Nemesis

2. INDIAN HILL

HE'D NEVER BEEN to the Pocono Mountains before, or up through the rural northwestern counties of New Jersey to Pennsylvania. The train ride, traversing hills and woods and open farmland, made him think of himself as on a far greater excursion than just traveling to the next state over. There was an epic dimension to gliding past a landscape wholly unfamiliar to him, a sense he'd had the few previous times he'd been aboard a train — including the Jersey line that carried him to the shore — that a future new and unknown to him was about to unfold. Sighting the Delaware Water Gap, where the river separating New Jersey and Pennsylvania cut dramatically through the mountain range just fifteen minutes from his stop at Stroudsburg, only heightened the intensity of the trip and assured him — admittedly without reason — that no destroyer could possibly overleap so grand a natural barrier in order to catch him.

This marked the first time since his grandfather's death, three years earlier, that he would be leaving his grandmother in the care of anyone else for more than a weekend, and the first time he'd be out of the city for more than a night or two. And it was the first time in weeks that thoughts of polio weren't swamping him. He still mourned the two boys who had died, he was still oppressed by thinking of all of his other boys stricken with the crippling disease, yet he did not feel that he had faltered under the exigencies of the calamity or that someone else could have performed his job any more zealously. With all his energy and ingenuity, he had wholeheartedly confronted a devastating challenge — until he had chosen to abandon the challenge and flee the torrid city trembling under its epidemic and resounding with the sirens of ambulances constantly on the move.

At the Stroudsburg station, Carl, the Indian Hill driver, a large baby-faced man with a bald head and a shy manner, was waiting for him in the camp's old station wagon. Carl had come to town to pick up supplies and to meet Bucky's train. On shaking Carl's hand, Bucky had a single overriding thought: He's not carrying polio. And it's cool here, he realized. Even in the sun, it's cool!

Leaving town with his duffel bag stashed in the rear of the wagon, they passed along the pleasant main street of two- and three-story brick buildings — housing a row of street-level stores with business offices on the upper floors — and then turned north and began a slow ascent along zigzagging roads into the hills. They passed farms, and he saw horses and cows in the fields, and occasionally he caught sight of a farmer on a tractor. There were silos and barns and low wire fences and rural mailboxes atop wooden posts and no polio anywhere. At the top of a long climb they made a sharp turn off the blacktop onto a narrow unpaved road that was marked with a sign with the words CAMP INDIAN HILL burned into the wood and a picture below it of a teepee in a circle of flames — the same emblem that was on the side of the station wagon. After bouncing a couple of miles through the woods over the hard ridges of the dirt road — a twisting pitted track that was deliberately left that way, Carl told him, to discourage access to Indian Hill by anything other than bona fide camp traffic — they emerged into an open green oval that was the entrance to the camp grounds. Its impact was very like what he experienced upon entering Ruppert Stadium with Jake and Dave to see the Newark Bears play the first Sunday double-header of the season and — after stepping out from the dim stadium recesses onto the bright walkway that led to the seats — surveying the spacious sweep of mown grass secreted in one of the ugliest parts of the city. But that was a walled-in ballpark. This was the wide-open spaces. Here the vista was limitless and the refuge even more beautiful than the home field of the Bears.

A metal pole stood at the center of the oval flying an American flag and, below it, a flag bearing the camp emblem. There was also a teepee nearby, some twelve or fifteen feet high, with the long supporting poles jutting through the hole at the apex. The gray canvas was decorated at the top with two rows of a zigzag lightning-like design and near the bottom with a wavy line that must have been meant to represent a range of mountains. To either side of the teepee was a weathered totem pole.

Down the slope from the green oval was the bright metallic sheen of a vast lake. A wooden dock ran along the shoreline, and, about fifty feet from one another, three narrow wooden piers jutted out some hundred feet into the lake; at the end of two of the piers were the diving platforms. This must be the boys' waterfront that was to be his domain. Marcia had told him that the lake was fed by natural springs. The words sounded like the name of an earthly wonder: natural springs — yet another way of saying "no polio." He was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt with his tie, and stepping from the wagon, he could feel on his arms and face that, though the sun was still strong, the air here was cooler even than in Stroudsburg. As he hefted his duffel bag strap over his shoulder, he was overtaken with the joy of beginning again, the rapturous intoxication of renewal — the bursting feeling of "I live! I live!"

He followed a dirt path to a small log building overlooking the lake, where Mr. Blomback had his office. Carl had insisted on relieving Bucky of his heavy bag and driving it up to the cabin called Comanche, where he'd be living with the oldest boys in camp, the fifteen-year-olds, and their counselor. Each of the cabins in the boys' and the girls' camps was named for an Indian tribe.

He knocked on the screen door and was welcomed warmly by the owner, a tall, gangly man with a long neck and a large Adam's apple and some wisps of gray hair crisscrossing his sunburned skull. He had to have been in his late fifties, and yet, in khaki shorts and a camp polo shirt, he looked sinewy and fit. Bucky knew from Marcia that when Mr. Blomback had become a young widower in 1926, he gave up a promising scholastic career as a vice principal at Newark's West Side High and bought the camp with his wife's family money to have a place to teach his two little boys the Indian lore that he had come to love as a summer outdoorsman. The boys were grown now and off in the army, and running the camp and directing the staff and visiting Jewish families in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to recruit youngsters for the camp season was Mr. Blomback's year-round job. His rustic office — constructed of raw logs like the building's exterior — had five full Indian headdresses, arranged on pegs, decorating the wall back of the desk; group photos of campers crowded the other walls, except where there were several shelves filled with books, all, said Mr. Blomback, concerned with Indian life and lore.

"This is the bible," he told Bucky, and handed him a thick volume called The Book of Woodcraft. "This book was my inspiration. This too," and he handed him a second and thinner book, Manual of the Woodcraft Indians. Obediently Bucky thumbed through the pages of Manual of the Woodcraft Indians, where he saw printed pen-and-ink drawings of mushrooms and birds and the leaves of a great number of trees, none of which were identifiable to him. He saw a chapter title, "Forty Birds That Every Boy Should Know," and had to accept the fact that he, already a man, didn't know more than a couple of them.

"These two books have been every camp owner's inspiration," Mr. Blomback told him. "Ernest Thompson Seton single-handedly began the Indian movement in camping. A great and influential teacher. 'Manhood,' Seton says, 'is the first aim of education. We follow out of doors those pursuits that, in a word, make for manhood.' Indispensable books. They hold up always a heroic human ideal. They accept the red man as the great prophet of outdoor life and woodcraft and use his methods whenever they are helpful. They propose initiation tests of fortitude, following the example of the red man. They propose that the foundation of all power is self-control. 'Above all,' says Seton, 'heroism.'"

Bucky nodded, agreeing that these were weighty matters, even if he'd never heard of Seton before.

"Every August fourteenth the camp commemorates Seton's birthday with an Indian Pageant. It's Ernest Thompson Seton who has made twentieth-century camping one of our country's greatest achievements."

Again Bucky nodded. "I'd like to read these books," he said, handing them back to Mr. Blomback. "They sound like important books, especially for educating young boys."

"At Indian Hill, educating boys and girls. I'd like you to read them. As soon as you get settled in, you can come and borrow my copies. Peerless books, published when the century was young and the whole nation, led by Teddy Roosevelt, was turning to the outdoor life. You are a godsend, young fellow," he said. "I've known Doc Steinberg and the Steinberg family all my life. If the Steinbergs vouch for you, that's good enough for me. I'm going to get one of the counselors to give you a tour of the camp, and I'm going to take you myself on a tour of the waterfront and introduce you to everyone there. They've all been anticipating your arrival. We have two goals at the waterfront: to teach our youngsters water skills and to teach our youngsters water safety."

"I learned the principles of both at Panzer, Mr. Blomback. I run the phys ed classes at Chancellor Avenue School with safety as my first concern."

"The parents have put their children in our care for the summer months," said Mr. Blomback. "Our job is not to fail them. We haven't had a single waterfront accident here since I bought the camp eighteen years ago. Not one."

"You can trust me, sir, to make safety foremost."

"Not a single accident," Mr. Blomback repeated sternly. "Waterfront director is one of the most responsible positions in the camp. Maybe the most responsible. A camp can be ruined by one careless accident in the water. Needless to say, every camper has a water buddy in his own grade. They must enter and leave the water together. A checkup for buddies is made before each swim and after each swim and at intervals during the swim. Lone swimming can result in fatalities."

"I think of myself as a responsible person, sir. You can rely on me to ensure the safety of every camper. Rest assured, I know about the importance of the buddy system."

"Okay, they're still serving lunch," Mr. Blomback said. "Today it's macaroni and cheese. Dinner is roast beef. Friday night is roast beef night at Indian Hill, rationing or no rationing. Come with me to the dining lodge and we'll get you something to eat. And here — here's a camp polo shirt. Take off your tie, slip it over your shirt for now, and we'll go to lunch. Irv Schlanger left his sheets, blankets, and towels. You can use them. Laundry pickup is Mondays."

The shirt was the same as the one Mr. Blomback was wearing: on the front was the name of the camp and beneath it the teepee in a circle of flames.

The dining lodge, a large timbered pavilion with open sides only steps along a wooden walkway from Mr. Blomback's lakeside office, was swarming with campers, the girls and their counselors seated at round tables on one side of the main aisle and the boys and their counselors on the other. Outside was the mild warmth of the sun — a sun that seemed benign and welcoming rather than malevolent, a nurturing Father Sun, the good god of brightness to a fecund Mother Earth — and the flickering luster of the lake and the lush green mesh of July's growing things, about which he knew barely any more than he knew about the birds. Inside was the noisy clamor of children's voices reverberating in the spacious lodge, the racket that reminded him of how much he enjoyed being around kids and why it was he loved his work. He'd nearly forgotten what that pleasure was like during the hard weeks of watching out for a menace against which he could offer no protection. These were happy, energetic kids who were not imperiled by a cruel and invisible enemy — they could actually be shielded from mishap by an adult's vigilant attention. Mercifully he was finished with impotently witnessing terror and death and was back in the midst of unworried children brimming with health. Here was work within his power to accomplish.

Mr. Blomback had left him alone with his lunch, saying they'd meet up again when Bucky had finished. In the dining lodge, nobody as yet knew or cared who he was — kids and counselors alike were engaged in a happy frenzy of socializing while they ate, cabinmates talking and laughing, at some tables bursting into song, as though it weren't the hours since breakfast but many years since they'd been together like this. He was searching the tables for Marcia, who herself probably wasn't yet on the lookout for him. On the phone the night before, both had assumed that by the time he was settled into his cabin and got under way at the waterfront, lunch would be long over and that he'd only arrive in the dining lodge at dinnertime.

When he found her table, he was so overjoyed that he had to restrain himself from standing and shouting her name. The truth of it was that during those last three days on the playground he thought he would never see her again. From the moment he'd agreed to the Indian Hill job, he was sure he'd come down with polio and lose everything. But here she was, a strikingly dark-eyed girl with thick, curly, black-black hair that she'd had cut for the summer — there are few true blacks in nature, and Marcia's hair was one of them. Her hair had reached glamorously down to her shoulders when they first met at a faculty get-together to introduce new staff the previous fall. She appealed to him so on that first afternoon that it was a while before, face-to-face, he could look straight into her eyes or could stop himself from ogling her from afar. Then he'd seen her walking assuredly at the head of her silent class, leading her pupils through the corridors to the auditorium, and he fell for her all over again. That the kids called her Miss Steinberg mesmerized him.

