The Plot Against America

3

ON JUNE 22, 1941, the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact-signed two years earlier by the two dictators only days before invading and dividing up Poland-was broken without warning when Hitler, having already overrun continental Europe, dared to undertake the conquest of the enormous landmass that stretched from Poland across Asia to the Pacific by staging a massive assault to the east against Stalin's troops. That evening, President Lindbergh addressed the nation from the White House about Hitler's colossal expansion of the war and astonished even my father by his candid praise for the German Führer. "With this act," the president declared, "Adolf Hitler has established himself as the world's greatest safeguard against the spread of Communism and its evils. This is not to minimize the effort of imperial Japan. Dedicated as the Japanese are to modernizing Chiang Kaishek's corrupt and feudal China, they are equally dedicated to rooting out the fanatical Chinese Communist minority, whose aim is to seize control of that vast country and, like the Bolsheviks in Russia, to turn China into a Communist prison camp. But it is Hitler to whom the entire world must be grateful tonight for striking at the Soviet Union. If the German army is successful in its struggle against Soviet Bolshevism-and there is every reason to believe that it will be-America will never have to face the threat of a voracious Communist state imposing its pernicious system on the rest of the world. I can only hope that the internationalists still serving in the United States Congress recognize that if we had allowed our nation to be dragged into this world war on the side of Great Britain and France, we would now find our great democracy allied with the evil regime of the USSR. Tonight the German army may well be waging the war that would otherwise have had to be fought by American troops."

Our troops were at the ready, however, and would be, the president reminded his countrymen, for a long time to come because of the peacetime draft established by Congress at his request, twenty-four months of compulsory military training for eighteen-year-olds, followed by eight years on call in the reserves which would contribute enormously to fulfilling his dual goal of "keeping America out of all foreign wars and of keeping all foreign wars out of America." "An independent destiny for America"-that was the phrase Lindbergh repeated some fifteen times in his State of the Union speech and again at the close of his address on the night of June 22. When I asked my father to explain what the words meant-absorbed by the headlines and weighed down by all my anxious thoughts, I was more and more asking what everything meant-he frowned and said, "It means turning our back on our friends. It means making friends with their enemies. You know what it means, son? It means destroying everything that America stands for."

Under the auspices of Just Folks-described by Lindbergh's newly created Office of American Absorption as "a volunteer work program introducing city youth to the traditional ways of heartland life"-my brother left on the last day of June 1941 for a summer "apprenticeship" with a Kentucky tobacco farmer. Because he'd never been away from home before, and because the family had never lived with such uncertainty before, and because my father objected strenuously to what the OAA's existence implied about our status as citizens-and also because Alvin, already off serving with the Canadian army, had become a perpetual source of concern-Sandy's was an emotional leave-taking. What had given Sandy strength to resist our parents' arguments against his participating in Just Folks-and planted the idea to apply in the first place-was the support he'd received from my mother's vivid younger sister, Evelyn, now executive assistant to Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, who'd been appointed by the new administration to serve as the first director of the OAA office for the state of New Jersey. The announced purpose of the OAA was to implement programs "encouraging America's religious and national minorities to become further incorporated into the larger society," though by the spring of 1941 the only minority the OAA appeared to take a serious interest in encouraging was ours. It was the intention of Just Folks to remove hundreds of Jewish boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen from the cities where they lived and attended school and put them to work for eight weeks as field hands and day laborers with farm families hundreds of miles from their homes. Notices extolling the new summer program had been posted on bulletin boards at Chancellor and at Weequahic, the high school just next door, where the student population, like ours, was nearly one hundred percent Jewish. One day in April, a representative from the New Jersey OAA had come to talk to the boys twelve and over about the program's mission, and that evening Sandy showed up at the dinner table with an application blank that required a parent's signature.

"Do you understand what this program is actually trying to do?" my father asked Sandy. "Do you understand why Lindbergh wants to separate boys like you from their families and ship them out to the sticks? Do you have any idea what's behind all this?"

"But this doesn't have anything to do with anti-Semitism, if that's what you think. You have one thing on your mind and one thing only. This is just a great opportunity, that's all."

"Opportunity for what?"

"To live on a farm. To go to Kentucky. To draw all the things there. Tractors. Barns. Animals. All kinds of animals."

"But they're not sending you all that way to draw animals," my father told him. "They're sending you there to fetch the slops for the animals. They're sending you there to spread manure. You'll be so bushed by the end of the day that you won't be able to stand on your feet, let alone draw a picture of an animal."

"And your hands," my mother said. "There's barbed wire on farms. There are machines with sharp blades. You could injure your hands, and then where would you be? You'd never draw again. I thought you were going to take classes at Arts High this summer. You were going to take drawing with Mr. Leonard."

"I can always do that-this is seeing America!"

The next night Aunt Evelyn came to dinner, invited by my mother for the hours Sandy was planning to be at a friend's house doing his homework; that way he wouldn't be around to witness the argument that was certain to flare up between Aunt Evelyn and my father on the subject of Just Folks, and that did indeed erupt upon her entering the house to announce that she would be taking care of Sandy's application the moment it reached the office. "Don't do us any favors," said my unsmiling father.

"You mean to tell me you're not letting him go?"

"Why should I? Why would I?" he asked her.

"Why on earth wouldn't you," Aunt Evelyn replied, "unless you're another Jew afraid of his shadow."

Their disagreement only grew more passionate during dinner, my father maintaining that Just Folks was the first step in a Lindbergh plan to separate Jewish children from their parents, to erode the solidarity of the Jewish family, and Aunt Evelyn intimating none too gently that the greatest fear of a Jew like her brother-in-law was that his children might escape winding up as narrow-minded and frightened as he was.

Alvin was the renegade on my father's side, Evelyn was the maverick on my mother's, a substitute elementary school teacher in the Newark system who'd been active several years earlier in founding the left-wing, largely Jewish Newark Teachers Union, whose few hundred members were competing with a more staid, apolitical teachers' association to negotiate contracts with the city. Evelyn was just thirty in 1941, and until two years before, when my maternal grandmother died of heart failure after a decade as a coronary invalid, it was Evelyn who'd cared for her in the tiny top-floor apartment of a two-and-a-half-family house that mother and daughter shared on Dewey Street, not far from Hawthorne Avenue School, where Evelyn usually subbed. On the days when a neighbor wasn't free to stop by to keep an eye on our grandmother, my mother would take the bus over to Dewey Street and look after her until Evelyn got home from work, and when Evelyn went to New York to see a play with her intellectual friends on a Saturday night, either our grandmother would be driven to our house by my father to spend the evening with us or my mother would return to Dewey Street to tend to her there. Many nights Aunt Evelyn never made it home from New York-even when she'd planned to return before midnight-and so my mother would be forced to spend the night away from her husband and children. And then there were the afternoons Evelyn didn't get back until hours after school was over, because of a long-standing off-and-on love affair with a substitute teacher from North Newark, like Evelyn a forceful union advocate, and unlike Evelyn married, Italian, and the parent of three children.

My mother would always contend that if Evelyn hadn't got waylaid at home for all those years nursing their invalid mother, she would have settled down to marry after getting her teaching certificate and never have ended up falling in and out of "unsavory" relationships with married men who were her fellow teachers. Her large nose didn't prevent people from calling Aunt Evelyn "striking," and it was true, as my mother observed, that when tiny Evelyn walked into a room-a vivacious brunette with a perfect, if miniaturized, womanly silhouette, enormous dark eyes slanted like a cat's, and crimson lipstick guaranteed to dazzle-everyone turned to look, the women as well as the men. Her hair was lacquered to a metallic luster and pulled back in a chignon, her eyebrows were dramatically plucked, and when she went off to sub, she donned a brightly colored skirt with matching high-heeled shoes and a broad white belt and a semisheer, pastel-colored blouse. My father considered her apparel in poor taste for a schoolteacher, and so did the principal at Hawthorne, but my mother, who, wrongly or not, reproached herself for Evelyn's having had to "sacrifice her youth" caring for their mother, was incapable of judging her sister's boldness harshly, even when Evelyn resigned from teaching, quit the union, and, seemingly without a qualm, abandoned her political loyalties to work for Rabbi Bengelsdorf in Lindbergh's OAA.

