First Papers (31 page)

“Tonight is excellent,” he said, “but my office is no good for talk, quite bad in fact. How would it strike you if we meet instead in the café next door? Nobody would interrupt us there.”

“That would be even better. Alida will be coming too—you did understand that?”

“Do I understand about wives? Has Alida ever been in an East Side restaurant?”

At his side, Alexandra said, “Stiva, what’s going on?”

Stefan looked around, and thought, Now I’ll find out about wives all right, I never even considered it. Into the telephone, he said, “If Alida would enjoy it, perhaps Alexandra might also like an East Side rendezvous, for the sake of change.”

He brushed away Evan’s thanks and smiled at Alexandra as he hung up. “It’s been several months,” he said, “since you’ve stopped in at the café. I thought you’d enjoy meeting them there tonight.”

Alexandra said, “I would not.” She turned abruptly and left him.

He thought, I knew it. But he went after her and said, “Now see here,” in his most cajoling voice.

“You never
thought
of including me,” she said, facing him suddenly. “If I hadn’t wanted to say welcome home to Evan, and come over to tell you not to hang up, why then, you would have thought nothing of meeting them there by yourself, without one word to me until afterward.”

“Damnable nonsense,” he said in Russian.

Since she was so correct, he was outraged. His pleasant emotions about Evan’s desire to hold him to his word, his sense of comradeliness, even his small proprietary pleasure at being the Paiges’ host in
his
domain—all this was riddled with holes by her spattering outburst.

“It is not nonsense,” she said. “I won’t go, like a—an afterthought.”

“Then don’t. If you’re going to dish up a bowlful of anguish, it’s better that you don’t.”

He started up the stairs. He could hear her hurl herself on the narrow bed in the sewing room, and he thought, Like a child, like a debutante. Each notion deepened his resentment. No matter how intelligent she was, no matter how fine and good, she was also a damnable nuisance with her hurt and her tears, and he wished he could call off the entire evening. It was ruined in any case.

He wondered about Evan’s specific plan for his help. An article, of course. Would Evan renew the other suggestion, about signing him up as a member of the committee? Surely not. But would a man of Evan’s temperament come downtown on the very evening he arrived back East, to ask him to write one article? Improbable also.

He rolled a cigarette and thought, How interesting human behavior is. Paige knows enough of press time to know it could not be in tomorrow’s paper if he doesn’t see me until midnight, yet he wants to come down tonight, not wait until tomorrow.

Human behavior. He wondered where Alexandra was, and why no sound of tears. He had been sure she would follow her sudden passion for etiquette and pursue him upstairs to belabor it until misery enveloped her like thick dark velvet.

He bent his cigarette double and jammed it into his crowded ashtray. His hand slipped and the red end of the cigarette nipped his thumb. He cursed at it, at the ashtray, at himself for smoking too much and at Alexandra for being so unreasonable that she drove a man to excesses that would kill off his health.

Then he went to find her.

She was out in the garden, hoeing the earth around her tomato plants, apparently contented and untroubled. In the late sun, Shag was the color of a red fox, and his dripping elongated tongue told of June and summer. Beyond the peaceful scene were the strenuous shouts of five boys and girls helping Fran and Fira to make the tennis court—if tennis court it was to be. The grass was certainly gone from the plot, but there was no more tennis court as yet than there would have been at the ruins of Pompeii five minutes after the eruption. Hills of loose earth straggled over half the area, where the rise had been which Franny had so complacently predicted would be leveled off in “a day or two.” Who could have suspected the rocky stratum under the grass and dandelions?

Alexandra said, “Well, what is it?”

He smiled and his irritation vanished. She had won a victory, and she had been aware of it when he came out to find her in such splendid calm and serenity, instead of in the tears he had expected. Now she had thrown it away by being Alexandra to the nth degree—unable to wait it out and force him to speak first, apologetic, contrite. He loved her for her failure. She was a marvel.

“You were right,” he said. “I was so interested in Evan’s inviting himself downtown, I hadn’t yet thought about anything else. But in another minute, I would have. You must know I would have.”

