Nemesis

1. EQUATORIAL NEWARK

THE FIRST CASE of polio that summer came early in June, right after Memorial Day, in a poor Italian neighborhood crosstown from where we lived. Over in the city's southwestern corner, in the Jewish Weequahic section, we heard nothing about it, nor did we hear anything about the next dozen cases scattered singly throughout Newark in nearly every neighborhood but ours. Only by the Fourth of July, when there were already forty cases reported in the city, did an article appear on the front page of the evening paper, titled "Health Chief Puts Parents on Polio Alert," in which Dr. William Kittell, superintendent of the Board of Health, was quoted as cautioning parents to monitor their children closely and to contact a physician if a child exhibited symptoms such as headache, sore throat, nausea, stiff neck, joint pain, or fever. Though Dr. Kittell acknowledged that forty polio cases was more than twice as many as normally reported this early in the polio season, he wanted it clearly understood that the city of 429,000 was by no means suffering from what could be characterized as an epidemic of poliomyelitis. This summer as every summer, there was reason for concern and for the proper hygienic precautions to be taken, but there was as yet no cause for the sort of alarm that had been displayed by parents, "justifiably enough," twenty-eight years earlier, during the largest outbreak of the disease ever reported — the 1916 polio epidemic in the northeastern United States, when there had been more than 27,000 cases, with 6,000 deaths. In Newark there had been 1,360 cases and 363 deaths.

Now even in a year with an average number of cases, when the chances of contracting polio were much reduced from what they'd been back in 1916, a paralytic disease that left a youngster permanently disabled and deformed or unable to breathe outside a cylindrical metal respirator tank known as an iron lung — or that could lead from paralysis of the respiratory muscles to death — caused the parents in our neighborhood considerable apprehension and marred the peace of mind of children who were free of school for the summer months and able to play outdoors all day and into the long twilit evenings. Concern for the dire consequences of falling seriously ill from polio was compounded by the fact that no medicine existed to treat the disease and no vaccine to produce immunity. Polio — or infantile paralysis, as it was called when the disease was thought to infect mainly toddlers — could befall anyone, for no apparent reason. Though children up to sixteen were usually the sufferers, adults too could become severely infected, as had the current president of the United States.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, polio's most renowned victim, had contracted the disease as a vigorous man of thirty-nine and subsequently had to be supported when he walked and, even then, had to wear heavy steel-and-leather braces from his hips to his feet to enable him to stand. The charitable institution that FDR founded while he was in the White House, the March of Dimes, raised money for research and for financial assistance to the families of the stricken; though partial or even full recovery was possible, it was often only after months or years of expensive hospital therapy and rehabilitation. During the annual fund drive, America's young donated their dimes at school to help in the fight against the disease, they dropped their dimes into collection cans passed around by ushers in movie theaters, and posters announcing "You Can Help, Too!" and "Help Fight Polio!" appeared on the walls of stores and offices and in the corridors of schools across the country, posters of children in wheelchairs — a pretty little girl wearing leg braces shyly sucking her thumb, a clean-cut little boy with leg braces heroically smiling with hope — posters that made the possibility of getting the disease seem all the more frighteningly real to otherwise healthy children.

Summers were steamy in low-lying Newark, and because the city was partially ringed by extensive wetlands — a major source of malaria back when that, too, was an unstoppable disease — there were swarms of mosquitoes to be swatted and slapped away whenever we sat on beach chairs in the alleys and driveways at night, seeking refuge out of doors from our sweltering flats, where there was nothing but a cold shower and ice water to mitigate the hellish heat. This was before the advent of home air conditioning, when a small black electric fan, set on a table to stir up a breeze indoors, offered little relief once the temperature reached the high nineties, as it did repeatedly that summer for stretches of a week or ten days. Outdoors, people lit citronella candles and sprayed with cans of the insecticide Flit to keep at bay the mosquitoes and flies that were known to have carried malaria, yellow fever, and typhoid fever and were believed by many, beginning with Newark's Mayor Drummond, who launched a citywide "Swat the Fly" campaign, to carry polio. When a fly or a mosquito managed to penetrate the screens of a family's flat or fly in through an open door, the insect would be doggedly hunted down with fly swatter and Flit out of fear that by alighting with its germ-laden legs on one of the household's sleeping children it would infect the youngster with polio. Since nobody then knew the source of the contagion, it was possible to grow suspicious of almost anything, including the bony alley cats that invaded our backyard garbage cans and the haggard stray dogs that slinked hungrily around the houses and defecated all over the sidewalk and street and the pigeons that cooed in the gables of the houses and dirtied front stoops with their chalky droppings. In the first month of the outbreak — before it was acknowledged as an epidemic by the Board of Health — the sanitation department set about systematically to exterminate the city's huge population of alley cats, even though no one knew whether they had any more to do with polio than domesticated house cats.

What people did know was that the disease was highly contagious and might be passed to the healthy by mere physical proximity to those already infected. For this reason, as the number of cases steadily mounted in the city — and communal fear with it — many children in our neighborhood found themselves prohibited by their parents from using the big public pool at Olympic Park in nearby Irvington, forbidden to go to the local "air-cooled" movie theaters, and forbidden to take the bus downtown or to travel Down Neck to Wilson Avenue to see our minor league team, the Newark Bears, play baseball at Ruppert Stadium. We were warned not to use public toilets or public drinking fountains or to swig a drink out of someone else's soda-pop bottle or to get a chill or to play with strangers or to borrow books from the public library or to talk on a public pay phone or to buy food from a street vendor or to eat until we had cleaned our hands thoroughly with soap and water. We were to wash all fruit and vegetables before we ate them, and we were to keep our distance from anyone who looked sick or complained of any of polio's telltale symptoms.

Escaping the city's heat entirely and being sent off to a summer camp in the mountains or the countryside was considered a child's best protection against catching polio. So too was spending the summer some sixty miles away at the Jersey Shore. A family who could afford it rented a bedroom with kitchen privileges in a rooming house in Bradley Beach, a strip of sand, boardwalk, and cottages a mile long that had already been popular for several decades among North Jersey Jews. There the mother and the children would go to the beach to breathe in the fresh, fortifying ocean air all week long and be joined on weekends and vacations by the father. Of course, cases of polio were known to crop up in summer camps as they did in the shore's seaside towns, but because they were nothing like as numerous as those reported back in Newark, it was widely believed that, whereas city surroundings, with their unclean pavements and stagnant air, facilitated contagion, settling within sight or sound of the sea or off in the country or up in the mountains afforded as good a guarantee as there was of evading the disease.

So the privileged lucky ones disappeared from the city for the summer while the rest of us remained behind to do exactly what we shouldn't, given that "overexertion" was suspected of being yet another possible cause of polio: we played inning after inning and game after game of softball on the baking asphalt of the school playground, running around all day in the extreme heat, drinking thirstily from the forbidden water fountain, between innings seated on a bench crushed up against one another, clutching in our laps the well-worn, grimy mitts we used out in the field to mop the sweat off our foreheads and to keep it from running into our eyes — clowning and carrying on in our soaking polo shirts and our smelly sneakers, unmindful of how our imprudence might be dooming any one of us to lifelong incarceration in an iron lung and the realization of the body's most dreadful fears.

Only a dozen or so girls ever appeared at the playground, mainly kids of eight or nine who could usually be seen jumping rope where far center field dropped off into a narrow school street closed to traffic. When the girls weren't jumping rope they used the street for hopscotch and running-bases and playing jacks or for happily bouncing a pink rubber ball at their feet all day long. Sometimes when the girls jumping rope played double dutch, twirling two ropes in opposite directions, one of the boys would rush up unbidden and, elbowing aside the girl who was about to jump, leap in and mockingly start bellowing the girls' favorite jumping song while deliberately entangling himself in their flying ropes. "H, my name is Hippopotamus — !" The girls would holler at him "Stop it! Stop it!" and call out for help from the playground director, who had only to shout from wherever he was on the playground to the troublemaker (most days it was the same boy), "Cut it out, Myron! Leave the girls alone or you're going home!" With that, the uproar subsided. Soon the jump ropes were once again snappily turning in the air and the chanting taken up anew by one jumper after another:

With their childish voices, the girls encamped at the far edge of the playground improvised their way from A to Z and back again, alliterating the nouns at the end of the line, sometimes preposterously, each time around. Leaping and darting about with excitement — except when Myron Kopferman and his like would apishly interfere — they exhibited astounding energy; unless they were summoned by the playground director to retreat to the shade of the school because of the heat, they didn't vacate that street from the Friday in June when the spring term ended to the Tuesday after Labor Day when the fall term began and they could jump rope only after school and at recess.

The playground director that year was Bucky Cantor, who, because of poor vision that necessitated his wearing thick eyeglasses, was one of the few young men around who wasn't off fighting in the war. During the previous school year, Mr. Cantor had become the new phys ed teacher at Chancellor Avenue School and so already knew many of us who habituated the playground from the gym classes he taught. He was twenty-three that summer, a graduate of South Side, Newark's mixed-race, mixed-religion high school, and Panzer College of Physical Education and Hygiene in East Orange. He stood slightly under five feet five inches tall, and though he was a superior athlete and strong competitor, his height, combined with his poor vision, had prevented him from playing college-level football, baseball, or basketball and restricted his intercollegiate sports activity to throwing the javelin and lifting weights. Atop his compact body was a good-sized head formed of emphatically slanting and sloping components: wide pronounced cheekbones, a steep forehead, an angular jaw, and a long straight nose with a prominent bridge that lent his profile the sharpness of a silhouette engraved on a coin. His full lips were as well defined as his muscles, and his complexion was tawny year-round. Since adolescence he had worn his hair in a military-style crewcut. You particularly noticed his ears with that haircut, not because they were unduly large, which they were not, not necessarily because they were joined so closely to his head, but because, seen from the side, they were shaped much like the ace of spades in a pack of cards, or the wings on the winged feet of mythology, with topmost tips that weren't rounded off, as most ears are, but came nearly to a point. Before his grandfather dubbed him Bucky, he was known briefly as Ace to his childhood street pals, a nickname inspired not merely by his precocious excellence at sports but by the uncommon configuration of those ears.

Altogether the oblique planes of his face gave the smoky gray eyes back of his glasses — eyes long and narrow like an Asian's — a deeply pocketed look, as though they were not so much set as cratered in the skull. The voice emerging from this precisely delineated face was, unexpectedly, rather high-pitched, but that did not diminish the force of his appearance. His was the cast-iron, wear-resistant, strikingly bold face of a sturdy young man you could rely on.

ONE AFTERNOON early in July, two cars full of Italians from East Side High, boys anywhere from fifteen to eighteen, drove in and parked at the top of the residential street back of the school, where the playground was situated. East Side was in the Ironbound section, the industrial slum that had reported the most cases of polio in the city so far. As soon as Mr. Cantor saw them pull up, he dropped his mitt on the field — he was playing third base in one of our pickup games — and trotted over to where the ten strangers had emptied out of the two cars. His athletic, pigeon-toed trot was already being imitated by the playground kids, as was his purposeful way of lightly lifting himself as he moved on the balls of his feet, and the slight sway, when he walked, of his substantial shoulders. For some of the boys his entire bearing had become theirs both on and off the playing field.

"What do you fellows want here?" Mr. Cantor said.

"We're spreadin' polio," one of the Italians replied. He was the one who'd come swaggering out of the cars first. "Ain't that right?" he said, turning to preen for the cohorts backing him up, who appeared right off to Mr. Cantor to be only too eager to begin a brawl.

"You look more like you're spreadin' trouble," Mr. Cantor told him. "Why don't you head out of here?"

"No, no," the Italian guy insisted, "not till we spread some polio. We got it and you don't, so we thought we'd drive up and spread a little around." All the while he talked, he rocked back and forth on his heels to indicate how tough he was. The brazen ease of his thumbs tucked into the front two loops of his trousers served no less than his gaze to register his contempt.

"I'm playground director here," Mr. Cantor said, pointing back over his shoulder toward us kids. "I'm asking you to leave the vicinity of the playground. You've got no business here and I'm asking you politely to go. What do you say?"

"Since when is there a law against spreadin' polio, Mr. Playground Director?"

"Look, polio is not a joke. And there's a law against being a public nuisance. I don't want to have to call the police. How about leaving on your own, before I get the cops to escort you out of here?"

With this, the leader of the pack, who was easily half a foot taller than Mr. Cantor, took a step forward and spat on the pavement. He left a gob of viscous sputum splattered there, only inches from the tip of Mr. Cantor's sneakers.

"What's that mean?" Mr. Cantor asked him. His voice was still calm and, with his arms crossed tightly over his chest, he was the embodiment of immovability. No Ironbound roughnecks were going to get the better of him or come anywhere near his kids.

"I told you what it means. We're spreadin' polio. We don't want to leave you people out."

"Look, cut the 'you people' crap," Mr. Cantor said and took one quick, angry step forward, placing him only inches from the Italian's face. "I'll give you ten seconds to turn around and move everybody out of here."

The Italian smiled. He really hadn't stopped smiling since he'd gotten out of the car. "Then what?" he asked.

"I told you. I'm going to get the cops to get you out and keep you out."

Here the Italian guy spat again, this time just to the side of Mr. Cantor's sneakers, and Mr. Cantor called over to the boy who had been waiting to bat next in the game and who, like the rest of us, was silently watching Mr. Cantor face down the ten Italians. "Jerry," Mr. Cantor said, "run to my office. Telephone the police. Say you're calling for me. Tell them I need them."

"What are they going to do, lock me up?" the chief Italian guy asked. "They gonna put me in the slammer for spitting on your precious Weequahic sidewalk? You own the sidewalk too, four eyes?"

Mr. Cantor didn't answer and just remained planted between the kids who'd been playing ball on the asphalt field behind him and the two carloads of Italian guys, still standing on the street at the edge of the playground as though each were about to drop the cigarette he was smoking and suddenly brandish a weapon. But by the time Jerry returned from Mr. Cantor's basement office — where, as instructed, he had telephoned the police — the two cars and their ominous occupants were gone. When the patrol car pulled up only minutes later, Mr. Cantor was able to give the cops the license plate numbers of both cars, which he'd memorized during the standoff. Only after the police had driven away did the kids back of the fence begin to ridicule the Italians.

It turned out that there was sputum spread over the wide area of pavement where the Italian guys had congregated, some twenty square feet of a wet, slimy, disgusting mess that certainly appeared to be an ideal breeding ground for disease. Mr. Cantor had two of the boys go down in the school basement to find a couple of buckets and fill them with hot water and ammonia in the janitor's room and then slosh the water across the pavement until every inch of it was washed clean. The kids sloshing away the slime reminded Mr. Cantor of how he'd had to clean up after killing a rat at the back of his grandfather's grocery store when he was ten years old.

"Nothing to worry about," Mr. Cantor told the boys. "They won't be back. That's just life," he said, quoting a line favored by his grandfather, "there's always something funny going on," and he rejoined the game and play was resumed. The boys observing from the other side of the two-story-high chainlink fence that enclosed the playground were mightily impressed by Mr. Cantor's taking on the Italians as he did. His confident, decisive manner, his weightlifter's strength, his joining in every day to enthusiastically play ball right alongside the rest of us — all this had made him a favorite of the playground regulars from the day he'd arrived as director; but after the incident with the Italians he became an outright hero, an idolized, protective, heroic older brother, particularly to those whose own older brothers were off in the war.

It was later in the week that two of the boys who'd been at the playground when the Italians had come around didn't show up for a few days to play ball. On the first morning, both had awakened with high fevers and stiff necks, and by the second evening — having begun to grow helplessly weak in their arms and legs and to have difficulty breathing — had to be rushed to the hospital by ambulance. One of the boys, Herbie Steinmark, was a chubby, clumsy, amiable eighth grader who, because of his athletic ineptness, was usually assigned to play right field and bat last, and the other, Alan Michaels, also an eighth grader, was among the two or three best athletes on the playground and the boy who'd grown closest to Mr. Cantor. Herbie's and Alan's constituted the first cases of polio in the neighborhood. Within forty-eight hours there were eleven additional cases, and though none were kids who'd been at the playground that day, word spread through the neighborhood that the disease had been carried to the Weequahic section by the Italians. Since so far their neighborhood had reported the most cases of polio in the city and ours had reported none, it was believed that, true to their word, the Italians had driven across town that afternoon intending to infect the Jews with polio and that they had succeeded.

