by Allen Drury
“Well,” Orrin said as they watched the plane lift off and dwindle rapidly into the night, “there goes an interesting young man.”
“Which,” Beth said, “probably ranks as the understatement of the year.”
“Yes,” he said, tucking her hand under his arm. “Brrh, it’s cold out here! Let’s get on back … And a curiously appealing one, too, in his own strange way. I wonder, though—I still wonder whether I handled that correctly. I just don’t know.”
“I suppose I’m partly to blame, too,” she said as they walked rapidly along. “Even though the Secretary of State told me Cullee’s resolution was his idea, I still think I had something to do with suggesting it.” She smiled. “So if you aren’t happy with the results, blame me.”
“I know,” he said glumly. “I know. But—Seab, for instance. And Cullee getting beaten up. And then this gray fizzle at the UN, after everything we’d done … You wonder. At least I do.”
“Cullee doesn’t hold it against you. And I’m sure Seab didn’t either. He was a fighter; he respected fighters. And as for the UN—well, I don’t see that we could have done much else, regardless of the outcome. Anyway, Harley’s satisfied; I’m satisfied. Most people are, I think. So why look back?”
“I didn’t used to, much. But the world intrudes, now … What are you going to do tomorrow—shop out the town?”
“Want to join me?”
“I suppose I should be over at the UN, but what the hell. Even Secretaries of State have to relax sometimes. Yes, I will.”
“Good.”
“And now,” he said soberly, “one more task and then we can go back to the Waldorf and go to bed.”
“Yes,” she said, equally subdued. “I hope he will know us.”
“I don’t know,” Orrin said. “Lafe’s going to meet us there first, and maybe he’ll have the late word.”
And, as they met him in the hushed corridors of Harkness, he did; but it was not what they had hoped to hear, though it was what they feared. Hal, he told them, had collapsed completely when he and Cullee brought him back to the hospital. He was now in partial coma and under heavy sedation, unable to see anyone.
“The doctors,” Lafe said in a saddened voice, “don’t know when, if ever, he will be able to—see anyone again. I’ll keep in touch with him, and if there is a better period before—before—I’ll let you know, Orrin, and maybe you can fly up. But they don’t hold out much hope now.”
“Well,” the Secretary said after a moment, “if he comes to at all before he goes—you tell him how proud his country is of him, will you? I think Harley is going to give him the Distinguished Service Medal later this week, but of course that probably won’t mean anything to him. If by any chance he does have a good period again, I think Harley wants to come up and give it to him here in person. But I suppose that’s very problematical, at the moment.”
“Very. They doubt that he’ll come back at all, now. The strains of the session yesterday pretty well rushed it along, I gather. He was under terrific tension. Cullee and I tried to make him take it easy, but he wouldn’t, so— there we are.”
“If he had called it off, of course,” Beth said, “then he wouldn’t have left the world his speech. So, maybe—maybe the Lord knew what He was doing, and you didn’t.”
“Speech …” Lafe mused. “It was a great one, but I wonder what difference it will make, in the long run.”
“Sometimes speeches live in ways we can’t calculate or understand,” Orrin said. “It wasn’t such a bad legacy to leave the world. I wouldn’t mind going out with something like that behind me.”
Lafe nodded.
“No, you’re right. Neither would I. I’d be proud … Though I think,” he added in a voice suddenly moved with emotion, “that he blacked out before he really had time to be.”
“What about his son?” Beth asked softly, and Lafe managed a little smile.
“I went up to see him this morning.”
“Oh? How is he?”
“The same. But you know something, Beth? I’m going to work with that boy. I really am. Hal sort of—entrusted him—to me, a few days ago. He asked me to look after him, and I will. I just can’t accept the idea that anyone as fine-looking as that, and as bright as Hal has told me he was as a child, is just—gone—forever. I don’t think Hal really ever accepted it, and I refuse to, too.” He gave a thoughtful smile, something faraway and touching in his expression. “He’s a challenge to me,” he said softly. “I’m going to bring that boy back, someday, Beth. You wait and see.”
“Oh, I hope so,” she said earnestly, putting a hand on his arm. “My dear Lafe, I hope so.”
“I will. I will … Well: you’re staying for the ball tomorrow night? It should be fun.”
“Yes,” Orrin said, “and tomorrow we’re going to shop out the town, so I’m told. Why don’t you have breakfast with us and come along?”
“I’ll have breakfast with you, but I won’t go shopping. I want to do some reading at the Library, I think, and then come back here and talk to some of the doctors about cases like Jimmy’s.” He smiled. “I’ve got a lot of homework to do in that area, if I’m to go about it correctly.”
“Yes,” Beth said. “I think that’s the right thing to do. Now”—she added gently—“now that you have a son.”
“Yes,” Lafe said; and, quite surprisingly for one whom much of the world considered to be generally light of heart and frivolous of purpose, sudden tears came into his eyes. “Yes.”
