First Papers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  Having him so offhand and nice about the size of people’s heads made her even happier about Grace Episcopal Church, though she couldn’t see any connection, and when she did start off with Anne and her mother the next morning, she felt sweet and happy all over.

  It was a beautiful shiny day, with the clouds way up and wispy against the blue. Downtown at Grace Church, she and Anne followed Mrs. Miller up the shallow stone steps, so old and used they were wavy at their front edges. Ahead, through the wide oak doors, Fee could see a big wide space. The nave? she thought. The apse? I don’t even know what they call anything.

  For the first time she felt nervous about doing something wrong and making a fool of herself. Mrs. Miller led them to a pew about halfway between the rear and the front of the church, and Fee watched to see if they crossed themselves the way Juanita Endoza sometimes did, or did anything else with their hands. But they just sat down, and she did too, and Anne gave her a little book from a rack in front of them, and Fee opened it for a minute and saw it was a hymnal. Then she could look around and upward, without anybody noticing.

  The church was larger and higher and dimmer inside than she ever had dreamed it would be, just looking at it from outside. And it was beautiful. Sitting there in the pew, you were half-hidden from everybody behind you or in front of you; you could look up and up in the dimness, broken by the streaming colors from the long stained-glass windows. You could see the stone ribs of the arches creeping up the walls and coming together above, like fingertips touching in prayer.

  Music flowed under the reaching praying stone fingers, and Fee wondered how she knew about hands reaching up like that to pray. She had never seen her mother’s hands do that, nor her father’s, nor any teacher’s, but she knew. There must have been something in a book she read long ago, and she remembered it as if it was something that had happened right in front of her eyes. There was something beautiful about it, and suddenly something sad too.

  Fee’s eyes filled with tears, though she was happy, and she was surprised to feel them hot in her eyelids. She looked upward again; now the arches seemed to waver a little, as if the praying hands shivered, and in the stained-glass windows, the blues and yellows and reds of the saints and the angels seemed to blur and quiver, too.

  Great bells began to peal and Fee recognized them. How often she had heard them from outside. But now she was inside and she loved them.

  Wondrous, Stefan thought later that day when he heard Fee’s rapturous account of her foray into organized religion. When I had to rebel and overthrow my parents, I turned atheist and later agnostic. She, poor child, was cheated of that chance through the misfortune of being born to parents who were already lost souls. So she rebels by turning back toward religion.

  There was a mathematical purity about it that pleased him. He had spoken of it to Alexandra several times during the collective preparations for Fee’s churchgoing, for he suspected that underneath Alexandra’s staunch principles about freedom of thought, she retained a certain classic tremulousness about her youngest child’s desire to exercise it.

  Alexandra detected his suspicions and argued against them, largely in her own mind, for this was no time to be at outs with him. Privately she found herself wondering again and again about what this first step might lead to for little Fira. Maybe parents should not agree to certain things after all. Maybe they should not permit a child to dabble in the opiate of the people, or was it the opium, she never could remember.

  But listening to Fee’s racing joy about her experience at church, she forgot any doubts she had had. Nothing mattered but a child’s awakening, and this was an awakening, a blossoming for Fee. What happened later on, how long her glory and intensity would last, remained to be seen. But for now, she had burst forth into an incredible world of wonder and trust and longing. It was beautiful to watch, because it was watching your child try her wings in one more new direction.

  If only they were strong enough to carry her. When it came to religion, a fledgling could be so easily swooped upon and wounded. It went without saying, in a family like theirs, that broad-mindedness was guaranteed the children from their mother and father. But once they left that warm safety, there was no guarantee the world would continue it. Like Eli.

  How shocked poor Eli had been to discover that the Martins were filled with grief over their daughter’s hurry-up marriage, not only because of Joan’s condition but also because she was “forced to marry a Jew.” Eli “a Jew” was always so unexpected an idea, or Fran or Fee, brought up as they were, small-town Americans and nothing else, all acting and looking and talking like all the other small-town Americans they had ever seen.

