Voices of a Summer Day (8 page)

“Him!” Benjamin said, pointing ungallantly at Levy. “You pass
him,
that—that scarecrow—and you flunk me. What sort of deal are you running here, anyway?”

“Hey,” Levy said, whining, “leave me out of this.”

“Mr. Levy is perfectly normal,” the woman said crisply. “Next.”

“He’s
normal?”

“Officially normal,” the woman said.

“And what am I?” Benjamin asked. “Officially a freak?”

“Nobody said that, Mr. Federov,” the woman gestured toward the next boy in line. “You are officially obese.”

“But there must be
something
I can do,” Benjamin said, standing there feeling ridiculous, fighting for his livelihood, dressed only in underpants and socks and holding his clothing in his hand, with fifteen other half-naked men in the room grinning at the scene.

“You can lose twenty-two pounds, Mr. Federov,” the lady doctor said, “and come back here in three months.”

“I’d have to cut off a
leg
to lose twenty-two pounds,” Benjamin shouted, losing his temper.

“That’s up to you, Mr. Federov,” the lady doctor said. “Next.”

He went dazedly out of the hospital, wanting to scream obscenities in the corridors or join the Communist Party or found an organization with the purpose of keeping women out of the medical profession. He sat down in the June sunlight on a park bench and put his head in his hands to contemplate the ruin of his life. As usual, his family was living with all the doors locked, the telephone turned off and the blinds down, so that bill collectors would gain no entrance. His parents had been proud that he had passed his examination and was now entering that Jewish realm of aristocrats, the world of scholars, even though his actual job would entail teaching eight-year-old children how to spell and solve arithmetical problems involving half a dozen pears and the price of ten oranges. But a teacher’s pay in those days was respectable, and they had all looked forward to being able to live with the shades up and the telephone connected.

Benjamin groaned on his bench. He was not going back to that entrenched house that night without a job, no matter what the job was. He had a copy of
The New York Times
in his pocket and he took it out and spread out the Help Wanted pages. He made some marks with a pencil, then went to the station and bought a ticket to New York.

It was nearly eight o’clock, but still daylight, when he turned down the shabby street of connected one-family stucco houses on which he lived. Like his own, and for the same reasons, almost half the houses looked permanently shut and abandoned. He walked carefully on the other side of the street from his own house, peering cautiously for secreted bill collectors and summons-servers, then hurried across the street and let himself in with his key.

His father was sitting in the living room in his shirt sleeves and with his shoes off. Israel was peddling household gadgets from door to door, and it meant walking, miles and miles each day on blazing pavements, and the first thing he did when he got home at night was take his shoes off. Israel had an evening newspaper on his lap, but the electricity had been off for a month and it was too dark to read with the shades down, and he was just sitting there in a threadbare upholstered chair, staring reflectively at a photograph on the opposite wall of Louis and Benjamin that had been taken on the beach when Benjamin was six years old. As Benjamin came into the room, he was sure that his father was thinking the same thing as himself—that it would be wonderful if Benjamin was again six years old and everything remained to be done all over again—differently.

By now, Benjamin could tell from the way his father sat in the chair what kind of a day Israel had had. When he had sold more than five dollars worth of the household gadgets during the day, Israel sat hopefully, his head up. His head was not up tonight.

The living room gleamed from Sophie Federov’s ministrations. Unable to halt the Depression, powerless to change the economy of the country or redeem the family fortunes in Wall Street, Sophie Federov fought the malevolence of the times in her own manner, in her own home. She scrubbed, she polished, she swept and washed and kept everything in place to the last precise half-inch in furious defiance of the chaos that threatened each day to engulf them all.

The room looked like a room in a museum. Exhibit B a lower-middle-class living room, furniture by Grand Rapids, with various silver objects out in pawnshops,
circa
1934.

Benjamin heard the sounds of his mother preparing dinner in the kitchen. He had hoped that by some miracle she would not be home this evening. But she was home. She was always home.

“Hi, Pop,” Benjamin said.

His father’s head went up. He smiled. When Israel looked at his sons, for a moment or two, anyway, it was a good day.

