“That is not true, Sally. If you’ll calm down a minute-”
She was too furious to listen. “I know what is true! You never asked your bag of a wife for a divorce. She’s not coming here to stand in the wings, hoping she’ll be First Lady. It’s you. You want to be President so badly, it smells, it stinks, the reek can be smelled a mile away. So no more bedroom gymnastics, no more, no more taking chances by you. You want to be there, lily-white and aristocratic and Ivy League, with the one and only wife of foreverness and togetherness on your arm, waiting in home beautiful, living the life beautiful, waiting for your country’s call the minute they boot that poor unbefitting nigger interloper out of your White House! Now everything’s got to be perfect, everything pure and American! Now you’ve got to quickly, quickly, sweep all dirt under the carpet, all dirt and maybe scandal, and there I go, under the carpet, too-”
“Stop it, Sally! You’re behaving like an insane-”
“Don’t you call me insane, you lousy, dirty no-good bastard!” she screamed, and then, before he could move, she drew her right hand back, flung it forward, and emptied the entire contents of her whiskey glass into his face.
As he sputtered, wiping his eyes and shirt with his handkerchief, she yelled, “I hope the whole world finds you out the way I did, you bastard!”
She ran out of the room, and out of the house; and Arthur Eaton, watching her, continuing to clean the dripping whiskey from his face and clothes, was no longer upset. In fact, he was pleased. It had been less costly than he had expected. For the price of a wet handkerchief, a change of apparel, and a minor indignity, he was rid of her forever.
Then, when she saw the door close, she started running.
Before that, Sally Watson did not know how long she had been waiting.
After leaving Arthur, and reeling down the cement steps into the lonely and darkened Georgetown street, she had not known where to turn, where to go. The two Secret Service men, in the car parked across the way, had pretended not to see her. She had pretended not to see them. She had started off, to nowhere, because there was no place left where she could any longer find peace from rage and shame, and then she had changed her mind.
She had come back toward the house, staying inside the shadows thrown by the stately mansions, hidden from the yellow pools of illumination under the streetlamps, and then, two houses from his, clinging to a chilled metal rail, in a recess out of sight, she had waited, senselessly waited, shivering, hating, waiting.
How long had it been, finally? Fifteen minutes? Twenty? However long it takes to die.
Once an automobile had drawn up, and it was not Kay Varney Eaton who had emerged, but five other persons, three of them male photographers, two of them (one whom she knew) women social columnists, and, chattering and cheerful, they had gathered on the sidewalk before Eaton’s residence.
Finally the limousine had arrived, and the chauffeur had leaped out and hastened to open the rear door. And there she was, that old woman, Kay Varney Eaton, tall and imperial, in her mink coat and mink hat, giving her diamond-laden hand and condescending stone smile to the serfs of the press. There were shrill questions, and requests to pose this way and that, and flashlight bulbs twinkling on and off, and then she had gone, First Lady-elect-almost, up the stairs. And at the top, horrid traitor’s face wreathed in a smile, Arthur was welcoming her, a self-conscious embrace before the cameras, an antiseptic cheek kiss, and then, a husbandly arm around her, he had taken her inside their house.
Then, when she saw the door close, she started running.
Sally went blindly, crazily, drunkenly up the street, and at the intersection fell against the post of a stoplight, gasping for air. A cruising taxi slowed, and she hailed it.
Inside, disheveled, mascara on her cheekbones, she was still too choked to speak, unable to direct the Negro cabdriver, who was attending her with curiosity, where to take her. Again, there was nowhere to go. But the last unimpaired although dying impulse of her self-esteem began to form her utterance. Only in one place, in months, years, a lifetime, had she had a raison d’être. So, not she, for she was no more, but the surviving impulse within her gave voice to her suicidal mood.
“Take me to-to the White House,” she said thickly.
She tried to look at the domes and spires of this city of monuments which she had dirtied, but she could not see. She tried to smoke a cigarette, but dropped it. She tried to cry, but no tears came, for total wretchedness suffused her heart and dry lungs.
