First Papers
Page 50
Prosperity, he thought wryly. In a way we are both war profiteers. He had reached the stationery store where he went twice each day for the latest papers, unless he was out of town. The owner had his three papers ready for him, the Evening World, the Sun and the miserable Journal with its thousand distortions, that he read as if he were still an editor and bound to keep track of the entire field. For him, in truth, there was no such thing as a glut of reading about the war. For him it was not only the war it was for everybody else: for a man born in Russia more than half a century ago, it was also the incredible possibility he had dreamed of and youthfully worked for and endlessly believed in. From the first days of the war, he had found a never-slaked thirst and hunger in him for news, but in addition there was a special passion for war news involving Russia. Ever since the loss of a million men on the Eastern Front, since the rumors of the demoralized army, the workers openly threatening strikes, his political sixth sense had been telling him that gigantic news was in the offing. History was on the march in Russia again.
Unconsciously, Ivarin speeded his pace as he walked up the hill. Drubhinov—was he still alive, that marvelous being who had drawn him into the movement, and then arranged his escape from prison? He had never written from America; it was their code. Foreign stamps and postmarks awoke the interest of the authorities too deeply, too fast.
Of course Drubhinov is alive, Ivarin thought. Petya was my age, why shouldn’t he be? He suddenly saw the fair-haired handsome young face, and longing stirred in him. They had quarreled about extremism as they became closer friends, quarreled over Stefan’s conviction that even within a revolutionary movement, extremism was a proposal to exchange an old tyranny for a new.
“You and your tactic of moderateness, both of you belong in England,” Petya once told him. “Or in France or America. Not here in Russia.”
Had Drubhinov stuck fast to that rejection of moderation? In the 1905 Revolution, then, he would have sided with the Bolsheviki, opposed to Stefan and the Mensheviki. Enemies!
Stefan let his mind drift and speculate. Soon Shag was upon him, and in the house Alexandra greeted him as if she had been lying in wait for him. “Maybe you can help me remember,” she said before he had shaken the snow out of his overcoat and overshoes. “I want to tell my other two groups that story about Joey and the pictures, but I can’t remember how I started it. Can you?”
“Something about wanting to tell them of a little boy with the most wonderful manners—”
“That’s it. Just a second—I’ll write it down.”
He watched her scribble it on the back of a bill from the grocery store, and he said, “I told you, you should always make notes so you won’t forget.”
She looked at him uncertainly. “I’ve tried, but it’s no good. Later on, I don’t know what the notes are supposed to lead me to.”
“Then write it all out, like a letter. Make believe you are writing somebody all about it, perhaps in a letter to me. ‘Dear Stiva, Today I told Sophie’s group about a little boy named Joey who had the most wonderful manners.’ Do you follow me?”
“And go on to the end?”
“The idea is to keep you from stiffening up and getting formal. Just you try writing down the two words, ‘Dear Stiva,’ and see if it doesn’t help.”
“I’ll try it right now.” Supper was late that night, and she looked weary when they had it. But at about midnight, she appeared upstairs at his desk, saying, “Could you glance at this?”
The pages she handed him were from his own writing tablet; he frowned at the larceny, and began to read.
Dear Stiva,
Let me tell you about a little boy with the most wonderful manners. His name is Joey. He is in kindergarten. In his school one day, the teacher was giving some of the modern tests, to tell whether a child was quick-minded and attentive to detail.
In order to do this, she handed Joey a picture, and said, “Tell me what you see, Joey.”
The first picture was of a woman with two ears on each side of her head.
Joey stared at the picture, turned it upside down and then turned it right side up again.
“Thank you, it’s wonderful,” he said, handing it back.
“Is anything wrong with the picture, Joey?” his teacher said.
“No, ma’am, it’s nice,” he said, and with a polite little smile he accepted the next picture she gave him. This one was of a horse and wagon. The horse had the right number of ears, but he had only two legs, one in front and one in back. Joey stared at this picture, until his teacher said, “Is anything wrong, Joey?”
Then he said, “No, ma’am, it’s nice,” and smiled politely once more.
Then the teacher gave him a third picture of a dog with three legs, another of a tricycle with five wheels, and last of all, a top spinning on its thick bottom, with its metal point in the air. Each time, Joey gave the same answer. So the teacher decided he was backward about “perception” and she sent a report to the principal, who then asked Joey’s mother to come to school to hear the sad news.
Poor mother! She was heartbroken about her little Joey, and when she got home, she asked him if he had not noticed that the woman had four ears, and the horse only two legs, and so on. Joey burst out laughing.
“Sure,” he yelled. “But you always slap me if I say it’s rotten, so I didn’t.”
From this little story of Joey, maybe you will see a moral: Tell your child to be honest and say just what he or she thinks. Don’t, please, force the poor little one always to say “it’s lovely, it’s perfect, thank you.”
