by Irwin Shaw
“No food to be taken along,” Benjamin warned them. “Only liquor. It’s all bootleg and they can’t go to the police about it.”
So the boys ate pâté, caviar, turkey, ice cream, lobster, potato salad, in any order that was convenient as they reached into the icebox and rifled the whiskey cases and filled their bags and gunny sacks and cardboard cartons with the bottles.
“Tonight,” Benjamin said, thinking of Pat, “we’re going to have ourselves a real New Year’s Eve party.”
It was six-thirty in the morning when they tiptoed out of the building to where the three cars were parked under a shed behind the kitchen. It was pitch-dark, but they didn’t put on any lights as they loaded the cars. In five minutes they were ready to go. The engines coughed in the pre-dawn cold, caught, and they rolled down the driveway, catching the huge Pennsylvania-Tudor pile of the club building momentarily in the glare of the headlights as they took a curve. England, my England, Benjamin thought sardonically, as the car lights picked out the dark beams. Then the building disappeared in the darkness and they sped toward home.
Most of the boys, when they weren’t spelling the drivers, slept. But Benjamin couldn’t sleep. He had never stolen anything in his life. Now I am a thief, he thought. He knew that later he would have to come to terms with this idea, as he would with the idea of the girl who had used his bed and the girl who had made him blush. But for the moment he was too tired, too inflamed by a hatred he had never known he could feel for anyone, to make any judgment on himself.
They held the party that night, but it was an anti-climax. They were all too exhausted to enjoy it, although there was a moment of laughter when they drew straws to see who would beat up Dyer when he came back to school after the holidays and a boy called Swinton, who was the best student in school, but was blind without his glasses and twenty-five pounds lighter than Dyer, came up with the short straw. So the problem of what to do with Dyer was postponed for more sober discussion.
Pat looked beautiful and happy, and Benjamin tried to match her mood. “Isn’t it nice,” she said, “to have our own private New Year.” Benjamin danced with her and went into the kitchen with her to kiss her a true and sensual Happy New Year. But he knew he had already betrayed her, even if the actual act of betrayal was years in the future.
The night had put its mark on Benjamin and he knew it. He was ashamed of himself. Filthy people had behaved filthily to him and he had become filthy himself.
Nobody ever hit Dyer and he didn’t say anything about what had happened at the country club, and in his junior year he was elected president of his class.
Eighteen months after the New Year’s party, Pat’s family moved to Oregon and she had to go along with them. She and Benjamin wrote to each other for a while, but it was no good, and by that time Benjamin had taken up with any number of other girls, none of them as good of heart or as brave and honest as Pat, but with whom he could go to bed without love or the pretense of love. In his imagination at that period, he thought of himself as mounting a curving ornate staircase over and over and over again.
After he got out of school and had moved to New York, Benjamin had an affair with a girl named Prentiss, who, it turned out, had been at the New Year’s Eve party in Pennsylvania. Neither of them remembered having seen each other that night and, from Benjamin’s description, the girl could not identify either the blond who had used his bed or the pretty dark bitch at the bar.
Miss Prentiss, it turned out, had her own peculiarities. She was the daughter of a Methodist minister from a small town near Scranton, with a face and manner of speaking that Benjamin’s mother would have called “refined.” But after the affair, which had lasted nearly three months and had been conducted in a fashion that Mrs. Federov would have never called refined, Miss Prentiss, naked and sipping straight bourbon on the edge of her wide double bed, asked Benjamin to marry her. He was making twenty-three dollars a week and going to night school to study drafting and, while he enjoyed seeing Miss Prentiss from time to time and sharing her bed and her bourbon, he could not see himself marrying her. She was pretty in a faded blond way, but given to neurotic bouts of anger and tears and insisted that he eat no meat when he went out with her, because she was a vegetarian and could not stand the sight even of a slice of chicken on a platter. She was the first girl he’d ever known who went to a psychiatrist and, in exchange for the lovemaking and the whiskey, he had to listen to endless reports from the couch, mostly about her father and his sermons and dreams of animals dying in their own blood.
