A Shade of Difference (80 page)

It was in this detached and floating mood, in which all the world seemed unreal, all plans undone, nothing any longer important or imperative, that he became aware that a chauffeured limousine was drawing up before his door and saw descending from it the tall gray figure of the Secretary of State. Still moving as in a dream, he left the window and went slowly to let him in.

Here in these brisk aseptic corridors high on Morningside Heights there were no longer any of the assumptions of psychiatric prejudgment concerning the infinite complexities of the human mind. Here in Harkness Pavilion medicine meant business, and there was no nonsense in the way it went about it.

Thus Senator Fry found himself hurried briskly from doctor to doctor and test to test this studied, that analyzed, efficient men and women skillfully reducing the human body and its functions to charts, graphs, and carefully organized reports. Once he remarked lightly—trying to cover the slashing pain in his chest—that he might be the medical mystery of the year.

“You won’t be when we get through with you,” the specialist who was checking his heart told him. But the electrocardiogram showed nothing, and the savage chest pains went on, and the specialist was not so confident when he said good-by and sent his patient on to the next station of his fateful journey.

By 3 p.m. he had been interviewed, tested, and examined for a dozen different things by a dozen different doctors. Conferences had been held, consultations had gone forward, a conclusion had been tentatively reached as one possibility after another was studied and eliminated. This he did not know. All he knew was that he felt an increasing sense of loneliness, a growing despair, for it seemed to him that he was traversing endless corridors, walking down endless hallways, looking into endless eyes that grew steadily more blurred and more impersonal as they discovered nothing, learned nothing, floundered deeper and deeper in the unfathomable mystery of the terrible storms that afflicted his body. In this sick blackness his heart cried out for his son, though he knew his son did not know him and could not help him, and for his friends, though he thought them uncaring and far away. He came to feel, though tended by many hands and the concern of many minds, utterly abandoned by the world. It was therefore with a rush of gratitude so profound it brought tears to his eyes that he entered the last of many neat white rooms and found waiting for him the junior Senator from Iowa and a young couple, apparently Indonesian, sitting with him on a wicker sofa.

“We thought we’d come and see the Pavilion’s most distinguished patient,” Lafe Smith said easily. “You remember this young lady from the doctor’s office at the UN; and this is her husband, who is interning here. How have they been treating you?”

“Fairly gently,” he said, managing a smile, “but with great thoroughness. I seem to have no secrets left—except, of course,” and his smile turned sad, “the secret of what is wrong with me. That still seems to elude them.”

“It won’t for long,” the boy said, flashing a comforting smile from his bronzed face. “They are pretty thorough here.”

“I know that,” Hal Fry said with a rueful humor. “Much better, I think, than the doctor your wife works for.”

The girl smiled.

“He is not well himself, I think. Inside, not well. He is quite mixed up about many things. It might be better if he worked somewhere else, in some other profession.”

“This is a young lady with definite opinions,” Lafe said with a smile, “as you can tell.”

“So I see. The two of you are going back to Indonesia when you complete your training, is that it?”

The boy nodded.

“We consider it a small, but perhaps worthwhile, contribution to our country. Doctors and nurses are needed so badly there.”

“Will you have your own hospital eventually?” Hal asked in an interested tone, then abruptly reached out for a chair. At once the girl was at his side, holding his arm and helping him to sit down.

“We should like to,” she said, returning to sit again, gravely, on the sofa. “It is a dream we have.”

“I suspect you have a way of making your dreams come true,” he said, managing a smile.

“Yes,” Lafe said with humorous agreement. A little silence fell and finally Hal Fry broke it, as he realized he must.

“Now suppose you tell me what you know. I haven’t been left all alone with you in this great big hospital just by chance. What is it?”

Across the face of the Senator from Iowa—When had he first seen that boyish visage, grinning at him across the Senate floor on its first day there? A long, long time ago, in some other world where things were right side up and one’s body made sense—there passed a troubled frown. The young couple, Hal noted, were sitting very still. A terrible terror gripped his heart.

“What is it?” he demanded. “What is it?”

“Pretty much everything has been eliminated,” Lafe said carefully, “except one thing that the blood count indicates, and for that they want to give you one further test to be sure. It involves an exploratory operation, probably tomorrow morning.”

