Q. What have you done about it since?
A. We’ve ordered our field men to continue probing for information.
Q. Not enough. Whatever Talley or Eaton determined—whether they kept this information from me because they decided it was unimportant, or because they refused to trust me, I am not yet ready to let them usurp my powers, the powers of this office, and make decisions for me. This can be serious, serious beyond belief.
The words blurred to her eyes, and the champagne’s bitter aftertaste was in her throat, and her writing hand was painful from spasms of cramp, but she knew that she must write this down too, and fully. She suspected it would be more important to Arthur than anything else. When one had knowledge of what other people thought of them, were planning against them, one was forewarned and as strong as one’s self and one’s opponent combined. How much she herself would want such a transcript of Arthur’s private conversations by long distance with his impossible wife. Armed with that, she would know how to behave to perfection. But then, she supposed, such information was superfluous. Every time Arthur lay in her embrace, peacefully asleep, his beautiful repose told her what he thought of Kay, what he thought of Sally, and what she herself could depend upon in the future.
She shook off the lassitude of drink, pulled a fresh index card before her, and began copying again.
Her wavering pencil had neared the bottom of the card, when abruptly it stopped, and hung there as if impaled.
There had been a sound outside the door.
Her head went up, her back arched, her heart thumped.
She listened.
Then there was a voice, and another voice, both muffled, barely audible, but as strident as fanfares against her ears, amplified and amplified again by her mortal terror.
Beyond the closed door, the voices seemed to converge upon her until they were recognizable, one that of Douglass Dilman, the other that of Beecher, his valet.
A cold sweat bathed her, and her clammy fingers tightened about the pencil as panic gripped her heart and head.
Impossible, was all that she could tell herself. But, simultaneously, the shock of fear cleared her head. She remembered for the first time since she had stood drinking her champagne after dinner: it was not an ordinary feature-length film they had seen, but two Signal Corps short subjects (running time, twenty-eight minutes) and one Air Force documentary (running time, seventeen minutes). No wonder it was over. No wonder the President was outside the door.
She was trapped, she and Arthur trapped, because of her stupid miscalculation, caught red-handed without prepared explanation or lie.
The voices, indistinct outside the door, rose and fell. Desperately her numb fingers sought help from her numbed brain. She threw the pencil into her purse, shoved the index cards together and jammed them haphazardly into the purse; then, holding the purse, she grabbed up the folder and stumbled out of the chair. Blindly, choking, she darted to the side of the bed. Casting the purse on the bed, she knelt, tore open the briefcase, and stuffed the folder into it.
She leaped to her feet, wildly searching the bedroom. Across the bed, past the towering headboard and Lincoln portrait on the wall, was another white door, the one leading into the adjoining Lincoln Sitting Room. It was her escape hatch, her only hope. If she could only get out before he came in. She went swiftly around the endless bed, half running, reached the door to safety, was about to open it, when she realized that she was empty-handed.
She spun back into the room, and then wanted to scream with anguish. There it was, the sonofabitching purse, the indicting purse fat with her notes for Arthur. There it was, glittering and mocking her, lying on the far side of the bed.
She bounded to the bed, reached over it for the purse, lost her balance, and fell across the blanket cover. She had snatched the purse and rolled over to regain her feet when she heard the creak, like the report of a firing squad, outside the corridor door. On an elbow, hypnotized, she watched the doorknob turn. She was lost.
In that living instant of horror, a flash of recollection was illuminated out of her past: she had got into José’s dingy flat in Greenwich Village, while he was playing with the band uptown, to rummage through his effects and find out if he had left a wife down in Puerto Rico. She was still on marijuana, and insanely jealous, and would not have an affair or marriage with a bigamist, and she would not take his word. She had heard his footsteps on the wooden boards outside, the key rattling in the unlocked door, and she had been trapped. She had thrown herself on his mattress, sprawled and in disarray, and pretended sleep. Thus he had found her, the first time in his room, and had accepted the fact that she had got drunk in the saloon downstairs waiting for him, and come up to sleep it off. It had deceived him completely, poor bewildered primitive, and she had blotted out his suspicions by giving herself to him. They had eloped the next day, the silly annulled episode, but the point was, he had not found out why she had been there, because of her cleverness. Had he found out, he would have cut her throat. He had been a nut, like herself in those sick days, and he would consent to any degradation except question of his word, his only wealth of pride.
