Nemesis

'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.'