(1961) The Chapman Report

by Irving Wallace

“I thought of one thing, Doctor. And your sophistries don’t make me think differently now. I thought of Sam Goldsmith in the gas chamber, and the children as orphans, unless someone acted with honesty on their behalf.”

  Dr. Chapman ignored this. “But the even more damaging consequence of the letter was in exposing a member of our team to the public as a maniac who had committed suicide. How the press and readers would have gloated over this. How they would have crucified us. Because of one bad egg, we would have all been rejected forever. Can you imagine, if our enemies had got hold of this-Dr. Jonas-“

  “Dr. Jonas knows.”

  “Knows?” Dr. Chapman echoed, rising to his feet. “What are you saying?”

  “Before I came here, I told him the whole thing.”

  “You stupid fool!”

  “I think you’re the one who’s behaving foolishly, Dr. Chapman. I know Jonas. You don’t. He reacted in an objective manner. He even said that there could be some justification in suppressing Cass’s letter-because of the ultimate harm it would do, to the family, to your project-if Sam Goldsmith could be saved some other way, if there were no risk to it. He felt that if your project is to be destroyed, it should be destroyed by scientific refutation, intellectually, and not by reason of scandal.”

  Dr. Chapman remained standing, flushed. “So now we’re dealing with Jesus.”

  “I didn’t agree with Jonas, either. I still won’t let an innocent bystander be sacrificed to your ego.”

  “He wouldn’t have been sacrificed,” Dr. Chapman said angrily. “The district attorney did not burn the letter until he had evidence, this noon, that Goldsmith was indeed innocent.”

  Paul felt an emotion of relief. “You mean he’s free?”

  “Of course. He was in Pomona at some damn business meeting or other and finally located witnesses to prove his alibi. Now you have your innocent bystander. There’s been no sacrificial lamb. It turns out I’m no tyrant after all. What do you say to that?”

  He sat down, more or less controlled, his arms folded across his chest.

  “I say nothing’s changed,” said Paul quietly. “This man is free. I’m glad. But the fact of you, as I’ve seen you all this day, is the same fact. You are not free, in my eyes. You were prepared to do anything to preserve your work, your future-“

  “Not true. No evidence.”

  “I’m satisfied with the evidence. Somehow, you did manage to subvert truth before it was made public. You did this before it was known that Goldsmith was innocent. I don’t know what would have happened had he proved no alibi. Would you have finally relented and allowed the letter to be published? I don’t know. I don’t want to know any more. Maybe even you don’t know. But I tell myself, This man whom I have admired for so long, he doesn’t care for people as people. I tell myself, maybe that is the weakness in our work, our approach-that it doesn’t treat people as warmblooded human beings but as numerals in charts, that this approach, a product of your own neurotic personality, is not the whole truth, and I am a victim of it as much as you-and people who will try to live by these unhuman facts-“

  There was a persistent knocking on the door. Dr. Chapman, the color high on his cheeks, considered the door without reply. After a moment, the knob turned, and the door squeaked open tentatively.

  It was Benita Selby.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to Dr. Chapman, “but Emil Ackerman is on the phone-“

  “Not now,” said Dr. Chapman brusquely. “Later-I’ll call him later.”

  “He only wants to know what time Sidney should meet you at the train.”

  Dr. Chapman avoided Paul’s sharp glance. “Six forty-five tonight,” he said to Benita. “I’ll give him the details later.”

  After Benita had shut the door, the two men sat in silence. Dr. Chapman studied his fingernails, and Paul packed tobacco into his pipe.

  “I was about to inform you of that,” Dr. Chapman said. “We had to have an immediate replacement for Cass,” he added.

  Paul put the match to his pipe, then shook it out and dropped it. “Well, at least it answers the question I wasn’t going to bother to ask. I’d wondered how, in a democracy, one suppresses an important document after it’s been delivered to the law. Now I understand. You find a man who owns the district attorney or the chief of police, and you make a deal with this man. So it was Ackerman. I shouldn’t be surprised. You once said he was in the business of being paid back. Now you’ve settled your debt.”