BUCKY CANTOR'S MOTHER had died in childbirth, and he had been raised by his maternal grandparents in a tenement housing twelve families on Barclay Street off lower Avon Avenue, in one of the poorer sections of the city. His father, from whom he'd inherited his bad eyesight, was a bookkeeper for a big downtown department store who had an inordinate fondness for betting on horses. Shortly after his wife's death and his son's birth he was convicted of larceny for stealing from his employer to cover his gambling debts — it turned out he'd been lining his pockets from the day he'd taken the job. He served two years in jail and, after his release, never returned to Newark. Instead of having a father, the boy, whose given name was Eugene, took his instruction in life from the big, bear-like, hard-working grandfather in whose Avon Avenue grocery store he worked after school and on Saturdays. He was five when his father married for a second time and hired a lawyer to get the boy to come to live with him and his new wife down in Perth Amboy where he had a job in the shipyards. The grandfather, rather than going out to hire his own lawyer, drove straight to Perth Amboy, where there was a confrontation in which he was said to have threatened to break his one-time son-in-law's neck should he dare to try in any way to interfere in Eugene's life. After that, Eugene's father was never heard from again.

It was from heaving crates of produce around the store with his grandfather that he began to develop his chest and arms, and from running up and down the three flights to their flat innumerable times a day that he began to develop his legs. And it was from his grandfather's intrepidness that he learned how to pit himself against any obstacle, including having been born the son of a man his grandfather would describe for as long as he lived as "a very shady character." He wanted as a boy to be physically strong, just like his grandfather, and not to have to wear thick glasses. But his eyes were so bad that when he put the glasses away at night to get ready for bed, he could barely make out the shape of the few pieces of furniture in his room. His grandfather, who had never given a second thought to his own disadvantages, instructed the unhappy child — when he'd first donned glasses at the age of eight — that his eyes were now as good as anyone else's. After that, there was nothing further to be said on the subject.

His grandmother was a warm, tenderhearted little woman, a good, sound parental counterweight to his grandfather. She bore hardship bravely, though teared up whenever mention was made of the twenty-year-old daughter who had died in childbirth. She was much loved by the customers in the store, and at home, where her hands were never still, she followed with half an ear Life Can Be Beautiful and the other soap operas she liked where the listener is always shuddering, always nervous, at the prospect of the next misfortune. In the few hours a day when she was not assisting in the grocery, she devoted herself wholeheartedly to Eugene's welfare, nursing him through measles, mumps, and chickenpox, seeing that his clothes were always clean and mended, that his homework was done, that his report cards were signed, that he was taken to the dentist regularly (as few poor children were in those days), that the food she cooked for him was hearty and plentiful, and that his fees were paid at the synagogue where he went after school for Hebrew classes to prepare for his bar mitzvah. But for the trio of common infectious childhood diseases, the boy had unwavering good health, strong even teeth, an overall sense of physical well-being that must have had something to do with the way she had mothered him, trying to do everything that was thought, in those days, to be good for a growing child. Between her and her husband there was rarely squabbling — each knew the job to do and how best to do it, and each carried it off with an avidity whose example was not lost on young Eugene.

The grandfather saw to the boy's masculine development, always on the alert to eradicate any weakness that might have been bequeathed — along with the poor eyesight — by his natural father and to teach the boy that a man's every endeavor was imbued with responsibility. His grandfather's dominance wasn't always easy to abide, but when Eugene met his expectations, the praise was never grudging. There was the time, when he was just ten, that the boy came upon a large gray rat in the dim stockroom back of the store. It was already dark outside when he saw the rat scuttling in and out of a stack of empty grocery cartons that he had helped his grandfather to unpack. His impulse was, of course, to run. Instead, knowing his grandfather was out front with a customer, he reached noiselessly into a corner for the deep, heavy coal shovel with which he was learning how to tend the furnace that heated the store.

Holding his breath, he advanced on tiptoe until he had stalked the panicked rat into a corner. When the boy lifted the shovel into the air, the rat rose on its hind legs and gnashed its frightening teeth, deploying itself to spring. But before it could leave the floor, he brought the underside of the shovel swiftly downward and, catching the rodent squarely on the skull, smashed its head open. Blood intermingled with bits of bone and brain drained into the cracks of the stockroom floorboards as — having failed to suppress completely a sudden impulse to vomit — he used the shovel blade to scoop up the dead animal. It was heavy, heavier than he could have imagined, and looked larger and longer resting in the shovel than it had up on its hind legs. Strangely, nothing — not even the lifeless strand of tail and the four motionless feet — looked quite as dead as the pairs of needle-thin, bloodstained whiskers. With his weapon raised over his head, he had not registered the whiskers; he had not registered anything other than the words "Kill it!" as if they were being formulated in his brain by his grandfather. He waited until the customer had left with her grocery bag and then, holding the shovel straight out in front of him — and poker-faced to reveal how unfazed he was — he carried the dead rat through to the front of the store to display to his grandfather before continuing out the door. At the corner, jiggling the carcass free of the shovel, he poked it through the iron grate into the flowing sewer. He returned to the store and, with a scrub brush, brown soap, rags, and a bucket of water, cleaned the floor of his vomit and the traces of the rat and rinsed off the shovel.

It was following this triumph that his grandfather — because of the nickname's connotation of obstinacy and gutsy, spirited, strong-willed fortitude — took to calling the bespectacled ten-year-old Bucky.

The grandfather, Sam Cantor, had come alone to America in the 1880s as an immigrant child from a Jewish village in Polish Galicia. His fearlessness had been learned in the Newark streets, where his nose had been broken more than once in fights with anti-Semitic gangs. The violent aggression against Jews that was commonplace in the city during his slum boyhood did much to form his view of life and his grandson's view in turn. He encouraged the grandson to stand up for himself as a man and to stand up for himself as a Jew, and to understand that one's battles were never over and that, in the relentless skirmish that living is, "when you have to pay the price, you pay it." The broken nose in the middle of his grandfather's face had always testified to the boy that though the world had tried, it could not crush him. The old man was dead of a heart attack by July 1944, when the ten Italians drove up to the playground and single-handedly Mr. Cantor turned them back, but that didn't mean he wasn't there throughout the confrontation.

A boy who'd lost a mother at birth and a father to jail, a boy whose parents figured not at all in his earliest recollections, couldn't have been more fortunate in the surrogates he'd inherited to make him strong in every way — he'd only rarely allow the thought of his missing parents to torment him, even if his biography had been determined by their absence.

MR. CANTOR had been twenty and a college junior when the U.S. Pacific Fleet was bombed and nearly destroyed in the surprise Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, 1941. On Monday the eighth he went off to the recruiting station outside City Hall to join the fight. But because of his eyes nobody would have him, not the army, the navy, the coast guard, or the marines. He was classified 4-F and sent back to Panzer College to continue preparing to be a phys ed teacher. His grandfather had only recently died, and however irrational the thought, Mr. Cantor felt as though he had let him down and failed to meet the expectations of his undeflectable mentor. What good were his muscular build and his athletic prowess if he couldn't exploit them as a soldier? He hadn't been lifting weights since early adolescence merely to be strong enough to hurl the javelin — he had made himself strong enough to be a marine.

After America entered the war, he was still walking the streets while all the able-bodied men his age were off training to fight the Japs and the Germans, among them his two closest friends from Panzer, who'd lined up outside the recruiting station with him on the morning of December 8. His grandmother, with whom he still lived while commuting to Panzer, heard him weeping in his bedroom the night his buddies Dave and Jake went off to Fort Dix to begin basic training without him, heard him weeping as she'd never known Eugene to weep before. He was ashamed to be seen in civilian clothes, ashamed when he watched the newsreels of the war at the movies, ashamed when he took the bus home to Newark from East Orange at the end of the school day and sat beside someone reading in the evening paper the day's biggest story: "Bataan Falls," "Corregidor Falls," "Wake Island Falls." He felt the shame of someone who might by himself have made a difference as the U.S. forces in the Pacific suffered one colossal defeat after another.

Because of the war and the draft, jobs in the school system for male gym teachers were so numerous that even before he graduated from Panzer in June of 1943, he had nailed down a position at ten-year-old Chancellor Avenue School and signed on as the summertime playground director. His goal was to teach phys ed and coach at Weequahic, the high school that had opened next door to Chancellor. It was because both schools had overwhelmingly Jewish student bodies and excellent scholastic credentials that Mr. Cantor was drawn to them. He wanted to teach these kids to excel in sports as well as in their studies and to value sportsmanship and what could be learned through competition on a playing field. He wanted to teach them what his grandfather had taught him: toughness and determination, to be physically brave and physically fit and never to allow themselves to be pushed around or, just because they knew how to use their brains, to be defamed as Jewish weaklings and sissies.

THE NEWS THAT SWEPT the playground after Herbie Steinmark and Alan Michaels were transported by ambulance to the isolation ward at Beth Israel Hospital was that they were both completely paralyzed and, no longer able to breathe on their own, were being kept alive in iron lungs. Though not everybody had shown up at the playground that morning, there were still enough kids for four teams to be organized for their daylong round robin of five-inning games. Mr. Cantor estimated that altogether, in addition to Herbie and Alan, some fifteen or twenty of the ninety or so playground regulars were missing — kept home, he assumed, by their parents because of the polio scare. Knowing as he did the protectiveness of the Jewish parents in the neighborhood and the maternal concern of the watchful mothers, he was in fact surprised that a good many more hadn't wound up staying away. Probably he had done some good by speaking to them as he had the day before.

"Boys," he had said, gathering them together on the field before they disbanded for dinner, "I don't want you to begin to panic. Polio is a disease that we have to live with every summer. It's a serious disease that's been around all my life. The best way to deal with the threat of polio is to stay healthy and strong. Try to wash yourself thoroughly every day and to eat right and to get eight hours of sleep and to drink eight glasses of water a day and not to give in to your worries and fears. We all want Herbie and Alan to get better as soon as possible. We all wish this hadn't happened to them. They're two terrific boys, and many of you are their close friends. Nevertheless, while they are recovering in the hospital, the rest of us have to go on living our lives. That means coming here to the playground every day and participating in sports as you always do. If any of you feel ill, of course you must tell your parents and stay at home and look after yourself until you've seen a doctor and are well. But if you're feeling fine, there's no reason in the world why you can't be as active as you like all summer long."

From the kitchen phone that evening he tried several times to call the Steinmark and Michaels families to express his concern and the concern of the boys at the playground and to find out more about the condition of the two sick boys. But there was no answer at either house. Not a good sign. The families must still have been at the hospital at nine-fifteen at night.

Then the phone rang. It was Marcia, calling from the Poconos. She had heard about the two kids at his playground. "I spoke to my folks. They told me. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," he said, extending the cord of the phone so he could stand where it was a touch cooler, closer to the screen of the open window. "All the other boys are fine. I've been trying to reach the families of the boys in the hospital to find out how they're doing."

"I miss you," Marcia said, "and I worry about you."

"I miss you too," he said, "but there's nothing to worry about."

"Now I'm sorry I came up here." She was working for the second summer as a head counselor at Indian Hill, a camp for Jewish boys and girls in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains seventy miles from the city; during the year she was a first-grade teacher at Chancellor — they'd met as new faculty members the previous fall. "It sounds awful," she said.

"It's awful for the two boys and their families," he said, "but the situation is far from out of hand. You shouldn't think it is."

"My mother said something about the Italians coming up to the playground to spread it."

"The Italians didn't spread anything. I was there. I know what happened. They were a bunch of wise-guys, that's all. They spit all over the street, and we washed it away. Polio is polio — nobody knows how it spreads. Summer comes and there it is, and there's nothing much you can do."

"I love you, Bucky. I think of you constantly."

Discreetly, so none of the neighbors could hear him through the open window, he lowered his voice and replied, "I love you too." It was difficult to tell her that because he had disciplined himself — sensibly, he thought — not to pine for her too much while she was away. It was also difficult because he'd never declared himself that openly to another girl and still found the words awkward to say.

"I have to get off the phone," Marcia said. "There's somebody waiting behind me. Please take care of yourself."

"I do. I will. But don't worry. Don't be frightened. There's nothing to be frightened about."

The next day, news raced through the community that within the Weequahic school district there were eleven new cases of polio — as many as had been reported there in the previous three years combined, and it was still only July, with a good two months to go before the polio season was over. Eleven new cases, and during the night Alan Michaels, Mr. Cantor's favorite, had died. The disease had finished him off in seventy-two hours.

The day following was Saturday, and the playground was open to organized activities only until noon, when the rising and falling whine of the air-raid sirens sounded in their weekly test from utility poles across the city. Instead of going back to Barclay Street after closing up, to help his grandmother with the week's grocery shopping — the stock of their own grocery store had been sold for a pittance after his grandfather's death — he showered in the boys' locker room and put on a clean shirt and trousers and a pair of polished shoes that he'd brought with him in a paper bag. Then he walked the length of Chancellor Avenue, all the way down the hill to Fabyan Place, where Alan Michaels's family lived. Despite polio's striking in the neighborhood, the store-lined main street was full of people out doing their Saturday grocery shopping and picking up their dry-cleaning and their drug prescriptions and whatever they needed from the electrical shop and the ladies' wear shop and the optical shop and the hardware store. In Frenchy's barber shop every seat was occupied by one of the neighborhood men waiting to get a haircut or a shave; in the shoe repair shop next door, the Italian shopkeeper — the street's only non-Jewish shop owner, not excluding Frenchy — was busy finding people's finished shoes in a pile of them on his cluttered counter while the Italian radio station blared through his open doorway. Already the stores had their front awnings rolled down to keep the sun from beaming hotly through the plate-glass window looking onto the street.