Now she was deeply tanned and wearing a white camp polo shirt like his, which only enhanced the darkness of her good looks, and specifically of those eyes, whose irises struck him as not only darker but rounder than anyone else's, two dream targets, their concentric circles colored brownish black. He'd never seen her any prettier, even if she looked less like one of the counselors than like one of the campers, barely resembling the tastefully dressed first-grade teacher who already, at twenty-two, carried herself with the outward composure of an experienced professional. He noticed that her girlish little nose was dabbed with a white ointment and wondered which she was treating, sunburn or poison ivy. And then he had the most cheering thought: That's what you worried about up here, that's what you warned the children about — poison ivy!

There was no way to get Marcia's attention in the midst of the dining lodge hubbub. Several times he raised an arm in the air, but she did not see him, even though he held his hand aloft and waved it about. Then he saw Marcia's sisters, the Steinberg twins, Sheila and Phyllis, sitting side by side several tables away from Marcia. They were eleven now and looked entirely unlike their older sister, freckled youngsters with frizzy reddish hair and long, painfully skinny legs and noses already evolving like their father's, and both already nearly as tall as Marcia. He waved in their direction, but they were talking animatedly with the girls at their table and they didn't see him either. From the moment he'd met them he'd been completely won over by Sheila and Phyllis, their vivacity, their intelligence, their intensity, even by the ungainliness that had begun to overtake them. I am going to know these two for the rest of my life, he thought, and the prospect filled him with enormous pleasure. We will all be part of the same family. And then, all at once, he was thinking of Herbie and Alan, who had died because they'd spent the summer in Newark, and of Sheila and Phyllis, kids almost the same age who were flourishing because they were spending the summer at Indian Hill. And then there were Jake and Dave, fighting the Germans somewhere in France while he was ensconced in this noisy funhouse of a summer camp with all these exuberant kids. He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this? Why does He set one person down in Nazi-occupied Europe with a rifle in his hands and the other in the Indian Hill dining lodge in front of a plate of macaroni and cheese? Why does He place one Weequahic child in polio-ridden Newark for the summer and another in the splendid sanctuary of the Poconos? For someone who had previously found in diligence and hard work the solution to all his problems, there was now much that was inexplicable to him about why what happens, happens as it does.

"Bucky!" The twins had spotted him and, above the din, were calling across to him. They were standing by their table and waving their arms. "Bucky! You made it! Hurray!"

He waved back and the twins began pointing excitedly toward where their sister was sitting.

He smiled and mouthed "I see, I see" while the twins called to Marcia, "Bucky's here!"

Marcia stood to look around, so he stood too, and now at last she saw him, and with both of her hands she threw him a kiss. He was saved. Polio hadn't beaten him.

HE SPENT the afternoon at the waterfront, watching as the counselors there — high school boys of seventeen, who hadn't yet reached draft age — put the campers through their swimming drills and exercises. There was nothing that wasn't familiar to him from the Teaching Swimming and Diving course he'd taken at Panzer. He looked to have inherited a beautifully run program and a perfect environment to work in — not an inch of the waterfront looked neglected, the docks, piers, platforms, and diving boards were all in superb condition, and the water was dazzlingly clear. Wooded hills thick with trees rose steeply all along the edge of the lake. The campers' cabins were tucked into low hills on the near side of the lake, the girls' camp beginning at the end of one wing of the dining lodge and the boys' at the other. About a hundred yards out there was a small wooded island covered with slanting trees whose bark appeared to be white. This must be the island where Marcia had said they could go to be safely alone.

She had managed to leave a note for him with the secretary at Mr. Blomback's office: "I couldn't believe my eyes, seeing my future husband here. I can get off at 9:30. Meet you outside the dining lodge. As the kids like to say, 'You send me.' M."

When the last of the swimming classes was over and the campers returned to their cabins to get ready for Friday night dinner and the movie that would follow, Bucky remained alone at the waterfront, delighted by how his first hours on the job had gone and elated by the company of all these unworried, wonderfully active children. He'd been in the water getting to know the counselors and how they worked and helping the kids with their strokes and their breathing, so he hadn't a chance to step out on the high board and dive. But all afternoon he'd been thinking about it, as if when he took that first dive he would be truly here.

He walked out along the narrow wooden pier that led to the high board, removed his glasses, and set them at the foot of the ladder. Then, half blind, he climbed to the board. Looking out, he could see his way to the edge of the board but distinguish little beyond that. The hills, the woods, the white island, even the lake had disappeared. He was alone on the board above the lake and could barely see a thing. The air was warm, his body was warm, and all he could hear was the pock of tennis balls being hit and the occasional clank of metal on metal where some campers off in the distance were pitching horseshoes and striking the stake. And when he breathed in, there was nothing to smell of Secaucus, New Jersey. He filled his lungs with the harmless clean air of the Pocono Mountains, then bounded three steps forward, took off, and, in control of every inch of his body throughout the blind flight, did a simple swan dive into water he could see only the instant before his arms broke neatly through and he plumbed the cold purity of the lake to its depths.

AT FIVE FORTY-FIVE, he was nearing the entrance to the dining lodge with the boys from his cabin when two campers broke away from a crowd of girls drifting in with their counselors and began calling his name. They were the Steinberg girls, twins so alike that, even up close, he had trouble telling them apart. "It's Sheila! It's Phyllis!" he cried as they hurled themselves into his arms. "You two look terrific," he said. "Look how dark you are. And you've grown again. Darn it, you're as tall as I am." "Taller!" they shouted, squirming all over him. "Oh, don't say that," Bucky said, laughing, "please, not taller already!" "Are you going to put on a diving exhibition?" one of them said. "Nobody's asked me to so far," he replied. "We're asking you to! A diving exhibition for the whole camp! All those twisting and backward things that you do in the air."

The girls had seen him dive a couple of months back, when he'd been invited down the shore to the Steinbergs' summer home in Deal for the Memorial Day weekend, and they'd all gone together to the swim club at the beach where the Steinbergs were members. It was the first time he'd been an overnight guest of the family's, and once he'd put aside his jitters about what someone of his background might talk about with such educated people, he found that Marcia's mother and father couldn't have been more kind and companionable. He remembered the pleasure he had taken in giving the twins basic instruction, at the low board of the swimming pool, on balancing themselves and taking off. They were timid to begin with, but by the end of the afternoon he had them doing straight dives off the board. By then he was their matinee idol, and they would wrest him from their older sister at every opportunity. And he was taken with them, the girls Dr. Steinberg appreciatively referred to as his "identically sparkling duo."

"I missed you two," he said to the twins. "Are you staying for the rest of the summer?" they asked. "I sure am." "Because Mr. Schlanger went into the army?" "That's right." "That's what Marcia said, but at first we thought she was dreaming." "I think I'm dreaming, being here," Bucky replied. "I'll see you girls later," he said, and, showing off for their cabinmates, they each lifted their faces to kiss him demonstratively on the lips. And, as they ran for the dining lodge entrance, no less demonstratively, they called, "We love you, Bucky!"

He ate next to the Comanche cabin counselor, Donald Kaplow, a seventeen-year-old who was a track-and-field enthusiast and threw the discus for his high school. When Bucky told him that he threw the javelin, Donald said that he had brought his equipment with him to camp, and whenever he had time off he practiced his throws in an open hayfield back of the girls' camp, where they held the big Indian Pageant in August. He wondered if Bucky would come along sometime to watch and give him some pointers. "Sure, sure," said Bucky.

"I watched you this afternoon," Donald said. "From the porch of our cabin you can see the lake. I watched you dive. Are you a competitive diver?"

"I can do the elementary competitive dives, but, no, I'm not a competitor."

"I never got my dives down. I repeat all kinds of ridiculous mistakes."

"Maybe I can help," Bucky said.

"Would you?"

"If there's time, sure."

"Oh, that's great. Thanks."

"We'll take them one by one. All you probably need are a few faults corrected and you'll be fine."

"And I'm not hogging your time?"

"Nope. If and when I have the time, it's yours."

"Thanks again, Mr. Cantor."

When he looked over to the girls' side of the dining lodge to see if he could find Marcia, he caught the eye of one of the Steinberg twins, who frantically waved her arm at him. He smiled and waved back and realized that in less than a day he had rid himself of his polio thoughts, except for a few minutes earlier, when he was reminded by Donald of Alan Michaels. Though Donald was five years older and already six feet tall, they were both nice-looking boys with broad shoulders and lean frames and long, strong legs, both avid to latch on to an instructor who could help them improve themselves at sports. Boys like Alan and Donald, seeming to sense right off the depth of his devotion to teaching and his capacity to give them assurance where they needed it, were quickly drawn into his mentoring orbit. Had Alan lived, he more than likely would have grown into an adolescent much like Donald Kaplow. Had Alan lived, had Herbie Steinmark lived, Bucky more than likely wouldn't be here and the unimaginable wouldn't be happening at home.

HE AND MARCIA canoed across the lake — he'd never been in a canoe before, but Marcia showed him how to handle the paddle, and watching her, he picked it up after only a few strokes. They moved slowly into the dark, and when they reached the narrow island, which was far longer than he'd realized at the boys' waterfront, they steered around to the far side, where they dragged the canoe ashore and pulled it back into a small grove of trees. They had hardly spoken from the time they touched hands outside the dining lodge and hurried over to the girls' waterfront to silently lift a canoe from the rack there.

There was no moon, no stars, no light except from a few of the cabins on the hillside back on shore. There had been the roast beef dinner in the dining lodge — where Donald Kaplow, with a boy's voracious appetite, had downed slice after slice of juicy red meat — and now there was a movie playing in the rec hall for the older kids, so the only sound that carried from the camp was the distant noise of the movie track. Close by they could hear the orchestral thrumming of frogs, and from far away a long rumble of thunder was audible every few minutes. The drama of the thunder didn't make their being alone together on the wooded island in their khaki shorts and camp polo shirts any less momentous or diminish the stimulus of their scanty clothes. Their arms and legs bare, they stood in a little cleared patch in among the trees, the two so close to each other that he could plainly see her despite the dark. Marcia, on her own, had gone out in the canoe and prepared the clearing a few nights earlier, readying the spot for their rendezvous by using her hands to rake away the leaves that had piled up the previous fall.

All around them the island was thickly packed with clusters of trees, which weren't entirely white, as they had looked to him from the waterfront, but bore black slashes encircling their bark as though they'd been scarred by a whip. The trunks of a number of them were bent or broken, some growing almost doubled over, some jaggedly torn apart halfway to the ground, some completely sheared off, ravaged by the weather or disease. The trees still intact were so elegantly slender that he could have wrapped his fingers around any one of them with as little difficulty as when he playfully clasped one of Marcia's thighs in the ring of his ten strong fingers. The upper branches and drooping branchlets of the undamaged trees spanned the clearing, creating a latticed dome of saw-toothed leaves and delicately thin, overarching limbs. It was a perfect hideaway, sequestration such as they could only dream about while, necking heavily on the Steinbergs' front porch, they attempted to muffle those readily identifiable noises that signal arousal, intense pleasure, and climax.

