Nemesis by Philip Roth Read Free Book Online

get rid of Horace—and get back to concentrating on the game—was to shake the moron's lifeless hand and say to him, "How ya doin', Horace?" Whereupon Horace would appear to be satisfied and head off to stand beside another of the players. All he
asked of life was that—to have his hand shaken. None of the playground boys ever laughed at him or teased him—at least not when Mr. Cantor was around—except for the uncontrollably energetic Kopfermans, Myron and Danny. They were strong, burly boys, good at sports, Myron the overexcitable, belligerent one and Danny the mischievous, secretive one. The older one especially, eleven-year-old Myron, had all the makings of a bully and had to be reined in when there was a disagreement among the boys on the field or when he interfered with the girls jumping rope. Mr. Cantor spent no small portion of his time trying to inculcate in untamed Myron the spirit of fair play and also to caution him to refrain from pestering Horace.
    "Look," Myron would say, "look, Horace. Look what I'm doing." When Horace saw the tip of Myron's sneaker beating rhythmically up and down on the bleacher step, his fingers would begin to twitch and his face would grow bright red and soon he would be waving his arms in the air as if he were fighting off a swarm of bees. More than once that summer Mr. Cantor had to tell Myron Kopferman to cut it out and not do it again. "Do what?
Dowhat?" Myron asked, managing to mask none of his insolence with a wide grin. "I'm tapping my foot, Mr. Cantor—don't I have a right to tap my foot?" "Knock it off, Myron," Mr. Cantor replied. The ten-year-old Kopferman boy, Danny, had a cap gun made of metal and modeled to look like a real revolver which he carried in his pocket, even when he was in the field playing second base. The cap gun produced a small explosive sound and smoke when the trigger was pressed. Danny liked to come up behind the other boys and try to frighten them with it. Mr. Cantor tolerated these hijinks only because the other boys were never really frightened. But one day Danny took out the toy weapon and waved it at Horace and told him to stick his hands in the air, which Horace did not do, and so Danny gleefully fired off five rounds of caps. The noise and smoke set Horace to howling, and in his clumsy, splayfooted way, he went running from his playground tormentor. Mr. Cantor confiscated the gun, and after that kept it in a drawer in his office, along with the toy "sheriff's" handcuffs that Danny had employed earlier in the summer to scare the playground's younger kids. Not for the first time
he sent Danny Kopferman home for the day with a note telling his mother what her younger son had gotten up to. He doubted that she'd ever seen it.
    Yushy, the guy in the mustard-smeared apron who'd been working for years behind the counter at Syd's, said to Mr. Cantor, "It's dead around here."
    "It's hot," Mr. Cantor answered. "It's summer. It's the weekend. Everybody's down the shore or staying indoors."
    "No, nobody's coming in because of that kid."
    "Alan Michaels."
    "Yeah," Yushy said. "He ate a hot dog here, and he went home and got polio and died, and now everybody's afraid to come in. It's bullshit. You don't get polio from a hot dog. We sell thousands of hot dogs and nobody gets polio. Then one kid gets polio and everybody says, 'It's the hot dogs at Syd's, it's the hot dogs at Syd's!' A boiled hot dog—how do you get polio from a boiled hot dog?"
    "People are frightened," Mr. Cantor said. "They're scared to death, so they worry about everything."
    "It's the wop bastards that brought it around," Yushy said.
    "That's not likely," Mr. Cantor said.
    "They did. They spit all over the place."
    "I was there. We washed the spit away with ammonia."
    "You washed the spit away but you didn't wash the polio away. You can't wash the polio away. You can't see it. It gets in the air and you open your mouth and breathe it in and next thing you got the polio. It's got nothing to