(1964) The Man

by Irving Wallace

  They sipped the wine, and then Dilman said, “I want to see as much of you and Sue as you can spare of yourselves. I’m busy as a beaver all day, and have plenty of homework at night, but I’ll be eating alone a good deal. With Julian up at school, and—well—I don’t have anyone around I can really kick off my shoes with. I need you both, Nat.”

  He was about to say something more when the servants came in with heaping platters, and he fell into silence. Abrahams guessed that Dilman would not speak during the evening while any of the White House staff was within earshot. He is wary and defensive, Abrahams thought; he’s afraid of letting anything slip, anything that might be misconstrued, whispered behind the stairs, and create gossip and paragraphs for enemy columnists. Sensible enough, Abrahams thought, and decided to go along with his friend and hold his own tongue until they were alone.

  While they were being served their slices of beef, potato pancakes, and more wine was being poured, Dilman spoke only once. He pointed to the vegetables. “Those peas, Nat, savor them, because you’ll be digesting history. Mrs. Crail says they were grown and picked from Teddy Roosevelt’s mint garden.”

  After the waiters had retreated, the two of them ate quietly for a full minute. Abrahams, his mouth full, said, “Mmm, the pancakes aren’t bad, Doug. You’re running a fine kosher kitchen.”

  “I’m sure that confuses them. That and the fact that I don’t like watermelon.” He spoke the last without bitterness, but with dry humor. He went on, “I meant what I was saying before, Nat. I want you and Sue here as often as you can come. This is the loneliest time I’ve ever faced. It’s bad enough being a widower President, in the White House by accident. But being a colored one, to boot, makes it—”

  “Enough of that nonsense,” Abrahams interrupted. “You’re not getting any sympathy from me, unless I get my share. Don’t forget, I’m only a white darky whose grandfather was beaten to death in a Polish progom.” He had spoken lightly, but suddenly he became serious. “Plenty of white Presidents have been unpopular and lonely, Doug. I remember reading a letter in some collection—R. H. Dana wrote it to one or another of the Adamses, wrote it from this town in the 1860s—to the effect that Lincoln—it was about President Lincoln—that ‘he has no admirers, no enthusiastic supporters, none to bet on his head.’ I’m sure for a time Lincoln felt like an outcast locked in this house . . . but yes, we want to see you whenever you’re free, which I’m sure won’t be as often as you think. And we want to see you not because we’re sorry for you but because we need good companionship, too.”

  “How long are you going to be here, Nat?”

  “A week or two, maybe even a month. If it works out, I’ll take Sue back, spend a few days straightening out my things at the office, and leave her to pack or sell off the furniture and maybe stay on with the kids until the end of their semester. I’d return here, and she could follow me later.” He paused. “Under the new plan, I’d be living in Washington for three years.”

  “That would be great, Nat.” Dilman grinned. “You’ll be living here longer than I will.” He ate slowly, thoughtfully. Then he said, “I think I was a little surprised when you wrote me about Avery Emmich’s offer, and that you were considering it. Didn’t I write you, asking you more about it? Maybe I didn’t. But even what you told me on the phone the other night doesn’t make it—well, entirely clear to me.”

  “What do you mean, Doug?”

  “You can’t live up on the Hill as long as I have without picking up a good deal of information about big business, big private enterprise. Not many come bigger than Eagles Industries. Nothing wrong with them, or any other corporation, except that Eagles isn’t notorious for being liberal or progressive. And Emmich, I gather, is a sort of throwback to Cornelius Vanderbilt, Astor, Gould. One of the public-be-damned gents, I always thought. Maybe I’m wrong. Anyway, I’ve found it hard to fit you into that framework. The mental pictures I have of you and Eagles don’t harmonize. I know I’m wrong.”

  Abrahams put down his fork. “You’re right, Doug. I’ve been through all that, until my conscience collapsed of weariness. Doug, it comes down to this—I’ve looked into Eagles, and if I had found out they were crooks, real crooks, or special bastards, or anything like that, I’d have blown the deal immediately. They’re no better or worse than the rest of American big business. The anatomy is the same, always—hard head, no heart, all hands in a thousand tills, mechanized, automated, conservative, with a single goal—profits. Okay. The democracy we fight to save. Eagles Industries needs me, men like me, with the liberal lapel button. For them, that’s good business, too. And I—I need a fat patron, Doug, because I’m threadbare, and have responsibilities, and can’t get any more life insurance. If the patron is willing to let me get fat, too, without putting me on a leash, it’s a good deal.”