"What do you call these trees?" he asked, putting his hand out to touch one. All at once, he had become inexplicably shy, just as when they had been introduced at that first faculty get-together and he found himself moving woodenly and with a ridiculously unnatural expression on his face. She had surprised him by extending her little hand to shake, and he was so befuddled that he wasn't sure what to do with it — the allure of her petite figure left him unable even to think of how to address her. The encounter had been colossally embarrassing for someone whose grandfather had raised him to believe that he must consider nothing beyond his strength to undertake, least of all saying hello to a girl who probably didn't weigh a hundred pounds.

"Birches," she answered. "They're white birches — silver birches."

"Some of the bark is peeling away." He easily stripped a swatch of thin silvery bark from the tree trunk under his hand and showed it to her, there in the dark, as though they were children on a nature hike.

"The Indians used birch bark for canoes," she told him.

"Of course," he said. "Birch bark canoes. I never thought it was the name of a tree."

There was silence between them while they listened to the mumble of the movie voices floating over the water and the thunder far away and the frogs nearby and the thud of something across the lake knocking against the swimming dock or the piers. His heartbeat quickened when he realized it could be Mr. Blomback, coming after them in another canoe.

"Why are there no birds out here?" he asked finally.

"There are. Birds don't sing at night."

"Don't or do?"

"Oh, Bucky," she whispered beseechingly, "must we really go on like this? Undress me, please. Undress me now."

After their weeks of separation, he had needed her to tell him that. He needed this intelligent girl to tell him everything, really, about life beyond the playground and the athletic field and the gym. He needed her entire family to tell him how to live a grown man's life in all the ways that nobody, including his grandfather, had yet done.

Instantly he undid the belt and the buttons on her shorts and slid them down over her legs to the ground. Meanwhile, she raised her arms like a child, and first he took the flashlight she was carrying out of her hand and then he gently pulled the polo shirt off over her head. She reached around to unhook her bra while he knelt and, with the bizarre, somewhat shaming sensation that he had lived for this moment, pulled her underpants down her legs and off over her feet.

"My socks," she said, having already kicked off her sneakers. He pulled off her socks and stuffed them into the sneakers. The socks were spotless and white and, along with the rest of what she was wearing, faintly fragrant of bleach from the camp laundry.

Without her clothes, she was small and slim, with beautifully formed, lightly muscled legs and thin arms and fragile wrists and tiny breasts, affixed high on her chest, and nipples that were soft, pale, and unprotuberant. The slender elfin female body looked as vulnerable as a child's. She certainly didn't look like someone familiar with copulation, nor was that far from the truth. One late-fall weekend when the rest of her family was away in Deal and when, at about four on a Saturday afternoon, with the shades pulled down in her bedroom on Goldsmith Avenue, he had taken her virginity — and lost his own — she had whispered to him afterward, "Bucky, teach me about sex," as if of the two of them she were the less experienced. They lay together on the bed for hours after that — her bed, he had thought, the very four-poster with carved posts and a flowered chintz canopy and a ruffled skirt in which she had been sleeping since childhood — while she, in a soft confiding voice, as though there were indeed others in the empty house, spoke of her unbelievable good luck in having not just her wonderful family but Bucky to love too. He then told her more than he ever had before about his boyhood, expressing himself more easily with her than he had with any girl he'd ever known, with anyone he'd ever known, revealing all he normally kept to himself about what made him happy and what made him sad. "I was the son of a thief," he admitted and found himself able to speak these words to her without a trace of shame. "He went to jail for stealing money. He's an ex-convict. I've never seen him. I don't know where he lives, or even if he's alive or dead. If he had raised me, who's to know if I wouldn't have turned out to be a thief myself? On my own, without grandparents like mine, in a neighborhood like mine," he told her, "it wouldn't have been hard to end up a bum."

Lying face-to-face in the four-poster, they went on with their stories until it was dusk, then dark, until both had said just about everything and revealed themselves to each other as fully as they knew how. And then, as if he weren't sufficiently captivated by her, Marcia whispered into his ear something she had just then learned. "This is the only way to talk, isn't it?"

"YOU," MARCIA WHISPERED after he'd undressed her. "Now you."

Quickly he pulled off his things and set them down next to hers at the edge of their clearing.

"Let me look at you. Oh, thank God," she said and burst into tears. He quickly gathered her into his arms, but it did not help. She sobbed without restraint.

"What is it?" he asked her. "What's the matter?"

"I thought you were going to die!" she exclaimed. "I thought you were going to become paralyzed and die! I couldn't sleep, I was so frightened. I'd come out here whenever I could to be alone and pray to God to keep you healthy. I never prayed so hard for anyone in my life. 'Please protect Bucky!' I'm crying like this out of happiness, darling! Such great, great happiness! You're here! You didn't get it! Oh, Bucky, hold me tight, hold me as close as you can! You're safe!"

WHEN THEY WERE dressed and ready to return to camp, he could not help himself and instead of chalking up her words to how relieved she was and forgetting them, he said what he shouldn't have said about her praying to the god whom he had repudiated. He knew there was no good reason to conclude this momentous day by returning to a subject so inflammatory, especially as he'd never heard her speak like that before and probably wouldn't ever again. It was a subject entirely too grave for the moment, and irrelevant, really, now that he was here. Yet he could not restrain himself. He'd been through too much back in Newark to squelch his feelings — and he'd left Newark and its pestilence a mere twelve hours ago.

"Do you really think God answered your prayers?" he asked her.

"I can't really know, can I? But you're here, aren't you? You're healthy, aren't you?"

"That doesn't prove anything," he said. "Why didn't God answer the prayers of Alan Michaels's parents? They must have prayed. Herbie Steinmark's parents must have prayed. They're good people. They're good Jews. Why didn't God intervene for them? Why didn't He save their boys?"

"I honestly don't know," Marcia helplessly answered.

"I don't either. I don't know why God created polio in the first place. What was He trying to prove? That we need people on earth who are crippled?"

"God didn't create polio," she said.

"You think not?"

"Yes," she said sharply, "I think not."

"But didn't God create everything?"

"That isn't the same thing."

"Why isn't it?"

"Why are you arguing with me, Bucky? What are we arguing for? All I said was that I prayed to God because I was frightened for you. And now you're here and I'm overwhelmingly happy. And out of that you've made an argument. Why do you want to fight with me when we haven't seen each other for weeks?"

"I don't want to fight," he said.

"Then don't," she said, more bewildered than angry.

All this while the thunder had been rolling in regularly and the lightning flickering nearby.

"We should go," she said. "We should get back while the storm is still a way off."

"But how can a Jew pray to a god who has put a curse like this on a neighborhood of thousands and thousands of Jews?"

"I don't know! What exactly are you driving at?"

He was suddenly afraid to tell her — afraid that if he persisted in pressing her to understand what he did, he would lose her and the family with her. They had never before argued or clashed over anything. Never once had he sensed in his loving Marcia a speck of opposition — or she in him, for that matter — and so, just in time, before he began to ruin things, Bucky reined himself in.

Together they dragged the canoe down to the edge of the lake, and within moments, without speaking, they were vigorously paddling toward camp and arrived well before the downpour began.

DONALD KAPLOW AND the other boys were asleep when Bucky entered the Comanche cabin and made his way down the narrow aisle between the footlockers. Quietly as he could, he got into his pajamas, stowed away his clothes, and slid between the fresh sheets that formerly belonged to Irv Schlanger and that he'd made the bed with earlier in the day. He and Marcia had not parted pleasantly, and he continued to feel the distress from when they'd hurriedly kissed good night at the landing and, each fearing that something other than God might lie at the root of their first quarrel, had run off in opposite directions for their cabins.

The rain began pounding on the cabin roof while Bucky lay awake thinking about Dave and Jake fighting in France in a war from which he'd been excluded. He thought of Irv Schlanger, the draftee who'd gone off to war after having slept only the night before in this very bed. Time and again it seemed as if everybody had gone off to war except him. To have been preserved from the fighting, to have escaped the bloodshed — all that someone else might have considered a boon, he saw as an affliction. He was raised to be a fearless battler by his grandfather, trained to think he must be a hugely responsible man, ready and fit to defend what was right, and instead, confronted with the struggle of the century, a worldwide conflict between good and evil, he could not take even the smallest part.

Yet he had been given a war to fight, the war being waged on the battlefield of his playground, the war whose troops he had deserted for Marcia and the safety of Indian Hill. If he could not fight in Europe or the Pacific, he could at least have remained in Newark, fighting their fear of polio alongside his endangered boys. Instead he was here in this haven devoid of danger; instead he had chosen to leave Newark for a summer camp atop a secluded mountain, concealed from the world at the far end of a narrow unpaved road and camouflaged from the air by a forest of trees — and doing what there? Playing with children. And happy at it! And the happier he felt, the more humiliating it was.

Despite the heavy rain drilling on the cabin roof and turning the grassy playing fields and the worn dirt trails into an enormous soggy puddle, despite the boom of thunder reverberating through the range of mountains and lightning jaggedly branching downward all around the camp, none of the boys in the two rows of bunks so much as stirred in their sleep. This simple, cozy log cabin — with its colorful school pennants and its decorated canoe paddles and its sticker-laden footlockers and its narrow camp beds with shoes, sneakers, and sandals lined up beneath them, with its securely sleeping crew of robust, healthy teenage boys — seemed as far from war, from his war, as he could have gotten. Here he had the innocent love of his two future sisters-in-law and the passionate love of his future wife; here he already had a boy like Donald Kaplow eagerly seeking instruction from him; here he had a marvelous waterfront to preside over and dozens of energetic youngsters to teach and encourage; here, at the end of the day, he had the high board to dive from in peace and tranquillity. Here he was shielded by as secure a refuge as you could find from the killer on the rampage at home. Here he had everything that Dave and Jake were without and that the kids on the Chancellor playground were without and that everyone in Newark was without. But what he no longer had was a conscience he could live with.

He would have to go back. Tomorrow he would have to take a train from Stroudsburg and, once back in Newark, make contact with O'Gara and tell him he wanted to resume work at the playground on Monday. Since the recreation department was short-handed because of the draft, there should be no problem recovering his job. In all, he would have been gone from the playground for a day and a half — and no one could say that a day and half off in the Poconos constituted negligence or desertion.

But wouldn't Marcia take his returning to Newark as a blow, as somehow castigating her, especially since their evening on the island had ended unhappily? If he picked up and left tomorrow, what repercussions would that have for their plans? He already intended to go into town as soon as he had an hour free and, with the fifty dollars he'd drawn out of the savings account for his grandmother's stove, buy Marcia an engagement ring at the local jewelry store… But he could not worry — not about Marcia's ring, not about Marcia's misunderstanding why he was going, not about leaving Mr. Blomback in the lurch, not about disappointing Donald Kaplow or the Steinberg twins. He had made a profound mistake. Rashly, he had yielded to fear, and under the spell of fear he had betrayed his boys and betrayed himself, when all he'd had to do was stay where he was and do his job. Marcia's lovingly trying to rescue him from Newark had led to his foolishly undermining himself. The kids here would do fine without him. This was no war zone. Indian Hill was where he wasn't needed.

Outside, just when it seemed it could not come down any harder, the rain reached a startling crescendo and began gushing like floodwater down the cabin's pitched roof and over the brimming gutters and sweeping past the closed windows in plummeting sheets. Suppose it were to rain like this in Newark, suppose it were to rain there for days on end, millions and millions of water drops slashing the houses and alleyways and streets of the city — would that wash the polio away? But why speculate about what was not and could not be? He had to head home! His impulse was to get up and pack his belongings in his duffel bag so as to be ready to catch the first morning train. But he didn't want to wake the boys or make it look as if he were rushing off in a panic. It was his rushing here that had been undertaken in a panic. He was leaving after having recovered his courage for an ordeal whose reality was undeniable, yet an ordeal whose hazards couldn't compare to those that threatened Dave and Jake as they battled to extend the Allied foothold in France.