She looked at him, hoe in her hand, suspicion in her eyes, but also trust and willingness to believe him. Shag trotted over to Stefan and he scratched the dog’s head absent-mindedly. “You must know I would have,” he repeated.

“I suppose so,” she said. “Perhaps I’m too sensitive.” She dropped the hoe and shook earth from the hem of her skirt. With a bound, Shag leaped toward her, crashing through the even rows of her tomato plants. “Bad, bad dog,” she scolded, “you’re always sorry afterward, but you always manage to mangle things first. Go away, go, I say.”

Shag miserably obeyed. Stiva watched him go and thought, At times, she can be quite witty.

It was like meeting a new man, Stefan Ivarin decided as he finished his coffee and signaled to the waiter to clear and tidy the littered table. Evander Paige had never shown himself this way in the three years and more that they had known each other, never so angry, so fierce, so close to hatred.

As Evan told his story Alida seemed nearly as stunned as Alexandra, though Alida was not hearing it for the first time, while Alexandra was raw under its first impact. She was always so unguarded about showing what she felt that now as she flinched or squeezed her eyelids tight in shock, Stefan found it hard to look in her direction.

Nobody interrupted Evan with question or comment. When the waiter approached, Stefan whispered, “Now, some tea,” but only by gesture did he ask the others if they would join him or order something else.

His flesh did not retract as Alexandra’s did, but violence tore him. He was a student again, a youth bending over a secret printing press in a Russian cellar; at the sudden stomp and thud of the Cossacks he was riven again with fear; he was in a stone cell again under the whistling descent of the knout.

Evan must have guessed it, for now he spoke directly to him, as one speaks to a co-survivor. And soon Stefan Ivarin felt that he was also Evander Paige, also standing in the ringed circle under the high crescent of the western moon, hearing the brutish laughter, feeling the iron hands grinding him down into the pocked and pitted road.

Suddenly he seemed to be manifold, ribboned and interlaced, the terrified boy in Russia, the grown man and editor listening, the native-born American lawyer telling. This extraordinary interlocking of memory and fact, of youth and man, of himself and his friend shook Stefan Ivarin in some new depth. It was as if they now shared the same corpuscles and muscles, briefly but forever, as if the lobes of their brains could be interchanged, as if they were a new creature, single, various, but one.

And as Evan went on to the aftermath of that May night, Stefan Ivarin hardly needed to wait for his words to sound and his sentences to form. His contempt for “San Diego Law” chilled Ivarin’s bowels but the contempt was familiar, his own, seen and known long before.

Yet he hungered for the specific, for date, place, name, and urged Evan on through the shabby farce of affidavits and depositions and sworn testimony, the deadening delays, the languid police. He could hear the raucous patriots in meetings swearing to protect the beloved city, see the local press blazing at the anarchists, foreign agitators, vagrants, bums, radicals, free-speechers.

Fleetingly, Ivarin’s heart lifted that the
San Francisco Bulletin
had at last made the issue state-wide, with a full-page attack on “Gag Law in San Diego,” and that the A.F. of L. and the young unions of the West finally joined forces, the copper miners and silver miners, the dockhands and lumbermen and seamen and shipbuilders.

“And then came the great news,” Evan said. “Up at the State Capitol, Governor Johnson ordered a full investigation of the riots and the vigilantes by a Federal grand jury.”

Ivarin nodded, but quickly looked away again.

“You know how it ended?” Evan said.

“I am sure,” Ivarin answered.

“The grand jury indicted thirty people,” Evan said quietly. “Thirty I.W.W.s and socialists and union leaders. And not one vigilante, not one.” He looked at Alida and at Alexandra. Then he addressed himself again to Stefan. “Not even one.”

Stefan said nothing.

All around him in the restaurant beat the loud voices of the East Side, of Europe, untrained in American composure, unaware of American manners, voices rising and falling in talk and argument, in bursting laughter or noisy discussion. Dishes clattered, waiters rushed back and forth, metal trays clashed against each other. The smells of Europe’s food were there—spiced meats, herring, dill pickles, cabbage soup, the rind of lemon, the sweet freshness of cherries, the baked sugar and honey of small cakes.

