First Papers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  “It sounds like a jarred vertebra or a squeezed nerve,” he said when she finished. “It can be agony. He needs sedation, maybe morphia, as soon as your Dr. Martin gets there. I can start out in an hour—the office is full of patients—but that would be two hours before I could see Stiva.”

  “Is there any danger?” she asked. “Tell me the truth.”

  “I’m only guessing, but with his history of back trouble, I can hope not.”

  “But what caused it? It’s as if he’s paralyzed.”

  “It can start when you pick up a match. But diagnosis on a telephone is impossible.”

  “Then I better hang up. Dr. Martin may be getting a busy while I talk.”

  “Alexandra,” he said authoritatively. “Explain how it happens that another doctor presumed to suggest morphia, or Dr. Martin will be offended. There is a protocol in these matters. Tell him I’ll be there at four.”

  As she held down the pronged hook, the telephone bell rang and she jumped. “Oh, Dr. Martin, please, could you come right away?” Again she told what had happened, and why she had called their old doctor in New York.

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Webster Martin said. “Try not to worry, Mrs. Ivarin.”

  “He’s never sick, never. I’ve never seen him this way.”

  She sat down for a moment after the call ended. Fear ran through her, that this might be real disease announcing itself in another guise.

  Please, she thought again. He’s had enough to bear already.

  “Tell me the truth,” Alexandra said once more as soon as she and Webster Martin were alone. And she repeated it again to Alexis in the late afternoon.

  “He has high blood pressure,” each doctor said. “Not an immediate danger, but serious.”

  He would have to live a different life, Dr. Martin said. There was a certain hardening of the arteries, not unexpected in a man nearly fifty-three, and not dangerous if he would follow orders to the letter. The acute attack in his lower back was almost inevitable, what with his long-neglected “back condition,” too chronic to be dubbed a simple lumbago any longer, and badly aggravated by his three-mile walk against heavy winds. Morphine and then lesser drugs, plus total immobility, would heal the inflamed areas to a marked degree in perhaps a week, when he could be measured for a made-to-order supporting belt or harness, but it would be out of the question for him to travel by trolley and train for a much longer period. As to the regimen of special diet and the like, to bring down the blood pressure, he would like to discuss it first with Dr. Michelovsky because Mr. Ivarin might feel more inclined to obey unwelcome orders from a lifelong friend.

  Mr. Ivarin, Alexandra thought fleetingly. Even in this awful time of sickness, it stays Mr. Ivarin and Mrs. Ivarin. And I call him Dr. Martin. How can we remain so distant, so formal, when our children are married, when we are all grandparents of Webby and Sandra?

  Resentment at Dr. Martin mingled with her gratitude for his speed in coming and for the thoroughness of his examination, but it was not until Alexis came and saw Stiva that she felt safe again. He reinforced everything Dr. Martin had said, and since Stiva was deeply under the injected drug, wrote out a series of instructions for her to give him, when he could understand them. For five days, he was not to be propped up in bed, even to read or eat; he was not to get up, not even to walk to the bathroom. If he disobeyed, it could end in his being moved in an ambulance to a hospital, perhaps to be “clinically immobilized” in spinal traction. This was not stated as a threat, merely as information.

  Unequivocal pain made Stefan obedient. Even to shift his position in bed was out of the question when the drugs thinned down. He read Alexis’ orders without interest; Alexandra held the prescription blank straight above him, and he read upward. He ate so little of what she tried to feed him that he never suspected the absence of salt or red meat nor the weakness of his morning sips of coffee. His lessons had to be postponed, his February lecture canceled, and he seemed not to care. He lay in a torpor hour upon hour; Alexandra was glad both doctors had ordered her to say nothing about his high blood pressure, for she could not have dealt him further pain.

  After five days, they were both there in consultation. When they told him and talked of “mild arteriosclerosis,” he said listlessly, “A synonym for getting old, isn’t it?” To Michelovsky he added, “You found my blood pressure high that time, when was it? Since then, over and over, I’ve been warned, ‘Your face is getting red.’ It’s an old story.”

