The Book of Daniel (11 page)

Sometimes Grandma went the other way. Then, in a few hours the phone would ring. Or sometimes a police car—a police car!—would pull up to the curb in front of the house, a green and white police car, and Grandma would emerge with great dignity, contemptuous of the cops who tried to help her out of their car. A green and white police car would pull up. Here is Grandma furiously shaking off the patronizing grip of the Bronx cop as she struggles out of their car.

    In my life as Daniel, I heard several explanations for Grandma’s plunges into the pit. Susan, age fifteen, in her new ivy-league cool: “I never knew Grandmother, but from what you
say, I suspect it was menopause.” My mother, during a particularly bad spell—I have stopped by the door to watch my father holding the thrashing old woman down on her bed so that the Doctor can give her a shot; small and frail, she is putting up a terrific struggle; and my mother stands at the foot of the bed shouting “Mama, stop it. Stop this nonsense, stop it, Mama!” and then, seeing me stricken pale in the doorway, my mother leads me downstairs and explains why, at the age of five or six or whatever I am, I am subjected to such things … It is simple: Grandma goes mad when she can no longer consider the torment of her life. My mother’s catalogue of the old lady’s misfortunes—the abandoned parents whose brown picture she still keeps in her drawer, the death of her first-born in the street, the death of her two sisters in the big fire, the death of her second-born from the flu, the death of her husband, my grandfather who would have loved me if he’d lived. “What killed him was not tuberculosis, what killed him and killed them all was poverty and exploitation, and that means being poor and being kept poor by people who grow fat and rich from your labor. It’s not fair, is it?”

“No, Ma.”

“Your grandma slaved all her life. To end up with nothing.”

Ignore the reverberations of that remark. Ignore the reverberations. Ignore them. Ignore … My father believed that a life committed to superstition could have no other end than madness, because madness was the disease of fantasy and fantasy of God, or superstition, was itself madness, a predictably abnormal expression of impoverished life. The most enormous problem faced by the Bolsheviks, he said, was education of the peasants. The Russian peasants had been kept in ignorance and illiteracy for so many generations that they were not much more than animals. God was an instrument of the Czar. And Grandma grew up, of course, in the
shtetl
of a provincial Russian town, a Jew, but also a Russian peasant. My father always gives you more of an answer than you bargained for.

And now let me put down what Grandma herself said about her tunings in and out. Occasionally, after her death, she liked to visit me and press a penny into my palm and bless my head,
and call me a good boy. And once I asked her why she felt it necessary to blow her mind in a way so frightening to children. And Grandma said:

“In any one day, it is possible to derive joy from your being and be nourished by it. In a filthy room with cold, broken windows and the clatter of your oppression in the streets, it is possible. And starving, with your teeth rotting in your mouth, and age like lead in your bones, and your eyes shattered with the horror of what you have seen—all together, and with the madness of your children thrown in, I call it God. And there is a traditional liturgy which is lovely in itself, but which reminds you too that others born and died know this feeling also. So I sing to myself in that language. And my curses are my love for them whom I curse for existing at the mercy of life and God and for the dust they will allow themselves to become for having been born. And my complicity in their being, the fruit of my womb, that I could have tricked them this way outrages me. Unable to stay in their presence for my love of them which they do not understand, and my terrible fear of their blasphemy, and their tampering with all the deep, intricate solderings of the universe. Do you begin to understand? I am speaking of the only form of ecstasy allowed to old ladies. It begins with the fear of not being able to breathe. And they inherit that from me, too, as you do, that excess of passion that shimmering fullness of stored life which always marks the victim. What we have, too much life in each of us, is what the world hates most. We offend. We stink with life. Our hearts make love to the world not gently. We are brutal with life and our brutality is called suffering. We scream into our pillows when we come.

“You are a good boy, Daniel. What I mean by that is perhaps only that you have compassion, and that however much I scared you, or however bad I smelled from my asthma, you trusted me enough to accept my pennies and let me call you a good boy. Or perhaps it is that I recognized in you the strength and innocence that will reclaim us all from defeat. That will exonerate our having lived and justify our suffering.”

