Nemesis

3. REUNION

WE NEVER SAW Mr. Cantor in the neighborhood again. The result of the spinal tap administered at Stroudsburg Hospital came back positive, and though he displayed no symptoms for almost forty-eight hours more, he was rushed onto the contagion ward, where he could have no visitors. And finally the cataclysm began — the monstrous headache, the enfeebling exhaustion, the severe nausea, the raging fever, the unbearable muscle ache, followed in another forty-eight hours by the paralysis. He was there for three weeks before he no longer needed catheterization and enemas, and they moved him upstairs and began treatment with steamed woolen hot packs wrapped around his arms and legs, all of which were initially stricken. He underwent four torturous sessions of the hot packs a day, together lasting as long as four to six hours. Fortunately his respiratory muscles hadn't been affected, so he never had to be moved inside an iron lung to assist with his breathing, a prospect that he dreaded more than any other. And his learning that Donald Kaplow was still in the same hospital, barely being kept alive in an iron lung, filled him with terror and tears. Donald the diver, Donald the discus thrower, Donald the naval-air-pilot-to-be, no longer powered by his lungs and his limbs!

Eventually Mr. Cantor was moved by ambulance to a Sister Kenny Institute in Philadelphia, where, by this point in the summer, the epidemic was nearly as bad as it was in Newark and the hospital's wards were so crowded that he was fortunate to get a bed. There the hot pack treatment continued, along with painful stretching of the contracted muscles of his arms and legs and of his back — which the paralysis had twisted — in order to "reeducate" them. He spent the next fourteen months in rehabilitation at the Kenny Institute, gradually recovering the full use of his right arm and partial use of his legs, though he was left with a twisted lower spine that had to be corrected several years later by a surgical fusion and a bone graft and the insertion of metal rods attached to the spine. The recuperation from the surgery put him on his back in a body cast for six months, tended day and night by his grandmother. He was at the Kenny Institute when President Roosevelt unexpectedly died, in April 1945, and the country went into mourning. He was there when defeated Germany surrendered in May, when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, and when Japan asked to surrender to the Allies a few days later. World War II was over, his buddy Dave would be coming home unscathed from fighting in Europe, America was jubilant, and he was still in the hospital, disfigured and maimed.

At the Kenny Institute he was one of the few who weren't bedridden. After a few weeks, he got into a wheelchair and was using it when he returned to Newark. There he continued treatment as an outpatient and, in time, recovered all the muscle function in his right leg. His bills had been astronomical, thousands and thousands of dollars, but they were paid by the Sister Kenny Institute and the March of Dimes.

He never returned to teaching phys ed at Chancellor or supervising the playground, nor did he realize his dream of coaching track and field at Weequahic. He left education entirely, and after a couple of unfortunate starts — employed first as a clerk in the Avon Avenue grocery store that had once been his grandfather's and then, when as a result of his disability he could find no other job, as a service station attendant on Springfield Avenue, where he was utterly unlike the crude guys working there and where customers sometimes called him Gimp — he took the civil service exam. Because he scored high and was a college graduate, he found a desk job with the post office downtown and so was able to support himself and his grandmother on his government salary.

I ran into him in 1971, years after I had graduated from architecture school and had set up my office in a building diagonally across the street from the main Newark post office. We could have passed each other on Broad Street a hundred times before the day I finally recognized him.

I was one of the Chancellor Avenue playground boys who, in the summer of '44, contracted polio and was then confined to a wheelchair for a year before protracted rehabilitation made it possible for me to locomote myself on a crutch and a cane, and with my two legs braced, as I do to this day. Some ten years back, after serving an apprenticeship with an architectural firm in the city, I started a company with a mechanical engineer who, like me, had had polio as a kid. We opened a consulting and contracting firm specializing in architectural modification for wheelchair accessibility, our options ranging from building additional rooms onto existing houses down to installing grab bars, lowering closet rods, and relocating light switches. We design and install ramps and wheelchair lifts, we widen doorways, we make bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen modifications — everything to improve life for wheelchair-bound people like my partner. The wheelchair-bound may require household structural changes that can be costly, but we do our best to keep to our estimates and to hold prices down. Along with the quality of our work, this is what largely accounts for our success. The rest was the luck of location and timing, of being the only such outfit in populous northern New Jersey at a moment when serious attention was beginning to be paid to the singular needs of the disabled.

Sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you're not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance — the tyranny of contingency — is everything. Chance is what I believed Mr. Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God.

Mr. Cantor still had a withered left arm and useless left hand, and the damage to the muscles in his left calf caused a dip in his gait. The leg had begun getting much weaker in recent years, both the lower and the upper leg, and the limb had also begun to be severely painful for the first time since his rehabilitation nearly thirty years before. As a result, following a doctor's examination and a couple of visits to his hospital's brace shop, he had taken to wearing a full leg brace beneath his trousers to support his left leg. It didn't ease the pain much, but along with a cane it helped with balance and steadiness on his feet. However, if things continued to deteriorate — as they often do in later years for many polio survivors who come to suffer what is known as post-polio syndrome — it might not be long, he said, before he wound up back in a chair.

