First Papers (5 page)

Ivarin slowly undressed and went to bed. He had never liked Joseph Fehler, not even at the beginning when he had not yet known he disliked him. On a larger paper, more departmentalized, his path would rarely have crossed that of the Business Manager; for most editors, it was a point of honor to steer clear of “the money side.” But the
Jewish News,
though only 30,000 less in circulation than the
Forward,
was informal and loose in its structure and behavior, and when Fehler had come to work some five years before, the staff was still small enough to make this steering-clear impractical. Duties overlapped; to this day sudden disputes could spring up over jurisdiction and boundary lines.

Hiring a business manager at all was a sign of prosperity. Until then, the paper’s founder and owner, Isaac Landau, aided by one old bookkeeper, had done all the buying of paper and inks and press equipment, all the billing and contracting and whatever “business managing” had to be done. Ivarin had no taste for such matters, and as insurance against any future invasion, rather made a point of it.

Fehler was not yet thirty-five when Landau took him on, but he was no neophyte. He had been a job printer, like his father before him, and had gone on from there to magazine and newspaper work in the foreign-language field. He sounded like a native-born American, having lived in the Middle West from the age of one or two until he was grown, but his mother tongue was German and the Yiddish that went with it because his parents were Jews. With three sons, his father had thought ahead to their forced conscription in the German Army and had emigrated after the Franco-Prussian war, settling in Milwaukee because New York had “too many Russian Jews.”

The German Jew versus the Russian Jew, Stefan Ivarin thought now, turning over in bed. Maybe that’s why I found something objectionable in Fehler from the start. The German Jew buttering his soul with that slippery superiority over the Russian Jew or Polish Jew. An intramural bigotry that outsiders never suspect. But had Fehler been more Russian than all the Romanoffs, we’d have clashed anyway, the moment he proclaimed himself a “philosophical anarchist.” What is that indeed, except an anarchist with his tail between his legs? Not precisely the right Damon for my Pythias.

An international metaphor, Ivarin thought, and felt the first vagueness of sleep.

In the darkness Fee woke, shaken by fear and recognition. Her father’s voice, full-throated and deep like an animal’s, rose and fell in the screaming of his nightmare. For a second she lay still, hoping somebody else would do it this time. Then she sprang up and ran to his room and leaned down over him. “Papa, wake up, Papa.”

His screaming rose in volume and she knew he would not wake until she had touched his shoulder. Then he would give one final cry, and it would be over for this time. But the instant of touching him and of hearing that last cry was the worst moment. For another second, she continued to call, “Papa, wake up.” Then she forced her hand through the darkness and seized his shoulder.

At her touch his body leaped.

“Wuh-ahhh.” It was a sliding groaning howl, followed by abrupt silence. He sat up and, in his ordinary voice, said impatiently, “All right, all right.”

“It’s me, Papa. Are you up?”

“Yes, yes. I had a bad dream.” He stretched his hand out for his glasses, on a chair drawn up to his bed, and as his blanket fell back from his moving arm, a faint sour smell rose to her nostrils. She drew back a step. “Turn the light on, Firuschka.”

She crossed the bare floor to the switch, her heart still thudding. He always called her Firuschka when she woke him, and he always said exactly the same words:
All right, all right. I had a bad dream.

The switch clicked as she turned back to him, reluctantly now that they could see each other. After waking him, she never knew what to say; it was hard even to meet his eyes. But to shake him awake and then just leave without a word seemed terrible.

She stood still, glancing around the room, waiting. Even coming in here at night was strange; everything looked different. His clothes were hung on a knob of his chair; through the open door to his study she could see his papers and equations and books piled on his desk, and the old wooden table next to it, with his chessboard and more books about famous chess players and their tournaments.

In bed, her father was clearing his throat and coughing. “What time is it?” he asked, and she made herself look at him as she answered. “I don’t know, Papa,” she said. “Late.”

He was blinking, and giving his head quick little shakes as if to dislodge the rest of his nightmare. He didn’t like pajamas, and in his buttoned, long-sleeved underwear, he seemed smaller and older than he did in the daytime when he was dressed. His neck looked thinner and his head balder. Now he put his glasses on and leaned over the chair to look at his watch. “After three,” he said, as if he were angry at the watch. “Go back to sleep, Fira. You’ll catch cold.”

