Voices of a Summer Day (3 page)

Even Benjamin felt he had to smile, hypocritically, as the boys laughed at Cohn’s offer. Benjamin’s passion was well-known and had been the subject of jokes several times in the skits put on in the Social Hall every Saturday evening.

“Benny,” Cohn said charmingly, “you’re not going to be sore at me, are you? You know how much I admire you. I’ve been around a lot and I’ve seen a lot of ballplayers and I don’t mind saying I never saw a more promising outfielder in my life. Why…” Cohn addressed the meeting at large again. “Why, when it’s two out and I’m pitching, and the ball’s hit out toward center field, I don’t even look around, no matter where it’s going. I just throw away my glove and start walking toward the bench because I know Benny’s out there and if Benny’s out there that ball’s going to be caught.” He took a few shrewd, defense-attorney’s steps toward Benjamin. “You’re not sore, are you, Benny?”

“No,” Benjamin said, “I’m not sore.” Sore was not the word for what he was feeling, anyway, and at the age of thirteen he didn’t know the accurate word for what Cohn was doing to him, and there was a good chance he would never learn the accurate word or have it ready for the proper occasion any time in his life.

“Anyway,” Cohn said, going back to his original position facing the boys seated in front of him on the grass in front of the mess hall, “all this is just a suggestion. If you fellers don’t want to go to Boston that’s okay with me. I’ll get in there and pitch like it was the World Series and I was Dazzy Vance. I’m just as happy one way or another. All I think is, maybe we ought to vote. This is a free country and the majority rules and all that bunk.
Bye, Bye, Bonnie
or Camp Canoga. It’s up to you.”

Bye, Bye, Bonnie
went for forty-one votes, Camp Canoga for two, Benjamin’s and that of a boy called Burke, who didn’t even play on either of the teams, but who had a grandmother in Boston he’d have to lunch with if she found out he was in the city.

Cohn’s uncle got the tickets for
Bye, Bye, Bonnie
for August 23rd. The plans had been made in advance and nobody had bothered to find out that on that same day, two men called Sacco and Vanzetti were to be executed in Charlestown State Prison. Few of the boys read anything but the sports pages of whatever newspapers found their way into the camp, but the director of the camp, who was the principal of a high school in the wintertime, read the front pages, too, and they were full of threats of riots, bombings, and mob action in Boston if the execution were carried out as scheduled.

The director had an understandable reluctance to send forty-three boys entrusted to his care into a city crammed, as the papers said, with violent anarchists from all over the world, and in which street fighting and bombings were likely to take place.

He called the seniors together and gave them a short course in contemporary history. When he told the boys that the Boston trip might have to be canceled, the boys responded with groans. “But it is not yet definite,” the director went on. He was an impressive, calm-looking man with a priest’s bald head and a fine tonsure of clipped white hair. But he was hounded all summer by fear for the tender souls turned trustingly over to him by parents every June 30th. “No, not definite at all,” the director said. “There have been protests all over the world, there is a great deal of confusion in this case, and I wouldn’t be surprised if at any moment the Governor of Massachusetts, who is a personal friend of mine, and a great and just man, either reprieved these poor men to wait for another investigation or commuted their sentences. We will have to wait for events,” the director said, and it was probably the first time in their lives that any of the boys listening to him had ever heard that phrase. “We will make double arrangements, both with Camp Canoga and Camp Berkeley, and with the proper people in Boston, so that no matter what happens, you boys will not be deprived of your holiday. If the poor men are to die, you will still have your two baseball games and basketball games. If, even at the last minute, we hear that the men are to live, you will have your rather extraordinary…uh…spree, in Boston.”

As the boys straggled disconsolately back to their bunks, Benjamin found himself next to Cohn. “What’s the matter, Cohn?” Benjamin asked. “Isn’t the Governor one of your uncles?” It was the sharpest thing he had said in all his thirteen years, and Cohn looked at him, surprised, as the realization hit him that there were people on the face of the earth who might disapprove of him and whom he could not charm and who might be pleased to make him suffer.

