by Allen Drury
“Well, I really do appreciate it, Harley,” Senator Anderson said. “But we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”
“I mean it,” Harley said. “Don’t get to feeling you don’t have friends, because you do.”
“Thanks, Harley,” Brig said, touched by his tone. “That’s very kind.”
After he had hung up, however, kindness suddenly did not seem to be enough. There had been too many strange happenings during the day, too many odd little things, not big and dramatic but just sufficiently out of focus so that the sum total was somehow very disturbing. It was strange, he thought, the way the two days shaped up. Yesterday had begun as a day of imagined shadows and had ended at midnight in the sunlight, figuratively speaking, of victory. Today had begun in sunlight and was ending with shadows; and in some intangible, ominous way he was beginning to feel, as he concluded work for the day and left the office shortly after 6 p.m. that this time the shadows were real.
It was not until he reached home, however, that he realized how real. And then it was not until after he had been home for some time, for although he could sense at once that Mabel was under strain of some sort, he did not for some hours associate it directly with himself. Partly this was because his wife, by an effort whose magnitude he only understood later, managed to maintain a relatively calm outward aspect, and partly it was because the early part of the evening was dominated, as always by his daughter. Dinner was a pitched battle, for some one of those mysterious reasons unclear to parents, and he got all his own stubbornness thrown back at him in a way that was, characteristically, both charming and infuriating. At the end of it she suddenly climbed into his lap, threw her arms around his neck and said, “I forgive you, Daddy,” in a tone of such gracious tolerance that he burst out laughing, and her mother taken out of her own preoccupations for a moment, laughed, too.
“You’ve been naughty, so you’re forgiving me,” he said. “Well, Pidge, I think that’s very kind of you.”
“You like me, don’t you, Daddy?” she inquired happily as he tossed her onto his shoulder and started up the stairs toward bath and bed.
“Don’t tell anybody,” he said, “but I do.”
“That’s nice,” she said comfortably. Halfway up, he paused and turned back.
“Coming, Mommy?” he asked, and Mabel smiled in a forced way that told him that whatever he had to face when he came down again would not be pleasant.
“I’ll wait here,” she said. Then she added with a sudden open urgency that disturbed him deeply, “Don’t be too long.”
“Well hurry it up,” he promised. “I’ll pop Pidge in and then I’ll be down.”
“Pop Pidge in,” his daughter repeated, for the words had a satisfying sound. “Pop! Pidge! In!”
As he came back down, leaving her rosy and angelic, playing thoughtfully in bed with Pooh and Piglet, he was suddenly conscious that the house was very still. Through the open windows the last of the light was dying out; a power mower was going somewhere; kids shouted, a car passed in the quiet street. Peace lay on the world, except, he sensed, in his own house. He sighed and went into the living room, where he found Mabel with the television on, just loud enough so they could talk over it and still not have their voices heard beyond the room.
“Well,” he said pleasantly, “have you had a good day?”
“Oh, pretty good,” she said, with a small attempt at politeness to match his.
“What did you do?” he asked, picking up the Star and surveying its last-edition headlines: NOMINATION REMAINS MYSTERY; and, TRACKERS LOSE SOVIET SPACE SIGNALS. “Go over to Knoxes?”
“We went shopping with Beth this morning,” she said, “but we’ve been home all afternoon.”
“Did Pidge take her nap?” he said. “She seemed awfully lively tonight.”
“She got about half an hour, I think,” Mabel said, smiling faintly. “Then she decided that was enough.”
“Just like her father,” he said with a mock wryness. “Headstrong.”
“Yes,” she said, and a little silence developed and grew while he looked thoughtfully at the paper.
“Did I leave my slippers down here?” he asked finally, and she got up promptly, went to the hall closet, brought them back, and dropped them by his feet.
“Thanks,” he said.
“That’s all right,” she said, and he became conscious that she was still standing close beside him. He took her hand and smiled up reassuringly.
“What’s the matter?” he asked humorously. “What have I done this time?”
“I don’t know,” she said, pulling her hand away and looking as though she might cry. “I just don’t know.”
“Well,” he said, “I certainly won’t know either unless you tell me. What is it?”
“Some man called here a little while before you got home,” she said, going back to her chair across the room.
“Who?” he asked. She shook her head with a strained, worried expression.
“He didn’t say,” she said.
“An anonymous caller,” he said with a little flare of angry contempt for whoever it was. “That’s always pleasant for a public man’s family. Did he threaten you or Pidge?”
“No, it wasn’t that,” she said, and just then the television blurred and she went to adjust it.
“What did he want, then?” he asked, putting down the paper and reaching for the slippers.
“He didn’t say,” she said in the same worried tone.
“Well, what did he say?” he asked with some impatience, and if her answer struck him like a physical blow it was not surprising, for nothing at all could have prepared him for it.
“He said to ask you about what you did in Honolulu,” she said.
