When Daniel opened the door, there stood the two FBI agents, Tom Davis and John Bradley. Behind them, across the street, frost in the crotches of the chain link fence of the schoolyard shone in the early morning sun like stars in Daniel’s eyes.
“Hi, Danny. Is your Dad at home?”
“What is it, Daniel?” his mother called from the living room.
“It’s those two men,” Daniel replied.
Daniel and the FBI men listened to the sounds of his mother waking up his father. Daniel still held the doorknob. He was ready to close the door the second he was told to.
“What time is it?” said his father in a drugged voice.
“Oh my God, it’s six-thirty,” his mother said.
She came into the hallway, pulling on her robe. Her long nightgown was thin cotton and Daniel panicked for a second because you could see the tips of her breasts through the material until she wrapped the robe around her and tied the belt. He glanced at the two men in the door to see if they saw, but there was nothing in their faces.
“Morning, Mrs. Isaacson. Can we come in?”
His mother was combing back her thick hair with her fingers. She turned her attention to the two men at the door, who by this time had become acquaintances of a sort. They had cultivated a we’re-all-in-this-thing-together kind of approach. The idea in their exaggeratedly wry suffering of my father’s verbal abuse and stubbornness was that they preferred having no part of this messy situation, but as long as they were assigned to this job, perhaps some mutual kindness and even a bit of humor would make it easier for everyone concerned. Once they even alluded to the pressure on them from their “higher-ups.”
“Who are these higher-ups?” my father had said.
“Now, Paul, we’re supposed to ask you the questions.”
“So you’re not getting enough out of me,” my father said, not without pride.
“You’re a tough nut, all right,” one of them said. “Next thing we know, you’ll be trying to indoctrinate us.”
“Well, I’ll tell you something. I have answered your questions about me. I have told you my biographical details. I have not answered questions about anyone else.”
“You mean like Doctor Mindish?”
“I have said what I mean. But I am curious about you. I am curious that a man of reasonable intelligence like yourself would choose to become a tool of the ruling class. I would like to know what makes you do it? What is your motivation? What are you saying to all the poor and sick and exploited individuals in this country when you join this Federal Bureau of Inquisition?”
“Well now, we don’t see things just the way you commies do, Paul.”
Either my mother nodded that they could come in, or they took her silence as permission. I know she would have been anxious to keep the cold out. They walked through the door and immediately there was an electric charge of life just outside, and right behind them came another man, then two more, then a few more, all warmly dressed and well tailored for the harsh autumn morning, a dozen FBI men, all told, bringing into our little splintery house all the chill of the outdoors on their bulky shoulders. They poured through the front door like an avalanche of snow.
“What is it now!” my mother shouted.
“Rochelle!” my father called.
I looked outside. Five or six sedans were double-parked along the street. Another car was pulling up. Two more of the G-men stood on the sidewalk. Another was going down the alley to come in through the basement. In my ears was the crackle of a turned-up police radio.
My father was shown the warrant for his arrest as he sat on his hide-a-bed with his bare feet on the floor. He groped around for his glasses. He told my mother he felt suddenly nauseous, and she had him bend over with his head between his knees till the feeling went away. She was furious.
“What are these men doing here?” she said to Bradley and Davis. “Do you think you’ve got John Dillinger? What are you doing?” Men were going through the bookshelves, the bedclothes, the mahogany wardrobe closet. Men were marching upstairs.
My mother stood with Susan in her arms and tears coming down her cheeks. Every piece of furniture in the house had been, in some moment of her life, her utmost concern. She had made every curtain, she had scrubbed and polished every inch of floor. This old, leaky, wooden shack we lived in — and what newspaperman who wrote about the trial ever said a thing about the Isaacsons’ poverty, the shabbiness of their home with its broken-down Salvation Army furniture and castoffs, and amateur paint jobs, its stained wallpaper where the rain soaked through the front door.
