(1964) The Man (123 page)

Nat Abrahams felt soft arms encircling him, feminine hands touching his neck and cheeks, and there was Sue, aglow and laughing through her tears, pressed to him, kissing him, kissing him again and again.

Then, holding her close, he was leading her past the celebrating crowds toward the exit.

“Come on, Sue, I want to go to the White House and tell him—”

“Oh, darling, he knows, he knows.”

Abrahams smiled. “He knows he was acquitted of four Articles. I want to tell him he was acquitted of five.”

T
HE
snow had begun to fall on New Year’s Eve, and it fell all the night, and now, on this bright, fresh morning of New Year’s Day, the capital city was blanketed in white.

The snow lay like a silvery imperial mantle on the dome of the United States Capitol, clung to the Corinthian marble columns of the United States Supreme Court, covered the flat roof of the Department of Justice. The frosted, pearly flakes sparkled from the cupola of the Jefferson Memorial, the branches of the dogwood trees surrounding the Lincoln Memorial, the five outside walls of the Pentagon Building, the iced surface of the Potomac River, the square mosque of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and the Stars and Stripes of the flag at full mast above the President’s House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

From the broad center window of the Yellow Oval Room, on the residential second floor of the White House, President Douglass Dilman could make out, more clearly than ever before, the white marble shaft of the Washington Monument. It might have been a trick of the dazzling morning, but to Dilman the soaring monument seemed less distant than it had been four months ago, less distant and less intimidating.

The rising pitch of a television announcer’s voice, his exclamations and superlatives of appreciation as he described the colorful floats and elaborately dressed equestrian groups in the Tournament of Roses parade from distant Pasadena, California, this voice, mingled with the remarks and comments of the guests watching the spectacle on the television screen, brought Dilman’s attention away from the monument, from the snowy south lawn and frosted Truman Balcony, and concentrated it once more on the activity in the festive room.

The handful of friends whom Dilman had informally invited to drop by this morning to enjoy the Pasadena parade, and then the various football Bowl games, filled the sofas and the chairs drawn up before the immense television set that had been placed in front of the marble fireplace.

Affectionately, Dilman observed Julian and Mindy in their activity across the room from the others. His son was holding out the cups into which Beecher was ladling either eggnog or fruit punch from the deep cut-glass vessels on the sideboard. Mindy was busily assisting Crystal in arranging the tiny sandwiches being transferred from a tray to a large serving platter.

It pleased Dilman that his son, less antagonistic toward Trafford University and the world at large recently, was doing better in school, taking more pride in his learning, as if he had decided that education in itself might be the most effective weapon against racial discrimination.

It pleased Dilman, too, to gaze upon his daughter’s delicate profile and lissome gracefulness and follow her fawnlike movements. This late holiday morning, she was gay, but Dilman did not deceive himself about her condition. By now, he knew that she was not always this way, nor would she be so in the future, for Mindy’s moods were mercurial, and she was given quickly to apathy, self-confusion, and melancholia. Still, Dilman had been told that she might be better one day, after she had been worse. The eminent psychoanalyst she had begun to visit two weeks before had promised Dilman this. And lately she seemed to enjoy immensely lending a hand with some of her father’s personal correspondence. But neither her presence here today nor the psychoanalyst’s tempered optimism had fully convinced Dilman. After his consultation with the psychoanalyst, Dilman had wondered—as he wondered this moment—once you’ve been white, how can you ever be black again? Mindy was not his child alone. She was Aldora’s child, too. The psychoanalyst, with all his wisdom and insight, was not black, so he might not ask himself what Dilman asked: How long would it be before Mindy tried to escape once more, escape Aldora’s way or her own?

