Silas Timberman

by Howard Fast

  “When did you last read it?”

  “Yesterday. I took it out of the library and read it carefully indeed—and I must say I was shocked. In all charity, I can only ascribe its creation to the bitterness and venom of a sick old man. The students who came to me and described its content as communist propaganda had good reason to be provoked.”

  “You’re not going to accuse Mark Twain of being a communist—or a tool of communists?”

  “Of course not. But what he says, within the context of today, is what the communists are saying. I should think there’s nothing they’d like better than to spread a million copies of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyberg across the country. It suits their purpose. And when you build an entire literary structure upon it, you suit their purpose. That’s the long and short of it, Silas, and there’s no getting away from it.”

  Silas opened and closed his mouth, feeling the hard, needlelike pressure of Myra’s fingers on his arm. He turned to look at her, and she said lightly.

  “For Lundfest and Timberman to attempt to settle the philosophical destiny of mankind on half a dozen martinis is quite a proposition. Suppose we all replenish our egos. Silas, pay some attention to Selma, please. And Ed, do be useful and mix another batch of drinks and fill up the glasses. Selma gets sherry and Sue Allen is drinking Scotch. And release me to be a mother for ten minutes and discover what my kids are up to.”

  “It will be a pleasure, my dear,” Lundfest agreed.

  And Silas, going across to where the Allens were sitting with Selma Kaplin, wondered whether the tact and quick thinking which Myra had displayed meant agreement or disagreement on her part, sympathy or annoyance—understanding of what he was being drawn into or toleration for the points Ed Lundfest had raised.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Monday: October 30, 1950

  THE FULCRUM INCIDENT

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE FULCRUM INCIDENT

  During the time that it lasted and engaged, to some extent, the attention of the whole nation, a number of people became intensely interested in the case of Silas Timberman; and this interest, as you will see, was both varied and diversified. As the most interested parties, Silas Timberman and his wife, Myra, had a personal as well as a historical point of view, and for a long time, questions of self-judgment remained unclear. Perhaps more than Silas, Myra maintained a certain objectivity, for she had no patience with the notion that people were leaves in violent winds of chance, nor did she ever feel that she was the victim of a particular sequence of events. At the same time, she began to observe a peculiar and fascinating imbalance of cause and effect which reminded her of nothing so much as a dance to a rising lilt of music, the rhythms of which were both beguiling and unmistakable.

  After the cocktail party, she had the feeling that she had averted certain dangers. The situation was not exactly new; people had one drink too many and various repressions exploded, sometimes unpleasantly; the difference, however, lay in the fact that here was something basic, something that puzzled her and eluded her in this situation. When she discussed it with Silas, he agreed and said.

  “I don’t feel aggressive about it, believe me, Myra. The truth of the matter is that I’m not deeply interested in politics and never have been, even the petty politics that work out on the campus. That may be a warp in my character, but there it is. Politics has a nasty taste, and I’m willing to let others work it out. I want to leave it alone.”

  “If it leaves us alone. What are you going to do about Mark Twain?”

  “I suppose that in the end I’ll do just what Lundfest wants me to do.”

  “You will?”

  “Well, isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “It may be what I wanted,” Myra said uncertainly. “But I didn’t think it was what you wanted. It wasn’t my problem. I was just sitting by and it seemed a small thing to have an explosion over. But—”

  “Well, isn’t it a small thing? You can blow it up all out of proportion, but that isn’t going to help.”

  “No—I guess not.”

  It still eluded her, and she suspected that it eluded Silas as well, and in this she was right. Overnight, it became like one of those weeds with roots that run under the ground; you pluck it in one place, and it promptly springs up somewhere else; or perhaps that was because she now made an interconnection where she would have made none before. For example, only the day before, Sunday afternoon, Reverend Greenwold, the university chaplain, had dropped in during the afternoon to accept a cup of tea from Myra and chat with her a bit. He explained that he had been out for a stroll and that the notion just took him, and when Myra apologized for Silas’ absence—he was down at the river with the children, fishing—he seemed rather relieved. He observed that he hadn’t seen them at chapel that morning, and Myra was taken somewhat aback. The last time they had been to chapel was the previous spring.

  “Is it so unusual?” she asked him.

  He was a fat, white-haired man, pink-cheeked and delicate in his ways. He nibbled appreciatively at the fruit cake Myra had put out for him, and admitted that while it was not unusual, it was still something he had to take notice of sooner or later.

  “Simply because I admire you and your husband and the fine family you have. Fine children. Fine, handsome girls, fine boy—rock material, the rock and the foundation, you know.”

  “I never considered it just that way,” Myra admitted.

  “Too close to it. And that’s our curse, isn’t it? We become too close to ourselves, no longer see ourselves. But we are seen, I assure you, Mrs. Timberman, we are seen.”

  “Are we?”

  “Indeed, I assure you. Seen and judged, Mrs. Timberman. I don’t want to sound like an old-fashioned revivalist, but there’s something in these times that calls for that old-fashioned spirit. These are the times that try men’s souls—”

  Myra just lacked the courage to observe that the man who said that had been remembered through the ages as a damned and hated atheist.

