Philip Roth - The Plot Against America

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.