American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (32 page)

  “And a cigarette,” Custer added automatically, but he shook his head before anyone could correct him.

  “No, the Mormons don’t even have that to console themselves. Poor devils. Nothing wrong with tobacco.”

  Libbie sniffed. Custer had been smoking and drinking and cursing ever since the disappointments of the Second Mexican War, and she still hated all three.

  “It does work, cigarette or no,” Pershing said. “We even quelled trouble with polygamists down in Teasdale by taking several hundred hostages and making it ever so clear we’d do what we had to do if trouble broke out.”

  Dowling wanted to wipe his forehead with the back of his hand and go,
Whew!
 because of that. He didn’t, but he wanted to. Instead, he said, “General, Mrs. Custer, your limousine is waiting just outside the station. If you’d be kind enough to come with me . . .” They came. They didn’t remark upon—perhaps they didn’t notice—the sharpshooters on the roof of the station. More riflemen were posted in the buildings across the street. Custer had served as General Pope’s right arm in the U.S. occupation of restive Utah during the Second Mexican War. Mormons had long memories, as everyone had found out in their uprising during the Great War. Someone might still want to take a potshot or two at Custer for what he’d done more than forty years before, no matter how many hostages’ lives it cost his people.

  The limousine carried more armor than an armored car. Even the windows were of glass allegedly bulletproof. That was one more thing Dowling didn’t want to have to put to the test.

  As they drove along the southern perimeter of Temple Square, Custer pointed to the ruins there and said, “That’s a bully sight—their temples to their false gods pulled down around their ears. May they never rise again.”

  “Er, yes,” Dowling answered, wondering when he’d last heard anyone—anyone but Custer, that is—say
bully
. Hardly at all since the Great War ended; he was sure of that. The old slang was dying out with the people who’d used it. Custer still lingered. Now, though, Dowling could see he wouldn’t go on forever after all.

  As old men will, Custer still dwelt on the past. “Do you know what my greatest regret is?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” Dowling said, as General Pershing shook his head.

  “My greatest regret is that we didn’t hang Abe Lincoln alongside the Mormon traitors he was consorting with,” Custer said. “He deserved it just as much as they did, and if we’d stretched his skinny neck the Socialists never would have got off the ground—I’m sure of that.”

  “I suppose we’d have Republicans instead,” Pershing said. “They’d be just about as bad, or I miss my guess.” He was twenty years younger than Custer, which meant he’d been a young man the last time the Republican Party had amounted to anything much. It was a sad shadow of its former self, and had been ever since Abraham Lincoln took a large part of its membership left into the Socialist camp at the end of the Second Mexican War.

  Custer sniffed and coughed and rolled his eyes. Plainly, he disagreed with General Pershing. For a wonder, though, he didn’t come right out and say so. Abner Dowling scratched his head in bemusement.

  Had Custer learned tact, or some semblance of it, at the age of eighty-six? There might have been less likely things, but Dowling couldn’t think of any offhand.

  Odds were that Libbie had poked him in the ribs with her elbow when Dowling didn’t notice. As the great man’s longtime adjutant, Dowling had long since concluded Libbie Custer was the brains of the outfit. George put on a better show—Libbie, in public, was self-effacing as could be—but she was the one who thought straight.

  Outside General Pershing’s headquarters, guards meticulously checked the limousine, front to back, top to bottom. At last, one of them told the driver, “You’re all right. Go on through.”

  “Thanks, Jonesy,” the driver said, and put the motorcar back into gear.

  “Still as bad as that?” Custer asked. “Will they blow us to kingdom come if we give them half a chance?”

  “We hope not,” Pershing said. “Still and all, we’d rather not find out.”

  “They don’t love us, and that’s a fact,” Dowling added.

  “Good,” Custer said. “If they loved us, that would mean we were soft on them, and we’d better not be soft. If we let them up for even a minute, the Mormons will start conspiring with the limeys or the Rebs, same as they did in the last war and same as they did forty-odd years ago, too.” There was another obsolete word. Only men of Custer’s generation still called the Confederates Rebels, and men of Custer’s generation, these days, were thin on the ground. The armored limousine stopped once more, this time inside the secure compound. A company stood at stiff attention, awaiting Custer’s inspection.

