The Book of Daniel (2 page)

But how would I get this scene to record Phyllis’ adenoidal prettiness, her sharp nose and fair skin and light Polish eyes.
Or her overassumption of life, a characteristic of teenage girls of high school culture. How would it connote the debts all husbands pay for their excesses. Already stirring in this marriage not two years old were the forms of my fearful kindness coming out like magic watercolor under her rubbing. And if the first glimpse people have of me is this, how do I establish sympathy? If I want to show disaster striking at a moment that brings least credit to me, why not begin with the stacks, Daniel roaming through the stacks, searching, too late, for a thesis.

Worcester State Hospital is situated off Route 9 in Worcester, Massachusetts, on the crest of a hill overlooking Lake Quinsigamond, a body of water so quiet that it is famous for crew races. The hospital is in fact two hospitals, an old and a new. The new hospital back toward the woods does not concern us. Lacking steps it is for older patients. The old hospital was put up around the turn of the century. It was designed with the idea that madness might be soothed in a setting of architectural beauty. It is darkly Victorian, with arched doors of oak and mullioned windows. One other fact of considerable interest is that contrary to the popular belief this is one insane asylum that is not overcrowded. In fact it is, upon Susan’s arrival, half empty. That is because modern methods of therapy, including tranquilizing drugs, do away with the necessity of incarcerating every nut who happens to live in Worcester, Mass., or environs. The idea now is to commit only those patients who cannot take care of themselves on the outside, or who are murderously inclined. Even for these, there are programs of visits home on weekends if there are homes, and other such privileges. The theory is that the person’s normal environment is therapeutic. The theory is that the person wants to go home.

Daniel found his sister in the Female Lounge. The walls there are yellow, ocher and tan. The ceiling is tan. The chairs are dark green imitation leather with chrome tubing arms and legs. There are two TV sets, one on either side of the room, and a rack for magazines. Susan was the only patient in the lounge. A staff attendant in a white uniform with white stockings, which
tend to make the legs look fatter than they are, sat with her legs together on a straight chair by the door. She played with her hair and read Modern Screen. Does Dick Really Love Liz? Let me indicate my good faith by addressing myself to the question. I don’t think he really loves her. I think he is fond of her. I think he enjoys buying her outlandishly expensive things and also an occasional tup in bed. I think he loves the life, the camera’s attention, the ponderous importance of every little fart he makes. I think he loves fraud of spectacular dimension. I think if they were put on trial for their lives, he might come to love her.

They had dressed Susan in one of those beltless, collarless hospital robes, and soft slippers. They had taken away her big granny glasses that always seemed to emphasize the spaciousness of her intelligence, and the honesty of her interest in whatever she looked at. She squinted at Daniel with the lovely blue eyes of a near-sighted girl. When she saw it was he, she stopped trying to look at him and rested her head back against the chair. She sat in a green imitation leather chair with her arms resting on its tubed chrome arms and her feet flat on the floor in their slippers. She looked awful. Her dark hair was combed back off her face in a way she would never have combed it. She always parted it in the middle and tied it at the back of her neck. Her skin looked blotchy. She was not a small person but she looked physically small sitting there. Not looking at him, she lifted her arm, her fingers dipping toward him, a bored, humorous, gesture, one that made his heart leap; and he took the outraised hand in both his hands thinking Oh honey, oh my poor honey, and kissed the back of her hand, thinking It’s her, it’s still her, no matter what she does, and only then noticing in front of his eyes the taped bandage around her wrist. When he’d had a good look, she pulled her hand away.

For ten minutes Daniel sat next to her. He was hunched over and staring at the floor while she sat with her head back and her eyes closed, and they were like the compensating halves of a clock sculpture that would exchange positions when the chimes struck. He thought he knew what it was, that sense of being overcome. You suffocated. The calamity of it. He had had such spells. People looked at you in a funny way and spoke to
you down corridors. You didn’t know what to do. Something was torn, there was a coming apart of intentions, a forgetting of what you could expect from being alive. You couldn’t laugh. You were in dread of yourself and it was dread so pure that one glance in the mirror scorched the heart and charred the eyes.

Daniel must have sighed. Susan reached out and patted him gently on the back. “They’re still fucking us,” she said. “Goodbye, Daniel. You get the picture.”

