The Outsider (27 page)

Jake had opened the door to bring them their morning coffee and bread, the early summer sun warming the cell, when there came through the door a booming voice: “Don't be the greatest horse's patootie in the county, Benton! You are already in more kinds of trouble than I care to list, not to mention putting the county in a position where it can be sued for five or six million dollars.”

“Hell, Professor, it ain't my doing. Them damned state troopers brought them in, and I got twelve niggers too and that big nigger preacher, Reverend Jones, and he is the last person on earth I want in my jail. I am getting him out of here just as soon as I can.”

“Were they mishandled? The colored folks?”

“They had their asses beaten off, if that's what you mean.”

“Makes it worse, don't you see? Makes it so much worse, I just wouldn't want to be in your shoes.”

“Professor, we didn't lay a finger on them. It's Captain Queen and them crazy troopers — Jake, will you close that damned door!”

A few minutes later, the door opened, and Jake escorted Professor Jackson through it, the corners of Jake's mouth twitching with what was less a smile than a controlled smirk of satisfaction. “This here's Professor Jackson,” he said to them. And to the professor, “This is Reverend Carter from up there in Connecticut, and this here is Rabbi Hartman from the same place, and he is a real, legitimate Jewish rabbi.”

“Thank you, Jake,” the professor said, “and now suppose you step outside and see we're not interrupted, and you can't be a witness to what you don't hear.”

“That's right, Professor. That's absolutely right.”

No more than five feet six inches tall, the professor had a physical appearance that contrasted oddly with his booming voice. He had sparse red hair, turning white, a freckled complexion, and pale blue eyes behind heavy glasses. When Jake left, he looked at the two men sadly and said, “Never known a do-gooder with the sense of a flea. You come down here to show your presence, fine thing. Maybe it'll help to get the colored folk to come forward and exercise their constitutional rights, maybe not. But when a passel of baboons in the uniforms of state troopers tell you to stop and break it up, you do it. They are armed. You're not. Heavens to Betsy, we are not animals down here. We have decent folk and indecent folk. That man, Jake Hunter, he put his job on the line, telephoning me. Now come over here and let me look at those bruises.” They stood by the bars and he stared at the cuts and bruises. “Nasty, nasty. Very nasty.”

“When can we get out of here, Professor?” Martin asked.

“Maybe an hour, maybe less.”

“Will you want bail?”

“For what? For getting beat up?” He turned and left, and they heard him saying to the sheriff, “I'm going down the street and get an order from Judge Parsefal for their release.”

“I can't let them go. Captain Queen — he'll skin me alive.”

“Now look here, Sheriff, you ignore a court order, and you'll finish your term in that same cell.”

“All right, all right. I can hear you. Why is my ass always in a sling?”

“Professor!” David shouted. “Professor, please come back a moment!” The professor came back. David was taking deep breaths. “Hurts my head when I shout. Professor, you've been very kind to us, but we can't leave here without the Negroes.”

“What?”

“We just can't. We were walking arm in arm with Reverend Jones. We can't go out and leave him here.”

“Marchand Jones?”

“That's right.”

“Goddamnit, Rabbi, I'm letting you and the reverend here walk off free. Why make it more difficult for me? The colored folk will get three months in the cooler, maybe only thirty days. I suppose I can get Jones off, not the others.”

“Then I'm afraid we sit here.”

Martin came to life, his voice shrill. “Means TV coverage, Professor. Every reporter in the foreign press corps will be down here. I'm just a Congregational minister, but Rabbi Hartman is one of the most important rabbis in America, and they'll make the worst anti-Semitic case out of it you ever saw —”

“That's enough, Reverend. You made your point. God Almighty, why don't you people stay home? You have more inequity up there than we could ever match, but you don't see us putting together delegations of crazy clerics to drive you mad. All right. I'll see what I can do. But you set foot in this state again, I swear I'll let you fry in your own juice.”

When he had gone, David turned to Martin and said, “I don't believe it. One of the most important rabbis in America. All he has to do is to call the Central Conference of American Rabbis and ask them if they ever heard of a David Hartman. If they're not too busy, they might find me in their directory, but suppose he calls the Conservative movement or the Orthodox. They'll say they never heard of me, and these people don't know Jews are divided into different groups. He'll wash his hands of the whole thing, and we'll end up on a chain gang somewhere.”

