First Papers (26 page)

“Mrs. Paige got here ten minutes ahead of you,” Miss Mainley told Fee in a sort of side-voice without turning to look at her. “I went along with her and the Callavini children also, to establish them in their proper classes. No visitors are going to skip a grade in this school the very day they get here!”

Fee thought it one of the funniest remarks she had ever heard, especially for a principal, and especially in that side-voice and with the sideways smile Miss Mainley gave her as she said it. It was enough to make you brag, dashing along while everybody in the halls could see Miss Mainley smiling and talking at you a mile a minute.

“Here’s Two-B,” Miss Mainley said. “I’ll take you in, Damsie.”

Through the open door, Fee could see Miss Mainley explain to the teacher and introduce Damsie. Damsie took to 2-B right away, and there wasn’t any fuss about leaving her there.

But when they reached 1-B, Josie wouldn’t go in. She hung on to Fee’s hand, and reached for her bookstrap and hung on to that too.

“Come in with us, Fira,” Miss Mainley said, “Josie is younger, you know—”

But when Josie was introduced all round and led to her desk, she collapsed into it, looked up at Fee without speaking and began to cry. It wasn’t loud and embarrassing, just soft and miserable.

“School is fun, Josie,” Fee whispered, but she glanced up at Miss Mainley in appeal. Josie looked so tiny, sitting there, huddled inside her middy as if she wanted to squinch her bones together and disappear.

“It will be fun later, Josie,” Miss Mainley said. “Here’s a present for you, and I’ll be back soon to see if it
was
fun. Now come along, Fira.”

Miss Mainley departed briskly, and Fee followed. The present was a bright-yellow pencil, new and sharp as a needle. In the corridor, Miss Mainley said, “She’ll quiet down,” and then waved Fee off, saying, “Skedaddle, or you’ll miss the last bell.”

It was so unexpected that Fee waved right back, as if she were a principal too. Then she ran off, in a panic that she had been fresh, and she reached her own class just as the bell clanged.

Miss Roberts said good morning in her special way and seemed interested in watching Fee arrange her books and pencil-box. Then she said, “Are they your cousins or friends of your family, Fee, the little girls you brought to school today?”

The old stupid whisper shot out of Tommy Gording to Jack Dryer across the aisle, and his cackle of a laugh too, but when Fee stood up to answer, it came out in her everyday reciting voice.

“No, ma’am, they’re not cousins or anything,” she said. “They’re from the Lawrence strike, and Mr. and Mrs. Paige took two strike kids to live with them too.”

“Why, how nice, Fee,” Miss Roberts said.

There was a whole hiss of whispering then, but Miss Roberts put up her “Attention” hand and it stopped. She looked at Fee as if she were waiting for the rest of her answer, and her “Attention” hand made the” whole class wait with her.

“Lawrence is in Massachusetts,” Fee added politely. “And everybody up there is cold and starving.”

“I remember now,” Miss Roberts said. “The newspapers haven’t had much about the textile strikes for quite a time.” Once again the whispers boiled up but Miss Roberts said, “Silence, please,” in her strict tone and they stopped at once. She gave Fee her “Be seated” nod, and kept looking past her over the whole room, taking her time, as if she wanted to look at everybody there, first one row and then the next row. Nobody moved.

Then Miss Roberts said softly, “Perhaps you have forgotten your manners, Class. But Fira Ivarin’s family have not. Helping people in trouble is the highest kind of manners.”

Fira felt wonderful.

By lunchtime the whole school knew about the Paiges’ Rico and Maria and about her Damsie and Josie. It was comfortable, having it all happen together. And it was different.

Tommy Gording and Jack Dryer and the rest of them could whisper and cackle as much as they pleased, and the minute Miss Roberts’ back was turned they’d start right in again, as sure as sure could be.

But the Paiges weren’t crazy foreigners and they were doing exactly the same thing her family was doing.

Let Tommy Gording and Jack Dryer put
that
in their pipes and smoke it.

And if it came to that, Miss King could put it in
her
pipe and smoke it too.

When you suddenly stopped being the youngest it was wonderful, Fee thought, and the way people started behaving as if you’d become lots older overnight was marvelous.

