Breakthroughs (66 page)

“It’s all right, Nancy.” Flora knew a lot of the nurses who helped take care of David. She came to the Pennsylvania Hospital as often as she could. She felt bad about not coming more often than she did, but sitting in Congress and handling the endless work that went along with sitting in Congress was a trap with huge jaws full of sharp teeth.

David lay quietly in the bed, his face almost as pale as the white linen of sheets and pillowcases—being at war with the CSA and the British Empire had made cotton scarce and hard to come by. Under the covers, the outline of his body seemed unnaturally small—and so it was, with one leg gone above the knee. But the rest of him seemed shrunken, too, as if losing the leg had made him lose some of his spirit. And if it had, would that be so surprising?

He managed a smile. “Hello, Flora,” he said. He sounded very tired, even now. Flora was glad he sounded any way at all. Loss of blood and an infection had almost killed him. If the infection had been a little worse…How would Flora ever have been able to show her face to her family? She had enough trouble showing her face to her family now. They didn’t condemn her. She condemned herself, which was far harder to bear.

“How are you?” she asked, feeling foolish and useless.

“Not too bad,” he answered, as he did whenever she asked—which meant she couldn’t take the words seriously. He’d lost a lot of flesh; parchmentlike skin stretched tight over the bones of his face. His dark eyes were enormous. Then he did seem to pick up a little energy, a little life, as he asked, “Are the Rebs really and truly trying to surrender?”

Back in New York City, he’d never called them Rebs; he’d picked that up in the trenches. Flora didn’t like it. It made him sound as if he endorsed the war even after what it had done to him. She said, “Pieces of the cease-fire are in place, but Roosevelt won’t give them all of it. He’s still driving in Virginia and the West. I wish he weren’t, but he has the bit between his teeth.”

“Bully,” David said, as if he were Roosevelt. “After everything it’s cost us, we’d better get the most we can out of this war. If we stop too soon, why did we go and fight it in the first place?”

“Because we were mad,” Flora replied, staring at her brother with a new kind of horror: he
did
sound like the president, where he’d been growing up a Socialist like everyone else in the family. She asked, “How can you say that, after what happened to you?” Only after she’d spoken the words did she notice she’d slipped from English into Yiddish.

David answered in the same language: “How can I say anything else? Do you want me to lose my leg and the country to have nothing to show for it?”

“I never wanted you to lose your leg at all,” Flora said. “I never wanted anyone to lose his leg, or his arm, or his eye, or anything. Even if we win, we have nothing to show for it. We never should have fought at all.”

“Nu?”
David said. Even raising an eyebrow seemed to cost him no small physical effort. “Maybe you’re right, Flora. Maybe we shouldn’t have gotten into it. But once we did decide to fight, what can we do but fight as hard as we can to win?”

That dilemma had dogged the Socialist Party from the beginning. Cutting the war short once a treasure of money and an even greater treasure of lives had been spent had proved not just impossible but, worse, unpopular, as the majorities Roosevelt and the Democrats brought in showed.

As David had learned new ways of talking and thinking in the trenches, so Flora had on the floor of Congress. Being without a good answer, she changed the subject: “Have they said anything more about fitting you with an artificial leg? As I was coming in, I saw a man walking very well with one.” She was stretching a point, but not too far.

“They’ll have to wait a while longer,” he said. “The stump’s not healed well enough yet, and the amputation was pretty high.” His mouth twisted. “Maybe I’ll be a one-crutch cripple instead of a two-crutch cripple.” Flora’s expression must have betrayed her, for her brother looked contrite. “It’s better than being dead, believe me.”

Reluctantly, Flora nodded. Her sister’s husband, Yossel Reisen, had been killed in Virginia bare days after he married Sophie; he had a son he’d never seen and never would see now.

A doctor came in. “Congresswoman Hamburger,” he said, polite but not obsequious: he’d dealt with a lot of important people. “If you’ll excuse me—” He advanced on David.

“Maybe you’d better go,” David said to Flora. “The stump looks better than it used to, but it’s still not pretty.”

She was glad of the excuse to leave, and ashamed of herself for being glad. Here was her baby brother—or so she remembered him, at any rate—dreadfully mutilated, and here he was, too, wanting the fighting to go on so others could suffer a like fate or worse. He obviously meant every word he said, but he might as well have started talking Persian for all the sense he made to her.

