American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (44 page)

  “I don’t care,” Flora said. “They can do it anyway.”

  The new state of Houston, carved from the conquered piece of Texas, went for Calvin Coolidge. So did Montana, which had been a Democratic stronghold ever since Theodore Roosevelt made a hero of himself there during the Second Mexican War. Flora began to worry in earnest. But a little past midnight, Pennsylvania, which had teetered for a long time, fell into her husband’s camp—and Pennsylvania’s electoral votes made up for a swarm of Montanas. New Jersey had also stayed close till then, and also ended up going Socialist.

  “We may make it,” Hosea Blackford said. “We just may.”

  By then, returns from the West were coming in. Colorado had a strong union tradition, and looked like going Socialist again. Idaho fell to Coolidge, and so did Nevada, but Blackford swept the West Coast, including populous California: Hiram Johnson had delivered his state.

  Flora was yawning when one of the telephones rang a little past three in the morning. “Mr. Vice President,” called the man who answered it, and then, in a different, awed, tone of voice, “Mr.

  President-elect, it’s Governor Coolidge, calling from Massachusetts.” That woke Flora better than a big cup of black coffee could have done. She kissed her husband before he could go to the telephone. “Hello, Governor,” he said when he picked up the instrument. “Thank you very much, sir. . . . That’s very generous. . . . Yes, you did give me quite a scare, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. . . . What’s that?” He had been smiling and cordial, but now his expression hardened. “I certainly hope you’re wrong, Governor. I think you are. . . . Yes, time will tell. Thank you again. Good night.” He hung up, perhaps more forcefully than he had to.

  “What did he say that made you angry?” Flora asked.

  “He said maybe he was lucky not to win,” Hosea Blackford answered. “He said bull markets don’t last forever, and this one’s gone on so long and risen so high, the crash will be all the worse when it comes back to earth.”

  “God forbid!” Flora exclaimed.

  “I think we’ve given God some help,” Hosea said. “The business cycle’s been rising steadily all through both of President Sinclair’s terms. I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t do the same for me. The Democrats may have enjoyed boom-and-bust capitalism before the war, but we’ve put that behind us now. We’re prosperous, and we’ll stay prosperous.”

 
  “Alevai, omayn!”
 Whenever Flora fell back into Yiddish these days, she spoke from heart and belly.

  Hosea Blackford smiled. He understood that. “I really do think it’ll be all right, Flora,” he said gently.

  “Oh, there’s more farm debt than I care to see out in the West, and the factories almost seem to be making things faster than people can buy them, but all that’s just a drop in the bucket. We’ll do fine.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you, not now—Mr. President.” Flora kissed him again. The telegraphers and men at the phones all cheered.

  “Not for another five months,” Hosea reminded her. “Say that to me in front of President Sinclair and he’ll arrest you for treason.”

  “Phooey,” Flora said, which wasn’t English or Yiddish, but was exactly what she meant.

  Another telephone rang. “Mr. President-elect, it’s the president.” This time, Flora didn’t try to delay her husband when he went to the telephone. “Hello, Upton,” he said.

  “Thank you so very much. . . . Yes, Cal threw in the towel a little while ago. He gave me some sour grapes, too, babbling about a crash. . . . Yes, of course it’s idiocy. When in all the history of the country have things gone so well? And we have you to thank for it. I’ll do my best to follow your footsteps. . . . Thanks again. Good-bye.”

  Flora went in and woke up Joshua. “Your father’s going to be president,” she told him.

  “I want to go back to sleep,” he said irritably—he wasn’t quite three, and didn’t care whether his father was president or a garbageman. Flora wanted to go to sleep, too.
Now I won’t have to live in Dakota,
she thought. And if that wasn’t reason enough, all by itself, to be glad Hosea had won, she couldn’t imagine what would be.

 
T
he year had turned eight days before. Lucien Galtier didn’t want to be standing out in the open, not with the weather down around zero and a raw wind blowing out of the northwest. Under his overcoat, his tight collar and black cravat felt as if they were choking him.

  Charles and Georges stood beside him in the graveyard. His sons’ faces were blank and bitter with grief.

