A Shade of Difference (95 page)

For one of them the injunction carried weight, and perhaps it did for the other, too, or would have if it had not come too late. Hal Fry, drawing on some source of strength that he did not know he possessed, found himself swept by a powerful emotion in which pity and love were inextricably mixed, and in the first agonizing months as they tried with a desperate patience to arouse some spark of recognition in their silent son, he sought in every way he knew to comfort and sustain his wife. There were a few times, a few hours, perhaps only a few minutes, when this seemed to work, when she seemed to turn to him with a love and comfort to match his own; but they were fleeting and soon gone. There began to come a steady withdrawal, broken only by sudden surges of accusation and blame and a deep unfairness that wounded him terribly, though he tried to tell himself that she was not well, that it was understandable that she should be almost unbalanced by their tragedy, that she was not really responsible for what she said or thought, that she did, indeed, need all the love he could give her even though she did not seem to understand or value it. But, inevitably, love rebuked began to die again, and this time he did not think it would recover.

In all this he was forced to face his own responsibility, too, for there remained like an evil presence in the house the self-serving excuse of the guilty doctor that some unusual blow or jar prior to birth had done the damage. He did not know how many times, in sad and bitter arguments, they relived those fateful five minutes on the icy front steps, but it must have run into the hundreds as the months dragged by. Only rarely did he remark in his own defense that there was a theory, too, that it might have been injury during delivery, and that for this the doctor she had chosen over his objections was responsible. This produced always a reaction so frantically self-defensive that he realized before long that it must spring from a feeling of guilt as deep as his own. And so, held together by the necessities of their now-pathetic child, chained to one another in a bond of mutual guilt and accusation, they lived out those bitter years during which one medical remedy after another proved useless and there came to them bit by bit the realization that the situation would not change.

Somehow against this background at home he still managed to perform his public duties and continue to win the support of his colleagues and the approval of his constituents. Perhaps because the Lord had, really, left him no choice, he was forced to apply himself ever more faithfully to his work, strive ever harder to serve his country, apply and strengthen ever more fully the sense of dedication that had always been so paramount an element in his character. Once Bob Munson, watching him fall into a brown study at some committee meeting, had given his arm a squeeze and said, “I wish there was something we could do.” But Hal had responded with a shake of the head and a smile that managed to be adequately confident. “I’m all right. I’m managing.” And so he did, out of some well of strength within him which, fortunately, proved inexhaustible.

There came the time for him to file for re-election, and although Kay seemed to resent it, he was convinced that his only salvation, and perhaps the only salvation for them all, was for him to keep working as hard as he knew how. He threw himself into the campaign as into some nerve-deadening drug, spent six months replenishing his heart and strength by direct contact with the good people and the good earth of his native state, and was re-elected by a much larger majority than he had received in his first race for the Senate. His people obviously approved of him, and such whispered intimations of his family tragedy as filtered through to the hills and valleys only served to arouse greater sympathy and loyalty. He started his second term secure in everything except the love of his wife and the health of his child.

For several more years they kept Jimmy at home, while he grew steadily more handsome and more appealing in all except his eyes, which did not know them, and his mind, which did not respond. In time the doctors at Georgetown, still testing from time to time, still keeping a friendly interest, began to suggest tactfully that perhaps it was too much of a burden to keep the boy with them, that perhaps his presence was too terrible a reminder of what had happened and of what might have been. It was suggested that possibly they should find a home for him somewhere where he could receive constant care among his own kind. The cost, they said, would be substantial, but since—they added with a tactful gravity that did not prevent the words from devastating both parents—since it did not matter to him, perhaps it would be better for them.

There were such institutions near Washington, but after a number of inquiries they decided upon Oak Lawn, up the Hudson above New York City. Discreetly and sometimes from the most surprising sources, people whom they would never have suspected of having a similar problem, they received suggestions: Oak Lawn seemed to have more adherents than any in a radius of several hundred miles. After several visits, they decided to take Jimmy there at the start of his eighth year. It would be near enough for periodic visits, not close enough so that they would feel they must constantly visit, with all the pain and anguish that such a frequent routine would entail. Assured that he would be well and faithfully cared for, they left him sitting, smiling gently, in a chair upon the lawn and drove back down to Washington silent and hardly thinking in the terrible depression that came with the final crushing of all their hopes.

After that, the house in Georgetown seemed emptier and more haunted than ever, and within a month they had decided to sell it and move to an apartment in Arlington Towers, across the Potomac from the capital on the Virginia side. Three months after they did so he came home from a late session of the Senate to find that his wife had sought, and finally found, surcease from pain, an end to thinking, an end to grief and guilt and lack of loving, an end of everything that had apparently been too much for her to bear any longer.

Through the blank weeks that followed, a hiatus in his life whose details he had never quite been able to sort out, only the faithful and loving kindness of such friends as the Majority Leader, Stanley Danta, Orrin and Beth Knox, the Speaker, and his own family brought him through. His sister Betty left her family and came from Ohio, where she now lived, to stay with him for four months, supervising the immediate change of apartment to a suite at the Mayflower shared with widower Senator John Winthrop of Massachusetts, filling his life with comfort and care, urging, demanding, pushing, bullying him on to do his job and not stop to look back until such time as he might be able to do so without having it pull him under completely. Aided by Bob Munson and his colleagues in the Senate, who immediately found extra assignments for him to undertake—a trip with Powell Hanson of North Dakota and Bill Kanaho of Hawaii to an Interparliamentary Union meeting in Rio two weeks after Kay’s death was one of them—he was subjected to an intensive therapy of affection and hard work that presently began to work its healing upon his shattered heart. It took time, but the day arrived when some of the constant sadness left his eyes, when he could smile again and mean it, when he even laughed now and then with something of his old ease and was able to offer once again his wryly good-natured comments on the world. This required more than a year, but when he emerged from it he had a new steadiness and certainty, a strength of character even greater than that he had possessed before.