By the end of the first week, Fran stopped paying much attention to Damsie and Josie, maybe because it wasn’t her school that they went to. Then Mrs. Paige telephoned and asked to talk to Fee. She wondered if Fee could take Rico and Maria along with her and Damsie and Josie. “Just for a few days,” Mrs. Paige said, as if she were coaxing. “They’re older, and pretty soon they’ll go and come themselves.”

And when the bell rang that afternoon, there they were, waiting out front in the schoolyard by the big stone statue where her own kids were already waiting. They
are
mine, she thought. Fran hasn’t one thing to do with the school part of them, and Mama and Papa haven’t either, except the one letter to Miss Mainley. At home, everybody had to ask
her
what had happened during the day, because when they asked Josie or Damsie, the answers were mostly little shrugs.

“Is your teacher nice, Damsie?”

“All right.”

“And yours, Josie? Is she nice too?”

“Kinda.”

Fee liked it when Fran or Mama took her aside and asked about Damsie and Josie and school. She liked to hurry out to the statue; it was important not to be late. One day she
was
five minutes late, and it was awful.

By then, Rico and Maria were going home by themselves, so Fee knew Damsie and Josie would be waiting all alone. There was nothing she could do; when the bell rang, Miss Roberts was at the blackboard, explaining something, and nobody was ever allowed to leave a class if a teacher was still talking.

It took Miss Roberts forever and when Fee dashed out, they were waiting in the empty yard, standing tight together as if they had been pasted to each other along their sides. They shrieked, “Here’s Fee, here’s Fee,” and ran to her as if she were the Queen of Sheba or Ethel Barrymore.

One afternoon, without saying a word to anybody first, she took Damsie and Josie off with her to Gray’s. They had never had a soda or a frappe, either one, and she even had to order for them, because they didn’t know what to say. “Three chocolate frappes with vanilla ice cream, and grated nuts and whipped cream,” she said and laid three nickels down on the counter. She had never spent so much of her allowance on a treat before. They both lapped up the last dribble, and it made her feel wonderful in a brand-new way.

Not everything was wonderful, but even the bad things didn’t last long. Once, leaving class, Trudy Loheim said, “Some people certainly are fickle, aren’t they?” and informed Fee it was the saddest thing in the world if your best friend turned into a traitor. Fee said, “I’ve asked you over about a million times since they came,” but Trudy dismissed it. “It’s no fun if we can’t be alone,” she said, turning it into a second accusation.

It ended in tears of rage for Fee, but that afternoon was Damsie’s and Josie’s turn to go play with Rico and Maria in the Paiges’ big high attic, and she had to hurry them over. She loved the Paiges’ house; it was all grey stucco on the outside, with ribs of dark-brown wood a few feet apart, and a roof of curved red tiles, one overlapping another all the way up to the top, like starched red ruffles on a dress.

It was time to say good-bye when Mrs. Paige asked them to stay for supper. Mr. Paige had something important to finish at his office, she said; he wouldn’t get home until ten.

“That’s not considered working late, over at your house, is it, Fee?” she asked, with her nice light laugh. Fee shook her head, and into it popped the memory of Mr. Paige’s trip to California. She hadn’t remembered it since goodness knew when. How was that possible, when it mattered so desperately?

“I’d love to have you three stay,” Mrs. Paige said.

“Stay here,” Damsie begged Fee, and Rico said, “There’s chicken.”

“I’d have to phone my mother,” Fee said, as if that hurdle might defeat the whole idea.

“Go ahead, dear.”

It was while she was saying “one-seven-one-eight-W” to the operator that she wondered if there were some offhand way she could phone Trudy too, and tell her she’d just been invited to have supper with Mrs. Paige at the Paiges’ house, without her parents being there. If Trudy was going to be mean and jealous, she ought to have plenty to be jealous about.

Fee sighed. It was impossible to phone Trudy and tell her. Why it was, she didn’t know, but it was impossible, and it made her sore to know it was.

The voices turned into shouts and Fee thought, They’ll scare them to death. She ran into the children’s room, and leaned down over Damsie and then over Josie. They were drowned in sleep; if the roof blew off with the racket below, they wouldn’t know it.

