Grunting surrender, Nat Abrahams gave up.
Unplugging the cord, wrapping it around the electric razor, he considered the results of his shaving in the dim yellow mirror of the cramped, rattling compartment lavatory. A sadly uneven job, but then God had been there first, he decided wryly. No electric gadgetry could smooth the Maker’s work. Nor did Nat Abrahams really care much. The twin in the mirror with its shock of unruly brown hair, lined forehead, bushy eyebrows, sunken eyes, hooked nose between high cheekbones, amused mouth, prominent jaw, all gaunt, sallow, keen, had been faithful friend and partner through most of his quixotic idiocies and adventures for most of his years. The six-feet-and-one-inch twin—not only the face, but the lanky, ungainly, sinewy structure appended to it—had frightened off few clients (well, maybe a few fastidious ones), lost few juries, antagonized few judges. It had won him Sue. It had collaborated to gain him mighty pleasures and minor reputation. Who could ask for anything more?
He smiled with self-mockery. Who could ask for anything more? He could. He could ask for one thing more—money—money, and plenty of it. The unselfish need of it, after years of treating it as a time-wasting intruder, was the only thing on earth that could have put him on this rushing train from Chicago to Washington, D.C., in his busiest August yet. He had turned over his crowded calendar to Felix Hart, he had turned over the three children to their grandmother, he had dragged Sue away from her thousand wife-mother activities, to obtain what he had spent a lifetime ignoring: the pot of gold that had become a necessity at last. Nothing but necessity would have sent him careening forth on this questionable treasure hunt.
Nat Abrahams reached down, pulled up his suspenders, and snapped them over his shoulders. The suspenders, regarded by his opponents as a corny affectation, had become so much a part of him now that he was hardly aware of them. When he was aware, he was happy to remember that they were not and had never been an affectation. In his first year in law school he had purchased his first pair and worn them as a talisman, to help him attain and honor the kind of shingle he had always wanted: Lincoln, of Lincoln & Herndon, Counselors, or Darrow, of Darrow & Sissman, Attorneys-at-Law. He had deserved half of neither shingle, he was certain, but he was equally certain that the talisman had reminded him always to remember the ideals of Lincoln and Darrow.
Yet this morning the suspenders felt as tight and uncomfortable as a guilty conscience. Was the journey to Washington right for him? The cardiac specialist, his old friend Greenberg, had reiterated that there was no choice. “Nat, surely the American Bar Association does not disapprove of its members being well paid. So why all the Old Country guilts? Enough already. Your whole life you have lived by the Golden Rule, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ So now it’s time to do unto yourself as you have done unto others. Survival, Nat, not at any price, no, but what Avery Emmich offers is not any price, but your price, your terms. Younger men with younger hearts will swing your broadsword to protect every minority, every civil liberty, so let go, let them. You have had your warning, one early coronary insufficiency. Not every man is so lucky. So do what I tell you and what Sue wants. Let go of the crusade. Go to Washington, sign the contract, make the fortune, and then come back and buy the farm. Live so your children can honor their father, not his tombstone. Go to Washington, Nat.”
The words rang in his ears, in duet with the train’s whistle. Well, if he was nothing else, he was obedient. Here he was, on the Capitol Limited, little more than one hour from Washington’s Union Station.
He left the lavatory and groped his way into the compartment bedroom, where only the tiny bed light over his upper berth and the slit of morning beneath the green shade provided visibility. He took down his vest, and then his suit coat, and pulled them on. Fixing the silver watch chain, he squinted to make out the time. Yes, one hour and five minutes more to Washington.
He bent to see if Sue was awake. Her back was to him. Her small, fragile face was buried in the pillow, and her short bob was a tangle. He listened to her inhale and exhale, and loved her now as he had for every moment of their eighteen years. She was so sound asleep, so far from turmoil, and he regretted having kept her awake last night with the news that he had heard in Akron.
