by Allen Drury
“No. I’m sorry I wasn’t down there to join you.”
“Well, you have things to do there,” Patsy said in a disinterested voice. “Anyway, he and Lucille were there—my GOODness, that woman is a frump—and Seab Cooley and I got into a little spat and the President had to jump in with both feet in his mouth as usual. But he did say he thought it was puzzling that Ted hadn’t said something, and he did indicate that it might be well for him to do so.”
“So you naturally accepted this as a command,” Felix said with distaste, “and Ted naturally thought it was a warning. So he issued his statement.”
‘“Why, of course. What else could he do, if he wants the President’s support? Anyway, darling, I must say I’m not entirely in disagreement with him, you know.”
“Oh, I know. Were you ever?”
“Oh, yes,” she said cheerfully. “You know, I never told you, but he was most skeptical when I married you.”
“Oh, was he. I could have expressed similar thoughts about him.”
“How fortunate that everyone thought it best to be polite … Or was it?”
“Possibly not. Perhaps we should never have married at all.”
“Who can ever tell what is best?” his wife asked in a vague tone.
“Exactly. Who?”
“Well, anyway, darling,” Patsy said with a sudden briskness. “Here we are, aren’t we? So what happens now? Are you going to abandon your amendment in the UN? Are we going to get a divorce? What IS going to happen?”
“Nothing is going to happen except what is happening. We are proceeding under instructions from the General Assembly for a week’s delay. Some of it is already gone. When the entirety is, we shall vote.”
“You don’t think the House action on Cullee’s resolution has hurt you any?”
“What sort of action was it?” Felix asked scornfully. “A five-vote margin with almost the full House voting. What good does that do with opinion here in the UN? The full pressure of the Administration, and it only escaped defeat by five votes! That does not seem like a very strong sentiment in the Congress. And what effect will that have on the Senate? How will the precious resolution fare there? No, I would not say anything has hurt me, as you put it.”
“Not even Ted,” his wife remarked. He made a scornful sound.
“Not even Ted.”
“Well, darling, I won’t keep you any longer. I’m glad you called to ask about Ted. I’m glad that hasn’t hurt. I’m glad all is going so well.”
“Will you file for divorce, or shall I?” he asked bluntly, and was pleased to hear her startled gasp. But her response was calm and unperturbed.
“Let’s don’t rush things. It isn’t anything that has to be decided right now.”
“Very well, but tell Ted one thing for me. He has made his record, and we all perceive it. Now I would appreciate it if he would mind his own business and leave me to mine.”
“But all of these businesses growing out of Terry’s visit are so mixed up together,” she said, “that how can any of us stay out of any of them?”
“‘And therefore,’” the M’Bulu concluded his quoting as he lay sprawled naked on his stomach on the disheveled bed, “‘it must be conceded that, however difficult the problems he has posed for the United States, the actions of the intelligent and idealistic young leader of Gorotoland while in this country have served as a worthy catalyst in the discussion of problems with which all Americans should be concerned.
“‘It may be that some may wish he had remained at home. But none can deny that, while here, his effect has been felt.’
“And that,” he said in a tone of great satisfaction, “is what the New York Times thinks of me.”
“Very powerful stuff,” Sue-Dan observed dryly through the half-opened door of the bathroom. She surveyed herself full-length in the mirror on the door, gave her dress a tug, her hair a pat, and emerged to turn slowly about for his inspection. “How do I look, Terry? Better than those pretty gals in Molobangwe with goat butter in their hair?”
“Much better,” the M’Bulu said, still in a tone of great satisfaction. He gave his sudden merry laugh. “At least in this country I know the butter is fresh.”
“You’re pretty fresh yourself,” she observed, giving him an unimpressed surveillance that must have rankled, for under it he stirred uneasily and presently sat up.
“I don’t wonder old Cullee got annoyed with you, if you looked at him like that. You didn’t look like that half an hour ago.”
“Half an hour ago is a long time, sometimes,” she told him crisply. “How soon you got to be over there?”
“I told the New York press I’d meet them for coffee at ten. Want to go with me?”
“That would be a sensation, all right, but no, thanks. I think I’ll have lunch with LeGage and then go shopping for a while.”
“Better come with me,” he said in a taunting tone. “Surely you don’t care if Cullee knows.”
“Cullee knows,” she said flatly, taking one last turn before the mirror.
“Does he care?” She shrugged.
“Who knows what Cullee thinks? He cares, but it won’t change him.” A shrewdly thoughtful and grudgingly complimentary expression crossed her sharp-featured little face. “He’s got principles, that boy.”
“Too bad you don’t like him,” Terrible Terry observed lightly. Her expression changed for a split second to one he could not interpret—angry, regretful, protesting, wistful, scornful, even, perhaps, hurt.
“Too bad you don’t keep your opinions to yourself,” she said shortly. “Isn’t it time for you to get up and put on your pretty doodads for the white folks? They like you pretty.”
