The prospect rather appealed to him. He shoved his eyeshade back from his forehead and reflected, a little sheepishly, on his willingness to slave for untold hours over the paper. Some men drew strength and substance from music, from painting, from the competition of moneymaking, from prayer and faith. But he renewed himself from this fountain pen in his stained fingers and the endless pulsing rush of the news.
The pulse and beat and rhythm of life on this newspaper had so long ago become the timepiece of his universe, that he no longer wanted the more leisurely world outside, where more time could usually be had for the asking of it. Here, time was the driver, the commander; the first edition’s presses were the lords of the afternoon and evening hours; their sworn subjects were all the people in the building, from the foundry men and machinists and typesetters in the basement all the way up to the reporters, the rewrite men, himself.
He drew his silver watch from his vest pocket, opened it and propped it up on his desk, the triangle of space made by it and its hinged cover suddenly a wedge of time, five minutes of time.
So the next meeting was to concern itself with the “paper as a whole.” It should be illuminating. And more basic than the money topics that had thus far engaged them. Basic to the paper, basic to him.
Stefan Ivarin picked up his pen. It had gone dry and he gave it a sharp flick. Its tip went moist; the gold nib glistened through the blue-black fluid, winking up at him.
Alida Paige said to her husband, “She’s the most studious girl. Vacation just starting, and taking an armload of newspapers to her room every night, making notes on them!”
“Maybe she fell behind on current events and has to make it up,” Evan said. “Or maybe she’s going to be an editor like her father.”
“Not Franny,” Alida said. “She hasn’t the faintest idea of doing anything but fall in love and get married.”
“I like watching the boys walk her over here. Remember Garry at that age?”
“I wrote Alexandra about Tom,” Alida said. “Any mother of girls likes to hear about things like that. Standing out there in the street looking up at her lighted window.”
“Hoping the shade was up.”
It was the fifth night since Francesca Ivarin had been their “bedtime guest” and Alida had found the arrangement no trouble and unexpectedly interesting. She would have thought it rude to inquire into Fran’s strange pursuits with the newspapers she brought with her each twilight when she arrived at Channing Street, but she rather wished Fran would volunteer an explanation. All she had offered so far was a slight wave of her hand at her folded papers, and a vague, “It’s so thrilling.”
That had been on her first evening, and Alida had thought nothing of the papers at all. But soon it became obvious that they were an inseparable part of Fran’s evening existence, and she began to wish Fran would explain them. But after a polite half-hour of chatting, mostly about the glory of tennis when you didn’t have to go to the public courts in the park and wait and wait and wait, Fran would say good night and go upstairs to bed. Alida had put her in the guest room, originally Van’s room, next door to Garry’s, and despite Alexandra’s warnings of Fran’s untidy habits, Fran was keeping it as neat as a room in a convent, the bed tightly made each morning before she left, her nightgown hung up, everything dusted. Only the papers crammed into the wastebasket were a mess.
It was rather intriguing, and at last Alida sat down on Fran’s perfectly made bed one morning and fished the papers out to have a look.
How odd, she thought, Fran is making a study of war news from Europe. Fran had underlined certain headlines and subheads on the front pages, certain names and dates, and they all dealt with Germany or England or France. The Reichstag’s frightening new bill for big increases in the German Army, the newest defeat of Bulgaria by Rumania and Turkey, even the heated predictions that the House of Lords would vote down Irish Home Rule next week—all these Fran had marked with her pencil, circling key phrases and quotes as she went, as if she meant to copy them out or learn them by heart.
The misleading little creature, Alida thought. With that face and figure, a secret passion for this kind of thing! How perfectly extraordinary.
But never a solitary word about it. Was she shy about her own ideas, as so many children of forceful parents so often were?
It was a startling discovery. But it was odd that Fran left the papers behind, like Hansel and Gretel leaving their clues in the wood. Did she long to be found out? Might it perhaps be a kindness to draw her out?
