He halted, and looked around the room, bewildered, as if seeking a friend in a company of strangers. The harsh kliegs, blended with the light of the overhead neon grill, made the witnesses to the historic tableau seem ghostly. He had lowered his right hand, and suddenly Chief Justice Johnstone reached out and grasped Dilman’s right hand in his own and shook it.
“Mr. President,” the Chief Justice was saying, “we deeply mourn the passing of our beloved past President, but the continuity of our government, the welfare of our country, must stand above any one individual in these perilous times. Our hearts go out to you for your double burden-and may the Lord in Heaven bless you and watch over you as the new Chief Executive of this nation-and-as the first Negro to become President of the United States.”
II
It was the muffled sound of argument that awakened him.
There was a thin line of ache behind his forehead as he listened, sorting and separating the muffled sound into two sounds, the first shrill and feminine, cross and indignant, the second low and male, calm and placating.
His head was deep in the fat pillow, so deep that when he turned, he could not see the time. The pillow had been handmade by Aldora, almost double-sized and stuffed with gray goose down, and presented to him on their first anniversary, so long ago, when their marriage still had hope.
The cross fire of altercation beyond his bedroom wall, increasingly abrasive, continued louder. He lifted himself ever so slightly on his forearm and was able to make out the time on the electric clock humming upon the end table beside the bed. It was eight fifty-two, and although the room was darkened by the drawn shades, he knew that it was morning.
He realized that he had meant to be awakened earlier, had meant to set the alarm, but had forgotten to do so before falling asleep. The shutoff lever on his telephone had banished all calls, and in his utter exhaustion he had slumbered on and on. It was shameful, he thought behind the headache, and, as always, to do anything shameful alarmed him. Other men could afford mistakes, small and large, but he could afford none, not the smallest one. Several times, during his residence in Washington, he had awakened with the remnant of the same dream, that he had been treading water in an enormous aquarium, and that all its sides were painted with blue eyes staring at him. The shimmering fragment of dream had always left him uneasy.
But now, the private hook of humor that he possessed but had not dared to reveal to anyone but Wanda and his closest friends extricated him from the fish bowl, and he was free to admit to himself that he had performed his first act as the President of the United States. He had overslept.
Suddenly the enormity of what had happened last night, and of what he was, oppressed him with its unreality and automatically forced him to retreat into the cup of the down pillow.
He had, he remembered, been told by someone last night that, after formally resigning from the Senate, he had become the President of the United States at ten thirty-seven in the evening. He had not been returned to his brownstone row house until after one o’clock in the morning. It was almost impossible to recollect what had taken place in the time between. He had signed something, yes, his first official signing; he had affixed his name to the proclamation that poor Speaker MacPherson was supposed to have signed, the same statement that had been hastily prepared for the Speaker and was to have been flown to Frankfurt. This proclamation was the official announcement of T. C.’s funeral and the period of national mourning.
He had listened to Secretary of State Arthur Eaton and Governor Wayne Talley expound on the critical Roemer Conference, and he had not absorbed a word of it. He had sat with them, smoking cigars until his eyes smarted and his throat felt blistered, and he had sat with the sympathetic press secretary, yes, Tim Flannery, the redhead, preparing the carefully worded release to all the news media. Then others had swum about them, senators and representatives whom he had known during work hours for years, and T. C.’s Cabinet members, whom he had hardly known at all, and they had spoken of approaches and strategies and public relations and the Party, and he had been grateful that they had addressed Eaton and Talley and Flannery and not himself.
He had been almost physically ill from the tension of the events of that day and evening, and after midnight there had been a stirring and rising, and he had been released, guided to a Cadillac limousine outside the South Portico. He remembered protesting against the two Secret Service agents who had entered the limousine with him, and protesting, with embarrassment, against both the motorcycle escort of police which had preceded him and the second car of agents which had followed him to his home.
He recalled the scene outside his brownstone, and how he had begged Hugo Gaynor, the Chief of Secret Service, who had followed him into his living room, to go home, and how Gaynor had been adamant about staying. And he remembered how he had surrendered from exhaustion, desiring only to escape to his bedroom and sleep alone, away from the blue eyes around the glass aquarium.
The sound of the argument beyond his bedroom wall was persisting. It had probably been going on steadily in the seconds of his introspection. And now, at last, he was able to place himself accurately in the time of day and the routine of his former life, and he knew what was happening in his living room. It was Crystal and a Secret Service agent who were locked in debate.
Crystal had come to him, through an employment agency, during his fourth term in the House of Representatives, and because he had been alone, and was still alone, she had grown fiercely maternal in her devotion to his comfort. Five days a week she appeared at eight-thirty to prepare his breakfast, make his bed, clean his flat, market for him. She worked until twelve-thirty, then disappeared to tend to her own household, which included her sister’s family, and then returned at three-thirty, remaining to cook and serve his dinner, often not leaving until eight o’clock in the evening. She was a poor cook, a burner of toast, and a slipshod domestic, a sweeper under the rug, but she was prompt, loyal, busy, and relatively unobtrusive (that is, until recently, when she had taken to carrying on, always quoting her brother-in-law, a gas station attendant, about the Turnerite Group, who were out to ruin the one chance that the colored folk would ever have for economic improvement through that rehabilitation subsidy act for Negroes that was being talked about).
At once, the reason for the altercation in the living room was clear to him. Crystal had arrived as usual, and found the Secret Service waiting, which was unusual. The irresistible force had collided with the immovable object.
Douglass Dilman threw aside his electric blanket and swung out of bed. He stood up, straightening his blue pajamas, stuck his feet into the misshapen slippers, picked his polka-dot cotton robe off the chair and pulled it on. He walked to the bureau mirror and looked at himself. His black kinky hair, as always after sleep, was shoved high into a peak at the back of his head. He took the wide-toothed comb and ran it through his full hair, smoothing down the peak. He poked at the inner corners of his bloodshot eyes, to wipe and clear them. He studied his broad indelicate countenance. He was dark-well, black, but not coal-black-and his features were Negroid. His forehead was high, his nose full and wide, his lips heavy and protruding.
Now in his fifties, he was overweight, not yet fat, but stocky and thick. Tim Flannery, he remembered, had asked for the statistics last night, and he had said that he was five feet ten inches (cheating a half-inch for more stature) and 180 pounds. His appearance, a big-city ward heeler had once told him, worked for him. His lack of height, his tackiness, the antithesis of the fearsome young Negro buck, combined with mild, refined Caucasian speech and mannerisms, made him more acceptable to the white labor voters; his unmistakable Negro features made him authentic and agreeable to the black menial voters. Oftentimes in the past, he had wished that he could be all one or the other, like the members of his family. Pitiful dead Aldora had been light tan, often mistaken for a Spaniard, and he was sure this had contributed to what had happened. Wretched Julian, his son, was as dark as himself, black really, but possessed of features less coarse than his own. Pathetic Mindy, his daughter, was (or had been when he had last set eyes on her six years ago) white and beautiful, white and lovely, which had pleased her mother, had worried him, had made Julian resentful, and had made Mindy herself haughty and impossible.