A Shade of Difference (69 page)

“Listen, you,” Cullee said with an ominous quiet. “This is my wife. Understand? I know you don’t give a damn where your wife is or what she’s doing, but I care about mine. So why don’t you just run along before I tell Ted Jason on you?”

“Take your hands off me,” Felix said with a cold dignity, turning pale. “You are making a public spectacle of us all. Possibly that suits your cheap sense of the dramatic, but it doesn’t help your own cause any—”

“And don’t lecture me on my cause, either,” the Congressman said in the same ominous voice, emphasizing it with a sudden jerk on the Ambassador’s arm, while all around eyes widened and voices gasped and excitement grew. “At least it’s a cause I’m not ashamed of. How do you feel about yours?”

“I am not ashamed, either,” Felix said harshly. “I am proud of anything that can promise justice to your cruel and stupid country.”

“Maybe you don’t know what people here think about you, Cullee,” LeGage suggested. “Maybe you better find out, before you get so big-man about everything.”

“Big man, big man,” Sue-Dan said with a biting little laugh. “Where’s Big Man now?”

“They think enough of me so they voted for me today,” the Congressman said with a stubborn anger. Terrible Terry gave again his merry laugh.

“They think enough of American money, American bribes, American promises. But they don’t think much of America when it comes to race. When are you going to get intelligent and side with your own color, Cullee? You can’t be so very happy, playing at being a white man.”

“That’s what he’s always wanted to be,” LeGage said bitterly.

“Do you want me to hit you right here and now?” Cullee demanded, but it was not his ex-roommate, strained and unhappy and watching him with an expression of pain and mistrust, who gave him answer.

“Hit us all, why don’t you?” Sue-Dan said with a shrill little laugh that rang through the now-silent room. “That would look fine, wouldn’t it? But I tell you this, Cullee”—and suddenly the little fox-face looked harsh and vicious with the burden of its emotions—“if you do, I won’t
ever
come back to you … Not ever. I mean it, Cullee. You just try it and see.”

“You don’t plan to come back, anyway,” he said in an agonized whisper, for suddenly he was entirely convinced that it was true. “You wouldn’t come back, whatever I did … Would you?” he added uncertainly, in a tone that robbed him abruptly of all force, so wavering and uneasy was it. She seized upon it with a laugh both scornful and triumphant.

“Let’s see what you do for your own people awhile, Cullee. Let’s see how you act with your white friends down there in Congress. Then we see whether I come back or not. That’s how we find out.”

“I’ve got to do what I think is right for everybody,” he said in an almost inaudible voice while they watched him closely and without the mercy that might otherwise have made them run away from his anguished face and tortured eyes. “For everybody. Not just—us.”

For a long moment, no one gave answer. Then the M’Bulu bowed low.

“Obviously,” he said in his clipped tones, “we are in the presence of an upright and moral man who cannot be swayed by the appeals that move ordinary mortals. I would suggest that we leave him to think about it. Sue-Dan, may I have the honor to dance with you?”

“My
honor,” she said, moving into his arms with a smile that she made deliberately as intimate and suggestive as she could.

“If you will excuse us, Cullee,” the M’Bulu said, and they swept away onto the deserted floor as the orchestra came abruptly to life and the gathering in all its glittering gossip began to stir and shift with the patterns of casual association that had been temporarily frozen by the tense tableau at its center.

“You are a fool,” Felix Labaiya said in a cold voice. “You are a fool and you are losing everything. Did you hear me?” he said sharply. “I said you are a—”

“I heard you,” Cullee Hamilton said dully. “Go away.”

“Very well,” the Ambassador said scornfully. “Beware the dancers, or they will knock you down.”

And he turned abruptly away, leaving only the chairman of DEFY to proffer whatever assistance, or further condemnation, he might feel moved to contribute.

“Cullee—” he said, starting to lay a tentative hand on the Congressman’s arm. “Cullee, let me—”

“You too,” the Congressman said, unseeing. “Go away.”

“I—” LeGage began helplessly, but his ex-roommate looked at him with so anguished an expression that his voice died away.

“Ah, God!” Cullee whispered harshly.
“
Just—go
—away.”

