Irving Wallace - The Man

“Miss Watson, you’ve knocked me out. I’d better turn on my radio and find out what’s been going on. I sure appreciate your-”

“Mr. Poole,” she called to him urgently, “I really phoned about something else. I wanted to discuss a personal matter-”

“Look, jingle me back in ten minutes, will you? I’ll be right here. Thanks, Miss Watson.”

He slammed the receiver down, almost certain that he was having his leg pulled, jumped up, and found his tiny red transistor radio. As he switched it on, he became positive that she had been teasing him. How in the devil could a rabbit-hearted twerp like Dilman become President of the United States? He was only a second-rate senator, and a Negro besides. That dizzy, sick dame, with her sadistic Southern joke, damn her.

The volume on the transistor radio was turned high, and the pontifical voice of a network editorial philosopher engulfed him. He listened, incredulous, and then began spinning the selector to other stations. There were news broadcasts. There were interpretive analysts. There were discussion panels. There were taped reports from the man on the street. There were faded reports from London, Paris, Moscow, Rome, Tokyo. Miss Watson was right. It was true. His boy Dilman was the Chief Executive of America the Beautiful. Lor’ Mighty! I’ll be John Browned!

He listened for five minutes, until he had the facts and they had sunk in, and then he turned the radio off. He wheezed about the room in his baggy pajamas, trying to sort it out, convert it into a facsimile of reality. Once he interrupted his walking, thinking, to ring the desk downstairs and ask the clerk to send the handyman next door for a carton of coffee and a doughnut, overcoming resistance with the promise of an extravagant half-dollar tip.

He resumed his heavy pacing, which finally led him into the closet-sized bathroom. By the time he had finished his quick shaving, nicking himself twice, his washing, and had changed into sweat shirt, corduroys, and moccasins, his mind had moved from the enormity of the news and narrowed down to himself. What did this upheaval mean to Leroy Poole?

His weeks of intimate conversation with Dilman made it clearly evident that the Senator, now President, was a loner. Whenever Poole had begged for relatives or friends whom he might consult for more objective information, Dilman had turned him aside. “I have almost no one close to me,” he had said. Eventually Poole had extracted several names: Dilman’s son, Julian, at Trafford University; Dilman’s maiden aunt, Beatrice, in Los Angeles; Dilman’s old sponsor and still political boss in his home state, the union leader, Slim Dubowsky; Dilman’s tenant, the Reverend Paul Spinger; Dilman’s acquaintance, the national chairman of the Party, Allan Noyes; Dilman’s good friend in the Second World War, the liberal trial attorney, Nathan Abrahams, in Chicago. “That’s about it, Leroy,” Dilman had said on that occasion. “Fact is, except maybe for Nat Abrahams, you yourself know me as well as, maybe better than, any of them.”

Of this list of friends, Poole now saw, he himself was one of the three who were in Washington, near at hand, ready with friendship and counsel. In short, his association with Dilman could be turned to profit, now that Dilman was the head of the country.

First off, the hack biography, since its subject was on all lips, would not be just another book that sold three thousand copies, but would be an intimate, inside look at a new President that might sell a hundred thousand copies. It could make Leroy Poole wealthy and give substance to his by-line. Second, and more important, far more important, there was his relationship with the President; their scheduled meetings in the coming weeks would give Leroy Poole access to the ear of the most powerful figure in the United States.

Dilman, as Leroy Poole saw him, was a weak and tentative public servant, who had spent so many years mouthing the Party’s pronouncements that he had become a mere ventriloquist’s dummy for his white superiors. He was unoriginal, without a single dynamic or progressive idea or program of his own. His head was a receptacle of platitudes and ayes. But it was a head, and it could be filled with ideas by one near enough to him. The possibility excited Poole. With real effort he might make Dilman swallow, digest, and regurgitate the Turnerite demands for full equality now. And even more might be accomplished. Great Negroes-forceful ones, brilliant ones, like Jeff Hurley-might be appointed to high and key government offices, possible, possible, provided there was one at Dilman’s arm to guide him in the right direction, even push him ahead.

Leroy Poole left the bathroom to answer the knock at the door with the conviction that fate had made his own future role unique. At last, as never before, in a way more effective than his essays and books, or his work on the Turnerite board, he could help promote his people to their rightful place.

He accepted the carton of tepid coffee, learning the cream and sugar were already in it, and the crushed doughnut, and reluctantly handed out a quarter and a half dollar for the breakfast and tip. After closing the door, he felt less worried about his extravagance. He was way up there now, potentially rich, potentially the savior of his people.

Then, gradually, as he squatted on the armchair to drink his coffee and munch the tasteless doughnut, the conviction that he might serve himself and every Negro through Dilman became fainter. Dilman, no matter what had happened, was still no more than the man Poole had come to know and despise. Dilman was as scared of whites as Poole himself had once been. Dilman had never once tried to break out of the servile, bowing, watermelon world of the Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas. He was a figurehead fink, using his color in a state where it mattered, to gain office, rejecting his color in the gentleman’s Chamber of the Senate, where it mattered more. How could a person who trembled so constantly even hold onto a new idea? How could a person always backing away from responsibility be reached?

In fact, Old Chub the Rabbit-Hearted might even renege on the biography now, Poole realized with a shudder. In the last minutes, the biography had become as valuable to Leroy Poole as a First Folio Shakespeare. As an obscure senator, Dilman had been afraid of the biography, recoiling from any attention. It had taken the intervention of the foremost Negro publisher in America, and pressure from several Negro leaders, including Spinger, to convince Dilman that a short, innocuous, political biography would be more useful to him than harmful.

Immediately after Poole had arrived in Washington, he had found Dilman reserved and tongue-tied about discussing his personal life. Cleverly Poole led the Senator into discussions of his public career. Since the facts had been published, Dilman had proved easier, more amiable, more talkative. Recently Poole had led him back to his private life, and Dilman, at last conditioned to these interviews, more trusting of his interrogator (who had not told him of his connection with the Turnerites), had been more helpful, but still not frank and open. If Dilman had been so timorous before, Poole wondered, how would he be now, when his every word might be examined by a suspicious or hostile citizenry? Would he call Leroy Poole in and tell him that the project was finished? Or would he simply evade Poole, postpone interviews, and allow the project to languish and die?

Leroy Poole put aside his coffee container, wiped the crumbs from his mouth as he brought the telephone to it, and put in a call for Dilman’s secretary, Diane Fuller, in the Old Senate Office Building. Told that her line was busy, Poole waited. Presently he heard her harassed voice, her speech ungrammatical as it was whenever she was under tension. Poole had always been flattering to the scrawny, nervous colored girl, because he had long ago learned that personal secretaries were important, sometimes alter egos, and even if Diane did not measure up, it paid to play it safe. As ever, Poole greeted her effusively, and congratulated her on the elevation of her boss.