Voices of a Summer Day

by Irwin Shaw

  His mother whipped around toward him, a small, straight, beautiful, fierce, indomitable woman, keeping a family together through one catastrophe after another, keeping things going with an iron ferocity of will, an unconquerable, spotless firmness of spirit in the dark, polished house that was her castle, her battlefield, her world. “Now,” she said to her son, “what was that about going to work tomorrow?”

  “I went to New York this afternoon,” Benjamin said, “and I got a job.”

  “What kind of job?” his mother asked suspiciously.

  “It pays eighteen dollars a week,” Benjamin said.

  “What kind of job?” his mother said.

  Benjamin took a deep breath. “Shipping clerk,” he said. “In an electric-appliance firm on West Twenty-third Street.”

  “Oh, my God. A shipping clerk. My son.” Mrs. Federov began to cry.

  “What’s there to cry about?” Benjamin said crossly, because now he would have liked to be able to cry, too.

  “High school, college, A’s and B’s all the way through, starving to buy books, and you say what’s wrong with being a shipping clerk.”

  “It’s not forever,” Benjamin said. “I’ll go to night school. I’ll study drafting and engineering—”

  “I know what you’ll do,” his mother said through her tears. “You’ll associate with hoodlums, you’ll get drunk on Saturday nights, you’ll go to whorehouses with all the others, you’ll wheel carts through the streets to the post office like a day laborer, you’ll forget you ever read a book, you’ll marry a cheap little factory girl and live like pigs, and your children will grow up to be shipping clerks just like you. I won’t let you do it.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Benjamin said, furious in his turn now, “when are you going to get over the idea that everybody who works with his hands is a hoodlum?”

  “I won’t get over the idea,” Mrs. Federov sobbed. “Because it’s true, it’s true. Israel,” she cried, “aren’t you going to say something about it?”

  His father was silent for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Sophie,” he said, “he’s a grown man. The times’re difficult. I have faith in him.”

  “You will not leave this house tomorrow to work as a laborer,” Mrs. Federov said to Benjamin. “That is not what I gave my life for.”

  “Mom…” Benjamin said wearily. “Be realistic. We’re sitting here in the dark because the lights’re turned off. There’re six million unemployed. They’re not waiting for your son. I want to be able to go over to the wall and push a button and have the lights come on in this house. And I’ll do anything—anything for it.”

  “There’s no sense,” his mother wept, sitting straight on the edge of a wooden chair, her hands clutched in her lap. “There’s no sense in the whole thing.”

  He didn’t have the courage to tell her the worst thing—that if she tried to reach him on the telephone at his place of work, she would be told that nobody by the name of Federov was employed by that firm. He had given his name as Bradley Faye, because in the advertisement in The New York Times it had said that only white Gentiles need apply.

  1964

  “HI.”

  Federov blinked. The dark, polished, threadbare room drifted away. Leah Stafford was standing in front of him along the third-base line. She gestured toward the empty bench alongside him. “Is that seat taken?”

  “Sit down.” Federov tapped the board with his right hand. Leah climbed the two lower planks and sat down. They didn’t kiss or shake hands. Leah was well over forty, but didn’t look it. She had deep copper-colored hair that she wore long, and a creamy complexion, now being preserved from the sun by a wide blue straw hat that added shifting sea-colors to her large green eyes. She was tall, slender, with long legs, and was one of those women who seemed to have been created especially for the styles of the middle of the twentieth century. Now she was wearing cream-colored, closefitting slacks and a loose, lightweight green sweater and blue sandals to match the hat. Summertime, Federov thought, admiring the color scheme. They had been lovers for several years, during and after the war, between her divorce from Bill Ross and her marriage to John Stafford.

  “I didn’t know you were a baseball fan,” Federov said.

  “I’m not,” Leah said. “The younger generation.” She made a gesture with her head toward the field. Young Johnny Stafford was playing right field. He was among the worst players in town and always was put in right field, with all his teammates hoping there wouldn’t be any lefthanders in the opposing lineup who would hit in that direction. “I promised Johnny I’d pick him up and take him home.”

