(1964) The Man

by Irving Wallace

  He was on, and liking it, and he went on and on, without interruption, except for a reverent “Sure enough?” or “Ain’t that somethin’!” from her occasionally. He narrated his activities of the day before yesterday, and of yesterday. He told her of his colleagues and their duties. He presented her with the highlights of the history of the Secret Service. He described the West Wing offices and the people and life in them, and he described what sections of the White House he himself had visited, with himself always in the foreground of these descriptions.

  She listened raptly, and drank, and exclaimed or clucked her admiration.

  His monologue took him a half hour, and when he was done, he was hoarse and happy. “Christ, Ruby, I’ve been bending your ear to death. You shouldn’t let me go on that way.”

  “You-all a good teacher, Otter. I was lovin’ it.”

  He finished what was left of his beer. “What about you, Ruby? What have you been up to today?”

  “Like I told you, nothin’, ’cept sleepin’ too long this mornin’ to git me my naycher back full stren’th—nothin’, Otter—”

  But then she went on about her hi-fi set, and the fun she’d had shopping for rare jazz records to add to her collection of classics. With enthusiasm she evoked names little known or unknown to him, mystical names like Bix Beiderbecke, Joe Oliver, Fats Waller, Muggsy Spanier, Bunk Johnson. She spoke of Storyville jazz and gut-gone bands and Bessie Smith’s “St. Louis Blues” and King Oliver’s Creole combine belting out “Froggie Moore.”

  After ten minutes she stopped. “You diggin’ it, Otter? No, you ain’t, you not with it, you a orfan from the blues. You need educatin’, Otter.”

  He swallowed. “I’m always open to improvement, Ruby.”

  “Man, you gonna go limp when you hear what I bought me this mornin’—know what?—piano solo of Jelly Roll doin’ ‘The Pearls.’ You gotta hear that, an’ then you gotta come up to my place an’ hear Duke Ellington an’ his Wash’tonians doin’ ‘Rainy Nights’—listenin’, you ain’t ever gonna be exactly the same, Otter, you gonna be no more orfan, you gonna join up an’ belong like Ruby Thomas here.”

  He had been holding his breath. Now he let it go with a wheeze. “Are you extending an invitation to me for a musical concert in your apartment, Ruby?”

  Her almond eyes held on him a moment. Then she said softly, “You always been welcome, Otter. Fact is, my machine needs some adjustin’ an’ I ain’t got the money for it yet, but you always sayin’ you got mechanical ways—”

  “I’m a wizard with a monkey wrench, Ruby. I’ve never tinkered with a hi-fi, but I bet I’ll have yours perfecto in two seconds and a jiffy. That’s a deal, if you say so. I’ll bring a bottle of J and B, and some tools, and you can give me my first jazz lesson.”

  She pushed her glass aside. “You done got a deal. When you wanna come up?”

  Before he could reply, a hollow, echoing voice intruded upon their conversation, coming from the left. He looked off. A well-dressed Negro customer had walked through the door, holding a transistor radio, and was making his way to the bar. The radio’s volume was on high, and an announcer’s voice boomed, “—gave his first press conference in the Cabinet Room of the White House today. President Dilman told fifty reporters very little that they did not already know. He sidestepped any direct commitment to the Minorities Rehabilitation Program, was evasive about reporting the results of his conversations with the visiting President of Baraza, and would make no comment on the New Succession Bill. However, the President did speak of reopening a summit conference with the Russians. He came under greatest fire, during the questioning period, over his appointment of the Reverend Paul Spinger, director of the Crispus Society, to investigate the electrifying kidnaping, down in Mississippi, of—”

  As abruptly as the radio news program had assailed him, it now ended. Beggs could see that Simon had leaned across the bar to speak to the customer, who had then lowered the volume.

  Turning back to Ruby, Beggs suddenly realized that he had lost all track of time. The radio program reporting on Dilman’s press conference reminded him that he was to report for duty, to guard Dilman, at four o’clock. He looked at his watch and was horrified that it was seven minutes to four.

