First Papers (80 page)

“It’s not so bad, Webby,” Fee said. “We’ll scoop it up.”

“He’ll hit me,” Webby screamed. “He’ll spank me.”

“He’s not even at home.”

But long after he stopped crying, angry questions about Eli still bubbled up in her mind. What was wrong with him anyway? Still spanking Web every minute, and Sandy too. Off there with his double exemptions, for the children and his asthma, feeling superior to everybody else!

There were three smart rings at the bell and Joan dashed in, her bobbed hair flying. “Look at me, I love it, do you?” The children were instantly excited, as Fee was too. How grand it would be not to have all her long hair to comb and wash and fix and pin up. “Maybe I’ll do it too,” Fee said, “when I get to college, if I ever do.”

Long after the children were in bed, Joan and she sat talking. Almost as if we were the same age, Fee thought. Then she told her about the spilled malted milk.

“Webby’s always so
afraid”
she said. “Doesn’t it mean something, Joan?”

“And especially about that damn malted milk,” Joan answered. “He caught his father at it one night. The wrong night, and he really did get a beating.”

“Caught him?”

“Caught him making a pig of himself over it, spoonful after spoonful.” She saw Fee staring at her. “Maybe he only did it out of nervousness over the next day. Eli always overeats when he’s bothered and upset. There’s that possibility too.”

“What was the next day?” Fee felt a feather skim down the back of her neck, and she shivered. Somebody’s walking over your grave was what that meant; she had heard it all her life. “What was the next day?” she repeated when Joan remained silent.

“The next day,” Joan said with care, “was the day he got the souvenir to show his grandchildren.”

At last the letter came. Fee saw it in the postman’s hand and ran out, crying, “Is that big one for me?” She tore it open, and then rushed back into the house.

“Mama, I
did,”
she called. “I got it, I won it, look at their letter. I can’t believe it, I began to think—”

“I’m so proud of you,” Alexandra said. “It’s time you had something to be happy about.” She read the brief letter. “The State of New York,” she said. “One hundred dollars a year for the four academic years.”

Fee wheeled and started upstairs. For once Fran was at home, still asleep but at home. Fee shook her awake and said, “I won my scholarship, Franny, I did, I really did. Here, look at this.”

Fran sleepily reached for it, read it, and then surprised Fee beyond speech. She got out of bed, put her arms around her and kissed her. “It’s just grand,” she said, “simply grand and glorious. Oh, Fee, you crazy galoot, I’m glad.”

Only later did they think of their father. “What about Papa?” Fee asked, and Fran said, “If you budge an inch, I’ll never forgive you. He’s had to take it about me renting a place in New York next month, hasn’t he?”

“I can’t stand another fight right now, I just can’t.” Fee ran downstairs again to her mother. “What about Papa? I forgot all about that.”

“Don’t borrow trouble,” Alexandra said. “He’s waiting for news of his own. I think he’ll get it too. Four pieces so far and he’s like a new man, a new writer, better than ever.”

That night Fee wrote her first letter to Garry. This time it was easy to know what to say.

Dear Garry,

I haven’t written because I had no news, but this morning I found out I can go to college after all. Those fifteen Regents you laughed at were not so silly; they brought my average up to 91, and I won a State Scholarship. I keep thinking about you and every time I feel glad you’re just the way you are.

She signed it “Love, Fee,” and then had to write it all over again, to sign it simply with her name. Then she tore up the second one and addressed the one she had written first. She ran all the way down to the mailbox on the corner to send it on its way.

T
HIRTY-SIX DAYS HAD
gone by, and Garry was no longer possessed by the voices of the trial, the questions, the answers. From his first hour as a prisoner, he wanted to forget them, but they came at him incessantly, day or night, awake, asleep.

In the second month they began to withdraw, particularly during working hours. He was assigned to the machine shop and while he was there, he could shape his thinking on the lathe—beveling, trimming, freeing it of its rawest edges.

But stupor, the vacuum of prison, that he had read about, once dreaded, still did not come. As if it were a companion, he sought it, but it eluded him. Memory, sentience, pain were his inseparables each night. His pain, the pain of others. His mother’s he dared not think about, nor his father’s; Letty’s he thought of in many ways, entwined with his own, divorced from it.

