First Papers (49 page)

“Will your mother and father let you?”

“Sure.”

“My mother said they wouldn’t.”

“For heaven’s sake!”

“Heaven’s sake” made them laugh, but that same afternoon, Fee telephoned Anne and said, “I told you they would.”

“What will your father say when he gets home and hears it?”

“He was right there.” She had forgotten to tell Anne what her father worked at, so Anne didn’t know about his being at home all day when regular fathers were off at work. Anne’s father was a salesman of faucets. “He said sure I could, and when my mother said she’d make me a new dress, he said he should hope so, she made a new dress for unimportant things, of course she should for me going to church the first time.”

“They didn’t even have to think about it awhile?” Anne asked.

“They always said we could decide for ourselves when we got bigger, about being religious or socialists or anything.”

“But right off the bat, the
both
of them. Gosh.”

Fee was surprised that Anne was so surprised, but not the way she used to be when Trudy talked about religion and what her mother thought Fee’s mother must think about Eli marrying Joan “outside your religion.” She still felt a tight little excitement stir around inside her if anybody talked about Jews or Christians, but by now she knew she would, so it didn’t surprise her the way it used to. It wasn’t especially pleasant or unpleasant; it was like some familiar dopey friend you were going to run into every once in a while.

“What Sunday should we pick?” Fee asked. “Not this next one, because of getting my new dress.”

Two days before the Sunday, the new dress was finished and Fee was so happy she said that if Grace Church was as wonderful as Anne Miller said, she probably would get converted.

“Converted?” It was her father, and he put his paper down on the table and looked at her, as if nothing was more interesting.

“Anne said I could be. Her minister said so. She asked her mother and her mother asked their minister, and he said yes, by all means.”

“Quite right,” he said. “You could be.” He thought for a while and then murmured, “By all means.” Under the table, his heel began to tap against the floor, but it wasn’t angry, just concentrating, and he pushed his paper away from him. Fee was proud of herself; usually he acted as if all talk at the table was a thing he had to put up with. And she was glad in another way. For the longest time, he had been sort of pulled-away to himself, not in a mood, just far off, and not happy. It had something to do with the paper, Mama said, and anybody would be upset about it.

But now he seemed really absorbed and interested in what Fee said about conversion and Anne’s minister. “Can I?” she prompted him.

“It’s a long process, conversion,” he said. “You don’t go to church one morning and then, hickory dickory dock, you’re converted.”

She laughed at the sound of it, the sort of thing Mama would say, but she also was surprised. The things her father just knew about! “Do you know how long it would take me?”

“Not precisely,” he said. “But in most religions, you do need time, a good deal of studying and thought. And to have real meaning, it should take a long time, don’t you agree?”

“Studying and thought?”

“Well, Jews would want a convert to study Hebrew and the Talmud, Catholics would give instruction in their catechism and the Bible, and Protestants would have their own methods of teaching their prayers and beliefs, especially to somebody who wasn’t born right into them. You follow me?”

“Anne Miller didn’t say anything like that.”

“Don’t look disheartened, Fee. You gobble up studies, and get famous grades whenever you want to.”

She cheered up. “Anyway, if I do whatever I’m supposed to, then I can be converted, is that right?”

Fran and Mama were at the table listening, but Papa ignored them and so did she. What they thought didn’t make a bit of difference, not to him and certainly not to her. She knew that if she were going to be converted, Papa was the one that mattered. Mama would decide the way he did. “Can I, Papa?” she repeated.

“You’re thirteen, aren’t you? It might take a year or two. Then there would be a special ceremony, as in all religions. And since conversion is not anything to be taken lightly, or to make mistakes about, let’s allow an extra year.”

“Two or three years from now,” Alexandra said sagely, speaking for the first time.

“So when you’re sixteen, Firuschka, if you still want to be taken officially into the Grace Episcopal Church, why then, ‘by all means,’ to quote the minister, and Mama and I will not object in the slightest.”

“I told Anne you wouldn’t,” Fee said triumphantly.

