First Papers (20 page)

“She didn’t!” she exclaimed after a moment, her eyes alight. “I can’t believe it, Dad … did she
really?”

“What’s up, Letts?” Garry said, but she waved him off, clutching the telephone to her breast. “She could have got it from Information, but I’m glad she called you—I’d rather hear this from you first so I can get used to it …
How much?
oh, no, I don’t believe you.”

“Hey!” He made a lunge for the telephone and at last she said, “Here he is, Dad, but please don’t give him even a hint. I want to tell him.”

Garry took the telephone and demanded, “What are you two up to, anyhow?” but he knew he would get no answer. His father’s first words to him were interesting enough.

“I may be sent out to California for a couple of weeks, Garry.”

“What for, Dad? When?”

“Pretty soon, I think. We had a meeting today and Schroeder suggested it. They’ve organized a League out there, and he and Abbott thought one of us ought to go out and get to know them, our first affiliate.”

“And you’re the one they picked!”

“I’m the one IF.” Evan sounded cautious, knowing that his very caution would reveal to Garry how much he wanted to go. “The big IF is finances. It would cost a lot, and our year-end report isn’t ready yet.”

“It’s not due until April, is it? They’re not going to wait around until April before they decide, are they?”

“Not that long, no.” Evan hesitated. “How did you remember April?”

“I don’t know. I just did. Suppose I sent in my dues for this year ahead of time—would that tip the scales right away?”

“Not enough, but thanks.” He hung up, pleased that Garry remembered just when the Free Speech League had begun. It was like Garry to be imaginative about his parents’ interests—many children were not—and Garry always seemed eager to hear about his father’s new work as counsel on the special cases handled by the League he had helped organize.

“Hurry,” Letty whispered as Garry said good night to his father.

“You
hurry. What did he tell you?”

“You’ll never never guess,” Letty said. “It started with a call this afternoon to ask for our number.”

“From whom?”

“Mrs. Aldrich.”

“Mrs. Aldrich?” He knew of one Mrs. Aldrich only, the wife of his employer.

“Cynthia Aldrich,” Letty said, her voice rising. “She wanted to talk to
me.”

“What
for?”

“She wants to buy my lowboy.”

“Buy it?”

“She saw it just that once,” Letty said, stressing each word, “at our lab party. She told Dad she couldn’t take her eyes off it all the time they were here. And she’s been out hunting the best shops for one ever since. She’ll pay me eighty dollars for it—oh, Garry, isn’t it crazy?”

He produced a long impressed whistle and she whirled away, crossing to the small chest of gleaming pale walnut in the far corner of the big room. The party had been for Otto Ohrmann and several other lab people and their wives, and Mr. Aldrich had asked if he might drop in for a while. Though his entrance, with Mrs. Aldrich in furs and plumes, had made everybody stiffen up, they had given an extra fillip to the afternoon, a sense of high occasion. And especially for Letty.

Several times Mrs. Aldrich had told her how delightful “the drawing room” was, and several times Letty had caught her gazing at the breakfront, at the lamp tables and particularly at the walnut lowboy, her most recent triumph, a piece she had bought for three dollars from a junk dealer, and then restored with what by now had become almost professional skill.

“Eighty dollars,” Letty repeated to Garry slowly. “Mrs. Aldrich said she has a lowboy that’s Queen Anne also, and near enough to make a good pair with mine. Ours.”

“You say ‘mine,’ darling. God knows I never would have carted the old wreck home, and spent weeks over it the way you did.”

“It was so
beautiful.”
She laid one hand on its surface, as if its beauty and sheen were alive.

“And God knows I didn’t believe you when you first said it was.” He went over to the lowboy also, and saluted it.

“Eighty dollars,” he said to it wonderingly. Then, turning to her, he saluted again. “Vive Queen Anne. Vive la France. Vive Letty Paige.”

“Oh, Gare darling,” she cried, “I’m so happy.”

The next morning, Evander Paige reached his office half an hour earlier than his usual nine o’clock. He liked the first hour of the day, and he took pleasure in his large office, though he understood that some of their younger clients found a certain old-fashioned look in the suite of rooms occupied by Turner, Paige, Levy and Payson on the third floor of their old building near Trinity Church, and even thought it quaint to have to walk up two flights of stairs.

