The Man

President, until you lead the way. The steward is all set.”

“Lunch already?” he had said, and inside, his stomach again climbed toward his gullet. “Too early for me. You tell the steward I’ll eat later. Go right ahead, and let everyone know they can get started.”

While the others went below to be served by the white-jacketed messboys, Dilman had remained on the deck alone. For a while he had sat in a deck chair, warm in his gray wool suit coat and constricting starched collar, shutting his eyes to the slight roll of the yacht, trying not to think of the work that awaited him in the lounge, wondering if Nat Abrahams had received his message last night and would be able to come out and visit him.

Too quickly an hour had passed, for he could hear the chatter of the diners as they came out on the deck, and he had pushed himself to his feet. He had not wanted to be found slumped in a deck chair, wilted and ailing. It would have been embarrassing and un-Presidential. The least that he could do, he had decided, was to assume some casual, more presentable pose. He had walked unsteadily to the bow section of the ship, and propped himself with elbows upon the rail, striking an attitude of deep meditation.

And he was at one o’clock, suffocated with nausea, increasingly dizzy and bleary, and sorry for himself.

From the corner of his eye he could see Arthur Eaton, so natty in his white yachting cap, foulard, brass- buttoned Navy coat and immaculate white trousers, joining Sally Watson at the prow, joking, laughing, enjoying this perfect day on the water. For the first time, the very first time, Dilman envied Arthur Eaton, not because Eaton was white and he was black, but because Eaton had had the advantage of being raised to this kind of life, being a natural part of it, belonging to it. Eaton was to the Presidential yacht born. Himself, he was strictly a ferry commuter, a Chicago elevated or New York subway type.

Bitterly he turned away from that pair and looked out to the hostile sea again. How he envied his predecessors, those natural outdoor maritime Presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy and T. C., gifted with sea legs, their class and breeding inborn-but all born, all with the advantages from their day one. Weakly, elbows stiffening on the rising and falling rail, he indulged his self-pity. This goddam yacht was only a symbol of the whole impossible thing. It was rotten to grow up and live one’s entire life as an outcast, a fringe man, and that went not only for Negroes but for many whites, too, whites without background and money and training. It was rotten to live and die dampened by inferiority and awkwardness, never really knowing which fork, which spoon, never knowing etiquette, or the games of leisure, surfing and polo, and that latest South American dance, never knowing sumptuous family gatherings at Thanksgiving or Christmas (with Mother, the matriarch, not Ma, with knobby washboard hands), never knowing foundations and charities and old school ties and stock portfolios and-and assurance, confidence, acceptance-never knowing yachts.

This was not just himself, a usurper here, a crasher, a servant made up like his master; this was most people everywhere, crippled for leisure by the exhausting striving to make good, make ends meet, make it until coronary time. That was Nat, too, in a way; Nat, like himself, knowing there was better while you pressed your nose to the pane, and knowing you had not the price of admission. There were greater inequities in life than this, but this was one that stayed with you forever. Like your skin, if it was black. His throat was filled with his gut, and he wanted to vomit it all overboard, but he fought it down, clenched his teeth and fought it, so as not to be what he was in front of Eaton and the Admiral and the women, and the Zeke Millers of the earth.

“Mr. President-”

He turned from the rail to find his physician, Admiral Oates, contemplating him.

“Are you all right?” the physician inquired.

“Why, yes, of course.” His Adam’s apple hardly had room to deny it.

“I’ve had an eye on you. Mmm. You seem a trifle distressed.”

“I’m tired. It’s hard to get off the treadmill. I’m tired.”

“Why don’t you go down into the bedroom and grab forty winks? Let me catch some fish for you.”

He wanted to buss the doctor for the face-saving order. “That’s a good idea. Maybe I will try to nap.”

He had started for the companionway when Oates caught his hand. He felt the physician press something hard and square into his palm. He looked at Oates questioningly.

“You wear this with your lifebelt,” said Admiral Oates, and he left.

Not until Dilman had reached the bottom of the stairs did he open his palm to see what Oates had given him. It was a tiny pillbox. He turned it over. On the label was printed “For motion sickness, 1 every 4 hours.” Ill as he was, he felt comforted, not only for the physician’s understanding but for his discretion.