  “Ruby, what time do you have?”

  “Five to four.”

  “Christ, I’d better find a cab.” He pushed free of the booth and jumped to his feet. Fumbling for his wallet, he found it and laid down three dollars. “Sorry to run out on you like this, Ruby.”

  She smiled. “Like I was sayin’, you is doin’ man’s work. But, Otter, you ain’t answered my lil question—when you fixin’ to come up an’ see me?”

  The haste went out of him. Impulsively he reached down and touched her hand. “Soon as I can, Ruby. My first free day off. Tell you what, see you here same time, day after tomorrow, and we’ll set a—a rendezvous.”

  “I’ll be waitin’, Otter dear.” She turned her palm upward, caught and caressed his fingers, then released them. “I wanna be with you.”

  He winked at her, started away, turned once to wave back, and then hastened outside to hail a taxi. For the first time in the Secret Service, he would be late on the job. Yet he did not give a damn what Agajanian said or Gaynor said, or in fact what President Dilman might say. All that mattered was what Ruby Thomas had said: Otter dear, I wanna be with you.

  Sighting the parked taxi down the block, he hummed to himself as he hurried toward it. The girl had said that she wanted to educate him. Great. Nothing suited him more. He had reached the time in his life where he wanted action, action and a little more learning. Whatever Dilman did with that colored broad of his, if he did, he could do better, if he dared.

  “The White House, Pennsylvania entrance,” he ordered the cab driver. “Half a buck extra if you make all the lights.”

  He was moving again, he was rolling, Jelly Rolling along, and everything was good, real good, once more.

  Edna Foster and George Murdock ate an early and hasty dinner at the Chez François on Connecticut Avenue near H Street, and by five-thirty they had left the modest French restaurant and headed in the direction of Lafayette Square.

  Edna had not enjoyed the rushed meal. She liked the comfort gained from leisure with George, their time for small talk and confidences, and she resented any deadlines imposed upon their dinners. Lately she had been more and more burdened by work, so that she often stayed on at night to clear her desk for the following day. Not that President Dilman was being more demanding than T. C. had been, for, in truth, he was almost diffident about summoning her for dictation or special assignments. No, it was not Dilman per se, but rather the atmosphere of conflict and tension that his presence in the Oval Office had created. Her desk, it sometimes seemed, had become a fort (her typewriter a machine gun), a surrounded outpost in an alien land, vainly trying to survive the cannonading and strafing of an overwhelming enemy.

  More difficult than the upsetting atmosphere was the concrete problem that she was no longer a personal secretary to the President alone. Under T. C., she had worked for him and no one else. Under Dilman, a subtle change had occurred. She worked not for the Commander in Chief exclusively, but for his aides, his staff and allies as well. It was as if a half dozen of them did not trust Dilman to perform solo, and intruded themselves as a chorus (so there might be less likelihood of detecting a sour note). Edna found herself doing what Dilman wanted, little enough, and also what Talley, General Faber, Eaton, to think of only three, wanted done for Dilman.

  Tonight would be one more night for her to reduce the overload of work. Besides, Dilman was having his last conferences with Kwame Amboko before and after his first State Dinner, and Flannery and the wire-service men and syndicated columnists (like George) would be standing by in the press lobby. She might be required to help Flannery and his girls if there were any press releases, which she did not mind as much, since indirectly she would be helping George.

  But more than the haste of th
eir dinner, what disturbed her right now, as they strolled hand and hand toward the square and the White House across from it, was George’s mood. Whatever his shortcomings—no one is perfect, her father always used to say, although it does not hurt to try—George Murdock was almost consistently cheerful and lighthearted. Rarely was he pensive. When he complained, and usually he did it in a joking way, it was not about the $150 a week he earned from Tri-State Syndicate, but about the fact that the twelve newspapers in his string were small, obscure, and so no one in Washington ever saw his stuff. As a consequence, he had no permanent slot in the Press Room off the West Wing entrance, and no standing among his colleagues or with the administration. This indignity, added to the chore of having to be his own photographer, sometimes became a matter of annoyance to him. Yet most of the time he enjoyed his work, what standing it did give him, and he lived economically in his bachelor’s quarters, his only extravagances being his numismatic collection, Indian-head coins his specialty, and his gifts to Edna.

