Preserve and Protect (29 page)

“Too intelligent,” she said, a little of her irreverent humor bubbling into her voice, “to ask a question as trite as that.”

“Well,” he said, unamused, “I am asking.”

“I think that’s something only you can decide,” she replied, her voice again polite. “How have you done with the problem tonight?”

“Did you hear my speech?”

“Yes,” she said, voice noncommittal. “I heard it.”

“Did you like it?”

“Why do you ask? If I liked it, you’re confirmed in your own concept of it. If I didn’t, then you know I’m mistaken. So what difference does it make? No, I didn’t like it. I haven’t liked any of your speeches in the last few days.”

“Things are moving fast,” he said with a defensive thoughtfulness. “I have to move with them.”

“Do you?”

“Yes,” he said crisply. “I’m sorry it upsets you.”

“I’m not upset, exactly,” she said slowly. “Just—I don’t really know. Puzzled, I guess.”

“By what?” he demanded. “What’s so puzzling about what I’m doing? I’m engaged in a terrific fight for the world’s most powerful office. Am I supposed to act as though I’m playing tennis?”

She was silent for a moment, and it seemed to him that he could almost hear the waves on “Vistazo’s” shore, though he knew they were three hundred yards below. At last she sighed again.

“I really don’t know what good it does to talk about it any longer. You know what I think. You know what I’d prefer to have you do. So why discuss it? You want me to tell you that I think what you’re doing is right. I can’t. So what’s the point?”

“You might at least wish me well,” he said sharply, and then his voice changed abruptly. “Ceil,” he said humbly, “I need you. I need you here. And don’t tell me that’s trite, because it’s true.…I talked to the President and to Bob Leffingwell tonight and they both think—they both think I’m out to destroy the country. Do you?”

There was a silence and then she started to say something about, “You’re so—so—” in a voice that sounded as though she might be half-crying. And then she stopped and the silence returned, and distantly again he thought he heard the surf, though it must have been only the painful pounding of his heart.

“What am I to say?” she asked at last. “I know those two men don’t mean that you are deliberately trying to destroy the country—you know they don’t mean that. But they’re worried about what you’re doing, and the people you seem to be depending on for support, and—and that’s what frightens them.…It frightens me.”

“I’m depending upon the National Committee,” he said, “and I think a majority is for me. What more do I have to depend upon?”

“And don’t be disingenuous,”
she said with a sudden desperate harshness. “You know who I mean,
you know who I mean.
Now, stop it!”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” he said, and abruptly his voice seemed to be growing calmer as hers became more agitated. “If you mean the legitimate protest groups—”

“‘Legitimate’! Oh, Ted!”

“They are legitimate.”

“But it isn’t legitimate, what they’re doing. It isn’t legitimate for you to go sneaking off with them and connive at—at—”

“At what?” he demanded, and there was no more supplication or apology in his voice at all. “Exactly what claptrap has Helen-Anne been giving you, anyway?”

“It isn’t claptrap,” she said. “She told me she saw you go into that room with those men, and just now I heard on the radio that they’ve formed this National Antiwar Congress to meet when the National Committee does. You told them to do that. And who knows what sort of horrible things will happen when they have their rally? How can you control them? What makes you think they won’t control you? Oh, Ted,” she said, more quietly, “I am so worried for you.”

“I’m all right,” he said with a sudden anger in his voice.
“I
am all right
. And I’m sorry Helen-Anne is turning into a screaming gossip about all this. She doesn’t know who was in that room, or anything about it. She won’t find a shred of evidence to support this cock-and-bull story of hers—”

“I suppose you’ve bought it all up,” she said bitterly. “Jason money can do anything.”

“What would be the point in ‘buying it all up?’” he inquired calmly. “What’s so shameful about all this, even if it were true? Can’t a candidate confer with his supporters? Has that become illegal now?”

“But such supporters,” she said with a sudden sad quietness. “Oh, my dear, such supporters!… Well, there’s no point in continuing this. You’ll do what you want to do, I’m sure. But I fear for you, my dearest—I fear for you. Do be careful. Don’t let them hurt you—or the country.”

