Voices of a Summer Day

by Irwin Shaw

  The camp was badly run. There wasn’t even a doctor, just a slovenly nurse who was trying to chalk up the all-time camp record for sleeping with the most counselors in the summer. Campers and counselors alike were permitted to go down to the lake whenever they liked and swim without supervision. After taps, counselors from the boys’ side could be seen walking openly, carrying blankets, to rendezvous with the girl counselors in secluded glades, wet with the cold dew of the mountain nights. The tennis courts were bumpy, the baseball field unkempt, the kitchen dirty; the atmosphere was slack, the counselors neglected their charges and spent their time scheming how they could get extra free time and making deals with each other to exchange their weekly twenty-four hours off so that they could amass three days of liberty in a row and flee from Mr. Kahn. If Benjamin, who had an exaggerated sense of order and responsibility, hadn’t needed the seventy-five dollars so badly he would have quit the first week.

  The counselor in the bunk next to Benjamin’s was a man called Schwartz, a physical-training teacher in a high school in New York. He was a well-muscled, wiry, short man with a dark complexion, made even darker by the sun so that he looked like an Arab. He was a stupid man, but he was more conscientious than the others and he and Benjamin became friendly on the basis of their common disgust with the way the camp was run. Schwartz was older than the other counselors, nearly thirty, and he was engaged to be married in October. He showed the photograph of his fiancée to everybody again and again. It was the photograph of a dumpy little woman with dyed blond hair and thick legs. “Isn’t she beautiful?” Schwartz asked eagerly each time he brought the snapshot out of his foot locker.

  Schwartz’s fiancée came to visit him from New York every two weeks, and Mr. Kahn, for reasons best known to himself, let Schwartz off on those Friday and Saturday nights to sleep with the beauty in a small hotel nearby.

  “Yes,” everybody agreed, “she’s beautiful.” Often when Schwartz showed the woman’s photograph, he left his foot locker open. There was a box of about thirty condoms, neatly and prominently arrayed on the top shelf of the foot locker. Schwartz smiled widely when people noticed the condoms. He was a simple man and proud to prove that he, an ordinary high school teacher, had a mistress, and one of such extreme beauty.

  In the middle of August, the night before the lady was due to arrive, two of the counselors stole into Schwartz’s bunk, opened the foot locker and with a needle carefully made little invisible holes in every one of the condoms and then put them back in their box, arranged just as Schwartz had left them. The practical jokers told most of the others counselors what they had done, but not Benjamin, because they knew Benjamin was a friend of Schwartz’s.

  Condoms were a standard source of humor, and one of the counselors who had pierced the holes in Schwartz’s collection added to his reputation as the camp wit by saying, “There’s going to be a little Schwartz in this camp a lot sooner than anyone realizes.”

  Schwartz was a physical-culture fanatic. He did a hundred push-ups a day and ran a mile each evening before dinner. But with all that, he had never learned really to swim. Even so, each morning after reveille, rain or shine, he would rush down to the lake with the swimming instructor, a man called Olson, and dive in, staying close to the dock, ignoring the coldness of the lake at that hour and brushing his teeth in the water. He had the theory that this exercise was good for his gums.

  Olson was a huge, muscular man who played water polo for a Midwestern school. He was taciturn, sleepy-eyed and in love with his own body. All day long, except when he was swimming, he could be seen stroking his chest and his ridged belly slowly with caressing, self-admiring hands. He talked little and did his job badly and spent a good part of his time just lying in bed, outside the reach of discipline. He rarely talked and nobody knew him very well, not even the fifteen-year-old girl who sneaked out of her bunk every night to meet him in the forest. Aside from swimming a couple of miles a day to get ready for the water-polo season, he was completely uninterested in everything and everybody connected with the camp.

  On the morning of the Friday that Schwartz’s fiancée was due to arrive, Schwartz and Olson went down as usual to the lake after reveille. It was a raw, drizzly day and they were alone. They dove in, Schwartz staying close to the docks, Olson swimming sixty yards out with one breath, then surfacing, taking another breath, and swimming back without taking his head out of the water. All this came out later.

