First Papers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no’?” he demanded. Gone instantly was his good-natured tone, gone his admiring appraisal, and in these five words there sounded instead the outrage and sarcasm that she had so often heard him direct at Eli or her mother, but never yet at her. Something went thick in her throat, and she couldn’t answer him.

  “What does that ‘no’ mean?” he insisted.

  “I don’t want to go to Jamaica Training,” she said. “I want to go to college. If I win a schol—”

  “You want what?”

  “To go to college,” Fee cried. “Because I—please listen to me about why.”

  “What can there be, for me to listen to? Are we so rich, that you can take two more years before you are self-supporting, two whole years more?”

  “I can’t bear Training School. I’d rather die—”

  “You’d rather die!” he roared at her. “How many times have I asked you to do what I want in this world?” he went on. “And on this one point that I do ask, that your mother and I have always taken for granted—on this you flout us?”

  “Stiva, if Fee does win a scholarship—”

  “Keep out of this,” he ordered Alexandra. “You are always ready to give in, supinely, spinelessly, whatever they want, no matter how shameless and selfish.”

  “It’s not selfish,” Fee said, her voice suddenly shrill. “There’s nothing bad about wanting to go to college.” She looked at him and thought, I hate him, he’s horrible and unfair. She burst into tears, and at the sight of them, Alexandra’s own eyes filled.

  “For God’s sake,” Stefan shouted at Alexandra, “none of your tears.”

  “How can I help it?” Alexandra demanded, moving closer to Fee. “The poor child.”

  “If you can’t help it, then leave me alone.”

  Alexandra clattered a chair out of the way and left the room. She banged the door so violently that her hand tingled around the knob. He was a czar, a Cossack, a tyrant. One by one, the children had come up against his will and gone through this hell of beating against its iron. First Eli, then Fran when she wanted to move out and live in New York, and now Fee. Fran had given in after a scene like this, but Fee would kill herself before—

  The thought turned Alexandra motionless. In the kitchen Fee was crying convulsively.

  “—Nineteen twenty-one before you are self-supporting,” Stefan thundered, “not 1919, as we always calculated. That’s too soon for milady who must do just what the rich girls do—”

  “Don’t you call me names,” Fee shouted. “Don’t make fun of me, I’m not going to Training, no matter what you say, I’m not, I’m not.”

  “Milady doesn’t intend to obey her parents,” he said, as if he were addressing somebody in the distance. “Did you hear that? She is no daughter of mine any longer, who spits on her father’s wishes—”

  The door flew open and Alexandra confronted him.

  “Are you suddenly a patriarch in the Bible?” she demanded, tears wet on her cheeks, hair wild. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Stefan ignored her. His face was scarlet, the skin damp and burnished so that it shone. He moved toward Fee, facing her, standing inches away from her. “You are to give up this rich man’s notion, do you follow me?” he demanded. “You need only two years to become a teacher and—”

  “I won’t become a teacher. I’ll never be a teacher.”

  Hysteria flung the words at him, and Fee ran out of the room.

  For a full week Alexandra spoke to Stefan only in monosyllables. He seemed not to notice, not to mind. But she knew that he did mind. She didn’t know how she knew it, but she was convinced. Soon she began to find an exhilaration in this unprecedented experience. She was in a bad mood.

  Day after day it continued. She left her food untouched on her plate, she muttered good morning and then fell silent. She could see him glance at her above his newspaper and then glance down, his foot pumping up and down on the linoleum in agitation. She would put his food before him and leave.

  She would not forgive him. She would not, could not, dredge up the usual excuses for him and exonerate him. Never before had poor Fee faced her father in a battle, faced him head on. From babyhood onward, the worst times Fee could remember were when Stefan was fighting Eli or Fran, and of course, herself, Alexandra. Those times were bad enough, when his shouting, his unbridled rage and temper had terrified and scarified Fee as a bystander.

  Now she was not a bystander, she was his enemy, facing him while his wrath and fury threw themselves at her like physical blows.

