E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

“Are they going to arrest you?”

My father forced a laugh. “Don’t worry.”

“What’s going to happen,” my mother whispers.

“I’ve told you everything I know. Do me a favor, Rochelle. Get what you need, and go home. I’ll be home at the usual time. It’s only the coming of Fascism so why should we be surprised.”

I associated Dr. Mindish with the smell of plaster and dental paste — a medicinal pungency emanated from him like the taste of a wintergreen Lifesaver. It wasn’t unpleasant. Only when he was in his office did you not smell this. When he wore his starched, white tunic, and fussed around his chest of pencil-thin drawers with all their drill bits and instruments, and when he turned on the water jet that went around the bowl, and shoved the cotton in your mouth, and pressed his stomach against your arm, and lowered his hulk over your face, he didn’t smell that way. At these times he smelled of salami.

I hated Mindish. He always patronized me. He was a large, bulky man with small eyes and a foreign intonation in his speech, and I had always known that he lacked integrity. He was an opportunist in his conversation, never providing the idea to drive it forward, but always picking up its scraps and litter, like a fat, quick-eyed wolf, I thought, with the humorous smile of a wolf. It was a matter of sorrow to me that my parents regarded him as a friend. He was the family dentist and he always hurt me when I went there. There was about him some vicious eroticism. He was always looking at Rochelle’s tits or ass, a fact which she didn’t seem to notice. He was always treating Paul with his clumsy humor like a ridiculous child, with shards of envy perhaps for Paul’s mind or youth, or energy. Mindish was much older than my mother and father. I think he was in his fifties when he was arrested.

I was pleased by the news. I thought if the G-men had to arrest someone, as my father said because if they didn’t they would have nothing to do, then they had made a wise choice in arresting Mindish. I felt that if it had been my job to arrest someone, I would have chosen Mindish too.

Early the next morning, as I was leaving for school, the doorbell rang and I opened the door and two men were standing on the porch. They were dressed neatly, and did not appear to be of the neighborhood. They had thin, neat faces and small noses, and crew-cut hair. They held their hats in their hands and wore nice overcoats. I thought maybe they were from one of those Christian religions that sent people from door to door to sell their religious magazines.

“Sonny,” said one, “is your mother or father home?”

“Yes,” I said. “They’re both home.”

My mother did not allow me to delay going to school just because the FBI had come to the door. I don’t know what happened on that first visit. The men went inside and, going down the splintery front steps, I turned and caught a glimpse of Paul coming out of the kitchen to meet them just as the door closed. My mother was holding the door and my father was coming forward in his ribbed undershirt, looking much skinnier than the two men who rang the bell.

When the FBI knocks on your door and wants only to ask a few questions, you do not have to consent to be asked questions. You are not required to talk to them just because they would like to talk to you. You don’t have to go with them to their office. You don’t have to do anything if you are not subpoenaed or arrested. But you only learn the law as you go along.

“They don’t know what they want,” Paul says to Rochelle. “It’s routine. If you don’t talk to them, they have nothing to pin their lies on. They are clumsy, obvious people.”

“I’m frightened,” my mother says. “Polizei don’t have to be smart.”

“Don’t worry,” Paul says. “Mindish won’t suffer from anything we said.” He is walking back and forth in the kitchen and he is pounding his fist into his palm. “We have done nothing wrong. There is nothing to be afraid of.”

It develops that all of Mindish’s friends are being questioned. Nobody knows what he is being held for. There has been no announcement on the radio, there has been no story in the newspaper. Sadie Mindish is in a state of hysterical collapse. Her apartment has been searched. Her daughter has stayed home from school. Nobody knows if they even have a lawyer.

The next day the same two FBI men come back again, this time in the early evening. They sit on the stuffed, sprung couch in the living room parlor with their knees together and their hats in their hands. They are very soft-spoken and friendly. Their strange names are Tom Davis and John Bradley. They smile at me while my mother goes to the phone to call my father.

“What grade are you in, young fellow?”

I don’t answer. I have never seen a real FBI man this close before. I peer at them, looking for superhuman powers, but there is no evidence that they have any. They look neither as handsome as in the movies nor as ugly as my parents’ revulsion makes them. I search their faces for a clue to their real nature. But their faces do not give clues.

When Paul comes home, he is very nervous.

“My lawyer has advised me that I don’t have to talk to you if I don’t want to,” my father said. “That particular fact you neglected yesterday to mention.”

“Well, yes sir, Mr. Isaacson, but we were hoping you would be cooperative. We’re only looking for information. It’s nothing mysterious. We thought you were a friend of Doctor Mindish. As his friend, you may be in a position to help him.”

“I will be glad to answer any questions in a court of law.”

“Do you deny now that you know him?”

“I will answer any questions in a court of law.”

The two men leave after a few minutes, and then they sit in their car, double-parked in front of the house, for ten or fifteen minutes more. They appear to be writing on clipboards or on pads, I can’t tell exactly. It is dark and they have turned on the interior car light. I am reminded of a patrol man writing a parking ticket. But the sense is of serious and irrevocable paperwork, and I find it frightening. There is some small, grey light in the dark sky over the schoolyard. The wind is making whistling noises at the edges of the window.

“Danny!” Rochelle says sharply. “Get away from there.”

My father takes my place at the curtains. “That is outrageous,” he says. “Don’t you see, it is part of the treatment. They are trying to shake us up. But we’re too smart for them. We’re onto them. They can sit out there all night for all I care.”

The next day is worse. At lunch my father tells my mother he is sure someone has searched the shop. When he unlocked the door this morning, he felt that things were slightly out of place. It wasn’t anything he could pinpoint exactly. Maybe the tubes in the trash barrel. Maybe the customer tickets. It was more like a sense of things having been disturbed.

Our lunch is muenster cheese sandwiches on pumpernickel and canned tomato soup. My father doesn’t eat. He sits with his elbow on the table and his hand to his head. He nods, as if he agrees with something he has decided.

“That’s it. That’s why they came here and asked you to call me home. They could just as easily have come to the store, couldn’t they? But they didn’t. They wanted to make sure I was home when they wanted to search my store.”

My mother discounts this. She says they could have waited until late at night and achieved the same thing. I understand that she is deliberately minimizing the situation. She suggests that perhaps my father is imagining the whole thing about the store being searched. As the pressure increases, she seems to be calming down. Her own hysteria has passed. She is worried about Paul. She is into the mental process which in the next three years will harden into a fortitude many people will find repugnant.