Nemesis (20 page)

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 The paralysis and everything that came in its wake had irreparably damaged his assurance as a virile man, and he had withdrawn completely from that whole side of life.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.

And never, never since he'd left for Camp Indian Hill in July 1944, had he returned to Weequahic or paid a visit to the gym where he'd taught at the Chancellor Avenue School or to the Chancellor playground.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Why would I? I was the Typhoid Mary of the Chancellor playground. I was the playground polio carrier. I was the Indian Hill polio carrier."

His idea of himself in this role hit me hard. Nothing could have prepared me for its severity.

"Were you? There's certainly no proof that you were."

"There's no proof that I wasn't," he said, speaking, as he mostly did during our lunchtime conversations, either looking away from my face to some unseen point in the distance or looking down into the food on our plates. He did not seem to want me, or perhaps anyone, staring inquisitively into his eyes.

"But you got polio," I told him. "You got it like
the rest of us unfortunate enough to get polio eleven years too soon for the vaccine. Twentieth-century medicine made its phenomenal progress just a little too slowly for us. Today childhood summers are as sublimely worry-free as they should be. The significance of polio has disappeared completely. Nobody anymore is defenseless like we were. But to speak specifically about you, the chances are you caught polio from Donald Kaplow rather than that you gave it to him."

"And what about Sheila, the Steinberg twin—who'd she get it from? Look, it's far too late in the day to be rehashing all that now," he said, oddly, having rehashed nearly everything with me already. "Whatever was done, was done," he said. "Whatever I did, I did. What I don't have, I live without."

"But even if it were possible that you were a carrier, you would have been an unsuspecting carrier. Surely you haven't lived all these years punishing yourself, despising yourself, for something you didn't do. That's much too harsh a sentence."

There was a pause, during which he studied that spot that engaged him—to the side of my head
and somewhere in the far distance, that spot which more than likely was 1944.

"What I've lived with mostly all these years," he said, "is Marcia Steinberg, if you want the truth. I cut myself free of many things, but I was never able to do that with her. All these years later, and there are times that I still think I recognize her on the street."

"As she was at twenty-two?"

He nodded, and then, to round out the disclosure, he said, "On Sundays I surely don't want to be thinking about her, yet that's when I mostly do. And nothing comes of my trying not to."

Some people are forgotten the moment you turn your back on them; that was not the case for Bucky with Marcia. Marcia's memory had endured.

He reached into his jacket pocket with his unwithered hand and took out an envelope and presented it to me. It was addressed to Eugene Cantor at 17 Barclay Street and postmarked at Stroudsburg, July 2 1944.

"Go ahead," he said. "I brought it so you can look at it. I got it when she'd been away at camp just a few days."

The note I took from the envelope was written
in perfect Palmer Method cursive on a small sheet of pale green stationery. It read:

My man my man my man my man my man
my man my man my man my man my man
my man my man my man my man my man
my man my man my man my man my man

All the way to the bottom of the page and halfway down the other side, the two words were repeated over and over, all of them evenly supported on an invisible straight line. The letter was signed with just her initial,
M,
a tall, beautifully formed capital exhibiting a little flourish in the loop and the stem, followed by "(as in My Man)."

I placed the single page back in the envelope and returned it to him.

"A twenty-two-year-old writes to her first lover. You must have been pleased to get such a letter."

"I got it when I came home from work. I kept it in my pocket during dinner. I took it with me to bed. I went to sleep with it in my hand. Then I was awakened by the phone. My grandmother slept across the hall. She was alarmed. 'Who can it be at this hour?' I went into the kitchen to answer. It was a few minutes after midnight by the
clock there. Marcia was calling from the phone booth behind Mr. Blomback's office. She'd been in bed in her cabin, unable to sleep, so she got up and dressed and came out in the dark to call me. She wanted to know if I had received the letter. I said I had. I said I was her man two hundred and eighteen times over—she could depend on that. I said that I was her man forever. Then she told me that she wanted to sing to her man to put him to sleep. I was at the kitchen table in my skivvies in the dark and sweating like a pig from the heat. It had been another whopper of a day, and it hadn't cooled off any by midnight. The lights were out in all the flats across the way. I don't think anyone was awake on our whole street."

"Did she sing to you?"

"A lullaby. It wasn't one I knew, but it was a lullaby. She sang it very, very softly. There it was, all by itself, over the phone. Probably one she remembered from when she was a kid."

"So you had a weakness for her soft voice too."

"I was stunned. Stunned by so much happiness. I was so stunned that I whispered into the phone, 'Are you really as wonderful as this?' I couldn't believe such a girl existed. I was the luckiest guy in the
world. And unstoppable. You understand me? With all that love of hers, how could I ever be stopped?"

"Then you lost her," I said. "How did you lose her? That you haven't told me yet."

"No, I haven't. I wouldn't let Marcia see me. That's how it happened. Look, maybe I've said enough." Suddenly, made uneasy by a pang of shame for the sentiments he'd just confided, he flushed deeply. "What the hell got me started? That letter. Finding that letter. I should never have gone looking for it."

With his elbow on the table he dropped his reddened face into his good hand and with his fingertips rubbed at his closed eyelid. We had reached the hardest part of the story.

"What happened to end it with Marcia?" I asked.