  My poor child, Alexandra thought, my Firuschka. If this Dr. Freud is right, this war with her father can damage her for life; it will set off echoes she will always vaguely hear whenever she’s in conflict with any man she loves—with a fiancé, with—with a lover perhaps, with her husband, and later on, her son. Dr. Freud might not be right in his more exaggerated views about what could go on in an infant’s life, but surely he was correct and intuitive about the unseen damage done to children by the very parents who loved them.

  Alexandra wished, fleetingly, that Dr. Freud had written more about the damage inflicted on parents by children. She thought of the night Eli had told her about changing his name to Eaves. Of his refusal to visit when his father was so sick. And of the family scandal when his infidelity was discovered that summer after the war began.

  For a moment, Dr. Freud and Fee alike were forgotten, and Alexandra’s heart squeezed in shame for Eli. During his second summer at the New Hampshire school, he had once again dawdled and delayed about finding a place for Joan and the children. But this time Joan suspected more than a lack of houses and when she finally joined him, she began sleuthing about. Sure enough, he had fallen in love the year before with a silly young thing, and was again carrying on with his pastoral paramour. Poor Joan—who could blame her for blurting out her pain to her mother? And then to Eli’s mother?

  But the pain children dealt out to their parents was dealt to full-grown people whose development could not be sent askew, in those hidden recesses of character, that loamy dark earth that held the roots of young plants and trees.

  Alexandra returned guiltily to Fee. But Fee was not a baby plant, not a child of four or five. Perhaps her spirit would not be sent askew too far by this first primary struggle with her father. Fee had some inborn strength of her own to call on.

  Alexandra cheered up. If the truth were known, she was rather enjoying this terrible period. It was as if Fee was seeing a lifetime’s worth of what her mother had had to endure, how crushing Stefan could be, how cruel. It was a new bond between them, mother and daughter together, united in a basic experience.

  “Don’t worry too much,” she said to Fee one day.

  “I’m not worried,” Fee answered briefly.

  “You look tired.”

  “I’m just tired. I never think about it any more.”

  “Your light is on until two or three every night. You’re doing too much.”

  “Even if I fell asleep, I’d leave it on, to spite him.”

  “Fira!”

  “Well, I would. And don’t tell me he didn’t mean it, that he can’t help being this way.”

  “Have I tried?”

  “I know you’re on his side. You always are.”

  Alexandra looked at her, dumfounded. When she was in a mood day after day, nobody in the house even noticed.

  He does, she thought, and was comforted.

  One morning a letter came, addressed to “Alexandra Bartschoi Ivarin,” and Alexandra thought, There’s a mistake, but how did they know my whole name? It was from Abend, the upper-left-hand corner said, and she finally opened the envelope and saw her name again.

  Dear Mrs. Ivarin,

  Thank you for sending us your sample column, about Joey. All of us agree that there is an undoubted audience waiting for such a column, amusing and instructive at the same time. We would like to discuss with you the possibilit
y of running one like it on a regular basis, every Wednesday, on our weekly Women’s Page.

  It was signed by the paper’s editor, Simon Tischmann. She read it twice, and then in a greed to prolong her joy, she raced through it a third time.

  So this was why Stefan had asked for her notes about little Joey, to send them off on her behalf, without a word to her, in a professional submission of material. She had thought about them several times while he was away on his short lecture trip, but since his return and his terrible fight with poor Fee, he was beyond the pale so she couldn’t ask if he was through with them.

  And all this time, Joey was in a newspaper office, being read by editors. She started for the stairs, to show him the letter, to bless and praise him for what he had done for her. How kind of him, how generous, especially now in this period of his own life when he was so bitterly useless in journalism, and had been for more than three years.

  Halfway up the stairs, Alexandra thought of Fee. She stopped. She was Fee’s ally—could she forsake Fee and rush to praise him? Fee would feel forlorn indeed. Betrayed. A Judas mother and a patriarch father.

