Promise of Joy (2 page)

1

Now the august day has come when he and Governor Edward Montoya Jason of California are to go to the Washington Monument Grounds and there before their countrymen pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor—and as much cooperation with each other as they can manage.

It is also the day when Secretary of State Orrin Knox, twice unsuccessful candidate for President, now Presidential nominee by fluke of death, circumstance, savagely bitter political battling and a squeak-in vote of 658 for him to 635 for Ted Jason, may find out whether he can trust the attractive, intelligent, equivocal flirter-with-the-violent that fluke and circumstance have thrust upon him as his running mate.

As he finishes shaving and prepares to rejoin his wife, Beth, in the living room of their comfortable, rambling old house in Washington’s secluded Spring Valley, he does not know just how much cooperation with Vice Presidential nominee Ted Jason there will be. But he has given Ted his word and he intends to keep it:

There will be as much as he can conscientiously contribute.

He will make a genuine effort.

Ambition and the country have a right to expect no less …

Ambition and the country!

How much he has done for both, in these recent hectic weeks that have seen President Harley M. Hudson win renomination in the wildly violent national convention; have seen Orrin become his running mate after a furious struggle with Ted Jason; have seen Harley’s death in the mysterious and still unexplained crash of Air Force One, followed by the accession to the Presidency of Speaker of the House William Abbott; and have seen that event in turn followed by the emergency reconvening of the National Committee, whose deliberations, surrounded by a violence even greater than that which shattered the convention, have finally resulted in Orrin’s nomination for President and Ted’s for Vice President.

Some have said that Ted, Governor of California, descendant of grandees and shrewd Yankee traders, darling of all that aggregation of uneasy citizens whose hopes and fears are symbolized and given voice by radically activist NAWAC—the National Anti-War Activities Congress—has flirted too much with violence.

Some—and they include Orrin and President Abbott—have said Ted has put himself in pawn to violence. Some—and they include Ted’s lovely wife, Ceil, who only last night abandoned her self-imposed exile at the great Jason ranch “Vistazo” north of Santa Barbara and flew back to be at Ted’s side for today’s ceremonies—have said that Ted has betrayed something essential in himself in so doing. And some—and they include all of those and many more besides, both in Washington and throughout the country—have made plain their fear that Ted may never be able to break free from violence and the begetters of violence, no matter how he tries.

And many of these—their uneasy discontent and frequently bitter criticism reaching him through a thousand channels in the past twenty-four hours—have said that Orrin Knox, in accepting Ted as his running mate, has betrayed everything Orrin has stood for in three decades of public life, and has taken a fearful chance with the country’s well-being for no other reason than sheer political opportunism and greed for office.

This, he knows, is the chief burden he carries before his countrymen today: the glibly cynical and disillusioned belief, on the part of so many, that Orrin Knox, so long regarded as a man of principle even by those who have disagreed with him most bitterly, is not so principled after all.

This he carries, and with it his worries about Ted, which are fully as lively, did his countrymen only know, as those anyone else may have. But how can he convince anyone of this now? He has apparently made a deal, hasn’t he? He has apparently reversed himself 180 degrees to accept Ted as his running mate, hasn’t he? He has apparently been just as much of a political trimmer and grasper after power as any he ever criticized in all his long and controversial years as Senator from Illinois … and he did not criticize with much charity, sometimes, in those days.

Fittingly enough, perhaps, many of his countrymen are not willing to grant him charity now.

And yet—and yet. Reviewing the immediate past as he casts an appraising glance at the steady eyes, the emphatic face, the brusque and somewhat impatient expression that stare back at him from the mirror, he does not find it in his heart to blame himself too much, even as he concedes that those who question him now do indeed, from their point of view, have more than reasonable grounds. He has had to answer for his decision to his son; and having done that, believes he can in the long run justify it to all but the most deliberately obtuse and intransigent.

