A middle-aged man in a homburg limped up to her, leaning on a stick. "Good speech," he said. A Soldiers' Circle pin showing a sword through his conscription year in a silver circle sparkled on his lapel.
"Thank you, David," Flora said with a sigh. That her own brother could belong to a reactionary organization like the Soldiers' Circle-and not only belong but wear the pin that showed he was proud to belong-had always dismayed her. The Soldiers' Circle wasn't the Freedom Party, but some of its higher-ups wished it were.
"Good speech," David Hamburger repeated, "but I'm still going to vote for Taft."
"I hadn't expected anything different," she said. David had gone into the Great War a Socialist like the rest of the family. He'd come out a conservative Democrat. He'd also come out with one leg gone above the knee. Flora had no doubt the two were related.
She asked, "And will you vote for Chaim Cohen, too?" Cohen was the latest Democrat to try to unseat her.
Her brother turned red. "No," he said. "I don't like all of your ideas-I don't like most of your ideas-but I know you're honest. And you're family. I don't let family down."
"Being family isn't reason enough to vote for me," she said.
"I think it is." David laughed. "And you may not like my politics, but at least I care about things. Did you see your sisters or your other brother or Mother and Father at your speech?"
Now Flora was the one who had to say, "No." Sophie and Esther and Isaac had their own lives, and lived them. They were proud when she won reelection, but they didn't even come to Socialist Party headquarters any more. As for her parents… "Mother and Father don't get out as much as they did."
"I know. They're getting old." David shook his head. "They've got old. Bis hindert und tzvantzik yuhr."
"Omayn," Flora said automatically, though she know her mother and father wouldn't live to 120 years. People didn't, however much you wished they would. A stab of loss and longing for Hosea pierced her. She was grateful her parents had lived to grow old. So many people didn't, even in the modern world.
"Have you got plans for tonight, or can you go to dinner with your reactionary tailor of a little brother?" David asked.
"I can go," Flora said. "And it's on me. I know I make more money than you do." She knew she made a lot more money than he did, but she didn't want to say so out loud.
With his usual touchy pride, David said, "I'm doing all right." He'd never asked her or anybody else for a dime, so she supposed he was. With a wry grin, though, he went on, "I'll let you buy. Don't think I won't. How does that go? 'From each according to her abilities, to each according to his needs'? Something like that, anyhow."
"I never heard anybody quote-I mean misquote-Marx to figure out who's getting dinner before," Flora said, and she couldn't help laughing. "Since I'm buying, how does Kornblatt's sound?"
"Let's go," her brother said, so the delicatessen must have sounded good.
When they got there, he ordered brisket and a schooner of beer. Flora chose stuffed cabbage, which just wasn't the same in Philadelphia. What she got at Kornblatt's wasn't the same as what she'd helped her mother make when she lived on the Lower East Side all the time, but it came closer.
David attacked the brisket as if he hadn't eaten in weeks. He'd devoured almost all of it before he looked up and said, "You really think we ought to give back what we won in the war? Give it back to those 'Freedom'-yelling mamzrim?"
"If the people who live there don't want to be part of the country, how can we keep them?" Flora asked.
"They were pretty quiet till Featherston started stirring them up," David said, which was true, or at least close to true. He speared his last bite of meat, chewed it, swallowed, and went on, "If we're not doing the same thing with the shvartzers in the CSA, we're missing a hell of a chance."
"I don't know anything about that," Flora said.
"Somebody ought to," her brother said, and somebody probably did. If the United States weren't trying to use Negroes in the Confederate States to make life difficult for the government there, then the War Department was indeed falling down on the job. Flora disliked a lot of the people and policies in the War Department, but she did not think the men at the top there were fools. Over almost a quarter of a century of public life, she'd learned the difference between someone who couldn't do his job and someone who simply disagreed with her about what the job should be.
"Say what you want," she told David, "but we'd just have endless trouble if we tried to keep those states."
David didn't reply with words, not right away. Instead, he rapped his artificial leg with his knuckles. By the sound that came from it, he might almost have been knocking on a door; it was made of wood and canvas and leather and metal. "You know how many men like me there are in the USA-men without legs, men without arms, men without eyes, men without faces? If we don't keep what we won, why did we get shot and blown up and gassed? Answer me that one, and then I'll say good-bye to Kentucky and Houston and Sequoyah."
"There is no answer," Flora said. "Sometimes something looks like a good idea when you do it but turns out not to be later on. Or haven't you ever had that happen?"
"Oh, yes. I've seen that. Who hasn't? But this one is kind of large to treat that way. And what do we do if giving back those states turns out to be that same kind of mistake? Taking them again would get expensive."
"I don't know," Flora said.
"Well, that's honest, anyhow. I said you were," her brother replied. "Does Al Smith know? Does anybody in the whole wide world know?"
"How can anybody know?" Flora asked, as reasonably as she could. "We'll just have to see how things turn out, that's all."
David paused to light a cigarette. He blew smoke up toward the ceiling, then said, "Seems to me that's a better reason for not doing something than for doing it. But I'm no politician, so what do I know?"
"It's going to happen." Flora knew she sounded uncomfortable. She couldn't help it. She went on, "If it makes you that unhappy, the thing to do is to vote for Taft. I think it will work out all right. I hope it does."
"I hope it does, too. But I don't think so. The Confederates on the banks of the Ohio again?" David Hamburger shook his head. "We had to worry about that for years, and then we didn't, and now we will again."
"When they were on the Ohio, they didn't cross it in the last war," Flora said.
"They didn't have barrels then. They didn't have bombers then, either," her brother said.
"Even if they do get it back, they've promised to leave it demilitarized afterwards," Flora said.
"Oh, yes. They've promised." David nodded. "So tell me-how far do you trust Jake Featherston's promises?"
Flora wished he hadn't asked that. She'd deplored Featherston in the U.S. Congress long before he was elected. She liked him no better, trusted him no further, now that he was president of the CSA. As she had on the stump, she said, "He's there. We have to deal with him." Her brother let the words fall flat, which left them sounding much worse than if he'd tried to answer them.
Chester Martin faced Election Day with all the enthusiasm of a man going to a doctor to have a painful boil lanced. His efforts to build a construction workers' union in antilabor Los Angeles had got strong backing from the Socialist Party. How could he forget that? He couldn't. But he couldn't make himself like the upcoming plebiscite, either.
His wife had no doubts. "I don't want another war," Rita said. "I lost my first husband in the last one." She hardly ever spoke of him, but now she went on, "Why should anybody else have to go through what I did? If we don't have to fight, that's good news to me."