Her grandson howled. Since he was wearing a diaper that shielded his bottom, Nellie knew she wasn’t hurting him much. The spanking made an impressive amount of noise, though, as did her yelling.
“Now,” she said, “are you going to do that any more?”
“No,” little Armstrong answered. Nellie wiped his nose, which was dripping yellowish snot. She didn’t believe him. For one thing, he was heading toward the age where he said no every other time he opened his mouth. For another, a toddler’s promise lasted only till he forgot he’d made it, which meant anywhere from two minutes to, in extraordinary circumstances, an hour or so.
“You be good, you hear me?” Nellie said.
“No,” Armstrong Grimes answered. That was neither defiance nor ignorance, only the first thing that came out of his mouth.
“I’m good, Mama,” Clara said, so virtuously that Nellie expected to be blinded by the halo about to spring into being above her head.
“Of course you are—when you feel like it,” Nellie told her own daughter. “Pick up those scraps, and don’t let him eat any more of them. Don’t let him eat your crayons, either.”
“I won’t, Mama.” Clara turned to her nephew. “You see? You can’t have anything.” Thus made forcibly aware that he was being deprived, Armstrong started crying again. Nellie had to spend more time soothing him before she could go out front again.
Edna was supposed to come get her son at half past three; she’d left him with Nellie so she could do some unencumbered shopping. She didn’t show up till a quarter after four. “Hello, Ma—I’m sorry,” she said in a perfunctory way. “How crazy did he drive you?”
“Crazy enough,” Nellie replied. “I was thinking he reminds me of you.” Edna laughed, but Nellie wasn’t joking. She went on, “Please come get him when you say you will. I’ve got enough to do keeping up with Clara and the coffeehouse. Put Armstrong in there, too, and I start climbing the walls.”
Edna sniffed. “I take care of Clara for you sometimes, and you don’t hear me complaining about it.”
“Oh, I do sometimes,” Nellie said. “And besides, when you take care of the children, that’s all you do. You have Merle to make a living for you. I’ve got to make my own living, and this place won’t run by itself.”
Before Edna could answer, Armstrong picked up something from the floor and started chewing on it. He bit Edna when she stuck her finger in his mouth to get it out. She finally did—it was a nasty little clump of hair and dust—and then whacked him a lot harder than Nellie had done. He wasn’t crying now because he was angry or frightened; he was crying because his bottom hurt.
“You’ve never been fair with me,” Edna said.
And here we go again, Nellie thought. One more round in the fight that never stops for good. She said, “You think being fair means doing whatever you want. I’ve got news for you, dearie—it doesn’t work that way.”
“I’ve got news for you, Ma—you never do what I want.” Edna glared. “You do as you please, and what pleases you most is doing whatever you think will make me maddest.”
“Why, you little liar!” Nellie snapped, as she might have at Clara. But Edna’s charge held just enough truth to sting more than it would have had it been made up from whole cloth. “And you were the one who was always sneaking around behind my back. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“I had to sneak around behind your back. You wouldn’t let me live any kind of life in front of your face,” Edna said.
“I don’t call living fast and loose any kind of a life.” To forestall her daughter, Nellie added, “And I ought to know, too. I found out the hard way.”
“Yeah, and you’ve been frozen up ever since on account of it,” Edna said, another shot with all too much truth in it. “I got what I was looking for in spite of you, and do you know what else? I like it just fine.” She carried her son out of the coffeehouse, slamming the door behind her hard enough to rattle the windows.
“Why is my big sister angry?” Clara asked from the door to her playroom. “If I slammed a door like that, I’d get a whipping.”
“Edna’s too big to get a whipping.” Under her breath, Nellie mumbled, “No matter how much she needs one.”
That slammed door also drew Hal from across the street. “You had another quarrel with Edna,” he said. It was not a question.
“Well, what if I did?” Nellie said. “I don’t suppose I would have, if she’d come and gotten her brat when she was supposed to.”
Exercising her temper proved a mistake. Clara started chanting, “Armstrong is a brat! Armstrong is a brat!”
