The Victorious Opposition (61 page)

“Yeah, I’ve tried some of that,” Armstrong said. “But it’s a day on and a week off. It’ll take me forever to do enough of anything to get the experience to make anybody want to take me on for good, and I’ll starve to death in the meantime.”

The man looked him over. “Other thing you could do is join the Army. You’re a big, strong fellow. They’ll take you unless you just got out of jail—maybe even if you just got out of jail, the way things are nowadays. You can sure as hell learn a trade in there.”

“Maybe,” Armstrong said. His father had made the same suggestion—made it loudly and pointedly, in fact. That would have prejudiced him against the idea even if he’d liked it to begin with. “They don’t pay you anything much in the Army, and you’re stuck there for three years if you volunteer.”

“Have it your way, pal. You think I give a rat’s ass about what you do, you’ve got another think coming.” The clerk behind the desk looked up at the line of poor, hungry men desperate for work. “Next!”

Seething, Armstrong stormed out of the hiring office. If he hadn’t thought the clerk would sic the cops on him, he would have whaled the stuffing out of the bastard. Sitting there like a little tin Jesus, who the hell did he think he was? But the answer to that was mournfully obvious.
He thinks he’s a man who’s got a job, and the son of a bitch is right.

Armstrong inquired at a furniture factory, a trucking company, and a joint that made Polish sausages before heading for home. No luck anywhere. His old man wanted him out there trying—insisted on it, as a matter of fact. If he didn’t pound the pavement, he wouldn’t get fed. Merle Grimes had been most painfully clear about that. Armstrong wished he thought his father were bluffing. Since he didn’t . . .

When he got home, he found his mother in tears. He hadn’t seen that since Granny died. “What happened?” he exclaimed.

Without a word, she held out an envelope to him. His name was typed on it. The return address was printed in an old-fashioned, hard-to-read typeface:

Another, smaller line below that said:

“Oh,” he said. It felt like a punch in the breadbasket. He’d known it was possible, of course, but he hadn’t thought it was likely. “Oh, shit.”

Edna Grimes nodded. “That’s what I said, too, Armstrong, when I saw the damn thing. But there’s nothing you can do about it. If they conscript you and you pass the physical, you’ve got to go.”

“Yeah.” Armstrong nodded glumly. From some of the things he’d heard, the only way to flunk the physical was not to have a pulse, too. He did his best to look on the bright side of things: “If they conscript me, it’s only for two years. That’s a year less than I’d spend if I joined up on my own.”

“I know. But still . . .” His mother gave him a hug of the sort he hadn’t had from her in years. “You’re my baby, Armstrong. I don’t want you going off to be a soldier. What if we have another war?”

Being his mother’s baby didn’t appeal to Armstrong. Fighting a war did—if you were going to be a soldier, what point was there to being one when nothing was happening? None he could see. That he might get hurt or killed never crossed his mind. He was, after all, only eighteen. But he was smart enough to know that, if he told his mother what he really thought, she’d pitch a fit. So, as soothingly as he could, he said, “There won’t be any war, Ma. We’re giving the Confederates those pleb-whatchamacallits, so they’ve got nothing left to fight about.”

“Jesus, I hope you’re right,” his mother said. “Some people, though, if you give ’em an inch, they’ll want to take a mile. The way the Freedom Party carries on, I’m afraid they’re like that.”

Armstrong’s little sister met the news that he was going to go off and be a soldier with complete equanimity. “So long,” Annie said. “When do you leave?”

“Not tonight, you little brat,” he said. She stuck out her tongue at him. He wanted to belt her a good one, but he knew he couldn’t. She’d just go yelling to their mother, and then he’d end up in trouble. Annie was almost as big a pest as Aunt Clara, who would no doubt hope he never came back when he went off to wherever they’d ship him for training.

When his father got home and found out, though, he slapped Armstrong on the back and poured him a good-sized slug of whiskey, something he’d never done before. “Congratulations, son!” Merle Grimes said. “They’ll make a man out of you.”

Since Armstrong was already convinced he was a man, that impressed him less than it might have. To show what tough stuff he was, he took a big gulp of the whiskey. He hadn’t done a lot of drinking. The hooch felt like battery acid going down the pipe, and exploded like a bomb in his stomach. “That’s good,” he wheezed in a voice that sounded like a ghost of its former self.

