Promise of Joy Page 8

  And as Hal quickly brought forward his chair and adjusted the microphone, he did so, obviously in some pain but managing to handle the situation with dignity. This did not prevent, however, a distinct shiver of dismay from running through his audience, and indeed through all friendly listeners everywhere. A certain triumphant note came into the noise from the park. At the press table Walter Dobius turned to Frankly Unctuous and murmured, “Absolutely impossible. Abso—lutely impossible!” “But they won’t get rid of him,” Frankly observed morosely. “No way.”

  The knowledge that this was indeed true presently brought a quietness to the room again. Beyond its confines the concerned might question, the violent might agitate, the critical might complain. Inside, they knew that for better or worse their hopes were pinned now on the Secretary of State, who simply must get better, as he promised, because there was no one else. Much as some of them might have misgivings, much as Roger Croy might have enjoyed making mischief an hour ago, they all knew that they were drained and exhausted, both emotionally and politically, to the point where they simply could not go through again the sort of battle for the Presidential nomination that they had gone through with Orrin Knox and Ted Jason. It was impossible.

  This did not mean, however, that the Vice Presidential nomination would go by default, or that there could not still be a vicious battle over it. To that eventuality the candidate now addressed himself.

  “Mr. President and members of the Committee,” he said gravely, shifting a little in his chair with a fleeting grimace of pain, “it is customary for one in my position to recommend his running mate. Usually the recommendation has been accepted. Much less often, it has not. I hope today it will be.

  “I have not consulted in any way with my choice for this position. Indeed,” he said simply, while the buzz of speculation raced over the room, “I have not been able. Yet I am convinced that the one I should like to have—if you agree with me—will serve, and willingly. I can think of no other who could more fittingly fill this position, more fairly and honorably perform the duties of Vice President and yes, if need be, the duties of President. I shall not waste time upon qualifications, for they will be obvious. I shall not waste time upon appeals for your support, for I hope it will be gladly forthcoming. I shall not embellish or expand. I shall simply give you a name, commend it to your most earnest consideration and hope you will agree.”

  He paused to reach for a glass of water, deliberately building tension, and as Hal quickly handed it to him, his purpose was amply achieved. “God damn it,” NBC muttered to CBS, pretty well summing up the mood in the room and wherever Orrin’s words were heard, “will you get on with it!” “Orrin,” CBS said, not entirely without a grudging admiration, “still knows how to create an effect.”

  After taking a quick sip of water, however, it appeared that he would not prolong it unduly. He took out a handkerchief, carefully wiped his lips, carefully put it away. Only a slightly heightened emphasis in his voice when he resumed revealed that he, too, was under tension; though why he should be, he told himself, he did not really know, since his next words would be the simplest and most obvious available—so simple and obvious, he hoped, that he would carry the Committee with him by acclamation.

  This he did, though after all the excited speeches of endorsement and agreement by the supporters of Edward M. Jason, after all the mixed but basically friendly comments by his own supporters, after the unanimous vote, the excitement of the media and the naming of a special committee to escort the new nominee for Vice President to Kennedy Center, he found that despite his most earnest efforts, he must start all over again.

  It was what he deserved, he told himself wryly later, for thinking he could make everything too easy.

  Mrs. Jason new vice presidential nominee. Secretary Knox names her to succeed slain husband. National committee approves choice by acclamation in wildly enthusiastic scene at Kennedy Center. First time woman has ever received the honor from a major party. Choice brings enthusiastic endorsement from all elements. She is expected to address committee this afternoon. Acceptance speech to be carried worldwide. Stock market rallies sharply on news. President Abbott says, “victory of the ticket is now assured.”

  “DARLING!” Patsy cried, bursting into the guest suite of her house in Dumbarton Oaks with such excitement that she didn’t even bother to knock. “DARLING, DARLING! That fantastic, crazy old Orrin Knox! Whoever would have thought he’d have the SENSE?… What’s the matter?” she demanded, giving her silent sister-in-law a sudden sharp glance in which impatience, annoyance and genuine alarm were about equally mixed. “What’s the matter? You’re not thinking of—you’re NOT THINKING OF—”

  “Patsy,” Ceil Jason said, very quietly but in a tone that for once reduced her voluble and exclamatory sister-in-law almost—almost—to silence. “Will you please go away and leave me alone?”

  “But—” Patsy said. “But they’re on their way right now to take you to the Center! You can’t—Ceil, you just can’t—”

  “I’m going to the Center,” Ceil said, her voice filled with an infinite weariness and pain. “Go away.”

  “Are you going to accept?” Patsy demanded. “You’ve got to accept! Ceil, you’ve got to—”

  “Patsy,” Ceil said, “I have lost my husband, I am still in considerable pain myself, I am only just beginning to think coherently again, and there you stand screaming at me. You are beyond belief. Please go.”

  “Well!” Patsy said. “Well, all I can say is—”

  “Don’t,” Ceil said. “Just go.”

  “Washington cannot remember,” Frankly Unctuous said from one of the special broadcasting booths set up downstairs, while all around him press telephones and typewriters rocked and clattered with the joyous news, “an occasion of such spontaneous celebration as is now greeting Secretary of State Orrin Knox’s stunning announcement that he has chosen the lovely Mrs. Ceil Jason to be his Vice Presidential running mate.

