II
Jake Featherston drummed his fingers on his desk. Spring was in the air in Richmond; the trees were putting on new leaves, while birdsong gladdened every ear. Or almost every ear—it did very little for Featherston. He’d led a battery of three-inch guns during the war, and much preferred their bellowing to the sweet notes of catbird and sparrow. When the guns roared, at least a man knew he was in a fight.
“And we are, God damn it,” Featherston muttered. The leader of the Freedom Party was a lanky man in his mid-thirties, with cheekbones and chin thrusting up under the flesh of his face like rocks under a thin coat of soil on some farm that would always yield more trouble than crops. His eyes . . . Some people were drawn to them, while others flinched away. He knew that. He didn’t quite understand it, but he knew it and used it. I always mean what I say, he told himself. And that shows. With all the lying sons of bitches running around loose, you’d better believe it shows.
If he looked out his window, he could see Capitol Square, and the Confederate Capitol in it. His lip curled in fine contempt. If that wasn’t the home of some of the biggest, lyingest sons of bitches in the whole wide world . . . “If it isn’t, then I’m a nigger,” Featherston declared. He talked to himself a fair amount, hardly noticing he was doing it. More than three years of serving a gun had taken a good deal of his hearing. People who didn’t care for him claimed he was selectively deaf. They had a point, too, though he wasn’t about to admit it.
The Capitol shared the square with a large equestrian statue of George Washington—who, being a Virginian, was much more revered in the CSA than in the USA these days—and an even larger one of Albert Sidney Johnston, hero and martyr during the War of Secession. Somewhere between one of those statues and the other, Woodrow Wilson had declared war on the USA almost ten years before.
“We should’ve licked those Yankee bastards,” Featherston said, as if somebody’d claimed otherwise. “If the niggers hadn’t risen up and stabbed us in the back, we would’ve licked those Yankee bastards.” He believed it with every fiber of his being.
And if that jackass down in Birmingham hadn’t blown out President Hampton’s stinking brains, what there were of them, the Party’d be well on its way towards putting this country back on its feet again. Jake slammed a scarred, callused fist down on the desk. Papers jumped. I was so close, dammit. He’d come within a whisker—well, two whiskers—of winning the presidential election in 1921. Looking toward 1927, he’d seen nothing but smooth sailing ahead.
Of course, one of the reasons the Freedom Party had almost won in 1921 was that its members went out there and brawled with anybody rash enough to have a different opinion. If you looked at things from one angle, President Hampton’s assassination followed from the Freedom Party’s nature almost as inexorably as night followed day.
Jake Featherston was not, had never been, and never would be a man to look at things that way.
He’d watched the Party lose seats in the 1923 Congressional elections. He’d been glad the losses weren’t worse. Other people celebrated because they were as large as they were. Up till that damned unfortunate incident, the Freedom Party had gone from success to success, each building momentum for the next. Unfortunately, he was finding the process worked the same way for failure.
What do we do if the money doesn’t keep coming in? What can we do if the money doesn’t keep coming in? he wondered. Only one answer occurred to him. We go under, that’s what. When he’d first joined the Freedom Party in the dark days right after the war, it had been nothing to speak of: a handful of angry men meeting in a saloon, with the membership list and everything else in a cigar box. It could end up that way again, too; he knew as much. Plenty of groups of disgruntled veterans had never got any bigger, and the Party had swallowed up a lot of the ones that had. Some other group could swallow it the same way.
“No, goddammit,” Jake snarled. For one thing, he remained convinced he was right. If the rest of the world didn’t think so, the rest of the world was wrong. And, for another, he’d got used to leading an important political party. He liked it. Without false modesty—and he was singularly free of modesty, false and otherwise—he knew he was good at it. He didn’t want to play second fiddle to anybody else, and he didn’t want to go back to being a big fish in a tiny pond.
The telephone on his desk jangled. He picked it up. “Featherston,” he barked into the mouthpiece.
“Yes, Mr. Featherston,” his secretary said. “I just wanted to remind you that you’ve got that talk on the wireless coming up in a little more than an hour. You’ll want to make sure you’re at the studio on time.”
