A Shade of Difference (100 page)

“More soup,” she said, giving him another spoonful, which went down more easily this time. “Now, you shush and listen. I know you been hurt right badly, and I hope they get who did it and give ’em what they got coming. If I’d had a gun last night, I’d have done some, myself. But you can’t just stop and quit. The world don’t run that way. People got to keep going, ’specially in your position. You got to help keep things steady, Cullee. That’s your job.”

“Fine shape to keep things steady. Look at me.”

“I’m looking at you. Been a long time since I see such a mess. But you still there underneath it, I do believe, and they can’t change that, can they? Wouldn’t like to think they could.” She gave a little chuckle. “’Spect I’d have to find me somebody else to be a slave to, if I thought that could happen. Don’t believe it can, and I don’t believe
you
believe it can, either, once you get to feeling more like yourself again. It won’t be long.”

“I’m so tired … so tired. It isn’t worth it.”

“You just want me to tell you it is so you can talk yourself around to it again. You know it is. Now finish this soup and stop your nonsense.”

“But—” he began feebly. The phone rang on its stand by the bed.

“Probably the President telling you to snap out of it,” she said, lifting the receiver. “Yes? Who’s this? … Yes, he is, Senator. Just a minute.”

“Who—?”

“Senator Smith at the United Nations.”

“But I don’t want—”

“Take it,” she ordered, laying the receiver on the pillow and holding the mouthpiece close to his mouth. “He’s a nice man and he wants to talk to you. Take it!”

“Hello?” he said, managing to raise his voice a little so that Lafe could hear him, distant but distinguishable.

“Cullee, I’ll tell you when I see you how sorry we all are about this. Right now, we need you up here. How soon can you come?”

“I can’t come.”

“Why not?” Lafe demanded sharply. “We need you. It’s imperative you come up and help us in the debate tomorrow.”

“I’m not well,” he whispered, his voice almost fading completely, “and, anyway, I don’t see why I should do anything—”

“You’re a member of the delegation, if nothing else; that’s why,” Lafe said in the same sharp tone. “And the United States needs you.”

“But I—am—not—well.”

“Is that the only reason?”

“I don’t see why I should do anything any more,” he muttered stubbornly. “Anyway, I’m sick.”

“Are you listening, Cullee?”

“I’m listening.”

“Let me tell you about the acting chief United States delegate to the United Nations,” Lafe said with a savage bitterness that instantly silenced the Congressman and broke through the sick haze so that he was abruptly alert and listening intently, “and then see how you feel about it.”

The bright, perceptive face of the master of ceremonies appeared once more dead-center on the little screen. Behind him his guests could be seen chatting away, still furnishing background as the program came to an end. They were people of indubitable distinction, a peace-loving nuclear physicist from a great university, an aging young playwright, an earnest lady literary critic whose flaring nostrils and hectic manner indicated more than one little problem behind all that erudition, and LeGage Shelby. It had been a lively evening, distinguished more by the zeal with which the participants had vied in condemning their own country than by the constructive suggestions they seemed able to offer to correct its shortcomings. Now, like all good things, it was coming to an end.

“Talk—Just Good Talk—is the purpose of TALK,” the master of ceremonies said smoothly. “Thank you so much for letting
us
talk to
You.”

“That was fascinating,” the President said, snapping off the machine. “Don’t you agree?”

“Why were you looking at it?” Orrin Knox inquired. “Nothing better to do in this peaceful world tonight?”

The President smiled.

“I like to find out from time to time what a certain segment of the better brains are thinking. It breaks the monotony, somehow. It also restores my faith. In myself … I thought I’d give a little study to the reaction to the developments at the UN. How was your visit with Cullee?”

“All right. He’s pretty badly banged up, but he thinks he can make it tomorrow. He’s going to take the train up tonight, as a matter of fact.”

“He doesn’t want to quit the whole business now?”

“No, on the contrary. He seems very determined to get up there, which pleases me. He’ll be a real help, I think.”

“It would be disastrous if he weren’t there,” the President said. “No indication as to who was responsible?”

“He’s sure it was LeGage. There’s an element in DEFY that can be called on for that sort of thing, and he seems to think that was it.”

“I must say LeGage looked and sounded very tense on the program just now. Though he was, if anything, milder than his white countrymen in attacking their mutual country.”

“What’s the general pattern been so far tonight. Mostly critical?”

