“Did we not abandon our claim of sovereignty over it when we recognized the CSA?” Flora asked sharply.
“So the Confederates now say,” Lansing returned-he might look dry and dusty, but he was dangerous, tarring her with the brush of the beaten enemy. “The view of the president is that recognition of the CSA was granted under duress and maintained by coercion on the part of the Confederates and their allies.”
“The peace, then, will be as harsh as you can make it,” Flora said.
Congressman Taft looked unhappy, but the question followed logically from others Lansing had answered without hesitation. He answered this one without hesitation, too: “Yes, ma’am. The stronger the peace from our point of view, the better off we shall be and the longer our foes will need to recover from it and menace us again.”
“Wouldn’t we be better off making them our friends?” Flora asked.
“Perhaps we might be, if they showed any interest in friendship,” Lansing said. “The next such interest they do show, however, will be the first.”
Democrats up and down the committee table laughed. Some of them even snickered. The chairman rapped loudly for order. Flora felt her face flush. The question, while heartfelt, had sounded naive. “If we do annex Canada, I expect a large influx of Socialist voters,” she remarked.
“No one, as yet, is speaking of making U.S. states from Canadian provinces, so the question of voter affiliation in them is moot,” Lansing replied. “Again, this differs from our approach to territory formerly under Confederate administration.”
“Of course it does,” Flora said. “Ex-Confederates are likely to make good Democrats, since they’re reactionary to the core.”
Taft’s gavel came down again. “That is out of order, Miss Hamburger.”
“Is it out of order to suggest that the administration will make whatever peace is to its advantage, and will worry about its advantage before it worries about the people’s advantage?” Flora asked. “Perhaps the administration is out of order, and I am not.”
Bang! Bang! Bang! Taft plied the gavel with such vigor, his beefy face turned red. “We shall have no more such outbursts,” he declared.
Flora inclined her head to the committee chairman. “Never ask any questions that might be difficult or inconvenient, is what you mean, isn’t it, Mr. Chairman?” she said. “Never ask any questions where the American people really need to know the answers. Never mind the First Amendment. Is that what you mean? If it is, Teddy Roosevelt is a lot more like Kaiser Bill than he thinks, or than he wants us to think.”
A couple of other Socialist congressmen on the Transportation Committee loudly clapped their hands, and the lone Republican with them. William Howard Taft, however, turned redder stilclass="underline" almost the color of a ripe beet. “It is intolerable that you should impugn the administration and the president in this way,” he boomed.
“Is it tolerable that the administration and the president should impugn the truth?” Flora returned.
She got no answer. What she got was an early adjournment of the committee. Robert Lansing stuffed papers into his briefcase and scurried away, looking back over his shoulder as if he expected dogs to come after him with teeth bared. His alarmed expression gave Flora some satisfaction, but not enough.
She went back to her office and stared in dismay at the mountain of paperwork awaiting her there. She’d wanted to go visit David at the Pennsylvania Hospital, but she wouldn’t have the chance, not today, not if she was going to do the job she’d been elected to do. Duty ran strong in her.
If she couldn’t take the time to visit, she could telephone. When the hospital operator answered, she said, “This is Congresswoman Hamburger. I’d like to speak to one of the doctors seeing my brother.” In this matter, she did not hesitate to use her influence. She could learn from the doctor, but she couldn’t make him do anything he wouldn’t have otherwise except talk to her.
“Please wait, ma’am,” the operator said, as Flora had known she would. Flora impatiently drummed her fingers on the broad oak surface of the desk.
“This is Dr. Hanrahan, Congresswoman,” a man’s voice said at last. Flora brightened; of all David’s doctors, Hanrahan seemed the most open. “We tried fitting a prosthesis on your brother this morning. The stump isn’t ready yet, I’m afraid, but he tolerated the padded end of the artificial leg better than he has. Things are healing in there, no doubt about it. And it was very good to see David upright, if only for a little while.”
Tears stung her eyes. “I wish I could have been there to see that,” she said. “How soon will he be walking? How well will he walk?”
“No way to tell how soon,” Hanrahan said. “I wish we had some better way to fight infection than we do, but his body will have to win that battle. How well…He’s always going to have a rolling motion to his stride, ma’am; that’s the way the knee joint on the prosthesis works. But I hope he’ll be able to get by without even a cane.”
“Alevai,” Flora said, which surely meant nothing to an Irishman. She returned to English: “I hope you’re right. That would help a lot.” She wondered if it would help enough for her brother ever to find a wife.
Maybe Hanrahan was thinking along with her, for he said, “A lot of good men got wounded in this war, Miss Hamburger. People won’t hold injuries against them, not nearly so much as they did before the fighting started. You don’t mind my saying so, there ought to be a law against people who do dumb things like that, anyhow.”
“I am going to write that down, Dr. Hanrahan,” Flora said, and she did. The Democrats, no doubt, would scream that such laws were not the federal government’s job. The only federal laws they liked readied the country for war. Maybe she could make them think about the aftermath of war, too.
After she got off the telephone with the doctor, she attacked the papers on her desk, only to be interrupted by Bertha, her secretary, who said, “Congressman Blackford would like to see you, Miss Hamburger.”
Flora blinked but nodded. Into the inner office came Hosea Blackford, a wide smile on his handsome face. “From everything I hear, Flora, you sent Mr. Lansing home with a tin can tied to his tail. That’s not easy; he’s a clever fellow.”
“Yes, I saw that,” Flora said. “But if he insists on treating everyone else like an idiot, he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.”
“A song one could sing about a great many people, from TR on down,” Blackford said. “But what one could do and what one does are often different. One thing you’ve become since you got here, Flora, is the conscience of the Congress.”
Nobody had ever called her anything like that before. She felt herself flush, and hoped Blackford couldn’t see her blushing. “Thank you very much,” she said at last. “I’m just doing the best I can.” Her smile was wry. “There have been times when you’ve said I was trying to do too much.”
“Not here, not now,” the congressman from Dakota answered. “Maybe I was wrong before, too. But certainly not now. You’ll have given Lansing and Roosevelt both something to think about.” He hesitated, then changed the subject: “Will you let me take you out to supper to celebrate a splendid day of witness grilling?”
Flora hesitated, too. The memory of Herman Bruck’s pestering still grated on her. But Blackford was as smooth as Bruck, back in New York City, wished he were. An invitation to supper was not necessarily an invitation to anything else (though it wasn’t necessarily not such an invitation, either). Well, she always had a hatpin. “All right,” she said.
Blackford ate shad at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, not far from city hall. “I never got seafood in Dakota, but I make up for it here,” he said. “If only oysters were in season.” Flora would never have thought of eating an oyster, no matter how secular she became. She contented herself with a beefsteak that did indeed provoke contentment.