“Thank you kindly, Lulu,” Featherston answered. He was more polite to Lulu Mattox than to practically anybody else he could think of. Unlike most people, his secretary deserved it. She was a maiden lady, somewhere between forty and seventy. Once upon a time, he’d read or heard—he couldn’t remember where or when—that Roman Catholic nuns were the brides of Christ. What he really knew about Catholicism would fit on the head of a pin; he’d been raised a hardshell Baptist, and he didn’t get to any church very often these days. But Lulu Mattox, without a doubt, was married to the Freedom Party. She gave it a single-minded devotion that put the enthusiasm of any mere Party man to shame. She had all the files at her fingertips, too, for she was the best-organized person Jake had ever met. He didn’t know what he would do without her.
A few minutes later, he went downstairs. Guards outside the building came to attention and saluted. “Freedom!” they said. The uniforms they wore were similar but not quite identical to those of the Confederate Army. The bayoneted Tredegar rifles they carried were Army issue. Someone might have asked questions about that, but the Freedom Party had gone out of its way to show the world that asking questions about it wasn’t a good idea.
“Freedom!” Jake echoed, returning those salutes as if he were a general himself. Part of him loathed the fat fools with the wreathed stars on their collar tabs who’d done so much to help the CSA lose the war. The rest of him wished he had that kind of power himself. I’d do a better job with it than those bastards ever could have.
A motorcar driven by another uniformed Freedom Party man stopped in front of the building. It was a boxy Birmingham, built in the CSA. Jake Featherston was damned if he’d go around Richmond in a Yankee automobile. “That wireless place,” he told the driver.
“Sure, Sarge,” the man replied. He was a large, burly fellow named Virgil Joyner. He’d been with the Freedom Party almost as long as Featherston had, and he’d been through all of the faction fights and the brawls with the Whigs and the Radical Liberals. Not many people could get away with calling Jake anything but “boss,” but he’d earned the right.
The broadcasting studio was in a new brick building on Franklin near Seventh, not far from the house in Richmond where Robert E. Lee and his family had lived for a time after the War of Secession. Featherston knew that only because he’d grown up in and around Richmond. Nothing remained of the house these days; Yankee bombs and the fires that so often followed them had leveled it.
“Hello, Mr. Featherston!” exclaimed the bright little man who ran the studio and the wireless station of which it was a part. His name was Saul Goldman. Since he was a Jew, Featherston assumed he sounded so cheerful, so friendly, because he was getting paid. He was bound to be a Radical Liberal himself, if not an out-and-out Red. Long as we give ’em the money, these bastards’ll sell us the rope we use to hang ’em, Featherston thought scornfully.
But if Goldman acted friendly, he’d play along—for now. “Good to see you,” he said, and shook hands polite as a banker. “Everything ready for me?”
“Yes, sir. You’re in Studio B this time. Follow me. You have your script?”
“Oh, yeah. You bet I do.” Featherston followed Goldman down a narrow, dingy hall to a cramped little studio whose walls and ceiling were covered by what looked like the cardboard bottoms of egg cartons. The stuff looked funny, but it helped kill echoes. The studio held a table with a microphone on it and a rickety chair. That was all. Jake pointed to the engineer in the next room, whom he could see through a window. “He’ll give me the signal when it’s time?”
Saul Goldman smiled. “That’s right. You know the routine almost like you work here.”
“I’d better by now, don’t you think?” Featherston sat down in front of the microphone and set his script on the table. He went through it quickly to make sure he had all the pages. Once he’d lost one, and had to ad-lib a bridge to the next one he had. Goldman slid out of the studio, closing the door behind him. The back of the door had more of those egg-carton sound deadeners glued to it.
After a bit, the engineer flashed two fingers—two minutes to go. Jake nodded to show he got it. The engineer was a professional, a man whose competence Jake respected. One finger—one minute. Then the fellow pointed straight at him at the same time as a red light went on. For half an hour, the airwaves were his.
“Confederates, wake up!” he said harshly. “This is Jake Featherston of the Freedom Party, and I’m here to tell you the truth.” He used that phrase to introduce every wireless talk.
He leaned toward the microphone, as he would have leaned toward a crowd. The first few times he’d done this, not having an audience in front of him had thrown him off stride. Now, though, he could imagine the crowd, hear it in his mind shouting for more. And he had more to give it.
“We can be a great country again,” he said. “We can, but will we? Not likely, not with the cowards and idiots we’ve got running things in Richmond these days. All they want to do is lick the Yankees’ . . . boots.” You couldn’t say some things on the air. No, you couldn’t say them, but sometimes implication worked better anyhow.
