Silas Timberman

by Howard Fast

  “Perhaps it does.”

  “And still you refuse to say who circulated it among the members of my faculty. Did you, Professor Timberman? Are you a communist?”

  “Is that a serious question?” Silas said evenly.

  “Most serious.”

  “Then I’m sorry you had to ask it,” Silas answered softly. “Until now, I kept assuring myself that nothing was basically different or could be. No—I am not a communist. I am not a communist, President Cabot.”

  And Cabot said, “Thank you, Professor Timberman, for your cooperation.” He rose to indicate that the session was over.

  * * *

  Brian saw him a long way off and raced to meet him. Brian became jet-propelled. He streamlined his body and fire roared from his jets. He came on with a rising pitch of sound, and Silas swept him up.

  When Silas held him at arm’s length, Brian paid tribute to his father’s strength. “You’re strong,” he said. “I’ll bet. In fact, I bet you’re the strongest man in the world.” He laughed as he said it, his small blue eyes crinkling and sparkling like bits of stone. “The strongest man in the world,” Silas thought to himself. It was a beautiful opinion. The sun was shining again, the white puffs of cloud tumbling across the autumn sky, and warmth and pleasure flowed back into Silas.

  “I saw you a long way off with a telescope,” Brian said.

  “No?”

  “With binoculars, I mean. I took your binoculars. I didn’t ask, but it’s all right, huh?”

  Silas put him down. “It’s all right, sure. But where’d you put them?”

  “On the grass. I’ll get them.”

  “We’ll both get them,” Silas said, as they walked along, hand in hand.

  “You got them in the war, huh? Did you kill anyone with them?”

  “You don’t kill people with binoculars, Brian. You use them to see things with that you didn’t know about before.”

  “Like stars. Suppose you were on the moon. You know, you could just put on the binoculars and see Mars as clear as day. Did you know that, Silas, if you were on the moon. And you know what Uncle Ike said—you know what he said?”

  “I guess I don’t know, if it’s a real surprise.”

  “He said, some night, when I can stay up late, he’d take me into the obsotory—is that right?—where the big telescope is.”

  “Observatory, you mean.”

  “Observatory, where the big telescope is. It’s so big it needs machinery just to move it around. Did you know that, Silas? Were you ever in the observatory?”

  They came to where the binoculars lay, and Silas picked them up and slung them around Brian’s shoulder. “I was there,” he told the boy. “Yes, Uncle Ike took me there.” It all came back to him, vivid, clear and wonderful—the first time he and Myra had gone in there, with Amsterdam and Hartman Spencer and old Dr. Lazarus Meyers, who had worked with Lowell and had been involved in the famous controversy as to whether the lines on the planet Mars were canals and whether there was life on Mars. That had been a good night, a special night with Myra, the two of them walking hand in hand until darkness fell and the lights began to blink on in the sky, and then going along the walk behind the Main Building to the little hillock on which the observatory was perched. It was not much of an observatory compared to some of the newer big ones around the country, but to Silas and Myra, who had never seen any other, its dome was large and impressive, and to Brian it would be even larger and more amazing. Amsterdam had been waiting for them, and as he took them inside, into the deeper darkness, he held his finger to his lips. The old man, Meyers, was taking a sight on Venus as it rose up above the horizon, and he was crochety in the silence he demanded when he worked at the instrument; so there was no other sound than the faint whir of the machinery that moved the telescope and the breathing of the men who stood around. Gradually, Silas’ eyes became used to the darkness, and he was able to make out the figures of the others, the white beard of Meyers, in the diffused starlight that came through the opening at the top of the dome.

  Then, when his own turn came, eternity opened up before him. That was only five years ago, but until then in all his life he had never looked into a telescope, and he was not prepared for the starry glory that appeared; he was not prepared for his motion into it, for the manner in which it absorbed him and enfolded him, enlarged him and dwindled him, so that his soul soared out only to be crushed back upon itself, himself a measureless mite in all the vastness. Myra must have experienced something of the same emotion, for when she turned away from the instrument, she went to him and held him—

  Afterwards, Myra talked with old Meyers. He liked her. She told him about the children, the two girls and the little boy who was then a year old. “What you saw through this machine,” Meyers said, “he will see it better. With his plain eyes. He and his whole generation—they will travel among the stars.”

