It is possible that the law professor and his wife were facing it squarely, right off the bat. It is possible they had decided to begin immediately to describe alternatives. Yet, according to one criminal of perception who watched them rather closely, they did not easily adjust to the presence of the ghosts in the lives of their children. These ghosts were not strange sounds in the attic, nor were they mists who moaned in the midnight garden. These ghosts were ironies. These ghosts were slips of the tongue. They were the brutal meanings in innocent remarks. They were the necessity to remain sensitive to your own words and gestures. These ghosts clung to the roof of your mouth, they hovered in your brain like fear, they resided in your muscles like nerves.
Sit up straight, Danny. You’re always squirming. This particular dinnertable remark of Lise’s put her to bed with a white hankie crumpled in her fist. I recreate an evening of over a dozen years ago. My new mother is really upset. My new father, sucking his pipe, tunes his fine mind to the problem, runs his fingers through his then brown hair, already sparse from running his fingers through it as he thinks. He sits by the bed, ignoring the sound of his wife’s weeping. He thinks the problem through and reaches something like the intellectual translation of his children’s feelings.
Honey, we are ironies to them, this house is ironic, if it rains it’s ironic. You’re crying about a condition of their lives that is irrevocable. Please allow us to live as normally and imperfectly as all people live. Let’s go to sleep. We’ll do what we can. We will all go to bed at night and we’ll all get up in the morning. Just like the rest of the world.
I have no more of them than the present of their lives. Of course, it was more complicated, but the image that returns to me is of a young couple reading about it in the newspapers and rushing downtown on the subway. Before that I know that Lise, with some other Jewish children, went from country to country, in front of the Nazis, from cellar to cellar, until she reached England. I don’t know how she got from England to America. I don’t know who took care of her. She met Robert Lewin at a summer camp in New Jersey where they both waited table. Another image is of Robert and Lise standing in front of a Rabbi with Robert in his Army uniform. There are some distant cousins. An old aunt or two. It is too late for me now to find out who they are or where they came from. And I don’t have the heart for it. Ascher chose them. They made a good home for us and provided examples for our lives of sanity and stability. We have repaid them by treating them as poorly as children treat their real parents. They are liberal Jews who live comfortably in a Christian world. Their home reflects idiosyncrasy that is valuable to me. Lise’s taste in furniture is distinctly old-fashioned and runs to middle European mahogany; her cuisine is Viennese. Robert years ago got into the habit of doing his work in the dining room — perhaps because he didn’t want his work to put him off from his family. From the dining room he can see through the center hall to the living room. And he can hear what is going on in the kitchen. So it is a dining room with a typewriter, and blue exam books and law journals and letters strewn about, and a meal prepared for by clearing all the detritus of the legal profession from the table to the buffet.
On the evening of that Memorial Day, 1967, Daniel pulled up in front of the Lewin home on Winthrop and turned off the motor. The rain had stopped. The streetlights shone on the wet street. Daniel’s wife immediately got out of the car, pushed the back of the seat forward, and lifted out her baby. Then she walked away in the direction of Beacon Street.
The Lewin house was a complete absurdity. It had Tudor-style bay windows on the second floor. But a Greek revival portico with plaster columns framed the front door. On the right-hand pillar, the number 67 gleamed in raised hemispheres of reflecting glass. Daniel turned off the car lights.
The house was dark. He thought he was about fifteen minutes ahead of the Lewins, although they might be longer if they had to drop Duberstein somewhere. Daniel got out of the car and stretched his legs. The rain had cooled things off. The air was fresh and the breeze moist and cool.
The mailbox alongside the door Daniel found stuffed with mail. This was a measure of the Lewins’ distraction. How else could you explain mail on Memorial Day. Among the letters was a small blue envelope addressed to Daniel Isaacson Lewin. It was a girl’s handwriting. The postmark was Cambridge.
