A Shade of Difference (112 page)

Without attempting to judge, for the moment, the merits of the dispute or the decision, he could understand, in a way that many of his countrymen had not until now been able to match, exactly why they could, indeed, “do that to us.” Perhaps for the first time, Americans were beginning to perceive how certain of their racial policies inflamed and antagonized the newly independent world. He could understand how those policies had arisen, in human error and human blindness; he could know what was the genuine truth of it—that his Administration, like all recent Administrations, had devoted itself to correcting those policies as speedily and honorably as could possibly be done. But he could also know that the past histories of many who now had the power to make their harshly antagonistic judgments felt in the UN had made it impossible for them to concede or realize these things.

This was but another example of one of the constantly recurring tragedies of history: the fatal timetable between cause and effect, the fatal inability of the understanding of the one to catch up with the blind prejudice aroused by the other.

In a minor degree, which had turned out to be a very major one before the M’Bulu’s visit was done, he himself had been responsible for such a lag. His initial refusal to give Terry the hospitality he desired, which the President still felt had been entirely correct, plus his inadvertent press conference blurt, which he knew ruefully to have been a human mistake but quite incorrect in view of all the tender feelings involved, had given opponents of the United States exactly the lever they sought. The all-out assault of the Soviets at Geneva had failed, and he rather thought it would be some time before anything so blatant would be attempted again. Therefore, the game now was to go back to previous policies of attempting to wear down and tear down the American image wherever and whenever it could be done. In a sense, the UN debate over the Labaiya resolution had been just as serious for his country as the meeting at Geneva. He was sadly aware that his country had not emerged from it with an equal success. Not because it had not tried to, in good faith and good intention, with a Congressional resolution that did, indeed, represent a startling act of compliance from a major power; but because there was, in the UN at this time, a mood that negated such gestures almost before they began.

Just as many members of the UN were honestly blinded by their emotions to the genuine integrity of such a gesture, so a great many of his countrymen were now going to be honestly blinded by their emotions against the UN.

There was, for a responsible man in such a situation, no course that could safely be based upon the sort of angry haste that the more admonitory metropolitan journals needlessly warned him against; but there was the almost inevitable certainty that his countrymen were going to force his Administration into a most serious re-examination of the United States’ relationship to the UN, and to the world itself, in the ensuing months. It would, he knew, inevitably color and shape the coming Presidential campaign. It would impose certain imperatives, even as it restricted their abilities to deal with those imperatives, upon such ambitious men as Orrin Knox and the Governor of California. And it might well force him, too, to undertake a serious re-examination of plans he had thought he could put away on a shelf of his mind and forget about until the time came to use them.

So as he waited for Lucille to come in and join him for the quiet supper they had planned together before an hour or two of reading aloud and then an early bed, the President knew very well that the M’Bulu’s visit was not really over, that in a sense it was just beginning, and that much that had already been changed by it would be changed still more as the months and years went by.

As one of those who really were deeply affected by the closing speech of his senior delegate to the United Nations, the President was doing his best, as he sat there at his desk, portly and kindly and comfortable-looking, to approach the changes with love. But he did not know if in these times even love would be strong enough to withstand the winds of anger that howled through the halls of history.

For the Congressman from California, love in these afterhours of Terrible Terry’s encounter with his country was a dominant thought but not yet, it seemed to him, in any way an achieved objective. He intended to stay for the UN Ball because he was mad enough at the Africans and Asians so that he wanted to annoy them with his presence just by being there, and to say to them with it: Go to hell if you think you can intimidate Cullee Hamilton or his country.

This was not, he recognized, the spirit of Hal Fry’s speech, which had profoundly touched and moved him, but it was about all he could muster as he thought of the smug and superior faces that would smile knowingly at him in the gaily-decorated Main Concourse tomorrow night. If he was to achieve love, he told himself as he wandered aimlessly through Manhattan’s snow-clogged Sunday streets, he would have to do better than that.

