by Irwin Shaw
“Did you do anything in the last inning?” Federov asked. Now that he knew his son’s team had won, he didn’t really care about the details, but after the long, sunny afternoon, he wanted to be able to look at the young, beautiful face for thirty seconds longer.
“One grounder,” Michael said carelessly, moving toward the door. “I stopped it and threw it in to second base. Nuthin’.” Then a curious, experimental look came over Michael’s face. “Nothing spectacular like you,” he said, his voice sounding cool and suddenly mature.
“What do you mean?” Federov asked, not remembering.
“That catch,” Michael said. “With one hand. And bowing.” There was no doubt about the reproof in his voice.
“What was wrong with it?” Federov asked.
“You know,” Michael said. “I don’t have to tell you.”
They were two grown men now, maneuvering, ready to attack.
“I don’t know,” Federov said.
“Sure you do,” Michael said, standing tall in front of his father. “You were showing off. All the fellows knew it.”
“Maybe I was,” Federov admitted. “Is there anything wrong with it?”
“It’s conspicuous,” Michael said. “Unnecessary. Nobody likes his father to be conspicuous.”
Federov nodded. “I see,” he said. “Well, I’ll see you later.”
There was a last, cool look, to see how much damage had been done, and then Michael was gone.
Federov swung on his stool and stared at the bottles behind the bar. Childhood was over. The unbreakable automatic approval was over and had probably been over for years, without his having noticed it. Now the critic and competitor was present in the family, feeling for his opponent’s weaknesses, testing his own powers to wound, to shape, to subjugate, to conquer, to stretch love to its breaking point.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, Federov thought. I did it myself to my father.
He remembered how he used to hate family celebrations, when Israel would get gay on two drinks, dance whirling nimble waltzes with girls and fat cousins or, as a special crowning performance, do a Russian khazatsky, a difficult spectacular dance in which the dancer crouched in a sitting position, folding his arms across his chest, and kicked out his feet in an impossibly fast rhythm while everybody stood around watching, shouting and clapping time. His father would get red in the face and do it for what seemed an impossibly long time, beaming and sweating, giving himself over, for a few moments in America, to all that was young and Russian in his soul, unfettered by the drab restraints, observed but only half-understood, of a heavy-footed Anglo-Saxon society.
Benjamin had gone out of the room once while his father was dancing like that, with thirty people clapping and shouting and cheering him on. Sophie Federov had noticed the look of scorn, of disapproval, on her son’s face, and had followed him out of the room. He was only eleven at the time.
“What’s wrong with you?” Mrs. Federov had asked.
“Pop,” Benjamin had said. “Why does he have to be so Jewish? Why does he have to behave like a fool, with all those people laughing at him?”
Mrs. Federov had grabbed his wrist hard. “Get this straight,” she said. “Your father is not behaving like a fool. Nobody is laughing at him. They are laughing with pleasure and admiration because your father is so happy and can dance so well and because he reminds them of some of the good things of their old life. And don’t you ever say a word to him about it. And don’t you grow up to be an Englishman.”
Remembering, in the dark bar, Federov smiled. He wondered if Peggy would be as wise with Michael or if it would do any good. An Englishman. Were they all growing up to be Englishmen?
He finished his beer, paid, and went to the car. He tossed the spikes and glove onto the back seat and drove toward home, sniffing the faint, lifetime-familiar summer odor of leather and sweat.
Peggy still wasn’t home. The gray-shingled house shook with the pound of the surf. There were too many magazines piled all over the living room. Esquire, January 1959. Seven New Yorkers from 1958, 1960, the summer of 1962. Three National Geographics, with their covers torn off. The Foreign Affairs Quarterly, a symposium on a crisis Federov barely remembered. An issue of Encounter from 1961. Federov picked it up. Hemingway had just killed himself and a critic spent many pages parodying and mocking Hemingway. Three issues of Playboy. One by one, Federov thumbed through them, opened the folded pages with the full-length glossy color photographs of plump, naked girls. How did they get girls to pose like that? Anything to get your name—or your ass—into the papers. The twentieth century. He looked at the girls. One blond, two brunettes. Waxed fruit. He collected all the magazines that had been issued before 1964 and carried them into the garage. Too damn many magazines.
