ALVIN WAS DISCHARGED in January 1942, after forsaking first the wheelchair and then the crutches and, over the course of a long hospital rehabilitation, having been trained by the Canadian army nurses to walk unassisted on his artificial limb. He would be receiving a monthly disability pension from the Canadian government of a hundred and twenty-five dollars, a little more than half of what my father earned each month from the Metropolitan, and an additional three hundred dollars in separation pay. As a handicapped veteran he was eligible for further benefits should he choose to remain in Canada, where foreign volunteers into the Canadian armed forces, if they wished, were granted citizenship immediately upon discharge. And why didn't he become a Canuck? asked Uncle Monty. Since he couldn't stand America anyway, why didn't he just stay up there and cash in?
Monty was the most overbearing of my uncles, which probably accounted for why he was also the richest. He'd made his fortune wholesaling fruit and vegetables down near the railroad tracks at the Miller Street market. Alvin's father, Uncle Jack, had begun the business and taken in Monty, and after Uncle Jack died Monty had taken in his youngest brother, my uncle Herbie; when he invited my father in as well-back when my parents were penniless newlyweds-my father said no, having already been sufficiently bullied by Monty while they were growing up. My father could keep pace with Monty's prodigious expenditure of energy, and his capacity to endure all manner of hardship was no less remarkable than Monty's, but he knew from the clashes of boyhood that he was no match for the innovator who'd first gambled on bringing ripe tomatoes to Newark in the wintertime by buying up carloads of green tomatoes from Cuba and ripening them in specially heated rooms on the creaky second floor of his Miller Street warehouse. When they were ready, Monty packed them four to a box, got top dollar, and was known thereafter as the Tomato King.
While we remained rent-paying tenants in a five-room second-story flat in Newark the uncles in the wholesale produce business lived in the Jewish section of suburban Maplewood, where each owned a large, white, shuttered Colonial with a green lawn out front and a polished Cadillac in the garage. For good or bad, the exalted egoism of an Abe Steinheim or an Uncle Monty or a Rabbi Bengelsdorf-conspicuously dynamic Jews all seemingly propelled by their embattled status as the offspring of greenhorns to play the biggest role that they could commandeer as American men-was not in the makeup of my father, nor was there the slightest longing for supremacy, and so though personal pride was a driving force and his blend of fortitude and combativeness was heavily fueled, like theirs, by the grievances attending his origins as an impoverished kid other kids called a kike, it was enough for him to make something (rather than everything) of himself and to do so without wrecking the lives around him. My father was born to contend but also to protect, and to inflict damage on an enemy didn't make his spirits soar as it did his older brother's (not to mention all the rest of the brutal entrepreneurial machers). There were the bosses and there were the bossed, and the bosses usually were bosses for a reason-and in business for themselves for a reason, whether the business was construction or produce or the rabbinate or the rackets. It was the best they could come up with to remain unobstructed-and, in their own eyes, unhumiliated-not least by the discrimination of the Protestant hierarchy that kept ninety-nine percent of the Jews employed by the dominant corporations uncomplainingly in their place.
"If Jack was alive," Monty said, "the kid wouldn't have got out the front door. You should never have let him go, Herm. He runs away to Canada to become a war hero and this is where it lands him, a goddamn gimp for the rest of his life." It was the Sunday before the Saturday of Alvin's return, and Uncle Monty, wearing clean clothes instead of the badly stained windbreaker and splattered old pants and filthy cloth cap that were his usual market attire, was leaning against our kitchen sink, a cigarette dangling out of his mouth. My mother was not present. She had excused herself, as she generally did when Monty was around, but I was a small boy and mesmerized by him, as though he were indeed the gorilla that she privately called him when her exasperation with his coarseness got the upper hand.
"Alvin can't bear your president," my father replied, "that's why he went to Canada. Not so long ago you couldn't bear the man either. But now this anti-Semite is your friend. The Depression is over, all you rich Jews tell me, and thanks not to Roosevelt but to Mr. Lindbergh. The stock market is up, profits are up, business is booming-and why? Because we have Lindbergh's peace instead of Roosevelt's war. And what else matters, what besides money counts with you people?" "You sound like Alvin, Herman. You sound like a kid. What counts besides money? Your two boys count. You want Sandy to come home one day like Alvin? You want Phil," he said, looking over to where I sat listening at the kitchen table, "to come home one day like Alvin? We're out of the war, and we're staying out of the war. Lindbergh's done me no harm that I can see." I expected my father to respond "Just you wait," but probably because I was there and frightened enough already, he didn't.
As soon as Monty left, my father told me, "Your uncle doesn't use his head. Coming home like Alvin-that's not something that's going to happen." "But what if Roosevelt is president again? Then there would be a war," I said. "Maybe and maybe not," my father replied, "nobody can predict that in advance." "But if there was a war," I said, "and if Sandy was old enough, then he would be drafted to fight in the war. And if he fought in the war, then what happened to Alvin could happen to him." "Son, anything can happen to anyone," my father told me, "but it usually doesn't." "Except when it does," I thought, but I didn't dare to say as much because he was already upset by my questions and might not even know how to answer if I kept on going. Since what Uncle Monty said to him about Lindbergh was exactly what Rabbi Bengelsdorf had told him-and also what Sandy was secretly saying to me-I began to wonder if my father knew what he was talking about.
It was close to a year after Lindbergh took office that Alvin returned to Newark on an overnight train from Montreal, accompanied by a Canadian Red Cross nurse and missing half of one of the legs that he'd left with. We drove downtown to Penn Station to meet him as we did to meet Sandy the summer before, only this time Sandy was with us. A few weeks earlier, in the interest of family harmony, I had been allowed to go off with Aunt Evelyn and him to sit in the audience and listen as he impressed the congregation of a synagogue some forty miles south of Newark, in New Brunswick, encouraging them to enroll their children in Just Folks with stories of his Kentucky adventure and an exhibition of his drawings. My parents had made it clear to me that Sandy's job with Just Folks was something I needn't mention to Alvin; they'd themselves explain everything, but only after Alvin had a chance to get used to being home and could better understand how America had changed since he'd gone to Canada. It was a matter not of hiding anything from Alvin or of lying to him but of protecting him from whatever could interfere with his recovery.
The Montreal train was late that morning, and to pass the time-and because the political situation was with him now every moment of the day-my father had bought a copy of the Daily News. Seated on a bench at Penn Station, he scanned the paper, a right-wing New York tabloid that he unfailingly referred to as a "rag," while the rest of us paced the platform, anxiously waiting for the next phase of our new life to begin. When the PA system announced that the Montreal train would be arriving even later than expected, my mother, linking arms with Sandy and me, walked us back to the bench to wait there together. My father had meanwhile finished as much of the Daily News as he could bear and thrown it into a trash basket. Since ours was a household where nickels and dimes mattered, I was as perplexed to see him discard the paper only minutes after buying it as I'd been to see him reading it in the first place. "Can you believe these people?" he said. "This fascist dog is still their hero." What he didn't say was that by making good on his campaign promise to keep America out of the worldwide war, the fascist dog had by now become the hero of virtually every paper in the country with the exception of PM.