“Exploratory?” Senator Fry said, and the word seemed to hang like some ominous shadow above their heads.

“In a sense, yes,” the girl said, “though not in the way you perhaps think. It does not involve a massive incision of the body.”

“Only the sternum,” the boy said. He gestured to it with a lean brown hand. “The breastbone. They test the marrow in it.”

“What’s that for?” Hal Fry said. A look of compassion that terrified him even more came into the eyes of the junior Senator from Iowa.

“My dear friend,” Lafe said. “It is for leukemia.”

And now, the Secretary of State told himself, he must embark upon one of the most difficult conversations of his life, and from it emerge, hopefully, with victory for Cullee and solace for Seab, a forward step for the United States domestically and a sign of good faith to the watching world. Quite a little assignment for a diplomat, as the President had remarked. He wondered if he could bring it off. Probably not, if his host’s initial expression was any indication. The Congressman looked unhappy and hostile and curiously remote, as though he were simultaneously suffering from something and had lost interest in it.

“Cullee,” Orrin Knox said, holding out his hand, “your office told me you were at home, so I took the liberty of coming here. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No,” the Congressman said with an air of tired disinterest. “I don’t mind.”

“Good,” the Secretary said, deliberately taking the chair he had noticed before to be his host’s. Cullee gave no sign, but dropped dispirited on the sofa and put his hands behind his head with a tired, unhappy sigh.

“Are you all right?” Orrin asked. Cullee gave a small, unresponsive smile.

“I guess so,” he said, adding without insolence, “Are you?”

“As well as can be expected, I guess. The world being what it is.”

“Yes,” the Congressman said slowly. “Well”—and there was a spark of humor returning—“are you and I improving it?”

“Trying,” Orrin Knox said. “Trying. Now we’ve got to get your resolution through the Senate and we’ll have done all we can at this end of the line.”

“Isn’t it going through?” Cullee asked with a stirring of surprise. “I thought it was.”

“I’m sure of it,” Orrin said. The Congressman, he realized, was suddenly out of whatever doldrums he had been in and watchfully alert.

“You don’t sound sure,” he said sharply. “What’s gone wrong?”

“I am sure. Nothing’s gone wrong. We have the votes.”

“Well, then—” The Congressman paused. “Maybe you’d better tell me what it is,” he said with an ominous quietness.

The Secretary studied him for a moment, obviously debating what tack to take. Then he took a deep breath and what seemed a reasonable gamble and told the truth.

“Nothing really fundamental. I just don’t want us to kill Seab Cooley while we’re at it, that’s all.”

“How will it kill Seab Cooley?” Cullee asked scornfully. “That sounds too dramatic for me to swallow, Senator.”

“It does sound dramatic, doesn’t it? It could happen, though, if the resolution is so strong he feels he has to filibuster.”

“Am I supposed to be concerned about that? Am I supposed to be concerned about an old man who has always supported the oppression of my people? Let him think about that while he’s dying from a filibuster, if he wants to!”

“He’s only done what his upbringing and training have taught him to do,” Orrin said quietly, but his host only looked angrier and more excited.

“So have I! So have I! Now I’m supposed to go easy on that old man? You want me to go easy on the South, Senator? Don’t make me laugh!”

“Laughing isn’t what anybody is doing, at the moment,” Orrin Knox said gravely. “We’re trying to work this out—
I’m
trying to work it out—with victory for you and still not too much pain for him. That’s all.”

“No, you’re not,” Cullee Hamilton said bitterly. “You’re trying to do exactly what ’Gage and Terry and all the rest have been warning me about. You’re just using Seab Cooley as an excuse. You’re afraid the resolution will offend too many people in the South, and that will hurt your chances for the nomination, and that’s why you want me to water it down. That’s what they told me and I said it wasn’t so. I said I believed in Orrin Knox. My God! What a laugh!”

For a second all the Secretary’s old angry impatience flared up within him, and it was all he could do to hold back some sharp and savagely stinging retort; but Orrin, as his colleagues had noted, was growing up, and so he managed, though not without an intense struggle, to suppress it. He looked at the Congressman with a calm and unflinching appraisal that made him drop his eyes and stare angrily at the floor. This accomplished, the Secretary spoke in a calm voice.

