by Irwin Shaw
He had never kissed a girl (he was convinced he wasn’t good-looking enough for this ever to happen to him), he had never smoked a cigarette (he wanted to be an All-American halfback), and never drunk a drop of alcohol (at the age of thirteen he doubted that he would be welcome in a speakeasy). He was by nature truthful and could not boast, like the other boys, who, while not going as far as the cherry-tree boy, spoke knowingly of kissing with open mouths, putting their hands under girls’ skirts and getting drunk on their parents’ hidden liquor on holidays.
The cherry-tree boy was named Boris Cohn. About two-thirds of the campers were Jewish. Somehow, in 1927, this easy association of Jew with Christian seemed natural and unforced. Only after the advent of Hitler would a similar mixture bear the burden of self-consciousness. Cohn came from a wealthy family in Manhattan, which had obviously spared no expense to spoil him. He had arrived in camp with a portable phonograph and a large collection of popular records. He went often to the theatre, he said, especially to musical comedies, took girls to restaurants, visited whorehouses, drank bathtub gin, smoked secretly, and insisted that he had driven a Packard phaeton for two weeks the summer before in Lakewood, New Jersey, using an older brother’s license and getting away with it. To put the seal on his exalted status, he had brought with him two dozen new Spalding tennis balls. Benjamin, like his other tent-mates, had brought a box of three balls, which he knew would have to last him the summer.
The phonograph blared for hours each day. Cohn had a particular liking for two songs, “Hallelujah” and “Sometimes I’m Happy,” from a musical comedy called Hit the Deck. Cohn would play them over and over again, practicing dance steps barefooted on the rough plank floor of the tent. The terrible thing about Cohn from Benjamin’s point of view was that, despite his depravity, he was generous and good-natured and was the best athlete in camp. He was the trickiest pitcher, with a curve, a drop, and a floater, he was the fastest runner in the 100- and 220-yard dash, he led the entire camp league in batting, he won the tennis tournament for seniors, he knocked out his opponent in the first round of the 150-pound finals, he beat the next man by five yards in the 100-yard free-style and won the mile swim across the lake by nearly 300 yards. He also dispensed largesse to whoever happened to be present upon the arrival of the luxurious packages his parents sent him two or three times a week. Two hours after mail call he never had as much as a Hershey bar left for himself. He also masturbated serenely when there were no counselors present. At the age of thirteen Cohn managed to shake, for life, Benjamin’s sense of morality and his belief in the rewards of virtue and the wisdom of his elders.
The counselor for the tent, a darkly handsome, thick young man by the name of Bryant, who was a second-string halfback for Syracuse, was completely under Cohn’s spell and didn’t even report Cohn when he caught Cohn smoking one night after taps. Bryant suffered from two obsessions. One was that he was going to be bald by the time he was twenty-five (which, in the event, turned out to be optimistic, as he was bald by his twenty-fourth birthday). The other was that he was better than the first-string Syracuse halfback and was only kept on the bench by an irrational dislike that the coach of the team had taken for him. Of all the five boys in the tent, Bryant discussed these weighty matters only with Cohn, who promised to find him the name of a doctor who had saved Cohn’s uncle’s hair under similar circumstances. Cohn also loaned Bryant a jar of expensive hair cream and, on two occasions, on Bryant’s day off, a ten-dollar bill. He also promised that another uncle of his, who was a graduate of Syracuse and a weighty influence in alumni affairs, would personally talk to the coach in Bryant’s behalf. Rich in everything, Cohn had an uncle for all eventualities. Actually, the next season, poor Bryant was demoted to third string and never even won his letter, but there was no way for him to know about his impending tragedy as he conferred in low tones throughout the summer with the all-powerful Cohn.
To the tune of “Sing Hallelujah, Hallelujah, sweep all your troubles away…” and “Sometimes I’m happy, sometimes I’m blue, My disposition depends on you…,” the summer passed, swinging into August on a chant of exultant optimism or Broadway melancholy, as the mood seized Cohn, cranking the handle of his phonograph and dancing barefoot on the tent floor.
