The Book of Daniel (30 page)

We understand Churchill found it of immense value to have played with toy soldiers as a child. We understand Truman found it of immense value to have commanded artillery as a young man.

From under his jacket Daniel pulls a cardboard tube. From
this he withdraws a poster which he smoothes flat. Standing on a chair he tapes the poster as high as he can on the wall facing her bed. The ceiling would be better but even on a chair he can’t reach it. The poster is a black and white photograph of a grainy Daniel looking scruffy and militant. Looking bearded, looking clear-eyed. His hand is raised, his fingers make the sign of peace. It is a posed photo blown up at a cost of four ninety-five.

    Fein is the reporter who did the reassessment piece in the
Times
on the tenth anniversary of the execution. He’s a robust bald-headed guy with grey sideburns.

“Do you remember the trial?” he asks me.

“We weren’t allowed to go.”

“It was a piss-poor trial. The case against them was nothing. Talking Tom’s word as a convicted spy wasn’t worth shit. All the government had was Mindish’s accomplice testimony that to believe you’d have to believe it’s possible that a radio repairman was trained and educated enough to draw intricate plans of the most sophisticated kind, and that he would reduce them so that they would fit on dental x-ray film—I still don’t understand why anyone would have to do that. It was too much. And that this stiff was valuable to the Russians. Insane I The Russians had everything they needed. They had all that stuff. They had professionals right there, they had their own men right on the spot. Anyway, the day after the
Times
ran my piece I was having lunch downtown and just as I’m leaving the restaurant Red Feuerman walks up behind me, the chief prosecuting attorney. He’s now Judge Feuerman of the Southern District, it was a career-making case, baby, everybody did well. Feuerman grabs me by the elbow, like this, you know how some guys grab your elbow like it was a tit or something, and he says, ‘Jack, you let the wrong guys get to you, I can’t believe you’d buy their story.’ ‘What story, Red, you’re not gonna stand
there and tell me without smiling that you had a case!’ ‘Someday when you have the time,’ he says, ‘come up to my office and I’ll show you some things.’”

What things, I asked Fein.

“Oh, it’s a lot of bullshit. That’s the way they all talk. Even before the execution, when the heat was on to commute the sentence, they dropped these hints about evidence they had and couldn’t use in the interest of national security. Like there’s this big report in the Justice Department that they’ve never released because of security, and no one can see it, and it’s supposed to have indisputable evidence. But a friend of mine in Justice told me if the report has evidence like they claim they would have released it. There’s a report all right, and the reason it’s classified is because it favors the defense. Shit, between the FBI and the CP your folks never had a chance.”

Jack Fein is a chain-smoker. He slid his Camel cigarettes out of the pack and laid them on the table in a row like cartridges in a belt. He drinks black coffee. He does not carry a camera or a pad. We were in this luncheonette. It was warm there but he kept his coat on and leaned all over the table with his coat sleeves flopping.

“You’re a tough baby,” he said. “That’s good. I’m glad to see that you’re hangin’ in there. What’s the
name
of your Foundation?”

“The Paul and Rochelle Isaacson Foundation for Revolution.”

“What’s it gonna do?”

“We’re, urn, funding publications to develop revolutionary awareness. We’re going to finance community action, urn, programs. We’re going to assert the radical alternative.”

“Great. You want to tell me where your Foundation is getting its money?”

“Sure, man, it’s no secret. It’s my trust money and my sister’s trust money. It’s a lot of money.”

“The thing the old lawyer put together, Ascher. From that committee.”

“Right.”

“What does it come to now?”

“Well, um, I haven’t been counting.”

“Beautiful. You’re a beautiful baby. Are you in SDS?”

“No.”

“PLP?”

“No.”

“Where do you live now?”

I tell him.

“What about your sister?”

“Well, see, I don’t think she wants to talk to anyone right now. She’s recovering from the trial.”

Wicked.

“Yeah.” He lights a new Camel with an old one. “Yeah, I heard something like that. Yeah. She would be how old now.”

“Susan is twenty.”

“And where is she?”

