He went on as if she hadn’t spoken: “If the people above you are happy with you, though, things are liable to go a lot better for you.”
She knew how he wanted to be above her: on a bed in some cheap hotel room. She found the idea more appalling than appealing. Now that George was gone, she did have times when she missed a man, sometimes very much. Frank Best, though, was emphatically not the man she missed.
Not understanding him seemed the safest course here. “I’ll be extra careful from now on, Mr. Best. I promise I will.”
He gave her a sour look. She wondered if he would make himself plainer. If he said, Sleep with me or lose your job, what would she do? She’d get up and quit, that was what. Maybe her expression said as much, for he turned and walked away, muttering under his breath.
Sylvia got back to work. She took extra care with the rings all morning long. If Best wanted an excuse to bother her, he’d have to invent one; she didn’t want to give him any. She felt his eye on her more than once, but pretended not to notice. At last, the lunch whistle blew.
“Was Frank singing his little be-nice-or-else song at you?” Sarah Wyckoff asked, gnawing on a chicken leg probably left over from supper the night before.
“He sure was.” Sylvia took a fierce bite of her own sandwich, which was made from day-old bread and sausage that tasted as if it were about half sawdust. For all Sylvia knew, it was. It cost half as much as a better brand. That mattered.
“He has no shame,” May Cavendish said. “None.”
“He’s a foreman,” Sarah said. “Of course he has no shame.”
“A foreman at the canning plant where I used to work got one of the girls there in a family way,” Sylvia said. Her friends made sad clucking noises and nodded knowingly. “I never found out if he married her afterwards or not—I got fired because I had to take care of my kids when they caught the chicken pox.”
She thought Isabella Antonelli would have come and let her know if everything had turned out all right. She hadn’t seen the other woman from the canning plant in a long time. That might have meant Isabella was deliriously happy and didn’t need her any more. It was more likely to mean the foreman from the canning plant had left her in the lurch. Sylvia wondered if she’d ever find out what had happened. Life didn’t tie up every loose end with a neat bow, the way novels did.
“That’s just like a man.” Sarah Wyckoff studied her own brawny forearm. “Nobody’s going to trifle with me, not and keep his teeth he won’t.”
May sighed. “Men make it so you don’t want to live with them, and they make it so you can’t hardly make a living by yourself. You don’t make as much as a man would doing the same job, and they don’t let you do half the jobs anyhow. You tell me what’s fair about that.”
“If they didn’t pay us less than they would a man, we wouldn’t have these jobs we’ve got here,” Sylvia said. The other two women nodded.
“And they won’t let us vote here in Massachusetts, either,” May said bitterly. “They’ve got to pass a law that says we can, and who’s got to pass it? Men, that’s who. You think more than half the men over at the New State House are going to vote for women? Hasn’t happened yet, and I’m not going to hold my breath, either.”
“There are a lot of states where it did happen.” Sylvia’s voice was wistful. “The world didn’t end, either.”
“You’d figure it did, the way some men carry on,” Sarah said. “May’s right. They aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.”
May ate an apple down to a very skinny core, then took out a pack of cigarettes. She lit one, then blew an elegant smoke ring. “I like a smoke after I eat,” she said. “Sort of settles what’s in there, if you know what I mean.”
“I sure do.” Sylvia got out her own cigarettes. The front of the pack showed soldiers in green-gray marching to victory. Nobody ever showed the mangled corpses of soldiers in green-gray and sailors in Navy blue who didn’t live to see victory. Sylvia never would have thought that way if she hadn’t lost George. Now, deliberately, she turned the pack over so she wouldn’t have to see those pink-cheeked soldiers. “Thanks for giving me a cigarette that time, May. I like ’em now.”
“Good.” May Cavendish had been about to put her cigarettes back into her handbag. She stopped and aimed the pack at Sarah. “Want to try ’em?”
“No, thanks.” Sarah shook her head. “I’ve smoked a couple of times. Never liked it enough to keep up with it. Don’t expect I would now, either.”