“This awful hypocrisy,” Alida said gently the next morning, pointing to a headline in the World. “Holding an international peace conference right here in Washington, and now here’s General Pershing fighting the Moro in the Philippines. Again!”
“Really?” Fran sat down at the table looking distressed. She wanted to ask what the Moro was, or were, in the Philippines, but she did not, in case she ought to know. “It’s terrible,” she said. “Is it a big war?”
Mr. Paige arrived for breakfast and the talk shifted to his newest free-speech case. For a while Fran listened because it was a murder case, too. Two migrant farm workers who were witnesses to the murder were being held illegally in prison, and had been for 158 days in a row, without any lawyer and with bail set at something wild like $10,000, when neither one had a cent. This was in Rhode Island and Fran heard familiar phrases like “due process” and “illegal search and seizure,” and her attention wandered.
Being in the Paiges’ house, though, made even this kind of talk seem different. They ate in the kitchen, too, but there was a real tablecloth instead of tacked-down oilcloth, and fresh napkins for everybody each morning, without a napkin ring in sight. All the cups and saucers and dishes matched each other, and there was always a little silver bowl of nasturtiums or cosmos or whatever was in bloom in the garden. Never had she been in a house where they had a centerpiece of flowers always on the table, and it filled her with the shyness she hated most, the kind she always felt when anybody new saw her own house for the first time.
“—address up in Canada?” Evan Paige asked his wife, and Fran’s heart dropped.
“Letty’s mother would forward it, dear,” Mrs. Paige said. “She’ll know if they decided on the new Laurentian place or the one they went to last year.”
Fran nearly gasped out her sudden terror. Canada? Letty’s mother? Were they off for Garry’s summer vacation, and would they be gone during the entire fifteen nights she was sleeping at the Paiges’ house?
Yes they will, something told her heavily. They went to Canada last year over the Fourth of July. She had forgotten that. Probably Garry’s vacation always came over the Fourth of July. He was a million miles away and would be for the whole time she was there.
“Are you all right, Franny?” Alida asked.
“Me?”
“You haven’t touched your food, dear.”
“I’m fine, honestly. I just can’t eat, I don’t know why not, but if you won’t be mad at me?”
“Of course I won’t.” She looked closely at Fran, hoping she wasn’t catching cold. “Perhaps you’re playing too much tennis in this suffocating heat, Franny.”
“I’m all right, honestly I am.” She sipped from her glass of milk and then stood up. “I’ll only play doubles today, no singles.”
Alida watched her run down Channing Street a few minutes later. If something had upset Fran, it doubtless would never be understood by any adult alive. Girls almost seventeen, though she had never had daughters, were very much like boys almost seventeen: indecipherable most of the time.
It was two or three days before Alida again admitted her lack of skill at deciphering. Then as she glanced into Fran’s tidy room one morning, it struck her that the marked-up mess of newspapers was not there. She paused and stared at the empty wastebasket. It had been empty yesterday and the day before, she realized. Perhaps ever since she had told the child about General Pershing and the Moro in the Philippines.
&nbs
p; Alexandra Ivarin felt like a traitor to her own flesh and blood. For the past ten days, only one member of her family had been with her on her beloved beach and she didn’t miss a soul.
Fira and she—plus, of course, Shag—were in sole possession of the tent, and it was remarkable how much she was enjoying it. How calm the place was, without the girls’ talk or bickering, how easy and quick to cook only for two, and most astonishing of all, how rarely she missed her darling Franny. Not to speak of Stiva and Eli and Joan. It was almost shameful.
She did think of Webby from time to time, because an idea kept nibbling away at her mind that could apply only to him—that is, if they had not all left already to join Eli in New Hampshire. Baby Sandra was too young to be able to live in a tent, with its limited facilities, but Webby? With him there would be no bottles to boil, no diapers to wash, no warm bath to give every day; he would eat like a little horse and paddle in the sea and play in the sand from morning to night.
