You are being provided with a book chapter by chapter. I will request you to read the book for me after each chapter. After reading the chapter, 1. shorten the chapter to no less than 300 words and no more than 400 words. 2. Do not change the name, address, or any important nouns in the chapter. 3. Do not translate the original language. 4. Keep the same style as the original chapter, keep it consistent throughout the chapter. Your reply must comply with all four requirements, or it’s invalid.
I will provide the chapter now.

G
20
The Antes House
us Plitzka, chairman of the Pottstown city council, hated Memorial
Day. Every year for as long as anyone could remember, the annual
meeting of the John Antes Historical Society’s Cornet Marching Band was
held in conjunction with the meeting of Pottstown’s city council. The
meetings were held five minutes apart—one after the other. First the city
council met. Then the entire historical society assembled out front.
Declarations were made, proclamations exclaimed. Then the John Antes
Historical Society’s Cornet Marching Band played. Next, everyone put
down their instruments and breakfast was served with German beer and
sausages because the Germans had to be thrown in there somewhere, since
they owned practically everything in town. Then the band played again.
Then the fire engines from the Empire Fire Company showed up ringing
their bells, and finally, by afternoon, with lots of harumphs and yahoos and
boops and bangs and fits and starts and proclamations, the Memorial Day
march began, with the city council members clad in Revolutionary-era
costumes serving as parade marshals.
It was a nod to history, a sentimental bid to the great John Antes,
Pottstown’s greatest composer. Nobody outside Pottstown had ever heard of
Antes, of course, in part because he wrote trumpet sonatas that nobody
played, and in part because the John Antes Historical Society’s Cornet
Marching Band, which was composed of forty-five souls—numbskulls, pig
farmers, heavy smokers, bums, drunks, cheerleaders, tomboys, bored
college students, and any other white American in Montgomery County
who could purse their lips tight enough to blast a noise through a trumpet—
sounded like a cross between a crank engine trying to start on a cold
October morning and a dying African silverback gorilla howling out its last.
It was all a nod to Antes, the great composer, husband, father, revolutionary,
statesman, plunderer, iron maker, wife beater, cornetist, Indian grave robber,
and all-around great American who served as president of Pottstown
borough and as a colonel under the great George Washington himself—and
still found time to write marching band sonatas for trumpet, imagine that.
After the daylong party and parade celebrating his life wound its way back
to the Antes House, more speeches were delivered, followed by a giant
outdoor pig roast party, followed by fireworks blasted into the night, at
which time everyone got drunk and forgot all about old John.
The entire celebration began and ended every year at the great
composer’s Revolutionary-era home, an exhausted, crumbling, stone-and-
stucco structure hunched at the corner of High Street and Union guarding
Chicken Hill like an old witch, the tattered neighborhood that rose up
behind it like a drunk male cousin hovering over little cousin Mary at
Christmas, who just turned eighteen and suddenly evolved from a gap-
toothed tomboy into a flamethrower. The beloved Antes House was a
cherished treasure, admired and saluted, the center of the universe for
Pottstown’s white citizens on Memorial Day. It also faithfully honored the
town’s Negro citizens the other 364 days a year, serving as a wonderful
shithouse, beer-guzzling headquarters, hideout from the cops, playpen for
runaways, tiedown spot for errant mules, and last-resort sex spot for
Chicken Hill teenagers in lust and love, all of whom graciously vanished a
week before Memorial Day when a truck bearing the words “Pottstown.
History in IRONG” with the G crossed out—a painter’s mistake—clunked
to the curb. A crew of men tumbled out and the annual transformation
began. American flags were hoisted. Plywood coverings were removed
from the windows, sashes painted and repaired, the sidewalk swept clean,
the brick walkway hosed down, the house scrubbed from top to bottom, and
when they finished, the exhausted workmen did the same thing they did
every year: they stood back and gazed at the old house with their hands on
their hips, shaking their heads like a mother who had just washed her son’s
face ten times only to realize that he was just plain ugly in the first place.
