(1964) The Man (102 page)

“Gentlemen, I quote Thaddeus Stevens’ bitter words following that other trial. ‘After mature reflection and thorough examination of ancient and modern history, I have come to the fixed conclusion that neither in Europe nor America will the Chief Executive of a nation be again removed by peaceful means. If he retains the money and the patronage of the government it will be found, as it has been found, stronger than the law and impenetrable to the spear of justice. If tyranny becomes intolerable the only resource will be found in the dagger of Brutus. God grant that it may never be used.’ ”

Abrahams seemed to weigh this, then he appeared to address the camera lens and its unseen audience. “Gentlemen, these are words worth pondering tonight. For little could Thaddeus Stevens, that champion of the colored people, yet enemy of the executive branch of government, have known how a future generation would distort his warning to its own ends. For today, at the bar of justice, stands a Chief Executive of the United States, unarmed with money or the power of dispensing government patronage, weakened by unconstitutional laws that have been devised to do him harm—today he stands alone to oppose the intolerable tyranny of his accusers, who, literally, have attempted to wrest control of his office from him, and have defied his necessary resistance by wielding, figuratively, the dagger of Brutus.

“Yes, honorable gentlemen of the Senate, this trial of impeachment, instigated by members of the House as a vengeful means of slaying a lawful leader so that he may be replaced by one of their own choosing, this trial of impeachment is the true dagger of Brutus. The blade has been drawn from its sheath today, by the opposition, for all the world to see. With its challenge to reason, to law and order, to democracy itself, the naked dagger of Brutus is being flourished, ready to be plunged again. I entreat you, I implore you, to heed the plea of Thaddeus Stevens: ‘God grant that it may never be used.’ . . . Thank you for the courtesy of your attention.”

Otto Beggs’s thumb pressed the remote control key, and the television screen went dark.

Disturbed—for he suffered the curious sensation that a second assassin, weapon bared, was approaching the President and he was helpless this time to intervene—Beggs reached for his package of cigarettes on the medicine table. As he fumbled for it, he was surprised to see Gertrude, one arm around Ogden, the other around Otis, standing in the doorway. She was in her best dress, the boys spick-and-span in their going-out suits, and their unexpected appearance at this time of the day, before visiting hours, made no sense.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, trying to sit upright, but pinned down by his suspended leg. “What’s going on? Is something wrong?”

“Otto,” Gertrude called out, “are you wide-awake—?”

“What do you mean—am I wide-awake? Of course I am.”

She was mysteriously beckoning to someone in the hospital corridor, and then she came into the room, pushing the boys before her. “Otto, this is a special occasion.”

Puzzled, he watched the sudden parade of Very Important Persons through the doorway into his hospital room. First came Secretary of the Treasury Moody, and then Chief Hugo Gaynor and Lou Agajanian, and then came Admiral Oates and Tim Flannery and Edna Foster, and finally, disregarding protocol, preceded and followed by more of the Secret Service men, came President Douglass Dilman.

The room was filled with smiling faces, and Otto Beggs’s head swam.

“What’s going on here? What’s going on?” he demanded worriedly.

President Dilman had circled the bed to the right side, and even he was smiling, which was incredible to Beggs, considering the impeachment trial he had just been watching.

“How are you doing, Mr. Beggs?” the President asked.

“I’m okay—I guess—” Beggs gestured in bewilderment at the roomful of people. “I don’t understand what’s going on.”

President Dilman nodded, digging both hands into his coat pockets, and extracting a black box with one hand and a small sheet of paper with the other.

“Mr. Beggs, I hope you can endure this brief and belated ceremony, well overdue and well deserved by you.” The President unfolded the sheet of paper. “Permit me to read the citation. ‘To Mr. Otto Beggs, veteran agent of the White House Secret Service Detail: At the recommendation of the President of the United States, and the Secretary of the Treasury, I hereby bestow upon you the highest award the government can give to a civilian, the Exceptional Civilian Service Honor, which is reserved for those who demonstrate outstanding courage and voluntarily risk personal safety, in the face of danger, while performing assigned duties, and whose performance results in direct benefit to other employees of the Department and to the government. Otto Beggs, for outstanding bravery in shielding the person of the President while under fire from an assassin’s gun, I do here and now cite you for your action and present you with this gold medal, gold lapel button, and certificate testifying that your country has bestowed this honor upon you.’ ”

Tears welled in Beggs’s eyes, and he was too choked to reply. He had the gold medal, and then the President’s hand, and he tried to smile at the applause, and at the photographers who swarmed into the room to shoot pictures of the bedside ceremony.