  But she had to speak to Stefan now, tell him what a marvelous thing he had wrought, for it really was he who had done it. If he had not sent Joey in, she never would have dreamed of doing it. She was already slipping away from the task of writing notes down; it was hard, no matter how informal.

  But to do it for publication. For pay? To see it come out in print? It would be the greatest adventure in her whole life.

  “Are you going down or coming up?”

  It was Stefan, and she looked up to see him at the top of the stairs, still in his underwear, looking straight at the letter in her hand. It was an act of God, surely, like a hurricane or an avalanche. Fee could not feel betrayed, when an act of God had intervened.

  “Oh, Stiva, look—it’s from Abend,” she said, rushing up with the letter extended. “How marvelous, sending it in.”

  He grunted and took the letter. As he read, his face lighted, and he said, in Russian, “I must still be an editor—I knew it would fill the bill.”

  “Did you do anything to it? Rewrite any of it?”

  “Would I take liberties with an author, without specific permission?” he asked. Then he tapped the letter with authority and said, “You’ll have an entire new career now as a writer. You’ll see.”

  “I can’t bear it.”

  “No question about it. Call them up and make an appointment. They’ll offer you at least ten dollars a column.”

  The appointment was for that same afternoon, and they offered fifteen. Alexandra knew all about the war boom and how it was touching its wand of gold to all segments of life, even those not involved with guns, explosives, cotton, food, shipping and ten other matters. But it was with a sense of unreality that she sat before the stranger named Simon Tischmann and heard him offer fifteen dollars every week for “anything” she wanted to write, in the general area of “guidance” to its women readers, help with their problems, “Americanization” in general.

  “Fifteen?” she said. “My husband guessed you would offer ten, and that seemed like big pay to me.” Her fingers flew to her mouth, as if she would cram back these unfortunate words. “I’m not much of a businesswoman,” she said.

  “Maybe that is why your first column is so human and warm,” said Mr. Tischmann, and Alexandra loved him. The column was to appear as soon as they had three more, “in the bank,” and the experiment was to last for half a year, probably from April first through October.

  “We’ll see how it’s received,” Mr. Tischmann said. “I’ll mail you the contract tomorrow.”

  “A contract?” she said. “Why do we need a contract?”

  “It’s the usual thing.”

  She shook her head. “I have your word,” she said, “and you have mine.” She smiled, dismissing contracts. He had her pages on the desk before him, and as she rose to go, she said, “May I?” and reached for them, as if they no longer were hers. Page by page, she read what she had written, knowing that he was watching her, amused at her, as if she were not only an amateur but a child. He thought she was reading in a splurge of self-congratulation, and partly he was correct. Now that Abend was going to set it up in type and print it, it did sound a great deal better than when she had written it down at home.

  But her real need was to see what Stefan had done to her pages before sending them in. Perhaps automatically he had improved her sentences here and there, substituting a word, editing out a repetition, without even recalling it later.

  He had not. He had inked out “Dear Stiva” and added some punctuation. That was all. A relief rushed through her, and another burst of pride. It was really her work they were going to run. Stefan had respected it as hers and left it as hers, intact, an entity in its own right.

  He was simply wonderful. Even when he was at his worst, he was still Stefan Ivarin.

  THIRTY

  WITH A START, FEE woke and saw them. It was barely dawn and yet her father and mother were both out on the sleeping porch, bending over a heavy rolled package on the floor. They were both fully dressed; they must have been up all night.

  She recognized the package at once. That was what had awakened her, the sound of it being dragged over the floor and over the doorsill to the porch, the door banging open in the blustery wind, her parents’ voices, low and yet excited, as they both worked at the heavy cord, undoing the knots. Inside was the flag, the awful bargain her mother had fallen for, so huge that when it hung out on the stubby gun of a flagpole up here on the second floor, it swooped halfway down the thin pillars of the downstairs porch. Every Fourth of July, or Lincoln’s or Washington’s Birthday, when the flag was out, she hated the hugeness of it; it belonged on a schoolhouse or a bank or City Hall, but on their long thin house, it was grotesque, like a giant in a baby carriage.

