First Papers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  The fifteen or twenty rows of benches for spectators were not full of strangers, and that too was terrible. Half of them were from Barnett; how had they got there early enough in the morning to get seats? “The joy in feeling superior propelled them,” her father had said.

  Mrs. Loheim was there, and Trudy, and Fee thought it cheap and mean of them to come. How long ago it was, when Trudy and her mother were part of her day-by-day world. Now here she was miles away from them, even though they were in the same courtroom. They were enjoying themselves, as if it were a moving picture, while she sat there hurting, listening to people attacking Garry, listening to his father try to pin them down, watching them slip around and attack from another direction.

  There was something so old-maidish about that Victoria Alston, but even Mr. Paige could not make her admit that it was only a newspaper headline that Garry had called soapy and mealy-mouthed; Vicky stuck to it, under oath, that it was President Wilson, the Commander-in-Chief, and that she took him to task about it, but that he kept right on. It was her word against his. She swore that he said right out that nobody could make him wear a uniform or use a gun and that anybody who did was going against the word of God in the Bible. Many of the men employed at Synthex were of draft age, and he kept saying it to them, too.

  None of it was a surprise; nothing all day was a surprise. Over and over for a month Fee had heard about the four letters, the people who wrote them, the preliminary examinations, and now here it all was for the last time. She could not believe a judge could really be taken in by them, but even her mother had told her optimism was foolish with the world gone mad.

  “Miss Fira Ivarin.”

  She sprang up with a gasp, before she remembered all the things Mr. Paige had told her about not being afraid. She was sworn in, and put on the stand, facing the courtroom, but she did not dare look at anybody except Mr. Paige. He smiled at her.

  “Now, Fee,” he said in his ordinary voice. “I’m just going to ask you to tell us here about the day you had a soda with Garry. When was that?”

  “The day he registered.”

  “June fifth. How do you remember so clearly?”

  “He showed me his card; he said he had the afternoon off to register.”

  “You got talking about the war,” Evan said. “Suppose you tell it in your own words.”

  She began with effort, but soon the words came faster. “And then we got talking about being patriotic, and he said it was hard to talk about things like that, and asked me if my father ever said straight out, ‘I love my country,’ and I said no, he always said things like ‘It’s a great country’ or ‘This wonderful country,’ but never the other.”

  “Then what did Garry say?”

  “Then he said there were so many ways a man could show that he did love it.”

  “Such as—did he say?”

  “Not exactly. He said he thought a man could work for his country, or suffer for it.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Or die for it.” She stopped, trying to remember. The courtroom was very quiet. “He said a man also could die for it, but not kill for it.”

  “Did he say what he meant by that?”

  She shook her head. “Not exactly. He did say you could kill off a man who was an enemy of your country, but killing him off wasn’t the same as working for the country itself, or its future, not if you kept thinking of its future.”

  “Did he say what he was going to do?”

  “I didn’t ask him, Mr. Paige. He never said, and I thought that wasn’t any of my business.”

  Even Mr. Edmonds was not as fast and snappy with her as he had been with the other witnesses when he was cross-examining them. Fee went over the answers once more, some of them two or three times. But no matter how Mr. Edmonds phrased his questions, she always said the same things; it wasn’t hard, it didn’t need any trick or wanting to outsmart him. All she had to do was to let herself think back. All she had to do was to remember, and it was as if they were still sitting there together, with Garry saying the words right to her in that serious voice he had used then.

  “—and this young lady,” Mr. Edmonds said to the judge, “who is apparently in love with the defendant, and who, in her youth and innocence, was taken in by his words—”

  “I wasn’t taken in, not a—”

  But Mr. Edmonds stopped her, and Fee saw Mr. Paige shake his head, as a signal. She was too angry to listen to what the prosecutor went on to say. Something that began, “despite this appealing faith in what she thinks is the defendant’s independence and courage.”

  “It is courage,” Fee said. And she looked at Garry for the first time. He was staring at her, and he didn’t look away. He was staring at her in a new way; she had never seen him look at her that way before, and she looked down at the floor. Then she looked back, as if he had told her to. He was still looking at her. He was different. The whole world was different.

  There was the waiting to be got through while the judge deliberated in his chambers. Unable to remain seated, Stefan Ivarin left the courtroom and went outside to the corridor, pacing up and down.

  She helped more than anyone else, he thought again. More than I have helped, for all my wishes to be of use.

  It’s the inevitable sequence. The old cannot find the way; the young instinctively do find it. The old back down, the young take over.

  Not yet, he thought, not yet. I’m not backing down quite so soon. Even if I was of no real help to Evan and to Garry.

  How did I think I could be of help? How was I of help about San Diego?

  Not for the trial, he suddenly thought. Never for a moment. I didn’t know of the vigilantes until it was all over, the trial done with, the verdict known. Not until then, when Evan came back, after all his legal work was done.

  Yet I did help. Not Evan, but the fight itself. His fight, mine.

  Fights can be lost in a courtroom. But they can go on outside. That’s what I knew then, that’s what I have forgotten.

