Sam's Legacy (33 page)

“You,” Tidewater said, when he had stopped laughing. “You, Ben, are the only friend—with one exception—I have ever seen again. Any person I knew before 1928 I was obliged never—” He turned to Sam: “Your son should not be so foolish as to regard my life, and the writing down of this part of it, as anything exotic or unusual. There were thousands of us who played baseball in the Negro Leagues, and there were thousands of us—some as light-skinned as myself—who, in the half-century following the Civil War, set down their life stories, often by themselves, with great literacy, often dictated to others. Then as now there was a great demand for the personal lives, for the details, the
secret
ways of black folks!” Tidewater spat the words out, laughed a wild laugh, almost maniacal. “I am not exotic, I am not even—the beginning of my tale—black. As you see, I am merely an old man saying good-bye to another old man, yes?”

He looked at Sam. “You'll have more—of my story—soon. You may serve the coffee and cake now, Florence.” Flo brought a plate from the kitchenette—a chocolate cake on it—then put water on to boil, brought cups and saucers, spoons, plates, and forks.

“Well,” Ben said, cutting the silence. He touched Sam's hand. “Mason's gift—it's not the kind I could have gotten on special—”

“Exactly,” Tidewater said, but he did not smile.

“Who,” Ben asked, “was the other friend?”

Tidewater stared ahead, at nothing, and made no move to reply.

“My girlfriend Irene,” Flo said, “despaired of a happy marriage because, when she was living with a young Jewish boy, who had come to New York from Chicago, and who later became a well-known novelist, she tried to fix up his apartment for him, in Greenwich Village, and, instead of saying that she needed to go to the store for a can of paint, she said she needed to leave for a pain of can't…”

“So?” Ben said.

“Nothing,” Flo said. “The phrase has been in my head, before, and while Mason was speaking. That was all. She never got over it, she claimed, and she put much too much stock into it, into one slip of the tongue. Still…”

Flo was trembling. She reached between Ben and Marion, with a knife, and cut into the cake. “I hope you like it. I wasn't used to your oven.” She served a piece of the cake to Ben. “I'm sorry I'm so distracted, so far away. Irene and I were classmates, closest friends in college—at Barnard—and I keep hearing her say it, seeing her eyes get rounder and rounder. I keep hearing her voice, so plaintive, so—what do you think, Ben?”

“It sounds like pure cant to me,” he said.

Flo started to reply, but changed her mind. She served a piece of cake to Tidewater, then to Sam, then to Marion.

“Very good,” Ben said. “Thank you. It's very good.”

Sam took a piece in his hand and bit into it; he watched Tidewater's mouth, obscure in the dark room, and thought of the soft chocolate—thick and sweet, the consistency somewhere between that of fudge and brownies—melting on his two-toned tongue. “And I'm sorry for being ugly,” Ben said to Flo. He caught a crumb, falling from his lip, then hummed, the way Sam remembered his grandfather humming, at the end of a meal. When he spoke again, Ben's voice seemed very sweet: “You look at me and you see a small ugly man, cruel to friends and children, yes? But I was not always like this. Ah no!” Ben's hands were clasped in front of him, his body rocking gently back and forth. “When I was young, in Galicia, I was a very beautiful child, but when I was young, I was put into the hands of a wicked nurse, who exchanged me for another…and that is why today, you see before you the man who—”

“All right,” Tidewater said. “All right.”

“A fool,” Ben went on, “can throw a stone into the water which ten wise men cannot recover.”

“Enough,” Tidewater said. “I will speak of my other friend, of—”

“Of course,” Ben said, easily. “But note my son's continuing silence. If I think of how far I might have gone in radio—consider Sam's potential, for the first thing I taught any student at the school—my famous opening lecture—was silence. The only actors and announcers who succeeded were those who mastered the uses of silence—when to pause, how long to pause, how to sustain the pause, how, coming into people's homes, to let the silence work for you. The lack of sound…do you recall the lecture, my son? Will you use your silence, when I am gone, to look for a job?”

