'Bully,' Nellie said, and then a new word she'd started hearing in the coffeehouse: 'Swell. Hal, you're sweet as anything, but will you please get the hell out of here and let me rest?'
'Of course. Of course.' He almost stumbled over his own feet, he went out the door so fast. He paused in the doorway to blow her a kiss, and then he was gone. A moment later, Nellie was gone, too.
They woke her in the middle of the night to nurse the baby again. By then, all the anesthetic had worn off. Not to put too fine a point on it, she felt like hell. The night nurse brought her some aspirin. That was sending a boy to do a man's job. She wondered if she'd be able to go back to sleep once they took Clara away again. She did, which testified less to the tablets' effectiveness than to her own overwhelming exhaustion.
When she woke in the morning, she was ravenous. She would have yelled at Edna for serving a customer such greasy scrambled eggs, overcooked bacon, and cold toast. The coffee they gave her with it might have been brewed from mud. She didn't notice till the whole breakfast was gone. While she was eating, she noticed only that it filled the vast, echoing void in her midsection.
After Clara had had breakfast, too, a nurse escorted Nellie down the hall so she could take a bath. It was the first time she'd had a good look at her body since the baby was born. She didn't care for what she saw, not even a little bit. The skin of her belly hung loose and flabby, having been stretched to accommodate the baby who wasn't in there any more. It would tighten up again; she remembered that from the days following Edna's birth. She'd been a lot younger in those days, though. How much would it tighten now?
If Hal wanted her less after she came home… that wouldn't break her heart. It would, if anything, be a relief. She resolved to lay in a supply of safes. Now that she knew she could catch, she didn't intend to do it again. If Hal didn't care to wear them- She grimaced. There were other things they could do, things that carried no risk. She hated those things, having had to do them for men who laid coins on the nightstands of cheap hotel rooms, but she hated the notion of getting pregnant again even more.
As it had been on the way to the bathtub, her walk on the way back was not only slow but distinctly bowlegged. She remembered that, too. She'd had a baby come through there, all right. Clara was waiting for her when she returned to her bed. Nellie startled herself with a smile. Another baby, no. This one? 'Not so bad,' she said, and took her daughter in her arms.
On the night of November 4, Roger Kimball headed over to Freedom Party headquarters on King Street to get the Congressional election returns as fast as the telegraph brought them into Charleston. He'd tried to get Clarence Potter and Jake Delamotte to come along with him. They'd both begged off.
'If your madman friends do win some seats, I'll want to go out and get drunk, and I don't mean by way of celebration,' Potter had said. 'That being so, I may as well go straight to a saloon now. The company's apt to be better, anyhow.'
'I aim to get drunk no matter what happens,' Jack Delamotte had echoed. He'd gone along with Potter.
Summer soldiers, Kimball thought. They'd been willing enough to think about using Jake Featherston, but hadn't settled down for the long haul of using Featherston's party. A submersible skipper learned patience. Those who didn't learn ended up on the bottom of the ocean.
Smoke filled the Freedom Party offices when Kimball walked in. As soon as the door closed behind him, he held up a gallon jug of whiskey. A raucous cheer went up, and everybody in the place welcomed him like a long-lost brother. His was far from the only restorative there; several men already seemed distinctly elevated. He laughed. Potter and Delamotte could have got drunk here and saved themselves thousands of dollars-not that thousands of dollars meant much any more.
'We're leading in the fourth district up in Virginia!' somebody at one of the bank of telegraph clickers announced, and more cheers rang out. People had yelled louder for Kimball and his whiskey, though.
He poured himself a glass and raised it high. 'Going to Congress!' he shouted, and another burst of happy noise filled the rooms.
It must have spilled out into the street, too, for a gray-uniformed cop poked his head inside to see what the commotion was about. Somebody stuck a cigar in his mouth, as if the Freedom Party had had a baby. Somebody else asked, 'Want a snort, Ed?' Before the policeman could nod or shake his head, he found a glass in his hand. He emptied it in short order.