  “Do you believe that? Do you really believe that?” Silas asked.

  “I don’t say things I don’t believe.”

  “And men will be like gods,” Myra whispered.

  “If there are men,” Meyers had said. “That is the more difficult problem, my dear. If there are men.”

  And now, five years later, Brian was saying, “When will Uncle Ike take me there? When?”

  Brian stayed outside. He became a jet plane, a rocket plane, a space ship, until he soared off to chase a bird. The girls were in the livingroom, watching a television program. Silas walked through into the kitchen, where Myra was delicately and efficiently making canapes. She gave him her cheek to kiss.

  “Hello, Si. How are you?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got to think about it for a while. What are they for—cocktails?”

  “Yes, don’t you remember? It gives me a chance to dispose of the Lundfests for a while without killing a whole evening.”

  “Yet we’ll have to have them for dinner sooner or later.”

  “I like to put things off—you can’t tell what will happen. Anyway, I asked Larry Kaplin and his wife—”

  “Ed doesn’t like them.”

  “I know, and I asked Bob and Susan Allen, because Joan Lundfest pines for youth and Susan thinks highly of you and she’s quite pretty.”

  “Of all the damn things!”

  “Of course. And now tell me about you. I looked for you in the free period this afternoon.”

  “I was with Anthony C. Cabot, president of this great university.”

  “And what did he want?”

  Silas told her, sitting on a kitchen chair, puffing at his pipe, and watching admiringly the quick, deft motions with which she prepared the little open sandwiches. She was so manually skillful, competent, and sure in her actions! He wondered what she would have done in his place—and was quite sure that whatever she would have done would have been better than his own behavior. Still, he told the story in detail, and she made almost no comment until he had finished. Then she looked at him with the kind of curiosity and inquiry that only once in a long while exists between people whose marriage is no longer new or uncertain, and she said,

  “Were you terribly surprised, Si?”

  This he considered for a moment. “I suppose not.”

  “I wasn’t. I’m glad you took it the way you did. Do you think it’s the end of it?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t either. And then there’ll be decisions each day, won’t there?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “I wasn’t before. I was only angry. Then I began to be afraid. It’s a funny feeling—a new kind of fear.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I say to myself, if only I had enough sense not to sign that damned petition. Then I realize that it wouldn’t have made any difference.”

  “Not in the long run, I guess,” Myra admitted. “But still it’s frightening. What’s wrong with me, Si? Am I soft and weak, or is everyone the way I am? I squirm and protest and think about
excitement and adventure and tell myself that I’m in a rut and a groove and a squirrel trap, and then while you were talking I kept thinking how much I like this, where it’s warm and safe and each day is like the day before and you have a reasonable certainty that tomorrow will be like today and you can plan and put ten dollars a week in the bank, and think about getting a new car or a new dress, and dream that maybe this summer we’ll take everything we’ve got and make that trip to Europe we always talk about—and then I was thinking, well, there’s only one thing to do, go to Cabot and weep a little perhaps and tell him how misguided both of us were, and how we realize that someone tricked us into signing a nasty communist petition, and he’d smile at me in his fatherly way and say, there, there, my dear, nothing to worry about, and just forget the whole uncomfortable business, and tell me who’s behind all this, and I’d name Ike Amsterdam and Alec Brady as the villains in the piece, and he’d assure me that I was fine and upstanding and patriotic—”

  “No—”

  “No, no, Si. I was just dreaming my own dream about getting out of this and not being afraid ever again. But I guess I’m not afraid enough yet, and maybe we’re both a little panicky, and this is all there is to it.”

  “I hope so, Myra.”

  “So go in and tell the kids to come in and eat, and I’ll look for Brian.”

  “He’s outside.”

  “I know.”

