Joe Steele Read online

  Charlie slowly walked to his own office. He should have been working on a speech about how much the community farms were producing and how everybody who worked on them was part of one big, happy family. It was drivel, of course, but a familiar kind of political drivel. He couldn’t make himself care about it. His deadline was still two days away, and he had other things on his mind.

  Sometimes a cigar was only a cigar. Sometimes a headache was only a headache, too. Sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes it meant you were having a stroke. Charlie’s uncle had complained of a headache just before he keeled over. Two days later, he was dead.

  Joe Steele wasn’t dead. He came down late that afternoon. If he looked pale and puffy, well, he could still be feeling the pill. The pill could account for the way he groped after words, too. He still had his marbles—he asked Charlie how the speech was coming.

  “It’ll be ready when you need it, Mr. President,” Charlie said.

  “Of course it will.” Joe Steele blinked at the idea that Charlie could suggest anything else was possible. Stroke or not, sleeping pill or not, he was pretty much his old self, in other words.

  By the time he had to deliver the speech, he was his old self. He’d never been an exciting speaker. He still wasn’t. But he’d always got the job done, and he did once more. Charlie let out a sigh of relief—in his office, with the door shut. One of these days, it wouldn’t be a false alarm. This time, it had been.

  XXVI

  Days would go by at the White House; Charlie would look back at them and try to remember what he’d done, only to discover he had no idea. Sometimes his head would come up after what he thought were a couple of days, and he would look at the calendar and see three weeks had passed. Where did they escape to? What had he been dealing with while they slipped through his fingers?

  He noticed Christmas of 1951—he spent that time with his family. But the only way he really noticed it was 1952 was by peeling the cellophane off the calendar a White House clerk left on his desk. Another year! Not just another year, but another election year. Joe Steele had already had five terms. It was like talking about five drinks. Once you’d had that many, what was one more?

  “He is going to run again, then?” Esther asked when Charlie came home with the astonishing news that 1952 had arrived after all.

  “I sure don’t see any signs that he won’t,” Charlie said. “But you know, going in these days is the strangest thing I’ve ever done.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It feels like riding on a merry-go-round,” Charlie answered. His wife gave him a quizzical look, or maybe just one that meant he was full of hops. “It does,” he insisted. “That’s the best way I know how to put it. You climb on, and it starts to go, and pretty soon it’s up to speed. You spin round and round, and round and round, and round and round some more.”

  Esther’s finger spun round and round, by her right ear. Charlie stuck out his tongue at her. “Sorry,” she said—a lie if he’d ever heard one. “But you aren’t making any sense.”

  “You didn’t let me finish. So the merry-go-round turns at that one speed for most of the ride. But when it’s heading toward time for your bunch to get off and the next bunch to get on, the merry-go-round doesn’t stop all at once. It slows down a little bit at a time. And when you’re on it, at first you don’t even notice, ’cause you’re still moving. But then you see things going around in slow motion instead of regular speed, and you know what’s going on. And that’s what the White House feels like these days.”

  “Oh. Okay, now I see what you mean,” Esther said. “Well, we’ve had twenty years of King Stork. A term or two of King Log might not be so bad.” Aesop’s fables had been a hit with Sarah and then again with Pat. Reading the stories over and over lodged them in Esther’s head and Charlie’s, too.

  “Maybe,” Charlie said. “Or maybe he’ll go on another kick instead. For a while, I thought who-lost-China? would be it, but he seems to have lost interest in that.”

  “I’ll tell you the one that scared me,” Esther said. “Einstein . . . died, and then some of the other physicists who Joe Steele thought didn’t speak up, they . . . died, too.”

  “I remember,” Charlie said unhappily. That discreet pause conveyed a world of meaning.

  “But I don’t know if you were paying attention to the names. Oppenheimer—a Jew. Van Neumann—a Jew. Szilard—a Jew. A Hungarian Jew, in fact, poor man.”

