(1964) The Man (17 page)

“If the law passes, it would make Arthur Eaton the President—I mean, should something happen to Dilman, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, of course,” said Hoyt Watson. “But nothing’s going to happen to Dilman. We’ve had all the accidents we’re going to have, and Dilman is a young man, Arthur Eaton’s age, and strong as a bull, I’m sure.” Watson paused, and eyed his daughter keenly. “Why this sudden interest in politics, Sally? This is more than I’ve heard from you in a year. I’m gratified.”

Sally moved toward her father, eased his hat from his hand, and placed it on his head. “I’m not interested in politics especially, Dad. I’m interested in Arthur Eaton. I have enormous admiration for him. I’d like to see him the First Man in the country—after you, of course.”

Hoyt Watson chuckled. “You can forget about your father. He has everything he wants out of life. As to Eaton—” He looked down at her, and then he said, “Your interest in our Secretary of State wouldn’t be personal, would it? I’m just remembering. I thought I saw you spending an inordinate amount of time with him at Allan Noyes’s party.”

“I think he’s the most attractive man in Washington.”

“His wife thinks so, too,” Hoyt Watson said with a wink. He pecked Sally’s cheek, turned to go, then halted. “Tell your mother I may be late for dinner. I’ll try to call her later.”

He was gone, leaving Sally with a flare of resentment at his having referred to her stepmother as her mother. But the irritation was quickly dispelled as she tried to recollect everything her father had said about Arthur Eaton and his position in government today.

After stacking the dishes on the side of the sink, she went to her vast cream-colored bedroom. She pulled the drapes open, to find the day halfheartedly sunny. She went to her double bed, a mess from the gyrations of her restless, drunken sleep, and quickly drew the blanket and quilt over it. She moved to her tall mirrored dressing table, pulled her long green housecoat around her, and sat on the bench to make up.

Her gaze fell on the framed color portrait of her taken two years ago, just after T. C.’s inauguration, when she had played the Southern belle in that silly satire at the Press Club. She examined the portrait with detachment. When Arthur Eaton looked at her, was this what he saw? Her blond hair was combed high and curling to one side, her frank, emerald eyes were what countless crude young men had called “bedroom eyes,” her nose was small and agreeably tilted, the beauty mark at the left of the mouth accentuated her full crimson lips.

Of course, she reminded herself without swinging to the mirror, the portrait was two years old. It did not reveal the shadows under her eyes, born of twenty-four months of drinks and barbiturates. Nevertheless, she remained hypnotized by her color portrait. Her complexion was marvelous, milky white and flawless, then as now. Yet, it was not a usual pretty-Southern-girl face. There was something hidden behind it that was wild and pitiful, although its outer aspect was childish and moody. But interesting, she decided, interesting, and not too much of its attraction had been traded for the liquor and pills that she used to fight the insomnia and emotional self-hate of unlovely fornication. Then, too, there was more for Eaton that no portrait could reveal.

Impulsively, not bothering about the morning’s makeup, she came to her feet, unfastened the housecoat, and threw it across the bench. She made her way to the center of the bedroom, and slowly paraded, as poised as one can be in lace brassière and clinging panties, before the high mirror. The ravages of inner imbalance had not marred any feature of her slender, lithe figure. Her breasts were high and large, her belly flat, her hips boyish, her thighs and legs long and nearly perfect.

Satisfied, she returned to the bench and, casting the housecoat aside, sat down to devote herself to her makeup and Arthur Eaton, lucky man. Merging memory with hope, she relived her short, happy life with Arthur Eaton, and almost miraculously her hangover evaporated.

She had always been conscious of him, at least in the two and more years he had been Secretary of State, conscious of his incredibly handsome face with its contained sensuality, and of his breeding and manners. But then, she had not thought about him too much, certainly no more than she had ever thought about a motion picture hero, because he had often had his wife, that immaculate, haughty icicle, Kay Varney Eaton, on his arm, and there was no real connection to be made with him.

