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

at the downstairs bar, still chewing on his last mouthful of the tepid, stringy frankfurter.
    By nine-thirty the bar was crowded. For some reason, it was decorated in nautical style: fake portholes, red and green brass running lights, model sailing vessels fully rigged in glass cases, a large ship’s wheel in mahogany fitted with electric bulbs as a chandelier, all this at least two hundred miles from the sea. The nautical bar was patronized by the younger set—married couples in their mid-twenties, boys from Princeton and Yale and Harvard, all crew-cut and, to Benjamin’s eyes, self-consciously lordly, who snapped their fingers at him when they wanted to order a drink. There were a great many pretty girls and young women who spoke with a flattened-A finishing-school drawl and who wore low-cut dresses that Benjamin was sure had cost at least five times as much as the dress Pat had bought for this same evening. Men and women alike, they talked of places like Newport and Hyannis and Palm Beach and what a wild weekend it had been at New Haven and how perfectly awful it was that Dahddy was set on getting a divorce again and did you hear about Ginny and that impossible South American and how grim they were going to feel tomorrow because they just absolutely had to catch the train at eleven o’clock for South Carolina and that would mean getting up in what was practically the middle of the night.
    To Benjamin they all seemed to have known each other since birth and to be unshakably at home no matter where they were. It’s a room full of Cohns, Benjamin thought, only not Jewish.
    The prettiest girl there was a dark beauty in a black dress that displayed a good deal of bosom, and whose shoulder strap dropped disturbingly off her plump, tanned shoulder. She was surrounded by tall young men at the bar, and there was gust after gust of laughter from the group as they drank their bootleg whiskey-sours, and bourbon and ginger ales. The girl spoke quickly in a soft, provocative whisper, confident of her wit, using her eyes to point up her stories, enjoying the glances of the men around her at her exposed perfect breasts and her bare shoulders. She was standing near the service end of the bar, and while Benjamin was waiting next to her with his tray for a round of drinks for a party at one of the tables, he couldn’t help but stare, fascinated and sick with admiration, at her naked shoulder.
    “…so I said to him,” the girl was saying, “if that’s the way Harvard men behave, I’m going to try Tuskegee Institute next time.” The men around her laughed very loudly, and she whipped her eyes from one to the other, making sure all tributes were being paid in full. She caught Benjamin staring at her shoulder. He raised his eyes hurriedly, and for a moment she looked at him directly and consideringly. Her glance was cold and level. He was just about as tall as any of the men in her group; he knew he was at least as good-looking, and his experience in football and boxing made him fairly sure that he could have beaten almost any of the men clustered around the bar without too much trouble. But he was wearing a waiter’s white coat and he was carrying a tray and the girl’s eyes became narrow and hostile. Still looking directly at him, knowing that everybody was watching her, she deliberately and contemptuously put the shoulder strap back into place. Then she turned her back on him.
    He felt a hot blush of shame well up from his collar and flood his face. He would have liked to kill the girl on the spot. Instead, he counted the glasses the bartender put on his tray and made his way through the crowd toward the table he was serving.
    The laughter from the bar made him tremble. He nearly spilled a drink, and a man at the table looked up at him and said sharply, “Watch what the hell you’re doing, stupid.”
    As he went about his duties he knew he hated everybody there that night. Although he didn’t want to be like them, he wanted,