Nemesis (16 page)

"Nothing. It's just in a list of things that the mayor is now closing."

So if he'd remained in Newark a few days longer, he would never have had to quit. Instead he would have been released, free to do whatever he wanted and to go wherever he liked. If only he'd stayed, he would never have had to phone O'Gara and take what he took from O'Gara. If only he'd stayed, he would never have had to walk out on his kids and look back for a lifetime at his inexcusable act.

"Here. Here's the headline," she said. "'Day's Record in City Polio Cases. Mayor Closes Facilities.' Should I send you the article, darling? Should I tear it out?"

"No, no. Grandma, there are counselors waiting
to use the phone and I don't have more change anyway. I have to go. Goodbye for now."

M
ARCIA WAS WAITING
by the entrance to the dining lodge, and together, wearing heavy sweaters against the unseasonable cold, they slipped down to the waterfront, where they found the canoe and started off across the lake through a rising mist, the silence broken only by the slurp of the paddle blades dipping into the water. At the island they paddled around to the far side and dragged the canoe ashore. Marcia had brought a blanket. He helped her to shake it open and spread it in the clearing.

"What's happened?" she asked. "What's the matter?"

"News from my grandmother. Seventy-nine new cases in Newark overnight. Thirty new cases at Weequahic. Three new cases at the playground. Two hospitalized and one dead. Ronnie Graubard. A quick, bright little fellow, full of spark, and he's dead."

Marcia took his hand. "I don't know what to say, Bucky. It's dreadful."

He sat down on the blanket and she sat beside him. "I don't know what to say either," he told her.

"Isn't it time for them to close the playground?" she asked.

"They have. They've closed it. They've closed all the playgrounds."

"When?"

"As of tomorrow. The mayor's shutting them down, my grandmother said."

"Well, wasn't that the best thing to do? He should have done it a long time ago."

"I should have stayed, Marcia. For as long as the playground was open, I should never have left."

"But it was only the other day that you got here."

"I left. There's nothing more to say. A fact is a fact. I left."

He drew her close to him on the blanket. "Here," he said. "Lie here with me," and he pressed her body to his. They held each other without speaking. There was nothing more that he knew of to say or to think. He had left while all the boys had stayed, and now two more of them were sick and one was dead.

"Is this what you've been thinking about since you got here? That you left?"

"If I were in Newark I would go to Ronnie's funeral. If I were in Newark I would visit the families. Instead I'm here."

"You can still do that when you get back."

"That's not the same thing."

"But even if you had stayed, what could you have done?"

"It isn't a matter of
doing
—it's a matter of being there! I should be there now, Marcia! Instead I'm at the top of a mountain in the middle of a lake!"

They held each other without speaking. Fifteen minutes must have passed. All Bucky could think of were their names, and all he could see were their faces: Billy Schizer. Ronald Graubard. Danny Kopferman. Myron Kopferman. Alan Michaels. Erwin Frankel. Herbie Steinmark. Leo Feinswog. Paul Lippman. Arnie Mesnikoff. All he could think of was the war in Newark and the boys that he had fled.

Another fifteen minutes must have passed before Marcia spoke again. In a hushed voice she said to him, "The stars are breathtaking. You never see stars like this at home. I'll bet this is the first time you've ever seen a night sky so full of stars."

He said nothing.

"Look," she said, "how when the leaves move
they let the starlight through. And the sun," she said a moment later, "did you see the sun this evening just as it was beginning to go down? It seemed so close to camp. Like a gong you could reach out and strike. All that's up there is so vast," she said, still vainly, naively trying to stop him from feeling unworthy, "and we are infinitesimal."

Yes, he thought, and there's something more infinitesimal than us. The virus destroying everything.

"Listen," Marcia said. "Shhh. Hear that?" There had been a social at the rec hall earlier in the evening, and the campers who had stayed behind to clean up must have put a record on the record player to keep them company while they gathered up soda bottles and swept the floor and the rest of the kids went off with their counselors to get ready for lights out. Over the silence of the dark lake came Marcia's favorite song of the summer. It was the song that was playing on the jukebox at Syd's the day Bucky had gone to extend his condolences to Alan's family, the same day he'd learned from Yushy the counterman that Herbie had died too.