  The recess lasted for a few minutes over an hour. Then Garry rose to hear the verdict. It was, “Guilty, as charged.”

  The sentence was a fine of five thousand dollars and imprisonment in a Federal prison for a term of three years.

  He felt it, the ache changing to anguish. He walked out of the courtroom, thinking only, Go slow, don’t look around. Slow, careful, slow. Empty, no thinking, no feeling, you knew it all along.

  Slow, careful, there it is again, the prison, the same until they ship you to the other.

  Three years. Three, three, three, three. Dear God, help me.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  AT TWO THAT NIGHT, Stefan Ivarin went to his desk and began to write. The house was silent, Alexandra long since sleeping the burning sleep of sorrow.

  He had been unable to consider bed, he could not concentrate on chess, on his mathematics. Over and over he saw Garry’s last quick look at his parents as he left for prison, heard Alida’s sobs, Evan’s voice stating the intention to appeal.

  All at once he abandoned his attempts to settle down to some distraction. He drew one of his narrow white pads toward him, shook down his fountain pen to free the flow of ink, and without clear intention, without knowing to what end, he began to write.

  Across the top of his page, taking great care with the formation of each letter, he blocked in a phrase.

  AN AMERICAN BOY IN SIBERIA?

  It was when he put in the question mark that certainty erupted within him. That question mark was like a signal, a wave of a hand—it was his old style, it was his old self.

  Assassinate a Book? Assassinate a Preface? Pogrom—California Style? A dozen headlines came back, his own headlines, that he had written atop his own editorials. He looked at this one and then wrote a subhead.

  Arrest and Imprisonment

  of a Youth

  Who Talked

  Once more he paused. Then he began; the sentences started to come; for a long time he wrote, with scarcely a corre
ction or interlineation.

  There is a boy I know who is dead wrong about this war. In my opinion, dead wrong.

  I call him a boy, because he grew up near me, the same age as my son, his parents close friends of my family in the small town where we all live.

  Today this boy, Garrett Paige, twenty-nine, was sentenced to a prison term that will last three years.

  For what? For something he said. Not for something he did, but for something he said. For many things he said. Said to the people he worked with, said to the people he knew as friends, said for a long time before we got into the war, and continued to say after we were in it.

  What he said was, “It is wrong to kill.” He is a deeply religious boy, a Unitarian, which again is something I happen not to agree with, but to his religion he has committed himself with all his young heart.

  And so, he often quoted the Bible and said, “‘Thou Shalt Not’ means ‘Thou Shalt Not,’ and there are no exceptions.”

  (This is where I disagree. I hold this war to be inescapable if man is to rid himself of tyranny and oppression.)

  Young Paige is a chemist, and when his boss first ordered shells and bombs and explosives for war, he quit his good job rather than make them.

  That was three years ago. The world war was Europe’s war then, not ours. Now it is ours. A big change.

  It changed you and me; it changed Garrett Paige. What did not change for him was his faith in his Bible and what it said. What did not change was his belief in his right to say so.

  He said so and lost friends; he said so and lost more than friends; he said so and on July tenth was arrested for the things he said. Things about war, about this war and all war. Things it is his right to say in a free country.

  This free country.

  His right, in war or peace, so long as he says only what he feels and does not say to one other man, “Break the law.”

  This he never did. Not once.

  Busybody letters said that he did; busybody witnesses swore that he did. And they lied.

  But this country is now partly enslaved to the Czar of Orthodoxy, the Emperor of Conformity. The Siberia I speak of awaits the man who says the unpopular thing—

  For the first time Stefan Ivarin paused. A long time ago, years, he and Eli had been in a fearful row about conformity. The idiom of one’s surroundings, Eli had said; one must protest within the idiom of one’s surroundings.

  Eli, my only son, Ivarin thought, and suddenly he felt closer to the imprisoned Garry than ever in his life he had felt to the son of his own blood.

  You did not, he thought, addressing Garry in his mind, you did not make your protest in the idiom of your surroundings.

  He was wrenched with regret for his son, wrenched with love for this young man in prison. Another night came back to him, that night in the café when Evan told of the country road and the needly little acorns and the ring of ruffians, told, and asked that he write not one piece, but several. That night, sitting there in the café together, the accents and odors and gestures of Europe around them, he had first felt that he and Evan were eternally kin, the foreign-born, the native-born, disparate and various, but one.

  Now he felt the same toward Evan’s son, a generation between them, but dividing them less than proving a continuity. A wheel had turned. In 1877 he had gone to prison in Russia for his ideas; in 1917 Garry was in prison in America for his.

  Stefan Ivarin closed his eyes. For a while he rested, and then went back to his unfinished piece. He read it through quickly and was sure of it. It was too long, but that was nothing; so often it was too long to start with. Next day’s light was a fierce critic, and his own blue pencil its most willing weapon.

  More important was an omission. Should he work in Garry’s letter which Evan himself had brought up in court, saying his son had no wish to hide it? If that went into this first piece, he could lead from it to a powerful paragraph:

  And that is not why he was arrested. That is not why he was locked up in a cell. That is not why he faces his three years in prison. He was arrested before that letter was sent.

