'It doesn't matter now, one way or the other,' Sylvia said. By the look on his face, her son was prepared to disagree with that as eloquently as he could. She didn't give him the chance. 'See you tomorrow morning,' she said to Mrs. Coneval, and took her children back to their apartment.
It seemed empty without her husband there. She was used to having him gone for days at a time; she'd even had to grow used to having him gone for much longer than that while he was a Confederate detainee. Now, though, with him in St. Louis, she had the strong sense she wouldn't see him again till the war ended, and it didn't look as if it was going to end any time soon.
She had some good scrod in the icebox. She hadn't lost the connections she'd made down on T Wharf; as a fisherman's wife (even if her husband wasn't actually fishing right now), she could find better fish than the ordinary shopper and pay less for it. She breaded the scrod, pan-fried it in lard on top of the stove, and served it up with mashed potatoes.
George, Jr., ate everything up and demanded more. He ate almost as much as a man, or so it seemed. She was probably wrong about that, she admitted to herself as she gave him more potatoes, but she wasn't wrong about his outgrowing all his clothes. She patted her purse. The allotment check would come in handy the next time she went shopping at Filene's.
Mary Jane, by contrast, had to be cajoled into eating much of anything. Sylvia produced a gumdrop from a bowl on a shelf too high for the children to reach. She set it on the table. 'Do you want it?' she asked her daughter.
Eyes wide with longing, Mary Jane nodded. Having once made the dread ful error of saying no to candy, she wasn't about to repeat it.
'All right,' Sylvia said. 'Eat up your supper and you can have it.' Sometimes that got results, sometimes a tantrum. Today it worked. Mary Jane cleaned her plate and stretched out a hand that needed washing. 'Good girl,' Sylvia told her, handing her the sweet.
After she'd scrubbed the dishes, she settled the children down on the couch, one on either side of her, and read to them from Queen Zixi of Ix. Mary Jane's attention sometimes wandered. When she got off the couch, went over to get a doll, and then came back to play with it, Sylvia didn't mind. The story held George, Jr., rapt for most of an hour. By then, it was time for Sylvia to get the children into bed. Morning came all too early.
Then she had the apartment to herself, before she also had to go to bed. When George was home, they'd sit and talk while he smoked a pipe or cigar. When he was out fishing, she'd look forward to his return. Now… now he was gone, and the place seemed large and empty and quiet as the tomb.
She walked around for a while with a feather duster, flicking specks from tables and gewgaws. What with the dirt and soot always in the air, things got dusty faster than they had any proper business doing. That would worsen in winter, when everyone burned more coal — always assuming the Coal Board didn't decide to let people turn to blocks of ice instead.
She realized she was dusting a china dog for the third time. Shaking her head, she put the feather duster away. Time hung heavy when she was alone, but not that heavy. She went into the bedroom, changed into a nainsook cotton nightgown with lace at the neck and sleeves, and set out the drawers and skirt and shirtwaist she'd wear the next morning. Then she went into the bathroom, where she cleaned her teeth and gave her hair a hundred strokes with the brush in front of the mirror over the sink. Evening ritual done, she went back into the bedroom, turned off the gas lamp, and lay down.
She sat up with a start. 'Lord have mercy, I'd forget my head if it wasn't sewed on tight!' she exclaimed. Not wanting to get up and light the lamp again, she fumbled in the darkness with the alarm clock on the nightstand. Had she forgotten to set it, she would surely have been late to work, which would have got her docked at best and fired at worst. 'Can't have that,' she said, as if someone lying beside her was trying to talk her into sleeping as long as she wanted.
But no one was lying beside her. The bed felt large and empty. Some nights, she was so tired she hardly noticed George was gone and would be gone God only knew how long. Others, she missed him to the point where tears ran down her face. They did no good. She knew that. Knowing didn't help.