  So, he suspected, was his own. His daughters—Nicole, Denise, Susanne, and Jeanne—could show their grief more openly, though that wind threatened to freeze the tears on their faces.

  It also whipped at Father Guillaume’s wool cassock. “Is everyone here?” he asked. Galtier nodded.

  Himself, his children, their spouses, his two grandchildren—and Charles’ wife big with child, due almost any day—Marie’s brother and sister and their spouses and children and grandchildren, some cousins, some friends. The priest raised his voice a little: “Let us pray.” Lucien bowed his head as Father Guillaume offered up sonorous Latin to the Lord. Absurdly, Galtier chose that moment to remember how strange the American priest who’d married Nicole and Leonard O’Doull had sounded while speaking Latin—he’d pronounced it differently from the way Quebecois clergymen did. But even they’d assured him it wasn’t wrong, merely not the same.

  After the Latin was done, Father Guillaume dropped back into French: “Marie Galtier no longer gives us the boon of her company on this earth. But she is at the right hand of the Father even as I speak these words, as she died in our true and holy Catholic faith. And she will live forever, for she was a good woman, as you show by coming here today to honor and commemorate her passing.” Nicole began to sob. Leonard O’Doull put his arm around her. Lucien wished someone would do the same for him. But he was a man. He had to bear this as a man did, as stoically as he could. His eyes slid to the black-draped coffin. He’d thought burying his parents was hard. And it had been. This, though, this felt ten times worse. That was his life going into the hole the gravediggers had hacked from the frozen ground.
How can I go on without Marie?
 he wondered. He couldn’t imagine finding an answer.

  “In a real way, too, Marie Galtier does still live here among us,” the priest said. Lucien almost called him a liar and a fool, there in front of everyone. Before he could say the words, Father Guillaume went on,

  “She lives in our hearts, in our memories. Whenever we recall her kindness and her love, she lives again.

  And because she gave us so many reasons to do just that, she will live on for a very long time indeed, even if her years among us were fewer than we would have wished. Think of her often, and she will live for you again.”

  He turned toward the coffin, making the sign of the cross and praying once more in Latin. All the people standing there shivering as they listened to him crossed themselves, too. As Lucien did so, he felt a certain dull amazement. Father Guillaume had been right after all. Lucien could hear his wife’s voice inside himself, could see her smile whenever he closed his eyes. A marvel, yes, but a painful marvel.

  Seeing her and hearing her that way only reminded him he wouldn’t see her or hear her in the flesh any more. Helplessly, he began to cry.

  “Here, Papa.” Of all people, his foolish son Georges was the one who held him and gave him a handkerchief: Georges, whose always-smiling face was as twisted with sorrow as Lucien’s had to be.

  “Thank you, my son,” Lucien whispered. He felt his eyelids trying to freeze together, and rubbed at them with the handkerchief.

  Then he and his sons and Marie’s brother and Dr. Leonard O’Doull lifted the coffin and set it in the grave. What struck Lucien was how little it weighed, which had little to do with six men lifting it. After Dr.

  O’Doull found the mass in Marie’s belly, after the X ray and the operation that only confirmed the worst, the flesh had melted off her day by day, till she was little more than parchment skin wrapped around bones by the time the end finally, mercifully, came. Those were memories of his wife Galtier wished he wouldn’t carry into the future with him. No matter what he wished, though, he would have them till his turn to lie in a coffin came. He made himself go over to the priest and say, “
Merci,
 Father Guillaume.” The young priest nodded soberly. “You are welcome, and more than welcome. This is a cup I wish had passed from me, and one I wish had passed from your wife as well. I would have hoped she might enjoy many more happy years.”

  “Yes. I would have hoped for the same.” Galtier looked up into the cloudy sky. More snow might start falling any time. “Better God should have taken me. Why did He take her and leave me all alone?” That thought had been with him since he first found out Marie was ill.

  “He knows the answer to that, even if He does not give it to us to know,” Father Guillaume said.

  “Marie knows now, too,” Lucien said. “If ever I see God face to face, I intend to ask Him about it, and His explanation had better be a good one.” The priest coughed and turned red. Galtier went on, “And if I don’t see Him face to face, if I meet the Devil instead, as could be, then I intend to find out from him.” Now Father Guillaume gravely shook his head. “Satan is the Father of Lies. Whatever he might tell you, you would not be able to believe it.”