"Well," said my mother as the train finally entered the station and began to pull to a stop, "here comes your cousin."
"What should we do?" I asked her, as she prompted us onto our feet and the four of us stepped toward the platform's edge.
"Say hello. It's Alvin. Welcome him home."
"What about his leg?" I whispered.
"What about it, dear?"
I shrugged.
Here my father took me by the shoulders. "Don't be afraid," he said to me. "Don't be afraid of Alvin and don't be afraid of his leg. Let him see how you've grown up."
It was Sandy who broke away from us and went racing toward the car that had come to a halt a couple of hundred feet down the track. Alvin was being pushed from the train in a wheelchair by a woman in a Red Cross uniform while the person who was barreling down on him shouting his name was the only one of us who'd been won over to the other side. I didn't know any longer what to make of my brother, but then I didn't know what to make of myself, so busy was I trying to remember to conceal everyone's secrets while doing my best to suppress my fears and trying not to stop believing in my father as well as in the Democrats and FDR and whoever else could keep me from teaming up with the rest of the country in adoring President Lindbergh.
"You're back!" Sandy cried. "You're home!" And then I watched as my brother, who'd only just turned fourteen but was as strong now as a young man of twenty, dropped to his knees on the platform's concrete floor, the better to be able to throw his arms around Alvin's neck. My mother began crying then, and my father quickly took me by the hand, either to try to prevent me from going to pieces or to protect himself from his own chaos of feelings.
I thought it must be my job to run to Alvin next, and so I pulled away from my parents and broke for the wheelchair and, once there, imitating Sandy, threw my arms around him, only to discover how rotten he smelled. I thought at first that the smell must be coming from his leg, but it was coming from his mouth. I held my breath and shut my eyes and only released my hold on Alvin when I felt him lean forward in the chair to shake my father's hand. I noticed then the wooden crutches strapped to one side of the wheelchair, and for the first time dared to look straight at him. I'd never before seen anyone so skeletal or so dejected. His eyes showed no fear, however, or any trace of weeping, and they surveyed my father with ferocity, as though it were the guardian who had committed the unpardonable act that had rendered the ward a cripple.
"Herman," he said, but that was all.
"You're here," my father said, "you're home. We're taking you home."
Then my mother bent forward to kiss him.
"Aunt Bess," Alvin said.
The left trouser leg dropped straight down from the knee, a sight generally familiar to adults but one that startled me, even though I already knew of a man with no legs at all, a man who began at the hips and was himself no more than a stump. I had seen him before, begging on the sidewalk outside my father's downtown office, but overwhelmed as I was by the colossal freakishness, I'd never had to think much about it since there was never any danger of his coming to live in our house. He did best with his begging in baseball season when, as the men working there left the building at the end of the day, he would run through the afternoon's final scores in his incongruously deep, declamatory voice, and each of them would drop a couple of coins into the battered laundry pail that was his alms box. He moved about on-appeared, in fact, to live on-a small platform of plywood fitted beneath with roller skates. Aside from my remembering the heavy, weatherbeaten work gloves he wore all year round-to protect the hands that were his means of ambulation-I'm unable to describe the rest of his outfit because the fear of gaping merged with the terror of seeing to prevent me from ever looking long enough to register what he wore. That he dressed at all seemed as miraculous as that he was somehow able to urinate and defecate, let alone remember the ball scores. Whenever I came along to the empty insurance office on a Saturday morning with my father-largely for the delight of twirling in his desk chair while he attended to the week's mail-he and the stump of a man would always greet each other with a friendly nod. I discovered then that the grotesque injustice of a man's being halved had not merely happened, which was incomprehensible enough, but happened to someone called Robert, as commonplace as a male name could be and six letters long, like my own. "How you doin', Little Robert?" my father said as we two passed together into the building. "How you, Herman?" Little Robert would reply. Eventually I asked my father, "Does he have a last name?" "Do you?" my father asked me. "Yes." "Well, so does he." "What is it? Little Robert what?" I asked. My father thought a moment, then laughed and said, "To tell you the truth, son, I don't know."
From the moment I found out that Alvin was returning to Newark to convalesce in our house, I would involuntarily envision Robert on his platform and wearing his work gloves whenever I lay stiffly in the dark trying to force myself asleep: first my stamps covered with swastikas, then Little Robert, the living stump.
"I thought you'd be up on the leg they gave you. I thought they couldn't discharge you otherwise," I heard my father saying to Alvin. "What's happened?"
Without bothering to look at him, Alvin snapped, "Stump broke down."
"What's that mean?" my father asked.
"It's nothing. Don't worry about it."
"Does he have luggage?" my father asked the nurse.
But before she could answer, Alvin said, "Sure I got luggage. Where do you think my leg is?"
Sandy and I were headed for the baggage counter on the main concourse with Alvin and his nurse while my father hurried off to get the car from the Raymond Boulevard lot, accompanied by my mother, who went along with him at the last minute, more than likely to talk over all they hadn't anticipated about Alvin's mental state. Out on the platform, the nurse had summoned a redcap, and together they helped Alvin to a standing position and then the redcap took charge of the wheelchair while the nurse walked at Alvin's side as he hopped to the head of the escalator. There she took up her place as a human shield, and he hopped after her, clutching the moving banister as the escalator descended. Sandy and I stood at Alvin's back, out of range at last of his unfragrant breath-and where Sandy instinctively braced himself to catch him should Alvin lose his balance. The redcap, carrying upside down and over his head the wheelchair with the crutches still strapped to one side, took the stairs parallel to the escalator and was already on the main concourse to greet us when Alvin hopped from the escalator and we stepped off behind him. The redcap placed the wheelchair right side up on the concourse floor and firmly positioned it for Alvin to sit back down, but Alvin turned on his one foot and began to hop vigorously away, leaving his nurse-to whom he'd said neither thank you nor goodbye-to watch him speed off along the crowded marble floor in the direction of the baggage room.
"Can't he fall?" Sandy asked the nurse. "He's going so fast. What if he slips and falls?"
"Him?" the nurse replied. "That boy can hop anywhere. That boy can hop a very long way. He won't fall. He's the world-champion hopper. He'd have been happier to hop from Montreal than to have me helping him down here by train." She then confided to us, two protected children entirely ignorant of the bitterness of loss, "I've seen 'em angry before," she said, "I've seen the ones without any limbs angry, but nobody before ever angry like him."
