American Front (30 page)

The rubber stamp nearly obscured the address. When she got a look at that, she shivered and felt so light-headed, she had to lean against the iron bank of mailboxes for a moment before she could open the envelope: it was in her husband’s handwriting.

Dear Sylvia
, the note inside read,
I want you to know I am all right and not hurt. The
Ripple
was caught and sunk by the
(here someone had rendered a word or two illegible with black ink).
They took us to north Carolina, where I am now. They treat us well. The food is all right. You can write me in care of the Red Cross and it will get to me sooner or later. They may end up letting me go in a while because I wasn’t in the Navy and they exchange civilians with the United States. I hope so. I love you. Give my love to the children to. I hope I see you before to long. Love again from your George
.

Sylvia leaned against the mailboxes again. Tears ran down her cheeks. “Oh, dear,” Henrietta Collingwood, a neighbor, said as she came downstairs. She pointed to the letter Sylvia was still holding. “I hope it is not bad news.” By her voice, she sounded certain it was.

But Sylvia shook her head. “No, Henrietta,” she said. “The best news of all: he is alive.”

“Come on, nigger-lovers, get movin’,” the Confederate guard said. He gestured with the bayonet of his rifle as if he would have liked to use it on the crew of the
Ripple
.

George Enos and the rest of the captured fishermen obediently got up and headed across the barbed-wire enclosure of Fort Johnston for their daily louse inspection. Anybody discovered with the little pests got his hair washed with kerosene and his clothes and bedding baked in an oven. That killed the lice for a while, but in a week or two they’d be back again.

Enos shivered. The wind off the Atlantic here at the outlet of the Cape Fear River was bitingly cold, though he still had on the gear he’d been wearing when the commerce raider
Swamp Fox
captured the
Ripple
. “I thought North Carolina was supposed to be hot and sticky all the time,” he said.

“Shut up, nigger-lover,” the guard said, his voice flat and harsh. Enos would have been surprised if he was eighteen; his face was full of angry red blotches. But he had a gun and he had the rest of the Confederate Army behind him, so Enos shut up. The crew of the
Ripple
had that unlovely handle hung on them because they’d insisted on treating Charlie White like a human being even after the
Swamp Fox
plucked them off the steam trawler and then sank it.

Technically, they were detainees, not prisoners of war. U.S. commerce raiders had scooped up Confederate merchant seamen, too. They were being exchanged, one for one, in the order of capture, using the good offices of the Kingdom of Spain, one of the few nations neutral in the fight that roiled across the world. Enos figured he’d probably get back to Boston about a week before the war ended, if it ever did. He hadn’t said that in his letter to Sylvia, but it remained at the back of his mind.

No matter what anybody called him, though, George felt like a prisoner of war. The worst of it was, he hadn’t even been at war when the Confederates nabbed him. All he’d been doing was trying to make a living. The Rebels didn’t give a damn about that. To them, capturing a fishing boat counted as a blow against the United States. It struck him as dreadfully unfair. War was about soldiers and sailors. It wasn’t about fishermen, not as far as he was concerned. But nobody cared what he thought. Nobody cared how much he missed his wife, either. That was something else war was about: not caring.

Off to one side, chips flew as Charlie White chopped firewood. The cook worked with grim intensity, slamming the axe down again and again. It was his turn for the job; Enos had done it a couple of days before, and yesterday a sailor off a freighter the
Swamp Fox
had sent to the bottom. The Rebs didn’t work Charlie any differently from the way they worked their other detainees. That would have been against international law, and they would have caught hell for it when word got back to the United States.

But they didn’t treat him as they would have treated a white man, either, always jeering at him—and, to a lesser degree, at the crewmen of the
Ripple
for insisting he was their friend, not a servant or a pet. They had Negro servants here at Fort Johnston, men who acted like dogs around Southern whites. Enos wondered what they used for self-respect.

He didn’t have much left himself. The medical orderly—the Rebs didn’t waste a doctor on damnyankees, not unless they were dying—snapped, “Bend over, nigger-lover.” When Enos obeyed, the fellow ran fingers through his hair, examining the nape of his neck and the short hairs behind his ears. Reluctantly, the orderly said, “All right, you’re clean—go on.”

Enos went, He suspected the Rebs of claiming the men from the
Ripple
were lousy even when they weren’t, just so they could put them through the process of getting rid of the vermin. Afterwards, your head smelled for days as if you’d been soaking it in the well of a kerosene lantern.

