A Shade of Difference (65 page)

This could mean only that one or the other of them must change his position, or their friendship with all its memories and shared ideals would be gone forever. He did not honestly see how he could change his, however bleak and lonely this certainty made him feel.

Sue-Dan—Sue-Dan was another matter. He had been obsessed with her the day they met; he would, he suspected, be obsessed with her to the day he died. She always had one advantage, he had often thought bitterly as she had sided increasingly with LeGage in their running battles over race: she could always spread her legs, and he’d come running. At first this had been wonderful, and in the opening years of their marriage he had felt humbly grateful that he had found a wife who could give him such satisfaction. Two bodies did not always go together that completely; theirs did, and it was a great happiness. But there came a time when he realized that this was jeopardizing his independence, sapping his determination, suborning his integrity. Their arguments did not end in conclusions, but in sex; and that was no ending. Increasingly Sue-Dan, like LeGage, had attempted to control and dominate his thinking, persuade him to change his views, lead him in directions a stubborn steadiness told him he should not go; and she had a weapon LeGage did not have, and used it as coolly and calculatingly as she knew how.

But Cullee Hamilton, thank God, had more to him than that. Increasingly in these recent years sex had not been enough to bring him to her way of thinking, and as she began to realize it she had begun to react with the waspish carping that had become noticeably sharper in the days since Terry had decided to escort a little girl to school. He felt that she was still devoted to his personal advancement, and the idea of being the wife of the first Negro Senator since Reconstruction appealed to her own pride and self-esteem; but she could not resist the acid comment, the extra dig, the debilitating, weakening, dismaying comment that sought to find in destruction of a competing ego the dominion that could not be found in love. And still his body ached for her, whatever she did, whatever she said. He despised himself for it, hated himself for it, told himself he was a weakling and a fool—and still came back.

Except that now he did not know whether he would come back; and the bleakness and loneliness he felt at the prospect of losing LeGage’s friendship was as nothing compared with the bleakness and loneliness he felt at the prospect of losing Sue-Dan. Yet it had come at last to the issue, and he felt that here no more than there could he make the final sacrifice of integrity that was demanded of him.

And so once again, as on the day a week ago when he had stood in the Senate and hardly known what was going on because he was so deeply involved in thinking about his personal problems, he found himself adrift on the angry sea of turmoil and emotional upset that always seemed to surround those two people. As long as he had known them both, it occurred to him with a sudden deeply wounding bitterness, they had never given him peace of heart or mind. And yet they expected him to put up with them, and forgive them, and subordinate his own purposes and personality to theirs, and not expect much of anything in return except the chance to serve them and say, Yes, ’Gage, and Yes, Sue-Dan, and never keep an ounce of pride and independence for poor old Cullee.

Well, poor old Cullee this time had other fish to fry. Poor old Cullee had about decided that it was time to cut loose from both of them and their ideas on what to do about race, and how to humiliate the white man, and all the rest of it. Their whole approach was sick, sad, pathetic, and self-defeating, and he as a member of the Congress of the United States knew it even if they didn’t.

And yet—and yet. So steady was his temperament and so fair his nature that even to them he could not be unjust. Maybe they were right after all. Maybe all those who said you had to resort to violent measures or live forever under the white man’s intolerant and self-interested domination were correct. They weren’t living under it any more in most of Africa. Why should they live under it any more in America, where men were supposed to be created equal and have an equal chance to make good on their own merits? Why should they tolerate any more, in this chaotic twentieth century, the sort of nonsense that said the color of a man’s skin had anything to do with his essential worth? Wasn’t he really, perhaps, being just an Uncle Tom, a white man’s stooge, a middle-of-the-roader trying to maintain an impossible position even as the road was washing away from under him? Wasn’t he really, perhaps, being just a pawn of white man’s politics with his resolution and his attempts to be fair and his foolish desire for integrity? Why did he think he had all the answers, and Sue-Dan and ’Gage were so wrong?

