First Papers (11 page)

“You see, Fira,” he said at the end, “it’s not always easy to be a little girl, when your parents are people like Mama and me. It sometimes is hard. Maybe even too hard.”

She pressed herself against him. “Oh, no, Papa, it isn’t.”

“But,” he went on, “to be the little girl of people who believe there could be a better world? In some ways that might be nicer than to be the little girl of people who never think of anything except having fun.”

“It
is
nicer.”

“When you grow up I think you will feel the way Mama and I feel, but in the meantime, I’m sorry about what happened. Very sorry, Firuschka.”

For a moment nobody said anything. Alexandra was looking at Stefan with a private love and gratitude. Then she made her voice practical and said, “Fee, you can read in bed for an hour or two. Would you like that?”

“Later on,” her father said, “I could perhaps give you a chess lesson.”

Uncertainly, Fee looked from one to the other. A new feeling rippled through her, warm and exciting. Nothing that had ever happened before in her whole life had been like this.

“Read first,” her father said, “then later maybe the chess. Have you a good book up there?”

Her mother went up with her, and propped Fran’s pillow behind her own, and brought a glass of water and her library book, and opened the window.

Even when her mother went downstairs again, they both kept right on talking about it. Two or three times Fee heard her father say, “Miss King,” and as the minutes passed, the new feeling grew. They made her feel important. They were a wonderful wonderful father and mother.

After a while, she heard her father at the telephone asking for a number. Then he said, “Miss Mainley, please.” Miss Mainley was the principal of the school, and Fee jumped out of bed and ran halfway down the stairs, calling out, “Please, Papa, don’t.”

He was already talking. He sounded strange, very polite and formal. “Entirely convenient,” he was saying. “And, Miss Mainley, would you be kind enough to invite Miss King to be present as well? Thank you again.”

Fee heard him hang up and then say to her mother, “Of course I will be careful. I will keep so cool it will be like ice.”

“Maybe I had better go, Stiva?”

“No. At schools, they do not see so many fathers.”

“But if you should get irritated—”

“Under the ice, may I be permitted to be irritated if my daughter is tormented?”

Fee went back to her bed, her new feeling of importance higher than before. Her father wasn’t going to his office, he wasn’t going to a meeting, or to a lecture; having a tormented daughter came ahead of anything else.

And soon Miss Mainley and Miss King would know it. Even his having a Russian accent wouldn’t spoil that. He could be so wonderful when he wanted to be. And it was wonderful that he was going, not Mama. Mama was too fat.

It was early afternoon when Stefan Ivarin, dressed in his best suit, which he wore only on the lecture platform, went through the front door of Barnett’s grade school, peering through his thick glasses, as he always did in a strange place. He found a door whose gold-stamped glass pane proclaimed, “Principal’s Office,” and as he knocked, he sternly reminded himself that he was, if ever in his life, to maintain a glacial tone and manner. As the door opened, a voice said cordially, “You are Fira’s father? I’m Geraldine Mainley.”

“How do you do, Miss Mainley,” Stefan said, taking the hand she offered and bowing a little over it. “Thank you for arranging this visit so quickly.”

Geraldine Mainley was about forty, he guessed, with a candid, intelligent face. But her appearance was remarkable; from an extremely slender body there sprang a bosom so ample, so protruding, that he swiftly looked away rather than risk any facial betrayal of the astonishment he felt. Standing near the window was Miss King, whom Miss Mainley introduced. To her he merely nodded, saying, “Miss King.” She was young and he could see why Fira always called her beautiful, with her retroussé nose and blue eyes, but he thought, No distinction, quite the opposite.

“Is Fira feeling better, Mr. Ivarin?” Miss Mainley asked as she indicated a chair for him.

“Yes,” he answered slowly. “Yes, a good deal. Physically.”

Geraldine Mainley looked at him thoughtfully. She had known that the Ivarins were in no way the typical immigrant family, and the telephone call had prepared her for cultivated speech, yet now she found herself unable to absorb this man’s actual presence. He’s like a—a diplomat, she thought, and she glanced at Miss King. Miss King was looking at the floor.

“You must mean,” Miss Mainley said, “that she is still upset emotionally.”

