“It’s good to hear that, from your own child,” he said. “I’m going to take it to New York. I may meet Mama too, after her letters. Are you all right alone here? Where is Fran? She’s never at home these days.”
“At the canteen. Do you think I could go over to Mrs. Paige for a while?” Before he could answer, she said, “Oh, Papa, I’m so glad you wrote it.”
She’s forgotten how she hates me, he thought, as he went up to dress for New York. Now I’m a good father again. Well, and why not? There is an equilibrium in it; she is a good daughter again.
By some freak the weather was cool and dry, more like September than the middle of August, and Ivarin walked briskly from his house. The HOUSE FOR SALE sign was at last gone; a slashing rainstorm had finally toppled it to its side, and Alexandra had carted it off, moaning about the “trench” dug into her grassy lawn by its exit.
The briskness made him feel well. For everyone except poor Garry, life had to go on today. Garry and surely Alida. But Evan was already going forward, absorbed in the next move. In the same way, he himself was absorbed by the move he had just taken and what lay ahead. There was authority in his thinking now, not pensive wondering. Not once, in the train to the city, did he ask what he would do if Steinberger said no. Not once, as he started to walk through the streets from Delancey to the paper, so infrequently traveled in these four long years, yet so familiar still, not once did he weigh the possibility of trying it next at the Forward, or even at the small but flourishing Abend.
He did consider seeing Abe Kesselbaum before Steinberger, letting him read it first, even inviting him, if Abe liked it, to go to Steinberger with him. A dual effort, as it were, and were it to go decidedly well with Steinberger, perhaps Abe could feel himself its sponsor.
But if it should not? Saddle poor Abe with some invisible part of it? He scowled, fished out a nickel and went into a candy store to an open phone, hung on the wall. He announced himself to Steinberger with some formality, said that he was in the city and would like to see him if possible.
Steinberger was formal too, but cordial and even inquisitive. He was at Ivarin’s service. In half an hour? Fine.
“We should be alone,” Stefan said amiably. (It sounded too authoritative.)
“I was going to suggest it,” Steinberger said.
For the half-hour Ivarin walked. Going into the building of the Jewish News brought his pulse up sharply. It was too early in the afternoon for the staff to be in the halls; he thought it just as well. When he knocked at Steinberger’s door, no secretary let him in. It was Steinberger himself, his hand outstretched.
They looked at each other for a minute. Each thought, He looks older. Each said, “You look better than ever.”
As Stefan Ivarin sat down, he took out his folded white sheets, and said, “Have you followed the Paige case?”
“Yes, and I often thought of you as I read it,” Steinberger said. “I knew that you know the father.”
“Here is an editorial I wrote last night,” Ivarin said, and pushed it across the desk. “As a free-lance submission, you understand.” Then he rose, went to the window and looked down at the busy street below.
It took Steinberger a long time. Too long. Then Ivarin realized that he must be reading it a second time, and he thought, Good man.
“Yes,” Steinberger said at last, and Ivarin turned. They stood in silence, facing each other. “I want to run it tomorrow.”
“As a free-lance submission,” Ivarin repeated. “That’s why I could permit myself to by-pass Fehler.”
“An outside piece. Under your signature.” He suddenly rose and shook hands.
“I am very pleased that you want it,” Ivarin said, and found it unthinkable to suggest a possible follow-up piece, a series, a regular space of his own. It had seemed so rational during the night; now it was unsayable.
“It needs cutting,” he said. “I haven’t cast it up for length.”
“Leave it. Let it run. Let them have enough to chew on.” He looked at Ivarin. “I sometimes feel we don’t give them enough to worry them. Many things wouldn’t arouse them anyway, but I think that readers who remember Europe—I think they get nervous if it seems not so free over here.”
Ivarin agreed. He wanted very much to question Steinberger about his way of proceeding—would he not make a gesture of consulting Fehler about the piece? the policy board? the Landaus?—but he forced himself not to. “You may run some risk, printing it.”