  Silas went into the livingroom, where the two girls sat on the couch in the gloom, staring at the flickering gray and white screen in the box. “Soup’s on,” he told them, sitting down between them and putting an arm around each.

  “Can’t we just—”

  “No.”

  “Just another ten minutes.”

  “No.”

  Geraldine turned it off, and Susan asked him, “Why don’t you like television?”

  “I don’t mind television. It’s what you see on it.”

  * * *

  If anti-Semitism existed at Clemington, it remained politely and thoughtfully undiscussed. That a quota system, which limited the number of Jewish students and Jewish faculty, was in operation, everyone understood; but the operation of this quota system was both delicate and concealed, and not referred to even by those who put it into operation—just as the fact that no Negro was a member of the faculty and only seventeen Negroes enrolled at the university as students, appeared to be a part of no one’s doing, but simply the result of normal conditions. Lawrence Kaplin would have denied that there was any apparent anti-Semitism at the university. That his social life was limited, his friends few, his intimates even fewer, was something he accepted philosophically. It had been going on for a long time and he was more or less accustomed to it, and he tended to place most of the blame on his own sedentary habits. His wife, Selma, felt it a little more keenly; but both of them being from the middle west, they were used to this kind of behavior on the part of their gentile friends, and they performed their own role of acceptance without tears.

  Selma Kaplin was a stout, rather handsome woman, who had moved into the latter years of middle age gracefully and easily. She had good features and a full head of white hair that was quite beautiful and an interesting contrast to her still youthful skin. Greeting her, Myra thought once again that she must have been extremely attractive in her youth, full-bodied and passionate, and wondered how her husband, so gentle and withdrawn, had coped with it. Myra wasn’t sure that she liked Lawrence Kaplin; she had a mistrust of the over-gentle, sensing a retreat from and fear of normality, but Silas was charmed by and fascinated with the encyclopedic knowledge of the man. But now Myra felt warm and good, a reaction from what had gone before, and the result of a single cocktail on an empty stomach, and she welcomed them with a pleasure so obviously sincere that they both felt at ease immediately.

  “We’re all ahead of you,” Myra said, “but I’m so glad you’re here, and do have a drink and catch up with us.”

  Greetings were exchanged. They all knew each other. Bob Allen, a round-cheeked, open-faced man, who looked less than his thirty-two years, had an instructorship in modern literature and a workshop in composition—it was expected that at a party like this the guests would be limited to Lundfest’s department. Joan Lundfest was a slight, languid woman, whose original blondness had by now become fixed in a corn-colored and perfect chemical sheen. She was over-painted, petulant and usually demanding, but bright now in a mild flirtation with Bob Allen. Lundfest and Silas were in animated conversation with Susan Allen, and Kaplin took a drink in his hand and joined them. Myra, to put Selma Kaplin at ease, talked home and children with her, served sandwiches, and caught words and phrases.

  “To think in terms of British education these days,” Lundfest was saying, “is worse than futile. We’ve reached a point of specialization these days, where we must draw a sharp line between knowledge for use and knowledge per se. There is no knowledge for itself. The British turn out educated nonentities; we produce engineers, statesmen, and leaders of industry.”

  “Who would be none the worse off if they could read.”

  “Come now, they read what is necessary to them, Silas.”

  “Where have I heard that? Now you’ll be telling me that the mind is like a closet—that it holds just so much and can’t be cluttered up with non-essentials.”

  “I’m not sure that isn’t so.”

  “Really?” Susan Allen smiled. “Then you and your technical civilization are consigning the whole lot of us to doom. Where is our future, Ed?”

  “In a smattering of ignorance,” Kaplin said tentatively, but Lundfest leaped at the phrase.

  “There it is, the semantical opposition. I’ve heard that smattering of ignorance five hundred times! What does it mean? I’ll tell you—nothing, absolutely nothing. Everyone is armed with a smattering of ignorance, composed of a few facts.”

  “They used to be flesh and blood,” Silas said.

