First Papers (16 page)

Just then the Paiges arrived and the whole day changed.

After the first spinning minutes, all she could do was busy herself with the Lord & Taylor box, and she squealed with joy when she saw what was in it—a real cashmere sweater, the most expensive thing she had ever owned.

“Try it on, Franny,” Fee said, and Fran could have hugged her for saying it.

“Later,” she said.

“Now, Fran, come on,” Fee insisted.

So she did and everybody watched while she slipped it on over her dress. She knew Garry was watching too, although she could not look straight at him, and even before she went to the tiny square of mirror, she could
feel
she looked well in it. In her high little voice, Mrs. Paige said, “I declare, you look a little beauty, Francesca,” and Fran nearly ran over and kissed her for saying it in front of Garry.

Fee’s friend arrived just then, and a moment later two of her own. The games started, and then there wasn’t a minute when she could talk to Garry alone. But not for part of a minute did she forget he was there. And the moment he disappeared, she knew that too, and began to wait for him to come back.

His father and he had gone off to change into bathing suits, while Letty used the back part of their own tent. Garry came back first; he looked marvelous. He had one of the new suits, without the short sleeves most men wore; it was black with two white stripes around the V neck and the big armholes, and also around the legs, just above his knees.

She felt funny, seeing Garry in a bathing suit for the first time, and she kept trying not to look at him. Then Letty joined him and she looked all right in her navy bloused suit and white cap, like a big puff of rubber over her hair. Her legs looked sort of thick, though, in her long black stockings, and come to think of it, her pleated bathing suit made her look a bit thick all over.

“It looks like rain,” her mother suddenly said, “everybody better get your swim in right away. Hurry!”

Fran felt like jumping with pleasure. All the boys and girls ran home to get their suits, and in a moment Garry would be seeing
her
in a bathing suit for the first time too. Her stockings didn’t make her look thick, and her bathing suit didn’t either.

“Come along, you two,” Eli said after supper, “let’s take a walk and see if this dump has changed since last summer.”

Fran paid no attention to him. By now the birthday party was over. The Paiges and Mama were talking about the big strikes that had started in England and Ireland on Thursday, stopping railroad trains dead. Garry knew more about it than anybody; a friend of his at the lab kept getting letters from relatives in Germany, warning him that the strikes would spread there too, and then to France.

“Come on, Fran,” Eli repeated, “let’s take a walk.”

“Well, the strike’s sort of interesting,” Fran said. “I’d rather stay and listen.”

Alexandra looked at her with new pleasure. “Poor devils, working twelve, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, for eight or nine dollars a week. A ninety-eight-hour week, for nine dollars.”

“It’s inhuman,” Fran said.

“They’ll get their ten-hour day,” Garry assured her.

“I
hope
so,” Fran said gratefully, as if he had just taken special pains to make her happier.

But Eli insisted. “Don’t be a pest on your birthday. Come on.”

There was nothing to do but go. Fee had already started, and they went up the beach to where the new dance hall had been built. Inside it, the Victrola was turned up to its loudest, blaring out “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Above them, though the sky still had a faint orange from sunset, the moon was new and clean, and the wind from the sea was dryer and cooler than it had been all summer. Soon vacation would be over and school starting up once more.

“Let’s sit down here,” Joan said. They had reached a breakwater sticking out from the ocean, and she felt it with her palm to see whether it was still wet.

Fran sat down beside her, first lifting the skirt of her new dress, and Fee sat on the sand, locking her arms around her knees. From above them, Eli said, “We have a big secret we want to tell you.” He sounded serious. “Do you both promise, on your honor?”

Joan said, “We’re sure you’re both old enough to keep a secret.”

“I certainly am,” Fran said. Loyally she added, “And Fee is too.”

“I
have
two big secrets anyway,” Fee said, and Fran snickered. One was about Trudy and the other about Betty, and Fee had blatted both of them out the same day she had heard them.

“We know we can trust you,” Joan said. “And you won’t want to tell your mother and father anyway, because it might hurt them.”

“Hurt them?” Fee said.

“Just at the beginning,” Joan said.

Fee looked at Fran and then at her brother. She wanted terribly to hear what the secret was, but in a funny way, she suddenly wished there wasn’t anything to hear. Fran looked serious, and Fee wondered if Fran was a little afraid too.

