First Papers (28 page)

She glared also and said nothing. He wanted to tell her in his own way, and with a faint indulgence, she wanted him to.

“So this sky-high jump would be from nine cents an hour to about eleven.”

“Gee, that’s awful.”

“Mind you, fifty-four hours in the mills and your pay now leaps from four dollars and eighty-six cents to five dollars and eighty-four cents. Every single Saturday! I tell you, labor is downright piggish.”

He banged the desk with his gleaming chunk of coal. Behind his glasses his eyes shone, and he was shouting, but he was in a good mood, so Fee found the noise exciting.

“And, mind you, this twenty-five per cent isn’t for everybody—let’s not be extremists, I pray you. Skilled workers with their twelve cents an hour and a handful of specialists getting twenty—no bonanza jump for them!”

“How much are the special ones striking for?”

“A one-cent raise—fifty-four cents more every week.” He raised a finger in admonition. “Do not ask me to put it in per cent marks—I’m not mathematician enough.”

She returned his look of private jesting, and then said, “It sounds so different in the paper.”

“It always does. In the big newspapers, it nearly always does. Even in those that intend to be honest.”

“But would it wreck New England, Papa, if we win?”

My child, he thought, my little daughter. We. If we win. A storm of love rocked him, and he turned abruptly toward the window, saying, “It’s stuffy in here. Too many cigarettes.” He rose and went over to it, opening it from the top. The air that blew in over his head had no frost in it. Winter was going.

“It won’t wreck anything,” he said, as he returned to his desk. “Here, there was something you didn’t see. Let me show you—it’s important to see these, every time they appear in print anywhere.”

With his fountain pen, he began to ink in the quotation marks around the last headline, making them very prominent. Fee leaned down over his right arm, watching his pen.

“They’re like signals,” he said. “Whenever you read something in quotation marks, remember you’ve had a high-sign that somebody said it or wrote it or warned it. If you want to believe this fearful threat that some giant intellect is making about New England, go ahead and believe it. But, Firuschka, I believe it’s a godforsaken pygmy lie.”

Fee laughed, and the last of her confusion and worry evaporated like steam from a windowpane. “I believe it too, Pa,” she cried, wishing you could kiss fathers the way you could kiss mothers, without seeming babyish. “Just an old godforsaken pygmy lie,” she chanted, and ran out of his room.

In the street a grocery wagon went by, and the horse’s hoofs made fat squashy sounds in the slush. It was the second week in March, and all of a sudden you could believe that the sun and the air knew all about the calendar and the end of stiff crusty old February.

They were all out on the porch, Fran and Fee and the girls and Shag. Nobody would allow Shag near enough to touch; his thick fur was muddied and soaked from his lunatic dashes all over the meadows and fields around the house; he was silly with spring. Damsie and Josie were spinning a metal top that made a whizzing sound.

“There’s Rico,” Fee said, seeing him race by with another boy a block away, where Channing crossed their street. Rico had been a trouble to the Paiges of late; half the time he wouldn’t mind Mrs. Paige, staying out long past supper without even telling her where he was.

“Mrs. Paige comes over here an awful lot of afternoons before Papa starts for New York,” Fran said. “Haven’t you noticed, Fee?” The instant the words were out, she wanted to snatch them back from the air. How
could
she forget the way Fee had carried on that time she spoke about Mrs. Paige’s crush on Papa? “Mostly,” Fran hastily added, “she’s just looking for Rico.”

Fee stared at her sister, glad she had never told Fran about her seesaw of doubt and sureness and doubt and sureness. Illogically, she remembered the Hippodrome and the hot chocolate at Letty and Garry’s afterward. Mrs. Paige had taken all of them on Saturday, and at Garry’s apartment, Fran sat staring at him like a lovesick cow while he did a smoky chemistry trick for Damsie and Josie and the Callavini kids.

“You’re getting hipped on people having crushes,” Fee stated clearly, in a faraway sort of teacher voice. “And it’s kind of disgusting, hinting at things all the time.”

Fran was astounded, and Fee was astounded herself. Never had she dreamed she could talk to Fran like this.

