A car zoomed by. The driver gave the marchers the finger out the window. It was nothing Diana hadn’t seen before. “What do you have to say to people like that?” E. A. Stuart asked.
Before Diana could say anything, Edna Lopatynski beat her to the punch: “They can go get stuffed.” Diana stared-that wasn’t like Edna at all. But the Polish woman went on, “I mean it. If people want to talk with me, I’m glad to talk with them. But if all you’re gonna do is something disgusting like that, to heck with you, buddy.”
They walked past Ford’s Theater. Lincoln got shot there, Diana thought. She would have torn down the place after something like that, but they hadn’t. Then something else crossed her mind. Even as things were, Lincoln got a lot more time than a lot of the kids he sent into battle. And he got a lot more time than Pat had or ever would, too.
The National Theater stood another few blocks farther on. Diana didn’t know one thing about it. In a way, that came as a relief. Nothing horrible had happened there, except maybe some of the productions.
She turned right on Fifteenth Street, in front of the Treasury Department building. As soon as she got past it, there was the White House on the left. Leaves had fallen from the trees on the White House grounds, so she could see it really well. They’d had at least one hard frost here, because the grass was going all yellow-brown, the way it did back in Anderson.
Left this time, onto Pennsylvania Avenue. The White House was at 1600-probably the one address besides their own that all Americans knew. Somebody behind Diana said, “It looks like a postcard.” She smiled. She’d had the same notion at almost the same time.
Several men waited for the marchers right in front of the gate that led into the White House grounds. Some of them were reporters. A newsreel camera crew filmed the demonstration. People all over the country might see this. The mere idea made Diana automatically pat at her hair with her free hand.
And one of the men in suits…Diana waved frantically. “Congressman Duncan!” she called. “Thanks so much for coming!” He hadn’t promised he would. He must have wondered whether showing up would gain him votes or cost them. And he must have decided it wouldn’t cost him too many, anyhow.
“Diana.” Edna tapped her on the shoulder. When Diana didn’t answer fast enough to suit her, she tapped again, harder. “Diana!”
“What?” Diana said impatiently. “That’s the Congressman from my district there, and-”
“And the guy next to him-the guy in the gray hat-is Senator Taft,” Edna broke in. “That counts for more, you ask me.”
“Senator Taft?” Diana whispered. And it was, sure enough. She recognized him now that Edna pointed him out. She thought she would have done it sooner if the hat hadn’t covered up his bald head-and kept it warm, too, she supposed. But she didn’t see Taft’s picture every day. Edna was from Ohio, so chances were she did.
Some of the other men gathered with Jerry Duncan and Robert Taft were probably Senators and Representatives, too. Their home states and districts knew what they looked like, but Diana didn’t. Maybe a book somewhere had pictures of all of them. Diana had never seen or heard of one like that, but it would sure be a handy thing to have if you were a political kind of person. And I am-now, she thought. I really am.
“More of them here than I expected,” Edna said. “Have we got enough signs for them all?”
“We will,” Diana declared. If they didn’t, if they had to rob a few ordinary Peters to let the political Pauls picket, she would do that without a qualm. The country needed to see not all politicians blindly followed Harry Truman’s lead.
“Hello, Mrs. McGraw.” Jerry Duncan came up to her with a big smile-a politician’s smile-spread across his face. “May we join you?”
“I hope you will,” Diana said. “Who are your, uh, colleagues?”
Duncan introduced Senator Taft first, as she’d hoped-he was the heavy hitter in the group. “Very pleased to meet you,” Taft said, his voice raspy. “You’re making people think, and that’s never bad.”
Diana wanted to make people feel. That would make them get out there and do things. But she didn’t want to argue with the Senator from Ohio, so she nodded. Edna handed Taft a picket sign that said ISN’T AMERICA ENOUGH? He gruffly thanked her and nodded at the sentiment. Diana nodded to herself. Being from his home state, Edna would know the kind of thing he wanted to say.
Jerry Duncan presented more politicos: from California, from Idaho, from Illinois, from Alabama, from Mississippi. “We’re not all Republicans here, you see,” he said.
“Sure.” Diana nodded. The Congressmen-or were they Senators? — from the Deep South might call themselves Democrats, but they’d be more conservative than most Republicans. Diana didn’t care whether they worshipped at the shrine of the donkey or the elephant. As long as they wanted GIs to stop dying in Germany, they were on her side.
Duncan’s sign said DIDN’T THE NAZIS SURRENDER? Reporters shouted questions at the politicians as they tramped back and forth in front of the White House along with the ordinary demonstrators. “This is pretty good,” Edna said. “Now the flatfoots’ll leave us alone. They won’t get tough where big shots can see ’em do it.”
“Yup.” Diana nodded. In Indianapolis or in Washington, the cops paid attention to power. They had to. What were they but power’s hunting dogs? Diana went on, “This is pretty good, Edna. But you know what? Next time we come here, we’ll fill that whole park with people.” She pointed across Pennsylvania Avenue to Lafayette Square.
“Wow! You don’t think small, do you?” Admiration filled Edna’s voice.
“If I thought small, I’d still be sitting at home crying ’cause Pat’s dead. We’d all be sitting at home, crying alone ’cause our boys are dead,” Diana answered. “But sitting at home and crying doesn’t help. If we don’t do anything but that, nobody else will, either. We’ve got to get people moving. And we will.”
“Damn right.” Edna could swear like a trooper when she felt like it. To her, it was just talk, not filthy talk.
A car going by on Pennsylvania Avenue honked its horn. “Traitors!” the driver yelled.
“Jackass!” Senator Taft said crisply. “This is just as much a part of government as all the wind and air up on Capitol Hill.” The man in the car couldn’t hear any of that, of course. But the reporters could. Several of them took down what he said. Most seemed to share E. A. Stuart’s knack for writing on the move.
Back and forth. Back and forth. They had several hundred people there-nowhere near enough to fill Lafayette Square, but enough to be noticed. Enough, Diana thought, to look like more when they film us. The majority of the picketers came from the East and the Midwest. The majority of people in the country lived in those parts, and they were closest to Washington. But a man was here from Nevada, and a woman from Washington state, and a couple from New Mexico, and several people from California. When something like this happened to you, it hit you hard. You wanted to do something about it. No-you had to.
After a while, the newsreel crew took their camera off its tripod. They loaded the gear into a van and drove away. Reporters drifted off. Diana hoped they were going to write up their stories, not to hoist a few in the nearest bar.
Some of the Representatives and Senators left after a bit, too. They must have felt they’d made their point-and they’d got filmed doing it, which was even better. Jerry Duncan and Robert Taft stayed. Diana had expected Duncan to; she thought of him as her Congressman, and didn’t worry about whether he thought the same way. But she was delighted about Taft. People said he was thinking of running for President in three years. If he did, if things changed then…Diana shook her head. Things needed to change right away. That was why she was doing all this.