The Book of Daniel (38 page)

She has begun to cry. “How did you find out where we lived?”

“I don’t know. Some guy told me a long time ago.”

“Who?”

“I don’t even remember who. What difference does it make? I haven’t told anyone, not even my sister. I didn’t even ask him, he just told me. I was sorry at the time. But Linda, things change. What seems clear isn’t so clear after a while. What seemed a matter of right and wrong.”

“I see.” Silence on the line. She sniffs. “You think you’re privileged to forgive my father, is that what you’re saying?”

“Not exactly.”

“That’s arrogance, all right. That’s the arrogance of the Isaacsons. So high and mighty—”

“Well look, it’s not that way and I don’t think the phone is the place to talk about it.”

“How dare you call us! How dare you!”

This time I was silent. Let her think I thought I’d blown it. She pinches her nostrils with a Kleenex. She swallows. She listens at the other end. She waits.

“Of course there are resentments, different viewpoints. How can I deny that? I don’t even know why I called you. I guess I hadn’t considered that it might be a shock to you to hear from me. I’m sorry. Maybe I should have thought twice. But I’m out here and it suddenly seemed to me the thing to do. I wanted to see your father, that’s all. How is he?”

“How is he? Fine. As well as can be expected.”

“Good, good. And your mother?”

“Fine.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Is there some way we could make an appointment? I’ll only be out here through tomorrow.”

“I don’t know.”

“I have to go back east. I came out on a job interview but I don’t think they want me.”

“You teach?”

“Yeah. I just got my Ph.D.”

“I see. Congratulations.”

“Well, it was a struggle.”

I laughed with a wry note of self-deprecation. I let the images settle. Jack P. Fein really delivered. “Don’t mess me up,” he said when I told him thanks. Then he broke the connection.

In 1949, the year the Russians got the bomb, C. G. Jung spun three coins and asked the
I Ching
, a book of ancient Chinese prophecy, what it thought its reception would be in the United States. The
I Ching
was just about to be published in the United States and nobody here besides Jung and a few Sinologists knew much about it. The
I Ching
answered that it thought it would make its way very nicely.

I’d concluded the phone conversation with a sense of having triggered in Linda Mindish the beginnings of joy. I would describe it this way: You live for many years, certainly for as long as you can remember, in a menacing state of unfinished business. The phone rings. You realize your intimacy with what you fear. Or this way: Suppose the person who has been fucked is calling on you to ask no more than to be fucked again, A new life proposes itself. You are aroused to that purring eroticism that comes when you understand you’re going to get away with something after all.

The house was a small pink stucco model on a palmy side street of cottage-cute houses. It was a half-block off the Pacific Coast Highway, which is a kind of Boston Post Road of the west, a thoroughfare at this point in its journey of gas stations, real estate offices, portrait photographers’ studios, supermarkets, taco drive-ins and ivory-white mortuaries. I rang the bell. The novel as private I.

Linda greets me with a thin smile of distaste. She wears
a blouse with ruffled sleeves and a high ruffled neck. Her skirt stops just above the knees. She’s a thin girl with pale hair cut very short and feathered up, the kind of fair skin that blotches with emotion, her father’s grey eyes set too close, a big nose, a long face. Flat-chested but with surprisingly good legs. Not as tall as I thought she’d be. On the other hand she’s more mature. More grown-up than she sounded on the phone.

I am led into a small living room, everything neat as a pin, modest and well cared for, the Sears American Maple series with selected bric-a-brac from other shores. A room that has never seen the likes of me. A man in a dark suit and tie stands up from the couch. His hair is cut like a brush and flat on top. We are introduced, and shake hands. He hands me his card. His name is Dale something and he’s a lawyer.

The thing is people don’t experience revelation. Linda had had too many years to adjust and conform her life to the demands of her father’s career. He’d been let out of prison in 1959. They had taken him to Orange County. The mother, Sadie, was an ignorant woman. Linda, at eighteen, had picked out the place, chosen the new family name, talked to the lawyers. She had worked, gone to school, gotten a degree in dentistry, and now had her own practice in a shopping center in Newport Beach. I learned this from Jack Fein. She supported the old people. She ruled the roost. It is not something you give up easily.

