by Irwin Shaw
As they drove through the dark streets, surrounded by the policemen, Federov held Peggy’s hand and stared down at the drawn, wounded, beloved face, pale and frightening in the bare light of the bulb attached to the ceiling of the van. If she comes out of this, Federov swore, I will never do anything to hurt her again. Never.
1964
STILL, HE THOUGHT, SITTING at the piano, hitting b flat, she could have left a note. Damned thoughtless.
He struck a last chord. The finger that had been cut at the baseball field when he caught the foul ball began to bleed again. Every day to its own small wound. It left a little dark red stain on the ivory of a key. He left it there and got up restlessly.
Peggy had come out of it all right, although with a bad concussion and scars and weeks of pain, but of course he had hurt her from time to time, because there is no living with anyone without hurting them occasionally. But he had tried to remember and keep beastliness down to a minimum. But if she walked in that minute, he knew he’d bawl her out angrily. He decided it would be better if he got out of the house. It was ominously empty and the late afternoon light made it seem lonely. It shook with the pound of the surf, a clean, polished, unstable, empty place for ghosts and heartbreak and premonition of shipwreck. He took off his shoes and socks and started out of the house to walk along the beach when the phone rang. He went back into the house and picked up the phone.
“Ben?” It was his brother’s voice. “I’ve been trying to get you all afternoon.”
“I was wandering around town. You coming out tonight?”
“No. That bitch called again,” Louis said. “I’ve been arguing with her for hours.”
“What’s the matter now?” Federov asked. “I thought we had it all arranged this morning.”
“Arranged!” Louis said. His voice was trembling with anger. Louis was so rarely angry that the emotion made his voice sound strange to Federov. “You can’t arrange anything with that bitch for more than fifteen minutes at a time. Just long enough to call her goddam mother and listen to the goddam old lady tell her I’m taking advantage of her.”
“What’s she asking for now?”
“My blood, my balls, and the marrow of my bones.” Louis never used language like that and Federov found that he was a little shocked by his brother’s unaccustomed vulgarity. “Fifty thousand cash, the whole goddam house, with the pictures and all the books, the place in Falmouth, and twenty-five thousand a year or one-half my income, whichever is higher, plus all lawyer’s fees. And the alimony to continue even if she gets married, and I know for a fact she’s been screwing some fairy dress designer for two years and’ll marry the sonofabitch the minute she comes back from Reno.”
“Man!” Federov said.
“Man is right. Oh. I forgot. And I pay all taxes.”
“You can’t give her that,” Federov said.
“I know it. I don’t have that,” Louis said. “I’ll be peddling pencils on streetcorners.”
“What’re you going to do?” Federov asked.
“I’m seeing her and her goddam lawyer tomorrow. I’ll try to fight out some compromise. What the hell else is there for me to do?”
“Her lawyer’s going to work on Sunday?”
“That goddam Rosenthal of hers’d work on Yom Kippur, New Year’s Eve and on the matinee of the Second Coming of the Lord if he thought there was an extra buck in it for him,” Louis said. “This is the first time in my life I’m sorry I’m Jewish and I can’t call anyone a dirty-Jew shyster lawyer.”
Federov couldn’t help laughing. After a moment, Louis had to laugh, too. “Maybe not on New Year’s Eve,” he said, and he was back to the old Louis again.
“What can I do for you?” Federov asked.
“Call up Mary and tell her I’m stuck in town on business and can’t come down this week.”
“Why can’t you call her up yourself?” Federov asked. Mary was the woman Louis intended to marry when he got his divorce. She was staying with some friends in a house down the beach for the weekend.
“I don’t want to call her,” Louis said. “She’ll ask all sorts of questions and get all upset. Every time she knows I see the bitch she thinks somehow I won’t get a divorce and we’ll never get married. You know how Mary is.”
“Boy,” Federov said, “you sure do pick ’em.”
