Read The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century Online
Authors: Harry Turtledove
Tags: #American Fiction - 20th Century, #Science Fiction; American, #Alternative Histories (Fiction), #Science Fiction; English, #20th Century, #Alternative Histories (Fiction); American, #General, #Science Fiction, #Historical Fiction; American, #Fantasy Fiction; American, #American Fiction, #Fiction, #Short Stories
The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century (11 page)
Jalal ad-Din felt sweat trickle into his beard. He knew he had let silence stretch too long. At last, picking his words carefully, he answered, “Magnificent khan, what Niketas says is not true. Aye, the caliph Abd ar-Rahman, peace be unto him, rules all the land of Islam. But he does so by right of conquest and right of descent, just as you rule the Bulgars. Were you, were your people, to become Muslim without warfare, he would have no more claim on you than any brother in Islam has on another.”
He hoped he was right, and that the jurists would not make a liar of him once he got back to Damascus. All the ground here was uncharted: no nation had ever accepted Islam without first coming under the control of the caliphate. Well, he thought, if Telerikh and the Bulgars did convert, that success in itself would ratify anything he did to accomplish it.
If... Telerikh showed no signs of having made up his mind. “I will meet with all of you in four days,” the khan said. He rose, signifying the end of the audience. The rival embassies rose too, and bowed deeply as he stumped between them out of the hall of audience.
“If only it were easy.” Jalal ad-Din sighed.
The leather purse was small but heavy. It hardly clinked as Jalal ad-Din pressed it into Dragomir’s hand. The steward made it disappear. “Tell me, if you would,” Jalal ad-Din said, as casually as if the purse had never existed at all, “how your master is inclined toward the two faiths about which he has been learning.”
“You are not the first person to ask me that question,” Dragomir remarked. He sounded the tiniest bit smug:
I’ve been bribed twice,
Jalal ad-Din translated mentally.
“Was the other person who inquired by any chance Niketas?” the Arab asked.
Telerikh’s steward dipped his head. “Why, yes, now that you mention it.” His ice-blue eyes gave Jalal ad-Din a careful once-over: men who could see past their noses deserved watching.
Smiling, Jalal ad-Din said, “And did you give him the same answer you will give me?”
“Why, certainly, noble sir.” Dragomir sounded as though the idea of doing anything else had never entered his mind. Perhaps it had not: “I told him, as I tell you now, that the mighty khan keeps his own counsel well, and has not revealed to me which faith—if either—he will choose.”
“You are an honest man.” Jalal ad-Din sighed. “Not as helpful as I would have hoped, but honest nonetheless.”
Dragomir bowed. “And you, noble sir, are most generous. Be assured that if I knew more, I would pass it on to you.” Jalal ad-Din nodded, thinking it would be a sorry spectacle indeed if one who served the caliph, the richest, mightiest lord in the world, could not afford a more lavish bribe than a miserable Christian priest.
However lavish the payment, though, it had not bought him what he wanted. He bowed his way out of Telerikh’s palace, spent the morning wandering through Pliska in search of trinkets for his fair-skinned bedmate. Here too he was spending Abd ar-Rahman’s money, so only the finest goldwork interested him.
He went from shop to shop, sometimes pausing to dicker, sometimes not. The rings and necklaces the Bulgar craftsmen displayed were less intricate, less ornate than those that would have fetched highest prices in Damascus, but had a rough vigor of their own. Jalal ad-Din finally chose a thick chain studded with fat garnets and pieces of polished jet.
He tucked the necklace into his robe, sat down to rest outside the jeweler’s shop. The sun blazed down. It was not as high in the sky, not as hot, really, as it would have been in Damascus at the same season, but this was muggy heat, not dry, and seemed worse. Jalal ad-Din felt like a boiled fish. He started to doze.
“
Assalamu aleykum
—peace to you,” someone said. Jalal ad-Din jerked awake, looked up. Niketas stood in front of him. Well, he’d long since gathered that the priest spoke Arabic, though they’d only used Greek between themselves till now.
“
Aleykum assalamu
—and to you, peace,” he replied. He yawned and stretched and started to get to his feet. Niketas took him by the elbow, helped him rise. “Ah, thank you. You are generous to an old man, and one who is no friend of yours.”
