Silas Timberman (32 page)

“Mother, Silas is not a communist. I'm also upset. Can't we argue about this when I see you? I must have the money.”

“But I can't just answer yes or no. Five thousand dollars is a great deal of money.”

“It's just a loan, mother. I've never asked you and dad for anything since I married Silas—”

“But you should have. You know we've never refused you anything.”

“I know that. And will you give me this money?”

“But Myra, darling, I don't have the money. It's up to your father, and you know how he feels about Silas.”

“But this is for me and the children—”

“The thing is, Myra, that where there's smoke, there's fire. You can't tell me that people are arrested because someone has a whim to do it. This is a very serious matter. It will be in the papers, won't it?”

“What difference does that make?”

“I don't see how you can be so unfeeling as to say such a thing. How can you say what difference does it make? You don't know what we've suffered since that Mark Twain business and then the hearing in Washington—and people asking your father what his dues in the Communist Party are? Of course, they were joshing him, but it hurt his business. There are people we just don't see anymore, believe it or not, and I don't know where it will end. And now this. How can you ask father to throw five thousand dollars away on a man who's been arrested as a criminal?”

“Silas is not a criminal, and the money will be returned. For God's sake, mother, will you lend it to me?”

“I don't think that's any tone to take, Myra.”

“I'm sorry. But can't you answer me? We must have that money.”

“I'm trying to tell you that I don't see how I can ask father for it, Myra. If I had it myself, I'd gladly give it to you, but I know exactly what your father's going to say. Especially when he sees it in the papers. Maybe in a week or two, when this has simmered down a little, he would feel differently. But right now, Myra—”

“In other words, you're trying to tell me that you won't give it to me.”

“That's very unfeeling of you, Myra. I've just explained that I can't give it to you. If you'll only be patient—”

When Myra put down the telephone, Geraldine was standing there, and asked her, “Was that grandma, Mommy?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” Geraldine said, and no more. Myra asked her to go up and sit with Brian. Myra was going to cry, and she wanted to do it alone with a door closed behind her, but when she had sat down in Silas' study, all desire to weep left her, and for a while she sat without doing anything, just looking at his books and thinking. Her anger went away. Anger, she had discovered, used you up. It was to no purpose.

She went upstairs to where Brian was in bed for the night—he had been walking around the house for the first time that day—and interrupted the story Geraldine was reading him to kiss him and say goodnight; thinking how wonderful Gerry and Susie had been about all this, and wondering how she could have functioned at all without them. She went into her bedroom, sat down at the dressing table, and looked at her face. A woman looks at her face in a variety of ways; Myra looked at her face as she would at that of a stranger, as she hadn't looked at herself for weeks, with curiosity and some annoyance. Myra was one of those fortunate women who had early in life accepted the fact that she was comely and who had never labored under a burden of doubts about how the world looked at her; and therefore, the lines around her mouth, the hollows in her cheeks and under her eyes, and the abundance of gray roots in her hair, came as more of a shock than she might have expected. She tried to be indifferent and failed—and tried to remember when she had last had her hair done. She combed it out, powdered her face, rouged her lips, and went downstairs to answer the tinkling chimes that Silas had always hated so.

Ike Amsterdam and Alec Brady were there, grinning and chatting the moment they walked in, Amsterdam making the ancient quip about the prisoner who claimed that they couldn't do it to him, and Brady wasting no time in turning over to Myra twenty-two hundred dollars in cash and bonds which they had already collected. He spread it on the dining room table, identifying each part of it. “A five hundred dollar bond from each of us, Ike and me. Our only apology for the small amount is that this should be spread around. I can get up another five hundred in cash, if I have to. The third five hundred dollar bond is from Henry Miller, in the Physics Department—I don't know whether you know him. He was on leave for six months to Los Alamos, and this is conscience money. Two hundred dollars from Moe Henderson and a hundred from Joel Seever—more conscience money. Three hundred from Federman and a hundred from the staff of
Fulcrum
—what do you think of that? Larry Kaplin and his wife will be over later with whatever they can lay hands on or pick up. Spencer will get to the bank in the morning. Lennox and Al Morse are covering the student body with a committee, and they expect to have a thousand dollars before midnight. Even if Silas has to bed down there for the night, we'll have him back in the morning. Do you feel better?”

“Do I feel better?” Myra said. “Do I feel better? Oh, my God—my God—” She began to cry now, sat down at the table and put her face in her hands, and wept without stopping, her whole body racked with her sobbing, crying as if her heart would break, not thinking or worrying any more, but just letting herself weep it through until it was done and out.…

* * *

MacAllister came to dinner, and he charmed Brian by making a fantastic bird that bobbed its head and flapped its wings, and he delighted the girls with a story of his first love at the age of twelve in Emporia, Kansas, and he held them all with odds and ends out of a long, varied and colorful career. “Jails,” he said to Myra, “are only frightening until you've been in one. Do you agree, Silas?”

The one night in the county jail on a hard cot had not made too much of an impression on Silas. He was also concerned about talking in front of the children. But MacAllister assured him, “It's the only way. You can't hide anything from them. Get it out in the open and it'll lose its edge.”

Perhaps he was right. MacAllister told them how, when a judge, he had always tried to get out of sending men to jail. He had forced drunken drivers to write on a blackboard, “I will not drink and drive,” ten thousand times. He sat up nights think-of ways to punish and teach simultaneously—“To what end, I don't know,” he admitted. “When something's wrong, its wrongness goes all the way down to the bottom and all the way up to the top. Where do you begin? Take Freddie Johnson, the Commissioner. Essentially, he's a decent human being. He has a heart, and he's not lost to pity and love. But because he's afraid to be dumped out of his job, he sits and listens to a little snotnose read him the law—”

After the children had gone to bed, he sat with Myra and Silas, drinking whisky very modestly and talking about the case. “The first thing to decide,” he pointed out, “is whether or not you want me for a lawyer.”

