The Victorious Opposition (45 page)

He did the extra work not merely from a sense of duty but from a sense of pride. He was going to bring Éloise Granche here, and he wanted everything perfect. If she thought he lived like a pig in a sty . . .
Well, so what?
some part of him jeered.
She doesn’t want to marry you anyhow.

He ignored the internal scoffing. He didn’t so much think it wrong as think it irrelevant. Seeing a clean house wouldn’t make Éloise change her mind and want to live here. When she spoke of patrimony and the problems marriage would cause both families, she was firm, she was decisive—and, as far as Lucien could see, she was dead right.

That wasn’t why he worked till his lungs burned and his heart pounded and his chest ached: worked harder than he did on the farm at any time of the year but harvest. He worked himself into a panting tizzy for one of the oldest reasons in the world: he wanted to impress the woman he cared about. They were already lovers; impressing her wouldn’t get him anything but a smile and perhaps a quick, offhand compliment. He knew that. His mother hadn’t raised a fool. Hoping to see that smile kept him slaving away with a smile on his own face.

After he couldn’t find anything else left to clean, he cleaned himself. He made lavish, even extravagant, use of water he heated on the stove. On a warmer day, he could have luxuriated in the steaming tub for a long time, letting the hot water soak the kinks out of his back. But water didn’t stay hot forever, not in winter in Quebec it didn’t. When it started to cool off, which it did all too soon, he got out and dried off in a hurry.

He thought about putting on his black wool suit when he went to get Éloise: thought about it and discarded the notion in the next breath. She would think someone had died, and he was on his way to the funeral. And besides, the suit smelled so strongly of mothballs, it would have made her eyes water. It stayed in the closet. He put on the clothes he would have worn to a dance—work clothes, but the best he had, and also impeccably clean. If he wouldn’t go to Éloise’s reeking of mothballs, he wouldn’t go reeking of stale sweat, either.

He’d just set a warm wool cap on his head and was putting on his overcoat when someone knocked on the door.
“Tabernac!”
he snarled. Who the devil would come bothering him now, when he had more important things to worry about than a neighbor who’d run out of chicken feed?

Before he went to the door, he shrugged on his overcoat.
I was just going out
would cut any visit short. With dramatic suddenness, he threw the door open. Whoever was out there, Lucien intended to make him feel guilty.

Dr. Leonard O’Doull stared at him, surprised but not visibly afflicted with guilt.

“What have we here?” Galtier’s son-in-law asked. “Is it that you are so eager to escape my company?”

Yes,
Galtier thought, but he couldn’t say that. “I was about to go out for a drive,” he replied.

“In this?” O’Doull waved at the swirling snow. Now he sounded more than surprised; he sounded astonished. “Me, I had to come down to the hospital today, and from the hospital it is but a short hop here. But why would you go out for a drive if you don’t have to?”

“To visit a friend,” Lucien replied, which was part of the truth, though he was careful to say
un ami
and not
une amie
: he didn’t want O’Doull knowing his friend was of the feminine persuasion. Realizing his son-in-law wouldn’t disappear in the wind, he stepped aside. “Come in. No point letting the heat out of the house.”

“No, certainly not.” O’Doull did come in, and stamped snow all over the tidy entry hall. Lucien did his best not to wince. Slowly, he shed his own coat and cap. Leonard O’Doull slithered out of his overcoat with a sigh of relief. He went on, “I won’t keep you long, since it’s plain you have such important business elsewhere.”

Galtier pretended not to notice the sarcasm. “Unfortunately, I do,” he said, which made O’Doull raise a gingery eyebrow. Lucien waved him to the couch. “But sit down. What sort of gossip have you heard at the hospital?”

“At the hospital? Nothing much.” O’Doull stretched his long legs out in front of him. To Galtier’s relief, he didn’t put his feet up on the table, as he’d sometimes been known to do. “Still, though, gossip does come to a doctor’s office.”

“Does it?” Lucien said tonelessly.

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it does,” his son-in-law replied. “And it could even be that the gossip that comes is true, though I did not think so before I knocked on your door.”

“Since you have not told me what this gossip is, I have no idea whether it is true or not,” Lucien said. “Should I care?” Were people starting to talk about Éloise and him?

Leonard O’Doull didn’t directly answer that. Instead, he asked, “
Mon beau-père,
are you a happy man?”

That question took Galtier by surprise. He thought for a moment, then answered, “Most of the time, I am too busy working even to wonder.”

