The Book of Daniel Read Free Page A

troubled me…. My cogitations much troubled me, and my countenance changed in me: but I kept the matter in my heart.”
    So much for Daniel, Beacon of Faith in a Time of Persecution. (You’ve got to be desperate to read the Bible.) Five grown-up people are trying to recover one twenty-year-old girl from a public insane asylum on Memorial Day. It can’t be done. It is not a working day. There is no one to process her record, sign her out, check her over. There is no one there to say she can go. I am livid. “Let’s just take her!” I shout. But that can’t be done. Robert Lewin, a professor of law at Boston College, won’t do it. Lise, his wife, tells me to be serious. And Dr. Duberstein, the infamous Dr. Alan Duberstein, makes useless phone calls in the public phone booth. Duberstein is a short, skinny man with a high voice. He was shot up during World War II and has a face annealed by plastic surgery. Straight hair that looks sewn into his scalp. Stucco skin, and no eyebrows. Into this fiasco he pokes a pipe. There are spots on his striped tie, and his brown wing-styled shoes need a shine.
    “I was told there would be no problem,” he insists to the admitting nurse. “We have an ambulance out there that is costing these people thirty-five dollars an hour.”
    “I can’t help that,” the admitting nurse says. She is large and cheerful. The state police brought Susan in off the turnpike and that makes her a public charge. “She has to be released,” the nurse says patiently. This must be the way she talks to maniacs. With a melody in her voice. “I can’t do it and you can’t do it. We haven’t even typed the admitting diagnosis.”
    I pace the lobby, pounding my fist into my palm. Phyllis sits on a bench, the baby sliding down her lap. Her earnest face tracks me, she pulls the baby back, it struggles, she pulls itback. I have no real desire to rescue Susan by force. But I wish I had her capacity to do things in a big way—that gift for causing public commotion, that family talent. Actually it’s just as well that Duberstein is kept away from her. And our parents too, for that matter. She has been going to Duberstein for years; once she told me she lost her respect for Duberstein when she found out he played golf twice a week. Then why do you go, Susan? “Alleviates parental anxieties,” said Susan the college girl. Alleviates parental anxieties. This makes me feel guilty for both of us. I look at the Lewins: pale, worried, under fire once again. I cannot bear the guilt. I begin to scold them. They should have called me sooner. I would have had the sense to get her out of here yesterday. “What were you trying to hide from me? What was the point!”
    Lise, my mother, a tiny woman in a blouse and short skirt with low-heeled shoes and shoulder bag, is a curious combination of 1945 WAC and slightly aging Viennese charmer onto the new fashions. She sits down on the bench next to Phyllis and takes the baby, an unconscious maternal gesture which gratifies Phyllis because it brings her into the family. “Oh, Danny,” Lise says, “don’t be a fool. Nobody’s hiding anything. You are down there. We are here. We are her parents. We cope. And if someone in the family can be spared for twenty-four hours, why not? Or should everyone stop functioning?”
    She seems to be taking the whole business with more fortitude than my father. My father speaks in his soft voice to Duberstein, suggesting various alternative courses of action. There are doctors at work even on Memorial Day. Find the senior doctor in charge. Talk to him. If he’s not in the building, find out where he is and call him. My father is very fond of Susan. Her excesses have always seemed to render him contemplative. This is the worst she’s been, the worst thing she’s done; it has occurred to him, perhaps, that the pattern of our lives is deterioration, that the movement of our lives is toward death.
    With great justice he refuses to pick up my