“Have it your own way,” May said with a shrug. She did put away the pack.
Sylvia smoked her cigarette with determination. She coughed only once. Her chest was getting used to tobacco smoke, too. And May was right: even without the buzz she’d got when first starting the habit, a smoke after dinner or supper was more enjoyable than just about any other time.
George had liked to smoke after they made love. Sylvia’s ears heated as she remembered that. She wondered what taking a deep drag while lazy in the afterglow would be like. Probably pretty nice, she thought. Would she ever have the chance to find out?
“There have to be some decent men out there somewhere,” she said suddenly.
“A lot of them are dead,” Sarah said. “My Martin is.” She sighed and looked down at the grimy wood of the floor. “I still can’t think about him without wanting to puddle up. I don’t even know if I’d ever want to be with anybody else.”
“I would, if I could find somebody,” May said. “But a lot of the men who are decent are settled down with their wives, on account of that’s what decent men do, and a lot of men, whether they’re decent or not, don’t want anything to do with you if you’ve got children.”
“Oh, there’s one thing they want to do with you,” Sylvia said. Both her friends laughed at the obvious truth in that. Sylvia went on, “But those aren’t the decent ones. Maybe I ought to go to church more often, but Sunday’s the only chance I have to rest even a little, not that I can get much with two kids in the house.”
“Plenty of men who go to church every livelong Sunday aren’t what you’d call decent, either,” May said, sounding as if she was speaking with the voice of experience. “They don’t go there to pray or to listen to the sermon—they go on account of they’re on the prowl.”
“That’s disgraceful,” Sylvia said.
“Sweetheart, there’s a whole lot of disgraceful things that go on in this world,” Sarah Wyckoff said with authority. “You don’t have to look no further than Frank Best if you want to see some.”
“Well, heaven knows that’s true,” Sylvia said with a sigh. “Now that I’ve told him no, I only hope he leaves me alone and doesn’t take it out on me like he said he was liable to.”
“All depends,” said May, who’d been at the galoshes factory longer than Sylvia. “If he finds somebody who goes along with him before too long, he’ll forget about you. If he doesn’t, you may not have such a good time for a while.”
Sylvia wondered how she ought to feel about hoping some other young woman succumbed to what Best thought of as his fatal charm. It would make her own life easier, no doubt about that. But would she wish the foreman on anyone else? She couldn’t imagine disliking anyone enough to hope she suffered such a fate.
When the whistle announcing the end of the lunch hour blew, she headed without enthusiasm back to her position just behind the galoshes molds. She reminded herself to do the best job she could painting rings on the rubber overshoes, to give Frank Best no reason to bother her.
But would he need an excuse? Here he came. That wasn’t blood in his eye. Sylvia recognized the expression. George had often worn it when he’d been away at sea for a long time. Frank Best hadn’t been, though she would cheerfully have dropped him off a pier. He wore the expression anyhow. Sylvia sighed. The end of the day seemed years away.
Sometimes, Roger Kimball still wished he’d gone to South America. Every so often, the Charleston papers gave tantalizing bits of news about the fighting that con
tinued down there even though the Great War was over everywhere else. The local enmities had started long before the war, and weren’t about to disappear because it did. Everybody but Paraguay and Bolivia needed submarine skippers, and they would have if only they’d had coastlines.
But he’d stayed in Charleston almost two years now, and he’d probably stay a while longer. For one thing, he saw Anne Colleton every so often: not so often as he would have liked, not quite so seldom as to make him give up in dismay. He understood how carefully she rationed their liaisons. It would have infuriated him more if he hadn’t admired her, too.
And, for another, he’d found, or thought he’d found, a way to help put the Confederate States back on their feet. Clarence Potter, who’d become a friend instead of a barroom acquaintance, thought he was crazy. “I can’t believe you’ve gotten yourself sucked into the Freedom Party,” Potter said one evening in Kimball’s small furnished apartment. “Those people couldn’t start a fire if you spotted them a lit torch and kindling.”
“I’m one of those people, Clarence,” Kimball said, with only a slight edge to his voice, “and I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head.”
