The Book of Daniel

by E. L. Doctorow

  “He’ll get them all,” she whispered. “He’ll get every one of them.”

  Ah Susy, my Susyanna, what have you done? You are a dupe of the international moralist propagandist apparatus! They have made a moral speed freak of you! They have wrecked your hair and taken away your granny glasses and dressed you in the robe of a sick person. Oh, look at what they’ve done, Susan, look at what they’ve done to you—

  THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF GOD

  AS REPRESENTED IN THE BIBLE

  Actually that’s what God does in the Bible—like the little girl says, he gets people. He takes care of them. He lays on this monumental justice. Oh the curses, the admonitions; the plagues, the scatterings, the ruinations, the strikings dead, the renderings unto and the tearings asunder. The floods. The fires. It is interesting to note that God as a character in the Bible seems almost always concerned with the idea of his recognition by mankind. He is constantly declaring His Authority, with rewards for those who recognize it and punishment for those who don’t. He performs fancy tricks. He enlists the help of naturally righteous humans who become messengers, or carriers of his miracles, or who deliver their people. Each age has by trial to achieve its recognition of Him—or to put it another way, every generation has to learn anew the lesson of His Existence. The drama in the Bible is always in the conflict of those who have learned with those who have not learned. Or in the testing of those who seem that they might be able to learn. In this context it is instructive to pause for a moment over the career of Daniel, a definitely minor, if not totally apocryphal figure (or figures) who worked with no particular delight for a few of the kings in the post-Alexandrine Empires. It is a bad time for Daniel and his co-religionists, for they are second-class citizens, in a distinctly hostile environment. But in that peculiar kind of symbiosis of pagan kings and wise subject-Jews, Daniel is apparently able to soften the worst excesses of the rulers against his people by making himself available for interpretations of dreams, visions or apparitions in the night. Dreams, visions and apparitions in the night seem to be an occupational hazard of the ancient rulers. Typically, the King (Nebuchadnezzar, or Belshazzar, or Cyrus) suffers a dream which he cannot understand. He consults his various retainers—magicians, astrologers, soothsayers, Chaldean wise men. Typically, they fail him. As a last resort Daniel, a Jew, is summoned. Daniel seems to be a modest man, brave, and more faithful to God than wise, for it is by means of prayer and piety that he learns from God the dream interpretations he must make to the King in order to survive. In one case, he must even recreate the dream before he can interpret it because the dumb King, Nebuchadnezzar, has forgotten what it is. For this wisdom Daniel is accorded ministerial rank in the tradition of Joseph and Moses before him. It is no sinecure, however. We think of Charlie Chaplin taken home every night by the fat, wealthy drunkard and kicked out of the drunkard’s house in the sobriety of the following morning. Like an alternating current, though quite direct. At one point, Daniel’s three brothers are accused of sacrilege by the cunning Chaldeans and the King sentences them to death in a fiery furnace. God sees that they survive the fire, but the strain on Daniel has to have been considerable. Another time Daniel, under the same indictment himself, is thrown into a pit with lions but survives an entire night unscratched. His is a life of confrontations, not the least of which has him putting down his employer in front of the whole crowd: You’ve bought it, Kingy. “God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it, thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting….” This is not a job for a man sensitive to loud noises or bright light. Daniel survives three reigns but at considerable personal cost. Toward the end his insights become more diffuse, apocalyptic, hysterical. One night he suffers his own dream, a weird and awesome vision of composite beasts and seas and heavens and fire and storms and an Ancient on a throne, and ironically he doesn’t know what it means: “I, Daniel, was grieved in my spirit in the midst of my body, and the vision of my head troubled me…. My cogitations much troubled me, and my countenance changed in me: but I kept the matter in my heart.”

