The Book of Daniel (15 page)

July–August, 1967,

I was very careful with Phyllis. We lived in a state of convalescence, waking up each morning to find the marriage somewhat stronger but still in need of hugs and kisses and tender lovemaking. A self-conscious period of serious talks showed signs of coming to an end. In these talks she looked for a rationale to forgive me and I was able to help her find one. We tried to share responsibility for my actions. We considered me as our mutual problem. I was shameless. We did our family shopping together on Broadway, and some evenings that were particularly hot I took her to the movies and I held Paul in my lap as he slept and we watched the flick. Our apartment was unlivable on hot days. I spent thirty dollars american for a hassock fan. We live in two rooms on 115th between Broadway and Riverside Drive, right off the breezy Hudson, but you can’t tell if you look out the
window. We’re in the back and we face the back of another apartment house. There are no breezes. You can hear rats in the walls. Phyllis in this time started to dream about moving out of New York. In the morning she walked me over to the library, holding my arm as I carried Paul. She would leave me at the front door of Butler and take Paul and walk off thinking happily about another day’s progress on my dissertation and how it would earn me the degree that would free us from New York. She imagined a small college out west where I would be willing to teach and she might even enroll as a student. It would be nothing like Columbia. No soot in the grass. I didn’t disabuse her. Perhaps she could summon up my dissertation, actually create it, just by imagining me here in the library. Why not, if her imagination was good enough?

One autumn day, with the wind slicing through the chain link fence around the schoolyard, and heavy grey clouds racking into each other over the rooftops of apartment houses, Rochelle went shopping with her son, Daniel, and her baby daughter, Susan. Daniel, as he was instructed, held onto the white wicker stroller his mother was pushing. It was an old summer stroller, with small, solid wheels and streamlined raindrop fenders like the wheelcovers on racing planes of the 1930’s, and a top that could swing back to let the sun in. Daniel himself had ridden in it when he was a baby. Now it was Susan’s. Rochelle had wrapped a blanket about the legs of the little girl and snugged it up to her chin. Daniel wore his mackinaw and a hunter’s cap with the earflaps pulled down. They were going to the butcher’s and then to the Daitch Dairy and maybe they’d stop in and say hello to their father in his store. I think this was in 1949 or 1950. I was seven or eight. Susan was about four. As we came down alongside the purple castle of a school and crossed Eastburn Avenue on 174th Street, and passed the shoemaker, Rochelle suddenly began to walk very fast, going past the Daitch Dairy, Daniel running to catch up with his hand.

“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 humor 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.”