Voices of a Summer Day

by Irwin Shaw

  At the grave in New Jersey, where the new pile of earth that was to cover the coffin was covered with a tactful green tarpaulin to keep the evidence of ultimate clay from the mourners, Federov and his brother Louis had to recite the prayer for the dead as the coffin was lowered. Neither of them knew Hebrew and they had tried to memorize the prayer from a pamphlet that had it printed in phonetic English. It was like boning up for an exam. But when the moment came, Federov could only remember bits and pieces of the lament and was embarrassed by the quick way the other eight mourners, who made up the minyan of ten, as prescribed by the Law, rushed in to cover his ignorance. Christ, he thought, what kind of a Jew am I? It is all ridiculous. I don’t believe a word of it. He’s dead and gone and this is merely theatre.

  As long as it was only theatre, it would have been better to bury him at Arlington with the other dead soldiers.

  When I go, Federov thought, as he mumbled the incomprehensible lament of his ancestors, I am going to be cremated. Privately. Without a word. Let them dump my ashes anywhere. On the places I have been happy—on the grass of a baseball field in Vermont; in the first bed in the city of New York where two virgins made love; on the balcony overlooking the roofs of Paris where a sergeant on leave had stood in the evening during the war with a beautiful redheaded American girl at his side; in the cradle of his son; in the long waves of the Atlantic in which he had swum so many sunny summers; in the dear and gentle hands of his wife…

  Or in the places where I have been unhappy or in danger. In the kitchen of a country club in Pennsylvania; in an old Irishwoman’s apron pocket; on the wide curving steps up which a drunken girl in a white dress had mounted twice in one night; on the farmhouse outside Coutances where a shell had hit ten yards from him and had not exploded; at Dachau, which he had made himself visit; at Camp Canoga, where, in dying, two Italians he had never seen had brought him the shock of being an outsider and alone.

  The prayer droned on by the side of the open grave. By a quirk, the prayer he had learned just the day before was forgotten and another one, which he had read many years ago in a travel magazine, in an article about Jerusalem, came back to him. It was the prayer recited before the Wailing Wall, and it came back to him with total clarity, as though he had the glossy page before him

  For the Temple that is destroyed…

  We sit in solitude and mourn.

  For the walls that are overthrown…

  We sit in solitude and mourn.

  For our majesty that is departed…

  We sit in solitude and mourn.

  For our great men who lie dead…

  We sit in solitude and mourn.

  For the precious stones that are burned…

  We sit in solitude and mourn.

  For the priests that have stumbled…

  We sit in solitude and mourn.

  For our kings who have despised Him…

  We sit in solitude and mourn.

  At a sign from the rabbi, he dropped the carnation he had been given onto his father’s coffin. One by one, the others did the same. He helped his mother to the car, with Louis on the other side. The cortege started toward the city. Federov took a last look back. The grave-diggers were taking the tarpaulin off the pile of brown earth. I should have given them a tip, Federov thought. Maybe then they’d have waited until we were out of the gate.

  1964

  IT WAS THE LAST inning, and Federov was thirsty after having sat in the sun all afternoon. As Michael passed him going out toward center field, Michael greeted Leah.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Stafford,” he said, minding his manners.

  “Hello, champ,” Leah said.

  “I’ll be in Vinnie’s bar,” Federov said to his son. “Come on over when the game’s finished and I’ll drive you home.”

  “Ok, Daddy-o,” Michael said, and trotted out to his position in center field.

  Federov turned to Leah, still sitting, propped on her elbows, her long legs slanted down to the bench below her, the brim of her straw hat throwing a deep shadow over the top half of her face.

  “Like a beer?” Federov asked.

  “No, thanks,” she said.

  “Aren’t you thirsty?”

  “Uhuh.”

  “But no beer?”

  “Not with you.”

  “Why not?”