“They want to lick the Yankees’ boots,” Jake repeated. “They’re great ones for sucking up to people, the Whigs are. They even suck up to our Negroes, our own Negroes, if you can believe it. And do you know what, folks? They’ve got reason to do it, may I go to the Devil if I lie.” He couldn’t say hell on the air, either, but he got his message across. “I’ll tell you what the reason is. Thanks to the Whigs, some of those niggers are citizens of the Confederate States, just like you and me.
“That’s right, friends. This here was supposed to be a white man’s country, but do the Whigs care about that? Not likely! Thanks to them, we’ve got niggers who can vote, niggers who can serve on juries, niggers who don’t have to show passbooks to anybody. That’d be bad enough if they’d put the coons in the Army so we could win the war. But they put ’em in, and we lost anyways. And then the Whigs went out and won the next election even so. Maybe some of you all see the sense in that. I tell you frankly, I don’t.”
He went on till the engineer signaled it was time to wind down, and ended as the man drew a finger across his throat. When he walked out of the studio, his shirt was as sweaty as if he’d spoken before a crowd of thousands. Saul Goldman came up and shook his hand. “Very good speech,” the Jew said. “Very good indeed.”
“I will be damned,” Featherston said. “I think you really mean it. You’re not making fun of me.” Goldman nodded. Jake asked the obvious question: “How come?”
“I’ll tell you.” Goldman had . . . not an accent, but the ghost of one, barely enough to suggest his parents would have spoken differently. “Anywhere else, when things go wrong, what do they do? They blame the Jews. Here, you blame the colored people. I am a Jew, a Jew in a country where things went wrong, and no one wants to kill me on account of it. Shouldn’t I be grateful?”
Jake had never been much for seeing the other fellow’s point of view, but he did this time. “Well, well,” he said. “Isn’t that interesting?”
Part of Colonel Irving Morrell—and the bigger part, at that—wanted to be back at Fort Leavenworth, making barrels larger and stronger and better. Part of him, but not all. The rest, the part that was a student of war rather than a combat soldier, found a lot to interest it back at the General Staff. Quite a few things crossed his desk that never made it into the newspapers.
He showed one of them to Lieutenant Colonel John Abell, asking, “Is this true?”
“Let me read through it first,” Abell said. General Liggett’s adjutant was thin and pale and almost sweatless, a pure student of war. Though probably brave enough, he would have been out of place on anything so untidy as a real battlefield. He and Morrell didn’t much like each other, but over the years they’d developed a wary respect for each other’s abilities. He took his own sweet time reading the report, then gave a judicious nod. “Yes, this ties in with some other things I’ve seen. I believe it’s credible.”
“The Turks really are massacring every Armenian they can get their hands on?” Morrell asked. Abell nodded again. Morrell took back the typewritten report, saying, “That’s terrible! What can we do about it?”
“We, as in the United States?” Abell asked, precise as usual. Morrell gave him an impatient nod. He said, “As best I can see, Colonel, nothing. What influence can we bring to bear in that part of the world?”
Morrell grimaced and grunted. His colleague was all too likely to be right. He’d had to find Armenia on a map before fully understanding the report he’d received. How many Americans would even have known where to look? The distant land at the edge of the Caucasus might have been lost among the mountains of the moon, as far as most people were concerned. With the best will in the world, the Navy couldn’t do a thing. And as for sending soldiers across a Russia whose civil strife looked eternal . . . The idea was absurd, and he knew it.
He tried a different tack: “Can Kaiser Bill do anything? When Germany spits, the Turks start swimming. And the Armenians are Christians, after all.”
Lieutenant Colonel Abell started to say something, then let out his breath without a word. A moment later, after sending Morrell a thoughtful look, he said, “May I speak frankly, Colonel?”
“When have I ever stopped you?” Morrell asked in turn.
“A point,” Abell admitted. “All right, then. There are times when you give the impression of being a man whose only solution to a problem is to hit something, and to keep hitting it till it falls over.”
“Teddy Roosevelt spent a lot of time talking about the big stick, Lieutenant Colonel,” Morrell said. “As far as I can see, he had a pretty good point.”