  “Enrico Fermi wasn’t Jewish,” Charlie said.

  “No, but he had a Jewish wife,” Esther returned. Charlie hadn’t known that. She went on, “For a while there, I thought Joe Steele would decide Hitler’d had a good idea about what to do with the Jews. To the Jews, I should say.”

  “He got rid of those guys because he was sore at them, not because they were Jewish.” Before coming to the White House, Charlie’d never dreamt he could sound so calm about murder, but here he was. And here those physicists weren’t. He added, “Besides, Captain Rickover—well, he’s Admiral Rickover now—he’s a Jew, too. And so were some of the guys he grabbed from the labor encampments. Teller, Feynman, Cohen, I don’t know how many other wreckers.”

  “I know that now. I didn’t know it then,” Esther said. “And they made the bomb work, and fried all the Japs in that city. Suppose it didn’t, though. Suppose Trotsky made his first. What would Joe Steele have done to the wreckers then? Or to all the Jews?”

  That was a good question, wasn’t it? Charlie decided he was better off not knowing the answer—and so was Esther. Much better. “It didn’t happen,” he said. “That’s what you have to remember. It’s just something you worried about. It’s not anything that came true.”

  “I know. But my folks came to America so they wouldn’t have to be afraid of pogroms any more, and so I wouldn’t, either,” Esther said. “That was what America stood for—being able to get along no matter who you were. But it didn’t exactly work out that way, did it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Not too long ago, I heard a shoeshine man talking with a janitor when they didn’t know I was listening.” Charlie didn’t say the men he was talking about were colored—with those jobs, what else would they be? He continued, “One of them said, ‘That Joe Steele, he done more for equality than any other four Presidents you can think of.’ ‘What you talkin’ about?’ the other fellow said. And the first guy told him, ‘He treats everybody jus’ the same way—like a nigger.’”

  Esther laughed and looked horrified at the same time. “That’s terrible!”

  “It sure is,” Charlie agreed. “What’s for dinner tonight?”

  * * *

  Mike walked into the classroom with his usual mix of excitement and dread. He supposed actors felt the same way as the curtain rose. He got a better reception than actors commonly did. All the kids in the room jumped to their feet, bowed, and chorused, “Konichiwa, Sensei-san!” Then they said the same thing in English: “Good morning, teacher!”

  When Mike returned the bow, he didn’t go as low as they had. They were just middle-school students, and he was a grown man. He didn’t grasp all the details of how Japanese bowed to one another; he wondered if any foreigner did. But he got the broad outlines, and they forgave his blunders because he was a foreigner and couldn’t be expected to know any better. As with a three-legged dancing bear, the wonder was that he did it at all, not that he did it well.

  “Konichiwa!” he said, and “Good morning!” Then he bowed to Midori Yanai as one equal to another and told her, “Konichiwa, Sensei-san!”

  Her bow was slightly lower than his: the bow of woman to man. The Constitutional Monarchy wrote women’s equality into its laws. Mike had no trouble playing along. For someone like her, who’d been raised in the old ways, change came harder.

  “Good morning, Sergeant Sullivan,” she said in English. Hanging around with him the past couple of years had made her better at distinguishing the
r sound in his title and the l sound in his name. She went back to Japanese to talk to the class: “Sergeant Sullivan has come here today to help you learn his language.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant Sullivan!” the boys and girls sang out in English. Most of them said Surrivan; Japanese didn’t use the l sound, and they had trouble hearing it, let alone saying it. Quite a few of them said Sank you, too; the th sound was another one their language didn’t own.

  “I am honored to be here,” Mike said in Japanese. He used that phrase whenever he visited a classroom. They took honor seriously here. Because he used it a lot, he said it well. When he went on, he didn’t sound so smooth. He knew his Japanese was bad. He didn’t worry about it. Because he’d hung around with Midori for a while, he had enough to do what he needed to do here—and she’d help him if he stumbled. “When I speak your language I am ichiban baka gaijin.” They giggled—the A-number-one stupid foreigner was admitting what he was. He continued through the giggles: “But when you speak my language, you are ichiban baka gaijin.”

