Advise and Consent

by Allen Drury

  There followed the great years, during which “Seab Cooley runs the country” became a favorite saying in Washington. Not that he did, of course, in many fundamental respects; but in many others, it was not too wide of the mark. Using Appropriations for the weapon it can be in the hands of a determined man, sometimes sweet and subtle, sometimes harshly ruthless, he worked his will with many government departments and agencies and with many of his colleagues; a man to be feared and, many thought, mistrusted; yet a man who always, by his lights, was fiercely faithful to the causes and the friends in which he believed. To the simpler critics who dealt in black and white, the liberal journals, the great northern and eastern newspapers, he was an evil influence to be denounced and vilified and feared; but Seab, like every other human being in government or anywhere else, was not that simple, and indeed he was in many ways more complex than most. Because he was violent in his rages and monumental in his public passions, and because he staged his effects with a shrewdly calculated flamboyance that increased over the years as he grew surer of his power, he was easy to label. But his colleagues knew, as they always know, that the easy label very rarely fits a United States Senator, for his is an office that changes the simple to less simple and makes the complex infinitely more so.

  Hurt at first by the labels, he soon decided that he could not escape them and so should bend them to his purposes. Steadily over the years, partly through the development of his native character, in greater part through a shrewd creation of his own legend, he built the picture of Seab Cooley that existed today: intelligent, industrious, persistent, tenacious, violent, passionate, vindictive, and tricky. Men did not take him lightly, and many a legislative battle he had won without a struggle simply because certain of his colleagues were actually afraid of him both politically and physically. There was still a lingering story, apocryphal but one he never bothered to kill because it suited his purposes, that he had once drawn a knife on a colleague on the Senate floor; it added to the awe in which he gradually came to be held as the years lengthened and South Carolina sent him back and back again until now he was in his seventh six-year term with a record of service unapproached by any other man but the late Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee. “Don’t get Seab riled up,” was a catch phrase around the Senate, and for many years it was a brave man who did. Some of course, such as Bob Munson, Orrin Knox, Stanley Danta, Arly Richardson, he had never been able to bluff, even though he had managed to beat them in open contest fairly often. It was only lately that he had begun to realize that perhaps the number of such men was growing, that perhaps he was no longer so strong as he once had been, that age was beginning to erode his position, that those who moved in awe of him just because he was Seab Cooley were dying off or being beaten by younger men who came fresh to the Senate and learned early that while Seab was a man to be wary of, he was also seventy-five years old and neither immortal nor infallible. Not yet had he really been toppled decisively from his throne, but he realized that there was a growing lack of respect for him among the younger members; Lafe Smith was such a one, Blair Sykes was another. There was a growing tendency, of which instinct and the increasingly jocular references of his older friends in the Senate made him increasingly aware, to poke a little fun at Seab, to make him the butt of little private jokes and sniping remarks that once no one would have dared to express, even privately, for fear they might get back and bring down his vindictive vengeance; there was even, as witness last Friday’s exchange with Lafe, an occasional open clash on the Senate floor. And only a week ago there had been the acrid crack he had overheard Blair Sykes make when Paul Hendershot had been defending him in the cloakroom. “When he first came here in Wilson’s Administration,” Paul had said, “there wasn’t a greater liberal than Seab Cooley.” “Oh yes,” Blair snapped impatiently, “I guess even Seab was young once.” Well, so he had been; in the way Paul meant, and in another way too; not for long, but long enough to set the pattern for a life that had much to do with the destinies of the United States.

