A Shade of Difference (57 page)

“You have it all thought out, don’t you?” her husband asked. “What is Panama, what am I, ‘side issues’? You have some loyalty to me, you know,” he said, even though he knew that of course if she did it was far outdistanced by her loyalty to her brother and her own country. But she laughed in her exaggerated way.

“Of COURSE I do! That’s why I don’t want to see you going off by yourself down this—this strange road. It IS strange now, you must admit that!”

“Let me ask you, Ted,” he said bluntly. “Do you think I’m a Communist?”

“That is an area where assumption is useless and appearance a lie,” the Governor replied promptly. “I think you are being foolish. What the reason is, who knows? No one will ever hear me say you are.”

“Of course not,” Felix agreed. “No candidate for President could admit he had a brother-in-law who—”

“That is right,” Ted said crisply. “If that is all you want to see involved here, and all you know of me, very well, we’ll put it on that cheap basis. I can’t afford to have you be a Communist or have you play the Communist game because it would hurt my chances. Reduce it to that level, if you want, and it is still valid. I don’t like what you are trying to do to my country and I want you to stop. Is that clear enough for you?”

“We really do feel, darling—” Patsy began, but Felix interrupted her.

“What is the use of talking? The amendment is in. It remains in. If you want to criticize it, Ted, go ahead. But surely you can understand that when a man becomes committed to something, he cannot back down. Furthermore, I do not believe the United States is so perfect in all this. I do not believe her record on race is so beautiful that she deserves to escape scot-free with the world’s blessing.”

“No more do I,” Ted Jason said, “but I believe she is trying, and I believe she is constantly improving. I believe in criticizing her on home ground, when she needs it. I don’t believe in trying to make her an international scapegoat.”

“There, I am afraid,” Felix said coldly, “you will not find much agreement in the UN.”

“Very well,” Ted said, reverting to his earlier pleasant tone. “Patsy, I guess he’s your problem. I’ve tried.”

“Oh, dear,” Patsy said. “I DO think you are making SUCH a mistake, Felix.”

“I am sorry,” he said firmly. “A man must do what he must.”

“Yes,” Ted agreed. “He must.”

“Do take care of yourself, darling,” Patsy said. “I worry about you so.”

“I will,” Felix said. “Come up to New York, if you like.”

“Perhaps—next week,” she said vaguely. “I want to see what happens on Cullee’s resolution.”

“It will be academic,” Felix said, “My amendment will pass tomorrow. But don’t come, if you don’t feel you should be near me when it does.”

“Oh,” she said, still vaguely. “It isn’t that.”

“Of course it is,” Ted Jason said pleasantly from California. “Good night, now, Felix. I think we understand each other, all around.”

“I’m sorry,” the Ambassador of Panama said, “but—”

“A man must do what he must,” Ted said. “I know. Good night, Patsy.”

“Good night,” she said absently. “Good night to you, too, darling. DO take care of yourself.”

“Yes, yes,” Felix said impatiently. “I said I will.”

But as he put down the receiver, snapped off the light, and resumed the uneasy search for fugitive sleep, he did not feel a certainty as calm as he hoped he had displayed to his wife and her brother. He was taking a gamble that might or might not work out, placing everything on this throw of the dice, betting that he had enough votes in the General Assembly to put his amendment through tomorrow, betting that once it went through Ted might criticize it but the family would not risk a divorce or cast him off or give substance to any personal scandal while Ted was seeking the nomination. Therefore he must be very careful from now on. He must make his stated motivations clear for the record. He must follow in the concluding stages exactly the pattern he had followed up to now, expressing an attitude more regretful than condemnatory toward the United States, enunciating only a friend’s wistful chiding to bring a recalcitrant associate back to the paths of virtue. None of his own personal emotions must show. “When Ted is President of the United States and you are President of Panama,” Patsy had said lightly long ago, “we’ll give you the Canal.” Nothing else held him to the Jasons now, but that was a tie so strong that he could not afford to break it too soon. He would weaken the United States all he could here in the UN, but he was in no position yet to risk an open break.

