Silas Timberman (12 page)

A student inquired, “Couldn't we ask the questions and let you answer them or not, as you see fit?”

“No.”

It helped to a certain degree, yet Silas had a feeling that he was dodging something that could not realistically be avoided. The students had questions and wanted to ask them. If his colleagues in the department had questions, they carefully avoided asking them or making any other reference to the affair. He ran into Frank Maxton, an assistant professor, and Joseph Prendergast, an instructor, both of them in the English Department, and while they said hello cordially enough, they avoided all reference to
Fulcrum
. Even Bob Allen, who grinned and squeezed his arm, made no reference to the editorials. People, he realized, were being careful. This was possibly a great joke and compounded foolishness, but nobody wanted to put his foot into it until he knew exactly what it was. Nor was he, on his part, exactly sure that he knew what it was; for he had no idea what was going to happen next, what was expected from him, from Lundfest, or from anyone else concerned. And being in that state of mind, he decided to go home.

He was leaving the building, stepping into the raw ocean of the campus, the hundreds of boys and girls and men and women who were moving in the wonderful, aimless pattern of youth along the walks and across the lawns, the shady trees and the green grass, the fine hedges and the old, ugly, ivy-clad halls, the sunshine and the winey autumn air—stepping into all of this, so right and familiar and so much a part of him and of his best memories, when he felt his sleeve plucked and turned to see Jerome Lennox, a tall, loose-limbed young man, turned twenty or so, red-headed, with a pleasant plain face. He was in Silas' American Literature class, a sophomore or a junior, he thought, interested, but without too many words or questions. Now he fell into step alongside of Silas and said, a little uncertainly.

“I appreciate how you feel about this business, Professor Timberman—but I thought it important enough to ask you—if you'd mind if I walked along with you a little and we talked?”

“About what?” Silas wondered if the slight drawl in Lennox's voice meant the South. He scented Texas, and he had never found it possible to like Texans. “Not this
Fulcrum
thing. I won't discuss that with you, Lennox.”

“Yes, that was it,” Lennox said. “You don't have to discuss it, but I'd like to say something, if I may.”

“I'd rather you didn't.”

“I knew you'd feel like that. It's important enough for me to push on, if you'll let me.”

“You're from Texas, aren't you?” Silas asked, the words sounding petty and inane the moment they were spoken, himself unaware that the only analogy to what he felt now had existed during his army days, the closeness, the frustrations, the stress between one man and another—and the comradeship as well, the great, driving need for comradeship; and asking himself as well, “Why did you say that? And what was the need of it and the meaning of it? And why does a series of small, senseless events cause you to close up in yourself?”

“I am, sir. El Paso.”

“Oh, go ahead, Lennox,” Silas told him. “Say whatever you want to say. There's no reason why you shouldn't.”

“I suppose there is reason enough, sir. I can imagine how you feel about all this, and maybe the best thing I could do is keep my oar out of it. But I admire you—I mean I like what you have to say. It's straight and honest, and it makes sense, which is a hell of a lot more than many things do these days. I mean you're a good teacher—and maybe I feel some kin because you were in the service too—”

Silas stared at the boy in astonishment. “How old are you, Lennox?”

“Older than I look. I'll be twenty-three. I enlisted the last year of the war.”

“Why?”

“Well, I don't know. A wild kid, I suppose—and I hated what they stood for I hated fascism.”

“At seventeen?”

“You don't need a college education for that, sir. The point is, I think you're getting a raw deal, and I don't think you know it, and—oh, what the hell, I'm putting my foot into it, but I made up my mind that I would say my piece.”

“Raw deal—what do you mean, Lennox?”

“This isn't just my own feeling. We've discussed it, myself and some of the other guys, and they agreed that I should talk to you. You see, it wasn't just an accident or kid stuff that those two editorials appeared this morning. It wasn't just some irresponsible guy going off half-cocked. It was thought out, and you could walk into it.”

“What the devil do you mean?”

