Nemesis (21 page)

"Because it's no longer the night before you left for camp. Because I'm no longer the person you fell in love with. You delude yourself if you think that I am. You're only doing what your conscience tells you is right—I understand that."

"You don't at all! You're speaking nonsense! It's you who's trying to be noble by refusing to talk to me and refusing to see me. By telling me to leave you alone. Oh, Bucky, you're being so blind!"

"Marcia, marry a man who isn't maimed, who's strong, who's fit, who's got all that a prospective father needs. You could have anyone, a lawyer, a doctor—someone as smart as you are and as educated as you are.
That's
what you and your family deserve. And that's what you should have."

"You are infuriating me so by talking like this! Nothing in my entire life has ever infuriated me as much as what you are doing right now! I have never known anyone other than you who finds such comfort in castigating himself!"

"That's not what I'm doing. That's an absolute distortion of what I'm doing. I just happen to see the implications of what's happened and you don't.
You won't. Listen to me: things aren't the way they were before the summer. Look at me. Things couldn't be more different. Look."

"Stop this, please. I've seen your arm and
I don't care.
"

"Then look at my leg," he said, pulling up his pajama bottoms.

"Stop, I beg you! You think it's your body that's deformed, but what's truly deformed is your mind!"

"Another good reason to save yourself from me. Most women would be delighted if a cripple volunteered to get out of their life."

"Then I'm not most women! And you're not just a cripple! Bucky, you've
always
been this way. You could never put things at the right distance—never! You're always holding yourself accountable when you're
not.
Either it's terrible God who is accountable, or it's terrible Bucky Cantor who is accountable, when in fact, accountability belongs to
neither.
Your attitude toward God—it's juvenile, it's just plain silly."

"Look, your God is not to my liking, so don't bring Him into the picture. He's too mean for me. He spends too much time killing children."

"And that is nonsense too! Just because you got polio doesn't give you the right to say ridiculous things. You have no idea what God is! No one does or can! You are being asinine—and you're not asinine. You sound so ignorant—and you're not ignorant. You are being crazy—and you're not crazy. You were never crazy. You were perfectly sane. Sane and sound and strong and smart. But this! Spurning my love for you, spurning my family—I refuse to be a party to such insanity!"

Here the obstinate resistance collapsed, and she threw her hands up over her face and began to sob. Other patients who were entertaining visitors on nearby benches or being pushed in wheelchairs along the paved path in front of the institute could not but notice the petite, pretty, well-dressed young woman, seated beside a patient in a wheelchair, who was so visibly swept away by her sorrow.

"I'm completely baffled by you," she told him through her tears. "If only you could have gone into the war, you might—oh, I don't know what you might. You might have been a soldier and gotten over all this—whatever it is. Can't you believe that it's you I love, whether or not you had polio? Can't you understand that the worst possible outcome for
both of us is for you to take yourself away from me? I cannot bear to lose you—is there no getting that through to you? Bucky, your life can be so much easier if only you'll let it be. How do I convince you that we have to go on together? Don't save me, for God's sake. Do what we planned—marry me!"

But he wouldn't be budged, however much she cried and however heartfelt the crying seemed, even to him. "Marry me," she said, and he could only reply, "I will not do that to you," and she could only reply, "You're not doing anything to me—I am responsible for my decisions!" But there was no breaking down his opposition, not when his last opportunity to be a man of integrity was by sparing the virtuous young woman he dearly loved from unthinkingly taking a cripple as her mate for life. The only way to save a remnant of his honor was in denying himself everything he had ever wanted for himself—should he be weak enough to do otherwise, he would suffer his final defeat. Most important, if she was not already secretly relieved that he was rejecting her, if she was still too much under the sway of that loving innocence of hers—and under the sway as well of a morally punctilious father—to see the truth plainly for herself, she would
feel differently when she had a family and a home of her own, with happy children and a husband who was whole. Yes, a day would come, and not far in the future, when she would find herself grateful to him for his having so pitilessly turned her away—when she would recognize how much better a life he had given her by his having vanished from it.

W
HEN HE'D COMPLETED
the story of the final meeting with Marcia, I asked him, "How bitter does all this leave you?"

