was white, maybe thirteen years old—went around, holding out a beret. Sam put some change in. The kids worked hard. “Take it easy, champ,” one of the Puerto Rican kids—not the drugged one—said to him, as they got out onto the platform.

  Sam had nothing to say to them. He saw Ben, in the airport lounge, laughing, and he realized that the joke he’d told had been one that Ben had once told to him, on their way to the radio school one day, in the subway. Sam gave his father credit. He was glad he hadn’t remembered until now.

  He got out at Church Avenue and walked home, his hand in his pocket, on his knife. The store was already closed, Tidewater below, and Sam was surprised, looking at his watch, to see that it was past nine-thirty. The bus, caught in the traffic—all the crazy people who’d moved out to Long Island heading back into the city for Saturday night—had taken longer than he’d expected it would. In the apartment, Sam turned on the radio and sat down on his couch. He listened to some light music, and when the news came on he was not surprised to hear that the Knicks’ winning streak had been broken; they had lost to the Detroit Pistons, 110 to 98, and, hearing the score, Sam knew that there was nothing to do but laugh, and so he rested his head against the back of the couch and let himself go.

  10

  Sam had telephoned Mr. Sabatini on the day following Ben’s departure and had bet on the Knicks again. He took five points; the Knicks won by four. On the following day he had telephoned and bet again, this time on the Los Angeles Lakers. The Lakers had lost. Sam was not surprised. In fact, if he’d wanted to, he could have told Sabatini that the way to make a bundle now was to lay your money against whatever Sam Berman was picking. He continued—every day for the first three weeks he was alone—to bet, and to lose, and to shrug off his losses. It was all the same to him; he wasn’t, he knew, required to believe in any of it.

  He did, still, believe in some things—in things such as Ben’s absence and the fact that he’d read part of Tidewater’s story; he believed in the cartons of clothing he opened for Flo; he believed in the line of shoppers that waited outside the rummage shop on Saturdays; he believed in his knife; and he believed in the contraptions in Stella’s apartment—the pulleys and wheels that were rigged up to enable her to have use of her arms and hands for her work. She had telephoned him, on New Year’s Eve, while he was watching the finals of the Holiday Festival on TV, and he had gone to her apartment for the first time the following afternoon, and had stopped by twice since then. She was, like Flo, direct with him: “If I wouldn’t call on New Year’s Eve, why should I call some other time—you know what I mean?” She lived in a two-room apartment, smaller than his place, and—despite the presence of all the special devices which enabled her, in her words, to cope—he felt comfortable when he was there.

  “If I were you and you were me, I’d be fascinated by all these contraptions too, right?” she’d said, and had given Sam a tour of the apartment, moving her wheelchair by herself, ahead of him. Once she’d shown him how the pulleys worked (attached to wheels near the ceiling, they looked to Sam like elaborate versions of the wiring attached to dentist’s drills), Sam could see that she was telling the truth when she said that it wasn’t all that complicated or difficult. Still, he gave her credit. And he was, he admitted, fascinated by the machines—the silver cups she slipped under her elbows and forearms, the attachments she had to grab with her teeth, the way rollers and ballbearings had been installed in drawers and in kitchen and bathroom equipment—and he liked the easy way, once her arms had use of the pulleys, that she could handle things, in the kitchen, or at her desk. The system of pulleys and weights, she explained, enabled her arms to float freely, so that she needed to expend a minimum of energy—of muscle—to get things to move. Her arms, when they started working, looked to Sam like the arms of a marionette, flopping jerkily, and yet she showed Sam, at her desk, just how precisely she could work. She made a decent living, she explained, designing greeting cards and—Sam laughed with her when she showed him a sample of her other work—the backs of playing cards. “I knew we had something in common, Sam the Gambler,” she’d said.

&nb
sp; Next to her bed, beside her desk, at the stove, and next to the living room couch, she had buttons which connected her with two other apartments in her building: one buzz was for the apartment of a fourteen-year-old girl, Sandra, who helped her get dressed and undressed, morning and evening, and two buzzes were for the superintendent (who’d wired the system for her), if the girl wasn’t home, or if Stella was ever in trouble. “My mother comes by too,” Stella said. “Once a day. You try to stop her—I gave up.”

