(1964) The Man (36 page)

Finishing his note-taking in the Rose Guest Room, he once more slipped on his fat-man jester mask of good cheer, teased Crystal and Diane, and bade them good-bye for today.

“Have we seen every room?” he asked the hovering valet.

“Not quite. Please follow me.”

They entered a corridor, then entered the red-and-white Empire Guest Room, then looked into the small bathroom with a carpet—a carpet in the can, Je-sus!—and then moved toward the southeast corner room.

“This is the last one you haven’t seen,” the fink valet was announcing. “It is the Lincoln Sitting Room, adjoining the Bedroom, which you visited. You’ll find the furniture somber, late Empire and Victorian. The side chairs are backed by laminated rosewood, quite unique. The room offers solitude, retreat, and an excellent view of Washington and Georgetown. Perhaps the only modern, discordant note in the Sitting Room is—”

The valet had gone into the Lincoln Sitting Room, and at once halted and drew himself upright.

“Excuse me, sir,” he was saying to someone in the corner. “We won’t disturb you, Mr. Dilman. I was taking one of the President’s guests on a—”

At the mention of the name, Leroy Poole squeezed past the valet into the Sitting Room, where Julian Dilman sat slumped in a red-patterned, upholstered chair drawn up before a going television set.

Poole rotated his palm in greeting. “Hi, Julian,” he said breezily.

Julian leaped to his feet, as filled with consternation and pleasure as if Lincoln himself had come into the room.

“Why, hello, Mr. Poole. It’s sure good to see you again. It was a great honor and pleasure meeting you downstairs. You don’t know what a fan I am of yours. I’d sure like to talk to you sometime about your essays.”

“Why not right now?” said Poole, all affability. He pivoted toward the impassive valet. “Do you mind, Jeeves?”

“Not at all, sir,” said Beecher. “We’ve completed the tour, sir. Ring for me when you are ready to leave.”

The valet backed off to the doorway, then through it, then hastened away.

Poole had followed the retreat of the valet to the door. Now, closing the door, he said to Julian, “That butler—I bet Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writing a book about him this minute.”

Julian clapped his hands, and beamed at being the solitary recipient of a Great Author’s
bon mot
. Going to the side chair nearest the President’s son, Poole silently exulted that he had found the
objet d’art
, animate, he had been hunting, and that it would not be difficult at all.

“Sit down, Julian,” Leroy Poole said. “I have only a couple of minutes, but I’d enjoy a little chat.”

Poole settled easily into a chair, while Julian, displaying embarrassment at the unreeling of an old Western motion picture filling the television set screen, said, “I—I was just eating up some time before catching my train back to Trafford. Let me shut it off.”

“You’ll never know how it came out,” Poole said.

“I don’t care,” said Julian. He went awkwardly to the television set and turned it off. Then, shyly, he took a place beside Poole. “My taste is better than that, believe it or not,” he said. “I read a lot, that’s what I do.”

“What sort of thing?” asked Poole.

“Well, the classics, of course,” said Julian nervously.

“I thought you said you read my stuff.”

“I do! That’s the truth, Mr. Poole, that’s what I really read the most now, the protest literature, that’s what I find important.”

Poole dropped his teasing demeanor and nodded solemnly. “Good boy,” he said. “I wish your father felt the same.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Poole?”

“I’ve come to know your father quite well, Julian, so I mean no negating or adverse criticism of his remarkable mind and achievements, but—no, I don’t think it’s fair to discuss this with—”

Julian almost fell from the chair in his eagerness. “Please, please, Mr. Poole, go ahead! I know my father pretty well, and I know his shortcomings as well as his good points.”

“Ummm,” murmured Poole. “Okay, then. It’s just that I don’t think he’s as close to his people, their problems, as he should be. I think he’s been in this antiseptic center of compromise too long, and he’s been separated from the realities of Negro misery and injustice too long.”

“You’re right, absolutely,” Julian said fervently. “He’s always been that way, at least long as I can remember, long as he’s been a politician depending on support from whites. To tell the truth, I was having a fight with him—well, a disagreement, let’s say—about just that before you came in his office.”

Poole wore his mask of innocent wonder. “No kidding?”

“He forced me into a Negro college,” Julian rushed on. “Now he objects because I’m giving so much time to the Crispus Society. I accused him of not facing what he is, what we’re up against, and he gave me a good dressing down.”

