Clarkton

by Howard Fast

  He tried to explain and tell them, but it was no good, and he sat there, looking at them dumbly.

  “Take it easy,” Ryan said to him. “Did you ever walk in anywhere where it all worked itself out?”

  “I’m leaving it bad, though,” he said. “It’s damned bad, and I’m walking out on it.”

  “You got a complicated job,” Ryan told him. “I do what I have to do because it’s pretty black and white, but nothing’s going to come that easy for your kind of a job. Give it time.”

  “It’s just beginning,” Ruth Abbott told him, a flat and bitter note in her voice. “We get old, and because we’ve had a few years of it, and because we’d rather live without trouble than with it, we forget that it’s just the beginning. Data fata secutus—that’s something Goldstein liked to say, you choose your destiny and you announce it. That’s a terrible decision, Mike. Most of the people we see never do it, and some do it halfway, and some do it all the way. Go into medicine or something like that if you want an easy profession, but if you’re going to make a new world, it comes harder. There’s nothing romantic about it; it’s day to day without rest or peace or security, and if you’re the kind of a man who wants a reward, we can do a damn sight better without you. Sure you didn’t come in here like some hellbent genius who knows all the answers; nobody knows all the answers. The rest you’ll learn, and you’ll learn it quickly because we haven’t got forever. Ryan’s been at this a long time; there’s nothing to be ashamed at in learning from Ryan.”

  “I’m not ashamed,” Sawyer said slowly. “It’s worse than that. I’m afraid.”

  “You’ll stop being afraid,” Abbott said. “It works that way.”

  They drove him to the station and put him on the train. Afterward, Ryan said, “You were hard on him, Ruth.”

  “He needed someone to be hard on him—he didn’t need pity.”

  After they dropped Ryan at the union hall, Ruth Abbott said to her husband, “How are you—all right?”

  “I’m all right,” Abbott said.

  “You wouldn’t stop the car and kiss me, would you?”

  He stopped the car and took her in his arms, and she lay against him, shivering a little. She cried for a while, and then she was all right, and they went on home.

  11.It did not surprise Abbott to find Lowell waiting for him. Back of his mind, he had felt that Lowell would come to him, if for no other reason than simply because there was no other person for Lowell to go to. That was the fine and damnable logic of the matter, the tall, handsome, well-bred New England gentleman who sat in his shabby waiting room, unable to meet his eyes, but trying to explain why he had come.

  “You don’t have to explain,” Abbott said. “If you wanted to come, of course you should.” The doctor sat down in a chair, waiting, noticing how Ruth stood by the door, a small, compact, freckled and ordinarily pretty woman, who watched them with steady and unwavering curiosity. He wondered whether she was angry, bitter, filled with hatred or, like himself, utterly impassive and beyond emotion.

  “I know what you think,” Lowell said.

  “That isn’t so,” Abbott told him pointedly. “You don’t know what I’m thinking, George. There’s no sense in saying you do. There’s no sense in going through motions.”

  “Do you want me to get out of here?” Lowell asked him.

  “It doesn’t matter, George. If you want to say something to me, I’ll listen.”

  “Christ, spare’me that fine tone of righteousness!” Lowell cried. “That’s the quality of a Communist, isn’t it, to see the whole world in black and white, right and wrong? There are no grays for you, are there, Elliott? There are no doubts, no indecisions, no mistakes, no agonies, no fears! It’s all laid out, according to plan, and I’m a black-livered murderer. Is that it?”

  “You say it. I didn’t say it, George.”

  “But that’s what you think.”

  “What did you come here for,” Abbott asked, “sympathy?”

  Lowell shook his head dumbly.

  “There are some things you understand, I think,” Abbott said quietly. “You know that two men were killed today, and that another has only an even chance of pulling through. You know that one of those men, Max Goldstein, was a friend of mine. Didn’t you tell me once, George, that a man who is fortunate can count his friends on the fingers of one hand, but if he is the average man, he needs no tally at all? I think you did. I knew this man Goldstein since I can recall knowing anyone. I learned from him. He had a deep wisdom, and I knew that, and because his humility was greater than his wisdom, I would call him a fool whenever I became angry and lost my temper—”

  “Elliott, I told you—”

  “Let me finish,” the doctor said. “I was going to say that he never lost his temper with me. That isn’t entirely true. He did lose his temper just once; that was nine years ago. He was already a fat barrel of a man; he hasn’t changed much in the past nine years. We used to argue about politics and other things then. He wasn’t a red then, and I was, and the war in Spain had just broken out, and I resented what I considered his monumental stupidity. I had already made up my mind to go to Spain, but I didn’t want to go empty handed. Ruth and I had worked out a scheme to fit out a truck as an emergency operating room, to be used at the front, but we didn’t have the money for it, and whatever money was being raised in the cities couldn’t be spared for a small-town physician with a harebrained scheme. I went to Max Goldstein with that problem, and he wrote out a check for me. He had exactly eight thousand two hundred and sixty-seven dollars in the bank—and that was the sum he wrote the check for. He lost his temper when I refused to take it, and in the end I took it, and I bought the truck.

