(1964) The Man (116 page)

And now, her vulgar reference to their last time together. He wanted only to be done with her, to file her in his history as finished business, and be left alone to go on with life. But here she was, unfiled, and the vulgar question hung between them.

“Yes,” he said, “I—I won’t ever forget that evening.”

“How could you? I knew you wouldn’t. And I knew you hadn’t forgotten what you promised. You haven’t, have you?”

He had forgotten. The Lord save him from women. They remembered everything, everything. How could they expect a man to remember what he said—men said anything, they were all Alexanders promising empires—under those circumstances? What in the devil
had
he said? He could guess, but he would not, aloud. He waited. She would tell him.

“I’ve been waiting for you to call me, Arthur. I’ve been living for that call. What happened when you asked her? Will she give you the divorce, or will you have to go out to Reno and get it?”

Divorce, he thought. That was it. He must have been out of his mind. If treaties were made in bed, he thought, women would own the world. What in the devil could he say to her now, to be rid of her? The diplomatic truth, that was best; that was his style, and none exceeded him at it.

“Yes, of course, Sally, it has been on my mind, too, but you know, divorce is not that simple a matter,” he said pedantically. Almost instinctively, he was moving them away from the heated, irrational atmosphere of the bedroom into the cooler, logical surroundings of the civil courtroom. “You know my feelings about Kay, and you’ve known my feelings toward you, Sally. I have desired a divorce, and kept it no secret from you. However, I’ve suddenly come up against one hard mathematical fact of life. It takes two to accomplish a divorce, not one. I broached it to Kay on the telephone a few days ago, and she would not have it. She is adamant. Separation she will abide, but not a divorce. So all I can do, until I have definite grounds against her, is to work on her, wear her down, and trust that her own sense of decency—”

Sally’s pale face was cold. “She won’t give you a divorce? Or is that State Department Eatonese for—you’ve decided not to ask her?”

“Sally, I did ask her. She doesn’t give a damn about me, but she likes the idea of being married—”

“So do I, Arthur.”

“—and now she likes it more than ever, since everything seems to be changing in my life. She’s been watching that impeachment trial like everyone else. She has a good idea they’ll drum Dilman out of office. If they do, she sees herself in the White House as First Lady. There’s no use trying to reason with her about a divorce at present, not while the result of the trial is still pending. In fact, well, I’ll be honest with you, because you must believe in me, Sally—the fact is, Kay has decided to come back to Washington. She’s on her way back right now—she’s, well, she is the person I’m expecting in a half hour. She wants to be here for the kill tomorrow.”

Sally began to laugh, and then threw back her head and laughed hysterically, and it made Eaton uneasy to watch her. Then her laughter broke into a sob, and she choked to control it.

“This is too much,” she cried out, “too, too much, the irony, to think it’s my fault, I’m responsible for creating my own Frankenstein monster—me—doing what I did—snooping, spying, going through hell, suffering that goddam insulting exposure in the Senate today—those questions, I wanted to die—die—and what was it all for? For you, so you could become President, and now never leave that old bag who wants to be First Lady.”

“Sally, listen—”

She was breathing like a wounded animal now, and her eyes were glazed and staring. “But you know what’s worse, Arthur? That you’re lying to me, you are lying. You used me, like you use everyone, and I couldn’t see it because I wanted to be used, because I thought there’d be something in it for me, too. I should have known. There’s nothing for me. It’s all you, everything’s for you.”

“That is not true, Sally. If you’ll calm down a minute—”

She was too furious to listen. “I know what is true! You never asked your bag of a wife for a divorce. She’s not coming here to stand in the wings, hoping she’ll be First Lady. It’s you. You want to be President so badly, it smells, it stinks, the reek can be smelled a mile away. So no more bedroom gymnastics, no more, no more taking chances by you. You want to be there, lily-white and aristocratic and Ivy League, with the one and only wife of foreverness and togetherness on your arm, waiting in home beautiful, living the life beautiful, waiting for your country’s call the minute they boot that poor unbefitting nigger interloper out of your White House! Now everything’s got to be perfect, everything pure and American! Now you’ve got to quickly, quickly, sweep all dirt under the carpet, all dirt and maybe scandal, and there I go, under the carpet, too—”

“Stop it, Sally! You’re behaving like an insane—”

“Don’t you call me insane, you lousy, dirty no-good bastard!” she screamed, and then, before he could move, she drew her right hand back, flung it forward, and emptied the entire contents of her whiskey glass into his face.