“No kidding?” Poole repeated. “Well, we gave him quite a morning, the two of us. You know that trouble down in Mississippi over the Turnerites—?”

“Oh, yes!”

“I begged your father to get the Attorney General into the matter, to straighten out that crooked trial. If he couldn’t do that as President—I know the pressure he is under—I asked him to do Jeff Hurley a personal favor. I asked him to have his friend Nat Abrahams—”

“I know Nat. He’s a great guy.”

“Okay, I asked your father to persuade Nat to step in and appeal the conviction, when it comes. Apparently, Nat’s tied up with something else, but he couldn’t say no to your father, to the President, if he were asked. No soap. Your father wouldn’t ask.”

“He wouldn’t?” said Julian. Then he nodded knowingly. “That’s right, he wouldn’t. Especially now. He has strong feelings against equality by force. I’m like you, like what you write, Mr. Poole. I think that’s the only course there is left for us. Yet nothing can change Dad. He’s wrong, but that’s the way he is.”

“You can change him,” said Leroy Poole. He had timed it. A pause, and then this opener before the real bombshell. He could see the beginning. Julian’s repellent eyes had inflated.

“Me?” Julian grimaced. “You mean you want me to ask him to help them down in Mississippi?”

Leroy Poole allowed his last mask of affability to slip away. His fat face was grim. He was Jeff Hurley’s envoy and final negotiator before the cataclysm.

“Julian, I didn’t come upon you in this room by accident. I pretended to be on a tour. That was crap. I was looking for you. You know why? Because those Turnerites down in Hattiesburg have got to be saved. No Negro can give in to such flagrant injustice and humiliation. I know Hurley has drawn the line in Hattiesburg. If those bastards step over it, there’ll be real trouble—not talk, Julian, but trouble—for your father, for the whole country, for you and me. I’m trying to prevent it being done the hard way. I want to be law-abiding like your father. Okay, either he’s got to intervene, or get someone in the government or in private practice, someone with weight, to throw it around and show those bastards that the Middle Ages are done and over with forever. That’s it, Julian. I just tried. I failed. You’re the last hope. I want you to go in there and convince your father to act.”

Julian pushed a little dry laugh, false and fearful, out of his unsmiling mouth. “Mr. Poole, I—I’d do anything—I’m trying all the time—but this is one thing I can’t do. My father just practically threw me out of his office over a lesser matter. If I even opened my mouth about this, he’d pin my ears back—he’d cut my allowance, make me quit Crispus, God knows what else. We’ve had it out about active protest. No use. I can’t go back to him again.”

Leroy Poole held his breath. This was it, the cold, chilling moment to strike, the clear air and exact time for the bombshell.

“Julian, I’m not asking you to go to your father, I’m ordering you to go—as one member of the Turnerite Group to another.”

He was pleased at the result of the impact. Julian’s eyes almost popped from their sockets, his mouth gaped, his jaw went slack. Some instinct of self-preservation appeared to draw his thin body into itself, as if trying to shrivel itself into invisibility. Julian’s terrified eyes went from Poole to the door and back again.

Julian sought helplessly to articulate some coherent reaction, and then he managed to stutter, “I—I—you shouldn’t—I—Jeff made the blood pledge with my pledge—that it would be secret—no one would know in a million years—it was the condition—to be in the secret corps. This is—this is—”

“There’s no betrayal, if that’s what you’re going to say, Julian,” said Leroy Poole briskly. “We have a small public organization, but the mass of the iceberg hidden below is the most of it and the most effective section. I’m an unlisted, undercover member, and so are you. I wouldn’t have known you belonged, except that Hurley wrote me the information the other day. No one knows, will ever know, except Hurley, Valetti, and now me, and I was okayed because I’m on the Advisory Board. When you and I went in, we vowed to do whatever we were ordered to do. I was ordered to write the pamphlets and propaganda. I did. Then I was ordered to get your father on our side. I followed orders, I tried. You—you were ordered to stay in the Crispus Society, get on their Student Council in New York, and you did, and then you were assigned to get inside information for us, about the trouble spots, the hard and soft spots—”

“I’ve done it, that’s what I been doing, that’s enough,” Julian whispered.