“All right. Never mind.” Dr. O’Doull smiled. “I hope, when you do have time away from your work, I hope you are happy, however you get to be that way. I hope so, and so does Nicole. And I have talked with Charles and Georges and Denise. They all feel the same way. I have not talked with your other two daughters, but I am sure they would agree.”

“Are you? Would they?” Lucien said. “And why is everyone so intimately concerned with my happiness?” That didn’t quite take the bull by the horns, but it came close.

O’Doull smiled at him. “Because of the gossip, as I said.”

“Well? And what is this gossip? And why are you acting like an old woman and listening to it?” There. Now Lucien would find out whatever there was to find out.

So he thought, anyhow. But O’Doull only smiled and said, “That it could be you have some reason for happiness.”

“Well, if I do, that reason is not a
beau-fils
who comes around snooping after what I am doing,” Lucien said pointedly.

This time, Leonard O’Doull laughed out loud. “As if you never did any snooping of your own,” he said. The only comeback Galtier found for that was dignified silence, so he used it. But even silence made his son-in-law laugh at him. O’Doull got to his feet.

“Well,
mon beau-père,
I won’t keep you any more. I hope you find happiness wherever you can.”

He didn’t even wait for an answer. He just put on his hat and overcoat and left. Through the howl of the wind, Lucien heard his son-in-law’s old Ford roar to flatulent life. The motorcar sputtered up the path from the farmhouse to the road. Then its noise faded away.

As soon as quiet returned, Lucien put on his own warm clothes again. He hoped the Chevrolet would start. It did. The battery might be going, but it wasn’t quite gone. He let the engine get good and warm, then put the auto in gear and drove off to Éloise Granche’s.

“What kept you?” she said when he knocked on the door. “I expected you half an hour ago.”

“My son-in-law paid me a call,” he answered with a shrug. “From what Leonard says, there may be some gossip about us. Do you mind? Does it bother you?”

“No, not at all,” Éloise said with a shrug of her own. “I’ve always expected it. We should be grateful it’s taken this long to show up.”

“Who knows whether it has?” Lucien said. “It’s taken this long for one of us to hear about it, yes. But that’s different. Who knows how long people have been mumbling this, that, or the other thing?”

Éloise looked thoughtful. Slowly, she nodded. “Yes, it could be that you are right. Still, it is a small thing. Shall we go?”

“Certainly,” Lucien replied. He held the passenger door of the Chevrolet open for her, then went around to the driver’s side. Again, the motorcar started. Lucien surreptitiously patted the steering wheel. The machine might be less reliable than a horse, but it was doing what it was supposed to do.

Hardly any traffic was on the road as he drove back to his own farmhouse. The autos and trucks that did appear seemed to come out of nowhere, loom enormously for a moment through the swirling snow, and then disappear as abruptly as they’d come into view. “Everything goes by so fast,” Éloise murmured.

“Tu as raison,”
Galtier said. “That was what gave me the hardest time when I learned to drive after the war.” Up till then, he hadn’t had a prayer of affording a motorcar. Only a bargain with the Americans for the land they’d taken from his farm for their hospital had let him do it. He went on, “In a buggy or a wagon, you have time to look away from the road and back again. In a motorcar? No.
Mon Dieu,
no. If you do not pay attention every moment, you will have a wreck.”

He got back to his house without having a wreck. He was anxious even so as he handed Éloise out of the Chevrolet. The anxiety grew on the short walk to the front door.
He
thought the place was reasonably tidy. But what did he know? What did he really know? He was only a man, after all.

When he opened the door, he distracted Éloise for a moment by flipping the switch and turning on a lamp across the room. “Electricity,” she said, and nodded to herself. “Yes, I knew you had it. It’s so much brighter and finer than kerosene.”

A moment later, Lucien wondered whether that fine, bright light was what he wanted. It would let her see every flaw in his housekeeping. Mercifully, though, she didn’t seem inclined to be critical. She let him guide her through the house, every so often nodding again.

“Very nice,” she said when the tour was done. “Very nice indeed. I am glad you’re comfortable. I have worried about you living here by yourself.” She raised an eyebrow. “Somehow, though, I doubt everything is
quite
so neat when you are not having company over.”

Lucien looked back at her, nothing but innocence on his face. “Why, my sweet, what can you possibly mean by that?”

Éloise started to explain exactly what she meant. Then she caught the glint in his eye and started to laugh instead. “You!” she said fondly. “You are a devil, aren’t you?”

“If I am, it is because you make me one,” Galtier answered. He took her in his arms to show just what kind of devil she made him. Her lips were sweet against his. She didn’t kiss quite like Marie—but she was probably thinking he didn’t kiss like her dead husband. And so what, either way? They were kissing each other, and nothing else mattered, not right then.