The memory passed through her mind with the speed of enlightenment.
Her gaze remained riveted to the doorknob. It had turned once, yet the door had not opened. She heard Dilman’s voice call out something to his valet. Still the door did not open, as she heard the distant reply from Beecher.
Could she lift herself off the bed, retrieve her now fallen evening shoe, reach the second door, get through it and close it, before the President came inside? Maybe. She started to sit up, then saw the door beginning to open, and more clearly heard Dilman wearily relate the last of some instruction for the morning to his valet.
Too late.
Breath locked in her lungs, she kicked off her other pump, lifted her legs high, and rolled to the middle of the bed. Her hair was mussed, which was all right, and one of the thin straps that held up her green bodice had slipped loosely down her arm, and the skirt of her cocktail dress, a part of it, she knew, had caught to the blanket in her falling back and rolling, so that her garters and a portion of one thigh were exposed. She did not know which to cover first, her thigh or her lace brassiere, but then she covered neither, for the door was opening and she must pretend sleep, pretend to have passed out, and this way she would look it. Besides, in this privacy, he wasn’t a President or politician or any big shot at all, but just a poor, lonesome colored man who’d had no attractive woman around for weeks, and she was the best-looking female in the White House. Let him know, let him know. José had been diverted. The colored man would be diverted, too, diverted and flustered, and would not bother to reason and concern himself with why she was there. She’d make it, she was sure, confident now, if only the champagne didn’t make her nauseated. She released her taut muscles, threw one arm out limply, so that her bodice dropped even farther and one spidery cup of the white brassière was almost fully revealed.
The door opened.
Her eyes closed tightly, and she tried to contain her breathing to the natural shallow breathing of sleep.
She waited for the exclamation from him, astonishment or harsh annoyance. Neither came. There were only the soft sounds of shoes rubbing on the carpet, of human movement, of a stifled yawn.
She eased one lid open to form a slit of vision. He filled the thin, long frame: his broad back was to her, his dinner jacket already removed, his white suspenders and dress shirt sharply contrasting with his thick growth of kinky inky hair. His stubby black hands were unfastening the white bow tie. He undid it, dropped it on the table, opened his collar. He began to turn, and knowing middle-aged men, she guessed what was next. He would make his way to the bed to sit, remove his shoes and socks, and stick his feet into comfortable bedroom slippers before settling down to read.
He had come around quickly, before she had closed her eye. For a second, she had the record of his petrified expression at discovering her: at once startled, a
t once confounded, at once agitated.
Her eyelid covered the slit. She feigned deep sleep, inhaling and exhaling through her mouth. She sensed, not heard, his advance toward her.
“Miss Watson—Miss Watson—”
She must seem to be too drunkenly unconscious to hear him. She breathed on, squirming slightly to her side in his direction.
“Miss Watson?”
Her bare arm felt the light touch of his blunt fingers, and involuntarily the nerves beneath the skin jumped, but she remained inert. His fingers pressed into her arm, and then pulled at her arm, shaking her. The pretense was over. She must do what must be done well and speedily.
She opened her eyes slowly, dazed eyes, closed them, then suddenly opened them wide in a double take, and instinctively hunched her shoulders in a position of self-protection. Her hand went to her mouth. “What—what are you doing here? What—where am I?” She tried to make her voice disoriented, distraught.
