First Papers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  She was no longer in bed, but in the window-missing kitchenette, wearing her blue robe of a thin flowered wool, ruffled at the hem; it couldn’t possibly be warm but it was pretty and becoming. She looked as she had looked since the sale of her lowboy a few days ago, happy and self-important and full of achievement.

  He returned to the bedroom, pulled the one armchair close to the fireplace, the newspaper on his knees, still folded as if it had no interest beyond the pictures of the storm. It wouldn’t be the right moment to have a serious discussion, he thought. He stared into the fire and wondered how one knew rightness or wrongness of moments.

  “Queen Anne, ma’am” he called out, “where’s that coffee?” She said, “You’re so silly,” in a voice he hadn’t heard in a long time, the voice of just-meeting, of flirtation, the voice of that first summer in Maine.

  For an instant the white brilliance of the snow gave way to the green and blue of a lake under a summer sky, and a shaft of longing bit into him, to have that Maine summer again, warm and beneficent, free of problems, filled only with a wild desire and the leap of love.

  He unfolded the paper, and turned to the news which the blizzard had displaced.

  LORD HALDANE REJECTS BERLIN DEMAND

  The smaller headlines and subheads tumbled after the main one: Haldane, of the British War Office, had gone to Berlin for unofficial talks with German ministers, hoping to reach an understanding to ease the tension between the nations.

  Germany demanded a guarantee that Britain would stay neutral in any war “into which Germany might be drawn.”

  Lord Haldane had summarily refused.

  The War Office would issue Britain’s formal refusal before the day was over.

  Instantly Garry froze in the grip of unwillingness to accept the news, the real news, the endless news that had piled shoulder-high in every paper for the past weeks, months, years … demands, rejections, treaties, armies, navies, the Triple Entente, the Entente Cordiale, the Kaiser, the Czar, the King, the Generals …

  Letty came in, carrying a tray with her prettiest china, fragile and translucent. He watched her pour their coffee, and said, “I wonder if the rink in Central Park is going to be cleared off by afternoon.”

  “They sweep it the minute the snow lets up,” Letty said. She was an expert skater and loved skating “spang in the middle of the city.” “You’re not going to go to work today,” she added, positively. “I can tell.”

  “I have to try.”

  “Not too hard though.”

  “I may not be going to Aldrich much longer, anyway.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That I’m pretty sure I’ll quit soon and find a job somewhere else.”

  “Quit?” She refilled his cup. “But why?”

  There were no easy words. This was what stayed unsaid when he felt that so little seemed of equal importance to each of them. For months now, whenever he had tried to share with her his uneasiness about Aldrich’s emerging plans, Letty willfully, or in an amazing lack of perception, would brush it aside as “just worrying” or else listen with a patient indulgence that reduced his words to mere petulance.

  “It’s hard to explain, but it’s wrong for somebody like me, and I don’t think any more that it might get right. It’s about their converting the business to synthetics.”

  “You said that was marvelous.”

  “I still would. But now it looks as if that’s being by-passed completely.”

  “You said the new plant was purposely for that.”

  “But things are changing so fast that Aldrich is changing pretty fast too. They’re going to make explosives instead.”

  She started to deny it, as if she knew their plans. He told her of new shipments of cellulose and of the absence of comparable quantities of sodium hydroxide and carbon disulphide for turning cellulose into the artificial silk that had become his specialty for the past fourteen months.

  “We’re getting sulphuric acid and nitric acid instead,” he said. “Do you know what you get from cellulose when you go at it with those two?”

  She shook her head. She hated this talk; she hated having to have it now when they had been so happy.

  “You get something they used to call ‘guncotton,’” Garry went on. “The technical name is cellulose trinitrate, also nitro-cellulose.”

  “Are they explosives?”

  “They can make bombs that could blow up a field full of soldiers.”

  She glanced down at the newspaper, and hated it too. In it was the timing mechanism that had set off this talk at a moment when she couldn’t force herself to think of such things. How could he?

