First Papers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  “Heavens, nothing like that. I simply had an idea I want to talk over, about children losing their foreign accents.”

  “Who said David has a foreign accent? I know him like a book and never heard it.”

  Alexandra was nonplussed. She wished she could turn on her heel and walk out. This young mother was either stupid or rude, and as unresponsive as a mule. “People can’t hear it themselves,” she said in one further attempt. “There’s a brand-new play, on that very point. About a professor who teaches a little English girl to speak English without an accent. An Englishman wrote it, a brilliant man, a socialist, and it’s a wonderful play, so human and so funny. The little girl didn’t know she had an accent, of course, nor did her father or mother. They couldn’t hear it, because they heard it all the time.”

  She had been carried away in her pleasure at finding so apt a way to make her point, so impressive a colleague in the world of phonetics. It apparently had got through to David’s mother, for she seemed at last to be thinking and receptive, mulling this over.

  “You listen to me,” Mrs. Herzog said suddenly. “Just two words, you listen.”

  “Why, you’re in a fury,” Alexandra said. “I’ll go. Forgive me.”

  “Mrs. Buttinsky!” She spat it out, and then repeated it in a shrewish scream. “Mrs. Buttinsky, that’s who you are. Get out of my tent, and leave my David alone.”

  Alexandra shook with anger at the onslaught. “Good day,” she said with dignity. “I wanted to—I hoped to—to interest you in an idea. But good day.”

  She did turn on her heel and behind her she heard a storm of language, ending in another “Mrs. Buttinsky.” The words lashed at her and her own anger whipped back at them, but, she thought, It’s impossible. Never, not once in all the hours of her life, as a teacher, as an adviser, an informal lecturer out here on the beach—never had she met anything but eagerness, never had she heard anything but words of thanks and desire for more. Now without warning, on this lovely hot clear summer morning, a woman she had approached with an open heart had turned fishwife and called her names and ordered her out. It was unbelievable. It was dreadful.

  Back in her own tent, Alexandra sat down heavily at the kitchen table. A sadness suffused her, an emptiness she usually escaped, except when Stiva was in a mood that hurt her and would not let her.

  Her worry about his not writing swooped down upon her like a dark grey gull, wings outspread, blotting out the sweet normal sun. For a few days she had almost banished it, but now this raw abusive encounter brought it back, raw and abusive too. Was he merely too busy? Or was something seriously wrong? By now it must be more than two weeks since he had sent a line. And both times she had telephoned him he had given her a curt “Nothing’s wrong,” and shut her off as only he could shut her off.

  She went over to the unread copies of the Jewish News, now stacked in a neat little pyramid by Fee. There must be ten or twelve of them, still rolled up; somehow she never could find time to start at the oldest one and read them until she did catch up. It might be a way of getting back at Stiva for not finding time to write to her.

  She opened the top copy, to keep Fee’s pyramid from collapsing, though starting with the latest issue was the exact opposite of reading them in sequence.

  The moment she slit open the skin-tight wrapper and spread the paper wide, she forgot Mrs. Buttinsky and everything that had happened to her that day.

  No wonder he hadn’t written. No wonder he had to say nothing was wrong when she phoned. His only alternative was to say everything was wrong.

  The paper was wrong. It was different. It glared up at her like an excited stranger. It was another paper.

  It was splashed and splotched with headlines and pictures and captions and boxes. A big thick streamer of type, seven columns wide, topped the entire page, as if war had just started or a terrible strike, or the Triangle fire. But it was only a follow-up story about Becker in the death house at Sing Sing, where he had already been for months for killing a gambler named Rosenthal, by now the stalest story in New York City, even though the yellow press kept pumping air into its lungs with the artificial respiration of their tricks.

  Under the screamer of a headline, there was something explosive and strange about the entire page. There were four photographs, three of them big, with heavy captions underneath. The columns of type were chopped up into short chunky paragraphs, wedged apart by black subheads, everything combining into the “crisis look” of it, the fire-alarm urgency.

