Before she could move to the sofa, he intercepted her. His distress was obvious. “Let me-I think I’d better explain,” he said quickly. “I think I can be honest with you. After all, you were T. C.’s confidential secretary.”
“Yes,” she said, bewildered.
Dilman hesitated. His eyes were cast downward at his shoes. “Once, President Eisenhower appointed a Negro, E. Frederic Morrow, to his staff in the White House, in an executive capacity. Morrow required a secretary from the White House pool. They were all specially trained white girls. Everyone refused the job. According to Morrow, ‘None wants the onus of working for a colored boss.’ So Morrow sat alone in his White House office, without a secretary, not knowing what to do. Then, late in the day, a white girl timidly appeared. She was from Massachusetts. She was religious. She knew Morrow was having trouble. She felt that she could not be true to her faith unless she volunteered for the job. When the white girl appeared, Morrow said, ‘She kept the door open behind her, as if for protection, and refused to come in and sit down.’ ” Dilman paused. “I could never forget that. In the Senate I always kept one door open when I had a white secretary or female visitor in. I-I guess I’ve brought the same feeling with me into the White House. Forgive my sensitivity, Miss Foster. Now, at least, you understand it.”
Shaken, Edna wanted to burst into tears. When Dilman raised his eyes to look at her, she tried to control her voice, but it quavered. “I think the President’s door should be closed.”
She went to the corridor door, shut it firmly, and without meeting his eyes she went to the curved sofa and sat down.
Dilman was behind the captain’s chair, still standing. He ignored the memorandum that he held. “Governor Talley tells me that I should announce to the White House staff that I am keeping all members on. Is that right?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“I’ll begin with you, Miss Foster. Will you stay?”
As he spoke, she had separated her shorthand pad from her folded letter of resignation. Now she stuffed the letter of resignation deep into her skirt pocket. “Yes, Mr. President,” she found herself saying. “I’d be honored to stay. Thank you.”
“I thank you,” he said with a wan smile. “Then you’re my first appointment as President of the United States. I’ll take care of the others later.”
Efficiently, she had opened her shorthand pad and held a pencil poised, waiting.
He had not yet consulted the memorandum. His eyes were directed toward the three naval paintings over the mantel of the fireplace. “Miss Foster, do you remember what Harry Truman said after F. D. R. died and after he himself had become President? He said, ‘I felt like the moon, the stars, and the planets had fallen on me.’ He said to reporters, ‘I’ve got the most awful responsibility a man ever had. If you fellows ever pray, pray for me.’ And Lyndon Johnson. Will we ever forget his leaving the plane at Andrews Airfield with President Kennedy’s coffin, and his going to the microphones? Do you remember, Miss Foster? He said, ‘I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help-and God’s.’ Well, Miss Foster, that’s how I feel, like Harry Truman did and like Lyndon Johnson did.”
Edna tried to find her voice. “I think everyone understands that, Mr. President.”
“Do they?” He looked at her absently. “I wonder.”
“They’ll pray for you and-and they’ll help you. I know they will, the way they helped Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. It’s no different now.”
His eyes were fixed upon her. “It is different now… They weren’t black.” Then, suddenly, he smiled. “Of course, if there’s no one’s help, there is always God’s. After all, we don’t know if He is white or black.”
And he sat down in the captain’s chair, and was ready to begin.
III
Reclining low in the rear seat of the bulletproof White House limousine, Douglass Dilman felt, this early morning, as he had felt every morning of the past week, like a prisoner being transferred from his home to his cellblock.
Up ahead, through the distortion of the bent windshield, he could make out the motorcycle escort, red lights flashing. On either side of him were more roaring motorcycles. Behind him he could hear the higher pitch of the protective sedan, which contained the remainder of his complement of bodyguards.
Within the luxurious limousine there was little freedom. In the front seat, the driver and the man next to him were Secret Service agents of the White House Detail. In the back, an arm’s length from Dilman, sitting sideways on one jump seat, was agent Beggs. True, none of them had their eyes upon him. The chauffeur’s gaze was directed straight ahead, the other agent in front examined the passing panorama of Sixteenth Street to their right, and Beggs examined the passing pedestrians and buildings to the left.
Douglass Dilman pressed his brown fedora more tightly to his skull as the wind whipped in through the opening of the electric window beside the driver. Wistfully, Dilman took in the landmarks that he had passed so often in the years when he had belonged to himself, and almost no one had cared if he were living or dead. He recognized the Hebrew Academy, the Methodist Church, the blue Woodner Hotel, the all-female Meridian Hill Hotel, the Hotel 2400, the Bulgarian Embassy, the white-pillared, red-brick, bogus English houses with their porches and stoops, which so many affluent Negroes had purchased from whites. In minutes the limousine would take him away from all this, around Lafayette Square, and to Executive Avenue and the south entrance of the stately Executive Mansion.
Dilman had awaited with dread the inevitability of this important day. It was his moving day. And now it was here. T. C.’s widow Hesper, Dilman had been told, had overseen the removal of the late President’s and her own personal effects and furniture from the White House yesterday, just as Governor Talley and Edna Foster had removed T. C.’s personal belongings from the Oval Office of the West Wing three days before.
For long, painful hours last night, Dilman, with the help of his housekeeper Crystal, his Senate secretary, Diane Fuller, Rose Spinger, and two nervous Army enlisted men, had assembled and packed into cartons and crates his pathetically limited and long-used possessions. Dilman had refused to allow anyone from the White House to help him, not Edna Foster, not T. C.’s valet Beecher, and not any of the White House staff that included the housekeeper, the houseboys, the ushers. Although Flannery had talked him into permitting newspapers to publish photographs of his simple living room in the brownstone row house, he did not want any critical outsiders to see or poke through his home. Nor had he permitted the Reverend Spinger or Wanda Gibson to come downstairs to assist him. In his new role, Dilman realized, he could no longer treat Spinger as a friend, only as one who headed America’s foremost Negro pressure organization. As for Wanda, her presence might have made the Secret Service men wonder about her relationship to him, and someone might have divulged it to the press, which in turn might distort it. While he had spoken to her briefly on the telephone every night before going to bed, he had not seen her personally since assuming the Presidency. She had not chided him for his neglect, for that was not her way. But he suspected that she commiserated with him, knowing his weaknesses, which was justifiable on her part.
Through the window he could see that they were turning off Sixteenth Street. Suddenly he was terrified. He tried to define his terror. It was not simply that he was giving up the safe anonymity of the ground floor of his modest two-story brownstone to spend a year and five months of life in the unfamiliar, awesome, museum-like, constantly exposed second story of the White House. That was bad enough, being the intruder-lodger in a mansion supported by a population that had never before permitted him to live among them, as part of them, in their easy streets and developments and tracts. The worst of it was that he was being carried farther and farther away from the only woman on earth whom he loved, and who cared for him. In short minutes he would be entombed in a prison that she could not visit, to which he dared not summon her. He wondered how long she would wait for his release, or if she would wait at all. He might lose her. He would lose her. Then he would be alone, utterly alone, in a hostile world. It was this terrifying possibility that had chilled him.
He brought his eyes from the window to the ominous radiophone beside him, and then to the sour face of the Secret Service agent in the jump seat. Fleetingly he wondered what the agent was so unhappy about. Perhaps, Dilman decided, his expression was really that of anxiety over his responsibility.
