Nemesis n-4

by Philip Roth

  Here a woman came out of a back bedroom; it was the sister-in-law who was looking after Mrs. Michaels. She stepped gently with her shoes on the floor, as though inside the bedroom a restless child had finally fallen asleep.

  Quietly she said, "She wants to know who you're talking to."

  "This is Mr. Cantor," said Mr. Michaels, wiping his eyes. "He is a teacher from Alan's school. How is she?" he asked his sister-in-law.

  "Not good," she reported in a low voice. "It's the same story. 'Not my baby, not my baby.'"

  "I'll be right in," he said.

  "I should be going," Mr. Cantor said and got up from his chair and set the untouched iced tea down on a side table. "I only wanted to pay my respects. May I ask when the funeral is?"

  "Tomorrow at ten. Schley Street Synagogue. Alan was the rabbi's Hebrew school favorite. He was everybody's favorite. Rabbi Slavin himself came here and offered the shul as soon as he heard what had happened. As a special honor to Alan. Everybody in the world loved that boy. He was one in a million."

  "What did you teach him?" the sister-in-law asked Mr. Cantor.

  "Gym."

  "Anything with sports in it, Alan loved," she said. "And what a student. The apple of everyone's eye."

  "I know that," said Mr. Cantor. "I see that. I can't express to you how very sorry I am."

  Downstairs, as he stepped out onto the stoop, a woman rushed out of the first-floor flat and, excitedly taking him by his arm, asked, "Where is the quarantine sign? People have been coming and going from upstairs, in and out, in and out, and why isn't there a quarantine sign? I have small children. Why isn't there a quarantine sign protecting my children? Are you a patrolman from the Sanitary Squad?"

  "I don't know anything about the Sanitary Squad. I'm from the playground. I teach at the school."

  "Who is in charge then?" A small, dark woman laden with fear, her face contorted with emotion, she looked as if her life had already been wrecked by polio rather than by her children's having to live precariously within its reach. She looked no better than Mr. Michaels did.

  "I suppose the Board of Health is in charge," Mr. Cantor said.

  "Where are they?" she pleaded. "Where is somebody who is in charge! People on the street won't even walk in front of our house — they walk deliberately on the other side. The child is already dead," she added, incoherent now with desperation, "and still I'm waiting for a quarantine sign!" And here she let out a shriek. Mr. Cantor had never heard a shriek before, other than in a horror movie. It was different from a scream. It could have been generated by an electrical current. It was a high-pitched, protracted sound unlike any human noise he knew, and the eerie shock of it caused his skin to crawl.

  HE'D HAD NO LUNCH, so he made his way to Syd's to get a hot dog. He was careful to walk on the shady side of the street, across from where nothing was sheltered from the glare of the sun and where he thought he could see heat waves shimmering above the sidewalk. Most of the shoppers had disappeared. It was one of those overpowering summer days when the thermometer registered an astonishing one hundred degrees and when, if the playground were open, he would have curtailed the softball games and encouraged the kids to use the chess- and checkerboards and the Ping-Pong tables set up in the shadow of the school. A lot of the boys took salt tablets that their mothers had given them for the heat, and wanted to go on playing no matter how high the temperature soared, even when the field's asphalt surface began to feel spongy and to radiate heat under their sneakers and the sun was so hot that you would think that rather than darkening your bare skin it would bleach you of all color before cremating you on the spot. Fresh from hearing Alan's father's lamentation, Mr. Cantor wondered if for the rest of the summer he oughtn't to shut down all sports when the temperature hit ninety. That way, he'd at least be doing something, though whether it was something that would make any difference to the spread of polio, he had no idea.

  Syd's was almost empty. Somebody was cursing at the pinball machine in the gloom at the back of the store, and two high school boys he did not know were goofing around by the jukebox, which was playing "I'll Be Seeing You," one of the summer's favorites. It was a song that Marcia liked to hear on the radio and that was as popular as it was because of all the wives and girlfriends left behind when their husbands and boyfriends went off for the duration of the war. He remembered now that he and Marcia had danced to the song on her back porch during the week before she'd left for Indian Hill. Dancing slowly together in a shuffling embrace while listening to "I'll Be Seeing You" had made them start to long for each other even before Marcia was gone.