  Assimilation was so natural an idea when you had no superior feelings toward other people, and it was such an American idea, the melting pot and all men are created equal. Some Jews looked on it as a dirty word, and some Americans didn’t want it to touch their own family. If Joan hadn’t been pregnant, goodness knew what opposition her parents might have put up. Now, of course, with two such grandchildren as Webby and Sandy, the Martins were happy over Joan’s marriage, but there was no real friendship between the families. Nothing like the closeness between the Paiges and the Ivarins.

  Why, they had become such friends that she could sense something wrong with Alida’s mood, as she could with Stiva’s. When Alida heard that Fee was going to church, she said it was sweet and good to find people like her and Stiva, who had principles like religious freedom and stuck to them. Then she said something about Garry’s sticking to his guns about changing jobs, but she sounded troubled and perplexed. Garry’s company, Alexandra knew, had abandoned the idea of explosives; were they returning to it now, after the slaughters in the Balkans and the bloodthirsty talk from Germany and Russia and France?

  “Stiva,” she suddenly said.

  He looked up. The Sunday papers were growing too big for a man to manage. The Times gave you ninety-some pages per nickel, about twenty pages for one cent. Twenty was normal in the daily Times, and perhaps Ochs felt it behooved him to stay with the usual ratio on Sunday. Was there dissension and struggle and an eternal play for power at the Times too?

  “Stiva,” she said again. “You don’t actually believe there will be a big war, do you?”

  He blinked at her, taking off his glasses and peering at her, myope intentness in his gaze.

  “Yes, I do believe it,” he said. “What’s all this about? I thought you were still lost in Fee’s clouds of glory.”

  “But somehow I began to think of explosives and bombs,” she said, “and then of Garry and Eli and all the young men beginning life.” She shuddered and added lamely, “I suppose a million mothers in Europe think of it even more than I do.”

  “France has raised its conscription from two years to three,” he said.

  “When? What made her do it?”

  “Germany raised the standing army to nearly a million. And Belgium insists that the Germans are calling up an unusual number of reserves.”

  “And Russia?”

  “The biggest peacetime army in history.”

  He returned to the paper, and absent-mindedly she drew the first section of the Times toward her, folding it and rolling it into a tight cylinder, curling her fingers around it closely. She wished he would tell her more of what was going on at the office but it was dangerous to dig at him about it.

  “It’s about two months now,” she said, “since Fehler began going crazy with the front page.”

  “The terrible thing is, it sells the paper.”

  It was unexpected. Usually he avoided being that specific. In the weeks since she had come back from the beach, the one thing they thought of was the office and the developments there. For brief stretches, for unexpected reasons like Fee and church, they could be absorbed by other aspects of living, but inevitably they returned to the paper. Talking openly about it was another thing. That depended on him.

  “‘Sells the paper,’” she prompted. “How much more?”
/>   “Fehler says a thousand copies more a day.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “It was his big news at the September meeting. Mrs. Landau almost jumped up and down on her chair, like Webby.”

  “I can’t stand her.”

  “Fehler also announced something else,” he said. “He hired a man to be the first Picture Editor and General Art Director, one of Hearst’s young geniuses, who’s Jewish so there’s no language problem. He’ll be Abe’s boss.”

  She stared at him, shocked. “Poor Abe, it’s a public slap in the face.”

  “After being top man so long, yes.”

  “Can he do anything?” she said. “Will he quit?”

  “He has four children.”

  “It’s a crime,” she said. “What things can happen under capitalism.”

  “This is a socialist paper,” he said drily.

  “But Fehler is an anarchist, no matter how he cringes and lies about it now to save his skin.”

  Here it was again, the unending wonder of her logical progressions. This time it didn’t amuse him. He wished he had kept quiet about that thousand a day.

  “I asked Otto and Louise for dinner Saturday,” Garry said. “Is that all right?”