He touched her bare shoulder. “Sue, darling—”
Her shoulder lifted, fell, and her head, eyes still shut, came around. “Mmm?”
“Time to wake up. We’re almost there.”
“Thanks.”
“Are you awake, Sue?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve got an hour to dress. If you make it fast, you can join me for breakfast. The diner’s two cars back. I’ll be there.”
“Okay.”
He straightened, flexed his shoulder muscles, picked up his attachè case, and went to the door.
“Nat—”
He halted, returned, to find her on an elbow, eyes wide-open, staring up at him.
“Nat, is it true, what you told me last night—or was I dreaming?”
“You weren’t dreaming, dear.”
“No,” she said slowly. “I was afraid of that. Poor Doug in the White House. I don’t mean just that he’s colored. It’s that he’s so—so sensitive and—and withdrawn. Nat, they’ll crucify him.”
Abrahams frowned. “He’s tougher than a lot of people think, and smarter, too.” He paused. “Maybe it’s the best thing that could have happened—I mean, to the country.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Honey,” he said evasively, “I never know absolutely what I believe until I’ve had breakfast and a pipeful. You ask me then. Now, hurry up. I’ll see you in the diner.”
Once he was alone in the train corridor, wending his way between the compartments and windows, he tried to understand what he did believe. Stopping before the last window, he placed a palm against the glass pane, briefly conscious of the blur of green trees flashing past him, but soon inattentive to the scenery. His mind had gone back to the scene he had witnessed at the depot, during the time of their departure yesterday.
When he and Sue had boarded the Capitol Limited in Chicago ten minutes before it left at three-forty yesterday afternoon, they had already known of the President’s sudden death in Frankfurt. All through the depot, and outside the train, and in the train itself, Abrahams had seen in the expressions of passengers and porters the same evidences of disbelief and anguish that he had observed that other terrible time when President John F. Kennedy’s life had been extinguished by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas.
Pushing himself away from the window, Abrahams tried to sort out the different qualities of grief. He felt sure that the public had reacted to T. C.’s death in Frankfurt in very much the same fashion that they had reacted to President Kennedy’s death in Dallas, which was considerably different from public reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in Warm Springs. T. C. had been almost as youthful as Kennedy, and as vigorous. Most people had regarded T. C. more as an older brother than as a father, because he had been their Chief Executive less than three years and they had not become totally dependent upon him. His sudden death had shaken them badly—that was evident everywhere yesterday—but what seemed to shake them more was the realization that invincible youth and strength, carrying hope and ambition, shielded by the indestructibility of success and power, could be brought down and stamped out so swiftly and easily. Thus, Abrahams guessed, public lamentation had taken on the form of disbelief. When Roosevelt died—and this, too, Abrahams remembered very well—the President had been an intimate part of people’s lives and experiences for so many years that the loss had been not only the loss of the ever present head of the family, but each man’s loss of a great segment of his personal life.
After their train left Chicago, Nat and Sue Abrahams had talked over the tragedy and its meaning at length, and pored over the latest newspapers, and then he had devoted himself to his work. While Abrahams had voted for T. C., supported him, he had felt no passionate involvement
with him, and so he suffered no feeling of passionate loss. He had thought, as he worked over his notes for the Washington meeting with Gorden Oliver, Emmich’s lobbyist there, that MacPherson might do the job as well as T. C. had done. There would be no national trauma.
The rest of the short afternoon on the train had been lost to working, napping, reading, and desultory chatter about the children, the new position that was in the offing, the utopia that was possible after that. They had gone to the lounge for martinis, and then eaten too much dinner. Abrahams had seen Sue back to their compartment, where the berths were already made. She had told him that she was tired, and would read some more, and go to sleep early.
With his attaché case he had returned to the lounge car to study the proposals from Emmich’s attorneys, to mark modifications and changes after them. He had hardly been aware that they were in Akron, and that it was eleven-fifteen and they were running a little late. But then, casually peering through the window, he had noticed, with growing curiosity, a large gathering of the train’s porters and conductors, and lips moving excitedly and considerable gesticulating from everyone.
