Voices of a Summer Day (13 page)

“Why don’t you leave that poor girl alone?” Peggy said. “She has enough to cope with as it is.”

“She’s a fool,” Benjamin said. “And why did you tell her you agreed that Louis ought to go to an analyst?”

“Because I think he should.”

“Oh, God.”

“Am I supposed to ask you each time I open my mouth whether I have your approval or not?” Peggy spoke in a low voice that only he could hear, but the tone was furious. “Leave your telephone number at all times, so I can check. The number of the Oak Room, for example.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about. I called. The Winstons telephoned to see if we could have dinner with them and I wanted to see if it was all right with you. You weren’t there, the headwaiter said.”

Benjamin sighed. He could say that the headwaiter hadn’t found him, that he
had
lunched there, but he felt perverse enough not to use the saving fib that evening. He felt put upon and unjustly treated. After all, it hadn’t been his fault that he hadn’t gone to the Oak Room. Foynes hadn’t come into town and Peggy had been on the phone all morning, as he now remembered it, so he hadn’t been able to invite her to lunch as he had wanted to. He looked away from his wife’s closed face at the crowded party. Joan and her actor were moving toward him and Peggy. They were passing Leah. Stafford was at Leah’s side, and so were several men in dark suits. Rooms in New York, Benjamin thought, are too damn complicated. He heard Leah’s laugh, low, disturbing, cool, inviting. The invitation, he somehow felt, was aimed at him, although there were twenty other men in the room. Maybe, he thought, I’ll call her tomorrow and tell her I’ll marry her and move out of town and never go to another cocktail party again in all my life.

“Foynes’s office called and said he couldn’t make it,” Benjamin said, annoyed with himself for feeling he had to explain. “I tried to get you, if you want to know the truth, to ask you for lunch, but the phone was busy.”

“I bet,” Peggy said.

“I don’t care if you believe me or not.” He felt holy and honest at being able to tell the truth and not be believed. Later on he would smile to himself ruefully at this oblique satisfaction, but right now, confronted with Peggy’s blind mistrust, he gave full rein to the unaccustomed pleasure of being a misunderstood husband.

“Where
did
you have lunch?” she asked.

“Some people came in from out of town and I took them to—”

“What people?”

“You don’t know them.” Leah would never ask questions like this in a million years, he thought. The husband would do the interrogating in
that
family.

“I don’t know anybody,” Peggy said. “Little old wifey-pie, staying home, bent over the stove, day and night, never gets to know anybody.”

From a foot away, Benjamin marveled, they’d look like a perfectly happy couple, the beautiful young woman, dazzlingly turned out, lovingly discussing the affairs of the day with her adoring husband. I wish I was a foot away, Benjamin thought. Or a mile away. Or in Madagascar.

“I invited Joan and her actor friend to have dinner with us,” Benjamin said. In another moment the couple would have made their way through the crowd of guests and Benjamin wanted no surprises.

“Coward,” Peggy said.

She knows me too damn well, Benjamin thought. Maybe it
really
is time to move on. He sighed again.

“One more sigh,” Peggy said, “and you’re out. And don’t blind yourself with those martinis. That’s your fourth.”

“Third,” he said.

“Fourth,” she said. “I’ve been watching.”

Gentlemen don’t count, Benjamin remembered, from the warm bedroom that afternoon. Ladies shouldn’t count, either. Peggy was only drinking vermouth over ice. Her abstinence gave her a moral edge over him that also served to irritate him. With deliberation, he finished his martini and took another off a waiter’s tray.

“Susan had some interesting information,” Peggy said, “about your friend Joan Parkes.”

“I have an interesting plan,” Benjamin said, working on his fourth or fifth martini, according to who was keeping score. “From now on, let’s not talk to anybody who ever got divorced from anybody in my family.”

“Ready to go, old boy?” the actor said, as he and Joan came up to them. “Peggy, you look smashing.” He smiled at Peggy, who he knew liked him and she smiled back, hiding everything. She also smiled at Joan.

“Let’s go to a nice, chic little French place,” Joan said. “Just the cozy four of us. Oh, my God!”