Entering the bedroom cabin, Dilman yanked a silver pitcher out of its holder beside the lower bunk, filled a thick-rimmed glass with water, then swallowed a Dramamine pill and water. Squeamishly, he held on to the upper bunk and waited for the result of the silent civil war inside his throat. Either the pill would make it through the enemy line and save him, or the enemy would throw up the pill and overwhelm him. It took twenty minutes to a half hour for a pill to dissolve and work, he had read in some digest magazine, and he waited, hot with anguish, moist with perspiration. He wanted to lie down on the bunk and die. The defeat would be too enormous, and he resisted bowing to it.

After fifteen minutes, hearing a roar outside, he staggered to the porthole to see what was happening. What he saw was the PT boat Guardian, filled with Beggs and several other armed Secret Service men, slicing through the water thirty yards away. Far off there was the speck of what appeared to be a cabin cruiser, growing gradually larger. He left the porthole, once more tempted by the bunk, and then, blindly determined to survive, he walked out of the bedroom.

Within a minute, he was inside the yacht’s Presidential lounge, where the pitch and roll of the vessel were less apparent. He surveyed the off-white walls of the lounge, the green-and-white curtains with their nautical pattern, the soft aquamarine-colored chairs, the painting of the Independence hung over the television set. The lounge was as gracious as any room in the White House, and he knew that he was best off here, because he would not dare to be ill in a room like this.

Observing his locked briefcase propped against a deep chair, he made his way to it, sat down heavily, and devoted himself to the combination that sprung open his lock. There was only one thick sheaf of printed sheets, fastened into a manila binder, inside the briefcase. This was the Minorities Rehabilitation Bill that the Senate and House had passed, and that was now in his hands awaiting his signature. He had read it thoroughly last night, made some notes and put question marks in the margins about certain provisions, and now he must reread the seven-billion-dollar bill once more and do what needed to be done, what the majority of his staff, of Congress, of white America and black America were apparently waiting for him to do.

He opened the manila binder to examine the bill a final time, but his vision was double, and his stomach heaved higher and higher toward his throat. He dropped the folder on the end table and gagged, clutching the arms of his chair, willing for himself the sea legs and stomach and mind and inner ears of F. D. R. or Kennedy or T. C. And then his convulsions stopped, and he lay back limp, arms flopped on his thighs, legs outstretched, a minor skirmish won, praying for the Dramamine to put down the enemy and save the beleaguered battlements of well-being and dignity.

Half reclining in this state of stupor, Dilman tried to remove his mind from water to land. His memory sought out Wanda, Julian, Mindy, Aldora… piteous Aldora of their long ago… it had gone wrong the second-to-last day of the last week of their honeymoon, driving home through Joplin, Missouri… going into that nice-looking bar for a late afternoon drink, because Aldora from the start had always liked a late afternoon drink, and when inside having their cocktail, those two drunken young business fellows had come up, hey-buddying him, hey-buddy-what-you- doin-with-one-of-our-white-girls, hey-buddy?… and knowing they were loaded to the gills, trying to explain, not fight, explain that Aldora was colored like himself and his bride… and trying to leave until they grabbed him and held him, saying hey-buddy, you-not-leavin, no, not leavin with any white girl… and him trying to pull free, until they wrestled him down and pummeled him bloody and Aldora began screaming… and the men going at last, hooting and whooping… and he and Aldora… the real beginning of the trouble had been then, but not the real beginning, for it had begun when she was born more white than black, fair skin, unfair heart… displacing her bitterness at fate, life, for making her almost white but not enough, displacing it by resenting her lot with him, his dark skin… and his striving to show her he was no poor black trash, but more a man, worthy of her, big lawyer, big politician… but no good, because there was Mindy, almost white like herself, so white she also had the prospects Aldora had abandoned too early, and Aldora’s growing contempt for him and her hoarding and segregating of Mindy, as if he would contaminate his daughter… and then Aldora wanting another Mindy, to prove something, maybe flee from him, but again no good… worse… getting Julian, black as coal, reminder that her husband was black and she was black and