The Man

Bemused, he started back to the Family Dining Room to take his place at the head of the table.

Edna Foster brushed the limp brown strands of hair from her eyes, left the President once more buried in the heap of files delivered to his desk by the FBI twenty minutes earlier, and unhappily returned to her own office to get the disagreeable task over with.

The instant that she returned, before she could prepare herself for him, Leroy Poole was out of his chair, forehead perspiring, swollen eyes moist, black porcine face beseeching her. She tried to escape behind the moat of her desk, but doggedly he trudged after her and hung over her electric typewriter.

“What did he say, Miss Foster?” Poole begged to know. “Did you tell the President that the Federal judge of that lousy U.S. District Court sentenced Jeff Hurley to death, to be executed in the lethal gas chamber?”

Edna Foster squirmed. “Yes, the President had heard the news from Mr. Lombardi.” She hated this scene, and tried to avert her gaze from Poole. It was evident that the grotesque little Negro had been crying all morning, and over the death sentence of a man, not even one of his family, a man crying over another man. It embarrassed her and made her slightly ill.

“Will he see me, or is he still sore at me?” Poole asked.

Edna summoned a vestige of dignity. “I really can’t say if the President is-is sore at you, as you put it-but he definitely cannot see you, even for a minute. This is honestly one of his busiest days. I can vouch for that.”

Leroy Poole seemed to sag into some emotional morass, nodding, nodding, and then whining, “What about my request that he commute the sentence? He has that power. I have new evidence, and we’ve filled out the application for executive clemency in the Justice Department. If I have to wait for all those investigations and recommendations from the pardon attorney and the Attorney General, Jeff Hurley will be dead and buried before my appeal gets to Dilman’s desk. Did you tell him that?”

“Everything, Mr. Poole.” She flipped a page of her shorthand pad. “I passed on to him everything you asked me to, and the President answered-I have it here word for word-‘Inform Mr. Poole to go through proper channels at the Department of Justice on his appeal for executive clemency in the case of Jefferson Hurley. For my part, I will personally contact Attorney General Kemmler and request that he cut the red tape and expedite the appeal. When I have the new evidence, and the Attorney General’s recommendation, I shall review the appeal and summon Mr. Poole to hear my final decision. I promise him this will be done before Mr. Hurley can go to the gas chamber.’ ” Edna looked up. “That’s all.”

A gust of air escaped Poole’s mouth, as from the neck of a balloon, yet his puffed features did not deflate. “Okay, fair enough,” Poole said. “I’ll go ahead. I’ll see the appeal is in order. You just see that I’m here to talk it over with the President and hear his pardon before Jeff Hurley is gone.”

“You have the President’s word, Mr. Poole.”

“Okay. Goddam them down there, legalizing murder of the best, most decent human being in the country. I won’t let them, and Dilman won’t either, once he reviews the facts and hears what I have to say… Okay, I know you’re busy, Miss Foster. Just remember to call me.”

Temporarily appeased, Leroy Poole shuffled across the office, out the door and out of her sight, and Edna Foster dropped into her hard swivel chair with a sigh of relief. She laid her notebook aside, and waited to see if the pinch behind her eyes was going to develop into another migraine headache. It was getting worse and worse, all this pressure, and all these people, like just now, a black man in here, a black man in there, and all their anger and self-pity.

Why had she fastened on Dilman’s color again? She tried to think. Was it the tension of the job, created by Dilman’s color, or simply, simply the discomfort of being secretary to a Negro? How far had she come since that first day when she had agreed to work for Dilman, just as she had so long ago for T. C.?

