Nemesis by Philip Roth Read Free Book Online Page B

suit, a white shirt, and the darker of his two ties, and took the bus to Schley Street. The
synagogue was a low, dismal yellow-brick box of a building across the street from an overgrown lot that had been converted into a neighborhood victory garden, probably the one where Alan had taken diligent care of his own vegetable plot. Mr. Cantor could see a few women, wearing broad-brimmed straw hats for protection from the morning sun, bent over and weeding small patches of land adjacent to an advertising billboard. In front of the synagogue a row of cars was parked, one of them a black hearse, whose driver stood at the curb moving a cloth over the front fender. Inside the hearse Mr. Cantor could see the casket. It was impossible to believe that Alan was lying in that pale, plain pine box merely from having caught a summertime disease. That box from which you cannot force your way out. That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever. The rest of us live and grow older by the day, but he remains twelve. Millions of years go by, and he is still twelve.
    Mr. Cantor took his folded yarmulke out of his pants pocket, slipped it on his head, and went inside, where he found an empty seat near the back. He followed the prayers in the prayer book and joined the congregation in the recitations. Midway
through, a woman's voice was heard to scream, "She fainted! Help!" Rabbi Slavin briefly stopped the service while someone, most likely a doctor, rushed along the aisle and up the stairs to the balcony, to tend to whoever had passed out in the women's section. The synagogue temperature must have been at least ninety by then, and highest probably in the balcony. No wonder somebody had fainted. If the service didn't soon come to an end, people would start fainting everywhere. Even Mr. Cantor felt a little woozy inside his one suit, a woolen suit made to be worn in the winter.
    The seat next to him was empty. He kept wanting Alan to walk in and take it. He wanted Alan to walk in with his baseball mitt and sit down beside him and, as he regularly did at noon on the playground bleachers, eat the sandwich out of his lunch bag beside Mr. Cantor.
    The eulogy was delivered by Alan's uncle, Isadore Michaels, whose pharmacy had stood for years on the corner of Wainwright and Chancellor and whom all the customers called Doc. He was a jovial-looking man, heavyset and dark-complexioned like Alan's father, with those same grainy patches under his eyes. He alone was speaking because no
other family member felt able to control his emotions enough to do it. There were many people sobbing, and not only in the women's section.
    "God blessed us with Alan Avram Michaels for twelve years," his uncle Isadore said, smiling bravely. "And He blessed me with a nephew who I loved like my own child from the day he was born. On his way home every day after school, Alan would always stop by the store and sit at the counter and order a chocolate malted. When he was first starting school he was the skinniest kid in the world, and the idea was to fatten him up. If I was free, I'd go over to the soda fountain and make the malted for him myself and add in extra malt to put some pounds on him. Once that ritual began, it went on year after year. How I would enjoy those after-school visits from my extraordinary nephew!"
    Here he had to take a moment to collect himself.
    "Alan," he resumed, "was an authority on tropical fish. He could talk like an expert about everything you do to take care of all the different kinds of tropical fish. There was nothing more thrilling than to visit the house and sit with Alan alongside his aquarium and have him explain to you everything about each of the fish and how they had babies and so on. You could sit there with him for an hour and he still wouldn't be finished telling you all that he knew. You came away from being with Alan and you had a smile on your face and your spirits were lifted, and you'd learned something besides. How