Walk in Hell

of revolutionary consciousness as anyone Flora knew: frighteningly full sometimes.

“Sometimes the uprising comes too soon,” Flora said. “Look at the Confederacy. The proletariat failed there- nothing but banditry left now.”

“Race mystified the white proletarians, splitting the laboring class,” Maria returned. “That won’t happen here in the United States. When the workers rise up against the trusts and the capitalists, they’ll all rise together and overthrow the rotten system.” She sounded messianically certain.

Up on the platform at the front of the hall, the chairman rapped loudly for order. Slowly, Saul Masliansky got some small semblance of it. When it didn’t come fast enough to suit him, he rapped again, this time as if firing a gun. “Be quiet, there!” he shouted, first in Yiddish, then in English. “Do you want to caucus, or do you just want to talk?”

“With this crowd, that’s about even money,” Flora said with a smile.

“You should have accepted somebody besides Masliansky,” Maria Tresca said, not smiling back. “He favors Herman.”

“I know. Everyone who could chair this caucus favors Herman, as far as I can tell,” Flora answered. “But Saul is honest. When he sees what the people want, he won’t thwart them.”

“Ha!” Maria said darkly. “He’s assistant editor for the Daily Forward. He’s going to go right on favoring Bruck, because Herman got everything he knows about Socialism straight out of the newspaper.”

That was so unfair, and at the same time so delicious, that Flora couldn’t help giggling. She’d expected to be too nervous here to see straight, let alone to speak well, and now she wasn’t any more. She hoped the delightful, flighty feeling would last. “He’s honest,” she said again. “I’ve seen him admit he’s wrong. How many others who might have done the job can you say that about?”

“We’re not going to have a caucus if you people can’t keep quiet,” Saul Masliansky said, like a schoolteacher confronting a classroom full of hooligans. He didn’t look like a teacher, or like an editor, either. With an embroidered vest and a high, pale forehead, what he looked like was a professional gambler. He played his trump card with the air of a gambler pulling an ace out of his sleeve, too: “Do you want to hear the candidates? We’ve agreed we’re all going to support whichever one we choose, so picking the better one strikes me as a pretty good idea. Anybody who thinks different can go outside to talk.”

“Anyone who thinks different can geh in drerd,” Maria Tresca said. Flora laughed again. Maria had acquired an excellent, often scurrilous command of Yiddish.

“Mr. Chairman,” somebody called, “I move that, when we pick, we pick by secret ballot.”

“Second!” Herman Bruck shouted.

“You keep quiet,” Masliansky barked at him. “Candidates aren’t members of the caucus. You can’t second. You talk to us, and that’s all. Do I hear a proper second?” He did, a moment later. The motion passed on a voice vote.

Member or not, Flora shouted against it. “If you can’t stand up and be counted at a caucus, when can you?” she demanded.

“You’re right-and you’re wrong,” Maria said. “Herman thinks secrecy will work for him, but I think he’s wrong. More people will go against the bigwigs if they aren’t looking over their shoulders.”

“Maybe,” Flora said.

Saul Masliansky plied his gavel once more. “Will the contenders please come forward?” he said.

“There he goes, selling his paper again,” some wit shouted, and got a laugh.

Flora made her way up to the platform. So did Herman Bruck, in a dark gray suit that shouted respectability at the world. Had Flora been respectable in the same sort of way, she wouldn’t have presumed to seek the Congressional nomination in the first place.

Herman nodded to her. He took her more seriously than he had before her Remembrance Day speech, but not so seriously as he would have taken, say, Saul Masliansky. Masliansky, after all, was a man, not someone he’d pestered to go to the cinema with him.

The chairman said, “We tossed a coin to see who would talk to you when. Our esteemed comrade, Mr. Herman Bruck here, won the toss. He chose to speak first. Herman Bruck!”

“Friends, Myron Zuckerman gave our district the best years of his life,” Bruck said, and won sympathetic applause from everyone who revered Zuckerman’s memory-which meant from everyone in the hall. “I aim to go to Philadelphia to do my best to fill his shoes, to keep the Fourteenth Ward as it has been, at the forefront in the fight against the trusts, and, I hope-alevai-to work with the next president of the United States of America, Senator Eugene V. Debs of Indiana!”

The Socialists’ national convention wouldn’t come until next month, but Debs’ nomination to face TR was a forgone conclusion. Again, Herman Bruck got loud cheers. Flora did her best not to let that worry her. He’d been applauded for invoking Zuckerman’s name, and again for invoking that of Debs. She wondered when he’d say anything about himself that deserved cheers.

As far as she was concerned, he never did. That didn’t mean he didn’t get applause, only that he was breathtakingly conventional in every position he took. He might as well have said, I agree with what all the other Socialists think, half a dozen times and then sat down.

After a while-after what seemed to Flora a very long while-he did sit down. Saul Masliansky said, “And now, Miss Flora Hamburger will tell you why she thinks Herman Bruck has been talking nonsense for the past twenty minutes.” He grinned at her.

It wasn’t quite the introduction she’d expected, but it would serve. She could make it serve, though that meant junking the opening she’d worked out in advance. She decided to take the chance: “Herman Bruck doesn’t talk nonsense. He’s a good Socialist. If you choose him, I will support him-that’s what the caucus is all about. But-”

She took a deep breath. “Herman Bruck is safe. Is being safe what the Socialist Party, the party of revolution, stands for? I don’t think so. He tells you what we’ve done in the past. He tells you what he’ll do in the future if you choose him as your candidate. The one is just the same as the other. If we elect people who will go on doing the same things, are we radicals or are we reactionaries?” The talk with Maria before she’d come up here was paying dividends-an alarmingly capitalistic thought for a would-be Socialist candidate.

“If you want life to go on as it always has, if you don’t want to work for radical change in this country, if you don’t want peace between us and our neighbors, you might as well vote for a Democrat. If you want to let Teddy Roosevelt know we don’t intend to let war mean unending oppression of the proletariat, you’ll choose me.”

She embroidered on that theme for a while, then returned to the other: “As I say, Herman Bruck is a sound man. He is a safe man. I think he’s sound and safe enough to lose this November. If you want someone to run hard and do everything she can to get this seat out of TR’s clutches, you’ll vote for me today and you’ll vote for me again in the fall.”

She stepped back. She thought she got as much applause as Herman Bruck had. More? She couldn’t tell. Saul Masliansky said, “Now we fight it out. We have a waiting room for the two of you. We have two waiting rooms, in fact, if you’d rather-?”

“It’s all right,” Flora said. “We aren’t enemies.” Herman Bruck nodded.

They didn’t say much to each other in the waiting room. Flora sat in a hard chair under one of the electric lamps hanging from the ceiling. Bruck smoked a cigarette, and another, and another. Through the closed door, Flora listened to the shouts from the caucus. She wished she were out there. She and Bruck weren’t members, so she couldn’t be.

After what seemed like forever, the door opened. She and Herman Bruck both sprang to their feet, facing Masliansky with the same eager anxiety fathers in a hospital maternity-ward waiting room showed when the doctor came in. But only one of them would get to keep this baby; like the one in the biblical story of Solomon, it was indivisible.

“Mazeltov, Flora,” the caucus chairman said.

Bruck stubbed out his last cigarette under the heel of his gleaming shoe. “Mazeltov,” he echoed. “Anything I can do, you know I will.” He managed a joke, something rare for him: “That’s true, even though you won’t go out with me.”

“Thank you.” Flora felt light-headed. “Talk like that more often, and I might. But now”-she could hardly