"Angry at what?" Sandy asked anxiously.
She was a strapping woman with stern gray eyes and hair short as a soldier's under her gray Red Cross cap, but it was in the softest maternal tones, with a gentleness that came as yet another of the day's surprises, as though Sandy were one of her very own charges, that she explained, "At what people get angry at-at how things turn out."
My mother and I had to take the bus home because there wasn't enough room in the little family Studebaker. Alvin's wheelchair went into the trunk, though as it was the old unwieldy uncollapsible type, the lid of the trunk had to be tied shut with heavy twine to accommodate it. His canvas overseas bag (with the artificial leg somewhere inside) was stuffed so full that Sandy was unable to lift it even with my help, and we had to drag it across the concourse floor and through the door to the street; there my father took charge and he and Sandy laid it flat out across the back seat. Practically doubled over at the waist, Sandy was perched atop the bag for the ride home, Alvin's crutches straddling his lap. The crutches' rubber-capped tips protruded from one of the rear side-windows, and my father tied his pocket handkerchief around the ends to warn off other drivers. My father and Alvin rode up front, and I was unhappily preparing to squeeze between them just to the right of the floor shift when my mother said she wanted my company on the ride home. What she wanted, it turned out, was to prevent me from having to witness any more of the misery.
"It's okay," she said as we headed around the corner for the underpass where the line formed for the 14 bus. "It's perfectly natural to be upset. We all are."
I denied being in any way upset but found myself looking around the bus stop for somebody to follow. Easily a dozen different routes started out from this one Penn Station stop, and it happened that a Vailsburg bus bound for distant North Newark was taking on passengers at the very moment that my mother and I stood at the curbside of the underpass waiting for a 14 to show up. I spotted just the man to follow, a businessman with a briefcase who seemed to me-with my admittedly imperfect grasp of the telling characteristics that Earl was so masterfully attuned to-not to be Jewish. Yet I could only look with longing as the bus door closed behind him and he rode off without my spying on him from a nearby seat.
Once we were alone together on the bus, my mother said, "Tell me what's bothering you."
When I didn't reply she began to explain Alvin's behavior at the train station. "Alvin is ashamed. He feels ashamed for us to be seeing him in a wheelchair. When he left he was strong and independent. Now he wants to hide and he wants to scream and he wants to lash out, and it's terrible for him. And it's terrible too for a boy like you to have to see your big cousin like this. But that's all going to change. Just as soon as he understands that there's nothing about the way he looks or about what happened for him to be ashamed of, he's going to gain back the weight he lost, and he'll start to walk everywhere on his artificial leg, and he's going to look just as you remember him before he left for Canada…Does that help any? Does what I'm telling you reassure you at all?"
"I don't need to be reassured," I said, but what I wanted to ask was: "His stump-what does it mean that it's broken down? Do I have to look at it? Will I ever have to touch it? Are they going to fix it?"
On a Saturday a couple of weeks earlier I'd gone into the cellar with my mother and helped her empty the cartons full of Alvin's belongings, rescued by my father from the Wright Street room after Alvin had run off to join the Canadian army. Everything washable my mother scrubbed on the washboard in the divided cellar tub, soaping in one sink, rinsing in the other, and then feeding a piece at a time into the wringer while I cranked the handle to force out the rinse water. I hated that wringer; each piece of wash emerged flattened out from between its two rollers, looking as if it had been run over by a truck, and whenever I was down in the cellar for whatever reason, I was always afraid to turn my back on the thing. But now I steeled myself to drop each wet, deformed item of mangled laundry into the laundry basket and carry the basket upstairs so that my mother could dry everything on the backyard clothesline. I fed her the clothespins as she leaned from the window to hang out the wash, and while she stood in the kitchen after dinner that evening ironing the shirts and pajamas that I had just helped her to reel in, I sat at the kitchen table folding Alvin's underwear and rolling each pair of socks into a ball, determined to make everything turn out right by being the best little boy imaginable, much, much better than Sandy and better even than myself.
After school the next day, it required two trips for me to carry Alvin's good clothes around the corner to the tailor shop where they did our dry cleaning. Later in the week I picked them up and at home placed everything-topcoat, suit, sport jacket, and two pairs of his pants-on wooden hangers in the half I'd apportioned him of my bedroom closet and stacked the rest of the clean apparel in the top two drawers that had formerly been Sandy's. Since Alvin was going to be sleeping in our bedroom-to provide him with the easiest possible access to the bathroom-Sandy had already gotten himself ready to move to the sun parlor at the front of the flat by arranging his own belongings in the breakfront in the dining room, beside the linen tablecloth and napkins. One evening a few days before Alvin's scheduled return I shined his pair of brown shoes and his pair of black shoes, ignoring as best I could any uncertainty I had as to whether shining all four of them was still necessary. To make those shoes gleam, to get his good clothes clean, to neatly pile the dresser drawers with his freshly washed things-and all of it simply a prayer, an improvised prayer imploring the household gods to protect our humble five rooms and all they contained from the vengeful fury of the missing leg.
I tried to gauge from what I saw beyond the bus window how much time remained before we got to Summit Avenue and it was too late to unseal my fate. We were on Clinton Avenue just passing the Riviera Hotel, where, as I never failed to remember, my mother and father had spent their wedding night. We were clear of downtown, about halfway home, and directly ahead was Temple B'nai Abraham, the great oval fortress built to serve the city's Jewish rich and no less foreign to me than if it had been the Vatican.
"I could move into your bed," my mother said, "if that's what's bothering you. For now, until everybody gets used to everybody else again, I could sleep in your bed next to Alvin's bed and you could go in and sleep with Daddy in our bed. Would that be better?"
I said that I'd rather sleep alone in my own bed.
"What if Sandy moved back from the sun parlor to his bed," my mother suggested, "and Alvin slept in yours and you slept where Sandy was going to sleep, on the daybed in the sun parlor? Would you be lonely up at the front of the house, or is that what you would really prefer?"
Would I prefer it? I'd have loved it. But how possibly could Sandy, who was now working for Lindbergh, share a room with someone who had lost his leg going to war against Lindbergh's Nazi friends?
