Free The Immigrant’s Daughter by Howard Fast Page B

either.
    â€œBut I’m not Barbara.” Eloise sighed. “You do know, Barbara,” tentatively speaking yet apologizing for having the temerity to speak, “you will be elected this time. Do you really want that?”
    â€œWhy do you say I’ll win this time? No Democrat has ever won in the Forty-eighth.”
    â€œBecause it’s not six years ago,” Eloise said. “We’ve been so deep in the women’s movement that we never really got outside to look at it. We’ve ended that horror in Vietnam and Nixon’s gone and no woman in this country will ever be quite the same again, and even if the Forty-eighth is slightly to the right of Pasadena, you’ll still win, Barbara.”
    â€œIt’s different,” Clair said. “A few months ago, Gerald L. K. Smith died down in Glendale, and it hardly made the papers.”
    â€œWho was he?” May Ling asked.
    â€œThere you are — only the most notorious anti-Semite and public native fascist of our time, my time, darling, not yours. I can’t applaud what you’re doing, Barbara — Washington is an unhappy place — and I know you a little. But — oh, hell, why not?”
    After dinner, May Ling’s baby had to be taken home, and Adam had to go over things with Clair. Freddie said to Eloise, “Mom, I want a half hour with Barbara.”
    Eloise looked at him curiously, and then nodded. “I’ll wait here with your father.”
    â€œWe’ll be in the living room,” Freddie said.
    All very odd, Barbara thought. At this point, she hardly knew whether to be depressed or pleased by her decision. There had been a time when the decision would have been hers, entirely hers — perhaps tested on Boyd, but still entirely hers, regardless of Boyd’s agreement or protest — but now, after the conversation at the dinner table, she felt neither enthusiasm nor any real approval from the only family she had. Of course, Eloise’s calm certainty that she would win the contest surprised her, but Eloise always surprised her when it came to a matter of importance. The same might be said of Freddie. At age thirty-four, Freddie was knowledgeable, sometimes brilliant, and usually iconoclastic. He had always adored Barbara, and he underlined that now.
    â€œYou know,” he said, sitting opposite her, his long, good-looking face, the Seldon face, set seriously, “I do feel like a horse’s ass, Aunt Barbara, and I have no damn right to say what I’m saying —”
    â€œFor heaven’s sake, Freddie, stop apologizing and get to it.”
    â€œAll right, and you can put me down and walk out of here, but I’m saying it anyway. You’re being used by a pack of bums, and that includes that benign old gentleman Tony Moretti. Where was he when they tossed you in jail? Same party, same head — do you want me to stop?”
    â€œNo, Freddie. I want you to say exactly what you want to say, and I won’t take offense. You are very dear to me.”
    â€œAll right, I’ll go on. There’s a notion around that because Nixon behaved like a complete turd, the Democrats have come up smelling like roses. Not to me. The crazy time of terror that sent you and a lot of others to jail was called McCarthyism, and the Democrats loved that. It made people forget that Truman started the whole thing with his Executive Order on the Loyalty Oath, and let me add something else. When we drove down to Mississippi to help in the registration drive, back in the sixties, and they whipped us and tortured us and they murdered Bert Jones and Herbie Katz — you remember that, I think?”
    â€œYes, I do,” Barbara said softly, recalling how she found him after the incident in the hospital at Jackson, Mississippi.
    â€œWell, who was in the White House then? Brave Jack Kennedy and brave brother Bobby, and they knew what was happening down south, they