VII
As far as Cincinnatus Driver was concerned, the worst part of prison was getting used to it. After a while, Luther Bliss stopped interrogating him, which meant he didn’t get beat up very much any more. Hardly anything happened to him any more, in fact. He sat in his cell with nothing to do, except for the one hour a week when he was led out to exercise, as a beast might have been.
Outside the gray stone walls of the prison, time was passing. What did Elizabeth think, back in Des Moines? What did Achilles think? How big was the boy these days? Cincinnatus struggled to remember his face. Did Amanda remember him at all? He was starting to doubt it.
Only the weather told him the season of the year. He never saw a newspaper, or anything else with print on it. He began to wonder if he still remembered how to read and write. That thought provoked him to bitter laughter. Read and write? Hell, I’m startin’ to wonder if I still recollect how to talk. Days at a time would go by when he never said a word to anyone.
The guards did not encourage conversation, which would do for an understatement till a bigger one came along. When they gave orders, it was always, “Come here, nigger,” “Go there, boy,” or “Stand aside, nigger.” They didn’t want to hear Cincinnatus say, “Yes, suh.” They just wanted him to do as he was told. He did it. He’d tried not doing it a couple of times. The results of that had proved more painful than they were worth.
He’d also tried protesting that he was a citizen of the United States, and nobody, not even Luther Bliss and the Kentucky State Police, had any business holding him like this. The results of that had proved even more painful than those of the other.
If I wasn’t colored, they wouldn’t be able to get away with it, no matter what they think I done. That had run through his mind more times than he could count. He did his best not to dwell on it. Its truth was all too obvious. He’d thought things would be better in the USA than they had been when Kentucky was part of the CSA. Maybe not.
But, in spite of all this, maybe. In the Confederate States, Negroes who made trouble often just stopped living. However much Luther Bliss wanted Cincinnatus on ice, he hadn’t dug a hole and put his body in it. Sometimes Cincinnatus wondered why not.
On a hot, muggy afternoon in what he reckoned was the middle of summer, three guards came to his cell door. Two of them drew pistols and pointed them at him, while the third turned a key in the lock and opened the cell. Then that fellow jumped back and yanked his pistol from its holster, too. “Come along with us,” one of the guards said.
“Where?” Cincinnatus’ voice creaked with disuse, and with fear. This wasn’t exercise time or mealtime. Maybe that hole in the ground waited for him after all.
“Don’t give us no back talk, boy, or you’ll be sorry for it,” the guard snapped. “Get moving.”
Cincinnatus did, thinking, They can kill me here as easy as anywhere else, and then take my body wherever they need to. He wanted to run. His legs had that light-as-a-feather feel panic could bring. He was sure he could outrun these three big-bellied white men. But he was also sure it would do him no good. Nobody outran a bullet.
They took him not to the room where they’d questioned him before but to an office in one of the prison’s corner towers. He supposed it was the warden’s office, but the man behind the desk was, inevitably, Luther Bliss. Bliss had light brown eyes, like a hound dog’s. At the moment, those eyes were as sad as a hound dog’s, too.
When Cincinnatus came in, the chief of the Kentucky State Police turned to the other man in the room, an older fellow who sat in a chair off to one side. “See, Mr. Darrow? Here he is, sound as a dollar.”
“Whose dollars are you talking about, Bliss?” the old man—Darrow?—demanded. “The Confederates’, after the war?”
Oh, sweet Jesus, Cincinnatus thought. Bliss is going to lock him up and throw away the key. But Bliss didn’t do anything except drum his fingers on the desktop. If he was angry, he didn’t show it past that—which made Cincinnatus take another long look at the man named Darrow.
He had to be close to seventy. His skin was grandfather-pink. His jowls sagged. He combed thinning iron-gray hair over the top of his head to make it cover as much ground as it could. But his gray-blue eyes were some of the sharpest—and some of the nastiest—Cincinnatus had ever seen.
After coughing a couple of times, he pulled his wallet from a vest pocket. He looked down at a photograph in it, then over to Cincinnatus. “You are Cincinnatus Driver,” he said, sounding surprised. “I wouldn’t’ve put it past this sneaky son of a bitch”—he pointed to Luther Bliss—“to try to sneak a ringer by me, but I guess he figured I’d spot it.”
Again, the world didn’t end. All Bliss said was, “I resent that, Mr. Darrow.”
