Voices of a Summer Day (7 page)

From that moment he knew he was going to search for girls like that, for girls like the one in the black dress who had pulled up her shoulder strap when she noticed that he was watching her, that he wanted a hundred girls he had seen downstairs during the course of the night, and that in the long run he was going to sleep with as many of them as he could. At the same moment he knew he was never going to marry Pat and that, for a longer or shorter period of his life, he was going to be promiscuous and probably perverse and, for a long time and perhaps forever, incapable of fidelity.

“Ah, God,” he said aloud. He got up and put on the light. He sat on the edge of the bed, shivering, but wide awake. Suddenly, he realized that he was famished. He had to have something to eat or faint from hunger. Then he remembered the old lady’s key. She had left it in the door of her office next to the kitchen when she had turned angrily on Cunningham as he started to sing “The Wearing of the Green.”

Benjamin put on his shoes, tried the door. It still held. He looked around the room for something to break the door down with. There was an old putter with a broken handle lying in the corner of the room, left there by some caddy or athletic waiter the summer before. Benjamin picked up the putter and began hacking at the top panel of the door, unmindful of the noise. He banged crazily at the thin wood and soon it began to splinter and holes began to open up. With his bare hands, Benjamin ripped out sections of the panel. A jagged, sharp piece of wood ripped his hand and there was blood on the door and on his clothes, but he didn’t stop.

Nobody seemed to have heard the noise. All the boys were so exhausted you could have shot cannons off in their ears without waking them. Besides, the howl of the wind around the eaves and through cracks in the walls kept the whole floor in a turmoil of creaks and haunted whistles. Soon there was a hole in the door big enough to crawl through. Benjamin lowered his small bag through the hole, put on his jacket and overcoat and climbed out.

He went down through the darkened building. On the floor below, where there were several guest rooms that were locked for the winter, there was no sound. As he descended the stairway, the smell of spilled whiskey, dancers’ sweat, stale food assailed him from the dining room. He found the kitchen and turned on the light. He left blood on the switch.

The key was in the door to the small office. He turned it, went in. He saw the old lady’s apron hanging on the hook. He reached into the apron pocket. The ring of keys was there. He took them, leaving a stain of blood on the cloth, and tried the icebox padlock. On the third try, the key worked. The icebox was enormous and crammed with food. He left the door open, then went to the little room where the liquor was locked away. He found the key for that, too, and opened the door. There were at least ten cases of whiskey there and dozens of half-full bottles. A wild smile contorted his face as he looked at the treasure. He took an opened bottle of whiskey and put it on the big table. Then he went to the icebox and took out a platter of turkey, a large can of caviar, a slab of butter, a pound loaf of pâté de foie gras. He arranged them with crazy precision in a row next to the whiskey bottle, then went to the bread bin, which was unlocked, and took out six rolls. He found a fork and a knife and a mug and sat down, making himself move slowly for maximum enjoyment of the meal, and began to eat. He ate four large helpings of caviar on rolls, spread with a mixture of blood and butter. He ate half the loaf of pâté, washing down each mouthful with raw whiskey. It was the first time he had ever eaten pâté de foie gras and he didn’t know what the delicious black slivers embedded in it were called. The next day Cunningham told him they were called truffles. He made three sandwiches piled with slices of breast of turkey and ate them. He made another sandwich and munched on it as he climbed up to the top floor again and woke up all the boys one by one, shaking them and making sure they were awake enough to understand him when he told them what he proposed to do. In all the mean, bare rooms of the top floor the boys got out of bed, dressed, took their bags with them and stole down to the kitchen.

“No food to be taken along,” Benjamin warned them. “Only liquor. It’s all bootleg and they can’t go to the police about it.”

So the boys ate pâté, caviar, turkey, ice cream, lobster, potato salad, in any order that was convenient as they reached into the icebox and rifled the whiskey cases and filled their bags and gunny sacks and cardboard cartons with the bottles.

“Tonight,” Benjamin said, thinking of Pat, “we’re going to have ourselves a
real
New Year’s Eve party.”

