(1964) The Man (8 page)

He had been almost physically ill from the tension of the events of that day and evening, and after midnight there had been a stirring and rising, and he had been released, guided to a Cadillac limousine outside the South Portico. He remembered protesting against the two Secret Service agents who had entered the limousine with him, and protesting, with embarrassment, against both the motorcycle escort of police which had preceded him and the second car of agents which had followed him to his home.

He recalled the scene outside his brownstone, and how he had begged Hugo Gaynor, the Chief of Secret Service, who had followed him into his living room, to go home, and how Gaynor had been adamant about staying. And he remembered how he had surrendered from exhaustion, desiring only to escape to his bedroom and sleep alone, away from the blue eyes around the glass aquarium.

The sound of the argument beyond his bedroom wall was persisting. It had probably been going on steadily in the seconds of his introspection. And now, at last, he was able to place himself accurately in the time of day and the routine of his former life, and he knew what was happening in his living room. It was Crystal and a Secret Service agent who were locked in debate.

Crystal had come to him, through an employment agency, during his fourth term in the House of Representatives, and because he had been alone, and was still alone, she had grown fiercely maternal in her devotion to his comfort. Five days a week she appeared at eight-thirty to prepare his breakfast, make his bed, clean his flat, market for him. She worked until twelve-thirty, then disappeared to tend to her own household, which included her sister’s family, and then returned at three-thirty, remaining to cook and serve his dinner, often not leaving until eight o’clock in the evening. She was a poor cook, a burner of toast, and a slipshod domestic, a sweeper under the rug, but she was prompt, loyal, busy, and relatively unobtrusive (that is, until recently, when she had taken to carrying on, always quoting her brother-in-law, a gas station attendant, about the Turnerite Group, who were out to ruin the one chance that the colored folk would ever have for economic improvement through that rehabilitation subsidy act for Negroes that was being talked about).

At once, the reason for the altercation in the living room was clear to him. Crystal had arrived as usual, and found the Secret Service waiting, which was unusual. The irresistible force had collided with the immovable object.

Douglass Dilman threw aside his electric blanket and swung out of bed. He stood up, straightening his blue pajamas, stuck his feet into the misshapen slippers, picked his polka-dot cotton robe off the chair and pulled it on. He walked to the bureau mirror and looked at himself. His black kinky hair, as always after sleep, was shoved high into a peak at the back of his head. He took the wide-toothed comb and ran it through his full hair, smoothing down the peak. He poked at the inner corners of his bloodshot eyes, to wipe and clear them. He studied his broad indelicate countenance. He was dark—well, black, but not coal-black—and his features were Negroid. His forehead was high, his nose full and wide, his lips heavy and protruding.

Now in his fifties, he was overweight, not yet fat, but stocky and thick. Tim Flannery, he remembered, had asked for the statistics last night, and he had said that he was five feet ten inches (cheating a half-inch for more stature) and 180 pounds. His appearance, a big-city ward heeler had once told him, worked for him. His lack of height, his tackiness, the antithesis of the fearsome young Negro buck, combined with mild, refined Caucasian speech and mannerisms, made him more acceptable to the white labor voters; his unmistakable Negro features made him authentic and agreeable to the black menial voters. Oftentimes in the past, he had wished that he could be all one or the other, like the members of his family. Pitiful dead Aldora had been light tan, often mistaken for a Spaniard, and he was sure this had contributed to what had happened. Wretched Julian, his son, was as dark as himself, black really, but possessed of features less coarse than his own. Pathetic Mindy, his daughter, was (or had been when he had last set eyes on her six years ago) white and beautiful, white and lovely, which had pleased her mother, had worried him, had made Julian resentful, and had made Mindy herself haughty and impossible.

He thought that he heard Crystal’s sharp voice through the wall. “Wake him up!” she was demanding.

He knotted the belt of his robe, crossed to the door, went through the narrow hallway, and turned left into the living room.

The sight that met him was not unexpected. Beneath the arch that led from the entry hall into the living room stood the shiny, bulging Crystal, shapeless in her tent of brown coat, still holding the morning newspapers in one hand and the inevitable huge straw basket (for leftovers for her sister’s hound) in her right hand. Blocking her way stood lanky, elderly Hugo Gaynor, Chief of the Secret Service, and the well-proportioned ex-California athlete whom Dilman recognized as Lou Agajanian, Chief of the White House Detail of the Secret Service.

