My God how I hate them all, how I despise their pompous little egos and their discussions and resolutions and breast-beating; with their arrogance as they delivered to us each week the truth, the gospel according to nth Street. Always they treated Paul like a child and with his mind! a mind so fine, so superior to theirs except in the grubby self-serving politics of the Party. He was always being censured, he was never quite in step. All he did was slave for them, believe for them. Communists have no respect for people, only for positions. It is as if we never existed. Someone not Mindish, Mindish hasn’t the brain, someone told him to do this. I can’t understand it as anything else. Except that after years he learned in this thick Polisher way the impudence that permits you to use people for your own purposes if you speak in the name of the Party. You blind them with your ideals and while they are looking up you stab them in the belly for the sake of your ideals.
But he is so stupid, they are so stupid, he never properly became a citizen. He is legally vulnerable, sexually frustrated, a spy who saves himself by convicting his friends. This is what Ascher will say. It is possibly true. It is conceivable that all these years a secret spy with his dental x-rays he never managed the practice of dentistry too well because he was not by nature a dentist but a spy. A man with two lives. A man with friends to be used in case of emergency. It is possible. I will know when he walks into the courtroom and I look him in the eyes.
BETH DAVID SYNAGOGUE
Grand Concourse and 175th St.
Bronx 57, New York
February 4, 1954
My Dear Robert,
I am not writing this at the office but wanted quickly to let you know I don’t see what purpose your coming up to NY would serve. It is impossible to defend in this trial. Hirsch has ruled that my clients may be questioned about their political associations as establishing their motive for the crime they are accused of. Therefore no matter what strategy I employ by the inversions of logic of these times a conclusion will be derived that makes them guilty. Whether they declare their communism or take the Fifth, communists they are shown to be. And if they are communists they are liars. And if they are liars this dog Mindish must be telling the truth. That is because even if he is a communist he is a witness for the United States Govt. All I can have the Isaacsons do is deny Mindish’s testimony. But if Mindish testifies he met with the famous Thos. Flemming, who is known in certain circles as Talkative Tom because he has been used by the govt in three trials already, and Flemming who is brought from his prison cell to the courtroom testifies he took orders from Kusnetsov of the Soviet Govt, how, not being there, can my clients deny that? Yet they are held to account for it. They are held to account for the Soviet Union. They are held to account for the condition of the world today. And all the indictment states is that they met with Mindish in the kitchen of their own house.
I don’t think it is advisable for you to leave your classes. Please don’t. If I think you can help I will call on you. I expect to lose the trial but win on appeal. I am saying yiska for your father. God forgive me, in one sense I am glad Samuel is no longer on earth—that he would have to see in this case the sometimes terrible power of his beloved law.
My sincerest regards to you and your lovely bride.
Jake Ascher
VERDICT
The Isaacsons are convicted of conspiracy to give to the Soviet Union the secret of the atom bomb. No—the secret of the hydrogen bomb. Or is it the cobalt bomb? Or the neutron bomb. Or napalm. Something like that.
One day after a rain, a young man trying to interpret and analyze the awful visions of his head makes an ordinary visit to his sister in her sanitarium. It is the autumn of a really great year. He stands outside her window, his cheap boots darkening in the wet grass. He searches for her first on one wet foot, then on the other. She’s not in the bed, she’s not in the chair, she’s not in the corner near the door. If she is in the room she is somewhere along the window wall beyond his line of sight. A face appears in the safety-glass panel of the door. The door opens and he ducks. He hears a voice, cheerful, patronizing and solicitous. It is a voice for addressing pets.
The sanitarium is built to look like a series of connected garden apartments. It is located in a quiet residential street of Newton, not far from Boston College. Behind it is a professional building for doctors and dentists, also built to look like a series of garden apartments. The sanitarium and the professional building share a parking lot. One day in the previous week, this young man hunkering here in the shadow of these garden apartments, rushed out of the sanitarium and across this parking lot, his fleece-lined jacket flying from his upraised hand like a battle flag. He was screaming incomprehensibly, making hoarse guttural sounds of rage, he was really behaving quite poorly. Behind him trying in vain to call him to account, his foster father came out of the door of the sanitarium, just as the young man disappeared through the doors of the professional building. Behind the young man’s foster father came the young man’s foster mother. Behind the foster mother came a nurse. They were quite alarmed. Somehow the young man had gotten it in his head that his sister, a patient in the sanitarium, was being considered for shock therapy. A strong electric current is applied by means of electrodes fastened to the scalp earlobes shoulders nipples bellybutton genitals asshole knees toes and soles of the feet, to the nervous system of the patient. The patient does a rigid dance. The current is stopped and the patient relaxes. The current is applied again and the patient dances again. The current is relaxed. The young man was going after one of the doctors with an office in the professional building, a psychiatrist named Duberstein. He was going to kill this Doctor Duberstein. In his zeal he forswore the professional directory in the lobby and simply went down the halls, flinging open the doors of the waiting rooms and treatment rooms and x-ray rooms, banging doors and scaring mothers and their babies, old men with the shakes, and boys with severe cases of acne. It is just as well. Had he been a killer he would have moved quietly. But preceded by his shock waves he alerted the supposed victim, sending him a signal of the ritualistic nature of his fury. Not that Duberstein picked this up. His chair was warm and a manila folder lay open on his desk and his pipe smoke hung in the air. He was GONE! A lucky thing too, I would have killed him.
