First Papers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  She stepped back to the curb to get a larger view. It was so stylish to be way up here on Madison at Seventieth, and to have a second floor that was hers as well, half for an extra showroom and half for her own workshop. Last fall she had followed a hunch and sent Josh Flick to a trade school to learn upholstering, and faithful Josh, for all his limp and “looking peculiar,” had turned into an expert at rebuilding old sofas and chairs, from the frames and springs and webbing up through the final covering with the costliest of fabrics. Now he left the packing and cleaning to another man she had hired, though he still insisted on polishing the brass doorknob outside— “for luck.” He made three times the dollar a day with which he had started, and was worth every dime of it.

  The window was superb. The lemony sweep of the satin draperies at each side was so much more elegant than the red damask of old; it was more formal, rather cold, but much more fashionable. The red damask would seem obvious to her now; it did at home, in the living room, but Garry still liked it and there was no point in rushing things. Next fall, if they renewed the lease, she could broach the idea of the same lemony-yellow satin there too. Duplication again. As Josh might say, “for luck.”

  But who knew what would happen by next fall?

  Letty turned away from her windows. She hailed several cabs before she got one, and realized she would be late. She kept forgetting that she wasn’t around the corner from Tiffany’s, where it had taken only a flash to walk to Thirty-fourth and into the great lobby, either to find him already there, or to seat herself and wait for him to come.

  She liked it when she got there first, despite the advice in the ladies’ magazines about not seeming overeager about a man. She could watch for him to come in, and when Peter did catch his first sight of her, she could see the change sweep over his face, and it made her happy. He was forty-five now, distinguished and wonderful-looking, and as the sudden gleam took charge, vital and commanding. For nearly a year they had been seeing each other for these secret meetings, usually at the Waldorf or the Vanderbilt, usually for tea, occasionally for lunch, and in absolute innocence, except for the central fact that they were in love.

  Did anyone suspect? Did Garry never doubt the message from Blanche, nor wonder at the frequency with which Mrs. Everrett or Miss McNaught told him she was “out shopping with a client,” if he telephoned while she was meeting Peter for lunch?

  Luncheon. Tea. Once in a while, an hour in his entrancing house, conscious of the servants. But even without them there, they would have limited themselves just as they did. Peter wanted nothing clandestine and guilty, any more than she did. He would rather wait. He was so sure.

  Letty sighed. Sudden sighs, deep and slow, were a new part of her life; she couldn’t stop them or head them off. She knew it was pure nerves, but it worried her. Did she sigh the same way at home, in front of Garry?

  “At last,” Peter’s voice said. She looked up. The cab had stopped and he was there, on the curb, paying off the cabbie.

  “Darling,” she whispered.

  She was late getting home, too, and Garry seemed strange when she did get there. He was just sitting in the Benjamin Randolph wing chair, finishing a drink, not reading, not dressed to go, not even shaved and showered. He looked at her in an especially thoughtful way as she came in, and a squirm of fear went through her. She would collapse at the first word of where were you? whom with? Not that Garry ever would. Even if he did suspect that she was in love with Peter, it wouldn’t be his style to “prosecute” her. He probably would call it quits instead and break up for good.

  “You haven’t forgotten Cindy and Hank?” she said.

  He shook his head and glanced at the new watch on his wrist but still made no move.

  “If you’d rather stay home,” she blurted out unexpectedly.

  “But you want to go.”

  “I could go anyway. I could tell Cindy you were running a cold and a fever, or something.”

  Relief was mixed with his surprise, and as she went off to dress she felt relief herself. How often she had wanted to go by herself without saying so, and here she had blurted it out and it was so easy! It was no longer that she wanted to escape war talk at parties. There was no way of shutting it off any more, no matter where you went. Now it wasn’t just the Garrys and Ottos who talked about the war—it was everybody, everywhere. Half had voted for Wilson because he kept us out of it, and half had voted against him because he was being mushy-headed, with all his peace offers and his talk about all the nations forming a league. Garry, of course, still didn’t fit in with either group.

