V
Sam Carsten smeared zinc-oxide ointment on the bridge of his nose. It wouldn’t do him any good. He was dolefully certain of that. When summer came, he got a sunburn. He’d got sunburned in San Francisco, which wasn’t easy. Hell, he’d got sunburned in Seattle, which was damn near impossible.
The port of Brest, France, toward which the USS O’Brien was steaming, lay on the same parallel of latitude as Seattle. Somebody’d told that to Carsten, but he’d had to look it up for himself in an atlas before he would believe it. The bright sunshine dancing off the ocean—and off the green land ahead—seemed almost tropical in comparison to what Seattle usually got.
He patted the breech of the destroyer’s forward four-inch gun. “This here is one more place I figured I’d have to fight my way into,” he remarked.
“Yes, sir,” Nathan Hirskowitz agreed. The petty officer shrugged. “But we’ve got one thing going for us, even on a little courtesy call like this.”
“You bet we do,” Sam said. “We aren’t Germans.”
Hirskowitz nodded. He scratched his chin. Whiskers rasped under his nails, though he’d shaved that morning. “Yes, sir,” he said. “That’s what I was thinking, all right.”
“They just don’t like Germans here in France, same as they just don’t like Englishmen in Ireland.” Carsten thought for a moment, then went on, “And same as they just don’t like us in the CSA—what do you want to bet a ship from the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet gets the same sort of big hello in Charleston as we do here?”
“I won’t touch that one. You got to be right,” Hirskowitz said.
“Damn funny business, though,” Sam said. “We were at war with the froggies, too, same as Kaiser Bill was at war with the Confederates.”
“But we didn’t lick France, same as the Germans didn’t lick the Confederate States. That makes all the difference.” Hirskowitz added something in French.
“What the hell’s that mean?” Sam asked in surprise.
“Something like, the better you know somebody, the more reasons you can find to despise him,” the gunner’s mate answered.
“Well, I’ve known you for a while, and this is the first I knew you spoke any French.”
Nathan Hirskowitz surprised Sam again, this time by looking and sounding faintly embarrassed: “It’s my old man’s fault, sir. He came to the United States out of this little Romanian village in the middle of nowhere—that’s what he has to say about it, anyway. But he’d taught himself French and German and English while he was still there.”
“That’s pretty good,” Sam said. “He taught you, too, eh?”
“Yeah, me and my brothers and my sister. German was easy, of course, because we already used Yiddish around the house, and they’re pretty close. But he made us learn French, too.”
“So what does he do in New York City?” Sam asked. “How come you aren’t too rich to think about joining the Navy?”
“How come?” Hirskowitz snorted. “I’ll tell you how come, sir. Pop had a storing and hauling business. But he liked horses better than trucks, and so that went under. He’s smart, but he’s a stubborn bastard, my old man is. And since his business went under, he hasn’t done much of anything. He sponges off the rest of my relatives, that’s all. You listen to him talk, he’s too smart to work.”
“Oh. One of those.” Carsten nodded; he’d met the type. “Too bad. Any which way, though, I expect I’ll stick with you when we get shore leave. Always handy to have somebody along who knows the lingo.”
“Sir, you’re an officer, remember? You got to find one of your own who speaks French. You can’t go drinking with a no-account gunner’s mate.”
Sam cursed under his breath. Hirskowitz was right, no doubt about it. The trouble was, Carsten didn’t like drinking with officers. That was the bad news about being a mustang. He’d spent close to twenty years as an able seaman and petty officer himself. His rank had changed, but his taste in companions hadn’t. Officers still struck him as a snooty lot. But he would hear about it, and in great detail, if he fraternized—that was the word they’d use—with men of lower rank.
Up to the wharf came the O’Brien. The skipper handled that himself, disdaining the help of the tugboats hovering in the harbor. If he made a hash of it, he’d have nobody but himself to blame. But he didn’t. With all the Frenchmen watching—and, no doubt, with some Germans keeping an eye on the destroyer, too—he came alongside as smoothly as if parking a car.
A French naval officer whose uniform, save for his kepi, didn’t look a whole lot different from American styles, came aboard the O’Brien. “Welcome to la belle France,” he said in accented English. “We have been allies before, your country and mine. We are not enemies now. It could be, one day, we shall ally again.”
