“HI.”
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.
“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.