“Marriage?” Benjamin asked. “Are you out of your mind? Do you know how much money I make a week?”
“I don’t care,” Miss Prentiss said, turning her refined pale eyes and refined watery breasts in his direction as he lay, with the sheet up to his waist, in the rumpled bed. “I have a little money. And when Daddy dies I’ll have quite a bit more.”
“Have I ever told you I love you?” Benjamin asked, seeking safety in brutality.
“Do you love me?”
“No.”
“No,” Miss Prentiss said. She sipped calmly at her bourbon. “But I need you.”
“Not that much, you don’t,” Benjamin said, wondering how he could get up and dressed and out of the apartment without seeming like a cad.
“You don’t know,” she said. “I have great difficulty in being satisfied. Sexually, I mean.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” he said.
“Not with you,” she said. “That’s the point. With other men. The torment I’ve gone through.”
“What’s so special about me?” Benjamin asked, half-suspicious and half-flattered and not averse to having his dearest illusions about himself confirmed.
“You’re a Jew,” she said. “I can only have an orgasm with a bestial Jew.”
“Let’s talk it over some other time, darling,” Benjamin said, getting out of his side of the bed and starting hurriedly to get dressed. “It’s late and I still have two hours work to do before I go to sleep.”
As he walked toward the subway down the tree-lined street in Greenwich Village where Miss Prentiss lived, a street probably teeming with bestial Jews, Benjamin shook his head. That country club in Pennsylvania, he thought. What a collection!
He was living in New York because of another woman—a woman he had seen only once for fifteen minutes. It was in a public hospital in Trenton. He had just been graduated from college and had managed to pass the examinations for teaching in grade school in the New Jersey state system and had been called with a hundred other candidates for a physical examination. The doctor turned out to be a short dumpy woman with thick-lensed glasses who looked at the half-naked young men she had to pass on as though they were all suffering from a loathsome disease. Another doctor had already checked Benjamin’s heart, lungs, and eyesight and had noted that Benjamin had had measles and whooping cough and did not limp or have any crippling deformities. The lady doctor merely was weighing and measuring the candidates. When it was Benjamin’s turn, she looked a long time at the scale as it came to rest. Her expression was one of distaste and her voice was disapproving as she called out, “One eighty-seven,” to the clerk at the table next to the scale.
Benjamin stepped off the scales and picked up his shirt, trousers and shoes, wondering what school he would be assigned to and how long it would be before he could give up teaching for something for which he was better fitted.
“I’m afraid you’ll be rejected, Mr. Federov,” the lady doctor said.
“What?” Benjamin asked incredulously. The last time he had been sick had been at the age of six.
“You’re obese, Mr. Federov,” the lady doctor said.
“Obese,” he repeated stupidly. He looked down at his powerful hard arms, his tucked-in, narrow waist, at the long, granite-hard halfback’s legs. He was twenty-one years old and he could tear telephone books in half with his bare hands and run the mile in well under five minutes, and in the last baseball game of the year he had hit a hom
e run over a fence 350 feet away. “Obese,” he said. “There isn’t an ounce of fat on me.” He was ready to cry with wounded vanity. The summer before, when he had been working as a counselor, the girl counselors had taken a vote on the man with the best body in camp and he had been designated. And now this dumpy little woman with glaucous eyes and bad breath and breasts like market bags was telling him he was obese.
“According to the chart,” the lady doctor said, enjoying his humiliation as she would enjoy the humiliation of any man who fell, even momentarily, under her power, “according to the chart, a man of your age and height should not weigh more than one hundred and sixty-five pounds.”
“But I’m a football player,” Benjamin said, feeling foolish. “That’s the way football players’re built.”
“You’re not in college any more,” the lady doctor said crisply. “You’re not going to be pampered here just because you can throw a football every Saturday.”
