Voices of a Summer Day (16 page)

“Tell me what your father was like,” the rabbi said. They were in the living room of his parents’ apartment on Riverside Drive, before the funeral. The rabbi was to conduct the service and deliver the eulogy. The rabbi had never known Israel. He was young and brisk and professionally sympathetic, and Federov was sure that as soon as he left the apartment, he would jot down some hurried, businesslike notes for the speech the next morning.

Federov knew that the rabbi wanted to hear that Israel had been a true believer, had prayed with shawl and philacteries every morning, had fasted on Yom Kippur and never missed the Passover
seder.
None of this was true. Israel had been a Jew,
that
was true; he had been proud of Jews who made names for themselves in the Gentile world and had despised Jews whose actions had reflected badly on their people; but he had rarely gone to synagogue and had been too modest to believe that God took any interest in him whatever.

“What was my father like?” Federov repeated. He shrugged. Who could answer a question like that? “He was a good catcher,” he said.

The rabbi smiled. He was a Reformed rabbi and he smiled to show that he could bear his religion in a modern manner when necessary.

“What else?” Federov shrugged again. “He was a failure, he was poor, he worked like a slave, he never said no to me. Even when he came home from work exhausted on a spring evening he would go out to the vacant lot near our house and hit flies to me until it got dark. He never hurt anybody, he had a foolish belief that people were good, he loved his wife, he went to war, he saw me off to war, he did what he could.” Federov stood up. “I’m sorry, Rabbi,” he said. “Ask somebody else what my father was like. Just make your speech short and simple and go easy on the emotion tomorrow, if you don’t mind.”

Then he went out of the apartment to a bar nearby and had two whiskeys.

The rabbi nearly followed instructions. The speech was only ten minutes longer than was absolutely necessary and he didn’t try too hard to draw tears, and Federov felt he earned the hundred dollars Federov was going to give him that afternoon.

At the grave in New Jersey, where the new pile of earth that was to cover the coffin was covered with a tactful green tarpaulin to keep the evidence of ultimate clay from the mourners, Federov and his brother Louis had to recite the prayer for the dead as the coffin was lowered. Neither of them knew Hebrew and they had tried to memorize the prayer from a pamphlet that had it printed in phonetic English. It was like boning up for an exam. But when the moment came, Federov could only remember bits and pieces of the lament and was embarrassed by the quick way the other eight mourners, who made up the
minyan
of ten, as prescribed by the Law, rushed in to cover his ignorance. Christ, he thought, what kind of a Jew am I? It is all ridiculous. I don’t believe a word of it. He’s dead and gone and this is merely theatre.

As long as it was only theatre, it would have been better to bury him at Arlington with the other dead soldiers.

When I go, Federov thought, as he mumbled the incomprehensible lament of his ancestors, I am going to be cremated. Privately. Without a word. Let them dump my ashes anywhere. On the places I have been happy—on the grass of a baseball field in Vermont; in the first bed in the city of New York where two virgins made love; on the balcony overlooking the roofs of Paris where a sergeant on leave had stood in the evening during the war with a beautiful redheaded American girl at his side; in the cradle of his son; in the long waves of the Atlantic in which he had swum so many sunny summers; in the dear and gentle hands of his wife…

Or in the places where I have been unhappy or in danger. In the kitchen of a country club in Pennsylvania; in an old Irishwoman’s apron pocket; on the wide curving steps up which a drunken girl in a white dress had mounted twice in one night; on the farmhouse outside Coutances where a shell had hit ten yards from him and had not exploded; at Dachau, which he had made himself visit; at Camp Canoga, where, in dying, two Italians he had never seen had brought him the shock of being an outsider and alone.

The prayer droned on by the side of the open grave. By a quirk, the prayer he had learned just the day before was forgotten and another one, which he had read many years ago in a travel magazine, in an article about Jerusalem, came back to him. It was the prayer recited before the Wailing Wall, and it came back to him with total clarity, as though he had the glossy page before him

For the Temple that is destroyed…

We sit in solitude and mourn.

