Nemesis

was at the kitchen table in my skivvies in the dark and sweating like a pig from the heat. It had been another whopper of a day, and it hadn't cooled off any by midnight. The lights were out in all the flats across the way. I don't think anyone was awake on our whole street.'

'Did she sing to you?'

'A lullaby. It wasn't one I knew, but it was a lullaby. She sang it very, very softly. There it was, all by itself, over the phone. Probably one she remembered from when she was a kid.'

'So you had a weakness for her soft voice too.'

'I was stunned. Stunned by so much happiness. I was so stunned that I whispered into the phone, 'Are you really as wonderful as this?' I couldn't believe such a girl existed. I was the luckiest guy in the world. And unstoppable. You understand me? With all that love of hers, how could I ever be stopped?'

'Then you lost her,' I said. 'How did you lose her? That you haven't told me yet.'

'No, I haven't. I wouldn't let Marcia see me. That's how it happened. Look, maybe I've said enough.' Suddenly, made uneasy by a pang of shame for the sentiments he'd just confided, he flushed deeply. 'What the hell got me started? That letter. Finding that letter. I should never have gone looking for it.'

With his elbow on the table he dropped his reddened face into his good hand and with his fingertips rubbed at his closed eyelid. We had reached the hardest part of the story.

'What happened to end it with Marcia?' I asked.

'When she came up to Stroudsburg to the hospital, when I was out of isolation, I had them turn her away. She left me a note telling me that her kid sister had only a mild, nonparalytic case and after three weeks recovered completely. I was relieved to learn that, but I still didn't want to resume my relations with the family. Marcia tried a second time to see me when I was transferred down to Philadelphia. That time I let her. We had a terrible argument. I didn't know she had it in her — I'd never seen her openly angry at anyone before. After that, she never came back. We never made contact again. Her father tried to talk to me when I was in Philadelphia, but I wouldn't take the call. When I was working at the Esso station on Springfield Avenue, out of the blue one day he pulled in for gas. That was a long way for him to go for gas.'

'Was he there for her? To try to get you to come back?'

'I don't know. Maybe. I let another guy take the pump. I hid. I knew I was no match for Dr. Steinberg. I have no idea what happened to his daughter. I don't want to know. Whoever she married, let them and their children be happy and enjoy good health. Let's hope their merciful God will have blessed them with all that before He sticks His shiv in their back.'

It was an arrestingly harsh utterance from the likes of Bucky Cantor, and, momentarily, he seemed to have perturbed himself by making it.

'I owed her her freedom,' he finally said, 'and I gave it to her. I didn't want the girl to feel stuck with me. I didn't want to ruin her life. She hadn't fallen in love with a cripple, and she shouldn't be stuck with one.'

'Wasn't that up to her to decide?' I asked. 'A damaged man is sometimes very attractive to a certain type of woman. I know from experience.'

'Look, Marcia was a sweet, naive, well-brought-up girl with kindly, responsible parents who had taught her and her sisters to be polite and obliging,' Bucky said. 'She was a young new first-grade teacher, wet behind the ears. A slight slip of a thing, inches shorter even than me. It didn't help her being more intelligent than me — she still didn't have any idea of how to go about getting out of her mess. So I did it for her. I did what had to be done.'

'You've given this a lot of thought,' I said. 'All your thought, it sounds like.'

He smiled for one of the few times during our talks, a smile very like a frown, denoting weariness more than good cheer. There was no lightness in him. That was missing, as were the energy and the industry that were once at the center of him. And, of course, the athletic ingredient had completely vanished. It wasn't only an arm and a leg that were useless. His original personality, all that vital purposefulness that would hit you in the face the moment you met him, seemed itself to have been stripped away, lifted from him in shreds as though it were the thin swatch of bark that he'd peeled from the birch tree the first night with Marcia on the island in the lake at Indian Hill. We had been together one day a week at lunch over a period of a few months and never once did he lighten up, not even when he said, 'That song she liked, 'I'll Be Seeing You'—I've never been able to forget that either. Soupy, sappy, yet it looks like I'll remember it for as long as I live. I don't know what would happen if I had to hear it again.'

'You'd bawl.'

'I might.'

'You'd have a right,' I said. 'Anyone would be miserable, having renounced a true mate like that.'

'Oh, my old playground buddy,' he said, with more feeling than he'd spoken yet, 'I never thought that's how it would end with her. Never.'

'When she got angry with you — the time she came to see you in Philadelphia —'

'I never saw her again after that.'

'You've said. But what happened?'

He was in a wheelchair, he told me, a glorious autumn Saturday in mid-October, still warm enough for them to go outdoors and for her to sit on a bench on the lawn in front of the Sister Kenny Institute, beneath the branches of a tree whose leaves had turned and begun to fall, but not so warm that the polio epidemic in the northeastern states hadn't finally dissipated and died away. By then Bucky had not seen her or spoken to her in nearly three months, so she hadn't yet had a chance to observe how crippled he was. There had been an exchange of correspondence, not between Bucky and Marcia but between Bucky and Marcia's father. Dr. Steinberg had written to tell Bucky that he had an obligation to allow Marcia to visit him and tell him directly what was on her mind. 'Marcia and the family,' wrote Dr. Steinberg, 'deserve better from you than this.' Against a handwritten letter on personalized hospital stationery from a man of the doctor's stature, Bucky, of course, had no defense, and so the date and time of Marcia's visit were set, and the quarrel began almost immediately upon her arrival, when he noticed right off that her hair had grown out since he'd seen her last, making her look more womanly than she had at camp and prettier now than ever. She had dressed with gloves and a hat, just like the proper teacher whom he'd first fallen for.

There was nothing she could say that would change his mind, he announced, however much he would have loved just to reach out with his good hand and touch her face. Instead, he used his good hand to grasp his dead arm around the wrist and raise it to the level of her eyes. 'Look,' he said. 'This is what I look like.'

She did not speak, but she did not blink either. No, he told her, he was no longer man enough to be a husband and a father, and it was irresponsible of her to think otherwise.

'Irresponsible of me?' she cried.

'To be the noble heroine. Yes.'

'What are you talking about? I'm not trying to be anything other than the person who loves you and wants to marry you and be your wife.' And then she advanced the gambit that she had no doubt rehearsed on the train down. 'Bucky, it's not complicated, really,' she told him. 'I'm not complicated. Remember me? Remember what I said to you the night before I left for camp in June? 'We'll do it perfectly.' Well, we will. Nothing has changed that. I'm just an ordinary girl who wants to be happy. You make me happy. You always have. Why won't you now?'

'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