"'I'll be seeing you,'" Marcia sang to him softly, "'in all the old familiar places—'" And here she
stood, pulled him after her, and, determined not to let his spirits drop any further—and not knowing what else to do—she got him to begin to dance.

"'That this heart of mine embraces,'" she sang, her cheek pressed to his chest, "'all day through...'" And her voice rose appealingly on the elongated "through."

He did as she wanted and obligingly held her to him and, shuffling her slowly around the middle of the clearing that they had made their own, remembered the night before she'd left for Indian Hill at the end of June, when they'd danced together just like this to the radio music on her family's porch. It was a night when all they'd had to be concerned about was Marcia's going away for the summer.

"'In that small café,'" she sang, her voice thin and whispery, "'the park across the way...'"

Amid the island's little forest of leaning birches, their soft wood bent, as Marcia had explained, from the pounding they took in the hard Pocono winters, the two clung to each other with their unparalyzed arms, swaying together to the music on their unparalyzed legs, pressing together their unparalyzed trunks, and able now to hear the words only intermittently—"...everything that's light and gay
...think of you ... when night is new ... seeing you"—before the song stopped. Someone across the lake had lifted the arm of the record player and switched it off, and the lights in the rec hall went out one at a time, and they could hear kids calling to one another, "Night! Good night!" Then the flashlights came on, and from the dance floor of the island ballroom, he and Marcia could see points of light flickering here and there as each of the kids—safe, healthy, unafraid, unharmed—traced a path back to the cabins.

"We have each other," Marcia whispered, removing his glasses and hungrily kissing his face. "No matter what happens in the world, we have each other's love. Bucky, I promise, you'll always have me singing to you and loving you and, whatever happens, I'll always be standing at your side."

"We do," he said to her, "we have each other's love." Yet what difference does that make, he thought, to Billy and Erwin and Ronnie? What difference does that make to their families? Hugging and kissing and dancing like lovesick teenagers ignorant of everything—what could that do for anyone?

***

W
HEN HE GOT BACK
to the cabin—everyone there in the deep sleep induced by a day full of hiking and swimming and playing ball—he found a note on his bed from Donald. "Call your grandmother," it said. Call her? But he'd spoken to her only a couple of hours earlier. He sped out the door and raced down to the phone booth wondering what had happened to her and thinking he should never have left her alone to come to camp. Of course she couldn't manage by herself, not when she had those pains in her chest every time she tried to carry anything up the stairs. He'd left her alone and now something had happened.

"Grandma, it's Eugene. What's wrong? Are you all right?"

"I'm all right. I have some news. That's why I called the camp. I didn't want to alarm you, but I thought you would want to know right away. It's not good news, Eugene. I wouldn't have called long distance otherwise. It's more tragedy. Mrs. Garonzik phoned from Elizabeth a few minutes ago. To speak to you."

"Jake," Bucky said.

"Yes," she said. "Jake is dead."

"How? How?"

"In action in France."

"I don't believe it. He was indestructible. He was a brick wall. He was six feet three inches tall and two hundred and fifteen pounds. He was a powerhouse. He can't be dead!"

"I'm afraid it's true, darling. His mother said he was killed in action. In a town whose name I can't remember now. I should have written it down. Eileen is there with the family."

The mention of Eileen shocked him anew. Jake had met Eileen McCurdy in high school, and she'd been Jake's girl throughout his years at Panzer. The two were to marry and set up house in Elizabeth as soon as he returned from the war.

"He was so big and with such good manners," his grandmother was saying. "Jake was one of the nicest boys you ever brought around. I can see him now, eating right in the kitchen here that first night he came home with you for dinner. Dave came too. Jake wanted 'Jewish food.' He ate sixteen latkes."

"He did. Yes, I remember. And we laughed, all of us laughed." Tears were coursing down Bucky's face now. "Dave's alive, though. Dave Jacobs is alive."

