The Book of Daniel

by E. L. Doctorow

  But I was a smart-ass kid, I wasn’t that innocent. I took what he gave to have him. On Sunday morning I went with him from door to door to sell subscriptions to the Worker. This was the Sunday Mobilization. It was arduous—he talked a lot to everyone, not just me. How much of it didn’t I hear except for the sound of the voice itself? A quality difficult to remember now, except that it was nasal, sing-songy, a voice I associate with the expression on his face of complete self-absorption. Yes, that is how I remember him: talking, developing some dialectic with great relish, the words very liquid; he spoke with a wet mouth, as if, sometimes, his tongue lay in bubbles, that type of speaker who in his excitement sometimes sprays his listener; developing some idea, overdeveloping it tiresomely, I could tell by my mother’s face, although I may have personally found it interesting. He was tendentious! Yes! A word he loved to apply to others. Tendentious. Also indiscriminate in his attention to ideas, problems, from the most mundane to the most serious, giving them equal time in his tireless broadcast, high or low, serious or stupid. It was Rochelle who worried about having enough to eat. Was there one like him on the Black Tennis Court? She wanted him to make more money. The family mythology was that in practical matters of the world, Paul Isaacson was a more or less irresponsible child. He couldn’t be trusted. He couldn’t be trusted to make a living, to find his glasses, to remember to come home for lunch, to take the garbage out, to wear his rubbers when it rained. There was between my mother and Aunt Frieda and Aunt Ruthie a maternal rivalry for his irresponsible heart. Frieda and Ruth, his older sisters and his only living relatives, felt that he was a genius; and that his genius had never been given a chance because he had married too early and been overcome by family responsibilities. Rochelle was bitter about that. She had to prove to them that she could take care of him better than they had. That the girl he met at City before the war, and married during the war, the girl who went down to live with him in Washington, D.C. before they were even married, was good for him and would help him fulfill himself. In this, though a Communist, she was totally bourgeois, wasn’t she. Tacitly I know she accepted their judgment of Paul as a failure; but who was to blame—that was the real issue. There was a degree in engineering that was never taken. Unlike Rochelle, Paul had never completed college. He’d gone off to war and come back a married man, a father, a provider—their Pauly! They never forgave her for Paul Isaacson’s fate as a radio repairman or for his political views. They believed he would have outgrown his radicalism if not for her.

  I cooperated in this myth of my irresponsible father. I enjoyed it. It pushed him into childhood with me. Sometimes I felt as if Rochelle was mother to us both. Sometimes I felt that in practical knowledge of what had to be done for the moment, I was his older brother. I imagined my father subject to Rochelle’s discipline, to Williams’ wrath as he threw the garbage pails around the cellar, to Grandma’s curses. Just like me. There was truth in it and I’d laugh.

  But when he was in the back of his store the natural order of things was recovered. My father was skinny, nervous, selfish, unreliable, full of hot radical passion; insolent in his faith, loyal to Marxism-Leninism, rude-eyed and tendentious. He scared me. But when he repaired radios, I was released. The pressure was off me and I was free in his concentration. I loved him in that lousy store. I always wanted to go there. On rainy days when I got on my mother’s nerves, she sent me there. Or at lunchtime when he hadn’t come home, she’d give me his sandwich in a bag and his coffee in a thermos and send me to the store before I went back to school. Or sometimes I’d have to go bring him home for dinner. I went along the school fence to 174th Street, then down 174th Street still along the school fence, to Eastburn Avenue; across Eastburn; and another block past the shoemaker, the dairy, Irving’s Fish Market, Spotless Cleaner, to Morris Avenue; across Morris; and in the middle of that block right between the candy store I didn’t like, and Berger’s Barber Shop, was Isaacson Radio, Sales and Repair.

