The Plot Against America
by Philip Roth

 

Meanwhile more kids were rushing out of their houses, delirious with World Series excitement. But no sooner did they hit the street howling Kurowski's name than Big Gerry began barking at them, "Go get your bats! The war is on!" And he didn't mean the war against Germany.

By evening there wasn't a Jewish family on our street that wasn't barricaded behind double-locked doors, their radios playing nonstop to catch the latest bulletin and everyone phoning to tell everyone else that Winchell had said nothing remotely inflammatory to the Louisville crowd, that he had, in fact, begun his speech in what could only have been intended as an open appeal to civic self-esteem—"Mr. and Mrs. Louisville, Kentucky, proud citizens of the unique American city that is home to the greatest horse race in the world and birthplace of the very first Jewish justice of the United States Supreme Court—" and yet before he could speak aloud the name of Louis D. Brandeis, he'd been brought down by three bullets to the back of the head. A second report, aired just moments later, identified the spot where the murder occurred as only a few yards from one of the most elegant municipal buildings constructed in the Greek Revival style in the whole of Kentucky, the Jefferson County Courthouse, with its commanding statue of Thomas Jefferson facing the street and a long, wide staircase leading up to the grandly columned portico. The shots that killed Winchell appeared to have been fired from one of the courthouse's large, austere, beautifully proportioned front windows.

My mother began making her first calls immediately upon coming in from shopping. I had stationed myself just inside the door to tell her about Walter Winchell the instant she got home, but by then she already knew the little there was to be known, first because the butcher's wife had phoned the store to repeat the news bulletin to her husband just as he was wrapping my mother's order, and then because of the bewilderment apparent among the people out on the street, who were already scurrying for the safety of their homes. Failing to reach my father, whose truck hadn't yet pulled up at the market, she of course began to worry about my brother, who was cutting it close once again and probably wouldn't come rushing up the back stairs until seconds before he was due at the kitchen table with his hands washed of the day's dirt and his face scrubbed clean of lipstick. It was the worst moment imaginable for either of them to be away and their precise whereabouts unknown, but without taking time to unbag the groceries or to register her alarm, my mother said to me, "Get me the map. Get your map of America."

There was a large folding map of the North American continent squared away in a pocket inside volume one of the encyclopedia set sold to us by a door-to-door salesman the year I started school. I rushed into the sun parlor, where, shelved between the brass George Washington bookends bought at Mount Vernon by my father, was the whole of our library: the six-volume encyclopedia, a leather-bound copy of the United States Constitution awarded by Metropolitan Life, and the unabridged Webster's dictionary that Aunt Evelyn had given Sandy for his tenth birthday. I opened the map and spread it across the kitchen table's oilcloth covering, whereupon my mother—using the magnifying glass that I'd received from my parents for a seventh-birthday gift along with my irreplaceable, unforgotten stamp album—searched for the speck in north-central Kentucky that was the city of Danville.

In only seconds the two of us were back at the telephone table in the foyer, above which hung yet another of my father's awards for selling insurance, a framed copper engraving replicating the Declaration of Independence. Local dial service within Essex County was barely ten years old and probably a good third of the people in Newark didn't as yet have any phone service at all—and most who did were, like us, on a party line—and so the long-distance call was still a wondrous phenomenon, not only because making one was far from an ordinary household experience for a family of our means but because no technological explanation, however basic, could remove it entirely from the realm of magic.

My mother spoke to the operator very precisely to be sure that nothing went wrong and we weren't charged by mistake for anything extra. "I want to make a long-distance person-to-person call, operator. To Danville, Kentucky. Person-to-person to Mrs. Selma Wishnow. And please, operator, when my three minutes are up, don't forget to tell me."

There was a long pause while the operator got the number from the directory operator. When my mother finally heard the call being placed, she signaled for me to put my ear beside hers but not to speak.

"Hello!" Answering enthusiastically is Seldon.

Operator: "This is long distance. I have a person-to-person call for Mrs. Selma Wistful."

"Uh-uh," Seldon mumbles.

"Is this Mrs. Wistful?"

"Hello? My mother's not home right now."

Operator: "I'm calling for Mrs. Selma Wistful—"

"Wishnow," my mother shouts. "Wish-now."

"Who's that?" Seldon says. "Who's calling?"

Operator: "Young lady, is your mother home?"

