American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (94 page)

  As casually as Cincinnatus could, he said, “Hear you’re goin’ to the pictures with Grace Chang.” Amanda dropped her pencil.

  Achilles glared defiance. “That’s right. What about it? I think some of the money I make ought to be mine to have some fun with. Don’t you?”

  Having fun with the money wasn’t the point. Having fun with Grace Chang was. But all Cincinnatus said was, “Reckon I do. It’s all right with me. Just wish I’d’ve heard about it from you and not from Grace’s pa.”

  Set for a fight, Achilles didn’t seem to know what to do when he didn’t get one. “Oh,” he said, and left his mouth hanging open. After a long moment, he added, “I figured you’d have a fit.” Another pause, even longer. “Maybe I was wrong.”

  “Maybe you was,” Cincinnatus agreed. “No matter what you think, son, I ain’t quite one o’ them dinosaur things. Not
quite
.” He waited out one more pause. At last, Achilles nodded. His agreement made Cincinnatus feel he’d done a few things right after all.

 
T
hanksgiving was supposed to be one of the happiest days of the year. When Chester Martin and Rita went to his parents’ apartment for dinner, that was in the back of his mind. In the front of his mind was the chance to stuff himself till he was about ready to burst at the seams. The money his father had given him let his wife and him keep their own apartment and keep eating. It didn’t let them keep eating well. He was sick of cabbage and potatoes and boiled noodles and day-old brown bread.

  “Turkey,” he said dreamily as he and Rita got off the trolley and walked toward the block of flats where he’d lived so long. The weather was sunny but crisp—a perfect late November afternoon. “
Roast
turkey.

  Stuffing with giblet gravy.” He’d eaten a lot of giblets since losing his job, but they
belonged
in gravy.

  “Mashed potatoes. Sweet potatoes. Rolls and butter. Pumpkin pie. Apple pie, too. Whipped cream.”

  “Stop it, Chester,” Rita said. “I’m going to drool on my shoes.” A motorcar went by. Somebody inside waved. The Chevrolet parked in front of the apartment building. “There’s your sister and her husband and little Pete.”

  “I see ’em.” Chester waved back. His brother-in-law, Otis Blake, worked in a plate-glass plant and still had a job. He’d never given Chester a hard time about losing his. He couldn’t very well, not when his own brother was out of work.

  “Uncle Chester! Aunt Rita!” Pete Blake, who was five, hit Chester in the knees with a tackle harder than a good many he’d met on the gridiron.

  “Careful there, tiger.” Martin ruffled his hair. “You almost knocked me on my can. You gonna be a tough guy when you grow up?”

  “Tough guy!” Pete yelled. Then he gave Rita a kiss. Either he wasn’t so tough yet, or he knew a pretty girl when he saw one.

  Chester hugged Sue and shook hands with her husband. Otis Blake had his blond hair permanently parted in the middle by a scar from a scalp wound during the war. An inch lower and he wouldn’t have been standing there. “How are you?” he asked now.

  With a shrug, Martin answered, “I’m still here. They haven’t knocked me out yet.”

  “Good,” Blake said. “That’s good.”

  “Come on. Let’s go up to the place,” Sue said. She turned to Pete. “You want to see Gramps and Grandma, don’t you?”

  “Gramps! Grandma!” Pete was enthusiastic about everything. Chances were he’d never heard of a business collapse. If he had, it meant nothing to him. Chester wished he could say the same.

  Wonderful smells filled his nose as soon as he walked through the door. When he saw his mother’s face a moment later, he knew something was wrong no matter how good the odors wafting out of the kitchen were. She looked as if she’d been wounded and didn’t want to admit it even to herself. After the hugs, after the kisses, Martin asked, “What is it, Ma? And don’t tell me it’s nothing, on account of I know that’s not so.”

  Sue and Otis exchanged glances. Whatever it was, they already knew. Louisa Martin spoke in a low voice, as if in a sickroom: “Your father’s been laid off.” Five words. Five words that changed—ruined—not just one life but at least two, maybe four. “Oh,” Chester said, a soft, pained exhalation—he might have been punched in the stomach. Rita’s lips skinned back from her teeth. Like her mother-in-law, she was trying to find out how much it hurt.

