Everyone seemed to be concentrating hard, no one chatting or looking out of the window.

Maria showed him her desk and introduced the woman at the next typewriter, an attractive redhead in her midthirties. “George, this is my friend Miss Fordham. Nelly, why is everyone so quiet?”

Before Nelly could answer, Salinger came out of his office, a small, chubby man in a tailored European-style suit. With him was President Kennedy.

The president smiled at everyone, nodded to George, and spoke to Maria. “You must be Maria Summers,” he said. “You’ve written a good press release—clear and emphatic. Well done.”

Maria flushed with pleasure. “Thank you, Mr. President.”

He seemed in no hurry. “What were you doing before you came here?” He asked the question as if there was nothing in the world more interesting.

“I was at Chicago Law.”

“Do you like it in the press office?”

“Oh, yes, it’s exciting.”

“Well, I appreciate your good work. Keep it up.”

“I’ll do my very best.”

The president went out, and Salinger followed.

George looked at Maria with amusement. She seemed dazed.

After a moment, Nelly Fordham spoke. “Yeah, it takes you like that,” she said. “For a minute there, you were the most beautiful woman in the world.”

Maria looked at her. “Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly how I felt.”

• • •

Maria was a little lonely, but otherwise happy.

She loved working at the White House, surrounded by bright, sincere people who wanted only to make the world a better place. She felt she could achieve a lot in government. She knew she would have to struggle with prejudice—against women and against Negroes—but she believed she could overcome that with intelligence and determination.

Her family had a history of prevailing against the odds. Her grandfather, Saul Summers, had walked to Chicago from his hometown of Golgotha, Alabama. On the way he had been arrested for “vagrancy” and sentenced to thirty days’ labor in a coal mine. While there, he saw a man clubbed to death by guards for trying to escape. After thirty days he was not released, and when he complained he was flogged. He risked his life, escaped, and made it to Chicago. There he eventually became pastor of the Bethlehem Full Gospel Church. Now eighty years old, he was semiretired, still preaching occasionally.

Maria’s father, Daniel, had gone to a Negro college and law school. In 1930, in the Depression, he had opened a storefront law firm in the South Side neighborhood, where no one could afford a postage stamp, let alone a lawyer. Maria had often heard him reminisce about how his clients had paid him in kind: homemade cakes, eggs from their backyard hens, a free haircut, some carpentry around his office. By the time Roosevelt’s New Deal kicked in and the economy improved, he was the most popular black lawyer in Chicago.

So Maria was not afraid of adversity. But she was lonely. Everyone around her was white. Grandfather Summers often said: “There’s nothing wrong with white people. They just ain’t black.” She knew what he meant. White people did not know about “vagrancy.” Somehow it slipped their minds that Alabama had continued to send Negroes to forced labor camps until 1927. If she spoke about such things, they looked sad for a moment, then turned away, and she knew they thought she was exaggerating. Black people who talked about prejudice were boring to whites, like sick people who recited their symptoms.