A Shade of Difference

by Allen Drury

  At home dear friends, in Washington great hopes and a future as bright as any in the Congress. Only yesterday the Speaker had told someone, and the word had quickly come back to him, that “Seab Cooley has the brightest future of anybody here, right now. You mark my words, he won’t go wrong. He’s got too much to offer America.”

  And that was what he wanted to do, he told himself as he went slowly, ever so slowly, down the steps toward the little room on S Street: to honor his friends and be a credit to them, to bring glory to his native state and do great things for his country in the glowing years which awaited her in the coming golden era of a just and lasting peace.

  So the world was not cold tonight, nor did he notice the wind as it blew from Virginia and the far reaches of the sleeping continent. He was young Seab Cooley, and he had so much to do, and no one could possibly be cold or unhappy or seared by loss of hope with such a future stretching ahead. As he reached the foot of the steps he turned back to pause and look up at the great white dome of the Capitol shining serene and steady above.

  “Now,” he whispered, as he saw it floating against the first faint flush of dawning in the east, “am I not serving you well, my dear country for whom the years hold so much? Will we not go on together to such wonderful greatness, you and I? And is not the world glorious in the morning?”

  He watched the great dome for a moment and then, as he turned away, not noticing that his foot missed the last step and that he sprawled flat upon his back upon the grass, he asked the Lord one last silent question, whose little trace of arrogance amused him, for he thought the Lord would understand it, and forgive him:

  Are You not pleased with Your servant Seabright? And is he not deserving of Your kindness?

  He was not at all surprised, nor was he alarmed—rather he felt a peaceful, overwhelming gratitude as the world rose bright and shining and young and hopeful before him once again—when the Lord, as it seemed to him, reached down a giant hand a moment later to where he lay upon the grass, and tapped him gently on the forehead, and said, Yes.

  ***

  Four: Hal Fry’s Book

  1

  Thus did the shade of difference work its way with the Congress of the United States in the wake of Terence Ajkaje’s visit; and thus did it return to another forum where men contended even more fiercely and with even less charity toward one another.

  Behind it in the cold dark morning in the beautiful city where a young man lay bloodied and an old man lay dead, it left the unanswered and possibly unanswerable question of whether their troubled peoples would ever find the love, the vision, and the mutual tolerance to justify all the hopes and sacrifices of both the races over so many years.

  Ahead in the glistening house on the East River, it raised anew the question of whether a well-meaning, mixed-up, harried land would ever be granted the patience and the understanding to live true to her purposes in a world so determined to make sure that she should not.

  In the mind of the man in Harkness Pavilion upon whom much of the immediate responsibility for finding an answer was now to devolve in the squabbling parliament of the nations, there was at this particular lonely hour a strange mixture of moods and emotions as he waited for dawn and the operation that would tell him whether or not he would be on earth much longer to worry about such matters. Now, after many sleepless periods as the bleak night dragged on, he was thinking, with a gleam of the irony he knew might soon be one of his few remaining defenses, of American advertising and what a balm it was for the beleaguered, what an easement for sore hearts and surcease for troubled souls.

  Turning the dial of the transistor radio Lafe had brought him, in search of distraction as the haunted darkness of the silent hospital came gradually to life, he brought in successively a singing commercial for a stomach-acid remedy, a stern voice discussing sinus trouble, another describing the latest thing for backaches, yet another murmuring in hushed tones about bothersome situations in the lower colon. Interspersed with these came the frenzied adenoidal yodeling of some slackmouthed delinquent with a guitar, the wild, insane, animal caterwauling of the latest singing sensation; a quartet of precious voices of indeterminate gender racing up and down in strange abandon through the tattered remnants of a once-beautiful ballad of the early sixties; the mind-destroying clatter of the newest popular band.

  Cozened, abjured, admonished, sung to, wailed at, pounded over the head with the outpourings both cultural and cloacal of his country’s fantastic civilization, it occupied his mind for the moment to play a little game with what he heard.

  Suppose all this were real: suppose, just once, that American advertising and the public American approach to things really got down to cases on what actually faced the country. Suppose the talents of Madison Avenue, the copywriters for the unctuous voices, the composers of the jolly jingles, the writers of the idiot songs, really talked about the world as it actually was. Would a great sobering, a great steadying-down, a great humbling, strengthening, virtue-restoring change come over the land, of the sort that must come if it was to survive? Or would the output, still, be such things as:

  “Is your digestive tract interfering with those homely little pleasures of life that everyone should be free to enjoy? Does that ‘certain feeling’ mean that you are missing out on easy regularity? Try Instant H.B.—H-Bomb. With Instant H.B. all those pains will be forgotten. Your worries about regularity will be ended once and for all—quickly—painlessly—so fast you won’t know it. Try Instant H.B. It will take you out of this world.”

  Or, faced with a tussle in Congress over the defense budget, would there pour forth upon the airwaves, suitably illustrated with cute little cartoon figures on TV, some such rollicking advice as:

  “Tell your boys on Capitol Hill:

  “Pass that bill!

  “Pass that bill!

