Voices of a Summer Day (4 page)

The next morning he didn’t even watch the basketball game. He took a canoe out on the Canoga lake by himself and paddled out far enough so that the cries of the spectators around the court could not be heard. He lay back in the spotty sunlight and listened to the water rippling against the canoe and read
The Saturday Evening Post.
There was a picture of an old cowboy on the cover, listening to a Victrola with a horn. The old cowboy was holding a record marked “Dreams of Long Ago” and was crying. Inside the magazine there was a story that Benjamin read with interest.
What was there to help her now? Emily asked herself rather strangely. What was to prevent her, for example, from going straight down over the hill to the gypsy camp yonder, and the violin that was calling, calling, into the dusk?

Canoga won the basketball game, too, and Bryant lost his temper with everybody. On the long trip that afternoon to Camp Berkeley, the boys were sullen and there was no singing in any of the trucks.

1964

F
EDEROV SHIFTED A LITTLE
closer to home plate because the sun was in his eyes now. Andy Roberts was still playing, but the other third baseman had been replaced by Joe Cerrazzi, whose father ran the liquor store in town. Cerrazzi had played for West Virginia a few years before and was the best ballplayer in town, and he made Federov pay attention to the game again. Cerrazzi moved constantly, went up on his toes before each play, with his hands hanging low and loose below his knees, ready for anything. During the inning he swooped in on a bunt, which he picked up with his bare hand, throwing it underhand in the same movement to nip the runner at first base. Then in the next inning, with a man on third, he cut across in front of the shortstop on a slow roller, charged the ball, kept the runner from moving with a quick feint and threw out the batter with a clothesline peg.

“Hey, Joe,” Federov said, “what’re you wasting your time for? The Mets need you.”

“I’d rather sell booze,” Cerrazzi said. “I’m an intellectual.”

He was the first batter up in the next inning and connected squarely with the ball. It went in a screaming drive to dead center. Federov watched Michael turn and race, in what seemed like hopeless optimism, toward the fence that marked off the boundary of the field. At the last moment Michael leaped high against the fence, hitting hard against the wire and falling to his knees, but coming up with the ball. There were whistles of appreciation from the bench and from the few spectators and Cerrazzi came over and sat down next to Federov and said,
“There’s
the one the Mets could use. Your kid. He sure likes to win, doesn’t he?”

“It looks that way,” Federov said. He remembered his own reaction to what the coach had said about passion when he himself had been nineteen and wondered at what age he could use the word to Michael.

“Is he going to go in seriously for playing ball?” Cerrazzi asked. “I could give him a hint or two.”

“No,” Federov said. “He prefers tennis.”

“He’s right. Tennis is something you can play all your life,” Cerrazzi said, with the born athlete’s solemn lack of shame about using clichés.

Federov didn’t tell Cerrazzi that the only reason that Michael was playing baseball that afternoon was that he couldn’t get into the town’s country club because he was Jewish, or anyway half-Jewish, and the few private courts that the Jewish summer people could play on were reserved for adults on the weekends. Federov’s wife, Peggy, who wasn’t Jewish, was in a constant state of irritation about this and tried to keep Federov from inviting home friends of his who belonged to the Club, but Federov had long ago stopped worrying about what he considered the annoying but minor inconsistencies of American life. After Auschwitz, it was hard to be too deeply concerned because your son couldn’t play two hours of doubles on a Saturday afternoon. And in the arguments he had with Peggy on the subject, he defended his Gentile friends for their passivity by reminding Peggy of all the places they themselves went to which didn’t admit Negroes, despite their own theoretical absence of prejudice. “I am no longer young,” he had once written to his wife in answering a letter of hers in which she had complained about what she called “the hypocrisy” of his friends at the Club. “I do not have enough anger left for all causes. I must ration it wisely.”

Well, Joe Cerrazzi couldn’t get into the Club either. And it had nothing to do with his religion. He couldn’t get in because his father ran a liquor store. Federov wondered if Peggy would be more annoyed at being barred from playing tennis because she was married to a Jew or because of being married to a liquor salesman. I must ask her, Federov thought, the next time the damn thing comes up.