XII

C
incinnatus Driver wasn’t happy about walking upstairs from his apartment. He knew he should have been happy. Knowing that only made him more unhappy yet. He sighed and muttered something under his breath. The more you looked at it, the more you lived it, the more complicated life got.

He knocked on the door of the apartment just above his. The wireless was on inside, pretty loud. He had to knock twice before anybody in there heard him. Suddenly, the wireless got softer. A few seconds later, the door opened.

“Evenin’, Mr. Chang,” Cincinnatus said. “How are you today?”

“Oh. Hello, Mr. Driver,” said the father of Cincinnatus’ daughter-in-law. Joey Chang was polite. He’d always stayed polite with Cincinnatus, even if he didn’t much care to have Achilles in his family. He hesitated, then brightened. “I just make new batch of beer. You want some?” If Cincinnatus had come up about homebrew, then maybe they wouldn’t have to talk about . . . other things.

And Cincinnatus smiled and nodded and said, “I’d love to have some, for true.” He meant every word of it. Iowa was a dry state, with liquor of any kind hard to come by. And Chang made damn good beer. But that wasn’t why Cincinnatus had come upstairs. “I got some news you need to know.”

“News?” Mr. Chang asked, and Cincinnatus nodded again. The Chinaman sighed, much as Cincinnatus had while climbing the stairs. He stepped aside. “You come in, you tell me news.”

“Thank you kindly,” Cincinnatus said. “Evenin’, Mrs. Chang,” he called to the woman sitting close by the wireless set. It was playing a comedy about a trolley driver and his friend who worked in a sewer. Cincinnatus wondered how much Mrs. Chang followed; her English wasn’t as good as her husband’s.

As if to underscore that, Joey Chang spoke to her in Chinese. She answered in the same language. Cincinnatus understood not a word, but she didn’t sound happy. Mr. Chang sighed again, on exactly the same note. He lit a cigarette, then offered Cincinnatus one. Once they were both smoking, he said, “What is this news?”

“Achilles and Grace, they gonna have themselves another baby toward the end of the year,” Cincinnatus answered.

“Baby?” Mrs. Chang said sharply. She might not have a whole lot of English, but she sure understood that.

“Yes, ma’am. That’s right,” Cincinnatus said.

“This is good news. Here, you wait.” Joey Chang went into the kitchen. He came back half a minute later with three small glasses. He gave one to his wife, one to Cincinnatus, and kept the third for himself. “A baby.
Kampai!
” he said, and knocked back his glass.

“Mud in your eye.” Cincinnatus followed suit. This wasn’t beer. It scorched his gullet all the way down, and exploded like a bomb when it hit his stomach. “Whew!” He eyed the empty glass with respect. “You make that yourself?”

“Not me.” Chang shook his head. “This place too small for proper still. Beer easy. Can make beer anywhere. But need more room for still, need place where neighbors no smell . . . smoke.” He scowled; that wasn’t the word he wanted. After a moment, he found the right one: “Fumes. Neighbors no smell fumes. For this, I trade plenty beer with fellow I know. You want more?”

“If you’ve got it to spare, I wouldn’t mind another one. Don’t want to put you to no trouble, though.”

“No trouble.” Mr. Chang took Cincinnatus’ glass and disappeared into the kitchen again. When he returned, he had a refill, too. This time, Cincinnatus sipped cautiously instead of sending the hooch down the hatch. It was some kind of brandy, not whiskey, and strong enough to grow hair on his chest—or on Joey Chang’s chest, which was a bigger challenge. “Another baby,” Chang murmured, his eyes for a few seconds soft and far away. “Grandfather again.”

“Yeah,” Cincinnatus said dreamily. Then he pointed at Mr. Chang. “You’d like it a lot better if you saw the new baby when it comes—and if you saw the grandbaby you already got once in a while.”

“I know. I know.” Chang stared down into the glass he held. “But Grace, she run off, she get married when we say no. She not do what her mother, her father say. She marry fellow who is not Chinese. Things hard on account of that.”

He was a little man, more than a head shorter than Cincinnatus. But he spoke with enormous pride.
Reckon he’d say the same thing if I was white, too,
Cincinnatus thought, bemused. He hadn’t imagined a Chinaman could also look down his nose at whites. The mere idea broadened his mental horizon.