It would be several months before it occurred to my parents that Aunt Evelyn was the rabbi's mistress and had been ever since he'd met her at a reception following his speech to the Newark Teachers Union on "The Classroom Development of American Ideals"-and they realized it only then because, on leaving the New Jersey OAA to assume the job of federal director at the national headquarters in Washington, Bengelsdorf announced to the Newark papers news of his engagement, at age sixty-three, to his thirty-one-year-old firebrand of an assistant.

When he first ran off to fight Hitler, Alvin imagined that the quickest way to see action would be aboard one of the Canadian destroyers that were protecting the merchant marine ships carrying supplies to Great Britain. Stories in the newspaper regularly reported the sinking by German submarines of one or more of the Canadian ships in the North Atlantic, sometimes as close to the mainland as the coastal fishing waters of Newfoundland-an especially ominous development for the British because Canada had become virtually their only source of arms, food, medicine, and machinery once the Lindbergh administration overturned the aid legislation enacted by the Roosevelt Congress. In Montreal Alvin met a young American defector who told him to forget about the navy-it was the Canadian commandos who were in the thick of things, carrying out nighttime raids on the Nazi-occupied continent, sabotaging utilities vital to the Germans, blowing up ammunition arsenals, and, alongside British commandos and in concert with underground European resistance movements, destroying dock and shipyard facilities up and down the coastline of western Europe. When he recounted for Alvin all the many ways the commandos taught you to kill a man, Alvin dropped his original plans and went to join up. Like the rest of the Canadian armed forces, the commandos were eager to accept qualified American citizens into their ranks, and so, after sixteen weeks of training, Alvin was assigned to an active commando unit and shipped to a secret staging area in the British Isles. And that was when we heard from him finally, receiving a six-word letter that read, "Off to fight. See you soon."

It was just days after Sandy, all on his own, took the overnight train to Kentucky that my parents received a second letter, this one not from Alvin but from the War Department in Ottawa, advising Alvin's designated next of kin that their nephew had been wounded in action and was in a convalescent hospital in Dorset, England. After the dinner dishes were cleared that night, my mother sat back down at the kitchen table with a fountain pen and the box of monogrammed stationery reserved for important correspondence. My father seated himself across from her, and I stood looking over her shoulder to observe how her cursive script uniformly unfurled because of the handwriting mechanics she'd employed as a secretary and taught early on to Sandy and me-the third and fourth fingers positioned to support the hand, and the forefinger nearer the pen point than the thumb. She spoke each sentence aloud before writing it down in case my father wanted to change or add anything.

Dearest Alvin,

This morning we received a letter from the Canadian government telling us that you were wounded in action and that you're in a hospital in England. The letter contained nothing more specific other than a mailing address for you.

Right now we are at the kitchen table, Uncle Herman, Philip, and Aunt Bess. We all want to know everything about your condition. Sandy is away for the summer, but we'll write him about you immediately.

Is there any chance you will be sent back to Canada? If so, we would drive there to see you. In the meantime, we send you our love and hope you will write us from England. Please write or ask someone to write for you. Whatever you want us to do, we will do.

Again, we love you and we miss you.

To this message we appended our three signatures. It was nearly a month before we got a response.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Roth:

Corporal Alvin Roth received your letter of July 5. I am the senior nurse on his unit and I read the letter to him several times to be sure he understood who it was from and what it said.

Right now Cpl. Roth is not communicative. He lost his left leg below the knee and was seriously wounded in his right foot. The right foot is healing and that wound should not leave him impaired. When his left leg is ready, he will be fitted with a prosthesis and taught to walk with it.

This is a dark moment for Cpl. Roth, but I wish to assure you that in time he should be able to resume his life as a civilian with no significant physical problems. This hospital is limited to amputees and burn cases. I have seen many men undergo the same psychological difficulties as Cpl. Roth, but most of them come through, and I strongly believe that Cpl. Roth will too.

Sincerely,

Lt. A. F. Cooper

Once a week, Sandy wrote saying he was fine and reporting how hot it was in Kentucky and concluding with a sentence about life on the farm-something like "There's a bumper crop of blackberries" or "The steer are being driven crazy by flies" or "Today they're cutting alfalfa" or "Topping began," whatever that might mean. Then, below his signature-and perhaps to prove to his father that he had stamina enough to do his artwork even after working all day on the farm-he'd sketch a picture of a pig ("This pig," he noted, "weighs over three hundred pounds!") or a dog ("Suzie, Orin's dog-her specialty is scaring snakes") or a lamb ("Mr. Mawhinney took 30 lambs to the stockyards yesterday") or of a barn ("They just painted this place with creosote. P-U!"). Usually far more space was taken up by the drawing than by the message, and, to my mother's chagrin, the questions she would raise in her own weekly letter, asking if he needed clothes or medicine or money, rarely got answered. Of course I knew my mother cared for each of her children with equal devotion, but not till Sandy was gone to Kentucky did I learn how much he meant to her as someone distinct from his little brother. Though she wasn't about to grow despondent over being separated for eight weeks from a son already thirteen, all summer long there was an undercurrent of the forlorn noticeable in certain gestures and facial expressions, particularly at the kitchen table when the fourth chair drawn up for dinner remained empty night after night.

Aunt Evelyn was with us when we went to Penn Station to pick Sandy up on the late-August Saturday that he arrived back in Newark. She was the last one my father wanted coming along, but just as when, against his own inclinations, he'd eventually allowed Sandy to apply for Just Folks and accept the summer job in Kentucky, he had yielded to his sister-in-law's influence over his son to avoid making more difficult a predicament whose ultimate danger still wasn't entirely clear.

At the station, Aunt Evelyn was the first of us to recognize Sandy when he stepped from the train onto the platform, some ten pounds heavier than when he'd left and his brown hair blondish from his working in the fields under the summer sun. He'd grown a couple of inches as well, so that his pants were now nowhere near his shoe tops, and altogether my impression was of my brother in disguise.

"Hey, farmer," Aunt Evelyn called, "over here!" and Sandy came loping in our direction, swinging his bags at his sides and sporting an outdoorsy new walk to go with the new physique.

"Welcome home, stranger," my mother said, and, with the air of a young girl, happily threw her arms around his neck, and the words she murmured into his ear ("Was there ever a boy so handsome?") caused him to complain, "Ma! Cut it out!" which, of course, handed the rest of the family a big laugh. We all hugged him, and, standing beside the train he'd boarded seven hundred fifty miles away, he flexed his biceps so I could feel them. In the car, when he began answering our questions, we heard how husky his voice had become, and we heard for the first time the drawl and the twang.

