First Papers (8 page)

We have always differed in our approach to action; she will never concede that to drill the milkman every day may accomplish nothing but the satisfaction of her need to drill, and that black drapery may be nothing but a desire to wear her socialism on her sleeve. He pushed his chair back. “I’m going to New York.”

“At this hour? But why? It’s after seven.”

“Must I give an accounting of every desire I have to go to New York?”

“But Alida and Evan are coming. I told them you’d be home. You
know
that.”

“Then tell them I’m not home.” He opened the door, turned back, and said, “Eli will be only too glad to take the bunting down for you, perhaps even tonight, under cover of darkness, in the perfect idiom of his surroundings.”

His angry footsteps sounded through the dining room, through the parlor. The front door slammed. Alexandra’s sobs rose in volume, and the girls came running in, Fee burying her face against her mother’s waist.

“The big crank,” Fran stormed. “The minute I’m a teacher, I’m going to move out of here and never even talk to him again.”

“Move
now,”
Alexandra said, still crying. “Move tonight. Don’t you dare to call him such names while you stay here, that’s all.”

“You
call him things, you say he ruined your life, but if anybody else says a word, you stick up for him.”

Alexandra stood over Fran, her plump body quivering with anger. “I at least understand him,” she said. “He has had a terrible life, from the moment he was born it was hard, and he has become a great man and you are too silly to know it.”

“If that’s what great men are like!”

“You think a great man is always an angel, day and night? You’re a child, you know nothing about life. But go ask anybody in the labor movement—”

“Oh, God, the labor movement.”

“Franny,” Fee pleaded.

“Ask Eugene V. Debs,” Alexandra went on, “Debs himself would tell you your father is—”

“Is it true,” Fee interrupted, “that Papa ruined your life?”

“Of course not,” Alexandra said. She put her hand on the child’s shoulder. “Don’t look so frightened, Firuschka,” she said. “Nothing’s really wrong. This is the way we are, that’s all.”

“Does Papa
hate
us?”

“No, darling, no. He loves us, he would die for us. But when he’s in a bad mood, he can’t help it.”

Fee stared at her for a moment and then said, “Could I go to the library?”

“Go, both of you. Get some nice interesting books.”

As they left, Alexandra thought, I’ll tell them about the bunting in the morning. She imagined the relief that would leap to their faces, and her spirits lifted. When the kitchen was at last tidy, she filled the kettle—she and Stefan had made tea-drinkers of the Paiges in the two years of their friendship—and went to change from her housedress. Again she thought of the bunting. She could hear the ripping sounds it would make as it was torn down, could see the porch columns emerge white again after their single night of mourning. She sat down suddenly on her bed.

No idea, she thought wretchedly, none, from Christianity to the French Revolution to the first labor union, not one of them would ever have taken root if every parent gave up the moment a child disapproved. Had the children of the abolitionists all applauded when their parents spoke out first against slavery? Had the sons of Socrates and Galileo and Abraham Lincoln approved everything their Papa said or did? And even from a child’s point of view—would those young girls of sixteen and seventeen who jumped from skyscraper windows last Saturday, their hair streaming upwards in flames—would they have disapproved of a house draped in black to mourn them?

No, she thought. No. It is impossible. To say nothing to the world? To do not even one small thing? No, it is not possible.

The doorbell rang, and she hurried to answer it.

They stood there, surveying the bunting, not only Alida and Evan, but their son Garrett and his wife Letty, who still lived with them. Alexandra touched her finger to the switch and flooded the porch with light; all four looked about them once again, but it was Alida who spoke first.

“Oh, Alexandra,” she said in her high little voice. “It’s a fine idea. I think we’ll do it too.”

Gratitude and warmth surged through Alexandra, and as she welcomed them into the house, explaining Stefan’s absence as well as she could, saying the girls would be right back, offering them tea, she thought for the hundredth time how fortunate it had been to find such people living a few minutes’ walk away.

“A tree introduced us,” Evan had once said, and it had become a standing jest between the two families. In fact it had been during the final days of building the house that they had met each other, only days after the trees had been planted. One afternoon, when the plasterers were near the end of their task, she and Stefan had walked up the hill from their rented house in the village, and had found two people examining one of the young maples whose trunks were scarcely three inches across inside their swathing of burlap. The man was bending over almost to the ground, his head cocked near the slender trunk, as if he were listening for a heartbeat. On his face was such concern, and in his whole attitude so lively an interest, that Stefan said, “Is anything wrong with it?”