  Olson swam to the dock, climbed out, gave Schwartz his toothbrush, with the ribbon of paste neatly on it, and went to the shore end of the dock to dry himself off and put on his bathrobe and moccasins. They swam naked in the mornings. When Olson turned around again, Schwartz was gone. Olson looked over the edge of the dock. The water was black and chopped by the wind. Olson saw nothing. Then he ran up the eight-hundred-yard hill to the camp to get help.

  Schwartz had been under the water more than ten minutes when they finally found him and brought him to the surface. He was dead but nobody on the dock wanted to admit it. Olson and Benjamin took turns at artificial respiration, working on Schwartz, who had been stretched on his stomach, with one arm folded under his head. Olson and Benjamin spelled each other, kneeling over the still body, pressing down with both hands on Schwartz’s back, then slowly releasing the pressure in a rhythm that they hoped would restore normal breathing. Kahn had come running down in his bathrobe, a ruffled, uncombed, screechy, barnyard bird of a man, shouting at everybody, saying, “Oh, my God,” and “The idiot,” and “This is the end,” and peering again and again into Schwartz’s calm open dead eyes and saying, “There’s life there. I know it. I know it.” He made sure immediately that no one besides Olson and Benjamin and the two other counselors who had run down with Olson could approach the lake, and he hurried up the hill himself to call the hospital in the nearest town to send an ambulance and a pulmotor and to tell all counselors that the routine of the camp was to go on as usual that morning, except that all swimming was canceled because of the bad weather.

  On the dock, Benjamin was working over Schwartz. Olson had a towel wrapped around his head and neck, and pulled his bathrobe tighter around him to avoid catching cold.

  The other two counselors by now had been posted out of sight as guards to block the way to the lake.

  “He’s croaked,” Olson said flatly, making sure he was dry all over. “We’re working on a stiff. It’s a waste of time.”

  Benjamin didn’t say anything. He worked on the cool brown body of his friend, push, release, count, push, release, count. He knew Schwartz was dead, but he didn’t say anything, either about that or about Olson’s running up the hill for help, knowing that nobody could get back down to the lake in less than ten minutes, instead of diving in immediately and hunting for Schwartz while there was still a chance of saving him. The water off the dock was only twenty feet deep and Olson could stay under for three minutes at a time when necessary. He had run up the hill for one of three reasons—panic or stupidity or cowardice. Benjamin never decided which.

  A half-hour later, Kahn came back, standing on the running board of the ambulance. He had waited outside the gate of the camp so that he could cut the ambulance off and bring it down a side road, where the campers, now at their breakfast in the mess hall, could not see it and start rumors flying. The young doctor in the ambulance turned Schwartz over, put the rubber mask on Schwartz’s face and started the machine going. By the expression on the doctor’s face, Benjamin knew that the doctor knew he was wasting his time. Nobody said anything. Olson and Benjamin and Kahn stood off to one side in the fine drizzle, watching the doctor and the ambulance driver work the machine, the only sound the chop of the water against the pilings of the dock and the desolate, hoarse, almost animal sigh of the pulmotor and the nervous gasping of Mr. Kahn as he smoked cigarette after cigarette and tried to will poor Schwartz to start earning his salary again and breathe.

  Occasionally, almost negligently, the doctor knelt and put his hand on Schwartz’s wri
st to feel for a pulse that was never going to be there again, or strip back the blanket that now covered the body and listen with his stethoscope for the beating of a heart that wasn’t going to beat again. The doctor would listen patiently for a minute, then remove the stethoscope from his ears and let it dangle around his neck and pull the blanket into place and stand up.

  Each time, Kahn would ask excitedly, “Well?” The doctor would shake his head. He looked bored. The pulmotor made its hoarse, agonized sigh in the drizzle. Schwartz lay still. His eyes closed now about the rubber mask, he looked merely asleep. Only his complexion was changing. Under the Arab brown of his skin there was an indigo tinge. It was the first time Benjamin had ever seen a dead man.

  It was misty and the forest on the other side of the lake was lost in the enveloping grayness. They could have been on the banks of a limitless ocean. Whales could have been cruising offshore, battleships could have been making their way through the mist to foreign ports.

  After an hour, the doctor said, “Well, that’s that.”

