E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

“Your parents should have been so kind.” She is startled by her own remark. She looks as if about to apologize, but she pulls herself together. “They were not kind people — to any of us. What do you want papers for?”

“I don’t know. I guess I think they belong to me.”

“I see. I’m sorry there is nothing I have to give you. Talk to Robert.”

I got up to go.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “I have no love for the memory of your parents. They were Communists and they destroyed everything they touched.”

“You don’t think they were innocent?”

“They were not innocent of permitting themselves to be used. And of using other people in their fanaticism. Innocent. The case ruined Jacob’s.health.”

She rose from the sofa, “They were very difficult to deal with. They were very stubborn. He would come home furious, he would want to do something and they wouldn’t let him. He would want to do something for their sake and they wouldn’t let him,”

“Like what?”

“He wanted to call certain people as witnesses and they wouldn’t let him. All sorts of things like that.”

“Who?”

She walks with care — she is showing me to the door. “What?”

“Who did he want to call for a witness?”

“Who knows who? Jacob was a brilliant lawyer. And today when people write about the case or talk about it, it is Jacob they criticize. He should have done this, he shouldn’t have done that. Do they know what he had to put up with?”

Her hand is on the doorknob. The bones growing around the rings, the pain in the fingers

Interviewed by Daniel

for the Foundation.

ROBERT LEWIN

67 Winthrop Road, Brookline

Daniel pulls up to the house. They are used now to his abrupt appearances. His inconsiderate departures. They hear the rage in the way he uses his brakes. In the patches he leaves on Brookline hills.

The chilly winds have dried the streets. The corner light comes on.

Now they are into specialists. The great faith. We had a specialist in to look at her. They’re doing some tests. He wants to consult with another specialist. With enough specialists man can be made immortal. What do all the specialists do here on Saturday night? They come for the big look at Susan.

“Where have you been,” Lise says. “Why don’t we hear from you?”

They have turned strange. They are visibly shrunken, both of them. Their use of specialists is turning them into old Jewish people. What has happened to the fighting liberal the students love? My father lights his pipe with a slight tremor in his hands. My mother has turned grey overnight. I have the sudden intuition that their lives have become too sorrowful for sex. “When did you last eat a decent meal,” Lise says.

Upstairs I clean up. I pass the back bedroom where I used to live. When my sister was twelve or thirteen she used to work her tentative saucy sex on me, and coquette and comb her hair for hours, and droop her lower lip and put black stuff on her dark eyes and accidentally graze her small breasts across my arm. And act cool. It was a high old time and it made me laugh. And she knew the humor of it: one day in this doorway she stopped when she saw me looking, raised her arms, and saluted me with a flick of her ass.

It is furnished now as a guest room, it’s a neat empty guest room. From the window you can see the lights of Boston eight or ten miles to the east. What am I feeling, what awful need? In the late afternoon the sun burned on the windows of downtown Boston as if someone was flashing signals with a mirror. This was my window. I pretended the signals were for me. I didn’t have to decode them because it was enough that they were being sent. What gave me immense satisfaction was the thought that anyone who tried to intercept the signals, and decipher them, would fail. No matter who, the FBI or the Nazis, nobody not standing right here in this window could read the signals exactly as they were sent or understand them as they were meant to be understood.

Daniel tried to leave the window. He stared at the evening skyline, Boston’s lights glowing into the heavy atmosphere like the light of a furnace. It is a feeling with no bottom, no root, of no locus. It pulses out of him like a radio wave, out of all parts of him at once, and it needs. It disseminates, it is diffuse; and one moment he thinks it is something his heart wants the fullness of, and another that his arms want to hold, and for another moment it is something his cock wants to get into. But if he could accommodate any part of his body the feeling wouldn’t leave, it would still be there in all parts of him at once, each cell of his body radiating its passionate need.

But the worst of it is that he hadn’t remembered what an ancient friend of a feeling it was.

“I’ve got to talk to you.”

My father sighs. We have talked before. He sits at the dining room table, a stack of blue exam books before him. His New Yorkers lie about still in their mailing wrappers.

“Do you know of anything my parents did to hurt the case Ascher was putting together?”

“What do you mean?”

“Testimony, evidence, anything they wouldn’t let him use?”

“Who have you been talking to now,” my mother says.

“What difference does it make?”

“Fanny Ascher?”

“Yes.”

Lise snorts. “Of course. I made a kartoifel. Would you rather have pot roast or steak?”

“I don’t care. I’m not hungry.”

“Daniel, I’m making supper anyway.”

“Anything, it doesn’t matter.”

“It never matters—”

“Jesus,” Daniel shouts, “anygoddamn thing!”

“But when you sit down it matters!”

“Shhh, calm down, everyone,” my father says. “We’ll have the pot roast. All right with you, Dan?”

“Yeah, all right.”

“Thank you,” Lise says and frosts through the door.

My father clears his throat. “Let’s go in the living room. The thing is, you see, Fanny Ascher’s feelings are well known. And it’s understandable. She’s very bitter about Jake’s death.”

Daniel sits down. He grows very still. “Just tell me if you know anything about it.”

“Jake never said anything to me along those lines. On the other hand I wasn’t up there with him in the day-to-day handling of the case. That was my first teaching job at Virginia. I only got involved in the later appeals. I helped him a little bit. But lots of lawyers were involved by then. It was all very public by then.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just what I said. I don’t know any more than you do. Have you looked through everything in the file?”

Not a useful reply. They are stung and swollen about the heart. They have not forgiven me for Jack Fein’s piece in the Times. The threat I made on Duberstein’s life is fresh in their minds. A pattern of being denied their rights in Susan, their rights in me. They were not consulted about the changes in my appearance: the beard, the climbing downward of my hair, the newest recklessness of attitude which colors the face, sinks the eyes. A suspicion of having lived their lives to no effect.

The house itself seems to have shrunken, and lost its gleam. The furniture looks out of date and shabby. The walls are yellowed. There is a smell in the house of something less than assured life. A sense in the way my father sits with his arms on the armchair that he has passed the line across his life at which whatever was success is now understood to be failure.

“Dad, I can recite that file by heart.”

“Do you ever drink?”

“What?”

“I’m going to have a drink before dinner. Would you like some scotch?”