The Book of Daniel (17 page)

Either my mother nodded that they could come in, or they took her silence as permission. I know she would have been anxious to keep the cold out. They walked through the door and immediately there was an electric charge of life just outside, and right behind them came another man, then two more, then a few more, all warmly dressed and well tailored for the harsh autumn morning, a dozen FBI men, all told, bringing into our little splintery house all the chill of the outdoors on their bulky shoulders. They poured through the front door like an avalanche of snow.

“What is it now!” my mother shouted.

“Rochelle!” my father called.

I looked outside. Five or six sedans were double-parked along the street. Another car was pulling up. Two more of the G-men stood on the sidewalk. Another was going down the alley to come in through the basement. In my ears was the crackle of a turned-up police radio.

My father was shown the warrant for his arrest as he sat on his hide-a-bed with his bare feet on the floor. He groped around for his glasses. He told my mother he felt suddenly nauseous, and she had him bend over with his head between his knees till the feeling went away. She was furious.

“What are these men doing here?” she said to Bradley and Davis. “Do you think you’ve got John Dillinger? What are you doing?” Men were going through the bookshelves, the bedclothes, the mahogany wardrobe closet. Men were marching upstairs.

My mother stood with Susan in her arms and tears coming down her cheeks. Every piece of furniture in the house had been, in some moment of her life, her utmost concern. She had made every curtain, she had scrubbed and polished every inch of floor. This old, leaky, wooden shack we lived in—and what newspaperman who wrote about the trial ever said a thing about the Isaacsons’ poverty, the shabbiness of their home with its broken-down Salvation Army furniture and castoffs, and amateur paint jobs, its stained wallpaper where the rain soaked through the front door.

“Murderers!” my mother cried. “Maniacs! Haven’t you hounded us enough? Can’t you leave us alone?”

She did not appear to realize that my father had been arrested.

I ran upstairs. Two of them were in my room. They examined my dinosaur book, the model airplane I was working on, and the cigar box I used to hold my marbles. They looked under the mattress on my cot, they lifted the linoleum on the floor, they looked in the closet and went through the blankets and sheets my mother kept there, flapping out each one and then throwing it on the floor. They took the crystal radio my father had helped me make, and the table radio, an old metal Edison that I listened to my programs on, pulling out the plug and wrapping the cord around the radio and tucking it under his arm. And in Susan’s room one of them opened the belly of her monkey doll with a penknife and stuck his finger in it and pulled out the stuffing. In Susan’s room was my grandma’s shiny hope chest, and they were going through that, tossing out Grandma’s brown picture of her mother and father, and a
siddur
, two down pillows, and some old clothes of hers, and a lace tablecloth with fringe. Mothballs rattled on the floor. Down at the bottom of the chest was a blue, oblong tin with rounded corners. It was my grandma’s last tin of asthma grass. One of them picked it up, opened it slowly, sniffed it, replaced the lid, and wrapped the tin in his handkerchief and put it in his pocket.

Daniel ran back to his own room. His own blue tin filled with pennies of peculiar existence had been opened and the pennies scattered on the floor.

Downstairs the place was a shambles. Broken dishes in the
kitchen. The newspapers from under the stairs strewn about. One of them was picking out copies of the
Daily Worker
, and issues of other papers with stories about ATOM SPIES arrested in England, Canada and New Jersey. A terrible draft swept through the house now, the front door having been propped open. I looked outside. Williams stood on the sidewalk. He was wearing his overalls over a grey sweat shirt. He was wearing slippers. He was looking down the alley. And from under my feet came the thunder of the garbage cans crashing around the cellar.

I don’t know how long this went on. There appeared across the street, along the schoolyard fence, growing numbers of children not interested in going to school. People were hanging out of the windows of the apartment houses on 173rd Street. At each corner of our block a regular police patrol car was parked across the intersection. The FBI radio sputtered like my grandma’s asthma grass. Teachers were watching. The FBI men were taking all these valuable things to their cars. I stood at the door and watched, and this is what they took: My crystal radio and my radio for listening. A stack of selected newspapers. My father’s International Workers’ Order insurance policy for five thousand dollars. A toolbox. A year’s issues of
Masses and Mainstream.
And the following books:
JEWS WITHOUT MONEY
by Mike Gold,
THE IRON HEEL
by Jack London,
STATE AND REVOLUTION
by V. Lenin,
GENE DEBS, THE STORY OF A FIGHTING AMERICAN
by Herbert Marais and William Cahn,
THE PRICE OF FREE WORLD VICTORY
by Henry A. Wallace, Vice President of the United States,
THE GREAT CONSPIRACY
by Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn,
WHO OWNS AMERICA
by James S. Allen (the cover shows a fat capitalist with a top hat and a dollar sign inscribed on his belly, sitting in front of a factory on top of a big bag marked
profits
—oh, Red cartoons! Oh, Robert Minor with your sexy goddess of freedom lying raped and bleeding, and your workingmen of the giant arms, and the clasped hands of your black and white brothers, and your ranks of workers advancing toward the cringing capitalist bosses, I salute you! I salute you, Creator of the anti-comic strip! In such bold strokes of the charcoal pencil is my childhood forever rubbed into my
subversive brain, oh, Robert Minor, oh, William Gropper, geniuses of the pencil stroke, precision tools of working-class dreams, agitators, symbol-makers, vanguard of the vanguard with your unremitting proprietorship of the public outrage) and
THE STORY OF THE FIVE YEAR PLAN
by M. Ilin. This last book is from my room. It is a translation of a primer for Russian children. My father gave it to me and said to keep it in my room until I was old enough to read it. I am old enough, but have not gotten around to reading past the first chapter.