  That brought them up short. They weren’t used to thinking of themselves as foreigners. That another language had its own native place was an idea they needed work on.

  “I try to speak Japanese better each time I do it,” Mike said. “You should try to speak English better each time, too.”

  He led them in touching their tongues to the backs of their front teeth to make l noises, and to putting their tongues between their top and bottom teeth for th. Because he’d been making those sounds since he was a baby, he was better at showing how to do it than Midori Yanai was. For her, they were as foreign as they were to the kids.

  He went through conversation drills with them, letting them hear what a native speaker sounded like. Then he asked for questions in English. A boy raised his hand. Mike nodded to him. “Why English the verb not at the end puts?” he asked.

  “Why does Japanese put it at the end?” Mike answered. The kid blinked; that was water to a fish to him. Mike went on, “I don’t know why. Why, I don’t know.” He grinned. The kid just frowned. He didn’t get wordplay in English yet. So Mike continued, “But Japanese is wrong with the verb in the middle. English is wrong with the verb at the end.” It wasn’t always, but they were still learning rules. They weren’t ready for exceptions.

  They bowed him out of the classroom with a singsong “Arigato gozaimasu, Sensei-san!” He killed time in Wakamatsu till school let out. Then he went back there to meet Midori.

  “Thank you,” she told him. “I think that went well today.”

  “Good. I thought so, too, but you know better than I do.” Mike didn’t hug her or give her a kiss. Men didn’t show women affection in public here. Things like that were starting to catch on with youngsters who imitated the Americans they saw in person or in the movies, but Midori kept the ways she’d grown up with. Mike didn’t push it, which was one of the reasons they got along.

  After they walked side by side, decorously not touching, for a while, they went to a restaurant. It was more than a greasy spoon, less than fancy. She had tonkatsu: breaded pork chop fried and cut into bite-sized slices, with a thick, spicy sauce. He ordered a bowl of ishikari nabe. It was a Japanese take on salmon stew that he’d learned to enjoy.

  Once they’d eaten, they went to her little apartment. The building was new since the Japanese War. It was made of bricks and concrete, not wood and paper. “My only fear,” Midori had said, “is that it will not stay up in an earthquake.”

  Mike had felt several since coming to Japan. He hadn’t been in one strong enough to knock down buildings, but he knew they had them. He’d said, “I hope it stays up, too.” What else could you say?

  The apartment was bigger than a jail cell, but not much. It would have driven Mike crazy. Midori took it in stride. She made the most of the space she had by not putting a lot in it, and by making sure everything stayed in its proper place if she wasn’t using it.

  She didn’t even have a bed. She had futons—floor mats. The Japs had been using them forever. Rooms here were so many futons long and so many wide. If you piled two or three together, well, that was pretty nice when you felt like fooling around.

  Lazy and happy in the afterglow, Mike said, “You’re wonderful, you know that?” He tried to say the same thing in Japanese, too.

  “I am also happy with you,” she said. “Sometimes I feel I should not be, but I am.”

  “You shouldn’t be? How come? Because I’m American?”

  “Hai.” She nodded. “I am sorry. I am so sorry, but it is true. You are a good man, but you are a gaijin. You cannot fit here for the rest of your life.”

  She was bound to be right about that. Sooner or later—sooner, since he was well past fifty—they’d muster him out of the Army and ship him home. And then he’d have to face all the nasty choices he’d ducked in 1946 by leaving the uniform on. Montana? New Mexico? Wyoming? Colorado? Reporter? Tree feller? People feller? Go back East and risk the Jeebies jugging him again, this time for what would be a life stretch?

  With Midori, there might be other possibilities. “Do you think you could fit in in the United States, in a country full of round-eyed barbarians?”

  He said it as a joke, but he knew that was how she thought of Americans in general. After a moment, she asked, “How do you mean that?”