There was a hint of pleasure in Stefan’s voice, and Alexandra knew he was pleased to find two nice-looking strangers pausing over his property. She herself had experienced a tingle of satisfaction, almost of importance, as if the three young maples were her children, and talented enough to draw warm attention from passers-by.

At Stefan’s question, the man had straightened up, removing his hat, smiling, and saying, “Are you the owners of this house?”

“Yes,” Stefan had said, putting out his hand and bowing a little from the waist in the ceremonious way that always came back when he was meeting people for the first time. “Stefan Ivarin, sir, and my wife Alexandra.”

“And I’m Evander Paige,” Evan had said, grasping Stefan’s hand warmly. “This is my wife, Alida.”

In the instant of speaking and shaking hands all round, in the ready smile on Evan’s and Alida’s faces, Alexandra had felt a promise of friendship. Evan was tall and spare, with a narrow gaunt face that reminded her of descriptions of New England farmers, or of Owen Wister’s Virginian. His wife was small and thin, still pretty, though she was perhaps the same age as Alexandra. Her blond hair had scarcely any grey in it and Alexandra instantly noted that her navy-blue serge suit swept to her ankles with no bulge anywhere.

“I’m worried about your maple,” Evan Paige was saying to Stefan. “We were just passing and I heard the wire singing.”

“Off key, I take it?” Stefan said at once, and both the Paiges laughed and looked at him once again.

“Very much so,” Evan replied. “It’s much looser than the others and if this wind rises, the tree could be wrenched loose by the unequal stress.”

“It’s very kind of you, sir,” Stefan said, “to trouble about a strange tree.”

“It won’t be a stranger long,” Alida had put in. It was a kindly voice and Alexandra’s heart opened to it. “We pass here every day. Our house is just over there, on Charming Street.” She gestured toward it and smiled at both of them. “As soon as you move in, we must visit each other.”

Then and there, the visiting had begun. When Stefan said he had designed the house himself, Evan seemed impressed and asked to be shown through it; in the empty rooms, their voices rang and echoed, their steps resounded. The Paiges had ended by inviting them to return home with them, and over tea (served in cups) their talk had soon turned to the Inaugural speech William Howard Taft had made the week before. It was Evander Paige’s phrase, “Taft’s usual tariff promises,” spoken with a dry irony, that led Stefan to say, “We seem to feel the same way about many of these matters.”

“I voted for Debs,” Evan replied. “The third time since Nineteen Hundred.”

“My dear sir,” Stefan said, “I greet you again. I’ve been a socialist since I was a boy of seventeen in Odessa.” He rose and put out his hand once again to Evan. Evan rose too, and they stood there shaking hands as if each was congratulating the other.

Watching them, Alexandra and Alida Paige smiled at each other like schoolgirls discovering a common joy.

“And if women could vote,” Alida added, “I’d have voted for Debs three times too.”

They had remained at the Paiges’ for an hour, exploring each other as if they were hungry. Evan Paige was a lawyer in New York, and through one of his first cases for a young convict who had broken parole, he had begun to do a good deal of voluntary work with the parole board for the city prisons. He still did, though of late he was increasingly active as attorney in free speech cases, and, with a group of other lawyers and one or two people in government, was trying to form a free speech league, to provide free legal counsel to “offenders” who could not retain lawyers of their own.

They had only one son, Garrett, named after his mother’s family, who was to be a chemist when he finished college in June. Another son, Van, had died at fifteen of mastoiditis; he would have been twenty-four now and probably a lawyer like his father.

Alexandra marveled at the way they could speak of their lost son, so calm and measured their tone, so much the victor over the pain that had been theirs and—how well she knew—still was. As she and Stefan were leaving, they met Garry, down from college for spring vacation, a handsome, fair-haired boy nearly twenty-one, spare and tall like his father, and seeming to offer friendliness on trust, expecting it to be accepted and returned, as his parents had done. Garry was to be married after Commencement Day to a girl named Letty Brooks. Later on in their acquaintance with the family, they met Letty, but Alexandra had taken a vague dislike to her.

