Nemesis (7 page)

Whenever he tried at the graveside to summon up a thought appropriate to the occasion, he would remember the story his grandmother had told him about his mother and the fish. Of all her stories—standard inspirational stories about how clever Doris had been in school and how helpful she'd been around the house and how she'd loved as a child
to
sit at the cash register in the store ringing up the sales, just the way he did when he was small—this was the one that had lodged in his mind. The unforgotten event occurred on a spring afternoon long before her death and his birth, when, to prepare for Passover, his grandmother would walk up Avon Avenue to the fish store to choose two live carp from the fishmonger's tank and bring them home in a pail and keep them alive in the tin tub that the family used for taking baths. She'd fill the tub with water and leave the fish there until it was time to chop off their heads and tails, scale them, and cook them to make gefilte fish. One day when Mr. Cantor's mother was five years old, she'd come bounding up the stairs from kindergarten, found the fish swimming in the tin tub, and after quickly removing her clothes, got into the tub to play with them. His grandmother found her there when she came up from the store to fix her an after-school snack. They never told his grandfather what the child had done for fear that he might punish her for it. Even when the little boy was told about the fish by his grandmother—he was then himself in kindergarten—he was cautioned to keep the story a secret so as not to upset his grandfather, who, in
the first years after his cherished daughter's death, was able to deflect the anguish of losing her only by never speaking of her.

It may have seemed odd for Mr. Cantor to think of this story at his mother's graveside, but what else that was memorable was there to think about?

B
Y THE END
of the next week, Weequahic had reported the summer's highest number of polio cases of any school district in the city. The playground itself was geographically ringed with new cases. Across from the playground on Hobson Street a ten-year-old girl, Lillian Sussman, had been stricken; across from the school on Bayview Avenue a six-year-old girl, Barbara Friedman, had been stricken—and neither was among the girls who jumped rope regularly at the playground, though there were now less than half as many of them around since the polio scare had begun. And down from the playground on Vassar Avenue, the two Kopferman brothers, Danny and Myron, had also been stricken. The evening of the day he heard the news about the Kopferman boys, he telephoned their house. He got Mrs. Kopferman. He explained who he was and why he was calling.

"You!" shouted Mrs. Kopferman. "You have the nerve to call?"

"Excuse me," Mr. Cantor said. "I don't understand."

"What don't you understand? You don't understand that in summertime you use your head with children running around in the heat? That you don't let them drink from the public fountain? That you watch when they are pouring sweat? Do you know how to use the eyes that God gave you and watch over children during polio season? No! Not for a minute!"

"Mrs. Kopferman, I assure you, I am careful with all the boys."

"So why do I have two paralyzed children? Both my boys! All that I've got! Explain that to me! You let them run around like animals up there—and you wonder why they get polio! Because of you! Because of a reckless, irresponsible idiot like you!" And she hung up.

He had called the Kopfermans from the kitchen, after he had sent his grandmother downstairs to sit outside with the neighbors and he had finished cleaning up from dinner. The day's heat had not broken, and indoors it was suffocatingly hot. When
he hung up from the phone call he was saturated with perspiration, even though before eating he had taken a shower and changed into fresh clothes. How he wished his grandfather were around for him to talk to. He knew that Mrs. Kopferman was hysterical; he knew that she was overcome with grief and crazily lashing out at him; but he would have liked to have his grandfather there to assure him that he was not culpable in the ways she had said. This was his first direct confrontation with vile accusation and intemperate hatred, and it had unstrung him far more than dealing with the ten menacing Italians at the playground.

It was seven o'clock and still bright outdoors when he went three flights down the scuffed steps of the outside wooden staircase to visit for a moment with the neighbors before he took a walk. His grandmother was sitting with them in front of the building, using a citronella candle to keep the mosquitoes away. They sat on fold-up beach chairs and were talking about polio. The older ones, like his grandmother, had lived through the city's 1916 epidemic and were lamenting the fact that in the intervening years science had been unable to find a cure for the disease or come up with an idea of
how to prevent it. Look at Weequahic, they said, as clean and sanitary as any section in the city, and it's the worst hit. There was talk, somebody said, of keeping the colored cleaning women from coming to the neighborhood for fear that they carried the polio germs up from the slums. Somebody else said that in his estimation the disease was spread by money, by paper money passing from hand to hand. The important thing, he said, was always to wash your hands after you handled paper money or coins. What about the mail, someone else said, you don't think it could be spread by the mail? What are you going to do, somebody retorted, suspend delivering the mail? The whole city would come to a halt.

