First Papers (54 page)

“Don’t worry about us,” Alexandra said, removing the coin from its hiding place by the sugar bowl. “We are so fortunate anyway.”

“Oh, I know, yes, my husband told me about Mr. Ivarin’s lecture last month, and about giving his own lessons; I know he has a thousand different ways to earn a living without that accursed paper.”

Her face was moist with effort, and Alexandra said, “There’s even one more way for me—perhaps you could help me with it.”

“Me? I’d die of being proud.”

Alexandra told her of Sonya’s phone call. “Maybe you could start up a little group in New York,” she said. “Perhaps Sophie would help you.”

“I’ll see Sophie, I’ll see everybody.” Anna Godleberg sprang to her feet in excitement. “Even people who have never been at the beach know about your little lectures. It will be such a success, you’ll see, Mrs. Ivarin.”

“It would make me happy,” Alexandra said. “Will you really try to round up a few of the women? It would be the biggest favor.”

“A minute is all it will take me. You can’t believe how we’ve worried already, some of us, about losing our evenings in the tent this summer—” She looked ill at ease again over this revelation that they had jumped straight to the financial meanings of Ivarin’s disappearance from the
Jewish News.

“I shouldn’t have said it. Excuse me. It’s none of my business, what is to happen with your summer. If you took me for a common gossip—”

She strapped her books together with the schoolgirl bookstrap she always used, shellacked canvas with a brass tip to keep it from raveling.

“It can’t be common gossip,” Alexandra said, “with so much kindness in it. Gossip is always cruel.”

It was one of the days when Stefan Ivarin would not be going into the city; he would be at home teaching instead. He had begun to dislike these evenings, though he resolved not to question them. He was at work on another article in English, this one on the outcry from all organized labor at the news that Henry Ford would pay every one of his workers a five-dollar wage per day. Ford said he wanted to share some ten millions of his 1914 profits with his thirty thousand workingmen, as a matter of good will. “Good will” indeed. It was an outrageous sop to labor, a bribe, a handout, yet half the world took it as an unheard-of magnanimity.

The article was giving Ivarin trouble. Was there another side to this, other plateaus of economic truth, that needed further exploring and further thinking through?

Even the classic problems of capital and labor could suddenly shoot off into new complexities. A five-dollar minimum, not won by the workers themselves, but handed out like a slice of birthday cake. To hail it as manna from heaven was craven, but to expose the interior treachery of so disarming a move would need an extended analysis he had not yet been able to achieve. Nor had anybody else in the field of labor. He could not write his piece yet; it would be premature.

It was a bad feeling always, to be balked when he sat down to write. It seemed to happen more often now. That other editor, waiting somewhere to pass on his work, to accept or reject, loomed larger; the habit of half a lifetime was not so easily filed away in the cabinet of necessity.

He rolled a cigarette, lighted it and drew sharp smoke deep and hard into his lungs. A paroxysm of coughing seized him and he was helpless, waiting for it to subside. It did not, and suddenly it was as though a hot sword stabbed through his back, low and to the right of his spine, forcing a cry of pain from him. From another room Alexandra called, “What is it?” and came running down the hall. Both his hands flew to the small of his back, his pen splashing ink on his old grey smoking jacket, making two ragged blotches low in the center, like knobby vertebrae suddenly exposed.

“Stiva, what happened to you?”

He clutched his body as if hands and back had hardened into a single unit. His head was thrust forward, his mouth distorted with effort. He saw Alexandra’s stricken face, and he grunted “Soon,” but he made no move to return to a normal position. The muscles of his neck stood out like cables curving outward on a suspension bridge, visible from his earlobes to his shoulder blades, and when she said, “Is it more than your lumbago?” he could not answer.

Lumbago. It could mean a hundred different things, from a nagging ache to something like this. He tried to lean forward and again the hot iron shot through to his spine. “This is worse than any other,” he said. He moved his hands an inch away from his stiffened body, to see if he could manage without their encircling support, without his thumbs pressed inward like grappling hooks on his hipbones, as if to hold them together. He could not manage; with another cry of pain he locked his hands into position again.

“I’ll call a doctor,” Alexandra said.

“No, wait.”

