“That doesn’t make it right.”
Sue glanced at him. “That doesn’t make it wrong either, darling. I think you’re misplacing your hostility. You feel guilty about leaving your practice, abandoning your underdogs, making so much money in a short time. You feel ashamed, and so you’re taking it out on Eagles and Emmich and Oliver and anything they propose. Nat, you’re smarter than that. Study all that stuff in your pocket objectively, like you study a legal brief. Then decide how you feel. If MRP is a sensible compromise program, speak up for it. And there’s nothing wrong in telling Doug you’re for it, whether he’s President or not. He may welcome discussing it with you. If you don’t like it, shut up.”
She took her right hand from the steering wheel and covered her husband’s hand. “Nat, maybe it is good for the country. Don’t be like some angry kid who has to be against everything his elders are for, to show he’s a man. You are a man, the best and most wonderful one on earth. You are a man who can still serve himself and the public while protecting his own life and his children. Don Quixote wasn’t for real, darling, but you are. No more dragons, either. Freud scared them away. And all that is left are human problems to be solved by human beings like yourself in a mature way. I know you’ll handle this and the next three years that way.”
Her literary allusion, so exactly and uncannily reflective of his own on the street corner earlier, swept aside the last vestige of his anger. Wives, he thought, wonderful wives who grow your minds as you grow theirs, until you and they are one and the same till death do you part. He was amused by her and loved her, for herself and for the better part of him that she possessed, and he wanted to hug her and hold her close to him and enjoy her.
Instead, he leaned over and kissed the corner of her mouth. She seemed startled, and wary, and then pleased.
“Mmm,” she whispered, “nice, even if I did almost hit that truck.” Then she said, “What brought on that affection?”
He continued to smile at her. She would never know what had moved him. Nor did it matter. He could only say, “Because you make good speeches, and you are sensible, and you think I am a man, and I love you. I’ll always love you.”
He settled back, at ease at last, lighted his pipe again, and felt strong enough to bend a little, a little, if it would be necessary.
When Otto Beggs caught sight of the broken, unlighted neon sign jutting out from the Walk Inn a long block away, he automatically slowed down. For the second time in a week he had lied to Gertrude about his hours, to get away from home early, and for the second time in a week he was deliberately timing his arrival at the tavern because he knew that Ruby Thomas would be there, and suddenly he felt furtive and uneasy about what had previously come about so naturally-well, almost.
Except for those times in Korea, which did not count because he was in the Army and in danger and the tiny, submissive girls were foreigners, and except for four or five times on special assignment trips around the country, which did not count because he had been drinking in his off hours and the women were prostitutes, not women, Otto Beggs had never been unfaithful to his wife. He was prim and correct about living up to the responsibilities of a husband and a father, and about remembering the obligations of his position in the Secret Service, and especially the extra obligations thrust upon him as a Congressional Medal of Honor holder, and he would do nothing to sully his reputation. He looked down, with an attitude of superiority (and a tinge of envy), upon those of his colleagues who cheated on their wives, proud that there was as little likelihood that a scandal would find its way into his scrap-books as there was that Tom Swift would accept a bribe or that an astronaut would beat his wife.
Yet what had made Otto Beggs feel furtive this time, for the first time, was not the lie to Gertrude (he had already lied to her two days ago), not the fact that he had told Ruby Thomas he would be there (he had been there with her three times before), but that he had lain awake several hours last night enacting a fantasy relationship with her. Even worse, late this morning, and again after lunch, with Austin’s lousy real estate primers open on the desk, he had been unable to study a line because Ruby had sat on the pages before him, Ruby dressed (which was like any other woman undressed), Ruby naked (which was like any other woman undressed), Ruby naked (which was like no sight on earth, he imagined), Ruby opening her arms to him (which had excited him as much as if he were a schoolboy).
