Ruby shook her head. “You too charitable, Otter-my friends and relatives, they don’t think that Dilman weak-they think him evil all day long, ’cause he resents his color, thass what.”

There was imagining and there was performing, and Otto Beggs had had enough of the imagining and was ready for the performing. He lowered his arm further, and encircled her tighter, feeling the spongy give of her breast beneath the lingerie.

“Aw, forget him, Ruby. He’s not worth you and your friends getting so sore about. Believe me, and you know how well I know him, take my word for it from the inside, he’s scared of his shadow, and that’s why he acts the way he does.”

She seemed hardly aware of Beggs’s arm or hand or increasing ardor. She sat up a little. “What is you meanin’-thass why he acts way he does? Don’t tell me he ain’t ’shamed of his own people an’ actin’ against us.” Her tone had become concerned. “You knows somethin’ different, bein’ with him? I won’t believe anythin’, sep if you-”

Ruby, listen.” He was determined to end this conversation fast, and get going with her. “Like I said, I hold no brief for the guy, and I don’t like being put in the position of defending him. At the same time, I think enough of you not to want to see you all worked up and angry, for no reason. So let me tell you the truth of it, between us, strictly you and me-”

“For sure, I promise, Otter.”

“-and let’s get you relaxed and at ease again, and have ourselves a ball. Few people have had as close a look at the President as I have. You agree to that?”

“Sure enuff, Otter, but don’t you think he-?”

“He’s no more against Negroes than you are or your friends are or I am. He’s just on the spot being President, being a colored President, and he knows it and feels it. He knows whatever which-way he turns, a whole bunch of people will think he’s wrong, simply because he’s a minority person. Whenever I get sore at him and at myself for having to spend my good time guarding him, guarding a man who is contributing nothing to improve us, I remember a couple things I’ve seen and heard, and then, instead of being sore, well, I pity him. That’s true, Ruby, I’m not puffing myself up, but me, I pity him.” He paused. “You know why? Because even though he’s sitting where F. D. R. and Harry and Ike and J. F. K. and Lyndon and The Judge and T. C. sat, he still feels he’s sitting in the back of the bus, because that’s where a lot of people around him make him think he belongs. I don’t know politics, but I’ve got eyes and ears. Certain people are trying to run him, and to make it easier they’re pressuring him, letting him know he doesn’t belong, and he feels it and suffers like a dog, and that’s the only thing he’s got from me, my sympathy.”

Ruby seemed curiously chastened and troubled. “What you mean with that there talkin’, Otter? What you mean?”

Beggs was becoming increasingly furious at the time this was taking. “Okay, I’ll give it to you quickly, and then you promise, no more politics or Dilman?”

“ ’Course, Otter, I promise. But what you mean by-?”

“Remember that big speech he delivered the other night, vetoing the minorities bill everyone wanted? I was outside his open door, the door to his office, during it and afterwards. I could see and hear everything. You should have seen him after that speech, almost sick with nervousness and worry. Then there were a lot of phone calls, apparently from big shots in government and all over, and most of them must have been awful, calling him names, giving him hell. Anyway, later, I heard him on the phone with somebody who’s a friend of his, a lawyer from Chicago, and I heard Dilman saying-these aren’t the exact words, but something like this-‘Don’t kid me, Nat, they want to crucify me. There’s a whole race of people around here like them, not white or black, but selfish, thinking of themselves and no one else and not the country. I could’ve been popular, a little popular, by playing along the way I have all my life, but I figured just once I’d like to be myself and do what I think is right. I thought everyone would see I have nothing to gain by doing wrong. I don’t have to play politics, because I don’t have to worry about getting re-elected. I have only a short time to go, so I can afford to be honest. I figured everyone would see that, and kind of think twice about the veto, and sit down and talk out a real bill and not a bribe. I didn’t think they’d come down on me like this. I can’t repeat what I’ve been called tonight. How do you reach people like that? How do you reach anyone at all?’ And he went on, Ruby, not in those exact words, but like that. Well, Christ, I never felt sorrier for him than I did then, until the next-”

Beggs found that Ruby was holding his arm, clutching it. “Otter, that really did happen? I can’t-it’s sorta-”

“It happened, you bet it happened,” Beggs said. “It’s just more of the same. You read about the time he gave his first official dinner for the African President, and half the big guests never showed up? Can you beat that? It’s true. I was there.”

“Oh, no-” said Ruby. She released Beggs’s arm, reached for her drink, and took a long swallow of it.

Fascinated now by the way his words were upsetting her, feeling there was some strength and ascendancy to win over her in this way, Otto Beggs went on. “One more little thing I started to tell you. The next day, after the television speech, I happened to be alone with Dilman’s secretary, and she was kind of disturbed and unraveled from the way he was being beaten up on the phone and in the papers, and we got to talking about it. She’s a white girl, you know, from Wisconsin, and usually cool and steady, but she was kind of emotional, and when I said it was too bad the way the President was getting knocked around for his color, she said that I didn’t know the half of how he really felt.”

Ruby was staring at her drink, not at Beggs. “What-what she mean by that there talk, Otter?”

“Miss Foster, her name is. She said she’d never forget his first day as President. She was alone with him the first time, planning to hand in her resignation, and when she’d come in his office, there was one door open. She started to shut it, so they could be in privacy, and he wouldn’t let her close the door, he didn’t want it shut. She couldn’t understand, and then he said that Eisenhower once had a Negro adviser who found that white girls always left a door open when they came in to see him, sort of as protection, as if he was a lower animal or habitual rapist. And so Dilman took to the habit of being sure one door was left open whenever a white girl came in and-” To Beggs’s astonishment, Ruby had jumped up from the sofa and gone to the center of the room, her back turned to him. “Anyway,” he concluded lamely, “Miss Foster said she wanted to cry for him, and she shut that door and did not resign. So whatever your friends think about Dilman being evil-”

He halted, and listened.

It was incredible. Ruby’s shoulders were shaking, and her face was in her hands, and she was sobbing.

Utterly confounded, Otto Beggs left the sofa and hurried to her side. “Ruby, what the hell-” He grabbed her arms, and pulled her around, and then drew her hands from her eyes. She was crying, mascara running, and tears streaking her face. “Otter-Otter-Otter,” she kept repeating.

He shook her a little. “Ruby, what’s got into you?”

She swallowed, trying to control herself. “Otter, the devil’s in me an’ I’ll burn in front of Jesus if I don’t tell you-Otter, from what you told me, you swear it-”

“What I told you? I only told you the truth about-”

“Jesus in Heaven, I done did an awful an’ wicked act, I think I did, I think, I don’t know, but I’m worryin’, Jesus, I’m worryin’-’cause I don’t wan’ Pres Dilman hurt if he’s like you say.”

Beggs felt the blood coursing to his head. “What-what do you mean-?” A chill of apprehension, intensified by guilt and fear, crept across his chest and forearms, leaving goose pimples. “How-how could anything you do hurt him-the President?”