As for God, it was easy to think kindly of Him in a paradise like Indian Hill. It was something else in Newark — or Europe or the Pacific — in the summer of 1944.

BY THE NEXT MORNING the wet world of the storm had vanished, and the sun was too brilliant, the weather too invigorating, the high excitement of the boys beginning their new day unfettered by fear too inspiring for him to imagine never awakening again within these cabin walls plastered with pennants from a dozen schools. And jeopardizing their future by precipitously abandoning Marcia was too horrifying to contemplate. The view from the cabin porch of the ripple-free gloss of the lake into which he had dived so deeply at the end of his first day and, in the distance, of the island where they had canoed to make love beneath the canopy of birch leaves — to divest himself of this after just one day was impossible. He was even fortified by the sight of the soaked floorboards at the entrance to the cabin, where the wind had whipped the raindrops across the porch and through the screen door — even that ordinary marker of a torrential downpour somehow sustained him in his decision to stay. Under a sky scoured to an eggshell smoothness by that driving storm, with birds calling and flying about overhead, and in the company of all these exhilarated kids, how could he do otherwise? He wasn't a doctor. He wasn't a nurse. He could not return to a tragedy whose conditions he was impotent to change.

Forget about God, he told himself. Since when is God your business anyway? And, enacting the role that was his business, he headed off for breakfast with the boys, filling his lungs with fresh mountain air purified of all contaminants. While they trooped across the grassy slope of the hill, a rich moist green smell, brand new to him, rose from the rain-soaked earth and seemed to certify that he was indisputably in tune with life. He had always lived in a city flat with his grandparents and had never before felt on his skin that commingling of warmth and coolness that is a July mountain morning, or known the fullness of emotion it could excite. There was something so enlivening about spending one's workday in this unbounded space, something so beguiling about stripping Marcia of her clothes in the dark of an empty island apart from everyone, something so thrilling about going to sleep beneath a blitzkrieg of thunder and lightning and awakening to what looked like the first morning ever that the sun had shone down on human activity. I'm here, he thought, and I'm happy — and so he was, cheered even by the squishing sound made by tramping on the sodden grass cushioning his every step. It's all here! Peace! Love! Health! Beauty! Children! Work! What else was there to do but stay? Yes, everything he saw and smelled and heard was a telling premonition of that phantom, future happiness.

Later in the day there was an unusual incident, one said never to have occurred at the camp before. A huge swarm of butterflies settled over Indian Hill, and for about an hour in the middle of the afternoon they could be seen erratically dipping and darting over the playing fields and thickly perched on the tape of the tennis nets and alighting on the clusters of milkweed growing plentifully at the fringe of the camp grounds. Had they been blown in overnight on the strong storm winds? Had they lost their way while migrating south? But why would they be migrating so early in the summer? Nobody, not even the nature counselor, knew the answer. They appeared en masse as if to scrutinize every blade of grass, every shrub, every tree, every vine stem, fern frond, weed, and flower petal in the mountaintop camp before reorienting themselves to resume their flight to wherever it was they were headed.

While he stood in the hot sun at the dock, watching the faces full of sunlight bobbing about in the water, one of the butterflies landed on Bucky and began to sip on his bare shoulder. Miraculous! Imbibing the minerals of his perspiration! Fantastic! Bucky remained motionless, observing the butterfly out of the corner of his eye until the thing levitated and was suddenly gone. Later, recounting the episode to the boys in the cabin, he told them that his butterfly looked as though it had been designed and painted by the Indians, with its veined wings patterned in orange and black and the black edging minutely dotted with tiny white spots — what he did not tell them was that he was so astonished by the gorgeous butterfly's feeding on his flesh that when it flew off he allowed himself to half believe that this too must be an omen of bounteous days to come.

Nobody at Indian Hill was afraid of the butterflies blanketing the camp and brightly clouding the air. Rather, everyone smiled with delight at all that silent, spirited flitting about, campers and counselors alike thrilled to feel themselves engulfed by the weightless fragility of those innumerable, colorful fluttering wings. Some campers came racing out of their cabins wielding butterfly nets that they'd made in crafts, and the youngest children ran madly after the rising, plunging butterflies, trying to catch them with their outstretched hands. Everybody was happy, because everybody knew that butterflies didn't bite or spread disease but disseminated the pollen that made seed plants grow. What could be more salutary than that?

Yes, the playground in Newark was behind him. He would not leave Indian Hill. There he was prey to polio; here he was food for butterflies. Vacillation — a painful weakness previously unknown to him — would no longer subvert his assurance of what needed to be done.

BY THIS POINT in the summer, the beginners in the boys' camp had progressed beyond blowing bubbles in the water and practicing the face-down float and were at least swimming the dog paddle; many were beyond that, well into the elementary backstroke and crawl, and a few of the beginners were already jumping into the deep water and swimming twenty feet to the shallow edge of the lake. He had five counselors on his staff, and though they seemed adept at handling boys of all ages and at conducting the swimming program under his supervision, Bucky found himself, from the first day, drawn into the water to work with what the counselors privately called the "sinkers," the young ones who were least sure of themselves and making the slowest progress and who seemed lacking in natural buoyancy. He would walk out along the pier to the deep-water platform where a counselor was instructing the older boys in diving; he would spend time with kids who were working hard to improve their butterfly stroke; but invariably he would return to the young ones and get down into the water with them and work on their flutter kick and their scissors kick and their frog kick, reassuring them with the support of his hands and just a few words that he was right there and they were in no danger of choking on a mouthful of water, let alone of drowning. By the end of a day at the waterfront he thought, exactly as he had when he began at Panzer, that there could be no more satisfying job for a man than giving a boy learning a sport, along with the basic instruction, the security and confidence that all will be well and getting him over the fear of a new experience, whether it was in swimming or boxing or baseball.

A matchless day, with dozens to come. Before dinner he'd get his wettish welcome on the lips from the twins, who'd be waiting for him at the dining lodge steps and who sent up a cry of "Kiss! Kiss!" the moment he came into sight, and after dinner he had promised Donald Kaplow he would work with him on his dives. Then, at nine-thirty, off to the dark island with his wife-to-be. She'd left another note in an envelope at Mr. Blomback's office. "More. Meet me. M." He had already arranged with Carl to drive him into Stroudsburg during the week so he could buy Marcia's engagement ring.

About half an hour after dinner, while the boys from their cabin played in a pickup softball game on the diamond by the flagpole, he and Donald went down to the dock for Bucky to watch Donald's springboard dives. Donald started off with a front dive, a back dive, and a front jackknife.

"Good!" Bucky said to him. "I don't understand what you think is wrong with them."

Donald smiled at the compliment but asked anyway, "Is my approach right? Is my hurdle right?"

"You bet they are," Bucky said. "You know what you want to do and you do it. You do a model jackknife. First the upper part of the body bends over and the legs do nothing. Then the lower part of the body comes up behind while the head and arms are stable. Right in every detail. Do you do a back somersault? Let's see it. Watch out for the board."

Donald was a natural diver and didn't exhibit a single one of the faults that Bucky might have expected to see in the back somersault. When Donald came up from the dive and was still in the water pushing the hair out of his eyes, Bucky called to him, "Good forceful spin. You keep the tuck nice and tight. Timing, balance — great job all around."

Donald climbed out of the water onto the dock, and when Bucky tossed him a towel, he rubbed himself dry. "Is it too chilly out here for you?" Bucky asked. "Are you cold?"

"No, not at all," Donald answered.

The sun was still radiant and the big sky still blue but the temperature had dropped close to ten degrees since dinner. Hard to believe that only days earlier he and his playground boys had been suffering the very heat that incubated the pestilence that was ravaging his city and making people crazy with fear. And dizzying to realize that up here every last thing had changed for the better. If only the temperature in Newark could drop like this and stay like this for the rest of July and August!

"You're shivering," Bucky said. "Let's pick up again same time tomorrow. How about it?"

"But just the forward somersault, please? I'll do it first from the end of the board," Donald said, and he took up his position with his arms in front, his elbows flexed, and his knees slightly bent. "This isn't my best dive," he said.

"Concentrate," Bucky said. "Upward arm lift and then tuck."

Donald readied himself and then dived forward and up, rolled into the tuck, and came down feet-first, making a classic vertical entry into the lake.

"Did I screw up?" Donald asked when he surfaced. He had to shade his eyes from the western sun and the sparkling glare it threw across the water in order to see Bucky clearly.

"Nope," Bucky told him. "Momentarily your hands lost contact with your legs, but that didn't matter much."

"Didn't it? Let me do it again," he said, breast-stroking up to the ladder. "Let me get it right."

"Okay, Ace," Bucky said, laughing, and pinning on Donald the nickname he'd been dubbed with on the street as a little kid with pointy ears, back before his grandfather had stepped in to rename him for good. "One last forward somersault and we go inside."

This time, starting from the foot of the board, Donald began with his regular approach and takeoff and expertly completed the dive. His hands moved faultlessly from his shins to the sides of his knees and then to the sides of his thighs in the break.

"Great!" Bucky called to him as he emerged at the surface. "Great height, great spin. Nice and forceful from beginning to end. Where are all those mistakes you told me you make? You don't make any."

"Mr. Cantor," he said excitedly as he climbed back onto the dock, "let me show you my half twist and my back jackknife and then we'll go in. Let me finish the sequence. I'm not cold, really."

"But I am," Bucky said, laughing, "and I'm dry and have a shirt on."

"Well," replied Donald, "that's the difference between seventeen and twenty-four."

"Twenty-three," said Bucky, laughing again and as pleased as he could be — pleased by Donald and his perseverance and filled with contentment knowing that Marcia and the twins were only steps away. It was almost as if they were a family already. As if Donald, only six years his junior, were Marcia's and his own son and, incongruously, the twins' nephew. "Look," he said, "the temperature is going down by the minute. We've got the whole rest of the summer to practice out here." And he tossed Donald his sweatshirt to put on and, for good measure, had him wrap the towel around the waist of his wet trunks.

On the trudge up the slope to the cabin, Donald said, "I want to join the naval air corps when I'm eighteen. My best friend went in a year ago. We write all the time. He told me about the training. It's tough. But I want to get into the war before it ends. I want to fly against the Japs. I've wanted to since Pearl Harbor. I was fourteen when the war began, old enough to know what was happening and to want to do something about it. I want to be in on it when the Japs surrender. What a day that's going to be."

"I hope you get the chance," Bucky told him.

"What kept you out, Mr. Cantor?"

"My eyesight. These things." He tapped his glasses with a fingernail. "I've got my closest buddies fighting in France. They jumped into Normandy on D-Day. I wish I could have been with them."

"I follow the war in the Pacific," Donald said. "In Europe it's going to be quick now. This is the beginning of the end for Germany. But in the Pacific there's still plenty of fighting to be done. Last month, in the Marianas, we destroyed one hundred forty Jap planes in two days. Imagine being in on that."

"There's plenty of fighting left on both fronts," Bucky told him. "You won't miss out."

As they mounted the Comanche cabin steps, Donald asked, "Can you watch the rest of the dives after dinner tomorrow night?"

"Sure I can."

"And thanks, Mr. Cantor, for giving me all that time."

