But Custer had turned a whole great assault column of barrels loose against the CSA, and Morrell had ridden a barrel at the head of that column. Without the breakthroughs they'd won, the Great War might still be going on.
'Likewise, Colonel. I'm very glad to meet you.' N. Mattoon Thomas was probably lying, too. In the Army, it was an axiom of faith that the Socialists wanted to get rid of everything that had let the USA win the war. That Thomas had forced George Custer into retirement didn't speak well for him, not in Morrell's eyes.
Hunter Liggett said, 'Colonel, I passed your memorandum on the unfortunate situation in Armenia to the assistant secretary here, in the hope that he might send it on to the Department of State.'
'A very perceptive document,' Thomas said. 'I dare hope it will do some good, although one never knows. Very perceptive indeed.' He studied Morrell as an entomologist might study a new species of beetle. 'I should hardly have expected such a thing from a soldier.'
Morrell gave him a smile that was all sharp teeth. 'Sorry, sir. We don't gas grandmothers and burn babies all the time.'
Silence slammed down in General Liggett's office. The head of the General Staff broke it, saying, 'What Colonel Morrell meant, sir, was-'
'I know perfectly well what Colonel Morrell meant,' Thomas said, his voice cold as the middle of a meat locker. 'He resents my party for telling him he may not play with big iron toys forever and tell the American people, 'Hang the expense! We may need these one day.' I wear his resentment as a badge of honor.' He gave Morrell a nod that was almost a bow. 'And what have you got to say about that, Colonel? You seem in an outspoken mood today.'
'I've never said, 'Hang the expense,' sir,' Morrell answered. 'But we may need better barrels one day, and they aren't toys. If your party thinks what we do is play, why not get rid of the Army altogether, and the Navy, too?'
Before Thomas could reply, the telephone on General Liggett's desk rang. He snatched it up. 'Confound it, you know what sort of meeting I'm in,' he snapped, from which Morrell concluded he was talking to Lieutenant Colonel Abell in the outer office. But then Liggett said, 'What? What's that?' Color drained from his face, leaving it corpse- yellow. 'Dear God in heaven,' he whispered, and hung up.
'What is it?' Morrell and N. Mattoon Thomas said the same thing at the same time.
General Liggett stared blindly from one of them to the other. Tears glistened in his eyes. All at once, he looked like an old, old man. 'Teddy Roosevelt is dead,' he said, sounding as stunned and disbelieving as a shell- shocked soldier. 'He was playing a round of golf outside Syracuse, and he fell over, and he didn't get up. Cerebral hemorrhage, they think.'
'Oh, my God.' Again, Morrell and Thomas spoke together. Thomas might be a Socialist, but Theodore Roosevelt had been a mighty force in the United States for more than forty years. No one, regardless of party, could be indifferent to that.
So far Morrell thought, and no further. Then what he'd just heard really hit him. To his amazement and shame and dismay, he began to weep. A moment later, blurrily, he saw tears running down the faces of Hunter Liggett and N. Mattoon Thomas, too.
C ongresswoman Flora Blackford should have been packing for the trip from Philadelphia to Chicago, for the Socialist Party's nominating convention. President Upton Sinclair would surely get his party's nod for a second term: the Socialists' first president, elected almost forty years after the modern Socialist Party began in Chicago, when in the aftermath of the Second Mexican War Abraham Lincoln led the Republican left wing out of one organization and into another.
Yes, the presidential nomination was a foregone conclusion. The vice presidency? Flora smiled to herself. The vice presidency was a forgone conclusion, too. Nothing in the world, as far as she could see, would keep Hosea Blackford, her husband, from getting the nomination again. And then, in 1928… He'd once said he didn't expect to get the nod for the top of the ticket then. Maybe, though, maybe he was wrong.
Such things were what she should have been thinking about-what she had been thinking about up till a few days before. Now she put her most somber clothes into a suitcase. She wouldn't be going to Chicago, not yet, and neither would her husband. She'd always wanted to visit the city where the modern Party was born, and she would-but not yet. Instead, she packed for the short trip down to Washington, D.C., for the funeral of Theodore Roosevelt.
Hosea Blackford came into the bedroom carrying black trousers and a white shirt. As he put them in the suitcase, he shook his head. 'I'm almost as old as Teddy Roosevelt, and I still feel as though my father just died.'
Both of Flora's parents were still alive, but she nodded. 'Everybody in the whole country feels that way, near enough,' she answered. 'We didn't always like him-'
'If we were Socialists, we practically never liked him,' Hosea Blackford said.
Nodding, Flora went on, 'But whether we liked him or not, he made us what we are. He raised us. He raised this whole country. It's no wonder we feel lost without him.'
'No wonder at all,' her husband said over his shoulder as he went back to the hall closet for a black jacket and a black homburg. 'He was always sure he knew what was best for us. He wasn't always right, but he was always sure.' He chuckled. 'Sounds like my pa, I'll tell you that.' His flat Great Plains accent was a world away from her Yiddish-flavored New York City speech.
He went back for a black cravat. Flora closed the suitcase. 'Are we ready to go?' she asked.
'I expect so.' He looked out the window of the flat that had been his alone-across the hall from hers-which they now shared. A motorcar waited in front of the building. Grunting, he picked up the suitcase.
When they went outside, the driver saw him carrying it and rushed to take it from him. Grudgingly, Blackford surrendered it. He gave Flora a wry grin. Ever since she was elected to Congress, she'd wrestled with the problem of the privileges members of government-even Socialist members of government-enjoyed. For all her wrestling, for all her commitment to class struggle, she had yet to come to a conclusion that satisfied her.
She and her husband enjoyed even more privilege on the southbound train: a fancy Pullman car all to themselves, and food brought to them from the diner. When they got to Washington, another motorcar whisked them to the White House.
The flag in front of the famous building flew at half staff. The White House itself looked much as it had before the Great War. Repairs there had been finished almost a year before. The Washington Monument off to the south, however, remained a truncated stub of its former self. Scaffolding surrounded it; it would rise again to its full majestic height.
'If there's ever another war, all this work will go to waste,' Flora said.
'One more reason there'd better not be another war,' her husband answered, and she nodded.
President Upton Sinclair met them in the downstairs entry hall. After shaking hands with his vice president and kissing Flora on the cheek, he said, 'I would sooner have done this in Philadelphia, but Roosevelt left word he wanted the ceremony here, and I couldn't very well say no.'
'Hardly,' Hosea Blackford agreed. 'What does it feel like? — staying in the White House, I mean.'
'Well, look at the place. I feel as though I were living in a museum.' Sinclair waved. He was a tall, slim man in his mid-forties: the youngest man ever elected president. His youthful vigor had served him well in 1920, when Teddy Roosevelt, even then past sixty, could be seen as a man whose time, however great, had passed him by. The president shook his head. 'It's even worse than living in a museum. It's the reproduction of a museum. They didn't get a whole lot out of here before the Confederates bombarded the place in 1914. Frankly, I'd rather be in Philadelphia. The Powel House doesn't make me think I'll get thrown out if I speak above a whisper.'
Flora found herself nodding. 'It is more like the American Museum of Natural History than any place where you'd want to stay, isn't it?'
'That's right.' President Sinclair nodded emphatically.
'Strange that we should be doing the honors for Roosevelt,' Hosea Blackford observed.
'He was a great man,' Flora said. 'A class enemy, but a great man.'
'Easier to admire a foe, especially an able one, after he's gone,' Sinclair said.
Like a lot of men largely self-taught-Abraham Lincoln had been the same-her husband was fond of quoting Shakespeare: ' 'Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus; and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves.'
