The Book of Daniel Read online

  Praise for

  The Book of Daniel

  “A ferocious feat of the imagination … Every scene is perfectly realized and feeds into the whole—the themes and symbols echoing and reverberating.”

  —Newsweek

  “The political novel of our age … the best work of its kind.”

  —The New Republic

  “A gripping, emotionally intense novel that beautifully describes the idealism of a generation rapidly being forgotten and contrasts it with a later radicalism … a novel of and for the present, one that throws light on America today and does so with a spare, brilliant intensity. This is an important work, one not to be missed.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Like reading a capsule history of the American left in the twentieth century … Public knowledge comes face to face with personal private pain, and the result is staggering.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Remarkable … brilliant … one of the finest works of fiction in recent years.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “A dazzlingly good novel … about politics, past and present, and, most importantly, about a man’s life.”

  —Boston Herald

  “It is a daring theme: What would happen to the children who had watched FBI agents take their parents from a New York apartment, were shunted from foster homes to shelters, visited their parents in a death house, grew up in a manic historical period…. This is an extraordinary contemporary novel, a stunning work.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Stirring, brilliant, very moving.”

  —The Houston Post

  a cognizant original v5 release november 24 2010

  Also by E. L. Doctorow

  Welcome to Hard Times

  Big as Life

  Ragtime

  Drinks Before Dinner (play)

  Loon Lake

  Lives of the Poets

  World’s Fair

  Billy Bathgate

  Jack London, Hemingway,

  and the Constitution (essays)

  The Waterworks

  City of God

  Sweet Land Stories

  The March

  Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993–2006

  for Jenny

  and

  Caroline

  and

  Richard

  Then a herald cried aloud, To you it is commanded, O people, nations and languages, That at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of music, ye fall down and worship the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar the king hath set up: And whosofalleth not down and worshippeth shall the same hour be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace. Therefore at that time, when all the people heard the sound of the cornet, flute, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of music, all the people, the nations, and the languages, fell down and worshipped the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar the king had set up.

  Daniel, 3:4

  With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums, I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play

  marches for conquer’d and slain persons.

  Walt Whitman,

  Song of Myself

  America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing….

  I can’t stand my own mind.

  America when will we end the human war?

  Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

  Allen Ginsberg,

  America

  Contents

  Book One

  MEMORIAL DAY

  Book Two

  HALLOWEEN

  Book Three

  STARFISH

  Book Four

  CHRISTMAS

  On Memorial Day in 1967

  Daniel Lewin thumbed his way from New York to Worcester, Mass., in just under five hours. With him was his young wife, Phyllis, and their eight-month-old son, Paul, whom Daniel carried in a sling chair strapped to his shoulders like a pack. The day was hot and overcast with the threat of rain, and the early morning traffic was wondering—I mean the early morning traffic was light, but not many drivers could pass them without wondering who they were and where they were going

  This is a Thinline felt tip marker, black. This is Composition Notebook 79C made in U.S.A. by Long Island Paper Products. Inc. This is Daniel trying one of the dark coves of the Browsing Room. Books for browsing are on the shelves. I sit at a table with a floor lamp at my shoulder. Outside this paneled room with its book-lined alcoves is the Periodical Room. The Periodical Room is filled with newspapers on sticks, magazines from round the world, and the droppings of learned societies. Down the hall is the Main Reading Room and the entrance to the stacks. On the floors above are the special collections of the various school libraries including the Library School Library. Downstairs there is even a branch of the Public Library. I feel encouraged to go on.

  Daniel, a tall young man of twenty-five, wore his curly hair long. Steel-rimmed spectacles and a full mustache, brown, like his hair, made him look if not older than he was then more self-possessed and opinionated. Let’s face it, he looked cool, deliberately cool. In fact nothing about his appearance was accidental. If he’d lived in the nineteen thirties and came on this way he would be a young commie. A cafeteria commie. He was dressed in a blue prison jacket and dungarees. His Brooklyn-born wife was nineteen, with long straight natural blond hair worn this day in braids. She came to his shoulder. She wore flower bellbottoms and a khaki rain poncho and carried a small bag with things for the baby. As a matter of principle she liked to talk to strangers and make them unafraid, and although Daniel hadn’t wanted her to come along, he was glad he relented. The rides came quickly. She talked for him while he stared out the window. Cars, he noticed, were very big and wide and soft. The people who drove them were not fearful but patronizing. They were inquisitive and obviously entertained to be driving these young American kids who probably smoked marijuana even though they had a baby.

  At about one o’clock they were let off at Route 9 in Worcester, a mile or so from their destination. They were looking up a long steep hill. At the crest of the hill, too far away to see, were the gates of Worcester State Hospital. Daniel had never been here but his father’s directions were precise. Daniel’s father was a law professor at Boston College forty miles to the east.

