It was the muffled sound of argument that awakened him.
There was a thin line of ache behind his forehead as he listened, sorting and separating the muffled sound into two sounds, the first shrill and feminine, cross and indignant, the second low and male, calm and placating.
His head was deep in the fat pillow, so deep that when he turned, he could not see the time. The pillow had been handmade by Aldora, almost double-sized and stuffed with gray goose down, and presented to him on their first anniversary, so long ago, when their marriage still had hope.
The cross fire of altercation beyond his bedroom wall, increasingly abrasive, continued louder. He lifted himself ever so slightly on his forearm and was able to make out the time on the electric clock humming upon the end table beside the bed. It was eight fifty-two, and although the room was darkened by the drawn shades, he knew that it was morning.
He realized that he had meant to be awakened earlier, had meant to set the alarm, but had forgotten to do so before falling asleep. The shutoff lever on his telephone had banished all calls, and in his utter exhaustion he had slumbered on and on. It was shameful, he thought behind the headache, and, as always, to do anything shameful alarmed him. Other men could afford mistakes, small and large, but he could afford none, not the smallest one. Several times, during his residence in Washington, he had awakened with the remnant of the same dream, that he had been treading water in an enormous aquarium, and that all its sides were painted with blue eyes staring at him. The shimmering fragment of dream had always left him uneasy.
But now, the private hook of humor that he possessed but had not dared to reveal to anyone but Wanda and his closest friends extricated him from the fish bowl, and he was free to admit to himself that he had performed his first act as the President of the United States. He had overslept.
Suddenly the enormity of what had happened last night, and of what he was, oppressed him with its unreality and automatically forced him to retreat into the cup of the down pillow.
He had, he remembered, been told by someone last night that, after formally resigning from the Senate, he had become the President of the United States at ten thirty-seven in the evening. He had not been returned to his brownstone row house until after one o’clock in the morning. It was almost impossible to recollect what had taken place in the time between. He had signed something, yes, his first official signing; he had affixed his name to the proclamation that poor Speaker MacPherson was supposed to have signed, the same statement that had been hastily prepared for the Speaker and was to have been flown to Frankfurt. This proclamation was the official announcement of T. C.’s funeral and the period of national mourning.
He had listened to Secretary of State Arthur Eaton and Governor Wayne Talley expound on the critical Roemer Conference, and he had not absorbed a word of it. He had sat with them, smoking cigars until his eyes smarted and his throat felt blistered, and he had sat with the sympathetic press secretary, yes, Tim Flannery, the redhead, preparing the carefully worded release to all the news media. Then others had swum about them, senators and representatives whom he had known during work hours for years, and T. C.’s Cabinet members, whom he had hardly known at all, and they had spoken of approaches and strategies and public relations and the Party, and he had been grateful that they had addressed Eaton and Talley and Flannery and not himself.
He had been almost physically ill from the tension of the events of that day and evening, and after midnight there had been a stirring and rising, and he had been released, guided to a Cadillac limousine outside the South Portico. He remembered protesting against the two Secret Service agents who had entered the limousine with him, and protesting, with embarrassment, against both the motorcycle escort of police which had preceded him and the second car of agents which had followed him to his home.
He recalled the scene outside his brownstone, and how he had begged Hugo Gaynor, the Chief of Secret Service, who had followed him into his living room, to go home, and how Gaynor had been adamant about staying. And he remembered how he had surrendered from exhaustion, desiring only to escape to his bedroom and sleep alone, away from the blue eyes around the glass aquarium.
The sound of the argument beyond his bedroom wall was persisting. It had probably been going on steadily in the seconds of his introspection. And now, at last, he was able to place himself accurately in the time of day and the routine of his former life, and he knew what was happening in his living room. It was Crystal and a Secret Service agent who were locked in debate.
Crystal had come to him, through an employment agency, during his fourth term in the House of Representatives, and because he had been alone, and was still alone, she had grown fiercely maternal in her devotion to his comfort. Five days a week she appeared at eight-thirty to prepare his breakfast, make his bed, clean his flat, market for him. She worked until twelve-thirty, then disappeared to tend to her own household, which included her sister’s family, and then returned at three-thirty, remaining to cook and serve his dinner, often not leaving until eight o’clock in the evening. She was a poor cook, a burner of toast, and a slipshod domestic, a sweeper under the rug, but she was prompt, loyal, busy, and relatively unobtrusive (that is, until recently, when she had taken to carrying on, always quoting her brother-in-law, a gas station attendant, about the Turnerite Group, who were out to ruin the one chance that the colored folk would ever have for economic improvement through that rehabilitation subsidy act for Negroes that was being talked about).
At once, the reason for the altercation in the living room was clear to him. Crystal had arrived as usual, and found the Secret Service waiting, which was unusual. The irresistible force had collided with the immovable object.
Douglass Dilman threw aside his electric blanket and swung out of bed. He stood up, straightening his blue pajamas, stuck his feet into the misshapen slippers, picked his polka-dot cotton robe off the chair and pulled it on. He walked to the bureau mirror and looked at himself. His black kinky hair, as always after sleep, was shoved high into a peak at the back of his head. He took the wide-toothed comb and ran it through his full hair, smoothing down the peak. He poked at the inner corners of his bloodshot eyes, to wipe and clear them. He studied his broad indelicate countenance. He was dark-well, black, but not coal-black-and his features were Negroid. His forehead was high, his nose full and wide, his lips heavy and protruding.
Now in his fifties, he was overweight, not yet fat, but stocky and thick. Tim Flannery, he remembered, had asked for the statistics last night, and he had said that he was five feet ten inches (cheating a half-inch for more stature) and 180 pounds. His appearance, a big-city ward heeler had once told him, worked for him. His lack of height, his tackiness, the antithesis of the fearsome young Negro buck, combined with mild, refined Caucasian speech and mannerisms, made him more acceptable to the white labor voters; his unmistakable Negro features made him authentic and agreeable to the black menial voters. Oftentimes in the past, he had wished that he could be all one or the other, like the members of his family. Pitiful dead Aldora had been light tan, often mistaken for a Spaniard, and he was sure this had contributed to what had happened. Wretched Julian, his son, was as dark as himself, black really, but possessed of features less coarse than his own. Pathetic Mindy, his daughter, was (or had been when he had last set eyes on her six years ago) white and beautiful, white and lovely, which had pleased her mother, had worried him, had made Julian resentful, and had made Mindy herself haughty and impossible.
He thought that he heard Crystal’s sharp voice through the wall. “Wake him up!” she was demanding.
He knotted the belt of his robe, crossed to the door, went through the narrow hallway, and turned left into the living room.
The sight that met him was not unexpected. Beneath the arch that led from the entry hall into the living room stood the shiny, bulging Crystal, shapeless in her tent of brown coat, still holding the morning newspapers in one hand and the inevitable huge straw basket (for leftovers for her sister’s hound) in her right hand. Blocking her way stood lanky, elderly Hugo Gaynor, Chief of the Secret Service, and the well-proportioned ex-California athlete whom Dilman recognized as Lou Agajanian, Chief of the White House Detail of the Secret Service.
It was Crystal who saw Dilman first.
She waved her fat hand and shrieked, “Senator! They won’t let me in-I gotta get up breakfast.”
Gaynor spun around, and Agajanian did the same, and both were instantly respectful and apologetic. “Mr. President,” Gaynor said, “we have no idea who this lady is. We can’t let people without credentials in here simply because they say they work for you. Can you imagine what-”
Dilman nodded. “She’s quite safe, Mr. Gaynor. Crystal has been my housekeeper for years. I should have advised you last night… Hello, Mr. Agajanian, I think we’ve met once or twice… Good morning, Crystal. It’s all right now. You can come in.”
Obediently the agents parted, backed off, and the magic of it made Crystal’s eyes widen. Her unsubtle black face was almost comically transformed from indignation to triumph to pleasure to awe. She waddled toward Dilman, halted, eyes blinking. “I-I almost forgot to say, Senator-President-Mr. President-but I want to be the first to wish you well, and also for my sister and brother-in-law and the kids.”
“Thank you, Crystal, thank you.”
She began to go sideways, still awed, and then she stopped. “We stayed up late and it was all over the television. Everyone was sorry about the others, but we’re happy that, if it had to be, then mercy, we’re sure-enough happy it is you. I-I almost didn’t come here this morning. I was sort of sure you’d be in the White House, with a special fancy staff, and not needing me any more.”
Dilman smiled. “I won’t be in the White House for a while, and you can be sure, Crystal, I’ll want you then as much as I want you now.”
She seemed overwhelmed with relief. “Thank you, Sena-Mr.-Mr. President-” Suddenly her round face broke into a toothy smile, enamel and gold, and she said, “I’ll have to take lessons how to talk to you. What’ll it be this special morning, anything special?”
“The same as always, Crystal. Give me fifteen minutes or so. I’ve got to shower and dress.”
She was off to the dining room and kitchen, straw basket swinging, and Dilman smiled at the two Secret Service executives. “She’s here every day,” he said, “and weekends her niece comes in.”
Gaynor said, “We’ll have to trouble you for a full list of your employees and friends.”
“You’ll have it today.”
“Mr. President, there are a number of calls that have come in-”
“Anything important?”
“I don’t believe anything urgent. The Secretary of State wants to speak to you when you’re up. Oh yes, one personal call-well, he phoned two or three times from New York-a young man who claims to be your son.”
“Julian?”
“That’s right, Mr. President. Gave the name Julian Dilman. Said he’d call back again at half past nine.”
“All right. Better give me time to get myself cleaned up and into some clothes.” He started to go, then said over his shoulder, “You can ask Crystal to make something for you. You must be starved.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” the two Secret Service officers said simultaneously.
The tone of their voices hung inside Douglass Dilman’s ears as he walked back to the bedroom. He was attuned to every nuance of every utterance that came from his white colleagues. The changeable inflection of speech was their civilized weapon of subtle mockery and superiority without insult, even when you were a congressman. This was their best weapon when they found that your skin was black and thin. You could not prove disrespect, but you could know its vibrations. He remembered one committee hearing when General Pitt Fortney had appeared as a witness before him and the others. He had posed a question, and Fortney’s reply, in print, on the record, had been beyond reproach. In writing, it was a general replying sensibly to a senator. Across the committee tables, verbalized, it had been a West Point white general speaking downward to a semiliterate jigaboo. Perhaps he had been oversensitive that time, and on several other recent occasions. For years he had tried to curb his excessive sensitivity, as other men tried to reduce their weight. It took diligent, unremitting work. It could be done. But then, every once in a while, you put on sudden sensitivity as you put on extra weight, and suffered for the added burden.
Throwing aside his robe, entering the bathroom, he decided that the two Secret Service heads, Gaynor and Agajanian, had been courteous in their behavior. And now it seemed reasonable that they should have been. To their dedicated eyes, a Mr. President was a Mr. President, whether he was Grover Cleveland or Woodrow Wilson or Dwight D. Eisenhower or T. C. or Douglass Dilman. All that mattered to them, their jobs, their future, their pride, was that they keep the pounds of flesh entrusted to them, whatever its pigmentation, alive.
He unbuttoned his pajama top, stripped it off, and removed the pajama trousers. Opening the shower door, he adjusted the knobs inside, then started the spray of water. Finding soap and cloth, he wondered how many other white men would be as courteous as his bodyguards. The personalities whose speeches he had heard, whose bright remarks he had heard, whose prejudices he had known, crossed his mind: the Southern congressmen, the Northern committeemen, the Western rightists, the Eastern Ivy League snobs. A son of Ham, he thought, in the White House, in the Oval Office of the West Wing, in the highest seat extant in this red, white, and blue (not black) republic. Despite the old prediction of Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, that there could be a Negro in the Presidency in thirty or forty years, there had been no one of equal stature, then or now, no matter how wise or liberal, who believed that it could happen then or in this century. Yet it had happened, by accident.
Stepping into the shower cell, he knew that he had been insulated since last night from what was happening out there, in the capital city, in the cities of the fifty states. How stunned the American people must be this hour to learn they would have to look up to an outsider, a member of the ten-per-cent black minority of their white country.
It was not the first spray of the shower that chilled him, but the first realization of what had happened and how wildly it would be resented.
He remembered the short poem: “How odd/of God/ to choose/ the Jews.”
He paraphrased it: How odd of God to choose me, to choose one who had already gone high enough, too high for comfort, and had wanted nothing higher for himself, one who wished only to be limited to his legislative height, where reticence and diffidence would still keep him an unresented exhibit that was a sop to the liberal conscience of the North. Then the Chief Justice’s wrenching words of last night came back to him: “may the Lord in Heaven bless you and watch over you… as the first Negro… President of the United States.”
His limbs felt weak, so weak, and his heart thudded inside its chest cavity. There were a million white men who were right for the job. There were a thousand black men who would have bravely and defiantly welcomed the Godsent opportunity, and called it God-sent. Yet something, something, had gone wrong Up There. The Lord had poked His heavenly finger at the wrong name, and now it was too late. He wanted to rebuke the Maker for His blunder, and then, strangely-out of respect to the memory of his mother and father and aunts in the Midwest earth, out of fear of the hellfire that had been sounded in that old Michigan church in the room behind the broken-down social club, when he was in knee pants-he was humble before that God and the Son of God; and his bitterness and fear, really it was deep-down cringing fear, turned to shame. This was no place for kneeling, but when there was the time and the place, he would beg forgiveness and beg for help.
Yet, Jesus, Jesus, why did it have to be himself, Douglass Dilman, who was not white and who was afraid of being black, and who was without armor or grace?
Then as the shower’s liquid needles, warmer now, hit his chest, and the foam ran down his stomach and thighs, and as he absently rubbed himself with the soapy cloth and allowed the stream of water to dissolve the soap, he thought that his position, despite his secret inadequacy, was not entirely bad. His mind went backward to last night, or the early hours of the morning, when the White House limousine had taken him home. What had happened then was, in retrospect, heartening.
When he had become a member of the House of Representatives, he had leased the upstairs front apartment of a red brick, two-story apartment building between Georgia Avenue and Sixteenth Street. The three rooms and kitchenette, modest and clean, had been sufficent to serve his widower existence. The location had been comfortably in the midst of a onetime white neighborhood, now occupied by upper-class Negroes. But the apartment had soon become too small for him. Senator Espinosa, who had grown senile and disabled, had resigned two-thirds of the way through his term. The Governor of Dilman’s state, to strengthen his position with his vast Negro voting population-which had trebled with the influx of colored families from the South-and with the liberal union leaders, had appointed Dilman to Espinosa’s vacant office for the two years remaining. Dilman as Senator had found himself, briefly, a rara avis. Having left Washington, D.C., to campaign in a preponderantly Negro district for his fifth House term, he had returned to Washington as a Senatorial appointee. One of the few Negroes to achieve so high a seat in government, he had been the subject of lead articles in such magazines as Life, Look, Time, and Newsweek, and he had made the covers of Ebony and Sepia. He had vaguely felt a freak and been discomfited, but, encouraged by the Party bosses, he had cooperated with one and all.
It had been during this transitional period, when he had been the object of so much attention, when his mail had swelled, when he had received callers (mostly political, mostly pressure), that he had decided that his rented apartment could no longer serve him. He had found that the parlor and kitchenette were too cramped, and there was need of a study and library at home. He had begun to search for a larger apartment, but the rents demanded had appalled him. Gradually he had concluded that it might be wisest to buy a house. Washington was, after all, his adopted city, and would likely remain his home for years to come. While he was a senator from his state by appointment, and only for a short period, and while he had no idea if he would be a senator again, he was confident that he could regain his old House seat. And even if that were not possible, he could go into private law practice in the capital city where, with a population 55 per cent Negro, a highly reputed Negro attorney would have enough clients to keep him occupied and secure.
Guided by real estate brokers, he had visited three brownstones in his neighborhood, and in each instance had felt that the house was overpriced and too expensive for his meager savings. The fourth brownstone had come to his attention by chance. Seated one morning behind his desk in the Old Senate Office Building, he had learned that the Reverend Paul Spinger was in his reception room, eager to see him. A visit paid by Spinger was not in itself unusual. Spinger, as director of the largest Negro organization in America, the Crispus Society, had often come to Dilman to discuss civil rights legislation. That morning, as far as Dilman could recall, there had been no immediate business to discuss. He had invited Reverend Spinger in, and the elderly but energetic clergyman-lobbyist had said that the word was around that Dilman wanted to buy a house. If true, he happened to know of a house not yet on the market, whose owner had to sell in a hurry, and which might be bought at a reasonable price, in view of its value as an investment. It was a ten-room, two-story brownstone off Sixteenth Street, on Van Buren N.W., and it was a bargain at $45,000. It was, Spinger had said, a solid, aged abode, that one day could stand remodeling, but was comfortable enough and well located on the fringe of the wealthier Negro section, near Walter Reed General Hospital. Spinger knew about the house in advance, he had said, because he and his wife Rose and a boarder had rented the upstairs for several years. The landlord had lived downstairs. Half jokingly, Spinger hoped that Senator Dilman would consider it. If someone else bought the house, they might require all ten rooms and evict the Spingers. The Senator, Spinger had reasoned, was a widower, with his son in boarding school, and would have no need for more than the downstairs rooms.
Senator Dilman had gone with the clergyman to visit the brownstone, and he had been enchanted by the quiet residential street with its maple trees, the small green front lawn, the walk up to the entry hall, the generous, comfortable rooms and nineteenth-century fixtures. Immediately he had bargained for it and closed the deal. That had been five years ago, more than five years ago, and not one day had Dilman regretted the financial encumbrance. For to this brownstone off Sixteenth Street Dilman owed not only his first real pleasure in having a place where he belonged, but also his enduring relationship with Wanda Gibson, and, because of last night, he owed to this house his first feeling of acceptance as the new and accidental Chief Executive of the United States.
Last night, he thought. And then his memory held on last night.
The feeling of acceptance had come at some time after one o’clock in the morning. As his chauffeured limousine turned into Van Buren Street, Dilman, sandwiched between the Secret Service agents, had become aware of a phenomenon. This was a well-off Negro neighborhood, but a hard-working one, and its inhabitants went to sleep early. The thoroughfare was always blanketed in darkness well before midnight. But last night, after midnight, the street was lighted with illumination from every house, and alive as a Mardi Gras. And then, as they had neared his brownstone, Dilman realized that Van Buren Street was thickly lined on both sides with people, neighbors and others of the capital city, who had come to be the first to set eyes upon America’s new President.
When the limousine had drawn up before his front lawn, and he had emerged, the size of the crowd in attendance had overwhelmed him, almost one thousand persons, he had guessed. The faces, many recognizable, had been mostly black, but there were whites here and there, although Dilman had been unable to discern if they were reporters, Secret Service agents, or simply sensation seekers of the kind who rushed to accidents. As he had walked between the agents to his front door, the applause had begun, then swelled, and there had been cheers. Dilman had paused, deeply moved, and had exhaustedly waved and waved, and then gone inside his house.
He had fallen asleep so quickly, he now supposed, because after the first fear and trepidation, the paralysis induced by change and sudden elevation, he had been warmed by friendship and approval. But now the harsher light of morning was upon him. The soothing blackness was gone. The uncertain whiteness waited.
He shut off the shower, emerged dripping onto the bath mat, quickly dried himself, then went into the bedroom to dress. This was a momentous day, and perhaps he would be expected to attire himself specially for it. He considered his dressiest Sunday black suit, then decided that it would be awkward in the morning. He settled for the charcoal one he had purchased ready-made at Garfinckel’s for his first appearance as temporary presiding officer of the Senate, during the Vice-President’s last trip abroad, six months before his death.
As he dressed himself, his mind compulsively revived one more event of last night, one that had taken place a few minutes before he retired. Sitting on his bed, wondering if the Secret Service men in the living room could hear his voice, he had dialed the Spingers upstairs.
The phone had hardly begun to ring, when it was answered. The voice he had recognized as belonging to Rose Spinger.
“Hello, Rose, I hope I didn’t wake you. This is Doug.”
Her response had been pitched high with excitement. “Oh, Doug, we hoped-heavens, I mustn’t be calling you Doug any more, or even Senator or landlord-”
He had smiled to himself tiredly. “Please, Rose, no formality. Nothing has changed between us. I-”
“Thank you, Doug. Oh, my heavens, to think of it! Did you see us outside in front, in that mob, waving to you?”
“I’m not sure. I saw Wanda for a second.”
“Of course, you would have. We’re all so thrilled. We’re sorry for that accident in Europe, but since it was God’s will, we’re happy you will be there to guide us. We need you, Doug, we all need you, and the Reverend says this is the hand of Providence… Oh, heavens, he’s telling me to be quiet and let you speak to Wanda. All right. Except I want to say for the Reverend and myself, from our hearts, that we wish you strength and courage.”
“Thank you, Rose, I need that.”
“The Reverend went to knock on Wanda’s door. She’s still up. She’ll pick up her phone in a second.”
“I’ll wait. Thanks, Rose.”
In the seconds that he waited, his brain had become alive and projected the early pictures of Wanda Gibson. When he had bought this brownstone five years ago, and while it was still in escrow, he had been invited to dinner by the Springers to celebrate his acquisition. He had met the Spingers before, many times, but always about the Hill, or at Crispus Society affairs, or at parties given by African Embassies near Sheridan Circle. This was the first time that he had accepted an invitation to their home. Twice, as a representative, he had been asked to their dinners, and twice he had declined with fabricated excuses. As a member of the House, he had not wanted to be in the position of having to answer to white colleagues who might charge that, as a Negro, he was being used by the head of the most important Negro organization. His timidity had been ridiculous, he had known, especially since other Negro congressmen and white liberals had attended those dinners in a natural way, and had enjoyed Rose Spinger’s cooking. Thereafter he had told himself that if he was ever invited again, he would accept.
The familiar timidity had assailed him but one more time, just before signing the escrow papers on the brownstone house. He had wondered what those on the Hill would think, once it got out, about a senator owning a house in which he permitted the leader of America’s largest minority pressure group to live. Nobody, apparently, had cared. Perhaps, Dilman thought wryly, because nobody, apparently, cared what he did at any time. In the Senate, until his surprising selection in Party caucus to serve as President pro tempore of the body when Vice-President Porter was out of town or ill, few had seemed aware of his existence. He was one of a hundred names on the roll call, rarely absent, but almost always silent and withdrawn. He made no speeches, gave no interviews, introduced no bills, and he went along with the Party and T. C. and everyone. Even though, after filling Espinosa’s unfinished term as Senator, he had been endorsed by the Party to run on his own (with strong Negro and labor support, against a weak opponent, destroyed by a graft exposé four days before the voting), and he had been re-elected to the Senate on his own, he had felt an interloper.
He had accepted the Spingers’ third invitation to dinner not as a senator but as their landlord, and he had gone unafraid, knowing at last that no one, not even such Southern red-neck mouthpieces as Representative Zeke Miller or Senator Bruce Hankins, cared or gave a damn.
There had been six of them at that intimate dinner at the Spingers’ five years ago, the host and hostess, a colored engineer and his colored teacher wife, himself as the personage and guest of honor, and Wanda Gibson. It had been his initial meeting with Wanda Gibson, and for the first time in the many years since Aldora’s death he had realized that affection and desire within him had not atrophied but had only been sublimated.
Even then, five years ago, Wanda had not been a girl, but a mature woman-a lady, he had always thought of her as being, a lady-of thirty-one. She was a graduate of the University of West Virginia, with economics as her major; and she had worked for her favorite professor in Morgantown and Charleston, and followed the professor, known for his liberal books, to Washington, D.C., when he accepted a government advisory job in the latter part of the Lyndon Johnson administration. When T. C. had become President, and Wanda’s professor had gone back to his university, she had stayed on in Washington. For the last two years she had held a well-paid position as executive secretary to the director of Vaduz Exporters, in nearby Bethesda, Maryland.
From the first, Dilman had known that Wanda was a remarkable find. Her intelligence and wit, her good nature and humor, her well-bred manner, had made it seem incredible that she had not ever been married. As he came to know her better, Dilman had come to understand her avoidance of marriage. Her parents, who had lived in West Virginia, where her father had been a short-order cook, dishwasher, janitor in an all-night diner serving coal miners, had sacrificed much of their comfort, and the futures of her younger brother and sister, to educate and launch her. When first one parent, and then the other, had been hospitalized, and afterward confined to costly sanitarium care, Wanda had accepted full responsibility to support and look after them, not only as daughter but as debtor. She had a burden, and she could not discard it in favor of marriage, for which she was so perfectly suited. But two years ago her father had died, and less than a year before her mother, and at last Wanda had been free to live her own life as her own person.
She had expected him to propose marriage last spring, Dilman knew, and he had not, and it had created, for the first time, an undercurrent of unhappiness between them. She had known that he wanted her for his wife. He had known that he needed her. The proposal was up to him, and yet, while he could profess affection and love, articulate his need for her, he could not bring her from upstairs to his flat downstairs as wife. He had thought about it a thousand times since spring, and had known that the failure was entirely his own. Marriage was an affirmative act, and he had been shackled by countless negative fears. He had tried, time and time again, to narrow in on specific fears, small ones, avoiding the major one, until at last he could see what was left and what in himself taunted him with contempt.
Wanda Gibson was a mulatto. That was the center of it. As a mulatto, she was more white in appearance than black. In most communities she could have passed for white. Her hair, while brunette and curling, was soft and long. Her eyes were light brown, her nose delicate and upturned, and her lips and mouth small. Her figure was trim, well hipped but otherwise slender. She considered herself a colored woman, and she lived as a colored woman. But, for Douglass Dilman, how she regarded herself, and how she approached her life, were not assurances enough.
The nagging cowardice within him, that avoided marriage to the one good companion of his life, was his fear of how she would look beside him and how this would affect his political career. With Wanda as his mate, he would appear blacker. With himself as her mate, she would appear whiter. Whatever the facts and truth, it would give the impression of an interracial marriage. It might not cause talk in Washington and in his home state, but on the other hand it might. It was an unnecessary risk. It would rock the boat in times like this. Or, at least, it might.
Dilman’s solution had been to avoid the issue. The weekly platonic meetings had continued, the Senator and his ladylike lady friend, in the Spinger living room, in the loges of Loew’s Palace Theater, and, ever so occasionally, in the Golden Ox or the Lincoln Inn. Recently, Dilman had become aware, each rendezvous had been less comfortable, less warm and communicative. It was as if they were both present, each desiring the company of the other, but now that she was free of parental commitment and he was temporary presiding chairman of the Senate, there had fallen a thick steel grill between them. You could see; you could hear; you could not touch. You were two, not one, and might never be one, and Wanda Gibson, for all her evenness of temperament and understanding, had begun to resent this failure in Douglass Dilman.
Since his invisible antenna of sensitivity had picked up and recorded her disappointment in him, Dilman had recently taken to reviewing and brooding over this relationship and his own life. Some weeks ago he had almost arrived at the decision to propose marriage, and to the devil with the consequences, if any. After all, he had asked himself in a practical way, how could he any longer be hurt? But then he had been sidetracked by his activity, and sham importance, in serving the Senate in the Vice-President’s place. And now, overnight, cruel Destiny had touched him. He had become the President of the United States. The personal choice ahead was clear-cut: should he be James Buchanan or Grover Cleveland? Buchanan had been the only unmarried President to serve his country. Cleveland had been the only Chief Executive to be married in the White House. When the choice was weighed thus, the scales tipped toward Buchanan. A showy wedding, like Cleveland’s in the Blue Room, before the world and the press, a marriage to a mulatto, a mulatto who might almost be mistaken for white, would merely serve to incense the enemies of his race. His uncertain position and precarious image, before a broken and divided country, would be worsened.
This had been his rationale last night, as he waited, the telephone receiver in his hand, to hear Wanda’s voice. His private decision, he had known, was neither courageous nor honest. It was merely expedient and political. It solved nothing, but simply traded off a personal problem to avoid a more fearsome one.
Gazing down at the receiver in his left hand, he had wondered why, under the circumstances, he was trying to speak to her at all, at least at this time. He had no idea what he could say to her, yet somehow, as President of the United States for more than three hours, he had to speak to someone before sleeping and then waking to the terrible fact, and the only one who might care about him, reassure him, was Wanda. As he waited for Wanda, his mind drifted to Mindy. His attitude toward the two of them was one and the same. He avoided taking a wife he needed for the same reason that he did not seek out a daughter he loved. He was black and still afraid.
“Hello, Doug.” She was calling down to him through a wire from upstairs, and yet she had never been farther away.
“Wanda, I wanted to-to say good night, before going to sleep.”
“Doug, it’s overwhelming, the whole thing. What does one say? Do I congratulate you? That sounds wrong.”
“You commiserate with me, and with the whole country.”
