The Legacy (28 page)

“Well, Miss Lavette,” said the President's wife, “you're not what I expected. You're much too young and attractive to be a communist out of the nineteen thirties.”

“I never have been a communist, and lately I seem to be revealing my age over and over. I'm fifty.”

“Not forty-nine. I like that. I don't like people who remain forty-nine forever, and I, certainly, should not believe everything I read, in particular about politics. Do you?”

“When I can, I prefer fiction. So I don't have to believe it.”

“Yet there's much more truth in it than in what they call nonfiction. The novelist can tell the truth. The biographer can't.”

“That's an interesting observation,” Barbara agreed, “and probably true.”

“You're here for the truth,” the President's wife said with satisfaction. “Will you have tea or some sherry?”

“Sherry, if you don't mind.”

She poured the sherry. “Dry. I don't like sweet sherry. Now suppose we begin. I have the whole afternoon set aside for you.”

“I would like to begin by thanking you for agreeing to talk to me.”

“Not at all. I'm as eager to hear your questions as you are to have my answers. I'm curious about the answers, too. I suppose I've been interviewed dozens of times, but never quite like this. By the way, are you Jewish? Don't be shocked. I expect your questions to be just as direct. You don't look Jewish, but one never knows.”

“No,” Barbara said, struggling for composure. “I suppose if I am anything in that way, I'm an Episcopalian.”

“Now why did I think you might be Jewish? Something I read. No, I must stop asking the questions. That's your job.”

“Very well. I shall be very blunt and direct. To begin, knowing what you know now, if you could go back to your wedding day, would you go through with it?”

“My dear Barbara, what woman would? You don't mind if I call you Barbara? Answer — no.”

“At this point, do you love your husband?”

“You are direct and blunt. Well, I shall abide by our agreement. The answer is no.”

“Do you think he loves you?”

The President's wife poured another glass of sherry. “For you, my dear?” Barbara nodded. “No, he doesn't,” said the President's wife. “He endures me.”

“Yet there must have been moments of happiness?”

“May I tell you why a man enters politics, Barbara? It's not a goal, it's not the consummation of any dream. Did you ever hear a child say, I want to grow up and be a politician? Usually, he's a lawyer — not always but most of the time. He hangs around the organization as a young man, business, favors, and then he gets his taste of some small office, just a lick of power. It's enough. A psychiatrist friend of mine once speculated that paranoia is the illness of mankind, but while it may be a slight rash on most of us, it's the disease of politics. Two sides of a coin, fear and power and a need to belong to the club. No noble motives, my dear, no wish to make the lot of man better, no urge to right wrongs, just get elected and move up. Do you suggest moments of happiness with such a man? Nonsense.”

“Did you ever love him?”

“I tried.”

“Why didn't you leave him?”

“Well, that is complicated. One broods over that too long, and it takes a certain kind of courage. We were not like the children of today. And there are pressures.”

“Yet in the public view, you were always the loyal and faithful wife, supportive and loving.”

“Such things are orchestrated. You either play your role or leave the cast. I never had the courage to leave the cast.”

“Was he kind to you?”

“No. Of course, a point came where I didn't give a hoot whether he was or not.”

“Did he ever turn to you, lean on you, ask for your guidance?”

“Really, my dear!”

“But the role of First Lady — that must have meant something?”

“Whoever invented the term ought to be horsewhipped. When himself walks into that White House, he is the most powerful man on the face of the earth, and if you don't think that power extends over his wife — well, dear Barbara, you're just whistling Dixie. Do you remember Fanny Brice's song, ‘Sometimes I like to dream of a cottage by a stream'? No, that's maudlin. There's no way I can explain this to you, and I certainly never tried to explain it to anyone else.”

“I think I understand,” Barbara said. “I'm trying to put myself in your place. I have to if I'm ever to write about this intelligently.”

“Then have some more sherry.”

“Thank you.” Barbara then said uncertainly, “May we talk about sex?”

