E. Doctorow: The Book of Daniel

Dr. Alan Duberstein probed the air with his ice cream spoon. It was his belief that Susan’s breakdown was connected somehow to her extracurricular activities. He thought she might be in SDS, but he knew for sure she had been active in the Boston Resistance. Last winter, when he and Susan had agreed to terminate her therapy, he had warned her about becoming too involved in political activities. He was having a vanilla soda with peach ice cream. We were all five of us plus the baby stuffed in a Howard Johnson’s window booth. Phyllis sat next to him and I imagined her as his wife. She fed the baby ice cream from a dish. I didn’t like their baby, a fat kid with red cheeks, light hair like his mother’s, and an odor of vomit.

Incredibly, we were all sitting in the Howard Johnson’s restaurant near Exit II on the Westbound side of the Massachusetts Turnpike. Yet it was logical enough. We had come to pick up Susan’s car, left by the police in the parking lot. It was mid-afternoon; everyone was hungry and thirsty. Perhaps also we were trying to see what there was about a Howard Johnson’s that would make Susan want to die here. Perhaps we felt if we could only understand we could help her. Nevertheless, I was ill. I am very sensitive to inappropriateness. For instance, to weddings in catering halls. There are no decent settings for joy or suffering. All our environments are wrong. They embarrass our emotions. They make our emotions into the plastic tiger lilies in the window boxes of Howard Johnson’s restaurants.

“Ordinary political expression was difficult enough for her,” Duberstein said. “Dissent was traumatic. It’s understandable after all. She bit off more than she could chew.”

“She’s a willful person,” my father said quietly.

“I have great faith in her,” Duberstein said, looking under his napkin for a straw.

Every table was taken. A holiday crowd stood behind the hostess stationed by the velvet rope at the entrance to the dining room. With her menus held to her breast, she swept her gaze across the tables. The hostess was in her forties with a beehive hairdo of platinum blonde. She wore an aqua crepe dress with a cowled collar and she was looking serious.

“If you’re not finishing your sandwich,” I said to Phyllis, “pass it over here.” I was angry with her for imagining Susan’s misery in the earnest compassionate way of high school girls with day-glow flowers. I strongly suspected her of having found it thrilling to marry into a notorious family. That was something I still had to look into.

“Well, listen,” Duberstein said, “I’d be insulting your intelligence if I didn’t admit this is a pretty serious business. There’s a lot to work out. But she has tremendous resources. She’s been down before.”

“What did you do, put ketchup on this?”

“What?” Phyllis says.

“You put ketchup on a club sandwich.”

Phyllis looks at me unhappily. She is still hoping someday to be accepted by her in-laws if not by her husband. My mother, Lise, perceives this. “Why not ketchup,” she says.

“We’ll get her all settled,” Duberstein says to my father, “and then we can go to work.”

“Yuk!”

“What’s the matter, Dan,” my father says. He is sitting next to me,

“Ketchup on a club sandwich. Yuk.”

“Would you like something else? How about ordering something.”

“No thanks, Dad. I’d still have to sit here and listen to this schmuck talk about my sister.”

It is just a few volts, but enough to do the job. The thing about the Isaacson family, the thing about everyone in our family, is that we’re not nice people. The issue, however, is real. I love my foster parents, but in this emergency they have chosen Duberstein. Duberstein is their man. God knows where he came from originally, I forget the circumstances, but to me he is just one of the thousands of intruders in my life, in my sister’s life — one of the thousands of guides, commentators, counselors, sympathizers and holders of opinion.

“Daniel, I hope you are prepared to apologize,” says my mother.

“What is it about Susan and me that makes anyone feel privileged to say anything at all to us. Why do I have to sit here and listen to this creep. Who needs him?”

“I called Dr. Duberstein because I think we need him very badly. I think Susan needs him. And I don’t think you’re handling yourself very well.”

“Dad—”

“I would expect better of you.”

“Dad, can you tell me—”

“Keep your voice down, please. You speak of privilege, but I’d like to know what gives you the privilege to be a foulmouth?”

For the Lewins, civility is the essence of being human. It is what makes communication possible. The absence of civility disturbs them because it can mean anything from rudeness at a table to suicide. Or genocide. I won’t go into this now in any detail but it is bound up with Robert Lewin’s love of the law. He knows the law is vulnerable to the mentality of the people who live by it, but he is concerned to see it evolve toward perfection. He is concerned to be moral. My mother too: she is a refugee, hunted by the Nazis all across Europe as a kid. Who am I to claim privilege by my suffering? After all they’ve done, and never once holding it up to me, why am I so quick to shame them?

“He can’t even get her out of there!” I tell them. “He can’t get her out of a public asylum for wards of the state and bums they pick up off the street.”

“Another twenty-four hours in what happens to be one of the best facilities in the East is not going to hurt your sister,” Duberstein says coolly. “I had a long talk with one of the staff people who, as it happens, took his residency at Jacobi when I was there. It’s a mistake that they admitted her. But the situation is under control.”

“He makes it sound like a personal triumph,”

“Danny.” My mother takes a handkerchief out of her pocketbook. “We’re all under a strain. Please, Danny.”

Duberstein says: “Why do you resent anyone who tries to help Susan?” He looks keenly at me as befits his question.

“Screw off, Doc. Go find your golf clubs and play a round with Dwight David Eisenhower.” It is a witless, anachronistic retort that astonishes even me. I must be on the edge. Everyone is pale. Even the baby has felt the current. He’s begun to cry. I leave the table.

Daniel leaving the Howard Johnson’s dining room perceived walking ahead of him, toward the crowd of people waiting for a table, the draped aqua ass of the hostess. And a regal ass it was, well girdled, and set on a pair of still-young legs. Her golden beehive bobbed on her neck and wisps of untucked hair at its base intimated dirty times for the lucky dong who happened to be there when all that hair came down. Her arm was raised, and for a moment Daniel thought she made the peace sign with her fingers. But it was a table for two.

Daniel made his way through the hungry families standing on tiptoe. Kids swarmed in front of the candy display. Popcorn lay in the carpet. In the men’s room all the crappers but two required a coin in the slot. On the other side of this wall, Susan had opened her veins and stood over the toilet until she fainted. He tried to get the picture. The sound of fountaining urinals distracted him. He noted on the wall a dispenser which, for twenty-five cents, offered the discriminating customer the choice of a pre-moistened soap-impregnated paper hanky, or a sanitized pocket comb, or a compass from Hong Kong in the form of an automobile tire, or two plastic dog magnets, one black, one white, stuck together in the pack by their magnetized feet.

He went outside. People eating ice-cream cones drifted through the parking lot. A stout woman in a housedress walked a bulldog from the tires of one car to the tires of another. At the gas pumps cars were waiting on line. The sun was out now, late in the afternoon, and the air was close and full of fumes. The thing is, Robert and Lise Lewin do not belong in highway service stops. It is misleading to show them out of their element. Especially when they are not feeling their best.