“No, don’t-don’t talk like that. It’s not true. That accident in Frankfurt was horrible. But it happened, Doug, those things happen. Remember how we once talked about what our families were doing the moment that they learned F. D. R. had died? And how they felt? They felt the world had come to an end, that they were dying, too, that there was no hope. Yet nothing happened to them, or to us. Life went on. Maybe differently than it might have had he lived, but not that differently. Well, Doug, T. C. was a good man, I’m sure, and popular, but he was no F. D. R., and neither was MacPherson. I know you’ll do as well as or better than either. No one is born to be the only one to be President. Thousands of men could be President just as well as the one who fought to get the office. If it had to be someone else, I think it could have been no one better than you.”
“Wanda, don’t-you know me too well for that-you know my weaknesses-”
“Everyone has weaknesses, Doug. Be sensible. Stand off and look around. Lincoln had weaknesses, and T. C. had too many to count, and probably dozens we couldn’t see to count. Of course you have weaknesses, but you’re strong enough to handle the job. Don’t discount your strengths. I can’t forget what you refuse to remember. With the kind of background you had, all that poverty, how did you get through the university and then law school? How did you get elected to the House of Representatives four times, and then get into the Senate, and even become its presiding officer? It took something. Doug, it took very much. I know you, maybe as well as anyone knows you, maybe better, and I am positive the whole country-once they get over the shock of the-of T. C.’s death-they’ll see you for what you are, and they’ll be proud of you.”
“Wanda, Wanda-you’re doing your best, I know-I appreciate it-but, Wanda, I’m black-tomorrow morning 230 million Americans are going to wake up and find their President, one they didn’t elect, is black.”
“That’s true, Doug… Maybe it’ll be a good thing for them, for the country.”
“Maybe, but-will they think so?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know what they’ll think and neither do you. I only know what I think. If you go at this as you’ve gone at everything before, with determination, honesty, learning what you have to learn, acting as you believe best, it will be all right. I’m sure it will work itself out.”
“You-you sound less certain now, Wanda.”
“Do I? I didn’t mean to. I guess I’m just concerned about you.”
“What do you mean? Tell me exactly what you mean.”
“I mean-please don’t take it wrong, Doug-we know each other too well for that-but-I mean it would be bad, hurtful, if you started off, went into the White House, feeling you don’t belong, feeling you are less than you should be, feeling that way because-because you are colored. Don’t misunderstand me, Doug, but-”
“I understand you very well. I’ll try not to be like that. I’ll try hard, but-you’re right, I guess-I am afraid… I’m also afraid for us. That’s on my mind, too. I don’t know what the demands or the expectations of the office are, except what I’ve seen and read. I don’t know what it is really like in there. I want to see you, speak to you, more than ever. I-I just don’t know-will they let me?”
“Doug, nobody owns you. You don’t have to wait for anyone to let you do anything, I mean in your personal life.”
“You’re right, Wanda.”
“It’s late, dear. You’d better get some sleep. I-I’ll be here. You call me when you can, anytime, I’ll be here.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Anytime… Now sleep, dearest, and know we are all with you. Good night, Doug.”
“Good night, Wanda, good night.”
After hanging up, he had tried to analyze their talk. She had offered him encouragement, and her language had been warm, and yet, toward the end especially, he had sensed her remoteness. Still, he had thought, as he reached to turn off the bed lamp and then pushed his fatigued body beneath the blanket, she was for him and with him, no matter how disappointed she might be in him, and that was comforting, that was something; and then he had felt drowsiness, and then he had slept.
He finished knotting his knit tie, pulled on the coat of his charcoal suit, and consulted his wristwatch. He was afraid the journey his mind had taken to the events of last night, to the five years with Wanda, had consumed an hour of time. He was amazed and pleased to see that only six minutes had passed. It occurred to him that he had made a discovery no scientist had made before him. He had found what traveled faster than the speed of light: memory. The trouble was, no matter how fast it traveled, memory never stopped.
Determined to retreat no more from the unknown present into the more pleasant past, he left the bedroom and walked briskly into the living room. Lou Agajanian was seated in a chair, under the arch leading into the entry hall, smoking a cigarette. Immediately, the head of the White House Detail leaped to his feet in a pose of civilian attention.
“Mr. President,” he said, “the boss-I mean, Mr. Gaynor, he went off to catch a wink of sleep. Another agent, Mr. Prentiss, came in to spell him. He’s in the kitchen, at the rear service door.”
“Fine, fine.” Dilman indicated the chair. “Please relax, Mr. Agajanian.”
The Chief of the White House Secret Service Detail remained standing while Dilman entered the small dining room, which overlooked the street. He noticed that instead of his usual yellow breakfast mat and plain pottery dishes, Crystal had set the table with the formal white tablecloth and decorated dishes from the good set. Obviously, for her, this was an Occasion. Amused, he called off toward the kitchen, “Let’s go, Crystal, I’m here!”
As he sat down, Crystal rushed in and placed his orange juice before him. “Eggs an’ bacon comin’, Mr. President!”
Before picking up the orange juice, he studied the messages on slips of paper lying before the telephone: his son Julian had phoned from Trafford University (“Will call you back”); his Senate secretary, Diane Fuller, had phoned from the Old Senate Office Building (“Has to go out on your business, will call you back”); Secretary of State Eaton had phoned from his house (“To inquire how you are”); press secretary Tim Flannery (“Please set aside time for him early today”); Governor Wayne Talley (“Will call back shortly”). Those were the messages. He guessed that there might have been hundreds more, except that his phone number was unlisted, known only to a select handful of persons.
Drinking down the unsweetened orange juice, grimacing at the liquid’s bite, he reached over and brought the pile of newspapers before him. There were five to which he subscribed, two New York City dailies, and three Washington, D.C., newspapers, one of the latter a Negro press publication.
Quickly he examined the headlines streaming across each front page. The sensational New York newspaper read:
NATION GASPS! A NEGRO IS PRESIDENT OF THE USA!
The moderate New York newspaper read:
SENATOR DOUGLASS DILMAN SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT LAST NIGHT: FIRST NEGRO TO ACHIEVE COUNTRY’S HIGHEST OFFICE
The pro-administration Washington newspaper read:
CONGRESS AND VOTERS RALLY TO SUPPORT SENATOR DOUGLASS DILMAN
The pro-segregationist, Zeke Miller Washington newspaper read:
NEGRO SENATOR MADE CHIEF EXECUTIVE BY FLUKE; JUDICIARY COMMITTEE MEETS TO DEBATE CONSTITUTIONALITY; CITIZENS PROTEST “UNFAIR” RULE OF MAJORITY BY MINORITY; REPRESENTATIVE MILLER PREDICTS “DISSENSION, DISUNITY, VIOLENCE”
The Negro Washington newspaper read:
HALLELUJAH! EQUAL RIGHTS AT LAST! COLORED PRESIDENT OF SENATE BECOMES PRESIDENT OF US ALL! WORLD APPLAUDS TRUE DEMOCRACY!
Several things were evident at once. To no one would he be simply a public servant who, by the law of succession, had become President of the United States. To both sides, and the middle, too, he would be the “Negro” who had become President. To the press of his own race he was the colored man, the black Moses, who had come to lead his people out of bondage and save them. To the press of the enemies of his race, as represented by Congressman Zeke Miller’s newspaper chain, he was a black and ugly thing pulled out from under a rock to wreak vengeance on the magnolia-scented South, to destroy the Grand Republic by enforcing equality between black godless brutes and white Christian human beings, to enforce his nigger ideas on their chaste daughters. To the sensational press he was a zoo object, a freak, for the time a story and circulation builder, who could be contended with seriously later. To the press of his Party he was still a senator, to be rallied around until the Party line toward him could be straightened out. To the moderate, conservative, thoughtful press he was-he reached for the respected and balanced New York daily again and reread its headline-the first Negro to achieve the country’s highest office.
Douglass Dilman considered this headline. It was true, and it was fair. But how many others, black or white, would be this reasonable? Slowly his eyes went down the columns of news datelined Washington, D.C. It was all solid reportage of his being sworn in, of the tragedy in Frankfurt that had led to his being sworn in, backed up by full quotations from Tim Flannery’s release explaining the Presidential Succession Act of 1947. At the bottom of the lead column was a box containing the suggestion that the reader turn to the main editorial on page sixteen.
Dilman put down his fork and knife, took up the New York newspaper, turned to page sixteen, folded it back and then in half. Immediately he found the main editorial headed THE NEW MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE, and then he settled in his chair to read what followed:
At 10:35 last night (EDT), a new, eligible American male was sworn in as President of the United States, to succeed a popular predecessor who died before fulfilling his full four-year term. In itself, this sudden changing of the guard was neither historic nor unusual. It has happened eight times before in our history. But last night, for the first time, there was a difference.
When Presidents Harrison, Taylor, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy died in office, their unexpired terms were filled out by men who had been their campaign running mates, by men second in line of succession, by men who had appeared beside them before the electorate, and by men of their own race and color. While public and Congressional acceptance of a second choice, a substitute President, was not always simple and smooth-as witness Andrew Johnson’s troubles when he succeeded Abraham Lincoln in 1865-at least the transitions were familiar enough to cause no national unrest or uneasiness.
However, the overnight accession of Senator Douglass Dilman, to fill the unexpired term of his popular predecessor, presents numerous problems which are deserving of thoughtful consideration. For the first time in our history, not the President’s running mate and campaign colleague, not his second-in-command, not his Vice-President, has taken over his vacant seat, but a relative outsider. For the first time, a senator and not a Vice-President, a legislative officer chosen by his Party colleagues and not the voters, has succeeded to the high office. And, for the first time, let it be stated plainly, a colored man, a member of the Negro race, has been catapulted into top command by an accident of life and a hitherto unused provision of law.
There is no reason why, in our view, a Negro should not be President of the United States. Were the country educated for him, prepared for him, were they to vote for him spontaneously and elect him to the high office, it would be a significant moment in our history and in world history. All men of good will and good heart have worked toward that moment, and hoped for that moment to come. Yet, unfortunately, this schizophrenic land of liberty is still groping its way toward equality. It still disfranchises Negroes, it bars them from gainful employment, it keeps them from decent housing, schooling, public accommodations. We still live in an era of growth as a nation-we are making our first toddling steps from uneasy tolerance and decency toward full equality-and so we still dwell in an era of constant falls and bruises.
Thus, a republic which continues to oppress its ten per cent Negro population, which continues to be riven by demonstrations and riots and sectional hatreds, finds itself overnight led by one of the minority it has constantly kept in servility. This is a nation that woke this morning and rubbed its eyes in disbelief when it found that a Negro was at its helm, a Negro was its constitutional pilot and leader. In an anguished and shameful period, when Negroes must still be led into schools protected by armed guards, when Negroes must search for segregated washrooms, when Negroes must sit in the rear of municipal buses, in a period such as this, a Negro has become the highest executive in the land, sitting in the seat of Washington, Lincoln, Wilson, becoming every American’s face and voice to the outside world.
The problem presented by a Negro in the Presidency is real, and it is grave. The problem is not President Dilman’s problem, but rather, the problem of almost every one of his 230 million fellow Americans. No longer, now, has the United States a half century of grace to grow up to its ideal of equality for every citizen. The United States is faced, today, with the necessity, the imperative necessity, of growing up to its ideal of equality all at once, of accepting a Negro as its leader all at once, of accepting colored men as equal to whites all at once. Failure to attain this maturity, by any state or any member of the democratic community, will be a blow to the country as a whole, will send us reeling backward to the edge of the abyss upon which we teetered toward destruction in the terrible months and days preceding the Civil War. If we go backward, if we fall now, all men here and all mankind everywhere will suffer a death of the soul, as they might suffer a death of the body from a nuclear holocaust.
This is not the morning to recapitulate the wrongs that colored men have suffered in this republic, and to plead their case for civil rights so long overdue. It is enough to remark that while the Constitution specifically bars anyone from this office who is not a natural-born citizen of the United States or not yet thirty-five years of age, it does not bar anyone because the pigmentation of his skin is other than white. A Negro has become President of the United States, and there is no reason on earth why he should not be President.
The Southern racists, and the Northern nonthinkers whose prejudices are rarely acted out, cannot deny that American Negroes, when given the opportunity, have been as capable as their white brothers in practicing wisdom, or attaining wealth, success, fame. One need only glance at the record. The black hue of their skin did not prevent Jan Matzeliger from inventing the billion-dollar shoe-last machine, did not prevent Frederick Douglass from becoming a brilliant lecturer and writer, did not prevent Booker T. Washington from becoming a great educator, did not prevent Matthew Henson from helping Peary discover the North Pole, did not prevent Paul Laurence Dunbar from composing his deathless lyrics, did not prevent Marian Anderson, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Mahalia Jackson, W. C. Handy from providing entertainment for the entire world.
Nor can the millions awakening this morning prove that Negroes, in the rare instances in the past when they served us in politics and government, acted with less wisdom, courage, judiciousness than did their white brothers. Ebenezer Bassett was our Minister to Haiti. Jonathan Wright was associate justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court. Jefferson P. Long served in the United States House of Representatives. Blanche K. Bruce served in the United States Senate. In more recent times, Robert C. Weaver administered the United States Housing and Home Finance Agency. E. Frederic Morrow worked as administrative aide to President Eisenhower. Ralph J. Bunche served in the United Nations. Andrew Hatcher worked as associate press secretary to President Kennedy. Carl Rowan served as director of the United States Information Agency under President Lyndon Johnson. Douglass Dilman was President pro tempore of the United States Senate in T. C.’s administration.
Each and every one of these leaders was a Negro citizen of the United States. They had earned the right to guide us, help us, not because their colored forebears helped free us and defend us in the Revolutionary War, in the War of 1812, in the Union Army of Lincoln and Grant, in the First and Second World Wars, in Korea, but because they were part of our whole, part of each of us, with the same stakes and goals. Now one of them, really one of us under the laws devised by the Founding Fathers and since, has become our President. The paramount question is not if Douglass Dilman is equal to the burdensome responsibility, but if we are equal to our responsibility as Americans.
Today we start the first day of President Dilman’s term, his time of trial and our own, the one year and five months that stretch ahead, and we begin with trepidation induced by a survey of cold statistics. Out of 230 million American citizens, there are 23 million Negroes, and it is supposed that most will accept our new President. Based on recent voting figures, excluding Negroes and Southern whites, there are perhaps 40 million white citizens of liberal and progressive persuasions, and it is supposed that most of these will cooperate with the new President.
On the other hand, there are 47 million whites in the fourteen states of the Solid South, and it is feared that most of them will reject our new President. Again, based on recent voting figures, there are 30 million extreme rightists in the East, North, and West, and it is likely that most of them will refuse cooperation to our new President.
What is the guess? Sixty-three million of us may be behind Douglass Dilman, 77 million of us may be against him. How are we to account for the remaining 90 million of our citizenry, the follow-the-leaders when told whom to follow, the undecideds in countless polls, the great center mass with real faces and real feelings who can go this way or that? How will they respond to a Negro in the Presidency? Will they listen to racists or rightists, or will they consider the pleadings of moderates and true democrats? Or will they react according to feelings long hidden and repressed about Negroes? How have they felt about the racial ferment in this country these last twenty years? Has something of the aspirations of the new and militant Negro leadership sunk deep into their consciences? Has more, or less, of the propaganda of segregationists infused their minds?
For the middle majority of us all, knowledge of Negroes firsthand is probably limited-limited to the colored cleaning woman, who comes twice a week, limited to the colored baseball player who saves or loses a home game, limited to the garage mechanic, or dime-store clerk, or blues singer seen and heard on a Saturday night. To this white majority, the black man is as unknown as once was the heart of the Dark Continent of Africa. Personally unacquainted with their dark-skinned fellow citizens, knowing of their strife only through the printed page, long avoiding real commitment to this issue because they were busy concentrating on their jobs and raises, shopping and picking the youngsters up at school, these white citizens are suddenly confronted with the imperative demand to make a historic personal decision.
There they are, this strange morning, the vast uncounted, staring with curiosity or bewilderment, with the first throbbings of pride or resentment, at a middle-aged senator with kinky hair and dark skin and African face, who has supplanted a leader they chose, and who is now their voice and image in domestic and international affairs.
We wait now for their commitment. We pray they, in turn, will wait for their own judgments to stand the tests of self-exploration and sound intelligence. And when they come to that moment of decision very soon, whether to accept President Dilman as one of them, one of us, and cooperate with him for the common good, or whether to reject him as an inferior alien disguised as one of us, we pray they will, on the eve of their personal commitments, bear one final consideration in mind.
Judgment of a colored man in the White House cannot and should not be made on whether he will or will not be a wise President, better than Harding, worse than Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or T. C., but whether or not his judges, all the products of independent America, have attained sufficient maturity, have grown high enough, have become citizens enough, to permit a fellow human being, experienced and expert in his calling, to reflect and serve them.
The immediate future is not in the hands of our first Negro President. It is in our hands, for better or for worse.
It seemed an eternity that Douglass Dilman sat at the dining-room table, holding the great metropolitan newspaper which had spelled out, frankly and sensibly, what conditions and judgment waited for him beyond the insular fort of his Negro dwelling and Negro neighborhood.
Presently he dropped the newspaper to the table beside the cold breakfast he had hardly touched. He knew that what he had read should have made him feel heartened, even hopeful. Yet the apprehension and fears of the morning shadowed any possible optimism. He thought: Yes, there are men of reason and good will out there; they exist. But then, he also knew, from years of traumatic observation, years of compromising and cowering to survive and get along, that men such as the one or ones who created that reasonable editorial were too few.
Dilman was not a highly imaginative man, not a soarer, a dreamer, a passionate mover or shaker; this he knew and had always known. He was an intelligent man. He was a formally educated man. He was an experienced man in his chosen field, politics, where knowledge of superficial catch phrases, some forensic talent, an ability to smile, a gift for concession, and a knowledge of facts were enough.
The hard factual core of his mind reframed the eloquent content of the editorial. If all men in America read it and were moved by it, he could enter the White House without fear. But what was this New York metropolitan newspaper anyway, in truth? It was a morning paper, the most appreciated by intellectuals in the land. Its total daily circulation was 800,000. How many of these 800,000 would even read the small type of the editorial page? And how many in the broad nation of 230 million would even know of its existence? It was a pebble trying to fell a Goliath of prejudice-a pebble, not a boulder.
The telephone to his left rang out, startling him from his brooding. Too quickly, out of guilt for the self-indulgence of self-concern, he shot his hand to the receiver, pulled it toward him, fumbling, almost dropping it into the eggs.
“Hello?”
It was a long-distance operator from Trafford, New York. He waited.
“Hello-hello-” He recognized the nervous, high-pitched voice at once as that belonging to Julian, his son. “Dad?”
“Yes, Julian. How are you?”
“Me? Forget about me. My God, Dad, they woke me up in the middle of the night with the news. I couldn’t believe it. I’d have called you right away, but I was afraid to wake you up. I tried all morning-”
“Yes, they told me.”
“I guess congratulations are in order. May I be one of the first to congratulate you?”
“You certainly may. Thank you, son.”
Julian went on excitedly. “Everyone’s thrilled about it, Dad. It’s the talk of the school. Kids are even cutting classes, whole groups roaming the quad, singing, celebrating.”
As he went on to describe the activities at Trafford University, Dilman realized that this was the first time in a year that his son had spoken with enthusiasm of the school. Julian had not wanted to go to the Negro university. He had been forced to enroll by his father, and he had never ceased resisting it or complaining about his classmates. Now elation had replaced complaint.
“I don’t know that they have so much to feel festive about,” Dilman interrupted. “We lost a fine President.”
“Sure we did, Dad, but, my God, can’t you see? In one stroke we have more than we ever dreamed of. We’ve got you there. No more lousy uphill fighting. Now you can do it all with a twist of the wrist. They’ve got to give in to you. You’re the President!” He was almost shouting with manic glee. “The shortcut’s been made. We’ll get our rights without-”
“Julian,” he said sternly. He had to put a stop to this Julian in Wonderland. “Don’t go around quoting me, or repeating a word I say. This is strictly family, you understand.”
“Sure, sure-”
“Nothing has changed that much, at least not for the better. The road ahead is just as long and steep as a day ago.”
“Naw, never, Dad. For once, stop being so conservative. You’re too close to the picture. You can’t see how big it is. I tell you-”
“You’ve told me enough,” said Dilman curtly. “We’ll discuss this another time. I’ve got a lot to attend to today. And I’m sure you have, too.”
“Yes, but not today, Dad. My God, they’re treating me here like I was the President.”
Instantly the letter from Chancellor Chauncey McKaye, of Trafford University, came to Dilman’s mind.
“Has Chancellor McKaye come down to congratulate you?” Dilman asked with slight sarcasm.
“No, not yet, but-”
“I don’t think he will. I think he celebrates honor students. Look, son, we’d better have a talk-”
“I want to. When are you moving into the White House? I want to come down with the gang and see the inside and-”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll know more about everything in the next few days. I want you here as soon as it is feasible, but without your friends this first time. I have something to discuss with you.”
“Okay, sure.” Julian sounded deflated. “When can I come to Washington? I’m free next Tuesday.”
“Tuesday, then. You come to the West Wing of the White House. I’ll leave word to let you in. Now, behave yourself and attend your classes.”
“Stop worrying, Dad.” He hesitated, and then lowered his voice. “I was thinking about-I wonder how she feels this morning.”
“Never mind about that,” Dilman said sharply. “See you Tuesday, and thanks for your call. I appreciate it.”
After he hung up, Dilman thought about his son’s oblique reference to Mindy, the unmentionable by name, the untouchable, the expatriate from her family and race, and he wondered about her, too. Would he hear from his daughter now? He knew the barter involved. Would it be worth it to her to abdicate her whiteness for the throne of a Negro President’s daughter? He guessed the answer, even as he asked himself the question, and he was grateful when the telephone sounded loudly once more.
This time the caller was his Senate secretary, Diane Fuller, and because he could hardly hear her and because she was almost inarticulate, he knew that she was among whites. He accepted her congratulations and then learned that she was in Edna Foster’s office in the White House. Diane explained that T. C.’s personal secretary had summoned her to pick up Dilman’s heavy inflow of top-level cables and telegrams, and bring the most important to his apartment, in case he wanted to see the communications early.
As Diane began to recite the names affixed to the cables of felicitations and good wishes-one from the Premier of the U.S.S.R., one from His Holiness the Pope, one from the British Prime Minister, one from the President of France, one from the Secretary General of the United Nations, one from President Amboko of Baraza-Douglass Dilman interrupted her.
“Diane, you leave all that right on Miss Foster’s desk,” he said. “Tell her I’ll be in shortly. As for you, go back to my Senate office and take calls. I’ll be in touch with you later.”
When he had finished with the telephone, a troubling thought plucked at his sensitivity. The President’s personal secretary, the late President’s secretary, had telephoned the Senate Building to get Dilman’s own colored secretary to pick up the messages for him. Why this roundabout, time-wasting maneuver? Why had not Edna Foster simply telephoned him herself or brought the messages to him? That would have been the normal way, and the most efficient. Was it that she had never been to a Negro neighborhood before? Or was he overreacting? Was it simply that she had been T. C.’s secretary, and was not only grief-stricken but uncertain about her future role?
Resolving to stop these convolutions of sensitivity, he pushed himself to his feet. He would get his hat, and do what he knew he was avoiding most. He would allow himself to be deposited at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Before he could leave the dining room, the telephone’s ring caught him. He took up the receiver. This time it was a more distant long-distance operator. She announced a call from Fairview Farm, outside Sioux City, Iowa. She repeated the number she had been given to contact. Did she have the correct number? Dilman assured her that this was the correct number.
Suddenly he inquired, “Who is calling here?”
In a schoolteacherish tone, she spelled out the name of the caller. Dilman could not help smiling. It was The Judge himself, and Dilman was delighted. No one, of course, ever called The Judge by any other name than that, and Dilman, who had been a member of the House when The Judge was the outgoing President of the United States, had known him slightly, and had liked the crusty, outspoken, nearsighted old ex-President enormously. The Judge-he had been a minor municipal justice of the peace long before he had become a veteran of the Senate and an American President-had been given so little chance to become elected in his time that he had campaigned without vacillating on issues, with astonishing candor, without selling himself to any man or bloc (since there was no need to, because his candidacy was considered hopeless). When he had won the Presidency in a landslide, putting two polls and three magazines out of business, The Judge had come to the office as his own man. The mandate to speak as he pleased, as well as the fact that he had reached an age when he did not give a damn about ambition and had no hopes for a second term, had made him one of the most individual, independent, and refreshing Chief Executives in modern times. When he liked a man, he liked him if he was black or white, a member of the Party or the opposition, a brain or a heel, and he said so in short expletives, and his enemies fulminated, and the nation adored him. In the three meetings that The Judge had had with Dilman, once while The Judge was President, twice later at Party conferences, he had made it clear that he liked Dilman as a person. No patronizing Rastus-boy attitude. He liked Dilman and he said so, and Dilman liked anyone who liked him and was flattered.
“Put him on-put him on-” he found himself telling the Iowa operator.
The receiver emitted a sound like that of cylinders misfiring, and suddenly The Judge’s nasal voice could be heard. “Mr. President Dilman, are you there?”
“Yes, Judge, how are-?”
“From one old bastard who’s hung in the public stocks to another about to be pilloried in the same place, I want to wish you well. Doug, I want you to go in there, keep your left up high, chin tucked in, and belt them straight from the shoulders. No matter what you hear, no matter what you see, just remember you’re the boss, you’re not Uncle Tom. You think what you think, speak out what you believe, and when you have to, you give them hell. Remember that, young man. Except for those Confederates who still think old Jeff Davis is President, you got your Party right behind you from this day on. And those that aren’t behind you, you tell me and I’ll whomp them into line. Just calling for me and the Missus to wish you the best on the first day, because you and I and the Missus know you need it.”
He began to cough, and Dilman waited, beaming like an idiot, and when the coughing ceased, Dilman spoke. “Judge, I appreciate this, I do, deeply. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“I’ve not done anything for you yet, young man, so don’t thank me till I do. But I’ll tell you what. Me and the Missus are living out here in the middle of nowhere, like Thoreau at the Pond, and all we got is cows and fresh air and time, and time is what we got the most of. So you listen, young fellow, and you remember, if you ever need me at all, not money but advice or a helping hand-both untaxable and both which we got plenty of out here-you come around to me and we’ll have a farm breakfast and talk, and set you straight, or if you want and I can move my bones, I’ll come up there to you. Remember that. Promise?”
“I won’t forget it, Judge.”
“Just one more thing, Douglass, and it’s a favor.” He paused, and then he said testily, “I don’t give a damn if you turn that White House upside down and inside out, but one thing I don’t want you to do-don’t you dare move my portrait out of the Green Room! Good luck, Mr. President, and God bless you!”
Returning the receiver to its cradle, Dilman chuckled. There were more than decent editorial writers out on the land. There were men like The Judge. The morning appeared brighter.
Again the telephone was ringing. Dilman glanced at his wristwatch. It was a quarter to ten. He picked up the receiver impatiently.
“Yes?”
“Good morning, Mr. President. This is Wayne Talley. I’m in the White House with Secretary of State Eaton. We have some urgent matters-routine, but they have to be settled-to discuss. Are you intending to come over here this morning, or would you prefer that we visit you?”
“I’m on my way to the White House right now,” said Douglass Dilman.
He hung up, and it occurred to him that this might be the last telephone call he would receive on his private unlisted number. He was going to another home with many telephones, connections to every state and to all countries, and his telephone number would be known to everyone in the world.
He started out of the dining room to find his hat, and to leave this Negro house and this Negro community behind him. He would try to live in a new house and a new community that was not meant for a Negro but for a man of all the people, because only such a man could serve as President of the United States-that is, a man who was certain that he was a man, and nothing less.
DURING Governor Wayne Talley’s brief conversation with Dilman, Arthur Eaton had sat on one of the two black sofas of the Presidential reception room, the Fish Room it was called after the mammoth sailfish that T. C. had had mounted and hung on one wall, staring up at the square skylight in the ceiling.
Arthur Eaton had hardly heard the conversation, so absorbed was he in his own musings. Persistently his mind had dwelt upon the loss of T. C., his closest public friend-in fact his only friend, since he was a person who had never encouraged personal or intimate relationships with other men. Eaton had been in government, a career diplomat, as far back as he cared to remember. His parents, when they were alive, and when there was money, would have been horrified at anything in government under diplomacy. To run for office, to depend upon others for largess, was unthinkable. As a consequence, Eaton had never considered running for any office, although there had been opportunities. His father, before his death-which occurred almost simultaneously with his loss of wealth-had arranged to put him into diplomacy, and in diplomacy he had been throughout his years.