  He didn’t like my marrying Phyllis, neither did my mother, but of course they wouldn’t say anything. Enlightened liberals are like that. Phyllis, a freshman dropout, has nothing for them. Liberals are like that too. They confuse character with education. They don’t believe we’ll live to be beautiful old people with strength in one another. Perhaps they sniff the strong erotic content of my marriage and find it distasteful. Phyllis is the kind of awkward girl with heavy thighs and heavy tits and slim lovely face whose ancestral mothers must have been bred in harems. The kind of unathletic helpless breeder to appeal to caliphs. The kind of sand dune that was made to be kicked around. Perhaps they are afraid I kick her around.

  Daniel considered taking a city bus to the top of the hill but the traffic was bumper to bumper and they could almost outpace it by walking. With Phyllis beside him, her hand lightly on his arm, and with his thumbs hooked under the chest straps of the baby rig, he trudged up the hill. The road was jammed in both directions, and a blue haze of exhaust drifted through the heavy air. Daniel imagined it curling around his ankles, his waist, and finally his throat. A stone wall ran beside them separating the sidewalk from the hospital grounds. On the downhill side of the street were gas stations, dry cleaning drive-ins, car washes, package stores, pizza parlors. American flags were everywhere.

  As they approached the top of the hill, they saw a stone kiosk in which a number of people waited for
the bus. A bus arrived. It discharged its passengers, closed its doors with a hiss, and disappeared over the crest of the hill. Not one of the people waiting at the bus stop had attempted to board. One woman wore a sweater that was too small, a long loose skirt, white sweat socks and house slippers. One man was in his undershirt. Another man wore shoes with the toes cut out, a soiled blue serge jacket and brown pants. There was something wrong with these people. They made faces. A mouth smiled at nothing, and unsmiled, smiled and unsmiled. A head shook in vehement denial. Most of them carried brown paper bags rolled tight against their stomachs. They seemed to hold their life in those bags. Daniel took Phyllis’ arm. As they reached the bus stop the weird people dispersed and flowed around them like pigeons scuttling out of their way, flowing around them and reforming behind them, stirring restlessly in the kiosk in the wake of their passing. Except for one man. One man, the one in the undershirt, ran ahead of them, looking back over his shoulder as they turned into the hospital grounds. He ran ahead of them waving his arm windmill fashion, as if trying to rid himself of the rolled up paper bag locked in his fist. Beyond him, down the tree-lined road (the fumy air clearing in the trees) was the turreted yellow-brick state hospital at Worcester, a public facility for the mentally ill.

  SO THAT’S WHERE THEY’RE GOING!

  From the Dartmouth Bible: “Daniel, a Beacon of Faith in a Time of Persecution. Few books of the Old Testament have been so full of enigmas as the Book of Daniel. Though it contains some of the most familiar stories of the Bible, nine of its twelve chapters record weird dreams and visions which have baffled readers for centuries.”

  The way to start may be the night before, Memorial Day Eve, when the phone rang. With Daniel and his child bride at sex in their 115th Street den. The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection. And I have finally got her on all fours, hanging there from her youth and shame, her fallen blond hair over her eyes, tears sliding like lovebeads down the long blond hairs of her straight hair. The phone is about to ring. The thing about Phyllis is that when she’s stoned all her inhibitions come out. She gets all tight and vulnerable and our lovemaking degrades her. Phyllis grew up in an apartment in Brooklyn, and her flower life is adopted, it is a principle. Her love of peace is a principle, her long hair, her love for me—all principles. Political decisions. She smokes dope on principle and that’s where I have her. All her instinctive unprincipled beliefs rise to the surface and her knees lock together. She becomes a sex martyr. I think that’s why I married her. So the phone is winding up to ring and here is soft Phyllis from Brooklyn suffering yet another penetration and her tormentor Daniel gently squeezing handfuls of soft ass while he probes her virtue, her motherhood, her vacuum, her vincibles, her vat, her butter tub, and explores the small geography of those distant island ranges, that geology of gland formations, Stalinites and Trotskyites, the Stalinites grow down from the top, the Trotskyites up from the bottom, or is it the other way around—and when we cannot be many moments from a very cruel come that is when the phone rings. It is the phone ringing. The phone. I believe it is the phone.

  But how would I get this scene to record Phyllis’ adenoidal prettiness, her sharp nose and fair skin and light Polish eyes. Or her overassumption of life, a characteristic of teenage girls of high school culture. How would it connote the debts all husbands pay for their excesses. Already stirring in this marriage not two years old were the forms of my fearful kindness coming out like magic watercolor under her rubbing. And if the first glimpse people have of me is this, how do I establish sympathy? If I want to show disaster striking at a moment that brings least credit to me, why not begin with the stacks, Daniel roaming through the stacks, searching, too late, for a thesis.

  Worcester State Hospital is situated off Route 9 in Worcester, Massachusetts, on the crest of a hill overlooking Lake Quinsigamond, a body of water so quiet that it is famous for crew races. The hospital is in fact two hospitals, an old and a new. The new hospital back toward the woods does not concern us. Lacking steps it is for older patients. The old hospital was put up around the turn of the century. It was designed with the idea that madness might be soothed in a setting of architectural beauty. It is darkly Victorian, with arched doors of oak and mullioned windows. One other fact of considerable interest is that contrary to the popular belief this is one insane asylum that is not overcrowded. In fact it is, upon Susan’s arrival, half empty. That is because modern methods of therapy, including tranquilizing drugs, do away with the necessity of incarcerating every nut who happens to live in Worcester, Mass., or environs. The idea now is to commit only those patients who cannot take care of themselves on the outside, or who are murderously inclined. Even for these, there are programs of visits home on weekends if there are homes, and other such privileges. The theory is that the person’s normal environment is therapeutic. The theory is that the person wants to go home.