“Watch it!” Benjamin said, but it was too late. Somehow, Peggy’s hand had slipped and the whole big glass of vermouth had spilled all down the front of Joan’s ruffled pink skirt, and Joan was dancing back unhappily, making small moaning sounds as the stain spread.

“I’m terribly sorry, Joan,” Peggy said. She bent over helpfully with a small handkerchief to try to repair some of the damage.

“Don’t touch it!” Joan wailed. “Oh, it’s ruined. And it’s the first time I’ve worn this dress.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Peggy said. There was very little apology in her voice. “But don’t worry, Joan, you go right back to where you got that dress…”

“Mainbocher’s,” Joan wept, dabbing hopelessly at the dress.

“You go right back to Mainbocher’s tomorrow,” Peggy said, sounding like a schoolteacher instructing a backward child, “and get exactly the same dress and send the bill to Ben’s office. You don’t mind, do you, Ben?”

“Delighted,” Benjamin said.

“Now, shall we go to dinner?” Peggy asked, briskly.

“I’m not going out to dinner looking like
this,”
Joan said, her emotion making her say
thith.
“I’m not going out anywhere. Eric, take me home.”

“Yes, dear girl,” the actor said. “Wise decision.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” Peggy said in the same tone she had used before.

“I don’t think you really are,” Joan said. She rushed across the room, trying to hide the stain on her skirt, which now had assumed the shape of the map of South America on the frail pink cloth. The actor looked briefly at Peggy, who was standing serenely in front of the window, beautifully framed by the lights of the river and the bridge and Queens in the gathering dusk behind her. Then the actor gave Benjamin a small, masculine, secret-language, understanding smile, shrugged, and went off to escort Joan home.

“Isn’t it awful?” Peggy said. “You and I will just have to eat alone tonight. Mr. and Mrs. Federov in a cozy little twosome.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Benjamin said. He had never hit a woman in his life and he didn’t want to start now, with his wife, in front of forty of his best friends.

“I’d like another drink,” Peggy said, like a little girl asking for another ice-cream soda. “Something happened to mine.”

“In the restaurant,” Benjamin said, and grabbed her arm hard and propelled her through the room. Peggy smiled graciously at everybody, the little girl who had had just the most wonderful time, ma’am, at the party, and they reached the door without Benjamin’s having to introduce Peggy to Leah.

They walked in silence, or almost silence, through the dusk toward the restaurant. Peggy was humming a happy little almost-tune under her breath as she walked at Benjamin’s side.

“Mainbocher’s,” she said calmly. “I bet that’ll cost you at least three hundred and fifty dollars.”

“That was a miserable, childish thing to do,” Benjamin said.

“Accidents happen, darling,” Peggy said. Her face wasn’t closed any more, but open like a happy tulip on a spring morning.

“Accidents!” Benjamin said. “Whom’re you kidding?”

“You, darling.” Peggy squeezed his arm affectionately. “I’m kidding you.”

“Disgraceful,” Benjamin said.

“Wasn’t it?” Peggy said cheerfully. “Would you have preferred it if I’d challenged her to a duel?”

“I never touched her.”

“That isn’t what I heard,” Peggy said.

“That damn fool Susan,” Benjamin said.

“It’s not nice to talk like that about members of your own family,” Peggy said.

“I never touched her,” Benjamin said. “Believe it or not.”

“Oh, the poor girl.”

“Do you want to know why I never touched her?” he demanded.

“Only if you’re dying to tell me.”

“Because she wouldn’t let me. She doesn’t have affairs with married men.”

“Foolish girl,” Peggy said. “That’ll teach her.” She patted Benjamin’s arm. “You don’t want to have anything to do with girls who won’t have affairs with married men, do you, baby?” She chuckled. She looked mischievous and eighteen and wonderful. “
‘I’m not going out to dinner looking like thith!’”
she said, getting Joan’s voice and lisp exactly.

Benjamin stopped walking. He put back his head and laughed. He stood there on the open street roaring with laughter. Peggy joined him and they laughed uncontrollably, impolitely, conspiratorially, unbreakably, together. When they stopped laughing, he took her to dinner and they had a fine time, talking about a million things, like people who have just fallen in love and don’t have enough hours to get everything in.