To give him his due, the medical officer did try to keep from spreading lice from one man to another. Between inspections, he dipped his hands into a bowl from which rose the antiseptic smell of dilute carbolic acid, then dried them on a towel. He looked over Patrick O’Donnell, and let the captain of the
Ripple
pass inspection in the same grudging manner he had Enos.

O’Donnell went over to the barbed wire and stood around looking bored. Enos walked up and stood beside him. “Another exciting day, isn’t it, Skipper?” he said.

“You might say that,” O’Donnell allowed. Both men laughed. About the only excitement in these parts was finding out whether your day’s ration of cornbread had mold or not, and whether the chunk of boiled sowbelly the Rebs gave you with it was all fat or whether it had a tiny bit of real meat attached.

Thinking of that made George Enos laugh again. “Remember that time when Fred got a whole strip of meat in his sowbelly? I bet they fired the cook who gave it to him the day after, because it sure hasn’t happened again.”

“Bet you’re right,” the skipper said. “Sure sounded like they were giving somebody holy hell that night, too. Might’ve been the cook.”

Ever so casually, he turned and glanced toward the disappearing turrets that held Fort Johnston’s three twelve-inch guns. Any ships that tried to ascend the Cape Fear River and bombard or mine Wilmington, North Carolina, would have to pass the guns here and in other forts farther up the river. Enos wouldn’t have liked to try it. In their endless practices, the Rebs seemed very alert.

He’d never asked O’Donnell why he spent so much time by the wire. It wasn’t really his concern, and confirming his suspicions wouldn’t have done him or the captain of the
Ripple
any good. But he was pretty sure that, when they finally did get exchanged, O’Donnell would give the U.S. Navy a set of drawings for the interior grounds of Fort Johnston better than anything they had now.

Enos had other things on his mind. “You think they’ll give us our jobs back when we get out of here?” he asked. “God only knows what Sylvia’s doing to make ends meet.”

“I hope you get your job back, George,” O’Donnell answered. “With me, it doesn’t matter so much.” A skipper who lost his ship, even if it wasn’t his fault, had trouble getting another one. But that wasn’t what O’Donnell meant. If and when the Confederates shipped him back to the United States, he was going straight into the Navy. They’d be glad to have him again, what with his experience.

They’d probably be glad to have George Enos, too. He’d never served on a warship, but he was a sailor. He’d have an easier time figuring out what was going on than some landlubber from Dakota.

He didn’t
want
to go into the Navy, the way O’Donnell did. Being kept away from Sylvia and his children had forcibly reminded him how much he missed them. You went aboard a cruiser, you were there for months at a time, and even when you get back to port, who could say where that port would be? If you were in San Diego, say, and got forty-eight hours’ liberty, so what? You couldn’t get back to Boston, let alone make the round trip, in that length of time.

He laughed. “What’s funny?” O’Donnell asked.

“Thinking about getting liberty and what I’d do with it if I’m too far from home to go back and if I join the Navy and if I ever get out of here. Too damn many ifs.” Enos laughed again. “Hell, liberty from the Navy is one thing. Liberty from here is a whole different one.” To that, Patrick O’Donnell could only nod.

And liberty from Fort Johnston was a different thing for the two white men from what it was for Charlie White. A Confederate soldier walked up and stood watching the
Ripple
’s cook chop wood. “Hey, nigger,” he said in an assumed tone of casual interest, “you think maybe back ’fore we manumitted you coons, my pa or granddad fucked your mother?”

Charlie stopped chopping. For a horrible second, George was afraid he’d try to use his hatchet against a rifle. But he just paused, then shook his head. “Nah. If that had happened, I’d be a whole lot uglier.”

Every detainee who heard the answer howled and jeered at Charlie’s comeback. The Reb who’d walked into it turned red as brick. He started to bring his rifle to bear on the cook. Now the detainees yelled even louder for a Confederate officer. Before anybody with bars or stars on his collar got to the barbed-wire enclosure, the soldier lowered the rifle, snarling, “Nigger gets uppity, he gets his sooner or later, wait an’ see if he don’t.”

“You haven’t got the balls to do that to anybody who could shoot back,” Lucas Phelps told him.

“Fuck you, too, pal—fuck you special,” the guard said. Phelps slowly and deliberately turned his back and walked away. The guard raised his voice: “Where you think you’re goin’, nigger-lover?”

