The plot against America

by Philip Roth

  "Put it on," he told me in his hollow, honking voice.

  "Why?" I shouted. "It's not going to fit me."

  "It don't fit nobody," he said. "Put it on."

  "I don't know how," I complained in my loudest voice, and so Joey clipped the microphone case to my shirt and dropped the battery into my pants pocket and, after he checked all the wiring, left it to me to insert the molded earpiece. I did so by closing my eyes and pretending it was a seashell and that we were down the shore and he wanted me to listen to the roar of the ocean. . .but I had to suppress the heaves when I managed to jiggle it into place, still stickily warm from the interior of his ear.

  "Okay, now what?"

  Whereupon he reached over and, as though it were the switch to the electric chair he was throwing and I were Public Enemy Number One, he gleefully turned the dial at the center of the microphone case.

  "I don't hear anything," I told him.

  "Wait'll I louden it."

  "Is wearing this thing going to make me deaf?" and I saw myself made both deaf and dumb, and trapped in Elizabeth for the rest of my life bending pretzels in the New Jersey Pretzel Factory.

  He laughed heartily at my saying that, though I hadn't meant it as a joke.

  "Look," I said, "I don't want to do this. Not now. There's a lot going on outside that's not so great, you know."

  But he was oblivious of what was not so great, either because he was Catholic and had nothing to worry about or simply because he was irrepressible Joey.

  "You know what the crook said who sold it? He ain't even a doctor," Joey told me, "but he gives me the bullshit test anyway. He takes his pocket watch out and he holds it right up to my ear and he says to me, 'Can you hear the watch tick, Joey?' and I can hear a little, and so he starts backing away, and he says, 'Can you hear it now, Joey?' and I can't, I can't hear nothing, and so he writes some numbers down on a piece of paper. Then he takes two half-dollars out of his pocket and it's the same thing. He clicks them by my ear, clicks them together, and he says, 'Can you hear the coins click, Joey?' and then he starts walking away again, and I see him clicking them, but I can't hear nothing no more. 'The same,' I tell him—and so he writes that down. Then he looks at what he wrote down, looks real real hard, then he takes this tin piece of shit out of a drawer. He puts it on me, all the pieces, and he tells my father, 'Your boy is going to hear the grass growing, that's how good this model is,'" and with that Joey began to turn the dial again until what I heard was water running into a bathtub—and I was the bathtub. Then he spun it vigorously—and there was thunder.

  "Cut it out!" I cried. "That's enough!" but Joey was joyfully leaping about, and so I reached up and yanked the earpiece out of my ear and was derailed for the moment thinking that, on top of Mayor La Guardia's being under arrest and President Roosevelt's being under arrest and even Rabbi Bengelsdorf's being under arrest, the new boy downstairs wasn't going to be any more of a picnic than the one before him had been, and this was when I determined to run away again. I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself. First I couldn't stand Seldon downstairs and now I couldn't stand Joey downstairs, and I determined then and there to run away from both of them. I would run away before Seldon got here, I would run away before the anti-Semites got here, I would run away before Mrs. Wishnow's body got here and there was a funeral that I had to go to. Under the protection of the mounted police, I would run away that very night from everything that was after me and everything that hated me and wanted to kill me. I would run away from everything I'd done and everything I hadn't done, and start out fresh as a boy nobody knew. And I realized, all at once, where to run away to—to Elizabeth, to the pretzel factory. I'd tell them in writing that I was a deaf-mute. They'd give me a job making pretzels, and I'd never speak and I'd pretend not to hear, and nobody would find out who I was.

  Joey said, "You know about the kid who drank the horse's blood?"

  "What horse's blood?"

  "St. Peter's horse. This kid, he got in at night, into the farm, and drank the horse's blood. They're looking for him."

  "Who is?"

  "The guys. Nick. Those guys. The older guys."

  "Who's Nick?"

  "One of the orphans. He's eighteen. The kid that did it's a Jew like you. They know for sure he's a Jew, and they're going to find him."

  "How come he drank the horse's blood?"

  "Jews drink blood."

