The Man with the Iron Heart

sooner no more mothers will start hating the Western Union delivery boy,” she said.

How were you supposed to answer that? Jerry couldn’t, all the more so because he thought she was right. But she seemed sure the election would make things happen as if by magic. As a multiterm Congressman, Jerry Duncan knew better. There’d be plenty of horse trading and log rolling before anything got done. Washington was like that. It always had been. If it ever changed, he would be astonished.

“If Truman won’t see reason, you ought to impeach him and throw him out on his ear,” Diana said.

Jerry held up a hand like a traffic cop at a busy intersection. “Don’t even try to get anybody to talk impeachment. You’d only be wasting your time, and no one would listen to you,” he said. “Truman’s not doing anything unconstitutional. He’s just wrong. There’s a big difference.”

“If they impeached everybody in Washington who was wrong, the place’d be empty inside of two weeks,” Betsy said.

“If you’re wrong enough-” Diana began.

Maybe she had something, too. If Roosevelt had been on the point of losing the war, wouldn’t people have run him out of town on a rail? Jerry suspected they would…which, in those days, would have left Henry Wallace President of the United States, a genuinely scary thought. Truman had no Vice President at the moment. That would make the Speaker of the House President if he got impeached. And the new Speaker would be a Republican….

Ed McGraw read the paper while he ate bacon and eggs over easy and toast with butter and jam and smoked a cigarette. “Well,” he said, “looks like you’ve got the kind of Congress you’re gonna need.”

“What are the final numbers?” Diana asked around a mouthful of toast-she was eating breakfast, too.

Her husband read from the front-page story: “‘If present trends continue, the House in the Eightieth Congress will consist of at least 257 Republicans, 169 Democrats, and one American Labor Party member. The final eight races are too close for a winner to be declared. In the Senate, there will be at least fifty-three Republicans and forty-two Democrats. Again, the final Senate race is still up in the air.’”

“That’s amazing,” Diana said. “The Democrats had big majorities in both houses of Congress the last time around.”

Ed rustled the newspaper to show he wasn’t done yet. “‘This historic reversal is surpassed in recent times only by the Democratic sweep that went with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election,’” he read. “‘Pundits believe many of the voters who turned to the GOP yesterday did so in protest against President Truman’s costly and bloody occupation of Germany. Diana McGraw’s opposition movement galvanized voter unhappiness.’” He grinned at her around the cigarette, which was about to singe his lips. “How about that, babe? You and zinc and sheet metal.” In the nick of time, the butt went into the ashtray.

“How about that?” Diana echoed. She didn’t quite get the joke, but Ed had been making factory jokes she didn’t quite get ever since they were newlyweds. She went on, “Jerry said something like that last night, but he’s on the same side as we are, so it’s hard to take him all that seriously.”

“Jerry…” Ed McGraw shoveled in a forkful. He took a bite of toast. Then he lit another cigarette. “Ever figure you’d call a Congressman by his first name?”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” Diana started to say that the Congressman’s wife didn’t like it very much. She swallowed the words before they came out. Why have Ed wondering whether Betsy Duncan had a good reason not to like it? That would set Ed wondering, too, which wouldn’t be good when nothing was going on between her and Jerry. And, she realized a beat later, it would be even worse if something were going on.

“You’re hot stuff, kiddo.” Ed took the cigarette butt out of his mouth long enough to drink some coffee. After that, it went right back in. “But I’ve known you were hot stuff since high school.”

“Oh, you-!” she said fondly. She never had confessed some of the things that went on in the back seat of his beat-up old Chevy before they got married. What the priest in the booth didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him…and God, of course, had already seen it.

“So how does it feel?” he asked. He’d never looked for any of the limelight himself. He wasn’t that kind of man. All he cared about were his house and his job and their family. “You know all these big shots. You met the President and everything. You get your name in the papers.”

“I wish nobody’d ever heard of me,” Diana said. “That would mean we had Pat back. To hell with all this other stuff.”

No, she didn’t usually swear in front of her husband. She hardly noticed doing it this time. Ed didn’t notice at all. His big bald head bobbed up and down. “You got that right. Oh, boy, do you ever. I’d trade anything for another minute with him, even. But you don’t get those chances over again.”

“You sure don’t.” Diana drained her own coffee mug. She looked at the clock above the stove. It always ran fast, but she made the correction without conscious thought. “You’d better get going.”

“I know. I know.” Ed stood up. He grabbed his sheet-metal dinner pail. “Tongue sandwich in here?”

“Sure.”

“Good-one of my favorites.” Ed leaned down and brushed his lips across hers, leaving affection and the smell of tobacco smoke behind. Then he was out the door and heading for work, right on time. Ever since they got married, he’d been as reliable as the machines he tended.

Diana smiled as the Pontiac backed down the driveway and chugged out into the street. Ed was reliable here, too-not just on the job. She didn’t want him to think she was running around, even if he didn’t always leave her glowing in bed any more. He’d never given her any reason to think he was, not even during the war, when all those Rosie the Riveter types flooded into the plant. Some of them-plenty of them, in Diana’s jaundiced opinion-were looking for more than work. If they’d found it, they hadn’t found it with Ed.

Reaching across the kitchen table, Diana snagged the newspaper. Ed always got it first, because he had to hustle out the door-and, not to put too fine a point on it, because he was the man. But she could look it over now. It had maps and charts showing Senators and Representatives by party in the old Congress and the new.

No doubt Jerry was right (yes, I do know my Congressman by his first name, Diana thought): some Republicans would back the occupation, while some Democrats would vote against it. But the more Republicans in Congress, the better the chances it would end soon. You didn’t need a crystal ball to see that.

“We will bring them home,” Diana said, there in the empty kitchen. It would have been empty even if Pat did come home: he would’ve gone off to work with Ed. But it would have been a different empty. It wouldn’t have been such an aching emptiness. Pat would have been gone, but he wouldn’t have been gone. Diana nodded to herself. Pretty soon, nobody else would have to worry about the aching kind of emptiness. She hoped.

XX

More than a year and a half after the war in Europe was supposed to have ended, London remained a sorry, miserable place. Food was still rationed. So was coal. People wore greatcoats even indoors. Demobilized soldiers seemed to huddle in theirs as they ambled along looking for work-but jobs were as hard to come by as everything else in Britain these days.

Police Constable Cedric Mitchell counted himself lucky. He’d had his position reserved for him when he came back from the war-if he came back. Plenty of his mates hadn’t. He’d made it across the Channel from Dunkirk in a tugboat that got strafed by two Stukas. Then he’d gone to North Africa, and then on to the slow, bloody slog up the Italian boot. Now he had a Military Medal, a great puckered scar on the outside of his right thigh, and nightmares that woke him up shrieking and sweating once or twice a week.

He also had a new dream that wasn’t so nasty: to retire to Algiers or Naples or somewhere else with decent weather one day. Down in those countries, winter didn’t mean long, long nights and fogs and endless coughs and shivers. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, but he damn well had.

“Italy’s wasted on the bloody Eyties,” he muttered, his breath adding to the mist that swirled in front of Parliament. “Fucking wasted.”

He walked his beat, back and forth, back and forth. The most lethal weapon he carried was a billy club. Thinking of that made him snort, which also added to the mist. No Jerry’d sneak up behind him and cut his throat