Preserve and Protect (50 page)

“The appeal is upheld.

“These proceedings are now concluded.”

And he stood up, and after one last, straight look into the eye of the world, turned with a suddenly great dignity and disappeared through the red velvet curtains.

For several seconds there was a stunned, disbelieving silence, and then a great rush of sound as everyone began talking at once, and everyone began to stand up and leave. Cameramen shouted to cameramen, reporters called to reporters, technical crews began to yank out their long, snaking cables, hood the cameras, trundle out the booms. George Harrison Wattersill and Roger P. Croy, dejected but true to their legal training and the customary courtesies of Washington, shook hands with Bob Leffingwell and Bob Munson, who reciprocated without too much visible triumph. From outside on the lawns there came an ominous, growing roar of angry sound from NAWAC which sent many reporters running through the echoing marble hall to the entrance. But the police were on duty, the barricades were up, and despite the noise, no one broke across the lines: there had not been time for any orders to come through, and violence, it seemed, would be averted long enough for the principals to get safely away.

As Walter Dobius stood between the great white pillars looking across the street at the milling thousands in floodlit Capitol Plaza—already beginning a chant that came clearly through the still-suffocating heat—

“O Justice Davis!

“You didn’t save us.

“Your robes can’t hide,

“The rat inside!

“KILL RATS! KILL RATS! KILL RATS!”

The Marshal appeared at his elbow and said quietly, “The Justice asks that you join him in his chambers, Mr. Dobius, if you’d care to. I’ll take you there.…”

“What do you want of me?” he demanded angrily when they were alone in the quiet room.

“Just what I said,” Tommy told him quietly. “I want you to accompany me on a little visit I’m going to make.”

“Where?” Walter demanded suspiciously. “And why should I go anywhere with you, after what you’ve done?”

“I have upheld the law,” Tommy said quietly, “which I am here to do. There is no reason to go with me at all, if you don’t want to. But I thought you might.”

“Where?” Walter demanded again. The little Justice gave him an odd look, filled with many things that Walter could not interpret, though one of them, he thought with an angry refusal to accept it, might be pity.

“Come along and see,” Tommy said. And taking off his robes, he hung them in the closet; folded his yellow note paper carefully and locked it in the drawer of his desk; and turned to the door.

“I’m going to have to go out the back way,” he said, “because the crowd may turn violent out front. The President has kindly sent me a military escort.”

“He has no right to send Federal troops to this sovereign Court!” Walter said sharply.

“Very true,” Justice Davis said calmly. “But tonight I am glad to have them, all the same.” He opened the door. “Good night, Walter.”

“No, wait,” Walter said, although by now, in some sick, foreboding way, he was almost certain he knew where Tommy was going. “Wait, I’ll go with you.”

But his impulse did not last very long, for as they came presently to Massachusetts Avenue and started around Dupont Circle, toward Sheridan Circle and Oak Hill Cemetery beyond, a strange thing happened.

Abruptly he seemed to shrivel back in his seat, some sort of strange physical contortion appeared to seize him, his whole body set in rigid lines of protest and Tommy could see that he was actually straining back from the door, arms and legs stiff with aversion and a sort of animal horror.

“I don’t want”—he broke out incoherently—“I can’t—I can’t—I can’t—”

And with a sudden and quite awful incongruity, he began to cry, in short, choking, agonizing gulps that sounded really dreadful in the closed-off back seat of the big black limousine as it floated gently along behind its Army escort.

“Let—me out!” he managed to articulate at last. “You must—let me out!”

“Driver!” Tommy said sharply through the tube, rapping on the window with his signet ring, “Draw off and let Mr. Dobius out!”

And after he had, and Walter had somehow tumbled out, Tommy looked back as the car drew away and saw him standing under the misty overarching trees of upper Massachusetts Avenue, his arms at his sides, his face straight ahead, his body quivering and shaking with sobs, infinitely pathetic, terribly alone.

