The Center Cannot Hold ae-2

by Harry Turtledove

  With another yawn, he picked up a magazine. The lead article wondered how many seats in the Confederate Congress the Freedom Party would gain in the 1931 elections. Not very many, the writer predicted. "Shows how much you know," Moss muttered, and closed the magazine in disgust.

  He shut his eyes and tried to doze. He didn't think he had a prayer. He was worrying about what would happen in the delivery room, and the chair was stiff and uncomfortable. But the next time he looked at the clock, an hour and a half had gone by. He blinked in astonishment. His companion in the waiting room had slumped onto one arm of the sofa. He snored softly.

  Daybreak came late, as it always did in Canadian winter. Moss wished for coffee again, and, when his stomach growled, for breakfast. The Canadian man slept on and on. Moss slipped out to use the men's room down the hall. He disturbed the other fellow not a bit.

  A nurse came in at a little past ten. "Mr. Ferguson?" she said. Moss pointed at his sleeping comrade. "Mr. Ferguson?" she said again, louder this time. The Canadian man opened his eyes. He needed a moment to figure out where he was. As he straightened, the nurse said, "Congratulations, Mr. Ferguson. You have a baby boy, and your wife is fine."

  "What'll you call him?" Moss asked, sticking out his hand.

  Ferguson shook it. "Bruce," he answered, "after my wife's uncle." He asked the nurse, "Can I see Elspeth now? And the baby?"

  "Just for a little while. Come with me," the nurse said.

  As she turned to go, Jonathan asked her, "Excuse me, but how is Mrs. Moss doing?"

  "She's getting there," the nurse answered. "Some time this afternoon for her, I expect."

  "This afternoon?" Moss said in dismay. The nurse only nodded and led Mr. Ferguson out of the waiting room to see his wife and his son, who hadn't waited around before coming out to see the world.

  It was half past four, as a matter of fact, with night falling fast and itchy stubble rasping on Moss' cheeks and chin, before another nurse came in and said, "Mr. Moss?"

  "That's me." He jumped to his feet. "Is Laura all right?"

  The nurse not only nodded, she cracked a smile; he'd thought that was against hospital regulations. "Yes, she's fine. You have a little girl. Not so little, in fact-eight pounds, two ounces."

  "Dorothy," Moss whispered. A boy would have been Peter. "Can I see her, uh, them?"

  "Come along," the nurse said. "Your wife is still woozy from the anesthetic."

  Laura didn't just look woozy; she looked drunk out of her mind. "The peaches are spoiled," she announced, fixing Jonathan with a stare that said it was his fault.

  "It's all right, honey," he said, and bent down and kissed her on her sweaty forehead. "Look-we've got a daughter!" The nurse holding the baby in a pink blanket lifted her up a little so both Mosses could get a look at her. She was about the size of a cat but much less finished-looking. Her skin was as thin and prone to crumple as finest parchment, and bright, bright pink. She screwed up her face. A thin, furious yowl burst from her lips.

  "She's beautiful," Laura whispered.

  At first, Jonathan Moss thought that was still the ether talking. Dorothy's head was a funny shape and much too big for her body, her skin was a weird color, she made her tiny, squashed features even stranger when she cried, and the noise that filled the maternity room put him in mind of a dog with its tail stuck in a door.

  Those doubts lasted a good three or four seconds. Then he took another look at his new daughter. "You're right," he said, and he was whispering, too. "She is beautiful. She's the most beautiful baby in the world."

  F ive days into a new year. Nellie Jacobs couldn't make herself care. Her husband wouldn't see the end of 1933. Hal probably wouldn't see the end of January. He might not see the end of the week, and this was Thursday. He lay in the veterans' ward of Remembrance Hospital, not far from the White House. If it weren't for his Distinguished Service Medal, they wouldn't have admitted him, for he hadn't formally been a soldier. And if it weren't for the oxygen they gave him, he would have been dead weeks before. Nellie wasn't sure they were doing him any favors by keeping him alive. But they also gave him morphine, so he wasn't in much pain.

  She got dressed and went downstairs and made breakfast for herself and Clara. She'd just sent her younger daughter off to school when her older one came in. "Hello, Edna," Nellie said. "Thank you very much." She didn't like being beholden to Edna-or to anyone else-but here she had no choice.