“Stop that!” Hal Jacobs said sharply, and, for a wonder, Clara stopped it. She listened to her father more often than to her mother, perhaps because Hal gave her fewer orders than Nellie did.
Nellie sighed. “I wish Edna would pay as much attention to you as Clara does.” She sighed again. “I wish anyone would pay attention to me.”
“I always pay attention to you, my dear,” Hal said.
That was true. It was so true, Nellie had come to take it for granted in the years since she and Hal got married. Because she took it for granted, it no longer satisfied her. She said, “I wish Edna would pay attention to me.”
“She is a grown woman,” Hal said. “With a little luck, she is paying attention to her own husband now.”
“It’s not the same,” Nellie replied in a sulky voice.
“No, I suppose it is not,” Hal admitted. “But it is good that she should pay attention to someone, I think. And Merle Grimes is a young man worth paying attention to.”
“I know he is. I was thinking the same thing myself earlier today,” Nellie said. “But he’s not her mother, and I am.” She shook her head, discontented with the world and with Edna. “That’s probably why she doesn’t pay attention to me.”
“Yes, it probably is,” Hal said. “When I was becoming a man, I paid as little attention to my mother and my father as I could get away with.”
Nellie had hardly known her own father. When she’d got away from her mother at an early age, it was to go into the demimonde. Hal didn’t need to know any more about that than whatever he’d already found out. Nellie said, “But Edna isn’t becoming a woman. By now, she is one, like you said. Shouldn’t she have figured out that I know what I’m doing by now?”
“Maybe,” Hal said. “But maybe not, too.” He looked at Nellie with amused affection. “She has a stubborn streak as wide as yours. I wonder where she could have gotten it.”
“Not from me,” Nellie said automatically. She needed a moment to recognize the expression on her husband’s face. Hal Jacobs was doing his best not to laugh out loud. Again, Nellie spoke automatically: “I’m not stubborn!” Hal let the words hang, the most devastating thing he could have done. Nellie’s face went hot. She said, “I’m not that stubborn, anyway.”
“Well, maybe not,” Hal said; he should have been a diplomat in striped trousers, not a cobbler and sometimes spy. He went on, “You are my dear wife, and I love you exactly the way you are.”
“You’re sweet.” That was usually another automatic reply. This time, Nellie listened to what she’d just said. “You really are sweet, Hal. I’m glad I married you. I was scared to death when you asked me, but it’s worked out pretty well, hasn’t it?” If she sounded a little surprised, she could hope her husband didn’t notice.
If he did, he was too much a gentleman to show it. “The best five years of my life,” he said. “Being here with you, and being here to watch Clara grow up…” His face softened. “Yes, the best years of my life.”
With more than a little surprise, Nellie realized the years since the war had been the best of her life, too. She’d made more money when the Confederates occupied Washington, but she’d been worried and afraid all the time: worried about what Edna would do, afraid Bill Reach would tell the whole world what he knew, worried and afraid the U.S. bombardment would blow her and Edna and the coffeehouse to hell and gone.
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Now Edna was married, Bill Reach was dead, and the country was at peace. And living with Hal Jacobs hadn’t proved nearly so hard as she’d feared. “I love you, Hal,” she exclaimed.
Saying it surprised her: it seemed an afternoon for surprises. And discovering she meant it surprised her even more. Hearing it made her husband’s face light up. “I love it when you tell me that,” Hal said. “I did not know I could be more happy than I already was, but now I am.”
“I’m happy, too,” Nellie said. By the way all the stories were written, she should have been in love with her husband before she married him, instead of finding out she was five years later. Well, she thought, it’s not like I’ve lived a storybook life. She tried to remember if she’d ever told Hal she loved him before. Once or twice, maybe, in a dutiful fashion, as she occasionally gave him her body. But the words hadn’t come from her heart, not till today.
