The Book of Daniel Read Free Page B

pusillanimous charge. I have long since given up rights in Susan’s welfare. Who am I to tell them what to do or not to do? But he grants me my rights. “Let’s go outside,” he says. We all wait in the parkinglot while Duberstein goes off to find the medical administrator. The women and the baby sit in the Lewin car, a 1965 Impala with a regular shift, and leave the doors open; my father and I with our backs to the hospital lean against the car grille and look down the hill. Behind us, near the entrance, a sleek red and grey ambulance lurks in wait, the driver asleep behind the wheel with his cap tilted over his eyes. The hill is dotted with patients clutching brown paper bags.
    “We knew she was depressed,” Robert Lewin says. “We wanted her to come home for the weekend. But she said she had to get away. She didn’t sound so bad. She’s been making her classes. She’s been doing her work.” My father is looking older by the minute. He is bound to feel that Susan’s attempt at defection is his fault. If my mother feels that way she won’t show it. It occurs to me that they didn’t call me immediately because they were afraid of my reaction. They weren’t sure what it would be, they weren’t sure that Daniel wasn’t capable of the same thing, as if what Susan did was contagious.
    Suspense is all Robert Lewin can look forward to as the father of these children. He doesn’t even have the assurance of his own genes. I feel such sad tenderness for the guy, I put my arm around his shoulder. He’s no slouch. He works like hell, and belongs to committees, and practices law for poor people and writes for the law journals. He is big in the ACLU. He is popular with his classes, a thorn in the Dean’s side, a demonstrator against Dow Chemical recruiters. When he has the time, he likes to read The New Yorker.
    Neither of the Lewins is capable of regretting what they did for Susan and me. As cruel as we are. And we are really terrible low down people. I mean really low down. But they must know we mean them no harm except the harm in our love for them. Everyone in the family understands the mythological burden of acts much smaller than their consequences. My sister and I can never inflict total damage—that is the saving grace. The right to offend irreparably is a blood right.
    Suddenly Daniel was overwhelmed with a strong sweet sense of the holiday. The sun was trying to come out, the warm slight breezes of the overcast day played across the eyes, he was here with everyone in his immediate family standing on this reallygroovy prospect in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was thankful to Susan for relieving the dangerous tedium of his graduate life. She would be all right. In the meantime there was drama, a sweet fatality, a recharging of the weak diffused impulses of giving a shit. Robert Lewin felt his sympathy and was warmly reciprocating. Was Daniel all right? Had he or Phyllis eaten anything since leaving home that morning? He produced from the glove compartment a handful of candy bars. “Milky Ways all around,” he said with a sad smile. And there was a car to take care of, Susan’s car, still in the lot at the Howard Johnson’s near Exit II on the Westbound side of the Turnpike. The two men chatted quietly, building comfort for each other in the warm afternoon while Duberstein went about his futile attempts to get the hospital authorities to release Susan. Building concern for each other and then, in a widening circle of small talk, for their wives, for the innocent fat baby, and for anybody still within their power of concern, for anybody who could be saved by concern. The afternoon grew festive—
    Bukharin was no angel, of course. In the course of his trial he spoke of condoning the murder of Whites in the heat of the revolutionary struggle. Going down before Stalin, he felt obliged to make the distinction between murder that was politically necessary and factional terrorism. In 1928, ten years before his