On Sunday morning she was up an hour early and when Anne and her mother came to get her, she was so excited, it almost hurt. Her dress looked like thin chocolate wool with sand scattered over it, and she was wearing last winter’s white beaver hat, even though it was still Septembery outside. Just yesterday Anne mentioned hats and said you couldn’t go to church with just hair, but the dirty old beaver was the only hat she had. Mama was too busy finishing the dress; she told Papa he simply had to lend a hand and clean up the hat. He was so surprised he started right in.

It was funny to see him dousing a rag in benzene and rubbing and rubbing and rubbing, not even smoking a cigarette because of the benzene. But it was sort of nice too because he simply never did
anything,
and she didn’t know how to thank him.

“Whew, what a smell,” was all she said when he handed the hat back. “Like a kerosene stove or the Paiges’ car or something.”

“It will evaporate by tomorrow,” he said. “Anyway, there’s no smell of sulphur and brimstone.”

She looked up quickly, but he wasn’t being nasty and sarcastic. He just said it, watching her try the hat on to see if it still fitted. It did, and he said something about heads changing size at a different rate of speed from arms and legs and bodies.

“That’s why babies’ heads look so top-heavy,” he explained. “They’re almost adult-size long before the baby is an adult.”

“What a lot of things you’d never even think of if nobody told you.”

“You look at Webby’s head next time,” he said. “Or Sandy’s.”

Having him so offhand and nice about the size of people’s heads made her even happier about Grace Episcopal Church, though she couldn’t see any connection, and when she did start off with Anne and her mother the next morning, she felt sweet and happy all over.

It was a beautiful shiny day, with the clouds way up and wispy against the blue. Downtown at Grace Church, she and Anne followed Mrs. Miller up the shallow stone steps, so old and used they were wavy at their front edges. Ahead, through the wide oak doors, Fee could see a big wide space. The nave? she thought. The apse? I don’t even know what they call anything.

For the first time she felt nervous about doing something wrong and making a fool of herself. Mrs. Miller led them to a pew about halfway between the rear and the front of the church, and Fee watched to see if they crossed themselves the way Juanita Endoza sometimes did, or did anything else with their hands. But they just sat down, and she did too, and Anne gave her a little book from a rack in front of them, and Fee opened it for a minute and saw it was a hymnal. Then she could look around and upward, without anybody noticing.

The church was larger and higher and dimmer inside than she ever had dreamed it would be, just looking at it from outside. And it was beautiful. Sitting there in the pew, you were half-hidden from everybody behind you or in front of you; you could look up and up in the dimness, broken by the streaming colors from the long stained-glass windows. You could see the stone ribs of the arches creeping up the walls and coming together above, like fingertips touching in prayer.

Music flowed under the reaching praying stone fingers, and Fee wondered how she knew about hands reaching up like that to pray. She had never seen her mother’s hands do that, nor her father’s, nor any teacher’s, but she knew. There must have been something in a book she read long ago, and she remembered it as if it was something that had happened right in front of her eyes. There was something beautiful about it, and suddenly something sad too.

Fee’s eyes filled with tears, though she was happy, and she was surprised to feel them hot in her eyelids. She looked upward again; now the arches seemed to waver a little, as if the praying hands shivered, and in the stained-glass windows, the blues and yellows and reds of the saints and the angels seemed to blur and quiver, too.

Great bells began to peal and Fee recognized them. How often she had heard them from outside. But now she was inside and she loved them.

Wondrous, Stefan thought later that day when he heard Fee’s rapturous account of her foray into organized religion. When I had to rebel and overthrow my parents, I turned atheist and later agnostic. She, poor child, was cheated of that chance through the misfortune of being born to parents who were already lost souls. So she rebels by turning back toward religion.

There was a mathematical purity about it that pleased him. He had spoken of it to Alexandra several times during the collective preparations for Fee’s churchgoing, for he suspected that underneath Alexandra’s staunch principles about freedom of thought, she retained a certain classic tremulousness about her youngest child’s desire to exercise it.

