The plot against America

by Philip Roth

  "It's okay," she said as we headed around the corner for the underpass where the line formed for the 14 bus. "It's perfectly natural to be upset. We all are."

  I denied being in any way upset but found myself looking around the bus stop for somebody to follow. Easily a dozen different routes started out from this one Penn Station stop, and it happened that a Vailsburg bus bound for distant North Newark was taking on passengers at the very moment that my mother and I stood at the curbside of the underpass waiting for a 14 to show up. I spotted just the man to follow, a businessman with a briefcase who seemed to me—with my admittedly imperfect grasp of the telling characteristics that Earl was so masterfully attuned to—not to be Jewish. Yet I could only look with longing as the bus door closed behind him and he rode off without my spying on him from a nearby seat.

  Once we were alone together on the bus, my mother said, "Tell me what's bothering you."

  When I didn't reply she began to explain Alvin's behavior at the train station. "Alvin is ashamed. He feels ashamed for us to be seeing him in a wheelchair. When he left he was strong and independent. Now he wants to hide and he wants to scream and he wants to lash out, and it's terrible for him. And it's terrible too for a boy like you to have to see your big cousin like this. But that's all going to change. Just as soon as he understands that there's nothing about the way he looks or about what happened for him to be ashamed of, he's going to gain back the weight he lost, and he'll start to walk everywhere on his artificial leg, and he's going to look just as you remember him before he left for Canada. . .Does that help any? Does what I'm telling you reassure you at all?"

  "I don't need to be reassured," I said, but what I wanted to ask was: "His stump—what does it mean that it's broken down? Do I have to look at it? Will I ever have to touch it? Are they going to fix it?"

  On a Saturday a couple of weeks earlier I'd gone into the cellar with my mother and helped her empty the cartons full of Alvin's belongings, rescued by my father from the Wright Street room after Alvin had run off to join the Canadian army. Everything washable my mother scrubbed on the washboard in the divided cellar tub, soaping in one sink, rinsing in the other, and then feeding a piece at a time into the wringer while I cranked the handle to force out the rinse water. I hated that wringer; each piece of wash emerged flattened out from between its two rollers, looking as if it had been run over by a truck, and whenever I was down in the cellar for whatever reason, I was always afraid to turn my back on the thing. But now I steeled myself to drop each wet, deformed item of mangled laundry into the laundry basket and carry the basket upstairs so that my mother could dry everything on the backyard clothesline. I fed her the clothespins as she leaned from the window to hang out the wash, and while she stood in the kitchen after dinner that evening ironing the shirts and pajamas that I had just helped her to reel in, I sat at the kitchen table folding Alvin's underwear and rolling each pair of socks into a ball, determined to make everything turn out right by being the best little boy imaginable, much, much better than Sandy and better even than myself.

  After school the next day, it required two trips for me to carry Alvin's good clothes around the corner to the tailor shop where they did our dry cleaning. Later in the week I picked them up and at home placed everything—topcoat, suit, sport jacket, and two pairs of his pants—on wooden hangers in the half I'd apportioned him of my bedroom closet and stacked the rest of the clean apparel in the top two drawers that had formerly been Sandy's. Since Alvin was going to be sleeping in our bedroom—to provide him with the easiest possible access to the bathroom—Sandy had already gotten himself ready to move to the sun parlor at the front of the flat by arranging his own belongings in the breakfront in the dining room, beside the linen tablecloth and napkins. One evening a few days before Alvin's scheduled return I shined his pair of brown shoes and his pair of black shoes, ignoring as best I could any uncertainty I had as to whether shining all four of them was still necessary. To make those shoes gleam, to get his good clothes clean, to neatly pile the dresser drawers with his freshly washed things—and all of it simply a prayer, an improvised prayer imploring the household gods to protect our humble five rooms and all they contained from the vengeful fury of the missing leg.

  I tried to gauge from what I saw beyond the bus window how much time remained before we got to Summit Avenue and it was too late to unseal my fate. We were on Clinton Avenue just passing the Riviera Hotel, where, as I never failed to remember, my mother and father had spent their wedding night. We were clear of downtown, about halfway home, and directly ahead was Temple B'nai Abraham, the great oval fortress built to serve the city's Jewish rich and no less foreign to me than if it had been the Vatican.

