The Book of Daniel (31 page)

But the worst of it is that he hadn’t remembered what an ancient friend of a feeling it was.

“I’ve got to talk to you.”

My father sighs. We have talked before. He sits at the dining room table, a stack of blue exam books before him. His
New Yorkers
lie about still in their mailing wrappers.

“Do you know of anything my parents did to hurt the case Ascher was putting together?”

“What do you mean?”

“Testimony, evidence, anything they wouldn’t let him use?”

“Who have you been talking to now,” my mother says.

“What difference does it make?”

“Fanny Ascher?”

“Yes.”

Lise snorts. “Of course. I made a kartoifel. Would you rather have pot roast or steak?”

“I don’t care. I’m not hungry.”

“Daniel, I’m making supper anyway.”

“Anything, it doesn’t matter.”

“It never matters—”

“Jesus,” Daniel shouts, “anygoddamn thing!”

“But when you sit down it matters!”

“Shhh, calm down, everyone,” my father says. “We’ll have the pot roast. All right with you, Dan?”

“Yeah, all right.”

“Thank you,” Lise says and frosts through the door.

My father clears his throat. “Let’s go in the living room. The thing is, you see, Fanny Ascher’s feelings are well known. And it’s understandable. She’s very bitter about Jake’s death.”

Daniel sits down. He grows very still. “Just tell me if you know anything about it.”

“Jake never said anything to me along those lines. On the other hand I wasn’t up there with him in the day-to-day handling of the case. That was my first teaching job at Virginia. I only got involved in the later appeals. I helped him a little bit. But lots of lawyers were involved by then. It was all very public by then.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just what I said. I don’t know any more than you do. Have you looked through everything in the file?”

Not a useful reply. They are stung and swollen about the heart. They have not forgiven me for Jack Fein’s piece in the
Times.
The threat I made on Duberstein’s life is fresh in their minds. A pattern of being denied their rights in Susan, their rights in me. They were not consulted about the changes in my appearance: the beard, the climbing downward of my hair, the newest recklessness of attitude which colors the face, sinks the eyes. A suspicion of having lived their lives to no effect.

The house itself seems to have shrunken, and lost its gleam. The furniture looks out of date and shabby. The walls are yellowed. There is a smell in the house of something less than assured life. A sense in the way my father sits with his arms
on the armchair that he has passed the line across his life at which whatever was success is now understood to be failure.

“Dad, I can recite that file by heart.”

“Do you ever drink?”

“What?”

“I’m going to have a drink before dinner. Would you like some scotch?”

He goes into the kitchen for glasses and ice. “Of course, a man tells his wife things he wouldn’t tell anyone else. Who knows? Your parents were Party members and possibly they felt they had to consider aspects of their defense with an eye out for the Party. Maybe there’s something to it. I don’t know. Of course the Party made no effort to help them. It was only later, after the sentence, when the propaganda value became obvious to them.”

“Well, would it be something important? Something that could make a difference?”

“You mean about their testimony?”

“Yes.”

“I doubt it. You’ve got to understand Fanny. She lost a husband and she blames the case. That means she blames the Isaacson family. And to make matters worse in her mind Jake is remembered for this sacrifice by critics of the trial who find fault with his handling of it. She’s very sensitive to that. She resents criticism of him. It’s natural.”

“He had emphysema. He had a bad heart.”

“That’s right. He was not a well man. But there’s no doubt it helped him along. He was like my father. They only stopped working to eat or sleep. They were both that kind,”

He puts the ice into the glasses. “It was a good partnership.”

“She wanted you to take over the practice.”

“Yes.” A small smile. He keeps the scotch in the cabinet with the good dishes.

“She was always insensitive to Robert’s ideals,” my mother says.

“Try this,” handing me a drink. “It’s what we older folks use. Yes, Fanny was shocked that I didn’t want the practice. Something was always shocking her.”

“They never had children,” Lise says.

“The Aschers and my parents were very close. They always brought me a present for my birthday. When my mother died Fanny started to give advice. For years she tried to get my father to remarry. Introduce him to Hadassah ladies who’d lost their husbands. But Sam was interested in the practice of law. He said he never had the time.”