He didn’t say against whom he had in mind. He didn’t say—and he didn’t need to say. The O’Brien’s executive officer said something in French. Sam didn’t want to go drinking with the exec. The Frenchman saluted. The executive officer returned the salute. He said, “We come to France on a peaceful visit, and hope that peace will last forever.”
With a very Gallic shrug, the French officer replied, “What lasts forever? Nothing in this world, monsieur. I need to say one thing to you, a word of—comment dit-on?—a word of warning, yes. Your men are welcome to go ashore, but they should use a certain . . . a certain caution, oui?”
Since the Frenchman plainly wanted the O’Brien’s crew to hear that, the exec carried on in English: “What sort of caution, sir?”
“Political caution,” the local said. “The Action Française has no small power here in Brest. You know the Action Française?”
“Mais un petit peu,” the executive officer said, and then, “Only a little.”
“Even a little is too much,” the Frenchman told him. “They are royalist, they are Catholic—very, very Catholic, in a political way—and (forgive me) they oppose those who were the allies of the United States during the . . . the unpleasantness not so long past.”
They hate the Germans’ guts, Carsten thought. That’s what he means, but he’s too polite to say so. The O’Brien’s executive officer nodded and said, “Thanks for the warning. We will be careful.”
“I have done my duty,” the French officer answered. I wash my hands of the lot of you, he might have said. With another salute, he went back over the gangplank, up onto the pier, and into Brest.
Carsten wondered if the skipper would keep his crew aboard the ship after a greeting like that, but he didn’t. He did warn the men who got liberty to stick together and not to cause trouble. Sam hoped they would listen, but sailors in port weren’t always inclined to.
He went ashore himself, as much from simple curiosity as from any great desire to paint the town red. Brest wasn’t the sort of place to which tourists thronged. It was, first and foremost, a navy town. That didn’t faze Sam. The steep, slippery streets were another matter. Brest sat on a ridge above the Penfeld River, and seemed more suited to mountain goats than to men.
Mountain goats, though, didn’t go into bars. Carsten did, the first chance he got. “Whiskey,” he told the bartender, figuring that word didn’t change much from one language to another.
But the fellow surprised him by speaking English: “The apple brandy is better.” Seeing Sam’s look of surprise, he explained, “Many times during the Great War—and since—sailors from Angleterre come here.”
“All right. Thanks. I’ll try the stuff.” When Sam did, he found he liked it—Calvados was the name on the bottle. He drank some more. Warmth spread through him. A navy town had to have friendly women somewhere not too far from the sea. After I drink some more, I’ll find out about that, he thought.
Before he could, though, three or four French officers came in. One of them noticed his unfamiliar uniform. “You are—American?” he asked in halting English. “You are from the contre-torpilleur new in the harbor?”
“Yes, from the destroyer,” Sam agreed.
“And what think you of Brest?” the fellow asked.
“Nice town,” Carsten said; his mother had raised him to be polite. “And this Calvados stuff—this is the cat’s meow.” The Frenchman looked puzzled. Sam simplified: “It’s good. I like it.”
“Ah. ‘The cat’s meow.’ ” The French officer—a tough-looking fellow in his forties, a few years older than Sam—filed away the phrase. “Would it please you, monsieur, to see more of Brest?”
“Thank you, friend. I wouldn’t mind that at all,” Sam answered, thinking, among other things, that an officer ought to know where the officers’ brothels were, and which of them had the liveliest girls. But the Frenchman—his name turned out to be Henri Dimier—took him to the maritime museum housed in a chateau down by the harbor, and then to the cathedral of St. Louis closer to the center of town. Maybe he was an innocent, maybe he thought Sam was, or maybe he was subtly trying to annoy him. If so, he failed; Carsten found both buildings interesting, even if neither was exactly what he’d had in mind.
When they came out of the cathedral, a whole company of blue-uniformed policemen rushed up the street past them. “What’s going on there?” Sam asked.
“I think it is the Action Française,” Dimier answered, his face hard and grim. “They are to have a—how do you say?—a meeting in the Place de la Liberté. It is not far. Would you care to see?”
“Well . . . all right.” It wasn’t what Sam had had in mind. It wouldn’t be much fun. But it might be useful, and that counted, too. I suppose that counts, too, he thought mournfully.
The Place de la Liberté wasn’t far from the cathedral: only two or three blocks. Even before Carsten and Henri Dimier got there, the sound of singing filled the air. A forest of flags sprouted inside the park. Some were the familiar French tricolor, others covered with fleurs-de-lys. Pointing, Sam asked, “What are those?”