We were turning onto Clinton Place from the Clinton Avenue stop, the familiar residential corner where-back before Sandy deserted me for Aunt Evelyn on Saturday afternoons-he and I used to disembark for the double feature at the Roosevelt Theater, whose black-lettered marquee was a block away. Soon the bus would be sailing past the narrow alleyways and the two-and-a-half-family houses lining the level length of Clinton Place-streets that looked much like our own but whose red-brick bank of gabled front stoops aroused not a one of the basic boyhood emotions that ours did-before arriving at the big final turn onto Chancellor Avenue. There the grinding pull up the hill would begin, past the elegant fluted piers of the spiffy new high school, on to the sturdy flagpole out front of my grade school, and through to the crest of the hill, where a band of Lenni Lenapes were said by our third-grade teacher to have lived in a tiny village, cooking their food over hot stones and drawing designs on their pots. This was our destination, the Summit Avenue stop, diagonally across from the platters of freshly dipped chocolates profligately displayed in the lace-trimmed windows of Anna Mae's, the sweetshop that had succeeded the Indians' tepees and whose tantalizing scent honeyed the air less than a two-minute walk from our house.
In other words, the time left to say yes to the sun parlor was precisely measurable and running out, movie theater by movie theater, candy store by candy store, stoop by stoop, and yet all I could say was no, no, I'll be fine where I am, until my mother had nothing soothing left to suggest and, despite herself, went gloomily silent in a very ominous, undisguised way, as though the eventfulness of the morning was at last working her over the way it had me. Meanwhile, since I didn't know how long I could go on concealing that I couldn't bear Alvin because of his missing limb and his empty trouser leg and his awful smell and his wheelchair and his crutches and the way he wouldn't look up at any of us when he talked, I began to pretend that I was following somebody on our bus who didn't look Jewish. It was then that I realized-employing all the criteria imparted to me by Earl-that my mother looked Jewish. Her hair, her nose, her eyes-my mother looked unmistakably Jewish. But then so must I, who so strongly resembled her. I hadn't known.
What made Alvin smell bad was all the decay in his mouth. "You lose your teeth when you've got problems," Dr. Lieberfarb explained after looking around with his little mirror and saying "Uhoh" nineteen times, and that very afternoon he started drilling. He was going to do all that work for nothing because Alvin had volunteered to fight the fascists and because, unlike "the rich Jews" who astonished my father by imagining themselves secure in Lindbergh's America, Lieberfarb remained undeluded about what "the many Hitlers of this world" might yet have in store for us. Nineteen gold inlays was a big deal, but that's how he showed solidarity with my father, my mother, me, and the Democrats, as opposed to Uncle Monty, Aunt Evelyn, Sandy, and all the Republicans currently enjoying their countrymen's love. Nineteen inlays also took a long time, particularly for a dentist who'd trained in night school while working days packing cargo crates at Port Newark, and whose touch was never that light. Lieberfarb was drilling away for months, but within the first few weeks enough of the rot had been removed so that it was no longer such a trial to be sleeping more or less next to Alvin's mouth. The stump was something else. "Broken down" means that the end of the stump goes bad: it opens up, it cracks, it gets infected. There are boils, sores, edema, and you can't walk on it with the prosthesis and so have to be without it and resort to crutches until it heals and can take the pressure without breaking down again. At fault was the fit of the artificial leg. The doctors would tell him, "You've lost your fit," but he hadn't lost his fit, he never had a fit, Alvin said, because the legmaker hadn't got the measurements right to begin with.
"How long does it take to heal?" I asked him the night he finally told me what "broken down" meant. Sandy up at the front of the house and my parents in their bedroom had already been asleep for hours, and so too were Alvin and I when he began to shout "Dance! Dance!" and, with a frightening gasp, shot upright in his bed, wide awake. When I flipped on the night lamp and saw him covered with sweat, I got up and opened the bedroom door, and though suddenly covered in sweat myself, I tiptoed across the little back foyer, not to my parents' room, however, to report what had happened, but into the bathroom to get Alvin a towel. He used it to mop his face and his neck, then pulled off his pajama shirt to wipe his chest and his underarms, and now at last I saw what had become of the upper man since the lower man had been blown apart. No wounds, stitches, or disfiguring scars, but no strength either, just the pale skin of a sickly boy adhering to the knobs and ridges of bone.
This was our fourth night together. On the first three nights Alvin had been careful to change into his pajamas in the bathroom and then to hop back to hang his clothes in the closet, and since he used the bathroom again to dress in the mornings, I hadn't as yet had to look at the stump and could pretend I didn't know it was there. At night I turned to the wall and, fatigued by all my worries, fell right off to sleep and remained asleep until sometime in the early hours when Alvin got up and hopped to the bathroom and back to bed. He did all this without turning on the light and I lay there afraid he was going to bang into something and crash to the floor. At night, his every move made me want to run away, and not merely from the stump. It was on this fourth night, when Alvin had finished drying himself off with the towel and was lying there in just his pajama bottoms, that he pulled up the pajamas' left leg to take a look at the stump. I supposed this was a hopeful sign-that he was starting to be less crazily agitated, at least with me-but I still didn't want to look his way…and so I did, trying to be a soldier in my bed. What I saw extending down from his knee joint was something five or six inches long that resembled the elongated head of a featureless animal, something on which Sandy, with just a few well-placed strokes, could have crayoned eyes, a nose, a mouth, teeth, and ears, and turned it into the likeness of a rat. What I saw was what the word "stump" describes: the blunt remnant of something whole that belonged there and once had been there. If you didn't know what a leg looked like, this one might have seemed normal to you, given how the hairless skin was rounded off softly at the abbreviated end as though it were nature's handiwork and not the result of a trying sequence of medical amputations.
"Is it healed?" I asked him.
"Not yet."
"How long will it take?"
"Forever," he replied.
I was stunned. Then this is endless! I thought.
"Extremely frustrating," Alvin said. "You get on the leg they make for you and the stump breaks down. You get on crutches and it starts to swell up. The stump goes bad whatever you do. Get my bandages from the dresser."
I did as he told me. I was going to have to handle the beige elasticized wrappings he used to prevent his stump from swelling when the artificial leg was off. They were coiled up in a corner of the drawer beside his socks. Each was about three inches wide and had a large safety pin stuck through the end to keep it from unrolling. I no more wanted to plunge my hand into that drawer than to go down to the cellar and stick it into the wringer, but I did, and when I delivered the bandages to the bed, one in each fist, he said, "Good boy," and was able to make me laugh by petting my head like a dog's.
Afraid to see what came next, I sat on my bed and watched.
"You put this bandage on," he explained, "to keep it from blowing up." He held the stump in one hand and with the other undid the safety pin and began to unroll one of the bandages in a crisscrossing pattern over the stump and on up to the knee joint and then several inches beyond that. "You put this bandage on to keep it from blowing up"-he repeated the words wearily, with exaggerated patience-"but you don't want bandages over the breakdown because that won't let the breakdown heal. So you're just going back and forth until you're nuts." When he finished unrolling the bandage and inserted the safety pin to fasten the end, he showed me the results. "You have to pull it tight, you see?" He began a similar routine with the second bandage. The stump-when he was through with it-again reminded me of a small animal, this time one whose head had to be muzzled extra carefully to prevent it from sinking its razor-sharp teeth into the hand of its captor.
