Nemesis (10 page)

By the end of the day, Mr. Cantor had played at every position on the field, giving the boys on either side a chance to sit out an inning in the shade so as not to get overheated. He did not know what else to do to prevent the polio from spreading. Playing in the outfield, he'd had to hold his glove up to the peak of his baseball cap in order not to be blinded by the sun, a four o'clock sun no less punishing than the twelve o'clock sledgehammer. To his surprise, just beyond him on the school street he could hear the three sun-baked girls, still feverishly at it, still thrilling to the cadences of a thumping heart.

S, my name is Sally
And my husband's name is Sam...

At about five, when the boys were into the final inning of the last game of the day—the fielders with their sopping polo shirts cast aside on the nearby asphalt and the boys in the batter's box shirtless too—Mr. Cantor heard loud hollering from deep center field. It was Kenny Blumenfeld, enraged with, of all people, Horace. Mr. Cantor had noticed Horace
down at the end of the bench earlier in the afternoon but soon lost track of him and couldn't remember seeing him again. Probably he'd gone off to meander around the neighborhood and had only just returned to the playground and, disposed as he was to go out onto the field and stand silent and motionless beside one of the players, had chosen to approach Kenny and be near the biggest boy on either team. Earlier in the day it was Kenny who, uncharacteristically, had been racked with sobs about the ravaging of his friends, and now, again uncharacteristically, it was Kenny who was shouting at Horace and threateningly waving him off with his mitt. Not only was Kenny the biggest boy, but without his shirt on it was apparent that he was the strongest one too. By contrast, Horace, wearing his usual summer outfit of an oversized half-sleeve shirt and ballooning cotton trousers with an elasticized waistband and long-outmoded brown-and-white perforated shoes, seemed undernourished to the point of emaciation. His chest was sunken, his legs were spindly, and his scrawny marionette arms, dangling weakly at his sides, looked as if you could snap them in two as easily as you break a stick over your knee. He looked as though a good fright
could kill him, let alone a blow from a boy built like Kenny.

Instantly, Mr. Cantor sprang off the bench where he was seated and ran at full speed to the outfield while all the boys in the game and on the bleachers ran along with him and the three girls on the street stopped jumping rope, seemingly for the first time all summer.

"Get him away from me!" Kenny—the boy who was the model of maturity for the others, whom Mr. Cantor never had reason to admonish for failing to exercise self-control—that same Kenny was now howling, "Get him away from me or I'll kill him!"

"What is it? What's going on?" Mr. Cantor asked. Horace stood there with his head hanging and tears rolling down his face and keening, emitting a kind of radio signal from high in the back of his throat—a thin, oscillating sound of distress.

"Smell him!" Kenny screamed. "He has shit all over him! Get him the hell away from me! It's him! He's the one who's carrying the polio!"

"Calm down, Ken," Mr. Cantor said, trying to take hold of the boy, who wildly fought his way free. They were surrounded by the players on both
teams now, and when several of the boys rushed forward to grab Kenny by the arms and pull him back from where he was excoriating Horace, he turned to strike out at them with his fists, and all of them jumped away.

"I'm not calming down!" Kenny cried. "He's got shit all over his underwear! He's got shit all over his hands! He doesn't wash and he isn't clean, and then he wants us to take his hand, and shake his hand, and that's how he's spreading polio! He's the one who's crippling people! He's the one who's killing people! Get out of here, you! Get! Go!" And again he waved his mitt violently in the air as though warding off the attack of a rabid dog.

Meanwhile, managing to keep clear of Kenny's flailing arms, Mr. Cantor was able to interpose himself between the hysterical boy and the terrified creature onto whom he was pouring out his rage.

"You have to go home, Horace," Mr. Cantor quietly told him. "Go home to your parents. It's time for your supper. It's time to eat."

Horace did smell—he smelled horribly. And though Mr. Cantor repeated his words a second time, Horace kept on crying and keening and saying nothing.

"Here, Horace," Mr. Cantor said and extended his hand to him. Without looking up, Horace took the hand limply in his and Mr. Cantor shook Horace's hand as heartily as he had shaken Dr. Steinberg's after receiving his permission to become engaged to Marcia the night before.

