Capable of Honor (55 page)

Chapter 3

“Did you see this God-damned thing of Walter’s?” Helen-Anne Carrew demanded six hours later when, a little bleary-eyed—as who wasn’t? After all, it was the second day of the convention and from now on each succeeding morning was going to be considerably more bleary-eyed than the last, for everybody—she happened upon Bob Leffingwell, eating breakfast alone in the coffee shop of the Fairmont. “I swear I think he’s going crazy again. Of all the open invitations to—kill Harley—or start a revolution—or something. What is the matter with the man?”

“I don’t know,” Bob Leffingwell said, coming out of a brown study with an obvious effort. “Here, sit down and let me buy you breakfast. What do you hear?”

“I hear things are going to get very ugly,” she said, taking the chair he offered, staring around the room already filling with delegates and newsmen. He could see her nodding to a few, ignoring others, making quick mental notes of who was eating with whom, calculating, as all Washington correspondents do, the significance of various combinations. “I suppose you know—of course you do—that COMFORT, DEFY, and KEEP have consolidated their headquarters at the Hilton this morning. They’re already out in the streets in full force in front of all the hotels and from Union Square on up the hill here, and they aren’t being very pleasant—I suppose with your connivance.”

“That’s not exactly a friendly word,” he said with a fairly good attempt at a smile as the waitress came up. “What’ll you have?”

“Just orange juice, toast, and coffee, thanks. I have to keep my girlish figure.…Say,” she added, pausing to really study him for the first time.
“You’re
not feeling very happy today. What’s the matter?”

“Oh,” he said, and shrugged. “Mary Baffleburg, I suppose. My past—still my present, and apparently destined to be my future as well.”

“That was rough,” she agreed. “But,” she added with an impartial judicious thoughtfulness that robbed it of much of its sting, “you deserved it—and surely you expected it, at some time or other. The only thing to do is ride it out. Your friends know you regret it, and they include a surprising number of people—even Orrin Knox, I think, and obviously the Speaker. So to hell with the rest of them.…But that isn’t all that’s bothering you, is it? Something else.…What’s the matter, is Ted really losing ground? Is Walter really right? Have we all got to rise up from the Atlantic to the Gate to stop big, bad Orrin?
Must
we shoot Harley?”

He shook his head.

“I think we’re holding very well”—he smiled and gestured to the headlines in the papers she carried, he carried, everyone carried—“in spite of the helpful scare-campaign launched for us by Walter and his friends. Ted and Orrin this morning are holding at about the same level they were last night, I think.…No,” he said, suddenly serious again, “I’m as worried about the mood as you are, Helen-Anne. I think it’s going to be very disturbing, before we’re through. Mary Baffleburg attacked me, but that was just an expression of something much deeper underlying this convention. That was an advance warning, whether she knows it or not in her fat little pudding-head. There’s something very nasty waiting to break out, I think. Contrary to my man’s confidence about it, I’m not so sure it can be controlled once it gets loose.”

“My man won’t start it, sweetie.”

“Nor will mine, at least consciously. But there are people who feel bitter enough so that it may not take much.”

“What can we do to stop it?”

He frowned.

“I don’t know. That’s what disturbs me. Maybe”—he said somberly—“maybe the best thing to do is just get as far away from it as possible.”

She snorted.

“Hell’s fire, that’s no solution. I’m amazed at you. Bob Leffingwell, with all your history as a fighter in this government! You know perfectly well that’s no solution at all. You’re the last man I ever thought would break and run.”

He smiled a twisted little smile.

“Maybe Mary won her point.” Then he sighed and straightened up. “No, of course I don’t mean that. But I am disturbed, Helen-Anne, genuinely so, as you are. And I don’t know what to do about it. Ted thinks he can control COMFORT and DEFY and KEEP, but they represent powerful forces and now they’ve worked out an alliance that’s going to be terribly difficult to keep in hand. And violence begets violence, even though Orrin, too, of course, will do his best to prevent it. It isn’t going to be that easy. I can feel it in the air.”

“Maybe,” she said thoughtfully, nodding an absent greeting to Esmé Harbellow Stryke, who had come in with the Smetters and Roger P. Croy to take a table across the room, “maybe you should reconsider—where you do want to stand. Possibly you don’t want to get completely away … but just to the other side.”

