Carl Martin was just starting to creep. Every minute or so, he’d forget how to move and flop down like a jellyfish. At six months, that didn’t bother him. He thought it was funny. He’d try again after a while, when he remembered how to make his elbows work, and try to find something on the floor and stick it in his mouth. “Bwee!” he said proudly.
“You tell ’em, kid,” Chester Martin agreed. He was pretty proud of his son, though he sometimes wondered how any baby ever lived to grow up. Some of the things Carl did, and of course did without thinking about them… . You had to watch him not just every minute, but every single second.
As if to prove the point, the junior member of the Martin family headed for a book of matches that shouldn’t have been on the floor in the first place. Carl didn’t want a cigarette. He wanted to find out what matches tasted like. Chester grabbed them before his son could. Carl clouded up and started to cry.
“You can’t eat matches,” Chester said. “They aren’t good for you.”
Telling something like that to a six-month-old, naturally, did no good at all. Carl kept on crying. And, because he was crying, he forgot to hold his head up. When it came down, he banged it on the floor. That really gave him something to cry about.
“What now?” Rita called from the kitchen.
Chester explained, as best he could over his son’s din. He picked up the boy and cuddled him. The crying subsided. Chester pulled out his hankie and wiped snot off Carl’s face. Carl didn’t like that. He never did.
To distract him, Chester turned on the wireless. They’d bought the set not long after the baby was born. They couldn’t quite afford it, but Rita had wanted it badly. Feeding the baby meant being up in the middle of the night a lot. She wanted it to stay dark then, to keep Carl from waking up. Listening to music or news or a comedy show was better than sitting there all alone in the quiet.
Somebody knocked on the door. “There’s Sue and Otis and Pete,” Chester said.
“Oh, God, they’re early!” Rita said. “Well, let ’em in. The fried chicken’ll be done in about fifteen minutes.”
When Chester’s sister and brother-in-law and nephew came in, Sue exclaimed over the baby: “How big he’s getting!”
“He’s still tiny,” said Pete, who at nine seemed to be shooting up like a weed himself, all shins and forearms and long skinny neck.
Otis Blake pointed to him. “I think this one’s going to be a giraffe when he grows up.”
Sue shook her head. “No, he won’t. Giraffes eat vegetables.” Pete made a horrible face at the very idea.
Having company over made Carl forget he’d been crying and stare about wide-eyed. Chester wondered, not for the first time, what babies made of the world. It had to be confusing as hell. He put his son down, went into the kitchen, and pulled four bottles of Burgermeister out of the icebox. He set one on the counter by Rita, who was turning chicken pieces, and brought the others out for himself and Sue and Otis.
His brother-in-law raised his beer in salute. “Here’s to California,” he said.
“I’ll drink to that, by God,” Chester said, and did. “This place has saved my life. Back in Toledo, I’d still be out of work.”
“Oh, yes.” Blake nodded vigorously. “Back in Toledo, I was out of work, too. I’m not making as much as I did back there when I had a job—”
“Unions here aren’t what they were in Toledo,” Chester broke in.
“I’ve seen that,” Otis Blake agreed. “It’ll come, I think. But I’m working, and I’m not broke or on the dole. The way things have been since the stock market went south, I can’t complain.”
“That’s what years of hard times have done to us,” Chester said. “They’ve made us satisfied with less than we used to have. It’s not right.”
“What can we do about it, though?” his sister asked.
Before Chester could answer, Rita called, “Supper’s ready!” He felt like a prizefighter saved by the bell, because he didn’t know. He remembered the years when he’d eaten chicken gizzards and hearts because he couldn’t afford anything better. He’d even started to like them. Too often, though, he couldn’t afford them or beef heart or tripe or any of the other cheap meats. He remembered plate after plate of noodles or potatoes and cabbage, too.
Now, though, he grabbed himself a drumstick. The crispy skin burned his fingers. “Ow!” he said. Along with green beans and fried potatoes, it made a tasty meal—and he could leave the gizzard and heart and neck to Pete, who, since he’d started eating them as a kid, remained convinced they were treats. Later, when Chester saw everybody else had plenty, he also snagged a thigh. After juicy dark meat, giblets weren’t worth talking about, let alone eating.
