Voices of a Summer Day (9 page)

“Are you coming over tonight?” Leah asked.

“Are we invited?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll have to ask Peggy,” Federov said. “She’s my social secretary. Will it be amusing?”

“No,” Leah said, squinting out toward where her son was wheeling drunkenly under a high fly ball. “My advice is, don’t come. My, that boy plays badly,” she said as her son dropped the ball, then picked it up and threw to the wrong base. “The poor dear.”

“Why won’t it be amusing?” Federov asked.

“John’s cooked up a new, brilliant idea he’s going to pop tonight. He wants to set up a loan association of local homeowners who’ll help deserving Negroes buy houses here.”

“That doesn’t sound like such a poor idea,” Federov said.

“You’re just as bad as he is,” Leah said. “I’m going to start a committee with Peggy—The South Shore Association of Christian and Jewish Ladies for the Advancement of Medieval Behavior.” Leah had been born Leah Levinson, but if you were as beautiful as that it took more imagination than Leah possessed to believe that people could be damaged in any way just because they had a name like Levinson.

“You’re awful,” Federov said.

“Isn’t it the truth?” She turned and looked with just the slightest intention of flirtation at Federov. They had stopped being lovers long ago, but even now she amused herself by proving all over again that he was not immune to her.

“Cut it out, lady,” Federov said.

“Cut what out?” she asked innocently.

“You know.”

“You still being a bad boy?” she asked.

“No,” Federov said. “And if I were, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“Old age?”

“Maturity,” Federov said.

They watched their two sons, almost the same age, playing side by side in the outfield. Federov could tell, even at that distance, that Michael disdained Johnny Stafford. Any ball Michael could possibly reach, even though Johnny would hardly have to move a step to catch it, Michael raced over to field. When Johnny called over to say something to Michael, Michael didn’t even turn his head to answer. And when Johnny dropped the fly ball, Michael looked up to heaven in a style that Federov recognized from disputes at home and that meant, in thirteen-year-old sign language, “Oh, my dear God, why am I being thus afflicted?”

Federov shook his head regretfully. Michael’s attitude hadn’t changed anything in his own relationship with John Stafford, but it was a constant, irremediable small annoyance. Federov found Johnny a charming boy, well-mannered like his father, with the imprint of his mother’s beauty evident, but clearly masculinized. But by his desperate activities in right field, Johnny forfeited, at least for the years of his adolescence and possibly for his whole life, any claim on Michael’s friendship or even tolerance. I’m going to speak to the little bastard at least once more about it, Federov thought, knowing in advance that it was hopeless.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Leah asked. She had a voice that went with her particular kind of beauty—low, promising, musical, with a hidden echo of malice.

“What’s funny?”

“Us sitting here,” Leah said, “and the two kids out there. By different fathers, according to rumor.”

“Leah,” Federov said with all the firmness he could command, “don’t be impossible.”

Leah chuckled. “It’s one of the pleasures of my life,” she said, “getting a rise out of you. I can do it every time, can’t I?”

“No,” Federov said, lying.

“Liar,” Leah said.

They had met in 1935, just after Leah had married a friend of Federov’s called Ross. Leah was sixteen when she married. Nobody was surprised that she had married at the age of sixteen. As her mother had said at the wedding, “I thank God we managed to wait this long. I was afraid she was going to get married before she was twelve.”

Federov had seen the couple off and on for about a year, then the Rosses had moved to Detroit and he hadn’t seen Leah again until 1945 in Paris, where Leah, now divorced, was serving as a Red Cross girl, interfering with the conduct of the war. Federov was on leave for a week, and it was when he went into the Red Cross Enlisted Men’s Club on the Boulevard des Capucines that he found that the coffee and doughnuts he had come in for were being served to him by Leah Ross.

He was married to Peggy by this time, but the first thing he thought when he saw Leah was, I was wrong not to be in the same city the day her final decree of divorce was handed down.

1942

P
EGGY’S FATHER WAS A
colonel in the medical Corps in Georgia, where Benjamin was being trained as an infantryman.