She could not breathe, that was the worst of it. The inside of the careening taxi was dank, foul, suffocating. She made out a patch of wooded area, the tree-bowered walks ahead, and she cried out, “Boy-lemme off there-right there-Jackson and H-lemme out!”
The taxi swung into H Street, and she shoved a bill into the driver’s hand, released the door and herself, and went weaving into Lafayette Park, past the frostbitten Steuben statue, past the wet vacant benches, into the park, deeper and deeper, going nowhere.
Her sickened, self-lamenting brain would not stay behind, let her be free, but remained in the cage of her skull, mercilessly haunting and chastising her. Down through the liquor haze, her relentlessly chasing brain showed her herself as she was: the ghastly scene in the Lincoln Bedroom, the overpainted woman on the Senate podium spouting her distorted adventures into Abrahams’ pitying face, the degraded sound of her name on that sorrowful black man President’s tongue today.
All at once, through the last trees of the park, she saw the incredible sight, and seeing what she saw, her heart and legs quickened at the strange madness of it, a nightmare, another nightmare, and again she was running, drawn to the brightness ahead like a moth batting against a light.
She came through Lafayette Park, bursting out on the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue, and then stood paralyzed with disbelief at what was happening in the night.
To be seen through the iron grillwork fence, engraving itself in licking flames on the slope of the White House lawn, beyond the fence and before the North Portico, blazing in the night, burned a fiery cross.
There was more than the mammoth red glowing cross on the White House lawn, she could see. There were men around the cross, and in the White House driveway, and men clogging the open gate and straining past the guardhouse entrance. There were whooping young white men, rampaging hoodlums with incandescent torches, fleeing the lawn, then grappling and slugging it out and rolling on the grass and cement when caught by the white and colored White House policemen and Secret Service agents.
The pitched battle between the white marauders and hooligans who had incinerated a section of the lawn, now trying to escape, and the White House police trying to contain and arrest them, centered about the entrance gate. The convulsive sounds of men become animals, the sounds of clubs thudding on bone and flesh, of human wailing and cursing, of shotgun blasts in the sky and shrilling metallic whistles, made Sally recoil.
And suddenly, so suddenly, there was another sound-that of skidding rubber tires, angry brakes-and there was another sight-dozens of cars surging into Pennsylvania Avenue, erupting with shrieking men, black and white, most of them black, young and old, most of them young, all of them frenzied and armed.
More speeding and jolting cars were emptying out their vengeful cargoes of fierce Negroes or bellowing ofays and pinks. At once, the snarling white bullyboys who had branded the President’s House, and those rushing to reinforce them, and the embittered products of the capital’s squalid black slums that ringed the White House, who had had enough, enough, who would protect this one of their own, now as persecuted as they were, locked themselves into brutish pitched battle.
From the dark rim of the park, still standing detached, Sally Watson watched as if in a hypnotic trance.
The fighters milled through the street before her, striking and being struck, hurting and being hurt, vilifying and being vilified. And as she watched the race riot-the knives and scissors rising and falling, the broken bottles jabbing, the ch
ains swinging, the hurled rocks flying, the brawling blacks and whites cursing, sobbing, shrieking with pain, the beaten men with slashed bloodied faces and smashed jaws loosened in their sockets, men whining, whimpering, going down-as she saw all of this demoniac barbarity, Sally slowly began to relate it to herself.
The seething caldron of humanity was not the result of her witchcraft, the product of her madness alone, Sally knew. The causes were wider, deeper, older than the provocation of her own evil. Yet it was, this wildness in the night, more her doing than that of any other person present.
She wanted to tell them this, tell one and all, tell them to stop doing this to one another and to do their cruelty to her.
This must cease.
They must punish her.
Unsteadily, tripping once, twice, she left the sidewalk and made her way into the swirling center of the riot.
Dimly, she was aware of the inflamed, gap-toothed, bleeding Negro faces raging around her. Dimly, she was aware of the howling, spattered-nosed white faces fulminating around her. Dimly, she was aware of policemen in uniforms and soldiers in fatigues, hammering right and left with their billy clubs and rifle butts.
The jagged edges of a bottle ripped through her coat. A rock struck her shoulder and sent her plunging to her knees. A heavy combat boot skidded against her mouth.
