Preserve and Protect Page 7

  He drew a sudden long, shivering breath. How awful the prospects had been for the golden hero of the Golden State; how miraculous his salvation. Surely there must be a purpose in it somewhere!

  As quickly as it came, the mood passed. Governor Jason was not one to brood overlong on might-have-beens. If there was purpose, it was up to him to implement it. By some strange kindness or irony, the Lord had given him another chance. This time he would not destroy it but would see it through with vigor, integrity and all the determination of a clever mind, to which family character and great wealth had long ago given the habit of decisive command. Three days after his descent into the abyss of abandoned hope, he was on the way back; and with only a very little extra luck, he would not only regain his former position but go on from it to the goal he had been within sight of when the convention roared out of his control.

  “In January,” he said with a quiet certainty to the silent office, “Edward Montoya Jason will be President of the United States.”

  As if in response, the telephone rang; and lifting it to listen while the switchboard carried out his instructions to take the message but deflect the caller, he heard a voice he had not expected to hear unless he initiated the call. He felt a sudden surge of happiness. That she had called first seemed somehow to put the seal on all his certainties.

  “I’ll take this, Operator,” he broke in; and then, his voice, despite his best efforts, trembling a little, “Good morning. Where are you?”

  “I’m still at the ranch,” Ceil said. “Have you been home?”

  “No,” he said. “I just came up from San Francisco this morning. I came directly here.”

  “Have you had breakfast?”

  “A little.”

  “Well, you ought to have a good one. These are challenging times.”

  “Yes, I know,” he said, absurdly relieved that she should use her usual bantering tone. “I’m not being too active at the moment, though: just sitting here thinking.”

  “Is anyone with you?”

  “No,” he said; and ventured, “Not even my wife.”

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, trying to keep it light though his voice trembled a little again. “I came back to the Mark and found a note that you had gone to ‘Vistazo.’ I didn’t think I had kicked you out.”

  “I suppose it was a little abrupt,” she conceded. “But I suddenly had just had it.”

  “I thought I had too,” he said quietly.

  “It wasn’t very obvious at the time,” she said thoughtfully. “You didn’t give that impression.”

  “I have some pride, after all.”

  “Yes, I know.…What are you doing now?”

  “Just thinking.”

  “The Capitol on Sunday’s a good place for it, I guess. I saw your statement, of course.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “I thought it was very good from your standpoint.”

  “That isn’t what I asked,” he said, attempting jocularity.

  “Well, I don’t know how else to state it,” she said slowly, and he could visualize the characteristic little frown of concentration. “It wasn’t so good from mine.”

  “Why not?” he asked, and because he was afraid of sounding plaintive, sounded sharp. “I’m sorry,” he said instantly. “I didn’t mean to sound impatient. I’m—still under a lot of strain, I guess.”

  “That’s all right, I understand. I meant that it seemed a little—self-serving, maybe. But then, I suppose any such statement has to, of course.”

  “Didn’t Orrin’s?” he asked, again sharp; and this time he did not apologize.

  “Oh, yes,” she agreed. “I’m not arguing that.”

  “What would you have me do?” he demanded. “Not run?”

  “I don’t think you have a choice in the world.”

  “All right, then.”

  “Either from a political standpoint or a family one.”

  “What do you mean by that?” he inquired, making it lighter. “My fatal Jason blood?”

  “Your fatal Jason compulsion to take top prize if you possibly can.”

  “Do you think it’s just for the prize?” And again, to his annoyance, his voice trembled a little. He didn’t want to sound supplicant, but he knew he was. “Don’t you think I have any ideals and principles about it?”

  But at this there was dead silence from “Vistazo” and he knew exactly what she was saying to him: Ideals and principles after the things you did and condoned at the convention? And suddenly he was overwhelmed by this himself, and for several seconds was silent also, buffeted by a hundred unhappy thoughts. Finally, because he must, he spoke.

  “Ceil—” he said tentatively. “Do you think I’m really as—as awful—as—as I have seemed to be?”

  “Do you want an honest answer?”

  “I know I always get one from you,” he said, attempting a little laugh that didn’t really come off.

  “Yes,” she said, and sighed. “I suppose you do. That’s probably the trouble.”

  “No trouble. I just want to know if I am.”

  “Well—” she sighed again. “What am I supposed to say to that? I think you did things you shouldn’t have done. I think you permitted things to be done in your name that shouldn’t have been done. I didn’t approve of them. So I left. I haven’t changed my mind about them. They still disturb me, very much. I think what you ought to do now is stay out of it. Orrin has a right to it. The convention decided for the President and Orrin, let Orrin have it. He’s the logical choice of the opinion that really, I think, represents a majority of the country. Why should you revive all the bitterness and hatred now? Haven’t we had enough of it in the last couple of months? Aren’t you satisfied?”

  He was silent for a moment while all sorts of angrily defensive things came to mind and were rejected. Finally he spoke, more quietly than he had thought he could.

