American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (39 page)

  Back toward the stern, a couple of mechanics worked on an aeroplane. The machine looked sleeker and more powerful than the modified Great War–vintage aeroplanes that had flown off the
Remembrance
during Carsten’s last tour aboard her.
I’d better bone up on what the differences are,
 he thought.

  He didn’t get to stand around watching for very long. A respectful petty officer soon came up to him and whisked him over to the office of a gray-haired commander named van der Waal. “What do you know about minimizing damage from torpedo hits?” the other officer demanded.

  “Sir, I was aboard the
Dakota
when the Japs put a fish into her off the Sandwich Islands, but I didn’t have anything to do with damage control there,” Sam answered.

  “All right, that’s a little something, anyhow,” van der Waal said. “You’ve experienced the problem firsthand, which is good. That’s more than a lot of people can say. Does it interest you?”

  “No, sir. Not a whole lot,” Carsten said honestly. “I served a gun before I was an officer, and I’m interested in aeronautics, too. That’s how I came aboard the
Remembrance
during my first tour here.”

  “Naval aeronautics is important. I’d have a hard time telling you anything different, wouldn’t I, here on an aeroplane carrier?” Commander van der Waal’s craggy face creased in unaccustomed places when he smiled. But he quickly turned serious again. “But so is damage control. The Japs aren’t the only ones who’ve got submersibles, you know.” He looked south and west, in the direction of the CSA.

  “The Confederates aren’t supposed to have ’em!” Sam blurted.

  “I know that. And I know we send inspectors up and down their coast to make sure they don’t,” van der Waal told him. “But I’d bet they’ve got a few anyhow—and we haven’t been inspecting as hard as we might have the past few years. The budget keeps going down, and President Sinclair wants to get along with everybody. And the British still have some boats, and the French might, and we know perfectly well that the Japanese do. And so does the German High Seas Fleet. And so, Ensign . . .”

  “I see your point, sir,” Sam said, knowing he couldn’t very well say anything else. “If that’s what you want me to do, I’ll do it.” He couldn’t very well say anything but that, either. Then he dredged up a childhood expression: “But if I had my druthers, it’s not what I’d do.” Van der Waal chuckled. “Haven’t heard that one in a while. You gave up your druthers, you know, when you put on the uniform.”

  “Really, sir? I never would have noticed.” Some men would have wound up in trouble after talking back to a superior officer that way. Carsten did have a knack for not getting people angry at him.

  Commander van der Waal said, “Well, we’ll see what happens. You’ll start out in my shop, because I do need a man to back me up. If another opportunity comes along and you want to take it, I don’t suppose I’d stand in your way. Fair enough?”

  “More than fair enough, sir. It’s damn white of you, matter of fact.” Sam saluted. Most officers would have grabbed him and held on to him, and that would have been that. “Thank you very much!”

  “I don’t want a badly disaffected man serving under me. It’s not good for me, it wouldn’t be good for the officer in question, and it’s not good for the ship.” Van der Waal nodded briskly. “For now, you’re dismissed.”

  Sam saluted again and went out on deck. He spied a knot of sailors at the starboard bow. They were all pointing in the direction van der Waal had—toward the Confederate States. Carsten looked that way himself. He had no trouble spotting the Confederate coast-defense ship steaming along between the
Remembrance
and the shore.

  Like one of the U.S. Navy’s so-called Great Lakes battleships, the Confederate warship was only about half the size of a real battlewagon. She’d carry a battleship’s guns, but only half as many of them as, say, the
Dakota
. She wouldn’t have the armor or the speed to take on a first-class battleship, either. And she and her three sisters were the biggest warships the C.S. Navy was allowed to have.

 
What does her skipper think, looking at the
Remembrance
?
 Carsten wondered. He could sink her if they fought gun to gun; the aeroplane carrier had nothing bigger than five-inchers aboard. But they wouldn’t fight gun to gun, not unless something went horribly wrong. And how would that Confederate captain like to try shooting down aeroplanes that could drop bombs on his head or put torpedoes in the water running straight at his ship?

 
  He wouldn’t like it for hell,
 Sam thought. His grin stretched wide as the Atlantic. He liked the idea just fine himself.

