Philip

Philip’s account of the crisis is shaped by a child’s conviction that one mistake can make him responsible for everything that follows. After Mrs. Wishnow’s death and Seldon’s displacement, he imagines leaving his family and future behind, recasting himself as an orphan headed for Boys Town. His plans are practical in their particulars, but their emotional purpose is escape from guilt.

Narrative Position and Guilt

On October 19, when Seldon returned to Summit Avenue, Herman Roth and Sandy Roth had gone to Kentucky to bring him back. Mrs. Wishnow’s casket followed by train. Philip knew she had been burned beyond recognition in her car, but pictured her with clenched fists inside the coffin; he also returned in memory to being shut in the Wishnows’ bathroom while she patiently showed him how to open the door. Her patience made her seem like Bess Roth, sharpening the intimacy of the loss.

Philip does not describe his guilt as a passing fear. He believes he set the chain of events in motion and holds himself responsible both for what happened to Mrs. Wishnow and for Seldon’s orphaning. In his account, Lionel Bengelsdorf and Aunt Evelyn have their own responsibility, but that does not relieve Philip of the conviction that the devastation began with him. His self-accusation is a child’s attempt to give a terrible sequence a single cause, not proof that he objectively caused the deaths and upheaval.

The memory of Bess Roth guiding Seldon through his dinner and departure, and into the care of Orin Mawhinney and Mrs. Mawhinney, is bound up with that belief. Philip sees the rescue and its arrangements through the same lens as the loss: Seldon is being cared for, but Philip thinks of himself as the person who made the need for rescue possible.

The Pretzel-Factory Plan

After Joey had gone, Philip double-locked the door and avoided turning on the radio, afraid that another bulletin would bring worse news while he was alone. His thoughts returned to running away, this time to a pretzel factory he knew from a Sunday Call article. The article described Mr. Kuenze as claiming he could teach pretzel-making overnight, and gave Philip a concrete route into an imagined new life: the bus that passed the factory was the one he and Earl Axman had once taken to Elizabeth. Philip planned to get off and wait for the next bus if he saw the man Earl had identified as a “fairy.”

He imagined presenting Mr. Kuenze with a note claiming that he was deaf and mute, an orphan, and eager to learn the trade. At first, he signed it with Seldon’s name. Then another name came to him, and he rewrote it as Philip Flanagan. The change matters: Seldon’s identity had served as a disguise in Philip’s earlier attempt to leave, but this time he tries to invent a self for the journey ahead.

The factory article gave the plan its texture. Mr. Kuenze reportedly employed one hundred people, including deaf-mute workers and schoolchildren; he insisted that salt belonged in the dough and that salt on the outside was added only to satisfy customers. Philip turns these newspaper details into imagined credentials and a possible job. A claim about learning a trade overnight becomes the first step in a plan to save enough for a one-way train ticket to Omaha.

Boys Town and the Life He Imagines

Philip’s destination is Boys Town, where he believes Edward Flanagan takes in boys from the street, feeds and clothes them, educates them, and teaches them to become good citizens. His picture of the place comes partly from a film he saw at the Roosevelt when he was five, with Sandy Roth: Spencer Tracy played the priest and donated his Oscar to the real Boys Town. Philip also knows from his parents that Jewish boys live there and that their family, like many others who had seen the film, contributed each year.

Yet he imagines reaching Omaha by denying any settled identity. He would say that he did not know who or what he was, presenting himself simply as a boy rather than as a Jew or as the person responsible for Mrs. Wishnow’s death and Seldon’s loss. In his fantasy, his family can raise Seldon as their own; Seldon can have Philip’s bed, brother, and future. Nebraska’s distance from Newark, even greater than Kentucky’s, gives the plan its scale: escape must mean not merely leaving the house but becoming unreachable to the life he thinks he has damaged.

The Suitcase, the Cellar, and Departure

To prepare, Philip retrieves the cardboard suitcase in which he had hidden Seldon’s stolen clothes before his first attempt to run away. This time he intends to pack his own clothes. He will carry a miniature pewter musket bought at Mount Vernon, its bayonet barely an inch long. He had once used it to open envelopes from the stamp company when he still had Philip’s stamp album and collection; now he imagines the small bayonet as the only protection he can take with him.

The descent into the cellar becomes part of the departure in his mind. With a flashlight, Philip steadies himself by thinking that this will be the last time he must face the wringer, alley cats, drains, and the wall where one-legged Alvin Roth had once spattered his grief. The furnaces, still cold because the weather is not cold enough for coal, appear to him like grand burial vaults. He imagines Seldon’s dead father as a ghost still present there, cursing him, and tries to explain that he had not meant for the Wishnows to be moved or for Seldon to become a target. The imagined journey thus begins not with freedom, but with Philip carrying his guilt, his memories, and a makeshift weapon down the cellar stairs.