  And Edna didn't say anything but, "It's all right, Ma. Go on down to the hospital. Spend all the time you can with him. I know there's not much left. I'll mind the shop for you. It ain't like I never done it before."

  Nellie couldn't resist a jab: "No handsome Confederate officers coming in nowadays."

  "That's all right, too," Edna answered. "I made my catch, and I'm glad I did." After a small hesitation, she went on, "I won't say I'm not glad to get out of the house every once in a while myself. No, I won't say that."

  Balked because her daughter hadn't sniped back, Nellie set a hat on her head, picked up her handbag, and said, "I'll be back before you have to go take care of Armstrong."

  "Sure, Ma." Edna nodded. "Be careful when you're going down to the trolley stop, though. It's cold out there, and the sidewalks are icy. You don't want to fall."

  "I'm not an old lady yet," Nellie said sharply, though she was, when she stopped to think about it, closer to sixty than fifty. Shaking her head-she didn't like thinking about that-she hurried out of the coffeehouse. The bell over the door jingled behind her.

  Her breath fogged out around her as she hurried up the street. A man in an ancient ragged Army greatcoat stepped out of a doorway and whined, "Got any spare change, lady?" Nellie walked past him as if he didn't exist. He didn't bother cursing her; he must have been ignored a thousand times before. He just shrank back into the doorway and waited for someone else to come along.

  Three men and a woman were waiting for the trolley when Nellie got to the stop. "Any minute now," one of the men said. He carried a dinner pail, which probably meant he had a job.

  "Thank you," Nellie said-not, Good, or anything of the sort. She would have given anything she had not to be making this trip, the one she'd made every day she could while Hal lay dying in the hospital. How much it tormented her measured how much she'd come to love him.

  Sure enough, the trolley clanged up to the corner a couple of minutes later. Nellie threw her nickel in the fare box. The car was already crowded. A middle-aged man with a scar on his cheek stood up to offer her his seat. "Here you go, ma'am," he said.

  "Thank you," Nellie said again, this time in real astonishment. She couldn't remember the last time that had happened. Who would have thought any gentlemen were left in the world? she thought, and then, Who would have thought there were ever any gentlemen in the world? Except for her husband, her son-in-law, and her grandson, she still had no use for the male half of the race-and she knew her grandson was an unruly brat, even if he was blood kin. Well, Merle can always take Armstrong to the woodshed a little more often, that's all.

  Her stop was only a few minutes away from the coffeehouse. "President-elect Coolidge in Washington to meet with Cabinet picks!" a newsboy shouted, waving a paper at Nellie. She shook her head and hurried on to Remembrance Hospital.

  Built after the end of the war, the hospital was an immense, brutally modern building that resembled nothing so much as a great block of granite with windows. The stairs leading up to the front entrance were too wide for Nellie to take them in one step, too narrow for her to take them in two. The hitching strides she had to make annoyed her every morning. By the expressions some of the other people going up and down those steps wore, they didn't like them, either-or maybe they had other worries of their own, as Nellie did.

  The only happy people she saw coming out of the place were a young couple, the man carrying a crying baby. Maternity wards are different, Nellie thought as she went past them. I bet they're the only place in a hospital where people win instead of losing
.

  She knew the way to the veterans' ward. By now, she'd come often enough to be a regular. A nurse in the corridor nodded to her as she walked past. A couple of the nurses had even dropped in at the coffeehouse when they came off their shifts.

  Two long rows of metal-framed beds, facing each other, stretched the length of the ward. Hal lay in the sixth bed on the left-hand side as Nellie came in. Just beyond him lay a younger man, a fellow about forty, whose lungs were killing him faster than Hal's. He'd been gassed in Tennessee in 1917, and had been dying by inches ever since. Nellie had never seen anyone come to visit him. He nodded to her, his lips a little bluer than they had been the day before. Like Hal, he had a rubber attachment that fit over his nose to feed him oxygen.

  "Hello, darling," Hal said, his voice rasping and weak. His lungs weren't all that was troubling him, not any more. The flesh had melted from his bones over the past few months. His skull seemed to push out through the skin of his face, as if to announce the death that lay not far ahead.

  "How are you feeling?" As Nellie always did, she fought to hold worry and pain from her voice. Hal didn't need her reminders to know what was happening to him.

