by Allen Drury
And yet—and yet. So steady was his temperament and so fair his nature that even to them he could not be unjust. Maybe they were right after all. Maybe all those who said you had to resort to violent measures or live forever under the white man’s intolerant and self-interested domination were correct. They weren’t living under it any more in most of Africa. Why should they live under it any more in America, where men were supposed to be created equal and have an equal chance to make good on their own merits? Why should they tolerate any more, in this chaotic twentieth century, the sort of nonsense that said the color of a man’s skin had anything to do with his essential worth? Wasn’t he really, perhaps, being just an Uncle Tom, a white man’s stooge, a middle-of-the-roader trying to maintain an impossible position even as the road was washing away from under him? Wasn’t he really, perhaps, being just a pawn of white man’s politics with his resolution and his attempts to be fair and his foolish desire for integrity? Why did he think he had all the answers, and Sue-Dan and ’Gage were so wrong?
And why did he think, he told himself with the deepest self-scarification of all, why did he think that he could fool himself into thinking that his confusion had any other basis than it did? Why did he think he could deny to himself what was really gnawing at his heart, the bonds of friendship and the chains of love? LeGage, for all his tiresome jealousies and difficult hypersensitivities, was his oldest, nearest friend, closer to him than a brother. Sue-Dan, for all her sarcastic and cutting attitudes, was his wife, after whose body he lusted as hotly as he ever had. Even now as he looked about the room for the faces he knew instinctively he would not find, he felt the stirring in his thighs that always began at the sight of her, the sound of her, the smell of her, the thought of her. It didn’t matter what she said or what she did; she had him where he was most helpless and he couldn’t seem to do anything about it. And in a different sense, though nearly as commanding, he was held in the ties of youth and memory and gallant dreams and shared ideals to LeGage.
Had his wife and his friend been in the room at that moment, and had they been capable of the imagination and perception to approach him with the face of love, he would have withdrawn his resolution, abandoned his fight for moderation, perhaps become as intolerant and impatient as they. But they were gone, and although they did not know it, their moment to recapture him was also gone.
And yet—and yet he missed them both with such a terrible hunger and unhappiness that he did not know, at that moment, whether he would have the strength to continue on his middle road when the moment came, as come it must, to make the final decision and bid them final farewell.
It was no wonder, therefore, that he showed a blank and unseeing visage to the hostile, sneering eyes of Ghana and Guinea, the skeptical glances of Brazil and Ceylon, the quizzical examinations of India and the U.A.R. as he turned blindly and left the noisy Lounge to start his personal search for honor without betrayal and integrity with love.
2
“You understand, of course,” the little owl-eyed man said in his dark green office in the Medical Service on the fifth floor of the Secretariat, “that seizures of this type are quite frequently caused by some deep-seated psychosomatic—”
“I understand,” Hal Fry interrupted bluntly from behind the screen of pain that seemed to be separating him from the world, “that we’ve been all over that before, and there’s nothing to it. How many times do I have to tell you that it isn’t overwork, it isn’t tiredness, it isn’t my love life—”
“Have you got any?” the little man interrupted quickly. “Are you sure you’ve told me all you want to tell me, in that area?”
“I don’t want to tell you a damned thing. And I don’t think I have, either.”
“Ah, I thought there was something you were ashamed of. You wouldn’t have been trying so hard to conceal it, if there weren’t.”
“What in the hell have I been trying to conceal? You haven’t asked me and I haven’t told you. I don’t see that it has any bearing—”
“Come, come, of course it has a bearing. Our sexual lives have a bearing on everything we do. Yours does. Mine does. Everybody’s d—”
“Are you married?” Hal Fry demanded abruptly. The little man gave a sudden blink.
“Yes.”
“Happily?”
“We’re temporarily separated,” the little man said stiffly, “but that’s neither here nor th—”
“Ah,” Senator Fry said, though the terrible dizziness was back in his head and he didn’t know how many more seconds he would be able to maintain this whimsy without fainting, “that accounts for your nervous manner, then.”
“What nervous manner?” the little man demanded sharply. “I haven’t a nerv— Now, see here,” he said coldly. “Suppose you stop playing games and let’s get on with this. Obviously you’re suffering from some sort of sexual maladjustment. How do you and your wife react to one another during coitus?”
“We don’t react at all,” Hal Fry said, and a sudden little expression of pain, unassociated with the pain now ravaging his chest and abdomen, came into his eyes. His inquisitor perceived it with a triumphant cry.
“So! You don’t react at all! And you’re trying to tell me you don’t have a sexual prob—”
“My wife died ten years ago,” Hal Fry said. “Assuming it’s any of your business.”
“Well,” the little owl-eyed man said. “Well. I’m sorry. Then obviously you’re reacting from a lack of sexual outlet. Do you have a mistress?”
“No, I don’t have a mistress! How much longer is this nonsense going to go on?”
“Now, see here. You came to me. I didn’t come to you. If you have a problem and want my help, well and good. If not, there’s nothing I can do and we might as well stop wasting each other’s time.”