  “As you all know, his choice was immediately and unanimously endorsed by the National Committee, whose members at this moment are upstairs awaiting the arrival of the widow of Governor Edward M. Jason. Her acceptance will indeed, as President Abbott truly says, guarantee the victory of what is still, one may be allowed to happily note, the Knox-Jason ticket.

  “That this victory will in turn guarantee a much less rigid, much less doctrinaire Administration on the part of Orrin Knox, is as certain now as it was when Governor Jason was still alive. Indeed, it removes the fears of many, many millions both here and abroad that the Secretary might turn back to the reactionary, big-stick, arrogant, inexcusable American foreign policy he espoused during his years in the Senate, and more recently in Foggy Bottom. It guarantees the same peace-loving, moderate approach that would have been the case had Ted Jason lived to become Vice President: because the same forces which backed him and forced Secretary Knox to adopt a more reasonable policy that would make it possible for Governor Jason to accept a place on the ticket, are also behind his widow. Their influence, through her, will continue undiminished.

  “For that, fellow Americans”—and he stared straight into the camera, solemn, earnest and effective as always—“the people of this nation, and the peoples of the world, may be profoundly grateful. We are too close to disaster everywhere to be able to afford a national government which does not make every possible effort to maintain peace.

  “Because she does have this massive support which had gathered behind her husband, Mrs. Jason will be far from the ordinary innocuous Vice President. And because she is possessed of unusual intelligence as well as unusual beauty, she would also be, should events ever require it, a most capable and effective occupant of the Presidential office.

  “Therefore, Washington rejoices, the nation rejoices, the world rejoices. In a surprising show of statesmanship, Orrin Knox has astounded and delighted everyone. The act augurs well for an Administration which may not be as reactionary as many feared, after all.”
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br />   “Yes, you snide bastard,” Hal Knox said, snapping off the television in the small, heavily guarded room where they had been escorted to wait until Ceil arrived, “maybe it won’t be, after all.… Well,” he said, turning to his father, “you surprised them, all right. That I will have to concede.”

  “What’s the matter?” he inquired mildly, carefully shifting position to favor his wounded arm. “Don’t you like Ceil Jason?”

  “I think Ceil Jason is such a fine lady and so infinitely above what she was married to,” Hal said, “that there’s just no comparison. But she brings with her the same crew he did, and I don’t know whether, as a woman, she’ll be any better able to handle them than he could.”

  “She has character,” Crystal noted quietly. “A great deal of character. She was about to leave him because he wouldn’t break away from the violent, wasn’t she? She can handle them.”

  “She won’t have to,” Orrin remarked.

  “Oh, yes, she will,” Hal said. “They think they have a claim on her and they aren’t going to let her escape it. You may try to protect her and keep them out of the campaign, but they’ll be there. They’re too determined and too vicious to let go.”

  “Are you saying I can’t handle them?” his father demanded sharply.

  “You’ll try,” Hal agreed, “but it won’t be enough. After all, you know, you’ve made yourself even more of a sitting duck than you were before. They missed you the first time. Now they’ve got another Jason on the ticket. What makes you think they’ll miss next time?”

  “I must say,” Crystal remarked, half amused, half annoyed, “you’re a cheerful soul. Why don’t you try to be positive, for a change?”

  “Well, it’s true,” Hal said, his face as stubborn as his father’s often was. “It’s absolutely true and you know it. There still remains one sure way to get a Jason into the White House. So watch out. One sudden death in the Knox family”—abruptly his flippant tone dissolved, his face twisted and turned young and naked with pain—“is enough, thank you.”

  “All right,” Orrin said quietly. “All right. I’ll be careful. And so must she. I think one great advantage, however, lies in the fact that she did almost leave him because of the way he let the violent move in on his campaign. She didn’t approve of that, and I have the feeling she didn’t approve of his general approach to foreign policy, either. I’m pinning my hopes to that.”

  “And to the name of Jason,” Hal couldn’t resist. His wife made a movement of protest, his father gave him a steady look.

  “Yes,” he said. “To the name of Jason, also. Do you really think it is not important for me to win this election, Hal?”

  Their eyes held unwavering; then Hal’s looked away.

  “Yes,” he said, very low. “It is important. And she is infinitely better than he was. And you have pulled a great coup. And I accept it.”

  “Then let’s stop fighting about it, shall we?” his father suggested quietly. “We’re going to need all our energies to win. And there’s one other thing to keep in mind, in fairness to me: she wouldn’t be on the ticket, in spite of her name, if I didn’t really, honestly believe that she is fully capable of being President if”—he paused and gave an odd, fatalistic, almost humorous shrug—“if she had to. She isn’t just a political choice, after all. I hope I think a little more of my country than that.”

  “Of course you do,” Crystal said, leaning down to give him a comforting hug and kiss as, far in the distance, they began to hear a deep, rising, profoundly ecstatic sound.

