With his attaché case he had returned to the lounge car to study the proposals from Emmich’s attorneys, to mark modifications and changes after them. He had hardly been aware that they were in Akron, and that it was eleven-fifteen and they were running a little late. But then, casually peering through the window, he had noticed, with growing curiosity, a large gathering of the train’s porters and conductors, and lips moving excitedly and considerable gesticulating from everyone.
Minutes later, as the Capitol Limited had begun to move again, the wizened Negro bartender had hurried into the lounge with the news. MacPherson had also died in Frankfurt. Senator Douglass Dilman, a colored man, had just been sworn in as President of the United States.
Doug Dilman.
It had taken Nat Abrahams a long time to calm the chaotic emotions he had felt about his old friend and his friend’s incredible promotion. At midnight Abrahams had gone back to his compartment. In the darkness Sue’s sleepy voice welcomed him and said good night. He had sat down on the edge of her berth, and told her what he had heard. She had snapped on the blue night light above her head, and he could see that she was upset and trembling. He had given her a sleeping pill, and then they had discussed it, until her voice had thickened and fallen silent, and she had drifted off to sleep again. Later he had stretched in his upper berth, but he had not slept. He had been awake, his mind a turmoil, for at least an hour after they left Pittsburgh.
And here it was early morning, and here he was drawing closer and closer to the nation’s capital, a city so jolted overnight, so changed, by the rise to highest office of the only colored man he had ever known well and one who had been his friend since their first meeting during the Second World War. Only the previous week Abrahams had had a letter from Dilman, who was overjoyed that Abrahams was coming to Washington. Dilman insisted that they must see one another as often as possible during Abrahams’ visit. Dilman had even set a date for their dinner of reunion. Abrahams speculated as to whether that engagement still existed and, if it did, what his friend would be like.
Sighing, Nat Abrahams drove further speculation from his mind and walked quickly, opening heavy resisting doors, into the lounge car, and then continued into the immaculate dining car. Except for a sprinkling of white passengers, absorbed in the Pittsburgh newspapers, the dining car appeared to be the scene of a Pullman porters’ convention. At least a half dozen of them, joined by the Negro waiters, were congregated at the far end, engaged in deep conversation.
The short maître d’hôtel, rimless spectacles pressed into his Prussian face, bounced forward, signaling Abrahams to a table. As Abrahams sat before the spotless water glasses and gleaming silver ware, dancing to me click of the wheels and rails, the maîture d’hôtel placed the menu, order pad, and pencil in front of him.
“I won’t need a menu,” Abrahams said. Taking up the pad, he wrote his order: cereal, French toast, tea. Then he filled in Sue’s order: grapefruit, melba toast, coffee. He handed the pad to his host. “Hold the coffee until my wife comes in.”
“Very well, sir.”
Abrahams nodded off to the far end of the car. “I’ll wager they’re talking about President Dilman.”
“Nothing else but that. They can’t keep their minds on their work since it happened.” He bowed closer to Abrahams and whispered, “You’d think it was the Second Coming.”
“Let’s hope so.”
The maître d’ was about to say something, but seemed to change his mind, and said something else. “Are you, by any chance, with the government, sir?”
“Heaven forbid,” said Abrahams, “unless that covers all suffering taxpayers.”
The maître d’ lingered. “We’re expecting our next trainloads, the coming months, to be more heavily Negro, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t see why,” said Abrahams sharply. He motioned to the pad. “May I have my tea right away?”
After the maître d’ had hurried away, Abrahams remained inspecting the picture that the man had planted in his mind-thousands of Pullman cars, overflowing with black men pouring into Washington to accept their new appointments. However, he could only visualize the picture in broadest caricature. For, knowing Dilman as he did, he was aware that it was wildly ridiculous. One of Dilman’s shortcomings, Abrahams had always felt, was that he leaned too far backward, and away, from those worthies of his own race, lest he be charged with favoritism. Dilman believed that all men were created equal, and should inherit equal rights, yet he was too inhibited by fear to practice his beliefs. Instead he had a tendency to practice a sort of inverse segregation, one turned inside out. This was too harsh a judgment of so good and suffering a man, Abrahams knew, but it was largely true.
His memory went back to early 1945, when, as a captain, he had been assigned to the Military Justice Division of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, Department of the Army, in the Pentagon Building. He had found himself situated at a desk in the same glassed-in olive green cubbyhole as Lieutenant Douglass Dilman. Abrahams had known a few Negroes when he attended the Law School of the University of Chicago, but he had never known them intimately. Abrahams had never possessed any strong, special feelings about Negroes, except intellectual resentment at their oppression and slum history and bondage in America. His bookish, impecunious father, a philosophy professor, and his active-in-causes, fearlessly vocal mother (a sort of Margaret Fuller whose Master’s thesis had been on the Abolitionist movement) had raised him so naturally that he had come to manhood without any racial prejudices.
As a matter of fact, Abrahams was not even possessed of tolerance for Negroes, as many of his intellectual and progressive friends were. To Abrahams, the word tolerance bore, in itself, a flick of prejudice-one was nice to certain people, treated them equally, accepted them, but by being tolerant of them thus, one implied that they were different. To Abrahams, Negroes had been men who were light black or dark black as white men had been swarthy white or pasty white. All men were men together, and some were stupid and others were intelligent, some more boring than others and some more fascinating, some more bad than good and others more good than bad, whether they were black or white, brown or yellow. Abrahams had entered the Army with this attitude, and it had not changed.
Being confined in a cubbyhole with a Negro officer had been unusual only because he found Dilman shy and deferential beyond the requirements of their difference in rank, and because he had been uncertain about Dilman. His uncertainty was not related to his own feelings about Dilman’s color, but rather to Dilman’s own sensitivity about his color and to Abrahams’ whiteness. But because they had been thrown together a couple of feet from each other, devoting themselves to the same cases and working under the same pressures, Dilman’s defensiveness had gradually dropped.
Their closeness had begun in the common language of military legalities, and had eventually shifted to the common language of intellectually equal men. Not only had they worked together, but they had dined in the Pentagon cafeteria together daily and left the river entrance together in one car pool for their respective lodgings. They had come to know of each other’s lives, although Dilman had always been more guarded here, and of each other’s likes and dislikes, human weaknesses, human aspirations. They had become fond of each other as men, and when they had been assigned together to London, and then Paris, and then Occupied West Germany, their friendship had solidified. The triumph of it, Abrahams had finally realized, was that Dilman had one day ceased to consider him white and therefore alien.
After the war they had both practiced in Chicago, he with offices in the Loop, and Dilman on the South Side. While he had known that Dilman was married, he had never met Dilman’s wife during the war, because she had not accompanied him to Washington. In Chicago Abrahams met her three times and, knowing Dilman as he did, understood why Dilman had not brought her with him to Washington. Aldora Dilman, although of Negro ancestry, had proved to be of fair complexion. Abrahams had thought her tense, embittered, ashamed of her darker husband, and he had observed that she drank too much. Eleven months after setting himself up in Chicago, Dilman had abruptly moved himself and his wife to another city in another Midwestern state.