(1964) The Man (112 page)

He was entirely absorbed in the cross-examination when the telephone buzzer sounded. Absently, eyes still focused on the screen, his hand brought the receiver to his ear.

The voice was Edna Foster’s.

“Mr. President, it’s your son Julian, telephoning from New York City. He says that unless you are terribly tied up, he must speak to you, and even then he’d like a minute—he sounds—”

“Put him through, Miss Foster.”

He reached out, shut off the television set, then cupped the earphone and mouthpiece closer, and tensely waited.

“Hello, Dad?”

“Yes, Julian, what is it? You said—”

“Don’t be alarmed, everything’ll be fine,” Julian was saying in great agitation, “but I felt it best to call—it’s about Mindy—I’m in her apartment right now. Dad, she tried to kill herself, she tried—but she’s going to get well—everything’s working out—”

“Kill herself?” Dilman was aghast, chilled and shivering. “Are you sure she’s all right? Is there a doctor there? How is she, Julian? What happened?”

“After she saw the newspapers—the ones telling about her passing—and then heard the radio—she finally made up her mind and took an overdose of sleeping pills—my God, the amount of pills! Then, when she thought she was beyond help and ready to go, she telephoned me at Trafford. She wanted to clear her conscience before dying, I guess. Anyway, I could hardly understand her. She kept mumbling about some reporter who found her out, and to save her own neck she got him after me and my Turnerite membership, and now she was sorry and wanted to apologize. I tried to keep her talking, because I couldn’t understand her and knew something was wrong. Finally she blanked out, but luckily, when I got the long-distance operator to say we were cut off, she gave me Mindy’s unlisted number—then I made the operator get the police and police doctors. Whew, it was close, Dad. They found her sprawled on the floor, but the stomach pump did it. A few more minutes and she’d have been a goner. She’s all right, though. By the time I got her address from the police, and whizzed into New York from Trafford, she was half sitting up in bed, and her own doctor was—he’s still here. She’s okay now.”

Dilman slumped back, unable to overcome his anguish. “Julian, give me that address. I’m flying right in. I want to see her.”

“No, Dad, please—that’s the first thing she said when she knew I was calling you—she doesn’t want to see you or anyone else, no one for a while. The doctor agrees. She’s pretty weak. It would only upset her, I mean badly, that’s what the doctor says. She needs rest, some time to think, think by herself. Of course, I knew you’d want me to hire nurses to be with her—”

“She really tried to kill herself?” Dilman repeated, still aghast at what had taken place.

“Well—it was awful for her, Dad—being revealed naked in public like that, and—wait, one second, she’s trying to say something . . . what, Mindy? . . . Sure, sure, okay. . . . Dad, I—I showed her the newspapers with the statement you made in reply to the exposé. She was just repeating something from what you said, about the crime of passing not being hers but everyone’s, for not letting her grow up with dignity. It’s hard to understand her, the way she’s talking—so indistinctly.”

Dilman understood her, if his son did not. “Julian, let me have a word with the doctor.”

The physician, impressed by the opportunity to speak to a President, was verbose and clinical, but his prognosis came down to no serious aftereffects. Mindy had taken a lethal dose of Nembutals, and been discovered, and her stomach emptied in the nick of time. With proper care and rest, she would be on her feet in forty-eight hours. As for her mental outlook in the days to come, that, of course, was beyond the province of a general practitioner. Right now it would not be advisable for the President, for her father, to visit her, considering her emotional state. Perhaps it would be permitted in the near future, if she wished it. At this time, unwise.”

When Julian came back on the telephone, Dilman said, “I want you to remain there in her apartment, nurse or no nurse, at least overnight. Mindy may want someone close to talk to when she wakes up.”

“I’ll stay right here, Dad.”

“And you keep in touch with me. Understand?”

“Absolutely. I’ll call you later tonight.”

Dilman shook his head, although there was no one to witness his despair. “Poor baby. I only wish she’d see me. I have so much to say to her.”

“She’s alive, Dad. That’s all that matters. Maybe one day—”

Maybe one day.

Slowly, Dilman hung up.