  Alexandra did not read the page; she stared at it as if reading were not part of the expected thing to do with a newspaper. Was it possible, she wondered, that her own low spirits because of Mrs. Buttinsky were dragging down her judgment in general? In her surprise at finding any change at all in the paper, was she exaggerating, being “volatile” in her response? She looked away for a moment, out at the sand glistening before the tent, and then looked at the paper once more.

  It was not so terribly different after all, was it? More emphatic, certainly, as if it were thumping a fist on the table to make a point. In a way, there was something about it that looked easier to read, more coaxing to the eye, like a novel with lots of conversation as opposed to a book on economics.

  I’m trying to like it, she thought. I’m trying to pretend there’s nothing to be angry about. As if I was already face to face with Stiva and had to hide my feelings about it for his sake.

  She stood up uncertainly and went back for the pyramided cylinders atop the bookcase, carefully bringing them all to the table with her and setting them down as if it were vital not to disturb the symmetry of their arrangement. Using a paring knife to slit and rip off the tight wrappers, she opened them as they came off the top, going backward in date and sequence, so that Thursday’s paper gave way to Wednesday’s, and Wednesday’s to Tuesday’s, this week to last week. One by one, their front pages flared out their strangeness at her, and still she did not read. But as she looked down at it, she began to realize that this strangeness diminished in degree as she went backwards in time.

  The change had been planned to be gradual. She had missed its earliest stages; perhaps if she had been reading the paper regularly every day, she would not have found this morning’s paper so startling. If you got used to it, you might not even see it.

  “They couldn’t hear it,” she had told Mrs. Herzog about the little English girl’s parents, “because they heard it all the time.”

  Alexandra at last stood up. She had been sitting over the papers for a long time and her legs were cramped and tired. When she had finally begun to read, she could find nothing to pause over; the news stories sounded much the same as always. The editorial page reassured her; it was Stiva in each leading piece.

  So far they were changing only the quiet strong face the paper had always worn, not its heart. Would that come in time?

  She walked out to the front of the tent. The sun had disappeared under mackerel clouds and the air was cool. Suddenly, she wished the summer was over. Normally she was content to stay at the beach until the last moment, enjoying the sudden briskness of August nights, the need for sweaters and an extra blanket for each cot, hearing the ocean pound more meaningfully, promising gales ahead, storms, winter. It was lovely, this quiet falling away of summer, and she valued it as she valued its beginning and ripening in June and July.

  But suddenly she was homesick. If Stiva were enraged about the paper, home would be miserable, but all at once she was tired of the lazy life at the beach, and her heart filled with longing for home, for the late nights when she sat up waiting against all reason for the moment when she heard the front door open and Stiva come in.

  TWENTY-THREE

  BEFORE SEPTEMBER WAS OUT, Fira Ivarin decided she was the happiest girl in the world. Nothing in her entire life had ever been as wonderful as being a freshman at Barnett High.

  From the first morning, she loved it. She loved having an armchair with a side rest instead of a babyish desk with a lid, l
oved leaving a classroom when a bell rang at the end of a period, and going to a different one for the next course, instead of staying at the same place in the same room all day long.

  She was thrilled to have one teacher for algebra and a different one for English, another one for American history and a different one for German. The one for German was the most thrilling of all. He was a man, the first man teacher she had ever seen, except for Eli who didn’t count, and the first man teacher she had ever had as her very own. His name was Ludwig Wohl, and you said it with a V and a very big O, and you called him Doctor, not Mister, Wohl.

  He was rather tubby, but good-looking, with a reddish mustache and a beard that was as pointy as an ice pick. He called every girl in the class Fräulein and every boy Herr, rolling the r’s until it must have tickled the tip of his tongue. When he called on her to recite and said “Fraulein Ivarin” as he did the first day or two, rolling both the r’s as if he loved doing it, she felt grown-up and all set to giggle at the same time. Later, he switched to first names, and she became “Fraulein Fira,” and though there were no extra r’s, he seemed to get more roll with “Fira,” and that was even better.