  "I could move into your bed," my mother said, "if that's what's bothering you. For now, until everybody gets used to everybody else again, I could sleep in your bed next to Alvin's bed and you could go in and sleep with Daddy in our bed. Would that be better?"

  I said that I'd rather sleep alone in my own bed.

  "What if Sandy moved back from the sun parlor to his bed," my mother suggested, "and Alvin slept in yours and you slept where Sandy was going to sleep, on the daybed in the sun parlor? Would you be lonely up at the front of the house, or is that what you would really prefer?"

  Would I prefer it? I'd have loved it. But how possibly could Sandy, who was now working for Lindbergh, share a room with someone who had lost his leg going to war against Lindbergh's Nazi friends?

  We were turning onto Clinton Place from the Clinton Avenue stop, the familiar residential corner where—back before Sandy deserted me for Aunt Evelyn on Saturday afternoons—he and I used to disembark for the double feature at the Roosevelt Theater, whose black-lettered marquee was a block away. Soon the bus would be sailing past the narrow alleyways and the two-and-a-half-family houses lining the level length of Clinton Place—streets that looked much like our own but whose red-brick bank of gabled front stoops aroused not a one of the basic boyhood emotions that ours did—before arriving at the big final turn onto Chancellor Avenue. There the grinding pull up the hill would begin, past the elegant fluted piers of the spiffy new high school, on to the sturdy flagpole out front of my grade school, and through to the crest of the hill, where a band of Lenni Lenapes were said by our third-grade teacher to have lived in a tiny village, cooking their food over hot stones and drawing designs on their pots. This was our destination, the Summit Avenue stop, diagonally across from the platters of freshly dipped chocolates profligately displayed in the lace-trimmed windows of Anna Mae's, the sweetshop that had succeeded the Indians' tepees and whose tantalizing scent honeyed the air less than a two-minute walk from our house.

  In other words, the time left to say yes to the sun parlor was precisely measurable and running out, movie theater by movie theater, candy store by candy store, stoop by stoop, and yet all I could say was no, no, I'll be fine where I am, until my mother had nothing soothing left to suggest and, despite herself, went gloomily silent in a very ominous, undisguised way, as though the eventfulness of the morning was at last working her over the way it had me. Meanwhile, since I didn't know how long I could go on concealing that I couldn't bear Alvin because of his missing limb and his empty trouser leg and his awful smell and his wheelchair and his crutches and the way he wouldn't look up at any of us when he talked, I began to pretend that I was following somebody on our bus who didn't look Jewish. It was then that I realized—employing all the criteria imparted to me by Earl—that my mother looked Jewish. Her hair, her nose, her eyes—my mother looked unmistakably Jewish. But then so must I, who so strongly resembled her. I hadn't known.

  What made Alvin smell bad was all the decay in his mouth. "You lose your teeth when you've got problems," Dr. Lieberfarb explained after looking around with his little mirror and saying "Uhoh" nineteen times, and that very afternoon he started drilling. He was going to do all that work for nothing because Alvin had volunteered to fight the fascists and because, unlike "the rich Jews" who a
stonished my father by imagining themselves secure in Lindbergh's America, Lieberfarb remained undeluded about what "the many Hitlers of this world" might yet have in store for us. Nineteen gold inlays was a big deal, but that's how he showed solidarity with my father, my mother, me, and the Democrats, as opposed to Uncle Monty, Aunt Evelyn, Sandy, and all the Republicans currently enjoying their countrymen's love. Nineteen inlays also took a long time, particularly for a dentist who'd trained in night school while working days packing cargo crates at Port Newark, and whose touch was never that light. Lieberfarb was drilling away for months, but within the first few weeks enough of the rot had been removed so that it was no longer such a trial to be sleeping more or less next to Alvin's mouth. The stump was something else. "Broken down" means that the end of the stump goes bad: it opens up, it cracks, it gets infected. There are boils, sores, edema, and you can't walk on it with the prosthesis and so have to be without it and resort to crutches until it heals and can take the pressure without breaking down again. At fault was the fit of the artificial leg. The doctors would tell him, "You've lost your fit," but he hadn't lost his fit, he never had a fit, Alvin said, because the legmaker hadn't got the measurements right to begin with.

