E. Doctorow: The Book of Daniel

SO THAT’S WHERE THEY’RE GOING!

From the Dartmouth Bible: “Daniel, a Beacon of Faith in a Time of Persecution. Few books of the Old Testament have been so full of enigmas as the Book of Daniel. Though it contains some of the most familiar stories of the Bible, nine of its twelve chapters record weird dreams and visions which have baffled readers for centuries.”

The way to start may be the night before, Memorial Day Eve, when the phone rang. With Daniel and his child bride at sex in their 115th Street den. The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection. And I have finally got her on all fours, hanging there from her youth and shame, her fallen blond hair over her eyes, tears sliding like lovebeads down the long blond hairs of her straight hair. The phone is about to ring. The thing about Phyllis is that when she’s stoned all her inhibitions come out. She gets all tight and vulnerable and our lovemaking degrades her. Phyllis grew up in an apartment in Brooklyn, and her flower life is adopted, it is a principle. Her love of peace is a principle, her long hair, her love for me — all principles. Political decisions. She smokes dope on principle and that’s where I have her. All her instinctive unprincipled beliefs rise to the surface and her knees lock together. She becomes a sex martyr. I think that’s why I married her. So the phone is winding up to ring and here is soft Phyllis from Brooklyn suffering yet another penetration and her tormentor Daniel gently squeezing handfuls of soft ass while he probes her virtue, her motherhood, her vacuum, her vincibles, her vat, her butter tub, and explores the small geography of those distant island ranges, that geology of gland formations, Stalinites and Trotskyites, the Stalinites grow down from the top, the Trotskyites up from the bottom, or is it the other way around — and when we cannot be many moments from a very cruel come that is when the phone rings. It is the phone ringing. The phone. I believe it is the phone.

But how would I get this scene to record Phyllis’ adenoidal prettiness, her sharp nose and fair skin and light Polish eyes. Or her overassumption of life, a characteristic of teenage girls of high school culture. How would it connote the debts all husbands pay for their excesses. Already stirring in this marriage not two years old were the forms of my fearful kindness coming out like magic watercolor under her rubbing. And if the first glimpse people have of me is this, how do I establish sympathy? If I want to show disaster striking at a moment that brings least credit to me, why not begin with the stacks, Daniel roaming through the stacks, searching, too late, for a thesis.

Worcester State Hospital is situated off Route 9 in Worcester, Massachusetts, on the crest of a hill overlooking Lake Quinsigamond, a body of water so quiet that it is famous for crew races. The hospital is in fact two hospitals, an old and a new. The new hospital back toward the woods does not concern us. Lacking steps it is for older patients. The old hospital was put up around the turn of the century. It was designed with the idea that madness might be soothed in a setting of architectural beauty. It is darkly Victorian, with arched doors of oak and mullioned windows. One other fact of considerable interest is that contrary to the popular belief this is one insane asylum that is not overcrowded. In fact it is, upon Susan’s arrival, half empty. That is because modern methods of therapy, including tranquilizing drugs, do away with the necessity of incarcerating every nut who happens to live in Worcester, Mass., or environs. The idea now is to commit only those patients who cannot take care of themselves on the outside, or who are murderously inclined. Even for these, there are programs of visits home on weekends if there are homes, and other such privileges. The theory is that the person’s normal environment is therapeutic. The theory is that the person wants to go home.

Daniel found his sister in the Female Lounge. The walls there are yellow, ocher and tan. The ceiling is tan. The chairs are dark green imitation leather with chrome tubing arms and legs. There are two TV sets, one on either side of the room, and a rack for magazines. Susan was the only patient in the lounge. A staff attendant in a white uniform with white stockings, which tend to make the legs look fatter than they are, sat with her legs together on a straight chair by the door. She played with her hair and read Modern Screen. Does Dick Really Love Liz? Let me indicate my good faith by addressing myself to the question. I don’t think he really loves her. I think he is fond of her. I think he enjoys buying her outlandishly expensive things and also an occasional tup in bed. I think he loves the life, the camera’s attention, the ponderous importance of every little fart he makes. I think he loves fraud of spectacular dimension. I think if they were put on trial for their lives, he might come to love her.

