E. Doctorow: The Book of Daniel

“He’ll get them all,” she whispered. “He’ll get every one of them.”

Ah Susy, my Susyanna, what have you done? You are a dupe of the international moralist propagandist apparatus! They have made a moral speed freak of you! They have wrecked your hair and taken away your granny glasses and dressed you in the robe of a sick person. Oh, look at what they’ve done, Susan, look at what they’ve done to you—

THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF GOD

AS REPRESENTED IN THE BIBLE

Actually that’s what God does in the Bible — like the little girl says, he gets people. He takes care of them. He lays on this monumental justice. Oh the curses, the admonitions; the plagues, the scatterings, the ruinations, the strikings dead, the renderings unto and the tearings asunder. The floods. The fires. It is interesting to note that God as a character in the Bible seems almost always concerned with the idea of his recognition by mankind. He is constantly declaring His Authority, with rewards for those who recognize it and punishment for those who don’t. He performs fancy tricks. He enlists the help of naturally righteous humans who become messengers, or carriers of his miracles, or who deliver their people. Each age has by trial to achieve its recognition of Him — or to put it another way, every generation has to learn anew the lesson of His Existence. The drama in the Bible is always in the conflict of those who have learned with those who have not learned. Or in the testing of those who seem that they might be able to learn. In this context it is instructive to pause for a moment over the career of Daniel, a definitely minor, if not totally apocryphal figure (or figures) who worked with no particular delight for a few of the kings in the post-Alexandrine Empires. It is a bad time for Daniel and his co-religionists, for they are second-class citizens, in a distinctly hostile environment. But in that peculiar kind of symbiosis of pagan kings and wise subject-Jews, Daniel is apparently able to soften the worst excesses of the rulers against his people by making himself available for interpretations of dreams, visions or apparitions in the night. Dreams, visions and apparitions in the night seem to be an occupational hazard of the ancient rulers. Typically, the King (Nebuchadnezzar, or Belshazzar, or Cyrus) suffers a dream which he cannot understand. He consults his various retainers — magicians, astrologers, soothsayers, Chaldean wise men. Typically, they fail him. As a last resort Daniel, a Jew, is summoned. Daniel seems to be a modest man, brave, and more faithful to God than wise, for it is by means of prayer and piety that he learns from God the dream interpretations he must make to the King in order to survive. In one case, he must even recreate the dream before he can interpret it because the dumb King, Nebuchadnezzar, has forgotten what it is. For this wisdom Daniel is accorded ministerial rank in the tradition of Joseph and Moses before him. It is no sinecure, however. We think of Charlie Chaplin taken home every night by the fat, wealthy drunkard and kicked out of the drunkard’s house in the sobriety of the following morning. Like an alternating current, though quite direct. At one point, Daniel’s three brothers are accused of sacrilege by the cunning Chaldeans and the King sentences them to death in a fiery furnace. God sees that they survive the fire, but the strain on Daniel has to have been considerable. Another time Daniel, under the same indictment himself, is thrown into a pit with lions but survives an entire night unscratched. His is a life of confrontations, not the least of which has him putting down his employer in front of the whole crowd: You’ve bought it, Kingy. “God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it, thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting….” This is not a job for a man sensitive to loud noises or bright light. Daniel survives three reigns but at considerable personal cost. Toward the end his insights become more diffuse, apocalyptic, hysterical. One night he suffers his own dream, a weird and awesome vision of composite beasts and seas and heavens and fire and storms and an Ancient on a throne, and ironically he doesn’t know what it means: “I, Daniel, was grieved in my spirit in the midst of my body, and the vision of my head troubled me…. My cogitations much troubled me, and my countenance changed in me: but I kept the matter in my heart.”

So much for Daniel, Beacon of Faith in a Time of Persecution. (You’ve got to be desperate to read the Bible.) Five grown-up people are trying to recover one twenty-year-old girl from a public insane asylum on Memorial Day. It can’t be done. It is not a working day. There is no one to process her record, sign her out, check her over. There is no one there to say she can go. I am livid. “Let’s just take her!” I shout. But that can’t be done. Robert Lewin, a professor of law at Boston College, won’t do it. Lise, his wife, tells me to be serious. And Dr. Duberstein, the infamous Dr. Alan Duberstein, makes useless phone calls in the public phone booth. Duberstein is a short, skinny man with a high voice. He was shot up during World War II and has a face annealed by plastic surgery. Straight hair that looks sewn into his scalp. Stucco skin, and no eyebrows. Into this fiasco he pokes a pipe. There are spots on his striped tie, and his brown wing-styled shoes need a shine.

“I was told there would be no problem,” he insists to the admitting nurse. “We have an ambulance out there that is costing these people thirty-five dollars an hour.”

“I can’t help that,” the admitting nurse says. She is large and cheerful. The state police brought Susan in off the turnpike and that makes her a public charge. “She has to be released,” the nurse says patiently. This must be the way she talks to maniacs. With a melody in her voice. “I can’t do it and you can’t do it. We haven’t even typed the admitting diagnosis.”

I pace the lobby, pounding my fist into my palm. Phyllis sits on a bench, the baby sliding down her lap. Her earnest face tracks me, she pulls the baby back, it struggles, she pulls it back. I have no real desire to rescue Susan by force. But I wish I had her capacity to do things in a big way — that gift for causing public commotion, that family talent. Actually it’s just as well that Duberstein is kept away from her. And our parents too, for that matter. She has been going to Duberstein for years; once she told me she lost her respect for Duberstein when she found out he played golf twice a week. Then why do you go, Susan? “Alleviates parental anxieties,” said Susan the college girl. Alleviates parental anxieties. This makes me feel guilty for both of us. I look at the Lewins: pale, worried, under fire once again. I cannot bear the guilt. I begin to scold them. They should have called me sooner. I would have had the sense to get her out of here yesterday. “What were you trying to hide from me? What was the point!”

Lise, my mother, a tiny woman in a blouse and short skirt with low-heeled shoes and shoulder bag, is a curious combination of 1945 WAC and slightly aging Viennese charmer onto the new fashions. She sits down on the bench next to Phyllis and takes the baby, an unconscious maternal gesture which gratifies Phyllis because it brings her into the family. “Oh, Danny,” Lise says, “don’t be a fool. Nobody’s hiding anything. You are down there. We are here. We are her parents. We cope. And if someone in the family can be spared for twenty-four hours, why not? Or should everyone stop functioning?”

She seems to be taking the whole business with more fortitude than my father. My father speaks in his soft voice to Duberstein, suggesting various alternative courses of action. There are doctors at work even on Memorial Day. Find the senior doctor in charge. Talk to him. If he’s not in the building, find out where he is and call him. My father is very fond of Susan. Her excesses have always seemed to render him contemplative. This is the worst she’s been, the worst thing she’s done; it has occurred to him, perhaps, that the pattern of our lives is deterioration, that the movement of our lives is toward death.