Authors: Irving Wallace
This time the caller was his Senate secretary, Diane Fuller, and because he could hardly hear her and because she was almost inarticulate, he knew that she was among whites. He accepted her congratulations and then learned that she was in Edna Foster’s office in the White House. Diane explained that T. C.’s personal secretary had summoned her to pick up Dilman’s heavy inflow of top-level cables and telegrams, and bring the most important to his apartment, in case he wanted to see the communications early.
As Diane began to recite the names affixed to the cables of felicitations and good wishes—one from the Premier of the U.S.S.R., one from His Holiness the Pope, one from the British Prime Minister, one from the President of France, one from the Secretary General of the United Nations, one from President Amboko of Baraza—Douglass Dilman interrupted her.
“Diane, you leave all that right on Miss Foster’s desk,” he said. “Tell her I’ll be in shortly. As for you, go back to my Senate office and take calls. I’ll be in touch with you later.”
When he had finished with the telephone, a troubling thought plucked at his sensitivity. The President’s personal secretary, the late President’s secretary, had telephoned the Senate Building to get Dilman’s own colored secretary to pick up the messages for him. Why this roundabout, time-wasting maneuver? Why had not Edna Foster simply telephoned him herself or brought the messages to him? That would have been the normal way, and the most efficient. Was it that she had never been to a Negro neighborhood before? Or was he overreacting? Was it simply that she had been T. C.’s secretary, and was not only grief-stricken but uncertain about her future role?
Resolving to stop these convolutions of sensitivity, he pushed himself to his feet. He would get his hat, and do what he knew he was avoiding most. He would allow himself to be deposited at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Before he could leave the dining room, the telephone’s ring caught him. He took up the receiver. This time it was a more distant long-distance operator. She announced a call from Fairview Farm, outside Sioux City, Iowa. She repeated the number she had been given to contact. Did she have the correct number? Dilman assured her that this was the correct number.
Suddenly he inquired, “Who is calling here?”
In a schoolteacherish tone, she spelled out the name of the caller. Dilman could not help smiling. It was The Judge himself, and Dilman was delighted. No one, of course, ever called The Judge by any other name than that, and Dilman, who had been a member of the House when The Judge was the outgoing President of the United States, had known him slightly, and had liked the crusty, outspoken, nearsighted old ex-President enormously. The Judge—he had been a minor municipal justice of the peace long before he had become a veteran of the Senate and an American President—had been given so little chance to become elected in his time that he had campaigned without vacillating on issues, with astonishing candor, without selling himself to any man or bloc (since there was no need to, because his candidacy was considered hopeless). When he had won the Presidency in a landslide, putting two polls and three magazines out of business, The Judge had come to the office as his own man. The mandate to speak as he pleased, as well as the fact that he had reached an age when he did not give a damn about ambition and had no hopes for a second term, had made him one of the most individual, independent, and refreshing Chief Executives in modern times. When he liked a man, he liked him if he was black or white, a member of the Party or the opposition, a brain or a heel, and he said so in short expletives, and his enemies fulminated, and the nation adored him. In the three meetings that The Judge had had with Dilman, once while The Judge was President, twice later at Party conferences, he had made it clear that he liked Dilman as a person. No patronizing Rastus-boy attitude. He liked Dilman and he said so, and Dilman liked anyone who liked him and was flattered.
“Put him on—put him on—” he found himself telling the Iowa operator.
The receiver emitted a sound like that of cylinders misfiring, and suddenly The Judge’s nasal voice could be heard. “Mr. President Dilman, are you there?”
“Yes, Judge, how are—?”
“From one old bastard who’s hung in the public stocks to another about to be pilloried in the same place, I want to wish you well. Doug, I want you to go in there, keep your left up high, chin tucked in, and belt them straight from the shoulders. No matter what you hear, no matter what you see, just remember you’re the boss, you’re not Uncle Tom. You think what you think, speak out what you believe, and when you have to, you give them hell. Remember that, young man. Except for those Confederates who still think old Jeff Davis is President, you got your Party right behind you from this day on. And those that aren’t behind you, you tell me and I’ll whomp them into line. Just calling for me and the Missus to wish you the best on the first day, because you and I and the Missus know you need it.”
