Closing her compact, Edna fully absolved the late Vice-President of responsibility for her head cold and wretched face, and now, her face repaired, her mind clearer, she smelled the steaming coffee on the desk behind her. Somebody from the Navy Mess had noiselessly come and gone, and because of her self-absorption, she did not know who it had been and whom to thank. She sipped the coffee, recoiled, blew on it to cool it, and finally, breaking the slice of toast, munching it, she was able to drink down the contents of the cup.
At last, feeling better, forgiving the day for its earliness, forgiving everyone for everything, she came to her feet. Her platinum wristwatch, a generous gift from the First Lady, showed the time to be twenty-six minutes after six o’clock. Right now, Edna guessed, T. C. and his staff were leaving the Kaisersaal, the splendid dining room of emperors of the Holy Roman Empire located in the Roemer, Frankfurt’s five-gabled city hall. The European press, and recently the American papers, had gleefully taken to calling the meeting between the President of the United States and the Premier of Soviet Russia the Roemer Conference, reminding readers that Frankfurt’s city hall had been the site, during the Middle Ages, where international merchants gathered to trade.
Well, Edna thought, T. C. has done his trading for the morning. Now, driving the several blocks to the Alte Mainzer Palace, his headquarters in Frankfurt, he is probably considering what problems of the trading he must discuss this afternoon (over there) or morning (over here) with select Cabinet members and Congressional leaders. Edna had seen photographs of the President’s ornate Gothic ground-floor bedroom in the ancient Palace-the Bonn government had suggested the President use the ancient Palace for his living quarters instead of the United States Consulate across the Main River, because it was roomier, more picturesque, and nearer the Roemer-and not seeing this fourteenth-century Palace was what Edna regretted most about missing the trip.
Ordinarily, Edna traveled with the President. She had made four trips with him abroad-a wonderland for a farm girl from Wisconsin-but this was one of the two trips that she had missed, because of the darn head cold. Frankfurt was a city she had never seen, and even though Tim Flannery, the President’s press secretary, assured her that she had missed nothing, that postwar Frankfurt was a dull, Swiss-type industrial metropolis featuring nothing more exciting than the I. G. Farben Building and the Hesse State Radio Building, both modern monstrosities, Edna knew differently. She knew that the Allied bombers that had leveled Frankfurt’s medieval Old City in 1944 had, by some miracle, left almost intact the two dusty near-crumbling architectural wonders of the fourteenth century, the Frankfurt cathedral and the three-story Alte Mainzer Palace that housed the Presidential party. Edna knew that she traveled the way she tried to work, with efficiency, and she was not ashamed that she collected palaces, castles, and museums, with which to educate her children someday. The possibility of children, for one not even married and nearing spinsterhood, brought Edna back to reality, and once more brought her mind to George Murdock. She was sorry to lose the Alte Mainzer Palace for her collection, but there was compensation in not having to be apart from George the entire week.
She realized with a start that she had been standing at the desk, daydreaming away five more precious minutes, and 3,000 miles away in Frankfurt the President was nearing his telephone in the ancient Palace, and she had not yet made the few preparations necessary for his call to the Cabinet Room. Hastily she searched her desktop for the list of those who would be present for the conference call, found no such list, and then guessed that Wayne Talley would, from long habit, have left it on the President’s own desk.
Hurrying now, Edna opened the nearest door on her left, and crossed the rug to the sturdy brown Buchanan desk at the far end of the President’s corner office. The green blotter held nothing, and neither did the empty card stand, so much like a menu holder, into which T. C.’s daily engagement schedule was slipped. Concerned, she looked about, and then she saw it, the single sheet of paper that Talley had left for her, a corner of it pinned under the weight of the black telephone, the deceptively ordinary telephone that was the much-publicized hot line.
Taking the sheet, she scanned the list typed upon it: Talley himself, of course; Secretary of State Arthur Eaton, of course; Senator Selander, Majority Leader in the Senate; Representative Wickland, Majority Leader in the House; Senator Dilman, President pro tempore of the Senate; General Fortney, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Mr. Stover, Assistant Secretary for African Affairs in the State Department; Mr. Leach, the stenotypist. Eight in all. That was it for this morning.
Studying the personnel on the list as she slowly left the President’s desk, Edna played her deduction game. One did not have to be Scott of the CIA or Lombardi of the FBI to make an accurate prediction, once one was given a set of clues. Edna made her prediction to herself, enjoying the sport almost as much as she enjoyed the diversion of the crossword puzzles and Double-Crostic games that she hoarded for weekends. The emergency conference call from the President, she told herself, would be devoted almost entirely to Africa and the trouble over the new Republic of Baraza. The presence of the Assistant Secretary for African Affairs indicated this. Then there would be talk about pushing something through a balky Congress, probably the unpopular ratification of the renewal of the United States’ membership in the African Unity Pact, as well as further economic aid to newly independent African nations. The presence of two senators and one representative and one general indicated this. The attendance of Talley and Secretary of State Eaton furnished no added clues. They were always present when T. C. spoke, always there, his confidants and alter egos.
Yes, Edna decided unhappily, Africa would be the subject, and that promised a dull and wearisome morning. African talk meant almost nothing to her. What was it, really? A black jumble of crazy names like Basutoland, Nyasaland, Malagasy, Gambia, Dahomey, Chad, Rwanda, and lately, Baraza. Even if you were intelligent, you could not tell one country from another, or one primitive face from another (despite those wild robes they wore, despite those odd Oxford or Harvard accents they assumed when they called upon the President). It was all impossible and, for Edna, Africa remained the Dark Continent, affecting her day-to-day existence in no way whatsoever. And-repressed heresy-she suspected that those comic-opera countries meant little more to T. C. or Talley or Eaton, either. Soviet Russia, now, that was another matter. Russia could blow us up, and ruin everything, everyone, before some of us had a chance to get married and live and have children.
She had paused before the French doors leading out to the cement walk with its overhang and colonnades. Outside-T. C. called it his “backyard”-the darkness had gone, and the gray dawn was brightening. Even in late August, the Rose Garden was still in full bloom, the roses and Shasta daisies and geraniums dominated by early chrysanthemums. At the far end of the garden Andrew Jackson’s hoary magnolia tree, partially obscuring the White House rotunda and Truman’s Balcony, was thick with green foliage. For a moment Edna was tempted to step outside, join the White House policeman who had appeared on the walk, deeply inhale the cool fresh air, and fully revive herself for the Frankfurt call. But the platinum watch on her left wrist bound her to duty. Swiftly she left the President’s office and returned to her own desk.
Yanking open drawers, digging supplies out of them, she was at last occupied with routine and too busy for daydreaming. In a few minutes, her thin arms heavily weighted under a pyramid of memorandum pads, boxes of pencils, shorthand notebook, and spare ashtrays, she went carefully to the door of the Cabinet Room. Balancing her load against the frame of the door, she grasped the knob, turned it, and pushed the door open with her knee.