  Sam had questions, naturally, but he let them ride. For the time being it was enough that he had a place to go to when he felt like it, now that Dutch had flipped out on religion. He liked being with Stella, and he had, of course, asked himself why, but, since Ben had left, he also liked being around Tidewater. He hadn’t been to the man’s apartment yet, but when Tidewater sat in Sam’s room and droaned on, explaining things—about parts of his story or growing up with Ben—Sam felt at ease. The man had a good touch with words, and even when Sam wasn’t paying attention, he enjoyed having the sound of the voice in the room with him. Sometimes, he admitted, he figured things wrong—he had to force himself to remember that it had originally been the man’s silence which had riled him.

  Flo, too, had been very kind to him since Ben had left—and Sam had, as he’d promised himself, spent as much time with her as possible, listening to her talk with her clients, listening to her retell some of Ben’s stories, listening to her tell him how pleased she was—he was glad she didn’t stay closed-mouthed about it—about his new friendships with Stella and Tidewater.

  Sam enjoyed hearing other people talk. He liked being alone at night, watching television or listening to talk shows on the radio. He liked keeping his windows open, if it wasn’t too cold, and listening to the sounds from the street below. The noise of the city comforted him. Why live in a place like New York, he reasoned, if you didn’t like having sound around you. Sam liked the sound of the crowd at a basketball game, he liked the jabbering of the women in the rummage shop, he liked the sound of air-hammers and generators in the street. When he passed building construction sites, he would rest for a minute or two at the openings, listening to the noises that echoed inside. He liked the sounds of cars and sirens, portable radios and garbage trucks, and he enjoyed the screeching and deep rumbling of the subway. If he wanted silence, he knew, he could always go into Ben’s room, which he hadn’t touched since Ben had left.

  The brochure lay just where Ben had left it, on the desk, and Sam stopped to look at it sometimes on his way to or from the bathroom. He could hear Ben’s voice reciting the blurbs, and he could also hear, always, Tidewater’s thinner voice, telling Ben the truth: that he was going off to live in the graveyard before the graveyard. But Sam laughed; he figured Ben had probably used that line a dozen times by now, making it his own. His father would get by, there or here, and the fact that nobody—neither Sam, nor Flo, nor Tidewater—had heard from him yet didn’t mean anything. What could Ben say, after all: Having a wonderful time in the heartland of this famous California playground. Wish you were here. All residents must be ambulatory….

  On Sunday morning, three weeks and one day after Ben’s flight, Sam telephoned Mr. Sabatini, as he did every day.

  “This is Mr. Benjamin here.”

  “Ah, Mr. Benjamin,” Mr. Sabatini said, and there was, Sam could tell immediately, something different in Sabatini’s tone. “I have some good news for you, sweetheart. You don’t owe me anything anymore.”

  “Sure,” Sam said.

  “Yes. When you forgot your weekly appointment with my boy Willie yesterday, I decided it was time to let you off.” Sabatini paused, but Sam said nothing. He had a good idea of what was coming. “From now on you owe some friends of mine the money you owed me, all right? I’ve transferred your account. You pay them five singles a week until you’re back even, plus some interest—but they’ll be in touch with you about details.”

  “You’re a sport,” Sam said.

  “Believe me,” Mr. Sabatini said, “I’d like to keep your account, don’t you know that? You’ve been a good client for over six years—and I must say I’ve taken a personal interest in you. If it was up to me, Mr. Benjamin, I’d let you charge it, but my accountant says no. It’s a very hard year, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Money is tight.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Sam said, and tried to make his voice sound light, easy.

  “What I wanted to do was to use you as a business loss—but, again, my accountant wouldn’t let me. In this line of work, if I let my heart be my guide, where do you think I would be today? Remember, Mr. Sabatini sold apples in the thirties. That’s why—”

  “You talk too much,” Sam said. “Thanks for nothing.”

  “My friends will be seeing you. You’re a good boy, I can tell that—please, be careful. Do what they say. Do you hear me? I wouldn’t want to hear one day that…”

  Sam thought he heard passion in the familiar voice, but it meant nothing to him. “I look out for number one,” he said.

  “And give my best to your father, in his new life,” Mr. Sabatini said. “Good-bye and good luck—”

  “Don’t phone me again, you hear?” Sam heard his heart pumping; he hissed into the mouthpiece. “You goddamned—” Sam searched for a word.