"I'm a boy," Seldon says. Taken aback. Another blow. They won't stop coming. Yet he does sound girlish, his voice higher-pitched even than when he'd been living downstairs. "My mother's not home from work yet," Seldon says.

Operator: "Mrs. Wishnow is not at home, madam."

My mother looks at me and says, "What could have happened? The boy is alone. Where could she be? He's all by himself. Operator, I'll talk to anyone."

Operator: "Go ahead, sir."

"Who's this?" Seldon asks.

"Seldon, it's Mrs. Roth. From Newark."

"Mrs. Roth?"

"Yes. I'm calling long distance to speak to your mother."

"From Newark?"

"You know who I am."

"But it sounds like you're just down the street."

"Well, I'm not. This is a long-distance call. Seldon, where's your mother?"

"I'm just having a snack. I'm waiting for her to come home from work. I'm having some Fig Newtons. And some milk."

"Seldon—"

"I'm waiting for her to come home from work—she works late. She always works late. I just sit here. Sometimes I have a snack—"

"Seldon, stop right there. Be still a moment."

"And then she comes home and she makes dinner. But she's late every night."

Here my mother turns to me and makes to hand me the phone. "Talk to him. He won't listen when I speak."

"Talk to him about what?" I say, waving the phone away.

"Is Philip there?" Seldon asks.

"Just a moment, Seldon," my mother says.

"Is Philip there?" Seldon repeats.

To me, my mother says, "Take the phone, please."

"But what am I supposed to say?" I ask.

"Just get on the phone," and she places the receiver in my one hand and lifts the speaker for me to hold in the other.

"Hello, Seldon?" I say.

Softly tentative, unbelieving, he replies, "Philip?"

"Yes. Hi, Seldon."

"Hey, you know, I don't have any friends in school."

I tell him, "We want to speak to your mother."

"My mother's at work. She works late every night. I'm having a snack. I'm having some Fig Newtons and a glass of milk. It's going to be my birthday in about a week and my mother said I could have a party—"

"Seldon, wait a minute."

"But I don't have any friends."

"Seldon, I have to ask my mother a question. Just wait." I muzzle the speaker and whisper to her, "What am I supposed to say to him?"

My mother whispers, "Ask him if he knows what happened today in Louisville."

"Seldon, my mother wants to know if you know what happened today in Louisville."

"I live in Danville. I live in Danville, Kentucky. I'm just waiting for my mom to come home. I'm having a snack. Did something happen in Louisville?"

"Just a minute, Seldon," I say. "Now what?" I whisper to my mother.

"Just talk to him, please. Keep talking to him. And if the operator says the three minutes are up, you tell me."

"Why are you calling?" Seldon asks. "Are you going to come visit?"

"No."

"Remember when I saved your life?" he says.

"Yes, I do. I remember."

"Hey, what time is it there? Are you in Newark? Are you on Summit Avenue?"

"We told you we were. Yes."

"It's really clear, isn't it? It sounds like you're just down the block. I wish you could come over and have a snack with me, and then you could be here for my birthday party next week. I don't have any friends to invite to my birthday party. I don't have anybody to play chess with. I'm sitting here now practicing my opening move. Remember my opening move? I move out the pawn that's just in front of the king. Remember when I tried to teach you? I move out the king's pawn, remember? Then I put out the bishop, then I move the knight, and then the other knight—and remember the move when there's no pieces between the king and one of the rooks? When I move my king over two spaces to protect him?"

"Seldon—"

My mother whispers, "Tell him you miss him."

"Ma!" I say to her.

"Tell him, Philip."

"I miss you, Seldon."

"Do you want to come over for a snack then? I mean it sounds like—are you really just down the street?"

"No, this is a long-distance phone call."

"What time is it there?"

"It's, uh—about ten to six."

"Oh, it's ten to six here. My mom should already be home around five. Five-thirty the latest. One night she came home at nine."

"Seldon," I say, "do you know that Walter Winchell was killed?"

"Who's that?" he asks.

"Let me finish. Walter Winchell was killed in Louisville, Kentucky. In your state. Today."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Who is that?"

Operator: "Your three minutes are up, sir."

"Is that your uncle?" Seldon asks. "Is that your uncle who came to see you? Is he dead?"

"No, no," I say, and I'm thinking that, alone now out in Kentucky, he sounds as though he were the one who was kicked in the head. He sounds stunned. Stunted. He sounds stopped. And yet he was the smartest kid in our class.

