looking after me if my mother had to be off doing her PTA work and Sandy wasn't around and I was home by myself after school. I was remembering the generic maternalism that she shared with my mother-the succoring warmth I wallowed in as a matter of course-and that I experienced so strikingly on the afternoon that I got stuck in their bathroom and couldn't get out. I was remembering how kind she'd been to me while I repeatedly tried and failed to open the door, spontaneously caring for me as though, regardless of differences in appearance and temperament and immediate circumstance, the four of us-Seldon and Selma, Philip and Bess-were all one and the same. I was remembering Mrs. Wishnow when what was uppermost in her mind was what was uppermost in my mother's mind-back when she was just another watchful member of the local matriarchy whose overriding task was to establish a domestic way of life for the next generation. I was remembering Mrs. Wishnow unperturbed, when her fists weren't clenched and her face full of pain.
It was a small bathroom, exactly like ours, quite confining, the door next to a toilet and the toilet abutting a sink and a bathtub squeezed in beside that. I pulled on the door but it didn't open. At home I would just have closed it behind me, but at the Wishnows' I locked it-something I'd never done before in my life. I locked it and I peed and I flushed and I washed my hands and, because I didn't want to touch their towel, wiped them dry on the back of the legs of my corduroys-everything was fine, and then I went to exit the bathroom, and I couldn't undo the lock above the doorknob. I could turn it a little ways but then it would catch and stop. I didn't bang on the door or rattle the doorknob, I just kept trying to turn the lock as quietly as I could. But it wouldn't go, and so I sat back down on the toilet and I thought that maybe it would somehow work itself out. I sat there for a while but then I got lonesome and stood up and tried the lock again. It still wouldn't uncatch, and I started to knock lightly on the door, and Mrs. Wishnow came and said, 'Oh, the lock on the door does that sometimes. You have to turn it like this.' She explained how to do it, but I still couldn't get it open, and so very calmly she said, 'No, Philip, while you're turning it you have to pull it back,' and though I tried to do as she told me it still didn't work. 'Dear,' she said, 'turn and back simultaneously-turn and back at the same time.' 'Which way is back?' I said. 'Back. Back towards the wall.' 'Oh, the wall. Okay,' I said, but I couldn't get it right no matter what I did. 'It won't work,' I said, and I began to sweat, and then I heard Seldon. 'Philip? It's Seldon. Why did you lock it? We weren't going to come in.' 'I didn't say you were,' I said. 'Then why did you lock it?' 'I don't know,' I said. 'Do you think we should call the fire department, Mom? They can get him out with a ladder.' 'No, no, no,' Mrs. Wishnow said. 'Come on, Philip,' Seldon said, 'it's not that hard.' 'But it is. It's stuck.' 'How's he gonna get out, Ma?' 'Seldon, be still. Philip?' 'Yes.' 'Are you all right?' 'Well, it's hot in here. It's getting hot.' 'Take a glass of cold water, dear. There's a glass in the medicine cabinet. Take a glass of water and slowly drink it and you'll be fine.' 'Okay.' But the glass had something slimy at the bottom, and though I took it out, I only pretended to drink from it and drank instead from my cupped hands. 'Ma,' Seldon said, 'what's he doing wrong? Philip, what are you doing wrong?' 'How do I know?' I said. 'Mrs. Wishnow? Mrs. Wishnow?' 'Yes, dear.' 'It's getting too hot in here. I'm really starting to sweat.' 'Then open the window. Open the little window in the shower. Are you tall enough to do that?' 'I think so.' I took off my shoes and stepped into the shower in just my socks, and standing on my tiptoes I was able to reach the window-a smallish window of pebbled glass that looked onto the alleyway-but when I tried to open it, it was stuck too. 'It won't go,' I said. 'Bang it a little, dear. Bang the frame at the bottom, but not too hard, and I'm sure it will open.' I did as she told me but couldn't get it to budge. By now my shirt was saturated with sweat, and so I angled myself to be able to give the window a good strong shove upwards, but in turning I must have struck the shower handle with my elbow because suddenly the water was on. 'Oh, no!' I said, and ice-cold water was pouring over my head and down the back of my shirt, and I jumped out of the shower and onto the tile floor. 'What happened, dear?' 'The shower started.' 'How?' Seldon said. 'How could the shower start?' 'I don't know!' 'Are you very wet?' she asked me. 'Sort of.' 'Get a towel,' she told me. 'Get a towel out of the closet. The towels are in the closet.' We had the same narrow little bathroom closet directly upstairs over the Wishnows' bathroom closet, and we used it for towels too, but when I went to open theirs, I couldn't-the door was stuck. I yanked but it wouldn't open. 'What is it now, Philip?' 'Nothing.' I couldn't tell her. 'Did you take a towel?' 'Yes.' 'Then dry yourself off. And you must stay calm. There's nothing to worry about.' 'I am calm.' 'Sit down. Sit down and dry yourself off.' I was soaking wet, and now the floor was getting wet, and I sat on the toilet seat, and that's when I saw a bathroom for what it is-the upper end of a sewer-and that's when I felt the tears begin to well up. 'Don't worry,' Seldon called in to me, 'your mother and father will be home soon.' 'But how will I get out?' And all at once the door was open-and there was Seldon and behind him his mother. 'How'd you do that?' I said. 'I opened the door,' he said. 'But how?' He shrugged. 'I pushed. I just pushed. It was open all the time.' And that was when I began to bawl and Mrs. Wishnow took me in her arms and said, 'That's okay. Things like this happen. They can happen to anyone.' 'It was open, Ma,' Seldon said to her. 'Shhh,' she told him. 'Shhh. It doesn't matter,' and then she came into the bathroom and turned off the cold water-which was still streaming into the tub-and, without any problem she opened the closet door and took out a fresh towel and began to dry my hair and my face and my neck, all the while gently telling me that it didn't matter and that these things happened to people all the time.
