First Papers (33 page)

Alida was laughing in soft short spurts, like trills of music to accompany his phrases. She took the silver from Fee and set it out on the table, at either side of an imaginary plate.

Mr. Paige said, “One last haul, Fee. Half legal, half criminal.” He drew out the green netting, taking one end of it and giving Fee the other. Then he moved back, to stretch it taut between them.

“It’s a hammock,” Fee said, bewildered. “A tiny hammock.”

“The porter hangs it up every night on two hooks in your berth, and you put your clothes in it, and nothing falls out no matter how hard the train sways or swings.” Whereupon Mr. Paige surrendered his end to Franny, proceeded to take off his jacket, fold it lengthwise and lay it inside the tight webbing. “I don’t know what you can do with this contraption in Barnett, Fee,” he said, “but to me it says sleeping car and berth and train and overnight travel more than all the rest put together.”

“It’s marvelous,” Fee said, awed. “I’ve never seen—I never—I—oh, you’re the most wonderful—”

She wheeled around, ran into the parlor through the open double-doors and swiftly turned two somersaults on the carpet, the half-kind where you start with your shoulders touching the floor, so you’re not too wild and uncontrolled.

She heard the Paiges laugh, and Fran calling her a tomboy and laughing too, and she was so happy, she lay on the floor for a minute and laughed right along with them.

It was the end of June, with the household in the usual demented joy that meant school was closing and Alexandra and the girls going off for the summer, and though Stefan would acknowledge the heresy to no man, he could hardly wait for them to be gone.

Evan had been correct about the extra work, but work didn’t matter. Late hours, extra reading, research, inquiry, nothing mattered in his preoccupation with the new series. Each day was more demanding than the one preceding it, but nothing was beyond his powers. From the moment they had all parted at the café, energy kept boiling up as if from a hidden geyser newly erupted to bless and freshen him as he wrote.

That same night he had gone straight to his office, straight to his desk, needing no pause, no inner discussion. Across the top of his writing tablet, he had blocked out a title for Evan’s first piece, a title he was never to change.

POGROM—California Style?

He had omitted nothing, softened nothing. He could hear himself arguing later on with Alexandra that a newspaper’s readers were not children, to be spared shock or revulsion, arguing it more irritably with Fehler, who was raising the issue of disapproving readers on any handy pretext these days.

But issues and arguments didn’t matter either. For nearly two hours Ivarin wrote on, aware he was running long but not checking himself, stopping once for some twenty minutes when his assistant brought in changes and new leads for the morning’s Final, and then finishing the sentence under his pen without needing to reread it when Borg took himself off again.

It was nearly three in the morning when Ivarin started for Delancey Street and the subway. The streets of the East Side were dim and sleepy and as nearly quiet as they ever became, but he was too elated to be tired. The pain in his back was sharp, as always now when he stayed writing too long, and he paused occasionally, leaning slightly forward from the waist, rounding his shoulders, lowering his head, gently, purposefully, as if this rite could outwit his one enemy.

As he walked, he read in memory from the folded pages in his pocket, wishing that Alexandra were not asleep so he could show them to her as soon as he got to the house.

The Triangle Fire, he thought, it’s something like that night. Then too he had had to write on and on, unable to delay until the sensible hours of the morning, sorry too that she was asleep when he had ended. He had wandered around the house, he remembered, forcing himself to let her rest, sure she would like what he had written, yet absurdly eager to hear her say so.

Tonight—he suddenly realized it—he wished Evan were not asleep either. He was even more eager to show his pages to him.

That’s something new for you, Stefan Ivarin thought, amused. Now Evander Paige also. Life grows thinner as one grows older, or else it multiplies. My damnable back is not in total command yet.

Two days went by before he did show it to Evan. Though he could be as ruthless about cutting his own work as he was with the work of others, this San Diego material gave him no obvious superfluities that made cutting a wholesale assault. This was precision work, challenging all the way. Then came the English version; there could be no hurrying over his translating either.

Borg was only too happy to be trusted with new duties, and Stefan turned over an assortment of them, generous in praise at the young man’s quickness and growing ability.