“Why not? Nothing else has been sacred to you.”

“I'm sorry. I know I'm intruding and pressing, and my only excuse is that I'm very much excited by this project and very much compelled by what I'm doing, and please believe me that it's as hard for me to ask these things as it is for you to answer them.”

“I think I'm answering very easily. It's a relief, Barbara. No one has ever interviewed me this way. What about sex? Do you want the most powerful man on earth to be loving and tender in bed? When I was a child, Barbara, I used to speculate on how the Queen of England went about moving her bowels. Did she use toilet paper, like ordinary mortals? No, my husband and I have not slept together for many years. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“I feel foolish,” Barbara said unhappily.

“If you would stop being so damned respectful and see me as an ordinary and wretchedly unhappy woman, we could get on with this. You wrote that you wanted to talk to me in terms of my being a woman. You wanted to see the President's wife as a woman. I'm trying to be helpful.”

“But surely the power and the glory must have meant something?”

“Of course it did. When people kowtow to you and anticipate your every need, and it's always the presidential suite and Air Force One, and those silly fools on the television ask their silly questions, as if you were the Delphic oracle, it has to have an effect, but then you sit alone because himself is off and running — and you're alone, as alone as any woman has ever been.”

“Could it be different?”

“Then what you're asking, Barbara, is whether the presidency could be different. If we had a system where a decent, good-hearted, and honorable man, equipped with common sense and wisdom, could be elevated to the presidency, that would be another matter. But what do we have? A man must be demoniacally possessed to want that job. It must become an obsession. He must claw and fight and deal and compromise and sell his very soul to the devil. You're not reading a history book or an election commercial. You're talking to his wife. We read of emperors and kings and tyrants, but since the world began no man has ever had this kind of power in his hands. He can press a button and wipe out half of mankind, he can launch armies, airplanes, battleships. And because of custom or morality or what you will, he has to be married to what is euphemistically called the First Lady. Come, have some more sherry.”

They went on talking until the light faded, and when it was time to leave, the President's wife kissed Barbara on her cheek and said to her, “I like you, dear, and I'm very pleased that we had this talk. Of course, if you ever mention my name or if your fictional character bears the slightest resemblance to me, I shall deny ever having seen you. But you are a dear and very innocent. That's why I talked so much. If you were one of those sharp-nosed lady journalists one sees around Washington these days, I would have had you out of here in ten minutes.”

“I don't know how to thank you. You've been so kind and helpful.” Barbara was just a bit tight. “I couldn't have imagined what you are like. You're so wise about so many things.”

“I was trained in a hard school. Remember, I have been a President's wife. Your cab is waiting, so you'd better run.”

When Barbara returned to her hotel, she discovered that there had been three telephone calls that afternoon from Eloise. Barbara called Higate immediately. Adam answered the phone.

“You're still in Washington? You're calling from there?”

“Yes. What's wrong?”

“We don't know. Your mother told us where we could reach you. I don't know what you can do there, Barbara, but Eloise thinks you can help us. She's frantic. Freddie and four other kids left Princeton to get into this civil rights thing, down in Mississippi. That was three days ago. He promised to call, because truthfully we were against it, and so he promised faithfully. He never called, and Eloise is frantic and thinks you can get some information. I really don't know what you can do, but there might be some kind of national organization there in Washington that would tell you something. Anything.”

“Let me try,” Barbara said. “Do you know where they were going, what their destination was?”

“Only somewhere in Mississippi. That's all we know.”

“Let me try,” Barbara said, “and I'll call you tomorrow.”

