before. He could all but feel its juice trickling onto his hand, and for the first time he was frightened for himself. What was amazing was how long he had kept the fear in check.
He watched Kenny Blumenfeld weeping over his friends beset by polio, and suddenly he wanted to flee from working in the midst of these kids — to flee from the unceasing awareness of the persistent peril. To flee, as Marcia wanted him to.
Instead he sat quietly beside Kenny until the crying had subsided. Then he told him, 'I'll be back — I'm going to play for a while.' He stepped down off the bleachers and walked onto the field, where he said to Barry Mittelman, the third baseman, 'Get out of the sun now, get in the shade, get some water,' and taking Barry's mitt, he installed himself at third, vigorously working the pocket with his knuckles.
By the end of the day, Mr. Cantor had played at every position on the field, giving the boys on either side a chance to sit out an inning in the shade so as not to get overheated. He did not know what else to do to prevent the polio from spreading. Playing in the outfield, he'd had to hold his glove up to the peak of his baseball cap in order not to be blinded by the sun, a four o'clock sun no less punishing than the twelve o'clock sledgehammer. To his surprise, just beyond him on the school street he could hear the three sun-baked girls, still feverishly at it, still thrilling to the cadences of a thumping heart.
S, my name is Sally
And my husband's name is Sam…
At about five, when the boys were into the final inning of the last game of the day — the fielders with their sopping polo shirts cast aside on the nearby asphalt and the boys in the batter's box shirtless too — Mr. Cantor heard loud hollering from deep center field. It was Kenny Blumenfeld, enraged with, of all people, Horace. Mr. Cantor had noticed Horace down at the end of the bench earlier in the afternoon but soon lost track of him and couldn't remember seeing him again. Probably he'd gone off to meander around the neighborhood and had only just returned to the playground and, disposed as he was to go out onto the field and stand silent and motionless beside one of the players, had chosen to approach Kenny and be near the biggest boy on either team. Earlier in the day it was Kenny who, uncharacteristically, had been racked with sobs about the ravaging of his friends, and now, again uncharacteristically, it was Kenny who was shouting at Horace and threateningly waving him off with his mitt. Not only was Kenny the biggest boy, but without his shirt on it was apparent that he was the strongest one too. By contrast, Horace, wearing his usual summer outfit of an oversized half-sleeve shirt and ballooning cotton trousers with an elasticized waistband and long-outmoded brown-and-white perforated shoes, seemed undernourished to the point of emaciation. His chest was sunken, his legs were spindly, and his scrawny marionette arms, dangling weakly at his sides, looked as if you could snap them in two as easily as you break a stick over your knee. He looked as though a good fright could kill him, let alone a blow from a boy built like Kenny.
Instantly, Mr. Cantor sprang off the bench where he was seated and ran at full speed to the outfield while all the boys in the game and on the bleachers ran along with him and the three girls on the street stopped jumping rope, seemingly for the first time all summer.
'Get him away from me!' Kenny — the boy who was the model of maturity for the others, whom Mr. Cantor never had reason to admonish for failing to exercise self-control — that same Kenny was now howling, 'Get him away from me or I'll kill him!'
'What is it? What's going on?' Mr. Cantor asked. Horace stood there with his head hanging and tears rolling down his face and keening, emitting a kind of radio signal from high in the back of his throat — a thin, oscillating sound of distress.
'Smell him!' Kenny screamed. 'He has shit all over him! Get him the hell away from me! It's him! He's the one who's carrying the polio!'
'Calm down, Ken,' Mr. Cantor said, trying to take hold of the boy, who wildly fought his way free. They were surrounded by the players on both teams now, and when several of the boys rushed forward to grab Kenny by the arms and pull him back from where he was excoriating Horace, he turned to strike out at them with his fists, and all of them jumped away.
'I'm not calming down!' Kenny cried. 'He's got shit all over his underwear! He's got shit all over his hands! He doesn't wash and he isn't clean, and then he wants us to take his hand, and shake his hand, and that's how he's spreading polio! He's the one who's crippling people! He's the one who's killing people! Get out of here, you! Get! Go!' And again he waved his mitt violently in the air as though warding off the attack of a rabid dog.
