Sam's Legacy

by Jay Neugeboren

  “So?” Herbie asked, facing them. “What do you think?”

  “Great stuff,” Dutch said. “You got it made, Herbie. The life of Riley—”

  “It’s something,” Sam offered, when Herbie’s eyes caught his, and he could see, in front of him, ten couples—all past sixty-five years of age—arms on one another’s shoulders, the women’s hair done up, their wrinkles hidden under creams and powders. You may dance the buckles off your shoes, whatever your dance is….

  Herbie moved off, Dutch kidding him about married life, about his pot belly, but Sid detained Sam by stepping slightly in front of him. “Listen, Sammy, you look like—if you don’t mind my saying so—as if something’s bothering you.”

  “I got things on my mind,” Sam said. He heard Stella’s voice, speaking to Sid, and it made him smile. Why do people always have to say things is what I want to know….

  The still photo from the brochure—a white-haired woman in the foreground with diamond earrings and a diamond necklace above her low-cut pink gown—suddenly came to life, the way pictures did sometimes at the beginnings of movies. Sam saw the old people dancing around Herbie’s basement. “Look, Sam—I’ll tell you the truth, with old friends like us, we shouldn’t stand on ceremonies. I won’t press you, but…” Sam thought that Sid’s eyes were watering. “If I can do anything—if you want to talk about it—well—just know that I’m available, any time, night or day, okay?”

  “Sure,” Sam said. “That’s white of you, Sid. I mean—”

  Sid put up a hand, to stop Sam. “None of that shit with me, you jerk—but, like my wife’s girl says, ‘anything I can do to resist you, Mr. Adlerstein, you let me know.’”

  Sam smiled. He wanted to let Sid know that he appreciated the offer, that he knew—the truth—that any of the guys would have given the shirts off their backs for him if he’d asked them. Sure. Sam felt his Adam’s apple bob. He saw Sid lying back on the bed in his T-shirt, the telephone receiver cradled between his shoulder and his ear; he remembered listening afterward while Sid told him all about what one of the other guys—Sid wouldn’t say which one—had been telling him about what had happened, something between the guy and his sister. “I’ll let you know, Sid,” he said, and felt Sid’s fingers tighten along his arm-muscle. “Sure. You’d be the first.”

  Sid patted Sam on the stomach. “I don’t know how you do it, Ace—how you keep in shape.” Sid motioned with his head, and the two of them walked, toward the staircase.

  Sam glanced at the room with the boiler and the furnace. He wondered if Sid ever thought about his own grandfather, he wondered what Sid would make of his thoughts—of the business of the wooden dolls, of how he sometimes saw himself, Ben, and his grandfather in reverse order…. “Flo said to say hello,” he said.

  “Flo. Flo—she’s terrific,” Sid said, as they made their way up the staircase. “Flo. That girl is terrific—still running a store in a neighborhood like that. She has a lot of what we call ego-strength.”

  Sam flicked the light switch. “In here!” he heard Herbie calling. “It’s eating time, Sam, Sid—in the dining room.”

  Sid looked into Sam’s eyes. “I have a good life, Sam,” he said. “I really do.” Sam looked down at Sid’s balding head, at the dark spots along his cheeks, where the bristles of hair were beginning to come back in. “Sometimes, of course, I envy guys like you and Dutch—the freedom you have, the girls you can shtup—but I have a good life.” Sam didn’t know why Sid was talking this way, and yet, when he thought about it, it was the way Sid had always been; it had been, he thought, this way of sharing his life—this sincerity—which had made everybody love him so much, which had made him, as others put it, such a sweet guy. “I love my work—and I’m good at it. Believe me, Sammy, I’ve helped a lot of youngsters get out of some tough jams. You wouldn’t believe the things they do nowadays—it’s nothing like when we were growing up. But they’re terrific youngsters. And my wife—Susie—you should see her with our kids. She’s a terrific wife….” Sam found that he couldn’t listen to Sid. Sure. He imagined that Sid would probably have found the library book more interesting than Tidewater’s story.