After posing with the President, and then with Gertrude and the boys, and then with the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chief, Beggs fell back against his pillows exhausted. The President held up his hand.

“Mr. Beggs,” he said, “you are now a unique American hero, the sole citizen in our land who is the possessor of both the nation’s highest military award and its highest civilian award. One might imagine there is no place higher for you to go. However, it is our belief that there is much more you deserve, and can attain, in your chosen career. The Secret Service is waiting for your return to active duty, Mr. Beggs, although not at the same old stand. I am pleased to announce your promotion, effective as of today, to the position of Chief of the White House Detail. Our good friend, Lou Agajanian, is moving on to New York, and you, Mr. Beggs, will have his responsibility, his desk. We need you. Get back to us as soon as you can!”

Beggs, tears trickling down his cheeks, whispered, “I’ll be there, you bet. Thank you, Mr. President.”

The room was emptying now, and Gertrude herded the boys against the wall and held back, as the President went to join Flannery, who was waiting for him.

It was then, as Dilman and Flannery were about to leave, that Beggs remembered something he had meant to tell the President.

“Mr. President,” he called out. “May I speak to you for a moment, sir?”

“Why, yes, of course—”

Dilman nodded for Flannery to go outside, and then he came back to the bed and stood beside Beggs.

“Mr. President, I just have to tell you one incident I wasn’t going to tell anyone,” Beggs said in an undertone. “Zeke Miller himself, and some fellow named Wine, they were here last night. They sort of sneaked in. They tried to get me embittered about being crippled, tried to work me up against you—but what they were really after was a signed affidavit from me for the trial—a statement confessing that I saw you with Miss Wanda Gibson, behaving like they pretended you behaved—and claiming that I saw you drinking from time to time—and that I saw you, overheard you, at Trafford University talking to your son about the Turnerites. Know what I told them?”

President Dilman waited, silently.

Beggs said, “I told them to get the hell out of here before I knocked their crooked heads together and dropped them both out the window.” Solemnly, he stared at the leg suspended in traction. “You see, Mr. President, men like that don’t understand the first thing about the Secret Service. If they did, they’d have known my responsibility is to protect the President of the United States from every harm including assassination, even if it’s character assassination. I guess they didn’t know I was still on duty—and always will be. That’s all I wanted to assure you of, Mr. President.”

It was the President’s turn, Beggs could see, to be emotionally moved, much as Dilman was trying to hide it.

“Thank you, Mr. Beggs.”

“Nothing to thank me for. Like I said—I was doing my job.”

The moment the President was gone, Beggs wanted to be alone, but there were Gertrude and Otis and Ogden rushing toward him. Gertrude was over him, smothering him with her thin kisses, sniffling and wheezing, while the boys fought to clasp his free hand in panting joy. All Beggs could find to say to Gertrude, keep mumbling to her, was that now, with his promotion, there would be a sizable raise in salary, and now she could start hunting seriously for a different house, something in the suburbs where the Schearers lived, a house in a neighborhood that would make her happier. And she kept saying that it wasn’t a snob neighborhood that she would look for, only a larger place, a ranch-style house with sun, something roomier, that offered better surroundings for the boys. And he kept saying, wearily, that the task was in her department, and he was sure she would find something, and maybe it wouldn’t hurt if she left some time for herself to shop for a new dress or two, maybe that wouldn’t hurt.

When the nurse pried them apart, and led Gertrude and the children out of the hospital room, Otto Beggs was thankful to be by himself at last. There was a good deal to think about, the gold medal in his hand, its luster dimmed and its size diminished only by his bandaged hulking leg in traction. There was that, and the new executive job with its higher salary, and the new house in a classier neighborhood, and the family with their new respect and new clothes, and yet his mind touched each of these wonders briefly, then impatiently left it behind.

He turned his eyes toward the modest violet plant standing on the medicine table beside him.

Upon this, his thoughts lingered at length.

Otter.

He wondered what it would have been like, when he was still a man of action . . .

“I
WONDER,”
said Leroy Poole, “what’s keeping the President. It’s twenty minutes already. I’m sick of looking at that stupid fish.”

