Sam's Legacy (37 page)

On Sunday morning, three weeks and one day after Ben's flight, Sam telephoned Mr. Sabatini, as he did every day.

“This is Mr. Benjamin here.”

“Ah, Mr. Benjamin,” Mr. Sabatini said, and there was, Sam could tell immediately, something different in Sabatini's tone. “I have some good news for you, sweetheart. You don't owe me anything anymore.”

“Sure,” Sam said.

“Yes. When you forgot your weekly appointment with my boy Willie yesterday, I decided it was time to let you off.” Sabatini paused, but Sam said nothing. He had a good idea of what was coming. “From now on you owe some friends of mine the money you owed me, all right? I've transferred your account. You pay them five singles a week until you're back even, plus some interest—but they'll be in touch with you about details.”

“You're a sport,” Sam said.

“Believe me,” Mr. Sabatini said, “I'd like to keep your account, don't you know that? You've been a good client for over six years—and I must say I've taken a personal interest in you. If it was up to me, Mr. Benjamin, I'd let you charge it, but my accountant says no. It's a very hard year, as I'm sure you've noticed. Money is tight.”

“Thanks a lot,” Sam said, and tried to make his voice sound light, easy.

“What I wanted to do was to use you as a business loss—but, again, my accountant wouldn't let me. In this line of work, if I let my heart be my guide, where do you think I would be today? Remember, Mr. Sabatini sold apples in the thirties. That's why—”

“You talk too much,” Sam said. “Thanks for nothing.”

“My friends will be seeing you. You're a good boy, I can tell that—please, be careful. Do what they say. Do you hear me? I wouldn't want to hear one day that…”

Sam thought he heard passion in the familiar voice, but it meant nothing to him. “I look out for number one,” he said.

“And give my best to your father, in his new life,” Mr. Sabatini said. “Good-bye and good luck—”

“Don't phone me again, you hear?” Sam heard his heart pumping; he hissed into the mouthpiece. “You goddamned—” Sam searched for a word.

“Telephone you? But sweetheart,
you
telephoned
me
—don't you know that? I never telephone anybody.”

Sam hung up. Don't bet what you don't have—the first rule, and he'd gone against it. But if you don't believe in any of it, then why, he asked himself, are you so upset? Sure. Answer that and win a trip to California. He drank a glass of milk and sat on his couch, adding up, for the first time, the amount he owed. He was glad at least that he hadn't given Sabatini satisfaction there, by asking for the sum. There were the bets before Ben had left; there was the loan for Simon's card game and Ben's valise; there was the first three hundred on the Knicks the night Ben had left; and there were the bets every day since then for three weeks—Sam hadn't needed to write them down: he could remember each bet, the score of each game; and he could figure the total in his head, with the interest: it came, exactly, to six thousand six hundred.

Sam laughed. Six thousand six hundred dollars wasn't, after all, the kind of figure someone in his situation could—the word was rich—afford to believe in. Good news was right. Sabatini would be off his back; there'd be no more telephone calls. Sam knew all about the kinds of guys he'd been transferred to—the things they'd try to do to get their money; the way they'd draw the noose tight; he could have thought it all out if he'd wanted to, and envisioned everything—but there was no point in thinking about things ahead of time, he told himself. Let the cards fall, that was all.

He put his mackinaw on and left the apartment. Muriel stood in front of her door, as if she were guarding it. Sam put his keys in his pocket. “You wanna come with me?” he asked. “Maybe he's got a story for you too.”

Muriel's eyes did not move. There was something in the soft way they stared at him that he liked—but those eyes had something of their mother's glance in them. You had to watch out, he knew. Some of the biggest bastards and goons in the world had once been cute kids. He started down the stairs and it was only when he had gone halfway that he realized she was following him. He turned and watched her; she had one hand on the banister, while the other clutched a rag doll. She stepped carefully. Sam walked back up. “You got to stay home, kid,” he said. “It's cold out and you're not dressed.”

She reached across her body with her right hand, squeezing her rag doll between two posts of the balcony, so that it waited on the landing of their floor; then she offered her free hand to Sam. He took it and tried to get her to walk upstairs with him, but she refused. Her grip was hard. “Look, I got to see a man about a—” He broke off, removed his hand. “You just stay here, see?” He walked down and away, quickly. “Hang loose,” he called.

He turned to his right, at the bottom, around the staircase, and entered the dark part of the corridor, where the light did not reach.

