First Papers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  But now, with two whole weeks just ahead, with her invited to sleep at the Paiges’ every single night, it simply had to be that she’d see him at least once. And she’d be wearing her new graduation dress, white eyelet batiste with ruffles, rows and rows from the hem way up nearly to the waist and then around the neck and tiny puffy sleeves. Fee had a new white dress too, and it was all right for graduating from public school. Fee was just thirteen, but the poor kid didn’t have the shape to wear anything but a straight dress anyway—she was still flat as a board and nutty on the subject.

  “Girls,” Alexandra said. “Drink your milk, at least.”

  Fee jumped up and raced up to her room. Let Fran go on acting insane about her ruffles; yesterday Fee had tried on her own graduation dress for Trudy, and Trudy said it absolutely made her look sixteen. It was a stiff white silk and had accordion pleats, like a million knife edges until you walked, and then they spread apart and jumped together again with wonderful little crackling noises.

  Everything was wonderful anyhow. No more P.S. 6. She was already registered as a freshman at Barnett High, starting next fall. Class of Nineteen Seventeen—they reckoned four years ahead from the first minute. Maybe she could get a big red turtle-neck sweater with white felt letters stitched to it saying ’17. That is, if you were allowed to just “get” the letters. Maybe you had to win them in athletics; then she’d have to go out for girls’ basketball or field hockey. She would go out if you had to win them, and she would win them. She always did a thing if she really had to do it.

  Fran never won anything. Fran never even got A’s. Getting A was fun, like playing jacks better than Trudy or riding your bike faster. It was really interesting to know things and have that crazy feeling at the end of a test that you mostly hadn’t made one mistake. At Barnett High it would be more fun. Imagine taking algebra and German and French instead of arithmetic and grammar and all that baby stuff at public school; no matter whether Fran loved High or not, she was going to. Nobody ever was more different than she and Fran, and what Fran was so conceited about, nobody could figure out.

  Figure! Figure out. Your figure will soon fill out too. In the whole class of 8-B graduating today, only three of the girls hadn’t filled out one bit yet, Anna Kogel and Clementine Sarto and herself. Why couldn’t she have been one of the lucky ones? Trudy was. Trudy was going to be a big fat slob in a few years. You could tell, just looking at her in a middy.

  Fee turned sideways to the mirror and thought of the night she had the rouge and lipstick on and her hair way up, and tried to remember the way she looked then. But now there was nothing in the glass except her and the way her nightgown plastered itself to her chest, straight up and down like wallpaper. It was enough to make you puke.

  “Who’s going to be late?” Fran said, and Fee jumped. She was pulling her nightgown out in points a few inches below her collarbones, and Graduation was a million miles out of her mind. “Gee, I’ll hurry, Franny,” she said, and ripped off her nightgown and dived into her underwear. Suppose she was late—could a principal refuse to give you your diploma if you were late for Graduation?

  Three minutes later, she was dressed and ready.

  “You look nice,” Fran said.

  “You too.”

  She started for the door and heard the silky whisper of the pleats in her new dress. Suddenly she felt as slinky and seductive as the actress in the novel Trudy had loaned her last week.

  The two diplomas stood on the sideboard like tall white candles, but Alexandra no longer thought of them. Eli’s last day of teaching coincided with the girls’ last day of school, of course, so he and Joan had missed the morning, but now they were due any minute, with Webby and little Sandra too, and she kept listening for the first sound of the motorcycle roaring up the hill.

  It was nearly five before she caught it. Fran’s party on the tennis court was going full blast, with boys and girls calling and shouting silly flirting remarks back and forth, but despite them the motorcycle announced itself at last and she went out to the curb to watch Eli drive his family the last couple of blocks.

