Various reports had placed the location of Peters’s “secret” parade at City Hall, Pemberton Square, Sudbury Square, and Washington Street, but Ruth strolled up to the State House because that’s where everyone else seemed to be going. It wasn’t every day you got a chance to see a president, but he hoped if anyone ever tried to kill him someday, the powers that be would do a better job keeping his movements private. Wilson’s motorcade rolled up Park Street at the stroke of twelve and turned left onto Beacon at the State House. Across the street on the lawn of the Common, a bunch of bughouse suffragette dames burned their girdles and their corsets and even a few bras and shouted, “No vote, no citizenship! No vote, no citizenship!” as the smoke rose from the pyre and Wilson kept his eyes straight ahead. He was smaller than Ruth would have expected, thinner, too, as he rode in the back of an open-air sedan and waved stiffly to the crowd—one flick of the wrist to the left side of the street, one to the right, back to the left again, his eyes never making contact with anything but high windows and treetops. Which was probably good for him, because Ruth saw a dense mob of rough-looking, grimy men being held back by police along the Joy Street entrance to the Common. Had to be thousands of these guys. They held up banners that identified them as the Lawrence Strike Parade and shouted obscenities at the president and the police as the coppers tried to push them back. Ruth chuckled as the suffragettes rushed behind the motorcade, still screaming about the vote, their legs bare and raw in the cold because they’d torched their bloomers, too. He crossed the street and passed their burning pile of clothing as the motorcade rode down Beacon. Halfway across the Common, he heard fearful shouts from the crowd and turned to see the Lawrence strikers going at it with the cops, lots of stumbling and awkward punches and voices pitched high with outrage.

I’ll be damned, Ruth thought. The whole world’s on strike.

The motorcade appeared in front of him, rolling slowly down Charles Street. He kept a leisurely pace as he followed it through the throngs while it snaked around the Public Garden and then along Commonwealth. He signed a few autographs as he went, shook a few hands, but it was nice how his celebrity diminished in light of much larger star power. Folks were less clamorous and clingy with him that afternoon, as if, in the bright sun cast by Wilson’s fame, Babe was just one of the common folk. He might be famous, but he wasn’t the reason rifles were pointing down at their heads. That was a mean kind of famous. His was a friendly kind of famous, a regular famous.

By the time Wilson climbed a podium in Copley Square, Babe had grown bored, though. The president might have been powerful and book-smart and all, but he sure didn’t know much about public speaking. You had to give them a show, a little razzle here and some dazzle there, tell a few jokes, make them think you took as much pleasure in their company as they did in yours. But Wilson looked tired up there, old, his voice a thin, reedy thing as he droned on about League-of-Nations this and new-world-order that and the great responsibilities that come with great might and great freedom. For all the big words and big ideas, he smelled of defeat, of something stale and weary and broken beyond fixing. Ruth worked his way out of the crowd and signed two more autographs on the fringe of it and then walked up Tremont and went looking for a steak.