“That is the old flag, the royal flag, of France,” Dimier replied. “They want to, ah, return to his throne the king.”
“Oh.” Carsten wasn’t sure what to make of that. The mere idea struck him as pretty strange. He tried another question: “What are they singing?”
“I translate for you.” The French officer cocked his head to one side, listening. “Here. Like this:
“The German who has taken all, Who has robbed Paris of all she owns, Now says to France: ’You belong to us alone: Obey! Down on your knees, all of you!’ “And here is the—the refrain—is that the word?
“No, no, France is astir, Her eyes flash fire, No, no, Enough of treason now. “Would you hear more, monsieur?”
“Uh—yeah. If you don’t mind.” I do need to know this. We all need to know it.
Dimier picked up the song again:
“Insolent German, hold your tongue, Behold our king approaches, And our race Runs ahead of him. Back to where you belong, German, Our king will lead us!” And the refrain:
“One, two, France is astir, Her eyes flash fire, One, two, The French are at home.” And once more:
“Tomorrow, on our graves, The wheat will be more beautiful, Let us close our ranks! This summer we shall have Wine from the grapevines With royalty. “Do you understand, being an American, what all this means?”
“I doubt it,” Sam answered. “Do you?”
Before Henri Dimier could answer, the men of the Action Française charged the police who were trying to hold them in the square. For a moment, clubs flailing, the police did hold. But then the ralliers—the rioters, now—broke through. With shouts of triumph, they swarmed into the streets of Brest. Sam had a devil of a time getting back to the O’Brien. After that, though, he understood, or thought he understood, a good deal that he hadn’t before.
* * *
Clarence Potter was a meticulous man. If he hadn’t been, he couldn’t very well have had a successful career in intelligence work during the war. That habit of precision was one reason why he had no use for the Freedom Party. To his way of thinking, Jake Featherston and his followers only wanted to smash things up, with no idea what would replace them.
He stood in Marion Square in Charleston, listening to a Freedom Party Congressional candidate. The fellow’s name was Ezra Hutchinson. He was a rotund man who put Potter in mind of a hand grenade in a white summer suit. He exploded like a hand grenade, too. Unlike a hand grenade, though, he kept doing it over and over.
“Now hear me, friends!” he thundered, pumping a fist in the air atop the portable platform on which he stood. “Hear me! We’ve turned the other cheek to the USA for too long! It’s high time we took our place in the sun again our own selves. We’re a great country. We ought to start acting like it, by God!”
Some of the people in the little crowd in front of the platform clapped their hands. Ezra Hutchinson didn’t stand up there alone. A dozen Freedom Party hardnoses in white shirts and butternut trousers backed him. They all applauded like machines. Whenever he paused a little longer than usual, they barked out, “Freedom!” in sharp unison.
“Freedom!” echoed several voices from the crowd.
“We’re a great country!” Hutchinson repeated. “But who remembers that, here in the CSA? The Radical Liberals? Hell, no—they’d rather be Yankees. The Whigs? Oh, they say they do, but they’d rather suck up to the Yankees. I tell you the truth, friends: the only party that remembers when the Confederate States had men in them is the Freedom Party.”
That gave Clarence Potter the opening he’d been waiting for. He shouted, “The only party that shoots presidents is the Freedom Party!”
People stirred and muttered. Wade Hampton V was only a couple of years dead, but a lot of folks didn’t seem to want to remember how he’d died. The Freedom Party sure as hell didn’t want people to remember how he’d died. It was doing its best to act respectable. As far as Potter was concerned, its best could never be good enough.
Some of the goons on the platform turned their heads his way. More goons were sprinkled through the crowd, some in the Party’s near-uniform, others wearing their ordinary clothes. But Ezra Hutchinson only smiled. “Where were you during the war, pal?” he asked; Freedom Party men often believed they were the only ones who’d done any fighting.
“I was in the Army of Northern Virginia,” Potter answered, loudly and distinctly. “Where were you, you fat tub of goo?”
Hutchinson’s smile disappeared. He’d been a railroad scheduler during the Great War, and never come within a hundred miles of a fighting front. But then he stuck out his chins and tried to make the best of it: “I served my country! Nobody can say I didn’t serve my country.”
He waited for Potter to make some other gibe so he could give a sharper comeback. But Potter said nothing more. He just let the candidate’s words hang in the air. When Hutchinson did try to go back to his speech, he seemed flat, uninspired.