Well: let somebody love him, then; maybe that would help. He had loved a couple of people, or thought he had, and both had let him down; so let them come back and love him, wherever they were on this cold day in this cold world. Then he would think about love, and maybe after he had thought about it in relation to them he could extend himself a bit and think about it in relation to nations and peoples that would have to go some, now, to convince him that they were anything but what he had told them they were—jackals snapping at the heels of the country he belonged to and still wanted to serve with all the heart and idealism in him.

But, after all, he thought with a sudden impatience, a sudden deeply personal self-criticism as he walked slowly along, head bowed and young face stern in the drafty and near-deserted canyon of Fifth Avenue, why look for the kind of love Hal Fry was talking about, the kind of love the world needed and everyone needed, from outside? It didn’t come from outside, that kind of love: it came from inside. It was something you had to work out yourself, from your own being—then maybe if you really ever achieved it inside, somebody who had also achieved it inside would come along, and you could have it together and it would really be something—then you could give it to the world, too. But only after you had achieved it inside. Only then.

That’s what it really has to boil down to, little Cullee Hamilton from Lena, S.C., walking down your long dark street, he told himself; that’s where it has to come from, if you’re to have it, right from inside. And you know it hasn’t come yet, no, sir. It may be on the way, somewhere inside there, but it hasn’t come yet, for all your devotion to country and your decent, stubborn heart.

Exactly because of that decency, he did not, as he walked the cold city, give himself credit for the fact that, in his deep concern for his country and his compassionate attempt to bridge the gap between the races in their difficult relationship, he had already gone some distance along the way to love.

He was too humble to realize it, but little Cullee Hamilton from Lena, S.C., had gone already a long way farther than most.

Three others also appraised their positions, in another of their three-way telephone conversations, while far above the Atlantic the towering young giant who had affected all their lives winged worriedly home.

It was not a satisfactory conversation, and it accomplished nothing save to increase a little more the tensions between them. From Sacramento, Governor Jason made clear that he would increasingly disassociate himself from his brother-in-law. From Washington, his sister made clear that she would probably have to follow his lead in the long run, if not immediately. From the St. Regis in New York, Felix Labaiya made clear that while he would regret this, he did not, perhaps, really care.

Yet, in the curious fashion of their curious relationship, none of the three was ready to terminate it, and none did. Once again, as always, it was not love but ambition that held the family together; and once again it stopped them short of a final break, though all were aware that they had inched still further toward it, now that Felix had indeed accomplished the damage to their country which neither his wife nor brother-in-law could accept.

Of all those involved in the M’Bulu’s visit, he had emerged from it, in his estimation, in the best position. He had for all practical purposes done what he set out to do; and for this, he knew with a fiercely satisfied certainty, his grandfather would have been proud of him. He was proud of himself, as he contemplated the possibilities that now might open up as a gravely damaged United States sought to sort out its policies in the face of near-condemnation by the nations of the world. What had failed by a fluke on one issue might succeed handsomely on some other, now that the ice had been broken.

On the thirty-eighth floor of the Secretariat, serene in his own heart and mind for the first time in many months, the Secretary-General was patiently checking and rechecking the lists of liquor, food, and decorations presented to him by the Director of General Services for the reception and ball tomorrow night. He was calm in the certainty that, whatever the Assembly vote had been, he, like Senator Fry, had contributed some small accrual of decency to the collective conscience of mankind. His speech might not last as long as the Senator’s, and yet it, too, was of a nature to give it place in humanity’s memory. Possibly it, too, might yet in the long run produce some constructive results here in this argumentative congress of the world. If it could do that, no matter how little, just a very little, to help, he would be content. He thought it would, and he was content.

Now he was going over the preparations for the party, working on a Sunday because he wanted to be sure that nothing would be overlooked, no detail neglected, to make of it a happy and pleasant event for all the races of mankind. They might not be able to forget their animosities and troubles entirely, and yet it was the one occasion when they came closest to it. He appreciated the irony of this, for it was during the one night in the year when they had no business with one another that their organization came closest to that spirit of harmony which its founders had hoped it might eventually achieve in its conduct of human affairs.