  The retired general didn’t notice them till a soldier held the door for him and he got out of the automobile. When he did, he tried to straighten up as he made his slow way over to them. He reminded Dowling of a fire horse put out to pasture that heard the alarm bell once more and wanted to pull the engine again. Around soldiers, he came alive.

  Most of the men there in the courtyard were conscripts, too young to have served in the Great War.

  They still responded to Custer, though, grinning at his bad jokes and telling him their home towns when he asked.

  In a low voice, General Pershing said, “He looks like he wishes he were still in uniform.”

  “I’m sure he does, sir,” Dowling answered, also quietly. “The Socialists practically had to drag him out of it.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth, remembering. “That was an ugly scene.”

  “Those people . . .” Pershing shook his head. “It’s not for us to meddle in politics, and I know that’s a good rule, but there are times when I’m tempted to say exactly what’s on my mind.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dowling said.

  At the banquet that evening, Custer ate with good appetite and drank perhaps two glasses of white wine too many. Afterwards, Libbie told him, “Time to get to bed, Autie.” She might have been talking to a child that had stayed up too late.

  “In a moment, my dear,” Custer answered. Before struggling to his feet once more, he turned to Dowling and said, “Do you know, Major, there are times since they took the uniform off me when I simply feel adrift on the seas of fate. Once upon a time, I mastered the helm. But no more, Major, no more. This is what the years have done.”

  Dowling couldn’t blame Custer for forgetting his present rank and using the one he’d had when they served together during the war. “Yes, sir,” he said, and then, “I’m sorry, sir.” To his amazement, tears stung his eyes. Custer had lived too long, and knew it. Could any man suffer a worse fate? Dowling shook his head. He doubted it.

  “God bless you, Major,” Custer said. He let his wife, still competent as always, lead him out of the dining hall. One of those tears slid down Dowling’s cheek. He would have been more embarrassed—he would have been mortified—if he hadn’t seen that General Pershing’s face was wet, too.

 
I
n a way, sitting in the Socialist Party offices in New York’s Fourteenth Ward took Flora Blackford back to the days when she’d been Flora Hamburger. Waiting for the latest batch of election returns made her remember how nervous she’d been when her name first appeared on the ballot ten years before.

  In another way, though, coming back reminded her how much things had changed. She didn’t get back from Philadelphia all that often, even though the two cities were only a couple of hours apart by train. She didn’t hear Yiddish spoken all that often any more, either; she had to stop and think and listen to understand. What had been her first language was now on the way to becoming foreign to her.

  A telephone rang. Herman Bruck picked it up. He’d been sweet on Flora while she still lived in New York City, and maybe his smile had a wistful quality to it when he looked at her now. On the other hand, maybe it didn’t. He had a four-year-old of his own, and a two-year-old, and a six-month-old besides.

  That was bound to be more than enough to keep anybody busy.

  He scribbled something on a pad on his battered old desk. “Latest returns in our district—Hamburger, uh, Blackford, 9,791; Cantorowicz, 6,114.” Cheers filled the office. The Democrat, Abraham Cantorowicz, wasn’t quite a token candidate, but he hadn’t had any great chance of winning, either. The Congressional district whose borders roughly corresponded to those of the Fourteenth Ward had been solidly Socialist since before the turn of the century.

  On Flora’s lap, Joshua Blackford began to fuss. He was sleepy. At not quite one, he was up well past his bedtime, and in a strange place besides. She was surprised he hadn’t started making a racket before this.

  The telephone rang again. Again, Herman Bruck picked it up. Then he laid his palm against the mouthpiece and said, “Flora, it’s for you. It’s Cantorowicz.” More cheers—everyone knew what that had to mean. Flora passed her son to her husband.

  “Here—mind him for a few minutes, please,” she said.

  Hosea Blackford took the toddler. “This is what the vice president is for,” he said with a laugh. “He takes over so somebody else can go do something important.” That got two waves of laughter—one from those who followed it in English and another after it got translated into Yiddish. Flora made her way to the telephone. “This is Congresswoman Blackford,” she said.

