Out at the nursing station, a starched woman of about Edna's age, shook her head at Nellie. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Jacobs," she said, not sounding sorry in the least, "but I can't deviate from the attending physician's instructions." Nellie might have asked her to commit an unnatural act.

"Well, who is the attending physician, and where the devil do I find him?" Nellie asked.

"His name is Dr. Baumgartner, and his office is in room 127, near the front entrance," the nurse answered reluctantly. "I don't know if he's in. Even if he is, I don't think you can get him to change his mind."

"We'll see about that," Nellie snapped. She hurried off to room 127 with determined strides. Dr. Baumgartner was in, writing notes on one of his patients. He was in his late thirties, and wore the ribbon for a Purple Heart. Above his collar, the side of his neck was scarred. Nellie wondered how far down the scar ran and how bad it was. Shoving that aside, she told him what she wanted.

He heard her out, then shook his head. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Jacobs, but I don't see how I can do that. They don't call cigarettes coffin nails for nothing."

"What difference does that make?" Nellie asked bluntly. "He's dying anyhow."

"I know he is, ma'am," Baumgartner answered. "But my job is to keep him alive as long as I can and to keep him as comfortable as I can. That's what the oxygen is for."

"That's what the cigarettes are for," Nellie said: "the comfortable part, I mean."

Before Dr. Baumgartner could answer, an ambulance came clanging up to the front door of the hospital. The physician jumped to his feet and grabbed a black bag that sat on a corner of his desk. "You have to excuse me, ma'am," he said. "There might be something I can do to help there."

"We aren't done with this argument-not by a long shot we're not," Nellie said, and followed him as he hurried out of the office.

To her surprise, policemen rushed in through the entrance ahead of the men getting a stretcher out of the back of the ambulance. Some of them had drawn their pistols. Most people shrank away from them in alarm. Dr. Baumgartner eyed the pistols with the air of a man who'd known worse. "What the hell's going on?" he demanded.

"Come quick, Doc," one of the policemen told him. "Do what ever you can. He'd gotten out of the bathtub, they tell me, and he was shaving when he keeled over."

"Who's he?" Baumgartner asked. "And since when does an ambulance need a squad of motorcycle cops for escort?"

"Since it's got Calvin Coolidge in it, is since when," the policeman answered. "He keeled over, like I say, and nobody's been able to get a rise out of him since."

"Oh, dear God," Nellie said. Nobody paid any attention to her. The stretcher-bearers brought their burden into the hospital. Sure enough, the president-elect lay on the stretcher, his face pale and still.

Dr. Baumgartner knelt beside him. The doctor's hand found Coolidge's wrist. "He has no pulse," Baumgartner said. He peeled back an eyelid. "His pupil doesn't respond to light." He took his hand away from Coolidge's face. The president-elect stared up with one eye open, the other closed. Nellie could see what Dr. Baumgartner was going to say before he said it: "He's dead." Baumgartner's expression and voice were stunned.

"Can't you do anything for him, Doc?" a cop asked. "That's why we brung him here."

"You'd need the Lord. He can raise the dead. I can't," Dr. Baumgartner answered, still in that dazed voice. "If I'd been standing next to him the minute it happened, I don't think I could have done anything. Coronary thrombosis or a stroke, I'd say, although I can't begin to know which without an autopsy."

"Coro-what?" The policeman scratched his head. "What's that in English?"

"Heart attack," Baumgartner said patiently. "That'd be my guess. Without a postmortem, though, it's only a guess."

"What happens next?" Nellie asked. "He was president. I mean, he was going to be president. Now…" She looked down at the body, then quickly turned away. "Close his eye, please."

While Baumgartner did that, the policeman said, "Yeah, what the hell-'scuse me, lady-do we do now? We never had nothin' like this happen before. That damn Blackford-'scuse me again-better not get to be president on account of he finished second. That wouldn't be right, not after Cal here kicked his… tail."

"No, no, no. It doesn't work like that." Dr. Baumgartner shook his head. "The electoral college met yesterday, so the results are official. The vice president-elect becomes president-elect, and then he becomes president on the first of February."

"Well, that's a relief," the cop said. "Thanks, Doc."

And Nellie might have been the first one to taste the name and title the whole United States would know before the day was up: "President Herbert Hoover." She paused in thought, then slowly nodded and repeated the words. "President Herbert Hoover." She paused again. "I like the sound of it."

A long with her daughter, Mary Jane, Sylvia Enos crunched through snow to stand on the Boston Common and pay her last respects to Calvin Coolidge. George, Jr., would have come with them, too-Sylvia was sure of that-but his fishing boat was bringing in cod out on Georges Bank. For a moment, she wondered if he even knew. Then she shook her head, feeling foolish. The Whitecap had a wireless set aboard, so he was bound to.

Like her and Mary Jane, most of the people in the square wore black. It seemed all the more somber against the snow. Up on a rickety wooden platform, a newsreel photographer swung his camera over the crowd.

"It doesn't seem fair," Sylvia said. "He wasn't an old man-he was only sixty." Mary Jane gave her an odd look. But then, Mary Jane was only twenty, and to twenty sixty was one with the Pyramids of Egypt. Sylvia knew better, and wished she didn't. She went on, "And it doesn't seem fair he died before he could be president, especially when we've been stuck with Socialists the past twelve years."

"Hoover is a Democrat, too," Mary Jane said. But then, before Sylvia could, she added, "But he's not from Massachusetts."

"He certainly isn't," Sylvia said. "Born in Iowa, then on to California…" She sighed. "He's from about as far from Massachusetts as he can be and stay in the USA."

"He's-" Mary Jane broke off as heads swung toward a string of black autos approaching the State House behind a phalanx of motorcycle policemen. "Here comes the funeral procession."

A hearse carrying Coolidge's mortal remains led the cortege. Behind it came an open limousine in which sat President-elect Hoover. Behind his autos were a stream of others, all full of dignitaries civilian and military. When the hearse halted, an honor guard of soldiers, sailors, and Marines lifted Coolidge's flag-draped casket from it and set the coffin on a temporary bier whose black cloth cover was half hidden by red-white-and-blue bunting.

"I wish Pa could have got a funeral," Mary Jane said suddenly. "Not a fancy one like this, but any kind of funeral at all."

"You were a little girl when the Confederates torpedoed his ship," Sylvia said. "And he was away at sea so much before that. Do you remember him at all?"

"Not very much," her daughter answered. "But I do remember one time when he was home on leave and he kept telling my brother and me to go to bed. I didn't much like that then, so I guess it stuck with me."

Sylvia's face heated despite the chilly weather. A sailor home on leave wanted his children to go to bed so he could, too-with his wife. Sylvia's own life had been empty that way since George was killed. She sighed, exhaling a cloud of fog. When she had wanted a man, poor Ernie hadn't been able to do anything about it. That seemed so horribly unfair, it made her want to cry from sheer frustration. She couldn't do that now. Instead, she lit a cigarette. It helped take the edge off what ever bothered her.