Nemesis (4 page)

F
ABYAN PLACE
was the last street in Newark before the railroad tracks and the lumberyards and the border with Irvington. Like the other residential streets that branched off Chancellor, it was lined
with two-and-a-half-story frame houses fronted by red-brick stoops and hedged-in tiny yards and separated from one another by narrow cement driveways and small garages. At the curb in front of each stoop was a young shade tree planted in the last decade by the city and looking parched now after weeks of torrid temperatures and no rain. Nothing about the clean and quiet street gave evidence of unhealthiness or infection. In every house on every floor either the shades were pulled or the drapes drawn to keep out the ferocious heat. There was no one to be seen anywhere, and Mr. Cantor wondered if it was because of the heat or because the neighbors were keeping their children indoors out of respect for the Michaels family—or perhaps out of terror of the Michaels family.

Then a figure emerged from around the Lyons Avenue corner, making its solitary way through the brilliant light burning down on Fabyan Place and already softening the asphalt street. Mr. Cantor recognized who it was, even from afar, by the peculiar walk. It was Horace. Every man, woman, and child in the Weequahic section recognized Horace, largely because it was always so disquieting to find him heading one's way. When the smaller children
saw
him they ran to the other side of the street; when adults saw him they lowered their eyes. Horace was the neighborhood's "moron," a skinny man in his thirties or forties—no one knew his age for sure—whose mental development had stopped at around six and whom a psychologist would likely have categorized as an imbecile, or even an idiot, rather than the moron he'd been unclinically dubbed years before by the neighborhood youngsters. He dragged his feet beneath him, and his head, jutting forward from his neck like a turtle's, bobbed loosely with each step, so that altogether he appeared to be not so much walking as staggering forward. Spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth on the rare occasions when he spoke, and when he was silent he would sometimes drool. He had a thin, irregular face that looked as if it had been crushed and twisted in the vise of the birth canal, except for his nose, which was big and, given the narrowness of his face, oddly and grotesquely bulbous, and which inspired some of the kids to taunt him by shouting "Hey, bugle nose!" when he shuffled by the stoop or the driveway where they were congregated. His clothing gave off a sour
smell
regardless of the season, and his face was dotted with blood spots, tiny nicks in his skin certifying that though Horace might have the mind of a baby, he also had the beard of a man and, however hazardously, shaved himself, or was shaved by one of his parents, before he went out every day. Minutes earlier he must have left the little apartment back of the tailor shop around the corner where he lived with his parents, an aged couple who spoke Yiddish to each other and heavily accented English to the customers in the shop and were said to have other, normal children who were grown and lived elsewhere—amazingly enough, one of Horace's two brothers was said to be a doctor and the other a successful businessman. Horace was the family's youngest, and he was out walking the neighborhood streets every day of the year, in the worst of summer as in the worst of winter, when he wore an oversized mackinaw with its hood pulled up over his earmuffs and black galoshes with the toggles undone and mittens for his large hands that were attached to the cuffs of his sleeves with safety pins and that dangled there unused no matter what the temperature. It was an outfit in which, trudging
along, he looked even more outlandish than he did ordinarily making the rounds of the neighborhood alone.

Mr. Cantor found the Michaels house on the far side of the street, climbed the stoop steps, and, in the small hallway with the mailboxes, pushed the bell to their second-floor flat and heard it ringing upstairs. Slowly someone descended the interior stairs and opened the frosted glass door at the foot of the stairwell. The man who stood there was large and heavyset, and the buttons on his short-sleeved shirt pulled tightly across his belly. He had grainy dark patches under his eyes, and when he saw Mr. Cantor he was silent, as though grief had left him too stupefied to speak.

"I'm Bucky Cantor. I'm the playground director at Chancellor and a phys ed teacher there. Alan was in one of my gym classes. He was one of the boys who played ball up at the playground. I heard what happened and came to offer my condolences."

The man was a long time answering. "Alan talked about you," he finally said.

"Alan was a natural athlete. Alan was a very thoughtful boy. This is terrible, shocking news. It's
incomprehensible. I came to tell you how upset I am for all of you."

It was very hot in the hallway, and both the men were perspiring heavily.