But Sally was a receptacle for gossip, sought gossip, welcomed it, stored it, and among the tidbits of gossip that had come to her was one, from a reliable source, that Eaton and his wife had separated. This rumor had been given some credibility six weeks ago, four large parties ago, when she had found herself sitting next to him at the dinner party given by Secretary of Defense Carl Steinbrenner. Eaton had been alone. No Kay Varney Eaton anywhere. She had discovered him similarly unattached at Tim Flannery’s crowded and raucous outdoor barbecue. And when the national Party chairman, Allan Noyes, had given his large cocktail and dinner affair during the hot spell, and many of the guests, including herself, had gone swimming in the pool late at night, she had been more certain than ever that Eaton had rid himself of that monstrous wife.

Finishing her eye makeup, she reexamined her relationship with Arthur Eaton. The first of their three public meetings, the Steinbrenner one, had been largely exploratory. She had perceived that Eaton had become conscious of her not only as an individual but as a glamorous and pretty girl. He had wanted to know about her, rather formally but persistently, and she had told him all that she believed he should know.

At the Flannery party he had come in sports coat and slacks—gorgeous man—and she had been wearing the open-necked jonquil silk blouse and yellow shantung skirt, and been bare-legged and gay, and he had sought her out, remembering things she had told him about herself, and then for the first time telling her something of his own life and feelings.

The Noyes party had been the best. After most of the guests had departed, he had been one of the few top-level ones to remain. He had sat in a deck chair near the pool, drinking brandy steadily, and his eyes had followed her from the cabaña to the pool. She had known that in her tight white two-piece swimming suit she was a feast for any male’s eyes. Later, drying, she had sat at his feet, joining him in the brandy, and when it was very late and they were almost the last, she had realized that her father had gone and that she must call a taxi. Eaton had insisted upon driving her to Arlington.

She still remembered the drive. They had both been drunk, or rather she had been drunk and he had been high, and she had sat curled close to him and held one of his hands when it was free from the wheel, and he had covered hers firmly with his own. In the darkened street before her house he had kept the motor idling, and then, never taking his eyes from her face, he had turned off the ignition.

“You are quite a young lady,” he had said. “I don’t think I have ever met anyone quite like you before.”

“I hope not. There’s no one anywhere like me.”

“I suppose you have a hundred young men to keep you occupied.”

“I could have. I don’t. Not one.” She waited, but he was silent, troubled, and so she had helped him. “I have no patience, any more, for immature children. I’ve had all the young intellectual buzzards, dedicated patriots, ex-collegians-on-the-rise I can stand. Too tiresome. If I can’t have what I want, I’ll pass.”

He had taken an eternity to say the next. “What do you want, Sally?”

Despite her intoxicated state, she had maintained her control. “Oh, I don’t know. Someone like Mrs. Eaton’s husband.”

“You’re teasing an old man, Sally. Not fair.”

“You’re not old at all, and I’m not teasing one bit.”

“I see . . . I must make a confession, too, Sally. I’ve found you more refreshing than anyone I’ve met in ages. I don’t have much free time, except occasional evenings. Perhaps you would let me call you for dinner sometime.”

Her heart had almost burst. “Anytime!” She had sat up in the front seat, gone across the wheel, taken his surprised face in one hand, and kissed him on the lips. “There,” she had said. “Now I’m a fallen woman, and you can’t abandon me. I’ll be waiting for that dinner.”

The morning after had been her best morning in years. But that entire day, and in the several days following, he had not called, and she had begun to believe that she had invested too much in his promise and her hope. Either he had been drunk and indiscreet, and had now sobered and forgotten the flirtation, or he had weighed it and decided that a married Cabinet officer could have nothing to do, no matter how innocent, with the neurotic half-his-age daughter of a senator. Then, in her misery and consequent drinking, Sally had decided that it was his wife who was to blame. Despite flimsy rumor, Kay Varney was his wife, and was coming home or was home already, and that was it, the fact of it, and good-bye rendezvous and good-bye dinner.

And then, the other evening or morning, she had forgotten which, she had read Reb Blaser’s column. Arthur and Kay Eaton were—it was in black print, rumor or not, it, was in print—separated, with divorce imminent. The effect upon her was like that of a half-dozen vodkas. She soared. She walked on air. She was ten miles high, and almost in orbit. Her prospects rose with her. The fact that Arthur Eaton had not yet telephoned her, as he had said he would, meant only that he was busy with man’s work and not that he was confined by husbandhood.