Louis chuckled. He was not displeased about his complications with women. It was a side to his character, otherwise so tranquil, that Benjamin had never been able to fathom. “Be a brother,” Louis said. “Call the lady up. Tell her about the big job that came up suddenly in St. Louis or Washington or somewhere.”
“She’ll just call you up and find out.”
“I’ll turn the phone off for the weekend,” Louis said.
“Okay, brother,” said Federov resignedly.
“That’s a brother,” Louis said. “Don’t drown before Monday.” He hung up.
Federov looked at the phone for a moment, sighed, then dialed the number of the house where Mary was staying. Mary answered as though she had been sitting next to the phone waiting for a call. Federov lied convincingly.
“Oh, I’m desolate,” Mary said. She had a Northampton accent, softened by Madison Avenue. She worked on television and made a great deal of money. “We had such a fun weekend planned. I think you ought to talk to your brother Louis,” she went on. “He just works himself to the bone. Don’t you agree?”
“I do, I do indeed,” Federov said. “I certainly will talk to him.”
He hung up and looked at the phone. How many men will you screw, dear? he thought. What house will you take? How much alimony are you going to ask for when your time comes, dear?
Barefooted, he went out of the house onto the dunes before the phone rang again. He made his way down to the beach and walked along the water’s edge. The sea had calmed considerably, but it was still rough and menacing, with white water crashing onto the sand. The beach was deserted. He walked slowly, close enough to the water to feel the fine spray that spumed up from the waves against his face. The tide-swept beach was cool and firm under his feet. His footprints, broad and high-arched, were clearly defined behind him. I am making my mark on the sands of time, he thought ironically.
He started west but stopped after a few yards when he remembered that the house in which Mary was staying was only a quarter of a mile away and overlooked the beach. If she saw him, there would be a sentimental, worrisome hour of questions and explanations, and he was in no mood for that. There is a limit, he thought, to a brother’s responsibility. So he turned and went the other way, going back over his footprints.
1944
IT WAS IN THE ALSACE in November. His division was out of the line, for once, and he wangled a two-day pass and a jeep and drove over the war-torn roads for a hundred and fifty miles to where Louis’s A-20 squadron was based. He hadn’t seen his brother for two years. He knew that as of three weeks ago his brother had been alive. He knew that because he had received a letter from his mother two days before, reporting that she had just gotten a letter from Louis.
Louis was out on a mission when Federov at last found the airfield and went into the battered stone farmhouse that served as squadron headquarters. A sergeant with thick glasses was typing at a desk. He looked up from his typing long enough to tell Federov that it was a three-group raid, target railroad yards at Essen, going in at eight thousand feet, flak usually heavy in that area, no significant fighter opposition expected, no news yet, due back at sixteen hundred hours and did he want a cup of coffee?
Federov looked at his watch. It was three o’clock. Fifteen hundred hours. An hour, minimum, to wait to find out whether his brother was alive or not that afternoon. “Thanks,” he said. “Yeah.”
The sergeant waved to a wrinkly aluminum pot on a primus stove under a map of northern Germany. Federov helped himself, pouring the coffee into a canteen cup on a table against the wall. He put some sugar in it from another canteen cup on the table and poured in som
e condensed milk from a can with holes punched in the top. The coffee was hot but awful. It was going to take years of peace, he thought, to get the taste of Army coffee out of his mouth.
“That your jeep outside?” the sergeant asked, without looking up from his work.
“Yeah,” Federov said.
“Take the rotor out,” the sergeant said. “This squadron is composed exclusively of thieves.”
Federov finished his coffee and went outside and took the rotor out and put it in the pocket of his combat jacket. He looked around him. There were tents sunk in mud and the sound of engines from the line, where ground crews were making repairs on two A-20s. An airfield. An airfield like a hundred he had seen. An airfield in bad weather, with a mean wind snapping at canvas and making men hurry to get from place to place to avoid the cold.
