First Papers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  It ended in tears of rage for Fee, but that afternoon was Damsie’s and Josie’s turn to go play with Rico and Maria in the Paiges’ big high attic, and she had to hurry them over. She loved the Paiges’ house; it was all grey stucco on the outside, with ribs of dark-brown wood a few feet apart, and a roof of curved red tiles, one overlapping another all the way up to the top, like starched red ruffles on a dress.

  It was time to say good-bye when Mrs. Paige asked them to stay for supper. Mr. Paige had something important to finish at his office, she said; he wouldn’t get home until ten.

  “That’s not considered working late, over at your house, is it, Fee?” she asked, with her nice light laugh. Fee shook her head, and into it popped the memory of Mr. Paige’s trip to California. She hadn’t remembered it since goodness knew when. How was that possible, when it mattered so desperately?

  “I’d love to have you three stay,” Mrs. Paige said.

  “Stay here,” Damsie begged Fee, and Rico said, “There’s chicken.”

  “I’d have to phone my mother,” Fee said, as if that hurdle might defeat the whole idea.

  “Go ahead, dear.”

  It was while she was saying “one-seven-one-eight-W” to the operator that she wondered if there were some offhand way she could phone Trudy too, and tell her she’d just been invited to have supper with Mrs. Paige at the Paiges’ house, without her parents being there. If Trudy was going to be mean and jealous, she ought to have plenty to be jealous about.

  Fee sighed. It was impossible to phone Trudy and tell her. Why it was, she didn’t know, but it was impossible, and it made her sore to know it was.

  The voices turned into shouts and Fee thought, They’ll scare them to death. She ran into the children’s room, and leaned down over Damsie and then over Josie. They were drowned in sleep; if the roof blew off with the racket below, they wouldn’t know it.

  She closed their door in relief and stood in the hall listening, wishing Fran wasn’t off at Jack Purney’s sixteenth birthday party. The shouts were booming up through the funnel of the stairs from the kitchen, mixed of her father’s voice and her brother Eli’s, mixed with weeping that was not her mother’s and terrifying because it was not. She wondered what Mrs. Paige sounded like when she cried, but Mrs. Paige had gone home with Rico and Maria before supper, after all the rides on Eli’s motorcycle. Eli and Joan had left Webby with the people in the upstairs half of their house and had come over to meet the children, because Mama had nagged at Eli on the phone a lot, saying it was heartless not even to come once in three whole weeks and show a little concern for the poor things.

  Eli must have wanted to prove he wasn’t heartless because one by one he took all four kids out for a ride. Not one had even touched a motorcycle before, and each one came back buzzing with excitement. The fun spread to everybody and there was a jolly mood right through supper, with Papa joking about his empty agnostic office on Fridays, and sitting around like anybody else’s father.

  Now this! It was getting worse by the minute, with bursts of words like bullets. The familiar plunge of worry drove downwards inside her, and Fee stood, holding the knob of the children’s door as if the door might fly open. She was half undressed and her underwear felt sticky with sudden perspiring. She pulled at it, away from her moist skin, deciding to go back to her homework but not moving. The voices grew louder.

  “I did say that,” her father roared. “Mama was quite correct.”

  “But you didn’t mean it.” It was a terrible accusation as Eli said it, flung like a rock.

  “I meant every word. I did smash my parents between the eyes, just as you did, Mr.—Mr. Eaves.” Mr. Eaves was a rock too, hurled right back.

  “But you can forgive your own actions,” Eli said. “There’s some God-given difference between your actions and everybody else’s.”

  “And that difference, if you please—”

  There was a pause and Fee realized it was Joan crying, not Mama. She had never seen Joan cry except once a long time ago, before Webby was born. It was more terrible to know it was Joan down there with tears running down her face, not Mama.

  “That difference eluded me,” her father said, “when I first heard this news about Eaves. Until now, until this evening it eluded me.”

  “For God’s sake, can’t we drop it?” Eli said. “It’s done, and it isn’t going to be undone.”

  “That difference is that when I thrust those so-called daggers into my parents’ hearts, I was running some sort of risk or danger myself.”

