A Shade of Difference

by Allen Drury

  In time—but there was no time. The world was spinning ever faster, and those who would move it must seize the fleeting chance and tip it while they could. Companions and projects his father only dimly suspected began to concern Felix Labaiya; not until Felix, by then a two-term Deputy in the National Assembly, joined Aquilino Boyd to help lead the march on the Canal Zone on Independence Day, November 3, 1959, did his father realize that Don Jorge and not himself had won the battle for his son. And by then it was too late for Luis Labaiya to win him back, though he tried.

  Again there was the call to come to La Suerte, by now remodeled, modernized, made bright with Yanqui paints and Yanqui prints, only Donna Anna’s quarters far in the left wing preserved, as they had always been, in dingy splendor. There was even a swimming pool, now, and on long weekends lively groups of friends, quite often including members of the Canal Zone staff, the military governor and his lady, and other American residents as well as wealthy Panamanians, would travel the still-difficult two hundred miles out to frolic and disport. Near the end of his father’s life, Felix began to introduce a new element to these parties, one that increasingly embarrassed Luis Labaiya: angry students from the University, young scholars and professors, youthful journalists, occasionally a stranger or two from overseas, visitors full of positive opinions and instantaneous contention who rapidly disrupted the easygoing air of the estancia and turned previously relaxed gatherings into battlegrounds of argumentative tension. It was not long before Luis’ friends, particularly his American friends, began to find other things to do upon receipt of invitations to come to La Suerte. Urged on by increasing anxiety for his son and unexpected word from his doctors that he was engaged in a physical battle he could not win, the ex-President made one last attempt to persuade a moderation that Felix was no longer prepared to accept save as a deliberate means to an end. In his heart he had already left moderation far behind.

  The Ambassador sighed deeply now, an unconscious commentary on the gap between generations that he was not even aware of, as he thought of that second confrontation between father and son at La Suerte. As he had entered the high-ceilinged bedroom with its view down the valley, glanced at the wasted hands lying on the coverlet, and looked into the desperate eyes with a feeling of pain that he could not conceal, he had known a sudden resurgence of the love for his father that he had felt long ago as a child and had almost forgotten since in their increasingly bitter political arguments. A sudden vivid memory of a young and handsome Luis Labaiya riding a horse down jungle roads with a self-assured and self-confident swagger flashed into his mind; it was all he could do to suppress a sob. But his father’s opening words had ended the moment at once and instantly reestablished the insurmountable barrier between them.

  ‘The principal reason I do not wish to die,” he had said in the husky whisper that was all the cancer still permitted him, “is that I fear for my son.”

  With a great effort Felix retained his self-control and replied with a calmness he did not feel.

  “I am sorry for that,” he said gravely. “Sorry that I have disappointed you and sorry that you are worried for me. Neither has been necessary.”

  “You have made it necessary. It has not been my doing.”

  Felix realized that his nails were biting into his palms; the sensation was sharp enough to conquer his impulse to cry out in anger. Instead he retreated to the cold precision to which he always retreated when his purposes, his ideas, or his emotions were under attack from any source.

  “It has been the doing of the times. The world has moved from what it was. It is simply that I have moved with it. As,” he continued when his father’s ravaged hands made a movement of protest, “Panama too is moving with it. And will continue to move.”

  “It is not impossible,” Luis said, “that another Labaiya may someday sit in La Presidencia. I should like to feel before I go that you would govern with honor.”

  “What is honor?” Felix asked bitterly. “To bow to the Yanquis? To be their colony? To let them operate our Canal and rake off its profits into their own fat pockets? There are some who have considered that honor. Not I.”

  “My son, you talk in slogans, not in facts,” Luis said with a painful slowness. “They built the Canal. They do not run it at a profit. They do not keep from us anything which is rightfully ours.”

  “Is La Suerte’s land ours?” Felix demanded harshly. “Do we love La Suerte? So is Panama’s land ours, and so do I love Panama.”

  “And I do not?” Luis demanded with a ghostly but equal harshness. “La Suerte is nothing to me, Panama is nothing to me? You talk like a child and a fool.”

  “And yet I am neither,” Felix said coldly. “And many grown men who are neither agree with me. And the day is coming when all Panama and all the world will agree with me. And then the enemy will be gone, and we will be left in peace to prosper as God intended.”

  “The enemy! You are beyond intelligence to use such terms. My friends are not ‘the enemy’!”

  “Your friends are not my friends,” Felix snapped.

  “My son is not my son,” his father said, and turned on his side with an infinite weariness.

  “Father—” Felix began, but there was no sign of relaxation in the rigid back beneath the coverlet. Automatically he satisfied himself that the cloth still moved, faintly but regularly, with breathing, and then turned away and walked out on the terrace of La Suerte and stood for a long time, his eyes blinded by tears that shut off the valley of his childhood and growing-up, the jungle and mountains and tropical vistas of his dearly beloved home. But his back was rigid too, and no more than his father’s did it give sign of yielding. It was the last time he cried for anyone, and he would have died himself rather than have his father know that it had been for him.

