FOR RELEASE AT 11:00 A.M. EDT
Office of the White House Press Secretary
THE WHITE HOUSE
ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT AT THE FOUNDERS’ DAY CEREMONY, TRAFFORD UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, AFTER RECEIVING AN HONORARY DEGREE IN PHILOSOPHY.
COPIES OF THIS SPEECH ARE BEING DISTRIBUTED TO THE PRESS AT TRAFFORD UNIVERSITY AND FROM THIS OFFICE.
Chancellor McKaye, my fellow citizens:
It is a great pleasure for me to participate in this ninety-second celebration of the founding of your illustrious school. I am deeply gratified by the academic distinction being conferred upon me. This is not simply because the award has been given by a Negro university to one who is Negro, but because the award has been given by an institution-whose program and teachings have risen above the narrow confines of racial thinking-to one who is working as an American member of our national community and not as an Afro-American member of our country.
Indeed, it is about our relationship to our nation as a whole, as Americans, and nothing else, that I wish to address you today. You are aware of the racial unrest in our country. You are aware, also, that the Department of Justice and I have been studying evidence of the activities of these super-government, super-American societies and organizations, composed of extremists of the right and left, of white and black, responsible for fomenting such dangerous unrest in these critical…
IT was a cool, shining autumn morning, and President Dilman, feeling slightly ridiculous in his tasseled mortarboard and warmed by his dark gown, sat comfortably on the outdoor, flag-decorated stage, basking in the sun, only partially attentive to Chancellor McKaye’s laudatory introduction.
Except for the Washington press corps, predominantly white, seated in rows down to his left, busily engaged in reading and marking the mimeographed advance release of his address which Tim Flannery had passed out minutes before, the sea of faces stretching before and around him was black. The faculty and alumni, the ones he could see clearly because they were directly below in folding chairs, appeared interested and hospitable. The mass of the student body beyond, crowded and standing (and Julian probably among them, having rejected a place on the platform), represented a jagged inky blur offering no visible clue to its friendliness or hostility toward him. The fact was, they were there, orderly and silent, and to Dilman this seemed a good sign.
While he was no judge of crowds, Dilman guessed that there must be more than three thousand persons present, an amplitude of humanity that blanketed every foot of the rectangular grassy quadrangle, and the walks and shaded malls leading into it as well. What gave the scene its added dignity, even majesty, were the old stone buildings, vine-covered, rising behind the audience, the Social Science Building, Medgar Evers Memorial Library, the School of Law Building, and Garrison Hall, the student union.
Trafford University was, he told himself again, a gracious and resplendent school and campus. He would never understand why Julian had not made peace with it.
He shifted in his chair to enjoy the sun more, and was surprised again at the lack of tension and fatigue in his body. Certainly he had every reason to feel tired. His administrative duties in recent days had been hectic. He had affixed his signature to the African Unity Pact, previously ratified by the Senate. He had, after some brief soul-searching, allowed the insulting New Succession Bill to become law, not with the approval of his signature but by letting it remain in his desk drawer for ten days and a Sunday, whereby it had automatically become a statute. He had released, through Flannery, his only comment on the New Succession Bill: that he had not been able, in good faith, to sign it or yet to veto it. Since he doubted its constitutionality, he preferred it to be the House’s law and the Senate’s law until it could be judged properly by the Supreme Court in the first test case that should arise.
Certainly, too, he had had every reason for feeling worried in recent days. The White House press room, and his own Oval Office, had been filled with nerve-racking reports about the Hurley trial, the pros and cons on the possible banning of the Turnerite Group, the latest outbreaks of racial violence in Raleigh, Fort Lauderdale, Wichita, Oklahoma City, Cincinnati, Houston, San Diego, Oakland. He had not looked forward to this visit to Trafford, to the potentially explosive announcement he would make on this occasion, and, equally disagreeable, to the private confrontation with his son.
Yet here he was, and it was not bad at all. He felt relaxed. He felt welcome among his own. The speech would likely be well received. And as for Julian, whom he had seen momentarily with the reception committee, that small, reticent boy seemed utterly miscast for the violent role that Leroy Poole had said he was playing. Yet, reconsidering the last, Dilman retained one misgiving: would Poole have dared hurl such a charge as a lie, knowing how easy it would be for him to check it out?
Suddenly, he heard the words “-give you, ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States!”
He realized that the learned, dusky face of Chancellor McKaye was turned toward him, that there was scattered applause from up front, and that his turn had come at last.
Dilman rose, accepted his degree, accepted the Chancellor’s handshake. Then, putting the beribboned degree aside, he mounted the rostrum, extracting his triple-spaced typed speech from beneath his gown, placed it on the lectern under the curve of microphones, and smiled at the unsmiling black sea stretching before him. “Chancellor McKaye, my fellow citizens-” he began, hearing not his voice but its curious echo in this building-encircled outdoor arena.
The first of the speech went well, he felt. Although Talley, Flannery, Kemmler had all had a hand in the writing of it, had in fact written it, the third sentence had been inserted by himself, after a discussion with Nat Abrahams. This was the sentence about his pride in not being honored as a Negro by a Negro university, but in being honored as a fellow American by a distinguished school of learning that had broadened and risen above racial chauvinism.
Now, a little more uneasily, but keeping his voice deliberate and clear, he entered upon the controversial portion of his address. What he might say had been speculated upon in the press, on the airwaves, the entire week. Today what he said would be official. T. C.’s advisers had agreed that the announcement be made in his speech at Trafford University, because the atmosphere would be one of intellect and reason, and because the audience would be largely Negro, receptive to him, proud of him.
Now, as his eyes skipped to the words ahead, his voice faltered. He was not used to announcing agonized-over decisions in public. But there it was, in unmodified pica lettering on the page beneath the microphones, already released to the press, and he must read what had been written. Controlling his voice, enunciating with care, he plunged ahead.
“You are aware, also, that the Department of Justice and I have been studying evidence of the activities of these super-government, super-American societies and organizations,” he read, “composed of extremists of the right and left, of white and black, responsible for fomenting such dangerous unrest in these critical times when we must preserve unity and peace at home to maintain strength abroad.”
He held his breath, and then, leaving his deliberate manner behind, rushed in where former Presidents had feared to tread.
“Extraordinary challenges to our way of life, we have decided, must be met promptly and firmly by extraordinary countermeasures within the law. Drastic crimes against our government must be met and punished by drastic executive action. Recently, whatever its motivation, a deplorable crime occurred in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. A county judge was kidnaped and taken across two state lines, to be held for human ransom. The leader of the abduction was caught by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and is now standing trial, and his individual case will be decided, without prejudice, on its own merits. The concern of your government, however, has been with the factors behind the crime itself.”
He no longer looked up from the printed words. His gaze was directed to the carefully prepared text. He read from it with measured emphasis.
“Irrefutable evidence, examined by objective minds, has made it clear that the Federal crime was not perpetrated by irresponsible individuals, but was an act of organization policy. The abduction, we now know, was committed by the activist Turnerite Group, which has been financially backed by the Communist Party, as the first act in a premeditated strategy to subvert our laws, our country, and take the administration of justice into its own hands. Such activity cannot be permitted in a democratic government by the people, of the people, for the people. And so, to halt its cancerous spread, and with full knowledge of my accountability to our tradition of civil liberties, I take this occasion to announce to my fellow Americans that I am invoking the Subversive Activities Control Act against the leadership and membership of the Turnerite Group. As of eleven o’clock this morning, the Turnerite Group is outlawed and banned, and any further activity of any nature by its members will be regarded as criminal and dealt with under the statutes that provide-”
There was a thin crackling sound that interrupted Dilman, a sound similar to that of an eggshell breaking, and it distracted Dilman and made him lift his face to the microphones. He saw at once that it had been an egg, a raw egg that had hit the microphones, broken and splattered, now spilling its liquid yolk down upon the page of his manuscript.
Bewildered, he looked out over his audience and saw that a curious thing was happening before his eyes. The black mass, so inert, so silent, had come alive like dark amoebae breaking apart, moving, under a giant microscope lens. The rear two-thirds of the throng was surging forward, pushing and upending the faculty and dignitaries from their folding chairs on the fore part of the campus lawn.
Suddenly there were red, white and blue signs and banners rising above the dark, animated pack of three thousand. Squinting, Dilman could make out the crude, savage lettering on one sign, then another, and another, and still another: GO HOME, UNCLE TOM!… HE’D RATHER BE WHITE THAN BE PRESIDENT!… BLACK JUDAS! GIVE BACK YOUR THIRTY PIECES!… DILMAN, WIPE OFF THE BURNT CORK! SHOW YOUR TRUE FACE!… TWO RAT FINKS-DILMAN AND ZEKE MILLER!!
And, assaulting him like so many angry black fists, from beneath the signs, behind them, around them, he could hear a single choral chant screamed out by the infuriated horde: “Down with traitor Dilman! Down with traitor Dilman! Down with traitor Dilman!”
Petrified, eyes wide, mouth agape, Douglass Dilman saw the air suddenly filled with flying, churning objects. Dozens of eggs exploded on the platform around him, against the front of the rostrum, and then followed the rotten apples, gnawed chicken bones, chunks of red watermelon and green rinds.
The single chant, hoarse and hating, began to fragment into a hundred shouts of individual protest, shrieks dinning against his ears: “Beat it, you bastard!… You’re puttin’ us back in slavery!… Doughface, doughface!… Give Simon Legree the white man’s degree!… Sellout!… Down, down, down, with the Jim Crow President!”
Instinctively he recoiled at the fury of protest, lifting his arm to shield his face. He could hear police whistles, see the swaying comber of officers in blue, clubs out, bowling over the photographers, as they formed a chained line to protect him from his people. The wood platform on which he wavered now rocked with footsteps, the Chancellor, regents, deans, and Secret Service agents crowding about him to save him.
Someone was tugging at his shoulder, wrenching at it, and he gave way a little to stop the hurt, twisting his head, and he saw it was the Secret Service agent Otto Beggs. As he tried to speak, he was struck sharply on the jaw. His free hand went to his jaw and came away with a handful of gooey, dripping white and yellow egg and pieces of shell. There had been no physical pain in being struck, only psychic pain, followed by shock and fear.
“Come on, come on, outa here, Mr. President, outa here. Got to get you to where it’s safe!” Beggs was shouting.
They had surrounded him entirely now, his white Praetorians, almost lifting him from his feet as they hustled him across the platform, down the rear steps, and through the heavy lines of gathering police officers and faculty members, into the Main Administration Building behind.
Once, breathless, before being shoved inside, he had turned, wanting to call out something to the misled multitude, to explain why he had announced what he had announced, to explain that it would save them in the end. But it was no use. While the raised platform hid the eye center of the vortex, he could make out the rest of the wild mob on either side, the black students swinging their homemade signs and banners and yelling their foul epithets, and the police, reinforced by state troopers, retaliating with their clubs and curses and whistles.
Presently-he would never know how he had arrived there-he found himself on the tan leather couch in Chancellor McKaye’s high-ceilinged, oak-paneled office. The swift transition from the animal bedlam of the disorder outside to the hushed quiet of the soundproofed office left him limp and dizzy. Familiar persons came and went: Beggs wiping the egg from Dilman’s chin, Chancellor McKaye with his endless apologies, and Admiral Oates with his stethoscope and tranquilizers. After the dour White House physician had barred all visitors but those who were absolutely necessary and then himself had left, Dilman had received Tim Flannery.
“I’m sorry, I’m damn sorry, Mr. President,” the press secretary said, scratching his head through his rumpled red hair. “That was unexpected. Even the reporters were thrown.”
“What are they saying?” Dilman wanted to know.
“Most of them think it was planned by the Turnerites themselves,” said Flannery.
Dilman thought about this. “No, I don’t think so,” he said at last. “I don’t think one organization would be big enough. I think-I believe all of us misjudged Negro sentiment here and around the country. I can see it now, after the fact. Because the Crispus Society, the NAACP, the Urban League were still for going slowly, for the minorities bill, outspoken against the activist outfits like the Turnerites, we thought that was the heavy majority of Negro opinion. We’re wrong, Tim. I think those young Negro boys have had it. They may not be Turnerites, but they’re sympathetic, they want action. Gradualism is out. They’re rebelling against their fathers, who accommodated themselves to the segregation system. The young are disenchanted by the recent past. Their fathers failed. Hurley and his leaders represented a new look in paternal authority. And now, without thinking it out, they expected the first Negro in the Presidency to see things their way. And I refused. I went along with their fathers and the white men who fenced them in. I used a legal instrument to cut off their momentum and make their goal harder to reach. They weren’t positive I’d do it, but they suspected I would, and they came here prepared for it, with their signs and slogans, waiting. That’s the sum of it, I’d guess, the gospel truth.”
“Do you want to say anything like that to the press?” Flannery asked. “They’re clamoring for a statement.”
“Now? Lord, no. Now’s no time for reason and psychological explanations. Let this break up, and die down. Maybe we can issue something later.”
“Well, I’ll keep the correspondents away from you,” Flannery said. “I’ll tell them you’re safe and sound, and will have some statement to make tomorrow or the day after. They’ll be busy enough trying to interview some of the student demonstrators, find out what drove them to this.”
“Good luck to Reb Blaser,” Dilman said with a grimace.
Flannery stood up. “Mr. President, I’m still not so sure that demonstration was representative of all Negro feeling. I think you’ll see most of them are behind you when the minorities bill becomes operative.”
“I think you’ll find you’re wrong,” said Dilman. “They’ll look on the minorities bill as a white man’s bill. They’ll look on that as a forgiveness bribe, after today’s announcement, curtailing their right to direct action.”
“Maybe,” said Flannery.
“I hope maybe, Tim,” said Dilman. “When are we supposed to leave here?”
“After the Chancellor’s luncheon and-”
“Cancel it,” said Dilman. “McKaye’ll understand.”
“Done,” said Flannery. “Then you wanted a brief meeting with your son.”
“Yes. Is he safe? Will you find out about him? Give me a little while alone here to get my bearings, and then send him along.”
“Okay.”
“Tim, I could stand a drink, nothing too potent. Maybe a small brandy or some wine-”
Dilman had been alone ten minutes when Beggs opened the door to admit his press secretary once more. Flannery came in with a well-filled crystal decanter and a wine glass. He set both on the coffee table.
“The Dean of the Law School provided this,” he said. “Sherry. Will that do?”
“It’ll do fine.”
“The mob is gradually dispersing,” Flannery said.
“Any serious injuries?”
“A few bloody noses, one fractured wrist, that’s all. By the way, someone located Julian. He’s in his dorm room with his friends. He’s shaken up a bit, naturally, but he’s okay.”
“I’ll be ready for him in-in fifteen minutes.”
Alone once more, Dilman unwrapped a cigar, readied it, but was too distracted to light it. He put it down in the tray, reached for the decanter with his trembling hand, then realized that Flannery had already poured his drink. He took up the sherry in his right hand, steadying it with his left, and sipped it.
He reconsidered what he had done today. He had urged his people, already so grievously hurt, to uphold white men’s laws. He had alienated his Negro support. But conversely, had he gained white support, restored the majority of the people’s confidence in him? He was doubtful of this. The white electorate probably felt that he was carrying out, with reluctance, what T. C.’s advisers insisted he carry out. He had lost much, won little.
Yet these mathematics were not what concerned and bothered him. If he had felt positively in the right, nothing on earth would have disturbed him. What bothered him, as it had from the beginning, was that the Turnerites had qualified for condemnation only if they were Communist-financed. Yet he was still uncertain of the truth of this accusation. He had bought Attorney General Kemmler’s flimsy case after that bad telephone exchange with that damn Leroy Poole, after learning from Poole that the Mississippi abduction had been inspired by Turnerite policy, which frightened him, and after hearing the lie that his own son was a part of this terror, which had emphasized for him how far the members of that gang would go in maligning the innocent to gain their ends. But the reasonable part of his brain doubted that the Turnerites were literally subversive, dedicated to overthrowing the government. His black skin knew what all of Kemmler’s Justice Department attorneys would never understand, and what that rioting throng that had stopped his speech did understand, that the Turnerites were out to overthrow inequality, not government but inequality. Now it was too late for these second thoughts. If injustice this was, he must find other means to correct it.
He had finished his sherry, and then realized with a start that not fifteen minutes but twice that time had gone by. He jumped up, went to the door, and opened it. Beggs, who was planted outside, quickly turned.
“Has my son-?” Then he saw Julian, miserably huddled in a chair of the reception room. “Oh, hello, Julian. Come on in.” As Julian brushed past him with only a muttered greeting, Dilman asked Beggs, “How is it going?”
“We got it under control. Only a few handfuls of them hanging around.”
“Good. Tell Tim Flannery to have the car here in fifteen minutes. He can notify the helicopter crew.”
He closed the door carefully, to make certain it was fastened securely, and then he turned to his son. Julian was standing beside the coffee table, patting his checkered sport coat against his dark-gray slacks. His short hair was plastered down and glossy as ever, and his thyroid eyes were fixed on the sherry decanter.
Dilman indicated the decanter. “Want some?”
“No.”
“All right, sit down. We don’t have much time. Let’s talk.”
Defiantly, Julian remained on his feet, but once Dilman had settled on the couch, the boy yanked a chair nearer the coffee table and lowered himself into it.
“I don’t know what we’re supposed to talk about,” Julian said sullenly.
“We’ll see… Were you out there in that mob?”
“For a while. When the guys with the signs started infiltrating in, I decided to get out. I went with two of my friends back to my room.”
“Did you know this was going to happen?”
“If you did what they hoped you wouldn’t, yes, I knew it would happen. Everyone’s been steamed up since Hurley was arrested.”
“Have the other students been giving you a rough time?”
Julian examined his polished nails. “Not especially. I told them I didn’t know what you’d do. I told them if you did the banning, I was against it, and on their side.”
“I see.”
“I don’t have to listen to white men,” Julian said angrily. “I make my own decisions.”
Dilman picked up his unsmoked cigar. “Maybe I’m not listening to white men or colored men either. Maybe, in my position, I have a higher responsibility. Maybe I’m listening to the Constitution.”
“Oh, sure.”
Dilman knew that he could not continue to be high-minded and pretentious. He was dealing with his son, who was once more disillusioned with him and, in effect, disowning their relationship. “You know my feelings about the law, Julian. Possibly it would help if you’d transmit them to your friends.”
“Help who?” said Julian. “I’ll be lucky if I can find anybody to speak to me.”
Dilman’s heart ached. He put the cigar down again. “Do you want to transfer out of here, Julian?”
“A month ago, yes. Now, no. Not now. I’ll show them I belong to me.”
Dilman sighed audibly. The time had come. It was the wrong time, but then, perhaps, there would never be a right time to speak what was foremost in his mind. “Are you sure you belong only to yourself, Julian? Are you sure of that?”
Julian’s bulging eyes left the examination of his fingernails. He glanced suspiciously at his father. “What does that mean?”
“Do you have any allegiance elsewhere? I know you’re an officer in the student end of the Crispus Society-”
“That crud. Are you serious? I joined them before I grew up.”
“And after you grew up, Julian, what else did you join?”
Julian’s brow wrinkled, once more wary, and his pointed English shoe dug at the carpet. “What else did I join? I don’t get you, Dad.”
Dilman edged forward toward his son, until his knee hit the coffee table. “All right, cards on the table, Julian. I forget how many days ago-the night after the FBI caught Hurley-I received a call from the young man you so much admire-from Leroy Poole-pleading Jefferson Hurley’s case for self-defense and begging me not to ban the Turnerites. I said I’d have to ban them. Do you know what he said?” He watched his suspicious son carefully now. “He said to me, ‘You indict the Turnerites for criminal subversion, and you indict your own son.’ He said ‘Julian is one of us, stealing information from the Crispus people, getting statistics about persecutions in places like Hattiesburg.’ To that effect. That’s what he said.”
Julian’s face was filled with wrath. “Leroy Poole? He said that to you?”
“That and more. Yes, Julian. And I told him he was a rotten liar. He said, ‘Okay, ask Julian.’ ” He paused. “I’m here, Julian. I am asking you.”
“Asking me what? You mean you even listened one minute to that sonofabitchin’ smelly satchel-mouth? Him? He said all that?”
Dilman had never heard his son use such language before. Yet he was relieved by the boy’s indignation. “I’m quoting him almost exactly. I told you I did not believe him. I came here to make sure.”
Julian was on his feet, agitatedly wringing his hands. “That bastard, that dirty troublemaker.”
“Julian, I wouldn’t press this further, but obviously there’s a lot at stake for both of us. Were you ever, even for a day, for a minute, a secret member of that Turnerite Group? Just give me a simple yes or no, and that’s it.”
“No, I never was. I swear to it. Now are you happy?”
Dilman stood up. “I’m not happy. But I feel better. I’m glad you had the good sense for which I always gave you credit.”
“I never belonged,” said Julian shrilly, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t think they’re righter than you are.”
“I’m not interested, Julian. Thanks. Be well. I’ll see you soon in Washington.”
He tried to go to the door, but Julian blocked his way. “Dad, you can be President or whatever, but there’s a lot who put more faith in Jeff Hurley’s ideas than yours.”
“I told you I’m not interested.” He went around his son to the door.
“You’d better be, you’d just better be!” his son shouted.
He refused to be baited or engaged further. He had come here to ask his son for a plain answer. He had heard his son’s answer and it was satisfactory. That shone bright as a jewel on a dismal day. He would not allow this tiny gem of happiness to be tarnished so soon.
FOR RELEASE AT 8:00 P.M. EDT
Office of the White House Press Secretary
THE WHITE HOUSE
PRESIDENT DILMAN RETURNED FROM NEW YORK CITY AT 6:30 P.M. HE SPENT A HALF HOUR CONFERRING IN HIS OFFICE WITH ATTORNEY GENERAL KEMMLER AND SECRETARY OF HEALTH, EDUCATION AND WELFARE MRS. CUMMINS.
AT 7:15 P.M. THE PRESIDENT MET WITH THE REVEREND PAUL SPINGER AND DIRECTORS OF THE CRISPUS SOCIETY. FOLLOWING THE MEETING, THE PRESIDENT MADE AN IMPROMPTU STATEMENT TO THE PRESS.
PRESIDENT DILMAN: The unfortunate incident that took place on the campus of Trafford University this morning, after my announcement of the banning of the Turnerite Group, underlines the necessity…
“ ‘-for every American citizen to be alerted to the subversive dangers of extremism, from wherever it originates,’ President Dilman told the White House press corps gathered about him in the West Wing lobby earlier this evening. Showing no ill effects from the egg-throwing episode at Trafford, which is creating controversial headlines abroad, the President went on calmly to tell his listeners that he was taking further steps to align Negro moderates alongside-”
A voice from the far corner of Leroy Poole’s motel room bellowed, “Shut that goddam fink announcer off!”
