E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

A few minutes after my father’s body had been removed on a stretcher, and the floor mopped, and the organic smell of his death masked in the ammoniac scent of the cleanser, my mother was led into the chamber. She wore her grey, shapeless prison dress and terry cloth slippers. She knew that my father was dead. On her face was a carefully composed ironic smile. She calmly gazed at each of the witnesses until he turned away. Some, seeing her glance nearing them, simply would not look at her. Then my mother’s eyes lighted on the prison rabbi. It was the same man whose ministrations she had refused for the last forty-eight hours. “I will not have him here,” she said. The rabbi in his tallis and yarmulke walked toward the door. Before he was gone my mother called after him: “Let my son be bar mitzvahed today. Let our death be his bar mitzvah.” The rabbi said later he didn’t hear this remark, her voice not in this moment at its strongest.

My mother turned her back to the chair, disdaining any helping hand. She hugged the matron who had guarded her alone in the woman’s death cell block for two years. They had become dear friends. The matron wept and ran out of the chamber. My mother, still with her peculiar smile, sat down in the electric chair and observed the strapping in of herself like a passenger in a plane getting ready for the journey. When the hood went over her eyes they were open. When the switch was thrown she went into the same buzzing sputtering arc dance. The current was turned off. The doctor came over to the slumped body and listened for a heartbeat with his stethoscope. He expressed consternation. The electrocutioner came out of his cove and they conferred. The warden was highly agitated. The three reporters communicated in urgent whispers. The executioner went back behind the wall, and again received a signal, and again turned on the current. Later he said the first “dose” had not been enough to kill my mother Rochelle Isaacson.

THREE ENDINGS

1. THE HOUSE. For reasons Daniel cannot explain, a week after he’s back in New York he returns to the old neighborhood in the Bronx. It has changed. The Cross Bronx Expressway runs like a deep trench through what used to be 174th Street. The old apartment houses, rank upon rank, street after street, stand in their own soot like a ruined city filling with dirt. But people still live here. Great plastic bags of garbage are piled like sandbags against the sides of the buildings. The garbagemen are on strike. Garbage spills over the sidewalk. Empty milk cartons blow across streets. Newspapers stick to the legs. Coffee grounds drift across the schoolyard like sand across a desert. The old purple school still stands. It is not as big as I remembered. I rest my forehead against the fence and raise my arms above my head and hold the fence. Behind me, across the street, is my house. On the steps of the house, below the splintered porch, two black kids sit playing casino. A black woman opens the front door and calls to them to come inside. The night is coming on. The wind is beginning to blow over the schoolyard. I would like to turn and ask the woman if I can come in the house and look around. But the children gather up their cards and go inside and their mother shuts the door. I will do nothing. It’s their house now.

2. THE FUNERAL. It was a huge funeral. The cortege stretched for miles — buses, cars, even city taxis. Policemen directed traffic. Policemen directed the funeral traffic. Police stood at the entrance gates of the cemetery. Not everybody could be let in. Graves might be trampled. It was a long stifling day, but not without its social aspects. At the funeral chapel Jacob Ascher had introduced us to many people, including a young couple, the Lewins, who would be proposed as our parents. The weather was unseasonably hot, even for summer. Susan and I rode in the first black limousine behind the hearse. Aristocracy. We had the whole back to ourselves. But we sat close with our legs touching and we held hands as if we were sitting squeezed together between others. Faces peer in the windows.

We ride in a black Cadillac behind the hearse. It is one of those peculiar days of warmth with spring leaking through, escaping with a hiss into the winter like oil in water, like blood in milk. It is the kind of day the crocuses get fucked, exposing their petaled insides of delicate hue, yellow and white, lavender and flesh, to the spring. And it is too soon. It’s a miscalculation. Crocus, first flower, dead flower, flower of revolutionaries.

We stand at the side of the graves. An enormous crowd presses behind us. The prayers are incanted. Everyone is in black. I glance at Susan. She is perfectly composed. She is neat and trim in a sleeveless black dress. A black lace handkerchief rests on her head. She looks beautiful, and I am enormously proud of her. She is getting to be quite a young lady, with her hair parted in the middle and combed over her ears and tied at her neck in a very grown-up way. I feel her warm hand in my hand and see her lovely eye cast down at the open earth at our feet and an inexpressible love fills my throat and weakens my knees. I think if I can only love my little sister for the rest of our lives that’s all I will need.

The Lewins ride in the rear seat, Phyllis and I in jump seats at their knees. My mother wears a black hat with a veil over her eyes. Her eyes are swollen and red and her mouth is turned down in ugly grief. My father wears a dark suit and tie. He is demolished. He did not shave well and I can see patches of grey stubble that he missed under his chin and at the corner of his mouth. Phyllis’s face is pale, drawn. It is a sunny day and her weeping eyes are blue. She wears a pea jacket and dungarees.

In the cemetery we wait behind the hearse while the drivers smoke and talk on the sidewalk and the funeral director goes up to the office and deals with the cemetery people. This is a small funeral and he will have others today.

My sister is dead. She died of a failure of analysis.

Last autumn’s leaves scuttle across the plots. The plots are separated by pipe fences or planted borders. We drive down the straight narrow streets of the cemetery. It seems to me ridiculous that a cemetery should have street names and that one place rather than another is designated for a person’s burial. It is a city for the dead, in their eyes, a holy place of rest for the dead, in urban grids, with stones and markers like buildings, and upper-class neighborhoods of fashionable crypts, and cooperative apartments in the name of this lodge or that. Some stones are so old they are brown, and very close together, as in ghettos. Fashions change, even in gravestones. The newer style is to have the family name unadorned on one large stone, and individual members’ identity declared on footstones. Poems and biblical quotations seem to be out. Occasionally brief cryptic phrases in stylized Hebrew. The new stones are white and grey, and polished on their face and rough hewn on their sides.

Susan’s grave is under a tree very near my parents’ graves. I arranged everything. A green carpet covers the earth where it has been dug up. Three gravediggers move off and wait at a discreet distance as we get out of the car. They are young guys, not much older than I am. They will never lose their curiosity for the varieties of grief. Around the corner on the little graveyard street is a yellow trench-digger. Susan’s coffin rests in its grave and the funeral director looks at me. I have refused the company rabbi, and it’s now time to say the prayers and throw the shovelful of earth on Susan’s coffin. I tell him to wait a minute. I run through the cemetery and hire little old Jewish men, the kind who always come along for a fee to say the prayers the younger Jews don’t know. Little bearded men who make their livings in cemeteries — shamuses, scholars, bums, misfits, who make it begging people to say prayers for their newly dead, their recently dead, their long since dead. They are usually shabby, their heels run down. Some of them are drunkards. I run through the cemetery, hiring one after another, directing them, and by the time I get back, half a dozen stand there, ignoring each other and racing through prayers for Susan in their singsong rituals, rocking back and forth on their heels with their eyes closed, chanting and simpering their nasal prayers. It’s a bonanza. Other shamuses come running, like pigeons, when they see the crowd. I accept each blessed one. I have a roll of bills in my pocket. I am bankrolled. My mother and father go back to the car. The funeral director waits impatiently beside his shiny hearse. But I encourage the prayermakers, and when one is through I tell him again , this time for my mother and father. Isaacson. Pinchas. Rachele. Susele. For all of them. I hold my wife’s hand. And I think I am going to be able to cry.