Sam laughed. Look for a job—that was the best one yet. The room was quiet again, and the quiet reminded Sam of how dark it was. Sam didn't measure the time, but in a short while Flo came to the table, poured the coffee, gave out second pieces of cake to each of them. “I will speak of my friend,” Tidewater said, and looked, his eyes troubled, at Ben. Ben sipped coffee from his cup, his chin down at the table's level. There were, Sam could tell, a lot of things Ben might have said to Tidewater, but in the end, following his own advice, he rejected them all, and merely nodded his assent.

“In the early summer of 1930,” Tidewater began, “posing as a newspaper reporter, I visited Rube Foster—the friend—who, in 1927, at the age of forty-eight, had been committed to the state mental institution at Kankakee, Illinois. He had been, from the time I decided to make my way as a ballplayer—from the time you last saw me, Ben, when we were in school together—the man I had respected most. Born in Calvert, Texas, he had begun earning his own living as a baseball player before he had finished grade school. A minister's son, he never drank (though he did not, when a manager, require abstinence of his players), and he carried a loaded pistol with him always. He had been one of the great players during the first two decades of this century, a man with unlimited confidence in himself and his right arm, and he had become, when I first knew him, a superb field manager, and the organizer and first president of the league in which I played.

“It was Foster, you see, and not John McGraw, who had invented the hit-and-run play, and the squeeze bunt, and it was Foster who was, in his time, the admitted master of psychological warfare. In fact, McGraw would hire him, between seasons, as a coach. I will never forget coming into his home park in Chicago, in 1923, and seeing the row of metal files, for sharpening spikes, which he kept hanging from the nails outside the visiting team's dressing room. I laughed, of course, at the sheer transparency of such a ploy, and yet, coming to know the man's glowering black face, I eventually came to feel a slight chill whenever I saw the files hanging there.

“Foster told me, at the end of my first full season, when, in Chicago, I had defeated his team for the World Series championship, that I could have been the greatest of them all. He had seen all the greats, from Moses Fleetwood Walker to John Henry Lloyd, and the best of the whites, too, from Willie Keeler to Cobb and Ruth and Johnson, and he declared that if I could last—for there were lots of young boys who could have one or two seasons as good as any other man's—I could make them forget all the others, including himself.

“When we could, though I did not play for his team, we would travel together, and share a room. He would often recount for me the fact that the separation of the races into separate leagues had come about quite slowly, and he believed that the time before there had been separate leagues—a time just before he had begun playing—had been the Golden Age of Baseball. He did not believe that the races would ever mix again, in baseball or elsewhere, and, along with his Bible, he kept in his traveling bag a copy of Moses Walker's
Our Home Colony—A Treatise on the Past, Present, and Future of the Negro Race in America
, not because he believed in the back-to-Africa movement, but because Walker had been the last (acknowledged) black man to play on a white team.”

“I'm sorry we couldn't find the field,” Ben began. “My intentions—”

“When I visited Foster in 1930,” Tidewater continued, as if Ben had not spoken, “though he showed no sign of recognizing me, he did once—I spent but an hour with him, in a room he shared with five others—look out the barred window, and, pointing, said: ‘There's McGraw, boy.' For though he knew that McGraw had tried, as with me, to hire black players many times under many guises—most famously in the case of Charlie Grant, a fine second baseman whom he tried to pass off unsuccessfully as a full-blooded Indian named ‘Tokohoma,' it was his knowledge of my encounter with McGraw, when I refused to pass, which, I believed, first drew Foster to me.”

Tidewater stopped, and his head pivoted sideways, to Ben. “He was a man with whom you would have had nothing in common, Ben, except perhaps your obstinacy, or your shrewdness, and these were not, of course, things one could have shared.” His eyes moved from Ben, and his voice softened. “Foster died on December 9, 1930, and it pleased me in my foolishness to think that, sixteen years later, where he was, he had received the good news that, here in Brooklyn, a pigeon-toed black man of twenty-seven years old, whom even Sam has seen, one Jackie Roosevelt Robinson, the son of a Georgia sharecropper, had run out onto the grass of Ebbets Field, inaugurating what Rube Foster would surely have called, lacking my skepticism, the New Golden Age.

