Voices of a Summer Day by Irwin Shaw Read Free Book Online Page A

with, just because he isn’t you. How can I have fun when all I want is to start the new year with you and you’re hundreds of miles away waiting on table for a lot of rich miserable pigs?”
    “Still,” Benjamin said, “I think you ought to go.”
    “I’m not going,” she said. Her face was white and bitter. “I’m going to go to bed at nine o’clock and stuff cotton in my ears so I won’t hear the damn bells at midnight.”
    “Pat…”
    “I don’t want to talk about it any more,” she said. She began to walk on again.
    “Darling,” Benjamin said, “we’ll have our party on the night of the first. We’ll just pretend that our 1932 begins one day later than everybody else’s.”
    “All right,” she said. She tried to smile. “One day later.”
    The group of fourteen boys, an indiscriminate sampling of freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors, made the bitterly cold trip through New Jersey and Pennsylvania on the morning of December 31st. When they arrived at the club, a pretentious red-brick pile, gabled and generously adorned with fake Tudor beams to deceive the members into believing they were British aristocrats, they were put to work, even before they could unpack their few belongings and see where they were to sleep. All through the leaden, icy afternoon and the numbing blackness of the early evening, they were rushing in and out of the building, assailed alternately by the north wind and waves of tropical heat from the steaming kitchen, as they carted in cases of bootleg whiskey, cases of soda water and ginger ale, cartons of food, rented chairs and rented crockery for the evening’s festivities.
    The first guests were due to arrive at nine o’clock and the boys were kept so busy hauling supplies that they barely had time to dress for the evening. Their rooms were a row of single cells, designed for the summer staff, on the third floor, under the roof. They ate their dinner hurriedly in the kitchen. It was a large kitchen, none too clean, and it was heaped with pots of caviar, loaves of pâté de foie gras, cold lobster and a large dead flock of roast turkeys for the feast that evening. None of this was served to the waiters. They each were given two thin frankfurters, a helping of sauerkraut, chunks of stale bread, and mugs of thin coffee. An old, shapeless Irishwoman, who spoke with a broad brogue, ran the kitchen, and she rushed over and grabbed a plate of butter from Benjamin’s hand when he went to a sideboard to bring it back to the table at which the waiters were wolfing down their meal.
    “That’s not for the likes of you, my lad,” the old woman said, putting the butter plate decisively back on the sideboard. “Do you know what butter costs a pound these days?”
    Young Dyer, who had not been seen all day, since he had gone directly to his father’s home in town, came into the kitchen to hurry them up so that they would be at their places in the cloakrooms and in the various bars before the first guest arrived. Dyer was completely transformed. He was to help his father as assistant maître d’hôtel and he was immaculately dressed in a dinner jacket, with a stiff wing collar and jeweled studs. The affable campus politician was nowhere to be seen as he looked impatiently at his watch and said, “Come on, boys, you came here to work.”
    “Dyer,” Benjamin said, “tell that old bag I want some butter.”
    “She’s running the kitchen,” Dyer said. “There’re fixed rules. Sorry. Put a move on.”
    “Dyer,” Benjamin said, “You’re a shit.”
    “This is no time for jokes, Federov,” Dyer said.
    The kitchen door opened and Dyer’s father entered, He was a sallow fat man with the disappointed, suspicious eyes of a failed gambler. He, too, was handsomely turned out in a satin-lapelled dinner jacket. “The first car is coming up the driveway,” he said. “Everybody at his place. Now.”
    Benjamin struggled into his white waiter’s coat and went out to his station