Silas Timberman

by Howard Fast

  Then Mike Leslie spoke for the first time that evening. He was diffident about it. “Maybe I’ve got nothing to say here,” he apologized. “I only drove Mac up—”

  Silas had forgotten that he was in the room. He had taken a seat in the background, a low ottoman upon which he had sat through the evening, his thin body doubled over, elbows on knees, chin in hands, his dark eyes like hollows in his drawn face. When he spoke, his voice was harsh and grating, but it caught them and held them, and Silas wanted him to go on and told him so.

  “It’s very late.”

  “Let it be a little later then,” Silas said.

  “I don’t suppose five minutes will matter. Mac told you a lot. He’s a good lawyer. He’s the closest thing we got to an honest labor lawyer in this city. He tends to belittle himself, but he’s a good lawyer.”

  “I don’t need a testimonial in the middle of the night.”

  “All right, Mac. I wanted to apologize in advance. You told them everything except who put in the complaint.”

  “You tell me,” MacAllister said tiredly.

  “You could tell yourself, if you weren’t so tired,” Leslie said thoughtfully, looking around the circle of teachers, “We had a strike and it went for five weeks, so the boss phoned Washington and had the subpoenas drawn. When they couldn’t break the strike in front of the shop, they decided to break it in front of a committee in Washington. I don’t know who the boss is here—”

  “We know,” said Federman.

  “Anyway, for what it’s worth, keep it in mind. It might help.”

  It occurred to Silas that this Leslie was glad to be there with them, strange to them and yet not so strange; and he wanted to say something, and this was all he could say. Silas wanted to thank him, but didn’t know how.

  And anyway, there was nothing to thank him for, nothing they had gained from him, only the fantastic notion that came to Silas that somewhere along the way they had lost something, perhaps part of their own souls. It was a very new thing for Silas to sense that there was a security, a strange comfort of structure and numbers and strength into which Mike Leslie fitted but which they had somehow been denied. He accented their loneliness, because his manner plainly said that he was never alone.

  Was it right after the war, Silas wondered, that Brady had spoken to him about a teachers’ union, about one that existed in New York, a curious, almost-romantic story of teachers banding together—working together, marching together, and fighting together? It was vague in Silas’ mind, and he could only recall smiling at an idea as foreign to the pleasant campus of Clemington as a teachers’ strike would have been. “It couldn’t be here,” he had said, or something of the sort. “Would you join it if it were?” Brady had asked him, and he had said, “I might, I suppose, but it just isn’t real. A school isn’t a factory.” The presence of Mike Leslie pushed into his sleepy recollection, helping him toward the notion of faculty supporting what they, the seven of them here, were moving into. A teachers’ strike!

  He smiled rather foolishly, saying goodnight to Leslie, and made a mental note to ask Brady for more information about that strange union of teachers in New York City.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Wednesday: November 14, 1950

  THE HEARING

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE HEARING

  As the plane banked, swung around, and then lost altitude for the landing, Silas realized—not without guilt and a sense of irresponsibility—that he had enjoyed the excitement and motion of the trip. It was the first time in five years that he had been East, and a good deal more than five years since he had been to the District of Columbia. In all the time since the end of the war, the only travelling he and Myra had done consisted of their inexpensive summer vacations in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and on those occasions the children had been with them. Every penny they could save had gone into the endlessly discussed plans for a summer in Europe as soon as Brian was old enough to travel—this coming summer might have been it—and endless dreams of the places they would go where they had never been, the things they would see, the satisfaction of that strange hunger of almost every American to see where his people had come from and what they had left behind them.

  But the truth of the matter was that Silas had not, since the war ended, spent one night away from Myra or the children, and here he was on a wild adventure almost a thousand miles away from them, coming into the airport and listening with half an ear to Ike Amsterdam’s caustic comments on flight.

  “My third time, and I don’t like it,” Amsterdam was saying. “Fasten your seat belts—a devil of a lot that’s going to do. The fact of the matter is that heavier than air transport is a makeshift. We’ll work out a unified field theory eventually and do away with all this nonsense, and if we want to keep things in the air, we’ll do it sensibly. This is like fitting sailing ships with steam paddles—”

  He went on, but Silas was not listening to him. What a strange lot they were, Silas thought, himself on an adventure and Amsterdam speculating about problems of gravitation, and Spencer and Federman hotly arguing through the entire trip on whether the protean molecule was inevitable, and Brady immersed in a book on the Middle Ages, making some comment occasionally to Kaplin who shared his seat, and Edna Crawford and MacAllister pecking away at family history and talking about patchwork quilts—and all of them going to the finish, windup and doom, and all of them behaving this way;—and Silas wondering whether it was a part of today in America that people should be destroyed so calmly, so matter-of-factly that they themselves could not separate their own persons from the pervading matter-of-factness.

  When they were getting off the plane, MacAllister suggested that they divide up, four and four, and take two cabs to the Senate Office Building. It was only nine-thirty in the morning, so they had sufficient time.

  “I promised to call Myra as soon as we landed,” Silas said.