  “—and a man must steel himself. The Lord is the rock, there is no other. Our thinking gets muddied when we step off that foundation.”

  “And do you feel,” asked Myra, “that my thinking or my husband’s thinking is muddied?”

  “No, no—I pass no judgments, believe me, Mrs. Timberman. I have neither the wisdom nor the pride, and I would hold to judge not, lest ye be judged. Yet it is very easy to do the wrong thing in the idealistic belief that we are doing the right thing, very easy. I wish we only had to contend with the old-fashioned devil and his simple sins and cloven hoofs, but temptation is vastly more complicated today.”

  “Oh, the fool,” Myra thought, “and he goes on and on, and I wonder who could have sent him, because now we are godless, I suppose. Either Cabot or Lundfest—but how could they think?—” And yet she was not willing to ask him the nature of the temptation, or to spell out the quality and quantity of the sin.

  “We’ve never been anything but the most erratic church people,” she explained. “Perhaps, now with the children growing up—”

  “I can’t tell you how happy that would make me,” he nodded. “Believe me, Mrs. Timberman. It’s the children we must think of, and so many Protestants neglect that simple thought. Think of a new, untrammeled soul, like a butterfly in the palm of our hand—”

  Myra tried to think of it, and promised she would discuss it with Silas—and when Silas returned, she purposely made her account of the interview bright and amusing; whereupon she was more than a little surprised at Silas’ anger.

  “No! Damn it all to hell, no! I will not be made a fool of by that pious hypocrite! I still have to live with myself and look at my face when I shave, and vote once a year, and damn it all, I will not stoop to anything as mean and ignominious as that!”

  “But you said before—”

  “This is different!” he snapped, and would not say a word more on the subject.

  And the next day, at the supermarket in Clemington, Myra heard a
bout the Fulcrum editorial.

  Brian had pleaded and begged, so she agreed that he could skip kindergarten that day and have the supermarket instead, and his joy was reward enough and compensation for the chaos he would provide. In any case, Myra enjoyed having him with her, for when the two of them were alone he became a grave and thoughtful and protective young man, courted her, adored her, and provided her with a great deal of inner satisfaction. And, of course, the supermarket was for Brian a combination of joy and adventure. He demonstrated that the moment he entered. He steered the metal buggy in which the groceries were placed. He approved his mother’s purchases and fought for his own, particularly for peanut butter and chocolate. He knew when to be adamant, when to make a concession, when to put forward a large demand that would certainly be refused, in order that he might follow it up with a small demand that would thereby be granted. In other words, the supermarket was a vast toy, a hall of adventure, a test of his powers of persuasion, a school for his theories of diplomacy, and above all, a place from whence he could emerge with his own variety of good things to eat.

  Myra had come to anticipate and share his delight, and usually the two of them entered the game with equal knowledge and caution. Today, however, she was absorbed in her own thoughts, a process of picking her way through a maze of conflicting ideas, and Brian drifted off ahead by himself. Myra recalled the talk with the chaplain, tried to remember exactly what Ed Lundfest had said to her the week before, allowed herself bitterness and anger against him, which she combined with more scathing scorn for his wife, rearranged her grocery list again, wondering whether there wasn’t possibly some meat besides hamburger or chicken that her children would eat, and then played with the thought of revising all her lectures on Rome on the basis of Jerome Carcopino’s book, which she had just read with delight and envy—the envy extended to the pessimistic acceptance of the fact that she and Silas would never break loose from here and make the trip to Italy and Greece, which they had discussed so often, herself always with the carefully-cherished notion that she could persuade her mother in Cincinnati to take the three children for a summer—but rolling the notion away now. It was time she faced the fact of her parents’ dislike for Silas, less out of his intellectualism than the fact of his bland contentment with his job. They admitted that someone had to teach in a university, but why their daughter had to marry such a person was beyond their understanding—just as she was beyond their understanding, to a certain extent, and for this they blamed Silas. Almost any looseness of character, immodesty, even perversion—so long as it combined with a decent income—would have been easier to accept than her intellectualism, combined with what they considered semi-poverty. The fact that Myra herself conducted two lectures a week under the Symington Grant, in Classical Civilization, did nothing to alleviate this feeling.

  Myra bought butter, cheese, and probed at a chicken while she considered the question of intelligence and why it embarrassed her and made her feel a little foolish and a little impotent, a little dirty, even—so that she looked so strangely at the boys and girls who sat in her lectures, always wondering how they thought of her.

  The butcher advised her to take two fryers instead of the roasting chicken. “You’re certainly looking fine, Mrs. Timberman.” “I certainly don’t feel that way,” she might have said, thinking that good looks were something you had to feel inside of you, whatever you were on the outside, and he mentioned the weather, how good it was, and how it seemed to promise to continue. It was a platitude that you talked about the weather whenever there was nothing else to talk about, but Myra suddenly felt different about that. People did not discuss the weather at all because they had nothing else to talk about, but rather because it was one of the very few things they held in common with all others, unowned and equally experienced, a very limited brotherhood in a world in which everything else was allocated.

