By way of reply, his wife took an envelope out of a cut-glass bowl on a little table near the door and handed it to him. “This is for you,” she said.
“Oh,” he said: a little breath of a word. His was not the sort of household that got a letter from the White House, a letter whose envelope was embossed with the Presidential seal, every day. He eyed it in mock alarm. “They must be drafting me.”
Ruth poked him in the ribs. He wriggled to make her happy, even though he wasn’t ticklish. “Open it, you-you bulvan, you,” she said.
“Bulvan!” Leon said happily. He collected new words the way FDR had collected stamps. He had no idea that one was Yiddish, not English. He didn’t know the difference, or care. He didn’t know it meant ox or jerk. He just liked the sound of it.
Open it Aaron did: carefully, so he could keep the envelope for a souvenir along with whatever it held. The stationery had the Presidential emblem at the top of the sheet, too.
“Read!” Ruth said, as if she were Leon demanding a story.
Aaron read: “ ‘Dear Mr. Finch: It is with great pleasure that I congratulate you for the brave action you took in capturing the Soviet aviator who had bailed out of his bomber after attacking Los Angeles. What you did showed courage, quick wits, and patriotism. Americans can and should take you for an example. Your country owes you a debt of gratitude.’ ”
It wasn’t one of those printed letters made to look as if they were typewritten, with a machine signature likewise impersonating the real McCoy. He could feel the way the typewriter’s strokes indented the paper in the back. The President’s signature, sloppy and smeary, was also the genuine article. The typed-by/author line at the bottom left read rc/HST.
Ruth stared at the letter. “Wow!” she said. “That’s something! Well, so are you.” She kissed him.
He wagged a finger at her. “Don’t tell Roxane about it. She’ll think I’m selling out the workers again.”
“She’s not that bad,” Ruth said.
“Like heck she’s not,” Aaron replied. “But if you hadn’t gone to Marvin’s with her that one afternoon, we never would’ve run into each other. I’ll cut her some slack on account of that.”
“I guess we wouldn’t,” Ruth said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“There ought to be stories where some little thing happens differently and everything that comes afterwards gets changed from the way it really was,” Aaron said thoughtfully. “They might be fun, make you think a little while you’re reading. You know, like if the South won the Civil War.”
“Or if the Nazis won World War II.” Ruth showed she got what he was talking about.
He shook his head anyway. “Nobody’s ever gonna want to read about that, not in a million years. What else could a story like that be about except them killing everybody they didn’t like-everybody who wasn’t German, I mean?”
His father and mother had come to America from a little Romanian town. After the war, his older brother up in Oregon (who had lived through the bomb that fell on Portland) had got a couple of letters from a relative on their mother’s side. He’d sent money once. Then the Iron Curtain thudded down, and letters stopped getting through.
Ruth’s family sprang from a village right on the border between Byelorussia and the Ukraine. No one on this side of the Atlantic had heard a word from the ones who didn’t emigrate, not after Hitler invaded the USSR. Those people had to be dead now.
He didn’t want to think about things like that, especially not when he was holding a letter from Harry Truman. Evidently, Ruth didn’t want to think about things like that, either, because she pointed at the letter and said, “You ought to frame it and hang it in the living room. The envelope, too.”
“Maybe I will,” he answered. He was handy with tools; he could make the frame and cut the glass himself. It would be cheap. That notion led to another, one which made him chuckle.
“What’s so funny?” his wife asked.
“I was just thinking about Roxane and Howard again. They’ll be thrilled when they come over and see it, won’t they?”
“They probably will. They aren’t that bad, Aaron. They want America to be better, that’s all.”
“Huh.” Aaron had heard Marvin say the same thing. Saying it, though, didn’t necessarily make it so. But Aaron didn’t push it to a quarrel. Fighting with your wife struck him as a losing proposition. To Marvin, it was something more like sport, though Aaron didn’t believe for a minute that poor Sarah felt the same way. Instead of going on about Roxane and Howard Bauman, Aaron asked, “What smells good?”
“Short ribs,” Ruth answered. “They should be ready any minute. I’ve got ’em stewing with potatoes and carrots and onions and mushrooms.”
“Sounds wonderful,” Aaron said. One of the reasons it sounded wonderful was that it meant some short ribs had made it to the store. They’d eaten a lot of spaghetti with tomato sauce and macaroni and cheese lately. You didn’t need refrigerated railroad cars to ship that kind of stuff into town. For meat, you did.
He splashed Tabasco sauce on his short ribs. Ruth eyed him, but didn’t say anything about it. He splashed Tabasco or horseradish on everything this side of oranges and lemon-meringue pie. He poured hot sauce onto eggs. When he drank beer from a glass and not from the bottle or can, he sprinkled salt into it. Leon loved that because of the way it made the bubbles rise so spectacularly. Like Tabasco, the salt added flavor. He hadn’t had his taste buds shot off in the war, but all those packs of cigarettes had scorched them into submission.
After supper, Ruth washed and he dried. As she used steel wool on the aluminum pot the ribs had stewed in, she remarked, “I wonder how you got that letter.”
“Beats me,” Aaron said. “It’s pretty nice, though, isn’t it?”
“I mean,” Ruth went on as if he hadn’t spoken, “it was in the local news and everything, but how did it get all the way back to Washington?”
“Well, Truman did come out here to inspect the damage, and-” Aaron broke off. He snapped his fingers as an answer glowed like a shooting star inside his head.
“What?” his wife asked.
“I bet Herschel fixed it,” Aaron said. “He gives the Democrats money all the time. I know he’s met Truman. And his business has been rotten since the bombs fell. So maybe he thought this would make me feel good even if it didn’t put any money in my pocket.”
“If he did, he was right,” Ruth said.
“Yeah. I know.” Aaron smiled cynically. “Roxane would say he was just tricking me so I’d go on working for Blue Front without that extra money. She’d be right, too, I guess. But whether she is or whether she ain’t, I’m still gonna frame that letter!”
“Down below five hundred meters, Comrade Pilot,” Vladimir Zorin said from the Tu-4’s right-hand seat.
“Thanks. I know. Bozhemoi, but I hate night landings!” Boris Gribkov was keeping an eye on the altimeter, too. At the same time, he was peering out through the bomber’s crappy Plexiglas windshield, looking for the landing lights that would let him put the big plane down.
They wouldn’t be much-he knew that. He’d be landing on a stretch of Autobahn northeast of Munich. The Bavarian city lay in Red Army hands. He was still nervous, not only about the makeshift runway but also about the chance of American marauders. Deliberately, he made himself forget about those. If they jumped him now, he was dead. It was that simple. So he didn’t need to worry about them.
From the bombardier’s position, which had the best view in the plane, Alexander Lavrov called, “I see them, Comrade Pilot! Almost dead ahead-a cunt-hair’s worth to starboard.”
“Good job, Sasha! I see ’em, too-now.” The lights were provided by a bunch of soldiers shining flashlights up into the air. It wouldn’t have worked on a cloudy night, but it did here. Even as things were, the lights seemed mighty faint to Boris. Well, it wasn’t as if they wanted their presence so far forward advertised-just the opposite, in fact.