(1964) The Man (51 page)

From the time they had begun going together, she had wanted to help him succeed, because instinctively she knew that she might be helping to liberate herself from spinsterhood and improve her own condition of life. While she could have been of enormous value to him numerous times, by slipping out to him scoops or beats or whatever the reporters called exclusive stories, she had refrained from doing so. By her rigid standards it would have been unethical and unthinkable. George had always been a darling about this, and had never pressed her. Sometimes she had ached to let him in on a secret a few hours or days before it would become public, so that he could benefit by it and become famous. She had never done so. The main consideration was not that such an act might cost her the job she had once cherished, but that the respect in George’s eyes would have been lost to her. They had always discussed T. C., of course, but usually in relation to his public politics or known gossip or nonsense about her own work. However, since Dilman had come to office, there had been even fewer of these discussions, because her intuition had warned her that Dilman was more vulnerable to loose talk and more opposed by the press.

Yet, in her own way, Edna had tried to give assistance to George. She had made it known to T. C. that she was going steady, that her boy friend was a habitué of the West Wing lobby, so that T. C. would be more aware of George Murdock. And T. C. had been, for on several occasions George had been invited to intimate off-the-record briefings (reserved for the select handful of White House veterans) and paid-for administration trips that he would not have otherwise rated. Recently, whenever the opportunity presented itself, she had begun to mention George’s name to President Dilman, too. (“If you need me, Mr. President, I’ll be dining with my boy friend, George Murdock, of Tri-State Syndicate, at the Iron Gate Inn.”) She was never sure that Dilman heard her.

Even though George did not complain about his meager income, she was certain that it was his economic straits that inhibited him from discussing marriage. Except for the small amount he had been able to put into a few speculative stocks, she knew that he did not earn enough to save. Until he did, there was little chance of his proposing marriage. There was one hope on the far horizon, hinted at by George. He had an Uncle Victor in Hawaii, wealthy, retired, and now seventy-nine years old. George was a favorite of this uncle, and was undoubtedly written into the old man’s last will as the heir to a considerable sum. But the Waikiki sun appeared to have rejuvenated Uncle Victor. He had not been ill once since Edna had been going with George. Still, that was a hope, a possibility,
something
.

Sometimes Edna became desperate at the waiting. Once, on her own, she had planned to go to Tim Flannery, who was so nice, and ask him if he would take on George as a Press Department assistant. She had rehearsed her request, a beautiful and touching one. When the occasion had arisen, she could not make her speech. She had perceived that Flannery would have had to consult T. C., and whatever he might decide, it would put her in a bad light.
Using
her confidential position.

And so her directionless life with George had gone on with no merging of their separate paths into a single path in sight. Her father brought the situation up at least once every other month in his short, stilted letters from the farm outside Milwaukee, but she never tried to explain, beyond saying that George was still her good friend and implying that she was still behaving in a way that would not disgrace anyone back home.

In fact, most often, it was she, not George, who was disturbed by their seemingly pointless relationship. She had tried to tell him, without telling him, that she was the kind of girl who did not need much, who was not demanding. She had tried to tell him that the only riches in life to which she aspired were someone she cared for and a decent home where she could bear and raise wonderful children. Did he understand? He had never let on. How she wanted to tell him, if only he would bring it up, that she was ready to move into his confined apartment, ready to continue working while he worked, ready to skimp and save for their family and their future. This was her workable vision of tomorrow. She knew that it was not his. A man who wore lifts in his heels, she supposed, who was sensitive about his acne marks, she supposed, who wrote marvelously but was not read, she supposed, would be too proud for another second best.

Tonight—it was becoming dark, no longer day, not yet night—she could see from his mood, so unusually low-spirited, so ingrown and silent (he had not uttered a word in all their walk to this point), that until now it was his own good nature and ebullience that supported both of them. But not these minutes, not tonight. His depression was only too apparent. She wondered what had caused it. She was afraid to find out.

They had reached the square.

He released her hand. “One second, Edna. Late edition of the
Citizen-American
is out. I want to see how Zeke Miller let his paper handle your boss’s first press conference.”

