The Outsider (15 page)

“Do you mean that you sympathize with these people?” the judge demanded.

“I'm a rabbi. I sympathize with people who suffer. Do you find that so astonishing, Judge Interman? I also sympathize with you, because you had to sit in judgment.”

“No, sir,” Interman said harshly. “Not because I was the judge in the case. These people betrayed their country.”

“Yes, they did.”

“I think,” the judge said, “that I may have come to the wrong place.”

“Perhaps.”

Yet Interman made no motion to leave. He didn't rise; he didn't look at his watch. He simply sat there, staring at David, and after a few minutes had gone by, David said gently, “I'll listen, and I'll try to help. Whether or not I can, I don't know. But I'll try.”

“I have some leeway in sentencing them,” Interman said. “I suppose you realize that.”

“So I've read.”

“You don't just sentence two such people in a case like this. God Almighty, no. We're dealing with a death sentence, and that's what I couldn't face. Do you understand why?”

“I think so. You're Jewish and they're Jewish. But you felt they deserved the death sentence?”

“Don't you, Rabbi?”

“I'm not a judge,” David said.

“So I asked that I be removed from the case, that some other judge pass sentence. I'm not evading my duty. I sat through the case. The jury brought in a verdict of guilty.”

“Why must it be a death sentence?” David asked. “Civilized countries are doing away with capital punishment.”

“I thought of that too. Don't think I didn't consider it, but certain things happened.”

David waited.

“The President got in touch with me. He asked me to come down to Washington —” He paused, staring past David at the wall. “I was flattered. Anyone would be flattered. Can you understand that, Rabbi? An invitation from the White House, you're flattered. Well, my God, the case had taken the guts out of me, and I handled it. I didn't run for cover because I was a Jew. I did my duty, and it makes sense that I was being invited down to Washington for a pat on the shoulder, doesn't it?”

“It makes sense,” David agreed.

“Well, I'm down there. I'm taken into his office. He doesn't even offer to shake hands with me. He just says to me, flatly, ‘Judge Interman, I want you to sentence them to death.”

“‘With all due deference, Mr. President,' I said to him, ‘I can't pass the death sentence on those two people.' And then he looks at me as cold as ice, Rabbi, and he says to me, ‘What in hell do you mean, you can't?'” He paused and closed his eyes. Then he opened them and looked around the room. “You've never been in that office?”

“Never been to Washington in my life,” David said.

“No. Well, it does something to you. I tried to explain. I said to him, ‘Mr. President, please try to understand the position I am in. These will be the first two people to be executed for espionage in our time, and they're both Jewish. I'm Jewish, and God knows there's talk enough that they've been singled out because they're Jewish.'”

“You said that?”

“Rabbi, you'd have to close your eyes and your ears not to know that.”

“What did he say?”

“He was enraged with me. ‘You don't spill that kind of garbage in here. They were on trial because they were spies, not because they were Jewish' — or some such thing. I can't remember exactly. I never knew the man could have such anger. I tried to make him understand that if I gave them a death sentence, it would be the end of my existence as a normal human being. I would live on as the judge who had sentenced them to death. Am I right, Rabbi? Tell me, am I right?”

“I think so, yes.”

“How would you look at me? I sit here. Here's Interman. He sentenced a Jewish man and woman to death, the first in the twentieth century to be so sentenced. That's what I tried to explain to him, Rabbi. Goddamnit, I am somebody! I paid my dues! He was a political hack from his beginning. I am a judge in a federal court. I'm a human being. Who the hell is he? This is supposed to be a democracy. I stood up to him. I told him, ‘No, I will not do it. You want a death sentence, get someone else to do it. You didn't appoint me, and I'm not your errand boy.' Then he just studies me for a while, and then he says, ‘It's pretty damn good, being a judge, isn't it?' I didn't know what to make of that. With all that's been written about him, he's not an easy man to talk to. Not for me, in any case. He has that bland middle-America face and those rimless glasses. I kept thinking about George Babbitt. Did you ever read
Babbitt,
Rabbi?”