And there on the cabin porch, Donald reached out a bit stiffly to shake his hand — a surprising formality with its own ingratiating appeal. One session at the diving board and already they were like old friends, though while standing there with Donald at the end of a beautiful summer day, Bucky was unexpectedly stung by the thought of all the boys he'd abandoned on the playground. Try as he would to take delight in everything here, he couldn't yet succeed entirely in shutting out the inexcusable act and the place where he was no longer esteemed.

BETWEEN THE TIME that he left Donald and had arranged to meet Marcia, he went to the phone booth back of the camp office to call his grandmother. Probably he wasn't going to catch her in, because she would be sitting outside on a beach chair with the Einnemans and the Fishers, but as it happened, though the heat was supposed to return again the next day, the city had cooled off for twenty-four hours and she was able to sit in their flat with the windows open and the fan on and to listen to her programs on the radio. She asked how he was and how Marcia and the twins were, and when he told her that he and Marcia were getting engaged, she said, "I don't know whether to laugh or cry. My Eugene."

"Laugh," he said, laughing.

"Yes, I'm happy for you, darling," she said, "but I wish your mother had lived to see this. I only wish she had lived to see the man her son turned out to be. I wish Grandpa could be here. He would be excited for his boy. So proud. Dr. Steinberg's daughter."

"I wish he could be here too, Grandma. I think about him up here," Bucky said. "I thought about him yesterday when I went off the high board. I remembered how he taught me to swim at the Y. I was about six. He threw me into the pool and that was it. How are you, Grandma? Are the Einnemans looking after you all right?"

"Of course they are. Don't you worry about me. The Einnemans are very helpful, and I can take care of myself anyway. Eugene, I have to tell you something. There have been thirty new cases of polio in the Weequahic section. Seventy-nine in the city in just the last day. Nineteen dead. All records. And there have been more cases of polio at the Chancellor playground. Selma Shankman called me. She told me the boys' names and I wrote them down."

"Who are they, Grandma?"

"Let me get my glasses. Let me get the piece of paper," she said.

Several counselors were now standing in line outside the booth waiting to use the phone, and he signaled to them through the glass that he would be only another few minutes. Meanwhile, he waited in dread to hear the names. Why cripple children, he thought. Why a disease that cripples children? Why destroy our irreplaceable children? They're the best kids in the world.

"Eugene?"

"I'm here."

"All right. These are the names. These are the boys who are hospitalized. Billy Schizer and Erwin Frankel. And one death."

"Who died?

"A boy named Ronald Graubard. He got sick and died overnight. Did you know him?"

"I know him, Grandma, yes. I know him from the playground and from school. I know them all. Ronnie is dead. I can't believe it."

"I'm sorry to have to tell you," his grandmother said, "but I thought, because you were so close to all those boys, you would want to know."

"You were right. Of course I want to know."

"There are people in the city who are calling for a quarantine of the Weequahic section. There's talk from the mayor's office about a quarantine," she told him.

"A quarantine of all of Weequahic?"

"Yes. Barricading it off so nobody can go in or out. They would close it off at the Irvington line and the Hillside line and then at Hawthorne Avenue and at Elizabeth Avenue. That's what it said in tonight's paper. They even printed a map."

"But there are tens of thousands of people there, people who have jobs and have to go to work. They can't just pen people in like that, can they?"

"Things are bad, Eugene. People are up in arms. People are terrified. Everybody is frightened for their children. Thank God you're away. The bus drivers on the eight and fourteen lines say they won't drive into the Weequahic section unless they have protective masks. Some say they won't drive in there at all. The mailmen don't want to deliver mail there. The truck drivers who transport supplies to the stores, to the groceries, to the gas stations, and so on don't want to go in either. Strangers drive through with their windows rolled up no matter how hot it is outside. The anti-Semites are saying that it's because they're Jews that polio spreads there. Because of all the Jews — that's why Weequahic is the center of the paralysis and why the Jews should be isolated. Some of them sound as if they think the best way to get rid of the polio epidemic would be to burn down Weequahic with all the Jews in it. There is a lot of bad feeling because of the crazy things people are saying out of their fear. Out of their fear and out of their hatred. I was born in the city, and I've never known anything like this in my life. It's as if everything everywhere is collapsing."

"Yes, it sounds very bad," he said, dropping the last of his coins into the phone.

"And, Eugene, of course — I almost forgot. They're shutting down the playgrounds. As of tomorrow. Not just Chancellor but all over the city."

"They are? But the mayor was set on keeping them open."

"It's in tonight's paper. All the places where children congregate are being shut down. I have the article in front of me. Movie theaters are shutting down for children under sixteen. The city pool is shutting down. The public library with all its branches is shutting down. Pastors are shutting down Sunday schools. It's all in the paper. Schools might not open on schedule if things continue like this. I'll read you the opening line. 'There is a possibility that the public schools — '"

"But what does it say specifically about the playgrounds?"

"Nothing. It's just in a list of things that the mayor is now closing."

So if he'd remained in Newark a few days longer, he would never have had to quit. Instead he would have been released, free to do whatever he wanted and to go wherever he liked. If only he'd stayed, he would never have had to phone O'Gara and take what he took from O'Gara. If only he'd stayed, he would never have had to walk out on his kids and look back for a lifetime at his inexcusable act.

"Here. Here's the headline," she said. "'Day's Record in City Polio Cases. Mayor Closes Facilities.' Should I send you the article, darling? Should I tear it out?"

"No, no. Grandma, there are counselors waiting to use the phone and I don't have more change anyway. I have to go. Goodbye for now."

MARCIA WAS WAITING by the entrance to the dining lodge, and together, wearing heavy sweaters against the unseasonable cold, they slipped down to the waterfront, where they found the canoe and started off across the lake through a rising mist, the silence broken only by the slurp of the paddle blades dipping into the water. At the island they paddled around to the far side and dragged the canoe ashore. Marcia had brought a blanket. He helped her to shake it open and spread it in the clearing.

"What's happened?" she asked. "What's the matter?"

"News from my grandmother. Seventy-nine new cases in Newark overnight. Thirty new cases at Weequahic. Three new cases at the playground. Two hospitalized and one dead. Ronnie Graubard. A quick, bright little fellow, full of spark, and he's dead."

Marcia took his hand. "I don't know what to say, Bucky. It's dreadful."

He sat down on the blanket and she sat beside him. "I don't know what to say either," he told her.

"Isn't it time for them to close the playground?" she asked.

"They have. They've closed it. They've closed all the playgrounds."

"When?"

"As of tomorrow. The mayor's shutting them down, my grandmother said."

"Well, wasn't that the best thing to do? He should have done it a long time ago."

"I should have stayed, Marcia. For as long as the playground was open, I should never have left."

"But it was only the other day that you got here."

"I left. There's nothing more to say. A fact is a fact. I left."

He drew her close to him on the blanket. "Here," he said. "Lie here with me," and he pressed her body to his. They held each other without speaking. There was nothing more that he knew of to say or to think. He had left while all the boys had stayed, and now two more of them were sick and one was dead.

"Is this what you've been thinking about since you got here? That you left?"

"If I were in Newark I would go to Ronnie's funeral. If I were in Newark I would visit the families. Instead I'm here."

"You can still do that when you get back."

"That's not the same thing."

"But even if you had stayed, what could you have done?"

"It isn't a matter of doing — it's a matter of being there! I should be there now, Marcia! Instead I'm at the top of a mountain in the middle of a lake!"

They held each other without speaking. Fifteen minutes must have passed. All Bucky could think of were their names, and all he could see were their faces: Billy Schizer. Ronald Graubard. Danny Kopferman. Myron Kopferman. Alan Michaels. Erwin Frankel. Herbie Steinmark. Leo Feinswog. Paul Lippman. Arnie Mesnikoff. All he could think of was the war in Newark and the boys that he had fled.

Another fifteen minutes must have passed before Marcia spoke again. In a hushed voice she said to him, "The stars are breathtaking. You never see stars like this at home. I'll bet this is the first time you've ever seen a night sky so full of stars."

He said nothing.

"Look," she said, "how when the leaves move they let the starlight through. And the sun," she said a moment later, "did you see the sun this evening just as it was beginning to go down? It seemed so close to camp. Like a gong you could reach out and strike. All that's up there is so vast," she said, still vainly, naively trying to stop him from feeling unworthy, "and we are infinitesimal."

Yes, he thought, and there's something more infinitesimal than us. The virus destroying everything.

"Listen," Marcia said. "Shhh. Hear that?" There had been a social at the rec hall earlier in the evening, and the campers who had stayed behind to clean up must have put a record on the record player to keep them company while they gathered up soda bottles and swept the floor and the rest of the kids went off with their counselors to get ready for lights out. Over the silence of the dark lake came Marcia's favorite song of the summer. It was the song that was playing on the jukebox at Syd's the day Bucky had gone to extend his condolences to Alan's family, the same day he'd learned from Yushy the counterman that Herbie had died too.

"'I'll be seeing you,'" Marcia sang to him softly, "'in all the old familiar places — '" And here she stood, pulled him after her, and, determined not to let his spirits drop any further — and not knowing what else to do — she got him to begin to dance.

"'That this heart of mine embraces,'" she sang, her cheek pressed to his chest, "'all day through…'" And her voice rose appealingly on the elongated "through."

He did as she wanted and obligingly held her to him and, shuffling her slowly around the middle of the clearing that they had made their own, remembered the night before she'd left for Indian Hill at the end of June, when they'd danced together just like this to the radio music on her family's porch. It was a night when all they'd had to be concerned about was Marcia's going away for the summer.

"'In that small café,'" she sang, her voice thin and whispery, "'the park across the way…'"

Amid the island's little forest of leaning birches, their soft wood bent, as Marcia had explained, from the pounding they took in the hard Pocono winters, the two clung to each other with their unparalyzed arms, swaying together to the music on their unparalyzed legs, pressing together their unparalyzed trunks, and able now to hear the words only intermittently — "…everything that's light and gay…think of you… when night is new… seeing you" — before the song stopped. Someone across the lake had lifted the arm of the record player and switched it off, and the lights in the rec hall went out one at a time, and they could hear kids calling to one another, "Night! Good night!" Then the flashlights came on, and from the dance floor of the island ballroom, he and Marcia could see points of light flickering here and there as each of the kids — safe, healthy, unafraid, unharmed — traced a path back to the cabins.

"We have each other," Marcia whispered, removing his glasses and hungrily kissing his face. "No matter what happens in the world, we have each other's love. Bucky, I promise, you'll always have me singing to you and loving you and, whatever happens, I'll always be standing at your side."

"We do," he said to her, "we have each other's love." Yet what difference does that make, he thought, to Billy and Erwin and Ronnie? What difference does that make to their families? Hugging and kissing and dancing like lovesick teenagers ignorant of everything — what could that do for anyone?

WHEN HE GOT BACK to the cabin — everyone there in the deep sleep induced by a day full of hiking and swimming and playing ball — he found a note on his bed from Donald. "Call your grandmother," it said. Call her? But he'd spoken to her only a couple of hours earlier. He sped out the door and raced down to the phone booth wondering what had happened to her and thinking he should never have left her alone to come to camp. Of course she couldn't manage by herself, not when she had those pains in her chest every time she tried to carry anything up the stairs. He'd left her alone and now something had happened.

"Grandma, it's Eugene. What's wrong? Are you all right?"