These considerations were too unsettling for the first day of the New Year, and Dilman turned his thoughts to the others in the Yellow Oval Room. Somehow, he liked to believe they had become a part of his family. There they sat at ease, most of them, in various postures of relaxation. There was Otto Beggs, able to cross his good leg over his bad leg but unable to hide entirely the pain he was enduring, pointing out to his wife and two sons a particularly gaudy floral float moving ponderously across the sunny screen. Beggs would begin his executive duties, as special agent in charge of the White House Secret Service Detail, the first of next week when the holidays were officially over. Near him there was Jed Stover, with his wife and grown daughter, his mind obviously on matters far removed from the Pasadena parade. Ten days earlier, the Senate had reluctantly approved Stover’s appointment as Secretary of State, and since then three new international crises had sprung up. Then, seated comfortably in a side chair, there was General Leo Jaskawich, sworn in as the President’s special assistant to replace Talley, puffing his cheroot and amusing himself by blowing smoke rings. Finally, there was Wanda, so delightful in repose, so intent on the screen as she absently drank her fruit punch.

Dilman had not had Wanda’s present ready for her at Christmas, and so he had given her a card, shaped and printed as a rain check, and on it he had written apologetically that her gift would be arriving any day now. It had been delivered yesterday, but he had not given it to her yet. He was saving it for the intimate holiday dinner tonight. She would not be surprised, he guessed. Although Sue Abrahams—who had helped him make the final selection, and had suggested the modifications—had insisted upon disguising the engagement ring by wrapping it in a gigantic box, Wanda would not be surprised. But she would be pleased, he hoped, as pleased about it (and about what it meant to them in more ways than one) as he was himself.

He looked forward to the small dinner tonight. By then, the festivities, the games, the resolutions, would be behind them all. Then there would be easy, relaxed companionship, Wanda and himself as hostess and host to The Judge and his Missus, to Admiral Oates and his sister, to the Stovers, to the Tuttles, and—he had almost forgotten—to Edna Foster and to Tim Flannery, if they had finished their work in time.

Then Dilman’s eyes came to rest on Sue and Nat Abrahams, side by side on the sofa, and their three youngsters at their feet, and his only regret was that they could not remain for the dinner tonight. But Dilman knew, with a pang of guilt, that he had detained Nat long enough. In the weeks since the trial, and then through Christmas, Nat had stayed on, had volunteered to do so, to help Dilman draft the radically revised version of the Minorities Rehabilitation Program, one which put as much emphasis on giving Negroes and other minority groups equality in education, accommodations, voting, as the old bill had given them in economic parity. The revised version was prepared, ready to be introduced by his supporters in Congress when the members of both Houses reconvened shortly. And now, at last, Nat Abrahams was free to go home to Chicago, to share the holiday weekend with Sue’s relatives and to return to the law offices that his partner, Felix Hart, had been manning alone.

As he noticed the bulky morning newspaper on the sofa, Dilman’s mind went to the persons who were not here but had been so much a part of his life, for better, for worse, in recent months, and who were now less a part of his life, except as he read about them or heard about them. Hastily, Dilman’s mind revived news items, important, minor, of recent days.

Arthur Eaton was being boomed as the Party’s candidate in this year’s Presidential election, and his vociferous backers had entered his name in the first three state primary elections. But to the surprise of many, Governor Talley’s name had also been entered as a candidate in those primaries, and to the surprise of fewer people, Senator Hoyt Watson’s name had been resoundingly entered, too. For, although Watson had been dropped by his own state political machine, the curve of his national popularity (led by Southern liberals and independents) had risen, and the Party was now interested in testing his appeal outside the boundaries of the Mason-Dixon Line. In the Deep South, Representative Zeke Miller, basking in the afterwave of his impeachment trial publicity, was trying to organize and gain support of his idea for a powerful third political party, and there was money behind him, but it was too early to tell if there were also votes.

As for Dilman himself, the chairman of the Party, Allan Noyes, had telephoned the Oval Office repeatedly for an appointment “to talk things over”—meaning, no doubt, to find out in what manner Dilman could be useful to the Party without harming or obstructing it, and to learn his plans, and to determine what must be done with him in the future. But as Dilman had now shut out the past, he refused to peer into the future. He was entirely devoted to the present, to trying to be the kind of President he thought he was capable of being and the kind the nation needed. And so whenever Noyes had telephoned, Dilman had been too occupied to speak to him or arrange to see him.

