First Papers (70 page)

“Hello, Dad,” Garry said, suddenly opening the door.

Evan jumped up. “You look fine!”

“Shouldn’t I? You sound surprised.”

Evan laughed. “I expect everybody to look pale as a mushroom, the way I do. You haven’t a care in the world, by the look of that tan.”

“It’s the car, with the top down.” He looked at his father’s tired eyes and pale color, suddenly aware of him as looking much older. “What do you say to taking a ride along the river right now? We can talk over dinner.”

Evan smiled in appreciation, but he said, “Let me give you the gist of it, first. It’s so precise now, it won’t take but a minute.”

“Sure, if you’d rather.”

For a moment they just looked at each other. Then adopting an impersonal tone, as if he were addressing a client, Evan said, “Our bureau will advise any man to register, no matter whether he intends to claim conscientious objection or not. Especially if he does intend to. There can’t be anything that looks like draft-dodging, not if we’re to provide counsel.”

“That’s the official stand?”

“Roger Baldwin’s very strong on this, and I think he’s right. Not to register, we are saying, might look like trying to hide, or evade, and the government would have a much stronger case, contending that failing to register implies intent.”

“Intent to lie doggo?”

“There’s a watch on at all ports, for South America, Mexico, the Orient, so nobody can escape registration that way.”

“You’re kidding.”

Evan shook his head. “The escapers and dodgers we won’t defend. We’ll take on only real cases. To claim conscientious objection is not a crime. And if the claim is rejected, there still is no crime. Not until the objector refuses to obey his draft board’s order to serve.”

“I get the distinction, I think.”

“We’ll provide counsel for any real objector—the religious objectors, political objectors, the partials, the absolutes. It’s more complex than you ever dreamed, with more distinctions and variations.”

“The absolutes?”

“They’ll be the hardest cases of all.”

Again they just looked at each other.

“I
FEEL LIKE A CRIMINAL
,” Alexandra said, her voice joyous. “To be so happy, on Registration Day.”

The editor of
Abend
laughed into the telephone. “I could have held back the news until tomorrow.”

“No, oh no. Oh, Mr. Tischmann, are you sure?”

Simon Tischmann laughed. “You’re a delight,” he said, “just like your columns. We’re very sure.”

“Then I’ll go tell my husband. He’ll be happy too.”

She had no compunctions about waking Stefan. After only an eight-week trial, they wanted two columns instead of one. Thirty dollars every week, for something
she
wrote.

“Stiva,” she cried in his darkened room, “it’s good news, wake up.”

“Yes, what—?” As she blurted it out, he sat up in bed, groping for his glasses on the chair at his side. Even then, while she was a large blurred something to him, he reached up and clutched her arm and then her shoulder with such ferocity that he hurt.

“What did he say?” he demanded. “How did he put it?”

His pleasure was so acute, one would have thought he had just had this triumph, about something
he
had written. She repeated every word Tischmann had said, and then Stefan exclaimed, “Of course they’re sure, even after eight weeks. When you have a hit you know it the same day, the next day. Look at the mail you pull.”

Alexandra drew back slightly. The mail was one thing she didn’t like to remember. Do what she would, she could not keep the letters answered on time. It was the one blot, the one strain, the one miserable lining to the silvery moon of her new happiness.

“Can I keep up the columns?” she asked. “Two every week? Every Monday and every Thursday?”

“You’d better keep it up,” he said. “There has to be one big writer in this family.”

For an instant she paused, and then she said again, “I feel like a criminal though—when you think what day this is.”

“The juxtaposition is bad,” Stefan conceded. “But you can’t be expected to feel glum.”

“But at this very moment, Eli may be signing his life away, and Garry, and a million others. And I so happy.”

“Life doesn’t seek out its illogic,” he said. “It merely accepts it and passes it along.”

He was out of bed now and he kissed her. Then he said, “I’ll be right down,” and she left as if she had been summarily dismissed. Over and over as she prepared his breakfast, she heard Tischmann’s “You’re a delight, just like your columns. We’re very sure,” and the most extraordinary sensation came to her, as if she were a beautiful bird, preening its feathers. It was conceit, vanity, self-love, and it was simply delicious.