He went in and looked at Essen on the map. A big blob under acetate. There was an echo in his mind. Essen, Essen…Then he remembered. The governess on the boat to Fall River in the summer of 1935. The big, blond, smiling, bitter girl who came from Essen and who had been annoyed because he had guessed that she was a servant. He wondered if his brother had just dropped a five-hundred-pound bomb on the house in which Fraulein Gretchen Whatever had been born.
An hour is a long time when you are waiting to discover whether your brother is alive or dead. Sitting on the floor with his back against the wall in the orderly room (there was only one chair and the sergeant with glasses was sitting on it) Federov remembered taking Louis, aged nine, to the washhouse to wipe the blood off his lips after the fight Louis had just lost and to press the cold rag against the bump on Louis’s forehead. And his own tears.
You knew more about your brother when you both were young than later on, before wives, separation, the watchful weighing and balancing of maturity, made you cautious about showing what you meant profoundly to each other. You could weep for a brother when you were a child.
1933
WHEN BENJAMIN WAS playing football for the small teacher’s college in New Jersey that he went to, not because he particularly wanted to be a teacher, but because the tuition was free, Louis made a point of getting to see almost every game, even when it meant hitchhiking hundreds of miles to distant points in New England so that he could watch Benjamin play. During one game, when Benjamin had the wind knocked out of him and was lying senseless on the turf, Louis leaped from the stands, a small solemn boy still in knickerbockers, and ran out with the trainer to make sure that the injury was not serious. The first thing Benjamin saw when he came to was Louis’s anxious, thin face peering down at him. Louis had taken off Benjamin’s helmet and put it under his head and was massaging his neck as the trainer kept pushing Benjamin’s legs, bending his knees methodically up to and away from the stomach to get the wind back into Benjamin’s lungs.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Benjamin gasped, ashamed immediately before the squad at this grotesque breach of masculine etiquette.
“You all right?” Louis asked.
“Sure, I’m all right. Get back off the field,” Benjamin said.
“You want to stay in?” the trainer asked, dumping some water from his pail over Benjamin’s face.
“Come on, Ben,” Louis said. “Sit out this period.”
“I’m ok, I’m ok.” Benjamin struggled groggily back to his feet. If Louis hadn’t been there, he would have remained lying down at least another minute. Actually, he felt awful, nauseated and dizzy, and should have allowed himself to be led off the field to recover. But with Louis there, an incongruously solicitous figure with his short pants and baby face, there was no question of going back to the bench. “Get out of here,” Benjamin said angrily. At the age of nineteen, he had a keen sense of what was seemly in public, and that did not include visits from his family in front of three thousand spectators in the middle of a football game.
“Ok,” Louis said. “I’m going. But don’t be a hero.”
“Yes, Mom,” Benjamin said. This was a family joke. Each Saturday before he left for a game, it was the last thing his mother said to him as he went from the house with his gear in a duffel bag over his shoulder. Later on, during the war, she said the same thing the day he left for England.
His mother and he had conducted a running argument that endured for almost eight years about his playing football. She had come to see him play only once and discovered that she could not bear to see her son battered by what she called “insane hoodlums” all afternoon. Her only comment that evening was, “Why are you always the last one to get up from the ground? I thought you were dead twenty times today. You call that a game?”
It was true that Benjamin made a practice of staying on the ground as long as possible after each play. It gave him precious minutes of added rest throughout an afternoon. He wasn’t in as good shape as he should have been, mostly because he had to work at night as a sodajerk to earn the money to keep him in school, and he never got enough sleep.
His mother, who was not a lady who gave up easily, drew on friends and other members of the family to try to argue Benjamin into giving up playing football. “Goyim nochas, what are you proving?” was the phrase the friends and relatives used most often in describing football. The phrase meant “Gentile pleasures”—violent games, prizefighting, mountain climbing, and wars, all things that Jews were supposed to be too intelligent to indulge in. Every time he heard it, the words infuriated Benjamin. It infuriated him because of its echo of the ghetto and what he considered the sickly assumption, incomprehensibly borrowed from their enemies, that Jews were too clever to expose themselves to danger.
