It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  I was so proud of the children.

  I was there, in the line. I am on the Board of Assembly and I had been part of the debate. My duty was to be there, but people said, You are eighty-six years old. They said this gently, but I answered, Yes, and my greatest regret is that I was so frightened when the Nazis came the first time that I obeyed.

  We stood. They came. At first, they just raised their fists, they shouted louder. Black people and Jews standing together, unafraid, it incensed them. Then they broke ranks, charged right up to us. They cursed, screamed Heil Hitler and Niggers burn in hell. The police came, pushed them back. That the police were there, fighting against them, it made them furious. This is our country. Someone threw a bottle. Die, nigger. Someone threw a punch. Fuck the Jews. So many people shouting. Scuffles and fights. One of the bat mitzvahs, a freckled girl named Leah, yelled to a Nazi. A troublemaker, Leah, a girl I always liked. To the Nazi, a boy who looked no older than she was, she screamed, Your mother is ashamed.

  The Nazi pulled Leah from the line, threw her down, and started punching her.

  I pulled out my gun, fired into the street beside him. I would have shot him without hesitation but I was afraid for Leah.

  Concrete sprayed. The Nazi boy leapt fast and fell over. He looked frantically for the person with the gun. I had it fixed on him, not four feet from his face. Lying on the ground, eyes wide, he begged. No, no, please. He raised his hands. Please don’t shoot me. I was holding the gun so hard my arms shook.

  So badly, with my whole body, I wanted to shoot him. More, I thought, than I had ever wanted anything. But as soon as that thought came I knew this: even more, I had wanted to see Ludvik from the window of my room. And then I thought, this Nazi boy, he is someone’s grandson. He is someone’s little brother. I let the gun lower slowly. My whole body slumped.

  The Nazi boy jumped to his feet and pulled away my gun. I staggered. Jew bitch! Jew bitch! He pointed it at me. Leah lunged up from the ground to knock his arm away. The gun fired. Two policemen also then shot their guns.

  • • •

  Leah’s funeral was this morning. Within twenty-four hours, we bury our dead. The entire synagogue was there, and the Mount Horeb congregation came, too. The Nazi boy, I don’t know when his funeral will be, or who will come. His name was in the newspapers but I don’t remember it.

  At the funeral, everyone came and said, Are you all right? I hope you know this isn’t your fault. I know. Directly from the funeral I came home. I sat on my bed and wrapped myself in my blanket and I took these pills, all these pills. But not because I think it was my fault.

  It’s only, nothing has changed.

  If we’re silent, if we speak up; if we’re cowardly, if we’re brave; if we’re unwary, if we’re prepared; if we’re harsh, if we’re merciful: the ending is the same.

  I wanted to save Ludvik.

  I wanted the children to know who they were, to be ready.

  I wanted to show the Nazi boy pity, to let him live.

  I wanted to save Leah.

  Finally, now, there is nothing I want.

  S. J. ROZAN has won multiple awards, including the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, Macavity, the Japanese Maltese Falcon Society Falcon, and the Private Eye Writers of America Life Achievement. She’s written fifteen novels, thirteen under her own name and two with Carlos Dews as “Sam Cabot.” She’s edited/coedited two short story anthologies, and many of her own seventy-five-plus short stories have appeared in various “Best of the Year” collections. S. J. was born in the Bronx and lives in Lower Manhattan. She is a card-carrying member of the ACLU. www.sjrozan.net.

  RICHARD RUSSO

  * * *

  Top Step

  My maternal grandfather served in both world wars, too young for the first, too old for the second. In the Pacific he contracted malaria, from which he never fully recovered. What killed him, though, was emphysema, the result of breathing leather dust (he was a glove cutter) and smoking cigarettes. In other words he was poisoned on the job and also poisoned himself. The last years of his life he spent hooked up to an oxygen tank, gasping, his chest convulsing violently, as if it contained a trip-hammer. When my mother and I moved to Arizona from upstate New York to begin what we imagined would be new lives, I think we both understood that we were absolving ourselves of the duty of being present when his abused heart finally gave out.