“Yes,” the President said. He frowned and his voice became more serious. “But that’s to be expected; it doesn’t worry me. The thing that does is that we seem to be getting quite a violent reaction from the country on Cullee’s resolution and on our decision to try to accommodate the UN instead of opposing it. Seab’s death seems to have produced a flood of wires from all over the country, not just the South.” He sighed. “I do wish he hadn’t felt he had to do what he did. Or I wish we could have stopped him. Or something.”

“I know,” Orrin said soberly. “I know … My God,” he said in a tone of sudden anguished protest, “I didn’t want to kill Seab! I valued him as I have few friends in all my life. But he just wouldn’t listen. He just wouldn’t get out of the way. He could have compromised with Cullee so easily, and it all could have been worked out.”

“It wasn’t his way. And you didn’t kill him, so don’t brood about that. Maybe I did, or Bob, or fate or history or the times we live in. Or maybe he killed himself, with his stubborn old heart that wouldn’t yield an inch on what it believed in. I don’t think any one thing was responsible. It rarely is, in this world … Although, of course,” he added with an expression of sober distaste, “that little monster Van Ackerman helped it along.”

“I wish we could get him,” Orrin said simply. The President nodded.

“He runs next year, I believe. I’m going to give some attention to it, out there in Wyoming.”

“Good,” the Secretary said. “I’ll help … Mr. President”—and a troubled urgency came into his voice—“Harley—have I become a trimmer, in this job? Have I stopped being Orrin Knox? Should I have advocated saying to hell with the UN and given you my advice in that direction instead of the opposite? I don’t know,” he said, staring bleakly out across the dark Ellipse to the Washington Monument rising pure and untroubled against the night. “Maybe I have changed. Maybe I’ve let the world’s problems make me too weak. Maybe I ought to quit.”

“Maybe you ought to stop dramatizing yourself,” the President suggested comfortably. “That might be the best thing you could do for yourself. I am very well satisfied, and I think the country is too, on the whole. You didn’t exactly start with no enemies at all, you know, but I don’t think they’ve increased too much. Except, as I say, there is this reaction right now. But, even there, I expect I would have done the same thing, even without your advice.”

“Would you?” the Secretary asked in an unconvinced tone. “I wonder.”

“Oh, yes,” the President said. He gave a mischievous little smile. “You don’t really doubt that I’m President, do you?”

“No,” Orrin said with a somewhat rueful answering smile. “Not at all. But I still—wonder about myself. On the other hand, there are so
damned
many problems that won’t admit of an easy solution.” He sighed. “But I still don’t know.”

“What’s the matter? Something’s under all this Hamlet-like melancholy tonight. Has something gone wrong up there at the UN?”

The Secretary frowned.

“Nobody knows. Hal called a little while ago and said there are all sorts of rumors going around indicating we might conceivably not win that vote. Yet it takes two-thirds and I’m sure we’ve got enough to beat it. Even if we lost by a majority, it still wouldn’t be any two-thirds. So we’ve got it licked. And still—”

“That may be just pre-vote nerves,” the President said, “but I tell you one thing. If we lose that vote after all we’ve done here, after humbling ourselves as we have and placing trust in the good faith of the Assembly, after losing Seab and Cullee getting beaten up, and all the bitterness and strain we’ve undergone about it, the reaction we’re seeing now isn’t going to be anything to the reaction we’ll see then. I wouldn’t be at all surprised but what there’d be a nationwide revulsion and a real demand to get out of the UN. Also to fire the man who advocated co-operating with it on this issue. So you see, many things ride on that vote.” He looked thoughtfully at the papers on his desk. “Not that I
would
fire him, of course; you have my word on that. Or that I would take us out of the UN. But it would be a rocky passage for a while.”

“Do we ever have any other kind?” Orrin Knox asked.

“How is Hal?”

“On the job.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s quite ill, I think. But he insists on staying, and I think we must allow him that. He gave me his word to withdraw if he found he couldn’t take it, but he seems to regard this debate as the summation of his career, somehow
—”

“If not his life,” the President suggested softly. The Secretary nodded.

“If not his life. So I think we should let him do it.”

“I agree. I just wanted to know. Are you going to the memorial service for Seab tomorrow in the Senate?”

“Oh, yes. I think we both should, as a matter of fact. Don’t you?”

