The plot against America

by Philip Roth

  "I guess so," I said.

  "Oh, sweetheart," she said, drawing me to her and kissing me now all over my face, "I guess so too. I'm so glad you came to see me. I've missed you so," and she stroked me then as if to find out if my pockets were stuffed with stolen goods. Only years later did I come to understand that her skillful way with her groping hands may well have been what accounted for the rapid renovation of Aunt Evelyn's life by a figure of the stature of Lionel Bengelsdorf. Brilliant and erudite though the rabbi was, superior to everyone even in his egoism, Aunt Evelyn must never have been at a loss with him.

  The paradise of envelopment that followed was, of course, unidentifiable at the time. Wherever I put my own two hands, there was the soft surface of her body. Wherever I moved my face, there was the thickness of her scent. Wherever I looked, there was her clothing, new spring wrappings so light and gauzy that they didn't even veil the sheen of her slip. And there were the eyes of another human being as I'd never quite seen them before. I had not reached the age of desire, was blinded, of course, by the word "aunt," still found the random little stiffening of my acorn of a penis the puzzling nuisance it had always been, and so the delight that I took nestling into the curvaceousness of my mother's thirty-one-year-old sister, a tiny, lively Thumbelina seemingly timid in no way and formed after the model of hills and apples, was a lifeless feeling of frenzy and nothing more, as though a rare, imperfectly printed treasure of a stamp that I knew to be priceless had accidentally turned up on an ordinary letter dropped by the postman into our Summit Avenue mailbox.

  "Aunt Evelyn?"

  "My darling."

  "Do you know that we're moving to Kentucky?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "I don't want to go, Aunt Evelyn. I want to stay at my school."

  She stepped sharply back from me, and with the air now of anything but a paramour, asked, "Who sent you here, Philip?"

  "Sent me? Nobody."

  "Who sent you to see me? Tell the truth."

  "It is the truth. Nobody."

  She returned to the chair behind the desk, and the look in her eyes made it necessary for me to do everything I could not to get up and run. But I wanted what I wanted too much to run.

  "There's nothing to be afraid of in Kentucky," she said.

  "I'm not afraid. I just don't want to have to move."

  Even her silence was all-embracing and, if I had indeed been lying, would have forced from me the confession she wanted. Her life, poor woman, was a perpetual state of intensity.

  "Can't Seldon and his mother go instead of us?" I asked.

  "Who is Seldon?"

  "The boy downstairs whose father died. His mother works for the Metropolitan now. How come we have to go and they don't?"

  "Wasn't it your father who put you up to this, dear?"

  "No. No. Nobody even knows I'm here."

  But I saw she still didn't believe me—her aversion to my father was too precious to be dislodged by the obvious truth.

  "Does Seldon want to go with you to Kentucky?" she asked me.

  "I didn't ask him. I don't know. I just thought I'd ask you if they could go instead."

  "My dear little boy, do you see the New Jersey map? Do you see these pins in the map? Each one represents a family chosen for relocation. Now look at the map of the whole country. See all the pins there? Those represent the location to which each New Jersey family has been assigned. Making these assignments involves the cooperation of many, many people, in this office, in the Washington headquarters, and in the state to which each family is moving. The biggest and most important corporations in New Jersey are relocating employees in a partnership with Homestead 42, and so much more planning, much, much more than you can begin to imagine, has gone into all of this. And, of course, no decision is made by any one person. But even if it was, and I were that person, and I could do something to keep you near your friends and your school, I would continue to think that you for one are going to benefit enormously by becoming something more than another Jewish child whose parents have made him too frightened ever to leave the ghetto. Look what your family has done to Sandy. You saw your brother in New Brunswick that night. You saw him talking to all those people about his adventure on the tobacco farm. Do you remember that night?" she asked me. "Weren't you proud of him?"

  "Yes."

  "And did it sound as though living in Kentucky was frightening and that Sandy was ever, for a moment, afraid?"

  "No."