As he sputtered, wiping his eyes and shirt with his handkerchief, she yelled, “I hope the whole world finds you out the way I did, you bastard!”

She ran out of the room, and out of the house; and Arthur Eaton, watching her, continuing to clean the dripping whiskey from his face and clothes, was no longer upset. In fact, he was pleased. It had been less costly than he had expected. For the price of a wet handkerchief, a change of apparel, and a minor indignity, he was rid of her forever.

Then, when she saw the door close, she started running.

Before that, Sally Watson did not know how long she had been waiting.

After leaving Arthur, and reeling down the cement steps into the lonely and darkened Georgetown street, she had not known where to turn, where to go. The two Secret Service men, in the car parked across the way, had pretended not to see her. She had pretended not to see them. She had started off, to nowhere, because there was no place left where she could any longer find peace from rage and shame, and then she had changed her mind.

She had come back toward the house, staying inside the shadows thrown by the stately mansions, hidden from the yellow pools of illumination under the streetlamps, and then, two houses from his, clinging to a chilled metal rail, in a recess out of sight, she had waited, senselessly waited, shivering, hating, waiting.

How long had it been, finally? Fifteen minutes? Twenty? However long it takes to die.

Once an automobile had drawn up, and it was not Kay Varney Eaton who had emerged, but five other persons, three of them male photographers, two of them (one whom she knew) women social columnists, and, chattering and cheerful, they had gathered on the sidewalk before Eaton’s residence.

Finally the limousine had arrived, and the chauffeur had leaped out and hastened to open the rear door. And there she was, that
old
woman, Kay Varney Eaton, tall and imperial, in her mink coat and mink hat, giving her diamond-laden hand and condescending stone smile to the serfs of the press. There were shrill questions, and requests to pose this way and that, and flashlight bulbs twinkling on and off, and then she had gone, First Lady-elect-almost, up the stairs. And at the top, horrid traitor’s face wreathed in a smile, Arthur was welcoming her, a self-conscious embrace before the cameras, an antiseptic cheek kiss, and then, a husbandly arm around her, he had taken her inside their house.

Then, when she saw the door close, she started running.

Sally went blindly, crazily, drunkenly up the street, and at the intersection fell against the post of a stoplight, gasping for air. A cruising taxi slowed, and she hailed it.

Inside, disheveled, mascara on her cheekbones, she was still too choked to speak, unable to direct the Negro cabdriver, who was attending her with curiosity, where to take her. Again, there was nowhere to go. But the last unimpaired although dying impulse of her self-esteem began to form her utterance. Only in one place, in months, years, a lifetime, had she had a
raison d’être
. So, not she, for she was no more, but the surviving impulse within her gave voice to her suicidal mood.

“Take me to—to the White House,” she said thickly.

She tried to look at the domes and spires of this city of monuments which she had dirtied, but she could not see. She tried to smoke a cigarette, but dropped it. She tried to cry, but no tears came, for total wretchedness suffused her heart and dry lungs.

She could not breathe, that was the worst of it. The inside of the careening taxi was dank, foul, suffocating. She made out a patch of wooded area, the tree-bowered walks ahead, and she cried out, “Boy—lemme off there—right there—Jackson and H—lemme out!”

The taxi swung into H Street, and she shoved a bill into the driver’s hand, released the door and herself, and went weaving into Lafayette Park, past the frostbitten Steuben statue, past the wet vacant benches, into the park, deeper and deeper, going nowhere.

Her sickened, self-lamenting brain would not stay behind, let her be free, but remained in the cage of her skull, mercilessly haunting and chastising her. Down through the liquor haze, her relentlessly chasing brain showed her herself as she was: the ghastly scene in the Lincoln Bedroom, the overpainted woman on the Senate podium spouting her distorted adventures into Abrahams’ pitying face, the degraded sound of her name on that sorrowful black man President’s tongue today.

