Sam's Legacy (47 page)

I was thrilled, but not surprised. When the game was over Ruth lingered near his bench and beckoned to me with his hand. I had expected that I would have been able now to stare him down—to disdain, in myself, that very passion which had made me desire, so dearly, to defeat him. In his presence, however, with the game over, I could barely look at him; I was aware of my age, and of how young I must have seemed. “Hey kid,” he said. “You really took care of me out there to day. How ‘bout me standin' ya to a drink?” I nodded, my eyes fixed to the ground in front of his feet.” You come by my hotel later, okay? Any kid who throws the way you do—I got to stand ya to a drink.”

He punched me playfully on the shoulder of my right arm—the way he would have done to one of his own teammates. “See ya later, kid,” he said, and walked off.

In my hotel room, I took his photo from my wallet and tore it into little pieces. Yet I could not deceive myself. Although I had proven myself his master as a pitcher and hitter, if only for one day, I grew weak when I thought of our conversation, when I pictured him at the plate or in the outfield, when I remembered each detail of our confrontation.

He was, when I arrived, sitting in the lobby of his hotel, sprawled across an easy chair, entertaining a crowd—a red-headed girl in a low-cut sequined dress was on one arm of the chair, and Dugan sat on the other. Ruth was smoking a cigar and laughing boisterously. I recognized some of his teammates and assumed, correctly, that the other men were newspaper reporters. I stood in the doorway, watching his large hand—as he laughed—caress the thigh of the girl. She had a hand on his neck, her fingers inside the collar of his shirt. “Oh Babe!” she screamed, delighted. I felt an enormous revulsion, but I would not leave. I waited until, roaring with laughter and looking around the circle of men who were playing court to him, he spotted me. “C 'mere!” he yelled, gesturing with the hand that held the cigar. I obeyed and walked across the lobby. I was wearing a suit and tie, and realized how out of place I must have appeared.

“This here's the greatest pitcher I ever faced,” he said at once, as the crowd parted and I entered the circle of men around his chair. He pointed his cigar at one of the newspapermen. “You jackasses can quote me on that. You tell 'em the Babe says that the greatest pitcher in baseball is a nigger, and that includes Walter Johnson.” He sat up then, as if worried about something. “Hey listen,” he said. “You drink, don't ya?”

“Yes,” I said. “Occasionally.”

He mimicked me. “Occasionally,” he repeated, and laughed. “That's pretty good. You jackasses hear that? Old stuffed shirt Johnson, he's so clean—” He pulled the girl's head down to his mouth and whispered in her ear so that she howled with laughter. He stroked her thigh. “He ain't the Big Train,” Ruth went on. “He's the Milk Train!”

When the others had stopped laughing, Ruth shoved the girl off the arm of the sofa. “You get lost now. Me and the boys want to go have ourselves a good time. I'll call ya when I need ya, okay?” He stood up and put his arm around my shoulder. “This here's the greatest pitcher I ever faced. You jackasses can tell 'em that the Babe said so. He hits 'em pretty long too—not as long as me, but he whacked it pretty good today. “He put his cheek next to mine then.” But who's blacker, huh? Tell me that. Who's blacker?”

“You got him beat a country mile, Babe,” Meusel said.

“You really a colored?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I replied, trying to keep myself erect under the force of his arm, which was pushing me downward. “Yes I am.”

“Okay,” he said to the others. “It's the truth. I seen guys even whiter than him in Baltimore and they were niggers. We had a kid at St. Mary's was a white nigger.” He nodded his head up and down, vigorously, as if he were lecturing his friends. His stomach bulged, touching my right side. “Color ain't what counts. It's blood that does it, ain't that so, kid?”

“Yes,” I said. “It's blood.”

“See?” he said. “Didn't I tell ya?” He laughed again, and the others, for no reason that I could discern, joined him. “I can get even blacker than this, though—ask any guy. You should've seen me in August. Tell 'em, Bob.”

“Like the ace of spades,” Meusel said.

“Tell 'em, Tony.”

“Black as the devil's ass at midnight,” Lazzeri said.

“Tony, my baby!” Ruth cried, hugging Lazzeri. I felt myself shudder and could tell, from the way Ruth's other arm lifted slightly from my shoulder, that he had felt it also. “Any guy who strikes out the Babe twice in one day, I got to stand him to a drink, ain't that so?” He paused, then whispered to me in his high boy's voice, “You drink, don't ya?”

