First Papers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  He tried to empty his mind of image and memory, to stop speculating about how he could get back to his hotel. First, he needed to rest, to regain himself.

  Hardly a moment passed before he was up again, searching for further damage to the car. He could find none. Four new tires, four new doors—their vengeance had come in specific terms and tidy quantities. Had they been inspired further, they might also have bent and pierced and scratched each fender, all the shining glass and metal, gouged out the faceted lenses from the brass headlamps, smashed the engine itself.

  The cloth packet was hurting his hand. He loosened his grip; he had been jamming two buttons against the bones of his fingers. As if the buttons tapped out a coded order, Evan instantly retraced his steps to the open space where they had ringed Reitman, and began to search the ground, inch by inch.

  The last of the blur was gone from his vision and in the light of the high stars and the bright crescent of the moon, he found a long scrap of dark wool that might have come from a man’s trousers, and he pocketed it. He saw a gleaming section of curved glass, and knew it would fit the face of a dollar watch. He found, innocently clustered in a clump on the road, some small-scaled cactus, “them little needly acorny ones.”

  He saw what might have been the newspaper spreader, but he was wrenched by the spasm of vomit again and decided that Exhibits A, B, and C would be evidence enough for any court of law that was a court of law.

  He stood still, breathing deeply and quietly, resting once more. The farmhouse was little more than a shack, he saw now, but he moved toward it until he was sure that there was no barn, no stable that could contain a horse and wagon.

  Then he began to walk toward San Diego.

  The doctor sent by Jonathan Smithers said, “Nothing broken, and I think no concussion.” But he refused to let him get up, no matter how urgently Evan said he had to go to the League office, finish his report and turn over his exhibits.

  “Apart from the manhandling, Mr. Paige,” he said diffidently, “there’s your walking most of the night before the milk wagon showed up. Twelve miles for anybody out of training—well, you see. I’ll give you something for pain.”

  Dr. Grimes handed Evan a domed pill, poured water from the white crockery pitcher on the bedside table, and said, “You take this pill, and I’ll look in on you after supper.”

  Evan nodded, thinking, I’ll be back in an hour. He swallowed the pill with the complacent knowledge that he was going to disobey, the moment the doctor’s back was turned. As long as the hurricanes of pain blowing through his neck and legs meant no internal damage to brain or body, he had to see Jonathan and the others at once, to fill out the rough account he had telephoned the moment he had reached the hotel. They were already tracking down Ernie and Herbie and Bobbo, but he could give them descriptions, details, clues that might make it easier, faster and surer.

  “In case you have any lawyer’s plan worked out about getting up anyway,” Dr. Grimes added conversationally from the doorway, “you’ll be giving it up in about two minutes. The pill I gave you was a real persuader.”

  He nodded pleasantly and left. Evan wondered if he could have prevented Grimes from out-maneuvering him so handily, and decided he could not. The few seconds that had slipped by had taken some of his urgency along with them. His eyelids seemed thicker already and he leaned back into the pillows’ support with gratitude.

  At his side he could see Alida’s letter, a flash of white on the table, and he reached out, to read it again. But his hand fell an inch short of it, and he let it rest there, soothed at its proximity. She had written ten days ago but the letter had reached him only yesterday. Parts of it were funny, especially about her secret fear of joining the great parade up Fifth Avenue from the Arch up to Madison Square.

  “Alexandra was nervous too, but she kept my courage up,” she wrote, “telling me ten times over that once I marched in public for something like Woman Suffrage, I’d like it so much, I’d do it every chance I got.”

  Evan smiled. Sleep was all about him now, slowing his breathing and adding weight to his head, but he made another effort to pick up Alida’s letter, and this time he succeeded. The last page had saddened him, about Garry and Letty and their weekend in Barnett. He turned to it again.

  “They worry me so,” Alida had written at the top of the sheet. She had crossed the words out, and crossed them out a second and third time, but the paper had taken her pen’s first pressure to its heart, and still revealed the curves and lines of every word she had tried so insistently to unsay.