“You’re supposed to diagnose medical ailments,” Hal Fry said bitterly, “not parrot all this guff that has no bearing.”
“It has a bearing. A history of a marriage that was basically unhappy, followed by a long period of widower hood without adequate outlet—”
“Who said my marriage was basically unhappy? And what do you know about my outlets?”
“I can tell,” the little man said, not without a trace of smugness. “Was it happy?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Ah,” the little man said with satisfaction. “You see, I was right. And the shame of whatever it was you did that made it unhappy, followed by ten years of abstinence or unsatisfactory temporary liaisons, has finally culminated in a psychosomatic physical reaction that is—”
“Now, see here,” Senator Fry said, “I wish you’d stop talking all this damned nonsense and try to find out what is really wrong with me. Right at this moment I can barely see you—my vision seems to have some sort of red shadow over it—and I have terrible cramps in my stomach and my head feels like the devil and I think if I had to walk across the room I’d fall flat on my face from weakness. And raking up my past won’t help.”
“It was an unhappy past, then,” the little owl-eyed man said softly, staring at him with a wide-eyed candor. “The pattern is quite classic. The unhappy marriage, the guilt complex, the years of regret and frustration, all leading up to a psychiatric collapse of one sort or another. You have children?” he demanded abruptly.
‘Why should I tell you anything?” Hal Fry asked through the agonizing vise that had clamped itself abruptly on his chest. “I have a son.”
“How old is he?”
“Nineteen.”
“Is he with you?”
“He’s nearby.”
“In school?”
“No.”
“Oh,” the little man said with a quick, pouncing softness. “In an institution?”
“Why should I tell you anything?”
“I see,” the little man said, nodding thoughtfully. “Yes, that would explain it. The marriage made unhappy by the mentally defective child, the guilt feeling, the bitterness, the early death of t
he wife, the years of trying to find something to fill the emptiness, the futile searching for activities to occupy a life—”
“Look,” Hal Fry said savagely, “I am a Senator of the United States. If you don’t think that’s enough to occupy a life, you’re crazy. I don’t have time to turn around, I have so much to occupy my life. So what does that do to your silly theories?”
“Look inside yourself,” the little man said softly. “Study your own reactions. Analyze your own sickness. You’ll see. Then come back and we will see what we can do about it together.”
“I wouldn’t come back to you if I were dying.” The little man smiled, a calm, superior smile.
“You’re not dying. You’re just very much confused. A week from now, two weeks, a day maybe, you’ll be back telling me I’m right.”
“But I am not well,” Hal Fry said desperately, for now all his symptoms seemed to be attacking him at once and he literally did not know whether he could stand up and walk. “I have duties and responsibilities I must fulfill. I must get well. You are being no help to me at all.”
“I have been the greatest help to you that any man could be, for I have given you the key to unlock your own illness. You will thank me for it before long. Wait and see.”
“I’m sick,” Senator Fry repeated hopelessly, “and I must get well.”
“You are sick,” the little man agreed, “and you will get well. If you want to.”
“I think,” Hal said, managing to rise and surprised to find that he could move, slowly and carefully but without falling, toward the door, “that you are insane. I think you are insane from an insufferable arrogance of intellect and pride that will not let you make an honest diagnosis, because you know that if you tried to, you couldn’t.”
“Patients often get abusive when they are forced to face themselves.” The little owl-eyed man turned away indifferently to the papers on his desk. “Come back and see me when you are ready to get well.”
“I’ll die before I come back to you.”
“You won’t die. Come back when you are ready.”
And that, Hal Fry thought as he walked with an unsteady determination out of the office, past the pretty little Indonesian nurse who smiled sympathetically to him as he went, and down the corridor to the elevator, was about the best you could expect from these overtrained, oversexed, and overtheorized doctors who tried to read into everybody else their own sick frustrations. All the little man had accomplished was to instill the seed of doubt, to unnerve him, to rake up the past and make him feel even unhappier than he already was, to weaken and sap his strength of will and fortitude of character at a point at which he was coming rapidly to the conclusion that strength of will and fortitude of character were about all he had left to go on.
“I am sick,” he repeated in a stubborn whisper as he waited for the elevator to take him down to First Committee and the debate over Indonesia’s threat to Australian New Guinea, “and I must get well.”
But whether he would, and whether strength of will and fortitude of character would be enough to permit him to carry on his responsibilities here in the crucial days before the final vote on Felix Labaiya’s amendment, he did not know. Yet he determined one thing as he stood there waiting. From this point forward, insofar as will and character could assist him, he would make no further admissions to anyone that he was feeling sick, he would do nothing to indicate to the world that he was not fully capable of discharging his duties in this time of crisis for his country, he would carry on to the best of his ability in the way in which he was needed.
He did not know what was wrong with him, but he knew it was something far more fundamental than N.Y.U.’s brightest student could possibly be direct and uncomplicated enough to perceive. Maybe by thinking very hard about the tasks ahead he could persuade himself and his body by a sheer feat of will that it was not so.
He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and stepped into the elevator, a set smile on his lips and his eyes straight ahead as the machine shot downward to First Committee.