But American history is not meant to be pretty. It is plain. It is simple. It is
strong and truthful. Full of blood. And guts. And war. “Iron,” the mayor
announced with his usual cheery bluster at the end of the 1936 annual city
council and Antes society’s meetings, “is what made this town great. We are
the cannon makers. The gun makers. The steelmakers. The blood! The guts!
The glory! God is on our side! Remember: George Washington’s victory
here at Pottstown was the precursor to the great battle of Valley Forge!
Never forget!”
Plitzka, seated at a table inside the Antes House among the council
members, received this speech with a grumble and a wince. His big toe was
killing him. It was swollen to the size of a meatball. Plus, he had a headache
—two of them. The first was in his head. The second no aspirin could solve.
Plitzka was the new owner of the Clover Dairy, employer of twenty-nine
people—the first in his family to do such a thing, which, if that wasn’t the
American dream, he told friends, what is? Imagine that. Of course, the
friends who knew him well liked to imagine him drowning, but that wasn’t
the point. He was the boss! The top dog. Owner of the deck.
Problem was, the deck dealt him from a bottom card. Not a month
before, just as the deal closed, he discovered he hadn’t lined up his nickels
properly and was $1,400 short. In desperation, he called on his cousin
Ferdie, who had a wonderful head on his shoulders for swindling suckers
and banking horses at the nearby Sanatoga Racetrack. Ferdie declared
himself short as well but recommended Plitzka to a “good friend” in
Philadelphia who happily loaned him the money. The friend turned out to
be a frightening mobster named Nig Rosen.
Every time Plitzka thought of Rosen, his insides felt like liquefying Jell-
O. He was $1,400 plus interest in the red to a bona fide gangster and had
nowhere to find the money. Now, instead of spending the day scheming up
ways to burn himself out of that hole, he had to waste a precious day
limping around as a parade marshal while hoping Rosen’s palookas
wouldn’t make a public appearance. They had already shown up at his
office twice. It was a mess. Sitting at the table, with his toe throbbing, he
wanted to burst into tears.
When the meeting ended, he sat drumming his fingers on the table as the
other council members headed for the door and band members clambered
into the room bearing all manner of cornets. Plitzka lingered, scanning the
newcomers for Doc Roberts. He was hoping that Doc, who was a member
of just about every historical society in town and marched in every parade,
was a member of the John Antes Historical Society as well. He sighed in
relief when he spotted Doc’s recognizable hobble at the far end of the room.
Doc was holding, of all things, a tuba.
Plitzka rose from the table, his toe aching, and made his way past the
band members to Doc, who was busy fumbling with the instrument. “Hey,
Doc, my toe is killing me,” he said.
Doc glanced at Plitzka and turned back to his instrument, fumbling with
its valves. “Come by my office tomorrow,” he said.
“It’s bad. Can you take a look now?”
Doc turned and took a quick glance around the crowded anteroom.
“Here?”
“Outside.”
“I gotta play.”
“It can’t wait,” Plitzka said.
Doc turned back to fiddling with his tuba as Plitzka stood behind him,
helpless. He couldn’t stand Doc. Old-money clubfoot snob. One of the
Mayflower children. Parade co-marshal because his family had been here
since the Indians and all that. Got to blow a tuba in an all-trumpet marching
band. The two had tangled years before on the city council back when Doc
had served. Plitzka wanted to spend seventy dollars on a bronze plaque to
celebrate the establishment of the town’s first Polish business. Doc had
objected, saying, “We can’t give a plaque to every family that baked bread
here. The Polish have only been here since 1885—that’s after the Civil
War.” Plitzka never forgot the insult and was happy to engineer Doc’s exit
from the council by moving a few political odds and ends around and
getting him to resign.
Doc, for his part, bore equal distaste for Plitzka, whom he regarded as a
climber, a two-fisted political-club fighter, and the “new” kind of Pottstown
resident: i.e., a man without honor. Plitzka supplied cases of bourbon to
locals for their votes. He bullied local bankers into submission by
threatening to ban coal deliveries on streets where their businesses were.
Even the big boys at McClinton Iron and Bethlehem Steel answered his
calls. His house on the west side had a living room the size of a rugby field
and a welcome mat written in Old English. How did a Pole, whose family’s
pisshole of a farm atop Chicken Hill couldn’t sprout fleas, get that kind of
money? But given what happened up at the Jewish store on the Hill, Doc
didn’t need any new enemies, especially now. Especially Plitzka, who was
dangerous.