  “Last night we were talking about the Titanic again, and I said how unbearable if a warship or submarine had done it on purpose, instead of a submerged iceberg in a horrifying accident. Garry didn’t do anything except agree—in an instant, an iceberg of our own was right there in the room! I have the heaviest feeling that Letty freezes up about all sorts of things now, and if I say a word about the news or politics, I get that faint embarrassed sense that they’ve just had a quarrel but want me not to guess that they did. If this happened only once, I’d decide they did have a whopper, and think nothing of it. But it’s a persistent impression, and I pray I’m just imagining things.”

  Evan bowed his head, as if to second her prayer. Immediate pain ringed his throat, sending waving tendrils up into his brain, and he wondered if Grimes could have overlooked some hidden injury that his own doctor at home would have detected. He put Alida’s letter down on the bed beside him and fell asleep.

  Voices and lights struck at him from everywhere, and he opened his eyes unwillingly. Jonathan was coming in, closing the door behind him quickly. Beyond him in the hall were several policemen.

  Jonathan came close, asking how he felt, was the pain less? Beyond him, Evan saw bright light at the two windows, despite their lowered blinds; his disappointment was like a child’s anger. It was still daylight; Dr. Grimes and a second pill were a long way off.

  “What time is it?”

  “Ten, Evan. It’s morning.”

  “Grimes said he’d come back after supper.”

  “He did come back. You were still under and had fever. Grimes gave you a stronger sedative. I was here with him, so I know.”

  Evan tried to see his watch. It had been moved from the table, together with the thick white pitcher and Alida’s letter. Two small bottles stood there now, nothing else.

  With a start he said, “Who took my things away? Is my coat here?”

  “I took your exhibits with me last night; they’re in the office safe, locked up.” He pointed to a sheet of paper tacked to the closet door. “I left you a signed receipt in case you woke up and thought you’d been robbed.”

  “Good man.” He glanced toward the hall door, alert in a flash.

  “I thought of the police, too,” Jonathan said. “Especially since the Citizens’ Committee will affirm on oath that they know no Bobbo, no Herbie, no Ernie, and that all their members were in their trundle beds right through the entire night.”

  Evan didn’t answer. The Citizens’ Committee. How innocent, how upright.

  “I’ll get up,” he said slowly. “I suppose the police out there are armed with a fine warrant, to arrest me for disturbing the peace?”

  “Not by all the warrants in this sovereign state. You’ve got a lawyer, sir, who’s qualified to practice before the California Bar, as you are NOT. You also have a physician who has attested in writing that you are to remain in this room until he says different.”

  “That’s good too.” He got to his feet, and moved his head in a tentative circle, and then slowly backward. “I’m all right,” he said.

  “Coffee is coming up in a minute,” Smithers said. “And some eggs.”

  “I’m all right now,” Evan repeated. “I’d better be, with what’s ahead.”

  He didn’t mean for that one day, he thought as he shaved. He didn’t mean only in San Diego, or even Los Angeles where the new League chapter had just formed. He meant in the Governor’s mansion at
San Francisco, he meant in Washington, D. C, he meant in New York, he meant in courtrooms and in judge’s chambers and wherever he would be spending all the hours he meant to spend on this fight until he could again come to some possible pause.

  June was half over before Evan Paige was at home again. His homecoming dinner was at Garry and Letty’s apartment, but afterwards, on that same evening, he and Alida went down to the Lower East Side to meet the Ivarins at the all-night café they had so often heard about.

  Evan himself had arranged the midnight meeting. As he and Alida were leaving for the city in the late afternoon, he had telephoned Stefan, and almost his first words were, “Do you remember what you said that time—‘if there is a free-speech case you are angry about’?”

  “Yes, certainly, yes.” Ivarin was obscurely pleased that Paige had remembered and meant to hold him to it. “What is a convenient time to talk about it?”

  “We’re starting for Garry’s house now,” Evan said. “You’ll be at the paper tonight, won’t you?”

  “Did you say ‘the paper’?”