  She no longer really listened to any of it. It bored her, they bored her, all of them, every one. Garry, yes, Garry. She probably was becoming a “little peculiar” herself. The first time she had ever given herself away had surprised her more than it did Garry. It was terrible.

  Letty shuddered, remembering. It had been New Year’s Eve, the first one after the war began, and there was a big dance at the Grintzers’. People said it was the gayest, wildest New Year’s Eve anybody could remember, especially people who had been to Times Square and Broadway, with mobs gathering early for that new trick the Times had, lowering a big lighted ball from its top at the last sixty seconds of the old year. By then, they all knew it wasn’t going to be “out of the trenches by Christmas”—but they were gloriously happy anyway. And at the Grintzers’, that same excitement kept building up, and a few minutes before twelve, the dancing stopped and all the husbands and wives moved close to each other, watching the big ormolu clock. When it started to strike, she said, “Happy New Year, darling,” and Garry said, “Happy New Year, Letts,” in his old way, and they kissed.

  Then Garry said, just under his breath, “Dear God, end it for them,” and though she knew that his religion was a deep part of him, a ball of anger exploded in her that even at this happy moment he had to lug in the war and the wounded. Without meaning to, without knowing she was going to say a word, she heard herself say, “And for us too.”

  Garry thought that she was echoing his prayer, and he said something sweet, but she was staggered at what she did mean.

  Since that night it had grown within her, like an enemy-tumor, until by now it was unbearable to go around carrying it. She didn’t have courage yet to tell him she wanted to end it between them; she couldn’t get herself to the point. Never had there been a divorce in the Brooks family; her father would be indignant and her mother heartbroken and mortified.

  And then came Peter, and a hundred new emotions, and time passed like flashes of lightning.

  Letty raced through her dressing and Garry took her down and found a cab for her. The moment she drove off her spirits lifted; she was wearing her new pink crepe and could hardly breathe, but she knew how she looked in it. Peter was not to be there; he insisted that they should not “manage” to be asked to the same places, and this was a group of Hank’s classmates and their wives.

  But Hank talked about his brother at dinner, and it was a delight to sit there and listen. Peter had put all his own holdings into things like Hercules Powder and Bethlehem Steel, and Du Pont, at the very start of the war, and persuaded his clients to let him shift their portfolios the same way. The results were uniformly unbelievable, often as high as two or three hundred per cent up in a year. Somebody implied that Peter and Hank were millionaires, and Hank did not deny it. But his brother deserved the credit, he said. “There isn’t a war baby Peter doesn’t check in on. He’s one of the men the Street watches.”

  A new joy took possession of Letty, oddly proprietary, but at the same time submissive, as if she were a little girl and Peter her superior in every way. A superior who was also her petitioner. The paradox added a private delight to her evening.

  When she got home at two, Garry was asleep, and she undressed without turning the light on. Though it made him restless to sleep in a closed room, he had kept the window shut so that the freeze of the February night wouldn’t fill the apartment, and she was suddenly irked that
he should be so considerate. He must know something was wrong; he simply must. Why, the last time they had, must have been—when? How long back? Two months? Three?

  No matter how modern she was, she could never think about these things or put words to them the way other wives did. It had been months, that was all, and Garry hadn’t even tried or asked.

  “Is that you?” Garry said, turning over in bed. She murmured yes and stood still, waiting for him to sink into sound sleep again. But in another second he turned on the light and asked whether she had had a good time, and who was there.

  Again she was irked. To tell him about the evening was risky; she could not say it was full of business talk and war talk, but the ordinary kind, the all-right kind. She might blurt out that Proff and Connie were there and that Proff asked, “If we do get into it, will Garry be like those conchies in England?”

  “It was wonderful,” she said. “But I shouldn’t have stayed so late. I’m so sleepy.”