“She dislikes people not taking her advice,” my mother says.

“L’chayim,”
my father says raising his glass.

“The judiciary today is more sensitive—the trend now is to stringent protection of the trial’s integrity. There’s no doubt in my mind that if they were on trial today the government couldn’t do what it did then to get their conviction. During the trial the FBI arrested that fellow as another spy in the ring, and said he would testify in confirmation of Mindish’s confession. They never put him on the stand, and he himself was never brought to trial. Long before their trial the Isaacsons were tried and found guilty in the newspapers. Also in my opinion a charge to the jury like Judge Hirsch’s would today be ruled prejudicial. A judge today would be more sophisticated in his conduct. He’d have to be.”

“You mean they’d beat the rap?”

“Well no, not necessarily. I mean it would have been a different trial in the way it was handled. It would be tougher to convict them. The federal conspiracy laws being what they were the indictment would still be the same. That hasn’t changed. It is still the way to find someone guilty who you cannot prove did anything.”

“You were at Susan’s?” my mother says.

“Yeah.”

“I washed her hair today. I bought her a lovely robe but it’s too big. I’ll have to get the smaller size.”

“When it began I’m pretty sure the FBI didn’t know what they had or where it would lead them. They knew they had to bring in something. In those days, this was years before the sputnik thing, it was customary to downgrade the Russians’ science. People who know something about these things didn’t
make that mistake. But at the level of
Time
magazine the joke was how they copied everything and claimed it for their own. Well, of course the corollary of that is that it’s our bomb they have and that means we were betrayed. After the war our whole foreign policy depended on our having the bomb and the Soviets not having it. It was a terrible miscalculation. It militarized the world. And when they got it the only alternative to admitting our bankruptcy of leadership and national vision was to find conspiracies. It was one or the other.”

“Sometimes I used to think about the odds against it.”

“What?”

“That it would be laid on us. A particular family in a country of millions of families.”

“Well, if you’re the Bureau you have on hand a resource of files, especially of known left-wing activists. That is what you go to first, your own files. It’s like at the local police level, a crime of a certain kind is committed, say of sexual deviation, so you question your known deviates. And when he’s brought in he knows he’s vulnerable. He’ll take pains to establish his innocence, or to distinguish himself from who is guilty. But say he is apprehended when no crime is known to have been committed, well then the distinctions he makes reveal to the police the sense he has of his own vulnerability. And they go to work on that. They go to work on it with the sense of being justified in their original decision to question him.”

“You mean Mindish?”

“They questioned him for weeks before they arrested him. And after they arrested him they kept questioning him. And he became their case.”

“Robert, I wish we wouldn’t talk about this.”

“He became their case because he named your parents.”

“Well, first Paul was arrested.”

“Yes.”

“And then not for a few weeks, Rochelle.” “Yes.”

“Well, what, did he have second thoughts about my mother?”

“Well, more probably they arrested her as a means of persuading your father to talk. He was not proving as cooperative as Mindish. This was their procedure, this was investigative
procedure. And even after her arrest, if your parents had named other people they could have become prosecution witnesses like Mindish. But they didn’t do that. Therefore they became the defendants of the case. The government tried to take it as far as they could. That was their interest. But it stopped with Paul and Rochelle. Even after their trial and sentence, the government let them know that if they confessed the sentences would not be carried out. That indicates to me they didn’t know right to the end if they had the mastermind criminals they’d gotten a death sentence for. The idea of a confession was not to make your parents penitent, or to exonerate American justice. It was to make them name other people. So you see the death sentence itself was used as an investigative procedure.”

“What is this family’s continuing desire for punishment?” my mother says. “I can’t understand it.” She lays down her knife and fork.

“Lise, the boy asked me a question.”

“Does he have to be told these things? He doesn’t know?”

“I’m establishing for him the reasons Jake defended as he did.”

“You are going to tell him now, with the Isaacsons a dozen years in their graves, how you would have conducted the defense. That is hardly comforting.”

