The Wilson Deception

by David O. Stewart

  “How the president’s doing, mostly—his health, you know, which is still touch and go. Boucher’s not as interested in who’s coming to the residence, not like Dulles is. I suppose Boucher knows that, anyway. He’s got plenty of eyes watching the front door—from both sides of it.”

  “How much did you tell him about that business between me and Wilson and Grayson the other night?”

  “Just that Wilson took sick again, which is the official statement anyway. The president’s still going to those meetings with the other leaders, so they can see for themselves how sick he is.”

  Speed sat up a bit. “What business the other night?” After Joshua filled him in, he asked, “So how sick is the man?”

  “He seems to bounce back pretty good, you know,” Joshua said. “It’s pretty surprising. One day he looks half dead. Next morning he’s up singing hymns.”

  Fraser shook his head. “He’s very sick, and the worst thing is, I don’t think he appreciates how sick he is. That fool Grayson certainly isn’t telling him.”

  Cook tapped his chin with a forefinger. “Does it affect his mind?”

  “Sure could,” Fraser said. “It’s making me wonder about a lot of things. You see in the papers about China, where they’re letting Japan keep this province the Germans bullied the Chinese out of a while back? They’re giving this piece of China—no argument about it, it’s part of China—to Japan. How could Wilson possibly think that was self-determination for the Chinese? It’s straight-up land-grabbing, yet there’s Wilson agreeing to it. He did something like that for the Italians, too, some piece of Serbia or something like that. Seems like he’s junking every principle he sent us off to war to defend. Things like that make me worried.”

  Cook kept tapping his chin. “That’s dynamite you’re sitting on, Dr. Fraser. You’re saying the American president doesn’t have all his marbles. Imagine if the world knew about it.”

  Fraser shook his head. “I don’t really know it, not for sure, and I can’t tell the world what I suspect, even if I knew it for sure. He’s my patient. I can’t issue a public statement that any patient—much less the president of the United States—isn’t in his right mind.”

  “Well,” Cook cocked his head, “it’s worth spending some thinking time on. We’re looking to find something that Dulles wants to hush up, that he’ll pay a price to hush up. You may be sitting on just that thing.” He pulled a large envelope out of a bag under his chair and tossed it on the table. “Those are for Lawrence. He doesn’t get the one about Joshua. You look ’em over. See if you get any idea about something we can use for ourselves.” He held up a second envelope. “I’ll hang onto our set.”

  “You’re keeping copies of Lawrence’s photos?”

  “Sure am. Right now we’ve got no idea what might work in this crazy business.”

  Wednesday morning, May 7, 1919

  Wilson was standing at his usual window when Joshua brought his polished shoes into the dressing room. It was early but the blackbirds were there, right where they should be. Wilson missed the cardinals of Washington. Such vivid colors, such noble heads. The blackbirds of Paris were dreary by comparison, but they didn’t know that so they sang just the same. He missed Washington’s redbud trees, too, their delicate lavender a soothing sign of soft weather ahead. Paris had magnolias to greet spring, but he always found their blossoms excessive. He would be glad to get back home, back to afternoon drives in the country again. Grayson insisted the drives were essential for his health, but they had been quite impossible during the peace conference.

  The president was traveling to Versailles that morning. They were to present the final version of the treaty to German diplomats who had been waiting impatiently for it. His tail coat hung from the valet stand, under his white waistcoat.

  Joshua thought that Wilson, standing in his shirtsleeves and cravat, looked gray, a bit thin, distracted. His eye twitch raced. It had been strong for several days. After placing the shoes next to the table, Joshua stood straight. “Beautiful day, sir. Can I get anything else for you?”

  Wilson was slightly surprised to hear the voice, but didn’t turn to it. “Barnes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh. No. Nothing now. Except maybe a good old Presbyterian sermon.”

  “Sir?”