But you see I was learning. I was learning how to be an Isaacson. An Isaacson does things boldly calculated to bring self-destructive results. It is a way of making the world do your bidding. My face now bearded, my hair longer than it has ever been, I careen through my changes at an accelerating pace. The sense is of running too fast downhill. But why not, why the fuck not.
In the aftermath of my assault on his office Duberstein told the Lewins he would withdraw from the case unless they guaranteed to keep me away from her. I said I would guarantee to keep away from her if they would guarantee to have him withdraw from the case. My father, a lawyer with some knowledge of arbitration, suggested this compromise: I would guarantee to keep away from Duberstein’s hospital and his person if they guaranteed to keep his miserable hands off the voltmeter. The agreement was made.
At the same time I initiated discussions with the Lewins with the end in mind of becoming Susan’s sole legal guardian, an idea I view with warmth on days of sun, and coolly on days of rain. Today is chill. My feet are getting wet. I raise my face above the window sill and I see that the competent nurse has placed Susan back on her bed. The door is just closing. I watch my sister. Slowly her legs spread, her feet slide over the sides of the mattress and her toes hook into the crevice between the mattress and the spring. Her arms move outward; her hands curl over the edge of the mattress and find the same ledge. She holds her bed in her hands and by her ankles. Her tunic has risen above her knees. Her legs are skinny and have not been shaved. Her face is gaunt. She writhes gently on her back, swaying like something underwater, staring intently with her DP eyes at the ceiling. Finally the pillow is dislodged and falls to the floor. She presses her head back and peers at the junction of ceiling and wa
ll directly over the headboard. And now firmly attached to the bed she does not move.
Today Susan is a starfish. Today she practices the silence of the starfish. There are few silences deeper than the silence of the starfish. There are not many degrees of life lower before there is no life.
Daniel raises the window, hoists himself to the sill, and climbs through. He has a document which he puts with the others in the drawer in her bedtable. But that is not the main business of today.
He stands at the foot of her bed. To be objective, she is learning to rest upon what is designed to be rested on. From here I can see that the sanitarium does not require underwear. Look at that. A wave of hot guilt breaks over Daniel’s ears. He moves aside, out of the beam. That is the last thing to go. More than once I have asked myself if I’d like to screw my sister. I mean I have not asked myself, I have examined myself to see if that was what I wanted. But in our history I don’t think I have ever wanted that. My involvement with Susan has to do with rage, which is easily confused with unnatural passion. My interest, my raging interest is higher up, somewhere in the heart’s canyons with their clear echoes up into the throat: it enrages me that anyone, let alone my kid sister, could have characterized my actions, could have found in what I was doing and the way I was acting enough consistency, enough of a pattern, to make a confident moral judgment.
Mrs. Madge Green, with one prosthetic breast, drives her Buick Riviera to the S&H Redemption Center. Her Pontiac Bonneville. Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowl. Look at her lying there making a fool of herself. Teach her to play her stupid games. Look at the actress. Isn’t she something else! Look at how just lying there, not saying a fucking thing, not doing a thing but lying there and picking up bedsores she can still be morally preemptive. What character! To be truthful, Susan, I can live with your death. I will make a fuss because it will be expected of me. But I can live with it. I know how to do that. I’m not saying I won’t hang sad, but at suppertime I’ll be hungry, right? I’ll want a hamburger with everything on it.
You know I’m not shittin’ you, man. I can live with anyone’s death except my own. You know it. Everywhere in my life people have been trying to die and lots of them have made it. As it is I’ve done too much for you—and for what? You don’t talk, you don’t reinforce their sense of you. All they have is my word. I remember your voice, but how can I expect them to remember your voice. You can’t write out voices. All I can say about your voice is that it is so familiar to me that I cannot perceive the world except with your voice framing the edges of my vision. It is on the horizon and under my feet. The world has always been washed in Susan’s voice. It breaks where her voice breaks, under declaration, or late toward sleep, or at moments of love—only to more fully characterize itself. It is the feminine voice that passes solidly through ontological mirrors. It lies at the heart of the matter, the nub of the thing, the core of the problem, in the center, on the bull’s-eye, smack in the middle. We understand St. Joan: You want to fuck her but if you do you miss the point.
Susan, the other night I dreamed that with someone looking on I lifted my heavy scalloped gourd of a face with its eyes closed and affixed it to my head. It was not a funny dream. The eyes were closed. The thing weighed a ton but it wasn’t the whole head, just the facial edifice, curled like a bent-penny head of Lincoln, or the Roosevelt side of the dime or the Kennedy half dollar, curvilinear, like a watermelon. I felt the flesh with my fingers, with the tips of my fingers down my temple and cheek and it felt like dead flesh. I noticed its imperfections, this skin. It was cold, like clay, which is to say not cold but without warmth. A touch of a smile tipped its lips in sleep. Was that you with me in the dream, looking on?
