A Shade of Difference (79 page)

“What business is it of theirs?” the President had demanded, and Orrin had remarked that everybody’s business was everybody’s business at the UN nowadays. For several reasons, therefore, he did not relish the prospect of having to make another sudden change in the delegation so soon upon the heels of the other, even though illness would of course furnish a valid excuse.

Whether this would be necessary, he did not know. Lafe, who had seemed quite alarmed about Hal Fry’s health three or four days ago, had sounded more confident when he discussed it with him last night. “I think we’re going to get it cleared up in a day or so,” he had said, with an unconcern that didn’t ring quite true. But Orrin had been unable to shake him with further questioning, and when he had spoken to Hal himself this morning there had been the same stout insistence that everything was coming along all right.

“You’re sure,” Orrin had said. “Because I don’t want you to put on any heroics and then fail us when the pinch comes. I’d much rather you bowed out immediately than have you go along torturing yourself because of some concept of duty. I value it, and so does Harley, but your health is more important than anything else right now.”

“Is it?” Hal had asked thoughtfully. “I wonder.”

“We’ve got to feel we can depend on you,” Orrin had said finally.

“You can.”

So there it was. He assumed both Senators would come down to Washington for the vote on the Hamilton Resolution, whenever that might be, and he would have a chance to see for himself … whenever that might be.
That
depended, to a large extent, upon the determined old warrior who had just gone into Bob Munson’s office ahead of him.

He was destined to lose—he
must
lose. Justly or unjustly, Seab was standing in the way of the racial juggernaut of the Twentieth Century. Justly or unjustly, it would roll over him if he would not moderate his views to accommodate its passage. There was an outside chance that he might perhaps be persuaded to do so. If not, there was nothing for it but to let the juggernaut roll.

Seab and Bob and himself—whatever the outcome was to be, they would in all probability decide it together in the next forty-five minutes. He was struck by the thought that once more the fate of a major legislative issue rested with these three friends who had worked with and against each other in so many, many legislative battles of the past. It was with an ironic but curiously gentle smile that he stepped forward into the Majority Leader’s office to greet his two old colleagues and prepare to settle a major issue with them once again.

In the kitchen he could hear Maudie singing, and this sound, so foreign to his own once-more puzzled and uncertain mood, brought an extra edge of sharpness into his voice as he threw down his papers and flung off his coat and slumped with a strength-sapping tiredness into his seat at the dining-room table.

“Seems to me like you’re having a high old time around here,” he called out. “You got a boy friend out there, maybe?”

“Never mind my boy friends,” she said, coming through the swinging door with a tray of sandwiches and soup. “Best you keep your mind on your own problems, I’d say. How come you home for lunch, anyhow?”

“I just wanted to be with you, Maudie. You’re the only friend I’ve got right now. You know that.”

“I expect that’s truer than you like to think,” she said, sitting down opposite and studying him thoughtfully, much as his mother used to do when he was embarked upon some course she wasn’t entirely sure of but with which she wanted to help if she could. “They been giving you fits on this, haven’t they? Seems like they don’t know what they want. That’s all right if you know what you want. Think you do?”

“Oh, sure,” he said, fiddling with the soup without much appetite. “I want to pass my resolution and have my wife back and have everybody like me and be a hero to LeGage and all them and do my job at the UN and have the press like me and do what’s best for my country and—isn’t any limit on what I want, Old Maudie. Just a limit of getting there, that’s all.”

“You best forget that wife, and that LeGage, too. Neither one of ’em worth two spits on a dusty road. Likewise you best forget being a hero to everybody. You look in the mirror at night, if you can be a hero to that one when the sun comes down, that’s all you got to worry about.”

“And you, Maudie,” he said, meaning to be light but sounding serious in spite of himself. “Got to worry about you, too.”

She shrugged.

“Don’t see me making any signs to move out, do you? I’ll let you know when you stop being a hero to me. Won’t be any mistake about that … What they cooking up?” He felt a sudden sinking sensation in his heart.

“Who?”

“Oh, that Secretary Knox and Senator Cooley and all. I been hearing all sorts of things on the TV just now.”

