Capable of Honor (67 page)

“Thank you, Governor,” the four state troopers said; tossed coins quickly to see who would get the duty; left the loser on guard; and departed.

He opened the door and went in to a lightless, lifeless room; snapped on the light; saw staring back at him the high cheekbones, the silver comb and mantilla, the beautiful, deep-set eyes and strong old face he had known all his Life; saw on the mantel beside it a hastily scrawled note:

“I saw your broadcast. I’ve gone to Vistazo for a few days to try to sort things out a little. I want you to sit and look at this old lady and think about her for a while.”

But he knew, as he stood alone in the silent room and gazed into the calm, dispassionate eyes, that it was too late for Doña Valuela now—much too late.

And besides, he thought, with the first wrenching beginnings of defensiveness against the only two people in the world he really felt accountable to, she was tough herself. She would have understood.

He might have spent a much happier night and rested much easier than he did, had he been able to believe it.

There remained only one episode to make that historic night complete, and although it became a thing of song and story in the Washington press corps and along the shady lanes of Georgetown for many a year, none of the twenty or so reporters who witnessed it ever put it into print.

It was too rich to put into print, in a way: it was too choice to let out of the club, too good to share with the public. And also, it would have embarrassed Walter, and it was rather imperative, now that his candidate had decided to go for broke and he was needed so badly to help, that none of his true believers and dutiful colleagues do that.

He was sitting at his typewriter in the press workroom at the Hilton when it began, and rarely had the words come more smoothly or with such a strong, emphatic flow:

“At last America has a leader, washed to the top on a wave of repugnance against both the Hudson-Knox foreign policy and the violence which its supporters have brought to this otherwise decent convention.

“For one unhappy family, violence has brought its own bitter answer of violence in return. But for the nation, in one of those ironies that history adores, it has brought, one hopes, a great beneficence.

“What has happened here in these last fourteen dramatic hours marks one of the great watersheds of our political story: the repudiation of a sitting President by his party in convention assembled, and the very likely emergence of a new man to head both the party and the nation.

“Only the most profound public uneasiness and concern could have produced such a result. Only a people sincerely convinced that America must turn away from aggression and war to a policy of peace and stability—only a people—”

It was at that point that he realized that someone was reading over his shoulder, something which always annoyed him even though he recognized that it was basically a form of flattering tribute. But before he could look up and give the intruder a discouraging glance,

“Only a people,” she said loudly, “who have been fed lies and hatred and misinformation and ten thousand other kinds of crap by that great statesman and philosopher Walter Wonderful Dobius, that vicious demagogue of the press and all his vicious friends, that’s what people!”

“You’re drunk, Helen-Anne,” he said coldly, and then he did glance up at her and saw her looking like the wrath of God or a 4 A.M. convention reporter, her face smudged, her hair sloppy, her dress wilted. But there were tears in her eyes, and a cold glint too, and he knew she wasn’t drunk, except possibly with rage.

“Worthless,” she said bitterly. “Worthless, worthless, worthless! Sitting at your typewriter telling the boobs what to think, the great vast herd you regard with such contempt in your heart, such monstrous intellectual contempt! But they see through you, Walter. They see through you, never think they don’t. They let you play your little pompous game with them because it amuses them to watch you perform like a monkey on a stick, but they see through you! Oh, they do!”

“You don’t make sense,” he said, a righteous disgust in his voice but trying to keep it down in the hope it would lower hers which had already brought everything else in the room to a standstill. “If they see through me, they obviously don’t swallow the lies I give them. You can’t have it both ways. Why don’t you go to bed?”

“Listen!” she said. “Listen to me, Walter! You have almost killed Crystal Knox. You have actually killed two other people. You and your friends have created a climate in this country in which it will be a miracle if the President himself isn’t assassinated before this is over. You and your friends have destroyed every pretense of objectivity, fairness, decency, nonpartisanship, honor, that the press was ever supposed to have. The lot of you have spewed out a steady stream of deliberate misinformation, deliberate misrepresentation, twisted, slanted, dishonest reporting, photography and analysis from the day the crisis began in Gorotoland right on through Panama to this very hour.”

