Sam's Legacy (15 page)

The girl looked at me with a frankness I found startling. She held an open Bible, in her hands, and her face—a high yellow color—despite the day's heat and the proper black dress she wore, covering all but that face, seemed so very cool. “Father would have agreed,” Paul said to me, as he ushered us into Mr. Tanner's carriage. I thought of Jack Henry, the third of eleven children, whose father, originally from Tennessee, had been a Baptist minister, and I felt sad, as I often would, because Jack himself had never married, and had had no children. I looked back, and the girl's eyes moved to mine: she carried herself beautifully, her back arched, shoulders straight, chin lifted. “Not the least of your troubles,” Paul said to me, “is that you have defamed the Sabbath.” He laughed, mimicking what was written on one placard, but I saw no reason to laugh with him. I think he was made too smart, at the time, by his revered college education, by the Mencken-loving dandy it brought out in him. I preferred him as he had been behind the plate at Dexter Park, rocking slowly and talking to the batter: “Li'l brother goin' to blow it by you, Cap'n. Li'l brother
throws
that ball!”

I was furious, and all the way home, in Mr. Tanner's elegant carriage, I fumed silently—against Johnson, against Whitaker, against Paul, against my father, against myself. I contained caverns of rage then, and though the anger in me would later become deeper, there was something wonderful about the ability of my young body to contain so much sheer rage. Then I acted; now I consider those actions—and while I do, hearing Johnson's laugh or Paul's voice, I can feel that younger body tighten again, and I find that I have no desire to deny the hunger I feel to be back in it. Our passions may grow more intense as we grow older, but this is so, at least in part, because we act upon them less and less.

My mother was not in her music room when I entered our home. Instead, I found her on the ground in back of the house, her skirt spread in a circle under her as she weeded her flowerbed. She looked at me, smiling, and seemed to know that I had lost and that I did not wish to talk about it. I kissed her on the lips and asked if I could bring her something cool to drink. Was the sun not too hot for her? My brothers took her by the arms and sat her down in a metal lawn chair, under the shade of a tall oak which grew to the left of the house. I thought of the girl holding the Bible and I would have been willing to have had my mother's arms around me, to have rested my hot head on her lap, even with my brothers there. Her eyes were most loving toward me—yet, with my brothers present she offered only those eyes. She had prepared something to refresh us, if I would get it from the ice box. She knew how hot and weary we would be. I went to the kitchen and brought the pitcher of lemonade, with glasses, back with me on a tray. My brothers had removed their hats and jackets and were laughing, though at what I never knew. I poured their drinks for them. My mother's eyes were closed, and she did not watch me. I had not, until I drank my first glass, realized how thirsty I had been, and when I had, unmindful of the others, downed two more glasses straightaway, I found that my family was staring at me, silently. Then they laughed, and mother went inside to prepare supper. “Flowers and lemonade,” she said, smiling at me. “Oh Mason! Flowers and lemonade.”

Feeling, as I write, the quiet of that garden again, I must wonder if I was mad to have felt the way I did feel when I was on the playing field. The peace of the Sabbath reigned in our home, yet it could do nothing for me. I allowed my mother to serve me, I allowed myself to rest, to think of nothing—still, the peace I felt as I threw a baseball was the peace I sought, and cherished.

I wonder: when was I more mad—then, when the phantoms of my mind drove me to love and to hate, to desire and to deny with a passion that was beyond words? Or now, when I find names for what passed then, when I try to fix with words those things which had no names, those events and feelings which never did have, or could have had, beginnings or ends?

II

Birds

 

 

He replied: “All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing.”

—William Blake,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

5

In a daze, Sam descended the staircase, walked around the first-floor landing, and entered the store. He heard the sound of his father's laughter. “Ah, Mason,” he heard Ben say. Flo saw Sam, took his hand. In the front room, Ben and Mason sat on wooden chairs, facing one another, holding paper cups. Tidewater looked at Sam, steadily, and Sam returned the man's gaze.

“We were just talking about you,” Ben said. “The three of us were planning a trip.”

