E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

“Linda, honey, calm yourself,” Dale said.

But she was calmer than he was. The way an actor is calm as the audience takes his emotion to heart. For one moment I experienced the truth of the situation as an equitability of evil. This is what happens to us, to the children of trials; our hearts run to cunning, our minds are sharp as claws. Such shrewdness has to be burned into the eye’s soul, it is only formed in fire. There is no way in the world either of us would not be willing to use our sad lives; no betrayal impossible of our pain; no use too cheap of our patrimony. If Susan had only had a small portion! But nothing Susan did ever lacked innocence: no matter how loud, how demanding, how foolish, how self-destructive, nothing Susan did lacked innocence. This bitch was another matter. I imagined her in bed. There was no question in my mind that she wouldn’t refuse. That’s why she had called her fiancé—not to protect herself from my violence, but to keep intact her planned recovery from the life of Linda Mindish. She could take it on back very quickly. With just a small push. It would not be uninteresting, it would not be without blood, an incest of blood and death and jism and egg more corrupt than any I could have with my real sister. There was enough hard corruption in Linda Mindish and me, flawless forged criminals of perception, to exhaust the fires of the sun.

And then that moment passed and I saw her as locked into her family truths as we were locked in ours. Were these her formulations, or her mother Sadie’s? Hadn’t Sadie and her husband built them over the years of visiting hours? Wouldn’t they do that? I saw myself as having provided Linda the opportunity to say out loud the righteous complaint that this family had had in rehearsal for fifteen years.

“Well, the awful Isaacsons are dead, Linda. All you have to worry about is me. And what can I do? Expose you to your friends and neighbors in Orange County, California? But you moved here for a reason. It was a shrewd place to come. If your cover is blown there’s always room for an ex-Communist in Orange County. Right? After all, your old man helped bust a notorious spy ring. He was not without his part in the execution of the infamous Isaacsons, was he?”

Linda was looking grim. The lawyer said, “His testimony is a matter of record.”

“Right, it surely is. But there are still questions to be answered.” Daniel thought a moment. “For instance, have you ever discussed with him why he confessed? You’re a lawyer, Dale. Don’t you have a professional interest? It’s one of the great cases.”

“That’s a naïve question.”

“Why — because he was caught? And he purged himself and confessed and told the truth? To make that penance, right? Is that why he did it — because he was caught and had no choice? Or did he do it to save himself, to save his own life. My parents thought so — they thought he implicated them to save himself. They thought he was a spy. Or they pretended to. It’s all very puzzling.”

“What are you talking about,” said Linda.

“Shit, I don’t know. I wanted to tell your father I think he was innocent. I wanted to lay that on him,”

They looked at each other briefly as if an idea they had considered before my arrival — that I was a madman — seemed now brimming with prescience. Linda crossed her legs, adjusted her skirt. She picked a cigarette out of the box on the end table and held it before her in that stiff-fingered way of lady smokers, as Dale got out his lighter.

“You make me very sad.”

“Yeah, well, it’s hard to get it down, I know. I had trouble myself. But start with the idea that there was a spy ring and the whole thing was just as he testified in court. You’ve got to ask yourself why. There was no evidence except his confession. If he had not confessed there would have been no case against anyone, including himself. My father, I mean my foster father, thinks that he was hassled by the FBI. He thinks Selig just couldn’t hold up under the questioning. They had him for a long time. They had something on him — maybe citizenship. That he’s not a, urn, sophisticated man and didn’t know what could and couldn’t be done. But I disagree with that.”

“You do.”

“Yes. It’s possible he realized every value in the situation beautifully. My father’s interpretation lacks a knowledge of the old Left. The life of embattled Communist Party members in those days. That’s what’s missing from his analysis. There was another couple everybody in the Bronx membership knew about who had dropped out of Party life some years before. Did you ever hear of them? It was commonly rumored in the ranks, because none of our families or their friends were anything more than rank and file, that the other couple went underground, into espionage work. They took on a certain heroic mystery, that other couple. Do you know their name? Did your father every mention them to you? Has he ever said anything about this?”

“No, Danny.”

“Well, this other couple had two children. They were about the same age as my parents. A lot of mythology grew up about them. You didn’t talk about them without lowering your voice. Who knows how many children they had? Or what their age was? But they were supposed to have been fairly young, with kids, and they were said to live just a few blocks away, up on the Concourse.”

Think about it a while. Look at me.

“Is that all?” the lawyer says.

“Well, that’s the gist of it.”

He shook his head and smiled sadly. “It is highly speculative, to say the least.”

“That’s right. That’s why I want to talk to Selig.”

“Stop calling my father Selig,” Linda said.

“I have his fillings still in my mouth,” Daniel said with his palms in the air.

“Let me see if I understand this.”

“Oh Dale, it’s insane.”

“No, honey, just a minute. Now you’re saying that Dr. Mindish lied about your parents in deference to another couple who looked like them?”

“I don’t know if they looked like them. To protect another couple everyone thought was working under cover. To keep the FBI away from people of real value. They were closing in. To divert them. To get the heat off.”

“And that Dr. Mindish, who was innocent, made this story up about himself and your parents?”

“Well, actually Selig doesn’t have to be innocent for the theory to work. He might have been involved marginally. He might have been told to do it. But all right, let’s say innocent.”

“And that this mythical couple, these other people, were the ones who actually stole the secrets?”

“Well, not necessarily, because it’s never been proven that any secrets were stolen. It isn’t what really happened or was going to happen. It was what Selig and or some of the others thought had happened or was going to happen. It was as much fantasy as what the FBI thought had happened.”

“I see. And have you come up with any facts, or any information in support of this?”

“It’s just a theory, man,” Daniel said with a smile. “It’s my theory of the other couple.”

THE THEORY OF THE OTHER COUPLE

Shannon, in THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM, shows us the immense contribution made by the American Communist Party to its own destruction within a few years after the war. They had all the haughty, shrewd instincts of a successful suicide. It is no wonder in this club of ideologues of the working class, self-designed martyrs, Stalinist tuning forks, sentimentalists, visionaries, misfits, hysterics, fantasists, and dreamers of justice — no wonder that a myth would spring out of their awe for someone truly potent. It is ironic that such a myth would arise without planning or intent from their laboriously induced collective mythic self. But they were helpless before it. We have our daredevils too. We have our cat burglars and laughing caballeros. Our George Rafts flipping coins. Our masked riders of the plains. We have them.