The Man with the Iron Heart

She’d get off a train or wake up in a hotel bed and think, Wait! This is… Then it would come to her. But she still got those weird moments of dissociation. She got them more often as she traveled more, in fact.

No danger of that here, though. She hadn’t taken the train to San Francisco. She’d flown in a big, droning DC-4 (from St. Louis, anyhow; she’d taken the train to get that far). The plane didn’t give her as much room as a Pullman berth would have, but it got where it was going much faster. And the ride was surprisingly smooth, except for some turbulence climbing over the Rockies.

“We’ll be fine, folks,” the pilot said over the intercom as the airliner bumped through air pockets. “I flew the Hump during the war. Next to that, this is a piece of cake.” People sheepishly smiled at one another. Diana felt embarrassed about her jitters. The DC-4 went right on flying.

So here she was, talking to a sea of people in Golden Gate Park, about as far west as she could go if she didn’t want to start swimming. She could smell the Pacific Ocean. It smelled different from the Atlantic…cleaner, somehow. She didn’t think that was her imagination, not when she’d been in New York City not long before. The breeze that blew off the ocean tugged at her hair and pulled wisps loose in spite of everything bobby pins could do.

“This fight started two years ago now,” she said. “When we set out, nobody thought we had a prayer. The government was going to do whatever it was going to do. Listen to people who thought it was doing things wrong? Fat chance!”

Applause rolled up from the crowd like rising surf. The sun came out from behind a cloud. The day got warmer. The breeze from the Pacific felt friendlier. It was somewhere in the sixties. Tonight, it would be somewhere in the fifties. Diana knew she was in San Francisco, all right. But she couldn’t tell by the weather if it was March or May, August or October or December.

“We made Harry Truman listen! He didn’t want to, but he had to,” she said, and the crowd’s cheers got louder. “He said he knew best. We showed him he didn’t. He said he wanted to go on wasting lives in Germany. We told him he couldn’t. He said he’d do it anyway. We elected a Congress that wouldn’t let him.”

“That’s right!” Several people in the front rows shouted the same thing at the same time. Diana couldn’t make out all the other cries of approval, but she had no doubt that was what they were.

She remembered the big slug of gin that kindly neighbor’d given her the day she got the War Department telegram. It had done a lot for her. But the noise that meant a lot of people agreed with her about something important-no, that a lot of people followed her over something important-had a kick gin couldn’t come close to. (It had kick enough to let her forget-part of the time-that some people who didn’t follow her had guns. She got nervous whenever she thought about Gus van Slyke. Had that bullet been aimed at her?)

“And we did it! We, the people of the United States! We did it!” Diana didn’t show her nerves. She liked to quote the Constitution whenever she could. It made the blockheads who still called her anti-American have a harder time. “Our boys are coming home. Before too much longer, we’ll be out of Germany for good. No other family will have to go through what too many families have gone through already. And that will be good for the whole country.”

“It sure will!” The cry rose up from the thousands out there on the grass.

“But we aren’t finished yet,” Diana went on. “We’ve only started. That stubborn man in the White House still wants to do all the things the Eightieth Congress won’t let him do. He’s started to show his cards. He’s going to campaign against Congress next year. He’s going to try to bring back enough people who think like him so he can do all the foolish things he wants to. Folks, he’s going to campaign against the little people. He’s going to campaign against us! Will we let him get away with it?”

“Nooo!” This time, the crowd’s reply was a long wolf howl. Diana wished it would carry all the way to Washington. Maybe not now. Come November next year, it would.

“No is right. We know what we want, and we know how to get it,” Diana said. “After we send Harry Truman home-and Bess, and Margaret, and Margaret’s piano-we’ll go right on forming our more perfect union. We can do it. We will do it. We are the people.”

“We are the people!” the crowd roared as Diana stepped away from the microphone. She waved to them. They shouted louder than ever. Some of them cried out her name. If she’d grinned any wider, the top of her head would have fallen off. Who needed gin-who needed anything else- when you could have…this?

“I don’t know whether I want to go on after that,” said the San Francisco politico who followed her to the mike. The sympathetic laugh he got was enough to let him launch into his speech. He ripped into the Truman administration even harder than Diana had. The crowd loved it.

Policemen prowled the edge of the crowd to keep pro-administration hotheads from starting trouble. Diana hoped they’d do more good than they had in Indianapolis. Pickets who followed the Truman line did march beyond the cops’ perimeter. They shouted and heckled, but they were a long way from the speakers’ platform. And there weren’t very many of them. Diana marveled at that. When she was first starting out, opponents outnumbered and outshouted allies as often as not. No more. The country had swung her way. She shook her head, standing up there in the cool breeze off the Pacific. She’d made the country swing her way.

The sun was going down toward the sea when the rally broke up. Diana went to dinner with some of the locals who’d spoken in the park. The Cliff House looked out over the sea. You could watch the sun set, have a couple of drinks, and eat fish and clams and scallops that had been doing whatever they did in the ocean only a few hours before.

You could also watch the sea lions and water birds on Seal Rocks. Diana didn’t think she’d ever seen wild seals before. These beasts weren’t real wild; they hardly moved at all. A big white bird lit on one sea lion’s back. The animal just sat there on the rock. Maybe it was asleep, and the bird didn’t wake it up.

“Can I drive you back to your hotel?” the politico who’d come on after Diana asked when dinner was done. His name was Marvin Something; she couldn’t remember what. She also couldn’t remember if he was a city councilman or a county supervisor. She wasn’t sure it made any difference. The city of San Francisco filled all of San Francisco County.

“Thanks. That’s nice of you,” she said.

And it was. The Palace Hotel was way over on the other side of town, near the Bay. San Francisco was a compact city, but even so….

Marvin drove a Packard. Diana tried not to hold it against him; she was still biased in favor of General Motors cars. Traffic had started to thin out. He didn’t take long to get to the hotel at the corner of New Montgomery and Market. The Palace was famous for, among other things, endings. Before the big earthquake of 1906, a King of Hawaii had died there. Afterwards, and after a rebuilding, it was the place where President Harding breathed his last.

“Funny,” Diana said. “I wasn’t anywhere near so sorry when Harding passed away as I was when FDR died. I don’t think anybody was.”

“I know I wasn’t,” Marvin said. “But Roosevelt was special, and Harding was just kinda there, if you know what I mean. You didn’t feel like your father’d just died.”

“That’s what it was, all right. Except Roosevelt was everybody’s father,” Diana said. She’d had so much land on her in a few months in 1945-the President’s death (which really did feel like a family member’s), and then poor Pat’s. She wondered how she’d got through it.

Marvin found a parking space right by the hotel. If that wasn’t a miracle, it came close. He jumped out, hurried around the hood, and held her door open so she could get out. “Can I buy you a drink?” he asked as she did.

“I’m kind of tired…but sure. Why not?” she said. Sometimes you needed an extra one-maybe an extra two-to come down from the excitement a good rally stirred up. “Help me sleep tonight.”

“There you go,” Marvin agreed.

After that drink, Diana said, “I’m getting tight.” Because it wasn’t just a drink. How many had she had at the Cliff House? She couldn’t remember, which probably wasn’t a good sign.

But Marvin said, “Bird can’t fly on one wing,” and waved to the bartender again. Diana snickered. It wouldn’t have seemed so funny if she hadn’t had a good deal already, but she had, so it did. Following that train of logic-if it