Blood and Iron (17 page)

“That you, Xerxes?” she asked. When he admitted it, she opened the door, then shut it after him. She was still wearing that robe, and still not bothering to hold it closed very well. She pointed at the whiskey bottle. “What you got there?” Her voice was arch; she knew perfectly well what he had—and why, too.

“Wonder if you wants to take a nip with me,” Scipio said.

By way of reply, Bathsheba got a couple of mismatched glasses and sat down at one end of a ratty sofa. When Scipio sat down, too, close beside her, he contrived—or maybe she did—to brush his leg against hers. She didn’t pull away. He poured a healthy shot of whiskey into each glass.

They drank and talked, neither one of them in a hurry. After a while, Scipio slipped his arm around her. She leaned her head on his shoulder. He set down his glass, turned toward her, and tilted her face up for a kiss. Then his free hand slid inside her robe. He rapidly discovered she was naked under it.

Bathsheba laughed at what must have been his startled expression. “I was hopin’ you might stop by,” she said.

“Sweet thing, I ain’t stopped,” Scipio said. “I ain’t hardly even started.” He lowered his mouth to a dark-nippled breast. She pressed her hand to the back of his head, urging him on. His breath caught in his throat. He needed no urging.

These days, the Lower East Side in New York City felt strange to Flora Hamburger. That it felt strange was strange itself. She’d lived her whole life there, till she’d gone off to Philadelphia to take her seat in Congress at the start of 1917. Now, as October 1918 yielded to November, she was home again, campaigning for a second term.

But, though she’d visited the Lower East Side several times since, this long campaign swing forcibly brought home to her how much she’d been away. Everything seemed shabby and cramped and packed tighter with people than a tin of sardines was stuffed with little fish. Things surely hadn’t changed much in less than two years. But she’d taken them for granted before. She didn’t any more.

Her posters—red and black, with
VOTE SOCIALIST
!
VOTE HAMBURGER
! in both English and Yiddish—were almost everywhere in the Fourteenth Ward, and especially in the Centre Market, across the street from the Socialist Party headquarters. Her district was solidly Socialist; the Democratic candidate, an amiable nonentity named Marcus Krauskopf, had for all practical purposes thrown in the sponge. The Democrats hadn’t been able to win two years before even with an appointed incumbent. Now that Flora held the advantage of incumbency, they looked to be saving their efforts for places where they had a chance to do better.

Flora was not the sort who took anything for granted. She stood on a keg of nails and addressed the people who crowded into the Centre Market, even if many of them were after pickled tomatoes or needles or smoked whitefish, not speeches. “What have we got from our great victory? Dead men, maimed men, men who can’t get work because the capitalists care more for their profits than for letting people earn a proper living. That was the war the Democrats gave you. This is the peace the Democrats are giving you. Is it what you want?”

Some people in the market shouted, “No!” About as many, though, went on about their business. Most of them—most who were citizens, at any rate—would vote when the time came. They’d known too much oppression to throw away the chance to have a say in government the United States offered them.

“If you want to help the capitalists, you’ll vote for the Democrats,” Flora went on. “If you want to help yourselves, you’ll vote for me. I hope you vote for me.”

Her breath smoked as she talked. The day was raw, with ragged gray clouds scudding across the sky. People sneezed and coughed as they went from one market stall to the next. The Spanish influenza wasn’t nearly so bad as it had been the winter before, but it hadn’t gone away, either.

When Flora stepped down from the keg of nails, Herman Bruck reached out a hand to help steady her. Bruck was dapper in an overcoat of the very latest cut: not because he was rich, but because he came from a family of master tailors. “Fine speech,” he said. “Very fine speech.”

He didn’t want to let go of her hand. Her being away hadn’t made him any less interested in her. It had made her much less interested in him, not that she’d ever been very interested. Next to Hosea Blackford, he was a barely housebroken puppy. Freeing herself, Flora said, “Let’s go back to the offices. I want to make sure we’ll have all the poll-watchers we’ll need out on the fifth.” She was confident the Socialists would, but it gave her an excuse to move, and to keep Bruck moving.

The Party offices were above a butcher’s shop. Max Fleischmann, the butcher, came out of his doorway and spoke in Yiddish: “I’ll vote for you, Miss Hamburger.”

