“Sha, sha-hush, hush,” Sophie Reisen murmured wearily as she stumbled toward the baby’s cradle. Flora’s older sister scooped Yossel out, sat down in a chair, and began to nurse him. Little urgent sucking noises replaced his desperate cries.
Flora rolled over on the bed she shared with her younger sister Esther and tried to go back to sleep. She’d just succeeded when the alarm clock beside her head went off, clattering as if all the fire alarms in New York City were boiled down into its malevolent little case.
Blindly, almost drunk with weariness, she fumbled at the clock till it shut up. Then she staggered out of bed and splashed cold water on her face to bring back a semblance of life. She stared at herself in the mirror above the sink. Her dark eyes, usually so lively, were dull, with purplish circles under them. Her skin had a pallor that had nothing to do with fashion, but threw her cheekbones and prominent nose and chin into sharp relief. And he’s not even my baby, she thought with tired resentment.
Esther pushed her away from the mirror. She dressed quickly. By the time she got out to the kitchen, her mother had sweet rolls and coffee pale with milk already on the table. Her younger brothers, David and Isaac, were there eating and drinking. They’d risen no earlier than she had, but they hadn’t had to struggle with a recalcitrant corset.
Her father came in a moment after she did. The biggest mug of coffee was reserved for him. He already had his pipe going. The tobacco was harsher than what he’d used before the war cut off imports from the Confederacy, but the odor of smoke was still part of breakfast as far as Flora was concerned. Benjamin Hamburger bit into a roll, sipped his coffee, and nodded approvingly. “That’s good, Sarah,” he called to Flora’s mother, as he did every morning.
Sophie sat down, too. “He’s asleep again,” she said, sounding half asleep herself. “How long it will last-Gott vayss.” Her shrug was barely visible, as if she lacked the energy to raise her shoulders any higher. She probably did.
Flora Hamburger’s eyes went to the framed photograph of Yossel Reisen-baby Yossel’s father-near the divan in the living room. There he stood in his Army uniform, looking nothing like the yeshiva-bucher he’d been till he enlisted. Because he was going into the Army and might very well never come back, Sophie, who’d been his fiancee then, had given him a going-away present as old as history. He’d given her one as old as history, too, though it had taken nine months to find out whether that one was a boy or a girl.
He had married her when he came back to the Lower East Side on leave: the baby did bear his name. That was all of him it had, though; shortly before Sophie’s time of confinement, he’d been killed in one of the meaningless battles down in Virginia.
Flora had hated the war long before it came home to her family. As a Socialist Party activist, she’d done everything she could to keep the Socialist delegation in Congress-the second-largest bloc, behind the dominant Democrats but far ahead of the Republicans-from voting for war credits. She’d failed. Now it was the Socialists’ war, too. She and her party were to blame for that picture of a man who wasn’t coming home, and for so many like it from the black-bordered casualty lists the papers printed every day.
Her father, her sisters, her brother hurried off to work in the sweatshops that, these days, turned endless bolts of green-gray cloth into tunics and trousers and caps and puttees for men to wear as they went out to get slaughtered. David had just turned eighteen. She wondered how long it would be before he got his conscription call. Not long, she thought worriedly, not at the rate the war was going through the young men of two continents.
Before long, it was time for Flora to go, too. She kissed her mother on the cheek, saying, “I’ll see you tonight. I hope the baby isn’t too much trouble.”
Sarah Hamburger smiled. “I’ve had a lot of practice with babies by now, don’t you think?” She turned a speculative eye on Flora. “One of these days, alevai, it would be nice to take care of one of yours.”
That got Flora out of the apartment in a hurry. She didn’t even wait to adjust her picture hat in front of the mirror, but put it on as she was walking downstairs. If it was crooked, too bad. Her mother didn’t see, wouldn’t see, that living a full life didn’t have to include a life full of men (or full of one man) and full of babies.
Socialist Party headquarters for the Fourteenth Ward were in a crowded second-floor office above a butcher shop on Centre Market Court, across the street from the stalls and little shops in the Centre Market. Buyers already went from stall to store, looking for early morning bargains. Soldiers’ Circle men prowled through the marketplace, some of them wearing armbands, others pins, all of them carrying truncheons or wearing pistols on their hips. They’d been suppressing dissent and resistance to the war in Socialist neighborhoods ever since the Remembrance Day riots.
As often happened, a couple of them were leaning up against the brick wall near the stairway up to Socialist Party headquarters. They’d eased off on that for a time, but had come back in greater force since the Socialist uprising in the Confederate States. If the oppressed Negroes could rise up in righteous revolutionary fury there, what about the oppressed proletariat of all colors in the USA?
Flora waved to Max Fleischmann, the butcher downstairs. He waved back, smiling; she helped keep the Soldiers’ Circle goons from bothering him. Nothing could keep them from leering at her. Not by accident did the flowers in her hat conceal a couple of long, sharp hatpins.
Perhaps grouchy from lack of sleep, she glared back at the Soldiers’ Circle men. “I don’t know why you waste your time hanging around here,” she said, exaggerating for effect. “Aren’t you grateful that people who see the need for class struggle are helping the United States win the war?”
“Reds are Reds, whether they’re black or white,” one of the men answered. “We’ve got the answer for any what gets out o’ line.” He set his fist by the side of his neck, then jerked his arm sharply upward and let his head fall to one side, as if he’d been hanged. “Anybody tries a revolution here, that’s what they get, and that’s what they deserve.”
“I’m sure you would have told George Washington the same thing,” Flora said, and went upstairs. She felt the eyes of the Soldiers’ Circle men like daggers in her back till she opened the door and walked inside.
Party headquarters, as usual, put her in mind of a three-ring circus crammed into about half a ring. Typewriters clattered. People shouted into telephones in Yiddish and English, often with scant regard for which language they were using at any given moment. Other people stood in the narrow spaces between desks or sat on the corners of the desks themselves and argued loudly and passionately about anything that happened to cross their minds. Flora looked on the chaos and smiled. It was, in an even larger, even more disorderly style, her family writ large.
“Good morning, Maria,” she said to her secretary as she hung her hat on a tree near the desk.
“Good morning,” Maria Tresca answered. She was one of the few gentiles at the Fourteenth Ward office, but was as enthusiastic for Socialism and its goals as anyone else; her sister, Angelina, had died in the Remembrance Day riots the year before. She studied Flora, then added, “You look pleased with yourself.”
“Do I? Well, maybe I do,” Flora said. “I gave the bully boys downstairs something to think about.” She explained her crack about Washington. Maria grinned from ear to ear and clapped her hands together.
Over at the next desk, Herman Bruck hung up the telephone on which he’d been speaking and sent Flora a stern look. A stern look from Bruck was not something to bear lightly. He might have stepped out of the pages of a fashion catalogue, from perfectly trimmed hair and neat mustache to suits always of fine wool and most modish cut. He often made a spokesman for the Socialists, simply because he looked so elegant. Money had not done it for him; coming from a family of fancy tailors had.