Voices of a Summer Day (23 page)

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 wrist 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

T
HE 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.

The wind was dying down. An evening hush was settling over land and ocean. Gulls rose before him and sailed briefly out toward Hispaniola as he approached them. He walked with his head down, accompanied by the dead. It is only with the greatest care that memory can be kept from becoming a prison or a gallows.

Voices speak, faces appear, moments and images come and go—a promise broken, a false smile, a grave, a wedding night, a helmet in the rain, a father dancing, a son using the word “conspicuous,” a vermouth stain on a pink dress, a lipstick stain on a sheet, the mouths of malice, the whispers of betrayal; all movements dangerous, equivocal; weapons everywhere, but targets concealed, the terms of victory or surrender never quite stated.

It sometimes takes more honor to walk the last hundred yards to your front door than to advance against the walls of a fortress.

How gratifying, how simple it is to go to the water’s edge, continue…accomplish that one certain act to write finish to so many uncertain accomplishments.

He shivered. The Atlantic touched him with the first chill of evening, reminding him that glaciers fed these waters. He raised his head. Walking toward him was the blond girl with the two cats. The girl had wound her hair around her head in a crown. Was that all she had done that afternoon? While the guns had sounded, during the hot hours when the sirens had wailed, the murders had been committed, the famous men had broadcast their lies; while the crowds had formed and fled, leaving their wounded on the cobblestones, had she just braided her hair under a dune, sheltered from the wind, with the two cats at her ankles?