Philip Roth - Nemesis

I ran into him in 1971, years after I had graduated from architecture school and had set up my office in a building diagonally across the street from the main Newark post office. We could have passed each other on Broad Street a hundred times before the day I finally recognized him.

I was one of the Chancellor Avenue playground boys who, in the summer of '44, contracted polio and was then confined to a wheelchair for a year before protracted rehabilitation made it possible for me to locomote myself on a crutch and a cane, and with my two legs braced, as I do to this day. Some ten years back, after serving an apprenticeship with an architectural firm in the city, I started a company with a mechanical engineer who, like me, had had polio as a kid. We opened a consulting and contracting firm specializing in architectural modification for wheelchair accessibility, our options ranging from building additional rooms onto existing houses down to installing grab bars, lowering closet rods, and relocating light switches. We design and install ramps and wheelchair lifts, we widen doorways, we make bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen modifications — everything to improve life for wheelchair-bound people like my partner. The wheelchair-bound may require household structural changes that can be costly, but we do our best to keep to our estimates and to hold prices down. Along with the quality of our work, this is what largely accounts for our success. The rest was the luck of location and timing, of being the only such outfit in populous northern New Jersey at a moment when serious attention was beginning to be paid to the singular needs of the disabled.

Sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you're not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance — the tyranny of contingency — is everything. Chance is what I believed Mr. Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God.

Mr. Cantor still had a withered left arm and useless left hand, and the damage to the muscles in his left calf caused a dip in his gait. The leg had begun getting much weaker in recent years, both the lower and the upper leg, and the limb had also begun to be severely painful for the first time since his rehabilitation nearly thirty years before. As a result, following a doctor's examination and a couple of visits to his hospital's brace shop, he had taken to wearing a full leg brace beneath his trousers to support his left leg. It didn't ease the pain much, but along with a cane it helped with balance and steadiness on his feet. However, if things continued to deteriorate — as they often do in later years for many polio survivors who come to suffer what is known as post-polio syndrome — it might not be long, he said, before he wound up back in a chair.

We came upon each other at noon one spring day in 1971 on busy Broad Street, midway between where the two of us worked. It was I who spotted him, even though he wore a protective mustache now and, at the age of fifty, his once black hair was no longer cut in a military crewcut but rose atop his head like a white thicket — the mustache was white as well. And he no longer, of course, had that athletic, pigeon-toed stride. The sharp planes of his face were padded by the weight he'd gained, so he was nowhere as striking as when the head beneath the tawny skin looked to be machined to the most rigorous rectilinear specifications — when it was a young man's head unabashedly asserting itself. That original face was now interred in another, fleshier face, a concealment people often see when looking with resignation at their aging selves in the mirror. No trace of the compact muscleman remained, the muscles having melted away while the compactness had burgeoned. Now he was simply stout.

I was by then thirty-nine, a short, heavy man myself, bearded and bearing little if any resemblance to the frail kid I'd been growing up. When I realized on the street who he was, I got so excited I shouted after him, "Mr. Cantor! Mr. Cantor! It's Arnold Mesnikoff. From the Chancellor playground. Alan Michaels was my closest friend. He sat next to me all through school." Though I'd never forgotten Alan, I hadn't uttered his name aloud in the many years since he'd died, back in that decade when it seemed that the greatest menaces on earth were war, the atomic bomb, and polio.

After our first emotional street meeting, we began to eat lunch together once a week in a nearby diner, and that's how I got to hear his story. I turned out to be the first person to whom he'd ever told the whole of the story, from beginning to end, and — as he came to confide more intimately with each passing week — without leaving very much out. I tried my best to listen closely and to take it all in while he found the words for everything that had been on his mind for the better part of his life. Talking like this seemed to him to be neither pleasant nor unpleasant — it was a pouring forth that before long he could not control, neither an unburdening nor a remedy so much as an exile's painful visit to the irreclaimable homeland, the beloved birthplace that was the site of his undoing. We two had not been especially close on the playground — I was a poor athlete, a shy, quiet boy, delicately built. But the fact that I had been one of the kids hanging around Chancellor that horrible summer — that I was the best friend of his playground favorite and, like Alan and like him, had come down with polio — made him bluntly candid in a self-searing manner that sometimes astonished me, the auditor whom he'd never before known as an adult, the auditor now inspiring his confidence the way, as kids, I and the others had been inspired by him.

By and large he had the aura of ineradicable failure about him as he spoke of all that he'd been silent about for years, not just crippled physically by polio but no less demoralized by persistent shame. He was the very antithesis of the country's greatest prototype of the polio victim, FDR, disease having led Bucky not to triumph but to defeat. The paralysis and everything that came in its wake had irreparably damaged his assurance as a virile man, and he had withdrawn completely from that whole side of life. Mostly Bucky considered himself a gender blank — as in a cartridge that is blank — an abashing self-assessment for a boy who'd come of age in an era of national suffering and strife when men were meant to be undaunted defenders of home and country. When I told him that I had a wife and two children, he replied that he never had it in him to date anyone, let alone to marry, after he was paralyzed. He could never show his withered arm and withered leg to anyone other than a doctor or, when she was living, his grandmother. It was she who had devotedly taken care of him when he left the Kenny Institute, she who, despite her chest pains having been diagnosed as serious heart trouble, had boarded the train from Newark to visit him in Philadelphia every Sunday afternoon, without fail, for the fourteen months he was there.

She was now long dead, but until he found himself in the middle of the 1967 Newark riots — during which a house down the street had burned to the ground and shots had been fired from a nearby rooftop — he'd lived on in their small walkup flat in the tenement on Barclay near Avon. He had the flights of outside stairs to navigate — stairs that he'd once liked to take three at a time — and so, whatever the season, however icy or slippery they were, he laboriously climbed them so as to stay on in the third-floor flat where his grandmother's love had once been limitless and where the mothering voice that had never been unkind could be best remembered. Even though, especially though, no loved one from the past remained in his life, he could — and often did, involuntarily, while mounting the steps to his door at the end of the workday — summon up a clear picture of his kneeling grandmother, scrubbing their flight of stairs once a week with a stiff brush and a pail of sudsy water or cooking for their little family over the coal stove. That's the most he could do for his emotional reliance on women.