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.
Daniel and the FBI men listened to the sounds of his mother waking up his father. Daniel still held the doorknob. He was ready to close the door the second he was told to.
“What time is it?” said his father in a drugged voice.
“Oh my God, it’s six-thirty,” his mother said.
She came into the hallway, pulling on her robe. Her long nightgown was thin cotton and Daniel panicked for a second because you could see the tips of her breasts through the material until she wrapped the robe around her and tied the belt. He glanced at the two men in the door to see if they saw, but there was nothing in their faces.
“Morning, Mrs. Isaacson. Can we come in?”
His mother was combing back her thick hair with her fingers. She turned her attention to the two men at the door, who by this time had become acquaintances of a sort. They had cultivated a we’re-all-in-this-thing-together kind of approach. The idea in their exaggeratedly wry suffering of my father’s verbal abuse and stubbornness was that they preferred having no part of this messy situation, but as long as they were assigned to this job, perhaps some mutual kindness and even a bit of humor would make it easier for everyone concerned. Once they even alluded to the pressure on them from their “higher-ups.”
“Who are these higher-ups?” my father had said.
“Now, Paul, we’re supposed to ask you the questions.”
“So you’re not getting enough out of me,” my father said, not without pride.
“You’re a tough nut, all right,” one of them said. “Next thing we know, you’ll be trying to indoctrinate us.”
“Well, I’ll tell you something. I have answered your questions about me. I have told you my biographical details. I have not answered questions about anyone else.”
“You mean like Doctor Mindish?”
“I have said what I mean. But I am curious about you. I am curious that a man of reasonable intelligence like yourself would choose to become a tool of the ruling class. I would like to know what makes you do it? What is your motivation? What are you saying to all the poor and sick and exploited individuals in this country when you join this Federal Bureau of Inquisition?”
“Well now, we don’t see things just the way you commies do, Paul.”
Either my mother nodded that they could come in, or they took her silence as permission. I know she would have been anxious to keep the cold out. They walked through the door and immediately there was an electric charge of life just outside, and right behind them came another man, then two more, then a few more, all warmly dressed and well tailored for the harsh autumn morning, a dozen FBI men, all told, bringing into our little splintery house all the chill of the outdoors on their bulky shoulders. They poured through the front door like an avalanche of snow.
“What is it now!” my mother shouted.
“Rochelle!” my father called.
I looked outside. Five or six sedans were double-parked along the street. Another car was pulling up. Two more of the G-men stood on the sidewalk. Another was going down the alley to come in through the basement. In my ears was the crackle of a turned-up police radio.
My father was shown the warrant for his arrest as he sat on his hide-a-bed with his bare feet on the floor. He groped around for his glasses. He told my mother he felt suddenly nauseous, and she had him bend over with his head between his knees till the feeling went away. She was furious.
“What are th
ese men doing here?” she said to Bradley and Davis. “Do you think you’ve got John Dillinger? What are you doing?” Men were going through the bookshelves, the bedclothes, the mahogany wardrobe closet. Men were marching upstairs.
My mother stood with Susan in her arms and tears coming down her cheeks. Every piece of furniture in the house had been, in some moment of her life, her utmost concern. She had made every curtain, she had scrubbed and polished every inch of floor. This old, leaky, wooden shack we lived in—and what newspaperman who wrote about the trial ever said a thing about the Isaacsons’ poverty, the shabbiness of their home with its broken-down Salvation Army furniture and castoffs, and amateur paint jobs, its stained wallpaper where the rain soaked through the front door.
“Murderers!” my mother cried. “Maniacs! Haven’t you hounded us enough? Can’t you leave us alone?”
She did not appear to realize that my father had been arrested.
I ran upstairs. Two of them were in my room. They examined my dinosaur book, the model airplane I was working on, and the cigar box I used to hold my marbles. They looked under the mattress on my cot, they lifted the linoleum on the floor, they looked in the closet and went through the blankets and sheets my mother kept there, flapping out each one and then throwing it on the floor. They took the crystal radio my father had helped me make, and the table radio, an old metal Edison that I listened to my programs on, pulling out the plug and wrapping the cord around the radio and tucking it under his arm. And in Susan’s room one of them opened the belly of her monkey doll with a penknife and stuck his finger in it and pulled out the stuffing. In Susan’s room was my grandma’s shiny hope chest, and they were going through that, tossing out Grandma’s brown picture of her mother and father, and a siddur, two down pillows, and some old clothes of hers, and a lace tablecloth with fringe. Mothballs rattled on the floor. Down at the bottom of the chest was a blue, oblong tin with rounded corners. It was my grandma’s last tin of asthma grass. One of them picked it up, opened it slowly, sniffed it, replaced the lid, and wrapped the tin in his handkerchief and put it in his pocket.