“All right, Cullee,” ’Gage said hastily in a shaken voice. “I will.”

Somehow after that the Congressman from California managed to get from the center of the room, where he was indeed becoming an object of interference as well as derision to the gaily clad multitude that swirled about him, to one of the open windows. He looked back across the room for his wife and the M’Bulu, but everything blurred, he could not see them, his head was filled with the incessant pounding beat of the orchestra, growing more reckless and insistent as the dancers swayed faster to it. He turned with a harsh little noise of protest in his throat and walked out onto the esplanade, moving blindly along it north in the direction of Beekman Place until the sounds of Nigeria’s party became absorbed and lost in the night clamor of Manhattan to his left and the swift coursing of the river below to his right.

Finally he stopped and, with hands rigid upon the railing, stood staring at the water and the lights of Brooklyn across the way. “Pepsi-Cola,” Brooklyn said brightly; “Sunshine Biscuits.” The commercial messages of a civilization that offered little comfort for the mind and little surcease for the heart came emphatically to him over the dark channel. He sighed profoundly even as he realized with a start that he was no longer alone. Someone was approaching along the dark walkway from the distant Dining Room.

“Yes?” he said sharply, drawing himself up in readiness, not knowing what casual or not-so-casual intruder might have slipped passed the guards to invade the night precincts of the UN. But a comfortable laugh came back and he relaxed as he recognized it.

“Don’t shoot,” the junior Senator from Iowa said easily. “It’s me.”

“Hi,” Cullee said, a cool defensiveness in his tone. “What can I do for you?”

“First of all,” Lafe Smith said, “you can take that chip off your shoulder and throw it in the river. I’m not here to fight with you. Unlike some.”

“Oh. You saw.”

“Who didn’t?” Lafe said, the match for a cigarette momentarily lighting his shrewdly amiable face. “The whole wide world, in my estimation. I wouldn’t let it bother me, though, if I were you.”

“You wouldn’t?” Cullee said with a bitter irony. “That’s easy to say.”

“Easy to do, too, if you know which direction you’re going, and why,” Lafe said. “Or so,” he added thoughtfully as “Sunshine Biscuits” blinked at him cheerfully from across the river, “I have usually found.”

“You make it sound so simple,” Cullee said, still bitterly. “It isn’t so simple when you’re black.”

“I grant you that,” Lafe said gravely. “I’m not discounting that; I’m not crazy. I’m also not without a heart. I didn’t see much sign in there that anybody you were talking to had one.”

“They—I don’t think they meant to be mean,” Cullee said lamely. “They don’t know what they want.”

“Oh, I think they do. I think they know very well; whether mistakenly or not, at least they know. It seems to me that the problem is whether you know. Do you?”

For a moment his companion gave no answer, staring out across the river, a dark, silent bulk looming head and shoulders above the Senator from Iowa. Then he gave again the deep sigh he had uttered at the start of their conversation.

“I don’t know,” he said in a muffled voice. “I just don’t know.”

“I thought as much, which is why I came out. I thought maybe I could help, and I thought also that you should know that everything is set for your resolution to come up in the House on Monday. Orrin called about half an hour ago to say that the Speaker had arranged for a special Rules Committee meeting late this afternoon. They broke about half an hour ago after approving a six-hour debate rule on Monday. So you’re on your way. If that pleases you.”

“I don’t know, now—I just don’t know.”

“It still isn’t too late to back out, of course,” Lafe remarked matter-of-factly. “House rules will permit you to withdraw the resolution if you want to, won’t they?”

“Yes, they will.”

“Why don’t you, if it bothers you so?” the Senator suggested, still with an impersonal logic in his voice. “Then you’d be in the clear, without all this bother and unhappiness. Wouldn’t that be the simplest thing to do?”

His companion made a peculiar sound, between a sigh and a harsh, unamused laugh.

“What’s Old Doc Smith trying to do?” he asked. “Give me shock therapy and get me really confused? You know damned well nobody down there wants me to withdraw that resolution.”

“Seab does,” Lafe Smith said. “A lot of people do. Wouldn’t it be best for you to do what they want?” A blunt sarcasm came into his voice. “Why take a beating for the white man?”