Sam's own eyes were steady, he knew, and Tidewater would sense nothing. Still, things were blurred—he felt the way he did sometimes, coming in from the snow to a warm room. Pinpoints of light, like stars, flickered in front of him.

“Will you come?” Flo asked, pressing his hand, and handing him a cup.

“We intend to visit—before your father leaves us—some childhood scenes. It was at my request,” Tidewater said. “We'd like to see the houses we grew up in, the fields we played in.”

“Sure,” Sam said. “I've just been reading your story.”

“Good,” Ben said, and leaned forward, toward Tidewater. “Didn't I tell you, Mason? My son Sam Junior is the sports expert.”

“Don't be like that,” Flo said, sitting down between Tidewater and Ben. Sam saw Tidewater's eyes enlarge, in anger, and then close. In high school, Sam remembered, on his team jackets he'd always had
Sam Jr
. stitched in. He remembered the jacket from their synagogue team: red and yellow, a satin material, with the initials of the synagogue on the back—CST—and, on the front, where the left breast pocket would have been, a Star of David embroidered over a felt emblem of a basketball. His name had been stitched in on the right side. Ben's middle name was Sam also—for Samson. His own Sam was for Samuel. They'd been named for different grandfathers, he for his mother's father, whom he'd never known, Ben for his father's father, plowed under somewhere in Poland. Benjamin Samson Berman. Samuel Paul Berman.

“Think of it this way,” Ben had said, when Sam was a boy—it was a game they'd played. “We're both Sams, but I'm Samson.”

“No,” Sam would reply. “I'm Sam's son.”

“Then you're my son, if you're Sam's son.”

“But you're Samson. That makes you my son.” And around and around they'd go, he recalled, like Abbott and Costello. At the Linden Theater, on Nostrand Avenue, when Ben had taken him to see
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
, Sam had been petrified, he'd tried to hide his face in his father's shoulder. Ben had laughed, stroked his son's head. “Some Samson,” he had heard Ben whispering. “Who sheared your locks that you can't look at the screen? It's just an actor, my little Sam—like your father sometimes, on the radio—just an actor, a man with make-up on.…”

“A penny for your thoughts,” Flo said to him.

“What odds?” Sam asked, and the others laughed. The store was quiet, without shoppers. Sam saw that Tidewater was staring at him, smiling. Now that he knew about the guy, he had no reason to doubt it. It had always interested him, in fact, about athletes: the difference between what they were as players, and what they were in their private lives. Some of them—like Namath or Stallworth—were the same on and off the field, but there was no rule that said it had to be that way. Some of the greatest players could be the biggest deadbeats; and some of the quietest guys, guys who didn't even look like athletes, had been the greatest players, the born leaders. In truth, the only thing that bothered him about Tidewater's story, now that he had it, was that he felt—especially with the guy's eyes fixed on him—that it had been written somehow for him. Sam sipped his coffee and kept his mouth shut. He could see, from the wrinkles at the corners of his father's eyes, that Ben was flying, enjoying himself.

“You will come with us,” Ben said. “Won't you, sonny boy? You'll join our excursion?” Ben showed his left palm to the others. “I can still feel the sting, Mason—that one time I let you pitch to me.” He sat back. “But I said nothing at the time. That was always my trouble, you see. I could take it, but I couldn't dish it out. That's why, with my wife, with the school, with…”

“Poor Ben,” Flo said, and, with the others, Sam found himself laughing.

“All right, all right,” Ben said. “But notice my son's silence. Has he answered my question?”

“Sure,” Sam said, and he saw Tidewater smile. “I'll come.”

“Tell Sam,” Ben continued, as if his son had not spoken, “what you were telling us before—about your speed. Then he'll understand. Or”—Ben paused—“has Sam already read that story?”

“No,” Tidewater said, and he seemed, suddenly, embarrassed. “But it's a story he might have heard before, assigned to another.”

“Please,” Flo said.