Daniel took the letter back to the car. He was a naturally graceful fellow, and an old woman shuffling by in house slippers behind her Alaskan malamute could not help remark on the insolent long-legged grace of youth as it reads its letters by the light of a dashboard, one foot in the wet street, and the other planted in the car. She had written him here. He was terrified. He had decided when he sat with her that she was not mad, she was inconsolable. But she was mad.
This is the text of the letter.
Dear Daniel,
I have been thinking about last Christmas. Of course I’m going ahead with my plans but that’s not the point. You couldn’t have come on that way unless you believe the Isaacsons are guilty. That’s what I didn’t want to understand at the time. You think they are guilty. It’s enough to take someone’s life away.
Someday, Daniel, following your pathetic demons, you are going to disappear up your own asshole. To cover the time until then, I’m writing you out of my mind. You no longer exist.
S. I.
Annotation of Susan’s Letter, 1. The address on the envelope, 67 Winthrop, indicates no recognition of Daniel’s New York residence, or, by implication, the last five years of his life. This is deliberate but not malicious. For Susan there are still issues. For Susan the issues must be preserved. Everything about Daniel’s recent life is irrelevant — except as it confirms his loss to the cause. The funny thing is, however, that he got the letter where it was mailed. And after no particular delay.
2. The Christmas referred to was the Christmas previous in the winter previous in a previous phase of the world. At that time, the peace movement had not yet peaked. People who marched were called doves. The previous spring there had been a great big march of the doves down to the UN. Martin Luther King was alive. Bobby Kennedy was alive. The student left had not yet come to the attention of Time magazine. Newark and Detroit and Cleveland would not burn till the summer. The great Pentagon rush would not occur till the following October. Everyone was defining Black Power. You remember? It was an innocent world then with the oldtimey simple sadnesses. The Beatles were not yet political. And Walt Disney had just died. At the Lewin home on Winthrop Road, Lise’s face red from checking the holiday turkey roasting in the oven, Robert serving one too many drinks, an altercation occurred of some magnitude between the children, and Christmas, boldly celebrated in this Jewish home as American-Family Day with the Kids Home, was not merry.
3. The plans referred to were the apparent subject of the bitterness, the elder orphan child, Daniel, having not received word of them with sufficient respect. The plans for a Foundation for Revolution were offered up by the younger orphan child, Susan, a Radcliffe student, flushed with the triumphs of the Boston Resistance, a loosely confederated group of middle-class boys and girls who were returning draft cards to Washington and demonstrating in front of draft boards to indicate their opposition to the war in Vietnam. It bothered Daniel that his sister was so shining and bold as she spoke of their most recent demonstration, routed by the cops with clubs. She had been carrying a sign that read Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No, and she was knocked down and a cop had tried to hit her between the legs. Susan unbuttoned the sleeves of her blouse and displayed her swollen and discolored wrists. Phyllis gasped. Daniel noticed the Lewins look at each other with paling apprehension. Robert Lewin was amazed no bones had been broken. Susan was radiant. She wore an old-fashioned blouse with a high ruffled collar and puffy sleeves; she wore a dark skirt of velvet that came down to the tops of a pair of high lace boots. She was a lean attractive girl wearing old clothes picked up in an old clothes boutique, and naturally they looked like the latest thing. With her hair parted in the middle and pulled tight over her ears and clamped behind her neck, she was Rosa Luxemburg glancing at Daniel through her granny glasses of thin gold as if from the gates of another city, her fearless blue eyes striking his heart like the tolling of a bell. Daniel felt in this situation a poverty in his choice of wife. He suspected the Lewins of that sentimentality for radical action to which liberals are vulnerable — an abstract respect for the dangerous politics they themselves are incapable of practicing. I’m being unfair. They were disturbed by what she had done, just as they had been unnerved when, for a time, her thing had been to drop acid. And she had been a forthright head with the same idealism, with the same passionate embrace for that liberation as for this.