“What other kind of interest would a newspaper be likely to attempt?” Ivarin asked mildly one night when Borg ran on over this latter category. “Animal interest? Fish interest, tree interest, bird interest?”
“You hear words, Mr. Ivarin, that nobody else hears. I’ve said ‘human interest’ a thousand times but not one person—”
“Editors are lunatics about words,” Ivarin said. “But, if you’ll permit a suggestion, Saul, these are not days to talk a thousand times of your beloved survey in any way at all.”
Borg said, “You’re right, I won’t,” but Ivarin knew he would. The next day he passed Borg’s cubbyhole and saw him showing his newspaper-size portfolios to one of the stenographers, who was listening with interest and resentment mixed.
Poor Borg, Ivarin thought, as deluded as an illicit lover who swears prudence but reveals his ardent secret with every breath and every glance. What makes it worse is that a hundred people wish they were as well-off as he just now.
Whereupon Ivarin went down the hall to Fehler’s office. “I think it would be a wise health precaution,” he began, “if you called a temporary halt on Borg’s survey.”
Fehler did not look surprised. “Temporary for how long? Until the new management is announced and the staff settles down?”
“Long enough,” Ivarin agreed. “Borg can’t restrain his enthusiasm, and fevers are developing all around him.”
“It’s true,” Fehler said unexpectedly. “Bunzig said the same thing yesterday.” Bunzig was one of the older reporters, who had been on the staff a long time. “I’ll tell Borg we’re calling it off for a few weeks.”
“Until this damnable announcement is made.”
When the announcement did come, Stefan Ivarin learned of it a day before it was made official. His informant was Mrs. Landau herself.
“I want to explain something to you,” she said in an agitated voice on the telephone. “May I come to the office tonight to see you? Itzak would have wanted me to explain it myself.”
“Any time, yes, surely.” A wave of heat pumped through him and he knew. But he asked what time would suit her and then waited for eight o’clock and her arrival. She was still agitated, and constantly glanced about the room and over her shoulder. She had been a handsome woman, but time and grief had harrowed her face and it was destroyed. Ivarin had seen her twice since Isaac’s death, but her appearance now shocked him.
“You know how I admire every line you write,” she began in a tumble of words, looking at his thick lenses gropingly as if she was searching for his eyes, “and my daughters, too, and their husbands.”
“Thank you.”
“But the only man we can agree on,” she sped on, “at last we admit it, the only one. He has to like business, almost like a banker, a real strict businessman.”
“Yes, he has to.”
“You don’t like such things, you wouldn’t even be interested in that part of the paper.”
“And I would be no good at it.” He was sorry for her, even as he hated what she was going to tell him. Futile, awkward, her preparatory lotions of honeyed apology. He almost blurted out her news at her himself, to cut it short.
“So we agreed finally,” she pressed on. “He has been the Business Manager—now let him be the General Manager. Mr. Fehler.”
“Yes,” he said. “Fehler, of course.”
“My lawyer suggested it,” she said. “He said he’ll keep an eye on things for me, and we can change again later if it’s no good. But to go on this way any longer—”
“Impossible.”
There was a pause. They sat looking at each other, silent, and the pause lengthened. Then she leaned toward him, her hand out, but not touching him.
“Nothing will be different for you,” she said, beseeching him to believe her. “What could be different on this paper, for Ivarin?”
NINETEEN
I MUST GO AND congratulate him, Stefan Ivarin thought, but he did nothing. And I must call Alexandra at once, as I promised. But he turned his back on the telephone.
In the half-hour since Miriam Landau had left, he had done nothing except pace the familiar length of his office. Fehler knew already, she said at the end of her palpitating visit; Steinberger had told him that afternoon, and made it clear that nothing was to be different for him, Ivarin.