Aunt Evelyn was triumphant. Sandy talked about the last job he'd had out in the fields-going around with Orin, one of the Mawhinneys' sons, picking up the tobacco leaves broken off during harvesting. They were usually the lowest on the plant, Sandy said, they were called "flyings," and it so happened they were top-grade tobacco and fetched the highest price at the market. But the men doing the cutting on a tobacco patch of twenty-five acres can't bother about the leaves on the ground, he told us, as they have to cut some three thousand sticks of tobacco a day in order to get everything housed in the curing barn in two weeks. "Whoa, whoa-what's a 'stick,' dear?" Aunt Evelyn asked, and gladly he obliged her with the lengthiest possible explanation. And so what's a curing barn, she asked, what's topping, what's suckering, what's worming-and the more questions Aunt Evelyn came up with, the more authoritative Sandy became, so that even when we got to Summit Avenue and my father pulled the car into the alleyway, he was still going on about raising tobacco as though expecting us all to head right for the backyard and start preparing the weedy patch of dirt next to the garbage cans for Newark's first crop ever of white burley. "It's the sweetened burley in Luckys," he informed us, "that gives 'em the taste," and meanwhile I was itching to feel his biceps again, which to me were no less extraordinary than the regional accent, if that's what it was-he said "cain't" for "can't" and "rimember" for "remember" and "fahr" for "fire" and "agin" for "again" and "awalkin'" and "atalkin'" for "walking" and "talking," and whatever you wanted to call that concoction of English, it wasn't what we natives of New Jersey spoke.

Aunt Evelyn was triumphant but my father was stymied, said almost nothing, and at the dinner table that evening looked especially glum when Sandy got around to reporting on what a paragon Mr. Mawhinney was. First off, Mr. Mawhinney had graduated from the College of Agriculture at the University of Kentucky, while my father, like most other Newark slum children before the World War, hadn't been educated beyond the eighth grade. Mr. Mawhinney owned not just one farm but three-the lesser two rented to tenants-land that had been in his family going back nearly to the days of Daniel Boone, and my father owned nothing more impressive than a six-year-old car. Mr. Mawhinney could saddle a horse, drive a tractor, operate a thresher, ride a fertilizer drill, work a field as easily with a team of mules as with a team of oxen; he could rotate crops and manage hired men, both white and Negro; he could repair tools, sharpen plow points and mowers, put up fences, string barbed wire, raise chickens, dip sheep, dehorn cattle, slaughter pigs, smoke bacon, sugar-cure ham-and he raised watermelons that were the sweetest and juiciest Sandy had ever eaten. By cultivating tobacco, corn, and potatoes, Mr. Mawhinney was able to make a living right out of the earth and then, at Sunday dinner (where the six-foot-three-inch, two-hundred-and-thirty-pound farmer consumed more fried chicken with cream gravy than everyone else at the table combined), eat only food that he himself had raised, and all my father could do was sell insurance. It went without saying that Mr. Mawhinney was a Christian, a long-standing member of the great overpowering majority that fought the Revolution and founded the nation and conquered the wilderness and subjugated the Indian and enslaved the Negro and emancipated the Negro and segregated the Negro, one of the good, clean, hard-working Christian millions who settled the frontier, tilled the farms, built the cities, governed the states, sat in Congress, occupied the White House, amassed the wealth, possessed the land, owned the steel mills and the ball clubs and the railroads and the banks, even owned and oversaw the language, one of those unassailable Nordic and Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America and would always run it-generals, dignitaries, magnates, tycoons, the men who laid down the law and called the shots and read the riot act when they chose to-while my father, of course, was only a Jew.

Sandy got the news about Alvin once Aunt Evelyn had gone home. My father was at the kitchen table working on his account books preparatory to going out to make his evening collections and my mother was in the cellar with Sandy sorting through the clothes he'd brought back from Kentucky, deciding what to repair and what to throw out before putting everything else in the washtub. My mother always did immediately whatever had to be done, and she was set on disposing of his dirty clothes before she went to bed. I was down there with them, unable to let my brother out of my sight. He'd always known everything I didn't know, and he'd come back from Kentucky knowing still more.

"I have to tell you about Alvin," my mother said to him. "I didn't want to write because…well, I didn't want to shock you, dear." Here, having gathered herself together to make certain she wouldn't cry, she said in a low voice, "Alvin was wounded. He's in a hospital in England. He's there recovering from his wounds."

Astonished, Sandy asked, "Who wounded him?" as though she were reporting an occurrence in our neighborhood rather than in Nazi-occupied Europe, where people were being maimed, wounded, and killed all the time.

"We don't know any details," my mother said. "But it wasn't a superficial wound. I have to tell you something very sad, Sanford." And despite her attempt to keep everyone's courage up, her voice began to waver when she said, "Alvin's lost a leg."

"A leg?" There aren't many words less abstruse than "leg," but it took some doing for him to comprehend it.

"Yes. According to a letter we got from one of his nurses, his left leg below the knee." As if it might somehow soothe him, she added, "If you'd like to read it, the letter's upstairs."

"But-how will he walk?"

"They're going to fit him with an artificial leg."

"But I don't understand who wounded him. How did he get wounded?"

"Well, they were there to fight the Germans," she said, "so it must have been one of them."

Still half staving off what was half sinking in, Sandy asked, "Which leg?"

As tenderly as she could, she repeated, "The left."

"The whole leg? The whole thing?"

"No, no, no," she rushed to reassure him. "I told you, dear-below the knee."

Suddenly Sandy began to cry, and because he was so much bigger across the shoulders and through the chest and around the wrists than he'd been just last spring, because his arms were now brawny like a man's rather than stringy like a child's, I was so startled to see tears running down his deeply tanned face that I started crying too.

"Dear, it's awful," my mother said. "But Alvin is not dead. He is still alive, and now at least he's out of the war."

"What?" Sandy erupted. "Did you hear what you just said to me?"

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Didn't you hear yourself? You said, 'He's out of the war.'"

"And he is. Absolutely. And because he is, he'll now come home before anything more can possibly happen."

"But why was he even in the war, Ma?"

"Because-"

"Because of Dad!" Sandy shouted.

"Dear, no, this isn't true," and her hand flew up to cover her mouth as though it were she who had spoken those unpardonable words. "That is not so," she objected. "Alvin went off to Canada without telling us. He ran away on that Friday night. You remember how terrible it was. Nobody wanted Alvin to go to war-he just went, on his own."

"But Dad wants the whole country to go to war. Well, doesn't he? Isn't that why he voted for Roosevelt?"

"Lower your voice, please."

"First you say thank God that Alvin is out of the war-"

"Lower your voice!" and the tension of the day now so overwhelmed her that she lost her temper, and to the boy she had so painfully missed all summer long, she snapped, "You don't know what you're talking about!"

"But you won't listen," he shouted. "If it wasn't for President Lindbergh-"

That name again! I would rather have heard a bomb go off than to have to hear one more time the name that was tormenting us all.

Just then my father appeared in the dim light of the landing at the top of the cellar stairs. It was probably a good thing that from where we were standing by the deep laundry sink, all we could see of him were trousers and shoes.

"He's upset about Alvin," my mother said, looking up to explain what the shouting was about. "I made a mistake." To Sandy she said, "I should never have told you tonight. It's not easy for a boy to come home from a big experience like that…it's never easy to go from one place to another…and anyway you're so tired…," and then, helpless, giving herself up to her own exhaustion, she said, "The two of you, both of you, go upstairs now so I can do the wash."

And so we turned to mount the stairs and found, fortunately, that my father had already disappeared from the landing and was off in the car to make his evening collections.

In bed, one hour later. The lights are out all over the house. We whisper.

Did you really have a good time?

I had a great time.

What made it so great?

Being on a farm is great. You get to get up early in the morning, and you're outside all day, and there are all these animals. I drew a lot of animals, I'll show you my drawings. And we had ice cream every night. Mrs. Mawhinney makes it herself. There's fresh milk there.

All milk is fresh.

No, we got it right from the cow. It was still warm. We put it on the stove and we'd boil it and just take the cream off the top, and then we'd drink it.

You couldn't get sick from it?

That's why you boil it.

But you don't just drink it right out of the cow.

I tried that once but it doesn't taste so good. It's so creamy.

Did you milk a cow?

Orin showed me how to do it. It's hard to do. Orin would squirt it, and the cats would come around, and they'd try to catch the milk.

Did you have any friends?

Well, Orin's my best friend.

Orin Mawhinney?