It was six-thirty in the morning when they tiptoed out of the building to where the three cars were parked under a shed behind the kitchen. It was pitch-dark, but they didn’t put on any lights as they loaded the cars. In five minutes they were ready to go. The engines coughed in the pre-dawn cold, caught, and they rolled down the driveway, catching the huge Pennsylvania-Tudor pile of the club building momentarily in the glare of the headlights as they took a curve. England, my England, Benjamin thought sardonically, as the car lights picked out the dark beams. Then the building disappeared in the darkness and they sped toward home.

Most of the boys, when they weren’t spelling the drivers, slept. But Benjamin couldn’t sleep. He had never stolen anything in his life. Now I am a thief, he thought. He knew that later he would have to come to terms with this idea, as he would with the idea of the girl who had used his bed and the girl who had made him blush. But for the moment he was too tired, too inflamed by a hatred he had never known he could feel for anyone, to make any judgment on himself.

They held the party that night, but it was an anti-climax. They were all too exhausted to enjoy it, although there was a moment of laughter when they drew straws to see who would beat up Dyer when he came back to school after the holidays and a boy called Swinton, who was the best student in school, but was blind without his glasses and twenty-five pounds lighter than Dyer, came up with the short straw. So the problem of what to do with Dyer was postponed for more sober discussion.

Pat looked beautiful and happy, and Benjamin tried to match her mood. “Isn’t it nice,” she said, “to have our own private New Year.” Benjamin danced with her and went into the kitchen with her to kiss her a true and sensual Happy New Year. But he knew he had already betrayed her, even if the actual act of betrayal was years in the future.

The night had put its mark on Benjamin and he knew it. He was ashamed of himself. Filthy people had behaved filthily to him and he had become filthy himself.

Nobody ever hit Dyer and he didn’t say anything about what had happened at the country club, and in his junior year he was elected president of his class.

Eighteen months after the New Year’s party, Pat’s family moved to Oregon and she had to go along with them. She and Benjamin wrote to each other for a while, but it was no good, and by that time Benjamin had taken up with any number of other girls, none of them as good of heart or as brave and honest as Pat, but with whom he could go to bed without love or the pretense of love. In his imagination at that period, he thought of himself as mounting a curving ornate staircase over and over and over again.

After he got out of school and had moved to New York, Benjamin had an affair with a girl named Prentiss, who, it turned out, had been at the New Year’s Eve party in Pennsylvania. Neither of them remembered having seen each other that night and, from Benjamin’s description, the girl could not identify either the blond who had used his bed or the pretty dark bitch at the bar.

Miss Prentiss, it turned out, had her own peculiarities. She was the daughter of a Methodist minister from a small town near Scranton, with a face and manner of speaking that Benjamin’s mother would have called “refined.” But after the affair, which had lasted nearly three months and had been conducted in a fashion that Mrs. Federov would have never called refined, Miss Prentiss, naked and sipping straight bourbon on the edge of her wide double bed, asked Benjamin to marry her. He was making twenty-three dollars a week and going to night school to study drafting and, while he enjoyed seeing Miss Prentiss from time to time and sharing her bed and her bourbon, he could not see himself marrying her. She was pretty in a faded blond way, but given to neurotic bouts of anger and tears and insisted that he eat no meat when he went out with her, because she was a vegetarian and could not stand the sight even of a slice of chicken on a platter. She was the first girl he’d ever known who went to a psychiatrist and, in exchange for the lovemaking and the whiskey, he had to listen to endless reports from the couch, mostly about her father and his sermons and dreams of animals dying in their own blood.

“Marriage?” Benjamin asked. “Are you out of your mind? Do you know how much money I make a week?”

“I don’t care,” Miss Prentiss said, turning her refined pale eyes and refined watery breasts in his direction as he lay, with the sheet up to his waist, in the rumpled bed. “I have a little money. And when Daddy dies I’ll have quite a bit more.”

“Have I ever told you I love you?” Benjamin asked, seeking safety in brutality.

“Do you love me?”

“No.”

“No,” Miss Prentiss said. She sipped calmly at her bourbon. “But I need you.”

“Not that much, you don’t,” Benjamin said, wondering how he could get up and dressed and out of the apartment without seeming like a cad.

“You don’t know,” she said. “I have great difficulty in being satisfied. Sexually, I mean.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” he said.

