American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (70 page)

  “What is it?” Nellie didn’t scream at him. She never knew why or how she didn’t, but she didn’t. She waited, taut as a fiddle string.

  “It is called carcinoma of the lungs.” Hal pronounced the unfamiliar word with care. He pulled out his cigarettes and lit one.

  When he offered the pack to Nellie, she shook her head. “Not now. What the devil does that mean, anyway?”

  “Well, it is like a—a growth in there,” he said.

  “A growth? What kind of a growth? What can they do about it?” The questions flew quick and sharp, like machine-gun fire.

  Hal sighed. “It is a cancer, Nellie. They can aim more X rays at it, the doctor said. That will slow it down for a while.”

  “Slow it down . . . for a while,” Nellie echoed. Her husband nodded. She knew what that meant, knew what it had to mean, but grasped for a straw anyhow: “Can they stop it?”

  “It is a cancer,” he repeated. “We can hope for a miracle, but. . . .” A shrug. “Who knows why cancers happen? Just bad luck, the doctor said.” He blew a smoke ring at the ceiling, as he had for Clara and Armstrong. Then, stubbing out the cigarette, he said, “I am not afraid of death, darling. I am afraid of dying, a little, because I do not think it will be easy, but I am not afraid of death. Death will bring me peace. The only thing I am sorry for is that it will take me away from you and Clara. I do not think many men have the last years of their lives be the happiest one, but I have. I feel like the luckiest man in the world, even now.”

  “Oh, Hal.” Nellie hardly noticed the tears running down her face. “What are we going to do without you? What
can
we do without you? I love you. It took me a long time to figure that out—longer than it should have, you being the finest man I ever knew—but I do, and who knows? Maybe there’ll be a miracle with the X rays.” She grabbed for that straw again.

  Hal’s smile was gentle. “Yes, maybe there will,” he said, meaning,
not a chance
. He brushed her lips with his. “With you and Clara, I have already had two miracles.” Nellie shivered. She wasn’t, couldn’t be, ready for this. But who ever could? Ready or not, it always came.

 
“H
ere you are, George,” Sylvia Enos said, setting a plate of bacon and eggs in front of her son. When his fishing boat was in port, she liked to stuff him. She was convinced the cook on the
Whitecap
was trying to starve him. Logic told her that was silly, especially since he’d grown into a strapping man, almost six feet tall and broad as a bull through the shoulders. Logic, sometimes, had nothing to do with anything.

  “Thanks, Ma.” He slathered on salt and pepper and started to eat. With his mouth full, he went on, “You know what? When I went out to the Banks, I took along a copy of
I Sank Roger Kimball
. That’s a good book—that’s a really good book. You and that writer fellow did a . . . heck of a job.” The brief pause there surely meant he was changing what he might have said on the deck of the
Whitecap
. Sylvia smiled. She’d raised him right. He didn’t cuss in front of her—well, not much, anyhow.

  “Thank you,” she said now. “You ought to thank Ernie, too. He did the real work. And he’s a brick, too—if it hadn’t been for him, we’d’ve lost our money when the bank went under. He didn’t have to come back and warn me about that, but he did.”

  She turned away so her son wouldn’t see the look on her face. She didn’t know what her expression was, exactly, but she did know it wasn’t one she wanted George, Jr., seeing. She would have gone to bed with Ernie. She’d
wanted
to go to bed with him.
And a whole fat lot of good that did me,
 she thought.
Just my damned luck, the first time I really want a man since George got
killed, to fix on
one who couldn’t do me any good—or himself, either, poor fellow.

  George, Jr., got up and poured himself more coffee—and Sylvia, too, when she pushed her cup toward him. He added cream and sugar, sipped, and said, “There’s a lot of stuff in there I never knew before.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Sylvia answered. “That was nine years ago now. You were still a boy then.”

  “When you put me and Mary Jane on the train to Connecticut, did you really think you’d never see us again?”

  “Yes, I thought that. It was the hardest thing about what I did,” Sylvia said. “But no one was going to make that man pay for what he did to the
Ericsson
at the end of the war, and he deserved to.”

  “But you would have paid, too.”

  “I didn’t even think about what would happen to me. When I found out he was running around loose, I didn’t think about much of anything.”