  "You don't know what you're talking about. I don't drink blood. Sandy doesn't drink blood. My parents don't drink blood. Nobody I know drinks blood."

  "This kid does."

  "Yeah? And what's his name?"

  "Nick don't know yet. But they're looking for him. Don't worry, they'll get him."

  "And what will they do then, Joey? Drink his blood? Jews don't drink blood. Saying that is crazy." I handed his hearing aid back to him—thinking that I could now add Nick to everything else I was having to flee—and soon Joey began racing from window to window again, trying to get a look at the horses, until, when he could no longer bear being out of range of a spectacle comparable in his mind to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show coming to town and raising the big top in front of our house, he upped and flew out the door and that was the last I saw of him that night. There was rumored to be a police horse in Newark who munched on chewing tobacco, like the cop who rode him, and who was able to add numbers by tapping his right front hoof, and Joey later claimed that he'd seen him there on our block, a horse from the Eighth Precinct called Ned, who let kids swing from his tail without kicking out at them with his hind legs. And maybe he did meet the fabled Ned, and maybe that had made it all worth it. Nonetheless, for deserting me that night, for never returning, for succumbing to his love of excitement rather than obeying his mother's orders, Joey was soundly punished when his father got home from work the following morning, his horselike haunches thrashed mercilessly with the black strap off the night watchman's time clock.

  Once Joey had disappeared, I double-locked the door behind him and would have turned on the radio to distract me from my worries if I hadn't been afraid of yet another bulletin interrupting a regularly scheduled program and relaying to me, all by myself, even more horrible news than had been coming at us throughout the day. It wasn't long before I started thinking again about running away to the pretzel factory. I remembered the article about the factory that had appeared in the Sunday Call about a year before and that I'd cut out to bring to school for a report I had to make on a New Jersey industry. In the article the owner, a Mr. Kuenze, had been quoted as debunking the idea, prevalent apparently throughout the world, that it took years to teach somebody to become a pretzel maker. "I can teach them overnight," he said, "if they can be taught." A lot of the article had been about a controversy over the need for salt on a pretzel. Mr. Kuenze claimed that salt on the outside was unnecessary and that he put it on only "to satisfy the trade." The important thing, he said, was to put salt in the dough, which he alone did, of all the pretzel makers in the state. The article said that Mr. Kuenze had one hundred employees, a good many deaf-mutes among them but also "boys and girls who work after school."

  I knew which bus went by the pretzel factory—it was the same one that Earl and I had taken on the afternoon we'd followed home to Elizabeth the Christian who Earl had spotted as a fairy just in the nick of time. I'd have to pray that the fairy wouldn't be on the same bus—if by chance he was, I'd get off and take the next one. What I'd have to have with me was a note, a note this time not from Sister Mary Catherine but from a deaf-mute. "Dear Mr. Kuenze. I read about you in the Sunday Call. I want to learn to make pretzels. I'm sure I can be taught overnight. I am deaf and dumb. I am an orphan. Will you give me a job?" And I signed it "Seldon Wishnow." I couldn't for the life of me think of another name.

  I needed a note, and I needed clothes. I had to look to Mr. Kuenze like a kid he could trust, and I couldn't turn up without clothes. And thi
s time I needed a plan, what my father called "a long-range plan." It came to me immediately: my long-range plan would be to save enough of the money I earned at the pretzel factory to buy a one-way train ticket to Omaha, Nebraska, where Father Flanagan ran Boys Town. I knew about Boys Town and Father Flanagan—as did every boy in America—from the movie with Spencer Tracy, who won an Academy Award for playing the famous priest and then donated his Oscar to the real Boys Town. I was five when I saw it at the Roosevelt with Sandy on a Saturday afternoon. Father Flanagan took in boys from the street, some of them already thieves and little gangsters, and brought them out to his farm, where they were fed and clothed and received an education and where they played baseball and sang in a choir and learned to become good citizens. Father Flanagan was father to all of them, regardless of race or creed. Most of the boys were Catholic, some Protestant, but a few needy Jewish boys lived on the farm as well—this I knew from my parents, who, like thousands of other American families who'd seen the movie and wept, made an annual ecumenical contribution to Boys Town. Not that I'd identify myself as Jewish once I reached Omaha. I'd say—speaking aloud at long last—that I didn't know what I was or who. That I was nothing and nobody—just a boy and nothing more, and hardly the person responsible for the death of Mrs. Wishnow and the orphaning of her son. Let my family raise her son as their son from here on out. He could have my bed. He could have my brother. He could have my future. I'd make my life with Father Flanagan in Nebraska, which was even farther from Newark than Kentucky.