She went downstairs. A soldier with no legs was moving along in a wheelchair. He was whistling a vaudeville tune of some sort, and seemed happy enough with his world. Flora didn’t understand it. Flora couldn’t understand it. And, had she asked him, she was sure he would have told her the war had to go on, too. She didn’t understand that, either, but she was sure of it.

She went back to her office, but accomplished little that truly resembled work. She’d expected nothing different; seeing David always left her the worse for wear. After a while, realizing she’d read a letter three times without having the faintest idea what it was about, she put it away, got up, and told her secretary, “Bertha, I’m going over to my apartment.”

“All right, Miss Hamburger,” Bertha answered. “I hope your brother is better. I pray for him every night.” She crossed herself.

“Thank you,” Flora said. “He’s doing as well as he can, I think.” She’d said that so many times. It was even true. But
as well as he can
was a long way from
well
. And still he thought the United States should keep on with the war. Flora shook her head till the silk flowers on her hat rustled and rattled. She could live another hundred years without having it make sense to her.

She was standing in front of the Congressional office building waiting to flag a taxi when someone in a Ford called to her: “Where are you going, Flora?”

It was Hosea Blackford. “To my apartment,” she answered.

The congressman from Dakota pushed open the passenger-side door. “I’m heading that way myself,” he said. “Hop in, if you’ve a mind to.” She did hop in, with a word of thanks. She had very little to say on the short trip back to the apartment building. Blackford glanced over at her. “You’ve been to see your brother, or I miss my guess. I hope he hasn’t taken a turn for the worse?”

“No,” Flora said, and then she burst out, “He
still
thinks we have to go on pounding the Confederate States!”

Blackford drove in silence for some little while before finally saying, “If your own brother feels that way after he was wounded, you begin to get an idea of what the Democrats would have done to us if we had tried hard to cut off funds for the war after it began. This country thirsts for revenge the way a drunk thirsts for rotgut whiskey.”

“But it’s all mystification!” Flora exclaimed. “The capitalists have tricked the workers into going to war against their class interest, and into being thankful while they’re getting slaughtered. They’ve even tricked someone like David, who ought to know better if anyone should.” To her dismay, she began to cry.

Congressman Blackford parked the Ford across the street from the apartment building where they both lived. “Mystification is a notion that sounds more useful than it is,” he observed as he got out and went around to open her door for her. “What people believe and what they’ll do because they believe it is a big part of what’s real, especially in politics.”

“It’s one of the planks in the platform,” Flora said, taking his arm as she got out of the motorcar. “The capitalists and the bourgeoisie mystify the proletariat into going along with their desires.” She raised an eyebrow; he’d shown before that his ideology wasn’t so pure as she would have liked.

He shrugged now. “If you run a campaign that doesn’t do anything but shout ‘They’re tricking you!’ over and over, you’re going to lose. That’s one of the things the Socialist Party has proved again and again. The other thing the Democrats have proved for us—or against us, rather—is that, right now, anyhow, nationalism is stronger than class solidarity.” He shrugged again. “I’d say the whole world has proved that for us.”

“What about the Negroes in the Confederate States?” Flora asked.

“What about them?” Blackford returned. “They rose up and they got smashed. You’re still learning the difference between being an agitator and being a politician. Listen to me, Flora.” He sounded very earnest. “Compromise is not a dirty word.”

“Maybe it should be,” she answered, and strode into the apartment building ahead of him. She could feel his eyes on her back, but she did not turn around.

Gordon McSweeney prowled along the west bank of the Mississippi, looking for Confederate soldiers to kill. He didn’t find any. The United States had this stretch of the riverbank under firm control these days. He felt frustrated, as a lion might feel frustrated looking out of its cage and seeing a cage full of zebras across the walk in the zoo.

Not even the new, shiny captain’s bars he wore made him feel any easier about the world. He knew he’d been lucky to wreck one Confederate river monitor. Asking God to let him be that lucky twice was pushing the limits of what He was likely to grant.