“All right, Gus,” he grumbled.
The two men moved toward the door. Neither noticed the two Italian
women picking up papers and sweeping, moving around like ghosts. Pia
Fabicelli, the city council’s official janitor, was also reluctantly in
attendance, having been summoned away from her usual duties at city hall
to clean up behind the masters at the Antes House. She’d brought Fioria to
help.
As the two swept through the room removing coffee cups, cake crumbs,
and leftover papers that were the city council’s usual fare, they noticed Doc
and Plitzka hobbling for the door, both limping, with Plitzka leading the
way.
Pia nudged Fioria and quipped in Italian, “Look. Twins.”
Fioria chuckled. “If you stick your finger in the mouth of one, the other
will bite.”
They laughed and went back to work as Doc followed Plitzka outside.
Plitzka took a seat on the cracked brick front steps of the Antes House,
removed his shoe, peeled off his sock, and revealed the toe. It was ghastly:
bulging, red, and wrinkled. “What do you think?” he asked.
Doc stared at the wrinkled toe. “Whatever it is,” he said, “it needs
pressing.”
“Ain’t you gonna check it out? It’s killing me.”
“I need my instruments. How did it get that way?”
“That’s what you’re here for.”
“I’m not a mind reader, Gus. Did you hit it on something? A desk? A
chair? Did something fall on it?”
“No.”
“What have you done lately?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe you went for a walk somewhere and stepped on something. Or
maybe something fell on it, maybe in the plant, on the job?”
“This is my job,” Plitzka said dryly. “I don’t work in a plant, Doc. I’m
city council president.”
“Gus, give me a break. I’m trying to figure it out.”
“I’m in pain!”
Doc sat on the stoop one step below Plitzka, gingerly picking up the foot
by the heel but avoiding touching the disgusting toe, hoping it didn’t smell
like mustard gas. He placed the foot down gently. “When did it start? The
pain.”
“I’m not sure,” Gus said. “Last month me and the missus went to John
Wanamaker’s department store in Philly. She wanted to ride the elevator.
The thing got stuck on the fifth floor for twenty minutes. I think it started
then.”
That was partly true. He had done those things. But his foot had actually
started aching later that afternoon when he had left his wife in Wanamaker’s
to shop and walked four blocks to the gangster Nig Rosen’s tavern on Broad
Street. It was all so innocent. His cousin Ferdie said Rosen was a straight
shooter. Clean. A good guy. And at first, Plitzka found him just as his
cousin described: down-to-earth, reassuring, as Plitzka explained the
situation to him. “I’m a farmer’s boy,” Plitzka said. “Worked my way up.
Street sweeper. Clerk. City council. Now I’m at the door. This close to
buying the dairy that owns half the milk in town. I just need to get over this
last hump.” Rosen had been reassuring. “I’m a tavern owner,” he said. “I
know a little about supply and demand. Thank goodness Prohibition didn’t
kill us off.” He gave Plitzka the $1,400 with a smile and a 5 percent
monthly interest rate on a handshake. Then, the next week, he arrived at
Plitzka’s office with two large goons, demanding 35 percent interest starting
that day, with that interest bringing the loan payoff to $2,900. Plitzka
refused. “Do I look stupid? That’s more than double the amount,” he said.
“I won’t pay.” Rosen’s kindly features vanished and he coolly pulled back
his jacket to reveal a pistol and said, “How about I show up at your house
and jam this in your face?”
And just like that, the deal that was supposed to boost him into the
echelons of Pottstown royalty had closed up tightly around his neck,
strangling him. An extra $420 a month over his normal expenses, including
payroll, that were figured to the penny. Where would he get that from?
Sitting on the steps, his toe bristling with pain, thinking of Rosen and
those gorillas standing at the front door of his house, with his wife and kids
just inside, made Plitzka’s skin prickle.
“So it’s from nerves?” Doc Roberts said.
“If it’s nerves, it’s working overtime, Doc. This feels like a mousetrap.”