We came upon each other at noon one spring day in 1971 on busy Broad Street, midway between where the two of us worked. It was I who spotted him, even though he wore a protective mustache now and, at the age of fifty, his once black hair was no longer cut in a military crewcut but rose atop his head like a white thicket — the mustache was white as well. And he no longer, of course, had that athletic, pigeon-toed stride. The sharp planes of his face were padded by the weight he'd gained, so he was nowhere as striking as when the head beneath the tawny skin looked to be machined to the most rigorous rectilinear specifications — when it was a young man's head unabashedly asserting itself. That original face was now interred in another, fleshier face, a concealment people often see when looking with resignation at their aging selves in the mirror. No trace of the compact muscleman remained, the muscles having melted away while the compactness had burgeoned. Now he was simply stout.

I was by then thirty-nine, a short, heavy man myself, bearded and bearing little if any resemblance to the frail kid I'd been growing up. When I realized on the street who he was, I got so excited I shouted after him, "Mr. Cantor! Mr. Cantor! It's Arnold Mesnikoff. From the Chancellor playground. Alan Michaels was my closest friend. He sat next to me all through school." Though I'd never forgotten Alan, I hadn't uttered his name aloud in the many years since he'd died, back in that decade when it seemed that the greatest menaces on earth were war, the atomic bomb, and polio.

After our first emotional street meeting, we began to eat lunch together once a week in a nearby diner, and that's how I got to hear his story. I turned out to be the first person to whom he'd ever told the whole of the story, from beginning to end, and — as he came to confide more intimately with each passing week — without leaving very much out. I tried my best to listen closely and to take it all in while he found the words for everything that had been on his mind for the better part of his life. Talking like this seemed to him to be neither pleasant nor unpleasant — it was a pouring forth that before long he could not control, neither an unburdening nor a remedy so much as an exile's painful visit to the irreclaimable homeland, the beloved birthplace that was the site of his undoing. We two had not been especially close on the playground — I was a poor athlete, a shy, quiet boy, delicately built. But the fact that I had been one of the kids hanging around Chancellor that horrible summer — that I was the best friend of his playground favorite and, like Alan and like him, had come down with polio — made him bluntly candid in a self-searing manner that sometimes astonished me, the auditor whom he'd never before known as an adult, the auditor now inspiring his confidence the way, as kids, I and the others had been inspired by him.

By and large he had the aura of ineradicable failure about him as he spoke of all that he'd been silent about for years, not just crippled physically by polio but no less demoralized by persistent shame. He was the very antithesis of the country's greatest prototype of the polio victim, FDR, disease having led Bucky not to triumph but to defeat. The paralysis and everything that came in its wake had irreparably damaged his assurance as a virile man, and he had withdrawn completely from that whole side of life. Mostly Bucky considered himself a gender blank — as in a cartridge that is blank — an abashing self-assessment for a boy who'd come of age in an era of national suffering and strife when men were meant to be undaunted defenders of home and country. When I told him that I had a wife and two children, he replied that he never had it in him to date anyone, let alone to marry, after he was paralyzed. He could never show his withered arm and withered leg to anyone other than a doctor or, when she was living, his grandmother. It was she who had devotedly taken care of him when he left the Kenny Institute, she who, despite her chest pains having been diagnosed as serious heart trouble, had boarded the train from Newark to visit him in Philadelphia every Sunday afternoon, without fail, for the fourteen months he was there.

She was now long dead, but until he found himself in the middle of the 1967 Newark riots — during which a house down the street had burned to the ground and shots had been fired from a nearby rooftop — he'd lived on in their small walkup flat in the tenement on Barclay near Avon. He had the flights of outside stairs to navigate — stairs that he'd once liked to take three at a time — and so, whatever the season, however icy or slippery they were, he laboriously climbed them so as to stay on in the third-floor flat where his grandmother's love had once been limitless and where the mothering voice that had never been unkind could be best remembered. Even though, especially though, no loved one from the past remained in his life, he could — and often did, involuntarily, while mounting the steps to his door at the end of the workday — summon up a clear picture of his kneeling grandmother, scrubbing their flight of stairs once a week with a stiff brush and a pail of sudsy water or cooking for their little family over the coal stove. That's the most he could do for his emotional reliance on women.

And never, never since he'd left for Camp Indian Hill in July 1944, had he returned to Weequahic or paid a visit to the gym where he'd taught at the Chancellor Avenue School or to the Chancellor playground.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Why would I? I was the Typhoid Mary of the Chancellor playground. I was the playground polio carrier. I was the Indian Hill polio carrier."

His idea of himself in this role hit me hard. Nothing could have prepared me for its severity.

"Were you? There's certainly no proof that you were."

"There's no proof that I wasn't," he said, speaking, as he mostly did during our lunchtime conversations, either looking away from my face to some unseen point in the distance or looking down into the food on our plates. He did not seem to want me, or perhaps anyone, staring inquisitively into his eyes.