“It’s possible to get out, if we need to weasel. Maybe we will need to.” He shook his head. “So far the press has been fairly strong, where it comes to their being badgered. Haven’t you noticed?”
“For their own freedoms, yes.”
“Let’s try this and see.” He put his hand out to press the buzzer on his desk, but then pulled it back. “Where do you think it should go?” he asked, smiling for the first time. “On the editorial page?”
It was politesse and Ivarin meant to take his cue from it. “Anywhere but,” he said. “This is no try at a ‘come-back.’ You follow me?”
Steinberger laughed. “Then the front page,” he said.
Less than a minute after Ivarin left, Joseph Fehler entered. He looked directly at the sheets on Steinberger’s desk and said, “I hear Ivarin was here. How is he?”
“A little older, but fine.” Steinberger was holding the telephone, but he set it back on his desk. With some effort, he kept back a smile. In Fehler’s place he would have wanted to do the same thing, but he wouldn’t have moved an inch from his desk. “I was just about to phone you,” he went on, indicating Ivarin’s pages, “about this free-lance submission of his.”
“An editorial?”
“I want to run it tomorrow. I’m sure you won’t object.”
He handed it over, and made a point of not watching Fehler while he read it. From time to time he did glance at him; he was not surprised that Fehler’s face revealed nothing.
“It’s Ivarin, no question about it,” Fehler said. “A ‘free-lance submission,’ you said. Just this one time?”
“I’m not thinking about anything except this one time.”
“If it were to be more than that,” Fehler said slowly, “if he were to get back on the staff.”
Steinberger calmly repeated, “It is as an outsider that he wrote it. If you and I want one more piece, we might arrange one more.”
“Also as a free-lance?”
“Of course. Perhaps other pieces, from time to time.”
“On the same basis?”
“Ivarin will never be back on the staff. He stipulated himself that it was out of the question.”
“Well, then—”
Fehler said something else that he did not quite catch and then withdrew. Steinberger drew the telephone toward him. “Borg,” he said, “I want some space on tomorrow’s front page. Would you come in, please?”
At about eleven that evening, Stefan and Alexandra went to the café next to the paper, to wait for the first edition. He had met her at Abend, waiting there dutifully for more than an hour, while she finished out the full eight-hour day. Like a henpecked husband, he thought with pleasure, married to one of the new women. A year ago I couldn’t have made such a jest. Today changes it.
She still showed the strain and sleeplessness of the night before, but she was clearly stimulated at his unexpected appearance there, and at his cryptic explanation, “a piece of news about Steinberger.”
On his way to meet her, he had stopped to call Abe Kesselbaum, still at home. Abe sputtered his excitement, but Ivarin said, “Don’t blow this up in your mind. It’s only one piece.”
“Just the same. Ivarin again in the paper!”
“If that overseer of yours would let you lay it out, I’d like you to work on it.”
“I’ll tell him you said so, may I?”
“As you please. My wife and I will be in the café, late. Maybe you’ll drop in at the break.”
And now at any moment Abe woul
d be coming through the door, with the wet paper in his hand. At supper, telling Alexandra what he had written, remembering some phrases exactly, losing others, Ivarin had felt for the third time that day the long-forgotten thankfulness. First Fee, then Joseph Steinberger, then Alexandra. It was still his; it had come to him again as if he had never lost it. The universal language. The language of protest.
Don’t make too much of it, he thought. Two of them are your family, too close to you, too close to Garry.
What counts are strangers. What counts are readers.
And what about the trashiness of the Jewish News? That no longer counts? The sensation-mongering, the vulgar screaming? Has it disappeared, replaced by a dignity and quiet?
No, Mr. Prosecutor, he thought angrily, it has not been replaced. It is detestable. It is a platform of dung for a man to speak from. No rationalizations, no pious excuses.
“What’s wrong, Stiva?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re suddenly on Mars.”
“I beg you, let me be.”
