Sam's Legacy

by Jay Neugeboren

  What could any of it mean, Sam could have asked if he’d wanted to; not just because his father claimed he didn’t believe, which was an old story, but because the last time it had occurred to Ben to go through all the Friday night rituals had been at least twenty years before, and Sam couldn’t remember what the occasion had been then. Sam said nothing, though; he let his father go through the routine. What did it cost him, after all?

  At the head of the small table, his back to the front door, Ben was leaning on his elbow, sideways, his head close to Tidewater. His eyes, small and sleepy from too much wine, were almost closed. “Tell me, Mason,” he was saying, “what kind of privacy, do you suppose, is peripheral?”

  Tidewater leaned back, his chair rocking on two legs. “Ah Ben,” he said. “I see what you mean—exactly what you mean.”

  “When I’m gone, my son will be here.”

  “I mean to speak with him,” Tidewater said, but he did not look Sam’s way.

  “His silence,” Ben said, and switched to his other elbow, breathing on Sam. “What do you make of it? Is it because—” Ben stopped, seemingly confused; he touched a napkin to his forehead, blotting, and sat back. “My desire, as I prepare to leave you? What it has always been: to die in my sleep at the age of ninety-eight, with my grandchildren and great grandchildren standing around me and weeping.” He wiped his hand across his face, from the forehead down. “I might have considered remarrying, my son, and providing you with a mother,” his eyes looked straight at Flo, “but I was afraid, you see, that I might catch the disease also, and be—” He looked around. “Wine does this to me,” he said, then smiled at Sam. “I’m entitled to lapses also, don’t you think?” Then his voice shifted, and his eyes, avoiding Tidewater’s, fixed on Marion: “She may look like your sister, but she has V. D.”

  Flo was behind Ben’s chair. “You cut that out, Ben, do you hear?” she said. In the darkness, Sam could see anger in her eyes. Marion looked at the table.

  “No, no,” Ben said. “I was just remembering—my most famous line. I recorded it for Armed Forces Radio, shortly after V. E. Day. To protect our boys.” Ben turned his head upward, looking into Flo’s face. She caressed his cheek with her hand.

  “Ben,” she said, softly. “Benjamin.”

  “She may look like your sister, but she has V. D.”

  Sam felt warm, watching Flo bend down and rest her arms on his father’s shoulders. Muscular dystrophy was not, of course, contagious, yet Sam felt there was something to what Ben had said, though he wouldn’t have admitted it aloud, even for a joke. “I had a friend in college,” Flo was saying, “who always told me how lucky I was, to know I would marry a Jewish man. Poor Irene. She had a theory that Jewish men were more considerate because, as children, they’d been trained to worship their mothers.”

  As always when he listened to Flo’s voice, Sam felt himself relaxing, growing sleepy. But Ben’s voice was harsh. “And why do you tell us this tonight?” he asked.

  Flo put her cheek next to Ben’s head, on Sam’s side of the table. “Why don’t you stay, Ben? Why don’t you cancel your trip—at the least, why don’t you wait until Andy—”

  “He’s lingering,” Ben said, and laughed sharply. “Those are his own words. ‘I’m lingering, Ben. I’m lingering.’” Ben paused, looked at Sam. “No. I’ll go now. It will be better for everybody.”

  “Not for me,” Flo said.

  “Nor me,” Tidewater added, and moved his head so that Sam thought the man was going to press his face against Ben’s other cheek. “But you know that.”

  “And you, Marion?” Ben asked.

  “Yes,” Marion said. “I’d like you to stay.”

  “But notice,” Ben said, drawing away from Flo and raising a teaspoon in his hand, pointing the handle at Sam, “how silent my son remains. Our children are our immortality, yes?—and mine is like stone. If I’d had four sons, he would have been the fourth—do you know what I mean? In the Haggadah for Passover…”

  Flo stepped back, looked at Sam. “You shouldn’t,” she said to Ben. She came around, behind Sam’s chair, and Sam felt her hands, tightening on his arms. “You have no right.”

  Ben turned to Tidewater. “You agree, don’t you?”