“Thank you, Mr. Fleischmann,” Flora answered, genuinely touched—the butcher was, or had been, a staunch Democrat. His vote meant a lot to her.

In a slightly different way, it also meant a lot to Herman Bruck. As he went upstairs with Flora, he said, “If people like Fleischmann are voting for you, you’ll win in a walk.”

“We’ll know Tuesday night,” Flora said. Inside the office, people greeted her like the old friend she was. A term in Congress slipped away, and for a little while she was just the agitator she had been before Congressman Myron Zuckerman’s tragic accidental death made her run to fill his shoes and bring the seat back to the Socialist Party.

Everyone cheered when Bruck reported what Max Fleischmann had said. Maria Tresca remarked, “If we keep on like this, in 1920 the Democrats won’t bother to run anybody at all in this district, any more than the Republicans do now.” The secretary was a lone Italian in an office full of Jews, but probably the most ardent Socialist there—and, by now, not the least fluent in Yiddish, either.

“Maybe in 1920—
alevai
in 1920…the White House,” Herman Bruck said softly. Silence fell while people thought about that. When Teddy Roosevelt rode the crest of the wave after winning the Great War, such dreams from a Socialist would have been only dreams, and pipe dreams at that. Now, with the cost of the war clearer, with the strife that followed—maybe the dream could turn real.

Flora did check the roster of poll-watchers, and suggested some changes and additions.
If you want something done right, do it yourself,
she thought. After everything satisfied her, she headed back to the flat where she’d lived most of her life. The years on the floor of Congress had sharpened her debating; she had no trouble discouraging Bruck from walking along with her.

Coming in through the door reminded her anew of how much her life had changed. The apartment where she lived alone in Philadelphia was far bigger than this one, which housed her parents, two brothers, two sisters, and a toddler nephew, and which had housed her as well. It hadn’t seemed particularly crowded before she went away: everyone she knew lived the same way, and sometimes took in boarders to help make ends meet. Now she knew there were other possibilities.

Her sisters, Sophie and Esther, helped her mother in the kitchen. The smell of beef-and-barley soup rising from the pot on the stove mingled with the scent of her father’s pipe tobacco to make the odor of home. Her brothers, David and Isaac, bent over a chess board at one corner of the dining-room table. All was as it had been there, too, save for the crutch on the floor by David’s chair.

David moved a knight and looked smug. Isaac grunted, as if in pain. Looking up from the board, he consciously noticed Flora for the first time, though she hadn’t been particularly quiet. “Hello,” he said. “Got my conscription notice today.” He was eighteen, two years younger than his brother.

“You knew it was coming,” Flora said, and Isaac nodded: everyone put in his two years. Flora quietly thanked the God in Whom her Marxist exterior did not believe that Isaac would serve in peacetime. By the way David’s face twisted for a moment, that thought was going through his mind, too.

“How does the leg feel?” she asked him.

He slapped it. The sound it made was nothing like that of flesh: closer to furniture. “Not too bad,” he said. “I manage. I only need one leg for a sewing-machine treadle, and it doesn’t much matter which.” At that, guilt rose up and smote Flora. Seeing it, her brother said, “I didn’t mean to give you a hard time. It’s just the way things are, that’s all.”

A fresh puff of smoke rose from behind the
Daily Forward
their father was reading. Abraham Hamburger said, “It’s usually not a good idea to say anything that makes you explain yourself afterwards.”

“I wish more Congressmen would pay attention to that advice, Father,” Flora said, which caused fresh smoke signals to rise from behind the Yiddish newspaper.

Little Yossel Reisen grabbed Flora by the leg and gravely said, “Wowa”: the closest he could come to her name. Then he walked on unsteady feet to Sophie and said, “Mama.” That he had down solid.

Sophie Reisen stirred the soup, then picked him up. Yossel’s father, after whom he was named, had never seen him; he’d been killed in Virginia long before the baby was born. Had he not got Sophie in a family way, they probably wouldn’t have been married before he met a bullet.

When supper reached the table, the tastes of home were as familiar as the smell. Afterwards, Flora helped her mother with the dishes. “You will win again,” Sarah Hamburger said with calm assurance.

