Читать книгу The Education of Arnold Hitler - Marc Estrin - Страница 13

The hot Texas summer of ’57 passed uneventfully enough, in Mansfield. So convincing had been last year’s demonstration that August registration needed no more than private reminders about safety for any Negroes who might think of registering their children at all-white MHS. But the effigies waited warily in their garages.

All was not so circumspect in Little Rock next door, where Governor Orval Faubus and the Arkansas National Guard linked arms around Central High School to prevent nine Negro children from entering. President Eisenhower sent a thousand paratroopers to intervene. Like their effigies, Mansfield’s Negroes also waited warily, glued to their radios and TVs. Eventually, they stopped holding their breaths: it would be eight more years before the first black children walked through the door at Mansfield High.

. . .

On Friday evening, October 4th, 1957, all hell broke loose from the skies: the Russkies had put a “sputnik” in the heavens. Commies were circling the earth and were even now passing over Mansfield, Texas, every ninety-six minutes, beeping in Russian to their hearts’ content. President Eisenhower heard the news on the golf links at Gettysburg; the Hitler-Giardinis and the rest of America heard it on the eleven o’clock news. It was a weekend of panic and punditry.

Senator Henry Jackson declared Sputnik “a devastating blow” to America and called upon the president to proclaim “a week of shame and danger.” Republicans warned about the harmful effects of “progressive education,” “flabby curricula,” and “the shirking of basic subjects,” and even liberals joined the weekend chorus, urging more funding for education and science. By consensus the Cold War was not just about weapons but, even more importantly, about knowledge—and this “second Pearl Harbor” showed America was “losing the race.”

On Monday morning, Mrs. Armstrong asked her second grade class to prepare their weekly show-and-tells on the topic of Sputnik. When by Thursday no child had come forward, Mrs. Armstrong asked Edna and Arnold to make a presentation the next morning, the first-week anniversary of the artificial moon.

Edna (“the Brain”) Rawson was the child of Edward Rawson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Texas at Arlington, and Stella Rawson, pediatrician, and the only unabashed liberal in Mansfield. Stella was for everything everyone else opposed and was opposed to everything everyone else was for—except Mansfield High football, for which she was raging with juices, a fanatical president of the Mansfield Tigers Boosters’ Club.

Edna came to class the next morning with what may have been the very first newsprint-and-marker presentation in the history of the United States. Her parents delivered her to school with her mother’s painting easel and a pad of paper only six inches shorter than she was. She hoisted it up on the stand and asked Mrs. Armstrong to turn the cover back to the first page. There, almost invisibly sketched in light pencil, was a diagram she proceeded to darken as she spoke, her father having suggested the value of visuals. Her drawing eventually looked like this:

“This up here,” said Edna, reaching way up on tippy-toes with her Magic Marker^™ held by its very end, “is supposed to be someone shooting a gun . . . up on top of a mountain . . . on top of the earth.” She turned to face the class. “Sputnik is nothing new. Hundreds of years ago Isaac Newton . . .”

“Who’s that?” shouted Mac Herndon.

“A scientist. Hundreds of years ago Isaac Newton said that anything you throw is an earth satellite. He really said that. If you stand up here on the mountain and throw a stone or shoot a slow bullet, it falls to the earth [here she filled in the first falling line] in an ellipse.”

“What’s an ellipse?” shouted Dave Herndon, Mac’s twin brother.

“It’s like this.” She sketched one in the air, then filled out the inner ellipse in the diagram. “You only see a small part of it because the bullet or the stone drops so quickly. But the faster you throw or shoot it, the farther it goes before it hits the ground. And if you shoot it fast enough . . .”

“It goes all the way around,” Ellie Blatchly sang out in enthusiastic epiphany.

“Correct,” said Edna, filling in the large curve. “Like a little moon, traveling around again and again, since there’s nothing to stop it. That’s all Sputnik is. It is not new. Thank you very much.” And she bowed to prompted applause. The class was impressed, if slightly intimidated.

Arnold, too, had his presentational strategy. He had decided to adopt once more the persona of Long John Silver, from last year’s school play, dressing up in his pirate costume, complete with eyepatch and his mother’s old wooden leg.

“May I have a volunteer, please?” Six hands shot waving into the air—all from his enamored female fan club. He chose Eunice MacIntyre, the one he was least likely to be teased about being in love with.