“Go right ahead,” the other white man said cheerfully. “I intended that you should.”
Plaintively, Cincinnatus said, “Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?”
“My pleasure,” said the old man with the ferocious eyes. “I’m Clarence Darrow. I’m a lawyer. I’ve got a writ of habeas corpus with your name on it. That means you get out of jail. If you’ve got any brains, it also means you get the hell out of Kentucky.”
“My God.” Cincinnatus understood the words, but he wasn’t sure he believed them. He wasn’t sure he dared believe them. He said, “I didn’t think nobody could get me out of here.”
“Sonny, there’s something you have to understand: I’m a good lawyer.” Darrow spoke with a calm certainty that compelled belief. “I’m a damn good lawyer, matter of fact. This petty tyrant here”—he pointed at Luther Bliss again, and again Bliss didn’t rise to it—“kept thinking I wasn’t, but he’s not so smart as he thinks he is.”
“I know who’s my country’s friend and who ain’t,” Bliss said. “What do I need to know besides that?”
“How to live by the rules you say you’re protecting,” Clarence Darrow answered. The head of the Kentucky State Police snapped his fingers to show how little he cared about them. Darrow had been blustery before. Now he got angry, really angry. “What’s the point of having a country with laws if you get around ’em any time you happen not to care for ’em, eh? Answer me that.”
But Luther Bliss was not an easy man to quell. “This here’s Kentucky, Mr. Darrow. If we played by the rules all the time, the bastards who don’t would get the jump on us pretty damn quick, and you can bet on that. Half the people in this state are Confederate diehards, and the other half are Reds.”
He exaggerated. From what Cincinnatus remembered of the days before he’d moved north, he didn’t exaggerate by much. Darrow said, “If nobody in this godforsaken place wants to live in the USA, why not give it back to the Confederates?”
Cincinnatus gaped—he’d never heard anyone except a diehard say such a thing. Mildly, Bliss replied, “You know, Mr. Darrow, advocating return to the CSA is against the law here.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Darrow said. “Wouldn’t be one bit surprised. The law it’s against is unconstitutional, of course, not that you care about the Constitution of the United States.”
“Here’s your nigger, Mr. Darrow.” Bliss’ air of calm frayed at last. “Take him and get the hell out of here. Or don’t you think I could fix up a cell with your name on it right next to his?”
“I’m sure you could,” Darrow said. “And I’m sure you could make it very unpleasant for me. But I’m sure of something else, too—I’m sure I could make it even more unpleasant for you if you did.”
By the sour look on Luther Bliss’ face, he was sure of the same thing. It didn’t make him very happy. “Get out,” he repeated.
“Come along, Mr. Driver,” Clarence Darrow said. “Let’s get you back to civilization, or what passes for it in the United States these days.” He grunted with effort as he heaved himself to his feet. Cincinnatus needed a heartbeat to remember the surname belonged to him. He hadn’t grown up with it, and people didn’t use it very often. And nobody’d called him by it since he’d landed here. Dazedly, he followed the white lawyer.
Not till they got into the motorcar that had brought Darrow to the prison and the driver was taking them away did Cincinnatus turn to the lawyer and say, “God bless you, suh, for what you done there.”
“I don’t believe in God, any more than I believe in Mother Goose,” Darrow said. “Foolish notion. But I do believe in justice, and you deserve that. Everyone deserves that.”
Cincinnatus had known some Reds who said they didn’t believe in God. With them, he’d always thought that was a pose, or that they substituted Marx for God. With Clarence Darrow, it was different. The man spoke as if he needed no substitute for the Deity. Cincinnatus sensed that, but couldn’t fully fathom it. He said, “Well, God believes in you, whether you believe in Him or not.”
Darrow gave him an odd look. “You’ve got grit, son, if you can joke after you get out of that place.”
“I wasn’t jokin’, suh,” Cincinnatus said. They eyed each other in perfect mutual incomprehension. Cincinnatus asked, “How’d you even know I was stuck there, suh, to come and get me out?”
“Your wife finally raised a stink that was big enough for me to notice it,” Darrow answered. “It took her a while, because people in the USA don’t want to notice a colored woman even when she’s screaming her head off. But she kept at it. Remarkable woman. Stubborn as a Missouri mule.”
“Yes, suh,” Cincinnatus said happily. “God bless Elizabeth, too.” Clarence Darrow let out a long, rasping sigh. Cincinnatus took no notice of it. He went on, “But even if you knew I was in trouble, how’d you get Luther Bliss to turn loose o’ me? That’s one ornery man.”
