The plot against America (22 page)

A convent stood next to the orphans' residence. Both were simple red-brick buildings, and at the end of a summer's day you'd sometimes catch a glimpse of the orphans—white children, girls and boys, aged from about six to fourteen—sitting outdoors on the fire escape. I have no memory of seeing the orphans in a group anywhere else, certainly not running freely about the streets the way we did. A swarm of them would have discomfited me no less than did the unsettling appearance of the nuns, primarily because they were orphaned but also because they were said to be both "neglected" and "indigent."

Back of the residence hall, and unlike anything to be seen in our neighborhood—or anywhere else in an industrial city of close to half a million—was a truck farm of the kind that made New Jersey "the Garden State," back when compact family vegetable farms able to turn a small profit dotted the undeveloped rural reaches of the state. The food grown and harvested at St. Peter's went to feed the orphans, the dozen or so nuns, the old monsignor in charge, and the younger priest who was his assistant. With the help of the orphans, the land was worked by a resident German farmer called Thimmes—unless I'm remembering incorrectly and that was the name of St. Peter's monsignor, who'd been running the place for years.

At our public elementary school less than a mile away it was rumored that the nuns who instructed the orphans in class routinely smacked the stupidest of them across the hands with wooden rulers and that when a boy's offense was so gross as to be intolerable the monsignor's assistant was called in to beat him across the buttocks with the same whip the farmer used on the swaybacked pair of lumbering workhorses that pulled the plow for the spring planting. These horses we all knew and recognized because from time to time they'd wander together across the farm to the little wooded meadow at the southern boundary of St. Peter's domain and stick their heads inquisitively out above the gate that backed onto Goldsmith Avenue, where the crap game I'd come upon was taking place.

There was a chain-link fence about seven feet high at the edge of the playground on the near side of Goldsmith Avenue and a wire fence set in posts at the wooded edge of the truck farm on the far side, and since no houses had as yet gone up anywhere nearby and there was never much foot or automobile traffic to speak of, an almost sylvan seclusion was conveniently provided there for the neighborhood's tiny handful of losers to pursue their pleasures out of harm's way. The closest I'd ever come to one of these sinister conclaves before was when, during some playground game, I'd had to chase a ball that had rolled to where they all huddled together just beyond the fence, uttering imprecations at one another and saving their sweet talk for the dice.

Now, I was no righteous little foe of crapshooting, and I had begged Alvin to teach me how to play one afternoon when he was still on crutches and my mother had instructed me to accompany him to his dentist appointment and do things like drop his fare into the fare box and hold his crutches for him while he hopped onto the street from the bus's back door. That night, when everyone else had gone to sleep and we'd switched off the table lamp on the stand between our beds, he watched with a smile as, by the beam of my flashlight, I whispered, "Dice be nice," and soundlessly rolled three consecutive sevens across my sheets. Yet as I watched him now in the clutches of his inferiors, and remembered all that my family had sacrificed to prevent him from turning himself into a replica of Shushy, every obscenity I'd learned as his roommate flooded foully into my mind. I cursed him in behalf of my father, my mother, and especially my ostracized brother—was it for this that all of us had agreed to endure Alvin's objectionable behavior toward Sandy? Was it for this that he'd run off to fight in the war? I thought, "Take your fucking medal, gimp, and shove it!" If only he would learn his lesson by losing every last penny of his disability pension, but in fact he couldn't stop himself from winning, any more than he could stop himself from abandoning the desire to ever again be anyone's hero, and, having already raked in a big wad of bills, he held the dice to my lips and, in a gravelly voice with which he intended to be funny for his friends, he instructed me, "Blow on 'em—baby." I blew, he rolled and won yet again. "Six and one—making what?" he asked. "Seven," I obediently answered, "the hard way."

Shushy reached down to muss my hair and began calling me Alvin's mascot, as though "mascot" could encompass what I'd resolved to be for Alvin since he'd come home, as though a word so hollow and childish could account for why Alvin's King George medal was pinned to my undershirt. Shushy was dressed in a chocolate-colored double-breasted gabardine suit, with pegged trousers and wide, padded shoulders and flamboyant lapels, his favored getup whenever he went bopping around the neighborhood snapping his fingers—and, in my mother's words, "wasting his life"—while back in their tiny attic flat his mother hemmed a hundred dresses a day to meet the family's bills.