  “Where’s John?” Federov asked.

  “Home,” Leah said, “preparing the plans for the next civil war.”

  Federov laughed. John Stafford, whose ancestors had helped found the town in the eighteenth century, had been born to wealth, educated at the most imposing schools, served on the board of a bank his family had controlled for more than a hundred years and, with all this, worked tirelessly on missions for the government, on committees and foundations and school boards for such things as aid to refugees, the implementation of civil-rights programs, the assignment of scholarships to bright boys from poor homes, and all sorts of thankless but necessary civic tasks. Stafford dressed in the best traditions of his class, drank like a gentleman, and was, as Leah had once put it, insanely generous and hospitable. When he married Leah, he had quietly resigned from the Golf and Tennis Club, because she was Jewish, although nobody in the club would ever have challenged him on the subject and Leah herself had protested at length against her husband’s meticulous devotion to his conscience. Federov considered Stafford one of his best friends, and they saw each other at least two or three times a week, both in the city and down here at the shore. Federov had named him as guardian for Michael and his daughter in case he and Peggy were killed in an accident or died before Michael attained his majority. In the normal course of events, Federov would have asked Louis to assume the responsibility for the children, but with all the love between the brothers and all of Federov’s appreciation for Louis’s qualities, he couldn’t face up to the thought of his son and daughter being in on some of scenes with various wives, ex-wives, mistresses, and future wives that occurred with disheartening regularity in the tumult of Louis’s dealings with women.

  “Are you coming over tonight?” Leah asked.

  “Are we invited?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll have to ask Peggy,” Federov said. “She’s my social secretary. Will it be amusing?”

  “No,” Leah said, squinting out toward where her son was wheeling drunkenly under a high fly ball. “My advice is, don’t come. My, that boy plays badly,” she said as her son dropped the ball, then picked it up and threw to the wrong base. “The poor dear.”

  “Why won’t it be amusing?” Federov asked.

  “John’s cooked up a new, brilliant idea he’s going to pop tonight. He wants to set up a loan association of local homeowners who’ll help deserving Negroes buy houses here.”

  “That doesn’t sound like such a poor idea,” Federov said.

  “You’re just as bad as he is,” Leah said. “I’m going to start a committee with Peggy—The South Shore Association of Christian and Jewish Ladies for the Advancement of Medieval Behavior.” Leah had been born Leah Levinson, but if you were as beautiful as that it took more imagination than Leah possessed to believe that people could be damaged in any way just because they had a name like Levinson.

  “You’re awful,” Federov said.

  “Isn’t it the truth?” She turned and looked with just the slightest intention of flirtation at Federov. They had stopped being lovers long ago, but even now she amused herself by proving all over again that he was not immune to her.

  “Cut it out, lady,” Federov said.

  “Cut what out?” she asked innocently.

  “You know.”

  “You still being a bad boy?” she asked.

  “No,” Feder
ov said. “And if I were, I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “Old age?”

  “Maturity,” Federov said.

  They watched their two sons, almost the same age, playing side by side in the outfield. Federov could tell, even at that distance, that Michael disdained Johnny Stafford. Any ball Michael could possibly reach, even though Johnny would hardly have to move a step to catch it, Michael raced over to field. When Johnny called over to say something to Michael, Michael didn’t even turn his head to answer. And when Johnny dropped the fly ball, Michael looked up to heaven in a style that Federov recognized from disputes at home and that meant, in thirteen-year-old sign language, “Oh, my dear God, why am I being thus afflicted?”

