A Shade of Difference (31 page)

’Gage and Sue-Dan, he thought with a sigh; there was a pair for a man to contend with. Both wanted him to be what he was, his race’s finest representative in the national government; both wanted him to advance to the Senate; and yet neither could resist constantly needling him to take actions so violent in the area of race that they would inevitably destroy his public career, topple him from the House, and make of the Senate a blasted dream.

Well: he wasn’t the only man in public life who was torn many ways by many things, and he probably shouldn’t let it bother him too much. And perhaps it wouldn’t, were it not compounded by the other factor: an ability not given to many of his people to place their problem in perspective, to stand back and judge their needs against the overall necessities of the United States, hard pressed and under fire everywhere, in this most disorderly and irresponsible of centuries.

Never before, he imagined, had humanity been so completely frivolous about its own survival. In a sort of gargantuan joke on everybody, the fabric of a stable world society was ripped and torn on every hand, reason and restraint were tossed to the wind, decency and truth were hurled in history’s waste can, things that were declared to be things that were not, things that were not solemnly hailed as things that were. “Freedom!” they cried, and destroyed freedom in its name. “Progress!” they shouted, and scurried back as fast as they could scramble to the dark night of dictatorship and the death of the mind. And here was one little colored boy, trying to make sense of it all; one little colored boy, he thought grimly, who had been more than well-treated by his white countrymen and therefore felt himself under obligation to be responsible when he approached the matter of the beloved country they shared together.

Did this make him, then, a “white man’s pet,” as LeGage would have it? Because he wouldn’t walk with Terry through obscene women to take a little girl to school, because he wouldn’t engage in the easy slurs of the white man that were such a staple of daily conversation among so many of his people, because he tried to be objective—a desperately difficult thing to do, in this age of organized intolerance of the other fellow’s point of view?

Well, maybe. But he could not honestly believe it. He had some concept of himself better and higher than that. He remembered what his mother had said, shortly before her death, when he was first elected to the House.

“You goin’ there to be a servant to the country,” she had said with the intensity of the dying, staring at him out of the enormous dark eyes in the wasting face. “You be a good one.”

Be a good one. It was an injunction he had always done his best to follow, even now when his wife, his friend, everything, and everyone were conspiring to make it as difficult as possible.

Be a good one.

He got up with a sudden air of decision, crossed the room to the telephone, dialed a number, and said softly to the voice that answered—drowsily, for it was past midnight—“Mr. Secretary?”

From another telephone high in the Waldorf-Astoria in New York there came a muffled, questioning sound fifteen minutes later. The acting head of the United States delegation to the UN was also struggling awake.

“I’m sorry, Hal,” Orrin Knox said. “I didn’t want to wake you, but it seemed best. Cullee Hamilton just called to tell me what Felix has in mind. Are you awake?”

“Yes,” Senator Fry said, obviously making an effort to be instantly bright and receptive and apparently achieving it. “Go right ahead. I’m listening.”

Two minutes later he objected, “But we can stand that, can’t we? It may be a little embarrassing, but—”

“Any other time,” the Secretary agreed, “it would be embarrassing, but we could probably get it quietly killed in committee, or beaten if it had to go to a vote. But with this business of Terry to compound it, it could really do us great damage—very great damage—all over the world. Particularly in the way it’s going to be offered, which ties it in with the other matter. We really may not be able to beat it, with the Afro-Asians as excited as they are … I just called Patsy and woke her up, which I must say I enjoyed doing because of a little argument earlier in the evening that I’ll tell you about when I see you, and she said Felix was on the Pennsylvania Railroad sleeper to New York. She was a little vague, I suspect deliberately, as to where and when you could reach him tomorrow, but I’d like you to see him if you possibly can. Tell him that if he will hold off on this, I’ll begin serious talks with him at once on that Panama matter he’s been after. He’ll know the one.”

“Is it important enough to head him off on this?” Hal Fry asked in some surprise. “What is it, cession of the Canal?”