Central to his recovery, though only his sister knew it, was the refuge they had been trained by their parents to turn to in time of need: the Lord Himself. The Lord had done strange things to him, and sometimes even now he could still reject the thought that it made any sense or possessed any justice; but for the most part the habit of prayer ingrained in him since childhood stood him in good stead when he needed it. There were occasions when only an unquestioning belief and acceptance could bring a man through what he had to face and alleviate the awful torments of the world. He turned to God because that was all there was left for him to run to; and as often happens when men approach Him in that spirit at rock-bottom ebb of their dreams and hopes, God gave him comfort and sufficient strength to start the long road back.

Then he did indeed plunge into his work in the Senate with a devotion and dedication such as he had never known even in his most idealistic times. It was an age in which such dedication was welcome, for it was an age when his country was challenged everywhere by forces such as it had never encountered before, and when its survival demanded from each of its servants the utmost they were able to give. Having no longer anything to distract him or hold him back, with nothing now save an occasional visit to Oak Lawn to impede his concentration upon public affairs, he devoted himself increasingly to the work of the Foreign Relations Committee and the international activities with which it was concerned. His colleagues helped him in this, arranging for him to travel on the committee’s business over most of the earth’s surface. Downtown the President helped, too, assigning him often to the special missions and international delegations on which the Senate always demanded representation and was usually given it by a White House still conscious, after so many years, of the sad precedent of what had happened after the First World War when the Senate was slighted at Versailles. Hal Fry was always available, always eager and ready to go. The youthful impulse to serve had been transmuted by time, experience, and suffering into the devout dedication of a mature and earnest man. “I feel safe when Hal is on the job,” Harley Hudson’s predecessor had explained once to Bob Munson as he sent Hal off to a meeting of the Organization of American States at Lima. “He has nothing to think about but the country, now, and, harsh though it is to say so, I think that’s great for the country.”

With his appointment to the American delegation to the United Nations he entered upon what soon became for him the most fascinating of all his experiences in the diplomatic field.

In the strange organization, conceived in such hope, delivered in such naïveté growing to maturity in such headlong irresponsibility, he found that service to his country was more than a therapy, more than a dedication or a way of life that justified and alleviated other things. Service to the country was an absolute necessity that brooked of no slacking and allowed of no equivocation, that drove out thoughts of self-interest in the overriding imperatives of the nation’s needs. There in that hectic assemblage he found fast sledding and a rough track. Principles upon which the United States was founded, decencies by which it had tried to live in its international dealings, were either unknown or not understood by many delegations. It did not matter that their own principles were often most peculiar, their claims to nationhood most flimsy, their outlook twisted and distorted fearfully by an unhappy past for which they were not to blame. What mattered was where they were
now,
and how they felt
now,
and he early realized that in this atmosphere the moral and political structures of the West could not long survive without the most loyal and diligent protection of those who sprang from them. “One nation, one vote.” Though the nation might be a near-empty patch of desert or an island rising slowly from the primeval, the vote weighed just as heavily as those of the civilizations of centuries, though it could not be cast with the maturity of judgment or the perspective of history that centuries conferred.

There came to him as he watched the process in operation a concern and loving pity for his countrymen such as he had never known before. Observed from the vantage point of the United Nations, they seemed to him strangely lost and pathetic as they attempted to pretend that the realities that faced them were not what they were. There was among them, he could see, as they were reflected in the hostile eyes of many skeptical and envious faces, a desperate attempt to substitute words for deeds, a desperate urge to fling high-sounding phrases in the teeth of the gale of history that blew cruel and unforgiving upon the wistfully self-deluded of the Western world in the difficult passages of a violent century.

The endless passionate debates about “national purpose” that filled the newspapers, periodicals, and airwaves of his native land foundered on a hard rock that many Americans simply could not bring themselves to acknowledge: that they were up against a basically hostile climate manipulated by an opponent who had no
real
desire to get along with them.

This fact, so terrifying in its implications and so demanding of sacrifice and courage if the implications were fully acknowledged, was too much for most Americans—indeed for most Englishmen, or Frenchmen, or any other still-hopeful peoples of the West—to face. So they spun out the hurrying months and years of the enemy’s brutal advance assuring one another that they must find a Purpose, while the one purpose that could possibly mean anything at all to themselves, their posterity, or the world—simple survival—was slowly but surely allowed to erode away.

Against that background the visit of the M’Bulu, with all its clever, damaging corollaries, had presented an issue as grave in many ways for his country as though the Cuban Communists had lobbed a rocket into Florida. Never before had the world dared to intervene so directly in the affairs of the United States, but he could see now that it had been inevitable for a long time. It had taken only the nerve and astuteness of Terrible Terry and his friends to bring about a challenge that had been in the making, in many envious hearts and bitter minds, for years. History had finally presented to America a reckoning that America, in far too many places within her borders, had invited and, in the world’s judgment, deserved.

So it was now, as he fiddled once more with the radio dial to distract himself, that he felt a terrible protest in his heart against the God to Whom he had so often prayed, for having apparently abandoned him at a time when his duty and his desperate desire were to be active and on the job at the UN in these concluding stages of the problem presented by the M’Bulu. That was where he should be and that, he promised himself and the Lord with a defiant grimness, was where he was going to be until he dropped, if drop he must. It was the only thing—perhaps the last thing—that could give his life sense, and he did not intend to let anything deprive him of it as long as he could drive his body to house his spirit and carry it forward upon what he felt to be its mission.