Just then Abe appeared, with a copy for Alexandra and another for him. “Stiva, your picture,” she cried, and he was equally startled at the small cut of his own face looking up at him, next the bold byline, BY STEFAN IVARIN. The picture was his idea, Abe said, and his boss, thank God, had gone for it. They had set the piece in a two-column measure, with larger type than run-of-paper, and frequent subheads.
“Impressive,” Ivarin said. Secretly, vanity burst about him like shrapnel. “I must say, Abe, most impressive.”
“It’s glorious,” Alexandra corrected.
Later, on the way back to Barnett, Stefan Ivarin reminded himself not to triumph too soon. Tomorrow the readers would see it, the strangers, the only judges. But once again when the house grew still, he went to his desk and began a second piece, starting with Garry, but connecting Garry to the horsewhipped Bigelow, to the Vermont minister, to the benighted Minnesotan. In Bisbee, Arizona, a town heretofore unmapped in his geographical knowledge, twelve hundred Wobblies, strikers and their families, had just been hammered out of town by Bisbee vigilantes, again under some sweet-scented local name, had been kicked, shoved, pushed, hounded out. No trial was contemplated; the authorities conceded there was no chance of finding twelve people who could qualify for impartial jury duty.
Once again he sat at his desk far into the night, knowing he would not submit this piece for a while, but writing anyway. In the morning, he again slept late, as he used to sleep in the years of his old life.
“Abe says they already had six telephone calls and a telegram from the Cloakmakers’ Union,” Alexandra greeted him when he finally appeared. “He says to call him.”
The telegram, Abe told him, was a rather florid greeting to “the return of labor’s truest spokesman,” and the phone calls were admiring. Ivarin thanked him. Was there anything to report from the staff? “The best,” Abe said. “Everybody is full of it, except Fehler. Even Borg says he loves it. But so far, no word out of Fehler.”
Ivarin chuckled. A nip of conscience asked how he could be so cheerful less than two days after Garry’s sentencing. It’s a different department, he answered, and asked Abe to report again, if anything developed.
If Steinberger would call instead, he thought, and began to listen for the telephone. Steinberger did not call.
But several days later, he did. “It caused a sizable to-do,” he announced. “Almost fifty letters, postcards and calls.”
“That is good to hear. Thank you.”
“Actually, I would like to run a second piece. If deadline pressure is not unwelcome—”
“It never is unwelcome.”
“Then could you do one?”
“My pleasure,” Ivarin said. “I will write something today.”
Steinberger thanked him and added, “Perhaps later, you might write another, on a different subject. Still on your terms, the outside columnist.”
Ivarin said, almost stiffly, “Later is later.” To reveal the exhilaration pouring along his veins would have been like begging.
“The situation in Russia,” Steinberger said. “Some readers are getting frantic about it.”
“As I am too,” he said. “Five months, and the Bolsheviki show so much power. It freezes the blood.”
He went straight upstairs to his desk. If there is a “later,” he thought, the old alternating technique might still have the strongest impact. A piece in Garry’s series, then one on the danger in Russia, then again Garry and what it means to stay free. This “eternal vigilance” they talk of. It is never sure when and where it will be called for.
Fifty-six, he thought unexpectedly. It is no longer young, true enough. But it is not necessarily old.
Letty said, “If one more person gives me that look, I’ll close up the shop for a year.”
“It must be dreadful,” Peter Stiles said. “What you’ve been through!” He signaled the waiter, and without asking her, ordered a second drink. “I’m glad I could change our tickets. I don’t want you sitting through any war play tonight.”
“I’m glad too.” He was waiting for her to say it first, but she kept drawing back from the words. Cynthia Aldrich had come right out with it, and her own parents, in the letter her mother wrote the day after the trial was over. “In all the history of the Brooks family, on both sides, nobody has ever served a prison term, never. When I remember I once said that we never had had a divorce!”
“I’m so tired of thinking,” Letty said.
“It’s time you let me do it for you.”
“Oh, Peter.”
