American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold

by Harry Turtledove

  “Does it bother you?” her son asked. “It doesn’t bother me a bit, honest to God it doesn’t.” He laughed at his own choice of words.

  Sylvia had to think about how much it bothered her. Some, yes, but how much? It wasn’t as if she went to church every Sunday herself. She’d known plenty of Catholics who were perfectly nice, perfectly good people. How much did it really matter if her grandchildren grew up as mackerel-snappers? Less than she’d expected it to before she looked things over inside herself. “I guess it’s all right,” she said, and then nodded, firming up her acquiescence. “Yes, it is all right.”

  “That’s taken care of, then,” George, Jr., said. “They don’t mind too much that I’m not.” That side of the coin hadn’t occurred to Sylvia. Her son went on, “It’s the United States. Who you are counts for more than who your folks were. President Blackford’s wife was Jewish, and nobody made a big fuss about that.”

  “I suppose,” Sylvia said. “I’m still glad he lost. The Socialists just don’t know what to do about the Confederate States.”

  “With this new Freedom Party taking over, who does?” George, Jr., said.

  “I know.” Sylvia hesitated, then went on, “That Roger Kimball was a grand high panjandrum in the Freedom Party. If he hadn’t been, I never would have found out about him. That’s the kind of people that party draws, and it’s the best reason I can think of to figure they’re up to no good.”

  “We licked the CSA once,” her son said. “If we ever have to, we can lick ’em again.”

  He remembered only the last war. Unlike people born in the nineteenth century, he didn’t think of the repeated humiliations the United States had suffered at the hands of the Confederacy, Britain, and France before the Great War. And, though his own father was part of the cost of licking the Confederate States, he didn’t think about that, either.

  Well, why would he? went through Sylvia’s mind. He hardly remembers his father. How do you miss what you didn’t even know you had?

  She stood on tiptoe to kiss George, Jr., on the cheek. “Go to bed now. It’s late. It’s so late, it’s getting early.” He laughed at that, though Sylvia knew perfectly well what she’d meant. She went on, “I’m happy for you.”

  “Connie’s the most wonderful girl in the world.” He spoke with absolute conviction.

  Did she already let him into her bed, to make him that happy? Sylvia shrugged. It hardly mattered, not if they were getting married soon. The worst that could happen was a baby, and most people looked the other way if a first baby came seven or eight months after the wedding instead of the usual nine. “All right, son. Sleep tight tonight, and we’ll talk more in the morning.”

  In the morning, though, George, Jr., was still asleep when Mary Jane’s alarm clock went off. He didn’t wake up, either; in fact, his breathing didn’t even change. Mary Jane got dressed while Sylvia made coffee for both of them. Her daughter had landed a typist’s job. Neither of them knew how long it would last. They both knew she couldn’t afford to be late. She’d got the job when the girl who had it before was late three times in two weeks.

  Along with the coffee and eggs over hard, Sylvia gave Mary Jane the news. “That’s wonderful!” Mary Jane squealed. She hugged Sylvia. “Wonderful!”

  “Have you met the girl?” Sylvia asked. “I haven’t.”

  “Once,” her daughter answered. “We were at a dance together. We’d come separately, but we were both there at the same time. She’s blond—green eyes. Pretty enough, I guess.” Mary Jane shrugged, as if to say what men saw in women was largely a closed book to her.

  It was to Sylvia, too, but she said, “George certainly seems to think so. Do you care that she’s Catholic?”

  “Not me,” Mary Jane said at once. “As long as she gets along with George, that’s what matters.”

  “That’s what I think, too. We’re going to have to meet her and her folks, you know. I wonder what they’ll be like.” Sylvia sighed. “I wonder if they have a telephone. If they do, I could go to a booth and call them up and arrange it. But Lord only knows how many McGillicuddys there are in Boston.”

  “If they have a telephone, George will know the number.” Mary Jane was bound to be right about that. She gulped down the last of the coffee, rose from the table, and put on hat and overcoat against the cold, nasty weather outside. She hurried to the door, then turned back. “I’ll see you tonight. Gotta run now, or I’ll miss the trolley.”

