Voices of a Summer Day (22 page)

“She kept coughing and coughing into handkerchiefs,” Sternberger went on. “She had a dozen handkerchiefs on her, in pockets, tucked into her sleeves, into the sash around her bathrobe, everywhere, and she would cough so hard I thought the final hemorrhage had to start any minute.

“‘And me, me, your beloved Aunt Elsa,’ she said after the worst fit of coughing. ‘Here it is noon, August twenty-third, 1927, the two men are walking to the electric chair, the whole world is holding its breath in horror, and your aunt, who has been tortured by the police of four countries, who fought in revolutions, who has addressed meetings of fifty thousand people, whose name is hated by every hypocrite in the world, where is your aunt? In Boston, screaming in agony, denouncing this crime? Waiting with a gun to kill the
real
criminals? No. In a little room in Canada, a hopeless country with no history, no future, a continent of bigots, coughing my lungs out, dying for no purpose. And where should I be? In Charlestown Prison. Myself. Walking to the electric chair. Being the martyr to wake up a billion people from their sleep. The whole world is looking at this one execution. It is
our
crucifixion. At this moment they are making two saints for the next two thousand years. And who are these saints? Two poor, obscure, illiterate men, who don’t even know what’s happening to them. They are victims, not martyrs. THEY DO NOT KNOW THEIR GLORY and so they do not deserve it, they are robbing me of it, me, me, me…’”

Sternberger had stopped eating, as had Federov and George, as the smooth, easy lawyer’s voice dominated the hum of the busy restaurant, the voice low, but burning with the passion that had not diminished in thirty years, the voice that remembered the last terrible phrase of his aunt’s life: THEY DO NOT KNOW THEIR GLORY.

Sternberger shook his head, returning from the past. “She died four days later,” he said. “All alone. I was back at Coney Island selling frozen custard on the boardwalk. When I got home from Montreal my mother didn’t ask me a single question about what had happened there. All she said was, ‘One of your hoodlum friends is here, he came last night, he said he had no place to sleep.’ It was a classmate of mine from Columbia. They’d kicked him out of the YMCA on Twenty-third Street because he’d thrown a chair out the window and broken a skylight at noon, the only way he could think of at the time to protest the execution.” Sternberger was quiet for a moment.

“After my mother died in 1940, we finally got my aunt’s coffin down from the cemetery in Montreal and buried her next to her sister in Queens. I didn’t tell anybody about my aunt for years. I was ashamed of her.” He smiled a little sadly. “I don’t really know what to think about her even now,” he said. “I go out to Queens once a year and put some flowers on the two graves.” He looked at his watch. “I’m sorry,” he said, getting up. “I’m late. I have to go home.”

The next night Federov went to a party at the Staffords’. It was a big party in their house on East Seventy-eighth Street and there was the usual haphazard mixture of generations and professions that John Stafford gathered around him—actors, politicians, boys from Yale, young married couples who worked for magazines and publishing houses, people who were there because they were handsome or poor or seldom invited anywhere else.

Sternberger’s story about his aunt had haunted Federov all day long and, even though Stafford was surrounded by a group of young people who were standing with him at the bar, Federov began to tell Stafford about the old lady in Boston and her saints for the next two thousand years. When he mentioned the names of Sacco and Vanzetti, he saw blank looks on the faces of the youngsters.

Stafford laughed as Federov stopped in midsentence. “They never heard of them, Ben,” he said. “They don’t give that course in good schools.”

“I don’t believe it,” Federov said.

“They came in late,” Stafford said. “They were born after 1920.”

“Even so…,” Federov said.

“Ask them.”

“My dear young lady,” Federov said to a blond girl in a red dress, “can you tell me who Sacco and Vanzetti were?”

“Well…” The girl was embarrassed.

“How about you?” Federov turned to her escort, who seemed about twenty-three. “Do you know about them?”

“Vaguely,” the boy said. “To be honest—no.”

“They were anarchists back in the early twenties,” Federov said, fighting back what he knew as an irrational anger, “a shoemaker and a fish peddler in Massachusetts, and they were convicted of murdering a man in a holdup. But the general feeling was that they were innocent and they were convicted not because they had had anything to do with the crime, but because of their political opinions. Though Oliver Wendell Holmes—” Again he saw the look of puzzlement on the young faces. He laughed, his anger gone. “He was a Justice of the Supreme Court,” Federov explained. “Anyway, what I wanted to say was that despite all the outcry, Holmes thought the men were guilty and he wrote somewhere that the case was being turned into a text by the Reds. But whether he was right or wrong, at the time many people who were not Reds thought the case would never be forgotten and I guess I thought the same thing and that’s why I’m surprised when anybody doesn’t know all about them.”

