by Allen Drury
He looked with a glance that was half calculating, half pitying, toward the American delegation, where Senator Fry, gray-faced and tired, was moving slowly out with Senator Smith. We shall meet this afternoon, Felix Labaiya promised them. We shall meet this afternoon and see who wins the final toss.
Lafe waved to him and automatically he waved back. But there was no cordiality on either side, only the cold, carefully appraising look of opponents who know a battle to the death still lies before them.
After they had crossed First Avenue in the mixture of sleet, snow, and freezing rain that now had the city under siege, the two Americans went briefly up to Hal’s office in U.S. headquarters before catching a cab, Lafe to go to the Waldorf for much-needed sleep, Hal to return to Harkness for another treatment and sleep until time to come back for the next plenary. In the office they put through a call, as directed, to the White House and the Knox home in Spring Valley. Once again a conference call was set up and their two superiors, sleepy but increasingly awake as they talked along, analyzed with them the import of the day’s events.
“Is Cullee there?” the President asked, and Hal said yes, he was, but had preferred, and they had agreed, to defer his appearance until debate actually came on Felix’s new resolution.
“I think it’s as well we didn’t have him with us today,” Lafe said. “He’s still feeling pretty rocky and of course looks like the very devil—”
“Which is all right,” Orrin said from the Spring Valley house.
“It doesn’t harm us,” Hal agreed. “He’ll feel better tomorrow, and be more impressive then. I think it’s well for them to see how he looks; they’re always saying nobody in America cares about the racial problem. Somebody cared, right enough.”
“Which has made Cullee care, too, in a way he didn’t imagine he could before, I think,” Orrin said.
“How ironic it is,” the President said, “that in the affairs of the world these days, nations must stage-manage their effects as carefully as though they were on Broadway. Terry with his splattered robes, Cullee with his beaten body—” He made a sad sound, of tiredness and disgust. “What an age.”
“Yet it must be done,” the Secretary of State said. “That is how many of the nations reach their decisions nowadays, on the basis of emotions stirred up by things like that.”
“I know,” the President said. “It does not always give me great faith in the future of the globe. Good night, all. I think we know where we stand for this afternoon. Thank you for everything, and best of luck in the debate.”
“What will we do if—” Hal Fry began, and left the question hanging.
“We will do whatever the situation requires,” the President said. “When it requires it. Sleep well.”
The farewells said, the call ended, hats and coats on, lights turned off in the office, the two Senators stood for a moment looking across at the Secretariat, surging upward into the night, its many brightly lighted windows, where charwomen worked as the hour reached 2 a.m., obscured and shrouded by the weather. The building seemed almost to drift against the night, without anchor or reference point for the eye to tie it to, all else blocked out by the scudding storm. Out of the north door of the Main Concourse they could see a few last stragglers hurrying home across the lighted esplanade. In front of the Delegates’ Entrance, directly below, two tiny figures were methodically hauling down the sopping flags.
“It’s curious,” Lafe said. “So much happens there during the daytime, but somehow I always think of it as being at night. It always seems to be a night place—for night people
—”
“—doing night things to the world. I wonder if it will ever fulfill what mankind hoped for it when it first began.”
“Who knows?” Lafe asked soberly. “Who knows? … But, here!” He clapped his colleague on the back. “You’re desperately tired and it’s past 2 a.m. Let me run you up to the hospital.”
“I’ll drop you and go on alone. I can make it all right.”
“Can you?” Lafe said, studying him closely. Hal smiled.
“Whatever the situation requires,” he quoted the President. “When it requires it. Come on.”
Downstairs, while they waited for a cab to come along the now quite deserted avenue in the hostile storm, their eyes were inevitably drawn once more to the great building rising into the mists above them.
A night place—for night people—doing night things.
And the hope?
It was still there somewhere.
It had to be.
There Wasn’t Anything Else.
4
Looking down once again upon the crowded and colorful scene as he once more patiently awaited the arrival of the President of the Assembly, the Secretary-General could see that of all those who would contest the issue, the acting chief delegate of the United States appeared to be the most eager to commence. Certainly he was the first of the major participants to appear in the chamber, arriving with one of his delegation secretaries at 2:45 p.m., well in advance of the time the plenary would actually begin.
He looked, the S.-G. thought somewhat tense and under pressure, but that was understandable. Apparently his medical examination, despite the rumors running through the corridors, had given him a clean bill of health, for here he was again today, evidently in good shape and ready for battle. It was true that there was a certain luminous grayness about his face, but then, the S.-G. thought with a shiver, who wouldn’t be gray in the kind of weather that howled upon Manhattan outside? That is, he corrected himself with a small inward amusement anyone who could turn gray would be gray. Those who were black could only look pinched and shrink with the rest in the storm that had lasted all night and was only now easing, after piling the streets with heavy snow. It seemed to him that he could feel the cold right here in the chamber, overheated as it was, so foreign was this type of weather to that he was native to in West Africa.