On the morning of the 23rd, the forty-three boys and four counselors piled into Reo trucks with benches along the sides behind the driver’s cab. The passengers were protected by canvas stretched over wooden supports, but the back was open. It was a raw, gusty day, and the boys all wore sweaters as they piled onto the wooden seats. The latest rumor from Boston was that the Governor had not yet made up his mind about whether to show clemency to the convicted men. Bryant, who was in charge of the expedition, was to call the camp director at one o’clock for final instructions. If by that time the execution had been postponed or canceled, the trucks were to continue on to Boston. If the men had been electrocuted, the trucks were to go on to Camp Canoga. The boys would play the baseball game, stay the night, and play the basketball game the next morning. Then they were to go on to Camp Berkeley, repeat the program and start back toward camp the following afternoon.

Two or three of the older boys had newspapers with them and were making predictions that the Governor would have to commute the sentence. Benjamin, although an avid reader of everything else, had not yet begun to read newspapers and had no opinion of any kind on the rights and wrongs of the case and no notion of why such a fuss was being made about two men he had never heard of. Hundreds of people were electrocuted or hanged each year throughout the United States, he knew, without its interfering with anybody’s plans and the special nature of this particular punishment eluded him.

He glanced at a newspaper column that compared it to the Dreyfus case, but since Benjamin had never heard of the Dreyfus case this was of no help to him.

He sat as close to the open back of the truck as he could get, bumping on the hard bench, smelling the dusty canvas top and hoping he wouldn’t get carsick. He didn’t join in the jokes but sat gloomily, with eyes closed, concentrating to keep from being nauseated by the fumes from the engine and the roughness of the trip. He did not actively wish for the death of Sacco and Vanzetti that day, but if he had been told definitely that the men were not to die, he would have begged out of the trip and stayed in camp. Boston had no attraction for him. He had no interest in the theatre; the spiked punch of Cohn’s uncle would, he was sure, make him sick, and he had no illusions about the amount of attention the sixteen- and seventeen-year-old blonds and brunettes from Vassar and Radcliffe would lavish on him at a party. And in camp he could always scrounge games in the Intermediate League or take a couple of books in a canoe and catch up on his reading. So his presence in the truck was in reality a bet that the men would die and he would get a chance to play two ball games in the next three days.

As the Reos rolled along the rough narrow roads of 1927 New England, sending up clouds of white dust between the stands of second-growth pine, the boys in the truck with Benjamin began to sing. Since Cohn was in the same truck, they naturally sang “Hallelujah” and “Sometimes I’m happy, sometimes I’m blue.” Benjamin sat silent, not singing, hating the songs (in lieu of hating Cohn), feeling his hair and clothes getting gritty from the dust and conscious of a sour contraction in the pit of his stomach. Many years later, as a sergeant in the infantry, sitting by the tailgate of a weapons-carrier full of men, rolling across the plains of France after St. Lô, with a khaki handkerchief across the lower part of his face to keep out the dust, he had a curious feeling that he had done all this before, had felt exactly the same during another summer, that soon adolescent, unarmed voices on the road past Avranches would start chanting, “Sing, Hallelujah—and you’ll shoo the blues away; when cares pursue you—Hallelujah—gets you through the darkest day.”

Cohn stood up between the two rows of benches, keeping his balance easily as the truck swayed from side to side, conducting the choir, swinging his arms and making pained grimaces in imitation of an orchestra leader dissatisfied with the sounds his musicians were producing. The song ended in laughter at Cohn’s clowning and he spread both his arms, still in mimicry, and said, “Rise, gentlemen, rise.”

Everybody but Benjamin stood up. Even Bryant stood up with the others, going along with the joke. Cohn looked speculatively at Benjamin, and Benjamin was afraid Cohn was going to make a joke about him, but Cohn merely smiled, then began to improvise, first humming a little to himself as the boys sat down again, then going into his own words to the tune of “Sometimes I’m Happy.”

“Sometimes I’m happy,” Cohn sang, “sometimes I’m blue. Sacco, Vanzetti, what did you do? Dear Mr. Governor, can’t you be fine, And turn the juice on some other time?”

Somehow, by humming or going fast over the rough spots, Cohn managed to make his words fit the beat of the music and he grinned at the shout of laughter that greeted his cleverness.

“Now,” he said, “all together…”

“Sometimes I’m happy…” the young voices sang over the noise of the motors. And, “Sacco, Vanzetti, what did you do?”

