Sam's Legacy (34 page)

“Peripheral,” Sam said. “Whatever that means.”

“Whatever that means,” Ben repeated, and laughed easily. “I'm almost done now—if you could come into the bedroom for a minute, I'd like to show you a few things.”

Sam followed his father into the room. Under the window, to the right of the desk, a trunk was open, packed two-thirds of the way. It was filled with boxes, manila envelopes, old newspapers—Ben showed Sam the cartons that were packed, ready for shipping, if Ben decided not to return to Brooklyn. The trunk was to be sent also, Railway Express. Ben's
tephillin
bag, Sam saw, was lying on the bed, with a
siddur
next to it, but Sam didn't comment. He followed his father to the desk, where Ben showed him the piece of paper with his address—for forwarding mail—and the envelope of papers that might, someday, concern Sam. Sam remained silent. “The brochure is yours,” Ben said. “I thought you might like to have it, to—”

He stopped, shrugged, gestured to Sam to follow him into the bathroom. Ben opened the medicine chest above the sink. “I'm leaving you a few things—specials—that it doesn't pay to take with me: toothpaste, shaving cream…” Neither of them laughed. Ben closed the medicine chest, walked from the bathroom. “Sit down,” he said to Sam. “On the bed—please.” Sam sat, away from the
tephillin
bag, and waited. “Forget the specials business—I know all about it: it would make a good one-liner for an old radio routine—stealing to keep up with inflation—but I have my reasons, and—” He broke off, approached Sam. “Before I leave, there is one thing I want to talk to you about—just an idea, maybe as cockeyed as the last one we went in together on, but I'd like to have you hear me out. When I had to sell my medallion and give up the taxi, I think this idea was there then.” Ben sat on the bed, pushed some manila envelopes and some undershirts to one side. “The trouble you're in—whatever it is—I think I can take care of it. I'd like to square accounts, to—”

“Look,” Sam said. “I told you before, I take care of myself. You—”

“No,” Ben said, putting his hand on top of his son's. “You don't understand. It's not like that. This is a—a what?—a dream of mine, let's call it. But things won't be so tight for me, and I've been figuring. I'll stay with Andy, of course, while he needs me—but when he's gone, I can sell the apartment, don't you see? I won't have to stay there—and I won't have to come back here. I know this is in the future, and forget about what I say with my usual sarcasm now and then, but what would you think if, when the time comes, we take off together, you and me.” Ben paused. “We could buy a housetrailer.”

Sam had nothing to say. Ben waited two or three seconds, then stood. “It was just a thought,” he said, and turned away from Sam, toward the window, then continued turning in a slow circle, until he was facing Sam again, looking past him. “But I hear how flat it sounds now that the words are out. And I shouldn't have built your hopes up—the money, to help you out, isn't mine until Andy is gone, and he insists on lingering. You'll take care of shipping the cartons if I write—there's not much. It's good weather there, and if I need more clothing—for the active social life, yes?—I can buy. Andy isn't my height, or I'd—” Ben's eyes moved downward, to Sam's feet, then traveled upward. “Tell me, Samela—where did you come from?”

Sam tensed: he wanted, suddenly, to ask about Ben's father, and he sensed that Ben knew it. Sam felt pressure behind his eyes. It was bright outside—the sun melting the snow—but it wasn't, Sam knew, the glare that was bothering his eyes. He didn't like mysteries, that was all; the questions didn't come often, and he didn't dwell on them, but when they were there, they nagged at him, and if it were possible—if it didn't cost too much—it always made life easier to know a few things while you had the chance. Once Ben was gone there were things Sam would never know: things his grandfather had said and done, things about the village in Europe they'd all come from, things about Ben's own childhood and about Andy, the business about the girl in the taxi and about Sam's mother. Sure, he thought, if you started thinking this way—Tidewater had been right about that—there'd be no end: you could spend forever trying to get people to tell you about what you were like during those times you didn't, yourself, remember clearly. Sam had his usual advantage here—he remembered more than he wanted to—but there were still some blurred passages, some blind spots. Maybe, he thought, Ben's schemes were the equivalent of his own lapses. Maybe they were what filled up…“What,” he found himself asking, “was that business between you and Marion last night?”

