live with the Mawhinneys on their Kentucky farm. He'd change his name to Sandy Mawhinney and we'd never see him again, just as we were never going to see Alvin. And nobody need bother to kidnap him-he'd do it himself, hand himself over to the Christians so as never again to have anything to do with Jews. Nobody needed to kidnap him because Lindbergh had kidnapped him already, along with everyone else!
Sandy's behavior so unsettled me that, in the evenings, I took to doing my homework out of sight of him at the kitchen table. That was how I came to overhear my father-who was in the living room with my mother, reading the evening paper there while Sandy remained in contemptuous seclusion at the back of the flat-reminding her that our private turmoil was exactly the sort of dissension that the Lindbergh anti-Semites had hoped to stir up between Jewish parents and their children with programs like Just Folks. Understanding this, however, had only hardened his resolve not to follow Shepsie Tirschwell's lead and leave.
'What are you talking about?' said my mother. 'Are you telling me that the Tirschwells are going to Canada?' 'In June, yes,' he replied. 'Why? Why June? What's happening in June? When did you find out? Why didn't you say something?' 'Because I knew it would upset you.' 'And it has-why shouldn't it? Why,' she demanded to know, 'why, Herman, are they leaving in June?' 'Because in Shepsie's judgment the time has come. Let's not discuss it,' my father said softly. 'The little one is in the kitchen, and he's frightened enough. If Shepsie feels it's time, that is his decision for himself and his family, and good luck to him. Shepsie sits and watches the latest news hour after hour. The news is Shepsie's life, and the news is terrible, and so it affects how he thinks, and this is the decision he came up with.' 'The man came up with the decision,' my mother said, 'because he is
The next day, right after school, I walked down Chancellor Avenue and around to Clinton Place and then beyond the high school to where I figured chances were slight that anybody would recognize me and waited there for a bus downtown to the Newsreel Theater. I'd checked the newspaper timetable the night before. There was an hour-long show beginning at five minutes to four, which meant that I could catch a five o'clock 14 at the Broad Street stop across from the theater and be safely back in time for dinner, or even earlier, depending on when von Ribbentrop was slotted into the program. One way or another, I had to see Aunt Evelyn at the White House, and not because, like my parents, I was appalled and outraged by what she was doing but because her having gone there at all seemed to me more remarkable than anything that could possibly befall a member of our family-except for what had befallen Alvin.
NAZI BIGWIG WHITE HOUSE GUEST-that was the black-lettered headline spelled out across either side of the theater's triangular marquee, and along with my being downtown without my brother or Earl Axman or one of my parents, it made me feel powerfully delinquent when I stepped up to the box-office window and asked for a ticket.
'Unaccompanied by an adult? No, sir,' the woman selling tickets told me. 'I'm an orphan,' I told her. 'I live at the orphanage on Lyons Avenue. The sister sent me to do a report on President Lindbergh.' 'Where's her note?' I'd carefully written one out on the bus, using a blank page from my notebook, and handed it through the money slot. It was modeled after the notes of permission my mother wrote for school trips, only it was signed 'Sister Mary Catherine, St. Peter's Orphanage.' The woman looked at it without reading it, then beckoned for me to push my money over. I gave her one of Alvin's tens-a huge bill for a kid my size, let alone an orphan from St. Peter's-but she was busy and gave back nine-fifty in change and slipped me a ticket without any fuss. She failed, however, to return the note. 'I need that,' I said. 'Let's go, sonny,' she said impatiently, and motioned for me to make room for the people still lining up for the next show.
I got inside just as the lights went out and the martial music came on and the film began to roll. Because seemingly every man in Newark (the theater drew only a very few women) wanted to get a look at the unlikely White House guest, the place was filled to capacity for this late-Friday-afternoon show and the only empty seat I could find was in the far reaches of the balcony-anyone entering now would have to stand at the back of the orchestra's last row. A great excitement came over me, not only because of my having pulled off something that was not expected of me, but because enveloped by the fumes of the hundreds of cigarettes and the extravagant odor of the five-cent cigars, I felt deep in the virile magic of a boy masquerading as a man among men.
British land on Madagascar to take over French naval base.
Pierre Laval, chief of Vichy French government, denounces British move as 'act of aggression.'
RAF bombs Stuttgart third consecutive night.
British fighter planes in savage air battle over Malta.
German army resumes assault on USSR in the Kerch Peninsula.
Mandalay falls to Japanese army in Burma.
Japanese army launches new drive in jungles of New Guinea.
Japanese army marches into Yunnan province of China from Burma.
Chinese guerrillas raid city of Canton, killing five hundred Japanese troops.
A multitude of helmets, uniforms, weapons, buildings, harbors, beaches, flora, fauna-human faces of every race-but otherwise the same inferno again and again, the unsurpassable evil from whose horrors the United States, of all the great nations, was alone in being spared. Picture after picture of misery without end: the mortars bursting, the infantrymen doubled over and running, marines with raised rifles wading ashore, airplanes dropping bombs, airplanes blown apart and spiraling to earth, the mass graves, the kneeling chaplains, the improvised crosses, the sinking ships, the drowning sailors, the sea in flames, the shattered bridges, the tank bombardment, the targeted hospitals sheared in two, pillars of fire coiling upward from bombed-out oil tanks, prisoners corralled in a sea of mud, stretchers bearing living torsos, bayoneted civilians, dead babies, beheaded bodies bubbling blood…
And then the White House. A twilit spring evening. Shadows falling across the sprawl of lawn. Blooming bushes. Flowering trees. Limousines driven by liveried chauffeurs and everyone exiting them in formal attire. From the marble hallway beyond the open portico doors, a string ensemble playing last year's number one hit song, 'Intermezzo,' popularized from a theme in Wagner's
Had it not been for the Iron Cross, awarded to the foreign minister by his Fuhrer and embellishing the pocket just inches below the impeccably arranged silk handkerchief, as persuasively civilized a sham as human cunning could devise.
And there! Aunt Evelyn, Rabbi Bengelsdorf-past the marine guards, through the doorway, and gone!
They couldn't have been on the screen for as long as three seconds, and yet the rest of the national news and the closing sports clips were incomprehensible to me and I kept hoping for the film to spin back to the moment where my aunt materialized asparkle with the gems previously the property of the rabbi's late wife. Among the many improbabilities that the cameras established as irrefutably real, Aunt Evelyn's disgraceful triumph was for me the least real of all.
When the show was over and the lights went up, a uniformed usher was standing in the aisle motioning with
