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hard. He had always been high up in school, more often than not first in his class, and had made every weekly honor roll all season, and he ostentatiously remained ten yards away from Bryant, wishing him bad luck in every game Syracuse played that fall, and ashamed that his enemy (he now considered Bryant as exactly that) was the witness of this unprecedented callousness on the part of his mother and father. “Look,” he said to Bryant fifteen minutes after the departure of the last of the campers, “you don’t have to wait. I know how to get home. I’ve been to New York and back from Harrison a hundred times by myself.”
    “Stay where you are,” Bryant said, snapping at him. “We’re waiting for your father or mother or whatever member of your family finally remembers you’re here, if it takes all day.”
    Louis stood there serenely, looking out at the river, calmly munching on caramels, although it was only nine-thirty in the morning. He had wisely kept out a box for emergencies from the last canteen night at camp.
    Their parents arrived a few minutes later, both of them running. They had overslept, they said, the alarm had not gone off. Benjamin was furious with this foolish apology, especially since it was directed at Bryant and not at either Louis or himself. At least if it had been an accident or a death in the family or something important. His mother kissed him, his father embraced him and said he looked great. His mother said to Louis, “What time of the day is this to eat candy?” and kissed him ten times. His father took out a twenty-dollar bill and gave it to Bryant, who made a hypocritical show of trying to refuse it. “Take it, take it,” Benjamin’s father said, pressing the bill into Bryant’s hand. “I know how college boys can use a few extra dollars.”
    Benjamin would have liked to knock the twenty dollars out of his father’s hand, but he wouldn’t be ready for gestures like that for another five years.
    “I want to tell you, Mr. Federov,” Bryant said, man-to-man, “you have two wonderful boys there. Wonderful.”
    Benjamin said a dirty word, under his breath, but shook hands with Bryant when Bryant came over and stuck out his hand with a false, charming smile. “It’s been a great year, Tris, old feller.” The echo of the afternoon at Canoga was, Benjamin knew, deliberate and malicious. “I hope we’re all back together again next summer.”
    “Yeah,” Benjamin said. “Yeah.”
    “Tris? Tris?” his father said puzzledly. “What’s that for?”
    “It’s short for Tristan,” said Mrs. Federov, the ex-piano teacher. “He was a knight of the Round Table. He—well,” she hesitated puritanically over the rest of the sentence. “Well, he played around with his friend King Arthur’s wife. Her name was Guinevere.”
    Israel Federov looked suspiciously at Bryant’s retreating back. “What sort of name is that,” he said, “to call a thirteen-year-old boy?”
    Benjamin knew that if he had said, “The center fielder,” his father would have understood, only he would have thought it a compliment and have liked Bryant the better for it. And Benjamin didn’t want to have to explain why it wasn’t a compliment and the true nature of his relationship with Bryant. He didn’t want to talk about Bryant. He just wanted to go home.
    For many years after, the word “betrayal,” in Benjamin’s mind, was linked with the handshake in the shed and the alarm clock that had not gone off in Harrison on the morning of September 1st, 1927.

1931–34
    I T WAS THE LAST EASY summer of his boyhood and youth. His father’s partner turned out to be a thief and the business went into bankruptcy in October and the Federovs never had any money again until after the war. With the failure of his father’s business, Benjamin found himself scrambling, after school and during vacations, to get whatever jobs he could to feed himself, buy the necessary books for his courses, and help with a few