Minutes later, as the Capitol Limited had begun to move again, the wizened Negro bartender had hurried into the lounge with the news. MacPherson had also died in Frankfurt. Senator Douglass Dilman, a colored man, had just been sworn in as President of the United States.
Doug Dilman.
It had taken Nat Abrahams a long time to calm the chaotic emotions he had felt about his old friend and his friend’s incredible promotion. At midnight Abrahams had gone back to his compartment. In the darkness Sue’s sleepy voice welcomed him and said good night. He had sat down on the edge of her berth, and told her what he had heard. She had snapped on the blue night light above her head, and he could see that she was upset and trembling. He had given her a sleeping pill, and then they had discussed it, until her voice had thickened and fallen silent, and she had drifted off to sleep again. Later he had stretched in his upper berth, but he had not slept. He had been awake, his mind a turmoil, for at least an hour after they left Pittsburgh.
And here it was early morning, and here he was drawing closer and closer to the nation’s capital, a city so jolted overnight, so changed, by the rise to highest office of the only colored man he had ever known well and one who had been his friend since their first meeting during the Second World War. Only the previous week Abrahams had had a letter from Dilman, who was overjoyed that Abrahams was coming to Washington. Dilman insisted that they must see one another as often as possible during Abrahams’ visit. Dilman had even set a date for their dinner of reunion. Abrahams speculated as to whether that engagement still existed and, if it did, what his friend would be like.
Sighing, Nat Abrahams drove further speculation from his mind and walked quickly, opening heavy resisting doors, into the lounge car, and then continued into the immaculate dining car. Except for a sprinkling of white passengers, absorbed in the Pittsburgh newspapers, the dining car appeared to be the scene of a Pullman porters’ convention. At least a half dozen of them, joined by the Negro waiters, were congregated at the far end, engaged in deep conversation.
The short maître d’hôtel, rimless spectacles pressed into his Prussian face, bounced forward, signaling Abrahams to a table. As Abrahams sat before the spotless water glasses and gleaming silver ware, dancing to me click of the wheels and rails, the maîture d’hôtel placed the menu, order pad, and pencil in front of him.
“I won’t need a menu,” Abrahams said. Taking up the pad, he wrote his order: cereal, French toast, tea. Then he filled in Sue’s order: grapefruit, melba toast, coffee. He handed the pad to his host. “Hold the coffee until my wife comes in.”
“Very well, sir.”
Abrahams nodded off to the far end of the car. “I’ll wager they’re talking about President Dilman.”
“Nothing else but that. They can’t keep their minds on their work since it happened.” He bowed closer to Abrahams and whispered, “You’d think it was the Second Coming.”
“Let’s hope so.”
The maître d’ was about to say something, but seemed to change his mind, and said something else. “Are you, by any chance, with the government, sir?”
“Heaven forbid,” said Abrahams, “unless that covers all suffering taxpayers.”
The maître d’ lingered. “We’re expecting our next trainloads, the coming months, to be more heavily Negro, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t see why,” said Abrahams sharply. He motioned to the pad. “May I have my tea right away?”
After the maître d’ had hurried away, Abrahams remained inspecting the picture that the man had planted in his mind—thousands of Pullman cars, overflowing with black men pouring into Washington to accept their new appointments. However, he could only visualize the picture in broadest caricature. For, knowing Dilman as he did, he was aware that it was wildly ridiculous. One of Dilman’s shortcomings, Abrahams had always felt, was that he leaned too far backward, and away, from those worthies of his own race, lest he be charged with favoritism. Dilman believed that all men were created equal, and should inherit equal rights, yet he was too inhibited by fear to practice his beliefs. Instead he had a tendency to practice a sort of inverse segregation, one turned inside out. This was too harsh a judgment of so good and suffering a man, Abrahams knew, but it was largely true.