He went back into the house and looked into the refrigerator to see what there was going to be for dinner. There was a pitcher of iced tea and a lot of eggs and oranges and butter and yogurt, but no meat or fowl or fish. He closed the refrigerator. He wished Peggy was home so he could tell her he didn’t want to go out for dinner and to telephone for a roast of beef before the shops closed.
He went into the bedroom, vaguely thinking of lying down and taking a nap. “A nap every day will prolong your life, Ben,” the doctor kept telling him. Is prolonging your life necessarily good? And until when? Fifty-one? Fifty-two? Ninety? Anyway, he couldn’t take a nap. There were bills spread all over the twin beds. Peggy always did her accounts that way, spreading the bills on the beds in neat little piles. The only trouble was she would spread them all out, then leave them there and go do something else, and they would remain on the beds all day and all night until it was time to go to sleep. Then Peggy would have to gather them up and put them in a drawer and do the whole thing over again the next day. Peggy hated to do bills and the little piles of paper from Bloomingdale’s and Saks and the telephone company would be spread out on the beds at least ten days a month. She was always late in paying and from time to time Federov would get a sorrowful letter from a company saying that he was in danger of being considered a bad credit risk. He didn’t mind being considered a bad credit risk, but the sight of the bills spread out for years on the beds annoyed him. I make the money, the least she can do is spend it on time.
There was a letter on her makeup table. Federov didn’t mean to look, but he saw that it was written in a man’s handwriting and that it started “Dear Friend” and that it covered several pages. Because he was alone and annoyed by the bills he made a movement toward the letter. Then he stopped. He hadn’t ever read any of her letters and he wasn’t going to start now.
He went out of the room. Dear Friend. Hah! Somebody sneaking around his wife. Some coward. Lord Chesterfield’s injunction to his stupid son—“Never write a letter to a woman you can’t cool a bottle of beer on.” Or was it Lord Chesterfield? Anyway, a coward.
Who knows what a woman did with her time all week down here? Like the ski resorts. The men coming up from their offices on trains every Friday night. The one from Zurich to Davos. The Cuckolds’ Special. Swiss humor. Federov had never been in Switzerland, but one of his clients had told him about it. The client had had tuberculosis and had stayed more than a year in a sanitarium there. No skiing. Plenty of naps, morning and afternoon. Prolonging his life. He’d been cured of tuberculosis, then he’d been killed a couple of years later, driving drunk in the rain after a party in Westport.
Federov went into the living room and sat down at the piano. He couldn’t play, but when he was alone like this he sometimes sat down and made up chords and tried to run them together. The chords were inevitably minor and sad, even when he was feeling fine. This afternoon they were minor and sad, too.
Where the hell was she?
How did he know she wasn’t off with Dear Friend? Usually she left a note for him when she went out of the house, telling him where she’d gone and what time she’d be home. This time there was no note. Just those damn magazines.
Ma
ybe she had just picked up and gone off with another man, and there’d be a telephone call later that night from the city or from Boston or Washington (“I’m sorry, Ben, but it just had to happen. We’re very happy and we want to marry and I know you’ll be reasonable about the children and you’ve been taking me for granted for years now.”) She always said he was taking her for granted when they argued with each other. Though, really, they didn’t argue too often. Not so much as most couples. Dear Friend. Absurd. She would never do anything like that.
Every married woman who had ever indicated to him that she would like to have an affair with him had started off by saying that her husband took her for granted.
Where the hell was she?
