Silas Timberman (25 page)

“How many of this hundred have agreed?” Seever asked directly.

“Well—I don't know how much luck Brady and the others have had—”

“But you've had none.”

“So far,” Silas admitted.

“What do you want me to do, Silas? I'd like to be a hero. Everyone would, but you get over that when you get over childhood. I've got kids. I've got a wife. I've got a home that takes one hundred and twenty a month in carrying charges, even if we don't eat. I'm putting it on its most practical basis—”

“How practical is it, Joel? Or for how long? Cabot has the names of every person who signed the atom bomb petition. How long? Is it better for every honest man in the university to be picked off one by one—in silence?”

“I can't accept that.”

“Neither could I,” Silas said bitterly. “After all, my name is Silas Timberman. I'm not a Jew and I'm not a Negro. I'm a white Protestant American. Not even a subscriber to
The Nation
.”

“But you will admit that you put your foot in it. I'm not saying that I don't sympathize with you, Silas. I might question the wisdom of your actions. When I read your testimony, I felt that you were perhaps unnecessarily aggressive. We're dealing with a very basic thing. Surely, you cannot question the right of a congressional committee to gather facts?”

“As an inquisition?”

“That's a word, Silas. We are slaves of semantics these days. Gestapo, inquisition, star-chamber, witch-hunt—a whole semantic mythology.”

“It's not very mythological when you sit in the middle of it.”

“I suppose not. But everything is not plain and simple, no matter how plain and simple you try to make it, Silas. It was not only the atom bomb petition, but the attitude you took on civil defense. Then all this rumpus with Lundfest. He was put in an utterly impossible position.”

“Are you defending him?” Silas asked quietly.

“For God's sake, Silas—don't have a chip on your shoulder. I'm not defending him at all; I'm simply remarking on the difficulty of his position, and you can hardly deny that. Also, there's Bob Allen's testimony. I didn't want to bring it up—but you force me into a position where I have to.”

“Bob Allen's testimony?”

“It's there, Silas. It exists.”

“Do you believe it?” Silas asked, dumbfounded.

“I don't know whether I believe it. It's less important whether I believe it than whether others who don't know you as well as I do believe it.”

“And you think I'm a communist? After all the years we've been associated, you think I'm a communist?”

“Look, Silas, I don't know. When you come down to it, I don't know whether anyone's a communist, or whether the genus exists. I've often thought that Ike Amsterdam and Alec Brady were communists—perhaps Leon Federman, too, but I don't know. I'm not a judge in this kind of thing. The point is, Bob Allen does seem to know. Say what you will about him—the man's behaved like a cad, and no one admires an informer—he does seem to know whereof he talks. People are going to believe him. My wife's younger brother is in Korea. Of course, she feels something about that—”

“Give it up,” Silas thought. “It's over and done. He is where he is, and he's unshakable. The winds of fear are blowing all over him. Give it up. You degrade yourself in arguing this.”

But he couldn't give it up, and he had to argue it, and he had to be gentle and understanding and not lose his temper. He himself was already categorized; he had burns, and they would never heal. He had to remember the way he had been only a little while ago. He had to say to Seever.

“But Joel, leaving all judgments of character out of it, I think we could agree about what's happening at Clemington. This used to be the most liberal university in the midwest. Not five or ten years ago, but only yesterday. There isn't a school of journalism that didn't look upon
Fulcrum
with envy, as the epitome of a free and independent press. The very thought that there were truths one was forbidden to speak at Clemington would have been unthinkable, and it would have been equally unthinkable that a faculty member here could lose his job for doing what his conscience dictated. I don't say that everything was perfect. There were petty things, contests of personal ambition, petty greeds and jealousies, injustices—but that was to be expected in a place as big as this. But the overall picture was one of freedom to think, to talk, to inquire. And what is it now? There's a black pall of fear over this campus so thick you could cut it with a knife. I telephone people—and I hear the fear in their voices, and people have told me that they believe their wires are tapped. Of course, it's nonsense—but what a feeling to have at Clemington! I'm told that there hasn't been a mention of Mark Twain in the English Department in five weeks. Brady has a course on the French Revolution; they've suspended him and eliminated the course. We had the only course in the country on the American Indian, which based itself on the findings of Lewis H. Morgan; they've canceled the course because Engels used the work of Morgan in his
Origin of the Family
. There's been an investigation of the entire Department of Home Economics, based on those ridiculous charges of sex instruction calculated to destroy the American family—because Edna Crawford was dragged down to Washington with us—”

“I know, Silas,” Seever said, nodding to show that he expressed no disagreement with the facts. “When you put it all together that way, it sounds as alarming as hell. But isn't it a little unfair to pile it up in that fashion. It's not the end of the world, Silas, not even the end of Clemington. The only thing to do with a situation like this is to wait it out. Such things blow over. In 1919, they expelled four socialist professors from the university. Well, they were reinstated when the hysteria blew over.”

“This isn't 1919,” Silas said hopelessly.

“Of course not, Silas. Still, I don't see any solution in hysteria.”

“That's just it. I want to fight hysteria and stop it. That's why I want you to come into this with us.”

“I couldn't, Silas: I just don't think it's advisable. I think you've been carried away by the pressure of Brady and Amsterdam.…”

* * *

It is the essence of human life, and perhaps of all life, that it should create for itself conditions of normalcy wherein to function. It rejects the unusual, the impossible, the incredible—or else it rationalizes them until they too become the normal and matter-of-fact. There have been countless cases of people who lived on in houses even though they knew that the walls would crumble momentarily, the ceilings fall, the floors collapse, and there have been cases of farmers who went on plowing mine fields even though they knew the dangers. People have lived with bombs and battle, with disease and flood, so it is not too strange that the seven faculty members who appeared before the senate committee were able to return to Clemington and slip back into an altered normalcy.