  “Wait a minute,” Abbott said, raising his voice, directing one of his huge hands at Lowell. “You’re going to hear me out, George! You came here, and now, by God, you’re going to hear me! When I’m through, you can have your say, but you’re going to hear the rest of this. I went to court with this man yesterday. We came up before John Curtis to set bail for Danny Ryan and Joey Raye. You know Curtis. You know as well as I do what a dirty, cheap, thirdrate ward-heeler he is, in spite of that fancy coat of Beacon Hill polish he picked up in Boston. You also know that you own him, body and soul, just as you own Jimmy Burton, who will someday be governor of the state because he represents the Lowell interests. Well, I had to stand there and listen to Max being insulted and humiliated by this little fool, who isn’t fit to wipe the dirt from his feet, and I could think of only one thing—that all I knew and all I learned of what America is, the old America that Abbotts and Lowells made a long, long time ago, when a good many of them were professional revolutionaries—all that the word Yankee used to mean to me when I was a kid—all of that was in this fat, easygoing Jew, whose father was a peasant boy in Lithuania. And today he was killed, and I say that you killed him, George. Do you want sympathy from me?”

  For what seemed an endless space of time, or like a hole in time that gaped and sucked for content, like a wound in time too, Lowell stood there, saying nothing, doing nothing, looking straight ahead of him, and then, finally, said:

  “I didn’t do this, Elliott. I swear to God, I didn’t know it was being done. I didn’t know.”

  “It just happened.”

  “All I wanted was a decent, fair way out of this.”

  “I know,” Abbott said wearily. “I know you better, George, than you think. I know you for a humane and a cultured man. I’ve played chess with you, George. I’ve broken bread with you. I’ve been trusted with your secrets. You did nothing, nothing, George, and you’re suffering and you want sympathy and pity.”

  “Go to devil,” Lowell said, and took up his hat and coat, and walked out. But driving home, through the cold New England twilight, he knew that it would not have been in Elliott Abbott’s power to grant peace. There was no peace left. Death was a dark thing that sat in his consciousness, and even if he were filthy drunk, night after night, it would not drive away the
monster that waited. Something was dying and something was in birth, but his own companion was death, and as he drove along Concord Way, past the plant, and up the concrete road toward his house, it gave him of its own cold company.

  A Biography of Howard Fast

  Howard Fast (1914-2003), one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century, was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. Fast's commitment to championing social justice in his writing was rivaled only by his deftness as a storyteller and his lively cinematic style.

  Born on November 11, 1914, in New York City, Fast was the son of two immigrants. His mother, Ida, came from a Jewish family in Britain, while his father, Barney, emigrated from the Ukraine, changing his last name to Fast on arrival at Ellis Island. Fast's mother passed away when he was only eight, and when his father lost steady work in the garment industry, Fast began to take odd jobs to help support the family. One such job was at the New York Public Library, where Fast, surrounded by books, was able to read widely. Among the books that made a mark on him was Jack London's The Iron Heel, containing prescient warnings against fascism that set his course both as a writer and as an advocate for human rights.

  Fast began his writing career early, leaving high school to finish his first novel, Two Valleys (1933). His next novels, including Conceived in Liberty (1939) and Citizen Tom Paine (1943), explored the American Revolution and the progressive values that Fast saw as essential to the American experiment. In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist Party, an alliance that came to define—and often encumber—much of his career. His novels during this period advocated freedom against tyranny, bigotry, and oppression by exploring essential moments in American history, as in The American (1946). During this time Fast also started a family of his own. He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and the couple had two children.

  Congressional action against the Communist Party began in 1948, and in 1950, Fast, an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because he refused to provide the names of other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Fast was issued a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. While in prison, he was inspired to write Spartacus (1951), his iconic retelling of a slave revolt during the Roman Empire, and did much of his research for the book during his incarceration. Fast's appearance before Congress also earned him a blacklisting by all major publishers, so he started his own press, Blue Heron, in order to release Spartacus. Other novels published by Blue Heron, including Silas Timberman (1954), directly addressed the persecution of Communists and others during the ongoing Red Scare. Fast continued to associate with the Communist Party until the horrors of Stalin's purges of dissidents and political enemies came to light in the mid-1950s. He left the Party in 1956.