  With Quebecois stubbornness, Lucien said, “I’ll hear what he says, and then I’ll make up my own mind.”

  Charles came up to him and asked, “Do you want me to drive you home, Papa?”

  “Why would I?” Galtier asked in honest surprise.

  “After this . . . I was not sure how you would be,” his older son answered.

  “I am not so very well,” Galtier agreed. “But if I am not so very well after burying my wife, are you so very well after burying your mother? It could be you would make a worse menace on the road than I,
n’est-ce pas
?”

  Charles looked surprised, but nodded. “Yes, it could be, I suppose.” He turned away. “I should have known you were too stubborn to take help from anyone.”

  “When I need it, I take it,” Lucien said. “When I don’t, I don’t. Don’t be angry at me, son. I am not angry at you. And the two of us, we’re not so very different, eh?” He knew that was true. Charles took after him in more than looks. His older son also had a character much like his own. After a moment’s thought, Charles gave him the same sort of grudging nod he would have used himself. “All right, Father. Yes, you’re right—I can be a stiff-necked nuisance, too. I’ll see you there, then?”

  “Certainly,” Galtier said. “Where else would I go, but to my own house?” But when he got out of the Chevrolet close by the farmhouse on the land that had been in his family for almost 250 years, he wondered. He didn’t want to go back into the house. Going in there had always—not literally always, but more than thirty years came close enough—meant going in to see Marie. Now she wasn’t there. She never would be there, not any more. And remembering that she had been there, remembering the life together the two of them had built, the life now forever sundered, forever shattered, was like knives to Lucien. He had to gather himself before he could go inside.

  Nicole and Leonard O’Doull were already there. So were Charles and his wife. One by one and in small groups, the rest of his children and his wife’s relatives and his friends came in. There was plenty to drink and plenty to eat; the womenfolk in the family had been cooking since Marie died.

  “Thank you all,” Lucien said. “Thank you all very much for coming. Thank you for caring for Marie.” His face twisted into a characteristically wry grin. “For I know you certainly would not have come for my sake.”

  “Certainly not,
mon beau-père,
 ” Dr. O’Doull said. “We all hate you.” For a moment, Galtier took him seriously, being too emotionally battered to recognize irony. But then even he saw the smile on his son-in-law’s face, and those on the faces of his other loved ones. He wanted to smile, too, but ended up weeping once more instead. He felt mortified all over again, and angrily turned away from Dr. O’Doull.

  “It’s all right,” said the American who’d become part of his family. “No one thinks less of you for it.

  Here. Drink this.” He gave Lucien a glass of applejack.

  The homemade spirits went down Galtier’s throat without his even noticing them. He had another glass, and another, all with scant effect. He felt too much already for applejack to make much difference. For the next half hour or so, he thanked everyone who’d come to his house to say good-bye to Marie.

  “What will you do now, Papa?” Georges asked him. “Do you know yet?”

  “What
can
I do?” Galtier answered. “I’ll go on as best I can. If I don’t feed the animals tomorrow, who will? If I don’t take care of the farm, who will? The work doesn’t do itself. You always thought it did, but it doesn’t. Someone has to do it. If no one does it, it doesn’t get done.”

  “But . . .” His younger son gestured. “How can you do all the farm work, and then do all the housework, too?”

  “Electricity helps,” Lucien said. “With electricity, everything is quicker and easier. And I was in the Army a long time ago. I know how to keep things tidy—unlike certain people I could name.” Georges didn’t rise to that, which proved how solemn an occasion this was. He just asked, “And while you were in the Army, Papa, did they also teach you how to cook?”

  “No, but then, who cares?” Galtier answered. “I am the only person I’ll be cooking for. I won’t starve to death. And if supper is particularly bad one night, I can always throw things at the clumsy fool who fixed it.”

  He made his son laugh at that, and thought he’d tricked Georges—maybe even tricked himself—into believing everything was, or at least soon would be, all right. A few minutes later, though, Georges sprawled in a chair, hands over his face, weeping with as much heartbreak as Lucien knew himself.