Six or seven weeks ago they would have been talking about the war news.

He heard a phone ringing and realized it was from their flat and that it must be Marcia calling from camp. Every school day for the past year they'd see each other at least once or twice in the corridors during school hours and then spend the weekends together, and this was the first extended period since they'd met that they were apart. He missed her, and he missed the Steinberg family,
who
had been kind and welcoming to him from the start. Her father was a doctor and her mother had formerly been a high school English teacher, and they lived, with Marcia's two younger sisters—twins in the sixth grade at Maple Avenue School—in a large, comfortable house on Goldsmith Avenue, a block up from Dr. Steinberg's Elizabeth Avenue office. After Mrs. Kopferman had accused Mr. Cantor of criminal negligence, he had thought about going to see Dr. Steinberg to talk to him about the epidemic and find out more about the disease. Dr. Steinberg was an educated man (in this way unlike the grandfather, who'd never read a book), and when he spoke Mr. Cantor always felt confident that he knew what he was talking about. He was no replacement for his grandfather—and no replacement, certainly, for a father of his own—but he was now the man he most admired and relied on. On his first date with Marcia, when he asked about her family, she had said of her father that he was not only wonderful with his patients but that he had a gift for keeping everybody in their household content and justly settling all her kid sisters' spats. He was the best judge of character she'd ever known. "My mother," she'd say, "calls him 'the impeccable thermometer of the family's emotional temperature.' There's no doctor I know of," she told him, "who's more humane than my dad."

"It's you!" Mr. Cantor said after racing up the stairs to get the phone. "It's boiling here. It's after seven and it's still as hot as it was at noon. The thermometers look stuck. How are you?"

"I have something to tell you. I have spectacular news," Marcia said. "Irv Schlanger got his draft notice. He's leaving camp. They need a replacement. They desperately need a waterfront director for the rest of the season. I told Mr. Blomback about you, I gave him all your credentials, and he wants to hire you, sight unseen."

Mr. Blomback was the owner-director of Indian Hill and an old friend of the Steinbergs. Before he went into the camp business, he had been a young high school vice principal in Newark and Mrs. Steinberg's boss when she was starting out as a new teacher.

"Marcia," Mr. Cantor said to her, "I've got a job."

"But you could get away from the epidemic. I'm so worried about you, Bucky. In the hot city with all those kids. In such close contact with all those
kids—and right at the center of the epidemic. And that heat, day after day of that heat."

"I've got some ninety kids at the playground, and so far, among those kids we've had only four polio cases."

"Yes, and two
deaths.
"

"That's still not an epidemic at the playground, Marcia."

"I meant in Weequahic altogether. It's the most affected part of the city. And it's not even August, the worst month of all. By then Weequahic could have
ten
times as many cases. Bucky, please, leave your job. You could be the boys' waterfront director at Indian Hill. The kids are great, the staff is great, Mr. Blomback is great—you'd love it here. You could be waterfront director for years and years to come. We could be working here every summer. We could be together as a couple and you'd be safe."

"I'm safe here, Marcia."

"You're
not
".

"I can't quit my job. This is my first year. How can I walk out on all those kids? I can't leave them. They need me more than ever. This is what I have to be doing."

"Darling, you're a fine and dedicated teacher, but that doesn't mean you're indispensable to a playground's summer program.
I
need you more than ever. I love you so much. I miss you so much. I dread the idea of something happening to you. What possible good are you doing our future by putting yourself in harm's way?"

"Your father deals with sick people all the time. He's in harm's way all the time. Do you worry about him that much?"

"This summer? Yes. Thank God my sisters are here at the camp. Yes, I worry about my father and about my mother and about everybody I love."