Even though he was annoyed by the clutter of magazines and nothing in the refrigerator for dinner and the crazy piles of unpaid bills on the beds, he didn’t want her to be off with another man. He wanted her to be right here having a drink with him and telling him what the children had been doing all week and who was expected on Sunday and if the movie she had seen on Wednesday was ok. He wanted to be sitting there with a drink in his hand, listening to her, being a little bored, thinking maybe he’d have had more fun if he stayed in town over the weekend, but still sitting there, married, with an old-fashioned glass in his hand, not quite listening, being a little bored, and knowing the whole family was going to have dinner together at eight o’clock.
Then there was always the possibility of accidents. How many people got killed on the roads every year? Fifty, a hundred thousand? And she drove like a maniac. When he asked her why she drove that way, taking all those chances, she said it was the only way she could express herself. The one promise he could get out of her was that she wouldn’t express herself while the children were in the car.
He hit a long, sorrowful, complicated chord on the piano, a lot of flats in it, B flat, A flat, the sad notes. He saw the car over on its side, the crushed doors, the broken glass.
Where the hell was she?
1959
IT WAS IN PARIS. He had been invited to attend an international congress on town planning. There was a chartered plane, cheap, and he’d taken two weeks off, and he and Peggy had arrived in Paris in May, just when everybody told you to arrive in Paris. But the congress had turned out to be a bore, and somehow he and Peggy weren’t getting along those two weeks, and she wanted to go to just the places he didn’t want to go to, and the girls in Paris made you want to die that spring, and it seemed absurd to be in that town at that season with your wife, especially since she was being sullen and unhappy most of the time.
They sat at midnight on the terrasse of Fouquet’s, drinking whiskey, being glum with each other because the holiday had all gone wrong and the people they were thrown with had bored them and they were boring each other. Peggy was talking, but he wasn’t really listening to her. He was looking at another table, where two marvelous-looking girls were sitting with an unpleasantly handsome young man of about twenty-five. The two girls and the young man had gotten out of a Facel sports car that was parked right in front of Fouquet’s, and they were laughing a lot, and one of the girls was whispering into the young man’s ear and making him smile, and the whole thing was intolerable to a middle-aged American sitting there, a tourist, not knowing French, with a wife he wished he’d left home.
“…go home alone and you could stay on another week and…” He suddenly became conscious of what Peggy was saying.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“If you could take your eyes off those girls for a second,” Peggy said.
“What did you say? What’s that about going home alone?”
“Well, we’re not having any fun this way,” Peggy said, tight-lipped, accusing. “We’re just getting on each other’s nerves. I can see the ice filming over your face when I say two words to you.”
“God, you have an exaggerated way of talking. Ice filming. God.”
“I’m sorry you don’t like the way I talk,” she said. “You don’t have to be bothered with it. I’ll take the plane home tomorrow and you can stay on here another week and enjoy yourself and get over your mood and—”
“Don’t be a damn fool,” he said, wishing he had the guts to say, “Yes, that’s a good idea, I’ll drive you to the airport tomorrow.” “We came together,” he said, “and we’ll leave together.”
“Well, sleep on it,” she said.
“I don’t have to sleep on anything,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
He paid the bill and followed. Peggy toward the taxi stand on the corner, self-consciously keeping himself from looking at the two girls and the unpleasantly handsome young man. The taxi was a small, rattly Simca that smelled vilely of the driver’s cigarettes. They went all the way down to the Place de la Concorde and over the bridge to the Left Bank without saying a word, and they were nearly at their hotel when the car came out of the dark side street to their left, like a shell, and hit them.
Somehow, he was floating slowly over the top of the taxi, free, in midair, seeing everything clearly, having plenty of time to pull his arms and legs close to his body. He came down on his tensed forearm and rolled over on his shoulder on the pavement. There was a shock, and he knew something had happened to his knee, but there wasn’t any real pain and he stood up, only staggering a little, and ran over to where the Simca was crumpled against the iron shutter of a pharmacy window. The driver was on his hands and knees on the pavement, saying “Merde” over and over again in a healthy voice. Peggy was down between the seats, in a strange, contorted position, not moving, and there was some blood that he could see in the light from a lamppost.
