Sam's Legacy (43 page)

“Listen,” Sam said. “You study for me too, okay? I got to get going now.”

“Right, Ace,” Dutch said. He took his hand from his pocket, removed his glove, and offered his cold palm to Sam. Sam sighed, and shook Dutch's hand. “It's been real good talking with you again—we don't see enough of each other anymore. I mean—things change, right?—but we should keep in touch.”

“In the clutch, count on Dutch,” Sam said, and smiled.

“Sure, Ace,” Dutch said, and walked off toward Linden Boulevard. “Thanks.”

Sam turned to the left. He wondered what Dutch would have thought if he'd known about Stella, and he smiled, for he did know, despite everything, that if he'd wanted to he could have shared what was happening with Dutch. Still, it was better if nobody knew for a while, until things straightened out. Sam glanced over his shoulder and saw that Dutch was waiting at the corner, like a schoolkid, for the light to change. Sam could stop in at Steve's, get another cup of coffee, and then double back and head for Stella's—by then Dutch would have been far enough ahead of him. He didn't like rejecting Dutch because, when he thought about it, he knew that he could never have thought of sharing what was happening with the other guys: Herbie or Sid or Shimmy or Max or Nate. That would really be rich, Sam thought, entering Steve's candy store—Stella sitting around with all the other wives, talking about carpeted wastebaskets.

Sam squinted. The store was very warm inside. He tightened, knowing that his mind could, if he let it, imagine how the guys would treat him if he and Stella stayed together. He could, if he wanted to, hear the words each of them would say, but he didn't want to. He shivered, blinked—as if to clear his head. Why, he wondered, did he feel so angry?

He opened his mackinaw and sat down at the counter. He didn't see Steve. Two black girls were sitting to his left, eating sandwiches, at the far end, a transistor radio on the counter in front of them, blasting rock music. What Sam felt, he realized, was the anger he thought Stella would have felt—the fact that no matter how long they looked at her the others would never stop seeing her wheelchair and her floppy arms and her electric gizmos. She could joke about it until doomsday, but—hadn't Sam felt the same way, and wasn't that why he'd kept going to see her at first?—when you added things up, the fact of who she was, of her condition, would always come out on top. Sure. Stella was right to have set herself up the way she had, so that she needed almost nobody else—and who she needed, she paid. Sam breathed through his nostrils, heavily, feeling what Stella would have felt on a Saturday night at Herbie's house.

A woman—nice-looking, about his own age—looked down at him. “What'll it be?” she asked.

“Just some coffee,” Sam said.

The woman nodded. She seemed, somehow, embarrassed to be serving Sam. “You must be Barbara,” Sam said. “I'm Sam—Sam Berman. I live up the street.”

Her eyes showed pleasure. “Oh,” she said. “Oh yes. Steve's mentioned you—you're the one whose father went to live in California.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “That's me.”

Barbara poured his coffee. “Milk?”

Sam nodded. “Where's Steve—taking a day off?”

Barbara shook her head and glanced toward the two black girls. “No,” she said. “I thought you would have heard. He's in the hospital.”

“Hey,” Sam said, seeing tears in the girl's eyes. “I'm sorry I pried—I was just making conversation, if you know what I mean.”

She breathed in deeply. “It's all right. I could have kept the store closed, but it gives me something to do. Steve telephones and gives me directions, and I telephone when I have a question—my father had a luncheonette, in Crown Heights, so I know how to do most things.”

“Well, tell him I hope he gets out soon.” Sam stirred his coffee. “I mean, I hope it's nothing serious.”

“They beat him up,” Barbara said, and her head moved up and down, as if to confirm the truth of her statement. “I'm only glad he didn't reach for his gun or they might have done worse. They beat him up terribly, Sam. They beat him up.”

“Hey, take it easy now,” Sam said, and rose from his chair, his toes pushing off from the silver footholds to reach across the counter. He wanted to console her, to take her head on his shoulder.

“He would have given them the money—they had no reason. He would have given them the money.”

“Sure, he's a good guy—Steve's okay,” Sam said. “But you calm down.”

