It took a few minutes for the cafeteria to come alive again with the squeaking of chairs and the rattle of cutlery and the light tinkle of plates, if not yet the full dinnertime clamor.
'Would you like more coffee?' my father said to my mother. 'You heard the owner-he wants you to fill your cup.'
'No,' she murmured, 'no more.'
'And you, Mr. Taylor-coffee?'
'Nope, I'm fine.'
'So,' my father said to Mr. Taylor-stiffly, lamely, but beginning again to push back at everything awful that was surging in. 'What kind of job did you do before this one? Or have you always been a guide in Washington?'
And it was here that we heard once again from the man who'd stepped up to inform us that, like Benedict Arnold before him, Walter Winchell had sold out to the British. 'Oh, don't you worry,' he was assuring his friends, 'the Jews will find out soon enough.'
In all that quiet there was no mistaking what he'd said, especially as he hadn't bothered to modulate the taunt in any way. Half the diners didn't even look up, pretending to have heard nothing, but more than a few twisted round to look right at the offending objects.
I'd seen tarring and feathering only once, in a Western movie, but I thought, 'We are going to be tarred and feathered,' envisioning all our humiliation sticking to the skin like a coat of thick filth that you could never get off.
My father was stalled for a moment, having to decide once again whether to attempt to control the event or give in to it. 'I was asking Mr. Taylor,' he suddenly said to my mother while taking her hands in both of his, 'about what he did before being a guide.' And he looked at her like someone casting a spell, someone whose art is to prevent your will from being free of his and keep you from acting on your own.
'Yes,' she said, 'I heard.' And then, her anguish once again filling her with tears, she nonetheless drew herself up erect in her seat and said to Mr. Taylor, 'Yes, please tell us.'
'Keep eating your ice cream, boys,' my father said, reaching out and patting our forearms until we looked him right in the eye. 'Is it good?'
'Yes,' we said.
'Well, you just keep eating and take your time.' He smiled to make us smile, and then said to Mr. Taylor, 'The job before this one, your old job-what was it you did again, sir?'
'I was a college teacher, Mr. Roth.'
'Is that right?' my father said. 'Hear that, boys? You're eating your dinner with a college teacher.'
'A college history teacher,' added Mr. Taylor for the sake of accuracy.
'Should have known,' my father admitted.
'Little college in northwest Indiana,' Mr. Taylor told the four of us. 'When they shut half the place down in ' 32, that was it for me.'
'And so what'd you do then?' my father asked.
'Well, you can imagine. What with unemployment and all the strikes, I did a little of everything. Harvested mint up in the Indiana mucklands. Packed meat for the slaughterhouse in Hammond. Packed soap for Cudahy in East Chicago. Worked a year for Real Silk Hosiery Mills in Indianapolis. Even worked a stint at Logansport, at the mental hospital there, worked as an orderly for people suffering mental diseases. Hard times finally washed me up here.'
'And what was the name of that college where you taught?' my father asked.
'Wabash.'
'Wabash? Well,' said my father, soothed by the very sound of the word, 'everybody has heard of that.'
'Four hundred and twenty-six students? I'm not so sure they have. What everybody has heard of is something that one of our distinguished graduates once said, though they don't necessarily know him for being a Wabash man. They know him for being U.S. vice president, 1912 to 1920. That is our two-term vice president Thomas Riley Marshall.'
'Sure,' my father said. 'Vice President Marshall, the Democratic governor of Indiana. Vice president under another great Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. Man of dignity, President Wilson. It was President Wilson,' he said, after two days of tutelage under Mr. Taylor, himself in the mood now to elucidate, 'who had the courage to appoint Louis D. Brandeis to the Supreme Court. First Jewish member ever of the Supreme Court. You know that, boys?'
We did-it was hardly the first time he'd told us. It was only the first time he'd told us in a booming voice in a cafeteria like this one in Washington, D.C.
Sailing on, Mr. Taylor said, 'And what the vice president said has been famous nationwide ever since. One day, in the United States Senate-while he was presiding over a Senate debate-he said to the senators there, 'What this country needs,' he said, 'is a really good five-cent cigar.''
My father laughed-that was indeed a folksy observation that had won the heart of his whole generation and that even Sandy and I knew through his repeating it to us. So he laughed genially, and then, to further astonish not only his family but probably everyone in the cafeteria, to whom he'd already extolled Woodrow Wilson for appointing a Jew to the Supreme Court, he proclaimed, 'What this country needs now is a new president.'
No riot ensued. Nothing. Indeed, by not quitting he appeared almost to have won the day.
'And isn't there a Wabash River?' my father next asked Mr. Taylor.
'Longest tributary of the Ohio. Runs four hundred and seventy-five miles clear across the state east to west.'
'And there is a song, too,' my father remembered almost dreamily.
'Right you are,' replied Mr. Taylor. 'A very famous song. Maybe as famous as 'Yankee Doodle' itself. Written by Paul Dresser in 1897. 'On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away.''
'Of course!' cried my father.
'The favorite song,' said Mr. Taylor, 'of our Spanish-American War soldiers in 1898 and adopted as the state song of Indiana in 1913. March 4, to be exact.'
'Sure, sure, I know that one,' my father told him.
'I expect every American does,' Mr. Taylor said.
And all at once, in a brisk cadence, my father began to sing it, and strongly enough for everyone in the cafeteria to hear. ''Through the sycamores the candlelights are gleaming…''
'Good,' said our guide with admiration, 'very good,' and outright bewitched by my father's baritone bravura, the solemn little encyclopedia smiled at last.
'My husband,' said my dry-eyed mother, 'has a lovely singing voice.'
'That he does,' said Mr. Taylor, and though there was no applause-other than from Wilbur, back of the serving counter-here we abruptly got up to go before we outstayed our tiny triumph and the man with the presidential mustache went berserk.
3
ON JUNE 22, 1941, the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact-signed two years earlier by the two dictators only days before invading and dividing up Poland-was broken without warning when Hitler, having already overrun continental Europe, dared to undertake the conquest of the enormous landmass that stretched from Poland across Asia to the Pacific by staging a massive assault to the east against Stalin's troops. That evening, President Lindbergh addressed the nation from the White House about Hitler's colossal expansion of the war and astonished even my father by his candid praise for the German Fuhrer. 'With this act,' the president declared, 'Adolf Hitler has established himself as the world's greatest safeguard against the spread of Communism and its evils. This is not to minimize the effort of imperial Japan. Dedicated as the Japanese are to modernizing Chiang Kaishek's corrupt and feudal China, they are equally dedicated to rooting out the fanatical Chinese Communist minority,
