A Shade of Difference (56 page)

So here was this resolution by Cullee Hamilton, with Seab taking out after it on the one hand and Cullee pressing hard on the other. He would have to vote against it, or maybe be out of the city on business, or something, but he didn’t really see how he could avoid letting it come to a vote in committee, or how he could stop it if it did. Even if he wanted to, which he wasn’t at all sure he did, there was the situation Cullee had accurately perceived: Jawbone very likely didn’t have the votes.

But how was he to work his way out of the situation gracefully?

And would anybody give him time to do so?

Although he jumped as though shot when the jangle of the telephone abruptly broke in upon this uncomfortable reverie, he was not really surprised in the least that the answer to this last question should be No.

The Speaker had been having a little talk with young Cullee, the Speaker said, and before that a little talk with Orrin Knox; and he just thought mebbe Jawbone had better call his committee together this afternoon early and take a vote on that resolution. If he, Jawbone, wanted to vote against it, why, everybody could understand that, but as long as Cullee had the votes to bring it to the floor—the Speaker had already nailed that down for sure with a few phone calls to other members of the committee—why, better go ahead and get it over with. Especially since that would look good at the United Nations, which was the main reason for having a resolution, anyway.

At least, that was what the Speaker thought about it, and did he, Jawbone, agree?

Well, then, if he did, maybe they could meet at 2 p.m. and take care of it All right?

“All right,” Representative Swarthman said wanly, and the Speaker, who had not achieved his position of great power and influence in the Congress without knowing men and what troubled them, asked casually, “Would you like me to call Seab and explain it to him? I’d be glad to.”

“I would,” the chairman of Foreign Affairs said fervently. “Yes, sir, Bill, I
would
.”

“Leave it to me,” the Speaker said.

But apparently the Speaker’s persuasions were no more effective than anyone else’s, for no sooner had the House Foreign Affairs Committee decided, shortly before 3 p.m., to send the Hamilton Resolution to the floor with a favoring report, than the President Pro Tempore was on his feet in the Senate denouncing the “inchy, squinchy, little bitty vote of 15-13” by which the House committee rendered its verdict.

The speech was one of Seab’s most effective, filled with pyrotechnics and raising just those questions of national integrity and voluntary self-abasement that disturbed all who contemplated honestly the full implications of the issue. Much as they hated to give him the attention and the prominence, many influential voices in the communications world found themselves forced to do so on the evening news reports. Enough of his ideas on Orrin Knox agreed with theirs so that they could not have avoided comment upon his speech if they wished to give the country what they regarded as the proper impression; and this, of course, they did.

Thus as the nation had a pre-dinner drink and listened, certain ideas got another boost, just as the Senator from South Carolina had hoped they would: a question concerning the good faith of the Secretary of State; a vague feeling that the Speaker and the Majority Leader were helping him put something over; a certain skeptical, half-amused, half-pitying attitude toward the Congressman from California, encouraged in the Negro community by some of its most influential voices; a further mistrust of the Ambassador of Panama, already deep because of his amendment at the UN; the first beginnings of an uneasy wonderment about his brother-in-law, the Governor of California, singled out for special attack by Senator Cooley in his recapitulation of events in Charleston.

Away at his leisurely tree-shaded capital in the West, the Governor began to sense the national reaction to this somewhere around 10 p.m., Pacific Time, and very soon thereafter a conference call had been set up between Sacramento, Washington, and New York. It was 10 a.m. at the St. Regis, and in his carefully soundproofed, tightly-shuttered room (he was extraordinarily sensitive to light, and though he slept well in his native mountains he was often jarred awake by the most casual of nocturnal city sounds) the Ambassador of Panama came instantly alert from a fragile, uneasy sleep when the phone rang.

“Yes?” he said in some alarm, not knowing whether he was to be told of war, revolution in Panama that could mean either triumph or dismissal, or some other event suitable for disturbance in the late hours. When he heard his wife’s voice he relaxed a little, though some sharpness remained in his tone as he asked, “What’s the matter? Are you ill?”

“N-o,” she said, which for some reason disturbed him even more.

