The Book of Daniel (16 page)

I was pleased by the news. I thought if the G-men had to arrest someone, as my father said because if they didn’t they would have nothing to do, then they had made a wise choice in arresting Mindish. I felt that if it had been my job to arrest someone, I would have chosen Mindish too.

Early the next morning, as I was leaving for school, the doorbell rang and I opened the door and two men were standing on the porch. They were dressed neatly, and did not appear to be of the neighborhood. They had thin, neat faces and small noses, and crew-cut hair. They held their hats in their hands and wore nice overcoats. I thought maybe they were from one of those
Christian religions that sent people from door to door to sell their religious magazines.

“Sonny,” said one, “is your mother or father home?”

“Yes,” I said. “They’re both home.”

My mother did not allow me to delay going to school just because the FBI had come to the door. I don’t know what happened on that first visit. The men went inside and, going down the splintery front steps, I turned and caught a glimpse of Paul coming out of the kitchen to meet them just as the door closed. My mother was holding the door and my father was coming forward in his ribbed undershirt, looking much skinnier than the two men who rang the bell.

When the FBI knocks on your door and wants only to ask a few questions, you do not have to consent to be asked questions. You are not required to talk to them just because they would like to talk to you. You don’t have to go with them to their office. You don’t have to do anything if you are not subpoenaed or arrested. But you only learn the law as you go along.

“They don’t know what they want,” Paul says to Rochelle. “It’s routine. If you don’t talk to them, they have nothing to pin their lies on. They are clumsy, obvious people.”

“I’m frightened,” my mother says.
“Polizei
don’t have to be smart.”

“Don’t worry,” Paul says. “Mindish won’t suffer from anything we said.” He is walking back and forth in the kitchen and he is pounding his fist into his palm. “We have done nothing wrong. There is nothing to be afraid of.”

It develops that all of Mindish’s friends are being questioned. Nobody knows what he is being held for. There has been no announcement on the radio, there has been no story in the newspaper. Sadie Mindish is in a state of hysterical collapse. Her apartment has been searched. Her daughter has stayed home from school. Nobody knows if they even have a lawyer.

The next day the same two FBI men come back again, this time in the early evening. They sit on the stuffed, sprung couch in the living room parlor with their knees together and their hats in their hands. They are very soft-spoken and friendly. Their strange names are Tom Davis and John Bradley. They smile at me while my mother goes to the phone to call my father.

“What grade are you in, young fellow?”

I don’t answer. I have never seen a real FBI man this close before. I peer at them, looking for superhuman powers, but there is no evidence that they have any. They look neither as handsome as in the movies nor as ugly as my parents’ revulsion makes them. I search their faces for a clue to their real nature. But their faces do not give clues.

When Paul comes home, he is very nervous.

“My lawyer has advised me that I don’t have to talk to you if I don’t want to,” my father said. “That particular fact you neglected yesterday to mention.”

“Well, yes sir, Mr. Isaacson, but we were hoping you would be cooperative. We’re only looking for information. It’s nothing mysterious. We thought you were a friend of Doctor Mindish. As his friend, you may be in a position to help him.”

“I will be glad to answer any questions in a court of law.”

“Do you deny now that you know him?”

“I will answer any questions in a court of law.”

The two men leave after a few minutes, and then they sit in their car, double-parked in front of the house, for ten or fifteen minutes more. They appear to be writing on clipboards or on pads, I can’t tell exactly. It is dark and they have turned on the interior car light. I am reminded of a patrol man writing a parking ticket. But the sense is of serious and irrevocable paperwork, and I find it frightening. There is some small, grey light in the dark sky over the schoolyard. The wind is making whistling noises at the edges of the window.

“Danny!” Rochelle says sharply. “Get away from there.”

My father takes my place at the curtains. “That is outrageous,” he says. “Don’t you see, it is part of the treatment. They are trying to shake us up. But we’re too smart for them. We’re onto them. They can sit out there all night for all I care.”