He played tennis with Stafford on Tuesday and they split four sets and decided to have dinner together, all of them, Leah and Stafford and Benjamin and Peggy, that night. They all liked each other very much and, even before Stafford married Leah, they were seeing each other two or three times a week.

Peggy and he had gone to the quiet wedding. Neither of them had ever spoken of his affair with Leah, although he was sure Peggy finally knew about it. And when, after her honeymoon, Leah had hinted that she was prepared to continue with the affair, Federov had made it clear it was over. It wasn’t easy. He knew there were going to be times when he was going to regret his rectitude perhaps more than he had ever regretted any of his sins, but he was not going to make love to the wife of a man who had become his friend and whom he admired so completely.

Since then, the couples had become inseparable. There was no cynicism on either side because of the past. Friendships have been built on worse foundations. The four of them had gone on a trip to Europe together, with their children; Federov played tennis with Stafford two or three times a week; they were almost automatically on each other’s guest list at parties; the two women went to galleries and the theatre together in the afternoons and worried about their children together; and it was Stafford who, in 1950, had suggested that the Federovs buy the house in the town on Long Island in which Stafford’s ancestors had put up the first roof.

1964

A
BATTER HIT A
triple and there was a lot of shouting in front of Leah and Federov as the batter slid into third base in a cloud of dust.

“I guess I’ll see you tonight,” Federov said, leaning back against the plank above them and watching with admiration the long, exquisite feet, in their open blue sandals, of the woman beside him. “I’m sure Peggy will want to go.”

“Well,” Leah said, “you’ve been warned. It could be worse than two weeks ago.”

“It couldn’t be,” Federov said.

At the dinner party two Saturdays before, the subject of the German play
The Deputy
had come up. It was causing a sensation in New York, as it had wherever it had been shown, because of its attack on Pope Pius XII for not having publicly denounced the German massacre of the Jews. One of the guests was a woman of about forty, a neighbor of the Staffords. She was wearing a disastrous green dress, a thin, plain woman with hyperthyroid eyes, whose husband somehow managed not to be there on most weekends. She was rarely invited out by any of the regular group of the resort. After one evening in her company Federov had understood why. He also understood why her husband found it necessary to stay in town most weekends. Her name was Carol-Ann Humes, née Fredericks, from Charleston, South Carolina, and while she usually was quiet and tried to please, she moved in an atmosphere of boredom as solid and palpable as cement.

But Stafford, who could not bear to see anyone he knew neglected or hurt and who made a point of taking care of social cripples—ladies who were being divorced, rude men with unpopular political convictions,
nouveau riche
couples with gaudy clothes and objectionable children—always had Mrs. Humes to all gatherings in his house. He was not a born host. It would never have occurred to him, as it did to Leah, to speculate whether any given party in his home was a success or not. In fact, the flow of people through his living room and past his table was not really considered by him in terms of what others called parties. People were his medium, his instructors, his pupils, his concern. If he knew them, they were his responsibility. He was rich in spirit as well as in worldly goods, and his hospitality was general.

In the middle of the discussion, already heated, about the German play, Mrs. Humes said that it was a shame that such a play could be put on the stage in New York. She wasn’t even a Catholic, but she felt that the Pope had been a fine man and that it was disgraceful that he could be attacked in public so many years later, when he was dead and could no longer defend himself.

Peggy, who had been in the thick of the argument, turned on Mrs. Humes. “Have you seen the play?” she demanded.

“No,” Mrs. Humes said. “I wouldn’t degrade myself. But I’ve read the critics and the articles in the newspapers.”

“Don’t you think it might be a good idea to see something like this before you talk about it?” Peggy asked, trying to sound friendly and reasonable and not succeeding.

“No,” Mrs. Humes said. “I wouldn’t even care if it was a
good
play. It’s the subject…” She waved her sunburned hands vaguely. “The world is weary of the subject, Peggy, you might as well face it.”

Peggy turned to a small, hunched man down the table from her. His name was Grauheim. He was married to a teacher in the local school and worked in the town pharmacy putting together prescriptions. He had come to America in 1949, and Europe still haunted his face and tinged his speech. “Mr. Grauheim,” Peggy said, “are you tired of the subject?”