Jack Fein is a chain-smoker. He slid his Camel cigarettes out of the pack and laid them on the table in a row like cartridges in a belt. He drinks black coffee. He does not carry a camera or a pad. We were in this luncheonette. It was warm there but he kept his coat on and leaned all over the table with his coat sleeves flopping.
“You’re a tough baby,” he said. “That’s good. I’m glad to see that you’re hangin’ in there. What’s the name of your Foundation?”
“The Paul and Rochelle Isaacson Foundation for Revolution.”
“What’s it gonna do?”
“We’re, urn, funding publications to develop revolutionary awareness. We’re going to finance community action, urn, programs. We’re going to assert the radical alternative.”
“Great. You want to tell me where your Foundation is getting its money?”
“Sure, man, it’s no secret. It’s my trust money and my sister’s trust money. It’s a lot of money.”
“The thing the old lawyer put together, Ascher. From that committee.”
“Right.”
“What does it come to now?”
“Well, um, I haven’t been counting.”
“Beautiful. You’re a beautiful baby. Are you in SDS?”
“No.”
“PLP?”
“No.”
“Where do you live now?”
I tell him.
“What about your sister?”
“Well, see, I don’t think she wants to talk to anyone right now. She’s recovering from the trial.”
Wicked.
“Yeah.” He lights a new Camel with an old one. “Yeah, I heard something like that. Yeah. She would be how old now.”
“Susan is twenty.”
“And where is she?”
“Out of state, that’s all I can tell you.”
“What about your foster parents. Could I talk to them?”
“Look, I don’t care about blowing our cover. I don’t think any of us care anymore. Anyone who was interested could have traced us up to Boston. But I mean there are certain family things to be settled by all of us, not me acting alone. We’ve all got responsibilities to each other.”
“I understand. Don’t worry, I don’t fuck around.”
I do not like the sudden sympathetic turn of things. Here I’m laying the Foundation on him and he wants to talk to the responsible adults. It occurs to me that I am dealing with a professional. The son of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, who were executed a dozen years ago for crimes against the nation, has established a Foundation to clear their name.
“Of course it can’t be done,” Fein assures, me.
“But that’s not the purpose,” I tell him.
“Listen, kid, a radical is no better than his analysis. You know that. Your folks were framed, but that doesn’t mean they were innocent babes. I don’t believe they were a dangerous conspiracy to pass important defense secrets, but I don’t believe either that the U.S. Attorney, and the Judge, and the Justice Department and the President of the United Sates conspired against them.”
“I thought you said the evidence was phony.”
“That’s right. Those guys had to bring in a conviction. That was their job. But no one would have put the finger on your parents unless they thought they were up to something. In this country people don’t get picked out of a hat to be put on trial for their lives. I don’t know—your parents and Mindish had to have been into some goddamn thing. They acted guilty. They were little neighborhood commies probably with some kind of third-rate operation that wasn’t of use to anyone except maybe it made them feel important. Maybe what they were doing was worth five years. Maybe. But that would have been in the best of times, and in the best of times nobody would have cared, nobody would have cared enough to falsify evidence. No one would have been afraid enough to throw a switch.”
FANNY ASCHER
570 West 72nd Street
Fanny Ascher was curious to see how I’d turned out. That’s why she agreed to talk to me. There was also a repugnance or fear of me, and what I came from, or of my name, and that’s why she sat on the edge of her sofa with her ankles crossed, with her chin high, in wary widowhood. She is a thin lady with very fair skin, finely wrinkled, and grey jeweled eyeglasses, and hair tinted blue. It is difficult to clasp fingers painlessly around a diamond ring and a wedding band on that fourth finger. The crookedness bothered me, the distortion in that hand’s form the arthritic form
“You are a student still?”
“Yes.”
I have been trying to keep up with what you people are doing with your long hair and strange clothes. I am an enlightened woman and I like young people. Nevertheless I am disappointed that you look this way. It does not inspire confidence.
“And married, with a baby?”
“Yes.”
She shakes her head.
“And your sister?”
“She’s getting better.”
“Still?”
“Yes.”
The woman’s head oscillates left right left right left right. Her eyes are fixed on me.
“I don’t want to take up a lot of your time.”
“My time? What do you think I do with my time?”
“Well, I only came to ask if there were any papers, any letters you know about. Any files.”
“There are none. Robert has all the files. I gave him everything I found. How is Robert?”
“He’s OK.”
“You go up there?”
“Yes, when I can.”
“They are busy people.”
“Yes.”
“I hear from them every year on the high holy days. A card.”
“Yes.”
Photograph of Ascher on the baby grand. A younger man than I remember, smiling in soft focus in a leather frame,
“Well, that’s all I came to ask you.”