“No, you’re not,” Potter said. “Your deplorable taste in politics aside, you’re an intelligent man. Believe me, that makes you stand out from the common herd in the Freedom Party. It makes you stand out from Jake Featherston, too.” He held up a hand. “Don’t get me wrong—Featherston’s not stupid. But he has no more education than you’d expect, and the only thing he’s good at is getting up on the stump and making everyone else as angry as he is.”
Jack Delamotte took a pull at his whiskey. “I’ve heard him talk myself now. He even makes me angry, and I’m usually too damn lazy to get mad about anything.”
“We need to get angry, dammit,” Kimball said. “Too much wrong with this country not to get angry about it. The money’s still not worth anything, the damnyankees won’t let us have a proper Army and Navy, and half the niggers in the country act like they own it. You can’t tell me different. You know damn well it’s true.”
“Featherston has about as good a chance of solving those problems as the man in the moon,” Potter said. “Maybe less.”
“Clarence is right,” Jack Delamotte said. “He’s like one of those nigger preachers. He gets folks all hot and bothered, sure as hell, but you look at what he says and you see he doesn’t really say anything at all.”
“That’s all right,” Kimball said placidly. Potter and Delamotte both looked startled. Kimball pointed at the former intelligence officer. “Clarence, the first time we met, you were talking about finding a goal for the CSA and getting people to stick to it. You remember that?”
“Of course I do,” Potter said. “It was true then, and it’s still true now. It’s truer than ever now, because we’ve drifted longer without a rudder.”
Kimball chuckled. “Trying to talk like a Navy man, are you? Well, all right, go ahead. But you know this Featherston character, right?” He waited for Potter to nod, then went on, “Like Jack said, he’s awful damn good at riling people up. If he doesn’t have any kind of education, so what? So much the better, matter of fact. What do you say we get hold of him and give him the kind of ideas the Confederate States need to get back on their feet?”
“You and me and Clarence, saving the country?” Delamotte didn’t just seem dubious; he seemed on the point of laughing out loud.
“Somebody’s got to,” Roger Kimball answered. He wasn’t laughing, not now. “Nobody in Richmond knows how, that’s for damn sure. What do you say, Clarence? Will Featherston listen to you?”
Potter rubbed his chin. His gray eyes held uncertainty, something Kimball had rarely seen in them. At last, he said, “I don’t know for certain. He hated officers in general, but he didn’t hate me in particular, because I did him some good turns. But does that mean we’d be able to steer him the way we want him to go? I’m not sure. I’m not sure he’s in the habit of listening to anybody, either. He’s as stubborn as they come.”
Jack Delamotte looked down into his glass, which was empty. “Easy enough to get on a tiger’s back,” he observed. “How do you get off again?”
“Oh, we’d manage that,” Potter said confidently. “Any of the three of us—even you, Jack, no matter how lackadaisical you let yourself get—is a match for Featherston and then some.”
“That’s settled, then,” Kimball said, though it wasn’t, not anywhere close. “We’ll get hold of Featherston, fill him full of what we figure he ought to say, and get people to pay attention to what really needs doing.” He picked up the whiskey bottle from the table, yanked out the cork, and poured fresh drinks for himself and his friends. They solemnly clinked glasses.
As was his way, Kimball wasted no time trying to make what he planned come true. He’d become a familiar fixture at the Freedom Party offices over on King Street, next to the headquarters of the Washington Light Infantry, a unit that, as its name suggested, had fought in the wars of the CSA and the USA since the Revolution. “No, Commander,” a fellow there said from behind a typewriter, “I don’t know when Sergeant Featherston will be coming into South Carolina again. It shouldn’t be too long, though. With Congressional elections this fall, he’ll be doing a deal of traveling, I reckon. We aim to send Richmond a message from all across the country.”