“Soon as the rehearsal’s done, before we march, I’ll run by the office and
pick up a little something,” Doc said.
Plitzka seemed relieved. He reached for his sock and gingerly placed it
on his foot. “Thanks, Doc. You might want to take something, too. You look
a little peaked yourself.”
“I’m okay.” Doc shrugged, trying to seem nonchalant. The truth was,
since Chona died a week ago, his nerves were frayed to pieces. No one
questioned his version of events. No one suspected. The matter died away
quietly. But in the confusion of the moment, he’d somehow—he never did
figure out how—snatched a pendant off Chona’s neck, a mezuzah bearing
an inscription in a foreign language. He had no idea what it said or how it
landed in his fist. It couldn’t have been intentional, grabbing the darn thing,
but the truth was he simply couldn’t remember. It was just a moment of
passion, that’s all. He’d gotten carried away. Women do that to men
sometimes. Happens every day. He wanted to return the cursed thing, but to
whom? He could have thrown it out, but that made it feel like murder,
which it was not. He was a decent man. He decided to mail it but was afraid
someone might track it to him. Instead, he carried it in his pocket to the
parade. His intent was to leave it somewhere near Chicken Hill, where it
might be found, knowing that the Antes House was close to the Hill. Just
set it on the ground and walk away. But now Plitzka had shown up; plus his
stomach was bothering him. It was tension. Things simply had not gone
well since the . . . accident. There were rumors. He had heard plenty. Did
Plitzka know? Plitzka, of all people, a shady carpetbagger, a one-
generation-removed immigrant who would sell his grandma for a quarter.
Had someone said something? And now the parade, right at the foot of
Chicken Hill, basically in the Negroes’ backyard. I shouldn’t have come
here today, he thought.
Even as he said it to himself, Doc noticed a Negro woman walking
briskly past on the road glance at him, then move on, turning up the dirt
road to Chicken Hill. Two more Negroes followed, men in work clothes,
cutting suspicious glances, then hurrying on.
“A lot of new darkies in town,” Plitzka said.
“Yeah.” Doc shrugged. Had someone said something?
“There’s more niggers coming every year,” Gus said. “They’re like
roaches.”
Doc sat up painfully and said, “I’ll be over after we rehearse a few
songs. Then we’ll run over to the office.”
He was about to push himself to his feet when he heard Plitzka say, “Too
bad about the Jewess.”
Doc felt his heart racing with panic, and suddenly felt too weak to stand.
Still seated facing the road, he managed to murmur, “Shame,” and rose to
his feet, anxious to leave.
Just then a Negro couple walked past, and Doc, now standing, froze with
his back to Plitzka. The Negro man didn’t look at him, but the woman
slowed to a halt, glaring straight at Doc. She wouldn’t stop staring. Doc’s
head felt light. He suddenly felt thirsty. He needed a drink of water.
“You know her?” Plitzka asked.
“Huh?”
“I asked did you know her.”
“Who? Her?” Doc said, pointing at the Negro woman who suddenly
turned and moved up toward the Hill.
“Not her. The lady who died.”
Doc nodded, still facing the road, his back to Plitzka. He placed his
hands in his pockets, trying to be nonchalant. “She was sick a long time.”
He heard Plitzka say something else, but a blast of a trumpeter warming
up inside the Antes House drowned out Plitzka’s utterance. Something
about “letters.”
“What?” Doc asked.
“The letters. She was the one who used to write letters to the Mercury
complaining about our White Knights march. Not to speak evil of the dead
and all, but this is America, Doc. Everybody gotta play by the rules.”
Doc, his insides feeling like jelly, merely nodded.
“Whatever happened to the boy?” Plitzka asked.
Doc wasn’t sure whether to leave. He wanted to. But do . . . guilty people
run? he thought to himself. No. I did nothing wrong.
He decided to sit back down on the steps just to show indifference. He
lowered himself to the step just beneath Plitzka and cleared his throat. “The
kid?” He tried to sound nonchalant. “Oh, we got him some help. He’s up at
Pennhurst.”
“That’s good. He’ll get a good education at least.”