South upon the Potomac, where men were as concerned as anywhere about the day’s debate in the General Assembly and the fate of Cullee Hamilton’s resolution in the Congress of the United States, the senior Senator from South Carolina was thinking at a furious rate as he presided, apparently half asleep, over an afternoon session of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Justice Department witnesses were before the committee, and Seab Cooley was listening with an ominous benevolence as the Attorney General made an earnest appeal for additional funds to finance the assignment of special United States marshals “in case of emergency.” The phrase brought the reaction everyone had been awaiting from the chairman.
“Now, Mr. Attorney General,” he said gently, stirring awake and giving the witness a shrewd glance from his hooded old eyes, “would you tell the committee, are these emergencies you discover, or emergencies you create?”
“Emergencies that come to us for solution, Mr. Chairman,” the Attorney General said, rather tartly. “I don’t believe it is our policy to go out of our way to create emergencies unnecessarily.”
“You don’t believe it is your policy to go out of your way to create emergencies unnecessarily.”
“No, sir.”
“No, sir. No, sir. Well, I’m glad to hear that.” He smiled blandly and the sudden tension that had come upon the alert young men of the Attorney General’s staff eased somewhat. “You may proceed, Mr. Attorney General.”
“Oops!” whispered the Dallas News to the Los Angeles Times at the press table. “Thought we were going to have a story there, for a second.”
“Seab’s just going through the motions,” the Times whispered back “I don’t think his heart is in it today.”
And, if truth were known, this press table analysis of the chairman’s rather absent-minded manner was correct. His heart was not in it. In fact his heart felt tired, and old, and, quite uncharacteristically, discouraged.
It was not like Seabright B. Cooley, who had smitten his enemies hip and thigh when they attacked him in Gath and fell upon him in Ashkelon, to feel put upon and bothered by the world, but today he did. He had been following certain matters very closely, without saying anything to anyone about it, and just before the committee session began he had stopped by the paper stand near the public elevators at the entrance to the Senate side of the Capitol and dropped in his coin for the late edition of the Washington Daily News. “CULLEE HOLDS FINGER IN UN DIKE,” the paper had announced with its customary cheerful insouciance. “WINS DELAY FOR US TO SPANK OURSELVES.”
This rather carefree analysis of the debate and vote in the General Assembly was in fact, as often with the News, rather closer to the realities and the Washington reaction than many people cared to admit. “Of all the damned things,” Bill Kanaho had snorted, stopping by to read over Seab’s shoulder. “Why in hell should we be humbling ourselves again?” Seab had nodded and made a mental note of the name of Hawaii’s senior Senator as one who, despite his racial background, might be a tried and trusted ally in the bitter struggle that would ensue when Cullee’s resolution reached the Senate—if it reached the Senate. But of that the senior Senator from South Carolina had few illusions and little doubt. The cards were stacked in the House, and everything his spies over there told him only served to emphasize the fact. It was now Saturday afternoon, and present plans were to bring the resolution to the House floor on Monday and ram it through under a tight limitation of debate that could bring a decision by nightfall.
This situation was, of course, attributable principally to the one man to whom such bursts of legislative speed in the House were almost always attributable. The Speaker, who moved in obvious and powerful ways his wonders to perform, had followed up his success in bringing the resolution out of the Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday on a 15-13 vote by arranging for the House Rules Committee to meet later this afternoon and approve the debate rule for Monday. Even with the parliamentary delaying tactics
permissible under House rules, this would probably mean a final vote not later than 9 or 10 p.m.; assuming, of course, that the narrow vote in the Foreign Affairs Committee did not accurately reflect the divided sentiment in the House, and assuming also that Seab’s southern friends would not stand together. If the South remained solid and the House was as divided as the Foreign Affairs vote indicated, then the resolution might be stopped in the chamber of its birth and Seab would not have to fight it in the Senate.
Of this pleasant and desirable outcome, however, he was not at all positive as he heard, with just enough attention to make the Attorney General nervous, that hard-working official’s concluding paragraphs. Jawbone Swarthman had shown toward the Speaker the same qualities of malleable timidity that had made Seab sponsor his political career in the first place; the only trouble was that this time he had shown them toward the Speaker instead of toward his senior Senator, and this defection had left Seab feeling like a parent stabbed by his own child. Jawbone had called him right away, of course, apologizing profusely, and had explained that his decision to vote with the majority to bring the Hamilton resolution out of committee had simply been due to “pressures over here that you understand, Senator, sure you do.” Seab had said dryly that he did, but that he had a few pressures himself to exert against Jawbone in South Carolina and perhaps it was time he did so. For the first time this threat had not produced its customary result. Jawbone had said merely, “Yes, well, you know how it is, Senator,” and this vague response had been more alarming to Senator Cooley than any amount of open defiance. It had indicated quite clearly that Representative Swarthman, too, thought he was slipping and was no longer quite so afraid of his vengeance as he had always been heretofore. Of course Jawbone had assured him, sure now, sure now, that he would oppose the Hamilton resolution when it reached the floor of the House.