“Well, it's no worse than your sudden spurt of nobility. I had to back it up somehow.”

“You call that backing it up?”

“Yes. Sort of. I thought you were right and very principled. I had to back you up.”

“Martin, you are crazy. Plain crazy.”

“Yes — yes. But it's a shared lunacy, David. Remember that.”

The dean of the local law school was as good as his word, even to the extent of having the town doctor clean out their cuts and tape them properly; but Lucy did not absolve them that easily. “You and Martin,” she said coldly, “are not only two unintelligent men, but two middle-aged men who should have realized that their Don Quixote days are over!”

“I trust you meant intelligent. We are fairly intelligent.”

“Not by Millie's vote or mine.”

“You knew we were going down there. We weren't the only clergymen. There were over fifty of us enlisted for the registration drive.”

“According to the
New York Times,
this Captain — whatever his name was — ordered you to stop. All he had were guns and clubs in the hands of young men. But you and Martin didn't see fit to stop.”

“Well, not just the two of us. Aside from all the people behind us, there was Reverend Marchand Jones. You know, it was his back yard, so to speak. It wasn't just that we were ordered to stop. The
Times
man got the story from the troopers and from some of the marchers and Reverend Jones. The way he was beaten, he couldn't remember much of anything, but the way it happened was that we were ordered to disperse, to break it up and get off the road. Well, we couldn't do that.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know how I can explain it. This Jones fellow, he went up and spoke to the troopers. Then he came back, and very quietly he said, ‘So long, so slow.' It was like a total lament for his people, a road so very long, progress so slow. We could say the same about the Jews — two thousand years of it that leads David Hartman up here to Leighton Ridge, so long and so slow. Do you understand?”

Minutes passed while Lucy stared at him in silence. Then she nodded, tears welling into her eyes. “You make me afraid to love you.”

He took her in his arms. “Don't ever be afraid. Don't ever be afraid, my darling.”

It was not the end of the incident by any means. A new thing had come into the world in the decade and a half since the end of World War Two, and already it was titled
the media
— radio, television, film, and press. The television networks had discovered that occasionally but increasingly their cameras could be where the news was being made, and that if their cameras were not there, it would sometimes happen that other cameras would be there, ready to sell them the footage. It had happened in this incident; the footage was taken and sold to one of the networks, whereupon millions and millions of Americans witnessed the clubbing of three men of the cloth by state troopers. Since things happen in a very ordinary manner from day to day, almost no one observed that it was amazingly odd for three clergymen, one a Baptist, one a Congregationalist, and one a Jew, to be leading a march in the Deep South for the registration and freedom of black voters, and for all to go down together under the troopers' clubs. Something had changed in the world. Clergymen were doing something they had not done before. It evoked a new kind of interest, and both David and Martin found themselvesin the position of being momentary celebrities. They were interviewed, they were begged to participate in talk shows — most of which they refused — and Leighton Ridge suddenly, after two hundred years of blissful obscurity, was catapulted into the public eye. Americans were treated to a capsule history of Connecticut, the fifth state to ratify the Constitution of the United States, the settling place of the famous — only now —
Levelers,
whom Cromwell had decimated and driven out of England.

In all reality, as some Connecticut booster put it, this was the real birthplace of the American Revolution. Along with this, TV viewers were lectured — in short form — on the intriguing topographical structure of Connecticut, ridge after ridge, valley after valley, the low foothills of the Berkshires riding down to Long Island Sound.

There were all sorts of odds and ends of results, one of them being a telephone call from Mel Klein, who said, “David, can you and Lucy come to dinner next Monday? There's a friend of mine, a very interesting man from Germany, and he's spending a few days with us here. As a matter of fact, he's a film producer, the biggest in Germany. His name is Herman Strauss, and he wants very much to meet you. He's Jewish, yes.”