Immediately Poole got out of his chair and hopped to the transistor radio propped against the bag of fruit, and with a roll of his thumb muted the news report.
Pocketing the tiny radio, Poole wheeled to face the others, who were sitting or lolling about the large motel room he had rented the morning after the night he had put the zinging old filial arrow into that bastard Dilman. Once having revealed to Dilman that the kidnaping had been an official Turnerite action, and having zinged him with the news of Julian’s secret membership, he had begun worrying that Dilman might sic the FBI bloodhounds after him for more information. Losing no time, Poole had borrowed a car and removed himself and his effects from his hotel in the center of Washington to this obscure second-class motel on Canal Road, near Fletcher’s Boat House, three miles from Georgetown.
Since then, Poole had decided that he probably was not being sought for more information after all. Most likely, for fear of compromising his kid Julian, the President had told no one of the call from his biographer. Finally Poole had felt safe enough to let the word of his whereabouts be known to those who mattered. One by one they had converged outside Washington, the last of the Turnerite leaders, to determine what could be done for Hurley and for the survival of their organization.
There were seven of them here-Poole excluded himself-and they had been gathered for at least four hours, drinking beer and eating cheese and ham sandwiches. They had reported, they had debated, they had speculated, taking breaks to listen to the news broadcasts, and the time had come for a settlement.
Frank Valetti, Hurley’s second-in-command, product of a Negro-Italian interracial marriage, who resembled a bronzed Indian brave (and was the most persuasive and sophisticated among them, excepting Leroy Poole himself), had informally presided. He had already burned the membership records and minutes of meetings. He had accounted for the cash on hand and suggested how it be spent. The vote had been seven to one in favor of Valetti’s proposal that the funds be turned over to a white leftist lawyer, a good headline maker in Manhattan, to be used to reinforce Jeff Hurley’s defense. The lone dissenter had been Burleigh Thomas, one of the two men who had assisted Hurley in the kidnaping of Gage, and who had gotten away unrecognized, to be the last arrival at the motel. Burleigh Thomas, a constantly fuming, short-tempered, squat and muscular truck driver with matted hair, a low broad-bridged nose, a cleft chin and an abrasive voice, had wanted most of the remaining Turnerite funds held out to support further underground violence.
“Jeff Hurley’s a stuck pig, scalded, skinned, and ready to be cooked,” Burleigh Thomas had said. “Why throw the dough down the drain? Let those of us who wants to, go on and use it for getting in a few more licks against the whiteboys.”
Valetti had replied reasonably that Dilman’s banning had left them disorganized, in danger, and further activist resistance was pointless at this time. Later, perhaps, but not now. Leroy Poole had added that Jeff Hurley was not dead yet, that there were means to save him, that it was their duty to try, and to make a good propaganda campaign for their ideals along the way. This would take what was left of the money. And so the vote had gone seven to one.
Settlement time had arrived. Disposition of the corpus sine pectore.
“Well, gang,” said Valetti, uncrossing his legs and bringing his hands together, “I guess that does it. I think we’re all of a mind to disband. Our head man is gone. Our records are gone. Our funds are disposed of. We’re through-at least for now.”
“What are you going to do, Frank?” Poole asked.
“I’m going abroad for a while.”
“Abroad, listen to him,” Burleigh Thomas mocked. “Abroad, eh? Chickening out, you mean.”
Valetti shook his head gently. “Don’t try to bug me, Burleigh, we’re on the same side. Yup, I’m going abroad, because I don’t want the Federals badgering me or using me against Jeff Hurley. Besides I want to raise some dough for our cause, lots of it, and then come back and reorganize something new.”
“Who’s giving you dough abroad?” Burleigh Thomas snorted. “Who gives a damn about us anywheres else? Them that does, they ain’t got the green stuff, and them that has, they don’t give a damn.”
“Settle down, Burleigh.” Valetti’s lips curled in a knowing smile. “I’ve got my means. I suggest you join up with our old friends in the more respectable societies, and do what you can to rouse them up a bit. Just do your best, and when the climate here is ripe, and I have a nest egg for us, I’ll be back and calling on you, all of you. As for Jeff, I guess we can trust the lawyers to do what can be done, and if they get nowhere, we can depend on Leroy here to try to intervene with the President for clemency.”
“I don’t know if Dilman’ll even see me again,” said Poole.
“You’ve got enough to make him see you again.” Valetti winked. “Maybe one or two of our records weren’t burned.”
Burleigh Thomas was on his feet, hiking up his overalls. “I wouldn’t spit on that goddam yellowbelly Dilman, let alone go asking him any favors. I’d see him for only one thing, to bust his goddam face wide open. He’s the cause of all our trouble, I tell you. I could see it from the day he came in that job, told Jeff Hurley as much from the start, that Dilman would be our worst enemy, bad or worse than some goddam whiteshirt Kleagle. Like I said to Jeff from the beginning, we better be prepared to fight that there white nigger of ours hard as we fight the whiteboy skunks. Well, you guys can see I was right, wasn’t I? Lookit him, lookit Dilman. When you got a Rastus nigger up there, you got someone doing the backward bends, so’s he not even treating us like some stumblebum white politician would, let alone like a nigger should. I tell you, I’d sure enough give my left gut to see T. C. still President, or even that Yankee man, Eaton, because they’d at least remember our voting power, and they wouldn’t be hacking us down with that subversive controls business. But Dilman-” Thomas glared at Poole. “I’d rather let my pal Jeff Hurley die in the chair than ask that yellowbelly nigger Dilman one favor.”
“I don’t have to ask Dilman any favors,” piped up Leroy Poole. “Like Frank says, we’ve got other means to deal with turncoats.”
“You bet we have, but not by asking favors,” Thomas growled. He stared at the others. “Okay, you fraidcat punks, do whatever you want to do. Some of us ain’t giving up so easy, no sir. We’re not letting any crappy control laws put in by that possum slummock make us run for cover.”
“You haven’t got a chance on your own,” said Frank Valetti. He threw his raincoat over his arm and went to the motel door,. “I’m hitting the road. Good luck to each of you. We’ll win what Jeff and all of us are after-one day, someday soon. Good night.”
After Valetti had gone, the others shook hands with Poole and one another and departed, singly and in pairs. Presently the room was empty of all but Burleigh Thomas and Leroy Poole.
Thomas pulled on his heavy sweater as Poole waited. Poole could see that Thomas was deliberately fussing too much with his garment, as if he wanted to speak about something on his mind.
Poole felt uncomfortable. It often amazed him that one organization, with one purpose and goal, could have room for men so dissimilar as Thomas and himself. For Poole, the ones like Thomas were aboriginals, too brutish and demoniac to appreciate the refinements of rebellion and freedom, as did ones like himself. The Thomases were the easiest targets for whites like Zeke Miller and Bruce Hankins and Everett Gage, the late Everett Gage, who did not believe such beings were prepared for civilized equality. When you agreed to set them free, you opened the cage. But what then? Could untrained, barbarous, vindictive primates be let loose to live with skilled, educated, law-abiding higher creatures?
Instantly Poole hated himself for entertaining red-neck thoughts. His mind went to his morning mental exercises, and he knew that Burleigh Thomas was as deserving of freedom, no matter how ill-prepared he was for it, as he himself, and he felt kindlier toward the truck driver.
He found Burleigh Thomas scrutinizing him. Poole suffered a lump of guilt inside. “Well, Burleigh, I wish you-”
“Leroy, what you going to do next?”
Poole was surprised that his primitive companion could have such concerns. “Do next? Why, first off, I’m kind of low on eating money. I guess I’ll knock off my book, the one I’m writing on Dilman, and get what is owed to me. And then I’ll start pounding my typewriter pulpit for real, trying to heat our people up some more. Guess I’m still a poor preacher boy at heart.”
“Naw, I mean about our movement.”
“What’s there to do? I’m keeping an eye on Jeff Hurley’s trial. I already heard from his old lady, Gladys, in Louisville, and his other relatives. They’re depending on me. I don’t think the Feds will give Jeff more than a stiff sentence, manslaughter or some such. They don’t want more trouble. If it goes past that, well, I guess I’ll have to go to Dilman. I can make him see me. And from what I’ve read, he’s got it in his power to save Jeff.” He could see that Thomas was not satisfied, and then he remembered. “Our movement, you asked? Like Frank Valetti said, the Attorney General and Dilman shot us down. I guess I’ll play dead until the shooting stops.”
Burleigh Thomas covered his matted hair with a wool cap. “Not me,” he said. “There are maybe a half dozen of us who ain’t letting those big shots think they won the crap game because they got the loaded bones. Nope. We’re going to keep moving in on them holy Joes, the way Jeff would want.”
“I wish you luck, Burleigh, but the dice are still loaded. Valetti’s a pretty smart guy. Why don’t you do what he suggests-take it easy until-”
“To hell with Valetti. He’s got his Commie friends to go back to. That ain’t got a friggin’ thing to do with us. We got no nothing waiting for us but to keep fighting.” He paused, and considered Poole through slit eyes. “You’re a mighty smart kid, Leroy. I been listening to you. They ain’t housebroke you yet, for sure.”
“Nobody has, and nobody ever will.”
“I don’t think we’re so far apart, except like in education. Knowing Dilman the way you do, I sorta have a hunch you agree with me he’s the worst yellowbelly sonofabitch ever got born black.”
“Basically, I can’t disagree with you,” Poole conceded. “However, his fault isn’t that he’s mean, but that he’s scared-”
“Shivering scared, yup. Old cullud-boy-in-the-cemetery-scared, yup. But to me there’s nothing badder, because that makes him suck around those whiteboys, barking and standing on his hind legs when they give him their finger-snapping. It’s like he’s afraid to recognize us, to prove he don’t know us, so he’s twice as tough against us. I think even that scrotum-face, rumdum Zeke Miller would be better-”
“We-ll, I wouldn’t go that far, Burleigh.”
“You’re going to see I’m right,” insisted Thomas. “Before Dilman’s finished in office, we’ll all be back on the plantations picking cotton. I’m just saying to you, do what you want, but there are some of us not letting him get away with it. What Jeff started, we’re finishing. We’re going to bug that Dilman until he’s gotta tell difference between black from white.” Thomas hesitated. “You sure you don’t want to stay with us?”
Leroy Poole patted his belly. “I’m not built for the muscle part of it, Burleigh. I’m strictly a word man. Words can be fists, too.”
Thomas made two hamlike fists. “Not like these, no words like these. Okay, Leroy, you do your doings your way, I do them mine.” He went to the door, wrenched the knob, but turned back before opening it. “Maybe you’ll have a change of heart. If you do, I’ll be here a few days. If you want to talk, you can always get hold of me through my kid sister. She’s a good kid. Leave a note for her at the Walk Inn-that’s a booze joint on Seventeenth-and say you want me to call. Just leave a note for my sis.”
As he opened the door, Poole called out, “What’s her name, Burleigh?”
“Ruby-same last name like mine-Ruby Thomas. She knows where I am every minute.”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Office of the White House Press Secretary
THE WHITE HOUSE
FOLLOWING THE ORDERS OF THE WHITE HOUSE PHYSICIAN, ADMIRAL OATES, THE PRESIDENT IS SPENDING THE DAY ABOARD THE PRESIDENTIAL YACHT “FREDDIE BOY.” THE YACHT DEPARTED FROM THE WASHINGTON NAVY YARD DOCK AT 9 A.M., EDT. EXCEPT FOR CONFERRING WITH SECRETARY OF STATE EATON ON THE FORTHCOMING CONFERENCE WITH PREMIER KASATKIN, AND REVIEWING THE FINAL MINORITIES REHABILITATION PROGRAM BILL DELIVERED TO HIM BY CONGRESS, THE PRESIDENT WILL DEVOTE HIS TIME TO DEEP-SEA FISHING AND RESTING.
BY ONE o’clock in the afternoon, Douglass Dilman knew that the cruise was a mistake, and that he was in for another fiasco.
When Admiral Oates had suggested the brief nautical outing, his need for a relaxed day away from his office, especially because of the agitation induced by the Trafford University incident and the slight flare-up of his blood pressure, Dilman had not been able to reject the idea. Somehow, he had felt, it would make him lose face in front of Governor Talley, Secretary Eaton, and several other advisers in his office at the time. With feigned enthusiasm, he had agreed to the cruise. He had not told any one of them that except for one trip on a Great Lakes steamer and several ferryboat crossings to Staten Island, he had never been on a boat, and he had never in his life been on one that went out to sea.
His apprehension had been somewhat alleviated in the early morning, after he had been piped aboard and been made welcome by Commander Chappell, and been saluted by the six enlisted men on deck. As the ninety-two-foot yacht-once christened Eisenhower’s Barbara Ann and Kennedy’s Honey Fitz, and last and still T. C.’s Freddie Boy (so lettered in bright gold on the stern)-proceeded down the Anacostia River, and into Chesapeake Bay, Dilman had been taken on a tour of the vessel by Admiral Rivard, the veteran Navy Chief of Staff.
Hardly conscious of the rocking of the yacht, the steady creaking of the timbers, Dilman had admired the white, mahogany-trimmed ship from stem to stern, from port to starboard-or was it starboard? Wasn’t it aft? Or fore? Or bow? He had been as baffled by the Admiral’s language as he would have been by Latin or Hebrew, in fact, more so. Nodding constantly, to display his pleasure and comprehension, Dilman had covered not only every inch of the deck, but the Commander’s cabin where the helm could be seen, and then he had gone down the companionway-or was it hatch?-no, companionway, absolutely-between the nauseating, freshly painted walls to the cabins below. He had visited the dining room, which seated forty, and the large Presidential stateroom or bedroom with its two bunks, and the attractive lounge with its green carpet, chairs, television set, radiotelephone, and Currier and Ives nautical prints.
On the afterdeck-he was sure Admiral Rivard had called it the afterdeck-Dilman had gratefully settled into a bamboo chair on the hemp rug. He had tried to be attentive to Secretary Eaton, as the Secretary reported on his recent conversation with Soviet Ambassador Rudenko. Dilman had assimilated the gist of it-three-day summit conference to be held at the château in Chantilly, twenty-six miles north of Paris, with the final meeting capped by the French President’s farewell banquet, to be held in Versailles Palace-and all the while he had been hypnotized by the yacht’s rising and falling rail over Eaton’s shoulder. Dilman had measured, secretly, the distance the rail heaved above the horizon line and dipped beneath it. The upward motion had taken in two inches of perfectly blue and cloudless sky. The downward motion had taken in three inches of pea-green, sea-green water. The more his stomach gurgled, the more his gorge heaved toward his throat, the more attentive he had tried to be to Eaton’s voice.
He had not known how long his Secretary of State intended to go on, but he had been thankful when Edna Foster interrupted him with a shore-to-ship message. After that, Commander Chappell announced cheerfully that they were in the Atlantic, in the open sea, and the fishing tackle was ready for him on the port side. To Dilman, the obstacle of locating the port side (without daring to ask) through this floating maze, and the sickening knowledge that they were bouncing about in the middle of the ocean had given him the courage to state that he was not prepared to fish yet.
“I’ve got too much work,” he had said.
The Commander had persisted. “Mr. President, you ought to take advantage of a warm windless day like this. Not many this time of the year, I’ll tell you. But look there, the sun, not a breeze, sea smooth as glass, and some channel bass and marlin waiting to be caught.”
“Thank you, Commander, soon as I can.”
He slunk off, making a pretense of finding Miss Foster, but when he reached the companionway, Sally Watson had intercepted him. The sea change had made her more exuberant and prettier than ever. Her blond hair, swept back, was partially covered by the hood of her brightly striped Italian sweater. Her slim hips, as she walked, moved provocatively under her snug white raw-silk slacks.
“Magnificent, isn’t it?” she had asked joyously, lifting her sunglasses.
“Fine, fine,” he had said.
“I’m utterly famished. The salt air really gives one an appetite. But we’re not allowed to eat lunch, Mr. President, until you lead the way. The steward is all set.”
“Lunch already?” he had said, and inside, his stomach again climbed toward his gullet. “Too early for me. You tell the steward I’ll eat later. Go right ahead, and let everyone know they can get started.”
While the others went below to be served by the white-jacketed messboys, Dilman had remained on the deck alone. For a while he had sat in a deck chair, warm in his gray wool suit coat and constricting starched collar, shutting his eyes to the slight roll of the yacht, trying not to think of the work that awaited him in the lounge, wondering if Nat Abrahams had received his message last night and would be able to come out and visit him.
Too quickly an hour had passed, for he could hear the chatter of the diners as they came out on the deck, and he had pushed himself to his feet. He had not wanted to be found slumped in a deck chair, wilted and ailing. It would have been embarrassing and un-Presidential. The least that he could do, he had decided, was to assume some casual, more presentable pose. He had walked unsteadily to the bow section of the ship, and propped himself with elbows upon the rail, striking an attitude of deep meditation.
And he was at one o’clock, suffocated with nausea, increasingly dizzy and bleary, and sorry for himself.
From the corner of his eye he could see Arthur Eaton, so natty in his white yachting cap, foulard, brass-buttoned Navy coat and immaculate white trousers, joining Sally Watson at the prow, joking, laughing, enjoying this perfect day on the water. For the first time, the very first time, Dilman envied Arthur Eaton, not because Eaton was white and he was black, but because Eaton had had the advantage of being raised to this kind of life, being a natural part of it, belonging to it. Eaton was to the Presidential yacht born. Himself, he was strictly a ferry commuter, a Chicago elevated or New York subway type.
Bitterly he turned away from that pair and looked out to the hostile sea again. How he envied his predecessors, those natural outdoor maritime Presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy and T. C., gifted with sea legs, their class and breeding inborn-but all born, all with the advantages from their day one. Weakly, elbows stiffening on the rising and falling rail, he indulged his self-pity. This goddam yacht was only a symbol of the whole impossible thing. It was rotten to grow up and live one’s entire life as an outcast, a fringe man, and that went not only for Negroes but for many whites, too, whites without background and money and training. It was rotten to live and die dampened by inferiority and awkwardness, never really knowing which fork, which spoon, never knowing etiquette, or the games of leisure, surfing and polo, and that latest South American dance, never knowing sumptuous family gatherings at Thanksgiving or Christmas (with Mother, the matriarch, not Ma, with knobby washboard hands), never knowing foundations and charities and old school ties and stock portfolios and-and assurance, confidence, acceptance-never knowing yachts.
This was not just himself, a usurper here, a crasher, a servant made up like his master; this was most people everywhere, crippled for leisure by the exhausting striving to make good, make ends meet, make it until coronary time. That was Nat, too, in a way; Nat, like himself, knowing there was better while you pressed your nose to the pane, and knowing you had not the price of admission. There were greater inequities in life than this, but this was one that stayed with you forever. Like your skin, if it was black. His throat was filled with his gut, and he wanted to vomit it all overboard, but he fought it down, clenched his teeth and fought it, so as not to be what he was in front of Eaton and the Admiral and the women, and the Zeke Millers of the earth.
“Mr. President-”
He turned from the rail to find his physician, Admiral Oates, contemplating him.
“Are you all right?” the physician inquired.
“Why, yes, of course.” His Adam’s apple hardly had room to deny it.
“I’ve had an eye on you. Mmm. You seem a trifle distressed.”
“I’m tired. It’s hard to get off the treadmill. I’m tired.”
“Why don’t you go down into the bedroom and grab forty winks? Let me catch some fish for you.”
He wanted to buss the doctor for the face-saving order. “That’s a good idea. Maybe I will try to nap.”
He had started for the companionway when Oates caught his hand. He felt the physician press something hard and square into his palm. He looked at Oates questioningly.
“You wear this with your lifebelt,” said Admiral Oates, and he left.
Not until Dilman had reached the bottom of the stairs did he open his palm to see what Oates had given him. It was a tiny pillbox. He turned it over. On the label was printed “For motion sickness, 1 every 4 hours.” Ill as he was, he felt comforted, not only for the physician’s understanding but for his discretion.
Entering the bedroom cabin, Dilman yanked a silver pitcher out of its holder beside the lower bunk, filled a thick-rimmed glass with water, then swallowed a Dramamine pill and water. Squeamishly, he held on to the upper bunk and waited for the result of the silent civil war inside his throat. Either the pill would make it through the enemy line and save him, or the enemy would throw up the pill and overwhelm him. It took twenty minutes to a half hour for a pill to dissolve and work, he had read in some digest magazine, and he waited, hot with anguish, moist with perspiration. He wanted to lie down on the bunk and die. The defeat would be too enormous, and he resisted bowing to it.
After fifteen minutes, hearing a roar outside, he staggered to the porthole to see what was happening. What he saw was the PT boat Guardian, filled with Beggs and several other armed Secret Service men, slicing through the water thirty yards away. Far off there was the speck of what appeared to be a cabin cruiser, growing gradually larger. He left the porthole, once more tempted by the bunk, and then, blindly determined to survive, he walked out of the bedroom.
Within a minute, he was inside the yacht’s Presidential lounge, where the pitch and roll of the vessel were less apparent. He surveyed the off-white walls of the lounge, the green-and-white curtains with their nautical pattern, the soft aquamarine-colored chairs, the painting of the Independence hung over the television set. The lounge was as gracious as any room in the White House, and he knew that he was best off here, because he would not dare to be ill in a room like this.
Observing his locked briefcase propped against a deep chair, he made his way to it, sat down heavily, and devoted himself to the combination that sprung open his lock. There was only one thick sheaf of printed sheets, fastened into a manila binder, inside the briefcase. This was the Minorities Rehabilitation Bill that the Senate and House had passed, and that was now in his hands awaiting his signature. He had read it thoroughly last night, made some notes and put question marks in the margins about certain provisions, and now he must reread the seven-billion-dollar bill once more and do what needed to be done, what the majority of his staff, of Congress, of white America and black America were apparently waiting for him to do.
He opened the manila binder to examine the bill a final time, but his vision was double, and his stomach heaved higher and higher toward his throat. He dropped the folder on the end table and gagged, clutching the arms of his chair, willing for himself the sea legs and stomach and mind and inner ears of F. D. R. or Kennedy or T. C. And then his convulsions stopped, and he lay back limp, arms flopped on his thighs, legs outstretched, a minor skirmish won, praying for the Dramamine to put down the enemy and save the beleaguered battlements of well-being and dignity.
