The Center Cannot Hold

IX

Jonathan Moss nodded to the military judge in front of him. "Sir, no matter what the occupation codes say about collusion and incitement, my client is not guilty. The prosecutor hasn't introduced a single shred of evidence that Mr. Haynes either conspired against the United States, urged others to conspire or act against them, or, for that matter, acted against them himself in any way, shape, or form."

The judge, a grim-faced major named Daniel Royce, said, "Didn't you spend three years fighting against the Canucks?"

"Yes, sir, I did," Moss answered. "Right around here, as a matter of fact."

"I thought as much," Major Royce rumbled. "Why the devil are you defending them now, in that case?"

"To make sure they get a fair shake, sir," Moss said. "Plenty of people just want to jump on them with both feet now that they're down. This conspiracy charge against my client is a case in point. It's utterly groundless, as you can see."

"It is not!" yelped the military prosecutor, a captain surely too young to have fought in the Great War.

"Look at the evidence, sir, not the allegations, and you'll see for yourself," Moss told Major Royce. He hadn't lied to the judge. He did dislike seeing Americans swarming up into Ontario and ravaging the conquered province like so many locusts. But his reply hadn't been the whole truth, either. What would Royce have said had he answered, Because I fell in love with a Canadian woman while my squadron's aerodrome was up by Arthur? The major looked to have been a formidable football player in his younger days. He would have drop-kicked Moss clean out of his courtroom.

Scowling still, the military judge shuffled through the papers in front of him. He picked up one sheet and carefully read through it. Even from the back, Moss recognized it. It was a statement he'd got from his client's neighbors, saying they'd never seen anyone visit Haynes' house at a time when the prosecutor claimed he was shaping a plot there against the USA. His hopes leaped.

Bang! went Royce's gavel. Everyone in the courtroom who'd seen combat started; the sudden noise was too much like a gunshot for comfort. "I'm sorry, Captain, but I find myself agreeing with the defense attorney here," the military judge said. "I see no evidence of an offense against occupation regulations. Greed by people bringing the charges may be another matter. This case is dismissed. Keep your nose clean, Mr. Haynes, as you have been doing. You're a free man." The gavel banged again.

"Thank you very much, your Lordship." Paul Haynes sounded astonished that he wasn't heading for prison.

"I'm not a Lordship. You call me 'your Honor,' " Judge Royce said. "No more Lordships here, and a good thing, too, if you want to know what I think."

"Thank you, your Honor, then," Haynes said, not contradicting the military judge but not offering his own opinion, either. He turned to Jonathan Moss and stuck out his hand. "And thank you very much. I didn't think you could bring it off."

"You're not the only Canadian client I've had who's told me the same thing," Moss answered. "I'll tell you what I've told a lot of them-our courts will try you fairly if you give them half a chance."

"I wouldn't have believed it," Haynes said. "I thought they'd lock me up and throw away the key when they brought those treason charges against me."

In a low voice, Moss said, "You'd be smart to follow the judge's advice and not give them any excuse to charge you again. If you come before the court a second time, they're liable to think that where there's smoke, there's fire, even if they did let you off the hook once before." Listening to himself, he wondered how many cliches he could string together all at once.

"Wasn't any excuse to charge me this time," Paul Haynes grumbled. But then he nodded. "All right, Mr. Moss. I understand what you're telling me."

"Good," Moss said.

They left the courtroom together. Spring had been on the calendar for more than a month. Now, as April gave way to May, it was finally visible in Berlin, Ontario, too. The sky was blue, with only a few puffy white clouds drifting across it. The sun was, if not warm, at least tepid. It got up early and went to bed late. Trees were coming into new leaf. A robin chirped in one of them.

"You're a good fellow," Haynes said. He didn't even add for a Yank, as so many Canadians might have done. "I'll send you the rest of my fee soon as I can scrape the money together. You don't need to worry about that."

"I wasn't worried," Moss said, which was true. His Canadian clients reliably paid what they said they would when they said they'd do it. He wished the Americans he represented up here were as reliable.

Reporters were seldom allowed in military courts. Censorship still lay heavily on occupied Canada. Moss understood that without necessarily approving of it. Here in the street, a couple of newspapermen pounced on Paul Haynes. Moss slipped away before they could start grilling him, too. If they wanted him badly enough, they could run him down at his office. Meanwhile…

Meanwhile, he aimed to celebrate his victory in his own way. He got into his Bucephalus and pressed the starter button. The engine roared to life. A Bucephalus was a big, powerful motorcar. Owning one went a long way toward saying you were a big, powerful man. Owning a new one went a long way toward saying that, anyhow. Moss had owned this one when it was new. Here in the spring of 1928, it was anything but. One reason the engine roared was that it needed work he hadn't given it. The automobile's paint job and upholstery had seen better years. He had put new tires on it recently, but only because he'd got sick of patching the old ones when they blew out.

He put the car in gear and drove west out of Berlin. Roads were better than they had been when he first hung out his shingle in Ontario. The war, by now, had been over for ten and a half years. The roads the grinding conflict had cratered and pocked with shell holes were smooth once more-smoother than ever, in fact. Paving stretched for miles where only dirt had gone before.

About an hour after leaving Berlin, he drove through the much smaller town of Arthur, thirty miles to the west. Arthur hadn't bounced back from the war the way Berlin had. It lay off the beaten track. Few-hardly any-Americans came here with their money and their energy and their connections with the powers that be in the USA. But for a few more motorcars on the streets than would have been visible in 1914, time might have passed Arthur by.

A couple of people pointed to the Bucephalus as it rolled through town. Jonathan Moss saw one of them nod. They'd seen the motorcar before, many times. They had to know who he was. If a diehard wanted to take a shot at him… He shrugged. It hadn't happened yet. He wasn't going to start worrying about it now.

When he got to Laura Secord's farm, he found her where he'd expected to: out in the fields, plowing behind a horse about the size of a half-grown elephant. She must have seen his automobile pull in beside the farmhouse, but she didn't come in right away. The work came first. She'd stubbornly got a crop from the farm every year since the end of the war, and she didn't look like intending 1928 to be an exception.

Only after she'd done what she thought needed doing did she unhitch the enormous horse and lead him back toward the house and the barn. Moss got out of the Bucephalus and waved to her. She nodded back, sober as usual, but her gray eyes danced. "You got Paul Haynes off, didn't you?" she said.

"Sure did. Not just a reduced sentence, either: full acquittal," Moss said proudly. "Don't win one of those every day, not from Major Royce."

"That's… swell," she said. The hesitation probably meant she'd almost said bully instead; the old slang died hard, especially in out-of-the-way places like this. She led the immense horse into the barn. When she came out, she asked, "And how do you have in mind celebrating, eh, Yank?"

"I expect we'll think of something," he answered.

"What I'm thinking of first is a bath," she said.

Moss nodded. "Sure, sweetheart. I'll scrub your back, if you want me to."