  There were, Sam knew, exactly sixteen major league baseball players earning over a hundred grand a year now—it was a fact he found himself wanting to offer Sid, for conversation, but he knew that Sid might have found it strange, Sam simply introducing a subject like that. It made you think, though. Things changed. Sam remembered when he’d thought being a pro ballplayer would be a great life because there was a minimum yearly salary of five grand. Now, in addition to the sixteen, there were close to a hundred ballplayers earning over fifty thousand a year. Sid’s arm was around Sam’s shoulder. They entered the dining room, from the hallway, and Sam saw that the other guys were already seated around the table. The girls, as always, had eaten first. Ruth had put out the usual spread: plates of lox and pickled herring and cream cheese and butter, baskets of bagels and rolls and bialys, smoked white fish and matjes herring, carp and sliced tomatoes, platters of cookies and rugelech and egg salad. “But you know something I realized,” Sid said, as they sat down, next to each other, between Shimmy and Dutch. “There’s something missing out here—our kids have a terrific life, but they don’t have what we had: for example, I can’t send Elliott to the corner to get anything. Do you see what I mean? The kids out here, in developments like ours, they grow up without ever knowing what it is to run down to the corner for an errand.”

  “I see what you mean,” Sam said, and he thought of a guy he’d seen walking along Church Avenue a few days before, sporting a mink jump suit. He remembered the twin El Dorados. He saw all the guys sitting around a table in Garfield’s: Cohen, Stein, Mandel, Adlerstein, Zelenko, Gotbaum, and Berman. Strange how, when they’d been younger, they’d called one another by their last names or nicknames—he’d always been Berman, or Sam the Man, or Sam Junior—and now, in their thirties, they’d taken to using first names. Sid reached in front of Sam for a seeded roll, split it with his hands, began spreading cream cheese on it. Sam took a piece of rye bread and watched the others work, buttering their toasted bagels, laying the pieces of lox on their rolls, filling their mouths. He laughed to himself. That was the quick way to get out of shape. Sure. He’d still be wheeling and dealing long after the rest of them were in their graves.

  All eyes were on Max, who was telling one of his jokes: “…so Rastus lies there in the gutter, poor Rastus, his lip torn, blood streaming from his ears, his face a pulp, his knife in his hand—while Rufus staggers off, heading up to the second floor where Ella Mae, who they’ve fought over, is looking out her window, her eyes rolling, her bazookas dancing up and down—and all the shvartzehs look down at Rastus, poor Rastus, wondering why he has such a huge grin across his beaten face…” Was this the guy, Sam wondered, who had been the best dancer in their high school? Sam saw Max, a crowd of guys and girls around him while he moved his feet wildly, beautifully. And yet—the crazy thing—with all his rhythm, with the endlessly subtle moves of his body and feet and hands, he’d been a lousy athlete, totally uncoordinated. “…‘Because,’ Rastus said, looking up at the crowd from the gutter, showing them his knife. ‘Wait till he get upstairs with Ella Mae—I got that mother’s balls right here in my back pocket—!’”

  Shimmy laughed, gagged on a piece of his sandwich, and Sam saw the seeds from a sliced tomato trickle down his chin. The other guys roared with laughter. Max was working them up. Sam watched their mouths. “You know what nine out of ten Cadillac owners say?” Max asked. Shimmy rubbed the tears from his eyes. The other guys were still laughing, eating, rocking back and forth. Max lowered his voice. “De Cadillac am de best car on de road.”

  “You told that fifteen years ago,” Nate said, and he didn’t laugh.

  “And the tenth one,” Max went on, wrinkling his nose, eyes and mouth together, giving his best Yiddish inflection: “Hit’s ha very good car….”

  Shimmy waved him off, and swayed ag
ainst Sam’s shoulder. “Say dere, Kingfish,” he said, pointing a piece of bagel at Max. It was like old times, Sam thought, Shimmy and Max trading jokes. “Did you hear about the homosexual who had a hysterectomy?”

  “Stop!” Max cried. “You’re getting personal.”

  “They took out all his teeth,” Shimmy said. There was a moment of silence and then the laughter exploded again. Sam found himself laughing also, but he wasn’t sure if it was at the joke, or at the sight of the other six guys’ faces, at their laughter.

  “I’m plotzing already!” Herbie cried, trying to get into the act. “Wait till I tell Ruthie that one—”

  The jokes continued, Ruthie came in and put down a lemon meringue pie, a coffee cake, a platter of butter cookies, and a pot of coffee. Herbie pinched her, the guys laughed. She wore black toreador stretch pants—all the wives seemed to be wearing slacks, Sam noticed, except for Lillian, Max’s wife, who wore a mini-skirt. That figured. Sam remembered her, in high school, with her cone-shaped brassieres. He’d gotten what he’d wanted off her, he told himself. He took a slice of lemon meringue pie. She’d always had the hots for him. If he’d dry-humped her once, he’d dry-humped her a hundred times. Max could have his private house and his fancy sports clothes and his filthy jokes; Sam knew—and Max knew too—which one of them had taken sloppy seconds. When Max had been social chairman of their club, Sam remembered, driving out to Belle Harbor and Manhattan Beach to get them socials with the rich Jewish girls, he’d called himself Jonathan Avant the Third.