He listened alertly. He was not sure if she had said goodbye or good boy. He hung around for a while after that but she didn’t say another thing or even acknowledge that he was in the room. He gazed out the window, leaning his shoulder against the window frame. The window was barred. He could see Phyllis playing with the baby down on the hillside. At the top of the hill was a retaining wall of brick, and inside that wall a parking lot filled with pastel cars. Into his sight rolled a dark blue Chevrolet he recognized as the Lewins’. Then the view was cut off by the top of the brick portico sheltering the steps of the main entrance to the hospital.

Without saying much of anything, without even caring if he was there, Susan could restore in him the old cloying sense of family, and suggest that his wife was not in the same class and his child a complete irrelevance. That it was their thing, this orphan state, and that it obliterated everything else and separated them from everyone else, and always would, no matter what he did to deny it. Actually I don’t try to deny it. But I reserve the right to live with it in my own way, if I can. In Susan resides the fateful family gift for having definite feelings. Always taking stands, even as a kid. A moralist, a judge. This is right, that is wrong, this is good, that is bad. Her personal life carelessly displayed, her wants unashamed, not managed discreetly like most people’s. With her aggressive moral openness, with her loud and intelligent and repugnantly honest girlness. And all wrong. Always wrong. From politics back to drugs, and from drugs back to sex, and before sex, tantrums, and before tantrums, a faith in God. Here is a cheap effect: A long time ago, on an evening in June, 1954, June 22 to be exact, at exactly ten
P.M
., Susan gave me the word about God. It was during a night game between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.
Allie Reynolds was pitching for the Yanks and it was nothing-nothing in the top of the seventh. Boston had one out and a man on first. Jim Piersall was up and the count was three and one. Reynolds picked up the rosin bag. Mel Allen was saying how a base on balls is always trouble and as he spoke there was a short beep over his voice the way it happens on television to indicate that a new hour has begun. At that moment Susan, age eight, and I, thirteen, could not look at each other. Allie Reynolds dropped the rosin bag, pulled at the peak of his cap, and leaned forward for the sign. And that’s when Susan told me there was a God.

“He’ll get them all,” she whispered. “He’ll get every one of them.”

Ah Susy, my Susyanna, what have you done? You are a dupe of the international moralist propagandist apparatus! They have made a moral speed freak of you! They have wrecked your hair and taken away your granny glasses and dressed you in the robe of a sick person. Oh, look at what they’ve done, Susan, look at what they’ve done to you—

    Actually that’s what God does in the Bible—like the little girl says, he gets people. He takes care of them. He lays on this monumental justice. Oh the curses, the admonitions; the plagues, the scatterings, the ruinations, the strikings dead, the renderings unto and the tearings asunder. The floods. The fires. It is interesting to note that God as a
character
in the Bible seems almost always concerned with the idea of his recognition by mankind. He is constantly declaring His Authority, with rewards for those who recognize it and punishment for those who don’t. He performs fancy tricks. He enlists the help of naturally righteous humans who become messengers, or carriers of his miracles, or who deliver their people. Each age has by trial to achieve its recognition of Him—or to put it another way, every generation has to learn anew the lesson of His Existence.
The drama in the Bible is always in the conflict of those who have learned with those who have not learned. Or in the testing of those who seem that they might be able to learn. In this context it is instructive to pause for a moment over the career of Daniel, a definitely minor, if not totally apocryphal figure (or figures) who worked with no particular delight for a few of the kings in the post-Alexandrine Empires. It is a bad time for Daniel and his co-religionists, for they are second-class citizens, in a distinctly hostile environment. But in that peculiar kind of symbiosis of pagan kings and wise subject-Jews, Daniel is apparently able to soften the worst excesses of the rulers against his people by making himself available for interpretations of dreams, visions or apparitions in the night. Dreams, visions and apparitions in the night seem to be an occupational hazard of the ancient rulers. Typically, the King (Nebuchadnezzar, or Belshazzar, or Cyrus) suffers a dream which he cannot understand. He consults his various retainers—magicians, astrologers, soothsayers, Chaldean wise men. Typically, they fail him. As a last resort Daniel, a Jew, is summoned. Daniel seems to be a modest man, brave, and more faithful to God than wise, for it is by means of prayer and piety that he learns from God the dream interpretations he must make to the King in order to survive. In one case, he must even recreate the dream before he can interpret it because the dumb King, Nebuchadnezzar, has forgotten what it is. For this wisdom Daniel is accorded ministerial rank in the tradition of Joseph and Moses before him. It is no sinecure, however. We think of Charlie Chaplin taken home every night by the fat, wealthy drunkard and kicked out of the drunkard’s house in the sobriety of the following morning. Like an alternating current, though quite direct. At one point, Daniel’s three brothers are accused of sacrilege by the cunning Chaldeans and the King sentences them to death in a fiery furnace. God sees that they survive the fire, but the strain on Daniel has to have been considerable. Another time Daniel, under the same indictment himself, is thrown into a pit with lions but survives an entire night unscratched. His is a life of confrontations, not the least of which has him putting down his employer in front of the whole crowd: You’ve bought it, Kingy. “God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it, thou art
weighed in the balances and found wanting….” This is not a job for a man sensitive to loud noises or bright light. Daniel survives three reigns but at considerable personal cost. Toward the end his insights become more diffuse, apocalyptic, hysterical. One night he suffers his own dream, a weird and awesome vision of composite beasts and seas and heavens and fire and storms and an Ancient on a throne, and ironically he doesn’t know what it means: “I, Daniel, was grieved in my spirit in the midst of my body, and the vision of my head troubled me…. My cogitations much troubled me, and my countenance changed in me: but I kept the matter in my heart.”