  “My father, you know, was a great man. A great man.” Wilson looked back at Joshua, his expression wistful. “I’d give a good deal to hear him again, perhaps talking about the burdens of the civilized races. He was wonderful on that subject. He really felt that burden.” The president walked to the table. He sat to put his shoes on. “Do you speak with your father, Barnes? Perhaps what I mean to ask is, do you listen to him?”

  Before Joshua could answer, Wilson said, “Of course you don’t. I’m being foolish. Your father’s back in New York. You told me that. When you next see him, when we get back to Washington, remember my advice. Listen to your father.”

  “Sir, does that mean you intend for me to return to Washington with you?”

  “Of course. Even Mrs. Wilson agrees. We all think you’ve done fine.” Wilson groaned slightly as he leaned to pick up his shoes. “Today’s a very big day.” He smiled at Joshua. “I will meet the dreaded Germans. And about bloody time, as Mr. Lloyd George would say.”

  After Wilson had stared into space for a time, Joshua said, “Can I give you a hand with those shoes?”

  Wilson looked down at the shoe in his hand. “No. Thank you, Barnes.”

  Joshua left the room for the valet’s station, an alcove off the rear corridor of the third floor. He needed to see to the president’s laundry, then prepare his suit for the next day’s events. Most of all he needed a cigarette. He opened the window along the corridor and lit up, holding the cigarette outside while leaning against the frame. After months of smoking them, he still didn’t care much for a Gauloises, but he could afford them.

  He was feeling jittery. The peace conference was starting its last lap. This arrangement with Wilson, one way or another, was going to end. That was all right with him. He no longer gloried in the constricted freedom he enjoyed as John Barnes. It wouldn’t do. He recently remembered what Frederick Douglass said about the life of a slave—that if he had a bad master, he wished only for a good one, but that if he had a good master, he wished for his freedom. In twentieth-century terms, Joshua had moved from Douglass’ first category to the second one. He was out of prison. He had a good master, but he hadn’t yet won his life back. Not even if he went back to America with Wilson, working as John Barnes, valet. He ached for that third category, freedom, but still had no idea how to get there or whether he’d end up back in the first category.

  The old man had been right. Life as John Barnes wasn’t good enough. The old man was right more than Joshua probably gave him credit for. Being Speed Cook’s son had never been easy. The man was so big, so tough, so smart. So angry. How could his son not be a disappointment?

  He thought about the time back in Steubenville when he and his friend Morris—cursed by his moon face to be called Lunchpail—were playing Custer and Indians. They couldn’t have been more than eight years old.

  Two older white boys came by and said they couldn’t play that game, that Custer was white and had no nigger troops. Joshua had heard his father talk about the Negro soldiers out West, so he answered that there were lots of colored troops.

  “Yeah,” Lunchpail chimed in, “and they were too smart to get massacred like Custer.”

  They took the beating. Lunchpail went down easy and Joshua decided that was the better choice. They got off with a fat lip for Joshua and no visible marks on his friend, but the episode left them with an overpowering shame. They hadn’t fought. Joshua didn’t want to face his father. He said they should camp out near Echo Cave, a couple miles downriver.

  It got so cold that night. Lunchpail kept crying, so they started to walk back through the moonless night. Soon Lunchpail turned his ankle. They slept in a pile of leaves, huddled togeth
er for warmth.

  The walking was easier after the sun came up. In an hour, they hobbled into the yard of the hardscrabble Cook Hotel.

  Joshua’s mother came tearing down the stairs. She screamed Joshua’s name. She slapped him. Then she hugged him hard, spitting out scalding words through tears. Joshua blubbered the story out. He couldn’t stop talking.

  His father came home an hour later. He hadn’t slept, looking for Joshua all night. His face was like a stone. Carrying an axe, he took Joshua into the woods behind the hotel. The man could split wood one-handed, five bulging fingers gripping the axe near the end. He handled it like a hatchet.

  They stopped at a tree that was about forty feet high. His father said Joshua had to chop it down and make it fall north, safely away from their shed and chicken yard.