  Laid off. It hurt bad. Martin didn’t need to find out how much. What, after all, was the difference between bad and worse? Not enough to matter.

  A toilet flushed. Out came Stephen Douglas Martin, rubbing his hands together. One look at Chester’s face told him everything he needed to know. “So you heard already, did you?”

  “Yeah,” Chester said harshly. “I heard. What are you going to
do
, Pa?”

  “Darn good question,” his father replied. “Wish I had a darn good answer to go with it. Almost forty years at that place, and then—” He snapped his fingers. “I’m scrap metal. That’s what I am now, scrap metal. Yesterday was my last day. But I tell you one thing: I’m going to have the best darn Thanksgiving anybody ever had, and you can take that to the bank.” If Louisa and Sue and Rita hadn’t been there, and especially if Pete hadn’t, he might have expressed himself more pungently.

  “This is a fancy spread.” Chester wouldn’t say any more than that. Lurking behind the bland statement was a not-so-bland worry.
If you’re out of work, how can you
afford it?

  Casually, Louisa Martin said, “Otis and Sue gave us a little help. Not much, just a little.” Chester nodded. Otis was still working. The older Martins must have told him so they could make sure they got whatever help they needed for a proper holiday dinner.

  Knowing what Chester knew took some of the enjoyment away from the feast: it seemed too much like sharing a condemned man’s last meal. But that didn’t stop him from eating till he was groaningly full.

  When would his next chance to gorge himself on meat come? He had no idea. Like a savage in the jungle, he made the most of the chance he did have.

  About ten o’clock, Pete started getting sleepy and fussy. Sue and Otis took their son and some leftovers and headed back to their place. Chester had waited for that; he needed to speak to his parents without his sister and brother-in-law listening. He started, “Pa, the bosses had no business—”

  “No business?” Stephen Douglas Martin said. “Ha! Business is all they had, the . . . so-and-so’s.” Yes, he had trouble swearing in front of women.

  “What I meant was, we’ll figure out something now that . . .” Chester’s voice trailed away. He thought his father would know what he meant any which way. Now that the elder Martins had no money coming in, how could they afford to give anyone else a hand? They had to worry about keeping their own place.

  “Yes, we’ll manage. One way or another, we’ll manage,” Rita said. She had the same stubborn pride as anyone born a Martin.

  Stephen Douglas Martin said, “I hear you two were talking about California.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Chester said. “There’s no work in Toledo, or none to speak of. If you have a job, you’re all right. If you lose one, though, you haven’t got a prayer of finding anything new.”

  “Thanks so much,” his father said. “That’s just what I wanted to hear.”

  “I’m sorry, Pa. I’m sorry as . . . the devil. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t telling the truth.”

  “I know,” his father said. “I sure wish it did, though.”

  “What about California?” Rita kept her mind on business.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Chester’s father said. “Louisa and I have some money set aside. They aren’t going to throw us in the poorhouse right away, so you don’t need to worry your heads about that. I know this is a hard place to find work, on account of you’ve both done everything you could, but you haven’t had any luck. If I stake you two train tickets out West and enough money to keep you going a couple of months . . . well, what do you think about that?”

  “We’ll pay you back,” Chester said without even looking at Rita. “As soon as one of us gets something, we’ll pay you back, a little bit at a time till it’s all done.”

  “You don’t need to say that, Chester,” his father said with a small smile. “If I wasn’t sure of it, you think I’d offer?”

  “I don’t know,” Chester answered. “Depends on how bad you and Ma want to get rid of us, I guess.”

  “Chester!” his mother said reproachfully.

  “California.” Rita murmured the word. “Things are supposed to be good there, or as good as they are anywhere. They’ve got the farms, and they’ve got the moving pictures, and they’ve got all the people building houses for the people moving there for the other things.”

  “And the weather,” Chester said. “If we go to Los Angeles, we can kiss snow good-bye. I wouldn’t miss it a bit, and that’s the truth.”

  “You ready to tear everything up by the roots?” Stephen Douglas Martin asked. “If you do this, I can’t give you much more help till I’m back on my own feet.”
If I ever am
hung unspoken in the air. He went on, “Don’t want you winding up in a Blackfordburgh out there, even if you did vote for the fellow.”