Mrs. Federov came into the room, an apron, starched and immaculate, tied around her trim waist. Benjamin kissed her and held her a fraction of a second longer than usual in his arms.

“What’s for dinner?” he asked, postponing.

“Something special. Hamburger,” his mother said ironically. “Well, when do you go to work?”

“Tomorrow,” Benjamin said.

“Tomorrow?” His mother was surprised. “I thought the summer session didn’t begin until July.”

“Sit down, Mom,” Benjamin said.

“I don’t have to sit down,” she said. She was bracing herself for tragedy already. “What happened?”

“I have a job,” Benjamin said. “But not in the school system.”

“What do you mean, not in the school system? You passed the examination, didn’t you?”

“I thought so,” Benjamin said.

“You thought so?” his mother said sharply. “Don’t talk in riddles.”

“I didn’t pass the physical examination today in Trenton,” Benjamin said.

A look of alarm crossed his mother’s face. She gripped his arm tightly and stared into his eyes. “Tell the truth,” she said. “They found something in the hospital. What is it? Tuberculosis? You have a bad heart? What?”

“Nothing like that,” Benjamin said. “I…I’m overweight. The technical term is ‘obese.’”

“Overweight. Obese?” His mother sounded bewildered. “What are they, crazy in Trenton? Did you hear that, Israel? In Trenton they say your son is obese.”

“The government,” Israel said resignedly. “What can you expect?”

Mrs. Federov stepped back and eyed Benjamin sharply. “You’re not joking, are you? One of your bad jokes, Ben?”

“I’m not joking. That’s what they said.”

“But you have the body of a god,” Mrs. Federov said. “They should be built like you, those maniacs in Trenton.”

This was not the day Benjamin wanted to hear that he was built like a god, not even from his mother. But he couldn’t repress a smile at the thought of the lady doctor waking up in the morning to find herself built like him.

“They have a chart,” he explained wearily. “On the chart I’m twenty-two pounds overweight.”

“But you’re a football player, that’s the way football players get, didn’t you explain that?”

“I explained it,” Benjamin said. “It makes no difference. They go by the chart.”

“Football,” Mrs. Federov said bitterly. “You had to play football. You wouldn’t listen to your mother. Now see.” She turned on Israel, sunk into his chair. “And you, you encouraged him. All these years. Now are you satisfied?”

Israel hunched his shoulders a little. It was a habit that had grown on him since he lost his business.

“We sit in the dark because we can’t pay the electricity, and your son is twenty-two pounds overweight,” Mrs. Federov said to her husband, “and all you can do is sit in your chair with your shoes off.”

At that moment, Benjamin decided he was not going to marry unless he had one million dollars in the bank. Or maybe two million dollars.

His mother whipped around toward him, a small, straight, beautiful, fierce, indomitable woman, keeping a family together through one catastrophe after another, keeping things going with an iron ferocity of will, an unconquerable, spotless firmness of spirit in the dark, polished house that was her castle, her battlefield, her world. “Now,” she said to her son, “what was that about going to work tomorrow?”

“I went to New York this afternoon,” Benjamin said, “and I got a job.”

“What kind of job?” his mother asked suspiciously.

“It pays eighteen dollars a week,” Benjamin said.

“What kind of job?” his mother said.

Benjamin took a deep breath. “Shipping clerk,” he said. “In an electric-appliance firm on West Twenty-third Street.”

“Oh, my God. A shipping clerk. My son.” Mrs. Federov began to cry.

“What’s there to cry about?” Benjamin said crossly, because now he would have liked to be able to cry, too.

“High school, college, A’s and B’s all the way through, starving to buy books, and you say what’s wrong with being a shipping clerk.”

“It’s not forever,” Benjamin said. “I’ll go to night school. I’ll study drafting and engineering—”

“I know what you’ll do,” his mother said through her tears. “You’ll associate with hoodlums, you’ll get drunk on Saturday nights, you’ll go to whorehouses with all the others, you’ll wheel carts through the streets to the post office like a day laborer, you’ll forget you ever read a book, you’ll marry a cheap little factory girl and live like pigs, and your children will grow up to be shipping clerks just like you. I won’t let you do it.”

