by Irwin Shaw
“Good evening,” the girl said with that slight thickness of accent.
Federov moved toward her. They began to talk. Banalities. The beauty of the night. The calmness of the sea. The impressiveness of the sunset that evening. Their destinations. Truro, Nantucket. Her name. Gretchen Something. She lived in New York, she said, on West Ninety-sixth Street. They started to walk slowly along the deck. She took his arm. Slight pressure of fingers.
She had been born in Germany, she said. Essen. Explanation of accent. She had been in the United States three years.
“Oh,” Federov said. “To escape Hitler…”
The girl stopped walking. Her tone was almost harsh. “Why should I want to escape Hitler?” she said. “I am a German.”
Federov didn’t want to push it. It was too beautiful a night to discuss Hitler. “I just thought—well—” he said, “a lot of people have left Germany since he got in and I thought that maybe—”
“There is no reason to leave,” she said. “My family is there. My brothers. They write me. I know. I came to America to learn English, earn money. That is all.”
They walked in silence. Still the slight, inviting pressure of fingers.
“It is the New York newspapers,” the girl said. She wouldn’t leave it alone. There was the tone of aggrievement in the not unmusical voice, a permanent grudge, a whine of persecution. “They print only lies. Nobody in New York can ever know the truth. I know. I get letters from my brothers every week. It is a young man’s country now, they tell me. They can be proud again, the young men.”
“Uh-huh,” Federov said. No use in arguing. As he walked on the dark deck, with the smell of the gardens of Connecticut in his nostrils and the inviting touch of the soft fingers making him want to take her down to his cabin into his bed, he knew that sooner or later he would be in Europe with a gun in his hand, fighting the proud young brothers of the desirable girl at his side. But he didn’t want to talk about it. Sex now, tenderness now, youth now. War later.
Another subject. Fast. “You said you work in New York. What are you—a nurse, governess?”
She took her hand off his arm and stopped walking. “Why did you say that?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. A guess. Maybe because I saw those two nice little boys a minute before I saw you in the doorway before dinner.”
“People from New York are all the same.” Her voice was shrill now. “If you have a little German accent, immediately you are a servant.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being a nurse,” Federov said. “Some of my best friends are nurses.” Weak joke. “You can nurse me any time you want.”
“It is not funny, that, not funny at all,” the girl said. Her face was closed and bitter. The fat woman, the gross hausfrau who was going to be there ten years later, appeared suddenly. “Yes, I am a nurse. For the two little snotnoses. I will now wish you good-night. I am not good enough to associate with New York gentlemen like you.”
She turned and disappeared.
Federov slept alone and badly that night. The entire vacation was a waste of time. It rained almost every day, and his friend Ross and Leah, the new bride, argued with each other for the whole two weeks and Federov knew that a divorce was only a matter of time.
At the end of the holiday, as he drove toward New York alone in his car, he was a little ashamed because he knew he wanted to be in the same city with Leah the day the decree became final. Some ten years later, in Paris during the war, when he saw Leah in her Red Cross uniform, he knew he had been right in wanting to be in the same city with her. Only he hadn’t been ashamed in Paris. He was ten years older and he had been through a war and there were so many other things to be ashamed of by then.
1964
THE GAME WAS DRAWING to a close. The sun was low, the shadows long on the field, the players moved in a summer’s-end golden trance; his own son floated in a soft haze far away; the sound of surf came to his ears or he suddenly realized he had been hearing it all the afternoon without recognizing it, the puissant cadence of Ocean behind distant oaks two hundred years old; the beautiful, copper-haired woman, now silent beside him, was his good friend when she might very well have been among his bitterest enemies; his tall son glided like a stranger, ageless, a memory, across the green grass; his own father for a moment or two in a vanished September was alive…
1927
“ISRAEL, ISRAEL,” HIS father was shouting downstairs in the living room of the comfortable two-story house in Harrison, “my name is Israel and I want you to get that man out of my house.”