He did not think he had in the conversation just concluded, even though each of them had grown short and hostile at times. The Jasons weren’t free agents, either, when you looked at it realistically. Their tie was to the convention and nomination next year. Of course they wanted Cullee’s resolution, what could fit in better with their plans? But his last thought as he finally sank into a restless dozing was that they also wanted to avoid a family scandal, they also wanted to profit, if they could, from the good opinion of the colored races everywhere, and so they would hesitate for a long time before bringing about any open break with the man who was moving so forcefully to secure that good opinion here. They would hesitate at least long enough for him to put through his amendment tomorrow in the General Assembly and then it would be so politically advantageous for them that they could not afford to pull away, he told himself as he, the grandson of Don Jorge, dropped finally to sleep.

A sleep denied, had he but known it, to the Congressman from California, who lay in his lonely bed in the house off Sixteenth Street and wondered over and over again whether he was not in reality being an utter fool, an idiot, a pawn of politics, the stooge and white man’s nigger that loud voices in both races were so kindly telling him he was. The press had been after him for comment ever since Seab’s speech, and some of them, dissatisfied with his stock answer—“I believe the vote in the House Foreign Affairs Committee speaks for itself. I wouldn’t want to make any comment on any other aspect of the situation at this time”—had made it quite clear what they thought of him for introducing the resolution in the first place. He had remarked to Maudie at dinner, more puzzled, really, than angered, that “sometimes it seems as though nobody wants anything done in this country unless it can be done exactly their way. If you won’t play with them, they won’t give you any credit for anything.”

It baffled, but it also hurt; and there came a time, after he had heard the skeptical sarcasm in enough reportorial voices and seen and heard enough television and radio commentaries assailing his good faith and denouncing his gullibility, when he had almost begun to believe it.

“They can ride you pretty hard,” he had conceded glumly just before he went up to bed. “You can almost believe it, if you listen to them long enough.”

Maudie had told him not to listen and not to worry, but even she seemed a little shaken by it all. Her own earlier skepticism about “Orrin Knox and them” had given way to a fierce loyalty in his support, but even so, he could see the speculation in her eyes in unguarded moments.

“Don’t you desert me, Maudie,” he had finally said with a rueful laugh. “Don’t know as I could get along at all, if you left me.”

“I won’t leave you,” she promised, “as long as you’re doing right. As long as you’re doing right, I won’t leave you.”

But it was clear enough that the qualification was very real in her mind, and that she would be the judge if she felt the time had ever come.

Now as he lay in his bed and thought of himself and his wife and his friend, of the M’Bulu and Felix and Orrin and the President and everyone else involved in the tragic issue of race in this, its latest twisted turning, he wondered if it would ever make sense and if they would ever come out right on the other side—not just the other side of this immediate tangle, but the other side of the whole business. This was only one little phase of it, one little facet, thrown up into the headlines, transformed into a world scandal by the plans and ambitions of many states and individuals. Yet it went on every minute of every day in a thousand and one variations, from nervous college kids sitting at drugstore lunch counters to scared little children and howling mobs at schools to the cruelest kind of intellectual snubbing at New York cocktail parties where members of his race were invited for the publicity value of their skins, only to be insufferably patronized as human beings once they got there. So many things, so many things, hurtful, unhappy, unjust, unbearable—the miseries of it all, as his mother used to say mournfully on the rare occasions when she let it get through her defenses, the miseries of it all!

And for him, at this moment, in this time, on this immediate problem, miseries even deeper and more profound. Miseries of an empty bed when you needed your wife and she wasn’t there; miseries of a friend closer than a brother, gone and maybe not to come back; miseries of doing what you thought was right, but who knew, maybe for the wrong reasons, maybe just for ambition when all was said and done; miseries of stepping out front and trying to do a job and being made the target for every snide and sneering two-bit nothing in both races as a result; miseries of wondering whether you could trust a white man, any white man; miseries of wondering whether you had indeed been a sucker and a stooge for one particular white man; miseries of wondering whether he would stand by you or let you down; miseries of wondering whether you might really be selling him your birthright, as some said; miseries of wondering if you might not end up with the contempt of both races for trying to help them both—miseries of being black and in a position where you couldn’t avoid your responsibilities. Miseries of being an American and trying somehow to see your way clear to helping the country you loved solve, with liberty and justice for all, her deepest unhappiness and most rending agony.

