“Stefan,” Alexandra murmured, “some other time. Your face is getting red.”
It was as if she hadn’t spoken. Ivarin’s gaze stayed fixed on his son’s. Vaguely he was aware that the girls both looked fearful; he forced his voice down to a quieter tone. But in the next moment he heard it as loud and sonorous as if Eli were seated in the last row of the top gallery of a large lecture hall.
“This history book, mind you,” he went on, “has been in use for years, but suddenly a group of Virginia’s citizens discover they don’t approve of it. Why? The author, it appears, a man named Somebody Elson, not only writes of the bright side of slavery, the bright side, remember, but dares also to include the dark side of slavery. This ‘dark side’ admits there were sometimes illicit relations between white masters and black slaves. You follow me?”
“What’s the connection?” Eli asked impatiently.
“Why, need I spell that out?” Stefan sounded baffled, amazed. “Those citizens of Roanoke, speaking only in the ‘idiom of their surroundings,’ mind you, now demand, righteously demand—”
Alexandra said again, “Stiva, please.”
His glasses had begun to steam over. He seemed to see those far-off citizens of Virginia, see the author, so much one of them that he called the Civil War “a slaveholders’ rebellion,” and yet a transgressor they had to punish.
“Righteously and idiomatically,” he continued, “those Roanoke citizens demand that such an unidiomatic history book be banished by the college. Suppressed. Abolished.”
“For God’s sake, Pa, nobody means banishing books.”
“Conformists always mean banishing books, people, ideas, that do not conform to their own special familiar idiom. And if Roanoke College now gives in, no book in any college will be safe from the next group of citizens with its own pet idiom.”
“So one bunch of fools in Virginia,” Eli said, “is enough to make every book in every school unsafe. For God’s sake.”
“You are right; you have a point: this is America, not Russia. And if you thought a little more deeply about what that means, Eli, let me tell you, you would not speak so authoritatively about ‘idioms of one’s surroundings.’ In America, any opinion—”
“Oh, Lord,” his son said wearily, “here we go again about the greatness of America.”
Stefan Ivarin banged his fist on the table so that the dishes jumped. “You will not,” he shouted, “not while you live in this house, take that tone of contempt.”
“You want me to knuckle down to everything you say!”
“If you’d knuckle up, fork up, stand up, with some thinking one can take seriously. Years ago, I warned your mother, she was letting you grow up into a spineless Adonis.”
“Stefan,” Alexandra cried, springing up from her chair.
“Eli,” Joan said softly. “I don’t feel very well.”
Stefan Ivarin muttered, “I’m sorry, Joan. I get too excited, it’s true.”
“Oh, poor child,” Alexandra said to her. “You look pale. Come, I’ll take you upstairs, and you rest a little.”
“Eli will take me up, Mother Ivarin.” Slowly Joan rose from her chair, smiling as if in regret at leaving a gay party, and they all watched as she and Eli left the room.
The kitchen was silent. Ivarin stared at the oilcloth around his plate, a bright red-and-white-checked pattern, mitered at the corners and tacked on the underside, to keep it taut. His nerves were as stretched as that, nailed down, a crucifix of nerves; he was a fool to argue on these matters with any of them. “America” is not the magic word to them, he thought, that it is to me, liberty is not, freedom not. This, precisely, is where I come closest to Alexandra’s weeping, a gulping in my throat, as hard to control as her tears.
“Poor Joan is not used to our ways,” Alexandra said to no one in particular.
“She must hate it here,” Fran muttered.
“She does not hate it here,” Alexandra said sharply. “She loves it, being a member of our family. She and Eli could live with her family, couldn’t they? The Martins keep inviting them.”
“I bet she never heard such fights before,” Fran said.
“An argument,” Alexandra said sternly, “is not a fight.”
“Argument!” Fran let scorn sound in her words. To Fee she said, “Come on, let’s get started,” and began jamming dishes together, scraping each free of food as she did so. Fee carried glasses and silver to the sink and their mother took out dishpan and soap.
Stefan remained motionless. Joan’s device had not deceived him; to her he must have sounded like the czar of the supper table. Not czar; Oliver Wendell Holmes had called it “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.” Delightful, full of wisdom and good humor.
Good humor. Ay, there’s the rub, he thought. Tonight, good humor had been noticeable by its absence, and Joan had known it as had everybody else. He had an impulse to follow her upstairs and beg her to believe that soft-spoken discussion was impossible for him, and that a raised voice meant intensity as often as it meant anger. He sat on, doing nothing except to wonder why and when this vice had begun. Had his own parents habitually raised their voices? He could not remember.
“You’ve helped enough,” Alexandra said to the girls. “I’ll finish.”
Fran threw down her towel and left the room. Fee went on working, and Alexandra said, “Go, go. I’ll finish.” In her voice was the tone that warned Ivarin she wanted to speak to him in private, and he sighed.
“Stefan,” she said tentatively when Fira left.
“Yes?”
“If they all feel so terrible about it—”
“You are going to take the bunting down?”
“They all are so miserable.”
“Do as you like.”
“I’m not ‘doing.’ But perhaps it’s wrong to persist. Can’t we talk it through a little, sensibly?”
“Have you no memory, Alexandra? When I was reluctant about your idea, you accused me of indifference. Now you want to back down, and you demand that I approve. I beg you, decide it yourself.”
“You won’t even talk about it?”
He made a gesture of exhaustion. As she turned abruptly away, he heard the familiar, maddening first sound of her sniffling and then weeping. It is fantastic, he thought, literally a matter of fantasy and dreaming. Even when I give in supinely on something she wishes, we end in anguished tears.
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.
FOUR
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 seemi
ng 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.
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