First Papers (79 page)

Steinberger calmly repeated, “It is as an outsider that he wrote it. If you and I want one more piece, we might arrange one more.”

“Also as a free-lance?”

“Of course. Perhaps other pieces, from time to time.”

“On the same basis?”

“Ivarin will never be back on the staff. He stipulated himself that it was out of the question.”

“Well, then—”

Fehler said something else that he did not quite catch and then withdrew. Steinberger drew the telephone toward him. “Borg,” he said, “I want some space on tomorrow’s front page. Would you come in, please?”

At about eleven that evening, Stefan and Alexandra went to the café next to the paper, to wait for the first edition. He had met her at
Abend,
waiting there dutifully for more than an hour, while she finished out the full eight-hour day. Like a henpecked husband, he thought with pleasure, married to one of the new women. A year ago I couldn’t have made such a jest. Today changes it.

She still showed the strain and sleeplessness of the night before, but she was clearly stimulated at his unexpected appearance there, and at his cryptic explanation, “a piece of news about Steinberger.”

On his way to meet her, he had stopped to call Abe Kesselbaum, still at home. Abe sputtered his excitement, but Ivarin said, “Don’t blow this up in your mind. It’s only one piece.”

“Just the same. Ivarin again in the paper!”

“If that overseer of yours would let you lay it out, I’d like you to work on it.”

“I’ll tell him you said so, may I?”

“As you please. My wife and I will be in the café, late. Maybe you’ll drop in at the break.”

And now at any moment Abe would be coming through the door, with the wet paper in his hand. At supper, telling Alexandra what he had written, remembering some phrases exactly, losing others, Ivarin had felt for the third time that day the long-forgotten thankfulness. First Fee, then Joseph Steinberger, then Alexandra. It was still his; it had come to him again as if he had never lost it. The universal language. The language of protest.

Don’t make too much of it, he thought. Two of them are your family, too close to you, too close to Garry.

What counts are strangers. What counts are readers.

And what about the trashiness of the
Jewish News?
That no longer counts? The sensation-mongering, the vulgar screaming? Has it disappeared, replaced by a dignity and quiet?

No, Mr. Prosecutor, he thought angrily, it has not been replaced. It is detestable. It is a platform of dung for a man to speak from. No rationalizations, no pious excuses.

“What’s wrong, Stiva?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re suddenly on Mars.”

“I beg you, let me be.”

Just then Abe appeared, with a copy for Alexandra and another for him. “Stiva, your picture,” she cried, and he was equally startled at the small cut of his own face looking up at him, next the bold byline,
BY STEFAN IVARIN.
The picture was his idea, Abe said, and his boss, thank God, had gone for it. They had set the piece in a two-column measure, with larger type than run-of-paper, and frequent subheads.

“Impressive,” Ivarin said. Secretly, vanity burst about him like shrapnel. “I must say, Abe, most impressive.”

“It’s glorious,” Alexandra corrected.

Later, on the way back to Barnett, Stefan Ivarin reminded himself not to triumph too soon. Tomorrow the readers would see it, the strangers, the only judges. But once again when the house grew still, he went to his desk and began a second piece, starting with Garry, but connecting Garry to the horsewhipped Bigelow, to the Vermont minister, to the benighted Minnesotan. In Bisbee, Arizona, a town heretofore unmapped in his geographical knowledge, twelve hundred Wobblies, strikers and their families, had just been hammered out of town by Bisbee vigilantes, again under some sweet-scented local name, had been kicked, shoved, pushed, hounded out. No trial was contemplated; the authorities conceded there was no chance of finding twelve people who could qualify for impartial jury duty.

Once again he sat at his desk far into the night, knowing he would not submit this piece for a while, but writing anyway. In the morning, he again slept late, as he used to sleep in the years of his old life.

“Abe says they already had six telephone calls and a telegram from the Cloakmakers’ Union,” Alexandra greeted him when he finally appeared. “He says to call him.”

The telegram, Abe told him, was a rather florid greeting to “the return of labor’s truest spokesman,” and the phone calls were admiring. Ivarin thanked him. Was there anything to report from the staff? “The best,” Abe said. “Everybody is full of it, except Fehler. Even Borg says he loves it. But so far, no word out of Fehler.”