  Federov shook his head regretfully. Michael’s attitude hadn’t changed anything in his own relationship with John Stafford, but it was a constant, irremediable small annoyance. Federov found Johnny a charming boy, well-mannered like his father, with the imprint of his mother’s beauty evident, but clearly masculinized. But by his desperate activities in right field, Johnny forfeited, at least for the years of his adolescence and possibly for his whole life, any claim on Michael’s friendship or even tolerance. I’m going to speak to the little bastard at least once more about it, Federov thought, knowing in advance that it was hopeless.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” Leah asked. She had a voice that went with her particular kind of beauty—low, promising, musical, with a hidden echo of malice.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Us sitting here,” Leah said, “and the two kids out there. By different fathers, according to rumor.”

  “Leah,” Federov said with all the firmness he could command, “don’t be impossible.”

  Leah chuckled. “It’s one of the pleasures of my life,” she said, “getting a rise out of you. I can do it every time, can’t I?”

  “No,” Federov said, lying.

  “Liar,” Leah said.

  They had met in 1935, just after Leah had married a friend of Federov’s called Ross. Leah was sixteen when she married. Nobody was surprised that she had married at the age of sixteen. As her mother had said at the wedding, “I thank God we managed to wait this long. I was afraid she was going to get married before she was twelve.”

  Federov had seen the couple off and on for about a year, then the Rosses had moved to Detroit and he hadn’t seen Leah again until 1945 in Paris, where Leah, now divorced, was serving as a Red Cross girl, interfering with the conduct of the war. Federov was on leave for a week, and it was when he went into the Red Cross Enlisted Men’s Club on the Boulevard des Capucines that he found that the coffee and doughnuts he had come in for were being served to him by Leah Ross.

  He was married to Peggy by this time, but the first thing he thought when he saw Leah was, I was wrong not to be in the same city the day her final decree of divorce was handed down.

  1942

  PEGGY’S FATHER WAS A colonel in the medical Corps in Georgia, where Benjamin was being trained as an infantryman.

  Peggy was twenty that year, blond, not very tall, her eyes so deeply blue that in some lights they appeared violet. She wore her thick, rough hair cut short, almost like a boy’s; her body was lithe, with a hint of later fullness. Her legs were rounded, but athletically firm, and Benjamin, who had been spoiled a little by the ease with which he had drifted into one affair after another with some of the prettiest women in New York, was surprised to find that he thought, in all sobriety, that Peggy’s legs, with their healthy sensuality, were the most charming legs he had ever seen on a girl. At twenty, Peggy was startlingly pretty; by the age of thirty she would be beautiful.

  Benjamin met her on a tennis court in the garden of some friends of his parents, a middle-aged couple by the name of Bronstein, who had moved south from New York and who ran a prosperous men’s clothing store in town and who invited him to their house every time he was released for a few hours from camp.

  Peggy’s parents had rented the house next to the Bronstein’s. The first time Benjamin saw Peggy was when she came through a gate in the hedge that divided the two properties. She was wearing a short tennis dress, and her legs were tanned, and as she came toward the court where Benjamin was rallying desultorily with the Bronstein’s fifteen-year-old son, Benjamin purposely hit the ball into the net so that he could watch Peggy approach. He stared at her unashamedly, swept by a nameless nostalgia at the image of the young girl in the short white dress coming through the green, summery hedge, a negation of death, wars, all the angular, tortured, masculine world of armies.

  She played very good tennis, too, hitting all-out in the California style (her family were San Franciscans) and moving swiftly around the court, with her brief skirt flaring as she ran up to the net to reach for shots. When she missed a smash, she would shake her head and say in mock despair, “Peggy Woodham, you play like a girl!” She was not easy to beat. The first set she and Benjamin played against each other on that hot Sunday morning in Georgia, Benjamin only managed to win by 6-4. She shook his hand gravely at the net and said, “I never thought I’d be beaten by somebody from New York. And especially with a backhand like yours.”

  “What’s the matter with my backhand?” Benjamin asked.

  “It’s a mockery,” she said, teasing him. “Pure mockery. It’s a PFC of a backhand.”