“Hello, Sam.” The back door to the rummage shop opened. “I heard your steps. Come in a minute, dear.”

“Sure, Flo,” Sam said, and entered behind her.

Flo ran a hand across her forehead. “I've been working a little—getting things back in order after yesterday.” She smiled at him warmly. “Sundays are lonely for me.”

“I'll bet,” Sam said, then laughed with her at the figure of speech he had used.

“Ben used to visit me sometimes on Sundays—we'd take walks.” She sat down, in an old red armchair. “I shouldn't sound so wistful. Nobody ever promised me anything, as they say. We knew he'd stay out there—and I think we knew we wouldn't hear from him.” She looked past him. “I must be keeping you. You have your coat on.”

“I'm going to Stella's,” Sam said. “But I got to see Tidewater first.”

Flo's eyes seemed to grow darker. “He's been very busy lately,” she said. “I rarely see him anymore. He stays below.” “He's okay,” Sam offered. “I mean—”

Flo waved her hand at him, to be quiet, and her eyeglasses, hanging around her neck, bounced slightly on her bosom. She closed her eyes and, as she did rarely, looked her true age. “I'm tired.”

“It's the winter,” Sam said. “It gets to you. I mean, you can't blame Ben for—”

Sam fingered some silverware on a yellow Formica table. He wondered if Flo were thinking about her two children and her husband, and then he wondered why it was that, whenever he was around her, he thought of what her life had been. He was warm, but he didn't want to take his coat off. He would just as soon have gone downstairs and gotten that over with, once and for all. It wasn't that he was afraid—as he might have thought he would have been, if he'd asked himself about it previously; it was simply that, having decided to visit the man's place after all the time they had been living in the building together, it might as well be sooner than later.

“I didn't ask you in simply to tell you I was tired,” Flo said. “And I won't keep you. But I want to say something that's on my mind. It's important.”

Her voice was cold. “Shoot,” Sam said, smiling, hoping she would see that he was pleased to have her address him directly.

Flo leaned back in her chair. “I could preface what I'm going to say with a thousand qualifications, thoughts—but they would all come to the same thing.” Sam had an urge to reach out, so that he could smooth her forehead, her hair. “Yes. I think you care about my opinion, Sam. And I think I have some sense of your turn of mind. Here, then: I'd like Stella to bear your child.”

Sam felt something hammer on his chest.
“What
—?” He coughed, needing air. “Listen, are you—?”

Flo continued, ignoring his reaction. “Stella has said nothing to me, but I love her and know her too, and I'm sure she has, already, allowed herself to hope. You should say nothing to her, though, about what I've said.” Flo's lips were touching Sam's forehead, and—he didn't know how—he found that he was sitting in a green chair, his hands at his sides. Flo's hands were on the back of his neck, touching him. “You see, Sam, I love you like a son. And—this has all come to me since the day we took the trip together, to Ben's and Mason's old neighborhood—it pains me to think of you living on here by yourself someday, without seeing anything of yourself that will live on when you are gone. Ben is gone. My children are gone. Stella has no brothers or sisters. This store will be gone.”

Sam thought of moving, but he didn't. His head, sticking out from his mackinaw, felt cool, but his body, inside, felt hot. Flo's lips were smooth, like satin, and they moved against his forehead, above his eyes, touching his skin. “Of course I want this for myself—isn't that obvious?—but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be right for you too. This has been on my mind. I came here today hoping you would pass so that I would, once I'd stopped you, alone, have to tell you.” Despite what she was saying, her voice remained cooler than her lips. “You'll do what you want—what you have to—and if nothing happens, that will be no worse than if I'd said nothing.” He felt her breath on his neck. “I think sometimes that I know your turn of mind, and yet I couldn't be sure the same thought had, or had not, occurred to you. Ben was right. In some things, you are a mystery, Sam. You should have a child. You're not too old. Stella can bear you a child. Think about it. You don't have to say anything.”

Her voice moved away and Sam found himself at the door. “Sure,” he said. “I mean, sometimes I think about what you must have gone through.”

“This has been on my mind,” Flo said. “I came here today hoping you would pass.”

Sam sniffed through one nostril. Then, feeling weak, he said, “I don't get it.” He paused, his hand on the doorknob. He wanted to say something clever—after all, he thought, it had taken a lot for her to have said something like that to him, as weird as it was—still, nothing occurred to him. “I don't get it,” he said a second time, and was surprised to hear himself, with a boy's voice, say such a thing.

