The Plot Against America

population of Danville-let me get it here-Danville's population was 6, 700.'

'And how many Jews in Danville,' my mother asked, 'of the six thousand and seven hundred? How many in the whole state?'

'You already know, Bess. There are very few. All I can tell you is that it could be worse. It could be Montana, where the Gellers are going. It could be Kansas, where the Schwartzes are going. It could be Oklahoma, where the Brodys are going. Seven men are leaving from our office, and I am the luckiest, believe me. Kentucky is a beautiful place with a beautiful climate. It is not the end of the world. We will wind up living out there just about the way we live here. Maybe better, given that everything is cheaper and the climate's so nice. There's going to be school for the boys, there's going to be the job for me, there's going to be the house for you. Chances are we'll be able to afford to buy a place of our own where the boys can each have a separate room and a yard out back to play in.'

'And just where do they get the gall to do this to people?' my mother asked. 'I am dumbfounded, Herman. Our families are here. Our lifelong friends are here. The children's friends are here. We have lived in peace and harmony here all of our lives. We are only a block from the best elementary school in Newark. We are a block from the best high school in New Jersey. Our boys have been raised among Jews. They go to school with other Jewish children. There is no friction with the other children. There is no name-calling. There are no fights. They have never had to feel left out and lonely the way I did as a child. I cannot believe the company is doing this to you. The way you have worked for those people, the hours that you put in, the effort-and this,' she said angrily, 'is the reward.'

'Boys,' my father said, 'ask me what you want to know. Mother is right. This is a big surprise for all of us. We are all a little dumbfounded. So ask whatever is on your mind. I don't want anybody to be confused about anything.'

But Sandy wasn't confused, nor did he look dumbfounded in any way. Sandy was thrilled and barely able to hide his glee, and all because he knew exactly where to find Danville, Kentucky, on the map-fourteen miles from the Mawhinneys' tobacco farm. It could have been that he'd also known we would be moving there long before any of the rest of us did. My father and mother may not have said as much, but then, precisely because of what no one was saying, even I could understand that my father's being selected as one of his district's seven Jewish 'homesteaders' was no more fortuitous than his assignment to the company's new Danville office. Once he'd opened the back door to our flat and told Aunt Evelyn to leave the house and never come back, our fate could have played out no other way.

It was after dinner and we were in the living room. Serenely unperturbed, Sandy was drawing something and had no questions to ask, and I-looking outside with my face pressed to the screen of the open window-I had no questions to ask either, and so my father, grimly absorbed in his thoughts, and knowing he'd been defeated, began to pace the floor, and my mother, on the sofa, murmured something under her breath, refusing to resign herself to what awaited us. In the drama of confrontation, in the struggle against we knew not what, each had taken on the role that the other had played in the lobby of the Washington hotel. I realized how far things had gone and how terribly confusing everything now was and how calamity, when it comes, comes in a rush.

Since about three it had been squalling steadily, but abruptly the wind-driven downpour stopped and the sun came blazing out as though the clocks had been turned ahead and, over in the west, tomorrow morning was now set to begin at six P.M. today. How could a street as modest as ours induce such rapture just because it glittered with rain? How could the sidewalk's impassable leaf-strewn lagoons and the grassy little yards oozing from the flood of the downspouts exude a smell that roused my delight as if I'd been born in a tropical rain forest? Tinged with the bright after-storm light, Summit Avenue was as agleam with life as a pet, my own silky, pulsating pet, washed clean by sheets of falling water and now stretched its full length to bask in the bliss.

Nothing would ever get me to leave here.

'And who will the boys play with?' my mother asked.

'There are plenty of children in Kentucky to play with,' he assured her.

'And who will I talk to?' she asked. 'Who will I have there like the friends I've had my whole life?'

'There are women there, too.'