Several Freedom Party men started working their way back through the crowd toward Potter. He was there by himself. He carried a pistol—he always carried a pistol—but he didn’t want to use it unless he had to. He slipped away and around the corner before any of the goons got a good look at him. He’d done what he’d set out to do.
But, in a way, the Freedom Party men had done what they’d set out to do, too: they’d made him retreat. And they would make it hard for other candidates to speak; they weren’t shy about attacking their rivals’ gatherings. Jake Featherston, damn him, had turned Confederate politics into war.
Who knows where Featherston would be now if that Grady Calkins hadn’t gone and shot President Hampton? Potter thought. But snipers were part of war, too: a part that had upped and bit the Freedom Party.
Potter discovered the real problem at a Whig meeting a few days later. Everything there was stable, orderly, democratic. Speaker yielded politely to speaker. No one raised his voice. No one got excited. And, Potter was convinced, no one could possibly have hoped to influence the voters or make them give a damn about keeping the Whigs in power in Richmond.
He threw his hand in the air and was, in due course, recognized. “I have a simple question for you, Mr. Chairman,” he said. “Where are our hooligans, to break up Freedom Party rallies the way Featherston’s bastards work so hard to break up ours?”
People started buzzing. You didn’t often hear such questions at a gathering like this. The chairman’s gavel came down, once, twice, three times. Robert E. Washburn was a veteran of the Second Mexican War. He wore a big, bushy white mustache, and both looked and acted as if the nineteenth century had yet to give way to the twentieth. “You are out of order, Mr. Potter,” he said now. “I regret to state that I have had to point this out to you at previous gatherings as well.”
Heads bobbed up and down in polite agreement with Washburn’s ruling. Too many of those heads were gray or balding. The Whigs had dominated Confederate politics for a long time, as the Democrats had in the USA. The Democrats had got themselves a rude awakening. Potter feared the Freedom Party would give the CSA a worse shock than the Socialists had given the United States.
He said, “I am not out of order, Mr. Chairman, and it’s a legitimate question. When the damnyankees started using gas during the war, we had to do the same, or else leave the advantage with them. If we don’t fight Featherston’s fire with fire, what becomes of us now?”
Down came the gavel again. “You are out of order, Mr. Potter,” Washburn repeated. “Your zeal for the cause has outrun your respect for the institutions of the Confederate States of America.”
He seemed to think that was plenty to quell Potter, if not to make him hang his head in shame. But Clarence Potter remained unquelled. “Featherston’s got no respect for our institutions,” he pointed out. “If we keep too much, we’re liable not to have any institutions left to respect after a while.”
Now heads went back and forth. People didn’t agree with him. He’d run into that before. It drove him wild. He’d seen a plain truth, and he couldn’t get anyone else to see it. Jake Featherston had come much too close to smashing his way to a victory in 1921, and he would be even more dangerous now if that Calkins maniac hadn’t shown up the Freedom Party for what it was. Potter felt like knocking these placidly disagreeing heads together. That brought him up short. I’m not so different from Featherston after all, am I?
Robert E. Washburn said, “We rely upon the power of the police to protect us against any further, uh, unfortunate outbursts.”
That was an answer of sorts, but only of sorts. “And how many coppers start yelling, ‘Freedom!’ the minute they take off their gray suits?” Potter asked. “How well do you think they’ll do their job?”
He did make the buzz in the room change tone. A great many policemen favored the Freedom Party. That was too notorious a truth to need retelling. It had caused problems in 1921 and again in 1923, though the Freedom Party men had been on their best behavior then. How could anybody think it wouldn’t cause problems in the upcoming Congressional election?
The local chairman was evidently of that opinion. “Thank you for expressing your views with your usual vigor, Mr. Potter,” Washburn said. “If we may now proceed to further items of business. . . ?”
And that was that. They didn’t want to listen to him. And what the Whigs didn’t want to do, they didn’t have to do. More than sixty years of Confederate independence had taught them as much, and confirmed the lesson again and again. What would teach them otherwise? he wondered. The answer to that seemed obvious enough: losing to the Freedom Party.