Ivarin chuckled. A nip of conscience asked how he could be so cheerful less than two days after Garry’s sentencing. It’s a different department, he answered, and asked Abe to report again, if anything developed.

If Steinberger would call instead, he thought, and began to listen for the telephone. Steinberger did not call.

But several days later, he did. “It caused a sizable to-do,” he announced. “Almost fifty letters, postcards and calls.”

“That is good to hear. Thank you.”

“Actually, I would like to run a second piece. If deadline pressure is not unwelcome—”

“It never is unwelcome.”

“Then could you do one?”

“My pleasure,” Ivarin said. “I will write something today.”

Steinberger thanked him and added, “Perhaps later, you might write another, on a different subject. Still on your terms, the outside columnist.”

Ivarin said, almost stiffly, “Later is later.” To reveal the exhilaration pouring along his veins would have been like begging.

“The situation in Russia,” Steinberger said. “Some readers are getting frantic about it.”

“As I am too,” he said. “Five months, and the Bolsheviki show so much power. It freezes the blood.”

He went straight upstairs to his desk. If there is a “later,” he thought, the old alternating technique might still have the strongest impact. A piece in Garry’s series, then one on the danger in Russia, then again Garry and what it means to stay free. This “eternal vigilance” they talk of. It is never sure when and where it will be called for.

Fifty-six, he thought unexpectedly. It is no longer young, true enough. But it is not necessarily old.

Letty said, “If one more person gives me that look, I’ll close up the shop for a year.”

“It must be dreadful,” Peter Stiles said. “What you’ve been through!” He signaled the waiter, and without asking her, ordered a second drink. “I’m glad I could change our tickets. I don’t want you sitting through any war play tonight.”

“I’m glad too.” He was waiting for her to say it first, but she kept drawing back from the words. Cynthia Aldrich had come right out with it, and her own parents, in the letter her mother wrote the day after the trial was over. “In all the history of the Brooks family, on both sides, nobody has ever served a prison term, never. When I remember I once said that we never had had a divorce!”

“I’m so tired of thinking,” Letty said.

“It’s time you let me do it for you.”

“Oh, Peter.”

Somebody has to, she thought, I can’t any more. The day Garry was sentenced, she had thought about nothing but him, how he must feel going to prison, but then her own life claimed her again. Everybody’s did; there was nothing wrong or heartless in that. This afternoon, before Peter came to call for her, she had gone out to Madison Avenue, as if she just wanted a breath of fresh air, and stood staring into the show window, like any admirer of some piece on display, wondering what the hidden price tag said. Actually she was staring at the gilt lettering, superimposing “Brooks” over “Garrett” to see if it would fit. There was one more letter in Garrett, but the two t’s were thin and run-together. Two r’s and two t’s: she had never noticed that before.

“Mrs. Brooks Paige, Antiques” did sound smarter. Mrs. Brooks Paige. If she did go ahead, it would be her legal name. A widow went on forever with her husband’s name, but a woman who had to get a divorce coupled her own last name with her married name. She had read that somewhere, or heard it, and after Garry was found guilty, when Cynthia talked flat out about his name damaging the shop’s reputation, Cynthia had said it too. In a year, she said, nobody would remember that it hadn’t always been “Mrs. Brooks Paige, Antiques.”

But if I marry Peter, Letty thought now, would I have to change it again? Everything turned to problems. If only she had instituted proceedings way back, when Garry walked out that night and went to the Brevoort. Or at any time between then and his arrest. If she had started a divorce then, nobody could accuse her now of hitting him when he was down, nobody could call her cowardly or cruel.

But now if you do nothing, she thought, they’d only accuse you of trying to act like a martyr. A heroine. An angel with a halo.

“What, darling?” Peter asked. “You suddenly smiled.”

Slowly Fee came to realize once more that time did pass. The first days of Garry’s prison sentence had stood still, black rocks in a black desert. The first morning after the trial, hearing her father translate what he had written, somehow had managed to tear her hands loose from their clutch at the rocks, and for a while afterward, when she was alone, she had been able to think of three years as something that would move away, grain by grain. Then the standing still began again.