  There was no one sitting in any of the booths and nobody on any of the counter stools when Bucky took a seat adjacent to the screen door and the long serving window that opened onto Chancellor Avenue, in the path of whatever air might drift in from the street. A big fan was going at either end of the counter, but they didn't seem to do much good. The place was hot and the smell pervasive of french fries deep-frying in fat.

  He got a hot dog and a frosted root beer and began to eat at the counter by himself. Out the window, across the way, trudging slowly up the hill in the annihilating heat of equatorial Newark, there was Horace again, no doubt headed to the playground, not understanding that today was Saturday and that, in the summer, the playground closed on Saturdays at noon. (It was not clear whether he understood what "summer," "playground," "closed," or "noon" was either, just as his failure to cross to the other side of the street probably meant that he could not perform the rudimentary thinking to conceptualize "shade" or even just seek it out instinctively, as any dog would on a day like this.) When Horace found none of the kids back of the school, what would he do next? Sit for hours on the bleachers waiting for them to turn up, or resume those neighborhood wanderings that made him look like someone out sleepwalking in the middle of the day? Yes, Alan was dead and polio a threat to the lives of all the city's children, and yet Mr. Cantor couldn't but find something dispiriting about watching Horace walk the streets by himself beneath the ferocity of that sun, isolated and brainless in a blazing world.

  When the boys were playing ball Horace would either seat himself silently at the end of the bench where the team at bat was sitting or else get up and perambulate the field, stopping a foot or two away from one of the players in the field and remain there without moving. This went on all the time, and everybody knew that the only way a fielder could get rid of Horace — and get back to concentrating on the game — was to shake the moron's lifeless hand and say to him, "How ya doin', Horace?" Whereupon Horace would appear to be satisfied and head off to stand beside another of the players. All he asked of life was that — to have his hand shaken. None of the playground boys ever laughed at him or teased him — at least not when Mr. Cantor was around — except for the uncontrollably energetic Kopfermans, Myron and Danny. They were strong, burly boys, good at sports, Myron the overexcitable, belligerent one and Danny the mischievous, secretive one. The older one especially, eleven-year-old Myron, had all the makings of a bully and had to be reined in when there was a disagreement among the boys on the field or when he interfered with the girls jumping rope. Mr. Cantor spent no small portion of his time trying to inculcate in untamed Myron the spirit of fair play and also to caution him to refrain from pestering Horace.

  "Look," Myron would say, "look, Horace. Look what I'm doing." When Horace saw the tip of Myron's sneaker beating rhythmically up and down on the bleacher step, his fingers would begin to twitch and his face would grow bright red and soon he would be waving his arms in the air as if he were fighting off a swarm of bees. More than once that summer Mr. Cantor had to tell Myron Kopferman to cut it out and not do it again. "Do what? Do what?" Myron asked, managing to mask none of his insolence with a wide grin. "I'm tapping my foot, Mr. Cantor — don't I have a right to tap my foot?" "Knock it off, Myron," Mr. Cantor replied. The ten-year-old Kopferman boy, Danny, had a cap gun made of metal and modeled to look like a real revolver which he carried in his pocket,
even when he was in the field playing second base. The cap gun produced a small explosive sound and smoke when the trigger was pressed. Danny liked to come up behind the other boys and try to frighten them with it. Mr. Cantor tolerated these hijinks only because the other boys were never really frightened. But one day Danny took out the toy weapon and waved it at Horace and told him to stick his hands in the air, which Horace did not do, and so Danny gleefully fired off five rounds of caps. The noise and smoke set Horace to howling, and in his clumsy, splayfooted way, he went running from his playground tormentor. Mr. Cantor confiscated the gun, and after that kept it in a drawer in his office, along with the toy "sheriff's" handcuffs that Danny had employed earlier in the summer to scare the playground's younger kids. Not for the first time he sent Danny Kopferman home for the day with a note telling his mother what her younger son had gotten up to. He doubted that she'd ever seen it.

  Yushy, the guy in the mustard-smeared apron who'd been working for years behind the counter at Syd's, said to Mr. Cantor, "It's dead around here."