  Amsterdam, MacAllister and Brady said they would wait for him. The others got into a cab and went on ahead. The three who were with Silas said that they would be having coffee in the terminal building while he telephoned, and he got a pocketful of change, went into a booth, and called his number. Myra answered.

  “I’m not nervous, not a bit, really,” he said to her. “I think this is going to be all right, darling.”

  “I know it will be.”

  He told her how they had passed their time on the plane, and wondered why it had not occurred to him, as it had to Myra, that much of it was a pose. “I wish I had gone with you,” Myra said. MacAllister had assured them that the government refunded transportation, but still there was no one among them who was not counting pennies. With all the years they had worked and all the dignity of titles and honors of that curiously isolated academic world they inhabited, they were poor people. And the future prospect was that they would become a good deal poorer. He said goodby to Myra and walked over to the newsstand to buy a paper, and there he met Bob Allen.

  His first reaction was to have no other reaction than simple surprise and the warm feeling of reassurance one has on meeting an old friend a long way from home. Here was Bob Allen in Washington, as curious as that might be, and it wasn’t until Silas had spoken a warm hello and was shaking hands with Allen that he realized the obvious fact that, like himself, Allen must be there on subpoena. “Of course,” he told himself, “and isn’t it funny the way a person doesn’t think at first!” On the other hand, the instructor did not seem particularly surprised or pleased to see him, although he was obviously doing his best to simulate pleasure. Disconcerted, Silas told himself afterwards, but not surprised or pleased when Silas said.

  “But didn’t you know that there were subpoenas all over the place? Good heavens, I thought by the time we left, everyone in Indiana knew—Ike Amsterdam and Hartman and Federman—you might say we have a regular Clemington association here.”

  “I only received mine yesterday,” Allen said uncertainly. “I’ve been neck deep in it since then.” />
  “Of course—you would be! Isn’t it a rotten business? Do you have a lawyer?”

  “Well—yes and no. I’ve had help and advice. As a matter of fact, I have a meeting—my lawyer is in Washington, I mean I was recommended to one. I’ll be seeing you later, Silas.”

  “Why don’t you ride into Washington with us?” Silas asked. “The others have gone on ahead, but Ike and Alec Brady are having coffee with MacAllister. They’d be delighted to see you, and it might be profitable to all of us to talk things over—”

  “I’d like to, but I can’t,” Allen said uneasily. “I’m late already. See you later, Slias.” He dashed off, leaving Silas standing there foolishly, and conscious of having been something of a fool without knowing just why or how, avoiding and rejecting thoughts that came to him as he walked to the coffee shop—still avoiding them as he repeated to the others what had happened.

  “So it’s Bob Allen,” Amsterdam said, his wrinkled face bitter and bleak. “You never know, do you?”

  “You mean you would feel better if it was an obvious scoundrel like Lundfest,” Alec Brady remarked.

  “Yes. It hurts more when a youngster dirties himself. When you’re an old man yourself, it hurts more.”

  “I wouldn’t jump to conclusions,” Silas objected. “He had some explanation at least, and he could have gotten the subpoena yesterday. I wouldn’t condemn him until we know a little more.”

  “On the face of it, there isn’t much room for doubt,” Brady said.

  “Except the man himself. You’ve got to admit that he’s essentially a very decent chap—a liberal mind—my God, he’s been at our house any number of times. You don’t go to a man’s house and do this.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Jesus, Alec, if we begin to suspect the whole world, we live in a nightmare! Bob and Sue Allen are friends of mine, good friends. He was a student of mine, and I persuaded him to go into the Humanities—went out of my way to help him, and both Myra and I talked to Lundfest about his instructorship. You don’t spit in the face of something like that. Give the boy a chance.”

  “We’re all giving him a chance,” Brady murmured. “He has his chance. What I think won’t change that.”

  “Who is he? Tell me about him,” MacAllister said.

  Then they talked about him on the way into Washington, but it was still a matter of speculation when they entered the Senate Office Building—nor was he present when the hearing began.

  * * *

  The hearing neither fell short of Silas’ imaginings nor did it transcend them; it was just different. He remembered Washington as a city of white and shining beauty; somehow he had eliminated from his memory the slums, the rickety, ancient houses, the drab business streets, the jerry-built sheds for the expanding bureaucracy; and perhaps if he had come here under other circumstances, he would not have noticed these things at all. He remembered a smiling city, which was not smiling at all, and the basement floor through which they entered the Senate Office Building was a bare and gloomy place, lit fitfully with yellow overhead fixtures. They were directed up a flight of steps to the main offices of the committee, where a pink-cheeked, over-rouged young lady in a frilly white blouse, greeted them with a southern accent, accepted their subpoenas, made constant reflex motions toward her bleached blond hair, announced the number of the hearing room, and informed them that they were to return here for their expense money when the hearing had concluded. Evidently, the other four had already gone on to the hearing room.