Sure, Sam thought, hearing the man begin to speak: Negro players had had it rough. Sam had seen Satchel Paige on television, talking about his barnstorming days, and he remembered what they'd done to Jackie Robinson when he'd been the first Negro player in the Major Leagues—siccing black cats after him, making him room by himself, making him promise that he'd never talk back to anybody, even when they called him nigger. But Tidewater, Sam thought, and laughed at the idea, had had two strikes against him before he'd started: the first, his being white, and the second, his being black.

“When it was said of me that my fast ball moved so fast that you could not see it,” Tidewater was saying, “the figurative expression became literal. Sometimes, in the late innings of a game, with darkness descending, I would call my catcher to the mound, prolonging the game as visibility decreased; I would slip the ball to him, return to the mound without it, then go through the motions of firing an invisible ball—my catcher would crack the pocket of his glove with his fist, the batter would swing at nothing, and the catcher would return the ball, which he had hidden, all the while, under his chest protector.”

“Ah,” Ben sighed, leaning back, his small eyes closed. Then his finger pointed at his son and his voice rose. “Do you see now, Sam, why I…” But he seemed, all at once, to lose energy. He sighed again. “It's a parable,” he said. “I've always considered it a parable.”

Flo nodded. The bell above the front door jingled, and a Negro woman, one of the regulars, carrying a bundle in her arms—a small baby, Sam saw—entered. “Sometimes,” Flo said, “life can go by so fast that—”

“But as a story—as a story first,” Ben said, interrupting Flo. He shifted, and his eyes twinkled. “What I mean to say is, it's incom-parable.”

“Ah Ben,” Tidewater said, pleased. “I should have seen it coming. You're too quick for me.”

Ben stood, placed a hand on Sam's shoulder. He spoke softly, his head lowered. Sam watched Flo, looking at the woman's baby. “I'd like to pay you back,” Ben said. “You know that, Sam. It meant—it still means—a good deal to me. Especially now.”

“Forget it,” Sam said. Flo was holding the baby in front of Sam. Was she, he wondered, thinking of what she had once told him? If it had been him, he knew that every time he saw a baby—any baby—he would have thought of the children he hadn't had—or rather, of those he'd had and then had had taken away.

“Isn't he beautiful?” Flo asked.

“Sure,” Sam said. “He's an ace.”

“Don't put me on, son,” the woman said. “But put a kiss on his cheek, for good luck.”

Flo nodded and Sam did what she wanted; he bent over, felt the blood rush to his head, and touched his lips to the baby's skin, on the forehead. “You have a good boy there,” the woman said to Ben. “Like my oldest. Most of them now, they run off and leave you first chance.”

“He's a good boy,” Ben said.

Flo carried the baby to Ben, and then to Tidewater, and they each kissed it. Mrs. Scofield—Sam remembered her name, she was one of Flo's favorites—sat on a chair, and Flo returned the baby to her. She laughed at something Ben said, and talked about what had happened in the hospital. Was the new baby her seventh? eighth? her ninth? Sam couldn't keep count. She would bring the entire family in with her sometimes, to outfit them, as she put it. Her oldest son played basketball for Erasmus and would be going somewhere in the Midwest on a scholarship the following year. She did okay—he didn't know the exact figure—but the checks she got from the city for all the kids, from the government for her first husband (killed in Korea)… Even with the money rolling in, though, having an armful of kids was no picnic. Sam thought of all the diapers, filled with mush—and if the kid hurt somewhere and started bawling and you couldn't figure out where he hurt…

Mrs. Scofield laughed and, without interrupting her story, she slipped the baby's head under her blouse and put his mouth onto her breast. Sam watched the baby's mouth, swallowing the nipple. It seemed impossible that he could take so much in. The breast was enormous. “So then, seeing how this young doctor knew I'd been through this eight times before, I reached over and took his hand in mine and I said to him, ‘Honey, don't you worry none, don't you be nervous—why you just open your two little hands and I'll drop it right down in!'”

She leaned back then, laughing, and the baby went with her, lifted across her chest, sucking away. “I got to get going,” Sam said, and he looked at Tidewater, as if, he realized, he were asking for permission.

“I'm glad you'll come with us on our little trip,” Ben said. “To see where your father grew up, where he and Mason…”