American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (20 page)

  “Well, whether I should have or not, I damn well did,” her younger brother answered. Tom still had a few years to go before facing middle age—and forty meant less to a man than it did to a woman, anyhow. From forty, a woman could see all too well the approaching end of too many things, beauty among them.
From thirty-nine, too,
 Anne thought gloomily. But Tom was grinning at her. “Go on—open it.”

  “I will,” she said, and she did, tearing into the wrapping paper as she would have liked to tear into Father Time. “What on earth have you got here?”

  “I found it the last time I was in Columbia,” he said. “There. Now you’ve got it. See? It’s—”

  “A book of photographs of Marcel Duchamp’s paintings!” Anne exclaimed.

  “Seeing as he exhibited at Marshlands, I thought you’d like it,” her brother said. “And take a look at page one seventy-three.”

  “Why? What’s he done there?” Anne asked suspiciously. Tom’s grin only got wider and more annoying.

  She flipped through the book till she got to page 173. The painting, especially in a black-and-white reproduction, resembled nothing so much as an explosion in a prism factory. That didn’t surprise Anne.

  When Duchamp displayed his
Nude Descending a Staircase
at Marshlands just before the Great War broke out, the work had hung upside down for several days before anyone, including the artist, noticed.

  But here . . .

  Tom looked over her shoulder to make sure she’d got to the right page. “You see?” he said. “You see?” He pointed to the title below the photograph.

  “ ‘Mademoiselle Anne Colleton of North Carolina, Confederate States of America,’ ” Anne read. She said something most unladylike, and then, “For God’s sake, he doesn’t even remember what state he was in! I’m not surprised, I suppose—all he cared about while he was here was getting drunk and laying the nigger serving girls.”

  “What do you think of the likeness?” her brother asked.

  Before the war, Anne had been a champion of everything modern. Life was harder now. She had little time for such fripperies.
And I’m older than I was then,
 she thought bleakly.
It’s harder to stay up to
date, and to stay excited about being up to date.

  She took a longer look at “Mlle. Anne Colleton.” It still seemed made up of squares and triangles and rectangles flying in all directions. But lurking among them, cunningly hidden, were features that might have been her own. Slowly, she said, “It’s not as bad as you make it out to be.”

  “No, it’s worse,” Tom said. “When I was in the trenches, I saw men who got hit by shells and didn’t look this bad afterwards.” He brought his experience to the abstract painting, just as Anne brought hers.

  That was bound to be what Marcel Duchamp had had in mind. Anne might have cared more if he hadn’t made such a nuisance of himself while at Marshlands, and if he hadn’t been such a coward about recrossing the Atlantic after the war began and both sides’ submersibles started prowling.

  As things were, she only shrugged and said, “It
is
a compliment of sorts. Whatever he thought of me, he didn’t forget me once he got back to France.”

  “Nobody ever forgets you, Sis,” Tom Colleton said. Then he added something he never would have dared say before the war. Going into the Army had made a man of him; he’d been a boy, a comfortable boy, till then. He asked, “How come you never married any of the fellows who sniffed around after you?

  There were always enough of ’em.”

  Had he presumed to ask such a question before the Great War, she would have slapped him down, hard. Now, though she didn’t like it, she gave it a serious answer: “Some of them wanted to run me and to run my money. Nobody runs me, and I run the money better than most men could. I’ve said that before. And the others, the ones who didn’t care so much about the money . . .” She laughed a hard and bitter laugh. “They were sons of bitches, just about all of them. I recognize the breed. I’d better—takes one to know one, people say.”

  Almost fondly, she remembered Roger Kimball. The submarine officer had been a thoroughgoing son of a bitch. He’d also been far and away the best lover she ever had. She didn’t know what that said.

  (Actually, she did know, but she didn’t care to dwell on it.) But, in the end, Kimball had chosen the Freedom Party over her. And he was dead now, shot by the widow of a U.S. seaman whose destroyer he’d sunk after the CSA had asked for and been granted an armistice.

  She waited for Tom to give her a lecture. But he only asked another question: “Can you go on by yourself for the rest of your days?”