“Yes, when I was much younger.”

“Babbitt. Well, you can see the condition my mind is in. Where was I?”

“Something Truman said about being a judge?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, of course.” Interman shook his head, closed his eyes for a long moment, and then wiped them with his handkerchief.

“I'd like a drink, Rabbi, if you don't mind,” he said almost plaintively.

“Of course.”

“Just a little Scotch or bourbon straight, if you have it. No ice or anything.”

David brought him the Scotch, and he drained it down in a single gulp. “Yes, he said that it was pretty good being a judge, and then when I didn't know what to make of it, except to agree with him, he says, ‘a Jew judge, that's something' — can you imagine, from the President of the United States?”

“I find it hard to imagine or believe,” David said.

“I'm not lying. Would I lie to you?”

“Of course not.”

“I'm on edge, Rabbi. In my mind, I see myself standing up right then and there in the Oval Office and saying to that little bastard, ‘This is the United States of America and I'm a judge in the Federal Circuit Court, and I am Jewish, and I came out of the streets of New York, fought my way out with wit, with intelligence, and I was trained at Harvard College and Harvard Law School — not picked out of a haberdashery by a political boss called Prendergast, and you sit there and sneer at me because I'm Jewish.'”

Then Interman was silent, and after a minute or so, David said to him, “But you didn't say that?”

“No.”

“What did you say, if I may ask?”

“I said, ‘Yes, Mr. President, it's an honor.'”

“Just that?”

“That's all. He became very sweet and persuasive, and lectured me gently about doing my duty to the country that gave me sustenance. He came over to me, and he patted me on my shoulder, as if I were a kid who had been fresh to his daddy. Yet I kept thinking that I was my own man, and that I would be damned if I sentenced the atom spies to death.”

“Then you decided not to pass the death sentence?”

“I don't know. I thought I knew, but I don't, and now I feel that I must do it.”

“What?”

“The death sentence. Yet if I sentence the atom spies to death, I will become a leper among my own people, a pariah. God help me, what shall I do?”

They sat for a little while in silence, and then David asked him, “Is it being a pariah among your own people that tortures you — or pronouncing the death sentence on two people who, whatever their sins, perhaps do not deserve to die?”

“I don't follow you,” Interman told him. “Would you repeat that?”

“You raise the problem of what will overtake you if you pass the death sentence, if you sentence the two atom spies to death. As you say, they're both Jewish, and they will be the first to be executed for espionage in our time. Then it's almost impossible to separate the sentence from the fact that they are Jews. I'm only an observer of this whole incident, but there are many people who doubt that the government has proved its case —”

“Rabbi, this is damned communist propaganda!” Interman cried.

“Yes — perhaps. I don't want to argue that part of it, their guilt or innocence. I don't know enough to do so. But I do know that a good part of the circus that revolves around them is anti-Semitism, and certainly if we were dealing with a clean-cut, well-bred white Protestant couple, there would be no question of the death sentence. And there is no doubt, I am afraid, that if you sentence them to death, your action will not be praised or even condoned by most Jews. The question I put to you is simply this: Are you agonizing over the matter because you will be despised by many Jews or because you feel the spies do not deserve to die?”

“Forgive me,” Interman said with annoyance, “but what in hell are you talking about? I sat on this trial. Those two bastards are guilty as hell, and the fact that they are Jewish doubles the immensity of their crime.”

“Why?”

“Because every Jew is tarred by the guilt.”

“Every one? Even the six million who died in the Holocaust?”

“You know damned well what I mean.”

“And if you weren't Jewish, would you pass the death sentence?”

“In a minute.”

David shook his head. “Tell me, Judge Interman,” he said, “why did you come to me? To have me praise you? Or to assure you that Jews will not condemn you for sentencing two Jews to death?”