  “And you’ll have two more years of being a Congresswoman,” Abraham Cantorowicz told her. “I don’t see how I can catch you, and what’s the point in waiting to make this call after the handwriting goes up on the walls? Another election, another Democrat calling to concede. Congratulations.”

  “Thank you very much. That’s gracious of you,” Flora said. “You ran a strong campaign.” He’d run as well as a Democrat in this district could.

  “Someone had to be the sacrificial lamb—we weren’t about to let you run unopposed,” Cantorowicz answered. “We will keep fighting for this district, and we’ll win one of these days.”

  “Not soon, I don’t think,” Flora answered.

  “Maybe sooner than you think,” her defeated opponent answered. “Will you run for reelection when your husband runs for president?”

  Flora sent Hosea Blackford a look half startled, half thoughtful. She knew perfectly well he was thinking of running in 1928. Upton Sinclair almost certainly wouldn’t seek a third term. The only president who’d ever run a third time was Theodore Roosevelt. He’d won the Great War, made himself twice a national hero—and lost anyhow. The United States weren’t ready for one man ruling on and on.

  “You aren’t saying anything,” Cantorowicz remarked.

  “No, I’m not,” Flora told him. “We still have a couple of years to worry about that.”

  “Maybe you should run anyway,” the Democratic candidate said. “If he loses and you win, you’d still be able to support your family.”

  “I don’t think we’d have to worry there,” Flora answered coolly. She wasn’t kidding. Hosea Blackford was a talented lawyer with years of government connections. He would have no trouble making his way even if—God forbid!—he lost the election. Flora wasn’t sure she liked that in the abstract; whom a man knew shouldn’t have mattered so much as what he knew. But that didn’t change reality one bit.

 
  When I first went into Congress, I would have tried to change reality. I
did
try to change reality,
and I even had some luck,
 she thought. She took pride in being called the conscience of the House. But ten years there had taught her some things were unlikely to change in her lifetime, or her son’s, or his son’s, either, if he had a son.

  Cantorowicz said, “Well, I hope you have to worry about it. But you don’t want to listen to that right now. You want to celebrate, and you’ve earned the right. Good night.”

  “Good night,” Flora told him. The line went dead. Silence had fallen in the Socialist Party office.

  Everyone was looking at her. She put the phone back on the hook and nodded. “He’s conceded,” she said.

  Cheers and whoops shattered the silence. People came up and shook Flora’s hand and thumped her on the back, as if she were a man. The racket woke up Joshua, who’d fallen asleep in Hosea’s lap. The little boy started to cry. Hosea comforted him. Before long, he fell asleep again, his thumb in his mouth.

  Someone knocked on the door. Eventually, one of the men in the office heard the noise and opened it.

  There stood Sheldon Fleischmann, who ran the butcher’s shop downstairs. He looked a lot like his father, Max. The elder Fleischmann had quietly fallen over behind his counter one day, and never got up again. Like his father, Sheldon was a Democrat. Flora doubted he’d voted for her. Even so, he was carrying a tray of cold cuts, as Max had done more than once on election nights.

  “You don’t need to do that,” Flora scolded him. “You’re not even a Socialist.”

  “I try to be a good neighbor, though,” Fleischmann answered. “That’s more important than politics.”

  “If everyone thought that way, we’d hardly need politics,” Hosea Blackford said.

  His flat Great Plains accent stood out among the sharp, often Yiddish-flavored, New York voices in the office. Sheldon Fleischmann’s gaze swung to him in momentary surprise. Then the butcher realized who he had to be. “You’re right, Mr. Vice President,” he said, giving Blackford a respectful nod. “But too many people don’t.”

  “No, they don’t,” Blackford agreed. “I did say
if
.”

  “Yes, you did,” Fleischmann allowed. “
Mazeltov,
 Congresswoman.” He chuckled. “I’ve been saying that so long, it starts to sound natural.”

  “And why shouldn’t it?” Challenge rang from Flora’s voice.

  Had the butcher said something about women having no place in Congress, Flora would have exploded.

  She was ready to do it even now. But his answer was mild: “Only because there are a lot of men in Congress, ma’am, and just a couple of women. You do say what you’re used to.”