  “I wondered if you might manage half an hour later on in the evening, this evening. Then Alida and I could go downtown when we leave Garry’s, and perhaps see you at your office.”

  “Excellent! But wait—”

  Stefan was charmed at the unexpected suggestion. He had guessed Evan would be returning in a fury from California; there had been some Sunday pieces in The Call about the free-speech riots there. But it had not occurred to him that Evan would be driven to act the first night he was at home. That was more like his own character than like the equable and controlled New Englander Paige invariably seemed to be.

  “Tonight is excellent,” he said, “but my office is no good for talk, quite bad in fact. How would it strike you if we meet instead in the café next door? Nobody would interrupt us there.”

  “That would be even better. Alida will be coming too—you did understand that?”

  “Do I understand about wives? Has Alida ever been in an East Side restaurant?”

  At his side, Alexandra said, “Stiva, what’s going on?”

  Stefan looked around, and thought, Now I’ll find out about wives all right, I never even considered it. Into the telephone, he said, “If Alida would enjoy it, perhaps Alexandra might also like an East Side rendezvous, for the sake of change.”

  He brushed away Evan’s thanks and smiled at Alexandra as he hung up. “It’s been several months,” he said, “since you’ve stopped in at the café. I thought you’d enjoy meeting them there tonight.”

  Alexandra said, “I would not.” She turned abruptly and left him.

  He thought, I knew it. But he went after her and said, “Now see here,” in his most cajoling voice.

  “You never thought of including me,” she said, facing him suddenly. “If I hadn’t wanted to say welcome home to Evan, and come over to tell you not to hang up, why then, you would have thought nothing of meeting them there by yourself, without one word to me until afterward.”

  “Damnable nonsense,” he said in Russian.

  Since she was so correct, he was outraged. His pleasant emotions about Evan’s desire to hold him to his word, his sense of comradeliness, even his small proprietary pleasure at being the Paiges’ host in his domain—all this was riddled with holes by her spattering outburst.

  “It is not nonsense,” she said. “I won’t go, like a—an afterthought.”

  “Then don’t. If you’re going to dish up a bowlful of anguish, it’s better that you don’t.”

  He started up the stairs. He could hear her hurl herself on the narrow bed in the sewing room, and he thought, Like a child, like a debutante. Each notion deepened his resentment. No matter how intelligent she was, no matter how fine and good, she was also a damnable nuisance with her hurt and her tears, and he wished he could call off the entire evening. It was ruined in any case.

  He wondered about Evan’s specific plan for his help. An article, of course. Would Evan renew the other suggestion, about signing him up as a member of the committee? Surely not. But would a man of Evan’s temperament come downtown on the very evening he arrived back East, to ask him to write one article? Improbable also.

  He rolled a cigarette and thought, How interesting human behavior is. Paige knows enough of press time to know it could not be in tomorrow’s paper if he doesn’t see me until midnight, yet he wants to come down tonight, not wait until tomorrow.

  Human behavior. He wondered where Alexandra was, and why no sound of tears. He had been sure she would follow her sudden passion for etiquette and pursue him upstairs to belabor it until misery enveloped her like thick dark velvet.

  He bent his cigarette double and jammed it into his crowded ashtray. His hand slipped and the red end of the cigarette nipped his thumb. He cursed at it, at the ashtray, at himself for smoking too much and at Alexandra for being so unreasonable that she drove a man to excesses that would kill off his health.

  Then he went to find her.

  She was out in the garden, hoeing the earth around her tomato plants, apparently contented and untroubled. In the late sun, Shag was the color of a red fox, and his dripping elongated tongue told of June and summer. Beyond the peaceful scene were the strenuous shouts of five boys and girls helping Fran and Fira to make the tennis court—if tennis court it was to be. The grass was certainly gone from the plot, but there was no more tennis court as yet than there would have been at the ruins of Pompeii five minutes after the eruption. Hills of loose earth straggled over half the area, where the rise had been which Franny had so complacently predicted would be leveled off in “a day or two.” Who could have suspected the rocky stratum under the grass and dandelions?

