by Howard Fast
“It doesn’t go. I’ve written two paragraphs.”
“Read them to me.”
“And they’re no damn good. Listen to this—‘I’ve known Ike Amsterdam twenty years. And in those twenty years, he was friend, teacher—’ Oh, the hell with it! It’s no good. I’m not saying what I want to say.”
“What do you want to say?”
“I don’t really know, except that I want to cry out at the top of my lungs that something devilish and damnable and hideous is happening here, something like a disease, something that stinks to the heavens with rot and death!”
“And you don’t because that wouldn’t be considered and cool and objective—”
“Sarcasm doesn’t help.”
“I’m not trying to be sarcastic, Si. I’ve been thinking about this too. I want to ask you something—it’s at the bottom of this business, I think. Why did you sign that petition against the atom bomb?”
“Why did you?”
“I’m asking you, Si. Ask me later.”
“All right, I’ll try. It’s not easy to know why you do something. People like ourselves, Myra, we almost never have to explain why we do anything, do we?”
“No, not very often.”
“It was Alec Brady who came to me with the petition—do you know, Myra, the moment he opened it up, the moment he showed it to me and began to talk about it, I knew what he was.”
“What do you mean—you knew what he was?”
“A communist.”
Her eyes turned toward the door of the study, involuntarily, and Silas said, almost shrilly,
“There it is! Why did you do that? By God, is this a word a man can’t speak without fear and terror? What kind of a nightmare are we living in—what kind of a genteel, civilized, unholy nightmare do we inhabit? I tell myself that I’m a free-born, independent citizen of the United States of America, and I no more than mention the word communist, and there’s danger—and my wife is afraid and looks to see whether anyone can overhear me!”
“Si, someone will hear you, if you shout like that.”
“This is Indiana, not Germany!”
Myra became very calm, folding her hands in her lap and contemplating Silas with the curious interest one has for a new but intriguing acquaintance. “Very well,” she said softly. “You knew Alec Brady was a communist. Would you mind telling me how you knew?”
“I know how I knew, but it makes no sense. You asked me why I signed that damned petition. Well, I looked at Brady, and asked myself why he was taking it around—and do you know, my dear Myra, my dear good, sweet wife—we live in a world so empty of principle, so devoid of any interest but self-interest, so cursedly like that damned refrigerator that sits in our kitchen like a protecting household god, that I could find no reason, no reason on earth why Alec Brady should hold out that petition to me except that he must be a member of the Communist Party. And do you know, I asked him.”
“What did he say?” Myra wanted to know. “If you want to tell me?”
* * *
It had been early in June, the June before, just a few days before classes ended, and he and Brady were sitting on one of the stone benches at the edge of the fine grove of oaks for which the campus of Clemington was so justly renowned. It was about five o’clock, the summer afternoon shadows already long, the slow mantle of evening beginning to settle upon the place; and all of it, Silas remembered, gave him some sense of that inevitable melancholy that always accompanied the end of a school year. Brady had wanted a word with him, and they had walked over here, chatting about one thing and another, himself rather pleased to be with Brady, liking the man better than he understood him, and idly wondering what Brady had on his mind. The truth of it was that Silas liked and admired Brady, and was also a little bit in awe of him; and it was a part of Silas’ thinking that the men he knew and liked on the campus were also men he mistrusted to a certain degree, feeling that he fell short of their level, thereby pampering his own reserve and not inviting any rebuff. But Brady had a comfortable quality. His long and rather ugly features made an engaging face, and the fringe of red hair around his bald head made a balance between the sage and the ridiculous—and like many Irishmen, he used his voice well.
His relationship with Silas had not been very close, stemming from the mutual regard for Ike Amsterdam, but it was Silas rather than Brady who held back. The few evenings they had spent together, Silas had enjoyed immensely, fascinated by the big man’s dry and merciless treatment of what went on in the world now and what had gone on in the past; but that repelled Silas at the same time. He was uneasy with people whose knowledge was specific and whose judgments were sharp and unrelenting. He would also ask himself, somewhat petulantly, “Why does Brady, whom I prefer to be with, prefer to be with me?”
He asked himself that now and took a certain satisfaction in the fact that Brady wanted something from him. Brady had a petition, which called for the outlawing of the atomic bomb, then and forever; yet it was at odds with a cynical man. After Silas had read it—it was quite short—he sat in silence for a while, his thoughts piling on each other with no particular point of reference; and then he came to the decision that Brady was a communist. “Of all people, Brady,” he said to himself, and just for the moment, he forgot the petition and indulged the fascination of having discovered this amazing fact, which perhaps was not so amazing after all. It was typical of Silas that he asked the question immediately and directly.
“Why do you ask?” Brady wanted to know.
That was the point Silas made to Myra five months later. People do not approach other people with such petitions. A vast atomic frying pan had been devised, and in it, each was prepared to fry separately, and it was no concern of Silas’ whether his neighbor, his neighbor’s wife and children, or a million people in Timbuctu were incinerated. Conditioning had gone into that, and Silas was as well conditioned as the next person. He said to Brady,
“I suppose because I can’t think of any other reason why you’d ask me to sign that.”
