(1964) The Man

by Irving Wallace

  “Hurley tried. I heard that. He was told Abrahams is tied up on other business right now. But if you, as his friend, with your position—”

  “Absolutely no,” said Dilman. “If he can’t do it for Hurley, I don’t feel I should put him in the position of having to do it for me.” Then he added, “Especially since, in spite of what the details of that trial in Mississippi may be, I still don’t like how Hurley is going about things. Sorry, Leroy.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, too,” said Poole softly. “Forgive me. I think you are making a mistake.”

  “I’ve made many mistakes as an individual,” said Dilman. “I hope to make fewer as this country’s Chief Executive. I’m as conscious as you of my color and of injustices to men of my color. Perhaps what’s happened—my being put in this seat, this office—and acting with dignity and responsibility toward all races in the full view of the whole nation and the world—will, could, do more to break down barriers of prejudice than anything else. It is a dream I hold. I don’t want to destroy it by diverting myself to lesser skirmishes or using my influence on friends. Be patient, Leroy. Much will be done.” He paused. “Our conversation, of course, is privileged. I don’t want to see any of it in your book.”

  Leroy Poole rose. “Of course not, Mr. President. One thing has nothing to do with the other. . . . Thank you for your time. I’ll write up some questions for you to answer. I hope to see you again soon.”

  He had turned to leave, when he seemed to remember something and hurriedly came back to the desk.

  “Mr. President, I almost forgot, but I promised someone to mention this to you. There’s a young lady I met, very well known in Washington—very capable, I’m told—who wants to apply for the position of your social secretary. She’s—”

  “I was thinking of promoting one of the girls already on the White House staff. I don’t think anyone from outside—”

  “She’s Senator Watson’s daughter.”

  Dilman could not conceal his surprise. “Senator Watson? Are you sure? He’s the Southern—”

  “That’s right. But his daughter, Sally Watson, is different. I don’t know her well, but we’ve talked. She’s absolutely color-blind, progressive, liberal, and knows everyone in the city, naturally. She’s dying to apply for the job, if it’s open.”

  “Oh, it’s open.” Dilman tried to think. At least three top secretaries on T. C.’s staff had resigned. Mary Lou Rand, the First Lady’s press secretary, had been one of them. Miss Laurel, the First Lady’s social secretary, had been another. He hated to examine their real motives in quitting. He remembered the advice given him by T. C.’s widow this morning. Hesper had said that he needed a woman in the White House to manage the many executive social functions. The right woman was imperative. Through the morning, Dilman had thought of hiring a clever and personable Negro girl. Then he had rejected the idea. There was no Negro girl among those he knew who had the social background to conduct formal dinners, play hostess to heads of state and Supreme Court justices and congressmen and ambassadors. There was not one he knew, even if he waived experience, who had the education and poise. Moreover, a Negro girl brought into the White House by him on this level would invite more angry speculation from the press that he was peopling the White House with those of his own race.

  Yet, he had thought, a white social secretary invited as many difficulties, if different ones. While he expected that, by making inquiries, he could find the right young lady, one who had mingled in the government and Georgetown set, the idea of having a white girl so close to him in the White House was dangerous. That, too, might create suspicion and resentment. Nevertheless, it had to be someone, and if he was to do what Hesper advised, find an efficient person, it would have to be a white girl.

  He considered the name of the one whom Poole had suggested. He had a vague recollection of reading about Sally Watson in the Washington Post, the Star, Zeke Miller’s Citizen-American. As a senator’s daughter, she would know everyone, know what was proper and correct. And Poole had said that she was liberal and open-minded, and “dying” for the position. Gradually Dilman warmed to the suggestion. The act of appointing a Southern senator’s socialite daughter to a social job in the White House might be more valuable than harmful, from a public-relations point of view.

  Dilman found Leroy Poole still standing before him, Dilman nodded. “Yes, the position is open,” he repeated. “I was just thinking pro and con, but I suppose that is pointless without meeting the young lady and knowing more about her.”