At the turn in the road, where the cars from New York had to slow down, Fee waved her arms wide, like a cheerleader, and shouted, “Liberty Bonds—come on, here’s one for you.”

Stationed near her were Anne Miller and Trudy Loheim and two other seniors, but Fee’s sales were way ahead of theirs. At the side of the road, like a small recruiting station, was the Liberty Loan pavilion, plastered over with huge red, white and blue posters that said “Do your bit—invest,” “If you can’t enlist, invest,” and things like that. Perhaps because it was Registration Day, this was turning into the most successful afternoon of the ten separate times she had been out on the Liberty Loan Drive, and she was sure she would win Barnett High’s second prize for Biggest Total. Harvey Neill had first prize tied up tight as a tick, but his father had started him off with four thousand dollars’ worth, and besides, Harvey didn’t do anything much except the drive. He was only a junior and didn’t care about Regents.

Fee put the thought of Regents promptly aside. She had recently collapsed about studying. Everything else was so exciting, and anyway if she hadn’t crammed enough by now, it was just too bad. Last-minute, all-night cramming wouldn’t work for the thing she was doing. But she was ready; she could feel it in her bones.

“Liberty Bonds,” she shouted, coming perilously close to a car that was slowing down, so close that the driver yelled, “Look out, you,” as he stamped on his brake.

“Don’t be mad,” she said airily, “shouldn’t I give my life for my country? Would you sign for a bond?”

“Isn’t that cute?” a man next the driver said. “Giving her life for her country.” To Fee, he said, “Would you give a kiss for your country, if I sign?”

Fee knew how to handle the fresh ones. Before they were allowed out at all, the girls had been trained: laugh off anything you can, but if it’s worse than that, just turn on your heel and go back to the pavilion until the car drives on. Mostly it didn’t get worse.

It was fun, selling Liberty Bonds, a new and different kind of fun. It was wonderful to know you were helping your country; all the papers, and all the Four Minute Men giving speeches at the movies, were forever telling how vital every single bond was, what it stood for, what it could do, and how they had to go over the top on the two million dollars’ worth before June fifteenth.

But there was another kind of wonderful in it, just as exciting, but private. Like being the lead in the play, hearing the applause, having people say you could become a real actress and go on the Broadway stage because of your vitality and personality. This was also a question of personality, Miss Mercer said, only in a business-y way, being a salesman.

It was terribly easy, Fee thought; maybe Mercey was right, saying she could become a crack salesman and earn a lot of money. That was another exciting thing about the war; all kinds of things that only men used to do were now being done by women, from being letter-carriers and traffic cops to belonging to the women’s land army or working in munitions factories, putting the powder into shells and bullets.

“One more Liberty Bond,” she sang out as another car approached her station. The girls were strung out about twenty yards apart, and the rule was that you couldn’t barge in on a car that stopped nearer one of the others. But this one was definitely driving right past Anne and coming straight at her. Its top was down and a man—

“Garry,” she cried out in delight.

“I’ll be damned,” he said, pulling off the road and stopping. “Since when have you turned financier?”

She gave a little laugh of pure pleasure and retorted, “And since when do you go touring on Tuesday afternoons?”

He laughed, too. “I’m on my way to the family. Everybody got the afternoon off to register.”

“And did—?” She stopped herself. It wasn’t anything you just tossed out, not at Garry. A hundred times she had wondered what he was going to do today, but she’d die rather than dig around asking. Her parents had talked of it a hundred times too, but they’d never dream of asking either, not Garry, not his mother or father.

By this time he was out of the car and standing next to her. He was as tan as midsummer, and he seemed taller. Anne’s voice came singing out, “Get your Liberty Bond right here,” but Fee knew Anne and the rest of the girls were keeping more of an eye on her than on the cars. Garry took out his wallet and said, “Have you seen one, Fee?” and offered her a green card.

“Oh, Garry,” she cried, “you did register. Oh, that’s so wonderful. I thought I’d die,
not knowing.”

“Did you?” he asked, surprised.

