First Papers (53 page)

It was hopeful, he told Alexandra. He even had “headquarters” in New York for giving his lessons or for any appointment that might come up. Abe Kesselbaum had instantly offered the parlor of his tenement flat on Essex Street for as many evenings as Ivarin would honor him by using it.

“The news about you flew from one man to the next,” Abe said the first time they met after Ivarin had left. “Like when Landau died. Everybody is uneasy, scared of his job again, asking what’s next. They think Borg is too stuck on himself, and Fehler, you know what they think of Fehler.”

“Who’s writing the editorials? Bunzig’s style is easy to spot, so I know he’s done some of them, and I think Kinchevsky has filled in on several. Has there been any decision yet about a new editor?”

“Not that anybody knows of.” Fehler was interviewing men almost daily, without apparent success thus far. Abe sounded despondent; he was getting along well enough with his new boss; he had schooled himself in masking his real feelings, but with Ivarin off the paper, he knew that his own chance for regaining a higher status had gone forever.

“Life changes,” Ivarin comforted him, more out of desire to comfort than out of conviction. “Even on newspapers, it sometimes changes for the better. You are still young, Abe.”

Still young, Ivarin thought, lucky the man who wears the description. He himself was no longer able to. And yet? A burst of young energy had erupted in him; there was an excitement he had not expected in telephoning people in the newspaper world or the labor movement, and saying, more or less abruptly according to impulse, “This is Ivarin, I’ve just quit the
Jewish News,
and I would like to talk to you.”

Not yet old, he thought. That’s the phrase for me. “Still young” would be whistling in the dark, but not yet old is quite the thing. Apart from the flare-up of his lumbago, which had remained high and fairly constant since his enforced three-mile walk against stiff winds a month ago—only a month?—he actually felt in better shape than he had since the sweltering day last summer when the first “little test period” began.

In better shape emotionally, too. To be active was always a cure for him, to start a new project, begin a new series, even line up appointments and lectures and lessons. The despair that was born in that July meeting half a year back, had vanished like a puff of oily smoke. Occasionally an ache for the office seized his heart, irrational and inconsolable, like the longing for the dead, but time would ease that, he knew. He wrote his article on the Colorado strike with ease and authority, and sent it off, thinking, They’ll surely take it. The thought unexpectedly jarred him. To hang on another editor’s decision about a piece he had written? To write “on speculation”?

I’m boggling over phrases, he thought, feeling disgraced at being a free-lance writer, as if all writers were not exactly that.

You never were a free-lance writer, came the instant rebuttal. You never had to calculate some editor’s probable acceptance of what you wrote. You wrote because you
were
the editor.

He thundered at himself not to be a debating society. Then he turned his full attention to the translation he had already begun of Tchernyshevsky’s novel. He had not liked the fee of only a hundred dollars, in ten monthly payments, but he regarded the undertaking as a lucky piece of timing. He had to keep busy. If he was idle for only a few hours, anxiety and foreboding seized him. Already there had been minor disappointments with several of his evenings in New York; when his lessons were over and he had nobody to see, he would go back to the café, hoping for a hard game of chess or some good talk with an old crony. But that too had a tendency to demoralize him; in the café he could almost feel the throb and thump of the presses next door.

At the end of his first month off the paper he had earned $38, ten from the lecture, ten from the
Call,
ten from his translation advance, and the rest from his two pupils. But further encouragement came just then. He had had some cards printed cheaply, announcing that he was available for English lessons to those speaking Russian, Yiddish, French, German, or Polish, and the owner of the stationery and newspaper store in Barnett, who had seen years of service in the men’s coat trades, and knew all about Ivarin, perched it right beside the cash register. With barely suppressed triumph, the old dealer sent him two pupils within the next five days, and boasted that he would undoubtedly send along two more. The only snag was that these two would have to take their lessons right in Barnett, after coming home from work at night.

“It can’t be helped,” Stefan said to Alexandra. “If they lived in New York it would have been better, but they don’t.” And he added slowly, “Anyway, to go to New York religiously every night, and perhaps just sit around there—it’s none too cheerful when it happens. I may as well stay home and give some lessons.”