“Business?”

“You once told me some story about her, but I wasn't paying attention.” Sam stood and walked past his father. “Forget it—I was just curious. If you need any help—”

“I'd forgotten,” Ben said. He arranged things in the open trunk, lifted a stack of papers from his desk and placed them in the space he'd made. “But of all the possible—why should you want to know this?”

“I'm a bird,” Sam said.

“Ah,” Ben replied, and smiled at his son. “All right. I'll keep working, though, yes?” Sam nodded, and Ben continued, easily. “It's very simple—the kind of story that we could have kept going for our listeners for months. Marion's husband—she's still married, you know, but he's on the road, a salesman—it seems that, before their marriage, Marion became pregnant and—his career at the time, her indecision about marriage—they had the pregnancy terminated. Her word.”

Ben stopped, as if the story were over. “So?” Sam said. “It happens.”

Ben nodded, bent over his trunk, his head below the top part, so that suddenly Sam was frightened that it might fall, clamping on his father's neck. “But—and here is the soap opera part—a few years after they were married they decided that they wanted a child, and they have been trying ever since. With your imagination, I don't doubt that you can see what even a single month—the daily obsessions—would have been like.” Ben lifted his head abruptly, nearly grazing it on the lid of the trunk, where the hasp was. “They've tried different things, with each other, with”—Ben looked his son in the eye, then went on quickly—“others…with doctors, with tests—the entire catalog. Sometimes they're—”

“I was just curious,” Sam said.

“But why—out of the blue—why that question, Sam? Aren't there other things that you'd like to know?” Ben's voice became sharper. “Now that the time has come for us to part, aren't there, in your mysterious brain, some questions simmering—don't you, too, my son, have your magnificent obsession?”

“Sure,” Sam said, surprised that he was ready for his father. “I was wondering when—I mean, I have your address, right? If your two other brothers show up in New York, I'll let you know.”

Ben's eyes widened, and Sam felt himself laughing, even though he could hear no sound coming from his mouth. “I see what you mean,” Ben said. Sam leaned against the doorway, smiling at his father. Ben's head bobbed up and down. “Our fathers wouldn't—Mason's and mine—teach us the languages we should have known. That he learned the Latin sentences by heart, without ever learning to read and translate… It's something which moves me, which—”

“Look,” Sam said, annoyed, “if I can help, say so, otherwise I'm gonna go downstairs, stretch my legs. You need anything?”

Ben hesitated, and Sam could have predicted the possible wisecracks his father could have made, but he saw also that his father was wary now, that he would not be so foolish as to say what he knew Sam would know he was going to say. Sam was not surprised, then, when Ben turned back to his packing with the single word, “Nothing.”

Sam put on his green mackinaw and left the apartment. The line of Saturday morning shoppers stretched almost to the corner. At the curb, the snow, black-edged, was piled high between cars, but the sidewalks were clear and dark—wet from the melting snow. Sam didn't look into the rummage shop. He turned left. Nate the Numbers Man was standing at the corner, wearing sunglasses, talking to two women. If he'd wanted to, he knew, he could have said something about Andy—about the guy needing Ben's money, but being too proud to ask for it straight out. That was the real reason for having Ben come out there, and it surprised Sam to realize that his father, as smart as he was, didn't suspect. Sure. Ben had his blind spots too.

Sam crossed the street, lifting his head slightly to take in more sun. There was something lovely about the neighborhood on a morning like this, he thought—when the sun was out, and the sidewalks were wet, and people were heading out, to do whatever they did. Some girls were jumping rope on Martense Street, a few feet in from the corner. On the left side of the street, the wood-frame houses, wet—red and green and gray, with borders of snow on their pitched roofs—looked as if they'd been freshly painted. A football fell at Sam's feet. He picked it up, looked down the street where a young black kid was waiting with open arms. Sam lifted the ball, to toss it back, but it was slick from the puddles it had rolled through, and he couldn't get a good grip.