  But hardening of the arteries, they told him, was a progressive condition, and by now radical measures were indicated. Apart from the prescribed diet and medication, he was to forswear activity that excited him, to remain calm, almost lethargic. And it was essential that he reduce his sixty cigarettes a day until he could give up nicotine entirely.

  That was Webster Martin’s pronouncement. Dr. Michelovsky said, “I agree, Doctor, and there will be no difficulty with keeping to the diet and medication. Perhaps he will also cut down on his smoking. As for giving up activity, remaining lethargic and tranquil in his activities, it would be Ivarin’s death knell. I know this man.”

  They talked as if he could not hear them. He drew shallowly on the cigarette he had lit when their discussion began; he did not inhale deeply for fear of another paroxysm of coughing. During the revolution, he suddenly remembered, was the first time Alexis had discovered that he had some elevation of blood pressure. Nineteen five that had been, the last time he had been sick enough to see a doctor, and Alexis had joked sadly that half the Russian colony in New York, revolutionaries all, had fallen sick at the collapse of their hopes. An inflamed larynx and windpipe he had had, that was it, of no real consequence. Nineteen hundred and five, nine years ago, and he had been at the top of his powers, as a man, as an editor.

  Hate for the passing of time took him, a spasm of longing to be young again, strong, tireless in his work. In this, his second month off the paper, he would earn exactly ten dollars. With his lecture canceled, his lessons not given, he would “earn” only the fee on his translation. Thirty-eight dollars last month, and ten this. This single reality outweighed everything the doctors were still saying, in a melancholy reiteration, about the vital necessity of avoiding flare-ups or overexcitement, the necessity to limit himself gradually on tobacco.

  He reached for the ashtray on the chair near his bed, brought it toward him, and set it on the blanket drawn tight across his chest. He pressed his cigarette into the stale ashes already there, grinding it down, twisting it down. Alexis Michelovsky saw him and put his old hand out to steady the saucer crammed with butts.

  “‘Gradually’ won’t work,” Stefan said. “Better to get it over with.”

  “You mean now?” Michelovsky asked.

  “Why not?”

  “But you’ve smoked all your life,” Alexandra cried.

  “I’d rather get it over with,” he repeated.

  By nightfall, nothing mattered to him but not smoking; by next morning he could think of nothing but a cigarette; by the next night he was reliving the hunger strike and tobacco strike in prison in Russia when he was a boy of seventeen.

  Now, as then, he bit into his knuckles in a wildness of need, but now, after one day, the network of nerves, tendons, ligaments, muscles that bound his flesh to his bones tightened up with whistling pain again, and he shouted for Alexandra to get the drugs still available from the original prescriptions Dr. Martin had given him.

  He did not smoke. By the end of the first week, he had almost forgotten how to eat more than a mouthful of food, how to think, how to speak. He lay, concentrated on the vow not to smoke, on the knowing that he would not smoke, on the dream of comfort there had always been for him in the making of a cigarette, the lighting of it, the deep drawing down into himself of its mysterious nerve-feeding yield.

  It was unwise, perhaps, his instant deathblow to his dependence on smoking, not conducive to the calm and placid existence prescribed for him. But he could not tolerate
gradual change any longer. From the first moment the tearful Miriam Landau had peered into his eyes over a year ago to explain away her choice of Fehler, he had acceded to the hell of gradual change, in an unending sophistry of so-called patience and self-control and even dignity. It was enough.

  It had been the darkest period he had yet known. It must be bad for Alexandra, for the children, but he could barely think of that now. All his first hope of remaking the structure of life, his first quick encouragement drawn from signing up for a lecture, a lesson, an article—all that first hope had fallen sick with him, and during this siege of pain and illness had thinned and weakened and drained away.

  It was very bad. To be sick, to be old, to be squeezed out of the job you loved—it was bad. Perhaps too bad.