'First votes in from Alabama-we're winning in the Ninth. That's Birmingham,' a red-faced Freedom Party man said.
Applause rang out, and a couple of Rebel yells with it. People raised glasses and bottles on high and poured down the whiskey as if they'd never see it again. 'Congress is going to be ours!' somebody howled. That set off more applause.
It made Kimball want to laugh or cry or bang his head against the wall. A couple of seats made people think they'd win a majority, which wouldn't, couldn't, come within nine miles of happening. Maybe Clarence Potter was right: maybe the Freedom Party did attract idiots.
From everything Kimball had heard, even Jake Featherston wasn't predicting more than about ten seats' ending up with Freedom Party Representatives in them. That didn't make up a tenth part of the membership of the House. And if the leader of a party wasn't a professional optimist before an election, who was? Kimball had figured the night would be a success if the Freedom Party elected anybody. By that undemanding standard, things already looked to be going well.
'Here we go-First District, South Carolina. That's us. Quiet down, y'all,' somebody at the bank of telegraph tickers called. People did quiet down-a little. The fellow waited for the numbers to come in, then said, 'Damn, that Whig bastard is still a couple thousand votes up on Pinky. We're way out in front of the Radical Liberals, though.'
Kimball looked around to see if Pinky Hollister, the Freedom Party candidate, was in the office. He didn't spot him. That didn't surprise him too much: Hollister actually lived not in Charleston but in Mount Holly, fifteen miles outside of town. He was probably getting the results there.
'Well, we scared the sons of bitches, anyways,' a bald man said loudly. That signaled yet another round of cheers and clapping.
'To hell with scaring the sons of bitches,' Kimball said, even more loudly. 'We scared the sons of bitches up in the USA, but in the end they licked us. What I want us to do, God damn it to hell, is I want us to win'
Another near silence followed that. After a moment, people started to clap and yell and stomp on the floor. 'Freedom!' somebody shouted. The cry filled the room: 'Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!'
Dizziness that had nothing to do with the whiskey he'd drunk or with the tobacco smoke clogging and thickening the air filled Kimball. He'd known something of the same feeling when a torpedo he'd launched slammed into the side of a U.S. warship. Then, though, the pride had been in something he was doing himself. Now he rejoiced in being part of an entity larger than himself, but one whose success he'd had a hand in shaping.
'Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!' The shout went on and on. It was intoxicating, mesmerizing. Kimball howled out the word along with everybody else. While he was yelling, he didn't have to think. All he had to do was feel. The rhythmic cry filled him full.
The door out onto the street opened. Kimball wondered if another cop was going to come in and try to make people quiet down. (He hadn't seen the first policeman leave. There he was, as a matter of fact, drinking like a fish.) A good many people must have had the same thought, for the chant of 'Freedom!' came to a ragged halt.
But it wasn't a cop standing there. It was Anne Colleton. Not everybody in the office recognized her. Not everybody who recognized her knew she'd helped the Freedom Party. Most of the people who followed Jake Featherston were poor, or at best middle-class. One of the reasons they followed him was the vitriol he poured down on the heads of the Confederacy's elite. And here was an obvious member of that elite-Anne could never be anything else-coolly inspecting them, as if they were in the monkey house at the Charleston zoo.
Kimball started to explain who she was and what she'd done for the Party. Before he could get out more than a couple of words, she took matters into her own hands, as was her habit. 'Freedom!' she said crisply.
At that, the chant resumed, louder than ever. Men surged toward Anne, as men had a way of doing whenever she went out in public. If she'd accepted all the drinks they tried to press on her, she would have gone facedown on the floor in short order. After she took one, though, she was vaccinated against taking any more.
Instead of acting like a chunk of iron in the grip of a magnet, Kimball hung back. Anne took her own attractiveness so much for granted, a man who showed he wasn't completely in her grasp often succeeded in piquing her interest by sheer contrariness.