Peggy was twenty that year, blond, not very tall, her eyes so deeply blue that in some lights they appeared violet. She wore her thick, rough hair cut short, almost like a boy’s; her body was lithe, with a hint of later fullness. Her legs were rounded, but athletically firm, and Benjamin, who had been spoiled a little by the ease with which he had drifted into one affair after another with some of the prettiest women in New York, was surprised to find that he thought, in all sobriety, that Peggy’s legs, with their healthy sensuality, were the most charming legs he had ever seen on a girl. At twenty, Peggy was startlingly pretty; by the age of thirty she would be beautiful.

Benjamin met her on a tennis court in the garden of some friends of his parents, a middle-aged couple by the name of Bronstein, who had moved south from New York and who ran a prosperous men’s clothing store in town and who invited him to their house every time he was released for a few hours from camp.

Peggy’s parents had rented the house next to the Bronstein’s. The first time Benjamin saw Peggy was when she came through a gate in the hedge that divided the two properties. She was wearing a short tennis dress, and her legs were tanned, and as she came toward the court where Benjamin was rallying desultorily with the Bronstein’s fifteen-year-old son, Benjamin purposely hit the ball into the net so that he could watch Peggy approach. He stared at her unashamedly, swept by a nameless nostalgia at the image of the young girl in the short white dress coming through the green, summery hedge, a negation of death, wars, all the angular, tortured, masculine world of armies.

She played very good tennis, too, hitting all-out in the California style (her family were San Franciscans) and moving swiftly around the court, with her brief skirt flaring as she ran up to the net to reach for shots. When she missed a smash, she would shake her head and say in mock despair, “Peggy Woodham, you play like a
girl!”
She was not easy to beat. The first set she and Benjamin played against each other on that hot Sunday morning in Georgia, Benjamin only managed to win by 6-4. She shook his hand gravely at the net and said, “I never thought I’d be beaten by somebody from
New York.
And especially with a backhand like yours.”

“What’s the matter with my backhand?” Benjamin asked.

“It’s a mockery,” she said, teasing him. “Pure mockery. It’s a PFC of a backhand.”

“You’re rank-happy,” Benjamin said. Somehow, from the first moment, they spoke to each other as though they had known each other for years. “Just because your father is a colonel,” Benjamin said. He had learned quite a bit about her during the course of the morning. Her father was the commanding officer of the surgical section at the camp hospital; she worked in a bookshop in town; she had just got her BA from Stanford; she had been engaged to be married to a star football player and had broken it off because her fiancé had turned out to be a nasty man; she had an inferiority complex because her mother was one of the most beautiful women in San Francisco. She spoke gaily, swiftly, with a Western openness and directness and, by the time the morning was over and they went into the Bronstein house for lunch, Benjamin was thinking. It’s a lucky thing there’s a war on; otherwise I’d be planning to marry her. He was twenty-eight years old by then and he had carefully avoided getting married. For one thing, since the episode with Pat in college, no woman had appealed to him as a possible wife. For another, he was determined not to enter marriage as a poor man. Marriage was tough enough without that.

After lunch Peggy’s father came over and they played doubles with the Bronstein’s son. Patrick Woodham was a wiry bald man with a face and manner made for command. When Patrick Woodham was ten years old you would have known that if there ever was a war there would be eagles on his shoulders. Some colonels are made, some are born. Patrick Woodham was born a colonel. He also played a formidable game of tennis, and he and the Bronstein boy beat Benjamin and Peggy three sets in a row before they quit, because Colonel Woodham had to get back to the hospital.

Benjamin couldn’t tell whether the Colonel liked him or not. Woodham had a brusque, authoritative manner with everybody except his daughter. She was an only child, and he spoke to her with an indulgent tenderness that made Benjamin like the man, even if the man didn’t like him.

As they sat on the bench in the shadow of an oak by the side of the court, recovering from the last set, Woodham said to Peggy, “Put on your sweater. You’ll catch cold like that.”

“I’m boiling,” Peggy said.

“Put on your sweater,” Woodham said.

“Yes, Colonel,” Peggy said. “Yes, sir, Colonel.” Some day, Benjamin thought, looking at the fined-down hard man smiling with love and amusement at the girl, some day I must have a daughter.

They made love three weeks later, on a Saturday night, in the warm dark garden behind the tennis court. Peggy was not a virgin. “Remember,” she said later, enjoying her own candor, “I have a BA from Stanford. They don’t give degrees to virgins in California. It’s a state law.”

