First Papers (3 page)

The second Strauss waltz was ending. She turned off the Victrola and went back to her room, a small one, next to the parlor.

It had started out as the spare room and had become “the sewing room.” It was bare except for the sewing machine, the cot, and a chair, but she was sleeping better, since she had turned over her bedroom upstairs to Eli and Joan, and had moved down here. They had protested that they could manage in Eli’s room, but she had insisted.

Not only was it too small for two people, but when Eli was having an attack, he needed to sleep alone on that mountain of pillows. If only he would get well, if only he were older, she would be overjoyed about what had happened. A boy like that, though, just past twenty, to have a wife, a baby coming, and his inexplicable asthma—

Perhaps if her first son, the baby Stefan, had lived, she might not have so fierce a joy and pride in Eli, but it was as if he, the living Elijah, were her first-born. The love that she had for the girls was profound, of course, deep-flowing through every vein. But in her love for Eli was another quality, almost—she had almost thought “worship.” That was overstating it, but let it go. One worshiped humanity, one worshiped the ideas which would serve humanity, but also there was, in some love, a breath of worship.

Perhaps what she felt for Eli was a “mathematical” doubling and multiplying for the lost son and the living son. Almost a quarter-century had gone since the baby’s death, and yet the same cold fingers of memory reached for her heart whenever she thought of it.

Time flew, life went, the years softened much. But she would never be done completely with that first horror when she watched helplessly as her baby died. She herself had been in her twenties then, a girl still, unused to personal suffering. Twenty-three years ago that had been, twenty-three swift terrible beautiful years.

The thump of the morning newspaper against the porch steps brought Alexandra Ivarin back to the present, and she put on her bathrobe, combed her hair, and went outside for it. Folded and interlocked so that it would not fly apart when it was hurled through space by the newsboy, it sent invitation through her fingers, but she resisted it and went back to the kitchen. She put the percolator and a pot of water on the gas range and then opened the back door, calling to the dog. He came bounding in, a great shaggy beast with energy enough to throw over ten men.

“Down, Shag, down,” she cried. Immediately he crouched at her feet, looking up with his brown eyes glistening. She laughed. “You big silly fool,” she said, and leaned down to pat his massive head. He was an English sheep dog, unkempt, savage-looking, but gentle and loving. One of her pupils had given him to the children a year ago when he was a tan-and-white puppy; nobody had dreamed then that Shag would grow into this great animal, eating so much, thumping his tail so hard on the floor that the whole house shook. He needed a new kennel; Eli had built this one, allowing what they all thought was plenty of room for Shag’s growth. They had been wrong, and Eli kept promising to make a larger one.

“Soon,” he would say, “next Saturday at the latest.”

But a week of teaching seemed to exhaust him, probably because he was so new at it. Manhood had come to him too fast; six months ago he had begun to earn a living, five months ago he had married, and in two months he would be a father. Too fast, too fast—from the high springboard of boyhood he had dived into maturity. Joan had been nineteen, too, when they met at Jamaica Training School; neither of them had any experience with love, and they had been overpowered.

Poor children, Alexandra thought, what they must have gone through before they got up the courage to tell us and the Martins.

In Joan, fear was more understandable; her parents, Webster and Madge Martin, were strict, conventional people, good and kind, intelligent, too, since her father was a doctor, but both enslaved by what was proper or not proper, right or not right.

But Eli knew that his own parents set little value on such sanctities as ceremonies; common-law marriage was as legal as any other, if both man and woman were serious in their purpose and not merely having a liaison. Or had the boy been afraid that any parents would abandon convictions and principles when put to the test by their own children? He had been as frightened and miserable as Joan; only after their marriage at City Hall had he regained the appearance of happiness.

From the gas range came the sound of bubbling. Alexandra measured out the Scotch pinhead oatmeal, and stirred it into the boiling water. The sight of the hard little grains pleased her. So much better than denatured foods, she thought. When would people stop killing themselves off with gluey white oats and white flour and white rice and white sugar? Some day she might become a lecturer, too, and tell women about these new discoveries in diet and health. Even Alida Paige, so liberal and modern, lived in the dark ages about such matters; what chance was there for ignorant immigrants on the East Side, filled with their orthodox dietary rules and laws?