It was Crystal who saw Dilman first.

She waved her fat hand and shrieked, “Senator! They won’t let me in—I gotta get up breakfast.”

Gaynor spun around, and Agajanian did the same, and both were instantly respectful and apologetic. “Mr. President,” Gaynor said, “we have no idea who this lady is. We can’t let people without credentials in here simply because they say they work for you. Can you imagine what—”

Dilman nodded. “She’s quite safe, Mr. Gaynor. Crystal has been my housekeeper for years. I should have advised you last night. . . . Hello, Mr. Agajanian, I think we’ve met once or twice. . . . Good morning, Crystal. It’s all right now. You can come in.”

Obediently the agents parted, backed off, and the magic of it made Crystal’s eyes widen. Her unsubtle black face was almost comically transformed from indignation to triumph to pleasure to awe. She waddled toward Dilman, halted, eyes blinking. “I—I almost forgot to say, Senator—President—Mr. President—but I want to be the first to wish you well, and also for my sister and brother-in-law and the kids.”

“Thank you, Crystal, thank you.”

She began to go sideways, still awed, and then she stopped. “We stayed up late and it was all over the television. Everyone was sorry about the others, but we’re happy that, if it had to be, then mercy, we’re sure-enough happy it is you. I—I almost didn’t come here this morning. I was sort of sure you’d be in the White House, with a special fancy staff, and not needing me any more.”

Dilman smiled. “I won’t be in the White House for a while, and you can be sure, Crystal, I’ll want you then as much as I want you now.”

She seemed overwhelmed with relief. “Thank you, Sena—Mr.—Mr. President—” Suddenly her round face broke into a toothy smile, enamel and gold, and she said, “I’ll have to take lessons how to talk to you. What’ll it be this special morning, anything special?”

“The same as always, Crystal. Give me fifteen minutes or so. I’ve got to shower and dress.”

She was off to the dining room and kitchen, straw basket swinging, and Dilman smiled at the two Secret Service executives. “She’s here every day,” he said, “and weekends her niece comes in.”

Gaynor said, “We’ll have to trouble you for a full list of your employees and friends.”

“You’ll have it today.”

“Mr. President, there are a number of calls that have come in—”

“Anything important?”

“I don’t believe anything urgent. The Secretary of State wants to speak to you when you’re up. Oh yes, one personal call—well, he phoned two or three times from New York—a young man who claims to be your son.”

“Julian?”

“That’s right, Mr. President. Gave the name Julian Dilman. Said he’d call back again at half past nine.”

“All right. Better give me time to get myself cleaned up and into some clothes.” He started to go, then said over his shoulder, “You can ask Crystal to make something for you. You must be starved.”

“Thank you, Mr. President,” the two Secret Service officers said simultaneously.

The tone of their voices hung inside Douglass Dilman’s ears as he walked back to the bedroom. He was attuned to every nuance of every utterance that came from his white colleagues. The changeable inflection of speech was their civilized weapon of subtle mockery and superiority without insult, even when you were a congressman. This was their best weapon when they found that your skin was black and thin. You could not prove disrespect, but you could know its vibrations. He remembered one committee hearing when General Pitt Fortney had appeared as a witness before him and the others. He had posed a question, and Fortney’s reply, in print, on the record, had been beyond reproach. In writing, it was a general replying sensibly to a senator. Across the committee tables, verbalized, it had been a West Point white general speaking downward to a semiliterate jigaboo. Perhaps he had been oversensitive that time, and on several other recent occasions. For years he had tried to curb his excessive sensitivity, as other men tried to reduce their weight. It took diligent, unremitting work. It could be done. But then, every once in a while, you put on sudden sensitivity as you put on extra weight, and suffered for the added burden.

Throwing aside his robe, entering the bathroom, he decided that the two Secret Service heads, Gaynor and Agajanian, had been courteous in their behavior. And now it seemed reasonable that they should have been. To their dedicated eyes, a Mr. President was a Mr. President, whether he was Grover Cleveland or Woodrow Wilson or Dwight D. Eisenhower or T. C. or Douglass Dilman. All that mattered to them, their jobs, their future, their pride, was that they keep the pounds of flesh entrusted to them, whatever its pigmentation, alive.

