The Day They Came to Arrest the Book (5 page)

“You must have quite a library at home,” Deirdre said.

“Everywhere, the books are everywhere. American history’s on top of one of the front hall closets. Jewish history is in Dad’s closet. Hardly any room left for his clothes. Dad’s an atheist, but he says there’s a long, honorable tradition of Jewish atheism. He just tried to start a pile of Dickens in the kitchen. He said he thought Charles—Dad’s like you, he thinks of all of them as friends—he thought Charles would enjoy being in the center of things. But my mother, she said that if he wanted Mr. Dickens in the kitchen, he could get Mr. McDonald to feed Mr. Dickens and everybody else in the house, because she wasn’t about to duck books falling on her head with everything else she has to do. Don’t get me wrong. My mother likes to read too, but she says books are a sickness with my father, and
with me too. Anything you overdo, she says, is a sickness. Do you think so? I mean, about books.”

“You know what my answer is going to be.” Deirdre smiled. “Sure, you can overdo eating and you can overdo buying clothes or whatever, and you can overdo work, and you can overdo just about anything. But not books. Say, I was just looking you up. It’s Barnaby. That’s an interesting name. It comes from Barnabas, doesn’t it? From the Hebrew, I think. Son of exhortation, or consolation? Do you know?”

“I should, I guess, but I don’t. But that’s not how I got the name anyway.”

“What do you mean?” Deirdre looked at him quizzically.

Barney grinned. “I come out of a comic strip. There was this strip my mother loved when she was growing up. A kid named Barnaby and his fairy godfather, Mr. O’Malley, who had these magic powers, but somehow he always got it wrong. Things never came out the way he intended, not that he’d ever admit it. She kept a lot of the strips, and I still read them now and then. Anyway, Barnaby’s parents never believed Mr. O’Malley even existed, but Barnaby sure did. He and Mr. O’Malley talked a lot, and they went out on adventures all the time. I think my mother really wanted to call me O’Malley, but she thought the kids would laugh at me. So she settled for Barnaby so I’d always remind her, I guess, of Mr. O’Malley. You see, even though he did make mistakes, Mr. O’Malley was a lot of fun.”

“Well,” the librarian said, “it must be nice to have
a name that comes out of so much pleasure. My name”—her voice became low and deep—“comes out of tragedy, terrible tragedy. Long, long ago, there was a young girl, the daughter of a harpist at the court of an Irish king. She was raised in seclusion because the king wanted her for his wife. But there was a prophecy that Deirdre’s beauty—we’re speaking of the past now—would cause an awful, awful disaster. Not by
her
will, for she was the most innocent of maidens. But prophecy can curse even the innocent.

“Anyway,” Deirdre went on, “she fell in love with a young man, and he and his brothers kidnapped her, spiriting her away to Scotland. In time, the old king, the one who had wanted her for his wife, found them and killed the young man and his brothers. In anguish and in remorse—for she blamed her beauty for having caused those deaths—Deirdre killed herself. There, you see how lucky you are to have come out of a comic strip?”

“I guess so,” said Barnaby, “but Deirdre is a lovely name. It sounds, well, like music.”

“What kinds of books do you want to write, Barnaby?”

“Oh, stories,” he said. “Long, long stories. About tragedy. And about funny things. About people I know. Changed, of course. About people I’d like to know.” He smiled. “About me. I would like to imagine me in all kinds of—”

“Deirdre”—Nora Baines strode into the library—“we’ve got to talk. There’s going to be one god damn
big explosion around here. Oh, hello, Barney. Deirdre, did you hear what our leader, our mighty leader, wants me to do?”

“Oh, my God,” the librarian said. “I got a message to see him.” She looked at her watch. “I’m late. I got started talking to Barney—”

“I’m sorry,” Barney said.

“Oh, no.” Deirdre smiled. “I enjoyed that talk a lot.”

“Okay,” he said, “so did I.”

“I’ll walk up with you,” Nora Baines said to Deirdre. “I have to go to that debate, but I can fill you in on the way.”

“See ya.” Barney waved to them as they walked out of the library.

“Yes, indeed.” Deirdre Fitzgerald waved back.