“Don't be afraid,” Flo said, but when she came toward him, through the maze of cartons and used furniture, her hands slightly outstretched, palms up, he turned and slipped through the doorway, into the darkness of the corridor. He closed the door behind him. Above, in the light from his landing, he saw Muriel's feet hanging down, below the posts of the banister. As he opened the door under the staircase, he felt the weakness pass from him. He didn't, of course, have to believe Flo, but she didn't fool him either. He imagined Sid and Herbie and Max and Shimmy—even Nate—crowing over him, telling him how terrific his kid was, and the thought angered him. The birds were, Sam knew, switching on the light and heading down the wooden stairs to the cellar, everywhere, trying to make you—he laughed to himself, sweating, hearing his shoes bounce on wood, thinking of words—swallow anything. He remembered Sabatini—heard his voice—trying to make him quail, and he laughed aloud because he could have told him, or Flo—or anybody—that they were wasting their time: in poker or in life, Sam Berman couldn't be gulled.

The cellar was dry and warm, the light dim. The furnace, black and red, was to the left. Pipes ran along the ceiling, packed in white casing. The concrete floor, under Sam's shoes, had a thin layer of grit on it, so that Sam felt as if he were walking on sandpaper. There were wooden bins along one side of the room, with padlocks—Sam supposed that he and Ben were entitled to a bin, though they'd never used one. Along the back end, arranged more neatly than they were upstairs, furniture and cartons for the rummage shop were stored, perhaps five or six feet deep. Sam had to duck, stepping around a supporting pillar, in order not to hit his head against low-hanging copper pipes. Shovels and brooms and wooden poles were lined up against the side of one bin, and three garbage pails stood next to them. Sacks of special salt, for the sidewalks, were piled about ten high against the bare wall. Everything was in order. The basement was longer—perhaps forty feet in all—than Sam had imagined it would be, but then, he figured, it probably ran the full depth of the house. Sam saw stairs at the back end, which must have led outside to some small courtyard behind the building that Sam had never seen. He breathed in, wanting to compose himself before seeing Tidewater, and he was surprised at how light and thin the air seemed. He walked forward, his head bent down, toward the front of the building, and saw a door, a dull orange color, about five feet beyond the staircase, to the right of what must have been the water boiler. To the left of the door, meters were attached to the walls and Sam could see silver horizontal disks spinning in them. He knocked and waited.

“Ah, Sam,” Tidewater said, opening the door and stepping aside. “Please. I was hoping you would come by.”

“Sure,” Sam said, and not wanting to appear afraid he walked by Tidewater, stepping quickly into a square room—Sam could see at once that it was the man's only room—which was very brightly lit. The room measured about ten feet along each edge. The walls, of whitewashed concrete, were bare; the floor, an inch above the level of the cellar floor, was now covered with slats of wood, which were highly waxed.

“Please sit down,” Tidewater said, gesturing to an easy chair which was against the left wall. “I'm so glad you came.” “Sure,” Sam said, and sat. “Nice layout you got here.”

“It's rent-free,” Tidewater said.

“It's small, though.”

“I'm alone,” Tidewater replied, smiling, and Sam remarked to himself that the color of the man's skin matched the color of the walls. At the top, the walls seemed to slope inward, so that the ceiling was smaller than the floor. For the moment, Sam kept his eyes away from the man's face. He concentrated on the room, looking at its furnishings, wall by wall. There was a bookcase next to his easy chair, three shelves high and filled. Then a wooden table, with nothing on it. At right angles to the table, along the wall opposite the door, was a narrow bed, covered with a blue chenille spread. A metal reading lamp was clamped to the bed's headboard, and there was, on the floor next to the bed, a navy blue oval rug; shoes were lined up, evenly, underneath the bed. A table—Sam figured, from the jar of pencils and the bowl of sugar, that it was a combination desk and dining table—filled the remaining space along the wall. Opposite Sam, where Tidewater stood, his hands clasped in front of him like a preacher, the stove, sink, and refrigerator were next to one another—the stove was old and yellow, with sliding trays that could be lifted to cover the gas burners. There was a high slender chest in the far corner—for groceries, Sam imagined—and on either side of the front door, along the wall to Sam's right, was a dresser. The middle of the room was empty.