“If that were the best you could really think of me, then it would probably be wisest that I leave right now. I can’t really believe, however, that your view of me is that shallow, however emotional you may be about it at the moment. There are reasons, my friend, for not driving too hard against a man who has been United States Senator for fifty years and served his country well in many battles on many fronts. You know them as well as I do. You wouldn’t do it to the Speaker. No more would I want you to do it to Seab Cooley. Furthermore,” and a certain tartness came back into his voice, “who said I wanted to water down your damned resolution? I haven’t mentioned anything about it.”

“You don’t have to,” the Congressman said in a quieter but still hostile tone. “I can see you coming. Anyway,” he added with a sudden renewal of anger, “why play word games about it? What could I possibly change to please Seab Cooley that wouldn’t destroy the whole meaning of it? He wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less, and you know it. So what are we talking about?”

“We’re talking about doing honor,” Orrin Knox said, still with an edge in his voice, “—and I am going on the belief that you value the word—to a servant of this Republic who, whatever his faults in one area, has done well by his country in many others. That’s what we’re talking about. Are you with me?”

“I swear I don’t see why I should be.”

There was another angry silence, during which the Congressman in his turn stared at his guest. The Secretary’s eyes did not drop, and presently Cullee spoke in a voice that yielded very little.

“I swear I don’t see why I should be. He’s done enough dishonor to my people so I don’t see why I should honor him.” A sudden bleak expression came into his eyes. “It’s just like ’Gage said. He said I couldn’t trust you.”

“You know LeGage a thousand times better than I do,” Orrin said, “but I don’t think his views on me or any other white man are very conducive to a better understanding between the races. Now, do you, really?”

“At least he knows where he stands,” Cullee Hamilton said bitterly. “That’s more than I do, right this minute.”

“No honest man knows where he stands exactly. Only approximately, and with a prayer to the Lord to forgive his errors, if he’s wise. But that doesn’t mean you can’t see some things reasonably clearly, and one of them is that this eternal self-defeating suspicion of each other’s motives isn’t going to get any of us anywhere. Or does that sound like nonsense to you, too?”

“No,” the Congressman said slowly, “it doesn’t sound like nonsense.” His face set into a stubborn scowl. “But I’m not about to soften things down for Seab Cooley. Let him filibuster and be damned, as far as I’m concerned. He doesn’t deserve any better from any Negro.”

“Look: You don’t even know yet what could be done. Why don’t we just consider it for a minute as a couple of legislative technicians and see how it sounds? Here”—and he pulled a copy of H. J. Res. 23 out of his pocket and tossed it on the coffee table between them—“the only thing that might need to be changed is the last paragraph. We can let the rest of it stand, if it makes Terry happy.”

“But not all of it, if it makes me happy? Why don’t you leave me alone, Senator? It says it the way I want to say it.” An ominous glint came again into his eyes. “You don’t want me to chuck the whole thing, do you?”

“No, sir, I do not. The language now reads, ‘It is also the sense of the Congress that the United States should move with even greater speed to improve the lot of its Negro citizens. The Congress pledges its full assistance in securing such greater speed.’ … How about ‘should
give serious consideration to moving with greater speed
,’
and so forth. Would that be agreeable to you?”

The Congressman shook his head, the stubborn, embittered expression still in his eyes.

“Even if it were, which it isn’t, it wouldn’t be to Seab Cooley.”

“Bob Munson and I have just had lunch with Seab Cooley, and there is some reason to believe it might be.”

“Then that’s even more reason why I can’t accept it, so that answers that.”

“It doesn’t answer anything,” Orrin Knox said sharply. “Nothing. All he asks is a slight modification and the chance to make a speech against it, and then he’ll have made his record and can get out of the way.”

“And be re-elected in South Carolina and go on helping to suppress my people. No, thank you. And it isn’t any ‘slight modification,’ as you very well know. ‘Should move with even greater speed’ is a long way from ‘should give greater consideration to moving,’ Senator. What do you take me for, a fool?”