The Plot

by Irving Wallace

  For a moment, Earnshaw inhaled, paused, and then quickly, lest there be premature applause, he concluded: “Our leaders and statesmen have gone to Paris and they will not leave until their goals, which embody our ideals, your ideals and mine, America’s and Great Britain’s alike, do prevail throughout this planet of ours. Therefore, in the name of liberty and justice for every man individually, and mankind collectively, do I accept your Order of the British Empire with overwhelming gratefulness and pride. Thank you, my friends, and good night.”

  Once again, as he now expected, ex-President Emmett A. Earnshaw was embraced by enthusiastic and deafening applause. Taking up his page of notes, touching his badge and star of the Order, he acknowledged the accolade to his worth with a modest half-bow, a half-smile, then backed off, and erect and brisk, despite his years, he returned to his empty place. Accepting Lord Blenkinsop’s congratulatory handshake, he settled his long frame into the chair.

  As His Lordship reached the lectern to make his closing remarks, Earnshaw continued to bask in the continuing ovation. Feeling the light cool touch of feminine fingers on his clasped hands, he twisted his head to find his niece, Carol, her plain Dutch face wreathed in a proud smile, leaning toward him.

  “You were wonderful, Uncle Emmett,” she whispered. He winked and squeezed her hand. He was relieved that she, the only one close to him now, who had recently seen so much that was displeasing happen to him, had been witness to this occasion. Briefly, his eyes held on her, enjoying her as if she were his own daughter, which she practically had been for half her nineteen years. She was sweet and more pretty than plain, he thought, with her taffy hair and short bob, upturned nose, freckled face, rosy mouth, and she looked rather smart and grown up in the silk organza dress made for this event. The slight neckline exposed her slim throat, which was set off by the three strands of pearls that his Isabel had willed to her. Oddly, Carol resembled him, Earnshaw decided, more than she did her own father, his younger brother, so long dead. Once again, he squeezed her hand, and then released it.

  Shifting in his chair, Earnshaw turned away from Carol to thank his friend, Sir Austin Ormsby, seated on the other side. But to his surprise, Sir Austin’s back was to him, neck craning toward someone, a hotel manager apparently, who was beckoning him urgently. Already Sir Austin had slipped out of his place, and then, bent low so as not to distract the audience from the master of ceremonies’ concluding address, he was leaving the platform. Only mildly curious, Earnshaw observed Sir Austin, as the hotel manager whispered into his ear, and he saw his aristocratic British host nod, nod again, and then hastily yet quietly, start for the waiters’ exit behind the platform.

  Earnshaw politely gave his attention to the speaker, Lord Blenkinsop, who resembled G. K. Chesterton from the rear (Chesterton had been one of Earnshaw’s favorite detective story writers, recommended to him by Simon Madlock for the Father Brown stories). His Lordship, having extolled the former President as a worthy holder of the K.B.E., now launched into Earnshaw’s contributions, along with England’s contributions, to the pioneering nuclear disarmament schemes that were on the agenda of the forthcoming Summit in Paris.

  Impatient with His Lordship’s digression into politics, for politics had come to bore Earnshaw more and more in recent years, Earnshaw let his attention drift from the speaker to the audience. There were too many faces, a forest without trees, and he gave up trying to identify any that he might know. He studied the blue drapes on the walls enclosing the vast ballroom, then fastened on the mammoth circular inverted light in the ceiling above that had been referred to as “the dome.” Mesmerized by its concave brightness, Earnshaw found his thoughts turning inward, to the recent past so poorly illuminated.

  He supposed it had started going badly for him in the next to last year of his Administration, the year that produced the only black mark, minor though it had been, against his good years in office. That was when the defection at the Zurich Parley had occurred, and when his trusted right-hand man and confidant, Simon Madlock, had suddenly died of a heart attack shortly afterward. Of course, there had still been his wife, Isabel, so solid and reassuring, and there had been Carol, although she had been too young to be more than a slight diversion for his troubled mind.

  In Iris, last year in the Oval Office, he had wanted nothing more than to be liberated from thinking and decision-making and tiresome politics. And when the White House physician, Admiral Oates, had detected the not yet significant heart murmur and high blood pressure and advised him to go easy, he had seized upon this as a warning to retire.

  Despite the anguished protests of party leaders, Earnshaw had refused to run again, promising to throw the weight of his goodwill with the electorate behind his colorless but able Vice-President. Earnshaw had predicted an easy victory for his handpicked successor. But in the savage election contest that followed, enchanted by his prospects and plans for the easy life of retirement, and increasingly helpless since Madlock’s death, Earnshaw had not campaigned for his candidate with the intensity or devotion that he had intended. The opposition party’s candidate had won, less on the irritating pledge that he would awaken the nation from its Earnshawed stupor and abdication of responsibility in a world ringed by nuclear threats than on the simple fact that Earnshaw could not invest his own candidate with his own personality. The opposition candidate, a cold, tough product of a science-oriented clique, had become President of the United States, and after three years was President still and now making a big showy circus of his attendance at the Summit in Paris.

