(1964) The Man (99 page)

“I meant no harm to the President, I swear on my mother and father I didn’t,” she had told Flannery. “But I’m still one of the ones who has hurt him most, I know that, I’m not denying it. What’ll I do, Tim? I can’t go back to my office now, I can’t face him, and even if I could, he’d probably throw me out, and have every right to.”

“Well, Edna, this is one of those times I can’t speak for him,” Flannery had said, “and I really—well—I don’t think it’s my place to advise you what to do next. It depends on how you feel about the President and—well—how you feel about Murdock. After all, George is the man you’ve been planning to marry. I wish I could help you. I can’t. But I believe you didn’t mean to do any harm. I believe that.”

After he had gone, she had felt better but was no less confused. Flannery had reminded her, as the modest sparkling crest of tiny diamonds on her finger reminded her, that she was engaged to be married. To whom, then, did a girl owe her loyalty—to a boss she had sold out (not that these truths about him would not have been uncovered elsewhere, anyway), or to a fiancé who had sold her out (if he had done so, which he probably had, but then, perhaps, he had felt he was doing it for both of them, and it was not wrong because he loved her so)?

She had slept on it, and wakened with it, this insoluble dilemma, and she had spent hours playing out little fantasy games, with herself the heroine.

In one version, she had married George (for his explanation had been satisfactory), and she belonged, and she had dozens of other married lady friends, and they had teas and played bridge, and she marketed and cooked for George, and dutifully attended the PTA meetings, and they had marvelous summer vacations each year, in Palm Beach or Atlantic City or Provincetown, the young and happy marrieds, she a doting mother and the wife of the eminent columnist.

In a frighteningly different version of her fantasy, she had refused to marry George (for his explanation had
not
been satisfactory) and, discharged by the President, or losing her position after the President’s impeachment conviction, she had been forced to take one of those gray mouse-on-the-wheel jobs in the Commerce Department or the Pentagon, and she was a spinster and would always be one, gulping her lunches in dank basement cafeterias where the thick crockery was never quite dried, going to Hecht Company sales every Saturday with the other “girls” who had taken to dyeing their graying hair, collecting her cheap reproductions from the National Gallery of Art, spending summer vacations with her parents outside Milwaukee, growing fat and resentful and old alone, alone, and bitterly remembering that she’d had her chances (one chance anyway) and turned her back on them (well, on it), and garrulously recollecting (even for those who had heard it before) that she had once been the personal secretary to two Presidents of the United States, one killed, the other crucified.

She had awakened late this morning fortified to act out her last deception in the week of lies. George Murdock, she had almost convinced herself, could not be at fault, and if he had been, it might have been a slip of the tongue like her own, and even if it had not been that, but had been intentional, there was nothing that George could have given to the enemy forces that would have damaged the President more than he had already been damaged by himself. So, that was settled.

But then, at one o’clock sharp, she had turned on the television set, as everyone in America was doing, meaning to watch only a little of it out of curiosity, expecting to see no more than a tedious enactment of the kind of quasi-technical or irrelevant or senile verbiage you came across in the
Congressional Record
every morning. Instead, she had found herself absorbed in the trappings and opening grandeur of a drama that gripped her as much as any historical drama by Shakespeare that she had ever seen. And then there was that horrible Zeke Miller spouting his foul calumnies, and her numbed absorption had become inflamed to the point of sickening wrath. And then there was Nat Abrahams, making public the invisible fifth Article of Impeachment, and her wrath had melted into sickening shame.

It was all of that week behind her, and the morning and early afternoon of this day, that she had relived and dwelt upon as she splashed across the White House north driveway to the entrance of the West Wing lobby.

Closing her soggy umbrella, shaking it twice, she went into the small hall, and, avoiding the Reading Room straight ahead, filled with so many journalists with whom she was acquainted, she turned to the open doorway that led into the cramped pressroom.