  “I must admit,” Alexandra said, “I think Papa is right, Eli. He was arrested and he did go to prison—”

  “And you, sir,” Papa said, “were running away from risk and danger.”

  “Running away—what are you talking about?” There was the sound of a chair being shoved back hard. Eli must have sprung to his feet.

  “Running away from the risk of being a foreigner, of having a foreign name, of being a Jew, different from so-called real Americans.”

  “Exaggerate,” Eli said. “As usual, blow it all up.”

  “Pardon me, I do not wish to exaggerate.” Papa was suddenly as cool and formal as if he were addressing a stranger. “You do not regard a foreign name as a risk or danger, merely as a nuisance, an inconvenience. Hooray. What remains, nevertheless, is that you thrust your daggers to spare yourself.”

  On the last words, coolness vanished. He shot out each one in fury, with a thump on the table to mark it off. Outside, Shag began to bark in sudden warning, trotting back and forth on the porch, growling and watchful. Another chair was shoved back. They must be facing each other like wild animals.

  Fee shivered. She sat down on the top step, her forehead on her knees, her eyes squeezed tight as if to banish the scene she could not see. A moment later there was the click of a switch below her and the whole staircase was lighted. Her head flew up, but she sat rigid as her father started up the steps. He saw her and stopped short.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “Nothing.” She jumped up and ran into her room. She sat on the edge of her bed, expectant and afraid in a terrible familiar afraidness.

  It never was being afraid he would spank her, even way long ago when she was little. He never spanked them, except that one wild funny time when she was four that she and Franny still could go into stitches about.

  She could still see the doll that started it, the beautiful blond thing, with eyes that opened and shut. An English lesson of Papa’s in New York, who worked in a toy factory, gave it to him one night “for your little girl,” thinking he had only one.

  Apparently she and Fran used to fight like tigers, about whose turn it was to have the doll, though neither of them remembered that part. But one day, Papa was at his desk and they were at it about the doll and kept at it even though he kept ordering them to be quiet, and then without warning he marched in on them and spanked them, first one and then the other, with the doll tumbling like an acrobat between them because neither one would let go of it.

  All of a sudden it seemed so funny to be spanked by a father, that they got the giggles. The harder he spanked them, the louder they giggled, and if they looked at each other, it started them all over again.

  He gave up at last, talking Russian to himself, and he took the doll away by force, carrying it with him to his own room, slamming his door. The idea of the doll in there with him set them off worse than before, and they laughed until their stomachs hurt.

  The next day Papa said, “From now on, it is my doll. You can play with it any time you like, every day, if you like. But if you start fighting over it, I will take it away in one minute flat. Do you follow me?”

  After that, Fran and she always called it “Papa’s doll,” and it became a family joke that Mama told everybody. What Fee liked best of all was one part she didn’t remember herself, but had heard so many times, she almost did remember it.

  “It’s my father’s doll,” she had once explained
to a visitor. “I think he plays with it at night when we’re asleep.”

  Even now, rigid on the edge of her bed waiting to see what would happen when he got upstairs, that part made her smile. He came up heavily and stopped, and her heart stopped too. But then he went straight to his room. She waited another moment to be sure he wasn’t coming back, and then ran down to the kitchen.

  Joan had stopped crying but Eli was saying the wildest things about “never coming to this damn house again,” and about Papa’s sarcasm and inhuman logic and being a big fake about children having the right to live their own lives.

  Mama said “Stop it, Eli,” but she didn’t seem to be thinking about Eli.

  “We scared you, poor child,” she said when she saw Fee, but she didn’t seem to be thinking about Fee either.

  “We’d better start home,” Joan said.

  “Don’t stay upset,” Alexandra said. “You know how he is.”

  “She sure does,” Eli said. “And I know too. God!”

  They left, and Alexandra came back from the door looking vaguely around as if she were searching for something. Fee was putting away the rest of the dishes, but instead of praising her for being a good girl, Alexandra hardly saw what she was doing.