“Not now, Julian,” Poole went on relentlessly. “Now you’ve got more to do, because your situation has changed. Your father is President of this country. You’re his son, and that counts for something. You’re one of us, and we are your brothers, and that counts for more. You go to him—”

“What if I fail like you did? I know I’ll fail, I know. What’ll happen then?”

“We’ll worry about that later. All I want to know is that you don’t chicken out on Hurley and the Group. Will you see him today? Will you speak to him?”

Julian’s voice was a croak. “Yes.”

“Good boy.” Poole placed his hands on his knees and stood up. “What time are you going to be at the Union Station?”

“Five o’clock.”

“I’ll see you there,” said Leroy Poole.

He started for the door, but Julian’s quavering voice caught him before he could touch the knob.

“Mr. Poole—it—it’s supposed to be secret—that’s the whole thing.”

“Julian, what do you take us for? It’s as secret as it ever was, about me, about you. No one’s ratting on either of us. Trust Jeff Hurley. He’s the greatest Negro this country ever gave birth to. He’s our savior, our future. Let’s just do as he says, every one of us, and then maybe soon we’ll all be free, and won’t be scared any more, not scared of anyone, not scared of being secret and being found out. This is it, Julian. You get in there. You make your father’s first real Presidential act a gutsy one, and he’ll go down in history and deserve Lincoln’s bed—and so will you.”

Waiting for the President to finish his telephone call, Sally Watson glanced at her wristwatch. The time was twenty-three minutes after twelve. She had been with the President nearly eight minutes, had done most of the talking, and still was not certain if she had impressed him. There were seven minutes left—ten at the most—to prove that she could be an asset to him in the White House.

She was still breathless with the suddenness of Leroy’s call, the careening drive to Pennsylvania Avenue, the bantering passage through the crowd of newspapermen in the West Wing lobby, the immediate face-to-face interview with the new President.

She tried to review the first half of this important meeting. His blackness had not disconcerted her. Indeed, she had found his heavy features rather exotic and his general aspect not at all unattractive. What had disconcerted her was his remoteness. The few questions he had posed, about her upbringing, education, and previous jobs, had seemed directed not at her but at the blotter on his desk. Her replies, carefully detailed, confident yet reserved, well edited, had seemed to slide off the top of his kinky-haired head. He had hardly met her eyes at all. He had not reacted to anything she had told him. She could not be sure he was even listening. Sally Watson was not used to inattentiveness from men, black or white. Even T. C. used to
look
at her.

The President was still on the telephone, and she was worried now. Had his inattentiveness been due to a natural reticence, or preoccupation with his busy schedule? Or had he been bored by her? She could not believe that she had bored him. She had been composed and controlled, bright but not silly, and when she had left the house she had never looked better. Perhaps, between the house and here, with all the frightful rush and tension, she had unraveled.

Quickly, quietly, while there was time, Sally Watson brought her expensive lizard purse to her lap, located her enamel-inlaid sterling compact, and snapped it open. Her bouffant blond hair was still set perfectly, not a strand out of place. Her eye shadow and mascara were still fresh and right. Her lips—possibly they were overdone. Furtively, she found a Kleenex, brought it to her mouth, and pressed her lips against it. The compact mirror congratulated her on the improvement. The last touch of Aphrodite was gone. What was left, she prayed, was modest Pudicitia.

She dropped the compact into the purse and sat erect, waiting. President Dilman’s call was proving interminable for her. Every minute that he was so occupied was a minute subtracted from her chances. Could he even imagine how desperately she wanted the position? She would be “inside.” She would be “high up,” in the rarefied power hierarchy. She would be Somebody. Her circle of friends would envy her. Arthur Eaton would respect her infinitely more.

She
must
win the job. Yet there was not a single indication that President Dilman was seriously considering her for it. Of course, he had sent for her, but maybe that had been to satisfy Leroy Poole or toady to her father. A pin of discouragement perforated her grand hopes. Well, anyway, she told herself, if nothing came of it, well, anyway, she’d been the first of the crowd to see him up close, the strange one, the one on everyone’s lips. She would have a conversation piece and attention grabber for a month. But—oh, dammit—she didn’t want a conversation piece. She wanted a real occupation and identity, to make her eligible for continued living and for Arthur Eaton’s love.