Voices of a Summer Day (18 page)

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.

Maybe 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

I
T 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.

As they drove through the dark streets, surrounded by the policemen, Federov held Peggy’s hand and stared down at the drawn, wounded, beloved face, pale and frightening in the bare light of the bulb attached to the ceiling of the van. If she comes out of this, Federov swore, I will never do anything to hurt her again. Never.

1964

S
TILL, HE THOUGHT, SITTING
at the piano, hitting b flat, she could have left a note. Damned thoughtless.

He struck a last chord. The finger that had been cut at the baseball field when he caught the foul ball began to bleed again. Every day to its own small wound. It left a little dark red stain on the ivory of a key. He left it there and got up restlessly.

Peggy had come out of it all right, although with a bad concussion and scars and weeks of pain, but of course he had hurt her from time to time, because there is no living with anyone without hurting them occasionally. But he
had
tried to remember and keep beastliness down to a minimum. But if she walked in that minute, he knew he’d bawl her out angrily. He decided it would be better if he got out of the house. It was ominously empty and the late afternoon light made it seem lonely. It shook with the pound of the surf, a clean, polished, unstable, empty place for ghosts and heartbreak and premonition of shipwreck. He took off his shoes and socks and started out of the house to walk along the beach when the phone rang. He went back into the house and picked up the phone.

“Ben?” It was his brother’s voice. “I’ve been trying to get you all afternoon.”

“I was wandering around town. You coming out tonight?”

“No. That bitch called again,” Louis said. “I’ve been arguing with her for hours.”

“What’s the matter now?” Federov asked. “I thought we had it all arranged this morning.”

“Arranged!” Louis said. His voice was trembling with anger. Louis was so rarely angry that the emotion made his voice sound strange to Federov. “You can’t arrange anything with that bitch for more than fifteen minutes at a time. Just long enough to call her goddam mother and listen to the goddam old lady tell her I’m taking advantage of her.”

“What’s she asking for now?”

“My blood, my balls, and the marrow of my bones.” Louis never used language like that and Federov found that he was a little shocked by his brother’s unaccustomed vulgarity. “Fifty thousand cash, the whole goddam house,
with
the pictures
and
all the books, the place in Falmouth, and twenty-five thousand a year or one-half my income, whichever is higher, plus all lawyer’s fees. And the alimony to continue even if she gets married, and I know for a fact she’s been screwing some fairy dress designer for two years and’ll marry the sonofabitch the minute she comes back from Reno.”

“Man!” Federov said.

“Man is right. Oh. I forgot. And I pay all taxes.”

“You can’t give her that,” Federov said.

“I know it. I don’t
have
that,” Louis said. “I’ll be peddling pencils on streetcorners.”

“What’re you going to do?” Federov asked.

“I’m seeing her and her goddam lawyer tomorrow. I’ll try to fight out some compromise. What the hell else is there for me to do?”