For a second he had a horrible falling feeling as though he were spinning down and down into a fearful vortex with no way to stop. But by a great effort of will he managed to hold the universe still long enough to say with a fairly successful attempt at a laugh, “I haven’t been in Honolulu since the war.”
“That’s what he said,” Mabel told him. “Ask him what he did in Honolulu in the war.”
“Well,” he said, and he bent down to take off his shoes very carefully and deliberately, as though the exactitude with which he untied a shoestring might somehow put the world back together again, “I rested. I swam. I went surf riding. And I ate a lot. Did I ever tell you I put on ten pounds in that rest period?”
“Did you?” Mabel asked, and something about her tone made him look up with an odd, haggard expression on his face.
“Don’t you believe me?” he asked, and he could see through a sort of gray cloud that was beginning to settle over everything that this was the wrong thing to say, that it was too defensive and would only make her worry more. But he was so completely shattered, as whoever had attacked him with vicious cruelty through his wife had evidently calculated he would be, that all the self-control of a lifetime was temporarily in ruins.
“I don’t know,” she said at last, sounding lost and afraid. “He sounded so—odd, as though he knew a secret”—she gave a little shudder “—a dirty secret. Who was it? What did he want? What did he mean by it? Why won’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know,” he said desperately, as though reiteration would make it true. “I don’t know. Maybe it had something to do with the nomination. I don’t know.”
“But I thought the nomination was all settled,” she said in a voice that was half cry.
“I don’t know,” he repeated dully. “Maybe it isn’t.” He looked up with a stricken expression she had never seen.
“Please,” he said beseechingly, as though he were three years old and the sky had fallen in. “Please.” For now the day made sense.
But this change, so abrupt, so uncharacteristic, so utterly unexpected in one who had always seemed so strong and above any real need for her, so terrified her that she could hardly speak; and so instead of realizing that this was the moment to go to him, to accept an
d not ask questions, to give him the strength he had never asked from her but desperately needed now, and that if she did they might weather whatever it was and he would be hers forever, she gave a sudden cry and ran from the room.
How long he sat there alone he did not know, except that he knew out of some deep well of pain that it was a period in which he seemed to draw away irrevocably from humankind. Mabel he felt had abandoned him; Orrin and his other friends never even crossed his mind, so great was his inward agony. There was no one for him, he kept repeating to himself as he mechanically finished putting on his slippers and tried without success to turn back to the blur of newsprint that used to be the evening paper; no one.
He knew now with a sickening certainty that it was not only the nominee upon whom the past was rendering its bill, just as he knew instinctively that in some way he did not yet fully understand the agent responsible for it was the man who had assured him with smiles and good wishes at midnight that all was well.
In his pain and confusion and uncertainty, his first instinct was to call him immediately and make whatever sacrifice he wished in return for having himself and his family left alone. But when he walked as in a curious muffling fog to the downstairs phone and called the White House he was told that the President had gone to bed early with strict instructions that he not be disturbed except in the event of the greatest national emergency.
“I take it this is not that, Senator,” the White House operator said crisply, and he managed a harsh half laugh.
“Oh no,” he said as in a dream. “No, it isn’t that.”
***
Chapter 7
“It seems to us,” the Times said editorially next morning, “that the Leffingwell nomination has passed suddenly into a strange, hazy state in which motives are confused, decisions are unclear, and the future is in doubt. With all the world literally waiting upon the Senate, it is as though the principals had disappeared suddenly behind a screen.
“The Senator from Utah, Mr. Anderson, apparently the main road block at the moment to Mr. Leffingwell’s speedy confirmation, is aloof and uncommunicative with the press. No one knows what he wants.
“The President of the United States, confronted with a mysterious but apparently severe challenge to his nominee for Secretary of State, is similarly uncommunicative. No one knows what he intends.
“Mr. Leffingwell, though recipient forty-eight hours ago of the most ringing public endorsement from his chief, has received no public encouragement since and is remaining discreetly incommunicado, too.
“The incumbent Secretary of State goes about his remaining duties with an air of knowing where the bodies are buried, though they may be the wrong bodies and he may conceivably be looking in the wrong graveyard.
“In the Senate, all is confusion, with everybody puzzled and nobody sure of what is going on. Guesses are a dime a dozen and rumors that the President will withdraw Mr. Leffingwell, that he will not withdraw him, that at Senator Anderson’s importuning he has agreed upon a substitute, that he has defied Senator Anderson and has refused to consider a substitute, are flooding through Washington and over the country. It is as though someone had reached up suddenly and yanked the lights on the capital’s most dramatic political performance in years, leaving the actors to move about in darkness while the audience shuffles nervously and wonders whether it should hiss or applaud.
“We think it is time the lights went back on and the actors got on with the play. It has been eight days since the President submitted Mr. Leffingwell’s name to the Senate. Searching hearings were held during which all sorts of embarrassing questions were asked and answered, we believe completely, by the nominee. But now suddenly everything seems to be at sixes and sevens. Rumor says this is because Senator Anderson has received information of a nature damaging to Mr. Leffingwell that was not disclosed at the hearings. If this is so, Senator Anderson owes it to the country, the Senate, the President, the nominee, and himself, to state what this new evidence is. If there is no new evidence, he owes it to all concerned to say so unequivocally.
