“Are you saying you can’t be responsible for all the crazy people who follow you?” The fellow from the Whig wouldn’t give up.
“There’s crazy people in every party. Look in the mirror if you don’t believe me,” Jake replied. “And I’ll say it again, on account of you weren’t listening: the jury acquitted those fellows from the Freedom Party. I don’t know who burned Brearley’s house, and neither do the cops. No way to tell if it was Freedom Party men or a bunch of riled-up Whigs.”
“Not likely,” the reporter said.
Privately, Featherston thought he was right. Publicly, the Freedom Party leader shrugged. “Anything else, boys?” he asked. None of the reporters said anything. Jake shrugged again. “All right, then. We didn’t win, but we don’t surrender, either. And that’s about all I’ve got to say.” The newspapermen stood scribbling for a bit, then went off one by one to file their stories.
When the last one was out of earshot, Ferdinand Koenig said, “You handled that real well, Jake.”
“Said I would, didn’t I?” Jake answered. “Christ, I spent three years under fire. Damn me to hell if I’m going to let some stinking newspapermen rattle me.”
“All right,” Koenig said. “I was a little worried, and I don’t deny it. Hard loss to take, and you are sort of lit up.” Again, he told Featherston the truth as he saw it.
“Sort of,” Jake allowed. “But hell, you think those fellows with the notebooks are stone cold sober? Not likely! They’ve been drinking my booze all night long.”
Koenig laughed. “That’s true, but nobody cares what they say. People do care what you say. What do you say about where we go from here?”
“Same thing I’ve been saying all along.” Jake was surprised the question needed asking. “We go straight ahead, right on down this same road, till we win.”
As she did any evening she was at her apartment by herself, Flora Hamburger waited for a knock on the door. All too often, the quiet, discreet knock didn’t come. There were times these days—and, especially, these nights—when she felt lonelier than she had when she’d first got to Philadelphia almost five years before. That it was a few days before Christmas only made things worse. The whole city was in a holiday mood, which left her, a Jew, on the outside looking in.
She sat on the sofa, working her way through President Sinclair’s proposed budget for the Post Office Department. It was exactly as exciting as it sounded. Did the president really need to revise the definitions for third- and fourth-class post offices? At the moment, she hadn’t the faintest idea. Before long, though, the bill would come to a vote. She owed it to her constituents—she owed it to the country—to make her vote as well informed as she could.
Someone knocked on the door: the knock she’d been waiting for, the knock she’d almost given up expecting.
She sprang to her feet. Pages of the Post Office budget flew every which way. Flora noticed, but didn’t care. She hurried to the door and threw it open. There stood Hosea Blackford. “Come in,” Flora said, and the vice president of the United States did. She closed the door behind him, closed it and locked it.
Blackford kissed her, then said, “You’d better have something to drink in this place, dear, or I’ll have to go across the hall and come back.”
“I do,” Flora said. “Sit down. Wait. I’ll be right back.” She went into the kitchen, poured him some whiskey, and then poured herself some, too.
“You are a lifesaver,” he said, and gulped it down.
Flora sat down beside him. She drank her whiskey more slowly. “You look tired,” she said.
To her surprise, Blackford burst into raucous laughter. “God knows why. All I do is sit in a corner and gather dust—excuse me, preside over the Senate. There’s not much difference between the two, believe me. I’ve spent most of my life in the middle of the arena. Now…now I’m a $12,000-a-year hatrack, is what I am.”
“You knew this would happen when Sinclair picked you,” Flora said.
“Of course I did. But there’s a difference between knowing and actually having it happen to you.” Blackford sighed. “And I wanted it when he picked me. The first Socialist vice president in the history of the United States! I’ll go down in history—as a footnote, but I’ll go down.” His laugh was rueful. Flora thought he’d ask for another whiskey, but he didn’t. All he said was, “I feel like I’ve already gone down in history—very ancient history.”