“Please go get the globe.” Eunice got up from her seat and fetched the globe from its stand at the back of the room.” Bring it up here.”

With Eunice standing embarrassed in front of the class, Arnold pulled from the paper bag he had been toting a beautiful ten-inch model of a pirate ship he had built from a kit awarded to him for his stellar performance as Long John.

“Turn it so they can see Russia.” Eunice had a hard time with this command, so Arnold did it for her. “This is Moscow,” he said, and placed the ship down on what he thought might be the Kremlin. He looked at the outsized projectile and began revving up its engines with brumm brumms. The boat vibrated slightly atop the Kremlin wall. He began to bob lightly at the knees while increasing the amplitude of the sound. Then all of a sudden there was a big mouth-explosion, and the pirate ship lifted off the earth and began to circle the globe with that steady beeping that had so unnerved American radio listeners over the past week. The path of the orbit had to pass repeatedly through the small space between Carol’s arms, the globe and her chest, but after a few revolutions, she learned to leave him room, and the two of them performed a charming beep-ballet for the next minute. Audience attention was beginning to wander when, surprise of surprises, the bottom of the ship hinged open and out dropped an egg from its bomb bay—an egg that skittered off the globe and splattered on the floor. The class gasped. No one had ever dirtied the floor like that. Even Arnold was shocked: he had been prepared to clean up the globe but not the floor, or Carol’s shoes and socks.

“You will clean that up, Arnold?” Mrs. Armstrong pointedly inquired.

“Yes. But first . . . Sputnik is an aluminum sphere twenty-two inches in diameter, weighing 184 pounds. It is traveling 18,000 miles per hour in an orbit 550 miles above the earth. There is no reason why it could not drop a bomb wherever it wanted to, like right on Mansfield High School.” A few of the boys cheered. “It would make a worse mess than my egg. Thank you very much. And now, a word from our sponsor.” He bowed.

Again applause, this time heartfelt and enthusiastic. There were even some whistles and two “Kill the Commies!”

“Commies.” Another word he’d had to ask his dad about.

“Commies.” It wasn’t long before the national panic deepened, dragging a reluctant president along with it. During the month of October, Khrushchev began boasting of Soviet ICBMs that could reach the United States. Then, on November 3rd, Sputnik II blasted into orbit, a space vehicle weighing 1,120 pounds, six times as heavy as its predecessor. Besides carrying instruments that radioed information about atmospheric radiation, it carried a dog, little Laika, wired for medical monitoring. The trajectory was obvious: the Soviets were preparing to send a man to the moon. While most American children were worrying about what would happen to Laika, on November 6th, the adult world was treated to the fortieth anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution. Truly, for patriotic Americans, this was the worst of times, when only a month before it had been among the best.

With the new national emphasis on education, Arnold was allowed, even encouraged, to organize clubs—a chess club, a reading club, a greater-than-five-syllable-word-collecting club. His leadership qualities grew with his popularity. The handsome sailor, no longer a fag. But still—privately—a crybaby.

A most remarkable flow of tears occurred on his seventh birthday—Christmas Day, 1957. Arnold had become interested in church, more interested than his parents were, with George feeling his son should know something about “religion” and Anna sensing that somehow Catholic + Jewish ≠ Southern Baptist. But Arnold loved the Christ Child as his birthday cohort and little brother, the secret sharer of his feast, someone special who could “taketh away the sin of the world.” His understanding of that phrase was anybody’s guess.

On the way home from the service he checked with his father about something that had been bothering him.

“Saint Nick brought the presents last night?”

“The presents not from the family.”

“Did he bring the Christmas presents and my birthday presents?”

“Just the Christmas presents, I think.”

“Is Saint Nick old?” Arnold inquired.

“Very old. Big white beard,” his father assured him.

“Is he Old Nick?”

“I told you, he’s very old.”

And Arnold burst into tears the rest of the way home—unstoppable. When he got home, he wouldn’t touch his Christmas presents or open any of his birthday gifts. If Santa was actually the devil, how could he take part? His day was ruined forever. It took his mother to ferret all this out and explain the difference (recently learned herself) between Saint Nick, who happens to be old, and Old Nick, who was probably younger. With that, her son cheered up considerably and opened his gifts. The highlight of the year was a genuine leather football from Dad, with a pin scotch-taped to its side, and a small air pump that would also work on his bicycle.