The Man

Once they were in the ground-floor corridor, with the two Secret Service agents falling in a discreet distance behind them, Nat Abrahams spoke again.

“What about your future, Doug?”

“I don’t permit myself to think about it,” Dilman said. “I wake up, I work, I go to sleep. I’m trying to handle life a day at a time. That’s a big job, a big, strange, new job for a person who only recently found out he has the right to perform as a man and not just a colored man. It’s like starting afresh, second chance, with a new mind, new limbs, new nerve apparatus, new outlook. You have to get used to it before you can use all that health and strength.”

“Yes. I know,” said Abrahams. At the ground exit Abrahams stopped. “Whatever happens, Doug, I think it’s going to be better for you from now on.” He dug into his pocket and came out with a clipping. “Did you see this in the morning paper?”

“What is it?”

“The latest nationwide Public Opinion Poll taken on you. Listen.” He consulted the clipping. “When you came into office, 24 per cent of the people favored you, 61 per cent were against you, 15 per cent were undecided about you. Today, four months later-well, here it is-33 per cent of the people are in favor of you, 28 per cent against you, 39 per cent undecided.” He returned the clipping to his pocket. “The significant thing, Doug, is that right now, instead of the great percentage of people being against you, they’ve moved into the undecided column; they’ve left behind attitudes of strong resentment to move closer to you and say, in effect, ‘Okay-maybe-let’s wait and see-show us.’ Can you realize what that means, Doug?”

Dilman did not reply. The garden door had been opened for them, and Dilman went outside, with Abrahams following him, then going alongside him. The air was crisp, wholesome, bracing, and as they proceeded up the colo

Briefly, Dilman strode in silence, lost in thought, and at last he looked at his friend. “Strange, Nat, how whenever you’re not sure of the future, you go scampering back into the past. My mind just went back to when I was a kid, maybe seven or eight years old. There was a ditty all of us used to chant. Want to hear it?”

Abrahams nodded.

Dilman hesitated, then he recited:

Ef I wuz de President

Of dese United States,

I’d live on ’lasses candy

An’ swing on all de gates!

He shook his head. “Our most fanciful dream of heaven. Little did we realize there was no ’lasses candy, no swinging gates.’ ”

“Or realize that it was not a fanciful dream at all.”

Dilman glanced up sharply at his friend. “Not a dream?… Yes, I see. That’s true, isn’t it?”

“ ‘Ef I wuz de President.’ You became the President, Doug. You still are the President. That’s something, I think.”

“I suppose-yes, I suppose it is, ’lasses candy or not.”

“Because you’ve grown, Doug, and so has everyone around you-the entire country, it’s come of age, too,” said Abrahams. “The American people have finally learned what a great Kansas editor tried to teach them years ago, that-that liberty is the only thing you ca

Rounding the corner, Dilman stared out at the lustrous snow-covered garden and the glittering expanse of the White House south lawn. “You think it has been learned, Nat?”

“I believe so,” said Abrahams.

They had arrived at the French doors outside the Oval Office. They halted, facing one another.

“Let me put it this way,” Abrahams said. “The country may be uneasy today, but it is no longer ashamed or afraid, ashamed or afraid of you-or itself. The country’s learned to live with you, Doug, so now, at last, it can live with itself. It has a better conscience today. It feels right. That’s an awful good feeling, Doug… And that’s a huge step, the greatest this country’s made since the Emancipation Proclamation. Mr. Lincoln had long legs. But now, for the first time, we’ve found countless men with legs as long, and they’ve made the next step, the giant one. As a result, the country is closer to becoming one nation than it ever has been before-and by the time it becomes one nation, it may be ready, and qualified, to help make our world one world… Big words, Doug, but these are big times. None of us will ever be the same again-not you-not me-not anyone, anywhere. Thank God.”

A French door creaked behind them, and Edna Foster appeared. When she saw them, her worried features reflected immediate relief.

“Oh, there you are, Mr. President. I was calling everywhere,” she said. “There have been some messages-emergencies-low-grade, but nevertheless-”

“I’ll be right in, Miss Foster,” Dilman said, and then he turned back to his friend.

Nat Abrahams was smiling. “I think you belong inside.” He extended his hand. “Good luck, and a Happy New Year, Mr. President.”

Douglass Dilman clasped Abrahams’ hand firmly in his own. “Good luck, and a Happy New Year to you, Nat.”

After that, Dilman lingered outside briefly, watching Abrahams leave, and then, feeling assured and purposeful, feeling good, he entered his Oval Office to begin the day’s work.

AFTERWORD

I remember clearly the night that my father conceived the idea for The Man. It was after midnight June 8, 1963. I was fifteen years old. My mother and I were sitting in the kitchen reading the newspaper and talking. My father burst into the room, his eyes gleaming. “Have I got a great idea for a story,” he said excitedly.

It was not unusual for my father to tell us his ideas for novels. He would try them out and talk through a few possible plot directions. If an idea progressed to the stage where he would actually start writing it, he would clam up and, although we knew what he was working on, we wouldn’t hear again about the plot or the characters until he had written the words, “THE END.”

My father loved writing novels. He loved every aspect of the process. He enjoyed thinking of ideas. He enjoyed developing a plot and interweaving sub-plots. He enjoyed creating characters. He even enjoyed the minutiae of novel writing, like paging through the phone book looking for names to match his characters. He enjoyed researching the locations of his stories and he prided himself on the accuracy of his descriptions. He particularly loved the writing itself-putting a blank piece of paper into his typewriter (the same Underwood his parents gave him when he was thirteen years old) and filling it with the thoughts and dialogue of the characters he had created. He even liked, although to a lesser extent, rewriting, proofreading, and responding politely to the suggestions of editors.

My father was born March 19, 1916, in Chicago, Illinois. When he was still an infant, his parents moved to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and it was there that my father grew up and came of age.

I visited Kenosha once in 1978. It was quite a revelation to me and helped me to understand my father’s worldview. The houses he had lived in were still there, with their open yards and their long front porches. His father, in good times, owned a general store. When times were bad, he worked as a clerk in someone else’s shop. His mother always had snacks and sweets ready for my father and his friends. Even forty years after my father left it, Kenosha still exuded the pleasant charm of an All-American town where citizens could feel safe walking the streets at night and where everyone could dream the American dream. It was just like a small town from a Frank Capra film of the 1930s except that the inhabitants were Poles, Lithuanians, Italians, Swedes and Jews.