“Linda did the right thing,” the lawyer tells me. “You can’t expect people to see you under circumstances like this just because you call them on the phone. She had no way of even telling if you were who you said you were.”

“No, it’s him,” she says. “It’s Danny Isaacson.”

“So your father isn’t here,” Daniel said.

“That’s right.”

“Does he know I called?”

“Let me ask the questions,” the lawyer said. “What do you want? Why are you here?”

Daniel sighed. “Does he?”

“I decided not to tell him until I made up my mind if he should see you or not. So if you think for one moment that he’s afraid of you, you’re wrong.”

“I don’t want anyone to be afraid of me,” Daniel said. He seemed offended. He sat down on a tweed armchair, leaned back, and stuck his legs out and crossed them at the ankles. He massaged his forehead. I looked at Linda Mindish and saw the premature middle age at the corners of her mouth and under her eyes. She is five years older than I am. She is ten years older than Susan. She has worked hard. She looks at me and waits. In her eyes perhaps the recollection of our strange relationship of rib-poking, pushing, touching—she, her menses attained, and an eight-year-old boy. Always trying to break little Daniel’s hand, twist his fingers, dig nails in his arm. Why? As Selig her father precedes her into the Isaacson house without knocking and sees what’s in the icebox. As he laughs and makes a joke in his Polish accent. As he patronizes the child Paul. As he covets in his low-grade chronic coveting Paul’s wife. How did my thing with Linda begin? Imposed on her face in this moment is the thirteen-year-old girl with the terrible misfortune to look like her father. Drop dead. That was a favorite expression of Linda’s. Daniel, will you do me a favor? What? Drop dead. Followed by a fake smile, a mirthless flash of teeth, turned on and off, to illuminate the second stage of my wisdom—I was entitled to nothing but deeper and deeper levels of her alienation. She had gotten that line from some play or movie very big in the Bronx at the time. Do me a favor: drop dead. She exercised on me, bringing from what jungles of girl society in the upper grades I could only imagine, every shitty verbal abuse of the day.

“Linda, I think we ought to get down to business. After all you do have appointments this morning,” the lawyer said. Image white coat hands in the pockets chew on the other side for a day or two. Kind of woman at her best in an office.

“I recognize in you the same look, the same look I see in the mirror. It’s very familiar to me.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“The look of the same memories. We walk around in the same memories. It’s like a community.”

She sat down on the couch next to the lawyer and their hands met. They held hands sitting facing me on the couch.

“Linda’s a big girl and I can only advise her what to do,”
the lawyer said. “Tell us what you’re getting at. There is nothing Linda or her father has to fear from you. There is no legal issue here. We’re not obliged to discuss that case with you.” He says “that case” as if he’s dangling someone’s pair of dirty drawers. “Do you need money? What’s your problem?”

I said: “What did you say your name was? Dale? Why don’t you shut up for a fucking minute, Dale. I’m trying to tell her something. You weren’t there, were you? I don’t remember seeing you there.”

The lawyer glanced at Linda, struggled to his feet. He was white. “I want to warn you that as a lawyer I’m in a position to advise you on intimidation, threatened or implied, and on assault or threat of an assault in the state of California.” He is pointing his shaking finger.

Daniel waited, like a public speaker, for silence. His eyes were closed. He had seen enough of the lawyer. He understood more of Linda by her lawyer: a fellow with brown shining eyes, Disney-animal eyelashes, square clothes, skinhead haircut. Emanates passivism. To be kind. Maybe it’s his chin which in a few years will be completely engulfed in itself. Yet he’s blandly good-looking. Thirty-seven, -eight years old. A dangerous wide-hipped whitey.

Daniel opened his eyes. The lawyer had sat back down. I think he had only wanted to show Linda that he could act commendably. Daniel said, “What I mean is both of us, we both live lives that accommodate an event neither of us was responsible for. Can you agree with that? Is that a reasonably fair description?”

