The Victorious Opposition Read online

  “Using them is what makes you derelict.” Young eyed him, then sighed. “I see I do not persuade you. I don’t suppose I should have expected to. Yet hope does spring eternal in the human breast. I tell you, Colonel, no good will come from your using these machines.”

  “Do you threaten me, Mr. Young?”

  “Colonel, if I tell you the sun will come up tomorrow, is that a threat? I would not say so. I would call it a prediction based on what I know of past events. I would call this the same thing.” He stood up, politely challenging Dowling to arrest him for sedition after he’d come and put his head in the lion’s jaws. Dowling couldn’t, and he knew it. The word that Heber Young languished in a U.S. prison would touch off insurrection, regardless of whether the barrels in Temple Square did. As Young turned to go, he added, “If the government were generous enough to grant me the franchise, you may rest assured I would vote for Al Smith, in the hope that such discussions as this one would become unnecessary. Good day, Colonel Dowling.” Out he went, a man whose moral force somehow made him worth battalions.

  Four days later, one of the barrels caught fire on the way from the U.S. base to its turn at Temple Square. All eighteen crewmen escaped, and nobody shot at them as they burst from the doomed machine’s hatches. Word came to Dowling almost at once. Cursing, he left the base in an auto and zoomed down Temple toward the blazing barrel.

  By the time he got there, the fire had already started touching off ammunition. The fireworks display was spectacular, with red tracer rounds zooming in all directions. A fire engine roared up not long after Dowling arrived. It started spraying water on the barrel from as far away as the stream from the hose would reach. That struck him as being about as futile as offering last rites to a man smashed by a speeding locomotive, but he didn’t think it could do any harm, so he kept quiet about it.

  “How did this happen?” he demanded of the barrel’s commander, a captain named Witherspoon.

  “Sir, I don’t know.” Witherspoon nursed a burned hand.

  He’ll live, Dowling thought savagely. “Was it sabotage?” he asked.

  “Sir, I don’t know,” Captain Witherspoon repeated. “It could have been, but. . . .” He shrugged. “This machine has to be almost twenty years old. Plenty of things can go wrong with it any which way. A leak in a fuel line, a leak in an oil line . . .” Another shrug. He pointed toward the burning barrel, from which a thick cloud of black smoke rose. “We’ll never know now, that’s for damn sure.”

  “Yes. It is,” Dowling said unhappily. Were people in Salt Lake City laughing because they’d got away with one? Worse, were people in Richmond laughing because they’d got away with one?

  Kaplan’s, on the Lower East Side, was a delicatessen Flora Blackford hadn’t visited for years. That got driven home the minute she walked in the door. She remembered the foxy-red hair of Lou Kaplan, the proprietor; it made you want to warm your hands over it. Kaplan was still behind the counter. These days, though, his hair was white.

  These days, Flora’s hair had more than a little gray in it, too. She saw her brother at a table in the corner. She waved. David Hamburger nodded. She hurried over to him. Her little brother had a double chin, tired eyes, and gray in his own hair. The things time does to us! Flora thought, sudden tears stinging her eyes. She blinked them away. “It’s good to see you, David,” she said. “It’s been too long.”

  He shrugged. “I get by. I like being a tailor. I like it better than being a Congressman’s brother, and a lot better than being a First Lady’s brother. You can’t say I ever bothered you for anything, the way important people’s relatives do.”

  “Bothered me?” Flora shook her head. “I wish you would have. Most of the time, you wouldn’t even talk to me. You don’t visit. . . .”

  “I don’t get out much.” David tapped the cane leaning against his chair. He’d lost a leg in the war, not far below the hip. He could walk with a prosthesis, but only painfully. As if to emphasize that, he pointed to the chair across from him and said, “Sit down, for heaven’s sake. You know why I’m not going to get up till I have to.”

  Flora did sit. A waitress came over to her and David. They both ordered. The pause meant she didn’t have to call him on what she knew to be an evasion. He was, after all, here at Kaplan’s. He could have come to Socialist Party headquarters once in a while, too. He could have, but he hadn’t.

