The Old Religion Page 7

  It never existed? How, then, did Frank communicate with Jim, when Jim requested reemployment? They’d all testified he had not come into the office. How did they communicate? He wrote and Jim wrote back.

  This was the point Frank tried to make in his conference with his attorney. “Ask them that,” he said, and, always, the man looked down and away, indicating, “Please do not tell me how to run my affairs. I do not wish to embarrass you by pointing out your ignorance of my field.”

  But the man was a fool.

  Frank saw, now, that that which he had taken for courage was foolhardiness. The attorney had no desire to see Frank acquitted. An acquittal would subject him to the rage of the city. No. He wished to be seen to have made a valiant effort. He wished to have upheld, at great personal cost, a principle—the right to a fair trial.

  “What a fool. What a fool I was,” Frank thought. “Why did I enter into this charade? What could the man have possibly gained from my release? The fees were poor and had he ‘won,’ they might have been his last.

  “The swine,” he thought, “I can see him now, in his clubs, in his haunts.

  “Smug. Sure.

  “‘That was a fine thing you did …’ And the man deprecating it. With a sad shake of the head, to indicate ‘a sad business.’

  “A vile business, but for the principle involved. And the interlocutor reiterating, ‘No. A fine thing you did.’”

  He could see both men. In some club. On some veranda. Bursting with self-congratulation. Calling the evil good. How like the Christian. How like the Christian, he thought.

  Testimony

  Of course he’d looked at the girl. How could he not? He was a man. But that was what they’d questioned at the medical examination.

  Fowler had talked of “rumors of his deformity and his perversion.” What were these rumors? They had not existed until Fowler called them into being.

  Then the girls had come forth and alleged, “He could not do it like other men could,” and they said, “… his deformity,” two of the three stumbling on the word.

  In what was it supposed to consist? This disgusting, undescribed, and indescribable malformation? That, as the others did, he had ungovernable sexual tastes but, unlike them, was incapable of satisfying them? That he, the Jew, was the same ravening lecher as the black, but his “performance,” unlike that of the black in the Southern fiction, was pathetic—that he was, in fact, a eunuch.

  Was that why he’d been elected as the killer, in preference to the sweeper, Jim, who, it was clear, had killed the girl?

  For Jim came in a dead man already. He was tried and convicted through proximity to the crime, and by the color of his skin—already sentenced absent the evidence, which served not to indict but merely to confirm and to add the verdict of reason to that of race prejudice.

  Jim was already dead. He’d raped and killed the girl, and afterwards scrawled, “I rite this while big blk mans has his way wid me.”

  “Why would a black man,” the attorney prosecuting had said, “why would a black man,” he said, “try to evade suspicion by writing a note pointing to himself …?”

  “Why would a man want to kill?” the defense attorney said. “The note is false. …”

  “Are you suggesting,” Fowler said, “that this nigger, the sweeper, as in a chess game, thinking three moves ahead, that the man little more than an animal resolved, ‘I will kill, I will molest and kill …’?”

  Here the gallery and the jury and the judge inclined their heads somewhat as they always did at this point in the narrative, in respect for the dead, in solidarity with each other and with the generations past who had upheld the code, the amorphous code, the well-nigh or perhaps completely nonexistent code, to which they felt that they subscribed.

  “What is this code?” Frank thought, as the prosecution droned on in that cadence, the substance of which never failed to entrance and delight his listeners.

  “… and what is that right?” he thought. “What is that sweetness of which there is no surfeit?” Frank thought. “It is rectitude.”

  “… to her death—to her death, I say—and wrote a note? Had the presence of mind, barring—barring, mind you—the ludicrous notion that he had the foresight, that he had the presence of mind, to forge a chain of causation whereby we would think, ‘It cannot be Jim did the deed. Why? Because a note exists, written by the girl, and naming Jim …’ But, of course, Gentlemen, the note is a forgery; and the defendant wrote the note. And so …”

  Frank’s mind drifted. “What folly the law is,” he thought. “What might take its place? Perhaps it exists to prepare us for loss. And for sorrow—the clean promise of which becomes almost welcome after the obscene travesty of the law. And if we are to have cruelty, might we not call it by its name?”

  And he saw that for which he wished, that for which he wished in the law was not “common sense” but “paradise.”

  “I understand rage,” he thought. “How comfortable to have it endorsed by one’s peers. How lovely. That the state, that the community, that one’s home and religion, all say, ‘Go forth and kill. In the name of God.’ What have they done else these two thousand years,” he thought, “with their prattle of ‘progress,’ of ‘the future,’ of ‘change,’ of ‘America’? What swine, what fiends, what hypocrites—this American Religion.”

  “… he wanted me to do it with him,” the factory girl had said, “and he made me go into the other room with him, and he told me I didn’t do it with him, I’d lose my job, but when we got there, he took down his things … but he …” And here she paused, and when the courtroom was cleared of the women spectators, and when the judge and the jury and the prosecutor all leaned forward, all quite, as solemn as only prurience endorsed can be, all that she would say was, “He was formed different.”

