First Papers (58 page)

“Why, Alida.” It sounded so simple, so rational—why had they never thought of it themselves? Alexandra, faintly troubled, thought, There must be a reason why it’s wrong, and went to the window and looked at the sign. Its back was blank, but she could imagine it saying HOUSE FOR RENT. How much softer the words were.

Stefan refused to consider it. To be a landlord was to be a capitalist. “Alida is fine to think about us, to worry about us, but to rent the house and become a landlord like John Jacob Astor—impossible. Paige will see that, if she didn’t.”

“Nobody meant becoming a capitalist,” Alexandra said. “If you charged only enough rent to pay for a stopgap place, it would be like a temporary swap.”

“A swap, indeed. Plus enough on the side to pay for the interest on the mortgage here, to pay for repairs here, to pay the water taxes here. Enough to pay for a moving van out, and then another moving van back in. The chicanery, if I used our house as capital and denied I was playing capitalist.”

“It wouldn’t be like unearned increment—”

“No textbook jargon,” he said, too patiently. “I beg you, let it alone.”

“‘I beg you,’” she retorted. “Whenever you beg me, that means you command me.” She had been at the point of being hurt by his tone, but this observation struck her as so apt, so spirited, that she suddenly felt invincible.

“Let me read about this assassination,” he said, turning back to his paper. “There must be an article for me in it.”

Still triumphant, she went outdoors to the garden. How neglected it was compared to other summers, how scraggly and scratchy. With her four days a week in the city, she could not spare the time it needed, the calm, loving work early in the morning and last thing in the afternoon. Her neglect showed, and her skimpy little tomato plants were chiding her, her thin little lettuces and radishes reproaching her. She glanced up at the hot blue sky and then went around to the side of the house for the hose. The grooved black rubber was sweating, and Shag was lying stretched across the metal nozzle so that it was out of sight. The spigot must have been incompletely turned off; he always discovered it on a hot day and treated himself to the contraband coolness.

She had known that Stefan would say no to offering the house for rent instead of sale. She had been uneasy about the fundamental principle herself, but she had not his faculty for putting things into precise words. That was one thing that made him so strong a writer—

She wrenched the hose unceremoniously out from under Shag, and he sprang erect with a yelp of protest. It upset her these days to think of Stefan’s writing; something was going wrong with it.

Not with his translating; he was forging ahead like a fanatic on that, now that he was permitted at his desk again. Not only had he made up all the time he had lost on it, he was far ahead of any normal schedule.

It was different when he wrote an article. The piece he had finally completed on Henry Ford and his $5 a day—“Turning-point or Bribe?”—had come back from the
Wahrheit;
excellent though it was, most unfortunately it was no longer timely, since the news had broken three months before, in January, and the
Wahrheit
had commented on it on several occasions since then.

“They’re right, quite right,” Stefan said, but he was infuriated. He wrote the piece all over again, in English, and sent it to the
Call,
and then to the
Leader
out in Milwaukee, but both times it came back, with much the same explanation. At last he tore the piece to ribbons, and dumped them into the garbage pail.

He began an article the very day twenty strikers were killed in Ludlow, in a pitched battle between the miners and the Colorado State Militia; he had foreseen violence months back, and now Federal troops were being sent in, not to protect the starving miners, but to protect that most sacred of all gods, property. He was going to finish this piece in one day and mail it that night, as if the mailbox were the press room in the basement. Then no one could say “untimely” about it.

But it didn’t work out that way. He himself was dissatisfied with it, and he set it aside to do over. It was forced, he said, stilted. “In your own paper,” he told her, “you know what the reader knows; it’s been right on your own front page. But with somebody else’s readers, you have to stop, explain, fill in background. You are writing an essay, not an editorial.”

She asked to see what he had written; he refused. The next day he said it still needed more work; once again he did not mail it. On the third day she saw that the color had begun to rise in his forehead and it upset her. He was discouraged, he was angry, he was bored. It was not the kind of writing at which he was best. She almost wished he would not write a word on the assassination of the young Austrian Archduke, in that place in Serbia.