  Politics estranged them. Flora had never thought that could happen in her family, but it had. Her brother had come out of the war a staunch Democrat. It was as if, having been crippled, he didn’t want his wound to have been in vain, and so joined the party that was hardest on the CSA.

  Flora reached into the jar across the table, pulled out a pickled tomato, and bit into it. She smiled; the taste and the vinegar tang in the air and the crunch took her back to her childhood. “Can’t get things like this in Dakota, or even down in Philadelphia,” she said.

  That won her a grudging smile from David. “No, I don’t suppose you would,” he said, and then fell silent again as the waitress brought his pastrami sandwich and Flora’s corned beef on rye. He sipped from an egg cream, which had neither egg nor cream in it. Flora’s drink was a seltzer with a shpritz of raspberry syrup on top, something else unmatchable outside of New York City.

  “Is your family well?” Flora asked.

  “Well enough,” he answered. “Amazing how fast children grow.”

  She nodded; Joshua had taught her that. She said, “I’m glad—” and then broke off, hoping he would think she’d intended it for a complete sentence. David had feared no one would ever want to marry a one-legged man. She’d started to say she was glad he’d been wrong about that, but hadn’t known how he would take it.

  By his tight-lipped smile, he knew where she’d been going. But then he shrugged, visibly setting aside annoyance. He said, “These past couple of years, I see you’ve finally started to understand what nice people the Confederates really are. Better late than never, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

  “It’s not the Confederate people. It’s the Freedom Party,” Flora said. “Reactionaries have seized control of the apparatus of the state, the same as they have in France.”

  David Hamburger rolled his eyes. “I don’t suppose that would have happened if the people hadn’t voted them in, now would it?”

  “Well . . .” Flora winced. Her brother’s comment was painfully pungent, but that didn’t mean it was wrong.

  “Yes. Well,” he said. “Listen, if it comes to a fight we’d better be ready. That’s the big thing I wanted to tell you. We’ve got to, you hear me? Otherwise, this”—he made a fist and hit his artificial leg, which gave back a sound like knocking on a door—“was for nothing, and I don’t think I could stand that.”

  “It won’t come to war,” Flora said in genuine alarm. “Not even Hoover thinks it’ll come to war.”

  “Hoover’s one of the best men we’ve ever had for getting things done,” David said, “and one of the worst for figuring out what to do. That’s how it looks to me, anyhow. Of course, I’m no political bigwig. Nu, am I right or am I meshuggeh?”

  “You’re a lot of things, but you’re not meshuggeh,” Flora answered. He’d summed up Hoover better than most editorial columnists she’d seen. “I still think you worry too much about the CSA, though. They have more tsuris than we do.”

  “Just because you have tsuris doesn’t mean you can’t give it.” David finished his sandwich. He used one hand to help lever himself upright. Taking hold of the cane, he said, “They’ll send you back to Congress in a couple of days. I’m not telling you to listen to me—when did you ever? But keep your eyes open.”

  “I always do,” Flora insisted. Her brother didn’t argue. He just walked out of Kaplan’s, with a slow, rolling gait like a drunken sailor’s. That let the knee joint in the artificial leg lock each time he took a step, and kept it from buckling under him. Flora wanted to go after him, but what was the point? They hadn’t had anything in com
mon for years. A sad lunch talking politics proved as much, as if it needed proof.

  That evening, she made a speech in a union hall, and got cheered till her ears rang. More loud cheers greeted her after her two speeches the day before the election. She shook hands till her own was swollen and sore—and she knew how to minimize the damage while she did it.

  She expected she would win reelection, too. Her district was solidly Socialist; it had gone Democratic for a little while in the despair following the collapse, but then repented of its folly. What she didn’t know—what nobody knew—was whether the country would have its revenge on Herbert Hoover, as it had had its revenge on her husband four years earlier.

  Tuesday, November 3, was cold and rainy. Flora went out and voted early, so the reporters and photographers who waited at her polling place could get their stories and pictures into the papers before the polls closed. She knew her Democratic opponent was doing the same thing. This way, their appearances canceled each other out. If she hadn’t come early, he would have grabbed an edge—a small one, but an edge nonetheless.

