The Immigrant’s Daughter by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online

your man, Johnson, who turned it into an abattoir.”
    â€œSome truth,” Moretti agreed, unhappily. “But you’re pushing it, Boyd. You know by now how badly we want this cursed war over with. That’s why we’re sitting here, and that’s why I’m talking to you. We desperately want a woman candidate. We’ve been attacked on every hand as male chauvinist pigs, and the Republicans have pulled the rug right out from under us. We need a woman candidate, but not any woman. To just pick a woman out of the grab bag is meaningless. We need a woman like Barbara Lavette, and if you think it was easy to get the party caucus to agree to her —” He shook his big head. “No, not easy. Not easy at all.”
    â€œWithout asking her.”
    â€œBecause I know her. She’d be so damn mad at the notion of being used that she’d boot me out of the house. With reason.”
    â€œI’m afraid you lost me somewhere,” Boyd said. He was thinking that he really didn’t give a damn. Too much had happened. The war in Vietnam had snapped him loose from whatever illusions he still cherished, and if he ever troubled to define politics, it was as a pig’s game. Ruddy was a skinny pig, and the state houses in fifty states and the Congress in Washington were filled with Ruddys, fat and thin and in between, noses in a long trough that the plain people paid for. Perhaps Moretti sensed what he was thinking and regretted bringing Ruddy, or perhaps not. Moretti’s feet were still wet with the mud and dirt of another world, seven thousand miles away, and for him, politics was the song of freedom. Politics was the warm wonder of an enormously extended family, and he contemplated Kimmelman curiously and thoughtfully. He saw before him a man neither short nor tall, stocky, a light complexion, blue eyes and sandy hair. The middle fifties, Moretti decided, a man who had stepped out of uniform into a job at Benchly’s office back in 1945. Moretti had known the city the way it was, the city in the hills that the Italians and Jews and Irish built with their own hands, city of wops and yids and micks, their city in spite of the fact that the Wasps owned the banks and the railroads. How much did a Boyd Kimmelman understand? Men like Ruddy understood little or nothing, but Kimmelman —
    â€œI didn’t lose you, Boyd,” Moretti said gently. “I think you know what I mean. The lady believes. She’s not cynical.” Which Boyd Kimmelman knew. And Moretti, like so many in the city, knew that Boyd Kimmelman and Barbara Lavette had been living together yet apart for twelve years or so. It was not news anymore, not even gossip.
    â€œShe believes,” Boyd agreed. “She believes that you can stop war, that you can change history, that the good guys will triumph over the bad guys.”
    â€œThat’s it,” Ruddy said. “That’s the way we have to look at things.”
    â€œGod help us,” Boyd said.
    â€œWhat in hell does that mean?”
    â€œEat your dessert and stop talking,” Moretti said to Ruddy. He had a huge piece of chocolate cake on his plate, one of Gino’s famous double desserts. For about thirty seconds, Ruddy ignored it, as if to say that he didn’t take orders from Tony Moretti. Then he began to eat hungrily. Boyd felt sorry for him, and with that came the kind of guilt he might have felt in mocking the infirmity of a cripple.
    â€œGood, isn’t it? I have a sweet tooth, too.”
    Ruddy smiled with appreciation. His smile said that he held no grudge. He was a congressman. All people were voters and he loved all people and he loved all voters. No hard feelings. No hard feelings anywhere.
    â€œLet me be explicit,” Moretti said, “and tell you what I mean by belief. It’s a faith. I’m a Catholic. I have to believe. If I say I believe in Mary the mother of God — which I do — it’s