Free The Victorious Opposition by Harry Turtledove Page B

away.” She hoped she didn’t show how worried she was. The difference in their ages hadn’t seemed to matter when she married him, but now, while she remained in vigorous middle age, he was heading toward his seventy-fourth birthday. Illnesses he would have shrugged off even a few years before hung on and on. One of these days . . . Flora resolutely refused to think about that.
    Bruck nodded. “Sure. Everybody will understand that. Give him our best, then, and we hope we’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll drive you back to your block of flats.”
    She eyed him. Would he cause trouble in the auto? No. He had better sense than that. “Thanks,” she said again. He hurried off to get the motorcar from a side street. The De Soto bespoke prosperity but not riches.
    New York City traffic was even crazier than Flora remembered: more motorcars and trucks on the street, more drivers seeming not to care whether they lived or died.
This in spite of the subways,
she thought, and shuddered. Earlier in the year, she and Hosea and Joshua had been living in Dakota. New York City had five or six times as many people as the big state, and by all appearances had fifty or sixty times as many automobiles.
    She let out a sigh of relief at escaping the De Soto. The doorman tipped his cap when she went into the block of flats. The building where she’d lived with her parents and brothers and sisters hadn’t boasted a doorman. It hadn’t boasted an elevator operator—or an elevator—either. Not having to walk up four flights of stairs whenever she went to the flat was pleasant.
    Hosea Blackford greeted her with a sneeze. His nose was red. His face, always bony, had lost more flesh. His white hair lay thin and dry across his skull. This wasn’t death’s door—little by little, he was getting well—but the way he looked still alarmed her. After another sneeze, he peered at her over the tops of his reading glasses and brandished the
New York Times
like a weapon. “
Another
round of riots down in the Confederate States,” he said. “If that’s not reactionary madness on the march down there, I’ve never seen nor heard of it.”
    “Has anyone protested yet?” Flora asked.
    Her husband shook his head. “Not a word. The Confederates are saying it’s an internal matter, and our State Department is taking the same line.”
    She sighed. “We’d sing a different song if the Freedom Party were going after white men and not Negroes. The injustice, the hypocrisy, are so obvious—but nobody seems to care.”
    “A lot of whites in the Confederate States despise Negroes and come right out and say so,” Hosea Blackford said. “A lot of whites in the United States despise Negroes, too. They keep their mouths shut about it, and so they seem tolerant when you look at them alongside the Confederates. They seem tolerant—but they aren’t.”
    “I know. I saw that when we were both still in Congress,” Flora said. “It’s not just Democrats, either. Too many Socialists wouldn’t cross the street to do anything for a black man. I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know if we can do anything about it.”
    Hosea nodded. “Even Lincoln said the War of Secession was about trying to preserve the Union, not about the Negro or about slavery. He couldn’t have made anybody march behind his banner if he’d said the other—and even as things were, he failed.” He coughed again. “I wish I would have asked him about that when I met him on the train. I wish we would have talked about all kinds of things we never got to touch.”
    “I know,” Flora said. That chance meeting had changed his life. He talked about it often, and ever more so as he got older.
    Now he laughed a bitter laugh. “We’re two peas in a pod, Lincoln and I: the two biggest failures as president of the United States.”
    “Don’t talk like that!” Flora said.
    “Why not? It’s the truth. I’m not a blind man, Flora, and I hope I’m not a fool,” Hosea Blackford