The Plot Against America

'I don't mind, but I'm on my way home. I have to get home.'

Immediately I thought about the two ten-dollar bills. If he searched me, if he had a warrant to search me, wasn't he going to find all that money and assume it was stolen? Wouldn't anybody? And until ten minutes earlier, for an entire lifetime, I'd been walking around with my pockets empty, out on the street without a penny to my name! My allowance of five cents a week I saved in a jelly jar with a slit Sandy chiseled into the lid with the can opener blade of his Boy Scout knife. Now I was walking around like a bank robber.

'Don't be frightened. Calm down, Master Philip. You've heard Gangbusters. We're on your side. We protect you. I just want to ask a few questions about your cousin Alvin. How's he doing?'

'He's fine.'

'How's his leg coming along?'

'Good.'

'He's able to walk okay?'

'Yes.'

'Wasn't that him I saw over where you just came from? Wasn't that Alvin behind the playground? Out on the sidewalk, wasn't that Alvin with Shushy Margulis?'

I didn't reply, and so he said, 'It's okay if they're shooting craps. That's no crime. That's just part of being a big man. Alvin must have shot craps a lot in the army hospital up in Montreal.'

When I still wouldn't speak, he asked, 'What were the fellas talking about?'

'Nothing.'

'All afternoon they're out there, and they're talking about nothing?'

'They were just saying how much they were losing.'

'Nothing else? Nothing about the president? You know who the president is, don't you?'

'Charles A. Lindbergh.'

'Nothing about President Lindbergh, Master Philip?'

'Not that I heard,' I answered truthfully.

But might he not have overheard me saying what I'd said to the horses? Impossible-and yet by now I was sure that he knew every move I'd made since Alvin came home from the war and gave me his medal. It was indisputable that he knew that I was wearing the medal. Why else was he looking me over from head to toe?

'Did they talk about Canada?' he asked. 'About going to Canada?'

'No, sir.'

'Call me Don, why don't you? And I'll call you Phil. You know what a fascist is, don't you, Phil?'

'I think so.'

'Did they call anybody a fascist that you remember?'

'No.'

'Don't rush yourself. Don't rush to answer. Take all the time you need. Try hard to remember. It's important. Did they call anybody a fascist? Did they say anything about Hitler? You know who Hitler is.'

'Everybody does.'

'He's a bad man, isn't he?'

'Yes,' I said.

'He's against the Jews, isn't he?'

'Yes.'

'Who else is against the Jews?'

'The Bund.'

'Anyone else?' he asked.

I knew enough not to mention Henry Ford, America First, the southern Democrats, or the isolationist Republicans, let alone Lindbergh. Over the past few years, the list I heard at home of prominent Americans who hated Jews was far longer than that, and then there were the ordinary Americans, tens of thousands of them, maybe millions of them, like the beer drinkers we didn't want to live beside in Union and the owner of the hotel in Washington and the mustached diner who'd insulted us in the cafeteria near Union Station. 'Don't talk,' I told myself, as though a protected boy of nine were mixed up with criminals and had something to hide. But I must already have begun to think of myself as a little criminal because I was a Jew.

'And who else?' he repeated. 'Mr. Hoover wants to know who else. Come clean, Phil.'

'I am,' I insisted.

'How's your aunt Evelyn doing?'

'She's fine.'

'She's getting married. Isn't that right, that she's getting married? You can at least answer that.'

'Yes.'

'And do you know who she's marrying?'

'Yes.'

'You're a smart boy. I think you know more-a lot more. But you're too smart to tell me, aren't you?'

'She's marrying Rabbi Bengelsdorf,' I said. 'He's head of the OAA.'

My saying that made him laugh. 'Okay,' he told me, 'you go on home. Go home and eat your matzohs. Isn't that what makes you so smart? Eating the matzohs?'

We were now at the corner of Chancellor and Summit, and I could see the stoop of our house down at the end of the block. 'Bye!' I cried, and didn't wait for the light to change but ran for home before I fell into his trap, if I hadn't fallen into it already.

There were three police cars parked on the street in front of our house, our alleyway was blocked off by an ambulance, and a couple of cops stood on the stoop talking together while another was posted beside the back door. The women on the block, most of them still in their aprons, were on their front stoops trying to figure out what was going on, and all the kids were huddled on the sidewalk across the street from our house, peering out at the cops and the ambulance from between the row of parked cars. Never before could I remember them silently gathered together like that, looking so apprehensive.

Our downstairs neighbor was dead. Mr. Wishnow had committed suicide. That was why everything I could never have expected to see was now right outside the door of our house. Weighing barely eighty pounds, he had been able to strangulate himself by stringing the living room curtain cords over the wooden rod in the back-foyer coat closet, then looping them around his neck and falling forward off the edge of the kitchen chair where he'd seated himself inside the closet. When Seldon, home from school, went to put his coat away, he found his father, in his pajamas, hanging facedown on the closet floor amid the family's rubbers and galoshes. My first thought on learning the news was that I no longer had to be fearful of hearing a coughing fit emanating from the dying man in the first-floor flat whenever I was alone in the cellar, or of hearing him in my bed on the floor above when I was trying to fall asleep. But then I realized that the ghost of Mr. Wishnow would now join the circle of ghosts already inhabiting the cellar and that, just because I was relieved he was dead, he would go out of his way to haunt me for the rest of my life.

Since I didn't know what else to do, I at first kneeled at the side of the parked cars, hiding there with the other kids. None of them had a conception any larger than my own of the cataclysm that had befallen the Wishnows, but it was from their whisperings that I pieced together how Mr. Wishnow had died and how he'd been found and learned that Seldon and his mother were inside with one of the policemen and the medics. And with the corpse. The corpse was what the kids were all waiting to see. I waited with them rather than wind up entering the back hallway just as they were carrying Mr. Wishnow down the stairs. Nor did I want to get home and have to sit there alone until my mother, my father, or Sandy appeared. As for Alvin, I wanted never to see him again or to be questioned about him by anyone.

The woman who emerged from the house accompanying the medics wasn't Mrs. Wishnow but my mother. I couldn't understand why she was home from work until it dawned on me that the dead father they were carrying away was my own. Yes, of course-my father had committed suicide. He couldn't take any more of Lindbergh and what Lindbergh was letting the Nazis do to the Jews of Russia and what Lindbergh had done to our family right here and so it was he who had hanged himself-in our closet.

I didn't have hundreds of memories of him then, I had just one, and it did not seem to me at all important