There were other names Dilman knew, and they were often in other sections of the morning newspaper. On the society page it had been announced that Miss Sally Watson was off to Switzerland for a vacation. But Dilman had heard more, that it would be an extended stay in a renowned mental clinic in Zurich. On the book page it had been announced that Leroy Poole’s authoritative biography of the President was completed and would be published in the spring. But Dilman had heard more, that Poole had quickly brought the book to an end (making no secret of the fact that he was still Dilman’s foe) in order to obtain the necessary funds to work with Mrs. Gladys Hurley on an angry protest biography of the late Jefferson Hurley. On the feature page it had been announced in several columns—as rumor, not fact—that General Pitt Fortney, since his resignation as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would become a member of the board of directors of an Oregon aircraft company, a newly acquired subsidiary of Eagles Industries Corporation. And occasionally, in the back sections of Miller’s newspaper, there was a minor story bearing the dateline “New Orleans” and the by-line “George Murdock.”

Suddenly Dilman, whose eyes had strayed to the clock on the fireplace mantel, realized how late it was in the morning. Holiday or no, half of his staff were at their desks in the West Wing offices downstairs, Edna Foster among them, and Dilman knew that there were at least four or five hours of paper work for him to do, too.

He walked over to the sofa where Nat Abrahams sat, and touched his shoulder. Immediately Abrahams, still flushed with the delight he took in his family, jumped to his feet and came around to join Dilman.

“Well, Nat,” Dilman said, “I’ve got to get down to the galleys and start rowing. I’m afraid this is good-bye until sometime next year—”

“Mind if I walk you to the office, Doug?”

They found their overcoats, pulled them on, then went together into the West Hall and started for the elevator.

“Nat,” Dilman said, “we’re old friends, and you know how inarticulate I am about my deeper feelings. I’ve tried to tell you, in my way, how much I appreciate what you’ve done for me, how grateful I am to you. I don’t know what would have happened without you.”

“Nothing different would have happened.”

“I choose to believe it would not have been the same. No other attorney on earth would have understood me well enough to perceive the real indictment, and been able to invent and throw that Article V at them. Anyway, Nat, what you must know, before taking off, is how conscious I am of the sacrifice you made—”

“Enough of that, Doug. I don’t wear a halo well. I’m the bare-headed type. What sacrifice? Three unhappy years, filled with self-reproach, with that inhuman corporation? Thank God, you brought me to my senses. You saved me those wasted years, Doug. You handed them back to me. I’m the one who should be grateful to you for what you gave me.”

They reached the elevator and waited. “You know what I mean, Nat,” Dilman said. “Maybe you kept the three years, but you lost the farm, additional security, a financial cushion, because of me.”

Entering the elevator, they started down to the ground floor. “Listen to me,” Abrahams said. “I lost nothing, nothing at all. Farms? There are a hundred more, always will be, and maybe better ones. Instead of having mine in three years, I’ll have it, and all the rest, in five or six years. Doug, you have no idea how many calls I’ve had, fat offers I’ve received, since that trial. Not only corporations, but labor unions, Manhattan law firms. Some of them sound even better and more corrupting than Eagles ever was. Eventually I may accept one, if I can find one that is clean behind the ears as well as solvent. No hurry this time. I’ll sit back and let them woo me. So, you see, Doug, what you think I did for you has done as much for me. And it did something else, besides.” He grinned shyly before leaving the elevator. “It put me right smack in the history books, a footnote to you. My children’s children, they’ll read about me. Now, tell me, what other neighborhood Jewish lawyer ever had a break like that? Don’t thank me, Doug. Let me thank you.”

Once they were in the ground-floor corridor, with the two Secret Service agents falling in a discreet distance behind them, Nat Abrahams spoke again.

“What about your future, Doug?”

“I don’t permit myself to think about it,” Dilman said. “I wake up, I work, I go to sleep. I’m trying to handle life a day at a time. That’s a big job, a big, strange, new job for a person who only recently found out he has the right to perform as a man and not just a colored man. It’s like starting afresh, second chance, with a new mind, new limbs, new nerve apparatus, new outlook. You have to get used to it before you can use all that health and strength.”