A Shade of Difference

by Allen Drury

  And while the few remaining five-minute speeches were delivered, and then through the lopsided roll call, Cullee found that he was thinking it over, for this was a diversion important enough to take him away from the thought of Sue-Dan—though, of course, it inevitably led back to her, for she was gaining support all the time, and he was losing, in their running argument about what he should do. About all he needed now was for LeGage to call and put the pressure on him, and he would really be in a mood to blow up and tell them all to go to hell. He was not at all amused ten minutes later when this turned out to be mental telepathy and a page boy came up to tell him he was wanted on the phone in the cloakroom. “A Mr. Shelby,” the boy said, and was quite startled by the Congressman’s expression and the tone in which he said, “Oh, for—all right, I’ll take it!”

  “Cullee, boy!” ’Gage’s voice came cheerily over the line in one of the private booths. “How’s the great statesman in our next-to-most-deliberative body?”

  “I’m fine,” Cullee said, without giving much. “How’s our greatest civil rightser?”

  “Always busy,” LeGage said, not so cheerily. “Think you’ve got ’em stopped coming in the doors and they come in the windows. Looks now as though something’s going to pop in South Carolina.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Justice Tommy Davis has just handed down an order upholding our appeal in the Charleston case. They’re ordered to integrate immediately.”

  “Well, you’ll be down there tomorrow,” Cullee said in a mocking tone. “You can wrap all that up in no time.”

  “I don’t know about that,” LeGage said thoughtfully. “DEFY’ll have some pickets out, but South Carolina’s a tough one. They’re really mean down there.”

  “Check with Seab Cooley. He’s a friend of mine.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. Confidential Congress business. Look, ’Gage. I’ve got to get back to the floor in a minute. We’ve got an important vote coming up—”

  “Oh, damn it, you always use that ‘got to get back to the floor’ routine on me. Why don’t you ever be nice to me, Cullee? I’m a friend of yours.”

  “Yes, boy, I know. We slept together all through college. In the same room, that is.”

  “Well, damn it, you always hold me off, when we know each other a lot better than anybody else knows us. We need each other, Cullee. We’re both fighting for the same thing.”

  “Different ways.”

  “All right, Mr. High and Mighty. So you’re a Congressman and I’m head of DEFY. Who’s bigger?”

  “Want to test it out against me in California next year? Maybe you can lick me.”

  “Oh, damn it, I don’t want to lick you. I want you where you are, doing the job you’re doing. Or even a better one.”

  “Sure. Now you tell me to run for the Senate. That’ll really kill it.”

  “Cullee,” LeGage said patiently, and the Congressman could tell he was close to that point of emotionally frayed nerves to which he could so easily drive him, “please lay off me? I didn’t call to get in a fight. I called because Felix Labaiya asked me to. He thinks you ought to be down there in Charleston tomorrow at that luncheon for Terry.”

  “You agree with him?”

  “I suppose I’d better say no, so you’ll do it.”

  “Well, I don’t care whether you do or not, really. But I’m not going.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I just don’t like to be patronized by the Jasons, for one thing. Ted just sees one thing when he looks at me, and you too, and that’s the Colored Vote. Furthermore, Terry doesn’t mean any good for this country, and I don’t want to be part of whatever he may have in mind, even if you do. Also, I’ve seen him on his home grounds and he isn’t much. Why, hell! All this white sentimentalizing over that little two-bit belly bumper from the bush. He isn’t worth that.”

  “He isn’t little,” LeGage objected mildly. “He’s six-foot-seven.”

  “I’m talking about inside, not outside,” the Congressman snapped. “Why, hell! I’ll bet he’s all over television right this minute. Yes, Your Highness. No, Your Highness. Tell us poor ignorant white folks about all you noble black fighters for freedom in Africa, Your Highness. Crap all over the United States, Your Highness. We love it, Your Highness. It’s how we prove we’re a great-enlightened nation, Your Highness. Acchhkk. They make me sick!”