All at once, through the last trees of the park, she saw the incredible sight, and seeing what she saw, her heart and legs quickened at the strange madness of it, a nightmare, another nightmare, and again she was running, drawn to the brightness ahead like a moth batting against a light.

She came through Lafayette Park, bursting out on the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue, and then stood paralyzed with disbelief at what was happening in the night.

To be seen through the iron grillwork fence, engraving itself in licking flames on the slope of the White House lawn, beyond the fence and before the North Portico, blazing in the night, burned a fiery cross.

There was more than the mammoth red glowing cross on the White House lawn, she could see. There were men around the cross, and in the White House driveway, and men clogging the open gate and straining past the guardhouse entrance. There were whooping young white men, rampaging hoodlums with incandescent torches, fleeing the lawn, then grappling and slugging it out and rolling on the grass and cement when caught by the white and colored White House policemen and Secret Service agents.

The pitched battle between the white marauders and hooligans who had incinerated a section of the lawn, now trying to escape, and the White House police trying to contain and arrest them, centered about the entrance gate. The convulsive sounds of men become animals, the sounds of clubs thudding on bone and flesh, of human wailing and cursing, of shotgun blasts in the sky and shrilling metallic whistles, made Sally recoil.

And suddenly, so suddenly, there was another sound—that of skidding rubber tires, angry brakes—and there was another sight—dozens of cars surging into Pennsylvania Avenue, erupting with shrieking men, black and white, most of them black, young and old, most of them young, all of them frenzied and armed.

More speeding and jolting cars were emptying out their vengeful cargoes of fierce Negroes or bellowing ofays and pinks. At once, the snarling white bullyboys who had branded the President’s House, and those rushing to reinforce them, and the embittered products of the capital’s squalid black slums that ringed the White House, who had had enough, enough, who would protect this one of their own, now as persecuted as they were, locked themselves into brutish pitched battle.

From the dark rim of the park, still standing detached, Sally Watson watched as if in a hypnotic trance.

The fighters milled through the street before her, striking and being struck, hurting and being hurt, vilifying and being vilified. And as she watched the race riot—the knives and scissors rising and falling, the broken bottles jabbing, the chains swinging, the hurled rocks flying, the brawling blacks and whites cursing, sobbing, shrieking with pain, the beaten men with slashed bloodied faces and smashed jaws loosened in their sockets, men whining, whimpering, going down—as she saw all of this demoniac barbarity, Sally slowly began to relate it to herself.

The seething caldron of humanity was not the result of her witchcraft, the product of her madness alone, Sally knew. The causes were wider, deeper, older than the provocation of her own evil. Yet it was, this wildness in the night, more her doing than that of any other person present.

She wanted to tell them this, tell one and all, tell them to stop doing this to one another and to do their cruelty to her.

This must cease.

They must punish her.

Unsteadily, tripping once, twice, she left the sidewalk and made her way into the swirling center of the riot.

Dimly, she was aware of the inflamed, gap-toothed, bleeding Negro faces raging around her. Dimly, she was aware of the howling, spattered-nosed white faces fulminating around her. Dimly, she was aware of policemen in uniforms and soldiers in fatigues, hammering right and left with their billy clubs and rifle butts.

The jagged edges of a bottle ripped through her coat. A rock struck her shoulder and sent her plunging to her knees. A heavy combat boot skidded against her mouth.

She crawled between legs, then staggered upright, begging them to stop, but no one heard, and she was buffeted and slapped, and then she felt the spittle and blood mingling down her face. Then, unaccountably, she begged them not to kill her, not to kill her, until she did what she must do. Pushing, tearing, fighting, beating her fists, she tried to free herself from the rioters.

And then suddenly there was room to run once more.

She looked about, trying to make out what was happening, what was breaching and parting the mob, and then she could see. Police cruisers and army trucks were surrounding the thoroughfare. Lawmen with their pistols and leashed dogs, khaki-clad soldiers with their carbines rattling gunfire overhead, helmeted firemen with their swelling and flooding hoses, swarmed through the battleground, dispersing whites and blacks.