My mother takes the phone. "Seldon, this is Mrs. Roth. I want you to write something down."

"Okay. I have to go find a piece of paper. And a pencil."

Waiting. Waiting. "Seldon?" my mother says.

More waiting.

"Okay," he says.

"Seldon, write this down. This is now costing a lot of money."

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Roth. I just couldn't find a pencil in the house. I was at the kitchen table. I was having a snack."

"Seldon, write down that Mrs. Roth—"

"Okay."

"—called from Newark."

"From Newark. Gosh. I wish I was still in Newark, living downstairs. You know, I saved Philip's life."

"Mrs. Roth called from Newark to be sure—"

"Just a minute. I'm writing."

"—to be sure everything is okay."

"Is something supposed to not be okay? I mean Philip's all right. And you're okay. Is Mr. Roth okay?"

"Yes, thank you for asking, Seldon. Tell your mother that's why I called. There's nothing to worry about here."

"Should I be worried about something?"

"No. Just eat your snack—"

"I think I've had enough Fig Newtons now, but thanks anyway."

"Goodbye, Seldon."

"I like Fig Newtons, though."

"Goodbye, Seldon."

"Mrs. Roth?"

"Yes?"

"Is Philip going to come visit me? It's my birthday next week and I don't have anybody to invite for my birthday party. I don't have any friends in Danville. The kids here call me Saltine. I have to play chess with a kid who's six years old. He lives next door. He's the only one I can play with. One kid. I taught him chess. Sometimes he makes moves you can't do. Or he moves his queen and I have to tell him not to. I win all the time but it's really no fun. But I have nobody else to play with."

"Seldon, it's hard for everyone. It's hard for everyone now. Goodbye, Seldon." And she placed the receiver onto the hook and began to sob.

 

 

Only days before, on October first, the two Summit Avenue flats vacated in September by the "homesteaders of 1942"—the one beneath ours and another across the street, three doors down—were occupied by Italian families up from the First Ward. Essentially their new living quarters had been assigned to them by outright government edict, though with the sweetening incentive of a rent discount of fifteen percent (or $ 6. 37 on their monthly $ 42. 50) over a five-year period, that money to be paid directly to the landlord by the Department of the Interior over the life of the initial three-year lease and for the first two years of a lease's three-year renewal. Such arrangements derived from a previously unpublicized section of the homesteading plan called the Good Neighbor Project, designed to introduce a steadily increasing number of non-Jewish residents into predominantly Jewish neighborhoods and in this way "enrich" the "Americanness" of everyone involved. What one heard at home, however—and sometimes even at school from our teachers—was that the underlying goal of the Good Neighbor Project, like that of Just Folks, was to weaken the solidarity of the Jewish social structure as well as to diminish whatever electoral strength a Jewish community might have in local and congressional elections. If the displacing of Jewish families and their replacement by the conscripting of Gentile families followed the timetable of the agency's master plan, a Christian majority might well be dominant in at least half of America's twenty most heavily populated Jewish neighborhoods as early as the start of Lindbergh's second term and a resolution of America's Jewish Question close at hand, by one means or another.

The family conscripted to move in downstairs from us—a mother, a father, a son, and a grandmother—were the Cucuzzas. Because of my father's years of canvassing the First Ward, where the customers whose tiny premiums he collected each month were by and large Italians, he was already familiar with the new tenants, and consequently, when he got home from work on the morning after Mr. Cucuzza, a night watchman, had trucked the family's possessions up from their cold-water flat in a tenement building on a side street not far from Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, my father stopped off first at the downstairs door to see if, despite his appearing there without a coat and a tie and with dirty hands, the elderly grandmother would recognize him as the insurance man who'd sold her husband the policy that had provided the family with the means to bury him.