“That’s one first-class son of a bitch, is what that is,” Darrow said. “Even after I got the court order, he kept denying he’d ever heard of you. But I managed to persuade a judge otherwise—and here you are.”
“Here I am,” Cincinnatus agreed. Seeing farms and woods out the window, not stone and concrete and barbed wire, made him feel like a new man. But the new man had old problems. “What do I owe you, suh?” Lawyers didn’t come cheap; he knew that. Even so . . . “Whatever it is, I pays it. May take me a while, you understand, but I pays it.”
Darrow’s grin displayed crooked, tobacco-stained teeth. “Your wife told me you’d say that. You don’t owe me a dime—I did your case pro bono publico.” He saw the Latin meant nothing to Cincinnatus, and added, “For the public good.”
“That’s mighty kind of you, suh, but it ain’t right,” Cincinnatus said. “I want to pay you back. I owe you.”
“Your wife said you’d say that, too,” Clarence Darrow told him. “But there’s no need—I’ll make more from publicity than you could pay. If you must, pay the favor forward—do something good for someone else. Bargain?”
“Yes, suh—so help me God,” Cincinnatus said.
“More of that claptrap.” Darrow sighed. “Well, never mind. I hope you know better than to stick your nose back into Kentucky again?”
“Long as my folks ain’t poorly for true, sure,” Cincinnatus answered. “That’s what got me here before. I be more careful ‘bout the message nowadays, but if I reckon it’s so, what choice have I got but to come?”
Clarence Darrow gave him a long, measuring stare. The lawyer delivered his verdict in one word: “Fool.”
Coal smoke pouring out the stack, the train hurried toward the Salt Lake City station. Sparks flew as the brakes ground its iron wheels against the iron rails that carried it. Colonel Abner Dowling would rather have been somewhere, anywhere, else than on the platform waiting for that train to pull in. By the expression on his mustachioed face, General Pershing felt the same way.
“No help for it, though,” Dowling murmured, more than half to himself.
He hadn’t been quiet enough. But Pershing only nodded and said, “He has earned the right to do as he pleases.”
“I know that, sir,” Dowling answered. “I just wish he would have pleased to do something—anything—else.”
“Yes.” Pershing nodded again. “There is that, isn’t there?”
The train stopped right at the platform. Dowling had irrationally hoped against hope that it wouldn’t, but would keep right on going. The leader of the military band gathered on the platform caught Pershing’s eye. Pershing looked as if he wished the fellow hadn’t. At last, reluctantly, he nodded. The band leader either didn’t notice the reluctance or thought it wise to pretend he didn’t. With a proud flourish, he began to wave his baton. The band struck up “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”
No sooner had the vaunting music begun to blare forth than the door to one of the Pullman cars opened. Out came a bent ancient whose mustache and what Dowling could see of his hair—he always wore a hat, to keep the world from knowing he was bald—were a peroxided gold, defying time. A woman of about the same years followed him onto the platform.
“Well, Autie,” she sniffed, “they are giving you a proper welcome, anyhow.”
“What’s that, Libbie?” The old man cupped a hand behind his ear.
“I said, they’re giving you a proper welcome,” she repeated, louder this time.
“Can’t hear a thing over that music. At least they’re giving me a proper welcome.”
Colonel Dowling and General Pershing both stepped forward. They both saluted. They chorused, “Welcome to Utah, General Custer.” Dowling was lying in his teeth. He would have bet Pershing was doing the same.
“Thank you. Thank you both,” Custer said. He stiffly returned the salute, even though, having at last retired from the U.S. Army after more than sixty years of service, he wore a somber black suit and homburg. Three years before, he’d been as vigorous as a man in his eighties could be. Now . . . Dowling found himself surprised, dismayed, and surprised at being dismayed. He’d always thought—sometimes despairingly—that George Armstrong Custer was the one unchanging man on the face of the earth.
Here at last, he saw it wasn’t so. The retired general was visibly slower, visibly more feeble. Some spark had gone out of him since his retirement, and he seemed to know it.
Libbie Custer, by contrast, remained as she always had. “Hello, Colonel Dowling,” she said with a smile that showed white false teeth. “It’s good to see you again. Now that Autie and I are civilians, may I call you Abner?”
“Of course,” Dowling answered, though he’d always hated his Christian name.