“We changed our name,” Eli said. “We did it before Web was born, so it could get on his birth certificate.”

“Changed it?” they both asked.

“To Eaves. E-a-v-e-s. Eaves. No more Ivarin.”

“You didn’t,” Fran said, impressed. “You never would.”

“But I did.” He looked at her, then at Fee. “We got the legal part taken care of beforehand, and we know there’ll be a peach of a row when we tell Pa and Ma.”

“Oh, Eli,” Fee said slowly.

“Before Web was born?” Fran asked Joan. “But at the hospital, when we went to see you and the baby, we didn’t say ‘Eaves.’ The nurse called you ‘Mrs. Ivarin,’ not Mrs. Eaves.”

“We wanted it that way, to keep it to ourselves for a while. But Daddy and my doctor are friends, and they took care of the birth certificate.”

“Eaves,” Fran said. “Eli Eaves. It’s grand. But, gee.”

They all fell silent, looking at each other, starting to speak, then saying nothing.

“Will it be awful,” Fee asked at last, “when you tell Papa and Mama?”

Eli just whistled, and Fee’s wish came back stronger than ever, that there hadn’t been a secret to listen to, even one as exciting as this. Through the rest of the evening, when they were back in the tent and couldn’t say a word in front of their mother, and even next morning, Fee wasn’t over the feeling of being afraid. She wouldn’t admit it to Fran. The only thing she did say, the moment they were off by themselves, was that she never knew you could just go to court and change your name to a prettier one.

It was a small matter, Fran said learnedly. You could change your name even without bothering to go to court at all, if you felt like it, like taking a
nom de plume
or a pseudonym or a stage name. The only time the law cared was if you were a criminal, and were changing your name for criminal purposes.

“I could change my name to Francesca Fairbanks,” Fran ended, “or Francesca Fiske or anything I wanted. And you could change yours to Fira Foolish or Fira Phooey or—”

“You keep quiet.”

“That’s what we both have to do, Fee,” Fran said, serious and nice again. “We can’t even breathe ‘Eaves’ in front of Mama. She would just die.”

“T
O RECEIVE SUCH PRAISE
from you,” Stefan Ivarin said slowly to the man standing beside his desk in the office, “is, you will admit, an extraordinary experience.”

“Now, Stiva,” Joseph Fehler said. “It’s not so unheard of as all that. If only you could drop the chip on your shoulder.” He spoke ruefully, a man regretfully aware of difficulty yet declining to quarrel.

“Last spring, you recall,” Stefan said, “I had rather a nasty fight, overruling you, about the box on the front page—”

“But now that I want your editorial in a box on the front page,” Fehler cut in, “the notion becomes anathema to you.” He indicated the strip of galley on the desk and added, “For even
one
reader to miss this would be a crime.”

Involuntarily, Stefan glanced down, conscious of pleasure, and of annoyance that he should be so helpless in vanity. The moment the galley had come up from the press room, he had sent word to Abe Kesselbaum, the make-up man, that an error had been made; the editorial was for the regular page, in the usual format. Word had come back that by chance Mr. Fehler had happened to read it in proof and had sent word down that it should appear front-page center.

“ASSASSINATE A BOOK?” the headline said, and as Stefan read it again, his satisfaction with it deepened. There was economy there; “ASSASSINATE” brought anarchist idiocy and madness to mind as no other single word in the world could have done.

“You realize,” Stefan said, looking up at Fehler, “that if his book ever does get into print, between the efforts of your crowd and any money we raise here, I will still denounce his ideas at every opportunity?”

“Yes, Stiva. I didn’t think we had made a convert.”

Stefan grunted. He wished he could order Fehler to stop addressing him as “Stiva,” but the specific harshness eluded him. The sycophant’s tone Fehler had adopted this evening sent a chill of distaste through him, though the office was as clammy hot as if it were August instead of late October. Now, in his final phrase about making a convert, Fehler’s disdain for “the softness” of the moderate socialist twanged like a fat ’cello string. Stefan looked down again at the strip of smudged galley.

This paper has fought Anarchism for twenty years. It still does.