It was a bright, cloudless day and the temperature was rising by the hour. Boys from his gym classes and from the playground became excited when they spotted him out on Chancellor Avenue — since he lived not in the neighborhood but down in the South Side school district, they were used to seeing him only in his official capacities as gym teacher and playground director. He waved when they called "Mr. Cantor!" and he smiled and nodded at their parents, some of whom he recognized from PTA meetings. One of the fathers stopped to talk to him. "I want to shake your hand, young man," he said to Mr. Cantor. "You told those dagos where to get off. Those dirty dogs. One against ten. You're a brave young man." "Thank you, sir." "I'm Murray Rosenfield. I'm Joey's father." "Thank you, Mr. Rosenfield." Next, a woman who was out shopping stopped to speak to him. She smiled politely and said, "I'm Mrs. Lewy. I'm Bernie's mother. My son worships you, Mr. Cantor. But I have one thing to ask you. With what's going on in the city, do you think the boys should be running around in heat like this? Bernie comes home soaked to the skin. Is that a good idea? Look at what's happened to Alan. How does a family recover from something like this? His two brothers away in the war, and now this." "I don't let the boys overexert themselves, Mrs. Lewy. I watch out for them." "Bernie," she said, "doesn't know when to quit. He can run all day and all night if somebody doesn't stop him." "I'll be sure to stop him if he gets too hot. I'll keep my eye on him." "Oh, thank you, thank you. Everybody is very happy that it's you who's looking after the boys." "I hope I'm helping," Mr. Cantor replied. A small crowd had gathered while he'd been talking to Bernie's mother, and now a second woman approached and reached for his sleeve to get his attention. "And where's the Board of Health in all this?" "Are you asking me?" Mr. Cantor said. "Yes, you. Eleven new cases in the Weequahic section overnight! One child dead! I want to know what the Board of Health is doing to protect our children." "I don't work for the Board of Health," he replied. "I'm playground director at Chancellor." "Somebody said you were with the Board of Health," she charged him. "No, I'm not. I wish I could help you but I'm attached to the schools." "You dial the Board of Health," she said, "and you get a busy signal. I think they purposely leave the phone off the hook." "The Board of Health was here," another woman put in. "I saw them. They put a quarantine sign up on a house on my street." Her voice full of distress, she said, "There's a case of polio on my street!" "And the Board of Health does nothing!" someone else said angrily. "What is the city doing to stop this? Nothing!" "There's got to be something to do — but they're not doing it!" "They should inspect the milk that kids drink — polio comes from dirty cows and their infected milk." "No," said someone else, "it isn't the cows — it's the bottles. They don't sterilize those milk bottles right." "Why don't they fumigate?" another voice said. "Why don't they use disinfectant? Disinfect everything." "Why don't they do like they did when I was a child? They tied camphor balls around our necks. They had something that stunk bad they used to call asafetida — maybe that would work now." "Why don't they spread some kind of chemical on the streets and kill it that way?" "Forget about chemicals," someone else said. "The most important thing is for the children to wash their hands. Constantly wash their hands. Cleanliness! Cleanliness is the only cure!" "And another important thing," Mr. Cantor put in, "is for all of you to calm down and not lose your self-control and panic. And not communicate panic to the children. The important thing is to keep everything in their lives as normal as possible and for you all, in what you say to them, to try to stay reasonable and calm." "Wouldn't it be better if they stayed home till this passes over?" another woman said to him. "Isn't home the safest place in a crisis like this? I'm Richie Tulin's mother. Richie is crazy about you, Mr. Cantor. All the boys are. But wouldn't Richie be better off, wouldn't all the boys be better off, if you closed down the playground and they stayed at home?" "Shutting down the playground isn't up to me, Mrs. Tulin. That would be up to the superintendent of schools." "Don't think I'm blaming you for what's happening," she said. "No, no, I know you're not. You're a mother. You're concerned. I understand everyone's concern." "Our Jewish children are our riches," someone said. "Why is it attacking our beautiful Jewish children?" "I'm not a doctor. I'm not a scientist. I don't know why it attacks who it attacks. I don't believe that anyone does. That's why everybody tries to find who or what is guilty. They try to figure out what's responsible so they can eliminate it." "But what about the Italians? It had to be the Italians!" "No, no, I don't think so. I was there when the Italians came. They had no contact with the children. It was not the Italians. Look, you mustn't be eaten up with worry and you mustn't be eaten up with fear. What's important is not to infect the children with the germ of fear. We'll come through this, believe me. We'll all do our bit and stay calm and do everything we can to protect the children, and we'll all come through this together," he said. "Oh, thank you, young man. You're a splendid young man." "I have to be going, you'll have to excuse me," he told them all, looking one last time into their anxious eyes, beseeching him as though he were something far more powerful than a playground director twenty-three years old.

FABYAN PLACE was the last street in Newark before the railroad tracks and the lumberyards and the border with Irvington. Like the other residential streets that branched off Chancellor, it was lined with two-and-a-half-story frame houses fronted by red-brick stoops and hedged-in tiny yards and separated from one another by narrow cement driveways and small garages. At the curb in front of each stoop was a young shade tree planted in the last decade by the city and looking parched now after weeks of torrid temperatures and no rain. Nothing about the clean and quiet street gave evidence of unhealthiness or infection. In every house on every floor either the shades were pulled or the drapes drawn to keep out the ferocious heat. There was no one to be seen anywhere, and Mr. Cantor wondered if it was because of the heat or because the neighbors were keeping their children indoors out of respect for the Michaels family — or perhaps out of terror of the Michaels family.

Then a figure emerged from around the Lyons Avenue corner, making its solitary way through the brilliant light burning down on Fabyan Place and already softening the asphalt street. Mr. Cantor recognized who it was, even from afar, by the peculiar walk. It was Horace. Every man, woman, and child in the Weequahic section recognized Horace, largely because it was always so disquieting to find him heading one's way. When the smaller children saw him they ran to the other side of the street; when adults saw him they lowered their eyes. Horace was the neighborhood's "moron," a skinny man in his thirties or forties — no one knew his age for sure — whose mental development had stopped at around six and whom a psychologist would likely have categorized as an imbecile, or even an idiot, rather than the moron he'd been unclinically dubbed years before by the neighborhood youngsters. He dragged his feet beneath him, and his head, jutting forward from his neck like a turtle's, bobbed loosely with each step, so that altogether he appeared to be not so much walking as staggering forward. Spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth on the rare occasions when he spoke, and when he was silent he would sometimes drool. He had a thin, irregular face that looked as if it had been crushed and twisted in the vise of the birth canal, except for his nose, which was big and, given the narrowness of his face, oddly and grotesquely bulbous, and which inspired some of the kids to taunt him by shouting "Hey, bugle nose!" when he shuffled by the stoop or the driveway where they were congregated. His clothing gave off a sour smell regardless of the season, and his face was dotted with blood spots, tiny nicks in his skin certifying that though Horace might have the mind of a baby, he also had the beard of a man and, however hazardously, shaved himself, or was shaved by one of his parents, before he went out every day. Minutes earlier he must have left the little apartment back of the tailor shop around the corner where he lived with his parents, an aged couple who spoke Yiddish to each other and heavily accented English to the customers in the shop and were said to have other, normal children who were grown and lived elsewhere — amazingly enough, one of Horace's two brothers was said to be a doctor and the other a successful businessman. Horace was the family's youngest, and he was out walking the neighborhood streets every day of the year, in the worst of summer as in the worst of winter, when he wore an oversized mackinaw with its hood pulled up over his earmuffs and black galoshes with the toggles undone and mittens for his large hands that were attached to the cuffs of his sleeves with safety pins and that dangled there unused no matter what the temperature. It was an outfit in which, trudging along, he looked even more outlandish than he did ordinarily making the rounds of the neighborhood alone.

Mr. Cantor found the Michaels house on the far side of the street, climbed the stoop steps, and, in the small hallway with the mailboxes, pushed the bell to their second-floor flat and heard it ringing upstairs. Slowly someone descended the interior stairs and opened the frosted glass door at the foot of the stairwell. The man who stood there was large and heavyset, and the buttons on his short-sleeved shirt pulled tightly across his belly. He had grainy dark patches under his eyes, and when he saw Mr. Cantor he was silent, as though grief had left him too stupefied to speak.

"I'm Bucky Cantor. I'm the playground director at Chancellor and a phys ed teacher there. Alan was in one of my gym classes. He was one of the boys who played ball up at the playground. I heard what happened and came to offer my condolences."

The man was a long time answering. "Alan talked about you," he finally said.

"Alan was a natural athlete. Alan was a very thoughtful boy. This is terrible, shocking news. It's incomprehensible. I came to tell you how upset I am for all of you."

It was very hot in the hallway, and both the men were perspiring heavily.

"Come upstairs," Mr. Michaels said. "We'll give you something cold."

"I don't want to bother you," Mr. Cantor replied. "I wanted to express my condolences and tell you what a fine boy you had for a son. He was a grownup in every way."

"There's iced tea. My sister-in-law made some. We had to call the doctor for my wife. She's been in bed since it happened. They had to give her pheno-barb. Come and have some iced tea."

"I don't want to intrude."

"Come. Alan told us all about Mr. Cantor and his muscles. He loved the playground." Then, his voice breaking, he said, "He loved life."

Mr. Cantor followed the large, grief-stricken man up the stairs and into the flat. All the shades were lowered and no lights were on. There was a console radio beside the sofa and two big soft club chairs opposite that. Mr. Cantor sat on the sofa while Mr. Michaels went to the kitchen and returned with a glass of iced tea for the guest. He motioned for Mr. Cantor to sit closer to him in one of the club chairs and then, sighing audibly, painfully, he sat in the other chair, which had an ottoman at its foot. Once he was stretched out across the ottoman and the chair, he looked as though he too, like his wife, were in bed, drugged and incapable of moving. Shock had rendered his face expressionless. In the near darkness, the stained skin beneath his eyes looked black, as if it had been imprinted in ink with twin symbols of mourning. Ancient Jewish death rites call for the rending of one's garments on learning of the death of a loved one — M\ Michaels had affixed two dark patches to his colorless face instead.

"We have sons in the army," he said, speaking softly so no one in another room could hear, and slowly, as if out of great fatigue. "Ever since they've been overseas, not a day has gone by when I haven't expected to hear the worst. So far they have survived the worst fighting, and yet their baby brother wakes up a few mornings back with a stiff neck and a high fever, and three days later he's gone. How are we going to tell his brothers? How are we going to write this to them in combat? A twelve-year-old youngster, the best boy you could want, and he's gone. The first night he was so miserable that in the morning I thought that maybe the worst was over and the crisis had passed. But the worst had only begun. What a day that boy put in! The child was on fire. You read the thermometer and you couldn't believe it — a temperature of a hundred and six! As soon as the doctor came he immediately called the ambulance, and at the hospital they whisked him away from us — and that was it. We never saw our son alive again. He died all alone. No chance to say so much as goodbye. All we have of him is a closet with his clothes and his schoolbooks and his sports things, and there, over there, his fish."

For the first time, Mr. Cantor noticed the large glass aquarium up against the far wall, where not only were the shades drawn but dark drapes were pulled shut across a window that must have faced the driveway and the house next door. A neon light shone down on the tank, and inside he could see the population of tiny, many-hued fish, more than a dozen of them, either vanishing into a miniature grotto, green with miniature shrubbery, or sweeping the sandy bottom for food, or veering upward to suck at the surface, or just suspended stock-still near a silver cylinder bubbling air in one corner of the tank. Alan's handiwork, Mr. Cantor thought, a neatly outfitted habitat fastidiously managed and cared for.

"This morning," Mr. Michaels said, gesturing back over his shoulder at the tank, "I remembered to feed them. I jumped up in bed and remembered."

"He was the best boy," Mr. Cantor said, leaning across the chair so he could be heard while keeping his voice low.

"Always did his schoolwork," Mr. Michaels said. "Always helped his mother. Not a selfish bone in his body. Was going to begin in September to prepare for his bar mitzvah. Polite. Neat. Wrote each of his brothers V-mail letters every single week, letters full of news that he read to us at the dinner table. Always cheering his mother up when she would get down in the dumps about the two older boys. Always making her laugh. Even when he was a small boy you could have a good time laughing with Alan. Our house was where all their friends came to have a good time. The place was always full of boys. Why did Alan get polio? Why did he have to get sick and die?"

Mr. Cantor clutched the cold glass of iced tea in his hand without drinking from it, without even realizing he was holding it.

"All his friends are terrified," Mr. Michaels said. "They're terrified that they caught it from him and now they are going to get polio too. Their parents are hysterical. Nobody knows what to do. What is there to do? What should we have done? I rack my brain. Can there be a cleaner household than this one? Can there be a woman who keeps a more spotless house than my wife? Could there be a mother more attentive to her children's welfare? Could there be a boy who looked after his room and his clothes and himself any better than Alan did? Everything he did, he did it right the first time. And always happy. Always with a joke. So why did he die? Where is the fairness in that?"

"There is none," Mr. Cantor said.

"You do only the right thing, the right thing and the right thing and the right thing, going back all the way. You try to be a thoughtful person, a reasonable person, an accommodating person, and then this happens. Where is the sense in life?"

"It doesn't seem to have any," Mr. Cantor answered.

"Where are the scales of justice?" the poor man asked.

"I don't know, Mr. Michaels."

"Why does tragedy always strike down the people who least deserve it?"

"I don't know the answer," Mr. Cantor replied.

"Why not me instead of him?"

Mr. Cantor had no response at all to such a question. He could only shrug.

"A boy — tragedy strikes a boy. The cruelty of it!" Mr. Michaels said, pounding the arm of his chair with his open hand. "The meaninglessness of it! A terrible disease drops from the sky and somebody is dead overnight. A child, no less!"

Mr. Cantor wished that he knew a single word to utter that would alleviate, if only for a moment, the father's anguished suffering. But all he could do was nod his head.

"The other evening we were sitting outside," Mr. Michaels said. "Alan was with us. He had come back from tending his plot in the victory garden. He did that religiously. Last year we actually ate Alan's vegetables that he raised all summer long. A breeze came up. Unexpectedly it got breezy. Do you remember, the other night? Around eight o'clock, how refreshing it seemed?"

"Yes," Mr. Cantor said, but he hadn't been listening. He'd been looking across the room at the tropical fish swimming in the aquarium and thinking that without Alan to tend them, they would starve to death or be given away or, in time, be flushed down the toilet by somebody in tears.

"It seemed like a blessing after the broiling day we'd had. You wait and wait for a breeze. You think a breeze will bring some relief. But you know what I think it did instead?" Mr. Michaels asked. "I think that breeze blew the polio germs around in the air, around and around, the way you see leaves blow around in a flurry. I think Alan was sitting there and breathed in the germs from the breeze…" He couldn't continue; he had begun to cry, awkwardly, inexpertly, the way men cry who ordinarily like to think of themselves as a match for anything.

Here a woman came out of a back bedroom; it was the sister-in-law who was looking after Mrs. Michaels. She stepped gently with her shoes on the floor, as though inside the bedroom a restless child had finally fallen asleep.

Quietly she said, "She wants to know who you're talking to."

"This is Mr. Cantor," said Mr. Michaels, wiping his eyes. "He is a teacher from Alan's school. How is she?" he asked his sister-in-law.

"Not good," she reported in a low voice. "It's the same story. 'Not my baby, not my baby.'"

"I'll be right in," he said.

"I should be going," Mr. Cantor said and got up from his chair and set the untouched iced tea down on a side table. "I only wanted to pay my respects. May I ask when the funeral is?"

"Tomorrow at ten. Schley Street Synagogue. Alan was the rabbi's Hebrew school favorite. He was everybody's favorite. Rabbi Slavin himself came here and offered the shul as soon as he heard what had happened. As a special honor to Alan. Everybody in the world loved that boy. He was one in a million."

"What did you teach him?" the sister-in-law asked Mr. Cantor.

"Gym."

"Anything with sports in it, Alan loved," she said. "And what a student. The apple of everyone's eye."

"I know that," said Mr. Cantor. "I see that. I can't express to you how very sorry I am."

Downstairs, as he stepped out onto the stoop, a woman rushed out of the first-floor flat and, excitedly taking him by his arm, asked, "Where is the quarantine sign? People have been coming and going from upstairs, in and out, in and out, and why isn't there a quarantine sign? I have small children. Why isn't there a quarantine sign protecting my children? Are you a patrolman from the Sanitary Squad?"

"I don't know anything about the Sanitary Squad. I'm from the playground. I teach at the school."

"Who is in charge then?" A small, dark woman laden with fear, her face contorted with emotion, she looked as if her life had already been wrecked by polio rather than by her children's having to live precariously within its reach. She looked no better than Mr. Michaels did.

"I suppose the Board of Health is in charge," Mr. Cantor said.

"Where are they?" she pleaded. "Where is somebody who is in charge! People on the street won't even walk in front of our house — they walk deliberately on the other side. The child is already dead," she added, incoherent now with desperation, "and still I'm waiting for a quarantine sign!" And here she let out a shriek. Mr. Cantor had never heard a shriek before, other than in a horror movie. It was different from a scream. It could have been generated by an electrical current. It was a high-pitched, protracted sound unlike any human noise he knew, and the eerie shock of it caused his skin to crawl.

HE'D HAD NO LUNCH, so he made his way to Syd's to get a hot dog. He was careful to walk on the shady side of the street, across from where nothing was sheltered from the glare of the sun and where he thought he could see heat waves shimmering above the sidewalk. Most of the shoppers had disappeared. It was one of those overpowering summer days when the thermometer registered an astonishing one hundred degrees and when, if the playground were open, he would have curtailed the softball games and encouraged the kids to use the chess- and checkerboards and the Ping-Pong tables set up in the shadow of the school. A lot of the boys took salt tablets that their mothers had given them for the heat, and wanted to go on playing no matter how high the temperature soared, even when the field's asphalt surface began to feel spongy and to radiate heat under their sneakers and the sun was so hot that you would think that rather than darkening your bare skin it would bleach you of all color before cremating you on the spot. Fresh from hearing Alan's father's lamentation, Mr. Cantor wondered if for the rest of the summer he oughtn't to shut down all sports when the temperature hit ninety. That way, he'd at least be doing something, though whether it was something that would make any difference to the spread of polio, he had no idea.

