(1964) The Man

by Irving Wallace

  He waited for her hysteria to subside, and then he said, “Sue, while I often take a dim view of myself, I know my virtues and my capabilities. I feel I can do more for Doug than any other attorney on earth. Maybe you’re right, and no one can save him, but if anyone can, I have a feeling I might. He is my friend—”

  “And I’m your wife, and I’m the mother of your children! What about us? Do we have to put on blackface to get your help?”

  “Sue!”

  “Oh, dammit to hell for everything coming apart.” She covered her eyes with her hand.

  “Nothing’s come apart,” he said sternly. “I truly haven’t made up my mind yet. I’m just nagged by the lousy feeling that the meaning of our whole lives is being put up on the block for inspection at last—that everything that came before, our paper liberalism, our talk liberalism, our real fiber as two decent people—is being challenged for real, for the very first time. Now it’s not contributions to Crispus or CORE. Now it’s not having a Negro friend to dinner, knowing he’ll go home afterward. Now it’s as—as if a Negro family has moved into the neighborhood, really moved in, and every penny we have in the house, in the world, is being threatened—and—how do we act? Turn our backs, move on?”

  “It’s not the same at all!” Sue exclaimed indignantly. “Don’t twist things up with your lawyer sophistries. Nat, how can you? What are you trying to make me out, a heel? You know me, you know I love Doug as much as you do, but I don’t love him or anyone as much as you and the children.” She was pleading now. “Can’t you see that? Won’t you think of us first? Doug will survive or sink without you. But we can’t survive, not without you.”

  Abrahams shook his head. “Darling, it’s not all this or that, one thing or another. If I gave up Emmich for Dilman, the world wouldn’t come to an end. Remember that—”

  “Is that all you’ve got to say?”

  “I’m only trying to—”

  “To hell with you, then. Do whatever you damn well want to do. I’ve said all I’ve got to say to you!”

  He was startled to see her spin away and dash into the bedroom, slamming the door. He considered following her, but then, instead, he went to the tray of drinks near the suite entrance. He poured himself a whisky-and-water, and was stirring it with a martini mixer, thinking, thinking, when he heard her noisily emerge from the bedroom.

  He turned as she brushed past him. She had changed from the dinner sheath and pumps to a woolen blouse and skirt and flat-heeled shoes, and now was taking her heavy corduroy coat out of the closet.

  “Sue—where in the devil do you think you’re going?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t care. Maybe I’ll look for a truck to walk in front of. What difference does it make to you? I just want to be by myself, not that I haven’t been since Oliver left!”

  She was gone, the door resounding behind her, and he was alone with his drink.

  After that, he walked the carpet, pacing back and forth, weighing his neatly planned future on some unseen scale against his need to become involved with Doug Dilman and what Doug Dilman represented.

  Crazily his mind careened backward to that time, late in the last century, when Father Damien, the Belgian who had worked among lepers on a lonely Pacific island, had been viciously attacked by a Reverend Hyde for having been “coarse, dirty, head-strong.” It had been Robert Louis Stevenson, risking all of his earthly possessions against a libel suit, who had defended Father Damien, counterattacking his traducer as one who was suffering conscience pangs for his own inertia. “But, sir,” Stevenson had written to the Reverend Hyde and the world, “when we have failed, and another has succeeded; when we have stood by, and another has stepped in; when we sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a plain, uncouth peasant steps into battle, under the eyes of God, and . . . dies upon the field of honour—the battle cannot be retrieved. . . . We are not all expected to be Damiens; a man may conceive his duty more narrowly, he may love his comforts better; and none will cast a stone at him for that. But—”

  But.

  Abrahams reflected, meditated, and finally saw that it must be settled tonight. Well, then, he would settle it. He would think a lot and drink a little, or better yet, drink a lot and think a little, and when it was clearer, when he was certain, he would telephone the White House.

  And so he began to think a lot and drink a lot . . .

  There was a pressure on his right shoulder, gentle, but it was there and real, and he opened his eyes.