"I'm all right. I have some news. That's why I called the camp. I didn't want to alarm you, but I thought you would want to know right away. It's not good news, Eugene. I wouldn't have called long distance otherwise. It's more tragedy. Mrs. Garonzik phoned from Elizabeth a few minutes ago. To speak to you."

"Jake," Bucky said.

"Yes," she said. "Jake is dead."

"How? How?"

"In action in France."

"I don't believe it. He was indestructible. He was a brick wall. He was six feet three inches tall and two hundred and fifteen pounds. He was a powerhouse. He can't be dead!"

"I'm afraid it's true, darling. His mother said he was killed in action. In a town whose name I can't remember now. I should have written it down. Eileen is there with the family."

The mention of Eileen shocked him anew. Jake had met Eileen McCurdy in high school, and she'd been Jake's girl throughout his years at Panzer. The two were to marry and set up house in Elizabeth as soon as he returned from the war.

"He was so big and with such good manners," his grandmother was saying. "Jake was one of the nicest boys you ever brought around. I can see him now, eating right in the kitchen here that first night he came home with you for dinner. Dave came too. Jake wanted 'Jewish food.' He ate sixteen latkes."

"He did. Yes, I remember. And we laughed, all of us laughed." Tears were coursing down Bucky's face now. "Dave's alive, though. Dave Jacobs is alive."

"I can't say that I know, darling. There's no way I would know. I assume so. I hope so. I haven't heard anything. But according to tonight's news, the war in France is not going well. They said on the radio that there are many dead. Terrible battles with the Germans. Many dead and many wounded."

"I can't lose both my friends," Bucky replied weakly, and when he hung up he headed not back to the cabin but down to the waterfront. There, despite the new rush of cold air pushing in, he sat on the diving dock and stared into the darkness, repeating to himself the lionizing epithets by which Jake was known on the sports page of the campus paper — Bruiser Jake, Big Jake, Man Mountain Jake… He could no more imagine Jake dead than he could imagine himself dead, which didn't serve, however, to stop his tears.

At about midnight, he walked back to the pier, but instead of going up the hill to the cabin, he turned and went out again along the wooden walkway to the diving dock. He proceeded to pace the length of the walkway until a dim light began to illuminate the lake, and he remembered that in just such a light another of the dearly beloved dead, his grandfather, would drink hot tea out of a glass — tea spiked in winter with a shot of schnapps — before heading off to buy his day's produce at the Mulberry Street market. When school was out Bucky sometimes went with him.

He was still struggling to bring himself under control so as to return to the cabin before anyone awoke, when the birds in the woods started singing. It was dawn at Camp Indian Hill. Soon there'd be the murmur of young voices from the cabins and then the happy shouting would begin.

ONCE A WEEK, Indian Night was celebrated separately in the boys' and girls' camps. At eight, all the boys came together at the campfire circle in a wide clearing high above the lake. At the center of the circle was a pit lined with flat stones. The logs there were stacked horizontally and laid crisscross in log-cabin style, tapering upward some three feet from the two large, heavy logs at the base. The fire logs were ringed by a stone barrier of small, picturesquely irregular boulders. Some eight or ten feet back from the stone barrier the circle of benches began. The seats were made of split logs and the bases of stone, and they extended concentrically outward until there were four rows in all, divided into three sections. The woods began some twenty feet back of the last row of benches. Mr. Blomback called the structure the Council Ring and the weekly gathering there the Grand Council.

At the edge of the Council Ring there was a teepee, larger and more elaborately embellished than the teepee at the camp entrance. That was the Council Tent, decorated at the top with bands of red, green, yellow, blue, and black, and with a border at the bottom of red and black. There was also a totem pole, whose crest was carved with the head of an eagle, and below that with a large unfurled wing jutting stiffly out to either side. The dominant colors of the totem pole were black, white, and red, the last two being the colors for the camp's color war. The totem pole stood about fifteen feet high and could be seen by anyone looking up from a boat on the lake. To the west, across the lake, where the girls were holding their own Indian Night, the sun was beginning to set, and full darkness would come by the time the Grand Council was over. Only faintly could you hear the post-dinner kitchen clatter from the dining lodge, while beyond the lake a striated sky drama, a long lava flow of burnt orange and bright pink and bloody crimson, registered the lingering end of the day. An iridescent, slow-moving summer twilight was creeping over Indian Hill, a splashy gift from the god of the horizon, if there was such a deity in the Indian pantheon.

The boys and their counselors — each designated a "brave" for the evening — arrived at Grand Council dressed in outfits that in large part came out of the crafts shop. All wore beaded headbands, fringed tunics that were originally ordinary shirts, and leggings that were trousers stitched with fringe at the outside seam. On their feet they wore moccasins, some cut from leather in the crafts shop and a good many of which were high-top sneakers that had been wrapped like moccasins at the ankle with bead and fringe. A number of the boys had feathers in their headbands — dropped bird plumage that they'd found in the woods — some wore beaded armbands tied inches above the elbow, and many carried canoe paddles that were painted with symbols colored, like the totem pole, in red, black, and white. Others had bows borrowed from the archery shack slung over their shoulders — bows without the arrows — and a few carried simulated tom-toms of tightly drawn calfskin and drum beaters with beaded handles that they made in crafts. Several held in their hands rattles that were decorated baking-powder cans filled with pebbles. The youngest campers used their own bed blankets wrapped around them as Indian robes, which also served to keep them warm as the evening temperature dropped.

Bucky's Indian outfit had been gathered together for him by the crafts counselor. Like the faces of the others, his had been darkened with cocoa powder to simulate an Indian's skin tone, and he had two diagonal stripes — "war paint" — applied to either cheek, one of black drawn with charcoal and the other of red drawn with lipstick. He sat next to Donald Kaplow and with the rest of the Comanche boys, who were seated farther down along the bench. Everywhere the boys loudly talked and joked until two campers carrying calfskin drums got up from the benches and walked to the stone surround of the campfire logs and, facing each other, began to solemnly bang on the drums while those carrying rattles shook them, no two in the same rhythm.

Then everyone turned to look toward the teepee. Mr. Blomback emerged from the oval doorway in a feather headdress, white feathers with brown tips all around his head and trailing behind in a tail down to below his waist. His tunic, his leggings, even his moccasins were elaborately decorated with leather fringe and bands of beadwork and long tufts of what looked like human hair but was probably a woman's hairpiece from the five-and-ten. In one hand he carried a club — "Great Chief Blomback's war club," Donald whispered — that was replete with feathers, and in the other hand a peace pipe, consisting of a long wooden stem ending in a clay bowl and strung along the stem with still more feathers.

All the campers stood until Mr. Blomback stolidly made his way from the teepee to the center of the Council Ring. The drumming and the rattling stopped, and the campers took their seats.

Mr. Blomback handed his war club and peace pipe to the two drummers and, dramatically folding his arms over his chest, looked around at all the campers on the encircling benches. His heavy application of cocoa powder did not altogether cover his prominent Adam's apple, but otherwise he looked astonishingly like a real chief. In years gone by he had saluted the braves Indian fashion — using an upraised right arm with the palm forward — and they would collectively return the salute, simultaneously grunting "Ugh!" But this greeting had to be abandoned with the arrival on the world scene of the Nazis, who employed that salute to signify "Heil Hitler!"

"When first the brutal anthropoid stood up and walked erect," Mr. Blomback began, " — there was man! The great event was symbolized and marked by the lighting of the first campfire."

Donald turned to Bucky and whispered, "We get this every week. The little kids don't understand a word. No worse, I guess, than what happens in shul."

"For millions of years," Mr. Blomback continued, "our race has seen in this blessed fire the means and emblem of light, warmth, protection, friendly gathering, council."

He paused as the roar of an airplane engine passed over the camp. This happened now round the clock. An army air corps base had opened at the beginning of the war some seventy miles to the north, and Indian Hill was on its flyway.

"All the hallow of the ancient thoughts," Mr. Blomback said, "of hearth, fireside, home, is centered on its glow, and the home tie itself is weakened with the waning of the home fire. Only the ancient sacred fire of wood has power to touch and thrill the chords of primitive remembrance. Your campfire partner wins your love, and having camped in peace together — having marveled together at the morning sun, the evening light, the stars, the moon, the storms, the sunset, the dark of night — yours is a lasting bond of union, however wide your worlds may be apart."

Unfolding his two fringed arms, he extended them toward the assembly, and in unison the campers retorted to the stream of grandiloquence: "The campfire is the focal center of all primitive brotherhood. We shall not fail to use its magic."

The drummers now took up their tom-tom beat, and Donald whispered to Bucky, "An Indian historian. Somebody Seton. That's his god. Those are his words. Mr. Blomback uses the same Indian name as Seton: Black Wolf. He doesn't think any of this is nonsense."

Next a figure wearing the mask of a big-beaked bird stood in the front row and approached the ready-laid fire. He bowed his head to Mr. Blomback and then addressed the campers.

"Meetah Kola nayhoon-po omnicheeyay nee-chopi."

"It's our medicine man," whispered Donald. "It's Barry Feinberg."

"Hear me, my friends," the medicine man continued, translating his Indian sentence into English. "We are about to hold a council."

A boy stepped forward from the first row carrying several pieces of wood in his hand, one shaped like a bow, another a stick about a foot long with a sharpened end, and several smaller pieces. He set them on the ground near the medicine man.

"Now light we the council fire," the medicine man said, "after the manner of the forest children, not in the way of the white man, but — even as Wa-konda himself doth light his fire — by the rubbing together of two trees in the storm, so cometh forth the sacred fire from the wood of the forest."

The medicine man knelt, and many of the campers stood to watch as he used the bow and the long, pointed drill and the other odd bits of wood to attempt to ignite a fire.

Donald whispered to Bucky, "This can take a while."

"Can it even be done?" Bucky whispered back.

"Chief Black Wolf can do it in thirty-one seconds. For the campers it's harder. They sometimes have to give in and do it in the way of the helpless white man, by striking a match."

Some of the campers were standing on their benches to get a better look. After a few minutes, Mr. Blomback sidled over to the medicine man and, gesturing as he spoke, quietly gave him some tips.

Everyone waited several minutes more before a whoop went up from the campers, as first there was smoke and then a spark, which when blown upon, ignited a small flame in the tinder of dry pine needles and birch bark shavings. The tinder in turn ignited the kindling at the base of the logs, and the campers chanted in unison, "Fire, fire, fire, burn! Flames, flames, flames, turn! Smoke, smoke, smoke, rise!"

Then, with the mournful loud-soft-soft-soft beat of the two tom-toms, the dancing began: the Mohawks did the snake dance, the Senecas the caribou dance, the Oneidas the dog dance, the Hopis the corn dance, the Sioux the grass dance. In one dance the braves jumped strenuously about with their heads high in the air, in another they did a skipping step on the balls of their feet with a double hop on each foot, in a third they carried deer antlers before them, made of crooked tree limbs bound together. Sometimes they howled like wolves and sometimes they yapped like dogs, and in the end, when it was fully dark and the burning fire alone lit the Council Ring, twenty of the campers, each armed with a war club and wearing necklaces of beads and claws, set out by the light of the fire to hunt Mishi-Mokwa, the Big Bear. Mishi-Mokwa was impersonated by the largest boy in camp, Jerome Hochberger, who slept across the aisle from Bucky. Jerome was wrapped in somebody's mother's old fur coat that he'd pulled up over his head.

"I am fearless Mishi-Mokwa," Jerome growled from within the coat. "I, the mighty mountain grizzly, king of all the western prairies."