He gave his body a sudden, furious twist across the bed, buried his face in the pillows, smelled Sue-Dan; and of course that did nothing to help; it only made it worse. Where was she in New York, and what was she doing? Probably with her family; he could probably rest easy that she wasn’t with someone else. Or could he? It wouldn’t be LeGage; he trusted LeGage there implicitly, whatever else might go wrong between them; but it could always be the M’Bulu. Terrible Terry would be flying her around town with all his pretty robes flapping, giving her a big old time with all those fancy Africans at the UN, putting on a big show, being the great royal hero who had America on the run.

Yes, it could be Terry, she would probably like that, she was getting bored with
him,
he wasn’t a sufficiently vigorous hater of the white man to suit her, maybe she was with Terry right this minute, reaching for him the way she did for—

“No!” he cried aloud in anguish, whipping upon his back so that he lay full asprawl. “No,” he whimpered more quietly so as not to wake Maudie. “Oh,
no.”

For a long time he lay so, really thinking very little, images blurred and incoherent passing through his mind, jealous, sexual, fearfully painful, consciously masochistic as he removed himself from his memories and placed a triumphantly grinning Terry in them. The time came when this produced a physical reaction, agonizing, excruciating, rending, and easeful, all in one. He remained where he was, breathing heavily, as it passed and left his body limp; and little by little rational thought returned, and he began to think again about the road he had chosen and where it might lead him, and how he might best pass along it with credit to his country, his people, and himself.

There recurred to him presently his conversation with the Secretary of State, the tone of voice in which Orrin had called him from Spring Valley shortly after midnight and told him what he and the President had been discussing. At first the Secretary’s approach had been cordial but cautious; it was obvious that he was worried that Seab’s speech and all the other attacks upon them both might have shaken Cullee badly. Cullee’s initial hesitation had shown him he was right to be worried. Characteristically Orrin had wasted no time in coming to grips with it.

“How about it? Are you really worried about what they say? Do you want to back out? You can, you know, if it really bothers you. That would bring criticism too, but we’d help you ride it out.”

At first, a little overwhelmed by this direct and unadorned approach, he had hesitated.

“Go ahead and tell me,” Orrin had said. “The only way we can get along together on this is to have all our cards on the table. If you really think you’re being my stooge or I’ve conned you into something, say so. It won’t be true, but if you think so, it might as well be. Do you?”

“N-o,” he had said at last. “At least—I don’t think so.”

“I have ambitions too, you know,” the Secretary of State had said bluntly. “Maybe I’m just using you for all you’re worth. Maybe my only motive is to line up the colored vote to help win that nomination. You’d be a powerful asset if I had you on my side. Of course you know that. Better think about it carefully,” he said with an irony entering his tone. “I may be a bad and evil white man, out to use you all I can.”

The Congressman had gotten a glimmer at that point of why it was that Orrin Knox had gone so far in the public life of the country, for this directness and candor gave him a major psychological advantage even as it placed others at a disadvantage. Cullee couldn’t really say, “Yes, I distrust you,” even if he did, for Orrin had set the question in a psychological framework that would have permitted him to dismiss such an answer with a sardonic comment that would have left him with the advantage still.

If one were in any doubt of him at all, one was naturally disposed by this candor to be less doubtful of him, to trust him more and come further toward his position. So Cullee had responded with something of a matching irony.

“Maybe I’m out to use
you.
Maybe I could use your support in my race for Senator just as much as you could use mine for President.”

“Oh, you
are
going to run, then,” Orrin said. He added, “I’m very pleased for you,” and sounded it.