Again his companion was silent, and when he finally spoke it was in a tone that made the Senator think that possibly, just possibly, he was gaining ground in what he had come out on the esplanade to attempt.

“What are you trying to do? Make me mad enough to fight?”

“You don’t need that,” Lafe said quietly. “If you decide to fight, it will be a matter of judgment and not of emotion.”

“That’s right,” Cullee agreed, promptly enough so that Lafe could tell he was flattered. “I don’t do things just because I’m mad.”

“Everybody knows that, which is why some people want to make you mad, in the hope it will throw you off balance and then you really won’t know what to do. Have they succeeded?”

But once again his companion seemed to retreat into some inner area of silence that the intruder could not penetrate without an invitation and a road map.

“I don’t know,” he said again, finally. “I just don’t know.”

“Well, I won’t try to persuade you. You’re a rational man, you know all the considerations involved; you are, I know, as concerned as we all are about what is best for the country. I trust you. Will you shake hands on it?”

“If you like,” Cullee said. He gave again the heavy sigh as he complied. “I’ll do my best. I’ll do what I can.”

“You have to work it out,” Lafe said. “If you need us, call us.” He smiled. “We won’t call you. Good night, Cullee.”

“Good night, Lafe. I appreciate your friendship.”

“You have it. I feel we’re all in this together.”

“That’s what I think too,” the Congressman agreed in a bleak voice. “But it isn’t so easy to tell some people that.”

He turned again to his brooding over the water, his hands once more rigid on the railing, his arms stretched as tautly as though he were trying to force the iron itself to speak. Brooklyn continued to call cheerfully to him across the silent river; at his back the voice of Manhattan said urgent things in a tense, unintelligible roar. Maybe it all added up to something; maybe there was to be found in it somewhere an answer to his hurt, unhappy people and his hurt, unhappy land; but if so it escaped him right then. Perhaps he could come to it later, perhaps the way would be clear sometime, at the end of all this weary road. He smiled, without amusement as he thought of what LeGage’s reaction would be to the weary road, that mournful concept out of a past LeGage and his like tried to pretend had never existed. How they loved to display their self-conscious scorn for the Negro past, these Fancy Dans who weren’t worthy to lick the boots of those who had endured slavery and come through it with faith and human decency intact. He uttered a growl of contempt and distaste that broke harshly into the night. Once more he found he had company, as the Soviet Ambassador spoke, so close to his elbow that he jumped.

“You are unhappy,” Vasily Tashikov said. “The white man’s world is using you like a puppet, the black man’s world threatens to spew you out, and you are all alone to shiver in the winds of history’s reckoning. It is very sad.”

“What do you want?” the Congressman demanded, turning so abruptly that he almost bumped into the slight form beside him. He would say for its owner’s control that he did not yield an inch. Instead, he asked impassively, “It is true, is it not?”

“What if it is?” Cullee said with a bitter scorn. “What of it? Is that supposed to make me a patsy for you?”

“I am a little hazy on that expression,” the Soviet Ambassador said, “but I suppose it means the same as stooge. Make
you
a stooge for
me,”
he remarked thoughtfully. “How crude.”

“Why don’t you go back in there and leave me alone?” the Congressman demanded bluntly. “I have nothing for you, or you for me.”

“Nobody has anything for you,” the Soviet Ambassador said with a certain dreamy inevitability in his tone. “Neither the white man who uses you nor the black man who despises you. Poor Congressman Hamilton! It is a sad world he lives in.”

“Will you leave me alone?” Cullee demanded again. But the Ambassador remained at his side, a small, tenacious leech.

“Look, you,” he said, in the same gently inexorable tone. “How can you possibly defend a dying bourgeois imperialism in the face of your own people? The Negro is humiliated in the South, despised in the North, forced to remain in second-class citizenship east, west, and all over. And you try to defend his oppressors! You run their errands! You argue their cause! You introduce their resolutions and play their vicious game! For shame, Congressman Hamilton. For shame!”

“Ah—” Cullee began, but the Ambassador cut him off.

