The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (14 page)

Of course, from her exercise she knew that she would probably miss if she ever needed to use it, but she was confident that if God wanted her to live she could hit a mouse from ten thousand leagues away. That was how t
he Almighty worked; like a kind father who looked after her. But in all His mystery, Meryem didn’t understand why He had made her sick for no apparent reason. It was always a horrible experience, and she usually thought that you could understand sickness as trials and little prodding punishments or reminders of your frailty, like fatherly corrections. But this recurring bout of nausea was just too much. If He wanted her dead, then please—Lord—by all means! But He didn’t kill her, or even leave her infirm and delirious. She was only feeling like all the demons of the world were tearing at her organs, stabbing inside her chest, and torturing her just to make it hurt. Was it God testing her? For what?

Whatever she had done to deserve it, she couldn’t tell Daryn.
Even though she wasn’t sure, she didn’t want to admit to being the weak creature she might very well be. She would be as strong as any man had ever been if that was what it would take. She would endure the virtual hell that anything on Earth could ever be, and by God she would love every second of it. Even the seconds when she felt like asking God to please just end it.

“My, these men sure never stop try
ing,” Emily said with an emasculating chuckle as she made it clear how derisive she was about the machine featured prominently in the latest issue of
The New Yorker
.

Frederic nodded
while he kept on reading his newspaper, not really caring what his wife’s cousin thought about that device the magazine showcased and explained. Television was a home movie theater that was supposed to become as uniform in the home of every American as radios, although it was admittedly prohibitively expensive. From what Frederic could understand it was essentially a radio set with motion pictures in it rather than mere sound, and a couple of American firms had not only overtaken the German firm AEG’s domination now when the war had all but completely cut off AEG from the civilian market, but the National Radio Company had begun regular televisual broadcasts a few hours every day to the little television apparatuses.

Frederic
had no doubt that the clever men who devised such things could make good use of them and earn fortunes, and the war had left a glaring hole when the German television pioneers had become busy making military electronics rather than competing with Westinghouse, GEC, and Prinz-Shields on the cutting age of civilian broadcasting technology—the formerly ubiquitous AEG radios had all but disappeared from the high-end range. It was obvious that GEC, PS, and Westinghouse were all working towards some way of transmitting actually motion images by radio waves beyond the small scale of previous years with NRC’s recent decision to set up an actual television station next to its radio station in the city. Women didn’t understand the free market, and certainly not one of these women like Emily. She was the emblem of the stupidity that could flourish if it wasn’t firmly checked once in a while. How stupid she was!

Perhaps it was what the more vulgar men might say. If she
would only got fucked real good she might stop saying vapid things. For the past month, Emily Winston had made Frederic quite aware of everything she thought about everything. She whined about the state of things, but she did it in that conceited way as if she had nothing to do with it. She was a detestable creature who would go on about how this or that needed fixing and assume that someone would do it for her. Presumably an ingenious man.

“I think people are too fixated on electric things,” Emily said, earning the full attention of her cousin.

Frederic had no idea why his wife saw Emily as such a wonderful person. As far as he could tell, she was outrageously stupid and thought much too highly of herself. In particular, she seemed much too enamored with her own opinions on everything from politics to fashion to industry. While he agreed with her politics generally, he disliked her views on many particular matters, such as her hoping for the revival of the temperance movement which had stumbled into irrelevancy more than a decade ago when the country had become gripped in the First Recession, and in national and New York politics it had become a completely defunct political movement thanks to the positioning of the two parties to dance around the issue and avoid upsetting vital constituencies.

“Yes, I agree,” Helen said, not exactly surprising her husband with her agreeing with something Emily Winston said. “Things are much too complicated.”

“You don’t mind the radio, do you?” Fredric said, wishing to remind Helen of her cousin’s stupid remark about things electric.

There was a brief moment of silence, and he decided to return his attention to the newspaper once he was content that he had silenced the stupidity for now. Could the stupid cow not even come up with something to say? He regretted thinking bad thoughts about his wife, but frankly he was being so provoked by her cousin that he could not help be annoyed by both of them. Somehow, Helen seemed rather uppity now when she could hide behind her cousin, and she probably knew that he was too self-aware to even consider giving her a gently correcting stroke in front of Emily Winston. No matter how much she’d bloody earned it.