  Sylvia had been laid off from a job in a canning plant not long before, just as she had after the Great War ended. She wasn’t hurting yet, not with Mary Jane working and with the money she’d made in the 1932 presidential campaign, some of which she still had. Not going out to look for work one morning didn’t worry her.

  George, Jr., emerged from bed, still yawning, a little before nine. “They want to meet you, too, Ma, and Mary Jane,” he said when Sylvia asked him about the McGillicuddys. “They haven’t got a telephone, though. I’ll set it up when I see Connie.”

  Sylvia and Mary Jane went to the McGillicuddys’ house—it was a house, not a flat—near T Wharf two days later, on Sunday afternoon. Constance’s father, Patrick, was a redhead, going gray; her mother, Margaret, had hair whose defiant gold had to come from a dye bottle. George, Jr.’s, intended also had three strapping brothers and a kid sister who couldn’t have been much above ten. A big black dog named Nemo barked and wagged his tail and generally considered the house to be his, with the McGillicuddys tolerated guests whose purpose in life was to keep him full of horsemeat.

  “You’ve got a fine boy there,” Patrick McGillicuddy said, squeezing Sylvia’s hand as she stood in the front hall. “We’re glad to have him in the family.” He didn’t particularly talk like an Irishman. Looking Mary Jane up and down, he went on, “And I think Connor and Larry and Paul will be glad to have his sister in the family.” His sons grinned.

  “I’m glad to have her in the family, too,” said Constance’s sister, whose name was Liz.

  “Good for you, dear,” her father said, “but I don’t think you’re glad the way your brothers are.” The young men’s grins grew wider. Liz look confused. Whatever the McGillicuddys were going to tell her about the birds and bees, they didn’t seem to have told her yet.

  The way Connie looked at George, Jr., and the way she clung to him whenever she got the chance, told Sylvia everything she needed to know on that score. Her eyes met Margaret McGillicuddy’s. The two women shared a moment of perfect understanding. Enjoy it while it lasts, their faces both said, because it doesn’t usually last long.

  “One of these days, I’m going to read your book,” Patrick McGillicuddy told Sylvia. She nodded politely; she’d heard that a good many times. He went on, “You made a lot of people proud when you went down to the CSA and did what you did. Could have been me you were paying that sub skipper back for, easy as not.”

  She could tell he spoke from the heart. “Thank you,” she said. “That means a lot to me, especially since George tells me you were in the Navy, too.”

  “Only luck I’m still here.” He suddenly seemed to remember he had a drink in his hand. Raising it, he said, “And we’ve got luck right here in the room with us. To Connie and George!” He drank. So did Sylvia. So did everyone else.

  Another lonely winter night. Lucien Galtier took some fried chicken off the stove. He would never make a good cook, but he’d got to the point where he didn’t mind eating what he made. After he finished supper, he washed dishes and tidied up as meticulously as he could. Marie would have expected it of him, and he didn’t want to let her down. It wasn’t as good a job as she would have done, but he hoped she would give him credit for making the effort.

  After he put the last plate in the drainer—no matter what his wife had done, he couldn’t make himself waste time drying dishes—he left the kitchen and went out to the parlor: the living room, people were calling it these days. He turned on the wireless and waited for sound to start coming out of it.

&n
bsp; As music began to play, Lucien tapped the cabinet. “This is a marvelous machine,” he said, talking to himself as he often did while alone. “It makes me feel I have company, even when I have none.”

  The music stopped. The people on the wireless began to try to sell him laundry soap. He listened to the pitch with half an ear while he lit a cigarette. Not all the company was welcome. Another little skit proclaimed the virtues of a brand of tobacco different from the one he smoked. He shrugged and took another puff.

  More music came out of the speaker—a concertina solo. He grinned. “Welcome to Voyageurs,” the announcer said. Lucien settled down to listen. All of Quebec settled down to listen at half past seven on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights. The comedy about fur traders and Indians was the most popular show in the country.

