Irving Wallace - The Man

She lifted her fingers to his neck and caressed it. “Arthur-before-you were saying before how much you missed me-how you wanted to see me more often-alone… I’d like that.”

“Right now I want to kiss you,” he said.

Her eyes went to the entrance doors, worriedly, and then to the balcony doors to her left. “Let’s go outside a minute.”

“You’ll freeze.”

“You’ll keep me warm.”

He released her, and she went to the first sash wood door. Opening it, she stepped out into the darkness of the Truman Balcony and stood beside the moist green pad that covered the white metal settee. He came to her in the shadows, and she went quickly into his hard arms, feeling her breasts flattened against his chest as his parted lips rubbed against hers and finally held to them. They clung to one another, and when his lips freed her, she gasped, “I love you, Arthur. I want you-you say it.”

“Tonight,” he said.

“Tonight.”

“When you’re through here, come straight to the house. You don’t have to go home tonight.”

“Will the servants-?”

“They are off. Just us, alone.”

“Yes, Arthur.” She heard her exultant heart beating wildly, and brought her hands up to hold his face, and kissed him quickly. “There’ll be a million years of time tonight.” She pushed herself from him and sought his hand. “Let’s get downstairs, before we’re missed… No, wait, I’ll go first, then you… I can’t stand these next hours. You do love me, don’t you, darling? You won’t be sorry, you won’t be sorry at all.”

In the middle of the front row of seats in the white-and-gold hall that was the East Room, President Dilman sat impassively, his arms resting motionless on the arms of his chair like the paws of a sphinx, as he watched with distaste the show being performed by the Hollywood and Manhattan entertainers.

His mood had been good an hour ago when he sat down with President Amboko and waited while the guests noisily took their places. His good mood had continued as the entertainment began with the five-piece orchestra on the raised platform before him doing its lively medley of George M. Cohan songs, ending on the rousing “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

Then after the provocative blues singer, Libby Owens, backed by her own accompanist at the ornate mahogany grand piano with its gilt eagle legs, had rendered “St. Louis Blues” sweet and low, Dilman’s mood of well-being had begun to deteriorate. Just as he and so many of his fellow Negroes resented aggressive liberal whites who buttonholed them in ostentatious and determined displays of equality, speaking to them with proper indignation of nothing but Negro problems, he resented the slant and content of this show. The white entertainers, out of misplaced eagerness to parade their tolerance (look-we-are-on-your-side-fellow), had loaded their program heavily with both serious and humorous Negro sketches and songs. Dilman detested this kind of patronizing, well-intentioned though it may have been. If a Jew were President, he asked himself, would this same crowd have presented Yiddish jokes and songs?

He stared at the stage with displeasure. There was Herbie Teele, the brash nimble-limbed colored comedian, propped high on a stool, derby lopsided on his head, homely black face feigning solemnity, then wide-grinning after each burst of applause, twirling his cane and spouting his half-bitter inside integration stories and jokes. Why Herbie Teele tonight? Why this special routine? Would this same crowd have offered the same program to T. C., to The Judge, to Lyndon Johnson, to John F. Kennedy? Dilman doubted it.

He cast a sidelong glance at Amboko and then down the row at other members of the Barazan entourage, and they seemed appreciative enough. They were chuckling, beaming, and the constant eruptions of laughter from the rows behind indicated that Allan Noyes, the Party’s national chairman, had cast the evening right. At last Dilman once more had to blame himself for his own thin-skinned sensitivity, but he felt the way he felt, and there was no use trying to feel any other way.

He tried to be more attentive to the stage.

Herbie Teele, elastic mouth, brace of white chipmunk teeth, was concluding his routine.

“Well, all that I am, all that I hope to be, I owe to one of the pioneers of topical humor, my fellow Afro-American, Dick Gregory,” said Teele. “He went to jail so’s I could come to the White House. Like Dick used to say, these days I’m gettin’ a couple thousand a week for saying the same things I used to say under my breath. No matter what the goings-on in Mississippi, they’re really not readying to pass a law banning mixed drinks. So, like ol’ Dick, I’m not worried. The President is doin’ his best. He’s got the Reverend Spinger in there, and the Reverend is the only famous man I know who’s given out more fingerprints than autographs. The kids down South used to collect his signature on police blotters. Well, folks, let me bow out with one more to my mentor, Dick Gregory-like he used to think, I was just thinkin’ ”-Teele jumped off his stool and came to the edge of the platform and rubbed his cheeks vigorously-“now, wouldn’t it be a helluva joke if all this on me was burnt cork and all you folks were being tolerant for nuthin’?”

He slapped his hands, reared back and roared, and the audience behind Dilman gave out a great whoop of laughter and joy in unison, and applauded for a half minute as the audacious Teele pranced off the platform.

Dilman clapped halfheartedly, and when he had ceased, the two chandeliers above had dimmed, and Libby Owens, in her tight sequined skirt slit thigh-high, stood center stage, while her colored accompanist slid onto the bench behind the piano.

She drew the microphone to her and announced throatily, “For the finale, I shall render three haunting Negro spirituals by unknown bards.”

She began, and the room was hushed in the soft light. She sang:

“I know moon-rise, I know star-rise,

Lay dis body down.

I walk in de moonlight, I walk in de starlight,

To lay dis body down.

I’ll walk in de graveyard, I’ll walk through the graveyard

To lay dis body down.

I’ll lie in de grave and stretch out my arms;

Lay dis body down.”

The melancholy lyric moved Dilman, sent memory clutching backward for an almost forgotten part of his childhood, and he was too lost in the distant past to realize that someone, bent low, had hurried past the front row and crouched before him. He stirred, then was startled to find Beecher, the valet, on a knee waiting to address him.

“Mr. President,” the valet whispered, “Attorney General Kemmler is in the Blue Room. He must see you at once. He says it is urgent.”

Dilman’s heartbeat tripped. It is urgent . He had been so far away, rocking in the helpless cradle of the past, that he was unprepared to cope with crisis in the world of tall men.

Dilman shivered. “Tell him I’ll be right there.”

Silently the valet slipped away, and Dilman waited for the last of Libby Owens’ lyrics. As she finished the spiritual, and the room rang with applause, Dilman excused himself to Amboko, speaking under his breath, then hurriedly rose and went past the guests sitting in the front row and to the exit. He could see that first Eaton, then Nat Abrahams, were observing his sudden departure, and he shrugged to both. He went into the Main Hall, just as the piano resumed and Libby Owens sang, “Oh, Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you moan.”

Coming into the Main Hall of the first floor, Dilman found himself immediately flanked by two Secret Service agents.

“Why don’t you keep your eye on President Amboko,” Dilman suggested. “I’ll be all right.”