The Plot Against America

enough to be the memory I ought to be having. Alvin's last memory of his father was of him closing the car door on his little boy's finger-mine of my father was of him greeting the stump of a man who begged every day outside his office building. 'How you doin', Little Robert?' my father said, and the stump of a man replied, 'How you, Herman?'

It was here that I edged myself between the closely parked cars and darted out across the street.

When I saw that the sheet covering my father's body and face couldn't possibly allow him to breathe, I began to wail.

'Don't, don't, darling,' my mother said. 'There's nothing to be frightened of.' She put her arms around my head, held me to her, and repeated, 'There's nothing to be frightened of. He was sick and he was suffering and he died. Now he's not suffering anymore.'

'He was in the closet,' I said.

'No, he wasn't. He was in his bed. He died in his bed. He was very, very sick. You knew that. That was why he coughed all the time.'

By now the ambulance doors were swung open to receive the stretcher. The medics carefully maneuvered it inside and pulled the doors shut behind them. My mother stood next to me on the street, holding my hand in hers and to my amazement looking perfectly composed. Only when I made a move to break away from her and run after the ambulance, only when I cried, 'He can't breathe!' did she finally realize what was torturing me.

'It's Mr. Wishnow-it's Mr. Wishnow who is dead.' She shook me, gently shook me back and forth to bring me to my senses. 'It's Seldon's father, dear-he died from his illness this afternoon.'

I couldn't tell if she was lying to keep me from becoming more hysterical or if she was telling the wonderful truth.

'Seldon found him in the closet?'

'No. I told you-no. Seldon found his father in his bed. Seldon's mother wasn't home so he called the police. I came because Mrs. Wishnow called me at the store and asked me to help her. Do you understand? Daddy's at work. Daddy's working. Oh, what on earth have you been thinking? Daddy will be home for dinner very soon. So will Sandy. There's nothing to be afraid of. Everybody will be home, everybody is coming home, we'll have our dinner,' she said reassuringly, 'and everything is going to be fine.'

But nothing was 'fine.' The FBI agent who'd grilled me about Alvin on Chancellor Avenue had earlier stopped by Hahne's dress department to question my mother, then by the Metropolitan's Newark office to question my father, and, just after Sandy left Aunt Evelyn's office for home, he had boarded my brother's bus and, from the seat alongside him, conducted yet another interrogation. Alvin wasn't at dinner to hear about any of this-just as we were sitting down to eat, he'd phoned and told my mother not to save anything for him. It seemed that every time he'd made a killing at poker or craps, Alvin took Shushy downtown with him to the Hickory Grill for a charcoal-broiled steak dinner. 'Alvin's partner in crime,' my father called Shushy. What he called Alvin that evening was ungrateful, stupid, reckless, ignorant, and incorrigible.

'And bitter,' said my mother, sadly, 'so bitter because of his leg.'

'Well, I'm sick and tired of his leg,' said my father. 'He went to war. Who sent him? I didn't. You didn't. Abe Steinheim didn't. Abe Steinheim wanted to send him to college. He went to war on his own, and he's lucky he wasn't killed. He's lucky it was just his leg. This is it, Bess. I've had it with that boy. The FBI questions my children? Bad enough they harass you and me-and in my office, mind you, in front of the Boss! No,' he told her. 'This has to stop and stop now. This is a home. We are a family. He has dinner downtown with Shushy? Let him go live with Shushy.'

'If only he would go to school,' my mother said. 'If only he would take a job.'

'He has a job,' my father replied. 'Bum.'

After we'd finished eating, my mother put a meal together for Seldon and Mrs. Wishnow, and my father helped her carry the plates downstairs while Sandy and I were left with the dinner dishes. We set to work at the sink as we did most nights, except that I couldn't shut up. I told him about the crap game. I told him about the FBI agent. I told him about Mr. Wishnow. 'He didn't die in his bed,' I said. 'Mother's not telling us the truth. He committed suicide, only she doesn't want to say it. Seldon found him in the closet when he got home from school. He hung himself. That's why the police came.'

'Did he turn colors?' my brother asked me.

'I only saw him under the sheet. Maybe it was colors-I don't know. I don't want to know. It was bad enough when they jiggled the stretcher that you could see him move.' That I had thought at first it was my father under the sheet I didn't say aloud for fear that if I did it would turn out to be true. The fact that my father was alive, vividly alive-angry at Alvin and threatening to throw him out of the house-had no impact on my thinking.

'How do you know he was in the closet?' Sandy asked.

'That's what all the kids said.'

'And you believe them?' Because of his fame, he was becoming a very hard boy whose tremendous confidence now sounded more and more like lordly arrogance whenever he spoke about me or my friends.

'Well, why were all the police here? Just because he died? People die all the time,' I said, trying, however, not to believe it. 'He killed himself. He had to.'

'And is that against the law, killing yourself?' my brother asked me. 'What were they going to do, put him in jail for killing himself?'

I didn't know. I didn't know any longer what the law was and so I didn't know what might or might not be against it. I didn't seem to know whether my own father-who'd just headed downstairs with my mother-was really alive or pretending to be alive or being driven around dead in the back of that ambulance. I didn't know anything. I didn't know why Alvin was bad now instead of good. I didn't know if I had dreamed that an FBI agent had questioned me on Chancellor Avenue. It had to be a dream and yet couldn't be if everybody else said they'd been questioned too. Unless that was the dream. I felt woozy and thought I was going to faint. I'd never before seen anyone faint, other than in a movie, and I'd never before fainted myself. I'd never before looked at my house from a hiding place across the street and wished that it was somebody else's. I'd never before had twenty dollars in my pocket. I'd never before known anyone who'd seen his father hanging in a closet. I'd never before had to grow up at a pace like this.

Never before-the great refrain of 1942.

'You better call Mom,' I told my brother. 'Call her-tell her to come home right away!' But before Sandy could reach the back door to rush down to the Wishnows, I was vomiting into the dishtowel still in my hand, and when I collapsed it was because my leg had been blown off and my blood was everywhere.

I remained in bed with a high fever for six days, so weak and lifeless that the family doctor stopped by every evening to check on the progress of my disease, that not uncommon childhood ailment called why-can't-it-be-the- way-it-was.

The next day for me was Sunday. It was late afternoon, and Uncle Monty was visiting. Alvin was there too, and from what I could overhear from my bed of what was being said in the kitchen, he hadn't been seen anywhere around since Mr. Wishnow had committed suicide on Friday and he'd walked away from that crap game with his bundle of fives, tens, and twenties. But since dinnertime Friday I'd been away myself, off with the horses and their hooves, enveloped by kaleidoscopic hallucinations of the orphanage workhorses pursuing me to the edge of the earth.

And now Uncle Monty again, again Uncle Monty attacking Alvin, and with words I could not believe were being spoken in our house in the presence of my mother. But then, Uncle Monty knew how to subdue Alvin in ways that my father just couldn't employ.

By nightfall, after all the shouting had subsided into lamentations for my late uncle Jack and Monty's booming voice had gone hoarse, Alvin accepted the job at the produce market that he'd refused to consider when Monty had offered it first. As unmanned as he'd been by his mutilation on the morning he arrived at Penn Station in the care of that hulking Canadian nurse, as overridden by defeat as when, from his wheelchair, he wouldn't dare to look a one of us in the eye, Alvin consented to dissolve his partnership with Shushy and to give up gambling on the neighborhood streets. A hater no less of subservience than of weeping, he astonished everyone by breaking into