(1964) The Man

by Irving Wallace

  As the flushed Senator sat down, his colleagues and the House members crowned him with a smashing round of applause.

  Nat Abrahams had turned to the bench. “Mr. Chief Justice—”

  Chief Justice Johnstone nodded. “What say you to the objection, Mr. Manager Abrahams?”

  “It was not my purpose or intent to incite or inflame through demagoguery, or to imitate the manner and method of the opposition,” said Abrahams calmly. “I submit, Your Honor, that it is President Dilman’s difference of color that has antagonized his opposition, and inspired them to build their cleverly diverting Articles of Impeachment. I submit that the President’s color will in turn color and affect the mind of every prosecution witness, and a majority of the jurors, and largely to the detriment of my client. I submit this is the real hard-core issue, and no mere figment of my imagination. I stand prepared to offer concrete evidence in the form of affidavits—signed editorials from newspapers, speeches in the Congressional Record, off-the-record statements made by biased Senators—to prove that the President’s color is the central issue of this trial. I am prepared to contend with the four Articles as voted, to fight them with all my heart and soul, but I suggest that they are windmills, Your Honor, and that the real dragon to be slain is racial prejudice. I beg your leave to be permitted to speak further, with as much restraint as possible, and when it is appropriate, on this invisible Article of indictment.”

  Chief Justice Johnstone huffed, gathered his judicial robe around him, and looked past Abrahams toward Senator Hoyt Watson.

  “The Senator’s objection is sustained,” he announced. He peered down at Abrahams. “The counsel will not allude to a fifth Article again in this trial, but devote himself solely and entirely to the four Articles before this court. Proceed as directed, Mr. Manager!”

  Abrahams tried to accept the rebuke graciously. Turning his head from the bench, he could see his three associates watching him, and while their faces remained phlegmatic, there was applause in their eyes.

  Slowly, Abrahams continued around until he was once more face to face with the Senate. Legally, his accusation was stricken, but in fact the entire nation had heard his charge, and now it was a living issue that would hang over the conscience of every man in the days to come. If he could no longer allude to the fifth Article, it was nonetheless now made visible for all to see and reckon with. Officially, the color prejudice against President Dilman had been segregated from this hostile and limited Chamber, but now it ran rampant across the breadth of the broad country.

  By his reckless offensive into the exposed high ground of truth, Abrahams decided, he had lost hard votes for Doug Dilman as a President on trial for impeachment, but perhaps he had won something more important for Doug Dilman as a man. He hoped that his choice of tactic had been the right one, and that Doug would, somehow, understand.

  Inaudibly, Abrahams sighed. Well, he told himself for the last time, the truth was in the open. He had done what had to be done, in a manner most repugnant to him, but there had been no other choice for one who believed his cause was just.

  And now, he could see, he had accomplished something else, also. He had won the eyes and ears of the Senate, the House, the galleries, the entire nation. He had them even as Zeke Miller had not.

  Satisfied with this one victory, Nat Abrahams, relieved to be able to resume the role of attorney once more, quietly began to address his audience again.

  AT approximately a quarter to three in the afternoon, Edna Foster had suddenly turned off her television set, blotted the loathsome spectacle from her screen if not from her mind, impulsively changed into a severe suit, set a hat on her bunned brown hair, pulled on her transparent olive-colored raincoat, telephoned for a taxicab, snatched up her umbrella, and gone downstairs to wait for it.

  Now, at a quarter after three, she walked purposefully through the puddles of rainwater gathering across the circular driveway leading from the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance to the West Wing lobby of the White House. What she had relived, during the short taxi ride, she continued to relive intensely, unmindful of the steady drizzle spattering upon her umbrella overhead.

  It had been a horrible week of lies, lies and indecisiveness, and she was glad she had finally brought it to an end.

  She had seen George Murdock only once after her return from Paris and his belated return from the extended visit to New York City.

  Their meeting had taken place during the early evening of the day that the President’s impeachment had been introduced into the House of Representatives. It had not been her best evening, from the moment George had picked her up to the moment he had left her at her apartment door after dinner, because her mood had been at such odds with his. She had been stunned and unhappy over the fantastic attack on Dilman. George had been alive and gay because of his new high-paying job with the Zeke Miller chain of newspapers, which he had announced to her that night. She had hated his taking the job, somehow equating it with her misery over the threatened impeachment, and not even George’s naming an actual marriage date had improved her mood. She had desperately tried to evince some pretense of pleasure, but she had failed. She had hoped that a long evening together—she was relatively at liberty, with the President off on his tour of the Midwest, Far West, and Atlantic Coast—would work its miracle, restore her joy in the knowledge that she would soon be Mrs. Murdock, but then George had had time for only a short evening. He was, he had apologized, toiling nights as well as days now, to impress his new employers, anxious to get off on the right foot. Then, after he had hastened away to the Washington Citizen-American Building, and she had wearily returned to her living room, the orderly, well-regulated, promising personal world around her (which excluded the Dilman part of her world) had disintegrated completely (because Dilman could not be excluded from it, after all), and since that time, by choice, she had not seen George again.

