The Book of Daniel (39 page)

“You take me for a fool? Should I have believed you? I owe you nothing. Your whole family have always been liars. All full of high ideals except when it comes to other people. Except when it comes to ruining the lives of friends.”

“What does that mean?”

“They led Papa down the garden path. From the day he met them. They were always too good for him, but not too good to let him chauffeur them where they wanted to go, or run their errands, or fix their teeth, or turn into a spy for them. He wasn’t an intellectual. I was a child but even I understood how little respect they had, and how they took advantage.”

“Linda, honey, calm yourself,” Dale said.

But she was calmer than he was. The way an actor is calm as the audience takes his emotion to heart. For one moment I experienced the truth of the situation as an equitability of evil. This is what happens to us, to the children of trials; our hearts run to cunning, our minds are sharp as claws. Such shrewdness has to be burned into the eye’s soul, it is only formed in fire. There is no way in the world either of us would not be willing to use our sad lives; no betrayal impossible of our pain; no use too cheap of our patrimony. If Susan had only had a small portion! But nothing Susan did ever lacked innocence: no matter how loud, how demanding, how foolish, how self-destructive, nothing Susan did lacked innocence. This bitch was another matter. I imagined her in bed. There was no question in my mind that she wouldn’t refuse. That’s why she had called her fiancé—not to protect herself from my violence, but to keep intact her planned recovery from the life of Linda Mindish. She could take it on back very quickly. With just a small push. It would not be uninteresting, it would not be without blood, an incest of blood and death and jism and egg more corrupt than any I could have with my real sister. There was enough hard corruption in Linda Mindish and me, flawless forged criminals of perception, to exhaust the fires of the sun.

And then that moment passed and I saw her as locked into her family truths as we were locked in ours. Were these her
formulations, or her mother Sadie’s? Hadn’t Sadie and her husband built them over the years of visiting hours? Wouldn’t they do that? I saw myself as having provided Linda the opportunity to say out loud the righteous complaint that this family had had in rehearsal for fifteen years.

“Well, the awful Isaacsons are dead, Linda. All you have to worry about is me. And what can I do? Expose you to your friends and neighbors in Orange County, California? But you moved here for a reason. It was a shrewd place to come. If your cover is blown there’s always room for an ex-Communist in Orange County. Right? After all, your old man helped bust a notorious spy ring. He was not without his part in the execution of the infamous Isaacsons, was he?”

Linda was looking grim. The lawyer said, “His testimony is a matter of record.”

“Right, it surely is. But there are still questions to be answered.” Daniel thought a moment. “For instance, have you ever discussed with him why he confessed? You’re a lawyer, Dale. Don’t you have a professional interest? It’s one of the great cases.”

“That’s a naïve question.”

“Why—because he was caught? And he purged himself and confessed and told the truth? To make
that
penance, right? Is that why he did it—because he was caught and had no choice? Or did he do it to save himself, to save his own life. My parents thought so—they thought he implicated them to save himself. They thought he was a spy. Or they pretended to. It’s all very puzzling.”

“What are you talking about,” said Linda.

“Shit, I don’t know. I wanted to tell your father I think he was innocent. I wanted to lay that on him,”

They looked at each other briefly as if an idea they had considered before my arrival—that I was a madman—seemed now brimming with prescience. Linda crossed her legs, adjusted her skirt. She picked a cigarette out of the box on the end table and held it before her in that stiff-fingered way of lady smokers, as Dale got out his lighter.

“You make me very sad.”

“Yeah, well, it’s hard to get it down, I know. I had trouble
myself. But start with the idea that there was a spy ring and the whole thing was just as he testified in court. You’ve got to ask yourself why. There was no evidence except his confession. If he had not confessed there would have been no case against anyone, including himself. My father, I mean my foster father, thinks that he was hassled by the FBI. He thinks Selig just couldn’t hold up under the questioning. They had him for a long time. They had something on him—maybe citizenship. That he’s not a, urn, sophisticated man and didn’t know what could and couldn’t be done. But I disagree with that.”

“You do.”

