Nemesis (15 page)

Yes, the playground in Newark was behind him. He would not leave Indian Hill. There he was prey to polio; here he was food for butterflies. Vacillation—a painful weakness previously unknown to him—would no longer subvert his assurance of what needed to be done.

***

B
Y THIS POINT
in the summer, the beginners in the boys' camp had progressed beyond blowing bubbles in the water and practicing the face-down float and were at least swimming the dog paddle; many were beyond that, well into the elementary backstroke and crawl, and a few of the beginners were already jumping into the deep water and swimming twenty feet to the shallow edge of the lake. He had five counselors on his staff, and though they seemed adept at handling boys of all ages and at conducting the swimming program under his supervision, Bucky found himself, from the first day, drawn into the water to work with what the counselors privately called the "sinkers," the young ones who were least sure of themselves and making the slowest progress and who seemed lacking in natural buoyancy. He would walk out along the pier to the deep-water platform where a counselor was instructing the older boys in diving; he would spend time with kids who were working hard to improve their butterfly stroke; but invariably he would return to the young ones and get down into the water with them and work on their flutter kick and their scissors kick and their frog kick, reassuring them with the support of his hands and just a few words
that he was right there and they were in no danger of choking on a mouthful of water, let alone of drowning. By the end of a day at the waterfront he thought, exactly as he had when he began at Panzer, that there could be no more satisfying job for a man than giving a boy learning a sport, along with the basic instruction, the security and confidence that all will be well and getting him over the fear of a new experience, whether it was in swimming or boxing or baseball.

A matchless day, with dozens to come. Before dinner he'd get his wettish welcome on the lips from the twins, who'd be waiting for him at the dining lodge steps and who sent up a cry of "Kiss! Kiss!" the moment he came into sight, and after dinner he had promised Donald Kaplow he would work with him on his dives. Then, at nine-thirty, off to the dark island with his wife-to-be. She'd left another note in an envelope at Mr. Blomback's office. "More. Meet me. M." He had already arranged with Carl to drive him into Stroudsburg during the week so he could buy Marcia's engagement ring.

About half an hour after dinner, while the boys from their cabin played in a pickup softball game on the diamond by the flagpole, he and Donald
went down to the dock for Bucky to watch Donald's springboard dives. Donald started off with a front dive, a back dive, and a front jackknife.

"Good!" Bucky said to him. "I don't understand what you think is wrong with them."

Donald smiled at the compliment but asked anyway, "Is my approach right? Is my hurdle right?"

"You bet they are," Bucky said. "You know what you want to do and you do it. You do a model jackknife. First the upper part of the body bends over and the legs do nothing. Then the lower part of the body comes up behind while the head and arms are stable. Right in every detail. Do you do a back somersault? Let's see it. Watch out for the board."

Donald was a natural diver and didn't exhibit a single one of the faults that Bucky might have expected to see in the back somersault. When Donald came up from the dive and was still in the water pushing the hair out of his eyes, Bucky called to him, "Good forceful spin. You keep the tuck nice and tight. Timing, balance—great job all around."

Donald climbed out of the water onto the dock, and when Bucky tossed him a towel, he rubbed himself dry. "Is it too chilly out here for you?" Bucky asked. "Are you cold?"

"No, not at all," Donald answered.

The sun was still radiant and the big sky still blue but the temperature had dropped close to ten degrees since dinner. Hard to believe that only days earlier he and his playground boys had been suffering the very heat that incubated the pestilence that was ravaging his city and making people crazy with fear. And dizzying to realize that up here every last thing had changed for the better. If only the temperature in Newark could drop like this and stay like this for the rest of July and August!

"You're shivering," Bucky said. "Let's pick up again same time tomorrow. How about it?"

"But just the forward somersault, please? I'll do it first from the end of the board," Donald said, and he took up his position with his arms in front, his elbows flexed, and his knees slightly bent. "This isn't my best dive," he said.

"Concentrate," Bucky said. "Upward arm lift and then tuck."

