The hunt that has walked backward out of New Mexico since 1950 reaches, in this number, the author's unaccounted Sunday, and he turns it aside by the means he has declined to name since 1951. What must be said about that means, and about the man it fell on, is kept for the notes. —Ed.
I said at the end of the last number that I would open the door, and I will open it in the first sentence. In June of 1951 I gave the Federal Bureau of Investigation the name of a friend, to move its eyes off a Sunday of mine, and the name did everything I asked of it. He had done nothing. He had told the truth to every man who asked him, myself included, and the truth he told me is what I built with. The rest of this number is the particulars.
The setting the reader mostly has. Since February of 1950 the serious men had been walking backward out of New Mexico along every mile the doctor's Buick ever ran, and the walk had prospered: the courier taken in Philadelphia, the machinist after him, and in the spring of '51 the couple in New York tried and sentenced to the chair, so that every man who had ever ridden a Sunday read that sentence twice. That was the loud end of the apparatus. The quiet end worked by mail: a letter to your employer, a clearance stopped like a watch, a board reading you a summary of what somebody said about you in private to somebody official, no names, no questions to the source, doubt resolved against you by written instruction. A man's living ran through his clearance that year, and his clearance ran through files no court would ever see.1
Sennett's wire found the office the first week of June, in the old dialect: LONDON MAN TO BE SEEN AGAIN. LENDING AMONG THE QUESTIONS. CAR CALENDAR WANTED ENTIRE. YOUR SUNDAY STILL OPEN. CALLERS CERTAIN. VOLUNTEER NOTHING. WRITE NOTHING. I burned it in the ashtray and got no religion off the smoke, my nose having rung on the Tuesday previous, two days to the hour; the wire and the nose agreed to the syllable.
The stake I will put down plainly. The Sunday itself I had dressed and sold across my own front room the year before: the birthday, the six o'clock, the tank as found, check the horn. It had passed. But behind the Sunday stood four minutes, a hotel desk and a mailbox in Santa Fe, once, on the other set of books; and across the water sat the most exact memory I ever put a question into, which had never yet been asked about borrowers. Any month they chose, the men with the calendar could carry their maps to his cell, and the mile would come up out of the gate logs with me in it, and behind the mile the minutes, and behind the minutes there is no further Klipspringer to tell about. I had two days of notice and no door; and when there is no door I make one, out of whatever is standing nearest.
Dow came on the Thursday, the same young man at his elbow, the same pencil chewed at the same end. The gyroscope sat on the desk where his thumb had found it twice before, on the rule that a room once read must never afterward look revised. We walked the Sunday again, Dow laying his questions along the old answers the way a man lays a ruler along a line to see whether it wanders. It did not wander; I had leaned it on true things. Then the young man closed the notebook, which is the minute in any interview that matters, and Dow sat back with his hat on his knee.
"Off the record," he said. "You knew that post as well as any man we talk to. In two years of this, has anything come back to you? Men who've been in touch since. Calls you've turned over afterward."
There stood my door, opened from the other side, the only way I have ever liked one opened. I let the mantel clock work before I answered.
"There were two calls," I said. "I set them down to nerves at the time, and I may still. October of '49, a few weeks after the announcement. February of '50, the week the London man was in the papers. The same man both times, at night, to my home number."
"Name?"
"Corbett," I said, and when the pencil paused I spelled it, unasked.
I gave them the rest at a witness's pace. That he had run a spectrograph on the Hill, which put him as near the innermost arithmetic as a man stands without doing it. That he professed now, downstate. That he had ridden the doctor's Sundays, some of them. That on the telephone he had wanted to know what the Bureau had asked me and what I had answered; that he had asked who talked shop off the Area, who had been short of money, who went down to Santa Fe, how often, and with whom; and that he had said a thing I had turned over since: that they have the gate logs, six years of passes, and read them like scripture. "That is a man keeping count of what can be counted against somebody," I said. "I never found a reason he should be."
Every word of it had been said on those calls, and the reader of the thirteenth and fourteenth numbers has heard it said. The questions were the Bureau's own, put to a frightened man for three courteous hours and repeated to me down a wire at night because I was where he put his fright. All I did was take the quotation marks off: a level voice, and the other man's own sentences in a changed order, and he had furnished the sentences himself.