  The ambulance driver stopped the pulmotor. The sudden silence was a relief. Olson and Benjamin carried the body, still wrapped in the blanket, to the ambulance and put it in the back. Kahn insisted on going to the hospital in the ambulance. “Listen, boys,” he said to Benjamin and Olson, his tone wheedling, pleading, “don’t say anything up there.” He gestured in the direction of the camp. “Nothing much happened, eh, boys? Schwartz is ok, ok, heh? A little heart attack, maybe, heh? The cold water. He’s alive, see, we’re taking the best of care of him. No expense is being spared. He has a private room in the hospital, so he can rest, heh, no visitors for the time being, naturally, heh? And don’t tell even that to the children. To the other counselors, if necessary. If the rumor gets around that he drowned, there won’t be a boy or a girl left here by tomorrow morning. I’ll be ruined. He’ll be all right, won’t he, Doc?”

  “No,” the doctor said.

  “What do you know?” Kahn shouted. “A young inexperienced boy like you, just out of school. We’ll get a specialist, a heart man, the best.”

  “Ok, mister,” the doctor said, bored. He got into the back of the ambulance with the corpse.

  Kahn climbed up beside the driver. He made the driver go down a rough road all around the other side of the lake, even though it took thirty minutes longer to the hospital that way, because, he said, he didn’t want to take the chance of disturbing the children in the camp unnecessarily and spoiling their holiday.

  Olson and Benjamin watched the ambulance drive away, disappear into the drizzle, jolting on the rough dirt road.

  “Well,” Olson said, “I’m going to get me some breakfast.”

  He and Benjamin climbed the hill together. They didn’t speak. When they got to the mess hall, the boys had finished eating, but there were whispering groups of counselors who rushed over to Olson and Benjamin and bombarded them with questions. Benjamin refused to say anything.

  “He had a heart attack,” Olson told the other counselors as he drank his delayed coffee and munched on his scrambled eggs and rolls. “He’s resting in the hospital. The water was awfully cold this morning.”

  That night, Olson went out with his blanket to meet his fifteen-year-old girl as usual.

  Nobody remembered about Schwartz’s fiancée, and, when she arrived at the camp at five o’clock in the afternoon, it was Benjamin who had to tell her that Schwartz was dead. By then, Kahn had come back to the camp, his face sober, but his voice guardedly triumphant, with the news that the specialist had agreed with the diagnosis. Schwartz had died from a heart attack; he had not drowned.

  Not a single camper was taken home before the end of the season by his or her parents. A new rule was put into effect. There was to be no swimming except at specified hours with every counselor on duty on the dock and on the raft and in boats around the swimming area.

  Benjamin didn’t speak to Olson again all the rest of the summer. Olson didn’t seem to mind or even notice.

  Schwartz had no family that anybody knew of, and his foot locker, the condoms tactfully removed, was sent back to Schwartz’s fiancée in the city. She did not become pregnant that year.

  1964

  THE WAVES POUNDED ON the beach, rainbows in the spume, lit by the setting sun. The four boys were still out there in the rough sea. Federov didn’t know whether it was because they wanted to stay out or because they couldn’t get in. Either way, and whether they knew it or not, they were in danger. They still paid no attention to Federov’s shouts, which were lost in the pound of the surf.

  Death by water.

  Federov looked up at the verandah. A waiter in a white coat was serving the old ladies tea and muffins. Federov went up toward the verandah and stopped in front of the old ladies.

  “Good evening,” he said.

  The old ladies looked up from their tea. They nodded tightly. Guillotine mouths, munching on marmalade. The acid lines of disappointment and privilege pulled the thin lips down like barbed wire. The mottled hands tinkled the china cups.

  “Those boys out there”—Federov gestured toward the ocean—“they shouldn’t be out in this kind of sea. I wonder if you could ask the waiter to see if he can find one of the lifeguards and have him go out in the catamaran and round them up. I’ll go out with him, tell him, if he thinks I can help.”

  The two old ladies looked out at the boys fighting the waves.

  “It doesn’t look so bad to me,” one of the old ladies said. She had a voice like thin glass. “I’ve seen people swim in much worse off this beach. Haven’t you, Catherine?”

  The second old lady surveyed the Atlantic Ocean professionally. “Much worse,” she said.

  “Still—” Federov began.

  “I don’t like to interfere in the pleasures of strangers,” the first old lady said. She spoke with full appreciation of her own good manners.

  “They’re not strangers,” Federov argued, feeling foolish. “I’m sure they’re from around here. In fact, I think I recognize—”

  “Edward,” the first old lady said to the waiter, “are those boys members?”

