Papa. He won't get excited, the way Mother would; he has some common sense. And then, after he and we figure out what to say, he can tell Mother for us. He can be a-what's the word I want? — a buffer, that's it.'
'I don't know.' Again, Sophie's shiver had nothing to do with the cold.
'It has to be done. It will be better afterwards,' Flora insisted, as if to someone with a toothache whom she was trying to get to go to the dentist.
Dread drove hope from her sister's face once more. 'It won't be better,' Sophie said quietly. 'It will never be better, not any more.'
Flora feared she was right. Even so, she opened the window that gave access to the fire escape and said, 'Papa, can you come out here for a moment, please?'
Benjamin Hamburger had been standing over the kitchen table, kibitzing that game of chess-or maybe a new one by now-between David and Isaac. A puff of smoke rose from his pipe when he exhaled in surprise. 'All the plots hatched out there, and this is the first time I've been invited,' he remarked as he walked over and stepped out onto the landing.
That mild irony encouraged Flora. She closed the window. Isaac, David, Esther, and her mother all peered out toward the fire escape. They were used to her going out there. They were used to Sophie's going out there every so often. But when the two of them invited their father out, that was new, so it had to be suspect. Flora hadn't thought of that. Keeping the secret wouldn't be easy.
But, having started, she couldn't very well draw back. Her father was looking from her to Sophie and back again. If he wasn't the picture of curiosity, he'd do till a better one came along. Flora hoped Sophie would say what needed saying. When she didn't, Flora sighed and said, 'Papa, we have to tell you something.' Then she stopped. It wasn't easy, not when you got down to it.
Her father looked back and forth again. 'What you have to tell me, it isn't good news,' he said after a moment.
Flora nodded. That was true. While she was trying to find the best way to break the news, Sophie blurted, 'Oh, Papa, I'm going to have a baby!' and burst into tears all over again.
Flora waited for the sky to fall. Sophie looked as if she wanted to sink through the iron floor. Their father stood quiet for a moment. Then, slowly, he said, 'I wondered. There's a look women have in that condition, and you have it. And you're tired all the time, the way your mother was when she carried you. So yes, I wondered.' He sighed. 'I hoped not, but-'
'Will you tell Mother?' Flora asked, breathing more easily on finding his reaction was what she'd hoped it would be.
'She already knows, or wonders, too,' her father said, which made Flora and Sophie both stare. He coughed a couple of times before he went on, 'Remember, Sophie, she does your laundry, and-' He stopped, most abruptly, and coughed some more. After a moment, Flora understood why. Her face heated. Of all the things her father had never expected to do, discussing intimate bodily functions with his daughters had to rank high on the list.
Again, though, without some other intimate bodily functions, the discussion would not have arisen. And if their mother had known, or at least suspected, and kept quiet about it, that said there was more to her than Flora had suspected.
'What am I going to do?' Sophie wailed. 'What are we going to do?'
Benjamin Hamburger stood silent again. 'The best we can,' he answered. 'I don't know what else to say to you right now. The best we can.' Flora had been worried a few minutes before, but now she began to hope that best might be good enough.
Abner Dowling escaped First Army headquarters with the air of a man leaving the scene of a crime. That was how he felt. Providence, Kentucky, was less than ten miles away from the front lines; the pounding of U.S. guns- and answering fire from Confederate artillerywas a never-ending rumble from the east, irksome like a low-grade headache.
Dowling pulled his cap lower over his face so the brim would keep the rain and occasional spatters of snow out of his eyes. General Custer liked being up as close to the front as he could get. In the stables, the grooms kept his saddle ready to be slapped onto his horse at a moment's notice, so he could lead the charge that would tear the Rebel position wide open.
'He doesn't understand,' Dowling muttered, half to himself, half to the God who had so far paid remarkably little attention to any of his petitions. The major went on, still half prayerfully, 'Even a blind man should be able to see that slamming forward in the middle of winter isn't going to get you anywhere.'
One of the things serving under Custer had taught him was the difference between should be able to and can. The general kept feeding men and shells into the fight. Every furlong of bloody advance was hailed as the beginning of a breakthrough, every time the Confederates held seen as their last gasp.
'They've had more gasps than a brothel,' Dowling said. His belly shook as he laughed at his own wit. Custer didn't laugh at anything. No, that wasn't true. When he heard about a squad of Rebs machine-gunned as they foolishly broke cover, he'd chortled till his upper plate fell out of his mouth.
A train chugged into Providence out of the west: another reason the little town was currently First Army headquarters was that the railroad tracks came under Confederate artillery fire when you got a little closer to the front line. Doors opened. Soldiers in green-gray, their uniforms clean and neat, their faces open and naive, spilled out of the cars and formed up into columns under the profane instructions of their non-coms.
Mud spattered their boots and puttees and breeches. The main streets of Providence had been paved with bricks, but the Confederates had fought for the town before finally retreating from it; the U.S. bombardment and, later, Confederate shellfire from the east had torn great gaps in the paving. The soldiers stared down anxiously at the dirt they were picking up, as if expecting the corporals and sergeants to start screaming about that.
Unblooded troops, Dowling thought with a sigh. They conscientiously marched in step as they tramped toward the front. They wouldn't worry about dirt there, not even a little bit. They'd be blooded, and bloodied, all too soon. 'Meat for the meat grinder,' Custer's adjutant said sadly.
Another engine got up steam and moved slowly along a side track till it switched onto the one down which the troop train had come. Then it backed up and coupled to the rear of that train. Meanwhile, as soon as the troops the train had disgorged marched off toward the front, other soldiers began refilling the long chain of cars.
They were meat on which the grinder had already done its work. Some of them, the ones with arms in slings or with bandages on their faces, climbed aboard under their own power, and some of those seemed pretty cheerful. Why not? They'd been wounded, yes, but they were probably going to get better, and they were going back to hospitals well away from the front. Nobody would be shooting at them, not for a while.
But after the ambulatory patients came the great many who had to be carried onto the train in litters. Some of them moaned as their bearers moved them. Some didn't, but lay very still. None of themnone of the walking wounded, either- wore fresh uniforms. Theirs were tattered and dirty, and their faces, even those of the men who seemed chipper, were a study in contrast to the way the raw troops looked. They'd seen the elephant, and he'd stepped on them.
Dowling wished Custer would come and take a look at what soldiers who had been through the grinder were like. But that didn't interest the general. He saw the glory he'd win with victory, not the price he was paying for advances that looked not the least bit victorious to anyone but him.
Down the street about a block and a half from First Army headquarters stood a nondescript brick building that hadn't been too badly shelled. Providence was supposed to be a dry town, but if you needed a drink you could find one. Dowling needed one now.
The Negro behind the bar poured whiskey over ice and pushed the glass across to him. 'Here y'are, suh,' he said.
'Thanks, uh-what's your name, anyhow? Haven't seen you here before.'
'No, suh. I'm new hereabouts. Name's Aurelius, suh.'
'You could do worse. You're named after a great man,' Dowling said. By the bartender's smile, polite but meaningless, he didn't know anything about Marcus Aurelius. Dowling gulped down the whiskey and shoved the glass back for a refill. He didn't know why he'd expected a Southern Negro to know anything about the Roman Empire; from everything he'd seen, the Rebs did everything they could to keep their Negroes ignorant. He asked, 'How do you like it in the United States?'
The bartender gave him a hooded look, of the sort he was used to getting from soldiers who'd been caught