  "How long does it take to heal?" I asked him the night he finally told me what "broken down" meant. Sandy up at the front of the house and my parents in their bedroom had already been asleep for hours, and so too were Alvin and I when he began to shout "Dance! Dance!" and, with a frightening gasp, shot upright in his bed, wide awake. When I flipped on the night lamp and saw him covered with sweat, I got up and opened the bedroom door, and though suddenly covered in sweat myself, I tiptoed across the little back foyer, not to my parents' room, however, to report what had happened, but into the bathroom to get Alvin a towel. He used it to mop his face and his neck, then pulled off his pajama shirt to wipe his chest and his underarms, and now at last I saw what had become of the upper man since the lower man had been blown apart. No wounds, stitches, or disfiguring scars, but no strength either, just the pale skin of a sickly boy adhering to the knobs and ridges of bone.

  This was our fourth night together. On the first three nights Alvin had been careful to change into his pajamas in the bathroom and then to hop back to hang his clothes in the closet, and since he used the bathroom again to dress in the mornings, I hadn't as yet had to look at the stump and could pretend I didn't know it was there. At night I turned to the wall and, fatigued by all my worries, fell right off to sleep and remained asleep until sometime in the early hours when Alvin got up and hopped to the bathroom and back to bed. He did all this without turning on the light and I lay there afraid he was going to bang into something and crash to the floor. At night, his every move made me want to run away, and not merely from the stump. It was on this fourth night, when Alvin had finished drying himself off with the towel and was lying there in just his pajama bottoms, that he pulled up the pajamas' left leg to take a look at the stump. I supposed this was a hopeful sign—that he was starting to be less crazily agitated, at least with me—but I still didn't want to look his way. . .and so I did, trying to be a soldier in my bed. What I saw extending down from his knee joint was something five or six inches long that resembled the elongated head of a featureless animal, something on which Sandy, with just a few well-placed strokes, could have crayoned eyes, a nose, a mouth, teeth, and ears, and turned it into the likeness of a rat. What I saw was what the word "stump" describes: the blunt remnant of something whole that belonged there and once had been there. If you didn't know what a leg looked like, this one might have seemed normal to you, given how the hairless skin was rounded off softly at the abbreviated end as though it were nature's handiwork and not the result of a trying sequence of medical amputations.

  "Is it healed?" I asked him.

  "Not yet."

  "How long will it take?"

  "Forever," he replied.

  I was stunned. Then this is endless! I thought.

  "Extremely frustrating," Alvin said. "You get on the leg they make for you and the stump breaks down. You get on crutches and it starts to swell up. The stump goes bad whatever you do. Get my bandages from the dresser."

  I did as he told me. I was going to have to handle the beige elasticized wrappings he used to prevent his stump from swelling when the artificial leg was off. They were coiled up in a corner of the drawer beside his socks. Each was about three inches wide and had a large safety pin stuck through the end to keep it from unrolling. I no more wanted to plunge my hand into that drawer than to go down to the cellar and stick it into the wringer, but I did, and when I delivered the bandages to the bed, one in each fist, he said, "Good boy," and was able to make me laugh by petting my head like a dog's.

  Afraid to see what came next, I sat on my bed and watched.

  "You put this bandage on," he explained, "to keep it from blowing up." He held the stump in one hand and with the other undid the safety pin and began to unroll one of the bandages in a crisscrossing pattern over the stump and on up to the knee joint and then several inches beyond that. "You put this bandage on to keep it from blowing up"—he repeated the words wearily, with exaggerated patience—"but you don't want bandages over the breakdown because that won't let the breakdown heal. So you're just going back and forth until you're nuts." When he finished unrolling the bandage and inserted the safety pin to fasten the end, he showed me the results. "You have to pull it tight, you see?" He began a similar routine with the second bandage. The stump—when he was through with it—again reminded me of a small animal, this time one whose head had to be muzzled extra carefully to prevent it from sinking its razor-sharp teeth into the hand of its captor.

  "How do you learn that?" I asked him.

