Irving Wallace - The Man

He searched for his mottled briar pipe, filled it with tobacco from the rubbed pouch, and lit it. He had taken no more than one puff when the rented Ford blocked his vision and Sue was framed in the car window, her left hand hitting the horn.

He climbed inside, kissed her cheek, and the Ford jolted forward. He asked her what she had been doing and where they were going, and she began to tell him, but he hardly listened. If you must bend, he thought, how far do you bend?

As the car turned a corner, and he was forced against her, he realized that she had become silent and was trying to study him as she drove.

“What’s the matter, Nat?” she asked.

“Matter? What makes you think-?”

“You haven’t heard a word I’ve said. You’ve been a million miles away.”

He tried to smile. “Only a few blocks away, in the Hotel Congressional with Gorden Oliver, errand boy between Mephistopheles in Atlanta and Nat Faust right here.”

“So that’s the way it is,” said Sue. “Tell me. Don’t leave out a thing.”

She drove, and he talked. He told her what Oliver had wanted, and how he himself had reacted, as much as he could remember of it in a ten-minute monologue. When he was done, he turned his head. Her pretty face, still unlined except at the brow, was pointed straight ahead at the windshield, wifely grave.

“That’s it, Sue,” he said. “Beneath all the verbiage it comes to this, a command from on high-go in there and influence Doug Dilman, no matter what he believes, to approve the minorities bill. Persuade him, get him to sign it, and you’ve earned your salary from Emmich and big business.”

“Gorden Oliver didn’t tell you to do that in so many words.”

“He told me without the words.”

She continued watching the street before them. “Nat, maybe you’ve got your hackles up for no reason at all. You are simply assuming that whatever is good for Eagles Industries is bad for the country, for Dilman, for yourself, and you are against it. Can’t it be that what they want might also be what everyone else wants and needs?”

“We-ll-could be.”

“The odds are Doug Dilman likes most of the bill and will sign it. He hasn’t told you he won’t, has he?”

“No, he hasn’t.”

“I read the papers too, and from what I have read, almost the entire press and the political organizations and Congress seem to be behind this legislation.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

Sue glanced at him. “That doesn’t make it wrong either, darling. I think you’re misplacing your hostility. You feel guilty about leaving your practice, abandoning your underdogs, making so much money in a short time. You feel ashamed, and so you’re taking it out on Eagles and Emmich and Oliver and anything they propose. Nat, you’re smarter than that. Study all that stuff in your pocket objectively, like you study a legal brief. Then decide how you feel. If MRP is a sensible compromise program, speak up for it. And there’s nothing wrong in telling Doug you’re for it, whether he’s President or not. He may welcome discussing it with you. If you don’t like it, shut up.”

She took her right hand from the steering wheel and covered her husband’s hand. “Nat, maybe it is good for the country. Don’t be like some angry kid who has to be against everything his elders are for, to show he’s a man. You are a man, the best and most wonderful one on earth. You are a man who can still serve himself and the public while protecting his own life and his children. Don Quixote wasn’t for real, darling, but you are. No more dragons, either. Freud scared them away. And all that is left are human problems to be solved by human beings like yourself in a mature way. I know you’ll handle this and the next three years that way.”

Her literary allusion, so exactly and uncannily reflective of his own on the street corner earlier, swept aside the last vestige of his anger. Wives, he thought, wonderful wives who grow your minds as you grow theirs, until you and they are one and the same till death do you part. He was amused by her and loved her, for herself and for the better part of him that she possessed, and he wanted to hug her and hold her close to him and enjoy her.

Instead, he leaned over and kissed the corner of her mouth. She seemed startled, and wary, and then pleased.

“Mmm,” she whispered, “nice, even if I did almost hit that truck.” Then she said, “What brought on that affection?”

He continued to smile at her. She would never know what had moved him. Nor did it matter. He could only say, “Because you make good speeches, and you are sensible, and you think I am a man, and I love you. I’ll always love you.”

He settled back, at ease at last, lighted his pipe again, and felt strong enough to bend a little, a little, if it would be necessary.

When Otto Beggs caught sight of the broken, unlighted neon sign jutting out from the Walk Inn a long block away, he automatically slowed down. For the second time in a week he had lied to Gertrude about his hours, to get away from home early, and for the second time in a week he was deliberately timing his arrival at the tavern because he knew that Ruby Thomas would be there, and suddenly he felt furtive and uneasy about what had previously come about so naturally-well, almost.

Except for those times in Korea, which did not count because he was in the Army and in danger and the tiny, submissive girls were foreigners, and except for four or five times on special assignment trips around the country, which did not count because he had been drinking in his off hours and the women were prostitutes, not women, Otto Beggs had never been unfaithful to his wife. He was prim and correct about living up to the responsibilities of a husband and a father, and about remembering the obligations of his position in the Secret Service, and especially the extra obligations thrust upon him as a Congressional Medal of Honor holder, and he would do nothing to sully his reputation. He looked down, with an attitude of superiority (and a tinge of envy), upon those of his colleagues who cheated on their wives, proud that there was as little likelihood that a scandal would find its way into his scrap-books as there was that Tom Swift would accept a bribe or that an astronaut would beat his wife.

Yet what had made Otto Beggs feel furtive this time, for the first time, was not the lie to Gertrude (he had already lied to her two days ago), not the fact that he had told Ruby Thomas he would be there (he had been there with her three times before), but that he had lain awake several hours last night enacting a fantasy relationship with her. Even worse, late this morning, and again after lunch, with Austin’s lousy real estate primers open on the desk, he had been unable to study a line because Ruby had sat on the pages before him, Ruby dressed (which was like any other woman undressed), Ruby naked (which was like any other woman undressed), Ruby naked (which was like no sight on earth, he imagined), Ruby opening her arms to him (which had excited him as much as if he were a schoolboy).

It was this sudden obsession with her, and the realization that she might not be averse to fulfilling his dreams, that gave today’s meeting a special significance, and gave him pause in his advance toward the Walk Inn, where she waited. For now this was no more, at least to him, a casual meeting between chance acquaintances. It was something strange to him: an assignation. It was the kind of surreptitious activity of which he disapproved as being indecent, almost un-American, and yet it moved him like a force powerful enough to overwhelm his puritan will and fear of danger. Much as his mind resisted it, his body had become a partner to this rendezvous with Ruby. For in a life of disillusionment, where he was being ignored on a job he loved, being degraded into studying for a new and anonymous and sedentary career he detested, being disapproved of by those closest to him, being made less and less a virile male of action, there was one radiant light of hope. Ruby. It was Ruby who admired his looks, his position, his dreams. Ruby, who was young, magnificent, passionate (he was sure). It did not surprise him that he could not resist her. What did astound him was that the one radiant light of hope in his life, in this gray time, should shine from one so black. For Ruby Thomas, twenty-four, was a Negro.