He remained standing over her. “I’m afraid, Miss Watson, you fell fast asleep on my bed. You said before that you felt you’d had too much to drink, and you wanted to lie down. I don’t know how you found your way up here, but—”
“Oh, heavens, did I? What an awful thing. I—I guess I wanted to find some out-of-the-way corner—I meant to lie down on the bed in the Rose Guest Room, but I—oh, I remember—I couldn’t make it, that’s it. I was going past here, and I felt suddenly ill, and your bathroom was the nearest, and after that I simply collapsed on the first thing I saw. I’m afraid I’ve made a spectacle of myself. I’m sorry.”
“Not a bit. It happens sometime or other to everyone. It’s just that—” His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, and he smiled weakly. “If I had come in with someone, it could have been embarrassing for both of us. Of course, it’s ridiculous—”
She had not moved, lying there, her eyes on his Adam’s apple and his nervous fingers. She could see his gaze go helplessly from her naked thigh between the bunched hemline and the upper sheath of her silk stocking, to fix once more on the protrusion of her brassière cup. “I don’t know what to say,” she found herself saying. “What you must think of me. I’m ashamed. I hope you won’t hold this against me, I mean, against my keeping the job.”
He swallowed, and tried to chuckle. “Hardly,” he said. “What I should do is offer you a drink, or something, to get you on your feet. But I think you’ve had quite enough. What I will do is send you right home in a White House car, Miss Watson.”
“Thank you, Mr. President, thank you so much. You’re very kind.” She came up on an elbow, and then groaned, even as she forced a smile, groaned and touched her brow, to give validity to her having passed out. “Ouch. I have a cage of buzzards in my head.”
He was instantly solicitous. “If you don’t think you can make it, I’ll have Mrs. Crail find you a room on the third floor.”
“Oh no, not that, Mr. President. Mrs. Crail? She’d have me branded Hester Prynne—S for scarlet sinner—in ten seconds flat. I can make it under my own steam. I’m grateful to you.”
She began to sit up, and as she did, Dilman started to turn away. “I’ll step out while you fix yourself.”
“Oh,” she gasped, pretending to see for the first time her dropped bodice and revealed thigh. “Heavens, what a sight. Don’t leave—I’ll be out in a second.”
In a rapid motion, knowing she had survived the ordeal, eager to escape, she swung off the bed. As she did so, her hip struck the bulging evening purse on the edge of the bed, and the purse hurtled to the floor, hit hard, burst open, and spilled its contents widely over the figured rug.
She was momentarily horrified by what lay strewn about the rug, not her lipstick and compact, not her handkerchief and keys, but the bent index cards filled mainly with her clear writing, everywhere. She wanted to throw herself across them, hide them, gather them, but it was too late.
Out of automatic gallantry, Dilman had crouched, gone down to one knee, retrieving her beaded purse, returning to it the lipstick and compact, the handkerchief and keys, and now he began to pick up the scattered index cards.
“I—I’ll—please let me—don’t bother—” she cried out, yet she was unable to move from her sitting position on the bed.
He had gathered some of the cards, but the frantic pitch in her voice made him glance at her with surprise, and then, almost as a reflex, down at the uppermost card in his hand.
“It’s nothing—” she gasped out.
He stared down at the index card, ignoring her, while his free hand groped for the rest of the cards on the floor. He placed these on the others, and stared at the new top card, which was also crammed with writing. He rose silently, leaving the purse on the floor, blinking at the cards in his hand.
She could not see his full face; it was averted from her, lowered over the cards. She crossed her arms, dug her nails into her flesh to make the trembling cease. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to go, no way to brazen it out. She wanted to die, but could only wait for the first blow.
His voice, issuing from the lips and face not fully visible to her, was surprisingly controlled, level, though chillingly soft and restrained. “You have embarrassed both of us, Miss Watson—you have.”
“Don’t believe—it doesn’t mean what you—”
“It’s my own fault, of course.” His Negro modulation, the slurred vowels, had become more pronounced. “I should have known there is no one to be trusted. I should not have breached security by leaving my briefcase unlocked. Yet, I suppose I felt that my bedroom was—my own.”