  “The town’s too small,” Leah said, smiling; getting even, consciously perhaps, or unconsciously, Federov thought, for the rejection of 1947. Leah had a long memory and that was the only occasion in her life she hadn’t held a man she wanted, and from time to time, when they were alone, she made Federov pay for that singular defeat.

  “I’m a respectable matron now,” she said. “Haven’t you heard?”

  Federov stood up and looked down at her.

  “No,” he said, “I hadn’t heard.”

  She tilted her head back. The green eyes mocked him.

  “You’re too goddam beautiful,” he said, “I’m waiting for the day you begin to fade.”

  “You should live that long, boychek,” she said, for one second Leah Levinson from the Bronx.

  “See you tonight,” he said.

  “At your own risk.” She watched him as he passed behind home plate and across the street to his car.

  The beer tasted wonderful, and Federov drank the first one down quickly in the dark, empty bar. He ordered another one and nursed it, waiting for his son.

  The television set was on, a baseball game, the Yankees playing the Red Sox up in Boston. Federov watched idly for a while, amused at the difference between what he was watching on the screen and what he had seen all afternoon on the high school field.

  “Do you think they’ll win the pennant?” he asked Vinnie, the bartender.

  “They always do,” Vinnie said. “The bastards.”

  Federov smiled at this automatic hatred of otherwise sensible men for permanent winners. He decided that, when he got to his office, he’d ask his secretary to get a pair of seats for Michael and himself for all the home World Series games as soon as they went on sale. He enjoyed taking his son to games, mostly because of Michael’s attempt to be cool and critical of what was happening on the field, wanting, in this atmosphere of men, to be more adult than any of them, only to whoop with childish glee when his idol of the moment hit a home run or made a backhand catch of a line drive. It made Federov more tolerant of the masks he himself put on and the ease with which they were broken.

  Federov had taken Michael to his first big-league game when Michael was six. The Giants were playing the Reds at the Polo Grounds. The Yankees were a more interesting team to watch, but it was at the Polo Grounds that Benjamin, aged six, had watched his first baseball game, at his father’s side. An uprooted people, Federov had thought half-mockingly, we must make our family traditions with the material at hand. There was no ancestral keep to bring the male heir to; no hallowed family ceremonies into which to initiate a son; no church or synagogue or cult you believe in so that your son and his son after that could attach themselves automatically to three millennia of myth, no broad acres that had been lovingly tended for hundreds of years by people of the same blood and name to walk across with a six-year-old boy. He could not take his son to the spot where his father had gone bankrupt in the hardware business in 1927 and say, “Here your ancestors, while dying, preserved their honor.” He could not take his son to Russia and seek out the town where his grandfather or his own father had been born and read a plaque on the side of a building commemorating either event. He didn’t even know the name of the town and whether or not the Germans had left it standing. He couldn’t even take his son to the place in Newark where he, Benjamin Federov, had been born, because the family had moved four months later and he didn’t know the name of the street and had never thought of asking. He had been born on a kitchen table, his mother had said, but he doubted that at this late date the table could be found so that his son could offer sacrifices upon it. So, bereft of other tribal paraphernalia,
he took his son to the Polo Grounds, because when he was six his father had taken him to the Polo Grounds.

  In those years, just after the First War, both the Yankees and the Giants used the field, and it was the Yankees he had seen that first day with Israel. He didn’t remember much of what he had seen that afternoon and had been more interested in the frankfurters and sarsaparilla his father had bought him than in the game itself, but his father had kept the scorecard for years and much later, in cleaning out an attic, Federov had found the crumbling, yellow card. It had been carefully marked by his father, with runs, hits, errors, singles, outs, shortstop to first base, strikeouts, substitutions, all the elaborate, finicking code of the game, to remind men on winter nights of great deeds done on summer afternoons. Scanning the brittle scrap of yellowed paper, preserved from his childhood, Federov had realized he had seen heroes that day—Babe Ruth in right field, Home-Run Baker at third, Peckinpaugh at first, Waite Hoyt, the Flatbush undertaker, on the mound. The Yankees had won then, too, Federov remembered.