“A radio isn’t the same thing as some kind of home cinema,” Emily said, eager to rush to defend her cousin. “The problem is that so many people want to be islands separate from everything else. Rather than to go outside, they just want everything to come to them.”

“It will be convenient,” Fredric said, trying to keep his focus on the newspaper.

He could see Emily Winston in the corner of his eye frowning over in the sofa next to Helen. However, he tried his best to let it seem like a casual, disinterested remark. Although he had every intention of winning the argument, he wanted to give the impression that he was not at all giving it any thought at all while her little brain was probably working quite hard to come up with anything to say at all.

“Sometimes what’s convenient isn’t what’s best,” Emily retorted. “It would’ve been convenient to not bother with the Civil War.”

Emily surprised herself with the quick example she managed to conjure up. There was no way he could deny that it was an example of something good that required the most terrible inconveniences imaginable. Her great-grandfather and the countless thousands of others who had volunteered to go to war could have done the
convenient
thing and just refused. And what about the patriots? They could have been
convenient
and just let King George walk all over them rather than fight a long and hard war to set the country free.

“That’s not a question of convenience,” Frederic shot back.

Yet the moment the words left his lips, he realized that he had let himself been drawn into an actual debate, which was exactly what he did not wish to do—he was supposed to be detached and bored by her.
The damn silly woman!

“Sure it is,” Emily asserted.

“You can’t compare a war with technological innovation,” he muttered, feeling like he had to shut her up before he returned to reading the newspaper in silence now when he had engaged her in combat. “Technology makes the world better over time and that’s that. That has nothing to do with politics and national power.”

It seemed self-evident that Emily Winston was confusing technological progress with political decision-making. The former was practically a law of nature while the latter was far more volatile and complex and guided by political sentiment and emotion rather than human ingenuity and greed—the twin parents of technological progress.

“What about meatpacking?” Helen mumbled quietly.

She usually didn’t like to argue with Frederic, yet loyalty to her kind cousin whom her husband was so contemptuous of prompted her to say something. Besides, she agreed with Emily, and she remembered reading an article in some magazine
that was carefully optimistic about the president’s political legacy that mentioned his association with the movement for food regulation. Although she did not generally approve of people like Richard Kleist and union goons, most people these days had to agree with his pre-presidential and pre-senatorial activities and his vociferous opposition to certain bad things. You didn’t have to be a raging communist to read with horror about the pre-reform meatpacking industry or the ongoing battle to regulate a host of additives, cosmetics, and medicines.

“What about it?” Frederic muttered.

“Meatpacking was dirtier just a few years ago than it was centuries ago,” Helen quietly explained.

It seemed to her that there was no obvious link between progress and time. Surely the snake oil salesmen which some reformers had targeted for trying to sell useless “medicine” for tooth decay, consumption, or a string of other maladies was a new phenomenon. The best example she could think of was one she knew Frederic would not accept—distilled alcohol. She thought herself a moderate, and she would have been happy to see just distilled liquors outlawed rather than the whole lot of noxious beverages. However, that was the very kind of alcohol Frederic enjoyed—and perhaps the reason why she wanted to proscribe it as a compromise solution over the issue of beer and wine.

“And now it’s better,” Frederic said, thinking that the matter proved his point of how society was advancing. “Progress at work.”

Emily resolved to let the obstinate man have the last word. She had begun to think that he was not the kind of person she enjoyed having conversations with, and she let him return to reading his newspaper, only punctuating the short debate by giving Helen a reassuring look of agreement. Her cousin was significantly younger than her, but Emily still saw her as a good friend to exchange ideas with like her many other acquaintances.

Lately Emily had been feeling rather lonely, and she was actually not that interested in lending her support to her pregnant cousin as she was to be around someone she knew to be honest. Helen had married a man inferior to what she should have married—surely a man her father did not consider the best son-in-law imaginable—and she lived astonishingly simple without a single full-time servant, toiling for the mean and odious oaf she had married. Emily had never lived in a home with less than two or three servants, and she had been to more than one home with more than a dozen people maintaining gardens, keeping the home clean, cooking, doing the laundry, and so on.