  “I think you should at least see her, Mr. President. I think you’ll be impressed.”

  “All right, I’ll see her. Can you call her for me?”

  “Immediately.”

  Dilman’s eyes went to his engagement card and then to his wristwatch. He was still running ahead of schedule. There would be a free span of fifteen minutes or so between his last morning appointment and his luncheon with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “All right, Leroy. Tell Miss Watson to be here at twelve-fifteen. Don’t give her any false hopes. Simply say I’ll see her briefly.”

  “I’ll take care of it, gladly, Mr. President.” Poole began to turn away, when the view of the South Portico of the White House beyond the Rose Garden arrested him. “My, that’s a beautiful sight out there.” Suddenly he snapped his fingers. “One last thing, Mr. President. Since I’m ending your biography on your moving into the White House, I think it would be the smart thing to have a quick look at what’s going on up there.”

  “It’s a mess today—”

  “Exactly,” said Poole with heightening enthusiasm. “I want to see the moving in, the unpacking, the various rooms. I’ve never been up there before.”

  “The press and public are not usually invited into the President’s private apartment.”

  “I wouldn’t repeat the intimate details to a soul. I simply need a general visual picture for the book. That’ll be the tag of the book.”

  Dilman shrugged, indifferent, his mind already going to the next names on his engagement card. “Go ahead, Leroy, if you require it. But don’t get in the way and don’t be long. I’ll inform the Secret Service where you’re going.”

  He buzzed Edna Foster to alert Secret Service that Mr. Poole could be admitted to the second floor for a short visit. Then he buzzed Mr. Lucas to tell him to pencil in Miss Watson at twelve-fifteen, and to send in the next visitor.

  He sat back in his green chair, exhausted by the hammerings of guilt from his son, by the special pleadings of his biographer, and resentful of this jabbing at his repressed consciousness of being a Negro, of being the first colored man in America who could (if he wanted to, they said) lead his people out of servitude to a Promised Land.

  Through the French doors he could see the waddling, ridiculous figure of Leroy Poole making his way toward the ground-floor entrance. How could anyone as ineffectual and verbose and foolish-looking as that make him, a man in his position, feel so reproached and uneasy and afraid? Damn the Pooles and the Hurleys, he suddenly thought. They had no larger responsibility and so they could think, say, do anything. They had only a little ax to grind. But he, as President, had inherited a big stick. He must remember, he must never forget, to use it with wisdom, if at all. Unaccountably then, his mind revolved to Wanda Gibson, whom he could not see, and to the solution that had been taking form in his thoughts, and he began to feel more assured about what lay ahead. . . .

  After Leroy Poole had embraced Crystal across the expanse created by their equal corpulence, after kidding her gently and dubbing her Mammy Dolley Madison (for he adored her because she exuded the warmth he had enjoyed from his Mom in childhood), he made a mock ferocious charge across the litter in the Rose Guest Room toward Diane Fuller. While the skinny secretary feigned resistance and squealed, Poole pecked at her hollow cheek and pinched her behind.

  Then, elaborately, he again extracted his small spiral notebook, and began to scribble notes describing this historic room on Dilman�
�s unpacking day. Without meeting the eyes of the fink Uncle Tom of a valet, he was conscious of the haughty servant’s disapproval of his uncouth extroversion.

  Writing, Leroy Poole thought how much the valet Beecher had in common with Douglass Dilman: Man, you are sure enough a counterfeit white, like Massah, and, man, maybe it gets you along fine today, but it won’t stand you no good on Judgment Day, because you ain’t white, no matter what, and you ain’t black, no matter what, and you won’t rise no higher than purgatory and limbo.

  Before coming upon Crystal and Diane in the Rose Guest Room, Poole had been taken on a careful tour of the second floor of the White House by the valet. At another time in his young life, he imagined, the visit might have been memorable. To know that a poor shanty black boy like himself could be led down hallways and up elevators by the President’s bodyguards, could be shown the intimate splendors of the White House by the President’s valet, would have been a high spot of his life. This morning it was next to nothing, and he was as inattentive as if he were going through the modern office building on 44th Street in Manhattan to visit his publisher.