  “It’s those Russians are the villains,

  “That’s why Uncle Sam needs billions. (‘Pretty poor rhyme, Irving, but what the hell.’)

  “Write your Senator and Rep.:

  “Come on, boys, get hep! Get hep!

  “Give the President all he’s wanting,

  “Then we’ll stop that Soviet flaunting.

  “Let ’em have it with a will!

  “Pass that bill!

  “Pass that bill!”

  In some such carefree fashion, no doubt, it would all emerge, if any attempt were made to associate reality with the overlayer of thinking-twice-removed that enveloped American society like a great bland fog. Somewhere underneath it all was the troubled burden of the uneasy populace, faced with challenges such as America had never faced; around their heads, in their ears, in their eyes, in everything they saw or heard or read, a constant din of frivolous inconsequence sought to persuade them that the newest fuel system of the latest product of Detroit, to use but one obvious example, really mattered more to them than the steady erosion of their national position. In some protected upland far from the sludgy, slogging evil of their enemies’ advance—perhaps already, at least psychologically, taken out of this world by the thought of Instant H.B.—they were invited to pretend together that such concerns as this were actually of more importance than the destruction they faced as a nation if they did not somehow, and soon, find the secret of survival.

  And, of course, who could say with complete certainty that these things were not important? At least they were to those who were directly concerned. Indeed, what could be more important to a man in this world than facing death from leukemia, if he had no inner strengths and no greater vision and no higher task to occupy his heart and mind than clocking the advances of his own illness? Would not he, too, listen desperately to jingles and pretend the world did not exist?

  It was in that moment, brought back with a savage jolt to the particular reality he faced, that the senior Senator from West Virginia recognized anew the second of the two major strengths that were to support him in the days ahead. The first of course was his own character, whose nature he though
t he knew about, but which now, obviously, was to be tested to limits far beyond what it had already endured; and the second was the spirit of dedication and service that had inspired his public career from the day it had begun thirty-odd years ago in the grubby little coal-mining town of Omar in West Virginia.

  Here in the half-hopeful, half-hopeless arena of the United Nations that dedication had already increased steadily in the months past. Now under the spur of what might very likely be a terminal illness, it too would receive its ultimate testing. There came to him like a revelation the sudden thought that this was his jingle, this was his slogan, this was his way of submerging reality—by meeting it with what he believed to be the greatest reality of all, service to his country and to his fellow men of charity and goodwill, wherever they might be found, troubled and uncertain and needing help, upon the troubled globe.

  At one point in the long night, when it had not seemed to him that he had slept at all—but when he suspected that he had, in nature’s silent and secret way of restoring the body whether it wanted to be restored or not—there had come to him the searing question: restored for what? Restored so nature could play with it a little while longer before tossing it, ravaged and drained, onto the human scrap heap where cancer in one form or another had taken so many down the implacable centuries? It appeared to him in that dreadfully lonely moment that it must be so, though the operation that would confirm it beyond any doubt was still to come, and his mind still refused to accept the full impact of the possibility. Yet he knew the doctors must have little doubt, or they would not have permitted Lafe to prepare him; just as he realized with gratitude that only Lafe’s assessment of his ability to endure it would have persuaded Lafe to secure their permission to prepare him. He could not yet abandon the outside hope, the one chance in ten thousand that they might be wrong and that the sternum-tap would prove it. But, to some degree already, there had come the beginning of acceptance, and with it, at first, a great despair.

  In the grip of this, many hours of darkness had seemed to pass without beginning and without end, in a sort of terrible gray dream possessed of neither outline nor boundary into which he had retreated as an animal does when the world becomes too much for it. From time to time then, too, he had switched blindly over the radio dial, hardly knowing what came to him: the muted sounds of distant dance bands, softer and more harmonious in the night, the late-hour programs of orchestral music, the quieter regions of the air, broken now and again by news reports and the distant clashes of the hurrying world. Vaguely he had grasped that the Senate was locked in debate on the Hamilton Resolution, vaguely he had grasped the fact that Seab was filibustering. With a great ponderous tiredness, as though he were indeed struggling in a dream, he had wondered a little what would happen down there and what the reaction would be up here. Then his mind had slipped away again and lost itself in the contemplation of his own disaster, one more coming on top of those others he had suffered down the sad unhappy years.

  Sad and unhappy and yet now, with the coming of dawn and the instinctive resurgence of heart and spirit that comes to all but the most utterly forsaken at the rising of the sun, seeming to have their own curious rewards and their own surprisingly rugged strengths. If they had not, he certainly would not have been able to entertain, in the midst of desolation, the casual parodies in which he had just engaged. His mind would have nowhere found the strength to continue to appraise the world with its own particular combination of goodwill, irony, and friendly determination. He would already have been driven well on the way to madness by the prospect lying before him. So there must have been a great deal for him in all those years, a great deal in all that strange parallelism in which a steadily rising public career had marched side by side with the steady blasting of his human hopes.