“Yes. It’s possible he realized every value in the situation beautifully. My father’s interpretation lacks a knowledge of the old Left. The life of embattled Communist Party members in those days. That’s what’s missing from his analysis. There was another couple everybody in the Bronx membership knew about who had dropped out of Party life some years before. Did you ever hear of them? It was commonly rumored in the ranks, because none of our families or their friends were anything more than rank and file, that the other couple went underground, into espionage work. They took on a certain heroic mystery, that other couple. Do you know their name? Did your father every mention them to you? Has he ever said anything about this?”

“No, Danny.”

“Well, this other couple had two children. They were about the same age as my parents. A lot of mythology grew up about them. You didn’t talk about them without lowering your voice. Who knows how many children they had? Or what their age was? But they were supposed to have been fairly young, with kids, and they were said to live just a few blocks away, up on the Concourse.”

Think about it a while. Look at me.

“Is that all?” the lawyer says.

“Well, that’s the gist of it.”

He shook his head and smiled sadly. “It is highly speculative, to say the least.”

“That’s right. That’s why I want to talk to Selig.”

“Stop calling my father Selig,” Linda said.

“I have his fillings still in my mouth,” Daniel said with his palms in the air.

“Let me see if I understand this.”

“Oh Dale, it’s insane.”

“No, honey, just a minute. Now you’re saying that Dr. Mindish lied about your parents in deference to another couple who looked like them?”

“I don’t know if they looked like them. To protect another couple everyone thought was working under cover. To keep the FBI away from people of real value. They were closing in. To divert them. To get the heat off.”

“And that Dr. Mindish, who was innocent, made this story up about himself and your parents?”

“Well, actually Selig doesn’t have to be innocent for the theory to work. He might have been involved marginally. He might have been told to do it. But all right, let’s say innocent.”

“And that this mythical couple, these other people, were the ones who actually stole the secrets?”

“Well, not necessarily, because it’s never been proven that any secrets were stolen. It isn’t what really happened or was going to happen. It was what Selig and or some of the others
thought
had happened or was going to happen. It was as much fantasy as what the FBI thought had happened.”

“I see. And have you come up with any facts, or any information in support of this?”

“It’s just a theory, man,” Daniel said with a smile. “It’s my theory of the other couple.”

    Shannon, in
THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM
, shows us the immense contribution made by the American Communist Party to its own destruction within a few years after the war. They had all the haughty, shrewd instincts of a successful suicide. It is no wonder in this club of ideologues of the working class, self-designed martyrs, Stalinist tuning
forks, sentimentalists, visionaries, misfits, hysterics, fantasists, and dreamers of justice—no wonder that a myth would spring out of their awe for someone truly potent. It is ironic that such a myth would arise without planning or intent from their laboriously induced collective mythic self. But they were helpless before it.
We have our daredevils too. We have our cat burglars and laughing caballeros. Our George Rafts flipping coins. Our masked riders of the plains. We have them.

The mystery couple of the Grand Concourse, and their two children, walked out of their apartment one Sunday as if for an outing. They carried no luggage. A camera over his shoulder. A tote bag in her hand. Leaving an apartment intact, with dishes in the drain, they were never seen again. This happened soon after my father was arrested. They were later reported to be living under another name in New Zealand. They were reported to be traveling through Britain on Australian passports. They were reported traveling through France on British passports. They were arrested in West Berlin, held for six months without trial, and exchanged for two Englishmen held by the Russians in Moscow. They were last reported living in Leningrad.

When Selig Mindish was called to the stand, my mother sat up in her chair and folded her arms and lifted her head. There he was. He looked shrunken. He was a physically big man but she was shocked now to see how different he had become, all collapsed, all fallen in on himself, with his neck sticking out of his collar and his suit that seemed to slide over him as he moved. But the fat nose was still fat and the little pearl-grey eyes shone their dog intelligence at Feuerman’s assistant, the greasy one, who began to lead him through his testimony.

It was at this moment in the trial that she nearly lost her composure. Jake had told them what to anticipate. Still, to hear the treachery spoken with the emphasis of a nodding head in the familiar accents of their friend of many years was too much to be endured. She felt with her arms folded that she was holding herself together. Tears filled her eyes and flowed down her throat. She did not move a muscle. An electricity of rage flowed into her body. She wanted to leap out
of her chair and catch Selig Mindish by the throat and tear out his tongue.

