Irving Wallace - The Man

From the first, Dilman had known that Wanda was a remarkable find. Her intelligence and wit, her good nature and humor, her well-bred manner, had made it seem incredible that she had not ever been married. As he came to know her better, Dilman had come to understand her avoidance of marriage. Her parents, who had lived in West Virginia, where her father had been a short-order cook, dishwasher, janitor in an all-night diner serving coal miners, had sacrificed much of their comfort, and the futures of her younger brother and sister, to educate and launch her. When first one parent, and then the other, had been hospitalized, and afterward confined to costly sanitarium care, Wanda had accepted full responsibility to support and look after them, not only as daughter but as debtor. She had a burden, and she could not discard it in favor of marriage, for which she was so perfectly suited. But two years ago her father had died, and less than a year before her mother, and at last Wanda had been free to live her own life as her own person.

She had expected him to propose marriage last spring, Dilman knew, and he had not, and it had created, for the first time, an undercurrent of unhappiness between them. She had known that he wanted her for his wife. He had known that he needed her. The proposal was up to him, and yet, while he could profess affection and love, articulate his need for her, he could not bring her from upstairs to his flat downstairs as wife. He had thought about it a thousand times since spring, and had known that the failure was entirely his own. Marriage was an affirmative act, and he had been shackled by countless negative fears. He had tried, time and time again, to narrow in on specific fears, small ones, avoiding the major one, until at last he could see what was left and what in himself taunted him with contempt.

Wanda Gibson was a mulatto. That was the center of it. As a mulatto, she was more white in appearance than black. In most communities she could have passed for white. Her hair, while brunette and curling, was soft and long. Her eyes were light brown, her nose delicate and upturned, and her lips and mouth small. Her figure was trim, well hipped but otherwise slender. She considered herself a colored woman, and she lived as a colored woman. But, for Douglass Dilman, how she regarded herself, and how she approached her life, were not assurances enough.

The nagging cowardice within him, that avoided marriage to the one good companion of his life, was his fear of how she would look beside him and how this would affect his political career. With Wanda as his mate, he would appear blacker. With himself as her mate, she would appear whiter. Whatever the facts and truth, it would give the impression of an interracial marriage. It might not cause talk in Washington and in his home state, but on the other hand it might. It was an unnecessary risk. It would rock the boat in times like this. Or, at least, it might.

Dilman’s solution had been to avoid the issue. The weekly platonic meetings had continued, the Senator and his ladylike lady friend, in the Spinger living room, in the loges of Loew’s Palace Theater, and, ever so occasionally, in the Golden Ox or the Lincoln Inn. Recently, Dilman had become aware, each rendezvous had been less comfortable, less warm and communicative. It was as if they were both present, each desiring the company of the other, but now that she was free of parental commitment and he was temporary presiding chairman of the Senate, there had fallen a thick steel grill between them. You could see; you could hear; you could not touch. You were two, not one, and might never be one, and Wanda Gibson, for all her evenness of temperament and understanding, had begun to resent this failure in Douglass Dilman.

Since his invisible antenna of sensitivity had picked up and recorded her disappointment in him, Dilman had recently taken to reviewing and brooding over this relationship and his own life. Some weeks ago he had almost arrived at the decision to propose marriage, and to the devil with the consequences, if any. After all, he had asked himself in a practical way, how could he any longer be hurt? But then he had been sidetracked by his activity, and sham importance, in serving the Senate in the Vice-President’s place. And now, overnight, cruel Destiny had touched him. He had become the President of the United States. The personal choice ahead was clear-cut: should he be James Buchanan or Grover Cleveland? Buchanan had been the only unmarried President to serve his country. Cleveland had been the only Chief Executive to be married in the White House. When the choice was weighed thus, the scales tipped toward Buchanan. A showy wedding, like Cleveland’s in the Blue Room, before the world and the press, a marriage to a mulatto, a mulatto who might almost be mistaken for white, would merely serve to incense the enemies of his race. His uncertain position and precarious image, before a broken and divided country, would be worsened.

This had been his rationale last night, as he waited, the telephone receiver in his hand, to hear Wanda’s voice. His private decision, he had known, was neither courageous nor honest. It was merely expedient and political. It solved nothing, but simply traded off a personal problem to avoid a more fearsome one.

Gazing down at the receiver in his left hand, he had wondered why, under the circumstances, he was trying to speak to her at all, at least at this time. He had no idea what he could say to her, yet somehow, as President of the United States for more than three hours, he had to speak to someone before sleeping and then waking to the terrible fact, and the only one who might care about him, reassure him, was Wanda. As he waited for Wanda, his mind drifted to Mindy. His attitude toward the two of them was one and the same. He avoided taking a wife he needed for the same reason that he did not seek out a daughter he loved. He was black and still afraid.

“Hello, Doug.” She was calling down to him through a wire from upstairs, and yet she had never been farther away.

“Wanda, I wanted to-to say good night, before going to sleep.”

“Doug, it’s overwhelming, the whole thing. What does one say? Do I congratulate you? That sounds wrong.”

“You commiserate with me, and with the whole country.”

“No, don’t-don’t talk like that. It’s not true. That accident in Frankfurt was horrible. But it happened, Doug, those things happen. Remember how we once talked about what our families were doing the moment that they learned F. D. R. had died? And how they felt? They felt the world had come to an end, that they were dying, too, that there was no hope. Yet nothing happened to them, or to us. Life went on. Maybe differently than it might have had he lived, but not that differently. Well, Doug, T. C. was a good man, I’m sure, and popular, but he was no F. D. R., and neither was MacPherson. I know you’ll do as well as or better than either. No one is born to be the only one to be President. Thousands of men could be President just as well as the one who fought to get the office. If it had to be someone else, I think it could have been no one better than you.”

“Wanda, don’t-you know me too well for that-you know my weaknesses-”

“Everyone has weaknesses, Doug. Be sensible. Stand off and look around. Lincoln had weaknesses, and T. C. had too many to count, and probably dozens we couldn’t see to count. Of course you have weaknesses, but you’re strong enough to handle the job. Don’t discount your strengths. I can’t forget what you refuse to remember. With the kind of background you had, all that poverty, how did you get through the university and then law school? How did you get elected to the House of Representatives four times, and then get into the Senate, and even become its presiding officer? It took something . Doug, it took very much. I know you, maybe as well as anyone knows you, maybe better, and I am positive the whole country-once they get over the shock of the-of T. C.’s death-they’ll see you for what you are, and they’ll be proud of you.”