  So much for Daniel, Beacon of Faith in a Time of Persecution. (You’ve got to be desperate to read the Bible.) Five grown-up people are trying to recover one twenty-year-old girl from a public insane asylum on Memorial Day. It can’t be done. It is not a working day. There is no one to process her record, sign her out, check her over. There is no one there to say she can go. I am livid. “Let’s just take her!” I shout. But that can’t be done. Robert Lewin, a professor of law at Boston College, won’t do it. Lise, his wife, tells me to be serious. And Dr. Duberstein, the infamous Dr. Alan Duberstein, makes useless phone calls in the public phone booth. Duberstein is a short, skinny man with a high voice. He was shot up during World War II and has a face annealed by plastic surgery. Straight hair that looks sewn into his scalp. Stucco skin, and no eyebrows. Into this fiasco he pokes a pipe. There are spots on his striped tie, and his brown wing-styled shoes need a shine.

  “I was told there would be no problem,” he insists to the admitting nurse. “We have an ambulance out there that is costing these people thirty-five dollars an hour.”

  “I can’t help that,” the admitting nurse says. She is large and cheerful. The state police brought Susan in off the turnpike and that makes her a public charge. “She has to be released,” the nurse says patiently. This must be the way she talks to maniacs. With a melody in her voice. “I can’t do it and you can’t do it. We haven’t even typed the admitting diagnosis.”

  I pace the lobby, pounding my fist into my palm. Phyllis sits on a bench, the baby sliding down her lap. Her earnest face tracks me, she pulls the baby back, it struggles, she pulls it back. I have no real desire to rescue Susan by force. But I wish I had her capacity to do things in a big way—that gift for causing public commotion, that family talent. Actually it’s just as well that Duberstein is kept away from her. And our parents too, for that matter. She has been going to Duberstein for years; once she told me she lost her respect for Duberstein when she found out he played golf twice a week. Then why do you go, Susan? “Alleviates parental anxieties,” said Susan the college girl. Alleviates parental anxieties. This makes me feel guilty for both of us. I look at the Lewins: pale, worried, under fire once again. I cannot bear the guilt. I begin to scold them. They should have called me sooner. I would have had the sense to get her out of here yesterday. “What were you trying to hide from me? What was the point!”

  Lise, my mother, a tiny woman in a blouse and short skirt with low-heeled shoes and shoulder bag, is a curious combination of 1945 WAC and slightly aging Viennese charmer onto the new fashions. She sits down on the bench next to Phyllis and takes the baby, an unconscious maternal gesture which gratifies Phyllis because it brings her into the family. “Oh, Danny,” Lise says, “don’t be a fool. Nobody’s hiding anything. You are down there. We are here. We are her parents. We cope. And if someone in the family can be spared for twenty-four hours, why not? Or should everyone stop functioning?”

  She seems to be taking the whole business with more fortitude than my father. My father speaks in his soft voice to Duberstein, suggesting various alternative courses of action. There are doctors at work even on Memorial Day. Find the senior doctor in charge. Talk to him. If he’s not in the building, find out where he is and call him. My father is very fond of Susan. Her excesses have always seemed to render him contemplative. This is the worst she’s been, the worst thing she’s done; it has occurred to him, perhaps, that the pattern of our lives is deterioration, that the movement of our lives is toward death.

  With great justice he refuses to pick up my pusillanimous charge. I have long since given up rights in Susan’s welfare. Who am I to tell them what to do or not to do? But he grants me my rights. “Let’s go outside,” he says. We all wait in the parking lot while Duberstein goes off to find the medical administrator. The women and the baby sit in the Lewin car, a 1965 Impala with a regular shift, and leave the doors open; my father and I with our backs to the ho
spital lean against the car grille and look down the hill. Behind us, near the entrance, a sleek red and grey ambulance lurks in wait, the driver asleep behind the wheel with his cap tilted over his eyes. The hill is dotted with patients clutching brown paper bags.

  “We knew she was depressed,” Robert Lewin says. “We wanted her to come home for the weekend. But she said she had to get away. She didn’t sound so bad. She’s been making her classes. She’s been doing her work.” My father is looking older by the minute. He is bound to feel that Susan’s attempt at defection is his fault. If my mother feels that way she won’t show it. It occurs to me that they didn’t call me immediately because they were afraid of my reaction. They weren’t sure what it would be, they weren’t sure that Daniel wasn’t capable of the same thing, as if what Susan did was contagious.

