The Book of Daniel (28 page)

She fell for him. Perhaps she knew then he was not to have a brilliant career in the revolution. Perhaps it didn’t matter. He was not a practical fellow and his practical political understanding of the necessities of daily revolutionary life had been fused by the heat of too much belief. They were members of a party, after all. Russia was the only socialist nation, after all. They sat the next summer around a campfire in Connecticut, and understood that Poland and Latvia and Estonia had been socialized, and that the pact was to buy time, and Stalin knew what he was doing, and the Popular Front was over; but Paul sat in the light of the fire, chemically transformed in his anti-Fascist purity, and he didn’t seem to hear. The day-to-day intricacies of strategy and tactics did not command his attention. The issues commanded his attention. The ends in view. They met an older man, Selig Mindish, and his wife, they met many interesting people in that progressive camp, they listened to marvelous lectures, they went to square dances, they were the youngsters in this crowd, shining college students who waited table, youngest of the grownups, apple of everyone’s eye, and one warm night, with the stars shining and the blackberry bushes, and the crickets’ fiddle and the frogs’ jug band, they knew each other and it was good.

Brushing her thick wavy hair, brushing it back from her temples, brushing it clean, maintaining herself in this cell with fastidiousness. She suffers most the shower rule. They will let her shower only twice a week. The humiliation is intolerable. Brushes her hair clean, brushes it, fires the scalp and learns to bathe at the sink in her cell. A matron, a woman like herself, with children, a clean decent woman who is sympathetic and becoming her friend, allows her to hang her blanket for a few minutes with borrowed clothespins over the bars each morning; and she removes her clothes and stands at the sink laving herself with the cold water, washing her body with soap and cold water, drying her body with the thin starched crusty prison towel and then washing the sink, and then washing her underclothes, and then washing the sink again. Enjoying the tensity of her coldness, the tightening stippled skin, the nerve thrill of coldness warming in its own blood. Walking barefoot on the stone floor of their prison.

The women in her cellblock have enormous respect for her, and though they call each other by their first names, they address her as Mrs. Isaacson. They ask her advice; they are hookers and addicts and thieves waiting for trial. She understands
that part of the respect she is due derives from the seriousness of the charge against her. To herself she has to smile. But green shoots of concern go out from her to these women, and in the exercise yard she might explain to this one what she understands of the value of psychotherapy, and where, in what city agencies, it can be arranged for at no cost; or to that one that the burning feeling during urination is probably cystitis which is like a cold in the urinary tract, and that it should be attended to by a doctor, even a prison doctor, and can quickly be cleared up. They also like the way she plays volleyball, awkwardly, but with absolute determination to win. When her trial comes, in the tradition of this place she is offered different items of clothes out of different cells, so that she will make the best possible appearance before the judge. In the privacy of her bed that night, she cries; it can be heard, but at this time of night, before sleep, many of the women cry, and because it is not uncommon it is private. She cries not because she is so terribly moved by the generosity of the other inmates—that alone would not cause her to cry—but because she is so clearly one of them and the cellblock has so unquestionably become her home.

In her mind it is a ritual defense, a ceremony. Once Pauly took her to the theater, a workshop theater on Houston Street down at the bottom of Manhattan. There were these students on a stage without a curtain, and it was a Greek play with girls in togas doing this slow arm-waving dance to symbolize their fear their wish that what was going to happen would not happen, and they pushed themselves away from the terrible action, they pushed the air, ceremoniously putting their hands up to the sides of their faces and pushing away air. Nevertheless, what they feared and abhorred came to pass.

She has no doubt about the outcome of the trial. But the penalty is unknown and she listens to the testimony, she looks at the faces and listens to the language so as to fathom the penalty. But the way she receives this knowledge is unexpected: she receives it not from what happens in the courtroom but in the light of the increasing intensity of her hatred for them, for the people in this court. Her hatred intensifies day by day and she gradually surmises that the punishment will be measured in comparable intensity, and that what she wishes for them will be given back to her, a sharp and penetrating reflection of her own incandescent hatred.

Only then does she begin to understand, in the light of her instinct, how this punishment shall be justified. It is no mean feat in this highly textured trial with witnesses examined at length whose testimony is incidental, and with legal hassles that take half a morning, and with the recesses, marching back and forth to the elevator, and in the necessity for concentration, so physically demanding that she is exhausted at the end of the day’s session.