  Fee glanced at her once or twice, but Alexandra did not notice that either. Then she said, “Oh my goodness! I knew something was making me furious at him.”

  “At Eli?”

  “At Papa. I knew it all the time. But I couldn’t separate it from everything else. I listened, I agreed with every word he said to Eli, and yet, under agreeing with him, there was something burning in me about him.”

  She pulled her lower lip in with her teeth and then let it go and then pulled it back in. Fee said, “Don’t do that, Mama,” and Alexandra said sharply, “Stop ordering me about!”

  Fee didn’t take it as a scolding. Her mother probably didn’t know she had said it. She was still puzzling out whatever it was Papa had done to her.

  “When Eli said ‘inhuman logic,’ something sounded familiar,” Alexandra continued. “But I couldn’t think then, not until a minute ago. ‘Inhuman logic’—why, those were the very words I used to Papa, that night Eli told me he’d changed his name.”

  Fee wished her mother wouldn’t talk about that horrible time. It was so long ago and so frightening—

  “That night,” Alexandra said, “I waited and waited for Papa to come home, with my heart breaking for the way he would feel at the news that his only boy—”

  Her voice thickened, and Fee begged, “Don’t, Mama.”

  “But Papa didn’t feel that way,” Alexandra went on. “With his inhuman logic, he made me look like an idiot. And now, half a year later, after I finally got over Eli’s action by myself, now he shows he was just as heartbroken as I was.” Her eyes filled and she added, “It was unspeakable of him that night to be so noble. Posing as a philosopher and sage, married to a simpleton and booby.”

  Fee shook her head in total disapproval of her father, still not sure what had been so unspeakable in his long-ago behavior. Her mother looked at her with new misery.

  “‘Euphonious,’ he called their new name. ‘Well, it’s euphonious enough’—oh, Firuschka, he can be so hurtful, he can really torment the soul.”

  Her tears now spilled over and she wiped them harshly away with the checked kitchen towel. Her shoulders shook, and her round stomach shook, and Fee couldn’t think of anything except how awful it was to be fat and old and floppy instead of young.

  She hated thinking it now, but she couldn’t help it. She looked away from her weeping mother, wishing she could go up to her room where she needn’t see her. Did Papa sometimes think she was disgusting too? Did they love each other any more, Papa and Mama? Was that what really was the hurtful thing, tormenting the soul?

  Maybe Papa did have a crush on Mrs. Paige and Mama knew it, and knew that Mrs. Paige had one right back.

  Fee suddenly remembered how it felt when Fran told her about it, how her heart exploded in a terrible new kind of pain, and later went all shiny with joy when she saw for herself that they didn’t look the way people with crushes always did look.

  But now, standing off watching while her mother cried so—“he can really torment the soul”—now the explosion happened again and then the icy skin encasing her and she wondered if old people were different when they fell in love, different and hiding and secret so you couldn’t tell just by looking at them. If she and Fran had been able to keep Eli’s secret from that night on the beach, maybe Papa and Mrs. Paige had a secret they had to keep.

  “Oh, Mama,” she cried out, rushing to her mother, “I love you so.”

  Joan transferred Webby from their neighbor’s bed to his own, adoring his sleepy gibberish, and then made two cups of steaming malted milk for herself and Eli. In a winter like this the motorcycle ride home from Barnett was all anybody could bear.

  “This will warm us up,” she said. “I hope it won’t give you a heartburn.”

  “Only the powder does that,” he said. “And if I didn’t have to make a pig of myself when I open the jar—”

  He sounded like a child confessing an orgy of cookies and jam, but it was more serious than that. He did make a pig of himself; whenever he felt like a snack, he went straight to the huge jar of the powdered malted milk, as big as the ones you saw in soda fountains, and ate spoonful after spoonful of it, just as it was. She had tried it a couple of times, but she didn’t like the grainy dry feel of the powder, nor the way it stuck to her teeth and caked on her palate. Eli did; he couldn’t remember how far back he had formed his taste for it, but it never left him. If he overdid it, he knew he’d pay the price with an upset stomach, a heartburn, often the first steps toward an attack of asthma. And he overdid it at least once a month.