Meanwhile, General Pershing was shaking hands with Custer and exchanging polite and, no doubt, insincere compliments. During the Great War, Pershing’s command had been just to the east of Custer’s. Pershing’s Second Army had captured Louisville and generally pushed south faster than Custer’s First—till Custer decided he knew more about barrels than anyone in the War Department . . . and, against all odds, turned out to be right. From things Pershing had said since Abner Dowling came to Utah, he still couldn’t figure out how Custer had pulled that off.
At the time, Dowling had been sure Custer’s lies to Philadelphia would get the general—and, not so incidentally, himself—court-martialed and sent to Leavenworth to do hard labor for the rest of their lives. Instead, his superior had ended up the USA’s greatest military hero since George Washington, and Dowling, by reflected glory, had ended up a minor hero himself.
Custer said, “Are you keeping the Mormons here on a tight rein, General? I hope to heaven you are, because they will cause trouble if they get half a chance.”
“Things have been tolerably quiet, anyway,” Pershing answered. “They don’t shoot at our men any more. Taking hostages worked pretty well for the Germans in Belgium, and for us in Canada and the CSA, and it works here, too. The Mormons may want us dead, but they don’t want their friends and neighbors and sweethearts going up against a wall with a blindfold.”
“And a cigarette,” Custer added automatically, but he shook his head before anyone could correct him. “No, the Mormons don’t even have that to console themselves. Poor devils. Nothing wrong with tobacco.”
Libbie sniffed. Custer had been smoking and drinking and cursing ever since the disappointments of the Second Mexican War, and she still hated all three.
“It does work, cigarette or no,” Pershing said. “We even quelled trouble with polygamists down in Teasdale by taking several hundred hostages and making it ever so clear we’d do what we had to do if trouble broke out.”
Dowling wanted to wipe his forehead with the back of his hand and go, Whew! because of that. He didn’t, but he wanted to. Instead, he said, “General, Mrs. Custer, your limousine is waiting just outside the station. If you’d be kind enough to come with me . . .”
They came. They didn’t remark upon—perhaps they didn’t notice—the sharpshooters on the roof of the station. More riflemen were posted in the buildings across the street. Custer had served as General Pope’s right arm in the U.S. occupation of restive Utah during the Second Mexican War. Mormons had long memories, as everyone had found out in their uprising during the Great War. Someone might still want to take a potshot or two at Custer for what he’d done more than forty years before, no matter how many hostages’ lives it cost his people.
The limousine carried more armor than an armored car. Even the windows were of glass allegedly bulletproof. That was one more thing Dowling didn’t want to have to put to the test.
As they drove along the southern perimeter of Temple Square, Custer pointed to the ruins there and said, “That’s a bully sight—their temples to their false gods pulled down around their ears. May they never rise again.”
“Er, yes,” Dowling answered, wondering when he’d last heard anyone—anyone but Custer, that is—say bully. Hardly at all since the Great War ended; he was sure of that. The old slang was dying out with the people who’d used it. Custer still lingered. Now, though, Dowling could see he wouldn’t go on forever after all.
As old men will, Custer still dwelt on the past. “Do you know what my greatest regret is?” he asked.
“No, sir,” Dowling said, as General Pershing shook his head.
“My greatest regret is that we didn’t hang Abe Lincoln alongside the Mormon traitors he was consorting with,” Custer said. “He deserved it just as much as they did, and if we’d stretched his skinny neck the Socialists never would have got off the ground—I’m sure of that.”
“I suppose we’d have Republicans instead,” Pershing said. “They’d be just about as bad, or I miss my guess.” He was twenty years younger than Custer, which meant he’d been a young man the last time the Republican Party had amounted to anything much. It was a sad shadow of its former self, and had been ever since Abraham Lincoln took a large part of its membership left into the Socialist camp at the end of the Second Mexican War.
Custer sniffed and coughed and rolled his eyes. Plainly, he disagreed with General Pershing. For a wonder, though, he didn’t come right out and say so. Abner Dowling scratched his head in bemusement. Had Custer learned tact, or some semblance of it, at the age of eighty-six? There might have been less likely things, but Dowling couldn’t think of any offhand.
Odds were that Libbie had poked him in the ribs with her elbow when Dowling didn’t notice. As the great man’s longtime adjutant, Dowling had long since concluded Libbie Custer was the brains of the outfit. George put on a better show—Libbie, in public, was self-effacing as could be—but she was the one who thought straight.