  Mike took a deep breath. “Do you want to marry me?” he asked. When Stella, or her lawyers, told him she was cutting him loose, he’d never dreamt he would ask that of another woman. But that letter had come to the labor camp more than a dozen years ago now. Stella had long since found somebody else: a booking agent named Morris Cantor. Why shouldn’t he?

  “I would like to do that, yes,” Midori said slowly, “but how hard will it be?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll find out.” Mike did know they didn’t make it easy. But he thought he could manage it. He’d done everything the USA asked from him and then some the past ten years. The USA might manage a little something for him. And the rules about getting together with local women were easier now than they had been right after the big war. Fraternizing then might land you in the guardhouse.

  “It is good to know you care about me for more than this.” Still naked in the warm night, Midori touched herself between the legs for a moment. “I thought so, but it is still good to know.”

  “Good to know you care about me—you love me—too.” Mike’s voice sounded rough even to himself. Americans who took up with Japanese women often wondered if their lady friends cared or if they were only meal tickets.

  “I did not expect you to propose to me tonight.” Midori laughed.

  Hearing that laugh made Mike feel better. “It’s about time, you know?” he said. She nodded. He could have said It’s now or never, and that would have been every bit as true. It sounded better this way, though. He still had a bit of writer in him after all.

  * * *

  When the Republicans gathered in Chicago, they nominated Robert Taft. He aimed to be the first man since John Quincy Adams to follow his father into the White House. Before they nominated him, they talked about drafting Omar Bradley or Dwight Eisenhower.

  The conqueror of Western Europe and the architect of victory in the Pacific both turned them down. “Politics is no place for soldiers,” Bradley said. George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and Zachary Taylor, among others, might have come out with a different view of things. But Washington, Grant, and Taylor hadn’t served under Joe Steele.

  Casually, Charlie asked Vince Scriabin, “Do you know how the two generals happened to say no?”

  “Yes,” the Hammer answered, and not another word. Charlie was left to his own imaginings. He hoped they were juicier than what really happened, but he had no guarantees.

  Three weeks after the GOP cleared out of the International Amphitheatre, the Democrats came in to renominate Joe Steele and John Nance Garner. Charlie always fe
lt funny about going back to the Windy City for a convention. This one, at least, was in a different building from the one they’d used to pick Joe Steele the first time. Banners hanging from the rafters shouted TWENTY YEARS OF PROGRESS!

  In his acceptance speech, Joe Steele said, “When I first became the Democratic candidate in 1932, the United States suffered in the grip of the Depression. Many of you can remember that. Now we are the greatest, the strongest, the richest country in the world. Every one of you knows that. I am not braggart enough to claim I had everything to do with that. But I am not modest enough to claim I had nothing to do with it, either.”

  Delegates laughed and applauded. So did Charlie, up on the podium. Most of the words were his. The delivery was the President’s, and he could have done better. He stumbled over a few phrases; it was almost as if he were sleepwalking through the speech.

  It wouldn’t sound too bad over the radio, though, and he hadn’t wanted TV here. The Republicans had had it, and it played up a vicious floor fight. The Democrats didn’t have those brawls, not under Joe Steele they didn’t. But that might not have been why he vetoed the cameras. He wasn’t young any more. He also wasn’t well any more. But he was still shrewd enough to realize he would do better not to show the country how old and unwell he was.

  Taft went around the United States arguing that it would be better to bring American troops home from Europe and from South Japan. “If they want our weapons to defend themselves, that is one thing,” he said. “But haven’t we spent enough lives outside our borders to pay the butcher’s bill for the rest of this century?”

  “We are part of the world whether we like it or not,” Joe Steele replied. “Even if we go away from it, it won’t go away from us. Bombers with atomic weapons can already reach our shores. One day soon, rockets will fly halfway around the world in minutes. We have enemies, countries that hate and fear and envy our wealth and safety. We have to hold them back wherever we can.”