  Once her heart would have stopped at the sight. But one lived and learned, and this time she only thought, How beautiful they all are. The tandem seat behind Eli was empty, except for a basket strapped to it, full of Sandra’s bottles and diapers, for at two Webby was still too young to be buckled on by himself back there. In the sidecar Joan was holding Sandra in her lap, and down on the floor sat Webby, propped by his mother’s knees and folded in three like a chubby little zigzag. His blond hair was flying and his handsome face was already so tan that his eyes looked like bluing that was too light. The baby was fair, too, and as plump as a piglet, sitting up in her mother’s arms looking strong and sweet and good-natured. Joan was a sunburned schoolgirl compared to summer a year ago when she was pregnant, and Eli looked as if he had never had an attack in his life.

  The “Eaves” family, she thought. Maybe they were right in some terrible hidden way. Maybe it’s part of evolution, that the father and mother cannot bear to accept, but that Nature easily accepts, like Darwin.

  Alexandra paused, not certain about her meaning. But she did not question herself arduously—a brief comfort had brushed her heart, and it sufficed. It was another touch of goodness in one of the happiest days of her life. At Fee’s school, Miss Mainley had come up to congratulate “the mother of one of our brightest students,” and said that Fee would sail right through high school and college. At Barnett High, Fran looked like a princess, and Alexandra saw with delight that Tom Ladendock hung around her like her special owner. Might it be that Fran would never finish out her two years at Jamaica Training School for Teachers?

  But it was better not to permit such questions to tap at one’s mind. In the Ivarin household, much better not. Why, when she told Stefan what Miss Mainley said about Fee sailing right through high school and college, she had actually left out the part about college. Four years of college? That was for the rich, too, and Stefan had often said so. To be a teacher one did not need four whole years after the four years of high school; that was like going on the Grand Tour in Europe; it had nothing to do with getting a good education and preparing for an honorable profession.

  A good education, Alexandra thought. From the moment of birth, all their children were guaranteed a good education. Eli had had his, in two years Fran’s would be complete, and in six the whole glorious process would be finished for Fee, and all the Ivarin children.

  Life with nobody rushing off to school? For sixteen or seventeen years, since Eli was five, one child or the other was always racing off to school, with the house full of homework and talk of teachers and tests and marks, with school supplies to buy every fall and all the good things and bad that seemed to happen to every child in every school everywhere. It was hard to imagine a life with all that done forever.

  There would, of course, be Webby and Sandra. But they would be little Eaves going to school, not little Ivarins.

  “Hello, Ma,” Eli called. He kicked down the big iron triangle that held the Harley upright at the curb, and she helped Joan with the children. Webby shouted, “Grammy,” and Sandra beamed and bubbled saliva and came into her arms with the supreme willingness of a good-tempered and healthy baby. Alexandra’s heart bubbled with gratitude; no woman ever had led such a blessed life, nor been so blessed as she.

  Stefan was happy to see all of them, too; he was clumsy with the baby, making silly noises too close to her face, which made her draw back, but with Webby, he was charming, better than he had ever been with his own children, as if he had improved in the thirteen years since Fee was born.

  “You can lecture too, Webby,” he was assuring the child at one point, when Alexandra came back to them from the kitchen. “Here, stand up on this chair.”

  Webby chortled and laughed and climbed onto the dining-room chair Stefan had pulled away from the table.

  “Comrades, workers,” Stefan orated, standing a few feet away. “You
say it now, Webby.”

  “Com-mads,” Webby shouted, imitating the lift of the first syllable, his face gleeful.

  Stefan nodded approval and raised a forefinger. “The right to organize—”

  Webby raised his forefinger. “The wight—to—”

  “Organize.”

  “—gan-ize.”

  “—is a basic right in a free—”

  “—basic wight in a—”

  “That’s fine, Webby. You’re a born lecturer,” Stefan said. “In a great free country like America.”

  Webby looked confused for only a moment. “—great free country—”

  “Like America.”

  “Like Uh-Merica,” spacing the words and half chanting them as he had heard his grandfather do.

  Eli and Joan laughed, and Alexandra said, “It’s simply remarkable, a child of two, simply wonderful.”

  Webby jumped up and down on the chair in delight and Stefan said, “That’s all for now, Web. Maybe sometime when I give a big lecture, I’ll take you along to help me.”