  "You don't have to learn. You just put it on. Except," he suddenly announced, "it's too goddamn tight. Maybe you do have to learn. Goddamn son of a bitch! It's either too fucking loose or too fucking tight. It makes you nuts—the whole goddamn thing." He removed the safety pin that fastened the second bandage and then undid both bandages in order to start again. "You can see," he told me, struggling now to suppress disgust with the futility of everything, "how good at doing this you get," and resumed the rewrapping, which, like the healing, appeared destined to go on in our bedroom forever.

  The next day when school was over, I ran straight home to a house that I knew would be empty—Alvin was at the dentist, Sandy was off somewhere with Aunt Evelyn, the two of them inexplicably helping Lindbergh achieve his ends, and my parents wouldn't be back from work until suppertime. As Alvin had settled on using the daytime hours to allow the breakdown to heal unbandaged and the nights to wrap the stump to prevent the swelling, I readily found the two bandages in the corner of the top dresser drawer where he'd returned them rolled up that morning. I sat on the edge of my bed, turned up my left trouser leg, and, shocked to realize that what remained of Alvin's leg was not much bigger around than my own, set out to bandage myself. I'd spent the day at school mentally running through what I'd watched him do the night before, but at three-twenty, when I got home, I'd only just started to wrap the first bandage around an imaginary stump of my own when, against the flesh below my knee, I felt what turned out to be a ragged scab from the ulcerated underside of Alvin's stump. The scab must have come loose during the night—Alvin had either ignored it or failed to notice it—and now it was stuck to me and I was out way beyond what I could deal with. Though the heaves began in the bedroom, by racing for the back door and then down the back stairway to the cellar, I managed to position my head over the double sink seconds before the real puking began.

  To find myself alone in the dank cavern of the cellar was an ordeal under any circumstances, and not only because of the wringer. With its smudged frieze of mold and mildew running along the cracking whitewashed walls—stains in every hue of the excremental rainbow and seepage blotches that looked as if they'd leaked from a corpse—the cellar was a ghoulish realm apart, extending beneath the whole of the house and deriving no li
ght at all from the half-dozen slits of grime-clouded glass that looked onto the cement of the alleyways and the weedy front yard. There were several saucer-sized drains sunk into the bottom of a sloping concavity at the middle of the concrete floor. Secured in the mouth of each was a heavy black disc pierced by the concentric dime-sized perforations from which, with no difficulty, I imagined vaporous creatures spiraling malevolently up from the earth's innards into my life. The cellar was a place bereft not just of a sunny window but of every human assurance, and when I came to study Greek and Roman mythology in a freshman high school class and read in the textbook about Hades, Cerberus, and the River Styx, it was always our cellar that I was reminded of. One 30-watt bulb hung over the washtub into which I'd vomited, a second hung in the vicinity of the coal furnaces—ablaze and bulkily aligned together like the three-personed Pluto of our underworld—and another, almost always burned out, was suspended from an electrical cord inside each of the storage bins.

  I could never accept that the wintertime responsibility would fall to me for shoveling coal into our family's furnace first thing each morning, then banking the fire before going to bed, and once a day carrying a pailful of cold ashes out to the ashcan in the backyard. Sandy had by now grown strong enough to take over from my father, and in a few more years, when he went off like every other eighteen-year-old American boy to receive his twenty-four months of military training in President Lindbergh's new citizen Army, I would inherit the job and relinquish it only when I too was conscripted. Imagining a future when I'd be in the cellar manning the furnace all alone was, at nine, as upsetting as thinking about the inevitability of dying, which had also begun tormenting me in bed every night.

  But I mainly feared the cellar because of those who were already dead—my two grandfathers, my mother's mother, and the aunt and uncle who once constituted Alvin's family. Their bodies may have been interred just off Route 1 on the Newark-Elizabeth line, but in order to patrol our affairs and scrutinize our conduct their ghosts resided two stories beneath our flat. I had little or no recollection of any of them other than of the grandmother who'd died when I was six, and yet whenever I was headed for the cellar by myself, I took care to warn each in turn that I was on my way and to beg them to keep their distance and not to besiege me once I was in their midst. When Sandy was my age he used to arm himself against his brand of fear by barreling down the cellar stairs shouting, "Bad guys, I know you're down there—I've got a gun," while I would descend whispering, "I'm sorry for whatever I did that was wrong."