“Christ teaches us to love our enemies,” Niketas shrugged. “I try to obey His teachings, as best I can.”
Jalal ad-Din thought that teaching a stupid one—the thing to do with an enemy was to get rid of him. The Christians did not really believe what they said, either; he remembered how they’d fought at Constantinople, even after the walls were breached. But the priest had just been kind—no point in churlishly arguing with him.
Instead, the Arab said, “Allah be praised, day after tomorrow the khan will make his choice known.” He cocked an eyebrow at Niketas. “Dragomir tells me you tried to learn his answer in advance.”
“Which can only mean you did the same.” Niketas laughed drily. “I suspect you learned no more than I did.”
“Only that Dragomir is fond of gold,” Jalal ad-Din admitted.
Niketas laughed again, then grew serious. “How strange, is it not, that the souls of a nation ride on the whim of a man both ignorant and barbarous. God grant that he choose wisely.”
“From God comes all things,” Jalal ad-Din said. The Christian nodded; that much they believed in common. Jalal ad-Din went on, “That shows, I believe, why Telerikh will decide for Islam.”
“No, you are wrong there,” Niketas answered. “He must choose Christ. Surely God will not allow those who worship Him correctly to be penned up in one far corner of the world, and bar them forever from access to whatever folk may lie north and east of Bulgaria.”
Jalal ad-Din started to answer, then stopped and gave his rival a respectful look. As he had already noticed, Niketas’ thought had formidable depth to it. However clever he was, though, the priest who might have been Emperor had to deal with his weakness in the real world. Jalal ad-Din drove that weakness home: “If God loves you so well, why has he permitted us Muslims dominion over so many of you, and why has he let us drive you back and back, even giving over Constantinople, your imperial city, into our hands?”
“Not for your own sake, I’m certain,” Niketas snapped.
“No? Why then?” Jalal ad-Din refused to be nettled by the priest’s tone.
“Because of the multitude of our own sins, I’m sure. Not only was—
is
—Christendom sadly riddled with heresies and false beliefs, even those who believe what is true all too often lead sinful lives. Thus your eruption from the desert, to serve as God’s flail and as punishment for our errors.”
“You have answers to everything—everything but God’s true will. He will show that day after tomorrow, through Telerikh.”
“That He will.” With a stiff little bow, Niketas took his leave. Jalal ad-Din watched him go, wondering if hiring a knifeman would be worthwhile in spite of Telerikh’s warnings. Reluctantly, he decided against it; not here in Pliska, he thought. In Damascus he could have arranged it and never been traced, but he lacked those sorts of connections here. Too bad.
Only when he was almost back to the khan’s palace to give the pleasure girl the trinket did he stop to wonder whether Niketas was thinking about sticking a knife in
him
. Christian priests were supposed to be above such things, but Niketas himself had pointed out what sinners Christians were these days.
Telerikh’s servants summoned Jalal ad-Din and the other Arabs to the audience chamber just before the time for mid-afternoon prayers. Jalal ad-Din did not like having to put off the ritual; it struck him as a bad omen. He tried to stay serene. Voicing the inauspicious thought aloud would only give it power.
The Christians were already in the chamber when the Arabs entered. Jalal ad-Din did not like that either. Catching his eye, Niketas sent him a chilly nod. Theodore only scowled, as he did whenever he had anything to do with Muslims. The monk Paul, though, smiled at Jalal ad-Din as if at a dear friend. That only made him worry more.
Telerikh waited until both delegations stood before him. “I have decided,” he said abruptly. Jalal ad-Din drew in a sudden, sharp breath. From the number of boyars who echoed him, he guessed that not even the khan’s nobles knew his will. Dragomir had not lied, then.
The khan rose from his carven throne, stepped down between the rival embassies. The boyars muttered among themselves; this was not common procedure. Jalal ad-Din’s nails bit into his palms. His heart pounded in his chest till he wondered how long it could endure.
Telerikh turned to face southeast. For a moment, Jalal ad-Din was too keyed up to notice or care. Then the khan sank to his knees, his face turned toward Mecca, toward the Holy City. Again Jalal ad-Din’s heart threatened to burst, this time with joy.
“La illaha ill’Allah; Muhammadun rasulu’llah,”
Telerikh said in a loud, firm voice. “There is no God but Allah; Muhammad is the prophet of Allah.” He repeated the
shahada
twice more, then rose to his feet and bowed to Jalal ad-Din.