  Suspense is all Robert Lewin can look forward to as the father of these children. He doesn’t even have the assurance of his own genes. I feel such sad tenderness for the guy, I put my arm around his shoulder. He’s no slouch. He works like hell, and belongs to committees, and practices law for poor people and writes for the law journals. He is big in the ACLU. He is popular with his classes, a thorn in the Dean’s side, a demonstrator against Dow Chemical recruiters. When he has the time, he likes to read The New Yorker.

  Neither of the Lewins is capable of regretting what they did for Susan and me. As cruel as we are. And we are really terrible low down people. I mean really low down. But they must know we mean them no harm except the harm in our love for them. Everyone in the family understands the mythological burden of acts much smaller than their consequences. My sister and I can never inflict total damage—that is the saving grace. The right to offend irreparably is a blood right.

  Suddenly Daniel was overwhelmed with a strong sweet sense of the holiday. The sun was trying to come out, the warm slight breezes of the overcast day played across the eyes, he was here with everyone in his immediate family standing on this really groovy prospect in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was thankful to Susan for relieving the dangerous tedium of his graduate life. She would be all right. In the meantime there was drama, a sweet fatality, a recharging of the weak diffused impulses of giving a shit. Robert Lewin felt his sympathy and was warmly reciprocating. Was Daniel all right? Had he or Phyllis eaten anything since leaving home that morning? He produced from the glove compartment a handful of candy bars. “Milky Ways all around,” he said with a sad smile. And there was a car to take care of, Susan’s car, still in the lot at the Howard Johnson’s near Exit II on the Westbound side of the Turnpike. The two men chatted quietly, building comfort for each other in the warm afternoon while Duberstein went about his futile attempts to get the hospital authorities to release Susan. Building concern for each other and then, in a widening circle of small talk, for their wives, for the innocent fat baby, and for anybody still within their power of concern, for anybody who could be saved by concern. The afternoon grew festive—

  Bukharin was no angel, of course. In the course of his trial he spoke of condoning the murder of Whites in the heat of the revolutionary struggle. Going down before Stalin, he felt obliged to make the distinction between murder that was politically necessary and factional terrorism. In 1928, ten years before his trial, he criticized Stalin’s line of forced industrialization and compared Stalin personally to Genghis Khan. In September, 1936, a meeting of the Central Committee was called to consider the expulsion from the Party of Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov for leading a Right Wing-Trotskyite conspiracy. Bukharin said that the real conspiracy was Stalin’s and that to achieve unlimited power Stalin would destroy the Bolshevik Party and that therefore he, Bukharin, and others, were to be eliminated and that was the source of the charge against him. The Central Committee accepted Bukharin’s defense and voted not to expel him. The conspiracy charge was dropped. Within a year, ninety-eight members of the Central Committee were arrested and shot. (We learn this from N. Khrushchev in his address to the 20th Party Congress.) Then the charges were reinstated and Bukharin was put on trial.

  Actually, there are separate mysteries to be examined here. Why do the facts of Russian national torment make Americans feel smug? Why do two state cops, finding a young girl bleeding to death in the ladies’ room of a Howard Johnson’s, take her not to the nearest hospital, but to the nearest public insane asylum? On second thought these mysteries may not be unrelated.

  Subjects to be taken up:

  1. The old picture poster that I found in Susan’s Volvo, in the front seat, in a cardboard tube.

  2. The terrible scene the previous Christmas in the Jewish household at 67 Winthrop Rd., Brookline, a two-family house built, in the style of that neighborhood, to look like a one-family.

  3. Our mad grandma and the big black man in the cellar.

  4. Fleshing out the Lewins, maybe following them to the Turnpike and then to Brookline. Remember it wasn’t until you got into Susan’s car that it really hit you. They’re still fucking us. You get the picture. Good boy, Daniel.

