Silas Timberman (35 page)

“Since 1933, I believe.”

“In other words, eighteen years?”

“That is correct—about eighteen years.”

“And during that period, did you know him well? I mean, did you know him socially as well as professionally?”

“I did.”

“You and your wife were frequent visitors at his home, were you not?”

“Well, I don't know that you would term it frequent—”

“But you did visit his home?”

“Yes, we did.”

“About how often?”

“Really, I can't say. I kept no record.”

“I'm just asking for a rough estimate—once a week, once a month?”

“About once a month, I suppose.”

“You would say you were friends as well as associates, would you not?”

“Up to a point, yes. When I realized what Professor Timberman's motives were, I severed that friendship.”

“When was that?”

“Some three months ago.”

“Yet isn't it true that you attended a cocktail party at Professor Timberman's home on October 25th of 1950?”

“I'm not sure of the date. I said about three months.”

“Yet before that, during the eighteen years of friendship, were there no signs of Professor Timberman's alleged communist affiliations?”

“I should say there were. But they were cleverly concealed.”

“Too cleverly concealed for you to notice them?”

“Yes and no.”

“I am not asking for yes and no. I am asking for yes or no.”

“It is not difficult for a communist to conceal himself behind liberal pretensions.”

“I am asking you whether at any time during those eighteen years, prior to three months ago, you noticed any sign of Professor Timberman's alleged communist affiliations?”

“The answer is yes.”

“Yet you did nothing about this?”

“I informed President Cabot—the president of the university.”

“When did you inform President Cabot?”

At this point, Mr. Ward objected, and again the judge called both lawyers to the bench. Silas watched their whispered colloquy and wondered why he could not draw a line of sense or reason out of the conduct of the trial? MacAllister returned from the bench and attempted to establish the fact that Lundfest had known Silas eighteen years without suspecting communist tendencies, but each path he tried to follow was immediately closed off by objections. Again and again, MacAllister shifted his ground.

“Professor Timberman is a full professor, is he not, sir?”

“He is.”

“Isn't it rather unusual for a man of his age?”

“In some universities it would be. Clemington has expanded considerably during the post-war years.”

“Yet it reflects a number of promotions, doesn't it?”

“Yes, I suppose it does.”

“Were you responsible for those promotions, Professor Lundfest?”

“To some degree.”

“Weren't you entirely responsible as the head of the department in which Professor Timberman worked?”

“No, I only made the recommendations. Others passed upon them.”

“Yet doesn't it strike you as strange that you should recommend a man for promotion again and again whom you now accuse of being a secret communist?”

An objection cut off the answer, and the objection was sustained. An attempt on the part of MacAllister to introduce the Mark Twain controversy was similarly dealt with. When he switched to the mass demonstration, he was again walled in by objections. When he tried to elaborate on the question of civil defense and reveal the position Lundfest had taken at the time, another bench conference was called. After that, the court adjourned for lunch.

* * *

At lunch, MacAllister toyed with his food and stared morosely at Silas and told Silas how he wished to God he could have a drink; and it was Silas who had to point out to him that the trial had only begun.

“It doesn't matter—this isn't a trial, Silas! What the hell—you got to know it.”

“All right, I know it. It's still a trial.”

“It isn't. I don't know where they dug up this Horace Ward, but he frightens me. He frightens me, not only because he's an ignorant, insufferable man and a bad lawyer, but because he isn't trying not to be a bad lawyer. The point is, he doesn't have to try. In all my life, on the bench and in court, I never saw a man less fitted to try a case and I never saw a witness so poorly prepared and questioned as Lundfest. He left out whole areas of questioning that would have been far more effective than those he selected. His questioning was not to the point. It was inept and blundering. It did not tend to build evidence—and I don't think he gave a damn whether it did or not. Meanwhile, the judge is trying to turn him into a lawyer—and to block every line I take. I don't want to walk into contempt, not because I'm afraid, but because it won't do you one damn bit of good.”

“Isn't it possible that they pulled Lundfest in at the last moment?”

“It's possible—anything's possible. All they have is Bob Allen, and they'll put him on this afternoon. Short and sweet.”

When they returned to the courthouse, a group of reporters gathered around Silas in the corridor outside the courtroom, and began to question him about the trial and his own feelings concerning the trial. “My feelings are very plain,” he said. “I told the truth. This whole thing is fantastic.” “We heard that Lundfest testified this morning. Isn't he the one who was mixed up in that Mark Twain affair?” Yes, he was, Silas nodded, the same one. “Do you feel that you will be acquitted?” And if he wasn't acquitted? Was that what MacAllister had been trying to tell him? It had never entered his mind in a real, deep manner that he could be found guilty. Guilty of what? What had he done, and what were they trying to do to him?

“I don't know,” he found himself saying slowly, looking at the reporters curiously. They were alert, good-natured, objective. They had no enemies. They were only interested in all the interesting things that happened here in the District Courthouse. Suppose he told them that he was a man with a wife he loved and three children—and all the respectable, small dreams of living his life in peace and quiet and watching his three children grow up, and no more than that and no less than that? They would be polite. Would they write that Silas Timberman was a victim of something or other? There was a war in Korea, but obviously that didn't concern them and they would not be able to see why it should possibly concern him. Did he hurt when a shell fragment cut a Korean open? Did his children wake up when Korean children wept? He had signed a petition against the use of the atom bomb, but wasn't it obvious that if you were going to kill, the more efficient methods were better than the less efficient methods? MacAllister had been puzzled why Lundfest had not testified about the petition—a professional interest. And these reporters also had a professional concern.

He had lost all interest in what they would write about him, and he turned his back on them and walked into the courtroom.

