“Now that scares me more than anything, Grandma.”
“You’re fuckin’ right, Dan. Just remember, though, this placing of the burden on the children is a family tradition. But only your crazy grandma had the grace to make a ritual of it. Ritual being an artful transfer of knowledge. And pennies being the sum of her life’s value.”
A medical textbook. On the white and shining pages are photographs of three female bodies. Little, withered Grandma with her head of wildly twisted grey hair. Rochelle, strong, breasty, stocky, prim mouthed. And Susan in her thin gold granny glasses. They stand in a row across the double-page spread, palms turned slightly out, feet turned slightly out, nothing hidden. They could be standing up or lying down. Grandma looks like the wrinkled matriarch of an aboriginal tribe. Rochelle’s got the bosoms, but Susan is taller and more feminine. They all have triangles, but move your gaze upward. This is a medical textbook. The meaning of the picture is in the thin, diagrammatic arrow line, colored red, that runs from Grandma’s breast through your mama’s and into your sister’s. The red line describes the progress of madness inherited through the heart.
cottage cheese, tomatoes if they are good, a pound of hamburger, something gooey for dessert.
On the theory that what occurs is right. Any action is correct because it happens. What of that theory? Only if it works. I worry about images. Images are what things mean. Take the word image. It connotes soft, sheer flesh shimmering on the air, like the rainbowed slick of a bubble. Image connotes images, the multiplicity being an image. Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual’s calloused capacity to feel powerful undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality. They serve no social purpose.
You are going to have to shoot straight with Professor Sukenick. He thinks you are not applying for an NDEA fellowship because you refuse on principle to sign a loyalty oath. Why is shooting straight a metaphor for honesty? I am not applying for a fellowship because if I sign a hundred loyalty oaths, I still won’t get it. I should tell him who I am. Not that I’ve attempted to hide this information, but it is difficult to work it into any kind of small talk. Sukenick is a youth-sympathetic liberal, very sharp. He would be intrigued by my story. He would not believe that the government checks me out once or twice a year. My own father doesn’t believe it. Of course, this is not an assignment any FBI man, even the most callow, could consider without yawning. Nevertheless, my dossier is up to date. I live in constant and degrading relationship to the society that has destroyed my mother and father. I will never be drafted. If I left school today my classification would still be 2-A, which covers any situation not in the national interest. Listen, Professor, I could burn my draft card on the steps of the Pentagon and nothing would happen. Nothing I do will result in anything but an additional entry in my file. My file. I am deprived of the chance of resisting my government. They have no discoveries to make about me. They will not regard anything I do as provocative, disruptive or insulting. Nobody in the Federal police will ever say to a colleague: Who is this guy! No matter what political or symbolic act I perform in protest or disobedience, no harm will befall me. I have worked this out. It’s true. I am totally deprived of the right to be dangerous. If I were to assassinate the President, the criminality of my family, its genetic criminality, would be established. There is nothing I can do, mild or extreme, that they cannot have planned for. In the meantime, they have only to make sure that I am in no way involved with the United States Government, either as a social beneficiary, or as a servitor, however humble. They will give me no money. They will force me into no uniform. No administration will ever be connected to me in any way to make itself vulnerable to the opportunism of congressmen.
If, on the other hand, I were to become publically militant Daniel Isaacson all their precautions would have been justified. And probably whatever cause I lent myself to could be more easily discredited.
The final existential condition is citizenship. Every man is the enemy of his own country. EVERY MAN IS THE ENEMY OF HIS OWN COUNTRY. Every country is the enemy of its own citizens. Here are some places in the world I don’t have to look out for: Switzerland, Finland, Bolivia, Uruguay, Sweden, Red China, Taiwan, Soviet Russia, England, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, Canada, the entire continent of Africa, the entire continent of Antarctica, Japan, Mexico, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Burma, Israel, Egypt, South America, Cuba, Haiti, Aukland, all the little stamps in the stamp album, the Free Port of Shannon. All these places have relationships with my country not with me. My relationship is with my country. In the film Paths of Glory, a French regiment is shown in the trenches during World War I. They are ordered to attack with their rifles and bayonets an impregnable German position called The Pimple. They physically are not able to bring themselves to leap out of their trenches to commit this mass suicide. In a rage, their General behind the lines orders his own artillery to fire upon them. The artillery balks. The General withdraws this regiment from the lines and punishes it for rank disobedience by executing three enlisted men who have been picked by straw lot. Their own comrades are the firing squad. In war the soldier’s destruction is accomplished by his own Commanders. It is his government which places a rifle in his hands, puts him up on the front, and tells him his mission is to survive. All societies are armed societies. All citizens are soldiers. All Governments stand ready to commit their citizens to death in the interest of their government.
Drawing and Quartering. This particular form of execution was favored by English monarchic government against all except the aristocratic inner circle which was allowed the dignity of simple beheading. For everyone else the method worked like this: the transgressor was hanged and cut down before he was dead. Then he was emasculated, disemboweled, and his entrails were set on fire in front of his eyes. If the executioner was merciful the heart was then removed from the body, but in any case, the final act of the ritual was then performed, a hacking of the body into four parts, the quarters then being thrown to the dogs. Treason was the usual crime for this punishment, its definition being determined by the King’s courts for the King’s convenience.
In 1954, Robert Lewin accepted an appointment as Assistant Professor of Law at Boston College, a Jesuit institution in Newton, Massachusetts. Making a modest down payment, he bought an old house in nearby Brookline, and with his wife and two children, Daniel, fourteen, and Susan, nine, took possession one warm September afternoon a week or so before classes began. The three-story house, grey stucco with maroon trim and a roof of slate, was situated on Winthrop Road. This was a quiet residential avenue that curved up the hill from Beacon Street with its stores and trolley tracks. It wound through facing ranks of attached redstones, apartment buildings and cumbersome old houses set close to one another on small lots. The best feature of the new house as far as the Lewins were concerned was that it produced income to pay for itself. Inside the front door, with its clear, plastic louvers, was a small entranceway to two doors, two mailboxes, two bells. Like many of the houses in the neighborhood, number 67 was built for two families and designed to look as if it contained only one. The Lewins occupied the ground floor, and half of the second. Their tenants occupied half of the second floor and all of the third. Each apartment had a downstairs and an upstairs, and each was a mirror version of the other.
The two-family house was just an odd fact in the Lewin children’s odd life. Every sound had echoes, every image bore another. The very first full day in the house, before anything was unpacked, the new family went exploring, running down the one hundred forty-seven wood steps of Winthrop Path (always to be that number, the same each time, a source of great satisfaction) between the tiers of backyards on this terraced hill with the backs of houses resting on stilts, Brookline being built on hills; and catching the Beacon Street trolley to downtown Boston. There, in their explorations—all of them being New Yorkers—they
came upon the street signs of the Freedom Trail.
It is possible that the law professor and his wife were facing it squarely, right off the bat. It is possible they had decided to begin immediately to describe alternatives. Yet, according to one criminal of perception who watched them rather closely, they did not easily adjust to the presence of the ghosts in the lives of their children. These ghosts were not strange sounds in the attic, nor were they mists who moaned in the midnight garden. These ghosts were ironies. These ghosts were slips of the tongue. They were the brutal meanings in innocent remarks. They were the necessity to remain sensitive to your own words and gestures. These ghosts clung to the roof of your mouth, they hovered in your brain like fear, they resided in your muscles like nerves.
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.”