"God killed my mother in childbirth. God gave me a thief for a father. In my early twenties, God gave me polio that I in turn gave to at least a dozen kids, probably more—including Marcia's sister, including you, most likely. Including Donald Kaplow. He died in an iron lung at Stroudsburg Hospital in August 1944. How bitter should I be? You tell me." He asserted this caustically, in the same tone in which he'd proclaimed that her God would one day betray Marcia and plant a knife in her back too.

"It's not for me," I replied, "to find fault with any polio sufferer, young or old, who can't fully overcome the pain of an infirmity that never ends. Of course there's brooding over its permanence. But
there must in time be something more. You speak of God. You still believe in this God you disparage?"

"Yes. Somebody had to make this place."

"God the great criminal," I said. "Yet if it's God who's the criminal, it can't be you who's the criminal as well."

"Okay, it's a medical enigma.
I'm
a medical enigma," Bucky said confusingly. Did he mean perhaps that it was a
theological
enigma? Was this his Everyman's version of Gnostic doctrine, complete with an evil Demiurge? The divine as inimical to our being here? Admittedly, the evidence he could cull from his experience was not negligible. Only a fiend could invent polio. Only a fiend could invent Horace. Only a fiend could invent World War II. Add it all up and the fiend wins. The fiend is omnipotent. Bucky's conception of God, as I thought I understood it, was of an omnipotent being whose nature and purpose was to be adduced not from doubtful biblical evidence but from irrefutable historical proof, gleaned during a lifetime passed on this planet in the middle of the twentieth century. His conception of God was of an omnipotent being who was a union not of three persons in one Godhead, as in Christianity, but of two—a sick fuck and an evil genius.

To my atheistic mind, proposing such a God was certainly no more ridiculous than giving credence to the deities sustaining billions of others; as for Bucky's rebellion against Him, it struck me as absurd simply because there was no need for it. That the polio epidemic among the children of the Weequahic section and the children of Camp Indian Hill was a tragedy, he could not accept. He has to convert tragedy into guilt. He has to find a necessity for what happens. There is an epidemic and he needs a reason for it. He has to ask why. Why? Why? That it is pointless, contingent, preposterous, and tragic will not satisfy him. That it is a proliferating virus will not satisfy him. Instead he looks desperately for a deeper cause, this martyr, this maniac of the why, and finds the why either in God or in himself or, mystically, mysteriously, in their dreadful joining together as the sole destroyer. I have to say that however much I might sympathize with the amassing of woes that had blighted his life, this is nothing more than stupid hubris, not the hubris of will or desire but the hubris of fantastical, childish religious interpretation. We have heard it
all before and by now have heard enough of it, even from someone as profoundly decent as Bucky Cantor.

"And you, Arnie?" he asked me. "You're without bitterness?"

"I got the disease when I was still a kid. I was twelve, about half your age. I was in the hospital for close to a year. I was the oldest one on the ward," I said, "surrounded by little kids screaming and crying for their families—day and night these little kids searching in vain for a face they knew. They weren't alone in feeling deserted. There was plenty of fear and despair to go around. And plenty of bitterness growing up with a pair of stick legs. For years I lay in bed at night talking to my limbs, whispering, 'Move! Move!' I missed a year of grade school, so when I got back, I had lost my class and my classmates. And in high school I had some hard knocks. The girls pitied me and the boys avoided me. I was always sitting brooding on the sidelines. Life on the sidelines makes for a painful adolescence. I wanted to walk like everyone else. Watching them, the unbroken ones, out after school playing ball, I wanted to shout, 'I have a right to be running too!' I was constantly torn by the thought that it could so easily have been another way. For a while I didn't want to go to school at all—I didn't want to be reminded all day long of what people my age looked like and of all they could do. What I wanted was the tiniest thing in the world: to be like everyone else. You know the situation," I said to him. "I'll never be me as I was me in the past. I'll be this instead for the rest of my life. I'll never know delight again."

Bucky nodded. He who once, briefly, atop the high board at Indian Hill, was the happiest man on earth—who had listened to Marcia Steinberg tenderly lullabying him to sleep over the long-distance line in the tremendous heat of that poisonous summer—understood all too easily what I was talking about.