Alexandra detected his suspicions and argued against them, largely in her own mind, for this was no time to be at outs with him. Privately she found herself wondering again and again about what this first step might lead to for little Fira. Maybe parents should not agree to certain things after all. Maybe they should not permit a child to dabble in the opiate of the people, or was it the opium, she never could remember.

But listening to Fee’s racing joy about her experience at church, she forgot any doubts she had had. Nothing mattered but a child’s awakening, and this was an awakening, a blossoming for Fee. What happened later on, how long her glory and intensity would last, remained to be seen. But for now, she had burst forth into an incredible world of wonder and trust and longing. It was beautiful to watch, because it was watching your child try her wings in one more new direction.

If only they were strong enough to carry her. When it came to religion, a fledgling could be so easily swooped upon and wounded. It went without saying, in a family like theirs, that broad-mindedness was guaranteed the children from their mother and father. But once they left that warm safety, there was no guarantee the world would continue it. Like Eli.

How shocked poor Eli had been to discover that the Martins were filled with grief over their daughter’s hurry-up marriage, not only because of Joan’s condition but also because she was “forced to marry a Jew.” Eli “a Jew” was always so unexpected an idea, or Fran or Fee, brought up as they were, small-town Americans and nothing else, all acting and looking and talking like all the other small-town Americans they had ever seen.

Assimilation was so natural an idea when you had no superior feelings toward other people, and it was such an American idea, the melting pot and all men are created equal. Some Jews looked on it as a dirty word, and some Americans didn’t want it to touch their own family. If Joan hadn’t been pregnant, goodness knew what opposition her parents might have put up. Now, of course, with two such grandchildren as Webby and Sandy, the Martins were happy over Joan’s marriage, but there was no real friendship between the families. Nothing like the closeness between the Paiges and the Ivarins.

Why, they had become such friends that she could sense something wrong with Alida’s mood, as she could with Stiva’s. When Alida heard that Fee was going to church, she said it was sweet and good to find people like her and Stiva, who had principles like religious freedom and stuck to them. Then she said something about Garry’s sticking to his guns about changing jobs, but she sounded troubled and perplexed. Garry’s company, Alexandra knew, had abandoned the idea of explosives; were they returning to it now, after the slaughters in the Balkans and the bloodthirsty talk from Germany and Russia and France?

“Stiva,” she suddenly said.

He looked up. The Sunday papers were growing too big for a man to manage. The
Times
gave you ninety-some pages per nickel, about twenty pages for one cent. Twenty was normal in the daily
Times,
and perhaps Ochs felt it behooved him to stay with the usual ratio on Sunday. Was there dissension and struggle and an eternal play for power at the
Times
too?

“Stiva,” she said again. “You don’t actually believe there will be a big war, do you?”

He blinked at her, taking off his glasses and peering at her, myope intentness in his gaze.

“Yes, I do believe it,” he said. “What’s all this about? I thought you were still lost in Fee’s clouds of glory.”

“But somehow I began to think of explosives and bombs,” she said, “and then of Garry and Eli and all the young men beginning life.” She shuddered and added lamely, “I suppose a million mothers in Europe think of it even more than I do.”

“France has raised its conscription from two years to three,” he said.

“When? What made her do it?”

“Germany raised the standing army to nearly a million. And Belgium insists that the Germans are calling up an unusual number of reserves.”

“And Russia?”

“The biggest peacetime army in history.”

He returned to the paper, and absent-mindedly she drew the first section of the
Times
toward her, folding it and rolling it into a tight cylinder, curling her fingers around it closely. She wished he would tell her more of what was going on at the office but it was dangerous to dig at him about it.

“It’s about two months now,” she said, “since Fehler began going crazy with the front page.”

“The terrible thing is, it sells the paper.”

It was unexpected. Usually he avoided being that specific. In the weeks since she had come back from the beach, the one thing they thought of was the office and the developments there. For brief stretches, for unexpected reasons like Fee and church, they could be absorbed by other aspects of living, but inevitably they returned to the paper. Talking openly about it was another thing. That depended on him.