It was this sudden obsession with her, and the realization that she might not be averse to fulfilling his dreams, that gave today’s meeting a special significance, and gave him pause in his advance toward the Walk Inn, where she waited. For now this was no more, at least to him, a casual meeting between chance acquaintances. It was something strange to him: an assignation. It was the kind of surreptitious activity of which he disapproved as being indecent, almost un-American, and yet it moved him like a force powerful enough to overwhelm his puritan will and fear of danger. Much as his mind resisted it, his body had become a partner to this rendezvous with Ruby. For in a life of disillusionment, where he was being ignored on a job he loved, being degraded into studying for a new and anonymous and sedentary career he detested, being disapproved of by those closest to him, being made less and less a virile male of action, there was one radiant light of hope. Ruby. It was Ruby who admired his looks, his position, his dreams. Ruby, who was young, magnificent, passionate (he was sure). It did not surprise him that he could not resist her. What did astound him was that the one radiant light of hope in his life, in this gray time, should shine from one so black. For Ruby Thomas, twenty-four, was a Negro.
He had progressed halfway up the block, and the neon in front of the Walk Inn loomed larger and more distinctly against the silver-gray midafternoon sky. His reluctant stride shortened, for he wanted added time to think, to decide if he was plumb crazy or plain lucky, to determine whether the lie he had told Gertrude a second time in three days was worth the risk.
Almost two weeks ago-an afternoon such as this one, he remembered-he had pulled the battered Nash Rambler up before the Walk Inn before continuing to work, because he was out of cigarettes. Once inside the dim interior of the saloon, reviving his resentment against the shiftless colored boys who had appropriated his place at the pinball machines, he had gone to the horseshoe bar for his cigarettes. Then, realizing that he was thirsty, he had lifted himself up on a stool and asked Simon, the former pugilist now a bartender, for a root beer in a frosted stein.
As the soft drink had been placed before him, Ruby Thomas had set herself on the stool beside him. She had made him conscious of her presence by pointing at his root beer and telling Simon, “That sho’ looks yum-I’ll have some of the same, but git me a J an’ B on the rocks on the side.” Immediately, two facts had made themselves clear to Otto Beggs: one, that this was the prettiest Negro girl he had ever seen; two, that despite her reserve she must be interested in him, for most of the stools at the bar were unoccupied, and yet she had deliberately and boldly chosen to sit beside him.
At first he had tried to ignore her, for fear that she was a streetwalker. This concern was quickly dispelled by her appearance and manner. She was attired in a crisp white uniform-he would learn she was a dental assistant, only recently moved into the neighborhood-and there was a fresh, unused look about her and a self-contained air of minding her own business.
Against his will, without being too obvious, he had inspected her several times from head to toe. She sat erectly on the stool, one leg crossed over the other, exposing a knee and shapely calf. She was, his thumping heart told him, breathtaking. Not since he had enjoyed and suffered through a long-distance crush on the singer Lena Horne, way back when he was a sophomore at Oregon State University, had he known a colored girl to attract him so instantly and engage him so totally. This one had tousled gamin hair, silken, brunette, sort of French, and widely spaced, large almond eyes, a short cute nose, and pouting lower lip. He guessed that she was no more than five feet two, and he thought it therefore remarkable how firm and large her breasts were beneath the white uniform, and how broad her thighs were against the tightened skirt. And she was black, although it kept amazing him how her color enhanced rather than detracted from her prettiness.
She had not spoken, and he had not spoken, that first time, until he had emptied his stein and was sorting his change. Suddenly she had turned to him and said, “I’m guessin’ who you are-Lordy, I kin tell-y’all the famous Mr. Beggs, the Secret Service hero.” He had flushed with pleasure and pride, and mumbled that he was no hero at all but that yes, he was Otto Beggs and he was a Secret Service agent. He had wondered how she knew. She had told him that everyone in the neighborhood knew-Lordy, he was the big celebrity in the neighborhood-and that he had been pointed out to her last week. She had been apologetic about intruding upon his privacy-“I knows you must git mighty tired of bein’ a celebrity”-but she wanted to brag to the girls in the office that she had met him. He had asked her name, and she had told him, and had told him where she worked, and he had said that he hoped to