John Abell looked distinctly pained. Sniffing, he said, “Our former president, however gifted, was not a General Staff officer, nor did he think like one. Which brings me back to what I was saying—you often give that same bull-moose impression, and then you turn around and come up with something not only clever but subtle. That might be worth pursuing. It would have to go through the State Department, of course.”
Morrell grunted again. “And why should the boys in the cutaways and the striped trousers pay any attention to us green-gray types?”
For once, Abell’s answering smile was sympathetic. The United States were one of the two most powerful countries in the world these days, sure enough. Very often, the American diplomatic corps behaved as if the U.S. Army had had nothing to do with that. Such a supercilious attitude infuriated Morrell. Of course, his fury mattered not at all; had people in the State Department known of it, it would more likely have amused them than anything else.
Abell said, “May I make a suggestion?”
“Please.”
“If it were I,” the brainy lieutenant colonel said, flaunting his grammatical accuracy, “I would draft a memorandum on the subject, send it to General Liggett, and hope he could get it to the secretary of war or one of his assistants. Being civilians, they have a better chance than we of getting the diplomats to notice the paper.”
“That’s . . . not bad, Lieutenant Colonel,” Morrell said. Abell hadn’t even tried to steal the idea for himself, and he had Liggett’s ear. Though it wasn’t obvious at first glance, he could be useful. Morrell chuckled. He probably thinks the same about me. He went on, “I’ll take care of it right away. Thanks.”
“Always glad to be of service, sir.” Now Abell sounded as coolly ironic as usual.
When Morrell spoke that evening of what he’d done during the day, his wife nodded vigorous approval. “I hope something comes of it, Irv,” Agnes Morrell said. “Hasn’t this poor, sorry world seen enough killing these past few years?”
“Well, I think so,” Morrell answered. “You won’t find many soldiers singing the praises of murder, you know.”
“Of course I know that,” Agnes told him, more than a little indignantly. She was in her early thirties, not far from his own age, and had been another soldier’s widow before meeting him at a dance back in Leavenworth. She had brown eyes; her black hair, these days, was cut short in what the fashion magazines called a shingle bob. It was all the rage at the moment. Morrell didn’t think it quite suited his wife, but didn’t intend to tell her so. As far as he could see, such things were her business, not his. She went on, “Supper will be ready in a few minutes.”
“Smells good.” Morrell’s nostrils flared. Compared to some of the things he’d eaten in Sonora and the Canadian Rockies and Kentucky and Tennessee, it smelled very good indeed. “What is it?” Back on the battlefield, there’d been plenty of times he hadn’t wanted to know. Horse? Donkey? Cat? Buzzard? He couldn’t prove it, which meant he didn’t have to think about it . . . too often.
“Chicken stew with dumplings and carrots,” Agnes said. “That’s the way you like it, isn’t it?”
Spit flooded his mouth as he nodded. “I knew I married you for a couple of reasons,” he said.
“A couple of reasons?” Her eyebrows, plucked thin, flew up in mock surprise. “What on earth could the other one be?”
He walked over to her and let his hand rest lightly on her belly for a moment. “We’ll find out if it’s a boy or a girl sooner than we think.”
“It won’t be tomorrow,” Agnes reminded him. She’d been sure she was in a family way for only a few weeks. There wasn’t much doubt any more; not only had her time of the month twice failed to come, but she was perpetually sleepy. And she had trouble keeping food down. She gave Irving Morrell a much bigger helping than she took for herself, and she ate warily.
When they undressed for bed that night, he used a forefinger to follow the new tracery of blue veins that had sprung out on Agnes’ breasts. She gave him a mischievous smile. “All those veins probably remind you of the rivers on a campaign map.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have thought of it just that way,” Morrell answered, cupping her breast in the palm of her hand. “What sort of campaign did you have in mind, honey?”
“Oh, I expect you’ll think of something,” she answered. He squeezed, gently—but not quite gently enough. The corners of her mouth turned down. “They’re sore. People say you get over that, but I haven’t yet.”
He tried to be more careful, and evidently succeeded, for things went on from there. When they’d progressed a good deal further, Agnes climbed on top of him. The idea had startled him when she first proposed it; he’d always thought a man belonged in the saddle. But she didn’t have his weight on her tender breasts this way—and, he’d discovered, it was fine no matter who went where.