  “That must have been . . . very strange,” George, Jr., said. “A couple of fellows on the boat were in the Army during the war—they got conscripted before they could join the Navy, or else they weren’t sailors yet: I don’t know which. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Sometimes they tell stories. They talk about how they were going up against Confederate machine guns and they didn’t think they’d come back alive. It must have been like that for you, too.”

  “Maybe.” Sylvia wasn’t so sure. If a man charged a machine gun, he had a chance of living—maybe not much of a chance, but a chance. Once she’d shot Roger Kimball, she was in the hands of the law, and she didn’t think she had any chance of escape at all. She hadn’t counted on having Confederate politics come to her rescue.

  Her son said, “You have a book signing this morning?”

  “That’s right. Every time I sign one, that’s fourteen and three-quarter cents in my pocket,” Sylvia answered. She couldn’t have figured that out herself from the murky language of the book contract she’d signed; Ernie had explained the way things worked.

  “Call it fifteen cents.” George, Jr.’s, face got a faraway look. He’d always been good in school. Sylvia wished he would have liked it more, would have got his high-school diploma instead of going to work on T Wharf. Years too late to worry about that, though. He went on, “If you sign twenty of them, then, that’s three dollars. That’s not a bad day’s wage.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll sign that many of them,” Sylvia said, “but they’re buying the book—or I hope they are—from here to San Diego. We’ll see what it does, that’s all. The reviews have been pretty good.” That was Ernie’s doing, of course; the actual words on paper were his.
But the story’s mine,
 Sylvia reminded herself.
He couldn’t have written it if not for me. My name deserves to be on the cover,
too.

  “Might be just as well they took a while getting it into print,” her son said. “With the Freedom Party coming up again in the CSA, people here are liable to be more interested in what happened to one of its bigwigs back then.”

  Sylvia blinked. That was true, and she hadn’t thought of it herself. George, Jr., had a man’s shrewdness.

  Well, fair enough—he
was
a man; he’d be old enough to vote in November.
Has it really been more
than twenty-one years since he was born?
 Sylvia didn’t want to believe that, but couldn’t very well help it.

  The bookstore, Burke’s, wasn’t far from Faneuil Hall. No line stretched around the block waiting for her when she arrived. They did have a sign in the window saying she’d be there. That was good. She’d signed at two or three stores that hadn’t let anyone know she’d be there. As a result, she hadn’t signed much.

  She took her place at a table near the door. The table held a dozen copies of
I Sank Roger Kimball
and a neat hand-lettered sign: MEET THE AUTHOR. A man in a suit that had seen better days came up to her and asked, “Excuse me, ma’am, but where’s the bathroom?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t work here,” Sylvia said. She’d already seen people paid no attention to signs. The man muttered something and went away.

  Another man came up. He took a book from the pile for her to sign. “I was in the Navy,” he said. “You did everybody on the
Ericsson
a good turn.”

  “Thank you,” Sylvia said.

  A woman picked up a copy of the book. She said, “My brother would like this, and his birthday is coming up. Would you sign it ‘To Pete,’ please?”

  “‘To Pete,’” Sylvia echoed, and wrote the man’s name and hers on the title page. That was where Ernie had said the autograph was supposed to go. He knew such things, or Sylvia was willing to believe he did.

  A plump woman in a flowered housedress approached. “Where are your cookbooks, dear?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t work here,” Sylvia said again. She held up a copy of
I Sank Roger Kimball
. “Would you like to buy
my
book? I’ll be glad to sign it for you if you do.”
Of course I will. It makes me money.

  The woman shook her head. “Not unless it’s got good recipes for beans and cabbage in it.” That, Sylvia couldn’t claim. The other woman wandered off, in search of cookbooks.

  Over the next two hours, four more people asked Sylvia questions whose answers only someone who worked at Burke’s could have known. She sent them off to the clerk behind the cash register. She also did get another nine people to buy copies of the book, most by simply sitting there and having them come up, a couple by waving the book as they walked into the store. The first time she’d signed, she hadn’t done that—she’d been too shy. But the manager of that bookstore gave her a tip she took to heart: “If you don’t toot your own horn, lady, who’s gonna do it for you?” She was getting ready to go home when the bell over Burke’s front door jangled again. In walked a lean Irishman with a lot of teeth. He tipped his fedora to her. “Good day to you, Mrs. Enos.” Striding up to the table, he took a copy of her book and opened it to the title page. Most people, left to themselves, chose the half-title page or the blank sheet in front of it, but he knew the ropes. “If you’d be so kind . . .?”