Somebody has to, she thought, I can’t any more. The day Garry was sentenced, she had thought about nothing but him, how he must feel going to prison, but then her own life claimed her again. Everybody’s did; there was nothing wrong or heartless in that. This afternoon, before Peter came to call for her, she had gone out to Madison Avenue, as if she just wanted a breath of fresh air, and stood staring into the show window, like any admirer of some piece on display, wondering what the hidden price tag said. Actually she was staring at the gilt lettering, superimposing “Brooks” over “Garrett” to see if it would fit. There was one more letter in Garrett, but the two t’s were thin and run-together. Two r’s and two t’s: she had never noticed that before.
“Mrs. Brooks Paige, Antiques” did sound smarter. Mrs. Brooks Paige. If she did go ahead, it would be her legal name. A widow went on forever with her husband’s name, but a woman who had to get a divorce coupled her own last name with her married name. She had read that somewhere, or heard it, and after Garry was found guilty, when Cynthia talked flat out about his name damaging the shop’s reputation, Cynthia had said it too. In a year, she said, nobody would remember that it hadn’t always been “Mrs. Brooks Paige, Antiques.”
But if I marry Peter, Letty thought now, would I have to change it again? Everything turned to problems. If only she had instituted proceedings way back, when Garry walked out that night and went to the Brevoort. Or at any time between then and his arrest. If she had started a divorce then, nobody could accuse her now of hitting him when he was down, nobody could call her cowardly or cruel.
But now if you do nothing, she thought, they’d only accuse you of trying to act like a martyr. A heroine. An angel with a halo.
“What, darling?” Peter asked. “You suddenly smiled.”
Slowly Fee came to realize once more that time did pass. The first days of Garry’s prison sentence had stood still, black rocks in a black desert. The first morning after the trial, hearing her father translate what he had written, somehow had managed to tear her hands loose from their clutch at the rocks, and for a while afterward, when she was alone, she had been able to think of three years as something that would move away, grain by grain. Then the standing still began again.
She asked a few days later if anybody could visit Garry, and the answer was, “Only his family.” The stillness grew thick once more, and everything was wrapped in it. She knew
her parents were happy, or excited, about the paper, her father’s paper. For so long “the paper” was her mother’s; having her father on his own paper, was before the war, before everything.
Before Garry. Did everybody have a private calendar inside the world’s calendar?
Once upon a time her calendar had taken in the wait from Regents Week until the end of August when the letter from Albany would come. And if she did win her scholarship, it stretched in a lovely hazy way over four years of Barnard College, where she had been entered, just in case, ever since Easter vacation.
Now the only real calendar was the one that said Three Years. Until August, 1920. The war might be over by then; she would be waiting to start her senior year, if she were at college, and she would be twenty herself. And Garry twelve years older. It didn’t sound so much for anybody who was twenty.
When she went over to see Mrs. Paige, she felt about twelve, and even with Mrs. Paige being kind, the noose of shyness knotted tighter. After the first week or so, Mrs. Paige was something like herself again, talking in that same soft way, saying Garry’s name as if he were still at Synthex and expected for one family meal over the weekend.
“Why don’t you write to him, Fee?” she asked once. “Mail means a lot when you’re a prisoner.”
Fee looked away at the word. The two Paiges were allowed to visit him once a month, and he wasn’t allowed to write more than once a week, but there was no limit about the letters he could receive.
“I started to write once or twice,” Fee said, “but I always tore it up. I never know what to say.”
“Don’t tear the next one. Remember he thought you were the best witness of all; he said so again when his father saw him about the appeal.”
“Did he really?” She had heard it from her parents already, but her heart flamed at hearing it from Garry’s mother. Just sitting near her was important, a special event, like talking to Mr. Fitch instead of to a teacher.
Mr. Fitch. Teachers. The fifteen exams. Curiosity began to stir again, and one morning she went out to the porch to wait for the mailman. It was nearly Labor Day, it should have been here by now.
First Papers Page 62
