E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

“Linda?”

“What?”

“I happened to be in the neighborhood. I mean no harm. Honestly. I’ve known where you people were for a long time. I’m seeing friends at, um, UCI and I decided to call you. Is that so terrible?”

“We read about you in the paper. I know what you’re trying to do. If you think I’m afraid of you, you’re wrong.”

“I don’t think that. That story exaggerated, the guy misunderstood the purpose of the Foundation.”

“We have friends out here. We have loyal friends who know our real name. We don’t have anything to hide. So don’t think you can scare me.”

“I just want to talk to your father.”

“Well, he doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“He used to like me.”

“I’m going to hang up now. If you bother us anymore I’ll call the police.”

“Linda, be civilized. What’s wrong with my talking to him?”

“He’s an old man and he’s sick. He wants to be left in peace. Do you understand?”

“Well, of course. I’d like to come by and pay my respects. I’ll only stay a few minutes.”

“You must be crazy.”

“I was a kid when it happened, Linda. You think I can carry a grudge all my life? That’s a waste. I’ve got my own thing.”

“Oh God, that figures, a hippie. I believe that.”

“We were all hurt. OK? It was terrible. But it happened to all of us. None of us can forget it, but we were all very close. I feel the need to see you people. Is that so very hard to understand?”

She has begun to cry. “How did you find out where we lived?”

“I don’t know. Some guy told me a long time ago.”

“Who?”

“I don’t even remember who. What difference does it make? I haven’t told anyone, not even my sister. I didn’t even ask him, he just told me. I was sorry at the time. But Linda, things change. What seems clear isn’t so clear after a while. What seemed a matter of right and wrong.”

“I see.” Silence on the line. She sniffs. “You think you’re privileged to forgive my father, is that what you’re saying?”

“Not exactly.”

“That’s arrogance, all right. That’s the arrogance of the Isaacsons. So high and mighty—”

“Well look, it’s not that way and I don’t think the phone is the place to talk about it.”

“How dare you call us! How dare you!”

This time I was silent. Let her think I thought I’d blown it. She pinches her nostrils with a Kleenex. She swallows. She listens at the other end. She waits.

“Of course there are resentments, different viewpoints. How can I deny that? I don’t even know why I called you. I guess I hadn’t considered that it might be a shock to you to hear from me. I’m sorry. Maybe I should have thought twice. But I’m out here and it suddenly seemed to me the thing to do. I wanted to see your father, that’s all. How is he?”

“How is he? Fine. As well as can be expected.”

“Good, good. And your mother?”

“Fine.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Is there some way we could make an appointment? I’ll only be out here through tomorrow.”

“I don’t know.”

“I have to go back east. I came out on a job interview but I don’t think they want me.”

“You teach?”

“Yeah. I just got my Ph.D.”

“I see. Congratulations.”

“Well, it was a struggle.”

I laughed with a wry note of self-deprecation. I let the images settle. Jack P. Fein really delivered. “Don’t mess me up,” he said when I told him thanks. Then he broke the connection.

In 1949, the year the Russians got the bomb, C. G. Jung spun three coins and asked the I Ching , a book of ancient Chinese prophecy, what it thought its reception would be in the United States. The I Ching was just about to be published in the United States and nobody here besides Jung and a few Sinologists knew much about it. The I Ching answered that it thought it would make its way very nicely.

I’d concluded the phone conversation with a sense of having triggered in Linda Mindish the beginnings of joy. I would describe it this way: You live for many years, certainly for as long as you can remember, in a menacing state of unfinished business. The phone rings. You realize your intimacy with what you fear. Or this way: Suppose the person who has been fucked is calling on you to ask no more than to be fucked again, A new life proposes itself. You are aroused to that purring eroticism that comes when you understand you’re going to get away with something after all.

The house was a small pink stucco model on a palmy side street of cottage-cute houses. It was a half-block off the Pacific Coast Highway, which is a kind of Boston Post Road of the west, a thoroughfare at this point in its journey of gas stations, real estate offices, portrait photographers’ studios, supermarkets, taco drive-ins and ivory-white mortuaries. I rang the bell. The novel as private I.

Linda greets me with a thin smile of distaste. She wears a blouse with ruffled sleeves and a high ruffled neck. Her skirt stops just above the knees. She’s a thin girl with pale hair cut very short and feathered up, the kind of fair skin that blotches with emotion, her father’s grey eyes set too close, a big nose, a long face. Flat-chested but with surprisingly good legs. Not as tall as I thought she’d be. On the other hand she’s more mature. More grown-up than she sounded on the phone.

I am led into a small living room, everything neat as a pin, modest and well cared for, the Sears American Maple series with selected bric-a-brac from other shores. A room that has never seen the likes of me. A man in a dark suit and tie stands up from the couch. His hair is cut like a brush and flat on top. We are introduced, and shake hands. He hands me his card. His name is Dale something and he’s a lawyer.

The thing is people don’t experience revelation. Linda had had too many years to adjust and conform her life to the demands of her father’s career. He’d been let out of prison in 1959. They had taken him to Orange County. The mother, Sadie, was an ignorant woman. Linda, at eighteen, had picked out the place, chosen the new family name, talked to the lawyers. She had worked, gone to school, gotten a degree in dentistry, and now had her own practice in a shopping center in Newport Beach. I learned this from Jack Fein. She supported the old people. She ruled the roost. It is not something you give up easily.

“Linda did the right thing,” the lawyer tells me. “You can’t expect people to see you under circumstances like this just because you call them on the phone. She had no way of even telling if you were who you said you were.”

“No, it’s him,” she says. “It’s Danny Isaacson.”

“So your father isn’t here,” Daniel said.

“That’s right.”

“Does he know I called?”

“Let me ask the questions,” the lawyer said. “What do you want? Why are you here?”

Daniel sighed. “Does he?”

“I decided not to tell him until I made up my mind if he should see you or not. So if you think for one moment that he’s afraid of you, you’re wrong.”

“I don’t want anyone to be afraid of me,” Daniel said. He seemed offended. He sat down on a tweed armchair, leaned back, and stuck his legs out and crossed them at the ankles. He massaged his forehead. I looked at Linda Mindish and saw the premature middle age at the corners of her mouth and under her eyes. She is five years older than I am. She is ten years older than Susan. She has worked hard. She looks at me and waits. In her eyes perhaps the recollection of our strange relationship of rib-poking, pushing, touching — she, her menses attained, and an eight-year-old boy. Always trying to break little Daniel’s hand, twist his fingers, dig nails in his arm. Why? As Selig her father precedes her into the Isaacson house without knocking and sees what’s in the icebox. As he laughs and makes a joke in his Polish accent. As he patronizes the child Paul. As he covets in his low-grade chronic coveting Paul’s wife. How did my thing with Linda begin? Imposed on her face in this moment is the thirteen-year-old girl with the terrible misfortune to look like her father. Drop dead. That was a favorite expression of Linda’s. Daniel, will you do me a favor? What? Drop dead. Followed by a fake smile, a mirthless flash of teeth, turned on and off, to illuminate the second stage of my wisdom — I was entitled to nothing but deeper and deeper levels of her alienation. She had gotten that line from some play or movie very big in the Bronx at the time. Do me a favor: drop dead. She exercised on me, bringing from what jungles of girl society in the upper grades I could only imagine, every shitty verbal abuse of the day.