  “Of course, Mr. Kennedy.” She wrote,
For Joseph Kennedy—Best wishes, Sylvia Enos,
 and gave the book back to him.
Another fourteen and three-quarter cents,
 she thought,
but I didn’t expect he’d
want anything to do with me.

  Kennedy took the book over to the clerk, paid for it, and then came back to Sylvia’s table. “I hope this means you’ve come to your senses, politically speaking,” he remarked, though the way he looked at her didn’t seem political at all.

  She said, “I’ve always been a Democrat.” That wasn’t strictly true. She’d favored the Socialists till she saw Upton Sinclair do no more than protest to the Confederate States when it came out that Roger Kimball had torpedoed the USS
Ericsson
after the Confederates were supposed to have stopped fighting. But she’d voted Democratic for as long as she’d had the suffrage.

  “You sometimes picked odd ways to show it.” No, Kennedy hadn’t forgotten seeing her at a Socialist rally on the Boston Common.

  Knowing he hadn’t forgotten, she asked him, “What do you want with me?” The way his eyes flashed told her one thing he wanted. He knew she knew he was married; his wife had watched her children when she spoke at a Democratic function. He didn’t care if she knew. He wanted what he wanted. But he made himself remember he wanted something else, too: “I hear you’re doing well with your book. I look forward to reading it.”

  “Thank you,” Sylvia Enos said.

  Kennedy hefted his copy of
I Sank Roger Kimball
. “This has put you in the public eye, you know. We have a campaign to run, Mrs. Enos. Would you help Governor Coolidge—help the Democratic Party—take Powel House back from the Socialists? They were lucky at first, but what’s happened to the country in President Blackford’s term shows their true colors.” That wasn’t even close to fair, and Sylvia knew it. But she’d already seen that political campaigns weren’t designed to be fair. They were designed to convince, by whatever means possible. She said, “I’d like to help, Mr. Kennedy, but I don’t know if I can. Times are hard.”

  “Don’t you worry about that,” Joseph Kennedy said. “Don’t you worry about that a bit. We’ll take care of you.” That glint showed again in his eyes. “How does a hundred dollars a month sound, from now till the election? Plus expenses, of course.”

  For a moment, it sounded too good to be true. But then Sylvia remembered Ernie talking about his dicker with their publisher, and about first offers’ being meant to snag people who didn’t have the nerve the stand up for what they were really worth. Her spine stiffened. She said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Kennedy, but I’ve got so many things planned, that isn’t really enough to pull me away.” Joseph Kennedy eyed her again, this time in a very different way. Plainly, he’d expected her not just to say yes but to swoon with gratitude. After a long moment, he nodded, perhaps seeing her for the first time as a person and not just as a tool or a nicely shaped piece of meat. “More to you than meets the eye, isn’t there?” he said, more to himself than to her. He grew brisk. “Well, business is business, and you’ll do us some good. How does two hundred a month sound, then?” Sylvia didn’t gasp, but she came close. The way things were, that was a lot of money. “And expenses? And full pay for November, too?” she asked.

  Kennedy bared his teeth. “You sure you’re not a sheeny, Mrs. Enos?” he said. She didn’t answer. She just waited. He gave her a sour nod. “And expenses. And full pay for November, too,” he promised, and stuck out his hand. “Bargain?”

  She was oddly reluctant to touch him. She didn’t see how she could avoid it, though. When they shook on the deal, his hand felt like . . . a hand. Somehow, she hadn’t expected his flesh to seem so ordinary.

  “Bargain,” she said. The wolf wouldn’t come round her door again till the end of the year—longer, if she salted some money away, as she planned to. That made it a fine bargain indeed, as far as she was concerned.

 
A
eroplanes roared off the
Remembrance
’s flight deck, one after another. Even with a push from the catapult to speed them on their way, they almost dropped into the gray-green water of the northern Pacific till they gained altitude and buzzed away, some to the north, others to the south.