  "How am I?" He wheezed laughter. "One day closer, that's all." He paused to fight a little more air into the lungs that didn't want to hold it any more. "We're always one day closer, but usually… usually we don't think about it. How's Clara?"

  "She's fine," Nellie said. "I'll bring her Saturday. She wants to see you, but what with school and all now that New Year's is gone…."

  "School is important," Hal said. "What could be more important than school?" He stopped to gather breath again. "Maybe it's better.. she doesn't see me… like this. Let her… remember me.. like I was when I was stronger."

  "Oh, Hal." Nellie had to turn away. She didn't want her husband to see the tears stinging her eyes. All she cared about was making sure he stayed as happy and comfortable as he could till the end finally came.

  A man in the row of beds facing Hal's lit a cigarette. Hal said, "Do you know what I wish?" Nellie shook her head. He lifted a bony hand and pointed with a forefinger that still showed a yellowish stain. "I wish I had one of those, that's what. They won't let me smoke… on account of this oxygen gear… Fire, you know."

  "That's terrible." Nellie rose. "I'm going to see if I can't get 'em to change their minds." As far as she was concerned, cigarettes were more important for Hal than oxygen right now. The oxygen helped keep him alive, yes, but so what? Cigarettes would make him happy as he went, for he was going to go.

  Out at the nursing station, a starched woman of about Edna's age, shook her head at Nellie. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Jacobs," she said, not sounding sorry in the least, "but I can't deviate from the attending physician's instructions." Nellie might have asked her to commit an unnatural act.

  "Well, who is the attending physician, and where the devil do I find him?" Nellie asked.

  "His name is Dr. Baumgartner, and his office is in room 127, near the front entrance," the nurse answered reluctantly. "I don't know if he's in. Even if he is, I don't think you can get him to change his mind."

  "We'll see about that," Nellie snapped. She hurried off to room 127 with determined strides. Dr. Baumgartner was in, writing notes on one of his patients. He was in his late thirties, and wore the ribbon for a Purple Heart. Above his collar, the side of his neck was scarred. Nellie wondered how far down the scar ran and how bad it was. Shoving that aside, she told him what she wanted.

  He heard her out, then shook his head. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Jacobs, but I don't see how I can do that. They don't call cigarettes coffin nails for nothing."

  "What difference does that make?" Nellie asked bluntly. "He's dying anyhow."

  "I know he is, ma'am," Baumgartner answered. "But my job is to keep him alive as long as I can and to keep him as comfortable as I can. That's what the oxygen is for."

  "That's what the cigarettes are for," Nellie said: "the comfortable part, I mean."

  Before Dr. Baumgartner could answer, an ambulance came clanging up to the front door of the hospital. The physician jumped to his feet and grabbed a black bag that sat on a corner of his desk. "You have to excuse me, ma'am," he said. "There might be something I can do to help there."

  "We aren't done with this argument-not by a long shot we're not," Nellie said, and followed him as he hurried out of the office.

  To her surprise, policemen rushed in through the entrance ahead of the men getting a stretcher out of the back of the ambulance. Some of them had drawn their pistols. Most people shrank away from them in alarm. Dr. Baumgartner eyed the pistols with the air of a man who'd known worse. "What the hell's going on?" he demanded.

  "Come quick, Doc," one of the policemen told him. "Do what ever you can. He'd gotten out of the bathtub, they tell me, and he was shaving when he keeled over."

  "Who's he?" Baumgartner asked. "And since when does an ambulance need a squad of motorcycle cops for escort?"

  "Since it's got Calvin Coolidge in it, is since when," the policeman answered. "He keeled over, like I say, and nobody's been able to get a rise out of him since."

  "Oh, dear God," Nellie said. Nobody paid any attention to her. The stretcher-bearers brought their burden into the hospital. Sure enough, the president-elect lay on the stretcher, his face pale and still.

  Dr. Baumgartner knelt beside him. The doctor's hand found Coolidge's wrist. "He has no pulse," Baumgartner said. He peeled back an eyelid. "His pupil doesn't respond to light." He took his hand away from Coolidge's face. The president-elect stared up with one eye open, the other closed. Nellie could see what Dr. Baumgartner was going to say before he said it: "He's dead." Baumgartner's expression and voice were stunned.

