The Book of Daniel

by E. L. Doctorow

  “Like the rest of our luck,” Ascher muttered into the wind. “Like the way all our luck is running.” With his face buried in the man’s coat Daniel was aware of sounds: horns, cars starting and stopping, the large yet soft sound of innumerable people walking, music coming out of a record store. And then a clop-clopping that made him pull back and look around the coat. Two cops on horses, straight backed, tall, manly on their really fine brown horses. And he felt guilty for admiring them, for he knew they were reactionaries.

  The lawyer spoke. “Now you must stay close to me and do as I tell you to do. We are a little late. I can tell from here, a tremendous crowd, it’s a great tribute. You should feel proud. When you’re standing up there, keep your heads up, look proud and tall and don’t slump, stand up straight. So that everyone can see you. Vershtey? Don’t be afraid. What is it, little girl?”

  “I’ve got something in my eye.”

  “We have no time now, Susan. Come.”

  Susan leaned back against Ascher’s grip and planted her feet. “I’ve got something in my eye,” she insisted.

  “Keep your eye closed. It will come out.”

  “No! It hurts,” she said.

  Ascher let go her hand and started to yell. Daniel understood that everyone was nervous. He took his sister by the hand and led her into the doorway of a shoe store. Here they were protected from the wind. He took off his gloves and lifted the back of his mackinaw and dug into his pocket for a handkerchief. “Take your glasses off,” he said. “Don’t rub it. Take your hand away—that’s it. Look up.”

  Her little red face was squinched up around the closed eye. “How can I see what it is if you don’t open your eye,” Daniel said.

  “I can’t.”

  Daniel laughed. “Come on, Susyanna—you should see what a funny face you’re making.”

  “I am not!”

  “Please, children, we are late. This is very important! Quickly, quickly!”

  “Just a minute, Mr. Ascher,” Daniel said. “She’s only a little girl, you know.”

  The poignancy of this description so affected Susan that she began to cry. Daniel put his arms around her and said he was sorry. Ascher muttered in Yiddish and lifted his arms. Then he dropped them, with a smack, against his sides. He walked away and came back.

  “Come on, Susan, let me get it out and when we get home I’ll play with you. I’ll play Monopoly with you.” That was a treat because it was such a long game.

  Susan opened the afflicted eye, blinked and blinked again. She discovered that whatever it was was gone.

  “Gottzudanken!” Ascher said.

  “Will you still play with me?” Susan wanted to know.

  “Yes.” Daniel wiped away her tears, wiped her nose, and then wiped his own.

  “Hurry, hurry !” Ascher said.

  When they reached the corner of Broadway the wind wasn’t so bad because the street was filled with people. They were moving into a crowd. More police on horseback, in ranks of two, stood along the curb. Other policemen, on foot, were diverting the Broadway traffic east and west on 42nd Street, which is what made the traffic jam. Horns sounded and a policeman blew his whistle. In the surge of people Ascher held Susan and Daniel by the wrists and crossed with them through the spaces between the cars. Two entire blocks from 40th to 42nd on Broadway were cordoned off. People stood in the street. It was an amazing sight. The center of attention was down at 40th: a man on a platform was shouting through a microphone. Two loudspeakers on the tops of trucks beamed his voice at the people but it was hard to hear what he was saying. The crowd, which was attentive, seemed by its massiveness to muffle the sound. A man saying something quietly to someone next to him destroyed the amplified words. Only the echoes of the unintelligible voice bounced off the buildings. Some people in the crowd held placards aloft, and at moments in the speech when applause rattled like marbles spilling on the ground, these were poked upwards rhythmically.

  Ascher led the two children into the edges of the crowd, keeping near the buildings where it was thinnest. They went single file, Ascher preceding Daniel and holding his wrist and Daniel pulling Susan behind him. “Pardon me,” Ascher said. “Excuse me.”