In all these furiously tumbling weeks, the moment of greatest truth for Orrin Knox came, as it perhaps did for Ted Jason, on the night when the sinister forces of NAWAC waylaid and beat his daughter-in-law, Crystal Danta Knox, outside the national convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Crystal had lost the son she was carrying, and it seemed for a while that Orrin’s son Hal had lost all faith in his country, its political system and the ultimate human decencies that are the only protection men have against the fearful winds of decay and dissolution that howl unceasing around a free but sometimes achingly imperfect nation.

When his father selected for running mate the man Hal regarded as the principal cause of his wife’s beating and his son’s death, it seemed that Hal no longer had anything at all in which to believe.

But Orrin had brought him back, he tells himself with a sudden grimness that gives sterner lines to the strong, impatient face, and if he could do that, he can bring the rest of them back too. Hal had been utterly devastated by his choice of Ted Jason, yet Orrin had brought him back. It had not been easy. But it had been done.

Their principal conversation on the subject had occurred soon after former Governor Roger P. Croy of Oregon, Ted’s campaign manager, had left the Spring Valley house to give the press indirect but unmistakable affirmation that Ted would indeed be the Vice Presidential choice. Shortly thereafter had come a peremptory rap on the study door.

“Who is it?” Orrin had asked.

A voice he hardly recognized had said, “Me.”

“Oh,” he said, and suddenly felt tense, nervous and sick inside. “Come in.”

He glanced up quickly into the haggard, unhappy eyes of his son and glanced quickly away again.

“Sit down.”

“I will if you’ll look me straight in the eyes,” Hal said in a voice so low he could hardly hear it.

“Very well,” he said, though it cost him as few things in life had. “Now, do you want to sit down, or had you rather stand?”

“Why?”
Hal demanded, standing. “In the name of God,
why?”

“Because there are times when politics offers cruel choices,” Orrin said slowly, “and sometimes, even with the best will in the world, one gets caught in them.”

“Do you realize that that man, or his people, killed my son and your grandson?” Hal asked in a strangled voice.

Orrin sighed.

“Yes.”

“And do you realize that his gangs may do anything—destroy the country—put us under dictatorship—anything?”

“I think there is that potential, yes, if they’re not controlled.”

“Do you think that millionaire lightweight is controlling them? Was he controlling them this afternoon?”

“Sit down, Hal,” he said quietly, “and stop being rhetorical. I know just about everything there is to know about the character and motivations and strengths and weaknesses of Edward M. Jason, I believe. I don’t think there’s much you can tell me. And I don’t think there’s much to be gained from our fighting about it.”

“But I want to know why,” Hal said, sitting slowly down on the sofa. “I want to know
why
my father, whom I have always loved and respected and looked up”—his voice began to break but he forced himself on—“looked up to—why he has decided now that this man is worthy to move up one step from the White House. I don’t—I don’t even know why you think he’s worthy to associate with you
personally,
let alone be Vice President.…You’ve got to tell me something,” he said, staring at the rug. “I’ve got to have something left to believe.”

For several minutes Orrin did not reply, though his first impulse was to go to his son and put his arms around him as though he were a little boy. But it died, as such things do, because he wasn’t a little boy. Instead he tried to piece together something coherent that would make sense. He wasn’t sure it would, in Hal’s present mood—or his own, for that matter—but he knew he had to try.

“I think,” he said slowly, “that Ted Jason, at heart, is not a bad or an evil man. I think to a large extent he is sincerely convinced that he has a better answer for this country than I do. I think he really believes that if he could be elected President, things would somehow straighten themselves out and he could bring peace to the world at large, and to us domestically. I think he really thinks that.”

“Does that give him a license to kill my son?” Hal asked with a withering bitterness. His face suddenly dissolved. “My
son,”
he said in a choking voice. “Like I—like I was for you, when I was born.
My son.”

Orrin closed his eyes and sat back with his hands over them for a long moment. Then he looked up, though not at his son.

“You make it very difficult.”

Again Hal spoke with a devastating bitterness.

“Am I supposed to make it easy?”

