American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (26 page)

  Nellie had needed years after the war to stop wanting to duck whenever motors droned overhead.

  Now, though, she and her husband stood in the street on the bright, crisp New Year’s Day of 1926, staring into the blue sky, pointing, and exclaiming in excitement like a couple of children. “Look! There it is!” Hal Jacobs said, pointing again.

  “I see it!” Nellie answered. “Looks like a big old fat cigar up there in the sky, doesn’t it?”

  “It certainly does,” Hal said. “That is just what it looks like, I think.” Clara tugged at Nellie’s skirt. “Ma, I have to go potty,” she said.

  “Well, go on in and go,” Nellie said impatiently. “Your dad and me, we’re going to stay right here and watch the zeppelin a while longer.” Clara made the beginnings of a whimper. “Go on,” Nellie told her.

  “Go on, or I’ll warm your fanny for you. You’re going to be six this year. You don’t need me to hold your hand any more when you go tinkle.”

  Her daughter ducked into the coffeehouse. Nellie kept staring up at the
Kronprinz Friedrich Wilhelm
as it neared the mooring station that had been set up at the top of the newly refinished Washington Monument. “Can you believe it?” Hal said. “It flew all the way across the Atlantic. All the way across the ocean, without stopping once. What an age we live in!”

  “Paper says the crown prince himself is in there.” Nellie tried to point to the little passenger gondola hanging beneath the great cigar-shaped gas bag. “On a state visit to President Sinclair.” As Clara came back, Hal nodded. His voice was troubled. “We fought side by side with Kaiser Bill all through the Great War. Sad we should squabble with Germany now. I hope Friedrich Wilhelm can patch things up.”

  “That’d be good,” Nellie agreed. “Don’t want to worry about little Armstrong going off to war one of these days.” She doted on her grandson, not least because her daughter Edna had to take care of him most of the time. Edna’s half sister Clara, on the other hand, had been a not altogether welcome surprise and was an ungodly amount of work for a woman well into middle age. She would, thank God, be going back to kindergarten in a few more days.

  Suddenly, the zeppelin’s engines stopped buzzing. “They’ve got it,” Hal said, as if he personally had been the one to moor the
Kronprinz Friedrich Wilhelm
to the white stone tower. He sounded delighted to repeat himself: “What an age we live in! When my father was born, there was no telegraph and hardly any railroads. And now we have these wireless sets and—this.” He pointed toward the Washington Monument again.

  “It’s something, all right,” Nellie agreed. But then, perhaps incautiously, she went on, “I don’t know that it’s all to the good.”

  “Not all to the good?” Her husband looked indignant. “What do you mean? What could be grander than—that?”

  “Oh, it’s—swell, the young people say now.” Nellie brought out the slang self-consciously; like anyone of her generation, she was much more used to
bully
. “But when your pa was born, Hal, this here was all one country, too, you know. We’ve spilled an awful lot o’ blood since on account of it ain’t any more.”

  “Well, yes, of course,” he said. The two of them, in conquered and reconquered Washington, had seen more spilled blood than most civilians. He sighed and breathed out a big, puffy cloud of steam. “I can’t imagine how things could have been any different, though. You might as well talk about us losing the Revolution and still belonging to England.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” Nellie sighed. Hal was the sensible one in the family. He was, as far as she was concerned, sometimes sensible to a fault. Clara came back out. Nellie absentmindedly ruffled her hair.

  Then she decided to be sensible, too, and said, “Now we’ve seen it. Let’s go inside. It’s cold out here.”

  “Oh, Ma!” Nobody had ever accused Clara of being sensible.

  But Hal said, “Your mother is right. If you stay out here too long, you could catch pneumonia, and then where would you be?”

  “I’d be out here, having a good time,” Clara answered. Pneumonia was just a word to her, not one of the many diseases that could so easily kill children.

  “Come on in,” Nellie said. She knew what pneumonia was, all right. “Edna and Uncle Merle and Cousin Armstrong are coming over in a little while.”

  That did get Clara back inside, at the price of continual questions—“When will they come? Why aren’t they here yet?”—till her half sister, Edna’s husband, and their son arrived half an hour later. Armstrong pulled Clara’s hair. She squalled like a cat that had had its tail stepped on, then stamped on his foot hard enough to make him wail even louder.