Syd's was almost empty. Somebody was cursing at the pinball machine in the gloom at the back of the store, and two high school boys he did not know were goofing around by the jukebox, which was playing "I'll Be Seeing You," one of the summer's favorites. It was a song that Marcia liked to hear on the radio and that was as popular as it was because of all the wives and girlfriends left behind when their husbands and boyfriends went off for the duration of the war. He remembered now that he and Marcia had danced to the song on her back porch during the week before she'd left for Indian Hill. Dancing slowly together in a shuffling embrace while listening to "I'll Be Seeing You" had made them start to long for each other even before Marcia was gone.

There was no one sitting in any of the booths and nobody on any of the counter stools when Bucky took a seat adjacent to the screen door and the long serving window that opened onto Chancellor Avenue, in the path of whatever air might drift in from the street. A big fan was going at either end of the counter, but they didn't seem to do much good. The place was hot and the smell pervasive of french fries deep-frying in fat.

He got a hot dog and a frosted root beer and began to eat at the counter by himself. Out the window, across the way, trudging slowly up the hill in the annihilating heat of equatorial Newark, there was Horace again, no doubt headed to the playground, not understanding that today was Saturday and that, in the summer, the playground closed on Saturdays at noon. (It was not clear whether he understood what "summer," "playground," "closed," or "noon" was either, just as his failure to cross to the other side of the street probably meant that he could not perform the rudimentary thinking to conceptualize "shade" or even just seek it out instinctively, as any dog would on a day like this.) When Horace found none of the kids back of the school, what would he do next? Sit for hours on the bleachers waiting for them to turn up, or resume those neighborhood wanderings that made him look like someone out sleepwalking in the middle of the day? Yes, Alan was dead and polio a threat to the lives of all the city's children, and yet Mr. Cantor couldn't but find something dispiriting about watching Horace walk the streets by himself beneath the ferocity of that sun, isolated and brainless in a blazing world.

When the boys were playing ball Horace would either seat himself silently at the end of the bench where the team at bat was sitting or else get up and perambulate the field, stopping a foot or two away from one of the players in the field and remain there without moving. This went on all the time, and everybody knew that the only way a fielder could get rid of Horace — and get back to concentrating on the game — was to shake the moron's lifeless hand and say to him, "How ya doin', Horace?" Whereupon Horace would appear to be satisfied and head off to stand beside another of the players. All he asked of life was that — to have his hand shaken. None of the playground boys ever laughed at him or teased him — at least not when Mr. Cantor was around — except for the uncontrollably energetic Kopfermans, Myron and Danny. They were strong, burly boys, good at sports, Myron the overexcitable, belligerent one and Danny the mischievous, secretive one. The older one especially, eleven-year-old Myron, had all the makings of a bully and had to be reined in when there was a disagreement among the boys on the field or when he interfered with the girls jumping rope. Mr. Cantor spent no small portion of his time trying to inculcate in untamed Myron the spirit of fair play and also to caution him to refrain from pestering Horace.

"Look," Myron would say, "look, Horace. Look what I'm doing." When Horace saw the tip of Myron's sneaker beating rhythmically up and down on the bleacher step, his fingers would begin to twitch and his face would grow bright red and soon he would be waving his arms in the air as if he were fighting off a swarm of bees. More than once that summer Mr. Cantor had to tell Myron Kopferman to cut it out and not do it again. "Do what? Do what?" Myron asked, managing to mask none of his insolence with a wide grin. "I'm tapping my foot, Mr. Cantor — don't I have a right to tap my foot?" "Knock it off, Myron," Mr. Cantor replied. The ten-year-old Kopferman boy, Danny, had a cap gun made of metal and modeled to look like a real revolver which he carried in his pocket, even when he was in the field playing second base. The cap gun produced a small explosive sound and smoke when the trigger was pressed. Danny liked to come up behind the other boys and try to frighten them with it. Mr. Cantor tolerated these hijinks only because the other boys were never really frightened. But one day Danny took out the toy weapon and waved it at Horace and told him to stick his hands in the air, which Horace did not do, and so Danny gleefully fired off five rounds of caps. The noise and smoke set Horace to howling, and in his clumsy, splayfooted way, he went running from his playground tormentor. Mr. Cantor confiscated the gun, and after that kept it in a drawer in his office, along with the toy "sheriff's" handcuffs that Danny had employed earlier in the summer to scare the playground's younger kids. Not for the first time he sent Danny Kopferman home for the day with a note telling his mother what her younger son had gotten up to. He doubted that she'd ever seen it.

Yushy, the guy in the mustard-smeared apron who'd been working for years behind the counter at Syd's, said to Mr. Cantor, "It's dead around here."

"It's hot," Mr. Cantor answered. "It's summer. It's the weekend. Everybody's down the shore or staying indoors."

"No, nobody's coming in because of that kid."

"Alan Michaels."

"Yeah," Yushy said. "He ate a hot dog here, and he went home and got polio and died, and now everybody's afraid to come in. It's bullshit. You don't get polio from a hot dog. We sell thousands of hot dogs and nobody gets polio. Then one kid gets polio and everybody says, 'It's the hot dogs at Syd's, it's the hot dogs at Syd's!' A boiled hot dog — how do you get polio from a boiled hot dog?"

"People are frightened," Mr. Cantor said. "They're scared to death, so they worry about everything."

"It's the wop bastards that brought it around," Yushy said.

"That's not likely," Mr. Cantor said.

"They did. They spit all over the place."

"I was there. We washed the spit away with ammonia."

"You washed the spit away but you didn't wash the polio away. You can't wash the polio away. You can't see it. It gets in the air and you open your mouth and breathe it in and next thing you got the polio. It's got nothing to do with hot dogs."

Mr. Cantor offered no response and, while listening to the end of the familiar song playing on the jukebox — and suddenly missing Marcia — finished up eating.

I'll be seeing you,

In every lovely summer's day,

In every thing that's light and gay,

I'll always think of you that way…

"Suppose the kid had had an ice cream sundae at Halem's," Yushy said. "Would nobody eat ice cream sundaes at Halem's? Suppose he had chow mein up at the chinks'—would nobody go up to the chinks for chow mein?"

"Probably," Mr. Cantor said.

"And what about the other kid that died?" Yushy asked.

"What other kid?"

"The kid that died this morning."

"What kid died? Herbie Steinmark died?"

"Yeah. He didn't eat no hot dogs here."

"Are you sure he died? Who told you Herbie Steinmark died?"

"Somebody. Somebody came in just before and told me. A couple of guys told me."

Mr. Cantor paid Yushy for the food and then, despite the tremendous heat — and unafraid of the heat — ran from Syd's across Chancellor and back to the playground, where he raced down the stairs to the basement door, unlocked it, and headed for his office. There he picked up the telephone and dialed the number of Beth Israel Hospital, one of a list of emergency numbers on a card that was thumbtacked to the notice board over his phone. Directly above it was another card, bearing a quotation he had written out in pen from Joseph Lee, the father of the playground movement, whom he'd read about at Panzer; it had been up there since the first day he arrived on the job. "Play for the adult is recreation, the renewal of life; play for the child is growth, the gaining of life." Tacked up beside that was a notice that had arrived in the mail just the day before from the head of the recreation department to all playground directors:

When he got through to the hospital, he asked the operator for patient information and then asked for the condition of Herbert Steinmark. He was told that the patient was no longer in the hospital. "But he's in an iron lung," Mr. Cantor protested. "The patient is deceased," said the operator.

Deceased? What could that word have to do with plump, round, smiling Herbie? He was the least coordinated of all the boys at the playground, and the most ingratiating. He was always among the boys who helped him put out the equipment first thing in the morning. In gym class at Chancellor, he was hopeless on the pommel horse and the parallel bars and with the rings and the climbing rope, but because he tried hard and was persistently good-natured, Mr. Cantor had never given him lower than a B. Alan the natural athlete and Herbie the hopeless athlete, completely lacking physical agility — both had been playing on the field the day the Italians tried to invade the playground, and both were dead, polio fatalities at the age of twelve.

Mr. Cantor rushed down the basement hall to the washroom that was used by the playground boys and, at the mercy of his grief, with no idea what to do with his misery, he grabbed the janitor's mop, a bucket of water, and a gallon can of disinfectant and swabbed the entire tile floor, profusely sweating while he worked. Next he went into the girls' washroom, and vigorously, in a mad rage, he cleaned the floor there. Then, with his clothes and his hands reeking of disinfectant, he took the bus home.

THE NEXT MORNING, after shaving, showering, and eating breakfast, he repolished his good shoes, put on his suit, a white shirt, and the darker of his two ties, and took the bus to Schley Street. The synagogue was a low, dismal yellow-brick box of a building across the street from an overgrown lot that had been converted into a neighborhood victory garden, probably the one where Alan had taken diligent care of his own vegetable plot. Mr. Cantor could see a few women, wearing broad-brimmed straw hats for protection from the morning sun, bent over and weeding small patches of land adjacent to an advertising billboard. In front of the synagogue a row of cars was parked, one of them a black hearse, whose driver stood at the curb moving a cloth over the front fender. Inside the hearse Mr. Cantor could see the casket. It was impossible to believe that Alan was lying in that pale, plain pine box merely from having caught a summertime disease. That box from which you cannot force your way out. That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever. The rest of us live and grow older by the day, but he remains twelve. Millions of years go by, and he is still twelve.

Mr. Cantor took his folded yarmulke out of his pants pocket, slipped it on his head, and went inside, where he found an empty seat near the back. He followed the prayers in the prayer book and joined the congregation in the recitations. Midway through, a woman's voice was heard to scream, "She fainted! Help!" Rabbi Slavin briefly stopped the service while someone, most likely a doctor, rushed along the aisle and up the stairs to the balcony, to tend to whoever had passed out in the women's section. The synagogue temperature must have been at least ninety by then, and highest probably in the balcony. No wonder somebody had fainted. If the service didn't soon come to an end, people would start fainting everywhere. Even Mr. Cantor felt a little woozy inside his one suit, a woolen suit made to be worn in the winter.

The seat next to him was empty. He kept wanting Alan to walk in and take it. He wanted Alan to walk in with his baseball mitt and sit down beside him and, as he regularly did at noon on the playground bleachers, eat the sandwich out of his lunch bag beside Mr. Cantor.

The eulogy was delivered by Alan's uncle, Isadore Michaels, whose pharmacy had stood for years on the corner of Wainwright and Chancellor and whom all the customers called Doc. He was a jovial-looking man, heavyset and dark-complexioned like Alan's father, with those same grainy patches under his eyes. He alone was speaking because no other family member felt able to control his emotions enough to do it. There were many people sobbing, and not only in the women's section.

"God blessed us with Alan Avram Michaels for twelve years," his uncle Isadore said, smiling bravely. "And He blessed me with a nephew who I loved like my own child from the day he was born. On his way home every day after school, Alan would always stop by the store and sit at the counter and order a chocolate malted. When he was first starting school he was the skinniest kid in the world, and the idea was to fatten him up. If I was free, I'd go over to the soda fountain and make the malted for him myself and add in extra malt to put some pounds on him. Once that ritual began, it went on year after year. How I would enjoy those after-school visits from my extraordinary nephew!"

Here he had to take a moment to collect himself.

"Alan," he resumed, "was an authority on tropical fish. He could talk like an expert about everything you do to take care of all the different kinds of tropical fish. There was nothing more thrilling than to visit the house and sit with Alan alongside his aquarium and have him explain to you everything about each of the fish and how they had babies and so on. You could sit there with him for an hour and he still wouldn't be finished telling you all that he knew. You came away from being with Alan and you had a smile on your face and your spirits were lifted, and you'd learned something besides. How did he do it? How did this child do all that he did for all of us adults? What was Alan's special secret? It was to live every day of life, seeing the wonder in everything and taking delight in everything, whether it was his after-school malted, or his tropical fish, or the sports in which he excelled, or contributing to the war effort in the victory garden, or what he'd studied that day at school. Alan packed more healthy fun into his twelve years than most people get in a lifetime. And Alan gave more pleasure to others than most people give in a lifetime. Alan's life is ended…"

Here he had to stop again, and when he continued it was with a husky voice and on the edge of tears.

"Alan's life is ended," he repeated, "and yet, in our sorrow, we should remember that while he lived it, it was an endless life. Every day was endless for Alan because of his curiosity. Every day was endless for Alan because of his geniality. He remained a happy child all of his life, and with everything the child did, he always gave it his all. There are fates far worse than that in this world."

Afterward, Mr. Cantor stood outside on the synagogue steps to pay his respects to Alan's family and to thank Alan's uncle for all he had said. Who would have imagined, watching him in his white coat at the drugstore, measuring out tablets for someone's prescription, how eloquent an orator Doc Michaels could be, especially while the people scattered throughout the congregation, upstairs and down, were openly wailing from the impact of his words? Mr. Cantor saw four boys from the playground exiting together from the service: the Spector boy, the Sobelsohn boy, the Taback boy, and the Finkelstein boy. They all wore ill-fitting suits and white shirts and ties and hard shoes, and perspiration streamed down their faces. It wasn't impossible that their greatest hardship that day was their being strangled in all that heat by a starched collar and a tie rather than their having their initial encounter with death. Still, they had dressed in their best clothes and come to the synagogue despite the weather, and Mr. Cantor walked up to them and took each by the shoulder and then reassuringly patted his back. "Alan would be glad you were here," he told them quietly. "It was very thoughtful of you to do this."

Then someone touched him on the back. "Who are you going with?"

"What?"

"There — " The person pointed to a car some way from the hearse. "There, go with the Beckermans," and he was pushed toward a Plymouth sedan parked down the curb.

It hadn't been his plan to go out to the cemetery. After the synagogue service, he intended to return to help his grandmother finish up the weekend chores. But he got into the car whose door was being held open for him and sat in the back seat beside a woman with a black-veiled hat who was fanning herself by waving a handkerchief in front of her face, whose powder was streaky with perspiration. In the driver's seat was a chunky little man in a dark suit whose nose was broken like his grandfather's and maybe for the same reason: anti-Semites. Seated alongside him was a plain, dark-haired girl of fifteen or sixteen, who was introduced as Alan's cousin Meryl. The elder Beckermans were Alan's aunt and uncle on his mother's side. Mr. Cantor introduced himself as one of Alan's teachers.

They had to sit in the hot car some ten minutes, waiting for the funeral cortege to form behind the hearse. Mr. Cantor tried to remember what Isadore Michaels had said in his eulogy about how Alan's life, while Alan lived it, had seemed to the boy to be endless, but invariably he wound up instead imagining Alan roasting like a piece of meat in his box.

They proceeded down Schley Street to Chancellor Avenue, where they made a left and began the slow trek up Chancellor, past Alan's uncle's pharmacy and toward the grade school and the high school at the top of the hill. There was hardly any other traffic — most of the stores were closed except for Tabatchnick's, catering to the Sunday morning smoked-fish trade, the corner candy stores that were selling the Sunday papers, and the bakery, selling coffee cake and bagels for Sunday breakfast. In his twelve years, Alan would have been out on this street a thousand times, heading back and forth to school and to the playground, going out to get something for his mother, meeting his friends at Halem's, walking all the way up and all the way down the hill to Weequahic Park to go fishing and ice-skating and rowing on the lake. Now he was riding down Chancellor Avenue for the last time, at the head of a funeral cortege and inside that box. If this car is an oven, Mr. Cantor thought, imagine the inside of that box.

Everyone in the car had been silent until they nearly reached the crest of the hill and were passing Syd's hot dog joint.