Yet it is a shock that in this free country, not one publisher will accept Alexander Berkman’s
Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.
To assassinate a book, we need only to refuse it print.

Readers of the
Jewish News,
so many of whom still recall the tyrannies they escaped from when they came to America, say again and again, “It’s a free country,” and their hearts hammer with gratitude and love.

But that great banner, “A free country,” will wave only while all writing and speaking and thinking remain free, even that which we detest, despise or fear.

Therefore this newspaper now invites its readers to send in money orders for a special fund to publish Berkman’s book privately—

As Stefan read on, he was aware of Fehler’s eyes upon him, of the triumph in them. He is a fool, Stefan thought; like every extremist, he is so obsessed with his own ideas, he loses the ability to reason as men reason. Now he is certain he is “using” me and the paper. He cannot see that by robbing this book of martyrdom, we not only maintain a principle, but doom the book to the oblivion it undoubtedly deserves.

“I must either overrule you on position, Fehler,” he said aloud, “and restore this to the editorial page where it normally would appear, or else, call a special meeting of the policy staff and put this vexing matter to a vote.”

Joseph Fehler shook his head. His handsome face, ruddy and still tanned from his late vacation, seemed to elongate and harden. “I will be outvoted,” he said. “I am always outvoted here.”

Stefan Ivarin picked up a heavy pencil, changed the printing directions on the smudged galley, and shouted “Boy, Boy,” until an old man in a sweater appeared and took the galley from him. “Yes,” he said to Fehler, “you would be outvoted.”

“Your conception of freedom,” Fehler said bitterly.

A current of anger shot through Stefan but he controlled it. “This old story,” he said wearily. He rose so that he could face Fehler. “If you wish to be in the voting majority, Fehler, you must join the staff of an anarchist paper. Perhaps Johann Most could use your talents as business manager on
Die Freiheit.”
Fehler started to reply, but Stefan refused to allow it, his voice growing in volume, ploughing right on. “But here on the
Jewish News,
where you are the single anarchist, among an entire staff of Democrats and Socialists, do you really daydream about majorities?”

“You would celebrate for a week,” Fehler said, “if I went to another paper.”

“Perhaps not for a whole week.”

Stefan felt the heat mounting in his forehead and eyes; in his mind, Alexandra said, “Stiva, please, your face is getting red.” He lowered his voice. “Are we to descend to sarcasms now about ‘celebrating’? Bickering like young girls with hurt feelings?”

“I did not intend to bicker.”

“Neither did I. It does not matter.” He seated himself at his desk once more. “What does matter,” he said, “is that the owner of the paper approves of your efficiency, whatever he may feel about your political formation. The paper’s circulation grows, the income grows, he wants no changes. So it has been for five years, so let it be for another five years.”

“Perhaps,” Fehler said, and left the room.

Stefan looked after him. Yes, sooner or later, a show of power, and not over Fehler’s anarchism, either. He will choose a more popular arena, where he has more chance to tear me apart.

“It will break his heart,” Alexandra said bitterly.

“Mama, please don’t cry,” Fee begged. “Please don’t.”

“He’ll raise the roof,” Eli said. “That I grant, but it won’t break his heart. Nothing could.”

They were in the kitchen, Alexandra and the girls, Eli and Joan. Alexandra put her hand on Fee’s thin shoulder, nodding as if in obedience to the child’s entreaty. But tears kept flooding her reddened eyes; nothing under heaven could stop them now.

Joan looked at Eli in reproof for his roughness, and wished he had put it off once again, as he had put it off so many times since they had done it in June. Father Ivarin wasn’t there, and maybe that was why Eli had chosen tonight to tell his mother about Eaves. An hour had passed since he had, and all Joan could think of now was how to end it and get Eli home. If he didn’t calm down, he wouldn’t sleep, and he’d have a frightful day tomorrow. His new school was way out in Brighton Beach and he had to leave at seven-fifteen each morning to get there in time.

“Don’t you tell him about it,” Joan advised Alexandra. “Eli and I ought to tell him ourselves—we don’t want to put it off on you.”

“I can’t hide a thing like this.”

“Can’t you make up some excuse? You could say you’re worried about the baby, a sudden temperature, something like that. Then tomorrow I’ll come back and tell him myself.”