Nemesis (8 page)

He could hear a siren in the distance. He heard sirens off and on, day and night now. They were not the air-raid sirens—those went off only once a week, at noon on Saturdays, and they did not induce fear so much as provide solace by proclaiming the city ready for anything. These were the sirens
of ambulances going to get polio victims and transport them to the hospital, sirens stridently screaming, "Out of the way—a life is at stake!" Several city hospitals had recently run out of iron lungs, and patients in need of them were being taken to Belleville, Kearny, and Elizabeth until a new shipment of the respirator tanks reached Newark. He could only hope that the ambulance wasn't headed for the Weequahic section to pick up another of his kids.

He had begun to hear rumors that if the epidemic got any worse, all the city's playgrounds might have to be shut down in order to prevent the children from being in close contact there. Normally such a decision would be up to the Board of Health, but the mayor was opposed to any unnecessary disruption to the summer lives of Newark's boys and girls and would make the final decision himself. He was doing everything he could to calm the city's parents and, according to the paper, had appeared in each of the wards to inform concerned citizens about all the ways the city was ensuring that filth and dirt and garbage were removed regularly from public and private property. He reminded them to keep their trash cans firmly covered and to join the "Swat the Fly" campaign by keeping their screens
in good repair and swatting and killing the disease-carrying flies that bred in filth and found their way indoors through open doors and unscreened windows. Garbage pickup was to be increased to every other day, and to abet the anti-fly campaign, fly swatters would be distributed free by "sanitary inspectors" visiting the residential neighborhoods to make certain that all streets were cleared of refuse. In his attempt to assure parents that everything was under control and generally safe, the mayor made a special point of telling them, "The playgrounds will remain open. Our city kids need their playgrounds in the summer. The Prudential Life Insurance Company of Newark and Metropolitan Life of New York both tell us that fresh air and sunshine are the principal weapons with which to eliminate the disease. Give the children plenty of sunshine and fresh air on the playgrounds and no germ can long withstand the impact of either. Above all," he told his audiences, "keep your yards and cellars clean, don't lose your heads, and we'll soon see a decline in the spread of this scourge. And swat the fly unmercifully. You cannot overestimate the evil that flies do."

Mr. Cantor started up Avon to Belmont swaddled by the stifling heat and enveloped by the stifling smell. On days when the wind came from the south, up from the Rahway and Linden refineries, there was the acrid smell of burning in the air, but tonight the currents were from the north, and the air had the distinctively foul stench that issued from the Secaucus pig farms, a few miles up the Hackensack River. Mr. Cantor knew of no street odor more foul. During a heat wave, when Newark seemed drained of every drop of pure air, it could sometimes be so sickeningly fecal-smelling that a strong whiff would make you gag and race indoors. People were already blaming the eruption of polio cases on the city's proximity to Secaucus—contemptuously known as "the Hog Capital of Hudson County"—and on the infectious properties inhering in that all-blanketing miasma that was, to those downwind of it, a toxic compound of God only knew what vile, pestilential, putrid ingredients. If they were right, breathing in the breath of life was a dangerous activity in Newark—take a deep breath and you could die.

Yet in spite of everything uninviting about the night, there was a string of boys on rattly old bicycles coasting full speed down the uneven cobblestones
between the trolley tracks on Avon Avenue and screaming "Geronimo!" at the top of their lungs. There were boys cavorting around and grabbing at one another in front of the candy stores. There were boys seated on the tenement stoops, smoking and talking among themselves. There were boys in the middle of the street lazily tossing fly balls to one another under the streetlights. On an empty corner lot a hoop had been raised on the side wall of an abandoned building, and, by the light of the liquor store across the street, where derelicts staggered in and out, a few boys were practicing underhand foul shots. He passed another corner where some boys were gathered around a mail collection box, atop which one of their pals was perched, yodeling for their amusement. There were families camped out on fire escapes, playing radios trailing extension cords that were plugged in a wall socket inside, and more families gathered in the dim alleyways between buildings. Passing by the tenement dwellers on his walk, he saw women fanning themselves with paper fans a local dry cleaner gave free to his customers, and he saw workmen, home from the factory floor, sitting and talking in their sleeveless undershirts, and the word he heard again
and again in the snatches of conversation was, of course, "polio." Only the children seemed capable of thinking of anything else. Only the children (the children!) acted as though, outside the Weequahic section at least, summertime was still a carefree adventure.