  “I think Smith will whip him,” Hosea Blackford said when Flora came back to their apartment after voting: he was still registered in Dakota, and had cast an absentee ballot. He’d stayed on the sidelines during the campaign. For one thing, his own reputation wouldn’t help either Flora or the Socialist Party. For another, he was getting ever more fragile. He still managed pretty well as long as he stuck close to home. Out in crowds these days, though, he seemed not only frail but also slightly baffled. That worried Flora.

  She took her son with her to Socialist Party headquarters for the Fourteenth Ward, then, but not her husband. Most of her family was there, too, although her nephew, Yossel, was serving out his time as a conscript on occupation duty in Canada, and David, as usual, gave the Socialists a wide berth.

  Flora was glad Yossel had been sent north rather than down to Houston. That was a running sore that would not heal. Hoover had made a mess of things there, but Flora had no idea what a Socialist president might have done to make things better.

  When she came in, Herman Bruck boomed, “Let’s all welcome Congresswoman Hamburger!” He turned red as a bonfire. “Congresswoman Blackford!” he said, blushing still. “But I knew her when she was Congresswoman Hamburger.”

  He had, too. It was twenty years now—and where had the time gone?—since she’d beaten him for the nomination to this seat when Myron Zuckerman, the longtime incumbent, fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. If that hadn’t happened . . .

  With a shake of her head, Flora tried to drive that thought out of her mind. It wasn’t easy. The past couple of years, there’d been a spate of what people called “worlds of if” novels. If the USA had won the War of Secession or the Second Mexican War, if the Negro uprising had succeeded in the CSA, if the Red uprising had succeeded in Russia . . . If, if, if. Dealing with the world as it was was hard enough for most people. Flora didn’t think the “worlds of if” fad would last.

  Bruck turned on a wireless set. He got loud music, and then, as he turned the dial, a quiz show. A couple of young women perked up at that, but he kept changing stations till he found one that was giving election returns. “With the polls just closing in New York . . .” the announcer said. A burst of static squelched him.

  Another station farther down the dial came in better. It was announcing early returns from Massachusetts. Cheers rang out in the Socialist headquarters when the broadcaster said Smith was leading Hoover three to two. The station switched to an interview with a Boston Democratic leader. “Doesn’t look good for us heah,” the man said in a gravelly, New England–accented voice. “Have to hope Smith and Borah don’t drag the local candidates down too fah.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Kennedy,” the interviewer said.

  “Yes, thank you, Mr. Kennedy!” Maria Tresca said. She and Flora grinned at each other. The two of them had been friends for more than twenty years, too. It was partly a matter of living in a largely Jewish district, partly sheer luck, that Flora and not Maria had succeeded in politics.

  As soon as Flora heard Al Smith was ahead in Massachusetts, she knew the night would belong to the Socialists. And so it proved. She handily won her own race; her Democratic opponent called before eleven o’clock to throw in the towel. That brought more cheers in the headquarters, though by then everyone was starting to get hoarse. The air was blue with cigarette, cigar, and pipe smoke, which helped make throats raw.

  President Hoover’s spokesman kept issuing statements along the lines of, “The current trend cannot be overlooked, but the president will not concede the election before he is sure his victory is impossible.”

  Herman Bruck pulled out a bottle of champagne, an upper-class touch for the party of the proletariat. He brought Flora a glass—not a fancy flute, but an ordinary water glass. “Here’s to Hoover! His victory is impossible!” he said.

  “Alevai, omayn!” Flora drank. The bubbles tickled her nose.

  Bruck had a glass, too. “Did you ever imagine, when we first started here, we would win Powel House, lose it, and win it back?” he asked. “Did you ever imagine you would be First Lady?”

  “Don’t be silly.” She shook her head. “How could I? How could anyone?”

  He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. People all around them cheered. Flora laughed. She wasn’t so sure Herman had done it just to congratulate her. He’d been sweet on her before she won her first election and went to Philadelphia, even if she hadn’t been sweet on him. Now they’d both been married to other people for years. But he just smiled when she wagged a finger at him, and everyone else laughed and cheered some more. On a night full of victory, she didn’t push it.