He could recollect many of his previous posts with ease. There had been the minor beginning as a representative to UNESCO in Paris. There had been the appointment as a delegate to the still growing United Nations in New York. There had been three ambassadorships to three corners of the globe. There had been special troubleshooting assignments, where poise and firmness and keen intellect were wanted, from Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. There had been a period of dismay, almost ennui, when the assignments seemed to be blurring, each one resembling the last, with the same polished tables and same calfskin briefcases and same treaties and same Oriental or Semitic or Asian or European countenances uttering the restrained semantics of upper-echelon diplomatic negotiation. Eaton relished protocol, fine manners, the limited games of wits, and yet he had once become bored by it all. It was a period during which he had felt trapped on a treadmill. Worse, as oppressive, was the fact that he and Kay had lived beyond his means, because this was the way they had been taught to live, and more and more he had become dependent upon her inherited fortune. In his career at that time, not so long ago, he had possessed no hope for change or promotion, and in his personal life he had enjoyed no freedom. It was T. C. who had rescued him, and offered him his greatest hope.
He had enjoyed T. C.’s vigor and boundless extroversion since their college years. While their paths had crossed occasionally, Arthur Eaton had watched T. C.’s political fortunes rise from afar. He had observed his friend engage and defeat foe after foe in elections of more and more importance. He had, with admiration mingled with envy, observed T. C. become a national figure. He was not surprised when the convention had nominated T. C. as the Party’s standard-bearer on the third ballot, but he was surprised when Tim Flannery had telephoned from St. Louis to report that T. C. needed his assistance in the campaign and wanted him to fly out immediately.
At the time, Eaton had been between missions, momentarily free of an assignment, and he had gone to T. C. at once. To Arthur Eaton, in that St. Louis hotel suite, T. C. had been as he had always been, only more so, more confident, more exuberant, more stimulating. T. C. had presented his proposition directly. As the Party’s candidate, he was well-enough versed in domestic affairs to handle himself properly. But, T. C. had admitted disarmingly, he’d had little opportunity to be involved in international problems, and on the subject of foreign affairs he was a dolt, and he needed help and advice. He had implored Eaton to take a leave of absence from the Department of State, and join T. C.’s campaign for the Presidency as adviser on foreign affairs and part-time speech writer.
Although the idea of accompanying anyone on a grueling campaign junket, leaving air-conditioned rooms and polished tables for grubby, poorly lit hotel rooms, half-cooked food, smelly, disheveled local politicians, revolted Arthur Eaton, he had accepted without hesitation. There had been two reasons for his immediate acceptance. One was the chance to get away from Washington, from Kay and her tiresome social friends, from work that was suffocating him, and the other (and more exciting) reason was T. C.’s promise. “Arthur, you help me win, and I’ll see that you have yourself a Cabinet post, not selling stamps or worrying about squaws, but a big one, the biggest. You help me now, and you can help me run this country and most of the world next year.”
It had happened exactly as T. C. had promised that it would. Two hours after T. C.’s opponent had conceded defeat on television, and T. C. had become the President-elect, Arthur Eaton had answered the ringing telephone in Georgetown. The caller had been T. C. himself. No sooner had Eaton congratulated him than T. C. had boomed out, “Arthur, you got any enemies in the Senate?” Eaton could think of none, not real enemies. Then T. C. had said, “Think they’ll give consent on your appointment?” And Eaton had asked, “To what?” And then T. C., with a delighted laugh that was almost a shout, had bellowed across the wire, “To Secretary of State, my friend. You are the first in my Cabinet, and welcome to it!”
So he had become Secretary of State Eaton, and with Talley trotting between T. C. and himself, he had assisted the President in running the country. Those had been adventurous and stimulating days, those days of the two years and seven months gone by, and they had been his Fountain of Youth. Not only had each morning, with its challenges, been a joy to wake to, but Eaton had found the independence to shake off the yoke of money that held him captive to his wife. He had been enabled to ignore her disdain, her snobbery, her petty values, her Social Register crowd and her avant-garde artist salon. He had, indeed, been able to plead devotion to something that mattered more, survival of his country. This had been the same shield he had always been able to hold up to fend off Kay’s barbed anger. Her technique had not varied from its pattern in the past; it had only intensified. She had continued to hack away at his masculinity. When she found that she could no longer bring him down, as she had always succeeded in doing in the past, she had begun to increase her trips away from Washington. She had permitted herself to be seen with her endless bright young men in public. Eaton had rarely speculated on what she might be doing with her companions in private. But more and more, freed of her, he had begun to derive pleasure from the company of attentive and appreciative young Washington women, the single ones. There had been but two short-lived affairs-for he was always aware of the dangers-but they had been gratifying enough to remind him that he was a person still capable of enjoying love and companionship, and that he was more than his wife had tried to make him.
All of this pride and pleasure he owed to the patronage and friendship of T. C., whom he had revered as a friend and respected as a leader. Twenty-four hours ago their future had seemed glowing. There were years of their joint rule ahead of them-the remainder of this term, and the almost certain second term. Twenty-four hours ago Eaton’s resurrection as an individual, a very important person, had been secure. And then, shockingly, with the crumbling of that ancient Palace in Frankfurt, his high hopes and good prospects had crumbled, too. And so he knew that his mourning was not only for the loss of his friend, but for the loss of something of himself.
Throughout the endless tragic night in Georgetown, following the swearing in of Dilman as President, he had received and listened to or overheard the members of T. C.’s bereft team and the leaders of the Party. Most of the chatter had been about how to preserve the unity of the Party, now that a Negro was its head. There had been a little talk, he remembered, about preserving the unity of the nation as well. Too, there had been talk, mostly in Southern accents, about challenging the constitutionality of the 1947 Act of Succession, and there had been talk, in harder accents, about reviving some aspect of the old 1867 Tenure of Office Act, which had once enabled the Senate to try to restrict a President from removing officers appointed to his Cabinet. In short, Eaton remembered, the concern had not been about Dilman’s ability to handle the office, and how he must best be guided, but rather about how to balk him or, failing in that, to control him, pluck his powers, so that the nation would not be tainted black and so that those present might not lose their jobs to colored men and to bleeding-heart Negro-lovers.
Through the night, Arthur Eaton had not permitted himself to be drawn into these discussions. His foresight had suffered from emotional cataracts. He had thought only of the immediate consequences of the fateful night, of the condition of the country and himself now, in the present, without T. C. as mentor. When his living room bar and then his library had emptied, and he had sought sleep, he had still not fastened on the full realization that even though another, by default, had become President, this other must be made to understand that it was still T. C.’s country and T. C.’s government and that any successor was there merely as a custodian of T. C.’s ideas and ideals, which Eaton himself might continue to spell out and present.
Not until now, in the Fish Room of the White House-a room, like the Oval Office, restored by T. C. to the decor of the Kennedy administration-had Eaton, after listening to Talley on the telephone, after reviewing all that he had reviewed in his head, finally settled on the idea of what must be done. He had a role, after all, and perhaps now it was more important than it had been before. He must ignore every one of those harebrained schemes about blocking Dilman from the Oval Office, or obstructing the lamentable Negro. He must devote himself, Eaton decided, to keeping T. C. as alive as he had ever been. Only thus could their United States be saved, and, parenthetically, only thus could Arthur Eaton have a continuing, meaningful life.
He sat straight on the sofa, saw that Wayne Talley was standing at the desk near the door, making notes on a sheet that lay beside the quaint early typewriter once used by Woodrow Wilson.
“What are you up to, Wayne?” he inquired.
“Dilman’s on his way in. He’s an absolute amateur. I’m not saying he’s stupid-hell, he’s been around the Hill long enough. But he’s ignorant of what really goes on, and of things that have to be done. It kills me when I think of it. The Majority Party senators caucus every time there’s a new Congress in the Conference Room of the Senate Office Building to select a temporary presiding officer to sit up there with the gavel and pound it. The idea is to select one of their own as a substitute or alternate for the Vice-President when he’s out of town. Nine times out of ten, they cast their caucus vote for the member among them who has seniority. There’s no rule about it, but it’s a kind of gesture of courtesy, a custom, to select the senator who’s had the most years of service. That’s why Rydberg had the spot so long. ‘Papa Methuselah’ they called him. Then his doctors make him quit, so the Senate needs a replacement, what with Porter traveling all the time. They’ve got to caucus again. So what happens this time? All those riots, the bloodshed, in Detroit, Chicago, Memphis, Dallas, all of it from Negroes, with those protest marches and boycotts worsening-so a couple of smart guys get the big political brainstorm, let’s give the honorary presiding post to a Negro, a democratic gesture, and shut up those demonstrators, prove to them we mean well. So Senator Selander, the senior member, who normally would have become President pro tempore, seconds the suggestion. That makes it okay. So Selander steps out of the caucus, phones me, and tells me to pass it on to T. C. to find out if he approves. Well, T. C. was so damn busy that day he didn’t give a hoot who held that unimportant President pro tempore of the Senate job, so he said okay, maybe it’ll look good for the Party, let them do what they think best. So the Party caucus elects Douglass Dilman, and puts the resolution naming him to the whole Senate. Then, a routine thing, the opposition offers an amendment putting forth their own candidate, Senator Riggins, and a roll call is held and the opposition amendment voted down. Then the original resolution on behalf of Dilman is put to a voice vote, and the ayes have it, and Dilman has that idiotic do-nothing post. Who in the hell would know that the Vice-President would drop dead soon after that? Who in the hell would imagine that the fourth in line of succession could ever become President of the United States? In fact, who in the hell, on that day they routinely caucused and voted, even knew that the President pro tempore of the Senate was the fourth in line? I always thought it was the Secretary of State. I thought it was you, Arthur, not that it mattered a damn at the time. So for political and publicity reasons we put that poor Party hack in there, and we had our showcase colored man up there for all to see, a man with no qualifications for leadership whatsoever-”
“How do you know that?” asked Eaton quietly.
“Douglass Dilman’s been in the House four terms, in the Senate two terms, and what has he ever done or instigated?” said Talley heatedly. “He was sent to Washington because of the temper of the times, and given an honorary gavel in the Senate because of the times, and then a once-in-a-thousand accident happens, and blooey, we’re stuck with a tenth-rater whose presence means potential trouble, and plenty of it.” He lifted his hands to the ceiling. “The fourth in line becoming President-I repeat, Arthur, who could’ve imagined it?”
“It was always a possibility,” said Eaton. “I was reading this morning that what happened now might very well have happened during the last six weeks of 1961. At that time Speaker Rayburn was dead, and not replaced, and had President Kennedy been assassinated then, and Vice-President Johnson with him, we would have had the fourth in line, President pro tempore of the Senate Hayden, as President of the United States.”
“But this Dilman, anyone would have been better than Dilman.”
“Well, if he doesn’t work out,” said Eaton, “you and your senator friends have only yourselves to blame. As an expediency, you played politics instead of exercising judgment, and you did it once too often.”
“Arthur, don’t lecture me from hindsight. We always play politics. That’s our business. Politics-why, that’s not necessarily a dirty word. It implies bargaining, giving and taking, it means tuning in on the times, doing things people want even when you’re not sure it’s best for them. More often than not, politics produces good results. And usually, when we play politics, we guess right, and what happens is right not only for us here but for most of the people out there. This time, this once, though-” He shook his head sadly. “Well, like I said, we were dealing with a minor decision, and we dusted it off to placate a pressure group. Who in the hell knew that it would lead to this?”
“Yet it has led to this,” said Eaton. “I suggest that we forget the past, and consider what is to be done in the present. This is the time to be realistic, to make the best of a-a difficult situation.” He paused and considered Talley. “I believe T. C. would have wanted that.”
Talley’s cross-eye jumped, and he swallowed, as ever cowed by the mention of T. C.’s name. “Yes, I guess you’re right,” he said. He came away from the desk, rattling the sheet of paper in his hand. “Well, you can see that I, personally, am trying to make the best of it. I’m trying to get up a reasonable list of the first duties Dilman must discharge. God knows how well he’ll be able to manage them.”
“Wayne, certainly he will expect expert counsel and guidance,” said Eaton softly. “Long ago the office became too big for one man. After all, what are the demands on the President today? He is Chief Executive, overseeing the execution of our laws, exercising important powers of appointment and removal. He is chief of state, national host to an endless stream of native and foreign visitors. He is Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy and Marines and Air Force, with the Pentagon dangling from his civilian lapel. He is arbiter of both Houses on Capitol Hill, able to influence Congressional activity, able to nullify its accomplishments by veto. He is Ambassador to the world, making deals with international leaders, ironing out treaties, selecting foreign diplomat puppets, using my own Department of State as little more than a computer. And that, Wayne, is but the start of it, for any President. Consider his lesser jobs-he runs his political party, he molds public opinion, he sees that his voice is heard in the United Nations, he acts as a superpoliceman in areas ranging from strikes to race riots to big-business monopoly.”
Arthur Eaton saw that Talley was becoming impatient, and he smiled. “Forgive a résumé of what you are already too well acquainted with, but this is a morning in which to remember the facts of a President’s life. What lone man, in our complex age, can perform as so many men at one and the same time? There’s enough here to give Hercules a nervous breakdown. Every modern President knows that. Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson knew that, and delegated power to specialists. The only one who tried to go it alone was The Judge, and that lasted about one year, and his cranky ego put him in such a hole that it took several hundred experts to dig him out. Why, T. C. once told me our method of electing and depending on one President was as outmoded as the horse-and-buggy, that what this country needed today was the election of a board of Presidents, at least five serving at once. Since he could not have that, T. C. did the next-best thing. He took on you, Wayne, after you lost your election, and myself, and a half-dozen others of the Party as assistant Presidents, and it worked nicely, very nicely.”
Talley sniffed. “Great, Arthur, I know that. You know that. Maybe every schoolboy knows that. But does our new Mr. President know that?”
“He may. If he does not understand delegation of power, I think he will come to understand it within a week.”
“I wish I could be as sure of that as you, Arthur. We’re not dealing with an ordinary man. We’re dealing with a colored man, the product of a race that’s been pushed around for a century or more, and is used to being told what to do, and resents it. You give someone like that power, the power to do the pushing, and he may not want to let go of one inch of it. He can ruin us.”
Eaton was briefly preoccupied. At last he looked up. “You may be right. On the other hand, it is quite possible that his color, the history of his racial background, can work to our benefit. Based on what I know of his performance on Capitol Hill, he is a timid and uncertain man, a good listener, orthodox and agreeable in every way. Last night I asked Senator Selander to read me Dilman’s voting record for this last session. He went along with T. C. and the Party on every piece of major legislation. I think that augurs well for all of us.”
“Arthur, he wasn’t President of the United States then.”
“No, but now that he is, he may be more frightened and eager for our help than ever before. At least, I choose to think so. I cannot fire up enthusiasm for those extremist challenges and measures being proposed to void Dilman’s Presidency or to hamper him if he legally remains our President. I see no reason to antagonize him, where there is no shred of evidence that he will be uncooperative. I believe we must make him see matters as T. C. saw them and would have acted upon them in the future. If we succeed, it’ll be a certainty that we will survive the rest of the term unscathed. And I think the time to begin our guidance is right now, from this moment onward.” He pointed to the sheet of paper in Talley’s hand. “Tell me what is on Dilman’s agenda.”
Still troubled, Talley sat on the edge of the sofa, and consulted the scribblings on the sheet of paper he held before him. “Let me see-umm-he signed the proclamation for T. C.’s funeral and the period of national mourning last night, didn’t he? Yes, I remember. Well, now, he’ll have to go over and meet the funeral plane tomorrow.”
“I wish Grover Illingsworth would take care of that,” said Eaton. Then he added, “Anyway, let him make arrangements for the procession, the services in the White House, and the funeral itself. He’s the best Chief of Protocol we’ve ever had, but he’s even better at-at delicate affairs like this. I’ve already packed him off in T. C.’s jet to bring Hesper back from Arizona.”
Talley brought his head up sharply. “What about Hesper? Should Dilman see her?”
Eaton did not reply at once. He thought of Hesper, T. C.’s gracious wife, now a widow, with one fatherless son, isolated in the summer home in Phoenix. He had already spoken to her. She was taking it courageously, as might be expected of a woman of her background. Like his own Kay, she was Social Register and independently wealthy, but unlike his own Kay, she was well-balanced and friendly. Passionately devoted to her child, her numerous charities, she would survive her loss well. “I don’t know, Wayne,” Eaton said. “Perhaps Dilman should pay his respects to the First Lady, but I think it would be uncomfortable for both of them. We have a day or two. Let me think about it.” He waved his hand at Talley’s notes. “Let’s go on.”
“He has to swear in the White House staff-”
“This afternoon.”
“-and fill some sudden vacancies, mostly female secretaries, Southern.”
“I see. Fine, Edna can begin screening applicants.”
Talley went back to his notes. “Tim Flannery says the press reports show considerable concern. The country’s had a bad jolt.” He looked up. “Maybe it would allay everyone’s fear if they could have a look at him, see that he’s harmless. I thought we could prepare a short, rather self-effacing speech for him, and put him on the television networks-”
“No,” said Eaton firmly. “Too soon. His appearance might inflame rather than soothe. Let’s try to keep him out of sight for a while, let the country know that even under Dilman the government has not been disrupted, that business is going on as usual.”
“What about letting him address a Joint Session of Congress? Truman did it after F. D. R.’s death.”
“He did it over his colleagues’ protests. No, Wayne, I don’t like that either. I still say keep him close to his desk for a while, until everyone settles down.”
“Well-”
“Arrange to have him lunch tomorrow with selected leaders of the Senate and House.”
“Excellent,” said Talley, making a note of it. “What about the Cabinet? Shall I summon all hands for a meeting today?”
Eaton shook his head. “Not today. Not tomorrow, either.”
“Won’t it look funny if he doesn’t-”
Eaton licked his lower lip. “I do not want him running a Cabinet meeting until we’ve had a chance to brief him thoroughly. We’ve first got to inform Dilman of T. C.’s desires, wishes, plans. Then he will know how to handle himself.” He sat up straight. “I’ll tell you what to do, Wayne-beginning this afternoon, and during the next few days, have the various Cabinet members drop in on courtesy calls, but make sure none of them discusses business. As to Dilman, for his part he must request each one to remain in office and to serve him as each served T. C.”
“What if he objects or has reservations?”
“He won’t resist, Wayne. He doesn’t know them, and he does need a knowledgeable Cabinet at once. He hasn’t had time to consider anyone else. Oh yes, be sure to remind him that after F. D. R. died, Harry Truman did just this, asked each member of Roosevelt’s Cabinet to stay on. And Lyndon Johnson did the same. Very well, what next?”
“At least a dozen ambassadors have applied this morning for appointments. Ambassador Rudenko wants to discuss resumption of the Roemer Conference-”
“I’ll see him myself.”
“Then the Ambassador from Baraza, Nnamdi Wamba, is most anxious-”
“I’ll have Jed Stover stall him. I’m flying someone over to Baraza tomorrow to sit down with President Amboko. I want to do what T. C. was intending to do-pave the way for a settlement with the Russians by making the Africans ease upon their Communists in return for our ratifying the African Unity Pact. I want to feel Amboko out. When we are ready, we can tell Dilman how to behave with the Barazans.”
“Then the Indian Ambassador and-”
“Limit them to courtesy calls, too. No official business until next week. Is that enough to keep Dilman occupied?”
Talley nodded. “Of course, but there’s-”
The knocking on the door behind them made both of them turn. “Yes?” Talley called out.
The door opened and Edna Foster poked her head into the room. “Secretary Eaton, since it’s personal, I thought, rather than buzz-there’s a call from Miami Beach for you. It’s Mrs. Eaton. Can you take it now?”
Eaton hesitated and then quickly said, “Yes, certainly. Thank you, Miss Foster.”
“Line two, please,” Edna said, and closed the door.
Eaton rose stiffly from the sofa and crossed to the telephone.
“Arthur, if you’d like to be alone-” Talley called after him.
“Stay where you are.”
“Eaton punched a plastic key on the telephone and brought the receiver to his ear. “Kay dear, how are you?”
He listened to her soprano mockery of his greeting. “ ‘Kay dear, how are you?’ Oh, my, somebody should hear you. They’d think you had just come off the tennis court. How do you do it, Arthur? How do you stand calm and collected in a massacre? I thought you’d be in the middle of a wake, at least, beating your breast and loaded to the gills over your poor T. C. Doesn’t anything drive you to drink, Arthur?”
“You may succeed where others have failed, darling.”
Her laughter rattled through the receiver, and then there was a pause, and she came on more soberly. “I heard it when we all drove back to the hotel before midnight. They broke in on the music, every station. Quite an uproar down here in Florida. And this morning, too. The colored waiter wouldn’t even take a tip for breakfast. ‘Got enuff for one day, ma’am,’ he said. And the whites down in the lobby, glowering and complaining and nigger-hating all over the place. It’s enough to scare you. Know anywhere to hide, Arthur? Or don’t you run scared any more?”
“Not any more, Kay.”
“That the best you can do, Arthur? You sound so restrained. Is there someone in the room with you?”
“Yes, there is.”
“Well, that shouldn’t inhibit the Eatons, should it, now? We’re public property, we belong to all ages. Did you know Reb Blaser’s column is syndicated? Indeed it is. I read about us right down here in the sand. I hear the Eatons are heading for the divorce court. Should I believe everything I read?”
“Cut it out, Kay. He was gunning for bigger game in that column.”
“I should think there’s no bigger game than you personally right now, my dear one. What’s the saying-ah-you’re a heartbeat away from the Presidency, I read.”
“I haven’t had time to think about it.”
“Well, I have, Arthur. I have nothing but time these days. I could hardly fall asleep last night speculating about it. I kept thinking how close it had been. What if that Negro-whatever his name is-had been with T. C. and MacPherson in Frankfurt? Why, you’d be the President and I’d be the First Lady. Now, you couldn’t divorce a First Lady, could you? Could you, Arthur? Has it ever been done?”
At last her chiding anger had penetrated his control. “Kay, stop it. I’m busy right now. We can-”
Her voice was suddenly serious. “Arthur, do you want me to come home now? If you need me-”
He thought how much he had needed her how many times in the past, but now he needed only peace of mind. He had a desire to tell her so, but he was aware that Talley was in the room, and he restrained himself. “Finish your vacation, Kay. That would be best for both of us.”
“Drop dead,” she said calmly, and hung up.
He was left with the receiver still uplifted, without the chance to say good-bye, always an embarrassment when others were in the room. He made a lame pretense. “Be well, Kay,” he said into the dead phone, and he returned the receiver to its place.
He observed that Talley was too busily occupied making notes on that crowded single sheet of paper. He was sure that Talley had guessed what had gone on between Kay and himself, and he was even more resentful of Kay for baiting him when she knew he was not alone.
Remaining near the telephone, Eaton inquired, “What about the rest of Dilman’s agenda?”
“Oh,” Talley said, sitting erect, as if he had been deeply absorbed in work and unaware that the telephone call had ended. Quickly he began to announce what was left for Dilman to do. “He’ll have to reply to a ton of foreign dispatches from heads of state. Maybe something short and sweet, to instill confidence in them. Perhaps a longer cable in response to Premier Kasatkin. I think Tim Flannery and the two of us should get to work immediately helping Dilman draft a dignified, somewhat ambiguous statement to the press telling them that he enters the office with a sense of responsibility to T. C. and to the American people who voted T. C. into office, and that the ship of state is still T. C.’s ship, and he is only temporarily at the helm, but will do his best-”
“Good,” said Eaton. “Inform Dilman and Flannery we’ll meet at three today.”
“Next on the schedule-”
The telephone beside Eaton rang out. He picked it up, praying that it was not Kay again. It proved to be Edna Foster from across the hall. She reported that Congressman Zeke Miller and one of his assistants were in the press lobby. Miller had said that it was imperative that he see both Eaton and Talley. He had promised not to take up more than a few minutes.
“What should I say to him?” Edna Foster asked.
“Tell him we’re crowded for time, but-” He weighed the necessity of seeing Congressman Miller, whom he found gauche and distasteful, but then he realized that if he were to act as T. C. acted, he would have to be a politician as well as a diplomat. “Very well, Miss Foster, send him in.”
He moved toward the corridor door.
“Who is it?” Talley inquired.
“Zeke Miller wants to see us for a few minutes. I suppose we have to.”
“Absolutely,” said Talley. “He packs a lot of power, especially right now.”
Eaton opened the door, noticing that the “In Use” sign still hung from its peg, and then, as if on cue, Representative Zeke Miller, thin briefcase tucked under his arm, charged into the Fish Room, shaking hands with Eaton, and with Talley, who had come to his feet. Then Miller introduced the gangling young man with thick spectacles and flabby lips and overloaded brown briefcase, who had followed him inside, as one Casper Wine.
Zeke Miller circled the Fish Room, hot with perspiration, and imperiously ordered his assistant to a chair. “Sit down over there, Casper.” Then he said to Eaton, “Casper Wine is the goldarn smartest young constitutional lawyer on the Hill. Does a lot of homework for those of us on the House Judiciary Committee.”
Miller swung away, yanking a blue handkerchief from his hip pocket. He brought it to his nose, honked into it, and then, balling up the handkerchief, wiped the perspiration from his forehead, face, and neck. Eaton watched Miller’s activity, these nervous gyrations, with growing distaste. On those occasions when he had been thrown together with Miller, he had always left feeling that he would have been more comfortable with a pit viper. For one thing, Eaton found the Southern Congressman’s appearance repulsive. Not that Miller was technically ugly, Eaton conceded, but his aspect was that of the bigot incarnate. Miller was not quite short, was wiry, and was perpetually in motion. There was something meanly threatening about him, like a coiled spring ready to tear loose, explode, and shred anyone within range.
Miller was semibald, with a long, thin, veiny nose, tiny gray eyes, and an almost lipless mouth that continually worked over discolored teeth. His small frame, like his small mind, was tough and supple. His suits were expensive but garish. Neither his father’s textile money nor his inheritance from his mother had given him polish. His years away from the Deep South had modified his Dixie accent which, it was said in the cloakrooms, he turned on at will during electioneering years.
When taking to the hustings down home, traveling the red clay roads and magnolia groves, Zeke Miller reverted to being the complete “Southroner,” and the voice that twanged away like the plucked strings of a banjo on the floor of the House became softer, rounder, as its rich mellifluousness inveighed against the Communist-African conspiracy “to undermine America by reducing us to one mongrelized family, and thereby bringing on the Biblical Armageddon which will wipe our Christian government from the earth.” America’s hope, Miller often said, was in containing the spread of the Black Plague through strict segregation, and ultimately shipping off the carriers and spreaders of destruction to their native Africa. In his infrequent cheerier moments of oratory, Miller was given to attributing his jokes to his father’s decrepit green parrot, or to revising suitable quotations from the Old Testament. He would not forget that his grandpappy, Braxton Z. Miller, had owned slaves, and they had been peaceable and grateful, and “the Nigra’s lot” had been the better for this paternal segregation. “As the Prophets have told us,” Miller often liked to say, “ ‘Thou shalt not plow with an ox and an ass together.’ ”
Now Zeke Miller had finished drying himself, and was folding his handkerchief and returning it to his hip pocket. “I tell you,” he muttered, “those reporters out there sure downright bugged me. Trying to make me out a Bilbo or worse. Anything for a story. They sure can be mighty rough boys.”
“You should know, Zeke,” Talley said cheerfully, “you own half of them.”
“Aw, no, that’s not true, Governor,” Miller said. “The few newspapers my Dad and I control, they don’t amount to a hill of beans.” For the first time Miller became conscious of Eaton’s stare. He half faced Eaton. “I’ve got too many more serious matters on my head than to bother about my newspapers. Just for the record, Mr. Secretary, I had no part in what that goldarn fool, Reb Blaser, put in our papers. It got me sore as could be, and I told Reb off good, and said if he picks on my friends once more with goldarn scandal rumors, I’ll see that he winds up on one of those nigger newspapers. Just so there’s no misunderstanding, Mr. Secretary, I’ve got nothing against you and your lady. I’m for you. I’m for all of T. C.’s team and everyone in our constitutional government. Fact is, I’m closer on your side than I’ve ever been before. No, sir, you’ve got my word, no more subverting rumors.”
“You’re protesting too much, Congressman,” said Eaton, “and it’s not necessary. I take your word it was a mistake. I accept your promise that it won’t happen again. I’ve quite forgotten the whole incident. You’re right, there are more important matters to contend with now.”
Miller’s mouth cracked into a smile, and his nicotine-stained teeth were revealed. “There’s more important things on my mind, too. If you sit down, I’ll be quick, I’ll give you a report on what’s been going on up on the Hill to save this poor country.”
Eaton and Talley eased themselves down on the sofa, but Zeke Miller stayed on his feet, snapping open his briefcase, extracting a wad of clipped papers. “Know what this is?” he asked, holding up the papers while dropping his briefcase. “This is the American people joined and united in one voice of protest against the greatest humiliation and danger of our century-against having an ignorant nig possum politician dirtying the White House and shoving us around.”