"How do you learn that?" I asked him.
"You don't have to learn. You just put it on. Except," he suddenly announced, "it's too goddamn tight. Maybe you do have to learn. Goddamn son of a bitch! It's either too fucking loose or too fucking tight. It makes you nuts-the whole goddamn thing." He removed the safety pin that fastened the second bandage and then undid both bandages in order to start again. "You can see," he told me, struggling now to suppress disgust with the futility of everything, "how good at doing this you get," and resumed the rewrapping, which, like the healing, appeared destined to go on in our bedroom forever.
The next day when school was over, I ran straight home to a house that I knew would be empty-Alvin was at the dentist, Sandy was off somewhere with Aunt Evelyn, the two of them inexplicably helping Lindbergh achieve his ends, and my parents wouldn't be back from work until suppertime. As Alvin had settled on using the daytime hours to allow the breakdown to heal unbandaged and the nights to wrap the stump to prevent the swelling, I readily found the two bandages in the corner of the top dresser drawer where he'd returned them rolled up that morning. I sat on the edge of my bed, turned up my left trouser leg, and, shocked to realize that what remained of Alvin's leg was not much bigger around than my own, set out to bandage myself. I'd spent the day at school mentally running through what I'd watched him do the night before, but at three-twenty, when I got home, I'd only just started to wrap the first bandage around an imaginary stump of my own when, against the flesh below my knee, I felt what turned out to be a ragged scab from the ulcerated underside of Alvin's stump. The scab must have come loose during the night-Alvin had either ignored it or failed to notice it-and now it was stuck to me and I was out way beyond what I could deal with. Though the heaves began in the bedroom, by racing for the back door and then down the back stairway to the cellar, I managed to position my head over the double sink seconds before the real puking began.
To find myself alone in the dank cavern of the cellar was an ordeal under any circumstances, and not only because of the wringer. With its smudged frieze of mold and mildew running along the cracking whitewashed walls-stains in every hue of the excremental rainbow and seepage blotches that looked as if they'd leaked from a corpse-the cellar was a ghoulish realm apart, extending beneath the whole of the house and deriving no light at all from the half-dozen slits of grime-clouded glass that looked onto the cement of the alleyways and the weedy front yard. There were several saucer-sized drains sunk into the bottom of a sloping concavity at the middle of the concrete floor. Secured in the mouth of each was a heavy black disc pierced by the concentric dime-sized perforations from which, with no difficulty, I imagined vaporous creatures spiraling malevolently up from the earth's innards into my life. The cellar was a place bereft not just of a sunny window but of every human assurance, and when I came to study Greek and Roman mythology in a freshman high school class and read in the textbook about Hades, Cerberus, and the River Styx, it was always our cellar that I was reminded of. One 30-watt bulb hung over the washtub into which I'd vomited, a second hung in the vicinity of the coal furnaces-ablaze and bulkily aligned together like the three-personed Pluto of our underworld-and another, almost always burned out, was suspended from an electrical cord inside each of the storage bins.
I could never accept that the wintertime responsibility would fall to me for shoveling coal into our family's furnace first thing each morning, then banking the fire before going to bed, and once a day carrying a pailful of cold ashes out to the ashcan in the backyard. Sandy had by now grown strong enough to take over from my father, and in a few more years, when he went off like every other eighteen-year-old American boy to receive his twenty-four months of military training in President Lindbergh's new citizen Army, I would inherit the job and relinquish it only when I too was conscripted. Imagining a future when I'd be in the cellar manning the furnace all alone was, at nine, as upsetting as thinking about the inevitability of dying, which had also begun tormenting me in bed every night.
But I mainly feared the cellar because of those who were already dead-my two grandfathers, my mother's mother, and the aunt and uncle who once constituted Alvin's family. Their bodies may have been interred just off Route 1 on the Newark-Elizabeth line, but in order to patrol our affairs and scrutinize our conduct their ghosts resided two stories beneath our flat. I had little or no recollection of any of them other than of the grandmother who'd died when I was six, and yet whenever I was headed for the cellar by myself, I took care to warn each in turn that I was on my way and to beg them to keep their distance and not to besiege me once I was in their midst. When Sandy was my age he used to arm himself against his brand of fear by barreling down the cellar stairs shouting, "Bad guys, I know you're down there-I've got a gun," while I would descend whispering, "I'm sorry for whatever I did that was wrong."
There was the wringer, the drains, the dead-the ghosts of the dead watching and judging and condemning as I vomited into the double sink where my mother and I had washed Alvin's clothes-and there were the alley cats who would disappear into the cellar when the outside back door was left ajar and then yowl from wherever in the dark they were crouched, and there was the agonized cough of our downstairs neighbor Mr. Wishnow, a cough that sounded from the cellar as though he were being ripped apart by the teeth of a two-man saw. Like my father, Mr. Wishnow was an insurance agent with the Metropolitan, but for over a year he had been on disability pay, too ill with cancer of the mouth and the throat to do anything but stay at home and listen to the daytime radio serials when he wasn't asleep or uncontrollably coughing. With the blessing of the home office, his wife had taken over for him-the first female insurance agent in the history of the Newark district-and now kept the same long hours as my father, who generally had to go back out after dinner to make his collections and canvassed for prospective customers most every Saturday or Sunday, weekends being the only time when he could hope to find a breadwinner at home to listen to his spiel. Before my mother had herself begun to work as a saleslady at Hahne's, she would stop downstairs a couple of times a day to see how Mr. Wishnow was doing; and now, when Mrs. Wishnow called to say she couldn't be home in time to cook a proper dinner, my mother would prepare a little more of whatever we were eating and Sandy and I, before we were allowed to sit down to our own meal, each carried a warm plateful of food to the first floor on a tray, one for Mr. Wishnow and one for Seldon, the Wishnows' only child. Seldon would open the door for us and we would maneuver our trays through the foyer and into the kitchen, absorbed in trying not to spill anything as we set them on the table where Mr. Wishnow was already waiting, a paper napkin tucked into the top of his pajamas but looking in no way able to feed himself, however desperately in need of nutrition. "You boys all right?" he would ask us in the shredded rag of a voice that was left to him. "How about a joke for me, Phillie? I could use a good joke," he allowed, but without bitterness, without sadness, merely demonstrating the soft, defensive joviality of someone still hanging on for no seeming reason. Seldon must have told his father that I could make the kids laugh at school, and so I would teasingly be asked to tell him a joke when just by his proximity he'd have obliterated my capacity to speak. The best I could do was to try to look at somebody whom I knew to be dying-and, worse, resigned to dying-without allowing my eyes to see in his the gruesome evidence of the bodily misery he was being made to pass through on the way to a spectral life in our cellar with all the other dead. Sometimes, when Mr. Wishnow's supply of medicine had to be refilled at the drugstore, Seldon would hurry up the stairs to ask if I wanted to go with him, and because I had learned from my parents that Seldon's father was doomed-and because Seldon himself acted as if he knew nothing about it-there was no way I could think of to refuse him, even though I'd never liked being with anyone so nakedly eager to be befriended. Seldon was a child transparently under the sway of his loneliness, undeservedly rich with sorrow and working much too hard to achieve the permanent smile, one of those skinny, pallid, gentle-faced boys who embarrass everyone by throwing a ball like a girl but also the smartest kid in our class and the schoolwide whiz at arithmetic. Oddly, there was nobody in gym class better than Seldon at scrambling up and down the ropes that dangled from the gymnasium's high ceiling, his aerial nimbleness integrally related-according to one of our teachers-to his unchallengeable adroitness with numbers. He was already a little champ at chess, which his father had taught him, and so whenever I accompanied him to the drugstore I knew there was no way to prevent my winding up later at the chessboard in his family's darkened living room-dark to save electricity and dark because the drapes were now drawn all the time to keep the neighborhood's morbidly curious from peering in at Seldon's step-by-step descent into fatherlessness. Undeterred by my stern resistance, Solitary Seldon (as he'd been nicknamed by Earl Axman, whose mother's overnight mental collapse had been a startling parental catastrophe of another order) would try to teach me for the millionth time how to move the pieces and play the game while, behind the back bedroom door, his father coughed so frequently and with so much force that there seemed to be not one father but four, five, six fathers in there coughing themselves to death.