  He put his hands under the child’s arms and swept him off the chair. A twinge nipped his back and Stefan said, “This pain,” reaching behind him to massage his muscles. But in the next moment he forgot them and was answering Eli’s question about how things were going at the paper.

  “It still seems pleasant enough,” he said. “I tell myself en garde once in a while as if it was chess, but that’s all.” As if to change the subject before it was well started, he asked about the private school at Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire where Eli had signed up for his first summer of teaching.

  “If only you could rest for a week or two first, Eli,” Alexandra said.

  “I can’t,” Eli said. “I have to report up there in two days.”

  A crash of metal and smashing glass in the kitchen brought them all to their feet. Webby had wandered off and Eli reached him first, the others right behind him. The tea glasses that Alexandra had left on the kitchen table were in a heap on the floor, and the large tin tray that had held them had skittered off toward the sink. Webby’s leg was bleeding, right through his white stocking, and he was shrieking in terror.

  Eli saw at once that the cut was superficial. “It’s nothing,” he said. “What happened?” Webby cried louder. “You tell me what happened,” Eli said, seizing his son’s shoulder.

  “Webby doesn’t know!” It was a scream, growing louder as Eli shook him. Behind them, Alexandra said, “The glasses don’t matter, is he all right?” With the scream was Eli’s sudden hard breathing, and the two intermingled sounds pierced her heart.

  “I said, tell me what happened,” Eli repeated, suddenly twisting Webby around and spanking him hard.

  “Eli, don’t,” Joan cried.

  He suddenly stopped, as he had begun, and Joan put Sandra into Alexandra’s arms and led away the sobbing Webby, murmuring comfort to him as they left.

  Eli avoided his parents’ eyes; there was absolute silence. On the floor, the tray slipped from the support of the sink’s leg and stretched out flat, surrounded by slivers and curves of the broken tumblers. Sandra was crying too, and Alexandra rubbed the baby’s back and whispered, “Don’t cry, darling, there, there.”

  “You will make a liar of him,” Stefan said to Eli, and his voice was controlled and harsh. “Next time he will say they fell by themselves, and when he’s older, he’ll say ‘the other fellow did it, not me.’”

  Eli turned away.

  “You spank him too often,” Stefan said. “I know about it.”

  “You what?”

  “Joan didn’t tell us, don’t accuse her.”

  “What right have you to interfere, anyway?”

  “He’s my grandson, that right. And he’s a clever child who will learn soon enough to be a liar to escape a beating.”

  “For God’s sake, spanking isn’t beating him.”

  “Then you will spank him for telling lies.” Stefan turned and left the room.

  Eli’s breathing toughened. It took on its ropy sound and came in short hard breaks. Alexandra wished to all the heavens she had never told Stefan of the time she was visiting Joan and Eli when Joan’s mother was there, and Eli lost his temper and spanked Webby. That time it was Mrs. Martin who had cried out in protest. “But, Eli, you spank him every time he does the slightest thing. Every time I’ve been here, you’ve hit that poor baby.”

  Shame had engulfed Alexandra that her son should deserve such a rebuke. And now again, shame went hotly through her at Stefan’s protest. What had happened to Eli to turn him into a father who could strike a child so often?

  Was it the asthma alone? Or was there something wrong and unhappy in his life with Joan? This teaching job for the summer in New Hampshire—was there a clue in that? He was going up alone for the first week or two, because the small school had no accommodations for a teacher’s family, but he planned to rent a cottage somewhere nearby for Joan and the children, so they need not be separated until Labor Day.

  Was he looking forward to a week or two of solitude? Did something in him cry out for a rest from parenthood? A father at twenty, again at twenty-one—perhaps he secretly grieved for the larky young manhood he had never had, free as the air, the gay young blade chasing after this pretty girl for a while and then another, with no thought as yet of wife or children.