She yanked the copy out of his typewriter and he grabbed for it with a sudden instinctive lunge. But she stepped back out of his reach so that in his haste he almost lost his dignity and fell out of his chair before he remembered who he was sufficiently to curb his blind anger and sit slowly down again.

“’For one unhappy family, violence has brought its own bitter answer of violence in return.’ My God, you
monster,
how many times do you and your crowd have to be told that Orrin Knox didn’t start any of this? You
know
he didn’t start it, yet from the minute it began you’ve blamed it on him as deliberately and cold-bloodedly as you know how, and that’s plenty! You’ve lied and lied and lied, the lot of you, and the horrible thing, you horrible individual, is that
you have known you lied.
You’ve done it tongue-in-cheek as though it were a lark for you, or a nice, happy game. Well,” she shouted, beginning to cry in earnest, so that her voice came choked and harsh, “it isn’t a nice, happy game! It’s a killing game and it’s killing America, and God damn you, you’d better stop it!”

There was only one way to handle this, he knew from past experience, and he did it, sitting very quietly and sedately, telling himself how calm and dignified and controlled he was, not giving in to it, not giving in, not—until presently her sobs subsided in the absolutely silent room where old friends from Washington and respectful, awestruck admirers from the country press watched in astounded silence. Then he reached out his hand and said quietly,

“May I have my copy back, please?”

“Take it!” she said, ripped it across and flung it at his feet. For a moment he was literally blinded with rage, a great red cloud that seemed to envelop his head and his whole being. But once again the knowledge that he was Walter Dobius whom all the world admired and to whom nobody said or did such things, if they were sane, came to his rescue. Obviously she was not. He had known it for years, and now he had the proof.

Slowly, deliberately, he reached down and picked up the two halves of his copy, arranged them on the table beside his machine so that he could read them. Then slowly and with equal deliberation—though his hands visibly trembled and he could not really see the paper, so violent were his emotions—he put a piece of carbon between two new sheets, inserted them in the typewriter, and began doggedly to copy it over. But she was not through yet. Suddenly her purse was flung across the platen so that the keys would not strike, and again she was standing close to him.

“Listen to me, Walter,” she said, more quietly now, in a shaky but controlled voice that was, in its way, more frightful to him than the other. “No one else has ever said this to you and no one else ever will, because you’ve gotten beyond it. But somebody,” she said, and her voice sounded quite slow and awkward, so that he glanced up sharply, but she looked all right, or anyway no worse than before except for a few new tear-streaks, “somebody should, before it’s too late.

“You
are
a monster, Walter,” she said carefully. “You are an ego grown so great, so convinced of its own infallibility, so fawned upon and made much of by the world, that you have just about lost touch with reality. You have become all mind, and it’s a mind that thinks a thousand times a day how wonderful Walter Dobius is. It isn’t a mind that really thinks—
really
thinks, way down under—how it can make life more kindly for people, or help them be more decent to each other, or make the world happier. That takes heart and you’ve got a mind without heart, Walter. You’ve got a mind, now, that thinks it knows better than anybody else what ought to be done. You’ve got a mind that rejects anything that doesn’t agree with it because
it knows best
and it can’t even acknowledge anybody’s right to differ anymore. Anybody who differs now has to be destroyed, if you can do it. Walter Dobius
and what he says
means more to you than anything on this earth.…I feel sorry for you, Walter,” she concluded more quietly, and in some wildly curious way he sensed that possibly she did, or at least thought, in her strange, twisted mind, that she did, “because I think you are a sad case. I think you are a genuinely pathetic being.…Just about,” she said with a sudden bleak despair, “the saddest and most pathetic I know.”

But this he could not take, he had been patient and tolerant too long under this extraordinary outburst, some last tight rein of control was abruptly broken by her monstrously—
monstrously
—patronizing conclusion.