 
N
ellie Jacobs was keeping one eye on the coffeehouse and the other on Clara’s arithmetic homework when Clara’s half sister, Edna Grimes, burst into the place. That Clara was going on eight years old, and so old enough to have homework, surprised Nellie. That Edna should come bursting in astonished her.

  Then Nellie got a look at her older daughter’s face, and astonishment turned to alarm. “Good heavens, Edna! What’s wrong?” she asked. “Are you all right? Are Merle and Armstrong?”

  “Armstrong is a brat,” Clara declared. Anything might have distracted her from the problems in her workbook. The mention of her nephew—who was only a couple of years younger than she was—more than sufficed.

  Only a couple of customers were working on coffee and, in one case, a sandwich. Business would pick up after government offices closed in another forty-five minutes. Nellie hoped it would, anyhow. It had been a slow day—whenever snow fell in Washington, it tied the city in knots.

  Nellie expected Edna to go into one of the back rooms before saying whatever was on her mind. That way, the men wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop. But her daughter said, “Oh, Ma, I don’t know what to do!

  Merle’s found out about Nick Kincaid!”

  “Oh,” Nellie said, and then, “Oh, Lordy.”

  “Who’s Nick Kincaid, Edna?” Clara asked.

  “He was a . . . a fellow I used to know, a soldier,” Edna answered. “I was going to marry him, maybe, but he got killed in the war.”

  That told Clara enough to satisfy her. It didn’t say everything there was to say on the subject, not by a long chalk. Edna had certainly been about to marry Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid; she’d been walking down the aisle with him when U.S. artillery fire tore off his head. The other thing she’d neglected to tell her half sister was that Kincaid had been a soldier, all right, but one who fought for the Confederate States.

  “Well, dear,” Nellie said, as coolly as she could, “you knew this was liable to happen one of these days.” She was, if anything, amazed it hadn’t happened sooner.

  Edna said, “When it didn’t happen for so long, I reckoned it never would. And you know how Merle is, how he always put me on a pedestal.”

  Most men, Nellie was convinced, put women on pedestals so they could look up their skirts. But she found herself nodding. Merle Grimes was different—or had been different. He’d lost his first wife during the great influenza epidemic of 1918. Since meeting Edna and falling in love with her, he’d made as good a husband as any woman could want—better than Edna deserved, Nellie often thought.

  Edna never would have gone up on that pedestal if Merle (who had a Purple Heart—a U.S. Purple Heart) had known everything—or even most things—about Nick Kincaid. What he would have thought had he known Kincaid had got Edna into bed . . . Nellie shied away from that. Sometimes the quiet ones were the worst when they did lose their tempers. Even finding out Edna’s former fiancé had worn butternut and not green-gray was liable to be enough.

  “What am I gonna
do
, Ma?” Edna wailed.

  “How’d he find out?” Nellie asked.

  “This fellow from the CSA came into his office for some kind of business or other.” Now Edna had the sense to keep her voice down; one of the men drinking coffee had leaned forward to snoop a little too obviously. She went on, “They both wore Purple Heart ribbons, dammit—you know how the Confederates give ’em, too. And they got to talking soldier talk: where’d you fight, how’d you get hurt, that kind of thing.”

  “And?” Nellie asked.

  “And one thing led to another, and they got to liking each other,” Edna said. “And Merle said how he’d married a Washington gal, and that was the closest thing you could get to marrying a gal from the Confederate States. And the other fellow said that was funny, on account of his cousin had almost married this Washington gal who worked in a coffeehouse when he was here on occupation duty during the war.”

  “Uh-oh,” Nellie said.

  Edna nodded bitterly. “
Uh-oh
is right. Merle said his wife—me, I mean—was working in a coffeehouse when he met her, too. And they went and talked a little more, and they figured out they were both talking about the same gal. And I got this phone call from Merle, and I didn’t like the way he sounded, not for beans I didn’t, and so I left Armstrong with Mrs. Parker next door—he was playing with her boy Eddie anyways—and I came over here.”

  “All right, dear,” Nellie said. “I may not be much, but I’m what you’ve always got, and that’s for sure.” Edna nodded, biting her lip and blinking back tears. There had been times when Nellie hoped she would never see her daughter again, not a few of them when Edna was fooling around with the late Confederate Lieutenant Kincaid. But Edna was what Nellie had, too, and always would be. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Clara, but her younger daughter often felt more like an afterthought or an accident than flesh of Nellie’s flesh. Of course, Edna had been an accident, too, but that was a long time ago now.

