The Book of Daniel Read Online Free PDF Page B

ridings, floggings,public hangings, and burnings. Over seventy Negroes were lynched in 1919, not a few of them war veterans. There were speeches against “foreign ideologies” and much talk about “100 percent Americanism.” The teaching of evolution in the schools of Tennessee was outlawed. Elsewhere textbooks were repudiated that were not sufficiently patriotic. New immigration laws made racial distinctions and set stringent quotas. Jews were charged with international conspiracy and Catholics with trying to bring the Pope to America. The country would soon go dry, thus creating large-scale, organized crime in the U.S. The White Sox threw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. And the stage was set for the trial of two Italian-born anarchists, N. Sacco and B. Vanzetti for the alleged murder of a paymaster in South Braintree, Mass. The story of this trial is well known and often noted by historians and need not be recounted here. To say nothing of World War II—
    Dr. Alan Duberstein probed the air with his ice cream spoon. It was his belief that Susan’s breakdown was connected somehow to her extracurricular activities. He thought she might be in SDS, but he knew for sure she had been active in the Boston Resistance. Last winter, when he and Susan had agreed to terminate her therapy, he had warned her about becoming too involved in political activities. He was having a vanilla soda with peach ice cream. We were all five of us plus the baby stuffed in a Howard Johnson’s window booth. Phyllis sat next to him and I imagined her as his wife. She fed the baby ice cream from a dish. I didn’t like their baby, a fat kid with red cheeks, light hair like his mother’s, and an odor of vomit.
    Incredibly, we were all sitting in the Howard Johnson’s restaurant near Exit II on the Westbound side of the Massachusetts Turnpike. Yet it was logical enough. We had come to pick up Susan’s car, left by the police in the parking lot. It was mid-afternoon; everyone was hungry and thirsty. Perhaps also we were trying to see what there was about a Howard Johnson’s that would make Susan want to die here. Perhaps we felt if we could only understand we could help her. Nevertheless, I was ill. I am very sensitive to inappropriateness. For instance, to weddings in catering halls. There are no decent settings for joy orsuffering. All our environments are wrong. They embarrass our emotions. They make our emotions into the plastic tiger lilies in the window boxes of Howard Johnson’s restaurants.
    “Ordinary political expression was difficult enough for her,” Duberstein said. “Dissent was traumatic. It’s understandable after all. She bit off more than she could chew.”
    “She’s a willful person,” my father said quietly.
    “I have great faith in her,” Duberstein said, looking under his napkin for a straw.
    Every table was taken. A holiday crowd stood behind the hostess stationed by the velvet rope at the entrance to the dining room. With her menus held to her breast, she swept her gaze across the tables. The hostess was in her forties with a beehive hairdo of platinum blonde. She wore an aqua crepe dress with a cowled collar and she was looking serious.
    “If you’re not finishing your sandwich,” I said to Phyllis, “pass it over here.” I was angry with her for imagining Susan’s misery in the earnest compassionate way of high school girls with day-glow flowers. I strongly suspected her of having found it thrilling to marry into a notorious family. That was something I still had to look into.
    “Well, listen,” Duberstein said, “I’d be insulting your intelligence if I didn’t admit this is a pretty serious business. There’s a lot to work out. But she has tremendous resources. She’s been down before.”
    “What did you do, put ketchup on this?”
    “What?” Phyllis says.
    “You put ketchup on a club sandwich.”
    Phyllis looks at me unhappily. She is still hoping someday to be accepted by her in-laws if not