Before Sacco and Vanzetti could be executed for ingratitude in the Massachusetts style, however, huge crowds turned out in protest all over the world. The fish peddler and the shoemaker had become planetary celebrities.
"Never in our full life," said Vanzetti, "could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man, as now we do by accident."
If this were done as a modern Passion Play, the actors playing the authorities, the Pontius Pilates, would still have to express scorn for the opinions of the mob. But they would be in favor rather than against the death penalty this time.
And they would never wash their hands.
They were in fact so proud of what they were about to do that they asked a committee composed of three of the wisest, most respected, most fair-minded and impartial men within the boundaries of the state to say to the world whether or not justice was about to be done.
It was only this part of the Sacco and Vanzetti story that Kenneth Whistler chose to tell — that night so long ago, when Mary Kathleen and I held hands while he spoke.
He dwelt most scornfully on the resonant credentials of the three wise men.
One was Robert Grant, a retired probate judge, who knew what the laws were and how they were meant to work. The chairman was the president of Harvard, and he would still be president when I became a freshman. Imagine that. He was A. Lawrence Lowell. The other, who according to Whistler " . . . knew a lot about electricity, if nothing else," was Samuel W. Stratton, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
During their deliberations, they received thousands of telegrams, some in favor of the executions, but most opposed. Among the telegraphers were Romain Rolland, George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, John Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis, and H. G. Wells.
The triumvirate declared at last that it was clear to them that, if Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted, justice would be done.
So much for the wisdom of even the wisest human beings.
And I am now compelled to wonder if wisdom has ever existed or can ever exist. Might wisdom be as impossible in this particular universe as a perpetual-motion machine?
Who was the wisest man in the Bible, supposedly — wiser even, we can suppose, than the president of Harvard? He was King Solomon, of course. Two women claiming the same baby appeared before Solomon, asking him to apply his legendary wisdom to their case. He suggested cutting the baby in two.
And the wisest men in Massachusetts said that Sacco and Vanzetti should die.
When their decision was rendered, my hero Kenneth Whistler was in charge of pickets before the Massachusetts State House in Boston, by his own account. It was raining.
"Nature sympathized," he said, looking straight at Mary Kathleen and me in the front row. He laughed.
Mary Kathleen and I did not laugh with him. Neither did anybody else in the audience. His laugh was a chilling laugh about how little Nature ever cares about what human beings think is going on.
And Whistler kept his pickets before the State House for ten more days, until the night of the execution. Then he led them through the winding streets and across the bridge to Charlestown, where the prison was. Among his pickets were Edna St. Vincent Millay and John Dos Passes and Haywood Broun.
National Guardsmen and police were waiting for them. There were machine gunners on the walls, with their guns aimed out at the general populace, the people who wanted Pontius Pilate to be merciful.
And Kenneth Whistler had with him a heavy parcel. It was an enormous banner, long and narrow and rolled up tight. He had had it made that morning.
The prison lights began their dimming.
When they had dimmed nine times, Whistler and a friend hurried to the funeral parlor where the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti were to be displayed. The state had no further use for the bodies. They had become the property of relatives and friends again.
Whistler told us that two pairs of sawhorses had been set up in the front room of the funeral parlor, awaiting the coffins. Now Whistler and his friend unfurled their banner, and they nailed it to the wall over the sawhorses.
On the banner were painted the words that the man who had sentenced Sacco and Vanzetti to death, Webster Thayer, had spoken to a friend soon after he passed the sentence:
DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID TO THOSE
ANARCHIST BASTARDS THE OTHER DAY?
20
Sacco and Vanzetti never lost their dignity — never cracked up. Walter F. Starbuck finally did.
I seemed to hold up quite well when I was arrested in the showroom of The American Harp Company. When old Delmar Peale showed the two policemen the circular about the stolen clarinet parts, when he explained what I was to be arrested for, I even smiled. I had the perfect alibi, after alclass="underline" I had been in prison for the past two years.
When I told them that, though, it did not relax them as much as I had hoped. They decided that I was perhaps more of a desperado than they had at first supposed.
The police station was in an uproar when we arrived. Television crews and newspaper reporters were trying to get at the young men who had rioted in the gardens of the United Nations, who had thrown the finance minister of Sri Lanka into the East River. The Sri Lankan had not been found yet, so it was assumed that the rioters would be charged with murder.
Actually, the Sri Lankan would be rescued by a police launch about two hours later. He would be found clinging to a bell buoy off Governor's Island. The papers the next morning would describe him as "incoherent." I can believe it.
There was no one to question me at once. I was going to have to be locked up for a while. The police station was so busy that there wasn't even an ordinary cell for me. I was given a chair in the corridor outside the cells. It was there that the rioters insulted me from behind bars, imagining that I would enjoy nothing so much as making love to them.
I was eventually taken to a padded cell in the basement. It was designed to hold a maniac until an ambulance could come for her or him. There wasn't a toilet in there, because a maniac might try to bash his or her brains out on a toilet's rim. There was no cot, no chair. I would have to sit or lie on the padded floor. Oddly enough, the only piece of furniture was a large bowling trophy, which somebody had stored in there. I got to know it well.
So there I was back in a quiet basement again.
And, as had happened to me when I was the President's special advisor on youth affairs, I was forgotten again.
I was accidentally left there from noon until eight o'clock that night, without food or water or a toilet or the slightest sound from the outside — on what was to have been my first full day of freedom. Thus began a test of my character that I failed.
I thought about Mary Kathleen and all she had been through. I still did not know that she was Mrs. Jack Graham, but she had told me something else very interesting about herself: After I left Harvard, after I stopped answering her letters or even thinking much about her anymore, she hitchhiked to Kentucky, where Kenneth Whistler was still working as a miner and an organizer. She arrived at sundown at the shack where he was living alone. The place was unlocked, having nothing inside worth stealing. Whistler was still at work. Mary Kathleen had brought food with her. When Whistler came home, there was smoke coming out of his chimney. There was a hot meal waiting for him inside.
That was how she got down into the coalfields. And that was how she happened, when Kenneth Whistler became violent late at night because of alcohol, to run out into the moonlit street of a shanty town and into the arms of a young mining engineer. He was, of course, Jack Graham.
And then I regaled myself with a story by my prison friend Dr. Robert Fender, which he had published under the name of "Kilgore Trout." It was called "Asleep at the Switch." It was about a huge reception center outside the Pearly Gates of heaven — filled with computers and staffed by people who had been certified public accountants or investment counselors or business managers back on Earth.