But it didn’t work out that way. He himself was dissatisfied with it, and he set it aside to do over. It was forced, he said, stilted. “In your own paper,” he told her, “you know what the reader knows; it’s been right on your own front page. But with somebody else’s readers, you have to stop, explain, fill in background. You are writing an essay, not an editorial.”
She asked to see what he had written; he refused. The next day he said it still needed more work; once again he did not mail it. On the third day she saw that the color had begun to rise in his forehead and it upset her. He was discouraged, he was angry, he was bored. It was not the kind of writing at which he was best. She almost wished he would not write a word on the assassination of the young Austrian Archduke, in that place in Serbia.
If he pressed too hard with these free-lance pieces, and if too many of them were rejected?
Fee wished she could put on blinders whenever she passed the white sign on the lawn. Nobody seemed to feel the way she felt about it.
The first time some people came to look at the house, she wanted to slam the front door in their faces. It was a man and a woman, and they looked things over as if it were their house already, staring, amazed at the plaster walls, talking to each other about them, ignoring Mama, who was explaining about letting a house settle before you put up wallpaper. Then they saw the stairs starting up from the back hall, and they laughed. For the first time in her life, Fee loved the stairs.
They finally said they would have to think it over, and it was like a last-minute escape. They hadn’t even asked the price, her mother said, and it meant they were not going to think it over at all. They were not interested at all.
“That’s good,” Fee said.
“Good?” Alexandra repeated. “You call that good?”
“What is the price?”
“Exactly what it cost us, not a penny more,” Alexandra said.
“How much did it?”
“The lots were four hundred dollars each,” Alexandra said proudly, “because this is ‘select property,’ up here on the hill, and no stores allowed, just houses. So that’s eight hundred, and building the house came to five thousand, two hundred.”
“Six thousand dollars,” Fee said. “Whew.”
“Minus the mortgage, of course. But even so, it’s wonderful, isn’t it, that we could save and put aside so much? And now when we are in such need of it, there it is.”
The next people did ask the price, but the house wasn’t exactly what they wanted. Some real estate people came, and they went about things like machines, zip zip and out. It was “a slow market,” they said; business hadn’t picked up from the dip last year, but any house with copper pipes and the best materials would find a buyer soon.
Each day that passed was like a present, Fee thought. Maybe it would take a long time before it actually happened. Fran said it would. After the first few days of getting used to the white sign, the tennis court worried Fran more than the house. Papa had written the owner of the land practically the minute he got off the paper, sending a final $3 check and saying he no longer wished to rent the property from him. Fran had been positive the unseen man would wreck the tennis court so they couldn’t play on it free of charge, but it was still there, and still “her court.”
“Selling the house isn’t even necessary,” she burst out to Fee one day. “He has enough money saved to last a year, but he’s too stingy to spend it.”
“How do you know?”
“From things,” Fran said with authority. “I can figure out our budget too, you know.”
“He never never would sell this house if he could help it,” Fee said, with equal authority.
“I don’t give a hoot any more. I’ll be earning my own living in one more year, don’t forget, and then I’m moving straight to New York. If I’m appointed to a school there, they can’t even kick up a fuss.”
“You’re getting to be more like Eli every minute.”
Fee walked away, wishing she could make Fran shut up about having only one more year at Jamaica Training School for Teachers. She herself had three more years at High, and then two at Training. If she went to Training.
But I won’t, she thought, I never will.
If she did go, she would have to teach, and the one surest thing in her life was that she would not be a teacher. Let Fran teach, let Eli teach, but for her, never. All her life she had said that, and it was truer than ever. What she wanted to do, what she wanted to be, she didn’t know. But it was something you started to be by going to college first.
Anne Miller was going to college in three years, and John, in two. Tom Ladendock was just back from his first year at Cornell, and he wasn’t even jealous of Fran and Nick Fanelli, because Nick went to Jamaica Training too, and if you were a college man, you didn’t mind about boys in places like that. Tom called Nick terrible names like Dago and Wop and he upset Franny horribly too by saying nobody like Nick could belong to his fraternity at Cornell. “He might as well be a little Jew-boy.” He remembered right away, and blushed deep red, and tried to take it back. He said Fran was different, and so was her little sister, but Fran said Cornell had certainly made him different, and she left him flat. That night she cried like anything.
Fee felt pretty horrible herself about it. And about being stuck right there in Barnett for the summer. Next month it would be worse because Anne and John were going back to Iowa for August, to stay at their grandfather’s, and she would have to get through a whole month without seeing John once. Fran might go flitting from Jack Purney to Tom Ladendock to Nick Fanelli—and then forget all of them the moment she saw Garry Paige again—but Fee wasn’t fickle and flirty, and how she could stand it after John left was impossible to figure out.
“Are you going to go to church every Sunday when we’re not here?” he asked one day, looking at her sideways.
“What a thing to ask,” Fee said with dignity. “Of course I am.”
“I’d never, if nobody was watching.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“But there’s one place I would go,” he said. “If somebody cute went with me.”
“Where?”
“To the new theater downtown.”