Along with that, it seemed to him, there was another coldness in the room, the coldness of men contending in bitterness and determination for different and conflicting ends and ambitions. He had spent much time in the white man’s world, but gods and ghosts still walked his mind at times, and this was one. There were presences here today, moving among the living and influencing their actions; presences going back to the earliest colonialism and the first slave-trading days in Africa—not only white presences that had profited, but black presences that had profited, as well.
The burden of all the world lay heavy upon this issue. What the Indian Ambassador had lately taken to referring to, with a pixyish relish, as the “shade of difference” united many in guilt even as it divided them in purpose.
What could he do about it, where could he logically and with honor participate in the struggle imposed by history upon mankind? Perhaps, old man, he told himself bleakly, there is no place for you. Perhaps you will fail here, as in all the rest.
For his part, as he stood at the head of the aisle leading down to the section marked for the United States delegation, managing to smile and shake hands with other delegates as they arrived, Senator Fry, too, was feeling the winds of the years and the certainty of a harsh contention. As much as could be expected, he was ready for it, after a long sleep under sedation that had lasted until almost noon. But he wondered if any of them, really, whatever their condition, was ready for it, and whether this might not be one of those occasions when men attempted to deal with forces of history so great that they could not, in reality, be controlled or managed—when the only feasible human purpose must be to channel them as much as possible into ways that would not damage too much the structure of a reasonably sane society.
Whether some of his fellow delegates realized this he did not know as he stood there watching them form into little groups, chat for a moment, break up, form other groups, move restlessly here and there among the aisles, waving and greeting one another as the chamber filled. There were many purposes here, within the shadow of the resolution of the P
anamanian Ambassador on The Matter of the United States; and he was well aware that a majority of them were hostile to his country and that it was questionable if his country could defeat them.
In the delegation and among its friends, he thought things were as favorable as possible under the circumstances. Certain strategies had been worked out, certain plans made, for the debate. With equal attention to detail, he knew, plans and strategies had been organized by the other side. The votes that had permitted Felix to bring the issue here in this form, and the vote with which Gorotoland’s independence had been approved, might on the face of them be taken to predict a simple and inevitable defeat for the United States on the companion issue. Yet it was not that simple or inevitable, as many hints and indications coming into the delegation during the morning had made clear.
Again, as in the first debate when Terry had made his dramatic appeal after the episode in Charleston, there appeared to be two conflicting impulses: one to rush forward in a storm of emotion and condemn the United States, the other to recognize the United States’ many contributions to the UN and draw back before condemnation went too far. What he would do in the event the first impulse prevailed, he did not know. He had no instructions other than the President’s cryptic “what the situation requires, when it requires it,” and so he was in no position to use the possibility of future action as a weapon in debate. He did not know what the possibility was.
Neither was there any further means of diplomacy or pressure open to the delegation. Everything had been exhausted by now. The type of horse-trading with funds and promises and warnings that all the nations resorted to on major issues had run its course. Nothing was left but persuasion and argument in open debate; and there, basically, all that remained was emotion, since reason and logic had automatically been forced to a secondary place by the impassioned prejudices and preconceptions that surrounded this highly emotional matter.
Nonetheless, he thought as he tightened his grasp on a little bottle of pills in his pocket, it should not be the move of the United States to be the first to raise the emotional cloud around this. His country had a case, in logic and justice, and it should be presented that way first. That would be consistent with the basic American concept of the United Nations—more idealistic, perhaps, than that of most. To that concept, as well as to his country’s own interests, he felt her delegation must try to be true.
He would begin, then, after Felix made his opening statement, on that theme which in these recent months, and especially in these past hours, he conceived to be a theme worthy of a man’s endeavors. There had come to him, in these two nights of certainty about his condition, a swift draining-away of more mundane matters, a rapidly diminishing concern for the affairs that occupied men less starkly confronted by their own mortality than he. Now his life was narrowing down to some final justification, some essential reality worthy of the sacrifice the Lord had placed upon him for some reason he could not understand. But perhaps the reason was simple. Perhaps it was to clear his mind and life so that he could make one last appeal to mankind to honor the promise it had made to itself here on the East River. Perhaps it had been done so that he could be free to urge his fellow men to honor, along with it, those qualities of tolerance and decency and love that they can sometimes achieve when all else is gone and they are left to realize at last their desperate need of one another in the night that surrounds the universe. Perhaps only one in his particular position at this particular time could do it. It could be, he thought as a sudden wave of dizziness shot through his head and his eyes began to blur again with the reddish tinge, that this was it.
“Good afternoon,” he said automatically to the delegate of Guinea as they arrived together at the Delegates’ Entrance; but the delegate of Guinea, after a startled and scornful look, did not reply. Very well, you bastard, he told the delegate of Guinea in his mind. Don’t speak, and see if I care.