  He was formed different. She would say no more. And she wept.

  Then they would look at him—proud, vehemently proud of their restraint in not falling upon him then and there and having his life.

  Formed different, she said. And the subsequently scheduled medical examination had the city rapt, waiting for news.

  His wife

  It was the grossness of his wife, he knew, which upset them. Her weight. Well, that was one of life’s tragedies.

  And it was not—for he thought of it at length—that the association with the animal prompted the comparison; no, he corrected himself, it may have, indeed, prompted it, but it was not at the core; for they looked like pigs, the men with their pink, rusty, milk-colored skins, and their necks growing out over their collars. They looked like pigs, with their short noses and their cheeks puffed out, and they were fat.

  They were fat, with their bellies dropping out and down over the belt, and vast legs, and the slow way that they turned their heads; who considered themselves full of self-restraint (you saw it in their eyes), who turned their heads so slowly as he passed, to say, “Yes. I see you. And I won’t show that I judge you—though you are a fiend.”

  Full of that vaunted Southern self-respect.

  And there was that which was attractive in it. There was that in it he could respect, if it were not so false. So vicious.

  He saw it was directed at his wife also. That they looked at her as they would at a sow. And, then, what was he?

  For they could not see their lack of fastidiousness, and accounted his fastidiousness priggish or inverted—his dress, his figure; not “dapper,” as in some favored one of their own; not “trim,” not “slight,” not, if one of their own group at the Coffee Corner, “bantam,” “Banty.”

  None of it. He was the invert who did what with that gross woman behind him, behind the rail, sitting and crying. Crying at any hour of the day—at this description, that assertion, from the fatigue, God knows what, from the anxiety, from shame.

  At any moment. Continually, preternaturally. Weeping. As the crowd laughed at her, as if she were some animal.

  How could they laugh at her? Who spoke of Souther
n Womanhood? They were the animals.

  And he supposed it was a blessing, that she was not what they, if it went that way, would call attractive, seductive, oriental, voluptuous—for what would they not make of that, who were so interested in sex, in his sex. In his penis, in his habits. As if he were a specimen captured by savages who’d never seen a white man.

  Photographs

  If it had been the watch, could it not arguably have been the cardinal? And if it had been one or the other, did that not argue a plan; and, if a plan, then a reason for his trial?

  Or, if he’d been chosen at random, then, at least, reason behind a plan in which he had been caught by accident?

  And if there was that force sufficient to make such a plan—given he’d been ensnared through no fault or through no error of his own—would that not counsel submission to a power of such magnitude?

  Submission, possibly, but not acquiescence, he thought, unless one could discern the reason, or the good, in it; and, even if so, why me, he thought, rather than another?

  Absent which answer, submission would become courage, not to say faith.

  “How much do we unwittingly intuit,” he thought, “in extenuation of that which we lack the honesty to call ‘random’? So,” he thought, “so, we could argue both sides of the proposition.

  “And if there were no predestination in the walk, or in the cardinal. Or in the watch, or in myself at all, and all my actions, and my very self, then …”

  “The Greeks wrote,” the Rabbi had said, “‘Either the Gods exist or they do not. If they do, then, no doubt, things are unfolding under their control; if they do not, why should we mourn to depart a world ruled by chance?’”

  “All right. The watch. The cardinal,” he thought. “Yes, these, but what portents did I ignore—for surely my consciousness, my capabilities, and my predilections prescribe the choice of my impressions. If I had been ill on that day, would I have stopped by the jewelry window at all? Or might I not have walked to the pharmacy? And what would have happened then? Or if I had stopped at Sloan’s for a cigar? Or if I had lingered to watch the cardinal …?”

  “… the pictures, Mr. Frank …” the doctor said.

  Frank came around. He heard the man repeat the phrase, and his eyes focused, slowly, on him. “The pictures, yes,” Frank said. They were of girls in various states of undress. Some having or pretending to have sex with other women, some with men, some simply sitting, looking, Frank thought, quite bored. Drugged, perhaps. He heard the doctor drone on. “… your impressions …”

  “What?” Frank said, and drifted away.

  “… force you to cooperate?” he heard the doctor say. Then he was back again in contemplation of the cardinal.

  “… or come another day. But I must insist on some, some, some semblance of cooperation.” Frank drew in a long breath.

  “Or do you wish me to go and file this report with the Commission?”

  Frank looked at the man.

  “… and say that you’ve been uncooperative?” the man said.

  “I’ve lived my life as a fool,” Frank thought. “Every word and every gesture of my life—those I called Good and those I called Bad—has been the act of a fool …

  “If there is this vicious stupidity in the world, and I have, to this point, escaped it by chance, by merest chance, thirty years, and accounted my astounding fortune as a show of merit.” He sighed.

  “A man had as well establish a school in How to Avoid the Plague …”

  “… all right,” the doctor said.

  “… because he’d had the blind fortune to’ve escaped it himself,” he thought, “and so act as those ‘authorities’ who have escaped knowledge both of their and others’ savagery, and set themselves up as philosophers.”