As the Charleston Whigs droned on, Potter got to his feet and slipped out of their meeting. Nobody tried to call him back. Everybody seemed glad he was going. They didn’t want to hear their grip on things was endangered. They deserve to lose, by God, he thought as he went out into the heat and humidity of a Charleston summer. But then, remembering Jake Featherston’s burning eyes as he’d seen them again and again during the Great War, Potter shook his head. They almost deserve to lose. No one deserves what those “Freedom!”-shouting yahoos would give us if they won.
Pigeons strutted along the street, cooing gently. They were slow and stupid and ever so confident nobody would bother them. Why not? They’d proved right again and again and again. This one stranger in their midst wouldn’t prove any different . . . would he?
Clarence Potter laughed. He threw his arms wide. Some of the pigeons scurried back from him. One or two even spread their wings and fluttered away a few feet. Most? Most kept right on strutting and pecking, and paid him no attention whatsoever. “You goddamn dumb sons of bitches,” he told them, laughing though it wasn’t really funny. “You might as well be Whigs.” The birds went right on ignoring him, which proved his point.
He wondered whether the Radical Liberals would take him seriously. Odds were, they would. The Freedom Party, after all, was replacing them as the Whigs’ principal opposition. But then he wondered if it mattered whether the Rad Libs took him seriously. It probably didn’t. No one except a few dreamers had ever thought the Radical Liberals could govern the CSA. They gave the states of the West and Southwest a safety valve through which they could blow off steam when Richmond ignored them, as it usually did. Closer to the heart of the CSA, the Radical Liberals let people pretend the country really was a democratic republic—without the risks and complications a real change of power would have entailed.
Why do I bother? Potter wondered as he strode past the pigeons that, fat and happy and brainless, went on pretending he wasn’t there—or, if he was, that he couldn’t possibly be dangerous. Easier just to sit back and let nature take its course.
But he knew the answer to that. It was simple enough: he knew Jake Featherston. Ten years now since I walked into the First Richmond Howitzers’ encampment. Ten years since he told me Jeb Stuart III’s body servant might be a Red, and since Jeb Stuart III, being III of an important family, made sure nothing would happen to the nigger. Jeb Stuart III was dead, of course. He’d looked for death when he realized he’d made a bad mistake. He’d had plenty of old-fashioned Confederate courage and honor. But he’d taken however many Yankee bullets he took without having the faintest conception of just how bad a mistake he’d made.
“The whole Confederacy is still finding out just how bad a mistake you made, Captain Stuart,” Clarence Potter muttered. A young woman coming the other way—a young woman in a shockingly short skirt, one that reached so high, it let him see the bottom of her kneecap—gave him a curious glance as she went by.
Potter was by now used to garnering curious glances. He wasn’t nearly so used to women showing that much leg. He looked back over his shoulder at her. For a little while, at least, he forgot all about the Freedom Party.
When the steam whistle announcing shift change blew, Chester Martin let out a sigh of relief. It had been a good day on the steel-mill floor. Everything had gone the way it was supposed to. Nobody’d got hurt. You couldn’t ask for more than that, not in this business.
Instead of heading straight home, he stopped at the Socialist Party hall not far from the mill. A good many men from his mill and others nearby sat and stood there, talking steel and talking politics and winding down from the long, hard weeks they’d just put in. “How’s it going, Chester?” somebody called. Martin mimed falling over in exhaustion, which got a laugh.
Somebody else said, “They don’t work us as hard as they worked our fathers.”
“Only goes to show what you know, Albert,” Chester retorted. “My old man’s got one of those soft foreman’s jobs. He hardly even has calluses on his hands any more, except from pushing a pencil. They work me a hell of a lot harder than they work him.”
“Sold out to the people who own the means of production, has he?” Albert Bauer said—he was and always had been a Socialist of the old school.
Before Chester could answer that, someone else did it for him: “Oh, put a sock in it, for Christ’s sake. We’re starting to own the means of production. At least, I’ve bought some shares of stock, and I’ll bet you have, too. Go on, tell me I’m a liar.”
Bauer said not a word. In fact, so many people said not a word that something close to silence fell for a moment. Have that many of us bought stocks? Chester wondered. He had a few shares himself, and knew his father had more than a few: Stephen Douglas Martin had been picking up a share here, a share there, ever since he started making good money when he wasn’t conscripted into the Great War.
“Funny,” Martin said. “The Party talks about government owning the means of production, but it never says much about the proletariat buying ’em up one piece at a time.”
“Marx never figured anything like that would happen,” someone said. “Neither did Lincoln. Back when they lived, you couldn’t make enough money to have any left over to invest.”
