First Papers (76 page)

“It’s such a shock,” Letty finally said.

“Mark saw it first, and made me call you. He told me to warn you, newspaper people may descend on you, right there.”

“I suppose so. In the telephone book.”

“If only it were ‘The English Antiques Shop,’ or some other name.”

Letty said, “Yes,” without taking it in. She knew she ought to think of the shop, but she could not, not yet. Through the window she gazed at the gold lettering, running backwards, “Mrs. Garrett Paige, Antiques.” That was its name, not “The English Antiques Shop” or anything else. She stared at the lettering, but she also saw Garry’s face. “I suppose I should have been prepared,” she said, “but I always thought if war did come, he’d change.”

Cynthia made a faint sound of dissent. “Should I come over for a while? In case there
are
newspaper reporters?”

The shop, Letty thought, I do have to protect it. “I’m so mixed up, I can’t think,” she said. “It’s dangerous for the shop, isn’t it?”

“Now, Letty, you’re not to fret. We’re simply not going to let the shop’s name get dragged in the mud.”

“I feel so dreadful, even thinking of business at a time like this.”

“Of course you do, dear child. But we have to carry on, and I’ll think about it for you. I’ve always been your special adviser, haven’t I?” She went on rapidly, for she was not sure whether the soft sounds in the receiver were sobs, and she felt it best not to know.

As she hung up, Letty looked at Mrs. Everrett, and then at Miss McNaught. They averted their glances, and her heart sank. They both knew it. The whole world knew it. Peter knew it.

“Mrs. Everrett,” she said, “Please see if you can cancel my appointment.”

But just then, the door of the shop opened, and her new client came in. She was not only new, but one of the clients known as “important,” with a town house to do over as well as an estate in Pinehurst for the winter months.

“I’m so sorry to be late,” she greeted Letty with a charming smile. “All that traffic.”

“It couldn’t matter less,” Letty answered, smiling too. Her client didn’t read the morning papers either, and in a flash of decision she thought, Cynthia’s right. You do have to carry on.

Fee was out on the porch, waiting for the newsboy and the Sunday papers. She had been up since six, as she had been every morning since it had happened, and except for Shag crouching uneasily at her feet, the house was motionless.

Only ten days had gone by but life had changed forever. Garry’s had and so had hers. Even when he did get out on bail the next afternoon, the relief over “the good news” had lasted for only a little while, and then her black awful feeling came back.

Nothing mattered now except what was going to happen to him. Going to college, her scholarship, what she would do if she didn’t win it—maybe she would care again at the end of the summer, when the time came near for the letter from Albany, but now none of it counted.

A whole month had to pass before the trial would begin, a whole month.

How could Garry stand it, not knowing for another thirty days and thirty nights? Even working with his father and the other lawyers every day in New York, rounding up witnesses, getting the case ready—even so, how could he bear it? She saw him once in a while, for maybe a minute, never more than to say hello, and she was almost glad of that, because if she ever got talking, he would guess.

Just yesterday her mother said, “You’re still upset, Fee, and why not? I always said, ‘a real Ivarin, not deaf to the miseries of others.’ Do you remember Damsie and Josie?”

“Who? Of course I do.” She started out of the room, but there was something she had to ask. The draft numbers had at last been picked, and Garry’s wasn’t one of them. “Mama, since his number didn’t come up this time, will his letter make any difference?”

“I asked the same question. Papa doesn’t know.”

“But it might be a year before the second draft,” Fee said. “Maybe he could have kept it back until then.”

“Papa thinks Garry was right to send it anyway. Mr. Molloy knew he wrote it; Garry told him in advance, because of working there. So it would come out at the trial anyway.”

Fee couldn’t stand the word “trial” spoken out loud. She didn’t like to hear any of it spoken out loud. She was glad Fran didn’t talk much about it. Fran had carried on a lot that first day, but then she had dolled up for the Soldiers Dance and rushed off to Masonic Hall. She stayed out way after it was over, and when she did get in, she yanked at Fee’s shoulder until she awoke. Fran had met a boy named David Marks, a second lieutenant from Tennessee, the first officer she’d ever met. He wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place, because the dances were for enlisted men only, no officers. He was an aviator, good-looking, and his father owned three big stores for electrical things and belonged to a country club.

