"YOU'RE NOT WEARING yourself down, are you, Eugene?" Dinner was over and he was cleaning up while she sat at the table sipping a glass of water from the icebox. "You rush to the playground," she said, "you rush to visit the families of your boys, you rush on Sunday to the funeral, you rush home in the evening to help me — maybe this weekend you should stop rushing around in this heat and take the train and find a bed for the weekend down the shore. Take a break from everything. Get away from the heat. Get away from the playground. Go swimming. It'll do you a world of good."
"That's a thought, Grandma. That's not a bad idea."
"The Einnemans can look in on me, and Sunday night you'll come home refreshed. This polio is wearing you out. That's no good for anyone."
Over dinner he had told her about the three new cases at the playground and said that he was going to telephone the families later, when they got home from the hospital.
Meanwhile, the sirens were sounding again, and very close to the house, which was unusual, since as far as he knew there'd been no more than three or four cases in the entire residential triangle formed by Springfield, Clinton, and Belmont avenues. Theirs were the lowest numbers for any neighborhood in the city. At the southern end of the triangle, where he lived with his grandmother and where the rents were half what they were in Weequahic, there had been but a single case of polio — the victim an adult, a man of thirty, a stevedore who worked at the port — while in the Weequahic section, with its five elementary schools, there had been more than a hundred and forty cases, all in children under fourteen, in the first weeks of July alone.
Yes, of course — the shore, where some of his playground kids had already escaped with their mothers for the remainder of the summer. He knew a rooming house back from the beach in Bradley where he could get one of the cots in the cellar for a buck. He could do his diving off the high board of the boardwalk's big saltwater pool, dive all day long and then at night stroll along the boards to Asbury Park and pick up a mess of fried clams and a root beer at the arcade and sit on one of the benches facing the ocean and happily feast away while watching the surf come crashing in. What could be more removed from the Newark polio epidemic, what could be more of a tonic for him, than the booming black nighttime Atlantic? This was the first summer since the war began when the danger of German U-boats in nearby waters or of waterborne German saboteurs coming ashore after dark was considered to be over, when the blackout had been lifted, and — though the coast guard still patrolled the beaches and maintained pillboxes along the coast — when the lights were on again all along the Jersey Shore. That meant that both the Germans and the Japanese were suffering crippling defeats and that, nearly three years after it had begun, America's war was beginning to come to an end. It meant that his two best college buddies, Big Jake Garonzik and Dave Jacobs, would be returning home unscathed, if only they could make it through the remaining months of combat in Europe. He thought of the song Marcia liked so much: "I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places." That will be the day, he thought, when he could see Jake and Dave in the old familiar places!
He had never gotten over the shame of not being with them, for all that there was nothing he could do about it. They had wound up together in an airborne unit, jumping from planes into battle — what he would have wanted to do, exactly what he was constructed to do. Some six weeks earlier, at dawn on D-Day, they had been members of a huge paratroop force that had landed behind the German lines on the Normandy peninsula. Mr. Cantor knew from staying in touch with their families that despite the many casualties taken during the invasion, the two of them had survived. From following the maps in the paper plotting the Allies' progress, he figured that they had probably been in the heavy fighting to capture Cherbourg late in June. The first thing Mr. Cantor looked for in the Newark News that his grandmother got from the Einnemans every night after they'd finished reading it was whatever he could find about the U.S. army's campaign in France. After that, he read the box on the front page of the News that was called "The Daily Polio Bulletin" and that appeared just below a reproduction of a quarantine sign. "Board of Health of Newark, New Jersey," the sign read. "Keep out. This house contains a case of polio. Any person violating the isolation and quarantine rules and regulations of the board or who willfully removes, defaces, or obstructs this card without authority is liable to a fine of $50." The polio bulletin, which was also broadcast every day on the local radio station, kept Newarkers up to date on the number and location of every new case in the city. So far this summer, what people heard or read there was never what they hoped to find there — that the epidemic was on the wane — but rather that the tally of new cases had increased yet again from the day before. The impact of the numbers was, of course, disheartening and frightening and wearying. For these weren't the impersonal numbers one was accustomed to hearing on the radio or reading in the paper, the numbers that served to locate a house or record a person's age or establish the price of a pair of shoes. These were the terrifying numbers charting the progress of a horrible disease and, in the sixteen wards of Newark, corresponding in their impact to the numbers of the dead, wounded, and missing in the real war. Because this was real war too, a war of slaughter, ruin, waste, and damnation, war with the ravages of war — war upon the children of Newark.
YES, HE COULD certainly use a few days on his own down the shore. That, in fact, was what he'd been planning on doing when the summer began — with Marcia gone, to head to the shore every weekend to dive the day away and then walk the boards to Asbury at night to eat his favorite seashore meal. The cellar was dank where he rented a cot and the water was rarely hot in the shower everyone used and there was sand in the sheets and towels, but, second only to throwing the javelin, diving was his favorite sport. Two days of diving would help him to shake loose, at least temporarily, from the preoccupation with his stricken boys and quiet his agitation over Kenny Blumenfeld's hysterical outbursts and maybe clear his head of the malice he felt toward God.
Then, when his grandmother was outside with the neighbors and he was about finished with cleaning up and had just sat down at the table in his sleeveless undershirt and briefs to drink yet another glass of ice water, Marcia called. Dr. Steinberg had agreed to wait for Mr. Cantor to talk with Marcia before he or Mrs. Steinberg said anything to her about the engagement, so she was calling without any knowledge of the conversation on the back porch the evening before. She was calling to tell him she loved him and she missed him and to learn what he had decided about coming to the camp to take over from Irv Schlanger as waterfront director.
"What should I tell Mr. Blomback?" she asked.
"Tell him yes," Mr. Cantor said, and he startled himself no less by what he'd just agreed to than he had done asking permission of Dr. Steinberg to become engaged to his daughter. "Tell him I will," he said.