  Tidewater looked across the table at Sam, a reflection from the candlelight flashing from a corner of his left eye, then lowered his head. Sam felt Flo’s fingers on his shoulders. Would she sense the slight tightening there? Tidewater looked up, his nostrils flaring. “We have a rare thing in this building, and you are a fool to throw it away, Ben Berman. That we are here—you and Sam, and Flo and Marion, and myself for reasons too—too what—?” He stopped suddenly, winced—Sam could feel the blow that had just struck the man—and, his eyes pressed closed, he reached across and grabbed Ben’s hand in his own. “That we found one another after all the years apart. You are the only man who knew me before—” His voice was suddenly passionate, bitter: “It is all so stupid, Ben. Don’t you see that? Don’t you see that you should stay here?” He looked up at the others, embarrassed, and drew his hand from Ben’s. “I do not mean to offend, but we have a rare thing, all of us living and working in one place, all—” Tidewater closed his eyes, unable to continue.

  “A neighborhood in transition is what I call it,” Ben offered, smiling.

  Sam felt Flo’s fingernails dig into his shoulder muscles. “Stop!” she said. “Oh stop!”

  Ben hesitated, looked at Tidewater’s face, then spoke. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There were four sons: one was wise, one was wicked, one was simple, and one was too young to—as the translation goes—have the ability to inquire.” Sam could feel, as Tidewater’s eyes opened, looking nowhere, what his father must have been remembering, and he knew he didn’t need it. But Ben’s voice was dry, he recited the story without drama, and though he looked at Sam with affection, when he came to the simple son’s question, as to—the words were perfect—what it was all about, it was the wicked son Sam had always remembered: the son who asks what you signify by all these things, and thus, by the use of the word “you” excludes himself from the community.

  When Ben was done, Flo sat down, next to Tidewater. “Would you, tonight, tell us about your father?” she asked Ben. “Then—your presents. We each have something for you.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” Ben said. “Ask Samela here. He, at least, made my father smile. My father was a funny man, yes? His advice to my son: ‘If you drink a malted every day for ninety-six years, you’ll live to be very old.’”

  Sam remembered, but he didn’t laugh. “Please,” Flo said. “Be serious at last. You owe us at least that, don’t you? To be serious. If it weren’t—I wouldn’t press you so.”

  “It’s nothing,” Ben said, rubbing his eyes.

  “Tell her the story,” Tidewater said, and his voice was forceful, commanding. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. I’ve told you.”

  “Ashamed?” Ben lifted his head and laughed. “It was his decision, not mine.” Ben drank some wine, looked around the table. “But all right. Why not?” He kept his eyes on Sam. “Sunshine and hot competition, yes?” He laughed to himself, and then began: “My father’s dream, of course, was to bring all his sons to America. He arrived here in 1909 with myself and Andy, who was already old enough to go to work, and did. My father worked as a baker, for a distant uncle, leaving Andy to watch me when Poppa would leave for work at midnight.” He blinked. “I don’t remember much. Your grandmother he never spoke of. Andy knows nothing either. It was a forbidden subject. Maybe my other two brothers knew something, but by this time—they were older than Andy—they have doubtless taken whatever story was there to sleep with them.”

  Sam looked past his father, at the candles burning down in the window, at the windows across the street; he thought of people walking outside, below, where the melted snow had now turned to deadly layers of rippled ice. He didn’t need to be out on a night like this. Sam expected nothing. That was his number one rule no
w—and if, in whatever his father would tell, there were some truth about Ben, and about Ben’s father, then he figured he’d be ahead of the game. He was curious—he admitted that to himself—and there was something now in Ben’s tone which made him less suspicious than he would have been ordinarily. The sarcasm, for one thing, was gone—and the deep tones were softer, more mellow.

