Fear Itself

by Andrew Rosenheim

  His father said, ‘I’m sorry, Eric. The Motorola’s not working. It needs a new tube.’

  Nessheim wished his father had mentioned this that morning – they could have taken the radio into Bremen and had it fixed.

  ‘That’s a pity,’ said Eric. ‘You know, it is my opinion that if Coughlin had stood for president last year instead of this Lemke fellow, there might have been a surprise.’

  ‘He’d have beaten Roosevelt?’ asked Jimmy sceptically.

  ‘Who knows?’ said Eric, raising both beefy hands from his chair rests. ‘I think people are tired of this Rosenfeld you so admire. He’s letting Communists take over everything.’

  ‘I haven’t seen many Reds in this neck of the woods,’ said Jimmy.

  But Uncle Eric waved this away. ‘You are absolutely wrong, young man. If you come to the Town Hall tonight you can see one in the flesh. He is travelling from Milwaukee just to show us the errors of our ways.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Certainly not. Come see for yourself. I plan to. He’s speaking at eight o’clock in the Town Hall – on Spain, it says. He may find us not the dupes he thinks ve are.’

  ‘Or you might be swayed by his eloquence,’ said Nessheim, ignoring his mother’s disapproving look. She didn’t like arguments.

  ‘I doubt he’s a Coughlin,’ said his uncle.

  ‘Eric has heard the priest speak in person,’ said Aunt Greta with pride.

  ‘Coughlin’s come to Wisconsin?’ asked Jimmy’s father.

  Greta shook her head. ‘This was at his own church. In Michigan. Eric visited there last month.’

  ‘Stille!’ said Uncle Eric sharply. He seemed uncomfortable now, and made a show of looking at the clock. ‘We should take our leave, Greta. We must not overstay our welcome.’

  Nessheim went out with his mother to say goodbye as they left. When he came back his father was in the little sitting room, listening to a concert on the Motorola.

  ‘I thought—’

  His father answered with a grin. ‘I am sure the Radio Priest would forgive me.’

  Nessheim stayed home that night, and on Sunday morning stayed in bed while his parents rose and went to early service at the Lutheran church in Bremen. It was no longer a point of contention; he had stopped attending in college, and by now there was an unspoken truce not to argue about his decision.

  He got up twenty minutes after they left, and went downstairs. He saw his parents had only had coffee – his mother usually made breakfast after church. He went out and with the small hand scythe splintered small logs into kindling, then used the axe to split big logs into small. He filled the bin on the back porch, then carried a smaller basket into the kitchen and fed the wood stove.

  He took six eggs from the pantry, also from Dreigenberg’s farm, and broke them into a bowl, whisking them with some cream he found in a jug in the pantry. Cutting thick slices from the bacon hanging from a peg, he put them on the stove top to fry, laid the table, made a fresh pot of coffee, and began to scramble the eggs just as his parents came through the back door.

  ‘Good service?’ he asked.

  ‘It was “Save Your Nickels”,’ his father said, his nickname for the resident minister, who had offered this helpful advice from his pulpit one Sunday when the Depression had first struck.

  ‘You didn’t have to do this, Jimmy,’ said his mother, gesturing at the table, then the stove. But she seemed grateful.

  ‘It’s okay, Mom. Cut some bread will you, the eggs will be ready.’

  They ate at the kitchen table, his parents unusually quiet. ‘Lots of people at church?’ he asked.

  ‘Quite a few,’ his father allowed. ‘Mrs Weisborn’s ill.’ ‘Sorry to hear that.’ She’d been his third grade teacher. ‘And we saw Trudy’s parents,’ his mother offered. ‘They said hello to you.’

  This didn’t explain why his parents were so subdued – they’d known for months that he and Trudy were no longer going steady.

  His father pushed at the last of his egg with a heel of home-baked wheat bread. ‘There was some trouble last night,’ he said.

  ‘What kind of trouble, Papa?’

  ‘Fighting,’ his mother said, her lips pursed in disapproval.

  ‘In town,’ his father said, lifting his head. ‘At the hall.’