He could envision, with sorrow, Mindy’s probable destiny. Condemned and ostracized in New York City, truly alone, of no people, no race, she would—like the Wandering Jew, the cobbler who had pushed off the Lord—become an eternal wanderer, too, in search of identity and belonging. As long as she could endure it, there would be for Mindy, endlessly, another city, another lie, another fearful life lived within the fragile lie, and another exposure. Perhaps the only peace she would ever know would be the peace of the oblivion she had sought, and been denied, today. How soon would she be driven to seek it again?

Aching with grief, Douglass Dilman left his desk, circled the room, and then finally he opened the door to Miss Foster’s office and went inside. He had no specific business with his secretary. He wanted only the solace of companionship.

Edna Foster, partly attentive to the letter she was typing, partly attentive to the television screen, halted in her work and greeted him with a guilty nod.

“I guess I’m being compulsive about it, Mr. President,” she said. “I can’t keep my eyes off the set.”

On the small screen, Tuttle and Eaton were no longer in view. The camera was offering a panoramic picture of the crowded Senate floor, galleries, and press section. The volume had been turned down too low for Dilman to hear the announcer.

“What’s happening?” he asked Miss Foster.

“There was a motion for recess,” said Miss Foster. “After Mr. Tuttle finished with Eaton, the prosecution rested its case. I don’t think they’ve made such a good case—I mean, there are no facts, if you think about it.”

Dilman said, “Unfortunately, Miss Foster, too few people watching, including the senators, may think about it. Did they say what comes next?”

“Yes. Mr. Abrahams said that, except for introducing and reading the defense affidavits, he has only to examine the five witnesses for the defense that he has subpoenaed. Then somebody from the floor made a motion which was passed by a voice vote. It was agreed that Mr. Abrahams could begin his examination of defense witnesses at five-thirty this afternoon. Then the court will adjourn at seven for dinner and convene again tonight, for a night session, at eight-thirty, continuing until all the defense witnesses have been heard and cross-examined. Tomorrow the Senate will convene at ten o’clock in the morning for the closing speeches. The House managers will be given one hour, then Mr. Abrahams will be given one hour. Then there will be a lunch break, and Johnstone said if there were no undue delays, no further points of law to be discussed, the voting should begin at two o’clock tomorrow.”

It came as a small shock to Dilman that the trial, which had become a way of life for him, was almost over. There was left only the rest of this fading day, some drugged sleep, and then tomorrow the final decision to acquit or convict. He was not prepared for judgment day, not so soon, but then, he supposed, no one ever was, really.

“Thanks, Miss Foster, sorry to interrupt your work.”

He went back into the lonely Oval Office and closed the door. Hands locked behind him, he walked around the room. He tried to figure out why the trial’s end appeared to him to be so sudden and disturbing. Then he knew the answer. There was a sense of incompleteness about it for him, because he had not been an active participant. It was as if a great vessel was sinking—maybe yet to be saved, more likely to be lost forever—and the captain was not there; the captain was somewhere far away, on land, going over the steamship company’s accounts. That would be wrong, as this was wrong.

He called to mind Nat Abrahams’ firm injunction of ten days ago—ten thousand years ago, it seemed by emotion’s calendar—that the President, although legally permitted to do so, must not stand as a living witness in his own defense. Like himself, President Andrew Johnson had wanted to be heard and had been kept silent by his managers. In the end, perhaps, Johnson’s managers had been proved right. But somehow, this second Presidential impeachment trial in American history was different, basically different, from the nation’s first. The first had been important, aside from the opposing two philosophies on reconstructing the defeated South, because it pitted the legislative branch of government against the executive branch. President Johnson had been tried for being an obstructive politician. This second impeachment trial, however, was vastly more crucial to the United States. The basic issue was not the differences between two powerful branches of government. The basic issue was the hushed and invisible Article V of the impeachment. Dilman knew that Abrahams was right. As President, he was not being tried for being an obstructive politician. He was being tried for being a Negro.