  “No, ma’am,” Edward said. “They’re from the town.”

  He was a Negro and Federov had a fleeting notion that Edward didn’t care who drowned and who didn’t drown as long as he was white.

  Another acid dropping of two mouths, twin guillotines. “I’m sorry, sir,” said the old lady who had spoken before. “You heard the waiter. They are not members.”

  Federov laughed. He was surprised at the noise as it came from his throat. The two mouths went down, blades.

  He turned and saw he hadn’t needed to bother. The boys had caught a big wave and the four mattresses came swirling in, sweeping their riders high up onto dry sand. The boys jumped up, laughing.

  Federov strode down to them. “Ok,” he said. He knew one of the boys, Jimmy Redford, the son of the owner of the stationery store the Federovs patronized. “Ok, Jimmy, if I ever see you do anything as foolish as that again, I’ll grab you and take you to your father, and if he doesn’t beat the stuffing out of you, I will. That’s a promise, Jimmy. Did you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.” The boys stood in a short, guilty row, looking as if they had been caught by a policeman as they were breaking windows or lined up in juvenile court for buying beer illegally.

  Federov started back toward home as the boys dried themselves and put pants on over their wet trunks. The sun was low in the west as he walked into it.

  The afternoon whirled in his head.

  They are not members. Sacco and Vanzetti, guilty or innocent, were not members. He and his father, the old catcher, and his brother (flak heavy in the area) and his wife and son (Old Pope Sinister the First) and his eleven-year-old daughter were not members. Pat Forrester, her new party dress hanging uselessly in the closet, her ears stuffed with cotton against the celebrating bells, was not a member. Sternberger’s aunt, coughing her lungs up in Montreal (THEY DO NOT KNOW THEIR GLORY)
, was not a member. His Uncle George (I should have cried my tears, too, for the two Italians), clubbed by a Boston cop, was not a member. John Stafford with characteristic tact, had quietly resigned and was no longer a member. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, although accepted by the committee on the day of his birth, had declined the invitation and was not a member. You heard what the waiter said.

  Now list the members. Bryant, laughing, trying to remember the song Sacco, Vanzetti, What did you do?, was a member. Cohn, that all-’round boy, gifted, heartless, dead, was a member. Article 7: It is understood that there is nothing in the club rules that guarantees that members are immune to suffering or death. The club was no fly-by-night organization, it had its history; according to Henry IV the Duc de Crillon was a charter member.

  More recently, the Dyers, father and son, bowing, were members, although under the tacit condition that they were always to arrive by the servants’ entrance. Fräulein Whatever, of the steamer Priscilla, out of New York bound for Fall River, bombed, perhaps, some years later in Essen (Now they can be proud again, the young men), was a member, as a thousand nonmembers died or escaped dying once more in the shot-up planes above her head. Olson, caressing himself, running for help when he should have been in twenty feet of cold mountain water, was a member, accepted the same day as Morris Kahn, who paid his dues for a lifetime by driving the long way around a lake in an ambulance with a dead fool on the stretcher behind him. Mrs. Carol-Ann Humes, in her lamentable green dress, a little tipsy to drown her timidity in this high company, sensitive of nose and not ashamed to say that Pope John XXIII was a Communist, was a member. Craven, the quarterback with the cocky street-fighter’s face and the naked greed for applause, stopped three times within the two-yard line, was a member. Fuck you, brother. The girl in the white dress on the eve of the new year of 1933, having paid an unusually high initiation fee, was a member. The beauty with the loose shoulder strap was on the governing committee and passed on all newcomers. The old Irishwoman (Scum, she said), while given to drink, was a member, although she knew her place as she knew everybody’s place. Louis’s wife (The house in town, the place in Falmouth, and the pictures and the books—my blood, my balls, the marrow of my bones) was a member. The lawyer Rosenthal, ready to work on Sunday, or Yom Kippur, or on the matinée of the Second Coming of the Lord, was a member. The croquet players on the Belgian lawn were members. Leah Levinson Ross Stafford had applied for membership, but perhaps, despite her beauty, her application would be tabled for further consideration. The high school boys and girls in Dallas (Kennedy gawn, Johnson next; Kennedy gawn, Johnson next) were all members.