'Gentile women,' she said. Ordinarily my mother drew no strength from scorn, but she spoke scornfully now- that's how perplexed she was and how endangered she felt. 'Good Christian women,' she said, 'who will fall all over themselves to make me feel at home. They have no right to do this!' she proclaimed.

'Bess, please-this is what it is like to work for a big company. Big companies transfer people all the time. And when they do, you have to pick up and go.'

'I'm talking about the government. The government cannot do this. They cannot force people to pick up and go-that is not in any constitution that I ever heard of.'

'They aren't forcing us.'

'Then why are we going?' she asked. 'Of course they are forcing us. This is illegal. You cannot just take Jews because they're Jews and force them to live where you want them to. You cannot take a city and just do what you want with it. To get rid of Newark as it is, with Jews living here like everyone else? What business is it of theirs? This is against the law. Everyone knows it is against the law.'

'Yeah,' said Sandy without bothering to look up from what he was sketching, 'why don't we sue the United States of America?'

'You can sue,' I told him. 'In the Supreme Court.'

'Ignore him,' my mother told me. 'Until your brother learns to be civil, we just continue to ignore him.'

Here Sandy got up and took his drawing materials into our bedroom. Unable any longer to witness the spectacle of my father's defenselessness and my mother's anguish, I unlocked the front door and raced down the front stairs and out into the street where the kids who'd finished their dinner were already dropping Popsicle sticks into the gutters and watching them cascade over the iron grate into the gurgling sewer along with the natural detritus shaken by the storm from the locust trees and the swirl of candy wrappers, beetles, bottle caps, earthworms, cigarette butts, and, mysteriously, inexplicably, predictably, the single mucilaginous rubber. Everybody was out having one last good time before they had to turn in for bed-and all of them still capable of having a good time because none had a parent working for any of the corporations collaborating with Homestead 42. Their fathers were men who worked for themselves or with a partner who was a brother or an in-law and so they weren't going to have to go anywhere. But I wasn't going anywhere either. I would not be driven by the United States government from a street whose very gutters gushed with the elixir of life.

Alvin was in the rackets in Philadelphia, Sandy lived in exile in our house, and my father's authority as a protector had been drastically compromised if not destroyed. Two years earlier, to preserve our chosen way of life, he had mustered his strength to drive over to the home office and, face to face with the big boss, to decline the promotion that would have advanced his career and increased his earnings but at the price of taking us to live in heavily Bundist New Jersey. Now he no longer had it in him to challenge an uprooting potentially no less hazardous, having concluded that confrontation was futile and our fate out of his hands. Shockingly enough, my father had been rendered impotent by his company's having obediently joined hands with the state. There was nobody left to protect us except me.

After school the next day, I covertly headed off again for the downtown bus, this time for the number 7 line, whose route ran some three-quarters of a mile from Summit Avenue, on the far side of the farmed acreage of the orphan asylum, out where St. Peter's Church fronted the thoroughfare of Lyons Avenue and where, in the shadow of its cross-capped steeple, I was even less likely to be spotted by a neighbor or a schoolmate or a family friend than when I made it my business to walk past the high school and down to Clinton Place to take the 14.

I waited at the bus stop outside the church beside two nuns identically buried within the coarse heavy cloth of those voluminous black habits that I'd never had a chance to study as I did that day. Back then, a nun's habit reached to her shoes, and that, along with the brilliant white, starched arc of cloth that starkly framed her facial features and obliterated all lateral vision-the stiffened wimple that hid scalp, ears, chin, and neck and was itself enfolded in an extensive white headcloth-made of the traditionally dressed Catholic nuns the most archaic-looking creatures I had ever seen, far more startling to behold in our neighborhood than even the creepily morticianlike priests. No buttons or pockets were visible, and thus there was no way to figure out how that sheath of thickly gathered curtaining got hooked up or how it was taken off or whether it ever was taken off, given that overlaying everything was a large metal cross suspended from a long cord necklace, and strung beads, big and shiny as 'killer'