Ascher said: “And the Soviets have not helped matters with their bomb. They are now as dangerous as we are. That is intolerable. And the Communists in China now run the show there. We find that intolerable too. It is not a period that our historians will be proud of us. We are in the mood that someone should pay for what we find intolerable. If you are not Robert Taft, watch out.”
This was hardly the kind of talk my mother could find comforting. Ascher was not a tactful man. He lacked a bedside manner. You accepted the way he was because of his obvious integrity, and because you had no choice. Ascher was not a political man, you could imagine him voting for anyone he found morally recognizable, no matter what the party. If anything, he was conservative. He perceived in the law a codification of the religious sense of life. He was said to have worked for years on a still unfinished book demonstrating the contributions of the Old Testament to American law. For Ascher witch-hunting was paganism. Irrationality was a sin. He came to our cold house and sat without taking off his coat, and with his homburg shoved back on his head, he asked a few questions and answered a few questions, and nodded and sighed, and shook his head. For Ascher, my parents’ communism was easily condoned because it was pathetic and gutsy at the same time. One of the people who wrote about Paul and Rochelle, a Jewish literary critic, said that they were so crass and hypocritical that they even called on their Jewish faith to sustain sympathy for themselves in their last months. This writer could not have understood Ascher. Or the large arms of ethical sanctity he could wrap around an atheistic Communist when in the person of a misfit Jew as ignorant as my father of the real practical world of men and power. Ascher understood how someone could forswear his Jewish heritage and take for his own the perfectionist dream of heaven on earth, and in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, still consider himself a Jew.
THE EDUCATION OF A LAWYER
We will watch this well-meaning but outclassed man as he goes downtown on the subway and learns the law as it is administered by highly motivated Federal prosecuting agencies.
After the FBI had been through the store, my mother opened it up so that customers could recover whatever was fixed, and so that we could collect whatever money my father had earned. We needed every dollar. We hadn’t enough for the rent, and while Ascher had said not to think about his fee, there was now a big, new expense to worry about in addition to everything else.
I took to my mother my blue tin of pennies and gave them to her: there was about eighty cents. She cried and hugged me as I had known she would. I wanted to see her cry. I wanted her to hug me. I wanted her to experience the poignancy of the moment I had planned.
Very few people came to the store. Those who did kept their faces averted, as if by looking my mother in the eye they would contract her misfortune. Somehow I knew there was gossip to the effect that Rochelle had gall to stand in the store with her children where everyone could see her in her shame. Nobody wanted to come near us. In this Jewish neighborhood Paul Isaacson was bad for the Jews. Had not McCarthy made a speech describing the great battle between international atheistic communism and Christianity? There was no question in anyone’s mind where the Jews belonged according to Joe McCarthy.
My mother was embittered by the reaction of the neighborhood. She thought about calling up those who had not picked up their radios, but decided against it. “We could be living in a peasant village,” she told Ascher. “The fear, the ignorance. No one, not even the few who are sympathetic, has considered that my husband might be innocent.”
“Even among the educated,” Ascher said. “That is the effect of a Federal Grand Jury indictment. It strains the presumption of innocence. But don’t worry, a court is still a court, and that is where it will be decided. Not on 174th Street, but in the courtroom.”
My father had been indicted along with Selig Mindish and unnamed others for conspiring to violate the Espionage Act of 1917. His bail had been set at one hundred thousand dollars. That meant he would be in jail until his trial, which Ascher said was months away. Ascher had pleaded that the bail was excessive, but his plea was rejected. The Korean War was going badly, the papers were speculating on the physical damage one atom bomb could do to the City of New York. So many hundreds of thousands dead; so many millions dying of radiation sickness; so many familiar streets turned into rubble.
The store was closed.
Here do the scene of Rochelle and her two children and Williams, the colored man who lives in the cellar, carrying radio parts, tools, boxes of tubes, etc., home from the Radio Store. Cleaning out the store over a period of a few cold, wintry days and marching home with tons of junk, even Susan in her pudgy little hands carrying radio parts. Williams pushing the TV console on a dolly, in that lumbering slow-motion walk, glowering Williams in his faded blue overalls pushing the TV set up 174th Street. Behind him the store is now empty. The windows are empty. The landlord has put a lock on the door, and a painter on a ladder is very quickly blanking out Isaacson Radio, Sales and Repair.
Our lives are shrinking. The Isaacson family exists now only to the edges of its own domesticity. For my father substitute a rubber-handled screwdriver which I have taken to cherishing, along with some empty red tube boxes which I stack like cells of a hierarchic structure, or like modules of a dramatic new city. Also, a heavy, old diamond-shaped microphone from a real radio station. It broadcasts on a secret frequency directly to my father in his jail cell. I whisper instructions as to what he should do when he hears the hoot of an owl outside his cell window tonight. It will be our rescue team coming to get him. I advise him to be ready and to wait further instructions. Roger, he radios back to me. Roger and out, I reply.