  Garry began once more. He went through everything he had told her, this time making it as non-technical as he could, though he knew that Letty had acquired far more knowledge of chemistry than she suspected, and of the chemical research into new processes and new products that had been so absorbing to him ever since he had been promoted past his first work of making collodion and other drug products that bore the Aldrich label.

  “Otto and I,” he added, “have facts to go on, not just suspicions. There’s nothing secret about any of this, if you put it all together. The Acids fellow showed Otto the jump in our in-shipments, and Barclay bragged to me about the huge new orders on his books.”

  “Who’s Barclay?”

  “That fat salesman. He’s head of sales now, and pleased as Punch.”

  She understood why Barclay was, and why everybody but Garry would be pleased as Punch too. Each month Aldrich grew, its profits and sales grew; the new plant was to be twice as large as this one. People were always getting raises, new people were being hired, Garry was making more than they had dared hope even a year ago.

  “So now you know,” Garry ended. “If they are converting to explosives a hundred per cent, that’s the end of it for me. For Otto too.”

  There was silence. Letty thought, But maybe they won’t. Even big companies change plans when their calculations take new turns and new directions.

  She wondered whether to say that; she stole a glance at him; he shook his head and drew his breath deeply, as if he were tired.

  “There,” she said.

  The single word pulled him up short. She had said it soothingly, sweetly, as if to say, “You’ll feel better now for having talked it all out with me.”

  “Damn it,” he said, and stood up abruptly, not looking at her, and went to the windows.

  It had begun to snow again, but the wind had dropped; the flakes were aimless, uncertain. The garden looked melancholy now.

  Letty could resist his deepest needs, as he could resist hers, by being willing but unable to feel them. She wanted to understand and share each single emotion, belief, conviction that he held, but she could not because they were too alien to her own interior conformation.

  Just as he wanted to achieve a sharing passion for shining silver and crystal, for furniture that was old and honored by use and time, and just as he failed to know what she reveled in or despaired over.

  Behind him, he heard the pages rustle. She did try to share his interest in the news; if he began now to discuss Haldane with her, she would listen like a dutiful child, eager to please him. A dozen times he had decided not to discuss what she called “politics” at home, and at last it was becoming second nature to wait until he could talk to Otto or to his parents or to some of his other friends who also were gripped by the rise and fall of drama in the dispatches and headlines.

  The small clock on the bureau struck eight. “I’d better try to make it to the lab,” he said. Her face was sad and he thought, I’ve ruined her morning. An impulse drove him to close the distance between them, and without planning to, he said, “Listen to this,” took up the paper and read aloud the headlines on Lord Haldane. Then he began to read the story itself to her. In a moment he forgot why he was doing it, he forgot himself, forgot Letty; the lines of type were straight magnets drawing him one by one to the end.

 
Only then did he glance at her. She sat erect, her face squeezed and tight, her eyelids pressed shut as if to avoid any glimpse of him, lost in news she could not follow and danger she could not believe in.

  “I didn’t mean to read all of it,” he said. “I get carried away with it because if there should be war in Europe—”

  “War, war, war,” she said dully. “It’s all you ever think about.”

  “That’s not fair. You know it isn’t.”

  She didn’t acknowledge or disavow it, but her rigid body and unyielding voice held neither truce nor forgiveness.

  “It’s you and me I think of,” he went on. “Our life would change if there was a war and America got into it.”

  “So would everybody else’s life.”

  “But ours in a different way.”

  “Because you wouldn’t enlist?” she said. “That’s what you say now. You might change.”

  Anger whipped him. “I will not change,” he said. It sounded too noble. “I don’t think I’ll change, let’s put it that way. That’s why—when I think ahead—that’s why I want—”

  “You want,” she burst out. “It’s always what you want, and what you believe, and your ideas about the factory and explosives and Germany and England and being a pacifist and Heaven knows what else.”