  "It's hot," Mr. Cantor answered. "It's summer. It's the weekend. Everybody's down the shore or staying indoors."

  "No, nobody's coming in because of that kid."

  "Alan Michaels."

  "Yeah," Yushy said. "He ate a hot dog here, and he went home and got polio and died, and now everybody's afraid to come in. It's bullshit. You don't get polio from a hot dog. We sell thousands of hot dogs and nobody gets polio. Then one kid gets polio and everybody says, 'It's the hot dogs at Syd's, it's the hot dogs at Syd's!' A boiled hot dog — how do you get polio from a boiled hot dog?"

  "People are frightened," Mr. Cantor said. "They're scared to death, so they worry about everything."

  "It's the wop bastards that brought it around," Yushy said.

  "That's not likely," Mr. Cantor said.

  "They did. They spit all over the place."

  "I was there. We washed the spit away with ammonia."

  "You washed the spit away but you didn't wash the polio away. You can't wash the polio away. You can't see it. It gets in the air and you open your mouth and breathe it in and next thing you got the polio. It's got nothing to do with hot dogs."

  Mr. Cantor offered no response and, while listening to the end of the familiar song playing on the jukebox — and suddenly missing Marcia — finished up eating.

  I'll be seeing you,

  In every lovely summer's day,

  In every thing that's light and gay,

  I'll always think of you that way…

  "Suppose the kid had had an ice cream sundae at Halem's," Yushy said. "Would nobody eat ice cream sundaes at Halem's? Suppose he had chow mein up at the chinks'—would nobody go up to the chinks for chow mein?"

  "Probably," Mr. Cantor said.

  "And what about the other kid that died?" Yushy asked.

  "What other kid?"

  "The kid that died this morning."

  "What kid died? Herbie Steinmark died?"

  "Yeah. He didn't eat no hot dogs here."

  "Are you sure he died? Who told you Herbie Steinmark died?"

  "Somebody. Somebody came in just before and told me. A couple of guys told me."

  Mr. Cantor paid Yushy for the food and then, despite the tremendous heat — and unafraid of the heat — ran from Syd's across Chancellor and back to the playground, where he raced down the stairs to the basement door, unlocked it, and headed for his office. There he picked up the telephone and dialed the number of Beth Israel Hospital, one of a list of emergency numbers on a card that was thumbtacked to the notice board over his phone. Directly above it was another card, bearing a quotation he had written out in pen from Joseph Lee, the father of the playground movement, whom he'd read about at Panzer; it had been up there since the first day he arrived on the job. "Play for the adult is recreation, the renewal of life; play for the child is growth, the gaining of life." Tacked up beside that was a notice that had arrived in the mail just the day before from the head of the recreation department to all playground directors:

  In view of the danger to Newark children in the present outbreak of polio, please give very strict attention to the following. If you have not sufficient washroom supplies on hand, order them at once. Go over wash bowls, toilet bowls, floors and walls daily with disinfectant, and see that everything is immaculately clean. Toilet facilities must be thoroughly scrubbed throughout the premises under your supervision. Give the above your personal and unremitting attention as long as the present outbreak menaces the community.

  When he got through to the hospital, he asked the operator for patient information and then asked for the condition of Herbert Steinmark. He was told that the patient was no longer in the hospital. "But he's in an iron lung," Mr. Cantor protested. "The patient is deceased," said the operator.

  Deceased? What could that word have to do with plump, round, smiling Herbie? He was the least coordinated of all the boys at the playground, and the most ingratiating. He was always among the boys who helped him put out the equipment first thing in the morning. In gym class at Chancellor, he was hopeless on the pommel horse and the parallel bars and with the rings and the climbing rope, but because he tried hard and was persistently good-natured, Mr. Cantor had never given him lower than a B. Alan the natural athlete and Herbie the hopeless athlete, completely lacking physical agility — both had been playing on the field the day the Italians tried to invade the playground, and both were dead, polio fatalities at the age of twelve.