And why did he think, he told himself with the deepest self-scarification of all, why did he think that he could fool himself into thinking that his confusion had any other basis than it did? Why did he think he could deny to himself what was really gnawing at his heart, the bonds of friendship and the chains of love? LeGage, for all his tiresome jealousies and difficult hypersensitivities, was his oldest, nearest friend, closer to him than a brother. Sue-Dan, for all her sarcastic and cutting attitudes, was his wife, after whose body he lusted as hotly as he ever had. Even now as he looked about the room for the faces he knew instinctively he would not find, he felt the stirring in his thighs that always began at the sight of her, the sound of her, the smell of her, the thought of her. It didn’t matter what she said or what she did; she had him where he was most helpless and he couldn’t seem to do anything about it. And in a different sense, though nearly as commanding, he was held in the ties of youth and memory and gallant dreams and shared ideals to LeGage.

Had his wife and his friend been in the room at that moment, and had they been capable of the imagination and perception to approach him with the face of love, he would have withdrawn his resolution, abandoned his fight for moderation, perhaps become as intolerant and impatient as they. But they were gone, and although they did not know it, their moment to recapture him was also gone.

And yet—and yet he missed them both with such a terrible hunger and unhappiness that he did not know, at that moment, whether he would have the strength to continue on his middle road when the moment came, as come it must, to make the final decision and bid them final farewell.

It was no wonder, therefore, that he showed a blank and unseeing visage to the hostile, sneering eyes of Ghana and Guinea, the skeptical glances of Brazil and Ceylon, the quizzical examinations of India and the U.A.R. as he turned blindly and left the noisy Lounge to start his personal search for honor without betrayal and integrity with love.

2

“You understand, of course,” the little owl-eyed man said in his dark green office in the Medical Service on the fifth floor of the Secretariat, “that seizures of this type are quite frequently caused by some deep-seated psychosomatic—”

“I understand,” Hal Fry interrupted bluntly from behind the screen of pain that seemed to be separating him from the world, “that we’ve been all over that before, and there’s nothing to it. How many times do I have to tell you that it isn’t overwork, it isn’t tiredness, it isn’t my love life—”

“Have you got any?” the little man interrupted quickly. “Are you sure you’ve told me all you want to tell me, in that area?”

“I don’t want to tell you a damned thing. And I don’t think I have, either.”

“Ah, I thought there was something you were ashamed of. You wouldn’t have been trying so hard to conceal it, if there weren’t.”

“What in the
hell
have I been trying to conceal? You haven’t asked me and I haven’t told you. I don’t see that it has any bearing—”

“Come, come, of course it has a bearing. Our sexual lives have a bearing on everything we do. Yours does. Mine does. Everybody’s d—”

“Are you married?” Hal Fry demanded abruptly. The little man gave a sudden blink.

“Yes.”

“Happily?”

“We’re temporarily separated,” the little man said stiffly, “but that’s neither here nor th—”

“Ah,” Senator Fry said, though the terrible dizziness was back in his head and he didn’t know how many more seconds he would be able to maintain this whimsy without fainting, “that accounts for your nervous manner, then.”

“What nervous manner?” the little man demanded sharply. “I haven’t a nerv— Now, see here,” he said coldly. “Suppose you stop playing games and let’s get on with this. Obviously you’re suffering from some sort of sexual maladjustment. How do you and your wife react to one another during coitus?”

“We don’t react at all,” Hal Fry said, and a sudden little expression of pain, unassociated with the pain now ravaging his chest and abdomen, came into his eyes. His inquisitor perceived it with a triumphant cry.

“So! You don’t react at all! And you’re trying to tell me you don’t have a sexual prob—”

“My wife died ten years ago,” Hal Fry said. “Assuming it’s any of your business.”

“Well,” the little owl-eyed man said. “Well. I’m sorry. Then obviously you’re reacting from a lack of sexual outlet. Do you have a mistress?”

“No, I don’t have a mistress! How much longer is this nonsense going to go on?”

“Now, see here. You came to me. I didn’t come to you. If you have a problem and want my help, well and good. If not, there’s nothing I can do and we might as well stop wasting each other’s time.”