“Really, how
can
you defend them? What earthly justice is there in the Negro’s condition in this great empty land of pretense? Just tell me, as a flat proposition,
what sense does it make?
”

And to this, of course, because there was no rational answer but only an answer of faith that progress had been made and would continue to be made hereafter, because there was not so much, when all was said and done, that could be pointed to with the unassailable logic demanded by his inquisitor and the watching world, the Congressman from California did not, for several minutes, give answer. When he did, it was in a slow, uncertain voice in which the dogged stubbornness had dwindled to a trace.

“All I know is, we’re better off than we used to be,” he said, suddenly unclenching his hands from the rail and rubbing his eyes in a desperately tired fashion, “and we’re going to be better yet. If America can just keep working at it, we’ll be better yet. That’s all I know.”

“If,” the Ambassador said scornfully. “If, if, if! This feeble, rotten country, this joke of a democracy! Do you have the simplest privileges of a white man’s pet dog? Would he let
you
come in and lie by the fire on a winter night? Why, of course not. And the whole world knows it, my friend. The whole world.”

“All I know—” Cullee began again, in infinite weariness, but the Ambassador was on it at once.

“Justify it. Look at it from any angle you like and say it makes sense. I defy you to do so. And here, on the other hand, are all the new free states of Africa, standing forth in their liberty and independence. Nearly two centuries of America and the American Negro hasn’t got as much as the free Negro of Africa achieves in two years. How they are laughing at you, my friend, as you attempt to defend the United States imperialist oppressors. It is no wonder the delegate of Kenya spits and your wife has left you. It is no wonder you are the laughingstock of this whole UN.”

But at this there was some indication that the Soviet Ambassador might have gone too far, for abruptly he found himself grasped by the coat-front and lifted off the ground so that he dangled half strangled like a puppet on a string, his feet jerking ignominiously, a harsh, gasping breath just managing to emerge from between his frantically opened lips.

“You see that water?” the Congressman asked softly, holding Vasily Tashikov out over it so that it slipped away darkly beneath his feet into horrible distances foul with horrible deeds, awash with the sickness of the horrible great city in the horrible black night. “I could drop you in it right this minute and nobody would know, Mr. Ambassador. Nobody at all would know until you floated up somewhere down in New Jersey, maybe, or they found you half eaten by the crabs. Assuming any crab would stoop to eat you. Assuming that!” And with a sudden half-cry of inarticulate rage the Congressman shook the Ambassador until his teeth rattled and his breath came ever shorter from his rapidly purpling lips.

“Now,” he said, lifting him abruptly back over the railing and slamming him down on his feet so hard it was a wonder it did not break his ankles, “get away from me, you twisting bastard, always twisting everything up, and leave my country alone. Go on away and tell it to somebody else. Just get away and leave us alone. I don’t ever want to speak to you again.”

For a long moment the Soviet Ambassador struggled, with long, hoarse gasps for air, to regain his breath, teetering back and forth on his heels like a far-gone drunk, his face gradually sorting itself out into some semblance of cohesion. When he finally spoke, it was in a painful wheeze. The words came clearly nonetheless.

“You can silence me … but you … can’t … silence … what I say. It doesn’t … make sense. It doesn’t … make sense! It doesn’t … make sense!”

“Go on!” Cullee Hamilton cried, aware that in the distance from the brightly lighted doors of the Delegates’ Dining Room a guard was coming on the run.
“Go on!”

“Yes,” the Soviet Ambassador said, still with difficulty, brushing away the guard’s helping hands and frantic questions with a furiously impatient air, “I will go on, and we will beat you, silly dupe of the imperialist oppressors, and your evil country, too.”

Some time later—how much he did not know for sure, though the music was diminishing, in the distant Dining Room and in the lighted arches of the windows fewer and fewer figures could be discerned, the night wind was growing colder, and it must be nearing midnight—he came gradually out of the depths of unthinking, unfeeling, unmoving where he had remained since the hated figure of his opponent had disappeared, still fuming, with the still-worried guard, into the darkness. And there, he suspected, he too should go, having given way to anger, having revealed his own terrible unease, having laid bare the terrible choices that could not be rationalized in a world clamoring for certainties and viciously eager to condemn the middle ground. Into the night he should go and there find—what? More liquor, and what good would that do? More sex, and how permanent an answer would that provide? There were many ways to run away from thinking and self-knowledge in the Borough of Manhattan, but he had discovered one thing, somewhere along the years, and that was the truth of what his mother had said one time when he had done something naughty as a child and threatened loudly to run away from home if he got licked for it. “You can run and run and run,” she had said, “’way down that long dark street, and at the end of it you know what you still going to find? Yourself, little boy, that’s what. Yourself.”