She closed their door in relief and stood in the hall listening, wishing Fran wasn’t off at Jack Purney’s sixteenth birthday party. The shouts were booming up through the funnel of the stairs from the kitchen, mixed of her father’s voice and her brother Eli’s, mixed with weeping that was not her mother’s and terrifying because it was not. She wondered what Mrs. Paige sounded like when she cried, but Mrs. Paige had gone home with Rico and Maria before supper, after all the rides on Eli’s motorcycle. Eli and Joan had left Webby with the people in the upstairs half of their house and had come over to meet the children, because Mama had nagged at Eli on the phone a lot, saying it was heartless not even to come once in three whole weeks and show a little concern for the poor things.

Eli must have wanted to prove he wasn’t heartless because one by one he took all four kids out for a ride. Not one had even touched a motorcycle before, and each one came back buzzing with excitement. The fun spread to everybody and there was a jolly mood right through supper, with Papa joking about his empty agnostic office on Fridays, and sitting around like anybody else’s father.

Now this! It was getting worse by the minute, with bursts of words like bullets. The familiar plunge of worry drove downwards inside her, and Fee stood, holding the knob of the children’s door as if the door might fly open. She was half undressed and her underwear felt sticky with sudden perspiring. She pulled at it, away from her moist skin, deciding to go back to her homework but not moving. The voices grew louder.

“I did say that,” her father roared. “Mama was quite correct.”

“But you didn’t mean it.” It was a terrible accusation as Eli said it, flung like a rock.

“I meant every word. I did smash my parents between the eyes, just as you did, Mr.—Mr. Eaves.” Mr. Eaves was a rock too, hurled right back.

“But you can forgive your own actions,” Eli said. “There’s some God-given difference between your actions and everybody else’s.”

“And that difference, if you please—”

There was a pause and Fee realized it was Joan crying, not Mama. She had never seen Joan cry except once a long time ago, before Webby was born. It was more terrible to know it was Joan down there with tears running down her face, not Mama.

“That difference eluded me,” her father said, “when I first heard this news about Eaves. Until now, until this evening it eluded me.”

“For God’s sake, can’t we drop it?” Eli said. “It’s done, and it isn’t going to be undone.”

“That difference is that when I thrust those so-called daggers into my parents’ hearts, I was running some sort of risk or danger myself.”

“I must admit,” Alexandra said, “I think Papa is right, Eli. He
was
arrested and he did go to prison—”

“And you, sir,” Papa said, “were running
away
from risk and danger.”

“Running away—what are you talking about?” There was the sound of a chair being shoved back hard. Eli must have sprung to his feet.

“Running away from the risk of being a foreigner, of having a foreign name, of being a Jew, different from so-called real Americans.”

“Exaggerate,” Eli said. “As usual, blow it all up.”

“Pardon me, I do not wish to exaggerate.” Papa was suddenly as cool and formal as if he were addressing a stranger. “You do not regard a foreign name as a risk or danger, merely as a nuisance, an inconvenience. Hooray. What remains, nevertheless, is that
you
thrust your daggers to spare
yourself.”

On the last words, coolness vanished. He shot out each one in fury, with a thump on the table to mark it off. Outside, Shag began to bark in sudden warning, trotting back and forth on the porch, growling and watchful. Another chair was shoved back. They must be facing each other like wild animals.

Fee shivered. She sat down on the top step, her forehead on her knees, her eyes squeezed tight as if to banish the scene she could not see. A moment later there was the click of a switch below her and the whole staircase was lighted. Her head flew up, but she sat rigid as her father started up the steps. He saw her and stopped short.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“Nothing.” She jumped up and ran into her room. She sat on the edge of her bed, expectant and afraid in a terrible familiar afraidness.

It never was being afraid he would spank her, even way long ago when she was little. He never spanked them, except that one wild funny time when she was four that she and Franny still could go into stitches about.

She could still see the doll that started it, the beautiful blond thing, with eyes that opened and shut. An English lesson of Papa’s in New York, who worked in a toy factory, gave it to him one night “for your little girl,” thinking he had only one.

Apparently she and Fran used to fight like tigers, about whose turn it was to have the doll, though neither of them remembered that part. But one day, Papa was at his desk and they were at it about the doll and kept at it even though he kept ordering them to be quiet, and then without warning he marched in on them and spanked them, first one and then the other, with the doll tumbling like an acrobat between them because neither one would let go of it.