"Come upstairs," Mr. Michaels said. "We'll give you something cold."

"I don't want to bother you," Mr. Cantor replied. "I wanted to express my condolences and tell you what a fine boy you had for a son. He was a grownup in every way."

"There's iced tea. My sister-in-law made some. We had to call the doctor for my wife. She's been in bed since it happened. They had to give her pheno-barb. Come and have some iced tea."

"I don't want to intrude."

"Come. Alan told us all about Mr. Cantor and his muscles. He loved the playground." Then, his voice breaking, he said, "He loved life."

Mr. Cantor followed the large, grief-stricken man up the stairs and into the flat. All the shades were lowered and no lights were on. There was a console radio beside the sofa and two big soft club chairs opposite that. Mr. Cantor sat on the sofa while Mr. Michaels went to the kitchen and returned with a glass of iced tea for the guest. He motioned for Mr. Cantor to sit closer to him in one of the club chairs and then, sighing audibly, painfully, he sat in the other chair, which had an ottoman at its foot. Once he was stretched out across the ottoman and the chair, he looked as though he too, like his wife, were in bed, drugged and incapable of moving. Shock had rendered his face expressionless. In the near darkness, the stained skin beneath his eyes looked black, as if it had been imprinted in ink with twin symbols of mourning. Ancient Jewish death rites call for the rending of one's garments on learning of the death of a loved one—M\ Michaels had affixed two dark patches to his colorless face instead.

"We have sons in the army," he said, speaking softly so no one in another room could hear, and slowly, as if out of great fatigue. "Ever since they've been overseas, not a day has gone by when I haven't expected to hear the worst. So far they have survived the worst fighting, and yet their baby brother wakes up a few mornings back with a stiff neck and a high fever, and three days later he's gone. How are we going to tell his brothers? How are we going to write this to them in combat? A twelve-year-old
youngster, the best boy you could want, and he's gone. The first night he was so miserable that in the morning I thought that maybe the worst was over and the crisis had passed. But the worst had only begun. What a day that boy put in! The child was on fire. You read the thermometer and you couldn't believe it—a temperature of a hundred and six! As soon as the doctor came he immediately called the ambulance, and at the hospital they whisked him away from us—and that was it. We never saw our son alive again. He died all alone. No chance to say so much as goodbye. All we have of him is a closet with his clothes and his schoolbooks and his sports things, and there, over there, his fish."

For the first time, Mr. Cantor noticed the large glass aquarium up against the far wall, where not only were the shades drawn but dark drapes were pulled shut across a window that must have faced the driveway and the house next door. A neon light shone down on the tank, and inside he could see the population of tiny, many-hued fish, more than a dozen of them, either vanishing into a miniature grotto, green with miniature shrubbery, or sweeping the sandy bottom for food, or veering upward to suck at the surface, or just suspended stock-still
near a silver cylinder bubbling air in one corner of the tank. Alan's handiwork, Mr. Cantor thought, a neatly outfitted habitat fastidiously managed and cared for.

"This morning," Mr. Michaels said, gesturing back over his shoulder at the tank, "I remembered to feed them. I jumped up in bed and remembered."

"He was the best boy," Mr. Cantor said, leaning across the chair so he could be heard while keeping his voice low.

"Always did his schoolwork," Mr. Michaels said. "Always helped his mother. Not a selfish bone in his body. Was going to begin in September to prepare for his bar mitzvah. Polite. Neat. Wrote each of his brothers V-mail letters every single week, letters full of news that he read to us at the dinner table. Always cheering his mother up when she would get down in the dumps about the two older boys. Always making her laugh. Even when he was a small boy you could have a good time laughing with Alan. Our house was where all their friends came to have a good time. The place was always full of boys. Why did Alan get polio? Why did he have to get sick and die?"

Mr. Cantor clutched the cold glass of iced tea in his hand without drinking from it, without even realizing he was holding it.

"All his friends are terrified," Mr. Michaels said. "They're terrified that they caught it from him and now they are going to get polio too. Their parents are hysterical. Nobody knows what to do. What is there to do? What should we have done? I rack my brain. Can there be a cleaner household than this one? Can there be a woman who keeps a more spotless house than my wife? Could there be a mother more attentive to her children's welfare? Could there be a boy who looked after his room and his clothes and himself any better than Alan did? Everything he did, he did it right the first time. And always happy. Always with a joke. So why did he die? Where is the fairness in that?"

