Irving Wallace - The Man

“I think you should at least see her, Mr. President. I think you’ll be impressed.”

“All right, I’ll see her. Can you call her for me?”

“Immediately.”

Dilman’s eyes went to his engagement card and then to his wristwatch. He was still running ahead of schedule. There would be a free span of fifteen minutes or so between his last morning appointment and his luncheon with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“All right, Leroy. Tell Miss Watson to be here at twelve-fifteen. Don’t give her any false hopes. Simply say I’ll see her briefly.”

“I’ll take care of it, gladly, Mr. President.” Poole began to turn away, when the view of the South Portico of the White House beyond the Rose Garden arrested him. “My, that’s a beautiful sight out there.” Suddenly he snapped his fingers. “One last thing, Mr. President. Since I’m ending your biography on your moving into the White House, I think it would be the smart thing to have a quick look at what’s going on up there.”

“It’s a mess today-”

“Exactly,” said Poole with heightening enthusiasm. “I want to see the moving in, the unpacking, the various rooms. I’ve never been up there before.”

“The press and public are not usually invited into the President’s private apartment.”

“I wouldn’t repeat the intimate details to a soul. I simply need a general visual picture for the book. That’ll be the tag of the book.”

Dilman shrugged, indifferent, his mind already going to the next names on his engagement card. “Go ahead, Leroy, if you require it. But don’t get in the way and don’t be long. I’ll inform the Secret Service where you’re going.”

He buzzed Edna Foster to alert Secret Service that Mr. Poole could be admitted to the second floor for a short visit. Then he buzzed Mr. Lucas to tell him to pencil in Miss Watson at twelve-fifteen, and to send in the next visitor.

He sat back in his green chair, exhausted by the hammerings of guilt from his son, by the special pleadings of his biographer, and resentful of this jabbing at his repressed consciousness of being a Negro, of being the first colored man in America who could (if he wanted to, they said) lead his people out of servitude to a Promised Land.

Through the French doors he could see the waddling, ridiculous figure of Leroy Poole making his way toward the ground-floor entrance. How could anyone as ineffectual and verbose and foolish-looking as that make him, a man in his position, feel so reproached and uneasy and afraid? Damn the Pooles and the Hurleys, he suddenly thought. They had no larger responsibility and so they could think, say, do anything. They had only a little ax to grind. But he, as President, had inherited a big stick. He must remember, he must never forget, to use it with wisdom, if at all. Unaccountably then, his mind revolved to Wanda Gibson, whom he could not see, and to the solution that had been taking form in his thoughts, and he began to feel more assured about what lay ahead…

After Leroy Poole had embraced Crystal across the expanse created by their equal corpulence, after kidding her gently and dubbing her Mammy Dolley Madison (for he adored her because she exuded the warmth he had enjoyed from his Mom in childhood), he made a mock ferocious charge across the litter in the Rose Guest Room toward Diane Fuller. While the skinny secretary feigned resistance and squealed, Poole pecked at her hollow cheek and pinched her behind.

Then, elaborately, he again extracted his small spiral notebook, and began to scribble notes describing this historic room on Dilman’s unpacking day. Without meeting the eyes of the fink Uncle Tom of a valet, he was conscious of the haughty servant’s disapproval of his uncouth extroversion.

Writing, Leroy Poole thought how much the valet Beecher had in common with Douglass Dilman: Man, you are sure enough a counterfeit white, like Massah, and, man, maybe it gets you along fine today, but it won’t stand you no good on Judgment Day, because you ain’t white, no matter what, and you ain’t black, no matter what, and you won’t rise no higher than purgatory and limbo.

Before coming upon Crystal and Diane in the Rose Guest Room, Poole had been taken on a careful tour of the second floor of the White House by the valet. At another time in his young life, he imagined, the visit might have been memorable. To know that a poor shanty black boy like himself could be led down hallways and up elevators by the President’s bodyguards, could be shown the intimate splendors of the White House by the President’s valet, would have been a high spot of his life. This morning it was next to nothing, and he was as inattentive as if he were going through the modern office building on 44th Street in Manhattan to visit his publisher.

For ten minutes he had been guided in and out of the great hall, in and out of the Yellow Oval Room, the Treaty Room, the Lincoln Bedroom (here he had his only start, seeing that fink Dilman’s clothes piled on the long bed), all the while listening to that Uncle Tom valet’s supercilious history patter. While Poole had made a pretense of taking notes, had indeed taken several, knowing all the while that he could get what he needed from the excellent guidebook the White House Historical Association had published, his entire attention was focused on a confrontation with one person somewhere in one of these stodgy, phony rooms.

Christ, he had thought, what had this junk cost to keep one bum politician in luxury for four years while millions of his people couldn’t buy their way out of the countless filthy, overcrowded, rotting and stinking slums? The hell with all this, the crappy Victorian chairs in the Treaty Room, the crappy crystal chandeliers bought by that nitwit President Grant, the crappy Monroe vases in the Yellow Oval Room, the crappy Greuze painting of Ben Franklin, another white fink-all this cared for by more overpaid people than there were working in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department or than were publicly able to work for the Turnerite Group.

His lousy meeting with that servile black Judas, Dilman, more yellow on his spine than black, had infuriated him, blinded him to everything but his failure. There were his gutty, beaten brothers handcuffed in that stinkpot town in that Devil’s Island of a state in the deep torture chamber of the South, suffering kangaroo trial before a foul vermin of a county judge. There was his friend Jeff Hurley, and that smart good Dago, Valetti, and the rest of his brother blacks risking their lives in Little Rock or Shreveport, where every segregated hotel was about as safe as the Alamo. And here was he, one of the secret unlisted members they counted upon most, commanded by their leader to convince a fink President to get a maybe fink Jew lawyer to lend a hand to justice. They were on the firing line, waiting on word from him, their hopes and last appeal for decency depending on him, and he had failed. Would Hurley understand how desperately he had tried? Would Hurley believe that he had been unable to turn a black man who was yellow into a black man who would be Negro? Yet three days ago the mails had brought him a hasty letter from Hurley and one last hope. If this hope was fulfilled, they could be optimistic again. If this, too, failed, then hell would break loose, and when Poole remembered the Turnerite plan of last resort, he had shuddered. And so he had tagged after the valet, looking not at the objets d’art which were America’s pride and heritage-not his, for America rejected him-looking not at this alien decadence but for the one animate object he must meet.

Finishing his note-taking in the Rose Guest Room, he once more slipped on his fat-man jester mask of good cheer, teased Crystal and Diane, and bade them good-bye for today.