"When she came up to Stroudsburg to the hospital, when I was out of isolation, I had them turn her away. She left me a note telling me that her kid sister had only a mild, nonparalytic case and after three weeks recovered completely. I was relieved to learn that, but I still didn't want to resume my relations with the family. Marcia tried a second time to see me when I was transferred down to Philadelphia. That time I let her. We had a terrible argument. I didn't know she had it in her—I'd never seen her openly angry at anyone before. After that, she never came back. We never made contact again. Her father tried to talk to me when I was in Philadelphia, but I wouldn't take the call. When I was working at the Esso station on Springfield Avenue, out of the blue one day he pulled in for gas. That was a long way for him to go for gas."

"Was he there for her? To try to get you to come back?"

"I don't know. Maybe. I let another guy take the pump. I hid. I knew I was no match for Dr. Steinberg. I have no idea what happened to his daughter. I don't want to know. Whoever she married, let them and their children be happy and enjoy good health. Let's hope their merciful God will have blessed them with all that before He sticks His shiv in their back."

It was an arrestingly harsh utterance from the likes of Bucky Cantor, and, momentarily, he seemed to have perturbed himself by making it.

"I owed her her freedom," he finally said, "and I gave it to her. I didn't want the girl to feel stuck with me. I didn't want to ruin her life. She hadn't
fallen in love with a cripple, and she shouldn't be stuck with one."

"Wasn't that up to her to decide?" I asked. "A damaged man is sometimes very attractive to a certain type of woman. I know from experience."

"Look, Marcia was a sweet, naive, well-brought-up girl with kindly, responsible parents who had taught her and her sisters to be polite and obliging," Bucky said. "She was a young new first-grade teacher, wet behind the ears. A slight slip of a thing, inches shorter even than me. It didn't help her being more intelligent than me—she still didn't have any idea of how to go about getting out of her mess. So I did it for her. I did what had to be done."

"You've given this a lot of thought," I said. "All your thought, it sounds like."

He smiled for one of the few times during our talks, a smile very like a frown, denoting weariness more than good cheer. There was no lightness in him. That was missing, as were the energy and the industry that were once at the center of him. And, of course, the athletic ingredient had completely vanished. It wasn't only an arm and a leg that were useless. His original personality, all that vital purposefulness that would hit you in the face the moment you met him, seemed itself to have been stripped away, lifted from him in shreds as though it were the thin swatch of bark that he'd peeled from the birch tree the first night with Marcia on the island in the lake at Indian Hill. We had been together one day a week at lunch over a period of a few months and never once did he lighten up, not even when he said, "That song she liked, 'I'll Be Seeing You'—I've never been able to forget that either. Soupy, sappy, yet it looks like I'll remember it for as long as I live. I don't know what would happen if I had to hear it again."

"You'd bawl."

"I might."

"You'd have a right," I said. "Anyone would be miserable, having renounced a true mate like that."

"Oh, my old playground buddy," he said, with more feeling than he'd spoken yet, "I never thought that's how it would end with her. Never."

"When she got angry with you—the time she came to see you in Philadelphia—"

"I never saw her again after that."

"You've said. But what happened?"

He was in a wheelchair, he told me, a glorious
autumn Saturday in mid-October, still warm enough for them to go outdoors and for her to sit on a bench on the lawn in front of the Sister Kenny Institute, beneath the branches of a tree whose leaves had turned and begun to fall, but not so warm that the polio epidemic in the northeastern states hadn't finally dissipated and died away. By then Bucky had not seen her or spoken to her in nearly three months, so she hadn't yet had a chance to observe how crippled he was. There had been an exchange of correspondence, not between Bucky and Marcia but between Bucky and Marcia's father. Dr. Steinberg had written to tell Bucky that he had an obligation to allow Marcia to visit him and tell him directly what was on her mind. "Marcia and the family," wrote Dr. Steinberg, "deserve better from you than this." Against a handwritten letter on personalized hospital stationery from a man of the doctor's stature, Bucky, of course, had no defense, and so the date and time of Marcia's visit were set, and the quarrel began almost immediately upon her arrival, when he noticed right off that her hair had grown out since he'd seen her last, making her look more womanly than she had at camp and prettier now than ever. She had dressed with gloves
and a hat, just like the proper teacher whom he'd first fallen for.

There was nothing she could say that would change his mind, he announced, however much he would have loved just to reach out with his good hand and touch her face. Instead, he used his good hand to grasp his dead arm around the wrist and raise it to the level of her eyes. "Look," he said. "This is what I look like."

She did not speak, but she did not blink either. No, he told her, he was no longer man enough to be a husband and a father, and it was irresponsible of her to think otherwise.

"Irresponsible of
me?
" she cried.

"To be the noble heroine. Yes."

"What are you talking about? I'm not trying to be anything other than the person who loves you and wants to marry you and be your wife." And then she advanced the gambit that she had no doubt rehearsed on the train down. "Bucky, it's not complicated, really," she told him. "
I'm
not complicated. Remember me? Remember what I said to you the night before I left for camp in June? 'We'll do it perfectly.' Well, we will. Nothing has changed that. I'm just an ordinary girl who wants to be happy.
You make me happy. You always have. Why won't you now?"