“I'm all right,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. She looked to her right, but the girls were not paying attention. “Do you want to know what happened?”

“Sure,” Sam said. “I mean, if you feel like it—Steve and I knew each other since public school. My father and his father were friends.”

“One of them stabbed him in the eye.”

Sam's right hand flashed upward. “What—?”

“Yes. There are a lot of bandages now, and Steve is very brave, as always, but I don't know how it will affect him after. His father—”

“You don't got to tell me anymore,” Sam said, and he shuddered, imagining the blade of a knife slicing through his own eye.

“Steve won't let me tell his father—I guess because his father warned him to get out before this, with the way the neighborhood's been changing.”

“Sure,” Sam said. “We talked about it, Steve and me.”

“That's why I'm here—to keep myself busy. My mother's watching the children. I close in the afternoons so I can go visit him in the hospital.”

Sam thought of telling her to cry if she wanted to. “Listen,” he said instead. “You tell Steve I stopped by, and that—which place is he in?—I'll try to go over and visit him, if he likes visitors, I mean. Some guys would rather be left to themselves. I know that.”

Barbara nodded. “I'll tell him,” she said. “He's at Maimonides. The emergency people took him to Kings County, but my mother knew a specialist and we had him transferred.” She looked past Sam. “I'm taking up your time.”

“I'm really sorry to hear that it happened,” Sam said. “I hope it's not—I mean: do you have hospitalization?”

“Oh yes.”

“That's good,” Sam said. He could see, from the corner of his eye, that one of the girls was moving her rear end to the music—lifting it from the stool and turning it slowly in circles. “It must have been some guys who were really out of it—nobody from the neighborhood, I mean who knew Steve, would have done it. I'd bet on that.”

Barbara moved her shoulders slightly, to indicate her ignorance. “He won't say.”

“Is he gonna press charges—if they get the guys?”

“He has to—because of the insurance.”

Sam put a quarter down on the counter, and when Barbara had given him his change he stood. “I'll stop by tomorrow—and you let me know what he said. If he wants visitors, I'll go over sometime.” Sam moved his shoulders, in the same way, he realized, that Barbara had. “It's no trouble—I mean, I got a lot of free time.”

Sam walked along Church Avenue, past the Bel-Air supermarket, the Granada Theater. Shimmy's wife was named Barbara also—it was how he had remembered the name of Steve's wife. He could hear Dutch when they'd been in high school, talking about how much he'd gotten from her, about how he'd dry-humped her on the kitchen floor. There was no point in admitting it to Dutch, but he could, in fact, understand why a guy might want to do what he was doing—start being interested in religion at a certain point in his life. Sam turned the corner at Rogers Avenue and ducked his head down. He should have worn a hat. It was colder than he'd imagined, and if it snowed—which was doubtful—it would become impossible. He had no desire to go to
shul
, or to sit around studying with a bunch of old men, but he did have a desire, he knew, to know about things he could never know about. Most of all, he would have liked to have known what his father's childhood had been like—what it had been like then, growing up with Andy and his grandfather. The story Ben had told at the dinner that last night came into Sam's mind often, especially, he realized, since he'd been seeing Stella, and what he wondered the most about—the things he wished he could have seen—were things physical: the clothes his father had worn, the food he'd eaten, the plates he'd eaten it on, the books he'd carried to school, the hat he'd worn in winter, the stores he'd gone into, what his relatives had looked like, what the apartment they'd lived in had been like, what was where in each room, and when.

It was difficult—he couldn't quite make it, despite the way his mind worked—to imagine his father as a boy playing in the streets. Sam could conjure up the picture of a small boy's body—throwing snowballs, or playing hide-and-seek, or carrying packages home from the store—but what he could not see was the face on that body. He closed his eyes against the cold, and in the blackness he tried to see his father before he had been his father, and though he could visualize a small boy holding onto his grandfather's hand (Sam pictured them at the Battery, near the entrance for the Staten Island ferry), when his eyes got to the boy's face, Sam drew a blank. He could not imagine his father's face as a young face, he could not imagine that it had ever not had things on its mind. Sure. On a day like this, he reasoned, he saw the sense to what Ben had done, leaving.