  Alexandra said, “Well, what is it?”

  He smiled and his irritation vanished. She had won a victory, and she had been aware of it when he came out to find her in such splendid calm and serenity, instead of in the tears he had expected. Now she had thrown it away by being Alexandra to the nth degree—unable to wait it out and force him to speak first, apologetic, contrite. He loved her for her failure. She was a marvel.

  “You were right,” he said. “I was so interested in Evan’s inviting himself downtown, I hadn’t yet thought about anything else. But in another minute, I would have. You must know I would have.”

  She looked at him, hoe in her hand, suspicion in her eyes, but also trust and willingness to believe him. Shag trotted over to Stefan and he scratched the dog’s head absent-mindedly. “You must know I would have,” he repeated.

  “I suppose so,” she said. “Perhaps I’m too sensitive.” She dropped the hoe and shook earth from the hem of her skirt. With a bound, Shag leaped toward her, crashing through the even rows of her tomato plants. “Bad, bad dog,” she scolded, “you’re always sorry afterward, but you always manage to mangle things first. Go away, go, I say.”

  Shag miserably obeyed. Stiva watched him go and thought, At times, she can be quite witty.

  It was like meeting a new man, Stefan Ivarin decided as he finished his coffee and signaled to the waiter to clear and tidy the littered table. Evander Paige had never shown himself this way in the three years and more that they had known each other, never so angry, so fierce, so close to hatred.

  As Evan told his story Alida seemed nearly as stunned as Alexandra, though Alida was not hearing it for the first time, while Alexandra was raw under its first impact. She was always so unguarded about showing what she felt that now as she flinched or squeezed her eyelids tight in shock, Stefan found it hard to look in her direction.

  Nobody interrupted Evan with question or comment. When the waiter approached, Stefan whispered, “Now, some tea,” but only by gesture did he ask the others if they would join him or order something else.

  His flesh did not retract as Alexandra’s did, but violence tore him. He was a student again, a youth bending over a secret printing press in a Russian cellar; at the sudden stomp and thud of the Cossacks he was riven again with fear;
he was in a stone cell again under the whistling descent of the knout.

  Evan must have guessed it, for now he spoke directly to him, as one speaks to a co-survivor. And soon Stefan Ivarin felt that he was also Evander Paige, also standing in the ringed circle under the high crescent of the western moon, hearing the brutish laughter, feeling the iron hands grinding him down into the pocked and pitted road.

  Suddenly he seemed to be manifold, ribboned and interlaced, the terrified boy in Russia, the grown man and editor listening, the native-born American lawyer telling. This extraordinary interlocking of memory and fact, of youth and man, of himself and his friend shook Stefan Ivarin in some new depth. It was as if they now shared the same corpuscles and muscles, briefly but forever, as if the lobes of their brains could be interchanged, as if they were a new creature, single, various, but one.

  And as Evan went on to the aftermath of that May night, Stefan Ivarin hardly needed to wait for his words to sound and his sentences to form. His contempt for “San Diego Law” chilled Ivarin’s bowels but the contempt was familiar, his own, seen and known long before.

  Yet he hungered for the specific, for date, place, name, and urged Evan on through the shabby farce of affidavits and depositions and sworn testimony, the deadening delays, the languid police. He could hear the raucous patriots in meetings swearing to protect the beloved city, see the local press blazing at the anarchists, foreign agitators, vagrants, bums, radicals, free-speechers.

  Fleetingly, Ivarin’s heart lifted that the San Francisco Bulletin had at last made the issue state-wide, with a full-page attack on “Gag Law in San Diego,” and that the A.F. of L. and the young unions of the West finally joined forces, the copper miners and silver miners, the dockhands and lumbermen and seamen and shipbuilders.

  “And then came the great news,” Evan said. “Up at the State Capitol, Governor Johnson ordered a full investigation of the riots and the vigilantes by a Federal grand jury.”

  Ivarin nodded, but quickly looked away again.

  “You know how it ended?” Evan said.