“Oh, Christ,” Benjamin said, furious in his turn now, “when are you going to get over the idea that everybody who works with his hands is a hoodlum?”

“I won’t get over the idea,” Mrs. Federov sobbed. “Because it’s true, it’s true. Israel,” she cried, “aren’t you going to say something about it?”

His father was silent for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Sophie,” he said, “he’s a grown man. The times’re difficult. I have faith in him.”

“You will not leave this house tomorrow to work as a laborer,” Mrs. Federov said to Benjamin. “That is not what I gave my life for.”

“Mom…” Benjamin said wearily. “Be realistic. We’re sitting here in the dark because the lights’re turned off. There’re six million unemployed. They’re not waiting for your son. I want to be able to go over to the wall and push a button and have the lights come on in this house. And I’ll do anything—
anything
for it.”

“There’s no sense,” his mother wept, sitting straight on the edge of a wooden chair, her hands clutched in her lap. “There’s no sense in the whole thing.”

He didn’t have the courage to tell her the worst thing—that if she tried to reach him on the telephone at his place of work, she would be told that nobody by the name of Federov was employed by that firm. He had given his name as Bradley Faye, because in the advertisement in
The New York Times
it had said that only white Gentiles need apply.

1964

“H
I.”

Federov blinked. The dark, polished, threadbare room drifted away. Leah Stafford was standing in front of him along the third-base line. She gestured toward the empty bench alongside him. “Is that seat taken?”

“Sit down.” Federov tapped the board with his right hand. Leah climbed the two lower planks and sat down. They didn’t kiss or shake hands. Leah was well over forty, but didn’t look it. She had deep copper-colored hair that she wore long, and a creamy complexion, now being preserved from the sun by a wide blue straw hat that added shifting sea-colors to her large green eyes. She was tall, slender, with long legs, and was one of those women who seemed to have been created especially for the styles of the middle of the twentieth century. Now she was wearing cream-colored, closefitting slacks and a loose, lightweight green sweater and blue sandals to match the hat. Summertime, Federov thought, admiring the color scheme. They had been lovers for several years, during and after the war, between her divorce from Bill Ross and her marriage to John Stafford.

“I didn’t know you were a baseball fan,” Federov said.

“I’m not,” Leah said. “The younger generation.” She made a gesture with her head toward the field. Young Johnny Stafford was playing right field. He was among the worst players in town and always was put in right field, with all his teammates hoping there wouldn’t be any lefthanders in the opposing lineup who would hit in that direction. “I promised Johnny I’d pick him up and take him home.”

“Where’s John?” Federov asked.

“Home,” Leah said, “preparing the plans for the next civil war.”

Federov laughed. John Stafford, whose ancestors had helped found the town in the eighteenth century, had been born to wealth, educated at the most imposing schools, served on the board of a bank his family had controlled for more than a hundred years and, with all this, worked tirelessly on missions for the government, on committees and foundations and school boards for such things as aid to refugees, the implementation of civil-rights programs, the assignment of scholarships to bright boys from poor homes, and all sorts of thankless but necessary civic tasks. Stafford dressed in the best traditions of his class, drank like a gentleman, and was, as Leah had once put it, insanely generous and hospitable. When he married Leah, he had quietly resigned from the Golf and Tennis Club, because she was Jewish, although nobody in the club would ever have challenged him on the subject and Leah herself had protested at length against her husband’s meticulous devotion to his conscience. Federov considered Stafford one of his best friends, and they saw each other at least two or three times a week, both in the city and down here at the shore. Federov had named him as guardian for Michael and his daughter in case he and Peggy were killed in an accident or died before Michael attained his majority. In the normal course of events, Federov would have asked Louis to assume the responsibility for the children, but with all the love between the brothers and all of Federov’s appreciation for Louis’s qualities, he couldn’t face up to the thought of his son and daughter being in on some of scenes with various wives, ex-wives, mistresses, and future wives that occurred with disheartening regularity in the tumult of Louis’s dealings with women.