In less than a week it was I and not Alvin who was bandaging his stump, and by then I'd practiced enough on myself-and without again throwing up-that he hadn't once to complain of the bandages being too loose or too tight. I did this nightly-even after the stump had healed and he was walking regularly on the artificial leg-to stave off a resurgence of the swelling. All the while the stump was healing, the artificial leg had been at the back of the clothes closet, largely hidden from sight by the shoes on the floor and by the trousers hanging down from the crossrod. It still took some doing not to notice it, but I was determined and didn't know what it was made of till the day Alvin took it out to put on. Except for its eerily replicating the shape of the lower half of a real lower limb, everything about it was horrible, but horrible and a wonder both, beginning with what Alvin called his harness: the dark leather thigh-corset that laced up the front and extended from just below the buttock to the top of the kneecap and that was attached to the prosthesis by hinged steel joints on either side of the knee. The stump, with a long white woolen sock pulled over it, fit snugly into a cushioned socket carved into the top of the prosthesis, which was fashioned of hollowed-out wood with air holes punched into it and not, as I'd been imagining, of a length of black rubber resembling a comic-book bludgeon. At the end of the leg was an artificial foot that flexed only a few degrees and was cushioned with a sponge sole. It screwed neatly into the leg without any of the hardware showing, and though it looked more like a wooden shoetree than a living foot with five separate toes, when Alvin slipped into his socks and shoes-the socks washed by my mother, the shoes shined by me-you'd have thought that the feet were both his own.
The first day back on his artificial leg Alvin exercised in the alleyway by walking back and forth from the garage at the far end to the scrawny hedge enclosing the tiny front yard, but never a step farther, to where he could be seen by someone out on the street. The second day he again exercised alone in the morning, but when I got home from school he took me outdoors with him for another session, this time not just concentrating on his walking but pretending that the soundness of his stump and the fit of his prosthesis-and the long future ahead as a one-legged man-weren't weighing on his mind. The following week Alvin was wearing the leg around the house all day, and the week after that, he said to me, "Go get the football." Only we didn't own a football-owning a football was as big a deal as owning cleats or shoulder pads, and no kid had one who wasn't "rich." And I couldn't just go and sign one out from the playground back of the school unless we were going to use it right there, so what I did-I who'd not stolen anything so far other than some change from my parents' pockets-what I did without a moment's hesitation was to stroll down Keer Avenue to where there were one-family houses with front and back lawns and case every driveway until I saw what I was after-a football to steal, a real leather Wilson football, scuffed from the pavement, with worn leather lacing and a bladder you inflated, that some kid with money had left unattended. I tucked it under my arm and took off, tearing all the way up the hill to Summit Avenue as if I were returning a kickoff for old Notre Dame.
That afternoon we practiced pass plays in the alleyway for close to an hour, and at night, when we examined the stump together behind our bedroom's closed door, we saw not one sign of its breaking down, even though while tossing me his perfect left-handed spirals Alvin had been taking practically the whole of his weight on the artificial limb. "I didn't have a choice" is the defense I would have formulated had I been caught in the act on Keer Avenue that day. My cousin Alvin wanted a football, Your Honor. He lost his leg fighting Hitler and now he's home and he wanted a football. What else could I possibly do?
By then a month had passed since the awful homecoming at Penn Station and, though it wasn't necessarily pleasant, I'd feel no revulsion to speak of when, while going for my shoes in the morning, I reached to the back of the closet for Alvin's prosthesis and handed it across to where he was seated on the bed in his under-shorts, waiting his turn in the bathroom. The grimness was fading and he'd begun gaining weight, gorging himself between meals on fistfuls of whatever was in the refrigerator, and his eyes didn't look so enormous, and his hair had grown thick again, wavy hair so black it had a waxen sheen, and as he sat there semihelpless with his stump exposed, there was more each morning for a boy who worshiped him to worship, and what there was to pity was a little less impossible to bear.
Soon Alvin was no longer confining himself to the alleyway, and without having to rely on the crutches or the cane that it humiliated him to use in public, he was all over the place on his artificial leg, shopping for my mother at the butcher's, the bakery, and the vegetable store, buying a hotdog for himself down at the corner, taking the bus not only to the dentist on Clinton Avenue but all the way on to Market Street to buy a new shirt at Larkey's-and also, as I didn't yet know, dropping by the playing fields back of the high school with his separation pay in his pocket to see who might be hanging around wanting to play poker or shoot craps. After school one day, the two of us made room in the storage bin for the wheelchair, and that night after dinner I reported to my mother something that had dawned on me at school. Wherever I was and no matter what I was supposed to be doing, I found myself thinking about Alvin and how I could get him to forget about his prosthesis-and so I said to my mother, "If Alvin had a zipper on the side of his pant leg, it would be easier for him, wouldn't it, to get in and out of his pants when he's got his leg on?" The next morning, on her way to work, my mother dropped off a pair of Alvin's army trousers with a neighborhood seamstress who worked out of her house, and the seamstress was able to open the side seam and sew in a zipper that extended some six inches up the uncuffed left pant leg. That night when Alvin pulled on the trousers after having undone the zipper, the pant leg passed easily up over the prosthesis without his having to curse everyone on earth just because he was getting dressed. And when he closed the zipper, you couldn't see it. "You don't even know it's there!" I cried. In the morning, we put all his other trousers in a paper bag for my mother to take to the seamstress to fix. "I couldn't live without you," Alvin said to me when we went to bed that night. "I couldn't put my pants on without you," and he gave me to keep forever the Canadian medal that he'd been awarded "for performance under exceptional circumstances." It was a circular silver medal, on one side King George VI in profile and on the other a triumphant lion standing on the body of a dragon. I of course cherished it and began to wear it regularly, but with the narrow green ribbon from which it hung pinned to my undershirt so no one would see it and question my loyalty to the United States. I left it in my drawer at home only on days I had gym and we had to strip off our outer shirts to exercise.