But when he had finally mastered himself enough to catch a cab and get back to the office they kept for him at the
Post,
his column came out savage as ever, just the same:

“WASHINGTON—So the nation and the world must face the prospect of a threatened, browbeaten, controlled National Committee, selecting a hand-picked nominee under the massive threat of armed Presidential displeasure.

“Rarely has American democracy witnessed so sad a spectacle as it seems likely to witness now that Justice Davis has handed down his ruling.

“And rarely, it might be said, has American democracy been so bitterly and tragically betrayed by one it had always thought to be its friend, as it has been betrayed by Justice Davis.

“What will happen now, no one in this fearful capital tonight can accurately predict, but one thing is certain:

“The prospect of new and ever more violent protest is now almost inevitable—against America’s futile and tragic foreign policy, against the Secretary of State who created it, against the President who with armed troops stationed in the streets of the capital enforces it, against the National Committee whose deliberations can no longer be considered free and democratic as it shakes and trembles beneath the threat of his bayonet-backed displeasure.

“This is what Mr. Justice Davis has done this night: made inevitable a further tragic tearing-apart of an already tragically torn land. This may make happy his friends the President, the Secretary of State, and the dwindling number of fatally misguided Americans who agree with them.

“But it cannot make happy any American who truly and honestly loves his country; for his country, now, confronts disaster.…”

“The Supreme Court of the United States,” the President said in a statement issued shortly after midnight through the White House press office, “acting in the person of Mr. Justice Davis, has ruled that the National Committee is free from legal hindrances and may now proceed to do the work for which it has come to Washington.

“Therefore I am issuing a call to Committee members to meet with me again in the Playhouse at the Kennedy Center at ten a.m. today to continue our deliberations.

“Let us get on with the work speedily. The task is imperative.”

And in the rather old-fashioned, slightly musty, but very comfortable bachelor quarters at the Westchester that he had occupied for thirty years, Mr. Justice Davis fixed himself a cup of hot chocolate, poured into it a jigger of Curaçao, and drank it slowly while he watched Frankly Unctuous damn him up and down on some late panel of experts discussing the awful thing he had done. Then he went to bed.

He had not, he realized as he turned off the lamp and snuggled into the sheets, felt so much at ease in his mind for many months; perhaps not since all the dreadful things that had happened as a result of his impulse to pick up the envelope Brigham Anderson had dropped after giving him a ride to work that day. Indirectly, but nonetheless inescapably, Brig had died because of that impulse. For a long time Tommy had not thought about those things, had not permitted himself to, had closed them off from his mind; but now, tonight, he could.

The mood in which he had mailed Helen-Anne’s notes returned, strengthened by his visit to her grave, quiet and still on its deserted hillside in the hot, humid night. It was a curiously restful grave for one so full of vigorous life and bounce. Walter’s flowers, the President’s, the Knoxes’ and many others, were drooping now. To them he added the roses he had taken from his secretary’s desk as he left the office. They weren’t much, but ever since he had read her notes yesterday for the first time, he had intended to bring them to her himself.

In some strange way, it all seemed fitting and peaceful in spite of the terrible, unexplained tragedy of her death. He told her good night quietly, smiling suddenly as he recalled what she had said to him years ago when he had been vigorously denouncing Orrin for some piece of social legislation—he couldn’t remember what now, but he was making quite an argument about its Constitutional irregularities. “Constitutional, my hat!” she had said in her raucous way. “You sentimental old coot, Tommy, you can’t fool me!”

Well, he was a sentimental old coot: sentimental about a lot of people and a lot of things, sentimental most of all about his poor old bumbling, stumbling, unhappy America, which was probably why he had always felt he must work so hard to help her find decency and justice, even when it meant meddling in things that many people thought weren’t fitting for a Justice of the Supreme Court. Even when, once, it had taken him too far and caused the death of a fine young Senator he would give anything to have still alive.

Tommy had seen a lot, in his years on the Court, and imperfect as he knew himself to be, he had still tried to do what he thought was best for America. So he had tonight. He knew his two friends who rested, one in Oak Hill and the other in Salt Lake City, would approve of him, could they know. They, too, had wanted what was best for America. Most people he knew in this strange, fantastic, mixed-up city did, in spite of the wrong turnings they took and the dreadful confusions they got themselves and the country into, sometimes.