  But now Joan smiled in absolution at his confession. She was glad he was getting over his fury at his father. What an evening! What a family! Whenever she thought she had learned not to let them shake her to her smallest nerves, they could fly into some new crisis that jangled a hundred tinier nerves she never knew she had. Tonight she had felt like one huge scream from the moment it began until Eli kicked over the motor on the Harley for the trip home. In the rush of freezing wind, talk was impossible and she wished it could stay impossible forever.

  Everything at supper had been so smooth until the very end. They’d all laughed over her new stories of Webby’s doings, and both the Ivarins were happy and dear that she was to have another baby in August.

  “If it’s a girl,” she started to tell them, but Eli interrupted.

  “Since Web was named for Joan’s father,” he said happily, “we’re going to call this one Stefan if it’s a boy, and Alexandra if it’s a girl.”

  “Stefan?” Father Ivarin asked instantly. “Why not change it to Steve?”

  In one swoop the nightmare was on them.

  Joan stole a look at Eli now, but he was finishing his drink, stretching and yawning. “If it is a girl,” he said, “we won’t be up against it in August.”

  All she answered was, “It’s five months off. Let’s not think about it.”

  “The damn old crank, nothing will satisfy him. Remember when you said my being the only son is why he picks me up no matter what I do? You wait till the girls get bigger.”

  “Boys often clash with their fathers more than girls do,” she said. “That’s all I meant.”

  “But you just wait,” he said. “Let’s say if Fran decides next year, she isn’t going to Training School and be a teacher, if she sees how great it is to earn what I earn. Or, wait till Fee is sixteen. Fee’s a spunky kid with ideas of her own. She can get mad, too—and she won’t always knuckle down to him.”

  “She’s awfully stubborn sometimes.”

  “You stick around, Joanie,” he said. “There’ll be fireworks just like the ones I had to stand for.”

  He coughed slightly. Illogically Joan said, “I wish I hadn’t cried so tonight. I was a disgrace.�
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  “I could kill him when he’s that way, the God-damn tyrant. The Great Ivarin, the Champion of the Suffering, the Noble Fighter for a Better World. Sure Mike—in public. But at home, why, he’s the biggest czar of them all. If you agree with him, good. If you don’t, by God, if you argue against him or act the way you think is right instead of the way he does, by God, down comes the knout on your back.”

  “Oh, Eli, don’t get worked up again.”

  “His knout is words. And rages. And then the hell of living with his bad moods.”

  Fee woke up with the decision made. It would be only fair to prepare Damsie and Josie. They had lived there for two whole weeks, but they hadn’t ever seen Papa in a mood, and they might be frightened. She didn’t know how to explain, but she had to. Perhaps, she said, as they dressed, her mother might seem nervous or sad, and might even stay that way for a day or two, but it would pass, and it wasn’t anything they need be upset about. Her father might be grumpy and slam doors and things, but that needn’t be scary either.

  “Why?” Josie asked.

  “Well, last night they had a big argument—”

  “Did he hit her?” Damsie interrupted eagerly.

  “Hit my mother?” Fee cried.

  “My Pa hits my Ma like that, that, that, that, when they get in a fight.” Each “that” was Damsie’s clenched fist hitting herself vigorously on the jaw, on her ear, on her mouth, under her chin so her teeth clacked together.

  “He hits me,” Josie said calmly.

  “Ma hits us most,” Damsie said. She pulled down her black stocking halfway to her shoe. “Look.” She pointed to a scar circling the lower curve of her kneecap, which Fee had once asked about without getting any reply. “My Ma hit me so hard that time, I fell against the big black pail of coal, and the shovel slit me open and all the blood and everything—”

  “You poor little thing,” Fee cried. An unusual stir went through her, a strange sense of safety and sureness about her own life compared to Damsie’s, no matter whether Papa was in a horrible mood or not.

  When they came in that afternoon, he was not in a mood at all. At the front door, they could hear Mama laughing in the kitchen, and he was talking about something in the papers, and laughing too.