“If you have so little to do, why haven’t you stopped by here more often?” Flora’s question came out sharper then she’d intended. After she’d said it, though, she was just as well pleased she’d said it as she had.
He raised an eyebrow. “Do you really want me here crying on your shoulder every night? I can’t believe that.”
“Of course I do!” she exclaimed, honestly astonished. And she’d astonished him—she saw as much. She wondered if they really knew each other at all, despite so much time talking, despite lying down together in her bedroom.
“Well, well,” he said, and then again, in slow wonder: “Well, well.” He reached out and brushed the backs of his fingers against her cheek. She didn’t know whether to pull away or clutch him to her. Deciding she was lonelier than angry took only a moment. She reached for him at the same time as he reached for her.
Later, in the bedroom, she moaned beneath him, enclosed in the circle of his arms, his mouth hot and moist and urgent on her nipple. His hand helped her along as he drove deep into her. Her pleasure was just beginning to slide down from the very peak when he gasped and shuddered and spent himself.
He kissed her again, then got off her and hurried into the bathroom. From behind the door came a plop as he tossed the French letter he’d been wearing into the toilet. He was careful not to leave them in the wastebasket for the maid to find. Usually, that wet plop made her laugh. Tonight, it only reminded her how wary they had to be. She was a mistress, after all, not a wife.
Usually, she managed not to think about that. Tonight, piled onto everything else, it hit her hard, harder than it ever had before. What had she done to her life, not even realizing she was doing it? While Blackford loosed a long stream into the toilet, she rolled over onto her belly and softly began to cry.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, and punctuated that by flushing. Flora didn’t answer. He opened the door, turned out the light, and stood there for a moment while his eyes got used to dimness again—or maybe his ears caught her quiet sobs first. He hurried over to the bed and set a hand on her back. “What on earth is the matter, dear?”
“Nothing!” Flora shrugged the hand away. She tried to stop crying, but discovered she couldn’t.
“I’ve been thinking,” Blackford repeated, and then, this time, went on: “I’ve been thinking we ought to figure out where we’re going.”
“Where are we going?” Flora asked bitterly. “Are we going anywhere?” She didn’t want to roll back over. She didn’t want to look at him.
“Well, that doesn’t just depend on me. That depends on both of us,” Blackford said. He waited for Flora to reply. When she didn’t, he shrugged; she felt the mattress shake. He spoke again: “We can’t very well get married, for instance, unless you want to marry me, too.”
Flora’s head jerked up. She swiped at her eyes with her arm—she didn’t want to see Blackford, or what she could see of him in the near darkness, through a haze of tears. Gulping to try to steady her voice, she said, “Married?”
Hosea Blackford nodded. She both saw and felt him do that. “It seems to be the right thing to do, don’t you think?” he said. “Heaven knows we love each other.” He waited for Flora again. She knew she had to respond this time, and managed a nod. That seemed to satisfy Blackford, who went on, “All over the world, you know, when people love each other, they do get married.”
“But—” The objections that filled Flora’s head proved she’d been in Philadelphia, in Congress, the past five years. “If you marry me, Hosea, what will that do to your career?�
�� She didn’t just mean, If you marry me. She also meant, If you marry a Jew.
He understood her. One of the reasons she loved him was that he understood her. With another shrug, he answered, “When you’re vice president, you haven’t got much of a career to look forward to, anyhow. And I don’t think the party will ever nominate me for president—Dakota doesn’t carry enough electoral votes to make that worthwhile. So after this term, or after next term at the latest, I’m done.”
“In that case, you go back to Dakota and take your old seat back,” Flora declared. “Or you could, anyhow. Could you do it with a Jewish wife?”
“I don’t know that I particularly want my old seat back. It seems in pretty good hands with Torvald Sveinssen, and he’ll have had it for a while by the time I’m not vice president any more,” Blackford said. He reached out and put his hand on her bare shoulder. This time, she let it stay. He went on, “All you’ve done is talk about me. What about you, Flora? How will people in New York City like it if you came home with a gentile husband?”