“Precisely,” he said. “And I confess, so am I.” He paused, waiting for comment, but there was none. “Not only that she should have been ridiculed in public about the bunting—”

“I merely asked about it out of interest and concern,” Miss King put in.

“Children of ten, nearly eleven,” Stefan said courteously, “do not vomit over questions that arise from interest and concern.”

“I don’t know what Fira told you, Mr. Ivarin.” She pronounced it Ivverin.

“Nor,” he said, “does Fira normally tell lies.”

“I’m sure she doesn’t. But I simply asked—”

“Permit me, Miss King,” Stefan interrupted. “Permit me to explain why I am here. By the way, I asked that you be present because I do not wish to make charges about you in your absence.”

Miss King glanced away. Geraldine Mainley said, “It is a grave enough matter, Mr. Ivarin, if a pupil feels ridiculed by a teacher.”

“Yet there is a graver matter.” Now he turned slightly in his chair, addressing himself only to the older woman. “And this larger matter,” he continued, “is that Fira was asked to state whether her parents were anarchists or socialists.”

Miss King looked up. “I simply made a remark.”

Stefan Ivarin raised a palm of caution, as if to head her off from further folly. “For anybody in authority,” he went on quietly, “to interrogate an American about his political belief is shocking. Am I not correct?”

“I would certainly think so,” Miss Mainley said. Miss King said nothing.

“It also is illegal,” he continued drily. “Not that she was interrogated about her
own
political faith. That I will readily grant. She was asked, it appears, about somebody else’s. She was asked, in effect, to turn informer. They do just this in Russia. Precisely this.”

“Why, Mr. Ivverin,” Miss King said. “That’s taking it too seriously.”

“My dear Miss King, not too seriously, I assure you. If the day should ever come when an American can be quizzed about his political or religious belief, quizzed against his will, mind you, and by someone in authority, America will not be the free country it is.”

“But I wasn’t ‘quizzing’ her. It was, well, thinking out loud, chatting—”

“When one is
required
to answer,” Stefan said, “that is not chatting.”

Miss Mainley said, “No, it could not be.”

“I am only too happy to volunteer the shocking information,” Stefan went on, with a new crispness in his enunciation, “that I am a socialist. That, however, is volunteering. You follow me?”

He waited until Miss King nodded.

“If anybody in authority,” he said, “required me to answer, I’d tell him to go to the devil. And as an American citizen, I would be within my rights.”

Geraldine Mainley said, “I’m sure Miss King agrees with you.”

“In that case,” he said, “she will understand why I now charge her with invading the inalienable rights of an American child.”

There was no reply from either of the two. Stefan leaned forward. For the first time, his color rose.

“As to Miss King’s rights,” he continued. “I assure you, Miss King, I defend your right to ridicule me, publicly, privately, in a lecture hall where I am speaking, or in letters to the newspapers—anywhere, any time, you choose.”

“Ridicule?” she said. “I really didn’t mean to hurt Fira’s feelings. As for my ‘right’—”

“Though I defend it,” he went on, suddenly sharp, “I also despise the practice of such a right on a child.”

Miss King gasped. “Why, Mr. Ivverin.”

“Ee-
var
-in,” he said, amiable again, “the accent is not recessive. By the way, Fira tells me that though she has been your pupil since last fall, you still stumble over her name, obviously too foreign a name to master. Ivarin.” He dismissed the matter with a wave of his hand and rose.

“Thank you, Miss Mainley,” he said. “I was ordered by my wife not to lose my temper. I hope I can report a passing mark on that?”

“You can, you certainly can.” She rose too, and put out her hand. Her face was miserable, her gaze direct and clear.

He clasped her hand warmly, bowing over it again, and said, “I am grateful you and I understand each other, Miss Mainley; I am glad that I came. Good-bye.” He turned briefly to Miss King. “Good day, Miss King,” he said.

“Good-bye, Mr. ur-unn—Mr. Ivarin.” “Quite easy, isn’t it?” He smiled and was gone.

T
HE NIGHT THE BABY WAS BORN
, Fee was allowed to stay up “as long as you please,” and as eleven o’clock went by and then midnight, she realized that having a baby was a far bigger event than the last day of school or the Fourth of July.

