The Book of Daniel

by E. L. Doctorow

  “My God,” his mother said. “My God, it’s happened.”

  The carriage bounced off the curb into the street at Morris Avenue and Susan cried out in fright. Up ahead, in the middle of the next block, a crowd stood in front of Isaacson Radio, Sales and Repair. Rochelle had no time for amenities, raising the front wheels of the stroller and bringing them down hard on the sidewalk, then the rear wheels. She ran the last half block, her long black coat flapping around her legs. It’s happened. That is what she said. Daniel running with his hunter’s leather cap flopping around on his head, the peak turning annoyingly off center toward his left ear; Susan, holding on with both hands, peering ahead with her tremulous upper lip ready to yield the potent bawl of outrage.

  This street, 174th Street, was just in this time undergoing the shock of the supermarket. An A&P had opened, the size of three or four normal stores; a Safeway would soon follow. Nevertheless, a woman could still shop for meat at a butcher’s, and butter and eggs in a dairy, and fish in a fish store, and bread in a bakery. There still in this time came along the street in front of your house a horse-drawn open wagon with vegetables and fruit displayed in their wooden shipping boxes, the vegetable man crying out his prices also written in crayon on brown paper bags stuck on slats between the boxes—the whole store on wooden steelbound wheels, arranged to rise up from the wagon bed at an angle so the lady could see everything available. The man would twirl his reins around the wheel brake, urge the horse into parking position between the cars, and set up shop for his particular customers, engaging in debates concerning the quality of his fruits and vegetables relative to their prices, clambering all over his wagon for pounds of this or bunches of that at the command of the customer, exchanging philosophical ideas of great gloom with great cheerfulness. When the vegetable man with his broken old horse clattered along past my house, he knew he was the last. A decade before there were scissors sharpeners, and knife grinders, and peddlers with bundles on their backs crying “I cash clothes!” and vendors of homemade ices in the summer and hot sweet potatoes in the winter, themselves relics of the teeming market streets of the Lower East Side at the beginning of the century. At one time, the Bronx had been an escape. In 1900 you beat the Lower East Side by moving to the Bronx. Only remorselessly does history catch up. And all your secret dreams are rooted open to the light. It is History, that pig, biting into the heart’s secrets.

  I was not doing well in school that year. I was in the third grade. I would not fold my hands at the edge of my desk. I went to the bathroom without raising my hand. I talked when I felt like talking. There were periodic drills in the event of nuclear bombs falling. We marched into the hallways where there were no windows, and sat hunched against the wall, knees up, arms around knees, head down. I suppose it was 1949. All the schools were very big on air-raid drills. The Russians had exploded an atom bomb. Truman was said to be soft on Communism. The Chinese Reds had booted out Chiang Kai-shek. American Communist leaders were on trial for conspiracy to advocate and teach the violent overthrow of the Government. There were lots of air-raid drills in my school. The little girls preferred to kneel with their heads down, and their hands linked in back of their heads. In that way the little boys across the hall couldn’t see up their dresses. We drilled in the event of atom bombs falling. My father told me not to sit with my head on my knees, nor to comply with the request to pretend that bombs were falling from the sky. My father cursed all schoolteachers who would train their classes to accept the imminence of war. I was not doing well in school that year.

  But one other thing I will have to work on is the feeling of Daniel at that age in his own loose clothes not quite synchronized to the rhythm of discontent-and-crisis, discontent-and-crisis, by which, weirdly, his parents lived in simultaneous fear and hope, defeat and victory. So that running toward his father’s store with the crowd in front of it on this windy, autumn afternoon, he is cool enough to perceive that nothing is the matter; that the crowd is amiable, and cops or ambulances are nowhere to be seen. There is no tension in the scene. It is a social occasion. It is the first television set to come to 174th Street, and it is sitting there in the window of Isaacson Radio, Sales and Repair, a great brown console, beaming its tiny moving pictures to the curious crowd.

  I should have watched my mother’s face at the moment she understood this. But I was pushing forward for a glimpse of Faye Emerson. I doubt if her face softened with relief. I doubt if she smiled at the foolishness of her foreboding.

  My father came out of the store and worked his way through the group of people standing there, and ignoring him as he jostled through them. He did not have a coat on, only his shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his work apron with its pockets for tools. He took my mother’s arm and together they walked a few feet away from the edge of the gathering, she still pushing the stroller.

  “Where did you get that?” Rochelle said.

  “It was on order. Listen—”

  “Can we take it home?” I asked him.

  “Just a minute, Danny. Let me talk to your mother. Mindish has been arrested.”

  “What!”

  “Keep your voice down. Early this morning while he was eating breakfast. The FBI came and took him downtown.”

  “Oh, my God—”

  “Don’t say anything to anyone. Go about your business and let everyting remain the same. I’ll be home for supper, and then we’ll talk.”

  “How do you know?”

  “His wife called me. It was a stupid thing to do. I don’t understand the brains of some people. She said Mindish wanted me to know, and told her to call me.”