Perhaps Hal sensed something of the same thing. He walked up to her and gave her a kiss a good deal warmer than the pecks that usually passed between them. She returned it with more warmth than usual, too. For once, she didn’t mind the gleam that came into Hal’s eye. The idea of making love while kindled suddenly struck her as delicious, not disgusting.
But Clara was still playing not far from one of the tables, and a customer chose that moment to come in. Can’t have everything, Nellie thought as she walked over to ask the man what he wanted. She looked around. No, she couldn’t have everything—she wouldn’t be rich as long as she lived, for instance. What she had, though, was pretty good.
As Hosea Blackford did whenever he came up to the Lower East Side of New York City, he looked around in astonishment. Turning to his wife, he said, “I can’t imagine what growing up here would have been like, with the buildings blocking out the sky and with swarms of people everywhere.”
Flora Blackford—after being married for a year, she hardly ever signed her name Flora Hamburger any more—shrugged. “It’s all what you’re used to,” she answered. “I couldn’t imagine there was so much open space in the whole world, let alone the USA, till I took that train trip out to Dakota with you this past summer. I felt like a little tiny bug on a great big plate.”
Up till 1917, New York City was all she’d ever known. Up till the train trip to Dakota, all she’d known were New York City, Philadelphia, and the ninety-odd built-up miles between them. Endless expanses of grass waving gently in the breeze all the way out to the horizon had not been part of her mental landscape. They were now, and she felt richer for it.
A boy in short pants ran by carrying a stack of the Daily Forward. “Buy my paper!” he yelled in Yiddish. “Buy my paper!”
“I understood that.” Blackford looked pleased with himself. “The German I took in college isn’t quite fossilized after all—and being around your family is an education in any number of ways.”
“I’ll tell my father you said so,” Flora said. She walked up the stairs of the apartment house that seemed so familiar and so strange at the same time.
Following her, Blackford said, “Go ahead. He’ll take it the right way. He has better sense than half the people in the Cabinet, believe you me he does.”
“Considering what goes on in the Cabinet, that’s not saying so much,” Flora answered. Her husband rewarded her with a gust of laughter. She laughed, too, but a little ruefully: the scent of cooking cabbage was very strong. “I don’t think this building is ready for the vice president of the United States.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, laughing again. “Compared to the farm I grew up on, it’s paradise—a crowded paradise, but paradise. It’s got running water and flush toilets and electricity. The farm I grew up on sure didn’t, not that anybody had electricity back then.”
“This building had gas lamps up until a few years ago,” Flora said. It did not have an elevator; she and Blackford walked upstairs hand in hand.
Knocking at the door to the flat where she’d lived so long seemed strange, too, but it also seemed right: she didn’t live here any more, and never would again. When the door swung open, David Hamburger was the one with his hand on the latch. His other hand held the cane that helped him get around.
Flora embraced her brother carefully, not wanting to make him topple over. David shook hands with Hosea Blackford, then shuffled through a turn and walked back to the kitchen table. Each slow, rolling step on his artificial leg was a separate effort, each a silent reproach against the war that, though more than six years over, would echo through shattered lives for most of the rest of the century.
Blackford shed his coat; the October evening might have had a nip to it, but the inside of the flat was warm enough and to spare. “Here, I’ll take that,” Flora’s younger sister Esther said, and she did.
“Chess?” David asked. He pulled out the board and pieces even before Blackford could nod.
“I’ll take on the winner,” Isaac said. The younger of Flora’s brothers wore in his lapel a silver Soldiers’ Circle pin inscribed 1918—the year of his conscription class. She thanked heaven that he, unlike David, hadn’t had to go to war…and wished to heaven he wouldn’t wear that pin. Soldiers’ Circle men could be almost as goonish as the Freedom Party’s ruffians down in the Confederate States. But he did as he pleased in such things. He was a man now, and let everyone know it on any excuse or none.
“Hello, Aunt Flora!” Yossel Reisen said. Coming home so seldom, Flora was amazed at how much her older sister’s son grew in between times. He’d been a baby when she went off to Congress, but he was in school now. He added, “Hello, Uncle Hosea!”