“That’s fine,” Kimball said. “That’s mighty fine. Thing is, I’d like to send a message to Sergeant Featherston.” Having failed to become an officer, the leader of the Freedom Party took an upside-down pride in his noncommissioned rank. Kimball kept his face carefully straight while referring to it. “I just found out a friend of mine served in the Army of Northern Virginia and got to know him pretty well up there. He’d like to have the chance to say hello.”
“A lot of people served in the Army of Northern Virginia,” the Freedom Party man said. “I did myself, as a matter of fact. And you’d be surprised how many of them say now that they knew Sergeant Featherston then.”
“My friend’s name is Potter, Clarence Potter,” Kimball said patiently. “He told me the name I should mention is Pompey, that Sergeant Featherston would know what it meant.” Quite casually, he set a gold dollar, a tiny little coin, on the desk by the typewriter.
The Freedom Party man licked his lips. A gold dollar could buy a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of banknotes these days. He made the coin disappear: not hard when it was so small. “I reckon I can arrange a wire up to Richmond. You’re right—I know he’d be glad to hear from an old friend, and especially through Party channels.”
Kimball could have sent the telegram himself. But how many telegrams did Jake Featherston get every day? Piles, without a doubt. He’d made himself widely known through the CSA. How many of those telegrams got tossed unread? He’d pay more attention to the ones that came from inside his own outfit.
“Thanks, friend,” Kimball said, and headed off to a poker game well pleased with himself. He won, too, which left him even more pleased.
When he strolled back into the Freedom Party headquarters a couple of days later, the fellow who’d pocketed the gold dollar held out a pale yellow telegram. Kimball took it with a confidence that evaporated as he read the message: MAJOR POTTER—IF YOU CARED ABOUT SEEING ME, YOU COULD HAVE DONE IT A LONG TIME AGO. FEATHERSTON, SGT., 1ST RICHMOND HOWITZERS.
“He knows your friend, I reckon,” the Freedom Party man said, “but it doesn’t sound like he’s real hot to pay him a visit.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Kimball agreed morosely. “Thanks for trying, anyhow.” Now that he knew the man took bribes, he might want to pay him off again, which meant not growling at him now.
But what he really wanted to do was get hold of Jake Featherston. If Potter’s name wasn’t the key that fit the lock, he needed one that would. As he left the Freedom Party office, he snapped his fingers. Maybe he knew where to find it.
Since he had no telephone in his flat, he went over to the telephone exchang
e building and placed a call up to St. Matthews. It took a little while to go through. By now, Anne Colleton’s brother was used to Kimball calling, even if he didn’t quite accept him. But Anne answered the telephone herself. “Hello, Roger!” she said when she found out who was on the other end of the line. “What can I do for you today?”
Kimball had learned to read her tone of voice. It said, If you’re calling because you want to sleep with me, forget about it. Under other circumstances, that would have angered him. It still did, a little, but he buried that. “What do you think of the Freedom Party?” he asked.
He took her by surprise. There were several seconds of silence up in St. Matthews before she answered, “I haven’t really thought much about it one way or the other. It certainly has been making a lot of noise lately, though, hasn’t it?” Now she might have been a detective whipping out a magnifying glass. “Why do you want to know?”
He explained what he had in mind for the Freedom Party, finishing, “People are starting to listen to this Featherston. If he says the right things, he might be the one who can haul the country out of the swamp.”
“Well,” Anne said after another thoughtful pause, “I don’t know what I expected you to say when you called, but that wasn’t it.” She hesitated again. “Why do you think Featherston would listen to me?”
Kimball hadn’t wanted Featherston listening to her; he’d wanted the Freedom Party leader listening to what he had to say. Maybe Anne would say the same things he would have, but he had no guarantee about that. Still, she was waiting for an answer, and he gave her a blunt one: “You’ve got money. You ever hear of a politician—any sort of politician—who didn’t need money?”
She laughed. “You’re right about that, heaven knows—and so do I, the hard way. I don’t know that I want to spend any of my money on the Freedom Party, but I don’t know that I don’t, either. Let me do some checking around and see if it would be money well spent. If I decide it is, I expect I can find a way to let Featherston know I want to have a talk with him.”
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