"I can't say that I know, darling. There's no way I would know. I assume so. I hope so. I haven't heard
anything. But according to tonight's news, the war in France is not going well. They said on the radio that there are many dead. Terrible battles with the Germans. Many dead and many wounded."

"I can't lose both my friends," Bucky replied weakly, and when he hung up he headed not back to the cabin but down to the waterfront. There, despite the new rush of cold air pushing in, he sat on the diving dock and stared into the darkness, repeating to himself the lionizing epithets by which Jake was known on the sports page of the campus paper—Bruiser Jake, Big Jake, Man Mountain Jake ... He could no more imagine Jake dead than he could imagine himself dead, which didn't serve, however, to stop his tears.

At about midnight, he walked back to the pier, but instead of going up the hill to the cabin, he turned and went out again along the wooden walkway to the diving dock. He proceeded to pace the length of the walkway until a dim light began to illuminate the lake, and he remembered that in just such a light another of the dearly beloved dead, his grandfather, would drink hot tea out of a glass—tea spiked in winter with a shot of schnapps—before heading off to buy his day's produce at the Mulberry Street market. When school was out Bucky sometimes went with him.

He was still struggling to bring himself under control so as to return to the cabin before anyone awoke, when the birds in the woods started singing. It was dawn at Camp Indian Hill. Soon there'd be the murmur of young voices from the cabins and then the happy shouting would begin.

O
NCE A WEEK
, Indian Night was celebrated separately in the boys' and girls' camps. At eight, all the boys came together at the campfire circle in a wide clearing high above the lake. At the center of the circle was a pit lined with flat stones. The logs there were stacked horizontally and laid crisscross in log-cabin style, tapering upward some three feet from the two large, heavy logs at the base. The fire logs were ringed by a stone barrier of small, picturesquely irregular boulders. Some eight or ten feet back from the stone barrier the circle of benches began. The seats were made of split logs and the bases of stone, and they extended concentrically outward until there were four rows in all, divided into three sections. The woods began some twenty feet back of the last row of benches. Mr. Blomback called the
structure the Council Ring and the weekly gathering there the Grand Council.

At the edge of the Council Ring there was a teepee, larger and more elaborately embellished than the teepee at the camp entrance. That was the Council Tent, decorated at the top with bands of red, green, yellow, blue, and black, and with a border at the bottom of red and black. There was also a totem pole, whose crest was carved with the head of an eagle, and below that with a large unfurled wing jutting stiffly out to either side. The dominant colors of the totem pole were black, white, and red, the last two being the colors for the camp's color war. The totem pole stood about fifteen feet high and could be seen by anyone looking up from a boat on the lake. To the west, across the lake, where the girls were holding their own Indian Night, the sun was beginning to set, and full darkness would come by the time the Grand Council was over. Only faintly could you hear the post-dinner kitchen clatter from the dining lodge, while beyond the lake a striated sky drama, a long lava flow of burnt orange and bright pink and bloody crimson, registered the lingering end of the day. An iridescent, slow-moving summer twilight was creeping over Indian Hill,
a splashy gift from the god of the horizon, if there was such a deity in the Indian pantheon.

The boys and their counselors—each designated a "brave" for the evening—arrived at Grand Council dressed in outfits that in large part came out of the crafts shop. All wore beaded headbands, fringed tunics that were originally ordinary shirts, and leggings that were trousers stitched with fringe at the outside seam. On their feet they wore moccasins, some cut from leather in the crafts shop and a good many of which were high-top sneakers that had been wrapped like moccasins at the ankle with bead and fringe. A number of the boys had feathers in their headbands—dropped bird plumage that they'd found in the woods—some wore beaded armbands tied inches above the elbow, and many carried canoe paddles that were painted with symbols colored, like the totem pole, in red, black, and white. Others had bows borrowed from the archery shack slung over their shoulders—bows without the arrows—and a few carried simulated tom-toms of tightly drawn calfskin and drum beaters with beaded handles that they made in crafts. Several held in their hands rattles that were decorated baking-powder cans filled with pebbles. The youngest campers used their
own bed blankets wrapped around them as Indian robes, which also served to keep them warm as the evening temperature dropped.