  He got little sympathy from his mother. “Serves you right,” Edna said. “I saw what you did to Clara.”

  “Happy New Year,” Merle Grimes said above the wails of the two irate children. Behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, irony glinted in his eyes.

  “Well, I do hope the rest of it’ll be happier than this godawful racket,” Nellie said. “Maybe the crown prince will bury the hatchet once and for all.”

  “He’d like to bury it in our backs, I think,” Grimes said. “One of these days, we really will have to worry about Germany. The Germans are worrying about us right this minute, and you can bet your bottom dollar on that.”

  Hal handed him a whiskey. After they clinked glasses and toasted 1926, Nellie’s husband said, “We’ll have a hard time worrying about Germany when we don’t even worry about the CSA.”

  “I know,” Grimes said. “Well, good old Kaiser Bill’s got other worries besides us, too, and that’s not bad.”

  Nellie raised her glass for a toast of her own. “Here’s to no more war anywhere,” she said once she’d caught everybody’s eye. “Haven’t we had enough?”

  “Amen!” her husband said, and drank.

  “I know
I’ve
had enough, enough and then some,” her son-in-law said. He drank, too. “Wasn’t for those . . . miserable Confederates”—he didn’t swear around women, but he’d come close there—“I wouldn’t limp for the rest of my days.”

  Edna also drank. “I hope they never, ever come anywhere near Washington again,” she said. Nellie eyed her daughter. Edna looked back defiantly, but couldn’t help turning red. She’d nearly married a Confederate officer. In fact, she would have married him if a U.S. shell hadn’t killed him on his way to the altar.
Almost ten years ago now,
 Nellie thought, amazed, wondering where the time had gone. As far as she knew, Merle Grimes had no idea Nicholas H. Kincaid had ever existed.

  That was Edna’s worry, not her own. She had secrets in her past, too, secrets she wanted to stay buried till they shoveled dirt over her. Her husband reminded her of those secrets by pouring everyone’s glass full and proposing a toast of his own: “Here’s to our missing friends, gone but not forgotten.”

  “Oh, God, yes!” Merle said, and gulped that drink down. His mouth tightened; harsh lines sprang out at its corners. “Too many good fellows dead for no reason: Ernie and Clancy and Bob and Otis and—” Behind his spectacles, tears glinted.

  “And Bill Reach, too.” Hal Jacobs sounded as maudlin as his step-daughter’s husband. “He was worth a division, maybe more, in getting the Confederates out of Washington. I wish he’d lived to see this day, with an American empire stretching north to south, east to west. . . .” He sighed. “He should have, too.

  Just bad luck.”

  Now Edna eyed Nellie. Now Nellie flushed and had trouble meeting her daughter’s eye. She didn’t reckon Bill Reach a missing friend. Reach had mortified her during the war, drunkenly taking her for the strumpet she’d been a long time before. She’d never been able to tell Edna anything since, not hoping to be taken seriously.

  But not even Edna knew how Bill Reach had died. No one but Nellie knew that, which was just how she wanted things. She’d been foraging for supplies when he tried to rape her, counting on a broken bottle to intimidate her into cooperating. But she’d carried a butcher knife, and she’d been sober. Bill Reach’s body was one of God knew how many hundreds or thousands from the time of the U.S.

  bombardment, the time before the Confederate Army finally and sullenly pulled out of the U.S. capital.

  So far as she knew, nobody’d ever found it.

 
I hope nobody ever does, either,
 she thought savagely.
I hope he rots in the ground and burns in hell
forever. It’d serve him right, by God.

  Her husband had said something to her, but she had no idea what. “I’m sorry, Hal,” she said. “I must’ve been woolgathering.”

  “It’s all right, sweetheart,” Hal said with a tender smile. He did love her. She knew that. She was absently fond of him, too, not least because, being a long way from young, he didn’t try to make love to her very often. She’d had more than enough of that. Now he went on, “I said, I know you feel the same way about poor Bill as I do. He always praised the information you got to the skies. He did like the bottle a bit too much, but he was a fine man, a first-class patriot.” Nellie managed a nod and a glassy smile. They sufficed. Edna made a small noise that might have been the start of a snicker, but did stop at Nellie’s glower. And then they all got distracted, for Clara came in shouting, “Ma! Ma! Armstrong went and put somethin’ down the potty and then he flushed it, and now there’s water all over everything! Come quick!”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Nellie sprang to her feet, as did the other grownups.

