We are all cheering wildly when the concert is over. Everyone talks busily as we walk to the bus. It has turned into a happy day. There have been ennobling sentiments. But in the parking lot my mother grasps my hand and I find that we are hurrying.
The bus moves off in a line of buses and cars. Peekskill policemen direct the traffic. “This is not the way we came,” Mindish says, leaning forward from his seat behind my father’s. My father rises wonderingly, in a sitting position. We are going uphill on a winding, narrow road through some woods. The buses are in low gear, the gear of pain, the sound that makes an engine human. I notice something odd — three or four grown men running along the edge of the woods. They run faster than the bus. I lean forward to see where they are running, and see more men coming out of the woods. They are throwing things toward the road. “Look out,” my father screams. At this moment the bus jerks to a stop, stalling in gear. The driver throws up his arms. There is the sound of shattering glass. A cry goes through the bus, the involuntary leaping out from throats of perception. My father sits back down, holding the railing of the seat in front of him. We all sit dumbfounded as if it was a show that had nothing to do with us. The driver’s face is decorated in blood. From the front to the back of the bus, people are ducking, like dominoes going down in a row, a beautiful pattern of shatter appears on the window alongside my mother’s head, and in the moment before I feel my head being forced down to the seat, I see a man with a boulder, heaving it into the rear window of the bus in front of us.
People are shouting to get the bus moving. But the driver is out of his seat, and even if he weren’t, there is no place to go. There are buses in front, and buses behind. The thunking of rocks on the sides and roof of the bus punctures the ears. Glass breaks like music. People cry out. “What is this,” demands my father’s voice, above me. “What is this!”
Flying in with the rocks, like notes tied to them with string, the words kike, commie bastard, jew commie, red. I listen carefully. Jew. Commie. Red. Nigger. Bastard. Kike. Nigger-lover. Red. Jew bastard. These words are shouted. The rocks, some of them as big as my head, are propelled by the motives of education. “Well teach you!” the enraged voices cry. “This will teach you, you commie bastard kikes!”
My mother and I are squeezed down between our seat and the back of the seat in front. We are kneeling. Every rattle, every crash operates like a simple machine for the tightening of her hold upon me. I imagine some kind of system of pulleys activated by shouts, pounding rocks, shattering glass. Inch by inch I am buried more firmly under her, until my head rests on her folded leg, and her breasts and arms cover the curve of my back, and her hands hold me by the bones of my ass. I feel through the cloth of her skirt her thigh muscle twitching under my mouth and chin, quivering in what — fear? rage? exertion? — and she is laying her head on my back and muttering into my backbone. Murderers. Dogs. Scum. It is the muttering epithet of my grandma, but in English. Fascist scum. Nazi pigs. Murderers.
I am in an intoxication of fear. The thought of my grandma has suggested a new meaning of her famous curses — not as the rantings of an old madwoman, but the exact and potent introjection of measures of doom into our lives. The bus is rocking. We are all going to die. My heart beats furiously but I am aware of the material of my mother’s skirt — a rough, wool cloth, which will leave a rashlike sensitivity on my cheek.
I hear Mindish yelling at my father to get down. “Pauly!” my mother cries over my back. “What are you doing! Paul!”
My father, crouching in the aisle, has seen something through the window. He steps over people and around them, making his way tortuously to the front of the bus. “Officer!” he shouts. “Officer!”
My spindly father, spinning his way to the front. To the war. This mustn’t be permitted. “This mustn’t be permitted,” he calls back in explanation. Then he is at the door commanding the driver to open it. The bus is rocking. He holds the overhead bar, insisting that the driver open the door of the bus. But the others yell to keep the door shut. “We can’t permit this,” he turns around to say. “We cannot permit this outrage.”
Mindish has followed him forward. The big dentist is smiling. “Get down, Paul. What are you doing! Get back here!” My father has sighted the policeman again, and is trying to pry open the double door with his hands. He shouts through the opening in the rubber guards of the door, shouts through the opening he makes with his hands. “Officer! Why do you permit this!” He struggles to fold back the doors, straining like Samson between the pillars, with his thin arms. He has attracted the attention of the commandos outside, and they are trying to help him open the door. We are at a moment of great insanity. My father’s entire left arm disappears through the doors. He leans at a crazy tilt. He is like one of my knotted shoelaces pulled up tight to its knot. How do I know this? If I was crouched behind a seat, how do I remember this? Calmly, with his right hand, my father removes his glasses, folds them against his chest and hands them up to Mindish. The deliberateness of this act terrifies me. I see something I don’t recognize, something I never knew with my child’s confidence in my perception of my parents. I am stunned. Now the bus stops rocking. The patriots have zeroed in on their target. They are all up at the front, outside the door. We stare in silence as my father silently experiences the breaking of his arm. Sweat pops up on his forehead. His face contorts. “Open the door!” my mother screams. “Open the door before they break him in half!” When the door opens with a hiss, my father flies from our view. A roar goes up. Two men who have been holding him in the insane tug of war tumble out after him. It is a comic sight to see them all go flying out the door, connected like sausages. I cannot see what is happening outside. There are frightening sounds. “Stop them!” my mother cries, pushing into the aisle. I am slammed against the seat. People are surging out to do battle, or to run, I can’t tell which. Above the heads, at the front of the bus, I see Mindish holding aloft my father’s folded glasses. He is a tall man and has this weird, embarrassed expression on his face, a smile for the ridiculous idea of being at someone’s mercy.
I don’t remember how we got home. There were police sirens, there was groaning and crying on this road through the woods. There was an ambulance. But I remember my father lying on the old couch in the living room. His arm was in splints, the whole top of his head was wrapped in a bandage, like an odd hat. There were scratches on his face. But he looked at me through glasses that were unbroken. He tried to smile through his cracked, swollen mouth. He couldn’t talk. I stared at him and I was frightened. There were tears in his eyes. My mother sat on the floor beside him, looking at the floor, and she held his hand. Their heads were close. They looked so desolate that I began to cry. I had not cried at all before this, but I cried now, and my mother pulled me over to her and sat me on her lap, and held me against her breast, and held my father’s hand and kissed it.
So there were limits to his failure. There were times when this passionately unreliable, naïve childish being found the world perfectly disposed. My mother was right about the Robeson Concert, but my father was headstrong. I began to appreciate the mystery in the dark intercourse of adults. The phone kept ringing — that night, the next day. Everyone said that if Pauly had not done what he had done, the bus would have been turned over and God knows how many crushed to death. It was true that in that whole bus, he was the only man who did anything. Nobody else could move. I thought about it a lot. That was something to be proud of, that he got up to do something. But what he did was mysterious and complicated and not anything like what people were saying. I thought about it for a long time. I decided he was trying to get the attention of the cop because he really thought the cop would help. The Law would arrest the Fascist hoodlums. That is what put him at the door and made him vulnerable.