  “Saturday?” Letty asked. “This coming Saturday?”

  “Have we something for Saturday?” he asked. “It’s Otto’s birthday.”

  “The Harretts are coming, and the Grintzers, and Peter. I asked them two weeks ago, don’t you remember?”

  He looked disgusted with himself. “Of course I remember.” He glanced at their dining table; more than six was crowded, and they were already seven. “Well, I’ll tell Otto they can come afterwards.”

  “Afterwards?” She hesitated. “You mean some other night, after Saturday?”

  “No, I meant after dinner.”

  “Oh,” Letty said.

  Garry almost said, “I can un-invite them,” but an unwillingness kept him back. “What’s wrong with asking them to drop in after dinner for coffee and some drinks? I thought you liked Otto and Louise.”

  “I do, only—” She was opening a large box delivered by an expensive dress shop that afternoon, and as she peeled away layers of white tissue paper from the top to reveal a glistening green satin, she said, “Isn’t that heavenly, that color! I loved it the minute I saw it.”

  He admired the new dress and predicted she would look beautiful in it. Then he said, “About the Ohrmanns. We haven’t had them here since spring.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I was just wondering how they’d get along with everybody.” She waited for an answer and then said, “Otto and Louise are so different, that’s all.”

  “Does that mean,” he asked carefully, “not well-off and fashionable?”

  “Why in the world would I care about anything like that?”

  “I can’t imagine. Just the way you said it.”

  “You are imagining,” she said.

  Again he thought of the unseen social yardstick. Since the summer it kept poking at his thoughts at unexpected times. The table and its limits—was that now being measured by it, too? He was willing to make the usual concessions to the social graces, but beyond a point they didn’t count enough. “I could stall Otto off until after dinner, nine-thirty or ten,” he finally said.

  “Wouldn’t it be better asking them for Sunday, for dinner? It’s awful inviting people, but saying ‘you eat by yourself first.’”

  “What’s all this fiddling around?” he demanded. “You don’t want them here with the others. Why not come right out and say so?” “Otto is a—a radical,” she said, flinging it into the room between them. “Most nice people just can’t stand—” She turned away, saying something he couldn’t catch about “free speech and all the rest,” and left the room.

  A radical. A single word to damn all dissenters, from the lunatics hurling bombs to the most moderate of socialists like his father. She would exempt the family from such a labeling; it would be too embarrassing: My father-in-law a radical! My husband a radical!

  He stared down at the dress box and with a wrench of the string of memory remembered their trip to Canada. Were they going to keep on hitting rough spots whenever their path crossed the path of the Stileses and the Aldriches, the Harretts and the Grintzers?

  From the other room, Letty called to him, and a moment later she appeared in the bedroom door. “I’m sorry, darling,” she said.

  He nodded and she withdrew once more. Soon he grew calmer and went into their room. She was lying down, facing the tall windows. The last afternoon light was yellowing the October-dry garden, and a shaft of light struck warmly across his eyes.

  “Come on, Letty,” he said. “I didn’t ask Otto on purpose, but since I did.” He made a complete statement of it, and she sat up, ready for compromise.

  “I shouldn’t have called him that,” she conceded. “But take people like Jerry and Kay—apart from being friends, they’re awfully important in business. Jerry is Olive Harrett’s pride and joy, and he tells her absolutely everything, and I may get a second shipment on consignment from her any minute.”

  “They’re not such boobs, though, that they’ll fall apart at Otto’s ideas. Or at mine. We’ll have a fine time, dance and be merry. You’ll see.”

  On Saturday, they were done with coffee before the Ohrmanns came, and Otto accepted everybody’s congratulations and a special bottle of Rhine wine from Garry. Louise told a story about their youngest child, who had bought him a penny’s-worth of licorice shoestrings as a gift, and burst into tears when he ate one. Then both Ohrmanns withdrew into a shell of shyness that Garry had never seen, built, he thought, on Otto’s self-consciousness, among these strangers, about his still-heavy accent, and Louise’s uneasy lack of small talk. He waited for it to pass, but after another round of chatter by the others on books and plays, he saw that their shyness was worse. It was impossible to let them sit and flounder.