"But you got polio," I told him. "You got it like the rest of us unfortunate enough to get polio eleven years too soon for the vaccine. Twentieth-century medicine made its phenomenal progress just a little too slowly for us. Today childhood summers are as sublimely worry-free as they should be. The significance of polio has disappeared completely. Nobody anymore is defenseless like we were. But to speak specifically about you, the chances are you caught polio from Donald Kaplow rather than that you gave it to him."

"And what about Sheila, the Steinberg twin — who'd she get it from? Look, it's far too late in the day to be rehashing all that now," he said, oddly, having rehashed nearly everything with me already. "Whatever was done, was done," he said. "Whatever I did, I did. What I don't have, I live without."

"But even if it were possible that you were a carrier, you would have been an unsuspecting carrier. Surely you haven't lived all these years punishing yourself, despising yourself, for something you didn't do. That's much too harsh a sentence."

There was a pause, during which he studied that spot that engaged him — to the side of my head and somewhere in the far distance, that spot which more than likely was 1944.

"What I've lived with mostly all these years," he said, "is Marcia Steinberg, if you want the truth. I cut myself free of many things, but I was never able to do that with her. All these years later, and there are times that I still think I recognize her on the street."

"As she was at twenty-two?"

He nodded, and then, to round out the disclosure, he said, "On Sundays I surely don't want to be thinking about her, yet that's when I mostly do. And nothing comes of my trying not to."

Some people are forgotten the moment you turn your back on them; that was not the case for Bucky with Marcia. Marcia's memory had endured.

He reached into his jacket pocket with his unwithered hand and took out an envelope and presented it to me. It was addressed to Eugene Cantor at 17 Barclay Street and postmarked at Stroudsburg, July 2 1944.

"Go ahead," he said. "I brought it so you can look at it. I got it when she'd been away at camp just a few days."

The note I took from the envelope was written in perfect Palmer Method cursive on a small sheet of pale green stationery. It read:

All the way to the bottom of the page and halfway down the other side, the two words were repeated over and over, all of them evenly supported on an invisible straight line. The letter was signed with just her initial, M, a tall, beautifully formed capital exhibiting a little flourish in the loop and the stem, followed by "(as in My Man)."

I placed the single page back in the envelope and returned it to him.

"A twenty-two-year-old writes to her first lover. You must have been pleased to get such a letter."

"I got it when I came home from work. I kept it in my pocket during dinner. I took it with me to bed. I went to sleep with it in my hand. Then I was awakened by the phone. My grandmother slept across the hall. She was alarmed. 'Who can it be at this hour?' I went into the kitchen to answer. It was a few minutes after midnight by the clock there. Marcia was calling from the phone booth behind Mr. Blomback's office. She'd been in bed in her cabin, unable to sleep, so she got up and dressed and came out in the dark to call me. She wanted to know if I had received the letter. I said I had. I said I was her man two hundred and eighteen times over — she could depend on that. I said that I was her man forever. Then she told me that she wanted to sing to her man to put him to sleep. I was at the kitchen table in my skivvies in the dark and sweating like a pig from the heat. It had been another whopper of a day, and it hadn't cooled off any by midnight. The lights were out in all the flats across the way. I don't think anyone was awake on our whole street."

"Did she sing to you?"

"A lullaby. It wasn't one I knew, but it was a lullaby. She sang it very, very softly. There it was, all by itself, over the phone. Probably one she remembered from when she was a kid."

"So you had a weakness for her soft voice too."

"I was stunned. Stunned by so much happiness. I was so stunned that I whispered into the phone, 'Are you really as wonderful as this?' I couldn't believe such a girl existed. I was the luckiest guy in the world. And unstoppable. You understand me? With all that love of hers, how could I ever be stopped?"

"Then you lost her," I said. "How did you lose her? That you haven't told me yet."

"No, I haven't. I wouldn't let Marcia see me. That's how it happened. Look, maybe I've said enough." Suddenly, made uneasy by a pang of shame for the sentiments he'd just confided, he flushed deeply. "What the hell got me started? That letter. Finding that letter. I should never have gone looking for it."

With his elbow on the table he dropped his reddened face into his good hand and with his fingertips rubbed at his closed eyelid. We had reached the hardest part of the story.

"What happened to end it with Marcia?" I asked.

"When she came up to Stroudsburg to the hospital, when I was out of isolation, I had them turn her away. She left me a note telling me that her kid sister had only a mild, nonparalytic case and after three weeks recovered completely. I was relieved to learn that, but I still didn't want to resume my relations with the family. Marcia tried a second time to see me when I was transferred down to Philadelphia. That time I let her. We had a terrible argument. I didn't know she had it in her — I'd never seen her openly angry at anyone before. After that, she never came back. We never made contact again. Her father tried to talk to me when I was in Philadelphia, but I wouldn't take the call. When I was working at the Esso station on Springfield Avenue, out of the blue one day he pulled in for gas. That was a long way for him to go for gas."