They had dressed Susan in one of those beltless, collarless hospital robes, and soft slippers. They had taken away her big granny glasses that always seemed to emphasize the spaciousness of her intelligence, and the honesty of her interest in whatever she looked at. She squinted at Daniel with the lovely blue eyes of a near-sighted girl. When she saw it was he, she stopped trying to look at him and rested her head back against the chair. She sat in a green imitation leather chair with her arms resting on its tubed chrome arms and her feet flat on the floor in their slippers. She looked awful. Her dark hair was combed back off her face in a way she would never have combed it. She always parted it in the middle and tied it at the back of her neck. Her skin looked blotchy. She was not a small person but she looked physically small sitting there. Not looking at him, she lifted her arm, her fingers dipping toward him, a bored, humorous, gesture, one that made his heart leap; and he took the outraised hand in both his hands thinking Oh honey, oh my poor honey, and kissed the back of her hand, thinking It’s her, it’s still her, no matter what she does, and only then noticing in front of his eyes the taped bandage around her wrist. When he’d had a good look, she pulled her hand away.

For ten minutes Daniel sat next to her. He was hunched over and staring at the floor while she sat with her head back and her eyes closed, and they were like the compensating halves of a clock sculpture that would exchange positions when the chimes struck. He thought he knew what it was, that sense of being overcome. You suffocated. The calamity of it. He had had such spells. People looked at you in a funny way and spoke to you down corridors. You didn’t know what to do. Something was torn, there was a coming apart of intentions, a forgetting of what you could expect from being alive. You couldn’t laugh. You were in dread of yourself and it was dread so pure that one glance in the mirror scorched the heart and charred the eyes.

Daniel must have sighed. Susan reached out and patted him gently on the back. “They’re still fucking us,” she said. “Goodbye, Daniel. You get the picture.”

He listened alertly. He was not sure if she had said goodbye or good boy. He hung around for a while after that but she didn’t say another thing or even acknowledge that he was in the room. He gazed out the window, leaning his shoulder against the window frame. The window was barred. He could see Phyllis playing with the baby down on the hillside. At the top of the hill was a retaining wall of brick, and inside that wall a parking lot filled with pastel cars. Into his sight rolled a dark blue Chevrolet he recognized as the Lewins’. Then the view was cut off by the top of the brick portico sheltering the steps of the main entrance to the hospital.

Without saying much of anything, without even caring if he was there, Susan could restore in him the old cloying sense of family, and suggest that his wife was not in the same class and his child a complete irrelevance. That it was their thing, this orphan state, and that it obliterated everything else and separated them from everyone else, and always would, no matter what he did to deny it. Actually I don’t try to deny it. But I reserve the right to live with it in my own way, if I can. In Susan resides the fateful family gift for having definite feelings. Always taking stands, even as a kid. A moralist, a judge. This is right, that is wrong, this is good, that is bad. Her personal life carelessly displayed, her wants unashamed, not managed discreetly like most people’s. With her aggressive moral openness, with her loud and intelligent and repugnantly honest girlness. And all wrong. Always wrong. From politics back to drugs, and from drugs back to sex, and before sex, tantrums, and before tantrums, a faith in God. Here is a cheap effect: A long time ago, on an evening in June, 1954, June 22 to be exact, at exactly ten P.M., Susan gave me the word about God. It was during a night game between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. Allie Reynolds was pitching for the Yanks and it was nothing-nothing in the top of the seventh. Boston had one out and a man on first. Jim Piersall was up and the count was three and one. Reynolds picked up the rosin bag. Mel Allen was saying how a base on balls is always trouble and as he spoke there was a short beep over his voice the way it happens on television to indicate that a new hour has begun. At that moment Susan, age eight, and I, thirteen, could not look at each other. Allie Reynolds dropped the rosin bag, pulled at the peak of his cap, and leaned forward for the sign. And that’s when Susan told me there was a God.