  ‘With the Communist who spoke?’ He was surprised. Wisconsin was a progressive state, and this county was no exception – it had voted for La Follette in 1924, when he’d run as a Socialist candidate for President.

  ‘This Communist brought some supporters with him.’ His father scraped his plate absent-mindedly with his fork.

  ‘Did they cause the trouble?’

  ‘Not exactly. Some locals went to the meeting; they weren’t happy with what the man had to say.’

  ‘About Hitler,’ his mother said flatly. For all her vestigial Germanness, she had no time for the Reich’s leader.

  ‘Ja,’ said his father. ‘About Germany too. It upset some people.’

  Suddenly he understood. ‘Like Uncle Eric? And these Bund friends of his?’

  His father nodded wearily. Jimmy said, ‘So what happened then? Is Uncle Eric okay?’ Not that I care about the fat son of a bitch, he thought to himself.

  ‘He’s fine now. They were heckling this Communist, and one of the Milwaukee men pushed him. Alex tried to help him out. The biggest bruise your uncle has is his pride, but Alex has a broken jaw.’

  ‘Alex Burgmeister?’

  His father looked at him with surprise. ‘Of course. He’s the leader of the Bund here.’

  He spent the morning clearing junk out of the barn, shifting the heavy items his father couldn’t move alone any more. They had chicken dinner at two, then Jimmy packed up and got ready to go. He wasn’t going to trust his luck twice and wanted to reach Chicago before dark.

  He helped clear the table, then went and stood on the porch while his mother did the dishes. He gazed out at the land that ran from the back fence down through mixed grass meadow to a small pond. The forty acres had been theirs once, and he felt an ineffable sadness that it was gone – his father said the bank hadn’t resold it yet, but that was just a matter of time. Nessheim wondered, if he felt this morose himself looking at the forty, how his father must feel, having to see it every day. Then he realised his father was standing next to him, his forearms propped against the rail.

  His father broke the silence. ‘I know you don’t work at a bank, son.’

  Jimmy was going to protest, but he saw the resolution in his father’s face. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I keep my 12-gauge shells on the shelf in your closet. When I went to get a box, I knocked off one of the hangers, and your holster fell on the floor.’ He snorted. ‘I don’t think a bank job usually requires a gun, so unless you’ve gone to work for Mr Capone robbing banks, I think you must work somewhere else.’

  There was no point denying it. He said, ‘I work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’m a Special Agent; that’s why I carry a gun. I’m required to wear it when I travel, even coming here.’

  His father nodded, but remained silent. He said at last, ‘I didn’t bring you up to lie.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry, Papa.’

  His father put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I think maybe we’ll say nothing to your mother. She’s taking it hard enough that you’re not going to law school.’

  Jimmy gave a grateful nod. His father added, ‘I hope they’ve taught you how to shoot straight. Your Uncle Eric almost blew my head off when he took me target shooting.’

  They both laughed, but then his father said more seriously, ‘You’re a true American.’

  ‘Do you think that’s wrong?’

  ‘No, not at all. It’s just that in the past they didn’t allow it for the likes of me.’

  ‘Who was “they”?’

  His father shrugged. ‘You name it. The government, the newspapers, the police, the local folks – anyone who wasn’t Germ
an. Some of them were even my friends – so I thought, until the night they came after me in my own house. I should have guessed they were coming after they’d written Kaiser Lover all over our front door.’

  ‘Did you get hurt?’

  ‘I was lucky. They took me and a few others with funny German names down to the Town Hall and had us swear an oath of allegiance. Then they made us get on our knees and kiss the American flag. You were five years old and sound asleep in bed, thank God.’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘My cousin Alfred – you never knew him, he went back to Germany – he got it worse. They beat him with sticks like he was a dog.’

  His father put both hands on the rail of the porch and stared intently out towards the back field, at the dark saucer-like dip of the soil which held part of his past.

  He turned his head to look at his son. ‘As I say, you’re American in a way I wasn’t ever allowed to be.’ Through the screen porch Jimmy could hear his mother moving around the parlour, plumping the pillows on the sofa. His father said quietly, ‘But I’m worried there’s going to be another war.’

  ‘There already is one in Spain,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘That’s just a rehearsal for the main event.’

