The Book of Daniel (12 page)

Sit up straight, Danny. You’re always squirming. This particular dinnertable remark of Lise’s put her to bed with a white hankie crumpled in her fist. I recreate an evening of over a dozen years ago. My new mother is really upset. My new father, sucking his pipe, tunes his fine mind to the problem, runs his fingers through his then brown hair, already sparse from running his fingers through it as he thinks. He sits by the bed, ignoring the sound of his wife’s weeping. He thinks the problem through and reaches something like the intellectual translation of his children’s feelings.

Honey,
we
are ironies to them, this
house
is ironic, if it
rains
it’s ironic. You’re crying about a condition of their lives that is irrevocable. Please allow us to live as normally and imperfectly as all people live. Let’s go to sleep. We’ll do what we can. We will all go to bed at night and we’ll all get up in the morning. Just like the rest of the world.

I have no more of them than the present of their lives. Of course, it was more complicated, but the image that returns to me is of a young couple reading about it in the newspapers and rushing downtown on the subway. Before that I know that Lise, with some other Jewish children, went from country to country, in front of the Nazis, from cellar to cellar, until she reached England. I don’t know how she got from England to America. I don’t know who took care of her. She met Robert Lewin at a summer
camp in New Jersey where they both waited table. Another image is of Robert and Lise standing in front of a Rabbi with Robert in his Army uniform. There are some distant cousins. An old aunt or two. It is too late for me now to find out who they are or where they came from. And I don’t have the heart for it. Ascher chose them. They made a good home for us and provided examples for our lives of sanity and stability. We have repaid them by treating them as poorly as children treat their real parents. They are liberal Jews who live comfortably in a Christian world. Their home reflects idiosyncrasy that is valuable to me. Lise’s taste in furniture is distinctly old-fashioned and runs to middle European mahogany; her cuisine is Viennese. Robert years ago got into the habit of doing his work in the dining room—perhaps because he didn’t want his work to put him off from his family. From the dining room he can see through the center hall to the living room. And he can hear what is going on in the kitchen. So it is a dining room with a typewriter, and blue exam books and law journals and letters strewn about, and a meal prepared for by clearing all the detritus of the legal profession from the table to the buffet.

On the evening of that Memorial Day, 1967, Daniel pulled up in front of the Lewin home on Winthrop and turned off the motor. The rain had stopped. The streetlights shone on the wet street. Daniel’s wife immediately got out of the car, pushed the back of the seat forward, and lifted out her baby. Then she walked away in the direction of Beacon Street.

The Lewin house was a complete absurdity. It had Tudor-style bay windows on the second floor. But a Greek revival portico with plaster columns framed the front door. On the right-hand pillar, the number 67 gleamed in raised hemispheres of reflecting glass. Daniel turned off the car lights.

The house was dark. He thought he was about fifteen minutes ahead of the Lewins, although they might be longer if they had to drop Duberstein somewhere. Daniel got out of the car and stretched his legs. The rain had cooled things off. The air was fresh and the breeze moist and cool.

The mailbox alongside the door Daniel found stuffed with mail. This was a measure of the Lewins’ distraction. How else could you explain mail on Memorial Day. Among the letters was
a small blue envelope addressed to Daniel Isaacson Lewin. It was a girl’s handwriting. The postmark was Cambridge.

Daniel took the letter back to the car. He was a naturally graceful fellow, and an old woman shuffling by in house slippers behind her Alaskan malamute could not help remark on the insolent long-legged grace of youth as it reads its letters by the light of a dashboard, one foot in the wet street, and the other planted in the car. She had written him here. He was terrified. He had decided when he sat with her that she was not mad, she was inconsolable. But she was mad.

This is the text of the letter.

Dear Daniel,

I have been thinking about last Christmas. Of course I’m going ahead with my plans but that’s not the point. You couldn’t have come on that way unless you believe the Isaacsons are guilty. That’s what I didn’t want to understand at the time. You think they are guilty. It’s enough to take someone’s life away.

