Martin's faith in Socialism was newer, more pragmatic, and neither so deep nor so abiding. He said, 'Maybe so, Al, but there's liable to be a hell of a long time hiding in that sooner or later.'
'The dialectic doesn't say how fast things will happen,' Bauer answered calmly. 'It just says they will happen, and that's enough for me.'
'Maybe for you,' Martin said. 'Me, I'd sort of like to know whether a revolution's coming in my time or whether it's something my great-grandchildren will be waiting for-if I ever have any.' He wasn't so young as he had been. There were times when he wished he'd found a girl as soon as he came home from the war, or maybe even before then. But work in the foundry and work for the Socialist Party left little time for courting, or even thinking about courting.
Back when he'd been a Democrat, he'd thought Socialist girls were loose, without a moral to their name. People said it so often, he'd been sure it was true. Now, rather to his regret, he knew better. A lot of the women in the Socialist Party were married to Socialist men. A lot of the ones who weren't might as well have been married to the Party. That left… slim pickings.
Albert Bauer said, 'Even if we don't get a revolution in the CSA any time soon, we don't want the reactionaries in charge down there. That would turn the class struggle on its head. As far as I'm concerned, keeping the Freedom Party down is reason enough to let reparations go.'
'Well, maybe,' Martin said. He wouldn't say any more than maybe, no matter how his friend tried to argue him around. He was sorry the Confederates had had their president shot. He wouldn't have wished that even on the CSA. But not wishing anything bad on the Confederate States didn't necessarily mean he wished anything good on them, either.
After he got home that evening, the topic came up again around the supper table. He'd expected it would; the newsboys were hawking papers by shouting about reparations. 'What do you think, Chester?' Stephen Douglas Martin asked. 'You were the one who was doing the fighting.'
'Hard to say, Pa,' Martin answered. 'I used to think that, if I ever saw a Reb drowning, I'd toss him an anvil. Now-I just don't know.'
'Can't we let the war be over at last?' Louisa Martin said. 'Haven't both sides been through enough yet? When can we be satisfied?'
'Might as well ask the Mormons out West, Ma,' her daughter Sue said. 'They just took some shots at a couple of Army trucks-did you see that in the newspaper? They don't forget we beat them. You can bet the Confederates haven't forgotten we beat them. So why should we forget it?'
'It goes both ways, though,' Chester said. 'It's not an easy question. If we keep holding the Rebs down, they'll hate us on account of that. They did it to us for years and years, after the War of Secession and then after the Second Mexican War. Do we want them thinking about nothing but paying us back, the way we worked so hard to get even with them and with England and France?'
'You sound like a Socialist, all right,' his father said, laughing. 'Pass the peas, will you, you lousy Red?'
Chester laughed, too, and passed the bowl. 'Talking to you and Mother, I sound like a Socialist. When I talk to people down at the Socialist hall, I sound like a Democrat half the time. I've noticed that before. I'm stuck in the middle, you might say.'
'People who can see both sides of the question usually are,' his mother told him. 'It's not the worst place in the world to be.'
Sue Martin looked curiously at Chester. 'With that Purple Heart in your bedroom, I'd think you'd be the last one to want to let the Confederates up off the floor.'
He shrugged. 'Like Mother says, maybe it's time for the war to be over and done with. Besides, the one thing I don't want to do is have to fight those… so-and-so's again.' Talking about a new war almost made him slip back into the foul language of the trenches. 'If they can settle down because they're not paying reparations any more, that might not be too bad.'
'You make good sense, son,' Stephen Douglas Martin said. His wife nodded. After a moment, so did Sue. Martin's father went on, 'Now, what are the odds that anybody in Congress would know common sense if it flew around Philadelphia in an aeroplane?'
'There's a Socialist majority,' Martin said. But that didn't prove anything, and he knew it. 'We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?'
Out of the blue, Sue asked, 'How do you think that Congresswoman you met would vote? You know the one I mean-the one whose brother got wounded while he was in your squad?'
'Flora Hamburger,' Martin said. 'Yeah, sure, I know who you mean. That's a good question. She usually does what's right. I don't really know. We'll have to keep watching the newspapers, I guess.'
'Flora Hamburger.' Louisa Martin snapped her fingers. 'I know where I saw that name. She's the one who got engaged to the vice president a little while ago.' She looked from her son to her daughter and back again, as if to say getting engaged would satisfy her: catching a vice president was unnecessary.
'Mother,' Sue said in warning tones.
'She's just giving you a rough time,' Martin said. That got his sister and his mother both glaring at him. He forked up some peas, freshly conscious of the dangers peacemakers faced when they stepped between warring factions.
When Chester looked up from the peas, he found his father eyeing him with more than a little amusement. Stephen Douglas Martin had the good sense to stay out of a quarrel he couldn't hope to influence.
Over the next few days, the debate about reparations stayed in the newspapers, along with the reprisals the Army was taking against the perennially rebellious Mormons in Utah. The collision of two aeroplanes carrying mail elbowed both those stories out of the headlines for a little while, but the excitement about the crash died quickly- though not so quickly as the two luckless pilots had.
When Flora Hamburger came out in favor of ending reprisals, the papers carried the news on the front page. 'Conscience of the Congress says yes!' newsboys shouted. 'Reparations repeal seen as likely!'
Martin was less impressed with the announcement than he would have been before Congresswoman Hamburger got engaged to Vice President Blackford. In a way, that made her part of the administration proposing the new policy. But then again, from what he knew of her, she wasn't so easy to influence. Maybe she was speaking her mind after all.
'I think the bill will pass now. I hope it works out for the best, that's all,' Martin said when Sue asked him about it that night over oxtail soup. 'Can't know till it happens.'
'When you do something, you can't know ahead of time what will come of it,' his father said. ^Politicians will tell you they do. but they don't. Sometimes, you just go ahead and do things and see where they lead.'
'That's how the war happened,' Martin said. 'Nobody imagined it would be so bad when it started. When it started, people cheered. But we locked horns with the Rebs and the Canucks, and for the longest time nobody could go forward or back. I hope this doesn't go wrong the same way, that's all.'
'Sometimes being afraid of what could go wrong is a good reason not to do anything,' Stephen Douglas Martin observed.
'You're a Democrat, all right,' Chester said.
'Well, so I am,' his father agreed. 'Upton Sinclair's been in for more than a year now, and I'm switched if I can see how he's set the world on fire.'
Louisa Martin said, 'We already set the world on fire once, not very long ago. Isn't that enough for you, Stephen?'
'Well, maybe it is, when you put it like that,' her husband said. 'If letting the Confederates off the hook means we don't have to fight another war, I suppose I'm for it. But if they start spending the money they would have given us on guns and such, that'll cause trouble like you wouldn't believe.' He raised his mug of beer. 'Here's hoping they've learned their lesson.' He sipped the suds.
'Here's hoping,' Chester Martin echoed. He drank, too. So did his mother and sister.
Roger Kimball was drunk. He'd been drunk a lot of the time since Grady Calkins shot President Wade Hampton V Staring down into his glass of whiskey, he muttered, 'Stupid bastard. Stupid fucking bastard.' Calkins might as well have taken his Tredegar and shot the Freedom Party right between the eyes.
The whiskey, Kimball decided, was staring back at him. He drank it down so it wouldn't do that any more. Any old excuse in a storm, he thought. He poured himself a fresh glass. Maybe this one would be more polite. Whether it was or not, he'd drink it.