Half reclining in this state of stupor, Dilman tried to remove his mind from water to land. His memory sought out Wanda, Julian, Mindy, Aldora… piteous Aldora of their long ago… it had gone wrong the second-to-last day of the last week of their honeymoon, driving home through Joplin, Missouri… going into that nice-looking bar for a late afternoon drink, because Aldora from the start had always liked a late afternoon drink, and when inside having their cocktail, those two drunken young business fellows had come up, hey-buddying him, hey-buddy-what-you-doin-with-one-of-our-white-girls, hey-buddy?… and knowing they were loaded to the gills, trying to explain, not fight, explain that Aldora was colored like himself and his bride… and trying to leave until they grabbed him and held him, saying hey-buddy, you-not-leavin, no, not leavin with any white girl… and him trying to pull free, until they wrestled him down and pummeled him bloody and Aldora began screaming… and the men going at last, hooting and whooping… and he and Aldora… the real beginning of the trouble had been then, but not the real beginning, for it had begun when she was born more white than black, fair skin, unfair heart… displacing her bitterness at fate, life, for making her almost white but not enough, displacing it by resenting her lot with him, his dark skin… and his striving to show her he was no poor black trash, but more a man, worthy of her, big lawyer, big politician… but no good, because there was Mindy, almost white like herself, so white she also had the prospects Aldora had abandoned too early, and Aldora’s growing contempt for him and her hoarding and segregating of Mindy, as if he would contaminate his daughter… and then Aldora wanting another Mindy, to prove something, maybe flee from him, but again no good… worse… getting Julian, black as coal, reminder that her husband was black and she was black and Mindy was black too… and his own trying to lift them up in politics, lift them high as white men, to make up for being Aldora’s black albatross, and Mindy’s, too… but too late to lift them up with him, because they had escaped, both escaped… Mindy, with Aldora’s conspiratorial help, into a white private school in Colorado, the name of which he’d never known, and then into the East, the white white East… and Aldora escaping too, into a bottle, a bottle a day, as insulated by glass as a model ship in a great big bottle… and his trying everything to reach her and help her escape, even trying to crawl into the bottle with her, no good… even taking a room in the sanitarium with her, no good… until she’d escaped at last, in a coffin, in the ground, where no one is almost white, where all are equal, still and equal, possessed of one mind, dead, one flesh, dead, one face, dead, white-wanting, free-wanting Aldora, in the subterranean planet of nothingness where there were no demons of almost.
He envied her, too, and wanted to escape the drowsy too-oft-relived nightmare, and now he had the Dramamine, and he escaped.
He dozed.
An eternity? An hour? How long had it been? He did not know, after the rattle of the door and then the persistent knocking upon it and then the calling out of his name had aroused him.
Blinking, he sat up, rubbing his eyes. He swallowed. The Adam’s apple had running room. There was still a clogging thickness in his throat, but the nausea and dizziness were gone, and so were Aldora and those dreadful years.
“Who is it?” he called out. He shook himself fully awake. “Who’s there?”
“Mr. President-”
He recognized Miss Foster’s muffled voice, and he said, “Come in, come in.”
She poked her head into the lounge. “Mr. President, Mr. Abrahams is aboard. Would you-?”
“Of course, send him in. I’ve been waiting for him.”
She left the door open, and the squishing of her sensible rubber soled shoes receded up the corridor, to be replaced in seconds by the solid smack of Abrahams’ leather heels.
Like himself, Dilman was pleased to be reminded, Nat Abrahams was not to the sea or manor born. Abrahams’ husk of brown hair had been tangled by his boat ride, and the bulky tweed coat he carried slung over one white shirt sleeve, and his tie pinned down by a gold-plated tie clasp, and his uncreased heavyweight wool trousers, and his scuffed brogues gave him the appearance of a landlubber adrift on a raft.
It occurred to Dilman, as it had occurred to him once before, years ago, how much resemblance his friend bore to Frederic Dorr Steele’s profile drawings of Sherlock Holmes, especially this moment when Abrahams, having greeted Dilman, stood in profile, too, his bony, falcon countenance adorned with pipe and jutting jaw, and all the admirable cold wisdom of the great detective. Could one imagine a hearty and windblown nautical Sherlock Holmes? Inconceivable. As impossible, Dilman decided, as Nat Abrahams and himself on this luxury yacht. With an ally of the anchored earth present, Dilman felt well for the first time. He felt as restored as if he had disembarked on terra firma.
Abrahams strode across the lounge, billowing a trail of smoke, clutched Dilman’s hand heartily, and pulled up a side chair.
“Quite a layout,” he said, his hand taking in the yacht’s lounge. “Been enjoying it?”
“It’s a hell ship, Nat,” he said. “This is what must have inspired Edward Everett Hale to write The Man Without a Country. I know how Philip Nolan felt. Any day, give me my own, my native land.”
Abrahams studied him. “Mal de mer, Doug?”
“Times ten,” said Dilman. “I became seasick going up the gangplank. You have no idea what it’s been like, Nat. All my advisers and officers and aides up there, inhaling, exhaling, full of salt air and the bounding main. Everyone telling me what a perfect day it is, great riding vessel, ocean like a carpet, and me alone, the only one, staggering around, trying to hide from them, not to let them see that all I want is to upchuck. I couldn’t fish, couldn’t eat, couldn’t even make sense talking to Eaton. I’ve devoted every minute to concentrating on not throwing up. I guess I wanted to uphold my position of authority. Tell me, how can you be Commander in Chief of the Navy and have your head in the toilet bowl the whole lousy voyage? They’re born to it, up there, their stomachs trained for it. How can I let them know their Commander thinks a knot is something you tie-and that the closest he ever came to a yacht was when he turned the pages of Holiday-and that all the President accomplished today was that he didn’t vomit? But I haven’t fooled them one bit, Nat, not Eaton or any one of them. They know I’m as out of place here as in the White House… What’s the idea winding me up like this, Nat? But anyway-you brought it up. How do I feel? Sick and demeaned, and thanks for coming to hear me complain.”
Nat Abrahams, pipe between his teeth, was shaking his head, so that some burning flakes drifted to the floor. He stamped them out, and then he said, “Doug, what are you trying to prove? You feel sick and demeaned? Demeaned about not being an old yachtsman with social background? Holy Daniel, look over your shoulder-what did Andrew Jackson and Zach Taylor and Abe Lincoln and Harry Truman know about yachting and Exeter or Yale? And they did right well, you bet they did. And sick, you feel sick? Well, you’re the boss, and if bouncing around on this roller coaster makes you queasy, get off, just get off. Tell them you don’t like it and want to go home. I’ve said this before, so forgive me, but why try to wear T. C.’s shoes, or even Arthur Eaton’s, if they pinch? You can afford your own.”
At last Dilman was able to smile. “Thanks, Dad. I feel better already. In fact, I could stand a tall cool drink. What about you?”
“Nothing would please me more… Sit still, I’ll make them.”
Abrahams went to the bar and made a bourbon-and-soda for Dilman, and sloshed some Scotch over ice for himself. After he returned to his chair, and they drank awhile in silence, Dilman said, “Better, much better.” He set his half-finished bourbon down beside the MRP Bill, and loosened his tie. “I know I’m cheating you, Nat. I invite you to fish-”
“Nonsense.”
“-but I guess I really wanted a chance to talk to you. There hasn’t been much time lately. I haven’t seen you since those Trafford boys used me for target practice, have I?”
“No. I was tied up, too. I got Sue off to Chicago, to pack. And while waiting for that final contract, I’ve been meeting your legislators. Oliver has practically made me an honorary congressman.” He hesitated. “Trafford? I gather it was rough on you and Julian.”
“It was. But I had no choice. From the demonstrations going on, I guess I’ve alienated what Negro sympathy I had. I think that’s what surprised me most.”
“You’ll win it back, and fast,” said Abrahams. “Once you sign the minorities bill, you’ll have 70 or 80 per cent of the Negro population on your side. Nothing you do will satisfy the rest, the extremists.” Abrahams’ glance went to the end table and back to Dilman, who sat bemused. “Have you signed the Minorities Rehabilitation Bill yet, Doug?”
“Not yet. I don’t know. I suppose that’s why I wanted to see you today. Fishing, yes, I guess I wanted to throw out a line and fish for your opinion.” Dilman thought that his friend had fidgeted uneasily, and he was puzzled. “Unless, of course, you haven’t kept up on the bill and don’t particularly care to talk about it. If-”
“Oh, I’ve read it, Doug. Don’t forget, I’m the new Nat Abrahams, and I’m supposed to be conversant with all pending and active legislation. And the minorities bill-let’s face it, it is the biggest domestic spending program to go through Congress in years.”
Dilman watched Abrahams tap the ashes out of his pipe and then refill it and light it. Dilman said, “The cost doesn’t bother me, if I could be as positive as T. C.’s crowd and Congress that it would do some good. I keep having the sneaking feeling that-that it’s a sort of-oh, give-them-bread-and-circuses sort of thing.”
“It’s more than that,” Abrahams said, too hastily. Drawing on his pipe harder, he dug for something in his hip pocket. “As a matter of fact, I happen to have a little item here-” He pulled out several sheets of paper that had been folded and stapled. He unfolded them. “I-I have here the-the salient points of the bill-facts and figures, and some authoritative notes, projecting its effect on the country as a whole. I even penciled in several of its questionable aspects. But overall, there’s no doubt, it can give our economy a big boost, a big one-” His voice had trailed off. He held the papers forth tentatively. “Maybe you’d like to see this.”
“I certainly would.” Dilman took it, and since it was concise, he read every word of it, acutely aware that Nat Abrahams was watching him nervously, exactly the way Leroy Poole used to watch him nervously when he read the author’s manuscript pages.
Reading on, flipping the pages, Dilman felt a growing sense of bewilderment. The logic was there, the statistics and authorities were there, but there was something real and important missing. What was missing was the Nat Abrahams that he knew, or, my God, thought he knew. There was none of Nat’s keen intellect, his humanity, his understanding, his language. There was a complete omission of the central issue, the kind Nat liked to tackle head on. Dilman hoped to find it toward the end. When he reached the end, it was not there. He felt cheated and deeply confused.
He looked up, unable to disguise his disappointment. “Interesting. It does make a solid case for priming the economy. I just sort of-missed-any case for how it’ll close the racial gap between the have-nots and the haves.”
To Dilman, there was no question about it this time: his friend was squirming. Abrahams set down his drink. “Well, we take that for granted.”
“Take what for granted, Nat?” Dilman sat up. “We’re friends-don’t take this in the wrong spirit-I’m not being critical of you-but this is a minorities bill. That, to me, is the primary point. What will the seven billion dollars of taxpayers’ money do for minorities, not for the economy? Will the spending buy equality for all, or merely greater prosperity for industry and labor? Dammit, Nat, as a matter of self-interest, there’s every reason why I should sign the bill. Everyone wants me to, and God knows I need every possible bit of support now, and I probably will sign it. Only, foggy as I am, indecisive as I’ve been, one factor seems to be wanting in the entire bill, as it appears to be missing in your précis. I miss the sum allocated to give the Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Indians, Japanese-lets stick to the Negroes-I miss the sum that will guarantee them all they really want, first-class citizenship.”
Abrahams had reddened. “Doug-” he began.
“No, let me finish. Here we have it, seven billion dollars for public highway construction, desegregated but quota-limited schools, dams, factories, forest conservation, and sure, preferential treatment so Negroes do the work involved and receive the benefits. But, Nat, despite all those watered-down civil rights bills passed in recent years, when we talk about the American Negro today, we still talk about five rights being kept away from him-five, not one. The right to work, and not be the first to be fired, the last to be hired, and not be exiled to menial jobs. All right, this bill takes care of that. What about his other four rights? Will this bill really give the Negro the right to use public facilities? To have first-rate education? To occupy integrated housing? To enjoy freedom to vote like any other American? No. There are a few crumbs, sure. Sweep them together and what do they represent? No segregation in buildings constructed under this MRP Bill. Higher salaries for teachers who go into slum areas or work in desegregated schools, and some free tutoring programs and scholarships. Better and cheaper housing in the tracts the bill subsidizes for those who will move into these mixed neighborhoods. And on voting, nothing specific, the usual patriotic promises and hopes. So there it is, and our Negro leaders are ready to accept the crumbs because they’re tired of fighting for the loaf, when they’ve been hungry more than a century. I can understand that. But I’m troubled. This bill may rehabilitate the minorities financially, but it won’t raise them up to full equality. And in the end, it may be only a delaying action, and solve nothing for the white population either. Yet I could be wrong, dead wrong. Maybe fights are won one skirmish at a time, and this would gain my people one right they desperately want. And who am I to worry it so, be indecisive again, when smarter minds support this bill? Still-” He stared directly at Abrahams and then held up the stapled sheets of paper. “I guess it was unfair of me to expect you to include all that other in your summary, because I felt lame and sort of wanted a crutch. It’s just that this didn’t sound like you’d written it.”
Dilman sat back, and fumbled for his drink.
Quickly Nat Abrahams leaned forward and took the papers from Dilman’s lap. “I didn’t write it, Doug. Eagles Industries wrote it. Avery Emmich wrote it. Gordon Oliver wrote it. They wanted me to transmit it to you-first assignment-and I did. I’m ashamed of myself now. I knew, the second I handed it to you, I could never go through with it, pretending it was mine.”
Embarrassed, Dilman tried to stop him. “Forget it, Nat. You did what you had to do, and some of the points in there are well made.”
Abrahams stood up, ripped the paper in half, worked it into a ball, and stuffed it into his trouser pocket.
“It stinks,” he said flatly. “I’ll never do this to you again, no more harmonizing with others on what they believe. I’ll rely on solo. Doug, you’ve said it, there’s good in the minorities bill and there’s bad. It’s a big decision you have to make, and there are a lot of considerations to keep in mind, but you’ll do what you must do, for yourself and others. No one’s going to influence you. You wanted my opinion, and I’ll give it to you if you still want it.”
“I do, I sure do, Nat. Who else can I listen to?”
“Yourself. But let me have my own honest say, and then I’ll shut up… Doug, I hate this minorities bill. I hate its pretense. Every reservation you hold is true, as far as I’m concerned. T. C. and most of Congress invented this legislation as an emergency measure. The country is splintered apart-always has been-but these years it’s been worse than ever. Negro revolution, you bet, and about time. So how does one put down a revolution, especially a just one? By force? Impossible in our democracy. Unthinkable. By giving in to those discriminated against, giving them justice and making democracy a true one? Difficult. Too much ignorance, blind hatred, senseless fear, and politics, for which read compromise. By bribery? The old Roman trick? The only way. So they came up with this MRP. Put down the insurrection and buy peace with money. Money is cheaper than decency. So here is a vast hog-barrel, boondoggling bribe to buy off the Negroes. And the Negroes can’t resist. They are weak, tired of the long slow fight, and-you said it-they’re hungry. If you’ve got to choose between having three square meals a day and money in the bank and all the wonders and advantages of materialism, as against waiting for the less tangible advantages of full liberty, which will you choose? So the Negroes, most of them, have given in. And the whites, big business, big labor unions-they love it. They’ve paid off the revolutionists and their guilty consciences, and they’ve purchased safety. And a good deal more besides, because they’ll make profits, giving with one charitable hand, taking it back with the other.
“Everyone is happy, almost everyone, except those few of your people who are willing to go hungry a little longer to get five-fifths of what belongs to them, not one-fifth, and except the impractical liberals like myself who know better and want better for your people-but, of course, can afford to despise this bill because our stomachs are full. Now you’ve heard all I have to say, Doug, and don’t listen to it. I don’t have to make the decision. I don’t have to worry if I’ve done a disservice to minorities or expediently helped them endure the near future. I don’t have to worry if my opinion is weightier than those of several hundred experts. I don’t have to worry how I feel if I do sign or what will happen to me and the country if I do not sign. Don’t you listen to me, the man from Eagles Industries with a full stomach, Doug. I teed off this way because I wanted you to know I am still the man you’ve always known me to be. As for you, I know-”
There was a sharp knocking, and Dilman’s attention was diverted to the lounge door.
“Mr. President,” a voice called out, “it’s Secretary Eaton.”
“Come in.”
The door swung open, and Eaton entered. He appeared disconcerted to find Abrahams with Dilman, then recovered his poise. His manner toward Dilman was concerned and sympathetic. “I missed you on deck, and I only wanted to know that you were all right, Mr. President. Is everything satisfactory?”
Dilman stood up and offered his Secretary of State a half-humorous grimace. “Mr. Secretary, to be perfectly frank with you, everything couldn’t be worse. I’ve been seasick-”
“I’m sorry, Mr. President.”
“-and while there has been an improvement, I’m still uncomfortable. If I am Commander in Chief of all the troops on land and all the ships at sea, I’d like to issue my first naval order. Have someone turn this damn yacht right around and deposit me safe and sound on God’s good earth.”
Eaton’s conditioned countenance betrayed neither approval nor disapproval. “As you wish it, Mr. President. I’ll transmit your order to Commander Chappell at once.”
“And my apologies to our guests for cutting short their little outing.”
Eaton nodded, and hurriedly left. The second that the cabin door closed, Dilman pivoted toward Nat Abrahams and gave him a wide grin and an elaborate salute.
“How was that, teacher?”
Abrahams smiled. “You’re learning. You get an A.”
Dilman had become solemn once more. “Now what I need is an A where it counts more, in political science.” He took up the manila folder holding the minorities bill and balanced it thoughtfully. “Of course, it all depends on who does the grading, doesn’t it?”
He stuffed the folder into his briefcase, pressed it shut, then went to Abrahams and took him by the arm. “For some reason, I feel better now. I think everything is settling into place, anatomically speaking. I’m ready to fish awhile, if you are. Who knows, Nat? We might even catch something we’ll be proud of…”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Office of the White House Press Secretary
THE WHITE HOUSE
THE PRESIDENT HAS REQUESTED SPECIAL TIME OF ALL MAJOR TELEVISION AND RADIO NETWORKS TONIGHT TO ADDRESS THE NATION AT 7:00 P.M., EDT, ON THE SUBJECT OF THE MINORITIES REHABILITATION PROGRAM AND THE BILL CONCERNING THIS PROGRAM AWAITING HIS SIGNATURE. THE FULL TEXT OF HIS ADDRESS WILL BE DISTRIBUTED TO THE PRESS FROM THIS OFFICE TEN MINUTES AFTER HE IS ON THE AIR.
ALTHOUGH it was too soon for Governor Talley to have arrived upstairs for their private meeting, before the others came, before the President’s television address began, Secretary of State Arthur Eaton found it impossible to sit out the intervening time in the loneliness of his huge seventh-floor office.
Ever since receiving Governor Talley’s cryptic, but definitely frantic, telephone call from the White House ten minutes ago, Arthur Eaton had been worried and on edge. He had not liked the tone, and the inconceivable implications, of Talley’s abbreviated call. Apparently, even in the privacy of his own White House office, Talley had been suspicious of being overheard or monitored. Yet what he had said, guarded as he had been, had been made meaningful and eloquent enough by his nettled speech and its unnatural brevity.
Pacing, Arthur Eaton reconstructed what little he had heard:
“Arthur? This is Wayne Talley. I’ve just come from Edna Foster’s office. The President wouldn’t see me. He had Miss Foster give back the speech we wrote. He’s written his own.”
“His own? What are you talking about, Wayne? What kind of nonsense is that? Are you pulling my leg?”
“Arthur, I swear-”
“What in the devil has he written? What is in it?”
“Arthur, I can’t speak. I’d better see you as soon as possible, before the others. Shall I come to your office?”
“Yes-no, wait-I think we want some seclusion. You use the E Street entrance. Take my private elevator right up to the top, to the eighth floor. I’ll leave word for them to let you come up, and the others, also. I’ll be waiting in the Madison Dining Room… How does it look to you, Governor? He’s going to sign the bill, of course?”
“I think so, I think so, there’s nothing else he can do. It’s what he’s going to say about it that bothers me. I’ll get over to State right away, Arthur. Good-bye.”
That was all the evidence Eaton had to go by, ten minutes ago and now.
The degree to which the news had flustered him was a surprise. He had been schooled to be poised for the unexpected. Even international masters of the unexpected, like Premier Kasatkin, could be anticipated. One studied their arcs of reasoning, from the top curve of predictability to the bottom curve of unpredictability, and if one knew their backgrounds, ambitions, pressures, one could be ready to bisect and contain them at any point of the arc. But Dilman, apparently, had proved himself to be unlike other men.
This, then, was a part of what had unsettled Arthur Eaton, jolted his superior complacency. He had, of course, made his study of the new President, a shallow study, to be truthful, but then, the man had appeared to have no subtle resources that would require an examination of more depth. Dilman had given the impression, from the first, of a person obvious and simple to divine, or so it had seemed to one of Eaton’s wide experience with more clever and devious men.
Of three dozen important demands made upon him, Dilman had been agreeable to all, well, all save two, and even in these two matters he had finally performed what was requested of him. He had not signed the New Succession Bill into law, that was true, but he had weakly permitted it to become law, with only the mildest legalistic protest. No one had minded that too much, considering Dilman’s color and sensitivity and his need not to condone publicly a legislative insult. The fact was: he had come along.
Then, in the invoking of the Subversive Activities Control Act, he had displayed faint resistance, evidenced by hesitancy and delay. Yet his hesitancy, if one was reasonable, could not be regarded as unexpected. He had been asked to outlaw a segment of his own race, and suffer their ire, and had recoiled from it as long as possible. Too, his behavior toward the Turnerites, if one studied these matters as Eaton did, was the natural result of his personality. Time and again he had shown himself to be fearful and uncertain, and therefore indecisive and slow. This was simply his style. In the end, predictably, he had banned the Turnerite Group.
But this new development of ten or fifteen minutes ago, this was unusual. To date, his slowness in signing the Minorities Rehabilitation Program Bill was not unexpected, but part of his pattern. His sudden announcement yesterday, before the Cabinet meeting adjourned, that he had decided to address the nation on the bill, had been a minor surprise to Eaton and all of them only because they did not expect an act of impulse on Dilman’s part. Yet, once more, it was an understandable desire. Many Presidents, before approving of a crucial or gigantic piece of spending legislation, liked to explain their belief in what they were doing, mention minor reservations (as political self-protection if anything went wrong or there was dissent), and to dramatize their own roles in a useful action. No, it was not unexpected that Dilman, conscious that the minorities bill was T. C.’s bill, would wish to reap some of T. C.’s popularity and curry some favor (when he needed it most) by projecting himself before the public on millions of television screens as one of the authors of the bountiful bill.
It had been routine for T. C.’s writers and special counselors to spend the remainder of yesterday afternoon, following the Cabinet meeting, and most of the evening, sketching out and molding into final form a public speech, in this case the fifteen-minute address on the minorities bill that explained its virtues and Dilman’s own approval. Dilman had known that they were preparing his address, and had offered no objections. Late last night Dilman had received the polished final draft from Talley, with no indication of protest, indeed with thanks. And to Talley’s suggestion that should Dilman desire any changes today, everyone would be standing by to help him, Dilman had again been appreciative.