  The man closed his portfolio and stood and gazed at Frank.

  “I’m sorry,” Frank said. “What is it you wished to know?”

  “It’s too late for that,” the doctor said.

  “Well, then,” Frank said, “please excuse me if I’ve put you out.”

  He saw the man look to determine if he was being mocked, and he saw that the man felt he most probably was not, but could not completely dismiss the possibility, and he saw the man decide that dignity was best protected by an angry exit, and he left the room accordingly.

  “Where was I?” Frank thought. “The bird. Although I wonder what he expected me to find in those photographs. Or who the men were who created a science of looking at them. Wouldn’t any two people, of necessity, have different thoughts and feelings, looking at those cards? And the doctor himself,” he thought.

  “I wonder what his feelings were, in showing them to me.”

  He rubbed his face. “What can they have been?”

  The guard opened the door and motioned for Frank to stand, which he did, reluctantly, as he preferred the room to his cell.

  He stood. The guard re-manacled his legs and motioned Frank to leave the room.

  Frank shuffled down the corridor. The leg chain ran between his ankles. At its center was welded a second chain, the other end of which was a large ring, which the guard held in his hand.

  The guard walked behind Frank. The two moved slowly down the corridor, and through a large metal door, and into the cell block.

  “What can he have seen in those photographs?” Frank thought.

  “And what would induce a man to take a job like that?”

  Examination

  They claimed, as their racial due, the right to intimidate, and were outraged when that right was not endorsed.

  The way of our race, he thought, has been to agree with their position, and to couch all requests as appeals to their supposed merit.

  How insulting the phrase “a credit to his race”; and, equally, “their contributions to the country.” What country? And, to turn it on its head, those who would patronize the Jews, what contributions had they made, past the accident of their ignorant birth?

  What Indians had they fought? What British? What vaccines invented, songs composed, what, in short, had they done except rest content on some supposed inherited merit? Those savage dogs on a dungheap, he thought.

  “But nothing will be defended as vehemently as a lie, and there’s the truth of patriotism.

  “‘Contributions,’ indeed, meaning, ‘what have you done for me?’

  “A Christian country,” he mused, “built on the lie ‘I am saved.’

  “Saved from what? From death, which means what? That they have been rendered immortal? By what? By the incantation of a ritual phrase, ‘I believe …’

  “What pagan idolatry,” he thought. “It makes the sin of the Golden Calf charming and mild.

  “I am saved …” To be proved when?

  And can they really believe that their life on earth is worthless? Do they not mean it, rather, of the lives of others?

  “Savage, psychotic swine …,” he thought.

  As they prepared for his second examination.

  “And what did it mean to her, ‘He is not like other men’? She means, it was some misheard understanding of circumcision. Yet she was unsure what it meant.”

  His lawyer should have said “Disrobe,” he thought.

  “He should have had me do it in the courtroom, where it could have been shown.

  “What did it mean? What can the girl have meant?”

  He sat in his cell and looked back on the physical examination.

  “Yes, I will. No, I will not. Yes. I will,” he thought. “No. I will not. No. I will not think of it.”

  But he could not keep himself from reliving the humiliation, the extremity which was mitigated only by his sense of wonder.

  “If only everyone knew,” he thought.

  The end of the trial

  The power of the prosecutor’s case—to the extent it rested on fact—the power lay in the adamantine refusal of all to believe in Jim’s intelligence. In their ability to ascribe more than an almost preverbal animal responsivenes
s to him.

  “What contempt he must have for whites,” Frank thought.

  “He says ‘nawsuh’ and lowers his eyes. And he raped the girl, and killed her, and is killing me, and evades all penalty and all suspicion by saying ‘nawsuh.’”

  “Jim did not write the note, for Jim cannot write. Who, then, was the only person capable, placed at the scene? Who …?” the prosecutor had said.

  But there were the letters. There was the black girl who had gone to his lawyer’s office and offered to sell the letters Jim had written her.

  The handwriting appeared to be the same as in the Mary Phagan note, “man has his way wid me.” And Jim had signed them. There it was. There was the man proved a liar.

  “Then,” Frank thought, “if there were only two who could have written the note, and if the writer was the murderer, and if it were shown that Jim wrote …”

  But what happened to the letters?

  “Love thing, I wants jus to be your man, an …”

  Day after day, Frank waited. And he waited till the end of the trial. His requests to his lawyer were answered by the same patient nod of the head.

  But the letters never appeared, and the trial ended, and he was sentenced to die.

  Taken to prison

  Whom did one thank when the sun went down?

  What could he thank, indeed?

  For it was pleasure to occupy his mind with philosophy, or conjugations of a verb, or to make lists. He would list the cities he had visited, the books he had read—the novels of Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, or Anthony Trollope. When he could not sleep he would have the books. And he would hoard them, as he thought of it, the more memorables titles till the end; sometimes, of course, he would forget them—the memorable ones—as he made his list. At two, three, at any hour of the morning, he would be anxious to keep in his mind, in his sleepy mind, the well-known titles, and use them to swell his total.