"And would you expect your father to pick up and leave his patients because of the polio?"

"My father is a doctor. He chose to be a doctor. Dealing with sick people is his job. It isn't yours. Your job is dealing with
well
people, with children who are healthy and can run around and play games and have fun. You would be a sensational waterfront director. Everybody here would love you. You're an excellent swimmer, you're an excellent diver, you're an excellent teacher. Oh, Bucky, it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And," she said, lowering her voice, "we could be alone up here. There's an island in the lake. We could canoe over there at night after lights out. We wouldn't have to worry about your grandmother or my parents or about my sisters snooping around the house. We could finally, finally be alone."

He could take all her clothes off, he thought, and see her completely naked. They could be alone on a dark island without their clothes on. And, with no one nearby to worry about, he could caress her as unhurriedly and as hungrily as he liked. And he could be free of the Kopferman family. He would not have any more Mrs. Kopfermans hysterically charging that he had given their children polio. And he could stop hating God, which was confusing his emotions and making him feel very strange. On their island he could be far from everything that was growing harder and harder to bear.

"I can't leave my grandmother," Mr. Cantor said. "How is she going to get the groceries up the three flights? She gets pains in her chest from carrying things up the stairs. I have to be here. I have to do the laundry. I have to do the shopping. I have to take care of her."

"The Einnemans can look after her for the rest of the summer. They'd go to the grocery store for
her. They'd do her few pieces of laundry. They'd be more than willing to help out. She babysits for them already. They're crazy about her."

"The Einnemans are great neighbors, but it's not their job. It's mine. I can't leave Newark."

"What shall I tell Mr. Blomback?"

"Tell him thank you but I can't leave Newark, not at a time like this."

"I'm not going to tell him anything," Marcia replied. "I'm going to wait. I'm going to give you a day to think about it. I'm going to call again tomorrow night. Bucky, you most definitely wouldn't be shirking the duties of your job. There's nothing unheroic about leaving Newark at a time like this. I know you. I know what you're thinking. But you're so brave as it is, sweetheart. I get weak in the knees when I think about how brave you are. If you come to Indian Hill, you'd really just be doing another job no less conscientiously. And you'd be fulfilling another duty you have to yourself—to be happy. Bucky, this is simply prudence in the face of danger—it's common sense!"

"I'm not going to change my mind. I want to be with you, I miss you every day, but I can't possibly leave here now."

"But you must think of your own welfare too. Sleep on it, sweetheart, please, please do."

It was the Einnemans and the Fishers whom his grandmother was sitting with outside. The Fishers, an electrician and his wife in their late forties, had an eighteen-year-old son, a marine, waiting to ship out from California to the Pacific, and a daughter who was a salesgirl for the downtown department store from which his father had embezzled, an inescapable fact that would flash through Mr. Cantor's mind whenever they happened to meet leaving for work in the morning. The Einnemans were a young married couple with an infant boy who lived directly downstairs from the Cantors. The baby was outside with them, sleeping in his carriage; since the child had been born, Mr. Cantor's grandmother had been helping to look after him.

They were still talking about polio, now by recalling its frightening precursors. His grandmother was remembering when whooping cough victims were required to wear armbands and how, before a vaccine was developed, the most dreaded disease in the city was diphtheria. She remembered getting one of the first smallpox vaccinations. The site of the injection had become seriously infected, and
she had a large, uneven circle of scarred flesh on her upper right arm as a result. She pushed up the half-sleeve of her housedress and extended her arm to show it to everyone.

After a while Mr. Cantor told them he was going to take a walk, and went off first to the drugstore on Avon Avenue and got an ice cream cone at the soda fountain. He chose a stool under one of the revolving fans and sat there to eat his ice cream—and to think. Any demand made upon him he had to fulfill, and the demand now was to take care of his endangered kids at the playground. And he had to fulfill it not for the kids alone but out of respect for the memory of the tenacious grocer who, with all his gruff intensity and despite all his limitations, had fulfilled every demand he ever faced. Marcia had it dead wrong—it would be hard to shun the responsibilities of his job any more execrably than by decamping to join her in the Pocono Mountains.