And now, for the first time, the unpredictable: Dilman had rejected their speech in favor of one he had written, was writing, himself. He had displayed his first evidence of decisive action, of individuality, of independence, of ignoring advice from his betters-no, not his betters-his more experienced advisers.
Eaton had tried to penetrate the President’s motivation for this silly and small rebellion. It did not mean that Dilman was opposing their wishes, the wishes, in fact, of Congress, the country, his own race, in regard to the important bill. No, one unaccountable action did not imply or indicate a more drastic one to follow. All Dilman was doing was demanding to write their speech his way. A sensitive colored man was asserting his rights. That was it. Eaton could see it more clearly now. By overlooking consideration of that one dimension of President Dilman’s color, Eaton had almost erred in anticipating his behavior. Dilman’s color had been largely responsible for his quick servility, his readiness to come along, his indecisiveness. This same color, Eaton saw, must occasionally drive him into some action of immature self-assertion, as if to remind the whites around him that he was their equal, a man with a mind of his own. That was it, of course, the complete explanation. Dilman was doing their bidding, whatever his secret qualms, on the Minorities Rehabilitation Bill, but was reminding them that although he must do what he was being told to do, he still would not allow himself to be held in utter contempt. In short, Eaton saw, the President must at least be permitted to say in his own words what his advisers wanted said.
Eaton told himself that his analysis made sense. He congratulated himself on clearing up the enigma. Yet, he realized, he was still unnerved. Why? Well, dammit, what President of the United States had ever shielded the contents of a vital domestic policy speech-in this case the most vital one in a decade-from everyone around him?
Tired of trying to solve mysteries with insufficient clues, impatient to learn the details of Talley’s encounter with Dilman, or with the protective Miss Foster, Arthur Eaton left his office. He proceeded through his stenographer’s office-reminded, those moments, that he was to have met Sally Watson in his home shortly after the speech, resenting the fact that he might now be delayed, and had better phone her to come later-and then he entered the small reception room and went on into the main reception room. The desk there, too, was empty. He noted the time. It was eleven minutes after six o’clock. Everyone had gone home.
Yet not quite everyone, Eaton realized. Two clerks passed busily through the corridor. Assistant Secretary Stover, in his shirt-sleeves, carrying a dispatch, waved at him. The sight of such activity pleased Eaton. At least here, in his dominion, there were no mysteries, and nothing was unknown to him. Under his exacting rule, guided by his cool intelligence and supported by a five-hundred-million-dollar annual budget, his army of seven thousand foreign affairs specialists toiled, and one thousand of these worked through the night. It gave him pride that his palace, the Department of State Building, was never dark-as, so suddenly, the White House had become dark.
Restlessly, to kill time, Arthur Eaton wandered into the corridor. He turned right, made his way across the rich blue carpeting, absently glanced at the framed pictures of the nation’s previous Secretaries of State on the wall, then came to a halt before Room 7228, the corridor entrance to his own office. He studied the two words lettered on the walnut panel of his door. They read simply: the secretary. He thought of the many persons who saw these two words daily, and how few understood the encompassing, far-reaching nature of his responsibility, reaching back to T. C., reaching ahead to every American citizen everywhere, reaching now into that suddenly secretive Oval Office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
It was time for Talley to arrive, he decided.
Quickiy he went to his private elevator, found and inserted his special key, observed the arrow light up red. Once inside, he was whisked to the eighth floor, a treasure house of history visited by no one except himself, his luncheon guests, and those he invited to attend diplomatic functions and State Department dinners during the evenings.
Leaving the elevator, Eaton hastened through the lounge, past the bar, and pulled open the two doors that led into the small, dimly lighted Madison Dining Room, the private hideaway where he ate lunch almost daily. None of the dozen chairs around the center table, nor the chairs drawn up before the television set, were occupied.
Annoyed, Eaton crossed the room, entered the adjacent dining room, also empty, and then he continued through this room and made his way to the outside terrace. The night air had turned cold, and he shivered. He went to the cement rail, kept his balance by holding onto a metal pillar, and peered down into E Street, studying the area between the parked automobiles and the green canopy that covered the walk to his private elevator. There was no one to be seen.
He looked up, and in the distance he could make out the Lincoln Memorial and the mass of the Pentagon Building behind it. Tonight he wished that he could see the White House half so clearly. He became aware that as he exhaled, his breath was condensing into visible clouds of vapor. Why the devil was Talley being so slow? Well, he told himself, it was not worth risking pneumonia to catch sight of his arrival.
He left the terrace for the heated interior of the eight floor, and then returned to the Madison Dining Room. As he entered, he saw Wayne Talley bustling in from the lounge, tugging off his camel’s hair overcoat, and dropping it and his hat across a chair.
“My God, Wayne, it’s about time.” Eaton tried to keep the peevishness out of his voice. “Where have you been?”
“The traffic,” said Talley breathlessly. “Even Moses couldn’t have made that sea of cars part, let alone a White House limousine.”
They met at the dining table. “What happened?” Eaton demanded. “Try to remember everything.”
“I wish there was much more to tell you besides what I told you on the phone, but there isn’t,” Talley said. “When I gave him the draft of the speech last night, I assured him I’d be waiting to consult with him on any changes. He said he was grateful, and I thought he was. I waited around in my office all morning, and not a word from him. After lunch I dropped in on Edna Foster and asked if the President had been looking for me. She said no, he was tied up. I asked if he had the speech on his desk. She said she thought she had seen it there. I told her to be sure to tell him I was standing by for any last-minute changes or modifications. She said she’d tell him. Well, the whole afternoon passed and not a word-”
“Didn’t you see Dilman at all today? I mean, on anything else?”
“Not even a glimpse of him.” Talley complained. “I think this is the first day that’s ever happened Well, about an hour ago I couldn’t stand it any more, so I went back to Miss Foster’s office and again I asked if he’d been looking for me. She said no, not as far as she knew. That was too much, so I said, ‘Edna I’d like to see the President.’ And she said-you know what she said?-she said, ‘I’m sorry, Governor Talley, but he canceled every one of his appointments and left strict orders not to be disturbed.’ How do you like that, Arthur? Well, I didn’t, not at all, so I said, ‘What in the heck is he so busy with?’ She said, ‘I really don’t know, except he’s been writing the entire morning and afternoon.’ Writing? That exasperated me-”
Eaton looked up from his watch crossly. “Governor, do you mind skipping your feelings and traumas, and sticking to what happened? In a few more minutes, we won’t be alone.”
Hurt, Talley said, “Geez, Arthur, I was only trying-okay, okay-so I said to her firmly, ‘Edna, I’m his aide, and if he knows I’m out here he will probably want to see me. So you go in there, you tell him I sent you in, and tell him I’d like to know what he thinks of the speech, and if he’d like to talk it over.’ She was kind of hesitant, but I insisted. So she went inside, and I cooled my heels for maybe a minute. Then she came out, and you know what she had in her hand? This.” Wayne Talley reached inside his suit coat and jerked forth the folded typescript of the speech they had jointly prepared for Dilman the night before, Talley opened it and pointed to the pen-written scrawl across the top.
Eaton cocked his head, squinted his eyes, trying to decipher the scrawl. Haltingly, he read the President’s notation aloud. “ ‘Thanks for all your trouble. D. D.’ ” Eaton frowned, and pursed his lips. “I wonder if he even read it.”
“I don’t know,” said Talley. “All I know is Miss Foster stuck it in my hands and said, ‘President Dilman asked me to tell you he appreciates this, the work that went into it, but he won’t need it because he’s writing his own speech.’ I was so appalled, I blurted out to her, I said, ‘Edna, for Chrissakes, no President in living memory has ever written his own speech. It takes writers, real writers, and in this instance, specialists in domestic matters. No man can do it alone. He’d botch it.’ And she said, ‘I don’t think you have to worry, Governor. He didn’t do it entirely alone. When I told him you were standing by to help, he said to tell you he’d had plenty of help all day long from friends of his.’ I got sore, and I said, ‘I thought you told me no one saw him today.’ She said, ‘That’s right, at least not through this office or Mr. Lucas’ office. But he may have seen someone in his own apartment at lunch. Besides, I didn’t say that no one talked to him today. There were plenty of telephone calls.’ I couldn’t ask her who he called or who called him, so I thanked her, double checked with Lucas to see if there’d been any visitors through his office-there weren’t-and then I hoped right back to my desk and telephoned you. That’s the whole of it, Arthur. What do you think?”
“I think I don’t like it, and I thin our President is a fool,” Eaton said. “He is liable to make a bloody mess of it. I can only pray he is literate and lucid enough to make the meaning and intent of the bill clear to the people.”
“Well, I’ve had time to cool off, and I’m becoming philosophical about the whole thing,” Talley said. “What difference what he says about it, as long as he signs it? I only resent his being so high-handed, and ignoring us. Besides”-Talley smoothed the typescript almost lovingly where it lay on the table-“it was such a damn beautiful bit of rhetoric, would have kicked the whole minorities program off in high. Christ, what T. C. could have done with this. Lookee here-”
He began to read snatches of the rejected speech. “ ‘This magnificent Federal program follows in the great American tradition of the WPA at home and the Marshall Plan abroad, both milestones in our democratic effort to lend a strong, undemanding hand to those of our citizens who need a hand, and to give aid and comfort to those millions who desire their country’s help even as they help themselves. It is with pride in my fellow citizens, and with the greatest confidence in our future well-being and security, that I endorse the Minorities Rehabilitation Program approved by our Congress, and that I put my name to it before all of you.’ ” Talley looked up. “Not bad, Arthur?” He dipped his head again. “I like this part best. ‘This bill, my fellow Americans, will stand as a monument more enduring than granite to the name and memory of my predecessor, the late President, who-’ ”
“That’s enough, Governor,” Eaton interrupted. “It’s a waste of time. It has as much meaning now as a letter that was never mailed.” He paused, and listened. “Is that the elevator?”
Quickly Talley folded the speech and shoved it into his pocket. He sidled up to Eaton. “What do we tell them?”
“Nothing, except that Dilman told you he was revising our draft at length, and we have no idea how he has altered the language.” He looked off. “Hello, Allan… Evening, Senator-”
The Majority Leader of the Senate, John Selander, came into the room, followed by Allan Noyes, chairman of the Party. Minutes later, Gorden Oliver, full of cheer and carrying a bottle of Cutty Sark as his entry pass, arrived with Harvey Wickland, Majority Leader of the House of Representatives. Shortly after, Secretary of the Interior Lionel Ruttenberg was the last to arrive.
Arthur Eaton found that he had no patience for the usual small talk and gossip, and he drifted apart from his guests to smoke and think. When he consulted his wristwatch, it was only three minutes to speech time.
He returned to the group, but hung back while Gorden Oliver finished the latest addition to his endless store of jokes.
“-stood waiting on the Montgomery street corner for his transportation,” Oliver was saying, “and when it came, this dark-skinned gentleman climbed on, paid his fare, and started to sit down in the front seat. Then the driver yelled at him, ‘Get in the back of the bus!’ Then the man said, ‘But I’m Jewish.’ Then the driver yelled, ‘Get off the bus!’ ”
They all roared with glee, and Oliver, encouraged, was about to embark on another story when Eaton said loudly, “The President is speaking in one minute. Let’s settle down.”
As Talley hastened to turn on the television set, find the clearest channel, adjust the volume, the others took their places in the semi-circle of chairs set before the screen. Eaton did not join them, but propped himself against the table edge, arms folded across his chest.
The television screen was filled by a commercial, and then the station break with the network’s emblem.
Senator Selander, tipping his chair backward, twisting, whispered to Eaton, “What’s this that Wayne was telling me about the President doing considerable rewriting on the address we prepared? I thought it was a gem. Are you sure you have no idea what parts he changed?”
“No idea whatsoever, Senator. Apparently it was a last-minute thing. In all probability, he beefed up the sections on civil rights. I think he’s trying to woo back his Negro following. But quite honestly, I don’t-” Eaton uncrossed his arms and pointed past Selander. “There it goes. We’ll know soon enough.”
They concentrated on the screen, which now showed the Presidential seal.
Eaton’s memory of the many times he had been in that Oval Office when T. C. had waited to address the nation enlarged the screen in his mind. A minute or two before, the still photographers had been shooed out, and what remained were four or five television cameras and their operators focusing on T. C.’s hearty figure, solid and ready in the big leather chair behind the Buchanan desk. Eaton remembered too, with an ache of nostalgia, the little things that prepared T. C. for this moment; the thick cables leading from the cameras across the rug and through the French doors to the colonnaded walk where the Secret Service men stood; the black drape hung and pinned across the windows behind the President; the brown felt cloth thrown over the desk from which the gadgets and framed photographs of Hesper and Freddie had been temporarily removed; the tilted stand atop the desk, holding the cards on which the President’s address had been typed; the two members of the press pool, sitting out of view at the President’s left; the television monitor set off screen at his right, but facing him so he could see the image that he was projecting; the two secretaries in the rear, holding transcripts of the speech, to check his spoken words against the printed words, and pencil in any changes he improvised or ad-libbed.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”
The camera cut from the close-up of the Presidential seal to a full shot of the President behind his desk. And to Eaton’s surprise, he had succumbed completely to memory’s sorcery. For it was not T. C. who sat there at all, but a black stranger. The camera moved in until the screen was entirely occupied by Douglass Dilman’s broad African visage and features. These features, blended and made indistinguishable by his blackness, contrasted with the lightness of his suit and shirt, but matched the blackness of his hands resting on the sides of the stand. For the first time in many weeks, Eaton sensed his loss, the nation’s loss, and felt deeply embittered by the sheer insanity of human existence.
“Good evening, my fellow citizens.”
If not T. C., Eaton thought, then at least a reasonable facsimile. Thank the Lord, he thought, that all of them here were alive to see that T. C. would not be wholly dead.
By an effort of will, he ceased his thinking of what could not be. He listened. President Douglass Dilman was addressing the nation.
“One week ago there reached my desk the original enrolled bill, printed on parchment paper, certified and signed by the acting Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Acting President of the Senate, that has come to be popularly known as the Minorities Rehabilitation Program. It requires only the scratch of my pen to enact it into public law-or, on the other hand, it takes only my returning it unsigned to the House in which it originated, with my objectins stated, to institute a Presidential veto.
“To this date, I have neither approved the bill nor rejected it, because I have needed as much time as possible to consider every aspect of it, to weigh its cost against its value to all of us. Before rendering my decision, I felt it necessary to discuss briefly with you, the people, certain aspects of the bill, of this Minorities Rehabilitation Program.
“The preponderance of opinion is behind this program. Four out of five of your representatives in Congress are behind it. They are behind it, they say, because they feel that it will repay a minority of the population, largely Negro, for years of deprivation, it will restore economic dignity to those who have suffered loss of it because of their color, and it will bring a dramatic end to racial strife. Business leaders, as well as labor leaders, are behind it because they believe that the program will boost the national economy, bring prosperity to all, and bring civil peace to the land. Even the majority of Negro organization directors favor the bill as an expedient measure of restitution that would, to a degree, make up for losses suffered through a century of actual slavery and continued segregation thereafter.
“Without bothering to explore in detail every provision of the bill, and speaking to you in the plainest of language, what are the general arguments for and against the Minorities Rehabilitation Program?
“Those who want me to sign this bill-and they are, I repeat, the overwhelming majority-sincerely believe that by dispersing in various ways seven billion dollars of your tax payments, over a period of five years, to the underprivileged racial minorities of this nation, they will be bringing internal peace to the United States. They feel that the Federal government can now accomplish, by this massive outpouring of money, what the prejudices of private industry and restrictions of labor unions have heretofore prevented doing: close the economic gap between black and white. They feel that this financial restitution to the colored man will make up for a century of oppression. And they feel that, by giving twenty-three million of the nation’s blacks economic equality, by giving them higher wages, jobs or better jobs, subsidized training, by so occupying their minds and hands, by so filling their stomachs, they will have brought tranquility and order through the democratic process to the United States.
“However, there is a smaller, less vocal number of Americans, as concerned about the depriation of minorities, as desirous of bringing about tranquility and order, who strongly believe this nation cannot afford the minorities bill, not because of its financial cost but because of the means by which it will bankrupt our ideals, our democracy, our Constitution.
“What are their arguments against the bill? You have seen little discussion of their reservations in the press, and heard few of their protests on the floors of Congress or on the airwaves. In all fairness, their objections should be heard tonight, and considered by you, as they have been considered by me.
“The dissenters believe that this bill is a governmental conspiracy to bride the oppressed into silence. It may bring racial peace, but at what price to our democratic integrity? The Constitution will be converted into a checkbook. We will have given our minorities not civil rights, not equality, but a giant payoff to end their clamor. Under this bill, the Negro will not have gained his vote, his equal place in public accommodations, his dignity as a free American. Instead, he will have gained employment. He will have been detoured from the hard, uphill road to that place where free men live, to remain at the roadside beneath and below them, diverted from his goal by the dollars he has suddenly found. And when the money is spent, where will he be? Still too far from freedom, and perhaps unable to find the public road again.
“Yes, my fellow citizens, there are thoughtful men, Americans as decent as you and I, who believe in their deepest conscience that one cannot substitute dollars for the dignity of liberty. By so doing, we undermine the humanity of the giver as well as the taker, we weaken the majority as well as the minority. And worse, by so doing, we reinforce the anti-American caricature of Uncle Sam throughout the world by showing him not as a man but as a figure-head in the shape of a dollar sign, an Uncle Sam who offers his flock cash instead of love, respect, and freedom.
“The proponents of the Minorities Rehabilitation Program believe that through a seven-billion-dollar outlay they will have bought time. The opponents of the program wonder, time for what? And how much time? There are those who believe that the time to solve our minority problem is today, no matter how high the cost in civil strife and discontent, and that the means to solve it is not through huge Federal bribes, but through total Federal support of any human being who is treated as less than an American and less than a man because of his race, religion, color, or national origin.
“My fellow citizens, there is something to be said for both sides, but as your President I can choose only one side, and for me the moment of decision has arrived. Addressing you then, not as one who is prejudiced by white or black demands, not as one heeding majority or minority wishes, but rather addressing you as one who has come to believe that any travail or sacrifice is worthwhile if it will strengthen the foundation of a stronger, totally democratic United States of America that can stand before the world unashamed, indeed, proud, for having practiced those noble ideas upon which it was founded, I hereby notify my former colleagues in Congress, and my fellow citizens everywhere, that I cannot and shall not sign the Minorities Rehabilitation Program into law.
“Tonight I am vetoing this bill, and returning it to the House where it originated, with the prayer that never again will I or any President be forced to consider an example of legislation so cynical as to pretend that freedom has a price tag.
“Yet we do need powerful legislation to replace this bill. We need legislation concerned with equality, not tranquility, and in due time I intend-”
Before the gasps, groans, and angry exclamations from those in the Madison Dining Room could drown out the remainder of the President’s speech, Arthur Eaton leaped forward, cursing under his breath, and savagely turned off the television set.
White-faced, trembling, he stood with his back to the others, unable to face them until he had regained his composure.
He heard Talley say, “I’ll be goddamned, that sonofabitch torpedoed us!”
He heard Oliver demand, “That bastard, who does he think he is?”
He heard Noyes explode, “The Party can’t let him get away with it!”
He heard Senator Selander predict, “He’s split the country, even if we can override his veto.”
As the voices became increasingly furious and uncontrolled behind him, Eaton tried to block out the din, to assemble his thoughts. His first thoughts were of T. C. The minorities bill was to have been T. C.’s enduring monument. Tonight, no matter what followed, it was a monument no more. Until tonight T. C. had been alive, his government kept alive, through the works he had instigated and the men he had left behind to see them through. Yet tonight a semiliterate black man, defying the wishes of his superiors and the majority of the nation, had trampled on moderation to cater to extremists of his color. Tonight a black interloper, employing the rankest demagoguery in a crude and inciting play for power, had sold out national unity to dress his personal pride.
Then, filtering through Arthur Eaton’s initial shock and disgust, the real implication of Dilman’s rebellion could be seen: It was not T. C. who had been ousted from the White House Oval Office, for T. C. was a ghost, but it was himself, Arthur Eaton himself, T. C.’s heir, who had been banished from decision making and rule.
“What’s left without Party rule?” he could hear Congressman Wickland cry out behind him. “Anarchy, that’s what is left!”
Eaton heard the telephone across the room. Glad of an excuse to escape from the others, he hastily went to answer it.
Immediately he recognized the excitable voice, with its mean Southern slur, on the other end.
“Oh, hello, Zeke.”
“Arthur?” shouted Congressman Zeke Miller. “What do you think, Arthur? Don’t answer. You’re too goldarn gentlemanly for your own good. Let me tell you what I think, Arthur. I’m not afraid of speaking out the truth. You know what I think, Arthur? I think that there black Nigra just did us and the country the greatest goldarn service in history. He showed us he’s ready to dump all branches of government, executive, legislative, judicial, all, to make himself the Nigra dictator like they once had down in Haiti. He stripped and showed his true colors-ha, you betcha-showed us he’s making a black republic exclusive for his brother Nigras-banning the Turnerites, then showing himself to be worse than-”
Eaton had little patience for this line. “Zeke, he’s already alienated the Negro extremists. This won’t win them back. What he’s done, for whatever reason, is simply to alienate most everyone else. I think he’s left himself high and dry-”
“All the better!” Zeke Miller shouted. “Now we can bring him down. Now he’s in the open for what he is, and no more bleeding hearts to guard him, no more poor oppressed black Tom mask to gain sympathy, but just a big black bull Nigra as mean as Mr. Hyde himself. He downright showed his hand, his malignant hand, with that veto, Arthur, and made a mess for us on the Hill and all over the country. Now he’s in the open, and we’re coming out in the open, too. You’ve got to get off the dime now, Arthur. You’re not going to let some all-fired ignoramus lout of a nigger do that to T. C.’s memory, besmirch our great friend, and drag the country to hell and deeper because he’s fixing to make us into another Africa. Arthur, you’re not letting him get away with that, are you? For the sake of the country and our prestige, you got to play ball with us. We’re suffering this together. We’re going to put old Sambo on the hot seat good, and we’re going to roast his ass plenty, until he yells enough, and begs us to get him off it. I’m going to force him to resign, to resign because of disability or whatever, but to resign, and if he refuses, I’m going to resign him by force.”
“How do you intend to do all of that, Zeke?”
“You’ll see. Watch and see. Meanwhile, the boys want to know, I want to know, are you with us, Arthur?”