  “What a strange thought,” she said to herself, and then took the two chickens and asked whether he had seen Brian.

  “Down that way, I think,” he answered.

  She chose the corridor between the great mountains of cookies and the peaks of jam, and there he was, talking to Selma Kaplin, and as Myra approached, explaining the action of a jet plane pictured on a box of breakfast food. “—no propellers,” he was insisting. “Can’t you understand that, no propellers.”

  “Then how does it go?”

  “Jets. My goodness, jets! Don’t you understand? A jet shoots out, and zoom, away it goes. Just like that. I’ll tell you something. Not everybody knows this, but I’m telling you the truth. When I grow up, it will be rockets. No propellers no jets—just rockets. Do you understand that?” he asked patiently.

  “Thank goodness you’re here,” Selma Kaplin said to Myra. “I was up to my neck. Where does he get it all?”

  “Television—Ike Amsterdam, various places. This is a generation that will go to the moon and Mars, I suppose. The universe is their oyster. It’s a little horrible.”

  “Why is it horrible?” Brian wanted to know.

  “Brian—you’ve loaded up the cart with more stuff than we could eat in a month. I told you two boxes of cookies, not six. And we have plenty of jam at home. Suppose you find some place for this stuff I bought—it’s just chicken and butter and cheese, but see if you can’t make some room for it.”

  Then Selma Kaplin burst out, “Myra—here I’ve been standing and talking and never asked you. Did you see today’s Fulcrum?”

  “No—usually Silas gets it.”

  “Well, just look at it. Right here, yes. I have a copy in my purse.”

  Myra read it. She stood where she was, all other things forgotten, and read what Fulcrum had printed on the case of Silas Timberman.

  * * *

  In 1911, a Clemington undergraduate, a senior then, had made a statement to the effect that he would rather be editor of Fulcrum than captain of the football team. It might have passed unnoticed, except that he had made the statement in print, and that subsequently, he became a United States senator of no small importance. All of which led later Fulcrum staffs to subscribe money to place his statement on a plaque which adorned the front of the Arts Building until 1937, when embarrassed alumni forced its removal to the corridor outside of the Fulcrum offices. Their feeling was that it went in the face of strong American principles and tended to sow confusion among otherwise unconfused undergraduates, and some of this natural embarrassment came from the fact of Fulcrum itself.

  In the first place, the name—suggested, strangely enough, by Dr. Lazarus Meyers in 1896—was curious, and the fact that it was simply Fulcrum on the masthead of a daily newspaper, rather than The Fulcrum or preferably The Clarion or The Call or The Bugle, gave it a certain arty air, proper enough for a place like Antioch, but incongruous in a great university like Clemington. But while they forced the removal of the plaque from its conspicuous position, they were able to change neither the name nor the singular tradition of the newspaper—a remarkably persistent tradition, even though subject to a good deal of variation during the post-war years.

  In 1898, Fulcrum launched a bitter and remorseless campaign against the Spanish War and the war in the Philippines, the high spot of which was a special editorial written by Mark Twain for the newspaper, dry, caustic, and as the then president of the university expressed it, “utterly immoral.” This resulted in the expulsion and subsequent reinstatement of the editor after quite a commotion on and off the campus, and for the next two generations, Fulcrum operated with a very live memory of its beginnings. There was almost no issue, no controversy, no public debate in which it did not make its position clear—usually iconoclastically clear. And as the only paper in the town of Clemington was the weekly Star, Fulcrum had a very considerable off-campus readership. Not too large, for Chicago and Indianapolis papers were sold in Clemington, but sufficient to save its four pages from being turned into a house organ, and sufficient to keep its editors alert and responsive.

  Since 1945, howe
ver, the tone of Fulcrum had changed considerably, muting itself and becoming less blatantly anti-authoritarian. Caution and conservatism entered its columns, underlined when its former editor wrote, in 1948.

  “A number of letters to the editor of Fulcrum have pressed the paper to take sides in the approaching election. Such pressure, we feel, is ill-advised—as ill-advised as the suggestion that we support the dubious emergence of a group which titles itself, The Progressive Party, simply because the tradition of Fulcrum has shown support of such political movements in the past. We have never regarded so-called tradition as a strait jacket, and an examination of Fulcrum’s files reveals more anarchy than consistency. We refer in particular to the hate-the-rich, hit-the-successful pattern, which has been a juvenile indulgence all too often. Certainly, this kind of behavior in the past does not indicate its pursuit in the future, and it would seem to us more fitting that we conduct a sober re-evaluation, examining with fresh and candid eyes those mighty captains of industry and statesmanship who have contributed so much to make America what it is today. As always, our letter column is open to various points of view, but the notion that this paper should make a political alliance at this moment is one which we strongly reject.”

  This tone was maintained. Fulcrum became cautious, remarkably skillful—considering that none but undergraduates worked on the paper—in a turgid game of words which achieved pomposity without ever saying anything of consequence, and which avoided the new spectre of controversial issues like a plague. Nevertheless, it was in tune with the times, and the students accepted it without any undue comment.