“I don’t want anyone to be afraid of me,” Daniel said. He seemed offended. He sat down on a tweed armchair, leaned back, and stuck his legs out and crossed them at the ankles. He massaged his forehead. I looked at Linda Mindish and saw the premature middle age at the corners of her mouth and under her eyes. She is five years older than I am. She is ten years older than Susan. She has worked hard. She looks at me and waits. In her eyes perhaps the recollection of our strange relationship of rib-poking, pushing, touching—she, her menses attained, and an eight-year-old boy. Always trying to break little Daniel’s hand, twist his fingers, dig nails in his arm. Why? As Selig her father precedes her into the Isaacson house without knocking and sees what’s in the icebox. As he laughs and makes a joke in his Polish accent. As he patronizes the child Paul. As he covets in his low-grade chronic coveting Paul’s wife. How did my thing with Linda begin? Imposed on her face in this moment is the thirteen-year-old girl with the terrible misfortune to look like her father. Drop dead. That was a favorite expression of Linda’s. Daniel, will you do me a favor? What? Drop dead. Followed by a fake smile, a mirthless flash of teeth, turned on and off, to illuminate the second stage of my wisdom—I was entitled to nothing but deeper and deeper levels of her alienation. She had gotten that line from some play or movie very big in the Bronx at the time. Do me a favor: drop dead. She exercised on me, bringing from what jungles of girl society in the upper grades I could only imagine, every shitty verbal abuse of the day.
“Linda, I think we ought to get down to business. After all you do have appointments this morning,” the lawyer said. Image white coat hands in the pockets chew on the other side for a day or two. Kind of woman at her best in an office.
“I recognize in you the same look, the same look I see in the mirror. It’s very familiar to me.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“The look of the same memories. We walk around in the same memories. It’s like a community.”
She sat down on the couch next to the lawyer and their hands met. They held hands sitting facing me on the couch.
“Linda’s a big girl and I can only advise her what to do,” the lawyer said. “Tell us what you’re getting at. There is nothing Linda or her father has to fear from you. There is no legal issue here. We’re not obliged to discuss that case with you.” He says “that case” as if he’s dangling someone’s pair of dirty drawers. “Do you need money? What’s your problem?”
I said: “What did you say your name was? Dale? Why don’t you shut up for a fucking minute, Dale. I’m trying to tell her something. You weren’t there, were you? I don’t remember seeing you there.”
The lawyer glanced at Linda, struggled to his feet. He was white. “I want to warn you that as a lawyer I’m in a position to advise you on intimidation, threatened or implied, and on assault or threat of an assault in the state of California.” He is pointing his shaking finger.
Daniel waited, like a public speaker, for silence. His eyes were closed. He had seen enough of the lawyer. He understood more of Linda by her lawyer: a fellow with brown shining eyes, Disney-animal eyelashes, square clothes, skinhead haircut. Emanates passivism. To be kind. Maybe it’s his chin which in a few years will be completely engulfed in itself. Yet he’s blandly good-looking. Thirty-seven, -eight years old. A dangerous wide-hipped whitey.
Daniel opened his eyes. The lawyer had sat back down. I think he had only wanted to show Linda that he could act commendably. Daniel said, “What I mean is both of us, we both live lives that accommodate an event neither of us was responsible for. Can you agree with that? Is that a reasonably fair description?”
She stared at him. Almost imperceptibly her head dipped, as if in assenting she wanted him to know how small how shallow the space they could both stand in. And even that she had to recant: “You, however, are the one who’s bringing it up. You’re the one who’s come here to dredge things up.”
“I’m hoping your father can help me settle some questions.”
“What questions? Are there still questions? As far as I knew all questions were settled a long time ago.”
“Do you really want me to talk in front of this guy?”
“Dale and I are going to be married.” Their entwined hands lie between them on the couch. They stare at me attached in identical poses, feet flat on the floor in front of them, knees together, the dentist and her fiancé, a professional couple, and my heart sinks in the blank stare of their insularity and rises in rage as I realize whatever I mean to do I need them and rely upon them and have come three thousand miles to see them.
But there are certain things I am pretty sure of. It is not likely that Linda Mindish and her parents are prepared to reclaim their identity. I can assume the loyal friends she mentioned on the phone consist only of this guy. He is their big breakthrough. Therefore I am still a threat, I am potentially the public exposure of what neither of them right now wants exposed. On the other hand, although they have something to protect I’m sure that he, at least, feels his knowledge of the law and the fact that he practices here where he lives gives them leverage. I am a transient. He would want to persuade her that he can handle me with ease.
Yet it might have occurred to her after my phone call, granting her now a shrewdness far beyond my own, that an approach such as I made is essentially one of diplomacy. And that although she should of course anticipate something even as stupid as violence on my part, it is not likely. And that it might be worth the cost of a few tense moments to see what I want to trade. And an intuition, perhaps, that whatever it is she can take me. And be rid of the last possible connection. They had children. Someday we’ll have to deal with the children. I am good at dealing. My parents suffer no winters. They lack real friends, but so does everybody. Everybody here comes from somewhere else. Their neighbors nod to them in the morning. Once a week a Japanese gardener trims the little yard. I have my practice. I have Dale. There is more money in the Mindish family than Selig ever dreamed. Why should I think this bearded misfit is more of a test than my whole life has been since my father was arrested.