“To the shithouse,” the fisherman answered over his shoulder “I’m gonna pretend the hole is your face.”

“Watch it, Lucas,” George Enos said softly. Then he and all the other fishermen cried out in alarm and horror, for the guard brought the rifle up to his shoulder, took aim—he could hardly have missed, not from a range of twenty feet at the most—and fired at the back of Lucas Phelps’ head. Phelps took another half step and then crumpled, surely dead before he knew what hit him: George got a good look at the blasted ruin the bullet had made of his face as it exited. All the detainees screamed “Murder!” at the top of their lungs.

At the sound of the shot, an officer did come. He led the soldier away. Two days later, the fellow was back at his post, looking meaner than ever. Nobody said a word to him, not if he could help it.

Enos had another reason to hope exchange came soon. It was already too late for his comrade.

VIII

Dashing in spats and a double-breasted herringbone overcoat with a breast pocket slanted at the latest angle—or so he said—Herman Bruck came into the Socialist Party headquarters with a copy of the
New York Times
in one hand. He quickly hung his homburg on a tree and got out of the overcoat. It was icy outside, but very much the reverse with a couple of coal stoves and a steam radiator heating the office.

He went over to Flora Hamburger and set the newspaper on the desk in front of her. “Bully speech by Senator Debs,” he said, pointing. The newsprint had smudged on the gray calfskin of his gloves.

Flora bent over it. “Let me see,” she said. Debs had been the first Socialist elected to the Senate, coming out of Indiana when the Republicans broke up in disarray in the aftermath of the Second Mexican War. He’d been there ever since, and twice run unsuccessfully for president.

“‘Our losses in a few brief months have exceeded all those in the War of Secession, till now our bloodiest conflict,’” Flora read aloud. “‘Soon they will exceed those in all our previous wars combined. And for what? For what, I ask, Mr. President? When we fought to keep the Confederate States from abandoning our Union, we fought for a principle: that the covenant of the United States, once made, was indissoluble. Here, on what great principle do we stand? That the European alliances with which we have entangled ourselves be honored when even to be in them is to hold no honor? How splendid! How noble! What a fine principle for which to crucify mankind on a cross of blood and iron!’” She looked up in admiration. Several people who’d been listening to her broke into applause. “That
is
strong stuff,” she said.

Bruck nodded, as proud as if he’d made the speech himself. “When Debs crosses swords with TR, sparks always fly.”

Flora nodded. She read on down the column to the reply by Senator Lodge, who often spoke as Roosevelt’s surrogate in the Senate. Halfway through the summary of his remarks, she winced and softly quoted one sentence: “‘The distinguished gentleman’s remarks on the power of principle would seem more forceful had he not, in this very chamber, recently voted to support and finance the war he now so eloquently professes to despise.’” Her chin went up in defiance. “I knew that was a mistake, and I said so at the time.”

“So you did,” Bruck admitted. He saw the smudges on his gloves and took them off. His hands were winter pale. He spread them. “But what could we do? If we’d voted against the credits, we wouldn’t have had five Socialists left in Congress after the November elections. As things are, we picked up half a dozen seats.”

“What good does it do us to pick them up if we don’t act like Socialists once we have them?” Flora said.

A secretary, an Italian woman named Maria Tresca, who, along with her sister Angelina, was one of the few gentiles in the Tenth Ward office, quoted from the New Testament: “‘What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’”

It was not language commonly heard in the Socialist Party office, but no less effective for that. Herman Bruck spread his hands again. “We’ve been talking about that ever since the Party decided to run for office and accept seats if we won. Does working within the government advance the cause of the proletariat or delay the revolution?”

The argument that spawned kept the office lively the rest of the day. While Bruck was putting on his hat and overcoat to leave for the evening, he asked Flora, “Would you like to go to the moving pictures with me? The Orpheum is showing the new play with Sarah Bernhardt in it.”

“I can’t, Herman,” she answered, also buttoning her coat. “We’re having cousins over for supper, and I promised my mother I wouldn’t be late.”

Herman Bruck made a sour face. Maybe he suspected the cousins were fictitious, as in fact they were. That, though, wasn’t the sort of thing it was politic to say. “Another time, maybe,” he mumbled, and hurried out the door.

Angelina Tresca sent Flora an amused look. She returned one of resolute innocence. The less you admitted to anyone, the less you had to worry about getting to the wrong ears. Flora waited a few moments so she wasn’t likely to run into Bruck on the street, they went downstairs and walked home to her flat.