A couple of days later, he got called to General Hunter Liggett’s office. With General Liggett was a tall, long-faced man five or ten years older than Morrell. “Colonel, I’d like to introduce you to Mr. N. Mattoon Thomas, the assistant secretary of war.”
“Pleased to meet you, sir.” Morrell lied without hesitation. Thomas was the man who’d gone up to Canada to put General Custer out to pasture. Morrell still didn’t know if Custer was a good general. He had his doubts, in fact. But Custer had turned a whole great assault column of barrels loose against the CSA, and Morrell had ridden a barrel at the head of that column. Without the breakthroughs they’d won, the Great War might still be going on.
“Likewise, Colonel. I’m very glad to meet you.” N. Mattoon Thomas was probably lying, too. In the Army, it was an axiom of faith that the Socialists wanted to get rid of everything that had let the USA win the war. That Thomas had forced George Custer into retirement didn’t speak well for him, not in Morrell’s eyes.
Hunter Liggett said, “Colonel, I passed your memorandum on the unfortunate situation in Armenia to the assistant secretary here, in the hope that he might send it on to the Department of State.”
“A very perceptive document,” Thomas said. “I dare hope it will do some good, although one never knows. Very perceptive indeed.” He studied Morrell as an entomologist might study a new species of beetle. “I should hardly have expected such a thing from a soldier.”
Morrell gave him a smile that was all sharp teeth. “Sorry, sir. We don’t gas grandmothers and burn babies all the time.”
Silence slammed down in General Liggett’s office. The head of the General Staff broke it, saying, “What Colonel Morrell meant, sir, was—”
“I know perfectly well what Colonel Morrell meant,” Thomas said, his voice cold as the middle of a meat locker. “He resents my party for telling him he may not play with big iron toys forever and tell the American people, ‘Hang the expense! We may need these one day.’ I wear his resentment as a badge of honor.” He gave Morrell a nod that was almost a bow. “And what have you got to say about that, Colonel? You seem in an outspoken mood today.”
“I’ve never said, ‘Hang the expense,’ sir,” Morrell answered. “But we may need better barrels one day, and they aren’t toys. If your party thinks what we do is play, why not get rid of the Army altogether, and the Navy, too?”
Before Thomas could reply, the telephone on General Liggett’s desk rang. He snatched it up. “Confound it, you know what sort of meeting I’m in,” he snapped, from which Morrell concluded he was talking to Lieutenant Colonel Abell in the outer office. But then Liggett said, “What? What’s that?” Color drained from his face, leaving it corpse-yellow. “Dear God in heaven,” he whispered, and hung up.
“What is it?” Morrell and N. Mattoon Thomas said the same thing at the same time.
General Liggett stared blindly from one of them to the other. Tears glistened in his eyes. All at once, he looked like an old, old man. “Teddy Roosevelt is dead,” he said, sounding as stunned and disbelieving as a shell-shocked soldier. “He was playing a round of golf outside Syracuse, and he fell over, and he didn’t get up. Cerebral hemorrhage, they think.”
“Oh, my God.” Again, Morrell and Thomas spoke together. Thomas might be a Socialist, but Theodore Roosevelt had been a mighty force in the United States for more than forty years. No one, regardless of party, could be indifferent to that.
So far Morrell thought, and no further. Then what he’d just heard really hit him. To his amazement and shame and dismay, he began to weep. A moment later, blurrily, he saw tears running down the faces of Hunter Liggett and N. Mattoon Thomas, too.
Congresswoman Flora Blackford should have been packing for the trip from Philadelphia to Chicago, for the Socialist Party’s nominating convention. President Upton Sinclair would surely get his party’s nod for a second term: the Socialists’ first president, elected almost forty years after the modern Socialist Party began in Chicago, when in the aftermath of the Second Mexican War Abraham Lincoln led the Republican left wing out of one organization and into another.
Yes, the presidential nomination was a foregone conclusion. The vice presidency? Flora smiled to herself. The vice presidency was a forgone conclusion, too. Nothing in the world, as far as she could see, would keep Hosea Blackford, her husband, from getting the nomination again. And then, in 1928 . . . He’d once said he didn’t expect to get the nod for the top of the ticket then. Maybe, though, maybe he was wrong.
Such things were what she should have been thinking about—what she had been thinking about up till a few days before. Now she put her most somber clothes into a suitcase. She wouldn’t be going to Chicago, not yet, and neither would her husband. She’d always wanted to visit the city where the modern Party was born, and she would—but not yet. Instead, she packed for the short trip down to Washington, D.C., for the funeral of Theodore Roosevelt.