“As long as Wall Street keeps going up and up, though, you’d have to be a damn fool not to throw your money that way,” somebody else said. “It’s like stealing, only it’s legal. And buying on margin makes it even easier.”
Nobody argued with him. Even now, most of the men who left their jobs at the steel mills left only because they were too old or too physically worn or too badly hurt to do them any more. Those were the people for whom the Socialists were trying to push their old-age insurance policy through Congress. But if you could quit your work at sixty-five, or even sixty, and be sure you had enough left to live on for the rest of your days thanks to what you’d done for yourself while you were working . . . If you could manage that, the whole country would start looking different in twenty or thirty years.
I’ll turn sixty-five in 1957, Martin thought. It didn’t seem so impossibly far away—but then, he had just put in that long, long day at the mill.
He rode the trolley home, ate supper with his parents and his sister, and went to bed. When the wind-up alarm clock next to his head clattered the next morning, he just turned it off. He didn’t have a moment’s sleepy panic, thinking it was some infernal device falling on his trench. I’ve been home from the Great War for a while now, he thought as he put on a clean work shirt and overalls. But he would take a couple of puckered scars on his left arm to the grave. As it had on so many, the war had left its mark on him.
When he went into the kitchen, his father was already there, smoking his first cigar of the day. His mother fried eggs and potatoes in lard. She used a wood-handled iron spatula to flip some onto a plate for him. “Here’s your breakfast, dear,” she said. “Do you want some coffee?”
“Please,” he said, and she poured him a cup.
His father said, “Saturday today—only a half day.”
Chester nodded as he doctored the coffee with cream and sugar. “That’s right. You know I won’t be home very long, though—I’m going out with Rita.”
Stephen Douglas Martin nodded. “You already told us, yeah.”
His mother gave him an approving smile. “Have a good time, son.”
“I think I will.” Chester dug into the hash browns and eggs so he wouldn’t have to show his amusement. His folks had decided they approved of Rita Habicht, or at least of his seeing her. They must have started to wonder if he would ever see anybody seriously. But he wasn’t the only Great War veteran in no hurry to get on with that particular part of his life. Plenty of men he knew who’d been through the mill (and, as a steelworker, he understood exactly what that phrase meant) were still single, even though they’d climbed into their thirties. It was as if they’d given so much in the trenches, they had little left for the rest of their lives.
He took the trolley past the half-scale statue of Remembrance—who would have looked fiercer without half a dozen pigeons perched on her sword arm—to the mill, where he put in his four hours. Then he hurried back home, washed up, shaved, and changed from overalls, work shirt, and cloth cap to trousers, white shirt, and straw hat. “I’m off,” he told his mother.
“You look very nice,” Louisa Martin said. He would have been happier if she hadn’t said that every time he went anywhere, but still—you took what you could get.
He rode the trolley again, this time to the block of flats where Rita lived. She had one of her own. She’d got married just before the war started. Her husband had stopped a bullet or a shell in one of the endless battles on the Roanoke front. Martin had fought there, too, till he got wounded. He’d never met Joe Habicht, but that proved exactly nothing. Rita had had a baby, too, and lost it to diphtheria the day after its second birthday. Women fought their own battles, even if not with guns. Through everything, though, she’d managed to hang on to the apartment.
She didn’t keep Chester waiting when he knocked on the door. His heart beat faster as she opened it. “Hi,” he said, a big, silly grin on his face. “How are you?”
“Fine, thanks.” She patted at her dark blond hair. It was a little damp; she must have washed after getting back from her Saturday half day, too. “It’s good to see you.”
“It’s good to be here,” he said, and leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. “You look real pretty.”
Rita smiled. “You always tell me that.”
“I always mean it, too.” But Martin started to laugh. When she asked him what was funny, he wouldn’t tell her. I’ll be damned if I want to admit I sound just like my mother, he thought. Instead, he said, “Shall we go on over to the Orpheum?”
“Sure,” she said. “Who’s playing there today?”
“Those four crazy brothers from New York are heading the bill,” he answered.
“Oh, good. They are funny,” Rita said. “I was in stitches the last time they came through Toledo.” That had been a couple of years before; she and Chester hadn’t known each other then. He wondered with whom she’d seen the comics. That she had a past independent of him occasionally bothered him, though he’d never stopped to wonder if his independent past bothered her. But neither of them had seen anybody else for several months now. That suited Chester fine, and seemed to suit Rita pretty well, too.