* * *

Bob Allen testified that afternoon, and possibly because Ward was able to draw on and repeat Brannigan's pattern of questioning during the hearing, he emerged as a better witness than Ed Lundfest. Against MacAllister's objections, they went through the naming of books once again, and for the first time, Silas realized that books, used and named within a certain framework, could have sinister overtones.
Babbitt
and
Elmer Gantry
reared up like fanged monsters, encroaching on the American way of life—the “new” way of life, from which the poor, sick author of the books had quietly fled, so that he could be linked here with one, Silas Timberman, without protest, without shame. Books that preached resistance to authority, books that advocated overthrow of the government by force and violence, books that mocked at sterling qualities that were the best in the world, obviously and conclusively, until one wrote about them in books.

“Dreiser”—when he said the word, it had a foreign sound.

“Yes, sir, Dreiser joined the Communist Party and boasted about it. It was widely known—”

An American Tragedy
—a sentence or two about the book let the jury know that with such books, the communists took power. MacAllister remained standing. The judge was gentle. “Yes, what is it now, Mr. MacAllister?” Obviously, the lawyer for the defense was afraid of books. Well, name them, get them out into the open! Mr. Ward was not afraid of books. Mr. Ward looked like Tyrone Power; he was familiar to them. During lunch, practically every one of them had remarked on the striking resemblance between Horace Ward and Tyrone Power, and it made quite a contrast when you saw Mr. MacAllister, with his red nose and puffy face, standing alongside of Mr. Ward, who was clean-cut and honest and filled with the fire of his own conviction! Questions of law were obviously less important than letting the truth out; that was what courts of law were for—to get the truth out and lay it bare. And what did Mr. MacAllister feel he accomplished by standing so insistently and objecting so tediously? Mr. Ward asked the witness about
Sister Carrie
, and again, the jury knew the meaning of a book about a lewd and calculating woman—and again Mr. MacAllister was objecting.

He repeated the story of the meeting at Professor Timberman's house in 1947. Like Mr. Ward, the witness was young and handsome and straightforward, and it was obvious that if you had to have teachers, it was preferable that they looked like Mr. Allen. Mr. Allen was also recognizable, and if he didn't look like Tyrone Power, he did look like all sorts of young Americans who were chosen to be seen precisely because they looked like young Americans. He was also recognizable because he was one of a group of new cavaliers who had set their lances against communism. At first, there had been ugly slanders against such people—to the effect of their being informers who peddled themselves and their information for a price; but in time and with the aid of a nation-wide press campaign, it was made plain that in this day and age in America, an informer was a hero. They were modest heroes, and Mr. Allen was modest. When he mentioned the names of Kaplin and Federman as being present at the meeting where Silas Timberman planned to take over Clemington University by force and violence, he did it without emphasis; and the jury could understand that he was not anti-Semitic, but simply aware of the fact that Jews were always concerned in these plots.

And he named names. He named Professor Timberman as a communist—in a manner that could hardly be doubted. He named Alec Brady as a communist. He named Federman and Kaplin and Edna Crawford. He named students. He spoke with a quiet, deliberate authority—with just that trace of regret proper to a man who does a duty not entirely pleasant. The pattern which emerged from his testimony was rather shocking, for it painted—whether he willed it so or not—a picture of a university as a place of many dark alleyways infested with communists who, in their malicious and godless evil, found unthinkably devious ways of perverting the thought of their students; but the truth can be shocking—and proof of it was in the manner in which this same Silas Timberman had used the work of that beloved American writer, Mark Twain.

That was a telling blow—telling enough, and with it, the government rested. Mr. Ward nodded seriously as he told the judge that his case was finished. He was not one for complication or procrastination; he had a simple, matter-of-fact case, and he had presented it simply and matter-of-factly.

Carried deep into the astonishing fabric of lies, whole lies, monstrous, unbelievable lies cut out of whole cloth, half-lies, half-truths, perversion of fact, distortion of fact, truth hedged around with untruth, inventions, distortions—carried into this, Silas found indignation giving way to wonder and acceptance. He was going to be convicted; it was plain. Nothing MacAllister could do, nothing Timberman could do would change that already established fact. He half expected the jury to burst into applause. He tried to remember Bob Allen as far back as he had known the man—to find some sign or indication of this present performance, but there was nothing he could lay a finger on, nothing he could pin down. It was true that Bob Allen was now an assistant professor, that he had already written magazine articles and that he had lectured for the American Legion in Indianapolis and in Chicago—each time for a substantial fee; but even that did not explain. People do not callously betray and destroy. If they did, the whole network of human society would collapse—and then he found himself asking himself, had it collapsed? Was it in the process? Or was it only himself in this nightmare—with all else as it always had been?

He forced himself to listen to MacAllister. Defeat was something the little man shed with marvelous and dogged persistence, but he too had changed in a single day. A new, whip-like quality was in his voice as he lashed at Bob Allen. “Informer—” He was warned by the judge. Bob Allen himself spoke Bob Allen's designation—“An American defending the country I love.” Still, “Informer!” The judge called a bench conference. He was gentle but firm. “I shall have to find you in contempt, Mr. MacAllister, if this continues.”

“How did you receive your appointment in the English Department, Mr. Allen?” MacAllister asked him.

“I filled out applications and took an oral review before the board.”

“Was it not through the intercession of Professor Timberman?”

“No, it was not,” as if the idea was completely amusing, glancing for the first time at Silas, a shade of a smile on his face. Many unusual things were amusing now.

“You spoke of a meeting at Professor Timberman's house some time in 1947. What was the exact date of that meeting, Mr. Allen?”

“I'm afraid I've forgotten the exact date.”

“Yet you remember in great detail everything that was said at that meeting?”