A medical textbook. On the white and shining pages are photographs of three female bodies. Little, withered Grandma with her head of wildly twisted grey hair. Rochelle, strong, breasty, stocky, prim mouthed. And Susan in her thin gold granny glasses. They stand in a row across the double-page spread, palms turned slightly out, feet turned slightly out, nothing hidden. They could be standing up or lying down. Grandma looks like the wrinkled matriarch of an aboriginal tribe. Rochelle’s got the bosoms, but Susan is taller and more feminine. They all have triangles, but move your gaze upward. This is a medical textbook. The meaning of the picture is in the thin, diagrammatic arrow line, colored red, that runs from Grandma’s breast through your mama’s and into your sister’s. The red line describes the progress of madness inherited through the heart.
cottage cheese, tomatoes if they are good, a pound of hamburger, something gooey for dessert.
On the theory that what occurs is right. Any action is correct because it happens. What of that theory? Only if it works. I worry about images. Images are what things mean. Take the word image. It connotes soft, sheer flesh shimmering on the air, like the rainbowed slick of a bubble. Image connotes images, the multiplicity being an image. Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual’s calloused capacity to feel powerful undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality. They serve no social purpose.
You are going to have to shoot straight with Professor Sukenick. He thinks you are not applying for an NDEA fellowship because you refuse on principle to sign a loyalty oath. Why is shooting straight a metaphor for honesty? I am not applying for a fellowship because if I sign a hundred loyalty oaths, I still won’t get it. I should tell him who I am. Not that I’ve attempted to hide this information, but it is difficult to work it into any kind of small talk. Sukenick is a youth-sympathetic liberal, very sharp. He would be intrigued by my story. He would not believe that the government checks me out once or twice a year. My own father doesn’t believe it. Of course, this is not an assignment any FBI man, even the most callow, could consider without yawning. Nevertheless, my dossier is up to date. I live in constant and degrading relationship to the society that has destroyed my mother and father. I will never be drafted. If I left school today my classification would still be 2-A, which covers any situation not in the national interest. Listen, Professor, I could burn my draft card on the steps of the Pentagon and nothing would happen. Nothing I do will result in anything but an additional entry in my file. My file. I am deprived of the chance of resisting my government. They have no discoveries to make about me. They will not regard anything I do as provocative, disruptive or insulting. Nobody in the Federal police will ever say to a colleague: Who is this guy! No matter what political or symbolic act I perform in protest or disobedience, no harm will befall me. I have worked this out. It’s true. I am totally deprived of the right to be dangerous. If I were to assassinate the President, the criminality of my family, its genetic criminality, would be established. There is nothing I can do, mild or extreme, that they cannot have planned for. In the meantime, they have only to make sure that I am in no way involved with the United States Government, either as a social beneficiary, or as a servitor, however humble. They will give me no money. They will force me into no uniform. No administration will ever be connected to me in any way to make itself vulnerable to the opportunism of congressmen.
If, on the other hand, I were to become publically militant Daniel Isaacson all their precautions would have been justified. And probably whatever cause I lent myself to could be more easily discredited.
The final existential condition is citizenship. Every man is the enemy of his own country. EVERY MAN IS THE ENEMY OF HIS OWN COUNTRY. Every country is the enemy of its own citizens. Here are some places in the world I don’t have to look out for: Switzerland, Finland, Bolivia, Uruguay, Sweden, Red China, Taiwan, Soviet Russia, England, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, Canada, the entire continent of Africa, the entire continent of Antarctica, Japan, Mexico, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Burma, Israel, Egypt, South America, Cuba, Haiti, Aukland, all the little stamps in the stamp album, the Free Port of Shannon. All these places have relationships with my country not with me. My relationship is with my country. In the film Paths of Glory, a French regiment is shown in the trenches during World War I. They are ordered to attack with their rifles and bayonets an impregnable German position called The Pimple. They physically are not able to bring themselves to leap out of their trenches to commit this mass suicide. In a rage, their General behind the lines orders his own artillery to fire upon them. The artillery balks. The General withdraws this regiment from the lines and punishes it for rank disobedience by executing three enlisted men who have been picked by straw lot. Their own comrades are the firing squad. In war the soldier’s destruction is accomplished by his own Commanders. It is his government which places a rifle in his hands, puts him up on the front, and tells him his mission is to survive. All societies are armed societies. All citizens are soldiers. All Governments stand ready to commit their citizens to death in the interest of their government.
Drawing and Quartering. This particular form of execution was favored by English monarchic government against all except the aristocratic inner circle which was allowed the dignity of simple beheading. For everyone else the method worked like this: the transgressor was hanged and cut down before he was dead. Then he was emasculated, disemboweled, and his entrails were set on fire in front of his eyes. If the executioner was merciful the heart was then removed from the body, but in any case, the final act of the ritual was then performed, a hacking of the body into four parts, the quarters then being thrown to the dogs. Treason was the usual crime for this punishment, its definition being determined by the King’s courts for the King’s convenience.
In 1954, Robert Lewin accepted an appointment as Assistant Professor of Law at Boston College, a Jesuit institution in Newton, Massachusetts. Making a modest down payment, he bought an old house in nearby Brookline, and with his wife and two children, Daniel, fourteen, and Susan, nine, took possession one warm September afternoon a week or so before classes began. The three-story house, grey stucco with maroon trim and a roof of slate, was situated on Winthrop Road. This was a quiet residential avenue that curved up the hill from Beacon Street with its stores and trolley tracks. It wound through facing ranks of attached redstones, apartment buildings and cumbersome old houses set close to one another on small lots. The best feature of the new house as far as the Lewins were concerned was that it produced income to pay for itself. Inside the front door, with its clear, plastic louvers, was a small entranceway to two doors, two mailboxes, two bells. Like many of the houses in the neighborhood, number 67 was built for two families and designed to look as if it contained only one. The Lewins occupied the ground floor, and half of the second. Their tenants occupied half of the second floor and all of the third. Each apartment had a downstairs and an upstairs, and each was a mirror version of the other.
The two-family house was just an odd fact in the Lewin children’s odd life. Every sound had echoes, every image bore another. The very first full day in the house, before anything was unpacked, the new family went exploring, running down the one hundred forty-seven wood steps of Winthrop Path (always to be that number, the same each time, a source of great satisfaction) between the tiers of backyards on this terraced hill with the backs of houses resting on stilts, Brookline being built on hills; and catching the Beacon Street trolley to downtown Boston. There, in their explorations — all of them being New Yorkers — they came upon the street signs of the Freedom Trail.