Yeah. He's my age. He goes to school there. He works on the farm. He gets up at four o'clock in the morning. He does chores. It's not like us. He goes to school on the bus. It's about forty-five minutes on the bus, and then he comes back in the evening, and he does some more chores, and he does his homework, and he goes to bed. He gets up at four o'clock the next morning. It's hard work to be a farmer's son.

But they're rich, aren't they?

They're pretty rich.

How come you talk like that now?

Why shouldn't I? That's the way they talk in Kentucky. You should hear Mrs. Mawhinney. She's from Georgia. She makes pancakes for breakfast every morning. With bacon. Mr. Mawhinney smokes his own bacon. In a smokehouse. He knows how to.

You ate bacon every morning?

Every morning. It's delicious. And on Sundays when we got up we had pancakes and bacon and eggs. From their own chickens. The eggs-they're almost red in the middle, they're so fresh. You go and take 'em from the chickens and bring 'em in and you eat 'em right there.

Did you eat ham?

We had ham for dinner about two times a week. Mr. Mawhinney makes his own ham. He has a special family recipe. He says if a ham isn't hung up to be aged for a year he doesn't want to eat it.

Did you eat sausage?

Yeah. He makes the sausage, too. They grind it in a sausage grinder. We had sausage sometimes instead of bacon. It's good. Pork chops. They're good too. They're great. I don't really know why we don't eat it.

Because it's stuff from a pig.

So what? Why do you think farmers raise pigs? For people to look at 'em? It's like anything else you eat. You just eat it, and it's really good.

You going to keep eating it now?

Sure.

It was really hot there, though, huh?

During the day. But we'd come in at lunchtime, and we'd have tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches. With lemonade-with lots of lemonade. We'd rest inside and then we'd go back out into the fields and do whatever we had to. Weeding. Weed all afternoon. Weed the corn. Weed the tobacco. We had a vegetable garden, me and Orin, and we'd weed that. We'd work with the hired hands, and there were some Negroes, day laborers. And there's one Negro, Randolph, who is a tenant, and he rose from hired hand. He's a grade-A farmer, Mr. Mawhinney says.

Can you understand when the Negroes talk?

Sure.

Can you imitate one?

They say "'bacca" for tobacco. They say "I 'clare." I 'clare this and I 'clare that. But they don't talk much. Mostly they work. At hog-killing time, Mr. Mawhinney has Clete and Old Henry who gut the hogs. They're Negroes, they're brothers, and they take the intestines home and eat 'em fried. Chitterlings.

Would you eat that?

Do I look like a Negro? Mr. Mawhinney says Negroes are starting to move away from the farm because they think they can earn more money in the city. Sometimes Old Henry got arrested on Saturday nights. For drinking. Mr. Mawhinney pays the fine to get him out because he needs him on Monday.

Do they have shoes?

Some. The kids are barefoot. The Mawhinneys give them their clothes when they're done with them. But they were happy.

Anybody say anything about anti-Semitism?

They don't even think about it, Philip. I was the first Jew they ever met. They told me that. But they never said anything mean. It's Kentucky. People there are really friendly.

So, are you glad to be home?

Sort of. I don't know.

You going to go back next year?

Sure.

What if Mom and Dad won't let you?

I'll go anyway.

Seemingly as a direct consequence of Sandy's having eaten bacon, ham, pork chops, and sausage, there was no containing the transformation of our lives. Rabbi Bengelsdorf was coming to dinner. Aunt Evelyn was bringing him.

"Why us?" my father said to my mother. Dinner was over, Sandy was on his bed writing to Orin Mawhinney, and I was alone with them in the living room, intent on seeing how my father was going to take the news now that everything around us was moving at once.

"She is my sister," said my mother, a touch belligerently, "he is her boss-I can't tell her no."

"I can," he said.

"You will do nothing of the sort."

"Then explain again why we deserve this great honor? The big shot has nothing more pressing than to come here?"

"Evelyn wants him to meet your son."

"That's ridiculous. Your sister has always been ridiculous. My son is in the eighth grade at Chancellor Avenue School. He spent the summer pulling weeds. This is all ridiculous."

"Herman, they're coming on Thursday night, and we're going to make them welcome. You may hate him, but he's not nobody."

"I know that," he said impatiently. "That's why I hate him."

When he walked about the house now a copy of PM was constantly in his hands, either rolled up like a weapon-as though he were preparing, if called upon, to go to war himself-or turned back to a page where there was something he wanted to read aloud to my mother. He was perplexed on this particular evening as to why the Germans continued to advance so easily into Russia, and so, rattling the paper in exasperation, he all at once exclaimed, "Why don't those Russians fight? They have planes-why don't they use them? Why doesn't anybody over there put up a fight? Hitler walks into a country, crosses the border and walks right in, and bingo, it's his. England," he announced, "is the only country in Europe to stand up to that dog. He pounds away at those English cities every single night, and they just come back and keep on fighting him with the RAF. Thank God for the men of the RAF."

"When is Hitler going to invade England?" I asked him. "Why doesn't he invade England now?"

"That was part of the deal he made with Mr. Lindbergh up in Iceland. Lindbergh wants to be the savior of mankind," my father explained to me, "and negotiate the peace that ends the war, and so after Hitler takes Russia, and after he takes the Middle East, and after he takes everything else he could possibly want, Lindbergh will call a phony peace conference-the kind that's right up the Germans' alley. The Germans will be there, and the price for world peace and no German invasion of Great Britain will be installing in England an English fascist government. Putting a fascist prime minister in Downing Street. And when the English say no, then Hitler will invade, and all with the consent of our president the peacemaker."

"Is that what Walter Winchell says?" I asked, thinking that all he had explained to me was just too smart for him.

"That's what I say," he told me, and probably that was true. The pressure of what was happening was accelerating everyone's education, my own included. "But thank God for Walter Winchell. Without him we'd be lost. He's the last person left on the radio to speak out against these dirty dogs. It's disgusting. It's worse than disgusting. Slowly but surely, there's nobody in America willing to speak out against Lindbergh's kissing Hitler's behind."

"What about the Democrats?" I asked.

"Son, don't ask me about the Democrats. I'm angry enough as it is."

My mother had me help her set the table in the dining room on Thursday evening, and then sent me to my bedroom to change into my good clothes. Aunt Evelyn and Rabbi Bengelsdorf were to arrive at seven, forty-five minutes later than we would ordinarily have finished eating in the kitchen, but seven was the earliest the rabbi could manage to get to our house because of all his official duties. This was the very traitor whom my father, usually so respectful of the Jewish clergy, had accused aloud of making "a stupid, lying speech" in behalf of Lindbergh at Madison Square Garden, the "Jewish fake," according to Alvin, who'd guaranteed Roosevelt's defeat by "koshering Lindbergh for the goyim," and so it was puzzling to witness the lengths to which we were going to feed him. I was myself instructed beforehand not to use the fresh towels in the bathroom or to go anywhere near my father's armchair, which was for the rabbi to occupy before we ate dinner.

First we all sat stiffly in the living room while my father offered the rabbi a highball or, if he preferred, a shot of schnapps, both of which Bengelsdorf declined in favor of a glass of tap water. "Newark has the best drinking water in the world," the rabbi said, and said it as he would say everything, with deep consideration. Graciously he received the glass, on a coaster, from my mother, whom I could still recall back in October running from the radio in order not to have to hear him praise Lindbergh. "You have a most agreeable house," he said to her. "Everything in its place and everything placed perfectly. It bespeaks the love of order which I myself share. I see you have a penchant for the color green."

"Forest green," said my mother, trying to smile and trying to please but speaking with difficulty and unable as yet to look his way.

"You should take great pride in your lovely home. I am honored to be a guest here."