Maybe you don’t think you are forcing your own child to be such a hypocrite. But if you have ever scolded him for saying “it’s no good,” or “I don’t want it,” when you or anybody else gives him something, why, then you’re in danger of having a little Joey on your hands, instead of a good lively little soul who says everything from the heart.
So stop nagging at your little boy or girl to say “Thank you, it’s wonderful,” and let them say what they think. In the long run, life will tell them when to be tactful. You needn’t worry about it now.
Stefan began to smile almost at the first paragraph, and at the end he let her see he was delighted. “It’s good,” he said, “quite pleasant reading, human and natural all the way through.”
“Oh, Stiva.”
“You ought to do just this,” he said, “every time you give your women some anecdote they seem to like. You know the other two groups will like it too, and you have it saved up as soon as you write it down.”
“It does fix it in my own mind,” she agreed. “I might even read it aloud to Anna’s group tomorrow night.”
“When you’re through with Joey,” he said jovially, “don’t throw him away. Give him to me.”
“What for?”
“A souvenir, should I say?” He looked at her mysteriously. “No, that’s not it. I want to—” he broke off and said, with a touch of irritation, “Do I have to account for every impulse I may have?”
Several days went by before he said, “Are you through with Joey or not?”
“Yes, I forgot,” she said and went to her sewing room for it. Forgot, he thought. She’s probably beside herself wondering why I should want it.
“And here is another one I did,” Alexandra said, giving him a set of new pages as well. “This one is about spanking, about what you said to Eli about making a liar out of Webby. But I didn’t give any names.”
This time Stefan did not seem amused as he read. But he read with attention, even absorption, and then said, “That’s it too, a different genre, but it will catch at them.”
He put the Joey pages into his pocket and as soon as he was alone at his desk, he inked out “Dear Stiva,” and sent them off to the editor of Abend, a small evening newspaper that had been in existence since the first winter of the war. He signed the pages only “Alexandra Bartschoi,” though on the back of the envelope, he wrote, “Ivarin, 800 Hill Avenue, Barnett, L. I.”
Garry found a three-room furnished flat in the town of Flushing, not more than a twenty-minute drive from the Synthex plant. It was on the second floor of a two-family house, ugly as sin, with one saving grace: a view of Flushing Bay from the front windows.
Even in the denuded landscape of early March, with the low-lying ground still patched with smoky snow, there was a sparkle to the water that cheered him when he went about in the unfamiliar morning silence, shaving, dressing and getting his breakfast. He liked to cook, he discovered, but it was so new, so abnormal almost, to wake alone, to spend this first hour of the day in total solitude, that each day began with heaviness. He wondered if Letty was finding it the same experience; she had Blanche, of course, a human presence around. It must make some small difference.
He would get used to it. His parents had invited him—he had known they would, and he had known that he would refuse—to live at home again, but he was twenty-eight, a man who had been married for seven years, nearly eight, and he couldn’t go back to being a child in his parents’ house again, not even as a temporary thing.
He had stayed at the Brevoort for only a week, and had found his new place on the first day he had searched for it. Apart from wanting to be near his work, he had no specifications for the way he wanted to live; to his surprise, it was a relief to find himself in harsh and unlovely surroundings, plain and dull to the point of idiocy. He did enjoy fine furniture and the soft gleam of old wood and silver, but suddenly now, in their absence, he realized that there was a suction in them too, pulling at your independence of judgment about what you liked, what was good, what was attractive. Unless it were “important,” you were obligated to disapprove of it.
He was exaggerating, of course; Letty would be the first to say, “Why, Gare, you never heard me preach any slavish following of period or that sort of thing.”
“Why, Gare.” He heard her voice saying the two syllables, and knew the sense of loss in a quick plunge inward and downward at the core of his body. The first days at the Brevoort he had been berserk with fury at her, and at Peter Stiles whom she had never mentioned, he realized at last, for a solid year or more, though she chatted often about everybody else they knew. By the end of a week he had cooled down, again surprised at the speed with which he could accept the end of their marriage. For longer than he liked to admit, he had known the end was approaching; again and again, after some miserable set-to, he had expected her to issue the ultimatum. How often had his mind gone waiting-empty then, like a beaker drained of its contents, waiting for refilling.
Even so, her words had come with stunning suddenness, and that suddenness could infuriate him still. There was a female cleverness to it, a particular kind of attack no man would ever think up or act upon. She must have known all winter that things were in their last moments between them; he had not made love to her for months, nor had she sought him, telling each other in the most blatant way that love had vanished. And yet that final night, she had made it seem, not a mutual parting, but as if she had dismissed him.
He looked about his ugly flat, as if assessing the distance there was between them. The sickly tan of the walls was matched by the unhealthy pink of the shower curtain in the bathroom, where he was shaving. Behind him, visible in the mirror, was the bedroom and a swathe of the parlor, with its “store-bought” furniture and pictures, its starched lace curtains, fancy lamps and endless knickknacks.
He thought of Letty seeing it, or their friends. “Or Cynthia Aldrich,” he said to his image in the mirror and this time he smiled.