“Hello, Yossel,” Hosea Blackford answered absently, most of his attention on the board in front of him. He played well enough to beat David some of the time, but not too often. He’d already gone down a pawn, which meant he probably wouldn’t win this game.
Abraham Hamburger came in from the bedroom, puffing on his pipe. He hugged Flora, then glanced at the chess board. Setting a hand on Blackford’s shoulder, he said, “You’re in trouble. But you knew that when you decided to marry my daughter, eh? If you didn’t, you should have.”
“Papa!” Flora said, indignation mostly but not altogether feigned.
“He’s not kidding, dear,” Blackford said. “You know he’s not.” Since Flora did, she subsided. Her husband started a series of trades that wiped the board clear like machine-gun fire smashing a frontal assault. By the time the dust settled, though, he was down two pawns, not one. Stopping David from promoting one of them cost him his bishop, his last piece other than pawns. He tipped over his king and stood up. “You got me again.”
David only grunted. He grunted again when Isaac took Blackford’s place. Before he and his brother could start playing, Sophie stuck her head out of the kitchen and announced, “Supper in a couple of minutes.”
“We’d better wait,” David said then.
“Ha!” Isaac said. “You’re just afraid I’d beat you.” But he scooped his pieces off the board and put them in the box. He and David had been giving each other a hard time as long as they’d been alive.
Sophie came out with plates and silverware. Behind her came Sarah Hamburger with a platter on which rested two big boiled beef tongues. While Sophie and Esther and Flora set the table, their mother went back into the kitchen, returning with another platter piled high with boiled potatoes and onions and carrots.
“Looks wonderful,” Hosea Blackford said enthusiastically. “Smells wonderful, too.”
Isaac gave him a quizzical look. “When I was in the Army, a lot of…fellows who weren’t Jews”—he’d caught himself before saying goyim to his brother-in-law—“turned up their noses at the idea of eating tongue.”
“All what you’re used to, I suppose,” Blackford said. “When I was growing up on a farm, we’d have it whenever we butchered a cow—or a lamb, for that matter, though a lamb’s tongue has a skin that’s tough to peel and so little meat, it’s almost more trouble than it’s worth. I hadn’t eaten tongue
for years before I first came here.”
“I knew then you liked,” Sarah Hamburger said, “so I make.” Her English was the least certain of anyone’s there, but she made a special effort for Blackford.
Over supper, Esther said, “What is it like, being vice president?” She laughed at herself. “I’ve been asking Flora what it’s like being in Congress ever since she got elected, and I still don’t really understand it, so I don’t know why I should ask you now.”
“Being in Congress is complicated, or it can be,” Blackford answered. “Being vice president is simple. Imagine you’re in a factory, and you have a machine with one very expensive part. If that part breaks, the whole machine shuts down till you can replace it.”
“And you’re that part?” Esther asked, her eyes wide.
Blackford laughed and shook his head. “I’m the spare for that part. I sit in the warehouse and gather dust. President Sinclair is the part that’s hooked up to the machine, and I hope to heaven that he doesn’t break.”
“You’re joking,” David said. He studied Blackford’s face. “No, I take it back. You’re not.”
“No, I’m not,” Blackford said. “Flora has heard me complain about this for as long as I’ve had the job. I have the potential to be a very important man—but the only way the potential turns real is if something horrible happens, the way something horrible happened to the Confederate president last year. Otherwise, I haven’t got much to do.”
Abraham Hamburger said, “This Mitchel, down in the Confederate States, seems to be doing a good job.”
“He does indeed,” Blackford said. “I’m not telling any secrets when I say President Sinclair is glad, too. If the regular politicians in the Confederate States do a good job, the reactionaries don’t get the chance to grab the reins.”
“A kholeriyeh on everybody in the Confederate States,” David muttered in Yiddish. Blackford glanced at Flora, but she didn’t translate. She didn’t blame her brother for feeling that way. Because of what the Confederates had done to him, she could hardly keep from feeling that way herself.
Blood and Iron Page 70