He began to cough, and Dilman waited, beaming like an idiot, and when the coughing ceased, Dilman spoke. “Judge, I appreciate this, I do, deeply. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“I’ve not done anything for you yet, young man, so don’t thank me till I do. But I’ll tell you what. Me and the Missus are living out here in the middle of nowhere, like Thoreau at the Pond, and all we got is cows and fresh air and time, and time is what we got the most of. So you listen, young fellow, and you remember, if you ever need me at all, not money but advice or a helping hand—both untaxable and both which we got plenty of out here—you come around to me and we’ll have a farm breakfast and talk, and set you straight, or if you want and I can move my bones, I’ll come up there to you. Remember that. Promise?”
“I won’t forget it, Judge.”
“Just one more thing, Douglass, and it’s a favor.” He paused, and then he said testily, “I don’t give a damn if you turn that White House upside down and inside out, but one thing I don’t want you to do—don’t you dare move my portrait out of the Green Room! Good luck, Mr. President, and God bless you!”
Returning the receiver to its cradle, Dilman chuckled. There were more than decent editorial writers out on the land. There were men like The Judge. The morning appeared brighter.
Again the telephone was ringing. Dilman glanced at his wristwatch. It was a quarter to ten. He picked up the receiver impatiently.
“Yes?”
“Good morning, Mr. President. This is Wayne Talley. I’m in the White House with Secretary of State Eaton. We have some urgent matters—routine, but they have to be settled—to discuss. Are you intending to come over here this morning, or would you prefer that we visit you?”
“I’m on my way to the White House right now,” said Douglass Dilman.
He hung up, and it occurred to him that this might be the last telephone call he would receive on his private unlisted number. He was going to another home with many telephones, connections to every state and to all countries, and his telephone number would be known to everyone in the world.
He started out of the dining room to find his hat, and to leave this Negro house and this Negro community behind him. He would try to live in a new house and a new community that was not meant for a Negro but for a man of all the people, because only such a man could serve as President of the United States—that is, a man who was certain that he was a man, and nothing less.
D
URING
Governor Wayne Talley’s brief conversation with Dilman, Arthur Eaton had sat on one of the two black sofas of the Presidential reception room, the Fish Room it was called after the mammoth sailfish that T. C. had had mounted and hung on one wall, staring up at the square skylight in the ceiling.
Arthur Eaton had hardly heard the conversation, so absorbed was he in his own musings. Persistently his mind had dwelt upon the loss of T. C., his closest public friend—in fact his only friend, since he was a person who had never encouraged personal or intimate relationships with other men. Eaton had been in government, a career diplomat, as far back as he cared to remember. His parents, when they were alive, and when there was money, would have been horrified at anything in government under diplomacy. To run for office, to depend upon others for largess, was unthinkable. As a consequence, Eaton had never considered running for any office, although there had been opportunities. His father, before his death—which occurred almost simultaneously with his loss of wealth—had arranged to put him into diplomacy, and in diplomacy he had been throughout his years.
He could recollect many of his previous posts with ease. There had been the minor beginning as a representative to UNESCO in Paris. There had been the appointment as a delegate to the still growing United Nations in New York. There had been three ambassadorships to three corners of the globe. There had been special troubleshooting assignments, where poise and firmness and keen intellect were wanted, from Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. There had been a period of dismay, almost ennui, when the assignments seemed to be blurring, each one resembling the last, with the same polished tables and same calfskin briefcases and same treaties and same Oriental or Semitic or Asian or European countenances uttering the restrained semantics of upper-echelon diplomatic negotiation. Eaton relished protocol, fine manners, the limited games of wits, and yet he had once become bored by it all. It was a period during which he had felt trapped on a treadmill. Worse, as oppressive, was the fact that he and Kay had lived beyond his means, because this was the way they had been taught to live, and more and more he had become dependent upon her inherited fortune. In his career at that time, not so long ago, he had possessed no hope for change or promotion, and in his personal life he had enjoyed no freedom. It was T. C. who had rescued him, and offered him his greatest hope.