At a moment when she can talk to Ascher alone, she asks him what is the precise meaning of treason.

Ascher tells her treason consists of making war against your country or giving aid and comfort to an enemy at war with your country. It is defined in the Constitution.

She hands to Ascher a piece of paper with some words in her own handwriting, and behind each word vertical pencil strokes, crossed diagonally every fifth stroke:

“You are a very astute person, Rochelle. You have a mind for the law.”

“Why don’t you tell the jury what Feuerman is doing, what they are all doing?”

“I have once recorded my objection, which was overruled. Emotionally I do not think anyone sitting in the jury box is capable in the present atmosphere of understanding such a distinction. The appellate, however, is capable of understanding the abuse of such a distinction.”

Once the pattern is perceived it fulfills itself continually to something in her that is satisfied by the exercise of order, in whatever cause. Implications of treason are fed like cubes of sugar to the twelve-headed animal which is Justice. In Feuerman’s opening remarks. In the way questions are asked. In support of lines of questioning where cases of treason are cited and the judge endorses the relevance of the citation. Ascher trusts only a trained judicial mind to understand in the leisure of a study of the transcript, the abuse of due process in trying someone under one law as if he had broken another.

They have been characterized in the press as traitors. While the legal charge of conspiracy deprives them of the safeguards of the ordinary rules of evidence, it will not protect them from the punishment that can be meted out to those convicted of the worst possible crime against their country. It is clear that although she and Paul will be found guilty of conspiracy to
commit espionage, it is for the crime of treason they will be sentenced.

I give this all to her. It is not the radical analysis of the Red visionary; it is the bookkeeper tallying accounts receivable, accounts disbursed.

Now only one question remains, and she needs Mindish for the answer. She has her suspicions, but she has to look at the man’s face. In the meantime she has concurred in a defense worked out by Paul and Ascher, even to the sexual motivation. It is a distasteful defense. It is an exaggeration, and therefore it is not true. It is not true because it makes too much of the truth. But she doesn’t care. It is only ritual. She looks forward to Mindish’s testimony. She finds herself in a state not unlike pleasurable anticipation as she waits for the man to look at her or not when he climbs up in the witness box, like a prize dog who will bark and point and sniff on command and find her in her guilt. Suspense as to her own instinctive response to the sight of Mindish is her only interest. She no longer bothers to condemn him. We have all changed in seven months. All the cells of our brains are changed and our beings are no longer what they were. If by some strange and unforeseen mercy we were to be released, found not guilty and released, our lives would have to begin again and I don’t know if that is possible. Our children are different children. I no longer know what they look like. I no longer remember what it is to lie next to my husband. Our trial brings out in me a self-knowledge that I might never have had to suffer: I am made of stone.

But I have had months to think about him, this erstwhile dentist with hands so lacking in skill that even his low fees could not retain his patients; a butcher in the mouth who could not make a bridge that fit, a filling that would not fall out. With all the delicacy of boxing gloves. You walked out of there and your jaw ached for days. And he was not clean either. Some sore, some kind of mouth ulcer always followed a visit to Dr. Mindish. Yet he was our friend. We laughed about his dentistry and we went to him and he charged next to nothing. A comrade’s discount.
It is possible with his practice that he stood in the center of a ring. He was a dentist to all of us. It is possible. He was already in the party the summer we waited table, Paul and I, at Paine Lodge. A dentist lives a public life and sees many people in privacy. At Paine Lodge he pretended with what we thought was his continental charm a paternalism which I thought led only to small privileges—his pleasure in our youth and in our minds, Paul’s especially, his fondness for walking in our door unannounced, his frank admiration once or twice expressed with his hands, of my physical features—and always with his eyes. It was harmless. At its worst it wasn’t even offensive, merely pathetic. He enjoyed us so. He did us favors. He took us to the beach, he drove us where we had to go. Always on hand. A loyal dull man who seemed to want no more than sparks from our life. With his poor graceless innocent wife. A crude mind, lacking in understanding of the finer things. He took his culture from us and his ideas from the meetings. Yet, and yet, he felt entitled to one further privilege beyond all these, in our friendship, and in his clandestine lechery for his friend’s wife, never courageously expressed, an essential sneak in his mentality, he took one more liberty for the low fees and comradeship: he took our lives.