were going through the modern office building on 44th Street in Manhattan to visit his publisher.
For ten minutes he had been guided in and out of the great hall, in and out of the Yellow Oval Room, the Treaty Room, the Lincoln Bedroom (here he had his only start, seeing that fink Dilman’s clothes piled on the long bed), all the while listening to that Uncle Tom valet’s supercilious history patter. While Poole had made a pretense of taking notes, had indeed taken several, knowing all the while that he could get what he needed from the excellent guidebook the White House Historical Association had published, his entire attention was focused on a confrontation with one person somewhere in one of these stodgy, phony rooms.
Christ, he had thought, what had this junk cost to keep one bum politician in luxury for four years while millions of his people couldn’t buy their way out of the countless filthy, overcrowded, rotting and stinking slums? The hell with all this, the crappy Victorian chairs in the Treaty Room, the crappy crystal chandeliers bought by that nitwit President Grant, the crappy Monroe vases in the Yellow Oval Room, the crappy Greuze painting of Ben Franklin, another white fink-all this cared for by more overpaid people than there were working in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department or than were publicly able to work for the Turnerite Group.
His lousy meeting with that servile black Judas, Dilman, more yellow on his spine than black, had infuriated him, blinded him to everything but his failure. There were his gutty, beaten brothers handcuffed in that stinkpot town in that Devil’s Island of a state in the deep torture chamber of the South, suffering kangaroo trial before a foul vermin of a county judge. There was his friend Jeff Hurley, and that smart good Dago, Valetti, and the rest of his brother blacks risking their lives in Little Rock or Shreveport, where every segregated hotel was about as safe as the Alamo. And here was he, one of the secret unlisted members they counted upon most, commanded by their leader to convince a fink President to get a maybe fink Jew lawyer to lend a hand to justice. They were on the firing line, waiting on word from him, their hopes and last appeal for decency depending on him, and he had failed. Would Hurley understand how desperately he had tried? Would Hurley believe that he had been unable to turn a black man who was yellow into a black man who would be Negro? Yet three days ago the mails had brought him a hasty letter from Hurley and one last hope. If this hope was fulfilled, they could be optimistic again. If this, too, failed, then hell would break loose, and when Poole remembered the Turnerite plan of last resort, he had shuddered. And so he had tagged after the valet, looking not at the
Finishing his note-taking in the Rose Guest Room, he once more slipped on his fat-man jester mask of good cheer, teased Crystal and Diane, and bade them good-bye for today.
“Have we seen every room?” he asked the hovering valet.
“Not quite. Please follow me.”
They entered a corridor, then entered the red-and-white Empire Guest Room, then looked into the small bathroom with a carpet-a carpet in the can, Je-sus!-and then moved toward the southeast corner room.
“This is the last one you haven’t seen,” the fink valet was announcing. “It is the Lincoln Sitting Room, adjoining the Bedroom, which you visited. You’ll find the furniture somber, late Empire and Victorian. The side chairs are backed by laminated rosewood, quite unique. The room offers solitude, retreat, and an excellent view of Washington and Georgetown. Perhaps the only modern, discordant note in the Sitting Room is-”
The valet had gone into the Lincoln Sitting Room, and at once halted and drew himself upright.
“Excuse me, sir,” he was saying to someone in the corner. “We won’t disturb you, Mr. Dilman. I was taking one of the President’s guests on a-”
At the mention of the name, Leroy Poole squeezed past the valet into the Sitting Room, where Julian Dilman sat slumped in a red-patterned, upholstered chair drawn up before a going television set.
Poole rotated his palm in greeting. “Hi, Julian,” he said breezily.
Julian leaped to his feet, as filled with consternation and pleasure as if Lincoln himself had come into the room.
“Why, hello, Mr. Poole. It’s sure good to see you again. It was a great honor and pleasure meeting you downstairs. You don’t know what a fan I am of yours. I’d sure like to talk to you sometime about your essays.”
“Why not right now?” said Poole, all affability. He pivoted toward the impassive valet. “Do you mind, Jeeves?”
“Not at all, sir,” said Beecher. “We’ve completed the tour, sir. Ring for me when you are ready to leave.”
The valet backed off to the doorway, then through it, then hastened away.
Poole had followed the retreat of the valet to the door. Now, closing the door, he said to Julian, “That butler-I bet Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writing a book about him this minute.”
Julian clapped his hands, and beamed at being the solitary recipient of a Great Author’s
“Sit down, Julian,” Leroy Poole said. “I have only a couple of minutes, but I’d enjoy a little chat.”
Poole settled easily into a chair, while Julian, displaying embarrassment at the unreeling of an old Western motion picture filling the television set screen, said, “I-I was just eating up some time before catching my train back to Trafford. Let me shut it off.”
“You’ll never know how it came out,” Poole said.
“I don’t care,” said Julian. He went awkwardly to the television set and turned it off. Then, shyly, he took a place beside Poole. “My taste is better than that, believe it or not,” he said. “I read a lot, that’s what I do.”
“What sort of thing?” asked Poole.
“Well, the classics, of course,” said Julian nervously.
“I thought you said you read my stuff.”
“I do! That’s the truth, Mr. Poole, that’s what I really read the most now, the protest literature, that’s what I find important.”
Poole dropped his teasing demeanor and nodded solemnly. “Good boy,” he said. “I wish your father felt the same.”
“What do you mean, Mr. Poole?”
“I’ve come to know your father quite well, Julian, so I mean no negating or adverse criticism of his remarkable mind and achievements, but-no, I don’t think it’s fair to discuss this with-”
Julian almost fell from the chair in his eagerness. “Please, please, Mr. Poole, go ahead! I know my father pretty well, and I know his shortcomings as well as his good points.”
“Ummm,” murmured Poole. “Okay, then. It’s just that I don’t think he’s as close to his people, their problems, as he should be. I think he’s been in this antiseptic center of compromise too long, and he’s been separated from the realities of Negro misery and injustice too long.”
“You’re right, absolutely,” Julian said fervently. “He’s always been that way, at least long as I can remember, long as he’s been a politician depending on support from whites. To tell the truth, I was having a fight with him- well, a disagreement, let’s say-about just that before you came in his office.”
Poole wore his mask of innocent wonder. “No kidding?”
“He forced me into a Negro college,” Julian rushed on. “Now he objects because I’m giving so much time to the Crispus Society. I accused him of not facing what he is, what we’re up against, and he gave me a good dressing down.”
“No kidding?” Poole repeated. “Well, we gave him quite a morning, the two of us. You know that trouble down in Mississippi over the Turnerites-?”
“Oh, yes!”
“I begged your father to get the Attorney General into the matter, to straighten out that crooked trial. If he couldn’t do that as President-I know the pressure he is under-I asked him to do Jeff Hurley a personal favor. I asked him to have his friend Nat Abrahams-”
“I know Nat. He’s a great guy.”
“Okay, I asked your father to persuade Nat to step in and appeal the conviction, when it comes. Apparently, Nat’s tied up with something else, but he couldn’t say no to your father, to the President, if he were asked. No soap. Your father wouldn’t ask.”
“He wouldn’t?” said Julian. Then he nodded knowingly. “That’s right, he wouldn’t. Especially now. He has strong feelings against equality by force. I’m like you, like what you write, Mr. Poole. I think that’s the only course