The picture of him, ruddy and tanned on the beach, a shiny red pail beside him while he squatted on his strong little haunches, sent her into a reverie and then to the telephone booth, still the single booth serving the whole of the tent city, larger by twenty new tents than it had been last year.
It was still early morning, not yet eight. It had rained heavily during the night, but the wet grey of the sand was already changing to a dry shimmering silver in the hot sun. She ambled along, seeing from afar that there was no one ahead of her waiting for the telephone. There hardly ever was. How many of the poor souls who scraped together dollars enough for a week or so out here, knew anybody at home with a telephone at their beck and call? In the stinking summer tenements of the poor, a telephone was unheard of, and in their sweatshops and pushcarts too.
Telephones are still for the rich, she thought, it’s a crime. Hastily she added, And of course for editors and lecturers and people like that, who have no choice. Again she felt like a traitor, and she hurried her pace for the rest of the way. In the booth, at the operator’s lilting “Number please?” her qualms dissolved. It always made her feel good, that “voice with a smile,” even though it was nothing but a calculated artifice to get more business. Joan’s number rang again and again, and when the operator chirped, “Your par-ty does not ans-wer,” she chirped back, “I’ll call a-gain, thank you,” and felt herself rather clever.
Outside the booth to wait, she realized that if Eli had found a cottage up there, Webby was in no need of his grandmother at all. She returned to the telephone, hurt in some unexpected way. This time the ringing had a sad useless sound, a confirmation of the message her heart had already given her.
She started home, the returned nickel moist in her hand. Married sons did not need rescue by loving mothers, and neither did their children. She should never have obeyed this simple impulse to phone about Webby, as if she alone could provide for his welfare during a blistering heat wave. As if she were aping the rich! Lady Bountiful to my suffering grandchild …
“Mrs. Ivarin, please, a moment.”
A woman was calling out to her from a nearby tent, speaking in Russian. It was unexpected, out here where Yiddish was the common language, and she answered happily in Russian though she could not clearly see the figure within the flaps of the tent. “I’ll wait, don’t hurry.”
In a moment a young woman came out, about thirty, Alexandra guessed, with a little girl of perhaps four at her side. The child’s face was tear-stained and pale, with no sunburn, and the center of her forehead was swollen and purplish blue. The woman, agitated by shyness, introduced herself as Sonya Mikhailovna Vladinski; her child was Natasha Stepanovna, and there was a baby asleep in the tent.
“Sophie Jabrowsky,” she said, “told me about you.”
“Oh, yes, Sophie,” Alexandra said with pleasure. “Is she here again? I hope so.”
“Later. But I can’t wait for her. She told me I should ask you about a private time for myself, but in Russian.” She raced ahead, afraid to be overcome with her stiffening shyness if she spoke slowly. Her Russian was a country Russian, Alexandra decided, not an illiterate’s speech, but not that of a much-schooled person either, and some of her words were hard to catch.
“Why, I would enjoy it,” Alexandra said. “I give so many lessons in English to foreigners, but not often English to Russians.”
“Not English lessons,” the young woman said. “Lessons about everything. Like the lectures, in your tent at night, for Sophie and all the women. Only, I will come alone, and pay.”
“You needn’t pay! Just come with the others; you would be welcome, as they are.”
“But I can’t understand except Russian.”
“You don’t know Yiddish at all?”
Sonya Mikhailovna did not. “In my town, Jews were not allowed. My husband is learning it now for his business.”
They had come to America only a few months before, and had met Sophie and her husband, who were Polish and could speak a Polish-Russian mixture they understood. One evening Sophie saw little Natasha banging her head on the floor in a fit, and Sophie told her that it was no fit, nothing but anger, and that there were modern ways to bring up children, different from the ways of Poland and Russia. Then Sophie told her all about Mrs. Ivarin and it made her half-sick with jealousy, until Sophie suggested that Mrs. Ivarin might take her as a pupil, for pay, for bringing-up-a-child lessons. Her husband said yes, he was making good money, what was twenty-five cents an hour, or even fifty cents, as some of his friends were now paying for their own lessons.