  He was astonished. She never accused and blamed; yet this tirade came smoothly, as if she had long rehearsed her bill of grievances, and could recite it fluently, with no pause to search for an item or a word.

  It was bitter, this discovery, bitter in a deeper place than any other where pain had yet reached him. In the living room, the sharp bell of the telephone rang out like a cry, and he sped toward it as if toward someone in catastrophe.

  A moment later, he called out, his voice false-gay for the benefit of the receiver in his hand, “It’s an admirer of yours, darling, Mrs. Aldrich.”

  The office was in an uproar. To Stefan Ivarin, it was contemptible to be discussing sales problems when a great strike was involved, but thus far there was no sign that Joseph Fehler would yield, and he himself saw not the remotest chance of giving in on an issue of this kind.

  To this meeting of the policy staff, Isaac Landau had also invited the two writers who were the paper’s special reporters on the city’s unions and on labor matters in general, as well as his lawyer, Joseph Steinberger, who had been in his office most of the day. The writers as well as Ivarin, Fehler and Abe Kesselbaum were all arguing at once.

  Landau thwacked his desk with the flat of his hand for quiet, but nobody heeded him. He raised his voice, but his words carried no solidity. This was his first week back at the paper after a debilitating stay at Polyclinic Hospital for tests and treatment of his recurrent stomach trouble, and so turbulent a meeting tired him. Like all people, the others had forgotten that he was still weak; each of them was intent only on his own words, his own beliefs.

  “It does make a difference to our readers,” Fehler was saying to Ivarin for the third time. “They live right here in New York and they’re sick of the Lawrence strike by now. Look at the newsstands if you won’t take my word for it.”

  “The newsstands!” Ivarin said irritably. “The returns. The sales sheet for this week, for last week.”

  “This is the fifth week!” Fehler instantly answered.

  Isaac Landau thumped his desk twice with his fist, using it as a gavel. Pain stung his flesh but this time they heard him and came to some semblance of order. Ivarin said, “Itzak, don’t get worn out, it’s too soon for you,” and his concern in the midst of turmoil shook Landau unexpectedly. He was always uneasy when the business side of newspaper life was forced on Ivarin; occasionally in the past he had asked Fehler if he could manage not to discuss figures, sales, costs, profits with Stefan. But such matters did need to be brought up at the monthly meeting of the policy staff, and this time, unhappily enough, he himself agreed with Fehler rather than with Ivarin, a state of affairs that added to his private wretchedness.

  He looked about him, reassessing the chance of a clear-cut decision, if he were to cut short the meeting and call for a vote. Abe Kesselbaum, a member of the group only since last November, had made it clear enough that he stood with Ivarin; the two reporters had no vote. But if they had, the split would continue, for one of them seconded Fehler’s complaint that the paper had played up the Lawrence strike too insistently.

  “The fifth week,” Fehler repeated. “Did I raise any sales questions the first week, the second, even the third?”

  “A noble silence,” Ivarin said. “Thank you.”

  Fehler flushed. “This is a New York newspaper,” he went on, “not a Lawrence newspaper or a Boston newspaper or a special organ for labor. It is a daily newspaper, for all the news every day.”

  “We carry nothing on Page One except Lawrence, Mass. I see.”

  Ivarin said “Lawrence Mass” as if it were a hyphenated term; since the middle of January when the strike had started in the first of the mills, the three syllables had taken on a new identity, a trio in a tragic key. Often the chords of protest and refusal had blended with those of hunger, despair, sometimes violence. But though two hundred thousand strikers and their families were now penniless, the bleat of surrender had not yet been heard.

  To Stefan Ivarin, it was unthinkable that his readers, so many of them workers and their families who had lived through strikes themselves, would or could stay deaf to a private clamor of recognition as they read about those on strike in another city.