"Was he there for her? To try to get you to come back?"

"I don't know. Maybe. I let another guy take the pump. I hid. I knew I was no match for Dr. Steinberg. I have no idea what happened to his daughter. I don't want to know. Whoever she married, let them and their children be happy and enjoy good health. Let's hope their merciful God will have blessed them with all that before He sticks His shiv in their back."

It was an arrestingly harsh utterance from the likes of Bucky Cantor, and, momentarily, he seemed to have perturbed himself by making it.

"I owed her her freedom," he finally said, "and I gave it to her. I didn't want the girl to feel stuck with me. I didn't want to ruin her life. She hadn't fallen in love with a cripple, and she shouldn't be stuck with one."

"Wasn't that up to her to decide?" I asked. "A damaged man is sometimes very attractive to a certain type of woman. I know from experience."

"Look, Marcia was a sweet, naive, well-brought-up girl with kindly, responsible parents who had taught her and her sisters to be polite and obliging," Bucky said. "She was a young new first-grade teacher, wet behind the ears. A slight slip of a thing, inches shorter even than me. It didn't help her being more intelligent than me — she still didn't have any idea of how to go about getting out of her mess. So I did it for her. I did what had to be done."

"You've given this a lot of thought," I said. "All your thought, it sounds like."

He smiled for one of the few times during our talks, a smile very like a frown, denoting weariness more than good cheer. There was no lightness in him. That was missing, as were the energy and the industry that were once at the center of him. And, of course, the athletic ingredient had completely vanished. It wasn't only an arm and a leg that were useless. His original personality, all that vital purposefulness that would hit you in the face the moment you met him, seemed itself to have been stripped away, lifted from him in shreds as though it were the thin swatch of bark that he'd peeled from the birch tree the first night with Marcia on the island in the lake at Indian Hill. We had been together one day a week at lunch over a period of a few months and never once did he lighten up, not even when he said, "That song she liked, 'I'll Be Seeing You'—I've never been able to forget that either. Soupy, sappy, yet it looks like I'll remember it for as long as I live. I don't know what would happen if I had to hear it again."

"You'd bawl."

"I might."

"You'd have a right," I said. "Anyone would be miserable, having renounced a true mate like that."

"Oh, my old playground buddy," he said, with more feeling than he'd spoken yet, "I never thought that's how it would end with her. Never."

"When she got angry with you — the time she came to see you in Philadelphia —"

"I never saw her again after that."

"You've said. But what happened?"

He was in a wheelchair, he told me, a glorious autumn Saturday in mid-October, still warm enough for them to go outdoors and for her to sit on a bench on the lawn in front of the Sister Kenny Institute, beneath the branches of a tree whose leaves had turned and begun to fall, but not so warm that the polio epidemic in the northeastern states hadn't finally dissipated and died away. By then Bucky had not seen her or spoken to her in nearly three months, so she hadn't yet had a chance to observe how crippled he was. There had been an exchange of correspondence, not between Bucky and Marcia but between Bucky and Marcia's father. Dr. Steinberg had written to tell Bucky that he had an obligation to allow Marcia to visit him and tell him directly what was on her mind. "Marcia and the family," wrote Dr. Steinberg, "deserve better from you than this." Against a handwritten letter on personalized hospital stationery from a man of the doctor's stature, Bucky, of course, had no defense, and so the date and time of Marcia's visit were set, and the quarrel began almost immediately upon her arrival, when he noticed right off that her hair had grown out since he'd seen her last, making her look more womanly than she had at camp and prettier now than ever. She had dressed with gloves and a hat, just like the proper teacher whom he'd first fallen for.

There was nothing she could say that would change his mind, he announced, however much he would have loved just to reach out with his good hand and touch her face. Instead, he used his good hand to grasp his dead arm around the wrist and raise it to the level of her eyes. "Look," he said. "This is what I look like."

She did not speak, but she did not blink either. No, he told her, he was no longer man enough to be a husband and a father, and it was irresponsible of her to think otherwise.

"Irresponsible of me?" she cried.

"To be the noble heroine. Yes."

"What are you talking about? I'm not trying to be anything other than the person who loves you and wants to marry you and be your wife." And then she advanced the gambit that she had no doubt rehearsed on the train down. "Bucky, it's not complicated, really," she told him. "I'm not complicated. Remember me? Remember what I said to you the night before I left for camp in June? 'We'll do it perfectly.' Well, we will. Nothing has changed that. I'm just an ordinary girl who wants to be happy. You make me happy. You always have. Why won't you now?"

"Because it's no longer the night before you left for camp. Because I'm no longer the person you fell in love with. You delude yourself if you think that I am. You're only doing what your conscience tells you is right — I understand that."

"You don't at all! You're speaking nonsense! It's you who's trying to be noble by refusing to talk to me and refusing to see me. By telling me to leave you alone. Oh, Bucky, you're being so blind!"