“But there’s nothing quaint about our law,” he had said once, for even in their regular flow of work, on the usual fee basis, the four partners were apt to be involved with “modern” cases, akin in spirit to the voluntary work they did on the outside. Most law firms still would not accept a labor union as a client, nor one of the Woman Suffrage groups, but he could never have remained interested in one such, nor done well enough to have become a partner within five years.

All four had their own “hobby” work that they did for motives of their own—Payson with his domestic court cases, Levy with his censorship ones, and Turner with juvenile offenders—but there had been noticeable curves and shifts in his own deep interests. He still devoted a great deal of time to prison and parole cases, but the ones he found most compelling now were these far subtler, far more complex cases usually lumped under the one label, “Free Speech.”

It was a natural development, predictable enough perhaps for a man who had gone to Brown before Harvard Law, and who therefore had felt personally involved when the attacks had begun on old Professor Andrews.

“Elisha Ben Andrews, may his tribe increase.”

The long-forgotten collegiate jest sounded in Evan’s mind, as it had so often in the eighteen-nineties when Andrews, one of the greatest teachers he had ever had, had been so viciously attacked the country over as a scoundrel, a corruptor of student minds and of potential patriots, virtually a traitor. All because he believed in international bimetalism.

Today, in 1912, it was comic to remember the furor over this crime of old Andrews, but in the nineties it had been anything but funny on half the campuses of the United States, in most of the newspapers, and among the agitated members of Brown University’s faculty and Board of Trustees.

International bimetalism, Evan thought now. He himself had been a young lawyer then, still conventional enough to be going back to good old Brown each June for Reunion, delighted to see classmates and a few favorite professors. But the increasing conservatism that was supposed to be inevitable as one’s youth vanished, had apparently by-passed him, and he remained attached to “radical” ideas like academic freedom and free speech and the waste and futility of war. Not to speak of socialism in general.

All his grandfathers had been rebels, hadn’t they, soldiers and officers in the Continental Army in 1776? And much later, all over Roxbury and Newburyport and Boston, his ancestors were noted for their “independence of mind” about nearly everything, including his own mother who flouted the Presbyterianism of her family, became a Unitarian, but still forbade the reading of any secular book on the Lord’s Day.

“Good morning, Mr. Paige.”

Evan greeted his secretary and entertained the vagrant thought that it was rather quaint to have a young man for a secretary in this day and age. A moment later, his telephone rang, and he picked it up himself. It was one of the League members, but the call was not about his trip to the Coast.

“You’re right, Evan,” he began. “We are top heavy with lawyers and it’s high time we balance out a bit. Did you talk to your friend?”

“I haven’t seen him yet—he’s only there Friday nights as a rule, or in the afternoons when
I’m
not.”

“A morning paper—you did say that.”

“Maybe this weekend. He’s not a man to rush, anyway; he’ll want to consider it.”

“It’s just that I’d like to know before I start on this new membership drive. In New York at least, his name would help.”

“Give me until Monday.”

“The Paiges may drop in later,” Alexandra said. “I think Evan has some news.”

“What kind of news?” Fran asked. News about Garry?

“How should I know till I hear it? But it’s nearly noon already, and this place is like a pigsty.”

“I hate Saturdays,” Fee said, not looking up from the book she was finishing. “Nothing but housework.”

“Every family does the heavy cleaning on Saturdays,” Alexandra said sternly. “Come, let’s do it with a will, and we’ll be finished before you know it.”

Neither girl stirred. “Do it with a will” was another one of their mother’s special phrases like “oh, my goodness” or “it’s delicious,” and they had learned long ago not to hear it. Fran was trying to repair her ivory-handled nail-buffer, one of the first purchases she had made for herself, now showing its hard use in the greyness of the once-yellow chamois, held taut to the long oval frame by a thin steel hoop.

Alexandra waited patiently for some response from the girls, busying herself with the everyday cleaning up of the breakfast table. As an afterthought, she added, “But Evan’s news might have something to do with a nice trip to California for his League.”

“To California?” Fran said.

“Alida said last week, they might send him, though he won’t know for a while. Maybe by now he does know.”

“I’d give a million dollars to go to California,” Fran said dreamily, “or to Palm Beach or Paris or Monte Carlo.”