“Out of state, that’s all I can tell you.”

“What about your foster parents. Could I talk to them?”

“Look, I don’t care about blowing our cover. I don’t think any of us care anymore. Anyone who was interested could have traced us up to Boston. But I mean there are certain family things to be settled by all of us, not me acting alone. We’ve all got responsibilities to each other.”

“I understand. Don’t worry, I don’t fuck around.”

I do not like the sudden sympathetic turn of things. Here I’m laying the Foundation on him and he wants to talk to the responsible adults. It occurs to me that I am dealing with a professional.
The son of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, who were executed a dozen years ago for crimes against the nation, has established a Foundation to clear their name.

“Of course it can’t be done,” Fein assures, me.

“But that’s not the purpose,” I tell him.

“Listen, kid, a radical is no better than his analysis. You know that. Your folks were framed, but that doesn’t mean they were innocent babes. I don’t believe they were a dangerous conspiracy to pass important defense secrets, but I don’t believe either that the U.S. Attorney, and the Judge, and the Justice Department and the President of the United Sates conspired against
them.”

“I thought you said the evidence was phony.”

“That’s right. Those guys had to bring in a conviction.
That was their job. But no one would have put the finger on your parents unless they thought they were up to something. In this country people don’t get picked out of a hat to be put on trial for their lives. I don’t know—your parents and Mindish had to have been into some goddamn thing. They
acted
guilty. They were little neighborhood commies probably with some kind of third-rate operation that wasn’t of use to anyone except maybe it made them feel important. Maybe what they were doing was worth five years. Maybe. But that would have been in the best of times, and in the best of times nobody would have cared, nobody would have cared enough to falsify evidence. No one would have been afraid enough to throw a switch.”

    Fanny Ascher was curious to see how I’d turned out. That’s why she agreed to talk to me. There was also a repugnance or fear of me, and what I came from, or of my name, and that’s why she sat on the edge of her sofa with her ankles crossed, with her chin high, in wary widowhood. She is a thin lady with very fair skin, finely wrinkled, and grey jeweled eyeglasses, and hair tinted blue. It is difficult to clasp fingers painlessly around a diamond ring and a wedding band on that fourth finger. The crookedness bothered me, the distortion in that hand’s form the arthritic form

“You are a student still?”

“Yes.”

I have been trying to keep up with what you people are doing with your long hair and strange clothes. I am an enlightened woman and I like young people. Nevertheless I am disappointed that you look this way. It does not inspire confidence.

“And married, with a baby?”

“Yes.”

She shakes her head.

“And your sister?”

“She’s getting better.”

“Still?”

“Yes.”

The woman’s head oscillates left right left right left right. Her eyes are fixed on me.

“I don’t want to take up a lot of your time.”

“My time? What do you think I do with my time?”

“Well, I only came to ask if there were any papers, any letters you know about. Any files.”

“There are none. Robert has all the files. I gave him everything I found. How is Robert?”

“He’s OK.”

“You go up there?”

“Yes, when I can.”

“They are busy people.”

“Yes.”

“I hear from them every year on the high holy days. A card.”

“Yes.”

Photograph of Ascher on the baby grand. A younger man than I remember, smiling in soft focus in a leather frame,

“Well, that’s all I came to ask you.”

“Jacob saved everything. For over a year every day I went to the office to go through his papers. Bills, letters, notes to himself—he threw away nothing. When I sold the practice and closed the office I had to clean up the garbage of thirty-five years. But it was all filed. There was no confusion. He was a man with an orderly mind.”

“Yes.”

“It was very difficult for me. I made myself ill.”

“Yes.”

“Robert did not want the practice.” We consider that for a minute. Daniel fears his boots have dirtied the carpet. This is wall-to-wall carpeting, rose beige, on 72nd Street.

“Would you like something, a glass of milk? There was a point Jacob and I seriously discussed adopting you ourselves.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, it’s true. How we would have managed at our age I can’t tell you. It was his idea, of course, not mine. I held my breath and he talked himself out of it. I was frankly surprised.
Only after he died did I think maybe he knew he hadn’t long and that was why he decided he couldn’t. Otherwise, who knows. Jacob made the decisions. It was characteristic. He didn’t know when to stop for people. The poorest client, he was meticulous.”