  TWENTY-SIX

  AT ALDRICH CHEMICAL, ON March first, an official memorandum informed all personnel: “Your company’s Number Two plant, now approaching completion, will manufacture commercial explosives, such as dynamite for blasting, powder for drilling, charges for tunnel and harbor work. Number One plant will continue on established lines.”

  Garry read it and looked at Otto Ohrmann. He saw skepticism take command of Otto’s face and said, “Have you no faith in the mimeographed word?” Otto muttered something he did not catch, and Garry added, “Too obvious a dodge, hey?” He went to his locker, drew his unfinished morning paper from the pocket of his topcoat and turned to Help Wanted Male. At his side, Otto read along with him.

  “We toss a coin,” Otto said, “if we both like the same one.”

  Six days later, a Saturday, Garry said, “Thanks, Mr. Molloy,” and took his hat from the elongated window sill. Across the twenty-foot width of plate glass ran the legend, Synthex, Inc., presenting the back of its flowery cursive script to the office.

  “Think of it as a starting point only, why don’t you?” James Molloy said. “I have this one other fellow to see on Monday and after that we’ll get in touch with you.”

  “I’m doing that already,” Garry said pleasantly, though he was disappointed. “But it would be more of a cut than I expected, even as a starter. Anyway, thanks again.”

  He left and went down into the warm drizzle and looked about him. Long Island City was a flat plain that might have been a hundred miles from New York, instead of just across the new bridge to Queens, and the only buildings that stood out above the ugly three-or four-story plateau of brick and concrete were the two ten-story factories making Sunshine Biscuits and Aeolian Pianos. The Synthex plant, modern as it was, was only four stories high, but it occupied an entire square block, and a billboard proclaimed its ownership of the adjacent property, used now as a parking area for two trucks and a few cars.

  Before meeting Molloy, he had been interviewed by the head of their New Products Development department, who had shown him around the laboratories and the factory at large; it was a satisfying experience. Synthex was not as up-to-date as Aldrich, but it was equipped for extensive projects in the field of synthetic fibers and substances. One of their major goals, in the experimental division, was to achieve a composition as tough as the black Bakelite of telephones but in a wide range of pale colors, a predictable achievement but still in the future.

  Garry had offered a minimum of explanation about his reasons for considering a change of jobs. Aldrich would soon concentrate on manufacturing in a field that did not interest him, he said; he wanted to stay in research. Artificial silks and allied products had become rather a specialty with him, so the Synthex ad had appealed to him.

  Garry liked Mr. Molloy. He could be described as “a scrappy little Irishman,” except that he was six feet one or two. He was pugnacious and vigorous in the way he spoke, and he dismissed Aldrich by saying, “In the trade they say he’s got a good head.” It did not interest Molloy why an Aldrich chemist was looking for another job, and Garry was relieved; he had been uncertain whether Aldrich activities were still a business secret on the outside.

  He glanced up again at the grey sky when he reached his car. The drizzle was little more than a pervasive mist, and in the west, across the river, there was a brightness that meant the March sunlight might soon break through. He obeyed an impulse, lowered the canvas top for the first time this year, and headed for the city.

  Rushing the season, he thought. It won’t be official spring for two weeks. Thank the Lord this winter is over and done with at last; it’s been the longest one ever. The fifth year of marriage—is that it? Maybe this happens to most couples in the fifth year, especially if they don’t have children.

  Recently he and Letty had been drifting along, like two becalmed sailboats separated by a small stretch of water, hailing each other easily enough when necessary, but most of the time intent, in a separate watchfulness, for the missing force to send them skimming along again.

  The day after Christmas, she had decided to take a few days off from the shop and visit her family up in Maine, and he had spent New Year’s Eve alone for the first time since their marriage. Undressing alone, going to bed alone, he had had the strangest sense of recognition, as if he and the quality of aloneness were not strangers in truth, but good friends who had been separated for a while and now were rejoined.