Across the Mississippi lay Memphis. It might as well have lain across the Pacific, for all McSweeney could do to it. U.S. artillerymen still pounded the city; the cease-fire did not hold west of the Tennessee River. McSweeney was glad of that. Watching smoke rise from the foe’s heartland gave him a certain amount of satisfaction, but only a certain amount. He hadn’t caused any of that devastation himself, and acutely felt the lack.

Ben Carlton came up alongside him. Carlton wore new sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve. He was a sergeant for the same reason McSweeney was a captain: the regiment had gone through the meat grinder taking Craighead Forest, and not nearly enough new officers and noncoms were coming up to replace the dead and wounded. Very few veterans were still privates these days.

“Pretty damn soon, the Rebs’ll pack it in here, too, I expect,” Carlton said.

“Every blasphemy that passes your lips means a hotter dose of hellfire in the world to come,” McSweeney answered.

“I’ve seen enough hellfire right here on earth,” Carlton said. “The kind the preachers go on about don’t worry me as much as it used to.”

“Oh, but it must!” McSweeney was shocked out of anger into earnestness. “If you do not repent of your sinful ways, the things you have seen here will be as nothing beside the torments you will suffer there. And those torments shall not pass away, but endure for all eternity.”

Instead of giving a direct answer, Carlton asked, “What are you going to do when the war’s finally done?”

McSweeney hadn’t thought about that, not since the day the United States had joined their allies in the fight against the Confederate States and the rest of the Quadruple Entente. He didn’t like thinking about it now. “I work on my old man’s farm,” he answered reluctantly. “Maybe I’ll go back—don’t know much else. Or maybe I’ll try and stay in the Army. That might be pretty good.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, sir, you can have my place when they turn me loose,” Carlton said. “I’ve done enough fighting to last me all my days. Don’t rightly know what I’ll do afterwards—I was sort of odd-jobbing around before I got conscripted—but I’ll come up with something, I figure.”

“Not cook,” McSweeney said. “Anything but cook. When you’re good, you’re not very good, and when you’re bad, even the rats won’t touch it.”

“Love you, too…sir,” Carlton said with a sour stare. He looked thoughtful; he might have been a lousy cook, but he knew all the angles. McSweeney cared nothing for angles. He always went straight ahead. After a few seconds’ contemplation, Carlton went on, “You want to stay in the Army, I figure they’ll let you do it. You’ve picked up so many medals, you’d fall forward on your kisser if you tried to pin the whole bunch on at once. If the Army tried to cut you loose and you didn’t want to go, you could raise a big stink in the papers.”

Raising a stink in the papers had never crossed Gordon McSweeney’s mind. He’d seen a newspaper but seldom before he had to do his service; when he read, he read the Good Book. So now it was with genuine curiosity that he asked, “Do you think it might help?”

“Hell, yes,” Carlton answered, ignoring McSweeney’s fearsome frown. “Can’t you see the headlines? ‘Hero Forced from Uniform!’—in big black letters, no less. Think the Army wants that kind of headline? Like hell they do. They want everybody proud of ’em, especially now that we’ve finally gone and licked the Rebs.”

It sounded logical. It sounded persuasive. McSweeney knew little of logic. What he knew of persuasion he actively distrusted: it struck him as a tool of Satan. With a sigh, he said, “The Army won’t be the same after the war is over.”

“That’s right,” Carlton said. “Most of the time, you’d sleep in a barracks. You’d get your meals regular, from a better cook than me. Nobody would be trying to shoot you or gas you or blow you up.”

McSweeney never worried about what the enemy was trying to do to him. His only concern was how he could kick the other fellow in the teeth. How to put that into words? “After the war,” he said slowly, “how can anything I do seem better than lukewarm?”

“You’re stationed in a nice, cozy barracks, you can go into town and find yourself a pretty girl.” Carlton had an answer for everything.

Most of the time, though, it was the wrong answer by Gordon McSweeney’s reckoning. “Lewdness and fornication lead to the pangs of hell no less surely than blasphemy,” he said, his voice stiff with disapproval.

Carlton rolled his eyes. “All right, Captain,” he said, using the rank in a way that reminded McSweeney he’d known him when he had none, “go into town, find yourself a pretty girl, and marry her, then, if that’s how you feel about it.”