  “I don’t know,” Anne admitted. To keep from having to think about it, she tried to change the subject:

  “What about you, Tom? You’re as single as I am.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said with a calm that surprised her. “But there are a couple of differences between us. For one thing, I’m a few years younger than you are. For another, I’m starting to look hard, and you’re not.”

  “Are you?” she said, surprised. “You didn’t tell me anything about that.” Tom nodded, almost defiantly. “Well, I am, and yes, I know I haven’t told you anything. No offense, Sis, but you like running people’s lives so much, you don’t like it when they try and run their own.” That held enough truth to make Anne give him a wry nod in return. He dipped his head, acknowledging it, and continued, “There’s one more thing, no offense. A lot of ways, when a man gets married matters a lot less than when a woman does.”

  And that was all too true, as well. In a fair, just world it wouldn’t have been, but Anne had never been naive enough to imagine the world either fair or just. Looks weren’t what kept a man, but they were what lured him. She’d used her own blond beauty to advantage more times than she could count. Again, turning thirty-nine reminded her she wouldn’t be able to do that forever. If she wanted to have a baby or two, she wouldn’t be able to do that forever, either.

  She sighed. “Well, Tom, when you’re right, you’re right, and you’re right, dammit. I’m going to have to do something about it.”

  Her brother blinked. He’d probably been expecting a shouting match, not agreement. “Just like that?” he asked.

  Anne nodded briskly. “Yes, just like that, or as close to just like that as I can make it. Or don’t you think I can do what I set my mind to doing?” If he said he didn’t, he
would
have a shouting match on his hands.

  But he only laughed. “Anybody who thinks that about you is a damn fool, Sis. Now, I may be a damn fool—plenty of people have called me one, and they’ve had their reasons—but I’m not that particular kind of a damn fool, thank you kindly.”

  Although Anne laughed, too, she also gave him another nod. “Good. You’d better not be.” She meant what she said. As if to prove it, she drove up to Columbia a couple of days later. She knew the eligible bachelors in little St. Matthews, South Carolina, much too well to have the slightest interest in marrying any of them. He was too old;
he
was too dull; he was too grouchy;
he
couldn’t count to twenty-one without dropping his pants. The pickings had to be better, or at least wider, in the state capital.

  They would be better still down in Charleston, but Columbia was a lot closer. That made it more convenient both for her and for the battered Ford she drove. Keeping the motorcar alive would probably let the local mechanic send his children to college, but she had to let it keep nibbling her to death a bit at a time. She couldn’t afford a new one, however much she wanted one.

  Before the war—that phrase again!—and even into it, she’d driven a powerful, comfortable Vauxhall, imported from England. Confederate soldiers had confiscated it at gunpoint during the Red uprising of 1915.
Almost ten years ago now,
 she thought with slow wonder. The Ford, now, the Ford was a boneshaker that couldn’t get past thirty-five miles an hour unless it went over a cliff. And it was a Yankee machine. But it was what she had, and it ran . . . after a fashion.

  She did like driving into Columbia. The town’s gracious architecture spoke of the better days of the last century. When the Negroes rebelled here, some houses, some blocks, had gone up in flames, but most of the city remained intact—and the damage, at last, was largely repaired. She couldn’t imagine a conflagration big enough to destroy the whole town. Columbia was too big for such disasters.

  Charleston had better hotels than Columbia, but the Essex House, only a few blocks from the green bronze dome of the State Capitol, would do. The Essex House also boasted a first-rate switchboard.

  She had no trouble keeping up with her investments while away from home. And she could even study day-old copies of the
New Orleans Financial Mercury
and three-day-old editions of the
Wall Street
Journal
. Since she kept most of her money in U.S. rather than C.S. markets, the latter did her more good.

  But here she was more interested in men who might have investments of their own than in investments themselves. Dinner at the hotel restaurant the first night she got into town made her wonder if she’d waited several years too long to make this particular hunting expedition. Before the war, she couldn’t possibly have eaten without shooing away anywhere from two to half a dozen men more interested in other pleasures than in those of the table. Here, she enjoyed—or didn’t so much enjoy—some very tasty fried chicken without drawing so much as a single eye.

