E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

“Can’t take ’em,” the man said.

“The things of children!”

“Sorry, Counselor.”

Ascher argued vehemently, and then suddenly stopped and pretended to us that it meant nothing. “It’s all right,” he confided to us, “I’ll speak to someone.”

We went to the Death House, a place that lacked the hum of the rest of the prison city. Elsewhere you could hear voices, or the rumble of machinery under your feet. Here, it was absolutely still. We were in a room bare of everything except a wooden table and some chairs. The bottom half of the walls were painted brown. The top half of the walls were painted yellow. No one was in the room. Everything was quiet.

“They have to bring them now,” Ascher said in a lowered voice. “First your mother, then afterwards your father,”

We waited and no one came. We stood in our coats and waited. I went to the window and looked out between the bars. We were high up. I could see the Hudson River. Ascher sat down at the end of the table, pushed his homburg back on his head, put his hands on his knees, and sighed. I heard the door open. I turned but it was a guard. He stepped inside the door, closed it softly, and stood against the wall with his arms folded. I went over to him and raised my hands.

“What are you doing, Daniel?”

“He has to frisk me,” I explained without lowering my hands.

“’At’s all right, kid,” the guard said. He cleared his throat. He had terrible acne, great red eruptions all over his face.

“No, go ahead, search me, I might have a gun.”

The guard looked at Ascher. He cleared his throat again.

“’At’s OK, kid, I’m satisfied you don’t have a gun,” he said.

“How do you know if you don’t search me.”

“Me too,” Susan said.

“All right, children,” Ascher said. “They haven’t seen their parents in over a year,” he explained to the guard.

“Yeah, well they’re here,” the guard said.

“Search me,” Daniel insisted, his voice louder now.

“OK, kid, I said it was OK,” the guard said. He acted as if he was afraid I’d wake someone.

“SEARCH ME!” I screamed. I could feel my face turning red.

The guard looked at Ascher, who had stood and walked up behind me. Ascher must have nodded, because he quickly leaned over and patted the pockets of my mackinaw.

“Now her.”

He lightly touched the hem of Susan’s coat, and then stood up straight against the wall and folded his arms and ignored us.

Still nobody came. Susan began to walk around the edges of the room, measuring each wall with her footsteps. When she came to the guard she merely went around him as if he were part of the wall. I took up my vigil at the window. I wondered why they built this prison within sight of the river, since it would only want to make people escape. If I had long enough time here I’d find a way to get or make a rope long enough and to saw the bars so that no one would know, and to climb the fence. I’d learn all these things with enough time. I would let myself down the wall and climb the barbed-wire fence and run down to the river. Once I reached the river they’d never catch me. I could hear my own breathing as I ran. I could feel the cold water rising around me as I waded into the river, and then warming as I set out downriver with powerful strokes made more powerful by the current. The chill of late afternoon was touching the hills. The sky was growing imperceptibly darker. I would swim to New York. The river had turned black. The scene through this barred window was absolutely still. Nothing moved. It was frozen in the absolute stillness of the dirt-crusted window.

For some time I had been observed by my mother who had quietly come into the room. She had been as noiseless as the Death House stones. She did not speak but watched Susan in her walk and me in my revery. I have the letters between them — how for a week they wrote back and forth in anticipation of the visit and constructed the proper way of presenting themselves. They would be calm, composed, cheerful, matter-of-fact. They would answer our questions honestly and with no alarm. They would teach us, by example, how one lived in the Death House.

What happened was that Susan ran over to me and took my hand. Then I saw her too. We stood near the window and looked at our mother.

She was smaller. She had on a grey sack dress and house slippers. Her hair looked shorter. She was thin, and she was very pale, almost waxen. She stared at us with an expression on her face either of joy or terrible pain, I don’t know which, but of such intensity that I couldn’t meet her gaze. My eyes squeezed shut and when I could open them again I saw that she had pressed her fingers to her temples and applied such pressure that the corners of her eyes had slanted.

Susan was crushing my fingers.

“Look at you two,” my mother said. “You’re so big I don’t recognize you.”

“We sent you pictures,” I said.

“I know, I know. And I love those pictures. I have them taped to the wall where I can see them all the time, even when I’m going to sleep.”

“In your cell?”

“Yes.”

“Can we go there?”

She glanced at the guard who stood there as if he saw and heard nothing. She smiled. “I’m afraid they wouldn’t allow it,” she said. But the feeling I had was that she ruled this place, and that the guards were like servants who took care of her.

“Aren’t you going to give me a hug?” my mother said.

Susan and I looked at each other, and shuffling across the room, we suffered ourselves to stand before her as she kneeled and hugged each of us in turn. We were as stiff as boards. She did not feel in a hug the way my mother used to feel. She didn’t smell the same.

“You’re so big. You’re beautiful. You’re my beautiful children.” She had red lipstick on that made her face horribly pale. Her eyes were sunken, burning very brightly from pits deep in her face.

“When are they going to kill you?” Susan said.

“Oh, they’re not going to do that. It’s just their way of talking. I’m sure Uncle Jake told you about appeals, about other judges who have to reexamine the evidence. It all takes time, you see. We’re in no danger of that right now.”

“But what if they kill you anyway?” Susan said. “How will they do it?”

“Well, darling, what they do is called electrocution, and it’s very painless. It’s very fast and it doesn’t hurt. But let’s not talk about that. Aren’t you warm? Take your coats off, let me look at you. You’re very nicely dressed. How lovely you look. Here, I have something for you.”

From her pockets she took two bars of candy, a Milky Way for each of us.

We sat at the table and ate the Milky Ways while she sat on a chair between us, touching our heads, our legs, our shoulders. “Look how broad-shouldered you’re getting,” she said to me. She seemed quite happy now.

I tried to think of things to tell her, things to make her feel good. I said I liked school. I said I enjoyed math. I said I had lots of friends. These were the lies of my letters, and to my disappointment she seemed to believe all of them. It is the same way you lie to very sick or old people to make them feel good, and let them believe that their pain has at least brought some order to the world. But it is a measure of the unreclaimable distance from you that they believe what you say.

“Where is my daddy,” Susan wants to know.

“Well, he’ll be here soon. First I get a visit with you, then he gets a visit with you.”

“Why not together?”

“I don’t know. It’s one of ther rules.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, my sweet girl. Look how long your hair has gotten. It’s so pretty.”