When he missed his point, Alvin drew all his winnings together and ostentatiously stuffed the bundle into his pocket—the man who broke the bank behind the high school. Then, by grasping the chain-link fence, he pulled himself to his feet. I knew (and not just from observing the tortured way he began limping about to get himself going) that a big boil had erupted on his stump the night before and that he wasn't in the best of shape that day. But he refused any longer to be seen on crutches by anyone outside the family, and before going off to team up with sleazy Shushy—and spend another day blatantly repudiating all the ideals that had made him a cripple—he harnessed the stump into the prosthesis however much it hurt.

"Goddamn legmaker" was all he said by way of complaint as he came up to put his hand on my shoulder.

"Can I go home now?" I whispered.

"Sure, why not?" and then he took two ten-dollar bills out of his pocket—nearly half my father's weekly paycheck—and flattened them against the palm of my hand. Never before had money seemed like something alive.

Instead of heading back across the playground, I took a slightly longer route home, proceeding down the Goldsmith Avenue hill to Hobson Street so that I could look up close at the orphanage horses. I had never dared to reach over and touch them, and before that day I'd never spoken to them the way other kids did, satirically calling these mud-spattered beasts drooling gooey saliva "Omaha" and "Whirlaway," which were the names of two of the greatest Kentucky Derby winners of our day.

I stopped a safe distance back from where the darkly gleaming high-relief eyes peered out above the orphanage fence, impassively monitoring through their long lashes the no man's land separating the stronghold of St. Peter's from the neighborhood of Jews beyond the pale. The chain was unlooped and hanging down off the gate. I had only to yank up on the latch and swing the gate open and the horses would be free to gallop away. The temptation was enormous—as was the spite.

"Fucking Lindbergh," I said to the horses, "Nazi fucking bastard Lindbergh!" and then, for fear that if I did fling open the gate, instead of the horses running free they'd use their big teeth to drag me into the orphanage, I darted down the street and, turning on Hobson, raced past the block-long row of four-family houses and out to the corner of Chancellor Avenue, where housewives I recognized were in and out of the grocery and the bakery and the butcher shop, and older boys whose names I knew were riding their bikes, and the tailor's son was carrying over either shoulder a load of newly pressed clothes for delivery, and where Italian singing issued onto the street through the shoemaker's doorway, his radio tuned as always to WEVD—the EVD to honor the persecuted socialist hero Eugene V. Debs—and where I was safe from Alvin, Shushy, the horses, the orphans, the priests, the nuns, and the parochial-school whip.

When I turned back up the hill toward home a man neatly dressed in a business suit fell in step beside me. It was still too early for the local workingmen to be getting home for dinner, and so I knew right off to be suspicious.

"Master Philip?" he inquired with a broad smile. "Do you ever listen to
Gangbusters
on the radio, Master Philip? About J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI?"

"Yes."

"Well, I work for Mr. Hoover. He's my boss. I'm an agent from the FBI. Here," he said, and he removed a billfold from an inside coat pocket and flipped it open to show me his badge. "If you wouldn't mind, I'd like to ask a few little questions."

"I don't mind, but I'm on my way home. I have to get home."

Immediately I thought about the two ten-dollar bills. If he searched me, if he had a warrant to search me, wasn't he going to find all that money and assume it was stolen? Wouldn't anybody? And until ten minutes earlier, for an entire lifetime, I'd been walking around with my pockets empty, out on the street without a penny to my name! My allowance of five cents a week I saved in a jelly jar with a slit Sandy chiseled into the lid with the can opener blade of his Boy Scout knife. Now I was walking around like a bank robber.

"Don't be frightened. Calm down, Master Philip. You've heard
Gangbusters.
We're on your side. We protect you. I just want to ask a few questions about your cousin Alvin. How's he doing?"

"He's fine."

"How's his leg coming along?"

"Good."

"He's able to walk okay?"

"Yes."

"Wasn't that him I saw over where you just came from? Wasn't that Alvin behind the playground? Out on the sidewalk, wasn't that Alvin with Shushy Margulis?"

