The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up

by Jacob M. Appel

  Arnold grinned. The girl looked up at him puzzled, biting the knuckle of her index finger, as though trying to figure out whether he was joking. She appeared so vulnerable, so close to tears, that the botanist instantly regretted his sarcasm. He wished he had some profound statement about patriotism to offer her—but he couldn’t even remember the stock platitudes that Gilbert Card had shared over dinner. He had absolutely nothing useful to say. He resisted the instinct to let her cry against his chest. Then the girl’s jaw stiffened and her hands balled into fists. “You’re screwing with me, Arnold,” she snapped. “I can tell.”

  “Excuse me?”

  How quickly she’d gone from Mr. Brinkman and pretty please to Arnold and screwing…

  “I’m not a moron,” she seethed. “I know you’re thinking I’m just some dumb girl reporter from some second-rate paper, but at least have the guts to say it. You’re pathetic, Mr. There Is No Story. You don’t think I can tell you’re holding out for one of the big-time magazines.”

  “I had to go to the bathroom,” Arnold insisted.

  “Bullshit!” The girl rummaged through her bag and slid a business card onto Arnold’s desk. “If you feel guilty for treating me like shit, here’s how to find me. I doubt you will—but deep down you’ll have to live with knowing it was my interview. It is my interview, goddammit, whether I get it or not.”

  She was gone before Arnold could stop her. He picked up the card.

  CASANDRA BROWARD

  The phrase “Reporter, Daily Vanguard” had been scrawled in red ink beneath her name. There were also a handwritten address and phone number.

  Arnold pocketed the card. He was feeling mildly pleased with himself—as though he’d withstood a brutal cross-examination—when he remembered that nothing outside his office had changed. His home was still surrounded by journalists; his wife still had him in the dog house. And to the Spotty Spitfords of the world, he was still Public Enemy Number One.

  Once Arnold was certain that the girl wasn’t going to return—that her departure wasn’t part of some complex ploy to catch him by surprise—he tried to phone Judith. He wasn’t particularly ready to talk to her—usually, if they fought in the morning, they both stewed through the workday and then made up in the evening—but these weren’t ordinary circumstances. Besides, he realized that he owed her an apology. Not for his antics at the baseball game, or his refusal to prostrate himself before the mob, but because he hadn’t explained to her why he couldn’t do what she wanted. Not adequately. In the heat of the moment, he’d probably just sounded obstinate. Besides, until now, he hadn’t even fully understood himself. The girl’s questions had helped him see things better: He wasn’t merely protesting for the right to protest or for some abstract principles. In a way, as peculiar as it sounded, he was protesting against all of the injustices he’d enumerated to Cassandra. Scottsboro. The Chicago Seven. Matthew Shepard. Bonnie Card had a bumper-sticker pasted to her office door that read: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” If he could only find a way to communicate these feelings to Judith, he thought it might resonate with her too. He hoped it would. But Judith didn’t answer the phone. Neither did the machine. After twenty rings, he had to accept that she’d unplugged the console or pulled the wire out of the jack. It was possible she didn’t even realize he was gone, that she thought he was still blowing off steam in the garden. He slammed down the phone and stormed out into the corridor.

  Guillermo had gone up front to supervise the morning deliveries, but the manager had left open the door to his office. Arnold stepped inside. The Venezuelan relied on the skylight for illumination, and preferred an oscillating fan to air-conditioning, so the warm, shadowy room felt like a government building in Havana. White bands of cigarette smoke still floated on the stagnant air. Arnold considered phoning Judith for a second time. But what would he say? That he’d suddenly realized the world was an outrageously unreasonable place? Then he couldn’t apologize because he was standing up for Sacco and Vanzetti. He knew Judith. She was far too practical—too reasonable—for all that. He didn’t phone. Instead, he flipped on the television.

  They were conducting another interview, this time with a nasal-voiced young attorney from the American Civil Liberties Union. “We’re not in the business of forcing ourselves on people,” she said. “If Mr. Brinkman would like to retain our services, this is certainly the sort of case we’d take a serious look at. But that’s entirely up to him. Trust me, there’s no shortage of work for us these days.” Arnold flipped to another station. Spotty Spitford was speaking to a different reporter, demanding that the mayor and the governor condemn “this insult to our boys in uniform.” On a third channel, the governor’s spokesman explained that Yankee Stadium was a private venue and that the Yankees were certainly entitled to ban Mr. Brinkman from future events. He hadn’t voted for the governor—in fact, he despised the governor—but if the governor could get him banished from Yankee stadium forever, that would be enough to earn his vote.