Someday, Daniel, following your pathetic demons, you are going to disappear up your own asshole. To cover the time until then, I’m writing you out of my mind. You no longer exist.

S. I.

Annotation of Susan’s Letter, 1. The address on the envelope, 67 Winthrop, indicates no recognition of Daniel’s New York residence, or, by implication, the last five years of his life. This is deliberate but not malicious. For Susan there are still issues. For Susan the issues must be preserved. Everything about Daniel’s recent life is irrelevant—except as it confirms his loss to the cause. The funny thing is, however, that he got the letter where it was mailed. And after no particular delay.

     2. The Christmas referred to was the Christmas previous in the winter previous in a previous phase of the world. At that time, the peace movement had not yet peaked. People who marched were called doves. The previous spring there had been a great big march of the doves down to the UN. Martin Luther King was alive. Bobby Kennedy was
alive. The student left had not yet come to the attention of
Time
magazine. Newark and Detroit and Cleveland would not burn till the summer. The great Pentagon rush would not occur till the following October. Everyone was defining Black Power. You remember? It was an innocent world then with the oldtimey simple sadnesses. The Beatles were not yet political. And Walt Disney had just died. At the Lewin home on Winthrop Road, Lise’s face red from checking the holiday turkey roasting in the oven, Robert serving one too many drinks, an altercation occurred of some magnitude between the children, and Christmas, boldly celebrated in this Jewish home as American-Family Day with the Kids Home, was not merry.

     3. The plans referred to were the apparent subject of the bitterness, the elder orphan child, Daniel, having not received word of them with sufficient respect. The plans for a Foundation for Revolution were offered up by the younger orphan child, Susan, a Radcliffe student, flushed with the triumphs of the Boston Resistance, a loosely confederated group of middle-class boys and girls who were returning draft cards to Washington and demonstrating in front of draft boards to indicate their opposition to the war in Vietnam. It bothered Daniel that his sister was so shining and bold as she spoke of their most recent demonstration, routed by the cops with clubs. She had been carrying a sign that read Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No, and she was knocked down and a cop had tried to hit her between the legs. Susan unbuttoned the sleeves of her blouse and displayed her swollen and discolored wrists. Phyllis gasped. Daniel noticed the Lewins look at each other with paling apprehension. Robert Lewin was amazed no bones had been broken. Susan was radiant. She wore an old-fashioned blouse with a high ruffled collar and puffy sleeves; she wore a dark skirt of velvet that came down to the tops of a pair of high lace boots. She was a lean attractive girl wearing old clothes picked up in an old clothes boutique, and naturally they looked like the latest thing. With her hair parted in the middle and pulled tight over her ears and clamped behind her neck, she was Rosa Luxemburg glancing at Daniel through her granny glasses of thin gold as if from the gates of another city, her fearless blue eyes striking his heart like the tolling of a
bell. Daniel felt in this situation a poverty in his choice of wife. He suspected the Lewins of that sentimentality for radical action to which liberals are vulnerable—an abstract respect for the dangerous politics they themselves are incapable of practicing. I’m being unfair. They were disturbed by what she had done, just as they had been unnerved when, for a time, her thing had been to drop acid. And she had been a forthright head with the same idealism, with the same passionate embrace for that liberation as for this.

Susan fended off the worries of her parents. She put them down for their cautiousness. She lectured on the moral and tactical differences between those who believed in going to prison and those who preferred Canada. Daniel drank his drink. The Foundation was to be named after Paul and Rochelle Isaacson. The Paul and Rochelle Isaacson Foundation for Revolution. The money would come from the trust when it came due to them. She was already talking to people in New York. In the coming year, on their respective birthdays, his twenty-fifth, her twenty-first, they would come into possession of the trust fund set up in their name by Ascher a dozen years before, and administered with great skill since by their foster father. Half and half. Susan suggested that she would welcome Daniel’s participation in the Foundation, not only for the money that was his, but because it would indicate, as well, a unanimity of family feeling, a proper assumption of their legacy by the Isaacson children. Indicate to whom, Daniel wanted to know. Why to the world, Susan said, her eyebrows lifting in surprise. Daniel asked Robert Lewin his opinion of the idea. Robert Lewin said Susan had been thinking about it for a while and had asked him if it was technically feasible, which it was. Daniel said sitting in front of draft boards or going to jail for refusing to be inducted was not his idea of how to make revolution. Susan nodded as if this was a point she had expected to come up. She herself thought resistance was an early phase, a stage in political development, and that other things were going on, new things were beginning to happen, and didn’t he keep his ears open at Columbia because she was sure Cambridge didn’t have a monopoly on New Left dialectic. She herself went through changes every day, and she would think the proper position now was not to stand
outside and criticize but to get inside and help create. “What the movement needs is money, Daniel. The Foundation can have a fantastic stabilizing effect. It can be really great. It can be something out of which other things happen.”