Since the debate would be held before the two combined classes, and since neither Maggie Crowley nor Nora Baines presided over a large enough room, the event was scheduled for the auditorium on the main floor where John Wayne had once stood, as alive as you or me.

On the outside of the door to the auditorium was a sign:

Luke shook his head as he read the sign.

“Out of hand?” he said to Barney. “This has got nothing to do with me. Not with the general I’ve got for
a mother. I’ve got about as much freedom as if I were doing time. It’s bad enough she has to know where I am all the time and whom I’m with, but she even opens my mail. Well, you know that.”

“Yeah,” Barney said, “but what I don’t know is why you let her do that.”

“What do you mean, why do I
let
her?” Luke said in exasperation. “What’s my alternative? Turn her in to the postal authorities for tampering with the U.S. mail? How would that look on my college application? ‘Mother: doing five to ten in the federal pen.’ ”

“I know what you mean,” said Gordon McLean behind them. “My parents don’t trust me for one second. They say I should be grateful I got parents who care that much about me. Well, you know, you can overdo caring. I feel like I’m wearing a collar. What about you?” He turned to Barney. “Your folks on top of you all the time?”

“No,” Barney said, “not really. I mean, so long as my grades are okay and I don’t come home walking sideways. Or upside down. They take an interest, you know, but they’re not all over me.”

“Barney, I’d like you to come home to dinner some night,” Gordon said, “and tell my folks just that. Just that one thing. You got to be near the top of the class, you’re the editor of the paper, and you never get into hassles with any of the teachers or anybody else. So you are a walking advertisement for the freedom way of life.”

Meanwhile, seated behind a long table on the stage
of the auditorium, Matthew Griswold, who always arrived early for every appointment because that was a surefire way not to be late, was amusedly watching the lively interplay among the students as they took their seats. Including Luke Hagstrom’s affectionate bouncing of a book off Kate Steven’s head, and her taking the book and shoving it into his stomach.

A tall, bony man with stooped shoulders and sparse gray hair, Griswold bowed slightly as Maggie Crowley introduced him to Nora Baines.

“Are you going to be grading us on our loyalty to American values today,” Nora asked with a wintry smile, “or will you just be debating?”

“Are you requesting a grade?” Griswold smiled.

“Only if I can test you in return.” Nora’s smile grew colder.”

“On what?” Griswold persisted in being friendly.

“Oh, on
your
Americanism. On whether, for example, you agree with James Madison that the real danger to liberty in our democracy comes from the power of the majority.”

Griswold looked appreciatively at Nora Baines. “That’s too good a question,” he said, “for a brief answer.” He looked at his watch. “I wish
you
were debating me today.”

His actual opponent, a short, stocky young man in his late twenties with light-brown hair and an armful of newspapers, from which a banana could just barely be seen peeking, rushed onstage.

“Sorry to be late,” Kent Dickinson said. “The elevator in the courthouse got stuck.”

“I thought the ACLU could work wonders,” said Griswold.

“Hiya, Matt.” Dickinson grinned. “If only the power of faith in the Constitution
were
that great.”

“Ah, Kent,” said the older man, “if you’d only put God on your board of directors, you’d never get stuck at all.”

Maggie Crowley suggested it was time to get started. Dickinson was to be first. As he tossed his newspapers on the table, the banana slid out onto the stage and then onto the floor, to the snickering of the students. The young lawyer looked at it sadly. “That was my lunch. Oh, well,” he said to the front row of students, “maybe one of you would hold it for me.”

Going up to the microphone, Dickinson rummaged through his pockets, found a battered paperback, opened it to a page marked by a rubber band, looked up, and said:

“There was a man, a great American, who served on the United States Supreme Court for a long time. His name was Hugo Black, and he once said”—Dickinson looked at the book—“that since the earliest days of human history, I quote, ‘Philosophers have dreamed of a country where the mind and spirit of man would be free; where there would be no limits to inquiry; where men would be free—”

“And women!” Kate shouted.

“Sure.” Dickinson, startled, looked up. “Who said no? Where
all
would be free, okay, ‘
to challenge the most deeply rooted beliefs and principles.’
“He turned and looked at Griswold, who smiled and raised his eyebrows.