“How—” he cried, half-rising, sitting back, starting to rise again, turning his head blindly, almost gasping with rage, “how could you—how could you say such things to me! How do you have the
nerve
to say such things!…What am I doing, what has my crime been? Well, I’ll tell you!” he cried with a consuming bitterness while all around the room was absolutely still, his colleagues, looking, could any of them have had the time and detachment to note it, really quite funny in their drop-jawed amazement, “All right, I’ll tell you! It has been to oppose as strongly as I know how a policy that I believe—I
believe,
whether you think I do or not!—is leading this nation and the world to disaster. Is it wrong to believe in world order? Is it wrong to believe in the United Nations? Is it wrong to think that a President of the United States and a Secretary of State should not launch armed aggression against smaller states? Is it wrong to say they should abide by international law? Is it wrong to say that—”

“Oh, don’t give me that crap!” she cried again, and he shouted, “Oh, stop using that cheap, two-bit word!” so furiously that she blinked and stepped back a little. “I ask you, is it wrong for me to use my column and my position to fight for the policies I believe in, and against those I honestly think—
I honestly think
—are destroying the last chance of ever arriving at a workable arrangement with the Communists?

“You tell me it’s just a game, to fight for what I believe in!” His face contorted and his mouth twisted with a terrible, affronted bitterness. “Well, God damn you.”

For several minutes she said nothing. When she finally spoke it was in a curiously soft, regretful voice.

“God hasn’t given you a mission to run the world, Walter. He hasn’t, Walter, love, he really hasn’t.…Poor Walter!” she said abruptly, and turned away, murmuring to herself from some deep pity that shattered, terrified, and enraged him, “Poor, poor Walter.”

“Don’t you ‘poor Walter’ me!” he shouted at her back as she went out the door. “Don’t you ‘poor’—I’m Walter Dobius! I’m not poor Walter! I’m Walter Dobius!”

And breathing very heavily, his vision so blurred with anger that he could hardly see the paper, his hands trembling so violently that he could hardly control them, he sat down slowly and began pecking, hesitantly at first and then with a surer rhythm, at the keys, while all around the room there was an audible release of breath and one by one his colleagues, not daring to look at him or even at one another, turned back to work.

“Hi,” he said softly to the white, bandaged figure in the bed, his eyes red and haggard, his voice choked with weeping. “How are you feeling?”

There was a little stirring, a muffled sound that he could just sense was, “All right,” and on the coverlet the hand closest to his moved ever so slightly. So he took it and sat for several minutes trying to get his voice under control again.

“Crys,” he said finally, “it’s no good. Dad’s going to withdraw, and I’m going to give up any idea I ever had of going into politics.” Again there was a little stirring, he knew it was protest, and he hurried on. “Yes I am, it just isn’t worth it. There’s plenty of money in law, it’s a good career, and there’s no reason why I should subject my wife and”—he hesitated, his eyes filled with tears, but he forced himself to go on—“my family, to this sort of thing. You were almost killed and he—he was, and I’m just not going to do it. I’m just not.”

The little motion came again, the faint but unmistakable impression of argument and denial, and his voice sharpened with an impatience grown from horror and fright at what might have been, and what was.

“And you don’t have to be noble about it, either! You don’t have to tell me it’s worth it to keep on fighting, because it isn’t! They’re too much for us, Crys, the evil are on top, now, and the world isn’t going to recover, in our time or maybe for hundreds of years. They’re in control of everything, they’ve got it all their way, and they aren’t going to relent now, because why should they? Oh, yes, the bastards may deplore it in their TV shows and their columns and their editorials, but you just watch: there’ll be a knife thrown in along with the hypocritical sob-stuff. They’ll use it to slam us again, in some twisted way they always know how to manage. They’re glad this happened to one of Orrin Knox’s family, they’re glad you got hurt and we lost our son and Dad has been knocked for a loop. They want him out, and they want us out, they want everyone out who doesn’t agree with them. And, Crys,” his eyes filled again with tears and he could hardly go on, “they’ve succeeded with me. I give up.”

But once again—and of course he had expected it—there was the slightest movement, the elusive but emphatic sense of protest and stubborn denial. And presently, though he tried to fight against it, he found himself caught helplessly somewhere between tears and laughter and apparently attempting both.