So much for Daniel, Beacon of Faith in a Time of Persecution. (You’ve got to be desperate to read the Bible.) Five grown-up people are trying to recover one twenty-year-old girl from a public insane asylum on Memorial Day. It can’t be done. It is not a working day. There is no one to process her record, sign her out, check her over. There is no one there to say she can go. I am livid. “Let’s just take her!” I shout. But that can’t be done. Robert Lewin, a professor of law at Boston College, won’t do it. Lise, his wife, tells me to be serious. And Dr. Duberstein, the infamous Dr. Alan Duberstein, makes useless phone calls in the public phone booth. Duberstein is a short, skinny man with a high voice. He was shot up during World War II and has a face annealed by plastic surgery. Straight hair that looks sewn into his scalp. Stucco skin, and no eyebrows. Into this fiasco he pokes a pipe. There are spots on his striped tie, and his brown wing-styled shoes need a shine.

“I was told there would be no problem,” he insists to the admitting nurse. “We have an ambulance out there that is costing these people thirty-five dollars an hour.”

“I can’t help that,” the admitting nurse says. She is large and cheerful. The state police brought Susan in off the turnpike and that makes her a public charge. “She has to be released,” the nurse says patiently. This must be the way she talks to maniacs. With a melody in her voice. “I can’t do it and you can’t do it. We haven’t even typed the admitting diagnosis.”

I pace the lobby, pounding my fist into my palm. Phyllis sits on a bench, the baby sliding down her lap. Her earnest face tracks me, she pulls the baby back, it struggles, she pulls it
back. I have no real desire to rescue Susan by force. But I wish I had her capacity to do things in a big way—that gift for causing public commotion, that family talent. Actually it’s just as well that Duberstein is kept away from her. And our parents too, for that matter. She has been going to Duberstein for years; once she told me she lost her respect for Duberstein when she found out he played golf twice a week. Then why do you go, Susan? “Alleviates parental anxieties,” said Susan the college girl. Alleviates parental anxieties. This makes me feel guilty for both of us. I look at the Lewins: pale, worried, under fire once again. I cannot bear the guilt. I begin to scold them. They should have called me sooner. I would have had the sense to get her out of here yesterday. “What were you trying to hide from me? What was the point!”

Lise, my mother, a tiny woman in a blouse and short skirt with low-heeled shoes and shoulder bag, is a curious combination of 1945 WAC and slightly aging Viennese charmer onto the new fashions. She sits down on the bench next to Phyllis and takes the baby, an unconscious maternal gesture which gratifies Phyllis because it brings her into the family. “Oh, Danny,” Lise says, “don’t be a fool. Nobody’s hiding anything. You are down there. We are here. We are her parents. We cope. And if someone in the family can be spared for twenty-four hours, why not? Or should everyone stop functioning?”