The look she sent him this time was even more sour. "All right," she said at last. "You don't make things easy, do you?"
"Ma'am, Teddy Roosevelt and George Custer are dead, but you won't find a senior officer who doesn't have strong views about both of them," Dowling said.
Ophelia Clemens nodded again. That did seem to make sense to her. "I promise," she said solemnly. "And in case you're wondering, I don't break promises like that. If I did, no one would trust me when I made them."
Dowling believed her. She was, from everything he'd seen in Winnipeg and here on the train, a straight shooter. She probably had to be, to get ahead in a normally masculine business like reporting. He remembered she'd told him and Custer her father had been a newspaperman, too. Dowling said, "Strictly off the record, I'd bet on Teddy Roosevelt."
"I thought as much," she said. "Custer was nothing but a phony and a blowhard, wasn't he?"
"Strictly off the record," Dowling repeated, "he was a humbug and a blowhard. But if you say he was nothing but a humbug and a blowhard, you're wrong. He always went straight after what he wanted, and he went after it as hard as he could. When he was right-and he was, sometimes-that made him one of the most effective people the world has ever seen. The rest may be true, but don't forget that part of him."
Ophelia Clemens considered that. In the end, a little reluctantly, she nodded. "Yes, I suppose you have something. People need to judge a man by what he did, not just by the way he acted."
"Custer did a lot," Dowling said. "No two ways about that." He might have managed more, he might have managed better, if he hadn't become a self-parody in his later years. But what he had done would be remembered as long as the United States endured.
Dowling told Custer stories all the way from Salt Lake City to Washington, D.C., some on the record, some off. Ophelia Clemens wrote down what she could and either laughed or rolled her eyes at the rest. Dowling was sorry they went their separate ways after the train rolled into Union Station.
He paid his respects to Libbie Custer, who sat beside the general's body where it lay in state in the Capitol. "Hello, Colonel," Custer's widow said. "We had a fine run, Autie and I. I don't know what in heaven's name I'll do without him."
"I think you'll manage," Dowling said, on the whole truthfully. He'd always reckoned Mrs. Custer the brains of the outfit.
"I suppose I could," she said now. "But what's the point? I spent the past sixty-five years taking care of the general. Now that he's gone, what am I supposed to do with myself? I haven't much time left, either, you know."
With no answer for that-how could he contradict an obvious truth? — Dowling murmured, "I'm sorry," and made his escape.
He marched in the mourners' procession behind Custer's flag-draped coffin. The general's funeral was modeled on Teddy Roosevelt's; Dowling found it strangely fitting that the two men, longtime rivals in life, should be equals in death. The only difference he could see was that no foreign dignitaries came to say their farewells to General Custer.
A bespectacled man hoisted a boy onto his shoulders. In the funereal hush, his words carried: "Look, Armstrong. There goes the man you're named for."
Custer's final wishes-or maybe they were Libbie's wishes-were that his remains be buried at Arlington, across the Potomac from Washington in what was now West Virginia. He would spend eternity with Teddy Roosevelt, and Robert E. Lee, presumably, would spend it gnashing his teeth at having not one but two U.S. heroes take their final rest on his old estate.
"Well, to hell with Robert E. Lee," Dowling muttered, and he felt sure both Custer and Roosevelt would have agreed with him.
F lora Blackford had spent years speaking in front of crowds of workers. A women's club in Philadelphia wasn't the same thing. Speaking as First Lady in front of organizations like this wasn't even like speaking in the House of Representatives. There'd been plenty of cut-and-thrust in the House. Here, Flora had to be polite whether she wanted to or not.
"I'm sure you'll agree that we can return to prosperity, and that we will return to prosperity," she told the plump, prosperous women. Even if it was noncontroversial, it was also a campaign speech, with the 193 °Congressional election just around the corner. "The worst is over. From where we are now, we can only go up."
The women applauded. She'd told them what they wanted to hear, what they wanted to believe. She wanted to believe it herself. She'd wanted to believe it ever since the stock market crashed right after her husband became president. She'd wanted to, but believing got harder every day.
"We were the party of prosperity through the 1920s," she insisted. "We don't deserve to be labeled the party of depression."
Even though the women applauded again, Flora knew more than a little depression herself. Her husband had done what only twenty-nine men had done before him-he'd become president. And what had it got him? Only curses and the blame for the worst collapse the United States had known since the bad times after the Confederate States broke away in the War of Secession.
She got through the speech. She'd learned all about getting through speeches despite a heavy heart when she'd had to stand up in Congress after her brother David lost a leg in the Great War. She had to do a good job here. The coming election would be the first chance voters had to say anything about the Blackford administration and the Socialist Party since things went sour.
What would they say when they got the chance? Nothing good, she feared. The Socialists, naturally, had taken credit for everything that had gone right in their first two terms, Upton Sinclair's terms, in Powel House, regardless of whether they'd caused it. Political parties did that. How could they keep from getting the blame for everything that was going wrong now? The Democrats-even the remnants of the Republicans-were certainly doing their best to pin that blame on the party of Marx and Lincoln and Debs.
After the speech, after the coffee and cakes and polite talk that followed, she went back to the presidential residence. Traveling by chauffeured limousine to the Powel House struck her as expensive and wasteful, to say nothing of being the very opposite of egalitarian. But against entrenched presidential custom the Socialists had struggled in vain. The limousine waited for Flora outside the women's club-waited for her and whisked her away.
When she got back to Powel House, she found her husband studying a bill. "Is that the new relief authorization from Congress?" she asked.
Hosea Blackford nodded. "That's what it is," he said. "I'm going to sign it, too-even makework is better than no work at all, and no work at all is what too many people have these days. But it feels like putting a bandage on a man who's just been shot through the heart. How much good is it going to do?"
He'd been president for only a little more than a year and a half. The pressure of the job, though, had aged him more in that time than all the years he'd spent as vice president. His hair was thinner and grayer, his face more wrinkled and more weary-looking; his clothes hung on him like sacks, for he'd lost weight, too.
Would he look this way if things hadn't gone wrong? Flora wondered. Guilt gnawed at her. She'd encouraged Hosea to run for president. If she hadn't, the country would be blaming someone else for its troubles now. Shantytowns inhabited by men who'd lost their homes wouldn't be called Blackfordburghs. Comics wouldn't tell jokes about him on the vaudeville stage and over the wireless.
Then he said, "It's a good thing I've got this job instead of Calvin Coolidge. If he were sitting here, he'd veto this bill and all the others like it. Things would be a lot worse then-I'm sure of it. We have hungry people now-we'd have starving people then. The class struggle would go straight to the streets."
Tears stung her eyes. She said, "I was just thinking I never should have put you through all this."