great care. Marie took him with an automatic competence she would never lose, supporting his head in her right hand as she shifted him into the crook of her left arm. 'He is so small,' she murmured, as little Lucien flailed his arms at random. 'When you have not had one in the house for a while, you forget how small a newborn baby is.'
'He's a good-sized fellow,' Leonard O'Doull said. 'Almost eight pounds.'
'He felt like an elephant when I was having him,' Nicole added.
Marie ignored them both. 'So small,' she crooned. 'So small.'
'Here, give him to me,' Lucien said. His wife gave him a dirty look, but passed him the baby after another minute or so. He discovered he still knew how to hold an infant, too. His tiny namesake stared up at him from deep blue eyes. He knew they would get darker over time, but how much darker might prove an interesting question: Leonard O'Doull had green eyes. Galtier murmured, 'What are you thinking, little one?'
'What can he be thinking but, Who is this strange man?' Georges said.
'He could be thinking, Why is this man about to clout his son in the side of the head?' Galtier returned. He and Georges were both laughing. Had Lucien tried clouting his son in the side of the head, he suspected Georges could and would have made him regret it.
O'Doull said, 'He probably is thinking, Who is this strange man?' Before Galtier could do more than raise an eyebrow, his son-in-law went on, 'He is also thinking, What is this strange world? Everything must seem very peculiar to a baby: lights and sounds and smells and touch and all the rest. He never knew any of that before, not where he was.'
Galtier found it indelicate to mention where the baby had been before he was born. By their expressions, so did both his sons. He reminded himself O'Doull was a doctor, and thought differently of such things.
'Let me hold the baby now, Father,' Denise said. As Lucien handed his grandson to her, someone knocked on the front door.
'Who's that?' O'Doull said in some annoyance. Then he laughed at himself. 'Only one way to find out, n 'est- ce pas?' He opened the door.
There stood Bishop Pascal, plump and pink and looking as impressive as a plump, pink man could in miter and cope and cassock. He almost always had a broad smile on his face, and today was no exception. 'Did I hear correctly that this house had a blessed event last night?' he asked, and then, seeing little Lucien in Denise's arms, he pointed. 'Oh, very good. Very good indeed. I see that I did hear correctly.' His eyes twinkled. 'I am glad to know that my sources of information remain good.'
What he meant was, lam glad my spies are on the job. Lucien understood that perfectly well. If O'Doull didn't, it wasn't because Galtier hadn't told him. But Bishop Pascal was not an overt foe to Galtier these days, and had never been a foe to any American: on the contrary. Dr. O'Doull said, 'Come in, your Grace, come in. Yes, Nicole had a little boy last night.' He handed the bishop a cigar.
'How wonderful!' Bishop Pascal exclaimed. He held out his arms. Denise glanced at Galtier, who nodded ever so slightly. She passed the bishop the baby. He proved to know how to hold him. Beaming, he asked, 'And how is he called?'
'Lucien,' Leonard O'Doull answered.
'Ah, excellent!'' No, Bishop Pascal never stopped smiling. He aimed that large mouthful of teeth at Galtier. 'Your name goes on.' Lucien nodded. Bishop Pascal turned back to O'Doull. 'You should make sure that, as this little fellow grows up, he learns your language as well as the tongue of the Republic of Quebec'
He surely meant it as good advice. It probably was good advice. It made Galtier bristle all the same. Leonard O'Doull answered in a mild voice: 'These days, and I expect the rest of my days, the language of the Republic of Quebec is my language.'
'I meant no offense,' Bishop Pascal said quickly. 'With the world as it is today, though, knowing English will help a young man throughout his life.'
That had been true before the war. It was, as the bishop had said, likely to be even more true now, with Quebec so closely involved with the USA. That didn't mean Lucien had to like it worth a damn, though, and he didn't.
Sylvia Enos lit a cigarette. She sucked smoke down into her lungs, held it there, and blew it out again. Then she took another drag. She didn't feel nearly the exhilaration she had when she'd started the habit, but she did enjoy it. When she couldn't smoke, as on the line at the galoshes factory, she got tense, even jittery. Like so many of the other women working there, she'd taken to sneaking smokes in the restroom. The place always smelledlike a saloon.
Then she had to return to the line. Into the can of paint went her brush. She painted a red ring around the top of one of the black rubber overshoes sitting there in front of her, then around the other, working fast so the endless belts of the factory line would not carry them away before she could finish.
Another pair of galoshes, still warm from the mold, appeared before her. She put rings on them, too. Down the line they went. The next girl, armed with knives and shears, trimmed excess rubber from the galoshes. She threw the scraps into a bin under her foot. When the bin filled, the scraps would go back into the hopper along with fresh rubber, to be made into new overshoes. The factory wasted nothing and did everything as cheaply as possible. That was why Sylvia still had a job. Had a man taken it, they would have had to lay out a little more money every week.
After a while, the stink of rubber started to give her a headache. That happened every morning by ten o'clock. It also gave her another reason to wish for a cigarette, or maybe a whole pack. What she'd discovered the first day she lit up got truer the more she smoked: tobacco did blunt her sense of smell.
Frank Best headed her way. She groaned silently; the foreman was carrying an overshoe where she'd missed part of the red line around the top. She knew what he'd say before he said it. That didn't stop him: 'Thought you were going to slip this one by, didn't you?'
'I'm sorry, Mr. Best,' Sylvia said. She didn't want him to have any kind of hold on her. 'Here, give it to me. I'll fix it.'
He held on to it. 'You know, Sylvia, it really is too bad I have to take one out of a pair like this. It holds up the line and delays everybody. I hope I won't have to do it very often from now on.'
He was holding up the line, too, by lecturing her. She didn't say so; she knew a lost cause when she saw one. 'I'll do my best not to let it happen again,' she said. 'Please let me fix it.'
At last, Best did. As if she were Leonardo working on the Mona Lisa, Sylvia completed the red ring. She handed the rubber overshoe back to Best. Please, she thought. Take it back to wherever you spotted it and leave me alone. Lectures were one thing, and bad enough. The rest of his routine was worse.
That didn't keep him from trotting it out. 'You really should pay more attention to what you're doing,' he said. 'I would be disappointed, and I know you would be, too, if you made mistakes like this very often. Work is sometimes hard to find these days.'
'Mr. Best, I don't make mistakes like this very often,' Sylvia answered. 'You've said so yourself.'
He went on as if she hadn't spoken: 'If the people above you are happy with you, though, things are liable to go a lot better for you.'
She knew how he wanted to be above her: on a bed in some cheap hotel room. She found the idea more appalling than appealing. Now that George was gone, she did have times when she missed a man, sometimes very much. Frank Best, though, was emphatically not the man she missed.
Not understanding him seemed the safest course here. 'I'll be extra careful from now on, Mr. Best. I promise I will.'
He gave her a sour look. She wondered if he would make himself plainer. If he said, Sleep with me or lose your job, what would she do? She'd get up and quit, that was what. Maybe her expression said as much, for he turned and walked away, muttering under his breath.
Sylvia got back to work. She took extra care with the rings all morning long. If Best wanted an excuse to bother her, he'd have to invent one; she didn't want to give him any. She felt his eye on her more than once, but pretended not to notice. At last, the lunch whistle blew.
'Was Frank singing his little be-nice-or-else song at you?' Sarah Wyckoff asked, gnawing on a chicken leg probably left over from supper the night before.
'He sure was.' Sylvia took a fierce bite of her own sandwich, which was made from day-old bread and sausage that tasted as if it were about half sawdust. For all Sylvia knew, it was. It cost half as much as a better