  “You’re rank-happy,” Benjamin said. Somehow, from the first moment, they spoke to each other as though they had known each other for years. “Just because your father is a colonel,” Benjamin said. He had learned quite a bit about her during the course of the morning. Her father was the commanding officer of the surgical section at the camp hospital; she worked in a bookshop in town; she had just got her BA from Stanford; she had been engaged to be married to a star football player and had broken it off because her fiancé had turned out to be a nasty man; she had an inferiority complex because her mother was one of the most beautiful women in San Francisco. She spoke gaily, swiftly, with a Western openness and directness and, by the time the morning was over and they went into the Bronstein house for lunch, Benjamin was thinking. It’s a lucky thing there’s a war on; otherwise I’d be planning to marry her. He was twenty-eight years old by then and he had carefully avoided getting married. For one thing, since the episode with Pat in college, no woman had appealed to him as a possible wife. For another, he was determined not to enter marriage as a poor man. Marriage was tough enough without that.

  After lunch Peggy’s father came over and they played doubles with the Bronstein’s son. Patrick Woodham was a wiry bald man with a face and manner made for command. When Patrick Woodham was ten years old you would have known that if there ever was a war there would be eagles on his shoulders. Some colonels are made, some are born. Patrick Woodham was born a colonel. He also played a formidable game of tennis, and he and the Bronstein boy beat Benjamin and Peggy three sets in a row before they quit, because Colonel Woodham had to get back to the hospital.

  Benjamin couldn’t tell whether the Colonel liked him or not. Woodham had a brusque, authoritative manner with everybody except his daughter. She was an only child, and he spoke to her with an indulgent tenderness that made Benjamin like the man, even if the man didn’t like him.

  As they sat on the bench in the shadow of an oak by the side of the court, recovering from the last set, Woodham said to Peggy, “Put on your sweater. You’ll catch cold like that.”

  “I’m boiling,” Peggy said.

  “Put on your sweater,” Woodham said.

  “Yes, Colonel,” Peggy said. “Yes, sir, Colonel.” Some day, Benjamin thought, looking at the fined-down hard man smiling with love and amusement at the girl, some day I must have a daughter.

  They made love three weeks later, on a Saturday night, in the warm dark garden behind the tennis court. Peggy was not a virgin. “Remember,” she said later, enjoying her own candor, “I have a BA from Stanford. They don’t give degrees to virgins in California. It’s a state law.”

  In his arms, Peggy w
as not the brisk, teasing girl who strode onto the tennis court with such concentrated determination. Even the very first time, when awkwardness and haste were to be expected, their lovemaking was gentle and tender. As he lay there, his lips against her throat, taking in the fragrance of her skin and the perfume of the freshly cut grass and lilac from two huge bushes that loomed above them, Benjamin knew that there was no escape and that he didn’t want any escape.

  “You,” he said, whispering against the slender throat, “we’re going to get married.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment and she didn’t move. “You don’t have to marry me,” she said, “just because you raped me.”

  “I have to marry you,” he said, “because I have to marry you.”

  She began to sob. “Oh, my dear, my dear, my dear,” she said, holding his head so tight that his lips were crushed against her and he couldn’t speak.

  The colonel had no difficulty speaking, though. Benjamin was afraid that the Colonel would object to the marriage because Benjamin was Jewish. The Colonel, it turned out, was a fierce atheist, and didn’t mind at all that Benjamin was Jewish. But he minded a lot of other things.

  “She’s too damn young,” Woodham said as they sat across from each other on a hot Sunday afternoon in the library of the rambling frame house next to the Bronstein’s garden. “She’s only twenty.”

  “My mother was married before she was twenty,” Benjamin said.

  Woodham snorted and ran his hand the wrong way against his graying tonsure. “So was Peggy’s mother,” he said.

  “Well?” Benjamin said.

  Woodham poured a whiskey for each of them. “Women grew up quicker in those days,” he said. He handed Benjamin his glass. He noticed the little smile on Benjamin’s lips. “All right,” he said, “they didn’t. But there wasn’t a war on in those days. I don’t want my only daughter to be left a widow, probably with a kid, at the age of twenty-one, if you want to know the truth. Why can’t you wait?”