  “What am I gonna do, Ma?” Edna asked again.

  “Just remember, sweetie, your husband ain’t the only one in the family who’s got himself a medal,” Nellie said. “He starts going on about you selling out your country, you hit him over the head with the Order of Remembrance. For heaven’s sakes, Teddy Roosevelt put it on you his very own self.”

  “That’s true.” Edna brightened a little. “That
is
true.” But then she turned pale. She pointed out through the big glass window in front. “Oh, Jesus, Ma, there he is.”

  “Nothing bad’s going to happen,” Nellie said, though she knew she couldn’t be sure of any such thing.

  Edna’s husband was a quiet fellow, yes, but. . . .

  The bell above the door chimed cheerily as Merle Grimes walked into the coffeehouse. The rubber tip on his cane tapped against the linoleum floor. Behind the lenses of his spectacles, his eyes had a blind, stricken look, as if he’d had too much to drink, but Nellie didn’t think he was drunk.

  He nodded jerkily to her before swinging his gaze towards Edna. “When you weren’t home, I figured I’d find you here,” he said. She nodded, too. Grimes gestured with his cane. By the way he aimed it at Edna, Nellie thanked God it wasn’t a Springfield. What came out of his mouth, though, was only one more word: “Why?”

  Before Edna could say anything, Nellie told Clara, “Go upstairs. Go right now. This is grownup stuff.” Clara didn’t argue. Nellie’s tone got through. Her younger daughter took her homework and all but fled.

  “On account of if I told you I was . . . friendly with a Confederate soldier back in them days I thought I’d lose you, and I didn’t want to lose you,” Edna answered. “I didn’t want to lose you on account of I love you. I always have. I always will.”

  It was, Nellie thought, about the best answer her daughter could have given. But when her son-in-law said, “You lied to me,” Nellie knew it was liable not to be good enough. “You lied to me,” Merle Grimes repeated. It might have been the very worst thing he could think of to say. “I thought I knew you, and everything I thought I knew . . . I didn’t know.”

  One of the customers got up and left. A moment later, more reluctantly, so did the other one. Nellie went to the door behind him. She closed it in the face of a woman who started to come in.

  “Sorry—we’re closed,” she told the startled woman. She flipped the sign in the window to CLOSED, too. That was going to cost her money, but it couldn’t be helped.

  When she walked back behind the counter, Edna was saying, “—so sorry. But that was before I knew you, Merle, remember. I’ve never done nothing to make you sorry since, so help me God I haven’t.”

  “I’d have believed you yesterday, because I’d’ve been sure you were telling me the truth,” her husband said. “Now . . . How do I know it’s not just another lie?”

  “Edna wouldn’t do nothing like that, Merle,” Nellie said. “You think about that, you’ll know it’s true.” She liked Merle Grimes enough to want to do everything she could to keep him in the family. Even if she had her problems with Edna, her son-in-law was the kind of man who tempted her to forget her low opinion of half the human race.

  She didn’t mollify him, though. The look he gave her was colder than the weather outside. “You must have known about this Kincaid fellow, Mother Jacobs—you couldn’t very well not have. And you never said a word about him to me. So why should I believe you, either?”

  “We said Edna had a fiancé during the war, and that he got killed,” Nellie said. “Is that the truth or isn’t it?”

  “It’s less than half the truth,” Merle Grimes said stubbornly. “That’s the best way I know how to lie—tell the part of the truth that goes your way, and leave out everything else.” He was right, of course. That was the best way Nellie knew how to lie, too. She said, “The man’s dead, Merle. He’s more than ten years dead now. You can just forget about him. Everybody else has.” Grimes shook his head. “That’s not the point. What’s more, you know it’s not the point, Mother Jacobs.

  The point is that he was a . . . darned Confederate, and that Edna never told me about that. I’ve tried to take care of her and Armstrong. I’ve saved money. I’ve bought stocks. If she had told me, I don’t know what I’d’ve done. Washington was occupied, after all. Those things happened. But trying to sweep ’em under the rug afterwards . . .” He shook his head again. “No.” Nellie didn’t like the grim finality in his voice. Tears trickled down Edna’s face.
Sweet Jesus, she really
thinks she’s going to lose him right here and now,
 Nellie thought, fighting against panic of her own.