"Why did he have to eat in that filthy hole?" Mrs. Beckerman said. "Why couldn't he wait to get home and take something from the Frigidaire? Why do they allow that place to remain open across from a school? In summertime, no less."

"Edith," Mr. Beckerman said, "calm down."

"Ma," Alan's cousin Meryl said, "all the kids eat there. It's a hangout."

"It's a cesspool," Mrs. Beckerman said. "In polio season, for a boy with Alan's brains to go into a place like that, in this heat —"

"Enough, Edith. It's hot. We all know it's hot."

"There's his school," Mrs. Beckerman said as they reached the top of the hill and were passing the pale stone façade of the grade school where Mr. Cantor taught. "How many children love school the way Alan did? From the day he started, he loved it."

Perhaps the observation was being addressed to him, as a representative of the school. Mr. Cantor said, "He was an outstanding student."

"And there's Weequahic. He would have been an honor student at Weequahic. He was already planning to take Latin. Latin! I had a nickname for him. I called him Brilliant."

"That he was," Mr. Cantor said, thinking of Alan's father at the house and his uncle at the synagogue and now his aunt in the car — all of them gushing for the same good reason: because Alan deserved no less. They will lament to their graves losing this marvelous boy.

"In college," Mrs. Beckerman said, "he planned to study science. He wanted to be a scientist and cure disease. He read a book about Louis Pasteur and knew everything about how Louis Pasteur discovered that germs are invisible. He wanted to be another Louis Pasteur," she said, mapping out the whole of a future that was never to be. "Instead," she concluded, "he had to go to eat in a place crawling with germs."

"Edith, that's enough," Mr. Beckerman said. "We don't know how he got sick or where. Polio is all over the city. There's an epidemic. It's every place you look. He got a bad case and he died. That's all we know. Everything else is talk that gets you nowhere. We don't know what his future would have been."

"We do!" she said angrily. "That child could have been anything!"

"Okay, you're right. I'm not arguing. Let's just get to the cemetery and give him a proper burial. That's all we can do for him now."

"And the two other boys," Mrs. Beckerman said. "God forbid anything should happen to them."

"They made it this far," Mr. Beckerman said, "they'll make it the rest of the way. The war will soon be over and Larry and Lenny will be safely home."

"And they'll never see their baby brother again. Alan will still be gone," she said. "There's no bringing him back."

"Edith," he said, "we know that. Edith, you're talking and you're not saying anything that everybody doesn't know."

"Let her speak, Daddy," Meryl said.

"But what good does it do," Mr. Beckerman asked, "going on and on?"

"It does good," the girl said. "It does her good."

"Thank you, darling," Mrs. Beckerman said.

All the windows were rolled down, but Mr. Cantor felt as though he were wrapped not in a suit but a blanket. The cortege had reached the park and turned right onto Elizabeth Avenue and was passing through Hillside and across the railroad overpass into Elizabeth, and he hoped that it wasn't much more time before they reached the cemetery. He imagined that if Alan lay roasting in that box for much longer, the box would somehow ignite and explode, and as though a hand grenade had gone off inside, the boy's remains would come bursting out all over the hearse and the street.

WHY DOES POLIO strike only in the summer? At the cemetery, standing there bareheaded but for his yarmulke, he had to wonder if polio couldn't be caused by the summer sun itself. At midday, in its full overhead onslaught, it seemed to have more than sufficient strength to cripple and kill, and to be rather more likely to do so than a microscopic germ in a hot dog.

A grave had been dug for Alan's casket. It was the second open grave Mr. Cantor had ever seen, the first having been his grandfather's, three years earlier, just before the war began. Then he'd been weighed down caring for his grandmother and holding her close to him throughout the cemetery service so that her legs didn't give way. After that, he'd been so busy looking after her and staying in every night with her and eventually getting her out once a week for a movie and an ice cream sundae that it was a while before he could find the time to contemplate all he himself had lost. But as Alan's casket was lowered into the ground — as Mrs. Michaels lunged for the grave, crying "No! Not my baby!" — death revealed itself to him no less powerfully than the incessant beating of the sun on his yarmulke'd head.

They all joined the rabbi in reciting the mourner's prayer, praising God's almightiness, praising extravagantly, unstintingly, the very God who allowed everything, including children, to be destroyed by death. Between the death of Alan Michaels and the communal recitation of the God-glorifying Kaddish, Alan's family had had an interlude of some twenty-four hours to hate and loathe God for what He had inflicted upon them — not, of course, that it would have occurred to them to respond like that to Alan's death, and certainly not without fearing to incur God's wrath, prompting Him to wrest Larry and Lenny Michaels from them next.

But what might not have occurred to the Michaels family had not been lost on Mr. Cantor. To be sure, he himself hadn't dared to turn against God for taking his grandfather when the old man reached a timely age to die. But for killing Alan with polio at twelve? For the very existence of polio? How could there be forgiveness — let alone hallelujahs — in the face of such lunatic cruelty? It would have seemed far less of an affront to Mr. Cantor for the group gathered in mourning to declare themselves the celebrants of solar majesty, the children of an ever-constant solar deity, and, in the fervent way of our hemisphere's ancient heathen civilizations, to abandon themselves in a ritual sun dance around the dead boy's grave — better that, better to sanctify and placate the unrefracted rays of Great Father Sun than to submit to a supreme being for whatever atrocious crime it pleases Him to perpetrate. Yes, better by far to praise the irreplaceable generator that has sustained our existence from its beginning — better by far to honor in prayer one's tangible daily encounter with that ubiquitous eye of gold isolated in the blue body of the sky and its immanent power to incinerate the earth — than to swallow the official lie that God is good and truckle before a cold-blooded murderer of children. Better for one's dignity, for one's humanity, for one's worth altogether, not to mention for one's everyday idea of whatever the hell is going on here.

Four times during the prayer, at the grave of this child, the mourners repeated, "Omein."

Only when the funeral cortege had left the sprawl of tombstones behind and was exiting between the gates onto McClellan Street did he suddenly remember the visits he used to make as a boy to the Jewish cemetery on Grove Street where his mother, and now his grandfather, were buried and where his grandmother and he would be buried in turn. As a child he'd been taken by his grandparents to visit his mother's grave every year to commemorate her birthday in May, though from his first childhood visit on, he could not believe that she was interred there. Standing between his tearful grandparents, he always felt that he was going along with a game by pretending that she was — never more than at the cemetery did he feel that his having had a mother was a made-up story to begin with. And yet, despite his knowing that his annual visit was the queerest thing he was called upon to do, he would not ever refuse to go. If this was part of being a good son to a mother woven nowhere into his memories, then he did it, even when it felt like a hollow performance.

Whenever he tried at the graveside to summon up a thought appropriate to the occasion, he would remember the story his grandmother had told him about his mother and the fish. Of all her stories — standard inspirational stories about how clever Doris had been in school and how helpful she'd been around the house and how she'd loved as a child to sit at the cash register in the store ringing up the sales, just the way he did when he was small — this was the one that had lodged in his mind. The unforgotten event occurred on a spring afternoon long before her death and his birth, when, to prepare for Passover, his grandmother would walk up Avon Avenue to the fish store to choose two live carp from the fishmonger's tank and bring them home in a pail and keep them alive in the tin tub that the family used for taking baths. She'd fill the tub with water and leave the fish there until it was time to chop off their heads and tails, scale them, and cook them to make gefilte fish. One day when Mr. Cantor's mother was five years old, she'd come bounding up the stairs from kindergarten, found the fish swimming in the tin tub, and after quickly removing her clothes, got into the tub to play with them. His grandmother found her there when she came up from the store to fix her an after-school snack. They never told his grandfather what the child had done for fear that he might punish her for it. Even when the little boy was told about the fish by his grandmother — he was then himself in kindergarten — he was cautioned to keep the story a secret so as not to upset his grandfather, who, in the first years after his cherished daughter's death, was able to deflect the anguish of losing her only by never speaking of her.

It may have seemed odd for Mr. Cantor to think of this story at his mother's graveside, but what else that was memorable was there to think about?

BY THE END of the next week, Weequahic had reported the summer's highest number of polio cases of any school district in the city. The playground itself was geographically ringed with new cases. Across from the playground on Hobson Street a ten-year-old girl, Lillian Sussman, had been stricken; across from the school on Bayview Avenue a six-year-old girl, Barbara Friedman, had been stricken — and neither was among the girls who jumped rope regularly at the playground, though there were now less than half as many of them around since the polio scare had begun. And down from the playground on Vassar Avenue, the two Kopferman brothers, Danny and Myron, had also been stricken. The evening of the day he heard the news about the Kopferman boys, he telephoned their house. He got Mrs. Kopferman. He explained who he was and why he was calling.

"You!" shouted Mrs. Kopferman. "You have the nerve to call?"

"Excuse me," Mr. Cantor said. "I don't understand."

"What don't you understand? You don't understand that in summertime you use your head with children running around in the heat? That you don't let them drink from the public fountain? That you watch when they are pouring sweat? Do you know how to use the eyes that God gave you and watch over children during polio season? No! Not for a minute!"

"Mrs. Kopferman, I assure you, I am careful with all the boys."

"So why do I have two paralyzed children? Both my boys! All that I've got! Explain that to me! You let them run around like animals up there — and you wonder why they get polio! Because of you! Because of a reckless, irresponsible idiot like you!" And she hung up.

He had called the Kopfermans from the kitchen, after he had sent his grandmother downstairs to sit outside with the neighbors and he had finished cleaning up from dinner. The day's heat had not broken, and indoors it was suffocatingly hot. When he hung up from the phone call he was saturated with perspiration, even though before eating he had taken a shower and changed into fresh clothes. How he wished his grandfather were around for him to talk to. He knew that Mrs. Kopferman was hysterical; he knew that she was overcome with grief and crazily lashing out at him; but he would have liked to have his grandfather there to assure him that he was not culpable in the ways she had said. This was his first direct confrontation with vile accusation and intemperate hatred, and it had unstrung him far more than dealing with the ten menacing Italians at the playground.

It was seven o'clock and still bright outdoors when he went three flights down the scuffed steps of the outside wooden staircase to visit for a moment with the neighbors before he took a walk. His grandmother was sitting with them in front of the building, using a citronella candle to keep the mosquitoes away. They sat on fold-up beach chairs and were talking about polio. The older ones, like his grandmother, had lived through the city's 1916 epidemic and were lamenting the fact that in the intervening years science had been unable to find a cure for the disease or come up with an idea of how to prevent it. Look at Weequahic, they said, as clean and sanitary as any section in the city, and it's the worst hit. There was talk, somebody said, of keeping the colored cleaning women from coming to the neighborhood for fear that they carried the polio germs up from the slums. Somebody else said that in his estimation the disease was spread by money, by paper money passing from hand to hand. The important thing, he said, was always to wash your hands after you handled paper money or coins. What about the mail, someone else said, you don't think it could be spread by the mail? What are you going to do, somebody retorted, suspend delivering the mail? The whole city would come to a halt.

Six or seven weeks ago they would have been talking about the war news.

He heard a phone ringing and realized it was from their flat and that it must be Marcia calling from camp. Every school day for the past year they'd see each other at least once or twice in the corridors during school hours and then spend the weekends together, and this was the first extended period since they'd met that they were apart. He missed her, and he missed the Steinberg family, who had been kind and welcoming to him from the start. Her father was a doctor and her mother had formerly been a high school English teacher, and they lived, with Marcia's two younger sisters — twins in the sixth grade at Maple Avenue School — in a large, comfortable house on Goldsmith Avenue, a block up from Dr. Steinberg's Elizabeth Avenue office. After Mrs. Kopferman had accused Mr. Cantor of criminal negligence, he had thought about going to see Dr. Steinberg to talk to him about the epidemic and find out more about the disease. Dr. Steinberg was an educated man (in this way unlike the grandfather, who'd never read a book), and when he spoke Mr. Cantor always felt confident that he knew what he was talking about. He was no replacement for his grandfather — and no replacement, certainly, for a father of his own — but he was now the man he most admired and relied on. On his first date with Marcia, when he asked about her family, she had said of her father that he was not only wonderful with his patients but that he had a gift for keeping everybody in their household content and justly settling all her kid sisters' spats. He was the best judge of character she'd ever known. "My mother," she'd say, "calls him 'the impeccable thermometer of the family's emotional temperature.' There's no doctor I know of," she told him, "who's more humane than my dad."

"It's you!" Mr. Cantor said after racing up the stairs to get the phone. "It's boiling here. It's after seven and it's still as hot as it was at noon. The thermometers look stuck. How are you?"

"I have something to tell you. I have spectacular news," Marcia said. "Irv Schlanger got his draft notice. He's leaving camp. They need a replacement. They desperately need a waterfront director for the rest of the season. I told Mr. Blomback about you, I gave him all your credentials, and he wants to hire you, sight unseen."

Mr. Blomback was the owner-director of Indian Hill and an old friend of the Steinbergs. Before he went into the camp business, he had been a young high school vice principal in Newark and Mrs. Steinberg's boss when she was starting out as a new teacher.

"Marcia," Mr. Cantor said to her, "I've got a job."

"But you could get away from the epidemic. I'm so worried about you, Bucky. In the hot city with all those kids. In such close contact with all those kids — and right at the center of the epidemic. And that heat, day after day of that heat."

"I've got some ninety kids at the playground, and so far, among those kids we've had only four polio cases."

"Yes, and two deaths."

"That's still not an epidemic at the playground, Marcia."

"I meant in Weequahic altogether. It's the most affected part of the city. And it's not even August, the worst month of all. By then Weequahic could have ten times as many cases. Bucky, please, leave your job. You could be the boys' waterfront director at Indian Hill. The kids are great, the staff is great, Mr. Blomback is great — you'd love it here. You could be waterfront director for years and years to come. We could be working here every summer. We could be together as a couple and you'd be safe."

"I'm safe here, Marcia."

"You're not".

"I can't quit my job. This is my first year. How can I walk out on all those kids? I can't leave them. They need me more than ever. This is what I have to be doing."

"Darling, you're a fine and dedicated teacher, but that doesn't mean you're indispensable to a playground's summer program. I need you more than ever. I love you so much. I miss you so much. I dread the idea of something happening to you. What possible good are you doing our future by putting yourself in harm's way?"

"Your father deals with sick people all the time. He's in harm's way all the time. Do you worry about him that much?"

"This summer? Yes. Thank God my sisters are here at the camp. Yes, I worry about my father and about my mother and about everybody I love."

"And would you expect your father to pick up and leave his patients because of the polio?"

"My father is a doctor. He chose to be a doctor. Dealing with sick people is his job. It isn't yours. Your job is dealing with well people, with children who are healthy and can run around and play games and have fun. You would be a sensational waterfront director. Everybody here would love you. You're an excellent swimmer, you're an excellent diver, you're an excellent teacher. Oh, Bucky, it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And," she said, lowering her voice, "we could be alone up here. There's an island in the lake. We could canoe over there at night after lights out. We wouldn't have to worry about your grandmother or my parents or about my sisters snooping around the house. We could finally, finally be alone."

He could take all her clothes off, he thought, and see her completely naked. They could be alone on a dark island without their clothes on. And, with no one nearby to worry about, he could caress her as unhurriedly and as hungrily as he liked. And he could be free of the Kopferman family. He would not have any more Mrs. Kopfermans hysterically charging that he had given their children polio. And he could stop hating God, which was confusing his emotions and making him feel very strange. On their island he could be far from everything that was growing harder and harder to bear.

"I can't leave my grandmother," Mr. Cantor said. "How is she going to get the groceries up the three flights? She gets pains in her chest from carrying things up the stairs. I have to be here. I have to do the laundry. I have to do the shopping. I have to take care of her."

"The Einnemans can look after her for the rest of the summer. They'd go to the grocery store for her. They'd do her few pieces of laundry. They'd be more than willing to help out. She babysits for them already. They're crazy about her."