  Smiling and waving and calling in the night from among the white columns of Roselands: to this day he could see them still, Amy and Cornelia and the colonel, long years gone to rest; the colonel during the First World War, his daughters during the Second; Roselands sold to rich Yankees in 1945 and now the center for a drinking, gambling, easy-moraled, industry-based crowd growing fat with Yankee money on the cheap labor of the South. He had only been there once since the new owners took over, and then it was for a visit almost as uncomfortable as the first he ever made there. He had been an object for them to examine, something for them to see, a contact they must make for the sake of their proliferating businesses: their United States Senator, Barnwell’s brightest young man grown very old and just a little funny in his legend. He had been aware of a subtle ridicule, though he knew they would use him for all they could while he remained in office. He sensed that if they had their way this would not be for long, for he could perceive that they wanted a younger man, one not committed to the past, one who would be more flexible on racial matters and more adept at helping them impose a sort of reverse-quiet on the South by giving the spokesmen of its minority what they wanted while the Yankees made their money.

  Well, it had not always been so at Roselands. He avoided it now and never even went down the back road that led along its well-kept fences; but it was not just because of the Yankees. They might think he was avoiding it because they were there, and if so, let them think it and be damned. Actually when he accepted their hospitality on that one occasion after the second war it had been his first visit to the plantation in almost fifteen years; and when they had asked in their casual way, “Have you been here before, Senator?” a curious little secret smile they could not fathom had crossed his face. He had not enlightened them. He had only said softly, “Oh, yes, ma’am, yes, indeed. But that was long ago. Yes, ma’am. That was very long, long ago, quite before you all lovely people were born, I think, it was so long ago.”

  He could never say exactly at what moment on that first visit he had fallen in love with Amy Cashton, but he could always remember the exalted state in which he had come away from Roselands. The world had been one thing when he rode up the winding lane on his old horse in his new suit; it was quite another when he rode down again. All the fantasies he had not had time or opportunity to indulge while he was running the store and studying nights for high school, all the enormous force of a heart that loved very seldom but when it did loved completely, found their outlet in a sudden overwhelming emotion for the laughing fifteen-year-old who mocked his careful dignity while the colonel shushed her mildly and Cornelia looked disapproving. He had not been able to respond very well, sitting there looking handsome and uneasy and abashed and rather like a mastiff harried by a terrier, and when he went away it was with the helpless conviction that however much he might want to see her again, she could not possibly want to see him. Two days later her maid came by the store and under pretext of buying some linen goods handed him a note telling him to meet her next afternoon at the old well house at the north back corner of Roselands. Next afternoon he turned the store over to his brother on some pretext of going down street to see a friend, hitched up his horse, and rode away into a golden world that lasted exactly three months; whereupon, although there were various later attempts to recreate it by a heart that found itself too late contrite, it ended forever.

  For that much time, however, he discovered for himself the simple wonder of just being together with someone, the dreamlike state in which it does not matter what is said, what is done, when the mere state of being, as long as it is in the presence of the beloved, is enough. He could not recall much of what they said, talked about, did; mostly, he suspected, they sat by the well house and threw stones in the water; but around their secret hours such a golden haze enwrapped itself that it was as though all time and no time had come together in a moment of eternity that would last forever. Certainly it had for him, at any rate; and so, he knew, it had for h
er, even though she had chosen to destroy it because she was too young and too shallow then to understand the depths of the emotion she had aroused, or the qualities of the heart that had in absolute candor and absolutely without defenses offered itself to her.

  Often and often he had gone over the course of those three months, during which they had met in such fashion eleven times. The elaborate secrecy, almost gamelike in its childish pretending, should have given him some warning, for a moment’s reflection would have recalled that the colonel liked him, had given proof of it, and surely would not have minded him courting his daughter in straightforward fashion; but he was too bemused for reflection. Toward the end of their time together he had felt a sexual desire so great that he was afraid he might say or do something that would lose her forever; it was the measure of his innocence that he thought he was alone in this feeling. But he had been brought up by rigid standards, he had a romantic concept of what a lady thought and felt, and he feared more than anything in the world that he might violate it by some crudity or intimation of lust that would break the bounds of desperate self-control imposed upon him by upbringing and his own youthful imaginings. So it was that when she turned to him on that last day and first offered and then withdrew herself with a cruelly calculated deliberation that made a shattering mockery of his own emotions, instead of being angered as she wanted him to be into doing what had consumed him day and night, heart, mind, and body for weeks, he turned and fled in such tumult of being that it was hours before he finally got home and began the long, terrible, agonizing process of trying to put back together some semblance of a world that made sense.