True enough, he thought now; always true, of course, for everybody; and yet somewhere there must be an answer to the confusions of Cullee Hamilton, caught between the races, his wife probably in bed this very moment with the triumphant M’Bulu, his dearest friend turned away from him in hopelessness, facing all alone on the United Nations esplanade the plight of the decent man who tries to hold to a moderate course in the Century of Immoderates which will have none of it. He could talk to Orrin Knox or the President, but they would only repeat what they had said before, only try, like Lafe Smith, to bring him around and prod him along with their reverse psychology of whip-and-carrot and play-on-pride. He could seek out LeGage in the vast haunted city, but he would only repeat what he had said before, try to goad him into frenzy with scorn and sarcasm and the old, worn arguments about the white man’s guilt. And how would that serve America, or point the way to decency, or bring to either race the benison of an end to hatred and the start of love?

Presently, a tall figure bulking large against the garish messages of Brooklyn across the water, silent and enwrapped and barely nodding to the guard who let him out onto First Avenue after midnight, he left the UN and started walking blindly across the island of Manhattan. There was one more he might talk to, and perhaps he could see him tomorrow; but that, he suspected, was just a stalling. Essentially, there was no outside help for it and no easy way out: there was just one little boy at the end of this long street, and that was himself. If Cullee Hamilton couldn’t help Cullee Hamilton, then, sure enough, wasn’t anybody who could.

3

“So you see,” the Senator from West Virginia explained, on the broad green lawn in the soft sunny Sunday morning, under the kindly, sheltering tree, “we do the best we can, and once in a while—a
great
while—we seem to respond.”

“But not very often,” Lafe Smith said gently. “Not very often. If truth were known.”

“If truth were known,” Hal Fry said in a tortured whisper, “not once in the last five years.”

“Yes,” the Senator from Iowa said. “Jimmy,” he went on after a moment in a conversational tone, “would you like me to bring you a present next time I come? I might be able to find something you’d like, down in New York.”

There was a quick look, a smile of infinite warmth and kindness, and—nothing.

“It doesn’t do any good,” Senator Fry said in the same half-whisper. “It just never does any good.”

“Somewhere there must be an answer. Somewhere there must be.”

“Don’t you think I’ve tried to find it?” Hal Fry asked sharply. “What do you think I’ve been doing all these years?”

“I know,” Lafe said quickly. “Of course you have. I didn’t mean it to sound like that … But,
somehow,
there must be a key.”

“Why should I think so, any more than anyone else with the same—problem?” Senator Fry asked. “Lots of people never find the key because there just—isn’t—anything—to unlock.”

“But he looks so—”

“That’s what kills me. If he only looked like an—an—”

“Don’t say it!” Lafe said sharply. “Don’t
say
it. You just torture yourself and it doesn’t do any good. And maybe it isn’t true. You have to hope.”

“How long?” Hal Fry asked with a stricken look. “How long?”

For several minutes they said nothing, the handsome boy between them smiling graciously into the distance at something only he could see, the sound of softly muted voices coming to them from other groups under other trees, in the distance the sounds of a tennis game on a court below, hidden by the drop of hill to the Hudson. Finally Senator Fry stirred and slowly stood up.

“I think we’d better go. You’ve been very kind, but—this is enough.”

“As you say. It’s up to you.”

“No, I really think we’d better.” He looked down at his son, and for a moment the boy looked up, happy, serene, appearing to possess some otherworldly understanding that gave him again the heartbreaking expression of sympathy and kindness. His father leaned forward, kissed him on the forehead, and turned abruptly away.

“Good-by, Jimmy,” Lafe Smith said. “I’ll see you soon.”