  Here, having reached into her desk for something, she got up and came around again to where I was sitting. Her pretty face, with its large features and thickly applied makeup, suddenly looked to me preposterous—the carnal face of the ravenous mania to which, in my mother's judgment, her emotional younger sister had helplessly fallen prey. To be sure, for a child in the court of Louis XIV the ambitions and satisfactions of such a relative would never have attained the same intimidating aura of significance that Aunt Evelyn's did for me, nor would the worldly advancement of a cleric like Rabbi Bengelsdorf have seemed the least bit scandalous to my parents were they themselves raised at court as a marquis and a marchioness. Probably I couldn't have done any worse—I might well have done a lot better—seeking solace from the two nuns on the Lyons Avenue bus than from someone reveling in the pleasures of the standard, petty corruptions that proliferate wherever people compete for even the tiniest advantages of rank.

  "Be brave, darling. Be a brave boy. Do you want to sit on the front stoop of Summit Avenue for the rest of your life, or do you want to go out into the world like Sandy did and prove that you are as good as anyone? Suppose I'd been afraid to go to the White House and meet the president because people like your father say things about him and call him names. Suppose I'd been afraid to meet the foreign minister because they call him names. You cannot go around being afraid of everything that isn't familiar to you. You cannot grow up to be frightened like your parents. Promise me you won't."

  "I promise."

  "Here," she said, "I have a treat for you." And she handed me one of two little cardboard packets that she had been holding in her hand. "I got this for you at the White House. I love you, sweetheart, and I want you to have it."

  "What is it?"

  "An after-dinner chocolate. It's a chocolate wrapped in gold paper. And you know what's embossed right on the chocolate? The presidential seal. Here's one for you, and if I give you Sandy's, will you bring it to him for me?"

  "Okay."

  "This is what's on your table at the White House at the end of the meal. Chocolates in a silver dish. And the moment I saw them there I thought of the two boys in the world I most want to make happy."

  I got up, clutching the chocolates in my hand, and Aunt Evelyn put her arm tightly around my shoulder and walked me out past all the people working for her and into the corridor, where she pressed the button for the elevator.

  "What is Seldon's last name?" she asked me.

  "Wishnow."

  "And he's your best friend."

  How could I explain that I couldn't bear him? And so at last I lied and said, "Yes, he is," and, since my aunt did indeed love me and was not herself lying when she said she wanted to make me happy, only a few days later, after I'd finally disposed of the White House chocolates by waiting until no one was around and throwing them over the orphanage fence, Mrs. Wishnow received a letter from the Metropolitan informing her that she and her family were fortunate enough to have been chosen to move to Kentucky as well.

  On a Sunday afternoon at the end of May, a confidential meeting was convened in our living room for the Jewish insurance agents who, along with my father, were being relocated from the Metropolitan's Newark office under the auspices of Homestead 42. They all came with just their wives, having agreed that it would be best to leave the children at home. Earlier in the afternoon Sandy and I, joined by Seldon Wishnow, had arranged the chairs for the meeting, including a set of bridge chairs we'd carried upstairs from the Wishnows'. Afterward Mrs. Wishnow drove the
three of us to the Mayfair Theater in Hillside, where we would catch a double feature and then be picked up by my father when the meeting was over.