“He is a master jeweler,” Sonya ended. “He told me I should stop you right in the ocean, or anywhere, and ask you, beg you.”
By now Alexandra was dumfounded. From shyness, her new acquaintance had shifted to loquacity, unhalting, free of self-consciousness. It was a novel idea; never had she given “a lesson” in so formless an area as she covered with her immigrant women in the evenings.
“It would not be a strict lesson,” she said. “It would be more like a chat.”
Sonya gave a small jump. “When can I start? Tonight?”
“If you like. My tent is in the first—”
But her new pupil knew where the tent was. She had found that out from the postman, who had been helpful enough to point out Mrs. Ivarin, so she would know whom to stop in the ocean.
Alexandra laughed, and as she moved off, she remembered the nickel, now moist in her palm, and went back to the booth once more. When Joan did not answer, she called home.
“Hello,” Fran answered at the third ring. “Papa’s not up yet.”
“Of course not. How are you, Fran?”
“All right, I guess. It’s so hot.”
“You’ve been running. Could you hear the phone out on the court?”
“I wasn’t out. I just ran down from my room.”
“Why, dear, is it still raining there?”
“No, I just wasn’t playing.”
“Waiting your turn, like a good girl?”
Something was wrong, Alexandra thought. Fran sounded solemn, not the overjoyed young mistress of the glory and grandeur that was Rome. Or was it Greece?
“Mama? Are we cut off?”
“I was thinking. Do you know if Joan and the kids are up with Eli yet?”
“No, they’re still waiting around. Every house up there costs too much, he says.”
“Well, I had an idea, about Webby, and whenever I see our empty cot in the tent, it comes again. Maybe when you come out on the fifteenth, you could bring Webby out too.”
“Gee, that is an idea.”
The way she said it was strange; by now Alexandra was sure of it. But to ask one question was to be instructed on the importance of any daughter’s privacy. “Yes, it is,” she said, and waited.
“I just wondered,” Fran said finally. “Is there any reason you want Webby to wait until the fifteenth? That’s five days off.”
“It’s the day you’re coming.”
“But suppose I came right away
, and brought him, I mean tomorrow.”
“But the tennis?”
“Well, I suddenly thought.”
Alexandra thought, Is the child crying? “Is everything all right, dear?”
“Yes.”
“Is Papa in a mood?”
“No. I hardly ever see him.”
“And the Paiges in the evening—is that nice?”
“Oh yes, they’re just wonderful. But I—” There was a pause, and then Fran said, “I’m sort of blue, that’s all, and I kind of miss everybody.”
This was tribute. This was accolade. From Fran it was the sweetest praise Alexandra had won for a long time. Doubtless some romantic upset had soured Fran’s plan to stay and queen it at her precious tennis court, but the sweetness remained.
“Come out the minute you can,” Alexandra said firmly. “I’ll try Joan until I get her, and I’ll phone you around five tonight, to arrange things. Tell Papa.”
“Is it silly, changing my mind about the tennis and all?”
“Not one bit. Only fools stick a thing out just because they said they would.”
“You won’t tell anybody about me being blue?”
“Don’t worry, dear. I’m like the grave.”
The phrase set off distant echoes in Alexandra’s mind, vague and accusatory. But she was too contented to worry about what they could mean.
When she called back at five, two disappointments awaited her: Webby had a cold and could not come, and Fran had changed her mind about leaving at once. But Alexandra’s spirits remained high; tonight she would give her very first “private lecture” for pay. It was going to be another wonderful summer.
Garry and Letty did decide on the same place in the Laurentians they had chosen the year before, but a variation sprang up after they started.
While they were with Letty’s family, a note arrived from Lucinda and Hank Stiles, forwarded from New York, asking them “to come up to this heavenly place for a weekend, preferably this one.”
First Papers Page 35