It was an odd time, a strange time, but perhaps no stranger than any other time. The Sioux Indians staked a claim to Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, and thousands of San Francisco citizens who hardly ever thought about the prison sitting out there in the bay, now stood on the Embarcadero and on the hills, staring at it. King Hussein of Jordan came to San Francisco, and one of the first things he wanted to see was Alcatraz. Possibly the Sioux reminded him of the Israelis. It was a time when death made strange bedfellows. General Douglas MacArthur died, and so did Ben Hecht, who once wrote a book about miracles. Pandit Nehru died, and so did Ian Fleming, who created James Bond, who had a license to kill. Bond survived his maker, and the license to kill took on plague proportions in various parts of the earth. Herbert Hoover, who had once been President of the United States, died, and the younger citizens were sure that they had heard the name somewhere, and our nation responded to the trouble in Laos by stating that Laos had to be saved even if it had to be destroyed. Mwami Mwambusta IV, who was the black king of Burundi, came to San Francisco, and his robes created a stylistic explosion among local dressmakers, and another black man, Martin Luther King, spoke out for equality, and people listened because it was the kind of voice the country had not heard in a long, long time. In response to that voice, hundreds of young, idealistic college students went to Mississippi, to convince blacks that they had the right to register to vote.

Fred had never been South before, not from the East, and south in California is not really South. He had been to Tijuana and he had been to Vancouver. In terms set down by Princeton circles, he was not a very traveled person. Herb Katz had spent a summer in Paris, and Phil Strong had done a semester at Cambridge. Greenberg had been to Spain on a student tour. Only Bert Jones shared Fred's insularity.

“When you get born black,” Jones said, “you don't travel — unless the man gets you and inducts you. Travel is not for the poor.”

“Freddie is not poor,” Katz said. “The Lavettes are to California what the Rockefellers and the Lamonts are to New York. The trouble with Freddie is that he's a peasant. He grew up on a farm in some bleak place out there in the desert.”

“That,” Fred told him, “is a perfect illustration of the insularity, the ignorance, and the blind prejudice of the New Yorker. A winery is not a farm, and the Napa Valley is not in the desert. But how would you know that? You poor, shrunken, provincial inhabitants of that cruddy city do not have the vaguest notion of what this country is all about.”

“You ever been to Mississippi before, Freddie?” Jones asked him.

“Thank God, no.”

“Then, sonny,
you
do not have the vaguest notion of what this country is all about. Take my word for it.”

They drove to Washington on the first leg of the journey, where they would be briefed at the headquarters of the movement. Fred's car was a 1960 two-door Ford, which he had bought with five hundred dollars of birthday money from his grandmother. His original inclination had been for an MG, but the word was around that sports cars were a disaster, since it was impossible to make out with a girl in bucket seats. Now that he had accepted the Southern trip, he was excited and pleased with himself, facing the fact that his liberalism had been wholly intellectual, and he had the warm if nervous feeling that comes of embarking on an adventure of virtue. He liked the other boys; they were old friends and they were upstanding characters, neither grinds nor jocks, and while objectively big Phil Strong was as much a jock as anyone on the football squad, he had a brain and he had deserted the eating clubs for Woodrow Wilson. And while Fred had passed the time of day with Bert Jones and had eaten at the same table, he had never really made a close relationship with him or indeed with any other black man. Katz and Greenberg challenged him intellectually, a provocation he welcomed and enjoyed. He didn't have to play second fiddle to their knowledge and mental antics; he could keep pace with them.

The briefing in Washington, given by a tall, thin black woman whose name was Claudia Kendrick, was sober and without frills. They were told that, in a certain sense, they were going into enemy country, and that their safety would depend upon restraint, caution, and common sense. “You will have to learn what every Negro in the South knows, that when you are given a choice between staying alive and the exercise of your manhood or pride, you choose life.” She warned them against complex intellectual persuasion. “The Negroes you will be talking to are poor people, most of them poorly educated, many of them illiterate. They are not used to whites who want to help them. They will look at you with suspicion and mistrust. You must win their confidence. Use simple words and avoid an approach that is superior. When they ask you, as they will, why you are doing this, try to make them understand that you need their help as much as they need yours, that you need their votes to make the whole country a better place. But the central fact is that with the vote, they can win their freedom, and if they don't register, they can't vote. And have patience. Try to understand their circumstances and their fears.”