“It is accomplished,” the Arab said, fighting back tears. “You are a Muslim now, a fellow in submission to the will of God.”
“Not I alone. We shall all worship the one God and his prophet.” Telerikh turned to his boyars, shouted in the Bulgar tongue. A couple of nobles shouted back. Telerikh jerked his arm toward the doorway, a peremptory gesture of dismissal. The stubborn boyars glumly tramped out. The rest turned toward Mecca and knelt. Telerikh led them in the
shahada
, once, twice, three times. The khan faced Jalal ad-Din once more. “Now we are all Muslims here.”
“God is most great,” the Arab breathed. “Soon, magnificent khan, I vow, many teachers will come from Damascus to instruct you and your people fully in all details of the faith, though what you and your nobles have proclaimed will suffice for your souls until such time as the
ulama
—those learned in religion—may arrive.”
“It is very well,” Telerikh said. Then he seemed to remember that Theodore, Niketas, and Paul were still standing close by him, suddenly alone in a chamber full of the enemies of their faith. He turned to them. “Go back to your Pope in peace, Christian priests. I could not choose your religion, not with heaven as you say it is—and not with the caliph’s armies all along my southern border. Perhaps if Constantinople had not fallen so long ago, my folk would in the end have become Christian. Who can say? But in this world, as it is now, Muslims we must be, and Muslims we shall be.”
“I will pray for you, excellent khan, and for God’s forgiveness of the mistake you made this day,” Paul said gently. Theodore, on the other hand, looked as if he were consigning Telerikh to the hottest pits of hell.
Niketas caught Jalal ad-Din’s eye. The Arab nodded slightly to his defeated foe. More than anyone else in the chamber, the two of them understood how much bigger than Bulgaria was the issue decided here today. Islam would grow and grow, Christendom continue to shrink. Jalal ad-Din had heard that Ethiopia, far to the south of Egypt, had Christian rulers yet. What of it? Ethiopia was so far from the center of affairs as hardly to matter. And the same fate would now befall the isolated Christian countries in the far northwest of the world.
Let them be islands in the Muslim sea, he thought, if that was what their stubbornness dictated. One day,
inshallah,
that sea would wash over every island, and they would read the
Qu’ran
in Rome itself.
He had done his share and more to make that dream real, as a youth helping to capture Constantinople and now in his old age by bringing Bulgaria the true faith. He could return once more to his peaceful retirement in Damascus.
He wondered if Telerikh would let him take along that fair-skinned pleasure girl. He turned to the khan. It couldn’t hurt to ask.
Susan Shwartz has been writing fantasy and science fiction for more than twenty years. She is the author of the extraplanetary adventure
Heritage of Flight
, as well as the
Heirs to Byzantium
alternate world fantasy trilogy, comprised of
Byzantium’s Crown
,
The Woman of Flowers
, and
Queensblade
. The
Heirs to Byzantium
series lays the groundwork for her recent
Shards of Empire
and its sequel
Cross and Crescent
, sword-and-sorcery epics set in the eleventh century at the twilight of the Byzantine empire, which explore the clash of cultures during the First Crusade. Shwartz has collaborated on the
Star Trek
novels
Vulcan’s Forge
and
Vulcan’s Heart
with Josepha Sherman, and on
Empire of Eagles
with Andre Norton, for whom she also compiled the tribute anthology
Moonsinger’s Friends
. She has edited the
Arabesque
anthologies and is a coeditor for the
Sisters in Fantasy
anthology series.
Twenty-five years after the war, and my damned sixth sense about the phone still wakes me up at 3:00 A.M. Just as well. All Margaret needs is for me to snap awake, shout, and jump out of bed, grabbing for my pants and my .45. I don’t have it anymore. She made me sell it as soon as the kids were old enough to poke into the big chest of drawers. I don’t interfere when she makes decisions like that. The way things are going to the dogs, though, I’d feel a whole lot better about her safety if I had the gun.
So I stuck my feet into my slippers—the trench foot still itches—and snuck downstairs. If Margaret woke up, she’d think I was raiding the icebox and go back to sleep. I like being up and alone in my house, kind of guard duty. I don’t do much. I straighten towels or put books back on the shelves—though with Steff gone, that’s not a problem anymore. I don’t like seeing the kids’ rooms so bare.