And he would not look at them. Even when he was asked to point them out he did so only with his hand, pointing to their table with his eyes fastened on the prosecutor. He would not look in their direction. Writing on his pad, Jake broke the point of his pencil. Mindish continued to talk, giving names and dates, recalling conversations. She gazed at him fixedly. Her tears passed. Her rage passed. She continued to look at the witness, looking up to the stand, arms folded, in unwavering attention. It had become more important to her than her life to make Selig Mindish recognize her presence in this courtroom. She willed it. She wanted to extract from that miserable deathface an acknowledgment of her real existence. She could reconcile her persecution, her death, but never a delusion so monstrous that it did not grant her the truth of her own life. Look at me, you pig! Look! I will know why you have done this. You cannot dare to ignore me. You owe me a glimpse of your rotting cowardly soul, you murdering Cossack! Pig! Look at me. I defy you to look at me.

At this point in his testimony the dentist was describing how certain drawings were stored in the darkroom lab he’d made out of the closet in his office. The drawings were scaled down and scratched on dental x-ray films. Among the files and sanders and plaster jaws. The little assistant prosecutor went over to his table and came back holding between his thumb and forefinger a dental x-ray mounted as a slide.

“Is this what you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Will you please examine it and tell the court what it is.”

Accepting the film and holding it up to the light, Selig Mindish actually began to smile—it was the kind of thing that happens to children, ballooning their cheeks and escaping in snorts through their nose, when the secret is about to come out. The man was an idiot. But before he said the words that put them in their graves he turned and looked for a moment at Rochelle, looking for one fraction of a second into her eyes with the same moronic smile dying on his face and the absurdly significant dental x-ray slide in his spatulate fingers; and in
the little grey pig eyes of the dentist was the recognition she sought. A wry acknowledgment of this moment in the courtroom, in their lives, and she was stunned to read in it the message not of a betrayer

the novel as a sequence of analyses. But what of the executioner? A quiet respectable man, now retired. He is in the Yonkers phone book

no not as betrayer begging forgiveness, there was no appeal for forgiveness, nor did she see the rationalized hate that would permit him to do this, and justify it, no, nor the hypnotized stare of a programmed amnesiac, nor the actor’s look for the court’s benefit of a fellow conspirator—none of these: he presented the private faith of a comrade, one to another, complicitors in self-sacrifice, one to another, and I cannot communicate beyond this but by now you must know why and what is happening. She saw the comrade’s life of terrible regret, of sad determination, one to another, and the assumption of their shared knowledge, the sexuality of it. And then she turned to look at her husband. Ascher was hunched over his table writing furiously. Beyond Ascher’s shoulder, a sculpture of the burden of man, her husband Paul sat upright with his eyes closed and pain that had caused the corners of his mouth to turn upward. And they were not on trial but back at the summer camp, at Paine Lodge, Mindish and Paul and Rochelle, lifting their joined hands to the blackberry night of crickets’ fiddle and frogs’ jug band, spinning in intricate devolving patterns, diving through the arches of their own arms, and dazzling the brothers with a folk dance of infinite beauty, of eternal grace. And there swept over her now the horrifying conviction that Paul did not have to return this look of Mindish. That while she had been shielding him from her dread he had withheld from her his one crucial perception. And that what in this moment overwhelmed her was something her husband already knew in himself and for himself.

There is a line in one of her last letters to him.
The gambler has no rights.
It is a non sequitur. It is a line that makes no other sense. Its context is one of those miserable conversations they were allowed to have through the wire mesh once a week, a marital spat, low-voiced, urgent, full of fever and humiliation
and nausea; as he tried to get her approval for what he had done alone, for the complicity he had forced upon them, for the defense they had offered, for the gamble of her life and his. She suspended all communication with him after the third appeal failed. This is usually attributed to her well-known mental problems, the court having supplied a psychologist once a week for therapy.
They want me to adjust to the idea of dying
, she wrote Ascher. But she would not write Paul the last month of their lives, and it is not clear if they saw each other the night before their execution although it is commonly believed they did. And possibly they did, for a dance before death, a reconciliation in heat and love and terror, while the jailers fled the corridor and the stones groaned and the bars rattled; and they rippled and spasmed and shook and trembled as if electrocution was something people did together.