Return Engagement (26 page)

Orson Jordan smiled at the joke, even though Flora had been kidding on the square. He said, “In a way, ma’am, he thinks he is one of your constituents. He says anyone who respects liberty is.”

“That’s . . . very kind of him, and of you,” Flora said. “Flattery will get you nowhere, though, or I hope it won’t. What does he want?”

“Well, ma’am, you’re bound to know Utah is a bit touchy about soldiers going through it or soldiers being stationed there. We’ve earned the right to be touchy, I’d say. I was only a boy when the last troubles happened, and I wouldn’t want my own children to have to worry about anything like that.”

“I believe you,” Flora said. When the Mormons rose during the Great War, they’d fought till they couldn’t fight any more. Plenty of boys no older than Orson Jordan would have been had died with guns in hand. The United States had triumphed in a purely Tacitean way: they’d made a desert and called it peace.

“All right, then,” Jordan said. He wore a somber, discreetly striped suit and a very plain maroon tie. A faint smell of soap wafted from him. So did a much stronger aura of sincerity. He meant everything he said. He was a citizen the United States would have been proud to have as their own—if he hadn’t continued, “Governor Young wants to make it real plain he can’t answer for what will happen if the United States keep on doing things like that. A lot of people there hate Philadelphia and everything it stands for. He’s been holding them back, but he isn’t King Canute. He can’t go on doing it forever. Frankly, he doesn’t want to go on doing it forever. We want what ought to be ours.”

“Should what you want be any different from what other Americans want?” Flora asked. “When you got military rule lifted, part of the reason you did was that you convinced people back here you were ordinary citizens.”

“We’re citizens, but we’re not ordinary citizens,” Jordan said. “We got hounded out of the USA. That’s why we went to Utah in the first place. It belonged to Mexico then. But the First Mexican War put us under the Stars and Stripes again—and the government started persecuting us again. Look at 1881. The oppression after that was what made us rise in 1915. Do you think we can trust the United States when they start going back on their solemn word?”

He still sounded earnest and sincere. Flora still had no doubt he meant every word he said, meant it from the bottom of his heart. She also had no doubt he didn’t have any idea how irritating he was to her. She said, “Another way you’re special is that you’re not conscripted. Shouldn’t you count your blessings?”

Orson Jordan shook his head. “No, ma’am. We want to be trusted to do our duty, like anybody else.”

She pointed a finger at him. “I’m afraid you can’t have that both ways, Mr. Jordan. You want to be trusted, but you don’t want to trust. If you don’t trust, you won’t be trusted. It’s as simple as that.”

The Mormon emissary looked troubled. “You may have a point there. I will discuss it with the Governor when I get back to Salt Lake—you can count on that. But we have been through so much, trust will not come easy. I wish I could say something different, but I can’t.”

“Learning to trust Mormons won’t come easy for the rest of the country, either,” Flora said. “As I told you, the knife cuts both ways.”

“Yes, you did say that.” Jordan gave no hint about what he thought of her comment. After a moment, he went on, “You will take my words to President Smith?”

“You can certainly trust me on that,” Flora said, and her guest gave her a surprisingly boyish smile. She continued, “He needs to hear what you just told me. I can’t promise what he’ll do about it. I can’t promise he’ll do anything about it. There is a war on, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I rather thought there might be.” So Jordan was capable of irony. That surprised Flora, too. She wouldn’t have guessed he had such depths. She wondered what else might be lurking down there below that bland exterior. Orson Jordan politely took his leave before she had the chance to find out.

When Flora phoned Powel House—the President’s Philadelphia residence—she thought at first that his aides were going to refuse to give her an appointment. That infuriated her. They both went back a lot of years in Socialist affairs in New York. But when she mentioned Heber Young’s name, hesitation vanished. If she had news about Mormons, Al Smith wasn’t unavailable any more.

She took a cab to Powel House. The driver had to detour several times to avoid bomb craters in the road. “Lousy Confederates,” he said. “I hope we blow them all to kingdom come.”

“Yes,” agreed Flora, who also hoped Confederate bombers wouldn’t come over Philadelphia by daylight, as they had a couple of times. They hadn’t been back in the daytime for almost two weeks, though; heavy antiaircraft fire and improved fighter coverage were making that too expensive. But air-raid sirens howled most nights, and people scrambled for shelters.