To her surprise, the narrow work enclosure was abandoned except for a single reporter in the rear, tilted back in his green chair, swallowing from a soft-drink bottle while he studied a yellow sheet of teletype. She took in the room that she had so infrequently entered. A cardboard sign, tacked to a square pillar, read:
WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS
. There were aisles to her left and right, and in the center of the room were the two rows of reporters’ cubbyholes, back to back, each slot separated from the adjoining ones by perforated, soundproof plywood dividers. She hesitated, wondering which one was the right one.

Then, with determination, she went up the left aisle, between the green wall—unevenly decorated with framed photographs, many faded or yellowing, of former press regulars and Presidents—and the line of nine cubicles on her right side. Reaching the sixth cubicle, peering into it as she had into the others, her eye caught a typewritten notice Scotch-taped upon the blue center partition. It read: “Poachers Stay Out! Private Property Of Miller Newspaper Association. R. Blaser. G. Murdock.”

Shoving the chair aside, she searched around the battered standard typewriter, telephone, spindle with its sheaf of impaled handouts, and reference books. At last, she located a memorandum pad upon which was imprinted,
Quickie-Note
. Tearing off a sheet, she found a pencil stub and wrote, “George: Sorry, it doesn’t fit. Edna.” Then, easing the engagement ring off her finger, she placed it atop the note that she had written, and then she hurried out of the press quarters.

Approaching the Reading Room, returning the White House policeman’s hearty greeting, she intended to turn left and duck into the corridor that led past Flannery’s office to her own office. But the entrance to the press secretary’s corridor was blocked by a crowding, heaving, elbowing mass of correspondents, and in their midst, his rust-red hair tangled, his tie yanked down from his open collar, in shirt-sleeves and suffering harassment, was Tim Flannery.

The reporters milling around him were noisy, vociferous, and profane. Although Flannery kept raising a hand to silence them, his tormentors continued to wave their pads and shout questions: “Tim, is the President watching the impeachment on television? . . . Hey, what did he think of Zeke Miller’s opener? . . . Did Dilman himself get his counsel to inject the Negro issue? . . . Say, Tim, how is he taking it? . . . What about a statement? What time is he making a statement?”

“Pipe down, will you?” Flannery bellowed. “Now listen, fellows, I only stuck my head out here because you’ve been driving my poor secretaries nuts with notes and questions that you know they can’t answer and I can’t either . . . wait a minute—quiet—listen—I told all of you every day last week, I told you yesterday, I told you this morning, and I’ll repeat it once more for those of you who need ear trumpets: the President, and correctly so, believes it would be improper to make any public statement about his impeachment trial while it is in progress. He may have something to say afterward, but right now—”

“Afterward will be too late, and nobody’ll want to listen!” someone croaked out, and Edna could see the speaker was the repulsive Reb Blaser. “Tim, you tell him, for his own sake,” Blaser went on, “he better take advantage of any free space while he can get it. Two weeks from now he won’t be able to get mention in a single paper unless he takes out want ads!”

Another voice shouted angrily, “Can it, Reb, will you? You’ll always have Jeff Davis to write about anyway! . . . Hey, Tim, what about—?”

There was a chorus of laughter, and then Flannery stilled it. “Boys—repeat and stet—no comment from the President until the trial is over. However, he will continue to make statements and give out releases on other matters of government. Right now, I have two or three routine—”

The press crowd had quieted, bringing pencils to their pads, as Flannery read the White House news of the day.

Edna Foster realized that she would have to take the long route to her office, or whoever’s office it was by now. She started across the lobby, and had just passed the heavy center table adorned by the White House police pistol-shooting trophy, when she heard her name called aloud.

Slowing, she turned her head in time to observe George Murdock, decked out in an expensive smoke-gray suit she had not seen before, his pitted face beaming, as he hastened around the table to intercept her.

“Honey,” he said, grasping her forearms, “what a sight for sore eyes. Why didn’t you call me? When did you get back?”

The obligatory scene, she told herself. There was no use trying to escape it. A phrase from the trial crossed her mind, and she altered it for George and herself: kill the beast before it—even if it—means the end of your own life.

“Edna, when did you get back?” he repeated.

“I’ve never been away, George.”

“Never been away?” he echoed, puzzled, slowly releasing her arms.

“That’s right. I was here all the time. I didn’t want you to know, because I didn’t want to see you.”

