E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

You can’t ask anyone the way because nobody gets more sympathy than a child who has lost his way. People don’t forget that. That is like leaving a trail of bread crumbs. Worse, they take you in hand, you are captured. So you walk in dumb panic, hoping to be right, looking for signs, prodding your intuition, walking as if you knew where you were going. Decisively, you cross the street and turn left.

“How much more? Are we going to be there soon?”

“Be quiet.”

“Is it soon?”

“Soon. Just be quiet.”

The small warm hand in my hand. The imprint is permanent. The small warm hand in my hand. It is given to me and not withdrawn. The small warm hand in my hand. Every few steps I hear in the traffic and movement of the city a soft hiss hiss , like a signal from a doorway, like static from a secret radio. I am ever on the alert for secret signals. But it is Susan sniffing in the privacy of my ear, measuring our progress with intakes from her runny nose. Occasionally she draws a sleeve across her face.

“What are you crying about?”

“I’m not.”

“Am I going too fast?”

“Yes.”

I check to see if anyone is following. We are off the rumbling avenue and walking down a tenement street of the East Bronx. It’s a poor neighborhood. Occasionally we pass small porch houses with asphalt shingles just like ours. No one appears to be following. I slow up but we won’t stop. Kids stare at us from their stoops and doorways. I can’t pretend to be doing anything but passing through. There rises in me a feeling for the Shelter. I think of the lunch hour, the Saturday noon frankfurters. Nostalgia. A slight smear of homesick in the chest. Is that possible? Is it possible for feelings to be that indiscriminate?

Behind us is my vision of the Inertia Kid lying on his bunk. I am sorry for my routines. They were a failure. He knew I made fun of him. He knew what I was doing. I feel terrible. I feel the sickness of someone who has sold out. Occasionally in certain lights the idiocy of his expression was momentarily erased. His face was comely. I knew he was handsome and wise. I was afraid to look at him. I adored him. If I had stayed at the Shelter I could have taken care of him and protected him from impersonations. Could Roy hit a ball, jump as high?

In the afternoon Daniel and Susan had come to the section of Bathgate Avenue between 173rd Street and Claremont Parkway that was an open market of fruit and vegetable stalls and peddlers’ pushcarts at the curbs. The sidewalks were crowded with shoppers and the merchants in their full-length white aprons over their coats cried out their prices to passersby. Pyramids of apples and dark grapes, oranges and pumpkins, rose from the stalls. Prices written on brown paper bags impaled on wooden slats. Two pounds for nineteen cents! Six for thirty-three! Fresh! Sweet! Juicy! Bushels of green peppers. Boxes of carrots in bunches, and the green topping is wrung off upon purchase. Dates poured into a bag from a metal scoop. Indian nuts. Rock candy. They stood in front of an open Appetizing store magnetized by the slabs of lox, and the pickle barrels and the nut trays and the herring in cream. Who’s next! How much, lady! The women elbowed past, their shopping bags crammed. The smell of warm fresh bread floated out of a white bakery. The butcher’s freezer door slammed shut with a great clank. And here, with sawdust on the floor, was a store just like Irving’s Fish Market, with the live fish swimming in a tank and waiting for Irving’s rolling pin to stun them just before the knife sliced off their heads. How much, lady! And along the curbs were the pushcarts of notions and buttons and thread, of a selection of ladies’ panties, of factory-second shoes and sneakers tied by the laces, of bananas, just bananas, a pushcart piled with bananas, the peddler a specialist in bananas. With all those bananas he had to move them cheaper than the next guy. How much, lady! They’re rotten, a lady tells her friend. And everywhere were the cries of life and commerce, and the smells of the oranges and warm bread and fish and cheap new shoes. Cars inched through the narrow street. Mothers and children shouted back and forth from the street to the fire escapes. With Susan in tow Daniel slowly drifted in the eddying currents of shoppers. Loaded shopping bags swung into him. Old men pushed him out of the way. It was a dangerous passage but his heart was lifted because he had recognized Bathgate Avenue and knew it. Bathgate was spoken of with approval by his mother and father, who regretted only that it was too far to go to shop every day. But the food was best there, and the prices cheapest, and on special occasions, like with Mindish driving them in his old Chrysler, the Isaacsons would stock up from the rich markets of Bathgate Avenue. Shopping on Bathgate was a skill. One took satisfaction from one’s judgments and one’s purchases. Daniel also knew that when he came to Claremont Avenue he would be able to see the hills of Claremont Park, and that by climbing up the steps from Webster Avenue into Claremont Park he would inevitably come to Weeks Avenue not two blocks from his home.

“We’ll be there soon, Susan.”

He knew she was hungry. He considered stealing something; he had already seen two different kids filching fruit, but he was afraid. He didn’t mind getting shoved around in the street because he felt virtually invisible. Who could tell that he and Susan didn’t belong to someone walking right in front of them or right behind them? But if he stole something and was caught he would no longer be invisible. “We’ll be home soon,” he said over his shoulder.

And then tell of that last leg of the journey, the most frightening and dangerous. Claremont Avenue was a wide, dangerous street of traffic. Then you had to cross Webster, a confusing, doubly wide street of tracks and buses and cars going two ways, and lights that didn’t seem to allow the opportunity to cross. It didn’t seem like a street that was meant to be crossed. Also with the steep walls of the park on the other side this was an area open under the sky. One’s head and shoulders were vulnerable in the open spaces of the city. Crossing Webster and climbing the steep stone flights to the park, I became sensitive to the extreme danger of what I was doing. We were becoming exhausted. Also, now that we were leaving the depths of the East Bronx for the heights of Claremont, I remembered the Brookies, a gang of East Bronx terrorists who came up off Brook Avenue like a wind and raided the softer, barely better-off neighborhoods around this park and beat up the little kids and cut them and took their money. The closer we got to our neighborhood the more frightened we became. Susan began to cry. The tears flowed, the snot flowed. She wanted to sit down on a bench and rest. She wanted to pull up her socks which had disappeared into her shoes. Her shoes were blistering the backs of her heels.

The park was empty. A bitter wind was blowing through the bare trees, and piles of leaves whirled around our feet and stuck to our knees. Dirt stung my eyes. We turned our backs to the wind, and with our hands to our eyes, whirled and turned and spun our way toward home.

Here are the names of some traitors. Benedict Arnold, of course, along with his wife Peggy; General Charles Lee, a trusted aide of Washington’s; Burr, Burr’s daughter and son-in-law, the double traitor Wilkerson. The names also of Federalists too prominent to mention who secretly gave the British aid and comfort and entered negotiations with them that looked to a Federalist coup after a British victory. Robert E. Lee fits the definition, and also the Mormons who mounted war against the U.S. Govt. Examples abound. But historians of early America fail to mention the archetype traitor, the master subversive Poe, who wore a hole into the parchment and let the darkness pour through. This is how he did it: First he spilled a few drops of whiskey just below the Preamble. To this he added the blood of his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia, whom he had married and who hemorrhaged from the throat. He stirred these fluids in a small, elliptically stressed circle with the extracted tooth of the dead Ligeia. Then added some raven droppings. A small powerful odor arose from the Constitution; there was a wisp of smoke which exploded and quickly turned mustard yellow in color. When Poe blew this away through the resulting aperture in the parchment the darkness of the depths rose, and rises still from that small hole all these years incessantly pouring its dark hellish gases like soot, like smog, like the poisonous effulgence of combustion engines over Thrift and Virtue and Reason and Natural Law and the Rights of Man. It’s Poe, not those other guys. He and he alone. It’s Poe who ruined us, that scream from the smiling face of America.