Rita put Carl in his high chair and gave him small bits of food along with his bottle. He wound up wearing as much as he ate. He usually did. Pete watched in fascination. Sue said, “You used to eat that way, too.” The boy shook his head, denying even the possibility.
After apple pie, Rita made coffee for the grownups. Carl got fussy. She changed him and put him to bed. Otis Blake lit a cigarette. “Who are you two going to vote for when the election gets here?” he asked.
“Hoover hasn’t done anything much,” Chester said.
“Hoover hasn’t done anything, period,” Rita said. “I’m voting for Al Smith. I don’t know about him.” She pointed at her husband. She still hadn’t fully forgiven him for backing away from the Socialist camp in 1932.
He said, “I expect I’ll vote for Smith, too. The only thing that bothers me about him is that he’s never looked outside New York before now. I’m not sure he’s tough enough to spit in Jake Featherston’s eye if he has to.”
His brother-in-law scratched his head. He had a wide, perfect, permanent part in the middle of his scalp; had the bullet that made it been even a fraction of an inch lower, Sue would never have got the chance to meet him after the war. He said, “Don’t you think we need to worry about the USA more than we do about the CSA?”
“Not if another war’s brewing,” Chester said.
“Featherston fought in the last one,” Blake said. “He couldn’t be crazy enough to want to do that again. Besides, he’s firing generals. Remember? That was in the paper this past summer.”
“That’s true. It was,” Chester admitted. “I said I’d probably vote for Smith. I probably will.”
“Me, too,” Sue said. “Our folks are the only Democrats left in the family.”
Otis Blake snorted. “Yeah, they’re still Democrats even though your dad hasn’t got a job and can’t get one.” He and Chester had both sent Stephen Douglas Martin money whenever they could afford to.
The Blakes didn’t stay late. It was a Sunday night, with school ahead for Pete and work for Otis. After they left, Rita washed the dishes. Chester, who also had work in the morning, turned on the wireless before getting ready for bed. He found a news show.
“President Hoover vowed today to keep Houston in the United States regardless of Confederate pressure in the state,” the announcer said. “He also accused Governor Smith of having too soft a policy on the Confederate States. ‘Such well-meaning foolishness got the United States into trouble in the past two Socialist administrations,’ Hoover said. ‘I don’t intend to go down that mistaken road. We must be strong first. Everything else springs from that.’ ”
Chester grunted. Foreign policy was the only area where he favored the Democrats’ platform over the Socialists’. He shrugged. When you got right down to it, what happened in the USA counted for more than what happened outside. He’d voted against his class interest four years ago, and he’d spent most of the time since regretting it. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
The newscaster went on, “When asked for comment on the president’s remarks, Governor Smith said, ‘It’s hard to keep people in a country where they don’t want to stay. You would think the United States had learned that lesson after the War of Secession, but the present administration seems as thick-headed there as it does everywhere else.’ ”
Take that, Martin thought. He wasn’t sure he agreed with Al Smith, but he liked the way the governor of New York came back swinging hard when Hoover attacked him. The announcer went on to talk about the dust storms that were picking up the soil of drought-ridden Kansas and Sequoyah and Houston and blowing it east, so the dust came down in New York City and even on the decks of ships out of sight of land in the Atlantic. The winds blew from west to east, so the dust storms didn’t directly affect Los Angeles, but Martin had seen in newsreels how dreadful they were.
And farmers from the afflicted states were giving up any hope of bringing in a crop on their bone-dry farms. A lot of them were coming west by train or in rattletrap motorcars, looking for whatever work they could find. Two or three men who spoke with a twang had joined Chester’s construction crew. They worked hard enough to satisfy even the exacting Mordechai, who thought anybody who didn’t go home limp with exhaustion every night was a lazy son of a bitch.
Rita came out of the kitchen in the middle of the football scores. Since moving west himself, Chester had become passionately devoted to the fortunes of the Los Angeles Dons, the local franchise in the West Coast Football League. The Seattle Sharks, unfortunately, had smashed the hometown heroes, 31–10.
With an enormous yawn, Rita said, “I’m going to bed myself. He’s been so fussy the past few nights. He must be cutting a tooth, but I can’t find it yet. If he wakes up and he isn’t hungry, I wish you’d take him tonight.”