“Isn't that decided?” Myra asked. “After what you did—”

“I did nothing,” he interrupted. “The thunder and the shouting haven't even been scratched. We face a good deal, a trial in a Federal District Court, an appeal—and maybe, if everything else fails, an attempt to get to the Supreme Court. Or maybe we lick it right at the beginning with argument, although I doubt that. Silas has a lot at stake, ten years of his life, if they should decide to give him the maximum. You can't trifle with that.”

“But I still can't understand why they picked him.”

“Why not? Isn't his case typical of a hundred cases? Thinking becomes dangerous, and one of the most dangerous sources of thought are the schools. You have to control the schools, and that means controlling the teachers and what they teach. It's true that if you simply voice a threat, most teachers will perform to schedule. But there are always a good many like you and the others, enough to throw a monkey wrench in the works and to make more trouble than they want to have. They don't want that kind of trouble yet—not concentration camps and gangs of hoodlums; that would be too suggestive of other places where this has happened. They want to do it polite and quietly, with the full trappings of law and order and due process—and then be able to say to the people, look how we're protecting you from these dangerous elements that want to subvert us! And why not Silas Timberman? Didn't he scorn Cabot's civilian defense, and lay us all open to being wiped out by the Russians? Didn't he teach communist doctrine? Didn't he lie?”

“No, he did not,” Myra said.

“Prove it.”

“We will prove it to a jury, and a jury is twelve ordinary men and women, and why shouldn't they believe Si?”

“Because they are not twelve ordinary men and women—and because this is not the first political trial in America. There have been a good many, and the one jury that dared to disagree and not bring in a verdict of guilty was threatened and hounded and abused until the poor damned jurors wished they had never been born. Not that I won't fight this to win, if you decide I should represent you, but without illusions. It takes a hero to be an honest juror these days, to face the hounding of the FBI, to face the intimidations flung from every side—and your average juror is not a hero.”

“About representing me,” Silas said, “that's decided, if you want to. I don't know a better lawyer.”

“I do, but they cost more money. Don't jump to conclusions, Silas. You see here a beat-up, reformed politician, who saw a little light and wrecked his career with it, who drinks too much and stays in the Bar Association by the skin of his teeth. Of course you can get better counsel, if you want that?”

“Will it change the outcome?” Myra wanted to know.

“Will it? It might—I have to admit that. Then, it might not. It will cost a lot of money, and in the end, it might be no different, or even worse. I get annoyed with myself, but I'm not the worst lawyer, not by any means. I just want to give you the whole picture. I used to know a lawyer in New York, a labor lawyer and a damned wonderful man who had tried more cases like this than you could shake a stick at, and he was fond of telling the story of three labor leaders who were indicted for sedition. The first of the three got himself eminent counsel, as they call it, a big corporation lawyer, and he was found guilty and given five years. The second labor leader hired my friend, the labor lawyer, and he also was found guilty and got five years. The third labor leader said, a plague on both your houses; and he defended himself—and he was found guilty and got five years. So there you are.”

“I'll stick with you.”

“All right. You could do worse. Now, just to clear the air—one or two things. Are you a communist?”

“No.”

“Ever been one?”

“No.”

“Ever thought of it, been around it? Were you in the Young Communist League? Ever join any organizations?”

“Sure I thought of it—who didn't in the 'thirties? During the Spanish War, I made some contributions, nothing to be proud of but I didn't have any money at all then. Two dollars here, five there. If I knew communists then, they've moved elsewhere. I've signed statements occasionally—I don't even remember how many or when. I knew a communist in the army. He was a decent fellow, and we used to argue a good deal. My father knew some communists up in Minnesota—lumber workers. They were Finns. My father liked them. I remember he used to say that all the Finns in Minnesota were communists and that's why things were so bad in Finland. But he never became a communist. I don't know why. In his place, I would have, I think—but he didn't like politics. Here—now—well, I don't know. I've decided it's a rotten game, guessing who is a communist and who isn't. I suppose I know some, but I can't see that it matters, and I can't say that I'm sure.”

“All right. Next point—”

They were still at it at midnight, when MacAllister rose to leave, armed with a bundle of notes. By then, Silas was confirmed in his decision and glad for it. He decided that he liked MacAllister even more than he had thought.

CHAPTER NINE

Monday: January 27, 1951

THE TRIAL

CHAPTER NINE

THE TRIAL

MacAllister sat on one of the twin beds and watched Silas move restlessly around the little room. “This is his hard time,” MacAllister thought. “It will never again be as hard as it is now.” And Silas told himself angrily, “Why doesn't he tell me to go to bed? Why doesn't he tell me to go out and watch a movie? Why in hell's name does he sit there like that?”

The room was committed to memory; it had been waiting eternally for men like these. It had buff walls and twin beds, two dressers, one easy chair, two straight-backed chairs, and two racks for suitcases. The toilet was spotlessly clean, and there was a little cardboard box for razor blades. There was a disposable soft paper scarf to shine shoes with. They thought of everything.

“Let's go over part of it,” Silas suggested.

“Let's not. What happens when you study an hour before the exam? We've done everything that can be done—and maybe more. Do you play cards, Silas?”

He hadn't played since the war, and he smiled at the suggestion, and MacAllister thought, “That's better,” and said aloud, “I'll play you two cents casino and a nickel for the big diamond. O.K.?”

“O.K.,” Silas agreed.

They played for about a half-hour, and then Silas found himself losing interest, unable to concentrate on the simple mechanics of this simplest of card games.

“Rummy?” MacAllister asked.

Silas tossed in the cards and asked how long the trial would last, nor did MacAllister remind him that he had asked this question twenty times before.