  To his growing surprise, as he oriented himself to his surroundings, he found that he was seated at the bedroom dressing table, his head nestled in his folded arms. The travel clock behind the telephone told him he had drowsed off and slept over two hours.

  There was the pressure on his right shoulder again, and then he could see it was Sue’s hand, and Sue herself above him, and except for her eyes, red from weeping, and the tear stains on her cheeks, her expression was softer than he had ever remembered it.

  “Nat, are you all right?”

  He sat up, wagged his head like a shaggy dog, rubbed his eyes and ran his fingers through his rumpled hair. “I guess I’m a one-drink man,” he said. “Tonight I had three.” Then, badly, it all came back to him, and he was fully awake. “Where have you been all this time, Sue?”

  “Walking,” she said, “walking endlessly, prowling through Washington. It was nice and cold, and it—it did things for me. Know where I wound up? I went all around and back, and there I was on Pennsylvania Avenue, standing there like a goon, like I’d never been there before, in front of the black iron fence, looking at the White House in the nighttime. It looked so different tonight, Nat, like an abandoned fort on a lonely island, and I kept picturing him alone in there, alone in those empty rooms, lost, trapped, no one to turn to. And then a young couple came along, young marrieds, out-of-towners, the Midwest, I suppose, feeling good after dinner and walking it off, and she said she heard there was a White House tour every day and she wanted to take it, and he said sure thing but not this time, but next time, on the way back from wherever, because by then they’d have gotten rid of the tenant and fumigated the place and redecorated it right proper. And you know what, Nat, she laughed, she thought he was clever, so clever and right, and she was pleased with him, and they both laughed, and I was left there by myself staring through the iron fence and thinking about Doug in there, and you, and the children, and all of us. I couldn’t get back to you fast enough.”

  He had taken her hands. “Sue—”

  “Nat, forgive me for everything I said before. I don’t know what got into me. I wouldn’t want you with Eagles. I mean it. I couldn’t live off that kind of money, and raise the children on it. And if I were to know that you could have—have helped Doug—and didn’t—I couldn’t look at myself again, or you. I’m not worried about us, I’m really not. You have your practice. We can save. I’ll show you what I can do. And we’ll be together, that’s all that matters. And if we save, maybe one day we can get ourselves a farm, not that one, but another, even if it’s smaller.” He had tried to draw her to him, but she resisted. “Nat, call the White House and tell him.”

  He came to his feet, smiling. “I’ve already done it, Sue. I called him an hour ago and told him he had his attorney. I told him we were in this together, sink or swim, from tonight on. I thought he’d—he’d cry.” He encircled her with an arm. “Well, it’s done. I don’t know if I can help him, but one thing I do know. I didn’t do it for him alone, Sue, I did it for us.”

  She kissed him, and she whispered, “I love you so.” And when he released her, he could see that her face had never been more alive with excitement. “Nat, let’s call the children, and then let’s celebrate with dinner up here, and then—then let’s love each other, tonight and forever, and never stop.”

  He reached for her again, but she laughed and slipped away and went to change into her robe. Only at the bathroom door did she hesitate and half turn to him, her sweet face grave and trouble
d. “Nat, can you save him? You must. I want this to be the kind of country we’d like to leave for our children to grow up in, one where they can live unafraid, one they’ll be proud of. That would be the best thing we could leave them—not a farm, not a hundred farms or a million dollars—but a country like that.”

  VII

  As the time for combat drew closer, Douglass Dilman had taken to rising earlier each morning. He was living, he found, two wholly separate lives: in one, he continued to perform the endless exacting duties of the Presidency; in the other, he strenuously prepared for the criminal trial that would determine if he was fit or unfit to perform those duties.

  He sought and found extra hours he had not previously known existed. Sometimes it astonished him how many there were of these, stolen from sleep, from daydreaming, from inconsequential engagements. Amazingly, these hours he subtracted from himself, for himself, seemed to cost him little loss of energy or hope. It was as if he had discovered, and tapped, a new reservoir of stamina. His single-minded determination to fight back gave him a vigor he had never before enjoyed. His ceaseless activity left him no time to brood about the prosecution that awaited him or to anticipate its likely results.