"I'm sure you will," she told him. And, as a matter of fact, he did. One thing pleasantly led to another. After a while, they lay naked, side by side, on her bed. Lazy and sated, Moss lit a cigarette. He offered her the pack. She shook her head. That made other things jiggle, too. He watched with interested admiration. Though he didn't care to remember it, he was a little closer to forty than thirty these days; a second round wasn't so automatic as it had been a few years before. He thought he could rise to the occasion today, though. Laura Secord watched him watching her. "Did you enjoy your celebration?" she asked.

Had she smiled, that would have been different. As things were, her voice had an edge to it. "What's the matter, darling?" he asked, and reached out to toy with her left nipple.

She twisted away. "Why should anything be the matter?" she asked. "You come up here when it suits you, you… celebrate, and then you drive back down to Empire." She stubbornly kept using the name the Canadians had tried to hang on Berlin during the war, before the USA took it.

Although Jonathan Moss didn't have experience with a great many women, he knew trouble when he heard it. "Dammit, Laura, you'd better know by now that I don't come up here just to have a good time," he said.

"I know you didn't used to," she answered. "But things have been going on for a while now, and I do start to wonder. Can you blame me? Will you still drive up here every couple of weeks in 1935, or will you have found someone younger and prettier and closer to Empire by then?"

"I'm not looking for anybody else," Moss said. "I love you, in case you hadn't noticed."

"Do you?" Laura Secord asked.

"Of course I do!" he said. She looked at him. She didn't say what she was obviously thinking: in that case, what are you going to do about it? The question was, if anything, more effective left hanging in the air. Jonathan Moss took a deep breath. His response looked pretty obvious, too. "Will you marry me?" he asked. "Will you sell this farm and come over to Berlin-you can even call it Empire if you want-and live with me for the rest of our lives?"

Her nod said that that was the right question, sure enough. But it wasn't a nod of acceptance. She asked a question of her own: "Why didn't you ask me that a long time ago, Jonathan?"

"Why? Because I know I'm nothing but a lousy American, and I figured you'd tell me no for sure. I'd sooner have gone on the way things were than have that happen. Hearing no to a question like that hurts worse than anything else I can think of."

"What if I said yes?" she asked quietly.

"I'd throw you into my motorcar, and we'd get back to Berlin in time to find a justice of the peace. If you think I'd let you have the chance to change your mind, you're nuts."

Laura Secord gave him the ghost of a smile. "It couldn't be quite that fast, I'm afraid. I'd have to make arrangements to sell the livestock or to have it taken care of before I leave the farm."

" Are you telling me yes?" Moss demanded. She nodded again. This time, she meant it the way he'd hoped she would. He let out a whoop that probably scared some of her feral farm cats out of a year's growth. Moss didn't care. And he did rise again, and they found the best way to inaugurate their engagement.

Afterwards, she said, "I was afraid you didn't want to buy a cow as long as milk was cheap."

"Moo, me?" he answered, and startled her again, this time into laughter. If that wasn't a good omen, he didn't know what would be.

G eorge Enos, Jr., set cash on the kitchen table-more of it than Sylvia Enos had expected. "Here you go, Ma," her son said, his voice breaking with excitement. "We had us a he… heck of a run. Cod like you couldn't believe." He looked down at his hands, which had acquired the beginnings of the scabs and scars that always marked fishermen's fingers and palms. "I did more gutting than anybody could think of. And with the offal over the side, the birds that came, and the sharks-I never imagined anything like it."

"Your father used to talk the same way," Sylvia answered. She remembered him sitting up over a mug of coffee in the days when they were first married, telling her about what he'd done and what he'd seen and what it had felt like.

But this wasn't quite the same, after all. George Enos had done enough fishing by the time he married her that it had become routine, and wearying routine at that. George, Jr., didn't seem tired at all. Maybe that was because everything still seemed bright and new to him. Or maybe it was just because, at seventeen, he never got tired at all. His father certainly had, though, and he'd been only a few years older.

"How much is it, Ma?" Mary Jane asked, looking up from the onions she was chopping. She paused to rub her streaming eyes, then let out a yelp-she must have had onion juice on her fingers, and made things worse instead of better.

"Quite a bit," answered Sylvia, who'd been trained from childhood not to talk about money in any detail. "It will help a lot."

"That's good," Mary Jane said. "I'm going to look for a shopgirl job again tomorrow. I bet I find something, too. That one I had last summer was swell, but then you went and made me go back to school." She sent Sylvia as severe a look as a fifteen-year-old girl could give her mother.

Sylvia had no trouble withstanding it; she'd known far worse. "Summer work is one thing," she said. "School is something else. You need your schooling."

George, Jr., glanced at his sister. They both almost-but not quite; no, not quite-invisibly shook their heads. These days, they were old enough to team up on Sylvia, instead of fighting each other as they'd done for so long. Sylvia knew why George, Jr., sneered at school. He was making good money without it.

And Sylvia had a pretty good idea why Mary Jane didn't want to keep going. She was bound to be thinking something like, Who cares whether I can divide fractions and diagram sentences? What difference will it make? I'm going to get married and have babies, and my husband will make money for me.

"You never can tell," Sylvia said, half to herself, half to her daughter. "I thought George, Jr.'s, father was going to take care of things forever. But then the war came, and the Confederates captured him, and after that he joined the Navy, and he… he didn't come home. And I've had to run like crazy ever since, just trying to make ends meet. If I knew more about spelling and typing and arithmetic, I'd've had better jobs and made more money, and we'd've done better for ourselves. And if you think things like that can't happen to you and the people you love, Mary Jane, you're wrong. I wish you weren't, but you are. Because you never can tell."

By something surely not far from a miracle, she got through to her daughter. Instead of giving her a snippy answer, Mary Jane nodded and said, "I wish I could've known Pa better."

George, Jr., got up and set a hand on his younger sister's shoulder. "I wish I could have, too." His voice roughened. "But at least Ma paid back the stinking son of a bitch"-had he been out on the trawler instead of in his kitchen, he undoubtedly would have said something much hotter than that-"who sank the Ericsson. Everybody I sail with knows Ma's a hero."

Sylvia brushed that aside. "It won't get me any supper," she said, and stood up herself so she could start cooking. She hadn't felt heroic when she'd pumped a revolverful of bullets into Roger Kimball. She had trouble remembering now exactly how she had felt. Frightened and resigned was about as close as she could come to it. She hadn't thought she would ever see her children or Boston again.

But here she was, with all the same problems, all the same worries, she'd had before getting on the train for Charleston. Being a hero, she'd rapidly discovered, paid few bills. When she'd come home, she had got back the job she'd left so she could go to the Confederate States. She'd made a few speeches that brought in a little money. By now, though, she was old news. Even in this presidential election year, no one asked her to come out. Joe Kennedy, for instance, had used her and forgotten about her. Every once in a while, she wondered how many women he'd really, rather than metaphorically, seduced and abandoned. More than a few, or she missed her guess.

While washing dishes later that evening, Mary Jane asked, "Who are you going to vote for come November, Ma?"

Women's suffrage had finally come to Massachusetts-and to the rest of the holdout states in the USA-with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. These days, all the men who'd opposed it were busy explaining how they'd never really done any such thing, how they'd always looked out for the country's best interests, and as many other lies as they could find.