Divorced. The word had taken on a hardness since his father’s second visit to him in prison. “Garry, I have news about Letty,” he said, a reluctance in his tone. “She telephoned me and asked me to tell you.”

“She’s going to start a divorce, is that it?”

“By now she has already. She started for Nevada that same day, to establish residence.”

And a month has gone by since then, Garry thought now, and she’s about ready to see the judge.
Intolerable cruelty and mental anguish.
For once, it’s more than a legal slogan. Anguish, each to the other. Starting way back, each in our own fashion, never wanting to hurt the other, managing less and less each year to avoid doing it.

Who was to apologize for pain given or pain received? Pain was part of living, of feeling, of moving on from one stage to another. Some day he might be able to trace and examine the pain in their marriage, where it had risen, how it had gone along almost unnoticed, gathering power, cutting through their love, joining with little tributary troubles until it swept along in a force too strong to dam up or deny.

A river, he thought, and suddenly he saw his old geography book, with red lines wriggling down the great expanse of the nation. The schoolboy memory came strongly alive, why he did not know. In prison, one could not predict the mind’s activity, nor the heart’s. One day he was sure of what he had done, what he had said, what he believed; on another he would curse himself for it. Many men had found a way to make good their faith, to stand on what they believed, without getting themselves arrested, arraigned, indicted, convicted, sent to prison for it—but he had not. Had he blinded himself to any way but the way he had gone?

The schoolboy debater, unable to function, except when he blasted ahead with what he thought—was he still that?

He would slap the doubt down, trample on it. This had been no schoolboy debate; three years of prison and twice his total savings would testify to that.

Pain, defeat, hope again when his father visited and talked ahead to the appeal, perhaps by January. The hysterics were growing, but so was the awareness of it. Teddy Roosevelt had brought Madison Square Garden to its feet with warnings of “Huns Within,” and at Carnegie Hall, La Follette was denounced for “disloyal and seditious utterances.” Predictions were heard that Debs himself would land in prison; nothing was too outlandish, and no human safe who dared say it might
not
be the war to end war.

But in Baltimore, his father told him, Federal Judge Rose had directed a jury to return a verdict of “Not Guilty” for two men accused of “conspiring to persuade young men to evade or violate the Conscription Law,” the judge stating for the record, on the record, for the press, that “Every man has a perfect right to any opinion he may see fit to form about any law that is proposed, or about any law that is on the statute books.”

“If I had only lived in Baltimore, Dad.”

“Or if we manage to get Judge Rose’s kind of judge next time around. There still are some, even in all this.”

Perhaps in January, that next time. A new year, and he would have finished five months of his thirty-six by then, a hundred and fifty days of his thousand and ninety-five.

Dear God, help me. He prayed often. He drew comfort as never before from his praying and from his faith. He drew comfort from his parents’ support and approval, and from the things they wrote or told him about the widening support for his case. Clarence Darrow, Dr. Holmes, Norman Thomas, Senator La Follette, Roger Baldwin and his quickly growing Bureau—all saw in it an attack on a basic freedom.

His mother sent him translations of the two pieces Stefan Ivarin had written, soon to appear in the
Appeal to Reason
and the
Milwaukee Leader,
both excluded from the mails, but appearing in their own states. The two shook him particularly, not only because he could see and hear Ivarin in every phrase, but because he knew that if Ivarin and he were to go at it face to face once more, right here in this cell, Ivarin would still shout him down about how wrong he was on this inescapable war, you follow me?

And he also could hear Fee’s phrases from the witness chair, and they too brought him comfort.
It
is
courage.

When he least expected it, her words would sound again for him. Growing up in the Ivarin house, absorbing her parents’ ideas all her life, she surely agreed with her father about the inescapable war, the justified war. But she had said, “It
is
courage,” and for the first time she looked over to him.

He kept seeing her as he saw her then. She had changed. She was older, and he saw her as she would be some day, all warmth and all passion, for whatever she believed in, for whomever she loved.

