E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

“No, it would make her cry.”

“Would you like to sleep with her, too?”

“No, she wets the bed.”

The psychologist wrote something down. He said, “Well, what are we going to do? Supposing we gave you more time with her during the day. Would that help?”

Daniel shrugged.

“You see, we have rules here. We have a certain way of doing things. The boys are in one section, and the girls are in another section. Those are the rules.”

“So that’s like jail,” Daniel said smiling.

“Daniel, this is the East Bronx Children’s Shelter. This is not jail! Hey, look at me when I talk to you: did I tell you you had to come here?”

“No.”

“No. Did I tell Susan she had to come here?”

“No.”

“No! Well, then how can it be jail? Your parents asked the City if you could stay here. They asked their lawyer to put your names in application. Are you saying then that your own parents would put you in jail?”

Daniel shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t know! Would a mother and father put their own children in jail?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know! Well, they wouldn’t. You know they wouldn’t.”

Daniel ran his finger along the edge of the desk. Supposing the letters he got from his mother and father were really written by the FBI imitating their handwriting. Or supposing the FBI made them say they wanted the children put in the Shelter. He didn’t really believe it, but if it happened to be true he must be on guard. Because if they did put him and Susan in here they would have a reason, and the reason would be to make them hate their mother and father and then maybe to make up lies about them.

violin spiders

Mr. Guglielmi had come around to the front of the desk and sat one leg down upon it. “Besides,” he said, “if this was a jail you wouldn’t be allowed to have any fun. And you do have fun, don’t you, Dan?”

Daniel shrugged. “Yes.”

“Are you making friends?”

Daniel shrugged. He nodded.

“Good. Is there anything bothering you that you’d like to talk to me about?”

“No.”

“OK. I think what we’ll do is let Susan eat with you. And maybe at bedtime we’ll let you sit with her a few minutes while she gets sleepy. Let’s try that, OK?”

“OK,” Daniel said.

“If we didn’t have rules, Dan,” the psychologist said, “then we couldn’t get our work done. You can see that, can’t you? There are just too many of us to get by without rules.”

(when we first walked in there and sat with our things in the office downstairs everyone on the staff checked us out. Surreptitiously, of course. Quite a stir. Celebrities. Took the edge off that soon enough, didn’t we, Susy. Made them rue the day)

TREASON the only crime defined in the Constitution. Tyranny as under the Stuart and Tudor kings characterized by the elimination of political dissent under the laws of treason. Treason statutes which were many and unending, the instrument by which the monarch eliminated his opposition and also added to his wealth. The property of the executed traitor forfeited by his heirs because of the loathsomeness of his crime. The prosecution of treason, like witchcraft, an industry. Founding Fathers extremely sensitive to the establishment of a tyranny in this country by means of ambiguous treason law. Themselves traitors under British law. Under their formulation it became possible to be guilty of treason only against the nation, not the individual ruler or party. Treason was defined as an action rather than thought or speech. “Treason against the U.S. shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid & Comfort…. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same Overt Act, or on Confession in Open Court.” This definition, by members of the constitutional convention, intended that T. could not be otherwise defined short of constitutional amendment. “The decision to impose constitutional safeguards on treason prosecutions formed part of a broad emerging American tradition of liberalism…. No American has ever been executed for treason against his country,” says Nathaniel Weyl, TREASON: THE STORY OF DISLOYALTY AND BETRAYAL IN AMERICAN HISTORY, published in the year 1950. I say IF THIS BE TREASON MAKE THE MOST OF IT!

If this bee is tristante make the mort of it

If this be the reason make a mulch of it

If this brie is in season drink some milk with it

If this bitch is teasing make her post on it

If this boy is breathing make a ghost of him

My wife came back while I was ill with the flu and she took care of me. I wanted to cry when I heard the front door open. I fought down my urge to show gratitude. My helplessness released in her the tenderest passions, as the novelists used to say. Since I was incapacitated she and her baby had nothing to fear from me. Foul-smelling and stale and unshaven, yellowishly weak, I stared at her from the bedclothes as she went about cleaning the bedroom. I was waiting for her to make one false move of solicitation, but she fed me and changed the bed.

The timing of her return relieved us of the dreary rituals of reconciliation. Forgiving me turns her on, I have no other explanation for the fact that she keeps returning. Phyllis likes to forgive me. Small premature age lines have appeared at the corners of her eyes. Her face has thinned out and her thighs have got slimmer. Suffering does fine work with the chisel. I am finding her admirable, which disturbs me.

Today, as I left the apartment for the first time in two weeks, I noticed that she was way down. There is a gesture she has with her long light hair, taking the loose strands falling past her cheek and tucking them behind her ear. This morning, while feeding the baby, she did that with such deliberation that I felt she had to concentrate to get it done. To make it all perfect, from where I stood her head was just under the poster of the Isaacsons which is pasted on the kitchen wall. Yet since she’s come back I have not worked on her. And our life has been friendly.

In our last reconciliation I did something that I thought did not take. I wish I knew how education works. I wish I knew the secret workings in the soul of education. It has nothing to do with time as we measure it. Small secret chemical switches are thrown in the dark. Tiny courses are hung through the electric passages of the tissues. Silken sequences of atoms which have no property other than self-knowledge.

What happened was we went to bed, as reconcilers do. She happened to be just past her period, which is a very hot time for Phyllis, and she was ahead of me. Not at her pitch I noted it as a self-concern, an inward attention that seemed to exclude me. Yet she called out my name. Her fingers were mindless digging into my back. She wound up tighter and tighter, making smaller and quicker movements. I did not break my rhythm, which was insolently slow. Her heart pounded against me, her breasts were wet on my chest, her breath chased my ears, and then she pursed her lips and the effort was as if she were half whistling in pain or amazement. All this was having its effect and I was losing my cool. She was shivering her way through one come after another. Each one was stronger than the last. She was biting my mouth. She was going for the big bang. At this point I did the cruel thing, I pulled back. This forced her to rise after it. I stirred the froth of her honey. She hung from my neck whimpering into my mouth. At the peak of her distraction I slowly sank it back in, and this was the stroke that took her beyond her limits of character and physical integrity.

She told me later it had never before been so good. She couldn’t move for an hour. But leaning over her sleepy smiling eyes I could not find there the education recorded, no impression of the cruel thing, the cruel thing, and that it is always the cruel thing that mixes the tears of our eyes, the breath of our lungs, the creams of our comes….