DURING Governor Wayne Talley’s brief conversation with Dilman, Arthur Eaton had sat on one of the two black sofas of the Presidential reception room, the Fish Room it was called after the mammoth sailfish that T. C. had had mounted and hung on one wall, staring up at the square skylight in the ceiling.
Arthur Eaton had hardly heard the conversation, so absorbed was he in his own musings. Persistently his mind had dwelt upon the loss of T. C., his closest public friend-in fact his only friend, since he was a person who had never encouraged personal or intimate relationships with other men. Eaton had been in government, a career diplomat, as far back as he cared to remember. His parents, when they were alive, and when there was money, would have been horrified at anything in government under diplomacy. To run for office, to depend upon others for largess, was unthinkable. As a consequence, Eaton had never considered running for any office, although there had been opportunities. His father, before his death-which occurred almost simultaneously with his loss of wealth-had arranged to put him into diplomacy, and in diplomacy he had been throughout his years.
He could recollect many of his previous posts with ease. There had been the minor beginning as a representative to UNESCO in Paris. There had been the appointment as a delegate to the still growing United Nations in New York. There had been three ambassadorships to three corners of the globe. There had been special troubleshooting assignments, where poise and firmness and keen intellect were wanted, from Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. There had been a period of dismay, almost ennui, when the assignments seemed to be blurring, each one resembling the last, with the same polished tables and same calfskin briefcases and same treaties and same Oriental or Semitic or Asian or European countenances uttering the restrained semantics of upper-echelon diplomatic negotiation. Eaton relished protocol, fine manners, the limited games of wits, and yet he had once become bored by it all. It was a period during which he had felt trapped on a treadmill. Worse, as oppressive, was the fact that he and Kay had lived beyond his means, because this was the way they had been taught to live, and more and more he had become dependent upon her inherited fortune. In his career at that time, not so long ago, he had possessed no hope for change or promotion, and in his personal life he had enjoyed no freedom. It was T. C. who had rescued him, and offered him his greatest hope.
He had enjoyed T. C.’s vigor and boundless extroversion since their college years. While their paths had crossed occasionally, Arthur Eaton had watched T. C.’s political fortunes rise from afar. He had observed his friend engage and defeat foe after foe in elections of more and more importance. He had, with admiration mingled with envy, observed T. C. become a national figure. He was not surprised when the convention had nominated T. C. as the Party’s standard-bearer on the third ballot, but he was surprised when Tim Flannery had telephoned from St. Louis to report that T. C. needed his assistance in the campaign and wanted him to fly out immediately.
At the time, Eaton had been between missions, momentarily free of an assignment, and he had gone to T. C. at once. To Arthur Eaton, in that St. Louis hotel suite, T. C. had been as he had always been, only more so, more confident, more exuberant, more stimulating. T. C. had presented his proposition directly. As the Party’s candidate, he was well-enough versed in domestic affairs to handle himself properly. But, T. C. had admitted disarmingly, he’d had little opportunity to be involved in international problems, and on the subject of foreign affairs he was a dolt, and he needed help and advice. He had implored Eaton to take a leave of absence from the Department of State, and join T. C.’s campaign for the Presidency as adviser on foreign affairs and part-time speech writer.
Although the idea of accompanying anyone on a grueling campaign junket, leaving air-conditioned rooms and polished tables for grubby, poorly lit hotel rooms, half-cooked food, smelly, disheveled local politicians, revolted Arthur Eaton, he had accepted without hesitation. There had been two reasons for his immediate acceptance. One was the chance to get away from Washington, from Kay and her tiresome social friends, from work that was suffocating him, and the other (and more exciting) reason was T. C.’s promise. “Arthur, you help me win, and I’ll see that you have yourself a Cabinet post, not selling stamps or worrying about squaws, but a big one, the biggest. You help me now, and you can help me run this country and most of the world next year.”
It had happened exactly as T. C. had promised that it would. Two hours after T. C.’s opponent had conceded defeat on television, and T. C. had become the President-elect, Arthur Eaton had answered the ringing telephone in Georgetown. The caller had been T. C. himself. No sooner had Eaton congratulated him than T. C. had boomed out, “Arthur, you got any enemies in the Senate?” Eaton could think of none, not real enemies. Then T. C. had said, “Think they’ll give consent on your appointment?” And Eaton had asked, “To what?” And then T. C., with a delighted laugh that was almost a shout, had bellowed across the wire, “To Secretary of State, my friend. You are the first in my Cabinet, and welcome to it!”
So he had become Secretary of State Eaton, and with Talley trotting between T. C. and himself, he had assisted the President in running the country. Those had been adventurous and stimulating days, those days of the two years and seven months gone by, and they had been his Fountain of Youth. Not only had each morning, with its challenges, been a joy to wake to, but Eaton had found the independence to shake off the yoke of money that held him captive to his wife. He had been enabled to ignore her disdain, her snobbery, her petty values, her Social Register crowd and her avant-garde artist salon. He had, indeed, been able to plead devotion to something that mattered more, survival of his country. This had been the same shield he had always been able to hold up to fend off Kay’s barbed anger. Her technique had not varied from its pattern in the past; it had only intensified. She had continued to hack away at his masculinity. When she found that she could no longer bring him down, as she had always succeeded in doing in the past, she had begun to increase her trips away from Washington. She had permitted herself to be seen with her endless bright young men in public. Eaton had rarely speculated on what she might be doing with her companions in private. But more and more, freed of her, he had begun to derive pleasure from the company of attentive and appreciative young Washington women, the single ones. There had been but two short-lived affairs-for he was always aware of the dangers-but they had been gratifying enough to remind him that he was a person still capable of enjoying love and companionship, and that he was more than his wife had tried to make him.
All of this pride and pleasure he owed to the patronage and friendship of T. C., whom he had revered as a friend and respected as a leader. Twenty-four hours ago their future had seemed glowing. There were years of their joint rule ahead of them-the remainder of this term, and the almost certain second term. Twenty-four hours ago Eaton’s resurrection as an individual, a very important person, had been secure. And then, shockingly, with the crumbling of that ancient Palace in Frankfurt, his high hopes and good prospects had crumbled, too. And so he knew that his mourning was not only for the loss of his friend, but for the loss of something of himself.
Throughout the endless tragic night in Georgetown, following the swearing in of Dilman as President, he had received and listened to or overheard the members of T. C.’s bereft team and the leaders of the Party. Most of the chatter had been about how to preserve the unity of the Party, now that a Negro was its head. There had been a little talk, he remembered, about preserving the unity of the nation as well. Too, there had been talk, mostly in Southern accents, about challenging the constitutionality of the 1947 Act of Succession, and there had been talk, in harder accents, about reviving some aspect of the old 1867 Tenure of Office Act, which had once enabled the Senate to try to restrict a President from removing officers appointed to his Cabinet. In short, Eaton remembered, the concern had not been about Dilman’s ability to handle the office, and how he must best be guided, but rather about how to balk him or, failing in that, to control him, pluck his powers, so that the nation would not be tainted black and so that those present might not lose their jobs to colored men and to bleeding-heart Negro-lovers.