 
  I might as well be eating crow,
 she thought as she rose, unhappy, from the table.

  A visit to her assemblyman the next day was no more reassuring. Edgar Stow was younger than she was. He wore the ribbon for the Purple Heart in his lapel; the three missing fingers on his left hand explained why. Because of those missing digits, he had what she took to be a wedding band on the surviving index finger. He was polite to Anne, but polite to Anne as if she was an influential constituent (true) rather than a good-looking woman (false?). He also seemed maddeningly unaware of what she was trying to tell him.

  “Parties? Banquets?” He shook his head. “It’s pretty quiet here these days, ma’am. The old-timers, the men who’ve held their seats since before the war, they complain all the time about how dead it is. But we get a lot more business done nowadays than they ever did.” Stow sounded pleased with himself. He had an ashtray on his desk made from the brass base of a shell casing, with a couple of dimes bent into semicircles and welded to it to hold cigarettes. He’d surely made it, or had it made, while he was in the Army. Anne wanted to pick it up and brain him with it. His blindness stung. But that
ma’am
hurt worse. By the way he said it, he might have been talking to his grandmother.

  “So what exactly can I help you with today, ma’am?” he asked, polite, efficient—and stupid.

  Anne didn’t tell him.
Why waste my time?
 she thought as she left his office. But she had to wonder if she’d already wasted too much time.

 
S
am Carsten smeared zinc-oxide ointment on the bridge of his nose. It wouldn’t do him any good. He was dolefully certain of that. When summer came, he got a sunburn. He’d got sunburned in San Francisco, which wasn’t easy. Hell, he’d got sunburned in Seattle, which was damn near impossible.

  The port of Brest, France, toward which the USS
O’Brien
was steaming, lay on the same parallel of latitude as Seattle. Somebody’d told that to Carsten, but he’d had to look it up for himself in an atlas before he would believe it. The bright sunshine dancing off the ocean—and off the green land ahead—seemed almost tropical in comparison to what Seattle usually got.

  He patted the breech of the destroyer’s forward four-inch gun. “This here is one more place I figured I’d have to fight my way into,” he remarked.

  “Yes, sir,” Nathan Hirskowitz agreed. The petty officer shrugged. “But we’ve got one thing going for us, even on a little courtesy call like this.”

  “You bet we do,” Sam said. “We aren’t Germans.”

  Hirskowitz nodded. He scratched his chin. Whiskers rasped under his nails, though he’d shaved that morning. “Yes, sir,” he said. “That’s what I was thinking, all right.”

  “They just don’t like Germans here in France, same as they just don’t like Englishmen in Ireland.” Carsten thought for a moment, then went on, “And same as they just don’t like
us
in the CSA—what do you want to bet a ship from the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet gets the same sort of big hello in Charleston as we do here?”

  “I won’t touch that one. You got to be right,” Hirskowitz said.

  “Damn funny business, though,” Sam said. “We were at war with the froggies, too, same as Kaiser Bill was at war with the Confederates.”

  “But we didn’t lick France, same as the Germans didn’t lick the Confederate States. That makes all the difference.” Hirskowitz added something in French.

  “What the hell’s that mean?” Sam asked in surprise.

  “Something like, the better you know somebody, the more reasons you can find to despise him,” the gunner’s mate answered.

  “Well, I’ve known you for a while, and this is the first I knew you spoke any French.” Nathan Hirskowitz surprised Sam again, this time by looking and sounding faintly embarrassed: “It’s my old man’s fault, sir. He came to the United States out of this little Romanian village in the middle of nowhere—that’s what he has to say about it, anyway. But he’d taught himself French and German and English while he was still there.”

  “That’s pretty good,” Sam said. “He taught you, too, eh?”

  “Yeah, me and my brothers and my sister. German was easy, of course, because we already used Yiddish around the house, and they’re pretty close. But he made us learn French, too.”

  “So what does he do in New York City?” Sam asked. “How come you aren’t too rich to think about joining the Navy?”