  “What’s new from home?” he said, and was rewarded by Otto’s look.

  “It’s been a three-day orgy there,” he said, and explained to the others, “I have a brother still in Germany. With I. G. Farben, you know them?”

  “They’re in steel, aren’t they?” Jerry Harrett asked.

  “That’s Krupp,” Peter Stiles answered for Otto. “They make machinery for heavy industry, heavy arms. The Farben people are mainly drugs and dyes and chemicals, isn’t that right?”

  Otto said it was, and Letty looked impressed at Peter’s ready knowledge. “Otto’s brother is a top salesman at Farben,” Garry said, and then asked Otto, “What kind of three-day orgy?” though they had already talked it all out over their sandwich lunches at the lab. A fever of military self-love had seized the country, a public frenzy of boasting about German might and German power, all in the guise of a national celebration of the victory over Napoleon at Leipzig a hundred years ago, and the invasion of France that followed.

  “‘We did it once, we can do it again,’” Otto said. “That’s what they’re all shouting. Bismarck foams up at them in every stein of beer.”

  “Good old Bismarck,” Garry said, raising his glass as if in a toast. “Likewise, good old France.” It was heavy-handed and the knowledge irked him.

  “There won’t be war between them,” Bob Grintzer said positively. “Another Balkan mess, maybe, and let them stew in it.”

  “It might be a bigger stew next time,” Otto said. “As big as all Europe.”

  “They’re busy fixing up for it,” said Garry.

  Peter looked at Otto and then at Garry. “Socialists,” he said too casually, “are always against war, aren’t they? Automatically against it? Justifiable war or not?”

  “Not all socialists,” Garry said quickly, “but I sure am.”

  Peter shrugged and the others said nothing, but their heightened attention excited Garry. This was the way it should be in a man’s house.

  “Is that glass empty, Jerry?” Letty asked brightly. “Gare,
would you fix people’s drinks, darling?”

  He refilled glasses, but he thought, This is what counts, what really counts. He was oddly elated, and he urged Otto on. There was already a “war prosperity” in many pockets of industry, Otto said; shortages of raw materials were now so acute that every factory from Krupp and Farben down was aswim with overdue and undeliverable orders. The hunt for raw materials went far beyond the borders of Germany, and everyone in the field knew that England was buying up the waste products of spinning mills in Egypt and Indian cotton waste called “linters” for making cellulose and the new explosives and expellants.

  “And over here,” Garry added, “everyone in the field knows how many of our own Krupps and Farbens are getting ready right now.” Ironically he went on, “Business is business, and it doesn’t say ‘Thou Shalt Not Do Business.’”

  “That gets my goat,” Jerry Harrett suddenly said, but his wife Kay said, “I’m sick of all this business talk. Let’s put on that new record and dance.”

  “‘The International Rag,’” Letty said, jumping up. “It’s too cute for words.”

  Peter Stiles jumped up also, with a quick glance at Letty, a look of understanding, even of sympathy. Garry saw it and it enraged him, a tacit assurance to his wife that he, Peter, knew what she had to put up with. The music started, people moved about, laughter and snatches of talk filled the room, and Garry found himself repeating, Just the same, this is what really counts. He had no time to decide what “This” was, which counted, but he knew he would recognize it when he could think the evening through.

  He sat on with Otto and Louise, apart from the others now, as if they three had floated off on an unseen current, and before too long the Ohrmanns said good-bye and left. Then he asked Betty Grintzer to dance, and later Kay, and when he said “May I dance with my own wife?” she looked happy.

  But the moment they “were alone in their bedroom, she glanced at the clock on the dresser and said, “Not even twelve.”

  “They had a lovely time, Letty. And we did have two hours of dancing too, didn’t we?”