Benjamin had never heard his father shout before. He was a short, sweet-tempered man, with a naive belief in the goodness of his fellowman, an overflow of forgiveness when that belief was proved ill-founded.
“Israel, Israel,” his father was shouting, and Benjamin went quietly down the steps and peered into the living room to see what was going on. His father was there in his American Legion uniform, and Benjamin’s mother and his father’s sister, Bertha, and Bertha’s husband, George. George had a bandage around his head. He was powerfully built, about thirty years old, prematurely bald, with a broken nose and large, rough, workman’s hands.
“Sssh, Sssh,” Benjamin’s mother was saying. “The children…”
“Let the children hear!” Israel Federov said. “Let them know about this thug.” He turned on George. “You go out and you go to Boston and you demonstrate, you make a nuisance of yourself, you disturb the peace, you yell, ‘Everybody is wrong, the Governor, the judge, the president of Harvard University, highly respected men, Americans!’ And who is right? Two Italians who throw bombs. And you get hit on the head by a policeman! This is America, not Russia! And ten days in jail. Ten years it should have been.”
“Sssh…,” Benjamin’s mother said, “the children…”
“And you have the gall to come to this house with my sister,” Israel shouted, ignoring his wife for the first time in fifteen years of marriage, “and ask for pity. You have no job, your boss doesn’t like jailbirds. What a surprise! You have no money, you spent all your money going to Boston to make trouble, a veteran of the United States Army should strip himself to the bone to support a bum, a man who fights with policemen, a man who thinks it’s the right thing to do in America to kill important men, to throw bombs, to call the president of Harvard a liar.”
“Israel…please…,” Benjamin’s mother said softly.
“That’s it,” Benjamin’s father said. “Israel. I go to the American Legion meeting, Israel Federov American Expeditionary Force. Corporal Israel Federov, born in Russia, a Jew, and what do they say at the meeting? I’ll tell you what they say. They say, ‘Jews are troublemakers, they are anarchists, they should be thrown out of the country.’ And if I say, ‘No, Jews are not like that, they are patriots, I was hit by the machine gun in France, I laid in the mud bleeding a day and a night,’ they say, ‘Maybe, but what about your brother-in-law George in jail in Boston for two Italians?’”
Standing unnoticed on the steps outside the living-room door, Benjamin knew his father was right. If he could have, he would have gladly dragged his Uncle George out of the house with his bare hands.
“Jew, Jew,” George said. He had a rough outdoor voice to go with his broken nose and his workman’s hands. He had been a day laborer and a longshoreman, and his last job had been as a truck driver for a furniture-moving company. “Why don’t you forget Jew for a minute?”
“Forget,” Israel shouted. “You forget. Me, I remember. In Russia, they came into the villages and they said, ‘I’ll take that Jidok’—and they tore a boy of sixteen from the arms of his mother and they put him in the army of the Czar for twenty-five years. Degradation, abuse, Siberia, a lifetime. Die.”
“They got no army of the Czar any more,” George said. “Finally, they got a decent government.”
“Decent,” Israel said. “Hah! Worse. Don’t tell me. I know the Russians.”
“Israel, please…,” Benjamin’s
mother said.
Israel disregarded her and went up close to George, who towered over him. “When they ask me tonight at the Legion, ‘What about your Jew jailbird brother-in-law up in Boston?’ what should I tell them?”
“Tell them I’m not a Jew,” George said. “I’m an American. I was born in Cincinnati.”
“Why don’t we all sit down and have a cup of tea,” Benjamin’s mother said, “and not get so excited?”
“Cincinnati!” Israel said. “Don’t make me laugh. All they’ll remember is Jew. Get out. Bertha, get that bum out of my house.”
“Come on, Bertha,” George said. Even to Benjamin he sounded tired and beaten. “There’s no hope here.” He turned to Israel. “In the future things will happen and you will remember this day and you will say to yourself, ‘That bum George was right to get hit on the head by a policeman. I should’ve cried my tears, too, for the two Italians.’”
George and Bertha saw Benjamin as he stood there at the foot of the stairs, but they said nothing to him as they went out of his father’s house for the last time.