  This morning—because it was the morning of one of the most crucial days in his life—had begun earlier than any other.

  Beecher had entered the Lincoln Bedroom at six-thirty, awakened him, opened the drapes to the dark, ominous sky, and then had drawn his bath. After that, attired in the blue terry-cloth robe that Wanda had given him one Christmas, Dilman had padded through the West Hall to the sitting room of the private apartments so many other Presidents had used, and where he had only this week begun to eat his breakfast.

  Eight newspapers, among them the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, the Washington Star, were piled high beside his place mat. He took pride in the fact that one of the eight was Zeke Miller’s scurrilous Washington Citizen-American, and that his ego was sufficiently reinforced by the knowledge of injustice being done to him to read it, and he was prouder still that one week ago he had again subscribed to the Washington Afro-American. Beneath the pile, he knew, like an intelligence report on the enemy camp less than two miles away, lay the Congressional Record.

  This morning, he had been too preoccupied with ideas for the forthcoming and final meeting with his legal defense staff, and then too devoted to the folder with the label “Application for Executive Clemency re Jefferson Hurley, Petitioned by Mrs. Gladys Hurley (Mother) and Mr. Leroy Poole (Friend)” to open a newspaper.

  After breakfast, having gathered the newspapers under one arm, still reading the petition for commuting Hurley’s sentence from death to life imprisonment, he had gone up the corridor, meaning to change into his clothes. But then he had wandered into the Monroe Room, next to his bedroom, and dumping his newspapers on the pedestal table, he had sat in a Victorian chair and read on through the folder submitted by the Department of Justice.

  It was there that Nat Abrahams and Nat’s associates had found Douglass Dilman at seven forty-five, his petition laid aside, his newspapers strewn about him on the carpet, still in his terry-cloth bathrobe, absorbed in the fantasies of the Congressional Record.

  Dilman had read that the House of Representatives had named five of its most forensically able members to the task of trying him, with Representative Zeke Miller the chief prosecutor. He had read that the Senate, after the formality of converting itself from a legislative body into a high tribunal of justice, had voted upon sixteen rules of parliamentary procedure to govern its behavior as a court of impeachment. He had started to read about other arrangements being made for the Roman holiday scheduled to commence at one o’clock sharp this afternoon, when Nat Abrahams, pipe streaming smoke, had arrived, followed by Felix Hart, Walter T. Tuttle, and Joel Booker Priest.

  Dilman gestured toward the chairs around the table, and apologized for his bathrobe. Then, as they unstrapped and unlatched their briefcases, Dilman became conscious of the chamber in which they were about to confer.

  “Isn’t it strange I wound up in this room?” he said. “I wonder what compelled me to come into the—into this room—the Treaty or Monroe Room, it’s called. I’ve never used it for a meeting before.”

  “What’s so strange about it?” Felix Hart, Abrahams’ young Chicago partner, inquired.

  “Look at the inscription over the fireplace,” Dilman said.

  Felix Hart scurried over to the white fireplace and, bending slightly, read the mantel inscription aloud. “ ‘This Room Was First Used for Meetings of the Cabinet During the Administration of President Johnson.’ “He looked up, awed. “I assume that means Andrew Johnson, not Lyndon.”

  “It does,” Dilman said. “Maybe this is a good omen. I hope I get off as lucky as he did in his trial.”

  Without glancing up from the sorting of his notes, Nat Abrahams said. “That was a one-vote acquittal, Mr. President.” Dilman was once again disconcerted by his friend’s formality. Ever since his legal associates had been brought in, Abrahams had taken to addressing him as Mr. President, instead of Doug. Then Abrahams added, “We’ve simply got to do better than that. . . . Ready, gentlemen? We don’t have much time. Let’s review the whole business again, before heading up to the Hill.”