Most of those men were Democrats. Even so, Sylvia answered, "I'm going to vote for Governor Coolidge for president, because he's a Democrat and he'd be harder on the Confederates than Vice President Blackford. Coolidge fought in the war, too; he didn't stay back of the lines."

"Do you think Coolidge will win?" Mary Jane asked.

"I don't know," Sylvia said. "That's why they have the election-to find out who wins, I mean. Hardly anybody thought President Sinclair would beat Teddy Roosevelt in 1920, but he did."

"I was still little then," Mary Jane said thoughtfully, scrubbing at a frying pan with steel wool.

To Sylvia, Mary Jane was still little now, and would be the rest of her life. But she put that aside, and went back to the question her daughter had asked a little while before: "I do wish Governor Coolidge would be a little more… lively. People don't seem to get very excited about him, and that worries me. Blackford and his wife can really whip up the crowds. It matters a lot."

The following Sunday, someone knocked at the door to her flat. There stood her neighbor, Brigid Coneval. The Irishwoman said, "Blackford his own self will be after speaking on the Common today at half past two. Now that we can vote and all, I'm for hearing what he has to say for himself. Will you come with me, now?"

Sylvia found herself nodding. "I sure will," she said. "You're right-we ought to find out all we can about them."

"Indeed and we should," Brigid Coneval agreed. A war widow like Sylvia, she hadn't had an easy time of it since her husband was shot. She made ends meet by taking care of other people's children-though her own boys, by now, were also old enough to get jobs of their own and bring in a little money to help. Through everything, she'd kept an infectious grin. "And besides, it'll be fun. We can ride the subway over to the Common; there's a station close by there."

"Why not?" Sylvia didn't often do things on impulse, but this would be out of the ordinary, and it wouldn't cost anything except subway fare.

She didn't like the subway. It was even more crowded than trolley cars, and noisier, too. Between stations, the tunnel was black as coal. She kept wondering things like, What would happen if this train broke down? She knew she shouldn't. She knew that wasn't likely. But she couldn't help it.

The subway train got to the Common without incident. Sylvia and Brigid Coneval emerged from the bowels of the earth into bright sunshine. It glowed off the gilded dome of the State House, in front of which Vice President Blackford would speak. "Let's get under one of the trees," Sylvia said, pointing. "We're early. There's still room under there. We can stay in the shade. It'll be cooler."

"Well, aren't you the clever one, now?" her friend said. They staked out their spot with no trouble at all.

They were early. The crowd hadn't really begun to fill the Boston Common. Most of the people there so soon were either Blackford's Socialist backers or the Democratic activists who would heckle the vice president when he spoke. The two groups jockeyed for position and traded insults, mostly good-natured. They'd squared off against each other many times before, and knew they'd often meet again after this afternoon.

One of the men carrying an 8 YEARS IS ENOUGH! sign was Joe Kennedy. Seeing him, Sylvia shrank back farther under the tree. She didn't want him to see her, even though she had every right to be here. But he did-she got the feeling he missed very little. He saw her, recognized her, and turned his back. She wanted to call out, I'm going to vote for Coolidge! She didn't. She could tell it would do no good.

A big black car pulled up by the platform. A tall, gray-haired man and a short woman, much younger than he, got out and went to the platform. "That's himself's wife," Brigid Coneval said. "A Congresswoman from New York City, she is, and a Christ-killing sheeny besides."

Sylvia didn't care much about Jews one way or the other. She said, "By all they say, she's done a good job in Congress. And look at her! She's been there since the war, and she doesn't look any older than we are."

"Foosh!" said Brigid, who seemed determined to stay unimpressed. "And what's her husband, then? Sure and he's a dirty old man, for I'd not care to hang since he's seen the sweet side of forty."

Flora Blackford stepped up to the microphone. The Democrats in the crowd immediately started to jeer. She made as if to urge them on, and then said, "Listen to them, comrades. They won't tell the truth themselves, and they don't want to let anyone else tell it, either. Is that fair? Is that honest? Is that what you want in the Powel House for the next four years?"

"No!" people shouted.

The Congresswoman from New York City made a short, strong speech, giving the Socialists credit for everything that had gone right the past eight years: the booming stock market, laws allowing strikes for higher wages, and on and on.

"What about the revolt in Canada? What about cutting off Confederate reparations?" the Democrats yelled. "What about the bank troubles in Europe?"

"Well, what about them?" Flora retorted, meeting the hecklers head on. "The Canadians lost. And we're at peace with the Confederate States, and getting along with them well enough. Isn't it about time this country was at peace with its neighbors? As for the banks in Europe, well, what can we do about them here?"

Most people cheered. The Democrats went right on heckling. Vice President Blackford himself stepped up to the microphone. "We've had eight good years!" he said. "Let's have four more. We've got prosperity. We've got peace. Give us a few more Socialists in the Senate and we'll have old-age insurance, too. If you want to go back to gearing up for a war every generation, vote for Governor Coolidge. He'll give you one. If you want to make sure your sons and husbands and brothers live to grow old, vote for me. It's that simple."

But it wasn't, not as far as Sylvia was concerned. She wanted the Confederate States punished for what they'd done to the Ericsson, not forgiven their reparations. Hosea Blackford might not want a war, but wouldn't the Confederates if they ever got strong again? "I'm glad we came," she told Brigid Coneval on their way back to the subway station. "Now I'm surer than ever I'll vote for Coolidge."

"Sure and you can't mean it!" Brigid exclaimed, and argued with her all the way home even though she'd mocked both Hosea Blackford and his wife. She didn't change Sylvia's mind, or even come close.

Over the supper table, Chester Martin grinned at his wife. "Election Day coming up," he said with a sly smile.

"And so?" Rita answered. But she smiled, too. "Plenty of worse ways to meet than at a polling place."

"I should say." Martin had met women at worse places-and that didn't even count the soldiers' brothels behind the front during the war, when you'd stand in line outside in the rain for a couple of minutes of what was much more catharsis than rapture. At least I never got a dose of the clap, he thought.

"Do you think Blackford can do it?" Rita asked.

"Hope so," Martin said. "I don't see why not. Everybody's making good money. Why should we change when things are going the way they're supposed to?" He spread his hands. "I still don't much like the Socialists' foreign policy-I'd take a stronger line than they do-but that's not enough reason to vote for the Great Stone Face."

Rita laughed at the nickname. "Coolidge doesn't have much to say for himself, does he?"

"I think there's a reason for that, too," Chester replied. "He's never done anything worth talking about."

"Massachusetts is prosperous," Rita said. "He takes credit for that."

After sarcastically clapping his hands a couple of times, Martin said, "He may take it, but who says he deserves it? The whole country's prosperous, and the Socialists deserve credit for that." He'd come late to the Socialists, but had what amounted to a convert's zeal. "Look where we were in 1920, before President Sinclair won, and look where we are now."

"You're preaching to the choir, you know," his wife told him with a smile. "I'm going to vote for Blackford, too."

"I know, but look." Chester felt expansive. He wanted to tell the whole world how well his party had run the country over the past eight years. Since the whole world wasn't sitting across the kitchen table from him and Rita was, she got to listen to him. He went on, "Look how high the stock market's risen. Who would have thought the proletariat could start owning the means of production by buying shares in the big companies? With buying on margin, though, it's awfully easy to do." He laughed. "If we can afford to do it, it must be easy to do."