“Yes,” I said.

He pounded me on the back then, and roared with laughter. “But not like the Babe, I'll bet. C 'mon—”

One arm around my shoulder, the other around Lazzeri's, he led us from the hotel—his cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth, pointed upward. The smoke trailed into my face, tickling my throat when I breathed in. Bob Meusel, Herb Pennock, Joe Dugan, Aaron Ward, and George Pipgrass were in the crowd behind us, along with some sports writers. At the first corner, a group of young colored boys were sitting in front of their shoe shine stands. “I love kids,” Ruth said to me, his hand squeezing my shoulder. We waited while he had his shoes shined. He threw a dollar down on the sidewalk. “That's from the Babe,” he said, taking me around again as we walked off.

On the next block we entered a small bar. “This here's for whites only,” he whispered to me, loud enough for all his friends to hear. “But if you don't say nothing, I won't either, okay, kid?” He laughed out loud and pressed his cheek to mine again. “I mean, how they gonna tell who ya are, unless you tell 'em.” He moved away from me and called loudly, “The drinks are on the Babe—and I want everyone to have a good time!”

When his own mug and mine had been filled with beer, he toasted me. “Here's to the greatest pitcher I ever faced,” he said. “Even if he is a…”

He sputtered, laughing, into his beer, so that the foam rolled over the edge and down across his fist. He drank, then switched hands and sucked on his knuckles. He pulled me to a table at the side. The men who had been in the bar when we arrived would, when he looked their way, all raise their glasses to him. He smiled and raised his mug to them, each time. “Listen,” he said in my ear, “anything you want, you come to me. If that jackass bartender says anything—I'll tell him you're a friend of mine. Any friend of the Babe's—” He broke off, turning his eyes to the men around us. “What're you guys all staring at—I ain't gonna give a show.” He pounded his fist on the wooden table. “Okay. This is what we're all gonna do. Lazzeri, over here—”

Lazzeri, the Yankees' second baseman, came to him. “Watch this,” he said to me. He pulled Lazzeri's head to him and began whispering in his ear. Lazzeri giggled, his eyes wide. “Tony's gonna get a woman tonight,” Ruth declared, “so I'm givin' him some pointers—” He pressed Lazzeri's head to him, his hand cupped around the back of Lazzeri's skull.

Pennock spoke: “Lay off, Babe. You know what's gonna happen if—”

Ruth let Lazzeri's head go and he snarled at Pennock. “You gonna do somethin' about it—?”

Lazzeri lay his head on the wooden table. Tears rolled from his eyes, he was laughing so hard. “Sure, Babe,” one of the newspapermen said. “Go easy.”

“Ain't I doin' just that?” he asked, and I believed him. “I like to see a happy Italian, that's all. It don't do no harm, you guys. It's practice—with us all around anyway to help him out—it's practice so he can learn to—” Ruth leaned over then and said something else into Lazzeri's ear, while Lazzeri's head lay on the table. I tried not to hear the words, which referred to the things Lazzeri was going to do to the whore that Babe would supply him with. “How ‘bout you, kid?” he asked, leaning against me. “They got some of the best black cathouses I ever seen right here, just a block away—they got a gal there, she does somethin' called tyin' the knot, you'll think you're goin' through the roof, ain't that so, Tony?” He closed his eyes and drew breath in, through his nostrils. “Mmm—I can smell it from here—”

Lazzeri moaned and then grew limp: his head rolled once, to its other side, and then I heard a gurgling sound. “Do something, you jackasses!” Ruth commanded angrily, but he was already holding Lazzeri's head between his hands. Lazzeri's body twitched and Dugan got him from behind, holding him steady, so he would not fall. Ruth shoved his hand into Lazzeri's mouth and kept it wedged there. Pennock handed him a spoon—light flashed from it as if it were silver—and Ruth inserted it where his hand had been. “C 'mon, sweetheart,‘” he whispered to Lazzeri. “It ain't nothing. You'll be all right now. You'll be okay.” He shoved me backward, to give himself more room, and then, giving commands to the others to get Lazzeri from the top, he lifted his feet and laid the man out across several chairs. He covered him with his jacket and knelt beside him, caressing the face. There were tears in Ruth's eyes. “It ain't nothing, kid. I didn't mean to excite ya this far. Honest I didn't. We don't have to go to that cathouse if you don't want, okay?” He pressed his cheek to the man's face. “I didn't mean for this to happen, sweetheart, you believe me, don't ya? I just want to see ya get rid of this thing someday. But I didn't mean to excite ya this far.” He turned to the rest of us and his eyes were defiant. “Ain't there nobody strong enough to try to stop me? Can't ya see when I let things get carried away?” He spat. “You guys ain't men.” He turned his eyes from us. “We don't got to do nothing to no women, my Tony baby, okay? It's whatever you say.” Lazzeri's eyes rolled so that, his lids half-open, I saw only the whites. The bartender and the local customers peered over the shoulders of our group. “It's whatever you say, sweetheart.” He glanced at us and whispered, “He's comin' around already—I can tell.” Looking at the crowd, he began to stand. “Hey, what are you, a regular bunch of goons? C'mon, can't ya see the guy don't feel good—give him air.”