Eaton did not suppress his displeasure. He knew that Miller used the words “nigger” and “nig” when trumpeting for white votes in the South, but, like most of his colleagues, he confined himself to Negro (“Nigra,” his accent made it) in the public arena of the House. Now he had slipped back to “nigger,” and this, Eaton decided, came from inner fury. “Congressman Miller,” Eaton found himself saying, “President Dilman is not shoving anyone around. He hasn’t had the time to do so, even if he had the desire.”
“You wait, you just wait and see,” Miller shot back. “Before you can turn around, you’ll find yourself staring down at a nigger Cabinet, with every administrative aide and every ambassador a black jigaboo, and you can be sure he’ll be hiring white men for his servants and white girls for his secretaries. That’s what all of them have been waiting for.”
Miller belched, strutted in a tight circle, and came to roost before Eaton and Talley once more. “For a minute, forget about the side issues. I’m worried sick about the big issues. See here in my hand, tallies of the telegrams that have come flooding in to Hankins and myself and the rest of us, and not all from the South, either. I’ll leave them for you to read. Over two thousand telegrams since last night, demanding we keep that Dilman out of office and protect our country. Now, don’t give me any cool racist and segregationist back talk, because this is bigger than that. Almost three years ago the people of this glorious country heard the issues and elected the man they wanted to represent them, and suddenly they find themselves saddled with someone they never wanted who plumb hates their guts. I call that legal crime. I tell you here and now, and I’m willing to shout it from the rooftops, if that Nigra Dilman is allowed to sit in T. C.’s chair, we’re in for rebellion. Inside a month we’ll be wading through blood from white and nigger bodies. Letting this stranger be foisted upon us disrupts our unity and progress, degrades us in the eyes of the world, and promises corruption and ruin.”
He paused, his pinpoint eyes darting from Eaton to Talley, and then he hiccuped and went on. “I know what you’re both thinking, or maybe I don’t, but I’m no red-neck, I tell you. I’m an educated, progressive legislator who wants what is right. Sure I was raised to believe that we have our place, and the niggers have their place, and that’s the way Jehovah arranged it. But I’m a Party man, and always will be, so help me. When the Party had to bow to the Supreme Court and force us to give in to niggers, I went along. And that’s what I’ll still do. I eat with niggers, and ride with them, and let my youngsters enter the same school with them, because that’s the law. Good enough. I’ve done everything with niggers, like it or not, but goldarn it, there’s sure one thing I won’t do-I won’t let an African black man sit in the chair where General Washington sat, and try to rule me. Maybe if one day it was the wish of the electorate out there, black and white, I’d go along. If he was voted in by popular vote, I’d live with it. But the way it is now-no, never!”
Miller had the blue handkerchief out again, and angrily mopped his wet face.
Talley wrung his hands nervously. “Zeke, he was voted into the Senate-”
“By damn Northern Communists,” interrupted Miller.
“Nevertheless, he was voted into the Senate, and the Senate voted him President pro tempore, and legally he was in the line of succession. I don’t see what you can do about it.”
“Aha!” exclaimed Miller. “That’s why I brought Casper Wine over here. He knows the Constitution so thoroughly, he could’ve signed it with Hancock. A group of us who are concerned about what’s happening to our country, who believe in justice, we met most of the night and this morning, and we brought Casper in with us, to find out what could be done before Dilman becomes President.”
“He is already President,” said Eaton calmly. “I saw him sworn in last night.”
“Illegal procedure’s what you saw,” said Miller. “Casper and the rest of us have covered that point. There are plenty of loopholes in the Succession Act. We’re fixing to have the whole thing nullified. We’re getting up this preliminary challenge for the House Judiciary Committee. I’m here because I’m of the mind that you should be the first to know what we’re doing, Mr. Secretary. After all, if we win, you’re the one person directly affected. If we can disqualify Dilman, then you’re the one to replace him, by special election, if necessary. We’re only trying to make you President, Mr. Secretary.”
“I should be grateful,” said Eaton coldly, “but I am only interested in upholding the law.”
Miller had spun away. “Casper, read them our findings.”
Casper Wine was already tugging a massive legal brief out of his brown case.
Eaton shook his head. “We don’t have time to hear a reading of any brief. President Dilman is on his way here, and there is a good deal of business to transact… Mr. Wine, forget any reading. Tell us in your own words what you have in that appeal.”
Casper Wine squinted despairingly through his convex spectacle lenses at Miller.
Miller shrugged, then said, “Okay, give it to them in a capsule, Casper.”
The myopic constitutional attorney brought the legal brief up high, close to his eyes, until it all but obscured his face. Slowly he peeled the pages, reading to himself, and at last he lowered the brief to his lap. He began to speak in a hesitant falsetto, his magnified eyes not on Eaton or Talley but roaming his brief, the carpet, the shoes of his sponsor.
“It is difficult-uh-difficult to reduce our appeal to a few generalities without-uh-without reciting our researches into precedent, previous Acts-uh-Acts of Succession and constitutional history,” he said. “I shall attempt to condense our case.” His eyes closed behind his fat lenses, and then his eyes and his mouth opened. “If you will read the Constitution, you will see under Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 6, that should both the President-uh-President and Vice-President die, then Congress shall have the right to declare-I quote-‘what Officer shall then act as President’ until ‘a President shall be elected.’ Now then, Congress three times passed bills clarifying-uh-clarifying the succession, and the last bill in 1947 provided that the Speaker should be next in line, the President pro tempore of the-uh-the Senate after him, and the Secretary of State after him. Under this bill of 1947, within the framework of the Constitution, it is highly questionable if-uh-Dilman, this Douglass Dilman, can be sworn in, that is, can become in actuality President of the United States. First, the wording of the Constitution makes it clear-uh-clear that the successor must be an ‘Officer,’ and the weight of legal opinion is that Dilman as a Senator, and the Speaker before him, and the-uh-the Secretary of State after him are not technically officers at all. If Dilman is not an ‘Officer,’ how can he be eligible to become President?”
Talley turned to Eaton. “That’s a point, Arthur.”
Eaton wrinkled his nose and shook his head. “Too weak. I think it is doubtful if you can overturn an Act of Succession on a minor semantic issue.”
“We shall see,” said Casper Wine. “But let us suppose-uh-suppose you are found to be right, Mr. Secretary. Next, we come to a stronger challenge. The Constitution states plainly that the successor shall-uh-shall-and I emphasize this-shall ‘act as President’ until ‘a President shall be elected.’ In short, Senator Dilman may act as President, in an honorary custodial sense as he acted as chairman in the Senate, until a special election is held across the country to give us a new and legal President for four more years.”
Once more, Eaton was shaking his head. “I don’t see that. In the recent past, eight Vice-Presidents succeeded eight dead Presidents, and they did not act as Presidents, they performed as Presidents.”
“True, but they performed unconstitutionally,” persisted Wine. “The first mistake was made when William Harrison passed away in 1841. The Cabinet informed and addressed his successor, John Tyler, as Vice-President of the United States, Acting President, which was correct. Tyler, wishing the power, honors, and title of full President, ignored-uh-ignored the Cabinet, and made himself full President and spoke-uh-spoke of his ‘accession to the Presidency,’ despite protests of many senators. Other successors merely followed his high-handed illegal custom. Almost all-uh-all of these successors have been challenged in the press. Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson were so challenged. But nothing more happened.”
Zeke Miller jumped into view, and stood over Eaton. “This time, Mr. Secretary, we’re seeing to it something happens. We’re abiding by our beloved Constitution. If Dilman is not an officer, he is not eligible for the Presidency. If he is an officer, then he is eligible to act as President only until we can have a special election in this country to vote for a legal President-hopefully, Mr. Secretary, yourself.”
Eaton stood up. “Forget about me. I am not the issue.”
“You are the issue,” said Miller excitedly. “Six former Secretaries of State have become Presidents, but no President pro tempore of the Senate ever did. You are our best candidate.”
“Congressman Miller,” said Eaton wearily, “you can have no candidate for another year and five months, because you have a President… Mr. Wine, I appreciate your legal briefing. I can have no part of it. I will not deter you or the Congressman from presenting your findings before the House Judiciary. I can only remark that I must serve President Dilman until I am told not to do so.”
Congressman Zeke Miller began to grin. “Fair enough, fair enough. You let us carry the ball, and you stand by. Believe me, Mr. Secretary, you won’t regret it.” He sought his briefcase, and signaled Casper Wine to his feet. He paused before Talley. “I’m looking out for all of us, Governor. I am all-fired determined, by legal means which exist, to prevent that there Dilman from selling out our heritage to that parcel of black terrorists in the Turnerite gang and to those whining hymn singers in the Crispus Society and NAACP. You can tell Dilman he can play President for a couple days, but you better also tell him not to go to the expense of moving into the White House.” He winked. “I like that old House, I like the color it is right now.”
After Miller and Wine had gone, the clatter of their footsteps on the tile corridor quickly receding, the Fish Room was silent. Eaton and Talley did not look at one another. Eaton occupied himself inserting a cigarette into his silver holder and lighting it. When he had taken several puffs, he met Talley’s gaze.
“I do not like that man, I do not like him at all,” Eaton said.
“He’s a nasty customer, no question. You’d think he’d know better. But I understand his kind. I’ve been through his state with T. C., and there are loads of Millers down there. When you’ve seen that, you can know how he feels about having Dilman in here.”
“Wayne, you must believe me, I have nothing against Dilman because he is black. I simply have no prejudices about color.”
“Neither have I,” said Talley hastily.
Speaking more to himself than to Talley, Eaton went on. “I could never be on Miller’s side or Hankins’ side or anyone’s for such a reason. In fact, I would feel an obligation to defend President Dilman against such attacks.” He considered what he would say next. “I could find myself resisting Dilman, and being unwillingly thrown in with the Miller crowd, for only two reasons. If Dilman were, indeed, to perform as a Negro President instead of the President of the entire nation, if he were to show favoritism to men of his race to the detriment of the country as a whole, I would have to oppose him. And if he were to fall under the wrong influence, jettison T. C.’s program and T. C.’s team, I would have to fight him.” Then he added, “I do not anticipate either of these problems arising.”
“Well, up on the senior side of the Hill there’s a little more concern, Arthur,” said Talley. “Senator Hankins feels that the only way to preserve T. C.’s program is to preserve his Cabinet. They’ve been trying to figure out a way of curbing Dilman’s power of removal.”
“Yes, I guess I heard something of that last night.”
“They’re worried about Dilman moving in, feeling his oats after a bit, and then firing you and replacing you with a Negro friend or some white liberal who will toady to him. They’re worried this would not only end T. C.’s program but weaken the rightful line of succession.”
Eaton pursed his lips. “I believe that they are building straw men to knock down.”
“They want to play it safe, Arthur. As long as you’re around, they feel there is someone to oversee Dilman, make sure he speaks T. C.’s language and signs bills with T. C.’s pen. Then, too, they’re all feeling a little fatalistic-with good reason-and they want to make sure that if anything happens to Dilman, you’ll be around to succeed him, you and not someone, Negro or white, who does not represent the Party’s platform.”
“Yes, I see,” said Eaton thoughtfully. “Whatever they do, they had better make sure it is within the limitations imposed by the Constitution.”
“I’m curious to know exactly what they’re up to,” Talley said. “We know what Miller and his House boys are doing, but I keep wondering about Senator Hankins. I think I’ll give him a ring.” He started for the telephone, but hesitated when he reached it. “No, I don’t think I want to talk to Hankins. That’ll be Miller all over again.” He snapped his fingers. “I know-” He lifted the receiver and dialed one digit. “Edna? This is Governor Talley. Be a good girl and hook me up with Senator Hoyt Watson. He’s probably still at home… Yes, I’ll wait.”
Across the room Arthur Eaton waited, too. When he heard Talley get his connection and begin to question Senator Watson, he ejected his cigarette butt from the holder and replaced it with a fresh cigarette. It was the first time in a decade, to his surprise, that he had found it necessary to chain-smoke.
CONCENTRATING on the postcard-sized screen of the miniature Swiss television set, which stood on the white Formica breakfast table between them, Sally Watson heard her father say, “One second, Governor Talley, hold it a second.”
She glanced up from her coffee to find her father jabbing a finger at the television set. “Sally,” he called to her over the din, “would you mind lowering it a trifle?”
“Of course not, Dad.” She put down her coffee, reached out and turned down the volume.
“That’s better, baby.” Senator Hoyt Watson’s long Percheron face had gone back to the mouthpiece from which he removed his hand. “Okay, Governor, would you repeat your question?”
As she picked up her coffee cup again, Sally Watson’s attention returned to the television screen. The horrible newsreel film of the Frankfurt catastrophe had ended, and now the network was beginning to project a hastily prepared documentary biography to acquaint its viewers with President Douglass Dilman.
Fascinated, she watched the unreal scene in the Cabinet Room of the White House the night before, as Senator Dilman took the Presidential oath. Although she had seen Dilman a number of times in the corridors of the Old Senate Office Building and at Washington social affairs, she had never really been aware of him as an individual, she realized. In close-up on the television screen, he became a person, a very dark person, to be sure, but a man with neat wavy hair, kind eyes, and a habit of rubbing his upper lip with his lower one. Now the film took viewers back to Dilman’s beginnings. There were scenes of a Mid-western city slum area, where Dilman had been born over fifty years ago, and still photographs of an unattractive infant in absurd lacy dresses, and then dull shots of school buildings, and Sally Watson’s interest began to wane and her head began to throb.
She poured herself a third cup of black coffee, hoping her father would not see this, and she wondered at what point during the gruesome party last night she had switched from vodka to Scotch. She could not remember, except that she had made the change because the vodka had done nothing for her and she had wanted something that would make the evening bearable, especially with all that incessant and tiresome Grim Reaper chatter provoked by T. C.’s death. More and more, she knew, she was mixing her drinks at parties, determined to attain euphoria swiftly, and more and more often the hangovers were persisting late into the next day, when she was forced to rid herself of them with fresh drinks and new pills.
Drinking the third cup of black coffee, she tried to devote herself to the television screen. But now her father was replying to Talley, and since the sound volume on the set was low, it was superseded by her father’s basso, so that his voice and the image on the screen blended and created utter confusion.
Because her father’s voice was more alive than the pictures on the screen, and dominated them, she surrendered viewing for listening. Her father, a large, impressive, authoritative figure, with his trademark shock of white hair and his trademark black string tie in evidence, was drawling into the telephone.
“Certainly I’m not happy about the turn of events, Governor,” he was saying, “and neither will my constituents be happy. I don’t like to have truck with Hankins and Miller and their Ku Klux Klan adherents, but at the same time I must agree with them that the country is today faced with a crisis. I don’t like having a Negro as Chief Executive any more than they do, but I don’t like it for different reasons. I don’t think the country is ready for a colored man as President, and I foresee endless strife. I don’t think Dilman, the little I know of him, is up to the rigors of the office. He is adequately educated, modest, a good Party man, but I don’t think he is cut out of Presidential cloth. He may blunder us into considerable grief, unless we hold a firm rein on him. However, this I can assure you, Governor, and you may repeat my words to the Secretary of State-I cannot in good conscience go along with Miller in attempting legal gymnastics to prevent him from holding an office allowed him by the Constitution. I will not subscribe to that. On the other hand, I believe that what Senator Hankins is proposing to do does make a certain amount of sense-”
He halted to listen to Talley, nodding his head slightly at whatever he was hearing.
Since her father was not speaking, and the audio part of the television set was merely an indistinct hum, Sally concentrated on her coffee, as if this concentration would help eliminate her hangover. If she had not drunk so much at the Leroy Poole affair last night, she might have been in better shape now and this might have been an absorbing morning. In twenty-six years she could not remember a morning that gave so much promise of excitement, of an exchange of tidings and rumor.
Sally Watson was a girl who thrived upon turmoil. It stimulated her and gave her empty days meaning. When there bloomed confusion, scandal, the possibility of adventure, she was enriched. She would not have known this about herself, except for three short and almost fruitless efforts at self-understanding and adjustment with three concerned psychoanalysts in the last eight years. She knew also that when life did not provide this stimulation, her days became devoid of meaning, and she sought to fill them with drugs and drink.
She despised this need in herself, this weakness, and envied other women who controlled their restlessness with husbands, children, or careers. She was tangibly marked by her failure. She could see the mark now, as she drank her coffee, the white line across her right wrist, a permanent reminder of the dreadful time when she had slashed her wrist in an effort to solve everything. That had been seven or eight years ago, after she had been dropped from Radcliffe for the marijuana party (Senator Watson had “arranged” to have her quietly withdrawn from the school), and after she had tried to work for the advertising agency in New York City (Senator Watson had “arranged” the job), and after she had eloped to Vermont with the Puerto Rican musician (Senator Watson had “arranged” to keep the marriage out of the papers, and have it annulled, and have the boy deported). That feeble effort at self-destruction had been one institution and three analysts ago, very long ago, but the scar reminded her of what was possible, and for this she blamed her father, although she loved him, really, and her mother, in Rome with that parasite second husband who was a count, whom she hated and admired, and her stepmother, whom she disliked only for being an intruder and a bore.
Yes, she told herself, this morning-with T. C. dead and a Negro in the Presidency-might have been a ball. As one who had nothing but affection for the idea of death, who equated it with peace, she felt no loss at T. C.’s extinction. In truth, she had not cared for T. C. because he had refused, despite her father’s weighty intervention, to give her a job in the White House, and when she had mentioned it at the annual Congressional Dinner the President had given, he had teased her, and she had not been amused, only humiliated. So the events of the last day and night offered not loss but gain on the scales of adventure. A Negro President-my God, what must be going on around the city? If she had not had the damn hangover, she might have been on the phone at daybreak.
She had drained the cup of coffee, she realized, and her father was speaking once more. She tried not to listen to him but to herself, but his voice was too forceful to be ignored.
“All right, I’ll explain it to you, Governor Talley,” Senator Hoyt Watson was saying into the mouthpiece. “As you’ve remarked, the Senate has always reserved the right to approve of the President’s Cabinet appointments. He makes his choice, and we consent. After that, he retains all removal powers. He cannot hire alone, but he can fire alone. You mentioned the Tenure of Office Act of 1867. Hankins has a complete rundown on that. It was vindictive. It was meant to give the Senate complete control of President Andrew Johnson. It was the one and only time the Senate tried to curb the President’s removal powers. But it was known to be unconstitutional at the time, and, indeed, it was pronounced unconstitutional around sixty years later by the Supreme Court. Now, Hankins isn’t falling into that trap, and neither of us wants any repetition of the past. Therefore, Hankins-what? What was that, Governor?”
He listened a few seconds, and apparently interrupted Talley.
“No, hold your horses, Governor. I repeat that if we do something, it has to be under the law of the land. Now, Hankins hasn’t worked the wording out yet-I think we’ll have that in a day or two-but it is his intent to submit a revised-or new-succession bill at once. The idea would be that if this kind of tragedy ever took place again, the successor to the Presidency would merely act as a caretaker, a temporary Acting President, until the Electoral College could be reconvened and a full-time President and Vice-President be elected to finish out the unexpired term. As for our present situation, Hankins wants-and I think I subscribe to this-a retroactive clause stating that in order to preserve the present succession to the Presidency, as set up in 1947, so that this can’t be tampered with politically, those next in line to the office cannot be removed without a two-thirds consent vote of the Senate. In short, Secretary of State Eaton could not be removed, fired, willy-nilly. Neither could Secretary of the Treasury Moody or Attorney General Kemmler, the next two in line, be removed without our approval. I think-”
Abruptly he halted, his white-maned head cocked sideways, and then he resumed.
“No, I don’t know if it is constitutional. But it can serve us until it is tested. I haven’t the vaguest idea if Dilman would sign it or veto it-I don’t know that man at all, Governor, no one does-but if he has good faith, I think he will see the reasonableness and come along. I think this bill can be moved through to his desk quietly, without too much ballyhoo and fuss. I’m the last one to want it to appear that we are trying to manacle Dilman because of his race. As a matter of fact, Governor, I am approaching this New Succession Bill of Hankins’ not as something that may serve us only now, in this emergency, but as something that can serve us in the future, so that other successors cannot recklessly unseat their potential heirs and pack the Cabinet with persons of their own race or creed or party, or with incompetents who happen to be sycophants or relatives. In fact, I’m trotting over to the Hill now to see if I can assist Hankins with the language. I don’t want it to be a vindictive measure, but one that can be useful in the present and future. What’s that, Governor? Arthur Eaton wants to say-all right, put him on.”
With the second mention by her father of Secretary of State Arthur Eaton’s name, Sally Watson had become entirely alert and attentive. Now that her father was listening to Eaton, she bent forward, hoping to hear Eaton’s seductive voice on the phone, but it was impossible to hear a thing at this distance across the table.
At last she shut off the television set, rose, and noiselessly began to gather the breakfast dishes from the table. Normally, on maid’s day off, she and her stepmother did the dishes. But her stepmother had gone early to a Daughters of the Confederacy breakfast, and Sally lacked the patience to do this menial work by herself.
She emptied the leftovers into the garbage disposal, and waited for her father to finish.
Senator Watson was speaking into the telephone. “I concur, Arthur. I subscribe to everything you say. It will be judicious. I shall lend my weight to that. I will keep you closely informed… Let me add, I don’t seem to have had time up to now to tell you how sorry I am about the tragedy. I wasn’t as close to T. C. as you, but I respected him. It is a horrendous blow to the country. Nevertheless, the realities of life. We live with them. Let’s do our best… Good luck today, Arthur, good luck to both of us.”
From where she stood quietly at the sink behind him, Sally watched her father put away the telephone, pull free his napkin, wipe his mouth, and stand up. He appeared too self-absorbed to notice her. Yet she waited, eager to speak to one who had just spoken to Arthur Eaton.
“Dad-”
“Oh, hello, baby. I thought you were dressing. I’ve got to rush off. I’m late already.”
“Dad, I was listening to everything. It’s all very dangerous, isn’t it?”
He studied her for a moment. “Well, dangerous isn’t precisely the word. Nothing as ominous as that. Any new President creates certain problems for everyone, but a new one of Dilman’s race, in times like this, well, the problems are definitely heightened.”
Sally ran her fingers through her thick blond hair. “It gives me the chills to think how close Arthur Eaton came to being the President. Wouldn’t that have been wonderful?”
Hoyt Watson disappeared into the next room a moment, and reappeared with his hat and birch cane. “Well,” he said, “with Eaton we’d have had an easier time of it, no question. Good man, Eaton.”
Sally was not satisfied. “Do you think Arthur Eaton could still become President?”
Thoughtfully Hoyt Watson tapped his cane on the kitchen linoleum. “Unlikely, Sally. If you understand what I was discussing with Talley, you know what is going on.”
“I have an idea.”
“Representative Miller likes to imagine that he is John C. Calhoun. It was Calhoun, you remember, who used to remark that it was false to believe that all men are born free and equal. The assumption, he used to say, was based upon facts contrary to universal observation. Well, now, time has passed Calhoun by, and the time and the law say all men are free and equal, no matter what the realities. In short, no matter how nostalgic I may be for the past, I’ve founded my entire career on progress and observing the law. Representative Zeke Miller thinks otherwise, and where once he might have had an overflow auditorium to applaud and support his sentiments, he will today find the auditorium only one-third filled. He wants to prevent Dilman from becoming President. He is acting out a dream of the past. He won’t succeed in ousting Dilman simply because Dilman is black, and in getting Eaton elected because he is white. Dilman is our President, improbable as that is to conceive.”
“What about the new law you were discussing?”
“Well, even if we get it, that won’t change things very much, not in actuality. It will only prevent Dilman from discharging Eaton, Moody, Kemmler, the rest of T. C.’s Cabinet. Our idea is that we want this Cabinet so that Dilman is encouraged to follow T. C.’s ideas and the Party’s wishes. Then, as a show of goodwill on our part, we’ve agreed not to elect either a new Speaker of the House or a President pro tempore of the Senate, so that no one precedes the succession line of T. C.’s Cabinet for the rest of the unexpired term. Instead, our House and Senate members will rotate the job of presiding on an alphabetical, weekly basis. That would be in the bill, too.”
“If the law passes, it would make Arthur Eaton the President-I mean, should something happen to Dilman, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, of course,” said Hoyt Watson. “But nothing’s going to happen to Dilman. We’ve had all the accidents we’re going to have, and Dilman is a young man, Arthur Eaton’s age, and strong as a bull, I’m sure.” Watson paused, and eyed his daughter keenly. “Why this sudden interest in politics, Sally? This is more than I’ve heard from you in a year. I’m gratified.”
Sally moved toward her father, eased his hat from his hand, and placed it on his head. “I’m not interested in politics especially, Dad. I’m interested in Arthur Eaton. I have enormous admiration for him. I’d like to see him the First Man in the country-after you, of course.”
Hoyt Watson chuckled. “You can forget about your father. He has everything he wants out of life. As to Eaton-” He looked down at her, and then he said, “Your interest in our Secretary of State wouldn’t be personal, would it? I’m just remembering. I thought I saw you spending an inordinate amount of time with him at Allan Noyes’s party.”
“I think he’s the most attractive man in Washington.”
“His wife thinks so, too,” Hoyt Watson said with a wink. He pecked Sally’s cheek, turned to go, then halted. “Tell your mother I may be late for dinner. I’ll try to call her later.”
He was gone, leaving Sally with a flare of resentment at his having referred to her stepmother as her mother. But the irritation was quickly dispelled as she tried to recollect everything her father had said about Arthur Eaton and his position in government today.
After stacking the dishes on the side of the sink, she went to her vast cream-colored bedroom. She pulled the drapes open, to find the day halfheartedly sunny. She went to her double bed, a mess from the gyrations of her restless, drunken sleep, and quickly drew the blanket and quilt over it. She moved to her tall mirrored dressing table, pulled her long green housecoat around her, and sat on the bench to make up.
Her gaze fell on the framed color portrait of her taken two years ago, just after T. C.’s inauguration, when she had played the Southern belle in that silly satire at the Press Club. She examined the portrait with detachment. When Arthur Eaton looked at her, was this what he saw? Her blond hair was combed high and curling to one side, her frank, emerald eyes were what countless crude young men had called “bedroom eyes,” her nose was small and agreeably tilted, the beauty mark at the left of the mouth accentuated her full crimson lips.
Of course, she reminded herself without swinging to the mirror, the portrait was two years old. It did not reveal the shadows under her eyes, born of twenty-four months of drinks and barbiturates. Nevertheless, she remained hypnotized by her color portrait. Her complexion was marvelous, milky white and flawless, then as now. Yet, it was not a usual pretty-Southern-girl face. There was something hidden behind it that was wild and pitiful, although its outer aspect was childish and moody. But interesting, she decided, interesting, and not too much of its attraction had been traded for the liquor and pills that she used to fight the insomnia and emotional self-hate of unlovely fornication. Then, too, there was more for Eaton that no portrait could reveal.
Impulsively, not bothering about the morning’s makeup, she came to her feet, unfastened the housecoat, and threw it across the bench. She made her way to the center of the bedroom, and slowly paraded, as poised as one can be in lace brassière and clinging panties, before the high mirror. The ravages of inner imbalance had not marred any feature of her slender, lithe figure. Her breasts were high and large, her belly flat, her hips boyish, her thighs and legs long and nearly perfect.
Satisfied, she returned to the bench and, casting the housecoat aside, sat down to devote herself to her makeup and Arthur Eaton, lucky man. Merging memory with hope, she relived her short, happy life with Arthur Eaton, and almost miraculously her hangover evaporated.
She had always been conscious of him, at least in the two and more years he had been Secretary of State, conscious of his incredibly handsome face with its contained sensuality, and of his breeding and manners. But then, she had not thought about him too much, certainly no more than she had ever thought about a motion picture hero, because he had often had his wife, that immaculate, haughty icicle, Kay Varney Eaton, on his arm, and there was no real connection to be made with him.
But Sally was a receptacle for gossip, sought gossip, welcomed it, stored it, and among the tidbits of gossip that had come to her was one, from a reliable source, that Eaton and his wife had separated. This rumor had been given some credibility six weeks ago, four large parties ago, when she had found herself sitting next to him at the dinner party given by Secretary of Defense Carl Steinbrenner. Eaton had been alone. No Kay Varney Eaton anywhere. She had discovered him similarly unattached at Tim Flannery’s crowded and raucous outdoor barbecue. And when the national Party chairman, Allan Noyes, had given his large cocktail and dinner affair during the hot spell, and many of the guests, including herself, had gone swimming in the pool late at night, she had been more certain than ever that Eaton had rid himself of that monstrous wife.