Rita pointed to the newspaper, which lay on a chair. "The Wireless Corporation is splitting its stock again."

Martin nodded. "I saw that. I'm glad I got into Wireless somewhere close to the ground floor. I think it's going to be the big thing for years and years, and those four shares I managed to buy last summer are sixteen shares now. It's swell. Everything keeps going up and up and up. It's like coining money."

"Did you see that Congresswoman Blackford is coming to town Saturday?" Rita asked.

"No, I missed that," he answered. "Do you want to go see her?"

"Sure? Why not? It'll be fun," Rita said. "And besides, she shows what a woman can do when she puts her mind to it."

Although Chester wasn't sure he liked the sound of that, he said, "All right," anyhow, finding agreement the better part of valor. Then he added, "Did I ever tell you that I-"

"Met Flora Blackford when she was still Flora Hamburger?" Rita cut in. "Had her brother in your company during the war?" She shook her head. Her bobbed dark blond hair flipped back and forth. "No. You never, ever told me that. I've never heard it, not even once. Can't you tell?"

"I can tell you're giving me a hard time," he answered. She grinned. So did he.

Flora Blackford chose to speak near the Toledo city hall, in the shadow of the smaller copy of the great statue of Remembrance that stood on Bedloe Island in New York harbor. Chester found that interesting, even challenging. For more than a generation, remembrance had been the loudest drum the Democrats beat. For a nation twice defeated, twice humiliated, by the CSA and the Confederates' European allies, it was a drumbeat that had struck deep chords.

But now the Great War was eleven years past. The United States had won it. People still held Remembrance Day parades, but they didn't march with flags upside down any more. Having won, the United States were no longer in distress. And, ever since the Great War ended, the Democrats hadn't been able to find any other theme that resonated with the voters as remembrance had.

And now, here stood Flora Blackford under that great statue with the gleaming sword. By the way she stood there, she said Remembrance-and the Democrats-spoke to yesterday's worries, yesterday's needs. I'm going to talk about what you need to hear today-and tomorrow, she said without words, merely by standing there.

"We've come a long way the past eight years," she said, "but we've still got a long way to go. When President Sinclair was elected, you risked losing your job if you went out on strike. Some of you had lost your jobs. That can't happen any more, thanks to the laws we've passed."

Chester Martin pounded his palms together. He'd fought company goons, and he'd fought the police who served as the big capitalists' watchdogs and hunting hounds. Next to what he'd been through in the trenches, those brawls hadn't been anything much. And if you weren't willing to fight for what you wanted, did you really deserve to get it? He believed in the class struggle. He believed in it all the way down to his toes.

When the applause died down a little, Vice President Blackford's wife went on, "You know the Democrats never would have passed a bill like that, or like the one that gives workers the right to take leave without pay if there's a baby in the family or someone takes sick and then get their jobs back. They were in power from 1884 to 1920, and they still behave as though it's 1884."

That drew not only applause but whoops of laughter. It also fit in very well with what Chester had been thinking not long before. Flora Blackford continued, "And we tried to give you old-age insurance, too. We tried hard. But we couldn't quite manage that, because the Democrats had enough men in the Senate to tie up the bill with a filibuster. We've got to elect more Socialists. Friends, comrades, the presidency is important, but it's not enough, not by itself. We have to fight the forces of reaction wherever we find them. That's what the class struggle is all about."

It wasn't how Martin imagined the class struggle. He took the phrase literally. He'd broken enough heads in his time to have reason to take it literally. He'd taken his lumps, too; the real problem with the class struggle was that the capitalists and their lackeys fought back hard. But the idea of carrying the struggle even to the halls of Congress held a powerful appeal for him.

"We don't need the enormous Army and Navy we had before the Great War, the Army and Navy that ate up so much money and so much of our industry," Flora said. "We've won the war. Now we can enjoy what we won. Factories can make goods for people, not for killing. We can spend our wealth on what we need, not on battleships and machine guns and barrels. We've fought our neighbors too many times. We can work toward living at peace with them now."

That drew more loud cheers. Chester joined in them, but more than a little halfheartedly. This was the part of the Socialist platform that still graveled him. Still, Flora Blackford expressed it well. Maybe the 1920s were so prosperous because less money was going into weapons and fortifications and more into people's pockets. Maybe.

"Hosea Blackford will take us on toward the middle of the twentieth century," Flora declared. "Calvin Coolidge will drag us back into the nineteenth century. Which way do you want to go? The choice is yours-it's in the people's hands. I ask you not to turn your back on the future! I ask you to vote Socialist, to vote for Hosea Blackford for president and Hiram Johnson for vice president. Let Dakota and California show the rest of the country the way! Thank you!"

More applause-thunderous applause. Rita said, "I can't wait for November."

"Neither can I," Chester agreed. That was how a good stump speech was supposed to work. It made the faithful eager. Men and women pushed forward, trying to get a word with Flora Blackford now that she'd come down off the platform. "Come on," Martin told his wife, and did some pushing himself, wondering if the vice president's wife would remember him.

He didn't really expect her to, and she didn't, not when she looked at him. But when he shouted his name at her, she nodded. "You were David's sergeant," she said.

"That's right, ma'am." Chester grinned and nodded. "And this is my wife, Rita."

"Pleased to meet you." Flora clasped Rita's hand. "Will you vote for my husband on Election Day?"

"I sure will," Rita answered. "I was going to even before I heard you talk. But even if I'd been thinking about voting for the Democrats before, you would have made me change my mind."

"Thank you very much," Flora Blackford said. "He needs all the votes he can get, believe me. We can't take anything for granted. If we do, we're liable to lose."

"We'd better not," Chester Martin said. Before Vice President Blackford's wife could answer, a fresh surge of people from behind pushed Rita and him away from her. Again, that was no surprise; he felt lucky to have talked with her at all. Turning to Rita, he asked, "What do you think?"

"She's honest," Rita said at once. "If she is, it's a good bet her husband is, too. And she knew who you were as soon as you told her your name. That was something." She proudly took his arm. "You know important people."

He laughed. "Stick with me, kiddo, and I'll take you to the top."

Rita laughed, too, but only for a moment. Then she sobered. "You really do know important people, Chester. That might turn out to be important one of these days. You never can tell."

"Maybe." But Chester didn't believe it, not down deep. "I don't think Flora Blackford's the sort of person you can use to pull strings. She was in Congress, remember, when her brother got conscripted, and she didn't pull any for him. He could have had some soft, safe job behind the lines-typist or driver or something like that. He could have, but he didn't. He went into the fighting, and he got shot. If she didn't help David Hamburger, she's not likely to help me."

"That depends on what you'd need to ask her," Rita answered. "Like I said a minute ago, you never can tell."

Somebody stepped on Chester's foot, hard. "Ow!" he said. In the crowd, he couldn't even tell who'd done it. He pointed toward the trolley stop. "Let's get out of here and go home before we get trampled."