In the papers I hear his voice. He tells reporters that the charge against him is insane. I have his picture in handcuffs down at Foley Square. He does not know the English scientist, the Canadian immigrants, the New Jersey engineer. He knows Mindish only as a friend. While our life is shrinking, another existence, another dimension, expands its image and amplifies its voices. The picture I save of my mother shows her walking down the front steps of our house, holding her arm up to shield her face from the camera. Or is her arm held out in the threatening gesture the caption claims? She tells a reporter her husband is innocent, and that the FBI took things from her house without a search warrant. The story describes her attitude as defiant.
In this new dimension of life we are spread into headlines and news broadcasts. Our troops are being captured and killed. My mother reads of some hill in Korea, and says to me, “We shall bear the brunt.” She is pale and her face is thin. She eats very little. She is composed but often, with no warning, grabs me and hugs me too tight or studies Susan’s face or combs Susan’s hair with inordinate pleasure in the texture of die dark, silken hair, or the smell of its cleanliness after she washes it. I feel sometimes she studies me as if gauging the amount of my father in me, and the amount of Rochelle.
For a week or two only Ascher or the reporters came to our door. Then one evening there was a knock and it was one of the interesting people, Ben Cohen, the gentle friend, always so quiet. He had come directly from work from the subway where it was his job to make change and which protects him from the atom bomb.
The sight of him causes my mother to weep. Awkwardly, he pats her on the shoulder.
“It’s not smart to come here, Ben. It isn’t a smart thing to do. You’re a foolish man,” she says in gratitude.
He frowns, shakes his head. They have a cup of tea in the kitchen. He combs his mustache with his fingers. He lights his pipe. He hangs one skinny leg over the other. He listens to my mother.
“What possessed him to do it? Can you tell me? All these years … If you cannot expect civilized behavior, simple decency from your friends, of whom can you expect it? I think about it and I think about it, and I cannot make heads or tails of it. I just can’t understand what possesses a man to do something so terrible. To ruin a family, the lives of children.”
Ben, mute, shakes his
head.
“And I cannot forgive his wife, either. There has never been any love lost between Sadie Mindish and me. God knows what they have concocted between them.”
Ben Cohen says, “I want you to tell your lawyer that I will make myself useful in any way I can. I will testify as your witness. Anything.”
“Paul has already discussed this with Ascher. Paul told Ascher he doesn’t want to implicate anyone, he doesn’t want any of our friends to get involved. With the way things are, anyone who associates with us is himself made suspect. He says he could not bear the responsibility, it would weigh too heavily on him. And on me too, Ben. It’s enough to know you have offered it.”
There is something in her behavior, a regality of suffering, that is not lost on me. Perhaps the way she measures out her words keeps her emotions under control.
“Some financial help,” Ben Cohen pleads in his quiet voice.
My mother cries. “I miss him so. Ascher says he is fine. His letter says he is fine. But how can a man in jail be fine? He is locked up like some common criminal.”
Ben is the first of a thin trickle of friends who came to see us. Nate Silverstein, the furrier with the hoarse voice and the red face. Henry Bergman, the fiddler. I forget who else. It was a very small number. In fact they were braving not only the FBI, but the downtown hierarchy of the Communist Party. I know that within twenty-four hours of my father’s arrest, both he and my mother were written out of the Party. They were erased from the records. The Party did not want to be associated with anyone up on an espionage rap. Quickly and quietly erased out of existence.
But of the people who came, not one came without leaving a few dollars, or a cake, or a pound of cookies from the bakery, or a box of candy from Krum’s near Fordham Road. Susan said to me: “Is my daddy dead?” I felt the same way. It was like when Grandma died and people came. It was like we were sitting shivah for my father.
I asked my mother what was going to happen. She told me there would be a trial to decide if my father was guilty. “Your dad,” she called him. “The trial will determine if your dad is guilty.”
“Guilty of what?”
“Guilty of being a spy, of giving secrets. But really guilty of wanting a new world of socialism without want.”
I knew he was guilty of that, and I began to cry. “What will happen to him? What will happen to my father? What will they do to him? Will they kill him? Will he be dead?”
“Now, Daniel. Come here. Come here. I always forget how young you are. Isn’t that funny? Let me hug you. Let me hug my Danny. He’s such a big brave boy, I keep forgetting he’s not old at all. He takes such good care of his baby sister, I forget that he’s a baby too.”
“I’m not a baby.”