Finishing her eye makeup, she reexamined her relationship with Arthur Eaton. The first of their three public meetings, the Steinbrenner one, had been largely exploratory. She had perceived that Eaton had become conscious of her not only as an individual but as a glamorous and pretty girl. He had wanted to know about her, rather formally but persistently, and she had told him all that she believed he should know.
At the Flannery party he had come in sports coat and slacks-gorgeous man-and she had been wearing the open-necked jonquil silk blouse and yellow shantung skirt, and been bare-legged and gay, and he had sought her out, remembering things she had told him about herself, and then for the first time telling her something of his own life and feelings.
The Noyes party had been the best. After most of the guests had departed, he had been one of the few top-level ones to remain. He had sat in a deck chair near the pool, drinking brandy steadily, and his eyes had followed her from the cabaña to the pool. She had known that in her tight white two-piece swimming suit she was a feast for any male’s eyes. Later, drying, she had sat at his feet, joining him in the brandy, and when it was very late and they were almost the last, she had realized that her father had gone and that she must call a taxi. Eaton had insisted upon driving her to Arlington.
She still remembered the drive. They had both been drunk, or rather she had been drunk and he had been high, and she had sat curled close to him and held one of his hands when it was free from the wheel, and he had covered hers firmly with his own. In the darkened street before her house he had kept the motor idling, and then, never taking his eyes from her face, he had turned off the ignition.
“You are quite a young lady,” he had said. “I don’t think I have ever met anyone quite like you before.”
“I hope not. There’s no one anywhere like me.”
“I suppose you have a hundred young men to keep you occupied.”
“I could have. I don’t. Not one.” She waited, but he was silent, troubled, and so she had helped him. “I have no patience, any more, for immature children. I’ve had all the young intellectual buzzards, dedicated patriots, ex-collegians-on-the-rise I can stand. Too tiresome. If I can’t have what I want, I’ll pass.”
He had taken an eternity to say the next. “What do you want, Sally?”
Despite her intoxicated state, she had maintained her control. “Oh, I don’t know. Someone like Mrs. Eaton’s husband.”
“You’re teasing an old man, Sally. Not fair.”
“You’re not old at all, and I’m not teasing one bit.”
“I see… I must make a confession, too, Sally. I’ve found you more refreshing than anyone I’ve met in ages. I don’t have much free time, except occasional evenings. Perhaps you would let me call you for dinner sometime.”
Her heart had almost burst. “Anytime!” She had sat up in the front seat, gone across the wheel, taken his surprised face in one hand, and kissed him on the lips. “There,” she had said. “Now I’m a fallen woman, and you can’t abandon me. I’ll be waiting for that dinner.”
The morning after had been her best morning in years. But that entire day, and in the several days following, he had not called, and she had begun to believe that she had invested too much in his promise and her hope. Either he had been drunk and indiscreet, and had now sobered and forgotten the flirtation, or he had weighed it and decided that a married Cabinet officer could have nothing to do, no matter how innocent, with the neurotic half-his-age daughter of a senator. Then, in her misery and consequent drinking, Sally had decided that it was his wife who was to blame. Despite flimsy rumor, Kay Varney was his wife, and was coming home or was home already, and that was it, the fact of it, and good-bye rendezvous and good-bye dinner.
And then, the other evening or morning, she had forgotten which, she had read Reb Blaser’s column. Arthur and Kay Eaton were-it was in black print, rumor or not, it, was in print-separated, with divorce imminent. The effect upon her was like that of a half-dozen vodkas. She soared. She walked on air. She was ten miles high, and almost in orbit. Her prospects rose with her. The fact that Arthur Eaton had not yet telephoned her, as he had said he would, meant only that he was busy with man’s work and not that he was confined by husbandhood.
In her exhilaration Sally had wanted to telephone him, chide him for not keeping his word, but her instinct restrained her from this aggressive act. Also, she had told herself, it would have been in poor taste, after that wonderful Reb Blaser story. Eaton would call. Of this she was more certain than ever. If he did not, they would meet soon, and this time she would make sure that he knew of her desire for him. Yesterday she had even begun to think about contriving accidental meetings, when the Frankfurt tragedy had broken over her. As the daughter of a senator, she knew what that meant. Arthur would be busy for a while, busier than ever.
She had completed her makeup and was content with the result. She went to her wardrobe to search out the proper dress for this first day of a new administration, a day that had brought her Arthur (since Reb Blaser’s column, she had determinedly begun to regard him as her Arthur) to within a step of the Presidency. Holding out and rejecting dresses, she wondered how she could prove her love to Arthur Eaton. She could, of course, give herself wholly to him-not difficult-and let him be young once more and enjoy what he had certainly been deprived of by Kay Eaton. Still, such giving was too easy and rarely guaranteed endurance of a relationship. Mature men required much more. They wanted a woman interested in them, interested in their lives, their careers, a woman as concerned about them as they were concerned with themselves. At night a woman could resurrect a man’s ego in bed. But day had more hours. Successful women, the great courtesans of France, for instance, the mistresses of the rulers, women like Madame de Pompadour, survived and remained on top because they were not only love partners but helpmates. How could she be a helpmate to a public figure already so successful, the foremost member of the President’s Cabinet? How could she be of any use to a public figure who already possessed everything?
Just as she settled upon the simple blue Galletti suit and removed it from the hanger, something crossed her mind. She recalled her father’s conversation with Talley, and her own conversation with her father. Evidently Arthur Eaton did not have everything, yet. Overnight his position in the Cabinet was insecure. At the same time, overnight, he was the next in line to the Presidency. Senator Hankins and her father were working to keep him in the Cabinet, and believed that they would succeed. Representative Miller was working to make him President at once, but her father did not think this was possible. Clearly Arthur Eaton could use help. She wondered what help she could offer. If she were to come to know this Dilman, know him well, she might succeed, as a woman, where august councils failed. She might convince Dilman that Arthur Eaton was indispensable to him and to the country, that he must not only be retained as Secretary of State but must be given a heavy share of the Presidential powers. But she did not know Dilman, and it was hopeless, and then it occurred to her that she felt she knew Dilman, and then she remembered why.
It was because of last night’s party, the one that had given her the hangover, the one young Harriet Post, a Senate secretary who was as crazy as herself, had taken her to, a boozing, literary party of the avantgarde Washington crowd, lower-level, black-and-white. A Negro poet, reedy and homosexual and maybe talented, had given it in his unkempt, sparsely furnished, barnlike upstairs flat, above the hall with the sign over it, JESUS NEVER FAILS, on Georgia Avenue.
There had been at least forty persons coming and going, most of them Negro, all drinkers, all too full of T. C.’s death, all discussing the implications of Speaker MacPherson’s accession to the Presidency, and Sally had not enjoyed it particularly. Lately she had grasped at every invitation to a black-and-white party, because it was different, because it might mean a charge of excitement. Unlike her family, she had no feelings against Negroes. In fact, because of her sheltered upbringing in the South, she had always considered them attractive since they were forbidden and hence exotic, and because there were stories she had heard about the men. The stories were not true, she knew, from firsthand experimental evidence. After college, when she had met the jazz crowd from Harlem, she had slept with two of the colored boys in a band before running off with her Puerto Rican. Both brief affairs had been tiresome disappointments, no better, no worse than those with most of the white boys with whom she had slept. Perhaps she had expected too much. Perhaps the Negro musicians had not been able to give enough because they were inhibited by her Southern-supremacy origins.
The affair or wake last night had been a drunken bore. She had heard from Harriet about the guest of honor, Leroy Poole, and in fact thought that she had read some of his powerful essays on his years as a Negro in Harlem and on civil rights, and she had expected too much, again. Leroy Poole had looked like anything but an author. He had proved to be short, fat, perspiring, resembling nothing more than a jet-black eight ball. He had been supercilious and self-centered, too knowing and opinionated about everything and everyone in Washington and on the earth. He had repeated several choice anecdotes ridiculing MacPherson, who everyone had thought was the new Chief Executive.
Sally remembered that Poole had read aloud several passages from his second novel (still in the works, stream-of-consciousness), bitter narrative sections that made no sense and gave no fun when you were half drunk. After the applause he had explained the novel, and for a while his idea had held Sally’s attention. It was hard to recall it clearly the morning after, but there was something about the near future in the United States, something about a sudden outbreak of bubonic plague in the heavily Negro-populated county of a state similar to South Carolina or Louisiana (where some counties are 80 per cent Negro), but where the minority whites keep control because of their ties to the outside world. Overnight, to prevent the raging epidemic from spreading, this county is quarantined from the rest of the state and nation. No one can enter or leave. After a few months this isolated county has a population 90 per cent black, and 10 per cent white, and must live this way for several years.
“There it is, see?” Leroy Poole had squeaked, waving the manuscript in his pudgy fist. “Shoe on the other foot, see? Now we are the Ins and they are the Outs. How come? ’Cause gradual-like, the Negroes begin dominating the voting, buying and spending, law enforcement, the works. And pretty soon Negroes are running government, schools, business. And the poor whites left, the minority, what happens to them? Well, now, don’t you know? Negroes hire white women for their maids and white gents for their handymen. Now the whites go to the back of the bus, to the segregated lousy puking little white schools, and the Negroes got the run of the county. What do you say, friends, how’s that for an acidy parable?” She could recollect little more of it, or perhaps Leroy Poole had refused to tell any more. She had thought it rather novel and cruel, and wondered if he would finish it, and if he did, how it would be received.
Now, dressing, she realized that, by coincidence, Leroy Poole’s way-out fantasy of last night had-well, a small portion of it had-become a reality with Douglass Dilman’s accession to the Presidency. Her mind, remembering Dilman, remembered last night when she had found herself on a torn sofa beside Leroy Poole, listening to him discuss Dilman.
It all came back to her, the connection, Poole and Dilman, not what Poole had been saying. A Negro publisher had given Poole a sizable advance against royalties to write a biography of Senator Douglass Dilman, since Dilman was one of the highest-ranking Negroes in government. Poole had not been enthusiastic, for some reason, but had needed the cash to finish his novel, and had undertaken the chore. He had come to Washington weeks ago, received Dilman’s cooperation, and had been practically living with the Senator, gathering information on the Senator’s background and political career and ideas, and had already begun writing the made-to-order book. She recalled a thread of Poole’s conversation, to someone, to Harriet or herself. “I’ve gotten to know Senator Dilman better than he knows himself, I’ve been that close-but don’t hold it against me, sister!” He had screamed with laughter, a disconcerting high-pitched laughter, and after that she had left Poole for the bottle of Scotch.
Suddenly the creative process began to work inside Sally. She could almost feel it working, and she ceased buttoning her blouse to let it happen. Poole had said that Dilman was a widower, with a son, no one else. That was last night when Dilman was a senator. This morning he was the President of the United States, still a widower, with a son, and no one else. Who would run his life for him, the social part, the feminine part? A new President always made new appointments, hired new personnel. Whom would Dilman hire for his First Lady, his social secretary, his party giver? He might hold over some of T. C.’s staff, and the First Lady’s staff, but there would still be openings that would have to be filled, and there would certainly be resignations. Sally’s mind went to at least a half-dozen of her Southern girl friends who would not, or whose husbands or families would not let them, work under a Negro, President or no.
That was it, that was surely it, Sally exulted to herself. There would be an opening in the White House for a white girl of high social breeding and with a political background, to assist the new President, a girl who had many Negro friends and so could, in a natural way, give the President guidance in the world of white socialites about him. There would be an opening which she could fill, and in filling it give aid to that wonderful, kindly-looking Negro who had become Chief Executive, and in aiding him, gaining his dependence upon her, she could represent Arthur Eaton inside the White House. She could become Arthur’s helpmate on the highest level.
Only one piece of the puzzle was missing, and once that was in place the picture was there, made sense, and her future was assured. The missing piece was the image of the go-between who could get her offer of service to the new President himself. And she had that, too. Last night, last night, Leroy Poole, living with Dilman, writing about Dilman, last night a senator’s biographer, this morning a President’s historian.
Her mind fitted the last piece into the puzzle, and the picture that she saw and embraced was that of herself and Arthur, captioned by the lettering of her imagination: Secretary of State Arthur Eaton and Mrs. Sally Watson Eaton.
She ran to the cream-colored French telephone beside her bed, and then, as her hand clutched it, she tried desperately to remember the hotel where Leroy Poole was staying. Not the Shoreham, not the Mayflower, not the Hilton or Willard, no. What would that poor, struggling, fat little Negro writer be doing in one of those expensive big places? She eliminated the big hotels. She tried to think. It was some cheap hovel, ridiculously named, in the heart of town. She had heard it mentioned several times last night. It was on-yes, on F Street-heavens, but where-heavens-yes! That was it-Paradise-the Paradise Hotel on F Street.
She picked up the telephone and dialed for information…
The instant after the alarm clock went off, Leroy Poole opened his eyes, reached out and shut off the bell, flung aside his blanket, then settled back on the pillow and, lying perfectly still, began his daily morning exercise.
For five minutes, he performed this Spartan drill, a system of valuable and mystic calisthenics of his own invention, one known only to himself. As he engaged in it, he knew that his daily ritual would have astounded an outsider, especially a white outsider. Where most men did vigorous bends, push-ups, sit-ups to strengthen their muscles, to give tone to their physiques, Leroy Poole practiced an exercise consisting solely of remaining immobile on his bed, first contemplating his gross body, then conjuring up his gross past.
Once, wondering if this physical inactivity could be rightly regarded as exercise at all, Leroy Poole had looked up the word in Webster’s Dictionary. Exercise was, among other things, “Exertion for the sake of training or improvement, whether physical, intellectual or moral.” Pleased with the definition, he had continued to practice his peculiar form of exercise under its familiar name.
Leroy Poole’s morning exercise followed an unvarying routine. After awakening, and removing his blanket, he set his eyes on the mound of flesh before him, gazing at the flabby chest and jelly protrusion of stomach encased in capacious cotton pajamas. Sometimes he studied his hands, the fatness of the sausage fingers. He was not concerned with this obesity of the flesh, the distorted plasticity of it, for he had been told that it was the result of glands, not gluttony. Instead he was concerned that the outer softness so unfairly contradicted the inner hardness, making it more difficult for others, and himself as well, to take his aggressive word sermons and crusading pen seriously.
Since no physical exertion could reduce his body to the same hardness as that of his mind and heart, Leroy Poole compensated for this by toiling daily to invigorate and fortify what lay invisible beneath his skull and skin. Like Richard Wright, a boyhood idol, Leroy Poole had learned long ago that “there existed men against whom I was powerless, men who could violate my life at will,” and that their savage and unjust superiority must be combated, even unto death. He had to toughen his will against white men’s bribes: no money, no comfort, no intellectual rationalizing, no compromise promises of future Green Pastures, no white token acceptance and approval could be permitted to negate the searing helplessness and humiliation that he and his family had suffered, were suffering, or allowed to modify and weaken the determination in his mind and heart. These were the muscles-the inner muscles of righteous hate-that Leroy Poole sought to energize and sustain every morning. The exercise performed was a simple one: he remembered his past, and was strong again.
It was not always easy. It had not been easy this morning. Last night’s party had left him weakened, and a residue of this weakness remained. It had not been the drinks. He did not drink. His abstinence he owed less to the hellfire Baptist upbringing of his childhood than to the fact that drinks made black men as foolish as white men, but while white men could afford such lapses, black men could not. The weakness that carried over from the party was caused by the fact that he had been induced to read aloud a passage from his new novel, and relate some of the story, and he had been applauded and been made prideful and been lulled into believing, briefly, that life might not be so bad after all.
That was one impediment to his exercise this morning. Another was that he despised the work he must do in the next hours, days, weeks. He resented having to abandon his polemics, his angry and effective articles and essays on his experiences as a Negro and on his ideas about equality, for which he was poorly paid, to undertake a hack political biography that would profit him nothing but money. He resented, too, delaying his great novel, a moral earthquake that would shake the mossbacks and crackers of the South and the pretentious tolerators of the North from their fixed poles of prejudice. He resented delaying it in order to feed the vanity of stupid and ignorant Negro readers who wanted to enjoy vicariously the rise to Congress of one of their own color.
And there was more that distressed him after the alarm clock had jarred him from his sleep. He was ashamed of himself for the small corruption of making heroic, to his people, an undeserving ward heeler who, through servility and errand-running and ass-licking, had become a senator. If only he was presenting to his people the figure of a brave and true Negro leader like Jeff Hurley, his beloved friend, his superior in the Turnerites, it would be a worth-while and noble endeavor. But then, he knew, the Hurleys did not become congressmen in the paleface world. Only the handful of Dilmans could make it, because they were puking counterfeit whites. It distressed Leroy Poole that he must spend this precious day typing up notes of his last meeting with Dilman, preparing questions for the next interview, and then spend several months more writing the crummy, phony biography.
If he could not do his own work, he told himself upon awakening, then at the very least he should be at the barricades, where the action was, where the freedom fight would finally be won, just the way the whites had won their fight at Concord and Bunker Hill. He was miserable about the Turnerite fiasco in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, yesterday. He had known for some time, having learned about it from Hurley, that the first step in the new program was planned for yesterday afternoon. He had not known the result until last night. His mind went back to last night.
Because he had been offered a ride, and had research to do, he left the party early, over much protestation. The streets were curiously desolate, but then he supposed this was because T. C. had been killed and everyone was at home or in bars glued to television sets. There had been some talk between his driver, a Howard University boy, and himself about the President’s demise and what it might mean to their cause, and they agreed it meant nothing at all. Since the time Theodore Roosevelt had invited Booker T. Washington to the White House, no white President had proved any better than another for them. It was not yet ten o’clock when Leroy Poole was deposited before the small, three-story hotel, rising between an alley and a grocery store, its broken red neon sign shining out: PARADISE HOTEL.
He entered the minuscule lobby, with its spotted rug and seven threadbare chairs, and waddled to the reception desk. No one was there. Peering off, he saw the pimply young clerk at a table in the office, head in his arms, snoring softly. Leroy Poole went behind the desk, pulled down his key, and then walked toward the rickety self-service elevator. He paused at the newspaper rack, to buy the late edition, but the rack was empty. Disappointed because he had anticipated seeing the space the Mississippi demonstration received, he considered going out in search of a newspaper. At that moment he sighted one newspaper folded on a chair. It proved to be a discarded early evening edition, and the headlines proclaimed T. C.’s death and Speaker MacPherson’s succession to the Presidency.
Leroy Poole took the newspaper up to his second-floor room, and once he had bolted his door, he sought the results of the Turnerite demonstration in Hattiesburg. As page after page made no report of it, he began to believe that the newspaper had been printed too early to carry the news. And then, on page eighteen, he found it.
The wire service story was brief: To counteract the terror of the revived Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, a Negro activist group, the Turnerites, had sent twelve members, wearing black hoods and robes, to picket a department store owned by the local Klan’s Grand Dragon; the white proprietor had rushed out, unmasked one Turnerite picket, and thrown sulphuric acid in his face, permanently blinding him; the Negroes had gone berserk, beating the white Klan leader, smashing his store windows and damaging most of the showcases inside; the armed police and their dogs had come, and two of the Turnerites were in the county hospital, critically injured, and the other ten were in jail.
The news report infuriated Leroy Poole in two ways. First, it related that the Turnerites had retaliated for Klan violence with peaceful if dramatic picketing, and, as always, had been brutally attacked; and second, this horrible story, deserving of a page-one notice which might inspire national revulsion and action, had been buried on a back page because, unluckily, the President of the United States had died.
This defeat, as well as all his other frustrations and disappointments, had again filled his head, the instant the alarm jangled this morning. It would not be easy to undertake his daily exercise, and for seconds he considered skipping the exercise this once, but then he knew that he must not permit himself any inner flabbiness.
After that, he began his calisthenics.
Alabama. State flower: camellia. State tree: Southern pine. Motto: We Dare Defend Our Rights. Whose rights, you bastards? Father, a cotton picker, old, old at forty, dead at forty-one of malnutrition, pneumonia, fright. Mom, maid, cook, laundress, slavery (“Look, old lady, we know that lying nigger talk of yours, so if you’re too sick to come to work, you stay sick and stay home for good”). Older sister, prostitute for peckerwoods, not even mossbacks, but red-neck pecker-woods, the gutless bitch. Older brother, high I.Q., a shoeshine entrepreneur. His favorite cousin, grave outside Mobile. Almost a teacher. Walking in the woods with an educated white girl. Seen. Next day, six grabbed him, putting a blowtorch in his face. Leroy, Mom’s hope, youngest, running scared, hiding scared, hungry. Jewed by the hunchback, kicked and stoned by the squat red-necks, stealing once, twice, three times, wanting books, wanting everything, having nothing, but shoved, spat upon, threatened, cursed at, slapped, scared, always scared.
Pennsylvania. State flower: mountain laurel. State tree: hemlock. State motto: Virtue, Liberty, and Independence. Job in a trucking firm. Bullied and underpaid. No friends. No service in restaurants. No rooms in rooming houses. No nothing. Only freedom to read and read and read. College. Himself lonely, isolated, freakish. Scared, writing good English papers, amusing one white girl. She curious. Some meetings to talk literature. Discovered. Boy friends “protecting” her. Behind the gym at night. Holding him down, pulling off his pants, shorts, brandishing knives, then laughing (“Not enough to cut off, black boy, but keep it buttoned or you’ll lose it”). Humiliated, scared, quitting. North worse than South, because of pretense. North worse, because no place else to go.
New York City. New York Harlem. Flower: none. Tree: none. Motto: Don’t Want Your Daughter, Mister, Just Want Half Her Freedom. Black ghetto Harlem. Squalid, stinking, poverty, danger. Knives, booze, heroin, hot goods. Fleabags and tenements, and dinner out of garbage cans. Listening to New York voices, white: They’re illiterate, they’re shiftless, they’re not dependable, they’re criminals, they’re best in their place. Listening to Harlem voices, black voices: They sure is mean folk, they smells more than us, they is gougin’ crooks, they scared of us more than us of them, they no good never. Talk a waste. Learning, improving, escaping, all that counts. Reading books still free. Finding writer’s magazine in library, finding writing is paid for. Writing, writing, writing, first writing foolish white writing for money, can’t sell, then writing the Leroy way about what’s inside, crude, true, and the small magazine saying come over, and the Jew editor, a good Jew, saying you write, we’ll buy. Writing, writing, writing, and never stopping until his people make the scene, the American scene, but all of it still too slow. Need to cry out, to protest. Need to talk to someone, Mom too far, too scared. Joining everything. NAACP. Too slow. Crispus Society. Too slow. New thing, Turnerites, doers, not scared. Better. Much better. Mister, what’s wrong with me marrying your daughter? What’s so special about her? And, mister, who in the hell are you that’s in any way better than me?
As this exercising went on, strength growing through hot memory of oppression, Leroy Poole began to feel invigorated and purposeful. He decided that he would do one more minute of it before rising. His mind returned to the South, to personal offenses, to recollections of being shoved off the street, hustled to the rear of a bus, to degradations that he had witnessed, to recollections of his cousin being turned away from the polling place, his best friend being hooted away from the white high school. His mind did these push-ups, sit-ups, bends; his mind shadowboxed and ran a mile, until the blood throbbed in his temples, and his breathing came in gasps, and the rage coursed through his blood to quicken his heart and his determination never to relent.
It was the ringing of the telephone that stopped his exercise.
Satisfied with his preparation for the day, he shoved himself off the bed, hitched up his pajamas, and on bare feet hastened to the chipped telephone next to the armchair. Sitting, taking up the phone, he hoped that it would be Jeff Hurley, with a full report of the Mississippi trouble, and anxious to enlist Leroy Poole’s advice as a member of the Turnerite strategy board.
“Yeh, hello?”
“Oh, hello there. I hope I have the right room. Is this Leroy Poole, the writer?” The voice from the other end surprised him, for it came from a female, unmistakably from a refined Southern female.
“That’s right. This is Leroy Poole.”
“I hope I’m not interrupting your work, Mr. Poole. This is Sally Watson. Remember me?”
The name reminded him of no lady of his acquaintance. This did not surprise him. There were not many. However, occasionally club-women called, to request him to lecture or sit in on a civil rights panel. “I’m not sure, ma’am. The name is familiar.”
“Last night,” she was saying, somewhat distraughtly. “We met last night at the party for you. I was there with a friend. I’m Senator Hoyt Watson’s daughter-”
He placed her now. The well-shaped, edgy blonde. “Of course,” he said, “of course. How could anyone forget you?” He swallowed, restrained himself, not yet prepared to go on in this vein with a white girl, not while the remembrance of his cousin’s grave outside Mobile and his own humiliation behind the college gym were alive within him. “I enjoyed the pleasure of meeting you, Miss Watson.”
“And I enjoyed hearing you read from your new novel. I think it’s wonderful.”
Wonderful, he thought, a savage novel in which whites were reduced to a ten-per-cent minority in one imagined American county. “I’m glad you were open-minded enough to like it,” he said.
“Don’t let my accent or my father’s voting record fool you,” she said. “I’m quite my own person, and I count at least fifty Negroes among my good friends.” She paused, and then she said, “You must be very excited about the news this morning.”
“What news?” he asked.
“The new President, I mean.”
“Oh, that. I read all about it last night. I don’t think there’s anything especially exciting about MacPherson becoming President. He-”
“MacPherson?” She almost screamed the name through the telephone. “You mean you don’t know?”
He was utterly bewildered. “Know what? I just woke up, and I-”
“MacPherson died, too. One of your own people was sworn in as President last night. Your friend Douglass Dilman.”
The news vibrated in his ear. He sat thunderstruck, speechless and uncomprehending.
“Mr. Poole, are you there?”
“I-yes-I-are you sure? I can’t believe it.”
“It’s the truth. It’s all over the place. Everyone’s talking about it. Well, I’m glad I could bring you the news-”
“Miss Watson, you’ve knocked me out. I’d better turn on my radio and find out what’s been going on. I sure appreciate your-”
“Mr. Poole,” she called to him urgently, “I really phoned about something else. I wanted to discuss a personal matter-”
“Look, jingle me back in ten minutes, will you? I’ll be right here. Thanks, Miss Watson.”
He slammed the receiver down, almost certain that he was having his leg pulled, jumped up, and found his tiny red transistor radio. As he switched it on, he became positive that she had been teasing him. How in the devil could a rabbit-hearted twerp like Dilman become President of the United States? He was only a second-rate senator, and a Negro besides. That dizzy, sick dame, with her sadistic Southern joke, damn her.
The volume on the transistor radio was turned high, and the pontifical voice of a network editorial philosopher engulfed him. He listened, incredulous, and then began spinning the selector to other stations. There were news broadcasts. There were interpretive analysts. There were discussion panels. There were taped reports from the man on the street. There were faded reports from London, Paris, Moscow, Rome, Tokyo. Miss Watson was right. It was true. His boy Dilman was the Chief Executive of America the Beautiful. Lor’ Mighty! I’ll be John Browned!
He listened for five minutes, until he had the facts and they had sunk in, and then he turned the radio off. He wheezed about the room in his baggy pajamas, trying to sort it out, convert it into a facsimile of reality. Once he interrupted his walking, thinking, to ring the desk downstairs and ask the clerk to send the handyman next door for a carton of coffee and a doughnut, overcoming resistance with the promise of an extravagant half-dollar tip.
He resumed his heavy pacing, which finally led him into the closet-sized bathroom. By the time he had finished his quick shaving, nicking himself twice, his washing, and had changed into sweat shirt, corduroys, and moccasins, his mind had moved from the enormity of the news and narrowed down to himself. What did this upheaval mean to Leroy Poole?
His weeks of intimate conversation with Dilman made it clearly evident that the Senator, now President, was a loner. Whenever Poole had begged for relatives or friends whom he might consult for more objective information, Dilman had turned him aside. “I have almost no one close to me,” he had said. Eventually Poole had extracted several names: Dilman’s son, Julian, at Trafford University; Dilman’s maiden aunt, Beatrice, in Los Angeles; Dilman’s old sponsor and still political boss in his home state, the union leader, Slim Dubowsky; Dilman’s tenant, the Reverend Paul Spinger; Dilman’s acquaintance, the national chairman of the Party, Allan Noyes; Dilman’s good friend in the Second World War, the liberal trial attorney, Nathan Abrahams, in Chicago. “That’s about it, Leroy,” Dilman had said on that occasion. “Fact is, except maybe for Nat Abrahams, you yourself know me as well as, maybe better than, any of them.”
Of this list of friends, Poole now saw, he himself was one of the three who were in Washington, near at hand, ready with friendship and counsel. In short, his association with Dilman could be turned to profit, now that Dilman was the head of the country.
First off, the hack biography, since its subject was on all lips, would not be just another book that sold three thousand copies, but would be an intimate, inside look at a new President that might sell a hundred thousand copies. It could make Leroy Poole wealthy and give substance to his by-line. Second, and more important, far more important, there was his relationship with the President; their scheduled meetings in the coming weeks would give Leroy Poole access to the ear of the most powerful figure in the United States.