  The events of that unforgettable night still haunted and possessed her like a recurring hallucination. She had been too occupied with the last of her work during the hours before seeing George to inquire into every detail of the impeachment charges, to watch and hear the indictments read on television and radio, or read them in the newspapers. During her incessant typing, and hectic taking of telephone calls, she had become aware of several of the general charges. Something incomprehensible about the President having broken the law in his firing of Eaton, she had heard. Something ridiculous about his having frequent bouts of intoxication. Something utterly absurd about his having made improper advances toward that stupid, spoiled Sally Watson. But not until George had left her so early, and she had been able to kick off her shoes and be alone with the day’s newspapers, had she fully read all four of the Articles of Impeachment.

  Then, before they had made their full impact upon her, her privacy had been invaded, and her apartment had teemed with officious and threatening men. She had found herself cornered, with warrants and subpoenas thrust under her nose. She had found herself being questioned by the stuttering Casper Wine and two other attorneys or investigators sent by the House Judiciary Committee, and she had protested against the Federal Marshal turning her premises inside out.

  In desperation, she had tried to locate someone, anyone, to advise her during the barrage of questions, but there had been no one. Curiously, her first thought of succor had been the President, but he was traveling and out of reach. Then she had sought to reach George by telephone, but he was nowhere to be found. A last gasp had been a telephone call to her accountant, the one who made out her annual income tax, but neither his office nor residence number had brought an answer.

  And when the inquisitors had departed at midnight, they had left her with the extra copy of the shocking confession or affidavit or whatever it was called that she had been forced to sign (for everything in it was true, and could not be denied under oath). They had left her with a subpoena to appear (if needed) for the prosecution against the President. They had left her without her precious diary (locate
d, impounded, carried away by them over her tearful protests). Worst of all, they had left her with the wreckage of herself, her shattered self, and the first full realization of her unintended perfidy and disloyalty to the persecuted man who was her boss before he was her President.

  It had been a horror night, with a more dreadful week to follow it, because then the self-questioning had come, and for a long time she had refused to face the one unacceptable answer. How had they known that she had once inadvertently monitored a private telephone call from the President to his son? How had they known that she alone, among outsiders, had knowledge that the President possessed a daughter who was passing for white? How had they known that the President’s wife had once been a patient in a sanitarium for alcoholics? How had they known—no one, no one on earth knew—that she kept a private diary and had recorded every event and bit of knowledge on its lined pages?

  All of this information had been hers alone, unshared, as private as the date of her last menstrual period and the petite electric razor she used to remove the unattractive hair from her legs, and yet it had been known by someone, and now it would be known to the world. And then searching, searching, rummaging through the attic of memory, she had discovered the traitor, and first was disbelieving, and then unwilling to believe, unwilling to fasten the blame fully upon him.

  Her dreadful sin had burned her with shame, until she was nearly mad. For, and there was no avoiding it any longer, she had committed the only real wickedness a confidential secretary could commit. She had committed Indiscretion.

  And so she had exiled herself to her lonely apartment. For, difficult as it had been to face herself, it would have been completely impossible to face anyone else, either the one she had betrayed or the one who had betrayed her. She had lived her week of lies, and sent a message to the White House that she was unwell and would have to rest in bed for some time, and left a message for George not to call because her mother had fallen ill in Wisconsin and she was flying home to be at the bedside, and she would write.

  Only one human being, and then it was by accident, had even had a peek into her private inferno. Late during the fifth afternoon of her absence from work, there had been a knock on the door. She had expected the grocer’s boy with some cold cuts, bread, and milk. Instead, to her dismay, she had found herself confronted by the solicitous Tim Flannery. He had apologized for dropping by unannounced, but he had been concerned, he said, as the President had been concerned, about her health. It amazed her that anyone decent, let alone the harassed President, gave a damn about her, now that her disloyalty to her boss was known.

  She had meant to turn Tim Flannery away, and continue to nourish her self-pity and self-hate, when suddenly she had realized that she wanted someone near, anyone kind and good, and Tim Flannery was both. She had invited him inside, barely listening as he spoke of the difficult trip around the country, the untriumphant return, the President’s decision to fight back. The moment that he had lapsed into silence, she had bared her soul to him, determined to expiate her guilt. First haltingly, then with a torrent of words, she had revealed herself to him as she might to a father confessor. She had divulged everything, her weeks-ago drunken babblings to George Murdock, her next-day regrets lulled by her utter and reassuring trust in George, and she had gone on this way, unable to prove it was George who had given over so many of the President’s secrets to the enemy, but adding that she was almost certain of it, else why had the enemy so quickly knighted him with a reward?