Fran said, “I wasn’t hinting at anything.”

“Just because
you
have a big crush you think nobody knows about,” Fee said in the same level tone, “you run around suspecting everybody else has crushes too.”

“What big crush?” Fran demanded.

“Never mind.”

“What crush I think nobody knows about?”

“I said never mind.” An echo of some old clamor reminded Fee that big sisters could be terrible if they got furious, but it vanished in the din of joy over standing up to Fran.

“What’s got into you?” Fran crossed the porch to Fee and yanked her shoulder.

“Nothing. And don’t nag at me.”

Damsie looked up uneasily, and Josie held the metal top to her eyes like a screen. Fee ducked out of Fran’s reach, and sat down on the step next to Josie. Behind her she heard Fran mutter something and then slam herself into the house.

“It’s all right,” Fee said to the children. “She gets me sick.”

“Can we play lotto?” Damsie asked.

“I’ll see,” Fee said. “I have a lot of homework.”

Inside the vestibule behind them, the telephone rang, and they could hear Fran answer it, saying Hello angrily and then shouting, “It’s for you, Papa.”

“Can’t
we play lotto?” Damsie begged, and Fee eventually gave in. “We better go in the side door,” she said. “My father’s still talking on the telephone.”

He sounded worked up, but he was talking in Russian and Yiddish, so there was no way to know what it was about, except that he was happy. In a minute Mama went and stood right next to him at the phone too; she kept saying things and asking things, and she sounded happy too.

“Come
on.”
Damsie begged again.

The first lotto game was half over when Fee heard her mother start upstairs, calling out, “Girls, girls, it’s won, it’s all over, the strike is won.”

Fee flung open the bedroom door, and saw her mother’s joy, but a bleak apprehension rose in her, grey and ghostly. “Will the mills open right away?” she said slowly. She had known that the strike would be over someday, but she hadn’t thought of that for a long time.

Damsie and Josie watched Fee and her mother, as if this were just another family scene that had nothing to do with them.

“Don’t you understand, Damsie?” Alexandra said. “And you, Josie? Your Papa won, and everybody’s papa won, isn’t it wonderful?”

Damsie nodded her head up and down, up and down, as if somebody were pumping it. Then suddenly she jumped to her feet and screamed, “Can I go home to my Pa right now?”

“Of course, you’ll be going home, dears, the moment we can arrange it,” Alexandra said, taking each of them into her arms and kissing them in ecstatic triumph.

Damsie shook free by jumping up and down, now as joyous as Alexandra. She ran to the chiffonier, yanked open her special drawer, and started to pull out her jacks and red ball, her extra stockings and hair ribbons and the other belongings she would have to pack for the trip home.

Then Josie shouted, “Going home, going home,” and started hauling and tugging at the things in her own drawer, dumping them into a scramble on the floor.

Fran could not withstand the noise and shouting and at last she came in, too. Fee looked away, and her mother told the news to Fran and everybody went wild all over again about how wonderful it was that the strike was over, and that the strikers had won enough of their demands to make the terrible nine weeks worthwhile.

Suddenly Fee ran out of the room and down the hall to the bathroom. She slammed the door and pushed the hook into the round steel eye as hard as she could, grinding it in, to lock it the tightest it could be locked.

She flung cold water at her face until she had to gasp, and then she pressed the end of her pinky until it began to burn.

It wasn’t fair. One telephone call and they were going to go away and never come back. Without a minute’s warning, without even caring what anybody felt.

Alexandra was worried. She had been worried for two or three days without admitting it, but now she thought, Something is wrong with Fee. Maybe it isn’t just a cold. Maybe she’s really getting sick.

All her staunch theories about bringing up children commanded her to stop
that
line of speculation, and she obeyed.

She wound up the Victrola again, and continued with her dancing. One unexpected result of Damsie and Josie’s departure was the renewed freedom she found, dancing without once wondering whether two extra pairs of astonished young eyes were watching from another room.

She smiled at the idea. She had opened all the windows as far as they would go to the sweet warmth of the delayed spring, and it cheered her just to look out at the sparkling young grass and the nubbins of buds on all her bushes. Even though March had thumbed its nose at the maxims and gone out like a lion, these soft days of April were all the more delicious now that they at last were here.