The "other" Cucuzzas (relatives of "our" Cucuzzas, who'd moved from their own First Ward cold-water flat to the house three doors away) were a much larger family—three sons, a daughter, the two parents, and a grandfather—and potentially noisier, more disruptive neighbors. They were associated through the grandfather and the father with Ritchie "the Boot" Boiardo, the mobster who ruled Newark's Italian precincts and constituted the city's only serious competitor to Longy's underworld monopoly. To be sure, the father, Tommy, was but one of a bevy of underlings and, like his own retired father, doubled as a waiter at Boiardo's popular restaurant, the Vittorio Castle, when he wasn't making the rounds of the taverns, barber shops, brothels, schoolyards, and candy stores of the Third Ward slums to extract their pocket change from the Negroes who faithfully played the daily numbers game. Regardless of religion, the other Cucuzzas were hardly the sort of neighbors my parents wanted anywhere near their impressionable young sons, and to comfort us at breakfast on Sunday morning my father explained how much worse off we would have been if we'd gotten the numbers runner and his three boys instead of the night watchman and his son, Joey, an eleven-year-old recently enrolled at St. Peter's and, by my father's report, a good-natured kid with a hearing problem who had little in common with his roughneck cousins. Whereas down in the First Ward all four of Tommy Cucuzza's kids had gone to the local public school, here they'd been enrolled along with Joey at St. Peter's rather than at a public school like ours, brimming with brainy little Jews.

 

 

Since my father had left work only a few hours after the Winchell assassination and, over Uncle Monty's angry objections, driven back home to spend the remainder of that tense evening beside his wife and his children, the four of us were seated together at the kitchen table waiting for the radio to bring fresh news when Mr. Cucuzza and Joey came up the back stairway to pay a visit. They knocked on the door and then had to wait on the landing until my father was sure who was there.

Mr. Cucuzza was a bald, hulking man, six and a half feet tall, weighing over two hundred and fifty pounds, and he was dressed for work in his night watchman's uniform, a dark blue shirt, freshly pressed dark blue trousers, and a wide black belt that along with holding up his trousers supported several pounds of the most extraordinary collection of equipment I'd ever been close enough to reach out and touch. There were keys in bunches each the size of a hand grenade hanging to the side of either pants pocket, there was a set of real handcuffs, and a night watchman's clock in its black case dangled by a strap from the polished belt buckle. At first glance, I took the clock for a bomb, but there was no mistaking for other than what it was the pistol in a holster at his waist. A longish flashlight that had to have doubled as a blackjack was stuck lamp upward into his back pocket, and high on one sleeve of his starched workshirt was a triangular white patch whose blue lettering read "Special Guard."

Joey was also big—only two years my senior and already twice my weight—and to me the equipment he sported was nearly as intriguing as his father's. Looking like a wad of molded bubble gum plugging the hole of his right ear was a hearing aid attached by a thin wire to a round black case with a dial on the front that he wore clipped to his shirt pocket; another wire attached to a battery about the size of a large cigarette lighter that he carried around in his pants pocket. And in his hands he carried a cake, a gift from his mother to mine.

Joey's gift was the cake, Mr. Cucuzza's was a pistol. He owned two, one that he wore for work and the other that he kept hidden away at home. He'd come to offer my father the spare.

"Nice of you," my father said to him, "but I really don't know how to shoot."

"You pulla the trig'." Mr. Cucuzza had a surprisingly soft voice for someone so enormous, though with a raspy edge to it, as if it had been exposed too long to the weather during his hours of walking the watchman's beat. And his accent was so enjoyable to hear that when I was alone I sometimes pretended that the way he talked was the way I talked too. How many times did I entertain myself by saying aloud "You pulla the trig'"? With the exception of Joey's American-born mother, our Cucuzzas all had oddish voices, the bewhiskered grandmother's being oddest of all, odder even than Joey's, which sounded less like a voice than like the uninflected echo of a voice. And odd not just because she went around speaking only Italian, whether to others (including me) or to herself while she swept the back stairway or kneeled in the dirt planting her vegetables in our minute backyard or just stood muttering in the dark doorway. Hers was oddest because it sounded like a man's—she looked like a tiny old man in a long black dress and she sounded like one too, particularly when barking the commands and decrees and injunctions that Joey never dared disobey. The playful half of him, the soul that the nuns and the priests never saw enough of to save, was virtually all that I ever encountered when we two were alone. Why it was hard to feel too sorry about his hearing was because Joey was himself a very jolly, prankish boy with his own brand of hooting laughter, a talkative, curious, monumentally gullible boy whose mind moved quickly if unpredictably. It was hard to feel sorry for him, yet when he was around his family Joey's obedience was so painstakingly thorough that I found it almost as astonishing to contemplate as the painstakingly thorough lawlessness of a Shushy Margulis. There couldn't have been a better son in all of Italian Newark, which was why my own mother soon found him irresistible—his faultless filial devotion and his long dark eyelashes, the way he imploringly looked at adults, waiting to be told what to do, allowed her to set aside the uneasy aloofness that was her inbuilt defense against Gentiles. The old-country grandmother, however, gave her—and me—the willies.

