“You, you—” Robert was bewildered. It seemed incomprehensible.
“Sure,” said the rabbi. “See, isn’t it better we should sit down at the table and eat borsht and blinches and talk it over like men with sense, instead of we should kidnap you with white masks like hoodlums and try to convince you with a bath of tar and feathers, which never convinces anyway? Wouldn’t it be better, if the Tribe really had something against the Catholics or the Jews, they should bring it out—nice, quiet, like gentlemen—in the open? If they told the Catholic priests and the Jewish rabbis anything they know bad about them, wouldn’t the Catholics and the Jews themselves be the first ones to stop it? Or couldn’t they bring it up in a court if they were traitors to their country, and get the services from the department of justice and maybe deport them like it was the anarchists?”
“Yes, Mr. Levin, that’s the American way to settle things, in the open!”
“And it’s also the Jewish way,” said Levin.
“And the Catholic.”
“And it’s the Protestant,” said Hamilton. “If it wasn’t for my oath I’d bring the whole thing out in the open!”
“What oath?” asked Dr. Levin.
“My oath to the Tribe.”
“Don’t you remember that other oath we all took—McCall, a Catholic; you, a Protestant, and I, a Jew?”
“What oath?”