“Orrin?” he said, and for a second she thought she had misjudged him and gone too far. Then he went on, and she knew with a good deal of relief that she had not. “No, I don’t think so.” He stared at her with a thoughtful frown. “I don’t see how I could.…I really don’t see how I could.” He smiled with a sudden genuine humor. “He’s as bad as Mary Baffleburg.…Of course,” he said presently, and she held her breath and concentrated carefully on her coffee, trying not to give the slightest hint of her growing excitement, “he has much to recommend him. He was only doing what was right about my nomination—what I invited. I don’t feel as bitter toward him as I did.…And of course the President—” Then he broke off and it was all she could do not to blurt out, “The President
what?”
But somehow she managed to keep still (Good girl, Helen-Anne! she told herself. Oh, God-damned good
girl,
we didn’t know you
could
keep your God-damned mouth shut). But he only said, “Well—” briskly, and she knew the moment was over.

But it was enough, she crowed to herself, it was enough, and did she have a scoop she couldn’t use!

“I must not,” he went on thoughtfully after a moment, “as the Governor of California puts it, use the convention as a stage on which to admire myself playing Hamlet. What I’ve got to do now is figure out how to control our new-found allies, because it’s going to be tough. I think we’ve all got to help on that one.”

“I repeat, it isn’t my man who will start it.”

“Well, tell him to warn against it,” he said, “and I’ll try to get Ted to do likewise. Maybe that will help. Are you working for him now?”

“Not yet,” she said, gathering up her newspapers, her bulging purse, her scribble-filled pad and worn-down pencils. “Not until he wins the nomination, sweetie. Then I will.”

“He isn’t going to win,” he said, waving to the waitress for the check as she stood up and he stood with her to say goodbye.

“Sure he is,” she said, and took a chance: “And you’re going to help him.”

“Oh, no!” he said with a laugh. “Oh, no. Don’t go spreading anything like that.”

“I won’t spread it, but I’ll be expecting it.”

“Don’t wait up nights,” he advised. She laughed as she turned away.

“About one more, I think. That ought to just about do it.”

But he only laughed back at her and made a shooing motion with his hands. When she glanced back from the door he was paying the check, his face serious and withdrawn again. All right, buster, she thought: you wait and see what you do in the next twenty-four hours. Unless Helen-Anne misses her guess you’re going to be making quite a bit of news before this convention is over. And Helen-Anne doesn’t usually miss.

“You two look very serious,” Cullee said with a smile in the Oak Room at the St. Francis. “Is that any way to act at a reunion breakfast?”

“Our second reunion breakfast,” Mabel Anderson said with an answering smile. “We had one yesterday.”

“And,” Lafe said gravely, “we will have one tomorrow—and tomorrow—and tomorrow—and—Mabel, I don’t think you’ve met Sarah Johnson?”

“No, I haven’t,” she said, extending her hand. “Are you working on Cullee’s campaign?”

“I’m working on Cullee,” Sarah said with a laugh as she sat down.

“About got me, too,” the Congressman said, giving her a satisfied look as he took the fourth chair. “I think the title at the moment is secretary to the candidate in my campaign for the Senate, but as soon as I win and get rid of my other encumbrances, I’m going to take on Sarah.”

“Congratulations,” Mabel said. “Are you going to win?”

Cullee shrugged.

“Who knows? I beat Ray Smith for the nomination, and that isn’t bad, beating an incumbent.” He chuckled. “Even if it was by only nineteen thousand votes out of five million cast.…” The chuckle faded. “It isn’t going to be easy, Mabel, I can tell you that. California’s very divided on the war issue right now. I may just lose, if the other side decides to become the peace party. I don’t think my opponent will, himself, but he may not be a free agent.”

“And you are?”

He smiled.

“You’re quite the cross-examiner. Watch out, Lafe, she may give you a hard time.”

“It’ll be good for me,” the Senator from Iowa said complacently. “It’s a good question, too. Are you?”

Cullee got a stubborn look.

“I’m acting as though I am. Some of ’em tell me I’ve got to cut and trim because of that nineteen thousand squeak-through, but I tell ’em, no, sir, I’ve got the nomination and I’m the candidate and if anybody doesn’t like it, he can lump it.”

“That’s about what I’m telling them in Iowa,” Lafe said. “We may be taking quite a gamble, old buddy, but I’d rather do it that way than take a stand I couldn’t live with later.”

“Aren’t they noble?” Sarah said innocently to Mabel.

“They are noble,” Mabel agreed innocently with Sarah.

Cullee laughed.

“We operate on a simpler level. We’re just little Senators. I guess when you get up to the top you have to make some concessions and acquire a few peculiar bedfellows, isn’t that right, Lafe?”