But that was long before everything else went wrong.
The congressional campaign began at eight A.M. the Tuesday after Labor Day, with Walter Winchell up on a soapbox at Broadway and 42nd Street-the celebrated crossroads where he'd announced his presidential candidacy from atop the very same genuine wooden soapbox-and looking in broad daylight exactly as press photos pictured him broadcasting from the NBC studio Sunday nights at nine: jacketless, in his shirtsleeves, with the cuffs rolled up and his tie yanked down and, pushed back from his forehead, the hardboiled newsman's fedora. Within only minutes some half-dozen mounted New York City policemen were already needed to divert traffic away from the eager stream of working people charging onto the street to hear and see him in the flesh. And once word spread that the orator with the bullhorn wasn't just another Bible bore prophesying doom for sinful America but the Stork Club habitue only recently the country's most influential radio broadcaster and the city's most nefarious tabloid journalist, the number of onlookers grew from the hundreds to the thousands-nearly ten thousand people all told, said the papers, up from the subways and emptying out of the buses, drawn by the maverick and his immoderation.
'The broadcasting cowards,' he told them, 'and the billionaire publishing hooligans controlled from the White House by the Lindbergh gang say Winchell was canned for crying 'Fire!' in a crowded theater. Mr. and Mrs. New York City, the word wasn't 'fire.' It was 'fascism' Winchell cried-and it still is. Fascism! Fascism! And I will continue crying 'fascism' to every crowd of Americans I can find until Herr Lindbergh's pro-Hitler party of treason is driven from the Congress on Election Day. The Hitlerites can take away my radio microphone, and they've done just that, as you know. They can take away my newspaper column, and they have done that, as you know. And when, God forbid, America goes fascist, Lindbergh's storm troopers can lock me away in a concentration camp to shut me up- and they will do that too, as you know. They can even lock you away in a concentration camp to shut you up. And I hope by now that you damn well know that. But what our homegrown Hitlerites cannot take away is my love for America and yours. My love for democracy and yours. My love for freedom and yours. What they cannot take away-unless the gullible and the sheepish and the terrified are patsies enough to return them to Washington one more time-is the power of the ballot box. The Hitlerite plot against America must be stopped-and stopped by you! By you, Mr. and Mrs. New York! By the voting power of the freedom-loving people of this great city on Tuesday, November 3, nineteen hundred and forty-two!'
All that day-September 8, 1942-and into the evening, Winchell climbed atop his soapbox in every neighborhood in Manhattan, from Wall Street, where he was largely ignored, to Little Italy, where he was shouted down, to Greenwich Village, where he was ridiculed, to the Garment District, where he was intermittently cheered, to the Upper West Side, where he was welcomed as their savior by the Roosevelt Jews, and eventually north to Harlem, where, in the crowd of several hundred Negroes who gathered at dusk to hear him speak at the corner of Lenox Avenue and 125th Street, a few laughed and a handful applauded but most remained respectfully dissatisfied, as though to work his way into their antipathies would require his delivering a very different spiel.
It was difficult to ascertain the impact Winchell made on the voting public that day. To Winchell's former paper, Hearst's Daily Mirror, the ostensible effort to gather local grass-roots support for routing the Republican Party from Congress nationwide looked more like a publicity stunt than anything else-a predictably egomaniacal publicity stunt by an unemployed gossip columnist who could not bear being out of the spotlight-and especially so since not a single Democratic congressional candidate running for election in Manhattan chose to appear anywhere within hearing distance of the Winchell bullhorn. If any candidates were out campaigning, they stayed far from wherever Winchell repeatedly committed the political blunder of associating the name of Adolf Hitler with that of an American president whose heroics the world still idolized, whose achievement even the Fuhrer