Dilman, as Leroy Poole saw him, was a weak and tentative public servant, who had spent so many years mouthing the Party’s pronouncements that he had become a mere ventriloquist’s dummy for his white superiors. He was unoriginal, without a single dynamic or progressive idea or program of his own. His head was a receptacle of platitudes and ayes. But it was a head, and it could be filled with ideas by one near enough to him. The possibility excited Poole. With real effort he might make Dilman swallow, digest, and regurgitate the Turnerite demands for full equality now. And even more might be accomplished. Great Negroes-forceful ones, brilliant ones, like Jeff Hurley-might be appointed to high and key government offices, possible, possible, provided there was one at Dilman’s arm to guide him in the right direction, even push him ahead.
Leroy Poole left the bathroom to answer the knock at the door with the conviction that fate had made his own future role unique. At last, as never before, in a way more effective than his essays and books, or his work on the Turnerite board, he could help promote his people to their rightful place.
He accepted the carton of tepid coffee, learning the cream and sugar were already in it, and the crushed doughnut, and reluctantly handed out a quarter and a half dollar for the breakfast and tip. After closing the door, he felt less worried about his extravagance. He was way up there now, potentially rich, potentially the savior of his people.
Then, gradually, as he squatted on the armchair to drink his coffee and munch the tasteless doughnut, the conviction that he might serve himself and every Negro through Dilman became fainter. Dilman, no matter what had happened, was still no more than the man Poole had come to know and despise. Dilman was as scared of whites as Poole himself had once been. Dilman had never once tried to break out of the servile, bowing, watermelon world of the Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas. He was a figurehead fink, using his color in a state where it mattered, to gain office, rejecting his color in the gentleman’s Chamber of the Senate, where it mattered more. How could a person who trembled so constantly even hold onto a new idea? How could a person always backing away from responsibility be reached?
In fact, Old Chub the Rabbit-Hearted might even renege on the biography now, Poole realized with a shudder. In the last minutes, the biography had become as valuable to Leroy Poole as a First Folio Shakespeare. As an obscure senator, Dilman had been afraid of the biography, recoiling from any attention. It had taken the intervention of the foremost Negro publisher in America, and pressure from several Negro leaders, including Spinger, to convince Dilman that a short, innocuous, political biography would be more useful to him than harmful.
Immediately after Poole had arrived in Washington, he had found Dilman reserved and tongue-tied about discussing his personal life. Cleverly Poole led the Senator into discussions of his public career. Since the facts had been published, Dilman had proved easier, more amiable, more talkative. Recently Poole had led him back to his private life, and Dilman, at last conditioned to these interviews, more trusting of his interrogator (who had not told him of his connection with the Turnerites), had been more helpful, but still not frank and open. If Dilman had been so timorous before, Poole wondered, how would he be now, when his every word might be examined by a suspicious or hostile citizenry? Would he call Leroy Poole in and tell him that the project was finished? Or would he simply evade Poole, postpone interviews, and allow the project to languish and die?
Leroy Poole put aside his coffee container, wiped the crumbs from his mouth as he brought the telephone to it, and put in a call for Dilman’s secretary, Diane Fuller, in the Old Senate Office Building. Told that her line was busy, Poole waited. Presently he heard her harassed voice, her speech ungrammatical as it was whenever she was under tension. Poole had always been flattering to the scrawny, nervous colored girl, because he had long ago learned that personal secretaries were important, sometimes alter egos, and even if Diane did not measure up, it paid to play it safe. As ever, Poole greeted her effusively, and congratulated her on the elevation of her boss.
“Oh, what a day,” she groaned. “Everybody’s callin’, and it ain’t-isn’t-no fun. I don’t know what’s goin’ on here, Leroy.”
“Then I won’t keep you, honey chile,” Leroy Poole said sympathetically. “I just want to know where I stand. I have an appointment with him day after tomorrow, around two in the afternoon. He was going to give me a full hour. But now that he’s moved from the Senate to the White House, I want to be sure the date’s still good and to know where to come. Has he had time to mention it?”
“Leroy, so much is happening, I haven’t even seen him yet. Got to talk to him once on the phone, no more. I don’t know where he is or what he plans. I have your date on the calendar. First chance I get today or tomorrow, I’ll remind him.”
“That’s my sweetie pie. And look, I want to be reasonable. The poor guy’s been hit on the head with a country. If he’s crowded day after tomorrow, you tell him I can wait. But try to get a firm appointment out of him for this week, even if it’s a shorter time.”
“Sure thing, Leroy, I’ll call you… whoa, there’s three other phones. Good-bye.”
Leroy Poole sat back deeper in the chair, still holding the telephone in his lap. Of course, he had almost enough material to do the biography without any additional interviews with Dilman. He could see other people, which he had not done yet, and use clippings. Still, that was not the point. He wanted to maintain his person-to-person contact with Dilman. He must fight for nothing less.
The telephone in his lap shrilled at him, and he juggled it, undoing the receiver, then retrieved it.
“Yeh, hello?”
“Mr. Poole? Sally Watson again. Remember, you told me I could call back.”
“That’s right.”
“Have you heard the news for yourself by now?”
“Miss Watson, I not only heard the news, I’m trying to make some of it myself,” he said cockily. “It’s quite an experience, having someone you know, someone you’re dealing with, become President.”
“That’s why I’m calling you, Mr. Poole. I hope I’m not being presumptuous. If I am, you tell me. To be perfectly honest, even though I hardly know you-well, actually I feel that I do-I’ve read so much of your work-I want to ask a favor of you.” She paused. “There, I’ve said it.”
He puzzled over what on earth he could possibly do for a rich white girl whose father was a senior powerhouse in the Senate. “You name it, Miss Watson. If it’s something I can do, I’ll be glad to oblige.”
“I mean, I don’t go around asking people favors like this,” she said. “I’ve never done this before. But maybe you won’t mind. I know a lot of people on my own. Maybe one day I can be of help to you-not that you need it, with your genius.”
Impatience nudged Leroy Poole’s curiosity. “Like I said, name it.”
She seemed to exhale her request through the earpiece. “I want you to help me get a job with President Dilman.”
The request bewildered him. “A job with him? Why, I don’t know that I have all that much standing with him, Miss Watson,” he said. “Can’t your father do that better for you? After all, they were fellow senators, on the same side of the aisle.”
“Yes, I know,” she said hastily, “but that would be awkward for a hundred reasons. Besides, my father doesn’t know President Dilman as well as you do, and even if he did, it would be a little difficult for him to pop right in and ask for Party patronage.” Her tone became a plea. “You’ll be with the President constantly. It would be easy for you. I’m sure he’d listen.”
Leroy Poole straightened, gratified to have become Dilman’s adviser. He weighed her request. Her background was important. Intervening on her behalf was no skin off his ass. You did a favor, you had a debtor. It was good to have investments outstanding. When he saw Dilman-if he saw him-he could just toss it out, and if Dilman said yes or no, at least he had his debtor. “Miss Watson, I think you’d better tell me, what kind of job have you got in mind?”
“I want to be his social secretary.”
“Forgive me for being naïve, Miss Watson, but exactly what does that mean?”
“Every President has a White House social secretary. Sometimes his wife has one, too. But now there’s no First Lady, so the President will need someone competent and experienced for both jobs. The social secretary helps the President with his-well, his social life, getting up lists, sending invitations, calling around to arrange cocktail parties, dinners, informal gatherings in the White House. Both T. C. and President Johnson had marvelous social secretaries, but President Dilman needs someone even better. His problems are more complex. Not having a wife or daughter, he’ll have to have someone who knows all levels of Washington society. And, well, the fact that he is colored, he may want someone who-well, Mr. Poole, you know-who is understanding, and so forth. I fill the bill.”
She had entered Poole’s grounds, and he challenged her. “Where you from, Miss Watson?”
She sounded disconcerted. “You mean where I was born and raised? I was born in Louisiana. My mother lives in New Orleans. Well, now she’s in Rome, but-and my father, well, you know, he’s-”
“How’s it going to look, Miss Watson, a daughter of the Confederacy working so close to a Negro?”
“I told you how I feel. I don’t have those die-hard sentiments. I was educated in the East. You saw me at the party last night. I like your people.”
“I don’t mean how’s it going to look to you, Miss Watson. I mean how’s it going to look to your father? Even if Dilman took you on, do you think your father’d allow it?”
“Mr. Poole, not my father, not anyone, waves me around like a Confederate flag,” she said with a tinge of anger. “I’m over twenty-one. I’m an American like you and the President. I belong to me and I do as I please. I want a job where my background can be useful. I think that’s the right job for me. Above all, I think I might be of use to the President. I can send you a résumé of my experience and abilities, to show to him. I can send you a list of persons, high up as Cabinet members, who would recommend me. Won’t you help me?”
“Miss Watson, I like your sound, and I dig you. Yes, I’ll try to make a pitch for you. I’ll do my best.”
“When? Do you have an idea? I’d like to apply before everyone else begins pestering him.”
“I’m supposed to see him this week. If we speak on the phone earlier, I’ll mention you right off. Like I said, I’ll do my best. Whatever happens, I’ll call you.”
“Let me give you my number-”
“Wait, I don’t have a pencil.”
“Well, no matter, I have my own phone. I’m listed as Watson, Sally, in the Arlington book. I don’t know how to thank you enough.”
“Only thank me if I’m lucky. If I am, just see that I’m invited to one of those White House dinners someday.”
“I’ll do more. I’ll have hundreds of copies of your book there, waiting to be signed. Thanks, Mr. Poole. I’ll be living by the phone. Goodbye.”
Setting down the telephone, Leroy Poole crossed to the cheap pine desk on which his portable typewriter rested, located a pencil, and jotted a reminder to mention Sally Watson to Dilman, if and when. He then knelt, opened his suitcase under the desk, and pulled out two unwieldy legal-sized manila folders. One contained the typed transcript of his interviews with Douglass Dilman. The other was filled with typed research notes, newspaper clippings, photostats of magazine articles, and mimeographed handouts, all giving data on Dilman and his public record, on the Senate’s rules and history, and on Dilman’s home state and its politics; and there was also associated material on other Negroes who had served, or were currently serving, in Congress.
Returning to the armchair, he set the research folder on the floor and opened the folder of typed transcripts before him. He put aside the pages covered with penciled notes of his last talk with Dilman, four days ago, which still had to be typed. He began to study what had already been typed, the result of at least two dozen sessions with Dilman, his questions, Dilman’s answers.
The ringing of the telephone shattered his concentration. Hastily he closed the folder, shoved it between his leg and the arm of the chair, and brought the receiver before him, hoping that this was the call he wanted.
“Yeh, hello?”
“This is Memphis, Tennessee, long-distance operator. Is this Mr. Leroy Poole?”
“Right.”
“Please hold on a moment. Your line was busy. I’ll have to ring your party.”
“Operator, who’s calling?”
“Uh-Mr. Jefferson Hurley. One moment, please.”
Leroy Poole could feel the smile creasing in his face. Hurley had not neglected him after all. Busy as he was, having moved from Topeka down to Memphis, obviously to set up a base closer to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Hurley still had found time to consult with him. Poole gloried and preened at the compliment, not so much of being a member of the Turnerite inner circle as in being Jeff Hurley’s friend.
Waiting to hear the deep, thick voice, which never failed to move him, he visualized Jeff Hurley, whom he had seen too infrequently in the three years since they had met at a Crispus Society meeting on New York’s East Side. Hurley was a beautiful giant, at thirty-three but a year older than Poole, a self-educated, spellbinding, coffee-colored genius, determined and fearless, cleverer than any white man, unafraid of any human being, white or black. The Turnerite Group had been Hurley’s creation, hewed from the Crispus Society’s dead heartwood, a great and pulsating splinter committee secretly set upon a course of direct and immediate action to achieve equality now.
Hurley had given the Group its arrogant name because of his admiration for the brave Negro farmer and preacher, Nat Turner, who had dared to rebel against Virginia slavery in 1831. With five followers Turner had ranged through Southampton County, a vengeful black Moses determined to lead his children out of Egypt to freedom, and in the course of his rebellion he had slaughtered sixty whites. Freedom had not been won, and over one hundred colored men were to die from retaliation, but a point had been made. Never again would the South feel safe with its slaves.
Hurley’s Turnerites wished to make no point. They desired to lead no chosen people to a Promised Land. Their goal was to make the United States that Promised Land, the one promised in the Constitution, and to do so by force, if necessary. The black-hooded picketing yesterday, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, had been their first move. If it, or the Turnerite actions to follow, were thwarted, Hurley had promised, like the white Moses of the Jews, like the Moses of the blacks, Nat Turner, to respond with “an eye for an eye.” The Southern leaders had ranted against Hurley, the Northern leaders had chastised him for intemperance and impatience, and Spinger’s Crispus Society (in which many Turnerites still retained membership) had pleaded with him to observe due process of the law. Now, in Hattiesburg, Hurley and his Group had been assaulted bodily and hurt without just cause. Those who still recalled Hurley’s fiery press pronouncements would be wondering: Would his Old Testament warning be acted out?
Waiting at the telephone, Leroy Poole had no doubts. In all communities of people, you separated the men from the boys by determining which were the doers and which the talkers. Hurley was a doer. Leroy Poole adored him. It was not only Hurley’s authority that appealed to Poole, but the gorgeous physical aspect of the man, his short-cropped, glossy dark hair, his liquid brooding eyes, his aquiline nose, his gleaming teeth. This was the human being Leroy Poole wanted to be, but since the metamorphosis was an impossibility, it gratified Poole simply to stand beside that human being forever. For Poole, the best safety that he had ever known had been that offered by Hurley’s mammoth arm around him, Hurley’s hearty laughter, Hurley’s electrifying instructions. Leroy Poole had given only a part of himself, in friendship, to many black men and a few black women, but Jeff Hurley (whether Jeff knew it or not) was the only one of either sex for whom he would have given his life.
From far Memphis he felt Hurley enfold him. “Leroy? You there?”
“Jeff-Jeff-how are you?”
“I guess I’m the guy who knows the guy who knows the new President of the United States. How about that, Leroy? Speak of shocks-”
“I still can’t believe it.”
“I don’t know the reaction up your way, but down here you’d think old Nat Turner himself had overthrown the government of the United States. Almost every Memphis, white is apoplectic. Even here on Beale Street our brothers are numbed, full of joy and fire-works inside but afraid to display it.”
“The question is-what do you think, Jeff?”
“I don’t know what to think yet. I know nothing about Dilman except for a couple of cracks you’ve made in your letters. I gather you haven’t much high regard for him. You once called him a doughface.”
“Did I? Well, maybe that was too strong. He doesn’t exactly support the Southerners. Up to now I’ve just sort of felt he was less interested in equality than in self-survival. You know, Jeff, the kind of person who doesn’t even want to stop and help out when he sees someone in trouble or being wrongly hurt. He just wants to be left alone. Maybe that was understandable yesterday, but today’s a new day, and he’ll find no one’s going to leave him alone. What it comes to is who’s going to get to him first and strongest, and then he’s going to have to show if he’s nothing but a scarecrow stuffed full of bought ballots or if he’s a colored man with guts. I don’t have high hopes, Jeff.”
The voice from Memphis was momentarily still. Poole waited patiently, and at last he heard Hurley speak. “We’ll see soon enough, we’ll find out if they’ve made our man into another hanky-head. Things are moving fast, Leroy, and we’re not letting anyone ignore them.”
“That was awful, what happened down there in Hattiesburg. Was someone really blinded?”
“Yes, Simon was, poor bastard. Completely sightless, of all the rotten things. And Marvin’s sustained a skull fracture, but he’ll live. The other ten are okay, as okay as anyone can be in those stinking cell blocks.”
“When are they going to be let out?”
“Let out?” Hurley snorted bitterly. “They come up for sentencing in a day or two-”
“They come up for sentencing?” Leroy Poole shouted. “Je-sus, what did they do but peaceably picket in some Halloween costumes? What about the Grand Dragon who threw the-”
“Leroy, Leroy, you know better than that. Those folks can’t do anything wrong, just like we can’t do anything right. The charges against our boys are a mile long. Disturbing the peace, inciting a riot, assault and battery-you name it; whatever’s in the book is being thrown at them. Worst of all, a county judge named Everett Gage is going to be on the bench, reading the sentence. We’ve got the biography on him. Twice in ten years he let off proven lynchers. And they’ve built a special cemetery, in some swamp, just to hold the Negroes he’s sentenced to hard labor.”
“What are you going to do, Jeff?”
“I’m heading down to Little Rock in an hour, and if Judge Gage does what’s expected, I’ll probably set up a base of operations in Shreveport. Then, if necessary, some of us’ll do what has to be done.”
“You mean-?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Leroy Poole was suddenly unnerved. “Jeff, one thing. You talk about the sentencing. Didn’t our boys plead Not Guilty?”
“Sure thing.”
“Well, what about the trial first?”
“I omitted it to save long-distance charges. Leroy, you’ve been away from your South too long.”
“Yeh.”
Hurley’s voice came on more forcefully. “There is one thing that does count, and that’s an appeal carried on our behalf by an important attorney. Something to stir up pressure, force them into second thoughts, into moderation. That’s primarily why I called you.”
“What can I do, Jeff?”
“I’ll tell you what I’ve done, and what you can do. You’ve heard of Nat Abrahams-?”
“The lawyer?”
“The one who got those Mexicans off in California, and did that great job for the NAACP in Ohio. I tried to get through to him in Chicago. He was gone. His associate, fellow named Hart, said he was on his way to Washington. I explained the urgency of our case, and asked where we could contact him in Washington. Hart said Nat Abrahams was turning down all criminal cases, was involved with something new in your city. Leroy, I’d like to-”
Poole interrupted, remembering what had been nagging at him as he listened. “Wait, Jeff, something just came to mind. This Nat Abrahams, he’s the one-when Dilman gave me the names of relatives and friends to interview, he named Nat Abrahams of Chicago as one of his best friends.”
Hurley whistled. “Great. Better than I hoped for. I was going to ask you to look up Abrahams when he arrives, make a special plea for him to intervene for us on the appeal. But this is better, much better. When are you seeing Dilman again?”
“Well, now that he’s become President-”
“See him.” It was a command, and Leroy Poole came to attention. “See him,” Hurley repeated, “and when you see him, make sure he knows what’s happened to the Turnerites down in Mississippi, what’s happened to his people. Tell him you’d like him to get his friend Nat Abrahams to give us a little help. Tell him we’re desperate, anything you like. We need Abrahams, and no matter how busy he is, I can’t see him saying no to the President of the United States.”
Poole was worried. “I can’t see Abrahams saying no to Dilman either, but I sure can see Dilman saying no to me. You should look at the notes of my talks with Dilman. He’s chicken. He’s a let’s-make-haste-slowly fink.”
“Did you ever feel him out on the Turnerites?”
“I sure did. He hemmed and hawed, weaseling all the way. It’s in my notes.”
Hurley’s tone had become fiercer. “Send me a copy of your notes on Dilman. Everything. In return, I’ll send you something today, some information that’ll maybe help you turn Dilman from a chicken to a bantam cock. Try your best, Leroy, any way you can. Get your man in the White House to deliver Abrahams to us. If you succeed, you’ve done a great service for us, and we’ve got a real fighting chance.”
“What if I can’t make it, Jeff?”
“Then we’re going all the way, like we agreed.”
“I-I’d hate that, Jeff.”
“You think I’d like it? But it’s that or nothing now. We’ve been knocked around long enough. Maybe it’s time we punch back hard.”
“All right, Jeff.”
“First things first. Before you pitch the President, make sure Nat Abrahams is in Washington. Once you’re sure, you get in there with Dilman, because right now it’s either the lawyer way or the other way, one or the other, but whichever, it’s got to be fast. We’re going fast from here on in.”
Even an electric razor did not make the task of shaving easier on a swaying, speeding train. Ridding oneself of a thick stubble, while in rapid transit, required the steady hand of a surgeon and the concentration of a yogi. He possessed neither attribute this sulky gray morning. He blamed his unsure hand and his wandering mind on the stunning news that he had heard in Akron last night. He had been up half the night with it, following its implications along every dead-end tangent, and back again, and over again, and a few hours’ sleep had not alleviated the disturbance.
Grunting surrender, Nat Abrahams gave up.
Unplugging the cord, wrapping it around the electric razor, he considered the results of his shaving in the dim yellow mirror of the cramped, rattling compartment lavatory. A sadly uneven job, but then God had been there first, he decided wryly. No electric gadgetry could smooth the Maker’s work. Nor did Nat Abrahams really care much. The twin in the mirror with its shock of unruly brown hair, lined forehead, bushy eyebrows, sunken eyes, hooked nose between high cheekbones, amused mouth, prominent jaw, all gaunt, sallow, keen, had been faithful friend and partner through most of his quixotic idiocies and adventures for most of his years. The six-feet-and-one-inch twin-not only the face, but the lanky, ungainly, sinewy structure appended to it-had frightened off few clients (well, maybe a few fastidious ones), lost few juries, antagonized few judges. It had won him Sue. It had collaborated to gain him mighty pleasures and minor reputation. Who could ask for anything more?
He smiled with self-mockery. Who could ask for anything more? He could. He could ask for one thing more-money-money, and plenty of it. The unselfish need of it, after years of treating it as a time-wasting intruder, was the only thing on earth that could have put him on this rushing train from Chicago to Washington, D.C., in his busiest August yet. He had turned over his crowded calendar to Felix Hart, he had turned over the three children to their grandmother, he had dragged Sue away from her thousand wife-mother activities, to obtain what he had spent a lifetime ignoring: the pot of gold that had become a necessity at last. Nothing but necessity would have sent him careening forth on this questionable treasure hunt.
Nat Abrahams reached down, pulled up his suspenders, and snapped them over his shoulders. The suspenders, regarded by his opponents as a corny affectation, had become so much a part of him now that he was hardly aware of them. When he was aware, he was happy to remember that they were not and had never been an affectation. In his first year in law school he had purchased his first pair and worn them as a talisman, to help him attain and honor the kind of shingle he had always wanted: Lincoln, of Lincoln amp; Herndon, Counselors, or Darrow, of Darrow amp; Sissman, Attorneys-at-Law. He had deserved half of neither shingle, he was certain, but he was equally certain that the talisman had reminded him always to remember the ideals of Lincoln and Darrow.
Yet this morning the suspenders felt as tight and uncomfortable as a guilty conscience. Was the journey to Washington right for him? The cardiac specialist, his old friend Greenberg, had reiterated that there was no choice. “Nat, surely the American Bar Association does not disapprove of its members being well paid. So why all the Old Country guilts? Enough already. Your whole life you have lived by the Golden Rule, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ So now it’s time to do unto yourself as you have done unto others. Survival, Nat, not at any price, no, but what Avery Emmich offers is not any price, but your price, your terms. Younger men with younger hearts will swing your broadsword to protect every minority, every civil liberty, so let go, let them. You have had your warning, one early coronary insufficiency. Not every man is so lucky. So do what I tell you and what Sue wants. Let go of the crusade. Go to Washington, sign the contract, make the fortune, and then come back and buy the farm. Live so your children can honor their father, not his tombstone. Go to Washington, Nat.”
The words rang in his ears, in duet with the train’s whistle. Well, if he was nothing else, he was obedient. Here he was, on the Capitol Limited, little more than one hour from Washington’s Union Station.
He left the lavatory and groped his way into the compartment bedroom, where only the tiny bed light over his upper berth and the slit of morning beneath the green shade provided visibility. He took down his vest, and then his suit coat, and pulled them on. Fixing the silver watch chain, he squinted to make out the time. Yes, one hour and five minutes more to Washington.
He bent to see if Sue was awake. Her back was to him. Her small, fragile face was buried in the pillow, and her short bob was a tangle. He listened to her inhale and exhale, and loved her now as he had for every moment of their eighteen years. She was so sound asleep, so far from turmoil, and he regretted having kept her awake last night with the news that he had heard in Akron.
He touched her bare shoulder. “Sue, darling-”
Her shoulder lifted, fell, and her head, eyes still shut, came around. “Mmm?”
“Time to wake up. We’re almost there.”
“Thanks.”
“Are you awake, Sue?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve got an hour to dress. If you make it fast, you can join me for breakfast. The diner’s two cars back. I’ll be there.”
“Okay.”
He straightened, flexed his shoulder muscles, picked up his attachè case, and went to the door.
“Nat-”
He halted, returned, to find her on an elbow, eyes wide-open, staring up at him.
“Nat, is it true, what you told me last night-or was I dreaming?”
“You weren’t dreaming, dear.”
“No,” she said slowly. “I was afraid of that. Poor Doug in the White House. I don’t mean just that he’s colored. It’s that he’s so-so sensitive and-and withdrawn. Nat, they’ll crucify him.”
Abrahams frowned. “He’s tougher than a lot of people think, and smarter, too.” He paused. “Maybe it’s the best thing that could have happened-I mean, to the country.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Honey,” he said evasively, “I never know absolutely what I believe until I’ve had breakfast and a pipeful. You ask me then. Now, hurry up. I’ll see you in the diner.”
Once he was alone in the train corridor, wending his way between the compartments and windows, he tried to understand what he did believe. Stopping before the last window, he placed a palm against the glass pane, briefly conscious of the blur of green trees flashing past him, but soon inattentive to the scenery. His mind had gone back to the scene he had witnessed at the depot, during the time of their departure yesterday.
When he and Sue had boarded the Capitol Limited in Chicago ten minutes before it left at three-forty yesterday afternoon, they had already known of the President’s sudden death in Frankfurt. All through the depot, and outside the train, and in the train itself, Abrahams had seen in the expressions of passengers and porters the same evidences of disbelief and anguish that he had observed that other terrible time when President John F. Kennedy’s life had been extinguished by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas.
Pushing himself away from the window, Abrahams tried to sort out the different qualities of grief. He felt sure that the public had reacted to T. C.’s death in Frankfurt in very much the same fashion that they had reacted to President Kennedy’s death in Dallas, which was considerably different from public reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in Warm Springs. T. C. had been almost as youthful as Kennedy, and as vigorous. Most people had regarded T. C. more as an older brother than as a father, because he had been their Chief Executive less than three years and they had not become totally dependent upon him. His sudden death had shaken them badly-that was evident everywhere yesterday-but what seemed to shake them more was the realization that invincible youth and strength, carrying hope and ambition, shielded by the indestructibility of success and power, could be brought down and stamped out so swiftly and easily. Thus, Abrahams guessed, public lamentation had taken on the form of disbelief. When Roosevelt died-and this, too, Abrahams remembered very well-the President had been an intimate part of people’s lives and experiences for so many years that the loss had been not only the loss of the ever present head of the family, but each man’s loss of a great segment of his personal life.
After their train left Chicago, Nat and Sue Abrahams had talked over the tragedy and its meaning at length, and pored over the latest newspapers, and then he had devoted himself to his work. While Abrahams had voted for T. C., supported him, he had felt no passionate involvement with him, and so he suffered no feeling of passionate loss. He had thought, as he worked over his notes for the Washington meeting with Gorden Oliver, Emmich’s lobbyist there, that MacPherson might do the job as well as T. C. had done. There would be no national trauma.
The rest of the short afternoon on the train had been lost to working, napping, reading, and desultory chatter about the children, the new position that was in the offing, the utopia that was possible after that. They had gone to the lounge for martinis, and then eaten too much dinner. Abrahams had seen Sue back to their compartment, where the berths were already made. She had told him that she was tired, and would read some more, and go to sleep early.
With his attaché case he had returned to the lounge car to study the proposals from Emmich’s attorneys, to mark modifications and changes after them. He had hardly been aware that they were in Akron, and that it was eleven-fifteen and they were running a little late. But then, casually peering through the window, he had noticed, with growing curiosity, a large gathering of the train’s porters and conductors, and lips moving excitedly and considerable gesticulating from everyone.
Minutes later, as the Capitol Limited had begun to move again, the wizened Negro bartender had hurried into the lounge with the news. MacPherson had also died in Frankfurt. Senator Douglass Dilman, a colored man, had just been sworn in as President of the United States.
Doug Dilman.
It had taken Nat Abrahams a long time to calm the chaotic emotions he had felt about his old friend and his friend’s incredible promotion. At midnight Abrahams had gone back to his compartment. In the darkness Sue’s sleepy voice welcomed him and said good night. He had sat down on the edge of her berth, and told her what he had heard. She had snapped on the blue night light above her head, and he could see that she was upset and trembling. He had given her a sleeping pill, and then they had discussed it, until her voice had thickened and fallen silent, and she had drifted off to sleep again. Later he had stretched in his upper berth, but he had not slept. He had been awake, his mind a turmoil, for at least an hour after they left Pittsburgh.
