A military band struck up the national anthem. As if he were at a baseball game, Mike took off his hat and held it over his heart. A door opened on the White House’s column-fronted entrance. The President and the President-elect walked out side by side.
Hoover, a big man, stood several inches taller than Joe Steele. He didn’t tower over his successor by quite so much as Mike had thought he would. Had Joe Steele put lifts in his shoes? If he had, they were good ones; Mike couldn’t be sure at a glance, the way you could with a lot of elevator oxfords.
One thing that did make Hoover seem taller was his black silk top hat. He also wore white tie and a tailcoat. He might have been an Allied leader dictating terms to defeated Germany at Versailles in 1919. Or he might have been one of the European diplomats who dickered the Treaty of Berlin between Russia and Turkey forty years earlier.
Joe Steele, by contrast, was unmistakably a man of the twentieth century, not the nineteenth. Yes, he had on a black suit and a white shirt, but they were the kind of clothes a druggist might have worn to dinner. The shirt’s collar was stand-and-fall; it wasn’t a wing collar. He wore a plain black necktie, not a fancy white bow tie. And on his head sat not a topper, not even a fedora, but a gray herringbone tweed cap.
Hoover’s clothes said I’m important. I have money. I tell other people what to do. Joe Steele’s outfit delivered the opposite message, and delivered it loud and clear. His suit said I’m an ordinary guy. I’m getting dressed up because I have to. Wearing a cloth cap with the suit added But I don’t think it’s all that important even so.
All around Mike, people gasped when they saw what the new President had chosen to put on. “Shameful!” somebody muttered. “No, he has no shame,” someone else replied. Mike chuckled to himself. If those reporters weren’t a couple of old-guard Republicans from somewhere like Philadelphia or Boston, he would have been surprised. Whenever folks like that deigned to notice the world changing around them, they, like Queen Victoria, were Not Amused.
Well, Queen Victoria had been dead for a long time now. He wondered whether the rock-ribbed (and rock-headed) GOP stalwarts had noticed yet.
Photographers snapped away. Flash bulbs popped. Joe Steele genially touched the brim of his scandalous cap. Hoover looked as if he were sucking on a lemon. He’d looked that way in every photo of him taken since November that Mike had seen.
Behind the men came their wives. Lou Hoover had been the only woman majoring in geology at Stanford while Herbert Hoover studied there. She remained a handsome woman forty years later, and wore a gown in which she might have greeted the King and Queen of England. Betty Steele’s dress looked as if it came from the Montgomery Ward catalogue-from one of the nicer pages there, but still. . Any middle-aged, middle-class woman with some small sense of style could have chosen and afforded it.
She looked less happy than she might have. From what Charlie had heard, she often did. She and Joe Steele had lost two young children to diphtheria within days of each other, and never had any more. He poured his energy into politics after that. She didn’t seem to have much.
More photographs recorded the outgoing and incoming First Ladies for posterity. No one close enough for Mike to overhear sneered about Betty Steele’s clothes. People had used up their indignation on her husband.
The two Presidential couples got into a long open car for the ride to the swearing-in ceremony on the Mall. Reporters and photographers scrambled for the cars that would follow the fancy limousine to the formal inauguration. No one reserved seats in those; getting aboard reminded Mike of a rugby scrum. He managed to grab a seat next to the driver of a Model A. He felt like a tinned sardine, but at least he could go on.
Smoke rose from small fires in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. People who had nowhere else to live made encampments there. No doubt they hoped it gave the President something to think about when he looked out the window. By all the things Hoover hadn’t done in his unhappy term, he didn’t look out that window very often.
The Bonus Army had camped in several places near the Mall till Hoover ordered General MacArthur to clear them out. Clear them the Army did, with fire and bayonets and tear gas. Anyone who wasn’t rich sympathized with the hapless victims, not with their oppressors in uniform. Hoover seemed to have done everything he could to dig his own political grave and jump on in.
What about Roosevelt? Mike wondered for the thousandth time. The arson inspector didn’t say the Executive Mansion had had help burning down. He didn’t say it hadn’t. He said he couldn’t prove it had. Charlie had tried to run down phone records to see if Vince Scriabin was talking to anybody in Albany early that morning. No matter how much cash he spread around, he had no luck. Those records “weren’t available.” Had someone made them disappear? If anyone had, nobody who knew would say so. Another dead end-as dead as FDR.
Crowds lined the streets to watch the new man in the White House go by. Some of the people in the crowd were the lawyers and talkers who catered to Congress-and to whom Congress had always catered. Money talked in Washington, the same as it did everywhere else. Money talked louder in Washington than it did in a lot of other places, to tell you the truth.
Mike could recognize those people right away. They mostly didn’t dress as fancy as Herbert and Lou Hoover. They didn’t, but they could have. The quality of a haircut, the cut of a suit jacket, the glint of real gold links when somebody shot a cuff. . Mike knew the signs, sure as hell.
Most of the people who watched Joe Steele go to take the oath, though, were the ordinary folks who made Washington run. Butchers, bakers, waitresses, secretaries, sign-painters, cake decorators, housewives-people like that were out in force. Since it was Saturday, lots of them had brought their kids along so they could say they’d seen a President once upon a time.
Some of the people in the crowd were colored. Washington had rich colored folks, but most of them were even poorer than the whites. They cleaned and kept house for the city’s prosperous whites, and raised their children for them, too. No Jim Crow laws on the sidewalks. They could mix and mingle with the folks who thought they were their betters-as long as they stayed polite about it, of course.
Plenty of people on the sidewalk were out of work. Mike knew the signs: the shabby clothes, the bad shaves, most of all the pinched mouths and worried eyes. Unemployment stalked whites and Negroes alike. It brought its own odd kind of equality: when you didn’t have a job, everybody who did was better off than you were. A rising tide might lift all boats. The ebbing tide in America since Wall Street crashed had left millions of boats stranded on the beach.
Colored men and women who were out of work eyed Joe Steele with a painful kind of hope: painful not least because hope was something they’d been scared to feel and even more scared to show. But he was different from Hoover. He’d made them believe their worries were his worries, not just unpleasant noises in another room. If that turned out to be one more lie, chances were they wouldn’t just be disappointed. They’d be furious.
That same mix of people, rich and poor, white and black, packed the temporary bleachers on the Mall. Some construction firm or another had given day laborers work to run them up. Those same workers, or a different set, would get paid to knock them down after the ceremony ended.