“Remember,” said one of his mother’s friends, a high school English teacher who had been enlisted in the anti-football crusade, “remember, we are the People of the Book. We abstain from violence.”
Benjamin’s manners were too good to allow him to contradict an older man, and a friend of his mother’s at that, so he refrained from reminding the high school teacher that the Book itself was a chaotic chronicle of murder, treachery, pillage and slaughter, and that other races, too, had been, in their way, People of the Book without noticeably eschewing violence. The Greeks, for example. The man who had written Oedipus at Colonnus had fought the Samians, and been a general, to boot; the Anabasis had been written by a man who had retreated, sword in hand, with the ten thousand; the author of Don Quixote, which could be considered a Book with a capital B, had been taken prisoner as a common seaman in a naval engagement; Sir Walter Raleigh, whose poetry the teacher read to the students in his English classes, had also been known to go into battle from time to time.
The human race, Benjamin would have liked to say, are the People of the Book, and the claim by one small, dispersed tribe to exclusive title was presumptuous and foolish. But all he said was, “Thanks for taking the trouble, sir. But I’m not going to stop.”
“Why?” the teacher had said, annoyed. “It would give your mother so much pleasure.”
“I’m not here to give my mother pleasure,” Benjamin said.
“I won’t repeat that to her,” the teacher said.
“Thank you,” Benjamin said.
And then, inevitably…“Benjamin, what are you proving?”
Benjamin didn’t bother to answer.
He didn’t play football to prove anything. He played because he loved it, just the way he read John Keats and played baseball and boxed in the gym because he loved it. His father, though not going on record on the subject out of respect for Benjamin’s mother, quietly approved of his son’s playing and enjoyed watching the games. There was some ghetto left in his father, but not that much.
During Benjamin’s junior year at school, on a bitterly cold afternoon when hitting the frozen ground was like bouncing off cement, Louis was at the center of another incident. It was a rough game and the opposite team was very strong, and Benjamin was being hit harder on every play than he had been all season. He had a cold that had persisted with fever all week, and by the last quarter he was so tired
he could hardly stand up. He hadn’t gained more than five yards all day and had dropped a pass from his numbed hands in the open field and at his position at safety was having more and more difficulty covering the ends as they came sprinting down for long passes. The other team punted and Benjamin fumbled the kick within his own ten-yard line and the other team recovered, with a touchdown just a few feet away. The captain of Benjamin’s team called a time-out to give them all a chance to recover and plot the defense against the next four plays.
In the stands, Louis was sitting behind a large boy, aged nineteen or twenty who had a hip flask from which he and his girl were nipping to ward off the cold. When Benjamin dropped the punt, the boy with the flask hooted derisively. “Hey, Federov, you bum,” the boy shouted, “what’re you doing in a football uniform? Why don’t you try out for the girls’ ping-pong team?”
The spectators on either side of the boy with the flask laughed at the gibe. Louis, in the next row, leaned over and touched the wit’s shoulder lightly.
“You,” he said, although the boy was at least four years older than himself and thirty pounds heavier. “Get up.” Louis stood up.
The boy with the flask looked around and smiled when he saw the size of his challenger.
“What’s biting you, junior?” he asked.
“You talk too much,” Louis said.
“Do I?” the boy said. “What do you think you’re going to do about it?”
Louis tapped him on the shoulder again, this time hard. “Come on down under the stands,” he said, “and you’ll see.”
“You’re frightening me to death, junior,” the boy said.
Louis hit him with his closed fist this time, still on the shoulder.
“Ah,” the boy said, still acting amused and superior, “you’re a rough little feller, aren’t you?” But he stood up and followed Louis down under the stands.
