E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

One autumn day, with the wind slicing through the chain link fence around the schoolyard, and heavy grey clouds racking into each other over the rooftops of apartment houses, Rochelle went shopping with her son, Daniel, and her baby daughter, Susan. Daniel, as he was instructed, held onto the white wicker stroller his mother was pushing. It was an old summer stroller, with small, solid wheels and streamlined raindrop fenders like the wheelcovers on racing planes of the 1930’s, and a top that could swing back to let the sun in. Daniel himself had ridden in it when he was a baby. Now it was Susan’s. Rochelle had wrapped a blanket about the legs of the little girl and snugged it up to her chin. Daniel wore his mackinaw and a hunter’s cap with the earflaps pulled down. They were going to the butcher’s and then to the Daitch Dairy and maybe they’d stop in and say hello to their father in his store. I think this was in 1949 or 1950. I was seven or eight. Susan was about four. As we came down alongside the purple castle of a school and crossed Eastburn Avenue on 174th Street, and passed the shoemaker, Rochelle suddenly began to walk very fast, going past the Daitch Dairy, Daniel running to catch up with his hand.

“My God,” his mother said. “My God, it’s happened.”

The carriage bounced off the curb into the street at Morris Avenue and Susan cried out in fright. Up ahead, in the middle of the next block, a crowd stood in front of Isaacson Radio, Sales and Repair. Rochelle had no time for amenities, raising the front wheels of the stroller and bringing them down hard on the sidewalk, then the rear wheels. She ran the last half block, her long black coat flapping around her legs. It’s happened. That is what she said. Daniel running with his hunter’s leather cap flopping around on his head, the peak turning annoyingly off center toward his left ear; Susan, holding on with both hands, peering ahead with her tremulous upper lip ready to yield the potent bawl of outrage.

This street, 174th Street, was just in this time undergoing the shock of the supermarket. An A&P had opened, the size of three or four normal stores; a Safeway would soon follow. Nevertheless, a woman could still shop for meat at a butcher’s, and butter and eggs in a dairy, and fish in a fish store, and bread in a bakery. There still in this time came along the street in front of your house a horse-drawn open wagon with vegetables and fruit displayed in their wooden shipping boxes, the vegetable man crying out his prices also written in crayon on brown paper bags stuck on slats between the boxes — the whole store on wooden steelbound wheels, arranged to rise up from the wagon bed at an angle so the lady could see everything available. The man would twirl his reins around the wheel brake, urge the horse into parking position between the cars, and set up shop for his particular customers, engaging in debates concerning the quality of his fruits and vegetables relative to their prices, clambering all over his wagon for pounds of this or bunches of that at the command of the customer, exchanging philosophical ideas of great gloom with great cheerfulness. When the vegetable man with his broken old horse clattered along past my house, he knew he was the last. A decade before there were scissors sharpeners, and knife grinders, and peddlers with bundles on their backs crying “I cash clothes!” and vendors of homemade ices in the summer and hot sweet potatoes in the winter, themselves relics of the teeming market streets of the Lower East Side at the beginning of the century. At one time, the Bronx had been an escape. In 1900 you beat the Lower East Side by moving to the Bronx. Only remorselessly does history catch up. And all your secret dreams are rooted open to the light. It is History, that pig, biting into the heart’s secrets.

I was not doing well in school that year. I was in the third grade. I would not fold my hands at the edge of my desk. I went to the bathroom without raising my hand. I talked when I felt like talking. There were periodic drills in the event of nuclear bombs falling. We marched into the hallways where there were no windows, and sat hunched against the wall, knees up, arms around knees, head down. I suppose it was 1949. All the schools were very big on air-raid drills. The Russians had exploded an atom bomb. Truman was said to be soft on Communism. The Chinese Reds had booted out Chiang Kai-shek. American Communist leaders were on trial for conspiracy to advocate and teach the violent overthrow of the Government. There were lots of air-raid drills in my school. The little girls preferred to kneel with their heads down, and their hands linked in back of their heads. In that way the little boys across the hall couldn’t see up their dresses. We drilled in the event of atom bombs falling. My father told me not to sit with my head on my knees, nor to comply with the request to pretend that bombs were falling from the sky. My father cursed all schoolteachers who would train their classes to accept the imminence of war. I was not doing well in school that year.

But one other thing I will have to work on is the feeling of Daniel at that age in his own loose clothes not quite synchronized to the rhythm of discontent-and-crisis, discontent-and-crisis, by which, weirdly, his parents lived in simultaneous fear and hope, defeat and victory. So that running toward his father’s store with the crowd in front of it on this windy, autumn afternoon, he is cool enough to perceive that nothing is the matter; that the crowd is amiable, and cops or ambulances are nowhere to be seen. There is no tension in the scene. It is a social occasion. It is the first television set to come to 174th Street, and it is sitting there in the window of Isaacson Radio, Sales and Repair, a great brown console, beaming its tiny moving pictures to the curious crowd.

I should have watched my mother’s face at the moment she understood this. But I was pushing forward for a glimpse of Faye Emerson. I doubt if her face softened with relief. I doubt if she smiled at the foolishness of her foreboding.

My father came out of the store and worked his way through the group of people standing there, and ignoring him as he jostled through them. He did not have a coat on, only his shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his work apron with its pockets for tools. He took my mother’s arm and together they walked a few feet away from the edge of the gathering, she still pushing the stroller.

“Where did you get that?” Rochelle said.

“It was on order. Listen—”

“Can we take it home?” I asked him.

“Just a minute, Danny. Let me talk to your mother. Mindish has been arrested.”

“What!”

“Keep your voice down. Early this morning while he was eating breakfast. The FBI came and took him downtown.”

“Oh, my God—”

“Don’t say anything to anyone. Go about your business and let everyting remain the same. I’ll be home for supper, and then we’ll talk.”

“How do you know?”

“His wife called me. It was a stupid thing to do. I don’t understand the brains of some people. She said Mindish wanted me to know, and told her to call me.”

“Oh, Pauly—”

I looked first to my mother’s face, then to my father’s, riding the current between them which I imagine now as blue television light, a rare element of heavy sorrow and blinding dread.

“What did he do?” I tugged my father’s arm.

“You’ve got to keep calm and control your feelings,” my father said to my mother. She was frowning and biting her knuckles. My father picked up Susan and played with her for a moment, pretending to be jolly. “How’s my honey,” he said to the solemn little girl. “How’s my honeybun?”

“Why did they arrest him?”

“I don’t know, Danny. They think he’s done something. If they didn’t arrest people, there would be nothing for them to do. So they decide someone does something he shouldn’t and they arrest him.”