Donald readied himself and then dived forward and up, rolled into the tuck, and came down feet-first, making a classic vertical entry into the lake.

"Did I screw up?" Donald asked when he surfaced. He had to shade his eyes from the western
sun and the sparkling glare it threw across the water in order to see Bucky clearly.

"Nope," Bucky told him. "Momentarily your hands lost contact with your legs, but that didn't matter much."

"Didn't it? Let me do it again," he said, breast-stroking up to the ladder. "Let me get it right."

"Okay, Ace," Bucky said, laughing, and pinning on Donald the nickname he'd been dubbed with on the street as a little kid with pointy ears, back before his grandfather had stepped in to rename him for good. "One last forward somersault and we go inside."

This time, starting from the foot of the board, Donald began with his regular approach and takeoff and expertly completed the dive. His hands moved faultlessly from his shins to the sides of his knees and then to the sides of his thighs in the break.

"Great!" Bucky called to him as he emerged at the surface. "Great height, great spin. Nice and forceful from beginning to end. Where are all those mistakes you told me you make? You don't make any."

"Mr. Cantor," he said excitedly as he climbed back onto the dock, "let me show you my half twist
and my back jackknife and then we'll go in. Let me finish the sequence. I'm not cold, really."

"But I am," Bucky said, laughing, "and I'm dry and have a shirt on."

"Well," replied Donald, "that's the difference between seventeen and twenty-four."

"Twenty-three," said Bucky, laughing again and as pleased as he could be—pleased by Donald and his perseverance and filled with contentment knowing that Marcia and the twins were only steps away. It was almost as if they were a family already. As if Donald, only six years his junior, were Marcia's and his own son and, incongruously, the twins' nephew. "Look," he said, "the temperature is going down by the minute. We've got the whole rest of the summer to practice out here." And he tossed Donald his sweatshirt to put on and, for good measure, had him wrap the towel around the waist of his wet trunks.

On the trudge up the slope to the cabin, Donald said, "I want to join the naval air corps when I'm eighteen. My best friend went in a year ago. We write all the time. He told me about the training. It's tough. But I want to get into the war before it
ends. I want to fly against the Japs. I've wanted to since Pearl Harbor. I was fourteen when the war began, old enough to know what was happening and to want to do something about it. I want to be in on it when the Japs surrender. What a day that's going to be."

"I hope you get the chance," Bucky told him.

"What kept you out, Mr. Cantor?"

"My eyesight. These things." He tapped his glasses with a fingernail. "I've got my closest buddies fighting in France. They jumped into Normandy on D-Day. I wish I could have been with them."

"I follow the war in the Pacific," Donald said. "In Europe it's going to be quick now. This is the beginning of the end for Germany. But in the Pacific there's still plenty of fighting to be done. Last month, in the Marianas, we destroyed one hundred forty Jap planes in two days. Imagine being in on that."

"There's plenty of fighting left on both fronts," Bucky told him. "You won't miss out."

As they mounted the Comanche cabin steps, Donald asked, "Can you watch the rest of the dives after dinner tomorrow night?"

"Sure I can."

"And thanks, Mr. Cantor, for giving me all that time."

And there on the cabin porch, Donald reached out a bit stiffly to shake his hand—a surprising formality with its own ingratiating appeal. One session at the diving board and already they were like old friends, though while standing there with Donald at the end of a beautiful summer day, Bucky was unexpectedly stung by the thought of all the boys he'd abandoned on the playground. Try as he would to take delight in everything here, he couldn't yet succeed entirely in shutting out the inexcusable act and the place where he was no longer esteemed.

B
ETWEEN THE TIME
that he left Donald and had arranged to meet Marcia, he went to the phone booth back of the camp office to call his grandmother. Probably he wasn't going to catch her in, because she would be sitting outside on a beach chair with the Einnemans and the Fishers, but as it happened, though the heat was supposed to return again the next day, the city had cooled off for twenty-four hours and she was able to sit in their flat with the windows open and the fan on and to
listen to her programs on the radio. She asked how he was and how Marcia and the twins were, and when he told her that he and Marcia were getting engaged, she said, "I don't know whether to laugh or cry. My Eugene."