  He’d bought the house we shared—my mother and I on the top floor, he and my grandmother on the bottom—so we’d have a place to live after my parents split up. Having himself grown up in a disorderly home, he prized order. Our lawn was mowed and edged in summer, our leaves raked and disposed of in autumn, our sidewalks shoveled in winter, our house repainted at the first sign of flaking. The clothes he wore were never expensive or showy, but they were always clean and, thanks to my grandmother, crisply ironed. He always hiked his trouser legs an inch or two at the knee before sitting down, the first human gesture I can recall imitating. Other gestures of his I’ve imitated my whole life and been the better man for it. I loved him with my whole heart and love him still.

  That said, I don’t imitate everything about him. During the Civil Rights Movement, I remember him making fun of a young black mother on the news when she complained about “not even having enough money to feed my little babies!” A natural mimic, his impersonation was spot-on and devastating. Had he been asked to explain his lack of sympathy for the woman’s plight, her hungry kids, I doubt he would’ve mentioned her race, and in his defense he was equally merciless in his imitations of white southern lawmen and politicians. But there can be no question he was stereotyping her. There would’ve been no doubt in his mind that the kids in question all had different fathers and that producing more hungry kids was her only life skill. On the basis of this one anecdote, it would be hard to argue that the man I loved and love still was not racist. But I also remember the afternoon he ordered off his front porch a neighbor who was circulating a petition to keep a black family from buying a house on our street, explaining that this was America and we didn’t do things that way here. He must’ve seen how many names were already on the petition and known how many of his neighbors had accepted the man’s specious argument—that it wasn’t about these particular people and whether or not they were decent and hardworking, but rather a question of property values. If you let this family in, where do you draw the line?

  Where my grandfather drew it was right there, on our front porch, just one short step from the top.

  • • •

  My father drew lines, too.

  “Well,” he said, finally waking up and rubbing his eyes with his fists. “No need to tell me where we are.”

  Out late the night before, he’d slept most of the way to Albany. I’d just returned home from the university and next week would start working road construction with him. Before that could happen, I had to check in at the union hall where he and I were members. At the moment we were stopped at a traffic light in a predominantly black section of the city.

  “Please,” I begged him, because of course I knew where this was headed.

  “You’re telling me you can’t smell that?”

  On more than one previous occasion my father had claimed he could smell black people. Their blackness. Whether they were clean or dirty made no difference. Race itself, he claimed, had an odor.

  “You’re sure it isn’t poverty you’re smelling?” I ventured.

  “Yep,” he said. “And so are you. You just won’t admit it.”

  Mulignans, he called them, the Italian word for eggplant (“Ever see a white one?”). The irony was that by the end of August, after a summer of working in the hot sun, his own complexion would be darker than most light-skinned blacks. Certainly as dark as Calvin’s. When my father was spouting racist nonsense, I’d often remind him that one of his best friends was black, an incongruity that was not lost on Calvin either. Indeed, in a playful mood he would sometimes put his forearm up next to my father’s for compar
ison’s sake. “Except for the smell,” he’d say, grinning at me, if I happened to be around, “you can’t tell us apart.” One drunken night my father had apparently shared with Calvin his theory of smell.

  • • •

  Another story. It’s a few years later and my father and I are driving a U-Haul across the country from Tucson, Arizona, to Altoona, Pennsylvania, to my first academic job at a branch campus of Penn State. I’m pushing thirty, married, a father myself now, and broke. The plan is for my wife, who is pregnant with our second daughter, to join me later in the summer. My father is now in his fifties, but lean and strong from a lifetime of hard labor, his black Brillo Pad hair only just beginning to be flecked with gray. He’s a D-day guy. Bronze star. A genuine war hero. That he’s not prospered in the peace, as so many returning vets have, doesn’t seem to trouble him. That he’s alive and kicking seems enough. I myself am soft by comparison, soft in so many ways. Thanks to a series of deferments and then a high draft number, I’ve managed to stay out of Vietnam. My father’s opinion of that clusterfuck war was pretty much the same as mine, but I know it troubles him that I stayed home when others of my generation served and came back, like him, profoundly changed. But the “conflict” is finally over and I’m alive and I know he’s glad about that.