1964
I TOOK HER CHERRY UNDER a cherry tree, Federov remembered nearly forty years later, her, cherry, cherry, cherry, under the cherry, cherry tree. Old English ballad.
There was a shout of warning and Federov looked up just in time to see a foul ball coming at him. He could have stood up and cupped the ball safely in his two hands or let it go entirely, but instead, at the last moment, he stretched debonairly above his head and caught the ball with his left hand. The boys on the field laughed and there were a few cheers for the catch, and Federov made a grave baseball player’s salute, as though he were doffing his cap to an admiring crowd, before he tossed the ball to the pitcher. The ball had stung his palm and had broken a nail and his finger was bleeding a little, but he put his hand into his pocket and dried the blood off against the cloth. It would have been more sanitary to wrap a handkerchief around his finger, but he didn’t want to let on that the catch had been more troublesome than it had seemed. Showboat, he thought. Two hands for beginners. He smiled wryly at the everlasting vanity of old athletes.
1927
OTHER THINGS HAPPENED to Benjamin that summer. He played in three games on the senior varsity and made a diving catch in center field to save a victory against another camp that brought him the election of the Best Athlete of the Week at the Friday night ceremony of awards. Cohn gave him five dollars for the catch, because Cohn was pitching at the time. Benjamin didn’t get paid again for engaging in any sport until he played two or three games of semipro football in Newark for twenty-five dollars an afternoon the year after he got out of college, during the Depression.
And for the first time in his life, that summer he shed tears for someone besides himself. That long step toward maturity came after the finals of the boxing tournament, in which his brother Louis was beaten in three rounds for the seventy-five-pound championship by a boy two years older than he. At the end of the fight, Louis’s lip was cut and there was a big lump on his forehead. Louis took his beating with his usual stoicism, but, while Benjamin was leading him to the showers to stop the flow of blood and put an icy washrag against Louis’s forehead, the tears of helpless love suddenly came to Benjamin’s eyes. He turned his head, trying to keep Louis from seeing what was happening. But he knew that Louis knew, though they never talked about the moment, even when they were grown men. Louis looked at him gravely, wondering and a little ashamed of what seemed to him incomprehensible childishness in a brother he had never seen weep before.
Each summer, toward the end of the camp season, the seniors went on a three-day trip, usually to play baseball and basketball against other camps within a radius of 200 miles or so. But this summer Cohn had to be reckoned with. After supper one night on the lawn outside the mess hall, in a general meeting of the seniors that he had persuaded the head counselor to call, Cohn stood up, smiling and at ease, as usual, and made a speech. “I got a great idea, fellers,” he said. “Let’s be different for once. We’ve been playing ball all season long. What’s the sense in driving all over the place in trucks just to play some more ball? Anyway, we’re more than forty of us and only about fifteen fellers’re going to play, while all the rest of the guys just sit around like dopes. I don’t think that’s fair. After all, everybody’s paying the same twenty bucks extra for the trip, why should only fifteen guys have all the fun?” There were some cheers at this unusual example of self-sacrifice, since everybody knew that Cohn would pitch both days and play in both basketball games. Benjamin listened with sinking heart. He covered center field for the varsity and had dreamed of batting against pitchers he had never seen before and stealing base hits from strange hitters for the glory of his team. Summer meant baseball for him. If it weren’t for baseball, Benjamin wouldn’t have car
ed if it was winter all year round.
He watched Cohn’s persuasive brown monkey face as Cohn spoke and knew that something precious, something that in justice really belonged to him, was being taken away from him because of the strength of someone else’s character and the cleverness of somebody else’s mind. Somehow, he knew, too, that this was not the last time this would happen to him. He couldn’t hate Cohn for it. You couldn’t hate Cohn. Nobody could hate Cohn. You could only recognize his power.