  My poor Eli, Alexandra thought, rushing headlong into marriage and babies and worries over doctors’ bills. Eli was still seated at the table, staring down at it. Perhaps it was the down-turning of his face that made him look not like a boy of twenty-two but far older, thin, harried, with faint lines straining to show in his face.

  So soon? She glanced down at the baby in her arms, sleeping now, her head heavy against Alexandra’s shoulder, and the tides of memory swept in to engulf her, carrying with them the very feel and smell of another nine-month-old baby she had held against her breast, the first of her own to reach that age, the first to fill her with joy and love.

  If only she could reach out to him now, as she had done when he was a child. But children grown were not easy to reach.

  “Eli …” she began.

  “I have to check up on my bike,” he said, starting for the door. “An oil drip was starting.”

  She made no move. In a moment, from the street in front of the house, came the metallic clink of tools, and she sat down, listening. She was alone, with her namesake in her arms. Stefan’s footsteps sounded above her, evenly spaced; Joan and Webby were silent; probably he had sobbed himself to sleep, with his mother sitting near him, alone too. Outside on the tennis court, a tightly fought game was in progress, with players and spectators for the moment silent, intense in their concentration on the white ball going back and forth, back and forth. Beyond them, coming toward the house, Fee and Trudy came into view, with Shag trotting sedately beside them.

  They at least look at peace, Alexandra thought, and her harried nerves quieted. Gently she began to rock the sleeping baby in her arms, back and forth, back and forth. She glanced once or twice at the splintered glass on the floor and knew she should sweep it up. But there was, despite everything, a placid goodness about staying just as she was, and so she stayed just as she was.

  TWENTY-ONE

  EN GARDE, STEFAN IVARIN had said, as if it were chess. He thought it a fortunate phrase, vague enough to cover anything, including his obligation not to worry Alexandra needlessly, as well as his own inalienable right to keep things to himself when he saw fit.

  If it were a chess game, there had been an imperceptible change in the overall position. It could not be explained to a beginner, but Ivarin saw it. The middle game is on, he thought. The opening lasted long enough, and it was too smooth, too sedate, to be arresting. Now it is another matter.

  The change began with nothing more tangible than a feeling of hurry. Fehler no longer said there was no rush; he sounded rushed when you spoke to him, and he hastened from one appointment to the next. Nor did he take time to seek Iva
rin out for his opinion or to pass along some information. When he suddenly resuscitated Borg’s survey, and widened the scope of it, he dealt only in vague talk about current trends in the press.

  Big popular appeal, Ivarin thought. He means big popular trash. He means yellow journalism. This could be the end game, not the middle game.

  Ivarin asked Borg for further elucidation, but Saul also took recourse in generalities.

  “Anything that made a real hit, or that’s making a real hit.” With a young glint of mischief in his eye, Borg added, “This time, I’m remembering my promise not to talk too much.”

  “Good for you.”

  “You’ll admit I’ve stuck to it so far, Mr. Ivarin?”

  “Keep it up.”

  After which small exchange, Borg kept his mouth shut. He was adroit, Ivarin conceded, at pulling himself over to a new line of behavior when his superior officers indicated distaste with the old. A valuable trait for any young man. And confoundedly impudent, if too assiduously practiced.

  A few days later Fehler asked Ivarin whether he could manage without Borg entirely for two weeks or fifteen days.

  Ivarin said, “I could,” in an unwilling tone. “I did without him for years until Landau hired him. What’s up?”

  Fehler would like the July meeting to steer entirely away from the money-minded topics of their first three meetings, and talk about the paper as a whole. The survey, if it were completed in time, might prove a point of departure.

  “Even as a whipping boy, it would be useful,” Fehler said. “Parts of it we certainly will all attack.”

  Ivarin looked at him skeptically. “Why include them?”

  “To steer us toward things we can agree on.”

  He expects me to lash out at it, Ivarin thought. He is counting on me to. As to releasing Borg for two weeks, he agreed with a show of good will he did not feel. In the old days, true enough, he had had no assistant at all. But the flow of news had doubled since the old days, trebled, quadrupled. The two weeks would be frantic.