She knew it was none too cheerful. How could it be? A phantom New York.

Fee stood still, watching. Even though she knew about it in advance and hadn’t thought it was going to be anything, it was awful. Seeing him there at the kitchen table with a pupil, not Mama but
him,
was the most unexpected sight. Her own father giving a lesson—it was so sad, she felt like crying. She knew he used to teach when he was young, but that was in a real school. Not
this,
doing what Mama always did.

Side by side, at the kitchen table, so pupil and teacher could see the exercise book at the same time, her father and a man who was already pretty old were leaning forward while her father corrected what was written on the page. She could not understand a word because they were talking in Yiddish, but her whole life had gone by to the accompaniment of lessons. The mistake in the exercise book, the pause for explanation, the correction put down by the teacher above the writing of the pupil, the pupil’s nod or further-question-and-then-nod, the united moving ahead to the next word or line or page.

But to have her father doing it was just terrible.

She didn’t want him to look around and catch her watching him; on tiptoe she went up the stairs one at a time. Fran was out and Fee hoped she would stay out until the lessons were over, so Franny wouldn’t see him and get going about it. Fee didn’t want to say a word about Papa giving a lesson. It was not only sad, it was sort of a. disgrace.

Did people his age ever get blue or unhappy the way you did when you were young? Last week John Miller didn’t even look at her in the cafeteria at lunchtime, and she stayed blue and unhappy all afternoon. He had been there with the whole sophomore basketball team, and she kept telling herself it was natural for him not to look over even once, but it did no good. Nothing stopped the dragging blueness, and it was the first time in her whole life she had ever experienced anything so thick and sad.

Could her father and mother feel that way, at their age? The idea had never occurred to her, but now she couldn’t stop it. She could still see him sitting there, stiff and ramroddy, talking in that special teacher-explaining voice to a pupil who was almost as old as he was.

She threw herself face down on her bed. Her throat felt as if a cord was knotted around her Adam’s apple.

Eli wouldn’t come out to talk to him about it. “He’ll just get into a shouting match over something if I do,” he said to his mother on the telephone. “He can’t accept sympathy from anybody any more than he can accept an idea from anybody.”

“You’re heartless,” Alexandra said. “You seem not to care what happens to him.”

“He’ll get another job. ‘The great Stefan Ivarin.’”

“Sarcasm comes easy now,” she said. “Are you trying to get even with him?” Her wretchedness at his refusal to come to Barnett for an evening was growing worse. Every few days she suggested it to him or to Joan, to take the trip and “cheer Pa up,” but he was adamant. In some dark unknown way, Eli seemed glad that his father had come upon evil days. But Eli could never be so nasty, so spiteful, she thought. He was still a boy, unable to feel what his father was going through, how brave Stefan was being, how determined to make a new life without self-pity.

“Try to come soon,” she said now.

“It’s no use, Ma. I’d get riled as hell and then start another attack of this damn asthma.”

“Have you had another attack?” she asked in alarm.

“I’m over it.”

“Was it one of the terrible ones?”

“It’s over,” he said. “You know how I hate to talk about it when it’s over.”

“Did they inject adrenalin?”

“They do that more often now. But that’s nothing to worry about, no kidding.” His voice and his manner softened, as if he were not bereft of consideration for how parents could feel. Don’t depend too much, she thought, on any child for acts of kindness. They probably meant them; she must not be too easily hurt. It was one of her greatest faults.

She hung up, absolving Eli. Hours later, she suddenly thought, He didn’t even offer to help with a few dollars. Not that they would have accepted. They had both sworn never to be dependent upon their children for support, and even this calamity could not make them crumple up and forget that vow. They were at the start of making a new life; Stefan was like a young man starting out to make a career.

But Eli should have offered. It would be a sweet thing to hear your son offer to stand by you when you were in need.

“That was Mrs. Vladinski,” Alexandra said to Fran and Fee, exultantly one morning as she came back from the telephone. “You know, the pretty young Russian woman at the beach last summer.”

“Sonya Nikholovna,” Fran said knowingly. “She only talks Russian.”

