Philip Roth - The Plot Against America

Because she had to use the toilet and to eat something-because I didn't know what I could do other than to give my aunt whatever she needed-I had no choice but to bring her back upstairs with me. I sliced a piece of bread from the half a loaf that was left from dinner, buttered it, poured her a glass of milk, and, after she'd gone to the bathroom-and I'd pulled the kitchen shades so that nobody could see in from across the way-she came into the kitchen and feverishly gobbled everything down. Her coat and her purse were in her lap and she was still wearing her hat, and I hoped that as soon as she'd had enough to eat, she'd get up and go home so that I could go down and get the suitcase, pack it, and run away before my mother returned from the meeting. But once she'd eaten she began to babble, repeating again and again that she knew the truth and because of that they were going to kill her. They'd called out the mounted police, she informed me, to find where she was hiding.

In the silence that followed that startling remark-which, in those circumstances, when suddenly there were no longer any predictable happenings, I was enough of a child to almost believe-we followed the audible progress of a single horse prancing up the block toward Chancellor Avenue. "They know I'm here," she said.

"They don't, Aunt Evelyn," but the words had no hold on me as I spoke them. " I didn't know you were here."

"Then why did you come looking for me?"

"I didn't. I was looking for something else. The police are outside," I told her, convinced that I was deliberately lying even while speaking as earnestly as I could, "the police are outside because of the anti-Semitism. They're patrolling the streets to protect us."

She smiled the smile reserved for trusting souls. "Tell me another one, Philip."

Now nothing that I knew coincided with anything either of us was saying. The shadow of her madness had crept over me without my as yet understanding that while hiding in our storage bin-or perhaps earlier than that, while watching the FBI take the rabbi away in handcuffs-she had indeed lost her mind. Unless, of course, she'd already begun hopelessly slipping into insanity the night at the White House when she danced with von Ribbentrop. That was to be my father's theory-that long before the rabbi's arrest, when Bengelsdorf was astonishing all of Jewish Newark with the unseemliness of how high he had climbed in the president's esteem, she'd abandoned herself to the same credulity that had transformed the entire country into a madhouse: the worship of Lindbergh and his conception of the world.

"Do you want to lie down?" I asked, dreading that she would say yes. "Do you need to rest? Do you want me to call the doctor?"

Here she took my hand so firmly that her fingernails bit into my flesh. "Philip dearest, I know everything. "

"Do you know what happened to President Lindbergh? Is that what you mean?"

"Where is your mother?"

"At school. At a meeting."

"You'll bring me food and water, darling boy."

"I will? Sure. Where?"

"To the cellar. I can't drink from the laundry sink. Someone will find me."

"You don't want that," I said, thinking immediately of Joey's grandmother and the fiery breath of madness that wafted from her. "I'll bring everything." But having promised her that, I couldn't possibly run away.

"Would you happen to have an apple?" asked Aunt Evelyn.

I opened the refrigerator. "No, no apple. We're out of apples. My mother hasn't been able to do much shopping. But there's a pear, Aunt Evelyn. You want that?"

"Yes. And another piece of bread. Make another piece of bread."

Her voice kept changing. Now she sounded as though we were doing nothing more than getting ready for a picnic, making the best of what we had on hand to take to Weequahic Park to eat by the lake under a tree, as though the events of the day were as unimportant to us as probably they were to everybody else in America: a minor nuisance to the Christians, if that. As there were more than thirty million Christian families in America and only about a million Jewish families, why, really, should it bother them?

I cut a second slice from the loaf for her to take down to the cellar and smeared it extra heavily with butter. If asked later about the bread missing from the loaf, I'd say that Joey ate it, that and the pear, before he ran off to see the horses.

When she got home to learn that my father hadn't called, my mother was unable to hide her response. Forlornly she looked at the kitchen clock, remembering perhaps the time that it used to be at this hour: bedtime, when all that was required was for the children to wash their faces and brush their teeth for the day dense with fulfillable duties to be rounded off to the satisfaction of all. Now that was nine o'clock-or so we'd been led to believe by that wholly convincing, immutable lifelikeness that now turned out to have been a sham.

And the day in, day out routine of school-was that a sham too, a cunning deception perpetrated to soften us up with rational expectations and foster nonsensical feelings of trust? "Why no school?" I asked when she told me that tomorrow we'd have the day off. "Because," my mother replied, making recourse to the colorless formulation suggested to the parents in order for them to be truthful without frightening the children unduly, "the situation has further deteriorated." "What situation?" I asked. "Our situation." "Why? What happened now?" "Nothing happened. It's just better that you children stay home tomorrow. Where is Joey? Where is your friend?" "He ate some bread, and he took the pear, and he left. He took the pear out of the refrigerator and ran outside. He went to see the horses." "And you're sure that no one phoned?" she asked, simply too exhausted to be angry with Joey for letting her down at a moment like this. "I want to know why there's no school, Ma." "Must you know tonight?" "Yes. Why can't I go to school?" "Well…it's because there may be a war with Canada." "With Canada? When?" "No one knows. But it's best if you all stay home until we see what's going on." "But why are we going to war with Canada?" "Please, Philip, I can't take much more tonight. I've told you everything I know. You insisted and I told you. Now we just have to wait. We have to wait and see like everyone else." And then, as if the unknown whereabouts of my father and brother hadn't given rein to her worst imaginings-which was that we two were now, like the Wishnows, just a widow and her son-she said (trying doggedly to follow the protocol of the old nine o'clock), "I want you to wash up and go to bed."

Bed-as though as a place of warmth and comfort, rather than an incubator for dread, bed still existed.

War with Canada was far less of an enigma to me than what Aunt Evelyn was going to use for a toilet during the night. As best I could understand, the United States was at last entering into the worldwide war, not on the side of England and the British Commonwealth, whom everyone had expected we would support while FDR was president, but on the side of Hitler and Hitler's allies, Italy and Japan. Moreover, two full days had passed since we had heard from my father and Sandy, and for all we knew they had been killed as horribly as Seldon's mother by the rioting anti-Semites; there was, in addition, to be no school tomorrow, suggesting to me that there might never be school again if President Wheeler was now to inflict on us the laws we knew to have been imposed by the Nazis on the Jewish children of Germany. A political catastrophe of unimaginable proportions was transforming a free society into a police state, but a child is a child, and all I could think about in my bed was that when the time came to move her bowels, Aunt Evelyn would have to do it on our storage bin floor. This was the uncontrollable event that weighed on me in lieu of everything else, that loomed over me like the embodiment of everything else, and that blotted out everything else. The most negligible danger of all, and it came to assume such momentous significance that around midnight I tiptoed into the bathroom and at the back of the bottom shelf of the towel closet I found the bedpan we had bought for Alvin to use in an emergency when he first got home from Canada. I was already at the back door and ready to carry the bedpan down to Aunt Evelyn when my mother confronted me in her nightgown, aghast at the picture I presented of a small boy so overwhelmed he was going out of his mind.