“When?”
“Tonight. Unless you have a previous engagement.”
Fee flew off to ask if she could. The few times she had ever been allowed to see vaudeville and a moving picture, her mother had taken her and Fran to Jamaica, but the new Barnett Theater had just been finished right on Main Street, and now she had been asked to go alone with a boy, which made it even newer.
“You’re fourteen, aren’t you?” her mother said, looking pleased herself. “Of course you can go. But, your word of honor: straight home afterwards.”
“But if he wants a chocolate frappe at Gray’s—”
“Naturally, a frappe at Gray’s too.”
Going out with a boy was glorious, Fee discovered. During the vaudeville acts, they sat and laughed and joked, but when it got dark for the picture, John took her hand and held it and put his fingers between her fingers, moving them around and squeezing them together, and she didn’t pull her hand away. She could hardly stand it after a while; this was what everybody meant about being thrilled; it was like the time he had taken her by the shoulders and tried to un-cave her chest.
Thrills weren’t always lovely. If the wrong people had a thrill, it was disgusting. A few nights ago, Fran and Nick Fanelli went out, and without knowing they had come back, Fee went to the kitchen for a drink of water, without bothering to put the light on.
There they were, out on the back porch, and she could see them. Nick was in the big wicker rocker out there, holding Fran on his lap, and they were kissing and doing things and it was sickening. She tiptoed out of the kitchen and up the stairs, but she couldn’t forget them down there, and couldn’t get over the feeling that she was going to vomit. Fran was nearly eighteen, but even so. Her own sister. It was awful.
The hall was jammed
to the last row, and Stefan Ivarin stood there waiting for the applause to die away so he could finish his sentence. The lecture was half over, and they had stopped him ten or fifteen times.
It was in an old loft building on Hester Street, on the night a strike vote was to be taken in the men’s cloak industry, and the A. F. of L. had done a big job of publicizing his appearance, “the first lecture this year by the East Side’s most famous speaker.”
With his first sentences, his old “feel for the audience” came back, unchanged, undiminished; their response was unchanged, undiminished. Here at least he was none the worse for wear, none the older, none the weaker.
He talked not only about their strike but also about the bloody strike in Ludlow; he contrasted the methods of a moderate union like their own with those of an extremist union, their leadership with I.W.W. leadership out West. The labor movement, the socialist movement itself, he warned them, was in danger of a split, a division, a mortal cleavage between the old-line socialists who believed in progress wedded to responsibility, and the newfangled “action boys” who thought that terror tactics were excusable if they themselves used them.
“Terror gives birth to terror,” he shouted. “Violence by strikers, wrecking property, smashing machinery—I say to you, these only breed a smashing of workers’ heads by company cops and state militia and even Federal troops.”
The heat climbed in his face as he spoke, in his body, along his whole flesh, but he felt it glowing and beneficent, not threatening. The pressure in his veins now was a kinetic energy, not anger and revolt and scorn at himself or at Fehler or at his own situation. On this platform, facing these poor devils who looked up to him for guidance, for the spirit they would need for what they had to do, here he felt strong and free of concern about sickness or age. Since medicine was still half quackery, he would take his chances now with his own diagnosis: when your heart begins to be high again, a high blood pressure can do you no damage.
Alexandra was in the audience. She had temporarily lost three of her pupils and four of her lecture group, off with their children for their annual snatches of sea and clean air, and she had a free evening. She had asked whether he would mind having her there in the hall for his “first lecture,” and he had said he would like it. He meant it. She’s been a wonder, he thought, as he so often had in their long and tumultuous years. A little pain was in it when he had thought it while he was still a prisoner to helplessness, but that pain was gone now. She was a rock. During those months just past, she had dropped her maddening faults, her tears, her hurt feelings, and become a rock for them all to cling to.
Now, during a particularly wild burst of applause and stamping from the audience, he glanced at her, sitting in the first row. She was gazing up at him, responsive, enraptured for all the world to see, her eyes the shining eyes of the girl, Alexandra Bartschoi, who used to come to every lecture he ever gave when they were both young.
Letty looked at the postmark and tore open the letter. It was from Mt. Desert and it was signed, “Please do, Peter.” A lightness entered her heart.
Dear Letty and Garry,
This is to remind you about the latchstring being out. I can’t recall when you take your vacation but I hope this isn’t too late. Hank and Cindy are still off in England, as I think you know, and it’s been mostly their kid and the governess up here so far. But now I’m hoping to have a few amusing weekends, and this is to ask you for either the first or second in August. They’ll be back by then, and it will be like old times if you say yes.
Please do, Peter.
They had already taken their vacation, starting as usual over the Fourth of July, and they had got back only two days ago. Neither of them had suggested Canada this year; neither had remarked on the absence of an invitation from Hank and Cindy, Connie and Proff, or Peter himself, but Letty knew the lack of it in her heart and wondered if it had some special meaning.
She never spoke of it to Garry, and all he thought of was where to go for their holiday; she was glad to leave it all to him.
“White Sulphur Springs,” he finally said. “There’s a new hotel down there, very fashionable, very expensive.”