  Arnold changed stations one final time and found himself watching cartoons. The roadrunner charged off a cliff; the coyote followed. Then the coyote looked down. But the coyote halted mid-plummet as the broadcast switched to a “Breaking News” bulletin.

  Suddenly, he was watching the front of his own house again. This time, the door opened. Cameras snapped; protesters chanted. Gilbert Card stepped out into sunlight. The immigration attorney wore a modest pinstriped suit and carried an attaché case. When he raised his hand, like the Pope blessing St. Peter’s, the crowd went silent. Then Gilbert stepped to the edge of the porch and read from a prepared statement.

  “My name is Gilbert Card. I am a spokesman for the Brinkman family.”

  Someone shouted a question at the lawyer.

  “Card. C-A-R-D. I’m an attorney with Willoughby & Throop.”

  “Willoughby. W-I-L-L-O-U-G-H-B-Y,” he said. “And Throop. T-H-R-O-O-P.”

  When the onlookers quieted down, Gilbert continued.

  “First, let me thank you all for being here. These are difficult times for our nation and especially for New York City, where we live in the perpetual shadow of the horrors of September 11th. That is what makes Mr. Brinkman’s behaviour at yesterday’s Yankees game all the more unfortunate. I’ve known Arnold Brinkman for thirty years and nobody is more sorry about what happened yesterday than he is. He did not mean to show disrespect to anyone, least of all to our heroes in the armed forces. Mr. Brinkman has been under a lot of stress recently. As difficult as it may be for many people to understand, he thought he was doing something patriotic by refusing to stand. He now recognizes how mistaken he was and apologizes wholeheartedly.” Gilbert looked up at the audience. “Thank You,” he concluded. “God Bless America.”

  A murmur of approval spread through the crowd. Shouts of “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” drowned out the journalists’ follow-up questions. The two protesters clad in Revolutionary War garb struck up a festive duet on their fife and drum. If you’re just joining us from an affiliate station, the fast-talking reporter explained, the so-called Tongue Traitor has apologized… Arnold flipped the channel.

  “—and we’re getting breaking news of an apology from the Tongue Traitor—

  “—so I asked, when exactly would you perform CPR on a fish?—”

  “—Traitor’s attorney has issued a plea for forgiveness—”

  “—disguised as an onion—”

  “—actually said, ‘God Bless America’—”

  “—the other sister, the one who looks like a hedgehog—”

  “—has apologized—

  “—an apology—”

  “—at only $99.99—”

  “—rather moving statement from a lawyer representing the Tongue Traitor. It appears to represent a complete change of heart….”

  How dare he?! His own best friend on his own front lawn serving him up to the lions. This was worse than Nuremberg; this was like the Politburo officials who read al
oud the confessions from Stalin’s Purge Trials. He’d be remembered forever as the man who apologized for sticking out his tongue. Even though he wasn’t the slightest bit sorry—even though he’d do it again and again and again.

  Arnold was about to turn the TV off—or bash it in—when a commotion erupted behind the fast-talking reporter. The camera quickly focused on Spotty Spitford, who stood in the centre of the street with a bullhorn in one hand and what appeared to be a Bible in the other. “We will not accept no surrogate apologies,” the minister declared. “We will not accept no statement from a paid mouthpiece. You can’t buy no substitute, Mr. Brinkman. This ain’t no Civil War. We are the people and we ain’t gonna accept nothing less than a personal and unconditional plea for forgiveness.” Spitford raised his arms—the megaphone in one, the Bible in the other—as though the heavens might open and summon him up to duty. No such luck. “Let the coward speak for himself,” the minister shouted. “We want Brinkman.”

  The mob took up the chant of “We want Brinkman!” and carried it along the block like a hearse.

