E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

My father never really believed it would happen. My mother wasn’t to be surprised from the day they were indicted. But he never believed it was possible. He believed in the beneficence of his ideas, and could not appreciate that anyone would find them offensive enough, threatening enough to do — that. His ideas were an extension of himself, and he meant only well. Because the other side of finding confirmation over and over again, of dwelling in evidence, was that he would never believe any of it. He would never believe that America was not the cafeteria at City College; and as often as it was proved to him he forgot it.

Pauly. Sometimes he used to cut my mother’s hair. I don’t remember her ever cutting his. She would put a towel around her shoulders and spread newspaper on the floor in the kitchen and sit on a kitchen chair in the middle of the floor, and he would go to work; holding a scissors and a comb in his long hands, he would comb through her hair, get a short bunch of it off the comb and between his fingers, and with the comb like a harmonica in his mouth, pick up the scissors and slice off the hair. He was very deft. She had thick hair that tended to curl and she liked to keep it short. I wouldn’t say she enjoyed saving money, I would say it gave her satisfaction. I would say it was a righteous pleasure. She wore plain clothes that were bought to last. All our clothes were bought to last. She always bought things that were too big. “She wanted us to get use out of them,” I once explained to Susan when we were talking about this. “She wanted us to grow into them.” But Susan said: “She bought Daddy’s things too big, and her own things too. She dressed us all like bags. Why must you always think she was perfect? Why can’t you admit she just didn’t know how to buy clothes?”

I think she was a sexy woman, despite her austerity, her home-cut hair, her baggy clothes, her no make-up except for very red lipstick on her small, prim mouth in the full cheeks. Her grim appreciation of life. She was full-breasted and heavy-hocked and wore corsets, which I would see her pull on or off while she said something like “Danny, go turn the light out under the coffee.” She was exacting about cleanliness and kept us all cleaner than we thought was necessary. When she was working, before Susan was born, she would clean the house late at night and on weekends. That miserable little house. In my bed, when she came to fix the covers, I smelled her after her bath — she smelled of the steam of cleanliness, of powdered redness. She made curtains and tacked down linoleum and found bargains at the Salvation Army, and hammered and tacked and waxed and polished and scrubbed. She washed our clothes on a washboard in the deep half of the kitchen sink. She had enormous energy. The whole thing with Rochelle was defending herself against the vicious double-crossing trick that life was. Income was defense. A clean house. A developed political mind. Children. Her weaknesses were not as obvious to me as Paul’s. If someone claims to deal with life so as to survive, you grant him soundness of character. But she was as unstable as he was. In her grim expectations. In her refusal to have illusions. In her cold, dogmatic rage. As if there was some profound missed thing in her life which she could never forget. Some betrayal of promise. It wasn’t sex. It couldn’t have been sex. They used to make the whole house rock. They really went at it, they balled all the time.

In prison, she began to write.

Her politics was not theoretical or abstract. She had no difficulty making connections. Her politics was like Grandma’s religion — some purchase on the future against the terrible life of the present. Grandma lit candles on Friday night, with a shawl over her head and her hands covering her face while she said her prayer. When she lowered her hands, her eyes, her blue eyes, were filled with tears, and devastation was in her face. That was my mother’s communism. It was something whose promise was so strong that you endured much for it. Like a woman suffering pregnancy and childbirth to get the child. The child would make it worthwhile. The coming of socialism would sanctify those who had suffered. You went out and took your stand, and did what had to be done, not because you expected anything from it, but because someday there would be retribution and you wanted just a little of it to bear your name. If she had been religious like her Mama, she would have conceived this as a memorial plaque on the back of one of the pews in the Synagogue. But she was enlightened, independent, a college graduate, a girl who read and understood, who had joined the radical set at school, had scandalized her mother, had gone to live with her boyfriend when he was drafted and stationed in another city. She was a modern woman.

“Rochelle!” I hear my grandma’s taunt, “Imagine Rochelle!” And then in Yiddish: “Rachel is not good enough for her.”

But this isn’t the couple in the poster. That couple got away. Well funded, and supplied with false passports, they went either to New Zealand or Australia. Or Heaven. In any event, my mother and father, standing in for them, went to their deaths for crimes they did not commit. Or maybe they did committ them. Or maybe my mother and father got away with false passports for crimes they didn’t committ. How do you spell comit? Of one thing we are sure. Everything is elusive. God is elusive. Revolutionary morality is elusive. Justice is elusive. Human character. Quarters for the cigarette machine. You’ve got these two people in the poster, Daniel, now how you going to get them out? And you’ve got a grandma you mention once or twice, but we don’t know anything about her. And some colored man in the basement — what is that all about? What has that got to do with anything?

PEEKSKILL

It is Sunday, a warm Sunday morning in September. Everyne is up early. The phone is ringing. I am admonishhed to hurry up and wash and get dressed. I have to feed stupid Susan while the grownups get dressed. We are into that efficient cooperative use of time, by which it is saved, like money. I hate it when something like this is going on. My mother directs us all like a military commander. Susan takes the bowl of the spoon into her fat cheeks and clutches the shaft of it in her fat hand. She won’t let go. The phone rings again. I am directed to answer the phone. It is someone wanting to know the schedule. Everyone is meeting at our house. At nine-thirty they begin to arrive. The first, of course, is Dr. Mindish, and his wife and giant daughter. I hate Mindish. He seems to me an insincere man. I never believe anything he says. He is my father’s closest friend and the whole family’s dentist. He’s a tall man, balding, with a fat nose and a perpetually unshaved face. His eyes are small and colorless. He speaks with a foreign intonation. His daughter looks just like him, is as tall, has as big a nose, but with long hair hanging down each side of her face. His wife seems like an intruder in their family. “Well,” Mindish says when I answer the door, “they’ve got a new butler.” He’s really funny. As Linda Mindish, the daughter, walks by me, she pokes me in the ribs. Despising myself I smile at Mindish’s lousy wit and flinch from Linda’s hand. She is twelve or thirteen, and very strong.

A while later, the rest of them begin to troop in. Nate Silverstein, and his wife who teaches school downtown. Silverstein is a furrier, a florid man with a hoarse voice. And then Henry Bergman who is a professional musician, primarily a fiddler, although good enough on the French horn to play one season with Toscanini’s NBC Symphony. My favorite of my parents’ friends, Ben Cohen, a thin, gentle man with a mustache and an aromatic pipe. If my father died, I would want my mother to marry Ben Cohen. He always speaks softly when he speaks, which is not often. He never patronizes me. He is quiet and contemplative, and I like what he does too: he works for the City in the subway system, in a change booth. This seems to me a really fine job. You’re underground in a stronghold that has barred windows, and a heavy steel door that locks from the inside. It’s a very safe, secure place to be. You can eat your lunch in there, and read when the work is slow. All you have to do is make change, which is easy. If a bomb drops, you probably won’t even feel it. If there’s a storm, you don’t get wet. The only thing wrong about this job is that Ben Cohen never stays in one place. He’s always switching around. If I had the job, I’d want to have the booth in our station, 174th Street. Then I’d be close to home.