E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

“Come, children, come.” Susan — smaller, lighter, shorter in the leg — couldn’t keep up. She dangled from Ascher’s hammy hand, her shoes banging on the steps, finding purchase only to be hauled into the air again. “You’re hurting me!” she screamed. Why was he holding them so? Did he think they’d run away?

“You’re hurting her arm, Mr. Ascher,” Daniel said. “If you let us go we can get up the steps faster than you.”

“What? All right then, scoot,” Ascher said. Rubbing their wrists they clambered up, easily outgaining the huge, heavy lawyer. “Don’t fall!” he called after them. “Stay right there at the top.”

Calm now, curious, they watched the great bulk straining to reach them. Where they stood, in the mouth of the precipitous entrance to the subway, two winds converged, the hot underground draft rising to caress their faces and the cold blast of the street cutting at their backs. Dust, paper, soot, swirled along the ground. It was a cold, windy day. The brightness of the sun made their eyes squint.

Ascher climbed the last two steps with his hands pushing at his knees. “I’m not going to live long,” he said, trying to catch his breath. He pulled them out of the stream of people pouring down the stairs.

They stood against the building while Ascher took deep breaths and got his bearings. Across the street was Bryant Park and the Public Library. To the right was Sixth Avenue. “That way — we go west,” Ascher said, and he took their wrists again and they were off. They waited for the lights, crossed Sixth, and proceeded along 42nd Street toward Broadway. The newsstand man wore earmuffs. The wind blew hard. The kids walked with their faces averted, Daniel with the nubbin brim of his wool cap down on his forehead. His nose was running and he knew the wind would chafe him. It cut right through his pants. Ascher’s heavy grey overcoat moved in front of his eyes. Abruptly the hand let go of his wrist and he was thrust up against Ascher’s side, contained by the hand, sheltered from the wind. “Stay in close, that way you can walk,” the lawyer said. So it was like a strange six-legged beast walking down the windy range of Sixth Avenue, the two kids pressed into the man’s sides.

“Like the rest of our luck,” Ascher muttered into the wind. “Like the way all our luck is running.” With his face buried in the man’s coat Daniel was aware of sounds: horns, cars starting and stopping, the large yet soft sound of innumerable people walking, music coming out of a record store. And then a clop-clopping that made him pull back and look around the coat. Two cops on horses, straight backed, tall, manly on their really fine brown horses. And he felt guilty for admiring them, for he knew they were reactionaries.

The lawyer spoke. “Now you must stay close to me and do as I tell you to do. We are a little late. I can tell from here, a tremendous crowd, it’s a great tribute. You should feel proud. When you’re standing up there, keep your heads up, look proud and tall and don’t slump, stand up straight. So that everyone can see you. Vershtey? Don’t be afraid. What is it, little girl?”

“I’ve got something in my eye.”

“We have no time now, Susan. Come.”

Susan leaned back against Ascher’s grip and planted her feet. “I’ve got something in my eye,” she insisted.

“Keep your eye closed. It will come out.”

“No! It hurts,” she said.

Ascher let go her hand and started to yell. Daniel understood that everyone was nervous. He took his sister by the hand and led her into the doorway of a shoe store. Here they were protected from the wind. He took off his gloves and lifted the back of his mackinaw and dug into his pocket for a handkerchief. “Take your glasses off,” he said. “Don’t rub it. Take your hand away — that’s it. Look up.”

Her little red face was squinched up around the closed eye. “How can I see what it is if you don’t open your eye,” Daniel said.

“I can’t.”

Daniel laughed. “Come on, Susyanna — you should see what a funny face you’re making.”

“I am not!”

“Please, children, we are late. This is very important! Quickly, quickly!”

“Just a minute, Mr. Ascher,” Daniel said. “She’s only a little girl, you know.”

The poignancy of this description so affected Susan that she began to cry. Daniel put his arms around her and said he was sorry. Ascher muttered in Yiddish and lifted his arms. Then he dropped them, with a smack, against his sides. He walked away and came back.

“Come on, Susan, let me get it out and when we get home I’ll play with you. I’ll play Monopoly with you.” That was a treat because it was such a long game.

Susan opened the afflicted eye, blinked and blinked again. She discovered that whatever it was was gone.

“Gottzudanken!” Ascher said.

“Will you still play with me?” Susan wanted to know.

“Yes.” Daniel wiped away her tears, wiped her nose, and then wiped his own.

“Hurry, hurry!” Ascher said.

When they reached the corner of Broadway the wind wasn’t so bad because the street was filled with people. They were moving into a crowd. More police on horseback, in ranks of two, stood along the curb. Other policemen, on foot, were diverting the Broadway traffic east and west on 42nd Street, which is what made the traffic jam. Horns sounded and a policeman blew his whistle. In the surge of people Ascher held Susan and Daniel by the wrists and crossed with them through the spaces between the cars. Two entire blocks from 40th to 42nd on Broadway were cordoned off. People stood in the street. It was an amazing sight. The center of attention was down at 40th: a man on a platform was shouting through a microphone. Two loudspeakers on the tops of trucks beamed his voice at the people but it was hard to hear what he was saying. The crowd, which was attentive, seemed by its massiveness to muffle the sound. A man saying something quietly to someone next to him destroyed the amplified words. Only the echoes of the unintelligible voice bounced off the buildings. Some people in the crowd held placards aloft, and at moments in the speech when applause rattled like marbles spilling on the ground, these were poked upwards rhythmically.

Ascher led the two children into the edges of the crowd, keeping near the buildings where it was thinnest. They went single file, Ascher preceding Daniel and holding his wrist and Daniel pulling Susan behind him. “Pardon me,” Ascher said. “Excuse me.”

But at 41st Street the crowd became too thick for this stratagem. People were packed together right up to the building line. Daniel could not see the sidewalk except where he stood. Ascher’s response was to wade right into the crowd, cutting diagonally into the street and bulling his way through the overcoats. “Let me through, please. One side, one side.” Now it was stiflingly hot. Daniel felt the crowd as a weight that would crush him to death if it happened to close the path made by Ascher. An elbow came up and knocked his hat askew. His hands occupied, he couldn’t set it right. Finally it fell. Susan squatted to retrieve the hat and his hold on her hand was broken. Ascher was pulling him on and Susan disappeared in the closing ranks behind him.

“Wait!” he shouted, struggling in Ascher’s grasp. His wrist burned in the steel band.

“Daniel, Daniel!” his sister called.

Panicking, he shouted and dug in his heels. The grip broke. He fought his way back, pushing between the bodies that were like trees, immovable boulders. “Susan!”

Faces looked down angrily. “Shhh!” People muttered to him to keep quiet. The amplified voice filled the sky over his head: “Is this our so-called American justice? Is this an example to the world of American fair play and justice?”