The rabbi was quite tall, built on the order of Lindbergh, a thin, bald-headed man in a dark three-piece suit and gleaming black shoes; his erect posture alone seemed to me to express an allegiance to mankind's highest ideals. From the mellifluous southern accent I'd heard on the radio I had envisioned somebody looking far less severe, but just his eyeglasses were intimidating, in part because they were the owlish oval spectacles that pinched the nose to stay on the face, like the ones that Roosevelt wore, and in part because the very fact that he wore them-and examined you through them microscopically-made it clear that he was not a man with whom to disagree. Yet when he spoke his tone was warm, friendly, even confiding. I kept waiting for him to treat us with contempt or order us around, but all he did was to talk in that accent (which wasn't at all like Sandy's), and so softly that at times you had to hold your breath to hear how learned he was.

"And you must be the boy," he said to Sandy, "who's made us all so proud."

"I'm Sandy, sir," Sandy replied, flushing furiously. It was, to my mind, a brilliant retort to a question that another successful boy, trying to meet the sanctioned standard of modesty, might not have been able to handle with such dispatch. No, nothing could now undo Sandy, not with those muscles and that sun-bleached hair and the abundance of pig he'd stashed away without asking permission of anyone.

"And what was it like," the rabbi asked, "to work there in the Kentucky fields under the burning sun?" He said "wuhk" for "work" and "buhning" for "burning" and "theyuh" for "there," and pronounced "Kentucky" as it was spelled and not, as Sandy now did, as though the first three letters were K-i-n.

"I learned a lot, sir. I learned a lot about my country."

Aunt Evelyn visibly approved, as well she might have, since on the phone the evening before she'd fitted him out with the answer to just such a question. Since she had always to be superior to my father, there could be no greater delight than to shape the existence of his older son right in front of his nose.

"You were on a tobacco farm, your aunt Evelyn tells me."

"Yes, sir. White burley tobacco."

"Did you know, Sandy, that tobacco was the economic foundation of the first permanent English settlement in America, at Jamestown in Virginia?"

"I didn't," he admitted, but added, "Though I'm not surprised to hear it," and, in a flash, the worst was over.

"Many mishaps beset the Jamestown pioneers," the rabbi told him. "But what saved them from starvation and saved the settlement from extinction was the cultivation of tobacco. Think of it. Without tobacco, the first representative government in the New World would never have met at Jamestown, as it did in 1619. Without tobacco, the Jamestown colony would have collapsed, the colonization of Virginia would have failed, and the First Families of Virginia, whose wealth derived from their tobacco plantations, would themselves have never come to prominence. And when you remember that the First Families of Virginia were the forebears of the Virginia statesmen who were our country's Founding Fathers, you appreciate tobacco's vital importance to the history of our republic."

"You do," Sandy answered.

"I myself," said the rabbi, "was born in the American South. I was born fourteen years after the tragedy of the Civil War. My father as a young man fought for the Confederacy. His father came from Germany to settle in South Carolina in 1850. He was a peddler. He had a horse with a wagon and he wore a long beard and he sold to the Negroes and to the white people both. Did you ever hear of Judah Benjamin?" the rabbi asked Sandy.

"No, sir." But again he quickly righted himself, this time by replying, "May I ask who he was?"

"Well, he was a Jew and second only to Jefferson Davis in the government of the Confederacy. He was a Jewish lawyer who served Davis as attorney general, as secretary of war, and as secretary of state. Prior to the secession of the South he had served in the U.S. Senate as one of South Carolina's two senators. The cause for which the South went to war was neither legal nor moral in my judgment, yet I have always held Judah Benjamin in the highest regard. A Jew was a rarity in America in those days, in the North no less than the South, but don't think there wasn't anti-Semitism to contend with back then. Nonetheless Judah Benjamin came close to the very pinnacle of political success in the Confederate government. After the war was lost, he moved abroad to become a distinguished lawyer in England."

Here my mother removed herself to the kitchen-purportedly to check on the dinner-and Aunt Evelyn said to Sandy, "Maybe this is a good time for the rabbi to see the drawings you made on the farm."

Sandy got up and carried over to the rabbi's chair the several sketchbooks that he'd filled with drawings during the summer and that he'd been holding in his lap since we'd all gathered in the living room.

The rabbi took one of the books and began slowly turning the pages.

"Tell the rabbi a little something about each picture," Aunt Evelyn suggested.

"That's the barn," Sandy said. "That's where they hang the tobacco to cure after they harvest it."

"Well, that is a barn, all right, and a beautifully drawn barn. I very much like the pattern of light and dark. You're very talented, Sanford."

"And that's a tobacco plant growing. That's what they look like. See, it's shaped like a triangle. They're big. That one's still got the blossom on top. It's before they top it."

"And this tobacco plant," the rabbi said, turning to a new page, "with the bag on the top-that is something I've never seen before."

"That's how they get the seed. That's a seed plant. They cover the blossom with a paper bag and tie it tight. It keeps the blossom the way they want it."

"Very, very good," the rabbi said. "It isn't easy to draw a plant accurately and still make it into a work of art. Look how you've shadowed the undersides of the leaves. Very good indeed."

"And that's a plow, of course," Sandy said, "and that's a hoe. That's a hand hoe. To do your weeding with. Though you can also use just your hands."

"And did you weed much?" the rabbi asked teasingly.

"Oh, boy," Sandy said, and Rabbi Bengelsdorf smiled, looking not at all now like a frightening figure. "And that's just the dog," Sandy went on, "Orin's dog. She's sleeping. And that's one of the Negroes, Old Henry, and those are his hands. I thought they had character."

"And who is this?"

"That's Old Henry's brother. That's Clete."

"I like the way you've rendered him. How weary the man looks, slouching like that. I know those Negroes-I grew up with them, and I respect them. And this? Just what would this be?" the rabbi asked. "Here, with the bellows."

"Well, a person's inside. That's how he sprays against tobacco worms. He has to dress like that from head to foot with big gloves and heavy clothes all buttoned up so he doesn't get burned. When he squirts the insecticide out through the bellows he can burn himself with it. It's green, the dust, and when he's finished his clothes are covered with it. I tried to get the look of the dust, I tried to make it lighter where the dust is, but I don't think it came out right."

"Well, I'm sure," said the rabbi, "that it's hard to draw dust," and began to progress a little more rapidly through the remaining pages until he came to the end and closed the book. "Kentucky was an experience that wasn't wasted on you, was it, young man?"

"I loved it," Sandy replied, and my father, who had been silent and unmoving on the sofa since yielding the rabbi his favorite chair, got up and said, "I have to help Bess," the way he might have said, "I'm now going to jump out the window and kill myself."

"The Jews of America," the rabbi told us at dinner, "are unlike any other community of Jews in the history of the world. They have the greatest opportunity accorded to our people in modern times. The Jews of America can participate fully in the national life of their country. They need no longer dwell apart, a pariah community separated from the rest. All that is required is the courage that your son Sandy displayed by going on his own into the unknown of Kentucky to work for the summer as a farm hand there. I believe that Sandy and the other Jewish boys like him in the Just Folks program should serve as models not only for every Jewish child growing up in this country but for every Jewish adult. And this is not merely a dream of mine; it is the dream of President Lindbergh."

Our ordeal had suddenly taken the worst possible turn. I'd not forgotten how in Washington my father had stood up to the hotel manager and the bullying policeman, and so now that Lindbergh's name had been spoken with deference in his house I thought the moment had come when he would stand up to Bengelsdorf.

But a rabbi was a rabbi, and he didn't.

