Nemesis

'There are. Birds don't sing at night.'

'Don't or do?'

'Oh, Bucky,' she whispered beseechingly, 'must we really go on like this? Undress me, please. Undress me now.'

After their weeks of separation, he had needed her to tell him that. He needed this intelligent girl to tell him everything, really, about life beyond the playground and the athletic field and the gym. He needed her entire family to tell him how to live a grown man's life in all the ways that nobody, including his grandfather, had yet done.

Instantly he undid the belt and the buttons on her shorts and slid them down over her legs to the ground. Meanwhile, she raised her arms like a child, and first he took the flashlight she was carrying out of her hand and then he gently pulled the polo shirt off over her head. She reached around to unhook her bra while he knelt and, with the bizarre, somewhat shaming sensation that he had lived for this moment, pulled her underpants down her legs and off over her feet.

'My socks,' she said, having already kicked off her sneakers. He pulled off her socks and stuffed them into the sneakers. The socks were spotless and white and, along with the rest of what she was wearing, faintly fragrant of bleach from the camp laundry.

Without her clothes, she was small and slim, with beautifully formed, lightly muscled legs and thin arms and fragile wrists and tiny breasts, affixed high on her chest, and nipples that were soft, pale, and unprotuberant. The slender elfin female body looked as vulnerable as a child's. She certainly didn't look like someone familiar with copulation, nor was that far from the truth. One late-fall weekend when the rest of her family was away in Deal and when, at about four on a Saturday afternoon, with the shades pulled down in her bedroom on Goldsmith Avenue, he had taken her virginity — and lost his own — she had whispered to him afterward, 'Bucky, teach me about sex,' as if of the two of them she were the less experienced. They lay together on the bed for hours after that — her bed, he had thought, the very four-poster with carved posts and a flowered chintz canopy and a ruffled skirt in which she had been sleeping since childhood — while she, in a soft confiding voice, as though there were indeed others in the empty house, spoke of her unbelievable good luck in having not just her wonderful family but Bucky to love too. He then told her more than he ever had before about his boyhood, expressing himself more easily with her than he had with any girl he'd ever known, with anyone he'd ever known, revealing all he normally kept to himself about what made him happy and what made him sad. 'I was the son of a thief,' he admitted and found himself able to speak these words to her without a trace of shame. 'He went to jail for stealing money. He's an ex-convict. I've never seen him. I don't know where he lives, or even if he's alive or dead. If he had raised me, who's to know if I wouldn't have turned out to be a thief myself? On my own, without grandparents like mine, in a neighborhood like mine,' he told her, 'it wouldn't have been hard to end up a bum.'

Lying face-to-face in the four-poster, they went on with their stories until it was dusk, then dark, until both had said just about everything and revealed themselves to each other as fully as they knew how. And then, as if he weren't sufficiently captivated by her, Marcia whispered into his ear something she had just then learned. 'This is the only way to talk, isn't it?'

'YOU,' MARCIA WHISPERED after he'd undressed her. 'Now you.'

Quickly he pulled off his things and set them down next to hers at the edge of their clearing.

'Let me look at you. Oh, thank God,' she said and burst into tears. He quickly gathered her into his arms, but it did not help. She sobbed without restraint.

'What is it?' he asked her. 'What's the matter?'

'I thought you were going to die!' she exclaimed. 'I thought you were going to become paralyzed and die! I couldn't sleep, I was so frightened. I'd come out here whenever I could to be alone and pray to God to keep you healthy. I never prayed so hard for anyone in my life. 'Please protect Bucky!' I'm crying like this out of happiness, darling! Such great, great happiness! You're here! You didn't get it! Oh, Bucky, hold me tight, hold me as close as you can! You're safe!'

WHEN THEY WERE dressed and ready to return to camp, he could not help himself and instead of chalking up her words to how relieved she was and forgetting them, he said what he shouldn't have said about her praying to the god whom he had repudiated. He knew there was no good reason to conclude this momentous day by returning to a subject so inflammatory, especially as he'd never heard her speak like that before and probably wouldn't ever again. It was a subject entirely too grave for the moment, and irrelevant, really, now that he was here. Yet he could not restrain himself. He'd been through too much back in Newark to squelch his feelings — and he'd left Newark and its pestilence a mere twelve hours ago.

'Do you really think God answered your prayers?' he asked her.

'I can't really know, can I? But you're here, aren't you? You're healthy, aren't you?'

'That doesn't prove anything,' he said. 'Why didn't God answer the prayers of Alan Michaels's parents? They must have prayed. Herbie Steinmark's parents must have prayed. They're good people. They're good Jews. Why didn't God intervene for them? Why didn't He save their boys?'

'I honestly don't know,' Marcia helplessly answered.

'I don't either. I don't know why God created polio in the first place. What was He trying to prove? That we need people on earth who are crippled?'

'God didn't create polio,' she said.

'You think not?'

'Yes,' she said sharply, 'I think not.'

'But didn't God create everything?'

'That isn't the same thing.'

'Why isn't it?'

'Why are you arguing with me, Bucky? What are we arguing for? All I said was that I prayed to God because I was frightened for you. And now you're here and I'm overwhelmingly happy. And out of that you've made an argument. Why do you want to fight with me when we haven't seen each other for weeks?'

'I don't want to fight,' he said.

'Then don't,' she said, more bewildered than angry.

All this while the thunder had been rolling in regularly and the lightning flickering nearby.

'We should go,' she said. 'We should get back while the storm is still a way off.'

'But how can a Jew pray to a god who has put a curse like this on a neighborhood of thousands and thousands of Jews?'

'I don't know! What exactly are you driving at?'

He was suddenly afraid to tell her — afraid that if he persisted in pressing her to understand what he did, he would lose her and the family with her. They had never before argued or clashed over anything. Never once had he sensed in his loving Marcia a speck of opposition — or she in him, for that matter — and so, just in time, before he began to ruin things, Bucky reined himself in.

Together they dragged the canoe down to the edge of the lake, and within moments, without speaking, they were vigorously paddling toward camp and arrived well before the downpour began.

DONALD KAPLOW AND the other boys were asleep when Bucky entered the Comanche cabin and made his way down the narrow aisle between the footlockers. Quietly as he could, he got into his pajamas, stowed away his clothes, and slid between the fresh sheets that formerly belonged to Irv Schlanger and that he'd made the bed with earlier in the day. He and Marcia had not parted pleasantly, and he continued to feel the distress from when they'd hurriedly kissed good night at the landing and, each fearing that something other than God might lie at the root of their first quarrel, had run off in opposite directions for their cabins.

The rain began pounding on the cabin roof while Bucky lay awake thinking about Dave and Jake fighting in France in a war from which he'd been excluded. He thought of Irv Schlanger, the draftee who'd gone off to war after having slept only the night before in this very bed. Time and again it seemed as if everybody had gone off to war except him. To have been preserved from the fighting, to have escaped the bloodshed — all that someone else might have considered a boon, he saw as an affliction. He was raised to be a fearless battler by his grandfather,