“We must get somebody,” she said. “It’s frightening,”

“Wait.”

She moved toward him as if to help him, but he shook his head and said, “Not yet.” He still sat rigid as a rock, a man carved from granite, but he said, “My pen,” and loosened his fingers so that she could take it away from him.

He began to move his right foot backward, flexing his knee and trying to rise. Inch by inch he moved forward to the edge of his chair and his face went white with the effort of it.

She thought of Landau’s heart attack and her own heart contracted. “Joan’s father, Dr. Martin. He can come quickly.”

He nodded but she was afraid to leave him until he was lying down. He was clear of the chair now, still bent and angled forward, unable to straighten up. Had he broken his spine? Was it possible to deal oneself the blow of death itself? Please, she thought, please.

Stefan was nearing his narrow bed. She stripped the blankets and top sheet down with one sweep of her hand. Then she moved out of the way because he said, “It’s safer if I do it alone.”

He lowered himself to the edge of the bed and then with one final spurt of decision fell over sidewise, still doubled over as if his knees were lashed by wires to the upper part of his body.

She covered him as he was, with his clothes on, with his shoes on. His face and throat had gone wet, and she ran to the bathroom, moistened a towel, and came back to bathe away this visible look of pain. His eyeglasses were still on and she lifted them away.

“I’ll call him, Stiva,” she whispered. “Later, we can call Alexis, if it looks necessary.” She ran downstairs. Dr. Martin was out on calls, but would telephone her the moment he returned. She was too terrified to wait, and called Alexis, in New York. He was the Alexis Michelovsky who had refused her a maternity girdle but he was far more than a “woman’s doctor,” and though he was now over seventy, he was as active as an interne in his beloved medicine.

“It sounds like a jarred vertebra or a squeezed nerve,” he said when she finished. “It can be agony. He needs sedation, maybe morphia, as soon as your Dr. Martin gets there. I can start out in an hour—the office is full of patients—but that would be two hours before I could see Stiva.”

“Is there any danger?” she asked. “Tell me the truth.”

“I’m only guessing, but with his history of back trouble, I can hope not.”

“But what caused it? It’s as if he’s paralyzed.”

“It can start when you pick up a match. But diagnosis on a telephone is impossible.”

“Then I better hang up. Dr. Martin may be getting a busy while I talk.”

“Alexandra,” he said authoritatively. “Explain how it happens that another doctor presumed to suggest morphia, or Dr. Martin will be offended. There is a protocol in these matters. Tell him I’ll be there at four.”

As she held down the pronged hook, the telephone bell rang and she jumped. “Oh, Dr. Martin, please, could you come right away?” Again she told what had happened, and why she had called their old doctor in New York.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Webster Martin said. “Try not to worry, Mrs. Ivarin.”

“He’s never sick, never. I’ve never seen him this way.”

She sat down for a moment after the call ended. Fear ran through her, that this might be real disease announcing itself in another guise.

Please, she thought again. He’s had enough to bear already.

“Tell me the truth,” Alexandra said once more as soon as she and Webster Martin were alone. And she repeated it again to Alexis in the late afternoon.

“He has high blood pressure,” each doctor said. “Not an immediate danger, but serious.”

He would have to live a different life, Dr. Martin said. There was a certain hardening of the arteries, not unexpected in a man nearly fifty-three, and not dangerous if he would follow orders to the letter. The acute attack in his lower back was almost inevitable, what with his long-neglected “back condition,” too chronic to be dubbed a simple lumbago any longer, and badly aggravated by his three-mile walk against heavy winds. Morphine and then lesser drugs, plus total immobility, would heal the inflamed areas to a marked degree in perhaps a week, when he could be measured for a made-to-order supporting belt or harness, but it would be out of the question for him to travel by trolley and train for a much longer period. As to the regimen of special diet and the like, to bring down the blood pressure, he would like to discuss it first with Dr. Michelovsky because Mr. Ivarin might feel more inclined to obey unwelcome orders from a lifelong friend.

Mr. Ivarin, Alexandra thought fleetingly. Even in this awful time of sickness, it stays Mr. Ivarin and Mrs. Ivarin. And I call him Dr. Martin. How can we remain so distant, so formal, when our children are married, when we are all grandparents of Webby and Sandra?