"Suits me," his wife said. "I'm glad we came, though. She made a good speech-and I found out what a special fellow I married."

Martin started to tell her he was just an ordinary guy. He started to, but he didn't. If Rita wanted to think he was a special fellow, he didn't mind a bit.

F lora Blackford had waited out six elections to the House of Representatives. She'd been nervous every single time, though her New York City district was solidly Socialist and she'd had easy races after the first one. Now, for the first time since 1914, she wasn't running for Congress-but she was more nervous than ever.

Worrying about her husband's race proved more wearing than worrying about her own ever had. She hadn't been this anxious in 1924; she was sure of that. In 1924, Hosea Blackford hadn't headed the ticket. It probably hadn't won or lost because of anything he did.

Things were different now. If they went as she hoped, her husband would become president of the United States next March. If they didn't

… No, she wouldn't think about that.

Telegraph sets clicked in their apartments. Phones jangled. Off in one corner, an announcer on a wireless set spewed out results. Flora and Hosea got any news that came in as fast as they would have at Socialist Party headquarters in Philadelphia. But the same longstanding tradition that kept a presidential nominee away from the convention till he'd been declared the candidate bound a presidential hopeful to find out whether he'd won or lost away from the people who'd done the most to help him.

When Flora complained about that, her husband only shrugged. "It's one of the rules of the game," he said.

"One of the rules of the game used to be that the Democrats won every four years," Flora answered. "We've changed that. Why not the other?"

Hosea Blackford looked surprised. "I just hadn't thought about it. I did this in 1920. The two of us did it in '24. Maybe we will change things… four years from now."

She gave him a kiss. "I like that. You're already starting to think about your second term, are you?"

"I'd better worry about the first one, don't you think?" he said.

The wireless announcer said, "In Massachusetts, Governor Coolidge continues to pull away. He also leads comfortably in Vermont and Tennessee, and early returns from Kentucky show him with a strong lead there."

"Oy!" Flora said in dismay.

Her husband took the news much more in stride than she did. "Massachusetts is Coolidge's home state," he said. "We've never done well anywhere in New England. And Kentucky is full of reactionaries. How could it be anything else, when it belonged to the Confederate States till the middle of the war? Wait till we start getting returns from the places where working people live, where they make things."

She nodded. She knew that as well as he did. Even so… "I don't like losing anywhere," she said.

Hosea Blackford smiled. "That's one of the reasons I'm so glad you're on my side."

A man at one of the telephones called out, "Your lead in New York City just went up another twenty thousand votes, Mr. Vice President!" Flora smiled too-then. She finally had something to smile about.

"Vice President Blackford's large lead in New York City looks likely to carry the state for him, in spite of Governor Coolidge's popularity in the upstate regions," the commentator on the wireless declared. "Pennsylvania will probably be a closer race. The Socialists are strong in Pittsburgh, but Philadelphia is still a Democratic bastion."

"We have to have New York," Flora murmured. "We have to." The state had the biggest bloc of electoral votes in the USA: one out of every seven. Pennsylvania came next, but far behind. The Democrats could count as well as the Socialists. They'd campaigned hard in New York. Let them fall short. In Flora's mind, it was more than half a prayer.

"New returns from Ohio," a telegrapher said. "You're up in Toledo, up in Cleveland, holding your own in Columbus, not doing so well in Cincinnati."

"About what we expected," Blackford said. "What do the overall figures in the state look like?"

"You're up by… let me see… seventeen thousand," the man answered after some quick work with pencil and paper.

"Not bad for this early in the night," Flora said.

"No, not bad," Hosea Blackford agreed. "Can't say much more than that without knowing just where all those votes are coming from. But I'd rather be ahead than behind." Flora nodded.

Little by little, returns began trickling in from farther west. Indiana had long been a Socialist stronghold; Senator Debs had twice lost to Teddy Roosevelt as the Socialist Party's standard-bearer. Hosea Blackford was well ahead there. Republicans remained strong in Illinois, Michigan, and Iowa-those three-cornered races wouldn't be settled till the wee small hours. Like Indiana, Wisconsin was solidly in the Socialist camp.

"We're doing fine," Flora said, and tried to make herself believe it.

"Maybe I'm glad I'm here after all," her husband said. "Looks like it's going to be a long night. This way, I can just go back into the bedroom and sleep whenever I feel like it. And there aren't any reporters yelling at me, either. I wouldn't be able to hear myself think over at Party headquarters."

"I wish it didn't look like a long night," Flora said. "I wish we were sweeping the country, and we could declare victory as soon as the polls closed."

"Well, I wouldn't mind that myself." Hosea laughed. "The Democrats did it for one election after another. Maybe we will, too, somewhere down the line But we haven't got there yet. This one's going to be close."

Flora's fists tightened till her nails bit into the palms of her hands. It wasn't just that she wanted the Socialists to win Powel House and as many seats in the House and Senate as they could, though she did. She'd always wanted that, ever since becoming a Party activist before the Great War. But it felt secondary now. With her husband in the race, she wanted his triumph with an intensity that amazed her. A win tonight would cap a lifetime of service to the Socialist cause and to the country. Losing…

Again, she refused to think about losing.

Hosea Blackford didn't. "If I win, we stay in Philadelphia," he said. "If I lose, we go home. How would you like living way out West for a while?"

"It's beautiful country," Flora answered, and then said the best thing she could for it: "Joshua would like growing up there." Having said that, she went on, "It seems so… empty, though, to somebody who's used to New York City or Philadelphia."

She'd enjoyed spending holidays in Dakota with her husband. The wide open spaces awed her, for a while. But towns and trains and civilization in general seemed a distinct afterthought there. She didn't like that, not at all. To someone who'd grown up on the preposterously overcrowded Lower East Side, so many empty miles of prairie, relieved-if at all-only by a long line of telegraph poles shrinking toward an unbelievably distant horizon, felt more alarming than inspiring.

Someone slammed down a telephone and let out a string of curses that ignored her presence in the room. "Kansas is going for Coolidge, God damn it," he said.

That made Flora want to curse, too. Hosea Blackford took it in stride. "Confederate raiders hit Kansas hard during the war," he said. "They don't love Socialists there; they've been Democrats since the Second Mexican War."

"Well, they can geh kak afen yam," Flora said.

Her husband chuckled; he knew what that Yiddish unpleasantry meant. "There's no yam anywhere close to Kansas for them to geh kak afen," he pointed out.

"I don't care," Flora said. "They can do it anyway."

The new state of Houston, carved from the conquered piece of Texas, went for Calvin Coolidge. So did Montana, which had been a Democratic stronghold ever since Theodore Roosevelt made a hero of himself there during the Second Mexican War. Flora began to worry in earnest. But a little past midnight, Pennsylvania, which had teetered for a long time, fell into her husband's camp-and Pennsylvania's electoral votes made up for a swarm of Montanas. New Jersey had also stayed close till then, and also ended up going Socialist.

"We may make it," Hosea Blackford said. "We just may."

By then, returns from the West were coming in. Colorado had a strong union tradition, and looked like going Socialist again. Idaho fell to Coolidge, and so did Nevada, but Blackford swept the West Coast, including populous California: Hiram Johnson had delivered his state.