  His first conviction, for he was indeed an innocent then, was that the whole thing had been his doing, that it had been his exclusive idea, that he must have desperately shocked, offended, and horrified one who had trusted and cared for him and been his friend. It did not occur to him for many a long day after that this was not the case. So he began to apologize, writing crippled, agonized letters in which he abandoned all attempts to maintain the dignity of his own heart, taking on himself all blame, humbling himself endlessly, beseeching over and over again for lost happiness, addressing an Amy such as no Amy that ever existed except in his own mind; for of course if such an Amy had existed she would have been kind to him and answered, and of course there was no answer. He entered a period during which life became a dark valley that he walked through filled with shadowy figures that he talked to; while all the time sick, agonized, endless, futile conversations went on in his heart: I could have done such wonderful things for you. We could have been so happy together. If you would only let me show you how much you mean to me. Help me, beloved; help me, dear love. All of this coincided with his first months in college, and it was not until later that he realized how very strong his own character must be, that he could have been going through all that and still have managed to matriculate, begin his courses, and start his campus life with an outward stability and ease that guaranteed it success. Looking back, he marveled that he had survived with sanity intact, so agonizing had the experience been; but in time he understood that having survived that he could survive anything. And the day came when he was even grateful that it had happened, for it had taught him things about himself and his own strength that he could never have learned any other way, and that, once learned, could never be shaken by anyone.

  For several months after he entered the university he continued to write at regular intervals, but always without answer. Presently, at first in desperation but then in a more relaxed and pragmatic fashion, he turned to the easy sex of the town, and for a time that became the surest road back to sanity; he never regretted it or gave it a second thought, for he perceived instinctively that he needed it, indeed had to have it if he was to regain balance, and so went about it without compunction and without worry, violently though it flew in the face of his upbringing and earlier character. That was all in the past now and a grown man was being forged; he said good-by, a little late and without regrets, to the boy. “Seab does everything just a little larger than life,” somebody was to remark of him once, years later. Nothing proved it more than the practical, realistic, matter-of-fact, and virtually emotionless way in which he went about getting himself over the transition from adolescence to maturity.

  At the end of the school year he returned home, and inevitably was asked to Roselands again by the colonel. For a wild moment all the agonies returned, but nothing of this showed on the surface and he accepted with outward pleasure. Aside from a convulsion of heart and mind so great that he thought he would faint on the steps when he first saw her, his meeting with Amy passed off without incident; and before the evening ended he realized that while he would love her forever, and that it would in all probability keep him from marrying anyone else, he had come back armored and invincible with the invincibility of pain suffered too long, too unjustly, and too deep. But he was not to realize until several years later, when she finally decided she loved him, just how invincible he had become; for though it was still true that he would love her—or his dream of her, perhaps—forever, he found that in a curiously remote and removed sort of way he no longer cared enough to upset his life and go through the agony of subjecting himself to her again.

  After that, the little bitter game was played out over the years as neatly and inevitably as might have been expected. Shortly before he went away to law school she offered herself to him again, and this time he took her savagely enough to satisfy his own ego; and then he walked out and didn’t come back. There were appeals and apologizings and beseechings then, but they were on the other side and he did not respond; something was frozen away inside that never unthawed in the heat of their renewed association. Inevitably in time there came the spiteful marriage to someone she didn’t love; and then, after twenty childless years and a union that satisfied appearances but never fooled either her sister or him, her husband died and she returned to Roselands, still trying to revive the past. There followed the long series of visits to the plantation over the years, the long talks with Cornelia, who had never married but had remained at home to carry on shrewdly and successfully after her father’s death, with Amy always present but saying increasingly little. And in time, when another twenty years had passed so fast he hardly knew it, there came one night the frantic call from Cornelia about a heart attack, the hurried arrival, too late, at Roselands, and the burial in Barnwell beside the colonel and her mother; and then, three years later, the same sad journey for Cornelia, and then the tale was done. A long time ago, ma’am. Yes, ma’am, a very long, long time ago.

