"I won't give him a hard time for not going into the service," Flora said. "The voters know the story." If they didn't know it, she would make damn sure they found out before Election Day. "I want to show them what having somebody who's been in Congress for a while means to them."
"Well, you've got a chance to do that," Bruck said.
"I know," Flora answered unhappily. During the Great War, C.S. bombers hardly ever got as far north as New York City. They did little damage on their handful of raids. It wasn't like that this time around, worse luck.
Most of the Confederates' bombs had fallen on the port-most, but far from all. Some rained down on the city at random. In a place so full of people, the bombardiers must have assumed they would do damage wherever their explosions came down-and who was to say they were wrong?
Flora's district had suffered along with the rest of New York. Bombs had blown up apartment buildings and clothing factories and block after block of shops. Incendiaries had charred holes in the fabric of the city. Rebuilding wouldn't be easy or quick or cheap.
One advantage incumbency gave Flora was her connections down in Philadelphia. If she asked for money to help put her district back together, she was more likely to get it than a Congressman new in his seat.
Her campaign posters got right down to business when they talked about that. DO YOU WANT A NEW KID ON YOUR BLOCK? they asked, and showed Morris Kramer in short pants pulling a wheeled wooden duck on a string. That wasn't even remotely fair, but politics wasn't about being fair. Politics was about getting your guy in and keeping the other side's guy out. Once you'd done that, you could do all the other neat stuff you had in mind. If you stood on the sidelines looking longingly toward the playing field, all the neat ideas in the world weren't worth a dime.
"We want to make this district a better place than it was before the war," Flora said to whoever would listen to her. "Not the same as it used to be, not just as good as it used to be. Better. If we can't do that, we might as well leave the ruins alone, to remind us we shouldn't be dumb enough to fight another war."
Herman Bruck brought a blond kid in a captain's uniform up to her one afternoon at the Socialist Party headquarters. "Flora, I'd like you to meet Alex Swartz," he said.
"Hello, Captain Swartz," Flora said. "What can I do for you?" She had no doubt that the earnest young officer with a roll of papers under one arm was on the up and up. Whether Herman Bruck had an ulterior motive in introducing him…Well, she'd find out about that.
"Very pleased to meet you, ma'am," Alex Swartz said. He had broad, Slavic cheekbones and a narrow chin, giving his face a foxy cast. "I graduated from Columbia with a degree in architecture two weeks before the war started. I'm on leave right now-in a week, I go back down to occupation duty in Mississippi. But I wanted to show you some of the sketches I've made for how things might look once we put them back together."
"I'd like to see," Flora said, not exaggerating too much. If the sketches turned out to be garbage, she could come out with polite nothings, let the captain down easy, and then get on with her reelection campaign and with taking care of the damage in the district.
But they weren't garbage. As he unrolled them one by one and talked about what he had in mind, she saw she wasn't the only one who'd been thinking along those lines. The sketches showed a more spacious, less jam-packed, less hurried place than the one her constituents lived in now.
"This is a lot like what I have in mind," she said. "I particularly like the way you use green space, and the way you don't forget about theaters and libraries. The next question is, how much does it all cost?" That was the one that separated amateurs from professionals. She wouldn't have been surprised if Alex Swartz hadn't worried about it at all.
He had, though. "Here-I've made some estimates," he said, and pulled a couple of folded sheets of paper from his left breast pocket. "Not cheap, but I hope not too outrageous."
"Let's have a look." Flora peered through the bottoms of her bifocals. She found herself nodding. Captain Swartz had it just about right-what he was proposing wasn't cheap, but it wasn't too expensive, either. If you wanted to do things right, you had to spend some money. "Not bad, Captain. Not bad at all."
"Do you think…there's any chance it will happen?" he asked.
"There's some chance that some of it will," she answered. "I can't say any more than that. Nothing the government touches ever ends up looking just the way you thought it would before you started-you need to understand that right from the beginning, or else you start going crazy."
Swartz nodded. "Got you."
"Are you sure? You'd better, or you'll end up very disappointed. Most things end up as compromises, as committee decisions that don't make too many people too unhappy. Some good stuff goes down the drain. So does some crap. Which is which…depends on who's talking a lot of the time."
"Getting some of this built is better than leaving it all as pretty pictures," Captain Swartz insisted. "Pretty pictures are too easy."
"That sounds like the right attitude," Flora said.
"One thing you find out pretty darn quick in the Army-you won't get everything you want," Swartz said.
"It's no different in politics," Flora said. "We don't always have to shoot at people to make that clear, though, which is all to the good."
Captain Swartz looked about sixteen when he grinned. "I bet." Then the grin slipped. "Didn't I hear your son got wounded? How's he doing?"
"He's getting better," Flora answered. "It was a hand wound-nothing life-threatening, thank God." And it kept him out of action while the war finally ran down. Maybe it kept him from stopping something worse. She could hope so, anyway. Hoping so made her feel not quite so bad when she thought about what did happen to Joshua.
"Glad to hear it," the architect said. "I admire you for not keeping him out of the Army or getting him a job counting paper clips in Nevada or something. You would've had the clout to do it-I know that."
"Captain, I'll tell you what isn't even close to a secret. I'm his mother, after all. If he'd let me do something like that, I would have done it in a heartbeat," Flora answered. "But he didn't, and so I didn't. If, God forbid, anything worse would have happened, I don't know how I would have looked at myself in a mirror afterwards."
"Well, I can see that," Alex Swartz said. "But I can see how he feels about it, too. You don't want to think your mother's apron strings kept you out of danger everybody else had to face."
"No, and you don't want to get killed, either." Flora sighed. "He came through it, and he didn't get hurt too bad. That means I don't hate myself…too much." She tapped an unrolled drawing with the nail of her right index finger. "I really think you're on to something here with these sketches. I hope we can make some of them more than sketches, if you know what I mean. The district will be better off if we can."
His eyes glowed. "Thank you!"
"You're welcome," she said. "Remember, I grew up here, in a coldwater flat. We're too crowded. I like the open space that's part of your plan. We need more of it here. We'd be better off if the whole district had more, not just the parts the Confederates bombed."
"Using war as an engine for urban improvement-" Captain Swartz began.
"Is wasteful," Flora finished for him. She didn't know if that was what he was going to say, but it was the truth. She went on, "But if it's the only engine we've got, not using it would be a crime. And the way things are on the Lower East Side, I'm afraid it is."