It all spoke to him as a call from his own beginnings, a memory, a recognition of a promise made long ago, to whom he did not remember, for what he could not say. He looked at the somber face of the man before him, born in New England, grown in the unflurried sureness of an American youth, educated to a profession of justice. And he loved him as he had never yet known he could love another man.

Various, but one. He himself the American born in another land and become an American by choice, by law, by document; Evander Paige the American by birth, his first papers issued to him with his first breath—yet each knowing that a lifetime might go toward validating those papers and being worthy of them.

“One article,” he said at last. “Yes, one fine article about your acorns and your ‘tar’ and the flag. You are asking for more than that, I think.”

Evan nodded and said nothing. Alexandra put her napkin up to her mouth and then to her eyes; they were dry but they were on fire. She dipped the napkin into the ice water in her glass and then pressed it to each eyelid again. This wasn’t anything she would like her pupils to see her doing in a restaurant, but it didn’t matter.

“Tell Stefan, dear,” Alida said to her husband.

“Let’s take your ‘one fine article,’” Evan said. “It will appear in your paper first, but as fast as possible in twenty more. It would be translated the next day—I’ll arrange that—into English and other languages besides. German, Italian, Polish, Swedish.”

“Twenty papers?” Ivarin was genuinely startled.

“Here’s the twenty we’d like to use—I started drawing up a list out West where some League people could advise me—San Francisco, Duluth, Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis—probably you know most of the papers already.”

“An article of yours appearing all over the whole country!” Alexandra exclaimed. “Imagine!”

Stefan reached for Evan’s list. He knew the Wisconsin
Vorwaerts
and the San Francisco
Tageblatt,
both printed in German, and of course the
Appeal to Reason,
that stout native voice from Kansas. Some other names had the ring of the familiar, some he had never heard of. The Swedish paper was a weekly, published in Duluth, and the Italian was
La Prensa,
a neighbor of the
Jewish News
right in New York.

Evan Paige was a good campaigner, Ivarin thought; there was a large design here. The English translation he would do himself; Evan wanted to spare him the extra effort, but that was not to be considered.

He was aware that Evan was waiting for an answer, but Ivarin remained meditative and absorbed. Touching at the edge of his mind, like a tentative finger, asking for silence, for attention, for another moment of time, was an idea, and he held still, inviting it, wanting it, valuing it.

There are pogroms in California.

The phrase leaped at him. As if he saw it in print, he knew it for the opening line of his opening article. There are Cossacks in San Diego, czars of the streets. They call themselves by pretty names like “The Citizens’ Committee,” but they are the Armed Tyrants of Europe sprouting again in the sweet soil of this free land—

Aloud he said, “You have a good plan, Evan. It strikes me very strongly.”

“I think it is strong. San Diego isn’t the only city with vigilantes.”

“So you are suggesting a series of articles,” Ivarin said matter-of-factly. “The first right away, then a few days later, a second one, and so on. San Diego leading to episodes you fellows know about in other cities. That must be it.”

“That
is
it, Stiva.”

Stefan Ivarin took off his glasses, nodding to them as if in greeting, as if to signal them of duty and work and late hours ahead.

Evan said, “At first, I thought one piece only. But that led me to a second and a third, as I hoped it would lead you. I don’t know how much work it will be—a good deal, I am certain.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” Ivarin said it without stress, as Evan Paige had spoken without apology. Stefan squinted through the lenses he had been polishing and was satisfied with their brilliance. The ostensible target of these vigilantes, he would write, is always an anarchist, but along with anarchists, or instead of anarchists, the victims turn out to be strikers, workers holding grievance meetings, union organizers, vagrants, and of course socialists. Socialists who by definition oppose all anarchists as extremists, just as they oppose all vigilantes as extremists.

Yes, it could make a powerful series. Perhaps two of Evan’s articles, then one of his continuing pieces to get Berkman’s book printed, then back to Evan’s. He put his glasses on and with total illogic reached across to Alexandra and pinched her cheek. To Evan he said, “Can your people at the League send me material for subsequent articles?”

“I’ll select it myself,” Evan said. “If the League sent it, they would swamp you. But I will sift out what you’d be interested in. I think I’ll know.”