“I happened to call an uncle of mine in Boston yesterday,” Cohn said. Again that all-conquering phalanx of uncles. “And my uncle said, ‘I’d like to give the boys a treat.’ I don’t know whether you boys know it or not,” Cohn went on, “but a lot of times Broadway shows play in Boston before they come to New York. My uncle says there’s a musical comedy in Boston now called Bye, Bye, Bonnie that’s just a wow. Comedians, chorus girls, the whole thing. My uncle says it’ll cost a fortune to see it when it gets to New York, but he knows the man who owns the theatre and he’s getting us all the best seats in the house next Tuesday…” A loud cheer went up from the listening boys. Cohn grinned, before silencing them with a wave of the hand. “And that ain’t all. The night after, he’s going to give us a party. A real party.” Cohn winked lewdly. “If you know what I mean. Fancy food, lobster, baked Alaska, punch…If there weren’t any of our good old counselors here, I’d tell you what there’s going to be in that little old punch. Not just fruit juice, if you catch what I mean, not in my uncle’s house.” Everybody laughed at this, including Bryant and the other senior counselor present. “And that ain’t all, either. My uncle has two daughters.” He paused skillfully to let this sink in. “Beauts. And I’m not saying this just because they’re my cousins. And not kids. Old. Fifteen, seventeen, that sort of thing. And they’ve been around. Don’t let anybody tell you Boston is a dead town. I was there last Christmas and they practically had to carry me to the train. And these girls ain’t alone, fellers. They know everybody. But everybody. Blonds, brunettes, girls from Vassar, Radcliffe. College girls. And they’re all on notice, just sitting there waiting for us to say, ‘Lady, may I have the next dance?’” Now Cohn was saluted by whistles. He stopped the demonstration with another easy, masterful wave of a hand. “And if there’s anybody who just can’t get along without baseball, why the Braves’re playing Chicago while we’re there and my uncle’ll get whoever wants to go box seats, the best seats in the park. Now if this ain’t more fun than eating hamburgers and drinking cocoa and playing on a field at Camp Canoga that’s no smoother than a cow pasture and where you ought to wear a catcher’s mask in the outfield to protect yourself from the bad hops, I’ll eat Benny Federov’s five-dollar-and-fifty-cent Eddie Roush glove.”
Even Benjamin felt he had to smile, hypocritically, as the boys laughed at Cohn’s offer. Benjamin’s passion was well-known and had been the subject of jokes several times in the skits put on in the Social Hall every Saturday evening.
“Benny,” Cohn said charmingly, “you’re not going to be sore at me, are you? You know how much I admire you. I’ve been around a lot and I’ve seen a lot of ballplayers and I don’t mind saying I never saw a more promising outfielder in my life. Why…” Cohn addressed the meeting at large again. “Why, when it’s two out and I’m pitching, and the ball’s hit out toward center field, I don’t even look around, no matter where it’s going. I just throw away my glove and start walking toward the bench because I know Benny’s out there and if Benny’s out there that ball’s going to be caught.” He took a few shrewd, defense-attorney’s steps toward Benjamin. “You’re not sore, are you, Benny?”
“No,” Benjamin said, “I’m not sore.” Sore was not the word for what he was feeling, anyway, and at the age of thirteen he didn’t know the accurate word for what Cohn was doing to him, and there was a good chance he would never learn the accurate word or have it ready for the proper occasion any time in his life.
“Anyway,” Cohn said, going back to his original position facing the boys seated in front of him on the grass in front of the mess hall, “all this is just a suggestion. If you fellers don’t want to go to Boston that’s okay with me. I’ll get in there and pitch like it was the World Series and I was Dazzy Vance. I’m just as happy one way or another. All I think is, maybe we ought to vote. This is a free country and the majority rules and all that bunk. Bye, Bye, Bonnie or Camp Canoga. It’s up to you.”
Bye, Bye, Bonnie went for forty-one votes, Camp Canoga for two, Benjamin’s and that of a boy called Burke, who didn’t even play on either of the teams, but who had a grandmother in Boston he’d have to lunch with if she found out he was in the city.
Cohn’s uncle got the tickets for Bye, Bye, Bonnie for August 23rd. The plans had been made in advance and nobody had bothered to find out that on that same day, two men called Sacco and Vanzetti were to be executed in Charlestown State Prison. Few of the boys read anything but the sports pages of whatever newspapers found their way into the camp, but the director of the camp, who was the principal of a high school in the wintertime, read the front pages, too, and they were full of threats of riots, bombings, and mob action in Boston if the execution were carried out as scheduled.