Daniel ran back to his own room. His own blue tin filled with pennies of peculiar existence had been opened and the pennies scattered on the floor.
Downstairs the place was a shambles. Broken dishes in the kitchen. The newspapers from under the stairs strewn about. One of them was picking out copies of the Daily Worker, and issues of other papers with stories about ATOM SPIES arrested in England, Canada and New Jersey. A terrible draft swept through the house now, the front door having been propped open. I looked outside. Williams stood on the sidewalk. He was wearing his overalls over a grey sweat shirt. He was wearing slippers. He was looking down the alley. And from under my feet came the thunder of the garbage cans crashing around the cellar.
I don’t know how long this went on. There appeared across the street, along the schoolyard fence, growing numbers of children not interested in going to school. People were hanging out of the windows of the apartment houses on 173rd Street. At each corner of our block a regular police patrol car was parked across the intersection. The FBI radio sputtered like my grandma’s asthma grass. Teachers were watching. The FBI men were taking all these valuable things to their cars. I stood at the door and watched, and this is what they took: My crystal radio and my radio for listening. A stack of selected newspapers. My father’s International Workers’ Order insurance policy for five thousand dollars. A toolbox. A year’s issues of Masses and Mainstream. And the following books: JEWS WITHOUT MONEY by Mike Gold, THE IRON HEEL by Jack London, STATE AND REVOLUTION by V. Lenin, GENE DEBS, THE STORY OF A FIGHTING AMERICAN by Herbert Marais and William Cahn, THE PRICE OF FREE WORLD VICTORY by Henry A. Wallace, Vice President of the United States, THE GREAT CONSPIRACY by Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn, WHO OWNS AMERICA by James S. Allen (the cover shows a fat capitalist with a top hat and a dollar sign inscribed on his belly, sitting in front of a factory on top of a big bag marked profits—oh, Red cartoons! Oh, Robert Minor with your sexy goddess of freedom lying raped and bleeding, and your workingmen of the giant arms, and the clasped hands of your black and white brothers, and your ranks of workers advancing toward the cringing capitalist bosses, I salute you! I salute you, Creator of the anti-comic strip! In such bold strokes of the charcoal pencil is my childhood forever rubbed into my subversive brain, oh, Robert Minor, oh, William Gropper, geniuses of the pencil stroke, precision tools of working-class dreams, agitators, symbol-makers, vanguard of the vanguard with your unremitting proprietorship of the public outrage) and THE STORY OF THE FIVE YEAR PLAN by M. Ilin. This last book is from my room. It is a translation of a primer for Russian children. My father gave it to me and said to keep it in my room until I was old enough to read it. I am old enough, but have not gotten around to reading past the first chapter.
On the bank of a large river, great cliffs are being broken into bits. Fierce machines resembling prehistoric monsters clamber clumsily up the steps of a gigantic ladder hewed out of the mountain … A river appears where none existed before, a river one hundred kilometers long … A swamp is suddenly transformed into a broad lake … On the steppe, where formerly only feather grass and redtop grew, thousands of acres of wheat wave in the breeze … Airplanes fly above the Siberian taiga, where in little cabins live people with squinting eyes clad in strange dress made of animal skins … In the Kalmik region, in the middle of the naked steppe, grow buildings of steel and concrete alongside the felt tents of the nomads … Steel masts rise over the whole country: each mast has four legs and many arms, and each arm grasps metal wires … Through these wires runs a current, runs the power and the might of rivers and waterfalls, of peat swamps and coal beds. All this … is called the Five Year Plan.
Daniel stood in the entrance to the living room. He was still in his pajamas. The cold of the morning had driven itself into his chest. It filled his chest and his throat. It pressed at the backs of his eyes. He was frightened of the way he felt. The cold hung like ice from his heart. His little balls were encased in ice. His knees shifted in ice. He shivered and ice fell from his spine. His father was dressed now, standing in his good suit of grey glen plaid with the wide lapels and square shoulders hanging in slopes off his shoulders and the wide green-forest tie and the white shirt already turning up at the collars, buttoning his two-button jacket with one hand, and his face, unshaven, turned in a moment’s attitude of trying to remember something, trying to remember as if it was on the floor, this sadness, this awful sadness of trying to remember, so unaccustomedly dressed up in his over-large suit with the pleated trousers and cuffs almost covering his brown wing-tipped shoes, and his other hand rises limply from the wrist, his arm rises, and he doesn’t seem to care, attached to a handcuff as the man who holds him captured lifts his hands to light his cigarette, my father’s hand going along in tow, the agent cupping his match and lighting his cigarette, and my father’s hand dangling, having moved just as far as the other man moved it.
