There were sirens in the distance, off to the west where the hospital was. In the garden there were only shrill crickets and pulsating lightning bugs and the many varieties of fragrant flowers, their petals massed on the other side of the porch screens and, with Mrs. Steinberg away at the shore, more than likely watered by Dr. Steinberg after he'd eaten his dinner. A bowl of fruit lay on the glass top of the wicker coffee table in front of the wicker sofa where Mr. Cantor was sitting. Dr. Steinberg reached for a piece of fruit and told Mr. Cantor to help himself.
He bit into a delicious peach, a big and beautiful peach like the one Dr. Steinberg had taken from the bowl, and in the company of this thoroughly reasonable man and the soothing sense of security he exuded, he took his time eating it, savoring every sweet mouthful right down to the pit. Then, wholly unprepared for the moment but unable to contain himself, he placed the pit into an ashtray, leaned forward, and compressing his sticky hands tightly together between his knees, he said, "I would like your permission, sir, to ask Marcia to become engaged."
Dr. Steinberg burst out laughing and, raising his pipe in the air as though it were a trophy, he stood and did a little jig. "You have it!" he said. "I couldn't be more thrilled. And Mrs. Steinberg will be just as thrilled. I'm going to call her right now. And you're going to get on and tell her the news yourself. Oh, Bucky, this is just swell! Of course you have our permission. Marcia couldn't have hooked herself a better fellow. What a lucky family we are!"
Startled to hear Dr. Steinberg characterize his family as the lucky ones, Mr. Cantor felt himself flush with excitement, and he jumped to his feet too and heartily shook Dr. Steinberg's hand. Until that moment he hadn't planned to mention engagement to anyone until the new year, when he would be a bit more secure financially. He was still saving to buy a gas stove for his grandmother, to replace the coal stove she cooked on in the kitchen, and had figured that he'd have enough by December, if he didn't have to buy an engagement ring before then. But it was all the comfort he had derived from her kindly father, concluding with their enjoying those perfect peaches together on the back porch, that had roused him to seek permission there and then. What had done it was his knowing that Dr. Steinberg, merely by his presence, seemed able to answer the questions that nobody else could: what the hell is going on, and how do we get out of this? And something else had galvanized him as welclass="underline" the sound of the ambulance sirens crisscrossing Newark in the night.
THE NEXT MORNING was the worst so far. Three more boys had come down with polio — Leo Feinswog, Paul Lippman, and me, Arnie Mesnikoff. The playground had jumped from four to seven cases overnight. The sirens that he and Dr. Steinberg had heard the evening before could well have been from the ambulances speeding them to the hospital. He learned about the three new cases from the kids who came with their mitts that morning ready to spend the day playing ball. On an ordinary weekday he'd have two games going, one at each of the diamonds at either corner of the playground, but on this morning there weren't nearly enough boys on hand to field four teams. Aside from those who had taken ill, some sixty had apparently been kept away by apprehensive parents. The remainder he gathered together to talk to on the section of wooden bleachers that backed on to the rear wall of the school.
"Boys, I'm glad to see you here. Today's going to be another scorcher — you can tell that already. But that doesn't mean we're not going to go out on the field and play. It does mean we're going to take some precautions so none of you overdo it. Every two and a half innings we're taking a break in the shade, right here on the bleachers, for fifteen minutes. No running around during that time. That means everybody. Between noon and two, when it's hottest, there's going to be no softball at all. The ball fields are going to be empty. You want to play checkers, chess, Ping-Pong, you want to sit and talk on the bleachers, you want to bring a book or a magazine with you to read during the time-out… that's all fine. That's our new daily schedule. We're going to have as good a summer as we can, but we're going to do everything in moderation on days like this. Nobody here is going to get sunstroke out in that savage heat." He inserted "sunstroke" at the last moment, instead of saying "polio."
There were no complaints. There were no comments at all. They listened solemnly and nodded in agreement. It was the first time since the epidemic had begun that he could sense their fear. They each knew more than casually one or another of those who'd come down with the disease the day before, and in a way that they hadn't previously grasped the nature of the threat, they at last understood the chance they stood of catching polio themselves.
Mr. Cantor picked two teams of ten to start the first game. There were ten kids left over, and he told them they would go on to substitute, five to a side, after the first fifteen-minute break. That's the way they'd proceed throughout the day.
"All right?" Mr. Cantor said, clapping his hands enthusiastically. "It's a summer day like any other, and I want you to go out and play ball."
Instead of playing himself, he decided to start off the morning by sitting with the ten boys who were waiting their turn to join the game and who seemed unusually subdued. Back of center field, where the girls regularly gathered in the school street, Mr. Cantor noted that of the original dozen or so who had begun meeting there every weekday morning earlier in the summer, only three were present today — only three whose parents would apparently allow them to leave the vicinity of their homes for fear of their making contact with the other playground kids. The missing girls may have been among the neighborhood children he'd heard about who had been sent to take refuge with relatives a safe distance from the city, and some among those whisked from the menace to be immersed in, immunized by, the hygienic ocean air of the Jersey Shore.
Now two of the girls were turning the rope while one was jumping — and with nobody any longer quivering on her skinny legs, ready to rush in after her. The jumper's high tweeting voice could be heard that morning as far away as the bleachers, where boys normally full of jokes and wisecracks who had no trouble blabbering away all day long found themselves now with nothing to say.
K, my name is Kay
And my husband's name is Karl,
We come from Kansas
And we bring back kangaroos!
Mr. Cantor finally broke the long silence. "Any of you have friends who got sick?" he asked them.
They either nodded or quietly said yes.
"That's tough for you, I know. Very tough. We have to hope they get better and that they're soon back on the playground."
"You can wind up in an iron lung forever," said Bobby Finkelstein, a shy boy who was among the quietest of them, one of the boys he'd seen wearing a suit on the steps of the synagogue after Alan Michaels's funeral service.