  Nobody played baseball in the Polo Grounds any more, and they were tearing it down to put up blocks of apartment buildings.

  There were other traditions, of course, that his son might be induced to share. Going to war, for example, and seeing a son off to war, as his father had done. All within the span of less than twenty-five years. Michael was thirteen. Within eleven or twelve years, the ritual might very well be repeated. Three generations of the men of the same family sailing to battle would make quite a respectable, almost ancient, tradition in a country as young as America.

  Pilgrimages to battlefields on which your forbears had distinguished themselves was also something that might be built up, with a little application, into a tradition, although he had neglected to visit the Argonne, where his father had fought, and when in London with his wife and son in 1960 he had not sought out the building on Pall-Mall where he had made love to a skinny girl from the British Information Service when a bomb fell on a building three doors down. Although he was not in as overt a military position at that moment as a captain of infantry leading a charge, if he had been hit by the bomb fragment that had broken the window of the bedroom in which he and the girl were lying, he would have been awarded a Purple Heart for being wounded in combat. So, technically, it had been a battlefield, and in his own way he had been fighting on it.

  He hadn’t gone down to the beach where he had landed, either, because it was raining that week, and he hadn’t shown his son the cemetery where his platoon lieutenant was buried, because they were there for a holiday and Peggy thought children got used to the idea of death soon enough, anyway. The towns he had been among the first to enter in 1944 were of no historical significance and were off the tourists’ beaten track, and it was much more enjoyable to spend the time swimming off the rocks at Antibes. Leah Stafford and her husband and children were with them on the trip, so they could hardly be expected to make a sentimental expedition to the top-floor apartment behind the Place Palais Bourbon where Leah and he had lived together on his week’s leave. There went another tradition.

  There was a roar from the television set and Federov looked up. A Yankee batter had hit a long fly to left field and it bounced off the fence and the Boston left fielder misplayed it and let it get away from him, and by the time it came into the infield the Yankee was standing on third base.

  “The error sign is up,” the announcer’s voice said. “The official scorer is calling it an error.”

  Error, Federov thought. Error. The reward of so much human endeavor. The fielder had run as fast as he could, had used his talents, his experience, his nerve, to the utmost, and in the end the error sign had gone up.

  He watched the left fielder walking, dejected, his head down, back to his position, and thought of his own son roaming an almost equally exposed outfield, because all games are played in naked arenas where exposure to judgment is constant, even a bumpy high school field on a lazy Saturday afternoon, with only the players and a handful of spectators to say, aloud or in silence, Thumbs up or Thumbs down.

  He knew that his son’s team was ahead by one run and he hoped that if anything came Michael’s way in center field he’d hold onto it. His thoughts now on the dark side of men’s adventures on playing fields, Federov remembered the misjudged fly at Camp Canoga that had cost the game and Bryant saying, “And you’re not in the lineup tomorrow, either. You’re a jinx, Federov.”

  1946

  FEDEROV HAD SEEN BRYANT only once since then. It was just after the war and it was in a half-empty subway car going uptown, and Bryant was sitting alone, wearing a dark coat with a velvet collar and a derby hat, like a Tammany alderman or the vice-president of a small American bank who had been befriended by the wrong people on a short visit to London. With all that, Bryant looked surprisingly young and in good shape. For a moment Federov hesitated about going over, but was ashamed of himself immediately and stood up and walked across the car and said, “Hello, Dave.”

  Bryant looked up at him, unrecognizingly. His eyes were dull and bloodshot. There was a smell of liquor on his breath. “Hello,” he said.

  “I’m Benjamin Federov,” Federov said. “From camp.”

  “Oh, sure, hiya, Ben.” Bryant stood up and put out his hand. The second handshake, Federov thought. “Sure, sure, I remember,” Bryant said. “Good old Tris. Tris Speaker.” He smiled his own congratulations to himself for the accuracy of his memory.

