been well-favored by that powerful gentleman ever since the start of his first term five years ago—but the Senate Majority Leader is another matter. He has rather more on his mind than the Speaker does at the moment, the Senate being customarily more cluttered up with last-minute odds and ends than the House each year when adjournment approaches, and it will take a little extra assistance to get Cullee’s bill approved.
Not that he anticipates any great difficulty, but it is a matter of timing and that takes care. In this Ray Smith, for all that he is something of a laughingstock to his colleagues in their cloakroom conversations, can be of real assistance; particularly since those San Fernando Valley constituents are vitally important to him, too. Ray is up for re-election next year, and he is as sharply conscious of his constituency as Seab Cooley is of his. The fact that he too is in rather shaky condition may provide the extra spur to successful action on Cullee Hamilton’s bill. An extra spur to Cullee, too, Cullee thinks wryly, if only he were as ambitious as Sue-Dan and as full of git-up-and-go as she constantly tells him he ought to be.
The thought of his wife, though it appears to be a circuitous and indirect way to approach it, and though they would both be surprised at the parallel and for the moment unable to see it, brings him to the very point that is just passing through the clever old mind of the President Pro Tempore of the Senate as their eyes meet for a brief moment across the crowded chamber. He and Seab Cooley do not really know one another, having had only one brief and uncomfortable talk on carefully innocuous matters when Cullee testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing three years ago, but there is a certain instinctive understanding between them; “perhaps,” as Cullee told himself dryly at the time, “because we’re both Southerners.” Possibly for this reason it occurs to each of them in this fleeting instant now that the other may be thinking of the subject of race. Both are right, though there is a shade of difference in their thoughts. Seab is thinking of it in terms of his problem in South Carolina, Cullee, much more basically, in terms of his wife.
“Why don’t you run against fancy-nancy Smith for the Senate next year?” she keeps asking in her taunting way. “Because you’re afraid a nigger can’t make it, even in California?” And when he winces at the expression she laughs and says it again three times. “I know you don’t like that word, my poor little Cullee,” she tells him in mock-soothing tones. “That’s a bad word us enlightened people don’t use. But it’s true, isn’t it, nigger, nigger, nigger?”
It is all he can do at such moments, Cullee admits to himself, to keep from slapping her straight across the face; except that it is, as the M’Bulu of Mbuele has already indicated to the Secretary of State, a beautiful face, and it happens to belong to a girl with whom the young Congressman from California is in love in a way so fundamental he can’t help himself. So his only response is a tired sigh and the comment, “Why do you say things like that, Sue-Dan? You know it only bothers me, and what does it gain for you? Do you like to bother me? Haven’t you got better games to play than that?” But her response, as so often, is an apparently instant loss of interest. “You sigh an awful lot, lately,” she says, and with another little laugh she picks up the cat and a magazine, sinks into a chair, and seemingly becomes lost to the world as she studies the printed page and croons soft endearments to the cat.
Thinking of such scenes, which are becoming increasingly frequent of late, the Congressman sighs again and gives an unconscious, instinctive jerk of his right shoulder, as though someone were trying to hit him and he were ducking the blow. His eyes are troubled behind their gold-rimmed glasses, and across his handsome scholarly face, with
Not that he anticipates any great difficulty, but it is a matter of timing and that takes care. In this Ray Smith, for all that he is something of a laughingstock to his colleagues in their cloakroom conversations, can be of real assistance; particularly since those San Fernando Valley constituents are vitally important to him, too. Ray is up for re-election next year, and he is as sharply conscious of his constituency as Seab Cooley is of his. The fact that he too is in rather shaky condition may provide the extra spur to successful action on Cullee Hamilton’s bill. An extra spur to Cullee, too, Cullee thinks wryly, if only he were as ambitious as Sue-Dan and as full of git-up-and-go as she constantly tells him he ought to be.
The thought of his wife, though it appears to be a circuitous and indirect way to approach it, and though they would both be surprised at the parallel and for the moment unable to see it, brings him to the very point that is just passing through the clever old mind of the President Pro Tempore of the Senate as their eyes meet for a brief moment across the crowded chamber. He and Seab Cooley do not really know one another, having had only one brief and uncomfortable talk on carefully innocuous matters when Cullee testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing three years ago, but there is a certain instinctive understanding between them; “perhaps,” as Cullee told himself dryly at the time, “because we’re both Southerners.” Possibly for this reason it occurs to each of them in this fleeting instant now that the other may be thinking of the subject of race. Both are right, though there is a shade of difference in their thoughts. Seab is thinking of it in terms of his problem in South Carolina, Cullee, much more basically, in terms of his wife.
“Why don’t you run against fancy-nancy Smith for the Senate next year?” she keeps asking in her taunting way. “Because you’re afraid a nigger can’t make it, even in California?” And when he winces at the expression she laughs and says it again three times. “I know you don’t like that word, my poor little Cullee,” she tells him in mock-soothing tones. “That’s a bad word us enlightened people don’t use. But it’s true, isn’t it, nigger, nigger, nigger?”
It is all he can do at such moments, Cullee admits to himself, to keep from slapping her straight across the face; except that it is, as the M’Bulu of Mbuele has already indicated to the Secretary of State, a beautiful face, and it happens to belong to a girl with whom the young Congressman from California is in love in a way so fundamental he can’t help himself. So his only response is a tired sigh and the comment, “Why do you say things like that, Sue-Dan? You know it only bothers me, and what does it gain for you? Do you like to bother me? Haven’t you got better games to play than that?” But her response, as so often, is an apparently instant loss of interest. “You sigh an awful lot, lately,” she says, and with another little laugh she picks up the cat and a magazine, sinks into a chair, and seemingly becomes lost to the world as she studies the printed page and croons soft endearments to the cat.
Thinking of such scenes, which are becoming increasingly frequent of late, the Congressman sighs again and gives an unconscious, instinctive jerk of his right shoulder, as though someone were trying to hit him and he were ducking the blow. His eyes are troubled behind their gold-rimmed glasses, and across his handsome scholarly face, with
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