some $1.75, some two dollars even. One of the two-dollar men was black. Nobody raised a fuss.
Money jingling in his pocket, Cincinnatus headed for home with more news for Elizabeth than he could shake a stick at. He went past Conroy’s general store, as he always did when coming home from the riverfront. Conroy had a paper stuck in the bottom left-hand corner of his window. That meant he and Tom Kennedy wanted to see Cincinnatus.
“Well, I’ll be damned if I want to see them,” Cincinnatus muttered. “Paper? What paper? I didn’t see no paper.” He walked right past the general store.
Three eagles glared out at Flora Hamburger from every other wall as she walked to the Socialist Party offices. She glared right back at them. She was sick to death of wartime propaganda. What worried her most was that the Democrats were getting better at what she’d thought of as a Socialist specialty.
Other posters (some with text in Yiddish as well as English; the government didn’t miss a trick) exhorted people to buy the latest series of Victory Bonds, to use less coal than their legal ration (which was, most of the time, not big enough as it was), to take the train as little as they could (which also saved coal), to turn back glass bottles and tin cans, to give waste grease to the War Department through their local butcher shop, to…she lost track of everything. Anyone who tried to do all the things the posters urged him to do would go mad in short order.
But then, the world already seemed to have gone mad.
Here and there, among the eagles and the handsome men in green-gray and the women who had to be their wives or mothers, Socialist Party posters managed to find space. Keeping them up there wasn’t easy. As fast as boys went round with pastepots and brushes, Soldiers’ Circle men followed, tearing down anything that might contradict what TR wanted people to think today.
PEACE AND JUSTICE, one of the Socialist posters said. A SQUARE DEAL FOR THE WORKER, shouted another. A good many copies of that one stayed up; some of the Soldiers’ Circle goons took it for a government- issued poster. Stealing the opposition’s slogan was always a good idea.
Fewer Soldiers’ Circle men prowled the Centre Market than was usually so. And, most uncommonly, none loitered in front of Max Fleischmann’s butcher shop. Fleischmann was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the shop when Flora came up. “Good morning, my dear,” he said with Old World courtliness. He was a Democrat himself, which didn’t keep the government goons from giving him a hard time. With his shop right under Fourteenth Ward Socialist Party headquarters, it was guilt by association in the most literal sense of the words.
“Good morning, Mr. Fleischmann,” Flora answered. “How are you today?”
“Today, not so bad,” the butcher answered. “Last night-” He rolled his eyes. “You’ve seen the ‘turn in old grease’ posters?” After pausing to see if Flora would nod, he went on, “Last night, just as I was closing up shop, one of those Soldiers’ Circle
“
“I can complain to the City Council about that kind of harassment, if you’d like me to,” Flora said.
But the butcher shook his head. “Better not. If one of them does it one time, a
“It shouldn’t be like that,” Flora said. But she’d spent enough time as an activist to know the difference between what should have been and what was. Shaking her head in sad sympathy with Max Fleischmann, she went upstairs.
People were still coming into the Socialist Party offices, which meant the chaos wasn’t so bad as it would be later in the day. She had time to get a glass of tea, pour sugar into it, and catch up on a little paperwork before the telephones started going mad.
“How are you this morning?” Maria Tresca asked.
“I’ve been worse-little Yossel slept through the whole night,” Flora answered. “But I’ve been better, too.” She explained what the Soldiers’ Circle man had done to Max Fleischmann.
Maria was Catholic, but she’d spent enough time among Jews to understand what lard in the butcher shop meant. “It’s an outrage,” she snapped. “And he probably went out to a saloon and got drunk afterwards, laughing about it.”
“Probably just what he did,” Flora agreed. “Anyone who could think of anything so vile, he should walk in front of a train.”
Herman Bruck walked in just then. Flora wished fleetingly that he would walk in front of a train, too. But no, that wasn’t fair. Yes, Herman was a nuisance and wouldn’t leave her in peace. But he’d never yet made her snatch a hatpin out from among the artificial flowers where it lurked, and she didn’t think he ever would. There were nuisances, but then there were nuisances.
“Good morning, Flora,” he said, setting his homburg on the hat tree. “You look pretty today-you must have had a good night’s sleep.”
“Yes, thanks,” she answered shortly. She wasn’t going to tell him about little Yossel. She didn’t encourage him-but then, he needed no encouragement.
He’d got himself some tea and sat down at his desk when a Western Union messenger opened the door to the office. Flora thought about the messenger who’d brought word of little Yossel’s father’s death back to Sophie at the apartment the family shared. She shook her head, annoyed at herself. That wouldn’t happen here. People didn’t live here, however much it sometimes seemed they did.
She accepted the yellow envelope, gave the delivery boy a nickel, and watched him head back down to the street. “Who is it from?” Herman Bruck asked.
“It’s from Philadelphia,” she answered, and tore the envelope open. Her eyes slid rapidly over the words there. She had to read them twice before she believed them.
She had never heard the Socialist Party office go so quiet, not even in the aftermath of the Remembrance Day riots. Myron Zuckerman had been a Socialist stalwart in Congress since before the turn of the century. Come November, his reelection would have been as automatic as the movement of a three-day clock. The Democrats wouldn’t have put up more than a token candidate against him, and the Republicans probably wouldn’t have run anyone at all. All of a sudden, though, everything was different.
“There’s no doubt?” Maria Tresca asked.
“Not unless the telegram is wrong,” Flora answered. Her voice was gentle; she knew Maria hadn’t been doubting so much as hoping. She looked down at the telegram. It blurred, not from changing words but from the tears that filled her eyes.
“That’s-terrible.” Herman Bruck’s voice was shaken, as if he was holding back tears himself. “He was like a father to all of us.”
“What are we going to do?” Three people spoke at the same time. Everyone in the office had to be thinking the same thing.
Maybe because Yossel Reisen’s death had got her used to thinking clearly through shocks, Flora answered before anyone else: “The governor will appoint somebody to fill out the rest of his term.” That brought dismayed exclamations from everyone; Governor MacFarlane was as thoroughgoing a Democrat as anyone this side of TR.
“Almost a year of being represented by someone who does not represent us,” Maria Tresca said bitterly. The syntax might have been imperfect, but the meaning was clear.
“It’s liable to be longer than that,” Flora said. “Whoever he is, he’ll have most of that time to establish himself, too. He may not be so easy to throw out when November comes, either.”
“We’ll have to pick the finest candidate we can to oppose him, whoever he turns out to be,” Herman Bruck said. He stood up and struck a pose, as if to leave no doubt where he thought the finest candidate could be found.