  “The practice is not uncommon, Paul, even among savants of highest virtue.”

  “I’m sure you’re right about that. I’ve read a little in history. Presidents and monarchs have stooped to low deals. Philosophers, too. And men of science. But one always has hopes that somewhere there is someone-“

  “Paul, you’re behaving like an uncompromising child toward an erring parent. This immature inflexibility doesn’t suit you. We’re adults. I’m saving years of labor in the past, our present, our future -everything-by the most harmless horse trade. For a politician’s help, I agree to take on his nephew for a year or two. After all, the boy is a sociology major-“

  “He’s a snot-nosed voyeur. You said it yourself. You said you’d give up your work before debasing it by employing that unhealthy-“

  “Hold on now. Things change. You know me better than that. I’d never give him a key assignment.”

  “The hell you won’t. If you don’t feed him females, he’ll go running to Boss Tweed.”

  “Never. Trust me on this, Paul. Never.” He paused. “Look, what’s done is done, and after a while you’ll see it’s for the overall good.

  I think you’ve let your emotions dominate you entirely. By tomorrow, you’ll-well, both of us-we’ll look at all this in a different light. We’ve talked too much, puffed the whole disagreement out of proportion. I’d suggest you go and pack, and after a day on the train-“

  “There’ll be no day on the train.”

  “I can’t believe you’d be so irrational.”

  “It’s not a matter of rational or irrational. It’s come down to blind faith, at last. And I’ve lost my faith in you-in you and your whole approach. There are too many ghosts now-Sam Goldsmith, Dr. Jonas, Sidney Ackerman. But they’re the least of it. Perhaps it comes down to so simple a factor as language. I mean, the language of our once common faith, which is love. You speak of love in numbers-so much this, so much that-and the suspicion is slowly growing on me, stronger and stronger,, that mere numbers will not penetrate the screen we raise between ourselves and our subjects, or between our subjects’ heads and their hearts. I’m beginning to understand, I think I understand, that human beings are hardly numbers at all, that no numbers can add up devotion, tenderness, trust, pity, sacrifice, intimacy. I think love wants another tongue. What it is or will be, I don’t know yet, but I’m prepared to seek it.”

  “I look at you, Paul, but it’s Dr. Jonas’ voice I hear.”

  “Yes and no. I think I found the way myself. He gave me a hand, but I’m still my own man. You see, I don’t know what Jonas is for. I know what he’s against, but I don’t know what he advocates. But I do know what I believe and advocate. I believe that the dissection of love’s quality will bring me closer to truth than any study of love’s quantity. That’s the essence of it. Because of this, I believe that every romantic in history, often fumbling, often foolish, was closer to this truth than you. I believe every medieval wandering troubadour, every passionate Abe1ard, every pitiful Keats, every Shakespeare with his Juliet, and Tolstoy with his Anna Karenina, was closer to the full meaning of love than are you with your charts on orgasm and masturbation.”

  Dr. Chapman shook his head. “No, absolutely no. Believe that idiocy and you are the one who compounds ignorance with ignorance. I’m as aware as you of history. It offers more than you suggest. There is more to learn of sexual behavior-or love, if you prefer-from the fact of Shakespeare’s second-best bed, from the

  fact of Byron’s falling upon a chambermaid in C
alais before he’d had time to unpack, from the fact of Abelard’s love letters being written after he was castrated, from the fact of Madame de Pompadour’s hating the sex act and dieting on truffles and celery to give her more ardor, from the fact of Boswell’s having intercourse thirteen times between Paris and Dover with Rousseau’s mistress, Theresa Le Vasseur-there is more to learn from that than your inaccurate nonsense poems and novels and so-called love letters.”

  “I won’t argue with you any further,” said Paul. “Quantity is always more sensational than quality. You will have your audience, but no longer will I help you entertain it-or defraud it.”

  “Walk out then. Quit. Run to Jonas and spill our secrets. But if you do, I promise you, hear this, Paul-I promise you-I’ll see that you will be branded for what you are, a traitor and a nuisance. You’ll never work in academic circles again. Because I’ll ruin you.”