She stared at him. Almost imperceptibly her head dipped, as if in assenting she wanted him to know how small how shallow the space they could both stand in. And even that she had to recant: “You, however, are the one who’s bringing it up. You’re the one who’s come here to dredge things up.”

“I’m hoping your father can help me settle some questions.”

“What questions? Are there still questions? As far as I knew all questions were settled a long time ago.”

“Do you really want me to talk in front of this guy?”

“Dale and I are going to be married.” Their entwined hands lie between them on the couch. They stare at me attached in
identical poses, feet flat on the floor in front of them, knees together, the dentist and her fiancé, a professional couple, and my heart sinks in the blank stare of their insularity and rises in rage as I realize whatever I mean to do I need them and rely upon them and have come three thousand miles to see them.

But there are certain things I am pretty sure of. It is not likely that Linda Mindish and her parents are prepared to reclaim their identity. I can assume the loyal friends she mentioned on the phone consist only of this guy. He is their big breakthrough. Therefore I am still a threat, I am potentially the public exposure of what neither of them right now wants exposed. On the other hand, although they have something to protect I’m sure that he, at least, feels his knowledge of the law and the fact that he practices here where he lives gives them leverage. I am a transient. He would want to persuade her that he can handle me with ease.

Yet it might have occurred to her after my phone call, granting her now a shrewdness far beyond my own, that an approach such as I made is essentially one of diplomacy. And that although she should of course anticipate something even as stupid as violence on my part, it is not likely. And that it might be worth the cost of a few tense moments to see what I want to trade. And an intuition, perhaps, that whatever it is she can take me. And be rid of the last possible connection.
They had children. Someday we’ll have to deal with the children. I am good at dealing. My parents suffer no winters. They lack real friends, but so does everybody. Everybody here comes from somewhere else. Their neighbors nod to them in the morning. Once a week a Japanese gardener trims the little yard. I have my practice. I have Dale. There is more money in the Mindish family than Selig ever dreamed. Why should I think this bearded misfit is more of a test than my whole life has been since my father was arrested.

“I am interested to know how you and your mother supported yourselves after your father went to jail.”

“What?”

“Linda, it’s none of his business.”

“You were fourteen or fifteen. Your mother was not the kind of woman who could go out and get a job. Savings don’t
last six, seven years. And when you moved out here with your father he never resumed practicing, did he? I mean he hasn’t practiced since his jail term, as I understand it. And you were able to get through college and dental college.”

“Linda, don’t feel obliged to explain—”

“No, it’s all right, Dale. I see what he’s getting at. In the first place there’s no tuition if you live here,” she said to me. “And I had scholarships besides. I carried extra course loads and I held down jobs. And in the second place my father worked in a lab until just a few years ago.”

She sat up at the edge of the couch with her hands folded in her lap and her ankles primly together. “It’s true what you say, Danny, neither you nor I was responsible for anything that happened. But we’ve borne the brunt. When my father went to prison my mother and I suffered terribly. But something else was good about the experience—I discovered all sorts of resources in myself that I otherwise might not have. From what I can see, and from what I’ve heard, neither you nor your sister have been that fortunate.

“In many ways I had it worse. Your parents after all were heroes to some elements. Today I understand you can find Isaacson Streets all through Eastern Europe. But Selig Mindish was a hero to no one, to say the least. What my father did brings no honor to himself or his family. You lose friends for something like that. You go to jail, where your health breaks. And afterwards you make no new friends. So you see in many ways it has been worse. I’ll tell you something: there used to be times when I wished strongly, very strongly, that my father might be executed, that we could change places, the Isaacsons and Mindishes, and that I would be glad to stand in your shoes if only you could stand in mine. Let me have your hanky, Dale.”

Daniel watched her. He folded his hands under his chin and rested his elbows on the arms of the chair. A surprisingly cool and objective eye glanced at him as Linda blew her nose.

“You call up with all this phony hippie humility and the minute you’re in the door you start getting nasty.”

“I didn’t bring my lawyer,” Daniel says.

“Perhaps you should have.”

“I didn’t hide my father somewhere.”