“Now you’re dramatizing,” he said, attempting to put into his voice a lightness that didn’t quite come off. “Now you’re being much too, much too serious. Nobody is going to hurt me, or the country either. I can control it. It’s just a move in the game that’s got to be played out here while the National Committee makes up its mind, that’s all. It really isn’t anything for you to worry about.”

“I hope so,” she said in a desolate voice. “Oh, my dear, I hope so.”

“Come to me, Ceil,” he said softly. “I need you beside me now.”

“Good night,” she said. “Good night.”

“Ceil—” he began with a sudden desperation, but the line went dead at “Vistazo.” Slowly he put down the phone in Patsy’s silent house. Abruptly the insistent unfounded terrors of the night returned.

In half a dozen hours he had been accused of the deadliest betrayal of his country by his country’s President; by a man who now opposed him, but whose opinion, in some curious way, he still respected; and by his wife. From each in turn he had hoped to receive the support that would have enabled him to repudiate and turn away from the vortex they told him he was being drawn into, yet from each he had received only warnings, worries, condemnation. He had not received help.

It did not occur to him, in this dreadful lonely dead of night in Dumbarton Oaks, that the reason they did not give him help might be because he had not made it clear that he was asking help. And perhaps it was just as well that he did not realize this, for if he had, he might also have realized that he had gone so far down his desperate road that it was impossible for him either to ask or accept.

They thought “help” was to persuade him to give up his ambition and retire from the race for President. That was something he would not—could not—do. “Help” in his mind was how to get there without being thrown back completely for support upon the forces of violence active in the country. These in truth seemed to him at the moment to be the most effective and decisive elements in achieving what he wanted, and while he had suffered some misgivings about them in recent days, he no longer felt so uneasy.

He, too, deplored their excesses, but had they not assured him tonight that these were isolated examples? Hadn’t Freddie Van Ackerman, much more respectful and obliging than he had been in the convention’s closing hours, told him, “Hell, Ted, you have to allow for a little human nature, but we’ve got it under control now, and it won’t happen again”? Hadn’t LeGage Shelby, abandoning his stagey, show-off vulgarities about the white man, actually sounded like the brilliant college graduate he was when he had agreed solemnly, “From now on this is going to be dignified protest—
dignified?”
Hadn’t even lumpish Rufus Kleinfert nodded ponderously and echoed, “Ve vant to make our pointss like Americans?” And when he had suggested—or had someone else? He could not be entirely sure, such had been the vigor of their discussion, but he knew he was the one who synthesized and gave it form—the creation of a joint command for all the antiwar, black-racist and neo-isolationist groups in the country, had it not been agreed at once that it would proceed in an orderly and law-abiding manner toward the achievement of its objective, the election of Edward M. Jason as President and, through him, an end to the wars?

The creation of the National Antiwar Activities Congress—“NAWAC”—was, in his estimation, a real triumph on his part, and in fact a very practical answer to just those doubts raised by Ceil, Bob and the President. They had all been so basically hostile to him that he had not been able to explain it—there was, after all, pride, and more than that, Jason pride—but in NAWAC he had produced the formula by which protest could be channeled, legitimatized, made respectable, put back in the mainstream of American society. This had been a major accomplishment, and while he was not yet ready to reveal his participation—which was why he was so deeply annoyed with Helen-Anne for apparently scurrying about trying to get everyone alarmed, without knowing the facts—he was well satisfied. It represented a constructive, sensible and patriotic act, definitely minimizing, if not altogether removing, the influence of the Communists, kooks and crackpots whose violent outbursts had in recent days so seriously upset the country and his own campaign.

Granted, not everyone could put the genie back in the bottle. But he was about to prove that he could. And would.

Nothing now could shake his confidence in himself. He was doing exactly what Ceil and the others wanted him to do: control the violence. And they wanted him to abandon the cause just when he was about to re-establish his command!

Why were they so fearful, so unimaginative, so obtuse?

And why, in Patsy’s silent house, was he suddenly shivering himself?

And who, in the haunted two cities in the ominous night, was walking on whose grave?