I remember that Susan was crying, “Why they do that to Daddy? Why they do that to Daddy?” over and over, “Why they do that to Daddy?” and that my mother was rocking her, holding her tightly, and swaying with Susan in her arms saying shhhh, shhh … But Susan was hysterical, sobbing with great gasps for air. We have none of us ever had enough to breathe. I kicked the FBI in the shins and I butted them in the groin, and I screamed and raged, and swung my fists at them. I know I hurt a couple of them. But I was shoved aside. And when I came back, I was lifted by the hands and feet, and flopping and squirming like a snake, and You leave my pop alone! I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you! I was dropped behind the stairs in the pile of papers. My father was hustled out the door. I was on my knees, warmed by my own tears, thawed in my rage, and I saw his face as he turned for one brief moment and yelled over his shoulder: “Ascher!”
And then it was terribly quiet. And all the cars were gone, and the gaping people were gone, and the door was closed, and I looked at my weeping mother, and I held h
er baby daughter for her as she dialed the phone. And I realized my father was really gone.
The Isaacsons are arrested for conspiring to give the secret of television to the Soviet Union….
So Ascher came into our lives, the first Surrogate. Ascher was not a left-wing lawyer. He had spent his professional life practicing in the Bronx, primarily in civil law. He was what my Aunt Frieda called a Jewish gentleman. Ascher was the kind of lawyer who quietly handles all the legal affairs of his Synagogue for years without compensation. He was in his sixties when I first saw him, the large features of his face showing the signs of his emphysema. His mouth was stretched wide, his eyes deep-set and slightly bulging. I felt the weight of my grief when Ascher was around because, like a doctor, he would not have been there unless something was wrong. But I didn’t dislike him. He had enormous hands, and a gruff condescension to children that I did not find inappropriate or offensive.
Ascher was a pillar of the Bronx bar. He was not brilliant, but his law was sound, and his honor as a man, as a religious man, was unquestionable. He was an honest lawyer, and was dogged for his clients. I picture him on Yom Kippur standing in the pew with his homburg on his head, and a tallis around his shoulders. Ascher could wear a homburg and a tallis at the same time.
He was not my parents’ first choice. My parents were not accustomed to dealing with lawyers, or accountants, or bank tellers. I think now my father must have called a half-dozen lawyers on the recommendations of his friends, before he found Ascher. Lawyers were not anxious to handle any case involving the FBI, even left-wing lawyers. When my father was trying to find a lawyer while fending off the FBI visits, the case was open-ended, as any sharp lawyer understood. Maybe Ascher understood this too. He certainly understood that this was a bad time in history for anyone whom the law turned its eye on who was a Red, or a “progressive” as Communists had come to characterize themselves. Since 1946, indecent things had happened in the country. He lectured Rochelle as if she might not know. The Democrats under Harry Truman competed with the Republicans in Congress to see who could be rougher on the Left. People were losing their jobs and their careers for things they said or appeals they had supported fifteen years before. People were accused, investigated and fired from their jobs without knowing what the charges were, or who made them. People were blacklisted in their professions. Public confessions of error had become a national rite, just as in Russia. Witnesses naming friends and acquaintances seen at meetings twenty years before were praised by Congressmen. Informing was the new ethic. Ex-Communists who would testify about Party methods, and who would write confessionals, made lots of money. The measure of their success was the magnitude of their sin. It was the time of the Red Menace. The fear of Communists taking over the PTA and Community Chest affected the lives of ordinary people in ordinary towns. Anyone who knew anyone who was a Communist felt tainted. Everything that could be connected to the Communists took on taint. People who defended their civil liberties on principle. The First, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Pablo Picasso, because he had attended the Communists’ World Peace Congress in Paris and painted doves for peace. Doves. Peace. There was a new immigration control bill and alien deportation bill, and a control of American citizens abroad bill. And there was an internal security bill providing for concentration camps for anyone who might be expected to commit espionage. And there were now people who couldn’t get passports, and there were now people who couldn’t find jobs, and there were now people jailed for contempt, and there were now people who couldn’t find Mark Twain in the library because the Russians liked him and he was a best seller over there.