To Mr Finkelstein rocking homeward on the trolley the moral was clearer than it had ever been. I am entirely innocent, he said to himself. I have nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of. If there are others who have something to be ashamed of, let them hide and wait for this thing that is happening, let them play the part they have been given and let them wait as though they are actually guilty of wrong. I have nothing to be ashamed of and I will not hide as though there were something stolen in my house. I am a citizen of this country. I am an honest man, he thought as he got off the trolley and went down into the subway that would take him home, I am no Itzik. God dammit to hell, he said to himself as he pushed through the turnstile, they are not going to make an Itzik out of me.

A clattering on the floor of the platform brought him back to his surroundings. In going through the turnstile his cardboard box had broken open. At his feet lay two baseball bats. A third was starting to slip through a hole in the box. He set the box on the concrete and gathered the two bats together and pushed them back through the hole. Then he went on to the front part of the platform and waited. Next time he would see that they wrapped bats in heavier boxes. It was the first time he had ever bought bats, having decided only in the last few days that they were a good thing to have in the store.

Chapter Sixteen

FOR nearly forty days the city had had no rain. It is an insidious pacifier, rain; the people stay at home and the pages of the precinct blotters do not turn so often. But when the sky stays as blue as it did this summer, day after sweltering day, and the humid air chokes a man out of his sleep, it is the streets and stoops of the city that become populated and the authority of the family disintegrates for a time. The ice cream parlors crowd up, and the saloons; the beaches are flattened down by more people than they were meant to hold – the city empties out into its own swelling arteries. In this summer the city had had no rain and no real cool weather for nearly forty days and the people were rubbing against each other in their irritated quest for a draft and just one moment of easy breathing. Some took their alarm clocks and slept all night in Central Park, others, braving the sandflies, stretched out on the Coney Island beach. And many of them were robbed there and others were pilfered on the tar roofs of the tenements where they had closed their eyes to rest. People lay out on fire escapes which collapsed in the small hours of the morning. Others, out late, came home to find their apartments robbed, for they would not lock their windows and keep out the air. There were all sorts of accidents, some gloomy and others only expensive. Now and then an overworked refrigerator exploded right in the kitchen. Two boys trying to get an extra breeze stuck their heads out of the windows of the Culver Line and were decapitated by a stanchion. Several pregnant women dropped their babies before time in the monoxide-filled buses. One man on Sixth Avenue was so aggravated by the heat that he took a shotgun and fired twice into a crowd which was waiting for the traffic light to change. He said, later, that he could not stand the sight of so many people. A woman, nearly seventy, was caught trying to climb over the fence around Central Park reservoir. In the station house they allowed her to take a shower and sent her home with a wet handkerchief. In the Bronx there were many dogs running loose infected with rabies. Hundreds of people were contracting infantile paralysis, and it was rumored that the waters off Coney Island were polluted. But the people kept coming to Coney Island, and many of them stirred up the water around where they stood to make it look foamy and fresh and ward off the paralysis; the life guards noticed this. In the cafeterias the smell of souring milk turned everything the customers ate into something sour. They could not enjoy a meal and they had had no sleep. In Brooklyn there was an exceptionally heavy invasion of stinging flies and it was difficult to buy screens because of the war. Two enormous amusement parks burned down and several piers caught fire. People were afraid to go to the amusement parks after this and afraid to go to Coney Island, but they had to go, and they went, and they were always worried. Even the subways started acting peculiarly. In one week alone three trains were discovered speeding along on absolutely the wrong tracks. For nearly forty days the city had had no rain.