He had to squint now. There was no avoiding the sun. September was approaching and the sun was lower in the sky every afternoon. Low-sunned September, spikes hung up, vacations over, old outfielders playing their last games…

1927

O
N THE MORNING OF
September 1st, they were all back once more in the shed of the Fall River Line on Fulton Street. Children were being collected by parents in loud reunions, counselors were gravely accepting tips, aunts were exclaiming about how wonderful little Irving or little Patrick looked, the older boys were shaking hands with each other and promising to meet each other during the autumn, the director of the camp was beaming in the middle of the confusion because one more summer had passed without a drowning or an epidemic or poliomyelitis or an unpaid bill. The shed emptied quickly in the rush for home, but Benjamin and Louis were left standing there, because their parents had not yet come to pick them up. Finally, they were the only boys left and the director assigned Bryant to stay with them to await Mr. and Mrs. Federov’s arrival.

Bryant looked far from happy at this last assignment and neither he nor Benjamin exchanged a word with each other as they stood, a little apart, in the shed which was suddenly eerily quiet and cavernously large. Bryant had kept Benjamin off the season’s-end honor roll (Benjamin had learned this from one of the waiters who had served coffee and sandwiches at the counselors’ meeting where the votes were cast), and Benjamin had taken it hard. He had always been high up in school, more often than not first in his class, and had made every weekly honor roll all season, and he ostentatiously remained ten yards away from Bryant, wishing him bad luck in every game Syracuse played that fall, and ashamed that his enemy (he now considered Bryant as exactly that) was the witness of this unprecedented callousness on the part of his mother and father. “Look,” he said to Bryant fifteen minutes after the departure of the last of the campers, “you don’t have to wait. I know how to get home. I’ve been to New York and back from Harrison a hundred times by myself.”

“Stay where you are,” Bryant said, snapping at him. “We’re waiting for your father or mother or whatever member of your family finally remembers you’re here, if it takes all day.”

Louis stood there serenely, looking out at the river, calmly munching on caramels, although it was only nine-thirty in the morning. He had wisely kept out a box for emergencies from the last canteen night at camp.

Their parents arrived a few minutes later, both of them running. They had overslept, they said, the alarm had not gone off. Benjamin was furious with this foolish apology, especially since it was directed at Bryant and not at either Louis or himself. At least if it had been an accident or a death in the family or something
important.
His mother kissed him, his father embraced him and said he looked great. His mother said to Louis, “What time of the day is this to eat candy?” and kissed him ten times. His father took out a twenty-dollar bill and gave it to Bryant, who made a hypocritical show of trying to refuse it. “Take it, take it,” Benjamin’s father said, pressing the bill into Bryant’s hand. “I know how college boys can use a few extra dollars.”

Benjamin would have liked to knock the twenty dollars out of his father’s hand, but he wouldn’t be ready for gestures like that for another five years.

“I want to tell you, Mr. Federov,” Bryant said, man-to-man, “you have two wonderful boys there. Wonderful.”

Benjamin said a dirty word, under his breath, but shook hands with Bryant when Bryant came over and stuck out his hand with a false, charming smile. “It’s been a great year, Tris, old feller.” The echo of the afternoon at Canoga was, Benjamin knew, deliberate and malicious. “I hope we’re all back together again next summer.”

“Yeah,” Benjamin said. “Yeah.”

“Tris? Tris?” his father said puzzledly. “What’s that for?”

“It’s short for Tristan,” said Mrs. Federov, the ex-piano teacher. “He was a knight of the Round Table. He—well,” she hesitated puritanically over the rest of the sentence. “Well, he played around with his friend King Arthur’s wife. Her name was Guinevere.”

Israel Federov looked suspiciously at Bryant’s retreating back. “What sort of name is that,” he said, “to call a thirteen-year-old boy?”

Benjamin knew that if he had said, “The center fielder,” his father would have understood, only he would have thought it a compliment and have liked Bryant the better for it. And Benjamin didn’t want to have to explain why it wasn’t a compliment and the true nature of his relationship with Bryant. He didn’t want to talk about Bryant. He just wanted to go home.