“‘You win the ballgame in one or two innings,' he taught us. ‘Now is the time,' he would say, when the moment had come for his players to extend themselves.” Tidewater paused, and Sam listened to the others breathing. “Even so is it with my own life,” he went on. “For now is the time in which, setting down this brief narrative, and thinking of the years which have passed, I prepare to join myself with Foster, and with those others, discovered recently in the very place in which I am writing my story—my brothers who came before me and who, setting out from bondage toward their star, fell also, ignominiously short.”

Tidewater exhaled in a way that let the others know he had finished. “Fell what?” Ben asked, as if puzzled. Tidewater glared at him, but did not reply. “You should leave the riddles to Rabbi Katimsky,” Ben commented. “It's not your—”

“Please,” Flo said, and Sam watched his father's small head bob up and down several times.

Sam checked the Knick box score of the night before, and winced: they'd beaten the Royals, 106 to 105, for their eighteenth in a row, three past the all-time Laker record. Stallworth had pumped in twenty-three points, his high for the season. Sam put the paper down, picked up the phone, and dialed. There were guys who would try to get back even by doubling up, but he knew how they ended. “It's Mr. Benjamin here,” he said.

“Ah, Mr. Benjamin. This is Mr. Sabatini—I was just thinking about you.”

“Sure,” Sam said. “Listen, I thought I'd check—anything new with the Knicks?”

“It so happens, I can accommodate you now. Times are changing. But you'll have to take seven and a half points.”

“Give me three singles for tonight then.”

“Of course, sweetheart. It's why I was thinking of you—I was just having my first cup of coffee and saying to myself…and then, at this hour, your voice speaks to me.” Mr. Sabatini chuckled. “You know what they say about the early bird catching—”

“Sure,” Sam said. “Three singles.” He hung up, and he didn't laugh. He put the newspaper away, listened to his father humming in the bedroom, where he was packing, picked up a copy of
Sport
magazine. There was an article on Stallworth in it, but they hadn't even put the guy's picture or the title of the article on the cover; it showed you how fast people forgot. Sam had read the article twice, and it still got him, all the details about when the guy had been laid up for the twenty-seven days, about how he'd begun cheating—going to the schoolyard against doctor's orders, about how he'd felt when he'd been given the green light to play again. “I felt like I could jump over a building.” When you'd read a lot of these articles you could tell things: the guy who'd written it had liked Stallworth, and at the end, asking Stallworth—not about his heart (the guy had never done that, and Sam gave him credit there), but about the future—the words rang true, and Sam liked them: “What I look forward to most is—well, I'd just like to be able to relax for a change. I just want to relax. You know what I mean? I just want to relax a little in this life.”

Sure, Sam thought, but with all he'd been through, they'd gone and given top billing to a half-dozen other articles. And what about—Sam's right fist clenched, involuntarily—all the guys who had never come back? Campanella, the greatest catcher of them all, who'd played in the Negro Leagues until he was almost thirty years old, crippled now, in a wheelchair, with his wife leaving him. Gehrig, of course, dead at thirty-nine; Big Daddy Lipscomb, six feet six and three hundred twenty pounds, who used to pick runners off the ground as if they were children—dead of an overdose of heroin; little Robin Freeman, the great guard from Ohio State, with two fingers sawed off his shooting hand before his rookie season in the pros; Ernie Davis, of Syracuse, maybe as good a runner as Jim Brown, dead of leukemia at twenty-two; Ray Chapman, killed by a beanball; Herb Score, never the same after a line drive had nearly taken his eye out; Ken Hubbs, the Cubs' second baseman, killed in a car accident after he'd been named Rookie of the Year… When he thought about it, Sam wasn't surprised at what they'd done to the article on Stallworth. Sure. For every guy who came back, who knew how many dozens never made it. Sam thought of the colleges—there seemed to be one every other year or so lately—which lost entire football teams in plane crashes, and, picturing himself watching Ben's plane take off from the runway at Kennedy Airport, he shuddered.

“I hope things work out,” Ben said to him. “You know that. I couldn't help but hear your telephone conversation.” Ben put a suitcase down, next to the one Sam had given him as a gift. “Tonight you'll have privacy.”