  Even though discomfited by this rejection of his personal choice by the electorate, and his resultant alienation from committeemen in his party, Earnshaw had not really minded. Retirement, at least the first year of it, had been all that he had dreamed it would be, at least as long as Isabel was beside him and the public’s mass face beamed upon him and worshiped him. He and Isabel had exercised their option on the sprawling fifteen-room old Spanish-style house outside Rancho Santa Fe, south of Los Angeles and near the Pacific Ocean, and they had remodeled it, as well as the modest stable.

  Other Presidents, he knew, had failed to find the leisure they had anticipated, after their retirement from the White House. It had surprised General Eisenhower how little time there had been for golf, and how much political work was still demanded of him, in retirement. Eisenhower had been constantly occupied, during long hours of long days, with party leaders, with White House consultations, with receiving foreign envoys and delegations of visitors, with writing books when not replying to endless letters. Truman had been equally busy, and the Truman Library had often been almost as demanding of his time and energy as had been his duties as Chief Executive during his years in the White House.

  In Earnshaw’s first twelve months of total freedom, he had managed to keep his freedom total. He read the polls and knew that he was loved. He noticed his weekly mountain of mail and knew that he was respected. But he allowed Isabel and Carol to reply to his mail in his name. He avoided political party contacts, except for a handful of old card-playing cronies. His appearances on television were few and of short duration, and were usually restricted to patriotic occasions. He visited Washington only for official funerals. He had left visiting dignitaries to the Department of State and the smart-aleck in the White House. He devoted himself completely to bridge, poker, chess, to billiards on the magnificent antique table that Isabel had installed, to mystery stories that were not too long and complicated and that were in large typefaces. And, for half of each warm day outdoors, he gave time to his wonderful rose gardens, his three riding horses, his fishing schooner in the nearby bay. And then it ended.

  He could never be certain afterward whether his peace and pleasure had ended with Isabel’s unexpected death in the beginning of his second year of retirement, or with his slow realization that the opposition party in power was chipping away at his reputation. He had slowly awakened to the fact that he was losing the cushion of love he had always taken for granted an
d depended upon, that affection which came from the very real but quite faceless electorate out there, out there somewhere. Isabel’s death, at sixty-one, had been too sudden. One evening, she was there, with the hot roast, the television programs they watched, the hair curlers and plump smile and yawning pillow talk. The next morning, she was not there. She had left him, to await their reunion at another time in another place. It had been terrible, that void, and neither the outpouring of public remembrance and sympathy nor the temporary return of old friends had filled the void, and not even dear Carol, then seventeen and only on the brink of understanding, had filled its emptiness.

  Somehow, after the mourning, Earnshaw had tried to fill the void by keeping himself unmindful of its existence. Gradually, the card games were resumed, and the fishing trips, and the garden was improved and the stable enlarged, but it had been no good. The rewards of retirement had gone stale.

  Then one day, he did not know what day, he did not know when or how, the void had been filled, filled by Time, he suspected. He had found himself conscious and alive again, as an entity, as an ex-President and a personage. And he had not liked what he found of himself in the teeming, moving, progressing world. He had possessed an ally in Carol, and she was closer, more intelligent, more meaningful in her burgeoning maturity. But, to his surprise, he had not had his vast public any longer, he had not kept their interest, let alone their respect, and he had perceived dimly that the only pleasure of his late years would be to keep his pages intact in the future histories of his beloved America, but the sure promise of pages (plural) was diminishing to a page, a half-page, a footnote, and he had hated it.

  He could not discern, at first, how it had happened, or was happening. In his early resentment, he had blamed the President in power, the opposition party, and the press that they now coddled and controlled, for his fall from favor. He had condemned them for cleverly constructing the slide that would bring him down into final oblivion. Their motive, he had thought, was political: to reduce his effectiveness in future elections. The reporters, the journalists, had been another matter, actually. Their business was news, living news, and Earnshaw, as an amiable hermit, was no longer news except when he was ill-used in the handouts of his political enemies. The new historians and political scientists, with their pretentious half-baked evaluations and analyses of his personality and administration, were understandable, too. These clever ones throve on Presidents who were involved in conflict, domestic or foreign. The reactions of such Presidents to crisis were studied and praised, but in superficially examining Earnshaw’s term, his critics had found a good, easy Chief Executive in a good, easy time, an era of little internal stress and devoid of international strife. And so they had downgraded him as if avoiding trouble and playing caretaker to peace were a weakness and a sin.