“I mean that certain parties want to get you, sir.”

“Don't be dramatic, Lennox. Are you trying to tell me that Alvin Morse planned this to get me, as you put it. If you are, it's fantastic, and, I think, irresponsible on your part.”

“No—no, not Al Morse. He's honest—he just fell right into it. He has a bent for the dramatic and he thought this would be a fine way to get
Fulcrum
out of the doldrums. But he doesn't use his head, and he'll end up by being suspended. The brain here is our good friend Frank Hoffenstein. There's the lad. Go ahead, Morse, print it, and then I'll have my say. Hoffenstein was looking for you, Professor Timberman. Maybe he didn't know you from Adam, but he was looking for you, and now that he has you, he's going to cook with gas.”

Silas stopped walking and turned to face Lennox. He was baffled, incredulous and angry, and he didn't conceal the way he felt. “What the devil are you talking about, Lennox? Are you trying to tell me that Hoffenstein planned all this—to get me?”

“That's exactly what I'm trying to tell you.”

“It must be stylish these days,” Silas commented. “No one thinks twice before he slanders someone else.”

The blood ran up into Lennox's face, the neck first, and then suffusing his cheeks, and his small blue eyes became cold and withdrawn. “All right—I felt something like this. Did you ask me if I was from Texas because you hate Texans? Maybe you hate logic too. Well, I tried.”

“I'm sorry,” Silas said softly.

“Yes—oh, the hell with it! You're an honest man. They ought to frame the honest man before he disappears, build a statue to him or something. I'm trying to be honest with you, sir. Hoffenstein is out to get you—yes, to drive you off the campus. This is the first gun.”

“Why? Why? I don't even know him.”

“He doesn't know you either. But he wants to be a big man. Next week he'll be editor of
Fulcrum
. There's only one place for the smart money these days—and that's to lead the crusade against communism. That's Hoffenstein's role. He's going to be the boy Brannigan. This is his last year, and he's going to walk out of here into the state senate—over your dead body.”

“Why?”

“You keep asking me why, Professor. I don't know why. I'm just a dumb kid from El Paso. I don't know what makes Hoffenstein tick—I don't know what's in that object he calls his soul. But I write for
Fulcrum
and I know a louse when I see one, and I hate to see you destroyed because some smart apple can use you.”

“Aren't you being dramatic—”

“Why do you keep calling me dramatic? I'm not dramatic—but a lot of other things are. We live in strange times. The big man today is the man who hates communism, and it's the neatest thing they've found in a long time. You can do anything with it—and get anything. They don't care whether Mark Twain's an Elk or a cigar store Indian—the point is that he's useful. You're useful too.”

“You don't think I'm a communist?”

“No, I don't think that. Neither does Hoffenstein. It doesn't matter. I hate to talk to you like this—”

“Go ahead, Lennox. Feel no compunctions. What do you think I ought to do?”

“Nothing. Don't rise to any bait. There are a lot of good guys who see what time it is. Most of them are afraid—everyone's beginning to get a little afraid—but they'll still come around. All I wanted to do was to say my piece and let you know how this is planned.”

“Are you sure, Lennox?”

“I'm sure.”

* * *

How, he wondered, had it all happened in so short a time? He walked on home, reflecting that only two weeks ago, he had lived normally in a world of normality. It was a solid world, and while he was apt to regard it cynically at moments, he was also apt to believe at other moments that it was the very best of all possible worlds. It was a world of things, and you moved through it acquiring things and a little knowledge and experience as well, but mostly things. You had a variety of problems, fears, doubts, uncertainties and suspicions, and you were even bitterly unhappy at times and perhaps never very happy, but you always had the comfort of believing that the things made up for that.