  “No more life insurance, you said?”

  Abrahams could see the flick of concern in his friend’s dark countenance. He shrugged. “I’m exaggerating, self-dramatizing. It wasn’t a real coronary, only a yellow light that warned me to slow down. I want to slow down before it turns red and stops me dead. Nothing serious, no sword hanging overhead, but I love Sue and I love those kids and I want that farm. So I’m playing it safe. I’m trading three years of doing what doesn’t particularly interest me for a lifetime of living, of puttering around with what does interest me, after those three years. That’s the whole of it, Doug.”

  “I agree with your choice,” said Dilman solemnly. “I’d do exactly the same in your place. Have you seen Gorden Oliver yet?”

  “Twice, briefly. He came to the hotel. We’re still trying to reach agreement on several of my recent demands.”

  “What do you make of him?” Dilman asked.

  “Oliver? I don’t know. I must say, he threw me off balance on first meeting. I always fall prey to preconceived notions of what people will be like—I should know better, and I do. Anyway, word association, you say lobbyist and I say rotund, foxy, devious, green-backs, call girls, et cetera. I was surprised to find him rather out-doorsy, literate, direct, a qualified attorney, a family man.”

  Dilman had been listening to every word. “Yes, he’s all you found, Nat. He’s also a little, just a little, of what you expected him to be. He’s been in and out of my offices on the Hill, with talk, free information, free tickets and invitations, free services, free jokes, for years. I have no reason not to trust him or like him. He’s been useful to me at times. And registered lobbyists do as much good as harm. But somehow, even though he’s New England—I think he’s from Vermont—I keep remembering he is a company man and his company is headquartered in the South. Anyway, that’s nothing that need bother you, Nat. You are sharper than I am about people. You’ll stay on top of him.”

  The waiters had returned, and were busily removing the empty plates and platters, and used silverware. Both men waited for the able to be cleared, and for the ice-cream cake and coffee to be served, so that they had their privacy once more.

  Something had entered Abrahams’ mind, and would not go away. While he knew that his friend was sensitive and secretive about his personal relationships, Abrahams was curious and he determined to investigate one area. He had finished the dessert, and he filled his crusted, straight-stemmed pipe and lighted it, he said, as casually as possible, “Doug, I was thinking of what you were saying before about being lonely, and then I couldn’t help thinking of someone you’ve mentioned several times in your letters The lady you once introduced to Sue and me when we had dinner at your place. I mean Miss Gibson, Wanda Gibson.”

  Dilman did not raise his head from his coffee. “What made you think of her?”

  “As I said, your loneliness. I had a suspicion—Sue did, too, the night we met her—that you were fond of the young lady.”

  “I am,” said Dilman.

  “You still see her? I didn’t know. You haven’t mentioned her name in—why, I guess in over a year.”

  “Aside from you, she’s been the person c
losest to me. Until now, we’ve kept company all the time. She’s very unusual.”

  “Pretty, too,” Abrahams said, “and I thought sound and intelligent.”

  “Yes, all that. Now I don’t know what’ll happen to us. This President thing came right down between us like—I was thinking recently—like a steel grill. You know, this is privileged talk, Nat, strictly, like everything else—but I tried to call on her alone tonight, first time since all that happened to me—it was awful—”

  In a subdued, almost compulsive spate of recollection, Dilman recounted the details of his effort earlier in the evening to see Wanda alone at the Spingers’. He told of his offer to her of a job in the White House, and of her absolute refusal to accept one.

  “That’s what happened,” Dilman concluded, “and here we are, wanting one another, and farther apart than ever before. I wish she weren’t so prideful. I’d give anything to have her in the White House.”

  “Anything, Doug?”

  Dilman looked up sharply, eyes narrowing. He started to retort, but did not. He waited.