  From the time they had begun going together, she had wanted to help him succeed, because instinctively she knew that she might be helping to liberate herself from spinsterhood and improve her own condition of life. While she could have been of enormous value to him numerous times, by slipping out to him scoops or beats or whatever the reporters called exclusive stories, she had refrained from doing so. By her rigid standards it would have been unethical and unthinkable. George had always been a darling about this, and had never pressed her. Sometimes she had ached to let him in on a secret a few hours or days before it would become public, so that he could benefit by it and become famous. She had never done so. The main consideration was not that such an act might cost her the job she had once cherished, but that the respect in George’s eyes would have been lost to her. They had always discussed T. C., of course, but usually in relation to his public politics or known gossip or nonsense about her own work. However, since Dilman had come to office, there had been even fewer of these discussions, because her intuition had warned her that Dilman was more vulnerable to loose talk and more opposed by the press.

  Yet, in her own way, Edna had tried to give assistance to George. She had made it known to T. C. that she was going steady, that her boy friend was a habitué of the West Wing lobby, so that T. C. would be more aware of George Murdock. And T. C. had been, for on several occasions George had been invited to intimate off-the-record briefings (reserved for the select handful of White House veterans) and paid-for administration trips that he would not have otherwise rated. Recently, whenever the opportunity presented itself, she had begun to mention George’s name to President Dilman, too. (“If you need me, Mr. President, I’ll be dining with my boy friend, George Murdock, of Tri-State Syndicate, at the Iron Gate Inn.”) She was never sure that Dilman heard her.

  Even though George did not complain about his meager income, she was certain that it was his economic straits that inhibited him from discussing marriage. Except for the small amount he had been able to put into a few speculative stocks, she knew that he did not earn enough to save. Until he did, there was little chance of his proposing marriage. There was one hope on the far horizon, hinted at by George. He had an Uncle Victor in Hawaii, wealthy, retired, and now seventy-nine years old. George was a favorite of this uncle, and was undoubtedly written into the old man’s last will as the heir to a considerable sum. But the Waikiki sun appeared to have rejuvenated Uncle Victor. He had not been ill once since Edna had been going with George. Still, that was a hope, a possibility, something.

  Sometimes Edna became desperate at the waiting. Once, on her own, she had planned to go to Tim Flannery, who was so nice, and ask him if he would take on George as a Press Department assistant. She had rehearsed her request, a beautiful and touching one. When the occasion had arisen, she could not make her speech. She had perceived that Flannery would have had to consult T. C., and whatever he might decide, it would put her in a bad light. Using her confidential position.

  And so her directionless life with George had gone on with no merging of their separate paths into a single path in sight. Her father brought the situation up at least once every other month in his short, stilted letters from the farm outside Milwaukee, but she never tried to explain, beyond saying that George was still her good friend and implying that she was still behaving in a way that would not disgrace anyone back home.

  In fact, most often, it was she, not George, who was disturbed by their seemingly pointless relationship. She had tried to tell him, without telling him, that she was the kind of girl who did not need much, who was not demanding. She had tried to tell him that the only riches in life to which she aspired were someone she cared for and a decent home where she could bear and raise wonderful children. Did he understand? He had never let on. How she wanted to tell him, if only he would bring it up, that she was ready to move into his confined apartment, ready to continue working while he worked, ready to skimp and save for their family and their future. This was her workable vision of tomorrow. She knew that it was not his. A man who wore lifts in his heels, she supposed, who was sensitive about his acne marks, she supposed, who wrote marvelously but was not read, she supposed, would be too proud for another second best.