“It sounds lovely.
“We drive through Washington, and we could take a day for sightseeing.”
“I’ve always wanted to see Washington.”
“But what about our visit to the family?”
“I’d write Father and Mother and say we’re heading for the Sunny Southland instead. Maybe we could manage a weekend later.”
“If we took a Pullman up instead of driving, we could.”
Maybe during the first or second weekend in August, she thought now, and combine the two. That would mean Garry asking for a couple of days off at Aldrich, and so soon after his vacation, he wouldn’t want to.
She leaned back and let Peter’s letter drop on the table. She was still at breakfast; during the hot weather, with her best clients off at their summer places, she did not hurry to the shop the way she did at the height of the season. Mrs. Everrett could manage the ordinary customers, and it was lovely to dawdle around a little after Garry left for work each day.
“Is there any more coffee, Blanche?” she asked. “I’ll take it in my room, please.”
She took Peter’s letter with her. The tall windows were bright with summer, the tree leafy and full in the sun. The sea around Mt. Desert would be aquamarine on such a day, Peter and Hank’s lovely old boat would slip across the water, with the slap-slap of the sea on her hull, and of the wind on her canvas. She could feel herself, lazy and sunburned in a bathing suit, sitting on the deck again, gazing up at Peter until she realized she was staring as if he were an actor on a stage and she a member of the audience who had paid for the right to watch his every gesture.
Perhaps the only way would be for them to visit her parents in Rockland as they planned, and then have her take another day or two by herself to go on to Mt. Desert, while Garry went back to town for Monday morning. He was always sweet about that, no matter what else went wrong between them. Women were more than appendages of their husbands, he said; had he ever acted as if it was just talk?
Blanche appeared with fresh coffee, on a Sheffield tray laid with her best Georgian silver, by Emes and Barnard, 1792. A sense of luxury suffused Letty, and slowly she read the letter once more.
“Please do, Peter.”
It had a special sound in her mind, not insistent and yet rather commanding. Maybe I will, she thought.
Sixteen days of the summer vacation had gone by, when Stefan Ivarin suddenly thought, Nothing is worth this. Poverty averted is excellent in theory, but if insanity is the price, then let poverty come.
For sixteen days there had been no school for his daughters and all their energetic friends. He glanced out at the tennis court, which seemed to lie just under his window, as if it had developed the faculty of creeping closer during this first summer of having the whole family at home. There were six or eight of Fran’s friends there, going off in their particular style of laughter, insufferably full of sex awareness as well as noise.
Fee and her religious duenna, Anne Miller, were close at hand, too, on the back porch. At the moment they had forgotten their twin devotions to God and Boys, and were playing some thumping game that shook the house. It involved Shag, causing frenzied rushes and whanging against the copper screening, so that Stefan kept awaiting the whining tear of metallic mesh.
And in the parlor, mysteriously delayed long past her usual schedule, Alexandra was doing her morning dancing to the accompaniment of that eternal Strauss lollipop she called a waltz.
Suddenly he consulted a narrow strip of celluloid propped against his inkwell. The 1914 calendar was there in entirety, and showed him there were nearly two months to go before education would again claim the daytimes of the young. An intolerable stretch of time for a man at last making some headway as a functioning human being.
He stood still, listening. Fran, Fee, the Strauss waltz.
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He had to get rid of them.
They had taken it very well, all three, the dictum that there could be no extravagances this year like going off to the seashore. But, to his surprise, he had not.
Was there any way, now that he felt a little less pessimistic about what lay ahead, to get them out of the house for the rest of the summer? Perhaps for three or four weeks, if not for the rest of the summer?
The vision of them gone was entrancing. The familiar lost sensation of being alone in the house suddenly returned, floating into him like a silken fog. Alone, silent, untended, asked no questions, offered no solace. He could feel himself going downstairs in the morning to start the coffee, going out for the two papers, folded into thirds and interlocked, waiting for him on the porch in their pristine lumpishness. Since the Sarajevo affair, he had stopped telling himself he ought to cut the morning newspaper bill in half by giving up either the World or the Times; it was impossible to give up either one now. Never had an extra penny been better spent, nor the extra nickel on Sundays.
In any case, the saving of pennies and nickels no longer seemed so imperative. Where did optimism he buried when it was gone, and why did it seem so natural when it returned?
In hard reality, there was not yet much to be optimistic about, and yet here he was, daring to think of using up fifty dollars of their savings to send them off to their tent for at least a month.
His one lecture, after all, was not the only one he had on the schedule. The A. F. of L. had signed him for no less than six during their annual convention in the early fall. More than that, he had their assurances, backed up by word from Gompers, that they would count on him for two appearances each month throughout the year, usually in New York, but occasionally a night’s trip away. That was the minimum, at ten dollars each, and since when did a year go by in American labor where a minimum of lectures could suffice?
The Democratic Party had approached him just last week for their campaign in the city elections in November. Thirty dollars each was their rate, but to talk to labor not as a socialist but as a Tammany boy was not to talk to labor at all.
First Papers Page 46
