First Papers (22 page)

Aloud he said only, “Yes, I might like it, Stiva.” He thought, We are so different, but at bottom we’re allies.

Upstairs Fee said to Fran, “Why does Mrs. Paige stay so thin, while Mama stays so fat?”

“Keep quiet,” Fran answered from the doorway. “I think Mr. Paige and Papa are having a fight. It would be fun, wouldn’t it?”

“You’re spooky,” Fee said, trying to see how Shag would look in her navy-blue middy. When the flannel touched his ears, he flung himself free of middy and Fee both. She righted herself on the floor, and he lay full length beside her, his tail thumping, his dark eyes fixed on hers.

At the door, Fran said, “Shag, stop that noise,” but it was no use. That one promising flare-up downstairs had led nowhere; now they were all back to company-is-here voices; Papa never shouted at the Paiges or anybody Christian the way he shouted at the family or people from the paper or the unions.

“Can’t Mama stop being fat
ever?”
Fee asked when Fran finally deserted the doorway.

“She’s not fat. She’s just stretched out.”

“What stretches her?”

“I’ve told you a million times, and you can’t remember a thing.”

“You haven’t told me a million times! You don’t ever finish.”

Fran sighed in exaggerated woe. “All those baby questions.”

“They’re not baby! You just want to get my goat.”

Fran waved four fingers languidly, and then took up her nail-buffer, still unmended. She pried its steel hoop off and tried shifting the chamois so that the grey nubbled part would move off dead center and be replaced by a smoother part. But then she could not slip the hoop back. “Pull on this side, will you?” she said. “Then maybe it’ll stay put while I get this metal thing back on.”

“If you tell me, I’ll pull it for you,” Fee said, looking at the buffer with professional competence. The steel hoop fell to the floor and in despair Fran said, “Oh God, I just hate the old thing.” Fee took the denuded buffer from Fran’s discouraged grasp, saying conversationally, “What
did
stretch Mama out?” Her conciliatory tone implied, This is a fair offer; accept it and it’ll be good for both of us.

“When you’re having a baby,” Fran started tentatively.

“The baby is inside you,” Fee said energetically. “Don’t start with that stupid old stuff. But Mrs. Paige had a baby inside her twice, and she didn’t get stretched.”

Fran was nonplused at this crisp exposition and hesitated over her next words. At once Fee set down the buffer.

“Go on,” she ordered.
“Why
didn’t she?”

“Mrs. Paige was allowed to wear a special thing,” Fran said, “and Mama wasn’t. That’s why Mrs. Paige didn’t and Mama did.”

“What sort of special thing?”

“A maternity corset.”

“Why don’t you stretch in it?”

“It holds up your stomach when you get bigger and bigger, the way Joan got. Remember?”

“Sure I do. Did Joan wear it? I never saw it.”

“Joan wouldn’t leave it around where anybody could
see
it. They’re horrible big pink things with a million laces up the back and a sort of pouchy balloon up front.”

Fran made a face and Fee said, “Icky.” She was pressing the hoop in place, along one side of the frame, and now she gripped an edge of the dirty chamois with her teeth, pulling back on it hard. The hoop clicked; the chamois held; though the tapered ends of the buffer were uncovered, the buffing center was smoothly yellow.

“Goody,” Fran said admiringly. “Oh, Fee, you’re grand.”

“Right up in front of you like this?” Fee said, touching her finger tips and extending her curved arms forward as far as they would go.

“Not up at your shoulders. It has to hold you
up
so the baby won’t stretch and sag you way way way down to your knees.”

Fee again said, “Icky,” and looked down at her knees apprehensively as if she were fearful that her own small stomach would be billowing about her kneecaps.

Fran said, “Not exactly knees, either. It straps you up
under,
and holds you up so your stomach won’t go floppy forever. Like this.”

Fran placed her arms hard against her sides, elbows close in over her hipbones, making a basket-like circle of her arms, a sling to support a mighty weight.

Fee watched in total interest. “You’re a good explainer,” she said warmly. “I wish I could just ask you one tiny other thing.”

“Well, you can’t,” Fran said.

“Why not?”

“Because.”

Fee lunged at the buffer but Fran said, “You know something?”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“I think Papa has a crush on Mrs. Paige.”

