brand. That mattered.
'He has no shame,' May Cavendish said. 'None.'
'He's a foreman,' Sarah said. 'Of course he has no shame.'
'A foreman at the canning plant where I used to work got one of the girls there in a family way,' Sylvia said. Her friends made sad clucking noises and nodded knowingly. 'I never found out if he married her afterwards or not-I got fired because I had to take care of my kids when they caught the chicken pox.'
She thought Isabella Antonelli would have come and let her know if everything had turned out all right. She hadn't seen the other woman from the canning plant in a long time. That might have meant Isabella was deliriously happy and didn't need her any more. It was more likely to mean the foreman from the canning plant had left her in the lurch. Sylvia wondered if she'd ever find out what had happened. Life didn't tie up every loose end with a neat bow, the way novels did.
'That's just like a man.' Sarah Wyckoff studied her own brawny forearm. 'Nobody's going to trifle with me, not and keep his teeth he won't.'
May sighed. 'Men make it so you don't want to live with them, and they make it so you can't hardly make a living by yourself. You don't make as much as a man would doing the same job, and they don't let you do half the jobs anyhow. You tell me what's fair about that.'
'If they didn't pay us less than they would a man, we wouldn't have these jobs we've got here,' Sylvia said. The other two women nodded.
'And they won't let us vote here in Massachusetts, either,' May said bitterly. 'They've got to pass a law that says we can, and who's got to pass it? Men, that's who. You think more than half the men over at the New State House are going to vote for women? Hasn't happened yet, and I'm not going to hold my breath, either.'
'There are a lot of states where it did happen.' Sylvia's voice was wistful. 'The world didn't end, either.'
'You'd figure it did, the way some men carry on,' Sarah said. 'May's right. They aren't worth the paper they're printed on.'
May ate an apple down to a very skinny core, then took out a pack of cigarettes. She lit one, then blew an elegant smoke ring. 'I like a smoke after I eat,' she said. 'Sort of settles what's in there, if you know what I mean '
'I sure do.' Sylvia got out her own cigarettes. The front of the pack showed soldiers in green-gray marching to victory. Nobody ever showed the mangled corpses of soldiers in green-gray and sailors in Navy blue who didn't live to see victory. Sylvia never would have thought that way if she hadn't lost George. Now, deliberately, she turned the pack over so she wouldn't have to see those pink-cheeked soldiers. 'Thanks for giving me a cigarette that time, May. I like 'em now.'
'Good.' May Cavendish had been about to put her cigarettes back into her handbag. She stopped and aimed the pack at Sarah. 'Want to try'em?'
'No, thanks.' Sarah shook her head. 'I've smoked a couple of times. Never liked it enough to keep up with it. Don't expect I would now, either.'
'Have it your own way,' May said with a shrug. She did put away the pack.
Sylvia smoked her cigarette with determination. She coughed only once. Her chest was getting used to tobacco smoke, too. And May was right: even without the buzz she'd got when first starting the habit, a smoke after dinner or supper was more enjoyable than just about any other time.
George had liked to smoke after they made love. Sylvia's ears heated as she remembered that. She wondered what taking a deep drag while lazy in the afterglow would be like. Probably pretty nice, she thought. Would she ever have the chance to find out?
'There have to be some decent men out there somewhere,' she said suddenly.
'A lot of them are dead,' Sarah said. 'My Martin is.' She sighed and looked down at the grimy wood of the floor. 'I still can't think about him without wanting to puddle up. I don't even know if I'd ever want to be with anybody else.'
'I would, if I could find somebody,' May said. 'But a lot of the men who are decent are settled down with their wives, on account of that's what decent men do, and a lot of men, whether they're decent or not, don't want anything to do with you if you've got children.'
'Oh, there's one thing they want to do with you,' Sylvia said. Both her friends laughed at the obvious truth in that. Sylvia went on, 'But those aren't the decent ones. Maybe I ought to go to church more often, but Sunday's the only chance I have to rest even a little, not that I can get much with two kids in the house.'
'Plenty of men who go to church every livelong Sunday aren't what you'd call decent, either,' May said, sounding as if she was speaking with the voice of experience. 'They don't go there to pray or to listen to the sermon-they go on account of they're on the prowl.'
'That's disgraceful,' Sylvia said.
'Sweetheart, there's a whole lot of disgraceful things that go on in this world,' Sarah Wyckoff said with authority. 'You don't have to look no further than Frank Best if you want to see some.'
'Well, heaven knows that's true,' Sylvia said with a sigh. 'Now that I've told him no, I only hope he leaves me alone and doesn't take it out on me like he said he was liable to.'
'All depends,' said May, who'd been at the galoshes factory longer than Sylvia. 'If he finds somebody who goes along with him before too long, he'll forget about you. If he doesn't, you may not have such a good time for a while.'
Sylvia wondered how she ought to feel about hoping some other young woman succumbed to what Best thought of as his fatal charm. It would make her own life easier, no doubt about that. But would she wish the foreman on anyone else? She couldn't imagine disliking anyone enough to hope she suffered such a fate.
When the whistle announcing the end of the lunch hour blew, she headed without enthusiasm back to her position just behind the galoshes molds. She reminded herself to do the best job she could painting rings on the rubber overshoes, to give Frank Best no reason to bother her.
But would he need an excuse? Here he came. That wasn't blood in his eye. Sylvia recognized the expression. George had often worn it when he'd been away at sea for a long time. Frank Best hadn't been, though she would cheerfully have dropped him off a pier. He wore the expression anyhow. Sylvia sighed. The end of the day seemed years away.
Sometimes, Roger Kimball still wished he'd gone to South America. Every so often, the Charleston papers gave tantalizing bits of news about the fighting that continued down there even though the Great War was over everywhere else. The local enmities had started long before the war, and weren't about to disappear because it did. Everybody but Paraguay and Bolivia needed submarine skippers, and they would have if only they'd had coastlines.
But he'd stayed in Charleston almost two years now, and he'd probably stay a while longer. For one thing, he saw Anne Colleton every so often: not so often as he would have liked, not quite so seldom as to make him give up in dismay. He understood how carefully she rationed their liaisons. It would have infuriated him more if he hadn't admired her, too.
And, for another, he'd found, or thought he'd found, a way to help put the Confederate States back on their feet. Clarence Potter, who'd become a friend instead of a barroom acquaintance, thought he was crazy. 'I can't believe you've gotten yourself sucked into the Freedom Party,' Potter said one evening in Kim-ball's small furnished apartment. 'Those people couldn't start a fire if you spotted them a lit torch and kindling.'
'I'm one of those people, Clarence,' Kimball said, with only a slight edge to his voice, 'and 1*11 thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head.'
'No, you're not,' Potter said. 'Your deplorable taste in politics aside, you're an intelligent man. Believe me, that makes you stand out from the common herd in the Freedom Party. It makes you stand out from Jake Featherston, too.' He held up a hand. 'Don't get me wrong-Featherston's not stupid. But he has no more education than you'd expect, and the only thing he's good at is getting up on the stump and making everyone else as angry as he is.'
Jack Delamotte took a pull at his whiskey. 'I've heard him talk myself now. He even makes me angry, and I'm usually too damn lazy to get mad about anything.'
'We need to get angry, dammit,' Kimball said. 'Too much wrong with this country not to get angry about it. The money's still not worth anything, the damnyankees won't let us have a proper Army and Navy, and half the niggers in the country act like they own it. You can't tell me different. You know damn well it's true.'