The good heart and the good will were still there somewhere—somewhere. He hoped he had helped a little this day to discover them again and make them stronger. Anyway, he had done his best.

He closed his eyes, took a couple of deep breaths, and was instantly asleep.

7

Far off the sirens sounded and once again within the crowded Playhouse susurrus ceased. “Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances,” Anotis Spirotis, National Committeeman from Pennsylvania, murmured to Mary Buttner Baffleburg. Mary Baffleburg said, “Hmph!” But there was no denying he advanced with an extra aura this morning: somehow last night’s events seemed to have increased his stature and strengthened his position. It did seem, curiously, that he loomed larger than life, larger than Presidents normally loom, as he passed swiftly once more in his guarded limousine between the long lines of servicemen at ready, through the restless, sullen ranks of NAWAC, to Kennedy Center in the hot, glazed sun.

From his embittered countrymen as he passed, he received the sort of tribute he expected: a slow, growing swell of boos and hisses that came to those inside the Playhouse like a steady, rising wave from some uneasy sea. The wave crested in an angry boom of sound and was succeeded by an intently listening, watching silence. Through it they could hear the sound of motorcycles coming to a halt, an auto engine idling, the slam of a door, the slap of hundreds of hands on rifles as the inner group of guards snapped to attention while he passed from the plaza entrance along the North Gallery to the elevator up to the Playhouse, tucked away in the northwest corner of the second floor. There was a brief period of silence, everything was quiet everywhere; then a stir, a bustle, just outside the door, the crack of more hands on rifles; and there he was, walking down the aisle while they stood, this time not with his eyes lowered or grimly thoughtful, but nodding hellos and smiling as he came.

“Good morning,” he said as he reached the podium and turned to face them with a pleasantly relaxed and amiable expression. “Please be seated. I hope everyone rested well after last night’s excitement. I did.”

There was a murmur of amusement from the room and from outside a revival of the long, slow, savage “Boooooo!” He cocked his head and listened with a quizzical grimace clearly visible in the cameras. The booing increased. His expression became matter-of-fact and businesslike. He picked up the little ivory gavel and brought it down sharply on the lectern.

“This second emergency meeting of the National Committee is now in session. The Chair is pleased to inform the Committee for purposes of the record that the Supreme Court last night upheld the appeal of the Committee against the temporary injunction of the District Court for the District of Columbia. The Committee is now free to proceed at its pleasure to select candidates for President and Vice President of the United States.

“The Chair might say, incidentally, before we proceed, that he would like to raise one point and determine the Committee’s will upon it.” There was a sudden questioning silence. His tone took on an amused irony. “There has been much talk in the past twenty-four hours about military dictatorship—the ominous presence of the President hovering over the Committee with a threat of armed vengeance—the poor, beleaguered Committee trembling before the possibility of my—I believe the term was ‘bayonet-backed displeasure.’

“Well,” he said, looking thoughtfully around the room: “Are you?”

There was laughter, but the press was quick to note that several members appeared anxious to speak.

“I didn’t really think that you were,” the President said, “but I thought we should have it out in the open and have a talk about it, in case anybody is really concerned. Yes, Governor?” he said with an expression that brought much amusement as Roger P. Croy raised his hand and then got slowly to his feet beside his desk. “You rise like the Phoenix, undaunted and renewed. What are you going to tell me this morning?”

“Mr. President,” Roger P. Croy said with an easy smile, “we are all renewed and undaunted as we bask in the sun of your amiable good will. I will say—as many of us here who are lawyers by profession know from our own experience—that words and phrases sometimes become somewhat flamboyant in the eager pursuit of what one deems to be a valid argument.”

“They sometimes do in the press, too,” the President remarked, and there was more laughter as Herman Kappel of North Dakota waved a copy of the
Post
, folded to display Walter’s column.