I didn't reply, and so he said, "It's okay if they're shooting craps. That's no crime. That's just part of being a big man. Alvin must have shot craps a lot in the army hospital up in Montreal."

When I still wouldn't speak, he asked, "What were the fellas talking about?"

"Nothing."

"All afternoon they're out there, and they're talking about nothing?"

"They were just saying how much they were losing."

"Nothing else? Nothing about the president? You know who the president is, don't you?"

"Charles A. Lindbergh."

"Nothing about President Lindbergh, Master Philip?"

"Not that I heard," I answered truthfully.

But might he not have overheard
me
saying what I'd said to the horses? Impossible—and yet by now I was sure that he knew every move I'd made since Alvin came home from the war and gave me his medal. It was indisputable that he knew that I was wearing the medal. Why else was he looking me over from head to toe?

"Did they talk about Canada?" he asked. "About going to Canada?"

"No, sir."

"Call me Don, why don't you? And I'll call you Phil. You know what a fascist is, don't you, Phil?"

"I think so."

"Did they call anybody a fascist that you remember?"

"No."

"Don't rush yourself. Don't rush to answer. Take all the time you need. Try hard to remember. It's important. Did they call anybody a fascist? Did they say anything about Hitler? You know who Hitler is."

"Everybody does."

"He's a bad man, isn't he?"

"Yes," I said.

"He's against the Jews, isn't he?"

"Yes."

"Who else is against the Jews?"

"The Bund."

"Anyone else?" he asked.

I knew enough not to mention Henry Ford, America First, the southern Democrats, or the isolationist Republicans, let alone Lindbergh. Over the past few years, the list I heard at home of prominent Americans who hated Jews was far longer than that, and then there were the ordinary Americans, tens of thousands of them, maybe millions of them, like the beer drinkers we didn't want to live beside in Union and the owner of the hotel in Washington and the mustached diner who'd insulted us in the cafeteria near Union Station. "Don't talk," I told myself, as though a protected boy of nine were mixed up with criminals and had something to hide. But I must already have begun to think of myself as a little criminal because I was a Jew.

"And who else?" he repeated. "Mr. Hoover wants to know who else. Come clean, Phil."

"I
am,
" I insisted.

"How's your aunt Evelyn doing?"

"She's fine."

"She's getting married. Isn't that right, that she's getting married? You can at least answer that."

"Yes."

"And do you know who she's marrying?"

"Yes."

"You're a smart boy. I think you know more—a lot more. But you're too smart to tell me, aren't you?"

"She's marrying Rabbi Bengelsdorf," I said. "He's head of the OAA."

My saying that made him laugh. "Okay," he told me, "you go on home. Go home and eat your matzohs. Isn't that what makes you so smart? Eating the matzohs?"

We were now at the corner of Chancellor and Summit, and I could see the stoop of our house down at the end of the block. "Bye!" I cried, and didn't wait for the light to change but ran for home before I fell into his trap, if I hadn't fallen into it already.

There were three police cars parked on the street in front of our house, our alleyway was blocked off by an ambulance, and a couple of cops stood on the stoop talking together while another was posted beside the back door. The women on the block, most of them still in their aprons, were on their front stoops trying to figure out what was going on, and all the kids were huddled on the sidewalk across the street from our house, peering out at the cops and the ambulance from between the row of parked cars. Never before could I remember them silently gathered together like that, looking so apprehensive.

Our downstairs neighbor was dead. Mr. Wishnow had committed suicide. That was why everything I could never have expected to see was now right outside the door of our house. Weighing barely eighty pounds, he had been able to strangulate himself by stringing the living room curtain cords over the wooden rod in the back-foyer coat closet, then looping them around his neck and falling forward off the edge of the kitchen chair where he'd seated himself inside the closet. When Seldon, home from school, went to put his coat away, he found his father, in his pajamas, hanging facedown on the closet floor amid the family's rubbers and galoshes. My first thought on learning the news was that I no longer had to be fearful of hearing a coughing fit emanating from the dying man in the first-floor flat whenever I was alone in the cellar, or of hearing him in my bed on the floor above when I was trying to fall asleep. But then I realized that the ghost of Mr. Wishnow would now join the circle of ghosts already inhabiting the cellar and that, just because I was relieved he was dead, he would go out of his way to haunt me for the rest of my life.