First Papers (77 page)

The need creates the stature, Ivarin thought. He will have to have the stature, or else—

That damnable “or else.”

The suspense darkened his days. His encounters with Evan began to raise doubts of his own strength; Evan faced a suspense far closer than his own, yet Evan, and young Garry as well, managed an air of composure, admirable to behold.

A fierce longing seized him, for Garry to go free, for Russia to be safe. The days passed and the fierceness grew. He was on the periphery; once he would have been able to do something that would help.

The telephone rang, and he picked up the receiver. It was Garry, asking at once for Fee.

Ivarin called her, saw her mixture of eagerness and disbelief, and then ostentatiously left. If Alexandra were at home, she would have hovered. But he was not yet reduced to eavesdropping on a child.

“Fee,” Garry said, “do you remember the time we went for the soda?”

“Of course I do.”

“Could I come over and talk to you about it?”

“Oh, Garry, of course you could.”

“I’ll be right there. Try to remember what we talked about that day, will you?”

“I don’t need to ‘try.’ I can hear every single word right now.”

“Because, Fee, Dad’s been asking me about talks I’ve had with all my friends, and I couldn’t exactly remember what we said, except when I asked if you’d ever heard your father—”

“I remember.”

“Dad said he might like to put you on the stand next week, if you would agree. I’ll be right over.”

Fee trembled at the idea of herself in a courtroom, herself in a witness chair, herself being badgered by the prosecution. She had read about it so often, in the newspapers, in mystery books and detective stories. She ran upstairs to fix her hair, and change her dress, and the trembling grew worse.

In less than five minutes, she saw him coming toward the house, heard Shag’s welcoming bark, and she ran downstairs again, to reach the front door before he rang the bell. If only they could be by themselves while they talked.

“Let’s stay here, on the porch,” she said a minute later, as he came up the front steps toward her. The tremble was in her voice, too, but he didn’t notice. He still looked tan, but he was so thin, with his cheeks caved inwards, and his eyes farther back in their sockets.

He understood about staying outside, and he talked in low tones, as she did. Then, bit by bit, she repeated what they had said that Tuesday afternoon when he had found her selling Liberty Bonds.

“Would you be too nervous, Fee,” he asked at the end, “to say it in court?”

“Even if I am,” she said.

“It might help. ‘One part in the mosaic we’re trying to build,’ to quote my father.”

“Would I say it this same way? Like just now?”

“Exactly. Dad might talk to you about it first; he couldn’t today.”

“Oh, Garry.” She looked at him and then away. He stood up and she was about to stand up also, but suddenly she bowed her head, to hide her face. For a while nothing happened, and then he put his hand on her hair and said, “Fee?” as if it were a complete question. A thousand points of light ran from his fingers through her, and without looking up, she cried, “If anything happened to you.”

This time he said, “Why, Fee,” as if it were his answer.

Her father and mother, a man named Ohrmann, the people who wrote the letters—all day, people had been testifying, and now, in a moment, it would be her turn on the witness stand.

Waiting, dreading it, Fee felt her tongue stick to the roof of her mouth. She thought of the pebble that had helped her so much, that morning a month ago, and wished she could lean down in this frightening courtroom and find one now.

Everything about it was strange and the look on everybody’s faces was, too. The prosecuting attorney, Edmonds, asked questions as if he expected lies for the answers, and, high up on his perch, Judge Perkins seemed distant and not very interested. At the special table for Garry and Mr. Paige and Mr. Paige’s lawyer friends, Garry looked worn-out and even thinner.

The fifteen or twenty rows of benches for spectators were not full of strangers, and that too was terrible. Half of them were from Barnett; how had they got there early enough in the morning to get seats? “The joy in feeling superior propelled them,” her father had said.

Mrs. Loheim was there, and Trudy, and Fee thought it cheap and mean of them to come. How long ago it was, when Trudy and her mother were part of her day-by-day world. Now here she was miles away from them, even though they were in the same courtroom. They were enjoying themselves, as if it were a moving picture, while she sat there hurting, listening to people attacking Garry, listening to his father try to pin them down, watching them slip around and attack from another direction.