“Hey, Mom, did I ask for comfort? Did I say I needed comfort?”

“Lise, you’ll forgive me: I never felt it was a good idea to talk to Susan about the case.”

This remark brings us together. The air is clearing. Redness is in our cheeks. Around the kitchen table for one rush of an instant it is possible this son and his parents are having dinner together.

“So Mindish was their case. And Ascher chose to defend by discrediting Mindish. That was his defense. It seemed at the time the only possible defense to make. God knows I probably couldn’t have come up with anything better. The pressure was enormous. So he worked on Mindish’s self-interest. You see the theory for admitting accomplice testimony that is uncorroborated is that conspiracy is by its nature secretive and that only the parties to it can know it occurred. But in practice this means
the accomplice’s guilt is modified to the degree that he can convict the defendant. Mindish confessed and was severed from the trial; he wouldn’t know what he was going to get until your mother and father were sentenced. For the same offense, they received the death penalty and he got ten years. Ascher developed the motivation. The jealousy theme—you remember that. Then the revelation that Mindish had never been properly naturalized and that his citizenship was in doubt. There was a question anyway but it seemed enough to show that Mindish might conceivably feel threatened by deportation, and therefore testify to anything the government wanted him to say. Ascher worked out an alternate scenario to show Mindish as guiltier than he himself confessed to being. His fear of deportation, his malevolence, his thwarted lechery. You remember that statement in the summary. You can just see him point his finger. Here is your spy. He and he alone is responsible.”

“Right.”

“Well, you see terrible error in that argument. It admits there was a crime.”

“What?”

“By arguing this way Ascher grants the government the one premise he shouldn’t have. That any crime was committed at all.”

“But Mindish confessed!”

“Yes. And Ascher’s one chance was to discredit the confession. I’ve thought about it a lot. It’s not what you’d call ordinary procedure. But everything was loaded against them and something extraordinary was required. There was a very slim chance—for all the massive righteousness and fear of the time, and the relentless federal machinery—there was still a way to bring in the other verdict. And that was to prove the Isaacsons innocent by proving Mindish innocent,”

Technology is the making of metaphors from the natural world. Flight is the metaphor of air, wheels are the metaphor of water, food is the metaphor of earth. The metaphor of fire is electricity.

“I know, I know. It goes against the grain. But the more Ascher attacked Selig Mindish the more he led to the governmerit’s
strength. After all it finally boils down to which testimony the jury is going to believe. If the defense tacitly joins the prosecution in assuming a crime of espionage was indeed committed, where shall the distinction be made as to who was and who was not involved? Do you believe the prosecution witness who confesses or the defendant who denies? You see, in this light even testimony developed by the defense, Mindish’s questionable citizenship, operates for the prosecution. If he is not a citizen, he is a foreigner, with foreign loyalties. His own testimony tends to be supported. You see my point? Ascher was asking an American jury to believe that a man would be evil enough to put the finger on his innocent friends of fifteen years, practically a father to them by his own characterization. Closer than family, as he also described the relationship. They were closer than family. It is easier to believe in an offense against the state.”

“But why would Mindish confess if he was innocent? What would his motivation be for that?”

“Well, it’s hard now through everything that’s been written to remember some of the facts about Dr. Mindish. But he was an ignorant man. He never learned to speak English properly. He got his degree from some second-rate dental college when dentistry was not a full-fledged branch of the medical profession. Mindish was a simple mechanic. He affected a continental sophistication that could not stand up under five minutes of conversation. I feel about him that he was not a man given to political passion, but a very ordinary, very crude man perfectly capable of joining the Communist Party for no more than a satisfying social sense of himself, a kind of club life for a lower middle class Bronx dentist. So you ask what is the motivation for an innocent man to do what he did: Well, one motivation is to believe or to have been persuaded to believe in his own guilt. And to live in mortal fear of the consequences. Another is to believe in his own innocence but to believe or to have been persuaded to believe in the guilt of his friends. And to live in mortal fear of the consequences.”