FEDEROV HAD SEEN BRYANT only once since then. It was just after the war and it was in a half-empty subway car going uptown, and Bryant was sitting alone, wearing a dark coat with a velvet collar and a derby hat, like a Tammany alderman or the vice-president of a small American bank who had been befriended by the wrong people on a short visit to London. With all that, Bryant looked surprisingly young and in good shape. For a moment Federov hesitated about going over, but was ashamed of himself immediately and stood up and walked across the car and said, “Hello, Dave.”
Bryant looked up at him, unrecognizingly. His eyes were dull and bloodshot. There was a smell of liquor on his breath. “Hello,” he said.
“I’m Benjamin Federov,” Federov said. “From camp.”
“Oh, sure, hiya, Ben.” Bryant stood up and put out his hand. The second handshake, Federov thought. “Sure, sure, I remember,” Bryant said. “Good old Tris. Tris Speaker.” He smiled his own congratulations to himself for the accuracy of his memory.
Federov had a few more stations to go and they talked of the old days of 1927. “That boy Cohn,” Bryant said naturally. It was a cinch he wouldn’t have failed to recognize Cohn, even fifty years later. “An exceptional human being,” Bryant said portentously. “Exceptional. It’s a shame what happened to him.”
“What happened to him?” Federov asked.
“You mean to say that you didn’t hear?” Bryant asked, incredulous that anyone who had ever known Cohn would be ignorant of the least action of that hero.
“No,” Federov said. “I never heard anything about him since that summer.”
“Amazing,” Bryant said. “I thought everybody knew. He got killed during the war. In 1940.”
“1940?” Federov said. “We didn’t get into the war until ’41.”
“He joined the RAF. He flew his own plane, you know,” Bryant said.
“No, I didn’t know.”
“Uhuh. I flew with him a lot. Weekends. Holidays. All over the place. Lake George. Down to his uncle’s place in Key West. God, we had times. I tell you. The day the war broke out he went up to Canada and enlisted in the RAF. You know Cohn. He couldn’t stay out of anything. He was killed over London.”
They stood in silence for a moment, remembering Cohn. Now that Bryant had told him, what Cohn had done seemed inevitable to Federov, fated. With Conn’s character, which must have only been intensified with the years, the war must have seemed just another athletic event in which he could excel without exertion, another Bye, Bye, Bonnie, another holiday in a new town.
“God, he was clever,” Bryant said. “Remember that song he made up—that Sacco-Vanzetti thing”—Bryant began to hum, searching for the words. “God, he was full of laughs. An all-’round boy. A real all-’round boy. How did the beginning go again? I don’t remember, do you?”
“No,” Federov said. He was sorry he had come over to say hello. He didn’t want to hear any more about Cohn. “I was in England during the war, too,” he said, just to switch the subject.
“Were you?” Bryant said without interest.
“How about you?” Federov asked. “Where were you?”
“In Washington,” Bryant said gravely, in the tone that strong and taciturn men use in speaking of sacrifices they have made and dangers they have survived.
Federov managed not to smile. Bryant, he thought, you’re a born, irrevocable, third-string man. “Sorry,” he said, “here’s my station.” He hurried out, making a pretense of being afraid of having the doors close on him, so that there would never be a third handshake…
Why, when it’s two out and I’m pitching, the clever, persuasive voice argued out of the cool blue mountain dusk, and the ball’s hit out toward center field, I don’t even look around, no matter where it’s going. I just throw away my glove and start walking toward the bench because I know Benny’s out there, and if Benny’s out there that ball’s going to be caught.
I took her cherry under a cherry tree in Lake-wood, New Jersey.
From this and other missions, twenty-seven of our aircraft are missing.