  They were still shouting, “We want Brinkman! We want Brinkman!” when Arnold came charging up the street. The protesters now numbered in the hundreds. Not just professional agitators, but ordinary people who’d come to “defend their country.” There was even a contingent of World War II veterans from the American Legion. A smaller counter-demonstration occupied the opposite sidewalk: Fewer than a dozen college students and down-at-the-heel ex-hippies who could easily have passed as a reunion of the Chicago Seven. One waved a Soviet flag. Another wore a rubber Richard Nixon mask. Their posters read: “Free Palestine” and “Fur is Fratricide.” When Arnold passed through their ranks, none of them recognized him.

  Arnold pushed his way toward his porch, where the two officers still served as sentries, and the front door stood slightly ajar. Adrenaline and anger carried him forward. When he mounted the steps, the masses stepped back—as though fearing violence or contagion. “I’ll be brief,” he said.

  “Be sincere,” shouted Spitford.

  “I’ll be brief and sincere,” answered Arnold. “I do not apologize. I am not sorry. That man had no authority to speak on my behalf.” He took a deep breath. “It is you who should apologize. I wouldn’t stand during a goddam song. You murdered Sacco and Vanzetti. You tell me who has blood on his hands?” Then he stepped into the house and slammed the door behind him.

  Judith was sitting on the piano bench. Her face was streaked with eyeliner and her hair hung down unevenly. “Sacco and Vanzetti?” she said. Her voice was hardly audible.

  “Where the hell is Card?” shouted Arnold.

  “He thought it was best—”

  “He knew I’d kill him.”

  Judith shook her head. “Please, Arnold. It’s not Gilbert’s fault. I told him you wanted to apologize. If you’re going to kill anyone, you’re going to have to kill me.”

  “Godammit, Judith. You had no fucking right….”

  “And you had a right to run off on me like that?” cried Judith, rising to her feet. “I couldn’t find you. I had no idea where you went. Do you know what it’s like to be all alone with that going on outside?”

  The chanting started again. Louder. Swelling with rage.

  “Is that all you have to say to me?” asked Arnold.

  “I don’t think I have much of anything to say to you right now,” said Judith. Then she walked up the stairs and left Arnold standing alone.

  CHAPTER 5

  They lived the next five days as though prisoners in a city under siege. Arnold actually knew a considerable amount about sieges—or he’d thought he had. He’d always taken an interest in the botanical ignorance of the besieged, the malnourishment that arises from prejudices against edible shrubbery. In Vicksburg, for example, the Confederates exhausted their energies brewing coffee from cardboard when they might have grilled up steaks from their honeysuckle and verbena. When Henry IV lay siege to Paris, the locals stewed their own furniture to stay alive while embankments along the Seine sprouted enough purslane to feed the entire city. Even the mass starvation at Leningrad could have been eased, if not prevented, had the Soviets fished for edible marsh plants beneath Lake Ladoga. At one point, Arnold had considered writing a book, The Epicurean’s Guide for Famines and Embargos, but he’d intended this as a serious project, a self-help volume of the life-saving variety, while every editor he’d consulted had hoped to market it as a novelty item. Now Arnold realized how poorly he’d understood the experience of the besieged. He’d always thought of sieges solely in terms of captivity and deprivation—but neither of these conditions applied to him and Judith. He continued to go to work every morning. Judith could have taught her classes at St. Gregory’s, if she’d wanted to. They endured no shortages of food or electricity, no periodic barrage of artillery shells. Yet their days were living hell. No matter where he went, Arnold couldn’t escape the feeling that he was surrounded. His deed followed him through the workday like a personal rain cloud. It was the psychological battery of the siege, rather than any physical blockade, that tormented him.