“It’s Ted, then. Is he all right?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” his brother-in-law replied, and he came immediately to a tense attention, for this might well be the conversation he had expected for the past three days.

“That’s good,” he said carefully. “Are you in Washington?”

“No, Sacramento. This is a conference call. Pat’s in Washington.”

This diminutive of the diminutive for his sister’s name was not often used by the Governor, and something about it gave Felix to understand that this indeed was a family matter of some importance.

“I see,” he said slowly. “To what do I owe the honor at this ungodly hour?”

“Oh, a lot of things,” Ted Jason said with an easy laugh. “Seab Cooley. Cullee Hamilton. Orrin Knox. A resolution in the House. An amendment at the UN—all sorts of things.”

“I wanted to ask about that resolution in the House,” Felix said quickly, deciding it might be best to go on the offensive. “Who do you suppose put him up to it, Patsy?”

“Well,” she said, “I did. Or, anyway, I tried to. Apparently Orrin beat me to it.”

“How did you do that?” he asked evenly, though his heart was beginning to beat furiously at this surprising news of what he could only regard as betrayal. “Better yet,
why
did you do it?”

“I thought perhaps—it would be best. I talked to Sue-Dan Hamilton about it, but apparently she and Cullee are at outs at the moment, so he must have listened to Orrin instead.”

“But you knew what it might do to my amendment!” he said angrily. “You knew it would give them a chance to try to weasel out of it—”

“I believe she thought it might be well for us to have an out, Felix,” his brother-in-law said smoothly. “For us Americans, you know, it’s ‘we’ who want a chance to get out of it, not ‘them.’
We’re
‘us.’”

“I suppose it was your idea all along,” Felix said bitterly.

“No, it wasn’t, but I must say I agree with it. I feel perhaps you’ve gone a little far in this matter, Felix. I’m rather puzzled about it, so I thought I’d call and find out. I had no idea in Charleston that this was what you had in mind. Nor,” he added in a tone that always separated the Jasons at moments of crisis from the rest of the world, “did my sister.”

“It doesn’t matter that I had no idea what
my wife
had in mind, I suppose,” Felix Labaiya said in the same bitter tone.

“I can’t see that it has any particular bearing,” the Governor said pleasantly as the wire from Washington remained silent.

“Well—” Felix began, and then he too fell silent. An expensive moment passed without comment from anyone on either side of the continent.

“It was just that I felt that you might like an easy way out yourself, darling,” Patsy said finally. “After all, you’ve made your point, I think. And it is beginning to embarrass Ted quite a bit, thanks to that old fool Seab Cooley and some other people, and—well, I just thought it would be best if we tidied everything up. Not that I thought ORRIN would be the one to beat me to it,” she added with a little laugh that was so lighthearted and unconcerned that it infuriated her husband. “REALLY, that man!”

“Of course,” Felix said, holding his temper with great difficulty and trying to sound equally unconcerned, “you realize that I am completely surprised to learn that Ted is embarrassed about anything in connection with this. I thought Ted was happy with the luncheon and with the way things were going. Certainly he never told me any differently.”

“I’m telling you now,” the Governor said, still pleasantly. “I do think you’re out on a limb, Felix. It’s one thing for us all to express indignation and criticism when something goes wrong in the racial area, and it’s another to attempt an outright international humiliation of the United States of America. Obviously I can’t afford to go along with that, even if I felt like it. Which,” he added with some sarcasm, “contrary to what you sometimes hear about the Jasons, I do not.”

“I regard my amendment as inevitable,” the Ambassador of Panama said stubbornly. His wife made a startled, skeptical sound.

“Oh, now, darling. Surely it wasn’t inevitable. It needn’t have happened at all if you hadn’t introduced it. Surely THAT’S obvious.”

“Someone would have if I hadn’t,” Felix said, still stubbornly. His brother-in-law took him up on it at once.

“Why did you feel it had to be you? What made you feel you had to step into the middle of a situation highly difficult and embarrassing for the United States? Did someone ask you to?”

“No one asked me to,” Felix said evenly, though at great cost. “You both seem to forget that I am the author of the resolution on Gorotoland—”

“That’s a puzzle, too,” Ted Jason said, “but no matter.”