Barry’s models and football are all lined up, and Margaret dusts them. No problem telling the boys from the girls in our family. Barry’s room is red and navy, and Steff’s is all blue and purply, soft-like, with ruffles and a dressing table she designed herself. Now that she’s at school, we don’t trip on clothes all over the place. And I keep reminding myself we ought to yank out the Princess phone she got when she turned thirteen. Light on the dial’s burned out, anyway.
I wish she hadn’t taken down the crewelwork she did her freshman year. The flower baskets were a whole lot prettier than these “Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came” posters. But that’s better than the picture of that bearded Che-guy. I put my foot down about that thing, I can tell you. Not in
my
house, I said.
I’m proud of our house: two-floor brick Tudor with white walls and gold carpet and a big ticking grandfather’s clock in the hall. Classy taste, my wife has. Who’d have thought she’d look at someone like me?
Besides, dinner was pretty good. Some of that deli rye and that leftover steak...
As the light from the icebox slid across the wall phone it went off, almost like it had been alerted. I grabbed it before it could ring twice.
“Yeah?” I snapped the way I used to in Germany, and my gut froze. My son Barry’s in Saigon. If anything goes wrong, they send a telegram. No. That was last war. Now they send a car. God forbid.
But Steff, my crazy daughter—every time the phone rings at night I’m scared. Maybe she’s got herself arrested in one of her goddamn causes and I’m going to have to bail her out like I did in Chicago. Or it could be worse. Two years ago this month, some kids were in the wrong place at the wrong time up at Kent. Damn shame about them and the National Guard; it’ll take us years to live it down. Hell of a thing to happen in Ohio.
I thought my kid was going to lose her mind about it. The schools shut down all over the place, all that tuition money pissed away, and God only knows what she got into.
Not just God. Margaret. Steff would call up, say “put Mom on,” and Margaret would cry and turn into the phone so I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I think she sent money on the sly-like, so I wouldn’t make an issue of it. You don’t send kids to college so they can get shot at. Steff would say you don’t send anyone anywhere so they can get shot at. She’s just a kid, you know. She doesn’t really believe all that stuff. The kids shouldn’t have been there. Anyone could tell you that.
“Hey, that you, Joey?” The voice on the other end was thick with booze. “It’s Al. Remember me?”
“You son of a bitch, what’re you doing calling this hour of night?” I started to bellow, then piped down. “You wanna wake up my whole damn family?”
“Thought you’d be up, Joey. Like we were... the time when...”
“Yeah... yeah...” Sure I remembered. Too well. So did Al, my old army buddy. It happens from time to time. One of us gets to remembering, gets the booze out—Scotch for me these days now that my practice is finally paying off—then picks up the phone. Margaret calls it “going visiting” and “telephonitis” and only gets mad at the end of the month when the bills come in.
But Al wasn’t from my outfit at the Battle of the Bulge. Weren’t many of them left. Not many had been real close friends to start with: when you run away from home and lie about your age so you can go fight, you’re sort of out of place, soldier or not.
Damn near broke my own dad’s heart; he’d wanted me to follow him into school and law school and partnership. So I did that on GI bills when I got out. Got married and then there was Korea. I went back in, and that’s where I met Al.
“Remember? We’d run out of fuel for the tank and were burning grain alcohol... rather drink torpedo juice, wouldn’t you? And pushing that thing south to the 38th parallel, scared shitless the North Koreans’d get us if the engine fused...”
“Yeah...” How far was Korea from Saigon? My son, the lance corporal, had wangled himself a choice slot as Marine guard. I guess all Margaret’s nagging about posture and manners had paid off. Almost the only time it had with the Bear. God, you know you’d shed blood so your kids don’t turn out as big damn fools as you. I’d of sent Barry through school, any school. But he wanted the service. Not Army, either, but the Marines. Well, Parris Island did what I couldn’t do, and now he was “yes sir”–ing a lot of fancypants like Ambassador Bunker over in Vietnam. At least he wasn’t a chicken or a runaway...
“You there, Joey?” I was staring at the receiver. “I asked you, how’s your family?”