Soon, Fran would start work at making her tennis court, and the field to the south of the house would be overrun with her friends who were all filled with zeal to help with the leveling and grading and rolling, since that was their guarantee of using it as their own when it was ready. Or nearly their own. The agreement was that Fran or Fee could play in the first set each day, but then they had to wait turns like everyone else.

Jack Purney had suggested the arrangement, and Alexandra fretted a little about his basic assumption that Fran and Fee had superior status as owners. But undoubtedly she was being Utopian; after all it was Fran and Fee’s father who had sought out the absentee owner of the property, who was paying the rent the man demanded, an exorbitant three dollars a month for land lying useless! And it was their father who had donated money for two spades, a cast-iron roller, a tennis net from Spalding and the proper oak stakes to hold it up.

Luxuries like wire screening for backstops would of course have to wait. Perhaps next year, next April, no longer.

Optimism and confidence, as always, swept her hopes high. She felt well, and her strength seemed unflagging. Hop, hop, hop on the right foot, change; hop, hop, hop on the left. Slide and jump to the right, slide and jump to the left. The hops once more, then a deep bend to the right, another to the left.

How old, she wondered, was too old to learn tennis?

A vision of herself racing around on the court made her frown, running after a ball with her grey hair flying, wearing some sort of gym suit, with those baggy bloomers beneath her bulging stomach and a white middy over her pendulous breasts.

They would never forgive me, she thought.

Tennis was for the young, and even though she felt so strong and vital and aware of her endless energy, she was fifty-one and time seemed speedier and more evanescent with every year.

Well, she would enjoy watching the girls play. They would make new friends when the court was finished—that had been their strongest argument: anybody’s tennis court always swarms with all the boys and girls for miles around.

It was a great moment when Stiva finally abandoned his nonsense about “aping the rich” and gave in to Franny’s entreaties. Fee’s too, for even though Fira had never held a tennis racket in her hand, she had backed up Fran in every attempt to persuade him, from the first try more than a year ago, hurling herself into the fight with all her young might and boundless energy.

Alexandra paused and let the music run on. These last days Fee had no energy at all.

Something
is
wrong with her, she thought, theories or no theories. An ordinary cold wouldn’t account for it.

She silenced the Victrola with a determined click and clapped the lid down hard. Wallowing in ignorant fear over every cough or sneeze or stomach ache was one thing; facing the truth in Fee’s wan little face was another. Something was wrong.

She tried to recall when this sixth sense of all mothers had first told her so. Last week? That was when Fee’s cold began. The week before that? Fee had been rather quiet then, it was true, reading every night until her eyeballs must have jigged. It was natural enough, all that reading; at that time, Damsie and Josie had been gone only about a week, and like the whole family, Fee still missed them.

Like the whole family.

Alexandra Ivarin drew in her breath, held it like a precious commodity, and let it out only with the whisper, “Oh, my goodness.”

Fee
wasn’t
like the whole family about Damsie and Josie, hadn’t been during their four weeks in the house, nor after their return to Lawrence, Mass.

Why, the child had suffered heartbreak over their going, and nobody had been humane enough to guess.

Alexandra’s throat knobbed with sudden pain. She had been blind and stupid, abysmally, criminally stupid. How often during the month Damsie and Josie had lived with them, had she spoken to Stiva of Fee’s warmth toward them, her growing maturity as she took care of them, the fun she had with them because they were like the one thing she had never had—little sisters to play with and lord it over and love.

Fee
had
loved them; her whole nature had gone out to them from the first hour, and though Fran had been sweet also, it was Fee who had become their center of gravity.

And they had become hers.

Then how could Fee’s own mother, how could she, Alexandra Ivarin of supposed intelligence and knowledge about the ways of children—how could she have failed to prepare her own child for eventual parting and change and a natural period of missing them? And how could she have failed once again after they went off?

Fee was eating her heart out for them, that was the truth of it. Fee was knowing her first loss and sorrow. No wonder she was listless and pale and wan. And not one soul had tried to help her.