“Murderers!” my mother cried. “Maniacs! Haven’t you hounded us enough? Can’t you leave us alone?”
She did not appear to realize that my father had been arrested.
I ran upstairs. Two of them were in my room. They examined my dinosaur book, the model airplane I was working on, and the cigar box I used to hold my marbles. They looked under the mattress on my cot, they lifted the linoleum on the floor, they looked in the closet and went through the blankets and sheets my mother kept there, flapping out each one and then throwing it on the floor. They took the crystal radio my father had helped me make, and the table radio, an old metal Edison that I listened to my programs on, pulling out the plug and wrapping the cord around the radio and tucking it under his arm. And in Susan’s room one of them opened the belly of her monkey doll with a penknife and stuck his finger in it and pulled out the stuffing. In Susan’s room was my grandma’s shiny hope chest, and they were going through that, tossing out Grandma’s brown picture of her mother and father, and a siddur, two down pillows, and some old clothes of hers, and a lace tablecloth with fringe. Mothballs rattled on the floor. Down at the bottom of the chest was a blue, oblong tin with rounded corners. It was my grandma’s last tin of asthma grass. One of them picked it up, opened it slowly, sniffed it, replaced the lid, and wrapped the tin in his handkerchief and put it in his pocket.
Daniel ran back to his own room. His own blue tin filled with pennies of peculiar existence had been opened and the pennies scattered on the floor.
Downstairs the place was a shambles. Broken dishes in the kitchen. The newspapers from under the stairs strewn about. One of them was picking out copies of the Daily Worker, and issues of other papers with stories about ATOM SPIES arrested in England, Canada and New Jersey. A terrible draft swept through the house now, the front door having been propped open. I looked outside. Williams stood on the sidewalk. He was wearing his overalls over a grey sweat shirt. He was wearing slippers. He was looking down the alley. And from under my feet came the thunder of the garbage cans crashing around the cellar.
I don’t know how long this went on. There appeared across the street, along the schoolyard fence, growing numbers of children not interested in going to school. People were hanging out of the windows of the apartment houses on 173rd Street. At each corner of our block a regular police patrol car was parked across the intersection. The FBI radio sputtered like my grandma’s asthma grass. Teachers were watching. The FBI men were taking all these valuable things to their cars. I stood at the door and watched, and this is what they took: My crystal radio and my radio for listening. A stack of selected newspapers. My father’s International Workers’ Order insurance policy for five thousand dollars. A toolbox. A year’s issues of Masses and Mainstream. And the following books: JEWS WITHOUT MONEY by Mike Gold, THE IRON HEEL by Jack London, STATE AND REVOLUTION by V. Lenin, GENE DEBS, THE STORY OF A FIGHTING AMERICAN by Herbert Marais and William Cahn, THE PRICE OF FREE WORLD VICTORY by Henry A. Wallace, Vice President of the United States, THE GREAT CONSPIRACY by Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn, WHO OWNS AMERICA by James S. Allen (the cover shows a fat capitalist with a top hat and a dollar sign inscribed on his belly, sitting in front of a factory on top of a big bag marked profits—oh, Red cartoons! Oh, Robert Minor with your sexy goddess of freedom lying raped and bleeding, and your workingmen of the giant arms, and the clasped hands of your black and white brothers, and your ranks of workers advancing toward the cringing capitalist bosses, I salute you! I salute you, Creator of the anti-comic strip! In such bold strokes of the charcoal pencil is my childhood forever rubbed into my subversive brain, oh, Robert Minor, oh, William Gropper, geniuses of the pencil stroke, precision tools of working-class dreams, agitators, symbol-makers, vanguard of the vanguard with your unremitting proprietorship of the public outrage) and THE STORY OF THE FIVE YEAR PLAN by M. Ilin. This last book is from my room. It is a translation of a primer for Russian children. My father gave it to me and said to keep it in my room until I was old enough to read it. I am old enough, but have not gotten around to reading past the first chapter.