"Marcia, marry a man who isn't maimed, who's strong, who's fit, who's got all that a prospective father needs. You could have anyone, a lawyer, a doctor — someone as smart as you are and as educated as you are. That's what you and your family deserve. And that's what you should have."

"You are infuriating me so by talking like this! Nothing in my entire life has ever infuriated me as much as what you are doing right now! I have never known anyone other than you who finds such comfort in castigating himself!"

"That's not what I'm doing. That's an absolute distortion of what I'm doing. I just happen to see the implications of what's happened and you don't. You won't. Listen to me: things aren't the way they were before the summer. Look at me. Things couldn't be more different. Look."

"Stop this, please. I've seen your arm and I don't care."

"Then look at my leg," he said, pulling up his pajama bottoms.

"Stop, I beg you! You think it's your body that's deformed, but what's truly deformed is your mind!"

"Another good reason to save yourself from me. Most women would be delighted if a cripple volunteered to get out of their life."

"Then I'm not most women! And you're not just a cripple! Bucky, you've always been this way. You could never put things at the right distance — never! You're always holding yourself accountable when you're not. Either it's terrible God who is accountable, or it's terrible Bucky Cantor who is accountable, when in fact, accountability belongs to neither. Your attitude toward God — it's juvenile, it's just plain silly."

"Look, your God is not to my liking, so don't bring Him into the picture. He's too mean for me. He spends too much time killing children."

"And that is nonsense too! Just because you got polio doesn't give you the right to say ridiculous things. You have no idea what God is! No one does or can! You are being asinine — and you're not asinine. You sound so ignorant — and you're not ignorant. You are being crazy — and you're not crazy. You were never crazy. You were perfectly sane. Sane and sound and strong and smart. But this! Spurning my love for you, spurning my family — I refuse to be a party to such insanity!"

Here the obstinate resistance collapsed, and she threw her hands up over her face and began to sob. Other patients who were entertaining visitors on nearby benches or being pushed in wheelchairs along the paved path in front of the institute could not but notice the petite, pretty, well-dressed young woman, seated beside a patient in a wheelchair, who was so visibly swept away by her sorrow.

"I'm completely baffled by you," she told him through her tears. "If only you could have gone into the war, you might — oh, I don't know what you might. You might have been a soldier and gotten over all this — whatever it is. Can't you believe that it's you I love, whether or not you had polio? Can't you understand that the worst possible outcome for both of us is for you to take yourself away from me? I cannot bear to lose you — is there no getting that through to you? Bucky, your life can be so much easier if only you'll let it be. How do I convince you that we have to go on together? Don't save me, for God's sake. Do what we planned — marry me!"

But he wouldn't be budged, however much she cried and however heartfelt the crying seemed, even to him. "Marry me," she said, and he could only reply, "I will not do that to you," and she could only reply, "You're not doing anything to me — I am responsible for my decisions!" But there was no breaking down his opposition, not when his last opportunity to be a man of integrity was by sparing the virtuous young woman he dearly loved from unthinkingly taking a cripple as her mate for life. The only way to save a remnant of his honor was in denying himself everything he had ever wanted for himself — should he be weak enough to do otherwise, he would suffer his final defeat. Most important, if she was not already secretly relieved that he was rejecting her, if she was still too much under the sway of that loving innocence of hers — and under the sway as well of a morally punctilious father — to see the truth plainly for herself, she would feel differently when she had a family and a home of her own, with happy children and a husband who was whole. Yes, a day would come, and not far in the future, when she would find herself grateful to him for his having so pitilessly turned her away — when she would recognize how much better a life he had given her by his having vanished from it.

WHEN HE'D COMPLETED the story of the final meeting with Marcia, I asked him, "How bitter does all this leave you?"

"God killed my mother in childbirth. God gave me a thief for a father. In my early twenties, God gave me polio that I in turn gave to at least a dozen kids, probably more — including Marcia's sister, including you, most likely. Including Donald Kaplow. He died in an iron lung at Stroudsburg Hospital in August 1944. How bitter should I be? You tell me." He asserted this caustically, in the same tone in which he'd proclaimed that her God would one day betray Marcia and plant a knife in her back too.

"It's not for me," I replied, "to find fault with any polio sufferer, young or old, who can't fully overcome the pain of an infirmity that never ends. Of course there's brooding over its permanence. But there must in time be something more. You speak of God. You still believe in this God you disparage?"

"Yes. Somebody had to make this place."

"God the great criminal," I said. "Yet if it's God who's the criminal, it can't be you who's the criminal as well."

"Okay, it's a medical enigma. I'm a medical enigma," Bucky said confusingly. Did he mean perhaps that it was a theological enigma? Was this his Everyman's version of Gnostic doctrine, complete with an evil Demiurge? The divine as inimical to our being here? Admittedly, the evidence he could cull from his experience was not negligible. Only a fiend could invent polio. Only a fiend could invent Horace. Only a fiend could invent World War II. Add it all up and the fiend wins. The fiend is omnipotent. Bucky's conception of God, as I thought I understood it, was of an omnipotent being whose nature and purpose was to be adduced not from doubtful biblical evidence but from irrefutable historical proof, gleaned during a lifetime passed on this planet in the middle of the twentieth century. His conception of God was of an omnipotent being who was a union not of three persons in one Godhead, as in Christianity, but of two — a sick fuck and an evil genius.