“All right.” Chester did rock Carl back to sleep every once in a while.
When the alarm clock went off the next morning, he woke up happy. He hadn’t heard a thing in the night, which meant the baby must have slept straight through. Or so he thought, till he got a look at Rita’s wan, sleepy face. Reproachfully, she said, “You told me you’d take him, but you just lay there while he cried, till finally I got up and got him. He didn’t want to go back to bed after that, either.”
“I’m sorry,” Martin said. “I never even heard him.” That was nothing but the truth. Because he didn’t usually get up when the baby cried, the noise Carl made didn’t rouse him, though he’d shut off the alarm clock as soon as it rang.
His wife looked as if she had trouble believing him. “I don’t see how you could have missed him. Half the neighbors must have heard,” she said. But he kept protesting his innocence, and finally persuaded her. She rubbed bloodshot eyes. “I wish I could sleep through a racket like that.”
Chester had slept through worse in the Great War. Bursting shells hadn’t fazed him then, not unless they landed very close. A man could get used to anything. Absently, Chester scratched along the seam of his pajama bottoms. He’d got used to being lousy, too, and the vermin hid and laid their eggs in seams.
After strong coffee, scrambled eggs, and toast, he grabbed his tool kit and headed for the trolley stop. A man who had work clung to it. He didn’t give anyone the chance to take it away. Martin knew what he had to do. He aimed to do it. One day, he wanted to have the money to buy a house. His father had never owned one, living in apartments all his days. I can do better than that, Martin thought—a great American war cry. I can, and, by God, I will.
Polite as usual, Heber Young nodded to Abner Dowling. “I am afraid, Colonel, that this is our final meeting,” said the unofficial leader of the even more unofficial Mormon movement.
Dowling blinked “What’s that you say, Mr. Young?” His mouth fell open. Several chins wobbled.
“I am very sorry, but I have concluded that the United States are not serious about negotiating with the people of Utah,” Young said. “This being so, my continued presence no longer serves any useful purpose. I have better things to do with my time, to do with my life, than try to turn back the tide.”
That was some sort of legend. Dowling knew as much, though he couldn’t recall the details. He said, “I hope you’ll reconsider, Mr. Young. I know you to be a man of good will and a man of good sense. Your people will be the losers if you walk away.”
“So I have told myself many times—I am no less vain than any other man,” Heber Young replied gravely. “Telling myself such fables has kept me coming here to your headquarters these past several years, even though I know President Hoover has tied your hands. I believe you would be more liberal if not constrained by orders from Philadelphia. After so many futile discussions, though, I find I no longer have the heart for any more.”
“If you were any man but yourself, I would say the Confederate hotheads had got to you.” Dowling didn’t hide his anger and disappointment. “If you leave the scene, they will get to your people, and the results will not be happy.” He didn’t need Winthrop W. Webb’s prediction to see that, but the spy’s judgment here matched his own all too well.
“I shall have to take that chance,” Young said. “I am still not altogether convinced these men serve the CSA and not the USA.” He held up a hasty hand. “Please understand me, Colonel—I do not claim you are lying when you deny planting provocateurs among us. I believe you—you personally, that is. But whether someone else in the U.S. government is using such men … of that, I am less certain.”
Abner Dowling grunted. He wasn’t a hundred percent certain no U.S. officials were using provocateurs here in Utah, either. He wished he were, but he wasn’t. Since he wasn’t, he thought it wiser not to talk any more about that. Instead, he said, “You tell me you’re unhappy with the orders I get from back East? I admit I haven’t been happy about all of them myself.”
“Because you are honest enough to admit such things, I’ve kept coming back to talk with you,” Young said. “But no more. I am sorry, Colonel—I am very sorry, in fact—but enough is enough.” He started to get to his feet and walk out of Dowling’s office.
“Wait!” Dowling exclaimed.
“Why?” The Mormon was still polite, but implacable.
“Why? For the results of the election, that’s why,” the commandant of Salt Lake City answered. “If Smith beats Hoover, isn’t it likely I’ll have new orders after the first of next February?”