“But I need the job, ma’am,” Benjamin said. The depression was on and there were twenty applicants for every job in the country, and a job made the difference between eating and not eating. “I passed the examinations and I’ve been counting on—”
“You didn’t pass this examination, Mr. Federov,” the woman said. “I’m afraid you’d better move on. There are a lot of people waiting.”
Benjamin looked around him wildly, searching for an argument, any argument, to impress this miserable woman, keep her judgment on him from being final, concluded, catastrophic. The boy in front of him, a classmate of Benjamin’s named Levy, was standing on the other side of the scale, safely through, snickering. Levy was a short, narrow-shouldered boy with sickly oysterish skin marked by the livid scars of years of carbuncles. His chest was concave, he was knock-kneed, his legs and arms were like sticks, his eyes were protruding and yellowish. With all that, you’d have thought he would have to be brilliant in his work, but he wasn’t. He was one of the stupidest boys in the class and had just barely passed the written examination. Benjamin had never liked him, and he liked him considerably less at this moment, as Levy stood next to the scale, smirking, sweating unpleasantly in his oyster-colored skin.
“Him!” Benjamin said, pointing ungallantly at Levy. “You pass him, that—that scarecrow—and you flunk me. What sort of deal are you running here, anyway?”
“Hey,” Levy said, whining, “leave me out of this.”
“Mr. Levy is perfectly normal,” the woman said crisply. “Next.”
“He’s normal?”
“Officially normal,” the woman said.
“And what am I?” Benjamin asked. “Officially a freak?”
“Nobody said that, Mr. Federov,” the woman gestured toward the next boy in line. “You are officially obese.”
“But there must be something I can do,” Benjamin said, standing there feeling ridiculous, fighting for his livelihood, dressed only in underpants and socks and holding his clothing in his hand, with fifteen other half-naked men in the room grinning at the scene.
“You can lose twenty-two pounds, Mr. Federov,” the lady doctor said, “and come back here in three months.”
“I’d have to cut off a leg to lose twenty-two pounds,” Benjamin shouted, losing his temper.
“That’s up to you, Mr. Federov,” the lady doctor said. “Next.”
He went dazedly out of the hospital, wanting to scream obscenities in the corridors or join the Communist Party or found an organization with the purpose of keeping women out of the medical profession. He sat down in the June sunlight on a park bench and put his head in his hands to contemplate the ruin of his life. As usual, his family was living with all the doors locked, the telephone turned off and the blinds down, so that bill collectors would gain no entrance. His parents had been proud that he had passed his examination and was now entering that Jewish realm of aristocrats, the world of scholars, even though his actual job would entail teaching eight-year-old children how to spell and solve arithmetical problems involving half a dozen pears and the price of ten oranges. But a teacher’s pay in those days was respectable, and they had all looked forward to being able to live with the shades up and the telephone connected.
Benjamin groaned on his bench. He was not going back to that entrenched house that night without a job, no matter what the job was. He had a copy of The New York Times in his pocket and he took it out and spread out the Help Wanted pages. He made some marks with a pencil, then went to the station and bought a ticket to New York.
It was nearly eight o’clock, but still daylight, when he turned down the shabby street of connected one-family stucco houses on which he lived. Like his own, and for the same reasons, almost half the houses looked permanently shut and abandoned. He walked carefully on the other side of the street from his own house, peering cautiously for secreted bill collectors and summons-servers, then hurried across the street and let himself in with his key.
His father was sitting in the living room in his shirt sleeves and with his shoes off. Israel was peddling household gadgets from door to door, and it meant walking, miles and miles each day on blazing pavements, and the first thing he did when he got home at night was take his shoes off. Israel had an evening newspaper on his lap, but the electricity had been off for a month and it was too dark to read with the shades down, and he was just sitting there in a threadbare upholstered chair, staring reflectively at a photograph on the opposite wall of Louis and Benjamin that had been taken on the beach when Benjamin was six years old. As Benjamin came into the room, he was sure that his father was thinking the same thing as himself—that it would be wonderful if Benjamin was again six years old and everything remained to be done all over again—differently.