  In the window an advertising cutout faded from the sun: a modern housewife, smartly turned out in a dress that reaches almost to her ankles. She has her hand on the knob of a radio and does not look at it but out at you, as she turns it on. She is smiling and wears a hairdo of the time. She is not bad looking, with nice straight teeth, and she obviously has a pair though not trying to jam them in your face. She is in green, faded green. Her dress, her face, her smile, all green. Her radio is orange. The table it is on is orange. She is a slim, green woman for whom the act of turning on an orange radio is enormous pleasure. Maybe it was a defective radio and gave her a jolt. Maybe she was turning it off. I never thought of that. On the bed of the window, resting on old curled crepe paper, bleached grey, are two display radios—a table model and a console with cloth-covered doors and a combination automatic record changer. When you go inside you see that the two window display radios have nothing inside them. They are empty cabinets. Not many people buy radios here. Mostly they have their old ones fixed. There is no irony in Paul Isaacson’s owning his own business, because he makes no profit. He employs no one and, therefore, exploits no one. Isaacson Radio, Sales and Repair, is not a good business. There were lots of poor or lower middle class people in that neighborhood. They all knew someone who could sell cheaper. And they did not support big repair bills. He was honest and he never overcharged. Rochelle, who kept the books at home, was supposed to figure out how to pay the rent each month.

  Most of the store was used for the shop behind the counter. Behind the counter were boxed display shelves of unpainted plywood. There was an opening with an old living room drape of Rochelle’s hung from a rod. Then you were in the shop. Here were the racks of tubes with their numbers. And on the worktable the dusty radios, each with its tag. A patterned ceiling that drooped in the middle. I loved it there. It was a place to feel safe. It was all enclosed. And if he was busy, he didn’t talk. And I’d be engrossed with the mystery of the problem, the tracking down of the trouble inside the guts of a machine. It would hum, or beep, or sputter, or wouldn’t light, or make no sound at all. And he’d fix it. With his elaborate breathing he’d fix it. Sometimes he’d let me vacuum out the insides, clear the dust of years out of a chassis with a small powerful vacuum that was like a flashlight. And completely occupied with the problem he wouldn’t talk. History had no pattern in those moments. I didn’t have to worry. Imperialism, the last phase of capitalism, did not exist. There were tubes and condensers, and speakers and soldering irons and wires—a technology that was neutral and had no ideological significance. No, that’s wrong. He merely relented in noting it. When he was busy, I could secretly feel about him as other boys felt all the time about their fathers. And I didn’t have to worry about the Forces set against us in our struggle.

  But sometimes he would listen to the radio while he worked on it. And he liked to listen to the commentators—it didn’t matter which one. They talked for fifteen minutes at a time. John W. Vandercook, Raymond Gram Swing, H. V. Kaltenborn, Johannes Steel, Frank Kingdon, Quincy Howe, Gabriel Heatter, Fulton Lewis, Jr. They were carry-overs from the Second World War when people really wanted to know what was going on. They were an industry. My father listened as he worked. He shook his head. He poked his soldering iron into the heart of the radio as if trying to repair the voice, trying to fix the errors of analysis and interpretation. He stabbed it in the tubes, like a primitive again, as if the machine was talking, as if trying to re-program the lie box. I remember Radio Town Meeting of the Air. He used to turn that on at home. It would make him furious. The question to be debated was always loaded. The strong speaker was always a right-winger. The town crier would ring the bell and announce the program and he’d sit and listen until he couldn’t bear it any longer. It was the ritual of eating your heart out. That was my mother’s phrase for these things: “What are you eating your heart out for? Pauly. You know who owns the stations. You know it’s all rigged. Why must you eat your heart out?” Her contribution to his self-esteem was in warning him that his sensi
tivity could ruin his health. Who owns the airwaves? Who owns the American Press? Who rules America? Like Du Pont dealing with I. G. Farben. Evidence, there was never enough evidence. He swam in it. That was it—physical training, it was the way he stayed in shape. That has to be it. You ate your heart out to keep the revolutionary tension. But Rochelle didn’t have to do that. She didn’t have to go through the primer again and again. She knew the lesson. She was truer to the idea. In her way she was the more committed radical. Because, look, the implication of all the things he used to flagellate himself was that American democracy wasn’t democratic enough. He continued to be astonished, insulted, outraged, that it wasn’t purer, freer, finer, more ideal. Finding proof of it over and over again—the struggle is still going on, Pop!—like a guy looking for confirmation. How much confirmation did he need? Why did he expect so much of a system he knew by definition could never satisfy his standards of justice? A system he was committed to opposing because he had a better one in mind. It’s screwy. Lots of them were like that. They were Stalinists and every instance of Capitalist America fucking up drove them wild. My country! Why aren’t you what you claim to be? If they were put on trial, they didn’t say Of course, what else could we expect, they said You are making a mockery of American justice! And it was more than strategy, it was more than Lenin’s advice to use the reactionary apparatus to defend yourself, it was passion.