“M’wife’s fine,” I said. How long had it been since Al and I spoke—three years? Five? “So’re the kids. Barry’s in the Marines. My son the corporal. Stationed in Saigon. The Embassy, no less.” I could feel my chest puffing out even though I was tired and it was the middle of the night.
Car lights shone outside. I stiffened. What if... The lights passed. All’s quiet on the Western Front. Thank God.
Al and the beer hooted approvingly.
“And Steffie’s in college. Some damn radical Quaker place. I wanted her to stay in Ohio, be a nurse or a teacher, something practical in case, God forbid, she ever has to work, but my wife wanted her near her own people.”
“She getting plenty of crazy ideas at that school?”
“Steff’s a good kid, Al. Looks like a real lady now.”
What do you expect me to say? That after a year of looking and acting like the big-shot debs my wife admires in the
New York Times
, my Steffie’s decided to hate everything her dad fought for? Sometimes I think she’s majoring in revolution. It wasn’t enough she got arrested in 1968 campaigning for McCarthy—clean up for Gene, they called it. Clean? I never saw a scruffier bunch of kids till I saw the ones she’s taken up with now. Long hair, dirty—and the language? Worse than an army barracks.
She’s got another campaign now. This McGovern. I don’t see what they have against President Nixon or what they see in this McGovern character. Senator from South Dakota, and I tell you, he’s enough to make Mount Rushmore cry. I swear to God, the way these friends of Steff’s love unearthing and spreading nasty stories—this Ellsberg character Steff admires, you’d think he was a hero instead of some nutcase who spilled his guts in a shrink’s office, so help me. Or this My Lai business: things like that happen in war. You just don’t talk about them. Still, what do you expect of a bunch of kids? We made it too easy.
I keep hoping. She’s such a good girl, such a pretty girl; one of these days, she’ll come around and say “Daddy, I was wrong. I’m sorry.”
Never mind that.
Al had got onto the subject of
jo-sans
. Cripes, I hadn’t even thought of some of them for twenty years, being an old married man and all. What if Margaret had walked in? I’d of been dead. Sure, I laughed over old times, but I was relieved when he switched to “who’s doing what” and “who’s died,” and then onto current events. We played armchair general, and I tell you, if the Pentagon would listen to us, we’d win this turkey and have the boys home so damned fast...
About the time we’d agreed that this Kissinger was a slippery so-and-so and that bombing Haiphong was one of the best things we could have done, only we should have done it a whole lot earlier... hell of a way to fight a war, tying General Westmoreland’s hands, I heard footsteps on the stairs.
“Do you have any idea what time it is?” Margaret asked me.
I gestured
he called me
! at the phone, feeling like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar. My wife laughed. “Going visiting, is he? Well, let his wife give him aspirin for the hangover I bet he’s going to have. You have to go to the office tomorrow and...” she paused for emphasis like I was six years old, “you need your sleep.”
She disappeared back up the stairs, sure that I’d follow.
“That was the wife,” I told Al, my old good buddy. “Gotta go. Hey, don’t wait five years to call again. And if you’re ever in town, come on over for dinner!”
God, I hope she hadn’t heard that stuff about the
jo-sans
. Or the dinner invitation. We’d eat cold shoulder and crow, that was for sure.
Fall of ’72, we kept hearing stories. That Harvard guy that Kissinger was meeting with Le Duc Tho in Paris, and he was encouraged, but then they backed down: back and forth, back and forth till you were ready to scream. “Peace is at hand,” he says, and they say it in Hanoi, too. I mean what’s the good of it when the commies and your own leaders agree, and the army doesn’t? No news out of Radio Hanoi can be any good. And the boys are still coming home in bags, dammit.
Meanwhile, as I hear from Margaret, Stephanie is doing well in her classes. The ones she attends in between campaigning for this McGovern. At first I thought he was just a nuisance candidate. You know, like Stassen runs each time? Then, when they unearthed that stuff about Eagleton, and they changed VP candidates, I thought he was dead in the water for sure. But Shriver’s been a good choice: drawn in even more of the young, responsible folk and the people who respect what he did in the Peace Corps. But the real reason McGovern’s moving way up in the polls is that more and more people get sick and tired of the war. We just don’t believe we can win it, anymore. And that hurts.
I get letters from Barry, too. He’s good at that. Writes each one of us. I think he’s having a good time in Saigon. I hope he’s careful.