Intellectually, she supported all the right things for Negroes, their right to vote, to sit like anyone else in any school classroom, to be equal under God and the Constitution. All the right things she believed in, without equivocation, yes-yet in some mysterious way her emotions continued to dominate her intellect, and at such times she felt that those black people were a threatening and inferior people. Threatening because black was threatening, because black was evil, like blackmail, black arts, blacklist, black magic. Threatening because, no matter what common sense you had, when you walked in the street, in the dark, alone, and you saw a Negro man walking toward you, you felt unsafe, because black was African and black was night, meaning uncivilized, meaning oblivion. And, illogically, you considered them inferiors. When she was on a bus, and looked out the window to find a Negro at the wheel of a large new car that had drawn up to the light, she was always surprised if he was not a chauffeur, surprised and vaguely resentful. How could a lesser person have more than she, who was white, meaning good and decent, and educated and chaste? After such internal bouts, and with difficulty, brought on by shame, she would recall her popular readings on race: these were not inferior people, only different-appearing people. Desperately she would evoke the names of Booker T. Washington and Carver and Bunche, but it was no use.

Yet when those stupid Southern-born secretaries made their jokes, Edna was resentful of them, too, and felt superior because she was not so prejudiced as they. She would never stoop so low, she thought then, as to believe that Negroes, because of their color, made so by God’s choosing, were more criminal, more shiftless, more smelly than whites. Whenever she was thus intellectually reinforced, she had easier days with Dilman, treated him with more deference and regarded him with more respect, as if to make up for her fluctuating emotional prejudices and those of her friends. Yet she never wanted to defer too much to Dilman, because tolerance was a form of feeling superior, too. Then she tried to treat Dilman as she would George or Tim Flannery or any other white man. But then she couldn’t, not truly, because since he was black, his presence in the Oval Office meant threatening danger to him, to the country, to herself, and his inferiority made things a mess, and no matter what, she was sure he smelled different. Damnation. And then she blamed George. He was at fault for her miseries, her predicament.

Because of George, she was still on this horrible job. His proposal of marriage, true, had been the high spot of her whole life. Because of it she had not enjoyed her trip to France at all. When she had not been working, she was mooning and wanting to get back to George and marriage. She had not even taken the time to visit the Louvre. And after all that, when she had flown back so full of high hopes and expectations, George had not been waiting for her, which was really too much. There had been a note under her apartment door, nothing more. He was in New York City investigating a possible job. He’d be back in a day or two with good news. The day or two had frustratingly become almost a week, and his brief, enigmatic telephone calls gave her nothing more definite to expect from his trip.

Less than an hour ago she had received his daily call, the call for today. He was still in New York City, he said. He could not promise to be back tonight or tomorrow, but maybe tomorrow. For the first time she had not hidden her irritation. Was this the way to start a marriage, he in New York, she in Washington, not even seeing each other in ten or eleven days? To pacify her, he had stayed on the phone longer than usual, full of hints about a terrific job, a quick marriage, so on and so on. This had soothed her somewhat, but after he had hung up, the long distance operator had called her. There was an overcharge. The party had telephoned from a public booth and left without depositing the extra coins. Would she pay the overcharge? She would. Where should she send the one dollar and ten cents? To the telephone company in Trafford, New York, she was told. Not to New York City? No, to Trafford. Very well, Trafford.

What in the devil was going on with George Murdock, she wondered now. Why tell her that he was calling from New York City, and then have it turn out he was calling from Trafford? What could there be for him in Trafford? It was a one-street college town, Negro college town at that, and neither of them knew a soul there- except the President’s son, if that counted for anything.

So here was she, stewing, and there he was, somewhere,mysterious and behaving like anything but a bridegroom, and she was-all right, to use Leroy Poole’s word-she was sore as heck.

The buzzer at her elbow startled her.

She snatched at the telephone. “Yes, Mr. President?”

“Miss Foster, put a hold on all calls, and then come in. Bring your shorthand pad.”

She diverted incoming calls to Mr. Lucas, the engagements secretary, took up her notebook and pencils, and went to the door. Momentarily she hesitated, and then placed her right eye against the peephole.

There were two persons at the Buchanan desk, looking oddly magnified by the glass she peeked through. One