“Hmm.” Heber Young had already taken his dark homburg by the brim. Now he hesitated: perhaps the first time Dowling had ever seen him indecisive. He set the hat back on the tree and returned to the chair across the desk from Dowling. “Now that is interesting, Colonel. That is very interesting. You would follow more liberal orders if you received them?”
“I am a soldier, sir. I am obliged to follow all legitimate orders I receive.” Dowling didn’t tell the Mormon leader he intended to vote for Hoover, or that he hoped the incumbent would trounce Al Smith. Young likely knew as much. But he had told the truth. As if to prove it, he said, “Didn’t I try to get public-works jobs for Utah just after Hoover took over?” The president had forbidden the scheme, but Young couldn’t say he hadn’t tried.
“You did,” Young admitted. He rubbed his square chin. Then, abruptly, he nodded; once he had made up his mind, he didn’t hesitate. “All right, Colonel Dowling. I will wait and see what happens in the election. If Hoover wins a second term, that will be the end of that. If Smith wins … If Smith wins, I will see what happens next. Good day.” Now he did take his hat. Tipping it, he left.
Dowling allowed himself a sigh of relief. If Heber Young walked away from talks with the occupying authorities, that in itself might have been enough to ignite Utah. Dowling’s career wasn’t where it would have been if he hadn’t spent so many years as George Custer’s adjutant, but he still had hopes for it. With a Utah uprising on his record, he would have been dead in the water as far as hopes of getting stars on his shoulders one day went.
The telephone in the outer office rang. His own adjutant answered it. A moment later, the telephone on Dowling’s desk rang. “Abner Dowling,” he said crisply into the mouthpiece. He listened and nodded, though no one was there to see it. “That’s very good news. Thanks for passing it on.” He hung up.
Captain Toricelli came into the inner office, his face alight. “Barrels!” he said. “They’re really going to give them to us!”
“I only started shouting for them a year or so ago,” Dowling said. “The way things work back in Philadelphia, they’re on the dead run.”
“We could all have been dead by the time they got here,” Captain Toricelli said.
“If we had died, that’s the one thing I can think of that would have got them here faster,” Dowling said. His adjutant laughed. He wondered why. He hadn’t been kidding.
Being promised the machines didn’t mean getting them right away. When they did arrive, he was grievously disappointed. He’d been hoping for new barrels, and what he got were Great War retreads. They must have come from Houston; most of them still showed fresh bullet scars and other combat-related damage to their armor.
“I can move faster than one of these things,” Dowling said scornfully. Since he was built like a rolltop desk, that was unlikely to be true. But it wasn’t very false, either. A man in good shape could outrun one of these snorting monsters. Dowling eyed the crewmen, duffel bags on their shoulders, who dismounted from passenger cars. “They take a couple of squads’ worth of men apiece, too,” he grumbled; he remembered that very well from Great War days.
“Yes, sir,” Captain Toricelli answered. “But they’re better than nothing.”
“I suppose so,” Dowling said unwillingly. Then he brightened, a little. “I suppose new barrels are coming off the line. They’d have to be, eh? They must be going straight to Houston—and to Kentucky now, too.”
“That makes sense to me.” Toricelli sounded faintly aggrieved. What was the world coming to when a superior started making sense?
Three days later, a pair of barrels rumbled up Temple Street and took up positions in Temple Square. Dowling thought that would be the least inflammatory way he could use them. Temple Square had been under guard ever since the U.S. Army leveled the Mormon Temple and killed the last stubborn defenders there. Bits of granite from the Temple were potent relics to Mormons who opposed the government. That struck Dowling as medieval, which made it no less true. Soldiers had always had orders to shoot to kill whenever anyone tried to abscond with a fragment.
Dowling wasn’t particularly surprised when Heber Young paid him a call a few days later. He did his best to pretend he was, saying, “And to what do I owe the pleasure of your company this time, Mr. Young?”
“Those … horrible machines.” Young was furious, and making only the barest effort to hide it. “How dare you pollute Temple Square with their presence?”
“For one thing, we’ve had soldiers in the square for years. The barrels just reinforce them,” Dowling answered. “For another, I want people here to know we have them, and that we’ll use them if we need to. It might—prevent rashness, I guess you’d say.”
Heber Young shook his head. “More likely to provoke than to prevent.”
