horror on his face matched anything in the moving pictures. 'Yes!' he exclaimed. 'Cookie! Want cookie!' He started to cry.
Mary gave him a vanilla wafer. He calmed down. The way he'd wailed, though, said he needed a nap whether he wanted one or not. She didn't ask again, but scooped him up, sat down in the rocking chair, and started reading a story. She kept her tone deliberately bland. After about ten minutes, Alec's eyes sagged shut. She rocked a little longer, then carried him to his crib.
She put him down with care; sometimes his head would bob up if she wasn't gentle. But not today. Mary let out a sigh of relief. Now she had anywhere from half an hour to an hour and a half to herself. Time had been a luxury more precious than ermine, more precious than rubies, ever since Alec was born.
'Coffee!' Mary said, and headed for the kitchen. She'd always liked tea better. Come to that, she still did like tea better. But coffee had one unquestionable advantage: it was stronger. With a baby-now a toddler-in the house, strength counted. She'd long since given up trying to figure out how far behind on sleep she was.
A gently steaming cup beside her, she sat down in the rocking chair again, this time by herself. She unfolded the Rosenfeld Register and prepared to make the most of her free time. The Register was just a weekly, and so didn't bother with much news from abroad, but it did have one foreign story on the front page: CONFEDERATE STATES RESUME CONSCRIPTION Featherston of the CSA said he was doing it because of the continuing national emergency in the country, and blamed rebellious blacks. President Smith of the USA hadn't said anything by the time the Register went to press.
Mary glanced over to the wireless set. She couldn't remember anything Smith had said since the Register went to press, either. She thought about turning on the set and listening to some news, but she didn't have the energy to get up. Whatever the president of the USA said, she'd find out sooner or later.
Regardless of what President Smith said, Mary knew what she thought. If the Confederates weren't getting ready to spit in their northern neighbor's eye, she would have been surprised. She hoped they spat good and hard.
During the war, Canada and the Confederates had been on the same side. She'd wondered about that then; the Confederate States hadn't hung out a lamp of liberty for all the world to see. They still didn't, by all appearances. But, whether they did or not, one ancient rule had still applied: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
These days, Mary would gladly have allied with the Devil against the United States. Only trouble was, Old Scratch appeared uninterested in the deal-or maybe he'd taken up residence in Philadelphia. As for her country, it remained subjugated. She saw no grand uprising on the horizon. The Canadians had tried that once: tried, failed, and seemed to decide not to repeat the experiment.
That left Mary furious. She wanted to be part of something bigger than herself, something more than a rebellion of one. Other people made bombs, too, and made more of them; she read and heard about the bangs every so often, and had the feeling the papers and wireless didn't talk about all of them. The others attacked real soldiers and administrators, too, the way her father had. They didn't limit themselves to a Greek who'd come up to Canada to run a general store.
Mary looked up toward the heavens and asked God, or perhaps her father, Well, what else could I do? Other parts of life had got in the way of her thirst for revenge. One of those other parts was working in the diner across the street. Another was sleeping in the crib. She knew next to nothing about the people who planted other bombs, but she would have bet they didn't have babies to worry about.
Local stories filled most of the Register's pages: local stories and local advertising. The wedding announcements and obituaries were as stylized as the serials that ran ahead of main features on the cinema screen. If you'd seen one, you'd seen them all; only names and dates changed.
As for the ads, many of those were even more formulaic than the announcements. Peter Karamanlides bought space to plug his store every week So did Dr. Shipley, the painless dentist. Mary often wondered why, when they had the only general store and dentist's office for miles around. The same applied to the laundry and the haberdasher and to the newspaper itself. If you didn't use their services, whose would you use?
Advertisements from farmers often followed formulas, too. Those for stud services did: offspring to stand and walk was the stock phrase. If the offspring did, fine; if not, the stud fee had to be refunded. But some of those ads were different. There was no standard format, for instance, for selling a piano.