Daniel stood in the entrance to the living room. He was still in his pajamas. The cold of the morning had driven itself into his chest. It filled his chest and his throat. It pressed at the backs of his eyes. He was frightened of the way he felt. The cold hung like ice from his heart. His little balls were encased in ice. His knees shifted in ice. He shivered and ice fell from his spine. His father was dressed now, standing in his good suit of grey glen plaid with the wide lapels and square shoulders hanging in slopes off his shoulders and the wide green-forest tie and
the white shirt already turning up at the collars, buttoning his two-button jacket with one hand, and his face, unshaven, turned in a moment’s attitude of trying to remember something, trying to remember as if it was on the floor, this sadness, this awful sadness of trying to remember, so unaccustomedly dressed up in his over-large suit with the pleated trousers and cuffs almost covering his brown wing-tipped shoes, and his other hand rises limply from the wrist, his arm rises, and he doesn’t seem to care, attached to a handcuff as the man who holds him captured lifts his hands to light his cigarette, my father’s hand going along in tow, the agent cupping his match and lighting his cigarette, and my father’s hand dangling, having moved just as far as the other man moved it.

I remember that Susan was crying, “Why they do that to Daddy? Why they do that to Daddy?” over and over, “Why they do that to Daddy?” and that my mother was rocking her, holding her tightly, and swaying with Susan in her arms saying shhhh, shhh … But Susan was hysterical, sobbing with great gasps for air. We have none of us ever had enough to breathe. I kicked the FBI in the shins and I butted them in the groin, and I screamed and raged, and swung my fists at them. I know I hurt a couple of them. But I was shoved aside. And when I came back, I was lifted by the hands and feet, and flopping and squirming like a snake, and You leave my pop alone! I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you! I was dropped behind the stairs in the pile of papers. My father was hustled out the door. I was on my knees, warmed by my own tears, thawed in my rage, and I saw his face as he turned for one brief moment and yelled over his shoulder: “Ascher!”

And then it was terribly quiet. And all the cars were gone, and the gaping people were gone, and the door was closed, and I looked at my weeping mother, and I held her baby daughter for her as she dialed the phone. And I realized my father was really gone.

The Isaacsons are arrested for conspiring to give the secret of television to the Soviet Union….

So Ascher came into our lives, the first Surrogate. Ascher was not a left-wing lawyer. He had spent his professional life practicing in the Bronx, primarily in civil law. He was what my Aunt Frieda called a Jewish gentleman. Ascher was the kind of lawyer who quietly handles all the legal affairs of his Synagogue for years without compensation. He was in his sixties when I first saw him, the large features of his face showing the signs of his emphysema. His mouth was stretched wide, his eyes deep-set and slightly bulging. I felt the weight of my grief when Ascher was around because, like a doctor, he would not have been there unless something was wrong. But I didn’t dislike him. He had enormous hands, and a gruff condescension to children that I did not find inappropriate or offensive.

Ascher was a pillar of the Bronx bar. He was not brilliant, but his law was sound, and his honor as a man, as a religious man, was unquestionable. He was an honest lawyer, and was dogged for his clients. I picture him on Yom Kippur standing in the pew with his homburg on his head, and a tallis around his shoulders. Ascher could wear a homburg and a tallis at the same time.

He was not my parents’ first choice. My parents were not accustomed to dealing with lawyers, or accountants, or bank tellers. I think now my father must have called a half-dozen lawyers on the recommendations of his friends, before he found Ascher. Lawyers were not anxious to handle any case involving the FBI, even left-wing lawyers. When my father was trying to find a lawyer while fending off the FBI visits, the case was open-ended, as any sharp lawyer understood. Maybe Ascher understood this too. He certainly understood that this was a bad time in history for anyone whom the law turned its eye on who was a Red, or a “progressive” as Communists had come to characterize themselves. Since 1946, indecent things had happened in the country. He lectured Rochelle as if she might not know. The Democrats under Harry Truman competed with the Republicans in Congress to see who could be rougher on the Left. People were losing their jobs and their careers for things they
said or appeals they had supported fifteen years before. People were accused, investigated and fired from their jobs without knowing what the charges were, or who made them. People were blacklisted in their professions. Public confessions of error had become a national rite, just as in Russia. Witnesses naming friends and acquaintances seen at meetings twenty years before were praised by Congressmen. Informing was the new ethic. Ex-Communists who would testify about Party methods, and who would write confessionals, made lots of money. The measure of their success was the magnitude of their sin. It was the time of the Red Menace. The fear of Communists taking over the PTA and Community Chest affected the lives of ordinary people in ordinary towns. Anyone who knew anyone who was a Communist felt tainted. Everything that could be connected to the Communists took on taint. People who defended their civil liberties on principle. The First, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Pablo Picasso, because he had attended the Communists’ World Peace Congress in Paris and painted doves for peace. Doves. Peace. There was a new immigration control bill and alien deportation bill, and a control of American citizens abroad bill. And there was an internal security bill providing for concentration camps for anyone who might be expected to commit espionage. And there were now people who couldn’t get passports, and there were now people who couldn’t find jobs, and there were now people jailed for contempt, and there were now people who couldn’t find Mark Twain in the library because the Russians liked him and he was a best seller over there.

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.