“You
what?”
Fee cried out.

“I think he’s got a real crush on her,” Fran repeated, relishing the sensation she had made. “And I think she has a crush on him. Did you hear her down there? ‘Oh, Stefan, my dear, you are just the man for it, just the man they want.’” Fran let her voice climb, in mimicry of Alida.

Fee looked stricken. “Don’t do that, Franny,” she said.

“And did you see her blush while she said it to him? She always blushes now when she so much as looks at him.”

Fee clapped her palms to her ears and shouted, “I said
don’t.”

“Old people can fall in love too,” Fran went on authoritatively, “and I think Papa has a crush on her for fair, and—”

“He couldn’t have,” Fee whispered. “He just couldn’t.” Suddenly she burst into tears. She heard Fran’s exasperated, “For Pete’s sake,” but she couldn’t help it.

The idea was so horrible, so overwhelming that her heart exploded with pain. Papa
couldn’t
have a crush on Mrs. Paige, he couldn’t, he couldn’t. He loved Mama, and if he had a crush on anybody else in the whole world, then he couldn’t love Mama any more.

A desolation struck at her, over and around her like a frozen lake closing over her head. In this bottomless icy sinking, she knew Fran was talking to her, but the separate words could not get through the numb and icy skin encasing her.

Fran suddenly put an arm around her. “I’m sorry I said it, Fee—I didn’t think you’d take it so awfully.”

Fee leaned against her. It was new to have Fran so sorry about something she had done to her, but she couldn’t stop crying. She saw her middy blouse on the floor and at last she put it on again, as if it were morning and she were dressing for school. Then she started for the door; not knowing why she wanted to get out of the room or where she wanted to go.

“Fee,” Fran said in an urgent whisper, “are you going down and do anything crazy?”

“No.”

“It’ll be terrible if you do.”

“I won’t.” She started slowly down the stairs, holding the banister and going down one at a time, still now knowing why she was going. She would not go into the dining room where they were, but she could not turn around and go back either. Every third or fourth breath she took came out in a long pulling flutter, but she opened her lips, so it made no sound. On the bottom step, she could hear them: they were talking about the frightful strikes in the woolen mills in New England, and the lecture Papa had given up there, and the extra lectures he was going to go back and give every minute he could until the strike was won.

“It’s been nearly a month already, hasn’t it? How long can those poor people hold out?”

That was Mrs. Paige, in her familiar soft voice, and the sound of it pulled Fee down from the step to the little hall and past the edge of the open dining-room door.

Mrs. Paige was facing her, but she wasn’t looking toward the doorway. Her eyes were unhappy, and she sighed, and made little sounds of worry and sympathy. But the one she was talking to was Mama, not Papa. The one she was looking at was Mama, not Papa. It was Mama’s answer she was waiting for, about how long the poor people could hold out. She wasn’t even bothering with Papa.

And Papa wasn’t bothering with her. He was standing over by the window, making a cigarette, and talking to Mr. Paige.

Suddenly Fee’s heart jumped and danced and glistened. They were all just the way they always were, so it wasn’t true. She raced upstairs to tell Fran.

D
URING THE NIGHT IT
snowed, so heavily that neither the morning milk nor the newspaper had yet arrived when they waked up. For the first time since they had moved into the apartment, the heat coming up was slow and inadequate, knocking against the pipes in thumps of protest that the task assigned on this bitter morning was too great.

Garry said, “Don’t get up yet. Let’s have a fire in here and feel pampered.”

“Ooh,” Letty said.

He built a husky fire. In the small fireplace in their bedroom, the logs they always used seemed massive, but this was the first fire they had ever had while they were in bed, and they found it intimate and charming.

“I could bring our breakfast in here,” Letty said, not moving. She gazed past him to their stretch of garden. “Maybe you can’t get to the lab at all today,” she said. “Just look at it out there.”

The garden lay foamy and glistening under their windows. Where drifts had sloped up against the dark-green wood fence separating the Tenth Street gardens from their own and from their neighbors, he could have stood in snow up to his shoulders. For a moment, as he put on his bathrobe near the frost-traced windows, he wished he could keep away from Aldrich today, and wander about the city’s muted, fluffy streets instead.