“He’s six feet tall,” Fran ended in a sort of awe, “the only boy I’ve ever met who’s a whole head taller than me. The only Jewish boy. Do you remember that dance at the Yipsels in Brooklyn?”

Fee had heard of it a thousand times, and she steered Fran right off it. As soon as possible, she turned over and pretended to fall asleep.

Sleep refused to come back, and every night since then it had played tricks, sometimes covering her with such weighted blackness, it was like being buried, other times, blowing at her like a spring breeze, hardly touching her. Last night had been one of the heavy nights, but she had awakened before six, as if God had touched a button to uncoil her.

Now she saw the newsboy at last, coming over the crest of the hill. She ducked inside until he had left his papers and gone on; she did every morning. If he saw her out there waiting every day, he’d blab it all over town. Everybody knew they were real friends of the Paiges, and every human being in Barnett was talking his head off about Garry. They even went out of their way to pass the Paige house, gawking and snooping and gossiping.

When she went out again, she saw that at last there was no mention of Garry in either paper. Their front pages were still full of the lists of serial numbers in the draft-drawing, but not a mention of “The Paige Case.”

Her relief lasted only a few minutes. Inside on one of the feature pages, she found it. It was a summary, step by step from the beginning, and this time with pictures of Garry and his father both. Under the pictures ran a single caption:
DISLOYALTY SUSPECT WITH COUNSEL, HIS FATHER, ONCE ACTIVE IN CASE FOR EMMA GOLDMAN’S MANAGER.

It’s a dirty trick, Fee thought furiously. Mr. Paige was active against the vigilantes, that was all. He was against Emma Goldman, against her manager, against all anarchists, and it was underhanded and nasty to drag in Emma Goldman or any anarchist alive.

Her fury stayed as she read the story. There was a pointing finger in it all the way, and part of it sounded as if Mr. Paige was arrested, too. Even when it told how Garry had telephoned Synthex to resign, the moment he was out on bail, and heard then and there that he had been fired instead—even then they dragged in Mr. Paige and his trip to California.

The reporter had asked Garry how he felt when he heard he was fired. “I’m not sure yet,” was his only answer. Then they asked Mr. Paige.

“It came as a surprise,” he said and hesitated to explain why it did. “If I said Mr. Molloy had been most courteous and helpful, it might lay him open to misunderstanding, in the climate today. Which is why we have opted for a hearing before a Federal judge, instead of a trial by jury. An impartial jury would be hard to come by just now.”

The story “recalled that as far back as 1912, in California, Mr. Paige also questioned the impartiality of witnesses and jurymen. His allegations, upon investigation, were declared unsubstantiated.”

But they were true, Fee thought. Mr. Paige would never lie, never. And neither would Garry.

She finished in a rush. She couldn’t sit still. She couldn’t go in and get breakfast. She refolded the papers carefully, so nobody could tell she had already read them, and started off from the house. Shag came too, looking around at her every little while, checking up to find out if she were in the mood for a race or anything happy. Each time he would droop and walk on again.

She chose a route that led her directly away from Channing Street, and she walked until the sun began to burn on her hair, and people began to appear on the streets, going to church. On her way home, as she went by the corner of Hill and Channing, she glanced over at the Paiges’ house.

Then she stopped.

A couple of boys were kneeling on the pavement right in front of it, kids of nine or ten, kneeling as if they were playing marbles. But she caught a flash of white chalk and thought, Not marbles. Tic-tac-toe or hopscotch. Suddenly they rose and dashed off, both whooping with glee.

She stood where she was. Shag came back to her and sat at her feet, somber and uncertain, too. She patted his head, but she was looking at the Paiges’ house all the while. There was no sign of anybody awake as yet. The bedroom windows upstairs were all opened wide, as if they were still asleep. She tried to see if their newspaper was still out on their porch but she couldn’t be sure.

She kept hearing the way the boys had whooped when they ran off, shouting in a smark-alecky way. And they really had had chalk. She began to move quietly toward the house. There still was no sign of anybody awake.

As she drew closer she saw that something was printed on the pavement, in tall, wobbly letters.

It was one word. SPY.

