Philip Roth - The Plot Against America

Minutes later Aunt Evelyn was being led by my mother up the stairwell and into our apartment. There's no need to describe the disturbance this caused in the Cucuzza household or the antagonistic response to the frightful figure of my aunt by that frightful figure who was Joey's grandmother-the farcical edge of suffering is familiar to everyone. I was sent to sleep in my parents' bed, and my mother and Aunt Evelyn took over my room, where my mother's next great task was to prevent her sister from getting up out of Sandy's bed and stealing into the kitchen to turn on the gas and kill us all.

The round trip of fifteen hundred miles was the adventure of Sandy's lifetime. It was something more fateful for my father. His Guadalcanal, I suppose, his Battle of the Bulge. At forty-one he was too old to be drafted when, that December, with Lindbergh's policies discredited and Wheeler disgraced and Roosevelt back in the White House, America finally went to war against the Axis powers, so this was as close as he would ever come to the fear, fatigue, and physical suffering of the frontline soldier. Wearing his high steel neck brace and nursing two broken ribs and a sutured facial wound and exhibiting a mouthful of broken teeth-and carrying Mr. Cucuzza's extra pistol in the glove compartment for protection against the people who'd already murdered 122 Jews in those very regions of the country toward which the car was headed-he drove the seven hundred and fifty miles to Kentucky stopping only to get gas and go to the toilet. And after sleeping at the Mawhinneys' for five hours and eating something, turned around and started back, though now with a painful infection simmering along the length of his suture and with Seldon, sick to his stomach and feverish in the back seat, hallucinating about his mother and all but performing feats of magic to do what he could to bring her back.

The trip out had taken just over twenty-four hours, but the one back took three times as long because of the many times they had to stop for Seldon to vomit by the side of the road or to pull down his pants and squat in a ditch, and because, in just a twenty-mile radius of Charleston, West Virginia (where they went round in circles, hopelessly lost, instead of proceeding east and north toward Maryland), the car broke down on six separate occasions in little over a day: once in the midst of the railroad tracks, power lines, and massive conveyors of Alloy, a town of two hundred where enormous mounds of ore and silica surrounded the factory buildings of the Electro-Metallurgical Company plant; once in the nearby little town of Boomer, where flames from the coke ovens reached so high my father, standing after sundown in the middle of the unlighted street, could read (or misread) the road map by the incandescence; once in Belle, yet another of those tiny, hellish industrial hamlets, where the fumes from the Du Pont ammonia plant almost knocked them flat when they got out of the car to lift the hood and try to figure out what was wrong; again in South Charleston, the city that looked to Seldon like "a monster" because of the steam and the smoke wreathing the freight yards and the warehouses and the long dark roofs of the soot-blackened factories; and twice on the very outskirts of the state capital, Charleston. There, around midnight, in order to call a tow truck, my father had to cross a railroad embankment on foot and then descend a hill of junk to a bridge that spanned a river lined with coal barges and dredging barges and tugboats to go looking for a riverfront dive with a pay phone, meanwhile leaving the two boys alone together in the car just across the river road from an endless jumble of a plant-sheds and shanties, sheet-iron buildings and open coal cars, cranes and loading booms and steel-frame towers, electric ovens and roaring forges, squat storage tanks and high cyclone fences-a plant that was, if you believed the sign the size of a billboard, "The World's Biggest Manufacturer of Axes, Hatchets, and Scythes."

That factory brimming with sharpened blades dealt the final blow to the little that was left of Seldon's equilibrium-by morning he was screaming that he was going to be scalped by the Indians. And oddly he was on to something: an analogy could be made, even if one weren't delirious, to the uninvited white settlers who first poured through the Appalachian barrier into the favorite hunting grounds of the Delaware and Algonquin tribes, except that instead of alien, strange-looking whites affronting the local inhabitants with their rapaciousness, these were alien, strange-looking Jews provocative merely by their presence. This time around, though, those violently defending their lands from usurpation and their way of life from destruction weren't Indians led by the great Tecumseh but upright American Christians unleashed by the acting president of the United States.