  “Oh, Pauly—”

  I looked first to my mother’s face, then to my father’s, riding the current between them which I imagine now as blue television light, a rare element of heavy sorrow and blinding dread.

  “What did he do?” I tugged my father’s arm.

  “You’ve got to keep calm and control your feelings,” my father said to my mother. She was frowning and biting her knuckles. My father picked up Susan and played with her for a moment, pretending to be jolly. “How’s my honey,” he said to the solemn little girl. “How’s my honeybun?”

  “Why did they arrest him?”

  “I don’t know, Danny. They think he’s done something. If they didn’t arrest people, there would be nothing for them to do. So they decide someone does something he shouldn’t and they arrest him.”

  “Are they going to arrest you?”

  My father forced a laugh. “Don’t worry.”

  “What’s going to happen,” my mother whispers.

  “I’ve told you everything I know. Do me a favor, Rochelle. Get what you need, and go home. I’ll be home at the usual time. It’s only the coming of Fascism so why should we be surprised.”

  I associated Dr. Mindish with the smell of plaster and dental paste—a medicinal pungency emanated from him like the taste of a wintergreen Lifesaver. It wasn’t unpleasant. Only when he was in his office did you not smell this. When he wore his starched, white tunic, and fussed around his chest of pencil-thin drawers with all their drill bits and instruments, and when he turned on the water jet that went around the bowl, and shoved the cotton in your mouth, and pressed his stomach against your arm, and lowered his hulk over your face, he didn’t smell that way. At these times he smelled of salami.

  I hated Mindish. He always patronized me. He was a large, bulky man with small eyes and a foreign intonation in his speech, and I had always known that he lacked integrity. He was an opportunist in his conversation, never providing the idea to drive it forward, but always picking up its scraps and litter, like a fat, quick-eyed wolf, I thought, with the humorous smile of a wolf. It was a matter of sorrow to me that my parents regarded him as a friend. He was the family dentist and he always hurt me when I went there. There was about him some vicious eroticism. He was always looking at Rochelle’s tits or ass, a fact which she didn’t seem to notice. He was always treating Paul with his clumsy h
umor like a ridiculous child, with shards of envy perhaps for Paul’s mind or youth, or energy. Mindish was much older than my mother and father. I think he was in his fifties when he was arrested.

  I was pleased by the news. I thought if the G-men had to arrest someone, as my father said because if they didn’t they would have nothing to do, then they had made a wise choice in arresting Mindish. I felt that if it had been my job to arrest someone, I would have chosen Mindish too.

  Early the next morning, as I was leaving for school, the doorbell rang and I opened the door and two men were standing on the porch. They were dressed neatly, and did not appear to be of the neighborhood. They had thin, neat faces and small noses, and crew-cut hair. They held their hats in their hands and wore nice overcoats. I thought maybe they were from one of those Christian religions that sent people from door to door to sell their religious magazines.

  “Sonny,” said one, “is your mother or father home?”

  “Yes,” I said. “They’re both home.”

  My mother did not allow me to delay going to school just because the FBI had come to the door. I don’t know what happened on that first visit. The men went inside and, going down the splintery front steps, I turned and caught a glimpse of Paul coming out of the kitchen to meet them just as the door closed. My mother was holding the door and my father was coming forward in his ribbed undershirt, looking much skinnier than the two men who rang the bell.

  When the FBI knocks on your door and wants only to ask a few questions, you do not have to consent to be asked questions. You are not required to talk to them just because they would like to talk to you. You don’t have to go with them to their office. You don’t have to do anything if you are not subpoenaed or arrested. But you only learn the law as you go along.

  “They don’t know what they want,” Paul says to Rochelle. “It’s routine. If you don’t talk to them, they have nothing to pin their lies on. They are clumsy, obvious people.”

  “I’m frightened,” my mother says. “Polizei don’t have to be smart.”

  “Don’t worry,” Paul says. “Mindish won’t suffer from anything we said.” He is walking back and forth in the kitchen and he is pounding his fist into his palm. “We have done nothing wrong. There is nothing to be afraid of.”

  It develops that all of Mindish’s friends are being questioned. Nobody knows what he is being held for. There has been no announcement on the radio, there has been no story in the newspaper. Sadie Mindish is in a state of hysterical collapse. Her apartment has been searched. Her daughter has stayed home from school. Nobody knows if they even have a lawyer.

  The next day the same two FBI men come back again, this time in the early evening. They sit on the stuffed, sprung couch in the living room parlor with their knees together and their hats in their hands. They are very soft-spoken and friendly. Their strange names are Tom Davis and John Bradley. They smile at me while my mother goes to the phone to call my father.

  “What grade are you in, young fellow?”

  I don’t answer. I have never seen a real FBI man this close before. I peer at them, looking for superhuman powers, but there is no evidence that they have any. They look neither as handsome as in the movies nor as ugly as my parents’ revulsion makes them. I search their faces for a clue to their real nature. But their faces do not give clues.