  Two weeks later Luis Labaiya was dead, the funeral was over, the business of readjusting was done, Felix was head of the family, now dwindled to himself, and his mother, and Donna Anna, huddling together in the old wing of the house in a protest, silent but inescapable, as strong as his father’s. So be it, then. He was alone; he had always been alone; he would be alone. And when he was through, the world would know that in Felix Labaiya-Sofra it had a man who achieved what he set out to do.

  Perhaps it was this quality more than any other that had really brought about his marriage to Patsy Jason. Some spark, not of fire but of the cold blue light that burns in certain people, had leaped between them when they met in Washington. He had been there as counselor of embassy first, a tentative and cautious offering from the current government in Panama—an offering that said, in effect, Here is your chance. We shall see if you will continue down the road you are going or be Louie Labaiya’s son. It had occurred to him in the bitter days following his father’s death that obviously his best advantage lay in appearing to be the latter and giving them to understand that he was not bidding them farewell forever. He had gracefully eased himself away from the more publicly obstreperous companions of his radical days and begun to assume, not too slowly, not too fast, the necessary mantle of conformity.

  “I knew that when Louie died and he understood the full responsibilities of his position, Felix would be all right,” they told one another comfortably in the Zone. The enemy had even been invited back to La Suerte, and presently it seemed as though nothing at all had changed and that the House of Labaiya was again what it had been under his father, a pillar of Panama, one of the principal rocks upon which to rest the curious relationship between the Giant of the North and its tiny brother of the Isthmus.

  There had come in due course the invitation to go to Washington, and he had accepted it eagerly, for there was still much that he wanted to know about the Americans on their home ground. In the gleaming white capital, which he reached in an autumn season much like the present with the leaves turning and the air soft and a gentle wistfulness in the busy atmosphere, he had moved at once into a position of prominence in the diplomatic corps. “Panama Sends an Eligible Young Ba
chelor,” the Evening Star reported in a personality sketch in its society pages shortly after his arrival. “Pat and Perle and Dolly and Polly are all going to be after the new counselor of the Embassy of Panama,” the article had begun, “for he is everything a hostess’ heart could desire. Young, handsome, and dashing, he reportedly has a reputation in his homeland for being a great one with the ladies. So, watch out girls!” And the girls, of course, instead of watching out, had flung themselves at his head with a gay abandon that amused, if it did not particularly impress, the eligible young bachelor from Panama.

  Like most Latins—indeed, like most foreigners of whatever nature—Felix was somewhat baffled by the American attitude toward sex, a practical function in his country that few people thought about twice. Either you got it or you didn’t; if you did, fine, and if you didn’t, well, mañana was another day and more than one fish swam in the boundless sea. Bafflement soon yielded to amusement, and a calm decision to make the most of it; before very long he was living up to his reputation in a way that caused some deliriously excited gossip in Georgetown and other purlieus of the capital’s knowledgeable. This had been going on for six months when he met Patsy Jason at a party at Dolly’s. He was given to understand at once that this was not to be a conquest as simple as the rest.

  Why it shouldn’t have been he was for a time puzzled to understand, which was exactly the result intended, as he soon came to realize. His first impulse was to dismiss it, but something about Patsy, with her striking dark good looks, her outwardly vacuous chatter, and her inner certainties, seemed to appeal directly to something in him.

  “I think you’re very cold-blooded,” she had told him when she finally consented to being escorted to a ball at the beautiful main building of the Pan-American Union at Seventeenth Street and Constitution Avenue.

  “I have company in that,” he responded with a rarely flashing smile.

  “I know,” she said with a giggle. “Aren’t we WORTHLESS?”

  But they both knew they weren’t, of course. Few more intelligent people lived in Washington; few more perceptive, ambitious, and shrewd; few whose ultimate interests ran more nearly together. It was soon obvious to him that Patsy’s principal aim in life was to further the ambitions of her brother, then serving as Undersecretary of Defense before returning to make his successful race for Governor of California. Ted had lost his first wife and had not yet married the stunning Ceil who was now his second; Patsy, having nothing else to do with her time and share of the family millions, was keeping house for him on Foxhall Road and serving as his hostess. Felix was given to understand early that everything was subordinate to Ted, which of course made it doubly flattering when it became increasingly obvious that his own person and interests were assuming an equal, and soon a greater, place in Patsy’s life.

  That this condition could not last, he was quite sure, but there were plenty of reasons why he should take advantage of it while it did. They were both extremely wealthy—although compared with the Jason millions, of course, his own patrimony seemed relatively minor—both ambitious, both determined, both inclined to be ruthless in going after what they wanted. They were also completely at home in the world of national and international society and politics in which they moved, aware of most of the subtle influences that went into its operations, quick to see and act upon those things that could be of use to them. “Those two ought to marry,” the editorial director of the Washington Post had commented to Justice Tommy Davis as they watched the stunning couple circulate over the green lawns among the strawberry-laden tables at the British Embassy’s June garden party for the Queen. “They were certainly made for this town.”