“I am pretty,” he said with a cheerful grin, rising slowly to stretch like some lithe and beautiful panther and then begin to put on undershirt and shorts, pants and socks and shirt, sober maroon tie and gray business suit. This completed, he went to the closet and took from their hook his gorgeous green and gold robes, inserted his arms in the sleeves, and, with a practiced gesture, swung the trailing sash swiftly across his chest and over his left shoulder, clapped on his little pillbox hat, and stood in full array before her.
“How is that?” he demanded. She gave a mocking imitation of being overwhelmed.
“My goodness to gracious Aunt Beulah, if you aren’t the prettiest thing that ever hit New York. Guess a mere woman can’t compete with you, Terry. Just as well I’m not going along, I expect; nobody’d look at me … What are you going to tell them?”
“Anything they want to hear,” he said cheerfully. “Since they want to hear things critical of their own country, that’s what I’ll tell them. It isn’t difficult, don’t you know, … What are you and LeGage going to talk about?”
“We thought we’d talk about Cullee. Do you mind?”
“No, I don’t mind. It seems a little late, however.”
“He can still drop his resolution,” she said. “That wouldn’t stop the Senate from acting, but it would make it easier for it to be beaten. Maybe,” she said thoughtfully, “you and ’Gage should go down to Washington and see him.”
“We can tell him what you’ll do for him,” Terry said with an impudent smile. “Maybe that will work.”
“He knows. It hasn’t seemed to lately. Anyway, who said that was any of your business, pretty?”
He threw back his head and laughed his merry laugh.
“I thought after last night that I was a member of the club. I’m sorry.”
She shrugged.
“Isn’t any club. I just wanted to find out what those goat-grease gals in Molobangwe and all those little floozies at the UN see in you. You’re not so much.”
An expression of genuine anger shot across his face as he towered above her in his glittering apparel.
“Damned American,” he said with a cold bitterness.
“Damned foreigner,” she said indifferently. “’Spect you better run along, Terry. All your little press pals are waiting
. Anyway,” she added, opening the door, “I know LeGage is. So I’ll see you later. Maybe.”
“Have fun with Cullee,” he said spitefully, following her out and closing the door with an angry slam.
“I always do,” she said. The elevator came and they rode in silence to the lobby. She held out her hand in mock formality.
“Thank you for everything, Your Royal Highness.” He gave his sunny smile, amicability abruptly restored.
“You, too. I don’t envy old Cullee.” He was pleased to see that this shot went home, for a look of resentment, oddly mixed with something that might possibly have been pain, came into her eyes.
“Go to hell,” she whispered viciously. “Just go to hell.”
He made a happy sound.
“I’m going to the UN. Ta, ta.”
Far beyond the Mall, across the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and all the marbled buildings of the capital, the Majority Leader could see the hills of Virginia lying ablaze with autumn in the hazy sun. Soon now the weather would change; soon now, he thought with an ominous foreboding similar to the President’s, all our weather may change and the final winter of the race come rushing on.
Often and often before he had experienced this feeling at times of crisis—the Congo, Berlin, Laos, Viet Nam, the convenient death of Dag Hammarskjold, the first Soviet moon shot, the conference last spring in Geneva, the endless parade of unnecessary evils forced upon the world by the indefatigable plotters of Moscow. Many a time he had looked out upon the beautiful city where confused and uncertain men of goodwill struggled to thwart the never-resting schemers who gambled daily with the life of humanity, and wondered how long a time was left in which to see the vista. Next year—next week—tomorrow—this afternoon—ten minutes from now—now? Sooner or later, he suspected, the Now would be here; the whole world’s Now, when all the organized, efficient evil and all the struggling, uncertain good, and all the hopes and all the plans and all the craftiness and all the idealism and all the strange, unhappy mixture of bright dream and dark reality that went into human living would suddenly find their answer at last in two or three days and nights of great unearthly sound and illumination, of blast and heat and the crash of infinite thunders … and then silence, and no more. No more Washington, no more Moscow, no more Soviet Union, no more United States, no more functioning society anywhere, one vast ruin beyond the mind’s ability to grasp, a gray and smoking graveyard adrift forever in the soundless caverns of the uncaring universe.
He shivered and told himself that this apocalyptic vision, which was the constant quiet companion of so many millions, must yet, somehow, be fended off by their combined common sense and abilities, their combined protests, their one great NO! to thwart and defeat the NOW! But in all honesty he could not tell himself that the chances for this were good. Surely, everyone said, no sane man would—but the decision did not rest with sane men.
In all this, everywhere was a battlefield, everything a battle. It did not matter, really, whether it came by clash of conventional arms in some jungle, in a propaganda lie spread around the globe, in a nuclear test, in a deliberately forced crisis in some entrapped city, in a showdown in the United Nations. Anywhere anyone was unhappy, anywhere anyone wanted to cry lie and distort the truth, the United States was on the defensive, and the truth, if it caught up at all, caught up too slowly to stop the steady corrosion of national reputation and international goodwill. Thus it all became important, in a situation in which the implacable intent was always to distort and always to tear down.