“There's no question about whether or not they will die. If I don't sentence them, another judge will. It's easy enough for you to sit there like some damned stone Buddha. But I have to make the decision and I have to live with it.”

“We all live with our particular agony.”

“And that's your advice, as a rabbi?” He rose and stalked to the door, where he paused and said, “I shouldn't have come here. I told Osner I shouldn't have come here.” He then took two steps back to David. “You are one righteous bastard, aren't you, Rabbi?” Then his pugnacity collapsed and he stared at David, his eyes wet. “For God's sake, help me, Rabbi.”

“I don't know how to help you,” David said slowly. “I don't know what to tell you. How can I help you when I must speak out of my own belief? In my belief, no man has the right to say who should live and who should die. We have a President who dislikes Jews — not too unusual in our society — but would he undertake any action against you? It wouldn't be easy. You could expose him. He would deny it, but it would still put him in a difficult position, and once you had pronounced something less than the death sentence, no one could change it. But those are just random thoughts. You must do what your own conscience dictates.”

After he had taken Judge Interman to the synagogue to meet Jack Osner, David returned home and put down in his diary an account of the conversation as accurately as he could remember it, and then he wrote, “More and more, I wonder about my own function as a rabbi. I know a number of my fellow rabbis who regard their work as a profession. Martin Carter accepts the fact that he has a calling, whatever that is. I must talk to him about that. As for Judge Interman, why have I so little compassion for him? I can see it his way, his fight as a Jew to get into Harvard Law School, the dues he paid politically to get his first appointment, I think as assistant federal prosecutor, according to Osner, and then clawing his way up the ladder. The naked truth of the matter is that I dislike and distrust all judges.”

Back home the following day, Lucy and two noisy children set the world to rights. Lucy put on a pale green organdy dress that reached to her ankles and paraded it in front of David. “Gift from the mother of the bride. They sit around nights thinking of ways to spend money. I was a lady-in-waiting. Thank God you didn't come. Flower girls, bridesmaids, groomsmen, or whatever they're called, and ladies-in-waiting, the same as at Buckingham Palace. They had forty-two different varieties of canapés plus a fountain that poured four different flavors of punch. Do you know, it was fun. You weren't there, so I didn't have to be thinking all the time about what you were thinking. It was obscene, absolutely obscene; it created new levels of vulgarity, but it was fun. Did you ever see anything as hideous as this dress?”

“It's not too bad,” David said, unable to deny that she looked very young and beautiful. “You are lovely, truly lovely.”

“Oh, no, no, no. This color is hideous. Do you know, David, one of my dreadful cousins whom I had never met before came on to me. Would you believe it? An oversized football-player type who decided I was the best-looking woman there. It didn't take any time at all to shoot him down, but I think it was flattering, don't you?”

He was trying to decide whether he should tell her about the dinner at the Inn at Ridgefield.

“David, where are you?”

“I was thinking about Judge Interman.” Second lie.

“And you didn't hear a word I said. A big oversized cousin type pawing at me and trying to get me into bed —”

“Your cousin?”

“Well, I finally reached you. Yes, a first cousin, but this is the first time I met him. From Salt Lake City. How would you like to be a rabbi in Salt Lake City, where all the Jews are Gentiles? There was a whole contingent from there, eight of them, with their stupid jokes. Why are families so awful, David? Why isn't there anyone in a family like you? Anyway, it made me think about adultery. Not for me. What's that one Yiddish phrase you know? Yes — it
past nisht.
Not fitting at all. I don't know why I didn't recognize Interman's name —”

David decided he would not mention the Inn at Ridgefield.

“— but then it struck me like a flash. He's the judge who sat in the trial of the atom spies. What did he want?”

“Solace.”

“He wants you to take the curse off so that he can sentence them to death?”

Amazed, David asked, “What makes you say that?”

She put her arms around him and said, “My dear, innocent husband, in this stinking world, when you choose the most deplorable answer to any question, it's most likely to be right.”