from the playground became excited when they spotted him out on Chancellor Avenue — since he lived not in the neighborhood but down in the South Side school district, they were used to seeing him only in his official capacities as gym teacher and playground director. He waved when they called 'Mr. Cantor!' and he smiled and nodded at their parents, some of whom he recognized from PTA meetings. One of the fathers stopped to talk to him. 'I want to shake your hand, young man,' he said to Mr. Cantor. 'You told those dagos where to get off. Those dirty dogs. One against ten. You're a brave young man.' 'Thank you, sir.' 'I'm Murray Rosenfield. I'm Joey's father.' 'Thank you, Mr. Rosenfield.' Next, a woman who was out shopping stopped to speak to him. She smiled politely and said, 'I'm Mrs. Lewy. I'm Bernie's mother. My son worships you, Mr. Cantor. But I have one thing to ask you. With what's going on in the city, do you think the boys should be running around in heat like this? Bernie comes home soaked to the skin. Is that a good idea? Look at what's happened to Alan. How does a family recover from something like this? His two brothers away in the war, and now this.' 'I don't let the boys overexert themselves, Mrs. Lewy. I watch out for them.' 'Bernie,' she said, 'doesn't know when to quit. He can run all day and all night if somebody doesn't stop him.' 'I'll be sure to stop him if he gets too hot. I'll keep my eye on him.' 'Oh, thank you, thank you. Everybody is very happy that it's you who's looking after the boys.' 'I hope I'm helping,' Mr. Cantor replied. A small crowd had gathered while he'd been talking to Bernie's mother, and now a second woman approached and reached for his sleeve to get his attention. 'And where's the Board of Health in all this?' 'Are you asking me?' Mr. Cantor said. 'Yes, you. Eleven new cases in the Weequahic section overnight! One child dead! I want to know what the Board of Health is doing to protect our children.' 'I don't work for the Board of Health,' he replied. 'I'm playground director at Chancellor.' 'Somebody said you were with the Board of Health,' she charged him. 'No, I'm not. I wish I could help you but I'm attached to the schools.' 'You dial the Board of Health,' she said, 'and you get a busy signal. I think they purposely leave the phone off the hook.' 'The Board of Health was here,' another woman put in. 'I saw them. They put a quarantine sign up on a house on my street.' Her voice full of distress, she said, 'There's a case of polio on my street!' 'And the Board of Health does nothing!' someone else said angrily. 'What is the city doing to stop this? Nothing!' 'There's got to be something to do — but they're not doing it!' 'They should inspect the milk that kids drink — polio comes from dirty cows and their infected milk.' 'No,' said someone else, 'it isn't the cows — it's the bottles. They don't sterilize those milk bottles right.' 'Why don't they fumigate?' another voice said. 'Why don't they use disinfectant? Disinfect
FABYAN 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.