You
know what I mean.
Barry says he’s got a lot of respect for Ambassador Bunker. Says he was cool as any Marine during Tet, when the VC attacked the Embassy. Says the Ambassador’s spoken to him a couple of times, asked him what he wants to do when he gets out of the service. Imagine: My boy, talking to a big shot like that.
And Margaret sent Stephanie a plane ticket home in time for the election. Sure, she could vote at school, but “my vote will make more of a difference in Ohio,” she said to me. She was getting a fancy accent.
“You gonna cancel out my vote, baby?” I asked her.
“I sure am, Dad. D’you mind?”
“Hey, kid, what am I working for if it isn’t for you and your mom? Sure, come on home and give your fascist old dad a run for his money.”
That got kind of a watery laugh from her. We both remembered the time she went to Washington for that big march in ’69. I hit the ceiling and Margaret talked me down. “She didn’t have to tell us, Joe,” she reminded me.
No, she didn’t. But she had. Just in case something happened, she admitted that Thanksgiving when she came home from school.
I didn’t like the idea of my girl near tear gas and cops with nightsticks when I wasn’t around, so I pulled a few strings and sent her Congressman Kirwan’s card.
Mike,
the Congressman says I should call him when he comes to the lawyers’ table at the Ohio Hotel. And I wrote down on it the home phone number of Miss Messer, his assistant. If anything goes wrong, I told her, she should call there. And I drew a peace sign and signed the letter, “Love and peace, your fascist father.”
She says I drew it upside down. Well, what do you expect? Never drew one before.
Anyhow, she’ll be home for Election Day, and Barry’ll vote by absentee ballot. I’m proud that both my kids take voting seriously. Maybe that school of hers hasn’t been a total waste: Steff still takes her responsibilities as a citizen very seriously.
Meanwhile, things—talking and fighting both—slowed down in Paris and Saigon. I remember after Kennedy won the election, Khrushchev wouldn’t talk to President Eisenhower’s people because Ike was a lame duck. As if he weren’t one of the greatest generals we ever had. I tried to listen to some of the speeches by this McGovern Stephanie was wild for. Mostly, I thought he promised pie-in-the-sky. Our boys home by June, everyone working hard and off welfare—not that I’d mind, but I just didn’t see how he was going to pull any of it off. I really wanted to ask Barry what he thought, but I didn’t. Might be bad for morale.
Then things started to get worse. They stepped up the bombing. Tried to burn off the jungle, too. And the pictures... Dammit, I wish I could forget the one of that little girl running down the road with no clothes on screaming in pain. Sometimes at night, it gets messed up in my mind with that thing from Kent, with the girl kneeling and crying over that boy’s body. Damn things leap out at you from the newspaper or the news, but I can’t just stick my head in the sand.
Maybe the kids... maybe this McGovern... I’ve
been
under attack, and I tell you, there comes a time when you just want it to
stop
. Never mind what it costs you. You’ve already paid enough. I think the whole country’s reached that point, and so McGovern’s moving way up in the polls.
Election Day started out really well. The day before, letters had come from Barry. One for me. One for his mother. And even one for Stephanie. I suppose she’d told him she was going to be home, and APO delivery to the Embassy in Saigon is pretty regular. We all sort of went off by ourselves to read our letters. Then Margaret and I traded. I hoped Stephanie would offer to show us hers, too, but she didn’t. So we didn’t push.
You don’t push, not if you want your kids to trust you. Besides, my son and daughter have always had something special between them. He’s a good foot taller than she is, but she always looked out for her “baby brother” in school. He never minded that she was the bright one, the leader. Not till he decided not to go to college, and he overheard one of the family saying that Stephanie should have been the boy. So our Bear joined up, not waiting for the draft or anything. I expected Stephanie to throw a fit—Margaret certainly did, but all my girl said was, “He needs to win at something of his own.”
I wouldn’t have expected her to understand what that means to a boy. Maybe she’s growing up.
But it’s still all I can do to keep a decent tongue in my head toward my brother-in-law with the big fat mouth.
Election Day, it’s a family tradition that everyone comes over to watch the returns on TV. There were going to be some hot words over the cold cuts, if things ran true to speed. And I couldn’t see Steff sitting in the kitchen putting things on trays and talking girl talk with her aunts. Steff calls that sort of thing sexist. That’s a new word she’s got. Don’t see why it bothers her. It’s not like sometimes the women aren’t talking the most interesting things.