  But at 41st Street the crowd became too thick for this stratagem. People were packed together right up to the building line. Daniel could not see the sidewalk except where he stood. Ascher’s response was to wade right into the crowd, cutting diagonally into the street and bulling his way through the overcoats. “Let me through, please. One side, one side.” Now it was stiflingly hot. Daniel felt the crowd as a weight that would crush him to death if it happened to close the path made by Ascher. An elbow came up and knocked his hat askew. His hands occupied, he couldn’t set it right. Finally it fell. Susan squatted to retrieve the hat and his hold on her hand was broken. Ascher was pulling him on and Susan disappeared in the closing ranks behind him.

  “Wait!” he shouted, struggling in Ascher’s grasp. His wrist burned in the steel band.

  “Daniel, Daniel!” his sister called.

  Panicking, he shouted and dug in his heels. The grip broke. He fought his way back, pushing between the bodies that were like trees, immovable boulders. “Susan!”

  Faces looked down angrily. “Shhh!” People muttered to him to keep quiet. The amplified voice filled the sky over his head: “Is this our so-called American justice? Is this an example to the world of American fair play and justice?”

  “Those are the children!” he heard Ascher cry out. “But those are the children!” He ran into Susan before he saw her—clutching his hat with both hands, with no more room around her than her body made, her arms jammed against her chest. He put his arm around her shoulder and tried to regain his sense of direction. The heat was unbearable. He looked up, saw the sky, saw the roofline of buildings to his left. He decided if they were to cut through to his right they would reach the sidewalk and could follow the curb back toward the beginnings of the crowd. He knew how to get home.

  “I don’t like this,” Susan said. “I can’t move!”

  “Here they are!” A man standing next to him peered down. “I’ve got them.”

  And then Ascher was there and they were being pulled forward once more. “These are the children,” Ascher kept saying. “Let us through, please. I’ve got the children.” Eventually this was understood by people in the crowd. “He’s got the children!” they called to each other. Daniel could see a banner stretched on poles across the top of the platform ahead. FREE THEM! Someone lifted him up and he found himself being passed over the heads of the people, propelled sinuously like something on the top of the sea. He was terrified. He heard Susan’s voice behind him. “Let me down!” she was saying. “Help! Danny!”

  And finally it was the amplified voice that was booming out over Broadway: “Here are the children!” And a great roaring filled his ears as he and Susan were raised, tottering, onto the platform. He was dizzy. He grabbed Susan’s hand. Flushed and breathless, dizzied by the motion of heads and the thousands of voices in motion like the roar of the sea, they stared out at the crowd, a vast hideous being of millions of eyes that seemed to undulate in the canyon of the street, splashing life and sound and outrage in great waves up on the platform. Islanded, he felt the wind in his eyes. He felt for a moment that he and Susan had been betrayed and that the great mass would flood over them and carry them away. But the roar, though directed at them, was not meant for them; it was meant for others who dwelt in a realm so mysteriously symbolic that it defied his understanding. At the foot of the platform, at his feet, Ascher’s face stared up from the street, triumphant, beatific. He was shouting something but Daniel couldn’t hear. The man who had been speaking put one arm around his shoulder and one arm around Susan’s, gently, but with unmistakable authority, arranging himself between them. Still they held hands. And the roaring of the crowd had become a chant, a great choir echoing against the buildings until it was continuous: Free them, free them, free them! And he and Susan were transf
ixed by the placards, the oversized pictures of their mother and father everywhere above the crowd, going up and down in rhythm as the crowd roared Free them, free them, free them.

  Oh, baby, you know it now. We done played enough games for you, ain’t we. You a smart lil fucker. You know where it’s at now, don’ you big daddy. You got the picture. This the story of a fucking, right? You pullin’ out yo lit-er-ary map, mutha? You know where we goin’, right muthafuck?