“Good work, Saul,” he said as Borg showed him a list he had made of the next day’s assignments for the staff, something Borg had never done before and had undertaken on his own. “Post it on the board.”

“Without any changes, Mr. Ivarin?” He had gone a damp pink like a schoolboy though he was twenty-six, with four years of experience on a magazine printed in Yiddish.

“You have learned at breakneck speed since Landau hired you, Saul. How long ago was that?”

“Six months. You’re a wonderful teacher.”

“A good pupil makes a good teacher.”

Again Borg flushed. “There’s only one thing you have not taught me,” he said, turning away quickly. “How to write like Ivarin.”

Ivarin thanked him but was vaguely annoyed. A moment later he forgot Borg and telephoned Evan. When they met, the two men were alone. Stefan had suggested this himself, naming Paige’s house as the place he would prefer for their meeting, and Alexandra startled him by not being hurt. She had read the piece twice and the translation twice, saying that even in translation it was unmistakably Ivarin, and Ivarin at his greatest. Stefan did not find her language “too volatile.”

Evan read the article slowly. Then he said only, “I knew it.” He sat thoughtful and still, with the pages sprawled face down under his hand, as he had set them one by one.

“I knew this could happen, Stiva,” he said, “but I suppose you can never be sure until it’s written.”

“With material as dramatic as that, anybody—” Ivarin broke off and added, “Listen to this holy modesty,” but the truth was that Evan’s praise pleased him remarkably.

By the time his second article was ready, unfamiliar newspapers began to arrive at the house from all over the country with “Pogrom—California Style?” The sight of his own words translated by the pens of other men sent his hidden geyser into a greater leap and thrust and he felt that he would stay strong and productive for another fifty years.

“Well, Stefan,” Alida greeted him as she came over with Evan a few days later, to read the second piece, “I do believe Evan brings up your name with everybody be meets, just so he can get your clipping out of his wallet.”

“You’ll make him conceited, Alida,” Alexandra said. She saw the two men exchange glances, and a brief envy invaded her; they were becoming deeply attached, in the way men could when they embarked on work together that each held important and that each felt was partly the other’s to do best. Women so rarely could find that specialized warmth of colleagues or comrades-in-arms. Though of course, when Suffrage was won, that too would change.

Envy fled before the fair breeze of hope. Evan was reporting on the mail forwarded to the Free Speech League from the out-of-state papers.

“Some of them are vile. Not all; some are splendid.”

“The vile,” Ivarin said, “will outnumber the others five to one.”

“Well, the League has had plenty of vile letters since the day it was formed.”

“Hurrah and hooray rarely take pen in hand,” Ivarin said amiably.

“What a clever way of putting it, Stiva,” Alexandra said.

He frowned, turning to discourage further praise. To Evan he said, “It will be interesting to see whether your series acts like a catalyst on my series for printing Berkman’s book. Another appeal for funds is scheduled for Wednesday.”

“Could it hurt your Berkman campaign?” Paige asked quickly. “I never even considered that possibility.”

“Quite the contrary,” Ivarin said. “I’ve been irritated at the way the initial response has been dribbling off. Your series may wake it up again. There’s not much time left if the book is to come out this fall.”

“Stefan, it’s sweet,” Alida put in, “the way you always say ‘Evan’s series’ as if
you
hadn’t a thing to do with it.”

Ivarin laughed, but Alexandra looked pensive. Yet apart from Stefan’s annoying courtliness, she was happy he would be so involved with the Paiges for the next month or two. No steady diet of hard-boiled eggs like rocks this summer; Alida had already invited him over for supper whenever he and Evan were to see each other.

It would be the first summer she could go off with the girls without worrying about leaving him all alone. Tomorrow afternoon when the girls dashed home from the last day at school, they could all set off for the beach without one twinge of conscience. This summer, Stiva might even enjoy himself.

But the afternoon came and they did not set off.

Instead Fee sobbed as if her heart would break, Fran was pale and shaken, Alexandra was beside herself with guilt, and Stefan Ivarin was transformed into the executive, the managing genius, the pillar of strength and the one hope of the family.