She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and trying without much luck to go to sleep. She closed her eyes, which didn't seem to make the room much darker. But with her eyes closed, as they usually were when she and George made love, it was easier to imagine him on top of her, imagine his familiar weight pressing her down on the mattress, imagine his breath warming the hollow of her shoulder in quick gasps.
Imagination, now, was all she had. She shifted restlessly on the bed. If George were there now, she'd be able to sleep pretty soon. She shifted again. The hem of her nightgown rode up past her knees. She reached down. Instead of straightening it, she hiked it up to her waist.
A few minutes later, she rolled over onto her side. She would sleep now. She knew it. She bit her lip, not caring to remember what she'd just done. But when your man was away for months, maybe for years, what were you sup posed to do? It wasn't as good as the real thing with George (actually, that wasn't quite true — it felt as good, or maybe even better, but it was lonely at the end), but it was better than nothing.
'Better than nothing,' she muttered drowsily. With the war on, wasn't that as much as anybody had any business expecting? Her eyelids slid down over her eyes, of themselves this time. She started to say something else, but only a soft snore passed her lips.
'Masks and goggles!' Captain Orville Wyatt ordered as the bombardment of the Confederate positions east of the Roanoke began. Chester Martin quickly tied the hyposulfite-impregnated mask over his mouth and nose. He breathed in chemical dampness. That was unpleasant, but much less so than breathing in the poison gas that shells were spreading up and down the Rebel lines. He took off his newly issued helmet to strap the goggles over his eyes. He didn't know whether to curse the weight of the thing or bless it for making his brains less likely to be splattered over the landscape.
Beside Martin, Specs Peterson swore. 'They've been usin' this damn gas more since they started loading it into shells than they did when they shot it out of those projector things, and I fucking hate it,' he said. 'I can leave my glasses on and have the chlorine eat my eyes up, or I can take 'em off and fall on my damn face half a dozen times before I get to where the Rebs are at. Hell of a deal, ain't it?'
'I'm in the same boat, Peterson,' Captain Wyatt said, touching the ear-piece to his own spectacles. 'I've been leaving my glasses on. My eyes get better after a couple of days, seems like.'
'Yeah, but you want to be a hero,' Peterson muttered under his breath. 'Me, I just want to get out of this in one piece.'
'Amen,' Chester Martin said. 'All I want to do is live through this damn war and go home and make steel. I used to complain about that job like no body's business. It was hot and it was dirty and it was hard and it was dangerous. And it's still every damn one of those things. And you know what else? Next to what we're doin' now, it's so fine, I'll never grouse again.'
'Nothin' worse than farm work — I always used to say that,' Corporal Paul Andersen put in. 'Only goes to show I didn't know what the hell I was talking about. You do your two years as a conscript and that's not so bad. You figure real soldiering works out the same way. Ha!' His wave took in the trenches, the filth, the vermin, the fear, the foe.
Captain Wyatt said, 'Once upon a time, Virginia used to belong to the USA. Now we're working to take it back. It's not the kind of job anybody wants to do, but it needs doing. If everything goes right, we keep their front trenches. No matter what happens, we bring some prisoners back for interro gation.' He went up and down the trench line, checking to make sure his sol diers' masks and goggles were on securely. He was a long way from being the most good-natured of men, but he fussed over the soldiers in his company like a mother cat with a litter of kittens. As far as Martin was concerned, that made him a good officer.
The bombardment went on and on. Every so often, the Confederates would lob a few shells back at the U.S. lines, but they were taking it a lot harder than they were dishing it out. That suited Martin fine. He'd been on the receiving end of too many barrages to suit him. Giving was better-an un- Christian thought but a true one nonetheless.
Sharp as an axe coming down, the shelling ended. Up and down the trench line, whistles sounded. Martin scrambled up the steps made of sandbags, over the parapet, and toward the Rebel lines.
Pioneers had cut some paths through the barbed wire between the U.S. and Confederate lines, marking them with strips of cloth tied to the wire. Martin liked that and hated it at the same time. It gave him an easier way
