The Plot Against America

playing the famous priest and then donated his Oscar to the real Boys Town. I was five when I saw it at the Roosevelt with Sandy on a Saturday afternoon. Father Flanagan took in boys from the street, some of them already thieves and little gangsters, and brought them out to his farm, where they were fed and clothed and received an education and where they played baseball and sang in a choir and learned to become good citizens. Father Flanagan was father to all of them, regardless of race or creed. Most of the boys were Catholic, some Protestant, but a few needy Jewish boys lived on the farm as well-this I knew from my parents, who, like thousands of other American families who'd seen the movie and wept, made an annual ecumenical contribution to Boys Town. Not that I'd identify myself as Jewish once I reached Omaha. I'd say-speaking aloud at long last-that I didn't know what I was or who. That I was nothing and nobody-just a boy and nothing more, and hardly the person responsible for the death of Mrs. Wishnow and the orphaning of her son. Let my family raise her son as their son from here on out. He could have my bed. He could have my brother. He could have my future. I'd make my life with Father Flanagan in Nebraska, which was even farther from Newark than Kentucky.

Suddenly I thought of another name and rewrote the note, signing it 'Philip Flanagan.' Then I started for the cellar to get the cardboard suitcase in which I'd hidden Seldon's stolen clothes before running away the first time. This time I'd pack the suitcase with my own clothes and in my pocket carry the miniature pewter musket that I had bought at Mount Vernon and used to slice open the envelopes from the stamp company back when I still owned a serious collection and was getting mail. Its bayonet measured barely an inch in length, but leaving home for good I would need something for protection, and a letter opener was all I had.

Minutes later, descending the stairs with a flashlight, I was able to derive the strength to keep my legs from collapsing by realizing that this was the last occasion I'd ever have to go down into that cellar and confront the wringer or the alley cats or the drains or the dead. Or that dank, befouled wall facing the street on which one- legged Alvin had once spattered his grief.

It wasn't cold enough yet for us to start burning coal, and when, from the foot of the cellar stairs, I turned my flashlight on the ash-colored hulk of the fireless furnaces they looked to me like those ostentatious burial vaults where, for all the good it does them, the rich and mighty inter themselves. I stood there hoping that the ghost of Seldon's father would have gone off to Kentucky (perhaps unseen in the trunk of my father's car) to fetch his dead wife but understanding full well that he hadn't, that his business as a ghost was here with me-that his spectral heart seethed with curses, and all of them for me. 'I didn't mean for them to move,' I whispered. 'That was a mistake. I'm not who's really responsible. I didn't mean to make Seldon the target.'

I was prepared, of course, for the silence that inevitably surrounded my pleading utterances to the merciless dead, and instead heard my name pronounced in response-and by a woman! From beyond the furnaces, a woman moaning my name! Dead only hours and already back to begin haunting me for the rest of my life!

'I know the truth,' she said, and there, emerging like an oracular priestess out of the Delphi of our storage bin, came my aunt. 'They're after me, Philip,' Aunt Evelyn said. 'I know the truth, and they're going to kill me!'

Because she had to use the toilet and to eat something-because I didn't know what I could do other than to give my aunt whatever she needed-I had no choice but to bring her back upstairs with me. I sliced a piece of bread from the half a loaf that was left from dinner, buttered it, poured her a glass of milk, and, after she'd gone to the bathroom-and I'd pulled the kitchen shades so that nobody could see in from across the way-she came into the kitchen and feverishly gobbled everything down. Her coat and her purse were in her lap and she was still wearing her hat, and I hoped that as soon as she'd had enough to eat, she'd get up and go home so that I could go down and get the suitcase, pack it, and run away before my mother returned from the meeting. But once she'd eaten she began to babble, repeating again and again that she knew the truth and because of that they were going to kill her. They'd called out the mounted police, she informed me, to find where she was hiding.

In the silence that followed that startling remark-which, in those circumstances, when suddenly there were no longer any predictable happenings, I was enough of a child to almost believe-we followed the audible progress of a single horse prancing up the block toward Chancellor Avenue. 'They know I'm here,' she said.

'They don't, Aunt Evelyn,' but the words had no hold on me as I spoke them. 'I didn't know you were here.'

'Then why did you come looking for me?'

'I didn't. I was looking for something else. The police are outside,' I told her, convinced that I was deliberately lying even while speaking as earnestly as I could, 'the police are outside because of the anti-Semitism. They're patrolling the streets to protect us.'

She smiled the smile reserved for trusting souls. 'Tell me another one, Philip.'

Now nothing that I knew coincided with anything either of us was saying. The shadow of her madness had crept over me without my as yet understanding that while hiding in our storage bin-or perhaps earlier than that, while watching the FBI take the rabbi away in handcuffs-she had indeed lost her mind. Unless, of course, she'd already begun hopelessly slipping into insanity the night at the White House when she danced with von Ribbentrop. That was to be my father's theory-that long before the rabbi's arrest, when Bengelsdorf was astonishing all of Jewish Newark with the unseemliness of how high he had climbed in the president's esteem, she'd abandoned herself to the same credulity that had transformed the entire country into a madhouse: the worship of Lindbergh and his conception of the world.

'Do you want to lie down?' I asked, dreading that she would say yes. 'Do you need to rest? Do you want me to call the doctor?'

Here she took my hand so firmly that her fingernails bit into my flesh. 'Philip dearest, I know everything.'

'Do you know what happened to President Lindbergh? Is that what you mean?'

'Where is your mother?'

'At school. At a meeting.'

'You'll bring me food and water, darling boy.'

'I will? Sure. Where?'

'To the cellar. I can't drink from the laundry sink. Someone will find me.'

'You don't want that,' I said, thinking immediately of Joey's grandmother and the fiery breath of madness that wafted from her. 'I'll bring everything.' But having promised her that, I couldn't possibly run away.

'Would you happen to have an apple?' asked Aunt Evelyn.

I opened the refrigerator. 'No, no apple. We're out of apples. My mother hasn't been able to do much shopping. But there's a pear, Aunt Evelyn. You want that?'

'Yes. And another piece of bread. Make another piece of bread.'

Her voice kept changing. Now she sounded as though we were doing nothing more than getting ready for a picnic, making the best of what we had on hand to take to Weequahic Park to eat by the lake under a tree, as though the events of the day were as unimportant to us as probably they were to everybody else in America: a minor nuisance to the Christians, if that. As there were more than thirty million Christian families in America and only about a million Jewish families, why, really, should it bother them?

I cut a second slice from the loaf for her to take down to the cellar and smeared it extra heavily with butter. If asked later about the bread missing from the loaf, I'd say that Joey ate it, that and the pear, before he ran off to see the horses.

When she got home to learn that my father hadn't called, my mother was unable to hide her response. Forlornly she looked at the kitchen clock, remembering perhaps the time that it used to be at this hour: bedtime, when all that was required was for the children to wash their faces and brush their teeth for the day dense with fulfillable duties to be rounded off to the satisfaction of all. Now that was nine o'clock-or so we'd been led to believe by that wholly convincing, immutable lifelikeness that now turned out to have been a sham.

And the day in, day out routine of school-was that a sham too, a cunning deception perpetrated to soften us up with rational expectations and foster nonsensical feelings of trust? 'Why no school?' I asked when she told me that tomorrow we'd have the day off. 'Because,' my mother replied, making recourse to the colorless formulation suggested to the parents in order for them to be truthful without frightening the children unduly, 'the situation has further deteriorated.' 'What situation?' I asked. 'Our situation.' 'Why? What happened now?' 'Nothing happened. It's