For many years after, the word “betrayal,” in Benjamin’s mind, was linked with the handshake in the shed and the alarm clock that had not gone off in Harrison on the morning of September 1st, 1927.

1931–34

I
T WAS THE LAST EASY
summer of his boyhood and youth. His father’s partner turned out to be a thief and the business went into bankruptcy in October and the Federovs never had any money again until after the war. With the failure of his father’s business, Benjamin found himself scrambling, after school and during vacations, to get whatever jobs he could to feed himself, buy the necessary books for his courses, and help with a few dollars when he could, to keep the family going. He sold newspapers, he carried copy for the Newark
Ledger,
he spent a summer as a counselor in a camp in the Adirondacks, he worked as a delivery boy, and tutored backward children and performed whatever jobs were available for a hungry and inexperienced adolescent during the black years of the Depression.

When he was a freshman in college he was one of a group of students who were promised fifteen dollars apiece, plus tips, to serve as waiters on New Year’s Eve at a country club in western Pennsylvania. The boy who made the arrangements was a casual friend of Benjamin’s called Dyer, whose father was the manager of the country club. Since the golf course was closed and the tennis courts shut down for the winter, there was only a skeleton staff on duty and help for the huge party that was being held on New Year’s Eve for the members and their guests had to be collected at random, with no questions asked about previous experience at waiting on table. All they needed was a pair of black pants and a white shirt. Black bow ties and white jackets were to be supplied by Dyer’s father. The boys, fourteen in number, were to travel from the school to the country club in three borrowed cars, and they would get back late on New Year’s Day.

Young Dyer, working on his father’s behalf, made the whole thing seem very attractive, almost like a holiday. Dyer was a sophomore, with a little more money than most of his classmates, and was a campus politician with a smooth, confident way of talking and a quietly careless way of dressing that he hoped would make strangers believe he was an undergraduate at Princeton.

Benjamin was also involved in his first love affair that winter, with a girl who sat next to him in his English class. Her name was Patricia Forrester, and Benjamin blessed the orderly brain of the English teacher which had decreed that all students were to be seated alphabetically in front of him. Patricia was small and dark, with a pale, fine-boned, flowering face that for several years Benjamin believed to be unsurpassed in the long treasury of feminine beauty. From the first time he met her on a warm September afternoon, Benjamin had ignored all other girls and was coldly impervious to their attentions. For weeks after Pat told him that she loved him he wandered around the school grounds and through his classes in a foolish daze, forgetting where he had left his books, losing keys, turning up for the wrong courses at odd hours, staring unseeingly at his assigned reading, with Pat’s face swimming, gently smiling and rich with love, between his eyes and the printed page.

They were both virgins when they met, and they kissed in doorways and in the autumn woods around the campus and in the back seats of the ramshackle cars that one or two of Benjamin’s friends nagged away from their parents on Saturday nights. Even after they both realized they wanted to make love, it took weeks of planning to find a place they could use for the consummation. Benjamin lived in a dormitory; Pat lived with her mother and father and two younger sisters in an apartment a mile away from the school; the houses they went to for Saturday-night parties were always full of people, and parents in those days made a practice of returning home before midnight. The idea of going to a hotel and registering as man and wife, even if they could have afforded it, was distasteful to both of them. Their first love, they decided, could not be built on a snickering lie. Anyway, they were both sure there wasn’t a hotel clerk in America who would believe that they were man and wife, no matter how many suitcases they carried into the lobby.

Benjamin was despairingly certain that if it depended upon his ingenuity he and Pat would never do more than kiss and pet in the back seats of cars until he was old enough and rich enough to marry. Eight years, he figured, bitterly. It was only when Pat took matters into her own hands and got herself and Benjamin invited to a party at the home of a girl friend of hers in New York on Thanksgiving Eve, lulling her parents’ suspicions with the excuse that she wanted to stay over in the city to see the Macy parade, that Benjamin and she finally found themselves in a room together, with the door locked behind them. The New York friend’s parents had gone to Atlantic City for the holiday, the friend was older than Pat and delighted to be in on the intrigue, the party was small and ended early, and the first embarrassed virginal fumbling changed quickly into joy.