  But hanging the flag out today? What was today, for Pete’s sake? The sixteenth of March. What was that?

  Fee started forward to ask them, but there was such an extraordinary look about their faces, what she could see in profile, that she hesitated. She hadn’t forgiven her father, but by now her anger was like something set aside on a shelf, from time to time remembered, but at other times forgotten. The excitement about Mama’s articles was a screen for everything else; you could be happy again, and celebrate with Mama, and even say a word or two to him, though nothing was changed about college or the Regents exams. He knew it, and she knew it, and they were in a kind of temporary truce.

  “Franny,” she whispered, crossing to her sister’s bed, “look at them out there.”

  Fran didn’t stir. The last knot was undone by now and they began to open up the stiff brown paper. As they stood up, shaking out the flag between them, Fee caught sight of their faces full on, for the first time. They both looked strange, and now their voices were louder as if they couldn’t hold them down any more, no matter who was sleeping.

  “Franny,” she said again, tugging her awake. “Look at Papa and Mama.” This time Fran awoke, took one look, and groaned. “Oh God, what damn-fool thing are they up to now?”

  Stefan was threading the line through the wide white hem of the flag and again his back was turned to them. Then he worked the pulley arrangement and suddenly the flag snapped wide in the wind. He stood there watching it and then he turned to Alexandra and said something in Russian—

  Both girls jumped forward. He was crying. Tears ran down his face, and his cheeks and mouth were pulled out and distorted. Never in their whole lives had they seen him cry.

  “Papa,” Fee cried, “what happened?”

  “Is the war over?” Fran asked.

  “Russia,” Stefan started and then stood there gulping as if he had to fight for breath. “Russia is free. The Czar is gone.”

  “We were in New York all night,” Alexandra said. “We just got home.”

  “The Czar gone?” Fee asked her father.

  “It’s revolution,” he sa
id. Then to both of them at once he said, “Do you know what it is, when a country becomes free?”

  His voice broke over his last words and Fee forgot she hated him. To see him cry! Again and again she had seen her mother weep, heard her mother sob, but never, not once, never before this moment had she seen her father cry. She knew he was happy, but it was an unbearable thing to see. Her throat filled with the knotty ache it always got when a gigantic force pulled her, either happiness or sorrow, it made no difference which. They could be related, like that first day in church when she was little, and heard the pealing bells far above her.

  “It’s wonderful, Papa,” she said. Then she made a half-turn toward her mother, and awkwardly added, “And you too, Mama,” as if they had done something as a team and it wasn’t fair to congratulate only one.

  “Yes, darling,” Alexandra said, and kissed her, and then kissed Fran, though Fran was still standing just inside the door, staring at her father.

  He suddenly took out his big handkerchief and began to slap at his face with it, turning away to hide the fact that he was crying. He took off his glasses and dried his eyes, but the moment he put them back, he had to reach for his handkerchief once more.

  Alexandra put a finger to her mouth as they looked at her. It seemed a long time before he turned back to them.

  “And it’s the moderates who did it, mind you,” he said then. “That’s what makes it so tremendous. Not Bolsheviki, but the moderates.” He shook a finger at them, as if they were lined up with the Bolsheviki extremists he was forever haranguing about. “I knew something was up,” he added triumphantly, “I kept telling Mama all week, ‘No news from Petrograd? They’re suppressing something—strikes, mutiny, maybe even bigger than that.’ “

  “It’s true, he knew it all along,” Alexandra said. “Come inside now, Stiva, it’s quite cold out there.”

  “Yes,” he said, but he turned away, resting a hand on the stubby flagpole, making no move to obey her.

  “Let him be,” Alexandra said. “Get bathrobes on, girls, and help with breakfast.”

  “Were you really in New York all night?” Fee asked, as they retreated into the bedroom.