Mrs. Chang spoke, a sharp, singsong rattle of Chinese. Her husband answered in the same language, then returned to English for Cincinnatus’ benefit: “She say, we not angry because your boy colored fellow. We angry because Grace disobey us. For Chinese, this is very bad. Hard to forgive.”

“Don’t know nothin’ about that,” said Cincinnatus, who suspected Chang was lying some for politeness’ sake, but wasn’t quite sure. He went on, “I do know you ain’t just missin’ out on Grace, though. You missin’ out on your grandbaby. You gonna be missin’ out on
two
grandbabies. Your pride worth all that?”

Now Mr. Chang spoke in Chinese—translating the question, Cincinnatus figured. Mrs. Chang answered right away. Again, her tone said everything Cincinnatus needed to know.
You bet your life pride is worth it.
That was what she’d told him, all right. Cincinnatus wondered whether Mr. Chang would show any backbone. From everything the Negro had seen, Mrs. Chang was the one who said,
Jump, frog!
Her husband asked,
How high?
on the way up.

But he said something more, and then something more, and then something more again. After his last sally, Mrs. Chang burst into tears. Embarrassed, Cincinnatus turned away. “I better go,” he mumbled.

“All right, you go,” Mr. Chang said. “But you see Achilles and Grace, you say they can come by here. We be glad to see them. This go on too long.” Mrs. Chang protested again. Her husband, for a wonder, overrode her. They were still arguing when Cincinnatus slipped out the door and went downstairs.

“Well?” Elizabeth asked when he walked into their apartment.

“Mr. Chang say they can come visit,” Cincinnatus answered, and his wife’s face lit up. He raised a warning hand. “Mrs. Chang ain’t very happy about it. Pretty fair chance she make him change his mind.”

Elizabeth sighed. “They’s powerful proud folks,” she said. Cincinnatus walked over and gave her a kiss. She eyed him with as much suspicion as pleasure. “What’s that for?”

“On account of that’s the very same word the Changs used when they was talkin’ about themselves,” he said, “and only a clever lady like you would figure it out all on her lonesome.”

“That a fact?” Elizabeth said. Cincinnatus solemnly nodded. She wagged a finger at him. “I tell you a fact: you only talk so sweet to me when you want something—an’ I generally know what it is you want.”

If she hadn’t been smiling, the words would have flayed. As things were, Cincinnatus laughed. “Sure enough, you got what I want,” he said. Elizabeth snorted. Cincinnatus laughed again. But, though he might have been trying to butter her up, he hadn’t been lying. He hoped she felt the same way. She’d never given him any signs she didn’t.

When he came home two or three days later, Elizabeth pointed to an envelope on the kitchen table. “You got a letter from Covington,” she said. She hadn’t opened it. She’d acquired her letters only after they came to Iowa, and still didn’t read fluently. They also had a family rule that mail belonged to the person whose name was on the envelope, and to nobody else.

Cincinnatus eyed the envelope with a mixture of pleasure and apprehension. His father and mother still lived in Kentucky, and they did write to him every so often—or rather, they had a literate neighbor do it, for they couldn’t read or write. He was always glad to hear from them, and always suspicious when he did. Back in the 1920s, the Kentucky State Police had used a false message from them to lure him to Covington, and flung him into jail for sedition as soon as he got off the train.

He opened the envelope and took out the sheet of paper inside. He was frowning when he put it down. “What’s it say?” Elizabeth asked.

“He says Ma’s startin’ to forget things, act like she was a little child again.” Cincinnatus scowled at the letter. Up till now, Livia had always been the rock at which the family anchored. Seneca’s health had been shaky now and again, but hardly ever hers. Tears stung Cincinnatus’ eyes. This wasn’t anything a doctor could fix, either; he knew that too well.

“That’s hard to bear, sweetheart. That’s right hard to bear,” Elizabeth said. Both her parents, though, were long dead, so her sympathy went only so far. Sudden anxiety sharpened her voice as she asked, “He don’t want you to go down there? He better not, after all you went through.”

“No, no.” Cincinnatus shook his head. “He say my pa’s managin’ for now.” But then he shook his head in a different, more thoughtful way. “Reckon maybe I could, though. Ain’t no more Kentucky State Police to fling me in jail.”

“Sure ain’t.” But that wasn’t agreement from his wife. It was sarcasm. “And there ain’t on account o’ the Freedom Party’s runnin’ things in Kentucky nowadays. Freedom Party fellers, they love to have another nigger come down to their state an’ commence to raisin’ trouble.”

“I wouldn’t raise no trouble,” Cincinnatus said. “All I’d be doin’ was seein’ my own mother while she’s still on this earth.”