Meanwhile, managing to keep clear of Kenny's flailing arms, Mr. Cantor was able to interpose himself between the hysterical boy and the terrified creature onto whom he was pouring out his rage.
'You have to go home, Horace,' Mr. Cantor quietly told him. 'Go home to your parents. It's time for your supper. It's time to eat.'
Horace did smell — he smelled horribly. And though Mr. Cantor repeated his words a second time, Horace kept on crying and keening and saying nothing.
'Here, Horace,' Mr. Cantor said and extended his hand to him. Without looking up, Horace took the hand limply in his and Mr. Cantor shook Horace's hand as heartily as he had shaken Dr. Steinberg's after receiving his permission to become engaged to Marcia the night before.
'How ya doin', Horace?' Mr. Cantor whispered, pumping Horace's hand up and down. 'How ya doin', boy?' It took a little longer than usual, but then, just as it always had in the past when Horace moseyed out to stand beside a player on the field, the handshake ritual did the trick, and Horace, assuaged, turned toward the playground exit to leave, whether for home or elsewhere nobody knew, probably not even Horace. All the boys who had heard Kenny's raving hung way back from Horace as they watched him lurch off alone into the wall of heat, while the girls, shrilly screaming 'He's after us! The moron is chasing us!' ran with their jump ropes toward the late-afternoon Chancellor Avenue traffic, ran as fast as they could from the sight of how deep the human blight can go.
To quiet Kenny down, Mr. Cantor asked him to stay behind when the rest of the boys headed off and to help him put the playground equipment away in the basement storage room. Then, quietly talking to Kenny as they walked, Mr. Cantor accompanied him to his house, down the hill on Hansbury Avenue.
'It's piling up on everyone, Ken. You're not the only one in the neighborhood,' he told him, 'who's feeling the pressure of the polio. Between the polio and the weather, there isn't anybody who isn't at the end of his rope.'
'But he's spreading it, Mr. Cantor. I'm sure of it. I shouldn't have gone nuts, I know he's a moron, but he's not clean and he's spreading it. He walks all over the place and drools over everything and shakes everyone's hand and that's how he spreads the germs everywhere.'
'First off, Ken, we don't know what spreads it.'
'But we
On the pavement in front of Kenny's house, Mr. Cantor took him firmly by his shoulders, and Kenny, shuddering with revulsion, instantly shook free of his hands and cried, 'Don't touch me! You just touched him!'
'Go inside,' Mr. Cantor said, still composed but retreating a step. 'Take a cold shower. Get a cold drink. Cool off, Ken, and I'll see you tomorrow up at the playground.'
'But you're only being blind to who's spreading it because he's so helpless! Only he's not just helpless — he's dangerous! Don't you understand, Mr. Cantor? He doesn't know how to wipe his ass, so he gets it all over everyone else!'
THAT EVENING, watching his grandmother while she served him his dinner, he found himself wondering if this was how his mother would have come to look if she had been lucky enough to live another fifty years — frail, stooped, brittle-boned, with hair that decades earlier had lost its darkness and thinned to a white fluff, with stringy skin in the crooks of her arms and a fleshy lobe hanging from her chin and joints that ached in the morning and ankles that swelled and throbbed by nightfall and translucent papery skin on her mottled hands and cataracts that had shrouded and discolored her vision. As for the face above the ruin of her neck, it was now a tightly drawn mesh of finely patterned wrinkles, grooves so minute they appeared to be the work of an implement far less crude than the truncheon of old age — an etching needle perhaps, or a lacemaker's tool, manipulated by a master craftsman to render her as ancient-looking a grandmother as any on earth.
There had been a strong resemblance between his mother and his grandmother when his mother was growing up. He had seen it in photographs, where, of course, he had first noticed his own strong resemblance to his mother, particularly in the framed studio portrait of her that rested on the bureau in his grandparents' bedroom. The picture, taken for her high school graduation when she was eighteen, was in the 1919 South Side yearbook that