To my atheistic mind, proposing such a God was certainly no more ridiculous than giving credence to the deities sustaining billions of others; as for Bucky's rebellion against Him, it struck me as absurd simply because there was no need for it. That the polio epidemic among the children of the Weequahic section and the children of Camp Indian Hill was a tragedy, he could not accept. He has to convert tragedy into guilt. He has to find a necessity for what happens. There is an epidemic and he needs a reason for it. He has to ask why. Why? Why? That it is pointless, contingent, preposterous, and tragic will not satisfy him. That it is a proliferating virus will not satisfy him. Instead he looks desperately for a deeper cause, this martyr, this maniac of the why, and finds the why either in God or in himself or, mystically, mysteriously, in their dreadful joining together as the sole destroyer. I have to say that however much I might sympathize with the amassing of woes that had blighted his life, this is nothing more than stupid hubris, not the hubris of will or desire but the hubris of fantastical, childish religious interpretation. We have heard it all before and by now have heard enough of it, even from someone as profoundly decent as Bucky Cantor.

"And you, Arnie?" he asked me. "You're without bitterness?"

"I got the disease when I was still a kid. I was twelve, about half your age. I was in the hospital for close to a year. I was the oldest one on the ward," I said, "surrounded by little kids screaming and crying for their families — day and night these little kids searching in vain for a face they knew. They weren't alone in feeling deserted. There was plenty of fear and despair to go around. And plenty of bitterness growing up with a pair of stick legs. For years I lay in bed at night talking to my limbs, whispering, 'Move! Move!' I missed a year of grade school, so when I got back, I had lost my class and my classmates. And in high school I had some hard knocks. The girls pitied me and the boys avoided me. I was always sitting brooding on the sidelines. Life on the sidelines makes for a painful adolescence. I wanted to walk like everyone else. Watching them, the unbroken ones, out after school playing ball, I wanted to shout, 'I have a right to be running too!' I was constantly torn by the thought that it could so easily have been another way. For a while I didn't want to go to school at all — I didn't want to be reminded all day long of what people my age looked like and of all they could do. What I wanted was the tiniest thing in the world: to be like everyone else. You know the situation," I said to him. "I'll never be me as I was me in the past. I'll be this instead for the rest of my life. I'll never know delight again."

Bucky nodded. He who once, briefly, atop the high board at Indian Hill, was the happiest man on earth — who had listened to Marcia Steinberg tenderly lullabying him to sleep over the long-distance line in the tremendous heat of that poisonous summer — understood all too easily what I was talking about.

I told him then about a college roommate whom I moved out on in my sophomore year. "When I got to Rutgers," I said, "I was given the other Jewish polio victim to room with in the freshman dorm. That's how Noah paired students up in those days. This guy was physically far worse off than I was. Grotesquely deformed. Boy named Pomerantz. A brilliant scholarship student, high school valedictorian, pre-med genius, and I couldn't stand him. He drove me crazy. Couldn't shut up. Could never stifle his all-consuming hunger for pre-polio Pomerantz. Could not elude for a single day the injustice that had befallen him. Went ghoulishly on and on about it. 'First you learn just what a cripple's life is like,' he'd say to me. 'That's the first stage. When you recover from that, you do what little is to be done to avoid spiritual extinction. That's the second stage. After that, you struggle not to be nothing but your ordeal all the while that's all you're becoming. Then, if you're lucky, five hundred stages later, sometime in your seventies, you find you are finally able to say with some truth, "Well, I managed after all — I did not allow the life to be sucked out of me completely." That's when you die.' Pomerantz did great in college, easily got into medical school, and then he died — in his first year there he killed himself."

"I can't say," Bucky told me, "that I wasn't once attracted by the idea myself."

"I thought about it too," I said. "But then I wasn't quite the mess that Pomerantz was. And then I got lucky, tremendously lucky: in the last year of college I met my wife. And slowly polio ceased to be the only drama, and I got weaned away from railing at my fate. I learned that back there in Weequahic in 1944 I'd lived through a summerlong social tragedy that didn't have to be a lifelong personal tragedy too. My wife's been a tender, laughing companion for eighteen years. She's counted for a lot. And having children to father, you begin to forget the hand you've been dealt."

"I'm sure that's true. You look like a contented man."

"Where are you living now?" I asked.

"I moved to North Newark. I moved near Branch Brook Park. The furniture at my grandmother's place was so old and creaky that I didn't bother to keep it. Went out one Saturday morning and bought a brand-new bed, sofa, chairs, lamps, everything. I've got a comfortable place."

"What do you do for socializing?"

"I'm not much of a socializer, Arnie. I go to the movies. I go down to the Ironbound on Sundays for a good Portuguese meal. I enjoy sitting in the park when it's nice. I watch TV. I watch the news."