The hunters had a leader who was also from Bucky's cabin, Shelly Schreiber. With the drums beating loudly behind him and light from the fire flashing on his painted face, Shelly said, "These are all my chosen warriors. We go hunting Mishi-Mokwa, he the Big Bear of the mountains, he that ravages our borders. We will surely seek and slay him."

Here a lot of the little kids began to call, "Slay him! Slay him! Slay Mishi-Mokwa!"

The hunters gave a war whoop, dancing as though they were bears on their hind legs. Then they set out looking for the trail of the Big Bear by conspicuously smelling the ground. When they reached him, he rose with a loud snarl, eliciting screams of fright from the small boys on the nearby benches.

"Ho, Mishi-Mokwa," said the leader of the hunters, "we have found you. If you do not come before I count to a hundred, I will brand you a coward wherever I go."

Suddenly, the bear sprang up at them, and as the campers cheered, the hunters proceeded to club him senseless with war clubs of straw wrapped in burlap. When he was stretched across the ground in the fur coat, the hunters danced around Mishi-Mokwa, each in turn grasping his lifeless paw and shouting, "How! How! How!" The campers' cheering continued, the delight enormous at finding themselves encompassed by murder and death.

Next, two counselors, a small one and a tall one, identified as Short Feather and Long Feather, told a series of animal tales that made the younger children scream with feigned horror, and then Mr. Blomback, having removed his feather headdress and set it down alongside his peace pipe and war club, led the boys in singing familiar camp songs for some twenty minutes, thus bringing them down to earth from the excitement of playing Indian. This was followed by his saying, "And here's the important war news from last week. Here's what's been happening beyond Indian Hill. In Italy, the British army broke across the Arno River into Florence. In the Pacific, United States assault forces invaded Guam, and Tojo —"

"Boo! Boo, Tojo!" a group of older boys called out.

"Tojo, the premier of Japan," Mr. Blomback resumed, "was ousted as chief of the Japanese army staff. In England, Prime Minister Churchill —"

"Yay, Churchill!"

"— predicted that the war against Germany could come to end earlier than expected. And right here in Chicago, Illinois, as many of you know by now, President Roosevelt was nominated for a fourth term by the Democratic National Convention."

Here a good half of the campers came to their feet, shouting, "Hurray! Hurray, President Roosevelt!" while somebody beat wildly on one of the tom-toms and somebody else shook a rattle.

"And now," said Mr. Blomback when it was quiet again, "bearing in mind the American troops fighting in Europe and the Pacific, and bearing in mind all of you boys who, like me, have relatives in the service, the next-to-last song to end the campfire will be 'God Bless America.' We dedicate it to all of those who are overseas tonight, fighting for our country."

After they had stood to sing "God Bless America," the boys raised their arms in their fringed sleeves, draped them around one another's shoulders, and, with one row of campers swaying in one direction and the rows of campers in front and behind swaying in the other, they sang "Till We Meet Again," the anthem of comradery that calmly brought to a close every Indian Night. When it was sung for the last Indian Night of the season, many of the homebound campers would wind up in tears.

Meanwhile, Bucky alone had been brought to tears by the singing of "God Bless America" and the memory of the great college friend who had not been out of his thoughts since he'd learned of his death fighting in France. Bucky had done his best throughout the ceremonies to attend to what was going on around the fire as well as to listen to Donald quietly kibitzing beside him, but all he could really think about was Jake's death and Jake's life, about all that might have become of him had he lived. While the boys were hunting down the Big Bear, Bucky had been remembering the statewide college meet in the spring of '41 when Jake had set not just a Panzer College record but a U.S. collegiate record by throwing the shot fifty-six feet three inches. How did he do it, a reporter from the Newark Star-Ledger had asked him. Grinning widely — and flashing at Bucky his trophy with the tiny bronze shot-putter perched atop it, frozen at the point of the shot's release — Jake told him. "Easy," he said with a wink. "The left shoulder is high, the right shoulder is higher, the right elbow is even higher, and the right hand is the highest. There's the scheme. Follow that, and the shot takes care of itself." Easy. Everything for Jake was easy. He would surely have gone on to throw in the Olympics, would have gone on to marry Eileen as soon as he got home, would have garnered a job in college coaching… With all that talent, what could have stopped him?

After the singing of the farewell song, the campers buddied up in pairs and followed their counselors down from the benches around the dying campfire, which a couple of junior counselors stayed behind to extinguish. As they headed back to their cabins with their twinkling flashlights disappearing into the dark woods, an occasional war whoop went up from the departing boys, and some of the blanketed little ones, still under the spell of the blazing fire, could be heard gleefully shouting "How! How! How!" A few, by shining their flashlights upward from their chins while grimacing and widening their eyes, made monster faces to scare each other one last time before Indian Night was over. For close to an hour the voices of laughing and giggling children could be heard reverberating from cabin to cabin, and, even after everyone was asleep, the smell of wood smoke permeated the camp.

IT WAS six untroubled days later — the best days at the camp so far, lavish July light thickly spread everywhere, six masterpiece mountain midsummer days, one replicating the other — that someone stumbled jerkily, as if his ankles were in chains, to the Comanche cabin's bathroom at three A.M. Bucky's bed was at the end of a row just the other side of the bathroom wall, and when he awakened he heard the person in there being sick. He reached under his bed for his glasses and looked down the aisle to see who it was. The empty bed was Donald's. He got up and, with his lips close to the bathroom door, quietly said, "It's Bucky. You need help?"

Donald replied weakly, "Something I ate. I'll be okay." But soon he was retching again, and Bucky, in his pajamas, waited on the edge of his bed for Donald to come out of the bathroom.

Gary Weisberg, whose bed was next to Bucky's, had awakened and, seeing Bucky sitting up, rose on his elbows and whispered, "What's the matter?"

"Donald. Upset stomach. Go back to sleep."

Donald finally emerged from the bathroom and Bucky held his elbow with one hand and slipped an arm around his waist to help him back to bed. He got him under the covers and took his pulse.

"Normal," Bucky whispered. "How do you feel?"

Donald replied with his eyes shut. "Washed out. Chills."

When Bucky put his hand to Donald's forehead it felt warmer than it should. "You want me to take you to the infirmary? Fever and chills. Maybe you should see the nurse."

"I'll be okay," Donald said in a faint voice. "Just need sleep."

But in the morning, with Donald so feeble he couldn't get up from the bed to brush his teeth, Bucky again put his hand to the boy's forehead and said, "I'm taking you to the infirmary."

"It's the flu," Donald said. "Diving in the cold." He tried to smile. "Can't say I wasn't warned."

"Probably the cold did do it. But you're still running a temperature and you should be in the infirmary. Are you in pain? Does anything hurt?"

"My head."

"Severe?"

"Kind of."

The boys in the cabin had all gone off to breakfast without Donald and Bucky. Rather than waste time having Donald change into his clothes, Bucky slipped Donald's bathrobe over his pajamas in order to walk him in his slippers down to the small infirmary that stood close to the camp entrance. One of Indian Hill's two nurses would be on duty there.

"Let me help you up," Bucky said.

"I can do it," Donald said. But when he went to stand, he was unable to, and, startled, he fell backward onto the bed.

"My leg," he said.

"Which leg? Both legs?"

"My right leg. It's like it's dead."

"We're going to get you to the hospital."

"Why can't I walk?" Donald's voice was suddenly quavering with fear. "Why can't I use my leg?"

"I don't know," Bucky told him. "But the doctors will find out and get you back on your feet. You wait. Try to be calm. I'm calling an ambulance."

He ran as fast as he could down the hill to Mr. Blomback's office, thinking, Alan, Herbie, Ronnie, Jake — wasn't that enough? Now Donald too?

The camp director was in the dining lodge having breakfast with the campers and counselors. Bucky slowed to a walk as he entered the lodge and saw Mr. Blomback in his usual seat at the center table. It was one of the mornings especially loved by the campers, when the cook served pancakes and you could smell the rivers of maple syrup flooding the campers' plates. "Mr. Blomback," he said quietly, "can you step outside a moment? Something urgent."

Mr. Blomback got up and the two of them went out the door and walked a few steps from the dining lodge before Bucky said, "I think Donald Kaplow has polio. I left him in his bed. One leg is paralyzed. His head hurts him. He has a fever and he was up during the night being sick. We better call an ambulance."

"No, an ambulance will alarm everybody. I'll take him to the hospital in my car. You're sure it's polio?"

"His right leg is paralyzed," Bucky replied. "He can't stand on it. His head aches. He's completely done in. Doesn't that sound like polio?"

Bucky ran up the hill while Mr. Blomback got his car and drove after him and parked outside the cabin. Bucky wrapped Donald in a blanket, and he and Mr. Blomback helped him off the bed and out onto the porch that looked down to the lake, the two of them holding him up on either side. In the time Bucky had been gone, Donald's unparalyzed left leg had weakened, so his two feet dragged limply behind him as they carried him down the stairs and into the car.

"Don't speak to anyone yet," Mr. Blomback said to Bucky. "We don't want the kids to panic. We don't want the counselors to panic. I'm taking him to the hospital now. I'll call his family from there."

When Bucky looked at the boy lying in the back seat of the car with his eyes closed and beginning now to struggle to breathe, he remembered how on the second night at the lake Donald had done his dives even more confidently, with greater smoothness and balance, than he had on the first; he remembered how robust he'd been, how after Donald's finishing his repertoire, Bucky had worked with him for half an hour more on a swan dive. And he remembered how with each dive Donald had gotten better and better.

Bucky rapped on the window and Donald opened his eyes. "You're going to be all right," Bucky told him, and Mr. Blomback started away. Bucky ran alongside the car, calling in to Donald, "We're going to be diving again in a matter of days," even though the boy's deterioration was plainly discernible and the look in his eyes was gruesome — two feverish eyes scanning Bucky's face, frantically seeking a panacea that no one could provide.

Fortunately the campers were still at breakfast, and Bucky ran up the cabin steps to make up Donald's bed as best he could without the blanket in which he'd wrapped him. Then he went out onto the porch to look down at the lake, where his staff would be assembling in a little while, and to ask himself the obvious question: Who brought polio here if not me?

The boys in the cabin were told that Donald had been taken to the hospital with stomach flu and was to be kept there until he recovered. In fact, a spinal tap at the hospital confirmed that Donald Kaplow had polio, and his parents were notified by Mr. Blomback, and they set out from their home in Hazleton for Stroudsburg. Bucky put in his day at the waterfront, working with the counselors, spending time in the water with the young kids and at the diving board correcting the dives of the older kids, who were crazy about diving and who would do nothing else all day long if they were allowed. Then, when his workday was over and the campers were back in their cabins, changing out of their dirtied clothes for dinner, he took off his glasses and went up on the high board and for half an hour concentrated on doing every difficult dive he knew. When he was finished and came out of the water and put on his glasses, he still hadn't gotten what had happened out of his mind — the speed with which it had happened or the idea that he had made it happen. Or the idea that the outbreak of polio at the Chancellor playground had originated with him as well. All at once he heard a loud shriek. It was the shriek of the woman downstairs from the Michaels family, terrified that her child would catch polio and die. Only he didn't just hear the shriek — he was the shriek.