The September meeting of the policy staff was going well. Circulation was on the rise again, Fehler announced, a thousand a day, nothing too dramatic, but a welcome lift off the recent plateau. The growing suspense about Russia doubtless accounted for it, he said. When Riga fell, over Labor Day, a thrill of fear went through their Russian-Jewish readers, and this week with General Kornilov and his counter-revolutionists marching on the government itself, the word “fear” was not enough.

“On such days the newsstands go clean, of course,” Fehler said, “with no returns. And on certain other days, too. There have been six or seven such days in the past month.” He paused for an instant. “These other days led us to a decision, Mr. Steinberger and myself.”

The burr of self-consciousness caught at Fehler’s voice, and there was sudden strain in his listeners. Joseph Steinberger looked uninvolved, but Saul Borg, the two reporters, and Abe Kesselbaum became self-conscious too. Abe concentrated on a pad before him, drawing circles and interlocking triangles, but he was smiling.

“Mr. Steinberger and I,” Fehler said, “as you know, have been delighted with the reaction to the six or seven special pieces by Stefan Ivarin—especially among older readers who remember his writings. Mr. Steinberger has already discussed this matter with Mrs. Landau and her family, who of course will defer to his—to our judgment. This week we discussed it fully with Ivarin himself.”

At the last two words, Abe Kesselbaum exhaled, so forcibly that Fehler looked briefly at him.

“There has been no disposition to invite Ivarin back to the staff. However Mr. Steinberger did propose—Mr. Steinberger and I proposed—a daily column, to start at once. For some reason, though he never did before, Mr. Ivarin demanded a written contract for a period of years.”

“How many?” Saul Borg asked quickly. He had not been called up in the first draft, but was training a substitute to be ready for the next. He constantly looked ahead now.

“Five,” Fehler replied. “A five-year contract.”

For the first time Steinberger spoke. “We agreed and signed yesterday,” he said. “Ivarin starts next week.”

“Bravo,” Abe Kesselbaum shouted. The burst of talk began all about him and he had a dim memory of a Bravo at some other meeting. But that time he had whispered it.

For the first time in months, Alexandra stopped in front of the Victrola, considering it. In her hand was the record she had not played for those same months, and she shifted her gaze to its visible grooves, wondering whether it was possible now.

Since the terrible day they arrested Garry, she had been unable to do her morning dancing. The lilting music, the cheer and well-being that always came to her as her muscles responded to its rhythms, would have seemed an indelicacy. Instead she had reverted to her hated calisthenics with the deadly sound of her own voice counting off the one-and two-and three-ands.

But this morning, for the first time since early July, she was tempted. Perhaps the reckless step she had taken yesterday—so soon to be discovered—had left a residue of rashness urging her on.

She delayed a decision and opened a window. It was almost too much; the gust blowing in upon her naked body had a hint of December frost, though it was the first Sunday in October. A golden October it promised to be, but for the war, but for the cell in her heart which held Garry.

October. Harvest, fulfillment. A few nights ago with her “charter” lecture group, dear Anna Godleberg had raved about Stiva’s return to print, but then had loyally switched back to two of her pieces, the first she had ever tried on older children, starting high school, starting with flirtation and dates. The old refrain again came to Anna Godleberg’s lips. “You ought to put it all down, you ought to write a book.”

This time Alexandra hadn’t let it pass with silent thanks. This time she said, “I am, Anna, oh, I am. Each time I write a piece, it’s a fraction of a book. Some day there will
be
a book.”

Never before had she said it aloud; the sweet good words were like a promise of new youth waiting ahead. It was true. Only recently Stiva had made her see that when she had written enough pieces there could be a collection of the best ones in book form; he had promised to help her at that time, selecting and organizing her material into sections according to topics; he swore he would find her a publisher. Jewish women had never had such a book; it was her duty to give them one.

Duty—and desire. How fortunate when they were locked together like lovers, inseparable, one the same as the other.

Another frosty gust shot through the window and Alexandra remembered where she was. Naked and chilled through, she had been standing there gawking at the world, holding the Strauss waltz like a votive offering to it. With sudden resolve she opened the Victrola, and put it on.