  Joshua had split wood before, but he had never taken down a tree. He was eight. That first day, he chopped until a blister popped on each hand. Afraid to come home, he sat out next to the tree until it got dark, then slunk into the house.

  His mother washed his hands. “Boy’s hands are hurt,” she said to his father.

  In silent reply, his father lifted his two hands with their twisted fingers. His face was still stone.

  His mother wrapped Joshua’s hands in cloth for the second day. He chopped for another two hours, each swing getting more feeble. He had no idea how to make the tree fall in the right direction. When his father came by to watch him, Joshua asked how he could do it.

  “You need to figure that out,” his father said.

  When Joshua went out to the tree on the third day, he could hear his parents arguing, which was something they didn’t do. His father wasn’t a man you argued with. You could work around him, but arguing didn’t work.

  A few minutes after the voices ended, his father arrived and took the axe. With what seemed like a single swing, he dropped the tree exactly where it was supposed to fall, then sat on the trunk. Suddenly his father’s face was full of feeling.

  Joshua was afraid.

  In a low voice, his father said, “You listen to me now, son. You listen and remember.”

  Joshua nodded.

  “You made some terrible decisions out there with your friend. One bad choice after another.”

  Joshua nodded.

  “You can’t do that.”

  Joshua nodded again.

  “Colored people can’t make bad decisions, not ever, not without paying a terrible price.” His father looked savage enough to tear up the forest with his bare hands. “Every decision you make, every one, it has to be a good one. D’you understand?”

  Joshua nodded again, terrified by his father’s urgency.

  “That’s how you’re going to be better than your old man.” His father’s eyes bore into him. “You’ve got to be. I won’t allow you not to be.”

  Joshua started bawling.

  His father reached out and pulled him against his rough shirt. The shirt smelled. Tobacco smoke from the crap game that went all night in the hotel’s back room. The horse that the Cooks used to pull their wagon. His father’s sweat.

  Shaking his head, Joshua took a last drag on the Gaulois. He had to get the president’s clothes in order. He and his father and Fraser, they’d been stumbling around in the dark for months, trying to make the right decisions. Through it all, Joshua had known that he was lucky, lucky that the old man was still big and tough and smart, and angry enough to take months out of his life to save his son. It was time for Joshua to take care of himself.

  He stubbed out the cigarette on the window sill. It left a smudge. He’d have to get something to wash that off.

  Chapter 25

  Thursday, May 15, 1919

  Without waiting for an answer to his knock, Allen Dulles entered the president’s library with a bulky package under his arm. Lloyd George and Clemenceau stood near an open window. A warm breeze riffled the heavy, cream-colored curtains. Wilson sat near the window, his legs extended and crossed at the ankles. He was launching into a story, so Dulles waited near the door.

  “So there’s this colored fellow,” the president said, “and he’s found a gun and tried to pawn it as his own. The pawnbroker gets suspicious. He sneaks out of the back of the store and finds a policeman who arrests the man.

  “The Negro’s then hauled before the judge, who takes one look at him and asks, ‘Don’t you know that it’s against the law to carry a gun in New York?’

  “‘Yassuh,’ the darky says. ‘I just found that out.’

  “The judge then asks, ‘And don’t you know that it’s also against the law to pawn an article that doesn’t belong to you, something you just found?’

  “ ‘Yassuh,’ comes again from the darky. ‘I just found that out, too.’

  “ ‘So,’ the judge asks, wagging his finger, ‘what will you do if you ever find a gun like this in the future?’

  “The darky thinks for a minute and says, ‘I’s be sure to pawn it in New Jersey, suh!’” Wilson showed his big teeth when he laughed.

  The others smiled politely. Dulles stepped forward into the lull.

  “Ah, Mr. Dulles,” the president said. “Do pull the chairs back and place the map there on the floor. And please stay to make a record of our decisions.”

  Sinking to his knees on the carpet, Dulles took the package from under his arm and unfolded it carefully. He smoothed its folds flat.