The handsome face turned toward him for a moment. An expression of fleeting regret came momentarily into the beautiful dark eyes, then was erased as instantly as it had come. Lafe too turned away, with a heavy heart and a rising tension through his body. His day’s real task was just beginning.

How he would approach it, as they walked quickly back through the main buildings, he did not for the moment know. It was not until they reached the car that he decided that the direct approach was, as always, the best for him.

“Would you like me to drive?” he asked casually. “You probably don’t feel like it right now, do you?”

“Why?” Hal demanded quickly. “Do I look sick?”

“A little. And understandably, I should think.”

“I’m feeling pretty good this morning. Upset about him, of course, but then I always am. The other isn’t so bad today. Maybe I’m finally turning the corner on it, whatever it was.”

“I hope so,” Lafe said slowly. “Give me the keys.”

“You say that in a funny tone,” Senator Fry said with a half-humorous but questioning smile. “What do you know that I don’t know?”

“Give me the keys and get in. We’ll talk about it.”

“All right I hope it makes more sense than that little know-it-all at the UN. It seems it’s all a guilt complex because of—Jimmy.”

“I wouldn’t say so,” Senator Smith said, easing the car smoothly into the Sunday-thronged parkway going south. “I have a friend,” he added presently, “who thinks you ought to go in for a complete checkup and some real tests for a change, instead of all this oddball chatter that may only be wasting time.”

“What do you mean, wasting time? It isn’t that bad, is it?”

“Who knows?” Lafe said shortly. “If you won’t go in for a checkup, who can tell?”

“Who is this friend of yours, anyway? Some blonde you found under a sofa—or on top of it—in one of the conference rooms in the Secretariat?”

“He’s a young fellow who’s interning at Harkness Pavilion. I had a long phone conversation with him Friday night after the Nigerian party.”

“How did that go, by the way? I tried to get dressed and make it, but I really did feel lousy, as I phoned you. Did I miss anything?”

“You did. Everybody including his wife and LeGage Shelby jumped on Cullee Hamilton, and I don’t know whether they succeeded or not. He was out on the esplanade later and I went out and talked to him, but I don’t know whether I succeeded or not.”

“Funny, I didn’t see much in the papers about it.”

“Oh, yes, it was in the
Times
this morning; he was the fifth paragraph, something about, ‘It was reported meanwhile that Congressman Hamilton, under severe criticism and pressure from African Negroes and some American Negroes as well, might withdraw his resolution when the House meets tomorrow.’ The
Daily News
also had an item, small but gory. ‘Negro Congressman Rows With UN Africans at Dance,’ I believe the headline said.”

Hal Fry shook his head with a saddened expression.

“That’s a shame. I hope he’ll stand firm.”

“I don’t know. It’s up to him. There’s nothing we can do. Anyway, buster, don’t change the subject. How about going in that hospital and getting that checkup?”

For a few moments his companion was silent as they drove along, maintaining a steady pace that cut the miles away under them as they sped toward the city. Then he sighed and spoke in a voice that suddenly sounded drained of all will and determination to fight back.

“I’m afraid to, Lafe.
I’m
afraid they’ll really find something, too.”

“Maybe not,” the Senator from Iowa said. Then he added firmly, “But—maybe. In any event, wouldn’t you like to know?”

“I’ve often wondered, as I suppose everyone does,” the Senator from West Virginia said slowly. “I don’t know whether I would or not. You see, I’ve had quite—quite a bit—to bear—in my life. I don’t really know that I want to be told for sure that I’ve been singled out to bear more.”

God, Lafe Smith inquired politely, how does one answer that one? Got any ideas? But through the dimness that blurred his vision for a moment he recognized that he must not voice any doubts, not give any quarter to weakness when strength was all that remained to see his colleague through whatever destiny was his. So he spoke in a matter-of-fact tone that disclosed no emotion other than courage for the working day.

“I don’t think that it will come to that. But of course it
is
your decision, and perhaps I have no right to force you to it. Maybe it’s best to leave it a mystery, if that’s what you prefer.”

“And go along half crippled when we face what we do in the United Nations?” Senator Fry said quickly, and then gave a sad smile. “You see? I answer my own question … When can they take me at Harkness Pavilion?”