  But inescapably Earnshaw’s private accusations had swung from others to himself. Could the blame for his diminished position lie in some personal failure, after all? Quite possibly, he had decided his strength, his power, his future in history, had always rested in the hands of the dependable public. They had elevated him to their highest office and supported him in the Executive Mansion, because they respected and admired him as authority and hero. After he had retired, they remained his worshiping family, because they knew that he was still there, a living oracle, a voice of wisdom to sort out their own confusion, answer their questions, relieve their tensions, give assurance to their hopes. Yes, after his retirement they had been there for him—but then, he had come to understand he had not been there for them to lean upon. They had needed him and he had ignored them, left them to the cold one in the White House. In their eyes, he had abdicated his place to satisfy his own selfish requirements. It was as if a beloved and respected parent, with many children who had long leaned upon him, had suddenly taken off to dwell hedonistically in isolation on some distant island, unmindful of his brood’s needs and problems, refusing to answer their phone calls or their letters or see them in person. Like that French banker, who had abandoned his family to gratify his own selfish need to paint in Tahiti.

  Earnshaw had turned away from his public when they needed him and when he had turned back, later, it should not have surprised him that they were no longer there. And without his massive public, who would never permit a usurper to replace him in their esteem (as long as he did not fail or betray them), Earnshaw was the head of a family without a family. And without his relations, he was helpless before the advance of political enemies bent on destroying him. Yet, in a last desperation move, more than a year ago, he had sought to fight back. In his way, as best he could, he had issued a call for his clan to rally around him. Somehow, he had clung to the belief that the old charm, the old magic, would work as it had always worked. He had been shocked when his call was not heard. It had been as if his public thought that he had ceased to exist, that the pleading voice had been only the whisper of a ghost—or worse, as if the pleading voice had been heard, clearly heard, but was no longer heeded. It was as though his behavior outside of office had only confirmed the opinions of those who insisted it resembled his behavior in office, and now he was discredited, a hero of clay from head to foot.

  Yet, there had been those, here and there, who heard his call. His old friends in England, for example, who had announced this honor and invited him to accept it. While he was preparing for London, some faith in his old magic had been momentarily restored. When he was at his peak, even in retirement, columnists had always enjoyed speculating upon his appeal. And Isabel, with Carol’s assistance, had enjoyed filling scrapbook after scrapbook with these analyses. The formula for his magic, the press had believed, consisted of many elements: his unaffected speech, his simple wisdom (uncorrupted by intellectuals, whom he distrusted), his relaxed style, and above all, his benign countenance and attractive physical appearance. Even his worst enemies had conceded that Earnshaw’s looks were his greatest asset, which no intelligent argument could overcome at the ballot box.

  While Earnshaw had never liked this business about his looks, he had reconsidered it before leaving for his small English triumph. His outer aspect, currently, differed little from what it had been when he left the White House three years ago. He was still, as he had been in favored days, tall and unbent, and he retained the winning ungainliness of the country lawyer he had once been (people tended to forget that he had also been a corporation lawyer in an Eastern metropolis). He possessed still his full shock of gray hair, peaked bushy eyebrows, cheerful blue eyes, pug nose, broad happy mouth, dimpled cheek, cleft chin, all drawn on a long, frank, grandfatherly face, all (except the nose) quite like Uncle Sam with the beard removed.

  While Earnshaw wore his custom-tailored wool suits easily, they did not appear as expensive and fashionable as they were, because of his gangling height, slight potbelly, long arms and big reddish hands, and his jerky, bobbing gait. When he entered a room, everyone in it expected that he was bringing them presents, for he seemed so good, so pleased, so twinkling, chuckling, glad-handing, happy. When he was on a plane, other passengers felt easier, as if knowing nothing could happen to them. Too, one felt safer, truly, with a man who could misquote from Mark Twain, George Ade, P. T. Barnum, Ring Lardner, Clarence Darrow, Vachel Lindsay, S. S. Van Dine, and who could not even pronounce Thorstein Veblen, Rene Descartes, Franz Boas, Carl Jung, Fyodor Dostoevski, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Rufus Choate, than with a hundred supercilious know-it-alls who knew everything except how to get people to elect them to office.

  Earnshaw’s magic was no secret from anyone, not really. Instinctively, he liked people, and as a result, they liked him. Earnshaw’s philosophy was no secret either. The world was inhabited by two kinds of men—the good ones and the bad ones. The good ones liked America and Earnshaw. The bad ones were bad, not because they were cruel or ignorant or tyrannical, but because they did not like America or Earnshaw. Well, any darn fool could understand that now. If someone was around, or came along, who didn’t like your country or didn’t like
you, well, you weren’t going to think very highly of him, were you?

  Reviewing the past reviews of himself, even the worst by “the Freudian headshrinkers of the press who try to put every public figure on the couch of their columns,” as Simon Madlock had once so cleverly punned it, Earnshaw was certain that he had not changed a bit since his heyday. If the elements that had made him popular not long ago still existed in his person, then his popularity could be regained. Perhaps the Order of the British Empire would remind the public of an old love.

  Suddenly, far off, as he was in retrospection, Earnshaw heard his own name resound in his ears, and he dropped his gaze from the blazing dome on which it had been fixed, and by a great effort of will he swiveled his mind’s eye from the past to the present, and then he sat straight.