  The multicolor map of Europe and the Middle East, produced by the British Army’s cartography office, measured about eight feet wide by six feet. For today’s discussion, Dulles had used different colored inks to outline alternative borders for Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, and Austria. The yellow lines were the borders before the war began; red lines marked borders when the fighting stopped, as best anyone could figure out; the blue ones were the British proposal for a settlement; the brown lines sketched the French counterproposal. Labels pasted onto the map marked existing countries or nations that proposed to be born.

  Dulles had mastered the rationale for each alternative settlement, though some could be explained only by the naked self-interest of one Big Power or by a small community’s fear of being subject to stronger neighbors. Preparing the materials had meant a very late night, not to mention missing another soiree at Cromwell’s chateau. He hated missing the party. Like the peace conference, Cromwell’s revels could not go on forever.

  “Mr. Dulles,” Lloyd George exclaimed. His voice contained the rhythm of Welsh lyricism yet only a trace of that accent. “This looks like another baffling exercise in geographic nuance. I trust you are prepared to guide us.”

  Clemenceau pulled a chair over to the bottom edge of the map. “Perhaps, ” he said, “we might attempt something more intelligent than restoring colonies that were lost two thousand years ago, as we did for the Greeks.”

  Lloyd George tut-tutted in a way that no American could. “Did you see that Greece landed troops in Smyrna.”

  “Yes,” Clemenceau answered, “but there is no report yet of where they left the wooden horse. Very cunning of them to conceal it.” He tugged on the grey gloves he used to protect the skin of his hands. “Really, Mr. Prime Minister,” he scolded while peering down at the map. Gravity tugged his features and his mustache earthward. His somber expression was that of a schoolmaster reminding a bright pupil of something he should know. “This British preference for ancient claims is nothing but whimsy. The Jews must have Palestine. The Greeks acquire Smyrna. Yet you begrudge France its rights in the Lebanon and Syria, presumably because we have been there for the last fifty years and are actually there now. Our claim is far too strong to satisfy your scholars.”

  Dulles had pulled two chairs over to flank Clemenceau’s. He walked to the top side of the map and knelt so he could point out landmarks, cities, and natural features for the decisions of the day.

  “Monsieur Premier,” Lloyd George said as he sat, “you have assured us that so far as France is concerned, all depends on the German borders, payments from Germany
, and the disarmament of Germany. Having accommodated you on each of these points, even at the risk of sowing the seeds of a bitter German resentment, we discover that France’s appetite for distant lands revives, more ravenous than ever. It is both shocking and disappointing, sir. Most disappointing.”

  Clemenceau turned his head to the British leader without changing his expression. “How can a man be shocked who has promised the same lands to France, to Prince Feisal and his Arabs, to your Hebrew friends, to your own petroleum industry and Royal Navy, and to how many others? You will end up disappointing a great many people. But France will not be among the disappointed.”

  Wilson approached the map. “Gentlemen, gentlemen, perhaps we should get down to today’s business. I believe we are back in the Carpathian Mountains, this time with Silesia.” He knelt next to Dulles, grunting slightly as ligaments popped in both knees. “Mr. Dulles, would you be so good as to point out the choices before us?”

  Friday Morning, May 16, 1919

  Fraser knocked on the door of a nondescript office in a nondescript building in an anonymous neighborhood. In response to a shout from within, he entered. Colonel Boucher of the Deuxième Bureau sat at the far side of a nearly pristine desk. The Frenchman’s bulk made the desk look like a toy. Leaning forward on his elbows, Boucher’s arms seemed to reach across the entire desk. This was the first time Fraser had met him in an official setting.

  “Ah, Major Fraser. Thank you for coming. Please sit.”

  Fraser selected the only empty chair in the room, a spindly straight-backed affair that would never support Boucher’s bulk. He sat tentatively.

  “You are enjoying our Paris springtime?”

  “Thank you very much. Most of all, I’m enjoying a dwindling caseload at our hospital.”

  “Your patients recover? That is formidable!”