  Hal reached forward and turned on the television. There appeared, to the accompaniment of an excited commentary by two of the network’s brightest young men, a sleek black limousine accompanied by a police motorcycle escort, nearing Kennedy Center through wildly cheering thousands who packed solid every foot of the way.

  “Is she there?” Hal asked after a moment. “I don’t see her waving, or anything.”

  “She isn’t the ostentatious public type,” Crystal observed. “That’s one of the reasons I like her.”

  “She’s campaigned with Ted for years,” Orrin said. “You would think she’d be waving a little, at least. Must be some reason for it. Grief, probably.”

  But, sitting back in the heavily guarded car she shared with Patsy, the Jason aunts, Valuela Jason Randall and Selena Jason Castleberry, and Herbert, the Jason uncle, she refused, for the moment at least, to play the public game. She had always done her duty when Ted was alive, almost never turning down a campaign invitation, traveling with him the length and breadth of their great, fantastic nation-state from the Oregon line to the Mexican border. Ceil Jason, so blonde, so beautiful, so obviously possessed of intelligence, wit and charm, had been, in her more glamorous way, fully as vital a help to her husband’s ambitions as Beth Knox, in more old-shoe fashion, had been to Orrin’s. Yet now all that seemed very far away: it seemed too much of a burden to wave and pretend to smile. She was still, as she had told Patsy, in considerable pain from the assassin’s wildly erratic fusillade. And she had also spent the past two hours in considerable confusion of mind as to how she should meet this most unexpected and fantastic turn in her life created by Orrin Knox.

  Now as her triumphal procession began its final approach to Checkpoint Alpha past mobs even denser, noisier and more hysterically happy than those that had gone before, she felt that she had decided—on her own, this time, without reference to Ted, or to what he would have wanted, or to what his career required, or to anything but what she, Ceil Jason, knew was best for the country, and for her.

  She really felt, thinking back over the hectic time since the news had begun to bombard the house in Dumbarton Oaks via television, radio, telegram and telephone, that these were her priorities: first the country, and then herself. She had always tried to put them in that order, and that was why, only one short week ago, she had come within a hairbreadth of leaving her husband and ending forever the relationship that was then, and always would be, the most fundamental of her existence.

  Her feelings toward Ted now were strangely ambivalent, for a just-bereaved wife; being an honest woman, she could not help acknowledging to herself that this was the fact. To the family—Patsy, with her loud opinions and garish dresses, Selena and Herbert with their endless well-publicized espousing of Authentically Liberal Causes, Valuela with her painting, her villa at Positano and her string of never very permanent young men—she had appeared properly grief-stricken and indeed, at heart, she was.

  Yet there was something else … something else.

  Even though she had returned to his side from her self-imposed exile at the great Jason ranch, “Vistazo,” north of Santa Barbara, when Orrin gave him the Vice Presidential nomination, still she had rendered a judgment on Ted that she could not evade now. She had rendered a judgment by leaving, and she had rendered a judgment by returning; and essentially, although one brought her close to divorce and the other to reconciliation, they were the same.

  Edward Montoya Jason was to her, as to so many, an enigma, even though her life had run beside his for the better part of twenty years. When he had married her—handsome multimillionaire scion of Spanish dons, Indian stock and shrewd Yankee traders taking to wife the beautiful daughter of a modestly well-to-do family in Redding—it had been the great occasion of the San Francisco season, an event noted in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Town and Country, Palm Springs Life, Palm Beach Life and other such knowledgeable recorders of the social scene. When he had gradually moved into full control of the family corporations, Ceil had been his encourager and confidante. When he had entered public life and won the governorship, Californians had taken pride in the most beautiful first lady in the fifty states, who was still their Governor’s encourager and confidante. But when the prize of the Presidency began to affect his decisions, his public actions and his private thoughts, his encourager and confidante began to draw away. Her flight to “Vistazo” had been only the culmination and symbol of a long, steady proc
ess that had, by then, been under way for five or six years.

  So subtly yet so swiftly that it sometimes took her breath away, the Ted Jason who had been so straightforward, honest and filled with integrity when she married him began to trim, shade and equivocate in the governor’s office in Sacramento. At first gently, then more openly as she became more alarmed by this, she began to chide him for it, not to the point of open issue but in a way that she hoped would bring him back to her own original concept of him, which she knew had been his concept, too. She was finally forced to the unhappy conclusion that he was not going to come back, that he was set upon a course dictated by ambition from which he would not deflect, even for her. And this despite the fact that they had known, and still knew, a deep and abiding love for one another that seemed to go along in some separate channel quite apart from the steady erosion of integrity and firmness that she was unhappily witnessing, every day.

  Until the national convention so recently concluded, and then she knew that there could be separation no longer, that it was all coming together, that the Edward M. Jason who was rising to dominate his nation’s politics was simply no longer, nor would ever be again, the Edward M. Jason to whom she still owed, in heart and body, an allegiance she thought she could never abandon.

  But the day came—or the night, rather. When Crystal Knox was beaten by the thugs of NAWAC in the ghostly fog outside the Cow Palace—when she lost her baby and almost lost her life—it was a turning point for Ceil Jason as it was for all those most closely involved in the drama of the Presidential nomination.