Nemesis

the people scattered throughout the congregation, upstairs and down, were openly wailing from the impact of his words? Mr. Cantor saw four boys from the playground exiting together from the service: the Spector boy, the Sobelsohn boy, the Taback boy, and the Finkelstein boy. They all wore ill-fitting suits and white shirts and ties and hard shoes, and perspiration streamed down their faces. It wasn't impossible that their greatest hardship that day was their being strangled in all that heat by a starched collar and a tie rather than their having their initial encounter with death. Still, they had dressed in their best clothes and come to the synagogue despite the weather, and Mr. Cantor walked up to them and took each by the shoulder and then reassuringly patted his back. 'Alan would be glad you were here,' he told them quietly. 'It was very thoughtful of you to do this.'

Then someone touched him on the back. 'Who are you going with?'

'What?'

'There — ' The person pointed to a car some way from the hearse. 'There, go with the Beckermans,' and he was pushed toward a Plymouth sedan parked down the curb.

It hadn't been his plan to go out to the cemetery. After the synagogue service, he intended to return to help his grandmother finish up the weekend chores. But he got into the car whose door was being held open for him and sat in the back seat beside a woman with a black-veiled hat who was fanning herself by waving a handkerchief in front of her face, whose powder was streaky with perspiration. In the driver's seat was a chunky little man in a dark suit whose nose was broken like his grandfather's and maybe for the same reason: anti-Semites. Seated alongside him was a plain, dark-haired girl of fifteen or sixteen, who was introduced as Alan's cousin Meryl. The elder Beckermans were Alan's aunt and uncle on his mother's side. Mr. Cantor introduced himself as one of Alan's teachers.

They had to sit in the hot car some ten minutes, waiting for the funeral cortege to form behind the hearse. Mr. Cantor tried to remember what Isadore Michaels had said in his eulogy about how Alan's life, while Alan lived it, had seemed to the boy to be endless, but invariably he wound up instead imagining Alan roasting like a piece of meat in his box.

They proceeded down Schley Street to Chancellor Avenue, where they made a left and began the slow trek up Chancellor, past Alan's uncle's pharmacy and toward the grade school and the high school at the top of the hill. There was hardly any other traffic — most of the stores were closed except for Tabatchnick's, catering to the Sunday morning smoked-fish trade, the corner candy stores that were selling the Sunday papers, and the bakery, selling coffee cake and bagels for Sunday breakfast. In his twelve years, Alan would have been out on this street a thousand times, heading back and forth to school and to the playground, going out to get something for his mother, meeting his friends at Halem's, walking all the way up and all the way down the hill to Weequahic Park to go fishing and ice-skating and rowing on the lake. Now he was riding down Chancellor Avenue for the last time, at the head of a funeral cortege and inside that box. If this car is an oven, Mr. Cantor thought, imagine the inside of that box.

Everyone in the car had been silent until they nearly reached the crest of the hill and were passing Syd's hot dog joint.

'Why did he have to eat in that filthy hole?' Mrs. Beckerman said. 'Why couldn't he wait to get home and take something from the Frigidaire? Why do they allow that place to remain open across from a school? In summertime, no less.'

'Edith,' Mr. Beckerman said, 'calm down.'

'Ma,' Alan's cousin Meryl said, 'all the kids eat there. It's a hangout.'

'It's a cesspool,' Mrs. Beckerman said. 'In polio season, for a boy with Alan's brains to go into a place like that, in this heat —'

'Enough, Edith. It's hot. We all know it's hot.'

'There's his school,' Mrs. Beckerman said as they reached the top of the hill and were passing the pale stone facade of the grade school where Mr. Cantor taught. 'How many children love school the way Alan did? From the day he started, he loved it.'

Perhaps the observation was being addressed to him, as a representative of the school. Mr. Cantor said, 'He was an outstanding student.'

'And there's Weequahic. He would have been an honor student at Weequahic. He was already planning to take Latin. Latin! I had a nickname for him. I called him Brilliant.'

'That he was,' Mr. Cantor said, thinking of Alan's father at the house and his uncle at the synagogue and now his aunt in the car — all of them gushing for the same good reason: because Alan deserved no less. They will lament to their graves losing this marvelous boy.

'In college,' Mrs. Beckerman said, 'he planned to study science. He wanted to be a scientist and cure disease. He read a book about Louis Pasteur and knew everything about how Louis Pasteur discovered that germs are invisible. He wanted to be another Louis Pasteur,' she said, mapping out the whole of a future that was never to be. 'Instead,' she concluded, 'he had to go to eat in a place crawling with germs.'

'Edith, that's enough,' Mr. Beckerman said. 'We don't know how he got sick or where. Polio is all over the city. There's an epidemic. It's every place you look. He got a bad case and he died. That's all we know. Everything else is talk that gets you nowhere. We don't know what his future would have been.'

'We do!' she said angrily. 'That child could have been anything!'

'Okay, you're right. I'm not arguing. Let's just get to the cemetery and give him a proper burial. That's all we can do for him now.'

'And the two other boys,' Mrs. Beckerman said. 'God forbid anything should happen to them.'

'They made it this far,' Mr. Beckerman said, 'they'll make it the rest of the way. The war will soon be over and Larry and Lenny will be safely home.'

'And they'll never see their baby brother again. Alan will still be gone,' she said. 'There's no bringing him back.'

'Edith,' he said, 'we know that. Edith, you're talking and you're not saying anything that everybody doesn't know.'

'Let her speak, Daddy,' Meryl said.

'But what good does it do,' Mr. Beckerman asked, 'going on and on?'

'It does good,' the girl said. 'It does her good.'

'Thank you, darling,' Mrs. Beckerman said.

All the windows were rolled down, but Mr. Cantor felt as though he were wrapped not in a suit but a blanket. The cortege had reached the park and turned right onto Elizabeth Avenue and was passing through Hillside and across the railroad overpass into Elizabeth, and he hoped that it wasn't much more time before they reached the cemetery. He imagined that if Alan lay roasting in that box for much longer, the box would somehow ignite and explode, and as though a hand grenade had gone off inside, the boy's remains would come bursting out all over the hearse and the street.

WHY DOES POLIO strike only in the summer? At the cemetery, standing there bareheaded but for his yarmulke, he had to wonder if polio couldn't be caused by the summer sun itself. At midday, in its full overhead onslaught, it seemed to have more than sufficient strength to cripple and kill, and to be rather more likely to do so than a microscopic germ in a hot dog.

A grave had been dug for Alan's casket. It was the second open grave Mr. Cantor had ever seen, the first having been his grandfather's, three years earlier, just before the war began. Then he'd been weighed down caring for his grandmother and holding her close to him throughout the cemetery service so that her legs didn't give way. After that, he'd been so busy looking after her and staying in every night with her and eventually getting her out once a week for a movie and an ice cream sundae that it was a while before he could find the time to contemplate all he himself had lost. But as Alan's casket was lowered into the ground — as Mrs. Michaels lunged for the grave, crying 'No! Not my baby!' — death revealed itself to him no less powerfully than the incessant beating of the sun on his yarmulke'd head.

They all joined the rabbi in reciting the mourner's prayer, praising God's almightiness, praising extravagantly, unstintingly, the very God who allowed everything, including children, to be destroyed by death. Between the death of Alan Michaels and the communal recitation of the God-glorifying Kaddish, Alan's family had had an interlude of some twenty-four hours to hate and loathe God for what He had inflicted upon them — not, of course, that it would have occurred to them to respond like that to Alan's death, and certainly not without fearing to incur God's wrath, prompting Him to wrest Larry and Lenny Michaels from them next.