'No. It's even too cold to throw snowballs.'
'How can it be too cold to throw snowballs?' Alec was disbelieving. 'It's not too cold to snow.'
'It's too cold for people to go out there unless they have to.'
'Daddy went out there.'
'He just went across the street to the diner. And he didn't stop to throw snowballs at anybody.' Mary still wondered how Mort had come to be daddy to Alec. Her own father had always been pa to her. She hadn't looked for anything like that to change. But change it had.
'Sometimes Daddy throws snowballs,' Alec said.
Mary couldn't very well deny that. They'd had a memorable snowball fight only a few weeks before. But she said, 'He doesn't do it on days like this. On days like this, he stays inside where it's warm as much as he can.'
Alec went to a window and looked out. 'There's people out there.'
'I know there are people out there. Sometimes you have to go to the general store or to the dentist. Sometimes you have to deliver letters and things, the way the postman does.' The Yanks called him the mailman. Mary refused to. She'd been calling him the postman since she learned to talk, and she wasn't about to change now. She still called the last letter of the alphabet zed, too. She wondered if Alec would after he started going to school. Yanks said zee, which struck her as insufferably… American.
'Do you have to go to the general store, Mommy?' Alec asked hopefully.
'No. I've got everything I need right here,' Mary answered. She wasn't ma, either. She wondered why not. How had the language changed while she wasn't looking? She couldn't have said, but it had.
Cleaning and dusting here took only a fraction of the time they would have back on the farm. She didn't have any livestock to worry about, either. How many times had she gone out to the barn no matter what the weather was like, to feed the animals and collect eggs and muck out? She didn't have a number, but she knew it would have been a large one. Animals needed tending, rain or shine or blizzard. Back on the farm, if she had a moment to relax, it probably meant she'd forgotten something that needed doing. Here, she could sit down and smoke a cigarette and read a book or listen to the wireless without feeling guilty about leaving work undone.
Except for electric lights, the wireless was the best thing about electricity she'd found. And there were replacements of sorts for electric lights: gas lamps, or even the kerosene lanterns her mother still used out on the farm. What could replace the wireless, for immediacy or for entertainment? Nothing she could imagine.
No sooner had that thought crossed her mind, though, than she remembered a story the Rosenfeld Register had run not so long before. People were starting to figure out how to send moving pictures the same way they sent wireless signals. Apparently they'd broadcast pictures of a football game in New York City. But the sets cost more than a thousand dollars. Mary didn't suppose they'd ever come down to where an ordinary person could afford them.
During the middle of the afternoon, she started boiling a beef tongue in a big iron pot. Tongue was one of her favorite foods. Alec liked it, too. So did Mort, but he preferred it with cloves stuck in it. Back on the farm, they'd always done it simply with carrots and onions and potatoes and whatever other vegetables they happened to have. Today she made it the way her husband liked.
He sniffed when he got back from the diner. 'I know what that is!' he exclaimed.
'That's nice,' Mary said with a smile.
'That's very nice,' Mort said. 'We don't serve tongue at the diner. We can't get enough of it, and not enough people would order it if we did.'
'Well, here it is,' Mary told him. 'Sit down, make yourself at home, and it'll be ready in a minute.' The way things turned out, making himself at home kept him from sitting down for a while, because Alec tried to tackle him. Any football referee would have thrown a penalty flag. Mort only laughed.
'And Mommy fixed something up in the kitchen,' Alec said, trying to tell Mort about the day.
'I know she did, sport,' his father answered. 'And now we're going to have it for supper.'
'No, something else. Something this morning,' Alec insisted. Mary wondered if Mort would ask more questions. He didn't. Instead, he got Alec in a half nelson and tickled him with his free hand. Alec squealed and wiggled and kicked. Mary hoped he wouldn't have an accident. That sort of treatment was asking for trouble.
But Alec didn't. He was growing up. He'd start school pretty soon. Part of Mary reacted to that with surprise and horror, and not just because school would teach what the Yanks wanted taught. Where had the time gone? But part of her looked forward to getting him out of the apartment during the day. He really was starting to notice too much of what went on around him.
'Yum,' Mort said when he dug into dinner. Mary liked it, too, although she would have preferred the tender meat without cloves. To her, they distracted from the flavor; they didn't improve it. And Alec made supper exciting when he bit into one and yelled that it was burning his tongue off. A swig of milk helped put out the fire.
The next morning, the sun shone brilliantly. The mercury shot all the way up into the twenties. Mary wrapped the box she'd been working on in brown paper and binder twine. 'Come on,' she told Alec. 'Let's get you dressed up nice and warm. We have to take this to the post office.'
'What is it?'
'Something for your cousins, over in Ontario.'
Getting to the post office took a while, even if it was only three blocks away. Alec threw snowballs and made snow angels and generally had more fun than should have been legal. He had snow all over his front when they went in. It promptly started to melt, because 'Wilf Rokeby always kept his potbellied stove well fed with coal. The smell of his hair oil was part of the smell of the post office. He wore his hair parted right down the middle, the way he had when Mary was a little girl. It had been dark then. It was white now.
'What have we got here?' he asked when Mary set the box on the counter.
'Present for my cousins,' she answered, as she had with Alec.
Like any small-town postmaster, Rokeby knew a lot about what went on in his customers' lives. 'You don't have a lot to do with 'em,' he remarked, 'nor the rest of your family, either. Been years since I sent anything from you folks to Ontario.'
'I got a wire from them,' Mary said. 'Laura had a baby.'
His face softened. 'A baby. That's nice.' He put the package on the scale, then looked at a chart. 'Well, you owe me sixty-one cents for this.' She gave him three quarters, got her change, and took Alec back out into the snow.
Jonathan Moss got up from the table. He put on his overcoat and hat. 'I'm going to head for the office,' he said.
Laura nodded. 'I thought you would.' She gave him a quick, perfunctory kiss. 'Do you really have to go in on a Saturday morning, though?'
'I've got to be in court Monday morning, and I'm not ready,' Moss answered. 'If I don't want to get slaughtered, I'd better know what I'm doing. Say good morning to Dorothy for me when she finally gets up.'
'I will.' A faint smile crossed Laura's face. 'I wonder where she gets it.' Their daughter loved to sleep late, a habit neither of them had.
'Don't know. Wherever it comes from, I wish I could catch it. Well, I'm off.' Out the door Moss went. As soon as he closed it behind him, he dropped his right hand into the coat pocket where he carried his pistol. He didn't do that where Laura could see him. It made her nervous. But not doing it once he was out in the hallway made him nervous.
No one lay in wait there. No one troubled Jonathan on the stairs. No one bothered him on the way to his Ford, which he didn't park right in front of the apartment building. He examined the auto before getting in. It looked all right. Nothing blew up when he started the engine.
Maybe this is all so much moonshine, he thought as he drove to the office. But he couldn't afford to take the chance. What had happened to occupation headquarters in Berlin proved that. He might have laughed off threatening letters. Nobody but an idiot laughed off a bomb.
As usual, he chose a route to the office different from the one he'd used the day before. He didn't park right in front of the building where he worked, either: he used the guarded lot nearby. All the same, the ends of his daily trips to and from work made him nervous. If anyone was gunning for him, those were the places where danger was worst, because he always had to be there. So far, he'd had no trouble. Maybe all his precautions were snapping his fingers to keep the elephants away. Then again, maybe they weren't. The only way to find out was to stop taking