She turned away from the range and picked up the squared lump of newspaper, carefully opening its tightly folded bulk so as not to tear it. Every morning, when the boy on his bicycle fired the paper at the porch, it made a woody thump she loved. In the city one never heard these small sounds of village and town, so comforting and neighborly; before she and Stefan had arrived at their great decision to move away from New York, she had always had to go out to buy the morning paper at the corner stand. But here, a mile’s walk from Main Street, they had fallen into this Americanism of the thumping paper as if they had all been born to it.

The paper was now open and Alexandra turned it right side up. The front page was splattered with pictures and huge headlines.

154 KILLED IN SKYSCRAPER FACTORY FIRE: SCORES BURN, OTHERS LEAP TO DEATH

In the silent kitchen, her gasp was audible. From the black type, words sprang out at her. “700 Workers, mostly girls, trapped” … “Bodies of dead heap the streets” … “Triangle Waist Factory” … “charred skeletons bending over sewing machines” … “locked doors” … “girls jumping from windows with hair aflame …”

“Oh, my goodness,” Alexandra Ivarin whispered. She pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down heavily, trying to read the story word for word. But her eyes refused methodical behavior; they leaped from phrase to phrase—the single fire escape, the one stairway, the locked exit, the wooden sewing machines massed so closely that flight between them was impossible.

She turned to the second page and saw that it, too, contained nothing but the fire, and the third page, the fourth, most of the fifth. Lists of the dead stretched on, column after column, and she began to read them. Every second or third name was followed by “age 16” or “age 17.” Often the final words to the brief paragraphs were, “Identification by pay envelope.”

Children, she thought, half of them were children.

The names were Polish and Russian and Italian—the addresses all on the Lower East Side. Children of the Ghetto, Zangwill had named them, children of poverty and ignorance and injustice.

The fire had begun just before five in the afternoon. In the first hour after the news broke, the
World
said, ten thousand mothers and fathers had flocked to Washington Square, by eight o’clock twenty thousand were there, breaking through police and fire lines under the towering ten-story building, searching for their sons and daughters, begging for the names of the rescued. Her own throat felt their anguished voices, her own breast their pounding hearts. Suppose Eli or Fran or Fee—

“Oh, my goodness,” Alexandra Ivarin said again.

“Oh, my goodness what?” It was Fran, coming into the kitchen.

Silently Alexandra handed over the paper. Stefan had known about the fire last night; that was what had kept him in New York so much later than usual. It was two when she had gone to bed, his normal time for getting home, but there had been no sign of him. Now she understood.

“Gee, isn’t that awful?” Fran said a moment later.

Alexandra nodded, and said nothing. If she spoke at all, she would find herself explaining why it was not only awful but criminal, that it was not merely an accident but part of a whole system. And Fran would say “Oh, Mama,” with that sagging look.

Alexandra turned to the stove and began to serve the oatmeal. Behind her, she soon heard Fran riffle through the rest of the paper. She was looking for the Katzenjammer Kids, Mutt and Jeff, and the rest of the funnies.

As her older sister ran downstairs, Fira Ivarin pulled a white middy blouse over her head and wondered if she would be pretty too when she was fourteen. Three and a quarter years was a horrible time to have to wait to find out. Trudy Loheim, her best friend, was pretty already, prettier even than Fran. Anybody with Trudy’s blond hair and blue eyes and wonderful complexion had a big start on being pretty.

Fee slung the folded black silk sailor’s tie under the collar of her middy, hooked up her navy serge skirt and went up to the mirror above the bureau, staring at her brown eyes and brown hair. After a moment, she made a face and turned away.

“She’ll be a striking woman,” Alida Paige had once said to her mother, when they didn’t know she could hear them. “Francesca will be a pretty girl, but Fira will be handsome. People will notice her.”

Striking, Fee thought, handsome. When all anybody wanted was to be pretty and know how to dance and wear nice dresses from Best or Wanamaker, the way Trudy did. Trudy’s father worked in a brewery and was fat and drunk and sleepy, but Trudy looked like a picture in a magazine and had the start of a real shape, even though she hadn’t
begun
any more than she, Fira, had. Fran was always talking about everything being different once you began, but she just looked superior if you asked any questions about what it was like.