  Ivarin considered the possibility as if the words were already written, with his pen hanging above them, ready to descend and scratch them out, or move on to their followers.

  Not in this first piece, he decided. Time enough in a second one, or a third. There will be others, about the appeal, perhaps a request for a government review—

  A second piece, a third? A series of pieces? Ivarin shoved back from the desk, startled. He was not dazed, not daydreaming. He meant it.

  Suddenly he thumped the table. Of course he meant it. He meant to try it, not in a magazine, not in Alexandra’s paper, not anywhere but where he had always meant every word he cared about for most of his life.

  And Steinberger said he sometimes wondered if people didn’t feel the need for something that made it legitimate to suffer a little.

  Steinberger, “the new top-story.” Steinberger, who had said all the usual things when he took power—no changes, nobody in jeopardy—but had also spoken up of a newspaper’s duty.

  Especially, Ivarin thought with a faint interior amusement, when the paper has stayed on a dead circulation plateau for more than a year.

  He went back to his work, and hurried on to the end. Before him stood his silver watch, its lid open, propping it up like a sliver of time. When he finished, it showed twenty after four.

  How long it had been since he had stayed chained to his desk half the night, writing. How wild a joy there was in doing it again.

  In the morning he would read it to Alexandra and translate it for Evan and Alida. And then—

  Once more he stopped short.

  Then he would go to New York and take it direct to Steinberger. The devil with Fehler. He would write this series not as a staff member; that was forever over. But a new phenomenon was appearing more and more in the American press: the outside columnist, with a space of his own, under his own by-line. Even Brisbane, after two long decades of refusal, first by Pulitzer, then by Hearst, was at last achieving his heart’s desire, an editorial column that carried his name, not only in the Hearst sheets, but in other papers where he was not on the staff. It was another new phase in American journalism.

  Why not in the Jewish News?

  In the morning, to his astonishment, he overslept. It was nearly noon when he came downstairs, and Alexandra was already gone.

  “For her letters,” Fee reminded him.

  “Chortu, I forgot her letters.” It was he who had suggested this weekly trip to the offices of Abend for the secretarial help Simon Tischmann was willing to provide for her mail, and it had proved the solution to her growing problem. At first she had been tongue-tied and miserable, unable to dictate letters to a strange young woman, but so acute was her shame at being two to ten weeks behind, that she had persisted, and by now her weekly trip was her “life-saver.”

  Today Ivarin regretted the routine. He wanted her right there, right then. Her return at the end of the day would be too late. “I wanted her to read something,” he said to Fee, “that I wrote late last night about Garry.”

  Fee was setting out his fruit and pouring his coffee. At his words, the stream of coffee missed the cup and splashed the oilcloth. “God damn it,” she cried, so unexpectedly that he looked sharply at her. She’s in torment, he thought, and a warmth of sympathy touched him, rare when it came to any of the children, because he scarcely ever could follow what mattered to them and why it should matter.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, taking swipes with his napkin at the coffee spill. “I was going to let Mama read it”—he spread his sheaf of pages—”and then I was going to translate it for Evan and Alida. If they’re up to hearing anything about it. It may be too soon.”

  Fee poured coffee into a fresh cup. At its side, the narrow white pages lay, written over in her father’s heavy stub-pen strokes.

  “Papa,” she said. “Could you translate it now?” She saw his surprise. �
�I honestly would like to hear it.” Quickly she added, “We’re interested in things our parents do, after all.”

  He took a sip of his coffee. Then he remembered the sugar, and stirred in a heaping teaspoonful. She had seated herself across the table from him, and without looking at her, he sensed her eagerness and grief. He picked up his sheets, translating the headline and the secondary head. Then, easily, he continued.

  “There is a boy I know who is dead wrong about this war. In my opinion, dead wrong. I call him a boy, because he grew up near me, the same age as my son—”

  He heard Fee swallow, but he went on without looking up. Went on until he came to Garry’s arrest. “—was arrested for the things he said. Things about war, about this war and all war. Things it is his right to say in a free country—”

  “Oh, Papa,” she cried, and she put her head down on her folded arms and sobbed until the table shook. He put his pages aside and came around the table, standing near her, uncertain, unsure of what he could do.

  Suddenly he was again seeing her as a sobbing child of ten, hearing her mimic her own squeaky voice in the classroom, “I think we’re socialists, Miss King.” He had taken her into his lap then, held her, and he had made her know that he understood. “It is very bad,” he had said, “for a little girl to be so unhappy is very bad.”

  He wanted to say it now, but he said nothing. He wanted to let her know again that he—terrible father that she thought him when he opposed her—that her father understood what grief was, and loved her for the capacity of it.

  But he said nothing. He did nothing. Only when she grew quieter, did he make a gesture toward her. He laid his hand on her head, and was astounded that both her own flew up, holding it hard to her hair as if she would never let it go.

  He left for the city without going over to Charming Street. Fee’s response had keyed him to a higher pitch. After another few minutes, she had asked him to finish his translating, and as he came to the end, she said, “It’s so wonderful! I never knew you wrote that way.”