“I heard of them,” said a young girl at the far end of the bar. She was pretty, not American. Federov had met her and her husband several times. She was Belgian, but had married an American after the war. She was more than thirty years old, but she looked younger.

“How did you hear of them?” Federov asked.

“From my father and mother,” the girl said. “In Belgium.”

“What were they—your father and mother? Socialists?”

The girl laughed. “Nobility,” she said. There was a trace of mockery in her voice. “They used to play croquet on the lawn after dinner when I was a little girl. You know how you put your foot on your own ball and tap it to send your opponent’s ball off the course?”

“Yes,” Federov said, curious now.

“They called that the Sacco-Vanzetti shot,” the girl said. “You hit Sacco—I guess the noise the mallet made against the ball sounded something like ‘sacco’ or ‘socko’—and you knocked Vanzetti off the course. It was a family joke…” There was silence in the room.

The girl looked around, embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” she said, although what she was sorry about would have been difficult for her to explain and for the others to understand. “I suppose…in Belgium, at the time, it must have seemed—well—remote…”

1964

F
EDEROV HAD REACHED THE
beach in front of the Club by now. Two old ladies under the parasol stared coldly at him. A hundred times a summer they complained about the law, demagogically inspired, which permitted outsiders to spoil their view of the ocean merely by keeping below the high-tide line on the beach. Lonely sentries, old bones wrapped in scarves, windswept and discarded, unpleasant at a distance, unpleasant close up, menopaused, everlastingly dissatisfied, under a striped parasol on a bare white beach, they guarded the gates of the past.

The sea was still running strong, but now Federov, who had been walking with his head down watching his toes squash into the damp sand, saw that there were four boys, aged about seventeen, out in the rough water, being tossed about on rubber mattresses on which they were trying to ride the waves. They were not in any immediate trouble, but Federov knew the coast well and how treacherous rip tides could build up in this kind of swell and pull the strongest swimmer out to sea. He tried to shout to the boys to come in, feeling the disapproval of the old ladies behind his back at this unseemly noise. But the crash of waves drowned his voice and the boys either did not see him gesturing or purposely ignored him.

There was a catamaran on blocks high on the beach, but without oars. It was late in the afternoon, the red flag had been up all day and the two lifeguards who were usually on duty were not to be seen.

One of the boys was overturned by a wave and it was only by luck that another boy grabbed his mattress as it went by and held onto it.

“Fools,” Federov said aloud.

1932

D
EATH BY WATER.

The lake was down the hill, eight hundred yards away, out of sight of the camp. The camp was in the Adirondacks. It was a coed camp, the girls’ bunks separated by a thick grove of pines from the boys’ side. Benjamin was to get seventy-five dollars for working as a counselor for nine boys between the ages of eight and ten for the summer. The camp was owned by a Mr. Kahn, a small, roostery nuisance of a man with ulcers and a bad temper, who could be heard screaming at the cooks in the kitchen that they were wasting food. He also complained constantly to the counselors that they were losing too many baseballs and not being careful enough in checking the campers’ laundry each week and that he alone, poor, sorely beset, pitiful Morris Kahn, out of his own pocket, would have to pay the parents for all the missing shirts and sweaters at the end of the season.

The camp was badly run. There wasn’t even a doctor, just a slovenly nurse who was trying to chalk up the all-time camp record for sleeping with the most counselors in the summer. Campers and counselors alike were permitted to go down to the lake whenever they liked and swim without supervision. After taps, counselors from the boys’ side could be seen walking openly, carrying blankets, to rendezvous with the girl counselors in secluded glades, wet with the cold dew of the mountain nights. The tennis courts were bumpy, the baseball field unkempt, the kitchen dirty; the atmosphere was slack, the counselors neglected their charges and spent their time scheming how they could get extra free time and making deals with each other to exchange their weekly twenty-four hours off so that they could amass three days of liberty in a row and flee from Mr. Kahn. If Benjamin, who had an exaggerated sense of order and responsibility, hadn’t needed the seventy-five dollars so badly he would have quit the first week.