Presidents had spent more time in Powel House than in the White House since the Second Mexican War. Flora had spent much of four years there herself, when Hosea Blackford ran the country. Her mouth tightened. The country remembered her husband’s Presidency only for the economic collapse that had followed hard on the heels of his inauguration. He’d done everything he knew how to do to pull the USA out of it, but hadn’t had any luck. Calvin Coolidge had trounced him in 1932, and then died before taking office—whereupon Herbert Hoover had proved the Democrats didn’t know how to fix the economy, either.

Such gloomy reflections vanished from Flora’s mind when an aide led her up a splendid wooden staircase and into the office that had been her husband’s and now belonged to Al Smith. What replaced those reflections was something not far from shock. She hadn’t seen the President since he came to Congress to ask it to declare war on the CSA. If Smith hadn’t aged fifteen years in the month since then . . . he’d aged twenty.

He’d lost flesh. His face was shrunken and bloodless. By the bags under his eyes, he might not have slept since the war began. A situation map hung on the wall to one side of his battleship of a desk. The red pins stuck in the map showed Confederate forces farther north in Ohio than press or wireless admitted. Maybe that was why Smith hadn’t slept.

“How are you, Flora?” Even his voice, as full of New York City as Flora’s own, had lost strength. It didn’t show up on the wireless, where he had a microphone to help, but was all too obvious in person. “So what are these miserable Mormons trying to gouge out of us now?”

Had he been in other company, he might have asked what the Mormons were trying to jew out of the government. But Flora had met plenty of real anti-Semites, and knew Al Smith wasn’t one. And she had more urgent things to worry about anyhow. As dispassionately as she could, she summed up what Orson Jordan had told her.

“Nice of them,” the President said when she was through. “As long as we don’t try to get them to do what other Americans do or try to govern them at all, they’ll kindly consent to staying in the USA. But if we do try to do anything useful with them or with Utah, they’ll go up in smoke. Some bargain.” His wheezy laugh was bitter as wormwood.

“They . . . don’t like us any better than we like them,” Flora said carefully. “They . . . think they have good reason not to like us, or to trust us.”

“You know what? I don’t give a damn what they like or what they trust,” Al Smith said. “I let Jake Featherston take me for a ride, and the country’s paying for it now. I’ll take that shame to my grave. But if you think—if anybody thinks—I’ll let Heber Young take me for a ride, too, you’ve got another think coming.”

Was he reacting too strongly against the Governor of Utah because he hadn’t reacted strongly enough against the President of the Confederate States? Flora wouldn’t have been surprised. But that wasn’t something she could say. She did ask, “Are you all right, Mr. President?”

“I’ll do,” Al Smith answered. “I’ll last as long as I last. If I break down in harness, Charlie LaFollette can do the job. It seems pretty plain, wouldn’t you say?” Except for a nod, Flora didn’t have any answer to that, either.

E
very time Mary Pomeroy turned on the wireless, it was with fresh hope in her heart. She lived for the hourly news bulletins. Whenever the Yanks admitted losses, she felt like cheering. Whenever they didn’t, she assumed they were lying, covering up. The Confederates were bombing them in the East and pounding on them in the Midwest.
Now you know how it feels, you murdering sons of bitches!
she exulted.

The news on other fronts was good, too—good as far as she was concerned, that is. The Japanese were making menacing moves against the Sandwich Islands. The U.S.-held Bahamas were being bombed from Florida. In Europe, the German and Austro-Hungarian positions in the Ukraine seemed to be unraveling. Bulgaria wavered as a German ally—although she couldn’t waver too much, not with the Ottoman Turks on her southern border.

And the wireless kept saying things like, “All residents of Canada are urged to remain calm during the present state of emergency. Prompt and complete compliance with all official requests is required. Sabotage or subversive activity will be detected, rooted out, and punished with the utmost severity.”

Mary laughed whenever she listened to bulletins like those. If they weren’t cries of pain from the occupying authorities, she’d never heard any. And the more the Americans admitted they were in distress, the bigger the incentive the Canadians had to make that distress worse. Didn’t they?