  “What’s the matter, boy?” LeGage asked with a sarcasm he knew would infuriate but could never resist when Cullee got in this mood. “He try to run off with your wife?”

  “And leave my wife out of it,” the Congressman said ominously. “Good-by.”

  “Cullee. Please, Cullee, don’t hang up ye—oh, God damn it.”

  And that’s the way it always was with ’Gage, Cullee thought bitterly as he went back into the chamber; why in the hell doesn’t he leave me alone? They had been on each other’s nerves from the day they met, they had never stopped being on each other’s nerves one minute since, and they would always have this tension between them if they lived to be a hundred. “I think you and I are too much alike,” he had told his clever, driving roommate after one of the earliest of their many furious arguments in the room at Howard; “maybe I’d best move out.” But ’Gage, instantly contrite, had begged him not to—“We’ve got to stick together, boy. Who else is there for us to talk to?”—and some combination of like, dislike, affection, annoyance, love, hate, whatever, had kept them together, bickering through their school years and bickering still. It was true that they did know each other better than anyone else did, and that included ’Gage’s placidly limited wife and the hellcat he himself happened to have drawn in the Lord’s sardonic lottery. When things got unhappiest for him, he could always think—and it was genuinely comforting, he would admit— Well, I’ll bet ’Gage knows how I feel; and he was sure ’Gage did, and that ’Gage often thought the same about him, although they rarely came even as close to touching on it as ’Gage had done just now. It was a curious and apparently unbreakable relationship, whose possible implications they had finally faced one time in senior year in a completely candid discussion that certainly didn’t change matters any. “Well, it’s obvious neither of us is a woman,” Cullee had said, “but I guess we can’t live with each other or without each other.” “You make me awful mad sometimes,” ’Gage had agreed, “but I expect if I was ever really—really—in trouble, I’d come to you.” “Me, too,” Cullee said, and they had shaken hands very solemnly, at twenty-one. Then divergent paths to the same objectives had brought increasing criticism, increasing nagging, growing uneasiness and sharpness between them, inflamed and embittered the tensions of their youth, made their friendship ever harder to live with, or without. Damn it all, why did he have to be such an annoying bastard?

  On the House floor he found only a handful of members remaining for the final speeches of the day, the “special orders” without time limitation after regular House business is done, in which those who desire can present their arguments about this, their exhortations about that, rarely listened to by their colleagues but, once in the Record, available to be sent out under frank to presumably interested constituents. He left the floor; dropped by the Speaker’s office for fifteen minutes of what that gentleman referred to as “the usual libation,” a little late-afternoon ceremony that he reserved for the more powerful chairmen and his special favorites among the younger members; and then went on to his own office in the Old House Office Building, cleaned up the mail, and dismissed his staff. He called home to say he was coming; got the maid, Maudie, who informed him when he asked for Sue-Dan that “she’s resting and can’t be disturbed”; and closed the huge mahogany door to his office with a crash so vigorous that a policeman at the guard desk far down the corridor looked up startled from his copy of the Evening Star. He waved, the cop waved back, and then he took the elevator to the basement, got his Lincoln Continental out of the garage, and drove off through the heavy traffic of homebound Washington, ne
gotiating automatically and hardly conscious of the crush of cars around him all the way through town and up Sixteenth Street.

  Arrived home, he went on into the house, again punctuating his mood with the door from the carport. The sound brought Maudie immediately to the living room. She was a woman of sixty who reminded him a good deal of his mother, and she always treated him as though she were.

  “A mighty big noise from a big man,” she said, pausing to plump the pillows on the sofa. “Suppose the world’s ending, maybe, or something?”

  “It may be,” he said darkly. “Could just be, old Maudie.”

  “Not likely tonight,” she said. “Not likely tonight. Let me take that hat and coat and get you a drink.”

  “Thanks,” he said, tossing the garments to her. “The usual.”

  “Martinis made by the devil,” she observed disapprovingly, “but if you want one, I expect I have to make it.”

  “Expect so, Maudie,” he said, more cheerfully, “seeing as how you’re a devil.”