  The sensitive area, Abrahams thought. And then he thought, we’re either friends all the way or not at all. “You could have her here in an instant, Doug. It would take only four words: ‘Will you marry me?’ That’s the only anti-loneliness, Doug. Have you asked her?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, I can’t pry further.”

  Dilman said, “It’s all right. If anyone has a right to ask, it’s you, Nat. I know you want to help me. But I can’t go into it. I haven’t gone into it deeply enough with myself. Maybe someday I’ll be able to discuss it with you. All I can say—the only explanation I can make is—well—I can’t see myself with Wanda in a big ceremonial state wedding in the White House. Having one lone colored man in the White House is churning up enough trouble. Maybe it’ll calm down, because they’ll see I’m sort of alone and inoffensive, not threatening to anyone. But a Negro man and his wife in this Southern mansion? That would be too much for them out there to take—too much, and I’m not ready for it. I know it’s a shameful infirmity in me, Nat, but it is an infirmity I can’t overcome, like a limb missing, and one simply can’t will that limb back on. I haven’t the strength of character.” Embarrassed, Dilman fumbled for a cigar. Abrahams watched him, leaned across the table corner to light the cigar, and then sat back.

  “Doug,” Abrahams said at last, “how can I lecture the President of the United States? I can’t. But I can lecture one of my oldest and best friends. I’m going to.”

  Dilman grunted. “I’ve been lectured at all day, by the boy who’s writing my biography, by my son, by Wanda, by myself. I don’t mind one more, only I’m afraid the ground’s been pretty well covered.”

  “I’m sure it has,” said Abrahams. “But since I’m giving up making jury speeches, I’d like to hear the sound of my voice on a similar issue one last time, in valediction.” He knocked his pipe against the heel of his hand, then packed and lighted it once more. “Doug, there’s never been a Negro as high up as you, politically, in our country’s entire history. I know all there is to know about that. Most Negroes are happy about this, but many are scared of your sudden exposure and the subsequent white resentment. You are one of these. The nigger-hating whites are doubly inflamed, that’s for sure. You did worse than marry their sisters, you became the head of their plantations, their Massah, their Colonel. The rest of the whites are—what? Uneasy, edgy—let’s leave it that way. If the country had a say now, you’d be out in the street in ten seconds flat. The country has no say, so it has to sit still for you, until this Presidential term is over. But no matter how much hate there is out there, everyone knows you are here by law, the white man’s law. Nothing can alter the historical fact of your succession. You are rightfully their President, our President.

  “Okay, so how are you to behave? Just be yourself? Who in the hell are you, anyway? I’m sure you don’t know. Maybe I don’t know, either, but maybe I have a better idea than you do. You are our President. That’s a fact. You are an American citizen. That’s a fact. You are a Negro American. That’s a fact. Because of the last, the pigmentation of your skin, you are different from any other President in our history. That’s a fact. What does this mean to you? Does it mean you act like a minority party who’s now king of the hill and going to put his heel in everyone else’s face? Does it mean you act like somebody who wandered into the wrong house, and you better beat it quick before you’re arrested? Does it mean you act like you know you don’t belong because you are different, and you back away and hide? Or does it mean you act like a human being who has inherited, through no wish of his own, the toughest job on earth, and you know it, and they out there know it, and you are going to fill that job like any human being fills any job he has to do?”

  Dilman stared past Abrahams’ shoulder, twisting his cigar, twisting it until the tobacco leaf flaked. “Thank you, Nat. Very good in a Northern courtroom, where there’s a sanctified air of reason. Not very good here, where I’m servant to a mass of two hundred and thirty million who don’t always observe rules or reason.” His troubled eyes met Abraham’s eyes. “Your premise is not built on solid ground, Nat. You need one more fact, and it’s missing. Out there, even to the best of them, I’m not a human being. That’s it. I’m not a human being.”