But he had no intention of allowing the irony to shadow the event. He wanted this to be a happy night, and patiently, carefully, meticulously, and with a feeling of compassion and love that extended, for the time being, to all the difficult children who fought and argued so furiously in the fateful chambers below, he was doing his best to see that it would be.

2

And so it came time for the nations to dance, and from all the reaches of Megalopolis the Great City, from all the apartments, the hotel rooms, the delegation offices and headquarters, the homes and temporary resting places of the races of man, the long line of cars and taxicabs began rolling up to the Delegates’ Entrance as the hour approached nine-thirty on a clear, cold Monday night.

Some came in Fords, some in Ramblers and Chevrolets, some few in tiny sports cars incongruous in the sleek parade. The choice of most, aware of their nation’s dignity and anxious to suitably chariot their own importance, appeared to have settled upon the chauffeured Cadillacs, the Jaguars and Mercedes-Benzes provided by Manhattan’s many rental agencies. Out of these stylish conveyances there emerged powdered white faces and shiny black, dignified tuxedos and the flamboyant raiment of the distant plains and jungles. Bowing, smiling, laughing, nodding, they descended and moved within, while all about, electric in the air, could be felt a sense of the high portentousness of the nations, the touchingly hopeful pomposities of man.

Look at us,
they seemed to say:
We are the nations. We are the peoples.

We cannot blow ourselves off the face of the earth.

We cannot banish ourselves from history.

We are too important for that.

Look at us, how bright, how brilliant, how notable, how brave!

Do you not believe it?

Outside, overlooking First Avenue, the line of flags snapped bravely in the wind, and indoors, as the guests deposited their coats and then turned left from the entrance to make their way around the long curved wall that on its other side houses Conference Room 4 on the floor below, all the proud standards stood massed there, too, crowding the narrow passageway so that quite often some delegate in tuxedo or flowing robe would find himself brushing Israel, say, out of his face, while his wife did likewise with Italy or the Ivory Coast. Potted palms and other decorative plants, reminiscent of the homelands of many who came crowding in, stood over against the glass wall that separated them from the night, and distantly in the Main Concourse could be heard the sound of orchestras playing as the line moved slowly forward in gay and happy anticipation.

Presently the long, jostling progression emerged into the Concourse, to find waiting the pink little figures of the President of the General Assembly and his wife, the grizzled classical stateliness of the Secretary-General. Names were given, hands shaken, greetings exchanged. Duty done on both sides, the guests moved on into the shiny expanses where the wide-eyed Boy and Girl Scouts, the members of the Springport, Indiana, Parent-Teachers Association, the United Nations Study Group of the Women’s Club of Twin Falls, Idaho, and all their counterparts and copies were wont to gather at other times to learn the exciting story of the world organization.

Now the room had been modestly transformed under the direction of the Secretary-General—not too much, for the budget would not permit it, hampered as it always was by the refusal of some notable members to meet their assessments—but with a potted plant here, a festoon of paper streamers there, whirling lights behind red and blue and yellow glass that cast a flickering, multicolored combination of light and shadow upon the Main Concourse and gave a delightful and pleasing aspect that increased the holiday mood with which the guests turned to their partners and stepped forth upon the floor.

Grouped near Sputnik, midway toward Zeus, a dance band played the latest tunes, while downstairs, on the lower level of the post office and the gift shop, another could be heard performing for the dancers there. Toward the south end of the room, near the desk where Miss Burma (East), Miss Malaya (North), Miss Viet Nam (South) and Miss Thailand (West) were accustomed to comment on the unsuspecting tourists, long tables were set out with liquor and food for the buffet, and all along that part of the room, on both sides, smaller tables and chairs stood ready when the dancers should feel moved to eat or drink.