Outside General Pershing’s headquarters, guards meticulously checked the limousine, front to back, top to bottom. At last, one of them told the driver, “You’re all right. Go on through.”
“Thanks, Jonesy,” the driver said, and put the motorcar back into gear.
“Still as bad as that?” Custer asked. “Will they blow us to kingdom come if we give them half a chance?”
“We hope not,” Pershing said. “Still and all, we’d rather not find out.”
“They don’t love us, and that’s a fact,” Dowling added.
“Good,” Custer said. “If they loved us, that would mean we were soft on them, and we’d better not be soft. If we let them up for even a minute, the Mormons will start conspiring with the limeys or the Rebs, same as they did in the last war and same as they did forty-odd years ago, too.”
There was another obsolete word. Only men of Custer’s generation still called the Confederates Rebels, and men of Custer’s generation, these days, were thin on the ground. The armored limousine stopped once more, this time inside the secure compound. A company stood at stiff attention, awaiting Custer’s inspection.
The retired general didn’t notice them till a soldier held the door for him and he got out of the automobile. When he did, he tried to straighten up as he made his slow way over to them. He reminded Dowling of a fire horse put out to pasture that heard the alarm bell once more and wanted to pull the engine again. Around soldiers, he came alive.
Most of the men there in the courtyard were conscripts, too young to have served in the Great War. They still responded to Custer, though, grinning at his bad jokes and telling him their home towns when he asked.
In a low voice, General Pershing said, “He looks like he wishes he were still in uniform.”
“I’m sure he does, sir,” Dowling answered, also quietly. “The Socialists practically had to drag him out of it.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth, remembering. “That was an ugly scene.”
“Those people . . .” Pershing shook his head. “It’s not for us to meddle in politics, and I know that’s a good rule, but there are times when I’m tempted to say exactly what’s on my mind.”
“Yes, sir,” Dowling said.
At the banquet that evening, Custer ate with good appetite and drank perhaps two glasses of white wine too many. Afterwards, Libbie told him, “Time to get to bed, Autie.” She might have been talking to a child that had stayed up too late.
“In a moment, my dear,” Custer answered. Before struggling to his feet once more, he turned to Dowling and said, “Do you know, Major, there are times since they took the uniform off me when I simply feel adrift on the seas of fate. Once upon a time, I mastered the helm. But no more, Major, no more. This is what the years have done.”
Dowling couldn’t blame Custer for forgetting his present rank and using the one he’d had when they served together during the war. “Yes, sir,” he said, and then, “I’m sorry, sir.” To his amazement, tears stung his eyes. Custer had lived too long, and knew it. Could any man suffer a worse fate? Dowling shook his head. He doubted it.
“God bless you, Major,” Custer said. He let his wife, still competent as always, lead him out of the dining hall. One of those tears slid down Dowling’s cheek. He would have been more embarrassed—he would have been mortified—if he hadn’t seen that General Pershing’s face was wet, too.
In a way, sitting in the Socialist Party offices in New York’s Fourteenth Ward took Flora Blackford back to the days when she’d been Flora Hamburger. Waiting for the latest batch of election returns made her remember how nervous she’d been when her name first appeared on the ballot ten years before.
In another way, though, coming back reminded her how much things had changed. She didn’t get back from Philadelphia all that often, even though the two cities were only a couple of hours apart by train. She didn’t hear Yiddish spoken all that often any more, either; she had to stop and think and listen to understand. What had been her first language was now on the way to becoming foreign to her.
A telephone rang. Herman Bruck picked it up. He’d been sweet on Flora while she still lived in New York City, and maybe his smile had a wistful quality to it when he looked at her now. On the other hand, maybe it didn’t. He had a four-year-old of his own, and a two-year-old, and a six-month-old besides. That was bound to be more than enough to keep anybody busy.
He scribbled something on a pad on his battered old desk. “Latest returns in our district—Hamburger, uh, Blackford, 9,791; Cantorowicz, 6,114.” Cheers filled the office. The Democrat, Abraham Cantorowicz, wasn’t quite a token candidate, but he hadn’t had any great chance of winning, either. The Congressional district whose borders roughly corresponded to those of the Fourteenth Ward had been solidly Socialist since before the turn of the century.
On Flora’s lap, Joshua Blackford began to fuss. He was sleepy. At not quite one, he was up well past his bedtime, and in a strange place besides. She was surprised he hadn’t started making a racket before this.