  “That isn’t really very fair. I haven’t been ‘satisfied’ with the bitterness. It’s been an inevitable accompaniment of the kind of commitment Harley and Orrin made for us overseas. These adventures aren’t popular, you know. People are bitter about Panama and Gorotoland. It seems to them to be the Korea-Vietnam pattern all over again. Inevitably it gets into politics. I can’t help it if those who are bitter want me in the White House. They have to have some hope that things will improve. I can’t turn my back on them when they believe in me.”

  “It’s marvelous,” she said in a musing tone that robbed it somewhat of hurt, “how the Jasons can always rationalize what they want to do. As I see it, the convention reached a decision. The bitter people have lost. Why don’t you encourage them to accept it and join ranks with the rest? Why keep trying to split the country apart? Who does it help, except those who hate America?”

  “Ceil,” he said quietly, “now you’re not being rational. I’m not ‘trying to split the country apart.’ It is split apart. I’m trying to heal it again.”

  Once more there was silence from “Vistazo.” When she spoke it was in a tired and dismissive tone that re-awoke all the uncertain terrors that had surrounded him when she fled the convention.

  “Well … I’m sorry I called. Obviously it’s too late for you to back out now, and obviously you don’t want to. So there’s nothing I can do. Is President Abbott going to support you?”

  “I would consider it unlikely,” he said, diverted for a second back to politics; and then, the terrors breaking through in a way that quite surprised him, self-assured Jason that he was, “Ceil, Ceil! I wish you were here!”

  “So do I,” she said quietly. “But I can’t, for now.”

  “What will you do?” he asked, and his voice was trembling again, though he fought desperately to control it. “Stay down there, or”—suddenly he sounded desperately unsure—“You aren’t going to really leave me, are you?”

  “I expect not,” she said, after a moment. “After all, you’re my husband and I love you.”
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  “You do?” he asked humbly. “I’m not—very sure, right now.”

  “Let me think a little. I need the quiet. I’m going to take Trumpet and go riding over the hills this afternoon. Then I may go to the beach for a while with the Macombers. They’re going to be next door all week, so tomorrow I may go again. I’ll read some and rest some. Don’t worry about me. The staff is taking good care of me and the press doesn’t know I’m here, so I’m not being bothered with that. We can just rock along for a while the way we are. It will probably be good for both of us.”

  “Not for me,” he said, but her response was back to bantering.

  “Oh, yes. The candidate may suffer but the man may profit. And I too. Goodbye, my darling. Have a good lunch to make up for the skimpy breakfast.”

  “Ceil,” he said, hating himself for asking, but knowing he must, “will you refuse my calls if I try to reach you?”

  “Oh, no,” she said quietly. “Never. Call whenever you want to. I’ll be here.”

  After that, he was not too prepared for his sister when she called five minutes later, bright and ebullient, from Washington. But he decided to talk to her because it would keep him from succumbing to the black melancholy into which Ceil’s call was threatening to plunge him.

  This was a new thing for him. Ceil’s striking blonde beauty and honest personality had meant many things to him over the years, but she had never had this effect on him before. He had always felt that in the last analysis she needed him rather more than he needed her. Suddenly this was no longer true. It was odd and unsettling.

  For this mood Patsy, if not an absolute antidote, was at least a jolt. She was obviously off and running about something.

  “DARLING,” she said, “you’ll never GUESS what I’m going to do.”

  “I don’t dare.”

  “No, seriously, now, it’s going to be such a help to you. You MUST listen seriously.”

  “I will,” he said, “but I won’t promise anything.”

  But after he heard what she had in mind, he thought for several moments and then told her to go ahead; an indication, perhaps, that he still was not functioning quite normally, in the aftermath of the strange convention.

  Left to himself again, he contemplated the cool, dark lawns and the stately trees for a while longer and then tried once more to call Bob Leffingwell, now, presumably, returned to his home in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington. He did so fully aware of the probable mood of the director of the President’s Commission on Administrative Reform, whom he had last seen three days ago when they had parted in mutual bitterness and dislike. Bob Leffingwell had served him faithfully as campaign manager up to the point when violence got out of hand at the Cow Palace. Then he had resigned without any pretense of concealing his horror and contempt. His next appearance had been on the podium when he had started the convention stampede by nominating President Hudson and taking nearly half the New York delegation with him.

  This had brought him the automatic condemnation of that professionally liberal world which had endorsed him so vigorously when he and Orrin Knox were having their historic battle over his nomination to be Secretary of State. But it had brought him a strange sort of regeneration in the minds of all those good citizens who felt that his action somehow canceled out his childish and dreadful mistake when he had lied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about his foolish youthful connections with Communism. Now he was being subjected to a steady stream of withering scorn from such as Walter Dobius, The Greatest Publication, Newsweek, the Post, the In-Group Quarterly, the Saturday Review and all their gallant band of brothers. But this was counterbalanced and perhaps outweighed by the sober and generally respectful reappraisals that were coming from less partisan and more responsible sources.