  The other guests were Shepsie and Estelle Tirschwell, who were only days from moving their family to Winnipeg, and Monroe Silverman, a distant cousin who'd recently opened a law office in Irvington, just above the haberdashery store owned by my father's second-older brother, Lenny, the uncle who supplied Sandy and me with new school clothes "at cost." When my mother suggested—out of her enduring respect for everything that one is taught to respect—that Hyman Resnick, our local rabbi, should be invited to attend the meeting, nobody else among the organizers who'd assembled in our kitchen the week before showed much enthusiasm for the idea and, after a deferential few minutes of discussion (during which my father said diplomatically what he always said diplomatically about Rabbi Resnick, "I like the man, like his wife, no doubt in my mind he does an excellent job, but he's really not very brilliant, you know"), my mother's proposal was tabled. Even though, to the delight of a small child, these intimate friends of our family spoke in as wide and entertaining a range of voices as the characters on The Fred Allen Show and were each as distinctively different-looking as the comic-strip figures in the evening paper—this was back when evolution's sly wit was still rampantly apparent, long before the youthful renovation of face and figure became a serious adult aspiration—they were very similar people at the core: they raised their families, budgeted their money, attended to their elderly parents, and cared for their modest homes alike, on most every public issue thought alike, in political elections voted alike. Rabbi Resnick presided over an unimposing yellow-brick synagogue at the edge of the neighborhood where everyone showed up in their High Holiday best for the three days each year of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur observances but otherwise returned there for little else, except, when necessary, to dutifully recite the daily prayer for the dead during the period prescribed. A rabbi was to officiate at weddings and funerals, to bar mitzvah their sons, to visit the ill in the hospital, and to console the bereft at the shiva; beyond that he did not play a role of any importance in their day-today lives, nor did any of them—including my respectful mother—expect him to, and not just because Resnick wasn't that brilliant. Their being Jews didn't issue from the rabbinate or the synagogue or from their few formal religious practices, though over the years, largely for the sake of living parents who came once a week to visit and eat, several of the households, ours among them, were kosher. Their being Jews didn't even issue from on high. To be sure, each Friday at sundown, when my mother ritually (and touchingly, with the devotional delicacy she'd absorbed as a child from watching her own mother) lit the Sabbath candles, she invoked the Almighty by his Hebrew title but otherwise no one ever made mention of "Adonoy." These were Jews who needed no large terms of reference, no profession of faith or doctrinal creed, in order to be Jews, and they certainly needed no other language—they had one, their native tongue, whose vernacular expressiveness they wielded effortlessly and, whether at the card table or while making a sales pitch, with the easygoing command of the indigenous population. Neither was their being Jews a mishap or a misfortune or an achievement to be "proud" of. What they were was what they couldn't get rid of—what they couldn't even begin to want to get rid of. Their being Jews issued from their being themselves, as did their being American. It was as it was, in the nature of things, as fundamental as having arteries and veins, and they never manifested the slightest desire to change it or deny it, regardless of the consequences.

  I'd known these people all my life. The women were close and reliable friends who exchanged confidences and swapped recipes, who commiserated with one another on the phone and looked after one another's children and regularly celebrated one another's birthdays by traveling the twelve miles to Manhattan to see a Broadway show. The men had not only worked for years in the same district office but met to play pinochle on the two evenings a month the women had their mahjong game, and from time to time, on a Sunday morning, a group of them went off to the old sweatbaths on Mercer Street with their young sons in tow—the offspring of this set happened all to be boys somewhere between Sandy's age and mine. On Decoration Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day the families would usually organize a picnic some ten miles west of our neighborhood at the bucolic South Mountain Reservation, where the fathers and the sons tossed horseshoes and chose up sides for softball and listened to a ball game on somebody's static-ridden portable radio, the most magical technology known to our world. The boys weren't necessarily the best of friends but we felt connected through our fathers' affiliation. Of us all, Seldon was the least robust, least confident, and, most painfully for him, least lucky, and yet it was to Seldon that I had managed to contract myself for the remainder of boyhood and probably beyond. He'd begun to shadow me more doggedly since he and his mother had learned of their relocation, and I could only think that because we two were going to be the sole Jewish pupils in the Danville elementary school system, I'd be expected—by the Danville Gentiles no less than by our parents—to be his natural ally and closest companion. Seldon's omnipresence might not be the worst that was awaiting me in Kentucky, but to the imagination of a nine-year-old it registered as an unendurable ordeal and accelerated the urge to rebel.