The telephone rang again. Again, Herman Bruck picked it up. Then he laid his palm against the mouthpiece and said, “Flora, it’s for you. It’s Cantorowicz.”
More cheers—everyone knew what that had to mean. Flora passed her son to her husband. “Here—mind him for a few minutes, please,” she said.
Hosea Blackford took the toddler. “This is what the vice president is for,” he said with a laugh. “He takes over so somebody else can go do something important.”
That got two waves of laughter—one from those who followed it in English and another after it got translated into Yiddish. Flora made her way to the telephone. “This is Congresswoman Blackford,” she said.
“And you’ll have two more years of being a Congresswoman,” Abraham Cantorowicz told her. “I don’t see how I can catch you, and what’s the point in waiting to make this call after the handwriting goes up on the walls? Another election, another Democrat calling to concede. Congratulations.”
“Thank you very much. That’s gracious of you,” Flora said. “You ran a strong campaign.” He’d run as well as a Democrat in this district could.
“Someone had to be the sacrificial lamb—we weren’t about to let you run unopposed,” Cantorowicz answered. “We will keep fighting for this district, and we’ll win one of these days.”
“Not soon, I don’t think,” Flora answered.
“Maybe sooner than you think,” her defeated opponent answered. “Will you run for reelection when your husband runs for president?”
Flora sent Hosea Blackford a look half startled, half thoughtful. She knew perfectly well he was thinking of running in 1928. Upton Sinclair almost certainly wouldn’t seek a third term. The only president who’d ever run a third time was Theodore Roosevelt. He’d won the Great War, made himself twice a national hero—and lost anyhow. The United States weren’t ready for one man ruling on and on.
“You aren’t saying anything,” Cantorowicz remarked.
“No, I’m not,” Flora told him. “We still have a couple of years to worry about that.”
“Maybe you should run anyway,” the Democratic candidate said. “If he loses and you win, you’d still be able to support your family.”
“I don’t think we’d have to worry there,” Flora answered coolly. She wasn’t kidding. Hosea Blackford was a talented lawyer with years of government connections. He would have no trouble making his way even if—God forbid!—he lost the election. Flora wasn’t sure she liked that in the abstract; whom a man knew shouldn’t have mattered so much as what he knew. But that didn’t change reality one bit.
When I first went into Congress, I would have tried to change reality. I did try to change reality, and I even had some luck, she thought. She took pride in being called the conscience of the House. But ten years there had taught her some things were unlikely to change in her lifetime, or her son’s, or his son’s, either, if he had a son.
Cantorowicz said, “Well, I hope you have to worry about it. But you don’t want to listen to that right now. You want to celebrate, and you’ve earned the right. Good night.”
“Good night,” Flora told him. The line went dead. Silence had fallen in the Socialist Party office. Everyone was looking at her. She put the phone back on the hook and nodded. “He’s conceded,” she said.
Cheers and whoops shattered the silence. People came up and shook Flora’s hand and thumped her on the back, as if she were a man. The racket woke up Joshua, who’d fallen asleep in Hosea’s lap. The little boy started to cry. Hosea comforted him. Before long, he fell asleep again, his thumb in his mouth.
Someone knocked on the door. Eventually, one of the men in the office heard the noise and opened it. There stood Sheldon Fleischmann, who ran the butcher’s shop downstairs. He looked a lot like his father, Max. The elder Fleischmann had quietly fallen over behind his counter one day, and never got up again. Like his father, Sheldon was a Democrat. Flora doubted he’d voted for her. Even so, he was carrying a tray of cold cuts, as Max had done more than once on election nights.
“You don’t need to do that,” Flora scolded him. “You’re not even a Socialist.”
“I try to be a good neighbor, though,” Fleischmann answered. “That’s more important than politics.”
“If everyone thought that way, we’d hardly need politics,” Hosea Blackford said.
His flat Great Plains accent stood out among the sharp, often Yiddish-flavored, New York voices in the office. Sheldon Fleischmann’s gaze swung to him in momentary surprise. Then the butcher realized who he had to be. “You’re right, Mr. Vice President,” he said, giving Blackford a respectful nod. “But too many people don’t.”
“No, they don’t,” Blackford agreed. “I did say if.”
“Yes, you did,” Fleischmann allowed. “Mazeltov, Congresswoman.” He chuckled. “I’ve been saying that so long, it starts to sound natural.”