“It happens all the time,” Ruth said to me some minutes later, when Lazzeri was sitting up, recovered. “It ain't nothin' to get excited about—ya get used to it after a while. What's a guy supposed to do if he's born with a thing like that—stop living?” He raised his beer mug, which was empty. “Hey, kid—you at the bar—let's fill these things up again. We got to drink to our Italian friend's health, don't we?” He smiled lovingly at Lazzeri. “Ain't that right, kid?”

A short while later Pennock, with Ruth's permission, took Lazzeri back to the hotel. The drinking continued. To my surprise, I found that my head remained clear. I did not laugh at Ruth's supposed jokes, and I did not pay any attention to the compliments his friends paid to me, but I was, I knew, despite the man's meanness and vulgarity, happy to be in his presence. “See the way the kid here holds his stuff,” he said several times to the others. “You guys take a lesson.” He pointed to the newspapermen. “You're a lush, Ziegler. You ain't an athlete. You're just lush. You're a lush, Novak. You're a lush, too, Ellis. You're a lush, Wofford, you asshole.” His right arm went around my neck, his beer mug in his right hand, so that he drank while pressing his forehead to me. He put his mug in front of my lips and I drank also.

“I said the truth,” he told me, one hand on my leg, above the knee. “I never seen a guy had a fast ball like yours. I was a pitcher too, ya know.”

“I know,” I said.

“Oh yeah?” His narrow eyes widened. “You knew that?”

“My brothers saw you pitch at Ebbets Field, in the 1916 World Series.”

“Oh yeah?” He shook his head, wonderingly. “I couldn't carry your suitcase, though. You got a fast ball like I never seen before.”

We left shortly after midnight, his teammates walking behind us along the street, singing raucously. Ruth was very drunk, and in his drunkenness he became affectionate, leaning upon me for support and telling me how sweet I was, what a great pitcher I was, how much he would have liked to have done for a kid like me. “I love kids,” he told me. Helping him across the hotel lobby and up the stairs to his room, I felt as if I were, as I had been on the playing field that afternoon, the master of the situation—and yet, as soon as he had unlocked the door to his room and pushed me inside it, in front of him, my confidence vanished.

“Get outa here, you goddamned bitch!” he cursed, seeing that the red-headed girl who had been with him earlier in the evening was lying across his bed, in her underwear. She was barely awake, yet he pulled her by her right leg, jerking her so that she scraped her stomach across the metal railing at the foot of the bed. She screamed. Ruth swung the door open. He ordered me to get her clothes, which were in a pile on a chair, and I did what he said. “Now get your fat ass outa here.” He kicked her, his foot thudding solidly against her backside. She tried to get up, but he had grabbed her by one arm and was dragging her into the hallway. “Sure, Babe,” she said. “I didn't mean nothing.” He took her clothes from me and threw them at her, then tossed some money on the floor. “Here—buy yourself a new ass,” he laughed. “Yours is cracked!”

He slammed the door and his anger disappeared at once. He came to me and I found myself backing away, afraid of him. “I ain't so drunk,” he said, and smiled at me drowsily. I bumped into a chair and he laughed. “You don't got to be scared of me, any kid got a fast ball like you got.” He pressed his body against mine, his arms around my back. “Just tell me if I ain't got power, though?” He held me in a bear hug, his huge stomach pressing into me, his arms locked in the small of my back. “There ain't any guy in baseball got more strength than the Babe, you hear that?” I could not breathe, and there was in me no desire to struggle. I heard him grunting. His head burrowed against my shoulder, he squeezed harder, until I gagged.