"How ya doin', Horace?" Mr. Cantor whispered, pumping Horace's hand up and down. "How ya doin', boy?" It took a little longer than usual, but then, just as it always had in the past when Horace moseyed out to stand beside a player on the field, the handshake ritual did the trick, and Horace, assuaged, turned toward the playground exit to leave, whether for home or elsewhere nobody knew, probably not even Horace. All the boys who had heard Kenny's raving hung way back from Horace as they watched him lurch off alone into the wall of heat, while the girls, shrilly screaming "He's after us! The moron is chasing us!" ran with their jump ropes toward the late-afternoon Chancellor Avenue traffic, ran as fast as they could from the sight of how deep the human blight can go.

To quiet Kenny down, Mr. Cantor asked him to stay behind when the rest of the boys headed off and to help him put the playground equipment
away in the basement storage room. Then, quietly talking to Kenny as they walked, Mr. Cantor accompanied him to his house, down the hill on Hansbury Avenue.

"It's piling up on everyone, Ken. You're not the only one in the neighborhood," he told him, "who's feeling the pressure of the polio. Between the polio and the weather, there isn't anybody who isn't at the end of his rope."

"But he's spreading it, Mr. Cantor. I'm sure of it. I shouldn't have gone nuts, I know he's a moron, but he's not clean and he's spreading it. He walks all over the place and drools over everything and shakes everyone's hand and that's how he spreads the germs everywhere."

"First off, Ken, we don't know what spreads it."

"But we
do.
Filth, dirt, and shit," Kenny said, his outrage revving up again. "And he's filthy, dirty, and shitty, and he's spreading it. I know it."

On the pavement in front of Kenny's house, Mr. Cantor took him firmly by his shoulders, and Kenny, shuddering with revulsion, instantly shook free of his hands and cried, "Don't touch me! You just touched him!"

"Go inside," Mr. Cantor said, still composed but
retreating a step. "Take a cold shower. Get a cold drink. Cool off, Ken, and I'll see you tomorrow up at the playground."

"But you're only being blind to who's spreading it because he's so helpless! Only he's not just helpless—he's dangerous! Don't you understand, Mr. Cantor? He doesn't know how to wipe his ass, so he gets it all over everyone else!"

T
HAT EVENING,
watching his grandmother while she served him his dinner, he found himself wondering if this was how his mother would have come to look if she had been lucky enough to live another fifty years—frail, stooped, brittle-boned, with hair that decades earlier had lost its darkness and thinned to a white fluff, with stringy skin in the crooks of her arms and a fleshy lobe hanging from her chin and joints that ached in the morning and ankles that swelled and throbbed by nightfall and translucent papery skin on her mottled hands and cataracts that had shrouded and discolored her vision. As for the face above the ruin of her neck, it was now a tightly drawn mesh of finely patterned wrinkles, grooves so minute they appeared to be the work of an implement far less crude than the truncheon of old age—an etching needle perhaps, or a lacemaker's tool, manipulated by a master craftsman to render her as ancient-looking a grandmother as any on earth.

There had been a strong resemblance between his mother and his grandmother when his mother was growing up. He had seen it in photographs, where, of course, he had first noticed his own strong resemblance to his mother, particularly in the framed studio portrait of her that rested on the bureau in his grandparents' bedroom. The picture, taken for her high school graduation when she was eighteen, was in the 1919 South Side yearbook that Bucky leafed through often as a young schoolboy beginning to discover that the other boys in his class were not grandsons living with grandparents but sons living with a mother and father in what he came to think of as "real families." He best understood how precarious his footing in the world was when adults bestowed upon him the look that he despised, the pitying look that he knew so well, since he sometimes got it from teachers too. The look made only too clear that the intervention of his mother's aging parents was all that had stood between him and the bleak four-story red-brick building on nearby Clinton Avenue with its black iron fence and its windows of pebbled glass covered with iron grates and its heavy wooden doorway adorned with a white Jewish star and the broad lintel above it carved with the three most forlorn words he'd ever read:
HEBREW ORPHAN ASYLUM
.