  One of the Indians started complaining the voyageur had cheated him. That was a running gag on the show—in fact, the Indian got the better of the voyageur every time. He also spoke French not like an Indian but like a Jewish peddler, which made things funnier and made them funny in a different way.

  As usual, everything turned out all right—and turned out absurd—within the appointed half hour. After the show was done, Lucien turned to a station that played music, poured himself some apple brandy, and settled down with a French translation of an American story: a woman who’d gone down into the Confederate States to avenge her husband.

  It was a strange kind of French, extraordinarily terse and to the point. He wondered if the English was the same. Then he wondered if he could make enough sense out of written English to find out. He doubted it.

  “But I can ask my son-in-law,” he said. He had to remind himself Dr. Leonard O’Doull was a born anglophone. Whenever the two of them talked together, they spoke French. O’Doull sounded more like a Quebecois every year, too, losing bit by bit the Parisian accent with which he’d originally learned his second language.

  At about a quarter to nine, someone knocked on the door. Wondering who could be mad enough to pay him a call at this hour, Lucien put down the book and went to find out. It wasn’t snowing at the moment, but it had been and it would be, and it probably was below zero outside.

  When he opened the door, his younger son waited there. “Oh, hello, Georges,” Lucien said. “I might have known it would be you. What are you doing here so late?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t expect me to leave my house before Voyageurs was done, would you?” Georges asked reasonably. He stepped into the farmhouse where he’d been born and grown up. Lucien closed the door behind him to stop letting out precious heat. He went on, “I am not a rich man, to have a wireless set in my automobile. I am lucky to have an automobile.”

  “I’ve got the applejack out, to settle me before I go to bed,” Lucien said. “Would you like some?”

  “Yes, thank you, mon père. It will warm me up after the chilly drive over, the motorcar also lacking a heater. Ah, merci.” Georges accepted the glass and took a cautious sip—with bootleg applejack, you never knew what you were getting till you got it. He nodded. “This is a good batch. Strong enough to feel, but not strong enough to burn off the roof of your mouth.”

  “Yes, I thought the same,” Lucien agreed. “Is that why you came over—to drink my brandy, I mean?”

  “As good a reason as any, eh? And better than most, I think.” Georges looked around. He lit a cigarette, then sighed and shook his head. “Whenever I come here, I keep expecting chère Maman to come out of the kitchen and say hello.”

  That made Lucien pour his own glass full again. “Whenever I come in the house, son, I expect the same thing. But what I expect and what I get”—he sighed—“they are not the same.”

  “Calisse,” Georges said—almost more of an invocation of the holiness of the chalice than the usual Quebecois curse. He saw the book Lucien had been reading. “I went through that. A brave woman.”

  “I remember something about it in the papers when it happened,” Lucien said. “Not much, though, and of course there was no wireless then. Strange how we’ve come to take it for granted in just a few years’ time.”

  “My next-door neighbor visited me last fall,” Georges said. “It was a Wednesday night, and he listened to Voyageurs. He had no electricity on his farm till then, did Philippe, though he does well for himself. He never saw the need. A week after that, he went out and got it so he could have a wireless set for himself. A wireless show decided him.”

  “I believe you,” Lucien said. “Is this why you came, then? You wanted to tell me about your neighbor and the wireless and electricity?”

  “I came because I wanted to visit my father,” Georges replied. “Sour as you are, it could be that you find this hard to believe. If so . . . well, too bad. My neighbor Philippe cannot visit his father, for he has no father to visit. I am lucky, and I take advantage of my luck.” He hefted his glass. “And if I get a knock of applejack in the side, this is not so bad, either.”

  Lucien looked down into the pale yellow liquid filling his own glass. Slowly, he said, “I am going to tell you something I thought I would never say to you in all my days. You are a scamp, you know, and a rogue, and a fellow who gets away with everything he possibly can and then with one thing more.”

  “You never thought you would say this to me?” Georges raised an eyebrow and made a comical face. “Mon cher papa, you have been telling me this ever since I could stand up, and probably before that, too.”