“Jacob saved everything. For over a year every day I went to the office to go through his papers. Bills, letters, notes to himself—he threw away nothing. When I sold the practice and closed the office I had to clean up the garbage of thirty-five years. But it was all filed. There was no confusion. He was a man with an orderly mind.”
“Yes.”
“It was very difficult for me. I made myself ill.”
“Yes.”
“Robert did not want the practice.” We consider that for a minute. Daniel fears his boots have dirtied the carpet. This is wall-to-wall carpeting, rose beige, on 72nd Street.
“Would you like something, a glass of milk? There was a point Jacob and I seriously discussed adopting you ourselves.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, it’s true. How we would have managed at our age I can’t tell you. It was his idea, of course, not mine. I held my breath and he talked himself out of it. I was frankly surprised. Only after he died did I think maybe he knew he hadn’t long and that was why he decided he couldn’t. Otherwise, who knows. Jacob made the decisions. It was characteristic. He didn’t know when to stop for people. The poorest client, he was meticulous.”
“Yes.”
“We were not the same in that respect. He was generous to a fault.”
“He was very kind to us.”
“Your parents should have been so kind.” She is startled by her own remark. She looks as if about to apologize, but she pulls herself together. “They were not kind people—to any of us. What do you want papers for?”
“I don’t know. I guess I think they belong to me.”
“I see. I’m sorry there is nothing I have to give you. Talk to Robert.”
I got up to go.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “I have no love for the memory of your parents. They were Communists and they destroyed everything they touched.”
“You don’t think they were innocent?”
“They were not innocent of permitting themselves to be used. And of using other people in their fanaticism. Innocent. The case ruined Jacob’s.
health.”
She rose from the sofa, “They were very difficult to deal with. They were very stubborn. He would come home furious, he would want to do something and they wouldn’t let him. He would want to do something for their sake and they wouldn’t let him,”
“Like what?”
“He wanted to call certain people as witnesses and they wouldn’t let him. All sorts of things like that.”
“Who?”
She walks with care—she is showing me to the door. “What?”
“Who did he want to call for a witness?”
“Who knows who? Jacob was a brilliant lawyer. And today when people write about the case or talk about it, it is Jacob they criticize. He should have done this, he shouldn’t have done that. Do they know what he had to put up with?”
Her hand is on the doorknob. The bones growing around the rings, the pain in the fingers
Interviewed by Daniel
for the Foundation.
ROBERT LEWIN
67 Winthrop Road, Brookline
Daniel pulls up to the house. They are used now to his abrupt appearances. His inconsiderate departures. They hear the rage in the way he uses his brakes. In the patches he leaves on Brookline hills.
The chilly winds have dried the streets. The corner light comes on.
Now they are into specialists. The great faith. We had a specialist in to look at her. They’re doing some tests. He wants to consult with another specialist. With enough specialists man can be made immortal. What do all the specialists do here on Saturday night? They come for the big look at Susan.
“Where have you been,” Lise says. “Why don’t we hear from you?”
They have turned strange. They are visibly shrunken, both of them. Their use of specialists is turning them into old Jewish people. What has happened to the fighting liberal the students love? My father lights his pipe with a slight tremor in his hands. My mother has turned grey overnight. I have the sudden intuition that their lives have become too sorrowful for sex. “When did you last eat a decent meal,” Lise says.
Upstairs I clean up. I pass the back bedroom where I used to live. When my sister was twelve or thirteen she used to work her tentative saucy sex on me, and coquette and comb her hair for hours, and droop her lower lip and put black stuff on her dark eyes and accidentally graze her small breasts across my arm. And act cool. It was a high old time and it made me laugh. And she knew the humor of it: one day in this doorway she stopped when she saw me looking, raised her arms, and saluted me with a flick of her ass.
It is furnished now as a guest room, it’s a neat empty guest room. From the window you can see the lights of Boston eight or ten miles to the east. What am I feeling, what awful need? In the late afternoon the sun burned on the windows of downtown Boston as if someone was flashing signals with a mirror. This was my window. I pretended the signals were for me. I didn’t have to decode them because it was enough that they were being sent. What gave me immense satisfaction was the thought that anyone who tried to intercept the signals, and decipher them, would fail. No matter who, the FBI or the Nazis, nobody not standing right here in this window could read the signals exactly as they were sent or understand them as they were meant to be understood.
Daniel tried to leave the window. He stared at the evening skyline, Boston’s lights glowing into the heavy atmosphere like the light of a furnace. It is a feeling with no bottom, no root, of no locus. It pulses out of him like a radio wave, out of all parts of him at once, and it needs. It disseminates, it is diffuse; and one moment he thinks it is something his heart wants the fullness of, and another that his arms want to hold, and for another moment it is something his cock wants to get into. But if he could accommodate any part of his body the feeling wouldn’t leave, it would still be there in all parts of him at once, each cell of his body radiating its passionate need.