She spat straight down at it and rubbed at it with her shoe. If only she was wearing her sneakers; the rubber soles would be like erasers.

She spat again and rubbed harder. But in the hot sun, the spot went dry, and the chalked line still showed. A sense of hurry seized her, like in an exam. If they saw her, inside the house, they would come right out and discover it. Her mouth had gone dry; she picked up a pebble from the gravel driveway and sucked at it; they taught you to do that at field hockey, if you were dying of thirst. It worked like magic.

After a minute with the pebble, Fee knelt on the pavement. She lifted the hem of her dress and put it to her open lips. She felt it grow moist and she loved the pebble for helping her. Then with her dress, she began to mop the street.

“Shag, look,” she whispered. “It works.” He barked in joy; he always could tell the way she felt.

It’s an illusion that I cling to, Stefan Ivarin thought in bitterness, this belief that somehow I can “help Evan.”

Each time he came back to the house from a lecture, he was assailed by frustration, and he soon found it intolerable. Twice he had lectured about the arrest, not naming Garry, and each time he had aroused an anger in his listeners.

But how does it help Evan, or Garry, for my needle-workers to agree with me, or the men in the coal pits? Can I find no positive way to help now, at this crucial point? Can round up witnesses, like this Hank who remembers that it was he and not Garry who said conscription got his goat, and thus may discredit Grintzer as a witness, and cast some reasonable doubt on his testimony?

Can I help prove that the secretary Vicky is a morbid romantic, in love with the war as a woman is in love with a young lover?

Evan has the case planned, controlled, ordered; everything now depends on this Judge Perkins and how stout a judge or how frail a judge he is; how infected with the prevailing disease, or how free of it.

I will testify, Alexandra will testify, yes, yes. We will say what we know of Garry, of his intelligence, his independence, his inner goodness. But will Judge Perkins remember what Thoreau wrote about a man and his conscience?

As the days passed, as August approached, Ivarin’s sense of futility grew greyer. It’s Russia, he thought at times; I cannot think straight while the Bolsheviki grow bolder. A
coup
to seize the government! They failed last week, but will they try again? Or, with Trotsky arrested and Lenin in hiding somewhere outside the borders, will their kinetic energy dwindle away to nothing?

Do not let your own energy dwindle away, he commanded himself. One positive thing you can do for Evan is the “patriot” data. Get back to that. Without plan, he had begun to collect printed data about cases like Garry’s. Everywhere, “patriots” were doing to others what Garry’s accusers had done to him. Evan had said the data was valuable; in the courtroom some bit or piece might come in strongly at the psychological moment.

Ivarin went on collecting samples from newspapers all over the country. A survey, he thought once, my own survey, a touch more vital than anything Saul Borg ever contemplated. At special newsstands that sold out-of-town papers, he got hold of papers from big cities across America, reading, studying, clipping.

Every day there was something. In Boston, just days before, Federal agents had pulled in six or seven people for “unpatriotic remarks.” A parade of socialists, of workingmen from labor unions, their permit in order—and then, riot. A melange of the Naval Reserve, the National Guard, the Marines, and for a bizarre touch, Canadians in kilts—they had attacked. They seized flags and banners, they kicked people, pummeled them, beat them up—for two solid hours the riot went on, before law and order, those dilatory twins, came into play.

And there was in Vermont a minister handing out a pamphlet to five people, calling it unchristian to kill; he got fifteen years for it. Another man of the cloth, Bigelow, no pacifist at all, denounced the vast wartime profits of public utilities companies; he was publicly horsewhipped for it.

Ivarin grew interested in his collection. Did Evan know of those jailed for saying that war taxes would be wiser than Liberty Bonds? Of the benighted citizen in Minnesota jailed for telling ardent knitters that no soldier would ever get to see their socks?

Did Judge Perkins know any of it? There was a delirium abroad in the land, insidious as the mustard gas at Ypres.

And what was abroad in Russia? Ivarin always came to a halt at the question. The East Galician front was now shattered, and in the cities, the people were war-weary, sullen, hungry for food. Brusilove was out, Lvoff was gone, and suddenly the head of the government was Kerensky! A good man, a moderate, a fine socialist, but did Kerensky have the stature to head the country?