  How? I didn't know yet. All I'd felt so far was the pre-mutinous roiling, and all I'd done about it was to find a small, water-stained cardboard suitcase forgotten beneath the usable luggage in our cellar storage bin and, after cleaning it of mildew inside and out, hidden the clothing there that I surreptitiously took, piece by piece, from Seldon's room whenever my mother dragooned me into enduring my hour downstairs as a peevish student of chess. I would have taken my own clothes to stow away in the suitcase except that I knew my mother would discover what was missing and one day soon I'd have to come up with an explanation. She still did the wash on the weekends and put the laundered clothes back—as well as the dry cleaning that it was my job to collect from the tailor shop on Saturdays—and so mapped out in her head was an inventory of everyone's wardrobe that was complete down to the location of the last pair of socks. On the other hand, stealing clothes from Seldon was a snap, and—what with his having latched on to me as his other self—vengefully irresistible. Underclothes and socks were easy enough to get out of the Wishnow apartment—and down the cellar stairs to the suitcase—tucked beneath my undershirt. Stealing and hiding a pair of his trousers, a sport shirt, and a pair of his shoes posed a more difficult problem, but suffice it to say that Seldon was distractible enough for the theft to be accomplished and, for a time, to go unnoticed.

  Once having gathered together everything of his I needed, I couldn't have said what I planned to do next. He and I were about the same size, and on the afternoon when I dared to secrete myself in the bin and change out of my clothes and into Seldon's, all I did was to stand there and whisper, "Hello. My name is Seldon Wishnow," and feel like a freak, and not just because Seldon had become such a freak to me and I was being him but because it was clear from all my transgressive sneaking around Newark—and culminating in this costume party in the dark cellar—that I had become a far bigger freak myself. A freak with a trousseau.

  The $ 19. 50 left from Alvin's $ 20 also went into the suitcase, under the clothes. I then hurriedly got back into my own clothes, shoved the cardboard suitcase beneath the other luggage, and, before the angry ghost of Seldon's father could strangle me to death with a hangman's rope, ran for the alleyway and the outdoors. Over the next few days I was able to forget what I'd hidden and the unspecified purpose it was meant to serve. I could even count this latest little escapade as nothing seriously aberrant and as harmless as following Christians with Earl, until the evening when my mother had to rush downstairs to sit and hold Mrs. Wishnow's hand and make her a cup of tea and put her to bed, so wretched and distraught was Seldon's overworked mother because of her son's inexplicably "losing his clothes."

  Seldon meanwhile was up in our flat, where he
'd been sent to do his homework with me. He was plenty distraught himself. "I didn't lose them," he said through his tears. "How could I lose a pair of shoes? How could I lose a pair of pants?"

  "She'll get over it," I said.

  "No, not her—she doesn't get over anything. 'You're going to send us to the poorhouse,' she told me. Everything to my mother is 'the last straw.'"

  "Maybe you left them at gym class," I suggested.

  "How could I? How could I get out of gym class without any clothes on?"

  "Seldon, you had to leave them somewhere. Think."

  The next morning, before I headed for school and my mother left for work, she suggested my making a gift to Seldon of a set of my own clothes to replace his that had disappeared. "There's the shirt that you never wear—the one from Uncle Lenny's that you say is too green. And the pair of Sandy's corduroy trousers, the brown ones that never fit you right—I'm sure they would fit Seldon just fine. Mrs. Wishnow is beside herself, and it would be such a thoughtful gesture on your part," she said.

  "And underwear? Do you want to give him my underwear too? Should I take it off now, Ma?"

  "That's not necessary," she said, smiling to soothe my irritation. "But the green shirt and the brown corduroys and maybe one of your old belts that you don't use. It's entirely up to you, but it would mean a lot to Mrs. Wishnow, and to Seldon it would mean the world. Seldon worships you. You know that."

  I immediately thought, "She knows. She knows what I did. She knows everything."

  "But I don't want him walking around in my clothes," I said. "I don't want him telling everyone in Kentucky, 'Look at me, I'm wearing Roth's clothes.'"