The director had an understandable reluctance to send forty-three boys entrusted to his care into a city crammed, as the papers said, with violent anarchists from all over the world, and in which street fighting and bombings were likely to take place.
He called the seniors together and gave them a short course in contemporary history. When he told the boys that the Boston trip might have to be canceled, the boys responded with groans. “But it is not yet definite,” the director went on. He was an impressive, calm-looking man with a priest’s bald head and a fine tonsure of clipped white hair. But he was hounded all summer by fear for the tender souls turned trustingly over to him by parents every June 30th. “No, not definite at all,” the director said. “There have been protests all over the world, there is a great deal of confusion in this case, and I wouldn’t be surprised if at any moment the Governor of Massachusetts, who is a personal friend of mine, and a great and just man, either reprieved these poor men to wait for another investigation or commuted their sentences. We will have to wait for events,” the director said, and it was probably the first time in their lives that any of the boys listening to him had ever heard that phrase. “We will make double arrangements, both with Camp Canoga and Camp Berkeley, and with the proper people in Boston, so that no matter what happens, you boys will not be deprived of your holiday. If the poor men are to die, you will still have your two baseball games and basketball games. If, even at the last minute, we hear that the men are to live, you will have your rather extraordinary…uh…spree, in Boston.”
As the boys straggled disconsolately back to their bunks, Benjamin found himself next to Cohn. “What’s the matter, Cohn?” Benjamin asked. “Isn’t the Governor one of your uncles?” It was the sharpest thing he had said in all his thirteen years, and Cohn looked at him, surprised, as the realization hit him that there were people on the face of the earth who might disapprove of him and whom he could not charm and who might be pleased to make him suffer.
On the morning of the 23rd, the forty-three boys and four counselors piled into Reo trucks with benches along the sides behind the driver’s cab. The passengers were protected by canvas stretched over wooden supports, but the back was open. It was a raw, gusty day, and the boys all wore sweaters as they piled onto the wooden seats. The latest rumor from Boston was that the Governor had not yet made up his mind about whether to show clemency to the convicted men. Bryant, who was in charge of the expedition, was to call the camp director at one o’clock for final instructions. If by that time the execution had been postponed or canceled, the trucks were to continue on to Boston. If the men had been electrocuted, the trucks were to go on to Camp Canoga. The boys would play the baseball game, stay the night, and play the basketball game the next morning. Then they were to go on to Camp Berkeley, repe
at the program and start back toward camp the following afternoon.
Two or three of the older boys had newspapers with them and were making predictions that the Governor would have to commute the sentence. Benjamin, although an avid reader of everything else, had not yet begun to read newspapers and had no opinion of any kind on the rights and wrongs of the case and no notion of why such a fuss was being made about two men he had never heard of. Hundreds of people were electrocuted or hanged each year throughout the United States, he knew, without its interfering with anybody’s plans and the special nature of this particular punishment eluded him.
He glanced at a newspaper column that compared it to the Dreyfus case, but since Benjamin had never heard of the Dreyfus case this was of no help to him.
He sat as close to the open back of the truck as he could get, bumping on the hard bench, smelling the dusty canvas top and hoping he wouldn’t get carsick. He didn’t join in the jokes but sat gloomily, with eyes closed, concentrating to keep from being nauseated by the fumes from the engine and the roughness of the trip. He did not actively wish for the death of Sacco and Vanzetti that day, but if he had been told definitely that the men were not to die, he would have begged out of the trip and stayed in camp. Boston had no attraction for him. He had no interest in the theatre; the spiked punch of Cohn’s uncle would, he was sure, make him sick, and he had no illusions about the amount of attention the sixteen- and seventeen-year-old blonds and brunettes from Vassar and Radcliffe would lavish on him at a party. And in camp he could always scrounge games in the Intermediate League or take a couple of books in a canoe and catch up on his reading. So his presence in the truck was in reality a bet that the men would die and he would get a chance to play two ball games in the next three days.