“I didn’t know you’d been keeping tabs on me. What did the TV say?”

“All about how they cooking up some change in your resolution. Seems it will get through the Senate sooner if they cut it back to make the white folks happy. I’m just wondering, that’s all.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said sharply. “They haven’t mentioned anything like that to me.”

“Wouldn’t. Wouldn’t ’til it’s all done, would they? Might be you’d do something stop you being a hero to
them
if they told you too early.”

“You think I’m a hero to them? You think I’m their pet, like LeGage and the
Post
and all them say? Is that what you really think? I’d like to know.”

“Don’t know. You say you doin’ what’s right, I guess you doin’ what’s right. I guess your white friends won’t make you out a fool. Not if they think you worth anything at all.”

“I guess they won’t, I guess they’d better not. Anyway, Orrin Knox promised me—”

She made an impatient gesture.

“Promise on Sunday, cheat on Monday.”

“Today’s Tuesday. And Orrin Knox doesn’t go back on his word.”

“Well, that’s good,” she said, attracted by a sudden noise and peering outside. “That’s good you got such faith in your white friends, because here come a couple of black ones going to give you a hard time. Nobody but Mr. LeGage Shelby and his big buddy, Mr. Fancy-Pants from Africa. Want me to serve ’em lunch?”

“Don’t serve them anything,” he said, a sudden tension constricting his heart and clamping down on his stomach so that he was unable to eat any more and shoved his chair back violently from the table. “Just don’t serve ’em anything. If I ring, you come show them to the door, that’s all.”

“Oh, my. Going to throw them out in style, are we?”

“Going to throw them out, in style or not.”

But for all that he meant it, and for all that he went to the door as though going into battle, it was not with any certainty of outcome that he flung the door wide and stared defiantly at the two who confronted him there. LeGage, his hand outstretched but not yet touching the bell, looked as tense and unhappy as he; Terrible Terry looked as though he were on the gayest of picnics. It was he who spoke first, sweeping in grandly as he did so.

“He is home, you see, LeGage, just as his office said he would be. Cullee, old chap, how are you?”

“My office doesn’t lie,” he snapped, though he wasn’t sure of it lately. “What are you doing in Washington?”

“It’s a free country, as my American friends are so fond of telling me,” the M’Bulu said contentedly as he disposed his robes about him and sat down gracefully on the sofa. “I will have you know I have been invited down to attend a most smashing cocktail party here in honor of Justice Davis and myself. It isn’t until tomorrow, though, so I thought I would accompany our mutual friend here in a visit upon you. You don’t mind, I hope, dear old Cullee. You have a most charming home, empty though it is of the lady of the house.”

“She’ll be back,” he said, as though the promise would be enough to produce her. The M’Bulu shrugged with an elaborate use of his hands-out, palms-up gesture. “Who knows? Indeed, dear Cullee, who knows?”

The Congressman looked at him with an expression in which contempt, jealousy, and pain were mingled, then whirled abruptly on LeGage, still standing uneasily by the door.

“Sit down,” he ordered tersely. “What are you doing here with this jackass? What do you want of me?”

“I thought maybe we should have another talk, that’s all,” the chairman of DEFY said carefully, moving toward a chair. “You’re getting pretty far out and away, these days. I thought maybe I could still bring you back.”

“What’s it to me what you think?” Cullee demanded. “And what do you mean, far out and away? We’ve been all over this ten million times; I told you what I was going to do and I’m doing it. What call have you got now, coming into my home and trying to chew me out?”

“You see?” Terry inquired of no one in particular. “I told you he would be difficult, LeGage. I told you it was a pointless errand, trying to bring old Cullee back to his own people. He’s probably half white already, underneath those clothes. At any rate,” he added with a sudden vicious tone, “I dare say his liver is.”

“Do you want me to—” the Congressman began furiously, but restrained himself even as Terry said. “Oh, you couldn’t,” with an airy wave of the hand.

“I could, but I wouldn’t want to dirty my hands with a piece of foreign trash like you. I said to you, LeGage, what do you want of me? Answer and get out.”

