E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

Susan used the cushions of Aunt Frieda’s sofa to make the walls of the house. We moved over an armchair for the fourth wall. We accidentally stepped on some of the crayons and ground them into the rug. I didn’t put the Erector set away and Aunt Frieda nearly tripped on some of the screws in the dark hall rolling under her foot and scratching the floor.

She was terribly neat, but not clean. She wanted nothing moved in her dusty house. I tried to read the papers in her candy store and she screamed if I lifted one off the counter. If I messed it up how could she sell it? I learned how to steal the paper from her to see if there was anything in it about Paul and Rochelle. Neighborhood kids stole things from her all the time. When her back was turned. When the light hit her eyeglasses. I could have helped her but she didn’t ask for my help. I saw the same kind of coloring book on her shelves that Susan had. I saw the same kind of drawing pad and box of colored pencils I had. I realized these were Ascher’s presents and that he had probably bought them from Aunt Frieda. I put the newspapers I stole into the garbage. I often had spells of difficult breathing. These frightened me. I found that if I ran around and waved my arms like a windmill, I could breathe better for a moment. I knocked over a lamp and broke it. I could not make friends in the neighborhood because I belonged to Aunt Frieda who was intolerant of children and not popular. She had warned me not to dare say who I was other than her nephew. Susan told a little girl one day that our parents were in jail. This was a lower middle class tenement neighborhood. There were a lot of smart poor people in this neighborhood. One day somebody’s older brother was reported missing in Korea. There were incidents.

I found that when I couldn’t breathe well I became manically active. I did not speak, I screamed. I did not walk, I ran. I couldn’t keep still. I made a game of spying on Aunt Frieda. I peeked through the keyhole to watch her in the bathroom. When she walked to work down the three flights of stairs I followed one flight behind. I stole candy from her counter. I memorized the phone number in her booth and called it from her phone in the apartment. When she answered I hung up. Susan and I did acrobatics on the bed: I held Susan at full arm’s length over my head. I dangled her upside down over the side of the bed. She shrieked merrily. We used the bed as a trampoline.

There is nothing in this time that is valuable to me. I feel sorry now for Aunt Frieda who was merely a limited person too tried by her brother Paul, too tried by his shitting and pissing children who tortured her, too tried by the life she was forced to lead. She was not mean, neurotic, self-serving, insensitive or miserly. She was limited. We lasted, or she lasted, five weeks. We never did get to school in Brooklyn. There are no clues in this five weeks. If she were alive today I would not go see her because she would have nothing to tell me that I could use.

Every night for supper we had elbow macaroni mixed with cottage cheese. When Ascher transferred us to the Shelter, Frieda testified that she could not afford to keep us and could not physically contain us. These were only half-truths. One day I was caught spying on her in the bathroom: her eyes were shut and her head was tilted back and her teeth were bared as she sat on the pot with her bloomers around her knees arching her back in an ecstasy of defecation; something that sounded like a rock fell into the water beneath her. A moment later I bumped my head against the doorknob and the door, not quite shut, swung slowly open. Frieda would never forgive me.

I remember nothing of our trip to the Shelter in the Bronx. Ascher probably took us. Perhaps Frieda came along to help effect it. Perhaps there were two trips, one for interviews. I remember some sort of interview. It was a weird time. The newspapers were constantly trying my parents in releases from the Justice Department. There was never in any announcement from J. Edgar Hoover a presumption of innocence. An image grew of my father as a master spy. As a master spy and ringleader. Over a period of a few weeks he became more and more prominent in any discussion of various spy arrests. Dr. Mindish was portrayed as one of those who carried out his orders. I was becoming confused. If my father was a ringleader was I in his ring? How could I be in his ring if I didn’t know about it before I read it in the newspaper? Was this the Paul Isaacson who was my father? If it wasn’t where was my father? I found many of the words difficult. I missed my father’s voice analyzing, endlessly analyzing and exposing the lies in the newspaper, on the radio and television, in the air; I missed his truth, I missed his power to tell me the real meaning of what was presented to me. When I received a letter from him it was as uninformative and strange as the one from my mother. It didn’t sound like him. I tried to work things out the way he used to but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t summon up that power. He was being transformed before my eyes and he wasn’t there to stop it from happening. If he was in jail maybe he was an atomic ringleader. The operations of my mind tried to conform my life and my relationship with my father to the words of the newspaper.

It was Ascher’s grim face which always brought me back. Looking at this overburdened man sinking deeper and deeper into the responsibilities of my parents’ fate, there could be no question about the semantics of disaster. They were fucking us. Each new indictment handed down by the Grand Jury perfecting the conspiracy, expanding it, adding to its overt acts, drove it in deeper.

I felt guilty. Truman had to order the scientists to develop a super bomb. Although he had worked for the atom bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer opposed the development of the super bomb and so would be declared a security risk. Although he liked the A-bomb he didn’t like the H-bomb and so would be thought of as a traitor.

ALONE IN THE COLD WAR

with Franny and Zooey

Each boy had an army bunk bed with khaki blankets which he was expected to make every morning, a cubby next to the bed, and a footlocker at the foot of the bed. Your laundry bag was supposed to be tied to the foot of the bed. You were not supposed to paste anything on the walls. The walls were a kind of brown tile. The floor was vinyl tile, also brown. The windows were tinted safety windows imbedded with diamond cross-hatching, like filamented chain link fence. All the surfaces were hard and the din was often unbelievable. To quiet us down he blew a whistle which left points of pain in my ears. He blew a whistle to wake us up in the morning. There were always thirty to forty boys in the room, ages five to twelve. They tried to assign little guys to big guys, a kind of big brother system, but it didn’t always work. Some of the kids there were obviously sick: it was commonly thought they were retarded but I know now at least a couple of them were autistic. One kid never got off his bed of his own free will. If he was stood up near his bed he stood there until he was moved. They called him the Inertia Kid. Someone always had to arrange the Inertia Kid in the position he was supposed to be in in that moment. Another boy, a swarthy little hysteric, did not speak in recognizable sentences or with emotions that had anything to do with what was going on. He had a habit of walking around the edges of the gym whenever we went there to play. Or the outdoor yard. This kid would run around the circumference of whatever enclosure we were in, and after the first few times you didn’t even notice him. He was always chattering to himself and walking around the edges of places. All the oddballs were put down at the end of the room. At the other end, near the doors, were the transient beds. Boys who came to the Shelter for only a few days or a week or two stayed there near the doors. So the sense you had of the community was of a hard core in the middle with eroded borders of nuts and temporaries. After the first month I was moved from temporary status to hardcore.