She asked a few days later if anybody could visit Garry, and the answer was, “Only his family.” The stillness grew thick once more, and everything was wrapped in it. She knew her parents were happy, or excited, about the paper, her father’s paper. For so long “the paper” was her mother’s; having her father on his own paper, was before the war, before everything.

Before Garry. Did everybody have a private calendar inside the world’s calendar?

Once upon a time her calendar had taken in the wait from Regents Week until the end of August when the letter from Albany would come. And if she did win her scholarship, it stretched in a lovely hazy way over four years of Barnard College, where she had been entered, just in case, ever since Easter vacation.

Now the only real calendar was the one that said Three Years. Until August, 1920. The war might be over by then; she would be waiting to start her senior year, if she were at college, and she would be twenty herself. And Garry twelve years older. It didn’t sound so much for anybody who was twenty.

When she went over to see Mrs. Paige, she felt about twelve, and even with Mrs. Paige being kind, the noose of shyness knotted tighter. After the first week or so, Mrs. Paige was something like herself again, talking in that same soft way, saying Garry’s name as if he were still at Synthex and expected for one family meal over the weekend.

“Why don’t you write to him, Fee?” she asked once. “Mail means a lot when you’re a prisoner.”

Fee looked away at the word. The two Paiges were allowed to visit him once a month, and he wasn’t allowed to write more than once a week, but there was no limit about the letters he could receive.

“I started to write once or twice,” Fee said, “but I always tore it up. I never know what to say.”

“Don’t tear the next one. Remember he thought you were the best witness of all; he said so again when his father saw him about the appeal.”

“Did he really?” She had heard it from her parents already, but her heart flamed at hearing it from Garry’s mother. Just sitting near her was important, a special event, like talking to Mr. Fitch instead of to a teacher.

Mr. Fitch. Teachers. The fifteen exams. Curiosity began to stir again, and one morning she went out to the porch to wait for the mailman. It was nearly Labor Day, it should have been here by now.

Maybe I didn’t win one after all, she thought, and suddenly, longing for college took hold of her again. If there was any way to go on day after day for three full years, college would make it easier.

The mailman came and he had no long thin envelope for her, but he said, “Fine day,” in his ordinary voice. Barnett was forgetting Garry and “The Paige Case.” Words like “traitor” and “slacker” weren’t thrown around so often any more. But she still kept to herself. She didn’t see Anne, nor Juanita, she had no friends any more. Not just that they had said things about Garry. Mostly it was that she felt older than any one of them.

The next day there was no letter, nor the next. That afternoon she had promised to go to Brooklyn to stay with Webby and Sandra while Joan went off, and she was glad something forced her out of the house and away from the mailbox. Joan was only going to a beauty parlor, but it was to get an Irene Castle hair-bob, and it was a secret until she saw how she looked. Eli of course was in New Hampshire, again alone. Joan had decided to let him. “I’ll take my chances,” she told Fee once. “If he’s going to fall in love again, let him. He thinks
he’s
tired of marriage.” She had talked on and then said, “You’ve grown up so, Fee. I think you’re more mature than Fran will ever be.”

Now she was ready to start out when Fee arrived. Webby had grown another inch, and Sandra too, and they were so tan that their eyebrows looked white; they all had spent a month at the Martins’ new house in Long Beach, four blocks from the beach, where Joan’s father could have a vacation and be a doctor at the same time.

“Auntie Fee,” Webby cried, hugging her. “You can sleep in my room.”

“In
my
room,” Sandy shouted at him.

“No she can’t,” his mother said. “Not in anybody’s room.” Then, drawing Fee aside, she said, “I felt so awful about Garry Paige. We’ll talk later.”

“I sort of can’t,” Fee said and left it that way, turning to the tugging six-year-old at her side. “Webster Martin Eaves,” she said sternly, “you are tearing my skirt plumb in two. How will I ever ride home again?”

The children began an assault on the threatened skirt, and Joan left. An hour sped by, and once Fee thought with astonishment that she was having a good time. A howl from Webby plus the thump and noise of a heavy fall put an end to her well-being. She rushed to the kitchen, and then almost laughed in relief. The heavy fall was Eli’s five-pound jar of malted milk, its cover unscrewed, its total contents in a pale yellow mound on the linoleum.