I thought of him doing these things by himself and, like a lovesick swain, attempting on Sundays not to pine for Marcia Steinberg or to imagine during the week that he'd seen her, age twenty-two, walking on one of the downtown streets. One would have predicted, remembering the young man he'd been, that he would have had the strength to battle through to something more than this. And then I thought of myself without my family, and wondered if I would have done any better or even as well. Movies and work and Sunday dinner out — it sounded awfully bleak to me.

"Do you watch sports?"

Vigorously he shook his head as though I'd asked a child if he played with matches.

"I understand," I said. "When my kids were very young and I couldn't run around the yard with them, and when they were older and learned to ride bikes and I couldn't ride with them, it got to me. You try to choke down your feelings but it isn't easy."

"I don't even read the sports pages in the paper. I don't want to see them."

"Did you ever see your friend Dave when he came back from the war?"

"He got a job in the Englewood school system. He took his wife and his kids and he moved up there. No, I don't see him." Then he lapsed into silence, and it couldn't have been clearer that despite his stoical claim that what he did not have he lived without, he had not in the least accustomed himself to having lost so much, and that twenty-seven years later, he wondered still about all that had and had not happened, trying his best not to think of a multitude of things — among them, that by now he would have been head of the athletic program at Weequahic High.

"I wanted to help kids and make them strong," he finally said, "and instead I did them irrevocable harm." That was the thought that had shaped his decades of silent suffering, a man who was himself the least deserving of harm. He looked at that moment as if he had lived on this earth seven thousand shameful years. I took hold of his good hand then — a hand whose muscles worked well enough but that was no longer substantial and strong, a hand with no more firmness to it than a piece of soft fruit — and I said, "Polio did them the harm. You weren't a perpetrator. You had as little to do with spreading it as Horace did. You were just as much a victim as any of us was."

"Not so, Arnie. I remember one night Bill Blomback telling the kids about the Indians, telling them how the Indians believed that it was an evil being, shooting them with an invisible arrow, that caused certain of their diseases —"

"Don't," I protested. "Don't go any further with that, please. It's a campfire story, Bucky, a story for kids. There's probably a medicine man in it who drives off evil spirits. You're not the Indians' evil being. You were not the arrow, either, damn it — you were not the bringer of crippling and death. If you ever were a perpetrator — if you won't give ground about that — I repeat: you were a totally blameless one."

Then, vehemently — as though I could bring about change in him merely by a tremendous desire to do so; as though, after all our hours of talking over lunch, I could now get him to see himself as something more than his deficiencies and begin to liquidate his shame; as though it were within my power to revive a remnant of the unassailable young playground director who, unaided by anyone, had warded off the ten Italian roughnecks intending to frighten us with the threat of spreading polio among the Jews — I said, "Don't be against yourself. There's enough cruelty in the world as it is. Don't make things worse by scapegoating yourself."

But there's nobody less salvageable than a ruined good boy. He'd been alone far too long with his sense of things — and without all he'd wanted so desperately to have — for me to dislodge his interpretation of his life's terrible event or to shift his relation with it. Bucky wasn't a brilliant man — he wouldn't have had to be one to teach phys ed to kids — nor was he ever in the least carefree. He was largely a humorless person, articulate enough but with barely a trace of wit, who never in his life had spoken satirically or with irony, who rarely cracked a joke or spoke in jest — someone instead haunted by an exacerbated sense of duty but endowed with little force of mind, and for that he had paid a high price in assigning the gravest meaning to his story, one that, intensifying over time, perniciously magnified his misfortune. The havoc that had been wrought both on the Chancellor playground and at Indian Hill seemed to him not a malicious absurdity of nature but a great crime of his own, costing him all he'd once possessed and wrecking his life. The guilt in someone like Bucky may seem absurd but, in fact, is unavoidable. Such a person is condemned. Nothing he does matches the ideal in him. He never knows where his responsibility ends. He never trusts his limits because, saddled with a stern natural goodness that will not permit him to resign himself to the suffering of others, he will never guiltlessly acknowledge that he has any limits. Such a person's greatest triumph is in sparing his beloved from having a crippled husband, and his heroism consists of denying his deepest desire by relinquishing her.

Though maybe if he hadn't fled the challenge of the playground, maybe if he hadn't abandoned the Chancellor kids only days before the city shut down the playground and sent them all home — and maybe, too, if his closest buddy hadn't been killed in the war — he would not have been so quick to blame himself for the cataclysm and might not have become one of those people taken to pieces by his times. Maybe if he had stayed on and outlasted polio's communal testing of the Weequahic Jews, and, regardless of whatever might have happened to him, had manfully seen the epidemic through to the end…

Or maybe he would have come to see it his way no matter where he'd been, and for all I know — for all the science of epidemiology knows — maybe rightly so. Maybe Bucky wasn't mistaken. Maybe he wasn't deluded by self-mistrust. Maybe his assertions weren't exaggerated and he hadn't drawn the wrong conclusion. Maybe he was the invisible arrow.