  “Ed is flesh and blood. Ask the co-eds when he walks across the campus.” Susan did it well, and Silas wondered why women could manage Lundfest so easily, so competently—almost any woman. “The man’s a fool,” he said to himself, “but that isn’t all of it. I make a mistake every time I think of him as a fool.” For the fools in the group, he added to himself, were Silas Timberman and Lawrence Kaplin—Kaplin who had published the one meaningful monograph of his time on the evolution of the English language, whose opinions were regarded with awe and veneration by a hundred obscure scholars scattered around the world, and who was now regarding Lundfest with uncertainty and timidity.

  “A smattering of fear,” Silas thought.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Kaplin said. “I don’t measure the techniques against the arts. It’s simply a fact that the arts are becoming a thing of the past. No one is really very interested.”

  “That couldn’t be our fault, could it? Some self-inquiry might be in order. A part of the entire struggle of the free world against communism is preservation of western culture. This is a sacred trust, so as to speak.”

  “Come, now, Ed,” said Susan Allen. “Don’t make it sound like an editorial. We all have to live with ourselves.”

  “A profound truth,” Myra observed, coming over with another drink for Lundfest. “But it’s surprising how many people aren’t at all particular what they live with. What on earth are you talking about, Susan?”

  “Culture, I think.”

  “A smattering of barley,” Silas smiled, feeling the pleasant release, the fine looseness of two drinks on an empty stomach. “That’s a quote from Burns,” he explained to Lundfest. “You know—Oh wad some power the giftie gie us to see oursels as others see us. Or something like that, which makes it painless for almost anyone to abide with himself.”

  Susan Allen took Lundfest’s arm. “She wants to control this,” Silas thought. “But he’s angry now.” He wanted to prod it and push it as an acknowledgment of his own feeling flowed into his mind. He disliked Edward Lundfest; he disliked him intense
ly; as a matter of fact, he despised him and despised himself equally for having Lundfest here, wining and dining his pompous stupidity, his childish platitudes, his overt, bumptious sexual groping, his crude contempt for Kaplin—and Silas also felt that he, himself, was without pity for Kaplin. Timberman got what he deserved, and so did Kaplin. To each his desserts, and to Anthony C. Cabot, sooner or later, the White House or the State Department or the Supreme Court. Then President Edward Lundfest would have a nice sound in the Main Building. People thought ahead and planned and built—all, apparently, except Silas Timberman.

  “Erudition,” Susan began confidingly to Lundfest, and Myra competently parted the group. “This is very selfish, and the kiss of death to any party. Larry, come with me.” Myra bore him across to Bob Allen, who thanked her devotedly with his eyes, and she left Kaplin there to take the brunt of Joan Lundfest for a while. The Allens began to chat with Selma Kaplin, and Myra busied herself replenishing drinks, passing canapes, and emptying ashtrays—always with the thought in her mind that Silas was tight, watching him and Lundfest, worried for him, sensing motion and asking herself whether the motion was all about them—or whether it was she herself, and more so Silas, who was in motion. When she was able to join him, she noticed immediately the whiteness around his mouth, the very slight working of a muscle in his face. He was standing rigid, tall and rather impressive when he stood that way.

  “—not that this is the best time to go into it,” Lundfest was saying. “I just thought I’d mention it.”

  “But you’re not just mentioning it,” Silas replied. “You are advising me to drop it. I am teaching something, and you are saying to me, stop teaching it. It is dangerous; it is going to make trouble. Therefore, put it aside.”

  “Isn’t that rather dramatic, Silas? To build a whole, thematic conception of American literature around a minor story by Mark Twain is unorthodox, to say the least.”

  “Precisely, and it’s orthodoxy we are dealing with here.”

  “But Silas, place it in its proper context. I will not argue whether Hadleyberg is the best or worst of Mark Twain’s work. The point is that the time in which he wrote it is dead and gone forever. Things change, conditions change. This is simply a tendentious bit of writing which presents what the reader must consider a typical middle-western American town, slanders it from top to bottom, and emerges with the conclusion that anyone who runs a business, owns a bank or operates a store is evil and dishonest, whereas the poor, the ambitionless, the lazy and the stupid are good, honest and blessed. I can’t buy that, Silas.”