“I don’t think it would bother them too much—the Fourteenth Ward is a solidly Socialist district,” she answered. “And you wouldn’t be just any gentile husband, you know. You’re a good Socialist yourself—and you’re the vice president.”
“It could be,” Blackford said. “I can see how it could be that that would do well enough for your district. But I don’t have a lot of family back in Dakota. What will your family think if you go home and tell them you’re marrying a gentile?”
Flora rejected the first couple of answers that sprang to mind. Her family might indeed be delighted she was marrying at all, but Hosea didn’t have to know that. And her father, an immigrant tailor, might indeed be so awed she was marrying the vice president that he wouldn’t say a word even if her fiancé were a Mohammedan—but she doubted that. Abraham Hamburger wasn’t so outspoken as either Flora or her brothers and sisters, but he never had any trouble making his opinions known.
And the question Blackford had asked cut close to the one she was asking herself: how do I feel about marrying a gentile? Somehow, she’d hardly given that a thought while they were lovers. She wondered why. Because being lovers was impermanent, something she wouldn’t have to worry about forever? She didn’t think that was the whole answer, but it was surely part.
She ended up answering the question in her own mind, not the one Blackford had asked: “When we have children, I want to raise them as Jews.”
“Children?” Blackford started, then laughed wryly. “I’m getting a little long in the tooth to worry about children. But you’re not; of course you’ll want to have children.” Much more to himself than to Flora, he muttered, “I won’t be sorry not to wear a sheath any more, that’s for sure.” After a few seconds’ thought, he spoke to her again: “Your faith has a stronger hold on you than mine does on me; I’ve been a pretty pallid excuse for an Episcopalian for a long time now. If I’m not shooting blanks after all these years, I suppose it’s only fair we bring up the children your way.”
That was as rational an approach to the irrational business of religion as Flora could imagine. She’d seen in Congress that Blackford approached problems in a commonsense way. She’d seen he did the same in his private life, too, but this was an important proof. She said, “I think my father and mother will get along with you just fine.”
“Does that mean you’ll marry me, then?”
“I think it does.” Flora knew she shouldn’t sound surprised at a moment like that, but couldn’t help herself.
“Bully!” Blackford said softly. He took her in his arms. She felt his manhood stir a little against her flank, and tried her best to revive him. Her best turned out not to be good enough. He made a joke of it, saying, “See? This is what’s liable to happen when you have an old man for a husband.” Under that light tone, though, she could tell he was worried.
“It’s all right,” she said, but it plainly wasn’t all right. She cast about for a way to reassure him, and finally found one, even if it meant coming out with the most risqué thing she’d ever said in her life: “Your tongue never gets tired.” She was glad the only light came from a single lamp in the front room; he couldn’t possibly see her blush.
“Yes, some parts do still work better than others,” Blackford said, doing his best not to sound as if he were taking things too seriously. But, however hard saying that had been, Flora was glad she’d done it. She knew she’d eased his mind.
“I didn’t really expect—this,” she said, and then, “I didn’t expect any of this, not when I first came down from New York City. I was green as paint.”
“I didn’t know what to expect, either, when I met you at the Broad Street station,” Blackford answered. “Lord knows I didn’t expect this—but then, I didn’t expect any of the wonderful things you turned out to be, in Congress or out of it.”
Nobody else said things like that about Flora. She didn’t know how to take them. “Thank you,” she whispered. She said it again, on a slightly different note: “Thank you.” The day had been long and boring. The night had been even longer, and lonely. Going to sleep was the most she’d had to look forward to. Now, in the space of an hour, her whole world had changed. That had happened once before, when she was elected to Congress. She looked forward to these changes even more.