Neither on the neighborhood streets nor back at the drugstore ice cream counter did he run into any of the boys he'd grown up with and played ball with and gone through school with. By now, but for a few 4-Fs like himself—guys with heart murmurs or fallen arches or eyes as bad as his own who were working in war plants—they had all been drafted.

On Belmont, Mr. Cantor cut through the traffic at Hawthorne Avenue, where a couple of candy stores still had lights on and where he could hear the voices of boys hanging out along the street calling to one another. From there he headed up to Bergen Street and into the residential side streets of the wealthier end of the Weequahic section, on the side of the hill running down to Weequahic Park. Eventually he came to Goldsmith Avenue. Only when he was practically there did he realize that he wasn't out taking an aimless stroll halfway across the city on a hot summer night but heading very specifically for Marcia's. Maybe his intention was simply to look at the big brick house standing amid the other large brick houses flanking it and think of her and turn around and head back where he'd come from. But after circling once around the block, he found himself just paces from the Steinberg door, and with resolve he headed up the flagstone walk to ring the bell. The screened porch with the glider that faced the front lawn was where Marcia and he would sit and neck when they came back from the movies, until her mother called from upstairs to ask nicely if it wasn't time for Bucky to go home.

It was Dr. Steinberg who came to the door. Now he knew why he'd been roaming far from the tenements of Barclay Street, breathing in this stinking air.

"Bucky, my boy," Dr. Steinberg said, opening his arms and smiling. "What a nice surprise. Come in, come in."

"I went to get some ice cream and took a walk over here," Mr. Cantor explained.

"You miss your girl," Dr. Steinberg said, laughing. "So do I. I miss all three of my girls."

They went through the house to the screened porch at the back, which looked out onto Mrs.
Steinberg's garden. Mrs. Steinberg was staying at their summer house at the shore, where, the doctor said, he would be joining her for weekends. How would Bucky like a cold drink, Dr. Steinberg asked. There was fresh lemonade in the refrigerator. He'd bring him a glass.

The Steinbergs' house was the kind Mr. Cantor had dreamed about living in when he was a kid growing up with his grandparents in their third-floor three-room flat: a large one-family house with spacious halls and a central staircase and lots of bedrooms and more than one bathroom and two screened-in porches and thick wall-to-wall carpeting in all the rooms and wooden venetian blinds covering the windows instead of Woolworth's blackout shades. And, at the rear of the house, a flower garden. He'd never seen a full-blown flower garden before, except for the renowned rose garden in Weequahic Park, which his grandmother had taken him to visit as a child. That was a public garden kept up by the parks department; as far as he'd known,
all
gardens were public. A private flower garden flourishing in a Newark backyard amazed him. His own cemented-over backyard was riven with cracks, and stretches of it were stripped of crumbling chunks
that over the decades the neighborhood kids had pried loose for missiles to fling murderously at the alley cats or larkily at a passing car or in anger at one another. Girls in the building played hopscotch there until the boys drove them out to play aces up; there was the jumble of the building's beat-up metal garbage cans; and crisscrossing overhead were the clotheslines, a drooping web of them, rope strung on pulleys from a rear window in each tenement flat to a weathered telephone pole at the far side of the dilapidated yard. During earliest childhood, whenever his grandmother leaned out of the window to hang the week's wash, he stood nearby passing her the clothespins. Sometimes he would wake up screaming from nightmares of her leaning so far over the sill to hang a bedsheet that she tumbled out of the third-story window. Before his grandparents determined how and when to make intelligible to him that his mother had died in childbirth, he had come to imagine that she had died in just such a fall of her own. That's what having a backyard had meant to him until he was old enough to comprehend and deal with the truth—a place of death, a small rectangular graveyard for the women who loved him.