“Ivarin is a big name,” Steinberger had said, “part and parcel of the paper. Nothing must disturb him or his work.” It was language Fehler understood, business language. Talk of a paper’s big assets, and the need to protect them. Fehler was part and parcel, too, in a different area, Steinberger had said, and they would all keep remembering both sides of this long-established truth, as they had done while Isaac was alive. Fehler had been in total and instant and unreserved agreement with every word Steinberger said.
Why not? Ivarin thought now. It is so easy, agreeing with a plea for eternal peace, when you have just won a victory.
His own cynicism irritated him. Fehler would avoid any immediate war between them in any case. To find another editor was not the work of a moment, and whatever Fehler might do later for larger sales and profits, he would not lightly tackle so thorny a proposition.
I am like some young reporter, Ivarin thought angrily, canvassing the situation, checking it, deciding, My job is safe. The devil with “safe.”
He left his office and walked along the corridor to Fehler’s. Ordinarily nine o’clock would be too late to find Fehler still at the paper, but tonight would be different. The door was wide open and for a moment Ivarin stood looking in at him, seated in profile at the broad flat table he used, preferring it to a desk. This was the man who would now be boss of the entire staff. His boss. At least, to the extent that Landau had been his boss.
“Congratulations,” Ivarin said, offering his hand as he went in. “I’ve just heard the news.”
“Thanks, Stiva,” Fehler said, jumping up. “So she did come? She was worn out and thought she might wait a day.”
“She was uneasy about how I would take it,” he said. There was a pause. As always, he wished he could forbid Fehler the use of “Stiva” and as always he did nothing. “I’m not sure,” he went on, “how I do take it.”
Fehler smiled faintly. He was being careful to show no triumph or undue joy, and Ivarin gave him unheard applause for that show of taste.
“You will take it as it was intended,” Fehler said. “They did not come rushing to me; I’m not forgetting that. Only as a compromise, three months after Itzak died.”
Ivarin waved that aside. The pumping of heat that had begun with Miriam Landau’s telephone call had died away but now it began again; he knew that Fehler was reading his reddened color as accurately as a doctor. But a rise in blood pressure was stimulating, as well as uncomfortable, and he was alive to his nerve ends. This modesty of Fehler’s was a wise move, a useful lubricant for the days ahead.
Fehler offered a typed sheet of paper, the notice to the staff, to be posted in the morning. This time it was over the joint signatures of Miriam B. Landau and Jacob Steinberger, announcing “the long-awaited decision” and stating that Joseph Fehler would be known, not as General Manager, but as Publisher, a term more widely in use in the changing practices of modern journalism. Below this was an added message.
NOBODY’S JOB
IS IN JEOPARDY
AT THE JEWISH NEWS.
NO CHANGES
ARE IN VIEW
ON THE STAFF.
The notice was dated February 15, 1913, and Ivarin was sure that on the bulletin board next day it would be greeted with nearly universal relief. Though only the most unsophisticated would take its promise to heart, there would be a stir of reassurance throughout the paper. Better Joseph Fehler whom everybody knew by sight than a total stranger from the outside world.
Ivarin handed back the notice and drew his watch from his pocket, his automatic signal that unfinished work was on his desk, waiting for him. He said, “Well, we’ll all have a go at it,”
not quite knowing what he meant by that.
“One small point, Stiva,” Fehler said, again rising, and strolling to the door with him. “Mrs. Landau doesn’t seem at all interested in political questions. Had you noticed?”
“I never thought of it, one way or another.”
“I did only recently. And Steinberger, too. He does not seem even inquisitive about where I stand.”
They had reached the door of his office and Ivarin stopped. A sensation he did not like invaded him and for a moment he could not put a name to it. Then he knew it for embarrassment. Fehler was going to ask, as a favor—
“It’s the paper’s politics that can matter to them,” Ivarin said hurriedly. “Not yours.”
He raised a finger in final salute and departed. But inside his mind he suddenly gave way to mirth. It was abrupt and lavish, not feigned, but a burst of delight.
