“So what’s this idiot supposed to do, Dad?”

“Capitulate.”

“Can’t do that.”

“Yes, you can. You just don’t see the angles yet. The opportunity will come, I promise. They’re not as afraid of your union as you think, but they are, trust me, afraid. Use that. They will never yield, Aiden, on the affiliation with the AF of L. They can’t. But if you play that chip correctly, they will yield on other issues.”

“Dad, if we give up the AFL affiliation we’ll have corrupted everything we—”

“Take what you will from my musings,” his father said. “Good night, son, and the gods be with you.”

Mayor Andrew J. Peters believed implicitly in the primacy of a single principle: Things had a way of working themselves out.

So many men wasted so much valuable time and energy placing faith in the canard that they could control their destinies when, in fact, the world would continue to entangle and disentangle itself whether they were part of it or not. Why, one just had to look back at that terrible foreign war to see the folly of making rash decisions. Any decisions, really. Think, Andrew Peters would say to Starr on late afternoons like these, what a different outcome would have been accomplished if, after the death of Franz Ferdinand, the Austrians had refrained from rattling their sabers and the Serbians had done the same. Think, too, how pointless it was for Gavrilo Princip, that hopeless fool, to assassinate the archduke in the first place. Just think! All those lives lost, all that earth scorched, and to what end? If cooler heads had prevailed, if men had had the temperance to refrain from acting until their countrymen forgot all about it and went on to other thoughts and other things? What a nice world we’d have today.

For it was the war that had poisoned so many young men’s minds with thoughts of self-determination. This summer, colored men who’d fought overseas had been the main agitators behind the civil disorder that had resulted in the slaughter of their own people in Washington, Omaha, and most terribly in Chicago. Not that Peters was justifying the behavior of the whites who had killed them. Hardly. But you could see how it had happened, the coloreds trying to upset the applecart like that. People didn’t like change. They didn’t want to be upset. They wanted cool drinks on hot days and their meals served on time.

“Self-determination,” he muttered on the deck as Starr, lying beside him, tummy down on a chaise, stirred slightly.

“What’s that, Poppa?”

He leaned over from his own chaise and kissed her shoulder and considered unbuttoning his trousers. But the clouds were massing and the sky was low and the sea had darkened, as if from wine and grief.

“Nothing, darling.”

Starr closed her eyes. A beautiful child. Beautiful! Cheeks that reminded him of apples so ripe they might burst. An ass to match. And everything in between so lush and firm that Andrew J. Peters, mayor of the great city of Boston, occasionally imagined himself an ancient Greek or Roman when he was inside her. Starr Faithful—what an apt name. His lover, his cousin. Fourteen years old this summer, and yet more mature and lascivious than Martha would ever be.