“Now that scares me more than anything, Grandma.”

“You’re fuckin’ right, Dan. Just remember, though, this placing of the burden on the children is a family tradition. But
only your crazy grandma had the grace to make a ritual of it. Ritual being an artful transfer of knowledge. And pennies being the sum of her life’s value.”

A medical textbook. On the white and shining pages are photographs of three female bodies. Little, withered Grandma with her head of wildly twisted grey hair. Rochelle, strong, breasty, stocky, prim mouthed. And Susan in her thin gold granny glasses. They stand in a row across the double-page spread, palms turned slightly out, feet turned slightly out, nothing hidden. They could be standing up or lying down. Grandma looks like the wrinkled matriarch of an aboriginal tribe. Rochelle’s got the bosoms, but Susan is taller and more feminine. They all have triangles, but move your gaze upward. This is a medical textbook. The meaning of the picture is in the thin, diagrammatic arrow line, colored red, that runs from Grandma’s breast through your mama’s and into your sister’s. The red line describes the progress of madness inherited through the heart.

cottage cheese, tomatoes if they are good, a pound of hamburger, something gooey for dessert.

On the theory that what occurs is right. Any action is correct because it happens. What of that theory? Only if it works. I worry about images. Images are what things mean. Take the word image. It connotes soft, sheer flesh shimmering on the air, like the rainbowed slick of a bubble. Image connotes images, the multiplicity being an image. Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual’s calloused capacity to feel powerful undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality. They serve no social purpose.

You are going to have to shoot straight with Professor Sukenick. He thinks you are not applying for an NDEA fellowship
because you refuse on principle to sign a loyalty oath. Why is shooting straight a metaphor for honesty? I am not applying for a fellowship because if I sign a hundred loyalty oaths, I still won’t get it. I should tell him who I am. Not that I’ve attempted to hide this information, but it is difficult to work it into any kind of small talk. Sukenick is a youth-sympathetic liberal, very sharp. He would be intrigued by my story. He would not believe that the government checks me out once or twice a year. My own father doesn’t believe it. Of course, this is not an assignment any FBI man, even the most callow, could consider without yawning. Nevertheless, my dossier is up to date. I live in constant and degrading relationship to the society that has destroyed my mother and father. I will never be drafted. If I left school today my classification would still be 2-A, which covers any situation not in the national interest. Listen, Professor, I could burn my draft card on the steps of the Pentagon and nothing would happen. Nothing I do will result in anything but an additional entry in my file. My file. I am deprived of the chance of resisting my government. They have no discoveries to make about me. They will not regard anything I do as provocative, disruptive or insulting. Nobody in the Federal police will ever say to a colleague: Who
is
this guy! No matter what political or symbolic act I perform in protest or disobedience, no harm will befall me. I have worked this out. It’s true. I am totally deprived of the right to be dangerous. If I were to assassinate the President, the criminality of my family, its genetic criminality, would be established. There is nothing I can do, mild or extreme, that they cannot have planned for. In the meantime, they have only to make sure that I am in no way involved with the United States Government, either as a social beneficiary, or as a servitor, however humble. They will give me no money. They will force me into no uniform. No administration will ever be connected to me in any way to make itself vulnerable to the opportunism of congressmen.

If, on the other hand, I were to become publically militant Daniel Isaacson all their precautions would have been justified. And probably whatever cause I lent myself to could be more easily discredited.

