Nemesis recap

During Newark's 1944 polio epidemic, Bucky Cantor runs a Jewish neighborhood playground and feels personally responsible for keeping its boys safe. As children fall ill and die, his sense of duty becomes guilt, while his rejection from the military intensifies his shame. His fiancée Marcia persuades him to leave for the seemingly protected Indian Hill summer camp where she works. Polio soon appears there too, and Bucky contracts a severe case that permanently disables him. Convinced he carried the virus from Newark, he breaks his engagement rather than let Marcia share his diminished future. Decades later, former playground boy and fellow survivor Arnie Mesnikoff meets the isolated Bucky and tries to free him from a blame unsupported by what anyone knew about transmission. Bucky remains unable to accept chance, directing his anger at himself and at a God he sees as responsible for children's suffering. Arnie remembers instead the strong young athlete Bucky was before the epidemic.

In the summer of 1944, while war dominates national life, Eugene "Bucky" Cantor directs the Chancellor Avenue playground in Newark's Jewish Weequahic neighborhood. Poor eyesight has excluded the earnest young athlete from military service, and he tries to compensate by treating the boys' safety as a personal duty. A polio outbreak advances through the hot city, bringing rumor, sanitary rituals, closed public spaces, and fear. When playground boys become sick and Alan Michaels dies, Bucky faces grieving parents and begins to wonder whether he has failed those entrusted to him. He resists attempts to blame an isolated, unclean boy for the contagion, yet he increasingly believes every infection reflects a moral failure. His fiancée Marcia, working at Indian Hill camp in the Poconos, asks him to join her there as a waterfront director. Believing the camp is safe and longing to be with her, Bucky leaves Newark, though abandoning the playground troubles his conscience.

At Indian Hill, Bucky enters a setting of clean air, ordered activity, and apparent refuge from the city's epidemic. He excels at teaching swimming and diving and enjoys daily life with Marcia, allowing them to imagine marriage and a stable future. The escape collapses when a camper develops polio and further cases follow. Bucky reviews his movements between Newark and the camp and becomes convinced that he brought the virus with him, though the path of infection cannot be established. He then falls ill himself. The disease attacks him severely, destroying the athletic strength on which his self-respect has rested and leaving lasting paralysis. For Bucky, the physical catastrophe confirms the guilt he already feels: he interprets both the children's illnesses and his own as part of a moral reckoning rather than an unknowable epidemic.

Many years later, Arnie Mesnikoff, one of the Chancellor Avenue boys and himself a polio survivor, meets Bucky again. Bucky is physically disabled, isolated, and still governed by the summer of 1944. He tells Arnie that after rehabilitation he broke his engagement to Marcia, refusing to let her sacrifice marriage, children, and ordinary life to care for him. She went on to marry someone else, while he chose a narrow life shaped by shame. He believes he carried polio from Newark to Indian Hill and remains angry at a God who would permit or design such suffering. Arnie argues that Bucky had no evidence he was the source and no control over the disease, but Bucky cannot surrender the need to assign blame. The account ends with Arnie remembering Bucky before polio, demonstrating a javelin throw at the playground with exceptional coordination and strength, preserving an image of the man that guilt and illness could not entirely erase.

Decades after the epidemic, Arnie Mesnikoff encounters Bucky, who has been permanently disabled by polio and lives alone. Bucky explains that he ended his engagement to Marcia after his illness because he would not let her bind her future to his damaged body; she eventually married another man and had a family. He remains convinced that by leaving Newark for Indian Hill he carried the disease to the camp, and he has organized his life around that guilt. Arnie, himself a polio survivor, argues that Bucky could not have known where the virus came from and rejects both his self-condemnation and his picture of a cruel God deliberately punishing children. Bucky cannot accept that release. Arnie closes by remembering the young playground director at his physical peak, demonstrating the javelin throw with a grace and power that the later Bucky has lost but that survives in the witness's memory.