  Mr. Cantor rushed down the basement hall to the washroom that was used by the playground boys and, at the mercy of his grief, with no idea what to do with his misery, he grabbed the janitor's mop, a bucket of water, and a gallon can of disinfectant and swabbed the entire tile floor, profusely sweating while he worked. Next he went into the girls' washroom, and vigorously, in a mad rage, he cleaned the floor there. Then, with his clothes and his hands reeking of disinfectant, he took the bus home.

  THE NEXT MORNING, after shaving, showering, and eating breakfast, he repolished his good shoes, put on his suit, a white shirt, and the darker of his two ties, and took the bus to Schley Street. The synagogue was a low, dismal yellow-brick box of a building across the street from an overgrown lot that had been converted into a neighborhood victory garden, probably the one where Alan had taken diligent care of his own vegetable plot. Mr. Cantor could see a few women, wearing broad-brimmed straw hats for protection from the morning sun, bent over and weeding small patches of land adjacent to an advertising billboard. In front of the synagogue a row of cars was parked, one of them a black hearse, whose driver stood at the curb moving a cloth over the front fender. Inside the hearse Mr. Cantor could see the casket. It was impossible to believe that Alan was lying in that pale, plain pine box merely from having caught a summertime disease. That box from which you cannot force your way out. That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever. The rest of us live and grow older by the day, but he remains twelve. Millions of years go by, and he is still twelve.

  Mr. Cantor took his folded yarmulke out of his pants pocket, slipped it on his head, and went inside, where he found an empty seat near the back. He followed the prayers in the prayer book and joined the congregation in the recitations. Midway through, a woman's voice was heard to scream, "She fainted! Help!" Rabbi Slavin briefly stopped the service while someone, most likely a doctor, rushed along the aisle and up the stairs to the balcony, to tend to whoever had passed out in the women's section. The synagogue temperature must have been at least ninety by then, and highest probably in the balcony. No wonder somebody had fainted. If the service didn't soon come to an end, people would start fainting everywhere. Even Mr. Cantor felt a little woozy inside his one suit, a woolen suit made to be worn in the winter.

  The seat next to him was empty. He kept wanting Alan to walk in and take it. He wanted Alan to walk in with his baseball mitt and sit down beside him and, as he regularly did at noon on the playground bleachers, eat the sandwich out of his lun
ch bag beside Mr. Cantor.

  The eulogy was delivered by Alan's uncle, Isadore Michaels, whose pharmacy had stood for years on the corner of Wainwright and Chancellor and whom all the customers called Doc. He was a jovial-looking man, heavyset and dark-complexioned like Alan's father, with those same grainy patches under his eyes. He alone was speaking because no other family member felt able to control his emotions enough to do it. There were many people sobbing, and not only in the women's section.

  "God blessed us with Alan Avram Michaels for twelve years," his uncle Isadore said, smiling bravely. "And He blessed me with a nephew who I loved like my own child from the day he was born. On his way home every day after school, Alan would always stop by the store and sit at the counter and order a chocolate malted. When he was first starting school he was the skinniest kid in the world, and the idea was to fatten him up. If I was free, I'd go over to the soda fountain and make the malted for him myself and add in extra malt to put some pounds on him. Once that ritual began, it went on year after year. How I would enjoy those after-school visits from my extraordinary nephew!"

  Here he had to take a moment to collect himself.

  "Alan," he resumed, "was an authority on tropical fish. He could talk like an expert about everything you do to take care of all the different kinds of tropical fish. There was nothing more thrilling than to visit the house and sit with Alan alongside his aquarium and have him explain to you everything about each of the fish and how they had babies and so on. You could sit there with him for an hour and he still wouldn't be finished telling you all that he knew. You came away from being with Alan and you had a smile on your face and your spirits were lifted, and you'd learned something besides. How did he do it? How did this child do all that he did for all of us adults? What was Alan's special secret? It was to live every day of life, seeing the wonder in everything and taking delight in everything, whether it was his after-school malted, or his tropical fish, or the sports in which he excelled, or contributing to the war effort in the victory garden, or what he'd studied that day at school. Alan packed more healthy fun into his twelve years than most people get in a lifetime. And Alan gave more pleasure to others than most people give in a lifetime. Alan's life is ended…"