  Suddenly I thought of another name and rewrote the note, signing it "Philip Flanagan." Then I started for the cellar to get the cardboard suitcase in which I'd hidden Seldon's stolen clothes before running away the first time. This time I'd pack the suitcase with my own clothes and in my pocket carry the miniature pewter musket that I had bought at Mount Vernon and used to slice open the envelopes from the stamp company back when I still owned a serious collection and was getting mail. Its bayonet measured barely an inch in length, but leaving home for good I would need something for protection, and a letter opener was all I had.

  Minutes later, descending the stairs with a flashlight, I was able to derive the strength to keep my legs from collapsing by realizing that this was the last occasion I'd ever have to go down into that cellar and confront the wringer or the alley cats or the drains or the dead. Or that dank, befouled wall facing the street on which one-legged Alvin had once spattered his grief.

  It wasn't cold enough yet for us to start burning coal, and when, from the foot of the cellar stairs, I turned my flashlight on the ash-colored hulk of the fireless furnaces they looked to me like those ostentatious burial vaults where, for all the good it does them, the rich and mighty inter themselves. I stood there hoping that the ghost of Seldon's father would have gone off to Kentucky (perhaps unseen in the trunk of my father's car) to fetch his dead wife but understanding full well that he hadn't, that his business as a ghost was here with me—that his spectral heart seethed with curses, and all of them for me. "I didn't mean for them to move," I whispered. "That was a mistake. I'm not who's really responsible. I didn't mean to make Seldon the target."

  I was prepared, of course, for the silence that inevitably surrounded my pleading utterances to the merciless dead, and instead heard my name pronounced in response—and by a woman! From beyond the furnaces, a woman moaning my name! Dead only hours and already back to begin haunting me for the rest of my life!

  "I know the truth," she said, and there, emerging like an oracular priestess out of the Delphi of our storage bin, came my aunt. "They're after me, Philip," Aunt Evelyn said. "I know the truth, and they're going to kill me!"

  Because she had to use the toilet and to eat something—because I didn't know what I could do other than to give my aunt whatever she needed—I had no choice but to bring her back upstairs with me. I sliced a piece of bread from the half a loaf that was left from dinner, buttered it, poured her a glass of milk, and, after she'd gone to the bathroom—and I'd pulled the kitchen shades so that nobody could see in from across the way—she came into the kitchen and feverishly gobbled everything down. Her coat and her purse were in her lap and she was still wearing her hat, and I hoped that as soon as she'd had enough to eat, she'd get up and go home so that I could go down and get the suitcase, pack it, and run away before my mother returned from the meeting. But once she'd eaten she began to babble, repeating again and again that she knew the truth and because of that they were going to kill her. They'd called out the mounted police, she informed me, to find where she was hiding.

  In the silence that followed that startling remark—which, in those circumstances, when suddenly there were no longer any predictable happenings, I was enough of a child to almost believe—we followed the audible progress of a single horse prancing up the block toward Chancellor Avenue. "They know I'm here," she said.

  "They don't, Aunt Evelyn," but the words had no hold on me as I spoke them. "I didn't know you were here."

  "Then why did you come looking for me?"

  "I didn't. I was looking for something else. The police are outside," I told her, convinced that I was deliberately lying even while speaking as earnestly as I could, "the police are outside because of the anti-Semitism. They're patrolling the streets to protect us."

  She smiled the smile reserved for trusting souls. "Tell me another one, Philip."