“Edna, what in the devil do you mean—you didn’t want to see me?”

“I mean I want nothing to do with a person I can’t trust. You took what I told you in confidence, you sold it to Zeke Miller in return for a filthy job, and you are as responsible as anyone for the President being on trial, and that makes me ill—and you make me ill.”

At first, from the crimson hurt on his face, she thought that he would deny everything. To her surprise, he did not. He said, “Look, sure, but there was no question of breaking trust—I’ve never double-crossed anyone in my life—and you, I wouldn’t—” Suddenly he was aware that the conference around Tim Flannery was breaking up, and his colleagues were spreading about the room. “Edna,” he said urgently, “we can’t talk here. Let’s go out for something and I’ll explain—”

“I’m not going anywhere with you, now or ever.”

Pained, he dropped his voice low. “Look, honey, you promised to help me hold my old job or get a new one by tipping me off in advance to any news—and I thought, maybe I was mistaken, but I thought what you told me that night was meant to be in the nature of offering me something I could use—to help both of us. Well, I was just going to use a little, and that’s all I did use, but Reb and the Miller staff, they added two and two and came up with more. My own part in it was next to nothing.”

She would give no ground. “If your part was next to nothing, how come Zeke Miller paid you off so handsomely? For next to nothing?”

“Honey,” he whispered, “the ammunition that maybe they got from me, that I hinted at, was practically a dud compared to what they had found out and stored up already. Miller, he was just being grateful that I—I was on the side of people who want to see this country run right, that’s all. You don’t know him, Edna. Miller is actually a generous man beneath that political bombast. Anyway, I really believe it, that stuff about the President, and I really believe I’ve done something good for my country. Is that wrong? It’s all out now. And you know it as well as I do. Dilman isn’t fit to be our head of state. So be sensible—”

“Be sensible? For what? So we can be married, and you can have a cheap source of hot news for—”

“Stop it, Edna. Dilman’ll be out on his butt in two weeks, and you’ll be out of a job, so what kind of news source will you be? I want to marry you because I want to, that’s all. I can afford it now, and I want to be a family man—”

“Well, I can’t afford it now, because you’ve cost me too much.”

She saw him glancing off nervously, and then she became aware that Reb Blaser was hovering nearby, pretending disinterest. She was perversely pleased with George’s discomfort. She placed the soggy umbrella under her arm and started to go around him.

“Wait a minute,” he said, attempting to block her, “we’re not through.”

“Oh yes, we are.”

“You mean you’re choosing Black Sambo over me?” he said tightly.

“I’m choosing to go back to work for a man who’s trying his best, if he’ll have me, rather than live with a—a—with whatever low, slimy thing you’ve become. Good-bye, George. You and Blaser go on writing good lynch stories. I’ll be watching for them in print. Only don’t bother to call me ever again, especially not when you can’t sleep nights.”

“Edna, for God’s sake—”

She heard no more. She rushed out of the lobby. In the corridor, she was pleased with only one thing: that she was tearless.

Entering her office, she could see that nothing had changed except that her swivel chair was now occupied by the scrawny colored girl, Diane Fuller, who was busy on the telephone. As Edna put down her purse, propped her umbrella in a corner, and took off her raincoat, she realized that Diane was regarding her with popeyed disbelief, as if she were an apparition from another world.

Diane Fuller said, “Yes, Mr. President,” into the telephone. Then hanging up, rising, fumbling for her shorthand pad and pencils, she nervously said, “Hello, Miss Foster. I somehow didn’t expect you.”

Edna reached the desk. “Where are you going?”

“Inside. There’s a meeting about to start. The President wants me to take it down.”

“Well, you never mind.” She held out her hands for the pad and pencils. “I’m ready to go back to work.”

Diane Fuller clutched the pad and pencils. “I—I don’t know if—”

“I don’t know either, Diane,” she agreed, “but I intend to find out.” Firmly, she removed pad and pencils from the colored girl’s fingers. “You stand by for a while, take the phone messages. If I remain inside over five minutes you can go back to your office in the East Wing. If I come flying right out, you’ve got yourself a permanent position right here.”