But the worst of it is that he hadn’t remembered what an ancient friend of a feeling it was.
“I’ve got to talk to you.”
My father sighs. We have talked before. He sits at the dining room table, a stack of blue exam books before him. His New Yorkers lie about still in their mailing wrappers.
“Do you know of anything my parents did to hurt the case Ascher was putting together?”
“What do you mean?”
“Testimony, evidence, anything they wouldn’t let him use?”
“Who have you been talking to now,” my mother says.
“What difference does it make?”
“Fanny Ascher?”
“Yes.”
Lise snorts. “Of course. I made a kartoifel. Would you rather have pot roast or steak?”
“I don’t care. I’m not hungry.”
“Daniel, I’m making supper anyway.”
“Anything, it doesn’t matter.”
“It never matters—”
“Jesus,” Daniel shouts, “anygoddamn thing!”
“But when you sit down it matters!”
“Shhh, calm down, everyone,” my father says. “We’ll have the pot roast. All right with you, Dan?”
“Yeah, all right.”
“Thank you,” Lise says and frosts through the door.
My father clears his throat. “Let’s go in the living room. The thing is, you see, Fanny Ascher’s feelings are well known. And it’s understandable. She’s very bitter about Jake’s death.”
Daniel sits down. He grows very still. “Just tell me if you know anything about it.”
“Jake never said anything to me along those lines. On the other hand I wasn’t up there with him in the day-to-day handling of the case. That was my first teaching job at Virginia. I only got involved in the later appeals. I helped him a little bit. But lots of lawyers were involved by then. It was all very public by then.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just what I said. I don’t know any more than you do. Have you looked through everything in the file?”
Not a useful reply. They are stung and swollen about the heart. They have not forgiven me for Jack Fein’s piece in the Times. The threat I made on Duberstein’s life is fresh in their minds. A pattern of being denied their rights in Susan, their rights in me. They were not consulted about the changes in my appearance: the beard, the climbing downward of my hair, the newest recklessness of attitude which colors the face, sinks the eyes. A suspicion of having lived their lives to no effect.
The house itself seems to have shrunken, and lost its gleam. The furniture looks out of date and shabby. The walls are yellowed. There is a smell in the house of something less than assured life. A sense in the way my father sits with his arms on the armchair that he has passed the line across his life at which whatever was success is now understood to be failure.
“Dad, I can recite that file by heart.”
“Do you ever drink?”
“What?”
“I’m going to have a drink before dinner. Would you like some scotch?”
He goes into the kitchen for glasses and ice. “Of course, a man tells his wife things he wouldn’t tell anyone else. Who knows? Your parents were Party members and possibly they felt they had to consider aspects of their defense with an eye out for the Party. Maybe there’s something to it. I don’t know. Of course the Party made no effort to help them. It was only later, after the sentence, when the propaganda value became obvious to them.”
“Well, would it be something important? Something that could make a difference?”
“You mean about their testimony?”
“Yes.”
“I doubt it. You’ve got to understand Fanny. She lost a husband and she blames the case. That means she blames the Isaacson family. And to make matters worse in her mind Jake is remembered for this sacrifice by critics of the trial who find fault with his handling of it. She’s very sensitive to that. She resents criticism of him. It’s natural.”
“He had emphysema. He had a bad heart.”
“That’s right. He was not a well man. But ther
e’s no doubt it helped him along. He was like my father. They only stopped working to eat or sleep. They were both that kind,”
He puts the ice into the glasses. “It was a good partnership.”
“She wanted you to take over the practice.”
“Yes.” A small smile. He keeps the scotch in the cabinet with the good dishes.
“She was always insensitive to Robert’s ideals,” my mother says.
“Try this,” handing me a drink. “It’s what we older folks use. Yes, Fanny was shocked that I didn’t want the practice. Something was always shocking her.”
“They never had children,” Lise says.
“The Aschers and my parents were very close. They always brought me a present for my birthday. When my mother died Fanny started to give advice. For years she tried to get my father to remarry. Introduce him to Hadassah ladies who’d lost their husbands. But Sam was interested in the practice of law. He said he never had the time.”
“She dislikes people not taking her advice,” my mother says.
“L’chayim,” my father says raising his glass.
“The judiciary today is more sensitive—the trend now is to stringent protection of the trial’s integrity. There’s no doubt in my mind that if they were on trial today the government couldn’t do what it did then to get their conviction. During the trial the FBI arrested that fellow as another spy in the ring, and said he would testify in confirmation of Mindish’s confession. They never put him on the stand, and he himself was never brought to trial. Long before their trial the Isaacsons were tried and found guilty in the newspapers. Also in my opinion a charge to the jury like Judge Hirsch’s would today be ruled prejudicial. A judge today would be more sophisticated in his conduct. He’d have to be.”