Hosea Blackford came into the bedroom carrying black trousers and a white shirt. As he put them in the suitcase, he shook his head. “I’m almost as old as Teddy Roosevelt, and I still feel as though my father just died.”
Both of Flora’s parents were still alive, but she nodded. “Everybody in the whole country feels that way, near enough,” she answered. “We didn’t always like him—”
“If we were Socialists, we practically never liked him,” Hosea Blackford said.
Nodding, Flora went on, “But whether we liked him or not, he made us what we are. He raised us. He raised this whole country. It’s no wonder we feel lost without him.”
“No wonder at all,” her husband said over his shoulder as he went back to the hall closet for a black jacket and a black homburg. “He was always sure he knew what was best for us. He wasn’t always right, but he was always sure.” He chuckled. “Sounds like my pa, I’ll tell you that.” His flat Great Plains accent was a world away from her Yiddish-flavored New York City speech.
He went back for a black cravat. Flora closed the suitcase. “Are we ready to go?” she asked.
“I expect so.” He looked out the window of the flat that had been his alone—across the hall from hers—which they now shared. A motorcar waited in front of the building. Grunting, he picked up the suitcase.
When they went outside, the driver saw him carrying it and rushed to take it from him. Grudgingly, Blackford surrendered it. He gave Flora a wry grin. Ever since she was elected to Congress, she’d wrestled with the problem of the privileges members of government—even Socialist members of government—enjoyed. For all her wrestling, for all her commitment to class struggle, she had yet to come to a conclusion that satisfied her.
She and her husband enjoyed even more privilege on the southbound train: a fancy Pullman car all to themselves, and food brought to them from the diner. When they got to Washington, another motorcar whisked them to the White House.
The flag in front of the famous building flew at half staff. The White House itself looked much as it had before the Great War. Repairs there had been finished almost a year before. The Washington Monument off to the south, however, remained a truncated stub of its former self. Scaffolding surrounded it; it would rise again to its full majestic height.
“If there’s ever another war, all this work will go to waste,” Flora said.
“One more reason there’d better not be another war,” her husband answered, and she nodded.
President Upton Sinclair met them in the downstairs entry hall. After shaking hands with his vice president and kissing Flora on the cheek, he said, “I would sooner have done this in Philadelphia, but Roosevelt left word he wanted the ceremony here, and I couldn’t very well say no.”
“Hardly,” Hosea Blackford agreed. “What does it feel like?—staying in the White House, I mean.”
“Well, look at the place. I feel as though I were living in a museum.” Sinclair waved. He was a tall, slim man in his mid-forties: the youngest man ever elected president. His youthful vigor had served him well in 1920, when Teddy Roosevelt, even then past sixty, could be seen as a man whose time, however great, had passed him by. The president shook his head. “It’s even worse than living in a museum. It’s the reproduction of a museum. They didn’t get a whole lot out of here before the Confederates bombarded the place in 1914. Frankly, I’d rather be in Philadelphia. The Powel House doesn’t make me think I’ll get thrown out if I speak above a whisper.”
Flora found herself nodding. “It is more like the American Museum of Natural History than any place where you’d want to stay, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.” President Sinclair nodded emphatically.
“Strange that we should be doing the honors for Roosevelt,” Hosea Blackford observed.
“He was a great man,” Flora said. “A class enemy, but a great man.”
“Easier to admire a foe, especially an able one, after he’s gone,” Sinclair said.
Like a lot of men largely self-taught—Abraham Lincoln had been the same—her husband was fond of quoting Shakespeare: “ ‘Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus; and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves.’ ”
“An American Caesar.” President Sinclair nodded. “That fits.”
But Flora shook her head. “No. If he’d been Caesar, he never would have given up the presidency when he lost four years ago. He would have called out the troops instead. And if Teddy Roosevelt had called them, they might have marched, too.”
No one cared to contemplate that. Hosea Blackford said, “Well, he’s gone now, and . . . ‘I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.’ ”
“And we’ll give him a grand funeral, too,” the president added. “We can afford to do that. He’s a lot easier to deal with dead than he was alive.”