“I am interested to know how you and your mother supported yourselves after your father went to jail.”
“What?”
“Linda, it’s none of his business.”
“You were fourteen or fifteen. Your mother was not the kind of woman who could go out and get a job. Savings don’t last six, seven years. And when you moved out here with your father he never resumed practicing, did he? I mean he hasn’t practiced since his jail term, as I understand it. And you were able to get through college and dental college.”
“Linda, don’t feel obliged to explain—”
“No, it’s all right, Dale. I see what he’s getting at. In the first place there’s no tuition if you live here,” she said to me. “And I had scholarships besides. I carried extra course loads and I held down jobs. And in the second place my father worked in a lab until just a few years ago.”
She sat up at the edge of the couch with her hands folded in her lap and her ankles primly together. “It’s true what you say, Danny, neither you nor I was responsible for anything that happened. But we’ve borne the brunt. When my father went to prison my mother and I suffered terribly. But something else was good about the experience—I discovered all sorts of resources in myself that I otherwise might not have. From what I can see, and from what I’ve heard, neither you nor your sister have been that fortunate.
“In many ways I had it worse. Your parents after all were heroes to some elements. Today I understand you can find Isaacson Streets all through Eastern Europe. But Selig Mindish was a hero to no one, to say the least. What my father did brings no honor to himself or his family. You lose friends for something like that. You go to jail, where your health breaks. And afterwards you make no new friends. So you see in many ways it has been worse. I’ll tell you something: there used to be times when I wished strongly, very strongly, that my father might be executed, that we could change places
, the Isaacsons and Mindishes, and that I would be glad to stand in your shoes if only you could stand in mine. Let me have your hanky, Dale.”
Daniel watched her. He folded his hands under his chin and rested his elbows on the arms of the chair. A surprisingly cool and objective eye glanced at him as Linda blew her nose.
“You call up with all this phony hippie humility and the minute you’re in the door you start getting nasty.”
“I didn’t bring my lawyer,” Daniel says.
“Perhaps you should have.”
“I didn’t hide my father somewhere.”
“You take me for a fool? Should I have believed you? I owe you nothing. Your whole family have always been liars. All full of high ideals except when it comes to other people. Except when it comes to ruining the lives of friends.”
“What does that mean?”
“They led Papa down the garden path. From the day he met them. They were always too good for him, but not too good to let him chauffeur them where they wanted to go, or run their errands, or fix their teeth, or turn into a spy for them. He wasn’t an intellectual. I was a child but even I understood how little respect they had, and how they took advantage.”
“Linda, honey, calm yourself,” Dale said.
But she was calmer than he was. The way an actor is calm as the audience takes his emotion to heart. For one moment I experienced the truth of the situation as an equitability of evil. This is what happens to us, to the children of trials; our hearts run to cunning, our minds are sharp as claws. Such shrewdness has to be burned into the eye’s soul, it is only formed in fire. There is no way in the world either of us would not be willing to use our sad lives; no betrayal impossible of our pain; no use too cheap of our patrimony. If Susan had only had a small portion! But nothing Susan did ever lacked innocence: no matter how loud, how demanding, how foolish, how self-destructive, nothing Susan did lacked innocence. This bitch was another matter. I imagined her in bed. There was no question in my mind that she wouldn’t refuse. That’s why she had called her fiancé—not to protect herself from my violence, but to keep intact her planned recovery from the life of Linda Mindish. She could take it on back very quickly. With just a small push. It would not be uninteresting, it would not be without blood, an incest of blood and death and jism and egg more corrupt than any I could have with my real sister. There was enough hard corruption in Linda Mindish and me, flawless forged criminals of perception, to exhaust the fires of the sun.
And then that moment passed and I saw her as locked into her family truths as we were locked in ours. Were these her formulations, or her mother Sadie’s? Hadn’t Sadie and her husband built them over the years of visiting hours? Wouldn’t they do that? I saw myself as having provided Linda the opportunity to say out loud the righteous complaint that this family had had in rehearsal for fifteen years.
“Well, the awful Isaacsons are dead, Linda. All you have to worry about is me. And what can I do? Expose you to your friends and neighbors in Orange County, California? But you moved here for a reason. It was a shrewd place to come. If your cover is blown there’s always room for an ex-Communist in Orange County. Right? After all, your old man helped bust a notorious spy ring. He was not without his part in the execution of the infamous Isaacsons, was he?”
Linda was looking grim. The lawyer said, “His testimony is a matter of record.”
“Right, it surely is. But there are still questions to be answered.” Daniel thought a moment. “For instance, have you ever discussed with him why he confessed? You’re a lawyer, Dale. Don’t you have a professional interest? It’s one of the great cases.”
“That’s a naïve question.”
