Alvin Roth's hostility toward Sandy over his support for Lindbergh's government

Alvin Roth’s hostility toward Sandy Roth turns a family relationship into a test of what political loyalty means under Lindbergh’s government. Alvin returns from war to find Sandy aligned with the administration, and the rupture is registered less in a direct confrontation than in what Alvin already seems to know, what the family avoids saying, and the art he discovers beneath a bed. His anger does not prevent the family from caring for him, but it makes that care part of a strained household in which political truth is carefully withheld.

A reunion marked by silence

At first, the contrast between the cousins’ positions does not become an open argument. Alvin has returned wounded and dependent on others, while Sandy is occupied with his own activities. The narrator describes becoming Alvin’s personal valet, helping with the practical burdens of his prosthesis and receiving the Canadian medal Alvin gives him. Sandy initially seems not to notice how close the narrator and Alvin have become. When he does notice, what makes him miserable is not simply Alvin’s involvement with the narrator but Alvin’s hostile indifference toward him. By then, the narrator’s new role in Alvin’s daily life is established, and Sandy cannot easily displace him from it.

That indifference carries a political charge. The family has avoided speaking to Alvin about Sandy’s connection to Aunt Evelyn and Lionel Bengelsdorf, or about his participation in Just Folks. They believe that explaining the program’s appeal, or the growing Jewish acceptance of Lindbergh’s isolationist policies, would not soften Alvin’s response. In their view, he is the family member least likely to tolerate what appears to be accommodation with a government he hates. Their silence is meant to spare him, but it also leaves him to make sense of Sandy’s choices without an honest account from the family.

Alvin seems to have made up his mind nonetheless. The narrator recalls that nobody told him, Sandy did not incriminate himself in Alvin’s eyes, and yet Alvin behaved as if he knew that the cousin who had first welcomed him at the train station had also been the first to sign on with the fascists. The contrast between the welcome at the station and the political betrayal Alvin perceives gives their relationship its defining tension: a gesture of familial loyalty cannot cancel what Alvin sees as public allegiance to a hateful administration.

The portfolio beneath the bed

Alvin’s discovery of Sandy’s drawings happens not during a political debate but while he is alone, in pain, and unable to get himself back to bed without difficulty. Writhing on the kitchen floor after an accident, he has no one at home to call for help. As he tries to move toward his bed, he notices Sandy’s large art portfolio, which has been left beneath it because it is too big to store in the sun parlor. The portfolio contains Sandy’s drawings between sheets of tracing paper, secured with a ribbon. Alvin begins to undo the bow partly because he feels powerless to manage a more demanding physical task and wants to return to bed.

Inside, he finds three aviator portraits of Charles A. Lindbergh that Sandy had told the family he destroyed two years earlier, as well as newer portraits made at Aunt Evelyn’s request after Lindbergh became president. The narrator identifies the newer images as Sandy’s promotional work for a Just Folks recruitment speech: Lindbergh signing the Universal Conscription Act, contributing aeronautical suggestions to a fighter-bomber design, and relaxing at the White House with the family dog. These are not merely likenesses to Alvin. Their subjects represent the public image Sandy is helping to make persuasive: a president whose policies are presented as peaceful and protective, and whose private ease is made part of the same appeal.

Alvin examines the newer portraits on the bedroom floor. The discovery prompts a destructive impulse, but he does not act on it. He places the drawings back between their sheets of tracing paper and pushes the portfolio beneath the bed. That restraint does not amount to forgiveness: the preserved pictures remain evidence, and the narrator later connects Alvin’s discovery of the portfolio with his knowledge of Sandy’s political affiliation. The moment instead shows the conflict taking shape through an object Sandy has hidden in plain sight. Alvin does not need to confront his cousin at once; the drawings have already made the political relationship visible to him.

The charge of opportunism

Later, when Alvin speaks to the narrator about Sandy, he condemns him as an opportunist and says that selling out so quickly, at his age and with his talent, is especially disgraceful. Alvin’s anger extends beyond Sandy to Aunt Evelyn and Lionel Bengelsdorf, whom he likewise accuses of pursuing their own advantage. Against them he sets Aunt Bess and Uncle Herman as honest people. His judgment is starkly divided, but its basis is specific: he sees Sandy’s artistic talent and youth as reasons that his support for the administration is more, not less, culpable.

The narrator tries to reduce the significance of the drawings, saying Sandy only drew pictures. Alvin refuses that defense because the pictures are inseparable from the political work they perform. The narrator also lacks the courage to ask how Alvin learned about Sandy’s Just Folks affiliation. He suspects that after finding the portraits, Alvin searched the drawers of the dining-room breakfront, where Sandy kept school notebooks and writing paper, and found further evidence. That explanation remains the narrator’s inference, not a confirmed account of what Alvin did. What is clear is that the family’s silence has failed: Alvin has assembled enough evidence to regard Sandy as compromised.

The exchange becomes most painful when the narrator says Sandy is acting to protect the family from trouble. Alvin replies that Sandy is doing it because of him. The narrator protests, but Alvin treats the family-protection explanation as Sandy’s justification for what he is doing. His reply turns a claimed act of protection into a source of accusation: Alvin suspects that his presence and political opposition have been made an excuse for Sandy’s accommodation. Care for Alvin, in this reading, does not reconcile him to Sandy; it sharpens his sense that Sandy has translated family loyalty into a defense of collaboration.

A divided family without reconciliation

The hostility is especially complicated because the two cousins’ connection is not wholly severed. Sandy’s return to political work does not erase the fact that he welcomed Alvin home, and Alvin’s choice to preserve the portraits rather than destroy them leaves his response more controlled than his denunciation suggests. Yet neither the welcome nor the spared drawings repairs the breach. Sandy’s apparent indifference and Alvin’s refusal to disguise his contempt leave their political disagreement embedded in ordinary family life.

The relationship also unfolds against a changing public climate. As Alvin gets around the neighborhood, he sees that many Jewish residents have begun to regard Lindbergh’s successor as tolerable, despite the fears voiced by Walter Winchell and the opposition of Alvin’s father. Lionel Bengelsdorf’s assurances gain influence, and Jewish leaders increasingly treat his support for Lindbergh as prescient rather than treacherous. That broader acceptance helps explain why Sandy’s affiliation can appear defensible to other people; it does not alter Alvin’s judgment. For him, the drawings and the hidden affiliation disclose a betrayal that public reassurance cannot make innocent.

The narrator’s account keeps the relationship unresolved. It shows Alvin’s anger through his coldness toward Sandy, the portraits found in a private room, and the accusation that Sandy has sold out, while acknowledging how much the family does not know or say aloud. Sandy’s own explanation is reported through Alvin’s interpretation rather than established directly. The resulting uncertainty is part of the rupture: Alvin believes he understands the motive beneath Sandy’s defense, but the two cousins are not shown reaching a shared understanding. Their hostility makes political accommodation legible as a personal wound, one that persists even where family care continues.