Silas Timberman (19 page)

“Thank God,” he said to himself, “that I retain a little of a sense of humor, even at two in the morning.” Lawrence Kaplin glanced at him and wondered why he was smiling, and Silas realized that even Kaplin understood this thing better than he did. Confusion, ignorance, fear, half-truths and fantastic distortions—this was his stock of political knowledge, and he was professor of American Literature; and how was it with others, so many others who lacked even his minimum willingness to probe, to find out, to risk the truth?

“Let us consider Z,” nodded MacAllister. “Z is a communist, and so he says. Proud of it, we may say. Are you a communist, Z? I am. And do you meet with other communists, Z? I do. Please name them, Z. So, you see, the road of Z is also a short road. Be an informer or go to jail for a year—and yet this isn't as hopeless as it seems. We have a few weapons. To begin with, I'll be sitting beside each of you when you're answering questions. You can ask me anything you're in doubt of. We have certain Constitutional hopes—not bulwarks, but hopes, and it's better to have some hope than none at all. I feel that questions like these should not be answered, not only because they are traps and intended as traps, but because they violate certain rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution. Therefore, I would implement my refusal to answer by citing the First Amendment, namely, that Congress should make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. I would also refer to the Fourteenth Amendment, Section One, which holds that no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law—both of these will bear refreshing tomorrow, and I think you should be thoroughly familiar with the use and history of both these amendments.

“At the same time, there seems to be some really valid hope in the use of the Fifth Amendment—which holds that no person should be compelled to bear witness against himself.”

“Couldn't that be taken as an admission of guilt?” Federman asked.

“They will take what they please as an admission of guilt. However, the Fifth Amendment was written into the Constitution as protection for the innocent, not the guilty, a guarantee against torture and intimidation. Wouldn't you agree with me, Alec?”

Brady nodded. “There's quite a history, and it's too late to go into it, but the thing arose out of the struggles of the Protestant dissenters in England against the High Church—the Star Chamber hearings, the confession by force and threat, subsequently used as witness against the confessor—in other words, forced witness against oneself. It's been brought up in a number of cases recently, hasn't it?”

“In at least four cases recently, the witness invoked this privilege against self-incrimination, and there seems to be a good chance that it will hold in the Supreme Court. This becomes even more important when we reflect on the fact that more than a dozen writers and teachers are serving prison sentences at this moment—because they depended only on the First Amendment. It doesn't hold. But since the conviction of the national leaders of the Communist Party in New York, the court seems disposed to regard any question relating to communism or any activities that might be so construed as coming within the framework of privilege against self-incrimination. To you, it may mean the difference between prison and freedom, but it's not an easy thing to use. It means an understanding of this privilege—and a good deal of alertness.”

“It seems to me,” Silas said slowly, “that it also means an admission of guilt.”

“I tried to answer that, Silas,” Brady said.

“I know—but history is one thing and the world we live in is another. This will be construed as a trick, a maneuver, an evasion of whatever accusations are brought against us.”

“But no accusations have been brought against us, Silas,” Amsterdam argued. “For God's sake, man, look at the world you live in! We haven't been indicted, arrested, accused of anything—we are being brought in as performers for a circus!”

“In which I will not perform.”

“Then what—go to jail?”

“If I have to.”

“And what about Myra, the kids? What about your career, your life?”

A cold, cold chill of fear flowed over Silas; it ran down his spine and into his belly; it spread across his mind, and his thoughts moved slowly, sluggishly.

“I don't know,” he said.

Brady said, “I can understand Silas' position—only too well. I don't know whether it's right or wrong. It's not my position, but that doesn't mean my position is right or that MacAllister's position is right. We've been trying to jam a new world, a new fear, a whole new set of values and defenses into a few hours. It can't be done. I mean no criticism of you, Mac,” he told the lawyer. “There's still tomorrow and Tuesday, if we go in by plane. It's too late tonight to make any more out of this. We're too tired. The truth of it is that we're shocked. The shock has to wear off a little—”

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.