  Sam saw Lillian in the doorway to the kitchen, helping Ruth. With all the make-up she wore now, and the frosted hair—part silver and part a fake red color—you wouldn’t even know who you were doing it with. Sam looked at Dutch. Dutch glanced toward Lillian, back at Sam, then winked. Sam smiled. Sure. Dutch was okay. In the train, coming out, he shouldn’t have been so hard on the guy. Maybe, with time, Dutch would come around—the two of them could ride the rails together again. If anything ever opened up, that was.

  “Watch this,” Max said, then called into the kitchen. “Lillian—tell the guys—who’s Cazzie Russell?”

  Lillian looked in, smiled. “Oh Max,” she sighed. “He’s the seventh man on the Knicks.” She saw the guys smiling at her, and handed them the punch line. “Everybody knows that.”

  The guys laughed. Sam looked at the gold chains hanging from her neck in bunches, past her navel. A gold safety pin held her skirt together at the side. “And—watch this—what makes them so tough this year?” Max asked.

  “Their defense, sweetie—Red Holzman has worked miracles with them.”

  Max beamed. “Get this,” he said, to the table. “And who’s Sandy Koufax?”

  Lillian waved him off. “Silly—everybody knows that—he’s a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.”

  She winked, opened her mouth, wide—in imitation, Sam supposed, of Marilyn Monroe—and turned around, shaking her butt back into the kitchen. “Terrific,” Shimmy said. “You got a terrific girl there, Max.” He paused. “You still have fifty-one per cent of the shares, right?”

  “Tell me,” Max asked Shimmy, “for a hobby, do you still sniff bicycle seats?”

  The guys groaned. Sid touched Sam on the arm. “Do you play the market?” he asked. Max and Shimmy continued to rank one another out.

  “No,” Sam said.

  “Well, if you did, now’s the time to buy,” Sid said. “You can get some good prices on solid stocks.”

  “I don’t agree,” Herbie said. “It looks bad to me. With money tight, everybody I know is crying. Thank God, me and Ruthie, we don’t have to sell—we can wait till the market comes back up—but a lot of people are getting hurt.”

  “Of course,” Sid said. “If you live over your head. But I look at the market as an investment—not as a gamble.” He turned to Sam. “I know that goes against your grain, Sammy, but I’ll tell you something, every morning when I pick up the Times and turn to the stock page and look at mine, I get a genuine thrill—just like following a team, if you know what I mean.”

  “Well, without us pricks,” Shimmy was saying to Max. “Where would you cocksuckers be—?”

  “Keeping your savings in the bank,” Sid said. “What with inflation—you have to have your head examined—”

  Sam began laughing at that, and Shimmy patted him on the back. “You’re terrific, Sammy—and you too, Dutch—don’t you think, guys, we should give them medals for staying behind in Brooklyn and guarding the schoolyard!”

  “Cut it out,” Dutch said.

  “But I’ll bet they pick up a lot of”—Max paused—“of local color.”

  “I’m serious,” Shimmy said. “I mean, I have to go back there now, for business. I know. It takes a kind of—bravery, I’d call it—not to move out.” The table was quiet. “Sure,” Shimmy continued, seriously. “All of us—we do okay, but we run away from the problems. Dutch and Sammy, they’re sticking it out—”

  “A lot you know,” Sam said, and stood up.

  “Sure,” Nate said. “I’m in midtown a lot. They think they own the city now. They’re always bumping into you, daring you to say something. And believe me, I tell them where to get off.” Sam was surprised; Nate rarely spoke so much. “Sure,” Nate went on. “You know how I’d take care of the problem—with one big bomb, that’s how.”

  Shimmy shrugged, spread his hands, palms up. “Nathan,” he said, admonishing his friend. “And what would that do to my property?”

  “I get your point,” Nate said. “Yeah. You got the right idea, Shimmy—take what you can from them, and run. Because that’s just what they’d do to us. Ask Sam—I’ll bet he knows.”

  Sam shrugged. “They leave me alone,” he said.

  “Sam’s father—Ben—he calls it a neighborhood in transition,” Dutch offered.

  Sam glared at Dutch, turned, left the room. “If they’re so undernourished,” he heard Max saying, “then how come they grow so big is what I want to know—”

  Sam walked down the corridor, into the bedroom, went into the bathroom. He’d eaten more than he’d wanted to. As he shook himself off, he watched his face in the mirror of the medicine chest. Carpeted wastebaskets—that took brains!