And where did this leave Sandy? Because he was himself so busy, he seemed at first not to notice my breakneck transformation into personal valet to a decorated Canadian war hero who'd now gone ahead and decorated me; and when he did-and was made miserable at first not so much because of Alvin's involvement with me, which was bound to follow from our new sleeping arrangement, but because of the hostile indifference Alvin evinced toward him-it was too late to oust me from the great supporting role (with its nauseating duties) that I'd virtually been forced to undertake and that, to Sandy's surprise, had elicited such sublime recognition in the waning years of my long career as his little brother.
And all of this had been achieved without my once alluding to Sandy's affiliation, by way of Aunt Evelyn and Rabbi Bengelsdorf, with our present hateful administration. Everyone, including my brother, had avoided speaking of the OAA and Just Folks anywhere near Alvin, convinced that until he came to understand how the enormous popularity of Lindbergh's isolationist policies had begun to win even the support of many Jews-and how it was far less traitorous than it might appear for a Jewish boy Sandy's age to have been drawn to the adventure that Just Folks offered-there'd be nothing to mitigate the outrage of the most self-sacrificing and staunchest Lindbergh-hater of us all. But Alvin seemed already to have sensed that Sandy had let him down and, being Alvin, didn't bother disguising his feelings. I'd said nothing, my parents had said nothing, certainly Sandy hadn't said anything to incriminate himself in Alvin's eyes, and yet Alvin had come to know (or to behave as though he knew) that the first one to welcome him home at the train station had also been first to sign on with the fascists.
Nobody was sure what Alvin was going to do next. There would be problems finding a job because not everyone was going to hire somebody who was considered a cripple, a traitor, or both. However, it was essential, my parents said, to thwart any inclination Alvin might have to do nothing and just sulk and feel sorry for himself for the rest of his life while squeaking by on his pension. My mother wanted him to use his monthly disability check to put himself through college. She had asked around and been told that if he spent a year at Newark Academy, earning B's for the courses he'd got D's and F's in at Weequahic, more than likely he'd be able to get into the University of Newark the following year. But my father couldn't imagine Alvin voluntarily going back to the twelfth grade, even at a downtown private school; at twenty-two and after all he'd been through, he needed as quickly as possible to get a job with a future, and for this my father proposed Alvin's contacting Billy Steinheim. Billy was the son who'd befriended Alvin back when he was Abe's driver, and if Billy was willing to make the case to his father for giving Alvin a second chance, maybe they would agree to find a place for him in the firm, a lowly job for now but one in which he could redeem himself in Abe Steinheim's eyes. If need be, and only if need be, Alvin could get a start with Uncle Monty, who'd already come around to offer his nephew work at the produce market; that had been in those bad early days when Alvin's stump was seriously broken down and he was still in bed most of the time and wouldn't allow the shades to be raised in our room out of his dread of catching so much as a glimpse of the little world in which he'd once been whole. Driving home from Penn Station in the car with my father and Sandy, he'd shut his eyes once the high school came into view rather than be reminded of the innumerable times he'd come bounding out of that building at the end of the day unimpeded by bodily torment and equipped to pursue whatever he wanted.
It was on the very afternoon before Uncle Monty's visit that I was a little late returning from school-it had been my turn to stay to clean the blackboards-and got home to discover that Alvin was gone. I couldn't find him in his bed or in the bathroom or anywhere else in the flat, and so I ran outside to look for him in the backyard and then, bewildered, raced back into the house where, from the foot of the stairwell, I heard faint moaning sounds rising from below-ghosts, the suffering ghosts of Alvin's mother and father! When I edged down the cellar stairs to see if they could be seen there as well as heard, what I saw instead, up by the front wall of the cellar, was Alvin himself peering out of the horizontal little glass slit that looked at street level onto Summit Avenue. He was in his bathrobe, a hand to help him maintain his balance clutching the narrow sill. The other hand I couldn't see. He was using it for something that I was too young to know anything about. Through a little circle of window that had been cleared of grime, he was watching the high school girls who lived on Keer Avenue walk home from Weequahic along our street. Their legs scooting by the front hedge was about all that he could have possibly seen, but seeing that much was enough and caused him to moan with what I took to be anguish at his no longer himself having two legs to walk on. I retreated silently up the stairs and out the back door and squatted in the farthest corner of our garage, plotting to run away to New York to live with Earl Axman. Only because it was getting dark and I had homework to do, did I return to the house, stopping first to peek into the cellar to see if Alvin was still there. He wasn't, and so I dared to descend the stairs, dashing quickly past the wringer and around the drains, and once at the window and up on my toes-intending only to look out at the street the way he did-I discovered the whitewashed wall beneath the window slick and syrupy with an abundance of goo. Since I didn't know what masturbation was, I of course didn't know what ejaculate was. I thought it was pus. I thought it was phlegm. I didn't know what to think, except that it was something terrible. In the presence of a species of discharge as yet mysterious to me, I imagined it was something that festered in a man's body and then came spurting from his mouth when he was completely consumed by grief.