  Silas was not impressed by his first intimate contact with the committee function of government. The committee room was large and unattractive, divided into sections by woven hemp folding screens. The walls were painted a sour, pale green. There was an impressive display of filing cabinets, an eagle and George Washington on the walls in steel engraving, and a number of girls at desks, all of them in white blouses, each of them enough like the one he had spoken with before to be her sister, each of them equipped with an immobile face and unseeing blue eyes. On chairs tilted back against one wall, two men sat, square-faced, silent, obviously intent on relating their own images to something they had seen in the movies or read about in a magazine, never taking their consciously cold eyes off the little group of teachers.

  “Land of the Pilgrim’s pride,” thought Silas. He glanced at the others. Brady appeared thoughtful, Ike Amsterdam amused. MacAllister was business-like and competent, now that there was work to be done. He shepherded them out and led them down the corridor to the hearing room. There was quite a crowd in the corridor, among them Federman, Kaplin, Spencer and Edna Crawford. Federman, looped over his crutches, was talking animatedly to the others, immersed in what he was saying and indifferent to the strangers around them. He greeted Silas and the other three in his rich, full voice.

  “Enter the other thieves. We thought we had lost you, and here’s a three-ring circus. Have a look inside.”

  Silas looked and agreed. The hearing room was some seventy feet long by thirty feet wide, the rear two-thirds consisting of a spectators’ section and now jammed full of respectable-appearing, neatly dressed people, most of them elderly, most of them women, most of them obviously tourists who would see and long remember this example of the workings of government.

  They seemed neither partisan nor impatient, but sat and waited with the same patient neutralism exhibited by the small army of sound men, cameramen, electricians and lighting experts who swarmed all over the place, connecting wires, testing microphones and lights, flooding the place suddenly with a murderous glare and then dropping the room into a contrasting semi-darkness. There were four huge cameras in the room, each with a different type of lens arrangement, and they were being swiveled and pointed and tested, while assistants crawled around the high, semi-circular desk which occupied the opposite end of the room from where the spectators sat. Silas noticed that this enormous desk arrangement was set on a platform with a dozen seats behind it, and concluded—correctly—that the senators would sit there, above the others and removed from the witnesses, less like committeemen than judges. The men with the light meters went from seat to seat, making sure that no senator would be cast in the shadow, and then they came down to the long mahogany table reserved for the witnesses, as was the first row of seats in the spectators’ area. Between the two sections of the room was a line of press tables, already filling up with newspaper men, most of them wearing gray tweed and self-conscious attitudes of boredom and cynicism. After MacAllister had ushered his seven wards into the front row, a few of the newspaper men gathered around him with their pads to get names and other data. It seemed to Silas that MacAllister handled them very well, with just the proper mixture of respect and unconcern.

  It was all as unlike anything Silas had expected as the trial of Alice by the playing cards in Lewis Carroll’s wise fantasy would have been, a combination of forced hoopla and sated excitement, of the blatantly ordinary with the shamelessly extraordinary; as Federman had said, a circus, a setting for a vaudeville show, a cheap comedy implemented with ugly and irresistible power, with ignorance, boorishness and an eloquent lack of taste. Behind and over everything was the flag, the rich and lovely Stars and Stripes, draped for a background, draped like curtains—enough to make Silas want to weep with pity and anger.

  MacAllister crouched among them for a few last words, even as the nationally known boy counsel of the committee strutted into the room, short and plump, like a little rooster, his pants creasing tightly over his fat buttocks, his flat nose, his mouth fixed in a sneer—for all the world reminding Silas of the hopeless and irredeemable characters who played the heavy parts in the books of his childhood. “So this is the famous Dave Cann,” he reflected, “the twenty-five year old wonder who blazed through the Justice Department like a new star on the horizon, and who is Brannigan’s own strong right arm!” And as if in answer to Silas’ thoughts, Cann turned and let his tiny eyes pass slowly over the seven teachers in what he unquestionably considered a look of
cold and remorseless judgment.

  Meanwhile, MacAllister was reminding them to be slow to anger, considered in their answers, and aware of the fact that he would be sitting beside each of them when they were called. “There is no hurry,” he assured them. “We have all the time we need. Think before you answer, and remember our little session on the Constitution of the United States. Also, remember that to be contemptuous of them, to tell them what you think and feel, does not constitute contempt of Congress. Only a refusal to answer a relevant question can be construed as contempt—and if you are in any doubt, let me decide what is relevant. Also, note that your friend, Bob Allen, is not present. If he should turn up to testify as a friendly witness, as they call them, don’t be floored by it. Set yourselves to expect the worst.”

  “And, of course, this is one bad dream we won’t wake up from,” Kaplin observed, smiling ruefully.

  “I’m afraid not. This now goes out by TV and radio to a whole world. It’s part of Brannigan’s calculated risk—open it up and count on cowing and terrifying witnesses into a public defeat. That’s the way he plays, bold, and the stake is big. By all that is holy, play it back the same way, if you can! There he is now—the short, heavy-set man—that’s Brannigan. Next to him is Kempleson of Illinois, and behind them Jack Patterson of California. The man taking his seat at the end on the left, the old man, that’s Effingham D’Marcy, the chairman of the committee, but he will leave it to Brannigan. They will probably start with these four, and some of the others will join them later.”