  For ten minutes he had been guided in and out of the great hall, in and out of the Yellow Oval Room, the Treaty Room, the Lincoln Bedroom (here he had his only start, seeing that fink Dilman’s clothes piled on the long bed), all the while listening to that Uncle Tom valet’s supercilious history patter. While Poole had made a pretense of taking notes, had indeed taken several, knowing all the while that he could get what he needed from the excellent guidebook the White House Historical Association had published, his entire attention was focused on a confrontation with one person somewhere in one of these stodgy, phony rooms.

  Christ, he had thought, what had this junk cost to keep one bum politician in luxury for four years while millions of his people couldn’t buy their way out of the countless filthy, overcrowded, rotting and stinking slums? The hell with all this, the crappy Victorian chairs in the Treaty Room, the crappy crystal chandeliers bought by that nitwit President Grant, the crappy Monroe vases in the Yellow Oval Room, the crappy Greuze painting of Ben Franklin, another white fink—all this cared for by more overpaid people than there were working in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department or than were publicly able to work for the Turnerite Group.

  His lousy meeting with that servile black Judas, Dilman, more yellow on his spine than black, had infuriated him, blinded him to everything but his failure. There were his gutty, beaten brothers handcuffed in that stinkpot town in that Devil’s Island of a state in the deep torture chamber of the South, suffering kangaroo trial before a foul vermin of a county judge. There was his friend Jeff Hurley, and that smart good Dago, Valetti, and the rest of his brother blacks risking their lives in Little Rock or Shreveport, where every segregated hotel was about as safe as the Alamo. And here was he, one of the secret unlisted members they counted upon most, commanded by their leader to convince a fink President to get a maybe fink Jew lawyer to lend a hand to justice. They were on the firing line, waiting on word from him, their hopes and last appeal for decency depending on him, and he had failed. Would Hurley understand how desperately he had tried? Would Hurley believe that he had been unable to turn a black man who was yellow into a black man who would be Negro? Yet three days ago the mails had brought him a hasty letter from Hurley and one last hope. If this hope was fulfilled, they could be optimistic again. If this, too, failed, then hell would break loose, and when Poole remembered the Turnerite plan of last resort, he had shuddered. And so he had tagged after the valet, looking not at the objets d’art which were America’s pride and heritage—not his, for America rejected him—looking not at this alien decadence but for the one animate object he must meet.

  Finishing his note-taking in the Rose Guest Room, he once more slipped on his fat-man jester mask of good cheer, teased Crystal and Diane, and bade them good-bye for today.

  “Have we seen every room?” he asked the hovering valet.

  “Not quite. Please follow me.”

  They entered a corridor, then entered the red-and-white Empire Guest Room, then looked into the small bathroom with a carpet—a carpet in the can, Je-sus!—and then moved toward the southeast corner room.

  “This is the last one you haven’t seen,” the fink valet was announcing. “It is the Lincoln Sitting Room, adjoining the Bedroom, which you visited. You’ll find the furniture somber, late Empire and Victorian. The side chairs are backed by laminated rosewood, quite unique. The room offers solitude, retreat, and an excellent view of Washington and Georgetown. Perhaps the only modern, discordant note in the Sitting Room is—”

  The valet had gone into the Lincoln Sitting Room, and at once halted and drew himself upright.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he was saying to someone in the corner. “We won’t disturb you, Mr. Dilman. I was taking one of the President’s guests on a—”

  At the mention of the name, Leroy Poole squeezed past the valet into the Sitting Room, where Julian Dilman sat slumped in a red-patterned, upholstered chair drawn up before a going television set.

  Poole rotated his palm in greeting. “Hi, Julian,” he said breezily.

  Julian leaped to his feet, as filled with consternation and pleasure as if Lincoln himself had come into the room.

  “Why, hello, Mr. Poole. It’s sure good to see you again. It was a great honor and pleasure meeting you downstairs. You don’t know what a fan I am of yours. I’d sure like to talk to you sometime about your essays.”

