First Papers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  “Oh my goodness.”

  “There’s a new aviation camp in Florida, and they’re shipping Davey to teach flying, and he won’t go without me.”

  “My little Franny, married. I’m so happy.” And Alexandra burst into tears.

  “You like him,” Fran said, “you said you did.”

  “I did. He’s lovely. I wish I knew him more.”

  “He’s grand,” Fee said. “I met him yesterday while you were in New York, and he’s just wonderful. Lieutenant Marks, how do you like that? Mrs. Lieutenant David Marks, of Memphis, Tennessee.”

  Nothing could stop Fran after that. She talked too much, she told too much, she repeated things Davey had said, apologizing, granting that they were too personal, and going on anyway. She talked of his parents, of their big house and garden, the country club, and his father’s three stores of electrical supplies. She broadly hinted that Davey not only was going to be terribly rich later on, but was far beyond a second lieutenant’s pay right now, so renting a place off base was going to be no problem.

  An hour passed like one of Davey’s airplanes. Outside Shag somehow knew that extraordinary things were afoot and he barked himself hoarse until they let him in. He had instantly caught the general fever, and decided all rules were off.

  “Down, I say,” Alexandra shouted at him after an unexpected lunge. Her towel turban slipped over an eye and she remembered. “Wait a minute,” she said, and left them. Once again she ran the comb through her hair. This time she looked at herself, smiled, and hurried back.

  “Look at me,” she said. “I did it last night in New York.”

  Her curly grey hair was short, bobbed in the Irene Castle style, cut straight around, on a line with the lobes of her ears. As they stood gawking at her, she tossed her head, as she had done a dozen times an hour since yesterday. “It’s so light,” she cried, “so free. You can’t imagine.”

  “Oh, Mama,” Fee cried. “I love it. You look just like Joan.”

  Fran loved it too, she said. But she thought of Davey, of his parents coming for the wedding. God, why did she have to do it now? It’s for girls, not old women, not for people who weigh too much and have a foreign accent. I can’t wait to get out of this awful place, where you forever have to die of shame.

  Fee was the only one left at home now, and they treated her as if she were their equal. Hardly ever did they shift into Russian to discuss anything important, and if Mr. and Mrs. Paige did come over, they never suggested that she might want to go off and read.

  Her father still never mentioned college as college; he did ask her what courses she was taking “at that school of yours,” but that was it. As for putting up the rest of her tuition each semester, there wasn’t even a mention of it.

  “I’ll do it, I tell you,” her mother said. “You can’t change him. I earn plenty, don’t I?”

  “If I only could figure him out.”

  “He can be wrong, can’t he?” Alexandra flung it out as the ultimate challenge, and hurried on. “Tuition is two hundred and your scholarship takes care of one hundred—do you think I’m not good for the other half? If you need fancy clothes, get an afternoon job—fashion is not my worry.”

  “All I need is my cashmere sweater and saddle shoes.”

  College was unbelievable. From the first day, she wondered how she had ever liked High; this was not a harder High, with longer assignments, this was new, like the time she read Wuthering Heights for herself, by accident, when it wasn’t on a Reading List.

  Had Garry found a whole new world at college? She almost wrote to ask him, but his letters had to be mostly for his parents. She wrote every few days anyway, except when she heard about his divorce. She was afraid her fury at Letty would show. And also the bouncing ball of joy alongside the fury.

  Garry had only written to her twice in the twelve weeks he had been there. She always carried both letters in her purse, wherever she went, but she did not need to take them out to read them.

  Dear Fee,

  Congratulations on the Big 91. And on becoming a Barnard frosh. And thanks for writing me, especially for your last line. There haven’t been too many good things happening to me of late, so your testimony in court and then that last sentence in your letter were pretty important. I don’t know how to say thanks, but please do take it for said.

  Always, Garry

  The second had just come this week, and it was even shorter. She had read it and read it and read it, wondering if it really could mean a fraction of what she wanted it to mean.

  Dear Fee,

  Your letters help more than you can guess. They remind me that there are happy things going on too, and that the time will come when I might share some of them again. Please write a lot—I find myself waiting to see if there’s a letter from you.

  He had signed this one the same way, but this time the words sounded like different words. Always, Garry.

  Always and always and always. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. It was so sad in the play, but Macbeth was talking of death and dusty yesterdays, not of love and time ahead.

  Constantly Fee tried to think what “three years” was like. Three years from now, she would be twenty, but she could not think of herself as anything except seventeen. She could not remember herself at thirteen or ten or five; she had been all of them, but they were impossible Fees that no longer were true. The Fees waiting ahead were equally impossible.