To the President of the United States, sitting at his desk in the upstairs study, thoughtfully reading the editorials in the newspapers and the great sheaf of telegrams piled before him on this gray Sunday in snow-wrapped Washington, the aftermath of the glittering passage of the heir to Gorotoland was also bringing its second thoughts and sober reappraisals.
It was obvious already that a new and grave turning in foreign policy had come in the minds of his countrymen as a result of the Assembly’s vote on Felix Labaiya’s second resolution. Try as they might, previously friendly journals were hard put to it to find in their editorial hearts quite the measure of earnest endorsement of the United Nations that they had found before. There was the reluctant and cautious admission that just possibly the organization might be moving in directions that would bring it into sharp and perhaps fatal disrepute with the great commonalty of the United States. There was the wistful and aching hope that somehow this would not be so. There was the anguished reiteration of the theme that It Must Survive—There Isn’t Anything Else. And there were the customary stern and self-righteous admonitions to him, the President, to Keep Calm, Judge Fairly, and Not Act Hastily In The Heat Of The Moment.
Well, they needn’t worry—he wasn’t going to do that. But there was no mistaking the correctness of their fearful analyses of the public reaction. Of the telegrams flooding into the White House at the rate of some five hundred an hour, possibly twenty were in wholehearted approval of the actions of the United Nations with regard to the Labaiya resolution; all the rest were as violently critical as the regulations of the Federal Communications Commission would permit. He had also received a number of worried telephone calls from various members of the Senate and House, at home in their states and getting a terrific backlash against the UN from their constituents. He gathered from the worried voices of old friends as they came to him from around the continent that there was a shocked and indignant feeling of “They can’t do that to us” that promised rough going in the months ahead for the policies he deemed best.
Without attempting to judge, for the moment, the merits of the dispute or the decision, he could understand, in a way that many of his countrymen had not until now been able to match, exactly why they could, indeed, “do that to us.” Perhaps for the first time, Americans were beginning to perceive how certain of their racial policies inflamed and antagonized the newly independent world. He could understand how those policies had arisen, in human error and human blindness; he could know wh
at was the genuine truth of it—that his Administration, like all recent Administrations, had devoted itself to correcting those policies as speedily and honorably as could possibly be done. But he could also know that the past histories of many who now had the power to make their harshly antagonistic judgments felt in the UN had made it impossible for them to concede or realize these things.
This was but another example of one of the constantly recurring tragedies of history: the fatal timetable between cause and effect, the fatal inability of the understanding of the one to catch up with the blind prejudice aroused by the other.
In a minor degree, which had turned out to be a very major one before the M’Bulu’s visit was done, he himself had been responsible for such a lag. His initial refusal to give Terry the hospitality he desired, which the President still felt had been entirely correct, plus his inadvertent press conference blurt, which he knew ruefully to have been a human mistake but quite incorrect in view of all the tender feelings involved, had given opponents of the United States exactly the lever they sought. The all-out assault of the Soviets at Geneva had failed, and he rather thought it would be some time before anything so blatant would be attempted again. Therefore, the game now was to go back to previous policies of attempting to wear down and tear down the American image wherever and whenever it could be done. In a sense, the UN debate over the Labaiya resolution had been just as serious for his country as the meeting at Geneva. He was sadly aware that his country had not emerged from it with an equal success. Not because it had not tried to, in good faith and good intention, with a Congressional resolution that did, indeed, represent a startling act of compliance from a major power; but because there was, in the UN at this time, a mood that negated such gestures almost before they began.
Just as many members of the UN were honestly blinded by their emotions to the genuine integrity of such a gesture, so a great many of his countrymen were now going to be honestly blinded by their emotions against the UN.
There was, for a responsible man in such a situation, no course that could safely be based upon the sort of angry haste that the more admonitory metropolitan journals needlessly warned him against; but there was the almost inevitable certainty that his countrymen were going to force his Administration into a most serious re-examination of the United States’ relationship to the UN, and to the world itself, in the ensuing months. It would, he knew, inevitably color and shape the coming Presidential campaign. It would impose certain imperatives, even as it restricted their abilities to deal with those imperatives, upon such ambitious men as Orrin Knox and the Governor of California. And it might well force him, too, to undertake a serious re-examination of plans he had thought he could put away on a shelf of his mind and forget about until the time came to use them.
So as he waited for Lucille to come in and join him for the quiet supper they had planned together before an hour or two of reading aloud and then an early bed, the President knew very well that the M’Bulu’s visit was not really over, that in a sense it was just beginning, and that much that had already been changed by it would be changed still more as the months and years went by.
As one of those who really were deeply affected by the closing speech of his senior delegate to the United Nations, the President was doing his best, as he sat there at his desk, portly and kindly and comfortable-looking, to approach the changes with love. But he did not know if in these times even love would be strong enough to withstand the winds of anger that howled through the halls of history.
