The Plot Against America

 Pressing his skull firmly back into the grip of her hand, he started to sob uncontrollably. “They blew his leg off,” he told her, and here my mother motioned for Sandy and me to leave her to comfort him alone. 

A new life began for me. I'd watched my father fall apart, and I would never return to the same childhood. The mother at home was now away all day working for Hahne’s, the brother on call was now off after school working for Lindbergh, and the father who’d defiantly serenaded all those callow cafeteria anti-Semites in Washington was crying aloud with his mouth wide open—crying like both a baby abandoned and a man being tortured—because he was powerless to stop the unforeseen. And as Lindbergh’s election couldn’t have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

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Her pretty face, with its large features and thickly applied makeup, suddenly looked to me preposterous—the carnal face of the ravenous mania to which, in my mother’s judgment, her emotional vounger sister had helplessly fallen prey. To be sure, for a child in the court of Louis XIV the ambitions and satisfactions of such a relative would never have attained the same intimidating aura of significance that Aunt Evelyn’s did for me, nor would the worldly advancement of a cleric like Rabbi Bengelsdorf have seemed the least bit scandalous to my parents were they themselves raised at court as a marquis and a marchioness. Probably If couldn’t have done any worse—I might well have done a lot better—seeking solace from the two nuns on the Lyons Avenue bus than from someone reveling in the pleasures of the standard, petty corruptions that proliferate wherever people compete for even the tiniest advantages of rank.

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Unlike his mother and my parents, Seldon couldn’t get over the thrill of discovering that it wasn’t he who had inexplicably “lost” his clothes but I who had stolen them to use for my getaway. This utter improbability established, as never before, a value to his own existence that had previously escaped his attention. Telling the story with all the prestige of savior and co-conspirator both—and showing everyone who’d look at them his scraped feet—seemed to make Seldon significant at last even in his own eyes, a daredevil of a boy able to compel a hero’s attention for the first time in his life, while I was devastated, not only by the shame of it all, which was more unbearable and Jonger lasting than the headache, but because my stamp album, my greatest treasure, that which I could not live without, was gone, I didn’t remember having taken it with me until the day after I got home from the hospital and got up in the morning to get dressed and saw that it was missing trom beneath my socks and my underwear. The reason I stored it there in the first place was so as to see it first thing every morning when I dressed for school. And now the first thing 1 saw on my first morning home was that the biggest thing I had ever owned was gone.