The next day is worse. At lunch my father tells my mother he is sure someone has searched the shop. When he unlocked the door this morning, he felt that things were slightly out of place. It wasn’t anything he could pinpoint exactly. Maybe the tubes in the trash barrel. Maybe the customer tickets. It was more like a sense of things having been disturbed.

Our lunch is muenster cheese sandwiches on pumpernickel
and canned tomato soup. My father doesn’t eat. He sits with his elbow on the table and his hand to his head. He nods, as if he agrees with something he has decided.

“That’s it. That’s why they came here and asked you to call me home. They could just as easily have come to the store, couldn’t they? But they didn’t. They wanted to make sure I was home when they wanted to search my store.”

My mother discounts this. She says they could have waited until late at night and achieved the same thing. I understand that she is deliberately minimizing the situation. She suggests that perhaps my father is imagining the whole thing about the store being searched. As the pressure increases, she seems to be calming down. Her own hysteria has passed. She is worried about Paul. She is into the mental process which in the next three years will harden into a fortitude many people will find repugnant.

“Did you have your test, Danny?”

“This afternoon.”

“Do you know all the words?”

“Yes.”

But there are dark circles under her eyes. When I come home from school, the FBI men are sitting outside again in their car. My mother is lying down on the couch with a washcloth across her head. Her left forearm is bandaged. While ironing she gave herself a terrible burn. The edges of our existence seem to be crumbling. The house is cold and Williams has come up from the cellar to say in his deepest voice of menace that the furnace is not working properly and has to be cleaned. He will get to it when he can. I understand this means he will get to it when he does not feel abused by the situation. All my senses are in a state of magnification. I hang around the house feeling the different lights of the day. I drink the air. I taste the food I eat. Every moment of my waking life is intensified and I know exactly what is happening. A giant eye machine, like the mysterious black apparatus at the Hayden Planetarium with the two diving helmet heads and the black rivets and its insect legs, is turning its planetary beam slowly in our direction. And that is what is bringing on the dark skies and the cold weather. And when it reaches us, like the prison searchlight in the Nazi
concentration camp, it will stop. And we will be pinned, like the lady jammed through the schoolyard fence with her blood mixed with the milk and broken bottles. And our blood will hurt as if it had glass in it. And it will be hot in that beam and our house will smell and smoke and turn brown at the edges and flare up in a great, sucking floop of flame.

And that is exactly what happens.

If they had something on them before Mindish was arraigned, why didn’t they pick them up? If they were suspects before Mindish made his deal, why were they given four weeks to run away, or destroy incriminating evidence, or otherwise damage the case against them? The only answer is FBI stupidity or inefficiency, and that is a reasonable answer but not a good one.

Smoking.
In Japan in the 16th century, Christians were winnowed out by having the entire population of a village walk across an image of Christ painted on rice paper and placed on the ground. Those who refused to step on Christ’s face were immediately taken out of the procession and hanged upside down over a slow-burning sulfur fire. This is one of the slowest and most painful forms of execution known to civilization: the victim’s eyes hemorrhage and his flesh is slowly smoked. His blood boils, and his brain roasts in its own juices. Death may come as late as the second week, without the victim’s previous loss of consciousness.

First the strangulation of the phone. There are fewer calls each day. Then a period during which the phone rings once, twice, and is silent. Or I pick it up in time, but there is no answer. Finally, the phone stops ringing altogether. It is a dead thing. My father takes to making his outgoing calls in candy stores up and down 174th Street. I enjoy negotiating with him for nickels I happen to have. He needs lots of change, and during the day in school I make a point of trading off quarters for the small stuff. I like to be useful for his evening trips to the phone
booth. I make no profit, I merely want to be a help to him. He travels farther and farther from the house, using up phone booths the way he uses up change.