She waited in the gloom while he went to the heavily sweatered newsboy. She enjoyed observing George when he was apart from her. His thinning blond hair was so neat, his pointed nose and receding chin made him appear so intellectual (which he was), and the tweed topcoat, even if it was not exactly the latest fashion, gave him the appearance of Fleet Street’s best.

He returned to her, the newspaper opened, his gray eyes darting across it from side to side, then up and down. He was, she remembered, a remarkable speed reader. He clucked his tongue.

“What is it, George?” she asked.

“Congressman Miller’s unloading his big guns,” he said. “Look at the headlines over Reb Blaser’s by-line lead story.”

He pushed the front page before her, sharing it with her, an intimacy she appreciated tonight. She had meant to glance at the front page only briefly, for this kind of news was the last thing on her mind. But the headline pulled her eyes toward it.

The banner headline read:

IS THE WHITE HOUSE REALLY BLACK?

The second headline read:

DILMAN BEGINS TO COLOR LOOK OF NEW ADMINISTRATION

The three columns of bold type over Reb Blaser’s by-line read:

PRESIDENT DEFIES ATTORNEY GENERAL REFUSES TO ACT AGAINST TERROR KIDNAPERS OF JUDGE GAGE APPOINTS NEGRO FRIEND SPINGER TO “INVESTIGATE”

Edna’s eyes took in the three paragraphs of Blaser’s lead. Blaser had it from a source “close to the President” that Attorney General Clay Kemmler had demanded Dilman “outlaw” the Negro Turnerite Group for being behind the Mississippi kidnaping and for being supported by Communist Party funds. Apparently the President had rejected advice based on “well-known facts,” and had taken the first step in reducing T. C.’s brilliant Cabinet into “Uncle Tom’s Cabinet.” Dilman had appointed the Reverend Paul Spinger, a Negro apologist, to sustain his stand with “fiction” about the colored abductors. Dilman’s Black Hand had shown itself today, and it was redecorating the nation’s first and proudest house in its own dark hue. Not only had the President demeaned his high office and violated the nation’s trust, by attempting to treat with a known subversive and criminal like Jefferson Hurley, but he was dealing “softly” with a fellow African, Kwame Amboko, and risking our peaceful coexistence with Russia; he was refusing to come out in full support of T. C.’s minorities bill that would enable Negroes to “earn their citizenship” instead of commit crimes for it, and he was “reluctant” to sign the New Succession Bill on his desk that would assure every American that its Executive Mansion would remain as President Washington had wanted it to be and as President John Adams had known it.

Edna’s eyes skipped down to the end of the story. She read: “Tonight President Dilman is presiding over his first formal State Dinner in the very room where President Adams’ prayer is carved beneath the mantel: ‘I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof.’ Poor Adams! Tonight President Dilman will sit with his back to our country’s prayer, having for his first honor guest to our House an African who is tampering with our lives, enjoying for his first official entertainment the anti-American wit of several entertainers of his own race. As one well-known congressman remarked, ‘We on the Hill are worried that we have a black Andrew Johnson in the White House, one with no regard for other branches of government or for the wishes of the majority of all decent Americans. We have grave apprehensions about the future. If the remaining days of Dilman’s one-year-and-five-month term are like today, then, alas, America has been pushed into a time of trial and infamy that will come to be known as its own Dark Ages.’ ”

Edna Foster was surprised at her shivering indignation as she looked up from the newspaper. “How dare they! Did you read that? As ‘one well-known congressman remarked’—meaning who? Zeke Miller, that’s who!”

George Murdock withdrew the newspaper and carefully folded it. “I suppose it is Miller—after all, the paper is his plaything—but there are dozens more who are apt to say the same thing.”

Edna could not control the quaver in her protesting voice. “It’s terrible, terrible, George. I’ve read some bad things—the President insists on seeing everything—but this, his painting the White House black, creating an Uncle Tom’s Cabinet, it’s—it’s scurrilous libel. He ought to sue. George, I wish you wouldn’t buy that newspaper any more.”

He had taken Edna’s arm, and when the street was free of traffic, he guided her across it and into Lafayette Park. As they passed the Kosciusko statue, he said, “I disapprove of this as much as you do, Edna, you know that. But what the devil, I can’t say as I blame Reb Blaser. He does what he’s told. He’s got a job to do like the rest of us. I will say one thing, he’s a darn good writer.”