  5. Just as long as you don’t begin to think you’re doing something that has to be done. I want to make that clear, man. You are a betrayer. There is no cheap use to which you would not put your patrimony. You’re the kind of betrayer who betrays for no reason. Who would sit here and write all this, playing with yourself instead of doing your work—what do you think, Professor Sukenick will come to see if you’re really working? Do you think it matters to him? Or are you just looking for another father. How many fathers does one boy need? Why don’t you go out and get a job? Why don’t you drop something heavy? Why not something too heavy? Why not something to show Susan how it’s done?

  SILENCE IN THE LIBRARY: Who is this cat who starts out of his chair and bumps the reading table, and rushes into the stacks looking for anything he can find? Does Columbia University need this kind of graduate student? Going through the shelves like a thief—plundering whatever catches his eye, stumbling back to his place, his arms loaded with Secondary Sources! What is his School! What is his name!

  6. The trip downtown to see Artie the Revolutionary and the suspicion of financial shenanigans afoot.

  7. The Isaacson Foundation. IS IT SO TERRIBLE NOT TO KEEP THE MATTER IN MY HEART, TO GET THE MATTER OUT OF MY HEART, TO EMPTY MY HEART OF THIS MATTER? WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH MY HEART?

  The summer of 1967 was just beginning. There would be a wave of draft-card burning. There would be riots in Newark and Detroit. Young people in the United States would try a form of protest originated in this century by the Buddhist monks of South Vietnam. They would douse themselves with gasoline and light matches to themselves. They would burn to death in protest. But I, Daniel, was grieved, and the visions of my head troubled me and I do not want to keep the matter in my heart.

  Ascher’s huge hand was like a band of steel. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man, but when he was excited he lost control of his great strength and didn’t know he was using it. Daniel tried to pull away, to loosen the ring of pain around his wrist, but Ascher’s response was to tighten his grip and pull even harder. “Come, children, come,” the lawyer said. Laboriously they scrambled up the steps from the subway—a steep flight encased in black dirt and littered with gum wrappers and flattened cigarette butts. Rising after them were the hot odors of arcade popcorn, pizza, donuts, pretzels—all the marvels of cheap nourishment following after them like the cries of animals in a pet store. He always imagined they wanted to be bought.

  “Come, children, come.” Susan—smaller, lighter, shorter in the leg—couldn’t keep up. She dangled from Ascher’s hammy hand, her shoes banging on the steps, finding purchase only to be hauled into the air again. “You’re hurting me!” she screamed. Why was he holding them so? Did he think they’d run away?

  “You’re hurting her arm, Mr. Ascher,” Daniel said. “If you let us go we can get up the steps faster than you.”

  “What? All right then, scoot,” Ascher said. Rubbing their wrists they clambered up, easily outgaining the huge
, heavy lawyer. “Don’t fall!” he called after them. “Stay right there at the top.”

  Calm now, curious, they watched the great bulk straining to reach them. Where they stood, in the mouth of the precipitous entrance to the subway, two winds converged, the hot underground draft rising to caress their faces and the cold blast of the street cutting at their backs. Dust, paper, soot, swirled along the ground. It was a cold, windy day. The brightness of the sun made their eyes squint.

  Ascher climbed the last two steps with his hands pushing at his knees. “I’m not going to live long,” he said, trying to catch his breath. He pulled them out of the stream of people pouring down the stairs.

  They stood against the building while Ascher took deep breaths and got his bearings. Across the street was Bryant Park and the Public Library. To the right was Sixth Avenue. “That way—we go west,” Ascher said, and he took their wrists again and they were off. They waited for the lights, crossed Sixth, and proceeded along 42nd Street toward Broadway. The newsstand man wore earmuffs. The wind blew hard. The kids walked with their faces averted, Daniel with the nubbin brim of his wool cap down on his forehead. His nose was running and he knew the wind would chafe him. It cut right through his pants. Ascher’s heavy grey overcoat moved in front of his eyes. Abruptly the hand let go of his wrist and he was thrust up against Ascher’s side, contained by the hand, sheltered from the wind. “Stay in close, that way you can walk,” the lawyer said. So it was like a strange six-legged beast walking down the windy range of Sixth Avenue, the two kids pressed into the man’s sides.