“Sonya Mikhailovna,” her mother corrected. “That’s right, and you’ll never believe why she called me.” She sounded so cheerful and bouncy that both girls were as interested as if she were one of their friends instead of their mother.

“I’ve been feeling in my bones that something good would happen soon,” Alexandra said. “This may be the start of it.”

“What may?” Fee exploded.

“She wants me to go to New York twice a week to give her the private lecture at
her
house, a dollar each time.”

“Gee.” Fran looked at her mother with new respect.

“Her husband is doing very well,” Alexandra went on, “and she has nobody to leave with her children, so she can’t come out here, and she realizes she has stopped learning about bringing them up, and all the other things she was getting from me and can’t get from anybody else.”

Fran saw “the conceited look” settle over her mother’s face, but she forgave her. “Will you like going to New York twice a week?” she asked.

“A big change is what it will be. I’ll go right after breakfast, Mondays and Thursdays. It’s all arranged, even the days.”

“Will Papa like it?” Fee asked.

Alexandra looked upward toward his room. “I wish he’d come down, so I can tell him. He’ll be as delighted as I am.”

But some of the elation left her face as she said it, and Fee wondered if this was sad too. Mama sounded so jolly, but was there a hiding place inside the jolly for being sad?

“One new thing like this with Sonya,” Alexandra said, “and I feel sure about everything again.”

When the girls left, the sureness grew. She waited impatiently for Stiva to appear. He was sleeping lightly these days, and getting up at unheard-of hours; sometimes he could be heard moving about while the girls were still at home, though he never came down until they were off for school.

“Stiva, I have a nice little surprise,” she greeted him, and even before he had his coffee, she tumbled out her news.

“It is a surprise,” he said. “Twice a week, a dollar each time!”

His voice warmed her. “Something could grow from this,” she said. “I don’t know why I never thought of it before except at the beach.”

“You may be right,” he said. “It is a new kind of instruction, and there is a need for it.”

“Maybe I could gather a Little group in New York, for the same kind of evenings. But now there would be a charge, a few pennies from each one.”

“I don’t see why not,” he said. “They flock to you in that tent city.”

“Why should it only be the beach in summer?”

He looked cautiously at her. “The beach in summer?”

“Not this summer,” she said quickly. “I haven’t given this summer a thought.”

“We better face it ahead of time,” he said. “Fran and Fee better face it also.” He had been looking for an opportunity to get in an early warning that there could be no luxuries this year. Nevertheless when he finished his warning, he wished he had not chosen this moment of Alexandra’s triumph to raise the subject.

“It’s a nice little surprise, all right,” he repeated with enthusiasm, to make up for his lapse. “Monday and Thursday, one dollar each time.” He asked for more coffee and then suddenly added, “It’s good news for us right now. You’re a good girl.”

Anna Godleberg closed her copybook and English Grammar. Then, with the swift embarrassed gesture she had never been able to overcome, she darted her hand into the pocket of her skirt, slipped out a twenty-five-cent piece and laid it on the table, pushing it close to the saltcellar and sugar bowl. She never yet had managed to hand it directly to Mrs. Ivarin.

Alexandra watched the familiar motions. She had long since given up any hope of changing her pupil in this respect. At the beginning, she had spoken to her about it matter-of-factly, as if Mrs. Godleberg were stumbling over a diphthong, or forgetting to purse her lips to produce a W that would vary from a V. But now after nearly three years of weekly lessons, lessons which had wrought heart-warming changes in Mrs. Godleberg’s reading, writing, and speaking of English—by now Alexandra Ivarin herself was vaguely uneasy at the appearance of the quarter and glad when the ritual of payment was over.

“The teacher vanquished by the pupil,” she had remarked philosophically to Stefan one night. It was not her fault if Mrs. Godleberg who could learn so much, could not manage this, too.

But in the weeks since Stefan had left the paper, Mrs. Godleberg’s embarrassment had grown more acute, and tonight it was tinged with an agitation so noticeable that Alexandra was upset. It’s because she knows I really need it now, she thought, and for a moment she was suffused with longing
not
to need it, for Anna Godleberg’s sake as well as for her own.