Irving Wallace - The Man

“Have we seen every room?” he asked the hovering valet.

“Not quite. Please follow me.”

They entered a corridor, then entered the red-and-white Empire Guest Room, then looked into the small bathroom with a carpet-a carpet in the can, Je-sus!-and then moved toward the southeast corner room.

“This is the last one you haven’t seen,” the fink valet was announcing. “It is the Lincoln Sitting Room, adjoining the Bedroom, which you visited. You’ll find the furniture somber, late Empire and Victorian. The side chairs are backed by laminated rosewood, quite unique. The room offers solitude, retreat, and an excellent view of Washington and Georgetown. Perhaps the only modern, discordant note in the Sitting Room is-”

The valet had gone into the Lincoln Sitting Room, and at once halted and drew himself upright.

“Excuse me, sir,” he was saying to someone in the corner. “We won’t disturb you, Mr. Dilman. I was taking one of the President’s guests on a-”

At the mention of the name, Leroy Poole squeezed past the valet into the Sitting Room, where Julian Dilman sat slumped in a red-patterned, upholstered chair drawn up before a going television set.

Poole rotated his palm in greeting. “Hi, Julian,” he said breezily.

Julian leaped to his feet, as filled with consternation and pleasure as if Lincoln himself had come into the room.

“Why, hello, Mr. Poole. It’s sure good to see you again. It was a great honor and pleasure meeting you downstairs. You don’t know what a fan I am of yours. I’d sure like to talk to you sometime about your essays.”

“Why not right now?” said Poole, all affability. He pivoted toward the impassive valet. “Do you mind, Jeeves?”

“Not at all, sir,” said Beecher. “We’ve completed the tour, sir. Ring for me when you are ready to leave.”

The valet backed off to the doorway, then through it, then hastened away.

Poole had followed the retreat of the valet to the door. Now, closing the door, he said to Julian, “That butler-I bet Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writing a book about him this minute.”

Julian clapped his hands, and beamed at being the solitary recipient of a Great Author’s bon mot . Going to the side chair nearest the President’s son, Poole silently exulted that he had found the objet d’art , animate, he had been hunting, and that it would not be difficult at all.

“Sit down, Julian,” Leroy Poole said. “I have only a couple of minutes, but I’d enjoy a little chat.”

Poole settled easily into a chair, while Julian, displaying embarrassment at the unreeling of an old Western motion picture filling the television set screen, said, “I-I was just eating up some time before catching my train back to Trafford. Let me shut it off.”

“You’ll never know how it came out,” Poole said.

“I don’t care,” said Julian. He went awkwardly to the television set and turned it off. Then, shyly, he took a place beside Poole. “My taste is better than that, believe it or not,” he said. “I read a lot, that’s what I do.”

“What sort of thing?” asked Poole.

“Well, the classics, of course,” said Julian nervously.

“I thought you said you read my stuff.”

“I do! That’s the truth, Mr. Poole, that’s what I really read the most now, the protest literature, that’s what I find important.”

Poole dropped his teasing demeanor and nodded solemnly. “Good boy,” he said. “I wish your father felt the same.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Poole?”

“I’ve come to know your father quite well, Julian, so I mean no negating or adverse criticism of his remarkable mind and achievements, but-no, I don’t think it’s fair to discuss this with-”

Julian almost fell from the chair in his eagerness. “Please, please, Mr. Poole, go ahead! I know my father pretty well, and I know his shortcomings as well as his good points.”

“Ummm,” murmured Poole. “Okay, then. It’s just that I don’t think he’s as close to his people, their problems, as he should be. I think he’s been in this antiseptic center of compromise too long, and he’s been separated from the realities of Negro misery and injustice too long.”

“You’re right, absolutely,” Julian said fervently. “He’s always been that way, at least long as I can remember, long as he’s been a politician depending on support from whites. To tell the truth, I was having a fight with him-well, a disagreement, let’s say-about just that before you came in his office.”

Poole wore his mask of innocent wonder. “No kidding?”

“He forced me into a Negro college,” Julian rushed on. “Now he objects because I’m giving so much time to the Crispus Society. I accused him of not facing what he is, what we’re up against, and he gave me a good dressing down.”

“No kidding?” Poole repeated. “Well, we gave him quite a morning, the two of us. You know that trouble down in Mississippi over the Turnerites-?”

“Oh, yes!”

“I begged your father to get the Attorney General into the matter, to straighten out that crooked trial. If he couldn’t do that as President-I know the pressure he is under-I asked him to do Jeff Hurley a personal favor. I asked him to have his friend Nat Abrahams-”

“I know Nat. He’s a great guy.”

“Okay, I asked your father to persuade Nat to step in and appeal the conviction, when it comes. Apparently, Nat’s tied up with something else, but he couldn’t say no to your father, to the President, if he were asked. No soap. Your father wouldn’t ask.”

“He wouldn’t?” said Julian. Then he nodded knowingly. “That’s right, he wouldn’t. Especially now. He has strong feelings against equality by force. I’m like you, like what you write, Mr. Poole. I think that’s the only course there is left for us. Yet nothing can change Dad. He’s wrong, but that’s the way he is.”

“You can change him,” said Leroy Poole. He had timed it. A pause, and then this opener before the real bombshell. He could see the beginning. Julian’s repellent eyes had inflated.

“Me?” Julian grimaced. “You mean you want me to ask him to help them down in Mississippi?”

Leroy Poole allowed his last mask of affability to slip away. His fat face was grim. He was Jeff Hurley’s envoy and final negotiator before the cataclysm.

“Julian, I didn’t come upon you in this room by accident. I pretended to be on a tour. That was crap. I was looking for you. You know why? Because those Turnerites down in Hattiesburg have got to be saved. No Negro can give in to such flagrant injustice and humiliation. I know Hurley has drawn the line in Hattiesburg. If those bastards step over it, there’ll be real trouble-not talk, Julian, but trouble-for your father, for the whole country, for you and me. I’m trying to prevent it being done the hard way. I want to be law-abiding like your father. Okay, either he’s got to intervene, or get someone in the government or in private practice, someone with weight, to throw it around and show those bastards that the Middle Ages are done and over with forever. That’s it, Julian. I just tried. I failed. You’re the last hope. I want you to go in there and convince your father to act.”

Julian pushed a little dry laugh, false and fearful, out of his unsmiling mouth. “Mr. Poole, I-I’d do anything-I’m trying all the time-but this is one thing I can’t do. My father just practically threw me out of his office over a lesser matter. If I even opened my mouth about this, he’d pin my ears back-he’d cut my allowance, make me quit Crispus, God knows what else. We’ve had it out about active protest. No use. I can’t go back to him again.”

Leroy Poole held his breath. This was it, the cold, chilling moment to strike, the clear air and exact time for the bombshell.