In his arms, Peggy was not the brisk, teasing girl who strode onto the tennis court with such concentrated determination. Even the very first time, when awkwardness and haste were to be expected, their lovemaking was gentle and tender. As he lay there, his lips against her throat, taking in the fragrance of her skin and the perfume of the freshly cut grass and lilac from two huge bushes that loomed above them, Benjamin knew that there was no escape and that he didn’t want any escape.

“You,” he said, whispering against the slender throat, “we’re going to get married.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment and she didn’t move. “You don’t have to marry me,” she said, “just because you raped me.”

“I have to marry you,” he said, “because I have to marry you.”

She began to sob. “Oh, my dear, my dear, my dear,” she said, holding his head so tight that his lips were crushed against her and he couldn’t speak.

The colonel had no difficulty speaking, though. Benjamin was afraid that the Colonel would object to the marriage because Benjamin was Jewish. The Colonel, it turned out, was a fierce atheist, and didn’t mind at all that Benjamin was Jewish. But he minded a lot of other things.

“She’s too damn young,” Woodham said as they sat across from each other on a hot Sunday afternoon in the library of the rambling frame house next to the Bronstein’s garden. “She’s only twenty.”

“My mother was married before she was twenty,” Benjamin said.

Woodham snorted and ran his hand the wrong way against his graying tonsure. “So was Peggy’s mother,” he said.

“Well?” Benjamin said.

Woodham poured a whiskey for each of them. “Women grew up quicker in those days,” he said. He handed Benjamin his glass. He noticed the little smile on Benjamin’s lips. “All right,” he said, “they didn’t. But there wasn’t a war on in those days. I don’t want my only daughter to be left a widow, probably with a kid, at the age of twenty-one, if you want to know the truth. Why can’t you wait?”

“Because I can’t wait,” Benjamin said.
“She
won’t be waiting when the war’s over and I’ll lose her.”

“That’s what she says, too. About you.” Woodham drank his whiskey irritably. “Everybody thinks the god-damn war’s going to last forever. Maybe it’ll be over in a month. Who knows?”

This was in 1942. “It won’t be over in a month,” Benjamin said. “You know. And I know.”

“Have you got any money?” Woodham tried a new tack.

“Twenty-four dollars a month,” Benjamin said.

“God damn,” Woodham said. He paced annoyedly back and forth in the shaded room in front of the window. Through the window Benjamin could see the Bronstein’s tennis court and the two lilac bushes.

“Why don’t you wait until you get out of OCS?” Woodham said. “Then she’ll at least have a second-lieutenant’s pension when you get killed. I can rush through your application and—”

“I don’t want to be an officer,” Benjamin said.

“What’s the matter, is it against your religion?” Woodham glared at him.

Benjamin laughed. “No.”

“What’ve you got against officers?” Woodham demanded.

“Nothing. I just don’t want to be one.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t trust myself enough,” Benjamin said. “I don’t want to be responsible for getting anybody else but myself killed.”

“You’re overeducated,” Woodham said. “That’s what’s the matter with you. You couldn’t be any worse than ninety-nine out of a hundred of the idiots they’re pinning bars on every day. What’s your IQ?”

“One thirty-eight.”

“They grab anybody with an IQ of over one ten,” Woodham said. “Especially with a college education. Don’t you know that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t Sir me, Federov,” Woodham said. “One thirty-eight! Huh! As far as intelligence goes, you’re in the top five percent of the whole damned army. You don’t belong as a private in the infantry. You’re derelict in your duty, if you want my honest opinion.” He scowled at Benjamin, waiting for a response. Benjamin sat silently, enjoying his whiskey, looking out the window at the lilac bushes.

“You’re not even a good tennis player,” Woodham said. “The only point that Peggy and I’ve agreed on since she met you is that you have a laughable backhand.”

“You’re both absolutely right.” Benjamin stood up. He knew the argument was over. Woodham would have stopped the marriage if he could, but everybody knew he couldn’t, including Woodham himself.

“If you don’t get killed,” Woodham said, “will you at least come out to San Francisco to live after the war, so I can see Peggy once in a while?”