AND YET, at twenty-three, he was, to all of us boys, the most exemplary and revered authority we knew, a young man of convictions, easygoing, kind, fair-minded, thoughtful, stable, gentle, vigorous, muscular — a comrade and leader both. And never a more glorious figure than on the afternoon near the end of June, before the '44 epidemic seriously took hold in the city — before, for more than a few of us, our bodies and our lives would be drastically transformed — when we all marched behind him to the big dirt field across the street and down a short slope from the playground. It was where the high school football team held its workouts and practices and where he was going to show us how to throw the javelin. He was dressed in his skimpy, satiny track shorts and his sleeveless top, he wore cleated shoes, and, leading the pack, he carried the javelin loosely in his right hand.

When we got down to the field it was empty, and Mr. Cantor had us gather together on the sidelines at the Chancellor Avenue end, where he let us each examine the javelin and heft it in our hands, a slender metal pole weighing a little under two pounds and measuring about eight and a half feet long. He showed us the various holds you could use on the whipcord grip and then the one that he preferred. Then he explained to us something about the background of the javelin, which began in early societies, before the invention of the bow and arrow, with the throwing of the spear for hunting, and continued in Greece at the first Olympics in the eighth century B.C. The first javelin thrower was said to be Hercules, the great warrior and slayer of monsters, who, Mr. Cantor told us, was the giant son of the supreme Greek god, Zeus, and the strongest man on earth. The lecture over, he said he would now do his warm-ups, and we watched while he limbered up for about twenty minutes, some of the boys on the sidelines doing their best to mimic his movements. It was important, he said — at the same time as he was performing a side split with his pelvis to the ground — always to work beforehand at stretching the groin muscles, which were easily susceptible to strain. He used the javelin as a stretching stick for many of the exercises, twisting and turning with it balanced like a yoke across his shoulders while he kneeled and squatted and lunged and then while he stood and flexed and rotated his torso. He did a handstand and began walking a wide circle on his hands, and some of the kids tried that; with his mouth only inches from the ground, he informed us that he was doing the handstands in lieu of exercising on a bar to stretch his upper body. He finished off with forward body bends and trunk back-bends, during which he kept his heels fixed to the ground while pushing upward with his hips and arching his back amazingly high. When he said he was going to sprint twice around the edge of the field, we followed, barely able to keep up with him but pretending that it was we who were warming up for the throw. Then for a few minutes he practiced running along an imaginary runway without throwing the javelin, just carrying it high, flat, and straight.

When he was ready to begin, he told us what to watch for, starting with his approach run and the bounding stride and ending with the throw. Without the javelin in his hand he walked through the entire delivery for us in slow motion, describing it as he did so. "It's not magic, boys, and it's no picnic either. However, if you practice hard," he said, "and you work hard and you exercise diligently — if you're regular with your balance drills, one, your mobility drills, two, and your flexibility drills, three — if you're faithful to your weight-training program, and if throwing the javelin really matters to you, I guarantee you, something will come of it. Everything in sports requires determination. The three D's. Determination, dedication, and discipline, and you're practically all the way there."

As usual, taking every precaution, he told us that for safety's sake no one was to dart out onto the field at any point; we were to watch everything from where we were standing. He made this point twice. He couldn't have been more serious, the seriousness being the expression of his commitment to the task.

And then he hurled the javelin. You could see each of his muscles bulging when he released it into the air. He let out a strangulated yowl of effort (one we all went around imitating for days afterward), a noise expressing the essence of him — the naked battle cry of striving excellence. The instant the javelin took flight from his hand, he began dancing about to recover his balance and not fall across the foul line he'd etched in the dirt with his cleats. And all the while he watched the javelin as it made its trajectory in a high, sweeping arc over the field. None of us had ever before seen an athletic act so beautifully executed right in front of our eyes. The javelin carried, carried way beyond the fifty-yard line, down to the far side of the opponent's thirty, and when it descended and landed, the shaft quivered and its pointed metal tip angled sharply into the ground from the sailing force of the flight.

We sent up a loud cheer and began leaping about. All of the javelin's trajectory had originated in Mr. Cantor's supple muscles. His was the body — the feet, the legs, the buttocks, the trunk, the arms, the shoulders, even the thick stump of the bull neck — that acting in unison had powered the throw. It was as though our playground director had turned into a primordial man, hunting for food on the plains where he foraged, taming the wilds by the might of his hand. Never were we more in awe of anyone. Through him, we boys had left the little story of the neighborhood and entered the historical saga of our ancient gender.

He threw the javelin repeatedly that afternoon, each throw smooth and powerful, each throw accompanied by that resounding mingling of a shout and a grunt, and each, to our delight, landing several yards farther down the field than the last. Running with the javelin aloft, stretching his throwing arm back behind his body, bringing the throwing arm through to release the javelin high over his shoulder — and releasing it then like an explosion — he seemed to us invincible.