  “All right. It’s nothing more than this, as Mason knows. Andy went to work in the garment district, as a cutter; he saved, he had a few ideas, he found a man with money to back him—you know the rest. I worked for him in a haberdashery store on Lexington Avenue. In those days, there were still wealthy Jews living in Harlem.” Tidewater nodded. “Poppa and Andy wanted me—planned for me—to go to law school, and Andy had it arranged, but it wasn’t for me. Like my son, I wanted a kind of freedom, yes? I didn’t want to be bound to—” Ben waved his hands, in small circles, helplessly. “To what, after all?” He nodded several times, to himself. “A job, I suppose. A boss. I thought, with my voice, that I wanted to be an actor, and Andy had contacts in the Yiddish theater, which was thriving then, but I couldn’t, you see, speak Yiddish. Poppa had seen to that. He wanted us to be Americans and so, though he spoke to us in Yiddish, we were forbidden to reply to him in that language. I could, then, understand the language, but when I went to see the man Andy had spoken to, and he gave me something to read, I was of course lost.

  “I tried hanging around theatrical agents’ offices. I went to Atlantic City—but for the American stage, well—it’s obvious, isn’t it?—I had the voice of a leading man, and the body, even before I was twenty—the small body of an old Shylock. Radio was nowhere at the time; it was only later, after Roosevelt, that I saw its possibilities for me, but by then…” His voice was firm, and he stopped, started again, without any shift in tone. “That is, of course, all beside the point. Here. The story that Mason refers to: my father’s dream to bring his elder sons to America—Simon and Reuben—and the determination he brought to this dream. He put all his savings to that purpose, and he must have worked very hard. The war came, and after the war, the immigration laws changed, there were people who had to be paid off here, and now there were problems on the other side. Their village, which was in Galicia, where I was born, became part of Russia, a town near the Polish border named Riminov, and—after the war and the revolution—there were problems on their side too. Not all letters came through, my father spent his time seeing people, he found a man in New York named Harry Epstein, a flashy lawyer who had international connections and who said, for a price, that he could arrange things at both ends.

  “We had been in America fourteen years before my father had the money together. Fourteen years… What does that signify, fourteen years?” Ben nodded to himself. “He refused to take from Andy, and he refused to take from me. I was, by then, to tide me over only, I thought, driving a taxi, and it had cost enough of Andy’s money to pay off the right people there also. Andy knew some of the big Jewish gangsters. Things were arranged, I did all right, and I too had offered to give my father the money. But he said no and he went off, night after night, to bake his bread and twist his challahs. We were to save our money to buy ourselves houses, and for our marriages.”

  Ben stopped, looked at Tidewater. “It made me think sometimes, during those years of waiting and saving, that he didn’t love me as much as he loved Simon and Reuben. One of my earliest memories, in fact—this I can tell—is of wishing I could take a boat back to Europe, so that it would be me he was working for and dreaming of day after day. Does that sound strange?” He stopped. “Does it?”

  Nobody answered. “Then one morning,” Ben continued, “he came home before I had left for the day—usually we missed each other—and he handed me an envelope. ‘Here is the money in dollars.’ Those were his words. I was not to open the envelope, I was not to take any passengers until I had delivered the money to Harry Epstein. ‘Be careful, Benya,’ he said to me, and I went out.

  “I didn’t look in the envelope, but I didn’t go right to Harry Epstein either. I telephoned Andy who through his contacts had long before established that Harry Epstein was a fraud of frauds—a bastard of bastards whom the worms should feast on eternally!” Ben rose up in his chair, his eyes wide, and he slammed his hand on the table, palm down, rattling the glasses. He leaned forward. “But tell me, Samela, what could I have done? Andy had tried to reason with Poppa, and had met—like you—a stone wall. Ha! Go talk to the wall! That is an expression in Yiddish. So tell me, what was I to do? You know about odds, you are an expert—for every ten people trying to get to America, perhaps two made it on their own, or perhaps even, give the man his due, Harry Epstein did what anyone could have done. Those are percentages, no? Answer me that.”

  Sam said nothing, and Ben sighed, waved off any commentary. “We were four brothers,” he said, “but the wise one must have been one of the two left on the other side.