  “You get along, now. Don’t see you growing any angel wings, Mr. Congressman.” Her voice underwent the subtle change it always did when she referred to the lady of the house. “Shall I mix one for her, too?”

  He shrugged.

  “I don’t know. Is she up? Ask her.”

  “Oh, she’s not up,” Maudie said. “You wouldn’t think she’d be up and waiting for her husband after his day at the office, would you? That not the girl you married.”

  “Okay, if you know so much about it, old woman, maybe she just likes to wait for me in bed. How about that?”

  “You needn’t be flaunting it,” Maudie said tartly. “Even suppose it’s true. Which,” she added, “I don’t.”

  “All right,” he said, suddenly sterner, “get along out, now, and mix those drinks. I’ll take it up to her. Then,” he added wickedly, “maybe you can put off dinner an hour, Maudie, and think about it, down here in the kitchen.”

  “Hmph,” she said. “Little boy like to talk about getting the moon, but once he got it, what he got? Just plain old cheese. Not gold and silver at all, just plain old cheese.”

  “All right, get along, I said!” he repeated sharply. “And hurry it up!”

  “I’m gettin’,” she said grumpily. “Don’t rush me.”

  So much for that, he thought angrily as he went to the television set and snapped it on. So much for God damn that. Little boy will get the moon and see what it’s made of. But even as the screen began to light up and there appeared upon it exactly the bland and happy face he expected to see, he knew the answer. Maudie’s answer. Just plain old cheese.

  “Of course,” the M’Bulu was remarking in a film clip taken out on the concrete expanse of the plaza with the Secretariat Building looming most impressively behind him, “I am sure the United States does not wish to be in the position of being discourteous or inconsiderate to Africa. But—” he shrugged and gave his charming gesture and smile. “But—”

  “Then you think, Your Highness,” the network correspondent asked eagerly, “that the President definitely should have canceled his trip to Michigan to remain in Washington and entertain you?”

  “Oh, I would not want to disturb the President’s plans,” Terrible Terry said politely. “He knows what is best for his own health. And, I assume, for his country. But—” And again the charming shrug and smile.

  “Then you do think he should have stayed?”

  The M’Bulu laughed.

  “Now you are attempting to get me to be critical of the President.”

  “Oh, no,” the network correspondent objected, but Terry went on.

  “I think the President is a great man. I am sure that if he decided to insult Africa, he had reasons for it. And I am sure they make sense to him. Even if,” he added wistfully, “they leave all of us in Africa somewhat puzzled.”

  “You would say that the United States, then, has definitely lost ground in Africa as a result of the President’s snub?”

  Again the M’Bulu shrugged and smiled.

  “I would not want to pass judgment, but—well, yes, I think the United States definitely will have to regain some lost ground. If, of course, the United States cares what we in Africa think. Sometimes we are not so sure.”

  Cullee made a disgusted sound and snapped off the set as Maudie returned with the drinks.

  “A great man, Maudie. He’s going to tell the United States what to do. I think maybe he’s also going to lead us poor black folks out of slavery, if he has the time.”

  “Pfoof,” she said. “’T’s all I can say. Pfoof! Here’s your drinks.”

  “Thank you,” he said, starting up the stairs. As he did so, she laughed suddenly. “Bet she’s still listening to him. What do you bet?”

  “You know I’d lose, Maudie. Don’t hurry dinner.”

  “You going to be mighty embarrassed when you find you have forty-five minutes to kill,” she called, but he didn’t deign an answer.

  Nor, he thought as he kicked open the bedroom door and went in carrying the tray, was there any particular answer to make. Most of the older women of his race had an instinct for going straight to the jugular, particularly in matters involving life, death, love, and other fundamentals. Maudie had sensed it out, all right, though she had never before voiced it so frankly. By the same token, maybe she had made him face it more honestly than he had up to now. The thought did not give him a pleasant expression as he came into the room, and the shrewd little fox-face that greeted him from among the pillows and lacy things of the bed threw it back to him without an instant’s hesitation. Of course the bedroom television set was blaring too, and of course Terry was still on it, though on another channel. He put the drinks on the night table, went over to the machine, and snapped it off with a vicious twist of his fingers. Sue-Dan promptly switched it back on again with the remote-control mechanism beside the bed.