They had begun to adjust to what happened before it happened, and therefore when it happened, it did not seem too strange or surprising. Each was formally suspended; each faced the end of a career; each faced the problem of life and family and survival. And each participated in the feeling that his fate transcended himself.

Each was also spared the knowledge that he was not forgotten, for in America the distance between Washington, D.C. and a place like Clemington can often be unimaginably great.

If Silas knew that something more would happen, he also could not be certain that anything more would happen; and there was a certain amount of relief in thinking that nothing more was planned. He lived with the future in the only way an ordinarily normal person can live with it, by not turning to crystal balls to interpret it; and naturally there was a good deal that he did not know.

He did not know that in a large and orderly building in Washington, a file contained a folder marked,
Timberman, Silas
, and that this folder not only grew in content, but elicited a surprising amount of interest. He would have been amazed to know how many people were sent out to what curious corners of the country to make inquiries concerning one,
Timberman, Silas
, and he would, perhaps, have been somewhat amused by the reports turned in and duly added to the folder's contents. He had been aptly conditioned to a number of things, but not yet wholly conditioned to a multiplication of nonsense. He would also have been interested, disturbed, and not a little bewildered to discover how many people of importance thumbed through the folder and how often and in what manner it was discussed.

Yet in this attention paid to him, he was neither singular nor unusual. There was an amazing number of such folders in the same orderly building during that early winter of 1950, and while most were left undisturbed, many were discussed.

It was a time for such things. There had never been such a time before in all the life of the nation, in all the being and struggles and hopes and dreams of the nation. In this nation, there had never been a time before when people were afraid, and now they were becoming afraid. There had never been a time before when their fears and prejudices had been fed so steadily, like an insatiable furnace endlessly and tirelessly stoked, but now their fears and prejudices were so fed. There had never been a time before when so little information was given to them, but now fear began to seep in everywhere, and editors and newspaper men and commentators were not immune, and though no one knew exactly what to print and speak of, almost everyone in such a position began to understand what one did not print or speak of.

It was a time when the nation discovered certain things about itself, when evil crawled like vermin from beneath long-lying stones, when liars became heroes and informers were ennobled.
Pimp
had been a word for the bawdy houses,
tout
for the race tracks and the betting joints, but now the pimp and the tout became king and archduke of a new order.…

* * *

Ed Lundfest had never been an impulsive man, and as he drove along now, he rehearsed what would be the probable pattern of his errand. He was not unaware that he made an excellent impression upon most people, but he also knew that this was a part of intending and striving to make such an impression. He felt that people casual about human relations, moved through life casually, and he had no desire for the Reverend Elbert Masterson to have that impression of him. As with so many others, he sensed the increasing motion and tempo of events at Clemington, and because he was in a fortunate position with the top level of school administration, he knew that these events were not entirely haphazard. While he could not perhaps have spelled out in all detail the far-reaching and complex political goals that the Clemington incident aimed at, he was aware of many of them and he was also aware of his own place in them. More importantly, he understood the pattern. He was less interested in whether Anthony C. Cabot would be a candidate for the presidency or the vice-presidency of the United States, or the governorship of the state, than he was in the more personal question of who would succeed Dr. Cabot as president of Clemington. There were many bridges to be built, but first his own; since those latter were bridges no one else would be constructing; and it was in this latter capacity that he went to see Reverend Masterson.

In all, Clemington boasted churches of eleven Protestant denominations, as well as one large Roman Catholic church, sometimes called a cathedral, but hardly that. Since there were only seven Jewish families in the town, no synagogue had ever been built, and while the Protestant churches were numerous, both the buildings and the congregations were rather small. Reverend Masterson was the Methodist pastor in Clemington, and his tiny, ivy-covered church, rectory attached, could have been scaled about in the center of the eleven. The Methodist community was small, no more than a hundred and twenty families, and socially heterogeneous. You could not say of it, as you might have of the Episcopalians and Presbyterians, that it included the wealth of the town, nor, as was the case with the Baptists in Clemington, that its congregation consisted mostly of people who worked with their hands. It had an inherent stability that such congregations as the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah's Witnesses lacked, and its social pattern was both similar to yet subtly different from the Unitarians and the Congregationalists. Perhaps Lundfest had taken some of these factors into consideration, or perhaps he only felt that of all the clergymen in Clemington, Reverend Masterson commanded the most respect and was best equipped to deal with problems which would inevitably have an influence beyond Clemington.

He might have wished that Reverend Masterson was a little less individualistic, a little less stiff-necked, but these were qualities which took unpredictable directions in these times. Certainly, he was not wrong to start with Masterson—and proceed from there. If Masterson rebuffed him—a possibility he considered—he could go on to others.

It was about four o'clock on that afternoon, and the snow was just beginning to fall, when Ed Lundfest parked his car in front of the rectory. The rectory was a pleasant, unpretentious wing of the church, half stone, half brown weathered wood clothed with ivy and shaded, in the summertime, by two great elms. Elbert Masterson and his wife had occupied it for a generation and a half. Their children had grown up there and gone out from there to marry and rear families of their own. They lived there alone and very quietly, and when Lundfest tapped with the knocker, Mrs. Masterson, a withered little lady with dark eyes, opened the door herself. Lundfest knew her slightly; they exchanged polite greetings, and since it was obvious that he was there to see the pastor, Mrs. Masterson led Lundfest to the study, where, as she explained, the pastor was re-working the sermon of the day before.