“I worried so,” she cried. It was too emotional, but it was out before she could stop it. He was looking at her, and she looked down at the card.

“Look,” he said, “if you can call it a day, I’ll give you a lift home.”

“I’d love it,” she said, but added uncertainly, “I have to report and turn back all this stuff. It takes about five minutes. Would you wait that long?”

“Of course I’ll wait.”

She started off for the pavilion, but he shouted, “Hey, my card,” and she turned back to him with it. Her outstretched hand offered it, and then suddenly she said, “I was so
scared,
Garry.”

He looked surprised again, and when she came back and got into the car and drove off with him, with all the girls watching, she was excited and proud. Not one of them ever had anybody like Garry Paige waiting around for her; it was so different from having one of the boys at school waiting for you. She had taken an extra minute to fix her hair, and put on fresh lipstick; since the war, nobody had to get permission any more, even during school hours. And she was wearing her new dress with the short skirt; she wore it every time she came out to sell Liberty Bonds; having your skirt halfway to your knees was the latest thing, and gave you the loveliest feeling if you had nice ankles.

“This is fine,” Garry said after a minute. “Why don’t we stop off somewhere for a soda?”

“To celebrate,” she said. “The papers said today should be a festival and a patriotic occasion.”

“That’s right,” he said. “‘A joyous pilgrimage,’ too.” He glanced at her quickly; she was serious, trusting him. To say the wrong thing now would be fat-headed. He asked how many Liberty Bonds she had sold, and when her fifteen Regents were to descend on her. Only after they reached the soda fountain, and ordered, did he find himself searching for something to say.

“You’re not sorry you came, are you?” Fee said, after they had sat silently for a moment.

“I got thinking,” he said. “I’m sorry, I often do that, and then I just sit and don’t say a word.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I sort of like it. You look interesting. Some people just look dopey. My father looks angry.”

He laughed once again, and glanced quickly at her in appraisal. This wasn’t the first time she struck him as being oddly original; he had thought that of her before, when he did not know. Intense and original, he had thought. It was apparently true. She had meant it just now when she said she liked it, and before, when she said she had been scared about him. There was an openness about her that people usually thought childlike, but childishness had left her forever.

“How old are you, Fee?”

“Almost seventeen,” she said. “Why?”

“No special reason.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine last week.”

“I’ve known you half my life,” she said matter-of-factly. “But you haven’t known me even a quarter of yours.”

“Half your life? That goes back to—”

“Your father and mother stopped at one of our trees the year we moved in,” she said, “and your father said the stresses on the wires were wrong. My father thought he was an engineer, and then he found out he was a socialist.”

“Even better than being an engineer!” He grinned at her. “How do you remember things like that?”

“My mother always talks about how things got started. She’s awfully sentimental.”

Nineteen-nine, he thought, the year I married. “Was that about the tree in the spring or fall or when, do you know that too?”

She shook her head. “Anyway, that’s how long I’ve known you, but I didn’t start to worry about you until we got in the war.”

He said, “Don’t worry too much, Fee.” Then he added, “But thanks, it’s pretty nice of you.” Again she looked unsure, as she had when she asked if he would wait five minutes, and he added, “You mustn’t think everybody’s kidding, if they say things like that to you.”

She looked startled. “How’d you know I thought it?”

“I didn’t know for sure, but I guessed.”

She leaned toward him. “Oh, Garry, you are patriotic, aren’t you?”

He waited for a moment and then said, quietly, “Yes.”

“Then you’re not going to do anything wild?” she said. “Please don’t,
please.”

It was so unexpected, he made no answer for a time. Her dark eyes looked larger, wide with their plea. Then he said slowly, “Have you noticed how hard it is, to talk about something very important to you?” She nodded, but he felt it was more to be obliging than because she knew what he was getting at, and as if he were suddenly a teacher at a key point in a course, it seemed essential to make himself clear. “For instance, have you ever said, right out loud in a conversation, ‘I love my country’?”

“No,” she said, thinking about it. “Why, no, never.”

“Have you ever heard your father say, ‘I love my country,’ or ‘I love America’?”