For the walls that are overthrown…

We sit in solitude and mourn.

For our majesty that is departed…

We sit in solitude and mourn.

For our great men who lie dead…

We sit in solitude and mourn.

For the precious stones that are burned…

We sit in solitude and mourn.

For the priests that have stumbled…

We sit in solitude and mourn.

For our kings who have despised Him…

We sit in solitude and mourn.

At a sign from the rabbi, he dropped the carnation he had been given onto his father’s coffin. One by one, the others did the same. He helped his mother to the car, with Louis on the other side. The cortege started toward the city. Federov took a last look back. The grave-diggers were taking the tarpaulin off the pile of brown earth. I should have given them a tip, Federov thought. Maybe then they’d have waited until we were out of the gate.

1964

I
T WAS THE LAST
inning, and Federov was thirsty after having sat in the sun all afternoon. As Michael passed him going out toward center field, Michael greeted Leah.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Stafford,” he said, minding his manners.

“Hello, champ,” Leah said.

“I’ll be in Vinnie’s bar,” Federov said to his son. “Come on over when the game’s finished and I’ll drive you home.”

“Ok, Daddy-o,” Michael said, and trotted out to his position in center field.

Federov turned to Leah, still sitting, propped on her elbows, her long legs slanted down to the bench below her, the brim of her straw hat throwing a deep shadow over the top half of her face.

“Like a beer?” Federov asked.

“No, thanks,” she said.

“Aren’t you thirsty?”

“Uhuh.”

“But no beer?”

“Not with you.”

“Why not?”

“The town’s too small,” Leah said, smiling; getting even, consciously perhaps, or unconsciously, Federov thought, for the rejection of 1947. Leah had a long memory and that was the only occasion in her life she hadn’t held a man she wanted, and from time to time, when they were alone, she made Federov pay for that singular defeat.

“I’m a respectable matron now,” she said. “Haven’t you heard?”

Federov stood up and looked down at her.

“No,” he said, “I hadn’t heard.”

She tilted her head back. The green eyes mocked him.

“You’re too goddam beautiful,” he said, “I’m waiting for the day you begin to fade.”

“You should live that long, boychek,” she said, for one second Leah Levinson from the Bronx.

“See you tonight,” he said.

“At your own risk.” She watched him as he passed behind home plate and across the street to his car.

The beer tasted wonderful, and Federov drank the first one down quickly in the dark, empty bar. He ordered another one and nursed it, waiting for his son.

The television set was on, a baseball game, the Yankees playing the Red Sox up in Boston. Federov watched idly for a while, amused at the difference between what he was watching on the screen and what he had seen all afternoon on the high school field.

“Do you think they’ll win the pennant?” he asked Vinnie, the bartender.

“They always do,” Vinnie said. “The bastards.”

Federov smiled at this automatic hatred of otherwise sensible men for permanent winners. He decided that, when he got to his office, he’d ask his secretary to get a pair of seats for Michael and himself for all the home World Series games as soon as they went on sale. He enjoyed taking his son to games, mostly because of Michael’s attempt to be cool and critical of what was happening on the field, wanting, in this atmosphere of men, to be more adult than any of them, only to whoop with childish glee when his idol of the moment hit a home run or made a backhand catch of a line drive. It made Federov more tolerant of the masks he himself put on and the ease with which they were broken.