Meanwhile, the newspapers have been reporting a chain action of arrests around the world. An English scientist. An American engineer. A half-dozen immigrants in Canada. Secrets have been stolen. The FBI has been finding these people, and convicting them in the same press release. A chain reaction. My father comes home, not only with the
Daily Worker
, the
Times
, and the
Post
, but the
Telegram
, the
Tribune
, and even the
News, Mirror
and
Journal-American.
He is reading everything. He speaks of auto-da-fé, and I see a Nazi demagogue, Otto Duffy, a sinister European whose Fascist ideas are sweeping over the United States. And it is not just spy arrests, but political trials like Foster and Dennis, and the other Party leaders. It is the defamation of New Dealers like Alger Hiss. It is the Un-American Activities Committee investigations of Hollywood writers. It is the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. My father paints a picture: our house is completely surrounded by an army of madmen.

One night he reads aloud a
New York Times
story in which it is said that political discussion of any kind has virtually disappeared from college campuses. The
Times
has done a survey. Professors are afraid of being misinterpreted. It is becoming necessary in state universities to sign loyalty oaths.

“You hear, Rochelle? What does it tell you? You know where it ends, Rochelle.”

“Shhh, Pauly. You’ll wake the children.”

I was afraid to go to sleep. I had terrible nightmares which I couldn’t remember except in waking from them in terror and suffocation. I was terrified that if I went to sleep, the house would burn down, or that my parents would go away somewhere without telling us. For some reason, the second of these possibilities came to seem more likely. I would lie in the dark and think that I couldn’t fall asleep because the minute I did, they would leave me and Susan and go somewhere they had never told me about. A secret place. It’s the same thing when you catch them fucking, the same terror of exclusion. Flopping about, completely out of control, these people who control you.
Grunting and moaning and gasping, who have told you to tie your shoelaces and drink your juice. I could feel now in everything since Mindish’s arrest, a coming to stay in our lives of the worst possible expectations. The world was arranging itself to suit my mother and father, like some mystical alignment of forces in the air; so that frictionless and in physical harmony, all bodies and objects were secreting the one sentiment that was their Passion, that would take them from me.

Where they might run off to did not occur to me as jail. I thought of it as a harmonic state of being. Gradually, I recognized the location. It was somewhere near Peekskill, when Paul got beaten up. He lay for days on the living room couch-bed with his headaches and puffed mouth, and his broken arm, and Rochelle took care of him. Her ministrations were devoted but practical, like an army nurse in a field hospital. She was as grimly involved as he in what he had done. They didn’t seem to notice me. I understood the universe stood in proper relation at last to the family ego.

OH PAULY, OH MY POP, IT’S ALL RIGHT, IT REALLY IS ALL RIGHT. BUT WHY DID YOU HAVE TO GIVE YOUR GLASSES TO MINDISH?

One morning Daniel heard a knock on the door. He recognized the hour. You have to know the house to see what happened. The front door was on the left side of the house as you faced it from the inside. It opened onto a short hall, and on the right-hand side of the hall was the entrance to the living room. Halfway down this short, dark hall was the narrow stairs that went up to the two bedrooms. Under the stairs was the place we kept the carriage and also old newspapers. Just beyond this area was the doorway to the kitchen which was behind the living room in location. I tell you this (who?) so that you may record in clarity one of the Great Moments of the American Left. The American Left is in this great moment artfully reduced to the shabby conspiracies of a couple named Paul and Rochelle Isaacson. They sleep in a foldaway couch-bed in the living room. They bought it from Pauly’s older sister, Frieda, my Aunt Frieda, with the mole with one hair coming out of it just above her upper lip, when she moved into a smaller apartment, after her
husband died. The front hall is linoleum. A little side table, just out of range of the door when it opens, holds the phone and the Bronx phone book.

When Daniel opened the door, there stood the two FBI agents, Tom Davis and John Bradley. Behind them, across the street, frost in the crotches of the chain link fence of the schoolyard shone in the early morning sun like stars in Daniel’s eyes.

“Hi, Danny. Is your Dad at home?”

“What is it, Daniel?” his mother called from the living room.

“It’s those two men,” Daniel replied.