  Paul nodded slowly. “Yes, I think you might. But I rather expect you’ll ruin yourself, first. Somehow, I think I’ll survive you. I think Dr. Jonas will survive you. And our concept of love-as something more than an unfeeling act of animalism-I think that will survive you, too.” He rose to his feet. “Goodbye, Doctor.”

  Dr. Chapman remained in the chair. “Paul, think carefully-carefully-because if you walk out that door now, like this, without reconsidering, without apology, I’ll never let you walk back through it again.”

  “Goodbye, Doctor.”

  Paul had reached the door. The mechanical part of the decision was, finally, the easiest part. He opened the door, stepped through it, shut it. He strode down the corridor, down the steps, and outside.

  For a moment he stood on the pavement, studying the novelty shop beside the post office across the street. There was a placard in the window. He had not seen it before. It read: “Before you act-thimk!”

  He remembered something that he had once read, long ago, and he was not surprised. Sigmund Freud had written, or said, that on the day a son lost his father, he became a man at last, on that day and not before. It was sad, he reflected, that the great gain could only be accomplished through the great loss. Well, today he had seen a parent die. Requiescat in pace.

  Amen.

  How many miles he had walked, or how many hours, he did not know. There had been a seemingly endless panorama of chunky date palm trees and thick eucalyptus and Chinese elms, and begonias and roses and birds of paradise. There had been manicured lawns populated by tall men in swimming trunks, and long-legged women in shorts, and children in sunsuits and denims.

  Not once in his aimless wandering had he again thought of Dr. Chapman. All that was important to be said, he had said, and now the tiny satans had been exorcised, and he made his way without burden. The future he did not search at all. The past, the more distant past, he evoked constantly. But for the most, his mind was as directionless as his legs, churning memories, happy, unhappy, without significance or conclusion.

  Now, for the first time in an endless breadth of time, he was aware of the cotton clouds floating in the gray-blue sky and aware that the bright disk of sun showed only its rim above the irregular heads of the jacaranda trees.

  When he arrived at the street on which Kathleen Ballard lived, his sensory perceptions sharpened. He was more knowledgeable now of the avenue beneath his shoes, and the fresh green things, and the houses beyond.

  He thought of The Briars as The Briars, a place unknown to him before, where now so dramatic an upheaval had shaken his life, and the lives of Horace and Cass, and perhaps the women, the women too, he supposed.

  Lazily, he tried to fathom the meaning of this kind of suburban community in America, in the world, a suburb that was a limb of the urban whole, and yet distinct and separate, and he wondered how representative it was of the sexual mores of this time and age. There could be no capsule answer, of course, except that supplied by Dr. Chapman. And now, at last, he thought of Dr. Chapman and The Briars.

  Dr. Chapman’s eventual report on this community’s sexual mores, or one aspect of its mores, this printed report, would represent a minute segment, although the most widely publicized and known, of The Briars’ standing and meaning in its own time. Perhaps, for one hundred years, the report would be passed along from one generation to the next, in the mammoth relay race of evolution, but each time being carried a shorter distance and by fewer couriers. For, gradually, the report on American women in general, and in The Briars specifically, would be less applicable to new times, conditions, morals. Through the decades, it would have a diminishing number of readers and eventually become quaint and unidentifiable, until one day only scholars would consult it as historical source material, and what the scholars digested, culled, rewrote, would be all that remained of Dr. Chapman or The Briars.

  How, then, could the distant future ever know this community now, alive on this placid Sunday? Suddenly, with a stab of intellectual pain, the helpless pain of a frustration that must be lived with, Paul realized how haphazard and warped was all history, all knowledge. If he, this day, walking through a street that would one day become a fourth layer of ruins beneath a hump of dirt, could not clarify a picture of life in The Briars-what then could the scholars of the future, the students, his heirs, in not a hundred years but in five thousand years, make of it?