“I do. I think it was a little irregular of Bob to set it after adjournment, but I know the Senate wouldn’t have wanted it otherwise.”

“No, it had to be done right away. No one ever deserved it more.”

“Yes,” the President said. He stood and stretched. “Thank you for coming by. I think I’ll turn in. Brazil gets here at 11 a.m., you know. You’d better come here and ride out to Andrews Air Force Base with me to meet him.”

“Surely.”

“And now go home and stop worrying. We’ve all done what we thought we had to, and I think we’ve all done it honorably, and now all we can do is await the event. Isn’t that right?”

“I guess so,” the Secretary said, still not sounding entirely convinced. He turned back at the door to look searchingly at the comfortably portly man who watched him with a kindly thoughtfulness from behind the Presidential desk. “If you ever want my resignation … you know you only have to ask.”

“What did Cullee say?” the President inquired. “Did he blame you?”

“No. As a matter of fact, he was very kind to me and didn’t blame me at all. I was quite touched.”

“All right, then. There’s another judgment to add to mine. Now will you stop worrying?”

“Well—” The President waved him away.

“Go on home, will you? Just go on home and tell Beth your troubles. Don’t bother me!”

“I may do just that,” the Secretary said gratefully. “I just may.”

After the door had closed behind him, the President sat down again at his cluttered desk in the upstairs study where so many fateful things had happened over the years in the long, haunted history of the White House and looked quizzically at the books and papers piled upon it. Downstairs, over in the West Wing where he had his principal public office, he had a desk that was neatly kept and looked reasonably efficient in the periodic pictures of it that press and television gave the public. That, however, was something of a Presidential conceit. In the upstairs study, a man could relax and let the image go hang when he wanted to. His own real working desk was overflowing with odds and ends whose mysterious inner order was known to him and him alone.

Not of
course, that Lucille hadn’t tried to invade it and impose her own concept of order upon it the minute they moved into the White House, and this despite the fact that he thought he had long ago fought out at home the battle of the neat desk. “It’s just like it’s always been,” he had protested vehemently when she had started straightening and putting away. “I know,” she said, “but this is the White House. You weren’t President, then.” “I was
me
,”
he said, and after a while, when he had gone back to the original confusion several times, she had given up. By then she had taken her cue from him and adjusted to their new quarters as comfortably as he had. In fact, she had finally confessed that she had been silly to be so impressed at first. “You have to run the Presidency,” she said sagely. “You can’t afford to let it run you.” “That’s great philosophy,” he agreed, “as long as you’re not the President. Try it sometime.”

But at least in his desk, and in the house, and in his private and to a considerable degree his public life, he had succeeded fairly well, with her assistance. She was a wonderful wife to him, in all her roly-poly pink fluffiness that roused the easy satire of the ladies of the press. Underneath the exterior that fooled so many people there resided one of the shrewdest political minds he knew. At the same time, it wasn’t an anxious political mind, like so many in this ambition-ridden town. She would have been quite content to be at his side if he had remained a furniture manufacturer in Grand Rapids instead of entering upon the strange set of curious chances that had raised him, in a period of his party’s desperation, to be, first, Governor of Michigan, and then Vice President to his brilliant and dominating predecessor. She had given him a loving heart, a peaceful and comfortable home, two daughters, both now happily married in the Midwest, and the constant strength of her devoted loyalty and encouraging presence. There wasn’t much more a man could want, as he faced the problems into which fate and destiny had hurtled him.

Both he and Orrin, he reflected, were very lucky men to be so blessed in their wives. Beth Knox was the same type, loving, loyal, devoted, with a shrewd mind of her own that complemented and rounded out her husband’s even as she rounded out his life. There must be something about a lot of wives in these newer generations, he thought; not too many of them, at least in this town, seemed to possess the secret of wifehood that had been given to such as Lucille, Beth, Dolly Munson, and some few others he could think of. Not too many nowadays were helpmates in the old sense. Cullee Hamilton’s marriage was unhappy now, he knew; Lafe Smith’s had never really gotten launched before it ended; the Labaiyas’ could hardly be called ideal; and so it went. Many an uneasy relationship existed in the beautiful city that demanded of its more glamorous residents a clear eye, a steady hand, and a sure foot if they were to keep an even balance in the midst of all its temptations of power, and fend off the busy little claws of position and jealousy and ambition that could in time tear down all but the most solid citadels.