  Not, of course, that any such peculiar destiny had seemed likely when it all began. Life had started hard for him, seventh child of a coal-mining father in West Virginia’s chronically depressed regions, and at first it seemed unlikely that the future held anything more than a drab repetition of his father’s life, better paid, perhaps, as the United Mine Workers gained ground under their fierce old president, but essentially as gray and unrelieved. Three of his four brothers had stayed in the mines and were there yet, officials of the union, doing moderately well but, because of some lack of character, some lack of the extra spark that permits men to rise above their peers, unable to break the pattern. He and his two sisters had escaped, they to marry and move away, he to make of himself something far beyond the wildest hopes of the two modest, hardworking, God-fearing souls who had given him life.

  At first the potential showed itself only in an added brightness, an added quickness, an appealing and outgoing little personality that gave him a ready distinction in his family and among his playmates in the little town. Sometime in his fifth year a neighbor had taken the family’s picture with an old box camera; a year later in kindergarten his teacher had similarly recorded the seven pupils in her class. Somewhere in his apartment in Washington he had them still, squirreled away in some buried box: out of both he smiled forth as though emblazoned, attracting the eye with his tousled hair and humorously intelligent eyes.

  He had come across the two photographs scarcely a year ago and as soon as he had glimpsed them had known exactly what they were. He had thrust them back out of sight with a deep expression of pain in the eyes that once had laughed so merrily. But nothing could change what he had been then, or take from him the distinction of personality and character that had brought him up the long road to the United States Senate, carrying him through so much that others, less favored and so perhaps less singled out for the erratic chances of misfortune, had not been required to endure.

  Through kindergarten, grammar school, and high school the curve of his life was steadily upward. A natural deference had swiftly been accorded him by others, strengthened by his school grades, which were good from the first, and by qualities of leadership that were early apparent. There came a time before long when he was deliberately singled out by his teachers for special attention and preferment; but before that he had singled himself out, not consciously or in any way immodestly or arrogantly, but just by being what he was. The sight of it delighted and humbled his parents, whose other children possessed sturdy characters but no particular distinction. In Little Hal, who early gave promise of being something far beyond what Big Hal had been, they felt that they had been selected for special blessing. Being deeply religious and having a household where prayer was the daily accompaniment of a hard life, they thanked the Lord for him and instilled in him an acceptance of the Lord’s will that was to stand him in good stead later.

  Somewhere during the years of his growing up there began to come into his mind and heart a desire to help people. Initially this expressed itself in things as small as assisting a beleaguered friend to study for an exam. Then, as he became more actively engaged in the social and political life of his school, a broader aspect began to appear. He began to realize, as more and more of his fellows looked to him for leadership in their activities and aid in their troubles, that he apparently possessed some aspect of character that encouraged confidence and trust, some extra element that enabled him to translate it into positive, affirmative good. Coming as he did from a religious household, this produced an almost inevitable progression in his thoughts. At first he was duly grateful to the Lord for conferring upon him the gift of kindness; and then he began to feel a conscious determination to perfect it and use it as best he could for those who turned to him in need. Finally he decided that he must use it even more actively, as a positive force to improve the condition of those around him and help them, if he could, to achieve a better life.

  This process, a steadily growing development within him as he moved on from childhood into adolescence, represented a rare maturity of mind which he did not find expressed in very many of his contemporaries, bound as they were to the mine-scarred green hills of West Virginia. It was not surprisin
g, and it too was probably inevitable, that by the time he was ready to enter college the meager life in which he and his family and friends grew up should have produced a deeply dedicated feeling that he must serve humanity itself, first as he found it here and then, if he were so favored, as he found it over a much wider area. He came to feel that with so much misery in the world, everyone who could help should help. If he had been given equipment a little better than most to bring to the task, then he should use it.

  He realized, for he had a saving vein of self-humor and self-appraisal that kept him from taking himself too seriously, that it was very possible to become overly pompous about all this, and he soon learned not to express his feelings about it to anyone save his younger sister, Betty, who was the closest to him of any of his family. She possessed a sense of practical good humor as stable as his own, and when he told her of his dreams from time to time she encouraged him eagerly yet with a saving wit that helped to keep him from flying too far too fast. It was with her that he thrashed out such problems as whether he should become a great people’s advocate, one of the world’s great surgeons, a great journalist molding public opinion, another Gompers or Lewis fighting fiercely for labor, another Franklin Roosevelt gallantly riding the tides of social reform, a great research scientist finding at last the secret of cancer.

  These were the games he and Betty played as they grew up in the grimy little town where poverty and disaster never slept, and it was not until their father was lost, just as Hal reached college age, in a mine disaster caused by the company’s imperfect adherence to imperfect safety laws that it all coalesced into one fierce, burning desire to set things right in a sorry world through the channels of public service. The Great Depression had laid its turmoil upon the land, the New Deal was getting under way, “social service” was a phrase heard more and more frequently, and somewhere in the rushing surge of national activity he was sure there would be a place for him to give what he had. He went off to the University of West Virginia with his plan finally firm. He would study history, economics, political science, philosophy; get his degree and a teaching certificate in political science; participate as much as possible in the extracurricular life of the school; and eventually come home to the blackened valleys where disaster walked and give himself to service in whatever form it might open to him.