“No.” Dowling shook his head. “I am very sorry, sir, but I cannot agree. To my mind, the safety of my men and the protection of U.S. interests in Utah must come first.”
“Those infernal machines promote neither,” the Mormon leader insisted.
They looked at each other. Not for the first time, they found they were both using English but speaking two altogether different languages. “I would be derelict in my duties if I did not use barrels,” Dowling said.
“Using them is what makes you derelict.” Young eyed him, then sighed. “I see I do not persuade you. I don’t suppose I should have expected to. Yet hope does spring eternal in the human breast. I tell you, Colonel, no good will come from your using these machines.”
“Do you threaten me, Mr. Young?”
“Colonel, if I tell you the sun will come up tomorrow, is that a threat? I would not say so. I would call it a prediction based on what I know of past events. I would call this the same thing.” He stood up, politely challenging Dowling to arrest him for sedition after he’d come and put his head in the lion’s jaws. Dowling couldn’t, and he knew it. The word that Heber Young languished in a U.S. prison would touch off insurrection, regardless of whether the barrels in Temple Square did. As Young turned to go, he added, “If the government were generous enough to grant me the franchise, you may rest assured I would vote for Al Smith, in the hope that such discussions as this one would become unnecessary. Good day, Colonel Dowling.” Out he went, a man whose moral force somehow made him worth battalions.
Four days later, one of the barrels caught fire on the way from the U.S. base to its turn at Temple Square. All eighteen crewmen escaped, and nobody shot at them as they burst from the doomed machine’s hatches. Word came to Dowling almost at once. Cursing, he left the base in an auto and zoomed down Temple toward the blazing barrel.
By the time he got there, the fire had already started touching off ammunition. The fireworks display was spectacular, with red tracer rounds zooming in all directions. A fire engine roared up not long after Dowling arrived. It started spraying water on the barrel from as far away as the stream from the hose would reach. That struck him as being about as futile as offering last rites to a man smashed by a speeding locomotive, but he didn’t think it could do any harm, so he kept quiet about it.
“How did this happen?” he demanded of the barrel’s commander, a captain named Witherspoon.
“Sir, I don’t know.” Witherspoon nursed a burned hand.
He’ll live, Dowling thought savagely. “Was it sabotage?” he asked.
“Sir, I don’t know,” Captain Witherspoon repeated. “It could have been, but… .” He shrugged. “This machine has to be almost twenty years old. Plenty of things can go wrong with it any which way. A leak in a fuel line, a leak in an oil line …” Another shrug. He pointed toward the burning barrel, from which a thick cloud of black smoke rose. “We’ll never know now, that’s for damn sure.”
“Yes. It is,” Dowling said unhappily. Were people in Salt Lake City laughing because they’d got away with one? Worse, were people in Richmond laughing because they’d got away with one?
Kaplan’s, on the Lower East Side, was a delicatessen Flora Blackford hadn’t visited for years. That got driven home the minute she walked in the door. She remembered the foxy-red hair of Lou Kaplan, the proprietor; it made you want to warm your hands over it. Kaplan was still behind the counter. These days, though, his hair was white.
These days, Flora’s hair had more than a little gray in it, too. She saw her brother at a table in the corner. She waved. David Hamburger nodded. She hurried over to him. Her little brother had a double chin, tired eyes, and gray in his own hair. The things time does to us! Flora thought, sudden tears stinging her eyes. She blinked them away. “It’s good to see you, David,” she said. “It’s been too long.”
He shrugged. “I get by. I like being a tailor. I like it better than being a Congressman’s brother, and a lot better than being a First Lady’s brother. You can’t say I ever bothered you for anything, the way important people’s relatives do.”
“Bothered me?” Flora shook her head. “I wish you would have. Most of the time, you wouldn’t even talk to me. You don’t visit… .”
“I don’t get out much.” David tapped the cane leaning against his chair. He’d lost a leg in the war, not far below the hip. He could walk with a prosthesis, but only painfully. As if to emphasize that, he pointed to the chair across from him and said, “Sit down, for heaven’s sake. You know why I’m not going to get up till I have to.”