  And now he was Seab the Irascible, Seab the Invincible, Seab the Holy Terror, the Scourge of the Senate; but not entirely—not entirely. Years after her death, one day in the Old Senate Office Building, he had seen far down the corridor a girl go swinging by, so much like her that before he knew it a strange animal sob welled up and broke from his lips. He looked around hastily, but the girl was far off, no one else was around, no one had heard him. After a moment he went on, smiling grimly to himself. What would they say, all his critics and enemies, if they could see an old man crying for his youth? They wouldn’t believe it, because none of them believed that he had ever been young. But he had—he had. That was his little secret, for whatever good it did him now.

  It had affected his public life in ways he sensed but could never be sure he understood in full. There had been iron in his soul before; maybe Amy had refined it into steel. There had been a youthful determination to win a fair break from the world and make his own way on even terms with others; maybe Amy had turned it into a ruthlessness bordering on vindictiveness. There had been an ambition that never rested; maybe Amy had driven it to the heights. Maybe after all it wasn’t just Seab who had “run the government”; maybe Amy had helped to run it, too. At any rate, he recognized it for what it was, the major personal experience of his life, and because to a considerable degree it did furnish “the key to Seab,” it was something he never revealed to a
nyone. The lost years belonged to him, and he was not about to have them pawed over by strangers; to him and Amy and their golden world, so brief in time and so eternal in consequences.

  It was perhaps no wonder, then, that he should have loomed large against the pageant of his times. The Wilsonian liberalism that never really died found itself muted and without much companionship in the foredoomed twenties; revived again under Franklin Roosevelt, it inspired a consistently progressive voting record that was not enough to blot out the apparent rapacity for patronage, power, and steadily rising appropriations for his native state and its sisters of the South. The character was too vivid and colorful, the facile, shallow attack too easy; writing about Seab Cooley was one of those things that the Washington press corps reserved for a dull day when there wasn’t much news, because it was always easy to dream up something colorful about the Senator to fill up space.

  Behind all this, in a mind that remained unfailingly alert and passionately dedicated to the country, he had watched with Bob Munson and Orrin and the other old hands while America rose higher and higher and then spiraled suddenly into tailspin with no one knowing the answer and no one sure of the future and no one certain that the tailspin would be ended and the course again made steady. Basically, although he had chosen to make a great public show of personal enmity for Bob Leffingwell, although it was true that he had never forgiven him for giving him the lie direct on that far-back day, his real dislike went to the fundamentals of what he conceived to be the sickness of the times. For he saw Bob Leffingwell, with all his graceful flirtings with this cause and that over the years, with all his clever skatings along the outskirts of the flabbily-principled and dangerously over-liberal fads of his era, as that perfect symbol of mid-twentieth-century America, the Equivocal Man. He could always find an excuse for being hospitable to this, he could always find a reason for not being too hostile to that; he seemed always, or so it appeared to Senator Cooley, to slide smoothly just between the sharp edges of clashing principles and there find a glib, soft, woozy area of gummy compromise and rationale that effectively blurred everything, enervated all issues, weakened firmness, and sapped resolve in a way that hamstrung his own country and made it easier for her enemies to move a few steps farther along the path they had set themselves. Seab was fully aware, Bob Munson might be interested to know, of all the implications of the Leffingwell nomination, and he knew full well the forces he hoped to mobilize behind his opposition to it. He had preferred for a little while to let the impression stand that he was fighting the nomination just as he had always fought it, as a matter of personal feud with the nominee; but his purposes went deeper than that. Bob Leffingwell, to Seab’s mind, was one of the most dangerous men in America, and he felt with all the angry passion of all his angry years, that he had never engaged upon any project more vital to his country than his campaign to keep him out of the office of Secretary of State.