  It didn’t work. He was wide awake, and soon he got out of bed and put his bathrobe on. She said, “Can I fix you something to eat?” but before he could answer, she suddenly cried out, “Oh, Garry, I can’t bear it any more. I don’t know what’s happened, but it’s been happening so long and I just can’t manage it any longer.”

  “Manage what?”

  “We’re both so unhappy, if we’d admit it,” she said.

  “Manage what any longer?” he repeated.

  “I don’t mean get a divorce,” she said, “just not live here any more, not be together here any more.” She was not looking at him. At the word “here,” she waved her hand at their two beds, at the tall windows and the familiar garden beyond, then back to the fireplace.

  He watched her hand carefully, as if he needed to remember which items she indicated. “You want us to break up our marriage,” he said. Then he went into the living room and turned on all the lamps, one by one. Through the corridor of space past the kitchen, she could see him. He did not look surprised; he was calm, as if he were thinking about an experiment in the lab.

  “Maybe for a while,” she said, following after him. “Maybe until the war is over—”

  “Some wars are never over,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  She began to cry, softly. “I’m so unhappy,” she said, “it’s so terrible—”

  He said, “I’ll move out in the morning.”

  “I can go,” she said. “I never even thought who would be the one to leave.”

  “Letty, cut that,” he said, suddenly angry. “So far we haven’t made a fool of the other’s intelligence. Please don’t start.”

  They looked at each other without moving. Then she said, “I suppose you wouldn’t consent to staying here and let me be the one to leave.” Her words seemed to make him angry in a new way, and she wished she had not said them. He went quickly back to the bedroom, dressed, and left the apartment. “I’m going for a walk,” he said. It was nearly three.

  She stared at the door as it closed behind him. A hundred times she had come close to telling him, usually after some awful evening they had been through at somebody’s house. And now tonight, when he hadn’t even been at the party, tonight it had come spilling out of her throat.

  The telephone rang and she ran to it. “Oh, Garry, I’m so sorry—”

  “Let’s not go into feelings now,” he said. “I changed my mind about the walk; I’m at the Brevoort. I’ll send for my clothes tomorrow—get Blanche to put them together, will you?”

  “Of course, but I—”

  “I’ll stay here until I can find a place to live in. I’ll keep the car. You can have everything else.”

  “That wouldn’t be fair to you,” she protested. “All our lovely things.”

  “You keep them. Good night.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  STEFAN IVARIN STOOD STILL, considering the sign on the rising bank of ground in front of his house. Against the new snow, it was no longer a clear strong white, but a listless grey, its legend, HOUSE FOR SALE, rather faded and blurred. It tilted over at a slight angle, and a lazy indifference seemed to exude from it, as if it no longer took itself seriously, nor expected anyone else to take it seriously.

  “We ought to take it down,” Alexandra kept saying, but he always said, “Better leave it alone.”

  “But we’re both doing so well, Stiva.”

  “Yes, but I’d leave it there.”

  “We wouldn’t accept the best of offers by now,” she said.

  “Just the same, if you don’t mind.”

  It was a talisman, he thought with some amusement, gazing at it, and then continuing on his way to Main Street for the first evening editions. In those first days of despair nearly three years ago, the sign had been for them both a reminder that they really had something set aside, more solid, more substantial than the $1460 in the bank. Their equity in the house had given them courage and a sense of safety when they needed it most. That equity, of course, had proved an unavailable blessing. But putting the sign out there had been action; it revealed their willingness to take steps, no matter how drastic, and that in itself had been a source of new vigor and confidence to each of them.

  It also was a valuable object lesson to the girls; it told them as words never could tell them, that there were not limitless quantities of money available to fulfill their every wish, whether it were Fran’s endless need for new clothes and new trimmings for her tennis court, or Fee’s periodic spasms about going to college, which she doubtless soon would outgrow.