  “Yes, before that, too,” the elder Galtier agreed. “But that is not what I intended to say. What I intended to say is, you are a good son, Georges. It pains me to say it, and it must pain you to hear it, but there it is. You are a good son.”

  Georges didn’t say anything for close to a minute. When he did speak, his words were slow and thoughtful: “This means a very great deal to me, mon père.” He paused again, then went on, “What it means is, you are obviously senile, and suffering from softening of the brain. I am sure my esteemed brother-in-law, Dr. O’Doull, would have a fancier name for it, but that is what it is.”

  “Thank you,” Lucien said, and sounded enough as if he meant it to make his younger son give him a puzzled look. He explained: “Thank you for showing me you really are the ungrateful wretch I thought you were, and not the caring fellow I believed I saw before. I don’t recognize him, and wouldn’t know what to do with him if I saw him again.”

  “Oh, good.” Georges’ voice held nothing but relief. “Now we are insulting each other again. I know how to do this. I know why I should, too. We understand each other this way. The other?” He shook his head. “What could we do if we talked to each other like that all the time?”

  Lucien thought it over. “Lord knows.”

  His son got up and poured their glasses full of applejack again. “We can always get drunk. We know how to do that, too. How much work have you got in the morning?”

  “The usual.” Lucien shrugged. “How much have you got?”

  “The usual.” Georges shrugged, too. “But I have help, and you don’t.”

  With another shrug, Lucien said, “It’s winter. I have to feed the animals and muck out. Past that, things can wait. It’s not like plowing or harvest time. If you want to get drunk, we can get drunk. Too bad Charles and Leonard are not here to do it with us.”

  “Winter does not make the brilliant and talented Dr. O’Doull’s work lighter, as it does ours,” Georges said. “If anything, it makes his work worse.”

  “We’ll just have to drink by ourselves, then,” Lucien said. “What shall we drink to?”

  “How about drinking to being a small country where not much happens?” his son suggested. “The way the world seems to be going these days, we may be luckier than we know.”

  “I confess, I pay less attention to the world now than I did when we were part of Canada,” Lucien Galtier said. “In those days, we had to worry about the United States, because the United States used to worry about us. Now the United States don’t care much about us one way
or the other.”

  “We don’t bother them any more. We can’t bother them any more,” Georges replied. He paused, sipped, and then asked, “What do you think of Action Française?”

  “It is good to see France feeling strong again. What ever else we are, we are still French, eh?” Lucien said, and his son nodded. He continued, “But to be strong, France has to get ready for war. I do not think this is good, not since I have seen war with my own eyes.”

  “Most Frenchmen have also seen war with their own eyes,” his son said. “Those who have will not be eager to fight again, even if England goes the same way as France, which seems more likely every day.”

  “An eighteen-year-old in France will no more remember the Great War than an eighteen-year-old here,” Lucien replied. “It is 1934 now. Come this summer, the war will have been over for seventeen years.” He sipped at his applejack, wondering how that was possible.

  But then Georges said, “Half a lifetime for me—oh, not exactly, but close enough. That truly seems unbelievable, but it is so. All the time of my manhood, I have lived since the war in the Republic of Quebec.”

  “So you have.” Lucien also had trouble believing that, though it too was so. To keep from thinking about the passage of the years, he thought some more about how things were across the ocean. “England,” he said musingly. “I don’t love England—what Quebecois who grew up in Canada before the turn of the century could? But I don’t hate her, either, not quite.”

  “Why not?” Georges asked. “I know plenty of men your age who do.”

  “Because I always feel that, bad as she was, she could have been much worse,” Lucien replied after some thought. “She could have been like the Belgians in Africa, and made her name a stench among the nations. She didn’t, and so I give her . . . some . . . credit.”

  “Ah, but would you rather be on her side or on the side of the United States?” Georges asked slyly.

  “I would rather be on the side of Quebec, and of Quebec alone,” Lucien said. But his son hadn’t give him that choice, and he knew it.