E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

Snapping open the tarnished brass clasps

Of a flat and ancient purse of cracked leather

And withdrawing one penny with her thumb and forefinger

You get the picture. Good boy, Daniel. I tried not to offend her by giving any sign that she offended me, because she really smelled bad, my skinny mad little grandma, she smelled of her asthma grass which she burned like incense in a blue tin in her room. The sour smell, always with her, like a stink shadow — peeyouwee! — was on her fingers, in her change purse, in her black dress, in her wavy grey hair. She lifted my hand and pressed the penny into it, and then while I took a deep breath and held it, she leaned forward, about my height, and by the back of my neck pulled me forward for the dry kiss on the forehead. Daniel is a good boy, she said. That is for a good boy. I thought she meant the penny, the kiss being for her — her reward for having a good boy for a grandson. The very words she pronounced not as a judgment but as if good boy was a category of being, a species in nature which she was privileged in her old age to have living in the same house. There was a generation between us which we never discussed.

My grandma had spells. She used to accuse my mother, her very own daughter, of trying to poison her. My mother always had to taste the food she put on the table before the old woman would eat it. So my mother got into the habit of tasting everything, even a glass of milk for me, before she put it down. Grandma was the neighborhood crazywoman. When she went into one of these things, she would put a shawl over her head and run away. She would stomp down from the porch, bringing her high lace shoes together on one step before the next step was taken. And on the sidewalk, before rushing off, she would turn and shake her fist at the house and curse it in Yiddish, calling down cholera and Cossacks and typhoid and wholesale terrors of the burning fiery furnace, and if someone passed in the street she would curse him too. Suppose little Daniel was out there minding his baby sister in her carriage: Grandma would curse him out too, her eyes burning, lacking all recognition, her grey hair all uncombed, undone, the waves of it sticking out from her shawl, shockingly, like electric wire. Then she’d scurry away, describing with gestures toward the sidewalk the extent of her bitterness. Daniel was always glad to see her go. What worried him was when, a half-block away, she would turn with a raised fist for a parting blast, and it would become a very rhetorically involved curse, and she would forget in what direction she had been going and come back toward him and the house and the whole thing would start all over again. She ran away all the time. To Claremont Park. Down the hill to the New York Central tracks. In her black dress telling the world all the mad family secrets. Sometimes she went around the corner to her one friend, Mrs. Bittelman, also a widow, but a younger woman, perhaps in her late fifties, a kindly red-faced woman who seemed to Daniel to be the only person who liked Grandma and who had the patience to take seriously the stream of imprecations coming out of Grandma’s mouth, and to sit with her and nod solemnly and with sighs, until the spell was over. And to bring her home. Mrs. Bittelman had, beside her kindness, impeccable credentials: her only son, Jerome, had been killed in the war. Mrs. Bittelman’s apartment was on the ground floor of the apartment house around the corner on 173rd Street. The Venetian blinds were always drawn shut. In one window was one of those service stars. During the war a blue star in a window meant that that family had a soldier serving somewhere in the Army. A gold star meant that the boy had been killed. Mrs. Bittelman’s star was blue, but the boy had been killed. She had never had the heart to set the matter straight. She was an old Jewish lady, though not as old as my grandma, and the faded blue star on a shield of white cloth with a red border and gold tassels hung from a stick in her window years after the war was over.

Sometimes Grandma went the other way. Then, in a few hours the phone would ring. Or sometimes a police car — a police car! — would pull up to the curb in front of the house, a green and white police car, and Grandma would emerge with great dignity, contemptuous of the cops who tried to help her out of their car. A green and white police car would pull up. Here is Grandma furiously shaking off the patronizing grip of the Bronx cop as she struggles out of their car.

SEVERAL EXPLANATIONS

In my life as Daniel, I heard several explanations for Grandma’s plunges into the pit. Susan, age fifteen, in her new ivy-league cool: “I never knew Grandmother, but from what you say, I suspect it was menopause.” My mother, during a particularly bad spell — I have stopped by the door to watch my father holding the thrashing old woman down on her bed so that the Doctor can give her a shot; small and frail, she is putting up a terrific struggle; and my mother stands at the foot of the bed shouting “Mama, stop it. Stop this nonsense, stop it, Mama!” and then, seeing me stricken pale in the doorway, my mother leads me downstairs and explains why, at the age of five or six or whatever I am, I am subjected to such things … It is simple: Grandma goes mad when she can no longer consider the torment of her life. My mother’s catalogue of the old lady’s misfortunes — the abandoned parents whose brown picture she still keeps in her drawer, the death of her first-born in the street, the death of her two sisters in the big fire, the death of her second-born from the flu, the death of her husband, my grandfather who would have loved me if he’d lived. “What killed him was not tuberculosis, what killed him and killed them all was poverty and exploitation, and that means being poor and being kept poor by people who grow fat and rich from your labor. It’s not fair, is it?”

“No, Ma.”

“Your grandma slaved all her life. To end up with nothing.”

Ignore the reverberations of that remark. Ignore the reverberations. Ignore them. Ignore … My father believed that a life committed to superstition could have no other end than madness, because madness was the disease of fantasy and fantasy of God, or superstition, was itself madness, a predictably abnormal expression of impoverished life. The most enormous problem faced by the Bolsheviks, he said, was education of the peasants. The Russian peasants had been kept in ignorance and illiteracy for so many generations that they were not much more than animals. God was an instrument of the Czar. And Grandma grew up, of course, in the shtetl of a provincial Russian town, a Jew, but also a Russian peasant. My father always gives you more of an answer than you bargained for.

And now let me put down what Grandma herself said about her tunings in and out. Occasionally, after her death, she liked to visit me and press a penny into my palm and bless my head, and call me a good boy. And once I asked her why she felt it necessary to blow her mind in a way so frightening to children. And Grandma said:

“In any one day, it is possible to derive joy from your being and be nourished by it. In a filthy room with cold, broken windows and the clatter of your oppression in the streets, it is possible. And starving, with your teeth rotting in your mouth, and age like lead in your bones, and your eyes shattered with the horror of what you have seen — all together, and with the madness of your children thrown in, I call it God. And there is a traditional liturgy which is lovely in itself, but which reminds you too that others born and died know this feeling also. So I sing to myself in that language. And my curses are my love for them whom I curse for existing at the mercy of life and God and for the dust they will allow themselves to become for having been born. And my complicity in their being, the fruit of my womb, that I could have tricked them this way outrages me. Unable to stay in their presence for my love of them which they do not understand, and my terrible fear of their blasphemy, and their tampering with all the deep, intricate solderings of the universe. Do you begin to understand? I am speaking of the only form of ecstasy allowed to old ladies. It begins with the fear of not being able to breathe. And they inherit that from me, too, as you do, that excess of passion that shimmering fullness of stored life which always marks the victim. What we have, too much life in each of us, is what the world hates most. We offend. We stink with life. Our hearts make love to the world not gently. We are brutal with life and our brutality is called suffering. We scream into our pillows when we come.