“Glad you like it,” his father answered gravely. If he knew that Armstrong had just injured himself, he was polite enough not to let on. That was more discretion than he was in the habit of showing. He took a smaller sip from his own glass and asked, “When do you go in for your preinduction physical?”

“Next Wednesday,” Armstrong said. “I can hardly wait.”

He meant that ironically, but Merle Grimes took it seriously. “Good,” he said. “That’s real good. You ought to be eager to do something for your country. It’s been taking care of you all along.”

“Right,” Armstrong said tightly. He could have done without his father sounding like a goddamn recruiting poster.

Next Wednesday, naturally, rain poured down in buckets. Armstrong had to walk three blocks from the trolley stop to the building where the government doctors waited to get their hands on him. He was half soaked by the time he made it inside. Seeing several other guys his own age who were just as bedraggled as he was made him feel a little better. More fellows with wet hair and pimples came in the door after him, too.

A pair of clerks marched into the room. At the same time as one was saying, “Line up in alphabetical order by last name,” the other declared, “Line up according to height.”

After some confusion, alphabetical order won. Armstrong would have ended up about the same place either way. As a G, he was fairly close to the head of the line but not right at it. He was also taller than most of the young men there for their physicals, but not a real beanpole, either. He had a chance to look things over before the system got to work on him.

First came the paperwork. He would have bet money on that. His old man made a living pushing papers around for the government, and had plenty to do. Armstrong filled out about a million forms and carried them with him to the eye chart, which came next. The fellow in front of him had some trouble. “I can see the little bastards just fine,” he told the guy in the white coat in charge of the test. “Only thing is, I can’t no way read ’em.”

“Let me see your paperwork,” the man in the white coat said. Armstrong got a glimpse of a couple of pages, too. Just about everything was blank. The man in charge of the test frowned. “You’re illiterate?” Seeing the puzzled look on the young man’s face, he tried again: “You can’t read and write?”

“ ‘Fraid not,” the youth said. “I can sign my name. That’s about the size of it.”

“Didn’t you go to school?”

“A couple years. I never was much good, though. I been workin’ ever since.”

“Well, uh, Slaughter, no matter how good a name you’ve got for a soldier, you need to be able to read and write to enter the Army. You’re not even in the right place in line. You’ll be excused from conscription. I don’t know if your exclusion will be permanent or if they’ll class you as fit for service in an emergency. But we won’t take you now.” He glanced towards Armstrong Grimes. “Next!”

Armstrong thought about pretending he couldn’t read, too. Too late, though—he’d already filled out his paperwork and done it right. He stepped up to the line and went down the chart as far as he could, switching eyes when the man in the white coat told him to.

“Give me your papers,” the man said, then nodded. “You’ve passed here. Proceed to the next station.”

He saw even more guys in white coats than he had at the Polish sausage works where he’d tried to get a job. They measured and weighed him. One of them listened to his heart. Another one took his blood pressure. Another one—this one with a brand new pair of rubber gloves—told him to drop his pants, turn his head to one side, and cough. As he did, the man grabbed him in some highly intimate places. “No rupture,” he said, and wrote on Armstrong’s papers. “Now bend over and grab your ankles.”

“What?” Armstrong said in alarm. “You’re not going to—”

But the man in the white coat was already doing it. That was a lot less pleasant than being told to turn his head and cough. “Prostate gland normal,” the man said. He took off the gloves and tossed them into a corrugated-iron trash can. Then he wrote on the papers again. As soon as he gave them back, he started putting on a fresh pair of gloves.

“You must go through a lot of those,” Armstrong said. He pulled up his pants in a hurry, still stinging a little.

“You bet I do, sonny,” the man in the white coat agreed. “All things considered, would you rather I didn’t?” Armstrong hastily shook his head. “Well, neither would I,” the man said. “Go on to the next station.”

They drew blood there. A big, strapping fellow passed out just as Armstrong arrived. The fellow with the hypodermic syringe put it down in a hurry and managed to keep the big young man from banging his head on the floor. He dragged him off to one side and glared at Armstrong. “
You’re
not going to faint on me, are you? This guy was the third one today. Roll up your sleeve.”

“I don’t think I am,” Armstrong said. “What do you need to do this for, anyway?”