The afternoon Uncle Monty stopped by to see Alvin, he was on his way downtown to Miller Street, where, since he was fourteen years old, he'd been working all night long at the market, arriving at around five and getting home only at nine the next morning to eat his big meal and go to sleep for the day. That was the life lived by the richest member of our family. His two children fared better. Linda and Annette, who were a little older than Sandy and exhibited the painful shyness of girls who tiptoe around a tyrannical father, had lots of clothes and attended suburban Columbia High School in Maplewood, where there were more Jewish kids who had lots of clothes and whose fathers, like Monty, each owned a Caddy for themselves and had a second car in the garage for the convenience of the wife and the grown children. Living with them all in the big Maplewood house was my grandmother, who also had a lot of clothes, all bought for her by her most successful son and none of which she wore other than on the High Holidays and when Monty made her get dressed up to go out to eat with the family on Sundays. The restaurants weren't sufficiently kosher to meet her standards, so all she ever ordered was the a la carte prisoner's meal of bread and water, and then she never knew how to act in a restaurant anyway. Once when she saw a busboy carrying a staggering load of dishes back to the kitchen, she'd gotten up to go over and help him. Uncle Monty cried, "Ma! No! Loz im tsu ru! Let the boy be!" and when she slapped his hand away had to be pulled back to the table by the sleeve of her ridiculously sequined dress. There was a black woman, known as "the girl," who came by bus from Newark to clean two days a week, but that didn't stop Grandma from going down on her knees when no one was around to scrub the kitchen and bathroom floors or from doing her own wash on a washboard despite the presence in Monty's finished basement of a brand-new $ 99 Bendix Home Laundry. My aunt Tillie, Monty's wife, was endlessly complaining because her husband slept all day and was never home at night, though everyone else in the family considered that-far more than her own new Oldsmobile-to be her good luck.
Alvin was lying in bed and still in pajamas at four in the afternoon on that January day when Monty first dropped by to see him and to dare ask the question whose answer none of us exactly knew-"How the hell did you manage to lose a leg?" Since Alvin had been so uncompanionable when I got home from school, responding with a grunt of disgust to whatever I offered to cheer him up, I hardly expected our least lovable relative to elicit any response at all.
But the intimidating presence of Uncle Monty, with the ever-present cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, was such that not even Alvin, in those early days, could tell him to shut up and go away. On that particular afternoon Alvin couldn't begin to mimic the brash defiance that had enabled him to hop like a marvel across the Penn Station concourse upon arriving back home as an amputee.
"France," Alvin hollowly replied to the big question.
"Worst country in the world," Monty told him, and with no lack of certainty. As a twenty-one-year-old in the summer of 1918, Monty had himself fought in France against the Germans in the second bloody Battle of the Marne, and then in the Argonne Forest when the Allies broke through on the Germans' western front, and so, of course, he knew everything about France.
"I'm not asking you where," Monty said, "I'm asking you how."
"How," repeated Alvin.
"Spit it out, kid. It'll do you good."
He knew that too-what would do Alvin good.
"Where were you," he asked, "when you got hit? And don't tell me 'the wrong place.' All your life you been in the wrong place."
"We were waiting for the boat to get us out."
Here he closed his eyes as though hoping never to open them again. But instead of stopping right there, as I was praying for him to do-"Shot a German," he suddenly said.
"And?" said Monty.
"He was out there screaming for the rest of the night."
"So? So? Go on. So he was screaming. So what?"
"So near dawn, before the boat's due in, I crawled over to where he was. Maybe fifty yards away. By then he was already dead. But I crawled around to the top of him and I shot him twice in the head. Then I spit on the son of a bitch. And in that second they threw the grenade. I got it in both legs. On one of my legs the foot was twisted around. Broken and twisted. That one they could fix. They operated and fixed it. They put a cast on it. They straightened it out. But the other was gone. I looked down and I saw one foot backwards and one leg dangling. The left leg just about amputated already."
There it was, and nothing like the heroic reality that I had so shallowly imagined.
"Out in no man's land all alone," Monty told him, "could be you were hit by one of your own. It's not yet light, it's half-light, a guy hears gunfire, he panics-bingo, he yanks the pin."
As for that surmise, Alvin had nothing to say.
Anyone else might have understood and relented, if only because of the perspiration beading Alvin's forehead and the droplets pooled in the hollow of his throat and the fact that he still wouldn't open his eyes. But not my uncle-he understands and doesn't relent. "And how come you didn't get left there? After pulling that stunt, how come they didn't just leave you to die?"
"There was mud everywhere" was Alvin's vacant reply. "The ground was mud. All I remember is that there was mud."
"Who saved you, misfit?"
"They took me. I must have been out of it. Came and took me."
"I'm trying to picture your brain, Alvin, and I can't. Spits. He spits. And that's the story of how he loses a leg."
"Some things you don't know why you do them." It was I who was speaking. What did I know? But I was telling my uncle, "You just do them, Uncle Monty. You can't not."
"You can't not, Phillie, when you're a professional misfit." To Alvin he said, "So now what? You going to lay there living off disability checks? You going to live like a sharpie off your luck? Or would you maybe consider supporting yourself like the rest of us dumb mortals do? There's a job at the market for you when you're up out of bed. You start at the bottom, hosing down the floor and grading tomatoes, you start at the bottom with the buggy-luggers and the schleppers, but there's a job there working for me, and a paycheck every week. You pocket half the take at the Esso station, but I'll go with you anyway because you're still Jack's kid, and for my brother Jack I do anything. I wouldn't be where I am without Jack. Jack taught me the produce business and then he died. Just like Steinheim wanted to teach you the building business. But nobody can teach you, misfit. Throws the keys in Steinheim's face. Too big for Abe Steinheim. Only Hitler is big enough for Alvin Roth."
In the kitchen, in a drawer with the potholders and the oven thermometer, my mother kept a long stiff needle and heavy thread to truss up the Thanksgiving turkey after it was stuffed. It was the only instrument of torture, aside from the wringer, that I could think of that we owned, and I wanted to go in and get it and use it to shut my uncle's mouth.
At the bedroom door, before leaving for the market, Monty turned back to summarize. Bullies love to summarize. The redundant upbraiding summary-nothing to equal it outside the old-fashioned flogging. "Your buddies risked everything to save you. Went in and dragged you out under fire. Didn't they? And for what? So you could spend the rest of your life shooting craps with Margulis? So you can play seven-card stud up at the schoolyard? So you can go back and pump gas and steal Simkowitz blind? You make every mistake in the book. Everything you do you do wrong. Even shooting Germans you do wrong. Why is that? Why do you throw keys at people? Why do you spit? Someone who is already dead-and you spit? Why? Because life wasn't handed to you on a silver platter like it was handed to the rest of the Roths? If it wasn't for Jack, Alvin, I wouldn't be standing here wasting my breath. There is nothing you have earned. Let's be clear about that. Nothing. For twenty-two years you have remained a disaster. I'm doing this for your father, sonny, not for you. I'm doing it for your grandmother. 'Help the boy,' she tells me, so I'm helping you. Once you figure out how you want to make your fortune, come around on your pegleg and we'll talk."
Alvin didn't cry, didn't curse, didn't holler, even after Monty was out the back door and into his car and he could have unleashed his every evil thought. He was too far gone to roar that day. Or even to crack. Only I did, after he refused to open his eyes and look at me when I begged him to; only I cracked, alone later in the one place in our house where I knew I could go to be apart from the living and all that they cannot not do.