  “I meant no harm to the President, I swear on my mother and father I didn’t,” she had told Flannery. “But I’m still one of the ones who has hurt him most, I know that, I’m not denying it. What’ll I do, Tim? I can’t go back to my office now, I can’t face him, and even if I could, he’d probably throw me out, and have every right to.”

  “Well, Edna, this is one of those times I can’t speak for him,” Flannery had said, “and I really—well—I don’t think it’s my place to advise you what to do next. It depends on how you feel about the President and—well—how you feel about Murdock. After all, George is the man you’ve been planning to marry. I wish I could help you. I can’t. But I believe you didn’t mean to do any harm. I believe that.”

  After he had gone, she had felt better but was no less confused. Flannery had reminded her, as the modest sparkling crest of tiny diamonds on her finger reminded her, that she was engaged to be married. To whom, then, did a girl owe her loyalty—to a boss she had sold out (not that these truths about him would not have been uncovered elsewhere, anyway), or to a fiancé who had sold her out (if he had done so, which he probably had, but then, perhaps, he had felt he was doing it for both of them, and it was not wrong because he loved her so)?

  She had slept on it, and wakened with it, this insoluble dilemma, and she had spent hours playing out little fantasy games, with herself the heroine.

  In one version, she had married George (for his explanation had been satisfactory), and she belonged, and she had dozens of other married lady friends, and they had teas and played bridge, and she marketed and cooked for George, and dutifully attended the PTA meetings, and they had marvelous summer vacations each year, in Palm Beach or Atlantic City or Provincetown, the young and happy marrieds, she a doting mother and the wife of the eminent columnist.

  In a frighteningly different version of her fantasy, she had refused to marry George (for his explanation had not been satisfactory) and, discharged by the President, or losing her position after the President’s impeachment conviction, she had been forced to take one of those gray mouse-on-the-wheel jobs in the Commerce Department or the Pentagon, and she was a spinster and would always be one, gulping her lunches in dank basement cafeterias where the thick crockery was never quite dried, going to Hecht Company sales every Saturday with the other “girls” who had taken to dyeing their graying hair, collecting her cheap reproductions from the National Gallery of Art, spending summer vacations with her parents outside Milwaukee, growing fat and resentful and old alone, alone, and bitterly remembering that she’d had her chances (one chance anyway) and turned her back on them (well, on it), and garrulously recollecting (even for those who had heard it before) that she had once been the personal secretary to two Presidents of the United States, one killed, the other crucified.

  She had awakened late this morning fortified to act out her last deception in the week of lies. George Murdock, she had almost convinced herself, could not be at fault, and if he had been, it might have been a slip of the tongue like her own, and even if it had not been that, but had been intentional, there was nothing that George could have given to the enemy forces that would have damaged the President more than he had already been damaged by himself. So, that was settled.

  But then, at one o’clock sharp, she had turned on the television set, as everyone in America was doing, meaning to watch only a little of it out of curiosity, expecting to see no more than a tedious enactment of the kind of quasi-technical or irrelevant or senile verbiage you came across in the Congressional Record every morning. Instead, she had found herself absorbed in the trappings and opening grandeur of a drama that gripped her as much as any historical drama by Shakespeare that she had ever seen. And then there was that horrible Zeke Miller spouting his foul calumnies, and her numbed absorption had become inflamed to the point of sickening wrath. And then there was Nat Abrahams, making public the invisible fifth Article of Impeachment, and her wrath had melted into sickening shame.

  It was all of that week behind her, and the morning and early afternoon of this day, that she had relived and dwelt upon as she splashed across the White House north driveway to the entrance of the West Wing lobby.

  Closing her soggy umbrella, shaking it twice, she went into the small hall, and, avoiding the Reading Room straight ahead, filled with so many journalists with whom she was acquainted, she turned to the open doorway that led into the cramped pressroom.

  To her surprise, the narrow work enclosure was abandoned except for a s
ingle reporter in the rear, tilted back in his green chair, swallowing from a soft-drink bottle while he studied a yellow sheet of teletype. She took in the room that she had so infrequently entered. A cardboard sign, tacked to a square pillar, read: WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS. There were aisles to her left and right, and in the center of the room were the two rows of reporters’ cubbyholes, back to back, each slot separated from the adjoining ones by perforated, soundproof plywood dividers. She hesitated, wondering which one was the right one.

  Then, with determination, she went up the left aisle, between the green wall—unevenly decorated with framed photographs, many faded or yellowing, of former press regulars and Presidents—and the line of nine cubicles on her right side. Reaching the sixth cubicle, peering into it as she had into the others, her eye caught a typewritten notice Scotch-taped upon the blue center partition. It read: “Poachers Stay Out! Private Property Of Miller Newspaper Association. R. Blaser. G. Murdock.”