  “Fehler wasn’t being literal when he said the readers are sick of the strike,” Landau said pacifically. “He’s raising a question of the future. If the strike went on for another five weeks, let’s say, or ten weeks, then what?”

  Fervently Fehler said, “This question of the ‘future’ is here already. Not one edition has sold out on the stands for six days. They see headlines about Lawrence and they think it’s yesterday’s paper.”

  Ivarin pushed back his chair.

  “Are we to worry about selling out editions—or selling out labor?” He stood up, replacing his fountain pen in his vest pocket, and turned to Landau with finality. “You know how my vote will go. I’ll miss my train if I don’t get to my desk. By the way, I think your young man Borg will develop very well. He’s still fumbling a bit, but an assistant is a godsend just now.” He gave the room a general nod of farewell and left.

  “Your suitcase, Mr. Ivarin,” Abe Kesselbaum called out as he reached the door. “Let me.”

  “I have it.” He had come straight from the street to Landau’s office for the meeting, and his bulky suitcase stood just beyond the arc made by the opening or closing door. He had tossed his overcoat and hat atop the bag, and now the mound of evidence at his feet testified to the arduous trip ahead, the two days and nights of lectures, meetings, discussions with local authorities, harangues with the men leading the strike. Extremists too, the I.W.W., but in a different sense from Fehler’s extremists.

  At supper on his first night at home again, Stefan Ivarin saw without surprise that the girls were forcing themselves to appear interested in his report of his trip. It did not offend him; it was to be expected in youngsters. But this was one time it disappointed him.

  Alexandra hung on each detail, asking, prompting, urging him to go on whenever he paused for a forkful of food. But Francesca and Fee, saying “Oh” or “Gee” at what they deemed the appropriate places, soon took on the glassy look of dutiful listeners. As he talked, he wondered how to break through the glaze and reach them.

  “There was a little boy caught cheating on the bread line,” he said, ostensibly to Alexandra. “There was a hullaballoo, I can tell you.”

  “Cheating how?” Fran asked.

  “What did he do, Papa?” Fee added.

  “He had a plaid coat,” Stefan said, “a lumberman’s jacket, I think they call it. He wolfed down his bowl of soup before he was off the line for more than one minute. Then he stood right near the big steaming pots, watching
every ladleful.”

  “Couldn’t he get any more?” Fee asked.

  He shook his head. “So at last, he turned his plaid coat inside out to disguise himself, and went back to the end of the line.”

  “Poor child,” Alexandra said.

  “But the plaid squares showed through the cloth, his coat was so threadbare. Just behind him there was a woman. She saw the squares—”

  He looked at Fran and then at Fee. Why did it matter so immensely tonight that he had found the way to their involvement? He was no Alexandra, proselytizing in all directions at all times.

  “This woman had four children of her own—and when she saw the inside-out squares she knew what the boy was doing. She screamed at him and cursed him, and hit him. She threw him off the line, acting like a wild animal, as if she didn’t know a child could be so hungry he would try anything for a little more food.”

  “Oh, the poor starving child,” Alexandra said. “How old was he, Stiva?”

  “Six or seven.”

  “How much food is he supposed to get, Papa? Couldn’t they give him a little more?”

  That was Francesca, looking more sympathetic than she usually did about the hardships of strikers and their families. He had never been moralistic about blaming any of the children if they stayed remote from the hardships of workers in sweatshops or workers out of jobs or workers on strike; from babyhood they had heard about all of it so often that perhaps a new tale of poverty and struggle was like crying “Wolf.” But Fran’s face now struck him as sweeter, even prettier, than it had ever been; it had a warm and loving softness that was new.

  “They have no more to give him,” he said. “Thousands and thousands are on the bread lines and at the soup kitchens. Men, women, boys, girls, babies, grandfathers, grandmothers—almost nobody has a scrap of food in their house any longer.”

  “Do they die, Papa?” Fee asked.

  “Some have already, babies mostly, of malnutrition and cold. It was five above zero both nights.”