The telephone behind him rang, and his mother’s cheerful voice asked him to dinner on Saturday. “Same time?” he asked, and thanked her, meaning it. It was already a habit, driving out to Barnett once a week, to have “one home meal” with his parents, and it was solidly pleasant, not a dutiful chore.
It wasn’t that they agreed with him; it was that their terms were the same; wrong meant wrong, not unpatriotic. And when they went, as in the old days, to visit the Ivarins, who did not agree at all, who never yielded a point, there was a kind of good muscular strength in their arguing, unrelated to the vapid exchanges with most of his opponents.
The Ivarin girls were pleasant too. He did not think Francesca quite the beauty his mother called her; she was pretty but she was vain, and it flawed her. Fira was a surprise. She wasn’t a child any more, and it was easy to see why his mother always pronounced her “striking.” There was something intense in her and something original. He had never noticed until his mother spoke one night of “Fee’s big secret,” and even then he had been mainly amused at the idea of anybody taking fifteen finals over in a lump. But the amusement left its residue, and the residue made him notice Fee as an individual instead of as “the Ivarin kid,” which she had always been. She did strike you, that was true.
Fee was ashamed about being so weak about her secret. She had told it to her mother, of course, and to Fran, because she had to, what with staying up studying night after night until at least two o’clock, and she also had to tell it in a letter to John at Iowa State, to explain why she hadn’t written for so long. Then she decided he would probably say something about her plan in a letter back home to his family, so Anne would know, and it would be awful if Anne was hurt at finding it out in so roundabout a way, so she confided it to Anne too. And to be fair to Juanita Endoza, she simply had to tell her also. Then Ginny Smith, the captain of the girls’ basketball team, bawled her out one day for not playing her top game at Center, and she was so upset at Ginny’s tone, she found herself explaining just why she seemed lackadaisical on the court. Even Trudy Loheim, when Trudy smugly said that by fall she would be earning twenty dollars a week.
“Next fall,” Fee said airily, “I might be in college.”
“You’re kidding.”
“If I win my scholarship, I’m not.”
“What scholarship?” Trudy asked suspiciously.
There was nothing to do but explain. But by now, so many people knew the secret of her extra study schedule that Fee began to worry about her father finding out. Mr. Fitch’s advice about getting his permission kept coming back to her, and she was almost glad when her mother at last took a stand.
“You’re putting a burden on me, Fee,” Alexandra said sternly one evening. “I have never kept secrets from Papa, and I have never lied to him, and you are forcing me to do both.”
“Oh, Mama.”
“You sound just like Franny. I’m not a big boobie, and you needn’t sound as if I am. Besides, you’ll discover that this is the surest way of all to get him angry, when he discovers what’s been going on behind his back for months and months. He thinks you’re outgrowing this idea of college.”
Her father was just back from one of his lecture trips, taking “a swing,” as he called it, from Scranton and Wilkes-Barre to Milwaukee and St. Louis and Toledo and Buffalo, although she could never remember what order they came in. He loved his swings. He never came right out and admitted that they were fun, that he liked going to diners on trains and living at hotels and having all his fares and bills paid for him by the union or whoever was sending him. But everybody knew he loved the change and the travel, the crowds he drew everywhere, the applause.
Fee always thought of him as a lecturer now, and if anybody asked what her father did, she answered, “Lecture,” and it sounded silly. She could remember him as an editor of the paper, but it was almost like remembering “before the war.” It was that way, too, when she tried to imagine him rolling a cigarette and smoking it, though that bag of tobacco was still on top of his desk, and the half-empty packet of rice papers. Even the las
t box of matches he had used was there; when you were dusting his room, you had to be careful with these three-year-old relics.
The night before he had gone on this swing, she heard him complaining to her mother about the nightly waste of electric lights, and after her mother’s explanation, he had said, “Am I supposed to take that literally—that she’s studying each night until two in the morning?”
“It’s true.”
“Is this routine performance now at that high school of hers?” he said.
While he was gone her mother kept on at her: she had better tell him soon. “Oh, all right,” Fee said, at last, none too pleasantly, “I’ll tell him.”
But when the moment came, she said, “Papa,” and then stopped. He said, “Yes?” and she looked at her mother in a wild petition. “Go on, Fee,” her mother said, “tell.”
“What is this, a game of riddles?” he said good-naturedly. “Tell me what?”
“Why I’m up so late every night,” she said. “I—well, you see if I could take over a lot of my old Regents exams—anyway, I am taking them over, all of them.”
“Taking them over?” he said. “What for?”
“Trying to win a State scholarship.”
“Good for you. How much is it worth?”
“A hundred dollars a year.”
“Two hundred dollars.” He looked at her in admiring re-appraisal, as if he had never realized that she could do anything that could be valued at so high a price.
“Not two hundred,” she said. “Four.”
“How four?”
“It’s a four-year scholarship, for college,” Fee said. “If you go to Training, you don’t get any of it.”
“But you are going to Training.”