"The Einnemans are great neighbors, but it's not their job. It's mine. I can't leave Newark."

"What shall I tell Mr. Blomback?"

"Tell him thank you but I can't leave Newark, not at a time like this."

"I'm not going to tell him anything," Marcia replied. "I'm going to wait. I'm going to give you a day to think about it. I'm going to call again tomorrow night. Bucky, you most definitely wouldn't be shirking the duties of your job. There's nothing unheroic about leaving Newark at a time like this. I know you. I know what you're thinking. But you're so brave as it is, sweetheart. I get weak in the knees when I think about how brave you are. If you come to Indian Hill, you'd really just be doing another job no less conscientiously. And you'd be fulfilling another duty you have to yourself — to be happy. Bucky, this is simply prudence in the face of danger — it's common sense!"

"I'm not going to change my mind. I want to be with you, I miss you every day, but I can't possibly leave here now."

"But you must think of your own welfare too. Sleep on it, sweetheart, please, please do."

It was the Einnemans and the Fishers whom his grandmother was sitting with outside. The Fishers, an electrician and his wife in their late forties, had an eighteen-year-old son, a marine, waiting to ship out from California to the Pacific, and a daughter who was a salesgirl for the downtown department store from which his father had embezzled, an inescapable fact that would flash through Mr. Cantor's mind whenever they happened to meet leaving for work in the morning. The Einnemans were a young married couple with an infant boy who lived directly downstairs from the Cantors. The baby was outside with them, sleeping in his carriage; since the child had been born, Mr. Cantor's grandmother had been helping to look after him.

They were still talking about polio, now by recalling its frightening precursors. His grandmother was remembering when whooping cough victims were required to wear armbands and how, before a vaccine was developed, the most dreaded disease in the city was diphtheria. She remembered getting one of the first smallpox vaccinations. The site of the injection had become seriously infected, and she had a large, uneven circle of scarred flesh on her upper right arm as a result. She pushed up the half-sleeve of her housedress and extended her arm to show it to everyone.

After a while Mr. Cantor told them he was going to take a walk, and went off first to the drugstore on Avon Avenue and got an ice cream cone at the soda fountain. He chose a stool under one of the revolving fans and sat there to eat his ice cream — and to think. Any demand made upon him he had to fulfill, and the demand now was to take care of his endangered kids at the playground. And he had to fulfill it not for the kids alone but out of respect for the memory of the tenacious grocer who, with all his gruff intensity and despite all his limitations, had fulfilled every demand he ever faced. Marcia had it dead wrong — it would be hard to shun the responsibilities of his job any more execrably than by decamping to join her in the Pocono Mountains.

He could hear a siren in the distance. He heard sirens off and on, day and night now. They were not the air-raid sirens — those went off only once a week, at noon on Saturdays, and they did not induce fear so much as provide solace by proclaiming the city ready for anything. These were the sirens of ambulances going to get polio victims and transport them to the hospital, sirens stridently screaming, "Out of the way — a life is at stake!" Several city hospitals had recently run out of iron lungs, and patients in need of them were being taken to Belleville, Kearny, and Elizabeth until a new shipment of the respirator tanks reached Newark. He could only hope that the ambulance wasn't headed for the Weequahic section to pick up another of his kids.

He had begun to hear rumors that if the epidemic got any worse, all the city's playgrounds might have to be shut down in order to prevent the children from being in close contact there. Normally such a decision would be up to the Board of Health, but the mayor was opposed to any unnecessary disruption to the summer lives of Newark's boys and girls and would make the final decision himself. He was doing everything he could to calm the city's parents and, according to the paper, had appeared in each of the wards to inform concerned citizens about all the ways the city was ensuring that filth and dirt and garbage were removed regularly from public and private property. He reminded them to keep their trash cans firmly covered and to join the "Swat the Fly" campaign by keeping their screens in good repair and swatting and killing the disease-carrying flies that bred in filth and found their way indoors through open doors and unscreened windows. Garbage pickup was to be increased to every other day, and to abet the anti-fly campaign, fly swatters would be distributed free by "sanitary inspectors" visiting the residential neighborhoods to make certain that all streets were cleared of refuse. In his attempt to assure parents that everything was under control and generally safe, the mayor made a special point of telling them, "The playgrounds will remain open. Our city kids need their playgrounds in the summer. The Prudential Life Insurance Company of Newark and Metropolitan Life of New York both tell us that fresh air and sunshine are the principal weapons with which to eliminate the disease. Give the children plenty of sunshine and fresh air on the playgrounds and no germ can long withstand the impact of either. Above all," he told his audiences, "keep your yards and cellars clean, don't lose your heads, and we'll soon see a decline in the spread of this scourge. And swat the fly unmercifully. You cannot overestimate the evil that flies do."

Mr. Cantor started up Avon to Belmont swaddled by the stifling heat and enveloped by the stifling smell. On days when the wind came from the south, up from the Rahway and Linden refineries, there was the acrid smell of burning in the air, but tonight the currents were from the north, and the air had the distinctively foul stench that issued from the Secaucus pig farms, a few miles up the Hackensack River. Mr. Cantor knew of no street odor more foul. During a heat wave, when Newark seemed drained of every drop of pure air, it could sometimes be so sickeningly fecal-smelling that a strong whiff would make you gag and race indoors. People were already blaming the eruption of polio cases on the city's proximity to Secaucus — contemptuously known as "the Hog Capital of Hudson County" — and on the infectious properties inhering in that all-blanketing miasma that was, to those downwind of it, a toxic compound of God only knew what vile, pestilential, putrid ingredients. If they were right, breathing in the breath of life was a dangerous activity in Newark — take a deep breath and you could die.

Yet in spite of everything uninviting about the night, there was a string of boys on rattly old bicycles coasting full speed down the uneven cobblestones between the trolley tracks on Avon Avenue and screaming "Geronimo!" at the top of their lungs. There were boys cavorting around and grabbing at one another in front of the candy stores. There were boys seated on the tenement stoops, smoking and talking among themselves. There were boys in the middle of the street lazily tossing fly balls to one another under the streetlights. On an empty corner lot a hoop had been raised on the side wall of an abandoned building, and, by the light of the liquor store across the street, where derelicts staggered in and out, a few boys were practicing underhand foul shots. He passed another corner where some boys were gathered around a mail collection box, atop which one of their pals was perched, yodeling for their amusement. There were families camped out on fire escapes, playing radios trailing extension cords that were plugged in a wall socket inside, and more families gathered in the dim alleyways between buildings. Passing by the tenement dwellers on his walk, he saw women fanning themselves with paper fans a local dry cleaner gave free to his customers, and he saw workmen, home from the factory floor, sitting and talking in their sleeveless undershirts, and the word he heard again and again in the snatches of conversation was, of course, "polio." Only the children seemed capable of thinking of anything else. Only the children (the children!) acted as though, outside the Weequahic section at least, summertime was still a carefree adventure.

Neither on the neighborhood streets nor back at the drugstore ice cream counter did he run into any of the boys he'd grown up with and played ball with and gone through school with. By now, but for a few 4-Fs like himself — guys with heart murmurs or fallen arches or eyes as bad as his own who were working in war plants — they had all been drafted.

On Belmont, Mr. Cantor cut through the traffic at Hawthorne Avenue, where a couple of candy stores still had lights on and where he could hear the voices of boys hanging out along the street calling to one another. From there he headed up to Bergen Street and into the residential side streets of the wealthier end of the Weequahic section, on the side of the hill running down to Weequahic Park. Eventually he came to Goldsmith Avenue. Only when he was practically there did he realize that he wasn't out taking an aimless stroll halfway across the city on a hot summer night but heading very specifically for Marcia's. Maybe his intention was simply to look at the big brick house standing amid the other large brick houses flanking it and think of her and turn around and head back where he'd come from. But after circling once around the block, he found himself just paces from the Steinberg door, and with resolve he headed up the flagstone walk to ring the bell. The screened porch with the glider that faced the front lawn was where Marcia and he would sit and neck when they came back from the movies, until her mother called from upstairs to ask nicely if it wasn't time for Bucky to go home.

It was Dr. Steinberg who came to the door. Now he knew why he'd been roaming far from the tenements of Barclay Street, breathing in this stinking air.

"Bucky, my boy," Dr. Steinberg said, opening his arms and smiling. "What a nice surprise. Come in, come in."

"I went to get some ice cream and took a walk over here," Mr. Cantor explained.

"You miss your girl," Dr. Steinberg said, laughing. "So do I. I miss all three of my girls."

They went through the house to the screened porch at the back, which looked out onto Mrs. Steinberg's garden. Mrs. Steinberg was staying at their summer house at the shore, where, the doctor said, he would be joining her for weekends. How would Bucky like a cold drink, Dr. Steinberg asked. There was fresh lemonade in the refrigerator. He'd bring him a glass.

The Steinbergs' house was the kind Mr. Cantor had dreamed about living in when he was a kid growing up with his grandparents in their third-floor three-room flat: a large one-family house with spacious halls and a central staircase and lots of bedrooms and more than one bathroom and two screened-in porches and thick wall-to-wall carpeting in all the rooms and wooden venetian blinds covering the windows instead of Woolworth's blackout shades. And, at the rear of the house, a flower garden. He'd never seen a full-blown flower garden before, except for the renowned rose garden in Weequahic Park, which his grandmother had taken him to visit as a child. That was a public garden kept up by the parks department; as far as he'd known, all gardens were public. A private flower garden flourishing in a Newark backyard amazed him. His own cemented-over backyard was riven with cracks, and stretches of it were stripped of crumbling chunks that over the decades the neighborhood kids had pried loose for missiles to fling murderously at the alley cats or larkily at a passing car or in anger at one another. Girls in the building played hopscotch there until the boys drove them out to play aces up; there was the jumble of the building's beat-up metal garbage cans; and crisscrossing overhead were the clotheslines, a drooping web of them, rope strung on pulleys from a rear window in each tenement flat to a weathered telephone pole at the far side of the dilapidated yard. During earliest childhood, whenever his grandmother leaned out of the window to hang the week's wash, he stood nearby passing her the clothespins. Sometimes he would wake up screaming from nightmares of her leaning so far over the sill to hang a bedsheet that she tumbled out of the third-story window. Before his grandparents determined how and when to make intelligible to him that his mother had died in childbirth, he had come to imagine that she had died in just such a fall of her own. That's what having a backyard had meant to him until he was old enough to comprehend and deal with the truth — a place of death, a small rectangular graveyard for the women who loved him.

But now, just the thought of Mrs. Steinberg's garden filled him with pleasure and reminded him of all he valued most about the Steinbergs and how they lived, and of everything that his kindly grandparents couldn't offer him and that he'd always secretly hungered for. So unschooled was he in extravagance that he took the presence in a house of more than one bathroom as the height of luxurious living. He'd always possessed a strong family sense without himself having a traditional family, so sometimes when he was alone in the house with Marcia — which was rare because of the lively presence of her younger sisters — he would imagine that the two of them were married and the house and the garden and the domestic order and the surfeit of bathrooms were theirs. How at ease he felt in their house — yet it seemed a miracle to him that he had ever gotten there.

Dr. Steinberg came back out onto the porch with the lemonade. The porch was dark except for a lamp burning beside the chair where Dr. Steinberg had been reading the evening paper and smoking his pipe. He picked up the pipe and struck a match and, repeatedly drawing and puffing, he fussed with it until it was relit. The rich sweetness of Dr. Steinberg's tobacco served to ameliorate a little the citywide stink of Secaucus.

Dr. Steinberg was slender, agile, on the short side. He wore a substantial mustache and glasses that, though thick, were not as thick as Mr. Cantor's. His nose was his most distinctive feature: curved like a scimitar at the top but bent flat at the tip, and with the bone of the bridge cut like a diamond — in short, a nose out of a folktale, the sort of sizable, convoluted, intricately turned nose that, for many centuries, confronted though they have been by every imaginable hardship, the Jews had never stopped making. The irregularity of the nose was most conspicuous when he laughed, which he did often. He was unfailingly friendly, one of those engaging family physicians who, when they step into the waiting room holding someone's file folder, make the faces of all their patients light up — whenever he came at them with his stethoscope, they'd find themselves acutely happy to be under his care. Marcia liked that her father, a man of natural, unadorned authority, would jokingly but truthfully refer to his patients as his "masters."

"Marcia told me that you've lost some of your boys. I'm sorry to hear that, Bucky. Death is not that common among polio victims."

"So far, four have gotten polio and two have died. Two boys. Grade school boys. Both twelve."

"It's a lot of responsibility for you," Dr. Steinberg said, "looking after all those boys, especially at a time like this. I've been practicing medicine for over twenty-five years, and when I lose a patient, even if it's to old age, I still feel shaken. This epidemic must be a great weight on your shoulders."

"The problem is, I don't know if I'm doing the right thing or not by letting them play ball."

"Did anyone say you're doing the wrong thing?"

"Yes, the mother of two of the boys, brothers, who have gotten polio. I know she was hysterical. I know she was lashing out in frustration, yet knowing it doesn't seem to help."

"A doctor runs into that too. You're right — people in great pain become hysterical and, confronted with the injustice of illness, they lash out. But boys' playing ball doesn't give them polio. A virus does. We may not know much about polio, but we know that. Kids everywhere play hard out of doors all summer long, and even in an epidemic it's a very small percentage who become infected with the disease. And a very small percentage of those who get seriously ill from it. And a very small percentage of those who die — death results from respiratory paralysis, which is relatively rare. Every child who gets a headache doesn't come down with paralytic polio. That's why it's important not to exaggerate the danger and to carry on normally. You have nothing to feel guilty about. That's a natural reaction sometimes, but in your case it's not justified." Pointing at him meaningfully with the stem of his pipe, he warned the young man, "We can be severe judges of ourselves when it is in no way warranted. A misplaced sense of responsibility can be a debilitating thing."

"Dr. Steinberg, do you think it's going to get worse?"

"Epidemics have a way of spontaneously running out of steam. Right now there's a lot going on. Right now we have to keep up with what's happening while we wait and see whether this is fleeting or not. Usually the great majority of the cases are children under five. That's how it was in 1916. The pattern we're seeing with this outbreak, at least here in Newark, is somewhat different. But that doesn't suggest that the disease is going to go unchecked in this city forever. There's still no cause for alarm as far as I can tell."

Mr. Cantor hadn't felt as relieved in weeks as he did while being counseled by Dr. Steinberg. There was no place in all of Newark, including his family's flat — including even the gym floor at Chancellor Avenue School where he taught his phys ed classes — where he felt any more content than he did on the screened-in porch at the rear of the Steinberg home, with Dr. Steinberg seated in his cushioned wicker armchair and pulling on his well-worn pipe.

"Why is the epidemic worst in the Weequahic section?" Mr. Cantor asked. "Why should that be?"

"I don't know," Dr. Steinberg said. "Nobody knows. Polio is still a mysterious disease. It was slow coming this time. At first it was mainly in the Ironbound, then it jumped around the city, and suddenly it settled in Weequahic and took off."

Mr. Cantor told Dr. Steinberg about the incident with the East Side High Italians who'd driven up from the Ironbound and left the pavement at the playground entrance awash with their spit.

"You did the right thing," Dr. Steinberg told him. "You cleaned it up with water and ammonia. That was the best thing to do."

"But did I kill the polio germs, if there were any?"

"We don't know what kills polio germs," Dr. Steinberg said. "We don't know who or what carries polio, and there's still some debate about how it enters the body. But what's important is that you cleaned up an unhygienic mess and reassured the boys by the way you took charge. You demonstrated your competence, you demonstrated your equanimity — that's what the kids have to see. Bucky, you're shaken by what's happening now, but strong men get the shakes too. You must understand that a lot of us who are much older and more experienced with illness than you are also shaken by it. To stand by as a doctor unable to stop the spread of this dreadful disease is painful for all of us. A crippling disease that attacks mainly children and leaves some of them dead — that's difficult for any adult to accept. You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you're to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility."