“Easier,” his father said. “Just a little—easier—that’s all.…I don’t think there’s anything you’ve felt in these past few days that I haven’t—well, I’ll amend that, because I do remember how it was with you, and I do know you’ve been feeling things I can only imagine. I don’t really
know,
because back in those innocent days this kind of violence didn’t stalk America the way it does now. I didn’t have to worry about my family then as we all do now. I didn’t think I was taking my life and theirs into my hands every time I took a stand on a public issue. But it’s getting close to that now. Give us another five years like this, and freedom of opinion will be pretty much gone. Unless”—his expression too for a moment became bitter—“you’re on the right side.…

“All I’m saying about Ted Jason,” he resumed presently, “is that he’s in that curious state of mind in which ambition really does dominate all. It dominates so much that everything is related to it. Everything becomes possible to it. Everything seems right to it. Everything can be fitted in … and everything that feeds it can be justified.”

“And that doesn’t make him a dangerous man?”

“Of course it does,” Orrin said. “Of course it does. And yet not a
bad
man, in the sense that say”—his eyes grew somber as he thought of Wyoming’s demagogic junior Senator, chairman of the National Anti-War Activities Congress—“Fred Van Ackerman is a
bad
man.”

“How do you separate them?” Hal asked with a skepticism that at least, Orrin was relieved to note, replaced the bitterness a little. “Behind Ted Jason stands Van Ackerman. And all the rest of them. If you take one, you take them all.”

“I think they can be separated,” Orrin said, “because I think in Ted’s mind they
are
separated. I think if he can be shown what they are, and what they’re helping to get the United States into, he will break away from them. Because I think, as I say, that at heart he’s a decent and well-meaning man.”

“But that isn’t why you’re taking him,” Hal said with a sudden shrewd bitterness. “Not just because you think maybe you can reform him someday.”

“Sooner than that,” Orrin said. “But, no, you’re right. That isn’t why.”

Hal gave him a long look, so painful for him that he actually squinted as he did so. His father could barely hear him when he spoke.

“You’re taking him because of some deal, then.”

“No,” Orrin said, and thanked God he could say it truthfully. “No deal.” A smile lit his face briefly. “Do you really think if I’d made a deal I wouldn’t have made it for more than twenty-three votes, boy? What kind of a dealer do you think I am?”

“Well,” Hal said, and briefly he too smiled a little, “maybe not. But there must be some reason—some reason. There’s got to be something that makes sense”—and again his voice dropped very low—“if you are willing to put the murderer of your grandson on the ticket.”

Again Orrin sighed and looked away.

“You do have a way of cutting a man up.”

Hal laughed, a dry, humorless sound.

“I’m told it’s inherited,” he said, and at his father’s sudden angry look he did not flinch or drop his eyes. “But that doesn’t answer my question.”

“I’m trying. Give me a chance, will you?…In the first place, Ted isn’t a murderer—except as I suppose we are all murderers, who let things slide to a point where—things like that—can happen. Maybe I’m equally guilty, Hal. Did you ever think of that?”

Hal made a protesting movement but his father continued inexorably.

“Maybe I should have stepped aside at the convention. Maybe I should have stepped aside now, when the National Committee had to make its choice of a successor to Harley. Maybe I’m driven by power and ambition, too, beyond the point of decency—many think so, here and abroad. If I’d stepped aside, probably nobody would have hurt your wife and your—son. If I’d stepped aside in San Francisco, Harley would have had to take Ted, and maybe Harley would be alive now: who knows? It’s a fair assumption, even though Ted of course had nothing to do in any direct way with what happened to Harley. It was the climate—but maybe I’m as responsible as he is for the climate. Maybe if I’d gotten out of the way, Ted’s backers wouldn’t have felt they had to get desperate and do the things they have done. Maybe”—and again his eyes darkened at the thought of Helen-Anne Carrew, society columnist for the
Washington
Star-News,
ex-wife of America’s leading political columnist, Walter Dobius, murdered because she was getting too close to discovering the violent elements behind Ted Jason—“maybe Helen-Anne would still be alive. Maybe all of this is my fault as much as his. Maybe all men who don’t deny the ambition for power when they catch a glimpse of where it can lead to are guilty.… Did you ever think of that?”