“Not with you,” she said. “That’s the point. With other men. The torment I’ve gone through.”

“What’s so special about me?” Benjamin asked, half-suspicious and half-flattered and not averse to having his dearest illusions about himself confirmed.

“You’re a Jew,” she said. “I can only have an orgasm with a bestial Jew.”

“Let’s talk it over some other time, darling,” Benjamin said, getting out of his side of the bed and starting hurriedly to get dressed. “It’s late and I still have two hours work to do before I go to sleep.”

As he walked toward the subway down the tree-lined street in Greenwich Village where Miss Prentiss lived, a street probably teeming with bestial Jews, Benjamin shook his head. That country club in Pennsylvania, he thought. What a collection!

He was living in New York because of another woman—a woman he had seen only once for fifteen minutes. It was in a public hospital in Trenton. He had just been graduated from college and had managed to pass the examinations for teaching in grade school in the New Jersey state system and had been called with a hundred other candidates for a physical examination. The doctor turned out to be a short dumpy woman with thick-lensed glasses who looked at the half-naked young men she had to pass on as though they were all suffering from a loathsome disease. Another doctor had already checked Benjamin’s heart, lungs, and eyesight and had noted that Benjamin had had measles and whooping cough and did not limp or have any crippling deformities. The lady doctor merely was weighing and measuring the candidates. When it was Benjamin’s turn, she looked a long time at the scale as it came to rest. Her expression was one of distaste and her voice was disapproving as she called out, “One eighty-seven,” to the clerk at the table next to the scale.

Benjamin stepped off the scales and picked up his shirt, trousers and shoes, wondering what school he would be assigned to and how long it would be before he could give up teaching for something for which he was better fitted.

“I’m afraid you’ll be rejected, Mr. Federov,” the lady doctor said.

“What?” Benjamin asked incredulously. The last time he had been sick had been at the age of six.

“You’re obese, Mr. Federov,” the lady doctor said.

“Obese,” he repeated stupidly. He looked down at his powerful hard arms, his tucked-in, narrow waist, at the long, granite-hard halfback’s legs. He was twenty-one years old and he could tear telephone books in half with his bare hands and run the mile in well under five minutes, and in the last baseball game of the year he had hit a home run over a fence 350 feet away. “Obese,” he said. “There isn’t an ounce of fat on me.” He was ready to cry with wounded vanity. The summer before, when he had been working as a counselor, the girl counselors had taken a vote on the man with the best body in camp and he had been designated. And now this dumpy little woman with glaucous eyes and bad breath and breasts like market bags was telling him he was obese.

“According to the chart,” the lady doctor said, enjoying his humiliation as she would enjoy the humiliation of any man who fell, even momentarily, under her power, “according to the chart, a man of your age and height should not weigh more than one hundred and sixty-five pounds.”

“But I’m a football player,” Benjamin said, feeling foolish. “That’s the way football players’re built.”

“You’re not in college any more,” the lady doctor said crisply. “You’re not going to be pampered
here
just because you can throw a football every Saturday.”

“But I need the job, ma’am,” Benjamin said. The depression was on and there were twenty applicants for every job in the country, and a job made the difference between eating and not eating. “I passed the examinations and I’ve been counting on—”

“You didn’t pass
this
examination, Mr. Federov,” the woman said. “I’m afraid you’d better move on. There are a lot of people waiting.”

Benjamin looked around him wildly, searching for an argument, any argument, to impress this miserable woman, keep her judgment on him from being final, concluded, catastrophic. The boy in front of him, a classmate of Benjamin’s named Levy, was standing on the other side of the scale, safely through, snickering. Levy was a short, narrow-shouldered boy with sickly oysterish skin marked by the livid scars of years of carbuncles. His chest was concave, he was knock-kneed, his legs and arms were like sticks, his eyes were protruding and yellowish. With all that, you’d have thought he would have to be brilliant in his work, but he wasn’t. He was one of the stupidest boys in the class and had just barely passed the written examination. Benjamin had never liked him, and he liked him considerably less at this moment, as Levy stood next to the scale, smirking, sweating unpleasantly in his oyster-colored skin.