  "Can't you do anything for him, Doc?" a cop asked. "That's why we brung him here."

  "You'd need the Lord. He can raise the dead. I can't," Dr. Baumgartner answered, still in that dazed voice. "If I'd been standing next to him the minute it happened, I don't think I could have done anything. Coronary thrombosis or a stroke, I'd say, although I can't begin to know which without an autopsy."

  "Coro-what?" The policeman scratched his head. "What's that in English?"

  "Heart attack," Baumgartner said patiently. "That'd be my guess. Without a postmortem, though, it's only a guess."

  "What happens next?" Nellie asked. "He was president. I mean, he was going to be president. Now…" She looked down at the body, then quickly turned away. "Close his eye, please."

  While Baumgartner did that, the policeman said, "Yeah, what the hell-'scuse me, lady-do we do now? We never had nothin' like this happen before. That damn Blackford-'scuse me again-better not get to be president on account of he finished second. That wouldn't be right, not after Cal here kicked his… tail."

  "No, no, no. It doesn't work like that." Dr. Baumgartner shook his head. "The electoral college met yesterday, so the results are official. The vice president-elect becomes president-elect, and then he becomes president on the first of February."

  "Well, that's a relief," the cop said. "Thanks, Doc."

  And Nellie might have been the first one to taste the name and title the whole United States would know before the day was up: "President Herbert Hoover." She paused in thought, then slowly nodded and repeated the words. "President Herbert Hoover." She paused again. "I like the sound of it."

  A long with her daughter, Mary Jane, Sylvia Enos crunched through snow to stand on the Boston Common and pay her last respects to Calvin Coolidge. George, Jr., would have come with them, too-Sylvia was sure of that-but his fishing boat was bringing in cod out on Georges Bank. For a moment, she wondered if he even knew. Then she shook her head, feeling foolish. The Whitecap had a wireless set aboard, so he was bound to.

  Like her and Mary Jane, most of the people in the square wore black. It seemed all the more somber against the snow. Up on a rickety wooden platform, a newsreel photographer swung his camera over the crowd.

  "It doesn't seem fair," Sylvia said. "He wasn't
an old man-he was only sixty." Mary Jane gave her an odd look. But then, Mary Jane was only twenty, and to twenty sixty was one with the Pyramids of Egypt. Sylvia knew better, and wished she didn't. She went on, "And it doesn't seem fair he died before he could be president, especially when we've been stuck with Socialists the past twelve years."

  "Hoover is a Democrat, too," Mary Jane said. But then, before Sylvia could, she added, "But he's not from Massachusetts."

  "He certainly isn't," Sylvia said. "Born in Iowa, then on to California…" She sighed. "He's from about as far from Massachusetts as he can be and stay in the USA."

  "He's-" Mary Jane broke off as heads swung toward a string of black autos approaching the State House behind a phalanx of motorcycle policemen. "Here comes the funeral procession."

  A hearse carrying Coolidge's mortal remains led the cortege. Behind it came an open limousine in which sat President-elect Hoover. Behind his autos were a stream of others, all full of dignitaries civilian and military. When the hearse halted, an honor guard of soldiers, sailors, and Marines lifted Coolidge's flag-draped casket from it and set the coffin on a temporary bier whose black cloth cover was half hidden by red-white-and-blue bunting.

  "I wish Pa could have got a funeral," Mary Jane said suddenly. "Not a fancy one like this, but any kind of funeral at all."

  "You were a little girl when the Confederates torpedoed his ship," Sylvia said. "And he was away at sea so much before that. Do you remember him at all?"

  "Not very much," her daughter answered. "But I do remember one time when he was home on leave and he kept telling my brother and me to go to bed. I didn't much like that then, so I guess it stuck with me."

  Sylvia's face heated despite the chilly weather. A sailor home on leave wanted his children to go to bed so he could, too-with his wife. Sylvia's own life had been empty that way since George was killed. She sighed, exhaling a cloud of fog. When she had wanted a man, poor Ernie hadn't been able to do anything about it. That seemed so horribly unfair, it made her want to cry from sheer frustration. She couldn't do that now. Instead, she lit a cigarette. It helped take the edge off what ever bothered her.