It was the first relief, the first balance wheel of the evening. The new Publisher of the Jewish News was shivering in his pants that his benefactors might discover he was an anarchist. Or that Stefan Ivarin might go and tell them.
He did not call Alexandra. If it had been anybody else they had chosen, a relative, a businessman, somebody from any other newspaper, he would have abided by his promise and called her. But Fehler would be a shock to her as it had been to him, despite its having occurred to him more than once during the deadlock, and he could not deal it to her by telephone. He would have to endure the scene she would put him through.
He was angry at her in advance but he resolutely picked up his pen and went to work. March 4 was to be a historic day, apart from the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, and he meant to write a ringing editorial about it. For on that same day, for the first time in the history of America, labor would be officially elevated in the scheme of government; a Department of Labor was to be established, with its own seat in the Cabinet.
It was rich material, but he could not write two sentences easily. His pen stuck as if it were filled with mucilage; he struck out phrases as soon as he set them down. At last he tore up what he had written and leaned back in his chair.
He was tempted to tell Abe Kesselbaum the news, suggesting a visit to the café for a thorough talk about what it might mean. But he decided not to.
Borg came in at his usual intervals, but Ivarin had no thought of saying anything to him. Each time he glanced over the copy Borg brought in, asking “Do I need to read it?” and when Borg said “Nothing to bother about,” he scrawled his initial in the lower corner and gave it no further thought. Whatever Borg’s faults, his editing of routine stories constantly grew faster and more expert. In that respect he was still a godsend.
Once or twice one of the rewrite men or reporters came in, Bunzig, who had been on the paper as long as he had, and the labor specialist, Kinchevsky. Each time Ivarin was tempted, and then thought, Let them find out tomorrow, with the rest of the staff. What a parade there would be then to Fehler’s office, to offer congratulations and best wishes, express delight, wish him well, and incidentally to consolidate positions already held in his esteem or attempt to wipe out past mishaps and make a fresh start.
You’d think I was jealous of him, Ivarin thought. Back there I was like a cub reporter fretting whether my job was on thin ice; now I begrudge him the plaudits and bravos and excitement tomorrow. The new Publisher, the big man on the paper.
And the editor? When was the editor demoted?
Again he was invaded by mirth, but this time there was less conviction in it. It was far-fetched, that “jealous”; it was unlikely that what he felt in the pit of his stomach was the shabby squirm of jealousy. But if this persistent unwillingness was something nobler than that, he did not know it, so let it be dubbed jealousy and the devil with it.
Alexandra surprised him. She took the news without dramatics, without tears. She listened in nearly unbroken silence to his whole story and fastened onto Miriam Landau’s passionate question, “What could be different on this paper, for Ivarin?” She relished the lawyer’s amplification of the point and virtually memorized it.
“It’s a guarantee,” she said.
“They meant it for that.”
“And a warning to him.”
“We’ll see,” Ivarin said.
“See? Is Fehler rash enough to flout such clear orders? What is there to ‘see’?”
He shrugged, relieved that she was being so matter-of-fact about his news, yet puzzled too. She who could read untold menace into Fehler’s plan for something called a “survey” now accepted with serene confidence the absence of all menace in his appointment to the executive post the owner himself had held for twenty years.
Yet there was something soothing in her sunny decision that Joseph Fehler in any post whatever was Joseph Fehler still. The tight chain of his own thinking soon loosened and he told her of Fehler’s parting remark.
“The coward,” she cried, transformed on the instant. “The sniveling coward. Is he going to run around to the whole staff, one by one, hinting to them to say he always voted for Taft?”
He said, “Now, now,” as if he were soothing an excited child. Only Alexandra would have produced “Taft” that way, like a cat spitting. But her notion of Fehler in delicate conclave with all the staff, one by one, amused him and he said, “You cheered me up.”
“The sniveling coward,” she repeated, compressing her lips, a perfect mime of Scorn. “A guarantee is what it was, Stiva. He wouldn’t dare, but with cowards you need guarantees.”