  “Why not right now?” said Poole, all affability. He pivoted toward the impassive valet. “Do you mind, Jeeves?”

  “Not at all, sir,” said Beecher. “We’ve completed the tour, sir. Ring for me when you are ready to leave.”

  The valet backed off to the doorway, then through it, then hastened away.

  Poole had followed the retreat of the valet to the door. Now, closing the door, he said to Julian, “That butler—I bet Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writing a book about him this minute.”

  Julian clapped his hands, and beamed at being the solitary recipient of a Great Author’s bon mot. Going to the side chair nearest the President’s son, Poole silently exulted that he had found the objet d’art, animate, he had been hunting, and that it would not be difficult at all.

  “Sit down, Julian,” Leroy Poole said. “I have only a couple of minutes, but I’d enjoy a little chat.”

  Poole settled easily into a chair, while Julian, displaying embarrassment at the unreeling of an old Western motion picture filling the television set screen, said, “I—I was just eating up some time before catching my train back to Trafford. Let me shut it off.”

  “You’ll never know how it came out,” Poole said.

  “I don’t care,” said Julian. He went awkwardly to the television set and turned it off. Then, shyly, he took a place beside Poole. “My taste is better than that, believe it or not,” he said. “I read a lot, that’s what I do.”

  “What sort of thing?” asked Poole.

  “Well, the classics, of course,” said Julian nervously.

  “I thought you said you read my stuff.”

  “I do! That’s the truth, Mr. Poole, that’s what I really read the most now, the protest literature, that’s what I find important.”

  Poole dropped his teasing demeanor and nodded solemnly. “Good boy,” he said. “I wish your father felt the same.”

  “What do you mean, Mr. Poole?”

  “I’ve come to know your father quite well, Julian, so I mean no negating or adverse criticism of his remarkable mind and achievements, but—no, I don’t think it’s fair to discuss this with—”

  Julian almost fell from the chair in his eagerness. “Please, please, Mr. Poole, go ahead! I know my father pretty well, and I know his shortcomings as well as his good points.”

  “Ummm,” murmured Poole. “Okay, then. It’s just that I don’t think he’s as close to his people, their problems, as he should be. I think he’s been in this antiseptic center of co
mpromise too long, and he’s been separated from the realities of Negro misery and injustice too long.”

  “You’re right, absolutely,” Julian said fervently. “He’s always been that way, at least long as I can remember, long as he’s been a politician depending on support from whites. To tell the truth, I was having a fight with him—well, a disagreement, let’s say—about just that before you came in his office.”

  Poole wore his mask of innocent wonder. “No kidding?”

  “He forced me into a Negro college,” Julian rushed on. “Now he objects because I’m giving so much time to the Crispus Society. I accused him of not facing what he is, what we’re up against, and he gave me a good dressing down.”

  “No kidding?” Poole repeated. “Well, we gave him quite a morning, the two of us. You know that trouble down in Mississippi over the Turnerites—?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “I begged your father to get the Attorney General into the matter, to straighten out that crooked trial. If he couldn’t do that as President—I know the pressure he is under—I asked him to do Jeff Hurley a personal favor. I asked him to have his friend Nat Abrahams—”

  “I know Nat. He’s a great guy.”

  “Okay, I asked your father to persuade Nat to step in and appeal the conviction, when it comes. Apparently, Nat’s tied up with something else, but he couldn’t say no to your father, to the President, if he were asked. No soap. Your father wouldn’t ask.”

  “He wouldn’t?” said Julian. Then he nodded knowingly. “That’s right, he wouldn’t. Especially now. He has strong feelings against equality by force. I’m like you, like what you write, Mr. Poole. I think that’s the only course there is left for us. Yet nothing can change Dad. He’s wrong, but that’s the way he is.”

  “You can change him,” said Leroy Poole. He had timed it. A pause, and then this opener before the real bombshell. He could see the beginning. Julian’s repellent eyes had inflated.