There could be, he had long ago decided, no dealing with such minds except on the flimsiest and most temporary of bases; and therefore there rested upon his own land the need to remain true to her principles, to walk honorably and do justice in the sight of the world. He had long felt a sad impatience with the flaccid cringing before some mysterious and undelimitable entity called “world opinion.” He had always felt that the reason to do right was not because some illiterate savage in the swamps might think badly of you if you didn’t, but simply because you owed it to yourself and your concept of yourself as a nation to do right. If you so acted, then goodwill and good reputation would follow.
Except, of course, that it did not, in this world torn apart by the ravenous ambitions of Communist imperialism and the headlong desire for independence of peoples who had the right to it, without the education or talent to make it work. Of the rights and wrongs of the latter he was aware, and on the whole he sympathized; but it was the former that posed the greater problem for his country. The only power history had ever known that was dedicated exclusively to increasing every tension, inflaming every difference, promoting every antagonism, destroying every chance for peace, did not need truth to further its campaigns. It needed only the prejudice, and the unhappiness, of others.
Thus it did not matter that British rioted against their Negro immigrants, that French preached liberté and practiced inégalité, that in India the Pious the most vicious forms of racial discrimination were practiced, or that in Africa itself black murdered black. These peoples did not wish to look in their own mirrors, and so they were only too willing to ease their consciences by following eagerly when the Soviet Union pointed the finger at the United States.
It was much nicer to forget all about what you were doing to the colored races yourselves and run happily off to thumb your nose at America. America was fair game. And America, he could not deny, at times deserved it.
The rights and wrongs of the present situation, whatever they may have been at any given moment in the past few days, were therefore utterly immaterial to the issue now. In a political sense they had gone down the drain the moment Terry took the little girl to school. All that mattered was that the United States, in the eyes of millions too impatient to be bothered with the facts and too ignorant to understand them if they could be bothered, had done something bad. There were the most real and imperative reasons for seeking to redress the balance.
Politically this was so, and in the deeper sense that he preferred to think of as his country’s truest honor, it was also so. His native Michigan had its problems, Detroit was no shining example of harmony between the races, but this only served to emphasize the moral imperatives he considered binding upon him and upon the country. It was simply not right that the Negroes should be treated as they were in far too many places in America; and while the position of many of them had improved fantastically in recent decades, and while the whole emphasis of government had been upon improving their welfare even further, too much still remained to be done for either the country or the government to rest.
So he could not rest now, charged as he was with responsibility for getting the Administration’s legislative program through the Senate. The slow and difficult processes of democracy, compounded of the disparate actions of individual men blending ultimately into some final, peaceably reached consensus, were in major degree his personal charge, at least insofar as the Senate was concerned. The margin in the House had been barely enough to pass Cullee’s resolution, far from enough to justify any claim that the United States was wildly enthusiastic either about apologizing to the M’Bulu, who didn’t deserve it, or increasing the tempo of help for her own colored citizens, who did. Could the Senate do any better?
He sighed, and immediately there came into his mind two people, one his wife, who was increasingly anxious that he bring the session to an end and get away for a greatly needed rest, and the other the senior Senator from South Carolina, once again the principal obstacle in the path of his legislative plans. He thought with a warm affection of Dolly, who now that she had him lawfully wedded and bedded at “Vagaries” hovered over him like a mother hen with one chick. It had been a long time since he had been surrounded by such solicitous and unceasing love, and he felt very grateful to her for it. There was imposed upon him, in return, the obligation to fall willingly into her plans, to agree to her constantly expressed desire and worry that he get away for a genuine rest, t
hat he do something he had never had any particular urge to do, and join her in traveling abroad when the session was over.
When the session was over: that was the problem. He did not think at this moment that it would be more than another day or two, but Seab could always lead the South into filibuster. Except that he had the sense that Seab might just possibly not have the heart for it this time, that things had finally changed once and for all, that their old friend was aging rapidly and might at last be no longer able to summon his old vigor and valor. Furthermore, he did not think Seab had the votes. Many of their colleagues were skeptical of the resolution; few were under any illusions as to the worth of Terrible Terry or the ultimate intentions of the cabal that had flocked about him in this peculiar episode. Nonetheless, a majority, he was quite sure, were as convinced as he that the Congress must pass the resolution—some for practical reasons of world politics, some for reasons of idealism concerning America’s national purposes, most for that combination of idealism and practicality that most honest men are willing to admit governs all their actions. It might not be large, but he was quite sure it would be a majority.
There remained only the problem of what to do about Seab, and here Senator Munson found himself in agreement with his two former colleagues at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the State Department that some means must be found to let him down as gently as possible. It was not so easy to just say, to hell with old Seab Cooley; kick him in the teeth. He deserved better than that of his country and his colleagues, and the Senate, which could at times be a most surprisingly gentle and sentimental institution, would not, Bob Munson knew, either desire or tolerate too harsh a crushing of South Carolina’s most famous son.
Nonetheless, the Hamilton Resolution had to go through, and it had to go through in a form strong enough so that it meant something. Any compromise with Seab could only be pro forma, the most modest of changes in language; and whether he would accept them or continue to oppose them remained an open question that was not so important as Seab might think.