Eaton said, “Let’s not do anything rash, Zeke. Let Dilman dig his own grave for a while-”
“Takes too long!” snapped Miller. “I want to hustle him into it before we wind up in that hole, too.”
“Well, let me think awhile, let all of us think, and play it by ear until-”
“You play it by ear. You just remember what that ear heard from our Nigra President tonight. There’s only two sides left, Arthur, his and ours. You’ve got to be on ours. I’m counting you in. I’ll have more for you later, Arthur, a lot more.”
Although holding less distaste tonight than he usually did for the Southern Congressman, Arthur Eaton was relieved to hang up on him.
He turned to find Wayne Talley behind him. “That was Zeke Miller,” Eaton explained.
“I guessed it would be,” said Talley. “What’s he after? Throwing Dilman out?”
“Something like that. All kinds of wild, impractical talk. You don’t throw someone out because you disagree with him.”
“Sometimes you do,” said Talley. “But if you don’t or can’t, at least you try to control him.”
“How can we control him? Look what happened tonight.”
“Arthur, when someone’s dangerous, you isolate him from causing any more trouble.” Talley paused meaningfully. “Certainly, you don’t give him a gun. You know what I mean?”
“I think so-I think I do.”
Talley looked around, to make sure they were out of hearing of the others, and then he said, “Arthur, I wouldn’t send him that CIA report, not that one.”
“Aren’t you worrying too much? It may be inconsequential. It doesn’t have a very high reliability evaluation.”
“No matter,” Talley persisted. “Dilman’s irresponsible. He could make a mountain out of a molehill-before we get to the summit meeting in Chantilly. I think we’ve got to start right now, this instant, keeping the seat of government where it belongs.”
“You may be right.”
“If Zeke Miller’s too wild for you, then somebody else has got to do something. I think it’s up to us to save the country.”
“What there is left of it after tonight,” said Eaton bitterly. He considered this, then added, “You are right, Wayne. We have no choice. Dilman has just had his fair trial in public. He can be judged honestly. He is irresponsible, and therefore potentially dangerous. If we cannot punish him, we should seek means to contain him. That should be our private policy. As you so succinctly put it-no gun; we are not going to give him another opportunity to shoot this country down.”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Office of the White House Press Secretary
THE WHITE HOUSE
THE PRESIDENT IS LUNCHING TODAY WITH MAJORITY LEADERS AND MINORITY LEADERS OF BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS TO DISCUSS HIS VETO OF THE MINORITIES REHABILITATION PROGRAM AND DISCUSS AN AMENDED BILL.
FOLLOWING IS THE FULL TEXT OF A CABLE FROM NIKOLAI KASATKIN, PREMIER OF THE U.S.S.R., STATING HIS OPTIMISM CONCERNING THE CHANTILLY CONFERENCE TO BEGIN IN FOUR DAYS. FOLLOWING ALSO IS THE TEXT OF PRESIDENT DILMAN’S REPLY.
AT 3 P.M., THE PRESIDENT WILL MEET WITH SECRET SERVICE CHIEF HUGO GAYNOR TO APPROVE SPECIAL SECURITY MEASURES BEING PREPARED FOR THE PRESIDENT’S TRIP ABROAD.
AT four-fifteen of an overcast, chilly afternoon, a time when he was normally posted between the President’s Oval Office and the Rose Garden, Otto Beggs sat sprawled deeply and comfortably in the foam cushions of Ruby Thomas’ sofa and listened to the high-fidelity phonograph he had repaired an hour ago.
He was tieless and shoeless, and filled with a single-minded lust he had not felt in years, a passion gradually heightened by his second gin-and-tonic and the perfume and fleshy scent of Ruby’s dusky sensuous person so near to him. The insinuating rhythms were a part of it, too, he supposed, all that Bunk Johnson, Muggsy Spanier, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton that he pretended to understand but only felt.
But mostly it was the drinks. Ordinarily Otto Beggs was a beer man, a Coca-Cola man, because sobriety was a cornerstone of his exacting job, and an integral part of his devotion to physical fitness. Only at rare times had he ever indulged himself in gin-and-tonic (on his vacation, and at Christmas, and on Big Occasions like his wedding anniversary or when he received a raise in salary or chose diversions after hours on assignments away from Washington, but never on an ordinary weekday-and during an afternoon yet!). But this afternoon, at first guiltily, then as the gin took its potent effect, its taste becoming less medicinal, more pleasurable, he drank, because this was, indeed, a Big Occasion.
“What you thinkin’, Otter?” Ruby Thomas asked.
He looked at her, feasting his gaze upon her tousled dark hair, almond eyes, perfect dark complexion, open-collar orange-yellow blouse, bare feet tucked under her skirt. He said, “I’m too relaxed to think much, Ruby. This is great.”
“Now you talkin’, ’cause I’m ’joyin’ this, too,” she said. She brought her second J and B on ice to her lips, and drained the glass. “Yum. Sure gits this pickaninny’s naycher up. Yum, good.” She studied him over the glass. “Hope you not gonna leave me too quick like, Otter, jes when I’m gittin’ to ’joy myself. Can you stay awhile?”
“Remember, I told you before, Ruby, I took the day off. I can stay all day and evening, if you’re up to it.”
“Up to it? Mothah! I never been happier, man, you bet.” She set the glass down. “How you manage it, Otter? I mean, takin’ all day from you p’ofessional duty? Ever done this before?”
“Never done it before, Ruby. There’s always a first time, though, if there’s good enough reason. I figured you’re a good enough reason. So I made up to go to work, then parked behind the Walk Inn, then phoned my boss and told him I had a bellyache and was going to the doctor. Nothing to it.”
He thought about that call to Lou Agajanian, which had been taken, ironically, by the Negro, Roscoe Prentiss, who had been promoted to the position that was rightfully Otto’s own. If he had been hesitant before making the call, the fact that Prentiss answered had hardened his resolve to have some things his own way. Beggs had said that he was unwell, and was on his way to his doctor, and would then take it easy, but he’d probably be okay tomorrow.
Prentiss had been definitely upset. Ten of the White House Detail had been dispatched to Paris to look things over at Chantilly and Versailles nearby. Two others were in bed with influenza. There would be no one to substitute for Beggs but that new kid, Ross, transferred to the Detail from Baltimore only a week ago and still unfamiliar with the White House routine and the President’s habits. Maybe the doctor would give Beggs a clean bill of health, and he could report for duty anyway, even if a little late. Momentarily, Beggs had wavered-duty-but then he had revived his resentment toward Prentiss and Dilman, Negroes who had put him down, were still trying to put him down, trying to keep him from one of their girls. It had been difficult for him, but he had insisted, in a pained voice, that he was just too sick, and he’d check back with Agajanian tonight.
Working his way through back streets toward Ruby’s apartment, to be sure that no neighbor would observe him, he had worried briefly that Agajanian might be concerned and call the house, and Gertrude would learn of his deception. But that was unlikely, he had decided, for he had told Prentiss he would be at the doctor’s long enough for a complete physical examination. Furthermore, Agajanian was too busy to give him a second thought at any time. The new kid, Ross, could do the job.
A half hour after his arrival in Ruby’s small walk-up apartment through the private entrance to which she had carefully directed him, his last lingering guilt about dereliction from duty had been washed away by the two generous servings of gin and Ruby’s provocative warmth.
She had asked how he had managed to arrange seeing her, and he had told her that there had been nothing to it. It had not been really easy, yet it had been easier than he had expected.
He saw her pleased face, and was in turn pleased himself by his aggressive independence. This was worth any risk. She was the most beautiful dark animal on earth, and he was alone with her.
She was saying, “You mean, Otter, I’m more important for you to see than the Pres? You mean you don’t mind givin’ up p’ofessional work jes ’cause you wanna be with me?”
The gin, and the scent of her, now mixed together behind his temples and made him light-headed and reckless. “Honey, I’d rather be here than anywhere on earth. This is all I’ve been dreaming about, day and night, being with you like this.”
“Whee!” she exclaimed, and suddenly she was up on her knees, reaching out for him. “Man, I sure like you sweet-talkin’ me, makin’ me tingle all ovah-you is deservin’ a reward-”
She was over him, to his surprise, playfully mouthing little kisses upon his cheek. The fluttering opening and closing of her soft lips aroused him. Unable to control himself further, he threw his arms around her, and handling her as easily as a flexible plaything, pulled her down to his chest, pressed his lips hard against her half-open mouth. She responded with her lips, and wriggled her body in his grasp, until the sensuous movements of her back and the sides of her breasts against his palms almost suffocated him.
When she came away from him, eyes now open and staring up at him, gasping to breathe as he gasped too, she said, “Man, you sure is potent-you gittin’ poor Ruby’s naycher stirrin’ up a mile high an’ wantin’ to go-”
“Honey-”
She pushed herself off his lap and came around to stare at him solemnly. “Man, you know what you is doin’ to me?”
“Ruby-”
“You sure enuff full of powers, man, got me hot and full up with naycher-better lemme change-wanna let lil Ruby change?”
Bewildered, frightened, Beggs said, “Whatever you want, Ruby. Yes, you’d better.”
“Yum,” she said. She jumped off the sofa, and then abruptly sat on his lap again, her back to him, one finger pointing behind her. “Unbutton me, darlin’, so’s I can change.”
His thick fingers fumbled at the buttons, and he had difficulty opening them, but at last the back of her blouse fell apart revealing the smooth black shoulders and ridge of spine and the white band and clasp of her brassière. Her head came around, and her lower lip pouted. “Otter, you been ’round too much for this lil pickaninny. Ummm-” She kissed his nose and stood up, chastely holding up the front of her unfastened blouse with her palm. “Won’t be more than a minute changin’. Wanna freshen the drinks?”
“Sure thing.”
“You be waitin’ for lil Ruby-oh, mothah me! Dog my cats! I loves you, man-”
She went quickly, hips and skirt swinging, out of the small living room into the bedroom, half closing the door behind her.
Otto Beggs sat unmoving. She was gone, but the fragrance of her flesh still enveloped him, entered his pores, kindled his desire for her even more intensely. She had said that she wanted to “change.” What did that mean? Change to what? He had an idea to what. Still, would she? Was it possible? Of course, it was possible. She had said that she was hot and full up with “naycher”-meaning, he woozily deducted, that her natural instincts, her primitive instincts, had been aroused by him. Criminy, what did a colored girl do, how did she behave, when she felt like that? It was a mystery to him, yet his wonder at the unknown was secondary to his great expectations. Shortly, if he had not misread her, he would be initiated into the club-the club of coarse jokes-to be one with all those who had changed their luck.
He left the sofa for the kitchenette, dropped ice into the glasses, poured a double amount of J and B over her ice, and a long shot of gin over his, and forgot about the tonic. He walked back into the living room, holding her drink, taking a swallow of his, and suddenly he stood still. There she was, and he had never seen anything like it except in the movies and men’s magazines.
She posed, one hand on a hip, standing between the mosaic coffee table and the sofa.
“How you like it, Otter?” she asked, and as she pirouetted gracefully, the dark definite lines of her body were clearly revealed from behind the flimsy, long lemon-colored negligee. “I had to git myself some expensive underwear, price of three LPs, jes for this occasion with my Otter.”
“It fits you great,” he said, embarrassed by the thick huskiness of his voice. “This is sure a treat.”
“Don’t sweet-talk cottonpickin’ me-you a big hero with all them fancy whitegirls fussin’ ’round you-”
He took another drink, and protested, “None of them hold a candle to you, Ruby. You look like a movie star, no kidding.”
She lowered herself to the sofa, crossing one leg over the other in a new pose, this one of languor, and watched him. He placed her drink before her and looked down at her, at the ebony flesh running from the hollow of her throat to the exposed cleft between her breasts. She raised her hands behind her head, and he was hypnotized by the shifting and spreading of the mounds of her bosom, no longer covered by the brassière, hardly concealed by the transparent negligee.
She patted the soft sofa beside her. “Come on, Otter, ain’t you gonna show this woman no friendshipness?”
Stiffly, almost asthmatically wheezing, he moved between the sofa and table, drinking again. Then, daringly, he sank down beside her, one arm high on the sofa behind her, his free hand holding the drink. Without trying to look, he could see the reddish bikini panties she was wearing, and the flesh of one broad dark thigh as it lay over the other. He tried to lift his eyes to her face, but he could not help holding his gaze on her protruding breasts.
“Thirty-eight,” she said.
His head came up quickly. “What?”
She cupped her hands beneath her breasts. “Size thirty-eight,” she said. “Figger you’d wanna know exactly.”
He brought the trembling glass to his flushed face. “You should be an actress, Ruby, something like that.” He drank to reinforce his giddy hopes.
“Naw, like I told you before, I been there bein’ leered at by the whiteboys. I don’t like paradin’ myself before any ol’ body. You-you is somethin’ special, Otter-”
She reached out, gently but firmly removed the glass from his clutch, set it on the table, and squirmed closer to him, head against his shoulder, fingers playfully opening his shirt, and then her hand slipping underneath his shirt and caressing his hairy chest.
He dropped his arm from the sofa down around her shoulders, loosely, listening to the throaty sounds of her, like a cat’s motor-purrings. He was not positive what he should do next, take the plunge at once, grab her, start it, or tell her first what he wanted, or be more subtle and find out if what he thought was being led up to was really understood by both of them. If he came right out and made the move, or the demand, and she was just teasing around, it would be embarrassing and ruin everything. He had to be positive. Also, there were some women, even among the paid ones, who liked to go slow, and maybe she was one of these. If she was, he didn’t want to spoil his chances. There was time, plenty of time.
“Why do you think I’m so special, Ruby?” he asked, feeling foolish. “I like hearing it, believe me, but you must’ve known plenty of young men.”
“Not so many, Otter, an’ no somebody like you-you is handsome and strong-Jee-sus-you feels all muscle-an’ a hero with them medals, botherin’ ’bout lil pickaninny me-nobody me, sep I admit to bein’ thirty-eight where it counts-” She enjoyed this, and giggled. “You knows what, Otter, I was thinkin’ last night. You is too impo’tant to be wastin’ time even guardin’ the Pres of the U.S.A.-you knows that? You too impo’tant in you own right to be wastin’ time on a finky culludman Pres who ain’t half the man you is. Thass what I think of you, Otter. You is better than him. Mothah an’ Lordy, you sure is.”
“Thank you for the compliments, Ruby, but he is President of the United States, and nobody’s more important.”
“Ummm. You smell jes good… you is more impo’tant. That black man in the White House ain’t fit to shine you shoes.”
A little more, he thought, a little more of this aimless chatter, and he’d be sure, and take the plunge. “Last time we talked, you had no feelings one way or the other about President Dilman. What’s happened since, Ruby? You don’t have to answer-who gives a damn about him-except I’d think you’d be happy about a Negro in-”
Suddenly she removed her hand from his chest and turned on her side, her silky, cooing voice turning resolute and strident. “I ain’t happy ’bout him no more. Lots been happenin’ to him and us. Dilman ain’t good enuff to be colored man or whiteboy, either. He ain’t good enuff to be any ol’ thing. He a turd, nothin’ better. Lookit him bannin’ the Turners, not liftin’ a finger for poor ol’ Jeff Hurley. Lookit him even takin’ away the crummy minority law money from my kinfolk. Otter, that man you guardin’ with you life no good for nobody-he spellin’ only evil-”
Silently Beggs cursed himself for inciting her with a conversation that he had meant to use only as a bridge to the ultimate seduction. Now, judging from the indignation in her eyes, he saw that her mood was anything but sensual. Desperately, he tried to sidetrack her. “Ruby, just as you said before, he isn’t important enough to get riled up about. I don’t like him much either, I can admit it to you since we’re so close, and not because he’s a Negro or for what he’s doing to Negroes-I don’t know much about that, except the whites are plenty sore at him too for vetoing that bill, throwing his weight around-I don’t like him because he’s a weakling. That’s the main thing. That banning, somebody else did that for him, that’s how weak he is. And the veto, hell, that showed no guts, only he got scared of the banning and tried to make up for it-”
Ruby shook her head. “You too charitable, Otter-my friends and relatives, they don’t think that Dilman weak-they think him evil all day long, ’cause he resents his color, thass what.”
There was imagining and there was performing, and Otto Beggs had had enough of the imagining and was ready for the performing. He lowered his arm further, and encircled her tighter, feeling the spongy give of her breast beneath the lingerie.
“Aw, forget him, Ruby. He’s not worth you and your friends getting so sore about. Believe me, and you know how well I know him, take my word for it from the inside, he’s scared of his shadow, and that’s why he acts the way he does.”
She seemed hardly aware of Beggs’s arm or hand or increasing ardor. She sat up a little. “What is you meanin’-thass why he acts way he does? Don’t tell me he ain’t ’shamed of his own people an’ actin’ against us.” Her tone had become concerned. “You knows somethin’ different, bein’ with him? I won’t believe anythin’, sep if you-”
Ruby, listen.” He was determined to end this conversation fast, and get going with her. “Like I said, I hold no brief for the guy, and I don’t like being put in the position of defending him. At the same time, I think enough of you not to want to see you all worked up and angry, for no reason. So let me tell you the truth of it, between us, strictly you and me-”
“For sure, I promise, Otter.”
“-and let’s get you relaxed and at ease again, and have ourselves a ball. Few people have had as close a look at the President as I have. You agree to that?”
“Sure enuff, Otter, but don’t you think he-?”
“He’s no more against Negroes than you are or your friends are or I am. He’s just on the spot being President, being a colored President, and he knows it and feels it. He knows whatever which-way he turns, a whole bunch of people will think he’s wrong, simply because he’s a minority person. Whenever I get sore at him and at myself for having to spend my good time guarding him, guarding a man who is contributing nothing to improve us, I remember a couple things I’ve seen and heard, and then, instead of being sore, well, I pity him. That’s true, Ruby, I’m not puffing myself up, but me, I pity him.” He paused. “You know why? Because even though he’s sitting where F. D. R. and Harry and Ike and J. F. K. and Lyndon and The Judge and T. C. sat, he still feels he’s sitting in the back of the bus, because that’s where a lot of people around him make him think he belongs. I don’t know politics, but I’ve got eyes and ears. Certain people are trying to run him, and to make it easier they’re pressuring him, letting him know he doesn’t belong, and he feels it and suffers like a dog, and that’s the only thing he’s got from me, my sympathy.”
Ruby seemed curiously chastened and troubled. “What you mean with that there talkin’, Otter? What you mean?”
Beggs was becoming increasingly furious at the time this was taking. “Okay, I’ll give it to you quickly, and then you promise, no more politics or Dilman?”
“ ’Course, Otter, I promise. But what you mean by-?”
“Remember that big speech he delivered the other night, vetoing the minorities bill everyone wanted? I was outside his open door, the door to his office, during it and afterwards. I could see and hear everything. You should have seen him after that speech, almost sick with nervousness and worry. Then there were a lot of phone calls, apparently from big shots in government and all over, and most of them must have been awful, calling him names, giving him hell. Anyway, later, I heard him on the phone with somebody who’s a friend of his, a lawyer from Chicago, and I heard Dilman saying-these aren’t the exact words, but something like this-‘Don’t kid me, Nat, they want to crucify me. There’s a whole race of people around here like them, not white or black, but selfish, thinking of themselves and no one else and not the country. I could’ve been popular, a little popular, by playing along the way I have all my life, but I figured just once I’d like to be myself and do what I think is right. I thought everyone would see I have nothing to gain by doing wrong. I don’t have to play politics, because I don’t have to worry about getting re-elected. I have only a short time to go, so I can afford to be honest. I figured everyone would see that, and kind of think twice about the veto, and sit down and talk out a real bill and not a bribe. I didn’t think they’d come down on me like this. I can’t repeat what I’ve been called tonight. How do you reach people like that? How do you reach anyone at all?’ And he went on, Ruby, not in those exact words, but like that. Well, Christ, I never felt sorrier for him than I did then, until the next-”
Beggs found that Ruby was holding his arm, clutching it. “Otter, that really did happen? I can’t-it’s sorta-”
“It happened, you bet it happened,” Beggs said. “It’s just more of the same. You read about the time he gave his first official dinner for the African President, and half the big guests never showed up? Can you beat that? It’s true. I was there.”
“Oh, no-” said Ruby. She released Beggs’s arm, reached for her drink, and took a long swallow of it.
Fascinated now by the way his words were upsetting her, feeling there was some strength and ascendancy to win over her in this way, Otto Beggs went on. “One more little thing I started to tell you. The next day, after the television speech, I happened to be alone with Dilman’s secretary, and she was kind of disturbed and unraveled from the way he was being beaten up on the phone and in the papers, and we got to talking about it. She’s a white girl, you know, from Wisconsin, and usually cool and steady, but she was kind of emotional, and when I said it was too bad the way the President was getting knocked around for his color, she said that I didn’t know the half of how he really felt.”
Ruby was staring at her drink, not at Beggs. “What-what she mean by that there talk, Otter?”
“Miss Foster, her name is. She said she’d never forget his first day as President. She was alone with him the first time, planning to hand in her resignation, and when she’d come in his office, there was one door open. She started to shut it, so they could be in privacy, and he wouldn’t let her close the door, he didn’t want it shut. She couldn’t understand, and then he said that Eisenhower once had a Negro adviser who found that white girls always left a door open when they came in to see him, sort of as protection, as if he was a lower animal or habitual rapist. And so Dilman took to the habit of being sure one door was left open whenever a white girl came in and-” To Beggs’s astonishment, Ruby had jumped up from the sofa and gone to the center of the room, her back turned to him. “Anyway,” he concluded lamely, “Miss Foster said she wanted to cry for him, and she shut that door and did not resign. So whatever your friends think about Dilman being evil-”
He halted, and listened.
It was incredible. Ruby’s shoulders were shaking, and her face was in her hands, and she was sobbing.
Utterly confounded, Otto Beggs left the sofa and hurried to her side. “Ruby, what the hell-” He grabbed her arms, and pulled her around, and then drew her hands from her eyes. She was crying, mascara running, and tears streaking her face. “Otter-Otter-Otter,” she kept repeating.
He shook her a little. “Ruby, what’s got into you?”
She swallowed, trying to control herself. “Otter, the devil’s in me an’ I’ll burn in front of Jesus if I don’t tell you-Otter, from what you told me, you swear it-”
“What I told you? I only told you the truth about-”
“Jesus in Heaven, I done did an awful an’ wicked act, I think I did, I think, I don’t know, but I’m worryin’, Jesus, I’m worryin’-’cause I don’t wan’ Pres Dilman hurt if he’s like you say.”
Beggs felt the blood coursing to his head. “What-what do you mean-?” A chill of apprehension, intensified by guilt and fear, crept across his chest and forearms, leaving goose pimples. “How-how could anything you do hurt him-the President?”