Sleeping in the Mahan Bedroom felt strange to Flora; it was as big as the flat in which she and her whole family had lived in New York. The next morning, a colored servant—a reminder that Washington had once been closely aligned with the states now forming the Confederacy—brought her and her husband bacon and eggs and fried potatoes. She ate the eggs and potatoes; her husband demolished her bacon along with his own. “I shouldn’t, I suppose,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it. I don’t,” she answered, which was true most of the time. Only later did she wonder in what the eggs and potatoes had been cooked. Bacon grease? Lard? She was Socialist and secular and very Jewish, all at the same time, and every so often one piece bounced off another and left her unsure of what she ought to feel.
Tens—hundreds—of thousands of people lined the route from the Capitol to the remains of the Washington Monument and then south. She and Hosea Blackford took their places on a reviewing stand near the Monument to watch Theodore Roosevelt’s funeral procession, along with members of Congress and some foreign dignitaries: she recognized the ambassador from the Confederate States, who stood close by his colleagues from Britain, France, and the Empire of Mexico in a glum knot. No one else came very close to them.
Down among the ordinary spectators near the stand were a middle-aged woman wearing a gaudy medal—the Order of Remembrance, First Class—and a younger one who looked like her with the slightly less flamboyant Order of Remembrance, Second Class, hanging around her neck. They both held young children. The gray-haired man with them, who had a Distinguished Service Medal on his black jacket, said, “If she gets fussy, Nellie, give her to me.”
“I will, Hal,” the older woman answered. Flora wondered what she’d done during the war to earn such an important decoration.
She never found out. Indeed, a moment later, she forgot all about the people in the crowd, for flourishes of muffled drums announced that the procession was approaching. Behind the drummers—one each from the Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard—came a riderless black horse led by a soldier. As the animal slowly walked past, Flora saw that it had reversed boots thrust into the stirrups and a sheathed sword lashed to the saddle.
Six white horses, teamed in twos, drew the black caisson carrying Roosevelt’s body in a flag-draped coffin. All six of the horses were saddled. The saddles of the three on the right were empty; a soldier, a sailor, and a Marine rode the three on the left.
President Upton Sinclair, in somber black, marched bareheaded behind the caisson, along with some of Roosevelt’s relatives—including one man of about Flora’s age who had to be pushed along in a wheelchair. She wondered what sort of injury he’d taken in the war that had crippled him so.
The premier of the Republic of Quebec strode along a few paces after Sinclair and the Roosevelt family, accompanied by a couple of Central American heads of state who’d taken a fast liner to reach the USA in time for the funeral. After them came the ambassadors from the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire: the great wartime allies, given pride of place. Envoys from Chile and Paraguay and the Empire of Brazil came next, followed by other emissaries from Europe and the Americas—and the ambassador from the Empire of Japan, elegant in a black cutaway. Alone of all the Entente nations, Japan hadn’t yielded to the Central Powers. She’d just stopped fighting. It wasn’t the same thing, and everyone knew it.
After the foreign dignitaries marched a band playing soft, somber music. Another riderless horse brought up the rear of the procession. Flora found that excessive, but nobody’d asked her opinion. And the Socialist Party, being in power, did have an obligation to send the departed Roosevelt to his final rest with as much grandeur as possible, to keep the Democrats from screaming about indifference or worse.
Once the procession had passed the reviewing stand, it turned south, toward the Potomac. The crowds there were just as thick as they had been between the Capitol and the Washington Monument. The sounds of weeping rose above the music of the band. “Say what you will, the people loved him,” Hosea Blackford remarked.
“I know.” Flora shook her head in wonder. “In spite of the war he led them into, they loved him.” That war had cost her brother-in-law his life and her brother a leg. And David voted Democratic despite—or maybe because of—that missing leg, though he’d been a Socialist before.
Her husband said, “Well, he won it, no matter how much it cost. And now he gets his last revenge on the Confederate States.” He chuckled in reluctant admiration.
Flora didn’t know whether to admire Teddy Roosevelt’s final gesture or to be appalled by it. On the southern bank of the Potomac, in what had been Virginia but was now annexed to U.S. West Virginia, Robert E. Lee had had an estate. Since the Great War rolled over it, it had lain in ruins. That hadn’t bothered Roosevelt at all. He’d left instructions—and President Sinclair had agreed—that his last resting place should be on the grounds of Arlington.