“—and obviously it was logical for me to be the one to add the amendment.”

“Oh, the amendment was prepared by someone else and they just wanted the right man to introduce it?”

“The amendment was prepared by me,” Felix Labaiya said sharply. “What are you accusing me of, Ted?”

“He isn’t accusing you of anything, really,” Patsy said. “We’re just puzzled, that’s all.”

“I want him to tell me what he’s accusing me of,” Felix repeated angrily, his heart pounding with an agonizing rhythm.

“I’m not accusing you of anything,” the Governor said calmly, “except what you accuse yourself of by all this defensiveness.”

“Defensiveness, my God!” the Ambassador of Panama exclaimed. “When you both call up and jump all over me together? I am not supposed to be defensive? Maybe Jasons are that inhuman, but I am not!”

“Now, now!” Patsy said with a curious mixture of alarm and mockery. “Attacking the family is the cardinal sin, you know. EVERYTHING else, but don’t attack the family!”

“That’s right,” her brother said, sounding not at all amused. “What’s gotten into you lately, Felix? It seems to me you’re moving into a very strange and equivocal area of late. Have the Russians promised you the Canal, maybe, or something like that?”

“The Russians,” the Panamanian Ambassador said in a voice he made carefully level, “haven’t promised me anything except support for my amendment. Which is more than the United States has done. I talked to Hal Fry and he wouldn’t budge an inch. I told him it would look much better if the United States made an honest apology than if it tried to fight the inevitable tide of the times, which would mean taking a major defeat.”

“When did you become devoted to the doctrine of inevitability?” Governor Jason inquired. “And basically, Felix,” he went on in the blunt tone he adopted when he was getting down to cases, “since when did you take it upon yourself to lead the pack against the United States? We don’t like that, I may say.”

“Is this the national ‘we’ or the family ‘we’?” Felix couldn’t resist snapping, though he knew it would arouse the Governor. He didn’t care, Ted was too insufferably smug and self-righteous about all this. “You do not seem to have any qualms about attacking your own government if you think it can win you a few extra votes with the blacks. You just look at it as I do,” he suggested bitterly.
“I
want to impress the blacks, too. That’s the only thing that makes sense these days in the United Nations or the United States, as you apparently very well know. After all, you need Cullee in California, don’t you? You need him in the entire country.”

“If you think my motivations are as simple as that,” Ted Jason said with an odd little laugh that indicated more loneliness than he perhaps knew, “then I think you know me as little as everyone else does.” His sister made a little protesting sound but he ignored it. “Now, I’m not going to argue it with you further. Your position in this is highly embarrassing to me and my sister. A resolution has been introduced in the Congress, at whoever’s instigation, and it provides an excellent solution for all of us. I think you would be wise to take advantage of it.”

Felix snorted, for suddenly he felt that he had his fearsome brother-in-law on the run, that maybe he had the measure of this Yanqui as he had all the rest. A certain exhilarating excitement filled his heart, which was pumping hard now, not in contemplation of anything unpleasant, but rather in contemplation of his own indomitable invincibility.

“How could I take advantage of it?” he demanded. “The only way to do that would be to withdraw my amendment, and things have gone much too far here at the UN for me to do that. And even if I did, someone else would reintroduce it at once.”

“Let someone else,” Ted said coldly. “At least it would not be Patsy Jason’s husband.”

“Or Ted Jason’s brother-in-law,” Felix shot back. The Governor snorted in his turn.

“What do you gain by that? I’m not denying it to you. I repeat, though, you are childish if you think that is my only motivation.” He asked a question so abruptly that it took Felix’ breath away. “Do you love Panama, Felix?”

“I must assume that is a rational question,” Felix said finally. “What do you think?”

“So do I love the United States,” Governor Jason said. “There is some motivation here more worthy than how do we appeal to the blacks, you know …”

A little silence fell and into it Patsy finally spoke.

“I really think it would be best if you should withdraw your amendment, darling. You can say that since the United States seems to be moving toward a more reasonable position through Cullee’s resolution, you don’t feel it necessary to press the matter at the UN. Then we can all join in backing Cullee, without any side issues.”