Somehow, with the driver helping him, he managed to wrench a door open and drag her out. She had on a new black silk coat that she had bought the day before to show that she had been in Paris, and it was torn now and covered with blood. She groaned once as they lay her down on the pavement with the driver’s sweater as a pillow. She had her hand and arm covering her face and that’s where most of the blood was coming from. But she was moving and somebody said in English that it was all right, monsieur, the police were coming, the prefecture was just around the corner.
Groggily, kneeling beside his wife, Federov knew that it wasn’t the police he needed at the moment, but whatever French he knew had deserted him and he couldn’t take his eyes off Peggy lying there with her arm over her face.
“Peggy,” he said, whispering as though they were already in the hospital, “are you all right?”
She made a movement of her head that could have been interpreted as a nod. Then she took her arm away from her face. There was a big cut that went from high on her forehead down her cheek. That side of her head was all matted with hair now. She put her left hand up as though it were a pad, and with her right hand made writing movements on her palm. Federov dug in his pockets for his address book and a pencil. Holding her hand steady with his, he helped her write, in the light of the lamppost. A curious small crowd of about twenty people collected around them, murmuring sympathetically.
“Can’t talk,” Peggy wrote. Her handwriting, surprisingly, was recognizable. “Something broken. Jaw. Are you all right?”
“Yes,” he said.
“No public hospital,” she wrote. “American hospital, Neuilly.”
“Ok,” he said.
“Call Dr. Berenson,” she wrote. “Balzac 7347.”
“Ok,” Federov said. He had laughed at Peggy when Peggy had insisted upon telephoning her father in San Francisco for the name of a dependable English-speaking doctor in Paris. “We’re only going to be there two weeks, Peggy,” Federov had said, “we’re not going to die if we have to ask the hotel to find us a doctor.”
Now she not only remembered Berenson’s name, but his telephone number. He, himself, couldn’t even remember how to say, “Please bring me a glass of water,” in French at that moment.
Peggy kept on writing. “If they have to do anything to you, remember no penicillin. Allergy. Tell them
.”
“Yes.” Of course, Federov had forgotten all about his allergy to penicillin.
“Call O’Connor. Tribune,” Peggy wrote. O’Connor was a friend of hers from school who now worked on the city desk of the Paris edition. “Ask him keep this off wires. Family not to know.”
“I’ll call him,” Federov said.
Her hands dropped. She closed her eyes. For a moment it seemed to him that she was not breathing.
“Dearest,” he said, bending over her.
She opened her eyes and looked up at him. She began to write again on the pad. “Cut your forehead. Hurt?”
He put his hand to his forehead. It came away sticky with blood. “Nothing,” he said.
“Spoil your beauty,” she wrote. “Intolerable. Love you. Never intended leaving tomorrow. Lady’s trick. Love you. Where is goddam ambulance?”
When it came, it wasn’t an ambulance but a small police van. There were four policemen in it who had been sitting there with submachine guns, patrolling the streets on the lookout for Algerians and OAS men who were attacking police stations and bombing the homes of political figures. The policemen put their weapons on the floor of the black van and gently laid Peggy on a canvas stretcher beside the guns. The policemen helped Federov up into the van, too. He was limping now, from his knee. The driver of the other car climbed in under his own power. He was a young man in a black shirt, who had sat on the front fender of his smashed car, aloof, smoking one cigarette after another, an aggrieved expression on his face, making up his story for the insurance people. All that seemed to be wrong with him was a cut thumb. The driver of the taxi stayed with his machine, complaining to anybody who would listen to him.
The policemen didn’t want to go all the way out to Neuilly to the American Hospital, but when the van drove up to the Hôpital Necker and the young man in the black shirt got off, Federov refused to allow the policemen to touch Peggy. They grumbled, but they couldn’t very well club Federov and take the injured woman out by force and they finally started toward Neuilly, with the lights on inside the van to show whatever armed Algerians were about that this was an errand of mercy and to hold their fire.