They were delighted to come to dinner. Lucy wondered what connection Mel Klein had with a German film producer, and David guessed that he might be related to Della, whose mother's name was Strauss. It turned out that there was a relationship of sorts, but thin and distant. But Della's mother was still alive, and Strauss had come to her and through her, he had met Mel Klein and had been invited for a few days to Leighton Ridge. Herman Strauss was an unimpressive, balding man of middle height, with mild brown eyes behind heavy glasses, wide mouth, small nose, and the marvelously ingratiating manner of a cultured, middle-class Viennese. He wore a three-piece dark gray worsted suit, and as he shook hands firmly, David noticed a very odd thing. In the vest pocket of Strauss's suit were visible the tops of two silver teaspoons.

“I am so pleased to meet you, Rabbi Hartman,” he said. He had a heavy German accent, but his English sentence structure was excellent and his vocabulary sufficiently ample so that he did not have to grope for words. “I read about your struggle, believe me, but I also read three of your sermons. I thought they were brilliant and very perceptive.”

“Three of my sermons? I'm flattered, but you must be mistaken.”

“Oh, no. Printed in the Frankfurt magazine,
Der
— how would I translate it? Yes.
World Views.
”

Della Klein, listening, said, “I can explain it. The synagogue mimeographs the rabbi's sermons for those who want them, and I send copies to Mother. She has a dear friend in Germany who is one-quarter Jewish, and somehow managed to survive in Frankfurt, and Mother has been sending her copies of the sermons.”

“So it is explained,” Strauss said. “With an explanation everything is understandable. But I am sure they have not paid you a dollar for your writing, and to me that is the worst kind of thievery and not worthy of the magazine. In any case, I have an interest in a small publishing house, aside from my film work, and already I suggested to Hans Kramer, our managing editor, that he should make a book of your sermons — if you have enough, of course?”

“You must never ask a rabbi whether he has enough sermons,” David said, smiling. “If we could trade them for bread and butter —”

“That is what we will arrange. You see, in Germany, unlike here, guilt is very deep, very deep, so books of sermons do well.” His shirt sleeve had slipped back, the cuff revealing a digit of a number tattooed on his arm. “Guilt,” he said, touching it. “Two years in a concentration camp. Well, that's in the past, isn't it, Rabbi?”

“I hope so.”

At the dinner table, Mel Klein said gently, “Mr. Strauss, they say you are the largest film producer in Germany. Is it so?”

“And you're wondering how it can be, only fifteen years after the Holocaust. Maybe the largest, maybe second largest. I'm not sure. But you see, I am Viennese, even though I lived many years in Germany, and before the war I produced seven very successful films. To some extent, I saw what was coming, and I managed to hide the prints. So when the war ended and I came out of the concentration camp, I had the prints of my films, and Germany was starved for film. So it began.”

“And yet you stayed in Germany,” Lucy said. “After all the horror of the Holocaust.”

“Yes,” he said softly. “Wherever I am, the Holocaust sits beside me. From that, I can't run away. Also, in this life, I know only one thing, how to produce a moving picture. A shoemaker can make shoes anywhere, but myself—all my memories were Austria and Germany. I love the German language, German literature, German film tradition. So I remain in Germany.”

And still no one asked him about the two silver teaspoons. After dinner, David could contain his curiosity no longer, and he drew Strauss off into a corner of the living room, where the two of them, sitting in a pair of wing chairs, could talk with a degree of privacy.

Strauss, nodding with a slight smile, anticipated David's question and said, “No, I did not steal them from a restaurant. They belong to me. They are sterling. Why do I carry them around? You can't imagine, can you?”

“No. And I feel like a presumptuous fool.”

“No, never think of yourself as a fool, Rabbi. You're not a fool. I will tell you about the spoons. They are a reminder. In nineteen forty-two, I was in Berlin. I had no papers. As a Viennese Jew, I had no country. I had no money. I had no friend. All I had in the world were two sterling silver teaspoons that I had found in a buffet drawer in the ransacked home of a Jewish family I had sought out. Unexplainably, the Nazis who looted the place and took my friends away overlooked the two teaspoons. So you see, Rabbi Hartman, when you have no papers, money, or friends, a sterling silver teaspoon will buy you shelter and food. So I always keep two teaspoons in my vest pocket. People who know me understand. Others, like you, sometimes ask. And myself—they serve to remind me that I am a Jew; no matter how rich, how secure, I am a Jew, and the only thing in the world I can depend on is God's mercy.”