“That’s a bitter commentary on us and our lives, isn’t it?”
“When you look at it that way.”
“What other way is there to look at it, Silas?”
“Well, you know what I mean. If I could feel, as you do, that behind this enigma of Russia there’s something good, something else than senseless terror and regimentation—”
“How do you know I feel that way? You mean you’ve made up your mind that I’m a communist?”
“I suppose so. Are you?”
“Since you’ve made up your mind, there’s not much point except the satisfaction of your curiosity in my answering,” Brady smiled. “Will you sign it?”
“You wouldn’t have brought it to me unless you thought I would,” Silas replied, rather sadly.
“No, I suppose not.”
“It won’t do any good. Would that be the difference between you and me, Alec? I don’t believe things like this do any good—any at all.”
“If enough people say something, they’ll be listened to.”
“Enough people?” Silas looked beyond him, across the campus.
“It goes a little further than Clemington. The whole world has a common desire to live. They’re tired of being used.”
“It seems to me that it’s a case of who uses them most cleverly. From all I’ve heard, this is a Russian scheme, isn’t it?”
“I won’t even argue that, although I would deny it. The point is, it’s a plan to stop this damned horror before it starts.”
“If I sign it,” Silas said, staring at it, reading it through again—“if I sign it, it means trouble, doesn’t it? Like everyone else, I’m afraid to sign things. I get things like this sometimes in the mail, and I don’t sign them, even when I consider them justified. I live my own little lie, like everyone else. I live in a free land, where I’m afraid to sign a petition and then I justify the fear by telling myself that I’m being used, that it’s a trick, a front, a devic
e—” He looked up at Brady. “Those are your arguments, aren’t they?”
“Yours,” Brady answered.
“All the same, I don’t think I’ll sign it. Why did you think I would?”
“Because of what you just said, I suppose. This is a pretty bad time, Silas. Talk about Russia from now until August, and it doesn’t alter the fact one iota that this is a damned bad time, with a black mantle of fear sinking over the whole nation, with people afraid and afraid to admit that they are, confused, disarmed, with teachers being hounded like sheep and scholars being told what they should not think and writers being told what they should not write, and having their books burned if they don’t conform—conformity, that’s the hallmark of the time. We used to say that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, but now it’s the refuge of cowards as well. But you see, this isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened, and this isn’t the first place it has happened to. It never really works. You can’t take one hundred and sixty million people, and snap the whip, and have them jump through the hoop. There are always people who won’t jump—who insist that their right to think, to see the nature of reality, is precisely what makes them human, and who will not surrender their humanness. That’s why I think you’ll sign that petition—even if you’ve decided that I’m a communist and that it’s all a communist trap.”
In the end, Silas signed it—as he told Myra.
* * *
And he did not immediately understand why she had asked the question at all; because, as so often happens, the question became lost in the detail of the answer. He, Silas Timberman, was two things, two men, two lives, two parts of special awareness. One life, he lived; the other life was an awareness that existed without action—except where action was forced upon him, as when for a brief moment all of the United States and a good part of the rest of the world read with a mixture of amusement, concern, and perhaps horror, of a college professor in a mid-western university who was forbidden to teach the writings of Mark Twain.
“Let this go now, it’s no good,” he said to Myra, and they went into the livingroom and sat down on the couch, facing the fire. Myra watched him without making it obvious that she was doing so, sensing the play of mood within him, the stress and counter-stress of his turbulent thoughts. That was her own deduction, and it surprised her that she could couple the word turbulent with Silas, whom she was so used to thinking of as a person in repose. So he sits now, the man she had married and joined so much of her life with, a tall, skinny, thin-faced man, rather timid—
He might have picked up the notion. In his own thoughts, he was still making an assessment of Alec Brady and Ike Amsterdam and himself as well, and he remarked to Myra.
“Do you know, I’m a coward.” And then looked at her, almost defiantly.
“I suppose most men are, most of the time,” she nodded.
“I don’t want to talk tomorrow. I can’t. I can’t get up in front of those students and talk. I can’t, Myra.”
“I guess not.”
“What do I do about it?”
“They’re putting Fulcrum together now. You can drive over there and make a statement and explain how you were used all along, and since you’re practically convinced that Alec Brady is a communist, you have the best out in the world, and you might just as well denounce the student meeting as a communist plot—”
“That’s very helpful.”
“What do you expect me to say, Silas? I keep wondering whether we are unlike the rest of this country or very like them. Our precious enlightenment is a sort of darkness, isn’t it? You’re a coward and so am I.I was pretending to be facetious before, but another part of me meant what I said. I’m afraid, and I don’t know how I became afraid. It didn’t all happen in the past few weeks. It couldn’t have.”
“And when you turn to me, there’s nothing to lean on, is there, Myra?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is it?” he asked helplessly. “I’m forty years old, and I’m empty. I used to sleep like a baby, and now I lie in bed thinking that only a little while is left, and then I’ll die, and I get sick with the simple fact of mortality. I’m afraid.”