The kid, Sam could see, was eyeing him now, wondering if he was going to run off with it. Sam liked that. He cradled the ball in his right palm, his hand a few inches above the street; he skipped forward, on his right foot, his back bent over, let the ball drop, and laid into it with the instep of his right shoe. He remembered not to look up, and from the deep-sounding thud of the ball against his foot, he knew he'd connected. Even with his mackinaw restraining him, his foot went high and almost touched his left hand, which was stretched forward, for balance, parallel to the ground, and when he'd stayed frozen for a split-second in his follow-through, and then had let his breath out and looked up, he saw the ball still moving, point up, in a perfect spiral, high in the air, higher than the wood-frame buildings. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and continued along Nostrand Avenue, the picture of the kids in his mind—circling between the cars as they waited for the ball to come down. He wouldn't have been surprised if one of them would come up to him someday to ask if he'd ever played pro ball. It paid to stay in shape.

At Church Avenue, he crossed the street again and went into Steve's candy store. Ben's story about Marion hadn't surprised him. Things like that could run in families, he knew, in ways you wouldn't always suspect. Flo having had her kids, Marion still—the word they'd always used in Hebrew School—barren; it was, if you stopped to think about it, really the same thing with the two of them, only from opposite directions.

“How's tricks, Sam?” Steve asked.

“Okay,” Sam said, and took a seat at the counter. A black man, in a carpenter's blue and white striped overalls, was drinking a cup of coffee three stools to Sam's left. “Quiet at this hour, huh?”

“Oh yeah,” Steve said, his hands moving under the counter, cutting open a pullman loaf of white bread, stacking the slices. “Up till eight o'clock—when they're on their way to work—you keep going pretty fast, but it quiets down till about ten, ten-thirty, when the kids come in. You have to keep your eye on them—I mean, it's not the money, if you want the truth. They can take a couple of pieces of candy or some comic books—we all did that—but it's something else.” He winked. “Like, they were scared to death of my father, and I feel I—well, you know—they shouldn't figure his son was a patsy is all, so I growl at them.”

“I'll have a glass of milk,” Sam said, “and a chocolate doughnut.”

“Sure,” Steve said. He lifted a stainless steel lid, below counter level, and took a container of milk from inside. “You know what I mean, though?”

“But they got your old man a few times, didn't they?” Sam said. “Not the little kids, but—”

“Sure,” Steve said. “My mother wouldn't let him work finally, even after he was given a clean bill of health.” He gave Sam his glass of milk, and the doughnut on a plate. “I keep a gun.”

Sam shook his head sideways. “It won't help—they know what they're gonna do and you don't. The advantage is always with the guy who makes the first move in a situation like that.”

“But they know I have it,” Steve said. “Anyway, I get along with the locals. Unless a guy was really in a fix, he'd go somewhere else first. Things are changing, sure, but when I add up what's happened—in a year's time, say—it's not that much. A day like this, the neighborhood doesn't even look as if it's too different since we were kids.”

Sam nodded. “I'm not moving out,” he said, then added quickly, “but Ben is. He flies to California tonight—we have to be at the airport about six. He'll get supper on the plane, I guess.”

“Sure,” Steve said. “For a guy his age, it's the smart thing—take the snow last week, for example—when a guy his age slips and breaks a bone, it's not the same as it is for us. He's putting years on his life, moving out there.”

“He says it's just for a visit—to see his brother, who's been sick—but we both know he's going to stay.”

“I wrote to my old man, you know, after the last time you were in, and told him about your father, but he hasn't answered yet.” Steve walked along the counter, took the money the black man had left, cleared the table, lifted some cold cuts out of a compartment, and wiped a piece of butcher block with a towel. “Hey,” he said, coming back. “I knew I had something on my mind for you. An old friend of yours—Stein, Shimmy Stein—was in here the other day, and he asked if I'd seen you.”

“He knows where I live,” Sam said.

“I told him you stop by now and then, that was all.” Steve leaned on the counter, close to Sam. “He's making a pile, but it's not the kind of money I'd want in my pocket. I know some of the guys he has to deal with. He could be in bad trouble, if—”