  AN INTERESTING PHENOMENON

  Many historians have noted an interesting phenomenon in American life in the years immediately after a war. In the councils of government fierce partisanship replaces the necessary political coalitions of wartime. In the greater arena of social relations—business, labor, the community—violence rises, fear and recrimination dominate public discussion, passion prevails over reason. Many historians have noted this phenomenon. It is attributed to the continuance beyond the end of the war of the war hysteria. Unfortunately, the necessary emotional fever for fighting a war cannot be turned off like a water faucet. Enemies must continue to be found. The mind and heart cannot be demobilized as quickly as the platoon. On the contrary, like a fiery furnace at white heat, it takes a considerable time to cool.

  Take World War I. Immediately after this war, President Wilson’s ideal of international community ran afoul of fierce Republican partisanship under the leadership of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a man who had his eye on the Presidential elections of 1920. Congress’ failure to ratify Wilson’s dream of a League of Nations was regrettable, to say the least, in view of the unfortunate events in Europe that were to follow. Wilson himself can be said to be a victim of this partisanship, suffering a cleaving stroke down the left side of his face and body. This is a phenomenon noted by many historians.

  On the labor front in 1919 there was an unprecedented number of strikes involving many millions of workers. One of the larger strikes was mounted by the A.F. of L. against the United States Steel Corporation. At that time workers in the steel industry put in an average sixty-eight-hour week for bare subsistence wages. The strike spread to other plants, resulting in considerable violence—the death of eighteen striking workers, the calling out of troops to disperse picket lines, and so forth. By branding the strikers Bolsheviks and thereby separating them from their public support, the Corporation broke the strike. In Boston, the Police Department went on strike and Governor Calvin Coolidge replaced them. In Seattle there was a general strike which precipitated a nationwide “red scare.” This was the first red scare. Sixteen bombs were found in the New York Post Office just before May Day. The bombs were addressed to men prominent in American life, including John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. It is not clear today who was responsible for those bombs—Red terrorists, Black anarchists, or their enemies—but the effect was the same. Other bombs popped off all spring, damaging property, killing and maiming innocent people, and the nation responded with an alarm against Reds. It was feared that as in Russia, they were about to take over the country and shove large cocks into everyone’s mother. Strike that. The Press exacerbated public feeling. May Day parades in the big cities were attacked by policemen, and soldiers and sailors. The American Legion, just founded, raided I.W.W. headquarters in the State of Washington. Laws against seditious speech were passed in State Legislatures across the country and thousands of people were jailed, including a Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee who was sentenced to twenty years in prison. To say nothing of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 which took care of thousands more. To say nothing of Eugene V. Debs. On the evening of January 2, 1920, Attorney General Palmer, who had his eye on the White House, organized a Federal raid on Communist Party offices throughout the nation. With his right-hand assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, at his right hand, Palmer effected the arrest of over six thousand people, some Communist aliens, some just aliens, some just Communists, and some neither Communists nor aliens but persons visiting those who had been arrested. Property was confiscated, people chained together, handcuffed, and paraded through the streets (in Boston), or kept in corridors of Federal buildings for eight days without food or proper sanitation (in Detroit). Many historians have noted this phenomenon. The raids made an undoubted contribution to the wave of vigilantism which broke over the country. The Ku Klux Klan blossomed throughout the South and West. There were night ridings, floggings, public hangings, and burnings. Over seventy Negroes were lynched in 1919, not a few of them war veterans. There were speeches against “foreign ideologies” and much talk about “100 percent Americanism.” The teaching of evolution in the schools of Tennessee was outlawed. Elsewhere textbooks were repudiated that were not sufficiently patriotic. New immigration laws made racial distinctions and set stringent quotas. Jews were charged with international conspiracy and Catholics with trying to bring the Pope to America. The country would soon go dry, thus creating large-scale, organized crime in the U.S. The White Sox threw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. And the stage was set for the trial of two Italian-born anarchists, N. Sacco and B. Vanzetti for the alleged murder of a paymaster in South Braintree, Mass. The story of this trial is well known and often noted by historians and need not be recounted here. To say nothing of World War II—

  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 san
dwich.”

  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?