Free The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up by Jacob M. Appel Page A

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’slack 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