They held hands at the trolley stop. An old lady clucked disapprovingly, but they paid no attention to her. Things were looser now than they had been when she was a young woman. As far as Chester Martin was concerned, that was all to the good, too. He was sorry when the trolley car came clanging up so soon.
He slid a silver dollar to the ticket-taker at the Orpheum, and got back a half dollar and two yellow tickets. He and Rita went up to the first balcony and found some seats. He took her hand there, too. She leaned her head on his shoulder. When the house lights went down, he gave her a quick kiss.
A girl singer and a magician led off the show. As far as Martin was concerned, the magician couldn’t have disappeared fast enough. A trained-dog act ended abruptly when the dog, which could jump and fetch and even climb ladders to ring a bell at the top, proved not to be trained in a much more basic way. He got an enormous laugh, but not one of a sort the fellow in black tie who worked with him had in mind. The dancer who came on next got another laugh by soft-shoeing out holding his nose.
“I wouldn’t have done that,” Rita said, even though she’d laughed, too. “Now he’ll squabble with the man with the dog all the way to the end of the tour.” Chester wouldn’t have thought of that for himself. Once she said it, he realized she was bound to be right.
At last, after a couple of other acts Martin knew he wouldn’t remember ten minutes after he left the Orpheum, the Engels Brothers came out, along with the tall, skinny, dreadfully dignified woman who served as their comic foil. They were all young men, not far from Chester’s age, but got their name from the enormous, fuzzy beards they wore. One of the beards was dyed red, one yellow, one blue, and the fourth left black. From the balcony, Martin couldn’t tell if the beards were real or fakes. For the comics’ sake, he hoped they were phony.
The Brother with the undyed beard talked enough for any three men. The one with the yellow beard didn’t talk at all, but was so limber, he seemed to have no bones. The one with the blue beard tried to slap everybody else into line. The one with the red beard spent all his time chasing the tall, skinny woman, who seemed more bewildered than flattered by his attentions.
At one point, they all started pelting one another with oranges. It might have been trench warfare up there—by the way the Engels Brothers dodged around the prop furniture, they’d been in the trenches—except that the woman kept standing up and getting nailed. By the time they’d finished, the stage was a worse mess, much worse, than it had been after the dog act. But this was a lot funnier, too.
The Engels Brother with the black beard proved the sole survivor. He looked out at the audience and said, “Orange you glad you aren’t up here?” The curtain came down.
“That was . . . I don’t know exactly what that was, but I don’t know when I’ve laughed so hard, either,” Rita said as she got up and made her way toward the exit. Since Chester Martin was rubbing at his streaming eyes with his handkerchief, he couldn’t very well argue with her.
They had supper at a diner across the street from the Orpheum, then took the trolley back to Rita’s block of flats. “I had a wonderful time,” she said as she fumbled in her handbag for the key.
“I always have a terrific time with you, Rita.” Chester hesitated, then asked, “Can I come in for a minute, please?”
She hesitated, too. She was careful of her reputation. He’d seen that from the first time he took her out. He liked it. She said, “You’re not going to be—you know—difficult, are you?”
He would have liked nothing better than to be difficult, but he solemnly shook his head. “Cross my heart,” he answered, and did.
“All right.” Rita opened the door and flipped on a light. “The place is a mess.” It was, to Martin’s eye, perfectly neat. Rita sat down on the overstuffed sofa. She patted the upholstery next to her, asking, “What have you got in mind?”
Instead of sitting there, Chester awkwardly went to one knee in front of her. Her eyes got very big. Tongue stumbling, heart pounding, he repeated, “I always have a terrific time with you. I don’t think I’d ever want to be with anybody else. Will you—will you marry me, Rita?” He took a velvet jewelry box from his pocket and flipped it open to show her a ring set with a tiny chip of diamond.
She stared at him. “I wondered if you were going to ask me that tonight,” she whispered, and then, “The ring is beautiful.”
“You’re beautiful,” he said. “Will you?”
“Of course I will,” she answered.
Afterwards, he wasn’t quite sure who kissed whom first. When he came up for air, he gasped, “You never kissed me like that before.”
“Well, you never asked me to marry you before, either,” Rita answered.
He laughed. They kissed again. Heart pounding, he asked, “What else don’t I know?”
“You’ll find out,” she said. “After the wedding.”