He thought to ask: Doesn't God have a conscience? Where's His responsibility? Or does He know no limits? But instead he asked, "Should the playground be shut down?"

"You're the director. Should it?" Dr. Steinberg asked.

"I don't know what to think."

"What would the boys do if they couldn't come to the playground? Stay at home? No, they'd play ball somewhere else — in the streets, in the empty lots, they'd go down to the park to play ball. You can't get them to stop congregating together just by expelling them from the playground. They won't stay home — they'll hang around the corner candy store together, banging the pinball machine and pushing and shoving one another for fun. They'll drink out of each other's soda bottles no matter how much you tell them not to. Some of them will be so restless and bored they'll go too far and get into trouble. They're not angels — they're boys. Bucky, there's nothing you're doing that's making things worse. To the contrary, you're making things better. You're doing something useful. You're contributing to the welfare of the community. It's important that neighborhood life goes on as usual — otherwise, it's not only the stricken and their families who are victims, but Weequahic itself becomes a victim. At the playground you help keep panic at bay by overseeing those kids of yours playing the games they love. The alternative isn't to send them someplace else where they won't have your supervision. The alternative isn't to lock them up in their houses and fill them with dread. I'm against the frightening of Jewish kids. I'm against the frightening of Jews, period. That was Europe, that's why Jews fled. This is America. The less fear the better. Fear unmans us. Fear degrades us. Fostering less fear — that's your job and mine."

There were sirens in the distance, off to the west where the hospital was. In the garden there were only shrill crickets and pulsating lightning bugs and the many varieties of fragrant flowers, their petals massed on the other side of the porch screens and, with Mrs. Steinberg away at the shore, more than likely watered by Dr. Steinberg after he'd eaten his dinner. A bowl of fruit lay on the glass top of the wicker coffee table in front of the wicker sofa where Mr. Cantor was sitting. Dr. Steinberg reached for a piece of fruit and told Mr. Cantor to help himself.

He bit into a delicious peach, a big and beautiful peach like the one Dr. Steinberg had taken from the bowl, and in the company of this thoroughly reasonable man and the soothing sense of security he exuded, he took his time eating it, savoring every sweet mouthful right down to the pit. Then, wholly unprepared for the moment but unable to contain himself, he placed the pit into an ashtray, leaned forward, and compressing his sticky hands tightly together between his knees, he said, "I would like your permission, sir, to ask Marcia to become engaged."

Dr. Steinberg burst out laughing and, raising his pipe in the air as though it were a trophy, he stood and did a little jig. "You have it!" he said. "I couldn't be more thrilled. And Mrs. Steinberg will be just as thrilled. I'm going to call her right now. And you're going to get on and tell her the news yourself. Oh, Bucky, this is just swell! Of course you have our permission. Marcia couldn't have hooked herself a better fellow. What a lucky family we are!"

Startled to hear Dr. Steinberg characterize his family as the lucky ones, Mr. Cantor felt himself flush with excitement, and he jumped to his feet too and heartily shook Dr. Steinberg's hand. Until that moment he hadn't planned to mention engagement to anyone until the new year, when he would be a bit more secure financially. He was still saving to buy a gas stove for his grandmother, to replace the coal stove she cooked on in the kitchen, and had figured that he'd have enough by December, if he didn't have to buy an engagement ring before then. But it was all the comfort he had derived from her kindly father, concluding with their enjoying those perfect peaches together on the back porch, that had roused him to seek permission there and then. What had done it was his knowing that Dr. Steinberg, merely by his presence, seemed able to answer the questions that nobody else could: what the hell is going on, and how do we get out of this? And something else had galvanized him as well: the sound of the ambulance sirens crisscrossing Newark in the night.

THE NEXT MORNING was the worst so far. Three more boys had come down with polio — Leo Feinswog, Paul Lippman, and me, Arnie Mesnikoff. The playground had jumped from four to seven cases overnight. The sirens that he and Dr. Steinberg had heard the evening before could well have been from the ambulances speeding them to the hospital. He learned about the three new cases from the kids who came with their mitts that morning ready to spend the day playing ball. On an ordinary weekday he'd have two games going, one at each of the diamonds at either corner of the playground, but on this morning there weren't nearly enough boys on hand to field four teams. Aside from those who had taken ill, some sixty had apparently been kept away by apprehensive parents. The remainder he gathered together to talk to on the section of wooden bleachers that backed on to the rear wall of the school.

"Boys, I'm glad to see you here. Today's going to be another scorcher — you can tell that already. But that doesn't mean we're not going to go out on the field and play. It does mean we're going to take some precautions so none of you overdo it. Every two and a half innings we're taking a break in the shade, right here on the bleachers, for fifteen minutes. No running around during that time. That means everybody. Between noon and two, when it's hottest, there's going to be no softball at all. The ball fields are going to be empty. You want to play checkers, chess, Ping-Pong, you want to sit and talk on the bleachers, you want to bring a book or a magazine with you to read during the time-out… that's all fine. That's our new daily schedule. We're going to have as good a summer as we can, but we're going to do everything in moderation on days like this. Nobody here is going to get sunstroke out in that savage heat." He inserted "sunstroke" at the last moment, instead of saying "polio."

There were no complaints. There were no comments at all. They listened solemnly and nodded in agreement. It was the first time since the epidemic had begun that he could sense their fear. They each knew more than casually one or another of those who'd come down with the disease the day before, and in a way that they hadn't previously grasped the nature of the threat, they at last understood the chance they stood of catching polio themselves.

Mr. Cantor picked two teams of ten to start the first game. There were ten kids left over, and he told them they would go on to substitute, five to a side, after the first fifteen-minute break. That's the way they'd proceed throughout the day.

"All right?" Mr. Cantor said, clapping his hands enthusiastically. "It's a summer day like any other, and I want you to go out and play ball."

Instead of playing himself, he decided to start off the morning by sitting with the ten boys who were waiting their turn to join the game and who seemed unusually subdued. Back of center field, where the girls regularly gathered in the school street, Mr. Cantor noted that of the original dozen or so who had begun meeting there every weekday morning earlier in the summer, only three were present today — only three whose parents would apparently allow them to leave the vicinity of their homes for fear of their making contact with the other playground kids. The missing girls may have been among the neighborhood children he'd heard about who had been sent to take refuge with relatives a safe distance from the city, and some among those whisked from the menace to be immersed in, immunized by, the hygienic ocean air of the Jersey Shore.

Now two of the girls were turning the rope while one was jumping — and with nobody any longer quivering on her skinny legs, ready to rush in after her. The jumper's high tweeting voice could be heard that morning as far away as the bleachers, where boys normally full of jokes and wisecracks who had no trouble blabbering away all day long found themselves now with nothing to say.

Mr. Cantor finally broke the long silence. "Any of you have friends who got sick?" he asked them.

They either nodded or quietly said yes.

"That's tough for you, I know. Very tough. We have to hope they get better and that they're soon back on the playground."

"You can wind up in an iron lung forever," said Bobby Finkelstein, a shy boy who was among the quietest of them, one of the boys he'd seen wearing a suit on the steps of the synagogue after Alan Michaels's funeral service.

"You can," said Mr. Cantor. "But that's from respiratory paralysis, and that's very rare. You're far more likely to recover. It's a serious disease, it can do great harm, but there are recoveries. Sometimes they're partial, but many times they're total. Most cases are relatively light." He spoke with authority, the source of his knowledge being Dr. Steinberg.

"You can die," Bobby said, pursuing this subject in a way that in the past he'd pursued few others. Mostly he seemed to enjoy letting the extroverts do the talking, yet about what had happened to his friends he could not keep himself from going on. "Alan and Herbie died."

"You can die," Mr. Cantor allowed, "but the chances are slight."

"They weren't slight for Alan and Herbie," Bobby replied.

"I meant the chances are slight overall in the community, in the city."

"That doesn't help Alan and Herbie," Bobby insisted, his voice quavering.

"You're right, Bobby. You're right. It doesn't. What happened to them was terrible. What's happened to all the boys is terrible."

Now another of the boys on the bleachers spoke up, Kenny Blumenfeld, though what he was saying was unintelligible because of the state he was in. He was a tall, strong boy, intelligent, articulate, already at fourteen in his second year at Weequahic High and, unlike most of the other boys, mature in his ability to put emotion aside in matters of winning and losing. He, along with Alan, had been a leader on the playground, the boy who was always chosen captain of a team, the boy who had the longest arms and legs and hit the longest ball — and yet it was Kenny, the oldest and biggest and most grown-up of them all, as sturdy emotionally as he was physically, who was drumming his clenched fists on his thighs as tears coursed down his face.

Mr. Cantor went over to where he was seated and sat next to him.

Through his tears, speaking hoarsely, Kenny said, "All my friends are getting polio! All my friends are going to be cripples or going to be dead!"

In response Mr. Cantor placed his hand on Kenny's shoulder but said nothing. He looked out onto the field where the two teams were deep in the game, oblivious of what was happening on the sidelines. He remembered Dr. Steinberg cautioning him not to exaggerate the danger, and yet he thought: Kenny's right. Every one of them. Those on the field and those on the bleachers. The girls jumping rope. They're all kids, and polio is going after kids, and it will sweep through this place and destroy them all. Each morning that I show up there'll be another few gone. There's nothing to stop it unless they shut down the playground. And even shutting it down won't help — in the end it's going to get every last child. The neighborhood is doomed. Not a one of the children will survive intact, if they survive at all.

And then, out of nowhere, he thought of that peach he'd eaten on the Steinbergs' back porch the night before. He could all but feel its juice trickling onto his hand, and for the first time he was frightened for himself. What was amazing was how long he had kept the fear in check.

He watched Kenny Blumenfeld weeping over his friends beset by polio, and suddenly he wanted to flee from working in the midst of these kids — to flee from the unceasing awareness of the persistent peril. To flee, as Marcia wanted him to.

Instead he sat quietly beside Kenny until the crying had subsided. Then he told him, "I'll be back — I'm going to play for a while." He stepped down off the bleachers and walked onto the field, where he said to Barry Mittelman, the third baseman, "Get out of the sun now, get in the shade, get some water," and taking Barry's mitt, he installed himself at third, vigorously working the pocket with his knuckles.

By the end of the day, Mr. Cantor had played at every position on the field, giving the boys on either side a chance to sit out an inning in the shade so as not to get overheated. He did not know what else to do to prevent the polio from spreading. Playing in the outfield, he'd had to hold his glove up to the peak of his baseball cap in order not to be blinded by the sun, a four o'clock sun no less punishing than the twelve o'clock sledgehammer. To his surprise, just beyond him on the school street he could hear the three sun-baked girls, still feverishly at it, still thrilling to the cadences of a thumping heart.

S, my name is Sally

And my husband's name is Sam…

At about five, when the boys were into the final inning of the last game of the day — the fielders with their sopping polo shirts cast aside on the nearby asphalt and the boys in the batter's box shirtless too — Mr. Cantor heard loud hollering from deep center field. It was Kenny Blumenfeld, enraged with, of all people, Horace. Mr. Cantor had noticed Horace down at the end of the bench earlier in the afternoon but soon lost track of him and couldn't remember seeing him again. Probably he'd gone off to meander around the neighborhood and had only just returned to the playground and, disposed as he was to go out onto the field and stand silent and motionless beside one of the players, had chosen to approach Kenny and be near the biggest boy on either team. Earlier in the day it was Kenny who, uncharacteristically, had been racked with sobs about the ravaging of his friends, and now, again uncharacteristically, it was Kenny who was shouting at Horace and threateningly waving him off with his mitt. Not only was Kenny the biggest boy, but without his shirt on it was apparent that he was the strongest one too. By contrast, Horace, wearing his usual summer outfit of an oversized half-sleeve shirt and ballooning cotton trousers with an elasticized waistband and long-outmoded brown-and-white perforated shoes, seemed undernourished to the point of emaciation. His chest was sunken, his legs were spindly, and his scrawny marionette arms, dangling weakly at his sides, looked as if you could snap them in two as easily as you break a stick over your knee. He looked as though a good fright could kill him, let alone a blow from a boy built like Kenny.

Instantly, Mr. Cantor sprang off the bench where he was seated and ran at full speed to the outfield while all the boys in the game and on the bleachers ran along with him and the three girls on the street stopped jumping rope, seemingly for the first time all summer.

"Get him away from me!" Kenny — the boy who was the model of maturity for the others, whom Mr. Cantor never had reason to admonish for failing to exercise self-control — that same Kenny was now howling, "Get him away from me or I'll kill him!"

"What is it? What's going on?" Mr. Cantor asked. Horace stood there with his head hanging and tears rolling down his face and keening, emitting a kind of radio signal from high in the back of his throat — a thin, oscillating sound of distress.

"Smell him!" Kenny screamed. "He has shit all over him! Get him the hell away from me! It's him! He's the one who's carrying the polio!"

"Calm down, Ken," Mr. Cantor said, trying to take hold of the boy, who wildly fought his way free. They were surrounded by the players on both teams now, and when several of the boys rushed forward to grab Kenny by the arms and pull him back from where he was excoriating Horace, he turned to strike out at them with his fists, and all of them jumped away.

"I'm not calming down!" Kenny cried. "He's got shit all over his underwear! He's got shit all over his hands! He doesn't wash and he isn't clean, and then he wants us to take his hand, and shake his hand, and that's how he's spreading polio! He's the one who's crippling people! He's the one who's killing people! Get out of here, you! Get! Go!" And again he waved his mitt violently in the air as though warding off the attack of a rabid dog.

Meanwhile, managing to keep clear of Kenny's flailing arms, Mr. Cantor was able to interpose himself between the hysterical boy and the terrified creature onto whom he was pouring out his rage.

"You have to go home, Horace," Mr. Cantor quietly told him. "Go home to your parents. It's time for your supper. It's time to eat."

Horace did smell — he smelled horribly. And though Mr. Cantor repeated his words a second time, Horace kept on crying and keening and saying nothing.

"Here, Horace," Mr. Cantor said and extended his hand to him. Without looking up, Horace took the hand limply in his and Mr. Cantor shook Horace's hand as heartily as he had shaken Dr. Steinberg's after receiving his permission to become engaged to Marcia the night before.

"How ya doin', Horace?" Mr. Cantor whispered, pumping Horace's hand up and down. "How ya doin', boy?" It took a little longer than usual, but then, just as it always had in the past when Horace moseyed out to stand beside a player on the field, the handshake ritual did the trick, and Horace, assuaged, turned toward the playground exit to leave, whether for home or elsewhere nobody knew, probably not even Horace. All the boys who had heard Kenny's raving hung way back from Horace as they watched him lurch off alone into the wall of heat, while the girls, shrilly screaming "He's after us! The moron is chasing us!" ran with their jump ropes toward the late-afternoon Chancellor Avenue traffic, ran as fast as they could from the sight of how deep the human blight can go.

To quiet Kenny down, Mr. Cantor asked him to stay behind when the rest of the boys headed off and to help him put the playground equipment away in the basement storage room. Then, quietly talking to Kenny as they walked, Mr. Cantor accompanied him to his house, down the hill on Hansbury Avenue.

"It's piling up on everyone, Ken. You're not the only one in the neighborhood," he told him, "who's feeling the pressure of the polio. Between the polio and the weather, there isn't anybody who isn't at the end of his rope."

"But he's spreading it, Mr. Cantor. I'm sure of it. I shouldn't have gone nuts, I know he's a moron, but he's not clean and he's spreading it. He walks all over the place and drools over everything and shakes everyone's hand and that's how he spreads the germs everywhere."

"First off, Ken, we don't know what spreads it."

"But we do. Filth, dirt, and shit," Kenny said, his outrage revving up again. "And he's filthy, dirty, and shitty, and he's spreading it. I know it."

On the pavement in front of Kenny's house, Mr. Cantor took him firmly by his shoulders, and Kenny, shuddering with revulsion, instantly shook free of his hands and cried, "Don't touch me! You just touched him!"

"Go inside," Mr. Cantor said, still composed but retreating a step. "Take a cold shower. Get a cold drink. Cool off, Ken, and I'll see you tomorrow up at the playground."