  Daniel found his sister in the Female Lounge. The walls there are yellow, ocher and tan. The ceiling is tan. The chairs are dark green imitation leather with chrome tubing arms and legs. There are two TV sets, one on either side of the room, and a rack for magazines. Susan was the only patient in the lounge. A staff attendant in a white uniform with white stockings, which tend to make the legs look fatter than they are, sat with her legs together on a straight chair by the door. She played with her hair and read Modern Screen. Does Dick Really Love Liz? Let me indicate my good faith by addressing myself to the question. I don’t think he really loves her. I think he is fond of her. I think he enjoys buying her outlandishly expensive things and also an occasional tup in bed. I think he loves the life, the camera’s attention, the ponderous importance of every little fart he makes. I think he loves fraud of spectacular dimension. I think if they were put on trial for their lives, he might come to love her.

  They had dressed Susan in one of those beltless, collarless hospital robes, and soft slippers. They had taken away her big granny glasses that always seemed to emphasize the spaciousness of her intelligence, and the honesty of her interest in whatever she looked at. She squinted at Daniel with the lovely blue eyes of a near-sighted girl. When she saw it was he, she stopped trying to look at him and rested her head back against the chair. She sat in a green imitation leather chair with her arms resting on its tubed chrome arms and her feet flat on the floor in their slippers. She looked awful. Her dark hair was combed back off her face in a way she would never have combed it. She always parted it in the middle and tied it at the back of her neck. Her skin looked blotchy. She was not a small person but she looked physically small sitting there. Not looking at him, she lifted her arm, her fingers dipping toward him, a bored, humorous, gesture, one that made his heart leap; and he took the outraised hand in both his hands thinking Oh honey, oh my poor honey, and kissed the back of her hand, thinking It’s her, it’s still her, no matter what she does, and only then noticing in front of his eyes the taped bandage around her wrist. When he’d had a good look, she pulled her hand away.

  For ten minutes Daniel sat next to her. He was hunched over and staring at the floor while she sat with her head back and her eyes closed, and they were like the compensating halves of a clock sculpture that would exchange positions when the chimes struck. He thought he knew what it was, that sense of being overcome. You suffocated. The calamity of it. He had had such spells. People looked at you in a funny way and spoke to you down corridors. You didn’t know what to do. Something was torn, there was a coming apart of intentions, a forgetting of what you could expect from being alive. You couldn’t laugh. You were in dread of yourself and it was dread so pure that one glance in the mirror scorched the heart and charred the eyes.

  Daniel must have sighed. Susan reached out and patted him gently on the back. “They’re still fucking us,” she said. “Goodbye, Daniel. You get the picture.”

  He listened alertly. He was not sure if she had said goodbye or good boy. He hung around for a while after that but she didn’t say another thing or
even acknowledge that he was in the room. He gazed out the window, leaning his shoulder against the window frame. The window was barred. He could see Phyllis playing with the baby down on the hillside. At the top of the hill was a retaining wall of brick, and inside that wall a parking lot filled with pastel cars. Into his sight rolled a dark blue Chevrolet he recognized as the Lewins’. Then the view was cut off by the top of the brick portico sheltering the steps of the main entrance to the hospital.

  Without saying much of anything, without even caring if he was there, Susan could restore in him the old cloying sense of family, and suggest that his wife was not in the same class and his child a complete irrelevance. That it was their thing, this orphan state, and that it obliterated everything else and separated them from everyone else, and always would, no matter what he did to deny it. Actually I don’t try to deny it. But I reserve the right to live with it in my own way, if I can. In Susan resides the fateful family gift for having definite feelings. Always taking stands, even as a kid. A moralist, a judge. This is right, that is wrong, this is good, that is bad. Her personal life carelessly displayed, her wants unashamed, not managed discreetly like most people’s. With her aggressive moral openness, with her loud and intelligent and repugnantly honest girlness. And all wrong. Always wrong. From politics back to drugs, and from drugs back to sex, and before sex, tantrums, and before tantrums, a faith in God. Here is a cheap effect: A long time ago, on an evening in June, 1954, June 22 to be exact, at exactly ten P.M., Susan gave me the word about God. It was during a night game between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. Allie Reynolds was pitching for the Yanks and it was nothing-nothing in the top of the seventh. Boston had one out and a man on first. Jim Piersall was up and the count was three and one. Reynolds picked up the rosin bag. Mel Allen was saying how a base on balls is always trouble and as he spoke there was a short beep over his voice the way it happens on television to indicate that a new hour has begun. At that moment Susan, age eight, and I, thirteen, could not look at each other. Allie Reynolds dropped the rosin bag, pulled at the peak of his cap, and leaned forward for the sign. And that’s when Susan told me there was a God.