My mother and Aunt Evelyn served the meal, three courses followed by a marble cake freshly baked in our oven that afternoon. We ate off the "good" dishes with the "good" silverware, and in the dining room no less, where we had our best rug and our best furniture and our best linens and where we ourselves ate only on special occasions. From my side of the table you could see the photographic portraits of the family dead arranged atop the breakfront that was our memorial shrine. Framed there were two grandfathers, our maternal grandmother, a maternal aunt, and two uncles, one of them Uncle Jack, Alvin's father and my father's beloved older brother. In the aftermath of Rabbi Bengelsdorf's invoking Lindbergh's name, I was more confused than ever. A rabbi was a rabbi, but Alvin meanwhile was in a Canadian army hospital in Montreal learning to walk on an artificial left leg after having lost his own left leg battling Hitler, and in my own house-where I was supposed to wear anything except my good clothes-I had to put on my one tie and my one jacket to impress the very rabbi who helped to elect the president whose friend was Hitler. How could I not be confused, when our disgrace and our glory were one and the same? Something essential had been destroyed and lost, we were being coerced to be other than the Americans we were, and yet, by the light of the cut-glass chandelier, amid the weighty, dark-stained suite of dining room furniture, we were eating my mother's pot roast in the company of the first famous visitor we had ever entertained.

To further confound me and make me pay the full price for my thoughts, Bengelsdorf began, all at once, to speak about Alvin, whom he'd learned about from Aunt Evelyn. "I am saddened by the casualty in your family. My heart goes out to all of you. Evelyn tells me that when your nephew is released from the hospital he will come to convalesce with you all. I'm sure you know the mental anguish that such a wound can provoke in someone still in the flower of his youth. It will require all the love and patience you can muster to bring him to where he can again resume a useful life. His story is particularly tragic because there was no necessity whatsoever for his having crossed over to Canada to join their armed forces. Alvin Roth was born a citizen of the United States, and the United States is not at war with anyone, has no intention of going to war with anyone, and doesn't require the sacrifice of life or limb in warfare from a single one of its young men. Some of us have gone to great lengths to make this so. I have encountered considerable hostility from members of the Jewish community for allying myself in the 1940 election with the Lindbergh campaign. But I have been sustained by my abhorrence of war. It is terrible enough that young Alvin should have lost his leg in a battle on the European continent having nothing to do with the security of America or the well-being of Americans…"

On he went, more or less repeating what he'd said at Madison Square Garden in support of America's remaining neutral, but my focus now was only on Alvin. He was coming to stay with us? I looked at my mother. She'd told us nothing about it. When would he arrive? Where would he sleep? It was bad enough, as my mother had said in Washington, that we weren't living in a normal country; now we would never again be living in a normal house. A life of even more suffering was taking shape around me, and I wanted to scream "No! Alvin can't stay here-he has only one leg!"

I was so upset that it was a while before I realized that the dining room reign of decorum had ended and my father was no longer allowing himself to be shoved aside. Somehow he had managed at last to overturn the obstacles posed by Bengelsdorf's credentials and by his own insufficiencies; he had ceased being intimidated by the rabbinical grandeur, and, urged on by his irrepressible sense of an impending disaster-and violently irritated by the condescension-he was letting Bengelsdorf have it, pince-nez and all.

"Hitler," I heard him saying, "Hitler is not business as usual, Rabbi! This madman is not making a war from a thousand years ago. He is making a war such as no one has ever seen on this planet. He has conquered Europe. He is at war with Russia. Every night he bombs London into rubble and kills hundreds of innocent British civilians. He is the worst anti-Semite in history. And yet his great friend our president takes him at his word when Hitler tells him that they have an 'understanding.' Hitler had an understanding with the Russians. Did he keep it? He had an understanding with Chamberlain. Did he keep it? Hitler's goal is to conquer the world, and that includes the United States of America. And since everywhere he goes he shoots the Jews, when the time is right he will come and shoot the Jews here. And what will our president do then? Protect us? Defend us? Our president will not lift a finger. That is the understanding that they reached at Iceland, and any adult who thinks otherwise is crazy."

Rabbi Bengelsdorf showed no impatience with my father but listened respectfully, as if in sympathy with at least some of what he was hearing. Only Sandy seemed to be having trouble keeping his feelings to himself, and when our father referred scornfully to Lindbergh as "our president," he turned to me and made a face that revealed how far he'd spun out of the family orbit merely by making the ordinary American's adjustment to the new administration. My mother was seated to my father's right and, when he had finished, gripped his hand in hers, though to communicate how proud she was of him or to signal him to be still wasn't clear. As for Aunt Evelyn, she took all her cues from the rabbi, concealing her thoughts behind a mask of benign sufferance while her shallow brother-in-law dared to oppose with his piddling vocabulary a scholar who could talk in ten languages.

Bengelsdorf did not immediately respond but instead created a portentous interval in which quietly to insert his rejoinder: "I was at the White House talking to the president just yesterday morning." Here he sipped from his glass of water, allowing time for us to regain self-possession. "I was congratulating him," he continued, "on the significant inroad he had made into allaying the Jewish suspiciousness that dated back to his trips to Germany in the late thirties, when he was secretly taking the measure of the German air force for the U.S. government. I informed him that any number of my own congregants who had voted for Roosevelt were now his strong supporters, grateful that he had established our neutrality and spared our country the agonies of yet another great war. I told him that Just Folks and programs like it were beginning to convince the Jews of America that he is anything but their enemy. Admittedly, before his becoming president he at times made public statements grounded in anti-Semitic cliches. But he spoke from ignorance then, and admits as much today. I am pleased to tell you that it took no more than two or three sessions alone with the president to get him to relinquish his misconceptions and to appreciate the manifold nature of Jewish life in America. This is not an evil man, not in any way. This is a man of enormous native intelligence and great probity who is rightly celebrated for his personal courage and who wants now to enlist my aid to help him raze those barriers of ignorance that continue to separate Christian from Jew and Jew from Christian. Because there is ignorance as well among Jews, unfortunately, many of whom persist in thinking of President Lindbergh as an American Hitler when they know full well that he is not a dictator who attained power in a putsch but a democratic leader who came to office through a landslide victory in a fair and free election and who has exhibited not a single inclination toward authoritarian rule. He does not glorify the state at the expense of the individual but, to the contrary, encourages entrepreneurial individualism and a free enterprise system unencumbered by interference from the federal government. Where is the fascist statism? Where is the fascist thuggery? Where are the Nazi Brown Shirts and the secret police? When have you observed a single manifestation of fascist anti-Semitism emanating from our government? What Hitler perpetrated on Germany's Jews with the passage in 1935 of the Nuremberg Laws is the absolute antithesis of what President Lindbergh has undertaken to do for America's Jews through the establishment of the Office of American Absorption. The Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of their civil rights and did everything to exclude them from membership in their nation. What I have encouraged President Lindbergh to do is to initiate programs inviting Jews to enter as far into the national life as they like-a national life that I'm sure you would agree is no less ours to enjoy than anyone else's."

A pouring forth of sentences as informed as these had never before occurred at our dining table or probably anywhere on our block, and it was startling then-when the rabbi concluded by inquiring rather gently, even intimately, "Tell me, Herman, does what I've explained begin to address your fears?"-to hear my father respond flatly, "No. No. Not for a moment." And then, heedless of rendering an affront that would not only arouse the rabbi's displeasure but insult his dignity and provoke his vindictive contempt, my father added, "Hearing a person like you talk like that-frankly, it alarms me even more."

The following evening Aunt Evelyn phoned and bubblingly informed us that out of the one hundred New Jersey boys who'd gone west that summer under the sponsorship of Just Folks, Sandy had been selected as the statewide "recruiting officer" to speak as a veteran to eligible Jewish youngsters and their families about the OAA program's many benefits and to encourage them to apply. Thus did the rabbi extract his revenge. Our father's older son was now an honorary member of the new administration.