“He’s my baby.”
My lips were touching her cheek. “And then they’ll get you,” I sobbed.
“No, no, honey.”
“Dr. Mindish will kill you, too.”
“Don’t be afraid of Mindish. Feel sorry for him. Don’t be afraid of the Mindishes of this world. Pity them.” She pulled away from me. Her mood was changing. “Nobody can hurt them worse than they hurt themselves. Nobody can be hurt by them as badly as they hurt themselves. The treachery of that man will haunt him for as long as he lives. His treachery will haunt his children. Mindish will live forever in hell for the terrible thing he has done. He has exiled himself from the community of man.”
I couldn’t control the sobs that racked me.
“Stop crying, Daniel. Don’t cry. Nobody can hurt us. Hold your head up. Hold your shoulders back. Don’t be afraid. Nobody will take your daddy away from you. No one can take us away from our babies.”
Rochelle attempted to preserve the remnants of normal routine. Every morning I was packed off to school. I hated to go. I felt that if I wasn’t home, the FBI would kidnap her. I was terrified of their coming back. I ran home for lunch and I ran home at three o’clock.
I never told her, but in school things were hardly normal. One day the principal came into our room and spoke to the teacher up at the board so that no one could hear him. After he left, I was asked by my teacher to go to another room for a few minutes. It was an empty room and I sat there the rest of the day. The next day I spent in the school library—the whole morning, and the whole afternoon. The day after that, when I was admitted back into my class, I was placed in the first seat of the row next to the window. I wondered about the change. I understood that this new position left me in proximity to the least number of other kids. It didn’t bother me that much. In fact it was convenient because every few minutes I had to jump up to hoist myself on the radiators for a look out the window to my house—to see if anything was different. The teacher, with a fake smile, treated me with too much courtesy. As if she was afraid I would break. I was allowed to look out as many times as I wanted to. Her inability to hold to our previous relationship made me feel lonely. In trying to act as if nothing was different she phonied up the whole room. The kids all felt it. They felt it when she overpraised me, as if I was in kindergarten, for the answer I gave to some shitty little question. They wanted to talk about my father, but she wouldn’t let them.
“Is Daniel’s father a spy?”
“We won’t talk about that now, dear.”
I compared to my mother, uncharacteristically thin and pale, with the skin of her face so white it had become almost colorless, as something to see through to her flesh or bone—this opaque teacher with red lipstick and red fingernails, and shiny white teeth, all glazed porcelain, and smelling of flower water, who called me “dear.”
I was told by kids in my class that in prison they pull your fingernails out with a pliers, and they chain you to the wall, and it’s always dark, and the rats eat you, and that you have only bread and water to eat, and the bread has worms. I was told that the Army had already shot my father because he was a Russian. I was told that General MacArthur flew all the way from Japan to cut off my father’s prick with a scissors.
I asked Rochelle what prison was like. She told me that during the War she had been a Volunteer for the Blood Donor program, and one day they took blood from men in prison in downtown Manhattan. Maybe it was the very same prison. She said it was very clean. In each cell was a cot, a chair, and a window. And it was true that the window had bars, and the cell had bars, and that the walls were tile, and the floors were cement, and it was hardly cozy; but it was clean. And the prisoners were allowed to read. And they went to a dining room to eat three times a day. And there was a small yard where they could get fresh air. And they had blankets to keep them warm at night.
“Really,” my mother smiled at me. “It’s not so bad.”
One morning she told me she had to go downtown to testify before the Grand Jury. By the time I was ready to leave for school, Grandma’s old friend, Mrs. Bittelman, had arrived to sit with Susan. For Mrs. Bittelman the community of misery had no politics. My mother had been desperate after being served the summons because she did not know who would take care of Susan while she was gone. She had no money to pay anyone. My father’s two sisters, Frieda and Ruth, both worked, and besides that neither of them had come to see us or called since Paul had been put in jail. I suppose they felt they were the ones who ought to be consoled. Then my mother remembered Grandma’s friend, around the corner, and she went to knock on Mrs. Bittelman’s door and the kind woman said she would stay with Susan.
“I should be back before you’re out of school, Danny. But in case not, have some milk and cookies when you get home. And take Susan to the park. For lunch I left you a peanut butter sandwich and an apple in the icebox.”
I didn’t want her to go.
“I have to go, Daniel.”
“They’re going to put you in jail, too.”
“No, they’re not. They want to ask me questions, that’s all. That’s what a Grand Jury is. You are asked questions and they listen to your answers. The government lawyers want to ask me about Daddy, and I’m going to tell them wha
t a terrible thing they’re doing and make them understand he’s innocent.”
The Book of Daniel Page 14