For the Congressman from California, love in these afterhours of Terrible Terry’s encounter with his country was a dominant thought but not yet, it seemed to him, in any way an achieved objective. He intended to stay for the UN Ball because he was mad enough at the Africans and Asians so that he wanted to annoy them with his presence just by being there, and to say to them with it: Go to hell if you think you can intimidate Cullee Hamilton or his country.
This was not, he recognized, the spirit of Hal Fry’s speech, which had profoundly touched and moved him, but it was about all he could muster as he thought of the smug and superior faces that would smile knowingly at him in the gaily-decorated Main Concourse tomorrow night. If he was to achieve love, he told himself as he wandered aimlessly through Manhattan’s snow-clogged Sunday streets, he would have to do better than that.
Well: let somebody love him, then; maybe that would help. He had loved a couple of people, or thought he had, and both had let him down; so let them come back and love him, wherever they were on this cold day in this cold world. Then he would think about love, and maybe after he had thought about it in relation to them he could extend himself a bit and think about it in relation to nations and peoples that would have to go some, now, to convince him that they were anything but what he had told them they were—jackals snapping at the heels of the country he belonged to and still wanted to serve with all the heart and idealism in him.
But, after all, he thought with a sudden impatience, a sudden deeply personal self-criticism as he walked slowly along, head bowed and young face stern in the drafty and near-deserted canyon of Fifth Avenue, why look for the kind of love Hal Fry was talking about, the kind of love the world needed and everyone needed, from outside? It didn’t come from outside, that kind of love: it came from inside. It was something you had to work out yourself, from your own being—then maybe if you really ever achieved it inside, somebody who had also achieved it inside would come along, and you could have it together and it would really be something—then you could give it to the world, too. But only after you had achieved it inside. Only then.
That’s what it really has to boil down to, little Cullee Hamilton from Lena, S.C., walking down your long dark street, he told himself; that’s where it has to come from, if you’re to have it, right from inside. And you know it hasn’t come yet, no, sir. It may be on the way, somewhere inside there, but it hasn’t come yet, for all your devotion to country and your decent, stubborn heart.
Exactly because of that decency, he did not, as he walked the cold city, give himself credit for the fact that, in his deep concern for his country and his compassionate attempt to bridge the gap between the races in their difficult relationship, he had already gone some distance along the way to love.
He was too humble to realize it, but little Cullee Hamilton from Lena, S.C., had gone already a long way farther than most.
Three others also appraised their positions, in another of their three-way telephone conversations, while far above the Atlantic the towering young giant who had affected all their lives winged worriedly home.
It was not a satisfactory conversation, and it accomplished nothing save to increase a little more the tensions between them. From Sacramento, Governor Jason made clear that he would increasingly disassociate himself from his brother-in-law. From Washington, his sister made clear that she would probably have to follow his lead in the long run, if not immediately. From the St. Regis in New York, Felix Labaiya made clear that while he would regret this, he did not, perhaps, really care.
Yet, in the curious fashion of their curious relationship, none of the three was ready to terminate it, and none did. Once again, as always, it was not love but ambition that held the family together; and once again it stopped them short of a final break, though all were aware that they had inched still further toward it, now that Felix had indeed accomplished the damage to their country which neither his wife nor brother-in-law could accept.
Of all those involved in the M’Bulu’s visit, he had emerged from it, in his estimation, in the best position. He had for all practical purposes done what he set out to do; and for this, he knew with a fiercely satisfied certainty, his grandfather would have been proud of him. He was proud of himself, as he contemplated the possibilities that now might open up as a gravely damaged United States sought to sort out its policies in the face of near-condemnation by the nations of the world. What had failed by a fluke on one issue might succeed handsomely on some other, now that
the ice had been broken.
On the thirty-eighth floor of the Secretariat, serene in his own heart and mind for the first time in many months, the Secretary-General was patiently checking and rechecking the lists of liquor, food, and decorations presented to him by the Director of General Services for the reception and ball tomorrow night. He was calm in the certainty that, whatever the Assembly vote had been, he, like Senator Fry, had contributed some small accrual of decency to the collective conscience of mankind. His speech might not last as long as the Senator’s, and yet it, too, was of a nature to give it place in humanity’s memory. Possibly it, too, might yet in the long run produce some constructive results here in this argumentative congress of the world. If it could do that, no matter how little, just a very little, to help, he would be content. He thought it would, and he was content.
Now he was going over the preparations for the party, working on a Sunday because he wanted to be sure that nothing would be overlooked, no detail neglected, to make of it a happy and pleasant event for all the races of mankind. They might not be able to forget their animosities and troubles entirely, and yet it was the one occasion when they came closest to it. He appreciated the irony of this, for it was during the one night in the year when they had no business with one another that their organization came closest to that spirit of harmony which its founders had hoped it might eventually achieve in its conduct of human affairs.
But he had no intention of allowing the irony to shadow the event. He wanted this to be a happy night, and patiently, carefully, meticulously, and with a feeling of compassion and love that extended, for the time being, to all the difficult children who fought and argued so furiously in the fateful chambers below, he was doing his best to see that it would be.