“All right, Papa. Good night.”

Gratefully, she hurried out. It wasn’t a very cold night, but she felt shivery just the same. In her own room, the door to the sleeping porch didn’t fit tightly at the bottom and wind slithered in like snakes along the floor. But her bed was still warm, and she curled up in it, far down, pulling the blanket up over her hair and around her forehead like a hood.

Of late, she seemed to be the only one who ever heard him. At least she was always the one who had to run in to wake him. Fran insisted she never woke up, but Fira was sure she did wake and then lie there, too afraid to move. Her mother also said she couldn’t get upstairs in time to wake him, and Eli and Joan—well, Joan was too new in this house to be the one to do it. Joan never said anything about it, and everybody else was too used to it to ever talk about it.

In the daytime, her father never mentioned his dreams and it was impossible to ask him right out about them. Mama once had said it was always one dream: he was back in prison in Russia and they were flogging him with the knout. When anybody called out to wake him, the voice flowed right into his dream and became the shouts of the prison guards beating him. And when anybody actually touched him, it became the fiercest slash of the knout.

Poor Papa, Fee thought. Even though he never mentioned his dreams, he did sometimes talk about being in prison. He had just turned seventeen when he was arrested, and he belonged to a secret group of students, all of them sixteen and seventeen years old, at the University of Odessa, and all writing and printing pamphlets and articles about the oppression of the Czar and the horrible Russian police. He used to say, “When I was in prison,” with a sort of boasting pleasure in his voice, the way Betty Murphy’s father would say, “When I was in Paris.”

Down the hall, footsteps sounded; it was her father going to the bathroom. He left the door open, and she could hear him. Anger and shame spouted up in her, like jets of hot fluid, drenching and extinguishing her flare of love and pity.

She wished she had a father like Betty’s or Trudy’s. Their fathers didn’t stay up half the night and sleep in the morning when the rest of them had breakfast; Betty and Trudy didn’t have to hear that “shush” all the time. “Shush, Papa’s sleeping.” Or, “Shush, Papa’s working.” Or, “Shush, Papa’s in a mood.”

Every once in a while he would get in a mood and fall silent, never looking at anybody, going around for days like a stranger. Late at night, sometimes, she could hear him downstairs talking at the top of his lungs to Mama, as if he were on a platform, lecturing to a thousand people. The sound frightened her and sometimes Fran would listen a while and then look as if she hated him.

Fee didn’t hate him; sometimes he was wonderful, and said funny things. If only both of them were more like everybody else’s mother and father—without any accent, and not forever talking about a better world for workingmen and ending child labor and sweatshops, and what a great man Eugene V. Debs was, and electing Socialists to Congress, and eating brown bread and brown sugar.

They were both too old to change; fifty was half a century old. She thought of her father dead, lying in bed, his face blue-white and his eyes staring up at the ceiling. She was kneeling beside him, desperately crying, and in a circle around her stood the whole family and their best friends, watching her grief, saying, “Poor child, the youngest, his favorite one.”

Fee’s throat lumped and she sat up. Leaning across to the other bed she whispered, “Franny, are you awake?” There was no answer, and after a moment, she lay down again and fell asleep.

Suddenly, that afternoon, the sun grew hot and in a day or two the whole hill was green. Outside the Ivarin house, on the three slender maples, twigs and branches swelled and thickened with pale-yellow buds; in the back yard the two fruit trees took on a paler pink. Along the sides of the house and the front porch, lilies of the valley looked out from green sheaths and the Rose of Sharon bushes burst into young leaf.

Walking home from school with Trudy Loheim, Fee swung her books by their leather strap and slung her winter coat over her left shoulder as Trudy had done. It was Friday afternoon and on Fridays they were allowed to make fudge, taking turns at each other’s houses.

This was Fee’s turn and she was glad. It made her happy to be going home with her best friend in such warm and sunny weather, school over for the week, and somehow the sudden feel of Easter vacation just ahead, and then the whole summer.

A block away from her house, she stopped short, and Trudy stopped too.

