"But the country's in trouble. We need to do something," Flora said.
He sighed again. "I spent the last four years doing everything I knew how to do. None of it seemed to help much. I'm willing to let someone else worry about it for a while-especially since the people have shown they aren't willing to let me worry about it any more."
He sounded tired. Worse, he sounded old. Flora had seen how cruelly he'd aged in four hard years in Powel House. He was, she reminded herself, past his seventieth birthday. When they'd married, his being close to twice her age hadn't bothered her. It still didn't, not in most ways. But this loss of vigor, of resiliency, troubled her. She was sure that when she'd first come to know him, when she'd first fallen in love with him, he would have bounced back stronger and faster.
On the other hand, nobody who'd spent three years in the trenches during the Great War came out afterwards the same man he'd been when he went in. Hosea had spent four years in the presidential trenches, and he'd lost the war. She didn't suppose expecting him to stay unchanged was fair.
"When we do go back," she said, "I wonder if I ought to take a flat in the Fourteenth Ward."
"Aha!" her husband said, and smiled. "Something makes me think you want to go back to Congress."
"I'm thinking about it," Flora said. "I don't like seeing my old district in the hands of a Democrat. I don't like seeing a lot of our districts in the hands of Democrats."
"Neither do I." Hosea Blackford's smile was sour. "I don't think any of our candidates will ask me to hit the campaign trail for them next year, though. They'd probably want me on the stump for their opponents instead."
"It's not that bad," Flora insisted.
"No-odds are it's worse," Hosea answered. "I can't think of anything less welcome in a political party than a president who's just lost an election. After a while, I'll get to be an elder statesman, but right now I'm nothing but a nuisance." With a mournful shake of the head, he added, "By the the time I get to be an elder statesman, I'll probably be so elder, I'm dead."
"God forbid!" Flora exclaimed. No one in her family, no one among the immigrant Jews of the Lower East Side, spoke of death straight on like that. Words had power; to speak of something was to help bring it into being. The rational part of her mind knew that was nonsense, but the rational part of her mind went only so deep. Down underneath it, superstition still flourished.
"It's true," her husband said. "We both know it's true, even if you don't want to talk about it. I don't need to take out pencil and paper to know how old I am. I get reminded whenever I look in the mirror. I'd like to stay around long enough to see Joshua grow up, but how likely is that? I've already beaten the odds by lasting as long as I have."
"That's nothing but-" Flora began.
"The truth," Hosea finished for her. "You know it as well as I do, too. And if you don't, ask the next insurance salesman you happen to run into. He'll tell you what the actuarial tables say."
Flora wanted to tell him that was nonsense. She couldn't, and she knew it. The best she could do was change the subject: "Let's talk about something else."
"Fine." Now her husband's grin showed real amusement. "Do you think this new professional football federation's going to last?"
That wasn't what she'd had in mind. "I don't care," she said tartly. "What I think is, it's disgraceful to pay men so much to run around with a football when so many people can't find work at all. Talk about a waste of money!"
"It's an amusement, the same as an orchestra is an amusement," her husband said. "Nothing wrong with them. We need them. Especially in hard times, we need them."
"An orchestra is worthwhile," Flora said. "A football game?" She shook her head.
"A lot more people go to watch the Philadelphia Barrels than to the Philadelphia Symphony," Hosea said.
Since that was true, Flora could only stick out her chin and say, "Even so."
"Amusement is where you find it," Hosea said. "I'm not going to be elitist and look down my nose at anything."
To a good Socialist, elitist was a dirty word. Flora tried to turn it back on her husband: "When the top football players make more than the president of the United States-and some of them do-they're the elitists."
"They asked one of them about that two or three years ago. Did you happen to see what he said?" Hosea Blackford asked. Flora shook her head. She paid as little attention to sports as she could. One of her husband's eyebrows rose. "What he told the reporter was, 'I had a better year than he did.' All things considered, how could anyone tell Mr. Gehrig he was wrong?"
"A choleriyeh on Mr. Gehrig!" Flora said furiously. "Nothing that happened was your fault."
That eyebrow lifted again. "The Party told that to the voters. We told them and told them and told them. And Herbert Hoover is president of the United States today, and here I am in Dakota. If you're there, it's your fault."
"It isn't fair," Flora said.
Hosea laughed out loud, which only made her angrier. "Joshua might try to use an argument like that, but you shouldn't," he said. "It's the way politics works. 'What have you done for me lately?' is the question voters always ask-and maybe it's the question they should always ask. Teddy Roosevelt won the Great War. They didn't give him a third term, though, because of all the strikes and unrest that came afterwards. That's how Upton got to be president-and how I got to be vice president, if you remember."
"I'm not likely to forget," she answered. "I was so proud of you. And I'm still proud of you, and I still think you ought to be president, not that… that lump of a Hoover."
"As a matter of fact, I agree with you. I think you're sweet, too," he added. "Unfortunately, fifty-seven percent of the voters in the United States had a different opinion, and theirs counts for more than ours." He sighed. "It was even worse in the Electoral College, of course."
"Not right," Flora muttered.
"What's not right, Mama?" That was Joshua, still in his flannel pajamas. He was yawning. From somewhere on one side of the family or the other, he'd found a taste for sleeping late. On the Lower East Side-or, for that matter, on a Dakota farm-he would have had to get up early whether he wanted to or not. As the son of a man first vice president and then president, he could usually sleep as late as he wanted to. Privilege is everywhere, Flora thought.
But she had to answer him: "It's not right that your father lost the election."
"Oh." Joshua tried to frown, but a yawn ruined it. "Why not? The other guys got more votes, didn't they?"
Hosea laughed. "That's it in a nutshell, Josh. The other guys got more votes."
Josh. Flora didn't like the one-syllable abridgement of a perfectly good name. Joshua Blackford was rolling, majestic. Josh Blackford sounded like someone who wore overalls and a straw hat. And if that's elitist, too bad, she thought. Hosea didn't see the problem.
"The point is, the other guys"-she used her son's phrase as if it had quotation marks around it-"shouldn't have got more votes."
Joshua muttered something under his breath. Flora thought she heard, "Stinking Japs." Without a doubt, the Japanese bombing of Los Angeles had been the last straw-or rather, the last nail in the coffin. If Joshua wanted to think his father would have won without that, he could. Flora wanted to think the very same thing. The only problem was, she knew better. Looking at the last nail in the coffin meant ignoring all the others, and there were a lot of them.
"You'll win again in four years, though, won't you, Father?" Joshua had a boy's boundless confidence in his father. He also had a boy's strange notions about the way time worked.