“No, but in that area. So will you see him, please?”

There was a momentary hesitation and the Secretary caught it up at once.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, now, what?”

“Well, it’s just that—it’s my day to go up the Hudson, you know? I haven’t been able to get there in a couple of weeks, and I felt I should. Not that it makes any difference,” Hal Fry said with a sadness so deep it made the Secretary want to cry, “but I think I should. However, under the circumstances—”

“No,” Orrin said, “you go. What time will you be back?”

“Oh, about three, I suppose.”

“Well, all right. But do see Felix then for sure, okay? Because it could be quite vital. The stakes are suddenly much higher all around than they have been. I’m counting on you.”

“Sure thing. When will you be coming up?”

“I guess Monday morning, now. I hadn’t planned to, but there it is. The world doesn’t stand still for plans, nowadays. Now go back to sleep and get some more rest. You need it.”

“I took it easy today; I feel much better. And Orrin—thanks about tomorrow.”

“Certainly. You know you’re very welcome. Just be sure and see Felix when you get back.”

“Right.”

12

The day was glorious as he turned off West Seventy-second Street onto Riverside Drive and drove north toward the George Washington Bridge. The sky was bright with the exaggerated blue of autumn, a very few clearly defined clouds drifted white above the New Jersey Palisades, a lone river steamer plowed slowly up the wind-whipped channel of the Hudson, and close to the churning gray water the sea gulls dipped and swung. Not many cars were on the Drive at ten o’clock on this beautiful Sunday morning, and he drove with the feeling, sometimes unexpectedly granted even in the city of New York, that he was master of the universe. It was a feeling he would have enjoyed any other time, but today, as always on these visits that now extended back over so many years, he felt only a sadness so deep he wondered if he would ever recover from the burden. Each time, of course, he did, or thought he did, but each new time the pain returned as crushing as before.

This, however, was something he must try not to think about too much, even though the years did not lessen it as years were supposed to do. One could adjust to certain things, but one could never really accept them; the aching protest remained, no matter how dutifully one made obeisance to the Lord’s unfathomable will. It was so unjust, so unnecessary, so
unfair—
but he must stop that. It never solved anything, helped anything, or got him anywhere in his endless argument with a destiny that had turned out to be much darker than he had ever dreamed it would be when he first embarked upon it.

Not, of course, that the world was aware, save in the most casual way, of the void that lay beneath his outwardly successful career. “If, now and again, the senior Senator from West Virginia seems gripped by a melancholy beyond that normally brought by the endless contentions of men at the United Nations,”
Time
had said in its cover story on him three months ago, “he perhaps has reason.” There had been the briefest of comments, a genuinely kind reference, as though it were something the magazine had to include but did not relish, to his personal tragedy. Back home, it was rarely mentioned, seldom thought of, hardly known. His constituents, and many of his friends, had only a vague notion that there was something unhappy there. Fortunately his fundamental good nature and likable character were such that few really remembered and understood and felt the kind of sympathy that was, in itself, a pain.

For this, in all honesty, he was grateful, for he did not know for sure whether he could bear what he had to bear if it were the object of a constantly expressed general commiseration. There were things it was best that society not notice too much; some doors it was best, by mutual agreement, to keep closed. This was one of them. Nothing could be done about it, and endless expressions of sorrow could only make more difficult a burden that at no time was easy. He was grateful to society for forgetting. It did not help him forget, of course, but it made his remembering a little easier.

And so as usual, he told himself with a bitter self-sarcasm as he swung over the massive bridge to the Palisades Parkway and started the scenic run above the river toward West Point and Newburgh and his destination not far beyond, he had once again worked himself into the perfect frame of mind for it. Why did he always do this? Why could he not achieve the serenity of acceptance that he had sought in vain to achieve over the empty years? Why, why, why? … Well: he knew the answer to that, right enough. Because it was the sort of thing no man could accept serenely, unless he was a saint or until he was dead.