I told him then about a college roommate whom I moved out on in my sophomore year. "When I got to Rutgers," I said, "I was given the other Jewish polio victim to room with in the freshman dorm. That's how Noah paired students up in those days. This guy was physically far worse off than I was. Grotesquely deformed. Boy named Pomerantz. A brilliant scholarship student, high school valedictorian, pre-med genius, and I couldn't stand him. He drove me crazy. Couldn't shut up. Could never stifle his all-consuming hunger for pre-polio Pomerantz. Could not elude for a single day the injustice that had befallen him. Went ghoulishly on and on about it. 'First you learn just what a cripple's life is like,' he'd say to me. 'That's the first stage. When you recover from that, you do what little is to be done to avoid spiritual extinction. That's the second stage. After that, you struggle not to be nothing but your ordeal all the while that's all you're becoming. Then, if you're lucky, five hundred stages later, sometime in your seventies, you find you are finally able to say with some truth, "Well, I managed after all—I did not allow the life to be sucked out of me completely." That's when you die.' Pomerantz did great in college, easily got into medical school, and then
he
died—in his first year there he killed himself."

"I can't say," Bucky told me, "that I wasn't once attracted by the idea myself."

"I thought about it too," I said. "But then I wasn't quite the mess that Pomerantz was. And then I got lucky, tremendously lucky: in the last year of college I met my wife. And slowly polio ceased to be the only drama, and I got weaned away from railing at my fate. I learned that back there in Weequahic in 1944 I'd lived through a summerlong social tragedy that didn't have to be a lifelong personal tragedy too. My wife's been a tender, laughing companion for eighteen years. She's counted for a lot. And having children to father, you begin to forget the hand you've been dealt."

"I'm sure that's true. You look like a contented man."

"Where are you living now?" I asked.

"I moved to North Newark. I moved near Branch Brook Park. The furniture at my grandmother's place was so old and creaky that I didn't bother to keep it. Went out one Saturday morning and bought a brand-new bed, sofa, chairs, lamps, everything. I've got a comfortable place."

"What do you do for socializing?"

"I'm not much of a socializer, Arnie. I go to the movies. I go down to the Ironbound on Sundays for a good Portuguese meal. I enjoy sitting in the park when it's nice. I watch TV. I watch the news."

I thought of him doing these things by himself and, like a lovesick swain, attempting on Sundays not to pine for Marcia Steinberg or to imagine during the week that he'd seen her, age twenty-two, walking on one of the downtown streets. One would
have predicted, remembering the young man he'd been, that he would have had the strength to battle through to something more than this. And then I thought of myself without my family, and wondered if I would have done any better or even as well. Movies and work and Sunday dinner out—it sounded awfully bleak to me.

"Do you watch sports?"

Vigorously he shook his head as though I'd asked a child if he played with matches.

"I understand," I said. "When my kids were very young and I couldn't run around the yard with them, and when they were older and learned to ride bikes and I couldn't ride with them, it got to me. You try to choke down your feelings but it isn't easy."

"I don't even read the sports pages in the paper. I don't want to see them."

"Did you ever see your friend Dave when he came back from the war?"

"He got a job in the Englewood school system. He took his wife and his kids and he moved up there. No, I don't see him." Then he lapsed into silence, and it couldn't have been clearer that despite his stoical claim that what he did not have he lived without, he had not in the least accustomed himself to having lost so much, and that twenty-seven years later, he wondered still about all that had and had not happened, trying his best not to think of a multitude of things—among them, that by now he would have been head of the athletic program at Weequahic High.

"I wanted to help kids and make them strong," he finally said, "and instead I did them irrevocable harm." That was the thought that had shaped his decades of silent suffering, a man who was himself the least deserving of harm. He looked at that moment as if he had lived on this earth seven thousand shameful years. I took hold of his good hand then—a hand whose muscles worked well enough but that was no longer substantial and strong, a hand with no more firmness to it than a piece of soft fruit—and I said, "
Polio
did them the harm. You weren't a perpetrator. You had as little to do with spreading it as Horace did. You were just as much a victim as any of us was."