Fee turned her book face down on the kitchen table. “Would he go all the way to California in a train?” she asked.

“How else?” Alexandra said.

“Steerage?”

Alexandra laughed. “Steerage isn’t a—a
thing
to travel in.”

“I know what steerage is,” Fee said explosively. “I just said it instead of boat.” She was mortified at being caught in an error of language by her mother, an unheard-of turnabout.

“Don’t be so sensitive, Fira,” Alexandra said. “It’s what you’ve heard so often, ‘coming by steerage,’ or ‘they came by steerage.’ Why shouldn’t you say ‘steerage’?”

“Maybe he’ll go by Pony Express,” Fran said.

Fee ignored her. “How long does it take to go all the way there in a train, Mama?”

“Five days and five nights,” Alexandra said, relieved that Fee’s flash of temper had succumbed to the cure-all of new interest, “It must be delicious to spend five days and nights in a big warm train,” she said, glancing out at their snow-laden back porch and back yard, the clotheslines bright streaks of ice between the frosted trees. “You sit in a lovely plush seat, or at a real table if you can afford the dining-room car, with a white tablecloth and silver knives and forks, and you look out of a real plate-glass window and watch the scenery going by.”

The girls’ silence begged her to go on. “All day long the towns go by, and the villages, and the cities, and then the farms get bigger and bigger, as big as whole states, almost. And at night, your seat turns into a berth, curtained off like a queen’s bed, and you undress and get in, and read and sleep while the train keeps going, on and on in the darkness.”

“How do you know?” Fee said. “Did you ever go to California?”

“I’ve never been further than Philadelphia and once to Scranton,” Alexandra said. “But Papa told me how it is on long Pullman trips, and the rest I know from reading it.” She looked fearful that this admission had reduced her status as an authority on transcontinental travel.

“Do lots of people go all the way to California?” Fee persisted.

“If they have money for fare. At last you come to the Rocky Mountains. They’re as beautiful as the Alps in Switzerland—and the train crawls around and around, higher and higher until you’re in the clouds.”

“Does it just go and go, and never stop once, the whole way from here to California?” Fee asked.

“You bonehead,” Fran said pleasantly. “It has to stop at stations, doesn’t it? Like the el going to New York?”

“It
isn’t
like the el. It has a locomotive and sparks flying and black smoke streaming out and winding up to the sky. Hasn’t it, Mama?”

“Some day we all must travel,” Alexandra said.

“How much would it cost?” Fran asked.

“Heavens, a fortune. But maybe when the mortgage is paid off, and you’re both older—” She paused and then went on, the lift of hope in her voice. “We must manage it somehow, and see the Mississippi and the mountains and the deserts and then at last the Pacific Ocean. Just imagine, looking out at big breakers, and knowing it’s not Rockaway or Coney, but the Pacific Ocean.”

Her eyes gleamed and both girls looked faintly embarrassed. “I’d like to go just for the train ride,” Fran said hastily. “It must be fun every second.”

“It would be fun to go by motorcycle too,” Fee said. “If Eli ever wanted to go, I’d beg him to take me.”

“Darling, you’d die of exhaustion before you got halfway there,” Alexandra said.

“I would not! Eli says I’m the only one who never gets tired when he gives me a ride.”

“You’d sit on those hard stabbing handlebars all the way, with your little legs dangling, I suppose?”

Now Fee sounded superior. “Some motorcycles have a sort of swing on the side, like a short bathtub. Maybe Eli would get one before we started.”

Fran snorted in derision. “Eli might take you to California! Eli won’t even take us for a ride around
here
any more, he’s getting so stuck-up.”

Alexandra said, “He’s busy. He’s trying to get some extra teaching too.”

Fran ignored this. “Ever since he became Eli Eaves,” she said, “he snoots us about everything.”

“Nonsense,” Alexandra said briskly. “Now we all have to hurry or we’ll never get through before the Paiges ring the bell. Come, both of you.”

As she worked, Alexandra thought of a dozen things she herself would ask Evan about, if he were to take the trip she had dreamed aloud for the girls. Silly things, some of them, even embarrassing, like what the Pullman bathroom looked like on the California train, but she could ask the Paiges anything. They had become much closer friends since that night she had maneuvered Stiva into translating his famous editorial for them.