I am not altogether sympathetic to the new President. He is, certainly, a strange fellow (only forty-eight inches high at the shoulder). But is strangeness alone enough? I spoke to Sylvia: "Is strangeness alone enough?" "I love you," Sylvia said. I regarded her with my warm kind eyes. "Your thumb?" I said. Ohumb was a fiasco of tiny crusted slashes. "Pop-top beer s," she said. "He is a strange fellow, all right. He has some magic charisma which makes people --" She stopped and began again. "When the band begins to launto his campaign song, Struttin with Some Barbecue, I just. . . I t. . ."
The darkness, strangeness, and plexity of the new President have touched everyohere has been a great deal of fainting lately. Is the President at fault? I was sitting, I remember, in Row EE at City ter; the opera was "The Gypsy Baron." Sylvia was singing in her green-and-blue gypsy e in the gypsy encampment. I was thinking about the President. Is he, I wondered, right for this period? He is a strange fellow, I thought -- not like the other Presidents weve had. Not like Garfield. Not like Taft. Not like Harding, Hoover, either of the Roosevelts, or Woodrow Wilson. Then I noticed a lady sitting in front of me, holding a baby. I tapped her on the shoulder. "Madam," I said, "your child has I believe fainted." "Charles!" she cried, rotating the babys head like a dolls. "Charles, what has happeo you?" The Presi?dent was smiling in his box.
"The President!" I said to Sylvia ialiaaurant. She raised her glass of warm red wine. "Do you think he liked me? My singing?" "He looked pleased," I said. "He was smiling." "A bril?liant whirlwind campaign, I thought," Sylvia stated. "Winning was brilliant," I said. "He is the first President weve had from City College," Sylvia said. A waiter fainted behind us. "But is he right for the period?" I asked. "Our period is perhaps not so choice as the previous period, still --"
"He thinks a great deal about death, like all people from City," Sylvia said. "The death theme looms large in his sciousness. Ive known a great many people from City, and these people, with no signifit exceptions, are hung up on the death theme. Its an obsession, as it were." Other waiters carried the waiter who had fainted out into the kit.
"Our period will be characterized in future his?tories as a period of tentativeness and uainty, I feel," I said. "A kind of parenthesis. When he rides in his black limousih the plastic top I see a little boy who has blown an enormous soap bubble which has trapped him. The look on his face --" "The other didate was dazzled by his strangeness, newness, smallness, and philosophical grasp of the death theme," Sylvia said. "The other didate didnt have a prayer," I said. Sylvia ad?justed her green-and-blue veils ialiaaurant. "Not having goo City College and sat around the cafeterias there, discussih," she said.
I am, as I say, irely sympathetic. Certain things about the new President are not clear. I t make out what he is thinking. When he has finished speaking I ever remember what he has said. There remains only an impression of strangeness, darkness. . . On television, his face clouds when his name is mentioned. It is as if hearing his name frightens him. Theares directly into the cam?era (an actors preempting gaze) and begins to speak. One hears only ces. Neer ac?ts of his speeches always say only that he "touched on a number of matters in the realm of. . ." When he has finished speak