Read Online The President's Angel by Sophy Burnham - Free Book Online

so that if he didn’t hold on, he would be blown right off the surface of the Earth into the nothingness of space.
    So he held on and did his job and grinned and played the game.
    But the President had a secret, and the secret was his connection with the beggar in the park.
    As with all secrets, the owner guarded it jealously. He would not reveal his obsession, but he fingered it in meetings or while jogging on his exercise machine, or during the massage afterward, soothed by the caresses of his masseur. He found himself glancing out the window toward the park as he walked down the corridor with his aides, and always in the evening, as he prepared for bed, he found some opportunity to stroll to the north window casually and glance outside, looking for the demonstrators in the empty park.
    It was Jim who noticed that the single vagrant was back; he asked the President if he wanted the man removed. He was not a protestor and therefore, technically, did not belong with the dissident group that had been rounded up earlier. Sometimes he sat cross-legged on a park bench, sometimes he stretched on his blanket on the grass. Sometimes he went away, and then for hours at a stretch—or days—he would be gone. Should he be removed?
    Matt cut in quickly. “No, no, just leave him there, no harm.”
    One reason was the craftiness the President had developed: He didn’t want to seem more eccentric than Jim probably already found him. But the other reason was because the man in the park, this derelict, belonged to him. He watched him from the window on the second floor. He made inquiries. The man apparently was sane. Not troublesome. Or quarrelsome. But Matt, the sensitive, knew this anyway.
    The President took to walking to the front gate of the mansion—for exercise, he said. He waved to the tourists, shaking hands (to the dismay of the secret service) through the iron fence, and letting himself be photographed, happily bantering with the crowd. Then he shot a look at the park, looking for the vagrant, wondering if he noticed. Sometimes the beggar was in the park and sometimes not. When he was there, the President felt a surge of triumph, a vindication of some sort, mingled with antagonism and rage. When he was not, he felt a sag of disappointment. Then he stalked irritably back to the White House, to his office, his desk, his papers and meetings and international crises, and threw himself into life and death.
    One night in December a fine sleet slashed at the windows. The President stood with his back to the fireplace and a brandy in his hand. It was eleven o’clock. He could not keep the image from his mind. It had risen before him during the rare, private dinner with his wife, at which they talked like strangers before the servants or lapsed into their private prolonged silences. He did not know what she thought about in such moments—the boys, her trips, her work, perhaps her lover in California. His own thoughts were interrupted by the beggar, whose figure retreated later in the face of the papers he was studying; but when Anne had nodded good night and gone to her room, when he had started a snifter of brandy, the soft, sharp aroma floating in his nostrils and swirling around his tongue, then the man’s presence crept out from the back of his brain again, demanding his attention. He rang his butler and gave the order.
    A few minutes later two marines jogged through the sleet, weapons at port arms and puttees flashing white, down to the White House gate, across Pennsylvania Avenue and into the wet park. They stopped before the beggar, sitting blanketed on the bench. Their uniforms were drenched. One on either side, they marched him quickstep to the Presidential Palace.
    He met them at the door, two dripping marines at smart salute flanking a short and dirty, ragged, bearded, wet rat of a man. Undistinguished. Middle-aged. A blanket covered his shoulders, sending up the heavy smell of wet wool. Matt