Flora was yawning when one of the telephones rang a little past three in the morning. "Mr. Vice President," called the man who answered it, and then, in a different, awed, tone of voice, "Mr. President-elect, it's Governor Coolidge, calling from Massachusetts."

That woke Flora better than a big cup of black coffee could have done. She kissed her husband before he could go to the telephone. "Hello, Governor," he said when he picked up the instrument. "Thank you very much, sir… That's very generous… Yes, you did give me quite a scare, and I'm not ashamed to admit it… What's that?" He had been smiling and cordial, but now his expression hardened. "I certainly hope you're wrong, Governor. I think you are… Yes, time will tell. Thank you again. Good night." He hung up, perhaps more forcefully than he had to.

"What did he say that made you angry?" Flora asked.

"He said maybe he was lucky not to win," Hosea Blackford answered. "He said bull markets don't last forever, and this one's gone on so long and risen so high, the crash will be all the worse when it comes back to earth."

"God forbid!" Flora exclaimed.

"I think we've given God some help," Hosea said. "The business cycle's been rising steadily all through both of President Sinclair's terms. I don't see any reason why it shouldn't do the same for me. The Democrats may have enjoyed boom-and-bust capitalism before the war, but we've put that behind us now. We're prosperous, and we'll stay prosperous."

"Alevai, omayn!" Whenever Flora fell back into Yiddish these days, she spoke from heart and belly.

Hosea Blackford smiled. He understood that. "I really do think it'll be all right, Flora," he said gently. "Oh, there's more farm debt than I care to see out in the West, and the factories almost seem to be making things faster than people can buy them, but all that's just a drop in the bucket. We'll do fine."

"I'm not going to argue with you, not now-Mr. President." Flora kissed him again. The telegraphers and men at the phones all cheered.

"Not for another five months," Hosea reminded her. "Say that to me in front of President Sinclair and he'll arrest you for treason."

"Phooey," Flora said, which wasn't English or Yiddish, but was exactly what she meant.

Another telephone rang. "Mr. President-elect, it's the president."

This time, Flora didn't try to delay her husband when he went to the telephone. "Hello, Upton," he said. "Thank you so very much… Yes, Cal threw in the towel a little while ago. He gave me some sour grapes, too, babbling about a crash… Yes, of course it's idiocy. When in all the history of the country have things gone so well? And we have you to thank for it. I'll do my best to follow your footsteps.

… Thanks again. Good-bye."

Flora went in and woke up Joshua. "Your father's going to be president," she told him.

"I want to go back to sleep," he said irritably-he wasn't quite three, and didn't care whether his father was president or a garbageman. Flora wanted to go to sleep, too. Now I won't have to live in Dakota, she thought. And if that wasn't reason enough, all by itself, to be glad Hosea had won, she couldn't imagine what would be.

The year had turned eight days before. Lucien Galtier didn't want to be standing out in the open, not with the weather down around zero and a raw wind blowing out of the northwest. Under his overcoat, his tight collar and black cravat felt as if they were choking him.

Charles and Georges stood beside him in the graveyard. His sons' faces were blank and bitter with grief. So, he suspected, was his own. His daughters-Nicole, Denise, Susanne, and Jeanne-could show their grief more openly, though that wind threatened to freeze the tears on their faces.

It also whipped at Father Guillaume's wool cassock. "Is everyone here?" he asked. Galtier nodded. Himself, his children, their spouses, his two grandchildren-and Charles' wife big with child, due almost any day-Marie's brother and sister and their spouses and children and grandchildren, some cousins, some friends. The priest raised his voice a little: "Let us pray."

Lucien bowed his head as Father Guillaume offered up sonorous Latin to the Lord. Absurdly, Galtier chose that moment to remember how strange the American priest who'd married Nicole and Leonard O'Doull had sounded while speaking Latin-he'd pronounced it differently from the way Quebecois clergymen did. But even they'd assured him it wasn't wrong, merely not the same.

After the Latin was done, Father Guillaume dropped back into French: "Marie Galtier no longer gives us the boon of her company on this earth. But she is at the right hand of the Father even as I speak these words, as she died in our true and holy Catholic faith. And she will live forever, for she was a good woman, as you show by coming here today to honor and commemorate her passing."

Nicole began to sob. Leonard O'Doull put his arm around her. Lucien wished someone would do the same for him. But he was a man. He had to bear this as a man did, as stoically as he could. His eyes slid to the black-draped coffin. He'd thought burying his parents was hard. And it had been. This, though, this felt ten times worse. That was his life going into the hole the gravediggers had hacked from the frozen ground. How can I go on without Marie? he wondered. He couldn't imagine finding an answer.

"In a real way, too, Marie Galtier does still live here among us," the priest said. Lucien almost called him a liar and a fool, there in front of everyone. Before he could say the words, Father Guillaume went on, "She lives in our hearts, in our memories. Whenever we recall her kindness and her love, she lives again. And because she gave us so many reasons to do just that, she will live on for a very long time indeed, even if her years among us were fewer than we would have wished. Think of her often, and she will live for you again."

He turned toward the coffin, making the sign of the cross and praying once more in Latin. All the people standing there shivering as they listened to him crossed themselves, too. As Lucien did so, he felt a certain dull amazement. Father Guillaume had been right after all. Lucien could hear his wife's voice inside himself, could see her smile whenever he closed his eyes. A marvel, yes, but a painful marvel. Seeing her and hearing her that way only reminded him he wouldn't see her or hear her in the flesh any more. Helplessly, he began to cry.

"Here, Papa." Of all people, his foolish son Georges was the one who held him and gave him a handkerchief: Georges, whose always-smiling face was as twisted with sorrow as Lucien's had to be.

"Thank you, my son," Lucien whispered. He felt his eyelids trying to freeze together, and rubbed at them with the handkerchief.

Then he and his sons and Marie's brother and Dr. Leonard O'Doull lifted the coffin and set it in the grave. What struck Lucien was how little it weighed, which had little to do with six men lifting it. After Dr. O'Doull found the mass in Marie's belly, after the X ray and the operation that only confirmed the worst, the flesh had melted off her day by day, till she was little more than parchment skin wrapped around bones by the time the end finally, mercifully, came. Those were memories of his wife Galtier wished he wouldn't carry into the future with him. No matter what he wished, though, he would have them till his turn to lie in a coffin came. He made himself go over to the priest and say, " Merci, Father Guillaume."

The young priest nodded soberly. "You are welcome, and more than welcome. This is a cup I wish had passed from me, and one I wish had passed from your wife as well. I would have hoped she might enjoy many more happy years."

"Yes. I would have hoped for the same." Galtier looked up into the cloudy sky. More snow might start falling any time. "Better God should have taken me. Why did He take her and leave me all alone?" That thought had been with him since he first found out Marie was ill.

"He knows the answer to that, even if He does not give it to us to know," Father Guillaume said.

"Marie knows now, too," Lucien said. "If ever I see God face to face, I intend to ask Him about it, and His explanation had better be a good one." The priest coughed and turned red. Galtier went on, "And if I don't see Him face to face, if I meet the Devil instead, as could be, then I intend to find out from him."