A brisk ring at the bell told him the newsboy had come at last, and he ran down for the paper, hoping as always that he wouldn’t be caught in his bathrobe by the owner of the house or by another tenant. Every morning since they had moved in last summer, he had run the same risk.

The
Morning World
welcomed the snow too, it appeared; its front page had been blown nearly clear of its usual grey freight of warnings and reports and threats from Germany and Italy and Turkey and the rest of Europe. There was the fresh sweep of the blizzard instead, pictures of impassable streets, of stranded carriages, hatted and cloaked in billowing white, of trolleys and store windows grotesque or beautiful in arabesques and swirls of snow and splinters of ice.

He raced up the steps in the draughty hall of the old mansion. The headlines said the blizzard would probably last until night and the cold wave most of the week. He was glad. It was a sort of recess provided by God. He had still not discussed the continuing rumors at the lab with Letty.

She was no longer in bed, but in the window-missing kitchenette, wearing her blue robe of a thin flowered wool, ruffled at the hem; it couldn’t possibly be warm but it was pretty and becoming. She looked as she had looked since the sale of her lowboy a few days ago, happy and self-important and full of achievement.

He returned to the bedroom, pulled the one armchair close to the fireplace, the newspaper on his knees, still folded as if it had no interest beyond the pictures of the storm. It wouldn’t be the right moment to have a serious discussion, he thought. He stared into the fire and wondered how one knew rightness or wrongness of moments.

“Queen Anne, ma’am” he called out, “where’s that coffee?” She said, “You’re so silly,” in a voice he hadn’t heard in a long time, the voice of just-meeting, of flirtation, the voice of that first summer in Maine.

For an instant the white brilliance of the snow gave way to the green and blue of a lake under a summer sky, and a shaft of longing bit into him, to have that Maine summer again, warm and beneficent, free of problems, filled only with a wild desire and the leap of love.

He unfolded the paper, and turned to the news which the blizzard had displaced.

LORD HALDANE REJECTS BERLIN DEMAND

The smaller headlines and subheads tumbled after the main one: Haldane, of the British War Office, had gone to Berlin for unofficial talks with German ministers, hoping to reach an understanding to ease the tension between the nations.

Germany demanded a guarantee that Britain would stay neutral in any war “into which Germany might be drawn.”

Lord Haldane had summarily refused.

The War Office would issue Britain’s formal refusal before the day was over.

Instantly Garry froze in the grip of unwillingness to accept the news, the real news, the endless news that had piled shoulder-high in every paper for the past weeks, months, years … demands, rejections, treaties, armies, navies, the Triple Entente, the Entente Cordiale, the Kaiser, the Czar, the King, the Generals …

Letty came in, carrying a tray with her prettiest china, fragile and translucent. He watched her pour their coffee, and said, “I wonder if the rink in Central Park is going to be cleared off by afternoon.”

“They sweep it the minute the snow lets up,” Letty said. She was an expert skater and loved skating “spang in the middle of the city.” “You’re not going to go to work today,” she added, positively. “I can tell.”

“I have to try.”

“Not too hard though.”

“I may not be going to Aldrich much longer, anyway.”

“What does that mean?”

“That I’m pretty sure I’ll quit soon and find a job somewhere else.”

“Quit?” She refilled his cup. “But why?”

There were no easy words. This was what stayed unsaid when he felt that so little seemed of equal importance to each of them. For months now, whenever he had tried to share with her his uneasiness about Aldrich’s emerging plans, Letty willfully, or in an amazing lack of perception, would brush it aside as “just worrying” or else listen with a patient indulgence that reduced his words to mere petulance.

“It’s hard to explain, but it’s wrong for somebody like me, and I don’t think any more that it might get right. It’s about their converting the business to synthetics.”

“You said that was marvelous.”

“I still would. But now it looks as if that’s being by-passed completely.”

“You said the new plant was purposely for that.”

“But things are changing so fast that Aldrich is changing pretty fast too. They’re going to make explosives instead.”

She started to deny it, as if she knew their plans. He told her of new shipments of cellulose and of the absence of comparable quantities of sodium hydroxide and carbon disulphide for turning cellulose into the artificial silk that had become his specialty for the past fourteen months.