Flora did sit. A waitress came over to her and David. They both ordered. The pause meant she didn’t have to call him on what she knew to be an evasion. He was, after all, here at Kaplan’s. He could have come to Socialist Party headquarters once in a while, too. He could have, but he hadn’t.
Politics estranged them. Flora had never thought that could happen in her family, but it had. Her brother had come out of the war a staunch Democrat. It was as if, having been crippled, he didn’t want his wound to have been in vain, and so joined the party that was hardest on the CSA.
Flora reached into the jar across the table, pulled out a pickled tomato, and bit into it. She smiled; the taste and the vinegar tang in the air and the crunch took her back to her childhood. “Can’t get things like this in Dakota, or even down in Philadelphia,” she said.
That won her a grudging smile from David. “No, I don’t suppose you would,” he said, and then fell silent again as the waitress brought his pastrami sandwich and Flora’s corned beef on rye. He sipped from an egg cream, which had neither egg nor cream in it. Flora’s drink was a seltzer with a shpritz of raspberry syrup on top, something else unmatchable outside of New York City.
“Is your family well?” Flora asked.
“Well enough,” he answered. “Amazing how fast children grow.”
She nodded; Joshua had taught her that. She said, “I’m glad—” and then broke off, hoping he would think she’d intended it for a complete sentence. David had feared no one would ever want to marry a one-legged man. She’d started to say she was glad he’d been wrong about that, but hadn’t known how he would take it.
By his tight-lipped smile, he knew where she’d been going. But then he shrugged, visibly setting aside annoyance. He said, “These past couple of years, I see you’ve finally started to understand what nice people the Confederates really are. Better late than never, that’s all I’ve got to say.”
“It’s not the Confederate people. It’s the Freedom Party,” Flora said. “Reactionaries have seized control of the apparatus of the state, the same as they have in France.”
David Hamburger rolled his eyes. “I don’t suppose that would have happened if the people hadn’t voted them in, now would it?”
“Well …” Flora winced. Her brother’s comment was painfully pungent, but that didn’t mean it was wrong.
“Yes. Well,” he said. “Listen, if it comes to a fight we’d better be ready. That’s the big thing I wanted to tell you. We’ve got to, you hear me? Otherwise, this”—he made a fist and hit his artificial leg, which gave back a sound like knocking on a door—“was for nothing, and I don’t think I could stand that.”
“It won’t come to war,” Flora said in genuine alarm. “Not even Hoover thinks it’ll come to war.”
“Hoover’s one of the best men we’ve ever had for getting things done,” David said, “and one of the worst for figuring out what to do. That’s how it looks to me, anyhow. Of course, I’m no political bigwig. Nu, am I right or am I meshuggeh?”
“You’re a lot of things, but you’re not meshuggeh,” Flora answered. He’d summed up Hoover better than most editorial columnists she’d seen. “I still think you worry too much about the CSA, though. They have more tsuris than we do.”
“Just because you have tsuris doesn’t mean you can’t give it.” David finished his sandwich. He used one hand to help lever himself upright. Taking hold of the cane, he said, “They’ll send you back to Congress in a couple of days. I’m not telling you to listen to me—when did you ever? But keep your eyes open.”
“I always do,” Flora insisted. Her brother didn’t argue. He just walked out of Kaplan’s, with a slow, rolling gait like a drunken sailor’s. That let the knee joint in the artificial leg lock each time he took a step, and kept it from buckling under him. Flora wanted to go after him, but what was the point? They hadn’t had anything in common for years. A sad lunch talking politics proved as much, as if it needed proof.
That evening, she made a speech in a union hall, and got cheered till her ears rang. More loud cheers greeted her after her two speeches the day before the election. She shook hands till her own was swollen and sore—and she knew how to minimize the damage while she did it.
She expected she would win reelection, too. Her district was solidly Socialist; it had gone Democratic for a little while in the despair following the collapse, but then repented of its folly. What she didn’t know—what nobody knew—was whether the country would have its revenge on Herbert Hoover, as it had had its revenge on her husband four years earlier.
Tuesday, November 3, was cold and rainy. Flora went out and voted early, so the reporters and photographers who waited at her polling place could get their stories and pictures into the papers before the polls closed. She knew her Democratic opponent was doing the same thing. This way, their appearances canceled each other out. If she hadn’t come early, he would have grabbed an edge—a small one, but an edge nonetheless.
