“Mike, I’m gonna tell you two things about that,” Charlie answered. “The first one is, Joe Steele ain’t my guy. I just work out of Washington, so I write a lot about politics.”
“You suck up to those California gangsters, is what you do,” Mike said.
Charlie held up a hand, and held on to his temper. “The other thing is, we came up here to see people we care about-”
“People we love,” Esther broke in.
“People we love.” Charlie nodded. “That’s right. We didn’t come up here to wrangle about politics. That’s not a whole lot of fun. Okay?”
Mike was scowling. Charlie wondered if he’d had a drink or three before he came over here. Stella put her hand on his arm. He started to shake her off, but seemed to think twice. With what looked like a real effort, he made himself nod. “Okay, Charlie. We’ll do it that way. For auld lang syne, and all.”
“For auld lang syne,” Charlie agreed gratefully. He didn’t want to fight with his brother, especially out in public. He was in New York for a good time, not a row.
He got a T-bone. Esther chose a New York strip. Each cut off a bite and passed it to the other. Mike and Stella did the same thing with his sirloin and her veal chop. Marriage had all kinds of advantages. You got to try two different entrees whenever you went out to eat together.
But, except for the food, the dinner wasn’t a success. Charlie sighed once he and Esther got back to their hotel room after good-byes and handshakes and hugs. “Even if we didn’t talk about it, the elephant was still in the room,” he said.
“The elephants are all lying on their backs with their legs in the air,” Esther said.
He made a face at her. “You know what I mean. He thinks I’m a sellout. He might not’ve said it, but he still thinks it. And the way it looks to me is, he’s so buggy about Joe Steele, he doesn’t like anything the man does. And he has done some good, doggone it.”
“Some, maybe,” Esther said judiciously. “But everything comes with a price. And now we’ve got four more years to see how expensive it is.”
* * *
March, people said, came in like a lion. If March did come in like a lion, then January, 20, 1937, was. . what? A Tyrannosaurus rex, maybe. The Twentieth Amendment had moved Inauguration Day forward by six weeks, but it hadn’t moved the weather.
The day was about as nasty as Washington ever got, in fact. Close to a quarter of a million had come into the nation’s capital to watch Joe Steele take the oath of office for his second term, and Charlie was sure just about all of them wished they’d stayed wherever they came from. Several thousand holed up in Union Station and never got any farther. They might have been the lucky ones, or the smart ones.
It was cold. It was wet. It was miserable. It started raining before sunup and it didn’t stop all day. In the morning, some of the rain was freezing and some turned to sleet. By noon, the mercury did climb above freezing: one whole degree above freezing. Shivering in a topcoat under an umbrella, Charlie would sooner have been home in bed. Much sooner.
Joe Steele went ahead with the ceremony as if it were seventy-five degrees and not a cloud in the sky. Joe Steele, from everything Charlie had seen, always went ahead with what he’d already planned to do, no matter what. If people got in his way, he went through them or ran over them. If the weather got in his way, he just ignored it.
That meant Charles Evans Hughes also had to go ahead with the ceremony. The Chief Justice was in his mid-seventies. Watching water drip from the end of his nose and from his beard, Charlie hoped the poor old man wouldn’t come down with pneumonia and die. Hadn’t that happened to somebody, to one of the Presidents? Was it William Henry Harrison? He thought so, but wasn’t sure without looking it up. (Was Joe Steele, on the other hand, hoping Hughes did die of pneumonia so he could name a pliable replacement? Charlie told himself that was the kind of thing Mike would think.)
The President took the oath of office about twenty past twelve. It was raining harder than ever. A Secret Service man held an umbrella over Joe Steele’s head. Another held one above the microphone. Charlie watched that with some apprehension. Wouldn’t you fry yourself using the mike in this weather?
It didn’t bother the President. Or if it did, Joe Steele didn’t show it. Not showing he was bothered was another of his strengths. Not far from Charlie, Lazar Kagan and Stas Mikoian both looked miserable. Even Scriabin might have wanted to be somewhere else, and his pan was almost as dead as his boss’.
“We have finished the first Four Year Plan. We will go on with the second Four Year Plan.” Joe Steele made his program seem as implacable as he was. “The first Plan laid the foundation for moving forward with reconstructing our country. Now we will build on that foundation. The powerful who have become powerful by tricks and by guile have tried to stop me, but they have failed. The people see through their lies. We will move forward, and we will have better days ahead.”
He paused for applause. He got some, but it was tepid and muffled. Almost everybody was too soaked to show much enthusiasm-and the steady rain drowned the sound of clapping.
“I will work without rest to make this great nation more secure both at home and abroad,” the President said. “No wreckers will be allowed to stand in the way of progress or to sabotage it. No foreign foe will be allowed to challenge our strength. We defy Reds and Fascists alike. Neither disease will ever touch these shores!”
Another pause for applause. Some more soggy handclaps. Charlie thought the inaugural address would read well, but nobody except perhaps Gypsy Rose Lee would be able to excite this crowd-and Gypsy Rose Lee would freeze to death if she came out in what she usually almost wore.
Joe Steele plowed ahead. He promised jobs. He promised food. He promised dams and highways and canals. He promised warships on the seas, warplanes in the skies, and tanks on the ground. The microphone didn’t electrocute him. Charlie couldn’t have said why it didn’t, but it didn’t.
And after the speech was done, Joe Steele stood on an open-air reviewing stand while soldiers and tanks and marching bands rolled past. No one held an umbrella over his head there. He had his familiar cloth cap, and that was it. According to the program, bombers were supposed to have flown by overhead, but that bit of business did get canceled. Nobody could have seen the planes through the thick, dark clouds.
When he went back to the White House, it was in the same open car that had brought him to the Mall. Charlie was also in an open car, eight or ten vehicles behind the President’s. People lining the streets waved to him and the other shivering, dripping reporters, thinking they were dignitaries. A couple of them waved back. Charlie didn’t have the energy.
Secret Service men hurried the reporters into the White House. Going past the President’s car, Charlie saw that it had something like a half inch of water sloshing around in the bottom of the passenger compartment. The one he’d ridden in must have, too.
Colored cooks and servants set out hot coffee and tea and snacks. A Negro bartender in a tux waited for business. If he didn’t get rich from the tips the grateful gentlemen of the press gave him, they were even cheaper than they got credit for.
“I may live,” Charlie said after he got outside of a cup of coffee and a shot of bourbon.
“I must get out of these wet clothes and into a dry Martini.” Another newspaper man shamelessly cribbed from a movie script.
Charlie was contemplating another bourbon-as antifreeze, of course-when Lazar Kagan came up to him. The chunky Jew had put on a dry jacket, but his shirt still clung to him under it. “The President would like to talk to you for a few minutes,” he said.