Poole grimaced at the fish mounted on the board above the fireplace of the White House reception room, then glanced at Mrs. Gladys Hurley.

Gladys Hurley, seated straight, her shoulders back, mouth pinched, continued to look at the carpet and said nothing.

Fretfully, Poole wandered to the desk, picked at the museum-piece typewriter that was supposed to have been used by President Woodrow Wilson (another overrated fink, half his Cabinet members Southerners, ordering Negro Federal employees in Washington to be segregated, so busy trying to make the world safe for democracy he’d let sixty-nine lynchings take place in one year of his administration). Then irritably, Poole returned to the center table, yanked up a chair, and squatted in it, drumming his pudgy fingers on the tabletop.

He tried to keep his mind from imagining how Jeff Hurley felt this late afternoon, in his debasing prison garb, in his chilly deathrow cell in the State Penitentiary. It made Poole tremble to think what Jeff Hurley himself might be thinking this minute: in six days from this day, this hour, he would be strapped into the big lethal chair, held helpless while the cyanide capsules dropped, and he would be gassed until dead because of kidnaping for ransom and murder. He would be dying for a crime that was not his own but America’s crime, an innocent saint rubbed off the earth because the guilty who remained did not want to hear his accusations. This minute this good giant, this Gulliver pinioned by pygmies, was helpless, voiceless, impotent. Noble Jeff, great Jeff, poor Jeff, lost to life and the future, unless the two of them in this reception room, his protesters by proxy, could save him.

This was it. They were it.

Leroy Poole wished that he had obeyed his instinct and traveled down to see Jeff Hurley for himself. When he had proposed the visit, through Hurley’s lawyer, he had learned that Hurley would not have it. Hurley’s sole request of Poole had been to give his mother in Louisville a few bucks to make the trip to Washington, and there to help in building up the appeal for clemency—clemency desired not out of fear of death but out of fear of leaving his scattered but militant armies leaderless.

There had been little enough of the Turnerite funds left to work with, that for sure. Just recently, Poole had learned to his dismay that Frank Valetti had produced no more than half of the war chest for Hurley’s New York defense lawyer, and had skipped off to his Commie friends behind the Iron Curtain with the rest.

Poole’s own available funds had been meager. Except for a hundred bucks sent him by Valetti before taking off, except for what Burleigh Thomas (the ignorant numbskull with his stupid assassination attempt) had left behind for Hurley, delivered to Poole by that sister, Ruby (who had disappeared from town fast enough), there had been only his own dwindling bank account, the blood money, the last of the advance against the future royalties from the Dilman biography, which he had not yet had either the time or the interest to complete.

Poole had spent the Turnerite money and his own savings with care, as if every paper bill contributed another year to his beloved Jeff Hurley’s life. Poole had allotted some of the money for the New York lawyer, and used some for his own side trips and payoffs in order to gather the fresh evidence needed for the appeal. He had doled out some cash in treating influential Negro correspondents in the capital to dinner, bending their ears with the injustice mounted against Hurley, and a good deal of the press space his pleadings obtained had been gratifying, had whipped up further sympathy for Hurley among the Negro population, had even provoked one petition for clemency signed by eight hundred Northern Negroes. Then, when time had all but run out, and the money, too, Leroy Poole had purchased the round-trip bus ticket for Mrs. Gladys Hurley, mailed it to her in Louisville, brought her here to Washington yesterday, put her up in his hotel, all to have her on hand for this last, last climactic act.

Abruptly, Leroy Poole ceased drumming his fingers on the table. Once more he considered the mother of his idol, and was again vaguely disturbed and disappointed. Most often, Poole had observed, and made note of it for some future writing, the mothers of celebrities proved disconcerting. You might consider a novelist or scientist or philosopher or military hero so great, so invincible, so perfect as to believe that he had burst upon this mundane earth full-grown, without the process of human birth and with no previous habitat except Olympus. And then, sometimes, you learned he had a mother, a living rag, bone, and hank of hair, and it amazed you that a womb belonging to one so unattractive, mean, stupid, or merely garrulous and mediocre, could have produced Greatness. Especially was this often true in the case of celebrities renowned for their beauty, actresses or actors—flawless idols, all, until their mothers came out of the closets, shrill and repulsive crones.