Page 57 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

"Oh, yes, it's exciting."

"Well, I appreciate your good work. Keep it up."

"I'll do my very best."

The president went out, and Salinger followed.

George looked at Maria with amusement. She seemed dazed.

After a moment, Nelly Fordham spoke. "Yeah, it takes you like that," she said. "For a minute there, you were the most beautiful woman in the world."

Maria looked at her. "Yes," she said. "That's exactly how I felt."

*

Maria was a little lonely, but otherwise happy.

She loved working at the White House, surrounded by bright, sincere people who wanted only to make the world a better place. She felt she could achieve a lot in government. She knew she would have to struggle with prejudice--against women and against Negroes--but she believed she could overcome that with intelligence and determination.

Her family had a history of prevailing against the odds. Her grandfather, Saul Summers, had walked to Chicago from his hometown of Golgotha, Alabama. On the way he had been arrested for "vagrancy" and sentenced to thirty days' labor in a coal mine. While there, he saw a man clubbed to death by guards for trying to escape. After thirty days he was not released, and when he complained he was flogged. He risked his life, escaped, and made it to Chicago. There he eventually became pastor of the Bethlehem Full Gospel Church. Now eighty years old, he was semiretired, still preaching occasionally.

Maria's father, Daniel, had gone to a Negro college and law school. In 1930, in the Depression, he had opened a storefront law firm in the South Side neighborhood, where no one could afford a postage stamp, let alone a lawyer. Maria had often heard him reminisce about how his clients had paid him in kind: homemade cakes, eggs from their backyard hens, a free haircut, some carpentry around his office. By the time Roosevelt's New Deal kicked in and the economy improved, he was the most popular black lawyer in Chicago.

So Maria was not afraid of adversity. But she was lonely. Everyone around her was white. Grandfather Summers often said: "There's nothing wrong with white people. They just ain't black." She knew what he meant. White people did not know about "vagrancy." Somehow it slipped their minds that Alabama had continued to send Negroes to forced labor camps until 1927. If she spoke about such things, they looked sad for a moment, then turned away, and she knew they thought she was exaggerating. Black people who talked about prejudice were boring to whites, like sick people who recited their symptoms.

She had been delighted to see George Jakes again. She would have sought him out as soon as she got to Washington, except that a modest girl did not chase after a man, no matter how charming he was; and anyway she would not have known what to say. She liked George more than any man she had met since she broke up with Frank Baker two years ago. She would have married Frank if he had asked her, but he wanted sex without marriage, a proposal she had rejected. When George had walked her back to the press office, she had felt sure he was about to ask her for a date, and she had been disappointed when he had not.

She shared an apartment with two black girls, but did not have much in common with them. Both were secretaries, and mainly interested in fashions and movies.

Maria was used to being exceptional. There had not been many black women at her college, and at law school she had been the only one. Now she was the only black woman in the White House, not counting cleaners and cooks. She had no complaints: everyone was friendly. But she was lonely.

On the morning after she met George she was studying a speech by Fidel Castro, looking for nuggets the press office could use, when her phone rang and a man said: "Would you like to go swimming?"

The flat Boston accent was familiar, but she could not identify it for a moment. "Who is this?"

"Dave."

It was Dave Powers, the president's personal aide, sometimes called the First Friend. Maria had spoken to him two or three times. Like most people in the White House, he was amiable and charming.

But now Maria was taken by surprise. "Where?" she said.

He laughed. "Here in the White House, of course."

She recalled that there was a pool in the west gallery, between the White House and the West Wing. She had never seen it, but she knew it had been built for President Roosevelt. She had heard that President Kennedy liked to swim at least once a day because the water relieved the pressure on his bad back.

Dave added: "There will be some other girls."

Maria's first thought was of her hair. Just about every black woman in an office job wore a hairpiece or a wig to work. Blacks and whites alike felt that the natural look of black hair just was not businesslike. Today Maria had a beehive, with a hairpiece carefully braided into her own hair, which itself had been relaxed with chemicals to mimic the smooth, straight texture of white women's hair. It was not a secret: it would be obvious to every black woman who glanced at her. But a white man such as Dave would never even notice.

How could she go swimming? If she got her hair wet it would turn into a mess that she would not be able to rescue.

She was too embarrassed to say what the problem was, but she quickly thought of an excuse. "I don't have a swimsuit."

"We have swimsuits," Dave replied. "I'll pick you up at noon." He hung up.

Maria looked at her watch. It was ten to twelve.

What was she going to do? Would she be allowed to ease herself carefully into the water at the shallow end, and keep her hair dry?

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