To be objective, the weaker her signals the stronger mine become. We know the art of that. But what is happening is that as my signals grow stronger she has to move further and further away to hear them. Attentively, she will back off into nothingness.
To be objective, she is dying.
To be objective, they are still taking care of us, one by one.
Life recedes like the tide going out, the waves of life shrinking back, and over her forehead and down through her eyes a dryness, a loss of life. And she looked so pale, my God, she is dying and there is nothing Daniel can do. She is washing up on the beach, and when the last moisture sinks below the sand, and the sand dries in the sun, she will be dead. And my whole family will be dead.
When I picked her up there was no weight to her. There was no heft of ocean and slide of salt dune, no ocean of seabed shifting. Her arms hung down from the shoulders, her skinny legs from the knees. I felt her backbone against my arm, the bones of her thighs across my arms. Her head lolled back as if her neck were broken. Susan, in her ear, Susan, whispering, Susan hugging her bones and her dry weightlessness, Susan kissing her eyes. Only the warmth of her bones told me she was not dead.
When I laid her back down the shock of what I had done distributed itself through her body, and her feet twitched and her hands twitched. And her head rolled on the sheet and her eyes closed and opened and closed and opened. Then slowly the tremors slackened. And once again her arms moved out slowly and her feet hooked the mattress and she fixed herself to the bed, sucking to the bed with the vacuum pores of her shrinking bone marrow, and she stared once more at the ceiling and listened to the slow ebb of the sea.
We understand that when St. Joan led them into battle none of the soldiers watched the way her ass moved. We understand that Churchill found it of immense value to have played with toy soldiers as a child. Every line of every novel of Henry James has been paid for. James knew this and was willing to accept the moral burden. We can accept our moral burdens if our underlinen is clean. That is why we have toy soldiers. Susan digs all this. A starfish is not outraged. We must preserve our diminishing energies insofar as we direct them to the true objectives. A certain portion of the energy must be used for the regeneration of energy. That way you don’t just die like a bird falling, like a rock sinking, you die on a parabolic curve. You die in a course of attack. Susan knows this. To be a revolutionary you need only hold out your arms and dive. It is something like the sound barrier, there’s a boom when you break through, a concussion of space, a compression of the content of space. An echo ricochets through the red pacific twilight all the way over the ocean.
We understand Churchill found it of immense value to have played with toy soldiers as a child. We understand Truman found it of immense value to have commanded artillery as a young man.
From under his jacket Daniel pulls a cardboard tube. From this he withdraws a poster which he smoothes flat. Standing on a chair he tapes the poster as high as he can on the wall facing her bed. The ceiling would be better but even on a chair he can’t reach it. The poster is a black and white photograph of a grainy Daniel looking scruffy and militant. Looking bearded, looking clear-eyed. His hand is raised, his fingers make the sign of peace. It is a posed photo blown up at a cost of four ninety-five.
JACK P. FEIN
Ny Times
229 West 43rd Street
Fein is the reporter who did the reassessment piece in the Times on the tenth anniversary of the execution. He’s a robust bald-headed guy with grey sideburns.
“Do you remember the trial?” he asks me.
“We weren’t allowed to go.”
“It was a piss-poor trial. The case against them was nothing. Talking Tom’s word as a convicted spy wasn’t worth shit. All the government had was Mindish’s accomplice testimony that to believe you’d have to believe it’s possible that a radio repairman was trained and educated enough to draw intricate plans of the most sophisticated kind, and that he would reduce them so that they would fit on dental x-ray film—I still don’t understand why anyone would have to do that. It was too much. And that this stiff was valuable to the Russians. Insane I The Russians had everything they needed. They had all that stuff. They had professionals right there, they had their own men ri
ght on the spot. Anyway, the day after the Times ran my piece I was having lunch downtown and just as I’m leaving the restaurant Red Feuerman walks up behind me, the chief prosecuting attorney. He’s now Judge Feuerman of the Southern District, it was a career-making case, baby, everybody did well. Feuerman grabs me by the elbow, like this, you know how some guys grab your elbow like it was a tit or something, and he says, ‘Jack, you let the wrong guys get to you, I can’t believe you’d buy their story.’ ‘What story, Red, you’re not gonna stand there and tell me without smiling that you had a case!’ ‘Someday when you have the time,’ he says, ‘come up to my office and I’ll show you some things.’”
What things, I asked Fein.
“Oh, it’s a lot of bullshit. That’s the way they all talk. Even before the execution, when the heat was on to commute the sentence, they dropped these hints about evidence they had and couldn’t use in the interest of national security. Like there’s this big report in the Justice Department that they’ve never released because of security, and no one can see it, and it’s supposed to have indisputable evidence. But a friend of mine in Justice told me if the report has evidence like they claim they would have released it. There’s a report all right, and the reason it’s classified is because it favors the defense. Shit, between the FBI and the CP your folks never had a chance.”