  My father never really believed it would happen. My mother wasn’t to be surprised from the day they were indicted. But he never believed it was possible. He believed in the beneficence of his ideas, and could not appreciate that anyone would find them offensive enough, threatening enough to do—that. His ideas were an extension of himself, and he meant only well. Because the other side of finding confirmation over and over again, of dwelling in evidence, was that he would never believe any of it. He would never believe that America was not the cafeteria at City College; and as often as it was proved to him he forgot it.

  Pauly. Sometimes he used to cut my mother’s hair. I don’t remember her ever cutting his. She would put a towel around her shoulders and spread newspaper on the floor in the kitchen and sit on a kitchen chair in the middle of the floor, and he would go to work; holding a scissors and a comb in his long hands, he would comb through her hair, get a short bunch of it off the comb and between his fingers, and with the comb like a harmonica in his mouth, pick up the scissors and slice off the hair. He was very deft. She had thick hair that tended to curl and she liked to keep it short. I wouldn’t say she enjoyed saving money, I would say it gave her satisfaction. I would say it was a righteous pleasure. She wore plain clothes that were bought to last. All our clothes were bought to last. She always bought things that were too big. “She wanted us to get use out of them,” I once explained to Susan when we were talking about this. “She wanted us to grow into them.” But Susan said: “She bought Daddy’s things too big, and her own things too. She dressed us all like bags. Why must you always think she was perfect? Why can’t you admit she just didn’t know how to buy clothes?”

  I think she was a sexy woman, despite her austerity, her home-cut hair, her baggy clothes, her no make-up except for very red lipstick on her small, prim mouth in the full cheeks. Her grim appreciation of life. She was full-breasted and heavy-hocked and wore corsets, which I would see her pull on or off while she said something like “Danny, go turn the light out under the coffee.” She was exacting about cleanliness and kept us all cleaner than we thought was necessary. When she was working, before Susan was born, she would clean the house late at night and on weekends. That miserable little house. In my bed, when she came to fix the covers, I smelled her after her bath—she smelled of the steam of cleanliness, of powdered redness. She made curtains and tacked down linoleum and found bargains at the Salvation Army, and hammered and tacked and waxed and polished and scrubbed. She washed our clothes on a washboard in the deep half of the kitchen sink. She had enormous energy. The whole thing with Rochelle was defending herself against the vicious double-crossing trick that life was. Income was defense. A clean house. A developed political mind. Children. Her weaknesses were not as obvious to me as Paul’s. If someone claims to deal with life so as to survive, you grant him soundness of character. But she was as unstable as he was. In her grim expectations. In her refusal to have illusions. In her cold, dogmatic rage. As if there was some profound missed thing in her life which she could never forget. Some betrayal of promise. It wasn’t sex. It couldn’t have been sex. They used to make the whole house rock. They really went at it, they balled all the time.

  In prison, she began to write.

  Her politics was not theoretical or abstract. She had no difficulty making connections. Her politics was like Grandma’s religion—some purchase on the future against the terrible life of the present. Grandma lit candles on Friday night, with a shawl over her head and her hands covering her face while she said her prayer. When she lowered her hands, her eyes, her blue eyes, were filled with tears, and devastation was in her face. That was my mother’s communism. It was something whose promise was so strong that you endured much for it. Like a woman suffering pregnancy and childbirth to get the child. The child would make it worthwhile. The coming of socialism would sanctify those who had suffered. You went out and took your stand, and did what had to be done, not because you expected anything from it, but because someday there would be retribution and you wanted just a little of it to bear your name. If she had been religious like her Mama, she would have conceived this as a memorial plaque on the back of one of the pews in the Synagogue. But she was enlightened, independent, a college graduate, a girl who read and understood, who had joined the radical set at school, had scandalized her mother, had gone to live with her boyfriend when he was drafted and stationed in another city. She was a modern woman.