  “Leave it off!” he demanded, and after a long look and a moment sufficiently prolonged to tease him she complied with a little chuckle.

  “What’s the matter? You don’t want to hear your old friend Terry?”

  “No.”

  “Big man. Real famous now. Better look him up, Cullee. It might help your career.”

  “How’s that?” he demanded, going to the closet and taking off his coat and tie, tossing his shirt on a chair, putting his glasses carefully on the bureau, coming back to sit on the edge of the bed as he unlaced his shoes. “What’s he got to do with my career?”

  “Patsy Labaiya called a while ago. She thinks you ought to go to Charleston for that luncheon.”

  “LeGage Shelby called a while ago,” he said in a voice that mimicked her own sarcastic tones. “He thinks I ought to go to Charleston for that luncheon.”

  She laughed.

  “Cullee’s other wife. You can say no to Patsy, but sure enough you aren’t going to say no to ’Gage. Now, are you?”

  “Yes,” he said levelly, “I did say no to him.”

  “And had another fight.”

  “And had another fight.”

  “Could be the Jasons could help you when you run for Senator next year,” she observed dreamily, nestling down in the pillows with a luxuriant air.

  “If I run for Senator,” he corrected, slipping out of his trousers and draping them over the chair with his shirt.

  “Oh,” she said, as he sat again on the edge of the bed. “I expect you will.”

  ‘The Speaker thinks I should,” he admitted, and for the first time since he had entered the room Sue-Dan looked genuinely pleased.

  “Good for him. He’s got some sense, that old man.”

  “He’s got plenty of sense,” Cullee said, starting to strip off his undershirt. He was conscious of an immediate tensing alongside.

  “What you got in mind, Cullee?” she asked sharply. He gave a sarcastic laugh.

  “I just like to get undressed and run around naked. Isn’t that what you been thinking right along? Surely, now, you hav
en’t been thinking anything else, little Sue-Dan.”

  Her eyes looked enormous, though not, he thought bitterly, from any fear or anticipation of him. She played this game all the time.

  “I’m tired.”

  “I’m tired,” he mimicked. “So am I tired. But I’m not tired right here. See that, Sue-Dan? Terry isn’t the only big man. You got a big man, too.”

  “Why can’t you ever leave me alone?” she demanded angrily, starting to roll out the other side of the bed; but he reached an arm across and pinned her down with one enormous hand as he reached down with the other, ripped off his shorts, and dropped them on the floor.

  “I’ve got to show you who Cullee’s wife really is,” he said huskily, stripping back the blankets and clambering over her. “I think maybe you forgot since the last time.”

  “I haven’t forgotten anything,” she said through her teeth, struggling fiercely under him.

  “Then stop it,” he said angrily, his face an inch from hers, his powerfully muscled athlete’s body slowly and inexorably crushing down upon her. “Just stop it. God damn it, do you mean I have to rape my own wife?”

  Suddenly her struggles ceased as quickly as they had begun, her arms went around him, the world became a place of wild confusion, until at last they cried out together in hoarse, incoherent exclamation and a quietness descended.

  “Now get off me,” she whispered abruptly with a harshness that broke the mood at once. “Just get off me, big man. You’ve proved it, whatever it was you wanted to prove. Get off me.”

  “You just can’t help but be good, even when you hate me, can you, Sue-Dan?” he said with an equally harsh sarcasm as he started to comply. “You’re just a natural-born lay, Mrs. Congressman Hamilton.”

  “Better not let anybody else find it out,” she said shrewishly, and he swung back one huge hand, caught her wrist, and again pinned her down helpless on the bed, leaning over so close his face was again an inch from hers.

  “Better not you ever let anybody else find it out,” he whispered with a menace that he was pleased to note made her look genuinely terrified. “Or I not promise what I do to you, little Sue-Dan.”