“Otter-listen-I didn’t know a thing, sep some certain cullud folk were wantin’ me to meet you long time ago from right after Dilman become Pres, ’cause they not likin’ his weaslin’ ’bout the Turners, so they bein’ my folk, I agrees. But meetin’ you, I fo’gits ’bout them, ’cause I gotta admits y’all been excitin’ to me-then when those there certain cullud folk, they see Pres Dilman killin’ off the Turners an’ Hurley, they gits to fussin’ an’ fumin’-an’ they remembers me-an’ come askin’ if I is still friendly-like with Otter Beggs, an’ I says I is, sorta, an’ they says for me to git you up here in my ’partment today, git you off the job today, ’cause they didn’t want you round when they see the Pres-I-Otter-I don’t pay no mind to who tell me this, don’t remember who told me-Otter-don’t look like that, Otter-only there’s some who hate the Pres like you don’t know, like I was tellin’-hate him from the start, hate him with real hate now-an’ wanna have a showdown with him-an’ figgerin’ it was hard to git to him exactly private-like, with you always there, a hero man like you readyin’ to shoot everybody-so they say for me to keep you busy till they can see the Pres when he finishes with his office workin’ today an’ goes up to-”
Beggs was violent with rage. “Goddammit, you little whore!” he shouted, wrenching her arms. “If you’re lying to me or not telling everything-!”
“Otter, Otter, don’t! You hurtin’ me-Otter, it’s true, every word I’m tellin’. Why should I tell, sep I sinned-I know I sinned-”
He could not release her arms. “Damn you, who are your friends-what are they planning-?”
“I don’t know-don’t know-swear to Jesus-”
He flung her arms down fiercely. “I ought to kill you-boy, I ought to kill you for making me such a sucker-”
“But I was likin’ you, Otter-truth, I swears it-”
He was no longer listening.
He looked at his watch. It showed sixteen minutes after five o’clock. Almost every afternoon President Dilman quit his office at five-thirty. Ruby’s friends wanted to see the President when Beggs was not around, when someone less experienced and able than Beggs was there, when someone new was there. It could mean but one thing, one horrifying, life-shattering thing. There were only fourteen minutes for him to intercept Dilman or alert Agajanian.
He looked up and saw that Ruby Thomas had retreated to her bedroom door, frightened, watching him wide-eyed.
“I ought to beat you to a pulp and drag you to the FBI!” he hollered. “My duty’s more important than you, you little whore-”
He spun around, snatching up his coat and holster, and strode to the door.
She cried out, “Otter, I did tell you aforehand-you ain’ sayin’ I didn’t tell you-don’t let them hurt him, please, Otter-!”
He slammed the door on her, hastily buckling on the holster, then yanking on his coat as he went down the stairs two at a time. As he rushed outside, his first instinct was to locate a telephone booth, call Gaynor or Agajanian or Prentiss, any of the Detail, and warn them to keep the President in his office, and throw up a double-a triple-guard, and search for Ruby’s hophead friends. Then, suddenly, he realized it was impossible for him to make such a call. They’d ask him who and what-and how had he got his tip? What could he say? He had a hunch? He’d overheard something? He’d got a crank note with a lead? He possessed no instant evidence-except the truth-Ruby-and if he dared mention her, and she was hauled in, and they found out that he had not been sick, had been trying to have an affair with her, a colored girl, he’d be cooked, through, his present a scandal, his future no more. He’d lose the Secret Service, and Gertrude and the kids. No, the call was out. He’d have to do it himself.
He had been moving fast, now half running, all the while he had been thinking. He arrived at the alley behind the Walk Inn, with its parking slots, leaped into the Nash Rambler, started it, backed up, shifted, and wheeled out of the alley into the street. He gunned the car, running a yellow light, and twisted the vehicle toward the White House.
He drove fast, fast as he could over the route that he had traveled so many days of his life, jumping lights, beating the changing signals, weaving in and out of traffic, knowing he must be there before the President left his Oval Office. If a policeman flagged him down, he’d have to flash his Secret Service badge and bellow emergency. He drove on the brink of recklessness, ignoring the angry horns and curses that chased him briefly and then died away.
There were intervals of lucidity. He had sobered, he knew, but his breath still reeked of gin. If he came into the West Wing lobby like a madman, like some fugitive from a cops-and-robbers television show, and there was nothing there, and Ruby Thomas’ story was a cock-and-bull story, he would not only be the laughingstock of the Service but in real trouble for being drunk in public. Anticipating this, determined to prevent it, he dug into his pocket for the peppermints that he always carried and sucked on after having a beer or two, and was grateful that there was still a half roll. His nail loosened and freed three of them, and he popped them into his mouth.
With difficulty, as he neared his goal, he tried to organize his thoughts. Had that black bitch lied to him, fed him that whopper of a tale? It was possible, if she was some kind of psychopathic nut, a schizo, a fruitcake. Another possibility: maybe-and he hated this, hated the comment on his manliness-maybe she had led him on, for the kicks of it, and then, when the chips were down, had backed off, not wanting to go the distance with him, wanting to go so far for kicks and no farther, wanting to be rid of the whiteboy. There were women like that-teasers. And so she had pulled this wild story out of left field to get rid of him. Maybe. But, unhappily, that made little sense. After all, Beggs remembered, he had got her onto the subject of Dilman, challenged her opinion, changed her, touched the emotional part of her femininity and Negro feeling, and then she had done the about-face, the confessional. More than that, it was unlikely that she would invent so dramatic and serious a lie, knowing as she did that he could cause her so much trouble with the authorities.
Unless she was a psycho-she did not look like one, behave like one, except that Jelly Roll idiocy, and playing around with a white man like himself, who was respectable and married and could offer her nothing-well, there was no other explanation for what had happened except the worst one. And the worst one was: she was telling the truth. Someone she knew personally was plotting to hurt the President, and had used her to divert the best shot in the Secret Service.
The possibility that she had spoken the truth sickened him, and automatically made him thrust his foot harder against the gas pedal as his car rattled and shook out of another turn. My God, he thought, in five minutes it could happen, be happening, whatever it was, and he, Otto Beggs, Medal of Honor winner, Secret Service bodyguard, would not only be absent, derelict in his duty, unable to protect the President’s life, but would have innocently collaborated, in a way, with those who would be harming the President.
For a second he was tempted to skid to a halt, run to a telephone, and, since he could not admit he was calling, place an anonymous call. Then he knew that time had run out for that. There were always so many crank calls, and they were sifted and checked, and before his could be treated seriously, the five-minute leeway, less now, would be gone. Besides, even if there was time, supposing the President had been delayed in his office, Beggs knew that he would be no good at disguising his voice. He was no actor (the word actor was associated in his mind immediately with John Wilkes Booth, to whom he was uncomfortably close in infamy this moment), and it was no use. He kept the Rambler speedometer at fifty-five miles per hour.
The possibility of a real assault on the President, even an assassination attempt, grew on him, refused to go away, and became a firm conviction. These were bad, unsettled times. In Beggs’s experience, he had never known so many people to speak out viciously-not chidingly or satirically or with irritation, but viciously-against a Chief Executive of the land. Perhaps in no rooms of the 132 rooms in the White House was this savagery felt, or known, as thoroughly as in the rooms occupied by the Secret Service. Never in its history had the Protective Research Section of the Secret Service been so overworked. Since President Dilman had outlawed the Turnerites, since he had vetoed the minorities bill, there was evidence that eight out of every ten Americans were against him, and half of the threatening and obscene letters that had poured in recently, and had been referred to the Protective Section, were still unread, a mounting pile of anonymous letters to be analyzed and broken down by geography, writing habits, vocabulary tricks, so that the potential killers could be identified and observed or apprehended.
Whenever Chief Gaynor thought that his agents were becoming complacent and sloppy about routine, he made them read a sampling of the letters. Most, he would admit, were harmless, penned by ordinarily rational citizens letting off steam. But some, he would remind them, came from paranoid personalities, with little hold on reality, with obsessive beliefs that with one tug of a trigger they could right the wrong and save the nation. These were the ones, they existed. Oh, they existed, yes. Remember them, Gaynor would warn, remember Richard Lawrence, John Wilkes Booth, Charles J. Guiteau, Leon F. Czolgosz, John Schrank, Giuseppe Zangara, Oscar Collazo, Griselio Torresola, even the puzzling Lee Harvey Oswald-remember them and do not be deceived by the preponderance of foreign names. Enough of them were Americans, Gaynor would say, Americans who read the papers, went to amusement parks, shopped for groceries, celebrated holidays, saved their money, ate their meals, voted at election time, slept and woke, and walked crowded city streets, and carried instruments of destruction to bring great men down to their size and to their feet, to settle grievances. They existed. They acted. Expect the unexpected, Gaynor would say, never go slack, be ready and prepared for suddenness.
Otto Beggs saw the White House across the street. He screeched around a car, slowing for the red light on Pennsylvania Avenue, roared across the thoroughfare, and braked as he entered the Northwest Gate.
He began to show his pass, but a grinning White House policeman waved him through. “Hi, Otto. How come the VIP entrance? You being decorated again?”
“Yeh, decorated!” he shouted back. Yeh, with thirty pieces of silver, he thought.
He rode up the driveway, jerkily parked, came out of the car fast. He realized that he was still tieless, and that would draw attention, but there was no time to put on the necktie stuffed in his pocket. He must make haste without causing a commotion, without letting himself be waylaid by press or colleagues. He must get where he was going quickly, yet without creating panic, lest he be exposed for a fool over a false alarm.
Striding to the West Wing lobby, he glanced at his watch. If the timepiece was correct, it was five thirty-two.
As ever, at this hour, the press foyer with its three telephone booths was teeming with reporters. He shoved past them, ignoring their curiosity at his disheveled appearance. He swallowed the last of his peppermints, hurried into the Reading Room, keeping his back to the Secret Service offices to the right, curtly acknowledging the greeting of the blue-uniformed policeman at the desk to the left. He swung off, past the reporters lolling about on their leather sofas and chairs, past Tim Flannery’s office, and into the corridor with its black-and-white checkered floor.
Alone at last, now unobserved, he ran heavily past the Cabinet Room door and Miss Foster’s door, until he reached the open corridor entrance, with a chain across it, leading into the President’s Oval Office, where Agent Winkler stood guard.
“Hey, Otto,” the agent called out, “where you been?”
“I got a special message for the President. Where is he?” He poked his head into the office. It was empty.
“Left five seconds ago for upstairs.”
Beggs unfastened the chain with one hand as he unbuttoned his coat with the other. “Got to see him, important message,” he said, flipping the end of the chain to his colleague.
Moving swiftly, for his size, Beggs bounded across the President’s office toward the one French door that was still open to the Rose Garden.
Outside, heart hammering, he halted, and in the gloomy dusk of late afternoon scanned the L-shaped colonnaded terrace walk that led from the West Wing offices, past the indoor swimming pool, to the ground-floor entrance into the White House proper. He did not see them at first, and then, at once, he did, as they emerged from behind a white pillar. They were close together as they moved ahead, first President Dilman, then the new young fellow, Agent Ross, a short man, shorter than the President, a half stride behind.
The scene was peaceful and serene, the activity as familiar and routine as every five-thirty stroll he himself had enacted with Dilman in the last two months. Nothing unusual, nothing unexpected, nothing sudden.
False alarm, thank God, Beggs reassured himself, sagging with relief. His pleasure was mitigated only by the anger he had hoarded against that bitch of a colored girl, who had put him through a quarter of an hour of hell simply to be rid of him.
About to turn back into the office, he saw that the President had stopped to point out something concerning the barren hedges that separated the cement walk from the historic garden.
Automatically Otto Beggs’s trained eyes examined the leafless hedges, then lifted to inspect the White House Rotunda and Truman Balcony across the way, then lowered to study the bushy Andrew Jackson magnolia tree, then casually took in the depleted flower beds, the group of empty metal patio chairs around the outdoor table, the busy gardener in olive-drab overalls on his knees digging a hole with his trowel for a new plant, the rectangle of the Rose Garden itself off to the right, the-and then it came to him-the unusual and unexpected.
Beggs’s neck stiffened. His gaze shifted back to the gardener, the gardener in olive-drab overalls, their color almost blending him and losing him against the magnolia tree. The gardener straightened, stood up, rubbing his back, then reached down to pick up his plant, and slowly began working his way from the magnolia tree, unobtrusively, diagonally, across the carpet of lawn toward the spot where the President and Ross still stood, absorbed in their horticultural conversation.
As if propelled by instinct, Beggs stealthily moved to his left across the cement walk, toward the corner turn, toward the ramp leading down to where the President and Ross were talking. Beggs’s narrowed eyes never left the gardener. From eighty feet, he could not make out the laborer clearly, except to see that he was a squat, husky Negro carrying a plant, to all outward appearances absorbed in his work, going toward the chrysanthemum bed and naked hedges and white colonnades.
An innocent and customary pastoral scene, a prosaic scene to be observed daily from his post outside the President’s office, the gardeners, their plants, their tools, something that went on in the daylight and sun of repeated mornings and afternoons. But-Beggs’s mind wondered, as he moved: oddity one, an unfamiliar Negro gardener, he could not remember a Negro, the opposite in build of this husky person, yet Dilman, being Negro, could certainly have hired another recently; oddity two, a gardener at work in the dusk, scant minutes before night, a gardener alone when all the regulars had gone home, a gardener planting at an hour when planting was never done, impossible.
Beggs had arrived, unseen, at the corner colonnade that now separated the two on the walk from himself. Straight ahead of Beggs, Dilman and Ross were still talking, Dilman listening to the new Secret Service agent, and the new agent, his back to the garden, unaware that there was anyone else nearby. And even if Ross should turn, and the walk to the ground floor be resumed, the agent was too unfamiliar with the personnel and routine to realize that this was an unknown gardener who was engaged in planting at an unlikely hour. There they conversed, the unsuspecting pair, there straight ahead, to the left of the corner colonnade. And to the right of the colonnade, at the center of the garden, fifty feet away, the Negro gardener had strangely halted, put down his plant, was reaching inside his overalls.
Overcautious or not, Beggs had a pattern he must follow, one spurred by a foolish warning from a colored chippy and reinforced by a suspicion born of the unusual.
He started down the ramp, then called out, “Hey, Ross! Ross!”
President Dilman looked up, startled, as the new agent started to whirl around.
Beggs cupped his hand to his mouth. “That gardener behind you-check him. Who is he?”
Neither Ross nor the President had been listening when he began to give his order, and now as if by reflex action, to Beggs’s petrified amazement, the new agent quickly left Dilman and started toward Beggs, head cocked, one finger tipping his ear forward.
For a split second, Beggs was too horrified to speak. It was understandable, that reflex to catch more distinctly what had been called out, to draw nearer, but it was a lapse that broke the cardinal rule of Presidential protection. By his action, Ross had left Dilman momentarily alone and unguarded.
“What?” Ross called back, as he came toward Beggs. “What is it?”
Infuriated by a freshman’s stupidity, Beggs sprinted down the sharp decline, shaking his fist. “Dammit, you’re not supposed to leave the President! I told you to check on-” And then, as he was almost upon Ross, the corner of his eye caught the flash of motion, the suddenness of motion.
The Negro gardener had yanked some object from inside his overalls, and at once, from an easygoing planter he had become transformed into a purposeful aggressor, springing forward, dashing across the remaining lawn and flower bed, rapidly closing the distance that separated him from the President.
Beggs’s response was instantaneous, as swift, as positive, as mindless as it had been that memorable frozen night in Korea. Beggs clutched Ross by the shoulder, forcibly flung him aside, sent him pancaking against the wall.
As his free hand plunged to his holster, whipping out his revolver, Beggs stumbled, recovered his balance, and then he raced down the walk toward the President. Ahead, Dilman, hand massaging his forehead in bewilderment, remained inert, as if hypnotized by Beggs’s incredible action. To the right, converging on the President as he himself was, Beggs could make out the Negro gardener running, slipping on the wet grass but retaining his footing and bounding toward the President. The object in his fist, shockingly vivid now, was a Luger that seemed to grow monstrously large.
“Down! Drop down!” Beggs screamed at Dilman.
The President’s head spun from the charging Beggs to the sound of the running on his left. As he saw the looming black figure with its weapon, unmistakably an assailant waving a gun, hurtling from the lawn across the flower bed in order to take dead aim in the near-darkness, Dilman’s strangled throat cried out, “No!” and his arms went up to cover his face.
“Down!” Beggs roared again.
Rooted by fear, Dilman turned only his head and torso from the attack, helpless and a perfect target. Beggs was fifteen feet away when the burly assassin landed in the flower bed, pointing his Luger, sinking in the soft turned soil just as he pulled the trigger.
The explosion, so near, was like a clap of thunder against Beggs’s eardrums. He could see the erratic, tilted shot go high, ripping the cement and plaster above the President’s head.
In a frozen moment, imprinted on Beggs’s mind, there was the tableau of their coming together-murderer, victim, protector. Frozen, and insanely joyous, the white eyes and gold and white teeth of the matted dark Halloween head, over the hedge. Frozen, as unready and incredulous as a defenseless yearling about to go down, the wide, red-flecked eyes of the President, the lifted and ineffectual arms of the President with the sleeves too short and ridiculous. Frozen, Beggs himself, the length of a man’s length away, the length of mortality, his one leg high, high off the walk, his other driven against the cement, his catapult, the Corvallis Beggs, the Korea Beggs, the has-been who would-never-be, the faded physique glued and pressed into the scrapbook page.
The frozen moment heaved and blew sky-high, as the eruption and detonation came simultaneously.
Beggs erupted, vaulted into the air, knees and legs smashing the President’s chest. The assassin’s pistol, at the end of his wavering arm, the barrel an accusing and avenging metallic finger, came over the hedge and discharged its point-blank, vehement, deafening blast.
For an infinity, Beggs felt himself being lifted higher and higher by the blast, and then he was plummeting downward, legless, as if the folding body beneath him were his lower limbs. He heard Dilman groan as they crashed to the cement walk, Dilman beneath and doubled over, and himself atop Dilman.
Trying to rise, Beggs teetered on the rim of a deep invisible canyon, swaying, knowing he must fall. It was all feeling now, feeling and nerve ends, feeling the moist blood on Dilman’s cheekbone, the soaked blood that had pasted his own trousers to his own leg, feeling the security of the metal in the grip of his right palm.
The reverberations from the assassin’s blast still pounded inside his head. He came around on his side, lightning-fast, trying not to expose the President. He came around as the assassin above shook his gun, raised it unsteadily, as if unsure that he had killed the President and determined to try again, determined to find an opening. All this in the shaving of a second. As the other’s gun came up, steadying itself, Beggs’s wrist snapped the revolver in his palm upward. His proud Medal of Honor reflex. His forefinger tugged the trigger as immediately and gently as once it had pulled the thumb from his infant son’s mouth. The response, the report from his revolver, was as quiet and as firm as his finger’s reproof. There was a muffled metallic cough, a swooshing, humming sound.
He was not surprised to see the assassin’s black face let go its venom, open and broaden in wonder. He was not surprised to see the assassin’s fingers fan outward, like those of a mechanical doll, until the Luger was released and clattered to the cement walk. He was not surprised to see the person above touch both hands to his chest, as if to open the overalls at the reddening stain, and then drop his chin, and then gradually surrender life, and then fold downward and downward into a lumpy heap behind the stark branches of the hedge.
Beggs turned his head at the footsteps, so many hurrying footsteps. Sluggishly, with disinterest, he watched them coming from everywhere, from everywhere, it seemed, from the guardhouse, the Oval Office, the entrance above the ramp, and probably from the ground floor behind him. His vision was poor. There were police, Ross and Prentiss and a half-dozen others of Gaynor’s boys, Miss Foster, Flannery, Talley, countless more.
He heard the babel of voices, the shouts, the yelling, the commands.
“Get the physician-get Oates-right through there, around the corner!”
“Move Beggs-move him-lift him off!”
“The President-is he dead?”
It was pleasant for Beggs, all the hands, all the attention. He found himself on a blanket, on his back, staring up at blurred faces and the overhang above them.
From a distance he heard Ross’s voice. “-the gardener fired, missed, then Beggs jumped on the President and bowled him over as the colored guy fired again. Then Beggs rolled over and just shot him dead… The body’s over there, Chief-”
He thought that he heard Admiral Oates’s voice nearby. “Mr. President-Mr. President-” Then silence. “He’s alive-I don’t think he’s been touched-the blood’s not his-here, nurse, give me the spirits of ammonia-Mr. President, there now, that’s better-”
Then he heard President Dilman, weak but irritable. “I’m all right. Leave me alone. Beggs, he took the shot instead of me. Get over there and help him.”
Beggs opened his eyes. What was wrong with them? Nothing was distinct. Admiral Oates’s face floated into his vision, a face less grouchy because it was not clear. He was saying, “Easy, Mr. Beggs, let me have a look-oh yes, yes-see here, it’s his right leg-really chewed up-Miss Foster! Get an ambulance to take him to Walter Reed Hospital at once! Beggs, do you feel any pain? No, I suppose not. Shock. I’ll give you a shot-”
He felt the sting of the needle and its extraction, but no pain; then he was diverted by Chief Gaynor’s voice behind him somewhere. “Mr. President-you all right, sir? Just wanted to tell you the assassin’s cold dead. Beggs got him with one shot straight through the chest. His wallet here-Burleigh L. Thomas, twenty-eight-truck driver’s license-the clippings-Turnerite stuff-that’s it, I’m sure… This, this is the regular map of the guided tour through the White House. You can see the line he drew in red ink. See? Followed the ground-floor tour upstairs, then into the State Dining Room, and when the others went on to the Red Room, he must have hung behind, slipped into the Family Dining Room-something we’ve always been afraid of-hid out then, apparently had the overalls inside his suit coat or jacket, changed, picked up two plants-Hawkins says he saw a colored man carrying plants downstairs around three-thirty-he must have kept himself busy but out of sight until the regular gardeners left-then kind of blended himself with the magnolia, puttered around, waiting for you… What? No, Mr. Flannery, not yet, give us a chance to cover the grounds. We’ll have something definite for the press in the morning. Just tell them the attempt was made, the President is fine, just fine, and the assailant was shot dead.”
Beggs heard Dilman’s voice, shaky but loud. “Tim, you see that Otto Beggs gets all the credit-you hear? All the credit. Admiral, I want him to receive every bit of care available to-”
Someone was shouting, “That’s spelled B-u-r-l-e-i-g-h, yeh, Burleigh, Burleigh Thomas.”
Miss Foster’s voice, he thought, distinct but so far off. “The ambulance is on its way, Admiral! How is poor Mr. Beggs? Will he-?”