  The one thing she did know was that she was living in a new universe with Garry in each molecule of it, in each minute and half-minute of it. She would be in the middle of a class at Barnard, and suddenly she was back in the witness chair in the courtroom, seeing that different look come into Garry’s face. She would get into the train at Penn Station in the afternoon, and then the conductor would bawl out “BAA-NET” and she would think, But we just started, I haven’t even opened my book. And once a Columbia sophomore asked if she’d go out with him on a date, and she said, “Oh, I just couldn’t,” without stopping to think.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t explain. But I just couldn’t.”

  Almost none of the people she met at college knew about “The Paige Case” and her part in it; in August, most of them were off on vacations, and not bothering with newspapers. But even if they did know, they could never guess what had happened to her because of it. The trial was like a boundary line between two countries on a map; one country was the old way she had felt about Garry when she was a child, and the other was this vast new world she would never leave for the rest of her life.

  On weekends, she went over to the Paiges as soon as her Saturday cleaning was done. Mrs. Paige never asked why she came; she would talk to Fee about Garry’s last letter, and sometimes read bits of news aloud, like his making an improvement in the toolshop that the foreman liked and was adopting. And she would talk about the appeal that was almost sure to get on the calendar by the end of January or start of February.

  Once Mrs. Paige let her see her cry, without sending her home or even turning away. Fee didn’t know what to say; she put her hand on Mrs. Paige’s shoulder, and under her hand, she felt the shoulder sort of thank her.

  She still adored Mr. Paige, but there was something new in her feeling about Mrs. Paige. The sense of a special event, like talking to Mr. Fitch at High, was gone now; in its place was what she felt for her mother, but with an extra excitement to it.

  One Sunday when Fee was there, Mrs. Paige happened to tear off a leaf of the calendar on her small desk in the parlor. “November first,” Alida said. “I declare, time does move.”

  “‘The hypocritic days,’” Fee quoted, and added, “It’s Ralph Waldo Emerson; I just learned it.”

  “Say it for me, Fee. I don’t know it.”

  “‘Daughters of Time, the hypocritic days,’” Fee began, lowering her eyes in sudden constraint. “‘Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file—’”

  She broke off, and above her head
she heard a sound, but there were no words in it. Then Mrs. Paige left the room quickly, and water ran from the tap in the kitchen and a glass clinked against the brass faucet. I shouldn’t have, Fee thought; just because I can’t get it out of my head was no excuse.

  She heard Mr. Paige come down and talk to Mrs. Paige, and she sat wretchedly still. Should she go in and apologize? Should she just go home? An endless file, an endless file of days.

  “Fee, how’s college going?”

  It was Mr. Paige coming into the dining room, as friendly as ever. She jumped up and said, “Really marvelous.”

  “What’s your favorite course?”

  “Well, Baby Greek—it’s so good-looking to write in.” She answered his questions about teachers and new friends, and soon Mrs. Paige came back and they all three chatted a while as if they were three happy people.

  Then Mrs. Paige put her hand out toward Fee. “I asked you to recite it, and then I made you feel as if you’d hurt me. I’m sorry, Fee.”

  “I wouldn’t hurt you for anything,” Fee said passionately. “I love you so, I just couldn’t ever”

  Evan Paige said, “Of course you couldn’t, dear Fee.” He kept looking at her, and she sat quiet under his scrutiny.

  The instinct for love, Evan thought, the readiness to love—Fee has always had them. Oh, I love you, Mr. Paige. From five years back, a little girl’s excited voice sounded again; he remembered the small green “hammock” and he saw once more the wild exuberance of Fee’s joy over his assorted thefts and bribes and purchases from the Pullman car.

  Who could have thought that the little tomboy turning somersaults in an abandon of thanks, would turn into this Fee, this girl Garry was clearly preoccupied with already, and the Lord be praised for it. When the young can still long for love—

  “Fee, the appeal,” he said suddenly, “may have a slightly better chance than we dared hope.”

  “Oh, Mr. Paige.”

  “Tell her, Evan,” Alida said.

  “Well,” he said, his tone advising her not to overrate his news, “Molloy is going to testify this time. Basically, Molloy’s a decent enough fellow, and he doesn’t like the way he panicked about getting bad publicity in the papers. Now he sees that Synthex’s good name wasn’t damaged for all time, and he wants to speak up on Garry’s behalf.”

  On the table, Fee’s hands clasped as she listened, and she sat straighter, but she said nothing.

  “Molloy wants to testify that he first heard Garry’s beliefs about war back in 1914, when he came to work at Synthex, and heard them in ’15 and ’16 as well, long before we got into it, clearly a lifelong conviction of Garry’s. He also wants to say that Garry never once urged any man to disobey the draft law or any other.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up too much, Fee,” Mrs. Paige said. “But a new character witness might impress a new judge.”