He had enjoyed T. C.’s vigor and boundless extroversion since their college years. While their paths had crossed occasionally, Arthur Eaton had watched T. C.’s political fortunes rise from afar. He had observed his friend engage and defeat foe after foe in elections of more and more importance. He had, with admiration mingled with envy, observed T. C. become a national figure. He was not surprised when the convention had nominated T. C. as the Party’s standard-bearer on the third ballot, but he was surprised when Tim Flannery had telephoned from St. Louis to report that T. C. needed his assistance in the campaign and wanted him to fly out immediately.
At the time, Eaton had been between missions, momentarily free of an assignment, and he had gone to T. C. at once. To Arthur Eaton, in that St. Louis hotel suite, T. C. had been as he had always been, only more so, more confident, more exuberant, more stimulating. T. C. had presented his proposition directly. As the Party’s candidate, he was well-enough versed in domestic affairs to handle himself properly. But, T. C. had admitted disarmingly, he’d had little opportunity to be involved in international problems, and on the subject of foreign affairs he was a dolt, and he needed help and advice. He had implored Eaton to take a leave of absence from the Department of State, and join T. C.’s campaign for the Presidency as adviser on foreign affairs and part-time speech writer.
Although the idea of accompanying anyone on a grueling campaign junket, leaving air-conditioned rooms and polished tables for grubby, poorly lit hotel rooms, half-cooked food, smelly, disheveled local politicians, revolted Arthur Eaton, he had accepted without hesitation. There had been two reasons for his immediate acceptance. One was the chance to get away from Washington, from Kay and her tiresome social friends, from work that was suffocating him, and the other (and more exciting) reason was T. C.’s promise. “Arthur, you help me win, and I’ll see that you have yourself a Cabinet post, not selling stamps or worrying about squaws, but a big one, the biggest. You help me now, and you can help me run this country and most of the world next year.”
It had happened exactly as T. C. had promised that it would. Two hours after T. C.’s opponent had conceded defeat on television, and T. C. had become the President-elect, Arthur Eaton had answered the ringing telephone in Georgetown. The caller had been T. C. himself. No sooner had Eaton congratulated him than T. C. had boomed out, “Arthur, you got any enemies in the Senate?” Eaton could think of none, not real enemies. Then T. C. had said, “Think they’ll give consent on your appointment?” And Eaton had asked, “To what?” And then T. C., with a delighted laugh that was almost a shout, had bellowed across the wire, “To Secretary of State, my friend. You are the first in my Cabinet, and welcome to it!”
So he had become Secretary of State Eaton, and with Talley trotting between T. C. and himself, he had assisted the President in running the country. Those had been adventurous and stimulating days, those days of the two years and seven months gone by, and they had been his Fountain of Youth. Not only had each morning, with its challenges, been a joy to wake to, but Eaton had found the independence to shake off the yoke of money that held him captive to his wife. He had been enabled to ignore her disdain, her snobbery, her petty values, her Social Register crowd and her avant-garde artist salon. He had, indeed, been able to plead devotion to something that mattered more, survival of his country. This had been the same shield he had always been able to hold up to fend off Kay’s barbed anger. Her technique had not varied from its pattern in the past; it had only intensified. She had continued to hack away at his masculinity. When she found that she could no longer bring him down, as she had always succeeded in doing in the past, she had begun to increase her trips away from Washington. She had permitted herself to be seen with her endless bright young men in public. Eaton had rarely speculated on what she might be doing with her companions in private. But more and more, freed of her, he had begun to derive pleasure from the company of attentive and appreciative young Washington women, the single ones. There had been but two short-lived affairs—for he was always aware of the dangers—but they had been gratifying enough to remind him that he was a person still capable of enjoying love and companionship, and that he was more than his wife had tried to make him.