The final existential condition is citizenship. Every man is the
enemy of his own country. EVERY MAN IS THE ENEMY OF HIS OWN COUNTRY. Every country is the enemy of its own citizens. Here are some places in the world I don’t have to look out for: Switzerland, Finland, Bolivia, Uruguay, Sweden, Red China, Taiwan, Soviet Russia, England, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, Canada, the entire continent of Africa, the entire continent of Antarctica, Japan, Mexico, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Burma, Israel, Egypt, South America, Cuba, Haiti, Aukland, all the little stamps in the stamp album, the Free Port of Shannon. All these places have relationships with my country not with me. My relationship is with my country. In the film
Paths of Glory
, a French regiment is shown in the trenches during World War I. They are ordered to attack with their rifles and bayonets an impregnable German position called The Pimple. They physically are not able to bring themselves to leap out of their trenches to commit this mass suicide. In a rage, their General behind the lines orders his own artillery to fire upon them. The artillery balks. The General withdraws this regiment from the lines and punishes it for rank disobedience by executing three enlisted men who have been picked by straw lot. Their own comrades are the firing squad. In war the soldier’s destruction is accomplished by his own Commanders. It is his government which places a rifle in his hands, puts him up on the front, and tells him his mission is to survive. All societies are armed societies. All citizens are soldiers. All Governments stand ready to commit their citizens to death in the interest of their government.

Drawing and Quartering.
This particular form of execution was favored by English monarchic government against all except the aristocratic inner circle which was allowed the dignity of simple beheading. For everyone else the method worked like this: the transgressor was hanged and cut down before he was dead. Then he was emasculated, disemboweled, and his entrails were set on fire in front of his eyes. If the executioner was merciful the heart was then removed from the body, but in any case, the final act of the ritual was then performed,
a hacking of the body into four parts, the quarters then being thrown to the dogs. Treason was the usual crime for this punishment, its definition being determined by the King’s courts for the King’s convenience.

In 1954, Robert Lewin accepted an appointment as Assistant Professor of Law at Boston College, a Jesuit institution in Newton, Massachusetts. Making a modest down payment, he bought an old house in nearby Brookline, and with his wife and two children, Daniel, fourteen, and Susan, nine, took possession one warm September afternoon a week or so before classes began. The three-story house, grey stucco with maroon trim and a roof of slate, was situated on Winthrop Road. This was a quiet residential avenue that curved up the hill from Beacon Street with its stores and trolley tracks. It wound through facing ranks of attached redstones, apartment buildings and cumbersome old houses set close to one another on small lots. The best feature of the new house as far as the Lewins were concerned was that it produced income to pay for itself. Inside the front door, with its clear, plastic louvers, was a small entranceway to two doors, two mailboxes, two bells. Like many of the houses in the neighborhood, number 67 was built for two families and designed to look as if it contained only one. The Lewins occupied the ground floor, and half of the second. Their tenants occupied half of the second floor and all of the third. Each apartment had a downstairs and an upstairs, and each was a mirror version of the other.

The two-family house was just an odd fact in the Lewin children’s odd life. Every sound had echoes, every image bore another. The very first full day in the house, before anything was unpacked, the new family went exploring, running down the one hundred forty-seven wood steps of Winthrop Path (always to be that number, the same each time, a source of great satisfaction) between the tiers of backyards on this terraced hill with the backs of houses resting on stilts, Brookline being built on hills; and catching the Beacon Street trolley to downtown Boston. There, in their explorations—all of them being
New Yorkers—they came upon the street signs of the Freedom Trail.

It is possible that the law professor and his wife were facing it squarely, right off the bat. It is possible they had decided to begin immediately to describe alternatives. Yet, according to one criminal of perception who watched them rather closely, they did not easily adjust to the presence of the ghosts in the lives of their children. These ghosts were not strange sounds in the attic, nor were they mists who moaned in the midnight garden. These ghosts were ironies. These ghosts were slips of the tongue. They were the brutal meanings in innocent remarks. They were the necessity to remain sensitive to your own words and gestures. These ghosts clung to the roof of your mouth, they hovered in your brain like fear, they resided in your muscles like nerves.

Sit up straight, Danny. You’re always squirming. This particular dinnertable remark of Lise’s put her to bed with a white hankie crumpled in her fist. I recreate an evening of over a dozen years ago. My new mother is really upset. My new father, sucking his pipe, tunes his fine mind to the problem, runs his fingers through his then brown hair, already sparse from running his fingers through it as he thinks. He sits by the bed, ignoring the sound of his wife’s weeping. He thinks the problem through and reaches something like the intellectual translation of his children’s feelings.