Cooking odors filled the hallway as she came up to her door. When she opened it, more came out.
Sweet-and-sour stuffed cabbage tonight
, she thought. Along with that savory scent came smoke from her father’s pipe. It was harsher than it had been. He’d smoked Mail Pouch for years, but the Virginia and Kentucky tobaccos that went into the blend weren’t available any more. Now he fed the pipe with something called Corn Cake, which smelled, as far as Flan was concerned, like burning corn husks. She kept quiet about that not wanting to hurt his feelings.

Esther was in the kitchen, helping their mother. David and Isaac bent over a chess board at the table from which they would soon be evicted so everyone could eat supper. Flora glanced at the game. Isaac was a couple of pawns up, which was unusual; his brother beat him more often than not. The two mental warriors said hello without looking up from their battlefield.

“And how are things with you today?” Benjamin Hamburger asked.

“All right,” Flora answered. “I’m tired.” The moment the words were out of her mouth, she felt ashamed of them. Sophie was the one who had the right to complain about being tired: she worked longer hours at a harder job for less pay than her younger sister. Especially since the start of the useless, stupid war, Sophie had been dragging herself home exhausted every night.

As if thinking about her were enough to bring her home, Sophie came in just then, worn out as usual. She sank down onto the divas couch with a soft sigh and a posture so limp, it said she didn’t want to have to get up again for anything in the world.

Esther stuck her head out of the kitchen and said, “Oh, good, that was you. I thought I heard the door. Ready in a minute.” Sophie nodded wearily. She’d even been too tired to eat lately, which alarmed her mother. Esther’s eyes flicked to her brothers. Pointedly, she repeated, “Ready in a minute.” When that didn’t shift them, she started setting the table. They had to move the chess set in a hurry to keep from having a plate land on top of it.

Supper almost made Flora wish she’d gone out with Herman Bruck. Her family didn’t really want to hear about Socialist Party doings, not even her father. All any of them seemed to care about was ways to rise into the bourgeoisie, not how to aid and radicalize the vast masses of the proletariat. She sadly shook her head. Her own flesh and blood, class enemies. They didn’t even try to understand the goals toward which she worked.

After supper, she and Esther washed and dried dishes. Esther wanted to talk about how the war was going. Flora didn’t. That it was going at all was bitter as wormwood to her.

As soon as she’d put the last fork in its drawer, she got her coat and went out onto the fire escape. Her mother’s voice pursued her: “We’re not good enough for you?” But that wasn’t it, even if her family thought it was. It was just that she didn’t fit in among them, and the harder they tried to drive her back into what had been her place, the less it suited her.

It was chilly out there, but not intolerable. The nip of January air on her cheeks made her feel as if she were in a sleigh gliding down some quiet country road, not in the middle of the most crowded part of the biggest city in the United States, though she had to ignore the racket from her building and all the others to make the illusion complete.

A couple of minutes later, Sophie stepped out to join her. “Fresh air,” her older sister said gratefully. “It’s so stuffy in there.”

Flora sent her a sympathetic look. “And you were cooped up in front of your sewing machine all day before that,” she said. “No wonder you want to get all the air you can.” She wouldn’t have called New York City’s air, full of smoke and soot and fumes, fresh, but if her sister wanted to, she wouldn’t argue, either.

Sophie stepped down to the edge of the landing and looked over the iron rail. It was dark down there, with nothing worth mentioning to see. Not really to Flora—not really to anyone—Sophie said, “I should throw myself off.”

Alarmed, Flora hurried over to her and put an arm around her shoulder, dragging her away from the rail. “What’s wrong?” she demanded. “Is it something at work? I know they’ve been exploiting you without mercy, giving you much too much to try to do. The way you come home every night—”

Sophie shook her head. “It’s nothing to do with work,” she said, “and they aren’t working me any harder than they were before. ‘Exploiting’!” She laughed softly, though not in a way that said she thought anything was truly funny. “It’s not anything—political.”

“Then what is it?” Flora asked. “People don’t talk about jumping off a building for nothing, you know.”

Her sister’s shiver had nothing to do with cold, no more than her laugh had had anything to do with mirth. “What is it, Flora? Do you really want to know?”

“Of course I do,” Flora answered, indignant now. “I’m your sister. That counts for more than politics, even if we don’t agree all the time.”

“Yes, but it was politics you thought of first.” Sophie sighed. I suppose I may as well tell you. I have to tell someone—and if I don’t, it’ll be plain enough before long, anyway.”