She would have thought the same had Flora reckoned herself out of the running. As things were, Flora nodded. “Yes, I think I will,” she answered, and her mother beamed; Sarah Hamburger had known it all along.

Going to sleep that night was a fresh trial for Flora. She’d got used to dozing off in quiet surroundings, queer as the notion would have struck her before she went to Congress. The racket in the apartment, the sort of noise that had once lulled her, now set her teeth on edge because she wasn’t accustomed to it any more. Even having to answer Esther’s “Good night” struck her as an imposition.

She stumped hard through the last few days of the campaign. On Tuesday the fifth, she voted at Public School 130. The Socialist poll-watcher tipped his cap to her; his Democratic opposite number did not raise his expensive black homburg.

Then it was back to Socialist Party headquarters to wait for the polls to close in the district and across the country. As the night lengthened, telephone lines and telephone clickers began bringing in reports. By the third set of numbers from her district, she knew she was going to beat Marcus Krauskopf: her lead was close to two to one.

Well before midnight, Krauskopf read the writing on the wall and telephoned to concede.
“Mazeltov,”
he said graciously. “Now that you’ve won, go right on being the conscience of the House. They need one there, believe me.”

“Thank you very much,” she said. “You ran a good race.” That wasn’t quite true, but matched his graciousness.

“I did what I could.” She could almost hear him shrug over the wire. “But you’ve made a name for yourself, it’s a Socialist district anyhow, and I don’t think this is a Democratic year.”

As if to underscore that, Maria Tresca exclaimed, “We just elected a Socialist in the twenty-eighth district in Pennsylvania. Where is that, anyhow?”

People looked at maps. After a minute or so, Herman Bruck said, “It’s way up in the northwestern part of the state. We’ve never elected a Socialist Congressman from around there before—too many farmers, not enough miners. Maybe the people really have had enough of the Democratic Party.”

“Even if they are finally fed up, it’s taken them much too long to get that way,” Maria said. As far as she was concerned, the proletarian revolution was welcome to start tomorrow, or even tonight.

The later it got, the more returns came in from the West. The first numbers from Dakota showed Hosea Blackford handily ahead in his district. “A sound man,” Herman Bruck said.

“Sound? Half the time, he sounds like a Democrat,” Maria Tresca said darkly.

But even her ideological purity melted in the face of the gains the Socialists were making. A couple of districts in and just outside Toledo that had never been anything but Democratic were going Socialist tonight. The same thing happened in Illinois and Michigan and, eventually, in distant California, too.

“Is it a majority?” Flora asked, a question she hadn’t thought she would need tonight. She’d been optimistic going into the election, but there was a difference between optimism and cockeyed optimism.

Except, tonight, maybe there wasn’t. “I don’t know.” Herman Bruck sounded like a man doing his best to restrain astonished awe. “A lot of these races are still close. But it could be.” He looked toward a map where he’d been coloring Socialist districts red. “It really could be.”

Every time Cincinnatus Driver got downwind of the Kentucky Smoke House, spit gushed into his mouth. He couldn’t help it; Apicius Wood ran the best barbecue joint in Kentucky, very possibly the best in the USA. Negroes from the neighborhood came to the Kentucky Smoke House. So did Covington’s whites. And so did the men who’d come down from the other side of the Ohio since the Stars and Stripes replaced the Stars and Bars atop the city hall. Nobody turned up his nose at food like that.

Lucullus—Lucullus Wood, now that his father Apicius, like Cincinnatus, had taken a surname—was turning a pig’s carcass above a pit filled with hickory wood and basting the meat with a sauce an angel had surely brought down from heaven. He nodded to Cincinnatus. “Ain’t seen you here for a while,” he remarked. “What you want?”

Cincinnatus stretched out his hands in the direction of the pit. For a moment, he wanted nothing more than to revel in the warmth that came from it: the weather outside held a promise of winter. “I want to talk to your pa,” he answered as he began to warm up himself.

Lucullus made a sour face. “Why ain’t I surprised?”

“On account of you know me,” Cincinnatus said. “I’ll be damned if I know how you can look like you done bit into a green persimmon when you’re takin’ a bath in the best smell in the world.”

“Only thing I smell when you come around here is trouble,” Lucullus said. He never missed a beat in turning the carcass or basting it.