But now, just the thought of Mrs. Steinberg's garden filled him with pleasure and reminded him of all he valued most about the Steinbergs and how they lived, and of everything that his kindly grandparents couldn't offer him and that he'd always secretly hungered for. So unschooled was he in extravagance that he took the presence in a house of more than one bathroom as the height of luxurious living. He'd always possessed a strong family sense without himself having a traditional family, so sometimes when he was alone in the house with Marcia—which was rare because of the lively presence of her younger sisters—he would imagine that the two of them were married and the house and the garden and the domestic order and the surfeit of bathrooms were theirs. How at ease he felt in their house—yet it seemed a miracle to him that he had ever gotten there.

Dr. Steinberg came back out onto the porch with the lemonade. The porch was dark except for a lamp burning beside the chair where Dr. Steinberg had been reading the evening paper and smoking his pipe. He picked up the pipe and struck a match and, repeatedly drawing and puffing, he fussed with it until it was relit. The rich sweetness of Dr. Steinberg's tobacco served to ameliorate a little the citywide stink of Secaucus.

Dr. Steinberg was slender, agile, on the short side. He wore a substantial mustache and glasses that, though thick, were not as thick as Mr. Cantor's. His nose was his most distinctive feature: curved like a scimitar at the top but bent flat at the tip, and with the bone of the bridge cut like a diamond—in short, a nose out of a folktale, the sort of sizable, convoluted, intricately turned nose that, for many centuries, confronted though they have been by every imaginable hardship, the Jews had never stopped making. The irregularity of the nose was most conspicuous when he laughed, which he did often. He was unfailingly friendly, one of those engaging family physicians who, when they step into the waiting room holding someone's file folder, make the faces of all their patients light up—whenever he came at them with his stethoscope, they'd find themselves acutely happy to be under his care. Marcia liked that her father, a man of natural, unadorned authority, would jokingly but truthfully refer to his patients as his "masters."

"Marcia told me that you've lost some of your
boys. I'm sorry to hear that, Bucky. Death is not that common among polio victims."

"So far, four have gotten polio and two have died. Two boys. Grade school boys. Both twelve."

"It's a lot of responsibility for you," Dr. Steinberg said, "looking after all those boys, especially at a time like this. I've been practicing medicine for over twenty-five years, and when I lose a patient, even if it's to old age, I still feel shaken. This epidemic must be a great weight on your shoulders."

"The problem is, I don't know if I'm doing the right thing or not by letting them play ball."

"Did anyone say you're doing the wrong thing?"

"Yes, the mother of two of the boys, brothers, who have gotten polio. I know she was hysterical. I know she was lashing out in frustration, yet knowing it doesn't seem to help."

"A doctor runs into that too. You're right—people in great pain become hysterical and, confronted with the injustice of illness, they lash out. But boys' playing ball doesn't give them polio. A virus does. We may not know much about polio, but we know that. Kids everywhere play hard out of doors all summer long, and even in an epidemic it's
a very small percentage who become infected with the disease. And a very small percentage of those who get seriously ill from it. And a very small percentage of those who die—death results from respiratory paralysis, which is relatively rare. Every child who gets a headache doesn't come down with paralytic polio. That's why it's important not to exaggerate the danger and to carry on normally. You have nothing to feel guilty about. That's a natural reaction sometimes, but in your case it's not justified." Pointing at him meaningfully with the stem of his pipe, he warned the young man, "We can be severe judges of ourselves when it is in no way warranted. A misplaced sense of responsibility can be a debilitating thing."

"Dr. Steinberg, do you think it's going to get worse?"

"Epidemics have a way of spontaneously running out of steam. Right now there's a lot going on. Right now we have to keep up with what's happening while we wait and see whether this is fleeting or not. Usually the great majority of the cases are children under five. That's how it was in 1916. The pattern we're seeing with this outbreak, at least here in Newark, is somewhat different. But that doesn't
suggest that the disease is going to go unchecked in this city forever. There's still no cause for alarm as far as I can tell."