“I think Smith will whip him,” Hosea Blackford said when Flora came back to their apartment after voting: he was still registered in Dakota, and had cast an absentee ballot. He’d stayed on the sidelines during the campaign. For one thing, his own reputation wouldn’t help either Flora or the Socialist Party. For another, he was getting ever more fragile. He still managed pretty well as long as he stuck close to home. Out in crowds these days, though, he seemed not only frail but also slightly baffled. That worried Flora.
She took her son with her to Socialist Party headquarters for the Fourteenth Ward, then, but not her husband. Most of her family was there, too, although her nephew, Yossel, was serving out his time as a conscript on occupation duty in Canada, and David, as usual, gave the Socialists a wide berth.
Flora was glad Yossel had been sent north rather than down to Houston. That was a running sore that would not heal. Hoover had made a mess of things there, but Flora had no idea what a Socialist president might have done to make things better.
When she came in, Herman Bruck boomed, “Let’s all welcome Congresswoman Hamburger!” He turned red as a bonfire. “Congresswoman Blackford!” he said, blushing still. “But I knew her when she was Congresswoman Hamburger.”
He had, too. It was twenty years now—and where had the time gone?—since she’d beaten him for the nomination to this seat when Myron Zuckerman, the longtime incumbent, fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. If that hadn’t happened …
With a shake of her head, Flora tried to drive that thought out of her mind. It wasn’t easy. The past couple of years, there’d been a spate of what people called “worlds of if” novels. If the USA had won the War of Secession or the Second Mexican War, if the Negro uprising had succeeded in the CSA, if the Red uprising had succeeded in Russia … If, if, if. Dealing with the world as it was was hard enough for most people. Flora didn’t think the “worlds of if” fad would last.
Bruck turned on a wireless set. He got loud music, and then, as he turned the dial, a quiz show. A couple of young women perked up at that, but he kept changing stations till he found one that was giving election returns. “With the polls just closing in New York …” the announcer said. A burst of static squelched him.
Another station farther down the dial came in better. It was announcing early returns from Massachusetts. Cheers rang out in the Socialist headquarters when the broadcaster said Smith was leading Hoover three to two. The station switched to an interview with a Boston Democratic leader. “Doesn’t look good for us heah,” the man said in a gravelly, New England–accented voice. “Have to hope Smith and Borah don’t drag the local candidates down too fah.”
“Thank you, Mr. Kennedy,” the interviewer said.
“Yes, thank you, Mr. Kennedy!” Maria Tresca said. She and Flora grinned at each other. The two of them had been friends for more than twenty years, too. It was partly a matter of living in a largely Jewish district, partly sheer luck, that Flora and not Maria had succeeded in politics.
As soon as Flora heard Al Smith was ahead in Massachusetts, she knew the night would belong to the Socialists. And so it proved. She handily won her own race; her Democratic opponent called before eleven o’clock to throw in the towel. That brought more cheers in the headquarters, though by then everyone was starting to get hoarse. The air was blue with cigarette, cigar, and pipe smoke, which helped make throats raw.
President Hoover’s spokesman kept issuing statements along the lines of, “The current trend cannot be overlooked, but the president will not concede the election before he is sure his victory is impossible.”
Herman Bruck pulled out a bottle of champagne, an upper-class touch for the party of the proletariat. He brought Flora a glass—not a fancy flute, but an ordinary water glass. “Here’s to Hoover! His victory is impossible!” he said.
“Alevai, omayn!” Flora drank. The bubbles tickled her nose.
Bruck had a glass, too. “Did you ever imagine, when we first started here, we would win Powel House, lose it, and win it back?” he asked. “Did you ever imagine you would be First Lady?”
“Don’t be silly.” She shook her head. “How could I? How could anyone?”
He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. People all around them cheered. Flora laughed. She wasn’t so sure Herman had done it just to congratulate her. He’d been sweet on her before she won her first election and went to Philadelphia, even if she hadn’t been sweet on him. Now they’d both been married to other people for years. But he just smiled when she wagged a finger at him, and everyone else laughed and cheered some more. On a night full of victory, she didn’t push it.