Her mother had explained everything, because her mother believed in educating children about such things, instead of letting them hear it from their friends, or on the street. But even though Mama went into everything scientifically, she never got to real things like Joan and Eli and their going to have a baby.

Fee glanced toward the next room, now Eli and Joan’s. Sometimes she could hear them in there, laughing and talking, and last Sunday morning when Joan felt sick, she had gone in with a cup of hot coffee. Eli was still asleep, next to Joan, and it had made Fee feel queer to see them right out that way, even though she knew perfectly well that married people slept together in one bed. Actually seeing her own brother that way was different from simply knowing, and she had almost spilled the coffee.

There was no sense saying anything to Fran about such things;

Fran went Miss Ladylike all over and it drove her crazy. And Fran could be mean too. Always teasing her about getting too tall and having wide shoulders, and turning into an Amazon.

“Come on down, Fee,” Fran called from the kitchen. “I’m not going to wait around.”

Fran was going skating and was letting her go along. Sometimes Fran was wonderful. Fee raced two at a time down the stairs. At the table, Fran motioned to the back porch with her head, and Fee’s heart sank. Wearing her horrible old grey bathrobe, Mama was out there, talking to the milkman; he was holding his wire basket, looking down at the floor, nodding his head every other second.

He looked trapped, Fira thought, and shame boiled up for her mother, for the urgent way her mother was talking.

“A hundred and fifty people,” Mama said. “It’s a crime.”

“Terrible,” the milkman agreed listlessly.

“Burned alive,” Mama said. “Under socialism, it would be the workers who were the most important, not saving expenses on fire escapes. Then such tragedies couldn’t happen.”

“I guess that’s right,” he said. “Well, good day, Mrs. Ivarin.” He pronounced it Eye-var-
een
, coming down hard on the last syllable. Mama had told him at least ten times to say it as if it were Eee-
var
-in, but the next day he would return to his stupid Eye-var-
een
. Fee couldn’t stand him.

“Hello, Mama,” she said as her mother came back.

“Good morning, dear.”

Fran said, “Mama, do you
have
to talk socialism, every time the milkman comes?”

Fee said, “Fran,” in a pleading voice. She hated it when there was a fight.

“You keep still,” Fran ordered. “I can say anything I want.”

“Girls, girls,” their mother said.

“And to the iceman?” Fran went on. “And the grocer and the man who gets the garbage? They don’t even listen, and I tell you, it doesn’t do any
good.”

“And I tell
you,”
Alexandra said, “it’s the only way the world ever changes.” She turned to Fee. “Here’s your oatmeal.”

“Aren’t we having bacon and eggs? Today’s Sunday.”

“Yes, yes. I forgot what day it was.” She set the steaming cereal down and continued addressing Fran. “And the world has to change,” she said, pointing to the paper. “Do you want such things to go on happening? If the unions were really strong—”

“The unions, the unions,” Fran said under her breath.

Alexandra Ivarin opened her lips to speak, but just then Eli came downstairs, with Joan behind him, and she turned to them. Her eyes lighted at the sight of her son. He was wearing a blue shirt; he looked handsomest in blue. It made his grey eyes change color, like the sky when the clouds broke open. He was average height but well-built and manly; he had always been popular with girls. Joan was sweet and good, not very pretty nor remarkable; if they had not been so hasty, Eli might have had his pick from a dozen more gifted girls later on.

At his greeting, her heart sank. When he drew a breath, she could hear it, rough and hard as if it were made of cord. She glanced inquiringly at Joan, and behind his back, Joan nodded in unhappy confirmation.

“He had a bad night, Mother Ivarin,” Joan said, “but he won’t stay in bed.”

“I’m going for a ride,” Eli said.

“A ride,” Alexandra said in alarm, “when an attack is starting?”

“It helped last time.”

“That motorcycle.” His mother put her hand on his shoulder. “If you had a bad coughing spell when you’re going so fast, you might be killed.”