  ‘I hope we can stay out of it.’

  ‘Me too,’ said his father. ‘But the Communists, even the Liberals say we will have to act. You must know people like that,’ he added slyly.

  Jimmy thought of Stacey Madison and her circle. He said, ‘If anyone can keep us out of a war, it’s Roosevelt.’

  ‘You believe that? Uncle Eric and his Nazi-loving friends think it’s Roosevelt who’ll drag us in. That’s why they hate him so much.’

  5

  NESSHEIM MADE CHICAGO by dark, helped by not having any flat tyres. As he passed through the northern suburbs twilight was descending, and ahead of him the low slant of setting sun painted the thirty-nine floors of the Palmolive Building a rosy pink, like a sandstone obelisk. Going by Lincoln Park, he wondered if Stacey was home, and could just see her apartment building by craning his neck.

  He had met her at a party on the Near North Side during his spell at the bank. She’d been with a former Northwestern student who’d seen Nessheim play football and greeted him like a conquering hero; Stacey had been amused. She was a graduate of the University of Chicago who didn’t seem to have a job – not because she couldn’t find one, but because she didn’t want one. She was rich (the daughter of a paper manufacturing magnate), clever, and funny, and, he realised soon enough, infinitely flighty, losing interest in her passions, especially men, as soon as something more arresting hoved into sight. She’d picked him up – he still felt guilty thinking about the look on the Northwestern guy’s face when she’d asked Nessheim to drive her home – and for three weeks after that they’d seen each other every night. Then he didn’t hear from her for a month: she’d gone to Mexico, she told him breezily on her return.

  And she was a Communist – no, an ex-Communist she claimed, since she had transferred her affections from Stalin to Trotsky. It seemed an infinitesimal distinction to Nessheim, and one that would be lost on his bosses at the Bureau, but Stacey saw it as a gulf, and hated the powers at the Kremlin with an intensity to rival that of J. Edgar Hoover. She talked politics all the time but didn’t seem to mind Nessheim’s comparative lack of interest.

  ‘You’re the only right-wing lover I’ve ever had,’ she declared one afternoon, as they lay in the bedroom of her apartment on the edge of Lincoln Park.

  ‘I’m not right wing. I like FDR.’

  ‘Sometimes I can’t believe your politics are so naive.’

  ‘You’re just saying that because I don’t believe in Socialism.’ ‘That’s what I mean – you’re so naive.’

  There was a smell of fried meat and cabbage in the front hall of his boarding house, drifting in from the kitchen where the landlady, Mrs Schneiderman, liked to hold court while Tillie the black cook made supper. Meals were extra for her boarders, a peripatetic bunch who rarely stayed more than a few months. Three years on, and Nessheim was the longest-serving lodger.

  He stuck his head in the kitchen door. ‘Hi, Mrs S. I’m back. Any messages for me?’

  ‘Carole Lombard forgot to call,’ she said, and looked up from the comic section of the Sunday paper. She was a broad-shouldered woman of indecipherable age – she could have been sixty-five, or forty, since the fullness of her face kept wrinkles at bay. On the stove top Tillie was frying pork chops.

  ‘You want supper?’

  ‘No, thanks. I ate already,’ he fibbed.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ she said equably and turned back to her comics. Nessheim went upstairs.

  He knew that with the salary he was making he should be looking for a place of his own. But there was something comfortable about life at Schneiderman’s, which even after three years kept him there. He had a large sunny room, he could come and go as he pleased, and the rent was $6 a week, a savings on the rental of a ‘proper’ apartment that he could send home. He wasn’t allowed to have women in his room, but right now there weren’t any women to invite. Stacey Madison had been the last girl he’d slept with, and he’d been too embarrassed for her to see where he lived, much less come to his room. Stacey might have been a passionate advocate of the workers’ rights, but she liked to lay her own head at night on a refined kind of pillow.

  ‘Jimmy!’ came a shout from the hall and he woke with a start, realising he had dozed off. The wind-up alarm clock by his bed said nine-thirty. He opened the door and saw Mrs Schneiderman peering up from the bottom of the staircase.

  ‘Phone,’ she said unhappily, since she discouraged calls after eight o’clock. He quickly went downstairs to the phone on the wall by the kitchen door.