If he pressed too hard with these free-lance pieces, and if too many of them were rejected?

Fee wished she could put on blinders whenever she passed the white sign on the lawn. Nobody seemed to feel the way she felt about it.

The first time some people came to look at the house, she wanted to slam the front door in their faces. It was a man and a woman, and they looked things over as if it were their house already, staring, amazed at the plaster walls, talking to each other about them, ignoring Mama, who was explaining about letting a house settle before you put up wallpaper. Then they saw the stairs starting up from the back hall, and they laughed. For the first time in her life, Fee loved the stairs.

They finally said they would have to think it over, and it was like a last-minute escape. They hadn’t even asked the price, her mother said, and it meant they were
not
going to think it over at all. They were not interested at all.

“That’s good,” Fee said.

“Good?” Alexandra repeated. “You call that good?”

“What is the price?”

“Exactly what it cost us, not a penny more,” Alexandra said.

“How much did it?”

“The lots were four hundred dollars each,” Alexandra said proudly, “because this is ‘select property,’ up here on the hill, and no stores allowed, just houses. So that’s eight hundred, and building the house came to five thousand, two hundred.”

“Six thousand dollars,” Fee said. “Whew.”

“Minus the mortgage, of course. But even so, it’s wonderful, isn’t it, that we could save and put aside so much? And now when we are in such need of it, there it is.”

The next people did ask the price, but the house wasn’t exactly what they wanted. Some real estate people came, and they went about things like machines, zip zip and out. It was “a slow market,” they said; business hadn’t picked up from the dip last year, but any house with copper pipes and the best materials would find a buyer soon.

Each day that passed was like a present, Fee thought. Maybe it would take a long time before it actually happened. Fran said it would. After the first few days of getting used to the white sign, the tennis court worried Fran more than the house. Papa had written the owner of the land practically the minute he got off the paper, sending a final $3 check and saying he no longer wished to rent the property from him. Fran had been positive the unseen man would wreck the tennis court so they couldn’t play on it free of charge, but it was still there, and still “her court.”

“Selling the house isn’t even necessary,” she burst out to Fee one day. “He has enough money saved to last a year, but he’s too stingy to spend it.”

“How do you know?”

“From things,” Fran said with authority. “I can figure out our budget too, you know.”

“He never never would sell this house if he could help it,” Fee said, with equal authority.

“I don’t give a hoot any more. I’ll be earning my own living in one more year, don’t forget, and then I’m moving straight to New York. If I’m appointed to a school there, they can’t even kick up a fuss.”

“You’re getting to be more like Eli every minute.”

Fee walked away, wishing she could make Fran shut up about having only one more year at Jamaica Training School for Teachers. She herself had three more years at High, and then two at Training.
If
she went to Training.

But I won’t, she thought, I never will.

If she did go, she would have to teach, and the one surest thing in her life was that she would not be a teacher. Let Fran teach, let Eli teach, but for her, never. All her life she had said that, and it was truer than ever. What she wanted to do, what she wanted to be, she didn’t know. But it was something you started to be by going to college first.

Anne Miller was going to college in three years, and John, in two. Tom Ladendock was just back from his first year at Cornell, and he wasn’t even jealous of Fran and Nick Fanelli, because Nick went to Jamaica Training too, and if you were a college man, you didn’t mind about boys in places like that. Tom called Nick terrible names like Dago and Wop and he upset Franny horribly too by saying nobody like Nick could belong to his fraternity at Cornell. “He might as well be a little Jew-boy.” He remembered right away, and blushed deep red, and tried to take it back. He said Fran was different, and so was her little sister, but Fran said Cornell had certainly made
him
different, and she left him flat. That night she cried like anything.

Fee felt pretty horrible herself about it. And about being stuck right there in Barnett for the summer. Next month it would be worse because Anne and John were going back to Iowa for August, to stay at their grandfather’s, and she would have to get through a whole month without seeing John once. Fran might go flitting from Jack Purney to Tom Ladendock to Nick Fanelli—and then forget all of them the moment she saw Garry Paige again—but Fee wasn’t fickle and flirty, and how she could stand it after John left was impossible to figure out.

