Philip Roth - The Plot Against America

With every best wish,

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The second time the FBI entered our lives, it was my father who was under surveillance. The same agent who'd stopped to question me about Alvin, on the day that Mr. Wishnow hanged himself (and who'd questioned Sandy on the bus, my mother at the store, and my father at the office), showed up at the produce market and hung around the diner where the men would go to eat and get coffee in the middle of the night and, behaving as he'd done when Alvin began working for Uncle Monty, started asking around now about Alvin's uncle Herman and what he was saying to people about America and our president. Word got back to Uncle Monty through one of Longy Zwillman's henchmen, who passed on to Uncle Monty what Agent McCorkle had reported to him-namely, that after having housed and fed a traitor who'd fought for a foreign country, my father had now quit a good job with Metropolitan Life rather than participate in a government program designed to unify and strengthen the American people. Uncle Monty told Longy's guy that his brother was a poor schnook with no education who had two kids and a wife to support and couldn't do much harm to America by schlepping produce crates six nights a week. And Longy's guy listened sympathetically, according to Uncle Monty, who, with none of the decorum ordinarily practiced in our house, told us the whole story in our kitchen one Saturday afternoon-"and still the guy says to me, 'Your brother's gotta go.' So I told him, 'This is all bullshit. Tell Longy this is all part of the bullshit against Jews.' And the guy is himself a Jew, Niggy Apfelbaum, but what I say does not make a dent. Niggy goes back to Longy, and he tells him Roth don't do as he's told. What happens next? The Long One himself shows up, right there in my stinky little office and wearing a silk handmade suit. Tall, soft-spoken, dressed to kill-you see how he gets the movie stars. I said to him, 'I remember you from grade school, Longy. I could see even then you were going places.' So Longy says to me, 'I remember you, too. I could see even then you were going nowhere.' We started to laugh, and I told him, 'My brother needs a job, Longy. Can I not give my own brother a job?' 'And can I not have the FBI snooping around?' he asks me. 'I know all this,' I say, 'and didn't I get rid of my nephew Alvin because of the FBI? But with my own brother, it's not the same, is it? Look,' I tell him, 'twenty-four hours and I'll fix everything. If I don't, if I can't, Herman goes.' So I wait till after we close up the next morning, and I walk over to Sammy Eagle's, and sitting at the bar is the mick shmegeggy from the FBI. 'Let me buy your breakfast,' I tell him, and I order him a boilermaker, and I sit down next to him and I say, 'What do you got against Jews, McCorkle?' 'Nothing,' he says. 'Then why are you after my brother like this? What did he do to anybody?' 'Look, if I had something against Jews, would I be sitting here in Eagle's, would Sammy Eagle be my friend if I did?' He calls down the bar for Eagle to come over. 'Tell him,' McCorkle says, 'do I have anything against Jews?' 'Not that I know,' Eagle says. 'When your boy had the bar mitzvah, didn't I come and give him a tie clasp?' 'He still wears it,' Eagle tells me. 'See?' McCorkle says. 'I'm just doing my job, the way Sammy does his and you do yours.' 'And that's all my brother is doing,' I tell him. 'Fine. Good. So don't say I'm against the Jews.' 'My error,' I tell him, 'I apologize.' And meantime I slip him the envelope, the little brown envelope, and that's that."

Here my uncle turned to me and said, "I understand you're a horse thief. I understand you stole a horse from the church. Smart boy. Let me see." I leaned over and showed him where the horse's hoof had opened up my head. He laughed when he ran his finger lightly over the length of the scar and around the shaved patch where the hair was just growing in. "May you have many more," he told me-and then, as he'd been doing for as long as I could remember, he lifted me roughly onto one of his knees so that I could straddle it like, of all things, a horse. "You been to a bris, ain't you?" he asked, and began to give me the up-and-down ride by raising and lowering his thigh. "You know when they circumcise the baby at the bris, you know what they do, don't you?" "They cut off the foreskin," I said. "And what do they do with the little foreskin? After it's off-do you know what they do?" "No," I told him. "Well," said Uncle Monty, "they save them up, and when they got enough they give them to the FBI to make agents out of." I couldn't help myself, and even though I knew I wasn't supposed to-and even though last time he'd told me the joke, he'd said, "They send them to Ireland to make priests out of"-I began to laugh. "What was in the envelope?" I asked him. "Take a guess," he said. "I don't know. Money?" "Money is right. You're a bright little horse thief. The money that makes all trouble go away."

Only later did I learn from my brother, who'd overheard my parents talking in their bedroom, that the full amount of the bribe given to McCorkle was to be repaid to Uncle Monty, out of my father's already paltry paycheck, at the rate of ten dollars per week over the next six months. And my father could do nothing about it. About the laboriousness of the work, about the mortifications attendant upon serving his brother, all he ever said was "He's been this way since he's ten years old, he'll be this way till he dies."

Aside from Saturdays and Sunday mornings, my father was hardly to be seen that summer. My mother, on the other hand, was now around all the time, and since Sandy and I had to be home at noon for lunch and again in the midafternoon to check in with her and be accounted for, neither of us could stray very far, and in the evenings we were forbidden to go anywhere beyond the school playing field a block from the house. Either my mother was keeping a very strict vigil over herself or she'd managed temporarily to make peace with all her chagrin, because though my father had taken a steep pay cut and the household budget required some difficult trimming, she showed no disabling signs of the improbabilities she'd confronted over the past year. Her resilience had a lot to do with her being back at a job whose compensations mattered more to her than those derived from selling dresses, work she hadn't shrunk from doing but that seemed to her meaningless measured against her normal pursuits. Just how troubling her worries continued to be would only be clear to me when a letter arrived from Estelle Tirschwell, reporting on the family's progress in Winnipeg. Every lunchtime I brought the mail upstairs with me from our mailbox in the front entryway, and if there was an envelope bearing Canadian postage, she immediately sat down at the kitchen table and, while Sandy and I ate our sandwiches, read the letter to herself twice over, then folded it up to carry around in her apron pocket to look at another ten times before passing it on to my father to read when he got up to go to the market-the letter for my father, the canceled Canadian stamps for me, to help get me started on a new collection.

Sandy's friends were suddenly the girls his age, the teenage girls whom he knew from school but had never examined so covetously before. He went to find them at the playground where the organized summer activities took place all day and into the early evening. I was there too, accompanied regularly now by Seldon. I'd watch Sandy with fluctuating feelings of trepidation and delight, as though my own brother had become a pickpocket or a professional shill. He'd park himself on a bench near the ping-pong table, where the girls tended to congregate, and he'd start making pencil drawings in his sketchpad of the cutest around; invariably they'd want to see the drawings, and so before the day was over, chances were good he'd be walking dreamily out of the playground hand in hand with one of them. Sandy's strong proclivity for infatuation was no longer galvanized by propagandizing for Just Folks or topping tobacco for the Mawhinneys but fomented by these girls. Either the fresh excitement of desire had transformed his existence with the same incredible swiftness that Kentucky had and, at fourteen and a half, he'd been recast anew in a single hormonal blast or, as I believed-with my own proclivity to grant him omnipotence-getting girls to go off with him was simply an amusing ruse, how he was biding his time until…Always with Sandy I thought there must be a great deal more going on than I could begin to understand, when in fact, despite the handsome boy's air of self-assurance, he had no more idea than anyone else why he took the bait. Lindbergh's Jewish tobacco farmer discovers breasts, and suddenly he turns up as just another teenager.