  Not that the demonstrations didn’t continue. Every morning, at precisely eight o’clock, the singing protesters paraded around the corner and manned their picket lines. The news media estimated their number at nearly five thousand—far larger, it was frequently pointed out, than the group who’d marched against a Ku Klux Klan rally on the steps of City Hall the previous year. Of course, at the time, the media had initially reported the anti-Klan protesters to number 30,000. The pro-Arnold forces didn’t grow nearly as rapidly as did his opponents. Occasionally, on his walk to work, a stranger offered Arnold moral support. The greying transvestites at the costume shop promised they were praying for him. But none of these sympathizers had the time, or possibly the nerve, to join his ragtag band of defenders, which on Tuesday afternoon temporarily dwindled down to two pot-bellied motorcyclists handing out Mardis Gras beads on his behalf. By Thursday, his “followers” had been infiltrated by the radical Spartacist League and had turned against him. While Spitford’s thousands condemned Arnold’s lack of patriotism, dozens of anti-government leftists denounced him for his “petit-bourgeois” business dealings and his apparent unwillingness to renounce his citizenship. Spitford’s “Abolitionists” recruited three bagpipe players to accompany their fife and drum team. In response, the Spartacists banged tambourines and kitchen pans. The only sound more unnerving than the chorus of God Bless America that disrupted Arnold’s weeding each morning was the lacklustre rendition of the Internationale that followed. On the second day of the protests, Arnold incorporated a pair of earplugs into his gardening outfit. This tactic succeeded in filtering out the protesters, but also blocked out the songbirds, the crickets, even the flutter of the breeze through the hemlocks. It more or less defeated the purpose of living.

  While the protests grew larger and more aggressive, Arnold’s relationship with Judith deteriorated. Initially, he’d hoped her attitude might mellow. He had made meaningful sacrifices for her in the past Like placing his mother in that hyper-sterile nursing home when he’d have preferred that Mama come to live with them. Yet now she couldn’t accept that his apologizing didn’t matter as much to her as his not-apologizing mattered to him. Judith wouldn’t even give him the opportunity to argue his case. After he’d disowned Gilbert’s statement, she refused to speak to him at all. When Arnold entered a room, she left it quickly. If he tried to touch her, she swatted his hand away. One afternoon, she took Ray to the aquarium. Arnold suggested they leave by ladder. Instead, Judith walked straight through the front door and down the block, past the hooting demonstrators, without turning her head. Otherwise, she didn’t leave the house. She phoned in sick at St. Gregory’s. Her painting materials collected dust on the dining room table. Arnold’s wife spent her evenings ensconced in front of the television, watching their private lives being dissected for public outrage and amusement. A conservative cable network was running “24-hou
r Tongue Traitor” coverage that included interviews with a disgruntled former student whom Arnold had failed for cheating, although the news broadcast didn’t mention the cheating episode, as well as with the father of the nine children from the baseball game. “My daughter was scared,” the man said. “She’s had nightmares.” The media also burrowed deeper into Arnold’s past: his draft deferment during the Vietnam War, his summons for being in a public park after hours as a teenager. (Nobody explained that he’d been in the park hunting for moonflowers, which blossom only at night.) A digital counter at the corner of the television screen calculated exactly how much time Arnold had gone without apologizing. The counter was shaped like an alarm clock, but with horns and a forked orange tail. Judith called out the number of hours periodically. “I thought we were on the same side,” Arnold pleaded with her. “Can’t you try to see things my way?” In response, she shut off the television and locked herself in the upstairs bathroom. At night, she slept in her studio. She could have kept this silent treatment going for weeks or months. Judith was capable of just such intransigence. But even a siege does not relieve a household of its minor crises, such as the daily crush of domestic challenges. It was one such episode, on the third morning of the protests, that finally forced them to speak.

  Arnold had just come inside from the garden, where he’d been slicing a fallen sycamore with a chainsaw. He’d earlier put off this task for several months. Truthfully, the saw blades always scared him. But that morning he’d been in the mood to hew something—or someone—limb from limb. Chopping up the tree trunk presented fewer negative consequences than dismembering the Reverend Spitford. Besides which, the whir of the implement had helped drown out the chanting from the street. Arnold had thrown himself into the sawing with full force, working up a sweat, and when the task was done, he actually found himself disappointed that there was nothing else left to cut. On the way to the tool shed, he snipped at a few stray wisteria vines, gumming up the blades. Back in the townhouse, he ran the tap in the ground-floor bathroom and splashed his face in the sink. Then he took a swig of cool water from a paper cup. What he really wanted was a tall glass of orange juice, but Judith was preparing the kid’s breakfast in the kitchen, and Arnold didn’t want to drive her out of the room. Even though she was being unreasonable, “forcing” her to relocate made him feel guilty. So he sprawled out on the living room sofa to kill time.