“A snob,” she had announced. “Maybe Alida and Evan aren’t fashionable enough to suit her. In a house like that, with real Oriental rugs and lace curtains to the floor.”

Now, listening to Alida’s praise of the bunting, Alexandra saw that Letty alone of all the Paiges looked distant, perhaps even displeased. She was a pretty girl, with wavy black hair and light grey eyes, a startling color effect, and she had a willowy curving figure that any young man must find bewitching. But she, Alexandra, was not a bewitched young man, and she felt the vague dislike.

“But, if Garry was still a child,” she said, talking just past Letty’s head to Alida, “would
you
do it to your porch?”

“Sure she would,” Garry said.

“If I thought of it,” Alida said.

“Van and I were always getting some surprise or other,” Garry added, “and squawking over it.”

“But,” Alexandra said to Garry, “you and your brother didn’t worry about being called crazy foreigners. That makes a difference.”

“We had just as many battles with our children as you have with yours,” Alida said comfortably.

“Just as hot ones?” Briefly, feeling it a treachery, Alexandra related the crises of the day. As she spoke, Evan, Alida and Garry occasionally exchanged glances of amusement. “And I really think,” she ended, “that it’s because Stefan and I still are foreigners in the children’s eyes—that’s what makes them anxious to be more American than George Washington.”

“That may be part of it,” Evan said. “But not all.”

“Dad,” Garrett said, “remember my first bloody nose?”

“Some kid called him a spy,” Evan explained. “I was campaigning for Debs; and Van tried to bribe me to quit. They were eleven and thirteen and said I was mining their lives.”

“I wish the girls were back, to hear this,” Alexandra said.

“We offered to give up our allowance for a year,” Garry said, “if Dad would say he was for Bryan or McKinley and quit talking about the Spanish-American War and pacifism.”

“Children always want to run with the herd, Alexandra,” his mother put in. “They grow out of it.”

“Oh, I hope so.”

“By die time I was a senior at Barnett High,” Garry ended, “I out-pacifisted even Dad and Mother.”

Alexandra’s face was alight, and she suddenly said, “Eli and Joan don’t know you are here. Excuse me—I’ll see if they can come down now. Joan was feeling queasy.”

Upstairs, the bedroom door was closed, but Eli’s voice came through. They’re quarreling, she thought; he sounds just like Stefan. At her knock there was abrupt silence and then, from Joan, “Come in.”

“The Paiges are here,” Alexandra said. “Oh, Joan, you’re already in bed.”

“She’s so upset,” Eli said harshly, “she’s sick. I can’t have her go through this any more, even once more!”

“Eli,” Joan said. “Not now.”

“Not now, what?” Alexandra asked. But her heart thickened with the expectation of pain.

“We’re getting out, that’s what.”

“Mother Ivarin,” Joan said quickly, “I think it’s bad for the baby—I do get so wrought up. If it won’t hurt you, we’re going to move in with my parents until we can find a place to live.”

“Oh,” said Alexandra.

“We won’t be far away,” Joan went on, “and we’ll see each other all the time anyway.”

“I suppose so.” Alexandra looked at her son, her eyes dark with reproach. He turned his head away. “Well, it happens,” she said firmly. “I must go down now.”

She returned to the parlor, but her delight in the Paiges was covered over as by a thick cloth. The girls returned, and during their greetings, she thought, Soon they’ll be the only ones left.

“Garry,” she said. “Would you tell about your bloody nose again?”

Listening to his story, Fee sat like a small brown bird, head erect, eyes alert. Fran was attentive too, but in a different way. She seemed suddenly quite grown up, prettier, as if she had matured in the five minutes since she had come in and found them there. Fran sat close to Garry, and as she listened, she gave her head an occasional small toss, almost coquettishly, like a young princess holding her first court.

“But,” Fran finally said to Garry, “you could get out there and punch them. Boys can do things, but girls have to sit back and feel dreadful.”

Watching her, Alexandra forgot the news of loss she had just received upstairs. Francesca, she thought, my little Franny. Growing up, worshiping at the feet of a handsome young man. It was lovely to see, a token of how it would be in a couple of years when Fran was a young lady at last. It was too bad the Paiges had no unmarried sons.