Israel Federov, aged six, had passed through Ellis Island on the long voyage from Kiev by way of Hamburg, and was made into an American in the slums of New York City, in vacant lots along the East River where they played with taped baseballs, homemade bats, and without gloves. Israel Federov was made into an American catching behind the plate bare-handed in the years between 1895 and 1910. Israel Federov was an American with an old catcher’s hands, with three broken fingers, who, even when he was forty-five, was still nimble on wild pitches and could throw out fleet young runners who tried to steal second base on him.
Israel Federov had accompanied his son Benjamin to Pennsylvania Station in 1942 and had tried to carry Benjamin’s barracks bag, because it was the end of Benjamin’s overnight pass and he was going down to Newport News to embark for the war. Louis was already overseas in the Air Force. Benjamin didn’t allow his father to carry the bag.
“I’m not an old man yet,” Israel said, but he didn’t make a point of it. “Myself,” he said as they went through the uniforms and clasped couples of farewell, “myself, I left from Hoboken in 1917.”
There never had been any question about the Federov sons avoiding the Army after Pearl Harbor. For Israel Federov, if there was a war and you were a young man, you fought it. Standing in the gray light of the station, with the massed murmur of good-bys making a different music from the drums that had marched Israel off to his war, Benjamin remembered the legend, now a fixture in the family history, of his father’s rage against his brother Samuel, the pianist, who had planned to have himself ruptured to avoid the draft. Recalling various accounts of the scene, which had taken place when he was little more than an infant, made Benjamin smile, even at that moment, when sixty seconds more would separate father and son, perhaps for years, perhaps forever.
Later on, when he had his leave in Paris, he had wandered into the Hotel Crillon, on the Place de la Concorde and had smiled again, thinking of his father, as he read the quotation from the letter of Henry IV to the nobleman whose name now was memorialized by the hotel.
“Pends-toi,” the quotation, in large gilt letters on the wall, had read, “brave Crillon. Nous avons combattu à Arques et tu n’y étais pas.” With the help of a pocket dictionary, Federov had made the translation: “Hang yourself, good Crillon. Today we fought at Arques and you were not there.”
Samuel, the almost-ruptured pianist, could hardly be confused with the Duc de Crillon, and Israel, a small, poverty-worn Russian immigrant among the uniforms in Pennsylvania Station in 1942, bore little outward resemblance to Henry IV. But in another language and in perhaps somewhat different terms, Israel had made much the same statement to his pianist brother.
“Hoboken,” Israel said. “The band played as we sailed out of the harbor. And I came back.” This was said with something related to a smile, but Benjamin understood that he was being ordered, as obliquely as possible, so as not openly to offend God in his mysterious decrees, to follow in his father’s footsteps and return. Israel was trying so hard to be an American veteran, an American father, that he almost succeeded in not weeping when he put his arms around his son and said good-by.
1957
AS HE WAS DRESSING, Benjamin heard his father playing on Michael’s toy electric organ downstairs in the living room.
Although Israel couldn’t read music, he had played the piano by ear all his life, in a banging carefree style. Michael, six years old, was listening. Benjamin was taking the old man (frail now after a lifetime of work and two heart attacks and nothing left of the nimble, bare-handed catcher) to Yankee Stadium to see the Yankees play Detroit. Israel was picking out the “Star Spangled Banner” on the toy when Benjamin came into the room. “My fingers still work,” Israel said as he played the last notes, tremolo. He was freshly shaven, his skin pink and healthy-looking, and he was wearing a neat, blue-figured bow tie, like President Truman. His clothes hung terribly loosely on him and he stood up slowly. He leaned over and kissed Michael on the head. “Never be a catcher,” he said. “It’s terrible for the legs.” He gave Michael a dime. “Tell your mother to buy you an ice-cream cone.”