It was by then October 15-the very Thursday when Mayor La Guardia was arrested in New York, when the First Lady was incarcerated at Walter Reed, when FDR was "detained" along with the "Roosevelt Jews" alleged to have masterminded the kidnapping of Lindbergh père, when Rabbi Bengelsdorf was arrested in Washington and Aunt Evelyn went to pieces in our storage bin. On that same day my father and Sandy were searching the West Virginia mountains for the county's one licensed physician (as opposed to the licensed barber, who'd already offered his services), to try to get him to give Seldon something to quiet him down. The man they found on a rural dirt road was over seventy and reeking of whiskey, a good, kind, spry old "Doc" who ran a country clinic out of a little frame house where the patients who lined up waiting their turn on the front porch were, as Sandy later described them to me, the raggediest-looking bunch of white people he had ever seen. The doc figured Seldon's delirium stemmed mainly from dehydration and directed Seldon to spend an hour taking down ladle after ladle of water from the well out near the creekbed behind the house. He also drained the pus from my father's infected face to prevent blood poisoning, which in those days, when antibiotics were just discovered and not widely available, would probably have spread through his system and killed him before he made it home. The old guy displayed less talent stitching the wound back up than he had in diagnosing the incipient septicemia, with the result that for the rest of his life my father looked as though he'd sustained a dueling scar while a student at Heidelberg. Afterward it seemed not simply a sign of the contingencies of that trip but, to me, the imprint of his insane stoicism. When finally he reached Newark he was so depleted by fever and chills-and a racking cough no less alarming than Mr. Wishnow's-that Mr. Cucuzza took him straight from our kitchen, where he'd fainted at the dinner table, and once again to the Beth Israel Hospital, where he very nearly died from pneumonia. But there was no way of stopping him until Seldon was saved. My father was a rescuer and orphans were his specialty. A displacement even greater than having to move to Union or to leave for Kentucky was to lose one's parents and be orphaned. Witness, he would tell you, what had happened to Alvin. Witness what had happened to his sister-in-law after Grandma had died. No one should be motherless and fatherless. Motherless and fatherless you are vulnerable to manipulation, to influences-you are rootless and you are vulnerable to everything.

Sandy in the meantime perched on the railing of the clinic's front porch sketching the patients, one of them a thirteen-year-old girl named Cecile. These were the years when my precocious brother was three different boys in the course of twenty-four months, the years when, for all his unflappability, he could seem to do nothing satisfactory even by excelling: my parents didn't like it when he went to work for Lindbergh and became Aunt Evelyn's oratorical boy wonder and New Jersey's leading authority on tobacco farming, they didn't like it when he left Lindbergh for the girls and overnight became the neighborhood's youngest Don Juan, and now, having volunteered to guide my father a quarter of the way across the continent to the Mawhinney farm-and hoping by an exhibition of genuine bravery to recapture his prestige as the older son and reenter the family from which he'd been torn away-he virtually subverted his cause by an amusement that must have seemed to him wholly harmless for being "artistic": drawing nubile Cecile. When my father-with a new bandage covering his cheek-came out of the doctor's office and saw what Sandy was up to, he took him by the belt of his trousers and dragged him, sketchpad and all, clear off the side of the porch and out to the road and into the car. "Are you crazy," my father whispered, peering furiously down at him over his neck brace, "are you nuts, drawing her?" "It's only her face," Sandy tried to explain, holding the sketchpad to his chest-and lying. "I don't care what it is! You never heard of Leo Frank? You never heard of the Jew they lynched in Georgia because of that little factory girl? Stop drawing her, damn it! Stop drawing any of them! These people don't like being drawn-can't you see that? We came out to Kentucky to get this boy because they have burned his mother to death in her car! For Christ's sake, put those drawing things away, and don't draw any more girls!"