But he did care, the Congressman from California admitted honestly to himself as he gave a deep, unhappy sigh and followed the flouncily spiteful delegate of Guinea in. He did care that there was so much hostility in the world, that things were on so personal a level here on this embittered issue, and that his own difficult position was so little appreciated and understood by those whom pigmentation should have made his brothers but politics and prejudice had made his enemies. He did care, for this was one extra little burden added to the rest that made life, at the moment, a heavy thing to bear.
Not that he would not or could not bear it, of course, for even without the example of Hal Fry before him, sketched in bluntest terms by Lafe Smith in the telephone call that had brought him back to his duty here at the UN—even without good old Maudie, who had also been getting him here in her own loving, cantankerous way—he had his own character to rely upon. It was not a character to give in easily, no matter what the pressures. He was quite sure now that he would in any event have been right where he was, entering the Secretariat Building and turning toward the corridor to the Assembly Hall where there waited the fate of the new Labaiya Resolution and the judgment of the nations upon his own.
He did not know, as he turned left and joined the throng of delegates, spectators, and press who were taking the escalator to the second floor and proceeding toward the Assembly Hall down the long green-carpeted corridor, whether his wife or his friend would be here at this particular moment. Somehow he thought they might be, on this occasion, however carefully they had stayed away from the Senate. He had noticed the banners of DEFY among those that waved in a self-conscious straggle in the little parklike area across First Avenue where the police were accustomed to herd UN demonstrators, and it was not unlikely that the chairman was somewhere about. Perhaps even now he was conferring with Felix and his other friends in the Lounge or sitting with an air of ostentatious importance in the public gallery of the Assembly Hall. Sue-Dan, too, no doubt wearing stylish clothes and an expression as defiant as she dared, very likely might be there. He would just have to try not to see them, he told himself with a dogged determination. He really didn’t want to see them, so unsure was he of what he might do to LeGage after what LeGage had caused to be done to him, and so sure was he that from his wife he would receive just more hurtful words and hurtful actions.
Well, one thing was sure, anyway: he hadn’t been turned from his purpose in Washington, and he wasn’t going to be turned from it here. The United States was his concern, as imperfectly expressed, maybe, as most people expressed it, yet a passionate and overriding solicitude that dominated his thoughts and his actions, particularly right now. LeGage and all the dutiful echoers of his absolutist line in the white press and the colored press had done their best to throw him off balance; they hadn’t succeeded, so they had beaten him up—in a sense all of them had beaten him up, not just LeGage’s bullies. Sue-Dan had chimed in with her two-bits worth and tried to knock him off balance, too.
And yet he, Cullee, was still here, right where he had been, plowing along, confused about a lot of things, maybe, not very perfect, not very smart or brilliant, maybe, but knowing a couple of things that he’d take over them, any day: He knew he was honest, and he knew he was doing the right thing for his country, and, so as far as he was concerned, that was enough for him. As far as he was concerned, they could take a running jump and go to hell. They had shoved him off and they thought he’d come back, maybe, begging and crying and doing what they wanted. Well, they didn’t know old Cullee, even after all these years. If anybody did any coming back, it would be them, and maybe even that wouldn’t be enough. He had more important things to worry about now.
He shook his head impatiently as if to clear it of them, and it did seem to, a little.
He was aware as he walked along that the crowd was thinning around him, that those nearest him were falling away, that he was being left to move forward in a little isolated space that marked him out from the rest. Thus separated, his tall figure moved ahead, presenting to the hurrying crowd a picture he was not ashamed
for it to see: his face still misshapen and puffy; a patch still across his forehead where the gash, fortunately only skin-deep, was beginning to heal; his left arm in a sling; his gait half limping and awkward because of the pain that still crippled his body. Let them look at what hate could achieve, he thought grimly. Let them think about it a little. It will do them good.
“I say,” the delegate of Kenya remarked to the delegate of Uganda as they came along a few paces behind, “that is a little crude, that physical display. Do they expect that actually to impress us?”
“Some people,” said the delegate of Uganda, “have no taste.”
Half an hour later, the plenary session finally convened, the hall filled once more with tense and rustling life as the excitement of issues fiercely met and battles about to be joined gripped all its occupants, the Ambassador of Panama stood for a moment with his hands rigid upon the lectern and looked out upon the acrimonious descendants of Adam in all their shapes and shadings. He had slept hardly at all in forty-eight hours, and if he had stopped to think about it, the strain would certainly be telling upon him now. But he had not had time to think, and a keen excitement had buoyed him up all through the many conferences and telephone calls and private talks that had followed the Assembly’s dramatic and surprising support of his position in last night’s session.
He had not known, when he withdrew his amendment and reoffered it as a resolution in its own right, what the response would be. He had gambled that a majority would go with him, and a majority had. He had not known, when the vote came on Gorotoland, whether two-thirds would be with him, though he had made some careful plans for it. The plans had paid off.