Now Father Guillaume gravely shook his head. "Satan is the Father of Lies. Whatever he might tell you, you would not be able to believe it."

With Quebecois stubbornness, Lucien said, "I'll hear what he says, and then I'll make up my own mind."

Charles came up to him and asked, "Do you want me to drive you home, Papa?"

"Why would I?" Galtier asked in honest surprise.

"After this… I was not sure how you would be," his older son answered.

"I am not so very well," Galtier agreed. "But if I am not so very well after burying my wife, are you so very well after burying your mother? It could be you would make a worse menace on the road than I, n'est-ce pas?"

Charles looked surprised, but nodded. "Yes, it could be, I suppose." He turned away. "I should have known you were too stubborn to take help from anyone."

"When I need it, I take it," Lucien said. "When I don't, I don't. Don't be angry at me, son. I am not angry at you. And the two of us, we're not so very different, eh?"

He knew that was true. Charles took after him in more than looks. His older son also had a character much like his own. After a moment's thought, Charles gave him the same sort of grudging nod he would have used himself. "All right, Father. Yes, you're right-I can be a stiff-necked nuisance, too. I'll see you there, then?"

"Certainly," Galtier said. "Where else would I go, but to my own house?"

But when he got out of the Chevrolet close by the farmhouse on the land that had been in his family for almost 250 years, he wondered. He didn't want to go back into the house. Going in there had always-not literally always, but more than thirty years came close enough-meant going in to see Marie. Now she wasn't there. She never would be there, not any more. And remembering that she had been there, remembering the life together the two of them had built, the life now forever sundered, forever shattered, was like knives to Lucien. He had to gather himself before he could go inside.

Nicole and Leonard O'Doull were already there. So were Charles and his wife. One by one and in small groups, the rest of his children and his wife's relatives and his friends came in. There was plenty to drink and plenty to eat; the womenfolk in the family had been cooking since Marie died.

"Thank you all," Lucien said. "Thank you all very much for coming. Thank you for caring for Marie." His face twisted into a characteristically wry grin. "For I know you certainly would not have come for my sake."

"Certainly not, mon beau-pere, " Dr. O'Doull said. "We all hate you."

For a moment, Galtier took him seriously, being too emotionally battered to recognize irony. But then even he saw the smile on his son-in-law's face, and those on the faces of his other loved ones. He wanted to smile, too, but ended up weeping once more instead. He felt mortified all over again, and angrily turned away from Dr. O'Doull.

"It's all right," said the American who'd become part of his family. "No one thinks less of you for it. Here. Drink this." He gave Lucien a glass of applejack.

The homemade spirits went down Galtier's throat without his even noticing them. He had another glass, and another, all with scant effect. He felt too much already for applejack to make much difference. For the next half hour or so, he thanked everyone who'd come to his house to say good-bye to Marie.

"What will you do now, Papa?" Georges asked him. "Do you know yet?"

"What can I do?" Galtier answered. "I'll go on as best I can. If I don't feed the animals tomorrow, who will? If I don't take care of the farm, who will? The work doesn't do itself. You always thought it did, but it doesn't. Someone has to do it. If no one does it, it doesn't get done."

"But…" His younger son gestured. "How can you do all the farm work, and then do all the housework, too?"

"Electricity helps," Lucien said. "With electricity, everything is quicker and easier. And I was in the Army a long time ago. I know how to keep things tidy-unlike certain people I could name."

Georges didn't rise to that, which proved how solemn an occasion this was. He just asked, "And while you were in the Army, Papa, did they also teach you how to cook?"

"No, but then, who cares?" Galtier answered. "I am the only person I'll be cooking for. I won't starve to death. And if supper is particularly bad one night, I can always throw things at the clumsy fool who fixed it."

He made his son laugh at that, and thought he'd tricked Georges-maybe even tricked himself-into believing everything was, or at least soon would be, all right. A few minutes later, though, Georges sprawled in a chair, hands over his face, weeping with as much heartbreak as Lucien knew himself.

What will I do? Galtier wondered. For all his glib talk, he had no idea. At the moment, he didn't particularly want to go on living himself. Maybe that would change as time passed. He'd heard it did. He'd heard it, but didn't particularly believe it. Why not me? he wondered, as he had ever since he'd found Marie in the kitchen with tears running down her face.

He'd hoped Father Guillaume would have an answer for that, but no such luck. It would have to wait till he saw God, as Marie was seeing God now. If He doesn't have a good answer, I'll give Him a piece of my mind.

Nicole came over to him. She looked achingly like her mother, though she was a few inches taller; Marie had been a little woman, not much over five feet. "She's gone, Papa," she said wonderingly. "I can't believe it, but she's gone."

"I know," Lucien said.

"I love you," his oldest daughter said.

He hadn't heard that from her for years. He suspected it meant, I'm afraid I'll lose you, too. "And I love you, my dear," he said, as if to reply, I'm not going anywhere. But that wasn't really for him to say. He looked up to, and past, the ceiling. Don't You argue with me, he told God, and dared hope God was listening.

"A nother Inauguration Day," Nellie Jacobs said. "Dear God, where do the years go? First one I can recollect is President Blaine's, back in 1881. I was just a little girl then, of course."

"Well, I hope to heaven Hosea Blackford does a better job than James G. Blaine did," her husband answered.

"He'd better," Nellie exclaimed. "A few months after Blaine got elected, the Confederates were shelling Washington. I've been through that twice now. It had better not happen again, that's all I've got to say, because I don't think anybody could be lucky enough to live through it three times."

"I don't look for a war any time soon," Hal Jacobs said. "I don't see how we could have one. The Confederates aren't very strong, and we're prosperous. I still think the stock market is sound, even if the money trouble in Europe has set it hiccoughing."

"I'm glad it's hiccoughing," Nellie said. "It let us buy those shares of the Wireless Corporation for a lot less than they would have cost us a couple of months ago."

"Buy on the dips," Hal said wisely. "Buy on the dips, and you can't go wrong."

"That's what they say," Nellie agreed. "It's worked out pretty well for us so far. I just wish we'd been able to start out when we were a lot younger."

Hal shrugged. "For one thing, we didn't have the money. For another, the market was a lot riskier in those days-it would crash every few years. And then the war came along, and we were too busy to worry about it for quite a while."

"Too busy? Well, yes, a little bit," Nellie said. Hal pinned his Distinguished Service Medal on the breast pocket of his black jacket. With his white shirt, black cravat, and black homburg, the medal's ribbon gave his outfit the only dash of color it had. Nellie nodded approval. "You look handsome," she told him, and he did indeed look as handsome as he could.

"Thank you, my dear." He always seemed to glow a little when she paid him a compliment. And he returned the favor: "You are as lovely as always."

"Oh, foosh." Nellie had heard too many compliments from men over the years to trust them or take them seriously. Men complimented women because they wanted something from them-most often one thing in particular. She put on her Order of Remembrance, then turned her back on her husband. "Fasten the ribbon at the back of my neck, would you, Hal?"

"Of course," he said, and did. Then he kissed the back of her neck, too. She'd more than half expected him to do that, and she let him get away with it. By his relieved expression, he'd wondered if she would.

