E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

THE EDUCATION OF A LAWYER

We will watch this well-meaning but outclassed man as he goes downtown on the subway and learns the law as it is administered by highly motivated Federal prosecuting agencies.

After the FBI had been through the store, my mother opened it up so that customers could recover whatever was fixed, and so that we could collect whatever money my father had earned. We needed every dollar. We hadn’t enough for the rent, and while Ascher had said not to think about his fee, there was now a big, new expense to worry about in addition to everything else.

I took to my mother my blue tin of pennies and gave them to her: there was about eighty cents. She cried and hugged me as I had known she would. I wanted to see her cry. I wanted her to hug me. I wanted her to experience the poignancy of the moment I had planned.

Very few people came to the store. Those who did kept their faces averted, as if by looking my mother in the eye they would contract her misfortune. Somehow I knew there was gossip to the effect that Rochelle had gall to stand in the store with her children where everyone could see her in her shame. Nobody wanted to come near us. In this Jewish neighborhood Paul Isaacson was bad for the Jews. Had not McCarthy made a speech describing the great battle between international atheistic communism and Christianity? There was no question in anyone’s mind where the Jews belonged according to Joe McCarthy.

My mother was embittered by the reaction of the neighborhood. She thought about calling up those who had not picked up their radios, but decided against it. “We could be living in a peasant village,” she told Ascher. “The fear, the ignorance. No one, not even the few who are sympathetic, has considered that my husband might be innocent.”

“Even among the educated,” Ascher said. “That is the effect of a Federal Grand Jury indictment. It strains the presumption of innocence. But don’t worry, a court is still a court, and that is where it will be decided. Not on 174th Street, but in the courtroom.”

My father had been indicted along with Selig Mindish and unnamed others for conspiring to violate the Espionage Act of 1917. His bail had been set at one hundred thousand dollars. That meant he would be in jail until his trial, which Ascher said was months away. Ascher had pleaded that the bail was excessive, but his plea was rejected. The Korean War was going badly, the papers were speculating on the physical damage one atom bomb could do to the City of New York. So many hundreds of thousands dead; so many millions dying of radiation sickness; so many familiar streets turned into rubble.

The store was closed.

Here do the scene of Rochelle and her two children and Williams, the colored man who lives in the cellar, carrying radio parts, tools, boxes of tubes, etc., home from the Radio Store. Cleaning out the store over a period of a few cold, wintry days and marching home with tons of junk, even Susan in her pudgy little hands carrying radio parts. Williams pushing the TV console on a dolly, in that lumbering slow-motion walk, glowering Williams in his faded blue overalls pushing the TV set up 174th Street. Behind him the store is now empty. The windows are empty. The landlord has put a lock on the door, and a painter on a ladder is very quickly blanking out Isaacson Radio, Sales and Repair.

Our lives are shrinking. The Isaacson family exists now only to the edges of its own domesticity. For my father substitute a rubber-handled screwdriver which I have taken to cherishing, along with some empty red tube boxes which I stack like cells of a hierarchic structure, or like modules of a dramatic new city. Also, a heavy, old diamond-shaped microphone from a real radio station. It broadcasts on a secret frequency directly to my father in his jail cell. I whisper instructions as to what he should do when he hears the hoot of an owl outside his cell window tonight. It will be our rescue team coming to get him. I advise him to be ready and to wait further instructions. Roger, he radios back to me. Roger and out, I reply.

In the papers I hear his voice. He tells reporters that the charge against him is insane. I have his picture in handcuffs down at Foley Square. He does not know the English scientist, the Canadian immigrants, the New Jersey engineer. He knows Mindish only as a friend. While our life is shrinking, another existence, another dimension, expands its image and amplifies its voices. The picture I save of my mother shows her walking down the front steps of our house, holding her arm up to shield her face from the camera. Or is her arm held out in the threatening gesture the caption claims? She tells a reporter her husband is innocent, and that the FBI took things from her house without a search warrant. The story describes her attitude as defiant.

In this new dimension of life we are spread into headlines and news broadcasts. Our troops are being captured and killed. My mother reads of some hill in Korea, and says to me, “We shall bear the brunt.” She is pale and her face is thin. She eats very little. She is composed but often, with no warning, grabs me and hugs me too tight or studies Susan’s face or combs Susan’s hair with inordinate pleasure in the texture of die dark, silken hair, or the smell of its cleanliness after she washes it. I feel sometimes she studies me as if gauging the amount of my father in me, and the amount of Rochelle.

For a week or two only Ascher or the reporters came to our door. Then one evening there was a knock and it was one of the interesting people, Ben Cohen, the gentle friend, always so quiet. He had come directly from work from the subway where it was his job to make change and which protects him from the atom bomb.

The sight of him causes my mother to weep. Awkwardly, he pats her on the shoulder.

“It’s not smart to come here, Ben. It isn’t a smart thing to do. You’re a foolish man,” she says in gratitude.

He frowns, shakes his head. They have a cup of tea in the kitchen. He combs his mustache with his fingers. He lights his pipe. He hangs one skinny leg over the other. He listens to my mother.

“What possessed him to do it? Can you tell me? All these years … If you cannot expect civilized behavior, simple decency from your friends, of whom can you expect it? I think about it and I think about it, and I cannot make heads or tails of it. I just can’t understand what possesses a man to do something so terrible. To ruin a family, the lives of children.”

Ben, mute, shakes his head.

“And I cannot forgive his wife, either. There has never been any love lost between Sadie Mindish and me. God knows what they have concocted between them.”

Ben Cohen says, “I want you to tell your lawyer that I will make myself useful in any way I can. I will testify as your witness. Anything.”

“Paul has already discussed this with Ascher. Paul told Ascher he doesn’t want to implicate anyone, he doesn’t want any of our friends to get involved. With the way things are, anyone who associates with us is himself made suspect. He says he could not bear the responsibility, it would weigh too heavily on him. And on me too, Ben. It’s enough to know you have offered it.”

There is something in her behavior, a regality of suffering, that is not lost on me. Perhaps the way she measures out her words keeps her emotions under control.

“Some financial help,” Ben Cohen pleads in his quiet voice.

My mother cries. “I miss him so. Ascher says he is fine. His letter says he is fine. But how can a man in jail be fine? He is locked up like some common criminal.”

Ben is the first of a thin trickle of friends who came to see us. Nate Silverstein, the furrier with the hoarse voice and the red face. Henry Bergman, the fiddler. I forget who else. It was a very small number. In fact they were braving not only the FBI, but the downtown hierarchy of the Communist Party. I know that within twenty-four hours of my father’s arrest, both he and my mother were written out of the Party. They were erased from the records. The Party did not want to be associated with anyone up on an espionage rap. Quickly and quietly erased out of existence.