  Federov had a few more stations to go and they talked of the old days of 1927. “That boy Cohn,” Bryant said naturally. It was a cinch he wouldn’t have failed to recognize Cohn, even fifty years later. “An exceptional human being,” Bryant said portentously. “Exceptional. It’s a shame what happened to him.”

  “What happened to him?” Federov asked.

  “You mean to say that you didn’t hear?” Bryant asked, incredulous that anyone who had ever known Cohn would be ignorant of the least action of that hero.

  “No,” Federov said. “I never heard anything about him since that summer.”

  “Amazing,” Bryant said. “I thought everybody knew. He got killed during the war. In 1940.”

  “1940?” Federov said. “We didn’t get into the war until ’41.”

  “He joined the RAF. He flew his own plane, you know,” Bryant said.

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “Uhuh. I flew with him a lot. Weekends. Holidays. All over the place. Lake George. Down to his uncle’s place in Key West. God, we had times. I tell you. The day the war broke out he went up to Canada and enlisted in the RAF. You know Cohn. He couldn’t stay out of anything. He was killed over London.”

  They stood in silence for a moment, remembering Cohn. Now that Bryant had told him, what Cohn had done seemed inevitable to Federov, fated. With Conn’s character, which must have only been intensified with the years, the war must have seemed just another athletic event in which he could excel without exertion, another Bye, Bye, Bonnie, another holiday in a new town.

  “God, he was clever,” Bryant said. “Remember that song he made up—that Sacco-Vanzetti thing”—Bryant began to hum, searching for the words. “God, he was full of laughs. An all-’round boy. A real all-’round boy. How did the beginning go again? I don’t remember, do you?”

  “No,” Federov said. He was sorry he had come over to say hello. He didn’t want to hear any more about Cohn. “I was in England during the war, too,” he said, just to switch the subject.

  “Were you?” Bryant said without interest.

  “How about you?” Federov asked. “Where were you?”

  “In Washington,” Bryant said gravely, in the tone that strong and taciturn men use in speaking of sacrifices they have made and dangers they have survived.

  Federov managed not to smile. Bryant, he thought, you’re a born, irrevocable, third-string man. “Sorry,” he said, “here’s my station.” He hurried out, making a pretense of being afraid of having the doors close on him, so that there would never be a th
ird handshake…

  Why, when it’s two out and I’m pitching, the clever, persuasive voice argued out of the cool blue mountain dusk, 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.

  I took her cherry under a cherry tree in Lake-wood, New Jersey.

  From this and other missions, twenty-seven of our aircraft are missing.

  1964

  THE DOOR TO THE BAR opened, and Michael came in, swinging his glove and spikes. He was wearing tennis shoes now. “Hi,” he said, sitting down next to his father. “Can I have a coke?”

  “One coke, Vinnie,” Federov said. “How’d the game come out?”

  “We won,” Michael said.

  “Anything happen in the last inning?”

  “A little confusion and alarm,” Michael said. He gulped at the drink Vinnie put before him. “They got two men on base and Cerrazzi was up.” Michael drank again.

  “What’d he do?” Federov asked.

  “He walloped it. Baby, can that Cerrazzi hit that ball,” Michael said. “Only this time he hit it right at Buddy Horowitz on first base, and Buddy only had to take two steps and there was the ball game. Say, Dad, do you mind if I don’t ride home with you? There’s a volleyball game at Andy Robert’s house. You know the way home yourself, don’t you, Daddy-o?”

  “I know the way home all right,” Federov said. “And don’t be such a wise guy.”

  Michael laughed. He jumped from the stool. “Thanks for the coke.” He started out, then stopped. “Do you mind throwing this junk into the back of the car, Dad?” He waved the spikes, tied together with their laces, looped over the back strap of the glove.

  “Give them to me,” Federov said.

  Michael came over and put the spikes and glove on the stool next to his father. “Good old Dads,” he said. “See you at dinner.”