  “Rochelle!” I hear my grandma’s taunt, “Imagine Rochelle!” And then in Yiddish: “Rachel is not good enough for her.”

  But this isn’t the couple in the poster. That couple got away. Well funded, and supplied with false passports, they went either to New Zealand or Australia. Or Heaven. In any event, my mother and father, standing in for them, went to their deaths for crimes they did not commit. Or maybe they did committ them. Or maybe my mother and father got away with false passports for crimes they didn’t committ. How do you spell comit? Of one thing we are sure. Everything is elusive. God is elusive. Revolutionary morality is elusive. Justice is elusive. Human character. Quarters for the cigarette machine. You’ve got these two people in the poster, Daniel, now how you going to get them out? And you’ve got a grandma you mention once or twice, but we don’t know anything about her. And some colored man in the basement—what is that all about? What has that got to do with anything?

  PEEKSKILL

  It is Sunday, a warm Sunday morning in September. Everyne is up early. The phone is ringing. I am admonishhed to hurry up and wash and get dressed. I have to feed stupid Susan while the grownups get dressed. We are into that efficient cooperative use of time, by which it is saved, like money. I hate it when something like this is going on. My mother directs us all like a military commander. Susan takes the bowl of the spoon into her fat cheeks and clutches the shaft of it in her fat hand. She won’t let go. The phone rings again. I am directed to answer the phone. It is someone wanting to know the schedule. Everyone is meeting at our house. At nine-thirty they begin to arrive. The first, of course, is Dr. Mindish, and his wife and giant daughter. I hate Mindish. He seems to me an insincere man. I never believe anything he says. He is my father’s closest friend and the whole family’s dentist. He’s a tall man, balding, with a fat nose and a perpetually unshaved face. His eyes are small and colorless. He speaks with a foreign intonation. His daughter looks just like him, is as tall, has as big a nose, but with long hair hanging down each side of her face. His wife seems like an intruder in their family. “Well,” Mindish says when I answer the door, “they’ve got a new butler.” He’s really funny. As Linda Mindis
h, the daughter, walks by me, she pokes me in the ribs. Despising myself I smile at Mindish’s lousy wit and flinch from Linda’s hand. She is twelve or thirteen, and very strong.

  A while later, the rest of them begin to troop in. Nate Silverstein, and his wife who teaches school downtown. Silverstein is a furrier, a florid man with a hoarse voice. And then Henry Bergman who is a professional musician, primarily a fiddler, although good enough on the French horn to play one season with Toscanini’s NBC Symphony. My favorite of my parents’ friends, Ben Cohen, a thin, gentle man with a mustache and an aromatic pipe. If my father died, I would want my mother to marry Ben Cohen. He always speaks softly when he speaks, which is not often. He never patronizes me. He is quiet and contemplative, and I like what he does too: he works for the City in the subway system, in a change booth. This seems to me a really fine job. You’re underground in a stronghold that has barred windows, and a heavy steel door that locks from the inside. It’s a very safe, secure place to be. You can eat your lunch in there, and read when the work is slow. All you have to do is make change, which is easy. If a bomb drops, you probably won’t even feel it. If there’s a storm, you don’t get wet. The only thing wrong about this job is that Ben Cohen never stays in one place. He’s always switching around. If I had the job, I’d want to have the booth in our station, 174th Street. Then I’d be close to home.

  And then the Kantrowitz sisters who work for Welfare, the light one, and the dark one, both unmarried. And then other people besides the regulars—people I don’t know too well, people at the edges of my parents’ close friendships. There are about two dozen in all and a few of them have kids, and one couple has an infant in arms. They have all brought their lunch in brown paper bags.