The blood and drinks had coursed to her head, and the room rocked, and she felt palsied by insane desperation and recklessness. “Believe what you want—but try to believe me—I swear it on the Bible—I was drunk—I came in here to—to use the bathroom, and then lie down—I bumped into your briefcase—and something was sticking out—I figured it couldn’t be important if it was sticking out—so I took it to read, to help me nap—I read only a few pages—then I started copying a few things because—because—you want the truth? I want to write a book about you one day, about being your social secretary, and I wanted these notes as inside stuff to put in my diary, to remember years from now when there’d be no security involved—I swear—it was just something that—that happened on the spur of the moment—believe me—”
He turned toward her at last. She expected his features to be hardened into anger. She resented that they were only pitying, like those of a father listening to his daughter recount an improbable fib. “I see, Miss Watson. Do you mean to say that you’re in the habit of always packing note cards in your evening purse?”
“No—no, of course not. I was taking those home from my office. I’d picked them up just before dinner, to use before coming to work in the morning.”
He had moved closer to her, and was staring down at her now. “Or did Arthur Eaton put them in your purse, Miss Watson? Was that why you came here? For him?”
She tried to summon up indignation. “Eaton? What ever has he got to do with it? Why would I come here for him?”
“It’s all over Washington, Miss Watson. I don’t listen to gossip, but everyone seems to know about you and Eaton.”
“Filthy troublemakers!” She was truly angry at last. “Filthy, dirty tongues. How dare they!” She was panting, but tried to be as controlled as he. “What would I have to do with that old man? I have my own crowd. Besides—how can you? He’s married, he has a wife. I know him only socially, because he’s an old-time friend of Daddy’s, and—”
Dilman’s expression remained placid. “And he would like my job. In fact, as you now know, he has been trying to do my job, just as you have been trying to do Mrs. Eaton’s job. Very well. Now you can go to him and tell him I know.” He stepped forward to hand her the index cards, and his knee touched hers, and the contact, the proximity of him, his lack of anger, gave her a last mad surge of hope.
“No,” she said, refusing the cards, “I wouldn’t do that to you. I t
hink too much of you.”
He lowered the cards to drop them into her lap, eyes avoiding her eyes and the exposed brassière. With a sob, Sally clutched both his arms, not allowing him to turn away and leave her.
Dilman made no resistance. “Let go of me, Miss Watson.”
“No,” she sobbed. “Listen—all right—I’ll tell you the truth—all right, you’re forcing me to—it’s terrible—but I’ll tell you. I—I didn’t come here to lie down, or for anyone else, but just for you, to be with you awhile alone and talk to you. I deliberately came here to wait, and became lonesome, and poked around—looking at your work—it has moved me, the way you work so hard, and nobody understands you except a few of us, like myself—and the cards, the notes, I did take them to keep busy, for my diary, honestly—that’s what it was. I’m not ashamed, I wanted to be alone with you, to tell you I understand what you go through, that you have a friend in me who—”
Forcibly, he removed his arms from her grasp. “Miss Watson, I suggest you leave here at once.”
“No, listen—” She believed it now. Who had known Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton as well as Mrs. Maria Reynolds? President Cleveland as well as Mrs. Maria Halpin? President Harding as well as Miss Nan Britton? She believed those stories as much as she believed in herself, now and here, and in what was possible. If she were to lose Arthur because of her failure, she might still have more than any woman on earth. Casting the index cards aside, she leaped to her feet, and the room went topsy-turvy, and she almost collapsed, grabbing Dilman’s arms, holding herself erect. She knew she was drunk, but she knew what she wanted. “—listen—I do care for you. I want to help you. Don’t you—don’t you want to know me better?”
She had pulled close to him confidently, knowing the offer of her flesh had never failed her before. She waited for his concession to the inevitable, his embrace, and their friendship.
(1964) The Man Page 60