Even from that distance, she could see something queer about the house. She glanced at Trudy’s face, and then at the house once more. Her stomach tightened. The whole front of the house looked black.

It
was
black, she saw a moment later. Both her parents were out on the porch, her father on a stepladder, her mother below him, feeding him lengths of cotton fabric from a bolt she held in her arms. The fabric was black and they were draping the entire front of the house with it.

Any kind of physical work always made her father grumble, and say
Chortu;
the only time he ever spoke Russian was for secrets or when he cursed out loud. Yet here he was nailing the bunting over the doorway, curving it down in a swag, reaching down for the tacks her mother was passing up to him and nailing the swag up at either side. Each porch post had already been twined around with it from top to bottom, and one of the two windows had been framed in it.

She glanced at Trudy and desperately wished today wasn’t the day to make fudge. Trudy was staring at the porch, too, not saying anything.

“Oh, Trudy,” Fee whispered, “don’t tell anybody.”

“What are they doing?” Trudy whispered back.

“I don’t know—something crazy and terrible.”

They walked onward, slowly. Step by step Fee kept thinking it was terrible to have to go forward, to have to go straight up to the house and hear what they would say, with Trudy right there to hear it too. She was used to the way they talked, but Trudy wasn’t. There was no way to stop them, no way to go right past the house as if it had nothing to do with her.

The sound of hammering started again, and Shag’s barking with it. By now the girls were only a few feet away, but the hammering and barking covered up the sounds of their approach.

“Hello,” Fee called out.

Her mother heard her and spoke to her father. He stopped hammering, but stayed perched up on the stepladder, looking down at them. Shag leaped down the steps and flung himself joyously at Fee, but she ignored him and kept looking up at her parents.

“Hello, girls,” her mother said. “Now, Fira, don’t look like that until you hear the reason.”

“It’s a protest,” her father offered, in a strange, rather kindly voice. “Hello, Trudy.”

“Hello, Mr. Ivarin.” Trudy blushed, and turned a little to face Fee’s mother. “And Mrs. Ivarin.”

“Shag, you
stop!”
Fira cried, grabbing the dog’s collar without taking her eyes from her father’s face. “A protest?” she asked.

“About the Triangle fire,” he said. “Trudy, do you know about it?”

“I think so, Mr. Ivarin,” Trudy said uncertainly.

Fee’s mother came toward them, unwinding a few lengths from the bolt in her arms, so as not to topple the ladder. She addressed herself to Trudy. “It was in a factory, where the owners saved expenses on fire escapes, and a hundred and fifty workers were burned alive.”

Politely, Trudy said, “Oh, yes.”

“But, Mama,” Fee said, “is anybody
else
putting black all over their porch?”

“I had the idea and we—”

“The whole labor movement,” her father interrupted, still sounding patient, like Miss King at school explaining parsing, “is staging public demonstrations. We want to do something too.”

“It was my idea,” Alexandra began again, but she saw that the child was looking only at Stefan, and she let her voice trail away.

“But, Papa,” Fee said, moving closer to the ladder and looking up in entreaty, “everybody will make
fun
of me.”

“It’s nothing, Firuschka, let them. When you’re older you won’t mind.”

He turned back to his work and the hammering started again. Shag instantly resumed his barking; together, the hammering and barking were deafening. “Come on,” Fee said to Trudy, and ran around to the side entrance. She flung open the door to the back hall, and dropped her coat and books on the floor. Behind her, Trudy said, “Don’t you care, Fee. It’s not your fault.”

“It’s horrible,” she cried. “I hate it. I just hate it.” She sat down on the lower step of the stairway, and put her face on her knees. “Oh, Trudy, I just
can’t
make fudge today,” she said.

“Let’s go up to your room.”

“They’re so
mean!
They never even
care
what I feel like.”

“Come on, Fee, we can go up, can’t we?”

Trudy started up the uncarpeted stairs, and in a moment Fee picked up her books and coat and followed her. This crazy stairway! She forgot all about it until something bad happened, but then she could see the blueprints on the table again, and hear their voices, and see her father with his face all red and his foot pumping up and down a million times a minute.