He heard Oates’s distant voice. “He’s a brave man. Thank God for men like that.”
He felt soothed, no pain, too tired and sleepy to listen.
He thought: You hear that, Gertrude? You hear that, Otis, Ogden? Brave man.
He thought: You’re right, Ruby, your Otter here is impo’tant. Brave man.
He thought: Ruby Thomas, Burleigh Thomas. Fair enough, Ruby, all square.
He thought: Am I dying? To save a nigger? Dirty, lousy trick, goddam.
He thought: History books’ll say a President, he saved a President. Not bad, not bad, eh, Gertie girl?
He thought: Dear God, be merciful to me a sinner… dear Lord Jesus, see this, greater love hath no man than this… dear Saviour, cast me not into darkness… lemme live, please lemme live to fill the scrapbook, please, thank you, amen.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Office of the White House Press Secretary
THE WHITE HOUSE
ADMIRAL OATES, PERSONAL PHYSICIAN TO THE PRESIDENT, ANNOUNCED TODAY THAT, EXCEPT FOR SEVERAL HEAD BRUISES AND A GENERAL CONDITION OF FATIGUE, THE PRESIDENT IS IN EXCELLENT HEALTH, FOLLOWING YESTERDAY’S ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT. ALL OF THE PRESIDENT’S APPOINTMENTS HAVE BEEN CANCELED, AND HE HAS BEEN CONFINED TO HIS ROOMS FOR “A MUCH-NEEDED REST.” HE WILL ATTEND THE CHANTILLY CONFERENCE IN FRANCE AS SCHEDULED.
ADMIRAL OATES ALSO ANNOUNCED THAT OTTO BEGGS, WHITE HOUSE SECRET SERVICE AGENT WHOSE ACTION SAVED THE PRESIDENT’S LIFE, REMAINS ON THE “CRITICAL” LIST AT WALTER REED GENERAL HOSPITAL. DECISION WILL BE MADE IN NEXT FORTY-EIGHT HOURS WHETHER BEGGS’S INJURED LEG CAN BE SAVED OR WHETHER AMPUTATION WILL BE NECESSARY.
COMPLETE TEXT OF ADMIRAL OATES’S MEDICAL BULLETINS ONE AND TWO ARE ATTACHED.
EDNA FOSTER sat alone in a shadowy recess of the faintly lighted Promenade Lounge of the Mayflower Hotel. She was the small and elegant room’s single occupant in this pre-cocktail hour, lost in thought as she prepared to finish her third vodka Gibson.
She was to have met George Murdock here, their favorite secluded and somewhat-beyond-their-means meeting place when either of them needed a lift, at a quarter to six. Normally she would have finished her day’s work, and taken a taxi up Connecticut Avenue, and arrived here nearly on time, to find George waiting.
However, today had been anything but normal. Because the President had been indisposed, suffering acute hypertension (if the truth were known) induced by the horror of last night, and was confined to his quarters, Edna’s work load had diminished and her workday had been curtailed. Dilman’s usual engagements had been shunted off to the occupants of other offices, and her own duties had been distributed to other White House secretaries. By four-thirty in the afternoon her desk had been clean. She had telephoned the second floor, and the President had insisted that she close shop and go home early. She had found it too late to go to the apartment first, before meeting George, and too early to time her arrival at the lounge with his own. She had decided to go by foot, by some roundabout route, to the Mayflower, to use up the extra time. Once outside, she had found the air too nippy, the sky too bleak, for her thin skin and frayed nerves, and she had immediately altered her plan. She had known, then, what she wanted. Alone or not, she wanted to be drunk.
Now, forty-five minutes later, her little finger excessively crooked as she downed the last of her third Gibson, she was warm and resolute and nicely drunk.
A waiter in a red jacket, a servant gray and smooth as an old British family retainer, glided in from the adjacent Presidential Room, hovered a moment, then came forward and removed her long-stemmed cocktail glass.
“Another, ma’am?”
She was tempted, but then she might forget what she had so carefully rehearsed for George. “I think I’ll wait, if you don’t mind. I’m expecting a friend.”
After the waiter had gone, she took out her compact to prepare for her friend. She peered into the mirror with distaste. That’s what came of buying cheap compacts with cheap mirrors, she told herself. The cheap reflecting glass was always grainy, always gave you lines you did not deserve. But then, she was too inebriated for deceit. It was a good compact, the best she had ever owned, the gift of her generous aunt in Madison. The looking glass was flawless. The lines belonged to her, fact, no argument, and for those new creases engraved on her forehead, under her eyes, around her mouth, she blamed not time but her employer.
A person did not age that much in a couple of months, any scientist would tell you that, except if there was a reason, like the way you read of some person’s hair turning white overnight because of what they’d been through. She had her reason, and his initials were Douglass Dilman. If you were not inhuman, if you had half a heart, if you empathized with even a dumb animal, you had to suffer while being around that colored President eight to ten hours a day. It was like, as if, Dilman was William Tell’s son and she had to hold the wormy apple on his head, and all the Gesslers, or whatever their names, were shooting arrows to knock the apple off-we-ll, nobody was really aiming for the apple, everybody was aiming for him, President Tell, and lots of them missed and naturally hit her, because she was there holding the apple. Like perfect example last night. That Thomas brute-murderer with his surplus-sales gun. Bang. Bang. Bang. Missed Dilman. Hit Beggs. Hit her. Poor Dilman, vomiting afterwards. How must it feel always going around with an apple on your head? Poor Beggs, too. For that salary. She must remember to send over those foreign stamps to his boys. Most of all, poor Edna, she herself, personal secretary to a target, getting hit so often that the compact mirror finally showed it.
She wondered why three drinks had not made her drunk. She knew. They made profits serving domestic vodka, which was as potent as bottled water. At those prices, yet. What a gyp!
There was the cheap grainy mirror, still. She powdered her forehead, nose, chin, then combed her messy brown hair, then tried to give herself lips, then gave up, closed the compact and put it away.
She lifted her head and there was George, talking to the waiter. He was neat as always, but had grown shorter-was it possible? Yes, because maybe he had worn out his shoe lifts. He stooped and kissed her caked forehead, and squeezed her hand, and sat across from her, pushing the table lamp aside.
“Have you been here long, honey?” he wanted to know.
“George,” she said, “I’m quitting.” She hiccuped. “I’m quitting next week after I come back from Paris.”
Poor George looked not stricken exactly, but sort of moody. “Edna, we’ve been through this two times already-”
“And three times is out. The President can call me out.”
George Murdock, possessing the impatient air of one who had wanted to speak about himself but had first politely inquired how-are-you, and then had had to listen to his companion at length, said, “What is it now, Edna?”
“Don’t you read the papers, George? Huh? Last night. Most secretaries put the cover on their typewriters, lock the files, wash out the coffee cup and go home like anybody. Me, I have to be scared out of my wits, right outside my office, the President lying there, Otto Beggs half dead, that-that Thomas completely dead, a corpse. They never taught me that was part of it in secretarial school. I couldn’t sleep most of the night, George. I took three sodium butisols and had ten nightmares. That’s why I look so haggard.”
He reached out and touched her hand. “No matter how you feel, honey, you look great.”
“Thank you, George, but I mean it.”
His fingers left her hand, and began pinching his pitted cheeks. She wished that he wouldn’t. He said, “Edna, these things happen. They’ve been happening ever since that Lawrence fellow, the house painter, took a pot shot at President Jackson in 1835, and practically in the same place. That’s part of being President, knowing certain people will be sore at you and some of them are nuts. I’m sure Dilman was not surprised. That Burleigh Thomas was an out-and-out extremist, and he decided Dilman was hindering the Negro cause. So he took matters in his own hands. No one approved of it. Even the anti-Dilman press was dismayed.”
“Hypocrites, the papers, George. Forgive me. Next week they’ll resume their hate campaign and inflame some other assassin. No, George, this time I mean it. Don’t try to stop me. The first time, I wanted to resign because I missed T. C. and didn’t see how I could work for a stranger. Last time, I was just getting too sorry for Dilman, sickened by the hate he was suffering from. This time it’s different. He’s in danger, and so is everyone around him, and I’m scared.”
“Well-” said Murdock. He shrugged, then sat back, resigned and waiting, as the waiter served the Gibson and the Scotch-and-soda.
They both took their drinks and sipped them, and then, worrying about his displeasure, she said, “Don’t be mad at me, George.”
“I’m not mad at you,” he said curtly. “I’m mad at myself.”
She was too befogged to understand him. She said, “Why do you want me staying on that miserable old job? It’s not as if I’ve been able to be of any help to you, like a real girl friend should. Each time I want to give you a tip, without hurting security, I choke up, because I know so much, too much. I’m a detriment to you, that’s what. You see, you’ll be better off when I’m somewhere else. Pa called from Milwaukee this morning. Can you imagine? First time in all this time. Even he wanted me to quit.”
“I’m not saying you should stay on, Edna.” He drank, coughed, put down the Scotch. “I was just trying to buy a little time for us. If I thought you were in danger, I’d bodily remove you from that office, you believe me.”
She felt comforted, but determined. “Thank you, George. I-I just don’t think you can see the position I’m in like any ordinary person would. You’re a newspaperman, and it’s natural for you to-to look on what happened like a story-like part of a play that isn’t real-but if you’d been in the garden last night, not as a reporter-”
“Edna,” he said.
The quavering urgency in his tone made her stop. “What?”
“Edna, I’m not a newspaperman or reporter any longer. I’m unemployed. I haven’t had a chance to tell you.”
Her concern with herself, tied to her dream of their future, popped like a pricked balloon and disappeared into thin air. She stared at him. “Oh, George.” Her hands went to his sleeve. “No,” she said. “Did they fire you?”
He clutched to self-esteem as firmly as he now held his highball glass. “Not exactly, although it might look that way.” Involuntarily, his thin nostrils quivered. “Tri-State lost another of my papers. That brought me down to eight, and the low-paying ones at that. Weidner called and said carrying the column was a losing proposition-like hell it is, but that’s what he said-and unless I wanted to continue on a so-much-per-published-inch rate, making me virtually a stringer, he was taking on one of the more established names. So I told him, in effect, not on your life, you skinflint. I was even a little abusive about his ingratitude.”
“Good for you, George.”
“Then he backed down a bit and said-” Murdock hesitated. “Aw, what’s the use. Let’s have another round. I can use it.” He held up his glass, called the order, and finished his drink.
“What do you mean, he backed down?” Edna asked. In her heart she knew what was coming and wanted to run away from it, but this was too important, her whole life in the balance.
“You won’t like it, so never-”
“Please, George.”
“He said, ‘Of course, there’s still that so-called friend of yours right on the inside. If she’d become a source for you, one like all the name columnists have, and you’d promise to deliver a couple of whoppers in the next few weeks, we’d reconsider.’ I said, ‘Not on your life, Weidner, I don’t mix business with my personal life,’ and so I quit, two days ago I quit.”
Edna had been holding her breath. She let it go in a gasp. “George, why didn’t you tell him yes? Really, if I had known this before-how serious-George, I can help without hurting the President or my job. After all, what can hurt him or me any more? Look, George, maybe I can tell you some real exclusive things nobody has about the assassination attempt, or when we go to Chantilly and Versailles, maybe I can see if-”
“You’re sweet, darling. No use, now. I wouldn’t know what to do with the copy. I told you I quit. I’m out of work. I don’t have a column.” He considered her. “Don’t look so-so tragic, Edna. You can take the newspaper away from a boy, but you can’t take a boy away from the newspaper. I’ve got my lines out. There are some big people who think more of me than that crumb-bum hayseed in the Midwest does. You yourself heard Reb Blaser tell me how much his publisher thinks of my writing.”
“You wouldn’t work for them?”
“I’d work any place where I could be independent and write as I please. That includes the Miller chain or any other. What the hell, Edna. I’d rather be reporting for a reactionary paper where I can get a chance to give them a breath of fresh air, proselytize, than a paper whose readers believe what I believe and know what I know.”
As ever, George’s infallible logic subdued Edna. “You’re right, I guess,” she said.
The fresh drinks came. They drank in silence. It was wonderful, she thought, despite all this, how positive and clearheaded she felt.
“Let’s enjoy ourselves,” George Murdock was saying. “Rome hasn’t burned yet. Leave it to your Georgie. I’ll find another spot.”
“And I’ll help you!” she cried out. “This time I will, I promise. It’s only right. This time, every evening, I’ll tell you what I can about what goes on in the President’s office.”
“Edna, I repeat, no need for that. Besides, you’re quitting, too, next week. Did you forget?”
“Oh,” she said, and slumped. “That’s right.”
He kept looking at her, until she was uneasy, and then he kept looking at the Scotch, and then he said quietly, “Edna, when big things happen to you, your life sort of changes-know what I mean? You’re forced to take stock-and that’s what I’ve been doing myself these last two days, taking stock. I have a better picture of myself. I’ve been too conservative, not taking any chances, and to get anything out of life you’ve got to-well-stick your chin out and say to yourself and everybody, I’m me, I’m somebody, I deserve more out of life, out of my career and out of life, and I’m going out and get my share of life, no matter what. Know what I mean?”
Her mind had gone blank, but she said dutifully, “Yes, George.”
“I’m making a fresh start from tonight on. That’s what I decided. Like the next job. No more looking for anything second-rate. I’m shooting straight for the top. And like us, the two of us, no more waiting for the big doubloons at the end of the rainbow. Live for today, that’s all there is to be sure of, and if you have to make good, somehow you make it, and meanwhile you’re getting something out of life. Do you understand, honey?”
“Yes, George.”
“No, you don’t,” he said, “or you wouldn’t be sitting there like you’re miserable.” He put aside his drink and leaned across the table. “Edna, I’ve denied myself long enough. I want to start over again from scratch. Maybe it’s the wrong time, both of us going to be out of work, but maybe it’s the best time to start living. Edna, the minute you come back from France, let’s get married.”
She had not quite heard him, with her mind wallowing in self-pity, with the Gibson in front of her face, and she had been about to say “Yes, George” when comprehension forced its way into her stultified brain. “What? What did you say? I’m sorry, I-I’ve been drinking.”
He was smiling. “I said, darling, let’s get married. Forgive me for keeping you waiting this long, but if I’m going to be big, think big, I’ve got to show I can live big like-”
“Married?” She was about to weep. Could it be? Could it possibly be? “George-I-I think I’m going to die-you said-darling, you want to marry me?”
He continued to smile. “Nobody else, if you’ll have me. The minute you return-”
“Oh, George, I’m coming apart-come here, don’t let me cry-I’m so excited, I’ve never been happier-to think-George, kiss me-”
Nervously he glanced around the cocktail room, confirmed that they were still alone, and quickly he picked the chair up under him and moved it around the table beside her. She was sniffling as she accepted his kiss.
“I haven’t heard you say yes,” he murmured.
“Yes-yes-yes-a million times yes.” She had his shoulders, held him off, searched his face. “George, you mean it? I’m tight now-I don’t want to wake up in the morning and find out I was dreaming-we’re going to be married?”
“I’ll pin a note on you to remind you and to tell everyone else, ‘No Trespassing.’ ” He saw the waiter appear in the inner door. “Hey,” he called out, “two more of the same!”
“Oh, George, I’ve had enough to drink. I don’t need-”
“You haven’t had a drink as Mrs. Murdock-to-be.”
She enclosed both his narrow hands in her own, and snuggled against the wondrous safety of him. “When, darling, when will we do it?”
“Just as I said, right after you return from France. Of course, you’ll want to give Dilman a week or two’s notice-I mean, you owe him that much. It’s not easy for a President of the United States to replace his personal secretary. Then we can marry. We’ll work out exactly where and how, and I have a few bucks to tide us over while we’re both looking for jobs-actually, maybe you won’t have to work any more, if I can find something fast, something good-”
He had become solemn again, and she squeezed his hands and said, “Darling, don’t look so worried. I don’t want to start off with me being a burden. I want to quit that job, but it doesn’t have to be right away. Of course, I’ll stay on until you’re set. It’s the least I can do.” She kissed his cheek. “In fact, I’ll insist upon it.”
She parted from him, sat back in a ladylike way, as the celebrating round of drinks was served. Her eyes made out two Gibsons-two and a half-two waiters, two Georges; and the room reeled. She had never been so excited, so happy, so floaty, so lucid in her head, and, after the waiter discreetly left the lounge, so much at one with another person. He was no longer a separate being, a desirable object, a goal, an idea. He was her own, and she was his own, and the merging was miraculous.
After they toasted, she had no notion if she made sense, but she bubbled over and talked and talked about her life and hopes, and their life and future, and what she would do for him and what it would be like, the most perfect marriage in history.
How long she went on she did not know, except her first drink as Mrs. Murdock-to-be was drained, and she was being very serious now, practical, to show him he had not been mistaken because she was practical and would make his life an eternal Christmas.
She knew that her tongue was thick, but she knew also that on this memorable evening he must be reassured that he had not made a mistake.
“I’ll make it better than any marriage there’s been on earth, George, no bickering like my folks, or bossing around like my girl friend, Dorothy, did, no unfaithfulness from either of us like the people we know about here-the Arthur Eatons-that kind. You won’t want to chase, George, because you’ll have no need to. I’ll keep a beautiful house, and raise the best-mannered, smartest children, and give you interesting meals, and help you with your work, and charm your friends so you’ll be proud of me. You’d be surprised what I’m really like, George, how much better I am-better-groomed, and brighter, more fun-like when you first met me-remember? It’s just been worse recently, and you appreciate that, you know why. But once you have the right job, the one that’s perfectly right for you-and there’s no rush, George, I won’t quit until you tell me to-but once you’re settled and happy, then I can give up the White House office. You’ll see how different I’ll be, how relaxed, devoted, better-looking, once I get away from that horrible job and that poor miserable man I’m working for.”
“I’m sure of it, Edna,” he said.
“You can be surer than being sure of being sure of it,” she said grandiloquently. “Once I’m free to devote myself to you, and be with our kind of people, who are happier, as we will be, and not tied down to a friendless, tormented, heartbroken black man, with his black thoughts, who is worrying about being killed, who doesn’t even have a wife to console him because she drank herself to death, whose son is failing in school, whose daughter is passing for white-who is so afflicted with personal problems, nobody would believe it, let alone what he goes through in public where-”
She realized that her beloved George’s cool hand was upon her hand, caressing her hand lovingly, lacing his fingers through hers like they were married and in bed together. “Edna, what are you saying?”
“What am I saying?” she repeated, not remembering.
“About the President having a daughter. You must be mixed up. No more drinks. What if someone overheard you?”
“George, stop teasing. I haven’t been drinking any more than you. I’m very sober. I know everything I’m saying, and I never make up anything, like other wives do. You’ll see. You’ll find out. It’s one of my virtues from my father. You’ll always know your wife says everything true.”
“Everyone knows Dilman has that son in college, but-”
“George, I told you I never, never lie,” she said indignantly. “He has a daughter, too, older than Julian, and it’s a secret because she’s passing for white in New York, so he doesn’t recognize her maybe, or she him, I don’t know which, so that’s why nobody knows, but it’s true.” Through bleary eyes, she decided that he was still unconvinced of her integrity, and this was no way to begin a marriage. “George, he calls her Mindy, so does Julian call her Mindy, except her made-up passing name is Linda. Linda Dawson.”
“I can see where that would make him worried,” said George Murdock sympathetically. “It’s just odd, somebody as black as the President having a daughter hidden somewhere, white enough to pass.”
“Hormones,” she said knowingly. “Or is it genes?” She studied George’s many faces and tried to bring him into focus. “I don’t lie or exaggerate, George-”
“I didn’t say that you did.”
“But maybe you are thinking it-Edna, you are thinking, she is the kind of wife who’ll get drunk and make up stories and embarrass you socially. You said he’s black so how could he have a daughter who could pass? I can prove it, George. I wrote it down word for word in my diary. Did you know I have a diary? I started one the day T. C. moved into the White House. I thought some day-I’m not pretending to be a writer like you-but my job, I thought some day maybe my diary could be history. It isn’t much, but I am a President’s confidential secretary, two Presidents’, and maybe some day when we’re all dead, our children can make a million dollars getting a writer to fix it up. You hear of those things.”
“Very intelligent, Edna. I see I’m going to have an intelligent wife. Just don’t put me in your diary.”
She started to giggle and could hardly stop. “Of course you’re in it, George, but nothing you won’t like. You and T. C. and President Dilman-”
“And Mindy Dilman alias Linda Dawson. Pretty exotic company.” He brought her hand to his lips and kissed it, and released it. “Did Dilman tell you all of that stuff about his family?”
“Heavens, no-George, do you think we can have just one more drink to celebrate, a short one?-Dilman? No, he’s secret as a clam or something, and I don’t blame him, do you? But about the daughter, it came from him, sort of, well-I’m not sneaky, don’t think that-I’m very integrity, full of-you know-I never leak things to you-isn’t that so, George?”
“I’ve never known anyone with as much integrity as you, Edna.”
“Thank you. So you understand. Part of my job is, you know, to monitor his calls, the business ones, like I did for T. C., listening on the extension and taking down the gist of it shorthand so he has a record to refer back to. Standard procedure. So whenever Dilman makes a call, I’ve got to listen, except when it’s something real personal, like when he calls old friends like Nat Abrahams or the Spingers or some woman who lives with them named Gibson or his son, he tells me to get off, and let it be personal and I do. Well, this day he was letting me monitor calls, and maybe he was busy or upset, I don’t know, but he called his son and didn’t tell me-to get off, I mean-maybe he didn’t know or forgot I was on the line-and there it was, the President and his son Julian talking, and when I heard what they were saying to one another, I knew I shouldn’t be hearing it but I was too embarrassed to get off and let him hear the click and then always have him suspicious of me, so I suffered through, it, and when they hung up, I hung up simul-same time-and that’s how I heard the argument about his daughter and her passing, and about her, the daughter, being like her mother, Dilman’s wife, who wanted her to be white like she wanted to be white herself, and because Aldora, Dilman’s wife, couldn’t, she took to drinking-I don’t believe in drinking except socially, do you, George?-until she even became an alcoholic in that sanitarium in Illinois-in Springfield-and died after, except that was a long time ago. Isn’t it all horrible, George, how people let their lives become? Ours won’t, will it? For my part it won’t, I promise you.”
“I promise you, too.”
“I’ll be the best wife ever, George, once I’m away from that horrible atmosphere.”
“You’re the best wife in the world right now, darling. Let’s have one more for the road on that. Okay?”
They drank, and a half hour later they had a hamburger and gallons of hot black coffee-she was determined to give evidence of her wifely frugality-at the counter of the Mayflower Coffee Deck.