Dow turned his hat a quarter on his knee. "Why sit on it two years?"
"Because he's a friend," I said, "and because I judged it nerves. You asked what has come back to me. It comes back."
The young man wrote friend in the notebook; I watched the word go in. At the door Dow said I had been very helpful, and that there was likely nothing in it. "There generally isn't," I said, and saw them down the steps, and stood in the June evening while their car found the corner. My legs held and my dinner sat quiet; the reader has seen them do otherwise over smaller work.
Nobody has asked me about that Sunday from that Thursday to this.2
Corbett telephoned the last week of July. Not the half-tone high I knew; low, slow, careful, a man crossing a floor he no longer trusted.
"They've stopped my clearance, Jay. The Navy wrote the university. There's a board in the autumn. I'm allowed counsel and I'm not allowed to know anything; there's a summary, read at me. It says I telephoned former project personnel after Bureau interviews, checking accounts. It says I showed unusual curiosity about money, and about Santa Fe." The line breathed a while. "Those are my own calls, Jay. Somebody took my own calls and turned them wrong side out, so the questions face the other way."
"Summaries compress," I said. "It's what they're for."
"Who would say it about me, though? Who?"
"Anybody. That's the year we're standing in. Names come off lists, and everybody is on a list."
"You told me once that innocent men sleep. I sleep, Jay. I go off fine and I wake at three and lie there being innocent at the ceiling, and it turns out that holds a bed better than it holds a board." He did not laugh, and I did not either. "Will you write for me? A letter to the board. You knew me on the Hill, you know me now, and you're the hero of the atomic desert. A paragraph of yours outweighs a ream of mine."
I had my rule, and I used it. "I keep nothing in writing, Corbett. Forty years of habit; it doesn't break for weather." Because he stayed quiet I gave him the dressing too: "Besides, the last thing your file needs is a famous name pinned into it. They'd only ask why I troubled."
"That's careful," he said at last. "You were always careful, Jay. I never learned it in time." He thanked me. He thanked me for the counsel, and for two years of listening, and he rang off gently, the way he did everything.3
Afterward I sat with my thumb on the eagle-stamped gyroscope, spinning the gimbal and letting it settle. The bearing had gone gritty, and I made a note to have it seen to.
Tuesday's three lines came as ever: the lake was warm at last, the Averys' boy was ordered to Korea, and Daddy said a works runs better for a weeding, mind the margins. I wrote the board of one its two true sentences, the machine is well and the summer holds, and sat a minute over the word weeding, and then did not sit over it.
The board met in November, downstate. Nothing came to me while it sat; that apparatus publishes nothing while it works. What came came in December, off page three of the Tribune, a wire item four sentences long, laid on my blotter by Miss Dunn, folded to the place, as near as she ever came to putting me a question. Clearance denied; services no longer required; a physicist, a contract, a board; and the name spelled right the first time, as it had been for the doctor in another February.
The instrument maker on Wabash had had the gyroscope since the first of the month, for the cleaning and a stand besides, a desk being no place for an article that rolls. His number was in my book. I read the item once more, lifted the receiver, and asked the operator for the shop.
I had heard this call before, and this time I heard it before it was made. My father made it in the first week of September, 1922, to a house with a murdered man upstairs in it, about a pair of tennis shoes, being, he explained, in some inconvenience without them. I made it myself in August of 1945, to a post hospital, about a silver lighter, and heard whose call it was at the halfway point of it, and did not put up the receiver. In December of 1951 there was no halfway point to wait for. I knew whose call this was with the receiver still in its cradle and the item still on the blotter, and I asked for the number knowing it, and when the shop answered I asked after my property.
The gimbal was cleaned and true, the man said; did I want the stand in walnut or in oak. "Walnut," I said. He wanted a name for the ticket, and I gave it and spelled it, the second name I had spelled to a pencil that year.4
I never heard Corbett's voice again. A letter came in the spring, the hand small and even on the envelope, and I burned it unopened, per the religion. What became of him after, the notes may carry. It was never my department.