Doc found his eyes searching the road again. Another Negro walked by,
this one a man. The Negro slowed, staring perceptively, then stopped,
openly staring now, facing them, twenty feet off. He looked as if he were
about to shout something. Then, to Doc’s relief, he waved. Doc did
something he rarely did. He waved back.
Plitzka frowned. “Some of ’em are all right,” he said. “If they’d just
clean themselves. Have you been up on the Hill lately? The filth up there,
the open sewers, gosh . . .”
Doc felt his throat tightening; he was afraid to move and afraid to stay.
How did he get in this fix? Sitting here, gabbing with Plitzka, a low-life
cheating farmer turned political thug. He had given his whole life to the
town. His family had been in Pottstown more than one hundred years. And
now he had to sit here and listen to this moron quip. He felt anger working
its way into his throat. He couldn’t help himself.
“Speaking of clean,” he said. “You know the basement bathroom in the
Antes House? The one you guys voted to put in three years ago for the
public? I turned on the faucet today and muddy water came out.”
“It did?”
“Came right out the tap. I ran it a couple of minutes, but it didn’t clear
up. Is the city running water from the reservoir into Chicken Hill?”
Now it was Plitzka’s turn to be nervous. “I don’t know where the water
comes from.”
“Doesn’t the new reservoir near your old farm supply water to the Hill?”
“I don’t read every city contract, Doc.”
“You guys gotta look into that. Muddy water coming out of a tap on the
Hill will keep my office full of people from around here, Gus. And they
don’t pay.”
“We can’t keep track of every colored on the Hill, Doc. We got big
numbers up there. How many, who knows? We got open sewers up there
running down to Main Street. We close ’em up, they dig new ones. We gotta
straighten that out before we dig new water lines. Otherwise, they’re
crapping and throwing slop in the open sewers all over.”
“Water and sewers are two different things, Gus.”
“The Hill’s a zoo, Doc. Believe me. My old farm is up there.”
Doc nodded. He’d heard the stories about the Plitzka farm. How they
had made a deal with the city in years past to supply water to the town
before the new reservoir was built. And how the city was still paying the
farm for its well water. Now Plitzka, as head of the dairy company and
owner of his family’s farm, was collecting on both ends—from the city for
supplying water and getting free water from the city for his business to
boot. A real winner. Typical immigrant gangster. No honor. No sense of
history.
Doc couldn’t help himself. “You been up to the new reservoir?” he
asked.
“Many times,” Plitzka said. “It was a pond when I was a kid.”
“Has someone from the city ever gone up to look at those old pipes
around it? Maybe one of ’em’s cracked and mud’s getting in there.”
“If those pipes are cracked, I would have heard complaints from the
Hill,” Plitzka said.
“Why would the Negroes complain?” Doc said. “They still got wells, a
lot of ’em, don’t they?”
“If you want to draw a map of every house that has a well up there, go
ahead. It’s a maze up there.”
Doc’s anger boiled over. Why did Plitzka have to be such a jerk about
everything? He heard himself say, “You could ask the Negroes, Gus. You’re
their city councilman. You ought to talk to your constituents.”
Plitzka’s face reddened. “If I did, maybe they’d tell me what they heard
about you.”
“What about me?”
“You and that Jewess. I heard the rumors.”
“What rumors? The boy attacked me.”
“Not the rumors I heard.”
“Rumors don’t prove much.”
“They prove people can talk is all,” Gus said coolly. “You ever think of
talking to Chief Markus about it?”
“I already talked to him. She had a seizure. I tried to help her. The boy
got antsy and attacked. He’s deaf and probably dumb. I ran out and got the
cops. They wrote a report.”
“That they did,” Plitzka said slyly.
“She died of a stroke, Gus. That’s what the hospital in Reading said, too,
by the way.”
“Too bad there wasn’t a white man in the store when it started. That
would put an end to it.”
“To what?”
“The rumors.”
Doc rose, furious now. “Look after your own foot,” he said.
“Don’t lose your shirt, Doc,” Gus said. “I didn’t mean nothing. We
cleared the air. Got to the truth of the matter and all. C’mon, Doc. Let’s