"And there's Weequahic. He would have been an honor student at Weequahic. He was already planning to take Latin. Latin! I had a nickname for him. I called him Brilliant."
"That he was," Mr. Cantor said, thinking of Alan's father at the house and his uncle at the synagogue and now his aunt in the car — all of them gushing for the same good reason: because Alan deserved no less. They will lament to their graves losing this marvelous boy.
"In college," Mrs. Beckerman said, "he planned to study science. He wanted to be a scientist and cure disease. He read a book about Louis Pasteur and knew everything about how Louis Pasteur discovered that germs are invisible. He wanted to be another Louis Pasteur," she said, mapping out the whole of a future that was never to be. "Instead," she concluded, "he had to go to eat in a place crawling with germs."
"Edith, that's enough," Mr. Beckerman said. "We don't know how he got sick or where. Polio is all over the city. There's an epidemic. It's every place you look. He got a bad case and he died. That's all we know. Everything else is talk that gets you nowhere. We don't know what his future would have been."
"We do!" she said angrily. "That child could have been anything!"
"Okay, you're right. I'm not arguing. Let's just get to the cemetery and give him a proper burial. That's all we can do for him now."
"And the two other boys," Mrs. Beckerman said. "God forbid anything should happen to them."
"They made it this far," Mr. Beckerman said, "they'll make it the rest of the way. The war will soon be over and Larry and Lenny will be safely home."
"And they'll never see their baby brother again. Alan will still be gone," she said. "There's no bringing him back."
"Edith," he said, "we know that. Edith, you're talking and you're not saying anything that everybody doesn't know."
"Let her speak, Daddy," Meryl said.
"But what good does it do," Mr. Beckerman asked, "going on and on?"
"It does good," the girl said. "It does her good."
"Thank you, darling," Mrs. Beckerman said.
All the windows were rolled down, but Mr. Cantor felt as though he were wrapped not in a suit but a blanket. The cortege had reached the park and turned right onto Elizabeth Avenue and was passing through Hillside and across the railroad overpass into Elizabeth, and he hoped that it wasn't much more time before they reached the cemetery. He imagined that if Alan lay roasting in that box for much longer, the box would somehow ignite and explode, and as though a hand grenade had gone off inside, the boy's remains would come bursting out all over the hearse and the street.
WHY DOES POLIO strike only in the summer? At the cemetery, standing there bareheaded but for his yarmulke, he had to wonder if polio couldn't be caused by the summer sun itself. At midday, in its full overhead onslaught, it seemed to have more than sufficient strength to cripple and kill, and to be rather more likely to do so than a microscopic germ in a hot dog.
A grave had been dug for Alan's casket. It was the second open grave Mr. Cantor had ever seen, the first having been his grandfather's, three years earlier, just before the war began. Then he'd been weighed down caring for his grandmother and holding her close to him throughout the cemetery service so that her legs didn't give way. After that, he'd been so busy looking after her and staying in every night with her and eventually getting her out once a week for a movie and an ice cream sundae that it was a while before he could find the time to contemplate all he himself had lost. But as Alan's casket was lowered into the ground — as Mrs. Michaels lunged for the grave, crying "No! Not my baby!" — death revealed itself to him no less powerfully than the incessant beating of the sun on his yarmulke'd head.
They all joined the rabbi in reciting the mourner's prayer, praising God's almightiness, praising extravagantly, unstintingly, the very God who allowed everything, including children, to be destroyed by death. Between the death of Alan Michaels and the communal recitation of the God-glorifying Kaddish, Alan's family had had an interlude of some twenty-four hours to hate and loathe God for what He had inflicted upon them — not, of course, that it would have occurred to them to respond like that to Alan's death, and certainly not without fearing to incur God's wrath, prompting Him to wrest Larry and Lenny Michaels from them next.
But what might not have occurred to the Michaels family had not been lost on Mr. Cantor. To be sure, he himself hadn't dared to turn against God for taking his grandfather when the old man reached a timely age to die. But for killing Alan with polio at twelve? For the very existence of polio? How could there be forgiveness — let alone hallelujahs — in the face of such lunatic cruelty? It would have seemed far less of an affront to Mr. Cantor for the group gathered in mourning to declare themselves the celebrants of solar majesty, the children of an ever-constant solar deity, and, in the fervent way of our hemisphere's ancient heathen civilizations, to abandon themselves in a ritual sun dance around the dead boy's grave — better that, better to sanctify and placate the unrefracted rays of Great Father Sun than to submit to a supreme being for whatever atrocious crime it pleases Him to perpetrate. Yes, better by far to praise the irreplaceable generator that has sustained our existence from its beginning — better by far to honor in prayer one's tangible daily encounter with that ubiquitous eye of gold isolated in the blue body of the sky and its immanent power to incinerate the earth — than to swallow the official lie that God is good and truckle before a cold-blooded murderer of children. Better for one's dignity, for one's humanity, for one's worth altogether, not to mention for one's everyday idea of whatever the hell is going on here.
Four times during the prayer, at the grave of this child, the mourners repeated, "Omein."
Only when the funeral cortege had left the sprawl of tombstones behind and was exiting between the gates onto McClellan Street did he suddenly remember the visits he used to make as a boy to the Jewish cemetery on Grove Street where his mother, and now his grandfather, were buried and where his grandmother and he would be buried in turn. As a child he'd been taken by his grandparents to visit his mother's grave every year to commemorate her birthday in May, though from his first childhood visit on, he could not believe that she was interred there. Standing between his tearful grandparents, he always felt that he was going along with a game by pretending that she was — never more than at the cemetery did he feel that his having had a mother was a made-up story to begin with. And yet, despite his knowing that his annual visit was the queerest thing he was called upon to do, he would not ever refuse to go. If this was part of being a good son to a mother woven nowhere into his memories, then he did it, even when it felt like a hollow performance.
Whenever he tried at the graveside to summon up a thought appropriate to the occasion, he would remember the story his grandmother had told him about his mother and the fish. Of all her stories — standard inspirational stories about how clever Doris had been in school and how helpful she'd been around the house and how she'd loved as a child to sit at the cash register in the store ringing up the sales, just the way he did when he was small — this was the one that had lodged in his mind. The unforgotten event occurred on a spring afternoon long before her death and his birth, when, to prepare for Passover, his grandmother would walk up Avon Avenue to the fish store to choose two live carp from the fishmonger's tank and bring them home in a pail and keep them alive in the tin tub that the family used for taking baths. She'd fill the tub with water and leave the fish there until it was time to chop off their heads and tails, scale them, and cook them to make gefilte fish. One day when Mr. Cantor's mother was five years old, she'd come bounding up the stairs from kindergarten, found the fish swimming in the tin tub, and after quickly removing her clothes, got into the tub to play with them. His grandmother found her there when she came up from the store to fix her an after-school snack. They never told his grandfather what the child had done for fear that he might punish her for it. Even when the little boy was told about the fish by his grandmother — he was then himself in kindergarten — he was cautioned to keep the story a secret so as not to upset his grandfather, who, in the first years after his cherished daughter's death, was able to deflect the anguish of losing her only by never speaking of her.