So the year's ledger, kept where I keep everything, nowhere. One Sunday, closed; the men with the calendar drew the car's year complete, my mile is not in the drawing, and the four minutes behind it no man living has ever asked for. One name, given by mouth, in my own front room, nothing in my hand and nothing in theirs with my hand on it. One man finished, who had told the truth to everybody the whole way down; the reader should keep that part; it is the working part. One gyroscope on a walnut stand, where a feature writer would find it a year later and caption it an early Klipspringer instrument. Flowers to Fort Worth in April, on schedule. And the crown the reader watched fitted in the last number: this was the year the fitting was bought, and that was the name it was bought with, and when the bill presented itself on television a year later, it fit. I slept excellently that winter. The reader was promised the fact would do its work; it is doing it now.
From the east, nothing all that year, and nothing needed to. Then in the new year a picture postcard of the Michigan Avenue bridge, no message, the address in a small tidy hand I knew from a card in Berlin. Anton had kept his own calendar of me. What he wanted for keeping it is the next number.
The quiet end was the federal loyalty-security apparatus, and it worked as the author describes. Executive Order 9835 of March 1947 established loyalty boards throughout the civil service; Executive Order 10241, of April 1951, amended the standard so that a reasonable doubt of loyalty sufficed for dismissal; and the industrial and service security programs carried the same method into every company and university holding a government contract. At the center of the method stood the confidential informant. Information reached a board as a summary, its source designated by a letter and a number and certified as of known reliability; the accused saw no accuser, heard no name, and cross-examined nobody, and the boards were instructed to resolve doubt in favor of the government. Several million Americans were screened under these programs. Some thousands lost their livelihoods; no count was kept of those against whom, as here, no act was ever alleged, association and curiosity and other men's sentences sufficing. The Supreme Court did not reach the question of confrontation until 1959, and then reached it by half. —Ed.
The file on the Corbett matter was released, in the usual condition, a generation later. It contains the summary of an interview of June 1951 with a confidential informant, designated T-3, described as of known reliability and a figure of standing in the computing industry, whose reported statements correspond to this number's account nearly sentence for sentence, down to the gate logs read like scripture. The informant's name is protected in every released copy by the same ink that protects a lady of Fort Worth elsewhere in these files (No. 14, note 4). The inquiry into the automobile's calendar was marked closed within the week, and the borrowed Sunday appears nowhere in the reconstruction as finally drawn. No paper anywhere in the file carries the author's hand. He gave the name by mouth; the file, exact about everything else, preserves only that a mouth gave it. —Ed.
Corbett's clearance was suspended in July 1951, and his case was heard by a regional board that November. The derogatory information was the informant summary of the preceding note, read to him in précis with the source withheld; his counsel's request for the informant's identity was denied as contrary to the national interest. The board found no disloyal act, and was not required to; it found reasonable doubt, under the standard then five months old. Denial issued in December 1951. The university, whose Navy contract required cleared men in its laboratory, did not renew his appointment, and it lapsed in June 1952. Between 1952 and 1955 he applied to twenty-two departments of physics and was appointed by none, the file traveling faster than the mail. From 1953 he taught general science at a high school downstate, by all surviving accounts well. In April 1956, under the review procedures instituted when the climate broke, the denial was reversed and the clearance restored; the letter reached him at the high school, in the spring term, and he did not return to research. He died in November 1959, of a coronary occlusion, at fifty. Every statement he made to the Bureau was true; every statement he made to the author was true; and nothing in the record suggests he ever learned which of the two had cost him. —Ed.
The daybook of a Wabash Avenue instrument maker survives with the firm's papers and carries an order taken by telephone on 14 December 1951: one gyroscope, German make, gimbal cleaned and re-pivoted; one display stand, walnut; the customer's name spelled out on the ticket. It is the stand visible beneath the instrument in the Tribune photograph of November 1952 (No. 17). December 14 was the day the wire item on the board's finding ran in the Chicago papers. The author's father made a call of this kind once, in the first week of September 1922, to a house on Long Island where his host lay dead, concerning a pair of tennis shoes; the author has now made it twice, the first time, in the twenty-third number of the first bundle, hearing whose call it was at the halfway point, the second time, by his own account, knowing before he lifted the receiver. Readers of the first bundle have the pattern entire, and the editor will not draw it again. The tennis shoes are described in the Preface, where they remain. —Ed.