This time he laughed, though the convolutions of thought that had led to this pronouncement were beyond him. “Was Fehler one of the possibilities you had already thought of?” he asked, and the question so clearly mystified her that he added, “While the deadlock held on, I did wonder if it would end up Fehler.”
“But he’s not good enough and they knew it all along.”
“They decided he was.”
“They grew desperate, so they took him for the time being, knowing he isn’t good enough. If he actually were, Landau would have named him in his will, or in some codicil, or told the lawyer.”
How clever she was, to put her finger on that point so promptly, so effortlessly. His own phrase, “convolutions of thought,” sounded in his mind, with its patronizing affection, and he disowned it.
“The will or the codicil or telling Steinberger,” he said. “I think you must be right. It never occurred to me.”
She beamed. Her pleasure in his praise glistened on her skin like the sheen of summer’s first burn. She longed to touch him, to kiss him as if they were still young. How happy people could be even in times of change and trouble if they were close in what life meant to them. The word “socialism” began to sound in her mind, but for once she rebuked it as inappropriate and halted it at the end of its first syllable in a soft protracted “Shhh.”
They sat on for a long time, talking.
The weeks of early spring were easy ones for Stefan Ivarin and for the rest of the staff of the Jewish News. No changes were announced in procedure, none in personnel. Once the initial furor engendered by the bulletin board had petered out, the most noticeable change was the sight of Joseph Fehler in the office that had been Jacob Landau’s.
“There is no rush,” Fehler replied to people asking his plans. “I am considering certain matters, but there is no rush.”
With Ivarin he took pains to be more specific. “What would you think of getting the first edition out an hour earlier? They are all doing it.” “I’m thinking of how the policy staff should be enlarged—what do you think?” Day by day, or nearly so, Fehler would seek out Ivarin in the early evening, the end of his own working day and the beginning of the editor’s, and tell him what he was considering and ask for opinion and discussion and advice. Sometimes he would ask Abe Kesselbaum, too, and they would all three talk for a while, thoughtful, agreeable.
“A new Fehler,” Ivarin said one night to Alexandra. “A diplomat, a pourer of oil. If it’s an act, he does it w
ell. If he means it, so much the better.”
“Don’t trust him,” she said, her old air of being menaced again upon her like a soubrette’s agony in a low play. “It’s some sort of trap.”
“And I the fool to walk into it?” He turned away. Her serenity had been too good to last—the real trap was his thinking it might.
“There is no new Fehler, a man like that never changes for good.”
“Alexandra, I beg you.”
“Then don’t tell me another word about him! If I’m not permitted to say what I think, without ‘Alexandra, I beg you.’”
She walked out of the room, and straight into Fee and Franny. They must have heard, for they were standing stock still, their schoolbooks in their arms. They knew enough about what had happened to understand; she had told them about Fehler’s selection, adding that it was probably a better choice than some total stranger, who might turn out to be a capitalist at heart, against labor, against unions, against Papa’s whole life.
The girls had heard, and Fee whispered, “Did Fehler do anything to Papa?”
“No, darling, of course not.” She was too vexed to be amused at Fee’s use of the name, Fehler, but at other times it made her laugh. Neither of the girls ever said “Mr. Fehler”; naturally not, since they had never heard him called anything but the unadorned Fehler. But coming from Fee, it was as if she had spoken of King or Roberts or Mainley.
Stefan came out, saw them clustered at the foot of the stairs, and silently went off to the city. He usually went in earlier now, and so did many of the others; he would have to stop this soon or get fraternal protests from the photoengravers and typesetters who already did have unions and saw no reason why writers, reporters and editors could not get a union too.
When he reached the office he found Borg in a state of distress, and half-guessed what it was. To a degree he rather sympathized with him: Saul had confidently gone to Fehler with the question that had been in his throat since the notice went up on the bulletin board a month before.
First Papers Page 32