Resentment at Dr. Martin mingled with her gratitude for his speed in coming and for the thoroughness of his examination, but it was not until Alexis came and saw Stiva that she felt safe again. He reinforced everything Dr. Martin had said, and since Stiva was deeply under the injected drug, wrote out a series of instructions for her to give him, when he could understand them. For five days, he was not to be propped up in bed, even to read or eat; he was not to get up, not even to walk to the bathroom. If he disobeyed, it could end in his being moved in an ambulance to a hospital, perhaps to be “clinically immobilized” in spinal traction. This was not stated as a threat, merely as information.

Unequivocal pain made Stefan obedient. Even to shift his position in bed was out of the question when the drugs thinned down. He read Alexis’ orders without interest; Alexandra held the prescription blank straight above him, and he read upward. He ate so little of what she tried to feed him that he never suspected the absence of salt or red meat nor the weakness of his morning sips of coffee. His lessons had to be postponed, his February lecture canceled, and he seemed not to care. He lay in a torpor hour upon hour; Alexandra was glad both doctors had ordered her to say nothing about his high blood pressure, for she could not have dealt him further pain.

After five days, they were both there in consultation. When they told him and talked of “mild arteriosclerosis,” he said listlessly, “A synonym for getting old, isn’t it?” To Michelovsky he added, “You found my blood pressure high that time, when was it? Since then, over and over, I’ve been warned, ‘Your face is getting red.’ It’s an old story.”

But hardening of the arteries, they told him, was a progressive condition, and by now radical measures were indicated. Apart from the prescribed diet and medication, he was to forswear activity that excited him, to remain calm, almost lethargic. And it was essential that he reduce his sixty cigarettes a day until he could give up nicotine entirely.

That was Webster Martin’s pronouncement. Dr. Michelovsky said, “I agree, Doctor, and there will be no difficulty with keeping to the diet and medication. Perhaps he will also cut down on his smoking. As for giving up activity, remaining lethargic and tranquil in his activities, it would be Ivarin’s death knell. I know this man.”

They talked as if he could not hear them. He drew shallowly on the cigarette he had lit when their discussion began; he did not inhale deeply for fear of another paroxysm of coughing. During the revolution, he suddenly remembered, was the first time Alexis had discovered that he had some elevation of blood pressure. Nineteen five that had been, the last time he had been sick enough to see a doctor, and Alexis had joked sadly that half the Russian colony in New York, revolutionaries all, had fallen sick at the collapse of their hopes. An inflamed larynx and windpipe he had had, that was it, of no real consequence. Nineteen hundred and five, nine years ago, and he had been at the top of his powers, as a man, as an editor.

Hate for the passing of time took him, a spasm of longing to be young again, strong, tireless in his work. In this, his second month off the paper, he would earn exactly ten dollars. With his lecture canceled, his lessons not given, he would “earn” only the fee on his translation. Thirty-eight dollars last month, and ten this. This single reality outweighed everything the doctors were still saying, in a melancholy reiteration, about the vital necessity of avoiding flare-ups or overexcitement, the necessity to limit himself gradually on tobacco.

He reached for the ashtray on the chair near his bed, brought it toward him, and set it on the blanket drawn tight across his chest. He pressed his cigarette into the stale ashes already there, grinding it down, twisting it down. Alexis Michelovsky saw him and put his old hand out to steady the saucer crammed with butts.

“‘Gradually’ won’t work,” Stefan said. “Better to get it over with.”

“You mean
now?”
Michelovsky asked.

“Why not?”

“But you’ve smoked all your life,” Alexandra cried.

“I’d rather get it over with,” he repeated.

By nightfall, nothing mattered to him but not smoking; by next morning he could think of nothing but a cigarette; by the next night he was reliving the hunger strike and tobacco strike in prison in Russia when he was a boy of seventeen.

Now, as then, he bit into his knuckles in a wildness of need, but now, after one day, the network of nerves, tendons, ligaments, muscles that bound his flesh to his bones tightened up with whistling pain again, and he shouted for Alexandra to get the drugs still available from the original prescriptions Dr. Martin had given him.