  Now that Alexandra and he would reject any offer for the house, it was pointless to keep the sign there. Yet he clung to it, like an ignoramus who thought it had proved its power to ward off the evil eye.

  Between them, he thought comfortably, they had indeed warded off the worst. Since they had put their house on the block, their fortunes had climbed upward—in every particular except his writing. Miraculous though it seemed, his heavy schedule of lecturing did not shoot up his blood pressure in any lethal way; both doctors had to agree that he was physically better when he was not in a black mood, and lecturing always lifted his spirits, elated him, made him feel at his best. These mysteries were beyond the medicos, that was certain; if, because of holidays, he had periods with no lectures, and did nothing but rest and stay quiet, his blood pressure soon was at an alarming high. When he was up on the platform, excited and concentrated day after day, it behaved remarkably well.

  The second campaign for Wilson last year, and the wartime attacks on the slightest demands of labor as “unpatriotic,” both had sent his speaking schedule to new heights. By the end of the year his lectures had brought in very nearly the same money as he would have made had he still been on the paper.

  The Paper. No longer did a snake leap and writhe in his bowels at the thought of it, the sight of it, the mention of it. No longer was it a painful pleasure to see Abe Kesselbaum, and hear the latest news of it, a pleasure vitiated at first by an insensate envy and rage, yet a pleasure he could not deny himself because it satisfied his undiminishing interest in what was happening to Fehler, to Borg, to Mrs. Landau and Jacob Steinberger, a man he could have enjoyed getting to know had Steinberger not been bound to Miriam Landau, that female Uriah Heep.

  The paper’s circulation, Abe kept reporting, was “up again.” It kept rising with cliff-like abruptness for over two years and then had leveled off, holding steady at 200,000, second by a few thousand only to the Forward. The profits, despite the greater costs and much larger staff, had gone up sharply too. Nothing was too cheap to get by, either in text or in pictures, though Steinberger had finally balked and persuaded Mrs. Landau to vote against one expose of working girls seduced by factory owners, not on the ground of vulgarity but on the livelier one of possible libel suits. This had been rather recent; Abe had told him of it the last time they met, told it with relish, as Ivarin had heard it with relish. He found himself mortified that he shoul
d be pleased, but pleased he was.

  “You know Borg and how he’d take it,” Abe Kesselbaum said with a malicious grin.

  “I suppose so.”

  “He had talked it over with every living soul on the paper beforehand. Remember the way he talked to everybody about his damned survey until you had to call him off?”

  “I remember.”

  “He’s ten times worse by now. Whatever idea he gets, he chews off every ear on the paper about it, from the press room up. So when he was voted down on his seduced girls in the January meeting, he took it as a public kick in the teeth, thank God.”

  Ivarin laughed with unfeigned pleasure. With Abe he had never dissembled; he never would. Of late they were meeting again in the café next door to the paper. Ivarin still had a special sensation each time he walked the familiar route from the Delancey Street station, but for a long time now the “specialness” had been free of that early bitterness of longing to be back on the paper as its editor. There was still a faint sadness, a deprivation, but no longer anything strong enough to be destroying.

  This easing-off was not true of his feeling toward Fehler. It was Fehler who had killed him on the paper, and he had no ability to love his enemies. He was delighted that the Times had climbed even higher than the Jewish News, to a steady 325,000 circulation and five millions in advertising, and all this without any of the trashy tricks and gaudy splash of Fehler’s paper.

  Well, Ivarin thought now as he approached the newsstand, I’ve done well enough, despite Mr. Fehler. We’ve done well enough, rather.

  Alexandra had been remarkable, and that was a fact. Not once had she tired or complained of working too hard, and by now she was ready to lord it over him when the word “lecture” was used. Three separate groups of immigrant women she had now, on three separate evenings, each group held about twenty, and in the war-born prosperity, the fee was twenty cents, so some twelve dollars a week came in this way, in addition to the ten or twelve more from her many lessons.