For a while, I really thought we were going to make it through the evening without a fight. Stephanie came in, all rosy-faced and glowing from voting, then marching outside the poll all day. She’d left her protest signs in the garage, and she was wearing one of the good skirts and coats she took to school. When everyone said so, she laughed and went up to change into a workshirt and jeans.
“But you looked so pretty, just like a real college girl,” her aunt told her.
“That was just window dressing,” Stephanie said. “Can I help set the food out now? I’m famished.”
She’d wolfed down about half a corned beef sandwich when the phone rang, and she flew up the stairs. “You’re kidding. Massachusetts
already
? Oh wow! How’s it look for Pennsylvania? I’m telling you, I think we’re going to be lucky here, but I’m worried about the South...”
“You want another beer, Ron?” I asked my brother-in-law, who was turning red, pretending like he had swallowed something the wrong way and would choke if he didn’t drink real fast. Personally, I think he voted for Wallace in the last election, but you can’t pry the truth out of him about that with a crowbar.
We settled down to watch TV. Margaret and my sister Nance turned on the portable in the kitchen. I kind of hoped Stephanie would go in there, but she helped clear the table, then came in and sat beside me.
You could have knocked me over with a feather. Maybe the kids were right and people were sick of the bombings, the deaths, the feeling that Vietnam was going to hang around our necks till we choked on it. But state after state went to McGovern... “There goes Ohio! Straight on!” Stephanie shouted, raising a fist.
I don’t know when all hell broke loose. One moment we were sitting watching John Chancellor cut to President Nixon’s headquarters (and my daughter was doing this routine, like a Chatty Cathy doll, about Tri-cia Nixon). The next moment, she’d jumped up and was stamping one foot as she glared at her uncle.
“How
dare
you use that word?” she was saying to Ron, my brother-in-law. “They’re
not
gooks. They’re
Asians
. And it’s their country, not ours, but we’re destroying it for them. We’ve turned the kids into fugitives, the women into bar girls... and they all had fathers, too, till we killed them! What kind of a racist pig...”
“Who you calling a racist, little Miss Steff & Nonsense?” asked Ron. By then, he’d probably had at least two beers too many and way too many of my daughter’s yells of “straight on.” “Why, when I was in the war, there was this Nee-grow sergeant...”
“It’s ‘black’!” she snapped. “You call them
black
! How can you expect me to stay in the same house as this...”
She was out of the living room, and the front door slammed behind her before I could stop her.
“That little girl of yours is out of control,” Ron told me. “That’s what you get, sending her off to that snob school. OSU wasn’t good enough, oh no. So what happens? She meets a bunch of radicals there and picks up all sorts of crazy ideas. Tell you, Joey, you better put a leash on that kid, or she’ll get into real trouble.”
I got up, and he shut up. Margaret came in from the kitchen. I shook my head at her:
everything under control
. I wanted to get a jacket or something. Stephanie had run out without her coat, and the evening was chilly.
“I’d teach her a good lesson, that’s what I’d do,” said Ron.
Damn! Hadn’t I warned her, “I know you think it’s funny calling your uncle Ronnie the Racist. But one of these days, it’s going to slip out, and then there’ll be hell to pay.” But she’d said what I should have said. And that made me ashamed.
“She shouldn’t have been rude to you,” I said. “I’m going to tell her that. But you know how she feels about words like that. I don’t much like them either. Besides, this is her house, too.”
Ron was grumbling behind my back like an approaching thunderstorm, when I went into the front hall, took out a jacket from the closet, and went outside. Steffie was on the stoop, her face pressed against the cold brick. I put the jacket over her and closed my hands on hers. They were trembling. “Don’t rub your face against the brick, baby. You could cut yourself.”
She turned around and hugged me. I could feel she was crying with anger and trying hard not to. “I’m not going in there and apologizing,” she told me.
“Not even for me?” I coaxed her. There’d been a time she’d do anything in the world for her old dad.
She tried to laugh and cry together, and sounded like the way she used to gurgle when she was a baby.
“I’ll promise not to start any fights,” she said. “But I won’t promise to keep quiet if...”
“I told him you shouldn’t have been rude to an elder and a guest...”