  “Telephone you? But sweetheart, you telephoned me—don’t you know that? I never telephone anybody.”

  Sam hung up. Don’t bet what you don’t have—the first rule, and he’d gone against it. But if you don’t believe in any of it, then why, he asked himself, are you so upset? Sure. Answer that and win a trip to California. He drank a glass of milk and sat on his couch, adding up, for the first time, the amount he owed. He was glad at least that he hadn’t given Sabatini satisfaction there, by asking for the sum. There were the bets before Ben had left; there was the loan for Simon’s card game and Ben’s valise; there was the first three hundred on the Knicks the night Ben had left; and there were the bets every day since then for three weeks—Sam hadn’t needed to write them down: he could remember each bet, the score of each game; and he could figure the total in his head, with the interest: it came, exactly, to six thousand six hundred.

  Sam laughed. Six thousand six hundred dollars wasn’t, after all, the kind of figure someone in his situation could—the word was rich—afford to believe in. Good news was right. Sabatini would be off his back; there’d be no more telephone calls. Sam knew all about the kinds of guys he’d been transferred to—the things they’d try to do to get their money; the way they’d draw the noose tight; he could have thought it all out if he’d wanted to, and envisioned everything—but there was no point in thinking about things ahead of time, he told himself. Let the cards fall, that was all.

  He put his mackinaw on and left the apartment. Muriel stood in front of her door, as if she were guarding it. Sam put his keys in his pocket. “You wanna come with me?” he asked. “Maybe he’s got a story for you too.”

  Muriel’s eyes did not move. There was something in the soft way they stared at him that he liked—but those eyes had something of their mother’s glance in them. You had to watch out, he knew. Some of the biggest bastards and goons in the world had once been cute kids. He started down the stairs and it was only when he had gone halfway that he realized she was following him. He turned and watched her; she had one hand on the banister, while the other clutched a rag doll. She stepped carefully. Sam walked back up. “You got to stay home, kid,” he said. “It’s cold out and you’re not dressed.”

  She reached across her body with her right hand, squeezing her rag doll between two posts of the balcony, so that it waited on the landing of their floor; then she offered her free hand to Sam. He took it and tried to get her to walk upstairs with him, but she refused. Her grip was hard. “Look, I got to see a man about a—” He broke off, removed his hand. “You just stay here, see?” He walked down and away, quickly. “Hang loose,” he called.

  He turned to his right, at the bottom, around the staircase, and
entered the dark part of the corridor, where the light did not reach.

  “Hello, Sam.” The back door to the rummage shop opened. “I heard your steps. Come in a minute, dear.”

  “Sure, Flo,” Sam said, and entered behind her.

  Flo ran a hand across her forehead. “I’ve been working a little—getting things back in order after yesterday.” She smiled at him warmly. “Sundays are lonely for me.”

  “I’ll bet,” Sam said, then laughed with her at the figure of speech he had used.

  “Ben used to visit me sometimes on Sundays—we’d take walks.” She sat down, in an old red armchair. “I shouldn’t sound so wistful. Nobody ever promised me anything, as they say. We knew he’d stay out there—and I think we knew we wouldn’t hear from him.” She looked past him. “I must be keeping you. You have your coat on.”

  “I’m going to Stella’s,” Sam said. “But I got to see Tidewater first.”

  Flo’s eyes seemed to grow darker. “He’s been very busy lately,” she said. “I rarely see him anymore. He stays below.” “He’s okay,” Sam offered. “I mean—”

  Flo waved her hand at him, to be quiet, and her eyeglasses, hanging around her neck, bounced slightly on her bosom. She closed her eyes and, as she did rarely, looked her true age. “I’m tired.”

  “It’s the winter,” Sam said. “It gets to you. I mean, you can’t blame Ben for—”

  Sam fingered some silverware on a yellow Formica table. He wondered if Flo were thinking about her two children and her husband, and then he wondered why it was that, whenever he was around her, he thought of what her life had been. He was warm, but he didn’t want to take his coat off. He would just as soon have gone downstairs and gotten that over with, once and for all. It wasn’t that he was afraid—as he might have thought he would have been, if he’d asked himself about it previously; it was simply that, having decided to visit the man’s place after all the time they had been living in the building together, it might as well be sooner than later.