THEY TOOK THE CANOE to the island again that night. Marcia as yet knew nothing about Donald Kaplow's illness. Mr. Blomback intended to notify the entire camp at breakfast the following morning, in the company of Dr. Huntley, the camp physician from Stroudsburg, who visited the camp regularly and, along with the camp nurses, was usually called upon to treat little more than ringworm, impetigo, pinkeye, ivy poisoning, and, at worst, a broken bone. Though Mr. Blomback expected there would be some parents who would immediately remove their children from the camp, he was hoping that with Dr. Huntley's help in minimizing fear and curtailing any panic, he could carry on operating normally to the end of the season. He had confided this to Bucky when he returned from the hospital and reminded him to say nothing and to leave the announcement to him. Donald's condition had worsened. He now had excruciating muscle and joint pain and would probably need an iron lung to help him breathe. His parents had arrived, but by then Donald had been placed in isolation, and because of the danger of contagion, they hadn't been allowed to see him. The doctors had commented to Mr. Blomback on the rapidity with which Donald's flu-like symptoms had evolved into the most life-threatening strain of the disease.

All of this Bucky recounted to Marcia once they reached the island.

She gasped at his words. She was seated on the blanket and put her face in her hands. Bucky was pacing around the clearing, unable as yet to tell her the rest. It had been hard enough for her to hear about Donald without her having to hear in the next breath about him.

"I have to talk to my father" were the first words she spoke. "I have to phone him."

"Why not let Mr. Blomback tell the camp first?"

"He should have told the camp already. You cannot wait around with a thing like this."

"You think he should disband the camp?"

"That's what I want to ask my father. This is terrible. What about the rest of the boys in your cabin?"

"They seem to be all right so far."

"What about you?" she asked.

"I feel fine," he said. "I have to tell you, I spent two sessions at the lake with Donald a few days back. I was helping him with his dives. He couldn't have been healthier."

"When was that?"

"About a week ago. After dinner. I let him dive in the cold. That was probably an error. A bad error."

"Oh, Bucky, this isn't your fault. It's just so frightening. I'm frightened for you. I'm frightened for my sisters. I'm frightened for every kid in the camp. I'm frightened for myself. One case isn't one case in a summer camp full of kids living side by side. It's like a lit match in the dry woods. One case here is a hundred times more dangerous than it is in a city."

She remained seated and he resumed pacing. He was afraid to approach her because he was afraid to infect her, if he hadn't infected her already. If he hadn't infected everyone! The little ones at the lake! His waterfront staff! The twins, whom he kissed every night at the dining lodge! When, in his agitation, he removed his glasses to rub nervously at his eyes, the birch trees encircling them looked in the moonlight like a myriad of deformed silhouettes — their lovers' island haunted suddenly with the ghosts of polio victims.

"We have to go back," Marcia said. "I have to phone my father."

"I told Mr. Blomback I wouldn't tell anyone."

"I don't care. I am responsible for my sisters, if nothing else. I have to tell my father what has happened and ask him what to do. I'm scared, Bucky. I'm very scared. It was always as if polio would never notice that there were kids in these woods — that it couldn't find them here. I thought if they just stayed in camp and didn't go anywhere they'd be okay. How could it possibly hunt them down here?"

He couldn't tell her. She was too aghast to be told. And he was too confused by the magnitude of it all to do the telling. The magnitude of what had been done. The magnitude of what he had done.

Marcia got up from the blanket and folded it, and they pulled the canoe into the water and started back to camp. It was close to ten when they got to the landing. The counselors were up in the cabins getting their campers into bed. The lights were on in Mr. Blomback's office, but otherwise the camp seemed deserted. There was no line waiting to use the pay phone, though there'd be one tomorrow, once word was out about Donald and the turn that camp life had taken.

Marcia closed the folding door of the phone booth so there was no chance of her being overheard by anyone who might be about, and Bucky stood beside the booth, trying to tell from her reactions what Dr. Steinberg was saying. Marcia's voice was muffled, so all Bucky heard standing outside the booth were the insects droning and humming, sending his mind back to that chokingly close evening in Newark when he had sat out on the rear porch with Dr. Steinberg, eating that wonderful peach.

Her distress seemed to lessen once she heard her father's voice at the other end of the phone, and after only a few minutes she lowered herself onto the booth's little seat and talked to him from there. Bucky was supposed to have gone into Stroudsburg with Carl at noon that day to buy her engagement ring. Now the engagement was forgotten. It was polio only that was on Marcia's mind, as it had been on his all summer. There was no escape from polio, and not because it had followed him to the Poconos but because he had carried it to the Poconos with him. How, Marcia asked, had polio hunted us down here? Through the contagion of the newcomer, her boyfriend! Remembering all the boys who'd gotten polio while he was working earlier in the summer at Chancellor, remembering the scene that had erupted on the field the afternoon Kenny Blumenfeld had to be restrained from assaulting Horace, Bucky thought that it wasn't the moron that Kenny should have wanted to kill for spreading polio — it was the playground director.

Marcia opened the door and stepped out of the booth. Whatever her father told her had calmed her down, and with her arms around Bucky, she said, "I got so frightened for my sisters. I know you'll be all right, you're strong and fit, but I got so worried for those two girls."

"What did your father say?" he asked, speaking with his head turned so that he was not breathing into her face.

"He said that he's going to call Bill Blomback but that it sounds as if he's doing everything there is to do. He says you don't evacuate two hundred and fifty kids because of one case of polio. He says the kids should go on with their regular activities. He says he thinks a lot of parents are going to panic and pull their kids out. But that I shouldn't panic or panic the girls. He asked about you. I said you've been a rock. Oh, Bucky, I feel better. He and my mother are going to drive up this weekend instead of going down the shore. They want to reassure the girls themselves."

"Good," he said, and though he held her tightly, he was mindful to kiss her hair and not her lips when they separated for the night, as if by this time that could alter anything.

THE NEXT MORNING, at the close of breakfast, Mr. Blomback swung the cowbell whose ringing always preceded his announcements to the camp. The campers quieted down as he rose to his feet. "Good morning, boys and girls. I have a serious message to deliver to you this morning," he said, speaking evenly, with nothing in his voice to indicate alarm. "It concerns the health of one of our counselors. He is Donald Kaplow of the Comanche cabin. Donald became ill here two nights ago and yesterday morning awakened with a high fever. Mr. Cantor quickly notified me of Donald's condition, and it was decided that he should be taken to Stroudsburg Hospital. There, tests were performed and it was determined that Donald has contracted polio. His parents have arrived at the hospital to be with him. He is being treated and cared for by the hospital staff. I have Dr. Huntley, the camp physician, here with me, and he wants to say a few words to you."

The counselors and campers were, of course, startled to learn that everything in camp had suddenly changed — that everything in life had changed — and they waited in silence to hear what the doctor had to tell them. He was a middle-aged man with an unruffled manner who had been the camp's physician since its inception. He had a bland, reassuring way about him that was enhanced by his rimless spectacles and his thinning white hair and his pale plain face. He was dressed like no one else in camp, in a suit, white shirt, tie, and dark shoes.

"Good morning. For those of you who don't already know me, I'm Dr. Huntley. I know that if and when any of you ever feel ill, you tell your counselor and your counselor arranges for you to see Miss Rudko or Miss Southworth, the camp nurses, and if necessary, you see me. Well, I want to encourage you to continue with this same procedure during the days and weeks ahead. Any sign of illness, promptly notify your counselor, as you always would. If you have a sore throat, if you have a stiff neck, if you have an upset stomach, notify your counselor. If you have a headache, if you think you have a fever, notify your counselor. If you don't feel well generally, notify your counselor. Your counselor will get you to the nurse, who will look after you and who will be in touch with me. Because I want you all to be well so as to enjoy the remaining weeks of the summer."

Having spoken no more than those few calming words, Dr. Huntley sat down and Mr. Blomback stood again. "I want all you campers to know that before the morning is over I am going to phone each of your families to tell them about this development. In the meantime, I'd like to see the head counselors in my office right after breakfast. Everyone else," he said, "that's it for now. Today's program is unchanged. Regular activities. Go out into the sunshine and have a good time — it's another beautiful day."

Marcia rushed off to Mr. Blomback's office with the three other head counselors, and Bucky, instead of going down to the waterfront, which he'd had every intention of doing upon leaving the dining lodge, found himself running to catch up to Dr. Huntley before he stepped into his car, parked by the flagpole, and drove back to town.

Behind him he heard his named called. "Bucky! Wait a minute! Wait for us!" It was the Steinberg twins, racing to catch him. "Wait up!"

"Girls, I have to see Dr. Huntley."

"Bucky," said one of the twins, grabbing his hand, "what are we supposed to do?"

"You heard Mr. Blomback. Just go on with your activities."

"But polio — !" When they tried to reach out to hold him around the waist and nuzzle for reassurance against his broad chest, he instantly backed away for fear of breathing into the two identical panic-stricken faces.

"Don't you worry about polio," he said. "There's nothing to worry about. Sheila, Phyllis, I have to run — it's very important," and he left them there unconsoled, cringing up against each other.

"But we need you!" one of them called after him. "Marcia's with Mr. Blomback!"

"This afternoon!" he called back. "I promise! I'll see you soon!"

Dr. Huntley had opened the door to his car and was just getting in when Bucky reached him. "Dr. Huntley, I have to talk to you. I'm the waterfront director in the boys' camp. Bucky Cantor."

"Yes, Bill Blomback mentioned you."

"Dr. Huntley, I have to tell you something. I came up from Newark a week ago Friday. I'd been working there in a playground in the Weequahic neighborhood, where there's an epidemic of polio. Donald Kaplow and I were working out at the waterfront together after dinner for two nights. We've had lunch side by side every day. We pass each other in the cabin. I sat next to him at Indian Night. Now he's come down with polio. Doctor, am I the one who gave it to him? Am I going to give it to others? Is that possible?"

By now Dr. Huntley had stepped out of the car, the better to catch the overwrought words being spoken to him by this perfectly vigorous-looking young man. "How do you feel?" he asked Bucky.

"I feel fine."

"Well, the chances are slight that you are a healthy infected carrier. Though it could happen, it would be a very uncommon abnormality. Most usually, the carrier stage coincides with the clinical stage. But to ease your mind," the doctor said, "to be a hundred percent sure, we should take you in for a spinal tap and draw off some spinal fluid for analysis. Certain changes to spinal fluid are indicative of polio. We should do that right away, this morning, to put your mind at rest. You can drive with me to the hospital, and then we'll call Carl to drive you back here."

Bucky raced down to the waterfront to tell the staff he'd be gone for the morning and to put one of the senior counselors in charge till he returned, and then he met Dr. Huntley, who was waiting for him in his car for the ride into Stroudsburg. If only the test revealed that he was not the person responsible! If only he were about to be proved blameless! Then, when the examination at the hospital was over and everything certified to be okay, he could stop off at the Stroudsburg jewelry store on the way back to camp to buy the engagement ring for Marcia. He hoped to be able to afford something set with a genuine jewel.

Later that day, the cars began to arrive to take campers home. They continued arriving into the late evening and on into the next day, so that within forty-eight hours after Mr. Blomback had announced to the camp at breakfast that one of the counselors had come down with polio, more than a hundred of the two hundred and fifty campers had been removed by their parents. The next day, two more boys in Bucky's cabin — one of them Jerome Hochberger, the big boy in the fur coat who had played the bear on Indian Night — were diagnosed with polio and the entire camp was immediately shut down. Another nine of the Indian Hill campers fell ill and had to be hospitalized with polio when they got home, among them Marcia's sister Sheila.