“You know what they’re going to do,” his ex-roommate said, looking tense but determined. “They’re going to water down your resolution so it won’t mean anything anyway. Why in hell don’t you get sensible and get back where you belong, with us? You’re just a fool, all out there by yourself.”

“I’m not all out here by myself! A lot of people are with me. Just because you and your bunch of fanatics want to mess up America, it doesn’t mean a lot of good people don’t believe in me.”

“So modest, too,” Terry remarked. “So very modest, our noble Congressman.”

“Listen!” Cullee said. “What about things in your own back yard? What about things back home in dear old Molobangwe? Seems to me I heard about a riot over there yesterday. Maybe you better skitter back on home, you big pretty bug, and see what’s going on in your own house. Maybe your cousin’ll turn you out while you’re over here telling us how to run our country. Ever think of that, Terry? Maybe you’d better!”

“Everything is under control,” the M’Bulu said serenely. “Please be assured of that; everything is under control. Much as you’d like to see me destroyed, dear sweet Cullee.”

“I’d like to see you strung up by the heels with your head in the pot. Maybe then we’d have some peace around here.”

“You think that would do it?” Terry said with a sudden blazing harshness. “You think that would be sufficient to bring harmony to this great happy world so the blacks would love the whites and the whites would love the blacks and everything would be wonderful? Maybe I could offer to be a sacrifice if that would do it. But it won’t, old Cullee, and you know it. It will take more than that, a lot more than that!”

“They’re going to make a fool of you, Cullee,” LeGage said softly. “They’re going to get you fighting your own people and stooging for
them,
and all of a sudden some day you’re going to wake up and find they’ve dropped you flat, and you won’t have them and you won’t have us. And where will you be then, I ask you … Look,” he said, with a sudden agonized earnestness that shut the M’Bulu out of the room entirely and left just the two of them, arguing desperately as they used to do at Howard, as they had on so many angry, hopelessly entangled occasions in the past, “I don’t want to see them hurt you, Cullee. I don’t want to see you get separated from your own people. Orrin
Knox is just going to use you and drop you; that’s all they want is to have things their own way and have you to stooge for them … Please, Cullee,” he said in an aching whisper. “Please come back.”

“‘Please Cullee, please come back,’” the Congressman said with a bitter mimicry that was curiously close to tears. “How you do sound, Mr. LeGage Shelby, dear old buddy and roommate of mine, how you do carry on! And
what do you want from me, if it isn’t to stooge for
you?
Tell me
I’m
far out and away! Where have you gone? A long way from where I used to know you, I can tell you that, a
long
way!”

For several minutes neither of them said anything more and the M’Bulu did not stir, so that there was in the room only their harsh excited breathing and a sense of loss become irrevocable. Finally Cullee spoke, in a lower and less agitated tone, frightening to LeGage in its dull air of finality.

“Now I think you better go. I trust Orrin Knox and I’m doing what I think is best. You want me to mess it up down here in Washington so you can get the whole world to stomp on us up there in the UN. Well, I think more of my country than that. I think I’m an American, ’Gage. I don’t know what you are.… As for you,” he said to Terrible Terry with a contempt so withering that it penetrated even the bright defenses of that carefree soul, “I don’t know what you are, either, and I don’t care. So, now, get out. Get out both of you.”

“Seems like you’re always telling me to get out, lately,” ’Gage Shelby said in a shaking voice. “All right, I’m going, but I want you to know—”

“Then go! Just shut up and go!”

LeGage stared at him with a strange intensity, his face torn by some terrible emotion Cullee could not understand or really see, so violent was the storm of his own feelings. Finally ’Gage spoke in a voice so choked it was almost a croak.

“You watch out, Cullee. Things are going to happen to you if you don’t watch out. I warn you, things are going to—”

“Well!” Terrible Terry said lightly, rising to his feet. “I must say, how dramatic we all are, here in America. How—”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Cullee Hamilton said.
“Will you get out?”

After they had, urged on by a tight-lipped Maudie who entered and said “Scat!” in a tone so intense that even the M’Bulu looked taken aback, he remained standing by the window staring out one hand gripping the edge of the draperies, his forehead resting against the sash, the world seeming to spin away and away until he no longer felt any control of it.