There was no formula for the little stories speckled through the inner pages of the Rosenfeld Register, either. The editor, no doubt, would have called them 'human interest' pieces. Mary sometimes wondered about the sanity of any human being who was interested in stories about a two-headed calf nursed by two different cows or a man who pulled a boxcar with his teeth-and false teeth, at that.
But she looked at the filler pieces herself. A story about a mother cat nursing an orphaned puppy could make her smile. So could one about two former sweethearts who'd both moved away from the small town where they grew up, then didn't see each other for twenty-five years till they were standing in line at the same Toronto cinema. One had never married; the other was a widower. They'd fallen in love all over again.
Some of those 'human interest' stories made Mary grit her teeth, because propaganda poisoned them. The one about the Yank flier who'd requalified as a fighter pilot after twenty years away from aeroplanes was particularly sappy; she had to resist the impulse to crumple up the Register and throw it across the living room. The last paragraph said, Our bold hero, now also a successful barrister specializing in occupation affairs, is married to the former Laura Secord, a descendant of the 'Paul Revere of Canada,' who had the same name. They have one daughter. Thus we see that the two lands are becoming ever more closely intertwined.
Mary saw nothing of the sort. What she saw was a traitor living high on the hog because she'd married a Yank. And hadn't Laura Secord been one of the people who'd betrayed the uprising in the 1920s? Mary nodded to herself. She was sure she remembered that. She wouldn't forget the name, not when she'd learned it in school before the Yanks started changing what was taught. Had the woman been intertwined with this Yank flier even then? The lewd image was enough to make Mary's cheeks heat.
She'd promised herself vengeance on the people who'd made the uprising fail. She'd promised, and then she hadn't delivered. Her father would have been ashamed of her. Up there in heaven, Arthur McGregor probably was ashamed of her.
'I'll take care of it,' she whispered. 'I'll take care of it if it's the last thing I ever do.'
Then she had to take care of something else, because Alec woke up with a yell: 'Pooping potty!' That was his signal that he needed to use the toilet-or, sometimes, that he'd just gone. Mary rushed in to lift him out of the crib and see which it was this time.
'You're dry!' she exclaimed in glad surprise after a hasty check-he did have accidents in his sleep.
'Dry as a fly,' he answered, echoing one of the things she said to him.
'What a good boy!' Mary took him out of the crib, gave him a kiss, and stood him on a stool in front of the toilet. He did his business, and almost all of it went where it was supposed to go. Mary cleaned up the rest with toilet paper. 'What a good boy!' she said again. Another woman in the block of flats insisted babies didn't turn into people till they were toilet-trained. Mary thought that went too far… most of the time.
His clothes set to rights, Alec went off to play. Mary went off to keep at least one eye on him while he was playing, to make sure he didn't knock over a table or pull a lamp down on his head or try to swallow a big mouthful of dust or stick his finger in an electric socket or do any of the other interesting and creative things small children did in their unending effort not to live to grow up.
This afternoon, he made a beeline for the ashtray. 'Oh, no, you don't!' Mary said, and got there first. He'd tried that before. Once, he'd managed to swallow one of Mort's cigarette butts, as he'd proved by puking it up. Keeping an eye on her son, Mary understood how her mother had come to have gray hair.
Every so often, she cast a longing glance across the street at the diner. When Mort got back, she'd have another pair of eyes in the flat to keep watch on Alec. One toddler left two parents only slightly outnumbered. Dealing with Alec by herself, Mary often felt not just outnumbered but overwhelmed.
But when Mort did come home, he sank down into the rocking chair with a bottle of Moosehead and complained about how busy he'd been all day at the diner. 'Lord, it's good to get off my feet,' he said.
'I have the same feeling when Alec takes a nap,' Mary said pointedly.
Her husband didn't take the point. 'It was a madhouse over there today,' he said. 'We made good money, but they kept us hopping.'
'Alec always keeps me hopping,' Mary said.