  Bob Leffingwell at the moment, Governor Jason realized, was riding rather high again. He was once more respectable with that great group of independent voters in the center who decide most elections. The man who could persuade him to come over to his side would have gained a powerful asset. Particularly if he were the same man whom Bob Leffingwell had so dramatically repudiated only seventy-six hours ago.

  At first blush, Ted knew, this would seem to many a strange flip-flop for Bob. But all it required to make it easy, in the sometimes rather fantastic atmosphere of American politics, was the right tone and the right style. Bob could say—Ted already had his statement blocked out for him—that now that President Hudson had been so tragically taken from the scene, he could not in all honesty support Secretary Knox for the Presidential nomination. He could say that his support of President Hudson had been essentially personal; that he had been further persuaded to support the President by the unfortunate trend to violence that the Jason campaign had seemed to be taking; that he now had the personal assurance of Governor Jason that this trend had developed without the Governor’s knowledge or approval and would not occur again; and that he accordingly could now with a clear conscience return to support of the Governor, whose policies of sober negotiation and peaceful compromise in foreign affairs were, and always had been, much more satisfactory than the dangerous and ill-advised military adventures of Secretary Knox.

  It could be done, and easily, and out of it Bob Leffingwell could hold his new-found conservative support and at the same time regain the support of his temporarily hostile friends of the professionally liberal persuasion. He could appear to be an honestly troubled man who was now confronted with the opportunity to reassess his position.

  Hopefully, this would be an accurate description of his present state of mind. A humble and apologetic call from the Governor might be just what was needed to bring him over. Somehow Ted had to find him. When the phone rang ten times without answer in Arlington, he hung up; but five minutes later he called the switchboard and gave instructions that the number was to be tried every half hour until he said to stop.

  I am probably, Bob Leffingwell thought, one of the few people in the Potomac basin at this moment who are foolish enough to sit outside; but his lawn, too, was green and shaded, and the tulip trees and dogwood gave it an illusion of coolness. At least it was cooler than the city across the river that shimmered and danced before him, seeming to expand and contract and expand again, as he sat staring at it thoughtfully from a chaise longue by the pool. Washington almost seemed to float suspended in the haze, evanescent, mysterious, perhaps an illusion, perhaps not even there save in the harried minds of those whose lives revolved around it.

  For a moment he was amused by the conceit, but then it seemed to him that it was almost no conceit at all but the reality. What a mirage it was, that city, and how feverishly it could be conquered or changed or shattered or rebuilt in the hectic imaginings of those who sought in it their fame and fortune. Was it really that all-dominating, really that all-important? Wasn’t it perhaps something that was created at embassy receptions, in parties at Dolly Munson’s, in Press Club gossip, in the endless arguments of Capitol Hill that changed but never changed, in the endless jockeying for position, political or social or financial, that occupied the waking energies, the dreams, the hopes and the substance of many fiercely brilliant and ambitious people? Where did illusion end and reality begin in the Washington he knew—not the Washington of the dark streets and the steadily rising crime rate and the poverty and the drudgery and the ugliness and the filth, but the dream-city, beautiful and stately, that still guarded and gave form to the shining ideals and worried hopes of a confused, uncertain, basically decent and still goodhearted people?

  Was it reality now, that his telephone should be ringing, and that he should have a pretty good idea of who was trying to reach him? Was that the sort of reality that mattered to the black families on the dirty streets tucked away behind the magnificent avenues, was that what the knifer or the robber or the rapist thought about as he moved through Rock Creek Park or Capitol Hill or along the Tidal Basin in search of the unwary and the unattended, was that the kind of reality they were conce
rned about in Lafayette Park? Or was it just a reality that existed in some precious, fragile world somewhere on some special Cloud 9, kept up there by an exercise in mass illusion on the part of all the people who knew their dream-city had to be kept suspended in the air because they would all fall with it if it were not?

  He sighed and an expression almost of distaste crossed his face. The two cities were one. The Cabinet member who dined at Dolly’s tonight could be called away by a telephone call concerning the latest racial riot, the shadows that drifted through the parks could be rescued or driven into the ground by what they might decide in Congress, the lovely homes in Georgetown and other gracious places would stand solid on their foundations only as long as those who lived in the dirty streets and alleys could be convinced that someone was actively trying to help them. The illusionists could keep their shining city aloft only as long as the realists found their ugly one getting better. And salvation in the ugly city depended, whether its residents knew it or not, upon the decisions of those who walked the shining streets. They were locked in dreadful embrace and neither could be free of the other.

  Of course it mattered to all of them who were calling Bob Leffingwell on the telephone. It might very well be the next President of the United States, and in a thousand ways subtle and not so subtle they would all be affected to the end of their days by who he was and what he did.

  But for all that, Bob Leffingwell had no intention at the moment of answering the persistent ringing that came at regular intervals faintly from the house. Whether it be Governor Jason or Secretary Knox or the shrewd old Congressional veteran who now had the power, he just didn’t have much stomach for a long, exhausting conversation with any of them. He was aware of his own advantages at the moment, and the longer he kept himself secluded and aloof, the stronger they would become. There was no reason to get involved sooner than he had to.