Daniel must have sighed. Susan reached out and patted him gently on the back. “They’re still fucking us,” she said. “Goodbye, Daniel. You get the picture.”
He listened alertly. He was not sure if she had said goodbye or good boy. He hung around for a while after that but she didn’t say another thing or even acknowledge that he was in the room. He gazed out the window, leaning his shoulder against the window frame. The window was barred. He could see Phyllis playing with the baby down on the hillside. At the top of the hill was a retaining wall of brick, and inside that wall a parking lot filled with pastel cars. Into his sight rolled a dark blue Chevrolet he recognized as the Lewins’. Then the view was cut off by the top of the brick portico sheltering the steps of the main entrance to the hospital.
Without saying much of anything, without even caring if he was there, Susan could restore in him the old cloying sense of family, and suggest that his wife was not in the same class and his child a complete irrelevance. That it was their thing, this orphan state, and that it obliterated everything else and separated them from everyone else, and always would, no matter what he did to deny it. Actually I don’t try to deny it. But I reserve the right to live with it in my own way, if I can. In Susan resides the fateful family gift for having definite feelings. Always taking stands, even as a kid. A moralist, a judge. This is right, that is wrong, this is good, that is bad. Her personal life carelessly displayed, her wants unashamed, not managed discreetly like most people’s. With her aggressive moral openness, with her loud and intelligent and repugnantly honest girlness. And all wrong. Always wrong. From politics back to drugs, and from drugs back to sex, and before sex, tantrums, and before tantrums, a faith in God. Here is a cheap effect: A long time ago, on an evening in June, 1954, June 22 to be exact, at exactly ten P.M., Susan gave me the word about God. It was during a night game between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. Allie Reynolds was pitching for the Yanks and it was nothing-nothing in the top of the seventh. Boston had one out and a man on first. Jim Piersall was up and the count was three and one. Reynolds picked up the rosin bag. Mel Allen was saying how a base on balls is always trouble and as he spoke there was a short beep over his voice the way it happens on television to indicate that a new hour has begun. At that moment Susan, age eight, and I, thirteen, could not look at each other. Allie Reynolds dropped the rosin bag, pulled at the peak of his cap, and leaned forward for the sign. And that’s when Susan told me there was a God.
“He’ll get them all,” she whispered. “He’ll get every one of them.”
Ah Susy, my Susyanna, what have you done? You are a dupe of the international moralist propagandist apparatus! They have made a moral speed freak of you! They have wrecked your hair and taken away your granny glasses and dressed you in the robe of a sick person. Oh, look at what they’ve done, Susan, look at what they’ve done to you—
THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF GOD
AS REPRESENTED IN THE BIBLE
Actually that’s what God does in the Bible — like the little girl says, he gets people. He takes care of them. He lays on this monumental justice. Oh the curses, the admonitions; the plagues, the scatterings, the ruinations, the strikings dead, the renderings unto and the tearings asunder. The floods. The fires. It is interesting to note that God as a character in the Bible seems almost always concerned with the idea of his recognition by mankind. He is constantly declaring His Authority, with rewards for those who recognize it and punishment for those who don’t. He performs fancy tricks. He enlists the help of naturally righteous humans who become messengers, or carriers of his miracles, or who deliver their people. Each age has by trial to achieve its recognition of Him — or to put it another way, every generation has to learn anew the lesson of His Existence. The drama in the Bible is always in the conflict of those who have learned with those who have not learned. Or in the testing of those who seem that they might be able to learn. In this context it is instructive to pause for a moment over the career of Daniel, a definitely minor, if not totally apocryphal figure (or figures) who worked with no particular delight for a few of the kings in the post-Alexandrine Empires. It is a bad time for Daniel and his co-religionists, for they are second-class citizens, in a distinctly hostile environment. But in that peculiar kind of symbiosis of pagan kings and wise subject-Jews, Daniel is apparently able to soften the worst excesses of the rulers against his people by making himself available for interpretations of dreams, visions or apparitions in the night. Dreams, visions and apparitions in the night seem to be an occupational hazard of the ancient rulers. Typically, the King (Nebuchadnezzar, or Belshazzar, or Cyrus) suffers a dream which he cannot understand. He consults his various retainers — magicians, astrologers, soothsayers, Chaldean wise men. Typically, they fail him. As a last resort Daniel, a Jew, is summoned. Daniel seems to be a modest man, brave, and more faithful to God than wise, for it is by means of prayer and piety that he learns from God the dream interpretations he must make to the King in order to survive. In one case, he must even recreate the dream before he can interpret it because the dumb King, Nebuchadnezzar, has forgotten what it is. For this wisdom Daniel is accorded ministerial rank in the tradition of Joseph and Moses before him. It is no sinecure, however. We think of Charlie Chaplin taken home every night by the fat, wealthy drunkard and kicked out of the drunkard’s house in the sobriety of the following morning. Like an alternating current, though quite direct. At one point, Daniel’s three brothers are accused of sacrilege by the cunning Chaldeans and the King sentences them to death in a fiery furnace. God sees that they survive the fire, but the strain on Daniel has to have been considerable. Another time Daniel, under the same indictment himself, is thrown into a pit with lions but survives an entire night unscratched. His is a life of confrontations, not the least of which has him putting down his employer in front of the whole crowd: You’ve bought it, Kingy. “God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it, thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting….” This is not a job for a man sensitive to loud noises or bright light. Daniel survives three reigns but at considerable personal cost. Toward the end his insights become more diffuse, apocalyptic, hysterical. One night he suffers his own dream, a weird and awesome vision of composite beasts and seas and heavens and fire and storms and an Ancient on a throne, and ironically he doesn’t know what it means: “I, Daniel, was grieved in my spirit in the midst of my body, and the vision of my head 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.