Free Florence Gordon by Brian Morton

contempt, asked Daniel what he planned to do next, and when Daniel said he didn’t know, the teacher suggested that instead of bumming around aimlessly, he should spend a few years in the military and see how the other half lived.
    Normally, this was the kind of suggestion Daniel would have laughed off—his teacher probably expected him to—but it came at a time when he was feeling rigorously critical of both of his parents, and within a few weeks he went to a recruiting office and signed up. When he looked back on this decision in later years, his only question was whether he had done it to spite them or merely to baffle them. He served for two years, and although he saw no action and never even left the States—he was posted to Fort Lewis, Washington, where, having been recognized immediately as a bookish type, he was assigned the job of editing a veterans’ newsletter—by the time he got out, he felt thoroughly liberated from his parents. Not just from his parents: he was liberated, also, from their world.
    Florence and Saul, long divorced by then, were united only in this: neither of them could understand why the hell he’d done what he’d done. They were comfortably cloistered in the worldview of the Upper West Side; they wouldn’t have called themselves pacifists, but they’d been against every war the United States had waged in their adult lifetimes. If he’d joined a revolutionary organization dedicated to overthrowing the government by force, that might have made a little sense to them; joining the U.S. Army made no sense to them at all.
    Later, when he became a cop, one thing he felt clear about, and felt good about, was that he hadn’t become a cop to spite them. He’d known that it would leave them both aghast, but that wasn’t why he did it.
    He’d hated most of the things he encountered in the army. He hated the rigidity, he hated the hostility to thought, he hated the way you get turned into a machine programmed to inflict harm. But the thing that he loved about it was that it gave him his first real experience of democracy. The institution as a whole was hierarchical, but the enlisted men lived in a condition of stripped-down equality: nothing from your past, nothing that you’d been or done or had, meant anything now. The only thing that meant anything to the people you bunked with was not being an asshole, not doing your job so poorly that it made everybody else look bad, and not doing your job so well that it made everybody else look bad.
    When he joined the police force, his parents thought that he’d rejected them twice. What they failed to understand was that under his unfamiliar aspect, he was not very different from the person he’d been all his life. He still had the same social conscience that had led him to make posters for an Upper West Side anti-littering campaign when he was eight and to go door-to-door for Jimmy Carter when he was fourteen. He still wished to be of use.
    He’d rarely regretted his decision to become a cop, but, even after working for the Seattle PD for more than twenty years, he’d never really fit in. Early in his time there, one of his colleagues had spotted him reading a book on his lunch break, which was apparently a signal event in the history of the police force, and this led to someone’s calling him “the professor,” a name that had stuck with him since then—mostly because he was a reader, and partly, he suspected, because he was a Jew. Nobody hazed him or gave him a hard time, but he never stopped feeling like an outsider.
    After a few years he found his way into the Crisis Intervention unit, which is a little world within the world of the police force, with its own culture and its own values. He spent most of his time working with people who were mentally ill, trying to make sure they didn’t get swallowed up by the criminal justice system. (Crisis Intervention kept getting funded every year only because the city had found that it was