‘Whew!’ he whistled in mirth. ‘You are a most interesting young man. Look me up at George Town Inn, will you while you are in Washington,’ he patted me on the shoulder. And then turning to the barman, fired a parting shot: ‘Let the young man from Africa have as much beer as he wants. Just send the bill to me – up in the first Pullman Coach.’
‘Oh, thanks a lot,’ I gripped his outstretched hand, rather palpably hit, though not fatally, by his broadside that one had to make money, and lots of it, to be able to meet bills, especially those run up by others.
Political parties in America, when we look at them with regard to class, and distribution of wealth therefore tell nothing. Rather they seem to the stranger two mutually accommodating rival clubs into which members simply get drawn by accident of birth or adoption. Each has little of the ideological to persuade a convert as against the other; so contradictory and self-cancelling are their so-called right and liberal wings, and so absurd and mocking is the term Democrat for the rabid, conservative, racialist of the South who runs the majority party of that name, it has even been suggested by a number of wits that each party be sliced in two and the equivalent halves of right and liberal fused to make new wholes that at least will have some meaning and significance. History itself alone knows how many times the terms Republican and Democrat have actually changed hands or merged between both clubs. But every four years some fellow has to be elected to the presidency to hand out largesse, and naturally each club wants that honour for its member.
1 did not see a filibuster in action in either House of Congress, but the little I saw of the manoeuvring on the hill was not a campaign calculated to win entirely my humble cheers. There were those House Committees, midwife to every bill dropped in the hopper or on the clerk’s desk; but because each Committee had to be headed by its most senior member, the midwife often was dotty and possessed of the will and nerves to stifle any child not pleasing to her sight. Add to this the all-powerful Rules Committee, which can leave the new-born child to die outright or dwindle away in its incubator, the chances of a non-favourite bringing forth fruit appear very slim indeed.
But all this was sacrosanct to my Colonel and his ilk, and at no time would he allow my playing the iconoclast. Which was natural, except that he chose not to talk direct to me. Instead he asked Daniel Passent, my Polish colleague, and the one other fellow in the Parvin group who also persistently raised problems, although not with the same cheek as I, to plead with me that I was the embarrassment of everybody and had more than already proved the ruin of our outing and project. This mission I must say got home, for it left me for the rest of our stay in Washington prostrate with the twin feeling of amazement and amusement. Evidently, 1 did not quite get it out of my system, for on the fast train back to Princeton, after more giddy rounds of the city that left the most resourceful and disciplined time-server in the group dragging his feet, I found myself writing this epitaph from my general experience of Washington DC –
A morgue,
a museum –
Whose keepers
play at kings.
As a last act of homage and worship, we had also called at the White House just before taking off. President Kennedy was out at the back lawn receiving Italy’s Premier Fanfani that morning, and we had the rare privilege of personally being taken by Special Assistant to the President Ralph Dungan through the executive mansion to watch host and guest, a sharp study in height, review the guard of honour mounted by the combined men of the US Armed Forces the mightiest the world has ever known. Of Jackie and Caroline and John Junior we saw nothing; perhaps they were upstairs in the balcony and nursery, watching the grand show below. But we did see how much of the old colonial-type mansion was already in the hands of the ultra-modern décor people Jackie had herself called in. How it was all going to end was an issue lying still in the bosom of the muses. One object there, however, stood out prominent and definitive: the Presidential Seal of the United States. Almost immediately and with a presence I found overwhelming, it drew from me this final salute I captioned Home from Hiroshima:
By decree
Of the President of the United States
Of America, unchallenged
By factions on the hill,
The eagle across the seal
Has turned eyes
Away from the arrows to the olive
Shoot, so praise them who prospered most in war
And now will live
By peace. Yet in city
And field, from coast to coast,
The hail
Of plumes, plucked, scattered free
From the original breed,
Shriek, thrash, rend the skies
Till vengeance is
Theirs, and likely
At its own instance
The wild west wreck the world.
9
Ejection!
Astrange satellite was orbiting very low over the United States, so furiously low that millions of Americans milling from New York City to the village of Anaktuvule Pass in Alaska could see without the help of telescopes out in Cape Canaveral and California the burning body whirling above their heads. Looking very much like a huge helicopter ablaze with characters too weird to decipher by witch-catchers like the Central Intelligence Agency and Féderal Bureau of Intelligence, the strange foreign body in the air, showering out sparks and streamers in the wake of its own storm, in a matter of one flash and swirl had left the entire sky over the sub-continent running and awash with a scarlet so terrible to the eyes that some called it blood and others fire.
Those old enough to remember thought it a thousand times more real and menacing than any hoax of a Martian raid Orson Welles had let loose, and on every lip was again that cry of disbelief and despair raised by all Americans when the first sputnik shot into space. Only now it carried the keen edge of the grave. Parents and children fought one another for safety of their shelter, pastors and executive directors shut out members of their flock and staff, schoolchildren milled into the streets before teachers could put lessons into practice, and the football game as well as baseball broke up in the bowl, with rattles, cans of beer and bags, capsules and canisters of lunch beating a scaring tattoo that an ever-on-the-alert militia and reserve corps could not answer. Only the scaremonger gangs of press and politicians kept well in character. What is Washington doing? they beat their breasts. Are the peace-loving people of America going to be strafed to death before the Administration does something? This sure is a Communist plot! Let’s hop over and seize this here Cuba before Castro bombs us out! It’s not just classified pictures of the US that that man Kruschev wants – why, look at that thing up above there! And you can be sure it carries H-bombs to blow up New York City, Washington DC, and Chicago! And what are we, the most powerful people on earth today, doing but standing around and listening to all that hogwash from the UN – a house fully occupied by black brats and commies?
On this occasion however the Administration was not waiting to be prodded; indeed it was already much ahead of the fastest running and fastest talking messenger of evil omen. Click, went the button to Omaha, whether from the President direct or from the Pentagon, always in alliance with Big Business, nobody it seemed might live to tell. But there for the cowards and the courageous to see with one catch of breath were squadrons of the Strategic Air Command long since air-borne and chasing the strange phenomenon for all their worth. It was like robins flying after an enchanter owl. ‘Will they catch up with him? Can they gun him down without harm to millions of Americans below?’ The TV newscasters speculated soulfully. ‘But first,’ they broke off together ‘shall we pause for a message – oh, yes, our sponsors have not for one moment lost faith in the will of the American people to overcome all their enemies.’
At this point exactly, sounds of sirens, as if all of New York were already flooding with the blood or fire scarlet in the skies, came with one crashing crescendo over the high and low suds of the soap showing in the washing-machine, both of which hordes of housewives, stuck and clinging to their TV sets as a last resort, would very much want to buy at the end of the invasion; and then the siren-sounds drowned everything in that madhouse, on fire and out of sight.
And I bobbed out also, from stream of sleep and dream on the couch in my sitting-room and study, to hear the telephone ringing away outside my door in the third entry of Princeton’s Graduate College. Someone, puffing down the steps, had already picked the receiver up, calling out briefly: ‘JP, it’s for you again!’ I turned over on my side with one grunt after another, for my temples were hammering as hard as if they would split.
‘Are you up?’ Israel who had been my guest came up to where I lay thrashing still half asleep.
‘Ungh,’ I grunted more.
‘That call is for you,’ he shook me.
‘Ok, take it for me, will you?’
