Irving Wallace - The Man

He looked at Abrahams. “Nat, it’s my fault for not resigning when I could, for being a selfish and prideful mule and bucking the men with the whips, and all I’ll have succeeded in doing is to harm everyone-Wanda, Julian, the Spingers, and now the worst of it, my little girl Mindy. I knew I was up against mudslingers, but I thought I’d be taking most of the mud. I didn’t know it would spatter so wide, so wide and far and destructively. Well, I guess there is no turning back now.”

Absently clasping and unclasping his hands, he wandered back to the middle of the office floor. Aware of Tim Flannery again, he said, “What can I do for my girl? I don’t know.”

Flannery said, “Fight the mudslingers in the press, the way you’re fighting them in the Senate, Mr. President. Is there any statement we can release to offset this-I don’t mean just for your sake-for hers, too, to ease it for her?”

“No. What could I say that would do anything but make it worse? Thanks, Tim. You’d better get back to your work.” Then, as Flannery shrugged and prepared to leave the office, Dilman said to no one in particular, “If people only understood what makes a colored person pass for white.” Suddenly, he exclaimed with wonder. “Wait now-why not tell them? Why not tell them what it is like?”

He saw Flannery had hesitated at the door. “Tim, if Mindy can’t speak for herself, maybe her father should speak for her. I think I will make a statement.”

As Flannery returned, Dilman looked at Abrahams. “Any comment before I do, Nat?”

Abrahams said, “Don’t worry about my problems. This is something altogether your own. This is personal. Act the way I know you want to act-like a father, and not like the President.”

“Yes,” said Dilman.

“Do you want to dictate this statement now?” asked Flannery.

“Dictate it? No. I just want to go out in the press lobby-yes, that’s what I’ll do-and speak my mind. You go ahead, Tim. Alert the correspondents that I want to make a few brief remarks, and that’s all.”

Flannery hastened out. Dilman remained lost in thought for long seconds, then he went to the wastebasket, retrieved the Citizen-American , unfolded it, studied the headlines, and scanned the story.

“Poor child,” he said, and then he left, with Abrahams following him.

After Dilman went through Edna Foster’s empty office into the corridor, where two Secret Service men fell into step behind him, and turned toward the Reading Room, he was conscious of his press secretary’s staff watching him curiously from their desks as he passed them.

Nearing the open door leading to the press lobby, now blocked by Tim Flannery, with Edna Foster and her shorthand pad and pencil behind him, Dilman could see Flannery holding up his arms to quiet the clamoring reporters. Dilman hung back, listening, until Flannery finished his speech.

“-I repeat, gentlemen, those are the rules. He’s decided to make an impromptu statement about the unfortunate story that appeared exclusively in Zeke Miller’s Washington Citizen-American this morning. When he has finished his remarks, no questions about the matter will be entertained. None, boys.”

“Hey, Tim,” someone shouted, “after he does that, would he mind a couple of questions about the impeachment trial? I’d like to ask him about the House witnesses yesterday from the Vaduz Exporters, who insisted-”

“Absolutely no,” Flannery replied. “Nothing’s changed about that. No comment on the impeachment trial, or the Dragon Flies and Baraza, or anything else this morning. And no questions about his daughter. If you refuse to abide by our stipulations, I’m afraid-”

Several voices yelled out, “Okay, Tim!… Bring him out!… Let’s go! Where’s the President?”

Tim Flannery turned and nodded to Dilman, who came forward, easing his way between his press secretary and personal secretary, until he stood within the thickly massed assemblage of eager and impatient correspondents. For a moment Dilman scanned their familiar faces, then dropped his gaze to the pencils and notebooks or pieces of paper their hands held ready. They were waiting, and behind him, behind the Secret Service agents, Flannery, Miss Foster, Nat Abrahams, and many of the White House staff were waiting.

Dilman’s lips were dry. His Adam’s apple had grown huge in his throat. His lungs felt hot. For a hanging second he wondered if this was wrong, feeding fuel to the scurrilous Blaser story, and then his eyes picked out Blaser’s toad face, puffed and important, toward the rear. At once, he knew that he must speak what was in his heart, because somewhere in New York his poor girl child might be waiting also, and listening.

Dilman opened the newspaper in his hand, studied it, then held it aloft.

“You all read this-this news, I’m sure,” he said. He cast the newspaper aside, heard it flutter to the floor. “It is quite true, every word of it. Despite its tone or interpretation, these are the facts. The facts are correct. I have a twenty-year-old son named Julian, who has returned to his studies at Trafford University. I also have a daughter, yes, she is older than my son, she is twenty-four, and her legal name is Mindy Dilman. I have not seen her, not set eyes upon her, since shortly before my wife’s death, when my daughter was eighteen or thereabouts. With my wife’s encouragement, Mindy left the Midwest for the East, to seek a career. Like my wife, more than my wife, Mindy was fair-skinned, and had delicate features. On my wife’s side, for perhaps three or four generations back, and to a lesser extent on my own side, there were Caucasians and Indians, white and brown forebears.”

Dilman hesitated. “I might add, this is not unusual. I am well acquainted, as are most literate Negroes, with the history of our common ancestry. The information about ourselves comes to us largely from white sociologists and anthropologists. According to these authorities, there has always been miscegenation-racial mixing with consequent propagation-in the United States. This began in colonial times, although the most intensive interracial contact among Caucasians, Negroes, and Indians, as Dr. Gunnar Myrdal has pointed out, occurred during our period of slavery and immediately thereafter. It was a time when Negro women were sexually exploited by white men. As a result, according to Dr. Myrdal and numerous other sociologists, as a result of this mixing between whites and colored peoples, with or without the benefit of marriage, there are today estimated to be 70 per cent to 80 per cent of American Negroes who have some degree of so-called white blood or, more accurately, white genes. Because of this, my wife and I, like eight out of every ten Negro Americans, have some white heredity, no matter how minute. I might add that conversely, because of this mixing, at least 20 per cent and perhaps as high as 40 per cent of the whites in the United States have some degree of so-called Negro blood in their veins, whether they know it or not. In any case, because of these heredity facts, many Negro families will, every generation or so, produce offspring who more closely resemble their one or two Caucasian ancestors.”

Dilman studied the tops of the reporters’ heads encircling him, and then he went on.

“In our family of four, there were two of us who were black-skinned like myself and two who, because of the old admixture, were fair-skinned. My wife Aldora was fair-skinned, what is called, in a certain section of the country, ‘pumpkin yellow.’ I, her husband, as you can see, am unmistakably black. My son is also unmistakably black. But my daughter Mindy, from birth to maturity, was as fair as her mother. Her complexion was, and no doubt is today, more light-colored than many Mediterranean whites.