He unbuttoned his pajama top, stripped it off, and removed the pajama trousers. Opening the shower door, he adjusted the knobs inside, then started the spray of water. Finding soap and cloth, he wondered how many other white men would be as courteous as his bodyguards. The personalities whose speeches he had heard, whose bright remarks he had heard, whose prejudices he had known, crossed his mind: the Southern congressmen, the Northern committeemen, the Western rightists, the Eastern Ivy League snobs. A son of Ham, he thought, in the White House, in the Oval Office of the West Wing, in the highest seat extant in this red, white, and blue (not black) republic. Despite the old prediction of Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, that there could be a Negro in the Presidency in thirty or forty years, there had been no one of equal stature, then or now, no matter how wise or liberal, who believed that it could happen then or in this century. Yet it had happened,
by accident
.

Stepping into the shower cell, he knew that he had been insulated since last night from what was happening out there, in the capital city, in the cities of the fifty states. How stunned the American people must be this hour to learn they would have to look up to an outsider, a member of the ten-per-cent black minority of
their
white country.

It was not the first spray of the shower that chilled him, but the first realization of what had happened and how wildly it would be resented.

He remembered the short poem: “How odd/of God/ to choose/ the Jews.”

He paraphrased it: How odd of God to choose me, to choose one who had already gone high enough, too high for comfort, and had wanted nothing higher for himself, one who wished only to be limited to his legislative height, where reticence and diffidence would still keep him an unresented exhibit that was a sop to the liberal conscience of the North. Then the Chief Justice’s wrenching words of last night came back to him: “may the Lord in Heaven bless you and watch over you . . . as the first Negro . . . President of the United States.”

His limbs felt weak, so weak, and his heart thudded inside its chest cavity. There were a million white men who were right for the job. There were a thousand black men who would have bravely and defiantly welcomed the Godsent opportunity, and called it God-sent. Yet something, something, had gone wrong Up There. The Lord had poked His heavenly finger at the wrong name, and now it was too late. He wanted to rebuke the Maker for His blunder, and then, strangely—out of respect to the memory of his mother and father and aunts in the Midwest earth, out of fear of the hellfire that had been sounded in that old Michigan church in the room behind the broken-down social club, when he was in knee pants—he was humble before that God and the Son of God; and his bitterness and fear, really it was deep-down cringing fear, turned to shame. This was no place for kneeling, but when there was the time and the place, he would beg forgiveness and beg for help.

Yet, Jesus, Jesus, why did it have to be himself, Douglass Dilman, who was not white and who was afraid of being black, and who was without armor or grace?

Then as the shower’s liquid needles, warmer now, hit his chest, and the foam ran down his stomach and thighs, and as he absently rubbed himself with the soapy cloth and allowed the stream of water to dissolve the soap, he thought that his position, despite his secret inadequacy, was not entirely bad. His mind went backward to last night, or the early hours of the morning, when the White House limousine had taken him home. What had happened then was, in retrospect, heartening.

When he had become a member of the House of Representatives, he had leased the upstairs front apartment of a red brick, two-story apartment building between Georgia Avenue and Sixteenth Street. The three rooms and kitchenette, modest and clean, had been sufficent to serve his widower existence. The location had been comfortably in the midst of a onetime white neighborhood, now occupied by upper-class Negroes. But the apartment had soon become too small for him. Senator Espinosa, who had grown senile and disabled, had resigned two-thirds of the way through his term. The Governor of Dilman’s state, to strengthen his position with his vast Negro voting population—which had trebled with the influx of colored families from the South—and with the liberal union leaders, had appointed Dilman to Espinosa’s vacant office for the two years remaining. Dilman as Senator had found himself, briefly, a
rara avis
. Having left Washington, D.C., to campaign in a preponderantly Negro district for his fifth House term, he had returned to Washington as a Senatorial appointee. One of the few Negroes to achieve so high a seat in government, he had been the subject of lead articles in such magazines as
Life, Look, Time,
and
Newsweek
, and he had made the covers of
Ebony
and
Sepia
. He had vaguely felt a freak and been discomfited, but, encouraged by the Party bosses, he had cooperated with one and all.