“And why shouldn’t it?” Challenge rang from Flora’s voice.
Had the butcher said something about women having no place in Congress, Flora would have exploded. She was ready to do it even now. But his answer was mild: “Only because there are a lot of men in Congress, ma’am, and just a couple of women. You do say what you’re used to.”
Flora couldn’t very well argue there, however much she might have wanted to. She nodded. “All right,” she said. “I suppose I’ll let you get away with that.”
By the relief on Sheldon Fleischmann’s face, he felt as if he had got away with it. “Mazeltov again,” he said, and went downstairs once more.
In the office, Herman Bruck was talking with Maria Tresca. Maria was one of the few Italians in the overwhelmingly Jewish Fourteenth Ward. She’d also been a thoroughgoing radical even before her sister was killed in the Remembrance Day riots of 1915. For as long as Flora could remember, Maria had stood foursquare for the proletariat and against the power of big capitalists. Now, though, she listened attentively as Bruck said, “Amalgamated Mills is a very solid firm. They make fine-quality goods, and I think their stock is going to go straight through the roof. I got fifteen shares when it was at thirty-two last month, and it’s already gone up five and a half points.”
When it came to cloth, he knew what he was talking about. He was a master tailor from a family of tailors, and always dressed as if he made five times as much as he really did. Flora wasn’t much surprised when Maria Tresca gave back a serious nod. But she was surprised when strongly Socialist Maria offered a stock tip of her own: “I just bought five shares of Central Powers Steel in Toledo. They landed that new contract for the Great Lakes fleet, and they may split two for one soon.”
“Central Powers Steel, eh?” Herman Bruck’s round face grew alert. “I’ll have to look into that.”
“You’re both buying shares in the stock market?” Flora knew she sounded amazed. She managed to keep from calling it speculating, though that was what it was.
Bruck looked faintly embarrassed, but he said, “I’ve made a lot of money the last year and a half—that’s how long I’ve been in. And you only need to put up ten percent of the money when you buy on margin, so it’s a lot cheaper than it seems.”
“It’s a lot cheaper as long as the market goes up,” Flora said. “If it comes down, you need to pay more money or lose your shares.”
“It’s gone up for a long time now,” Bruck replied. “I don’t see why it should do anything else all of a sudden.”
Flora wasn’t sure how to answer that, or even if it had an answer. She turned to Maria Tresca. “You’re putting money into Wall Street? You, of all people?”
“Yes, some,” Maria answered defiantly. “If capitalism can make a secretary rich, let’s see it happen. I hope it can. And if it can’t”—she shrugged—“I’m not putting in more than I can afford to lose.”
“Well, that’s good,” Flora said. “I can think of a lot of people who aren’t being so careful, though.”
“What we need is more regulation of the market, to keep cheats and swindlers from having their way with people,” Maria Tresca said. “I don’t know too much about what goes on in the stock market, but that looks pretty clear to me. Some of those people will yank the shirt off your back and then sell it to you.”
Sadly, Flora answered, “I think you’re right, but getting the legislation through Congress is a different story. The Democrats are against it, and so are the Republicans. And more than a few Socialists have made so much money in the market, they think it’s the goose that lays golden eggs, too.”
She looked over at her husband. He held their sleeping son, all his attention, for the time being, resting on the little boy. But Flora knew Hosea also had money invested in Wall Street. She didn’t know exactly how much; he’d never talked much with her about that. Socialism in Dakota was altogether a milder thing, a more natively American thing, than it was here in New York City. What was shocking from Herman and Maria would have been nothing out of the ordinary for Hosea Blackford, though he and they belonged to the same party. He’d never cared to rub Flora’s nose in the ideological differences between them.
But if even thoroughgoing Socialists were buying and selling stocks, where had those differences gone? Would you use your own money to try to make a killing in the market? Flora asked herself. She didn’t think so, even now, but she admitted to herself that she wasn’t sure.
Are you a capitalist? Do you want to be a capitalist? It was like asking herself if she wanted to become a Christian. Very much like that, she realized—Socialism was about as much an article of faith with her as was Judaism. And yet . . . If I can provide for my family, why not? But that was the question: could she? One thing she’d learned in school still seemed true—what went up had to come down. Herman Bruck didn’t seem to believe that any more. For his sake, and the sake of many more like him, Flora hoped the rules had changed since she’d got out of Public School Number 130.