“Yes.”

“We were not the same in that respect. He was generous to a fault.”

“He was very kind to us.”

“Your parents should have been so kind.” She is startled by her own remark. She looks as if about to apologize, but she pulls herself together. “They were not kind people—to any of us. What do you want papers for?”

“I don’t know. I guess I think they belong to me.”

“I see. I’m sorry there is nothing I have to give you. Talk to Robert.”

I got up to go.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “I have no love for the memory of your parents. They were Communists and they destroyed everything they touched.”

“You don’t think they were innocent?”

“They were not innocent of permitting themselves to be used. And of using other people in their fanaticism. Innocent. The case ruined Jacob’s.health.”

She rose from the sofa, “They were very difficult to deal with. They were very stubborn. He would come home furious, he would want to do something and they wouldn’t let him. He would want to do something for their sake and they wouldn’t let him,”

“Like what?”

“He wanted to call certain people as witnesses and they wouldn’t let him. All sorts of things like that.”

“Who?”

She walks with care—she is showing me to the door. “What?”

“Who did he want to call for a witness?”

“Who knows who? Jacob was a brilliant lawyer. And today when people write about the case or talk about it, it is Jacob they criticize. He should have done this, he shouldn’t have done that. Do they know what he had to put up with?”

Her hand is on the doorknob. The bones growing around the rings, the pain in the fingers

Interviewed by Daniel
for the Foundation.

    Daniel pulls up to the house. They are used now to his abrupt appearances. His inconsiderate departures. They hear the rage in the way he uses his brakes. In the patches he leaves on Brookline hills.

The chilly winds have dried the streets. The corner light comes on.

Now they are into specialists. The great faith. We had a specialist in to look at her. They’re doing some tests. He wants to consult with another specialist. With enough specialists man can be made immortal. What do all the specialists do here on Saturday night? They come for the big look at Susan.

“Where have you been,” Lise says. “Why don’t we hear from you?”

They have turned strange. They are visibly shrunken, both of them. Their use of specialists is turning them into old Jewish people. What has happened to the fighting liberal the students love? My father lights his pipe with a slight tremor in his hands. My mother has turned grey overnight. I have the sudden intuition that their lives have become too sorrowful for sex. “When did you last eat a decent meal,” Lise says.

Upstairs I clean up. I pass the back bedroom where I used to live. When my sister was twelve or thirteen she used to work her tentative saucy sex on me, and coquette and comb her hair for hours, and droop her lower lip and put black stuff on her dark eyes and accidentally graze her small breasts across my arm. And act cool. It was a high old time and it made me laugh. And she knew the humor of it: one day in this doorway she stopped when she saw me looking, raised her arms, and saluted me with a flick of her ass.

It is furnished now as a guest room, it’s a neat empty guest room. From the window you can see the lights of Boston eight or ten miles to the east. What am I feeling, what awful need? In the late afternoon the sun burned on the windows of downtown Boston as if someone was flashing signals with a mirror. This was my window. I pretended the signals were for me. I didn’t have to decode them because it was enough that they were being sent. What gave me immense satisfaction was the thought that anyone who tried to intercept the signals, and decipher them, would fail. No matter who, the FBI or the Nazis, nobody not standing right here in this window could read the signals exactly as they were sent or understand them as they were meant to be understood.

Daniel tried to leave the window. He stared at the evening skyline, Boston’s lights glowing into the heavy atmosphere like the light of a furnace. It is a feeling with no bottom, no root, of no locus. It pulses out of him like a radio wave, out of all parts of him at once, and it
needs.
It disseminates, it is diffuse; and one moment he thinks it is something his heart wants the fullness of, and another that his arms want to hold, and for another moment it is something his cock wants to get into. But if he could accommodate any part of his body the feeling wouldn’t leave, it would still be there in all parts of him at once, each cell of his body radiating its passionate need.