Philip Roth - Nemesis

YES, HE COULD certainly use a few days on his own down the shore. That, in fact, was what he'd been planning on doing when the summer began — with Marcia gone, to head to the shore every weekend to dive the day away and then walk the boards to Asbury at night to eat his favorite seashore meal. The cellar was dank where he rented a cot and the water was rarely hot in the shower everyone used and there was sand in the sheets and towels, but, second only to throwing the javelin, diving was his favorite sport. Two days of diving would help him to shake loose, at least temporarily, from the preoccupation with his stricken boys and quiet his agitation over Kenny Blumenfeld's hysterical outbursts and maybe clear his head of the malice he felt toward God.

Then, when his grandmother was outside with the neighbors and he was about finished with cleaning up and had just sat down at the table in his sleeveless undershirt and briefs to drink yet another glass of ice water, Marcia called. Dr. Steinberg had agreed to wait for Mr. Cantor to talk with Marcia before he or Mrs. Steinberg said anything to her about the engagement, so she was calling without any knowledge of the conversation on the back porch the evening before. She was calling to tell him she loved him and she missed him and to learn what he had decided about coming to the camp to take over from Irv Schlanger as waterfront director.

"What should I tell Mr. Blomback?" she asked.

"Tell him yes," Mr. Cantor said, and he startled himself no less by what he'd just agreed to than he had done asking permission of Dr. Steinberg to become engaged to his daughter. "Tell him I will," he said.

Yet he'd had every intention of taking his grandmother's suggestion and going to the shore for the weekend and marshaling his forces so as to return to his job rejuvenated. If Jake and Dave could parachute into Nazi-occupied France on D-Day and help to anchor the Allied beachhead by fighting their way into Cherbourg against the stiffest German opposition, then surely he could face the dangers of running the playground at Chancellor Avenue School in the midst of a polio epidemic.

"Oh, Bucky," cried Marcia, "that's swell! Knowing you, I was so frightened you were going to say no. Oh, you're coming, you're coming to Indian Hill!"

"I'll have to call O'Gara and tell him, and he'll have to get somebody to take my place. O'Gara's the guy in charge of playgrounds at the superintendent's office. That could take a couple of days."

"Oh, do it as fast as you can!"

"I'll have to speak to Mr. Blomback myself. About the salary. I've got the rent and my grandmother to think about."

"I'm sure the salary's going to be no problem."

"And I have to talk to you about getting engaged," he said.

"What? You what?"

"We're getting engaged, Marcia. That's why I'm taking the job. I asked your father's permission last night over at the house. I'm coming to camp and we're getting engaged."

"We are?" she said, laughing. "Isn't it customary for the girl to be asked, even a girl as pliant as me?"

"Is it? I've never done it before. Will you be my fiancée?"

"Of course! Oh my goodness, Bucky, I'm so happy!"

"So am I," he said, "tremendously happy," and for the moment, because of this happiness, he was almost able to forget the betrayal of his playground kids; he was almost able to forget his outrage with God for the murderous persecution of Weequahic's innocent children. Talking to Marcia about their engagement, he was almost able to look the other way and to rush to embrace the security and predictability and contentment of a normal life lived in normal times. But when he hung up, there confronting him were his ideals — ideals of truthfulness and strength fostered in him by his grandfather, ideals of courage and sacrifice that he shared with Jake and Dave, ideals nurtured by him in boyhood to place himself beyond the reach of a crooked father's penchant for deceit — his ideals as a man demanding of him that he immediately reverse course and return for the rest of the summer to the work he had contracted to perform.

How could he have done what he'd just done?

IN THE MORNING he carried the equipment up from the storage room and organized two teams and got a softball game under way for the fewer than twenty kids who'd shown up to play. Then he returned to the basement to call O'Gara from his office and tell him that he was leaving his job at the end of the week to take over as waterfront director at a summer camp in the Poconos. That morning before he'd left for the playground, he'd gotten news over the radio that there were twenty-nine new polio cases in the city, sixteen of them in Weequahic.

"That's the second guy this morning," O'Gara said. "I got a Jewish guy over at Peshine Avenue playground who's quitting on me too." O'Gara was a tired old man with a big gut and an antagonistic manner who'd been running the city playgrounds for years and whose prowess as a Central High football player at the time of the First World War still constituted the culmination of his life. His brusqueness wasn't necessarily killing, yet it unsettled Mr. Cantor and left him feeling shifty and childishly grubbing about for the words to justify his decision. O'Gara's brusqueness wasn't unlike his grandfather's, perhaps because it was acquired on the same tough streets of the Third Ward. His grandfather was, of course, the last person he wanted to be thinking about while doing something so out of keeping with who he really was. He wanted to be thinking about Marcia and the Steinbergs and the future, but instead there was his grandfather to deliver the verdict with just a bit of an Irish intonation.

"The fellow I'm taking over for at the camp has been drafted," Mr. Cantor responded. "I've got to leave on Friday for the camp."

"This is what I get for giving you a plum job just a year out of college. You realize that you haven't exactly won my confidence by pulling a stunt like this. You realize that leaving me in the lurch in July like this isn't likely to make me disposed to ever hire you again, Cancer."

"Cantor," Mr. Cantor corrected him, as he always had to when they spoke.

"I don't care how many guys are away in the army," O'Gara said. "I don't like people quitting on me right in the midst of everything." And then he added, "Especially people who aren't in the army."

"I'm sorry to be leaving, Mr. O'Gara. And," he said, speaking in a shriller tone than he'd intended, "I'm sorry I'm not in the army — sorrier than you know." To make matters worse, he added, "I have to go. I have no choice."

"What?" O'Gara snapped back. "You have no choice, do you? Sure you got a choice. What you're doing is called making a choice. You're making your escape from the polio. You sign up for a job, and then there's the polio, and the hell with the job, the hell with the commitment, you run like hell as fast as you can. All you're doing is running away, Cancer, a world-champion muscleman like you. You're an opportunist, Cancer. I could say worse, but that will do." And then, with revulsion, he repeated, "An opportunist," as though the word stood for every degrading instinct that could possibly stigmatize a man.

"I have a fiancée at the camp," Mr. Cantor replied lamely.

"You had a fiancée at the camp when you signed on at Chancellor."

"No, no, I didn't," he rushed to say, as if to O'Gara that would make a difference. "We only became engaged this week."

"All right, you got an answer for everything. Like the guy from Peshine. You Jewish boys got all the answers. No, you're not stupid — but neither is O'Gara, Cancer. All right, all right, I'll get somebody up there to take your place, if there is anyone in this town who can fill your shoes. In the meantime, you have a rollicking time roasting marshmallows with your girlfriend at your kiddie camp."