  The car was approaching Thirty-seventh Street, where he turned right if he were going to pick Letty up at the shop. He thought of taking her off for a drive in the early spring chill. It was only three o’clock, and Saturday afternoon was always too busy for her, but he drew in at the curb, fished a nickel from his pocket and went to a telephone.

  “Oh, Gare, I wish I could,” she said. “But you just caught me in the middle of an appointment.”

  “Can you let Mrs. R’s-and-T’s do it for you?”

  “Would that I could,” she said airily, signaling that she couldn’t talk freely. “I’ll tell you about it at dinner, darling.”

  “I have something to tell you too.”

  He waited until they were alone before he told her about Molloy and Synthex. This waiting to speak was another new phase in their life, brought about by their having their first maid, a Frenchwoman named Blanche, who had once worked for the Harretts at Oyster Bay. Letty had hired her during the winter and the thirty dollars a month for her wages were well spent, now that Letty scarcely ever got home before seven, but Garry rather disliked having Blanche in the odd little extra room next to theirs. Don’t worry about this little one, darling, I’ll make it into a cunning room for a baby.

  Twice during the winter, Letty had made an appointment with Dr. Haslitt; she had broken each one. She was busier than ever. Recently she had ventured into a new side line, again abetted and endorsed by Cynthia Aldrich. “People are too timid to do a house, Letty, without an expert’s say-so, and the fees for interior decorators are tremendous.” Already it was clear Letty would succeed in this too. For the first time, Garry’s attitude toward the shop began to change; its increasing success and dazzle were becoming a rival to her longing or need for a baby.

  “I did see the Synthex people today,” he said when Blanche had given them a final “Bon soir.”

  “Oh, Garry, you should have warned me.”

  “I did. I showed you the ad and said I was going to see them.”

  “I suppose you did.”

  “Well, this afternoon I went.”

  “Did you get a job?”

  “They only pay thirty-five dollars to start. I said I’d think about it.” She looked distressed, and he didn’t think it was about the smaller amount of money.

  “Actually being interviewed for another job,” she said. “If they hear about it at Aldrich, you could be fired. We’ve all been such friends.”

  It caught him unawares: if he quit he would overturn the applecart of their friendship. She was accusing him of ignoring what was important to her. All you think of is what you want. All you think of is war, war, war.

  “You really would take a job with this Molloy?” Letty asked. “If they come up a little bit?”

  “Yes.”
>
  “When?”

  “I’d have to give Aldrich enough notice, and stay until they got a new man.”

  “Oh, Garry,” she said, tears coming suddenly to her eyes. “We’ve been so happy this way.”

  “We’ll be happy again, wherever I work,” he said roughly. He pushed away from the table and went to the fireplace where an unneeded small fire was dying out. It will get better, he thought, once it actually happens, like the time Dad came back from San Diego. She’ll line up with me, just the way she did then, a kind of family feeling. She knows as well as I do what’s shaping up at Aldrich and she knows I’d never have a hand in it.

  Unconsciously he stretched out his hands before him. On the left was a two-inch scar, still livid, running from the base of his thumb in a jagged line to his middle knuckle, the result of an acid burn he had got in the laboratory, which had unaccountably festered until finally it had required minor surgery. Eventually, the surgeon assured him, the scar would turn white and scarcely show.

  He stared at it now; he rather liked it as it was, red and angry-looking. It was like a possession to be valued, the credentials of a research chemist.

  There was no further word from Molloy, and day by day Letty prayed that there would be none. After ten days or so, Garry said, “I guess he hired the guy he saw Monday,” and never spoke of Synthex again. She was not base enough to be glad he had lost out, but it was fortunate he would have more time to think, before he played ducks and drakes with his whole future.

  Cynthia Aldrich herself talked of Garry’s future, not long after Mark had told her that Garry was “being difficult” around the lab, had given notice that he was looking for another job, and said openly that he had already had one interview which led nowhere, but that he was keeping an eye out elsewhere.

  “You simply must dissuade him from making such a mistake,” Cynthia said gravely.