Things were different now. If they went as she hoped, her husband would become president of the United States next March. If they didn't
… No, she wouldn't think about that.
Telegraph sets clicked in their apartments. Phones jangled. Off in one corner, an announcer on a wireless set spewed out results. Flora and Hosea got any news that came in as fast as they would have at Socialist Party headquarters in Philadelphia. But the same longstanding tradition that kept a presidential nominee away from the convention till he'd been declared the candidate bound a presidential hopeful to find out whether he'd won or lost away from the people who'd done the most to help him.
When Flora complained about that, her husband only shrugged. 'It's one of the rules of the game,' he said.
'One of the rules of the game used to be that the Democrats won every four years,' Flora answered. 'We've changed that. Why not the other?'
Hosea Blackford looked surprised. 'I just hadn't thought about it. I did this in 1920. The two of us did it in '24. Maybe we will change things… four years from now.'
She gave him a kiss. 'I like that. You're already starting to think about your second term, are you?'
'I'd better worry about the first one, don't you think?' he said.
The wireless announcer said, 'In Massachusetts, Governor Coolidge continues to pull away. He also leads comfortably in Vermont and Tennessee, and early returns from Kentucky show him with a strong lead there.'
'Oy!' Flora said in dismay.
Her husband took the news much more in stride than she did. 'Massachusetts is Coolidge's home state,' he said. 'We've never done well anywhere in New England. And Kentucky is full of reactionaries. How could it be anything else, when it belonged to the Confederate States till the middle of the war? Wait till we start getting returns from the places where working people live, where they make things.'
She nodded. She knew that as well as he did. Even so… 'I don't like losing anywhere,' she said.
Hosea Blackford smiled. 'That's one of the reasons I'm so glad you're on my side.'
A man at one of the telephones called out, 'Your lead in New York City just went up another twenty thousand votes, Mr. Vice President!' Flora smiled too-then. She finally had something to smile about.
'Vice President Blackford's large lead in New York City looks likely to carry the state for him, in spite of Governor Coolidge's popularity in the upstate regions,' the commentator on the wireless declared. 'Pennsylvania will probably be a closer race. The Socialists are strong in Pittsburgh, but Philadelphia is still a Democratic bastion.'
'We have to have New York,' Flora murmured. 'We have to.' The state had the biggest bloc of electoral votes in the USA: one out of every seven. Pennsylvania came next, but far behind. The Democrats could count as well as the Socialists. They'd campaigned hard in New York. Let them fall short. In Flora's mind, it was more than half a prayer.
'New returns from Ohio,' a telegrapher said. 'You're up in Toledo, up in Cleveland, holding your own in Columbus, not doing so well in Cincinnati.'
'About what we expected,' Blackford said. 'What do the overall figures in the state look like?'
'You're up by… let me see… seventeen thousand,' the man answered after some quick work with pencil and paper.
'Not bad for this early in the night,' Flora said.
'No, not bad,' Hosea Blackford agreed. 'Can't say much more than that without knowing just where all those votes are coming from. But I'd rather be ahead than behind.' Flora nodded.
Little by little, returns began trickling in from farther west. Indiana had long been a Socialist stronghold; Senator Debs had twice lost to Teddy Roosevelt as the Socialist Party's standard-bearer. Hosea Blackford was well ahead there. Republicans remained strong in Illinois, Michigan, and Iowa-those three-cornered races wouldn't be settled till the wee small hours. Like Indiana, Wisconsin was solidly in the Socialist camp.
'We're doing fine,' Flora said, and tried to make herself believe it.
'Maybe I'm glad I'm here after all,' her husband said. 'Looks like it's going to be a long night. This way, I can just go back into the bedroom and sleep whenever I feel like it. And there aren't any reporters yelling at me, either. I wouldn't be able to hear myself think over at Party headquarters.'
'I wish it didn't look like a long night,' Flora said. 'I wish we were sweeping the country, and we could declare victory as soon as the polls closed.'
'Well, I wouldn't mind that myself.' Hosea laughed. 'The Democrats did it for one election after another. Maybe we will, too, somewhere down the line But we haven't got there yet. This one's going to be close.'
Flora's fists tightened till her nails bit into the palms of her hands. It wasn't just that she wanted the Socialists to win Powel House and as many seats in the House and Senate as they could, though she did. She'd always wanted that, ever since becoming a Party activist before the Great War. But it felt secondary now. With her husband in the race, she wanted his triumph with an intensity that amazed her. A win tonight would cap a lifetime of service to the Socialist cause and to the country. Losing…
Again, she refused to think about losing.
Hosea Blackford didn't. 'If I win, we stay in Philadelphia,' he said. 'If I lose, we go home. How would you like living way out West for a while?'
'It's beautiful country,' Flora answered, and then said the best thing she could for it: 'Joshua would like growing up there.' Having said that, she went on, 'It seems so… empty, though, to somebody who's used to New York City or Philadelphia.'
She'd enjoyed spending holidays in Dakota with her husband. The wide open spaces awed her, for a while. But towns and trains and civilization in general seemed a distinct afterthought there. She didn't like that, not at all. To someone who'd grown up on the preposterously overcrowded Lower East Side, so many empty miles of prairie, relieved-if at all-only by a long line of telegraph poles shrinking toward an unbelievably distant horizon, felt more alarming than inspiring.
Someone slammed down a telephone and let out a string of curses that ignored her presence in the room. 'Kansas is going for Coolidge, God damn it,' he said.
That made Flora want to curse, too. Hosea Blackford took it in stride. 'Confederate raiders hit Kansas hard during the war,' he said. 'They don't love Socialists there; they've been Democrats since the Second Mexican War.'
'Well, they can geh kak afen yam,' Flora said.
Her husband chuckled; he knew what that Yiddish unpleasantry meant. 'There's no yam anywhere close to Kansas for them to geh kak afen,' he pointed out.
'I don't care,' Flora said. 'They can do it anyway.'
The new state of Houston, carved from the conquered piece of Texas, went for Calvin Coolidge. So did Montana, which had been a Democratic stronghold ever since Theodore Roosevelt made a hero of himself there during the Second Mexican War. Flora began to worry in earnest. But a little past midnight, Pennsylvania, which had teetered for a long time, fell into her husband's camp-and Pennsylvania's electoral votes made up for a swarm of Montanas. New Jersey had also stayed close till then, and also ended up going Socialist.
'We may make it,' Hosea Blackford said. 'We just may.'
By then, returns from the West were coming in. Colorado had a strong union tradition, and looked like going Socialist again. Idaho fell to Coolidge, and so did Nevada, but Blackford swept the West Coast, including populous California: Hiram Johnson had delivered his state.
Flora was yawning when one of the telephones rang a little past three in the morning. 'Mr. Vice President,' called the man who answered it, and then, in a different, awed, tone of voice, 'Mr. President-elect, it's Governor Coolidge, calling from Massachusetts.'
That woke Flora better than a big cup of black coffee could have done. She kissed her husband before he could go to the telephone. 'Hello, Governor,' he said when he picked up the instrument. 'Thank you very much, sir… That's very generous… Yes, you did give me quite a scare, and I'm not ashamed to admit it… What's that?' He had been smiling and cordial, but now his expression hardened. 'I certainly hope you're wrong, Governor. I think you are… Yes, time will tell. Thank you again. Good night.' He hung up, perhaps more forcefully than he had to.
'What did he say that made you angry?' Flora asked.
'He said maybe he was lucky not to win,' Hosea Blackford answered. 'He said bull markets don't last forever,