"Are you ready, Clara?" she called.

"Yes, Ma," her daughter answered from the room across the hall. "Is it time to go?"

"Just about," Nellie said. "And don't forget your coat."

"Do I have to bring it?" Clara said. "It's not cold out."

She was right. The weather was springlike, even though spring still lay two and a half weeks away. But Nellie answered, "Yes, take it. I'm bringing one, too. You never can tell what it'll do." Clara grumbled, but she couldn't complain too hard, not if Nellie was also bringing a coat. And Nellie knew she was right. She also had an umbrella, though the sun shone brightly for now. No, you never could tell.

They walked toward the Mall, for the parade of bands and companies of soldiers and-since this was another Socialist administration-gangs of workers who would precede the new President Blackford's inaugural address. They had a spot picked out-right in front of the rebuilt National Museum of Remembrance, and not far from the platform where the new president would speak. Edna and Merle and Armstrong would meet them there if they could fight their way through the crowd.

They wiggled forward till they stood in the second row in front of the museum. Nellie could see the platform, which was already filling with dignitaries. "We made good time," she said.

"Yes, we did," Hal agreed. "We'll be able to see everything, and we won't have any trouble hearing the president talk."

Clara chose that moment to announce, "Mama, I have to go."

"You always have to go," Nellie said in no small exasperation. She sighed. "I'll take you into the museum. Hold our places, Hal. Do the best you can." Her husband nodded. She took Clara's hand. "Come along with me, young lady. Why didn't you go before we left? That's what I want to know."

"I did," Clara answered with a child's self-righteousness. "I have to go again."

The line for the women's powder room at the Museum of Remembrance was as long as Nellie had feared it would be. She and Clara needed twenty minutes to work their way to the front. By then, Clara was fidgeting enough to convince Nellie she hadn't said she needed to go just to be annoying.

Many more people had come to the Mall by the time Nellie and Clara emerged from the museum once more. Nellie had to do some elbowing, and stepped on a couple of feet that didn't get out of the way fast enough to suit her. "Watch where you're going, lady," an angry man said.

"I'm so sorry," Nellie answered, and stepped on him again, not in the least by accident.

Hal Jacobs wasn't a big man. Nellie began to wonder if she'd ever find him. She was starting to worry when Merle Grimes said, "Hello, Mother Jacobs." He and Edna and Armstrong stood with Hal.

"Hello, Merle," she said. "I'd've gone right past the lot of you if you hadn't spoken up, Lord help me if I wouldn't."

"We're all together now," Hal said. "That's the way things are supposed to be."

"That's right," Edna said, a little louder than she had to. She clung to Merle's hand. They both wore their decorations, too. From what Nellie could see, things between them weren't quite the same as they had been before Merle found out about Nicholas H. Kincaid. They were tolerable, and Edna didn't seem actively discontented, but they weren't so lovey-dovey as before. Told you so, Edna, Nellie said, but only to herself.

A band began to play. Nellie stopped worrying about her daughter and son-in-law-and even about her other daughter and her grandson, who got along no better than they ever did-and watched yet another inauguration, yet another passing of the torch from one president to another.

This year, the passing was odd, as outgoing President Sinclair was about fifteen years younger than incoming President Blackford. It was as if the USA were moving backwards in time, something the country didn't do very often. Chief Justice Holmes administered the oath to Hosea Blackford.

Voice aided by a microphone, Blackford repeated the words that made him president of the United States: "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

A sigh ran through the crowd. Nellie had heard that oath every four years since 1881-not counting 1916. It made official what had happened five months before. Now the country had a new president. Now we see what happens next, she thought, as if it were a new chapter in a novel. And so, in a way, it was.

The most immediate thing that happened next was Blackford's inaugural address. Nellie got a good look at him up there on the stand. Behind him, his wife, who was much younger than he, tried to keep a little boy younger than Armstrong quiet. Robbing the cradle, Mr. President? Nellie thought.

"I am pleased to tell you how well off our country is today, thanks to the inspired leadership given over the past eight years by my most distinguished predecessor, President Upton Sinclair." Hosea Blackford owned a ringing baritone. Nellie thought she remembered hearing he'd been a lawyer before going to Congress. He certainly had the voice for it. He led the applause for the president leaving office. Sinclair rose one last time from his seat behind the podium to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd.

As the new ex-president sat down again, Blackford went on, "We are at peace on our continent. We extend the hand of friendship to both the Confederate States and the Empire of Mexico. We share a common heritage with the CSA, and I am pleased to note that Confederate President Burton Mitchel, a civilized gentleman, shares this view. May we see no more war in North America, not ever again!"

Nellie clapped as loud as she could. If war came, it would surely come to Washington, would surely come down on her head. She wanted peace for her daughter, peace for her grandson. She'd seen too much of war ever to want to know it again.

"To the north, the Republic of Quebec is our staunch ally," Blackford declared. Even Nellie knew that meant the Quebecois would do as they were told. The president said, "English-speaking Canada continues to recover under our guidance." Even Nellie knew that meant the rest of the Canucks would damn well have to do as they were told. "And Utah, long turbulent, looks toward the day when it shall be a state like any other."

That drew scattered boos even from a mostly friendly crowd. Few people outside of Utah had much sympathy for the Mormons, not after two uprisings.

"Broad oceans protect us from foreign foes," President Blackford said. "The Sandwich Islands serve as a bastion against the Empire of Japan, while the Atlantic shields us against Europe's unending turmoil and danger. And let me note that I am completely confident the panics of the past ten days in Vienna, in Rome, in Paris, and in London will not affect the Empire of Germany in any important way, and that they cannot possibly cross the Atlantic and endanger our own well-being."

Everyone applauded vigorously there. So far, the Berlin and New York exchanges had avoided most of the jitters afflicting the smaller European markets, though Richmond also seemed nervous. Beside Nellie, Hal murmured, "If we can ride it out for another week, we'll be fine. The Austro-Hungarians cause so much trouble. If they hadn't called for repayment of that Russian loan…"

"Hush," Nellie told him. "I want to hear the president."

Blackford seemed to have said everything he was going to say about foreign affairs. He switched to what he hoped to accomplish within the United States: "We want no man hungry. We want no one able-bodied without work. We want no capitalists exploiting the workers of our great land. We want justice for all, and we intend to get it. We will not let the aged, who have worked hard all their lives, be discarded like so many worn-out cogs in our industrial machine."

Nellie applauded that. She'd worked hard all her life, and looked forward to the day when she wouldn't have to any more. Old-age insurance sounded good to her-better than relying on whatever charity she might get from Merle and Edna, and perhaps from Clara and whomever she ended up marrying.

If Blackford can find a way for me to have enough to live on when I'm old, I'd vote Socialist forever-if I could vote at all. Women's suffrage was here, all over the USA-but not in Washington, D.C. Men were every bit as disenfranchised in the nation's legal capital. Now more than ever, that struck Nellie as monstrously unfair. Men had complained about it for as long as she could remember. It also affected her now, so she noticed it more. Hosea Blackford said not a word about votes for Washington.