The counselor in the bunk next to Benjamin’s was a man called Schwartz, a physical-training teacher in a high school in New York. He was a well-muscled, wiry, short man with a dark complexion, made even darker by the sun so that he looked like an Arab. He was a stupid man, but he was more conscientious than the others and he and Benjamin became friendly on the basis of their common disgust with the way the camp was run. Schwartz was older than the other counselors, nearly thirty, and he was engaged to be married in October. He showed the photograph of his fiancée to everybody again and again. It was the photograph of a dumpy little woman with dyed blond hair and thick legs. “Isn’t she beautiful?” Schwartz asked eagerly each time he brought the snapshot out of his foot locker.

Schwartz’s fiancée came to visit him from New York every two weeks, and Mr. Kahn, for reasons best known to himself, let Schwartz off on those Friday and Saturday nights to sleep with the beauty in a small hotel nearby.

“Yes,” everybody agreed, “she’s beautiful.” Often when Schwartz showed the woman’s photograph, he left his foot locker open. There was a box of about thirty condoms, neatly and prominently arrayed on the top shelf of the foot locker. Schwartz smiled widely when people noticed the condoms. He was a simple man and proud to prove that he, an ordinary high school teacher, had a mistress, and one of such extreme beauty.

In the middle of August, the night before the lady was due to arrive, two of the counselors stole into Schwartz’s bunk, opened the foot locker and with a needle carefully made little invisible holes in every one of the condoms and then put them back in their box, arranged just as Schwartz had left them. The practical jokers told most of the others counselors what they had done, but not Benjamin, because they knew Benjamin was a friend of Schwartz’s.

Condoms were a standard source of humor, and one of the counselors who had pierced the holes in Schwartz’s collection added to his reputation as the camp wit by saying, “There’s going to be a little Schwartz in this camp a lot sooner than anyone realizes.”

Schwartz was a physical-culture fanatic. He did a hundred push-ups a day and ran a mile each evening before dinner. But with all that, he had never learned really to swim. Even so, each morning after reveille, rain or shine, he would rush down to the lake with the swimming instructor, a man called Olson, and dive in, staying close to the dock, ignoring the coldness of the lake at that hour and brushing his teeth in the water. He had the theory that this exercise was good for his gums.

Olson was a huge, muscular man who played water polo for a Midwestern school. He was taciturn, sleepy-eyed and in love with his own body. All day long, except when he was swimming, he could be seen stroking his chest and his ridged belly slowly with caressing, self-admiring hands. He talked little and did his job badly and spent a good part of his time just lying in bed, outside the reach of discipline. He rarely talked and nobody knew him very well, not even the fifteen-year-old girl who sneaked out of her bunk every night to meet him in the forest. Aside from swimming a couple of miles a day to get ready for the water-polo season, he was completely uninterested in everything and everybody connected with the camp.

On the morning of the Friday that Schwartz’s fiancée was due to arrive, Schwartz and Olson went down as usual to the lake after reveille. It was a raw, drizzly day and they were alone. They dove in, Schwartz staying close to the docks, Olson swimming sixty yards out with one breath, then surfacing, taking another breath, and swimming back without taking his head out of the water. All this came out later.

Olson swam to the dock, climbed out, gave Schwartz his toothbrush, with the ribbon of paste neatly on it, and went to the shore end of the dock to dry himself off and put on his bathrobe and moccasins. They swam naked in the mornings. When Olson turned around again, Schwartz was gone. Olson looked over the edge of the dock. The water was black and chopped by the wind. Olson saw nothing. Then he ran up the eight-hundred-yard hill to the camp to get help.

Schwartz had been under the water more than ten minutes when they finally found him and brought him to the surface. He was dead but nobody on the dock wanted to admit it. Olson and Benjamin took turns at artificial respiration, working on Schwartz, who had been stretched on his stomach, with one arm folded under his head. Olson and Benjamin spelled each other, kneeling over the still body, pressing down with both hands on Schwartz’s back, then slowly releasing the pressure in a rhythm that they hoped would restore normal breathing. Kahn had come running down in his bathrobe, a ruffled, uncombed, screechy, barnyard bird of a man, shouting at everybody, saying, “Oh, my God,” and “The idiot,” and “This is the end,” and peering again and again into Schwartz’s calm open dead eyes and saying, “There’s life there. I know it. I know it.” He made sure immediately that no one besides Olson and Benjamin and the two other counselors who had run down with Olson could approach the lake, and he hurried up the hill himself to call the hospital in the nearest town to send an ambulance and a pulmotor and to tell all counselors that the routine of the camp was to go on as usual that morning, except that all swimming was canceled because of the bad weather.