  He tried to project this street five thousand years into the future. By then, based on nature’s past performance, The Briars, all of Los Angeles, no doubt, would have been buried again and again and again under explosives, floods, fires, earthquakes, with new cities built on old cities, and then crumbling, disintegrating, continually so, until some defeat had left it a vast mound of earth covered by grass or water.

  And then, one day, five thousand years hence, an archaeologist-perhaps a nonconformist, outlawed by his colleagues for his absurd conjecture that once there had been a city in this place, once in the twentieth century a.d.-would come with his copies of ancient fragments, with his belief in myth and legend, and direct the diggers. Months would pass, maybe years, and down, down beneath the layers of silt, they would discover their first telltale remnants of an ancient race.

  What would have survived the dust? What fossilized pieces would outlast Dr. Chapman and give their own history of this street in The Briars? A mud-caked enamel slab? Would this archaeologist of ten centuries later know the door of a freezer? A remarkable fin of hard substance? Would this archaeologist deduce it had belonged to an extinct beast, or somehow learn it had been the arrogant rear end of a four-wheeled vehicle known as Cadillac? A fancy bottle crusted with the loam of eternity, a portion of its label still legible? Would the cypher experts ever know the word on the label read bourbon? A small, gold-plated, faceless idol? Would

  the experts understand that it was one of the long dead religions, between Judaism and Mormon, or relate it some way to the folk play of the ancient time, when men awarded the idols in prolific number to mimics who permitted their images to be thrown in crude reproduction on a screen of cloth? A skeleton of a young person, probably female, no more than sixty-seven, buried in a time when life was that brief? Would they know that she had once lived in beauty, possessed of a dark and enigmatic soul, and that she had given her sex history to a investigator associated with Dr. Chapman (referred to in the Lake Michigan Scrolls), and that her sex history had been a deceit?

  Would this be The Briars in five thousand years? An enamel slab, a fin, a bottle, a statuette, a skeleton? Yes, Paul realized, this might be The Briars. The archaeologist’s discoveries would be heralded widely, and the hoary civilization and place reconstructed on countless papers, a place and people of frail women, pagan idols, dead languages, and monster vehicles.

  Paul scanned the street and wanted to reject the fantasy. It could not happen here, to this place so alive. To accept so total an extinction, made life pointless and impossible. Yet, his harder heart knew that it had always happened, and would happen again. “Thus, the inexorable years made of all history a lie. How ever again to believe that the Egypt,
Greece, Troy, Pompeii, of antiquity were what the historian supposed them to be from his faint twentieth-century conjectures?

  What did all this mean, after all? It meant, thought Paul, that The Briars existed truly but once. Now, on this day, at this time, in this place. The Briars that Dr. Chapman would record, or the one that he saw, for he and Dr. Chapman were no longer one, was all the reality that remained or that mattered. This was the gift to accept and appreciate: the living particles of time in this living place, chosen for him by some Fate, to be used and not squandered before the inevitable oblivion, before the erosion of never-stopping tomorrows, before the fossils formed, and the diggers came, and the lies began.

  Behind him, he had buried the past. Ahead, he could see no future recognizable. Momentarily, he was landless, stateless, and, with no desired haven, the journey ahead would be unendurable.

  Resolutely, Paul Radford entered Kathleen’s driveway.

  She had been so sure that he had given her up, because it was nightfall, and the train was to leave at seven, and he had not called, and he had not come.

  While she fed Deirdre in the kitchen, he recounted the events of the critical day past. The child, sensing the importance of it,-feeling the security of his presence, ate silently, listening, not understanding, but enjoying it. Kathleen moved about the kitchen, more tense than he had known her to be, and he spoke briefly but fully of Cass’s letter, of the newspapers, of the television program, of Dr. Jonas, of Sidney Ackerman, of Dr. George G. Chapman. He reported his actions, but not his emotions. The essence of the day was enough for now. They both understood this. If there should be other days, there would be time for the detail.

  Once, she asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. You mean, my work?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You could go back to books.”

  “I don’t want to run.”

  “Then you should see Dr. Jonas.”

  “I might. As for what else I do-it depends.”