She crawled between legs, then staggered upright, begging them to stop, but no one heard, and she was buffeted and slapped, and then she felt the spittle and blood mingling down her face. Then, unaccountably, she begged them not to kill her, not to kill her, until she did what she must do. Pushing, tearing, fighting, beating her fists, she tried to free herself from the rioters.
And then suddenly there was room to run once more.
She looked about, trying to make out what was happening, what was breaching and parting the mob, and then she could see. Police cruisers and army trucks were surrounding the thoroughfare. Lawmen with their pistols and leashed dogs, khaki-clad soldiers with their carbines rattling gunfire overhead, helmeted firemen with their swelling and flooding hoses, swarmed through the battleground, dispersing whites and blacks.
She had wanted to reach the White House sentry box, but she could only reach the iron fence. She gripped the metal pickets to keep from falling, and then her legs gave, and she slid to the pavement.
There was the sound of feet, and then she heard her name and opened her eyes.
She blinked up into the worried features of a mulatto woman, blinked up with no recognition.
“Miss Watson-Sally-are you badly hurt?”
“I dunno-no-not-what’s your-”
Then, for Sally, recognition came. She had seen the mulatto face before, yes, every day, newspapers, television, Senate, yes, Wanda Gibson, Wanda Gibson, President’s lady.
“I’d better find you help-” Wanda Gibson was saying.
Sally closed her eyes, listening to the sirens, and then through stinging, puffed lips, she groaned, “No, Wanda-no-just get me home-please, please, take me to my father-you take me-I-I’ve got to tell him something, it’s important-help me-it’s important to both of us.”
It was almost midnight, and they were still there in the Oval Office. From the sofa, Nat Abrahams, smoking his pipe, calmly watched, listened, and marveled anew at Douglass Dilman’s energy.
The President looked up from his desk at Tim Flannery and General Leo Jaskawich nearby, and he handed the sheet of paper back to his press secretary.
“That release will do fine, Tim,” he said. “I think we have given the facts, and it’s a fair enough statement about the riot so that it will please both sides or neither… There’s been no later news from the city police?”
“No,” said Flannery. “Luckily, no deaths, and no one on the critical list, but there were 187 injured, a few concussions, mostly cuts and lacerations, broken ribs, a couple of fractured arms. It was bad, but it could’ve been worse. Remember that race riot in Detroit in 1943? Went on for a week. Thirty-four killed and almost one thousand hurt. I think fast action saved us here. The whole thing was contained in ten to fifteen minutes.”
“Thank the Lord,” said Dilman. “All right, Tim, you can roll out that release, give it to the correspondents, and let them go home. Better get some sleep yourself.”
After Flannery had left, Dilman’s gaze held on Abrahams briefly. “Still puzzles me, Nat, what Wanda is doing over at Senator Watson’s, of all places, and what the Senator wants with me at this hour. Well, as long as Wanda is safe and sound.”
Before the lighting of the fiery cross on the lawn, and the resulting riot, Dilman had been expecting Wanda Gibson to come to a late White House dinner, Abrahams knew. The riot itself had diverted Dilman’s mind from her for an hour, but once the troublemakers had been dispersed and the area was under patrol and was peaceful again, and Wanda had still not appeared, Dilman had become fretful. His concern was that she might have been caught in the fighting, and injured.
Even when no woman’s name was reported on the injury list, Dilman had continued to fret. Then the telephone call had come through. It had been Wanda on the other end, at last, to apologize for not appearing. Something had come up, she had explained, and she was now at Senator Hoyt Watson’s house, and no, there was nothing wrong, she would explain later, but meanwhile, Senator Watson had asked to see the President tonight. “Tonight?” Dilman had protested, and then, as far as Abrahams could guess, Wanda had said that she thought the President should see him, that it was something important, for Dilman had replied, “Very well, Wanda, if you think so. Have him come over.” All of that had transpired a half hour ago.
Like Dilman, Abrahams wondered what Wanda was doing in the dugout of the enemy, and what Senator Watson wanted with the President at this late hour. It was all highly irregular.
Dilman had swung his chair toward Jaskawich.