  Now nothing that I knew coincided with anything either of us was saying. The shadow of her madness had crept over me without my as yet understanding that while hiding in our storage bin—or perhaps earlier than that, while watching the FBI take the rabbi away in handcuffs—she had indeed lost her mind. Unless, of course, she'd already begun hopelessly slipping into insanity the night at the White House when she danced with von Ribbentrop. That was to be my father's theory—that long before the rabbi's arrest, when Bengelsdorf was astonishing all of Jewish Newark with the unseemliness of how high he had climbed in the president's esteem, she'd abandoned herself to the same credulity that had transformed the entire country into a madhouse: the worship of Lindbergh and his conception of the world.

  "Do you want to lie down?" I asked, dreading that she would say yes. "Do you need to rest? Do you want me to call the doctor?"

  Here she took my hand so firmly that her fingernails bit into my flesh. "Philip dearest, I know everything."

  "Do you know what happened to President Lindbergh? Is that what you mean?"

  "Where is your mother?"

  "At school. At a meeting."

  "You'll bring me food and water, darling boy."

  "I will? Sure. Where?"

  "To the cellar. I can't drink from the laundry sink. Someone will find me."

  "You don't want that," I said, thinking immediately of Joey's grandmother and the fiery breath of madness that wafted from her. "I'll bring everything." But having promised her that, I couldn't possibly run away.

  "Would you happen to have an apple?" asked Aunt Evelyn.

  I opened the refrigerator. "No, no apple. We're out of apples. My mother hasn't been able to do much shopping. But there's a pear, Aunt Evelyn. You want that?"

  "Yes. And another piece of bread. Make another piece of bread."

  Her voice kept changing. Now she sounded as though we were doing nothing more than getting ready for a picnic, making the best of what we had on hand to take to Weequahic Park to eat by the lake under a tree, as though the events of the day were as unimportant to us as probably they were to everybody else in America: a minor nuisance to the Christians, if that. As there were more than thirty million Christian families in America and only about a million Jewish families, why, really, should it bother them?

  I cut a second slice from the loaf for her to take down to the cellar and smeared it extra heavily with butter. If asked later about the bread missing from the loaf, I'd say that Joey ate it, that and the pear, before he ran off to see the horses.

  When she got home to learn that my father hadn't called, my mother was unab
le to hide her response. Forlornly she looked at the kitchen clock, remembering perhaps the time that it used to be at this hour: bedtime, when all that was required was for the children to wash their faces and brush their teeth for the day dense with fulfillable duties to be rounded off to the satisfaction of all. Now that was nine o'clock—or so we'd been led to believe by that wholly convincing, immutable lifelikeness that now turned out to have been a sham.

  And the day in, day out routine of school—was that a sham too, a cunning deception perpetrated to soften us up with rational expectations and foster nonsensical feelings of trust? "Why no school?" I asked when she told me that tomorrow we'd have the day off. "Because," my mother replied, making recourse to the colorless formulation suggested to the parents in order for them to be truthful without frightening the children unduly, "the situation has further deteriorated." "What situation?" I asked. "Our situation." "Why? What happened now?" "Nothing happened. It's just better that you children stay home tomorrow. Where is Joey? Where is your friend?" "He ate some bread, and he took the pear, and he left. He took the pear out of the refrigerator and ran outside. He went to see the horses." "And you're sure that no one phoned?" she asked, simply too exhausted to be angry with Joey for letting her down at a moment like this. "I want to know why there's no school, Ma." "Must you know tonight?" "Yes. Why can't I go to school?" "Well. . .it's because there may be a war with Canada." "With Canada? When?" "No one knows. But it's best if you all stay home until we see what's going on." "But why are we going to war with Canada?" "Please, Philip, I can't take much more tonight. I've told you everything I know. You insisted and I told you. Now we just have to wait. We have to wait and see like everyone else." And then, as if the unknown whereabouts of my father and brother hadn't given rein to her worst imaginings—which was that we two were now, like the Wishnows, just a widow and her son—she said (trying doggedly to follow the protocol of the old nine o'clock), "I want you to wash up and go to bed."