In her exhilaration Sally had wanted to telephone him, chide him for not keeping his word, but her instinct restrained her from this aggressive act. Also, she had told herself, it would have been in poor taste, after that wonderful Reb Blaser story. Eaton would call. Of this she was more certain than ever. If he did not, they would meet soon, and this time she would make sure that he knew of her desire for him. Yesterday she had even begun to think about contriving accidental meetings, when the Frankfurt tragedy had broken over her. As the daughter of a senator, she knew what that meant. Arthur would be busy for a while, busier than ever.

She had completed her makeup and was content with the result. She went to her wardrobe to search out the proper dress for this first day of a new administration, a day that had brought her Arthur (since Reb Blaser’s column, she had determinedly begun to regard him as
her
Arthur) to within a step of the Presidency. Holding out and rejecting dresses, she wondered how she could prove her love to Arthur Eaton. She could, of course, give herself wholly to him—not difficult—and let him be young once more and enjoy what he had certainly been deprived of by Kay Eaton. Still, such giving was too easy and rarely guaranteed endurance of a relationship. Mature men required much more. They wanted a woman interested in them, interested in their lives, their careers, a woman as concerned about them as they were concerned with themselves. At night a woman could resurrect a man’s ego in bed. But day had more hours. Successful women, the great courtesans of France, for instance, the mistresses of the rulers, women like Madame de Pompadour, survived and remained on top because they were not only love partners but helpmates. How could she be a helpmate to a public figure already so successful, the foremost member of the President’s Cabinet? How could she be of any use to a public figure who already possessed everything?

Just as she settled upon the simple blue Galletti suit and removed it from the hanger, something crossed her mind. She recalled her father’s conversation with Talley, and her own conversation with her father. Evidently Arthur Eaton did not have everything, yet. Overnight his position in the Cabinet was insecure. At the same time, overnight, he was the next in line to the Presidency. Senator Hankins and her father were working to keep him in the Cabinet, and believed that they would succeed. Representative Miller was working to make him President at once, but her father did not think this was possible. Clearly Arthur Eaton could use help. She wondered what help she could offer. If she were to come to know this Dilman, know him well, she might succeed, as a woman, where august councils failed. She might convince Dilman that Arthur Eaton was indispensable to him and to the country, that he must not only be retained as Secretary of State but must be given a heavy share of the Presidential powers. But she did not know Dilman, and it was hopeless, and then it occurred to her that she
felt
she knew Dilman, and then she remembered why.

It was because of last night’s party, the one that had given her the hangover, the one young Harriet Post, a Senate secretary who was as crazy as herself, had taken her to, a boozing, literary party of the avantgarde Washington crowd, lower-level, black-and-white. A Negro poet, reedy and homosexual and maybe talented, had given it in his unkempt, sparsely furnished, barnlike upstairs flat, above the hall with the sign over it,
JESUS NEVER FAILS
, on Georgia Avenue.

There had been at least forty persons coming and going, most of them Negro, all drinkers, all too full of T. C.’s death, all discussing the implications of Speaker MacPherson’s accession to the Presidency, and Sally had not enjoyed it particularly. Lately she had grasped at every invitation to a black-and-white party, because it was different, because it might mean a charge of excitement. Unlike her family, she had no feelings against Negroes. In fact, because of her sheltered upbringing in the South, she had always considered them attractive since they were forbidden and hence exotic, and because there were stories she had heard about the men. The stories were not true, she knew, from firsthand experimental evidence. After college, when she had met the jazz crowd from Harlem, she had slept with two of the colored boys in a band before running off with her Puerto Rican. Both brief affairs had been tiresome disappointments, no better, no worse than those with most of the white boys with whom she had slept. Perhaps she had expected too much. Perhaps the Negro musicians had not been able to give enough because they were inhibited by her Southern-supremacy origins.

The affair or wake last night had been a drunken bore. She had heard from Harriet about the guest of honor, Leroy Poole, and in fact thought that she had read some of his powerful essays on his years as a Negro in Harlem and on civil rights, and she had expected too much, again. Leroy Poole had looked like anything but an author. He had proved to be short, fat, perspiring, resembling nothing more than a jet-black eight ball. He had been supercilious and self-centered, too knowing and opinionated about everything and everyone in Washington and on the earth. He had repeated several choice anecdotes ridiculing MacPherson, who everyone had thought was the new Chief Executive.