  They were made for something more, and both were aware of it. They were made for power. The difficulty involved in differing nationalities was not what it might have been in some other cases. The Jasons had interests in Panama, as they had in most places around the world, and Felix in any event was apparently embarked upon a substantial period of residence in America. “When Ted is President of the United States and you’re President of Panama,” Patsy had remarked after the wedding with a mock ruefulness, “where will I be?” “You can commute,” he had assured her with a pleasant smile, knowing that at that particular moment, probably the high point of their marriage as far as its emotional content was concerned, she would no more leave him than fly. But the day would come. When it did, it would be no problem. The marriage, he knew instinctively then, would go on regardless; have a brief season of passion now, then settle; and go on.

  They had been married at the Washington Cathedral at an enormously popular and enormously attended ceremony ignored by the Archdiocese of Washington, since for political reasons of his own Felix had chosen to fall away from the Church and Patsy was not about to join. The newly-elected Governor Jason gave his sister away, Life and Look each gave the ceremony six pages, everybody who was anybody was there to give it blessing, and what one reporter referred to as “the treaty of mutual assistance between Jason and Labaiya” was duly consummated. Felix entered upon it hopeful that in time the Jason interests might be added to his own in pursuit of the purposes to which he knew his life to be dedicated.

  What these were he never entirely told Patsy. She knew he was concerned about the Canal, that he felt, as he assured her quite truthfully most Panamanians did, a restless resentment of the relationship with the United States; but that he contemplated anything more she never suspected, for, after all, how could he? There was no way to achieve it, even if he did. His march with Aquilino Boyd on Independence Day 1959 had apparently been the high-water mark of Panamanian protest. Things had simmered since, but simmered, with a few relatively minor exceptions, quietly. Felix seemed increasingly removed from the inner turmoil of Panama as he moved on from counselor to Ambassador and went in due time from Washington to the United Nations.

  The day might come when his dream of winning support from the Jasons would prove to be delusion—who could say what time would bring in the affairs of ambitious men?—but he would not have been human had he not made it the basis of an active hope. If Ted became President, would there not be a more reasonable attitude in the White House toward the aspirations of his brother-in-law’s country, a concession that the changing pattern of world events made no longer suitable the continuance of so archaic and antiquated a relationship between sovereign states? He had never spelled this out to Governor Jason, who kept his own counsel even more completely than Felix did, if that were possible, and thereby was perhaps the only man living for whom the Panamanian Ambassador felt a secret, uneasy awe. But it would not be human not to hope: it would make things so much easier all around if it should turn out to be true.

  In time, so bland and well-behaved did his son apparently become, it came to seem that Luis Labaiya had won after all. On quick trips back to La Suerte he and Patsy entertained with a lavishness rarely seen in the Isthmus. In Panama, in Washington, and at the UN the Ambassador of Panama went about with a circumspect and equable air that presently erased many of the memories of whatever mood of rebellion may have shadowed his earlier years. These things were now attributed, if anyone thought of them at all, to youthful exuberance, a need to sow political wild oats, a tendency to substitute action for the sober appreciation of Panama’s best interests that any sensible man of course must have. “He just had to kick up his heels,” they said in the Zone. Felix smiled and went his way.

  There came a time when heads as shrewd as his, constantly studying and analyzing and restudying and reanalyzing the complex of nations and personalities at the United Nations, came to the conclusion that there might be found in the Ambassador of Panama an ally worth having. A short but intensive courtship followed, in which Felix found himself wined and dined and flattered by Vasily Tashikov until, as he told himself dryly, it was running out his ears. To it all he responded with a bland pretense of gratification which apparently fooled and flattered the Soviets, for they began to turn to him increasingly on matters inimical to
the West, seeking his advice, which he was always careful to keep noncommittal, and beseeching his active support, which he now and then began to give.

  Potentially it could be a dangerous game, and he knew it. He must always bear in mind three things—the disapproval of the United States, the disapproval of his own government, and the disapproval, perhaps most important of all, of his wife and in-laws. The most he had been able to persuade his government to agree to had been an occasional abstention on a vote of interest to Washington. This had caused some raised eyebrows in the State Department, but the temper of the world was changing, a little show of independence was considered a good thing—“At least they can’t say we run Panama,” somebody remarked jocularly at a meeting of the Policy Planning Staff. “Anyway, not all the time,” somebody else responded wryly—and nobody became too alarmed. Very cautiously and very carefully Felix felt his way, widening the area of his freedom of action little by little; a process of education, of human manipulation, of playing with opposing forces, which fascinated him. The only thing he regretted was that it was something he could not discuss with anyone, even his wife. He could never forget that the ultimate result might yet be some explosive conclusion that would blow all his careful fabrics asunder. It might also blow his marriage asunder. There was no point in hurrying the day, though he was prepared to face it if the necessities of his country brought it about.