There was something so old-maidish about that Victoria Alston, but even Mr. Paige could not make her admit that it was only a newspaper headline that Garry had called soapy and mealy-mouthed; Vicky stuck to it, under oath, that it was President Wilson, the Commander-in-Chief, and that she took him to task about it, but that he kept right on. It was her word against his. She swore that he said right out that nobody could make him wear a uniform or use a gun and that anybody who did was going against the word of God in the Bible. Many of the men employed at Synthex were of draft age, and he kept saying it to them, too.

None of it was a surprise; nothing all day was a surprise. Over and over for a month Fee had heard about the four letters, the people who wrote them, the preliminary examinations, and now here it all was for the last time. She could not believe a judge could really be taken in by them, but even her mother had told her optimism was foolish with the world gone mad.

“Miss Fira Ivarin.”

She sprang up with a gasp, before she remembered all the things Mr. Paige had told her about not being afraid. She was sworn in, and put on the stand, facing the courtroom, but she did not dare look at anybody except Mr. Paige. He smiled at her.

“Now, Fee,” he said in his ordinary voice. “I’m just going to ask you to tell us here about the day you had a soda with Garry. When was that?”

“The day he registered.”

“June fifth. How do you remember so clearly?”

“He showed me his card; he said he had the afternoon off to register.”

“You got talking about the war,” Evan said. “Suppose you tell it in your own words.”

She began with effort, but soon the words came faster. “And then we got talking about being patriotic, and he said it was hard to talk about things like that, and asked me if my father ever said straight out, ‘I love my country,’ and I said no, he always said things like ‘It’s a great country’ or ‘This wonderful country,’ but never the other.”

“Then what did Garry say?”

“Then he said there were so many ways a man could show that he did love it.”

“Such as—did he say?”

“Not exactly. He said he thought a man could work for his country, or suffer for it.”

“Anything else?”

“Or die for it.” She stopped, trying to remember. The courtroom was very quiet. “He said a man also could die for it, but not kill for it.”

“Did he say what he meant by that?”

She shook her head. “Not exactly. He did say you could kill off a man who was an enemy of your country, but killing him off wasn’t the same as working for the country itself, or its future, not if you kept thinking of its future.”

“Did he say what he was going to do?”

“I didn’t ask him, Mr. Paige. He never said, and I thought that wasn’t any of my business.”

Even Mr. Edmonds was not as fast and snappy with her as he had been with the other witnesses when he was cross-examining them. Fee went over the answers once more, some of them two or three times. But no matter how Mr. Edmonds phrased his questions, she always said the same things; it wasn’t hard, it didn’t need any trick or wanting to outsmart him. All she had to do was to let herself think back. All she had to do was to remember, and it was as if they were still sitting there together, with Garry saying the words right to her in that serious voice he had used then.

“—and this young lady,” Mr. Edmonds said to the judge, “who is apparently in love with the defendant, and who, in her youth and innocence, was taken in by his words—”

“I wasn’t taken in, not a—”

But Mr. Edmonds stopped her, and Fee saw Mr. Paige shake his head, as a signal. She was too angry to listen to what the prosecutor went on to say. Something that began, “despite this appealing faith in what she thinks is the defendant’s independence and courage.”

“It
is
courage,” Fee said. And she looked at Garry for the first time. He was staring at her, and he didn’t look away. He was staring at her in a new way; she had never seen him look at her that way before, and she looked down at the floor. Then she looked back, as if he had told her to. He was still looking at her. He was different. The whole world was different.

There was the waiting to be got through while the judge deliberated in his chambers. Unable to remain seated, Stefan Ivarin left the courtroom and went outside to the corridor, pacing up and down.

She helped more than anyone else, he thought again. More than I have helped, for all my wishes to be of use.

It’s the inevitable sequence. The old cannot find the way; the young instinctively do find it. The old back down, the young take over.