“You’re supposed to diagnose medical ailments,” Hal Fry said bitterly, “not parrot all this guff that has no bearing.”

“It has a bearing. A history of a marriage that was basically unhappy, followed by a long period of widower hood without adequate outlet—”

“Who said my marriage was basically unhappy? And what do you know about my outlets?”

“I can tell,” the little man said, not without a trace of smugness. “Was it happy?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“Ah,” the little man said with satisfaction. “You see, I was right. And the shame of whatever it was you did that made it unhappy, followed by ten years of abstinence or unsatisfactory temporary liaisons, has finally culminated in a psychosomatic physical reaction that is—”

“Now, see here,” Senator Fry said, “I wish you’d stop talking all this damned nonsense and try to find out what is really wrong with me. Right at this moment I can barely see you—my vision seems to have some sort of red shadow over it—and I have terrible cramps in my stomach and my head feels like the devil and I think if I had to walk across the room I’d fall flat on my face from weakness. And raking up my past won’t help.”

“It was an unhappy past, then,” the little owl-eyed man said softly, staring at him with a wide-eyed candor. “The pattern is quite classic. The unhappy marriage, the guilt complex, the years of regret and frustration, all leading up to a psychiatric collapse of one sort or another. You have children?” he demanded abruptly.

‘Why should I tell you anything?” Hal Fry asked through the agonizing vise that had clamped itself abruptly on his chest. “I have a son.”

“How old is he?”

“Nineteen.”

“Is he with you?”

“He’s nearby.”

“In school?”

“No.”

“Oh,” the little man said with a quick, pouncing softness. “In an institution?”

“Why should I tell you anything?”

“I see,” the little man said, nodding thoughtfully. “Yes, that would explain it. The marriage made unhappy by the mentally defective child, the guilt feeling, the bitterness, the early death of the wife, the years of trying to find something to fill the emptiness, the futile searching for activities to occupy a life—”

“Look,” Hal Fry said savagely, “I am a Senator of the United States. If you don’t think that’s enough to occupy a life, you’re crazy. I don’t have time to turn around, I have so much to occupy my life. So what does that do to your silly theories?”

“Look inside yourself,” the little man said softly. “Study your own reactions. Analyze your own sickness. You’ll see. Then come back and we will see what we can do about it together.”

“I wouldn’t come back to you if I were dying.” The little man smiled, a calm, superior smile.

“You’re not dying. You’re just very much confused. A week from now, two weeks, a day maybe, you’ll be back telling me I’m right.”

“But I am
not well,”
Hal Fry said desperately, for now all his symptoms seemed to be attacking him at once and he literally did not know whether he could stand up and walk. “I have duties and responsibilities I must fulfill. I must get well. You are being no help to me at all.”

“I have been the greatest help to you that any man could be, for I have given you the key to unlock your own illness. You will thank me for it before long. Wait and see.”

“I’m sick,” Senator Fry repeated hopelessly, “and I must get well.”

“You
are
sick,” the little man agreed, “and you
will
get well. If you want to.”

“I think,” Hal said, managing to rise and surprised to find that he could move, slowly and carefully but without falling, toward the door, “that you are insane. I think you are insane from an insufferable arrogance of intellect and pride that will not let you make an honest diagnosis, because you know that if you tried to, you couldn’t.”

“Patients often get abusive when they are forced to face themselves.” The little owl-eyed man turned away indifferently to the papers on his desk. “Come back and see me when you are ready to get well.”

“I’ll die before I come back to you.”

“You won’t die. Come back when you are ready.”

And that, Hal Fry thought as he walked with an unsteady determination out of the office, past the pretty little Indonesian nurse who smiled sympathetically to him as he went, and down the corridor to the elevator, was about the best you could expect from these overtrained, oversexed, and overtheorized doctors who tried to read into everybody else their own sick frustrations. All the little man had accomplished was to instill the seed of doubt, to unnerve him, to rake up the past and make him feel even unhappier than he already was, to weaken and sap his strength of will and fortitude of character at a point at which he was coming rapidly to the conclusion that strength of will and fortitude of character were about all he had left to go on.