Best think about the UN, he decided hastily; that was certainly problem enough to fill any man’s mind for the remainder of the ride. He had watched it feeding on its own tensions in the past three days, the endless self-cannibalizing of ideas, intentions, motivations, hopes, fears, objectives, ambitions, speculation, gossip, that went on all the time but always stepped up to an exaggerated pace whenever some new, unusual event occurred in the world to provoke it. What had begun as an unfortunate but probably harmless comedy of errors in the President’s inadvertent press conference remark and his first reaction to the M’Bulu’s visit had been transformed abruptly by the latter’s dramatic gesture in South Carolina into something far more dangerous and troublesome. And now Felix Labaiya was stepping in to make it even worse. And behind Felix, he supposed, either as a direct party in interest or just for the hell of it, was the Soviet Union.

And yet why, he challenged himself abruptly, should he so quickly assume that the Soviets had anything to do with it? Wasn’t he being quite unjust to Felix, who after all had never given any overt cause for such suspicions? Of course there was gossip about him in the corridors and the Lounge, but, then, there was gossip about everyone on some count or other. No one had ever caught Felix out in anything that could be attributed beyond question to Soviet influence. Why should one assume now, just because something was embarrassing to the United States, that Soviet influence was calling the tune? Might not Felix honestly feel this way? Many delegates did, particularly among the newer states. Why shouldn’t Felix arrive independently at the same judgment?

Furthermore, the assumption of Communist influence was too pat. Like many a United States delegate, Hal’s first impulse on being assigned to the United Nations had been to assume, for a while, that Communist malevolence was behind everything hostile to the United States. It did not take him long to perceive that while the malevolence existed, it did not encompass every antagonism, or inspire every hostility, to his country and the West. If the West weren’t vulnerable on so many points, he was honest enough to admit, it wouldn’t suffer attack on so many points. If his own country weren’t vulnerable, it wouldn’t now be such a sitting duck for the double-barreled assault of the Ambassador of Panama and the heir to Gorotoland.

Thus his thoughts went as the river grew narrower and more lovely above West Point and the sharp outlines of earlier morning gave way to the gentling haze of the day’s growing warmth. And then abruptly he was unable to fill his mind with the subject any longer, for now he was nearing his objective and the time had come to brace himself once more for other things.

He passed through Newburgh, turned off Highway 9-W to the river, came in sight of it rolling magnificently to his right, came to the well-remembered clump of woods, the small neat gates, the small unobtrusive sign: Oak Lawn. He turned in and began the winding approach, his breath beginning to come shorter as it always did despite his angriest efforts to keep it steady, his heart beginning to pound hurtfully. Had it been easier when she—before the day he had come home and found—but that, too, he did not want to think of, though he inevitably did. He supposed her presence used to help somehow, though, looking back, it seemed to him that it had always been the closest thing to hell that he would ever know on earth.

And then he was at the parking lot, carefully placing his car alongside the others—some modest and empty, others, not so modest, with chauffeurs waiting—and was on his way up the familiar walk to the familiar door. He was greeted with the hushed, respectful tones that were standard courtesy here, escorted down the long, waxed corridors, taken through the big sun porch overlooking the river, left to walk out alone upon the lawn. Fifty feet away, sitting by himself on a rattan chair in the brilliant sunlight, he saw a strikingly handsome boy of nineteen, his eyes looking far away, intent on something no other eyes would ever see, beyond the river.

“Jimmy!” Hal Fry called, his voice high and near breaking, as it always was at this moment, however he tried to keep it normal. “Hi, Jimmy!”

The boy turned in his slow way, that to a stranger might appear thoughtful, and gave the gravely beautiful smile that illuminated his face with a kindness beyond comprehension. There came an expression of friendly and all-embracing greeting, though Senator Fry knew that he had not recognized him now for many years, would never recognize him again, did not have the slightest realization of who he was or the slightest memory that he had ever been there before.

With a little half-sob in his throat he tried to keep his smile steady and reassuring as he went forward through the gorgeous morning to greet his son.