After that, they strolled for a long time in the cold, and George bought her a gardenia corsage in some place that was open late and warm inside, and then they walked through Lafayette Square until she felt the cold and began to sober. Then, so thoughtfully, so generously, he hailed a taxicab and took her home, and because it was late and she was wonderfully weary and he was inspired to get up early in the morning and look for the right job, he did not come in, except inside the hall of her apartment. She stayed in his arms, and as they kissed this time, she permitted him to pet her bust as long as he wanted to, because her bust and all of her belonged to him, and it felt good, so good.
When he was ready to go, and she could make out one of him, not two or three, she said, “You meant everything you said tonight, George, didn’t you?”
“Everything, sweetheart.”
“I think I bored you, talking so much, but I was so excited. It’s not every day a girl is proposed to and accepts. I hope I didn’t say anything foolish or-or indiscreet. Did I?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, if I did, it doesn’t matter, because we belong to each other now, no secrets, never, promise? You can trust me with everything and I can trust you. Isn’t that right, George?
“Sweetheart, from now on you’re not Edna Foster and I’m not George Murdock. We are Mr. and Mrs. Murdock, almost, for all intents, and whatever we say to one another, and that goes for both of us, is sacred as pillow talk. Agreed? Agreed.”
“I love you, George. You’ll be famous, I know.”
“That’s not important. I love you too, that’s all that matters. You have a great trip to Paris, and stay away from those seductive Frenchmen-”
“George, silly-”
“-and when you return, I’ll be right here, with the wedding band and a job, a real big job this time. That I can promise you for sure.”
FOR RELEASE AT 9:30 P.M. PARIS TIME
Office of the White House Press Secretary Abroad
THE UNITED STATES EMBASSY, PARIS
COMPLETE TEXT OF PRESIDENT DILMAN’S SPEECH AT APPROXIMATELY 11:00 P.M. TONIGHT CLOSING THE FIVE-DAY CHANTILLY CONFERENCE FOLLOWS. THE PRESIDENT IS DELIVERING THE ADDRESS AT THE CONCLUSION OF THE STATE BANQUET BEING HELD FOR HIM AND FOR PREMIER NIKOLAI KASATKIN OF THE U.S.S.R. BY THE PRESIDENT OF FRANCE IN THE HALL OF MIRRORS OF VERSAILLES PALACE. SIMULTANEOUSLY THE TEXT OF PREMIER KASATKIN’S REPLY WILL BE RELEASED AT THE SOVIET EMBASSY.
IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE BANQUET, PRESIDENT DILMAN WILL RETURN TO PARIS FROM VERSAILLES. HE WILL SPEND THE NIGHT IN HIS SUITE AT THE QUAID’ ORSAY BEFORE FLYING TO WASHINGTON IN THE MORNING.
WHILE THE five-day conference had been successful, the long hours had been strenuous, and Douglass Dilman had intended to return to Paris the moment that he and Premier Kasatkin and the French President had finished their public speeches. But when the formalities in the Hall of Mirrors had ended, and the bewigged, liveried servant had assisted Dilman from his chair, the Russian Premier energetically charged to his side.
“Mr. President,” Kasatkin had said in his guttural yet clearly understandable English, “you do not leave so soon to go to bed, no? In my country, to lie down after much rich food and wine is like lying down in the grave. Always, after feasts, I walk for thirty minutes in the court inside the Kremlin walls. We must enjoy a breath of air together in the magnificent gardens of Versailles, not to observe how tyrants built and lived, but to see that we live in health, now that we are friends and in accord.”
For a moment Dilman’s mind went to the five days of arguments, concessions, bartering in the drafty Grand Château at Chantilly. Although the Soviet Premier had been generally reasonable, his occasional flare-ups of temper had been irritating, as in the instance of his demands for freedom for native Communists in Baraza and other AUP countries. Too, his sporadic sarcasm had been annoying, as when he had chided Dilman and Eaton for finding a Communist bogeyman under every American bed. “You outlaw the Turnerites on the pretext they are using our good Moscow gold to overthrow you,” he had said. “Do you think we are crazy to waste money on your oppressed minorities, to incite them, when they have more anger against their capitalist overlords than we ever had or will have? Bah. When you are in trouble, you try to wriggle out and divert your masses from your own shortcomings by making them see Red, at home or in Africa.” Yet the gibes, the tantrums, had been fewer than Dilman had expected, and after Kasatkin had spoken his pieces for his Presidium and Pravda back home, he had always proved ready to trade. He was not a fanatical crusader, Dilman had guessed early. He was a pragmatist. When he spoke as Communism’s voice, with Lenin’s intelligence, he was perverse. When he spoke for himself, with his own intelligence, he was reasonable.
Now the Russian had extended a friendly and spontaneous invitation to Dilman, and Dilman found the other’s brusque, forthright, roughneck warmth difficult to resist or offend. Yet Dilman was tired. “Well,” Dilman said hesitantly, “I had promised Mr. Illingsworth and Secretary Eaton we’d try to get back at-”
“You promise nothing to the ones who work for you, you owe them nothing,” Kasatkin said with mock severity. “You owe only your proletariat, the working people, your allegiance and health to do good.”
Dilman cast a sickly smile at the Russian leader. “I’m less certain than you that my proletariat-or yours, for that matter-are all so unanimous in worrying about our good health.”
“You speak for yours, I shall speak for mine,” said Premier Kasatkin cheerfully. “Come now, Mr. President, some air, the two of us together, no advisers, no specialists, no petty bureaucrats. Five days we have been surrounded. One night, the last, let us be alone together, a social promenade to cement our continuing good relations. What are thirty minutes in a lifetime, after all? And who knows?” He winked broadly. “Our thirty minutes may mean more to the world than our other accomplishments of a lifetime.”
The Russian seemed so determined to end their meeting on a friendly note that Dilman could deny him no further. “Very well,” he said. “A short walk, then, in the gardens.”
Arthur Eaton had come upon them during the last exchange, and he appeared pained, trying to indicate that he disapproved, but Dilman avoided his eye. Dilman had permitted the Russian to take him by the arm, when Eaton finally protested. “Mr. President, we’re expected to depart-”
Premier Kasatkin brushed his hand toward Eaton as he might brush off a bothersome fly. “You go have some champagne with the other courtiers, Eaton. You keep busy with my pretty secretary with the yellow hair over there-Natasha. She admires you. Give your President and me, two simple men of the streets with bad table manners, a chance to discuss earthier matters alone-like our children, and our hernias. A half hour, Mr. Secretary.”
And now Dilman and Kasatkin were crossing the ancient cobblestone courtyard of the seventeenth-century Palace past the saluting Garde Républicaine, marching through the gate of the iron grillwork fence, preceded and followed at short distances by United States Secret Service men and Soviet KGB agents.
As the two leaders entered the 250-acre gardens, Dilman could see that the autumn season had already stripped the ancient trees of their green foliage. Yet the night was mild, refreshing, and the varicolored gush and spray of the spotlighted fountains lent their walk a festive air.
Dilman indicated a path that led in the direction of the Trianons, and the Russian Premier nodded and turned off with him, while the bodyguards ahead scampered back into line. Out of the corner of his eye Dilman glanced once again, as he had so many times in the past five days, at his Soviet counterpart and marveled at the familiarity of his face. What there was about Kasatkin, he had realized from the moment of their first handshake in the Grand Château at Chantilly, what there was that had partially disarmed and captivated Dilman, was the Russian leader’s uncanny resemblance to old Grandpa Schneider.
In the pantheon of Dilman’s memory, the brightest eternal flame honored Grandpa Schneider. When Dilman was seven and eight and maybe nine years old, surrounded by squalor, poverty, anger, deprived of all love except that which his mother could find strength and time to spare, the only male affection and guidance that Dilman had known had come from Grandpa Schneider. The old man-although lately Dilman had realized the old man could not have been that old then-had not been a grandpa and his name had not been Schneider. He had been an immigrant Jewish bachelor and a tailor (which, in Yiddish, was schneider), and because, when he was not hunched over the sewing machine or over the steam presser, he sat in a rocker, wearing a shawl and spectacles low on the bridge of his nose as he stitched, he had become Grandpa Schneider to the colored neighborhood and had been as pleased as if he had been crowned.
For Dilman, as a child, that rickety hot tailorshop had been the manor hall of a bountiful prince. Sitting cross-legged at Grandpa Schneider’s feet, while the old man repaired his shirts or patched his knickers or black stockings for free, Dilman would listen big-eyed to anecdotes of a faraway duchy named Bialystok in a kingdom named Poland. From Grandpa Schneider he would receive at no cost, and in equal quantities, Jewish aphorisms, licorice sticks, revised stories from Sholem Aleichem and Tolstoi, cinnamon rolls, and capsule biographies of such intellectuals as Emma Goldman, Lincoln Steffens, Elbert Hubbard, and Arthur Brisbane.
Long years later Dilman had often thought that more than the material deprivation of his youth, the oppression of his race, the goading of his mother, it was the magical goodness and encouragement of that kindly, improbable old tailor that had sent him to books, to schools, to law, to whatever he had become in life. During the hard years much had gone out of Dilman’s memory, or faded into the hinterland of memory, but not Grandpa Schneider. Dilman’s love for the old man was ever there, burning bright.
And that was why, although he had come to the Chantilly Conference tense, prepared to be aggressive, he had been immediately softened by Nikolai Kasatkin, despite the latter’s subsequent bombast. For the faces of the Soviet Premier and the immigrant tailor of cherished memory were almost the same face. Thereafter, Dilman had been unable to be anything but friendly, amiable, and receptive toward Kasatkin, who, himself disarmed, most often responded in kind. If the Chantilly Conference between two of the mammoth powers on earth were a success, and its success one day recorded by learned professors in weighty historical tomes, would there be any mention in any index of “Schneider, Grandpa”? Well, so much for definitive histories, Dilman had thought.
Tonight, observing Premier Kasatkin strutting beside him along the Versailles garden path, Dilman still saw the old tailor’s knobby peasant profile matching the Russian leader’s profile, but he observed more. For all his sixty years, Kasatkin was taller, heavier, more muscular than the one residing in Dilman’s memory. Too, Kasatkin’s silver hair was fuller, his nose more pugged, his bridgework (startling, when he laughed) made of stainless steel and not gold.
Kasatkin had moved his head, caught Dilman’s glance, and smiled. “Yes, you are familiar with this dynastic relic, I see. It is my first visit. Has it changed much since you were here after the Second War?”
Dilman blinked. “How did you know I’d been here before?”
“I have no time for strangers,” Kasatkin said. “I must know of a man before I consent to meet with him.”
“Yes, I came to Versailles, this place, twice, with an attorney friend from Chicago. It was during the liberation period. We were flown over. We were officers, Judge Advocate’s Division of the Army.” He searched off. “As far as I can make out, it hasn’t changed much, though I’m not sure I recognize everything. I knew the way to the Petit Trianon-you know, Louis XV built that little palace for Madame Du Barry, then his son gave it to Marie Antoinette-because my friend, a very learned man, told me a modern-day ghost story about it, which I never forgot. It was one of those things that sticks in your mind.”
Dilman turned toward Kasatkin, as they continued walking. “Have you ever heard about the two lady tourists, English schoolteachers, who came here to do some sightseeing one afternoon in 1901, and about the people they ran into and the objects they saw that did not exist then or now, but did exist over a century before? I mean, those two schoolteachers, walking through the Versailles gardens in 1901, just as we are walking tonight, they somehow walked backward in time and stumbled on Versailles as it had been in 1789.”
Kasatkin was staring at Dilman. “Surely, my friend, you give no belief to that story?”
At once, Dilman felt foolish. Here he was speaking to the hardheaded, materialistic graduate of the Moscow Industrial Academy, the boss of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, the dictator of 280,000,000 people, with whom he had spent nearly a week discussing trade agreements, ballistic missiles, outer space, Baraza, Berlin, India, Brazil, peace and coexistence, and here he was telling him a psychical experience as if it were as real as the issues over which they had debated. Kasatkin must think him mad or drunk or, worse, a moron. Dilman’s instinct was to puncture the tale good-naturedly and change the subject, but his loyalty to Nat Abrahams and to Nat’s intelligence, imagination, curiosity, would not allow such defection. There was nothing to do but go on, commit more of his forces to what had originally been a casual and innocent conversational foray.
“I don’t presume to say whether it’s true or not,” Dilman said. I know only that we are insignificant mortals, not certain of where we came from or where we are going or why we are here. Nor am I certain that all there is of ourselves or the world around us can be comprehended with our five known senses. How can we be sure we know everything?”
Kasatkin’s shrewd eyes twinkled. “We’d better be sure, my friend.” Then he added, chidingly, “Go on, go on with your tall tale. It will give me something to tell my grandchildren when they refuse to sleep. Evidence, my friend-what is the evidence that those school spinsters of yours broke the time barrier and were witnesses to events of the past?”
Rapidly, to get it over with, Dilman went on. “Both those school-teachers-one was named Anne Moberly, the other Jourdain-taught in the city of Oxford. They were intelligent, sober, conservative ladies. When they went on a vacation to France together in 1901, and decided to visit Versailles, they knew next to nothing about Versailles except for the information they had got from the Baedeker they carried with them. During their walk in the gardens, one such as we are making, they came across Frenchmen strangely attired in what appeared to be masquerade costumes. There were officials in green coats and tricornered hats. The Moberly woman thought the scenery unnatural and lifeless, one-dimensional, no breeze, no light and shade, no sense of aliveness. Then, and this is important, they crossed a small, rather rustic bridge over a ravine. And on the lawn, before the Petit Trianon over there, they saw an aristocratic lady in a large straw hat and full skirt, sketching at an easel. Not immediately, but afterward in Paris, they discussed the eerie, haunted quality of their day here, and they decided they had undergone a unique adventure, and secretly they began to research it.”
“A playlet,” said Kasatkin. “Maybe they saw actors in a playlet being put on for them?”
“No, there had been nothing like that. Anyway, they researched for nine years. You know what they found out? There was no ravine and no bridge over it in 1901, even though they had crossed it together. La Motte ’s map of the gardens, done in 1783, did not show the ravine or bridge either. But listen to this-two years after they’d had their adventure-the original map done by Mique, the Queen’s architect, from which La Motte had made an inaccurate copy, was discovered in the chimney of some French house. This original map showed the ravine and bridge that no longer existed. Furthermore, from a portrait done by Wertmuller, and from the journal of the Queen’s dressmaker telling what the Queen wore in the summer of 1789, our two schoolteachers ascertained that the aristocratic lady sketching on the lawn in 1901 was none other than Marie Antoinette herself… There you have it-well, a small part of it-what psychic experts have called the best-authenticated account of Serialism, stumbling backward through time, on record.”
Premier Kasatkin was silent as they tramped over a worn footbridge, and then he said, “Amusing… amusing, Mr. President, especially if one dreams of escaping present-day realities of possible nuclear horror by being transported into the past of 1789.” He made a short gesture toward the mist-clad grounds and trees and Petit Trianon. “The atmosphere invites escape. But it is false, a Potemkin lie to beguile and lull. All that is truth is our nuclear age, our power to destroy one another and life itself. For us, the two of us, we cannot be two old ladies running away into the past, Mr. President. The past is dead. It does not exist today. We have only ourselves and tonight and the future. Our unique adventure is to save, to guarantee, the reality of the future.”
“That is another story,” Dilman said with a smile, “still unwritten.”
“We are writing it,” Kasatkin said flatly. He sniffed the air. “The weather is changing. France can be unhealthy for common men if we are to read its dead past. Come, let us leave the Trianons and return to the present and the future.”
Kasatkin veered left, to a new path that would bring them to their motorcades waiting outside the Palace. The bodyguards, both American and Russian, were hastily doing their turnabouts, falling into position as the two leaders resumed their walk.
It was Premier Kasatkin who was speaking once more. “Mr. President, to be blunt, I like you more than the one who was President before you. The other one, he was a stranger. He came from a life that never knew oppression or want, he was like a sterile machine, and his ministers, such as your Secretary Eaton, were no better.” Kasatkin held up his hand. “Do not protest, do not defend. It is only my way of being complimentary to you. We understand each other because we have both been underdogs, like most of the people on the earth. When I use the word underprivileged, I know your experience makes you define it as I do, and not with the numerals of statistics and reports.”
“That much of what you say is true-” Dilman began.
“I have not spoken everything that is on my mind,” the Russian said. “More than any American President that has come before you, I think you understand my people and myself. You are surrounded by a reactionary clique, an elite class of capitalists, interested in promoting only their white-skinned version of freedom and prosperity. They regard us, as Communists, their enemy, as threats to the privilege and special interests they wallow in like hogs, just as they consider you, as Negroes, their enemy, and will allow you no freedom and no prosperity. Since you suffer, and therefore understand, such selfishness, I feel you and I are better able to-”
Listening, Dilman perceived Kasatkin’s unsubtle strategy. Deftly the Russian was trying to sever Dilman from his American citizenship, leave him as a second-class Negro citizen who would have more in common with the U.S.S.R. than with his own country.
“Premier Kasatkin, let me interrupt you here,” Dilman said. “I am an American who happens to be Negro. I am one person, not two who can be separated. I am more aware than you of inequality and injustice in my country. Nevertheless, progress has been made, is being made. Once our Negroes were slaves. Now they are free men. Once they were kept entirely segregated in certain areas. Now they are not. Once it would have been unthinkable for a colored man to be the Chief Executive of the United States. Now-well, here you see me.”
“Yes, you may think of yourself as an equal of the whites in your own country, but the ruling clique does not think so. I have read the reaction to your speeches and acts. Your life is in peril every second-”
“It was a Negro who tried to kill me,” said Dilman.
“Because he believed you were bending to white masters,” said Kasatkin shrewdly. “American you may be, very well,” he added. “But Negro you are, no matter what you tell me. I have observed it the entire week. What other reason could there be for your passionate interest in that little, unimportant tribal nation in Africa?”
For the first time this evening Dilman was pricked by annoyance. “Are you implying my interest in Baraza stems from my being a Negro rather than an American? If that is what you mean, you are wrong, dead wrong. Baraza chose, by plebiscite, to live under our democratic system rather than yours, and I am committed to see that their wishes are safeguarded and that nothing they have rejected is imposed upon them.”
“Come now, do not tell me they know what is best for them. What is this Baraza, really, truthfully-eighty tribes, fifty languages, primitives, leprosy-ridden and starved. You guarantee them alleged freedom, when they want food. You give them newspapers and radio stations and books and electricity, when they want wheat and livestock. No matter, no matter-as you remark, they will find their own way, decide for themselves, as we in Russia did one October week. All I have been saying is that your former President, as a white American capitalist, saw them for what they were, and saw how they could be used, as a potentially rich pawn for trading and bargaining. You see Baraza as an African American, and your interest is out of proportion to that little country’s worth. But, no matter. I understood this from the start at Chantilly, even admired it, and that was why I did not make a greater argument in our own bargaining. I appreciated the Negro feelings in you as you must appreciate the peasant feelings in me. I said to myself, Nikolai, let him have the good feeling of defending his fellow Negroes in Baraza, as long as he allows me to have the good feeling of defending the open freedom of the impoverished natives there who wish the right to support ideals of socialism. Now we understand each other fully, no?”
Moving through the light and darkness of the gardens of Versailles, Dilman had heard the Russian out with a rising sense of hopelessness. The gulf that separated them, that had almost been closed, now seemed wider than ever. He said, “I am sorry, Premier Kasatkin, but I still am unable to agree with your analysis of me, of my interest in Baraza. It absolutely does not spring from my color-”
“You cannot be unconscious of your color, Mr. President,” Kasatkin cut in. “When you go back to your America, what awaits you? Brutal racial riots on every street corner, fury, dissension. Why? Because you do not and cannot practice the democracy your white salesmen try to sell.”
Dilman had tired of being defensive. “You,” he said, “do you practice what you sell? True communism? The system of social organization in which goods are held in common? The system of Plato and Karl Marx?”
“The system of Karl Marx, yes,” said Premier Kasatkin coolly. And not only goods held in common, but brotherhood, respect-”
“You read our newspapers, but I read yours, too, Premier Kasatkin.” Dilman tried to keep his tone level, reasonable, to save what had been gained these last five days, yet let this mule-headed adversary know that he knew the U.S.S.R. was anything but a utopia. You speak of your brotherhood, your equality, in Russia. You have twenty-three members of your ruling Presidium, yet not one is a Georgian, a Uzbek, a Ukrainian. Not one is a Jew. Why the discrimination? Why the starvation purges? Why the constant treason trials? Why only one political party instead of two or three or many? Why the deposing or killing of those who are anti-Party? Why the persecutions of Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, Beria? Why no kosher shops and the dwindling handful of synagogues for one-fifth of the world’s Jews? Why the growing anti-Semitism? Why the beatings and ridicule of African students from Senegal and Nigeria at Moscow State University? Why those endless rural revolts against fixed prices and gouging taxation? Why the KGB and the MVD secret police? Why half a dozen Hungarys under your fist? Why do thousands flee from East Berlin, from all of your satellite provinces, when they can, if there is so much brotherhood? Why do your masses protest threadbare clothing and several families live cramped in one apartment while members of your entourage wear handsome suits and live in palatial dachas outside Moscow? Is this the comradeship you sell, Premier Kasatkin?”
He halted, winded, and was relieved to hear Kasatkin chuckling. “Good, good,” the Russian was saying, “spoken like a true son of the robber barons. I miscalculated. You feel you have more equality than I thought. Well, my friend, we would have to be here five more days for me to reply to you, and correct you, and I would get nowhere with you, and you would accomplish less with me. Let us forget ideologies, their strengths and weaknesses. Let us concentrate on coexistence in peace. We have glued together much these last days. Let us make it stick.”
“That is all I wish,” said Dilman.
They had arrived at the Palace. Ahead, their counselors and aides, and their French hosts, waited in curious groups beside the fleet of gleaming Citroëns.
Premier Kasatkin halted. “Our last moment alone, Mr. President.” He extended his hand. “We will keep the peace. As for Baraza, you have my pledge, we will not interfere with your people there.”
Dilman took his hand. “I shall reassure Kwame Amboko you will not intefere with his people there.”
Their grips relaxed, their hands parted. As they moved ahead, separating as they walked, Dilman remembered two lady schoolteachers who had once come to Versailles. He envied them their magical escape to the past, where all had already happened and where there could be no terror of the unknown, unlike Kasatkin’s realistic future, where there lurked tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.
Dilman mourned leaving what was behind, as he mourned Grandpa Schneider, who had not been at his side after all, and he said cheerlessly, “All right, Secretary Eaton, let’s head for home. There’s work to do.”