Shag was missing.

He had been absent at breakfast, but everybody took it for granted that he was off on an ordinary tour of the neighborhood and Fran and Fee had gone off to school without a glimmer of tragedy ahead. His new license had been bought and paid for at last, and though there had never yet been time to buy him the large collar he had long needed, to which the narrow metal plate would be attached, Alexandra was to get it today, as well as the muzzle demanded at the tent city.

And when the girls reached home shortly after three, there indeed was Shag’s new paraphernalia—the new collar and leash, the license plate neatly riveted into place, and the muzzle as well, a humane one, made of leather strips, not metal.

But Shag was nowhere in sight. He had not been seen since morning. He had not been seen, when their anguished reckoning was completed, since the night before. They called, whistled, shouted, raced through the entire neighborhood, but there was no sign of Shag, no report of him, no trace of him.

“He’s killed,” Fee cried in terror.

“Don’t say that,” Fran said, terrified too.

“Poor Shag, where
is
he?” Alexandra asked, tears starting as she put her hand out to comfort Fee and Fran.

“Wait, wait,” Stefan Ivarin shouted. “You are calamity-howlers, every one of you. Keep quiet and let me think.”

Fee was sobbing too wildly to stop, but Fran managed to stifle her grief in a frantic attempt to be adult. Alexandra dabbed at her eyes, but her obedient larynx and vocal cords followed her husband’s command.

“Where is that confounded dog pound?” Stefan asked.

Nobody could tell him. For months they had referred darkly to the dog-catcher’s wagon and its periodic excursions through the innocent streets of Barnett, but nobody knew whence it came nor where it returned with its living catch of uncollared, unlicensed pets.

“Are you all blockheads?” Ivarin shouted. “Not to know the simplest matter? He’s your dog, and you’ve put off his new collar for six months, couldn’t you at least
ask
where it is?”

If there were any
non sequitur
in this, nobody questioned it. All three kept shaking their heads from side to side until Stefan rushed from the room to consult the telephone book. His search through the endless listings of city departments was like an assault on the mild columns of type; his eardrums rang with Fee’s agonized fears about Shag lying crushed and bloodied in some gutter and his fury at all procrastinators pounded in his temples. Moreover, a black fear for that big clumsy fool of a Shag attacked his whole nervous system.

At last he summoned Information and learned that there was no dog pound in Barnett, nor in Jamaica, and that the one serving Barnett would be, most likely, the main one in Brooklyn, at the far reaches of the borough.

He called the number given him and was promptly told what he already knew, that his quest for any dog could not be made by telephone since nobody could be sure which animal he was interested in, no matter how he described it. He restrained his vocabulary and emotions long enough to discover that this dog pound did indeed “serve” the town of Barnett, would remain open for two more hours, that if the dog in question had been there for less than one day, as claimed, it would still be alive and could be freed at proof that a current and proper license had been procured and upon payment of a fine of one dollar.

By this time Fee was clutching at his sleeve so that he had to fight her off to hold the telephone at speaking position, and Fran was breathing praise and adulation of his talents and goodness such as she had never yet produced in her nearly sixteen years. Alexandra merely murmured, “Thank goodness you were at home, Stiva, I would have no idea where to start.”

His own hopes had taken one small leap upward at the “less than one day.” He summoned Information once more, for the telephone number of the public school in Brooklyn where Eli was so unwilling a teacher of the young.

It was now four o’clock, but if there was any truth in Eli’s summaries of the slaveries endured by the teaching profession, why then, his release on this the final day of the teaching year was still many hours off. Ivarin hoped devoutly that this was so, told the principal crisply that there was an emergency, and could Mr. Elijah Eaves be called to the telephone, please, irregular as that was.

“Eli,” he said an instant later. “Don’t worry, it’s Pa—it’s great luck they caught you at the front door.”

“Pa—is somebody sick?”

Eli was so immediate in his concern, Stefan nearly thanked him for seeming like a son again. Instead he told him about Shag, asked him to go straight to the dog pound to see if Shag was there, and then to call back one way or another without losing a moment.