  “Doug, for God’s sake—”

  “Facts, Nat, two lawyers addressing themselves to facts. You don’t want me to be a mean Negro or a servile Negro or a Negro in white face. You want me to be a human being who has a job called President, and to serve the job as a human being. How can I? Who’ll let me? What happens if I slip out of here one day, unrecognized, with Wanda for my wife, with nobody knowing who we are, and travel across the country? What am I then? Human being? I’m a nigger like any other nigger—you can’t tell one from another, you know—in the South and Southwest, and a Negro in the East and North and West. That’s what I am, Nat, when I’m not pretending to be senator or President. I’m a black man, nothing more. None of the government and organization language, like education, employment, equal suffrage, good housing, public accommodations, none of that is out there. It’s a simpler language out there. It says if you stand in line an hour in a market or store, and it’s come to be your turn, and a white man walks in, he gets served first. It says if you’ve got a hunger pang in your belly, and want to park at the first hamburger slop-joint you see, you can’t, because they won’t let you in. It says if your wife’s got to go to the bathroom, and there’s no public rest room she can get into, she’d better have a good bladder. It says if your throat is parched, and you want a Coke, just a lousy Coke, you can’t find a place to buy one, nowhere, no, sir. It says if you’re exhausted and grimy on the road and want to stop overnight, there’s not a hotel or motel with a vacancy when you ask. It says what Roy Wilkins always used to say, that every time you step out of your front door in the morning, until you come home and shut the door in the evening, you run the risk or certainty of all this kind of mistreatment and denial and humiliation. That’s the real language out there, Nat, and it reminds you, in case you ever tend to forget, that you’re not a human being, not here, not now, but a black man, meaning a half man.

  “Sure I am President, Nat, but I’m not forgetting, and no one will let me forget, I am a black man, not yet qualified for human being, let alone for President. No matter how I feel, I can only act one way, Nat, only one way, and that’s as if I’m a servant of T. C., keeping the house in order while he’s away. . . . It’s the old story I used to hear a Negro deacon tell when I was a little boy. He told it from the pulpit. ‘Ef yo’ say to de white man, “Ain’t yo’ forget yo’ hat?” he say, “Nigger, go get it!”’ That’s got to be my job, Nat, getting T. C.’s hat.”

  Nat Abrahams was too deeply moved, too filled with white man’s guilts, to plead further with Dilman. He knew that he should accept Dilman’s view of reality but try to broaden it, to help him see more clearly his role and future. It was no use n
ow, impossible, after this confessional. For years he and Dilman had openly discussed the Negro problem, and yet he could not recall any other time when he had heard his friend sound so passionately embittered.

  “Okay, Doug,” Abrahams said quietly, “you’ll get T. C.’s hat. But there are a few other things you have a right to do, to instigate, to press, on your own. You have a right—”

  Dilman held up a tired hand. “Nat, I have no more rights here than I have out there. Maybe fewer here. Someday, it might be different. But this is here and now. Don’t you think I’m aware of what’s going on? Don’t you think I know everything there is to know about the New Succession Bill they’re rushing through? Why all this speed from my colleagues on the Hill? Because they can’t forget I’m Negro and they don’t trust me, don’t want me to put in an Ethiopian Cabinet, with a black Secretary of State who might one day succeed me. And you know what, Nat—I’m not going to veto it. No, sir.”

  “You should.”

  “No, sir. I’m not going to sign it ‘Approved,’ either, but I’m not going to veto it. I’m going to let it sit on my desk ten days and a Sunday, and let it pass into law without either my approval or disapproval. It’ll get knocked out eventually by the Supreme Court, anyway. But I’ll play their little game, so they feel safer, so they know I’m not peopling the succession line with recruits from the Crispus Society or NAACP. I’m letting them know that I know my place, and I’ll do what I’m supposed to do, like it or not. If I didn’t, Nat, I’d be inviting real trouble for every Negro, let alone for myself, and for the unity of the country at large.”

  “Maybe it’s time for that,” said Abrahams.

  “It’ll never be time for that until my wife can go into any restroom in the land, and until a Negro can walk through the front door of the White House by popular demand.” He pushed himself away from the table. “It could be worse, Nat. I inherited some pretty good people from T. C. I know Governor Talley isn’t too smart, but he gets things done. Secretary Eaton is crafty and helpful, and a gentleman. As far as I can tell, the Cabinet is a good one. As for the bills pending, the minorities bill, the crisis in Africa, I think I can’t go far wrong listening to T. C.’s advisers. After all, they want what’s best for the country, too.”