“Are you going to go to church every Sunday when we’re not here?” he asked one day, looking at her sideways.

“What a thing to ask,” Fee said with dignity. “Of course I am.”

“I’d never, if nobody was watching.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“But there’s one place I would go,” he said. “If somebody cute went with me.”

“Where?”

“To the new theater downtown.”

“When?”

“Tonight. Unless you have a previous engagement.”

Fee flew off to ask if she could. The few times she had ever been allowed to see vaudeville and a moving picture, her mother had taken her and Fran to Jamaica, but the new Barnett Theater had just been finished right on Main Street, and now she had been asked to go alone with a boy, which made it even newer.

“You’re fourteen, aren’t you?” her mother said, looking pleased herself. “Of course you can go. But, your word of honor: straight home afterwards.”

“But if he wants a chocolate frappe at Gray’s—”

“Naturally, a frappe at Gray’s too.”

Going out with a boy was glorious, Fee discovered. During the vaudeville acts, they sat and laughed and joked, but when it got dark for the picture, John took her hand and held it and put his fingers between her fingers, moving them around and squeezing them together, and she didn’t pull her hand away. She could hardly stand it after a while; this was what everybody meant about being thrilled; it was like the time he had taken her by the shoulders and tried to un-cave her chest.

Thrills weren’t always lovely. If the wrong people had a thrill, it was disgusting. A few nights ago, Fran and Nick Fanelli went out, and without knowing they had come back, Fee went to the kitchen for a drink of water, without bothering to put the light on.

There they were, out on the back porch, and she could see them. Nick was in the big wicker rocker out there, holding Fran on his lap, and they were kissing and doing things and it was sickening. She tiptoed out of the kitchen and up the stairs, but she couldn’t forget them down there, and couldn’t get over the feeling that she was going to vomit. Fran was nearly eighteen, but even so. Her own sister. It was awful.

The hall was jammed to the last row, and Stefan Ivarin stood there waiting for the applause to die away so he could finish his sentence. The lecture was half over, and they had stopped him ten or fifteen times.

It was in an old loft building on Hester Street, on the night a strike vote was to be taken in the men’s cloak industry, and the A. F. of L. had done a big job of publicizing his appearance, “the first lecture this year by the East Side’s most famous speaker.”

With his first sentences, his old “feel for the audience” came back, unchanged, undiminished; their response was unchanged, undiminished. Here at least he was none the worse for wear, none the older, none the weaker.

He talked not only about their strike but also about the bloody strike in Ludlow; he contrasted the methods of a moderate union like their own with those of an extremist union, their leadership with I.W.W. leadership out West. The labor movement, the socialist movement itself, he warned them, was in danger of a split, a division, a mortal cleavage between the old-line socialists who believed in progress wedded to responsibility, and the newfangled “action boys” who thought that terror tactics were excusable if they themselves used them.

“Terror gives birth to terror,” he shouted. “Violence by strikers, wrecking property, smashing machinery—I say to you, these only breed a smashing of workers’ heads by company cops and state militia and even Federal troops.”

The heat climbed in his face as he spoke, in his body, along his whole flesh, but he felt it glowing and beneficent, not threatening. The pressure in his veins now was a kinetic energy, not anger and revolt and scorn at himself or at Fehler or at his own situation. On this platform, facing these poor devils who looked up to him for guidance, for the spirit they would need for what they had to do, here he felt strong and free of concern about sickness or age. Since medicine was still half quackery, he would take his chances now with his own diagnosis: when your heart begins to be high again, a high blood pressure can do you no damage.

Alexandra was in the audience. She had temporarily lost three of her pupils and four of her lecture group, off with their children for their annual snatches of sea and clean air, and she had a free evening. She had asked whether he would mind having her there in the hall for his “first lecture,” and he had said he would like it. He meant it. She’s been a wonder, he thought, as he so often had in their long and tumultuous years. A little pain was in it when he had thought it while he was still a prisoner to helplessness, but that pain was gone now. She was a rock. During those months just past, she had dropped her maddening faults, her tears, her hurt feelings, and become a rock for them all to cling to.