She hissed like the teenager she wasn’t. Not anymore.
“I also told him this was your house and you had a right to have your wishes respected, too. Now, will you come in and behave like a lady?”
“It’s
woman
, Daddy,” she told me.
I hugged her. “You know what I mean. Lady or woman, you’re still my little girl. You’re supposed to be for peace. Can you try to keep it in your own home?”
She looked up, respect in her eyes. “Ooh, that was a
nice
one,” she told me.
“Then remember, tantrums don’t win any arguments. Now, you go in. Maybe your mother needs help with the dishes.”
“He ought to help,” she muttered. “You do. It wouldn’t hurt.”
“No, it wouldn’t.” To my surprise, I agreed. “But if we wait for him to get off his butt, your mother’s going to be stuck with all of them.”
The gift of her obedience hit me in the face like a cold wind when you’ve had too much to drink. My eyes watered, and the lights up and down Outlook Avenue flickered. Everyone was watching the returns. Some of them had promised to drop in later. The Passells’ younger boy had gone to school with Steff. He was the only boy on the street still in school, studying accounting. The Carlsons’ middle son, who’d played varsity football, but always took time to coach our Bear, had left OSU and was in the Army. So was the oldest Bentfield, who’d been our paperboy. Fine young men, all of them. And the girls had turned out good, too, even Reenie, who’d got married too young.
Just a one-block street, but you had everything on it. Even a black family had moved in. Maybe I’d had my worries to start off with, but I was real proud we’d all greeted them like neighbors. On some streets when that happened, the kids dumped garbage on the lawn or TP’ed the house.
It was a nice street, a good block, and we’d all lived on it a long time. Nothing fancy, but solid. I wished my father could have seen my house. We’d come back since he’d lost everything in the Depression. But that’s the way of it. Each generation does a little bit better than the last one and makes things a little easier for the ones next in line.
We’ve been five generations in Youngstown. I like to think our name counts for something. Now, this is sort of embarrassing. I don’t go to church much, but I looked out over that street and
hoped
, that’s a better word for it, that my kids would make that name even more respected. My daughter, the whatever-she-wanted-to-be. A lawyer, maybe. And my son. Who knew? Maybe he’d come home and go back to school, and then this Ambassador—I couldn’t see my Bear as a diplomat, but...
“How many beers did
you
have?” I asked the sky, gave myself a mental shake, and went back in in time to watch President Nixon’s concession speech. It wasn’t, not really. You remember how close the race was against JFK. And the 1962 California election when he told the press, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more.”
I don’t know. Man’s a fighter, but he’s not a good loser. I tell you, I don’t know what a recount’s going to do to this country just when we need a strong leader in place.
“Country’s going to hell in a handbasket,” Ron grumbled. “I’m going home. Hey, Nancy? You going to yak all night? C’mon!”
After he left, my wife and daughter came back into the living room. Margaret brought out a pot of coffee.
Stephanie sat down to watch McGovern’s victory speech. She was holding her mother’s hand.
“I admit I am distressed at this demand for a recount at just the time when our country needs to be united. But I am confident that the count will only reaffirm the judgment of the great American people as the bombing has gone on, pounding our hearts as well as a captive nation, that it is enough!
“Now, I have heard it said,” the man went on with shining eyes, “that I do not care for honor. Say, rather, that I earn my honor where it may be found. Not in throwing lives after lives away in a war we should never have entered, but in admitting that we have gone as far as we may, and that now it is time for our friends the South Vietnamese to take their role as an independent people, not a client state. Accordingly, my first act as Commander in Chief will be...” his voice broke, “to bring them home. Our sons and brothers. The young fathers and husbands of America. Home.”
Tears were pouring down the women’s faces. I walked over to Margaret. All the years we’ve been married, she’s never been one to show affection in front of the kids. Now she leaned her head against me. “Our boy’s coming home!”
Stephanie’s face glowed like the pictures of kids holding candles in church or the big protest marches. She could have been at McGovern headquarters; that school of hers has enough pull to put her that high, but she’d chosen to come home instead.
I put a hand on her hair. It was almost as silky as it had been when she was in diapers. Again, my hand curved around her head. It was so warm, just like when she’d been little. “Baby, it looks like you and your friends have won. I just hope you’re right.”
