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.” 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
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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 fiancée 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,
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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