  He stepped back, zipped his fly, unlocked the door. “I thought I saw you come this way.” Susie was sitting on the bed. Her slacks, bell-bottomed, were made out of a gold mesh material. Sid had met her at college, out of town, at Syracuse University, but she was from Brooklyn too, he knew—had gone to Tilden High School.

  “How’s tricks?” Sam asked.

  “Listen,” she said, standing, drawing in on a filter-tipped cigarette and letting the smoke trail upward, toward the hanging lantern. “I didn’t want Sid to know…” She looked straight into Sam’s eyes, and Sam returned the look. She wasn’t a world-beater, but she was all right. Sam didn’t mind plain girls. She had a sweet smile and a good body. Her ass was a little heavy, but that, as they said, came in handy sometimes. “Would you take a number of a girl—a friend—if I gave it to you?”

  “Sure,” Sam said.

  Susie laughed, touched Sam’s forearm with her hand. The room seemed to be glowing, in a soft red color, from the bedspread. “I know you’d take it, but would you use it?”

  Sam shrugged. “I got things on my mind now. I couldn’t promise, Susie. Why not try Dutch?”

  “He’s your friend, isn’t he?” She rubbed her cigarette out in a black ashtray, next to the bed. “I mean, your best friend.”

  “I guess,” Sam said.

  “How can I put it so that you won’t—” She licked her upper lip. “From what Sid says, Dutch has his—well, his ups and his downs.”

  “Things are rough all over,” Sam said, and looked toward the door.

  “Here,” Susie said, and, from under the wide black leather belt that held her tunic tight at her waist, she pulled a folded piece of paper, and handed it to Sam. He slipped it into his shirt pocket without looking at it. “I’ll leave it to you. One thing
you should know, though—then come, we wouldn’t want to be caught here, or everyone would start asking why—is that Gail, she was a friend from college, was married. In fact, her divorce has gone through recently. I thought you should know.”

  “Sure,” Sam said. “I can understand something like that.”

  “She’s a tough girl, though,” Susie said. “And cute.” She took Sam’s arm. The sleeve of her tunic, made of a flimsy silk material, with a sheen to it, slid sideways against the muscle of his arm. “I think you two would hit it off. I have a feeling…”

  Sam smelled Susie’s perfume. He wondered how often Sid gave it to her. Her hair, at least, was its natural color: a kind of auburn. “You got to take some chances,” Sam said.

  Susie stopped, just outside the doorway, and looked up at him, her eyes sparkling. “That’s what you do, isn’t it?” she asked. The corridor was dark. Sam heard voices—the guys laughing, their wives chattering. “I mean, it must be an exciting life.” Here we go again, Sam thought. Sure. All these bitches, hustling their asses through high school and college to marry dentists and doctors and guys like Shimmy and Herbie, and then they still creamed all over you because they thought you weren’t like that. A lot they knew. He should introduce them all to Willie the Lump.

  “Call me, all right? Tell me how it goes. Promise me that…” He felt the points of her breasts graze his chest. He needed air. “You’ll like Gail—”

  “I didn’t promise anything,” Sam said. Sam the Lamb, he thought, that was his real name. “You shouldn’t sell Dutch short,” he added.

  “I didn’t mean to—” Susie stepped back.

  “It’s okay,” Sam said, and walked away, feeling better. “Don’t sweat it, right? Take care of your kids.”

  He heard her laughter, soft. She probably thought that was rich too, the way he talked. Sure. Sam Berman Jr., king of the jock-sniffers. He sat down at the dining room table, watched the guys drinking their coffee. Nate’s face was red. Sid was talking softly, explaining things about Negroes, about a Negro girl from his school whom he had helped. Sure, Sam thought, but while you’re out dripping tears all over the ghettos, you’d better keep a lock on your bedroom. Nate was getting angrier and angrier. Sid sat in his chair, cradling a pipe in the palm of his hand. “I’ll tell you this,” Nate said, pointing a finger. The guy, Sam could tell, still had plenty of power; under his shirt, above his pot belly, Sam could see that his chest was broad. Sam looked at Nate’s neck. It was still wide, coming down directly from under his ears, without any indentation. The guy had been a bulvan—third-team All-City, and that on sheer hustle; there were a lot of guys with better shots and moves, but Nate would have gone through a brick wall if the coach had asked him to. Sam gave him credit. “My aunts and uncles—my mother’s brothers and sisters—they didn’t die in Hitler’s gas chambers so that a bunch of dumb shvartzehs could knife my wife in the park, do you hear?”