The President's Angel Read Online Free PDF

his insistence, a scotch and soda. And he smiled and waved for the camera’s eye.
    In other words, he behaved as people liked their President to do. His special mark as President was simple: He made it look like fun.
    But at night, the state dinner over, and he again in his room, where Frank was laying out his pajamas and taking away his clothes to wash and press, the two of them moving quietly around one another, he began to chew his pain.
    All day he had known the inner thoughts of those about him—the uneasiness of the foreign minister of state, and how he was playing France against the USA. Sometimes he saw the knowledge as a cloud around a man, and other times he simply knew that something was wrong: A lie was being told, though he might not know the nature of the lie. He saw pain without knowing its source. And cobwebs of loneliness. And an aureole of rage. And also fear. As if he’d lost three layers of skin.
    He climbed into bed and lay against the pillows. He didn’t know what troubled him the most: the state of his advisors or himself. How could he trust the political judgment of a man so angry he would throw a plate at the red-painted kitchen wall? (White flakes of fish oozing down the red wall and behind the radiator.) Jim’s wife had gasped in shocked surprise. Jim had almost hit her instead, and the President saw that too, as clearly as if he had been in the room. He considered General Wallace as well, pressed by personal debts, projecting, under his aggression, fear.… Was everyone acting, and calling on him to act, in response to personal fears?
    On the other hand he himself, Matt Adams, was maybe going mad. He turned that over in his mind. He was afraid of that.
    â€œGood night, Mr. President,” said Frank at the door, jacket and trousers over one arm, the President’s shoes dangling from his fingertips.
    â€œGood night, Frank.”
    â€œAre you all right, sir?”
    It was the second time that day one of his staff had asked.
    â€œI’m fine. Do I look sick?”
    â€œJust that you seem distracted.”
    â€œAh. Well, good night, Frank.”
    He returned to his train of thought. He felt in perfect condition. His skin looked tanned, his body fit. He exercised, drank in moderation, did not smoke. How, then, to explain these flashes of imagination? Were they due to a short circuit on the pathways of the brain? Incipient stroke?
    Whatever was happening, he could not speak of it. Neither could he enter a hospital for tests. No one knew better than the President the dangers of letting the opposition entertain the slightest doubt. There was no one he could talk to. He stood alone.
    Frank was not the only member of the White House staff to be concerned about the President. Every eye was fixed on him, for the moods of the monarch affect everyone.
    In the basement cafeteria, secretaries dropped coins into machines to release a cold, dank sandwich wrapped in plastic, or an apple that had been kept eight months in cold storage, or a white paper cup into which a brownish liquid flowed. It was called tea or coffee or bouillon, but tasted much the same in any case.
    As they stood at the machines, purchasing their lunch, they complained in cautious undertones about their bosses, or more loudly about the weather, or their boyfriends, or, in a more general way, of the day. They cast their moods onto the rain or allergies or the barometric pressure of the memos going out that day, or on their hangovers from the night before, which was probably the only truthful one in the list. Nerves were on edge these days. Everything was being done at top speed, with overtime, and little sleep, and the sense of frenzy and hurry was infectious. In the Eastern Orthodox it was said that the Premier’s hands shook. Rumor circulated he had Parkinson’s disease. The White House waited, pondering the meaning of that turn of events, and who was governing. Intelligence (capital I) reported a