  Getting out the pair of long johns and mopping up the water didn’t take long. For Merle Grimes to wallop Armstrong’s backside with a hairbrush didn’t take long, either. Armstrong’s howls needed some little while to subside. So did Nellie’s temper. “He’s only a little boy, sweetheart,” Hal said.

  “Boys!” Nellie snorted, in the tone she usually reserved for,
Men!
 “You’d never see a little girl doing something like that.”

  “You tell ’em, Ma,” Edna said. She and Nellie argued whenever they got a chance, but she would back her mother in a quarrel against the other half of the human race.

  Except there was no quarrel. Hal Jacobs and Merle Grimes looked at each other, as if wondering who would bell the cat. At last, Hal said, “Well, Nellie, you may be right. If the world held nothing but women, we probably wouldn’t have fought the Great War.” Merle chuckled. “Oh, I don’t know if I’d go that far. They wouldn’t have fought it over Serbia, though—I am sure of that. More likely over which was better, Macy’s or Gimbel’s.” He laughed. So did Hal. And so did Edna, betraying her sex after all. Nellie glared at her—yes, they would squabble over anything. Defensively, Edna said, “Oh, come on, Ma—it
was
funny.”

  “Well, maybe,” Nellie said with the air of one making an enormous concession. She was so obvious about it, her husband and son-in-law started laughing again.

  “Peace,” Merle Grimes said when he could speak at last. “Peace. It’s 1926, and we’ve already drunk to peace. Let’s keep it for as long as we can.” Not even Nellie could find anything to argue with there.

 
J
onathan Moss got to his feet in the courtroom. “May it please your Honor,” he said wearily, “but I must object to the prosecution’s speaking of my client as ‘the guilty party.’ The purpose of a trial is to find out whether or not he is guilty.”

  His Honor was a U.S. Army colonel named Augustus Thorgood. Down came the gavel. “Overruled.” He nodded to the prosecutor, a U.S. Army major named Sam Lopat. “You may proceed.”

  “Thank you, your Honor,” Lopat replied. “As I was saying, Stubbs there is plainly guilty of insurrection against the military government of the United States in the former province of Ontario, as defined in Occupation Administrative Code, section 521, subsection 17.” Horace Stubbs, Moss’ client, leaned toward him and whispered, “Thanks for trying.”

  “We’re not out of it yet,” Moss whispered back. But he was whistling in the dark, and he knew it.

  Major Lopat went on, “Before witnesses, the defendant said the United States deserved to be booted out of Canada on their backside. His very words, your Honor!” His voice trembled with indignation.

  “Objection.” Moss got to his feet again. “No witnesses have been produced before the court to show my client said any such thing.”

  “We have the testimony,” Lopat said smugly.

  “But no witnesses,” Moss persisted. “Testimony can come from a man with a personal grudge, or from one out for a profit. How do we know unless we can cross-examine a witness?”

  “This is not an ordinary criminal proceeding, Mr. Moss, as you know perfectly well,” Colonel Thorgood said. “Testimony from certified informants may be admitted without their being liable to appear in open court, for fear of reprisal against them from the unreconciled.”

  “How can you possibly hope for justice under such conditions?” Moss asked.

  “We aim to stamp out rebellion,” the military judge said. “We will, too.”

  “Yes, your Honor. No doubt, your Honor.” Moss turned Thorgood’s title of respect into one of reproach. “But, sooner or later, ignoring the needs of justice and caring only for the needs of expedience
will
come back to haunt you. As Ben Franklin said, your Honor, ‘They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.’ ” He’d pulled that quotation out of his
Bartlett’s
, hoping he wouldn’t have to use it. If he did, his client would be in trouble. Well, Stubbs
was
in trouble, and Moss, like any lawyer worth his pay, used whatever weapons came to hand. And this one struck home. Colonel Thorgood turned red. Major Lopat jumped to his feet. “Now
I
object, your Honor! Incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial.”

  “Sustained.” Thorgood thumped the gavel. “The record will be stricken.”

  “Exception!” Moss said. “If you’re going to railroad an innocent man, at least be honest about what you’re doing.”

 
  Bang!
 The gavel came down again. “This inflammatory speech will also be stricken,” Colonel Thorgood declared. He nodded to Lopat. “Carry on, Major.”