  Promptly, they plunged into the last-minute summary of Dilman’s defense. For Dilman, the discussion was comforting. These were attorneys, and he was an attorney, and their language had the mathematical precision of Law School and his legal practice of long ago, so dear to his memory. The talk was rooted in tradition and precedent, and great names of the American bar, some heroes, some rascals, all geniuses in their fashion, were evoked. Dilman listened to the names of Webster, Choate, Stanbery, Darrow, Steuer, and many more.

  Dilman gave his complete attention to his four managers—even the title “managers,” as applied to attorneys in a Senate impeachment trial, had a comforting ring, as if these were men who not only defended, but controlled, guided, administered, directed their respondent, who might otherwise be helpless. Dilman heeded every exchange, as they examined the Articles of Impeachment point by point, sentence by sentence, and even word by word. They were trying to anticipate the course that Zeke Miller’s prosecution might take, and foresee what damaging evidence the House’s witnesses, signed affidavits, submitted exhibits, might present.

  Then they reviewed one more time how the House’s case could best be refuted.

  In replying to Article I, they appeared to be confident they could show that Wanda Gibson had never been privy to any government top secrets that she could have passed on to her Communist employers. They had other former Vaduz employees standing by to swear that Miss Gibson’s connection with Franz Gar was no more than that of secretary to employer, and that she had never been heard speaking to him about matters that were not concerned with her immediate job.

  Dilman’s managers displayed little concern about Article II. Their interrogation of Julian Dilman had convinced them that he had never been a member of the Turnerite Group, and that even if he had been, there could be no proof that the President had conspired with his son and the subversive Negro organization to obstruct the Department of Justice.

  However, Dilman was surprised at the massive dossier his managers had assembled in an effort to knock the underpinnings out from under Article III, an omnibus of scandalous accusations. They had put such extra effort into their rebuttal of this charge not because they believed the charge had legal substance, but because they saw that it might have effective propaganda value for the prosecution. First, they had investigated Sally Watson’s entire erratic history, but apparently Senator Hoyt Watson’s long influential arm had thwarted them at every turn.

  As to answering Miller’s allegation of the President’s extramarital affair with Miss Gibson, the success or failure of the defense would depend entirely on how Miss Gibson conducted herself testifying and under cross-examination on the witness stand. In replying to the House char
ges of Congressional contempt, Negro favoritism, alcoholism by Dilman, once more the defense managers were ready to rest their case entirely on the impression made by their own eye-witnesses and expert deponents.

  It was Article IV, Dilman observed, that continued to disturb his managers the most. This would resolve itself into a battle over the constitutionality of the New Succession Bill, and the degree to which Congress might ever be permitted to limit the powers of the executive branch.

  To reinforce his rebuttal of Article IV, Nat Abrahams had, the morning after accepting Dilman’s defense, insisted that the President make a new appointment to the office of Secretary of State, thus replacing Eaton. After hours of indecision, Dilman had finally settled upon Jed Stover, the Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, as the career diplomat best qualified to succeed Eaton. Happily, Stover had been enthusiastic about permitting his name to be used in this token gesture. Not unexpectedly, the Senate, without seriously considering Stover’s appointment while in committee, had rejected the replacement with a heavy vote. Then, to put their rebuke of the President indelibly on the record, the Senate had again declared Dilman’s removal of Arthur Eaton illegal, and had sustained Eaton as Secretary of State (and next in line to the Presidency) until the disagreement could be resolved during the trial of impeachment. As a gesture, Abrahams had submitted the issue of the unconstitutionality of the New Succession Bill to the Supreme Court, aware that it could not be considered before the impeachment trial ended.

  Fort forty minutes, Dilman heard out the give-and-take on these points among his managers, offering only an occasional comment himself. Now, glancing at the marble-encased clock, with its time-piece, calendar, barometer, a clock that went back to the time of Ulysses S. Grant, Dilman could see that it was almost a quarter after eight.