  When Paul comes home, he is very nervous.

  “My lawyer has advised me that I don’t have to talk to you if I don’t want to,” my father said. “That particular fact you neglected yesterday to mention.”

  “Well, yes sir, Mr. Isaacson, but we were hoping you would be cooperative. We’re only looking for information. It’s nothing mysterious. We thought you were a friend of Doctor Mindish. As his friend, you may be in a position to help him.”

  “I will be glad to answer any questions in a court of law.”

  “Do you deny now that you know him?”

  “I will answer any questions in a court of law.”

  The two men leave after a few minutes, and then they sit in their car, double-parked in front of the house, for ten or fifteen minutes more. They appear to be writing on clipboards or on pads, I can’t tell exactly. It is dark and they have turned on the interior car light. I am reminded of a patrol man writing a parking ticket. But the sense is of serious and irrevocable paperwork, and I find it frightening. There is some small, grey light in the dark sky over the schoolyard. The wind is making whistling noises at the edges of the window.

  “Danny!” Rochelle says sharply. “Get away from there.”

  My father takes my place at the curtains. “That is outrageous,” he says. “Don’t you see, it is part of the treatment. They are trying to shake us up. But we’re too smart for them. We’re onto them. They can sit out there all night for all I care.”

  The next day is worse. At lunch my father tells my mother he is sure someone has searched the shop. When he unlocked the door this morning, he felt that things were slightly out of place. It wasn’t anything he could pinpoint exactly. Maybe the tubes in the trash barrel. Maybe the customer tickets. It was more like a sense of things having been disturbed.

  Our lunch is muenster cheese sandwiches on pumpernickel and canned tomato soup. My father doesn’t eat. He sits with his elbow on the table and his hand to his head. He nods, as if he agrees with something he has decided.

  “That’s it. That’s why they came here and asked you to call me home. They could just as easily have come to the store, couldn’t they? But they didn’t. They wanted to make sure I was home when they wanted to search my store.”

  My mother discounts this. She says they could have waited until late at night and achieved the same thing. I understand that she is deliberately minimizing the situation. She suggests that perhaps my father is imagining the whole thing about the store being searched. As the pressure increases, she seems to be calming down. Her own hysteria has passed. She is worried about Paul. She is into the mental process which in the next three years will harden into a fortitude many people will find repugnant.

  “Did you have your test, Danny?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “Do you know all the words?”

  “Yes.”

  But there are dark circles under her eyes. When I come home from school, the FBI men are sitting outside again in their car. My mother is lying down on the couch with a washcloth across her head. Her left forearm is bandaged. While ironing she gave herself a terrible burn. The edges of our existence seem to be crumbling. The house is cold and Williams has come up from the cellar to say in his deepest voice of menace that the furnace is not working properly and has to be cleaned. He will get to it when he can. I understand this means he will get to it when he does not feel abused by the situation. All my senses are in a state of magnification. I hang around the house feeling the different lights of the day. I drink the air. I taste the food I eat. Every moment of my waking life is intensified and I know exactly what is happening. A giant eye machine, like the mysterious black apparatus at the Hayden Planetarium with the two diving helmet heads and the black rivets and its insect legs, is turning its planetary beam slowly in our direction. And that is what is bringing on the dark skies and the cold weather. And when it reaches us, like the prison searchlight in the Nazi concentration camp, it will stop. And we will be pinned, like the lady jammed through the schoolyard fence with her blood mixed with the milk and broken bottles. And our blood will hurt as if it had glass in it. And it will be hot in that beam and our house will smell and smoke and turn brown at the edges and flare up in a great, sucking floop of flame.

  And that is exactly what happens.

  If they had something on them before Mindish was arraigned, why didn’t they pick them up? If they were suspects before Mindish made his deal, why were they given four weeks to run away, or destroy incriminating evidence, or otherwise damage the case against them? The only answer is FBI stupidity or inefficiency, and that is a reasonable answer but not a good one.


  Smoking. In Japan in the 16th century, Christians were winnowed out by having the entire population of a village walk across an image of Christ painted on rice paper and placed on the ground. Those who refused to step on Christ’s face were immediately taken out of the procession and hanged upside down over a slow-burning sulfur fire. This is one of the slowest and most painful forms of execution known to civilization: the victim’s eyes hemorrhage and his flesh is slowly smoked. His blood boils, and his brain roasts in its own juices. Death may come as late as the second week, without the victim’s previous loss of consciousness.

  First the strangulation of the phone. There are fewer calls each day. Then a period during which the phone rings once, twice, and is silent. Or I pick it up in time, but there is no answer. Finally, the phone stops ringing altogether. It is a dead thing. My father takes to making his outgoing calls in candy stores up and down 174th Street. I enjoy negotiating with him for nickels I happen to have. He needs lots of change, and during the day in school I make a point of trading off quarters for the small stuff. I like to be useful for his evening trips to the phone booth. I make no profit, I merely want to be a help to him. He travels farther and farther from the house, using up phone booths the way he uses up change.