It was shortly after Sandy began spending his afternoons downtown at Aunt Evelyn's OAA office that my mother put on her best suit-the tailored gray jacket and skirt with the pale pinstripe that she wore to preside over PTA meetings and as a poll watcher in the school basement at election time-and went off to look for a job. At dinner she announced that she had found work selling ladies' dresses at Hahne's, a big downtown department store. She had been hired early as holiday help to work six days a week and Wednesday evenings, but as she was an experienced office secretary she harbored the hope that over the coming weeks a job might open up on the store's administrative floor and she would be retained after Christmas as a permanent employee. She explained to Sandy and me that her paycheck would contribute toward meeting the larger household bills occasioned by Alvin's return while her real intention (known to no one other than her husband) was to deposit her paychecks by mail into a Montreal bank account in case we had to flee and start from scratch in Canada.

My mother was gone, my brother was gone, and Alvin would soon be on his way home. My father had driven to Montreal to visit him in the army hospital there. One Friday morning, hours before Sandy and I got up for school, my mother made his breakfast, filled his thermos, packed food-three paper bags marked with Sandy's shading crayon, L for lunch, S for snack, D for dinner-and away he headed for the international border three hundred and fifty miles to the north. Since his boss could give him only the Friday off, he'd have to drive all that day to see Alvin on Saturday and then drive all day Sunday to be back for the morning staff meeting on Monday. He had a flat tire going and two more coming home and to make it to his meeting had to bypass us and drive from the highway directly downtown. By the time we saw him at dinner he'd been sleepless for over a day and without a proper wash for longer than that. Alvin, he told us, looked like a corpse, his weight down to something around a hundred pounds. Hearing this, I wondered how much the leg weighed that he'd lost, and that evening, without success, tried to weigh mine on the bathroom scale. "He's got no appetite," my father said. "They put food in front of him and he pushes it away. That boy, tough as he is, doesn't want to live, doesn't want anything except to lie there emaciated with that terrible grim face. I said, 'Alvin, I've known you since you were born. You're a fighter. You don't give up. You've got your father's strength. Your father could take the hardest blow and still keep going. So could your mother.' I told him, 'When your father died, the woman had to bounce back-she had no choice, she had you.' But I don't know what sunk in. I hope something," he said, his voice growing husky, "because while I was there, with all those sick boys in those beds all around me, while I was sitting beside his bed in that hospital-" and that was as far as he got. It was the first time I saw my father cry. A childhood milestone, when another's tears are more unbearable than one's own.

"It's because you're so tired," my mother said to him. She got up from her chair and, trying to calm him, came around and began to stroke his head. "When you finish eating," she said, "you'll take a shower and go right to bed."

Pressing his skull firmly back into the grip of her hand, he started to sob uncontrollably. "They blew his leg off," he told her, and here my mother motioned for Sandy and me to leave her to comfort him alone.

A new life began for me. I'd watched my father fall apart, and I would never return to the same childhood. The mother at home was now away all day working for Hahne's, the brother on call was now off after school working for Lindbergh, and the father who'd defiantly serenaded all those callow cafeteria anti-Semites in Washington was crying aloud with his mouth wide open-crying like both a baby abandoned and a man being tortured-because he was powerless to stop the unforeseen. And as Lindbergh's election couldn't have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as "History," harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

As I was on my own, I began to spend all my after-school hours with Earl Axman, my stamp mentor, and not just to pore over his collection with my magnifying glass or to look through his mother's bureau at her puzzling array of undergarments. Since my homework took no time and my only other chore was setting the table for dinner, I was now wholly available for mischief. And since, in the afternoons, Earl's mother seemed always to be off at the beauty parlor or over in New York shopping, Earl was free to provide it. He was nearly two years older than I, and because his glamorous parents were divorced-and because they were glamorous-he seemed never to have bothered being a model child. Of late, increasingly irritated by being one myself, I'd taken to mumbling in my bed, "Now let's do something awful," the suggestion with which Earl alternately thrilled and unnerved me whenever he got tired of what we were up to. Adventurousness was bound to assert its appeal sooner or later, but disillusioned by a sense that my family was slipping away from me right along with my country, I was ready to learn of the liberties a boy from an exemplary household could take when he stopped working to please everyone with his juvenile purity and discovered the guilty enjoyment of secretly acting on his own.

What I fell into with Earl was following people. He'd been doing it a couple of times a week for months now-traveling downtown alone after school and hanging around bus stops looking for men on their way home from work. When the one he settled on boarded his bus, Earl climbed aboard too, unobtrusively rode with him until he got off, got off right after him, and then from a safe distance followed him home. "Why?" I asked. "To see where they live." "But that's all? That's it?" "That's a lot. I go all over. I even leave Newark. I go anyplace I want. People live everywhere," Earl explained. "How do you get home before your mother?" "That's the trick-to go as far as I can and get back before she does." The money for the bus fares he readily confessed to stealing from his mother's handbags and then, as gleefully as if he were springing the lock on the vault at Fort Knox, opened wide a bedroom drawer where all kinds of handbags were piled haphazardly atop one another. On the weekends when he went to stay with his father in New York, he stole from the pockets of the suits hanging in his father's closet, and when four or five musicians from the Casa Loma Orchestra came over to his father's apartment to play poker on Sundays, he helpfully piled their overcoats on the bed, then went through their pockets and hid the change in a dirty sock at the bottom of his suitcase. Then he'd nonchalantly saunter into the living room to watch the card game all afternoon and listen to the funny stories they told about playing at the Paramount and the Essex House and the Glen Island Casino. In 1941 the band had just come back from Hollywood, where they'd been in a movie, and so between hands they talked about the stars and what they were like, inside information that Earl passed on to me and that I then repeated to Sandy, who invariably said, "That's bullshit," and warned me not to hang around with Earl Axman. "Your friend," he told me, "knows too much for a little kid." "He's got a great stamp collection." "Yeah, and he's got a mother," Sandy said, "who'll go out with anybody. She goes out with men who aren't even her age." "How do you know?" "Everybody on Summit Avenue knows." "I don't," I said. "Well," he told me, "that's not all you don't know," and, greatly pleased with myself, I thought, "Maybe there's something that you don't know either," but I nervously had to wonder if my best friend's mother wasn't what the older boys called "a whore."

It turned out to be far easier than I could have believed getting used to stealing from my mother and father, and easier than I would have thought following people, even though the first few times there wasn't a moment that didn't stun me, beginning with being downtown unwatched at three-thirty in the afternoon. Sometimes we'd go all the way to Penn Station to find someone, sometimes to Broad and Market, sometimes up Market to the courthouse to wait at the bus stop and catch our prey there. We never followed women. They didn't interest us, Earl said. We never followed anybody we thought was Jewish. They didn't interest us. Our curiosity was directed at men, the adult Christian men who worked all day in downtown Newark. Where did they go when they went home?

My apprehension was at its worst when we stepped up into the bus and paid. The fare money was stolen, we were where we shouldn't be, and where we were headed we had no idea-and by the time we got to wherever that was, I was too dizzy with emotion to understand what Earl told me when he whispered the name of the neighborhood into my ear. I was lost, a lost boy-that's what I pretended. What will I eat? Where will I sleep? Will dogs attack me? Will I be arrested and thrown in jail? Will some Christian take me in and adopt me? Or will I wind up being kidnapped like the Lindbergh child? I pretended either that I was lost in some far-off region unknown to me or that, with Lindbergh's connivance, Hitler had invaded America and Earl and I were fleeing the Nazis.