While Emily had no need for too much expenses; like a modern woman she had invested some of her money in funny machines like a refrigerator, an electric washing machine, and other curiosities that were expensive but highly recommended as practically useful. She didn’t understand them, but that was what the maid was for—she was a virtual mechanic who could negotiate just about any kind of domestic machinery. Since Emily could spend a thousand dollars a month without feeling the slightest shame when her accountant reviewed her expenses she could invest in things without concerning herself much at all about their efficacy.

Rather than continue to debate Helen’s cruel and tedious husband, Emily eagerly insisted to help her favorite cousin with some of the dull chores when Helen excused herself. At home, Emily had been used to not having to bother herself to do the sort of things her Hebrew maid took care of, and she was amazed that people could waste so much time on cleaning, cooking, and even doing things as banal as buy groceries in person, although Helen employed an errand boy to do that for some spare change.

Emily wasn’t stupid; she knew that her mother had had to do many tedious things before Emily had the good fortune to marry well enough that she could now keep not just herself and her son, but also heap money, clothes, and jewelry on her dear mother. After all, she had been good to Emily, and she felt a certain daughterly responsibility to give something back now that she could provide for her frail dear old mother.

In some way, Emily thought herself a wonderful example of genuine American aristocracy. Her family went back far into the mists of time as settlers with no discernible connection to the Old World, and her father, and his father, and his father had all been men of modest means. They had worked hard, but above all honestly, and as Mrs. Winston, she had passed some kind of threshold from being just a poor artisan’s daughter to becoming the sort of lady she could only have envied as a child. It wasn’t like the archaic sort of European aristocracy with titles that clearly separated the classes. There was something much less obvious that made you who you were. Someone like the governor of New York, who had clearly been a serious man before he became governor was nevertheless different from a common man, despite not being some sort of lord or baron like an English or German counterpart. It wasn’t mere money that made people who they were.

No, there was some sort of character trait that seemed to her to lie at the core of what made men or women better or worse than their peers. Her maid—Sonya—was obviously simple-minded and plain, and similarly, Helen’s husband was of a much feebler caliber than Helen’s father. Emily’s father had been somewhere just on the fringe of the class she had formally joined, although she had no doubt that the group of character traits that defined the modern cosmopolitan aristocracy were innate rather than acquired. That was why her circle of acquaintances wasn’t made up of Catholics, wops, Hebrews, and certainly not negroes, spics, or Mongols.

Helen was horribly embarrassed that Emily was mopping the kitchen floor while she was feeding Ronald his powder milk. While she was touched by her cousin’s helpfulness, Emily was not very proficient with the mop as she tried to negotiate it across the floor in zigzagging motions like it was a giant brush she was using to try to paint the floor with the water. She didn’t want to upset Emily after she had insisted that she should do the work while she fed her infant son some milk and some leftover ground beef, and Helen actually enjoyed not doing the work herself. As thoughtful as her husband could be at times, he was loathe to hire a maid, and he had inherited a manic need for having money put away for a bad day from a tough childhood very different from Helen’s. Helen just didn’t understand that fear of destitution, but she could do nothing about Frederic’s obsession with money. After all, a maid wouldn’t cost more than maybe fifteen–twenty dollars a month, yet she could only have part-time help a couple of hours a week, excluding the young man who came by to pick up and return laundry and other services that dealt with the domestic needs. She didn’t mind cooking, but she was certainly jealous of her cousin who didn’t have to do anything she didn’t feel like doing.

Emily felt very bad for Helen, but she did not want to embarrass her with money. She could afford to hire a maid to work for her, but Helen was very protective of her odious husband’s honor and pretended like she had no need for someone to do the chores for her. Emily had only heard through her mother that Helen’s husband could be violent with her, but Helen never once implied that he was anything but an adoring and Christian man who treated her far better than anyone would deserve. Even if the man was not a violent drunk, Emily was quite offended that he would lay a hand on a woman so much his superior. But what could she do about it? What could Emily do about anything?