Yet, the real reason for the historic trial would never be heard again on the floor of the Senate. The trial had gone its way, with oratory and testimony, and suddenly, tomorrow, it would be done, and at no time would the Senate have been forced, or the public outside have been forced, to examine themselves openly so they would understand why they were voting as they did. What had there been, these cruel days, to represent President Dilman? The interrogation of witnesses on peripheral charges, the speeches on evasive indictments. And now, tonight, more witnesses, more affidavits, offered to the Senate and the nation on what they preferred to hear and see, not on what they should hear and see.

Soon the sounds of battle would be stilled. Dilman would be ousted, condemned like Mindy to wander the country and the earth in disgrace. And more than Mindy—he was aware of this in a flash of clarity now—it would be his own fault for not helping to emphasize the nature of the real accusation against him for all the world to know. It would be his failure for not insisting that the public be forced to see for itself, firsthand, what it was really voting upon, and for not letting the people decide then whether they could, after voting, live with only satisfied minds, eyes, eardrums, or whether they needed to be able to live with their consciences, too.

He started moving toward his desk. It was John F. Kennedy, he remembered, who had so truly written of the Andrew Johnson impeachment trial: “Two great elements of drama were missing: the actual causes for which the President was being tried were not fundamental to the welfare of the nation; and the defendant himself was at all times absent.”

This time, he told himself, the great elements of drama would be fulfilled. This time America must not be lulled with a sugared half play, but must suffer, with him, the harsh play in its entirety. This time it had to be shown that the cause for trial was fundamental to the welfare of the nation, and it could be shown in only one way.

He lifted the telephone from the white console, and he instructed Edna Foster to locate Nat Abrahams for him, wherever he was in the Senate building.

Waiting, he thought Nat Abrahams would not be pleased by his casting aside of this one remaining garment of cowardice. No, Nat Abrahams would not be pleased. And might not understand. There was only one who might totally understand his act. Mindy would understand, at last.

He heard Felix Hart’s voice on the telephone, and Dilman said that he urgently wished to speak to Nat Abrahams. In a half minute, Nat Abrahams was on the other end.

“Nat, is it true you are putting on your defense witnesses between five-thirty and seven, and the rest later in the evening?”

“Yes.”

“Nat, I’ve thought about it. I want our invisible Article V opened up again—I want it there for everyone to see and hear—”

“But, Doug, you remember the ruling. We can’t—”

“There is one way we can.” He held his breath, and then he said it. “Nat, I’m coming right over to the Senate. I have made up my mind to testify. I am going to be your first and key witness.”

“Doug, you are the President of the United States.”

“I am the black man President of the United States. I don’t care what I’m asked or what I say. I only want to stand up there and be seen and heard by my judges. I know my appearance can lose it. But I also know this—something more may be finally won.”

By twenty minutes to six o’clock, as darkness covered Washington, D.C., the illuminated rectangular Chamber of the Senate of the United States was ready. Until this crucial moment, it had been filled for every speech and every witness, but now the word was out, and for the first time the vast room was crammed to overflowing with incredulous humanity. Not only was every seat occupied, but every square foot of standing space.

From his high seat, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, swathed in his black judgment robe, peered out of his wrinkled, sunken face, peered down at the kinky-haired, grim, thickset black man who stood directly below him, facing the Secretary of the Senate, right arm raised.

“You, Douglass Dilman, do affirm that the evidence you shall give in the case now depending between the United States and the President of the United States shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: so help you God.”

“I do.”

“Please be seated, Mr. President.”

The Chief Justice’s gavel struck. “As presiding officer, I once more admonish strangers and citizens in the galleries to maintain perfect order and profound silence. . . . Senators will please give their attention. . . . Gentlemen of counsel for the President, you may now begin your examination for the defense. Proceed with the first witness.”

Douglass Dilman gripped the knob ends of the arms of the witness chair, and stared out at the rows of blurred men, his jurymen, his impeachers, men who would decide, perhaps had already determined, his fate. Strangely, their faces were individually unclear. Angled up toward him there was nothing more than a blended disc of whiteness, curiously punctuated by gleaming varicolored dots of eyes, the eyes around the aquarium in the old bad dreams. He could not see them. It did not matter. He was here. They could see him. They could see their black conscience.