"Laugh," he said, laughing.

"Yes, I'm happy for you, darling," she said, "but I wish your mother had lived to see this. I only wish she had lived to see the man her son turned out to be. I wish Grandpa could be here. He would be excited for his boy. So proud. Dr. Steinberg's daughter."

"I wish he could be here too, Grandma. I think about him up here," Bucky said. "I thought about him yesterday when I went off the high board. I remembered how he taught me to swim at the Y. I was about six. He threw me into the pool and that was it. How are you, Grandma? Are the Einnemans looking after you all right?"

"Of course they are. Don't you worry about me. The Einnemans are very helpful, and I can take care of myself anyway. Eugene, I have to tell you something. There have been thirty new cases of polio in the Weequahic section. Seventy-nine in the city in just the last day. Nineteen dead. All records. And
there have been more cases of polio at the Chancellor playground. Selma Shankman called me. She told me the boys' names and I wrote them down."

"Who are they, Grandma?"

"Let me get my glasses. Let me get the piece of paper," she said.

Several counselors were now standing in line outside the booth waiting to use the phone, and he signaled to them through the glass that he would be only another few minutes. Meanwhile, he waited in dread to hear the names. Why cripple children, he thought. Why a disease that cripples children? Why destroy our irreplaceable children? They're the best kids in the world.

"Eugene?"

"I'm here."

"All right. These are the names. These are the boys who are hospitalized. Billy Schizer and Erwin Frankel. And one death."

"Who died?

"A boy named Ronald Graubard. He got sick and died overnight. Did you know him?"

"I know him, Grandma, yes. I know him from the playground and from school. I know them all. Ronnie is dead. I can't believe it."

"I'm sorry to have to tell you," his grandmother said, "but I thought, because you were so close to all those boys, you would want to know."

"You were right. Of course I want to know."

"There are people in the city who are calling for a quarantine of the Weequahic section. There's talk from the mayor's office about a quarantine," she told him.

"A quarantine of all of Weequahic?"

"Yes. Barricading it off so nobody can go in or out. They would close it off at the Irvington line and the Hillside line and then at Hawthorne Avenue and at Elizabeth Avenue. That's what it said in tonight's paper. They even printed a map."

"But there are tens of thousands of people there, people who have jobs and have to go to work. They can't just pen people in like that, can they?"

"Things are bad, Eugene. People are up in arms. People are terrified. Everybody is frightened for their children. Thank God you're away. The bus drivers on the eight and fourteen lines say they won't drive into the Weequahic section unless they have protective masks. Some say they won't drive in there at all. The mailmen don't want to deliver mail there. The truck drivers who transport supplies to the stores, to the groceries, to the gas stations, and so on don't want to go in either. Strangers drive through with their windows rolled up no matter how hot it is outside. The anti-Semites are saying that it's because they're Jews that polio spreads there. Because of all the Jews—that's why Weequahic is the center of the paralysis and why the Jews should be isolated. Some of them sound as if they think the best way to get rid of the polio epidemic would be to burn down Weequahic with all the Jews in it. There is a lot of bad feeling because of the crazy things people are saying out of their fear. Out of their fear and out of their hatred. I was born in the city, and I've never known anything like this in my life. It's as if everything everywhere is collapsing."

"Yes, it sounds very bad," he said, dropping the last of his coins into the phone.

"And, Eugene, of course—I almost forgot. They're shutting down the playgrounds. As of tomorrow. Not just Chancellor but all over the city."

"They are? But the mayor was set on keeping them open."

"It's in tonight's paper. All the places where children congregate are being shut down. I have the
article in front of me. Movie theaters are shutting down for children under sixteen. The city pool is shutting down. The public library with all its branches is shutting down. Pastors are shutting down Sunday schools. It's all in the paper. Schools might not open on schedule if things continue like this. I'll read you the opening line. 'There is a possibility that the public schools—'"

"But what does it say specifically about the playgrounds?"