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.
Six
On May 12th the following year, Arnold Hitler, eight years old, president of his third grade class, experienced his first human death. At 7:35 A.M., five minutes after the pre-school voluntary prayer session had begun in the front lobby, Peter Schrag, fourteen, interrupted the regular Monday morning practice with a random spray of bullets from a semiautomatic.22 pistol, wounding ten students and killing two girls, one immediately. As Arnold walked in the door, Peter pushed past him as if he didn’t exist and ran home to think things over. Arnold stood just inside the doorway, surveyed the bloody scene, and covered his ears against the shrill screaming of the girls. Then he turned around and ran to Karbur’s Kwik Stop to call his mom to come get him so he could go home to think things over. And cry.
The town was stupefied. Mass murder, at least domestic mass murder, had not yet become a national pastime. As clichéd as only reality can be, Peter Schrag had been “such a nice boy.”
“No one would have ever guessed that . . .”
. . .
That evening, Arnold demanded details of the die-on-the-cross story he’d heard about. George and Anna looked at one another with as much despair as if they had been asked to explain the facts of life, or the nonexistence of Santa. As they struggled to tell the tale, each realized how many particulars they had forgotten. Exasperated, Anna pulled the English Bible from the shelf, and Arnold was likely the only child in Texas that night who had the crucifixion for his bedtime story. On Sunday, he would not go to church.
“And why not?” his mother asked.
“Remember how you read me about the crucifixion, and how Jesus said, ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do’?”
“Yes. That’s what He said.”
“Well, it isn’t. He didn’t say that.”
“What do you mean? I read it to you right out of the Bible.”
“The other articles by Matthew and Mark and John don’t say he said that.”
Anna pulled out the Bible to check.
“They wouldn’t leave it out if He said it. They wouldn’t forget it—all three of them. Luke just made it up. It’s three against one!”
“He didn’t make it up. He . . .”
“If you can’t believe what you read in the Bible . . .” And before Arnold Hitler began to cry, he ran into his room and slammed the door. Strangely enough, that was it. No one in that family ever went to church again.
Seven
The ’60s began quite promptly for Arnold. On “Mayday” of 1960, Stella Rawson, her husband, Edward, their daughter, Edna, and nine-and-a-half-year-old Arnold Hitler stood on the southeast corner of Broad and Main from 10 to noon and 1 to 3, a Lilliputian demonstration for the churched and unchurched concerning fair play for Cuba. She and her husband had been to prerevolutionary Havana on their honeymoon and were simultaneously entranced by the beauty of the beach on which Edna was likely conceived and sickened by the juxtaposed poverty and glitz. They had since tried to keep up on the tumultuous island events and the fate of the brave and bearded liberators come down from the mountains. Fidel made them feel alive again, alive in a world that was not hopeless.
For a few days, most of America had been in love with Fidel as the media proudly proclaimed the overthrow of a system so corrupt that even Cuban elites were deserting. El Jefe seemed to be a George Washington–sized revolutionary out of the mythic past. But within a month it became apparent that his was a declaration of independence not just from domestic slime but from the United States of America! When they realized that Castro was serious about Cuba choosing its own path, that “greater general prosperity” might mean nationalization of U.S.-dominated industries, that “diversification of agriculture” meant less money for Texas rice, the prominent citizens who thought the new hero was merely making noble noises turned on him with the speed and fury of spurned lovers—as did the media. And so, therefore, did the people. The Senate invoked “the spectacle of a bearded monster stalking through Cuba,” and by February 1959, Congress had been filled with warnings of “a Kremlin-inspired plot to destroy free-enterprise,” with calls for American intervention “to save Cuba from chaos.”
Little did George and Anna suspect Arnold’s reason for wanting to do this vigil. During the four hours he stood in the Sunday Texas sun, only one thing was going through his head: the TV jingle for Castro Convertible Sofas:
With a Castro Convertible Sofa
You get comfort and beauty and style
So convert to a Castro Convertible