  His war we’ve never talked about, not due to any lack of interest on my part, but because men like my father and grandfather simply didn’t. Is it the realization that, with Vietnam over, I will probably never experience war firsthand that starts him talking today? Or just the fact that we’ve been cooped up in the cab of that U-Haul truck for so long? The worst was the Hedgerows, he begins, surprising me. (Not Normandy? Not the Hürtgen Forest?) Every time you turned around, there were more Germans stepping out from behind the hedges, hands in the air, wanting to surrender. (He slips unconsciously into present tense now, suddenly more in France than here in the cab of the truck.) We’re driving, going flat-out, miles and hours ahead of our supply train. Maybe days, for all we know. Here come another seven Germans, hands in the air. Then nine more. Another mile up the road, more hedgerows, more surrendering Germans. A dozen this time, maybe two. Hands in the air and guns on the ground at their feet. What do you do with them? You can’t take them with you. You can’t leave them behind because who knows? Maybe they take up their weapons again, and now they’re behind you, these same guys who have been shooting at you since Utah Beach.

  Did I ask the begged question? I don’t remember, but anyway, no need. He’s going to tell me. It’s the point of the story. And maybe the point of my not serving in Vietnam. In any company, he tells me, his voice thick, there’s always one who doesn’t mind taking these guys down the road.

  Down the road?

  Right, he says. Around the bend. Out of sight. If you don’t see it, it didn’t happen. None of your business. Your business is up ahead.

  And that was pretty much all my father had to say about the Second World War. And the one I managed to avoid.

  • • •

  “It occurs to me that I am America,” Allen Ginsberg wrote.

  The same thing occurs to me. I’m proud, like my grandfather and father, but also ashamed. I write this the week after young white men waving Nazi flags and members of the KKK and conspiracy-theory-stoked militiamen converged on Charlottesville and were not unambiguously denounced by the president of the United States. Is this the country my father and grandfather fought for? I ask because the shame I felt seeing those swastikas on display in Charlottesville was deeply personal, a betrayal of two men I loved, who at their best were brave men and good Americans and at their worst were far, far better than these despicable, pathetic, deluded fuckwads. My father and grandfather both believed, and not without justification, that America was the light and hope of the world. They also believed, with perhaps less justification, in me. Okay, not me, exactly, but the possibility inherent in my existence, in this time and this place, which, not coincidentally, is how I feel about my own children and grandchildren. Like my grandfather and father, I don’t demand or expect perfection in those I love. But I do hope that when their neighbor climbs the porch steps, petition in hand, my children and grandchildren will say, as my grandfather did, “That’s not the way we do things here. Not in America.” And I want them to know about the day when my father, in an uncharacteristically serious mood, took me aside and said, “Listen up, Dummy.” (Yeah, Dad?) “You’re ever in a tough spot? You need somebody you can trust? Go to Calvin.” I want them to understand that in the final analysis, as far as my father was concerned, Calvin wasn’t black. He was Calvin. I want them to understand that even though you couldn’t talk him out of the idea that black people had an odor and he held the entire race in low esteem, he made exceptions, as many as were necessary, in fact, and there were many. He preferred black men who worked hard to white men who didn’t. Like Whitman, he didn’t trouble himself about contradictions.

  What I most want my daughters and grandchildren to understand is that it’s okay to love flawed people with your whole heart and soul because if you don’t, you’ll end up with a low opinion of yourself. I want them to understand that the world poisons you, but that most of us are to one degree or another complicit in that poisoning. Inherent in being an American is cherishing ideals that are impossible to live up to, that invite failure and self-loathing when we don’t. Why commit to the impossible? Because it’s the only way forward. Because the many paradoxes of democracy demand nothing less. Because timid people don’t find the courage to face their neighbors on that top step. Cowed, they sign the petition. And not knowing what else to do with their enemies when at last they surrender, they take them down the road.

