The Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow Read Free Book Online Page B

country’s wealth. He told me about Sacco and Vanzetti. About the Scottsboro boys. He ran up and down history like a pianist playing his scales. Reading to me the facts and figures of economic exploitation, of slavery in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Putting together all the historic injustices and showing me the pattern and how everything that had happened was inevitable according to the Marxian analysis. Putting it all together. Everything was accounted for: even my comic books which he studied with me, teaching me to recognize and isolate the insidious stereotypes of yellow villains, Semitic villains, Russian villains. Even the function of public games like baseball. What its
real
purpose was. The economic class of baseball fans. Why they needed baseball. What would happen to the game if people had enough money, enough freedom. I listened because that was the price I paid for his attention. “And it’s still going on, Danny,” a famous remark. “In today’s newspaper it’s still going on. Right outside the door of this house it’s going on. In this house.” He said Williams, the janitor in the cellar, was a man destroyed by American Society because of his skin and never allowed to develop according to his inner worth. “The battle is not finished,the struggle of the working class is still going on. Never forget that, Danny.” And it seemed to me then that I was marked. Because
they
had a lot more power than
we
had. And it seemed to be even in the clouds which blew up through the sky over the schoolyard, that power of theirs to destroy and put down and take vengeance on the ideas in my head, on the dangerous information put in my head by my reckless father.
    But I was a smart-ass kid, I wasn’t that innocent. I took what he gave to have him. On Sunday morning I went with him from door to door to sell subscriptions to the
Worker.
This was the Sunday Mobilization. It was arduous—he talked a lot to everyone, not just me. How much of it didn’t I hear except for the sound of the voice itself? A quality difficult to remember now, except that it was nasal, sing-songy, a voice I associate with the expression on his face of complete self-absorption. Yes, that is how I remember him: talking, developing some dialectic with great relish, the words very liquid; he spoke with a wet mouth, as if, sometimes, his tongue lay in bubbles, that type of speaker who in his excitement sometimes sprays his listener; developing some idea, overdeveloping it tiresomely, I could tell by my mother’s face, although I may have personally found it interesting. He was tendentious! Yes! A word he loved to apply to others. Tendentious. Also indiscriminate in his attention to ideas, problems, from the most mundane to the most serious, giving them equal time in his tireless broadcast, high or low, serious or stupid. It was Rochelle who worried about having enough to eat.
Was there one like him on the Black Tennis Court?
She wanted him to make more money. The family mythology was that in practical matters of the world, Paul Isaacson was a more or less irresponsible child. He couldn’t be trusted. He couldn’t be trusted to make a living, to find his glasses, to remember to come home for lunch, to take the garbage out, to wear his rubbers when it rained. There was between my mother and Aunt Frieda and Aunt Ruthie a maternal rivalry for his irresponsible heart. Frieda and Ruth, his older sisters and his only living relatives, felt that he was a genius; and that his genius had never been given a chance because he had married too early and been overcome by family responsibilities. Rochelle was bitter about that. She had to proveto them that she could take care of him better than they had. That the girl he met at City before the war, and married during the war, the girl who went down to live with him in Washington, D.C.
before
they were even married, was good for him and would help him fulfill himself. In this, though a