And here it was early morning, and here he was drawing closer and closer to the nation’s capital, a city so jolted overnight, so changed, by the rise to highest office of the only colored man he had ever known well and one who had been his friend since their first meeting during the Second World War. Only the previous week Abrahams had had a letter from Dilman, who was overjoyed that Abrahams was coming to Washington. Dilman insisted that they must see one another as often as possible during Abrahams’ visit. Dilman had even set a date for their dinner of reunion. Abrahams speculated as to whether that engagement still existed and, if it did, what his friend would be like.
Sighing, Nat Abrahams drove further speculation from his mind and walked quickly, opening heavy resisting doors, into the lounge car, and then continued into the immaculate dining car. Except for a sprinkling of white passengers, absorbed in the Pittsburgh newspapers, the dining car appeared to be the scene of a Pullman porters’ convention. At least a half dozen of them, joined by the Negro waiters, were congregated at the far end, engaged in deep conversation.
The short maître d’hôtel, rimless spectacles pressed into his Prussian face, bounced forward, signaling Abrahams to a table. As Abrahams sat before the spotless water glasses and gleaming silver ware, dancing to me click of the wheels and rails, the maîture d’hôtel placed the menu, order pad, and pencil in front of him.
“I won’t need a menu,” Abrahams said. Taking up the pad, he wrote his order: cereal, French toast, tea. Then he filled in Sue’s order: grapefruit, melba toast, coffee. He handed the pad to his host. “Hold the coffee until my wife comes in.”
“Very well, sir.”
Abrahams nodded off to the far end of the car. “I’ll wager they’re talking about President Dilman.”
“Nothing else but that. They can’t keep their minds on their work since it happened.” He bowed closer to Abrahams and whispered, “You’d think it was the Second Coming.”
“Let’s hope so.”
The maître d’ was about to say something, but seemed to change his mind, and said something else. “Are you, by any chance, with the government, sir?”
“Heaven forbid,” said Abrahams, “unless that covers all suffering taxpayers.”
The maître d’ lingered. “We’re expecting our next trainloads, the coming months, to be more heavily Negro, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t see why,” said Abrahams sharply. He motioned to the pad. “May I have my tea right away?”
After the maître d’ had hurried away, Abrahams remained inspecting the picture that the man had planted in his mind-thousands of Pullman cars, overflowing with black men pouring into Washington to accept their new appointments. However, he could only visualize the picture in broadest caricature. For, knowing Dilman as he did, he was aware that it was wildly ridiculous. One of Dilman’s shortcomings, Abrahams had always felt, was that he leaned too far backward, and away, from those worthies of his own race, lest he be charged with favoritism. Dilman believed that all men were created equal, and should inherit equal rights, yet he was too inhibited by fear to practice his beliefs. Instead he had a tendency to practice a sort of inverse segregation, one turned inside out. This was too harsh a judgment of so good and suffering a man, Abrahams knew, but it was largely true.
His memory went back to early 1945, when, as a captain, he had been assigned to the Military Justice Division of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, Department of the Army, in the Pentagon Building. He had found himself situated at a desk in the same glassed-in olive green cubbyhole as Lieutenant Douglass Dilman. Abrahams had known a few Negroes when he attended the Law School of the University of Chicago, but he had never known them intimately. Abrahams had never possessed any strong, special feelings about Negroes, except intellectual resentment at their oppression and slum history and bondage in America. His bookish, impecunious father, a philosophy professor, and his active-in-causes, fearlessly vocal mother (a sort of Margaret Fuller whose Master’s thesis had been on the Abolitionist movement) had raised him so naturally that he had come to manhood without any racial prejudices.
As a matter of fact, Abrahams was not even possessed of tolerance for Negroes, as many of his intellectual and progressive friends were. To Abrahams, the word tolerance bore, in itself, a flick of prejudice-one was nice to certain people, treated them equally, accepted them, but by being tolerant of them thus, one implied that they were different. To Abrahams, Negroes had been men who were light black or dark black as white men had been swarthy white or pasty white. All men were men together, and some were stupid and others were intelligent, some more boring than others and some more fascinating, some more bad than good and others more good than bad, whether they were black or white, brown or yellow. Abrahams had entered the Army with this attitude, and it had not changed.
Being confined in a cubbyhole with a Negro officer had been unusual only because he found Dilman shy and deferential beyond the requirements of their difference in rank, and because he had been uncertain about Dilman. His uncertainty was not related to his own feelings about Dilman’s color, but rather to Dilman’s own sensitivity about his color and to Abrahams’ whiteness. But because they had been thrown together a couple of feet from each other, devoting themselves to the same cases and working under the same pressures, Dilman’s defensiveness had gradually dropped.
Their closeness had begun in the common language of military legalities, and had eventually shifted to the common language of intellectually equal men. Not only had they worked together, but they had dined in the Pentagon cafeteria together daily and left the river entrance together in one car pool for their respective lodgings. They had come to know of each other’s lives, although Dilman had always been more guarded here, and of each other’s likes and dislikes, human weaknesses, human aspirations. They had become fond of each other as men, and when they had been assigned together to London, and then Paris, and then Occupied West Germany, their friendship had solidified. The triumph of it, Abrahams had finally realized, was that Dilman had one day ceased to consider him white and therefore alien.
After the war they had both practiced in Chicago, he with offices in the Loop, and Dilman on the South Side. While he had known that Dilman was married, he had never met Dilman’s wife during the war, because she had not accompanied him to Washington. In Chicago Abrahams met her three times and, knowing Dilman as he did, understood why Dilman had not brought her with him to Washington. Aldora Dilman, although of Negro ancestry, had proved to be of fair complexion. Abrahams had thought her tense, embittered, ashamed of her darker husband, and he had observed that she drank too much. Eleven months after setting himself up in Chicago, Dilman had abruptly moved himself and his wife to another city in another Midwestern state.
Occasionally, in the next years, Abrahams had his reunions with Dilman, often going out of his way to enjoy one. After an initial constraint, Dilman had always accepted him as an old friend. Abrahams had become aware of Dilman’s work for Negro organizations and great labor unions. He had not been surprised when he read that Dilman had agreed to run for the House of Representatives, and he had been thrilled when Dilman won. Since Abrahams’ cases had often taken him to Washington, D.C., he had been able to see his old friend more frequently.
In these meetings, during which almost every subject was covered, Abrahams had learned to avoid one area, although he perceived much about it. He had silently understood Aldora’s refusing to accompany her Congressman husband to Washington. He had been pleased to learn, indirectly, that Aldora had given Dilman a son some years before. And it had come to him as no shock, somehow, when Aldora died at the age of forty. He offered Dilman no words of sympathy. He had always known that this dark area of personal life was one that Dilman did not like to discuss.
The years that had made them older had given each of them, in different ways, national identity. Abrahams’ name had become known for his successful intervention in cases involving legal oppressions of minorities. Dilman’s name had become even more widely known for his four terms in the House of Representatives, his appointment to a vacancy in the United States Senate, his election to the Senate, and finally his widely heralded election as President pro tempore of the Senate in the Vice-President’s absence. And now, overnight, this improbable upheaval in Dilman’s life, and the life and history of the United States.
Abrahams had been jounced out of memory by the dining car waiter staring at him, and he realized that he was shaking his head over the turn of events and the waiter was worried that he was shaking his head over the breakfast that lay before him.
“Is everything all right, sir?” the waiter was asking.
“Perfectly fine, looks excellent, thanks.”
He ate his cereal hastily, so that the French toast would not be cold. Eating, he realized that he must remove the problem of Doug Dilman from his mind. His immediate concern must be the personal business that was bringing him to Washington, D.C. In forty minutes they would be arriving at the Union Station, and not long after they would be in a taxi entering Massachusetts Avenue and heading for the Mayflower Hotel. Sue would be calling the children and her mother, and unpacking, while he would be making arrangements to meet with Oliver, the veteran lobbyist empowered by Avery Emmich, chairman of Eagles Industries Corporation, to negotiate with him. What would result from these meetings could be crucial to the future years of his life-and conscience.
Putting down knife and fork, Abrahams snapped open his attaché case and extracted the most recent proposals submitted by Emmich’s legal advisers. As he sipped his tea, reviewing the already familiar proposals, Abrahams was amused at how the formal legal language had bent to Emmich’s imperious personality. One could almost visualize the cowering corporation lawyers listening to Emmich’s flat commands on the Dictabelt, and then trying to couch them ever so little more in corporate phraseology. Every paragraph gave evidence of being pure Emmich. Straight declarations, bombastic imperatives, the highly limited and inflexible linguistics of millionaire patrons, the power elite, who had almost forgotten the sounds of reply that used words like possibly and compromise and suggest. In their lofty towers, protected by the magic weapons of money that brought all opposition to its knees, the Emmichs had made the word no, spoken to them, virtually obsolete.
He had met Avery Emmich but once, less than a year ago, and their conversation, or rather Emmich’s monologue, had been short and pointed. Emmich had been in Chicago to conclude the acquisition of several chemical plants. The millionaire had summoned Nat Abrahams to his suite, and Abrahams, surprised that he was even known to Emmich, had gone out of wonder and curiosity.
Avery Emmich, the son of a German immigrant, had proved to be a dyspeptic, glaring, squat man in his late sixties. In their twenty minutes together he had been as humorless and efficient as an imported calculating machine.
“I wanted to see what you look like,” Emmich had said at once. “You don’t look like a bleeding heart.”
“I’m an attorney,” Abrahams had said, “a hard-working one.”
“Yes. Recently some of your trial cases were brought to my attention. I was impressed.”
“Impressed?”
“You appear surprised,” Emmich had said.
“I guess I am,” Abrahams had said. “From what I’ve heard about you, and read, I wouldn’t have imagined you’d be impressed by someone who has defended Mexicans, Negroes, small unions.”
“Young man, I don’t give a hoot in hell whom you defend. I’m impressed because you took on tough cases and won them. I’m impressed by skill and toughness. What do you make a year?”
Abrahams had told him. Emmich had grunted with self-satisfaction, and revealed a slip of paper on which he had surmised what Abrahams’ income would be. Without further interrogation, Emmich had told Abrahams what he was after. He was, he had stated, after Nat Abrahams himself. He wanted Nat Abrahams in Washington, D.C. He made it clear that Eagles Industries and its multiple interests-cotton production, textile factories, chemical plants, brass and copper mills, insurance companies, shipping lines-had a vast network of legal representation, even in the nation’s capital. He made it clear that he was never satisfied with what he had, that he always demanded the best help, and that he was ready to pay for it. He made it clear that Washington, D.C., was a sore spot for him. Even under a sensible President like T. C., the government was putting its nose more and more into private enterprise. Emmich wanted the best there, the best minds, voices, legal lookouts.
Abrahams had heard all of this with detached fascination, but without interest. Even as he had listened, he could not conceive of himself abandoning the desperate and wretched people who needed him, for a more lucrative job with a mammoth combine. The Emmichs of the world, he had always known, advocated free enterprise for themselves and not a free economic society-less laudable. The Emmichs, he had always known, wanted competitors, consumers, workers, the government itself, controlled by their own definitions of freedom.
Abrahams had begun to shake his head, when Avery Emmich had announced Abrahams’ worth to the corporation in dollars and cents. Abrahams had been taken aback by the sum announced. The annual salary offered had been more than he had made in the last four years of exhausting work. After that, dazed, he had not shaken his head again. He had listened attentively, and with interest. It had amazed him the way Emmich had anticipated his unspoken reservations. He was being asked to represent the corporation as an attorney, no more, no less. He was being asked to speak for the corporation on legal matters and legislative matters, and to inform and advise the corporation on activities pertaining to its business. He was not being asked to compromise his ideals or attitudes. He was not being asked to perform contrary to his good conscience. He was not being asked to forfeit any part of his freedom as an individual. Eagles Industries would be his employer. Nat Abrahams would be its employee. He would not be lobotomized. He would be himself. Emmich wanted him.
And then it was that Abrahams had understood the sense of the offer. Every big company needed its basic liberal, to showcase, as every big company needed its basic Negro.
That visit in Emmich’s suite had been the beginning of it. Despite Sue’s squealing excitement over the offer, and his own headiness at what was suddenly made possible, Abrahams had clung to certain reservations about it, about the change itself. He had hated the thought of giving up a practice he loved, of dislocating himself and the family, for money. Yet it was only money that might guarantee him added years of life, and provide his wife and children with security. He had hated the thought of devoting himself to an impersonal financial combine, with headquarters in Atlanta, that had no motivation except profits and that regarded people as Social Security numbers. Yet it was a corporation that promised him unrestricted individual freedom.
While Eagles Industries bombarded him with telephone calls and memoranda, Nat Abrahams had remained indecisive. He had stalled his reply, and then he had made negotiations as difficult as possible, hoping that this would make decision unnecessary. He had refused to bind himself to Eagles Industries for seven years, and had insisted that three years were enough. Emmich had countered with five years. Abrahams had remained adamant. Emmich had agreed to three years. Abrahams had demanded more money, better side benefits, expense accounts, thorough definitions of his position, and to everything Emmich had acceded. Finally Sue had told him that he had been trying to create an encroaching monster, when the monster did not exist. And he had admitted that she was right.
There had been serious talks between Sue and himself. Both had circled the reality of his coronary warning, and both had finally faced it. They had also faced the fact that they lived on what he made, that aside from his life insurance policies, a still-mortgaged house, a pitifully small reserve of government bonds and blue-chip stocks, their financial future was bleak. He would never get far enough ahead to ease up, to enjoy semiretirement, to buy the farm they both wanted.
On a warm Sunday morning, with Roger, David, and Deborah churning about the back seat of the four-year-old sedan, they had driven down near Wheaton, Illinois, to look at the farm once more. The beautiful cottage, the freshly painted red barns, the smell of the machinery and livestock and brown-green grass and wheat and corn fields had overwhelmed them again. Driving home, the children happily napping in the back, he and Sue had speculated upon what his life could be on such a farm. He could retain an interest in the firm, serve as a once-a-week consultant on vital cases. He could give time at last to writings about what he believed in, writings that might accomplish more than his private cases had. He could manage the farm. He could be outdoors, live more easily with himself, have more time for Sue, for the children. Above all, he could live. In three years he could have this if he wanted it.
The following morning Nat Abrahams had telephoned Avery Emmich to draft a contract. In a month, he had promised, he would be prepared to go to Washington, to sit with Gorden Oliver, and mold the contract into its final form. And then he had taken an option on the farm outside Wheaton.
“Nat-”
His head came up at the sound of Sue’s voice, and he found her settling into the chair across from him.
“Where were you?” she was saying. “You were a million miles away.”
He smiled. “Not quite that far.” He thought: only the distance away you can reach in three years.
As she went at her grapefruit, he reminded the waiter of her coffee and melba toast, and then stuffed Emmich’s proposals into his attaché case.
“How are the waiters here taking Dilman?” she asked between mouthfuls.
“I gather they’re pleased. That is, if this had to happen, they’re pleased the next in line was one of their own.”
“They’re not all pleased,” said Sue. “I was just talking with our porter. He says most of his friends are glad a Negro will have a chance to show he can perform as well as anyone else. But our porter says he’s not as happy as his friends, because he says he’s a thinking man and they’re not. He says he’s thinking ahead, and he’s frightened. He doesn’t think this country is ready for any Negro to head it. He thinks this focuses the wrong kind of attention on the Negro, and is bound to cause worse resentment and antagonism. Nat, you should have seen his face when he was speaking. So-uneasy.”
For Abrahams it was too early in the day to concur, and to bare his own uneasiness. As he tried to determine what to say to Sue, he observed that her attention had been diverted by three persons taking seats at the table across the aisle. There was an elderly, obviously well-off couple, and opposite them a slick-haired, smooth-shaved, jowly, overweight, middle-aged young man in a tailor-made Oxford gray business suit.
The overweight middle-aged young man, wiping his spectacles with his napkin, was speaking, and not quietly. “Well, after that, the meeting broke up, and we hung around the television set,” he was saying. “I tell you honestly, we weren’t so worried about this Dilman’s competence, because that doesn’t matter these days. The government is run by committee rule, and T. C. had some good heads there. Our worry is in the area where a President can’t be controlled as well. You know, appointments, policy speeches and such. Those people-I mean, like Dilman-are leftist, no question. I can show you the facts. Now that one of them has power, he’s apt to coddle the Communists-don’t get me wrong, Harold, I’m not saying Dilman is a Red; I’m saying he’s apt to have a sympathy for them, rapport, let them slip in and take control here, and go soft on them abroad. Well, Harold, we’re not going to let that happen-no, sir.”
The speaker lowered his voice to address some confidences to his Companions, and Abrahams turned his head away. He found Sue looking at him, gray and helpless. Before he could placate her, there was the sound of a fork against a glass. The middle-aged young man kept up the noise, half turning for the waiter. A tall, skinny waiter came on the run.
“About time!” the middle-aged young man boomed with mock joviality. “What’s happening to the service? You all too busy running our government today?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the waiter said. “I was waitin’ for you to fill in your order.”
“Aw, give us a break, we poor folk can’t write,” the middle-aged young man said, winking. “Come on, Sam, one round of Sanka.”
The waiter stood a moment, unspeaking, and then slowly, with calm dignity, he turned away and walked toward the dining car kitchen.
The three across the way were laughing together now, and then huddled, whispering, and Abrahams did not want to overhear a word of it. He fumbled for his tea, head bent to avoid Sue’s eyes. He finished the tea, and, in no mood for his pipe, picked up the complimentary newspaper.
“Oh, Nat-”
Abrahams was forced to look up.
Sue was near tears. “I’m like our porter, Nat, I’m plain frightened. Doug needs friends so much.”
“He has friends,” Abrahams said curtly. “I’m sure no one in Washington is worried about that.”
She was staring at the back half of his folded newspaper. “Nat, if you’re right-I-I can read your paper upside down-why have they doubled the guard around him?”
“Honey, stop fretting. It’s routine. Whenever there’s a new President, they assign twice as many Secret Service men to him. Now, let’s hurry up and get out of here.” He tried to smile. “You concentrate on taking care of your husband, and let the Secret Service take care of Douglass Dilman.”
After securely buckling the strap that connected his revolver in its shoulder holster to his waist, Otto Beggs pulled on his dark, conservative, worn suit coat. Going to the bureau that he and Gertrude shared, he took down his open leather wallet, for good luck rubbed his thumb across the silver star of his Secret Service badge pinned inside, closed the wallet, and slipped it into his inner coat pocket.
He felt the constriction of hunger in his stomach, and yet he was not ready to join Gertrude and the boys for breakfast. He felt unnaturally elated this morning, and wanted to savor it minutes more, alone, before risking the loss of this rare well-being to his enemies downstairs.
Humming to himself, Otto Beggs strolled about the mussed and used bedroom, tidying it, then continued to his desk to straighten the three scrapbooks with his name imprinted in gold upon each. Considering his activities of the last twenty-four hours, it was strange that he should feel so fit.
He had worked not eight hours but eleven hours yesterday, after his boss, Lou Agajanian, Chief of the White House Detail, had awakened him to tell him to come in earlier and replace one of the night-shift agents who had become ill from a virus. Then there had been that pressure and strain, after the news that the President and Speaker had been killed, when the correspondents and half the government officials had overrun the West Wing. To make matters worse, not only Agajanian but Hugo Gaynor, the Chief of Secret Service, had been all over the place, on everyone’s tail, out of temper. It had been nerve-racking. And then, instead of giving him any rest at home, Gertrude had kept encouraging her relatives to come over, including her hotshot brother, Austin, and his wife and brats. It had been a nut house, and once, around midnight, he had tried to escape by saying that he was out of cigarettes. He had headed straight down the block for a couple of beers at the Walk Inn, but the joint was jammed with wild, drunken Negroes, and he had gone back to the house, embittered, to stay with television until three in the morning.
Before turning off the set he had heard one added interesting piece of news, and it had been confirmed, and it had kept him wide-awake and speculating about it until almost dawn. The interesting piece of news had been that the collapse of that ancient ceiling in the Alte Mainzer Palace had not only killed T. C. and MacPherson, but it had also crushed to death two Secret Service men. Beggs had known them both well. One had been Agajanian’s aide, Assistant Chief of the White House Detail Gene Sonenberg, and the other had been mobile White House special agent Les McCune, the only one of fifty on the House Detail who held seniority over Beggs.
Lying in bed, stimulated by what tragedy had made possible for him, Otto Beggs had done some simple subtraction and addition. The subtraction had consisted of removing Sonenberg from his position as Agajanian’s aide, and removing McCune as the next in line to fill that position. They were gone. The addition had consisted of putting a plus sign before his name. He was next, the one next eligible to move up and replace Sonenberg as Assistant Chief of the White House Detail. This promotion would make other promotions more likely. Once you got off your feet, taking orders, and on your seat, giving orders, the world was yours. After that, he might one day became Chief of the White House Detail, and then Deputy Chief of Secret Service, and then Assistant Chief of Security, until at last he became Chief of Secret Service under the Secretary of the Treasury. With the first giant step accomplished, the rungs above would be easier to grasp. And he had time. He was only in his early forties. In recent months Gertrude had made that seem too old for him to achieve anything better, and he had begun to believe her, but now, in a flash, he was young again, and once more on the road that had seemed so straight and easy when he had entered onto it at Corvallis, Oregon, and continued up it outside Seoul, Korea.
Last night, twisting and turning on his bed, he had wondered when he had lost the road, and where, and how, or if he had lost it at all. He had tried to relive his short journey, so much with him in recent years that he could only relive it as an experience ever present and not of the past.
At Oregon State University he was invincible. He had come to the campus on an athletic scholarship. Except for his innocent, pugged, smiling baby face and small head, everything about him was formidable. He was powerful, husky, amazingly agile and fast for his 190-pound weight. Swiftly, at fullback, he became the mainstay of the football team, carrying it in his senior year to a victory in the Rose Bowl and himself achieving singular recognition by being voted to Associated Press’s All-American second team. He was popular. The girls competed for his favor. Gertrude was one of them, not beautiful but attractive and smart. She earned his gratitude by helping him with his homework, and she earned his respect by letting him kiss and pet her but not letting him go all the way. By the time he graduated, they were dating steadily.
When he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the First Marines, and before he was shipped off to Korea, he married Gertrude and spent a three-day honeymoon with her in Yellow-stone National Park. After arriving in South Korea, the tension of battle evoked his football days and he was fearless. When a superior officer rebuked him for an unnecessary risk on a patrol, calling him “too goddam stupid to be afraid,” Beggs was proud. On a cold and icy night before Christmas, during his eleventh month in Korea, in the wintry scrubs outside Hagaru-ri, he became an authentic hero. Four wounded Marines lay trapped in enemy-held territory, as Chinese gunfire kept medical-aid corpsmen from reaching them. Enraged, Beggs snatched up a machine gun, and, darting forward, falling and rising, he decimated the Red Chinese, personally rescuing his four wounded buddies. For this he received America’s highest military award, the Congressional Medal of Honor, for valor in action.
In the Oval Office of the White House, the medal was pinned on Otto Beggs by President Eisenhower. There were columns of photographs and feature stories, and one of Gertrude’s gifts was the first scrapbook. There were dozens of well-paying executive jobs offered him, and he took the best, and left it, and took another, and then a third and a fourth, and left these also. After Oregon and Korea the jobs were too tame and caging. He wanted challenge and danger. He wanted-Gertrude’s word-“clippings.”
His nostalgia, in his waking dreams, was for that climactic moment in the White House when President Eisenhower had given him the Medal of Honor. He was jobless, but not concerned, because Gertrude had saved their money, and he was telling friends that he was “looking around for the right sort of thing.” Then one noon, in a barber’s chair, leafing through a magazine, he found exactly what he was seeking. There was a coverline article commemorating the death of a White House police officer who had been shot down before Blair House in the assassination attempt on President Truman by two Puerto Ricans. The alert and gallant White House police and Secret Service agents on guard had saved the President’s life in a gun battle. The story then went on to explain the role of the White House police, as a branch of the Secret Service, and told about the history and the daring adventures of the Secret Service itself, from the time after the murder of President McKinley when its prime responsibility became that of protecting the life of the President.
Intrigued by this one rare job that put a premium on courage, that promised drama, Otto Beggs wrote to the Chief of Secret Service, Treasury Department, Washington, D.C., relating his background, his keen interest, and applying for a position as a special White House agent.
What followed came quickly. Beggs was summoned to prove himself. With enthusiasm, he took the United States Civil Service test, the four-hour written observation and memory test of the Secret Service, the thorough physical examination. He overcame each obstacle, including the personal interviews, with ease. He received his appointment to the Secret Service at the beginner’s salary of $5,000 a year, with the assurance that once he had experience he would be raised gradually to $10,000 a year, and once he became a supervisor of top grade he could earn $16,000 a year.
While the money was not what he had earned in business, as Gertrude kept reminding him, he pointed out to her that it was more than sufficient for their needs. He told her that he would be serving his country again, which was worth any monetary sacrifice, and the prestige that he would acquire through the years might make him a political figure with the attendant wealth necessary to insure their future. He did not tell her that he felt he was being paid for having fun.
And, indeed, for Otto Beggs the beginnings were challenging. His enthusiasm mounted as he attended the Secret Service’s special training school in Washington. He was instructed in the use of the most modern submachine guns, revolvers, riot guns. He was instructed in judo, first aid, fire fighting, parachute landing, wrestling, psychiatry. He was indoctrinated into the mysteries of atomic, biological, and chemical warfare. When his basic training was concluded, he was casually asked what position in the Secret Service interested him the most. He was frank. He knew that the procedure was for a newcomer to spend two years in the field, apprehending counterfeiters and forgers, before being considered for an elite job in the Executive Mansion. Nevertheless, he felt that his background warranted his requesting immediate assignment to the exclusive White House Detail. He had no interest in chasing petty criminals. He desired only to protect the nation’s leading official from assassins. Having spoken his piece, he waited with confidence. He did not wait long. The word came from the Secretary of the Treasury himself. Otto Beggs had been assigned to become a member of the White House Detail. He was not surprised. He knew that the old Medal of Honor had counted for something.
The first year was agreeable, if somewhat disappointing. He had expected his supervisors, on the second floor of the East Wing of the White House, to recognize his unique merit by assigning him, at once, to be at the President’s elbow. Instead he found himself with the police at the East, then the South, then the West guardhouse entrances to the Executive Mansion. When he was assigned to what was cheerfully labeled “the diaper detail,” off and on watching over President Kennedy’s daughter and son, President Lyndon Johnson’s two daughters, his hopes soared again.
Encouraged, optimistic about his future in the early days of the “diaper detail,” he had insisted upon buying a house that would be their own. Impulsively he purchased a small, comfortable two-story residence off lower Connecticut Avenue. He crowed over his bargain, but Gertrude did not hide her apprehension. While the neighborhood was still genteel middle-class, it was only a few blocks from a bursting lower-class Negro section. Beggs was not concerned. The Negroes, he was positive, would stay in their place. If they invaded his neighborhood, he and Gertrude could sell at a profit. By then he would have his promotion, raise in salary, and they could find their way to one of the more expensive locations in suburban Washington. Gertrude was not convinced. She felt that the Negro invasion was on its way and her husband’s promotion was not.
As ever, Gertrude was proved right on both scores. The Negro invasion began slowly, at the perimeter, and then cut in deeper and faster. White homeowners, prospering at their government jobs and businesses, seeing a chance for additional profits, sold off and moved elsewhere. The neighborhood streets that Beggs liked to stroll along in the evening were soon one-third black, and several years later two-thirds black. Beggs’s favorite haunt, a congenial corner tavern known as the Walk Inn, with its bar and booths and variety of pinball machines, began to undergo a transformation, too. In the beginning, when he went there for his evening beer, Beggs joined a community of white neighbors, men who were his equals and who respected his important job and contested with him over the pinball machines. Gradually his friends disappeared, one by one, and there remained strangers with dark skins, men with whom Beggs had nothing in common.
From time to time, bowing to Gertrude’s increasingly shrill demands that they move, he accompanied his wife to suburbs like Silver Spring and Bethesda to see what the housing developments had for sale. It was for his sons, Ogden and Otis, for their better school conditions, that he did this. But the new pseudo colonials were too expensive. After each of these frustrating explorations, Beggs promised his distressed wife that a promotion was forthcoming and the move would soon be made possible.
Incredibly, the promotion did not come. Within the White House, and about its spacious grounds, Otto Beggs was transferred from one inconsequential job to another. Other agents surrounded the President’s Oval Office, walked with the great man, traveled with him. Beggs remained chained to routine and peripheral duty. When T. C. was elected, his hopes lifted once more. A change in the occupancy of the White House always gave promise of a change in his duties. And, indeed, there was a change. He found himself assigned to the West Wing lobby, occupied mostly by the press and visitors who called upon T. C. He did not mind, because he liked the reporters, who were important and who occasionally mentioned him or quoted him in their feature stories. But Gertrude would give him no peace.