You never really believed that there were people around you who didn't have things, deep freezers and frozen foods and canned foods and soft white bread wrapped in wax paper and cookies in boxes and Coca-Cola in cartons, and a kitchen table with a formica top, a refrigerator, a washing machine, a television set, an automobile, clothes, and green grass on the lawn and an extension to the telephone—and in a college town, this was not intruded upon by any whimper of pain, any cry of hunger, any slum or shack or hovel. In the best of all times, most people worked and most people had money in their pockets, and everyone left everyone else alone—and there it was, the best that man had been able to do, and enduring with solidity from day to day and from year to year.

And what had begun to happen, he wondered? And what was going to happen? And how was it that this sunny and durable world could be threaded through and through with fear?

Or was it? The evidence of his senses, his eyes and ears and nose, did not make it appear so. Here it was with the afternoon waning and the sky a fine, purple-tinted blue, and a cool, clean wind blowing. The great oaks and maples on the campus had bedecked themselves in a grand display of color, red leaves and bright yellow and pale yellow-green and subtle oranges and crisp yellow-browns, and the yellow-green carpet of matted, broad-leafed grass, so typical of the middle-western small town, made a ground-covering new and ancient at the same time. Across the brow of the hill, he caught a glimpse of the lush valley, the checker board of farm land, the strips of woodland, the lazily-winding river—and all of it was so good and fruitful, so evident in its plenty, that it did not seem possible or sane that fear could grow in this soil.

The atom bomb was far away, a myth, a legend, a fable without substance or meaning. These were not a martial people. The war in Korea was an unhappy and unpleasant thing, but it was distant, and no echo of bomb or gun penetrated here. No shell had ever exploded here, no machine gun chattering of death, no death ever unleashed from the sky.

The land lay in thoughtless peace, or so it seemed to Silas Timberman, but the peace inside of him had gone. He was suddenly alien in the peaceful land—and he wondered whether Lawrence Kaplin felt this way all the time, and how did those others feel who were never encased in the security of things, the Negroes who sometimes walked silently through Clemington, in and out, for you are not wanted here and we have no color problem here, where no Negro family has lived for eighty years, the itinerant farm workers in their faded jeans and pale blue shirts, the men without home or hope who put together packing cases on the river bank and lived in them—even in Clemington, which welcomed visitors by saying so brightly,
a town without rancor, without dirt
—even in Clemington?

It had changed, but what had changed and how much had changed he could not truly say. His department head had told him what he must teach and what he must not teach; the president of the university had hinted that he was disloyal; he had become the subject of campus gossip; and a student had spoken to him as no student ever had before, a long-limbed, red-headed Texan who destroyed all his carefully-built premises about Texans, defining plots and counterplots, cheap intrigue and whispered threats; and over it all was this nameless, pervasive, faceless threat and innuendo of communism, a word without meaning or definition, a threat, horror, devil, menace, indescribable, unknowable, inside of himself, outside of himself, something that had to be something because it could not be nothing and do as it did as nothing—and so forth and so on his thoughts moved, until good reality returned with the running, whooping welcome of Brian and his tale of adventure in the supermarket.

When Silas came into the house, he embraced Myra and held onto her as if they had gone through a long, long separation.

* * *

Myra was putting up a tray with tea and cookies, and remarked to Geraldine, “I hope this is right for the press. You never know. Our first press conference.”

“Why don't you give them cocktails?” Geraldine asked sourly. “All reporters like to drink anyway.”

“I don't think reporters like to drink more than anyone else, and three or four of these are students—and we have enough on our heads without feeding cocktails to students.”

“They're always drunk on television.”

“It's true, this is obviously television coming to life,” nodded Myra. “We'll stick to tea.”

“Silas is famous, isn't he?” Susan asked. “It's nice to have someone in the family who's famous.”

“It's not nice at all,” Geraldine said, and then Myra left the rest of it and walked in with the tea to where Silas faced a roomful of men and women and note pads and cameras—and reflected that in a way it was true, fame or infamy being equally enticing to a perpetually bored and hungry public who could find enticing, between the war and horror headlines, the proposition that Samuel B. Clemens was a tool of the communists. As Myra put down the tea things, Silas was talking, but managed a grateful nod at her appearance, even as he said,