"You aim," Mr. Cucuzza explained to my father, using a finger and a thumb to demonstrate, "and uhyou shoot. You aim and uhyou shoot and that's it."

"I don't need it," my father said.

"But ifuh they come roun'," Mr. Cucuzza said, "how you gonna protect?"

"Cucuzza, I was born in the city of Newark in the year nineteen hundred and one," my father told him. "All my life I have paid my rent on time, I have paid my taxes on time, and I have paid my bills on time. I've never cheated on an employer for as much as a dime. I have never tried to cheat the United States government. I believe in this country. I love this country."

"Me too," said our massive new downstairs neighbor, whose wide black belt might have been hung with shrunken heads, given the enchantment that it continued to cast over me. "I come-uh here I was uhten. Best country anyplace. No Mussolini here."

"I'm glad you feel that way, Cucuzza. It's a tragedy for Italy, it's a human tragedy for people like you."

"Mussolini, Hitler—make-uh me sick."

"You know what I love, Cucuzza? Election Day," my father told him. "I love to vote. Since I was old enough, I have not missed an election. In 1924 I voted against Mr. Coolidge and for Mr. Davis, and Mr. Coolidge won. And we all know what Mr. Coolidge did for the poor people of this country. In 1928 I voted against Mr. Hoover and for Mr. Smith, and Mr. Hoover won. And we know what he did for the poor people of this country. In 1932 I voted against Mr. Hoover for the second time and for Mr. Roosevelt for the first time, and, thank God, Mr. Roosevelt won, and he put America back on its feet. He took this country out of the Depression and he gave the people what he promised—a new deal. In 1936 I voted against Mr. Landon and for Mr. Roosevelt, and again Mr. Roosevelt won—two states, Maine and Vermont, that is all Mr. Landon is able to carry. Can't even carry Kansas. Mr. Roosevelt sweeps the country by the biggest presidential vote there has ever been, and once again he keeps every promise to the working people that he made in that campaign. And so what do the voters up and do in nineteen hundred and forty? They elect a fascist instead. Not just an idiot like Coolidge, not just a fool like Hoover, but an out-and-out fascist with a medal to prove it. They put in a fascist and a fascist rabble-rouser, Mr. Wheeler, as his sidekick, and they put Mr. Ford into the cabinet, not only an anti-Semite right up there with Hitler but a slave driver who has turned the workingman into a human machine. And so tonight you come to me, sir, in my own home, and you offer me a pistol. In America in the year nineteen hundred and forty-two, a brand-new neighbor, a man I do not even know yet, has to come here and offer me a pistol in order for me to protect my family from Mr. Lindbergh's anti-Semitic mob. Well, don't you think I'm not grateful, Cucuzza. I will never forget your concern. But I am a citizen of the United States of America, and so is my wife, and so are my children, and so," he said, his voice catching, "and so was Mr. Walter Winchell—"

But now, suddenly, there is a radio bulletin about Walter Winchell. "Shhh!" my father says. "Shhh!" as though in the kitchen someone other than himself had been the orator holding forth. We all listen—even Joey appears to listen—the way birds flock to migrate and fish swim in a school.

The body of Walter Winchell, slain that day at a political rally in Louisville, Kentucky, by a suspected American Nazi Party assassin working in collaboration with the Ku Klux Klan, will be carried overnight by train from Louisville to Pennsylvania Station in New York City. There, by order of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and under the protection of the New York City police, the body will lie in state in the great hall of the train station throughout the morning. According to Jewish custom, a funeral service will be held that same day, at two P.M. in Temple Emanu-El, New York's largest synagogue. A public-address system will broadcast the proceedings beyond the temple to a gathering of mourners on Fifth Avenue expected to number in the tens of thousands. Along with Mayor La Guardia, speakers will include Democratic senator James Mead, New York's Jewish governor, Herbert Lehman, and the former president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

"It's happening!" my father cries. "He's back! FDR is back!"

"We need him bad," Mr. Cucuzza says.

"Boys," he asks, "do you understand what is happening?" and here he throws his arms around Sandy and me. "It's the beginning of the end of fascism in America! No Mussolini here, Cucuzza—no more Mussolini here!"