  ‘Hello,’ he said into the mouthpiece, pressing the receiver firmly to his ear.

  ‘Is that Jimmy Nessheim?’ It was hard to hear – the radio was on in the kitchen.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘It’s Mary Le Saux. Eddie said I should call you if there was ever a problem.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘He hasn’t come home, Mr Nessheim.’

  ‘It’s not that late, Mrs Le Saux,’ he said with a trace of impatience. ‘Maybe he got held up somewhere.’

  ‘You don’t understand. He hasn’t been home since Thursday night.’

  ‘What?’ He had met with Eddie on Thursday. Three days before.

  ‘It’s not like him at all, Mr Nessheim. I’m worried.’

  ‘Have you talked to the police?’ Through the earpiece he could hear a child crying in the background.

  ‘I called them yesterday morning. They told me to sit tight – they said Eddie was probably on a bender. But Eddie’s never stayed out all night, Mr Nessheim. He isn’t like that.’

  ‘Could he have gone somewhere? You know, left town for a reason – maybe gone somewhere he couldn’t get in touch with you.’

  ‘He’d never do that.’

  I know, he wanted to say, but he held back – it would just worry her more.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll show up soon, Mary. He’ll have a good reason for having been away.’ Trying to soothe her, he sensed he was not doing a good job. ‘Why, he’ll probably be home tonight. If he’s not, you should phone the police again in the morning. And call me when you have news.’

  He gave her the number of the Bureau in Chicago. She thanked him and hung up, but her voice was as fraught as when their conversation had commenced.

  Back in his room upstairs, Nessheim wondered what he should do. He could call the Milwaukee police, but doubted he would get much out of them – they’d be more interested in his recent incursion on their turf. He’d better talk to Ferguson first thing, not that he figured he’d get much help from him.

  It was getting late, so he stripped to his underwear and climbed into bed. But even with the light out he couldn’t sleep. What had happened to Eddie Le Saux? Jimmy couldn’t see him as the type to do a bun
k – not with a wife and kids. Could it be something political then? A mission for the Party perhaps, taking him out of town on business he didn’t want even his wife to know about. If Eddie were helping those guys trying to get to Spain, for example, he’d know he was playing with fire as far as the federal authorities were concerned, and it would be a fire he’d want to keep his family well away from. That could be it, thought Nessheim with relief.

  He went to sleep at last, and the knock came as a complete surprise. He got up and opened the door, groggy but cautious, and found Mrs Schneiderman standing there, wearing a vast cotton nightdress. ‘It’s the phone again, Jimmy, and it’s after midnight. The man said it’s an emergency. All I can say is it better be.’

  The lake was calm, the gently lapping water muted as a baby’s bath. Out a few miles from shore an ore boat trudged north under a ceiling of cloud, headed for Duluth and copper country. Nessheim looked up and down the beach, but saw nothing but a vanilla length of sand. It was only as the patrolman pulled back the covering tarp that he looked down.

  The face of Eddie Le Saux had lost its knowingness. His cheeks were creased slightly and the skin around his strong jaw seemed curiously puffy and soft, but otherwise his immersion in the water had left him looking entirely peaceful. And dead, thought Nessheim with a jolt.

  ‘When was he found?’

  ‘Two hours ago,’ said the cop, whose name was Otis. He had blond hair but dark eyebrows, and he seemed to resent Nessheim’s presence. ‘We were going to move him, but Sarge said you had to see him first.’

  Nessheim nodded. He’d come up at first light after the late-night phone call, from Mary Le Saux’s brother, telling him they’d found Eddie’s boat drifting five miles outside Milwaukee’s harbour. The boat had been towed in by the Coast Guard. Nessheim had just seen it – a small dinghy with only a five h.p. outboard engine – when he’d been told they’d found a body on the shore.

  ‘Any idea how long he was in the water?’

  The cop shrugged his shoulders. ‘Doc said at least a couple of days.’

  It was Monday, less than ninety-six hours since Nessheim had seen him. ‘Is there anything to show what happened?’ It seemed odd to speak of Le Saux like this, when he lay four feet away.