His memory went back to early 1945, when, as a captain, he had been assigned to the Military Justice Division of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, Department of the Army, in the Pentagon Building. He had found himself situated at a desk in the same glassed-in olive green cubbyhole as Lieutenant Douglass Dilman. Abrahams had known a few Negroes when he attended the Law School of the University of Chicago, but he had never known them intimately. Abrahams had never possessed any strong, special feelings about Negroes, except intellectual resentment at their oppression and slum history and bondage in America. His bookish, impecunious father, a philosophy professor, and his active-in-causes, fearlessly vocal mother (a sort of Margaret Fuller whose Master’s thesis had been on the Abolitionist movement) had raised him so naturally that he had come to manhood without any racial prejudices.
As a matter of fact, Abrahams was not even possessed of tolerance for Negroes, as many of his intellectual and progressive friends were. To Abrahams, the word tolerance bore, in itself, a flick of prejudice—one was nice to certain people, treated them equally, accepted them, but by being tolerant of them thus, one implied that they were different. To Abrahams, Negroes had been men who were light black or dark black as white men had been swarthy white or pasty white. All men were men together, and some were stupid and others were intelligent, some more boring than others and some more fascinating, some more bad than good and others more good than bad, whether they were black or white, brown or yellow. Abrahams had entered the Army with this attitude, and it had not changed.
Being confined in a cubbyhole with a Negro officer had been unusual only because he found Dilman shy and deferential beyond the requirements of their difference in rank, and because he had been uncertain about Dilman. His uncertainty was not related to his own feelings about Dilman’s color, but rather to Dilman’s own sensitivity about his color and to Abrahams’ whiteness. But because they had been thrown together a couple of feet from each other, devoting themselves to the same cases and working under the same pressures, Dilman’s defensiveness had gradually dropped.
Their closeness had begun in the common language of military legalities, and had eventually shifted to the common language of intellectually equal men. Not only had they worked together, but they had dined in the Pentagon cafeteria together daily and left the river entrance together in one car pool for their respective lodgings. They had come to know of each other’s lives, although Dilman had always been more guarded here, and of each other’s likes and dislikes, human weaknesses, human aspirations. They had become fond of each other as men, and when they had been assigned together to London
, and then Paris, and then Occupied West Germany, their friendship had solidified. The triumph of it, Abrahams had finally realized, was that Dilman had one day ceased to consider him white and therefore alien.
After the war they had both practiced in Chicago, he with offices in the Loop, and Dilman on the South Side. While he had known that Dilman was married, he had never met Dilman’s wife during the war, because she had not accompanied him to Washington. In Chicago Abrahams met her three times and, knowing Dilman as he did, understood why Dilman had not brought her with him to Washington. Aldora Dilman, although of Negro ancestry, had proved to be of fair complexion. Abrahams had thought her tense, embittered, ashamed of her darker husband, and he had observed that she drank too much. Eleven months after setting himself up in Chicago, Dilman had abruptly moved himself and his wife to another city in another Midwestern state.
Occasionally, in the next years, Abrahams had his reunions with Dilman, often going out of his way to enjoy one. After an initial constraint, Dilman had always accepted him as an old friend. Abrahams had become aware of Dilman’s work for Negro organizations and great labor unions. He had not been surprised when he read that Dilman had agreed to run for the House of Representatives, and he had been thrilled when Dilman won. Since Abrahams’ cases had often taken him to Washington, D.C., he had been able to see his old friend more frequently.
In these meetings, during which almost every subject was covered, Abrahams had learned to avoid one area, although he perceived much about it. He had silently understood Aldora’s refusing to accompany her Congressman husband to Washington. He had been pleased to learn, indirectly, that Aldora had given Dilman a son some years before. And it had come to him as no shock, somehow, when Aldora died at the age of forty. He offered Dilman no words of sympathy. He had always known that this dark area of personal life was one that Dilman did not like to discuss.
(1964) The Man Page 17