  “I drove to Andy’s place of business and showed him the envelope. I wanted proof. ‘Have you heard of Lipsky?’ he asked, and I nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’

  “Andy telephoned first, and then we got into my taxi. I met the man Lipsky then who was supposed to be involved with Murder Incorporated, which did him so much good that during a private pogrom two years later he was killed by another Jewish gangster, a cousin of his named Feigenbaum. ‘At least they kept it in the family,’ Andy said to me at the time. He was always a joker.” Ben looked up. “All right. In those days Lipsky was the biggest of the biggest. I spare you the theatrics. Men with guns under their armpits escorted us into his apartment on Park Avenue, a girl who looked like Clara Bow and was dressed for horseback riding sat there sipping something from a glass, and Lipsky himself sat in a big easy chair like a sultan, with somebody manicuring his fingernails. His walls were covered with books.

  “‘First tell me, young man,’ I can still hear him saying. ‘What do you think of Spinoza?’ I did not know who he was talking about—a rival gangster? I wondered—and he was disappointed.” Ben stopped, closed his eyes. “The few details are for Sam, so he can know how they used to, as Mason would say, order things, yes?” Ben laughed, then leaned forward. Sam was glad that the room was dark. “Andy started to make a big thing about how grateful he was to the great Lipsky, but Lipsky told him ‘shush,’ and asked him what his business was. ‘For my brother,’ Andy says. ‘He has my father’s money, to get our two older brothers over here from Galicia—in Russia now. He’s supposed to give it to Harry Epstein. Tell him—’

  “Lipsky looked at his fingernails. ‘Epstein? Epstein is a crumb. A shonde,’ Lipsky declared. ‘See?’ Andy said to me. Lipsky thought for a minute. ‘You seem like good boys. You love your father, and that is the most important thing in the world. Chavayd es ahavicha v’es amechah. The fifth commandment and the most important one. I will give you boys a tip. If you can get someone to take your money—it’s not my line of business—the Yankees will win the pennant again. Forget about your brothers. Nobody can do anything now. But if I hear that things have changed, you will hear from me. Now boys, good-bye.’

  “It was, of course, as if God had spoken. I could not doubt Lipsky’s word on Epstein, and what were we to do with Poppa’s money? We couldn’t return it to him, and Andy could never have let Poppa know that he had contacts, for his business, with a man like Lipsky, who my father would have said was a curse on the Jews. We drove to a fancy restaurant whose name I don’t remember, where they had to loan me a jacket and tie, and when Andy asked me what I thought of Lipsky’s tip, I said, ‘It sounds good to me.’ The year was 1924.”

  Ben looked at Sam, and Sam felt his heart clench. Ben knew he would know, but, at the least, Sam would not give him the satisfaction of saying anything out loud. He waited; he saw, from the corner of his eye, that Tidewater was smiling knowingly, and that, next to him, Flo’s face was grief-stricken, her color, even in the dark room, gray.

  “As Sam could tell you as well as I—an
d Mason better than us both—the Yankees won pennants, consecutively, from 1921 to 1923, and again, from 1926 through 1928.” Ben wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. “Happily, Mr. Epstein was found dead a year and a half later, in the trunk of his car.” Ben’s eyes narrowed. “And my father—your grandfather, Sam—he told me then the words I leave with you: ‘Take, Benya! Take!’” Ben sat back, his mouth open, as if he were laughing, but with no sound coming out. “He cursed Epstein for having been murdered, and he cursed my mother, and my mother’s father, and he walked downstairs, with me following him, and in the hot sun—it was then August—he spat seven times—I counted. Then, ‘America,’ he said.

  “He sent me back upstairs and he himself went to synagogue. It was not, I imagine, for Epstein that he said kaddish.” Ben smiled, let his voice drop lower. “The moral of the story, my friends? My father never went to work again. Never. Not for a single hour. If we wanted to, he said, Andy and I could support him.” Ben’s smile was very broad. “All right?” he asked Flo.

  “The story changes nothing,” she said. “You should stay here. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Don’t use that word!” Ben’s voice rose. “I said before, it was his decision, don’t you see?”

  “Exactly,” Tidewater said. “We see exactly. That’s why—”