Sam's Legacy

by Jay Neugeboren

  Sam felt far away. “What’s on your mind?” he asked. “Come on.”

  “Nothing—I just wanted to see how you’re getting along since Ben left. That’s all. Momma asks about him a lot, how he likes it out there.”

  “He hasn’t been in touch,” Sam said.

  Dutch stood and walked to the window. “Okay. Sure—I’ll lay it on the line, Ace—” He turned back. “The word is out that you’re in deep, with Sabatini. I wanted you to know that if I could help—in the clutch, count on Dutch, you know what I mean?” Dutch looked at the floor, embarrassed. “I mean, I got a little bread stashed, from before I quit—you can make a touch on Dutch, okay? We don’t have to be cagey with each other.” Dutch moved away from the window. “You think it over, and—anytime—you let me know.” He leaned down and put his hands on Sam’s shoulders. “I know what it’s like when they get mean, Ace—remember that. I know. If I can help spare you.”

  “They won’t touch me,” Sam said, remembering what Tidewater had once said to him. “I got protection.” He laughed. “Sure. I’m Sam the Man.”

  Dutch punched him in the shoulder. “That’s my boy,” he said. “Enough said, right? If you need me, you know where to come. Since I’ve been going to shul again we got a little extra power on our side, if you know what I mean. In the mornings, when I put on my tephillin, I’ll think of you, okay?”

  Sam waved him off. “You’re bats,” he said, and smiled. “You don’t believe a word of it.”

  “That’s how much you know,” Dutch said. “We’re in the same boat, you and me—right, Sam?” Sam shrugged. Dutch’s voice was intense, passionate. “Those are your own words—they were, that is, when we used to travel together, right? You and me. But listen—we are in the same boat, Sam, and that’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m in shul three mornings a week. We can’t just be ourselves. Don’t you feel that sometimes? We have to be part of something that doesn’t die when we die—I know you believe that, Sam, though you’ve never said it. If everything begins and ends with just our body, then what’s the point, right? What’s it all for?”

  “You can have kids,” Sam replied simply.

  He looked up and found that Dutch was smiling at him. “That’s something—sure,” Dutch said, his eyes sparkling. “But not enough. Animals copulate and propagate.” Dutch licked his lips. “What makes us different, Sam? ‘Be thou righteous,’ God said to the first Jew, Abraham, and he said no more. But every Jew bears the weight of that command. ‘Who is the righteous man?’ the rabbis ask, and they reply: ‘He who doeth righteous deeds.’ Don’t you see, Ace? We Jews believe in this world. None of that adultery-in-the-mind jazz for us—it’s your life that matters, what you make of it; it’s the fact that you’re a Jew, whether you like it or not, and—what I was getting at—that does put you in the same boat, even you. We were studying with Rabbi Zanvel last week—on Saturday afternoon—and we read a passage which made me think of you. Listen. In the Talmud they tell the following story: In a boat at sea one of the men begins to bore a hole in the bottom—for what reason, what personal despair, we know not—but his comrades admonish him. ‘It’s my life,’ he replies. ‘I am only boring a hole under my own seat.’”

  Dutch sat back against the sofa, and Sam wanted to reach out a hand, to help his friend. “Don’t you get it?” Dutch said. “We read that portion of the Talmud so that I could come to help you, Sam. It was no accident. I know it. You do understand, don’t you?”

  Sam shrugged, and crossed one leg over the other. Then something clicked. He smiled: “Sounds boring to me,” he said.

  Dutch groaned. “Be serious,” he said, sitting forward. “Save that stuff for your old man. Listen to me: ‘Yes,’ his comrades say, ‘but when the sea rushes in we will all be drowned.’ Don’t you see? ‘And so it is with Israel,’ the rabbis comment. ‘It’s weal or its woe is in the hands of every individual Jew.’” Dutch paused. “I believe there was a reason we studied that passage just before I heard about you and Sabatini. Things like that don’t just happen.”

  “I don’t buy it,” Sam said, and then, before Dutch could say anything else, he stood and continued: “Anyway, I don’t want to kick you out but I got something in the works for this afternoon.”

  “We’re in the same boat,” Dutch said again, and he stood also, reciting the line as if he were in a trance. “You and me.”

  “I look out for number one,” Sam said. “If everybody did the same, we’d all do okay.” He stopped, considered what he’d said. “I mean, those who want to go around helping others—like Flo—that’s okay for them. But there are a lot of birds, if you want the truth, who, if I found them next to me, I’d heave them right over the side.”

  Dutch smiled. “Then think of it another way.” He picked up his coat. “If I was in trouble, wouldn’t you be there? Haven’t you—you remember the times—haven’t you been there to bail me out of a lot of tight spots?”

  Sam decided. “Christ—you’re in trouble now, Dutch,” he said. “But I don’t have the time. I’m sorry.”

  Sam saw Dutch’s eyes move swiftly, from side to side. “Me?—I haven’t been near a game or a bookie for months now. You—”

  Sam shook his head. “It’s all the same. All that stuff you gave me going out to Herbie’s, about why you quit. And this rabbi jazz—you don’t make sense, Dutch, if you want the truth.” Sam sighed. “I mean, some of it makes sense, by itself—but playing all those games against yourself, and—I know you, Dutch, that’s all. With your mother never going out and—” Sam opened the closet door and took out his mackinaw. “If I had the time, maybe we could—I don’t know. I mean, what good would words do?” Sam faced his friend, slipped his arms into the sleeves of his coat. “Anyway, you’ve been through stuff like this before. You’ll—” He paused, nodded. “You’ll probably pull out of it yourself, right?”

  “Probably?—what do you mean probably?” Dutch’s body seemed to sag. He put his coat on. “I said it before—you’re the one who should’ve been the rabbi.” They walked onto the landing, and Sam locked the door. Muriel was sitting in front of her door, sucking her thumb and holding a blanket across her lap. “It’s not like you think, Ace—you should come to shul some time on a Saturday afternoon, with the other men. It does me a lot of good—picks me up, if you know what I mean—arguing with these guys about things.”

  “You were always a good arguer.”

  Muriel slid backward, closer to her door. Sam waved to her, but Muriel did not respond. Her sandy curls were tangled. “It’s not like you think, Ace—” They opened the door to the outside and Dutch shuddered as the cold air hit him. “Sure, I got things on my mind—I couldn’t hide that from you—but it’s true why I stopped by. About Sabatini, I mean. My own stuff can wait.”

  Sam stood with Dutch in the doorway. Dutch’s eyes were tearing, from the cold. “Sure,” Sam said. “I believe you, Dutch.”

  “What I like about it is the idea of taking a break from life—I mean, the idea that you stop once a week and rest, that you take a break and think a little about what it’s all about. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “It makes sense.”

  “But it makes more than sense,” Dutch went on. “Because we—the Jewish people—we’ve been doing it, stopping this way to think about life once a week, for over two thousand years. My father and my father’s father—”

  “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 woul
d 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 quit
e 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.”