“Stump’s not too sore,” he answered, panting a little. “But it’s harder work than I thought it would be.”
“You haven’t been upright since you lost your leg,” Dr. Hanrahan reminded him. “Come on. Give me another step. You can do it.” David did, and nearly fell. Hanrahan steadied him before Flora could. “You’ve got to swing the prosthesis out, so the knee joint locks and takes your weight when you straighten up on it,” the doctor said. “You don’t learn that, the leg won’t work. That’s why everybody with an amputation above the knee walks like a sailor who hasn’t touched land in a couple of years.”
“But you are walking, David,” Flora said. She dropped from English into Yiddish: “Danken Gott dafahr. Omayn.”
Seeing her brother on his feet-or on one foot of his and one of wood and metal and leather-did a little to ease the guilt that had gnawed at her ever since he was wounded. Nothing would ever do more than a little. After her New York City district sent her to Congress, she’d had the chance to slide David from the trenches to a quiet post behind the lines. He wouldn’t have wanted her to do that, but she could have. She’d put Socialist egalitarianism above family ties…and this was the result.
Her brother shrugged awkwardly. “I only need one foot to operate a sewing-machine treadle. I won’t starve when I go home-and I won’t have to sponge off your Congresswoman’s salary, either.” He gave her a wry grin.
As a U.S. Representative, Flora made $7,500 a year, far more than the rest of her family put together. She didn’t begrudge sharing the money with her parents and brothers and sisters, and she knew David knew she didn’t. He took a brotherly privilege in teasing her.
He also took a brotherly privilege in picking her brains: “What’s the latest on the peace with the Rebs?”
She grimaced for a couple of reasons. For one, he hadn’t called the Confederates by that scornful nickname before he went into the Army. For another…“President Roosevelt is still being very hard and very stubborn. I can understand keeping some of the territory we won from the CSA, but all he’s willing to restore is the stretch of Tennessee south of the Cumberland we took as fighting wound down, and he won’t give that back: he wants to trade it for the little piece of Kentucky the Confederates still hold.”
“Bully for him!” David exclaimed. He had been a good Socialist before he went off to war. Now, a lot of the time, he sounded like a hidebound Democrat of the Roosevelt stripe. That distressed Flora, too.
She went on, “And he’s not going to let them keep any battleships or submersibles or military aeroplanes or barrels, and he’s demanded that they limit their Army to a hundred machine guns.”
“Bully!” This time, her brother and Dr. Hanrahan said it together.
Flora looked from one of them to the other in exasperation. “ And he won’t come a dime below two billion dollars in reparations, all of it to be paid in specie or in steel or oil at 1914 prices. That’s a crushing burden to lay on the proletariat of the Confederate States.”
“I hope it crushes them,” David said savagely. “Knock on wood, they’ll never be able to lift a finger against us again.” Instead of knocking on the door or on a window sill, he used his own artificial leg, which drove home the point.
Flora had given up trying to argue with him. He had his full share of the Hamburger family’s stubbornness. Instead, she turned to Dr. Hanrahan and asked, “How much longer will he have to stay here now that he’s started to get back on his feet?”
“He should be able to leave in about a month, provided he makes good progress and provided the infection in the stump doesn’t decide to flare up again,” Hanrahan said. Flora nodded; she’d seen he gave her straight answers. He finished with a brisk nod: “We’ll shoot for November first, then.”
After giving her brother a careful hug and an enthusiastic kiss, Flora left the Pennsylvania Hospital. Fall was in the air, sure enough; some of the leaves in the trees on the hospital grounds were beginning to turn. She flagged a cab. “The Congressional office building,” she told the driver.
“Yes, ma’am.” He touched the shiny leather brim of his cap, put the Oldsmobile in gear, and went out to do battle with Philadelphia traffic. The traffic won, as it often did. Philadelphia had been the de facto capital of the USA since the Confederates bombarded Washington during the Second Mexican War, more than thirty-five years before. Starting even before then, a great warren of Federal buildings had gone up in the center of town. Getting to them was not always for the faint of heart.
“I have a message for you,” said Flora’s secretary, a plump, middle-aged woman named Bertha. She waved a piece of paper. “Congressman Blackford wants you to call him back.”
“Does he?” Flora said, as neutrally as she could. “All right, I’ll do that. Thank you.” She went into her inner office and closed the door after her. She didn’t turn around to see whether Bertha was smiling behind her back. She hoped not, but she didn’t really want to know.
Dakota, a solidly Socialist state, had been returning Hosea Blackford to the House since Flora was a girl. He was about twice her age now, a senior figure in the Party, even if on the soft side ideologically as far as she was concerned. And he was a widower whose Philadelphia apartment lay right across the hall from hers. He had left no doubt he was interested in her, though he’d never done anything to tempt her into defending herself with a hatpin. To her own surprise, she found herself interested in return, even if he was both a moderate and a gentile.
“Now,” she muttered as she picked up the telephone and waited for the operator to come on the line, “is he calling about Party business or…something else?”
“Hello, Flora,” Blackford said when the call went through. “I just wanted to know if you had seen the newspaper stories about strikes in Ohio and Indiana and Illinois.”
Party business, then. “I’m afraid I haven’t,” Flora said. “I just got back from visiting David.”
“How is he?” Blackford asked.
“They’ve fitted the artificial leg, and he was up on it.” Flora shook her head, though Blackford couldn’t see that. “Even with one leg gone, he talks like a Democrat.” She inked a pen and slid a piece of paper in front of her so she could take notes. “Now tell me about these strikes.”
“From what I’ve read, factory owners are trying to hold down wages by pitting workers against each other,” he said. “With soldiers starting to come home from the war, they have more people wanting jobs than there are jobs to give, so they’re seeing who will work for the lowest pay.”
“That sounds like capitalists,” Flora said with a frown. A moment later, she brightened. “It also sounds like a political opportunity for us. If the factory owners keep doing things like that-and they probably will-they’ll radicalize the workers, and they’ll do a better job of it than we ever could.”
“I happen to know we’ve urged the strikers to stay as peaceful as they can, unless the bosses turn goons loose on them or their state governments or the U.S. government move troops against them,” Blackford said.
“Good.” Flora nodded. Blackford couldn’t see that, either, but she didn’t care. Something he’d said touched off another thought. “Has Roosevelt made any statement about this yet?”
“One of the wire reports quotes him as calling the factory owners a pack of greedy fools,” the Congressman from Dakota said, “but it doesn’t say he’ll do anything to make them stop playing games with people’s lives.”
“That sounds like him,” Flora said. “He talks about a square deal for the workers, but he doesn’t deliver. He delivered a war.”
“He delivered a victory,” Hosea Blackford corrected. “The country was starved for one. The country’s been starved for one for more than fifty years. You may not like that, but you can’t stick your head in the sand and pretend it isn’t so.”