Voices of a Summer Day Read Online Free PDF Page B

his knees, but coming up with the ball. There were whistles of appreciation from the bench and from the few spectators and Cerrazzi came over and sat down next to Federov and said, “There’s the one the Mets could use. Your kid. He sure likes to win, doesn’t he?”
    “It looks that way,” Federov said. He remembered his own reaction to what the coach had said about passion when he himself had been nineteen and wondered at what age he could use the word to Michael.
    “Is he going to go in seriously for playing ball?” Cerrazzi asked. “I could give him a hint or two.”
    “No,” Federov said. “He prefers tennis.”
    “He’s right. Tennis is something you can play all your life,” Cerrazzi said, with the born athlete’s solemn lack of shame about using clichés.
    Federov didn’t tell Cerrazzi that the only reason that Michael was playing baseball that afternoon was that he couldn’t get into the town’s country club because he was Jewish, or anyway half-Jewish, and the few private courts that the Jewish summer people could play on were reserved for adults on the weekends. Federov’s wife, Peggy, who wasn’t Jewish, was in a constant state of irritation about this and tried to keep Federov from inviting home friends of his who belonged to the Club, but Federov had long ago stopped worrying about what he considered the annoying but minor inconsistencies of American life. After Auschwitz, it was hard to be too deeply concerned because your son couldn’t play two hours of doubles on a Saturday afternoon. And in the arguments he had with Peggy on the subject, he defended his Gentile friends for their passivity by reminding Peggy of all the places they themselves went to which didn’t admit Negroes, despite their own theoretical absence of prejudice. “I am no longer young,” he had once written to his wife in answering a letter of hers in which she had complained about what she called “the hypocrisy” of his friends at the Club. “I do not have enough anger left for all causes. I must ration it wisely.”
    Well, Joe Cerrazzi couldn’t get into the Club either. And it had nothing to do with his religion. He couldn’t get in because his father ran a liquor store. Federov wondered if Peggy would be more annoyed at being barred from playing tennis because she was married to a Jew or because of being married to a liquor salesman. I must ask her, Federov thought, the next time the damn thing comes up.
    He had to squint now. There was no avoiding the sun. September was approaching and the sun was lower in the sky every afternoon. Low-sunned September, spikes hung up, vacations over, old outfielders playing their last games…

1927
    O N THE MORNING OF September 1st, they were all back once more in the shed of the Fall River Line on Fulton Street. Children were being collected by parents in loud reunions, counselors were gravely accepting tips, aunts were exclaiming about how wonderful little Irving or little Patrick looked, the older boys were shaking hands with each other and promising to meet each other during the autumn, the director of the camp was beaming in the middle of the confusion because one more summer had passed without a drowning or an epidemic or poliomyelitis or an unpaid bill. The shed emptied quickly in the rush for home, but Benjamin and Louis were left standing there, because their parents had not yet come to pick them up. Finally, they were the only boys left and the director assigned Bryant to stay with them to await Mr. and Mrs. Federov’s arrival.
    Bryant looked far from happy at this last assignment and neither he nor Benjamin exchanged a word with each other as they stood, a little apart, in the shed which was suddenly eerily quiet and cavernously large. Bryant had kept Benjamin off the season’s-end honor roll (Benjamin had learned this from one of the waiters who had served coffee and sandwiches at the counselors’ meeting where the votes were cast), and Benjamin had taken it