And when the time came, tomorrow, he knew he would have to say, “No.”
He shook his head, and leaned over the typewriter again. “A direct action left-radical movement headed by a Fuehrer (that is, a non-democratically maintained strong individual leader) would be, almost by definition, messianic and absolutist. Such an authoritarian regime, by carrying liberalism beyond its leftward boundaries into radicalism, and solidifying its position by rigidity in posture and extremism in defensive action, would ultimately turn itself inside out and become a generally repressive dictatorship, indistinguishable from a tyranny whose origins were at the opposite end of the political spectrum.”
The phone was ringing. Robert finished the final clause of the sentence, got to his feet, and strode across the hall and into the bedroom.
“Robert?” A familiar voice, female, he wasn’t sure who.
“Speaking,” he said.
“This is Evelyn. Evelyn Canby?”
“Oh, yes, Evelyn. Sure. How are you?”
“I’m just fine,” she said, and sounded surprisingly happy. “Bradford asked me to call.”
“He did?”
“He’s changed his mind. Isn’t that wonderful?”
No, it wasn’t. The sudden hollow in his chest told Robert just how much he’d been counting on the Lockridge candidacy in spite of all the rational objections. “Well, that was fast,” he said. “What happened?”
“He just changed his mind,” she said. “I guess it was a combination of all the things everybody said to him, you and Uncle Joe and Mr. Orr. And me too, I guess. The fact that nobody at all thought it was a good idea.”
I should have been more positive, Robert thought, even while he knew this was the best ending. Best for whom? “Well, I guess it was a tempest in a teapot, wasn’t it?” he said.
“I knew he couldn’t forget himself for very long,” she said, with a hindsight confidence she hadn’t shown the last time. “About a week, that was all it took, and he got his perspective back.”
“Well, that’s fine,” Robert said.
“He wanted me to call you,” she said. “Actually, he would have called you himself but I volunteered. I took over the mission, really. He wanted to tell you you needn’t come tomorrow, since there’s no longer anything to discuss.”
“Oh,” Robert said. And then, hurriedly, to keep it from sounding like the afterthought it was, “What about our date?”
“Oh, that’s all right,” she said, too brightly.
“What’s all right? You’ve got something else to do?”
“I wouldn’t want you to drive all that distance just to—”
It was hostility more than anything else that kept him from letting her let him off the hook. “It’s less than two hours,” he said. “And that was the main point of the trip anyway, wasn’t it? Dinner?”
She hadn’t heard the hostility in his voice; he heard the pleasure in hers. “I’m flattered,” she said. “If you really want to—”
“I insist.”
“All right. Seven o’clock?”
“Seven o’clock,” he said. “See you then.” And slammed the receiver into its cradle.
3
She couldn’t get her hair right. A maid had come upstairs almost ten minutes ago to tell her Robert was here — and five minutes late at that — and here she still stood before the mirror, dabbing at her hair with increasingly nervous fingertips, every dab altering the silhouette, but never for the better. She held a brush in her other hand and alternately poked at her head with its bristles and its handle, none of it doing any good.
Everything was taking forever today. She’d been irritable all afternoon, for no reason, even screaming at Dinah for some minor mischief, and then she’d had to take time away from dressing to soothe her guilt feelings by soothing the child. She had also kept switching back and forth among three dresses, and when she’d finally made her choice it turned out she couldn’t find the shoes that went with it. So that meant another decision, this time among two entrants, neither of which she really wanted to wear. Then there were the eyelashes, which she hadn’t worn since Paris, and seldom wore in any case, and which this evening absolutely refused to go on right. She kept looking like a sketch Salvador Dali had done for fun.
She wanted to cry, and she didn’t know why, which merely made everything foolish, so that in the end she wanted to cry because she didn’t know why she wanted to cry.
All right. Enough. The eyelashes were approximately in place, the hair would apparently never look any better than it did right now, and the time was almost twenty past seven. She turned with panicky dissatisfaction away at last from the mirror, fighting down the desire to go on poking herself like some sort of reluctant clay into ever odder and odder shapes, and left her bathroom and bedroom to go to Dinah’s room and bid her daughter good night.
Dinah was playing with her dolls, spread cabalistically around her. Evelyn cooed over her until she saw the little girl was only politely waiting for her to be off so she could return to her game. It was annoying to be more emotional than one’s four-year-old daughter, and that sudden annoyance — and the ludicrous self-image that came with it — did wonders for Evelyn, wiping away most of her nervousness and weepiness in one quick swipe, like a wet cloth over a blackboard.
Robert was in the front parlor downstairs, doing nothing in particular. He got to his feet and walked toward her when she entered the room, saying, “Hello, there.”
“Hello,” she said. “Sorry I’m late.” She was concentrating too completely on her own expression to be very aware of his, other than to see that he was smiling.
“A man is supposed to wait for a good-looking girl,” he said, and in some curious way he sounded surprised. That oddity in his tone distracted her from herself, and she looked at him more closely, and saw that he was surprised. He was looking at her with pleasure, which was nice, but also with surprise, which wasn’t so nice. Had he thought she was a frump? True, he’d never seen her dressed for an evening out before, but did she really look that bad in her daytime clothes? The idea was disturbing.
He held out an elbow for her, saying, “Shall we go?”
“Yes, of course.” She took his arm, trying to keep away from her face the frown that would have most accurately reflected her thoughts.
They were stopped near the front door by one of the Secret Service men — a new one, they kept changing all the time — who said, specifically to Evelyn, “Excuse me, Miss. Were you going out?”
Evelyn was grateful that Robert answered, not allowing the man’s boorishness to define their relationship. “Yes, we were. Something wrong?”
The man glanced at them both, doubtful now to whom to report, and Evelyn saw that while she had been thinking of herself as a woman with an escort the Secret Service man had thought of her only as a member of the family he was here to protect. She was pleased at having attained at least ambivalence in his anonymous mind, and doubly grateful to Robert for having accomplished it.
The man finally said, to the space between them, while his glance kept flicking back and forth, “Just a little trouble at the gate. Only be a minute.”