  From the start, she knew she was going to get an A with Dr. Wohl, because classes with him were such fun that it was impossible not to do your homework and be able to reel off the new vocabulary you had to learn by heart overnight, or write out German words on the blackboard, or even read something aloud, which was hardest because of the crazy sound of words ending in ich or och or ach.

  She said, “Gee, I don’t know,” when anybody asked why she chose German instead of French for her modern language, but the reason probably was that Trudy never had any doubt about what to take, and Fee took it too.

  But being best friends wasn’t the same, now that they were at Barnett High, though neither one of them admitted it. They kept on saying they were best friends; if anybody mentioned Trudy to Fee, it was automatic to say, “She’s my best friend,” and Trudy did the same thing. But it began to sound funny and young. Nobody else said it.

  That was before Fee met Juanita Endoza and Anne Miller, so liking them had nothing to do with it. You could have a best friend in high school without calling her your best friend; it was another change from grammar school. Every day was a change, even going past the chemistry lab and smelling the awful sulphuric acid and knowing you’d be taking chem next year, even that was exciting.

  Anne Miller was different from Trudy or anybody else she had ever known before; she was from Iowa, and she was fourteen. And Anne talked about boys, and could answer anything you asked about anything, and even if you didn’t ask, she seemed to know what you didn’t understand about, and she would tell you. Anne always dropped her voice, or even whispered, when she talked about boys, and her whisper made what she said twice as interesting. She had an older brother and maybe that was why she knew so much about boys, but compared to Anne, Trudy Loheim never said one thing worth listening to any more.

  But talking about boys wasn’t the only thing that made Anne Miller so fascinating. The other thing was being religious. She went to the Grace Episcopal Church down on Main Street and she really truly believed so hard in God and angels and life after death that she talked a lot about that, too, almost from the first day they had started to know each other. She couldn’t believe Fee had never been baptized or christened or anything and when Fee said she was agnostic and Jewish, Anne wouldn’t believe her. You could always tell, she insisted, and she knew Fee wasn’t. After a while she did believe it and then she asked if Fee would be allowed to go to church with her some Sunday, to see what it was like, and Fee said she’d love it.

  “Will your mother and father let you?”

  “Sure.”

  “My mother said they wouldn’t.”

  “For heaven’s sake!”

  “Heaven’s sake” made them laugh, but that same afternoon, Fee telephoned Anne and said, “I told you they would.”

  “What will your father say when he gets home and hears it?”

  “He was right there.” She had forgotten to tell Anne what her father worked at, so Anne didn’t know about his being at home all day when regular fathers were off at work. Anne’s father was a salesman of faucets. “He said sure I could, and when my mother said she’d make me a new dress, he said he should hope so, she made a new dress for unimportant things, of course she should for me going to church the first time.”

  “They didn’t even have to think about it awhile?” Anne asked.

  “They always said we could decide for ourselves when we got bigger, about being religious or socialists or anything.”

  “But right off the bat, the both of them. Gosh.”

  Fee was surprised that Anne was so surprised, but not the way she used to be when Trudy talked about religion and what her mother thought Fee’s mother must think about Eli marrying Joan “outside your religion.” She still felt a tight little excitement stir around inside her if anybody talked about Jews or Christians, but by now she knew she would, so it didn’t surprise her the way it used to. It wasn’t especially pleasant or unpleasant; it was like some familiar dopey friend you were going to run into every once in a while.

  “What Sunday should we pick?” Fee asked. “Not this next one, because of getting my new dress.”

  Two days before the Sunday, the new dress was finished and Fee was so happy she said that if Grace Church was as wonderful as Anne Miller said, she probably would get converted.