Even though the graduation picture on the bedroom bureau was said by his grandmother to catch perfectly the kindly spirit that animated his mother, it was not his favorite photograph of her, because of the dark academic robe she wore over her dress, the sight of which never failed to sadden him, as if the robe in the picture were a portent, the harbinger of her shroud. Nonetheless, alone at home when his grandparents were working around the corner in the store, he would sometimes drift into his grandparents' room to run the tip of one finger over the glass that protected the picture, tracing the contours of his mother's face as though the glass had been removed and the face there was flesh. He did this despite its causing him to feel keenly not the presence he was seeking but rather the absence of one he'd never seen anywhere other than in photos, whose voice he'd never heard speaking his name, whose maternal warmth he'd never luxuriated in, a
mother who had never got to care for him or feed him or put him to bed or help him with his schoolwork or watch him grow up to be the first of the family slated to go to college. Yet could he truthfully say he hadn't been sufficiently cherished as a child? Why was the genuine tenderness of a loving grandmother any less satisfying than the tenderness of a mother? It shouldn't have been, and yet secretly he felt that it was—and secretly felt ashamed for harboring such a thought.

After all this time, it had suddenly occurred to Mr. Cantor that God wasn't simply letting polio rampage through the Weequahic section but that twenty-three years back, God had also allowed his mother, only two years out of high school and younger than he was now, to die in childbirth. He'd never thought about her death that way before. Previously, because of the loving care that he received from his grandparents, it had always seemed to him that losing his mother at birth was something that was meant to happen to him and that his grandparents' raising him was a natural consequence of her death. So too was his father's being a gambler and a thief something that was meant to happen and that couldn't have been otherwise. But now that he was
no longer a child he was capable of understanding that why things couldn't be otherwise was because of God. If not for God, if not for the
nature
of God, they
would
be otherwise.

He couldn't repeat such an idea to his grandmother, who was no more reflective than his grandfather had been, and he did not feel inclined to talk about it with Dr. Steinberg. Though very much a thinking man, Dr. Steinberg was also an observant Jew and might take offense at the turn of mind that the polio epidemic was inspiring in Mr. Cantor. He wouldn't want to affront any of the Steinbergs, least of all Marcia, for whom the High Holidays were a source of reverence and a time of prayer when she dutifully attended synagogue services with her family on all three days. He wanted to show respect for everything that the Steinbergs held dear, including, of course, the religion that he shared with them, even if, like his grandfather—for whom duty was a religion, rather than the other way around—he was an indifferent practitioner of it. And to be wholly respectful had always been easy enough until the moment he found his anger provoked because of all the kids he was losing to polio, including the
incorrigible Kopferman boys. His anger provoked not against the Italians or the houseflies or the mail or the milk or the money or malodorous Secaucus or the merciless heat or Horace, not against whatever cause, however unlikely, people, in their fear and confusion, might advance to explain the epidemic, not even against the polio virus, but against the source, the creator—against God, who made the virus.

"Y
OU'RE NOT WEARING
yourself down, are you, Eugene?" Dinner was over and he was cleaning up while she sat at the table sipping a glass of water from the icebox. "You rush to the playground," she said, "you rush to visit the families of your boys, you rush on Sunday to the funeral, you rush home in the evening to help me—maybe this weekend you should stop rushing around in this heat and take the train and find a bed for the weekend down the shore. Take a break from everything. Get away from the heat. Get away from the playground. Go swimming. It'll do you a world of good."

"That's a thought, Grandma. That's not a bad idea."

"The Einnemans can look in on me, and Sunday night you'll come home refreshed. This polio is wearing you out. That's no good for anyone."

Over dinner he had told her about the three new cases at the playground and said that he was going to telephone the families later, when they got home from the hospital.

Meanwhile, the sirens were sounding again, and very close to the house, which was unusual, since as far as he knew there'd been no more than three or four cases in the entire residential triangle formed by Springfield, Clinton, and Belmont avenues. Theirs were the lowest numbers for any neighborhood in the city. At the southern end of the triangle, where he lived with his grandmother and where the rents were half what they were in Weequahic, there had been but a single case of polio—the victim an adult, a man of thirty, a stevedore who worked at the port—while in the Weequahic section, with its five elementary schools, there had been more than a hundred and forty cases, all in children under fourteen, in the first weeks of July alone.