He looked up, and above the sidewalk he could see Ben under the palm trees, wearing a pink golf cap on his head.
Sunshine and hot competition!
He had an urge to return home, to telephone long distance, to ask him to guess what the temperature was in Brooklyn…but if Ben had wanted to be in touch he would have been in touch.
Our greatest asset is our fine year-round weather
, he heard Ben tell him. A week or two before, he would have tightened at the sound of his father's voice, inside his head, but now he didn't mind. Stella made the difference, he supposed. Having her place to go to when he wanted—and feeling comfortable there—made it seem all right that he hadn't made any use of Ben's room, that he'd left it the way it had been. The other room had always been enough for him, anyway.

He spent the afternoon in Stella's living room, watching the game while Stella, in her bedroom, worked on some cards. She would, from time to time, wheel into his room and recite the poems to him, and they would laugh. When the game was over, they ate supper together and talked. Sam told her about Dutch's visit, and about what his own life had been like before he'd moved in with Ben—when he and Dutch had traveled together, playing cards and following the horses. Stella tried to get him to play poker with her, but Sam refused. “I only play for money,” he said. “It's best that way.”

When the dishes were in the sink, she got out of her chair and they sat together on her couch, watching television and talking about what had happened the night before. Sam stayed to hear the sports on the eleven o'clock news. The Knicks had won again, against the San Francisco Warriors, and while the announcer read off the high scorers (Stallworth was not among them), Sam wondered exactly how far from San Francisco Ben's place was. Stella told him that her physical therapist would be there first thing in the morning, at eight o'clock, and Sam said he would go—did she want him to help her get into bed? She said she would manage. Sam thought, before he left, of telling her about what had happened to Steve, but it was too late. He didn't want to give her bad dreams. It was something that, if he were going to mention it, he should have mentioned when he'd first arrived.

He kissed her goodnight and left, huddled inside his coat, a wool scarf—his mother had sent it to him from the Virgin Islands seven or eight years before—tight around his throat. Stella had been very quiet, he realized as he walked home—and this pleased him. He liked the way she joked with him—the way she had of putting things—but he liked it that she followed her own advice most of the time and wasn't always saying things simply to fill the silence.

Sam enjoyed walking around the old neighborhood at night, when nobody else was out: it was usually like this when he came home from the Garden, or from card games, when there were any. Quieter after midnight, since the buses only ran once an hour then. He walked up Linden Boulevard, smiling. Maybe, shuttling back and forth from his place to Stella's, and being able to choose between them—to stay in whichever one he wanted, when he wanted—maybe that was what they meant by peripheral privacy.

Sam turned the corner at Nostrand, onto his own block, and found that he was thinking of what Tidewater had said Rube Foster had once said to him, about the difference between a player who could stay in for the long pull, and one who was only a flash in the pan. Sam remembered how, as a kid, he had become attached to new guys before the season would start—from what the sportswriters would say about them. He could still remember all the names—guys who were going to be the new Bob Fellers or Joe DiMaggios. Now that Sam had seen the sportswriters sucking around dressing rooms and training camps, he resented what they had once done to him—the way they had preyed upon his willingness to believe. Half of them were rummies, though—and Sam had taken a few of their paychecks the time he and Dutch had stayed at Vero Beach together, for the Dodgers' spring training.

He crossed the street and saw that there were no lights on in the back of the rummage shop. That was fine with him. What he had thought of asking Tidewater, though, was this: what do you see in me? If the guy had known Babe Ruth and all those other guys, and if the rest of his story was the truth…

It was all the same to Sam: if what had happened had really happened, or if the old guy had imagined it all. And that included, Sam told himself, the business about the room below the cellar. Sam didn't have to believe that either. He figured Tidewater had found something there, but who knew what it had really been. Sam breathed in. The city air seemed cleaner to him in cold weather. “Hey Sam—!” He stopped, turned, saw nothing. “Over here! Quick!”