It was eighteen days after the day set for its arrival and as those days passed, Eli and Joan and Mama and even Fran grew jumpy about the delay. Eli and Joan had been living with the Martins for about two months, but as the time came closer for Joan to go to the hospital, they came over to the house quite often.

“Mother doesn’t even think of how I feel about dragging it out this way,” Joan complained once. “She’s just so thrilled the baby is cooperating with her fibs to the neighbors.”

“A tactful baby,” Alexandra remarked.

“Why
is the baby tactful?” Fee asked, and everybody burst out laughing. It became a family joke, and though her mother did what she called “explain openly,” Fee remained puzzled. It was an afternoon in the middle of June when the baby started to get born, and even her father was suddenly excited. He telephoned the paper that he wouldn’t be there that evening, and hour after hour, he sat in the kitchen with them, drinking tea and talking. “The second generation of Ivarins to be born in America,” he said, sounding happier than Fee had ever heard him sound. “But this time, it’s an Ivarin who’ll be able to say, ‘In America,’ when they ask, ‘And where was your father born?’”

His voice went thick and funny as he said it, and he began to talk about his first few days in America, about how he kept walking for ten and twelve hours each day, just looking at the houses and the meadows and the Brooklyn Bridge, which wasn’t finished.

“The Statue of Liberty wasn’t there yet,” he said. “Remember that was in 1879, when I was eighteen, but when the ship was entering the harbor, I felt precisely the way they feel now when they look up and see it standing there. Precisely.”

“Tell them about the buttons, Stiva.”

Fee and Fran knew about Papa’s first job in America, sewing buttons on shirts in a factory on the East Side, where he worked for twelve and sometimes fifteen hours a day, earning six or eight dollars a week. But they had heard it only from Mama, never straight from him, and it sounded like a new story now.

He told them of getting a room for three dollars a month on Delancey Street, and board for four dollars, and going to night school for English lessons, because in Russia he spoke “school English” only. Even while he was going to night school for English, he began to give English lessons to other foreigners, whom he called “other greenhorns.” During the off-seasons in the needle trades when there was nothing to sew buttons on, when he was laid off without warning for two months at a time, he might have gone hungry without his pupils and their twenty-five cents an hour.

Fee could not imagine her father as a boy of eighteen or nineteen, younger than Eli or Garrett Paige, and she sat listening as if he were reading aloud from a book he had just got from the library. But even in books where people were poor, like
Little Women
or
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,
there was nothing like a man sewing buttons and giving English lessons to foreigners while he was taking English lessons himself.

After another glass of tea and another telephone call to the hospital to ask about Joan, Papa went on and told them about starting to work on a newspaper, a Russian one first, and then a Jewish one, and about going to meetings with other people working in factories, and beginning to lecture to them about unions and sweatshops and child labor. His lectures were also in Russian at first, but later his audiences grew so large he changed to Jewish for that too, although “everybody in the Russian colony,” he said, “regarded Russian as their mother tongue and their intellectual cachet.”

Fee didn’t know what he meant, but she didn’t want to ask questions and stop what he was telling them. It was another way he could be wonderful, and it didn’t happen often either, any more than his caring about things at school. A long time had passed since that terrible day, two report cards’ worth, but she still hated Miss King and Tommy Gording and the others.

Now her father was talking of his own days at school. His voice was very loud even though he wasn’t angry, but now the loudness was happy, like the bells on a holiday or kids shouting when a team won.

“Your mother’s family were rich,” he said. “When she came to America, she had a big trunk loaded down with silver candlesticks and silver dishes and jewelry and furs, but when I was a little boy, my father was a hatmaker and we were always poor. We never had enough to eat, and we lived like cattle in the same room.”

“Your mother and father and
all?”
Fran asked.

“My three sisters and I, and my parents. None of us had ambitions for a private tennis court, I can tell you.”

“Oh, Papa,” Fran said.
“Don’t.”

“No, no, I’m teasing you.”

Instantly Fran looked wary, and Fee waited to see what would happen. That spring, Fran had begun to talk about how easy it would be to make a tennis court themselves, on the vacant lot next door—“just get the grass off, and level it a little, about four feet would have to be dug off the back end and it would be level. Jack Purney promised to help and we could do it without spending one cent.”