One day, before his shift, he called upon Chief of Secret Service Hugo Gaynor, waited in the oak-paneled, red-carpeted receiving room, and had his embarrassing interview. Gaynor was impatient, evasive, and pledged to Beggs that he would be kept in mind for the next promotion. Upset, Beggs sought his immediate boss, Lou Agajanian, in the Secret Service office off the West Wing lobby, and Agajanian said that he, too, would see what he could do. A short time later, eating in the President’s Navy Mess in the downstairs basement, he overheard some of his fellow agents gossiping, unaware that he was within earshot. They were analyzing one another and their absent colleagues. He thought he heard his name mentioned. He heard expressions like “workhorse” and “not too bright” and “living in the past.” He was not certain if they were referring to himself, and chose to believe that they were not. He did not repeat what he had overheard to Gertrude, who was too antagonistic to be a confidante any longer, but he thought about it for a number of nights in the Walk Inn, where his beer intake had gone up from one to three steins per sitting.
What he thought about was that while he liked his job, he had become increasingly disappointed in it. From the first, he had assumed it promised responsibility and danger and high adventure, countless opportunities for a fearless individual to prove himself under fire. Instead it had proved a job like almost any other, no more hazardous than had he remained a stockbroker or public relations man. Perhaps the disappointment, the monotony of each day’s shift, had dulled him. Perhaps the routine had made him less lively, less enthusiastic, less sharp and aggressive. Perhaps Gaynor and Agajanian saw this, and felt that he could not be trusted as one of the six to ten agents assigned to be closest to the President, or as one who deserved to be made a supervisor. He did not know.
Yet, despite Gertrude’s recent nagging that he quit the Secret Service and go into the real estate business with her successful rebuke of a brother, Austin, he could not bear to make the change. As a realtor, he might acquire money, but there would surely be the grave of anonymity. As an agent, he could always hope for recognition. He could also, no matter what the routine, feel he was in the center of life, where anything might happen. Once, some unimportant newspaperman, a kid named George Murdock, had interviewed him. Well, despite what the big reporters said, Murdock wasn’t that unimportant. His Tri-State Syndicate did have twelve newspapers, even if half of them were only weeklies. Anyway, this kid, George Murdock, had asked him what he liked about being an agent and what he did not like. He did not remember his reply, but what Murdock quoted him as saying was, “To me, the appeal of the Secret Service is the same appeal most law enforcement jobs hold. But I don’t consider it a mere job. If I did, I would have left it long ago for higher-paying executive positions that have been offered to me. There is more to it than merely doing a job. As an agent, you feel you are doing a real service to everyone. There is enough going on to keep you on your toes. There’s no routine or rut to bore you. Maybe it’s not as glamorous as people think, but there is plenty of pressure every minute, and there’s no margin for error. Our most important training is to cope with suddenness. Well, when you have to be alert for suddenness, you haven’t time to be bored.” George Murdock had given him a clipping of the interview as it appeared in the Sandusky, Ohio, Register. He supposed no one important, like the President or Gaynor or Agajanian, ever saw it. But he had seen it. It was on page seven of his third scrapbook.
All that had gone through his head last night, before he fell asleep as dawn came. Now, fully dressed, ready for breakfast and his daily shift that began in an hour, he stood immobilized in front of his scrapbooks. He opened the uppermost one and turned to page seven. There it was. He reread Murdock’s quote. He had remembered it correctly, word for word.
“Otto!” It was Gertrude screaming at him from the foot of the stairs. “Otto, you want to see your sons before they go to school, or not?”
“Coming!” he shouted back, almost gaily.
He felt good. He could not wait to get to work. The West Wing lobby would be a madhouse today. He would be interviewed about Sonenberg and McCune, who had died last night in Frankfurt with the President. He would think of what he should say, on the way to work. He might be too busy to say anything. He knew that Agajanian or Gaynor would be waiting for him.
He went, light-footed, out of the bedroom and down the stairs, as light and quick as he had been at Oregon and in Korea. Although he now weighed 210 pounds instead of 190, and maybe his face was a bit fleshier and blotched from beering, he was proud that he was still strong and fast and without an inch of flabbiness.
Almost breezily he entered the dining room, where Gertrude, in her usual early morning disarray, was trying to force Ogden, his ten-year-old, and Otis, who was eight, to eat their plates clean. Settling down to spear a waffle, he noticed, as he often had recently, that Gertrude, once pleasantly thin of face and trim of figure, had become sharp around the nose and mouth and baggier beneath the spotted housecoat. He noticed, too, that neither she nor his sons had acknowledged him with so much as a good morning. This time he would permit no disrespect to intrude on his good cheer.
“Well, Gertie, what’s the bad news today?” he said with a grin.
He had almost forgotten how much this greeting, which he had been using lately to anticipate and blunt her shrill attacks, infuriated her.
Her head swung toward him, threatening as a machine gun. What unholy hour did you get to sleep?”
“I don’t know. Two or three.” He buttered his waffles and poured syrup over them. “I couldn’t take my eyes off the television screen. What a night.”
“Apparently you were able to take your eyes off it long enough while my brother was here. I suppose you went to that frightful saloon?”
“Just for cigarettes.” He sliced off a piece of waffle and was pleased to find it limp and cold. “Then I guess I walked around. I as pretty shook up by that Frankfurt thing.”
“I didn’t know what to say to Austin. He only wants to help you. Even if he is my brother, he doesn’t have to.”
“I appreciate it,” Beggs said grimly. He stared at the tops of his sons’ heads. “Ogden-Otis-where’s your manners? I haven’t even heard hello.”
Both their sandy-haired heads went up and down. “Hello, Pop… hello.”
He might have been a stick of wood for all they cared, he thought. Gertrude had done a thorough job of brainwashing them against him. A few years ago they would have been swarming over him, tugging, hugging, pestering him for more stories of derring-do on the Oregon gridiron, on the Korean battlefields, on the perils of his White House job. They had looked up to him, admired him. Only Gertrude’s increased and open daily hectoring had reduced his past heroism and authority to his present symbol of failure.
He determined not to lose them. “Well, boys, it should be quite a day in school today, with a new President, eh?”
Gertrude’s querulous voice drew a discordant curtain between her sons and their father. “You sound like it’s good news. You have a Negro President. You have two sons in a predominantly Negro school. They’re both afraid they’ll be hooted at and kicked around.”
“Why make out that it’s so bad?” Beggs demanded. “Why does everything have to be bad?”
“Because it is, it just is,” “Gertrude said, throwing her crumpled paper napkin on the table. “Do you want some really bad news now? I don’t mind telling you. I just heard it from the milkman. The Schearers are moving out of the neighborhood. They’ve put their house up for sale. They didn’t even have the nerve to tell us. I had to hear it from the milkman.”
Automatically Beggs’s eyebrows had arched with surprise. The Schearers were the last of the old crowd, their old friends in the neighborhood, who had stayed on with them. He and Gertrude saw the Schearers at least twice a week.
Gertrude was going on. “He must’ve gotten that new position he applied for. Well, at least they’ve got some sense. They’ve had enough, even if you haven’t. And I’m thinking of the boys now, especially now, and nothing else.”
“I think of them, too,” he said angrily. He paused, to control himself, and then he said, “There’s going to be a change right here. Didn’t you hear it on television or read it in the papers?”
“What? Read what?”
“Sonenberg and McCune were in the same room with the President in Frankfurt. They were killed, too. That means the Assistant job to Agajanian in the White House is open, and I’m next up. It means a solid raise.”
Gertrude seemed to deflate into weariness. “Oh, that one. I heard that one before. Do you have a contract that says you’ll get it?”
“It’s my turn, Gertie. Chief Gaynor knows I’m next in line. Besides, I was thinking”-he felt shrewd, his old confident self-“the fact that we stayed on in this neighborhood is going to work for me. Look at it any way you want, but the new President is a Negro, and knowing Gaynor’s politicking, he’ll be wanting to play up to President Dilman. Gaynor knows where we live. It shows I have no prejudices-in fact, shows I like the Negro people and get along with them. Gaynor’ll figure my promotion will look good to Dilman.”
“I’m sure Dilman doesn’t know you exist,” said Gertrude, “and I’m not sure Gaynor knows either, considering these past years.” He was furious at her remark, in front of the boys, but before he could reply, she was on her feet, hustling Ogden and Otis to the door, stuffing their arms into their jackets. “Get on your way,” she was saying, “and watch the crossings, and if there’s any trouble you report it to the principal.”
Otis had gone through the door, but the older one, Ogden, hung behind. “Pop, last night Junior Austin said there’s a holiday off when a President dies. I hope so.”
“When I get to the White House, I’ll arrange it,” Beggs said expansively.
“Ha,” Ogden chortled, “that’ll be the day.”
Flushed, Beggs shouted, “If I can get you those damn stamps from the President’s secretary, I can-” It was too late. His older son had gone.
Put down, he waited, as Gertrude came back into the dining room. She tried to push her hair out of her face, and buttoned her housecoat, and then she lifted her head and stared at her husband. The tight, unyielding lines of attack had left her forehead and mouth. When she spoke, her tone was more imploring than accusing.
“Otto, I know what that promotion means to you, and I-I hope you get it, for your sake,” she said. “I know what the Service means to you, and all that business, and the excitements, and the scrapbooks. But there’s more to life, Otto. Even if you got the promotion-”
“I’ll get it,” he said fiercely.
“So you get it. But even then, we’d have to borrow and scrape to make a down payment on a better house in a-a decent, proper neighborhood for the boys.”
“We’ll manage, that’s all that counts.”
She came forward a few steps. “Why do you make it so hard for yourself and for us, Otto? It’s been-I guess it’s over a year since Austin agreed he’d like to have you in Chevy Chase as a partner. It was no favor to a brother-in-law. He’s making money hand over fist. He wants to expand. He respects you, no matter how-how carried away he gets sometimes with his success. He’s always saying a person of your background would be a definite asset to his business.”
“I don’t need his charity-him, of all people.”
She was pleading. “Otto, there’s no charity. You’d have to work for it. Six months ago you seemed to be more agreeable. That’s why I got him to loan you those textbooks, so you could study up for the realty board examinations. I think maybe you opened them once. They’ve been rotting inside the desk ever since. But you’re smart enough to do it. Look how fast you got in the Secret Service, passing those tests when you wanted to. You could become a licensed realtor in no time. You’d triple Austin’s business.”
“Doing what? Standing in drafty houses and showing couples still wet behind the ears the view, the goddam new plumbing, the bedrooms? That’s a life, after what I lived? Listen, Gertie, you stick with me, let me do it my way, and I promise you-”
The telephone in the living room rang out, and he stopped, wondering.
“I’ll get it,” Gertrude was saying. “Probably Mae Schearer to gloat about-”
She was gone. He started to eat his bowl of yogurt, when he saw her return.
“Otto, it’s Chief Gaynor calling from the White House.”
He jumped to his feet, suddenly beaming, his temples throbbing. “I knew it, I knew it. Tell him I’ll be right on. I’ll take it upstairs.”
He wanted this triumph alone. He rushed out of the dining room and bounded up the creaking stairs two at a time. Breathless, he snatched up the telephone on the desk.
“Hello… I’ve got it, Gertrude… hello.”
He heard her click off, and heard a remote secretary tell him to hold on, and then he heard Gaynor’s gruff voice, so welcome this morning.
“Beggs? Chief Gaynor here.”
“Good morning, Chief. I was just leaving for duty. Glad you caught me. I’m sure sorry about Sonenberg and McCune.”
“It happens, it happens,” said Gaynor impatiently. “We just wish they could have done something to save the President. Well, that’s behind us. We’ve got a job to do, and today it’s harder than ever. Beggs, I’m calling to tell you we’re forced into some changes around here-”
His heart swelled. “Yes, sure.”
“-and we’ve upped the guard detail, and have to do some switching around on the three shifts. I know you’re on the morning-to-afternoon shift. But for the time being we’re putting you on from afternoon to evening. You don’t have to come in now. Rest up. You check in at four o’clock and stay until one in the morning.”
His heart thumped faster. “You-you mentioned changes, Chief. Is that all? I mean, just the time?”
“Matter of fact, no, glad you mentioned it. One second, I think there’s another call-no, it’s okay. Yes, you’ll be undertaking a new job. Lou Agajanian tells me you get along well with Negroes.”
“That’s right, Chief,” he said hastily. “Been living right here off Connecticut among them for years. Some of my finest friends-”
“Excellent,” Gaynor interrupted. “We’re assigning you to being one of the twelve special agents who will personally be guarding President Dilman. How’s that?”
Confused, he waited for Chief Gaynor to tell him the rest, but realized there was no more. “I-I don’t understand, Chief. You want me to guard the President? Is that my new job?”
“I knew you’d be pleased. Agajanian told me it was a duty you’d always wanted.”
Beggs felt sinking and frantic. “Chief, it’s what I wanted four or five years ago. But there’s a lot of water under the bridge now. I-I’ve got seniority, now that McCune is gone. I know that Sonenberg left a supervisory vacancy. I figured it was regular procedure-I mean, I thought that the Assistant to Lou, that opening, would-”
“It’s already filled, Beggs.” Chief Gaynor was brisk and businesslike. “An hour ago I submitted Special Agent Roscoe Prentiss’ name to the Secretary of the Treasury and he okayed it.”
“Prentiss?” Beggs could barely restrain himself from shouting at his Chief. “He came into the Service four years after I did. He’s way down the list. I’m supposed to get-”
“Wait a minute, Beggs, easy there. You’re creating a seniority system that doesn’t exist. Going by length of time in the Service is not in the regulations. It’s a factor, of course-always has been when we consider promotions. But just as often we try to angle the right man for the right job at the right time.”
Beggs felt himself shaking with righteous indignation. “Who’s Prentiss? What has he got that I haven’t got?” Then it came to him, and he knew. “Don’t tell me. I get it. He’s colored. He’s being upped to supervisor because he’s a Negro.”
There were empty silent seconds on the telephone, and then Chief Gaynor came on less gruffly. “I’m not in a position to say that was the decisive factor, Beggs. I-” His tone of voice lowered, offering confidence, man-to-man equality. “I just want to put it to you as one reasonable human being to another-what would you do in my boots? Overnight we’ve got an unusual situation, we’ve got a Negro President. Don’t you think it’s only fair that one of the six Secret Service executives should be of his people? If I didn’t do this, he might feel we were being discriminatory, and feel unkindly toward the Service.”
“Did President Dilman ask for this?”
“No-no, he doesn’t even know about it yet. It’s just something we felt would be fair at this time.”
“Dammit, Chief, it’s not fair, say whatever you want. It’s discrimination against me because I’m white. It’s not giving me what I deserve. I don’t like it.”
“Beggs, this is a time to be reasonable. I appreciate your disappointment. The fact is, we’re giving you something better, something you always wanted, an assignment right next to the President of the United States. In fact, and Lou’ll go into this with you, there’ll be a-a token raise. As for the future, we’ll keep you in mind. We take care of our own, Beggs. Now, you take it easy, and check in with Lou at four. Be seeing you.”
Listlessly, Otto Beggs returned the telephone to the desk. Life had spat in his eye again. He knew when he was licked. His glance went to the door, but he had no stomach for facing Gertrude.
He lumbered to the bedroom window and glared down into the busy street. There were people down there, and most of them were black. Until now his attitude toward them had been boxed between resentment and toleration. Now he was bitter toward all of them. Because his Chief wanted to apple-polish a new President, who was Negro, who did not deserve to be President, Otto Beggs had been elbowed aside to make room for a callow colleague whose only qualification was his black skin. And the worst of it, they were throwing him a few pennies more and telling him to risk his life to protect the life of a colored politician.
The injustice of it gagged him. He, a war hero, who almost gave up his life for his country, almost got killed trying to protect those watermelon eaters in the safe rear lines doing soft KP and shooting craps and knocking up Korean girls. He, who had received the Medal of Honor from Eisenhower, having to be at the beck and call of a black President, whose war record consisted of keeping records in the Pentagon. Chrissakes, what in the hell was the world coming to?
He was ready for Gertrude at last.
He strode out of the room and down the stairs. She was waiting below, unblinking, as her fingers picked at the fringe of her housecoat, watching his descent. He felt that his cheeks were livid, and knew that she knew, and did not give a damn.
He looked fixedly at her. She did not utter a word.
He said, “My shift’s been changed. I’m not going to work until four. I’ve got time on my hands. I want to use it. Where in the hell are those real estate textbooks?”
She swallowed, quickly nodding her head. “I-I’ll find them for you, Otto. I’ll get them right away.”
She raised the long skirt of her housecoat, to make movement and speed easier, and hastily she climbed the stairs. For once, he was satisfied with her. For once, she’d had sufficient respect for him to say nothing more.
Late in the afternoon, still behind her desk in her office next to the President’s Oval Office, Edna Foster sat with hands clasped tightly, observing George Murdock as he read the short letter she had moments before pulled out of her gray electric typewriter.
Her gaze did not leave her fiancé. He was running his fingers through his sparse blond hair, and then scratching at his acne-pocked pale cheeks, and then scratching at his beaky nose and receding chin, about which she felt so possessive.
His small, translucent eyes were smaller as they came up from the page to meet her own. “No, Edna, don’t show it to him, not yet.”
She took her neat, two-paragraph letter of resignation to President Dilman back from George, coughed wretchedly, since her cold had settled in her chest, and said, “It’s expected of the whole staff.”
“Flannery told us President Dilman was keeping on T. C.’s entire staff. And there’ll be an announcement he’s keeping on the Cabinet, too. Just like Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson did, at first.”
“George, it’s impossible. How can I work for him after working for T. C.?”
Murdock’s eyes became even smaller. “Is that the reason, Edna?”
“I don’t know,” she said quickly. “He has his own secretary over in the Senate Office Building. She’s colored. She’d understand him. It-it would be so difficult for me.”
George Murdock shook his head. “No, it would be wrong, Edna. You know this job. The other girl doesn’t. Give him a break. You admitted you didn’t even know him. You haven’t even talked to him today.”
“He’s been locked up in the Cabinet Room for hours, with Eaton and Talley and everyone. Even if I did know him, it would be-”
She halted, and listened. She could hear the tread of many feet leaving the Cabinet Room for the tiled corridor outside.
She said, “They’re breaking up now, George. You’d better leave me. He might come in, and it wouldn’t look right.”
George Murdock came to his feet and so did she, and she was pleased that she was no taller than he, even if it was, as she suspected, because he wore lifts in his heels. He started for the corridor door. “Think twice, Edna, before you quit. You can help him. It might be better for both of us, you being busy right now. See you tonight.”
Alone with her letter of resignation, she reread it, then, with a pen, supplied a missing comma. George, she knew, was wiser than she, and she was attentive always to his counsel. But this time he was wrong because he could not see the turmoil inside her, and there had been no time to talk it out. Yet George had perceived what was at the bottom of her discomfort. He had doubted that she wanted to resign because of her loss of T. C. He had forced her to confess that she thought a colored secretary could serve a Negro President better.
She wondered now what her admission had meant. Why did she think Dilman should have a colored secretary? She had never possessed strong feelings for or against Negroes. In fact, throughout her career she had had no close contact with them. To her they were not people, but a controversial issue that had swirled about T. C.’s Oval Office these last two years and that had gone in and out of her typewriter as a civil rights problem. Like T. C., she had been for them. Like Lincoln, she did not believe in slavery or discrimination or prejudice. She had always considered herself open-minded and progressive, and wanting the right thing.
She had never been faced with the problem of knowing a Negro really well, or working for one really closely. Last night the problem had come to her, and all through the hectic and emotional day she had tried to evaluate it. Without precisely defining why, she had come to the conclusion that she must resign. She had drafted several versions of her letter, when she could find the time, and at last it was typed. She had called George in from the West Wing lobby, where the members of the press were crowded about for every news flash, but the two of them had had only five minutes together.
She wondered if she would see President Dilman at all today. He had arrived at the West Wing entrance late in the morning, had been hurried past the television and radio microphones outside, stopping just long enough to speak, brokenly, no more than thirty words of his grief over the nation’s loss, and to promise that the continuity of orderly government would not be impaired and that a formal statement would be forthcoming.
After that, he had spent the entire afternoon in the Cabinet Room, flanked by Secretary of State Eaton and Governor Talley, seeing Congressional leaders and several ambassadors, approving funeral arrangements, signing a more elaborate proclamation of a period of mourning, preparing a statement to the nation. There had been, as far as Edna had been able to make out, only one change in plans. She had scheduled the members of the Cabinet to see him, one after the other, separately. Apparently Dilman had insisted upon seeing them as a group for five minutes. Talley had emerged to tell her, and Edna had made the arrangements. The first Cabinet meeting had lasted seven minutes, and, according to Tim Flannery, President Dilman had requested one minute of silent prayer for T. C. and MacPherson, and then he had made a little impromptu speech promising that he would try to serve the country, try to carry out T. C.’s programs with their help, and he had concluded by pleading with all of them to stay on in their posts.
She heard muffled voices in the corridor, and then the tramp of footsteps toward the Oval Office, followed by lighter footsteps. Her intuition told her that President Dilman was on his way to his desk for the first time in his first day in office, followed, no doubt, by his Secret Service bodyguards.
She wanted to make certain.
She went quietly to the thick door that separated her room from the Oval Office. In the middle of the heavy door, at eye level, was a minute peephole with a magnifying glass inside it. Very few visitors, even members of the government, were aware that this peephole existed. Occasionally, with glee, T. C. had pointed it out to distinguished foreign guests. He had liked to say, to Edna’s embarrassment, “My wife Hesper had the hole drilled, so that Miss Foster can keep an eye on me. We have a lot of pretty secretaries here, you know.” Actually, as Edna knew from the first day, the peephole was there so that a President’s personal secretary could unobtrusively peer inside, to make sure that the Chief Executive was not occupied with visitors, before she entered or dared to disturb him.
Edna Foster stood on tiptoe and placed her right eye to the peephole.
The magnifying glass enlarged T. C.’s elaborate desk, made up of the oak timbers of the H.M.S. Resolute, a ship turned over to Queen Victoria by American Minister to Great Britain James Buchanan in an effort to aid the British search for a lost Arctic expedition. Years later Queen Victoria had returned a portion of the rescue vessel to President Hayes in the shape of this White House desk. And forever after it had been known as the Buchanan desk.
Clearly visible to Edna’s eye now, as she studied the venerable desk, were the numerous knickknacks and gadgets surrounding the green blotter, all favors that emissaries from Japan and Ecuador, Italy and Baraza, had brought to the President. Almost visible, too, were the silver-framed portraits of T. C.’s wife and adolescent son.
Dropping her gaze, Edna could make out the center of the room, even to the Presidential seal woven into the green carpet. Shifting her eyes to the right, Edna could see T. C.’s cushioned antique captain’s chair, set between the two curved sofas.
Beyond the furnishings, the Oval Office was empty.
Suddenly the open doorway to the corridor was filled by a Secret Service agent, the one named Beggs, who was unfastening the chain. A moment later President Douglass Dilman came into the room. No one followed him.
Knowing that this was his first visit, as Chief Executive of the land, to what was now his office and had been the office of every President since 1909, Edna Foster watched with fascination.
Douglass Dilman had come to the middle of the room hesitantly. He simply stood there as if uncertain where to turn, what to do, like one who was not sure that he had found the right address. Edna examined him. Although the peephole brought him closer, made him larger, he appeared smaller than she remembered him to have been last night. His broad black face reflected confusion. He rubbed one side of his flaring nostrils and slowly pirouetted, staring at the three windows behind the desk, at the two standing flags, the American flag and the Presidential flag. Then he stared down at the desk itself.
He was full in the peephole once more. Edna’s heart ached, not from the fact that T. C. was not there, not from the fact that a stranger was there instead, but for Dilman’s forlornness. His charcoal suit looked too new, too uncomfortable, and long at the sleeves. He might have been a proprietor of a shoeshine-stand concession in his Sunday best, waiting for an interview on the new lease.
She must go to him, at once, before he came to her.
Withdrawing from the peephole, Edna Foster folded her letter of resignation, located the memorandum of urgent calls and messages that she had prepared for the President. Holding the letter, the memorandum and her shorthand pad in her left hand, she nervously opened the door to his office and went inside.
“Good-good day, Mr. President.”
“Miss Foster, how do you do. I-I was about to find out where you were.”
“There’ve been endless phone calls and messages. Some may be important. I didn’t want to break in on your meetings, the-the first day-but-” She removed the memorandum from her left fist and handed it to him. “I’ve typed it out for you, in detail. If you want to dictate-”
She had started for her familiar chair next to T. C.’s desk, but Dilman did not move. She halted, and waited.
His eyes were on the desk. Then they swung toward the sofas across the room. He indicated one sofa. “I think it’ll be more comfortable over there.”
She nodded, then remembered a procedure. She went quickly to the open French door leading to the Rose Garden, waved to a Secret Service agent, then closed it. She started toward the other open door leading to the corridor.
Dilman, having reached the captain’s chair, said, “What are you doing?”
Puzzled, Edna replied, “I’m closing the doors for privacy.”
Dilman did not hide his concern. “No. Leave that one open.”
“I-I’ve always been told to do it, to shut them. What you may be dictating-it might be personal, I mean privileged-”
“Leave that door open,” Dilman said.
She was surprised at his severity. “Well, I-” She shrugged. “Very well, Mr. President.”
Before she could move to the sofa, he intercepted her. His distress was obvious. “Let me-I think I’d better explain,” he said quickly. “I think I can be honest with you. After all, you were T. C.’s confidential secretary.”
“Yes,” she said, bewildered.
Dilman hesitated. His eyes were cast downward at his shoes. “Once, President Eisenhower appointed a Negro, E. Frederic Morrow, to his staff in the White House, in an executive capacity. Morrow required a secretary from the White House pool. They were all specially trained white girls. Everyone refused the job. According to Morrow, ‘None wants the onus of working for a colored boss.’ So Morrow sat alone in his White House office, without a secretary, not knowing what to do. Then, late in the day, a white girl timidly appeared. She was from Massachusetts. She was religious. She knew Morrow was having trouble. She felt that she could not be true to her faith unless she volunteered for the job. When the white girl appeared, Morrow said, ‘She kept the door open behind her, as if for protection, and refused to come in and sit down.’ ” Dilman paused. “I could never forget that. In the Senate I always kept one door open when I had a white secretary or female visitor in. I-I guess I’ve brought the same feeling with me into the White House. Forgive my sensitivity, Miss Foster. Now, at least, you understand it.”
Shaken, Edna wanted to burst into tears. When Dilman raised his eyes to look at her, she tried to control her voice, but it quavered. “I think the President’s door should be closed.”
She went to the corridor door, shut it firmly, and without meeting his eyes she went to the curved sofa and sat down.
Dilman was behind the captain’s chair, still standing. He ignored the memorandum that he held. “Governor Talley tells me that I should announce to the White House staff that I am keeping all members on. Is that right?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“I’ll begin with you, Miss Foster. Will you stay?”
As he spoke, she had separated her shorthand pad from her folded letter of resignation. Now she stuffed the letter of resignation deep into her skirt pocket. “Yes, Mr. President,” she found herself saying. “I’d be honored to stay. Thank you.”
“I thank you,” he said with a wan smile. “Then you’re my first appointment as President of the United States. I’ll take care of the others later.”
Efficiently, she had opened her shorthand pad and held a pencil poised, waiting.
He had not yet consulted the memorandum. His eyes were directed toward the three naval paintings over the mantel of the fireplace. “Miss Foster, do you remember what Harry Truman said after F. D. R. died and after he himself had become President? He said, ‘I felt like the moon, the stars, and the planets had fallen on me.’ He said to reporters, ‘I’ve got the most awful responsibility a man ever had. If you fellows ever pray, pray for me.’ And Lyndon Johnson. Will we ever forget his leaving the plane at Andrews Airfield with President Kennedy’s coffin, and his going to the microphones? Do you remember, Miss Foster? He said, ‘I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help-and God’s.’ Well, Miss Foster, that’s how I feel, like Harry Truman did and like Lyndon Johnson did.”
Edna tried to find her voice. “I think everyone understands that, Mr. President.”
“Do they?” He looked at her absently. “I wonder.”
“They’ll pray for you and-and they’ll help you. I know they will, the way they helped Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. It’s no different now.”
His eyes were fixed upon her. “It is different now… They weren’t black.” Then, suddenly, he smiled. “Of course, if there’s no one’s help, there is always God’s. After all, we don’t know if He is white or black.”
And he sat down in the captain’s chair, and was ready to begin.