And all the while I assailed myself with my fears, we were surreptitiously turning corners and crossing streets and crouching behind trees to stay out of sight until the climactic moment when the man we were following reached his home and we watched him open the door and go in. Then we would stand off at a distance and look at the house-its door once again shut-and Earl would say something like, "That lawn's really big," or "Summer's over-why are there screens up?" or "See in the garage? That's the new Pontiac." And then, because trying to sneak up to the windows to peer in unobserved exceeded even Earl Axman's Peeping Jewism, he'd lead us back to the bus that would return us to Penn Station. Often at that hour, with everyone busy leaving work, the bus headed back downtown would be empty of passengers other than us, and so it was as though the driver were a chauffeur and the Public Service bus our private limousine and the two of us the most daring two boys alive. Earl was an extremely well-fed, white-skinned ten-year-old, already a bit of a vat, with full babyish cheeks and long dark lashes and tight black ringlets perfumed with his father's hair oil, and if the bus was empty, he would stretch himself out on the long rear seat in a pashalike posture perfectly embodying his swaggering mood, while sitting up beside him, lean and bony, I sported the half-ashamed little sidekick's smile of sublimity.

From Penn Station we'd catch the 14 home, taking our fourth bold bus ride of the afternoon. At dinner I'd think, "I followed a Christian, and nobody knows. I could have been kidnapped, and nobody knows. Using the money we've got between us, we could've, if we'd wanted…" and would sometimes all but give myself away to my sharp-eyed mother because beneath the kitchen table (and exactly like Earl when he was cooking up something) I couldn't stop jiggling my knee. And night after night I went to sleep under the exciting spell of the great new aim I'd unearthed for my eight-year-old life: to escape it. When at school I heard a bus through the open window climbing the Chancellor Avenue hill, all I could think about was being on board; the whole of the outside world had become a bus the way for a boy in South Dakota it was a pony-the pony that carries him to the limits of permissible flight.

I joined Earl as apprentice liar and thief in late October and, with no dwindling of the sense of momentousness, our secret jaunts continued as the weather grew colder in November and then on into December, when the Christmas decorations went up downtown and there was an excess of men to choose from at just about every bus stop. Christmas trees were for sale right on the downtown sidewalks, something I'd never seen before, and selling the trees for a buck apiece were kids who looked to be either hardship cases or toughs recently released from reform school. Money changing hands like that out in the open struck me at first as against the law and yet nobody appeared concerned with concealing the transaction. There were cops in profusion, cops with nightsticks walking the beat in their large blue overcoats, but they looked happy enough and seemed to be in on it-in on Christmas, that is. Big wind-driven blizzards had been whipping in twice a week since just after Thanksgiving, and so to either side of the freshly cleared streets grimy hillocks of snow were already banked as high as a car.

Unimpeded by the late-afternoon throngs, the vendors wrested one tree free from the others, carried it a ways onto the busy sidewalk, and propped it on its sawed-off trunk to be sized up by the customer. It was strange to see trees grown by some tree farmer miles from the city massed along the wrought-iron railings out front of the city's oldest churches and leaning in piles against the facades of the imposing banks and insurance buildings, and strange too, on a downtown street, to breathe in their rustic tang. There were no trees for sale in our neighborhood-because there was no one to buy them-and so the month of December, if it smelled at all, smelled of something a hissing alley cat had tugged from an overturned garbage can in somebody's yard, and of supper heating on the stove of a flat whose steamy kitchen window was open a crack to let in air from the alleyway, and of the bursts of noxious coal gas spewed from the furnace chimneys, and of the pail of ashes dragged up from the cellar to be emptied outdoors over slippery patches of sidewalk. Compared with the fragrances of North Jersey's damp spring and swampy summer and unsettled, moody fall, the smells of a bitter-cold winter were almost unnoticeable-or so I was convinced until I traveled downtown with Earl and saw the trees and took a whiff and discovered that, as with many things, for Christians December was otherwise. What with all of downtown strung with thousands of bulbs and the carolers singing and the Salvation Army band reveling and on every street corner another Santa Claus laughing, it was the month of the year when the heart of my birthplace was sublimely theirs and theirs alone. In Military Park there was a decorated Christmas tree forty feet tall, and from the face of the Public Service building hung a giant metal Christmas tree, illuminated by floodlights, that the Newark News said was eighty feet tall, while I was barely four and a half feet tall.

My final trip with Earl occurred one afternoon a few days before our Christmas vacation when we boarded the Linden bus behind a man who was carrying in either hand a department store shopping bag stuffed with gifts and decorated for the season in red and green; just ten days later Mrs. Axman would suffer a nervous breakdown and be taken away in an ambulance in the middle of the night, and soon after that, on New Year's Day 1942, Earl would be whisked off by his father, stamp collection and all. A mover's truck showed up later in January and, while I watched, took all the household furnishings away, including the bureau with Earl's mother's underwear, and no one on Summit Avenue saw the Axmans again.

Because the cold winter twilight now descended so quickly, following people home from the bus made us feel all the more satisfied with ourselves, as though we were about our business long after midnight, when other kids had been asleep for hours. The man with the shopping bags stayed on the bus past the Hillside line and over into Elizabeth and got off just past the big cemetery, not far from the corner where my mother had grown up, above her father's grocery store. We got off after him quietly enough, the two of us looking indistinguishable from a thousand other local schoolkids in the standard-issue winter camouflage of hooded mackinaw and thick woolen mittens and shapeless corduroy trousers tucked into ill-fitting rubber galoshes with half of their maddening toggles undone. But because we imagined ourselves more concealed than we were by the deepening shadows, or because our adroitness was losing its power to time, we must have tailed him less skillfully than we were practiced at doing, and thus compromised "the invincible duo," as Earl had vaingloriously dubbed the pair of Christian-trackers we'd become.

There were two long blocks to traverse, both of them lined with stately brick houses bright with Christmas lights that Earl identified in a whisper as "millionaires' mansions"; then there were two shorter blocks of much smaller, modest frame houses of the kind that by then we'd seen by the hundreds on the streets that we'd traveled, each with a Christmas wreath on the door. On the second of the two blocks the man turned onto a narrow brick pathway that curved up to a low shoebox of a shingled house that poked up prettily out of the banked snow like the edible adornment on a big frosted cake. Lamps were burning dimly upstairs and down, and the Christmas tree could be seen twinkling through one of the windows to the side of the front door. While the man set down his shopping bags to get his key out, we drew closer and closer to the undulating white lawn until, through the window, we were able to discern the ornaments decorating the tree.

"Look," Earl whispered. "See the top? At the very top of the tree-see that? It's Jesus!"

"No, it's an angel."

"What do you think Jesus is?"

I whispered back, "I thought he was their God."

"And chief of the angels-and there he is!"

This then was the culmination of our quest-Jesus Christ, who by their reasoning was everything and who by my reasoning had fucked everything up: because if it weren't for Christ there wouldn't be Christians, and if it weren't for Christians there wouldn't be anti-Semitism, and if it weren't for anti-Semitism there wouldn't be Hitler, and if it weren't for Hitler Lindbergh would never be president, and if Lindbergh weren't president…

Suddenly the man we'd followed, standing now in the open doorway with his shopping bags, twirled around and softly, as though exhaling a smoke ring, called, "Boys."

So flabbergasted were we by being caught that I, for one, felt summoned to step forward onto the path leading up to the house and, like the model child I'd been two months before, clear my conscience by telling him my name. Only Earl's arm held me back.

"Boys, don't hide. You don't have to," the man said.

"What now?" I whispered to Earl.

"Shhhhhh," he whispered back.

"Boys, I know you're there. Boys, it's getting awfully dark," he warned in a friendly voice. "Aren't you freezing out there? Wouldn't you like a nice cup of cocoa? Inside now, children, quickly inside now before it snows. There's hot cocoa, and I have spice cake and I have seed cake and gingerbread men, I have animal crackers frosted in all different colors, and there are marshmallows-there are marshmallows, boys, marshmallows in the cupboard that we can toast over a fire."

When I again looked at Earl to find out what to do, he was already on his way back to Newark. "Run for it," he shouted at me over his shoulder, "beat it, Phil-it's a fairy!"