“See if you’re anemic. See if you’ve got a social disease. See what your blood group is for transfusions. Hold still, now.” The man swabbed the inside of his elbow with alcohol. The needle bit. Armstrong looked away as the syringe filled with blood. He felt a little queasy, but only a little. The man yanked out the needle, stuck a piece of cotton fluff on the puncture, and slapped adhesive tape over it. He wrote on Armstrong’s papers. “That’s it. You’re done.”

“Did I pass?” Armstrong asked.

“Unless you’re anemic as hell or you’ve got syphilis, you did,” the man replied. “You’re healthy as a horse. You’ll make a hell of a soldier.”

“Oh, boy,” Armstrong said.

XVI

“H
e’s kept us out of war.” Flora Blackford repeated the Socialist Party slogan to a street-corner crowd in her district. “He’s kept us out of war, and he’s done everything he could to keep food on the working man’s table. If you want to see what the Democrats will do about that, look at what Herbert Hoover did. Nothing, that’s what.”

People in the mostly proletarian crowd clapped their hands. A sprinkling of hecklers at the back started a chant: “Taft! Taft! Robert Taft!”

Flora pointed at them. “I served in Congress with Senator Taft’s father. William Howard Taft was an honorable man. So is Robert Taft. I don’t say any differently. But I do say this: Senator Taft would be horrified at the way his supporters are bringing Freedom Party tactics into this campaign.”

That got more applause. Next to nobody in this strongly Socialist district had a good word to say about Jake Featherston’s gang. But one of the hecklers yelled, “Al Smith’s the one who’s in bed with the Freedom Party!”

“Al Smith is against war. I am against war. I had a brother-in-law killed and a brother badly wounded in the Great War,” Flora said. “If you are going to tell me you are for war—if you are going to tell me Senator Taft is for war—you will have a hard time selling that to the people of this district.”

“Taft is for keeping Kentucky and Houston,” the heckler called.

“How can you keep a state in the country when its own people don’t want to be here?” Flora asked. “That was the lesson of the War of Secession—you can’t. Some things you can buy at too high a price.”

The crowd applauded again, but less enthusiastically than before. Flora understood why: they wanted to have their cake and eat it, too; to have peace and to hold on to Kentucky and Houston. She wanted the same thing. She understood the people who said the USA had sacrificed too much even to think about giving back the two states. At least half the time, she felt that way herself. She would have liked the idea much better if it didn’t involve giving them back to Jake Featherston.

“I don’t love the Freedom Party,” she said. “But it is in power in the Confederate States, and we can’t very well pretend it isn’t and hope it will go away. What can we do if we don’t try to deal with it?” She was trying to convince herself as well as her audience, and she knew it.

“I’d sock it in the nose!” that iron-lunged heckler yelled. “Taft will sock it in the nose!”

“No, he won’t.” Flora shook her head. “If he does, he’ll have a war on his hands, and I can’t believe he wants one. He may talk tough, but his foreign policy won’t look much different from President Smith’s. And his domestic policy . . .” She rolled her eyes. “He grows like an onion—with his head in the ground.” She said it in English. Some of the people her age and older in the crowd echoed it in Yiddish.

She managed to get through the rest of her speech without too much harassment. She had a pretty good idea why, too: the Democrats didn’t think they could beat her. She’d never lost an election in this district. The Democrats had elected a candidate here while she was First Lady, but she’d trounced him as soon as she returned to the hustings.

At the end, she said, “If you’re in favor of what President Smith has done, you’ll vote for him again, and you’ll vote for me. If you’re not, you’ll vote for Taft. It’s about that simple, my friends. Forward with Smith or back with Taft?”

She stepped down from the platform with applause ringing in her ears. When she’d started agitating for the Socialists, she hadn’t had a platform—not a real one. She’d made her first few speeches standing on crates or beer barrels. She was right around the corner from the Croton Brewery, where she’d spoken at the outbreak of the Great War. She’d opposed war then; she still did. In 1914, her party hadn’t gone along with her. This year, it did.

Why aren’t I happier, then?
she wondered.

In 1914, the Confederate States hadn’t been that different from the United States. Most of the oppressed proletariat in the CSA had been black, but capitalists had oppressed workers almost as savagely in the USA. Now . . . Things were different now.

A middle-aged man in a homburg limped up to her, leaning on a stick. “Good speech,” he said. A Soldiers’ Circle pin showing a sword through his conscription year in a silver circle sparkled on his lapel.