“Well”—Dickinson faced the audience again—“at last, at long last, such a country actually came into being. And you’re in it. You’re part of it. For the first time in the history of the world, here was a nation with—and I quote—‘no legal restrictions of any kind upon the subjects people could investigate, discuss, and
deny.’
You’ve got to realize”—Dickinson looked at the students—“this had never happened before. There had never been a place like America.”

He began to pour out some water without looking at the glass, and there was now a small puddle under the table.

“And then”—Dickinson tried again and half filled the glass—“Justice Black went on to say that the people who wrote our Constitution—among them, George Mason—knew that having a country with all this freedom going on could be very risky. With everybody constantly doubting and questioning anything they wanted to. Good Lord—sorry, Matt”—he nodded to Griswold—“you could have another revolution with all that freedom. So why did they take that chance?
Because
the one thing they knew for sure was that freedom, real freedom, is always—
always
—the deadliest enemy of tyranny. George Mason believed that, and Jefferson, and Madison.”

He grabbed for his book, which was sliding down the stand. “One more thing from Justice Black. He was talking about the people I just mentioned, and all the other American revolutionaries who defied King George and the British troops so that they could live in liberty. But again, immediate liberty wasn’t the only thing on their minds. They were convinced that, with all the risks involved, liberty would bring extraordinary advantages to Americans to come.” Dickinson looked down and read:

“They believed that ‘the ultimate happiness and security of a nation lies in its ability’ “—his voice grew louder and louder—” ‘to explore, to grow, and ceaselessly to adapt itself to new knowledge, born of inquiry, FREE FROM ANY GOVERNMENTAL CONTROL OVER THE MIND AND SPIRIT OF MAN.’ ”

Dickinson paused to mild applause from most of the students, although Barney and Luke were clapping vigorously, as were the two faculty members.

“He’s not being very objective,” Nora Baines whispered to Maggie Crowley.

“Maybe not, but he’s sure being patriotic.” Crowley laughed.

“Now”—Dickinson threw his paperback on the table. It just missed his water glass, to his surprise and pleasure. “Now, there are a lot of groups going around the country these days trying to destroy that vision—that marvelous vision of a country where individual liberty is so natural a right that it is in the very air the citizens breathe. I shouldn’t say ‘vision’ because, with
constant struggle, we’ve made it real. We
are
free. But if these groups
succeed
, liberty will be only a vision again—just the stuff of dreams.

“What groups am I talking about?” The young lawyer looked at some notes on the back of an envelope, and then stuffed it back in his pocket. “You can usually recognize them by how they call themselves. MORAL or MORALITY is in there somewhere. Or DECENCY. Or AMERICANISM. And each one of them has a list of things they want changed, you know; but what they really want is to have
everybody thinking the same way
. The way
they
think.”

“Even if that were true,” Matthew Griswold, from his chair behind the table, said mildly, “what’s wrong with that? Isn’t everybody free in this free country to try to persuade everybody else to his way of thinking?”

“Of course, Matt,” Dickinson said heartily. “But the people I’m talking about are not content to see if their ideas can prevail in the free marketplace of ideas. They are trying to get GOVERNMENT to
enforce
their notions of morality, of decency, of Americanism. You see, they do indeed believe that individual freedoms are getting out of hand, that they must be controlled. But by whose standards? By
their
standards! And Government will be the policeman to make sure that everybody else falls in line with what these groups want.”

Griswold was shaking his head while writing some notes.

“Let me give you some examples of what I mean,” Dickinson said. “A number of these groups are getting school boards to censor books. To throw them right out of classrooms and out of school libraries. And in two cities—Drake, North Dakota, and Warsaw, Indiana—they actually BURNED those books. Like the Nazis did in Germany.

“And some of these people”—the lawyer took off his suit jacket and tossed it on the table next to the newspapers—“have been pushing hard to get the government to force prayers into public schools. But suppose you don’t want to pray in school? Oh, they say, those students who don’t want to, won’t have to. They’ll be excused from praying. But that way everybody will know who prayed and who didn’t pray. That’s not a choice anyone should have to make in public—in a school or anywhere else. You know why?”