Myra said nothing, but sat there watching the fire with the fire-light playing upon her face and features, a handsome, full-bodied woman, as ripe as he was dry.
“Are you ever sorry you married me?” he asked her.
“Sometimes.” She wanted desperately for him to be angry, emotional, violent—and knew he would not be.
“I never measured up, did I? No riches, no poverty. No villain, no hero—”
“Si, let’s go to bed!” she said suddenly, bitterly.
* * *
The Times had said: “Tall, loose-limbed, myopic, almost an old-fashioned crayon drawing of what a pedagogue should be, it is difficult to think of subversive intent in connection with Professor Silas Timberman.”
It was raining when he awoke in the morning, a thin, cold, nasty rain that would be intermittently driven by sudden and fierce gusts of wind, and he said to himself, “Thank God, there’ll be no meeting.” But by the time he had left the house, the rain had stopped; the cold, gray, windy sky remained.
The Tribune was alarmed but not too alarmed: “It is comforting to recall that this sort of nonsense is not new to America. Laughter is an excellent antidote. And one must remember that this is no service to the real and necessary campaign against subversives.”
He met Susan Allen. “Isn’t this weather wonderful!” she cried. “And doesn’t your spirit just soar with that wild wind! I do love a day like this. I think I’d want to be a sea-gull on a day like this more than anything else.”
“Are you and Bob coming to the meeting?” he asked her.
“Of course. No matter how much I hate communism, Silas, when you think of poor Professor Amsterdam, after all these years—you do get angry, and you do want to protest.”
The St. Louis Post, nearer to the scene, took a more somber point of view: “For ourselves, we feel that the reports of Mark Twain’s politics are greatly exaggerated; but whether one agrees or disagrees with the literary judgments of the authorities at Clemington, it is hard to support the removal of Alvin Morse, student editor of Fulcrum. Fulcrum has an honorable history among college newspapers, and many a respected journalist broke ice on its pages. At the most, Morse was guilty of a lack of editorial judgment, but freedom of the college press demands that student editors be allowed to make errors and suffer with their errors.”
Lawrence Kaplin was already in the office when Silas arrived, and he observed that Silas did not look particularly happy.
“A fight with Myra more than anything else, I guess,” Silas said, disturbed to a point where he violated a long-standing rule never to discuss such matters with anyone. “I seem to be less and less able to understand her.”
“We are all of us less and less able to understand the women we are married to—and they us. That’s not simply a platitude, Silas. As in other areas, we reap what we sow. I look forward to listening to you this afternoon. I hope the meeting is large—large enough to take the curse off.”
“And how large would that have to be?”
“A lot larger than I expect,” Kaplin smiled, rather sadly.
The major regional paper in Chicago found reason for rejoicing: “It is rewarding to note how promptly Anthony C. Cabot, president of Clemington, reacted to what otherwise would have been a most unpleasant situation. His statement in the first edition of Fulcrum, under the new editor, that he would welcome a loyalty oath for the faculty of Clemington, helps to clear the air. We have long been advocates of loyalty oaths for all teachers in all institutions of public education—and in all tax-exempt institutions, such as Clemington. It is slanderous to assert that the taking of loyalty Oaths is incompatible with free education. A person who refuses to take a simple oath of loyalty to his country and sworn denial of membership in any organization classed as subversive, is not fit to teach the children of ou
r nation.”
“How long is it now?” Silas asked himself, as he lectured by rote, went through his classes by rote. “Is it two weeks and only two weeks?”
Then, in the corridor, he met Ed Lundfest, and the two halted for a moment and looked at each other in silence before there was any greeting. There had to be a greeting. Man lived in a structure of civilization.
“Hello, Ed,” Silas said finally.
Lundfest nodded and passed by.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Silas said, and he smiled for the first time that day.
The Mirror in the East was blunt and expressive: “We never held a brief for commies anywhere, and we like them less in the schools. There is nothing a child can learn from the commies that’s worth learning, and the sooner they’re booted out of our school system, the better off we’ll be—even if a few sensitive souls are hurt in the process. As for Mark Twain, we venture to predict he’ll survive the process.”
Such blunt expressiveness was not too different from the tone of letters Silas had begun to receive recently, a new type of correspondence, liberally sprinkled with four-letter words not normally committed to paper. Silas read these with a sense of complete unreality. Some came from Indianapolis, and pointed out that the national headquarters of the American Legion was not too far distant, and others came from the town of Clemington; but all were unsigned, and they made Silas wonder what sort of strange human being sat down to write such letters—and what pathological satisfaction he received from the process. There was one from Indianapolis that spoke in words strangely similar to the Mirror editorial, stating flatly,
“There aint nothing you can teach, and the first thing you ought to do is go back to Russia where you stinkin commies belong. If you dont, we will teach you some good old americanism with a fencepole up your ass or maybe a rope you know where. And that goes for the bitch your married to.”
He didn’t show them to Myra—or even to Brady. He destroyed them as if they were things so shameful that surely part of the shame would rub off on him.