“What are you talking about?” Flora said. “Just come out and say it, if you’re going to.”

“All right, then.” But Sophie needed to gather herself before she brought the words out, all in one low-voiced rush: “Flora, I’m going to have a baby.”

Her sister stared. She felt as if she’d walked in front of a train without seeing or hearing it coming. “How did it happen?” she whispered.

Dimly lit by the lamps from the front room, Sophie’s face twisted. “How did it happen? There’s only one way I know of Yossel was going into the Army, and I didn’t know when I’d see him again or if I’d see him again, and I wanted to give him something special before he left. And so I…and so we—” She didn’t go on, and then, after a moment, she did: “I gave him something special, didn’t I?” All at once, without warning, she started to cry.

“Does mother know you’re—expecting?” Flora asked. She put her arm around her sister, who clung to her like a survivor from a torpedoed liner.

Sophie shook her head violently against Flora’s shoulder. “I couldn’t tell her,” she exclaimed. “I told you because—” She gulped and stopped.

Flora didn’t have any trouble figuring out what her sister hadn’t said.
Because you’re the radical one, the one who believes in socialism and free love
—something like that, anyhow. Flora had had men approach her on that basis, some of them men in the Socialist Party. But being free to love didn’t mean you had to, and didn’t mean loving was free from consequences, either.

Well, Sophie surely knew that now, even if she hadn’t thought it through before. And Sophie wasn’t some man trying to entice her into something sordid; she was her sister. “You’re going to have to tell her sooner or later,” Flora said gently, at which Sophie cried harder. Flora found another question: “Does Yossel know?”

Sophie shook her head again. “Every time I write him, I mean to tell him, but I just—can’t.”

“He’s going to be your husband,” Flora said.
If he lives
—she fought that thought down. “That makes it a little better. If he weren’t in the Army, I’m sure he’d marry you right now.” Sophie nodded. But if Yossel hadn’t been going into the Army, Sophie probably wouldn’t have given herself to him till they were married, in which case they wouldn’t have had this problem.

“What am I going to do?” Sophie wailed—but softly, not wanting anyone inside to hear her.

The obvious answer was,
You’re going to have this baby
. What sprang from that—Flora thought. At last, as if she’d just come up with a good campaign plank for a Congressional candidate, she clapped her hands together, also softly. “We won’t tell mother,” she said. “Mother is too perfectly conventional for words. All she’ll do is throw a fit, and we don’t need that, not now.”

Sophie nodded again, looking at her with a mixture of hope and dread. “We can’t keep from telling her forever, though,” she warned. Of itself, one hand went to her belly. “Pretty soon, she’ll know regardless of what we say.”

“I wasn’t finished,” Flora said. “She has to know before she finds out that way. No, we won’t tell her. We’ll tell Papa. He won’t get excited, the way Mother would; he has some common sense. And then, after he and we figure out what to say, he can tell Mother for us. He can be a—what’s the word I want?—a buffer, that’s it.”

“I don’t know.” Again, Sophie’s shiver had nothing to do with the cold.

“It has to be done. It will be better afterwards,” Flora insisted, as if to someone with a toothache whom she was trying to get to go to the dentist.

Dread drove hope from her sister’s face once more. “It won’t be better,” Sophie said quietly. “It will never be better, not any more.”

Flora feared she was right. Even so, she opened the window that gave access to the fire escape and said, “Papa, can you come out here for a moment, please?”

Benjamin Hamburger had been standing over the kitchen table, kibitzing that game of chess—or maybe a new one by now—between David and Isaac. A puff of smoke rose from his pipe when he exhaled in surprise. “All the plots hatched out there, and this is the first time I’ve been invited,” he remarked as he walked over and stepped out onto the landing.

That mild irony encouraged Flora. She closed the window. Isaac, David, Esther, and her mother all peered out toward the fire escape. They were used to her going out there. They were used to Sophie’s going out there every so often. But when the two of them invited their father out, that was new, so it had to be suspect. Flora hadn’t thought of that. Keeping the secret wouldn’t be easy.

But, having started, she couldn’t very well draw back. Her father was looking from her to Sophie and back again. If he wasn’t the picture of curiosity, he’d do till a better one came along. Flora hoped Sophie would say what needed saying. When she didn’t, Flora sighed and said, “Papa, we have to tell you something.” Then she stopped. It wasn’t easy, not when you got down to it.