By now, Benjamin could tell from the way his father sat in the chair what kind of a day Israel had had. When he had sold more than five dollars worth of the household gadgets during the day, Israel sat hopefully, his head up. His head was not up tonight.
The living room gleamed from Sophie Federov’s ministrations. Unable to halt the Depression, powerless to change the economy of the country or redeem the family fortunes in Wall Street, Sophie Federov fought the malevolence of the times in her own manner, in her own home. She scrubbed, she polished, she swept and washed and kept everything in place to the last precise half-inch in furious defiance of the chaos that threatened each day to engulf them all.
The room looked like a room in a museum. Exhibit B a lower-middle-class living room, furniture by Grand Rapids, with various silver objects out in pawnshops, circa 1934.
Benjamin heard the sounds of his mother preparing dinner in the kitchen. He had hoped that by some miracle she would not be home this evening. But she was home. She was always home.
“Hi, Pop,” Benjamin said.
His father’s head went up. He smiled. When Israel looked at his sons, for a moment or two, anyway, it was a good day.
Mrs. Federov came into the room, an apron, starched and immaculate, tied around her trim waist. Benjamin kissed her and held her a fraction of a second longer than usual in his arms.
“What’s for dinner?” he asked, postponing.
“Something special. Hamburger,” his mother said ironically. “Well, when do you go to work?”
“Tomorrow,” Benjamin said.
“Tomorrow?” His mother was surprised. “I thought the summer session didn’t begin until July.”
“Sit down, Mom,” Benjamin said.
“I don’t have to sit down,” she said. She was bracing herself for tragedy already. “What happened?”
“I have a job,” Benjamin said. “But not in the school system.”
“What do you mean, not in the school system? You passed the examination, didn’t you?”
“I thought so,” Benjamin said.
“You thought so?” his mother said sharply. “Don’t talk in riddles.”
“I didn’t pass the physical examination today in Trenton,” Benjamin said.
A look of alarm crossed his mother
’s face. She gripped his arm tightly and stared into his eyes. “Tell the truth,” she said. “They found something in the hospital. What is it? Tuberculosis? You have a bad heart? What?”
“Nothing like that,” Benjamin said. “I…I’m overweight. The technical term is ‘obese.’”
“Overweight. Obese?” His mother sounded bewildered. “What are they, crazy in Trenton? Did you hear that, Israel? In Trenton they say your son is obese.”
“The government,” Israel said resignedly. “What can you expect?”
Mrs. Federov stepped back and eyed Benjamin sharply. “You’re not joking, are you? One of your bad jokes, Ben?”
“I’m not joking. That’s what they said.”
“But you have the body of a god,” Mrs. Federov said. “They should be built like you, those maniacs in Trenton.”
This was not the day Benjamin wanted to hear that he was built like a god, not even from his mother. But he couldn’t repress a smile at the thought of the lady doctor waking up in the morning to find herself built like him.
“They have a chart,” he explained wearily. “On the chart I’m twenty-two pounds overweight.”
“But you’re a football player, that’s the way football players get, didn’t you explain that?”
“I explained it,” Benjamin said. “It makes no difference. They go by the chart.”
“Football,” Mrs. Federov said bitterly. “You had to play football. You wouldn’t listen to your mother. Now see.” She turned on Israel, sunk into his chair. “And you, you encouraged him. All these years. Now are you satisfied?”
Israel hunched his shoulders a little. It was a habit that had grown on him since he lost his business.
“We sit in the dark because we can’t pay the electricity, and your son is twenty-two pounds overweight,” Mrs. Federov said to her husband, “and all you can do is sit in your chair with your shoes off.”
At that moment, Benjamin decided he was not going to marry unless he had one million dollars in the bank. Or maybe two million dollars.