Judge Mahlon Pitney slammed down the gavel. He looked every inch a jurist: a spare, erect, handsome gray-haired man in his early sixties, his gray eyes clear and alert. “Here is my verdict in the action Smith v. Heusinger,” he said, with a glance toward the court clerk to make sure that worthy was ready to record the verdict. “It is the decision of this court that title to the property at issue in the above-entitled action does rightfully rest with the plaintiff, John Smith, who has shown right of possession sufficient to satisfy the court.”
Letting out a whoop would have been undignified, unprofessional. That very nearly didn’t stop Jonathan Moss, who instead reached out and shook hands with his client. John Smith looked more nearly amazed than delighted.
On the other side of the courtroom in Berlin, Ontario, Paul Heusinger stared daggers at Moss. Well he might have: Moss had just shown Judge Pitney he did not have good title to the land on which he’d built his office building—the building in which Moss had his law office. “You’re gone,” Heusinger mouthed. Moss nodded. He’d known he was gone whichever way the case went. At least he was going out a winner.
John Smith tugged at Moss’ sleeve. “Will he appeal?” the mousy little Canadian whispered.
“Can’t say for sure now,” Moss whispered back. “I’d guess not, though. I think we have a solid case here—and appeals are expensive.”
Back in the spectators’ seats, a couple of reporters scribbled furiously. They’d been covering the case since it first showed up on the docket; occasional man-bites-dog stories appeared in the Berlin Bulletin and, Moss supposed, some other papers as well. He didn’t mind—on the contrary. The stories had already brought him three or four clients much more able to pay his usual fees than John Smith was.
But for the reporters, the spectators’gallery was empty. As far as Moss could tell, Heusinger had not a friend in town. Smith probably had had friends here, but those who weren’t dead were scattered. The war had been hard on Berlin.
One of the reporters asked, “Now that you have your property back, Mr. Smith, what do you aim to do with it?”
Smith looked amazed all over again. “I don’t really know. I haven’t really thought about it, because I didn’t believe the Yanks would play fair and give it back to me. I don’t suppose they would have without Mr. Moss here.”
“No, that’s not true, and I don’t want anyone printing it,” Moss said. “Americans respect the law as much as Canadians do. It wasn’t a judge who said Mr. Smith has good title to that land. It was the law. And the law would have said the same thing regardless of whether Mr. Smith’s attorney came from the United States or Canada.”
The reporter
s took down what he said. If they didn’t believe him, they were too businesslike to show it on their faces. John Smith, less disciplined, looked highly dubious. Moss felt dubious himself. One of the things he’d already discovered in his brief practice was that judges were not animate law books in black robes. They were human, sometimes alarmingly so.
After a little more back-and-forth with the reporters, Moss reclaimed his overcoat, hat, and galoshes from the cloakroom. In a pocket of the overcoat were mittens and earmuffs. He put them on before venturing outside. Even so, the cold tore at him. The coat that had been better than good enough for winter in Chicago was just barely good enough for winter in Ontario. He wished for a nosemuff to go with the earmuffs.
He also wished for taller rubber overshoes. As he kicked his way through the new-fallen snow toward his apartment, some of the freezing stuff got over the red-ringed tops of the galoshes and did its best to turn his ankles into icicles. He wished he would have driven his motorcar over to the courthouse. If he had, though, it was only about even money the Bucephalus would have started after sitting so long unprotected in the snow.
The people of Berlin took the weather in stride in a way even Chicagoans didn’t. When it stayed this cold this long, people in Chicago complained. Complaining about the weather was as much Chicago’s sport as football was America’s. People up here simply went about their business. Moss didn’t know whether to admire them for that or to conclude they hadn’t the brains to grumble.
He hurled coal into the stove when he got into his flat, then stood in front of the black iron monstrosity till he was evenly done on all sides. He didn’t have a whole lot of room to stand anywhere in the apartment. Ever since he’d started the action against his landlord, he’d been moving crates of books out of his office, anticipating that Paul Heusinger or his own client would give him the bum’s rush.
Blood and Iron Page 54
