E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

But they stuck to it, didn’t they, Daniel? When the call came they answered. They offered up those genitals, didn’t they, Dandan? Yes, they did. There were moments when I thought he would crack, I had my doubts about him. But I knew she would take it finally, to the last volt, in absolute selfishness, in unbelievably rigid fury. But with Paul you couldn’t help feeling that the final connection was impossible for him to make between what he believed and how the world reacted. He couldn’t quite make that violent connection. Rochelle was the realist. Her politics was the politics of want, the things she never got, the chances she never had. If my mother had been anything but poor, I don’t think she would have been a Red. I can’t say that about him. He had that analytic cool; he claimed to believe in the insignificance of personal experience within the pattern of history. He even wrote that when he was in jail. The electric chair as methodology of capitalist economics. But he didn’t fool me. He was scared. He was without real resources of character, like most intellectuals. He was a brash, untested young man who walked out of CCNY into the nineteen forties, and found no one following him. No one followed my papa where he went. He was a selfish man. Or maybe no, merely so physically rude that he appeared selfish. Whatever he did had such personal force that it seemed offensive. Like sticking his tongue out to examine it in the mirror. Like shaving in front of me, talking all the while, while my eyes followed his razor through the thin spread of brushless cream. And when he was through, his jaw was as blue as before. That was offensive. That was selfishness of a profound sort. He didn’t keep his razor clean. He left blotches of gloppy shaving cream in the sink. He left the shower faucet dripping. He left towels wadded up. You knew he’d been there. He had a way of being conspicuous. Nothing he did was obscure — how beautiful that is to contemplate. Even his breathing was noisy. Bending over those radios. You could hear the concentration of the job in his release of breath, as if assuring himself that he was working hard and that something considerable was at stake. I would stand at his worktable and listen to him breathe, the twist of a screw or the soldering of a wire allowing him to reward himself with another exhalation. It was just the way he existed in the space he occupied. Right out to the edges. He didn’t dig me for a long time. He found it odd that he was my father. Why would I think that if it wasn’t so? Smoking one of those cigars that didn’t go with his face, he studied his son like a psychologist through a pane of glass. He didn’t understand what I meant when I flirted with him like a woman, as all little boys flirt with their fathers, or my angers, or what I wanted when I pleased him. With his long legs crossed at the knees and his large rude eyes magnified by his glasses. Like Susan’s eyes. And his skinniness, and the same face I have with the big lips and big teeth, and round bulb Russian nose. And the sleeves of his blue work shirt rolled up to the elbows — to just below the elbows. I remember his thin arms, with then jet-black hair, and the sinews moving under the skin. The hair grew right down over the backs of his hands to his knuckles. He was skinnier than I am. His hair was like wire.

But this describes just a moment’s oversensitive perception by the little criminal of perception. He was warm and affectionate. What I remember is the lectures. He wanted me to grow up right. He wrestled society for my soul. He worked on me to counteract the bad influences of my culture. That was our relationship — his teaching me how to be a psychic alien. That was part of the training. He had to exorcize the influences, the bad spirits. Did I ever wonder why my radio programs had commercials? He’d find me reading the back of the cereal box at breakfast, and break the ad down and show what it appealed to, how it was intended to make me believe something that wasn’t — that eating the cereal would make me an athlete. There were foods one didn’t eat, like bananas, because they were the fruit of some notorious exploitation. There were companies whose products we boycotted because of their politics or labor history. Like National Biscuit Company cookies. He didn’t like National Biscuit Company. He didn’t like Standard Oil. He didn’t like General Motors — not that we were ever in a position to buy a car. He didn’t like General Motors because they were owned by Du Pont, and Du Pont had had cartel agreements with I. G. Farben of Nazi Germany.

My mother was impatient with all of this. She was a prag-matist. She probably thought he wasted too much of himself, and me, on what should be accepted as a matter of course. It was nonsense to distinguish one capitalist perfidy from another. She put them all down and that was the end of it. But my father dwelled because he couldn’t help it in the abuses of justice and truth which offended his natural innocence. He couldn’t get them out of his mind. He took a peculiar kind of bitter joy from them. He gave me pamphlets with titles like Who Owns America or Rulers of the American Press. When I could barely read. He told me things I could never find in my American History about Andrew Carnegie’s Coal and Iron police, and Jay Gould’s outrages, and John D. Rockefeller. He told me about using imported Chinese labor like cattle to build the West, and of breeding Negroes and working them to death in the South. Of their torture. Of John Brown and Nat Turner. Of Thomas Paine, whose atheism made him an embarrassment to the leaders of the American Revolution. I heard about the framing of Tom Mooney and the execution of Joe Hill, and all the maimed and dead labor heroes of the early labor movement. The incredibly brutal fate of anyone who tried to help the worker. He described to me the working conditions and wages of the steel-workers, and coal miners, in the days before the unions — how men would be crippled for life or buried alive because the owners were so busy draining every last penny from their work that they wouldn’t even put the most primitive safety measures into effect. He told me about Henry Ford and Harry Bennett’s goons and the sit-down strikes, and the Depression which came like a blight over capitalist America at the very same time Socialist Russia was feeding every one of her citizens and providing each of them a fair share of the country’s wealth. He told me about Sacco and Vanzetti. About the Scottsboro boys. He ran up and down history like a pianist playing his scales. Reading to me the facts and figures of economic exploitation, of slavery in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Putting together all the historic injustices and showing me the pattern and how everything that had happened was inevitable according to the Marxian analysis. Putting it all together. Everything was accounted for: even my comic books which he studied with me, teaching me to recognize and isolate the insidious stereotypes of yellow villains, Semitic villains, Russian villains. Even the function of public games like baseball. What its real purpose was. The economic class of baseball fans. Why they needed baseball. What would happen to the game if people had enough money, enough freedom. I listened because that was the price I paid for his attention. “And it’s still going on, Danny,” a famous remark. “In today’s newspaper it’s still going on. Right outside the door of this house it’s going on. In this house.” He said Williams, the janitor in the cellar, was a man destroyed by American Society because of his skin and never allowed to develop according to his inner worth. “The battle is not finished, the struggle of the working class is still going on. Never forget that, Danny.” And it seemed to me then that I was marked. Because they had a lot more power than we had. And it seemed to be even in the clouds which blew up through the sky over the schoolyard, that power of theirs to destroy and put down and take vengeance on the ideas in my head, on the dangerous information put in my head by my reckless father.