Federov had taken Michael to his first big-league game when Michael was six. The Giants were playing the Reds at the Polo Grounds. The Yankees were a more interesting team to watch, but it was at the Polo Grounds that Benjamin, aged six, had watched
his
first baseball game, at his father’s side. An uprooted people, Federov had thought half-mockingly, we must make our family traditions with the material at hand. There was no ancestral keep to bring the male heir to; no hallowed family ceremonies into which to initiate a son; no church or synagogue or cult you believe in so that your son and his son after that could attach themselves automatically to three millennia of myth, no broad acres that had been lovingly tended for hundreds of years by people of the same blood and name to walk across with a six-year-old boy. He could not take his son to the spot where his father had gone bankrupt in the hardware business in 1927 and say, “Here your ancestors, while dying, preserved their honor.” He could not take his son to Russia and seek out the town where his grandfather or his own father had been born and read a plaque on the side of a building commemorating either event. He didn’t even know the name of the town and whether or not the Germans had left it standing. He couldn’t even take his son to the place in Newark where he, Benjamin Federov, had been born, because the family had moved four months later and he didn’t know the name of the street and had never thought of asking. He had been born on a kitchen table, his mother had said, but he doubted that at this late date the table could be found so that his son could offer sacrifices upon it. So, bereft of other tribal paraphernalia, he took his son to the Polo Grounds, because when
he
was six
his
father had taken him to the Polo Grounds.

In those years, just after the First War, both the Yankees and the Giants used the field, and it was the Yankees he had seen that first day with Israel. He didn’t remember much of what he had seen that afternoon and had been more interested in the frankfurters and sarsaparilla his father had bought him than in the game itself, but his father had kept the scorecard for years and much later, in cleaning out an attic, Federov had found the crumbling, yellow card. It had been carefully marked by his father, with runs, hits, errors, singles, outs, shortstop to first base, strikeouts, substitutions, all the elaborate, finicking code of the game, to remind men on winter nights of great deeds done on summer afternoons. Scanning the brittle scrap of yellowed paper, preserved from his childhood, Federov had realized he had seen heroes that day—Babe Ruth in right field, Home-Run Baker at third, Peckinpaugh at first, Waite Hoyt, the Flatbush undertaker, on the mound. The Yankees had won then, too, Federov remembered.

Nobody played baseball in the Polo Grounds any more, and they were tearing it down to put up blocks of apartment buildings.

There were other traditions, of course, that his son might be induced to share. Going to war, for example, and seeing a son off to war, as his father had done. All within the span of less than twenty-five years. Michael was thirteen. Within eleven or twelve years, the ritual might very well be repeated. Three generations of the men of the same family sailing to battle would make quite a respectable, almost ancient, tradition in a country as young as America.

Pilgrimages to battlefields on which your forbears had distinguished themselves was also something that might be built up, with a little application, into a tradition, although he had neglected to visit the Argonne, where his father had fought, and when in London with his wife and son in 1960 he had not sought out the building on Pall-Mall where he had made love to a skinny girl from the British Information Service when a bomb fell on a building three doors down. Although he was not in as overt a military position at that moment as a captain of infantry leading a charge, if he had been hit by the bomb fragment that had broken the window of the bedroom in which he and the girl were lying, he would have been awarded a Purple Heart for being wounded in combat. So, technically, it had been a battlefield, and in his own way he had been fighting on it.

He hadn’t gone down to the beach where he had landed, either, because it was raining that week, and he hadn’t shown his son the cemetery where his platoon lieutenant was buried, because they were there for a holiday and Peggy thought children got used to the idea of death soon enough, anyway. The towns he had been among the first to enter in 1944 were of no historical significance and were off the tourists’ beaten track, and it was much more enjoyable to spend the time swimming off the rocks at Antibes. Leah Stafford and her husband and children were with them on the trip, so they could hardly be expected to make a sentimental expedition to the top-floor apartment behind the Place Palais Bourbon where Leah and he had lived together on his week’s leave. There went another tradition.

There was a roar from the television set and Federov looked up. A Yankee batter had hit a long fly to left field and it bounced off the fence and the Boston left fielder misplayed it and let it get away from him, and by the time it came into the infield the Yankee was standing on third base.

“The error sign is up,” the announcer’s voice said. “The official scorer is calling it an error.”