Only Benjamin sat silent. Everything’s a joke to that sonofabitch, he thought bitterly, knowing that all the boys in the truck would call him a sorehead from then on and not caring.

“Dear Mr. Governor, can’t you be fine, And turn the juice on some other time?”

The voices sang louder and louder as the boys learned the words, and they were bawling the song out when the trucks stopped at one o’clock in front of the post office and general store of a small village and Bryant went in to call the director of the camp.

The village green, with its bandstand, was in front of the general store, and all the boys got out and stretched their legs and sat on the grass or on the steps of the bandstand and ate the sandwiches and oranges and drank the manufactured-tasting milk from thermos jugs that had been sent along by the camp cooks with their lunches.

Bryant took a long time, and while waiting for him Cohn taught his new song to the boys from the other trucks. The village was almost deserted, since it was lunchtime, and there was only a farmer or two passing through to listen puzzledly to the strange sound of more than forty boys in camp uniforms singing, in voices that ranged from childish soprano to uncertain bass: “Sacco, Vanzetti, what did you do?”

When Bryant came out of the general store he had a ponderous, self-important look on his face, like the manager of a baseball team walking out to the mound to send a pitcher to the showers. Everybody knew, before Bryant said a word, that the news was bad. “Boys,” he said, “I’m afraid Boston’s out. Both those guys were electrocuted an hour ago. Now let’s forget it and go to Canoga and show those fellers what kind of a ball club we have playing for us this season.”

“God damn it,” Cohn said. “We shoulda just stayed home.” Profanity was punishable under the camp rules, but Bryant put his arm consolingly around Cohn’s shoulders and said, “Boris, I know exactly how you feel.”

They piled once more into the trucks and started for Canoga. Benjamin sat near the open end of the truck again, on the verge of vomiting after the thick sandwiches and the thermos-bottle milk. The knowledge that within an hour or so he would be playing a ball game, something that usually filled him with excitement, gave him no pleasure today, because he knew the rest of the team would be playing resentfully and that they would remember that he was the only one among them who had wanted to play the game. They would look for signs of smugness and triumph, and Benjamin knew that no matter how he behaved and whether anybody said anything about it or not, a good deal of their resentment would be turned against him. Hell, he thought, I haven’t got a friend in this whole lousy camp. I’m going someplace else next summer.

They lost the game that afternoon. The whole team played stodgily. Years later, when Benjamin was in college, an unusually literate backfield coach had told him, “I don’t care how much ahead you are or how good you are or how easy it is, I want players who play with
passion.
Without that, don’t bother to suit up. You might as well go sit in the library on Saturdays and improve your mind. You’re not going to do me or anybody else any real good out there on the field.” Federov was nineteen at the time and considerably more blasé than when he reached fifty and he had smiled secretly at the coach’s using a word like “passion” in connection with a boy’s game. But later he had understood what the coach was talking about.

At any rate, nobody, including Benjamin, was playing with passion on that August afternoon in 1927. He didn’t get a hit all day. In the eighth inning it began to rain, and he slipped and misjudged a long fly that went over his head and rolled into the woods and let in two runs that won the game for Canoga. It was the first error he had made on a fly ball all season. Nobody said anything to him when he came in from the outfield, except Bryant. “Tris Speaker,” Bryant said bitterly. Speaker was the greatest center fielder of the period and the irony was not subtle. “I’m ashamed of you. I’m putting somebody else in for you. You’re no damned good. And you’re not in the lineup against Berkeley tomorrow, either. You’re a jinx, Federov.”

What a stupid man, Benjamin thought, I didn’t realize how much he wanted to go to Boston. No wonder he’s only second string for Syracuse. He’s probably too dumb to remember the signals.

The boy who took Benjamin’s place was a pudgy fifteen-year-old named Storch, who struck out on three straight called strikes without taking his bat off his shoulder, and bobbled a grounder in the outfield to let in two more runs for Canoga.

Benjamin was still too young and too committed to victory for whatever team he played on to get any satisfaction out of Storch’s disgrace and for the rest of the day and evening he kept to himself, brooding and unhappy and wishing the season were over and that he was leaving for home that night.