4

A NATIONAL COMMITTEE MEMBERS ON SOCIAL, SIGHTSEEING BINGE AS THEY AWAIT BIG DAY, the
Star
headlined Helen-Anne’s column on their activities three days later; STAND-BY PERIOD MEANS “RED-CARPET WHIRL” FOR FATEFUL HUNDRED AND SIX.

“Washington,” she wrote, “has rarely thrown the like of the round-the-clock party it is giving this week for the most important hundred and six people in the world—the members of the National Committee who are awaiting the start of the fateful meeting at which they will select a Presidential candidate to succeed the late President Harley M. Hudson.

“From Alabama’s Helen M. Rupert and Henry C. Godwin to Wyoming’s Alice Lathrop Smith and Ewan MacDonald MacDonald, the national Committeemen and women are having a red-carpeted whale of a time.

“So far they have enjoyed:

“1. The sensational reception given by Patsy Jason Labaiya at which the two top contenders, her brother, Governor Edward M. Jason of California, and Secretary of State Orrin Knox, plus new President William Abbott, laid down the battle lines for the contest to come.

“2. A dinner party at ‘Sots Hollow,’ fabulous Revolutionary-days estate of Mrs. Hattie Hamill Johnstone, ageless duenna of Washington society, at which Committee members first dined on diamond-studded gold plates, then whooped it up at an old-fashioned square dance amid seventeen cows, twenty-three horses and fifty-eight tons of hay flown in especially for the occasion.

“3. A Potomac cruise to a White House reception at Mt. Vernon, given two days ago by the President and the full Cabinet—this one very sedate with no fireworks, thank you very much!

“4. A reception given by the dean of the diplomatic corps. His Excellency Willem van der Merwe, at the South African Embassy, attended by fifty-one nations that are presently speaking to South Africa.

“5. A reception given at the Embassy of Ethiopia by His Excellency Ras Tafari Tudwa, attended by sixty-seven nations that presently are not speaking to South Africa.

“6. A joint dinner given by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Committee for a More Effective Congress, and the Over-All Study Group on Improving Just About Everything in Washington.

“7. Innumerable receptions, cocktail parties, dinners, brunches, teas, lunches, given by the various Congressional delegations for their respective National Committeemen and women.

“This capital, which does half its business at social functions and lives in a perpetual daze—and haze—of sociopolitical entertaining, has never seen the like.

“If Committee members don’t start their rendezvous with destiny next week with the biggest hangover in history, it won’t be Washington’s fault. Everybody is doing his, or her, best!”

But there was, of course, a darker side; and as she sat at her cluttered desk in the Monday-morning-noisy newsroom, she reflected thoughtfully on how little the country was told, sometimes, about what actually went on in the beautiful city where its fate was decided. She was not the only reporter in Washington who had been tipped to various strange events in the past several days: ominous, anonymous telephone calls to certain Committee members urging their support for Ted Jason, more open attempts to influence them through direct interventions by powerful political and financial leaders in their states, even, in three or four cases, veiled but unmistakable threats of physical reprisal if they did not support the Governor’s cause.

She was not the only reporter, but she was still the only one who was almost certain she knew where and when this new spurt of underground activity had begun. Or at least, she thought with a contempt that twisted her mouth suddenly into an ugly line that startled a passing copy boy, the only one who was prepared to print what she knew.

Prepared but uncertain, at the moment, whether she was going to be able to. She had not yet discussed it with her editors, but she was not entirely sure, for all her bravado to Patsy last week, that the
Star
really would back her up and print the story. Especially since the story was getting rather more sensational, as she dug deeper, than she had at first dared imagine.

Her inquiries to the hotel, as she had expected, had met with a bland, blank incomprehension. No, no one at all had been in Room 1223 that night. No, no one on the staff had seen the Governor anywhere except at the reception downstairs. No, nobody had any knowledge—certainly no record—of the presence on the premises of Senator Van Ackerman, Mr. Shelby, Mr. Kleinfert, other than at the reception, of course. Actually, that room had been reserved for a Mr. and Mrs. Hjalmar B. Poulsen from St. Paul, Minnesota, but they had not appeared and so the management regretfully was going to have to bill American Express for it; perhaps if madam would care to check with Amer—“I just might!” she had snapped before banging down the receiver.