I washed up as best I could, combed my hair, straightened my tie, brushed my clothes off with toilet paper. I found my handkerchief stuffed in a jacket pocket, remembered where it had been that day, and flushed it down a stool. Weirdly, as it got sucked down the hole, I seemed to hear a child cry — I realized my imagination was working overtime, like I still hadn’t come out the other end of those goddamn dreams. Have to take a vacation when this thing is over. I cleaned my shoe with soap and water. The lace was crusted with the stuff and had got broken when I tore the shoe out from under the cabbie’s seat, so I threw it away. To get at the crud in between the sole and top of the shoe, I wrapped toilet paper around a pencil point, an old trick I learned long ago on those long hot evenings after cleaning out the stables at the Prescott rodeo. Sooner or later, my enemies in the press would try to use that rodeo job against me, too — he got his start in life with both feet in the shit, they’ll say. Just as they’ll claim that I learned all I knew about politics when the bosses took notice of my good work and promoted me out front to bark for the Wheel of Fortune. Well, that’s fair game, you’ve got to be able to take it in politics, but they’ll be wrong about it, as usual. The stables taught me discipline and silence — the best test of a man is not how well he does the things he likes but how well he does the things he doesn’t like — while the Wheel of Fortune gave me an appreciation of risk and the rudiments of mob psychology. I learned out there how to make my mark among total strangers, people whose lives were totally different from my own, and how to keep quiet about it after. The whole Frontier Days Rodeo scene gave me a special ceremonial perspective on the legend of the American West, too, and it ended once and for all whatever squeamishness I might have had toward the cruder side of life. I can be around blood, shit, dead bodies, beatings, tragedy, any kind of garbage or ugliness, and not be bothered like most. In a concentration camp, I not only would survive, I would probably even prosper. And it was why Uncle Sam, I knew, could count on me tonight at the electrocutions, where others might lose their color, if not their courage and suppers as well. Tonight! Whew, it hardly seemed possible that it was really going to happen, after all, just a few hours from now! I didn’t know if I was pleased or not. I felt like I used to feel when an exam was rushing up on me I wasn’t prepared for. Hey! I had to get that speech written!
I hustled out of there and on up to my office. The girls greeted me as usual, but they were less than natural about it, something in the way they ducked their heads, glanced at each other, fussed with the pamphlets and brochures stacked out for tourists. Had they spotted so quickly my laceless shoe? Caught a whiff? Or — ah! I’d forgotten to lock the door to my inner office last night, they’d witnessed the mess in there. Encountering so much disorder in an office kept as neat as mine must have been as shocking to them as finding Foster Dulles’ office filled with empty gin bottles or Cardinal Spellman’s quarters littered with lace panties. I should get them out of there, I thought. I didn’t have much time left, and they were no help at a time like this. A nuisance, in fact.
I checked the mail, signed some letters, remarked favorably on a peculiar-looking beanie with five fingers sticking up that one of them had bought for a nephew, asked for a cup of coffee, looked over the advance copy of a special feature article on me for this Sunday’s Washington Post, apologized laughingly for the confusion in the other room, glanced at the appointments calendar. “I was working late last night on a report for the President, and let me say frankly, I, uh, didn’t get a chance to straighten up after,” I said with a loose chuckle. For some reason, I didn’t recognize a single name on the appointments calendar. “This Rosenberg thing, you know — the President wanted all the, uh, facts before making any final, I’ve been working sixteen hours a day on this thing, any final judgment on their petition for clemency.”
“What’s going to happen, Mr. Nixon? Has it been postponed again? We heard all the shouting—”
“No, the Court has held the line and the President has refused clemency. Everything’s all right. It is my understanding that they will be executed tonight, sometime around eight, if all, uh, goes well.” It was cold in here, the girls had the airconditioner on, and my shirt was sticking damply to my skin. I hoped I had a fresh shirt somewhere in my office. I realized I was reluctant to go back in there. One glance brought back everything from last night and my butt even began to ache again. I sat down on one of the tall black leather chairs out where the girls were.
“A pity,” one of the girls said. “Those two little boys…”
“Well, let’s not deceive ourselves, they should have thought more about those little boys when they started working for the Phantom,” I said with a smile. I leaned forward earnestly. “We’re fortunate that we have a President of the United States who isn’t a sucker and who isn’t going to be made one. I think the only man that can save America is Dwight, uh, Eisenhower.”
“Well, maybe,” the girl said, handing me a cup of hot coffee, “but it seems like it should be enough if they just electrocuted the man and let the woman go take care of the kids, maybe just cut off one of her arms or her tongue or something — I mean, it was probably mostly his fault anyway, women always do what men tell them to. I certainly do!”
I laughed jovially. “That’s funny,” I said, standing up. “I always had, uh, the idea it was just the opposite!”
The girls laughed. “Oh, you men!” one of them said.
I felt pleased with myself. I sat down again. I wasn’t usually so successful with this kind of banter. Maybe that encounter with the Phantom and the reporters had loosened me up: a good fight stirs the blood. And other things, too. Certainly, everybody was in a jocular — almost holiday — mood now, and whatever uneasiness there might have been when I entered had apparently been forgotten. “Well,” I grinned affably, “if the dry rot of corruption and Communism, which has eaten deep into our body, uh, politic during the past seven years, can only be chopped out with a hatchet — then let’s call for a hatchet!”
This was less successful. “My goodness!” said one of the girls, breaking the silence. “Eight o’clock, did you say? That’s only about seven hours from now!” I stood and looked at my watch. “And people are probably going there right now to get the best places!”
“All right,” I laughed in a yielding manner, “I can take a hint! Go ahead and cancel all my afternoon appointments and take the rest, uh, of the day off.” Things were working out better than I might have hoped. I felt freer now — I’d be alone, and alone I could work this thing out, bring it all to some kind of summation, find the words I’d need tonight at the ceremonies. I sat down. But I didn’t mean to. I got up again. I chuckled. I tried on the beanie with the five fingers and then handed it back. I strode cheerfully, chin high, into the maelstrom of my office, threw open the heavy red drapes, turned upon the debris as a manager might turn upon his ballplayers — trailing, exhausted, dispirited, but not yet defeated — in the bottom of the seventh. All right, boys, they’re all watching us now, let’s pick it up and put it together.
While the girls bustled about in the other rooms, tidying up their desks, freshening their makeup, making the necessary phone calls, I pretended to clean up my own office, snatching up the papers disinterestedly from the floor and chairs, stacking them more or less by date, dumping part of them as though carelessly into the wastebasket. “Early hath Life’s mighty question thrilled within the heart of youth,” I mused, recalling that Whittier quotation from over the mantel outside the President’s office back at college, “with a deep and strong beseeching…what and where is—?”