“Then why doesn’t he write for someone decent? I think there is simply no excuse—”

“Edna, be reasonable,” pleaded George Murdock. “We newspapermen try to be truthful and honest in our own way. Blaser has to give in a little, just the way I do. Do you think I like slanting my stories the way I have to, full of corn-shucked pap, because my employer and audiences are conservative hayseeds? Still, I have to. I’m sure you don’t like working overtime, like tonight. Yet you have to. Do you think Dilman likes reading newspapers like this one any more than I do? No, but he has to and I have to, so we both know what’s going on. The country’s full of many kinds of people, Edna, and we have to live with them.”

“Well, I don’t want to if I can help it,” Edna said. Her wrath had diminished as they reached the center of the park. George’s objectivity and good sense always calmed her, and Lafayette Park, too, always had the effect of soothing her. Even as she listened to George, she had been peering across the artificially lighted grass toward the tree trunks, looking for the brown squirrels, and sparrows and pigeons, that gave her so much pleasure. They reminded her of the farm in Wisconsin and her childhood when there had been so little conflict and so many rosy dreams. She saw two squirrels at last, one scampering up the rough bark-covered trunk of a tree, the other following, and she felt even better. “The poor President,” she said. “I can see him opening up the paper tomorrow morning or before lunch. I always try to avoid him then. I can’t stand the—the way his face looks—”

“How does it look?”

“How does it look? Sort of like the face of one of those Negroes they knock down in the South, after they pull back the dogs and close in around him and start kicking him—I remember the series of pictures of one on the ground being kicked, his first look of automatic shock, sort of, then pain but not letting them see it, then finally a look of resignation, keeping the hurt inside so as not to give them satisfaction. That’s the way the President looks when he reads the papers. He doesn’t show much. But I’d hate to see his X rays.”

George Murdock scratched one scarred cheek and then the other. “I guess I can only say I hope your boss is tough underneath, Edna. This vilification is just the start. Every President is a target. He asks for the job and he’s got to be prepared—”

“President Dilman did not ask for the job.”

“He did when he ran for the Senate, and he did when he accepted the gavel as President pro tempore of the Senate. Dilman is a bigger target than the others, because he’s black on white and can’t be missed. There he is. Everything he does will be judged not only for its wisdom but for what it means coming from a Negro. The facts of life, Edna. Every day is going to be worse for him.”

Her gaze went to George, and for once she was not calmed by his matter-of-factness. “You think it’ll be worse?”

“Unquestionably.”

She resolutely prepared herself to speak what had grown in her mind. “If it is, George, then, well—maybe he can take it, but I can’t. I’m going to quit.”

He was so startled that he stopped abruptly to study her, to gauge how serious she was. She knew that her upset expression convinced him. He took her arm. “Come here a minute,” he said. He led her to the last bench before Pennsylvania Avenue. After they sat down, he said, “Edna, I thought we settled your quitting that first day, when you took my advice and decided not to resign.”

“It’s never been completely settled in my mind, George. That first day I made up my mind to stay because you convinced me he needed help and because—you know—I felt so sorry for him. But I’m too close to what’s going on, and I can’t stand it. How can I explain it to you?”

She clasped her hands and looked down at the pavement. “I’ve had enough of the mental strain, George. The position is hard enough without that. I’ll be honest with you, I really will. I finally figured it out. It’s not that I suffer every day with him, get hurt because he’s hurt, the way I felt with T. C. No. I—I’m as liberal as anybody, but I can’t somehow identify with him in the same way. He’s so different from me. I know this is awful, but it is his color, I guess, his whole background, so different from anything I know. Yet I can
understand
him. So I’m outside him, but I have to be there. You know what—it is like a bullfight—having to go to a bullfight and watch. He’s the bull, practically helpless, no chance, and the men with the
banderillas
and the picadors with their lances are sticking him till he bleeds, goading and hurting him, until he’s weaker and weaker, and the matador comes out and finally drives the sword in behind his neck. If I have to be close up, watching, maybe I can’t feel like the bull, I can’t suffer that way, but I can hate what I see of all the torturing before he is finished and dragged away. I can be revolted and sickened by it. Well, George, that’s the way I feel, being in those offices with Dilman. I can’t stand it. I hate having to go in and see him tomorrow.”