  Tonight—it was becoming dark, no longer day, not yet night—she could see from his mood, so unusually low-spirited, so ingrown and silent (he had not uttered a word in all their walk to this point), that until now it was his own good nature and ebullience that supported both of them. But not these minutes, not tonight. His depression was only too apparent. She wondered what had caused it. She was afraid to find out.

  They had reached the square.

  He released her hand. “One second, Edna. Late edition of the Citizen-American is out. I want to see how Zeke Miller let his paper handle your boss’s first press conference.”

  She waited in the gloom while he went to the heavily sweatered newsboy. She enjoyed observing George when he was apart from her. His thinning blond hair was so neat, his pointed nose and receding chin made him appear so intellectual (which he was), and the tweed topcoat, even if it was not exactly the latest fashion, gave him the appearance of Fleet Street’s best.

  He returned to her, the newspaper opened, his gray eyes darting across it from side to side, then up and down. He was, she remembered, a remarkable speed reader. He clucked his tongue.

  “What is it, George?” she asked.

  “Congressman Miller’s unloading his big guns,” he said. “Look at the headlines over Reb Blaser’s by-line lead story.”

  He pushed the front page before her, sharing it with her, an intimacy she appreciated tonight. She had meant to glance at the front page only briefly, for this kind of news was the last thing on her mind. But the headline pulled her eyes toward it.

  The banner headline read:

  IS THE WHITE HOUSE REALLY BLACK?

  The second headline read:

  DILMAN BEGINS TO COLOR LOOK OF NEW ADMINISTRATION

  The three columns of bold type over Reb Blaser’s by-line read:

  PRESIDENT DEFIES ATTORNEY GENERAL REFUSES TO ACT AGAINST TERROR KIDNAPERS OF JUDGE GAGE APPOINTS NEGRO FRIEND SPINGER TO “INVESTIGATE”

  Edna’s eyes took in the three paragraphs of Blaser’s lead. Blaser had it from a source “close to the President” that Attorney General Clay Kemmler had demanded Dilman “outlaw” the Negro Turnerite Group for being behind the Mississippi kidnaping and for being supported by Communist Party funds. Apparently the President had rejected advice based on “well-known facts,” and had taken the first step in reducing T. C.’s brilliant Cabinet into “Uncle Tom’s Cabinet.” Dilman had appointed the Reverend Paul Spinger, a Negro apologist, to sustain his stand with “fiction” about the colored abductors. Dilman’s Black Hand had shown itself today, and it was redecorating the nation’s first and proudest house in its own dark hue. Not only had the President demeaned his high office and violated the nation’s trust, by attempting to treat with a known subversive and crim
inal like Jefferson Hurley, but he was dealing “softly” with a fellow African, Kwame Amboko, and risking our peaceful coexistence with Russia; he was refusing to come out in full support of T. C.’s minorities bill that would enable Negroes to “earn their citizenship” instead of commit crimes for it, and he was “reluctant” to sign the New Succession Bill on his desk that would assure every American that its Executive Mansion would remain as President Washington had wanted it to be and as President John Adams had known it.

  Edna’s eyes skipped down to the end of the story. She read: “Tonight President Dilman is presiding over his first formal State Dinner in the very room where President Adams’ prayer is carved beneath the mantel: ‘I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof.’ Poor Adams! Tonight President Dilman will sit with his back to our country’s prayer, having for his first honor guest to our House an African who is tampering with our lives, enjoying for his first official entertainment the anti-American wit of several entertainers of his own race. As one well-known congressman remarked, ‘We on the Hill are worried that we have a black Andrew Johnson in the White House, one with no regard for other branches of government or for the wishes of the majority of all decent Americans. We have grave apprehensions about the future. If the remaining days of Dilman’s one-year-and-five-month term are like today, then, alas, America has been pushed into a time of trial and infamy that will come to be known as its own Dark Ages.’ ”

  Edna Foster was surprised at her shivering indignation as she looked up from the newspaper. “How dare they! Did you read that? As ‘one well-known congressman remarked’—meaning who? Zeke Miller, that’s who!”