“Why—because he was caught? And he purged himself and confessed and told the truth? To make that penance, right? Is that why he did it—because he was caught and had no choice? Or did he do it to save himself, to save his own life. My parents thought so—they thought he implicated them to save himself. They thought he was a spy. Or they pretended to. It’s all very puzzling.”
“What are you talking about,” said Linda.
“Shit, I don’t know. I wanted to tell your father I think he was innocent. I wanted to lay that on him,”
They looked at each other briefly as if an idea they had considered before my arrival—that I was a madman—seemed now brimming with prescience. Linda crossed her legs, adjusted her skirt. She picked a cigarette out of the box on the end table and held it before her in that stiff-fingered way of lady smokers, as Dale got out his lighter.
“You make me very sad.”
“Yeah, well, it’s hard to get it down, I know. I had trouble myself. But start with the idea that there was a spy ring and the whole thing was just as he testified in court. You’ve got to ask yourself why. There was no evidence except his confession. If he had not confessed there would have been no case against anyone, including himself. My father, I mean my foster father, thinks that he was hassled by the FBI. He thinks Selig just couldn’t hold up under the questioning. They had him for a long time. They had something on him—maybe citizenship. That he’s not a, urn, sophisticated man and didn’t know what could and couldn’t be done. But I disagree with that.”
“You do.”
“Yes. It’s possible he realized every value in the situation beautifully. My father’s interpretation lacks a knowledge of the old Left. The life of embattled Communist Party members in those days. That’s what’s missing from his analysis. There was another couple everybody in the Bronx membership knew about who had dropped out of Party life some years before. Did you ever hear of them? It was commonly rumored in the ranks, because none of our families or their friends were anything more than rank and file, that the other couple went underground, into espionage work. They took on a certain heroic mystery, that other couple. Do you know their name? Did your father every mention them to you? Has he ever said anything about this?”
“No, Danny.”
“Well, this other couple had two children. They were about the same age as my parents. A lot of mythology grew up about them. You didn’t talk about them without lowering your voice. Who knows how many children they had? Or what their age was? But they were supposed to have been fairly young, with kids, and they were said to live just a few blocks away, up on the Concourse.”
Think about it a while. Look at me.
“Is that all?” the lawyer says.
“Well, that’s the gist of it.”
He shook his head and smiled sadly. “It is highly speculative, to say the least.”
“That’s right. That’s why I want to talk to Selig.”
“Stop calling my father Selig,” Linda said.
“I have his fillings still in my mouth,” Daniel said with his palms in the air.
“Let me see if I understand this.”
“Oh Dale, it’s insane.”
“No, honey, just a minute. Now you’re saying that Dr. Mindish lied about your parents in deference to another couple who looked like them?”
“I don’t know if they looked like them. To protect another couple everyone thought was working under cover. To keep the FBI away from people of real value. They were closing in. To divert them. To get the heat off.”
“And that Dr. Mindish, who was innocent, made this story up about himself and your parents?”
“Well, actually Selig doesn’t have to be innocent for the theory to work. He might have been involved marginally. He might have been told to do it. But all right, let’s say innocent.”
“And that this mythical couple, these other people, were the ones who actually stole the secrets?”
“Well, not necessarily, because it’s never been proven that any secrets were stolen. It isn’t what really happened or was going to happen. It was what Selig and or some of the others thought had happened or was going to happen. It was as much fantasy as what the FBI thought had happened.”
“I see. And have you come up with any facts, or any information in support of this?”
THE THEORY OF THE OTHER COUPLE
Shannon, in THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM, shows us the immense contribution made by the American Communist Party to its own destruction within a few years after the war. They had all the haughty, shrewd instincts of a successful suicide. It is no wonder in this club of ideologues of the working class, self-designed martyrs, Stalinist tuning forks, sentimentalists, visionaries, misfits, hysterics, fantasists, and dreamers of justice—no wonder that a myth would spring out of their awe for someone truly potent. It is ironic that such a myth would arise without planning or intent from their laboriously induced collective mythic self. But they were helpless before it. We have our daredevils too. We have our cat burglars and laughing caballeros. Our George Rafts flipping coins. Our masked riders of the plains. We have them.
The mystery couple of the Grand Concourse, and their two children, walked out of their apartment one Sunday as if for an outing. They carried no luggage. A camera over his shoulder. A tote bag in her hand. Leaving an apartment intact, with dishes in the drain, they were never seen again. This happened soon after my father was arrested. They were later reported to be living under another name in New Zealand. They were reported to be traveling through Britain on Australian passports. They were reported traveling through France on British passports. They were arrested in West Berlin, held for six months without trial, and exchanged for two Englishmen held by the Russians in Moscow. They were last reported living in Leningrad.
When Selig Mindish was called to the stand, my mother sat up in her chair and folded her arms and lifted her head. There he was. He looked shrunken. He was a physically big man but she was shocked now to see how different he had become, all collapsed, all fallen in on himself, with his neck sticking out of his collar and his suit that seemed to slide over him as he moved. But the fat nose was still fat and the little pearl-grey eyes shone their dog intelligence at Feuerman’s assistant, the greasy one, who began to lead him through his testimony.
The Book of Daniel Page 30