“Similarly, the President should make a statement or take some action that will indicate where he stands in the matter. Despite his dramatic endorsement of Mr. Leffingwell at the White House Correspondents’ banquet Thursday night, his silence now lends weight to growing speculation that for political reasons he is in the process of abandoning Mr. Leffingwell and seeking some other course.
“We could think of nothing more disastrous, to his own prestige, the success of his Administration, and the future of American foreign policy, than to allow this second-rate melodrama to continue. This is doubly true if the Russians, as seems possible, are actually on their way to the moon with a manned expedition. If Mr. Leffingwell is unfit—a contingency we cannot conceive of or accept—then it should be stated and he should be removed at once from further consideration for Secretary of State. If he is fit—and we heartily believe he is—he should be swiftly confirmed without further dilly-dallying.
“It is time, in other words, to fish or cut bait.”
And so, he thought as he put the paper slowly down and began going with a tired determination through his mail, it was: time to come to grips with the President, time to come to grips with himself, time to decide once and for all what he was made of and what, in the face of all the pressures now bearing so fearfully down upon him, he would do.
For a while last night, after Mabel had left the room and he had felt so utterly alone, he had descended into the depths of an agonized despair and it had seemed to him that he might conceivably never recover, that the pressures would be too great and the burden too frightful and the difficulties too overwhelming to surmount. Fortunately the black mood had been too black to last; before long his native courage, stubbornness and tenacity had begun to reassert themselves. So someone knew, the one thing he had hoped no one in the world, particularly the world of Washington, would ever know, and in some way apparently connected with the nomination someone was making use of it. Was that enough to make him give in? If he had been able to reach the President when he tried, it might have been; he was glad now that he had failed, for the delay had given him the chance to recover. It had taken him quite a while, fighting all alone with the television babbling on senseless and unnoticed across the room, to decide that he would not give in that easily; it was almost midnight before he reached that conclusion. When he did it was final. He decided then with a fatalistic acceptance of the consequences that he knew he would not change, that his obligation to the country—the country, in whose name they all were acting, the country, which imposed upon them all a single high duty pursued through paths as many and various as the men who owed loyalty to it—was such that he could not abandon his position, no matter what the pressures were or might become.
The decision made, he had begun to appraise the situation in the light of political and social realities as he had come to understand them in his seven years in office. Although the calculated cruelty of attacking him through his wife had temporarily thrown him off balance, the more he thought about it the more he came to see that it was what might be expected of the type of mentality that would use such a weapon at all. Whether that mentality possessed much more than a shrewd guess to go on, he did not know; evidently it did possess a little more, for the reference had been specific enough for him to understand and the time and place had been exact. But whether there was real proof beyond that, he was unable to tell, and the only assumption he could make was that this was the limit of it, and that if he handled it with sufficient calmness and steadiness he might see it through and emerge relatively unscathed. It was the type of attack that most decent men rejected, no matter what lay behind it, and he thought his friends would. Furthermore, there was the self-protective nature of a political community, the instinctive drawing-together prompted by the feeling that an attack on one was an attack on all, and that what might be turned upon one today might, if allowed to succeed, be turned with impunity upon another
tomorrow.
He had had occasion to note from time to time when personal scandals, some much more current and much less innocently connected with the tensions of wartime, had shaken the fabric of the higher echelons of Washington, that it was possible for such things to be smoothed over and hushed up and forgotten and everything to proceed as before. There was a sort of necessary workaday hypocrisy, as inescapable here as it was back home on a thousand Main Streets, that imposed its own adjustments on a society caught in the overriding need to keep things going. More often than the country suspected this enforced a combination of front-door idealism and backdoor acceptance of human realities that worked its own imperatives upon such situations. The government went on, people who knew the most startling things about one another met with bright unblinking urbanity at Georgetown cocktail parties, Washington conversation rattled chattily along its appointed customary courses, and few echoes, or none, reached the country. So, with a little luck, it might be with him—looking at it from the most practical and cold-blooded standpoint.
Unfortunately for any really genuine peace of mind, or even adequate pretense of it, however, he was not, of course, a cold-blooded man. Rationalize it how he might, he could not escape the brutally appalling reality of what had happened last night: someone, with absolute ruthlessness, appeared to be out to destroy him, and given the weapon he apparently possessed, might well succeed. For there was just one little qualification to be made about the self-protective nature of official Washington society: anything could be forgiven in the capital if the troops were with you and the right ox was being gored; but if the troops weren’t with you, if the White House, the press, and all the combinations of interest and pressure surrounding a popular nominee were on your trail, if you had chosen the wrong ox to go after and all its friends were in alliance against you to protect it, then you had better look out, for there would be no mercy shown you. And this, he knew, was his situation now.
