Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [47]
‘How’s my boy?’ she would ask, and hug him tightly, noting a grubby smear on his cheeks.
‘I cut my finger at school.’
‘I’ll get you a Band-Aid.’
They got on with things.
Nancy had never been particularly moved by Whitman, but in her mind she saw Ben and Joel and the ex-actor in the Washington woman’s kitchen, and she had a sudden need to look again at some of the poems. She asked Joey to borrow the Collected Works from the library.
Elbows on her mother’s kitchen table, this one too covered with brightly coloured oilcloth, she opened the book:
‘I sing the body electric . . .’
She read on through the poem, thinking how that woman in her kitchen might have reacted to some of the more outspoken phrases. She turned the page and came to a line that stopped her, trapped the breath in her lungs till she gasped for air. Slowly she read on:
‘The swimmer naked in the swimming bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and fro and from the heave of the water . . .’
Did Ben roll silently to and fro in the green-shine, with his face up, in his last moments? Ben the beautiful swimmer, the incidental drowning.
*
In church the following Sunday the thought for the week seemed to offer a practical note of comfort, a message that reached out to an exhausted, apprehensive people. The preacher’s voice drifted across her consciousness as he spoke of the heroism of long-dead people, of eighteenth-century Quakers who had set a benchmark for courage:
‘Every age has heroes and heroines willing to face formidable challenges, make sacrifices for the common good and speak truth to power. They deserve our gratitude and support.’
At the end of the service the congregation came out into a grey, cold day but Nancy, burning with anger, was unaware of the chill. Speak truth to power . . . The President had betrayed them with his power. Across the country people starved, slept rough, were disallowed their dignity as human beings. Schools closed. The sick were dying untended. The land was full of vagrants, travelling to nowhere. Surely it was time for change?
She had taken a job as office cleaner, and sweeping up at the local Democrat headquarters she came upon leaflets asking for volunteers. She looked at the posters, studied the literature. Next day, after work, she was knocking on doors, handing out leaflets.
Not long afterwards, one of the churchgoing ladies approached Nancy, her face contorted into a grimace of commiseration. Voice modulated into appropriate concern she enquired, ‘Nancy my dear. What are your plans?’
‘I’m campaigning for FDR,’ she said.
‘Let’s hope your hero can deliver the goods,’ her father remarked, sounding less than hopeful. ‘Remember the old fairy tale warning: be careful what you wish for.’
When the voters got the president they wished for, Nancy danced round the kitchen table.
‘We should be drinking champagne! A toast to Franklin Delano Roosevelt!’
‘Well now, we were never a wine-in-the-icebox family,’ Louis said. ‘Would you settle for cola?’
She read the Inaugural Address aloud to Joey from the newspaper:
‘So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.’
There was more: there was comfort, inspiration, when the President told his penniless people that happiness did not lie in the mere possession of money but in the joy of achievement and moral stimulation of work. ‘These dark days will be worth all they cost if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and our fellow men.’
On the radio, later, crackling through the ether, he repeated the words that had given her hope: ‘I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.’
22
Filled with post-election euphoria, as she kissed Joey goodnight, Nancy said, like someone ending a bedtime story with the promise of happy ever after: ‘Things will get