  • • •

  RICHARD RUSSO is the author of nine novels, two collections of short stories, a memoir, and several produced screenplays. Empire Falls won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and his adaptation of the book for HBO was nominated for an Emmy. His collection of essays, The Destiny Thief, will be published this spring. He and his wife, Barbara, live in Portland, Maine.

  JONATHAN SANTLOFER

  * * *

  Hope

  The car creeps across the Pulaski Skyway. Hope stares out the window at brackish water, the Hackensack River, and thinks of her father, a lawyer and intermittent tyrant, and how her mother waits on him like a slave and what he would say if he could see her right now.

  Off the bridge the car skids, the road slick in late February—not quite two weeks after Hope’s nineteenth birthday—a sheer icy drizzle varnishing the windshield.

  “Nothing to worry about,” says Barry, gripping the steering wheel, her boyfriend’s brother-in-law who has been enlisted for this job.

  The New Jersey Turnpike is better, wider, the ice not sticking as they cruise past elevated power lines and towers belching black smoke into a slate-gray sky.

  “God, it stinks here,” says Barry.

  It is very early on a Sunday morning, not many cars on the road and what sun there is, a hazy globule lolling just above the horizon, adds a sour lemony hue to the atmosphere.

  Her boyfriend, Artie, beside Hope in the back seat, turns to look behind them, the blue rental sedan still there.

  “What’s the exit again?” Barry asks.

  Artie, directions rumpled and clenched in his palm, says, “Thirteen.”

  Unlucky thirteen, Hope thinks, shutting her eyes.

  “You okay?” Artie asks.

  Hope looks at him then away, thinks of a conversation she had about art school, her mother saying Hope could go if she studied Art Ed, how she could teach and support a husband through medical school or law school, how she would have “something to fall back on,” and how, when she told that to Artie, they both laughed.

  The large green sign looms into view.

  Down the exit ramp to a stop sign, one turn then another, Artie supplying directions, Hope twisting in her seat, trying not to watch.

  “They’re still there,” says Barry, eying the sedan in hi
s rearview mirror.

  The service road runs parallel to the turnpike, close-set one-family homes lined up along its perimeter absorbing carbon monoxide like dermal patches. The road ends in a T.

  “Take a left over the highway,” Artie says, reading from the paper in his hand.

  On the overpass Hope looks down at cars whizzing beneath them, for a moment thinks she will shout: Stop! Let me out! I’m going to jump!

  “Take a right,” says Artie, his tone flat. “Then two blocks to a mall.”

  Through her window Hope surveys small signs of life: attached houses, a few leafless trees, boarded-up shops. No, she thinks, no signs of life at all.

  They pull into the strip mall—drugstore, supermarket, coffee shop, discount shoes—everything closed, New Jersey blue laws in effect.

  “Drive around back,” Artie says, “to the parking lot.”

  Hope holds her breath as they make the turn.

  “I guess dis is da place,” Barry singsongs, trying for cheerful. He parks at the edge of the lot.

  The blue rental follows and parks beside them.

  Artie’s college roommate, scrawny with glasses, an anti-Vietnam radical of some notoriety, gets out of the car, his girlfriend, Rochelle, dark-haired and petite, just behind him.

  Artie opens his door and gets out too. Hope doesn’t move. He leans back in, extends his hand, but she just sits there. “It’s going to be okay,” he says. Hope sucks in a breath then struggles out of the car, nods at the roommate’s girlfriend, whom she hardly knows though they are in this together, a freakish coincidence.

  The four of them stand together but apart, as if glued to their individual squares of asphalt.

  Hope asks, “What time is it?”

  “Ten to eight,” Artie says.