Elizabeth shook her finger at him as if he were a naughty little boy. “You stay right here where you belong.”

“Ain’t goin’ nowhere. Already told you that. But things ain’t as bad as you think in Kentucky, and that’s the truth. Yeah, they got them Freedom Party fellers runnin’ things now, but they can’t do like they done down in the Confederate States—can’t beat up all the folks who don’t like ’em and keep them folks from votin’. They lose the next election, they’s gone.”

“You goes down there, you’s gone,” Elizabeth said. “ ‘Sides, you goes down there, what’s Amanda an’ me supposed to do for money? It don’t grow on trees—or if it do, I ain’t found the nursery what sells it.”

“Even if I was to go, I wouldn’t be gone long,” Cincinnatus said. “It’d be to see my ma, say good-bye to her while she still know who I am. That kind of forgettin’, it just gits worse an’ worse. Somebody live long enough, he don’t even know who he is, let alone anybody else.”

Elizabeth softened slightly. “That’s so,” she admitted, and hugged Cincinnatus. “All right. We take it like it comes, see how she do. If you got to go, then you got to go, and that’s all there is to it.”

She started to let go of Cincinnatus, but now he squeezed her. “I love you,” he said. “You’re the best thing ever happen to me.”

“I better be,” Elizabeth said, “on account of you don’t know how to stay out of trouble on your own.” Cincinnatus wanted to resent that or get angry about it. He wanted to, but found he couldn’t.

“N
o,” Alexander Arthur Pomeroy declared, like a tycoon declining a merger offer. Mary had just asked him if he wanted a nap. At two and a half, he was liable to mean that no, too, and to be fussy and cranky at night because he hadn’t had it. One of these days before too long, he’d stop taking naps for good, and then Mary wouldn’t get any rest from dawn till dusk, either. She looked forward to that day with something less than delight. Most of Alec’s milestones had delighted her: first tooth, first step, first word. Last nap, though, last nap was different.

Of course, Alec might also have been saying no just for the sake of saying no. He did that a lot. From what other mothers said, every two-year-old went through the same maddening phase. Maddening though it was, it could also be funny. Slyly pitching her voice the same way as she had when asking him if he wanted a nap, Mary said, “Alec, do you want a cookie?”

“No,” he said again, a pint-sized captain of industry. Then he realized he’d made a dreadful mistake. The horror on his face matched anything in the moving pictures. “Yes!” he exclaimed. “Cookie! Want cookie!” He started to cry.

Mary gave him a vanilla wafer. He calmed down. The way he’d wailed, though, said he needed a nap whether he wanted one or not. She didn’t ask again, but scooped him up, sat down in the rocking chair, and started reading a story. She kept her tone deliberately bland. After about ten minutes, Alec’s eyes sagged shut. She rocked a little longer, then carried him to his crib.

She put him down with care; sometimes his head would bob up if she wasn’t gentle. But not today. Mary let out a sigh of relief. Now she had anywhere from half an hour to an hour and a half to herself. Time had been a luxury more precious than ermine, more precious than rubies, ever since Alec was born.

“Coffee!” Mary said, and headed for the kitchen. She’d always liked tea better. Come to that, she still did like tea better. But coffee had one unquestionable advantage: it was stronger. With a baby—now a toddler—in the house, strength counted. She’d long since given up trying to figure out how far behind on sleep she was.

A gently steaming cup beside her, she sat down in the rocking chair again, this time by herself. She unfolded the
Rosenfeld Register
and prepared to make the most of her free time. The
Register
was just a weekly, and so didn’t bother with much news from abroad, but it did have one foreign story on the front page:
CONFEDERATE STATES RESUME CONSCRIPTION!
President Featherston of the CSA said he was doing it because of the continuing national emergency in the country, and blamed rebellious blacks. President Smith of the USA hadn’t said anything by the time the
Register
went to press.

Mary glanced over to the wireless set. She couldn’t remember anything Smith had said since the
Register
went to press, either. She thought about turning on the set and listening to some news, but she didn’t have the energy to get up. Whatever the president of the USA said, she’d find out sooner or later.

Regardless of what President Smith said, Mary knew what she thought. If the Confederates weren’t getting ready to spit in their northern neighbor’s eye, she would have been surprised. She hoped they spat good and hard.

During the war, Canada and the Confederates had been on the same side. She’d wondered about that then; the Confederate States hadn’t hung out a lamp of liberty for all the world to see. They still didn’t, by all appearances. But, whether they did or not, one ancient rule had still applied: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.