  “I voted for Coolidge and Hoover this time around,” Chester said. Rita made a face at him. He made a face right back, and went on, “I held my nose, but I did it. But I don’t think Hoover’s exactly a ball of fire.”

  “He’s a ball of . . .” Now Rita seemed hampered in her choice of language. “
I
didn’t vote for Coolidge,” she added.

  “He’s had most of a year to make things better. He hasn’t done it,” Louisa Martin said. “He hasn’t done much of anything, not as far as I can see.”

  “President Blackford did everything under the sun for four years in a row,” Stephen Douglas Martin said. “He didn’t make things better, either.” Chester’s father was a rock-ribbed—Chester sometimes thought a rock-headed—Democrat. He continued, “Look how the war with the Japs is winding down now.”

  “Neither side ever wanted to fight that one all out, though,” Chester said. “That’s why it’s winding down.

  It’s not anything special Hoover’s done.”

  “They haven’t dropped any bombs on his head, the way they did on Blackford’s,” his father retorted.

  He wagged a finger at Chester. “Still want to go to Los Angeles after that?”

  “Yes!” This time, Rita spoke up before Chester could. She sounded even hungrier for California than he was.

  “Thank you, Pa, from the bottom of my heart,” Chester said.

  “If you get work, I may come out there myself,” his father said. “Anybody who thinks I’d miss snow is crazy.”

  “California,” Rita said again, as if she expected to pan for gold and pull nuggets the size of eggs from a clear, cold mountain stream.

  “California,” Chester echoed, as if he expected to go to Los Angeles and wind up a motion-picture leading man the day after he got there. He went on, “There are people who hop a freight for a chance like this.” He had, every now and then, thought of being one of them. “I
will
pay you back, Pa. So help me God, I will.”

  “I told you once, I wouldn’t stake you if I didn’t think you were good for it,” Stephen Douglas Martin answered. “Only thing I worry about is how many people will be going out there, looking for whatever they can find.”

  “At least there are things to find in California,” Chester said. “This town is dying on its feet. I’ve lived here all my life, except for when I was in the Army, but I won’t be sorry to say good-bye.” He laughed.

  Sorry? He hadn’t been so glad since the day the guns stopped and he realized he’d made it through the Great War alive.

 
A
t three in the morning on an early December day when the sun wouldn’t be up for hours and hours in Berlin, Ontario, Jonathan Moss thought wistfully of California or the Sandwich Islands or Florida or some other place with a halfway civilized climate. It was snowing outside. It had been snowing for a month. It would go on snowing till April, maybe May. He twisted in bed, trying to go back to sleep.
Trust me to
move out of Chicago for a place with
worse
weather,
 he thought. Most of the time, such musings carried wry amusement. Every so often, as tonight, they felt too much like kidding on the square.

  “There,” Laura said from the other bedroom. “Isn’t that better?”

  “Mama,” Dorothy said. At not quite a year, she could say a couple of dozen words. That made her advanced for her age. She wasn’t nearly advanced enough to keep from needing her diaper changed, though.

  “Now lie down and go back to sleep,” Laura said. The crib creaked as she put the baby back into it.

 
  “Mama!”
 Dorothy wailed as her mother left her bedroom and came back to the one she shared with Jonathan. That desperate appeal failing, Dorothy started crying and screaming and making as much racket as she could.

  All the books said you were supposed to let children cry themselves out when you put them to bed.

  After a while, they would get used to the idea that they could settle down by themselves. What the books didn’t say was how you were supposed to keep from going crazy while the baby had conniptions.

  Earplugs might have helped, except that Jonathan had never found any good enough to keep out the noise.

  His wife lay down beside him. “What are we going to do?” she said.

  “How is she going to learn to go to sleep by herself if you go in there and pick her up?” he asked.

  “How are we ever going to go to sleep if she screams her head off for the next two hours?” Laura returned.

  Jonathan didn’t have a good answer for that, because it had happened. It had happened more than once, as a matter of fact. The books said it wasn’t supposed to. Dorothy hadn’t read the books. She wasn’t advanced enough to know how to read, either.

  The next-door neighbors pounded on the wall, which meant the baby’s racket had woken them up.