“Susan, how is it whenever you present me with an idea, or ask me to do something, it’s in a way calculated to turn me off.”

She lowered her eyes. “I guess, Daniel, because not much is required to turn you off.”

“Let’s keep the discussion on a reasonably high plane,” Robert Lewin said.

“I try to, Daddy,” Susan said, “but anything that comes from me is automatically suspect. Right, Daniel?”

“No, it’s just that I hear about it as a privilege, after the decisions are made.”

“But nothing has happened yet. We’re just talking.”

“Who’s just talking.”

“You’re unbelievable. We’re just talking, now, you and me. Us.”

“No, you said you were talking to people in New York.”

“Oh, right, I have, I’m talking to a lot of people. I talk to whoever listens.”

“Who?”

Susan nimbly rebuttoned her sleeves. “Forget it. Forget I said a thing. You do as you like.” She turned to our father. “It makes me sad, it really does. We’re in this horrible imperialist war, we’re burning people, and the issue is how I happen to talk.”

“No, I’ll tell you what the issue is. The issue is if you want to give your money away why not just do it, why do you have to put a family tag on it? Why do you have to advertise?”

“That’s a Rightist question, It’s not advertising. The name Isaacson has meaning. What happened to the Isaacsons is a lesson to this generation. I suppose you can’t understand that.”

“There it is, the fucking family gift for self-objectification. You hear that? She calls her own mother and father the Isaacsons!”

“Listen, you two,” Robert Lewin said. “If you can’t conduct a civil discussion I’d prefer no discussion at all.”

“I’m not ashamed of the name. I’m proud of who I am. Unlike
you. If you could only see the schmucky way you come on in this world!”

“That may be. But I don’t think starting a Foundation is necessarily a good idea just because it has the name Isaacson on it. How will it work? Who is it for? What will it do?”

“WHY NOT LET’S TRY IT AND SEE!” She had stood up, and her fists were clenched at her sides. “You cop out with this phony cynicism bag that conveniently saves you from doing anything. Well, you tell me what to do. You give me a better idea what to do with this blood money.”

“This blood money has bought you an education, skiing lessons and records.”

“Why don’t you just admit you’re a selfish prick!”

“On the contrary, I don’t want the bread. I thought we’d give it to our parents.”

Robert Lewin said, “That is the one alternative that as guardian I won’t permit.”

“Well, I think you ought to reconsider. Your just due for all the bullshit you’ve put up with.”

“Don’t worry, Daniel. You can forget the Foundation. It doesn’t need you. You have all the political development of a retardate. Go back to your life. Take this milk cow of yours and go home.”

“If this doesn’t stop right now,” Lise said, “I’m not going to serve dinner.”

“Go back to the stacks, Daniel. The world needs another graduate student.”

“Well, I don’t have to go out and get beat up to justify my existence.”

“No, you’d rather jerk off behind a book.”

“This must stop,” the mother said. “You are ruining my dinner.”

“Susan, I don’t think you’re handling this very well.”

“Oh yes she is, she really is. She’s a Revolutionary! She’s got all the answers. She’s been to the barricades!”

“Oh Jesus,” Susan said, beginning to cry. “And you know I blame you,” she said to Robert Lewin. “I blame you all for the piece of shit this brother of mine—”

“Susan—”