Panting like a hound, Fabius said, “Reckon you see why Mistuh Jim hired hisself a new waiter. We got more business’n two can handle, let alone one like I was doin’.”
“You one busy nigger ’fore today, sure enough,” Scipio said.
“You done pulled your weight,” Fabius said. “Never had to hustle you, never had to tell you what to do. You said you know about waitin’ on tables, you wasn’t lyin’.”
“No, I weren’t lyin’,” Scipio agreed. “We git our ownselves somethin’ to eat now? Plumb hard settin’ it in front o’ other folk wif so much empty inside o’me.”
“I hear what you say.” Fabius nodded. “I done et ’fore the rush started, but you go on back there now. Mistuh Ogelthorpe don’t feed you good, you take a fryin’ pan and whack him upside the head.”
Ogelthorpe also nodded when Scipio did head back to the cooking area. “You know what you were doin’, sure as hell,” he said.
“Yes, suh,” Scipio said. Compared to the fancy banquets Anne Colleton had put on, this was crude, rough, fast work, but the principles didn’t change.
“Chicken soup in the pot,” Ogelthorpe said. “You want a ham sandwich to go along with it?”
“Thank you, suh. That be mighty fine.” Scipio had carried a lot of ham sandwiches out to hungry workers. He knew they were thick with meat and spears of garlicky pickle and richly daubed with a mustard whose odor tickled his nose. He’d just ladled out a bowl of soup when Ogelthorpe handed him a sandwich of his own.
The first bite told him why people crowded into the restaurant. Miss Anne would have turned up her nose at such a rough delicacy, but she wasn’t here. Scipio was. He took another big bite. With his mouth full, he said, “Suh, I’s gwine like this place jus’ fine.”
“Here you are, ma’am,” the cabbie said to Flora Hamburger as he pulled to a stop at the corner of Eighth and Pine. “Pennsylvania Hospital.”
“Thank you,” she answered, and gave him half a dollar, which included a twenty-cent tip. That was enough to make him leap out of the elderly Duryea and hold the door open for her with a show of subservience that made her most uncomfortable. Socialism, to her, meant equality among all workers, no matter what they did.
But she had no time to instruct him, not now. She hurried past the statue of William Penn toward the front entrance to the hospital, whose cornerstone, she saw, bore an inscription dating from the reign of George II.
A soldier walked past her, smiling and nodding as he did so. By his stick and the rolling gait he had in spite of it, Flora knew he was using an artificial leg. Because of what he’d gone through, she smiled back at him. Without that, she would have ignored him, as she was in the habit of ignoring all the young men who smiled and nodded at her.
She went up the stairs to the second floor. One wing had private rooms; the best doctors gave the patients in them the best care they could. That was an advantage David Hamburger would not have had without his sister’s being in Congress. Using it went against every egalitarian instinct she had, but family instincts were older and deeper.
She almost ran into a nurse coming out of her brother’s room. The woman in the starched gray and white uniform with the red cross embroidered on the breast gave back a pace. “I’m sorry, Congresswoman,” she said. “I didn’t realize you were coming in.”
“It’s all right, Nancy.” Flora knew a lot of the nurses who helped take care of David. She came to the Pennsylvania Hospital as often as she could. She felt bad about not coming more often than she did, but sitting in Congress and handling the endless work that went along with sitting in Congress was a trap with huge jaws full of sharp teeth.
David lay quietly in the bed, his face almost as pale as the white linen of sheets and pillowcases-being at war with the CSA and the British Empire had made cotton scarce and hard to come by. Under the covers, the outline of his body seemed unnaturally small-and so it was, with one leg gone above the knee. But the rest of him seemed shrunken, too, as if losing the leg had made him lose some of his spirit. And if it had, would that be so surprising?
He managed a smile. “Hello, Flora,” he said. He sounded very tired, even now. Flora was glad he sounded any way at all. Loss of blood and an infection had almost killed him. If the infection had been a little worse…How would Flora ever have been able to show her face to her family? She had enough trouble showing her face to her family now. They didn’t condemn her. She condemned herself, which was far harder to bear.
“How are you?” she asked, feeling foolish and useless.
“Not too bad,” he answered, as he did whenever she asked-which meant she couldn’t take the words seriously. He’d lost a lot of flesh; parchmentlike skin stretched tight over the bones of his face. His dark eyes were enormous. Then he did seem to pick up a little energy, a little life, as he asked, “Are the Rebs really and truly trying to surrender?”
Back in New York City, he’d never called them Rebs; he’d picked that up in the trenches. Flora didn’t like it. It made him sound as if he endorsed the war even after what it had done to him. She said, “Pieces of the cease-fire are in place, but Roosevelt won’t give them all of it. He’s still driving in Virginia and the West. I wish he weren’t, but he has the bit between his teeth.”
“Bully,” David said, as if he were Roosevelt. “After everything it’s cost us, we’d better get the most we can out of this war. If we stop too soon, why did we go and fight it in the first place?”
“Because we were mad,” Flora replied, staring at her brother with a new kind of horror: he
David answered in the same language: “How can I say anything else? Do you want me to lose my leg and the country to have nothing to show for it?”
“I never wanted you to lose your leg at all,” Flora said. “I never wanted anyone to lose his leg, or his arm, or his eye, or anything. Even if we win, we have nothing to show for it. We never should have fought at all.”
That dilemma had dogged the Socialist Party from the beginning. Cutting the war short once a treasure of money and an even greater treasure of lives had been spent had proved not just impossible but, worse, unpopular, as the majorities Roosevelt and the Democrats brought in showed.
As David had learned new ways of talking and thinking in the trenches, so Flora had on the floor of Congress. Being without a good answer, she changed the subject: “Have they said anything more about fitting you with an artificial leg? As I was coming in, I saw a man walking very well with one.” She was stretching a point, but not too far.
“They’ll have to wait a while longer,” he said. “The stump’s not healed well enough yet, and the amputation was pretty high.” His mouth twisted. “Maybe I’ll be a one-crutch cripple instead of a two-crutch cripple.” Flora’s expression must have betrayed her, for her brother looked contrite. “It’s better than being dead, believe me.”
Reluctantly, Flora nodded. Her sister’s husband, Yossel Reisen, had been killed in Virginia bare days after he married Sophie; he had a son he’d never seen and never would see now.
A doctor came in. “Congresswoman Hamburger,” he said, polite but not obsequious: he’d dealt with a lot of important people. “If you’ll excuse me-” He advanced on David.
“Maybe you’d better go,” David said to Flora. “The stump looks better than it used to, but it’s still not pretty.”
She was glad of the excuse to leave, and ashamed of herself for being glad. Here was her baby brother-or so she remembered him, at any rate-dreadfully mutilated, and here he was, too, wanting the fighting to go on so others could suffer a like fate or worse. He obviously meant every word he said, but he might as well have started talking Persian for all the sense he made to her.
She went downstairs. A soldier with no legs was moving along in a wheelchair. He was whistling a vaudeville tune of some sort, and seemed happy enough with his world. Flora didn’t understand it. Flora couldn’t understand it. And, had she asked him, she was sure he would have told her the war had to go on, too. She didn’t understand that, either, but she was sure of it.
She went back to her office, but accomplished little that truly resembled work. She’d expected nothing different; seeing David always left her the worse for wear. After a while, realizing she’d read a letter three times