  Fast's career changed course in 1960, when he began publishing suspense-mysteries under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham. He published nineteen books as Cunningham, including the seven-book Masao Masuto mystery series. Also, Spartacus was made into a major film in 1960, breaking the Hollywood blacklist once and for all. The success of Spartacus inspired large publishers to pay renewed attention to Fast's books, and in 1961 he published April Morning, a novel about the battle of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution. The book became a national bestseller and remains a staple of many literature classes. From 1960 onward Fast produced books at an astonishing pace—almost one book per year—while also contributing to screen adaptations of many of his books. His later works included the autobiography Being Red (1990) and the New York Times bestseller The Immigrants (1977).

  Fast died in 2003 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.

  Fast on a farm in upstate New York during the summer of 1917. Growing up, Fast often spent the summers in the Catskill Mountains with his aunt and uncle from Hunter, New York. These vacations provided a much-needed escape from the poverty and squalor of the Lower East Side's Jewish ghetto, as well as the bigotry his family encountered after they eventually relocated to an Irish and Italian neighborhood in upper Manhattan. However, the beauty and tranquility Fast encountered upstate were often marred by the hostility shown toward him by his aunt and uncle. "They treated us the way Oliver Twist was treated in the orphanage," Fast later recalled. Nevertheless, he "fell in love with the area" and continued to go there until he was in his twenties.

  Fast (left) with his older brother, Jerome, in 1935. In his memoir Being Red, Fast wrote that he and his brother "had no childhood." As a result of their mother's death in 1923 and their father's absenteeism, both boys had to fend for themselves early on. At age eleven, alongside his thirteen-year-old brother, Fast began selling copies of a local newspaper called the Bronx Home News. Other odd jobs would follow to make ends meet in violent, Depression-era New York City. Although he resented the hardscrabble nature of his upbringing, Fast acknowledged that the experience helped form a lifelong attachment to his brother. "My brother was like a rock," he wrote, "and without him I surely would have perished."

  A copy of Fast's military identification from World War II. During the war Fast worked as a war correspondent in the China-Burma-India theater, writing articles for publications such as PM, Esquire, and Coronet. He also contributed scripts to Voice of America, a radio program developed by Elmer Davis that the United States broadcast throughout occupied Europe.

  Here Fast poses for a picture with a fellow inmate at Mill Point prison, where he was sent in 1950 for his refusal to disclose information about other members of the Communist Party. Mill Point was a progressive federal institution made up of a series of army bunkhouses. "Everyone worked at the prison," said Fast during a 1998 interview, "and while I hate prison, I hate the whole concept of prison, I must say this was the most intelligent and humane prison, probably that existed in America." Indeed, Fast felt that his three-month stint there served him well as a writer: "I think a writer should see a little bit of prison and a little bit of war. Neither of these things can be properly invented. So that was my prison."

  Fast with his wife Bette and their two children, Jonathan and Rachel, in 1952. The family has a long history of literary achievement. Bette's father founded the Hudson County News Company. Jonathan Fast would go on to become a successful popular novelist, as would his daughter, Molly, whose mother, Erica Jong, is the author of the groundbreaking feminist novel Fear of Flying. (Photo courtesy of Lotte Jacobi.)

  Fast at a bookstand during his campaign for Congress in 1952. He ran on the American Labor Party ticket for the twenty-third congressional district in the Bronx. Although Fast remained a committed leftist his entire life, he looked back on his foray into national politics with a bit of amusement. "I got a disease, which is called 'candidateitis,'" he told Donald Swaim in a 1990 radio interview. "And this disease takes hold of your mind, and it convinces you that your winning an election is important, very often the most important thing on earth. And it grips you to a point that you're ready to kill to win that election." He concluded: "I was soundly defeated, but it was a fascinating experience."

  In 1953, the Soviet Union awarded Fast the International Peace Prize. This photo from the ceremony shows the performer, publisher, and civil rights activist Paul Robeson delivering a speech before presenting Fast (seated, second from left) with the prestigious award. Robeson and Fast came to know each other through their participation in leftist political causes during the 1940s and were friends for many years. Like Fast, Robeson was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era and invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions. This led to Robeson's work being banned in the United States, a situation that Robeson, unlike Fast, never completely overcame. In a late interview Fast cited Robeson as one of the forgotten heroes of the twentieth century. "Paul," he said, "was an extraordinary man." Also shown (from left to right): Essie Robeson, Mrs. Mellisk, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Rachel Fast, and Bette Fast. (Photo courtesy of Julius Lazarus and the author.
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  Howard and Bette Fast in California in 1976. The couple relocated to the West Coast after Fast grew disgruntled over the poor reception of his novel The Hessian. While in California, Fast temporarily gave up writing novels to work as a screenwriter, but, like many novelists before him, found the business disheartening. "In L.A. you work like hell because there is nothing else to do, unless you are cheating on your wife," he told People after he had moved back East in the 1980s. Of course, Fast, an ardent nature-lover, did enjoy California's scenic beauty and eventually set many of his novels—including The Immigrant's Daughter and the bestselling Masao Masuto detective series—in the state.