“Thank you, David,” Flora said with a sigh. That her own brother could belong to a reactionary organization like the Soldiers’ Circle—and not only belong but wear the pin that showed he was proud to belong—had always dismayed her. The Soldiers’ Circle wasn’t the Freedom Party, but some of its higher-ups wished it were.

“Good speech,” David Hamburger repeated, “but I’m still going to vote for Taft.”

“I hadn’t expected anything different,” she said. David had gone into the Great War a Socialist like the rest of the family. He’d come out a conservative Democrat. He’d also come out with one leg gone above the knee. Flora had no doubt the two were related.

She asked, “And will you vote for Chaim Cohen, too?” Cohen was the latest Democrat to try to unseat her.

Her brother turned red. “No,” he said. “I don’t like all of your ideas—I don’t like most of your ideas—but I know you’re honest. And you’re family. I don’t let family down.”

“Being family isn’t reason enough to vote for me,” she said.

“I think it is.” David laughed. “And you may not like my politics, but at least I care about things. Did you see your sisters or your other brother or Mother and Father at your speech?”

Now Flora was the one who had to say, “No.” Sophie and Esther and Isaac had their own lives, and lived them. They were proud when she won reelection, but they didn’t even come to Socialist Party headquarters any more. As for her parents . . . “Mother and Father don’t get out as much as they did.”

“I know. They’re getting old.” David shook his head. “They’ve
got
old.
Bis hindert und tzvantzik yuhr.
”

“Omayn,”
Flora said automatically, though she know her mother and father wouldn’t live to 120 years. People didn’t, however much you wished they would. A stab of loss and longing for Hosea pierced her. She was grateful her parents had lived to grow old. So many people didn’t, even in the modern world.

“Have you got plans for tonight, or can you go to dinner with your reactionary tailor of a little brother?” David asked.

“I can go,” Flora said. “And it’s on me. I know I make more money than you do.” She knew she made a lot more money than he did, but she didn’t want to say so out loud.

With his usual touchy pride, David said, “I’m doing all right.” He’d never asked her or anybody else for a dime, so she supposed he was. With a wry grin, though, he went on, “I’ll let you buy. Don’t think I won’t. How does that go? ‘From each according to her abilities, to each according to his needs’? Something like that, anyhow.”

“I never heard anybody quote—I mean misquote—Marx to figure out who’s getting dinner before,” Flora said, and she couldn’t help laughing. “Since I’m buying, how does Kornblatt’s sound?”

“Let’s go,” her brother said, so the delicatessen must have sounded good.

When they got there, he ordered brisket and a schooner of beer. Flora chose stuffed cabbage, which just wasn’t the same in Philadelphia. What she got at Kornblatt’s wasn’t the same as what she’d helped her mother make when she lived on the Lower East Side all the time, but it came closer.

David attacked the brisket as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks. He’d devoured almost all of it before he looked up and said, “You really think we ought to give back what we won in the war? Give it back to those ‘Freedom’-yelling
mamzrim
?”

“If the people who live there don’t want to be part of the country, how can we keep them?” Flora asked.

“They were pretty quiet till Featherston started stirring them up,” David said, which was true, or at least close to true. He speared his last bite of meat, chewed it, swallowed, and went on, “If we’re not doing the same thing with the
shvartzers
in the CSA, we’re missing a hell of a chance.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Flora said.

“Somebody ought to,” her brother said, and somebody probably did. If the United States weren’t trying to use Negroes in the Confederate States to make life difficult for the government there, then the War Department was indeed falling down on the job. Flora disliked a lot of the people and policies in the War Department, but she did not think the men at the top there were fools. Over almost a quarter of a century of public life, she’d learned the difference between someone who couldn’t do his job and someone who simply disagreed with her about what the job should be.

“Say what you want,” she told David, “but we’d just have endless trouble if we tried to keep those states.”

David didn’t reply with words, not right away. Instead, he rapped his artificial leg with his knuckles. By the sound that came from it, he might almost have been knocking on a door; it was made of wood and canvas and leather and metal. “You know how many men like me there are in the USA—men without legs, men without arms, men without eyes, men without faces? If we don’t keep what we won, why did we get shot and blown up and gassed? Answer me that one, and then I’ll say good-bye to Kentucky and Houston and Sequoyah.”

