Philip Roth - The Plot Against America

"She's fine."

"She's getting married. Isn't that right, that she's getting married? You can at least answer that."

"Yes."

"And do you know who she's marrying?"

"Yes."

"You're a smart boy. I think you know more-a lot more. But you're too smart to tell me, aren't you?"

"She's marrying Rabbi Bengelsdorf," I said. "He's head of the OAA."

My saying that made him laugh. "Okay," he told me, "you go on home. Go home and eat your matzohs. Isn't that what makes you so smart? Eating the matzohs?"

We were now at the corner of Chancellor and Summit, and I could see the stoop of our house down at the end of the block. "Bye!" I cried, and didn't wait for the light to change but ran for home before I fell into his trap, if I hadn't fallen into it already.

There were three police cars parked on the street in front of our house, our alleyway was blocked off by an ambulance, and a couple of cops stood on the stoop talking together while another was posted beside the back door. The women on the block, most of them still in their aprons, were on their front stoops trying to figure out what was going on, and all the kids were huddled on the sidewalk across the street from our house, peering out at the cops and the ambulance from between the row of parked cars. Never before could I remember them silently gathered together like that, looking so apprehensive.

Our downstairs neighbor was dead. Mr. Wishnow had committed suicide. That was why everything I could never have expected to see was now right outside the door of our house. Weighing barely eighty pounds, he had been able to strangulate himself by stringing the living room curtain cords over the wooden rod in the back-foyer coat closet, then looping them around his neck and falling forward off the edge of the kitchen chair where he'd seated himself inside the closet. When Seldon, home from school, went to put his coat away, he found his father, in his pajamas, hanging facedown on the closet floor amid the family's rubbers and galoshes. My first thought on learning the news was that I no longer had to be fearful of hearing a coughing fit emanating from the dying man in the first-floor flat whenever I was alone in the cellar, or of hearing him in my bed on the floor above when I was trying to fall asleep. But then I realized that the ghost of Mr. Wishnow would now join the circle of ghosts already inhabiting the cellar and that, just because I was relieved he was dead, he would go out of his way to haunt me for the rest of my life.

Since I didn't know what else to do, I at first kneeled at the side of the parked cars, hiding there with the other kids. None of them had a conception any larger than my own of the cataclysm that had befallen the Wishnows, but it was from their whisperings that I pieced together how Mr. Wishnow had died and how he'd been found and learned that Seldon and his mother were inside with one of the policemen and the medics. And with the corpse. The corpse was what the kids were all waiting to see. I waited with them rather than wind up entering the back hallway just as they were carrying Mr. Wishnow down the stairs. Nor did I want to get home and have to sit there alone until my mother, my father, or Sandy appeared. As for Alvin, I wanted never to see him again or to be questioned about him by anyone.

The woman who emerged from the house accompanying the medics wasn't Mrs. Wishnow but my mother. I couldn't understand why she was home from work until it dawned on me that the dead father they were carrying away was my own. Yes, of course- my father had committed suicide. He couldn't take any more of Lindbergh and what Lindbergh was letting the Nazis do to the Jews of Russia and what Lindbergh had done to our family right here and so it was he who had hanged himself-in our closet.

I didn't have hundreds of memories of him then, I had just one, and it did not seem to me at all important enough to be the memory I ought to be having. Alvin's last memory of his father was of him closing the car door on his little boy's finger-mine of my father was of him greeting the stump of a man who begged every day outside his office building. "How you doin', Little Robert?" my father said, and the stump of a man replied, "How you, Herman?"

It was here that I edged myself between the closely parked cars and darted out across the street.

When I saw that the sheet covering my father's body and face couldn't possibly allow him to breathe, I began to wail.

"Don't, don't, darling," my mother said. "There's nothing to be frightened of." She put her arms around my head, held me to her, and repeated, "There's nothing to be frightened of. He was sick and he was suffering and he died. Now he's not suffering anymore."

"He was in the closet," I said.

"No, he wasn't. He was in his bed. He died in his bed. He was very, very sick. You knew that. That was why he coughed all the time."

By now the ambulance doors were swung open to receive the stretcher. The medics carefully maneuvered it inside and pulled the doors shut behind them. My mother stood next to me on the street, holding my hand in hers and to my amazement looking perfectly composed. Only when I made a move to break away from her and run after the ambulance, only when I cried, "He can't breathe!" did she finally realize what was torturing me.

"It's Mr. Wishnow-it's Mr. Wishnow who is dead." She shook me, gently shook me back and forth to bring me to my senses. "It's Seldon's father, dear-he died from his illness this afternoon."

I couldn't tell if she was lying to keep me from becoming more hysterical or if she was telling the wonderful truth.

"Seldon found him in the closet?"

"No. I told you-no. Seldon found his father in his bed. Seldon's mother wasn't home so he called the police. I came because Mrs. Wishnow called me at the store and asked me to help her. Do you understand? Daddy's at work. Daddy's working. Oh, what on earth have you been thinking? Daddy will be home for dinner very soon. So will Sandy. There's nothing to be afraid of. Everybody will be home, everybody is coming home, we'll have our dinner," she said reassuringly, "and everything is going to be fine."

But nothing was "fine." The FBI agent who'd grilled me about Alvin on Chancellor Avenue had earlier stopped by Hahne's dress department to question my mother, then by the Metropolitan's Newark office to question my father, and, just after Sandy left Aunt Evelyn's office for home, he had boarded my brother's bus and, from the seat alongside him, conducted yet another interrogation. Alvin wasn't at dinner to hear about any of this-just as we were sitting down to eat, he'd phoned and told my mother not to save anything for him. It seemed that every time he'd made a killing at poker or craps, Alvin took Shushy downtown with him to the Hickory Grill for a charcoal-broiled steak dinner. "Alvin's partner in crime," my father called Shushy. What he called Alvin that evening was ungrateful, stupid, reckless, ignorant, and incorrigible.

"And bitter," said my mother, sadly, "so bitter because of his leg."

"Well, I'm sick and tired of his leg," said my father. "He went to war. Who sent him? I didn't. You didn't. Abe Steinheim didn't. Abe Steinheim wanted to send him to college. He went to war on his own, and he's lucky he wasn't killed. He's lucky it was just his leg. This is it, Bess. I've had it with that boy. The FBI questions my children? Bad enough they harass you and me-and in my office, mind you, in front of the Boss! No," he told her. "This has to stop and stop now. This is a home. We are a family. He has dinner downtown with Shushy? Let him go live with Shushy."

"If only he would go to school," my mother said. "If only he would take a job."

"He has a job," my father replied. "Bum."

After we'd finished eating, my mother put a meal together for Seldon and Mrs. Wishnow, and my father helped her carry the plates downstairs while Sandy and I were left with the dinner dishes. We set to work at the sink as we did most nights, except that I couldn't shut up. I told him about the crap game. I told him about the FBI agent. I told him about Mr. Wishnow. "He didn't die in his bed," I said. "Mother's not telling us the truth. He committed suicide, only she doesn't want to say it. Seldon found him in the closet when he got home from school. He hung himself. That's why the police came."