Not yet, he thought, not yet. I’m not backing down quite so soon. Even if I was of no real help to Evan and to Garry.

How did I think I could be of help? How was I of help about San Diego?

Not for the trial, he suddenly thought. Never for a moment. I didn’t know of the vigilantes until it was all over, the trial done with, the verdict known. Not until then, when Evan came back, after all his legal work was done.

Yet I did help. Not Evan, but the fight itself. His fight, mine.

Fights can be lost in a courtroom. But they can go on outside. That’s what I knew then, that’s what I have forgotten.

The recess lasted for a few minutes over an hour. Then Garry rose to hear the verdict. It was, “Guilty, as charged.”

The sentence was a fine of five thousand dollars and imprisonment in a Federal prison for a term of three years.

He felt it, the ache changing to anguish. He walked out of the courtroom, thinking only, Go slow, don’t look around. Slow, careful, slow. Empty, no thinking, no feeling, you knew it all along.

Slow, careful, there it is again, the prison, the same until they ship you to the other.

Three years. Three, three, three, three. Dear God, help me.

A
T TWO THAT NIGHT,
Stefan Ivarin went to his desk and began to write. The house was silent, Alexandra long since sleeping the burning sleep of sorrow.

He had been unable to consider bed, he could not concentrate on chess, on his mathematics. Over and over he saw Garry’s last quick look at his parents as he left for prison, heard Alida’s sobs, Evan’s voice stating the intention to appeal.

All at once he abandoned his attempts to settle down to some distraction. He drew one of his narrow white pads toward him, shook down his fountain pen to free the flow of ink, and without clear intention, without knowing to what end, he began to write.

Across the top of his page, taking great care with the formation of each letter, he blocked in a phrase.

AN AMERICAN BOY IN SIBERIA?

It was when he put in the question mark that certainty erupted within him. That question mark was like a signal, a wave of a hand—it was his old style, it was his old self.

Assassinate a Book? Assassinate a Preface? Pogrom
—
California Style?
A dozen headlines came back, his own headlines, that he had written atop his own editorials. He looked at this one and then wrote a subhead.

Arrest and Imprisonment

of a Youth

Who Talked

Once more he paused. Then he began; the sentences started to come; for a long time he wrote, with scarcely a correction or interlineation.

There is a boy I know who is dead wrong about this war. In my opinion, dead wrong.

I call him a boy, because he grew up near me, the same age as my son, his parents close friends of my family in the small town where we all live.

Today this boy, Garrett Paige, twenty-nine, was sentenced to a prison term that will last three years.

For what? For something he said. Not for something he did, but for something he said. For many things he said. Said to the people he worked with, said to the people he knew as friends, said for a long time before we got into the war, and continued to say after we were in it.

What he said was, “It is wrong to kill.” He is a deeply religious boy, a Unitarian, which again is something I happen not to agree with, but to his religion he has committed himself with all his young heart.

And so, he often quoted the Bible and said, “‘Thou Shalt Not’ means ‘Thou Shalt Not,’ and there are no exceptions.”

(This is where I disagree. I hold this war to be inescapable if man is to rid himself of tyranny and oppression.)

Young Paige is a chemist, and when his boss first ordered shells and bombs and explosives for war, he quit his good job rather than make them.

That was three years ago. The world war was Europe’s war then, not ours. Now it is ours. A big change.

It changed you and me; it changed Garrett Paige. What did not change for him was his faith in his Bible and what it said. What did not change was his belief in his right to say so.

He said so and lost friends; he said so and lost more than friends; he said so and on July tenth was arrested for the things he said. Things about war, about this war and all war. Things it is his right to say in a free country.

This free country.

His right, in war or peace, so long as he says only what
he
feels and does not say to one other man, “Break the law.”

This he never did. Not once.

Busybody letters said that he did; busybody witnesses swore that he did. And they lied.

But this country is now partly enslaved to the Czar of Orthodoxy, the Emperor of Conformity. The Siberia I speak of awaits the man who says the unpopular thing—