He and Benjamin got into a cab and started toward Yankee Stadium. They were on Lenox Avenue and 138th Street, driving up the broad street, with the Negroes leaning against the storefronts enjoying the May sunlight, and Israel was saying, “The best catchers I ever saw were Bill Dickey and Al Lopez. I never saw a catcher back up first as fast as Al Lopez when he first played for Brooklyn in…”
And then he died.
His father lay in the coffin in a large flower-banked room in a funeral chapel on Columbus Avenue in New York. Benjamin was the first one into the room, holding his mother’s arm, with Louis behind him, after the undertakers had prepared Israel for burial and set the scene.
Irresistibly, he was drawn to the coffin, and he left his mother with Louis and strode rapidly across the long room and bent down and kissed his father’s forehead. It was as cold as marble, but still Federov had an instinctive moment of surprise that his father didn’t move or smile with pleasure as he had always done, as far back as Federov could remember, when he saw his son.
Federov had been too distracted by the bustle of making the funeral arrangements to forbid the undertakers to use cosmetics, and now Israel Federov was going to have to travel through eternity with rouge and powder on his still face and lipstick on the mouth that had always been so kindly in life and now was pulled down by death into severity, like the histrionic scowling mouths of generals during the war who wanted to look tough and heroic for the photographers.
Israel Federov had been heroic in his way, maybe more so than the generals, but the heroism had come from the endurance of a world that had battered at him with a thousand small, ugly blows that no photographer would have had any interest in recording.
As he looked down at his father, Federov thought, I never even asked him the name of the town in which he was born.
Then he moved away from the coffin so that his mother and brother could say their own farewells, his mother weeping, Louis pale but controlled. God damn those miserable undertakers, Federov said to himself, walking away from the coffin. It served to keep him from crying. Nobody was going to see him cry. He was going to cry for his father, but later, at curious, unexpected moments, for years to come, perhaps for the rest of his life, but always alone and behind locked doors or in a place where nobody would know him or notice him or be interested in his grief.
The relatives, the uncles and aunts and cousins who had populated his youth and whom he had all but forgotten in the years between and whom he had difficulty now in recognizing in their present disguises of maturity and old age, shook his hand, kissed him, murmured consolation. He was involved, he thought, in the rites of strangers, whose voices had emerged, for this one day, out of the hush of antiquity.
“Tell me what your father was like,” the rabbi said. They were in t
he living room of his parents’ apartment on Riverside Drive, before the funeral. The rabbi was to conduct the service and deliver the eulogy. The rabbi had never known Israel. He was young and brisk and professionally sympathetic, and Federov was sure that as soon as he left the apartment, he would jot down some hurried, businesslike notes for the speech the next morning.
Federov knew that the rabbi wanted to hear that Israel had been a true believer, had prayed with shawl and philacteries every morning, had fasted on Yom Kippur and never missed the Passover seder. None of this was true. Israel had been a Jew, that was true; he had been proud of Jews who made names for themselves in the Gentile world and had despised Jews whose actions had reflected badly on their people; but he had rarely gone to synagogue and had been too modest to believe that God took any interest in him whatever.
“What was my father like?” Federov repeated. He shrugged. Who could answer a question like that? “He was a good catcher,” he said.
The rabbi smiled. He was a Reformed rabbi and he smiled to show that he could bear his religion in a modern manner when necessary.
“What else?” Federov shrugged again. “He was a failure, he was poor, he worked like a slave, he never said no to me. Even when he came home from work exhausted on a spring evening he would go out to the vacant lot near our house and hit flies to me until it got dark. He never hurt anybody, he had a foolish belief that people were good, he loved his wife, he went to war, he saw me off to war, he did what he could.” Federov stood up. “I’m sorry, Rabbi,” he said. “Ask somebody else what my father was like. Just make your speech short and simple and go easy on the emotion tomorrow, if you don’t mind.”
Then he went out of the apartment to a bar nearby and had two whiskeys.
The rabbi nearly followed instructions. The speech was only ten minutes longer than was absolutely necessary and he didn’t try too hard to draw tears, and Federov felt he earned the hundred dollars Federov was going to give him that afternoon.