  Again there was silence from all three. Then Fee looked at Mr. Paige and asked, “If we lose the appeal anyway, is there anything else you could do?”

  We, Evan thought, if we lose. For a moment he could not speak. Then he said, “At the worst, Fee, we might have to wait until the war ends. There would be amnesty on all these hysteria cases; it always happens. And Garry would come back to us then, at the very latest.”

  Several nights later, Fee looked at her watch, surprised. Midnight, and she still had half her paper to do for English Lit. Tonight should have been a good time to finish it. The house, for once, was quiet; it had been bedlam for the past week, with the Woman Suffrage victory on Election Day, and seven socialists elected to Albany, and the hue and cry against seating them, and the big victory over the Germans in the Aisne sector.

  But the worst bedlam was over the ups and downs in Russia. Trotsky was free, no he wasn’t, yes he was; Lenin was back, no, he’s still in Finland, no, he’s in Petrograd; Kerensky denies all rumors of Russia’s weakness and swears there will be no separate peace—up and down, back and forth, and her father going mad with each new dispatch.

  He was forever dropping in at the paper, just to watch the news ticker; he would hang over it hour after hour half the night. Mama was forever saying, “You’ll kill yourself, just when your life is at its highest point, at a new apex.”

  “It’s a killing time.”

  Tonight her mother was in New York, too. The house was empty as a barn. Fee had two rooms now, if she wanted them, with none of Fran’s dresses and slips and skirts in rings all over the floor, like big quoits. Fran didn’t write much either, but when she did, she drooled about her new life. She was learning to drive a car. It was her own car. Davey had bought it for her as a wedding present.

  Good for Franny, Fee thought, and stretched. She would rest a bit and then finish her Lit paper, no matter how late it was. She stepped over Shag’s supine body and went to the mirror over Fran’s old bureau, slipping out her hairpins. She brushed out the teased-up pompadour of her hair, and then tried to fold it under at her earlobes. It kept escaping, and she couldn’t tell; then she tried on one side only, using both hands at once, staring at the effect.

  I’m going to, she thought. Maybe tomorrow. And I’ll get Eli or Joan to take a snapshot. If the snap comes out, I could put it in my next letter. She tried to imagine Garry seeing it, opening a letter and seeing her face, and then looking at her.

  She turned away from the mirror, and went downstairs. She wanted something, even though she wasn’t hungry. I’d like mine in a glass.

  “We’ll have some tea,” she said to Shag and put the water up to boil.

  When she finally finished her Lit paper, it was past three and she went to bed. Still no sign of her mother and father. She slept hard, and when she sprang awake at the sound of their voices, she had a momentary feeling that it was the sleeping porch again, as on that dawning day in spring when they were out there with the flag. This time, too, it was just getting light, but they were nowhere to be seen.

  For a moment she was still, listening, straining to hear. Their voices were agitated, just like that other time at daybreak, but they were downstairs in the kitchen, not out on the porch. They were not having a fight, and though her mother was in tears, it wasn’t the usual hurt-feelings kind, or even the same as her weeping over Garry.

  Fee got out of bed and reached for her bathrobe. She didn’t have to sneak halfway down the stairs any longer; she could walk down and let them see her openly. Now only her father was talking, flinging words out, something about a coup d’état, about Kerensky fleeing for his life, the moderates being shot, the extremists triumphant—

  The kitchen door was open, and they were both there. Something in the way they sat, in the way they looked at each other halted Fee on the threshold, where they did not see her.

  “And now we’ll see a terrorism,” her father shouted, “now the whole world will see such a terrorism as the czars never dreamed of.”

  “Perhaps—”

  He wouldn’t listen. “Six months of hope, then the Bolsheviki take over.”

  “Perhaps it will fail too. Maybe Trotsky and Lenin—”

  He cut her off once more. “This time it is real. We are finished.”

  “Stiva, perhaps—somehow—”

  “There is no ‘perhaps.’ There is no ‘somehow.’” He sounded like a giant shouting in anguish. Then suddenly there was silence.

  Fee stood motionless, still in the doorway, still unwilling to go in. Her father suddenly put his head down, covering his face with his hands, right over his glasses. His shoulders were tight and high, and they were shaking. She remembered the time in spring when she saw him crying for the first time in all her life.

  He spoke again, and this time his voice broke. “My poor Russia,” he said. “My poor Russia.”

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reprodu
ced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1964 by Laura Z. Hobson

  cover design by Michel Vrana

  978-1-4532-4442-5

  This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  EBOOKS BY LAURA Z. HOBSON

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