"There is none," Mr. Cantor said.

"You do only the right thing, the right thing and the right thing and the right thing, going back all the way. You try to be a thoughtful person, a reasonable person, an accommodating person, and then this happens. Where is the sense in life?"

"It doesn't seem to have any," Mr. Cantor answered.

"Where are the scales of justice?" the poor man asked.

"I don't know, Mr. Michaels."

"Why does tragedy always strike down the people who least deserve it?"

"I don't know the answer," Mr. Cantor replied.

"Why not me instead of him?"

Mr. Cantor had no response at all to such a question. He could only shrug.

"A boy—tragedy strikes a
boy.
The cruelty of it!" Mr. Michaels said, pounding the arm of his chair with his open hand. "The meaninglessness of it! A terrible disease drops from the sky and somebody is dead overnight. A child, no less!"

Mr. Cantor wished that he knew a single word to utter that would alleviate, if only for a moment, the father's anguished suffering. But all he could do was nod his head.

"The other evening we were sitting outside," Mr. Michaels said. "Alan was with us. He had come back from tending his plot in the victory garden. He did that religiously. Last year we actually ate Alan's vegetables that he raised all summer long. A breeze came up. Unexpectedly it got breezy. Do you
remember, the other night? Around eight o'clock, how refreshing it seemed?"

"Yes," Mr. Cantor said, but he hadn't been listening. He'd been looking across the room at the tropical fish swimming in the aquarium and thinking that without Alan to tend them, they would starve to death or be given away or, in time, be flushed down the toilet by somebody in tears.

"It seemed like a blessing after the broiling day we'd had. You wait and wait for a breeze. You think a breeze will bring some relief. But you know what I think it did instead?" Mr. Michaels asked. "I think that breeze blew the polio germs around in the air, around and around, the way you see leaves blow around in a flurry. I think Alan was sitting there and breathed in the germs from the breeze..." He couldn't continue; he had begun to cry, awkwardly, inexpertly, the way men cry who ordinarily like to think of themselves as a match for anything.

Here a woman came out of a back bedroom; it was the sister-in-law who was looking after Mrs. Michaels. She stepped gently with her shoes on the floor, as though inside the bedroom a restless child had finally fallen asleep.

Quietly she said, "She wants to know who you're talking to."

"This is Mr. Cantor," said Mr. Michaels, wiping his eyes. "He is a teacher from Alan's school. How is she?" he asked his sister-in-law.

"Not good," she reported in a low voice. "It's the same story. 'Not my baby, not my baby.'"

"I'll be right in," he said.

"I should be going," Mr. Cantor said and got up from his chair and set the untouched iced tea down on a side table. "I only wanted to pay my respects. May I ask when the funeral is?"

"Tomorrow at ten. Schley Street Synagogue. Alan was the rabbi's Hebrew school favorite. He was
everybody's
favorite. Rabbi Slavin himself came here and offered the shul as soon as he heard what had happened. As a special honor to Alan. Everybody in the world loved that boy. He was one in a million."

"What did you teach him?" the sister-in-law asked Mr. Cantor.

"Gym."

"Anything with sports in it, Alan loved," she said. "And what a student. The apple of everyone's eye."

"I know that," said Mr. Cantor. "I see that. I can't express to you how very sorry I am."

Downstairs, as he stepped out onto the stoop, a woman rushed out of the first-floor flat and, excitedly taking him by his arm, asked, "Where is the quarantine sign? People have been coming and going from upstairs, in and out, in and out, and why isn't there a quarantine sign? I have small children. Why isn't there a quarantine sign protecting my children? Are you a patrolman from the Sanitary Squad?"

"I don't know anything about the Sanitary Squad. I'm from the playground. I teach at the school."

"Who is in charge then?" A small, dark woman laden with fear, her face contorted with emotion, she looked as if her life had already been wrecked by polio rather than by her children's having to live precariously within its reach. She looked no better than Mr. Michaels did.