  VIII

  “Happy New Year, darlin’!” Scipio said to Bathsheba. “Do Jesus! I was borned in slavery days, I don’t never reckon I lives to see 1937.”

  His wife sighed. “Better be a happy year,” she said darkly. “Last couple-three sure ain’t.”

  “We is on our feets,” Scipio said. “We gots a place again.” The flat wasn’t much worse than the one they’d lived in before white rioters torched so much of the Terry, and they weren’t paying much more for it. Compared to so many people who were still living in churches or in tents, they were amazingly lucky. That they’d managed to bring their money out with them had helped a lot. Money usually did.

  Bathsheba refused to look on the bright side of things. “What happens the next time the buckra decide they gots to go after all the niggers in town? Where we stay then?”

  “Ain’t been bad”—Scipio correct himself—“ain’t been too bad since.”

  “Bully!” In Bathsheba’s mouth, the old-fashioned white man’s slang sounded poisonously sarcastic.

  “We gots to go on. We gots to do what we kin.” Scipio knew he was trying to convince himself as well as her.

  “Wish we could go somewheres else,” his wife said.

  “Like where?” Scipio asked. She had no answer. He knew she wouldn’t. The United States had made it very plain they didn’t want any Negroes from the Confederate States, no matter what happened to blacks in the CSA. The Empire of Mexico was farther away and even less welcoming. “We is stuck where we’s at.”

  “Gots to be some way.” Like most people, Bathsheba saw what she wanted to see, regardless of whether it was really there.

  He didn’t try to argue with her. They’d argued too much lately. She still hadn’t stopped nagging him about who he was and who and what he had been. He gave short answers, knowing that the more he said, the more dangerous it was for him. Short answers didn’t satisfy her. She wanted to know—she was convinced she had the right to know—where and how and why and when he’d learned to talk like an educated white man. As far as he was concerned, the less said, the better. Secrecy had become deeply ingrained in him since he came to Augusta. Only by keeping his past secret did he, could he, survive.

  Neither of them stayed up long after midnight. They ha
d planned to get out with the children on New Year’s Day, but a cold, nasty rainstorm rolling down from the north put paid to that. Instead, they spent the day cooped up in the flat. They were all on edge, Scipio’s son and daughter from disappointment at an outing spoiled, himself and his wife over worry about what the new year might bring.

  It was still raining the next day: the sort of steady, sullen rain that promised to hang around for days. January second was a Saturday. The Huntsman’s Lodge, which had been closed for New Year’s, reopened. Scipio put on his formal clothes, then put a raincoat of rubberized cloth on over them. With that and an umbrella, he left the block of flats full of a relief he dared not show.

  He had no trouble getting to the Lodge. Because of the rain, only people who had to be out and about were, and no one seemed in the mood to harass a Negro. Also, the raincoat concealed the fancy jacket, wing-collared boiled shirt, and satin-striped trousers he wore beneath it. Not standing out in the crowd undoubtedly helped.

  Jerry Dover greeted him when he came in the door: “How are you, Xerxes? Happy New Year!”

  “I thanks you, suh. De same to you,” Scipio answered. With Dover, the work came first. If you could do it well, nothing else mattered. If you couldn’t, nothing else mattered, either, and he would send you packing. But if you could do it, he would stand by you. Scipio respected that, and responded to it.

  Today, though, Dover didn’t seem happy. “Got a few words to say when the whole crew comes in,” he told Scipio. “Won’t take long.”

  Anything that broke routine was worrisome. “What de trouble be?” Scipio asked.

  His boss shook his head. “I’ll tell you soon. I don’t want to have to do this more than once. You’ll hear, I promise.”

  That convinced Scipio the news, whatever it was, wouldn’t be good. He couldn’t do anything about it but wait. Naturally, one of the other waiters chose that day to show up late. When he finally did come in, he was so hung over, he could barely see. “New Year’s Eve night befo’ last,” somebody told him. He managed a sheepish grin, then took two aspirins from his pocket and dry-swallowed them.