“Well, General, any last-minute intelligence from the international-situation room downstairs?”
“Status quo. The pins in the map are unchanged. The teletypes are still. Absolutely no word from Kasatkin, or the Soviet Embassy here. And nothing new from Baraza City. Just what we had earlier. Continuing signs of growing activity on the frontier. And you’ve already heard from Steinbrenner. The battalions of the Dragon Flies will be airborne and heading for Africa in-let me see-about two hours.”
“It looks like a fight, doesn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so, Mr. President.”
“You know, General, something occurred to me before. I think we all have the same feeling about this action. Not you, or Nat, or I want to see a drop of American blood shed, and yet we agree this is right; as things are, it has to be done. But what occurred to me was-by a fluke of fate-and to our eternal shame-it may never be done. You don’t understand me, do you? I’ll tell you. Suppose the Communists launch their attack, as planned, tomorrow, and suppose we are there to meet them. At two o’clock tomorrow, the Senate jury starts its vote on me. If I’m convicted, thrown out-why, by late tomorrow afternoon there can be a new President of the United States sworn in-and with Eaton in this chair, I can just see him with Fortney, making our troops retreat, recalling them, agreeing to a phony armistice. In a week from now, Amboko would be in a dungeon, and his democracy, our democracy, there with him. And the Soviets would have a satellite country in Africa. All we’re trying to do, all we’ve done, may be wasted if two-thirds of the Senate tomorrow says I’m a Negro out to trade white boys to save Africans.”
“I hope we don’t live to see that happen, Mr. President,” said Jaskawich fervently.
“We likely will,” said Dilman. “You may have worked your last full day as a Presidential military attaché. Hope they still have a place for an unemployed astronaut. Well, you’d better get some sleep, too.”
“Good night, Mr. President… Good night, Mr. Abrahams.”
Once Jaskawich had departed, the two friends were alone for the first time that day. Abrahams moved from the sofa to the chair across from Dilman. He beg
an to analyze the closing speeches that would be made before the Senate tomorrow morning, first what he anticipated must be expected from Zeke Miller, and then the defense points that he himself wished to stress.
They had been discussing this for no more than five minutes, when they were interrupted by a knocking on the door between the Oval Room and the personal secretary’s office.
“Yes?” Dilman called out.
The door swung open, and a haggard Edna Foster stood in it.
“Are you still here?” Dilman said. “I appreciate it, Miss Foster, but I want you to get right home.”
“Yes, Mr. President. I was only waiting for Senator Hoyt Watson’s arrival. He is here now.”
“Oh. All right, show him in.”
Dilman stood up, alive with curiosity, and so did Abrahams, as Miss Foster held the door wider and Senator Hoyt Watson came through it. When the door closed, he advanced slowly toward the the President.
Abrahams had never seen the formidable Senator Watson this close before, and in this light. It surprised Abrahams how old the Senator appeared as he dragged his feet across the Oval Office. Midway in his passage he had with one hand removed his dark felt hat, and with the other adjusted his string tie, but he made no effort to divest himself of the birch cane hooked on his arm or the velvet-lapeled overcoat. Hatless, his hump of white hair mussed, his horsy, lumpy face seemed longer than ever and more doleful.
“Good evening, sir,” he said to Dilman. “It is kind of you to see me at this time. I gather that Miss Gibson telephoned to notify you of my intended visit?”
“Yes, Senator,” said Dilman cautiously, confused by Watson’s courtesy. “Please sit down.” He indicated Abrahams. “Is this anything you’d prefer to discuss in privacy?”
“No,” said Senator Watson, sitting with a grunt on the edge of the chair, “no, I would prefer to speak in front of your counsel. I shall be brief. I come here with a heavy heart, and with little to say, yet what I do say must necessarily be said by me tonight since it is important for you, both of you, to hear it tonight. My daughter Sally was caught up in the unfortunate riot outside this evening. She suffered some bruises, a minor laceration, but was otherwise uninjured. What did happen to her, whatever happened, apparently shook her back to her senses. She was found by Miss Gibson on the sidewalk, in a somewhat delirious condition, and Miss Gibson brought her directly to our house and to me.”
The Man Page 92