  “Converted?” It was her father, and he put his paper down on the table and looked at her, as if nothing was more interesting.

  “Anne said I could be. Her minister said so. She asked her mother and her mother asked their minister, and he said yes, by all means.”

  “Quite right,” he said. “You could be.” He thought for a while and then murmured, “By all means.” Under the table, his heel began to tap against the floor, but it wasn’t angry, just concentrating, and he pushed his paper away from him. Fee was proud of herself; usually he acted as if all talk at the table was a thing he had to put up with. And she was glad in another way. For the longest time, he had been sort of pulled-away to himself, not in a mood, just far off, and not happy. It had something to do with the paper, Mama said, and anybody would be upset about it.

  But now he seemed really absorbed and interested in what Fee said about conversion and Anne’s minister. “Can I?” she prompted him.

  “It’s a long process, conversion,” he said. “You don’t go to church one morning and then, hickory dickory dock, you’re converted.”

  She laughed at the sound of it, the sort of thing Mama would say, but she also was surprised. The things her father just knew about! “Do you know how long it would take me?”

  “Not precisely,” he said. “But in most religions, you do need time, a good deal of studying and thought. And to have real meaning, it should take a long time, don’t you agree?”

  “Studying and thought?”

  “Well, Jews would want a convert to study Hebrew and the Talmud, Catholics would give instruction in their catechism and the Bible, and Protestants would have their own methods of teaching their prayers and beliefs, especially to somebody who wasn’t born right into them. You follow me?”

  “Anne Miller didn’t say anything like that.”

  “Don’t look disheartened, Fee. You gobble up studies, and get famous grades whenever you want to.”

  She cheered up. “Anyway, if I do whatever I’m supposed to, then I can be converted, is that right?”

  Fran and Mama were at the table listening, but Papa ignored them and so did she. What they thought didn’t make a bit of difference, not to him and certainly not to her. She knew that if she were going to be converted, Papa was the one that mattered. Mama would decide the way he did. “Can I, Papa?” she repeated.

  “You’re thirteen, aren’t you? It might take a year or two. Then there would be a special ceremony, as in all religions. And since conversion is not anything to
be taken lightly, or to make mistakes about, let’s allow an extra year.”

  “Two or three years from now,” Alexandra said sagely, speaking for the first time.

  “So when you’re sixteen, Firuschka, if you still want to be taken officially into the Grace Episcopal Church, why then, ‘by all means,’ to quote the minister, and Mama and I will not object in the slightest.”

  “I told Anne you wouldn’t,” Fee said triumphantly.

  On Sunday morning she was up an hour early and when Anne and her mother came to get her, she was so excited, it almost hurt. Her dress looked like thin chocolate wool with sand scattered over it, and she was wearing last winter’s white beaver hat, even though it was still Septembery outside. Just yesterday Anne mentioned hats and said you couldn’t go to church with just hair, but the dirty old beaver was the only hat she had. Mama was too busy finishing the dress; she told Papa he simply had to lend a hand and clean up the hat. He was so surprised he started right in.

  It was funny to see him dousing a rag in benzene and rubbing and rubbing and rubbing, not even smoking a cigarette because of the benzene. But it was sort of nice too because he simply never did anything, and she didn’t know how to thank him.

  “Whew, what a smell,” was all she said when he handed the hat back. “Like a kerosene stove or the Paiges’ car or something.”

  “It will evaporate by tomorrow,” he said. “Anyway, there’s no smell of sulphur and brimstone.”

  She looked up quickly, but he wasn’t being nasty and sarcastic. He just said it, watching her try the hat on to see if it still fitted. It did, and he said something about heads changing size at a different rate of speed from arms and legs and bodies.

  “That’s why babies’ heads look so top-heavy,” he explained. “They’re almost adult-size long before the baby is an adult.”

  “What a lot of things you’d never even think of if nobody told you.”

  “You look at Webby’s head next time,” he said. “Or Sandy’s.”