If the bulletins didn’t do it, the way the Quebecois troops in Rosenfeld acted was liable to. The Americans, whatever else you could say about them, had behaved correctly most of the time. They’d known how to keep their hands to themselves, even if their eyes were known to wander. The Frenchies didn’t just look. They touched.

Not only that, the soldiers in blue-gray spoke French. Most of them had grown up since the Republic of Quebec broke away from Canada. They’d never had much reason to learn English. Nor had the local Manitobans had any more reason to pick up French. Hearing the Quebecois troopers jabber away in a language the locals couldn’t understand made them seem much more foreign than the Americans ever had.

They came in to eat at the Pomeroys’ diner fairly often. Even if they had to pay for it, the food there was better than what their own cooks dished out. Mort and his father took their money without learning to love them.

“It’s humiliating, that’s what it is,” he said when he got home one summer’s evening. “At least the lousy Yanks licked us. The Frenchies never did.”

“The Yanks shouldn’t have, either,” Mary said.

Mort only shrugged at that. “Maybe you’re right and maybe you’re wrong. I don’t know. I’ve never been much good at might-have-beens. All I know is, they did. I used to think they were pretty bad. Now I know better. The Frenchies showed me the difference between bad and worse.”

“Well, the Frenchies wouldn’t be here if they weren’t doing the Yanks’ dirty work for them,” Mary pointed out.

“That’s true,” her husband admitted. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

“May I be excused?” asked Alec, who’d finished the drumstick and fried potatoes in front of him.

“Yes, go ahead,” Mary answered. He hurried off to play. Mary looked after him with a smile half fond, half exasperated. “Little pitchers have big ears.”

“He is getting old enough to repeat anything he hears, isn’t he?” Mort said.

“Yes, but he’s not old enough to know there are times when he shouldn’t,” Mary answered. “Whenever we start talking about the Yanks, we start coming close to those times, too.”

“I don’t want to talk sedition. I’m too tired to talk sedition,” Mort said.

Mary was never too tired to talk sedition. She didn’t talk it very much with Mort. For one thing, she knew he was more resigned to the occupation than she was. For another, since she’d done more than talk, she didn’t want him to know that. The more people who knew something, the more who could give you away.

She did say, “The Yanks are flabbling about sedition on the wireless more than they used to.”

Mort smiled and cocked his head to one side. “That’s not a word I expected to hear from you.”

“What?” Mary didn’t even know what she’d said. She had to think back. “Oh. Flabbling?” Her husband nodded. She shrugged. “People say it. You hear it on the wireless. They’ll probably stop saying it in a little while.”

“I even heard a Frenchy use it today,” Mort said. “This little kid started to cry and have a fit in the diner, and this soldier, he goes,, ‘Ey, boy! Vat you flabble for?’ ” He put on a French accent.

“Did the kid stop?” Mary asked, intrigued in spite of herself.

“Not till his mother warmed his fanny for him,” Mort answered. “Then he really had something to cry about.”

“Good for her.” Mary didn’t approve of children who made scenes in public. She didn’t know anyone who did, either. The sooner you taught them they couldn’t get away with that kind of nonsense, the better off everybody was. She said, “The Yanks must be worried about sedition and sabotage, or they wouldn’t talk about them on the wireless so much.”

“Does sound like they’re hurting down south, doesn’t it?” Mort allowed. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of folks.” He didn’t love the Yanks. He never had. But he’d hardly ever been so vocal about showing how little he liked them, either.

Mary was tempted to let him know she still carried on the fight against the occupiers. She was tempted to, but she didn’t. Three could keep a secret, if two of them were dead. That was Benjamin Franklin: a Yank, but a Yank who’d known what was what. The Americans routinely broke up conspiracies against them. Traitors to Canada and blabbermouths gave the game away time after time. But her father had carried on the fight against the USA undetected for years, simply because he’d been able to keep his mouth shut. Collaborators hadn’t betrayed him; only luck had let him down. Mary intended to follow the same course.

Her husband went on, “The worst of it is, probably none of what happens down there matters to us. Even if the Confederates lick the Yanks, how can they make them turn Canada loose? They can’t. If you think straight, you’ve got to see that. We’re stuck. England can’t get us back, either, not if she’s fighting Germany. Even if she isn’t, she’s an ocean away and the Yanks are right next door. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about that.”