“There is no answer,” Flora said. “Sometimes something looks like a good idea when you do it but turns out not to be later on. Or haven’t you ever had that happen?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve seen that. Who hasn’t? But this one is kind of large to treat that way. And what do we do if giving back those states turns out to be that same kind of mistake? Taking them again would get expensive.”

“I don’t know,” Flora said.

“Well, that’s honest, anyhow. I said you were,” her brother replied. “Does Al Smith know? Does anybody in the whole wide world know?”

“How can anybody know?” Flora asked, as reasonably as she could. “We’ll just have to see how things turn out, that’s all.”

David paused to light a cigarette. He blew smoke up toward the ceiling, then said, “Seems to me that’s a better reason for not doing something than for doing it. But I’m no politician, so what do I know?”

“It’s going to happen.” Flora knew she sounded uncomfortable. She couldn’t help it. She went on, “If it makes you that unhappy, the thing to do
is
to vote for Taft. I think it will work out all right. I hope it does.”

“I hope it does, too. But I don’t think so. The Confederates on the banks of the Ohio again?” David Hamburger shook his head. “We had to worry about that for years, and then we didn’t, and now we will again.”

“When they were on the Ohio, they didn’t cross it in the last war,” Flora said.

“They didn’t have barrels then. They didn’t have bombers then, either,” her brother said.

“Even if they do get it back, they’ve promised to leave it demilitarized afterwards,” Flora said.

“Oh, yes. They’ve promised.” David nodded. “So tell me—how far do you trust Jake Featherston’s promises?”

Flora wished he hadn’t asked that. She’d deplored Featherston in the U.S. Congress long before he was elected. She liked him no better, trusted him no further, now that he was president of the CSA. As she had on the stump, she said, “He’s there. We have to deal with him.” Her brother let the words fall flat, which left them sounding much worse than if he’d tried to answer them.

C
hester Martin faced Election Day with all the enthusiasm of a man going to a doctor to have a painful boil lanced. His efforts to build a construction workers’ union in antilabor Los Angeles had got strong backing from the Socialist Party. How could he forget that? He couldn’t. But he couldn’t make himself like the upcoming plebiscite, either.

His wife had no doubts. “I don’t want another war,” Rita said. “I lost my first husband in the last one.” She hardly ever spoke of him, but now she went on, “Why should anybody else have to go through what I did? If we don’t have to fight, that’s good news to me.”

But Chester answered, “Who says we won’t?”

“Al Smith does, that’s who.” Rita sent him an exasperated stare. “Or are you going to vote for a Democrat for president again? Look how well that turned out the last time.”

“I don’t know. I’m thinking about it,” Chester said. Rita looked even more exasperated. She’d always been a Socialist. He’d been a Democrat through the Great War, but the only time he’d voted for a Democratic presidential candidate was in 1932, when he’d chosen Calvin Coolidge over Hosea Blackford. Blackford had had three and a half years to end the business collapse, and hadn’t done it. Coolidge, of course, dropped dead three weeks before taking office, and Herbert Hoover, his running mate, hadn’t done it, either. For that matter, neither had Smith. Chester went on, “Giving back so much of what we fought for sticks in my craw.”

“Giving the country back to the Democrats sticks in my craw,” Rita said. “Do you think Taft cares about what you’re trying to do here? If you do, you’re nuts. His father didn’t stand with the producers, and neither does he.”

That had an unpleasant ring of truth. Plenty of people would think local issues were the most important ones in the election. Half the time, Chester did. But, the other half of the time, he didn’t. He said, “If the Confederates want Houston and Kentucky back and then they’re done, that’s one thing.”

“They say that’s all,” Rita reminded him.

He nodded. “I know what they say. But Jake Featherston says all sorts of things. If he gets them back and starts putting soldiers into them, that’s a different story. If he does that, we’ve got trouble on our hands.”

“Even if he does, we can beat the Confederates again if we have to,” Rita said. “If we tell them to pull back, they’d have to back down, wouldn’t they?”

“Who knows? The point is, we shouldn’t have to find out.” Chester muttered unhappily to himself. He wanted a party with a strong foreign policy, and he also wanted a party with a strong domestic policy. Trouble was, the Democrats offered the one and the Socialists the other. He couldn’t have both. “Maybe I ought to vote for the Republicans. Then I’d have the worst of both worlds.”

“Funny. Funny like a crutch,” his wife said. “Well, I can’t tell you what to do, but I know what I’m going to.”