“So I hear. What’s the news from your old pal LeGage?”

“Him!” Cullee said, scowling at the thought of the chairman of DEFY, his onetime Howard University roommate and bitterest friend-enemy. “He was after me again last night—came to the room and we had a terrible row. He wants me to join this big movement for Ted he’s working up with Van Ackerman and Kleinfert.”

“But you’re not for Ted,” Lafe suggested.

“No, I’m not for Ted! I issued a statement right after I got the nomination”—he laughed suddenly—“that’s how noble I am, Sal, I waited until I got it—that I was leaving the door open as to what I’d do here. But it was pretty obvious which way I thought I’d walk when I went through that door.”

“And ’Gage couldn’t change you?” Mabel asked.

“He couldn’t change me if he had the last drink on earth and I was a dying man,” Cullee said flatly. “If I were Ted,” he said somberly, “I’d damned well watch out for what I was getting into.”

“Maybe you should warn him,” Lafe said.

“I’m going to see him, sometime today. I’ll tell him. I don’t expect it’ll do any good, but I’ll tell him.”

“Maybe it had better be before the committees meet,” Lafe said, “if you got an assignment last night like I did.”

“Oh, did you?” Cullee asked with a pleased smile. “Yes, the Speaker came by and gave me the word. I’m on-stage in Platform Committee in about one hour from now.”

“And I in Credentials,” Lafe said. He smiled with a frank enjoyment. “I’m looking forward to it. I’m not sure Orrin’s going to win, but it will be a chance to state a few home truths.”

“In Platform Committee, too,” Cullee said. “Too bad you girls can’t come see me, but I guess you can go listen to Lafe, all right.”

“Why don’t we?” Mabel said. “I have a young lady who was still sleeping when I got up, so I asked one of the maids to sit for me, but I’ll go get her and give her a quick breakfast and then we’ll meet you at the Hilton, Sarah, O.K.?”

“My pleasure,” Sarah said. “I’ll be there.”

“Excuse me, then,” Mabel said. “I’ll see you soon. Thanks, Lafe.”

“My
pleasure,” Lafe said.

“How’s it going?” Cullee asked as they watched her, a pleasant girl, a little dowdy, perhaps, but obviously as nice as she could be, go through the door, saying hello to a couple of her fellow delegates from Utah as she went.

“No rush … no rush at all. We’ve got a lifetime.”

“Ho!” Cullee said with a smile. “Like that, eh?”

“Like that,” Lafe said quietly. Then he smiled. “If you’ll tell me what the Speaker told you to do I’ll tell you what Bob Munson told me to do.”

Cullee laughed.

“Oh, no, you don’t! We’ve got secrets, you and I. Big, dark secrets.”

“Which boil down to:
fight like hell,”
the Senator from Iowa said. His expression became serious. “I only hope they work.”

Congressman Hamilton nodded somberly. “I only hope Ted’s people let them work.”

The President, too, hoped they would work, as he sat at his desk in the White House and, like most of his countrymen, tried to do his job with half his mind on the little box blabbing from San Francisco. Something was rising there he did not like. Twice in the last half-hour there had been shots of Powell Street from Union Square to Nob Hill, companion glimpses of the major hotel lobbies: in each the demonstrators stood solidly packed, virtually expressionless, barely moving, hardly speaking, silent, hostile, and, yes—menacing. The easygoing college kids of yesterday, the happy delegates who formed the impromptu parades and whooped it up in the convention’s opening hours, seemed to be still there but pushed back, shoved aside, elbowed out, relegated to the outer fringes where the cameras still caught them from time to time, but only briefly, sporadically, almost absentmindedly. Some people might still be having a good time, the ubiquitous lenses seemed to be saying, but they were rapidly becoming a minority. Not since the pictures of the defacing of the U.S. delegation headquarters at the UN three months ago, the President thought, had such grim and unpleasant white and black faces appeared upon the screen—and at least those had been screaming and yelling and there had been some animation, no matter how forced and phony. These were deliberately cold and impassive, deliberately ominous; pompous and childish in their ostentatious posing, yet with the pomposity and childishness of monstrous idiot infants who might at any moment go mad. And their banners were all of war, and of the fear of war, and of the hatreds of vicious minds let loose, as though their masters had pried open some giant manhole cover and out of it they had crawled from the sewers of the race to hold their savage placards denouncing Orrin and calling with a threatening insistence for Edward Jason.