The Book of Stone. Jonathan Papernick
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over Stone now than he had in life, his voice as clear as a bright spring day. Something was under the robe with him as he read, massaging his skin, soothing his muscles, the whispers like oxygen breathed into his lungs. Once or twice in the middle of the night, the street outside silent, it dawned on Stone that he might be losing his reason. He couldn’t go forever without sleeping, but an inner urgency drove him to read these books as quickly as possible. He didn’t need to eat; he devoured the words, and they filled him. He rationed water from a gallon jug and smoked cigarettes and refused to answer the door when Pinky knocked. Pinky slid periodic scrawled notes under the locked door telling him to stop feeling sorry for himself, he just needed to get laid, his mother had called twice and wanted to speak with him, and some giant, bearded man in a black suit and hat had been looking for him each of the last three mornings. Stone found a store-bought birthday card from his mother among the notes and lit it on fire, together with the notes, watching with fascination as they burned to nothing.
A leather-bound book by Henry Ward Beecher was of particular interest to Stone, considering he had studied at the school the preacher had founded near the end of his life. A quotation had been underlined by the Judge in reference to the Sharps repeater rifles abolitionists had shipped to Kansas in crates labeled BIBLES: “There is more moral power in one of these than in one hundred Bibles.”
Stone had spent six years at Beecher Academy in downtown Brooklyn, but he hardly recalled a single thing he had learned. The school was housed in an old Tudor Gothic structure, its brownstone facade covered in creeping ivy, the school’s maroon-and-white flag hanging limply on its pole beside a dispirited-looking Stars and Stripes. Beecher Academy had been established after the Civil War by Henry Ward Beecher as an institution of higher learning “founded upon the principles of abolitionism, liberalism, and faith,” but clearly the school’s mission had changed by the time Matthew arrived. Beecher Academy had been on the verge of going broke throughout the sixties and seventies, as enrollment dropped and drugs found their way into the classrooms. Students graduating with inflated grades and poor skills became known as Beecher bums, fit only to work in the service industry or, at best, to join the white-collar assembly line of corporate America. Infusions of private money, particularly from the Jews of Brooklyn Heights, turned Beecher around during the eighties, and by the end of the decade, it was one of the top-rated independent schools in the tristate area, boasting a 99 percent graduation rate and college acceptances at the top schools across the country. After Stone’s mother left, the Judge had chosen Beecher because of its proximity to the courthouse and its graduates’ high acceptance rate at Ivy League schools. Matthew had refused to go to an Ivy League school, but now, thinking back, he had no idea why.
There was one day at Beecher Academy that stood out from all the others, a day that would define his father, and Matthew’s broken relationship with him, forever. It was a Friday afternoon in early September of Matthew’s sophomore year. He had been dozing through math class when he heard sirens in the streets, filling the air, layer upon layer, in a rising pitch.
Matthew would soon learn that Menachem Wuensch, an Orthodox Jew driving a truck for Court Street Medical Supplies, had run over and killed a seven-year-old Arab boy as he sped down Atlantic Avenue. Wuensch, afraid to get out of his truck in the heart of Brooklyn’s Arab shopping district, rolled down his window, saw the boy’s broken body, and drove off. Within minutes, the store shutters all along Atlantic clanged shut and dozens of Arabs charged toward the medical supply shop shouting, “Kill Jews!” They threw rocks and bottles, smashed windows, pulled the teaching skeleton into the street, and burned it in effigy.
Court Street was burning. A fire engine blocked the entrance to Joralemon Street, where Beecher Academy was on lockdown, and a police officer called out instructions through a megaphone. “Please lock your doors and stay inside until order has been restored. Please stay away from windows, and do not open your door for anybody.” There were rumors Molotov cocktails were flying in front of Borough Hall.
The riot became a media sensation, another link in the narrative of Brooklyn’s racial strife. Only this time, the spin was new: African Americans were not at the boiling center. The oldest conflict in the world, as old as Isaac and Ishmael, was playing out on Brooklyn’s mean streets, and the media descended hungrily.
A boy had been run over on Atlantic Avenue, and in the ensuing riot one Arab man had been killed, almost a dozen injured.
A twenty-two-year-old yeshiva student named Isaac Brilliant, who worked as a part-time stock boy at the medical supply shop, was charged with aggravated assault and the murder of Nasser Al-Bassam, a sixty-three-year-old Palestinian-born shopkeeper who died of his injuries.
The case went before the Supreme Court of the State of New York; Walter J. Stone presiding.
The flamboyant Reverend Randall Roebling Nation, a preacher who claimed to have been ordained at the age of eight, took up the fight in his daily soapbox orations: “The elucidation of the struggle is coming to a head; the judges will be judged and the people will have justice, freedom, and liberty at last!”
Matthew knew Nation, with his tailored suits and gold jewelry, was full of wind, politicking simply to get his face in the papers. Every day in front of the courthouse, he took aim at the Judge, shouting, “I beseech you all to listen to R. R. Nation, as Nation speaks God’s truth. Judge Stone is a criminal, a crook, and a thief, and if he is not punished in this life, God will punish him in the next.”
Even as Brooklyn’s Arab community protested Walter Stone’s selection, picketing outside the Supreme Court building, the Judge said nothing. A spokesman stated, “The Judge’s record speaks for itself.”
Matthew heard nothing from his father, who had receded into his study with his law books for days on end, leaving only to dump his full ashtray into the toilet. By the time the case went to trial, Matthew had developed constant canker sores in his mouth; he found it difficult to speak, his mouth a piece of tenderized meat. Some days he didn’t even want to leave his room. He gargled salt water, apple cider vinegar, peroxide; nothing helped.
One evening, his mouth on fire, sucking on ice cubes to numb the pain, Matthew knocked on his father’s study door. “I want to go to the emergency room,” Matthew said through the closed door.
“Fine,” his father said after a moment.
Matthew remained at the door, his fist poised to knock again.
“I said fine.”
How wretched, how awful Matthew felt knowing he was just a repulsive, inconsequential insect in the pitiless eyes of his father. That night, Matthew burned himself for the first time. He realized, as he stood, match in hand, in his bathroom, that out of all things in the entire universe, he truly had control only over his own body. He could cause pain whenever he wanted and remove it just as easily. What a release!
MURDER INC. KIN TO RULE was headlined the day before the trial, and the story was picked up by the national media. The trial had all the makings of a Movie of the Week, said a Los Angeles Times columnist, who joked that Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now should be cast to play Judge Walter Stone. Matthew was amazed by the shallowness of some of the coverage, at the reporters playing casting director as if this trial were first and foremost a commodity to be gobbled up by Hollywood.
The Judge broke his silence the day before the trial was to begin. Appearing on the front steps of the Supreme Court, wearing his gray three-piece suit and half-moon glasses, he read from a prepared statement: “I am addressing the spurious canard that appeared in this morning’s paper in relation to my father. What my father may or may not have done before I was born holds no bearing on today’s proceedings, and I expect to hear nothing more on this matter.”
The jury was comprised of seven women and five men, three of whom were African American, four Hispanic, four white, and one Korean American. There was one Jew on the jury: Emile Alcalai, a teacher from Sheepshead Bay.
Brilliant, flanked by his lawyer and the court bailiff, wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a black silken yarmulke on his head. He smiled from behind his beard and nodded his head confidently at the court assembly, as if he knew all along he would soon be free.
When