"But you're only being blind to who's spreading it because he's so helpless! Only he's not just helpless — he's dangerous! Don't you understand, Mr. Cantor? He doesn't know how to wipe his ass, so he gets it all over everyone else!"

THAT EVENING, watching his grandmother while she served him his dinner, he found himself wondering if this was how his mother would have come to look if she had been lucky enough to live another fifty years — frail, stooped, brittle-boned, with hair that decades earlier had lost its darkness and thinned to a white fluff, with stringy skin in the crooks of her arms and a fleshy lobe hanging from her chin and joints that ached in the morning and ankles that swelled and throbbed by nightfall and translucent papery skin on her mottled hands and cataracts that had shrouded and discolored her vision. As for the face above the ruin of her neck, it was now a tightly drawn mesh of finely patterned wrinkles, grooves so minute they appeared to be the work of an implement far less crude than the truncheon of old age — an etching needle perhaps, or a lacemaker's tool, manipulated by a master craftsman to render her as ancient-looking a grandmother as any on earth.

There had been a strong resemblance between his mother and his grandmother when his mother was growing up. He had seen it in photographs, where, of course, he had first noticed his own strong resemblance to his mother, particularly in the framed studio portrait of her that rested on the bureau in his grandparents' bedroom. The picture, taken for her high school graduation when she was eighteen, was in the 1919 South Side yearbook that Bucky leafed through often as a young schoolboy beginning to discover that the other boys in his class were not grandsons living with grandparents but sons living with a mother and father in what he came to think of as "real families." He best understood how precarious his footing in the world was when adults bestowed upon him the look that he despised, the pitying look that he knew so well, since he sometimes got it from teachers too. The look made only too clear that the intervention of his mother's aging parents was all that had stood between him and the bleak four-story red-brick building on nearby Clinton Avenue with its black iron fence and its windows of pebbled glass covered with iron grates and its heavy wooden doorway adorned with a white Jewish star and the broad lintel above it carved with the three most forlorn words he'd ever read: HEBREW ORPHAN ASYLUM.

Even though the graduation picture on the bedroom bureau was said by his grandmother to catch perfectly the kindly spirit that animated his mother, it was not his favorite photograph of her, because of the dark academic robe she wore over her dress, the sight of which never failed to sadden him, as if the robe in the picture were a portent, the harbinger of her shroud. Nonetheless, alone at home when his grandparents were working around the corner in the store, he would sometimes drift into his grandparents' room to run the tip of one finger over the glass that protected the picture, tracing the contours of his mother's face as though the glass had been removed and the face there was flesh. He did this despite its causing him to feel keenly not the presence he was seeking but rather the absence of one he'd never seen anywhere other than in photos, whose voice he'd never heard speaking his name, whose maternal warmth he'd never luxuriated in, a mother who had never got to care for him or feed him or put him to bed or help him with his schoolwork or watch him grow up to be the first of the family slated to go to college. Yet could he truthfully say he hadn't been sufficiently cherished as a child? Why was the genuine tenderness of a loving grandmother any less satisfying than the tenderness of a mother? It shouldn't have been, and yet secretly he felt that it was — and secretly felt ashamed for harboring such a thought.

After all this time, it had suddenly occurred to Mr. Cantor that God wasn't simply letting polio rampage through the Weequahic section but that twenty-three years back, God had also allowed his mother, only two years out of high school and younger than he was now, to die in childbirth. He'd never thought about her death that way before. Previously, because of the loving care that he received from his grandparents, it had always seemed to him that losing his mother at birth was something that was meant to happen to him and that his grandparents' raising him was a natural consequence of her death. So too was his father's being a gambler and a thief something that was meant to happen and that couldn't have been otherwise. But now that he was no longer a child he was capable of understanding that why things couldn't be otherwise was because of God. If not for God, if not for the nature of God, they would be otherwise.

He couldn't repeat such an idea to his grandmother, who was no more reflective than his grandfather had been, and he did not feel inclined to talk about it with Dr. Steinberg. Though very much a thinking man, Dr. Steinberg was also an observant Jew and might take offense at the turn of mind that the polio epidemic was inspiring in Mr. Cantor. He wouldn't want to affront any of the Steinbergs, least of all Marcia, for whom the High Holidays were a source of reverence and a time of prayer when she dutifully attended synagogue services with her family on all three days. He wanted to show respect for everything that the Steinbergs held dear, including, of course, the religion that he shared with them, even if, like his grandfather — for whom duty was a religion, rather than the other way around — he was an indifferent practitioner of it. And to be wholly respectful had always been easy enough until the moment he found his anger provoked because of all the kids he was losing to polio, including the incorrigible Kopferman boys. His anger provoked not against the Italians or the houseflies or the mail or the milk or the money or malodorous Secaucus or the merciless heat or Horace, not against whatever cause, however unlikely, people, in their fear and confusion, might advance to explain the epidemic, not even against the polio virus, but against the source, the creator — against God, who made the virus.

"YOU'RE NOT WEARING yourself down, are you, Eugene?" Dinner was over and he was cleaning up while she sat at the table sipping a glass of water from the icebox. "You rush to the playground," she said, "you rush to visit the families of your boys, you rush on Sunday to the funeral, you rush home in the evening to help me — maybe this weekend you should stop rushing around in this heat and take the train and find a bed for the weekend down the shore. Take a break from everything. Get away from the heat. Get away from the playground. Go swimming. It'll do you a world of good."

"That's a thought, Grandma. That's not a bad idea."

"The Einnemans can look in on me, and Sunday night you'll come home refreshed. This polio is wearing you out. That's no good for anyone."

Over dinner he had told her about the three new cases at the playground and said that he was going to telephone the families later, when they got home from the hospital.

Meanwhile, the sirens were sounding again, and very close to the house, which was unusual, since as far as he knew there'd been no more than three or four cases in the entire residential triangle formed by Springfield, Clinton, and Belmont avenues. Theirs were the lowest numbers for any neighborhood in the city. At the southern end of the triangle, where he lived with his grandmother and where the rents were half what they were in Weequahic, there had been but a single case of polio — the victim an adult, a man of thirty, a stevedore who worked at the port — while in the Weequahic section, with its five elementary schools, there had been more than a hundred and forty cases, all in children under fourteen, in the first weeks of July alone.

Yes, of course — the shore, where some of his playground kids had already escaped with their mothers for the remainder of the summer. He knew a rooming house back from the beach in Bradley where he could get one of the cots in the cellar for a buck. He could do his diving off the high board of the boardwalk's big saltwater pool, dive all day long and then at night stroll along the boards to Asbury Park and pick up a mess of fried clams and a root beer at the arcade and sit on one of the benches facing the ocean and happily feast away while watching the surf come crashing in. What could be more removed from the Newark polio epidemic, what could be more of a tonic for him, than the booming black nighttime Atlantic? This was the first summer since the war began when the danger of German U-boats in nearby waters or of waterborne German saboteurs coming ashore after dark was considered to be over, when the blackout had been lifted, and — though the coast guard still patrolled the beaches and maintained pillboxes along the coast — when the lights were on again all along the Jersey Shore. That meant that both the Germans and the Japanese were suffering crippling defeats and that, nearly three years after it had begun, America's war was beginning to come to an end. It meant that his two best college buddies, Big Jake Garonzik and Dave Jacobs, would be returning home unscathed, if only they could make it through the remaining months of combat in Europe. He thought of the song Marcia liked so much: "I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places." That will be the day, he thought, when he could see Jake and Dave in the old familiar places!

He had never gotten over the shame of not being with them, for all that there was nothing he could do about it. They had wound up together in an airborne unit, jumping from planes into battle — what he would have wanted to do, exactly what he was constructed to do. Some six weeks earlier, at dawn on D-Day, they had been members of a huge paratroop force that had landed behind the German lines on the Normandy peninsula. Mr. Cantor knew from staying in touch with their families that despite the many casualties taken during the invasion, the two of them had survived. From following the maps in the paper plotting the Allies' progress, he figured that they had probably been in the heavy fighting to capture Cherbourg late in June. The first thing Mr. Cantor looked for in the Newark News that his grandmother got from the Einnemans every night after they'd finished reading it was whatever he could find about the U.S. army's campaign in France. After that, he read the box on the front page of the News that was called "The Daily Polio Bulletin" and that appeared just below a reproduction of a quarantine sign. "Board of Health of Newark, New Jersey," the sign read. "Keep out. This house contains a case of polio. Any person violating the isolation and quarantine rules and regulations of the board or who willfully removes, defaces, or obstructs this card without authority is liable to a fine of $50." The polio bulletin, which was also broadcast every day on the local radio station, kept Newarkers up to date on the number and location of every new case in the city. So far this summer, what people heard or read there was never what they hoped to find there — that the epidemic was on the wane — but rather that the tally of new cases had increased yet again from the day before. The impact of the numbers was, of course, disheartening and frightening and wearying. For these weren't the impersonal numbers one was accustomed to hearing on the radio or reading in the paper, the numbers that served to locate a house or record a person's age or establish the price of a pair of shoes. These were the terrifying numbers charting the progress of a horrible disease and, in the sixteen wards of Newark, corresponding in their impact to the numbers of the dead, wounded, and missing in the real war. Because this was real war too, a war of slaughter, ruin, waste, and damnation, war with the ravages of war — war upon the children of Newark.

YES, HE COULD certainly use a few days on his own down the shore. That, in fact, was what he'd been planning on doing when the summer began — with Marcia gone, to head to the shore every weekend to dive the day away and then walk the boards to Asbury at night to eat his favorite seashore meal. The cellar was dank where he rented a cot and the water was rarely hot in the shower everyone used and there was sand in the sheets and towels, but, second only to throwing the javelin, diving was his favorite sport. Two days of diving would help him to shake loose, at least temporarily, from the preoccupation with his stricken boys and quiet his agitation over Kenny Blumenfeld's hysterical outbursts and maybe clear his head of the malice he felt toward God.

Then, when his grandmother was outside with the neighbors and he was about finished with cleaning up and had just sat down at the table in his sleeveless undershirt and briefs to drink yet another glass of ice water, Marcia called. Dr. Steinberg had agreed to wait for Mr. Cantor to talk with Marcia before he or Mrs. Steinberg said anything to her about the engagement, so she was calling without any knowledge of the conversation on the back porch the evening before. She was calling to tell him she loved him and she missed him and to learn what he had decided about coming to the camp to take over from Irv Schlanger as waterfront director.

"What should I tell Mr. Blomback?" she asked.

"Tell him yes," Mr. Cantor said, and he startled himself no less by what he'd just agreed to than he had done asking permission of Dr. Steinberg to become engaged to his daughter. "Tell him I will," he said.

Yet he'd had every intention of taking his grandmother's suggestion and going to the shore for the weekend and marshaling his forces so as to return to his job rejuvenated. If Jake and Dave could parachute into Nazi-occupied France on D-Day and help to anchor the Allied beachhead by fighting their way into Cherbourg against the stiffest German opposition, then surely he could face the dangers of running the playground at Chancellor Avenue School in the midst of a polio epidemic.

"Oh, Bucky," cried Marcia, "that's swell! Knowing you, I was so frightened you were going to say no. Oh, you're coming, you're coming to Indian Hill!"

"I'll have to call O'Gara and tell him, and he'll have to get somebody to take my place. O'Gara's the guy in charge of playgrounds at the superintendent's office. That could take a couple of days."

"Oh, do it as fast as you can!"

"I'll have to speak to Mr. Blomback myself. About the salary. I've got the rent and my grandmother to think about."

"I'm sure the salary's going to be no problem."

"And I have to talk to you about getting engaged," he said.

"What? You what?"

"We're getting engaged, Marcia. That's why I'm taking the job. I asked your father's permission last night over at the house. I'm coming to camp and we're getting engaged."

"We are?" she said, laughing. "Isn't it customary for the girl to be asked, even a girl as pliant as me?"

"Is it? I've never done it before. Will you be my fiancée?"

"Of course! Oh my goodness, Bucky, I'm so happy!"

"So am I," he said, "tremendously happy," and for the moment, because of this happiness, he was almost able to forget the betrayal of his playground kids; he was almost able to forget his outrage with God for the murderous persecution of Weequahic's innocent children. Talking to Marcia about their engagement, he was almost able to look the other way and to rush to embrace the security and predictability and contentment of a normal life lived in normal times. But when he hung up, there confronting him were his ideals — ideals of truthfulness and strength fostered in him by his grandfather, ideals of courage and sacrifice that he shared with Jake and Dave, ideals nurtured by him in boyhood to place himself beyond the reach of a crooked father's penchant for deceit — his ideals as a man demanding of him that he immediately reverse course and return for the rest of the summer to the work he had contracted to perform.

How could he have done what he'd just done?

IN THE MORNING he carried the equipment up from the storage room and organized two teams and got a softball game under way for the fewer than twenty kids who'd shown up to play. Then he returned to the basement to call O'Gara from his office and tell him that he was leaving his job at the end of the week to take over as waterfront director at a summer camp in the Poconos. That morning before he'd left for the playground, he'd gotten news over the radio that there were twenty-nine new polio cases in the city, sixteen of them in Weequahic.

"That's the second guy this morning," O'Gara said. "I got a Jewish guy over at Peshine Avenue playground who's quitting on me too." O'Gara was a tired old man with a big gut and an antagonistic manner who'd been running the city playgrounds for years and whose prowess as a Central High football player at the time of the First World War still constituted the culmination of his life. His brusqueness wasn't necessarily killing, yet it unsettled Mr. Cantor and left him feeling shifty and childishly grubbing about for the words to justify his decision. O'Gara's brusqueness wasn't unlike his grandfather's, perhaps because it was acquired on the same tough streets of the Third Ward. His grandfather was, of course, the last person he wanted to be thinking about while doing something so out of keeping with who he really was. He wanted to be thinking about Marcia and the Steinbergs and the future, but instead there was his grandfather to deliver the verdict with just a bit of an Irish intonation.

"The fellow I'm taking over for at the camp has been drafted," Mr. Cantor responded. "I've got to leave on Friday for the camp."

"This is what I get for giving you a plum job just a year out of college. You realize that you haven't exactly won my confidence by pulling a stunt like this. You realize that leaving me in the lurch in July like this isn't likely to make me disposed to ever hire you again, Cancer."

"Cantor," Mr. Cantor corrected him, as he always had to when they spoke.

"I don't care how many guys are away in the army," O'Gara said. "I don't like people quitting on me right in the midst of everything." And then he added, "Especially people who aren't in the army."

"I'm sorry to be leaving, Mr. O'Gara. And," he said, speaking in a shriller tone than he'd intended, "I'm sorry I'm not in the army — sorrier than you know." To make matters worse, he added, "I have to go. I have no choice."

"What?" O'Gara snapped back. "You have no choice, do you? Sure you got a choice. What you're doing is called making a choice. You're making your escape from the polio. You sign up for a job, and then there's the polio, and the hell with the job, the hell with the commitment, you run like hell as fast as you can. All you're doing is running away, Cancer, a world-champion muscleman like you. You're an opportunist, Cancer. I could say worse, but that will do." And then, with revulsion, he repeated, "An opportunist," as though the word stood for every degrading instinct that could possibly stigmatize a man.

"I have a fiancée at the camp," Mr. Cantor replied lamely.

"You had a fiancée at the camp when you signed on at Chancellor."

"No, no, I didn't," he rushed to say, as if to O'Gara that would make a difference. "We only became engaged this week."

"All right, you got an answer for everything. Like the guy from Peshine. You Jewish boys got all the answers. No, you're not stupid — but neither is O'Gara, Cancer. All right, all right, I'll get somebody up there to take your place, if there is anyone in this town who can fill your shoes. In the meantime, you have a rollicking time roasting marshmallows with your girlfriend at your kiddie camp."

It was no less humiliating than he'd thought it would be, but he'd done it and it was over. He just had to get through three more days at the playground without contracting polio.